| 
Can Only Sacred Art Be
Christian?
By Professor Plinio Corrêa de
Oliveira
Through tall stained glass windows comes
abundant but soft streams of light. This light is reflected
everywhere: on the floor, the polished metal of the weapons
and suits of armor, and the bronze and crystal of the immense
candelabras. It even seems to touch with difficulty the
ceiling ribbing and paintings overhead. The strong yet elegant
columns, with their coherent, distinct, and suave lines,
open up like immense palm trees that protect the hall with
their fronds of stone. The hall is strongly impregnated
by a special ambience that invites one to repose without
idleness or dissipation. Rather, it is a repose imbued with
gravity, reflection, equilibrium and strength.
 |
| |
The armor and the stuffed deer enrich this
ambience recalling the prowess of the hunt and the battlefield.
The carved wood paneling with its elegance and warmth breaks
the austerity which the stone alone perhaps would have had
to the extreme. In the back on a pedestal is a statue of
a saint which draws one’s thoughts toward Heaven.
This hall undoubtedly reflects a mentality
that may be pleasing to some and perhaps displeasing to
others. However, it expresses an admirable arrangement of
colors and forms. It is a hall designed for daily use in
civil society which presents an ambience in which most of
us would feel at ease living our daily lives.
The Sainte Chapelle in Paris was constructed in the thirteenth
century by Saint Louis IX, King of France, to house some
of the thorns from the Crown of Our Lord Jesus Christ. It
expresses the same mentality as the hall even though it
is not turned toward daily life in society, but rather toward
prayer. Its note of elegance touches on the sublime. These
differences however do not cause it to lose any of its plenitude
of strength, equilibrium, gravity and recollection.
 |
Over the centuries, religious, artists
and pilgrims have seen an archetypal expression of the Christian
soul in the Sainte Chapelle. This is seen in the ambiance
contained therein. It can also be discerned in the mentality
so well expressed in its lines, colors, forms, and general
design.
Both the hall and the Chapel are Christian. What makes them
Christian is not only the effect of the religious images
and symbols found there. Rather, it is more by the ambience
that one imbibes there and the mentality that is the basis
of this ambience.
From these observations, one arrives at
a broad concept. A work of art is not Christian by simply
being covered with symbols of our Holy Religion, just as
a man does not become a monk by simply wearing a habit.
To be called genuinely Christian,
the pulsating soul that shows through in the work of art
must be Catholic. And a Christian ambience does not only
impregnate buildings destined for worship, but any place
where one sees in its design that unmistakable mark expressed
by a truly Christian soul in everything that he does.
|
|
