The "counter-Reformation" is treated badly in standard beast histories. The reality? The last time actual Logos took center stage in the official [art] narrative.
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Annibale Carracci, Assumption of the Virgin, 1590, oil on canvas, Museo del Prado, Madrid
The last Arts of the West post refocused after getting bogged down a little in the Renaissance. Maybe bogged down is too harsh, but we have spent a lot of time there. Not unreasonably - it's an inflection point in the entire culture of the West. But now it's time to move on.
That last post laid out why the Renaissance is such a change. Art gets sucked into the nascent secular transcendence of humanism like every other aspect of mainstream Western culture. It had to - the descent of the organic cultures of the West into the modern beast system is mass accumulated metaphysical inversion. And the Logos + Techne [L+T] formula that defines the actual arts of the West is a metaphysical relationship.
This is the L+T relationship in graphic form. It's the Band's operating assumption about the ontological composition of the arts of the West.
Logos is some element of truth - an immaterial abstraction. Techne is the technical skill or artisanship - crafted matter. One is external, objective, and not subject to human will. What truths to represent are a choice, but whether something is true is not. It's the technique that's discretional - the whole range of cultural and personal choices in play at any one time.
But the inversion of Western culture adds a secondary problem. It's not just art that is twisted into it's demented opposite. The narrative assumptions that govern every aspect life are fundamentally fake. Concepts like Progress! towards an ontologically incoherent secular materialist "utopia".
The idea of endless progress is an aspect of secular transcendence - that absolute qualities can exist in a temporal, fallen, entropic material reality. It this case it's not the oxymoronic "secular morality" or the logical impossibility of timeless moral precepts in a temporally mutable existence. This version is the infinite stream of water in a finite bucket problem. In both cases it's the pretense that absolutes inhere in a venue where absolutes don't materially exist. Ultimately they're variations on the difference between mathematical and experiential reality.
Of course, we've seen the fakeness. The failure of globalism to better society gets starker each year. Note how no one talks about progress or Star Trek type post-scarcity futures seriously any more. [note - Mars colonies when we can't colonize Antarctica aren't serious]. Pod dwelling and bug eating fit a more realistic future agenda - where only cloud people elites enjoy abundance and the masses live in wretched privation.
This means that it's not only the works of art themselves that are inverted. The widely-available historical accounts of art are too, because they're based on the fake narratives of the Progress! era. At the very least, modern histories assume a purely materialist string of events that can't account for the contours of the reality surrounding us. And even as that fake vision is collapsing, society acts as if the conclusions drawn from still hold. This is a problem if you're trying to piece together an historical account of what was really going on.
The point of the Arts of the West posts is two-fold - a) to look at how we get to modern art and b)
what that tells us about degeneration in the larger culture. This gets harder as we move forward in time partly because the amount and variety of art keeps growing and proliferating. And that means we have to depend on histories more than we'd like.
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E. Irving Couse, The Historian, 1902
History of any kind is a form of storytelling where the plot points are expected to be truthful. This is like any form/content relationship where the form – history or historical writing – controls the nature of the content – the particular narrative.
This painting shows a battle with American Soldiers being recorded in pictographic language on buckskin. Representational story with plot points perceived to be true, but told from a particular perspective.
Since history is a storytelling form, the content subdivides into another symbiotic pair, as seen in the last Langan post. These are plot [how the story is told or structured] and story [what information the plot tells]. Because of this, no history will be complete. Things extraneous to the plot get left out of the story. Even when the historian is being honest.
Sarah Yuster, Ed Johnson, 2005, oil, Staten Island Museum
In theory, the process is a spiral one. The way most people assume history works is that a plot is generated out of the historian’s growing understanding of the available historical record. Then the questions raised by the coalescing plot guide further inquiry. Eventually a coherent story is crafted to around some historical topic. And even the most scrupulous historian is limited by the available information and their own knowledge base.
Modern historians are worse. They start with set of false premises then try and force a limited reading of the historical record to fit that House of Lies narrative. The Band generally ignores this - note how rarely we bother with modern histories. But that isn't so easy to do with art. Trying to scan that history means familiarizing ourselves with a vast range of artworks. Number and accessibility mean we have to depend on pictures we can find on the internet. What gets scanned depends on the authorities' judgment. And that means accepting the outlines of the official narrative.
So full disclosure - the periods & masterpieces we're considering follow mainstream history and timelines. Out of necessity. The the failure of the official narrative is obvious from where it leads. But it means we can’t propose an entirely new alternative history ground up. Not as a casual blog poster. It's beyond us. All we can do is take the official history and see how and where it goes wrong. And we are drawing very different conclusions. We just don't want to give the impression we've claiming any higher truth value than that in our topic choices. In the end it doesn't matter much because it's the inversion in the official narrative that we're tracing.
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William Trost Richards, Sunrise on the Beach, around 1885, oil, private
That said, we have discovered roots of an alternative narrative in art commerce. Auction houses, dealers, collectors & private galleries have vast numbers of online images. Not the eight or nine-figure sales that make news. Things selling for a few k to a few million. Enough value to justify high-res sale photos but mostly left out of official [art] narratives.
The collectors' world still follows a rough beast pattern but with way more interest in actual art. We've already learned an alternative 19th century with guys like Richards. And found uplifting threads of excellence through a wounded 20th.
So we accept that the Renaissance is a major turning point in the arts of the West. But not for the reasons why it's usually pedestalized. The Renaissance art narrative was nailed down in then 19th and 20th century at peak Progress! mania. Humanism was cast as a critical early step in the [Progress! from Christian superstition to Star Trek atheist utopia] delusion.
This is the summary graphic we've used a lot. It's a nice reminder of the historical outline we work from.
What the Renaissance really does is introduce the terminal fiction that art is something with abstract-level existence. An existence independent of historical conditions - individual or cultural. An essential concept of art with a timeless essence like the moral values we looked at in the last House of Lies post. Let's call it [art]. to keep it distinct from art and Art!.
Staying in the spirit of disclosure, we are extrapolating here. The first critical writers on art in the Renaissance didn't formulate an explicit systematic definition of [art] in precise philosophical terms. No one wrote about art from a world perspective. There's the assumption the art they were writing about was local traditions. What they did was establish the assumption that art can be conceptualized in that way. It's a logical necessity for postulating any objective values that can be used for objective judgments of quality.
Pontormo, Visitation, 1528-1530, oil, Santi Michele e Francesco, Carmignano
The false assumption of ontological autonomy for art is mostly implicit in the Renaissance. Treating art in a way that requires it to be such a thing. There's something rhythmic about the forms and colors in Pontormo's mannerism that has nothing to do with the content. Less representation, more pure art.
It's in the Enlightenment era that the philosophical treatments come in, including Kant's authoritative demonstration that art has a subjective side. Where, by the way, our definition of techne in L+T as culturally determined comes from. Well, that, and common sense.
This categorical art - or [art] - really does come out of the humanistic cultures of Italy, so it starts small. As we said, it isn’t a universal set of rules as much as an attitude of assumed objectivity, so there's room for local differences. Venice and Florence had totally different theories of art. What matters is that there can be a “theory of art”. Put it in the form/content terms of the last House of Lies post - specific art theories [content] are less significant for historical transformation than the belief that [art] is theorizable in universalizing abstract terms [form].
It's important to remember that historical changes of this kind aren’t amorphous forces.
That's a postmodern deceit pushed by faux-intellectual puppets from Foucault to Harari. It appeals to de-moralized cretins in the midwit danger zone - smart enough for some abstract theorizing, but not smart enough to detect the lies therein. If anything, the squirt of dopamine they get from grasping something "complex" makes them emotionally committed to the fake theory. And self-cripplingly resistant to calling out liars.
Historical change takes place through human networks, with ideas spreading unevenly through human channels of influence. That fact one person can't direct history doesn't mean it isn't a product of human agencies. We know the whos and wheres of this new concept of [art]. We can see where and how it spread. The historical record indicates that the classicizing and humanistic ideas coming out of Renaissance Italy carried intellectual and cultural prestige. This is what inspired intellectuals, artists, and elites to adopt them all over the West.
Generalizing here, because historical change is not a simple binary. It is safe to say that the arts of the West traditionally developed organically from different cultural inputs and ideas. One commonly recurring input is the legacy of antique Greco-Roman culture. The historical development of the Middle Ages was built on Germanic tribal society with holdover Celtic admixture in what had been part of the Roman Empire. Of all these, the last had by far the most advanced artistic culture as well as symbolic resonance as the ultimate imperial archetype. Broad spectrum cultural achievement and the image of empire combined to make that Roman legacy irresistible to later Europeans. Artistic influence and revivals are an underrated part of keeping the impression of antiquity alive in the medieval West.
Pegasus page from the Leiden Aratea, fol. 32v, around 830-840, Leiden University Library
Much of our knowledge of ancient art comes through medieval copies. Like the Leiden Aratea - a 9th-century illustrated copy of the Roman Germanicus' astronomical treatise that was itself based on the the 3rd-century BC Greek writer Aratus. It is part of the Carolingian effort to preserve and build off ancient knowledge that started under Charlemagne.
It's not just ancient constellations that were preserved - the style of pictures is also copied from late Roman manuscripts.
Art appeals in part because it's can juxtapose multi-dimentional associations in expressive images. Roman art offered medievals echoes of the glorious legacy of the lost empire and a conveniently available tradition of advanced picture-making techniques.
Here's an inconvenient truth for those internet alternative history retards who build fatuous claims from artifacts "looking like" something else. Sometimes resemblance is a deliberate content reference. But sometimes it isn't. Artists routinely learned techniques from external examples without embracing the ideologies that these examples reflected.
Theotokos of Vladimir, early 1100s, tempera on panel, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; Duccio di Buoninsegna, Rucellai Madonna, 1285, tempera and gold on panel, Uffizi, Florence
Late medieval or proto-Renaissance Italian art was partly kickstarted by Byzantine icons. Note the similar styles in the Byzantine icon known as the Virgin of Vladimir and the great pre-Renaissance master from Siena. The icon has been repeatedly "restored", but even a mutilated state can't hide the resemblance. Duccio and late medieval painters adapted the sacred iconography of Byzantine icons into purely symbolic Italian art.
It's worth pointing out that the icons were themselves derived from late Roman models. The roots of Western culture are deep. One more reason that the modern obsession with blank slates and new orders is satanic.
Remember that medieval Italian artists like Duccio probably knew nothing of Orthodox image theology. At best a layman's casual awareness. There simply wasn't anything ontologically equivalent to an icon in the Western Church. A relic is probably the closest thing metaphysically. But relics aren't also materially paintings. The Italians used the same materials as the Byzantine iconographers to make their artworks. So they wind up translating the visual art part of the icon into the arts of the West.
Cambrai Madonna, around 1340, tempera, Cambrai Cathedral ; Jacopo Bellini, Madonna and Child, 1450s, oil and tempera on panel, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Carlo Crivelli, Madonna and Child, circa 1470, tempera on wood, Macerata Musei, Minzoni, Italy
As pictures, icons offered the Italians better ways of depicting things than the older domestic Romanesque style. Without the religious culture that emphasized faithful adherence to icon formulas, the icon was just a picture to learn from. And to be improved upon as artistic technique got better. It's why the Byzantinizing phase in medieval Italian art is so short-lived.
Note the dates. The Virgin of Vladimir is an Eleusa type of icon morphs into a Renaissance pose.
Hayne of Brussels, Virgin and Child, around 1454-1455, oil on panel, Nelson-Adkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Dieric Bouts, Virgin and Child, between 1455 and 1460, oil on panel, Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Eleusa type spreads into Northern Europe
Raphael, Tempi Madonna, 1508, oil on panel, Alte Pinakothek, Munich; Pompeo Batoni, Madonna and Child, 1742, oil on canvas, Galleria Borghese, Rome
And carries forward in time. The Batoni is from the 1740s.
On the surface it just looks like the Byzantine icon was translated into the purely representational Western concept of art and then developed organically into the 1800s. That's because [art] was superimposed over pre-existing organic artistic processes.
The humanists' systematic theorizing differentiates the Renaissance from older classical revivals or external influences. Idealized naturalism as [abstract theoretical value] instead of [just a model for making attractive pictures for artists to follow]. Sculpture and architecture - where real ancient examples survived - that show more direct visual influence. But humanism did vastly expand the Western understanding of Greco-Roman culture and painting was defined by ancient-adjacent principles. Not [looking like ancient art] but expressing the ideals humanists believed ancient art should express. And [art] was born as a thing-unto-itself subject to objective judgment.
Here’s the catch.
Renaissance theory was built on a fundamental category error and is ontologically hollow wishful projection. This should sound familiar. And since the claims of timeless absoluteness are fake, the definitions are actually just circumstantial and contingent. Stuff someone made up and not higher order logical truth. That should also sound familiar.
The crux of the problem - as often is the case in the emergent beast system - is the philosophical bait and switch. Some made-up contingent incidental offered as objective abstract truth. The operant mechanism of secular transcendence and the whole gamut of satanic fake Enlightenment "rationalist" values. The pustulent myth that ultimate reality is subject to human desire. And when the idiot masses collectively pretend the lie is true?
Installation view of The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, December 14, 2014–April 5, 2015
Whoever keeps the gates can make up whatever criteria they want and have it treated as if it were objective, external truth. Until the wheels fall off. There's no sense giving odds that any of this will be referenced in 100 years. let alone 500 or more. It won't be.
Look at it in ontological terms. L+T means the arts of the West combine technical skill and logos in a material form. Manipulation of matter to convey a truth in some manner. Representing something super-material via the material.
Stay ontologically rigorous. If art has an abstract and a material component, it’s the abstract part that’s objective. Timeless consistencies like truth - or [art] - have to be abstract because the material world is temporal, mutable, and fallen. It's the material part – the work of art that we can see – that's subjective. Here’s where the binary thinkers go poof. And why binary thinking is banishment to a foggy life of misunderstanding and error.
Christophe Vacher, The Wheel of Time, 2016
Vertical thinking escapes most people because it makes hierarchical relations across levels of reality. And the very concept of [levels of reality] is totally alien to the secular materialism of mentally gelded beast system Flatland.
It wasn’t necessary to be ontological savvy in the historical West because the three pillars are complementary. The nations of the West are material, historical things. The Classical heritage is the foundation of the abstract reasoning of morality, law, science – any inductive or deductive process. And Christianity accounts for the ultimate reality in an applicable form for our limited discernment. The fit between ontology, epistemology, deontology, and the historical structure of the West was made us aware we were on the right path from the beginning of the Band. And if salvation matters, the faith part is sufficient guidance if church dogma is sound.
So art represents objective abstract truth subjectively. That means style, medium, subject choice, etc. is chosen by artist and cultural context. These preferences develop organically through artists working within organic culture over time. It does not mean artists do what they wilt. Because they have to conform to material techne that their society values. And whatever art forms a society prefers, they have to point towards something true.
Utagawa Hiroshige, New Year's Eve Foxfires at the Changing Tree, Ōji, Edo period, around 1857, woodblock print - ink and color on paper, Metropolitan Museum of Art
This is an example of a ukiyo-e print - a Japanese art form that became popular in the late 19th-century West. Most would still find aesthetic appeal in it. But it is not of the Arts of the West. Note the inscriptions on it in the red areas. Writing over the surface of a painting - or print - is very different from how Western art is treated.
What it is is an example of L+T. The techne part is obvious - artistic woodblock printing requires technical skill. And it truthfully reflects organic cultural values and ideas of natural harmony. See how flexible L+T is? Both a wide net and rigorous exclusion of inverted garbage.
The truth – the logos in L+T – doesn’t have a fixed material form. The whole point about being systematic about ontology is to clarify what is possible and what is is lies. Truth can't have a fallen entropic temporally mutable form by definition. Like any abstract reality it manifests in imperfect material representations that conform more or less closely to it. That's the techne - techne that points to logos is art, and techne that doesn’t isn’t.
The techne - the skilled craft - is also important.
Terence Koh's gold plated feces (seriously) sold for $500 k in 2007. It is an unintentionally truthful comment on the money laundering and hollow posturing of modern art. But it is devoid of techne. It may be effective satire, but it doesn't belong to the arts of the West.
See where it gets hard to grasp? The Band is short tempered with retardery, but is sympathetic to the de-moralized and degraded masses here. Put L+T in the form/content terms of the last House of Lies post, and art seems to reverse intuitive ontological priority order.
The form is subjective and the content objective. The objective part is the immaterial abstract truth being represented. We can’t see truth qua itself – if we could there would be no need for art. All legitimate works of art share objective truth value despite looking really different. That’s what distinguishes them from other pictures or craftwork.
It only seems to reverse ontological priority order because of the nature of representation. Obviously the material form of the work has to precede the content message or subject that it communicates. Which is where the moronic ideas of "artistic autonomy" end. Because art is a representational form. All representations are antecedent to the thing they represent. The material form comes after the immaterial truth that it is representing. Allowing us to judge the truth value of that message or subject at the end of the chain.
Visualize...
Barent Fabritius, Young Painter in his Studio, between 1655 and 1660, oil on oak wood, Louvre Museum; Annibale Carracci, Christ appearing to Saint Peter on the Appian Way (Domine, Quo Vadis?), between 1601 and 1602, oil on panel, National Gallery, London
We could have arranged it vertically, to show the downward ontological progression from abstraction, to material object, to representational image, but this temporal sequence shows it well enpugh.
The part we see – the material part – is material. It can take as many shapes and forms as there are peoples. There needs to be skill – that’s the techne in L+T - but the specific skills that are valued are culturally dependent. They form organically through real artists and clients producing real things in a dialog over time. Choices and possibilities are set by individual takes on past examples and sometimes outside influences. But there are no top-down metaphysical “rules” to preferences in techne itself. It’s all circumstantial, as long as it points to something true.
The Renaissance introduces the inversion that the appearance, the techne, is also subject to absolute timeless abstract definition. And this category error redefines the art of the West as something at least capable of being centrally controlled.
Sainte-Chapelle, 1242-1248, Paris
It's how we get the inversive idiocy of castigating Gothic wonders like this as "barbarous". The whole concept of the "Dark Ages" for that matter.
The Sainte-Chapelle was built to house sacred relics for the King of France and is a masterpiece of proportioned rib vaulting and large-scale stained glass. It is unequivocally L+T at the highest level. But it didn't conform to the fake Renaissance humanist mandate that [art] objectively has to match Italian interpretations of ancient artistic practices. And therefore isn't art. Renaissance art may be magnificent at times, but it's easy to see the outline of the nascent beast system in its mentally challenged Logic!
Like most slides into the abyss, the damage isn’t immediately obvious. The initial Renaissance assumptions are preferences for harmony, symmetry, graceful forms, etc. Things that show up beyond the West too. There are general human aesthetic inclinations. It’s the conceptual change that art can be singularly defined in this way. Because the possibility of singular definition is the beginning of the centralization that will eventually let atavistic freaks invert L+T through [art] into Art!
Map the representation process and what happens.
The artist takes a subject and crafts a representation that is shaped by a whole range of topics. Some of which are shown in the thought bubble below. There are influences connecting the works - that's what a tradition is - but there's also variety. The constant is emphasis on craft and contemporary ideas of aesthetic appeal.
St. Luke painting the Virgin in Geoffroy Tory, Book of Hours, 1533), Ms. Library of Congress, Rosenwald ms. 10; Berlinghiero, Madonna and Child, possibly 1230s; Giotto, Madonna and Child, around 1310-1315; Beato Angelico, Pontassieve Madonna, around 1435; Sandro Botticelli, Madonna of the Book, 1480-1481; Raphael, Small Cowper Madonna, around 1504-1505; Sassoferrato, Madonna and Child, around 1640-1650
Now see what happens when [art] centralizes and critics interject fake "rules" between the artist and artworks. We'll stay with the same graphic configuration, but the art degenerates rapidly. From the Academy's Gérôme, where arbitrary and moribund creative limits were imposed, but techne mattered. To modern blasphemies where any link to the art of the West is inverted.
Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Virgin, the Infant Jesus and St. John, 1848; Pablo Picasso, Motherhood, 1901; Henri Matisse, Virgin and Child, 1950; Andy Warhol, Madonna with Child, between 1962-1987; Chris Ofili, The Holy Virgin Mary, 1996; Sergio Dinolfo, Madonna and Child, 2010s
Obviously the natures of the critics and the critical rules change over time. Otherwise, we would have kept Renaissance aesthetic standards like the French Academy. instead of degrading into modern trash. That’s the moral entropy that we see in every area of human existence. The basic truth that today’s transgression is tomorrows norm. Without constant conscious maintenance of standards, degradation is natural. It’s an unpleasant consequence of our Fallen nature. And there is nothing we can do to change it. The only tonic is to consciously maintain uncompromising moral standards in society to prevent the slide from ever starting.
Or we can do what we wilt down the slippery slope to eventual ruin in an endless churn of tyranny and impoverishment.
Installation view of Alexander Calder: Modern From the Start at the Museum of Modern Art, with White Panel, Gibraltar, and Apple Monster in the foreground
The linked article is actually titles Alexander Calder, MoMA’s Household God. Worshipping this turd - even figuratively - makes our point more effectively than any cutting remarks we could come up with.
So look past the specific set of art rules at any one time and think structurally. The introduction of critical authority in a thing called art centralizes it conceptually. It is defined as separate from the rest of the culture around it. And every definition requires defining parameters that distribute over the entire set. Meaning that the set – in this case “art” – is centralized definitionally by these parameters. The critical authority makes up the parameters, that then apply to everything defined by them as art. And if the central authorities become corrupted, inverted, satanic, etc….
So people look at a beautiful Renaissance painting and some modern trash and see complete inversion.
Giovanni Battista Salvi da Sassoferrato, Madonna and Child, around 1650, oil on panel
Christina Saj, Virgin and Child Enthroned, 21st century, mixed media
But both are products of centralized and critically determined concepts of [art]. It's another form/content relation. The form is the pretense that art is an abstract-level ontological category that exists independent of culturally determined material manifestations. And once the false form is accepted as real, the content can be whatever the centralized controllers say it is. What confuses people is that the centralization isn't a single organization or entity, but a network of institutions and authorities. A network that still manages to project a single ethos. We don't need to try and trace every formal and informal link between the players to see the emergence and propagation of this fake discursive construct. We use the words critic and critical as a shorthand reference to this.
Where the illusion of independence and difference comes in is in the content pushed through this fake form. The artistic degeneration captured by the two Madonnas only happens when the old historical sequence of organic solutions of L+T is replaced by a new historical sequence of centralized critical dogmas. Form/content.
Because there is no actual preexisting abstract ontological category of [art], there can never be a final binding definition. It's not a matter of refining understanding, or even drawing infinitely closer to an unattainable absolute like a calculus limit. There's no absolute to keep dialing in on. Just a false claim supporting a changing amorphous set of centralized elite dictates. Including the training and development of new elites. A self-propagating fake system like everything else in the House of Lies. Older graphics come in here.
The centralization-credentialism structure of the House of Lies posts applies to the degeneration of [art] into Art! Academies give way to widespread art schools and university programs. Chit holders can ascend through inverted "cultural institutions". And some chosen few become "authorities" - defining the next iteration of fake parameters.
The House of Lies is vast and complex, but the underlying patterns are simple and consistent. That's why recognizing them makes it easy to avoid the whole degenerate labyrinth.
Centralization - not just of resources, but also the power to at least functionally define what art is - is the vector for increasingly openly satanic elites to jack organic cultural processes & steer them into the abyss. This has consequences far beyond art, as in this graphic from an earlier Arts of the West post.
The Band has observed earlier that the jacking and inversion of Western popular culture in "the 60s" follows the same pattern as art in early modernism. Same process, larger scale.
The reality is that art was always functional. It took resources – enough so that manually skilled people could dedicate their lives to it and make a really good living doing so. If top Renaissance practitioners like Titian and Raphael acquired titles and lived in palatial homes, art had an accepted cultural purpose. Perhaps not as obvious as an axle or spoon, but a purpose - or purposes - all the same.
Peter Paul Rubens, The Miracles of St. Francis Xavier, 1617 or 1618, oil on canvas, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Art communicates. Religious art inspired devotion and gave spiritual truths appealing visual forms. Secular subjects captured likenesses, beautified places, and shared culture. All art has meant taste, status, wealth, etc. Bought and made for a reason. Without the reason, there is no art.
Usually there's more than one. Take this huge altarpiece by a Flemish Baroque genius of the counter-Reformation. At over 17.5' high, it's a monumental commemoration of one of the Jesuit Order's greatest saints. And it also reaffirms Catholic doctrine - including missionary work . And inspires the faithful with its majesty. And so on.
This purposefulness of art is what makes the onset of modernity another important shift. Before that, the critical fake “rules” of [art] coexisted with the functional aspects. An altarpiece still celebrated a saint, conveyed religious truth, beautified the nave or chapel, glorified the artist and patron who made and paid for it, etc. It just also conformed to the new demands of art as an abstract category. The Rubens up above builds on the work of Renaissance and ancient masters like a good humanist and is classically composed.
Modern autonomy rules out everything except whatever retarded fetish the atavist maggots infesting the carcass of Western culture are pimping at the moment. This doesn’t mean everyone buys it. But the web of institutions and organs that define the world of [art] do. And high-end visual expression is expunged from the official cultures of the societies of the West.
Vasily Kandinsky, Light Picture (Helles Bild), 1913, oil and resin on canvas, Guggenheim Museum, New York
According to the museum, this turd "effectively unfettered painting from its need to be representational", did the "most radically abstracted work shown in the famed Armory Show", and "wrote the groundbreaking On the Spiritual in Art in 1911".
Note the synergy between [garbage art], [the historic inversion of art into Art! in the early 20th-century], and [narrative spun up by a leading museum today].
Kandinsky is the sort of creature that could only have slime-trailed into prominence in a world of total cultural inversion. He was introduced, promoted, published, and pedestalized by different parties, but all working from the same fake satanic playbook. And it continues. We linked to the Guggenheim, but could have picked any number of leading museums, universities, publishers, etc. Consider this quote from a 1904 letter from the link above - “… the road ahead is fairly clear to me. I can claim without exaggeration that, if I carry it through, I shall come up with a new beautiful way of painting suited to infinite development.” It's pure inversion, where existing words are used in the opposite way to their standard meanings.
Although the "development" part wasn't off. Consider this gem...
V. Maldonado, The Fallen, 2018, acrylic on canvas
They do love hanging spiritual pretension on their mentally ill scribbling. It's as if they have to declare the fundamental inversions of legitimate artistic meaning.
This scribble is part of an "award-winning exhibition that challenges cultural and historical notions of the American West" in a university art museum. Note that objective analysis of the extant record is absent from this "challenge". It's a structure where one fake discourse narrative is replaced with another. All history is filtered through the eye of the storyteller, but like any representation, there is more or less truth value in each account. But modern art is freed from responsible representation. It can be whatever whim the scribbler - and more importantly, the inverted institutional enablers - declare. Hollow modernism is the perfect vehicle for empty projection. And empty projection without impersonal assessment of extant historical source material is the familiar will over reality formula. Do what thou wilt.
It takes time for this to fully form so we can see it happening historically.
Nicolas Poussin, Miracle of Saint Francis Xavier, between 1641 and 1642, oil on canvas, Louvre Museum
The new definition of art spreads gradually from Humanist Italy and is absorbed differently in different contexts. Academies only seriously form in the late 1600s. The arts of the West between Renaissance and Modernity slowly move from stylistic subdivisions and regional variation to the globalism of Art!.
Poussin was a French artist who lived and worked in and around Rome. He was too old for the French Academy, but his style became the template for that group. And for post-Renaissance classicism in general. Compare it to the Rubens. There is Baroque drama and light because that was the taste of the time. But note the greater balance, frontal arrangement, and careful rendering of each figure. There are fewer figures as well, and they are more carefully integrated together. Poussin drew on the example of Raphael and was seen as a yin to Rubens' yang in the 17th and 18th century French Academy. Note that neither yin nor yang included mentally ill scribbling.
This is where that historical narrative problem from the beginning comes back in. As the European nations coalesce out of the Middle Ages, there are too many traditions to follow. We have to use the standard timeline. That’s ok, because the early centuries of [art] are based on technical skill and beauty. The top artists do embody L+T. The expectations around [art] start to guide how L+T looks. But it doesn’t replace L+T until modernism. The narrative also hews to the most influential creators and high-profile projects. It’s elite taste, but the it’s the elite that fund the most refined fine arts.
And this is what makes the immediate post-Renaissance era so interesting. The new idea of [art] hadn't fully coalesced and the centralization was just starting. The traditional demand for functional beauty still existed. And the self-conscious artiness of Mannerism seems to have put a lot of the elites off.
The backlash to post-Renaissance mannerism comes from outside [art].
It’s tied into the Catholic reaction to Protestantism sometimes called the counter-Reformation. It's not the greatest name for what was really a wholesale course correction after the Hermetic and other blasphemies of the Renaissance Church. The Reformation may have been the catalyst, but the Church was in sore need of its own reform. This hasn't changed.
Nicolò Dorigati, Opening Session of the Council of Trent in 1545, 1711, Museo Diocesano Tridentino, Trento
There's more to the "counter-Reformation" than the famous Council of Trent, but its three sessions over 18 years represent the official Church position at the time. Ecclesiastic reform went hand in hand with a larger upsurge in religious sentiment.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, The Ecstasy of St. Teresa, 1647–1652, marble, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome
New figures of profound and militant faith emerged in numbers and influence unseen since the Middle Ages. Reforming bishops like Charles Borromeo. Founders of new orders like the Jesuit's Ignatius Loyola, the Theatine's Gaetano Thiene, and the Discalced Carmelites' Teresa of Avila. These often predate the Council of Trent. These energized the Church with an intense mystical spirituality that Bernini captured so effectively. Arguably the most gifted sculptor who ever lived, he brings Teresa's visionary experience to supernatural life.
Sant'Andrea della Valle, 1590-1650, Rome
Big imposing churches were built, both for the regular clergy and the new counter-Reformation orders. Like this imposing mother church of the Theatine order built over a number of decades by several architects.
The design follows a template established by the slightly earlier Church of the Gesù - the mother church of the Jesuit order in Rome.
Canonizations resume, as the reenergized Church recognizes her heroes. The famous canonization of 1622 included Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier of the Jesuits, Teresa of Avila of the Discalced Carmelites and Philip Neri of the Oratory along with the older Isidore of Seville. Canonization took a hiatus during much of the 16th century. We don't know whether this was actually due to insecurity over sainthood in the face of Protestant criticism. But the dramatic return and the counter-Reformatory heroes chosen link it to this upsurge in Catholic religiosity.
So not just Trent, but Trent gives us the official position on a widespread religious awakening.
The Council of Trent reaffirmed the dogmas that the Protestants rejected. It also put new emphasis on observance, tightening up the organic laxness of the medieval Church. Not to say that medieval theology was lax, but that there will always be some flexibility in practice when a body has to include everyone. Slight variations that don’t violate core dogma alleviate pressure within the system. Obviously extremes like the vile Cathars demanded a stronger response. But the reality is that the medieval Church was very different from the oppressive monolith idiot modern commentators pretend. Protestantism changes the old system by splitting the it over doctrinal variations. Admittedly more extreme variations, but introducing “types” of Christianity based on outward practices and signs.
Peter Paul Rubens, The Triumph of the Church, 1622-1625, oil on panel, Museo del Prado
One of Rubens' designs for a series of tapestries celebrating the Eucharist. Exactly the kind of emphasis on disputed doctrine that we just mentioned. In this one, a personification of the Church holds a radiant monstrance with the Eucharistic Host while her chariot crushes allegories of Hatred, Discord and Evil. It's typical of Rubens' Baroque style, with Renaissance type allegories used for a religious message and a new dynamism and energy. Note the papal crown on the Church's head.
Art was an issue in the Reformation. Some reformers banned religious art altogether – even destroying works of art in organized iconoclasm. Others were softer, but still downplayed images or rejected the aspects of the Church that drove art production. Just dismissing the cult of the saints did away with countless altarpieces, devotional icons, commemorative images, stained glass windows, print culture, chapel architecture etc.
The corpus Christi – the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist – drove the production of manuscript illuminations, altarpieces, sculptures, etc.
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Raphael, The Mass at Bolsena, 1511, fresco, Vatican Museums
Raphael's painting is one of countless examples of artistic celebrations of the Eucharist or Eucharistic miracles. This bleeding host scene took place in 1263 and was depicted here at the wish of Pope Julius II who was especially devoted to the sacrament.
The organized Church - ordained clergy all the way up to the pope – were the largest market for artworks, from small prints to vast frescos. Like the famous Sistine Chapel.
Michelangelo and others, Sistine Chapel, 1482-1541 with later additions, Vatican
The Sistine Chapel is a monument to Renaissance art and Michelangelo's greatest painting achievement. As the papal palace chapel, it was the spiritual heart of the Church.
Pilgrimage drove the construction and decoration of churches and chapels all over Europe.
Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, 1075-1211 with major additions through the 18th century, Spain
This massive Spanish cathedral was built on the believed burial site of the Apostle St. James the Greater. It became one of if not the preeminent pilgrimage site in medieval Europe. Pilgrimage was a major Catholic practice with connections to indulgences and Purgatory. All things rejected by Protestantism, along with the cult of the saints.
The statue of James on the eighteenth-century Façade of the Obradoiro shows him in the traditional pilgrim costume.
We've barely scratched the surface of the connections between the Church and the historic arts of the West, but it's enough for the present purposes. There’s no way that the occasional Reformed altarpiece could compensate, and art in Protestant environments move into more secular subjects. Landscape, genre, still-life, portraits – often taking some of the old moralizing role of religious art.
Jan Steen, The Dissolute Household, 1663–64, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art
What looks like a comic scene from a Dutch painter is a pointed moral lesson. The master of the house lasciviously holds the maid's hand while his drunken wife is poured more wine. Children run wild and instruments of pleasure are scattered around.
The future of this immorality and neglect is shown in the hanging basket. According to the museum site, it holds a beggar’s crutch and can, clappers used to warn of leprosy or plague, and the jack of spades, signifying misfortune. A Christian message, but very different from traditional Christian art.
The Church reaffirms religious art along the traditional lines at the Council of Trent. Without regard for the theoretical imperatives coming out of the Renaissance that led into mannerism. The old justification of religious imagery going back to the early Middle Ages that avoided Byzantine metaphysics and Islamic aniconism alike. Art was to be educational and/or motivational. With clear truthful depictions that present Christian source material in without distortion and in an emotionally moving way. Educating and inspiring as a way to keep the rhetorical appeal of imagery while resisting the lure of idolatry.
This looks like a direct refutation of [art]-driven art because of reasons belonging to the old function-driven art. The complex figural arrangements, irrational color schemes, inappropriate erotic elements, inscrutable subject details, and all the other arty aspect of the mannerist crap seen in the last post seem at cross-purposes to teaching or motivating. We don’t know if this was explicitly stated - mannerist art did seem to turn up in the traditional places without apparent issues.
But then again, so does the pope’s satanic throne. Placement alone is not a sufficient argument for legitimacy.
If we look at the art of the late 16th century, we can see a concentrated effort to make clearer and more direct paintings. It takes a while at first. Artists have to figure out how to meet counter-Reformation demands for clarity without becoming boring or repetitive. Emotional appeal without lasciviousness. Eventually another wave of genius innovators balance functionality and [art] appeal with the Baroque. The last time Christianity would be at the center of the official Western art narrative.
Scipione Pulzone, Madonna degli Angeli with St. Francesco of Assisi and St. Clare, 1588, Santa Maria degli Angeli, Messina
Pulzone is a good example of a first-wave reaction to the new artistic climate. The porcelain symmetry unusual colors of the angels carry over from mannerist artistic self-consciousness. And the Madonna and Child quote the esteemed example of Raphael.
But the arrangement and number of figures is simplified and clarified. The coronation of the Virgin is dogmatically straightforward. And the saints are Franciscan - an older order - but shown as models of devotional conduct. Note Clare's veneration of the Eucharist.
Scipione Pulzone, The Lamentation, 1593, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art
A few years later Pulzone painted this altarpiece for the for the Jesuit church of the Gesù. The museum website describes it as a meditation on the Entombment of Christ, in line with Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. This text is considered a landmark of counter-Reformation thought and described an imaginative process of visualizing Biblical events. The connection between this kind of emotional vizualization and counter-Reformation art is obvious.
Note how the picture is arranged to showcase Christ's sacrificial body and allow you up-close access. You're there, like a Spiritual Exercise. Little details like Mary's tears and the Magdalene's red swollen eyes enhance the emotional immediacy. It is carefully arranged - note the way the figures' heads form tidy diagonals. But with none of that mannerist complexity. Accurate and inspiring.
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Santi di Tito, Vision of St Thomas Aquinas, 1593, oil on panel, San Marco, Florence
Even Florence - the heart of Renaissance [art] - shows the new direction. This picture affirms the sanctity of the saints and efficacy of religious art with shocking realism.
The medieval saint's vision appears to be a painting come to life, with the crucified Christ accompanied by St. Catherine of Alexandria, the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, and St John. Devotional visualization, religious art, and miraculous vision overlap as pathways to communion with the divine.
Even the most mannerist of the Venetian masters in our Venice art posts develops a mystical intensity in his late works. His use of chiaroscuro - extreme contrasts of light and dark - anticipates Roman revolutionary Caravaggio. This effect always added drama and mystery, making it stylistic antithesis to the even clarity of classical lighting. For Tintoretto and other painters, the effect conveyed mystical darkness. With luminous figures shining out.
Jacopo Tintoretto, The Last Supper, 1592–1594, oil on canvas, Basilica di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice
Eventually artists figure out how to make the lessons of the Renaissance serve the new ethos. When this meets a rejuvenated Rome, the style known as the Baroque is born. We'll look at that mix of intense rhetoric and deep faith in part two. For now we'll mention a couple of things from the official timeline.
The Baroque takes different forms in different places. The original version is Italian - mainly
Roman - because papal Rome still held its Renaissance place as center of Western art. The new style was really driven by the Church and Roman aristocracy. It takes the ideas of the Renaissance, replaces the excessive humanism with doctrinaire counter-Reformation Catholicism, and cranks the rhetoric to 11.
Annibale Carracci, Pieta, 1600, oil on canvas, National Museum of Capodimonte, Naples
Carracci is the godfather of the new style. His figures have the classically structured configuration of a Raphael or Michelangelo. The faces have classical gravitas and beauty. But the dramatic chiaroscuro light comes straight out of Venice and ramps up the emotion. And the realism - Mary's face really does grieve.
That’s the biggest divider between Baroque and Renaissance in Italy as far as we can see. The values of the Baroque are all-out rhetorical appeal to the senses to max out emotional engagement. Because the subject was the last puff of Church vainglory. And the last hurrah of multi-century run as the center of art in the West.
In some ways, this counter-Reformation/Reform era and the Baroque art that followed is an Indian Summer of the premodern world. We've seen that the secular transcendence of humanism had already taken root in the Renaissance and that kings and popes had been intruding on each other's terrain before that. But the Church was at the center of Western art for the last time - the Baroque starts with religious rhetoric before morphing into ancien regime secular. And the logos in L+T was still aiming at ontologically credible Truth.
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Caravaggio, Saint Jerome Writing, around 1605, oil on canvas, Galleria Borghese, Rome
The subject matter is pure contest Catholic dogma - cult of the saints, integrity of the Vulgate, even the cardinal's robes. But the intensely contrasting light and shadow - and the spiritual mood it creates - is Caravaggio's genius. You feel Jerome's enlightenment and devotion as it emerges from the darkness. An apt metaphor for limits of discernment with indescribable rhetorical power.
There are a lot of factors that come together to create the conditions for Baroque art. Factors that will also undermine the spiritualized world view that the art reflects. The Renaissance can't be put back in the bottle, and the secular art culture of humanism coexists with the resurgent Church. And many things that seemed to strengthen the Church's position were also early foundations of the House of Lies to come. Here are a few big ones.
Explosion of Religiosity - by any account, the official policies of the Catholic Reform era were paralleled by an intense increase in popular devotion in Italy and other Catholic lands. Like different parts of a larger awakening. It was symbiotic, with public piety driving the Church and the Church channeling and directing public piety.
Antonio Lafrery, Pilgrims Visiting the Seven Churches of Rome during the Holy Year of 1575, c. 1575, engraving, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Pilgrimage had been around for a long time, but it was revitalized. During Holy Year, pilgrims to Rome's indulgences doubled. The traffic was a big part of the resurgent Roman economy. The downside was treating salvation as an economic transaction.
Louis-Jean Desprez and Francesco Piranesi, Pius VI in adoration in the Pauline Chapel during the ceremony of the Forty-Hours, c. 1783-1785, Desprez' watercolour and gouache over Piranesi's engraving, La Galerie Tarantino, Getty Museum, Los Angeles
New forms of public devotion like the Forty Hours also sprung up. This one started in the early 16th century and made veneration of the Eucharist a religious spectacle. Elaborate machines - artistic installations on altars with lights, sculpture, temporary architecture, etc. - turned altars into moving participatory visionary experiences. The painting is a 18th-century example, but it captures the splendor.
Marco Benefial, The Vision of Saint Philip Neri, 1721, oil on canvas, The Fitzwilliam Museum
The new saints of the era with their mystical visions and ecstasies were lightning rods for popular devotion. Their new orders - like Neri's Oratorians - provided outlets for devotion and the foundation of new churches and organizations. Neri was the main exponent of the pilgrimage to the seven ancient basilicas in the print above and was sometimes called the Apostle of Rome. He may actually have done that 1575 Holy Year circuit.
Giovan Battista Crespi (designer), Siro Zanella & Bernardo Falcone (builders) Sancarlone or Colossus of San Carlo Borromeo, 1614-1698, bronze, over 115 ft., near Arona, Italy.
This colossal statue - the second largest bronze statue in the world after the Statue of Liberty - celebrates the greatest bishop and reformer of the post-Reformation Church. Among other things, Borromeo was a promotor of the Forty Hours and healer during the terrible Plague of Milan. He died in 1584 and was canonized only 16 years later - a sign of his reputation.
First edition of St. Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises, pub. Antonio Bladio in Rome, 1548
Ignatius Loyola founded the Jesuits, who became almost synonymous with the Catholic Reform movement. He composed his Spiritual Exercises between 1522 and 1524 as a set of guided meditations and prayers intended to development discernment and enhance holiness. Their publication made them widely popular.
The Spiritual Exercises use structured self-examination and intense visualization techniques. This makes them a common reference for modern historians looking at the upsurge of religiosity in this period.
T. Galle, Prayer card from around 1600
It wasn't all grand art and installations either. Small printed prayer cards like this one made pictures accessible. These are like personal versions of the art of the period and actual visualizations of practices like the Spiritual Exercises and other devotional activity.
There were tons of things like this made. This one puts the mourning Mary and Jesus up front to focus on. The background shows other Passion scenes to get you thinking about the whole story.
The Pope rebuilds Rome - the upsurge of religiosity came with a change in Roman fortunes. The population surged and money poured into Church coffers. The later 1500s saw a boom in church and other construction, construction of new streets, fountains, aqueducts, and other infrastructure, and the completion of St. Peter's. The brief pontificate of Sixtus V (1585-1590) was probably the peak, but this carries well into the 17th century. The Baroque style depends on and projects an optimistic outlook.
Portrait of Sixtus V, published by Nicolaus van Aelst, around 1589, etching and engraving, Metropolitan Museum of Art
This famous print shows Pope Sixtus V surrounded by his major construction and other projects. It was Sixtus who first had an ancient aqueduct reconnected to make long-abandoned areas livable and added new streets.
The Band has written occult posts on the obelisk. The official story is that re-erecting them was a symbol of Roman rebirth. The ancient Romans brought them from Egypt as a sign of supplanting the older culture as the center of civilization. Most of them fell during the Middle Ages and the engineering knowledge to stand them up was lost. Sixtus' obelisk project placed Christian Rome as the new center of civilization - note the cross atop the lower Lateran obelisk.
Of course, this is the official story. The symbolism suggests a different kind of cultural center.
Michelangelo's dome of St. Peter's was finally completed in 1590 and had loomed over the city ever since. The nave and facade were added in the early 1600s, with other work continuing throughout the century.
New World discovery and the missions that followed.
Outside the city, the faith also seemed to be on the march. Awareness of the size of the world - including entire continents not in the ancient literature - did a lot to undermine Renaissance faith in antiquity. The monarchies of Europe were quick to empire build and exploit colonial wealth. But for the Church, this meant souls in need of salvation, and the success of the missions brought far more new Catholics than were lost in the Reformation. Of course, plenty of colonial wealth made its way into Church coffers.
John Vanderlyn, Landing of Columbus, 1847, oil on canvas, U.S. Capitol Rotunda.
The Spanish Empire took the early lead in the colonialist race. A resolute champion of Catholicism, first against Islam then Protestantism, the Spanish monarchy dealt the Church into its fortunes.
The downside is that this overseas expansion laid the foundations for globalism.
Frontispice from Daniello Bartoli's Della vita e dell’istituto di S. Ignatio, second edition, 1659
The Jesuits - like other orders - were heavily involved in overseas missions. This frontispiece from a biography of Loyola shows him presiding over the world with personifications of the four known continents. From top left - Africa, Americas, Asia, Europe.
Success in Religious War - Baroque triumphalism also reflects momentary success in the last wave of Western war fought on religious lines. The Wars of Religion in Europe would culminate in the ghastly 30 Years War and the Wesphalian system mentioned in the last post. But there were some successes in the early phases that weren't reversed. Belgium and much of central Europe. Colonialism came with epic thrashings of tactically and tactically overmatched local forces. And Catholic forces checked Ottoman advance in the Mediterranean at Malta and Lepanto well before the gates of Vienna.
Paolo Veronese, Allegory of the Battle of Lepanto, 1571, oil on canvas, Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice
Lepanto was a pivotal battle - the Ottomans did represent an existential threat. The Venetians provided most of the ships and Philip II of Spain polished his defender of the faith reputation.
This painting connects the victory to the Marian support of the leaders.
Giorgio Vasari, St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre cycle, 1573, fresco, Sala Regia, Vatican
The influential Renaissance humanist, historian, art theorist, and artist painted the famous 1572 removal of French Protestants on the walls of the papal throne room in the Vatican palace. The panel shown depicts the defenestration of Protestant leader Gaspard de Coligny in the background.
His style is still that complex arty Mannerism, but the subject matter captures the escalating religious hostility after the Reformation. Obviously anti-Catholic mouthpieces have used it as "evidence" of Catholic intolerance, but we can insta-dismiss that given the whole history of Enlightenment lies and inversion. The reality is that fundamental difference is incompatible and - as the old saying goes - diversity and proximity prefigure war.
The European Wars of Religion are too big a topic to treat comprehensively. These spanned over a century and played out differently in different parts of Europe. The final result was the Westphalian system that was supposed to prevent such total conflict in the future. That it failed so utterly means that it can only be seen as positive if the metric is the marginalization of Christianity. Well, that and redefining "nation" from extended family bound by blood to legalistic entity defined by arbitrary lines on a map and subject to alteration by conquest. That is, Progress! towards the current beast system and its House of Lies.
What made the Wars of Religion situation intractable were the inherent stalemates. The combatants' positions were held by faith, making them difficult to alter. And the military situation was balanced enough to ensure endless unresolved war of attrition. Westphalia was a better conclusion to endless slaughter. But it was only the best solution if establishing aristocratic nation-states as the basis of Western civilization the desired outcome.
Before the reversals that led to stalemate, the Spanish did have success against the Dutch in the 80 Years / 30 Years War. This added to the brief era of Catholic triumphalism before the Westphalian system would remove the Church from the center of European affairs for good.
Diego Velazquez, The Surrender of Breda, 1634–35, oil on canvas, Museo del Prado, Madrid
The great Spanish court painter showed Spanish commander Ambrogio Spinola accepting the surrender of the town of Breda from Protestant commander Justin of Nassau. Their aristocratic interaction belies the violence of the conflict. By the time this was painted for Spanish king Philip IV, the war had already turned against a Spain that was entering economic decline.
Carlo Maderno, facade by Giovanni Battista Soria, S. Maria della Vittoria, 1605-1626, Rome
This church was started by the Discalced Carmelite order - another new Catholic Reform orders founded by Teresa of Avila, one of those new saints mentioned up above. She was canonized along with Neri and Loyola in that group canonization in 1621.
The church was named for St. Paul, but rededicated to Mary in thanks for Imperial victory over Czech Protestants at the Battle of the White Mountain at Prague in 1620.
And showing how all this is connected...
...that's S. Maria della Vittoria on the left. The structure on the right is the Moses Fountain - put up by Sixtus V between 1585 and 1887 to celebrate his restoration of a Roman aqueduct. And Bernini's magnificent statue of Catholic reform hero and saint Teresa of Avila is inside.
The Baroque is born of this paradox. A creative explosion out of Christian fervor and a militant triumphalist Church that applied High Renaissance-level techne to the glory of God. The faith and rhetoric quickly fell out of favor in Enlightenment Europe and the Renaissance eclipsed the Baroque in the official narrative of [art]. But Rubens, Bernini, Caravaggio and the rest are every bit as gifted as their Renaissance counterparts. Perhaps more so - looking at them, these guys are some of the greatest creators in Western history.
But consider what was right around the corner. Colonialism prefigures globalism, becomes a moral sore on the West, and fueled dissolution. The Wars of Religion / Peace of Westphalia bring death and destruction, the political subordination of religion, and the rise of the oxymoronic nation-state.
Indian summer.
Pierre Mignard, Equestrian Portrait of Louis XIV, 1673, Galleria Sabauda, Turin
As the papacy diminished in importance, Baroque rhetoric eventually made its way to the European courts. Where it becomes associated with the empty bombast of the ancient regime and its nation states. No one was a bigger part of this than Louis XIV, the Sun King shown here in an allegory of classical triumph.
If the religious origins were one huge Enlightenment strike against the Baroque, the monarchical adaptation was the other.
But the early Italian form of Baroque seemed to marry rhetorical virtuosity with extreme sincerity. It answered the Church's need for clear images that really inspired. The result is some of the most potent religious art ever made.
Pietro Berrettini aka. Pietro da Cortona, Vision of St Francis, 1641, oil on canvas, 227 x 151 cm
Pietro da Cortona is another brilliant artist who is largely forgotten. This altarpiece is a great example of the Baroque way of depicting miraculous religious devotion. Lights, clouds, and angels burst through the barrier between Heaven and earth.
Baroque art uses visual rhetoric to represent connections between divine and material reality. The Band would connect this to the Ontological Hierarchy - the contiguous levels of reality that make up the foundation of what we can know and how we can know it. Here, the familiar figures of Madonna and Child from countless painting become visual expression of Francis' direct metaphysical contact with God.
The Catholic reform era is important for the arts of the West because it underlines the relation between art and [art]. The "counter-Reformation" was a refocus on doctrine and surge in public religiosity during the last period when the Church was the center of Western culture. And the equally brief spell of Catholic socio-economic resurgence meant the resources were there for artistic leadership.
Drumming out the distortions and lasciviousness of Mannerism for high-impact, ontologically sound Baroque art is something any real Christian would like to see repeated. Of course, the current filth in the Church is a lot worse than Mannerism...
Jago, Modern Pietà, marble, 2021-2022, on display in front of a Christian image of the Crucifixion in the church of S. Maria in Montesanto in Rome.
We are supposed to believe that this naked bald grotesque holding a nude boy is a "modern" Pietà. Something that "re-elaborates the theme of piety". The Pietà is an old devotional image that directs empathetic attention to Mary mourning the death of her son. The central sacrifice in the entire Christian story. The Band aren't theologians, but we're unaware of any aspect of the Incarnation that applies to this albino turd.
About that re-elaboration of piety. Remember, words have meanings. And in a Christian context, "piety" is "is the evidence of sincere faith. It is a devotion to God through our actions, not just thoughts and words". This from Christianity.com - hardly a radical site. Since there is nothing Christian about this, we can assume "re-elaboration" means [turn away from the will of God the Church was founded to represent].
Religious art after the counter-Reformation becomes a tool to deliver a message with budding [art] concerns secondary. Which in itself isn’t a bad thing. Sincere Baroque is L + T at the highest level. Catholic dogma - which is Christian - and Renaissance expectations of artistic excellence. But the Church proved worldly and unable to maintain moral authority. The so-called Christian monarchs rang in secular culture. And the most visionary artists like Rubens and Bernini were genius one-offs. The following generation lacked comparable talent to keep their innovations rolling. Especially in a climate of declining Church resources and cultural leadership.
The biggest issue for our posts is the shift from Church – however corrupt - to nation-state as the center of culture. Art doesn't go off the rails immediately, but the logos in L+T is mostly divorced from God, faith, and ultimate reality. Instead the truth is king, country, and other elites. Secular subjects that serve the aims of the secular powers, but whose claims have proven unable to meet the historical consistency of Christian morality.
Jacques-Louis David, The Oath of the Horatii, 1784-1785, oil on canvas, Louvre Museum
David is the premiere painter of the French Enlightenment. His Neoclassicism tapped the same subjects as Renaissance humanism but in a time of secular transcendence, nation-states, and other satanic inversions. The Horatii swear to their father that they'll fight to the death for Rome as the women mourn in a demonstration of duty and civic piety. But there's no higher morality here, just self-serving made up human conventions. The usual fraud that somehow material custom rises to the level of abstract moral absolute. There is some truth here, but no ultimate anchor to resist subversion. The techne will go next.
The result is that the highest techne is divided from Logos for the small-l logoi of socio-cultural character or ruling dynasty. Eventually the old classical language will be harnessed to the secular transcendence of Enlightenment "rationalism" before slowly being dustbinned by creeping modernity.
The next post will look at the Baroque art. And then the Enlightenment looms. But for now, some Indian summer...
Guido Reni, The Adoration of the Shepherds, about 1640, oil on canvas, National Gallery, London
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