Since art history evolved as a discipline in the 20th century, we have seen the positivist approach, collecting history, structuralism and post-structuralism, feminism, postcolonialism and critical theory race, queer studies and more. But what about art and theology?
The divine is rarely allowed a glimpse, partly because art historians tend to assume a general knowledge of the basics of Christianity and partly because the religion is increasingly seen as a irrelevant superstition from the past, propagated by an intrusive and often corrupt Church like an opiate. for the masses.
But religion, or more precisely theology, is quietly emerging in some major museums and academia as an important tool for interpreting art. Curators at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, for example, worked with focus groups representing Christian, Muslim and secular communities before re-exhibiting the medieval and Renaissance galleries in 2009, because they realized that the works were 80% religious and needed to be understood.
Ben Quash, Chair of Christianity and Arts at King’s College London since 2007, explains the distinction between theology and religion: “Theology is the tradition of thought that allows us to approach questions related to God in an academic way . If you ask yourself whether it is reasonable to believe in God, what kinds of ideas about God have shaped human civilizations, and how they have been expressed in practice, ethics, and liturgy, you are asking theological questions and you you don’t have to be a believer to do this.
Cancel configuration of Visual Commentary on Scripture (VCS) as an open access online resource that brings together theology and art. Guest art historians and theologians select three works of art from any era to illustrate a passage from the Old or New Testament. They write a brief historical commentary on each work, then a longer comparative text discussing their relationship to the biblical passage. Most of the art historians who have contributed to the VCS are new to theology, which does not mean expressing subjective religious feelings, but rather using the Bible to provide a scholarly interpretation of art. “So far we have covered about a third of the Bible and we plan to complete the project in about five years,” Quash says.
The initiative has its origins in a joint master’s degree in Christianity and the arts established 15 years ago by Quash and Nicholas Penny, then director of the National Gallery in London. It was partly designed to generate educational materials for the gallery, available today in the large section of its website devoted to art and religion. Penny had been converted to the idea by the exhibition See salvation, held at the gallery in 2000 under the direction of his predecessor Neil MacGregor. It wasn’t strictly theological, but, as MacGregor, the show’s co-curator, recounts, The arts journal“It was about how the figure of Christ was the form through which artists explored the big questions of the human predicament of love, suffering, hope, despair and compassion .”
This was already a notable break with conventional art history. MacGregor remembers that when the exhibition was first proposed, the older curators and Penny himself opposed it because, they said, it might be thought the gallery was proselytizing. “The Louvre was completely shocked, of course, because of the French public’s commitment to laïcité (secularism),” adds MacGregor. But the critics were confused; the exhibition, which had not found a sponsor, attracted more than 350,000 visitors, many of whom had never set foot in the gallery before.
California Christian philanthropists Roberta and Howard Ahmanson, who fund the arts and humanities, education, health care and homeless projects, later became strong supporters of the National Gallery. According to them, today we are experiencing a religious revolution similar to the invention of the printing press. In the visual age of the 21st century, where people communicate through images on social media, the Ahmansons saw the potential of an online platform to change the way people read the Bible.
Because the West is becoming dechristianized more and more quickly, says MacGregor, as those who were raised in a religious environment die off. While the Pew Research Center’s 2018 survey of Christianity in Western Europe found that 71% of Europeans identified as Christian, only 22% attended religious services at least once a month. Materialism and the belief that science answers all important questions, not to mention sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, have contributed to the discredit of the religion. At the same time, MacGregor observes that, since September 11, “all over the world, the political dimension of religious affiliation has become more accentuated and reinforced, making the issues quite different from those of the time when we “See Salvation” plans in the late 1990s.
It was in this context that the Ahmansons supported Quash in the creation of the VCS, launched at Tate Modern in 2018, in part to demonstrate its embrace of contemporary and historical art. So far, Quash says, a small minority of artists have refused to participate in online exhibitions because they don’t want to be associated with religion, but most have been supportive. The site now has followers in North America, the United Kingdom, Africa, Australia and Singapore and is used by museum curators, pastors and priests, academics and the general public. In some cases, the VCS has led scholars and museum curators to become interested in the Bible for the first time.
In April, the VCS launched a collaboration with the Bode Museum and the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin entitled “Unlocking Christian Art”, consisting of short films focused on the figures of Jesus and Mary through the works in the collections. Others should follow this fall on the prophets, angels, patriarchs, evangelists, etc. Another series called “Interfaith Discussions” uses museum works to illustrate the relationship between Christianity, Islam and Judaism, the so-called Abrahamic religions. The project aims to educate the public about Christian iconography in a city where religion was discouraged under East German communism and where large Turkish and Syrian communities live.
“Visual commentary on Scripture is an exercise in the imagination to read the Bible as religious people read it and also to see how art can bring texts and questions of faith to life without having to be religious . One of the big problems we have today is that people think that they can’t be interested in these issues without someone trying to get them to join a church, or that they will have the “It seems like you have an unhealthy interest in something that’s socially embarrassing,” Quash says. “What I find most encouraging is that the most progressive and adventurous conservatives are willing to take an interest in religion, while those who think it’s terrible or dangerous are the ones who get stuck in mud.”
An Example of Author Entry from Visual Commentary on Scripture
The days of Noah are yet to come
Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff, The Construction of Noah’s Ark, from Die Schedelsche Weltchronikby Hartmann Schedel (1493), woodcut
The story of Noah and the Flood was and still is one of the best known in the Old Testament and has been depicted with great imagination over the centuries. One can only make an educated guess as to what thoughts the author and illustrators of this first printed book had in mind about the story, but it is safe to say that they all would have viewed the Bible as a true story, in which Noah’s flood was an important event because, according to ancient tradition, it completed the first chapter of existence after Creation (the other six chapters of the Schedelsche Weltchronik being: until the birth of ‘Abraham; until the birth of King David; until the Babylonian exile; until the birth of Christ, and all the time thereafter, with the second coming of Christ as the last chapter).
It is also safe to say that they knew the connection with the Second Coming, for these words from the Gospel of St. Matthew were always read in church services before Christmas: Jesus said to his disciples, “As these were the days of Noah, so will the coming of the Son of Man be. For as in the days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark and they did not know until the flood came and took them all away. , thus will be the arrival of the Son of Man (Matthew 24: 37-39). In other words, the flood is a warning to prepare for the end times.
It is unlikely that the artists mastered the intricacies of theological interpretations of Noah’s Flood, but it is certain that they would have been accustomed to looking beyond the simple facts of the Bible to allegorical and moral meanings, for this was part intrinsic to the Christian mentality long after their lives. They wouldn’t have sat around like today’s Bible literalists, wondering how all the animals in the world could fit into the ark, even though it was as long as a football field.
For as St. John Chrysostom wrote in his delightfully down-to-earth homilies on Genesis in the 5th century, do not speculate about what the ark must have smelled like, about where they got their water to drink or about why Noah was not eaten by lions because we should not question God’s actions with human reason.
Thus, in the Middle Ages and beyond, the salvation of Noah with his family and animals was seen as evidence of God’s justice and mercy, while the ark itself was seen as a symbol foreshadowing the Church as a community in which everyone would find salvation. The moral message to the individual was that we must live virtuously and obey God, just as Noah lived virtuously and obeyed God’s instructions, no matter how crazy they may have seemed to him.
But the key message of Noah’s flood was that God had declared that he would no longer destroy the world. For us today, the message, always allegorical, is that creation has been entrusted to humanity and that we are responsible for it. Noah is all of us and we can still save ourselves. Each of us must build an ark against the chaos, the flood of today. The ark is a microcosm of the entire world.
