Religious art aids in understanding the divine
MARIA SMITH
News Writer
In the last talk of the College of Arts and Letters Saturday Scholar Series, Meredith Gill, assistant professor of art at Notre Dame, discussed religious inspiration in various artworks in her talk entitled, "Art and the Religious Imagination."
Gill explored the methods used in religious art and what meaning lay behind the artists' endeavors.
"Thomas Merton once said that a saint is a sign from God. The saint is a sacramentum, a sign of mediating grace," said Gill. "Can a work of art operate in the same way, as a sign of mediating grace?"
Gill emphasized the special role artists have in making religious experience more accessible to their audience. "Artists offer us a way to imagine the unimaginable," said Gill. "Artists can then be [a] special witness to the faith and works of art can be special witnesses."
Gill discussed two main methods — identification and vision — for creating art that connected viewers with a religious experience.
"Here the Roman martyr, Sebastian, is located in the Arno Valley of Florence, the artist's home town," said Gill, when describing Italian Antonio del Pollaiuolo's artwork "St. Sebastian" which depicts the saint being pierced by arrows for the crime of being a Christian. "Seeing this evoked quite literally on one's own doorstep had to allow the viewer a way into understanding this grueling death," she said.
Gill also discussed the painting "St. Augustine in His Study," a depiction by the Italian artist Vittore Carpaccio of the Catholic theologian and saint as a scholar.
"In this painting, he appears not as [a] theologian so much as a professor in his study," said Gill. "Here, I think that identification has to do with imagining an Augustine for the times."
Gill said insights such as these were a positive aspect of identification in religious art.
"The departure from historical truth tells us about the continuities of faith by giving us new stage sets and new kinds of heroes," said Gill.
However, she also emphasized the more disturbing side of identification in art.
"There is a deeper aspect to identification which plays into a very deep theme in Christianity," said Gill. "A work of art can prod us to imagine the worst of torments, torments worse than death itself."
Gill referred specifically to German artists Matthias Grunewald's painting "Temptation of St. Anthony," which shows the saint suffering from the disease known as St. Anthony's Fire, a fungus which caused lesions and gangrene. The painting hung in a ward for patients suffering from the disease, said Gill.
"Perhaps the patients identified with his suffering," said Gill. "And perhaps too they thought about their repentance as the hours of death approached for hell might indeed look like this."
Gill also described the visionary in art. She referred specifically to the Cornaro Chapel in Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome. Gianlorenzo Bernini's statue "St. Teresa in Ecstasy" depicts St. Teresa in awe before an angel. The work stands in a richly painted alcove in the Italian Church, while light from a hidden window above the alcove illuminates the scene.
"Bernini has represented the purely invisible and the purely spiritual through purely physical means," said Gill. "I think that we really could say, here, that we have a work of art as a sign of mediating grace."
Gill's lecture was the sixth and last talk in the Saturday Scholar Series, a project of the College of Arts and Letters that presents lectures on various topics the morning before each home football game.
All News Stories for Monday, November 25, 2002
