Page 10, 12th May 2000

12th May 2000

Page 10

Page 10, 12th May 2000 — Doubts
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Locations: London, ROME, Liverpool

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Page 10 from 5th November 1999

Doubts

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Father Richard Barrett answers readers' questions
resurrection. We long to love and to be loved, to understand and to be understood. This is the relationship which binds the shepherd to the sheep. "I know my own, and my own know me." This intimacy is entrusted to us by Christ in the power of his resurrection. It is not a casual and passing relationship with God. Christ loves and understands us as he himself is loved and understood by the Father. "I know my own . .. just as the Father knows me, and I know the Father." There is nothing the Good Shepherd will not sacrifice for those who are his own. "The good shepherd is the one who lays down his life for his sheep." We can only speculate that we might be capable of such generous love towards those we love. We cannot doubt that on the cross Jesus dignified us with such love. By his resurrection such love lives in our hearts. Our Christian life is not a frustrating struggle to establish a relationship with God. That relationship already exists. We have only to live the life already entrusted to us by the resurrection.
The gospel of the Good Shepherd also illustrates the darker side of our lives. The hired man appears to look after the sheep, but has no real regard for them. As soon as danger threatens, he abandons the flock. The sheep are scattered and confused. How easily we surrender the direction of our lives to what is casual and passing. How often we commit ourselves to mere illusion. The disintegration and loss we feel mirrors the scattered flock. Repentance brings us back lo Christ, the one place where we are truly known and understood. Recently an exhibition in Liverpool depicted the late Princess Diana as the Virgin Mary. Does the Church have a view regarding this kind of representation in public galleries?
/WAS IN ROME not long ago when I was invited to a viewing at the studio of the Pope's portrait painter, Dina Bellotti. A good example of one of her lithographs hangs at Allen Hall, London, a gift to the College by the late Cardinal Hume. It has even been rumoured that one British bishop is the proud owner of a portrait by her, but this seems hard to believe as most of her ecclesiastical subjects are Cardinals and Popes.
So, never missing an opportunity to dilute the wine of pleasure with the water of business, I waited until frosted Prosecco and canapes had been served and when Signora Bellotti began to speak about the subject of Princess Diana, I posed the reader's question. I described the exhibit in Liverpool and also other examples and waited for some pearl of wisdom from the lips of one of the greatest living Italian painters. Signora Bellotti recalled that Mantegna especially, but also Ghirlandaio and Piero della Francesca were not averse to depicting friends, patrons and even enemies in the garb and appearance of notable biblical subjects. Needless to say, enemies assumed the mantle of Judas. friends and patrons the garb of Peter or one of the other Apostles. She then suggested that it would not appear to be out of place for Btitish artists to cast Diana as the Mother of Divine Mercy given that
the cult to the Virgin had long been extinguished in England and that many ordinary people saw in Diana a similar kind of role model. Necessity is the mother of invention, after all.
We then discussed a scene from the recent movie, Elizabeth, where precisely such a process seemed to be taking shape. The mature Queen reconciles herself to her role as a new kind of sovereign and supplants the popular pre-reformation cult to the Virgin with her own, centred on her person and surrounded with the trappings of pomp and ceremony. The Crown becomes the symbol and repository of popular faith. One of the worthies at the party. Signora Giamli the widow of the sculptor who designed the dramatic cross that is now a feature of the present Pope's liturgical appearancesasked whether the outpouring of public emotion after the death of the Princess was in fact a kind of pent-up faith seeking an outlet in the traditional pre-Reformation acts of prayers. vigils, pilgrimages and the lighting of votive candles. I responded that it could have been so, but alas nobody identified it as such during the funeral of the Princess. There was no one there who was able to speak with the voice of the whole community, going back in time as well as outward to the nation. I said, at no more crucial a moment, did the nation need such a voice, the vox totals communitatis. Alas the Archbishop did not preach.
Signora Bellotti and her friends have answered the aesthetic question, now we must address the moral or religious question inserted by the reader. The first thing we can stumble into in this field is the brick wall of artistic autonomy. Most observers, let alone commentators, would find the ethical question posed of art as frankly unthinkable. Should the Church have a view at all? This may be the result of the success of Wilde's maxim: there is no such thing as an immoral book it is either well or badly written. Wilde in Britain. Baudelaire in France, liberated the arts from the scrutiny of moral censure. Art is still today depicted as an ethics-free zone. So the complaints of, say, clergy with regard to the exhibition in Liverpool can appear strangely oldfashioned and out of place almost an instance of a Victorian mind-set re-asserting itself.
The Catholic Church, however, is well placed to advance both the cause of artistic expression and the cause of sacred representation. McGregor, in the series Seeing Salvation, has done the country a service in surveying the great contribu tions to the depiction of sacred subjects. Rubens was much influenced by the Jesuit counter-Refonnation while the Lutherans seized the printing presses, they seized the paintings and of course a plethora of great painters collaborated in the Sistine Chapel. Caravaggio's first commission in Rome came from the French church near the Piazza Navona to depict three scenes from the life of Matthew and Piero della Francesca's Baptism of Christ are certainly the equal of the achievement of Paolo Veronese on the same subject.
Many of these artists received their greatest commissions from the Church. Indeed Catholic authorities adopted an indulgent attitude to their somewhat riotous private lives on the strength of their invaluable contribution to posterity. Of course, the difference between the tumultuous Caravaggio and some of his modern brethren was that he confined his anarchic lifestyle to the world off the canvas. The work of art itself was not to be subjected to the unethical or unsanctionable.
In the 16th century the Council of Trent intervened on the biblical subjects of Christian art and condemned the portrayal of Mary as swooning at the foot of the Cross; it was held to be =historical as Mary is reported by the Gospels to have resolutely stood by the Cross. Christians today tend to use the politics of public pressure when they are offended by plays or cinema, such as Corpus Christi or The Last Temptation of Christ. A blasphemy law exists in Britain to protect Christianity from offensive material just as the law protects Christian ministers of religion when they preach, conduct public worship or administer a sacrament (now extended to Catholic clergy). In practice there is much debate among lawyers about the precise range of the blasphemy laws but there is no reason why Christians should not avail of them when the occasion permits.
The Pope prefers to speak to the production end of the art market in his Letter to Artists and hopes that a new era will shortly dawn when faith and art can forge an alliance to render the beautiful with greater effect. This way, art can become "the epiphany of God's supreme beauty". Needless to say, a theology of beauty is available to the diligent enquirer, say in the work of Evdokimov, but it may not involve judgments about specific schools of artistic expression. In practice many subjects in Christian art have been depicted along the lines of realism, or what Caravaggio called il vero naturale. A certain artistic realism seems to be the preferred approach for sacred art in many Catholic churches this is a gesture to what Kenneth Clarke, in his series Civilisation, said was the genius of Catholicism: "the ability to synthesise the feelings of ordinary people". It is also applicable to great works of art.




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