Church Art
Dec. 3rd, 2010 09:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gementPerhaps six years ago, I had a coworker who went to Spain on vacation with her girlfriend. She was a no-nonsense nurse in her fifties, and utterly plainspoken. She said that she felt almost physically nauseous at the amount of money that had been poured into Church art over the centuries, when people were starving. I didn't understand the visceral magnitude of her sentiment at the time.
The Church has been the largest single patron of art in Europe, ever. I've always understood that artists need to create, and they also need to be fed, and the subjects they express on a large scale will be those required by their patrons. Speaking strictly from the perspective of art and music history, I appreciate how much infrastructure the Church has provided for the development and celebration of art.
I stood in two major churches today, and looked at a third from the outside. My reactions surprised me.
The first was an old, quiet church. It was heavy on the statues. It had fading frescoes everywhere. Behind the altar was a smaller room with mats to protect what was left of the intricate ceramic tile floor. The altar was completely overshadowed by the massive statue-laden tomb of King Vladislaus, founder of the Kingdom of Naples.
Other than the giant tomb, it was a lot like churches I'd seen on my trip to England. The excesses were long past, and carefully preserved as a cultural responsibility. The only current sign of glamor was a bright gold throne behind the altar, which struck me as a bit garish, but necessary to bring people's eyes back down from the tomb of doom. Focus, people. That's just the body of a king. This is the king of Heaven.
Bill mentioned, regretfully, that some of the churches he'd like to see weren't open, as they had been damaged in the 1980 earthquake and the buildings hadn't been made safe yet. Thirty years later, the curators are still patiently waiting for resources and technology to allow for repair, rather than pulling the movable art and bulldozing, which I'm pretty confident would happen in the U.S. This culture devotes resources to keeping things for later. As a librarian with an archivist streak, I am grateful.
The second church we visited was much grander, much busier, much more true to the original intent of all those frescoes. Everywhere I looked, another vivid and relentlessly detailed painting thwacked me in the brain. More gold, more vaulted ceilings completely covered in more frescoes, more more more more until I finally understood the sense of shock my coworker had felt.
It's still not as simple for me as it was for her. Supporting art and its preservation is an important outcome, which necessarily competes with other goals. "The poor will always be with us," as that one guy reportedly said when his friend called him a sellout for getting a spa treatment when people were starving.
The understanding I got from the church was not artistic, but sociological. This wasn't about whether or not it was right to spend a fortune on decoration. This was about the overwhelming might of The Church. The whole building existed to say, "Hey, peon. Bigger than you, remember? Bow down. Be awed. Now."
This is arguably to remind everyone of the glory of God. At a practical level, though, completely aside from any opinions on the validity of that and the sincerity of the designers, it's coming from an organization which dictated fiscal and foreign policy in multiple countries for centuries and is still making a bloody fortune. It's a corporation and a government and a religious movement all in one.
I'm not going to start muttering about Papist conspiracies, but when I looked up into that third layer of vaulted ceiling today, I finally understood where the conspiracy theories came from. I understood how using tithes from commoners to cover the building in more gold leaf wasn't just insulting, it was part of a mechanism to keep them tithing. I understood why people who wanted to break with Rome always and immediately went after the art. It's to break the propaganda machine. You can't fight them on their own terms, so you have to say their terms are soiled and burn it down before it can undermine people's emotions.
After walking the old town for hours, taking in enough sights that I'd stopped being able to read signs or, often, even able to remember things I'd seen two seconds before, we passed the Opera House and came out into an oasis.
We'd found a vast, empty plain of cobblestones with not many people on it, not many sights, just two plinths with statues of horsemen in an area half the size of an American city block. The area was hemmed in by the semicircular wings of a relatively modern building, which I took to be a slightly ornamental government building by the shape and architecture. I thought it might be the main courthouse, perhaps. It was sterile enough not to attract crowds, though some teens and stray dogs and a lone moped zoomed back and forth, entertaining themselves in the open space.
I took a deep breath in the quiet, and gave thanks to whatever government official had the ego and the power to devote half a block of precious crowdable space to emptiness. It seemed like a greater excess than all the ceilings. Just another organization saying, "Bigger than you. Be awed. Now."
The building was another church.
The Church has been the largest single patron of art in Europe, ever. I've always understood that artists need to create, and they also need to be fed, and the subjects they express on a large scale will be those required by their patrons. Speaking strictly from the perspective of art and music history, I appreciate how much infrastructure the Church has provided for the development and celebration of art.
I stood in two major churches today, and looked at a third from the outside. My reactions surprised me.
The first was an old, quiet church. It was heavy on the statues. It had fading frescoes everywhere. Behind the altar was a smaller room with mats to protect what was left of the intricate ceramic tile floor. The altar was completely overshadowed by the massive statue-laden tomb of King Vladislaus, founder of the Kingdom of Naples.
Other than the giant tomb, it was a lot like churches I'd seen on my trip to England. The excesses were long past, and carefully preserved as a cultural responsibility. The only current sign of glamor was a bright gold throne behind the altar, which struck me as a bit garish, but necessary to bring people's eyes back down from the tomb of doom. Focus, people. That's just the body of a king. This is the king of Heaven.
Bill mentioned, regretfully, that some of the churches he'd like to see weren't open, as they had been damaged in the 1980 earthquake and the buildings hadn't been made safe yet. Thirty years later, the curators are still patiently waiting for resources and technology to allow for repair, rather than pulling the movable art and bulldozing, which I'm pretty confident would happen in the U.S. This culture devotes resources to keeping things for later. As a librarian with an archivist streak, I am grateful.
The second church we visited was much grander, much busier, much more true to the original intent of all those frescoes. Everywhere I looked, another vivid and relentlessly detailed painting thwacked me in the brain. More gold, more vaulted ceilings completely covered in more frescoes, more more more more until I finally understood the sense of shock my coworker had felt.
It's still not as simple for me as it was for her. Supporting art and its preservation is an important outcome, which necessarily competes with other goals. "The poor will always be with us," as that one guy reportedly said when his friend called him a sellout for getting a spa treatment when people were starving.
The understanding I got from the church was not artistic, but sociological. This wasn't about whether or not it was right to spend a fortune on decoration. This was about the overwhelming might of The Church. The whole building existed to say, "Hey, peon. Bigger than you, remember? Bow down. Be awed. Now."
This is arguably to remind everyone of the glory of God. At a practical level, though, completely aside from any opinions on the validity of that and the sincerity of the designers, it's coming from an organization which dictated fiscal and foreign policy in multiple countries for centuries and is still making a bloody fortune. It's a corporation and a government and a religious movement all in one.
I'm not going to start muttering about Papist conspiracies, but when I looked up into that third layer of vaulted ceiling today, I finally understood where the conspiracy theories came from. I understood how using tithes from commoners to cover the building in more gold leaf wasn't just insulting, it was part of a mechanism to keep them tithing. I understood why people who wanted to break with Rome always and immediately went after the art. It's to break the propaganda machine. You can't fight them on their own terms, so you have to say their terms are soiled and burn it down before it can undermine people's emotions.
After walking the old town for hours, taking in enough sights that I'd stopped being able to read signs or, often, even able to remember things I'd seen two seconds before, we passed the Opera House and came out into an oasis.
We'd found a vast, empty plain of cobblestones with not many people on it, not many sights, just two plinths with statues of horsemen in an area half the size of an American city block. The area was hemmed in by the semicircular wings of a relatively modern building, which I took to be a slightly ornamental government building by the shape and architecture. I thought it might be the main courthouse, perhaps. It was sterile enough not to attract crowds, though some teens and stray dogs and a lone moped zoomed back and forth, entertaining themselves in the open space.
I took a deep breath in the quiet, and gave thanks to whatever government official had the ego and the power to devote half a block of precious crowdable space to emptiness. It seemed like a greater excess than all the ceilings. Just another organization saying, "Bigger than you. Be awed. Now."
The building was another church.
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no subject
Date: 2010-12-03 09:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-04 08:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-04 05:44 am (UTC)There was a smallish cathedral church around there -- did you fall into it? and the castle (not the big old one nearby) up on the hill is mine. I paid 2.50 euros for it 4 yrs ago. And an old man sang the verniculi song at me when I got lost and asked for directions back down the hill.
LOVING your writing.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-04 03:30 pm (UTC)I have no idea how to tell the castles apart, but as you mention the Funicolare, I'm guessing you mean the one we passed this morning on our way to the monastary-turned-Neapolitan cultural museum. We didn't go up, but I was curious, and I liked the Funicolare.
Then we walked all the way back down to our hotel over the rest of the day. Have I mentioned Bill likes walking a lot?
no subject
Date: 2010-12-04 06:51 am (UTC)Dingdingdingdingdingding! Nothing made me feel more Protestant than Toledo cathedral. As my mom pointed out, that half ton of gold in the monstrance was looted from the New World.
Yes, the Church was a patron of the arts, but only insofar as it served their purposes. Especially after the Reformation, at least in Spain, the pressure to conform to Vatican prescription - and very detailed that prescription was, too - was intense. I found the top floor of the Prado depressing for that very reason.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-04 03:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-05 05:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-06 07:45 am (UTC)