Stewardship Sunday

Music at Madison Square
 Sunday was the inaugural concert of Music at Madison Square, and the Organist-Choirmaster William Douglas and the supporters of The Aquila Music Foundation (many of them parishioners) are to be congratulated for an auspicious beginning to what promises to be a varied series of musical events of a high order. The autumnal-themed program of Handel and Vivaldi, both instrumental and vocal, was astutely chosen and exquisitely performed by the North Carolina Baroque Orchestra and soprano Kathryn Knauer. The Aquila Music Foundation builds on the Concert Fund established by the late William Ralston, Jr, sometime Rector of St. John’s, and the late Leonard Trosten, sometime Senior Warden of St. John’s. I think they would both have been well pleased to see and hear this happening at St. John’s. I know I am!        – GGD

Beato Angelico
At first what draws you is the decorative splendor of gold foil, ultramarine, and vermilion lavishly applied. (These are all costly materials, ultramarine because it was made of crushed lapis lazuli brought “over the sea”, and vermilion, made from crushed cinnabar, because it involves dangerous exposure to mercury.) After the color you notice the harmonious monumentality of the figures, integrated in rhetorically convincing groups, and the sweetness and gentleness of their demeanor. In form as much as in colour, we are in the presence of a master.

Such are the works of the Dominican friar known to his contemporaries as Fra Giovanni da Fiesole (1395-1455), to posterity as Fra Angelico, and since 1982, when Pope John Paul II proclaimed him patron saint of artists, as Beato Angelico. He was remembered as a man of deep piety, who prayed before taking up the brush, and wept when he painted Crucifixions; and all his art was made for public worship or private devotion.

Not despite his piety, or in addition to it, but because of it, he was also a critical figure in the development of western art – that is the art of the 13^th to the 18^th century, deeply shaped by the Christian religion. Lord knows there is much late modern religious art that makes you wish you weren’t Christian: mere piety does not make you a fine artist. But there was an extraordinary burst of creativity in these five or six centuries, which produced an astonishing tradition of the Christian sacred (in which Italian painters were preeminent) followed by the Christian secular (in which Dutch painters were preeminent). Angelico is one of the great masters of this tradition, and this fall I saw a monographic exhibition devoted to his work in Florence, which prompted these reflections. 

Angelico was trained in the elegant and decorative late Gothic tradition of painters like Lorenzo Monaco. But in the work of Angelico, this decorative elegance was transmuted by the Renaissance approach pioneered in the work of his short-lived contemporary, Masaccio (1395-1428), in which anatomically-plausible bodies with realistic volume occupy logically-constructed pictorial spaces, in rhetorically-persuasive groupings. Angelico takes over this innovation, notably in the way he handles clothing, which does not swing in the elegant loops of the late Gothic but respond to gravity in cylindrical folds. Moreover, the faces he paints are often individuated to the point of portraiture.

Before Angelico, the normative form of the altarpiece was the polyptych – individual figures, each housed in their own niche defined by a gilded framework of colonettes and decorative gables.  Angelico united these compartments in one oblong panel under one horizontal entablature – the format known as “pala quadrata” – so that the figures of the individual saints might also be united in one harmonious grouping around Christ – a grouping the historians call the “sacra conversazione”, the spiritual fellowship of hearts and minds united in the contemplation of the divine mystery. In some paintings Angelico continues the tradition of the “gold ground” – the painted figures set in a plane of thinly-beaten gold foil, which evokes an otherworldly luminosity. But in other pictures, such as the magnificent Deposition, he situated the figures in a realistic landscape complete with sky, mountains, rivers, plants and trees, buildings and cities. And in the wall paintings he did for each of the cells of the mendicant friars in his monastery in Florence, he renounced the use of expensive materials, and painted in inexpensive earth tones only. Depicting light not in gold foil but in paint will become standard for those followed him. 

Both in gold foil and in earthy pigments, Angelico’s work is could only have come out of Christianity. Whether it is the sweetness and gentleness of the Madonna and child, or the suffering of the Crucified. what we are seeing in this new approach to depicting realistic human figure in realistic space and settings with real human emotions is a striking achievement in what we might call the humanization of the divine—the working out in artistic terms of the Christian mystery, the Incarnation of God the Son. With his brush, Angelico teaches us to see and think what the meaning and implications of the Incarnation: that God has taken upon himself the fullness of humanity, even our humility, even the consequences of our falling away from him, that he may reveal in it the fullness of divine glory.    – GGD