Art, Inspiration and Beauty

Maryvale Institute

When one considers a work of art, one can focus on what is portrayed – the subject – what one might call ‘content’. Consideration of content can allow us to classify, for example, a painting as a landscape, a portrait or even as an abstract painting. A work of art can also be characterised, however, by how it portrays that content. In other words its style, or what we might call ‘form’.

When people discuss Christian art, there is often a great focus on the content: why are a loaf of bread and a bunch of grapes included in the composition? Why does Our Lady have three stars on her cloak? This course seeks to consider these elements of content. And crucially it also enables the student to study the form of great artistic traditions and how that form is influenced by the philosophy and theology of the artists who worked within them, what one might call the artists’ ‘worldview’. It argues that all artistic traditions develop visual vocabularies – the stylistic elements that comprise form – to enable the artists to articulate a particular worldview. It is the combination of these elements that differentiate, for example, the International gothic from the baroque and both, in turn, from the Romanesque even in a consistently Christian context.

An artist cannot flourish within any artistic tradition unless his worldview is consistent with that of the tradition. Accordingly, a tradition cannot perpetuate itself unless the worldviews of its artists are consistent with that upon which the visual vocabulary of tradition was developed to express; and they understand fully how that visual vocabulary relates to that worldview.

Designed with artists and patrons of the art in mind, the course will direct students to examine a number of different artistic traditions. These will include the Christian traditions of Byzantine/Slav iconography and Western idealised naturalism of the High Renaissance and the baroque as well as Islamic geometric art, traditional Chinese and Japanese landscape and Western art since the Romantic era.

After this study of the past, the course then challenges the students to articulate their own appreciation of the Catholic worldview and to consider how that can be manifest visually. The hope is that it will enable artists and patrons to develop an idea of how they can incorporate the timeless principles of unity, goodness, beauty and truth that underlie all good and beautiful art. We want to see emerging a new and previously unimagined artistic form that is united to the art of the past, that continues to be rooted in Revelation and incorporates these timeless principles, but speaks as powerfully of our era as the gothic or the baroque did theirs.

And finally, we will consider how such a tradition can be taught and preserved in our art schools. Many art schools today use the principles of ‘sincerity’ and ‘self-expression’ as their starting premises. As these terms are used, they encourage artists in a search for inspiration that is limited to the self. Our assertion is that if the timeless objective principles of good art are to be reflected, then the artist must seek to be a channel, rather than a source, and look beyond himself for inspiration to the source of all beauty, goodness and truth: the Blessed Trinity. The artist, therefore, must be trained in such a way that it encourages rather than undermines humility in the execution of his artistic virtue. This is, in fact, a true self-expression, a realisation of the self God wants us to be.