Art and the Christkan Tradition

Extract

Art is the servant of beauty and beauty is God, ‘Beauty’s self and Beauty’s giver’, and it is only when beauty is seen by the artist and by those who study his work as in no way reflecting God that art becomes an end in itself. We know, of course, the fame of the Church as patron of the Arts; yet her direct influence upon the kind of painting done began to slip late in the fifteenth century.

‘In the minds of many’, writes Berensen, ‘painting, although a very familiar art, was too much connected with solemn religious rites and with state ceremonies to be used at once for ends of personal pleasure. So landscape had to slide in under the patronage of St Jerome, while romantic biblical episodes, like the “Finding of Moses”, or the “Judgment of Solomon”, gave an excuse for genre, and the portrait crept in under the mantle of a patron saint.’