Wciv podcast v2

Religion has played a key role in shaping Western art, but the connection has become complicated in modern and contemporary art. In ancient Greece and Rome, art depicted gods and their activities, while in Judaism, there was a commandment against making carved images. Early Christianity used imagery to understand and communicate their faith. The Catholic Church commissioned art to focus on the life of Jesus and engage the congregation. Artists started incorporating pagan imagery, raising concerns about the excesses and critique from figures like Martin Luther. The Protestant Reformation shifted towards everyday life and observance of the natural world. Artists like Albert Dürer reflected this shift. Martin Luther was not against art but criticized the extravagance of the Catholic Church. Dutch masters and Netherlandish painters focused on natural and everyday subjects. Hello, my name's Anae Grant and today on my podcast I will be discussing the role of religion in shaping the Western artistic tradition and I'm joined by Colin. Good morning Anae, happy to be here. Happy to be here as well. So we can from this vantage understand that religion has played a key role in shaping the Western artistic tradition. However, I'm interested in discussing with you the evolution of that tradition as well as some of the ways that the connection has been complicated in modern and contemporary art. Let's discuss pre-Christian the role of religion in the Greek and Roman artistic tradition which is widely understood as the basis for Western art. Well we're certainly going to have to cover a lot of ground very quickly in our podcast. So ancient Greeks, yes, sculptures that were painted in colours and theatre I believe representing the gods and their activities. Yes, certainly and there's many examples of these. We have here lacunae and suns which although isn't necessarily depicting gods is depicting a scene from Greek mythology and how they used art as a way of bringing to life their myths and they certainly became very talented at it. Is there a way as well where art in these early civilizations also played into an oral tradition of religion? I can see how the public would have been able to better engage with their tradition and their myths through visual representations. Well if we consider lacunae and his sons I think he's a priest of Poseidon and he and his sons have been punished by some enormous snake and it's an extremely powerful work of art. It's everyone's twisting and turning and you can see like the expression of it and it sort of conveys more through an image than words can perhaps do. Yes, when this work was uncovered much later it was very affecting on Renaissance artists but to continue with a sort of timeline we then jump to the Judeo tradition which had a very different relationship to imagery than the Greek or Roman. In the Old Testament or the Torah there is a clear commandment that you shall not make carved images or any likenesses that is of God. This is a very different relationship between religion and art. The way this Judeo statement is phrased you think there's no wriggle room whatsoever in that. It's like very clear you shan't do it and so consequently Judaism was a book based, text based religion. Interestingly someone found wriggle room in that statement yet. I mean I think it's fair to say that even despite this commandment there have been examples of imagery tied to early Christian religion really since the development. So there's first century imagery. However the concept of idolatry to worship the creators rather than the creator was a big issue especially because as we discussed it was such a big part of pre-Christian pagan religion. Yes, it seems like that once they got very fond of images in religion they wanted to keep them and they found the argument compelling that we're sophisticated enough to understand that a carved image is not God it's just a way to understand God and I think that's how they must have got around it and they're tools for better deeper understanding of the religion rather than the religion itself. Yes certainly and we see that key thinkers such as Aquinas sort of furthered this belief that rather than a distraction from the religion imagery art can work as a tool for the religion, a way of better conveying meaning and better engaging with people. Yes so when you reach the Catholic Church's depiction of the life of Jesus it helps the congregation of the church focus their attention on what Jesus did and it doesn't take their attention off Jesus it helps them understand why they need to worship him, what he suffered for. And I think it's also very interesting that there are many examples of specifically Christian imagery that appear in Roman ruins and things where they understand there were secret congregations of Christians at times when Christianity was outlawed. So you see images of say fish or various symbols which would have helped early Christians find each other and secretly communicate. And I think it does speak to something that they must have recognized that we need images to understand the world and we are image makers and to sort of not have that to only have words in a book was going to be somehow a bit short and limiting for an expansive religion that wanted to bring more and more people into its faith. Yes and especially I think it's interesting to consider that a lot of early Christianity developed at a time when literacy was very much limited to a certain class of society and so for the majority of people there was not an ability to read these texts in their original form and so the ability to relate to imagery would have been very significant. And indeed when we even the people who could read the monks in their monasteries one of their jobs was to write the books, write the holy texts and such was their um inclination that they drew lots of little images in the margins and highly decorated it and had pictures of saints and animals and so forth surrounding the holy text. So that was the development in the middle ages of Christianity moving away from the plain text to decorated and imagery. Yes absolutely and some of those early medieval illustrations are really wonderful and they do tell a story and in a way bring the texts very much to life and you can see that imagery started to become more and more important as artistic practice throughout the middle ages began to develop and we see that also this this practice develops right up until the period known as the high renaissance where the artistic tradition of the church was putting more and more emphasis on things like realism like an ability to create depth in art but not simply to reflect the world around them but to reflect the heavenly to reflect the sort of super world. Yes so by the high renaissance which is around 1500 we're looking at very highly developed imagery very skillful drawings of everything including carved images like specifically marble sculptures carved in a very natural way and it seems to be really directly against that original commandment but yet this was being done under the commission of the popes in the Vatican. Absolutely and as I said before when Lacoon and his sons was discovered it was incredibly formative for artists such as Michelangelo who was working for commissions by the pope and creating works such as David which in a way combines the absolute height of those Greek and Roman sculpture talents with biblical texts so we have a sort of combining of the great powers of antiquity with the stories of the bible. Yes and it's around this time that we start to even wonder is the biblical scene actually the real subject matter or is it symbolic of something else or is the artist just enjoying making the artwork to such an extent that it's almost like the religious subject matter is just a part of the commission but they're making it a more elaborate work of art that goes past just its religious message. And it's also interesting to note at this time during the high renaissance these artists did not limit themselves to biblical subject matter in fact they started to create works around pagan imagery there's some wonderful examples of this there's the birth of Venus and the decision of Paris. So these are essentially stories from ancient Greece and they talk about topics of love and beauty rather than necessarily the Christian god. While these works created were incredibly beautiful and have remained pinnacles of what is being considered the western artistic tradition they did raise concerns among many who began to question why popes and people in positions of authority in the catholic church were not only allowing but funding paintings of pagan imagery. And this came about at a time when the catholic church was also under significant critique by such figures as Martin Luther who began to question the excesses of the catholic church and in a way the artistic practice and architectural practice of the period of the high renaissance from sort of 1500 to 1520 is both a wonderful and poignant example of these excesses which Luther was critical of. Yes so we have the beginning of the pushback against this excessive splendor of the renaissance and like is this what is this still religious art when it's doing it when it has so many other depictions in it and they're very sincere about their critique it really mattered they were somewhat getting back to basics and saying that that has to go because it's not sufficiently Christian religion anymore. Certainly and I think it's interesting to consider the works of Albert Dürer in this context because unlike those of the Italian high renaissance Dürer was working further north and he was more caught up in the feelings of the protestant reformation which began to be critical of the fantastical and supernatural and so what Dürer began to do was put greater emphasis on considering the observable natural and human world around him and in a way this is reflective of the protestant shift away from the extravagance of the catholic church and towards the significance of the everyday life lived well as a way of living for God. But even with Dürer it is really interesting that he painted Jesus Christ and when you look at it and compare it to Dürer's own self-portrait interestingly we can actually see similarities so it's a fascinating contradiction right there with Dürer. So Martin Luther wasn't totally against it he was probably more against the papacy and that seemed to be one more thing that he objected to so it's important to remember he wasn't ruling out making images in art he was he still liked art being made or it wasn't a big issue for his religious reform. We see this shift away from the supernatural towards the more natural everyday life which comes out in the works of the Dutch masters and the Netherlands became a very protestant nation particularly quite calvinist however they also continued to promote artistic expression and so there was an interesting relation between wanting to continue artistic tradition while also being concerned with not becoming too ostentatious as had been the case in the higher naissance Italian context. Yes and so in the context of a Christianity message you can see the more domestic scenes the more humble things taking on a greater importance. It's back to basic things where wine and bread for instance on a table could have a message painted beautifully but not excessive in the way that the papacy had been excessive for the protestants. To cut forward the relationship between religion and art in the west has certainly continued however into the 20th century it seemed to have become far more complicated as indeed the relationship between religion and many things did with this greater move towards secularization. Yes we could see we can trace a certain moving away from the church partly because the church wasn't providing the commissions anymore so artists had to find other patrons other means of making their art without the church commissioning altarpieces or madonnas artists took on other subjects and they released the freedom very much for that they weren't constrained by that commissioning for the church. However it is interesting to consider that there have been a couple of key examples of church commissions of major artists in the 20th century notably Matisse was commissioned to create a chapel in the south of France in 1943 and it was a wonderful example of a combining of modern artistic imagery with more traditional catholic imagery and this Matisse chapel is absolutely stunning it's got stained glass windows in Matisse colors it's got line drawings it's got the the priest robes it's the total vision the full work of art across the whole building's experience and it does contain imagery but in a way a lot of it is quite just decorative in plant forms which is interesting it patterning so in a funny way it contains fewer images and the line drawings are very open and suggestive rather than honing in on a very particular face of any individual so in an interesting way it is more compatible perhaps with the original commandment that we have been discussing. Yes certainly I think that the Matisse chapel really shows both the catholic tradition of incorporating art and beauty into the church and at the same time many of the critiques of the protestant reformation which called for yes as you said a reconsidering of the original texts and a pairing back of back to the essential forms and a final example which shows a very interesting and unique relationship between religion and art in the west is the Rothko chapel which was formed in part in reference to that Matisse chapel as a spiritual space it's called a world forum for leaders and it considers itself a space for people of all faiths and from all over the world it also came sort of following and in reference to Vatican II and so it's a non-specific religious space which uses modern art and architecture to in a way unite the world through multiplicity of faith rather than elimination of yes so Rothko famous for very abstract paintings no imagery the removal of imagery the saturation of just color but evoking an emotional field I think it's interesting too that Rothko from my understanding was descendant from a Russian Jewish population that escaped persecution and moved to New York City and so you know maybe there in the background is this Old Testament reading of not having imagery maybe that's the it is this sort of circling around almost to a to a the modern became closer to the ancient in an interesting circular way yes absolutely so I think that both the Matisse and Rothko chapel go to show that despite what we may think that modern and contemporary art became almost completely secularized there did remain a communication and a consideration particularly because of the long tradition of art and religion in the west and so while they may have evolved in practice they do still speak to religion and it certainly has shaped much of the tradition and it's it only goes to show how into the 21st century the relationship between religion and art in what in the west may continue to shape and evolve well yes it's it broadened out the equation possibly because the modernists were looking to create new things they didn't want to just produce more of what had gone before so there's definite change that came through modernism but still keeping some underlying ideas yes so I think when we consider art in the west it is inextricably linked to religion and to particularly the Christian tradition and in a way to questions around idolatry and around depictions of of figures whether or not that is correct how much and the extent to which we should be worshipping or creating but it certainly seems that creation has been an essential part of how people connect and relate through religion and otherwise throughout the tradition well it's been a fabulous discussion we we managed to cover a couple of thousand years in such a short time we did absolutely thank you very much for joining me today