Art and the Church

Extract

Nothing that an art-critic can say about the relationship between art and the Church can have very much value. By his very nature, the art-critic is bound to tackle the problem from the wrong end. The proper person to speak with authority would be the church-critic, but since church-criticism is not a recognized occupation, and since, even if it were, I would not be competent to undertake it, I can only envisage the problem from the end nearest to me—the wrong end, I admit, but at least an end.

The problem, as I see it, is this. The Church is certainly one among the various employers who recognise that the artist can be of service to them—the manufacturers who use his posters, the writers who use him as an illustrator, the personages who want him to paint their portraits and thereby preserve their memory for posterity. But, oddly enough, the Church is the most timid of them all. Poster designers and illustrators, though not usually in the front-rank of illustrative artists, at least tend to use the current idiom: they are ‘modem’ in the sense that they have learned their language from men of their own generation. But the artists employed by churchmen use, on the whole, an idiom that was developed in Italy in the 15th century, was superseded by the Baroque 17th century, forgotten by the frivolous 18th, revived, diluted and sweetened by the piously sentimental 19th and which survives into the 20th because it has been commercialised and further devitalised by firms of Church decorators.