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A Source of Distraction for Those Attached to the Vanities of the World. The Re - flections on Sacred Art by St Bernard of Clairvaux as Interpreted by Armand Rance

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Krasny P.

Modus. Prace z historii sztuki

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2014

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vol. 14

123-138

XX

1666 Armand Jean Bouthillier de Rance (1626-1700) started a thorough reform of the Cistercian abbey at La Trappe, aimed at restoring in the monastery the strict rule of the Cistercian orders founding fathers: Sts Robert of Molesme, Stephen Harding and Bernard of Clairvaux. A vision of monastic life based on their teachings was presented by Rance in his De la saintete et des devoirs de la vie monastiąue (1683). In this treatise he recalled St Bernards reserved attitude towards art, as expounded in An Apology to William of St Thierry. In his radical reading of this text, Rance declared that, in order to stimulate their piety, monks did not need magnificent churches, splendid liturgical utensils or paintings representing sacred subjects. On the basis of a thorough survey in the orders archival materials and an analysis of works of medieval Cistercian art, he demonstrated that in the centuries immediately following the foundation of the order, Cistercians had faithfully adhered to the‘artistic doctrine’ of their founding father. Rance appealed to his comrades and other monks to liberate their liturgical practices from the rich artistic setting, in order to be able to return the liturgy its proper spiritual character. He was convinced that, while proclaiming such radical teachings, he remained faithful to Catholic orthodoxy which had established the practice of richly decorated churches and the cult of religious images for the use of ‘lay people who by their very condition are imperfect and who are attached to vanities, whence their piety has to be stimulated by external things’. According to the holy tradition of the religious order, however, ‘all these things should be renounced, because not only may they distract the monks, but also instil things in their memory and hearts that should be rejected, in order that they do not divert the attention of monks away from the hermitage [of the monastery] towards the world’. Yet, in the last quarter of the seventeenth century Rances radical puritanism appealed also to the lay members of French intellectual elites who earlier had been under the influence of Jansenist theology, which criticised excessive magnificence of sacred art. One of them was Andre Felibien, an outstanding art theorist and secretary of the Parisian Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. The architectural forms of the Fa Trappe abbey church, remodelled by Rance, were depicted by Felibien in his Description de YAbbaye de la Trappe (1677) as a consistent realisation of the Cistercian reformers concept of sacred art. Similar views were expressed by Frere Pacome (actually, Guillaume Dardenne) in his laconic characteristic of the church and monastery at La Trappe, appended to the plans of the buildings offered by him to King Louis XIV in 1708. Rances artistic doctrine was also expounded in numerous pamphlets that propagated the Trappist reform among pious female members of the aristocracy; it was further disseminated by numerous pilgrims who freąuently yisited La Trappe in order to learn there pure piety, liberated from ‘mundane attachments’. Therefore, the radical interpretation of St Bernards thoughts on art included in De la saintete et des devoirs de la vie monastiąue must have significantly influenced the development of a conviction - widespread among enłightened French elites in the eighteenth century - that engendering piety by means of the works of art was associated with na'ive and superficial religiosity, and did not go with the enłightened piety of the honnetes

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LE VRAI PORTRAIT DE NOTRE - DAME. ON THE ATTEMPTS TO REFRESH THE MARIAN ICONOGRAPHY IN THE 19th CENTURY (Le vrai portrait de Notre-Dame. O próbach odnowienia ikonografii maryjnej w XIX wieku)

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Krasny P.

Sacrum et Decorum. Materiały i studia z historii sztuki sakralnej

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2009

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vol. 2

16-30

EN

In the 19th century, France witnessed a significant revival of Marian piety, which manifested itself, among other things, in mass participation in May Masses and a surge in the number of Living Rosary Circles. Numerous apparitions of Mother Mary were reported in the country, some of which the Church recognized as 'worthy of credence'. It was under their influence that l'abbé Blanc came up with a proposal to reconstruct the true image of Mary based on the accounts of her appearance given by those who experienced revelations. The results, however, proved disappointing. The appearance of Mother Mary, as seen by Catherine Labouré in the chapel of Rue du Bac, was 'corrected' to such an extent that the 'miraculous medallion' can be shown to have the actual prototype in the rococo statue of the Immaculate from the Parisian church of Saint-Sulpice. No better were the results of recording the image reported by the children of La Salette. Barréme d'Angers, a provincial sculptor, crowded every detail they described into a single figure of Mary; Joris Karl-Huysmans argued it made the Mother of God resemble an Iroquois in a headdress. A much more talented artist, Joseph-Higes Fabisch set out to sculpt the statue of Our Lady of Lourdes, using the account given by Bernadetta Soubirous as the basis for a 'memory portrait' of the Holy Virgin; the girl's memories were supplemented with reproductions of earlier art works. Even though the cooperation between Soubrious and the artist initially seemed to go well, the girl burst into tears upon seeing the finished statue. She commented that the image lacked the 'remarkable simplicity' of the Beautiful Lady. One reason for all these failures, argues Labouré, was 'the hubris of earthly artists', who groundlessly believed themselves capable of rendering supernatural visions in their material images. Some blame should probably also go to the clergy, who were too afraid of offending renowned sculptors to heed the objections voiced by the witnesses. Once the attempt at reviving the iconography of Mother Mary on the basis of revelations ended in failure, the church lost all faith in the skills of contemporary artists and began to disseminate the exact reproductions of medieval Marian images as the sole object of worship.

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TRADITION,DECREASING PIETY AND A VAGUE SENSE OF THE DIVINE. FRANCOIS RENE DE CHATEAUBRIAND AND THE CRISIS OF SACRED ART IN THE 19th CENTURY (Polish title below)

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Krasny P.

Sacrum et Decorum. Materiały i studia z historii sztuki sakralnej

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2011

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vol. 4

8-19

EN

(Polish title: Tradycja, stygnaca poboznosc i niejasne odczucie bostwa. Francois René de Chateaubriand a kryzys sztuki religijnej w XIX wieku). Many consider Francois René de Chateaubriand as the thinker primarily responsible for consolidating radically conservative and fideistic attitudes after the French Revolution. It was allegedly under his influence that French sacred art of the 19th century plunged into an era of barren historicism, which identified religious significance with allusions to the artistic tradition of the pre-revolutionary state. The origins of this idea are commonly traced back to Chateaubriand's statements on art in his apologetic treatise entitled The Genius of Christianity [Génie du Christianisme] It is should be noted, however, that these reflections are limited to but a dozen pages in the book, and it would be a futile attempt to use them as specific guidance on how sacred art should be created. Evident in these pages is Chateaubriand's admiration for the architecture of Gothic cathedrals, which evoke in him 'a kind of awe and a vague sentiment of the Divinity'; he is clearly awed by their solemn ambience, reverberating with echoes of past ages, which 'raise their venerable voices from the bosom of the stones, and are heard in every corner of the vast cathedral.' These statements may indeed be easily read as an encouragement to build churches in a neo-Gothic style, which will always appeal to the common folk. It should be borne in mind, however, that the neo-Gothic rose to prominence in French art thirty years after the publication of The Genius of Christianity. If we assume that the book was treated as an inspiration for reviving past architectural solutions, it may strike us as surprising that the motifs chosen often went directly against Chateaubriand's actual recommendations. At the beginning of the 19th century, French religious art returned to the forms of classicizing baroque and early classicism, which were criticized by Chateaubriand for their pagan origins and their inability to inspire true Christian piety. Therefore, it seems unlikely that the choice of 'retrospective' solutions was influenced by the The Genius of Christianity; rather, it was informed by specific academic tastes dominant in the French artistic milieu at the time and the ideal of 'restoring' French religious art to what it used to be before the iconoclasm and de-christianization championed by the French Revolution.

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Bishop Bernard Maciejowski's 'Epistola pastoralis' of 1601. A Forgotten Document Concerning the Reception of the Post-Tridentine Principles of Creating Sacred Art in Poland

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Krasny P.

Modus. Prace z historii sztuki

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2006

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vol. 7

119-148

EN

During the last session of the Council of Trent in 1563 the principles of creating Catholic sacred art were only established in a very broad outline. Much more detailed regulations appeared for the first time in the 'Instructiones fabricae et supellectilis ecclesiasticae', promulgated by St Charles Borromeo in 1577. These instructions were designed exclusively for the archdiocese of Milan, but soon began to be included in the Post-Tridentine legislation of other ecclesiastical provinces. In some dioceses attempts were also made to considerably simplify St Charles's orders for the purpose of adjusting them to a rather poor knowledge of art and liturgical tradition among the local clergy. It was in such a form that Jakob Mueller, vicar general of the Ratisbon diocese, published them for his subordinates in a booklet entitled 'Ornatus ecclesiasticus /Kirchliche Geschmuck' (1591). The chapters 'De fabrica ecclesiae and De supellectilli sacra' in the 'Epistola pastoralis' promulgated in 1601 by Bernard Maciejowski, Bishop of Cracow, who in 1582, at the outset of his ecclesiastical career, stayed for some time at Charles Borromeo's court, should also be considered as a highly simplified version of the Borromean instructions. Maciejowski stated that one of a clergyman's most important duties was to look alter the church entrusted to his care with as deep a commitment as would be shown by the husband solicitous to meet his wife's needs. Thus, he first ordered parish priests to see that their churches were in the best possible technical condition, especially their walls, roofs, windows, and paved floors. He attached great importance to proper storage of the Eucharist, claiming that the most suitable place for the Blessed Sacrament was a tabernacle set up on the high altar with an eternal light burning before it. A considerable part of instructions related to the principles of exhibiting relics and storing chrism as well as to those concerning the shapes and locations of baptismal fonts, pulpits, confessionals, and stoups. Maciejowski generally demanded that the pictures placed in a church have 'a suitable appearance and induce the souls of the faithful to piety'. A factor of considerable importance to creating the forms of churches was the order to build porches in front of their main entrances and erect sturdy bell towers separated from the church walls. The 1607 synod of Piotrków extended the instructions of the 'Epistola pastoralis' to the whole Gniezno archdiocese (that is, to most of the Commonwealth's area), Particular Polish dioceses soon incorporated it into their statutes and ordinaries announced its successive reprints. Therfore, it was probably no accident that a mass adaptation of the interiors of Polish churches to Post-Tridentine liturgical and pastoral reforms took place especially in the first half of the I7th century, thus coinciding with the promulgation and popularization of Maciejowski's text. So there are many indications that the 'Epistola pastoralis' was the most important and influential native product of the 'Counter Reformation theory of art' in the Polish Commonwealth.

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[review] E. M. Кишкинова, "Визaнтийcкoe вoзрoждeниe" в aрxитeктype Poccии. Cepeдинa XIX - нaчaлo XX вeкa, Caнкт-Пeтepбypг 2007; Ю. Р. Савельев, Петербургская школа "византийского стиля" в Российской империи, w: Санкт-Петербург и архитектура России, red. И.А. Бондаренко

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Krasny P.

Modus. Prace z historii sztuki

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2009

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vol. 8-9

322-334

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A Source of Distraction for Those Attached to the Vanities of the World. The Re - flections on Sacred Art by St Bernard of Clairvaux as Interpreted by Armand Rance

LE VRAI PORTRAIT DE NOTRE - DAME. ON THE ATTEMPTS TO REFRESH THE MARIAN ICONOGRAPHY IN THE 19th CENTURY (Le vrai portrait de Notre-Dame. O próbach odnowienia ikonografii maryjnej w XIX wieku)

TRADITION,DECREASING PIETY AND A VAGUE SENSE OF THE DIVINE. FRANCOIS RENE DE CHATEAUBRIAND AND THE CRISIS OF SACRED ART IN THE 19th CENTURY (Polish title below)

Bishop Bernard Maciejowski's 'Epistola pastoralis' of 1601. A Forgotten Document Concerning the Reception of the Post-Tridentine Principles of Creating Sacred Art in Poland