From an interview with Timothy Verdon, Art Historian and Canon of the Cathedral of Florence.
"God is infinitely beyond human comprehension – God is God, we are creatures. And yet in everything that the Judeo-Christian tradition tells us about God, it is clear that God wants to communicate with his creatures, God wants to be known by his creatures.
The whole point of the law and the prophecy in ancient Israel was that God wanted his creatures to understand him and themselves – a creature is a reflection, to some degree, of the Creator. This will of God to make himself understood – and in that process help us understand ourselves – reaches fulfilment in Christ. Christ is the Word of God where the Scriptures are many words that come from God and are filtered through the inspired authors; Christ is the very Word that all those other words try to give partial expression to.
Christ assumes a form that makes him intelligible to human beings – the Word becomes flesh. And then the Gospel of John immediately adds that he dwelt among us, and we saw his glory. What Christ did while he was on earth was to reveal the identity, the personality of the Father: all of the wonderful things that he did that reveal the father – the words he spoke, the miracles, the acts of mercy – even after Christ’s Resurrection and Ascension, they continue...
What’s the relationship of all of this with art which is my specific field? The relationship is simple. When Christ took a Body – when the Word of God took a body from the humanity of Mary – it was to be seen. Christ is now invisible except in the abstract forms of the sacraments – we see water and we know that we’re being cleansed, we see bread and wine and we know that his Body and Blood are present, but we don’t really see the body and blood. But somehow the extreme simplicity of that communication that God wanted in Christ’s Incarnation is now filtered by a symbolic system of sacraments and signs. So we don’t actually see, but the art of the Church allows us to see. It extends down through the centuries, something like that privileged experience of the people of Jesus’ own time when they saw him and intuited that there was more than just a man here. Art allows us to continue to enjoy that experience...
So the ancient desire of human beings to see God, Moses on the mountain asks God to show him his face…. In Christ people really contemplated the Face of God. Christ tells us that we see him in the poor and the needy, and so on. But the works of visual art that surround these privileged moments in which [people] come into direct contact with Christ, and which usually tell stories from the life of Christ, or of Mary or of the saints, in whom we also contemplate Christ – the works of art are part of this process.
Much of what I’ve done as an art historian is to try to remind other art historians of this whole dimension that I’m describing, which usually has not been discussed. And that’s a grave omission, because the artists and the patrons were more or less conscious of all of this. They lived within this system. So the art historians should be aware of it, because if not they are going to talk about these works in a way which is misleading. Certainly the style, the economical features – all of these things are interesting and real and an important part of the history of art, but the larger framework within which these works were meant to function was something more like what I’ve been describing.
I try to call the attention of colleagues to these things, and even more, perhaps, I try to reawaken Christians to the extraordinary eloquence and beauty of this visual heritage which today ordinary believing Christians have the equipment to understand. They may not be art historians but they have keys to understanding the works of architecture and painting and sculpture that many art historians don’t have. And those keys come from their own faith, from the simple experience of life in church, the life of the sacraments.
One could add that something that Christians tend not to reflect upon and that historians of art and of sacred music and sacred architecture similarly tend not to reflect upon, is that the great work of art that Christianity has produced since its beginning is the Liturgy.
What believing Christians have been harried by the Spirit to do right from the beginning is to seek those poetic forms of expression and those physical actions and those material objects that can be called into play to express their faith. Really Jesus himself taught us to do this. At the Last Supper, he took bread, and then he said words: “This is my Body”. Jesus, who is himself the Word made flesh, in order to communicate, takes physical things that already have their own range of meanings and says words that open that implicit range of meanings to a much more specific and explicit communication.
So Jesus himself is the first teacher of how you combine things and actions and words in order to create a composite work, which is basically a work of art. At the Last Supper, he puts on an apron, he kneels down, he washes their feet. He’s continually doing things that invite reflection and then making sure that we understand what he’s doing.
What I’m saying is that you can’t really just talk about the visual art of the Church, or the music of the Church, or the Liturgy. All of this is part of a single creative impulse that flows from the experience of Christ himself, the Word who becomes flesh. A conceptual expression of God who becomes visible and tangible. The First Letter of St John says that this is what we have seen and touched and contemplated with our own eyes; it’s a total sensory and intellectual experience. The Liturgy is that. So an artist working for the church and for its Liturgy is within this millennial creative action which, in the last analysis, is a continuation in time and space of the Creation described in Genesis."
