Plainchant, Icons and Mosaics

Extract

There are, broadly speaking, an netive and a contemplative life. Are there, perhaps, correspondingly also a contemplative and an active art? By this is meant an art born of, and again conducive to, contemplation, and, on the other hand, an art reflecting the active temperament of an epoch or an artist. Or, expressed differently, an art that is nourished by the contemplation of the Divine, of the eternal; an art that is, therefore, itself objective, timeless, expressing Being in so far as it can be expressed by human media; and, again, an art that observes the fleeting moment, the actual and temporal, and which, therefore, is itself subjective, timebound, expressing Becoming. Take the Gregorian plain chant and Bach's Mass in B Minor, take the ‘Madonna of St Luke’ in Santa Maria Maggiore and, say, the Sistine Madonna, take any mosaic executed between the 5th and the 12th centuries and any fresco painting of the Renaissance, and you have the two kinds of art that might be distinguished as ‘contemplative’ and active’.