John E. Skillen
The five essays in this issue of Palimpsest, all written by Dr. John E. Skillen, represent the best effort of the director of the Studio for Art, Faith & History to articulate a vision and strategies for revitalizing the culture of postmodern communities by reconnecting with pre-modern traditions. The essays were written independently – the third one for a forthcoming book on the value of international study programs for spiritual formation, the fourth delivered as an address at Gordon College, a fifth as the introduction for a catalog of paintings by Bruce Herman. But they also stand as a linked sequence: art and culture-making in a post-culture, reuniting the four parties involved in art-making, training new artists, revitalizing traditions through hospitality to the stranger, and illustrating the process through a case study.By certain measurements the arts can appear to be flourishing. But one of the meanings of the now-clichéd label of our age as “postmodern” is that no consensus exists that validates the role of the arts in an increasingly fragmented society. Indeed, the past century and more of modernism is defined as such precisely by the project of casting into doubt and undermining the tenets of a Christianized classical European tradition which long served to authorize a unified vision of worth and purpose for art and its role in culture.
The early protagonists of postmodernism could imagine that the relentless deconstructing of old assumptions would itself provide a vision for a brave new culture, one sustained, or suspended, in ironic deferral of any claims to the True, the Good, or the Beautiful. But the inspirational confidence and verve of postmodernism has largely evaporated. When the deconstruction of once-reliable groundings has run its course, there’s no terrain left to booby trap. A programme that, by definition, is motivated by the sabotaging of tradition will be incapable of fulfilling the central and centering role that the arts have played in culture: namely, as the mediator able to give “a local habitation and a name” to the deepest values, ideals, and shared faith commitments of a cultural community.
The absence of norms has given free rein, on the one hand, to an art of aimless and often violent self-obsession, and, on the other hand, to a poignant activism among those communities marginalized because of race, gender, or sexual-preference by the cultural norms of the past.
And yet the fact that people still seek a shared vision able to ground a common cultural welfare, and that they still look to the arts as mediators of such a vision, is evidenced by the remarkable renewal of interest over the past decade in traditional art. We see signs on several fronts of a deep hunger among deracinated people – people without roots – for historical location, for tradition and an informing vision of cultural values.
This hunger may have been given scope by the bubble of economic prosperity that marked the past decade and more. But expendable income alone does not account for the millions who line up for blockbuster museum shows, for the unprecedented increase in season ticket subscribers that arts groups such as the Boston Lyric Opera experienced for a time, for the best seller status of albums of Gregorian chant, for the explosion of cultural tourism to the artistic centers of Italy, for the exponential increase in people pursuing the rigors of pilgrimage to ancient sites, for the instant enrollments in icon-painting workshops around the country. (The longer-term effect of the recent economic crisis on such enthusiasms remains to be seen.)
If we live in a culture in many ways post-Christian – or, to use the eminent polymath George Steiner’s term, if we live in a post-culture – how can communities of Christian faith help foster a vibrant cultural welfare amidst the scattered remnants of tradition, not only for their own members but with a generous and hospitable spirit towards the plurality of communities around them?
From one point of view, we may try to appreciate the apparent courage of those who feel liberated by their release from answerability to any single Source or Signified behind shifting systems of floating signifiers. Yet we empathize with the more fragile majority for whom the absence of reliable touchstones is reason for personal and communal angst. It’s one thing to be the highly-paid tenured academic or the celebrity artist who can brave the hazards of deconstructed canons. It’s quite another thing to be the kid for whom the dissolution of all trustworthy norms of truth, goodness, and beauty renders him susceptible to the aimless diversions and addictive seductions of pornography or of downloading innumerable songs onto an iPod, or of the ersatz communities of the gang or of the “virtual” society of gamers or of having a thousand “Friends” on Facebook.
Those of us whose identity is still invested heavily in the Christian element of the dissolved tradition will likely face, on the one hand, the temptation of nostalgia for times when faith provided the currency of power. On the other hand, we needn’t be unnerved or surprised by uneasy relations between Christ and Culture. The apostle Paul and Saint Augustine should have taught us to be wary of assuming synonymity between the cultural cities of the world and the City of God not built with human hands.
The conditions of postmodern anti-culture – a Sargasso Sea of floating values rather than a set of anchored markers to chart a course by – fostered towards the end of the 20th Century two divergent responses. On the one hand, a rearguard reaction, often inclined towards nostalgia in tone and attitude, urged an educational recovery of the great tradition. The only hope for the future lies in a re-splicing of the elements once but no longer linked together in the shared synapses of intellect and emotion and sensibility. People of unassailable intelligence have taken this course. It fostered dictionaries of cultural literacy and home-schooling programs in the great books of the Western heritage.
On the other hand, the now-doctrinaire mode of deconstruction enjoyed exposing the pretense of logocentric tradition to provide ground and coherence. The practitioners of post-structuralist theory delighted in ironic play with the denatured and de-contextualized elements of tradition and heritage. Freed from the old truth-claims of a hegemonic Tradition, the happy postmodernist could allude to the past without feeling answerable to it.
The sincerity of the reactionaries, as well as the sophistication and wit deployed by the geniuses of postmodern pastiche in architecture and the arts, may both be appreciated. But in the long run, neither direction can sustain itself. No tradition can be artificially scotch-taped back together into its original form from its ruined fragments. (Or: a tradition so reconstructed will be a museum-piece, not the wellspring of a living community.) And irony feels vitalizing only for the generation with a memory of the former coherence, only, that is, for those who can register the difference between a before and an after.
Moments of a third way -- neither nostalgic nor ironic – have begun to take shape. Our own Studio for Art, Faith & History, and the Gordon College semester program in Orvieto is informed by the hunch that a fruitful future must involve a respectful reckoning with the past, but not a slavish imitation of it. This mode of becoming newly answerable to tradition and its origins marks many other “blips on the radar screen” as well, from the burgeoning classical-Christian school movement to focused operations such as the remarkably successful Long Island Academy of Fine Art founded by a young colleague and “dedicated to the understanding and advancement of classical art training and techniques,” or the Art Monastery Project founded by other young colleagues in another small town in central Italy whose purpose is “to produce art that is relevant to the contemporary world yet is informed and inspired by tradition” through applying “the disciplined efficiency and contemplative serenity of monastic life to art production.”
Having reached a zero-degree in which certain cultural trajectories have run their historical course, the only way to set a new course is through a fresh encounter with originary moments of tradition. The purpose of such return to the sources is not to try to recreate the same trajectories previously launched by those points of inspiration. Rather, it is to allow them to provoke and inspire new ones. Path-makers are among us. For me, examples include composers such as Arvo Pärt and John Tavener, whose experience of the secular silence of the postculture allowed a new encounter with the musical spareness and silence of ancient liturgical forms. Out of these they have shaped a musical idiom that speaks to the postcultural soul and feels brand new even as it brings forward the old.
By the originary, I mean those moments of artistic naming which bestow on, or reveal in, the apparent aimless flux of time and space a convincing pattern of narrative and form and order and priority. Under the authority of such form and order, humans experience a fusion between raw experience and the artifice of liturgy and ritual, with the result that nature becomes culture and cultural forms feel natural. When an entire community begins living under and through this naming, a tradition is in effect. And tradition is always communal. Individual and private naming is artistically and culturally significant only when it shapes a community’s identity and guides the unfolding trajectory of its history as a community.
For this reason, art can hope to exercise a truthful and benevolent influence in culture only when those involved in the work of art are all operating at a high degree of responsible care -- that is, only when they accept their vocation both to one another and to the Voice or Logos whose call they are heeding and to which they are answerable. Here we must recognize that although the artwork itself is the product of the artist’s own labors, the work (as in working) of art involves three other “constituencies”:
• the patrons who commission and fund it,
• the communities who use artwork to give shape and purpose to the activities that embody who they are, and
• the scholarly-types who interpret and contextualize and evaluate the artwork, and whose judgments inevitably mediate the perceptions through which the using communities receive and respond to the artwork.
[These four parties are the subject of the second essay in this issue of Palimpsest.]
Vibrant periods of cultural history exhibited rapprochement among these four parties. One must think of Italy in the “Renaissance” of the 1400’s, for example, whose cultural vitality can only be accounted for by the widespread consensus shared among the ruling families, town councilors, artisans and merchants, humanist scholars and poets, clergy, guilds and confraternities about the purposefulness of art, about aesthetic criteria and civic ideals and religious belief.
In our own time, distrust and cynicism are evident in the relationships among these groups, even though the economic boom of the last decade or so gave plenty of occasions for each to make money off the other. Artists express contempt for a bemused general public, who in turn accuse the art community of arrogance and immorality, even as many in the public succumb to a voyeuristic curiosity about famous artists and their infamous lifestyles. The structures of patronage defined art as an investment commodity whose value depended largely on the artist’s attainment of notoriety. The painting on the purchaser’s wall exists as an economic status symbol quite divorced from any intrinsic truth-revealing power the artwork might have. And the activity of criticism and interpretation -- underwritten by the assumptions of postmodern deconstructive theory – often claimed for itself the status of the primary and creative, on whose bestowal of meaning the artwork entirely depends.
Yet we believe that the present moment affords tremendous opportunities for communities marked by Christian conviction: for artists and patrons and interpreters and those who put art to work. The overarching goal is the long-term reconfiguration of the very paradigms by which the work of art has been defined and practiced. But one must begin with the generation of the uprooted, the post-culture kids. Many of these, to be sure, are jaded or aimless, weakened in will and empty of hope. But a charismatic minority -- on whom the future depends -- exist in a state of uncluttered possibility, antennae sharp and with a keen nose for fraud, with new synaptic linkages waiting to be formed, able to respond afresh both to their own raw experience and to the great namers of past tradition, thereby becoming the vessels and agents of the new.
[Educating the new generation is the subject of essay #3.]
We have opportunity not only to gain a hearing in the cultural marketplace – where the hypocritical ostracizing of people of Christian faith during the first phase of pluralization is running its course – but to be an avant-garde (to use the tired cliché) shaping the forms and conventions of whatever cultural commonweal is able to rise from the ruins of the past. But any such impact will not occur through exploiting the channels of dominance and power. Rather, it will occur through the winsome persuasion of insight and vision and real conversation, and by honest hospitality when resident aliens work with those who feel at home in the culture to create a third way. [This is the subject of essay #4.]
Futuro-Antico, or Backing into the Future
The Four Players in the Work of Art
When we talk about art-making nowadays, most of us probably have in mind some image of the independent artist working alone in his or her studio on a painting dreamed up ex nihilo out of her own imagination, with no knowledge on the artist’s part of where the painting or sculpture might end up, who if anyone will ever see it, whether it might make its way to a gallery, and who might buy it and for what reasons.These de-contextualized conditions of art-making in our time preserve for the artist an awful lot of freedom and room for individual expression, answerable to no one but themselves. But they have also contributed to a general alienation of the artist from society, splitting asunder the four “constituencies” or “parties” once understood as involved together in the artwork, in art doing its work.
These four parties are
• the artists who make art, of course, but also
• the patrons who commission and fund it,
• the scholarly-types who interpret it, and
• the communities who use artwork to give shape and purpose to the activities that embody who they are.
During recent centuries, relations between these four parties have generally fallen on hard times as the artist’s autonomy became the paramount value, and the community of users and patrons became the detached viewers of an art for art’s sake.
A sort of distrust and cynicism are often evident in the relationships among these groups even though the economic boom – or bubble – of the last decade often saw substantial sums of money moving through the art market.
The viewing “Audiences” of art, for instance, have shelled out a lot of money in recent years to see art packaged in highly commercialized blockbuster shows – surely a sign of something positive that so many have felt the desire to walk quietly through museums filled with canvases of Monet and panel paintings by Fra Angelico. Often spending as much time in the gift shop as in the show itself, we buy posters for our walls back home, and mugs and t-shirts with the show’s logo on them. But we seldom imagine that if our own group of friends pooled the amount of our tickets and purchases at the gift shop, we could commission an artist to paint or sculpt or compose something of lasting value for our own church’s worship space or the lobby of our business or the atrium of our school or for a garden or park open to the public.
In an earlier cultural epoch, art in every form and medium was the product of clear accountability among these four parties. To be sure, the lines of communication were seldom conflict-free. Nevertheless they ensured the social relevance of the artwork and the answerability of artists to their publics, as well as acknowledging the skill of the artist to give tangible form and visible speech to the deep values and beliefs of his sponsoring community.
One thinks of the early Italian Renaissance – a period that serves as a sort of touchstone for the Studio for Art, Faith & History. That period’s cultural vitality can only be accounted for by the widespread consensus shared among the ruling families and town councils, artisans and merchants, clergy in churches and monasteries, guilds and confraternities about the purposefulness of art, about aesthetic criteria and civic ideals and religious belief.
While we must resist a nostalgic hope that we can imitate some idealized past (like 15th century Florence), it is the hunch of the Studio that the best way to help foster a vibrant cultural of the arts in the church and from the church in our own time is to restore trust and cultivate healthy relationships among these four parties to the working of art.
Thus the goal of the Studio is to help encourage and train
• a new generation of artists willing and able to work humbly yet astutely with patrons and commissioning communities,
• a new generation of patrons who appreciate the value of art both in the church and from the church for society,
• a new discourse-community of interpretation through which the arts can be understood, evaluated, and contextualized through historically-informed conversation,
• communities who know how to use art for their own edification and enrichment, and who can discriminate work that is answerable to their guiding beliefs from that which is merely trendy.
Yes, these issues can be talked about in the classroom and explored in conferences. But it’s really through actual collaboration on real projects that artists, patrons, scholars and communities can learn how to appreciate, listen to, and argue with one another – and all with the end of making the final “product” more sophisticated and effective, not watering it down to mere propoganda, to simplistic Sunday school art that simply illustrates ideas.
Hence the Studio’s desire is to promote projects that bring artists into a closer relationship with patrons, with those interpreters whose ideas can enrich the complexity of the artwork, with the people for whom the artworks might play a role in their real lives, and with students, too.
I love how one of the Italian actors described her participation in theater director Karin Coonrod’s production of medieval mystery plays, performed in the streets and piazzas of Orvieto, involving dozens of folks in the community, a project with generous support from the Roman Catholic bishop of Orvieto as well as generous American Protestant patrons:
“I am happy [said Elisabetta Spallaccia] to have experienced Laude in Urbis and I hope to continue to work with everybody, to continue to grow our project. I say ‘our’ because we have experienced it together, with interest and commitment for the ‘treasure’ that we have discovered slowly, slowly together and which remains in precious custody of our heart, with great sacredness.”
ARTISTS
Artists now pretty much work as loners. For over a century the working assumption among artists and public alike has been that artworks are generally the result of private choices with little or no input from anyone considered to have expertise in the subject matter, when one can speak of subject matter.
A downside of this maximizing of the artist’s freedom and autonomy is that plenty of artists would admit (at least on the therapist’s couch) that they are lonely. Their lack of financial stability is a constant anxiety (except for the very few who gain star status); the game of working one’s way up the gallery-prestige ladder feels more like a bondage than a liberating freedom; few regular folk know how to talk about the artist’s work – standing awkwardly at a gallery opening, afraid to say something gauche, conversation generally declining to superficial comments about “liking” some formal aspect of the work, with more “good lucks” than sales.
And because another common assumption is that art ought to “shock” the viewer, saboutaging his habits and cracking him out of complacencies, the artist and the audience are implicitly set up as antagonists. Viewers “in the know” enjoy feeling complicit in the artist’s subversion of social norms and conventions. And because artwork so little operates in a context of being put to work or “used” (a highly suspect word since the art-for-art’s-sake movement) by a community of people – to focus their worship, to memorialize their heroes, to inspire their sense of civic responsibility, for example – there is little motivation for the artist to talk to such an audience of users.
Serious and conscientious artists will of course exhibit an inner drive to attain the maximum possible expertise in their media. But, since their subject matter is often seen as highly personalized and largely self-referential, artists are not generally motivated from within or expected from without to attain deep and sophisticated knowledge about the Thing that their artwork explores: the object in nature, the person portrayed, the issue, the story, the text, or the other artworks in the past that have addressed the same thing. (Indeed, that art even needs to be about something other than itself remains a repeated matter of modern debate.) Hence we get few open lines of connection between artists and folks who have such knowledge. In short, the very conditions of art-making in modern times have created environments that maximize the artist’s self-focus and exile other people from involvement.
It hasn’t always been this way.
During several centuries of what we call the Renaissance Italy (to refer to the Studio for Art, Faith & History’s location and reference point) art was produced almost entirely in and for public settings. To make a work of art meant that the artist was also training apprentices; assigning duties to assistants; meeting with the advisory committee assigned to the project by the commissioner; fussing over the patron’s satisfaction. The artist often worked on the same project with other artists of recognized stature (Masaccio with Masolino in the Brancacci Chapel; Signorelli completing work begun by Fra Angelico in the San Brizio Chapel, and so forth).
Artists had no time for navel-gazing, for waiting around for inspiration, or for choosing their own hours. When the temperature and humidity was right, the crew had to slap up the plaster for that day’s frescoing.
By the 1500s, the anecdotes that fill Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists signal a new public interest in artists’ private lives. But the little that is actually known about Giotto or Masaccio or Piero della Francesca is evidence that it was the things made by the artists, not the uniqueness of their personalities, that was of paramount importance. The layman’s description of how the entire citizenry of Siena processed Duccio’s new altarpiece painting of the Virgin from the artist’s workshop to the cathedral tells us nothing about the artist himself but lots about the importance of his altarpiece for the community’s life.
The hunch of the Studio for Art, Faith & History is that we’ve reached a time when artists themselves as well as the works they make would benefit by bringing the process of art-making back into a more public sphere and community setting and workshop environment. Modernity’s obsession with “find your own voice” – as most of my adult artist friends say was the mantra of their art school teachers – is giving way to a generation more willing to learn first to take on others’ voices; to subordinate the individual’s proclaimed uniqueness to a collaborative enterprise in which several people have a hand; to learn one’s peculiar and particular gifts in the context of a community of making which can draw out and endorse individual gifts without spinning everyone out into their own orbits.
I see plenty of signs that a younger generation of artists are interested in being reinserted into a “tradition,” into a conversation with other and older artists across space and time, willing to view their role as more collaborative. To serve this new generation, we perhaps need to recover the artist’s workshop as a place of teaching and mentoring and learning, rather than assuming that teaching can occur only in the classroom of separate educational institutions while preserving the artist’s studio strictly as a place of privacy – although to say such a thing cuts across the grain of deep habits.
Hence, in the Gordon-in-Orvieto semester program, the studio courses are organized, whenever possible, around a central project over which the skilled professional instructor stands as maestro, and therefore herself as a participant. The young artists join the maestro in subordinating their own personal inclinations and submitting their individual contributions to the harmony and integrity of the whole work. While this means that students don’t take their work home with them to the States, they can receive a different sort of satisfaction in knowing that their collectively-made ceramic-relief plaques of the 14 Stations of the Cross are installed in the contemplative garden of monastery San Lodovico, and are actually used every year during the Good Friday Way of the Cross liturgy to guide the gathered congregation’s devotions.
Bruce Herman’s triptychs about the life of Mary – Miriam, Virgin Mother – are the outcome of the artist’s willing collaboration, at every step of the way, with patrons, with academic interpreters, with the student apprentices who helped launch the work in a course. And the final product, says Herman, is all the more satisfying to him, and less of a merely ego-satisfaction.
PATRONS
Ours has not been a culture marked by a strong patronage of the arts. Many would want to counter such a bold statement by reference to the wealthy industrialists who developed private collections into endowed museums open to the public – from the Rockefellers and Fricks to Guggenheim and Getty – or if we think of competitive commissions for war memorials on the Washington Mall and the like.
If we mean by “patronage” simply the procedures by which artists get money, then of course patronage exists. This occurs nowadays mainly through a system of commercial galleries that take on the artist for a one-time show or for a long-term relationship whereby the gallery creates a distinct niche for the artist, in return for its own 30-50% take from sales generated by the gallery. And various endowed agencies of course exist from whom an artist may hope to be awarded a fellowship or a stipend. (The prestigious Rome Prize granted by the American Academy of Rome, for one example, provides full support for a year at its splendid estate overlooking the eternal city). Such arts grants exist at the federal level through the National Endowment for the Arts down to state and local levels, an area of the budget first to be cut during times of economic recession, as every artist laments.
There are occasional public works’ competitions, some of which are high-profile. [Another friend of the Studio has won the commission to create a monumental sculptural ensemble to serve as a replacement for the state of New Hampshire’s beloved “Old Man of the Mountain” – the rock profile high on the face of a cliff-side in the White Mountains which fell off. Her fortune is made, IF the state can actually allocate the funds for the work it has commissioned.) But face it, these forms of patronage touch the lives of very few of the artists who are trying to make careers out of their sense of vocation.
The person who buys a work of art is a sort of patron. Some regularly collect a particular artist’s work. But to be the object of such good fortune can be a mixed blessing. I think of an artist-friend from southern California who could be the envy of many another struggling painter for his having caught the fancy of a wealthy collector. But while appreciating the style and use of color and formal qualities of my friend’s paintings, the collector seems immune to the spiritual meanings of paintings almost always about figures and events from the Scriptures, seeing them simply through the lenses of fancy décor.
A system of patronage whereby collectors look to galleries and museum exhibitions for clues as to who’s hot and who’s not also tends towards valuing the artwork as an investment commodity based on the artist’s attainment of notoriety. The painting on the purchaser’s wall exists not even as an elegant complement to the furniture but as an economic status symbol quite divorced from any intrinsic truth-revealing power the artwork might have. It isn’t allowed to make claims on how the owner lives his life.
In all these modern modes of patronage, the norm is for the patron not to play an active role in deciding what the artist makes and how and why and for where she makes it. The artist is protected from the patron’s intrusion.
It hasn’t always been this way.
In the Renaissance, pretty much all art was commissioned and patrons had vested interests. A wealthy person, or a town council, a guild in charge of decorating a public building, or the committee charged with maintaining and decorating the cathedral, the abbot of a monastery, a family decorating a private chapel in a church – some such entity contracted with an artist not to make whatever he felt like, but to make a particular object (an altarpiece, for instance) for a particular location, of a particular size, often with highly specified subject matter and materials, to be used to assist a particular action, to be completed by a particular date, for an agreed-upon price.
This may sound limiting – an offensive intrusion into the artist’s proper autonomy – but the sheer quantity of high-level art produced during this period by artists who sometimes complained about late payments but never that their creative freedom had been inhibited, suggests that patronage no more limits creative excellence than modern artistic license can be shown to increase it.
The Italian Renaissance represents a good long moment of cultural history when wealthy people were expected to be patrons of the arts. And not only wealthy people but institutions who really believed in the capacity of good art to encourage, inspire, and teach the people who gathered within their walls. A culture where town council chambers were frescoed; where families put clauses in their wills for the decoration of chapels; where even orphanages and hospitals were the sites of commissions by famous artists; where public fountains or baptistery fonts were the objects of now-famous commissioned artworks.
Patrons were the spokespersons for, the guardians of, the interests of the communities the artwork was to serve; and therefore they were expected to have sophisticated knowledge of those interests.
Patrons were active. Enrico Scrovegni up north in Padova goes after the Florentine Giotto to decorate the family chapel whose frescoed lessons of generosity were to counter the family’s reputation for greed and usury. Lorenzo de Medici looks for talented young artists, and pays for their education. And so forth.
It’s certainly no coincidence that all the episodes in St. Peter’s life concerning money and clothes turn up in a fresco cycle commissioned by a wealthy cloth-making merchant family in Florence; or that sophisticated visual allusions to civic disorder and the Catharist heresy occur in a chapel in the Orvieto Duomo where martyred defenders of orthodox incarnational faith are buried. Patrons were involved in planning such complex and sophisticated works of art.
I think we need such patrons in our own time: astute with good business sense to combine a demand for high craftsmanship with feasibility and cost-control. One reason why Ghiberti got the big commission over Brunelleschi for the bronze doors of Florence Baptistry was that his skill in using fewer castings translated into less bronze and hence lower cost. We need patrons respectful both of the power of art to inspire and instruct people and of the skills of the hired artist; not trying to micromanage everything but leaving the programme to the advisorial experts.
And if we need patrons with projects in mind, we also need projects able to attract patrons genuinely interested and knowledgeable about the subject matter and purpose and setting. We need patrons, in other words, who will have personal incentive for being actively engaged throughout the process of making the artwork, and whose interest will continue as the community uses the artwork, rather than ending when the check for the final installment has been written.
Bruce Herman’s patron is a highly trained professor of academic theology, but a man who recognized that he had much to learn from the artist about visual theology, about how a work of visual art can tap a wellspring of emotions and relationships that are as relevant to a practiced faith as is clear systematic thinking. [Read the conversation between Herman and Walter Hansen published in IMAGE, and watch the video of Hansen’s address about the influence of Herman’s paintings on his own life.]
Patrons can help promote better artwork, but good art in turn can create patrons.
Listen, for example, to what Dr. Ange Lobue, a therapist and art collector from California, wrote about his experience of “Strangers and Other Angels” in Orvieto:
One evening in May 2006, my wife Chantal and I found ourselves following an inspired troupe of Italian and American actors and musicians in rehearsal, as they sang and danced from the steps of the Duomo through the streets of Orvieto, casting a magical spell under the amber evening glow of that medieval town.
We learned that the Compagnia de’ Colombari is an irreverent company of accomplished, award-winning, theatre professionals, both American and Italian. Conceived and directed by the celebrated New York City theatre artist Karin Coonrod, the Colombari “redefines how theatre can be true to both the present and the eternal,” going outside the walls of the theatre and the church to meet its audience in the streets, with a vision that “places its faith in love and self-laughter.”
We decided to prolong our stay in Orvieto to see the opening night performance, and were brought to tears as Tony-award winning Trazana Beverly, in the role of God on the steps of the Duomo, underscored by an Italian chorus, opened the production with a passionate recitation of James Weldon Johnson’s “Creation.”
The production ended with a celebration feast in which all but one of the white doves – released in a dramatic gesture of grace – flew in circles before flying away. That one remained perched, like an angel, on a wire high above the joy and laughter.
Later, back in California, with that vision of love and self-laughter still with me, I accepted an invitation to become a member of the board of directors.”
INTERPRETERS
The label is somewhat clumsy, but by “interpreters” I refer – with our contemporary context in mind – to those people engaged in interpreting and contextualizing and evaluating works of art, the intelligentsia of critics and reviewers, curators and historians whose judgments inevitably mediate the perceptions through which audiences receive and respond to the artwork.
How much power the critics actually have is up for debate. We ruefully enjoy noting, with the wisdom of hindsight, those artists once ignored by the intelligentsia of their own day who became future critics’ stars (like the impoverished Van Gogh whose “Sunflowers” is later auctioned in 1987 for $39.9 million).
Nevertheless, who can deny that critics and reviewers exercise considerable influence in determining which artists get a chance for commercial success. There is always the role of the mediator between artist and public. Face it, artists need words. They hope for words. “I’ll let the artwork speak for itself” we often hear the artist say at the opening of the show. But people don’t show up to where the artwork is “speaking” except by someone’s word of its worth. Hence we have the journalism of review and criticism: Art in America, ArtForum, American Theater, review sections in the New York Times, review essays in the New Yorker, reviews on National Public Radio, monthly magazines of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and so forth and so on. Plenty of artists fear a deadly word from the critic even as they open the paper in hope that their show has found notice. A list of such notices and reviews is a required section in every artist’s resumé.
My chief observation here is simply to note that in modern patterns of interpretation, the intelligentsia don’t even show up until after the fact of the artwork.
It hasn’t always been this way.
In the Renaissance, the scholarly community – the people with expertise in the subject matter – did its work before and during the production of the artwork, usually as the committee appointed by the patrons to make sure that the artist understood and gave adequate visual form to the underlying framework of ideas, or to the actions that the artwork was created to serve.
In Orvieto, for instance, Luca Signorelli’s contract for frescoing an entire chapel in the cathedral with scenes of the End Times and the Last Judgment expressly obliged him to consult with the “masters of the sacred page” – probably the scholarly friars at the theological “school” of the Dominican monastery in town (which had included notables such as St. Thomas Aquinas himself). One can imagine the concerns of the churchly authorities. What if Signorelli, left to his own devices, worked every trick in the book to make the End Times appear to be happening NOW (such as depicting people fleeing from the angels of destruction as though they were escaping right into the chapel itself) when the official eschatological doctrine of the time might have interpreted the Apocalypse as surely in a distant future. We’d have a dangerous mismatch between the theology and its visual representation. As it stands, the astonishing complexity yet consistency in the teaching implied by Signorelli’s “visual theology” is the product precisely of such collaboration between artist and advisors, and his frescoes have become a touchstone precisely for understanding the “eschatology” of the age (in fact suggesting the impending now-ness of the Second Coming).
Such collaboration is the only way to account for how someone like Raphael – poorly educated in the humanities – could design murals (in Pope Julius’s library in the Vatican) that explored the history and concepts and personages of the history of philosophy and theology and literature and law with the highest imaginable sophistication.
An assumption of the Studio for Art, Faith & History is that it is high time to recover the relationship.
Artists can benefit from a humble openness to what they might learn from people with deep knowledge about the subjects of their artistic exploration. The interaction goes both ways. The intelligentsia of an age that privileges cerebral and empirical scientific approaches to knowledge would do well to respect the artist’s peculiar skill in finding adequate visual, musical, dramatic, and poetic form for the knowing.
Karin Coonrod, for example, sought the close involvement of learned historians of medieval theater to help her reconstruct imaginatively how medieval people could experience ribald humor with “theological correctness” (as we might say nowadays), for whom seemingly profane comedy could be combined emotionally with doctrinally-orthodox devotion. And Coonrod sought this knowledge not simply to create museumized reproductions of medieval sacred drama, but to translate such “religious laughter” into a theatrical experience that would enable contemporary folk to overcome our age’s assumed polarity between deadpan piety and the subversiveness of comic irony.
COMMUNITIES OF USE
It’s difficult to find the best label for those people for whom artworks are made, the people we nowadays call “viewers” or the “audience” who will be looking at the artwork. But our very words of “looking” and “viewer” betray a modern bias.
We have been trained to see ourselves in the passive role as people standing quietly, hands behind back, in galleries and museums, fearful of getting so close to the work of art as to set off the alarm, or sitting quietly in concert halls and theaters. The very vocabulary of “use” – of speaking of art as having a useful purpose in the lives of those who engage with it – continues to be suspect even now at the tail end of a period that has emphasized the value of art in itself, without instrumental value, art to be enjoyed for art’s sake alone.
Even recent trends in interactive art (or the “happenings” that seemed so avant-garde in the 1960’s and ‘70’s) keep the artist largely in control. The audiences are invited to participate in the artist’s work rather than, visa versa, the artist being asked to create something that enhances the “audience’s” work.
The audience comes along afterwards, responding to an artwork to whose making the viewer was distinctly un-invited.
The viewers are obligated to adapt their behavior to the artwork – which (in our museumized, gallery-based art culture) is de-contextualized precisely to block or bracket any reaction other than the purely aesthetic that emerges from the viewer’s own identity and value commitments. These must be checked in along with the coat at the coat-check.
If, for example, the viewer enters a room in the museum full of altarpieces, she is expected to suppress any urge she might have (if a believer) to pray or to meditate on the blood shed on the cross for her salvation – any sort of devotional behavior, or liturgical behavior if visiting the gallery with a bunch of church friends – and to behold the paintings with dispassionate aesthetic appreciation, admiring how the artist has dealt with the folds in Mary’s drapery.
The viewer or audience has not always been expected to remain so passive.
In the Renaissance virtually all art was created for a particular community’s use – to assist it in performing the actions that defined and manifested its identity.
Indeed, until the last couple of centuries, museums didn’t even exist. Paintings were never displayed on place-neutral gallery-gray walls. Art was always in a place, made for that place, experienced in relation to the architecture and in relation to other artworks in the setting, settings in which real actions were performed.
Altarpieces clarified the sacrament that the congregation came forward to receive. Frescoes in the town council room reminded the councilmen of their duty to the public welfare. Last Suppers on the walls of monastic refectories helped the monks or nuns experience their own participation in the Last Supper; and so forth.
This fact does not at all mean that the “users” of the artwork were insensitive to its beauty, or did not have strong criteria of judgment about what elements constituted that beauty, or high expectations that the artwork had better be beautiful or the artist didn’t deserve his pay. Rather, the aspect of beauty, the aesthetic element, was evaluated for how well it did its job in helping the participant’s response match the purpose of the action that the artwork served. In short, beauty was seen as functional, not as something freed from functionality.
I think it is time to reinsert the artwork into the liturgies of the community that thus could value art on more levels than the aesthetic (or formal) alone. Yes, the art-for-art’s-sake movement intended to honor art, preserving it from the merely utilitarian. But the result has been a truncating of the range of responses that art is expected or permitted to activate.
Hence the Studio for Art, Faith & History seeks projects that in some way will allow “audiences” to become participants, projects that will be in situ – situated in the life of a community. It was a moving moment for me when we successfully hung the two gorgeous triptychs of scenes from the life of Mary, painted recently by Bruce Herman, in the renovated chapel at monastery San Paolo in Orvieto. But the more moving occasion occurred several days later when I was present with a group of 30 Protestant seminarians in that same chapel, in the middle of the night, the paintings illuminated only by candle-light, as these young women and men from a California “theology and the arts” program kept the eight services of the monastic “hours”, their devotions held in focus by these glorious paintings of the Annunciation, the Visitation, of the Wedding at Cana, of “keeping all these things in her heart.” The paintings are worthy of any gallery on Park Avenue or Newbury Street, but at that moment in the middle of the night they were doing their work.
It seems obvious enough: if the altarpiece in the chapel, the sculpture in the St. Francis Garden, or the fresco in the school or the meeting hall is to focus and concentrate the minds and hearts of those worshipping or learning or debating or praying, then the artist would do well to understand what the community thinks it does when it worships, when it learns, when it exercises civic responsibility for the welfare of the community.
It’s time to draw the artist back into the communities of those who need the work of the artist, into those communities that the artist needs.
Renaissance Bottega meets New Monasticism: Gordon College’s semester program in Orvieto
The Gordon-in-Orvieto semester program, first piloted in 1998, was the result of a decade of conversations among several friends and colleagues in the arts and humanities. Our concern was about how we ought to be responding as teachers, as well as in our own lives and vocations, to the unraveling of the Western classical-Christian cultural tradition.How does one go about reconnecting (if this is even possible or desirable) a generation of largely a-historical post-culture college students to this tradition, when its compositional network of allusions and imitations and adjustments are no longer operative in the “synapses” of mental, emotional, and spiritual processing and response. (Nor did we romanticize the breakdown.)
We sought for our students a vibrant experience of revisiting elements of pre-modernity for their relevance to post-modernity. Our thematic points of reference – but not slavishly or dogmatically followed – were the early Italian Renaissance in the arts, early medieval monastic life for our in-house guide, and ancient patterns of liturgical life (shaped time, kairos not chronos) in corporate and civic life.
We still site our original vision statement – admittedly a tad extravagant in its prose:
The Gordon-in-Orvieto semester program takes an experimental approach to learning in the landscape of our contemporary post-culture. The intent of the program is to foster in our students an attitude of responsive looking and listening for signs of new life in the traditions inhabited by artists and poets, saints and mystics, of the past, especially those of pre-modern Europe in Italy. With a discerning eye neither nostalgic nor ironic, we wish to explore the disintegrated fragments of the classical-Christian civilization of the West, raiding the past in order to rebuild the present.
We knew that revivifying for our students (and for us as teachers) this “sacred conversation” with tradition – as something spiritually as well as artistically and intellectually formative, as something that gets under the skin into the habits and rhythms of daily living – could not really occur if it was experienced solely as a classroom academic exercise. These underlying hopes and intentions needed to inform both our life together in our own in-house community, and be experienced in the civic context of a 2500-year-old town where the interplay between old and new is everywhere present in a palimpsest of layers (whether as an Intimissimi underwear shop in a 13th century storefront, or as the medieval town hall now renovated as a conference center).
Our original statement of the program’s purposes remains:
• To provide contemporary American students – whose lives are lived largely after or without tradition – a vivid experience of tradition in the arts, spirituality and worship, and civic life.
• To inspire young people of faith to re-connect with the artistic traditions of the past, neither in a mood of nostalgia nor in a mode of academic dispassion, but to foster a creative response to the past in order to shape a humane future in the arts.
• To establish a workshop environment that invites collaboration between teacher and student, integrating listening and writing with seeing and doing, and emphasizing an interdisciplinary approach to the study of art, history and theology.
• To give students an experience of rhythms of life slower and simpler than the forms of contemporary American life (with its speed and size, its barrage of visual images, and its pervading sense of impermanence) by dining together, encouraging sustained conversation, experiencing the traditional liturgies of religious life and civic celebrations, living more closely to the earth in the midst of vineyards and olive groves, and by trading the automobile for the foot.
We understood that the formation of our students (and of faculty and staff as well) would need to be woven into the fabric of all of the three overlapping circles of community that define our program: namely, as a community of makers; as a community within-the-walls of our monastery headquarters; and via the community of Orvieto without-the-walls.
Bottega: the classroom as community
As for the academic program, our intent was to recreate something on the order of the Renaissance bottega. We imagined a workshop environment that brought together skilled professionals in the arts and humanities to experiment with new ways of recuperating traditional texts, genres, media and styles; in a pedagogical mode that brought younger artists into the sacra conversazione of the tradition; and in a manner answerable to the audiences which these activities were intended to serve.
We encourage our teachers to organize their classes, whenever possible, around a central project over which the skilled professional instructor stands as maestro, and therefore as a participant. The young artists join the maestro in subordinating their own personal inclinations and submitting their individual contributions to the harmony and integrity of the whole work. The intent is to counter the individualism of the pedagogical model of so much modern instruction. Typically, the student is isolated in homework projects that are disassociated with peers and of which the instructor exists as evaluator, not as herself answerable to a final joint work.
As the historical/theoretical backdrop, our students study a cultural epoch (the early Renaissance) when art was understood as serving the uses and needs of the communities that sponsored it, rather than existing, modern-fashion, for the art-for-art’s-sake dispassionate aesthetic gaze of the viewer.
Over the years, the in situ products of a collaborative workshop have often meant that students cannot take their work back with them to the States. But they can receive a different sort of satisfaction in knowing, for example, that their collectively-made series of ceramic-relief plaques of the 14 Stations of the Cross are installed in the contemplative garden of monastery San Lodovico, where they are actually used every year during the Good Friday Way of the Cross liturgy to guide the gathered congregation’s devotions.
The ceramic wall mural of Noah’s ark and the tile backsplash for the fountain created by another class enlivens the playground of the nursery school run by the sisters at convento San Lodovico, offering occasion for scriptural catechism through the arts. A portion of the open-air courtyard along the cliff’s edge behind our present location at monastery San Paolo is envisioned as a Saint Francis garden. Shelly Bradbury’s sculpture class (spring 2008) got a start on a monumental arched gate into the garden, each stone block carved in relief with a scene from Francis’s life. Marino Moretti’s ceramic class (fall 2008) transformed one area of the garden into a flock of birds to whom St. Francis might preach, and a school of colorful and whimsical fish as the congregation of that other creature-sensitive golden-tongued Franciscan preacher, St. Anthony of Padova. About 30 ceramic panels wait to be mounted as a giant wall mural Bestiary.
Even our humanities courses include collaborative projects. Prof. Smith’s History of Monasticism created a Rule relevant for our contemporary cultural setting. Prof. Hevelone-Harper’s Theology of the Image students learn how to paint icons. Prof. Agnes Howard’s students attend monastic hours and perform plays. Poetry classes work towards a single book and performance. In short, the academic pattern moves toward a common product produced as a community of artists and learners for an actual community to use.
A bold example of this bottega-approach, with its integration of artistic formation with spiritual formation, occurred in a class taught in 2003 by Bruce Herman that launched an ambitious mural cycle about the life of the Virgin Mary. The unconventional character of the course shows up in the syllabus:
Course Description:
This course will acquaint the student with the working methods, imagery, and aesthetic philosophy of the teacher. Students will work alongside the professor as assistants on a common project, and will be given the privilege and responsibility of acting as collaborators learning and working in an apprenticeship atmosphere.
Unlike a (now) conventional academic college art classroom, the bottega is a workshop – with all the rigor and expectations associated with this – i.e., students will work hard for hours and days at a time, sometimes engaged in menial tasks associated with the common project, other times engaged at a deep, principled level with the substance of the project – a mural in eight parts. They will be drawn into the process of selecting the iconographic program (images, subject matter, scenes, theological symbolism, etc.) and executing the daily work associated with the mural.
Requirements:
• A humble and diligent attitude (perhaps more essential that artistic talent)
• Daily work ethic – and a humility about tasks and personal involvement
• Willingness to try
• Daily writing and sketching (to be announced)
• Fulfillment of chosen role (Scribe & Apprentice)
The Mural:
The bottega (the entire class) will be engaged in a common project of designing and executing a life-cycle mural on Mary, the Mother of Jesus – the Theotokos, or God-bearer. The cycle of images will be decided during the first few days of the course, selecting scenes and images from Scripture and traditional sources for the Life of Mary. All students will engage in a series of writing and sketching/research exercises that will become resources for the image cycle – i.e., using their research to help craft the iconographic program of the mural and its eventual “look.” 
Although Herman gave his students particular tasks in keeping with their interests and skills, every student had to prepare a meditation:
on all the Marian texts in Scripture – with a view to responding to these texts personally (i.e., by trying to remember events and persons in your own lives that have correspondence with Mary’s events and relationships — eg. Anne, Joachim, Gabriel, Joseph, the Visitation, Annunciation, Nativity, etc.). Are there equivalents (if less than supernatural) in your own lives in terms of events and/or personal relationships? How might these memories affect the way we select and compose a “scene” from the life of the Virgin? How do you incorporate the tradition and “translate” it into the vernacular of our contemporary life?
Incidentally, the project took several years to bring to completion, evolving over time into two enormous triptychs (exhibited in Massachusetts and California in 2008-09). Installed back in the cloistered chapel in monastery San Paolo, they can do their work amidst a living community of students, faculty, artists, and pilgrims – prompting meditation, inspiring devotion, guiding the liturgical work of the gathered company of worshippers, and arousing an inspirational desire among young apprentices to pursue disciplined training in their craft.
Herman’s course represents an attitude expected from our teachers: an engagement with the “material” that not only draws the group into a community of makers, but provides the occasion for a personal faith encounter with the “subject” – Mary in this case, Saint Francis in Shelly Bradbury’s case, and so on.
Professor Tanja Butler’s Art & Liturgy course (spring 2008) provides another recent example. In her class the final project was to “create a prayer station” for one of the “mysteries” of the Via Lucis (Way of Light, the 14 stations of the Resurrection paralleling the stations of the Via Crucis, or Way of the Cross). The process was as follows:
1. Select a station from the Via Lucis with which you feel an affinity. Using lectio divina, prayerfully identify one to four ways in which you feel connected to this scene from the life of Christ. Identify these connection points as words or simple phrases, themes you’ll be developing visually.
2. For each theme develop the following visual elements:
• narrative element
• autobiographical material
• symbol, either traditional or contemporary
• reference to Italian experience
3. Select a location in monastery San Paolo that has an appropriate connection with the content of your station. Determine the size, shape, and general structure of your station in relation to the design of the location. Consider architectural shapes, scale, light, color, texture.
4. Using a combination of acrylic paint, gesso, watercolor, gold leaf, collage, and text elements, create your prayer station.
5. Create a liturgy for your prayer station. The structure will be developed by the class, and may include:
• processional and interactive element (e.g. lighting of candles)
• reading the narrative segment
• group prayer
• silence, silent prayer
• sung or spoken group response
In sum, spiritual forming occurs not only via theme but kicks in through the whole bottega’s experience of the need of mutual discipline, cooperation, and answerability to something outside of themselves.
In-house community as site of spiritual formation
The program’s theme of revisiting the pre-modern for direction amidst the fragments of the post-modern was intended not only to characterize the academic program but to infiltrate our daily in-house community life. That is, just as we might hearken back to Giotto or Masaccio to learn how to frame a narrative that linked scriptural plots to contemporary life, so we might do well to revisit St. Benedict’s Rule for simple-yet-sophisticated 6th-century discernment regarding the poisons and blessings that erode or sustain a bunch of people thrown together in shared space.
Parallels between the workshop and the dormitory have gradually taken on sharper focus. The common threat to each is the self-absorption of an I-culture: individualism in the arts, and narcissism in community life.
As we state in the introduction to the program Handbook:
The Rule of San Paolo takes as its model the earliest and most influential of the handbooks for monastic communities – the 6th century Rule of Saint Benedict.
Saint Benedict has been called not only the father of Western monasticism but the “first European,” largely responsible for articulating the principles and putting into widespread practice a form of Christian community guided by mutual service and mutual accountability in the midst of the social disintegration of the “dark ages” of the crumbling Roman empire.
But many astute spiritual writers and theologians of our own time see Benedict as a figure with new relevance for a de-Christianized Europe, for a socially-fractured global society, and for the ‘emergent’ church of post-modernity.
It’s easy to see a new “dark age” in the murderous tribalism now destroying the love of neighbor in many parts of the world (and which may appear distant to us except when terrorist attacks bring barbarism and fanaticism closer to home). Harder to get a handle on, yet closer to home for us folk living in the developed economies of Western democracies, is an encroaching narcissistic individualism. Seduced willingly by the technological wizardry whose high-speed evolution silences any critical perspective, we are rapidly becoming a society of solipsistic “I”-pods. Shut off behind our personally-designed interior worlds of sound-scape and digital artifice, we imagine that cyber-communities of “virtual” social networking can offer a satisfying alternative to real bodies really listening in real time and in real space, taking real risks on one another’s behalf.
A number of leading faith-based writers are suggesting that our best hope for recovering healthy, morally-grounded social life will come through a sort of “new monasticism” in which small communities whose members are answerable to one another can model alternatives to the narcissism and ego-centric materialism that everywhere threatens neighborly love and authentic self-acceptance. [1]
Most of the topics and chapter titles in our own program Handbook are taken directly from the Rule of Saint Benedict, and quotations from Benedict illustrate each chapter (such as "Let no one in the monastery follow his own heart's fancy"). The key elements of “intentional community” include the following.
We follow a common daily schedule. Classes (both the single integrative course taken by all students during the first month, and the pairs of courses offered sequentially and intensively for four weeks each) meet from 9:00 AM to noon, Monday through Thursday. Students begin the day on their own, socializing or not over a simple breakfast, heading out for an early morning jog or cappuccino, or attending to a time of personal devotion (or rolling out of bed shortly before class).
After the morning class, we generally hold ‘chapter meeting’ – a mix of announcements, and exhortation on matters of housekeeping and community behavior, and brief prayer, singing and formal devotion presented by a teacher, staff member, or student. Then we stroll over to the local family-run restaurant along the central pedestrian street in Orvieto where students and instructors eat a substantial mid-day meal together, with no rushing allowed. Happily, leisurely conversation is almost always the norm. The group chemistry varies from semester to semester, and now and again one has to caution against exclusive little groupings, but mainly our students are happy to mix it up with each other.
Supper is again taken together, at a later European hour. But the main portion of the afternoon and evening are available for students’ own design of homework and studio work, and for personal choices about sketching, journaling, reading, walking, deepening friendships in-house and in town. As one student describes the effect of this rhythm:
The simplicity of that life wasn’t confining or restricting; rather it allowed me to explore my world in new ways that fed me artistically and spiritually. During my free time after lunch, I would explore the small town armed only with my sketchbook and camera, quietly documenting Orvieto with all of its textures, colors, patterns, structures and hidden passages. My senses were awakened and stimulated so that I could see God, beauty and community, from the bricks and the gnarly carved tufa walls to the beautiful structure of the Duomo and the fog that would roll in and out of the hills of Umbria. Orvieto itself was a fascinating mixture of the human and the divine that was somehow easier to see because I was out of my element and my social context. This same connection to the world around me is still something that I continue to cultivate now in my art and my spiritual walk. [Tegan Brozyna, Messiah College]
Students are expected to have returned from evening activities by 11:00 PM, when we bolt the big door (midnight on weekends, or to accommodate worthwhile cultural activities in town). We urge quietness in the night and good sleeping habits. We have had to respond year by year to the rapid and exponential availability – ubiquity – of internet-based options for communicating with friends and family back home (from simple e-mailing a few years ago, to Skype, Facebook and other social-networking means of sending of photo albums only minutes after returning from an excursion, and so on). The program handbook makes a case for our intentional curtailment of internet time, and for our commitment to the importance of maintaining our own bodily presence with one another, but we try to keep the issues open for discussion.
We emphasize collective responsibility for tidiness and cleaning, and being good stewards of resources and utility consumption. The passage cited from Benedict’s Rule goes as follows: “Let him regard all the utensils of the monastery and its whole property as if they were the sacred vessels of the altar. Let him not think that he may neglect anything. He should be neither a miser nor a prodigal and squanderer of the monastery's substance, but should do all things with measure and in accordance with the Abbot's instructions.”
I’m one who can easily be discouraged by the amount of time and energy spent patrolling and fussing over the little things: the pile of dishes remaining unwashed in the sink; the disorder in the sala; the dust-bunnies on the stairwells. “We are failing miserably!” I can moan in private despair. How do we exhort without nagging? How do we balance policing from the top with an expectation of mutual accountability generated from within the students themselves? I am grateful when, at chapter meeting, a student beats me to the punch by giving a lesson in washing and drying dishes. How does one get across with charitable patience the subtle spiritual/moral disconnect in the student who is quick to propose a time of evening prayer to defend our community from spiritual warfare, even as he or she is responsible for leaving the dirty dishes from his evening snack for someone else to wash in the morning – perhaps a stronger threat to community peace and concord than demons at the gate.
Indeed, we don’t claim to have perfected a formula here. But the effort is confirmed when I discover that a student isn’t sweeping her room or making her bed because she has never in her life been expected to do so, or that a student doesn’t know how to use the rag mop because he has never mopped a floor in his life. How poignant it is when a student speaks with gratitude about the simple matter of sitting down at table twice a day with the same group of people – practicing the art of courteous conversation – because she has never had that experience in her life. Perhaps growing up with a single parent, or trying bravely to juggle a frenetic schedule of studies, extracurricular activities, and part-time jobs, long accustomed to grabbing something on the run, passing siblings at the microwave.
I’m coming to see as one of the critical “formation” aspects of our program – having so apparently little to do with daily immersion in Renaissance fresco cycles – is learning to make one’s bed in the morning, or even to recognize the lethargy that leads us to slouch from one thing to another, leaning against walls for support, leaving single footprints at knee-height along the white-plastered walls of the monastery.
“New-monasticism,” of course, signifies more than housekeeping. At the heart of the rhythms of Ora et Labora is the importance for the community of a simple daily liturgy of the hours together. But here, too, we have found no formula. I (as director) claim no particular wisdom in balancing a forced rhythm of pauses for prayer enforced administratively from on high, with the value of letting the desire for and enactment of such punctuations emerge from the students themselves. But plenty of students testify to how much more readily possible such “liturgical shaping” becomes in our simple life in a convent than amidst the frenetic schedules of campus life or in church communities that encourage little between private morning devotions and Sunday services.
As one student describes the impact:
I was paradoxically required to do two things: simplify and ritualize. In all areas of daily life, these seemingly opposing forces came into play by asking that I leave the constant “obligations” and immediacy of American life behind (email, cell phones, internet-meandering, incessant homework, etc.), and replace it with a more liturgical way of living that involved a deeper commitment to the life of the community (shared meals, assigned tasks, joint living space, particular classroom style, exposure to the traditions of the Catholic community). … in Orvieto I discovered great freedom in living a life of chosen obligation. Even now, nearly three years later, I often remind myself to draw back to my “Orvieto self.” [Julie Pointer, Westmont College]
In-town community
Our attention to in-house spiritual life and formation is influenced by our approach to the third zone in which spiritual development is the issue: the larger community of shared Christian faith in the local town and church setting of the program. We have chosen deliberately not to try to meet all the spiritual life needs of all our students in house. At one dangerous end of a spectrum would be a “community within ourselves” that sabatages the equally fundamental purpose of the program to give students an authentic cross-cultural experience.
Orvieto provides an amiable setting in which our mainly (but not entirely) Protestant-evangelical students can discover ancient traditions of worship and spirituality still actively at work among the Roman Catholic community. That is, just as we are countering “individualism” in the arts, and “narcissism” in daily life of community, we are countering “parochialism” in our students’ experience of the church catholic – of an un-self-critical narrowness that universalizes one’s own accustomed patterns of prayer, worship, or spiritual labeling as normative for all cultures at all times.
We fuss about this aspect of the program. We want students out in the town. As the handbook states: “An intention of the program is for students to have a respectful, accurately informed, and non-combative experience of the Roman Catholic tradition that has so deeply informed Italian culture as a whole and the art and culture of the Renaissance in particular. We hope to foster an atmosphere of open yet courteous conversation about the historical varieties of Christian spiritual and doctrinal expression, while honoring each student in her chosen expressions of faith.”
We encourage students to participate in the established religious life of the town, perhaps visiting several churches during the semester or settling in at one – joining as a number have done the choir at the 1000-year-old parish church of San Giovenale – and certainly witnessing the grand liturgical services at the cathedral. Students are welcomed, for example, at the chanted service of Evening Prayer at the convent of a contemplative order of Franciscan nuns, or the weekly service of prayer and praise held by the area’s lively Catholic charismatic renewal community. There, the guitar and drum-accompanied singing turns out to be, for many of our students, the surprising closest-equivalent to the worship gatherings they enjoy on campus, and thus foiling some of the prejudices instilled in them by Catholic-suspicious churches back home. A provocative shock is to see some of the same people at both the charismatic prayer service and the chanted Vespers at the Franciscan convent: fellow believers who feel no dissonance between highly formalized contemplative ancient chant and contemporary singing “in the spirit,” hands waving, tongues declaring. (I love the title of a helpful book: Contemplation and Charismatic Renewal.)
“In a city where church bells are inescapable, daily rhythms change from rushing frantically ahead to measured and deliberate,” writes one student, and
time takes on a different feel and allows for more relational contemplative space. Through the daily Our Father over pranzo, the passegiata in the evening and chanted Vespers service with the Franciscan nuns at the Buon Gesu convent, the Orvieto semester changed the way I approach time and community, faith and work. These nuns are cloistered and dedicate their lives to prayer. This living example of faith as part of daily action continues to influence my daily practice, in that faith has become not something separate to be put on at appropriate times but something that is a constant presence. [Julia Hendrickson, Gordon College]
But we acknowledge the potential void felt by some students when they are completely unmoored from the largely collegiate-evangelical frameworks of spiritual and devotional and worship life (in the English language) that they bring with them. And yet someone in our administrative discussions will always speak up on behalf of periods of apparent barrenness. To experience one’s absence or loneliness while sitting awkwardly in a mass that one only partially follows, listening to prayers that are so obviously serving as containers for expression of faith for those around you, while feeling silence in oneself, can turn out to prompt a sort of via negativa deeply efficacious in the long run. After all, so many of our colleges’ study abroad programs are defined by the value of getting out of one’s “comfort zone,” an estrangement that turns out to be expansive. Then why ought we try to cushion our students against every sad moment of homesickness or cultural disconnect, when such eu-catastrophe is exactly what we are hoping to occasion.
As one student articulates the effect:
Being introduced to ancient traditions of Christian spirituality such as the Daily Office, the liturgy and silence allowed me to get to fellowship with God in a new, creative and humbling manner. Connecting with believers from a different culture (and generation, at times) affirmed that indeed, our faith unites us … igniting a passion for God that had been previously buried in a sea of 'consumerism Christianity' found in so many of our [post]modern churches today. [Laura Kuah, Messiah College]
I think, for a concluding example, of just one aspect of our program’s deliberate estrangement from the contemporary American ambient. As we say in the Handbook:
Most students come to appreciate the monastery as a respite from noise pollution. But many of us have to go through a period of withdrawal from a sort of addictive dependence on the pervasive background presence of noise, usually the popular music and radio chatter that we surround ourselves with as we move from the car to the mall to doing some homework to jogging. A recent challenge to community are the ubiquitous portable music players—by which we seem politely to keep our private music to ourselves—but which set up invisible walls of separation and can dull our attentiveness to the distinctive sounds of our environment, natural and social. Our program’s effort to reduce noise is intended to foster an atmosphere of conversation and listening.
As one student writes several years after her semester in Orvieto:
Prior to Orvieto the idea of silence was negative for me. It is what I was when I couldn't think fast enough, was feeling intimidated by something, or what I experienced when I was in a classroom setting. In Orvieto the idea of silence took on a new meaning for me. Being surrounded by men and woman who had devoted their lives to God by becoming nuns or monks was new to me. I saw the devotion they displayed through prayer and meditation. In Orvieto life was silent enough for me to think in a new way, a clear way, because the voices that had been clouding my mind were far away. When I started attending a liturgical service and practiced meditation in Orvieto I was able to come before God in a new way, a deeper way than I had experienced in the past. Silence became an opportunity to communicate with God and meditate on his word. [Jenelle Siegal, Gordon College]
Or as another student commented regarding “stillness”:
My time in Orvieto was where I began to learn the idea of making space in life. In America, with our fast paced and ultra-efficient lifestyle, from pre-packaged processed food to hand-held computers, I often felt that life was an exercise in overlapping and fitting events into the puzzle of my calendar. The transition to a quieter and more contemplative lifestyle was a difficult one, but began to transform my concept of how spirituality influences life. I learned not to be afraid of stillness. I learned that the spaces in life are as essential as the events, and allow time to appreciate and reflect. My time in Orvieto has always been a place in my mind I can return to when I can't seem to keep my priorities straight. I just remember to take a breath and make a space for the divine. [Kelley Johnston, Gordon College]
Endnote:
[1] Modern classics such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together and various books by Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen serve as recommended reading for the program. Kathleen Norris’s popular memoir A Cloister Walk, and her recent Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life are attractive and accessible to students. Among the growing number of books and essays using the phrase “new monasticism,” the recent book of essays entitled School(s) for Conversion: 12 Marks of a New Monasticism (edited by The Rutba House, from Wipf and Stock Cascade Books, 2005) is especially helpful. The Benedictine Handbook edited by Anthony Marett-Crosby (Liturgical Press, 2003) is a very useful resource for newcomers to historical understanding of the early monastic shaping of life. And something like Alasdair MacIntyre’s final paragraph in After Virtue hovers behind the program: “What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. … We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another – doubtless very different – St. Benedict.”
Strangers and Other Angels: welcoming the alien, alienating the resident, and recuperating tradition
“Resident alien” is one translation of the Greek word paroikous used, for example, in the first epistle of St. Peter when he writes to believers as “aliens and exiles” [NRS], as “sojourners and pilgrims” [NKJV] (2:11). It comes from the verb “to make a temporary home, to live as a stranger.” The phrase has personal meaning for me because of my family’s experience living as resident aliens in Italy for almost a decade while I have directed the Gordon-in-Orvieto semester program and the Studio for Art, Faith & History in this historic Umbrian town of Orvieto.By now I can relate to the “resident” half of the term. I have an official Carta d’Identità and a Carta di Soggiorno indicating legal permission for long-term residency short of citizenship. Our daughter Isabelle went to the local Italian elementary and middle school and is perfectly bilingual. The mayor has called me up for help with his English now and again. The bishop hugs me on the street. I have more of a public profile than I might wish.
But I still relate mainly to the “alien” half of the term, of being the stranger, the foreigner who depends on receiving hospitality from the native folk, from those who think of Orvieto as their turf, their town.
Indeed, our basically-happy and successful presence in Orvieto is the result of such “welcoming the stranger.” Only a few days into our first semester in 1998, one of our students wandered into the town library where a woman came up and greeted her warmly, saying that she had seen Michelle at Sunday worship in the cathedral, and wondered who she was and why she was in Orvieto. From this gesture of kindness to a stranger by Anna Lardani, and others like it, we were gradually introduced to the entire Lardani clan, to a vibrant and devout element of the Catholic Christian community in town, and friendships have developed that have changed lives irrevocably in both directions.
Hospitality given to the stranger – of welcoming the alien – is of course a current in the biblical ethic from Old Testament to New. As the Lord emphasizes in the law-book of Leviticus: “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt” [19:34 NRV].
Think of a story such as Abraham receiving the three guests at the Oaks of Mamre told in Genesis chapter 18: “He looked up and saw three men standing near him [they are called “angels” in chapter 19] … and said, ‘My lord, if I find favor with you, do not pass by your servant. Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree.” Then Abraham prepared meal cakes and slaughtered a fatted calf for them to eat, after which they deliver the big news that old Abraham and barren Sarah will have a son, whose descendants will bring blessing to the whole earth.
And as the writer of the New Testament epistle to the Hebrew believers exhorts: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it” [13:2], an ethic shared by the ancient Greeks, as in the myth of the old couple Baucis and Philemon who welcomed Zeus and Hermes when the two gods knocked at their door disguised as ordinary peasants.
In both Leviticus and Hebrews, the duty to welcome the alien, the stranger, is based on our own primordial identity as people who have been there ourselves. We are all refugees and aliens as a condition of being human. Some of us may think of this as testimony to a deep cultural memory of our Fall and Exile and hence of the reminder later on in Hebrews, “For here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come” [13:14] and “By faith … Abraham stayed for a time in the land he had been promised, as in a foreign land … For he looked forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God” [11: 9-10].
We can readily recognize the stranger’s need of being welcomed to the “table” of the resident/host. But, as the visit of three angelic strangers to Abraham indicates, it can also turn out that the stranger may have something to bring to the table, something that the resident-citizen needs.
The Stranger can be an Angel (literally) as in the Abraham story, with his promise of a miraculous birth of a son. Think of the story at the end of St. Luke‘s gospel where Jesus appears to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus after his Resurrection. He joins them as a stranger. They offer him hospitality – “dine with us” – but he is the one who can “interpret the things about himself in all the scriptures” and fulfill the very purposes of God about which they were confused [24: 13ff, 25-27].
Sometimes this “new” can be incorporated as an element into the host culture’s ways of thinking and living, but without requiring significant change to their worldview. But other times, the new element doesn’t fit the habituated categories, and requires significant modification of the whole framework -- which the resident may or may not be willing to make.
Remember the tomato, one of the fundamental ingredients of Italian cuisine, mastered by the Italians. It is a “resident alien,” imported to Italy from its native Americas in the 1500’s, and incorporated into Italian cooking only during the last couple of centuries. “The Tomato Had To Go Abroad To Make Good,” as one article is titled.
Another food example is worth expanding because it implicitly contains the whole point of this essay about how traditions are kept lively rather than stultified in traditionalisms.
Suor (sister) Giovanna Galli is the larger-than-life personality who is the mother superior of the convent of San Lodovico in Orvieto, where Gordon’s program was first housed. Suor Giovanna wanted to understand the utterly-foreign autumn holiday—Thanksgiving—that figured with such emotional prominence in the lives of the American students and teachers which she hosted. One could try to explain to Giovanna the religious-historical circumstances of the first Thanksgiving, and yet even the idea of Protestant Christians fleeing to maintain religious liberty in a wilderness territory did not readily translate into the categories of devout Italian Catholicism of this old-school nun.
But it’s the pumpkin pie that I’m interested in. An American-style pumpkin pie is foreign to Italians on two accounts. While the pumpkin is no stranger to the cuisine of central Italy, it’s a vegetable, and never a prospect for dessert or dolce. Second, neither the covered pie with full top crust (apple pie style) nor the naked uncovered version (alla pumpkin or pecan) is an element in the grammar of Italian cooking. The closest equivalent is the crostata. A fundamental of Italian desserts, the crostata has a pastry crust is not unlike that of an American pie, but is flatter, filled with a fruity purée of figs or wild berries or apricot, and always with a lattice-work crust on top.
So Suor Giovanna translated pumpkin pie into her own categories, but with sufficient openness and risk to allow violation of these categories. She sweetened the pumpkin purée to a degree suspicious to her own palate, and used it as the filling for a traditional crostata, lattice work and all. The upshot? Because of Suor Giovanna’s artistry in the kitchen, both Italian and American guests at our Thanksgiving Feast smacked their lips (or poked cheek with forefinger, Italian style). The pumpkin crostatas were delicious. Some of us have re-imported this new version of the old standby into our own American-soil Thanksgiving Dinners. Imagine, an Italian Thanksgiving dessert! A pumpkin crostata. And on the Italian side, a similar response: hmmm, not bad. “I never imagined that pumpkin could become a dessert.” The new invention (at least in the limited Italo-American circles of Orvieto) has entered the dessert repertory, modifying traditionalisms on both sides.
My point is simple. When traditions are confident enough not to be protectionist, they allow themselves to be enlivened and refreshed and transmitted by permitting an alien element to intrude. A vital traditionalism (“we always have a chestnut stuffing and canned jellied cranberry sauce or it’s not a real Thanksgiving dinner”) is willing to allow even an unexpected guest (the pumpkin crostata, of all things) to come on in and join the family celebration. Which of course was what the “Indians” did when the “Pilgrims” arrived. Thanksgiving is the expression of gratitude by the alien foreigner receiving unexpected grace and graciousness from the local folk.
But the exchange can take another forms. Strangers can bring something new to the table from their own homeland. But they can also bring something old, something they associate with the host culture, which they mean to honor by returning it, albeit with their own tampering. The strangers arrive with a respectful sense of their own need for what the host culture has, and through their strangerly efforts to imitate, to adapt themselves to the host culture, the stranger in fact helps the citizen-host to see her own traditions with fresh eyes.
I usually bring a couple of bottles of good Umbrian wine back with me to the States, but last September I brought a fine Napa Valley red wine back to Orvieto for my dear friend Ivano Tozzi—chief quality control officer for Bigi wines—to show him what the Americans have accomplished through their own adaptation of Italian wine-making tradition.
I remember when, during our first semester in 1998, the local ceramic sculptor Michele Golia visited Professor Jim Zingarelli’s sculpture class, set up in rather make-shift fashion in the old former stable of monastery San Lodovico. With sunlight filtering through the broken latticework overhead, students were chipping away with their chisels and mallets following traditional Renaissance methods, with “Z” working closely alongside his students. Almost with tears in his eyes, Michele told Jim: there are very few studios in Italy nowadays which keep alive the old traditions of sculpting in the workshop that you are doing here, and that are the very heritage of Italian art. Most art schools are trying to get modern, offering classes in graphic design done on the computer. Michele worried (justifiably as statistics increasingly show) that soon few skilled artisans would remain able to keep in repair the sculptural heritage of cathedral and palazzo decoration, let alone contribute something new to that tradition. Here you are, coming to us as Americans, and helping to sustain our own flagging Italian artistic traditions.
Another illustration gives us the title of this essay.
Back in 2003 New York City theater director Karin Coonrod inaugurated a long-term theater project in Orvieto whose working title has become “Strangers and Other Angels.” (Karin is acclaimed for her productions of both English and Italian Renaissance drama, and an alumna of Gordon College, half-Italian through her war-bride mother.)
The play is performed in itinerant fashion, and links together a series of bible episodes about strangers and angels, about strangers as angels. Each episode is performed at a different church, piazza or public space in town, with a cast that brings together local actors and musicians with strangers from the States, the Caribbean, Japan, elsewhere in Europe.
Her title of course alludes to the passage from Hebrews (about entertaining strangers who might be angels), and to the Emmaus story – which in fact frames the entire sequence.
When the two disciples wonder how this stranger has missed the news about the crucifixion of the one they hoped was the Messiah, he (in the drama) sings a new song “Don’t you remember.” Then follows not his interpretation of the prophets (as in the Gospel) but the performance of scenes that trace God’s redemptive work through history, from creation to judgment, via the Incarnation of Christ.
The Incarnation is the central theme: Jesus coming down to earth as the divine stranger, the alien who deigns to set aside his own power and glory, humbling himself to enter the flesh and blood and culture of the human dwellers – seeking (and not usually finding) hospitality among them.
The Creation story is performed in front of the Duomo façade, with angels moving from joy to grief as the first man and woman fall into sin. At their Expulsion the angel of judgment also offers a hope for redemption.
The Sacrifice of Isaac dramatizes the arrival of an angel in the nick of time to stop the faithful father’s sacrifice of his only begotten son, and then to bring to Abraham a substitutionary lamb for the sacrifice.
In a very comical Nativity scene, the angel announces the birth in Bethlehem of a Lamb of God to the shepherds just as they have discovered that the babe in Mak and Gil’s cradle is their own fat lamb, stolen by their erstwhile friend Mak to feed his family.
In the episode of the Descent of Christ into Hell, Jesus, before his resurrection on the third day, descends as a mighty angel to bash down the gates of hell and to trample Satan underfoot.
And then the drama returns us to the road to Emmaus and to the hospitality at the supper. There at the breaking of the bread – revealing the Real Presence of Christ in their midst – the disciples suddenly recognize the stranger in their midst as the one they should have been recognizing all along if they had been paying attention to all the clues in their own tradition. Then he disappears, and – in Coonrod’s production – their Emmaus supper opens up as a feast in the piazza to which the entire audience is invited. This American theater company’s local hosts become their guests, in a turning of the tables.
The project itself embodies its theme, and that of this essay.
These plays were not newly composed or imported to Orvieto as something new. “Strangers and Other Angels” is performed at the Feast of Corpus Christi, a holy-day inaugurated in 1264 by Pope Urban IV in order to celebrate in a big, almost cosmic way the mystery that occurs at every enactment of the sacrament. Holy Communion is the sign of Jesus’s incarnation (“this is my body,” as He tells his disciples at the Last Supper) and the means by which we become living members of his body: “those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them” [John 6:56].
And guess where this new holiday was inaugurated? In Orvieto, where the pope resided at the time, and hence the sort of ground zero for this holiday, celebrated with procession and pageantry.
But curiously, it was in England, not Italy, that various towns developed long cycles of plays during the 1300s in association with the holiday of Corpus Christi. These cycles, often with 20 to 30 episodes strung together, were performed peripatetically on carts that traveled from place to place in town. The trajectory of the whole was to mark God’s “incarnation”: His entering physically into earthly affairs, to create, warn and minister to, and finally to redeem and to judge his creatures, so beloved that He had sent his only Son like a stranger into a foreign land.
So Karin (in collaboration with NYC theater professionals and other Gordon College alumni such as poet and playwright Mark Stevick and composer Paul Vasile and myself) adapted several of the plays from these cycles, translating some into Italian, keeping some sections in English, wrapping the whole thing in music and dance. Coonrod and her Compagnia de’ Colombari in fact are bringing back to Orvieto in lively new guise the very stuff that had originated in Orvieto, but which another culture had amplified and enriched.
A bunch of strangers come to town (including students in the Gordon semester program) and join up with local folk for a few weeks of rehearsals, becoming angels both in costume and in reality. We heard over and over the same appreciative response: “you’ve given back to us our own tradition,” you’ve helped make new what had become old.
One can see the theme from these illustrations of our life in Orvieto.
They illustrate a reciprocity, a giving and receiving, a hospitality that changes both guest and host. Through such sacre conversazioni – sacred conversations, not just dialogues between two people trading their viewpoints – two communities open themselves up to receive the other’s gift. Both have a sense of having been drawn out of their own insular identity and becoming sojourners together in a new space, joined in a new trajectory. In this sharing a third community is fashioned.
The concept is St. Paul’s from his letter to the church at Ephesus, where he writes to Gentile believers as once “aliens” and “strangers” to the commonwealth of Israel: “in his flesh he has made both groups into one that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two.”
This “sacred conversation” can take various forms.
The stranger comes with an offer of something that the host culture “needs” only to discover that the hosts have something that the stranger needs. Isn’t this what so often happens on missions trips sponsored by church or school. We arrive in Honduras, or wherever, ready to offer our hammers and paintbrushes to re-roof a school or build a church for these impoverished folk, only to discover an exuberant simplicity of joy in the Lord, and a generosity of hospitality, that turns the tables on us: we’re the more spiritually impoverished. We were the receivers more than the givers.
Or, the stranger comes with a sense of her own need which the host culture can fulfill, only to discover that the host’s need is as great or greater than the stranger’s. This is largely the story, in fact, of our own program in Orvieto. We bring over some wonderful but de-racinated (rootless) American Christian students with little sense of their history, of the immense heritage in Italy of art and architecture informed by the Scriptures and Christian tradition, only to discover an increasingly secularized Europe in which the young people are even more ignorant about the imagery surrounding them than we are.
I think of one semester when the major project for my own course was for the students to prepare an Guidebook that would identify and explain all the figures in all the frescos, mostly fragmented, in the beloved 1,000-year-old church of San Giovenale. In English, of course. Then the priest, dear old Don Enrico, earnestly beseeched me to translate this into Italian, because “few of the people in my own parish, not to mention the Italian tourists that wander in, have any idea what they are looking at.”
I could offer other encouraging examples. The present Bishop of Orvieto, Padre Giovanni Scanavino, bravely welcomed a married woman Episcopal priest with children (that’s my wife and Gordon alumna Rev. Susan Skillen) into his diocese’s midst, saying to his own priests: “We Roman Catholic clergy can no longer avoid serious discussion about the role of ordained woman in the church, and of a married rather than celibate clergy. What better model could we hope to have for seeing what such a thing might look like than Susan.” So he invited this woman pastor to preach the sermon, in the Duomo itself, during “Christian Unity” week one January.
In the stranger’s angelic role of displacing the Resident from habituation, from traditionalism, from closed parochialism, there’s no guarantee that the resident alien will not also “alienate” the resident and be alienated.
Even Suor Giovanna, of pumpkin crostata fame …
In Orvieto in 2003, Bruce Herman initiated a series of large panel-paintings on the life of the Virgin Mary. These eventually took form as two enormous triptych altarpieces that were exhibited at Gordon College and Westmont College before being installed back in Orvieto in the spring of 2009.
Herman had started this project as a course in the Orvieto program, set up as a real Renaissance bottega with students working as apprentices, learning all the traditional methods of gessoing and water-gilding and so forth.
Local folk were brought in for photo sessions as potential models for all the figures -- arousing Suor Giovanna’s suspicions, uncomfortable having even local “strangers” inside the inner sanctum of the convent. Sergio Riccetti – a distinguished elderly gentleman with a majestic gray beard, honored in town for his fifty years as the Lord Mayor in the Corpus Christi procession – was one of the three Magi; the carpenter Luis was Joseph the carpenter; Anna Lardani and her daughter Elisa were Elisabeth and Mary of the Visitation, and so forth.
By the conclusion of the class, Bruce’s labors had brought several panels not to completion but to a level of figuration sufficient for a private viewing. We were proud of our students’ hard work, and invited the nuns to join us in an ecumenical service of vespers, our singing and devotion and readings from Scripture oriented towards the Blessed Virgin Mary, with the incomplete paintings displayed on the walls of their intended permanent location.
Catching us completely off guard, we could see the steam of anger rising from Suor Giovanna as she beheld the paintings for the first time. We staggered through the service. Afterwards, Giovanna commanded Bruce’s and my presence in her office. There she erupted in rage at the insult we had just forced upon her by impudently obliging her and her community to pay their devotion to the Virgin – patron saint of their order – via paintings in which the figures were clearly recognizable as local people, several, moreover, from the charismatic-renewal community unwelcomed in the diocese by the bishop at the time. We didn’t know what to say. I felt mortified at my lapse of imagination in not having anticipated such a reaction. But I was also angry at Suor Giovanna for her inability at least to recognize wholesomeness of motives, to acknowledge the innocence of the students caught in the crossfire, to appreciate that her Protestant American guests were at least trying to open up to the Virgin and her role in salvation history. And I was terrified by the distinct possibility that she would kick us (and the program) out the front door and lock it behind us.
So we’ve been welcomed as aliens, and we’ve alienated the residents. But when God has some open hearts to work with, we all become “resident aliens” together, no longer so attached to our earthly motherlands, able to live in any country as a temporary motherland. We become more keenly aware of the whole world as a place of exile and alienation for those who are called to begin living already as citizens in a kingdom not made with human hands, whose builder and maker is God.
Case Study in commissioning: Bruce Herman’s Mary Paintings
The two large Marian triptychs by Bruce Herman now installed in the chapel in monastery San Paolo are the product of several years of patient and painstaking labor by an artist working at the highest level of skill, following traditional methods, in complex media. They are also the product of intellectual rigor and disciplined lectio divina of the scripture. Bruce Herman’s work is informed by deep and broad reading in theology, aesthetics, philosophy; by sophisticated adaptation of traditions in iconography; and by seasoned reflection on the role of visual art in worship, devotion and theology.The paintings are not the result of purely private choices made by an autonomous artist working independently in his studio on a work dreamed up ex nihilo, with no knowledge of where the paintings might end up, who would see them, and who might buy them (these being the de-contextualized conditions generally assumed for art-making during the recent period of modernism).
Rather, these triptychs are the outcome of the artist’s willing collaboration, at every step of the way, with patrons, with academic interpreters, with student assistants, and with friends just trying to give a fresh hearing to Jesus’s mother. They are also, as Herman would say, the result of twenty years of conversations about the impending loss and possible recuperation of two dimensions of tradition: traditions of meaning (the subject of Dr. Rachel Smith’s essay in the catalogue prepared for these paintings) and traditions of making (the subject of my own account of Herman’s “Mary project”).
“… tradition means transmission rather than conservation…[and] it is in this sense that we can say that transmission is equivalent to translation,” writes Hans-Georg Gadamer. When objects once valued by a community are taken out of circulation and museum-ized, their tradition is eclipsed and in effect dies. A tradition is kept alive through repeated return to its sources and through acts of reinterpretation which are never mere repetitions. A tradition is renewed when something from the past is seen as timely or relevant by someone or by some community -- still timely enough to warrant the effort of translating it into contemporary language. And as the translator knows, this rendering contemporary of some lesson from the past, some word, some visual pattern or emotional sequence, sensed as newly needful, will itself modify contemporary language.
I have been fortunate to be a part of many conversations about such issues with Bruce and other of our colleagues and friends – often in unlikely settings such as Wednesday morning breakfasts at various local diners. One institutional result of these conversations was the creation of an arts-oriented undergraduate semester program in Orvieto (which I have administered since 1998). We sought a setting in which a generation of largely a-historical post-culture college students could experience something of a traditional community in which the elements of art, faith, family, and civic life still cohered, and then to play with reshaping the vestiges of that tradition into new configurations fitted for their own time.
Our intent was to recreate something on the order of the Renaissance bottega. We imagined a workshop environment that brought together skilled professionals in the arts and humanities to experiment with new ways of recuperating traditional texts, genres, media and styles; in a pedagogical mode that brought younger artists into the sacra conversazione of the tradition; and in a manner answerable to the audiences which these activities were intended to serve.
By 2002, Bruce had redrafted a conventional studio art course into a setting for launching the “Mary project” in Orvieto. The unconventional character of this course shows up in the syllabus:
COURSE DESCRIPTION:
This course will acquaint the student with the working methods, imagery, and aesthetic philosophy of the teacher. Students will work alongside of the professor as assistants on a common project, and will be given the privilege and responsibility of acting as collaborators learning and working in an apprenticeship atmosphere.
Unlike a (now) conventional academic college art classroom, the bottega is a workshop – with all the rigor and expectations associated. That is, students will work hard for hours and days at a time, sometimes engaged in menial tasks associated with the common project, other times engaged at a deep, principled level with the substance of the project – a mural in eight parts. They will be drawn into the process of selecting the iconographic program (images, subject matter, scenes, theological symbolism, etc.) and executing the daily work associated with the mural. Division of labor and daily tasks will be assigned by the workshop leader and/or his delegates.
Just as in a Renaissance bottega, where the master considered the talents and abilities and levels of skill of each member of the workshop, so we will seek to adjust the components of the project to the various verbal and visual interests and training of the members.
REQUIREMENTS:
• A humble and diligent attitude (perhaps more essential than artistic talent)
• Daily work ethic – and a humility about tasks and personal involvement
• Daily writing and sketching
• Work on assigned tasks from studio clean-up to figure painting
But while the design of the course may have been ours freely to plan, we had no unilateral control in selecting the in situ location for the completed “commission” – at that point envisioned as a linked series of eight large panels each dealing with a particular episode in Mary’s life.
Here must be introduced one of the main characters in the story: the formidable personality of Suor Giovanna Galli, mother superior of the convent which hosted the Gordon College program during its first several years. Suor Giovanna reluctantly allowed us to imagine installing the finished project along the walls of what the nuns still termed the palestra or gymnasium – a former cloistered chapel.
The room has a complicated history. As indicated by its architectural form, the chapel was designed as mirror image of the main church of the monastery, sharing a common altar wall. The feature is not unusual in convents of cloistered orders: the altar, typically perforated, allowed the “religious” inside and the laity coming to the monastery from outside to participate in a common liturgy. Photographs taken early in the 20th century show an ornately decorated space. But by the middle of the last century, when the sisters inhabiting Istituto San Lodovico were no longer cloistered but engaged in active mission as teachers in the high school sponsored by their order, the chapel was stripped and transformed into a gymnasium, with sprung wood flooring installed over the marble pavement. When we arrived, the climbing apparatus still lined the drab walls, but the high school had been closed for some years, and the convent pre-school used the space only now and then for recreation activities and pageants. With funding from the generous parents of a student, Gordon College made the appeal to refurbish the hall and return it to its original status as a place of worship, albeit minimally furnished, and designed to accommodate a variety of ecumenical activities. Bruce’s paintings were to serve as murals in this semi-sacred space.
The students in Herman’s bottega worked long and hard, laying down coat over coat of traditional hand-prepared gesso on the wood panels, hand-sanding them to silken smoothness. This work literally took weeks. Additionally, Bruce introduced several of the students to traditional water-gilding, a painstaking process of laying down fragile squares of gold and silver leaf (most of which would eventually appear only palimpsest-like, if at all, under multiple over-layers of paint).
Bruce’s skilled young assistant Truitt Seitz sketched in possibilities on some of the panels, most of which faced erasure, again through over-painting by Bruce. Local folk were brought in for photo sessions as potential models for all the figures -- arousing the suspicions of the mother superior, uncomfortable having strangers inside the inner sanctum of the convent. Sergio Riccetti – a distinguished elderly gentleman with a majestic gray beard, honored in town for his forty years as the “Lord Mayor” in the Corpus Christi procession – was one of the three Magi; the carpenter Luis as the carpenter Joseph; Anna Lardani and her daughter Elisa as the Elisabeth and Mary of the Visitation, and so forth.
At the conclusion of Professor Herman’s month-long “Mary Mural Bottega” – proud of our students’ hard work and cooperative spirits, with Bruce’s labors bringing several panels not to completion but to a level of figuration and complexity sufficient for a private viewing – we invited the nuns’ participation in a joint service of vespers, Marian in its singing and devotion, with the incomplete paintings displayed on the walls of their intended permanent location.
Catching us completely off guard, we could see the steam of anger rising from Suor Giovanna as she beheld the paintings for the first time. We staggered through the service. Afterwards, Giovanna commanded Bruce’s and my presence in her office. There she erupted in rage at the insult we had just forced upon her by impudently obliging her and her community to pay their devotion to the Virgin – patron saint of their order – via paintings in which the figures were clearly recognizable as local people, and many, moreover, from the charismatic-renewal community whose behavior was an embarrassment (at least from the perspective of Suor Giovanna’s theological and devotional convictions). We didn’t know what to say. I felt mortified at my lapse of imagination in not having anticipated such a reaction. But I was also angry at Suor Giovanna for her inability at least to recognize wholesomeness of motives, to acknowledge the innocence of the students caught in the crossfire, to appreciate that her Protestant American guests were at least trying to open up to the Virgin and her role in salvation history. And I was terrified by the distinct possibility that she would kick us (and the program) out the front door and lock it behind us.
The ironies of the situation were not lost upon us. Here we were, re-visiting Renaissance practices such as the inclusion of identifiable contemporary figures in the ancient narratives in order to foster reflection on the “typological” parallels between contemporary and biblical times, places, and people. We found ourselves more historically Catholic in our artistic strategies than these Catholic nuns! And while feeling that our initial foray into Renaissance-style commissioned murals had blown up in our faces, we had to remind ourselves that problems with patrons, offenses delivered and received were the very stuff of that era’s patronage process. (An example might be the fact that Masaccio’s frescoed portraits of the Brancacci family were probably chipped away when the family was exiled from Florence.) We had unwittingly recreated Renaissance conditions a little too vividly for our own good!
In the end, we weathered the immediate storm. But the moment impressed upon me that we should not expect to find in San Lodovico, under Suor Giovanna’s authoritarian leadership, either a blank canvas or a blank check for our own experimentations in recuperating the tradition of sacred art in contemporary modes.
The project got placed on the back burner for a couple of years – partly as a result of the impasse with Suor Giovanna, and partly due to Herman’s return to the States. (But of course the Cappella di San Brizio in the Orvieto Duomo stood idle, scaffolding in place, for fifty years between Fra Angelico’s abortive beginning and Luca Signorelli’s completion of one of the most stupendous Last Judgments in history – or so I consoled myself.)
By 2005, the Gordon program – now defined as a Studio for Art, Faith & History – had expanded the scope of its activities, collaborating, for instance, with the town authorities and the Catholic bishop in creating an annual Festival of Art and Faith to be inserted into the event most pivotal for the town’s identity: the late-spring holy-day of Corpus Christi. That year we organized a cycle of the medieval mystery plays, and an international conference on the “eucharistic and eschatological” themes of the Duomo’s decorative programme, and the town hosted a major show of Herman’s work, entitled Il Corpo Spezzato (the Body Broken) in its suite of large public galleries in the Palazzo dei Sette.
Partly as a means of re-focusing his attention on the “Mary mural project,” Bruce offered to hold a week-long Studio Aperto (open studio) in the large atrium of the Palazzo. While he worked afresh on the unfinished panels, set up around the atrium, visitors were welcomed to watch the artist at work, and even to interrupt him with questions about the process, the subject matter, the project as a whole. Groups of tourists, school children, and students of the college program visited almost daily during the Studio Aperto, including a surprise visit by the Bishop – who mischievously surprised the artist from behind with a bear hug during his work!
At the end of the week, the mayor’s Assessor of Culture, Dottoressa Teresa Urbani, spoke at a reception in the artist’s honor. Dr. Urbani said something that counterbalanced Suor Giovanna’s discouraging word that we had somehow barged in like insensitive Americans and violated the very tradition that we had supposedly come to learn from. Said Urbani: “You have given our tradition back to us.”
The context of her remark was clear: for many (mainly secularized post-Christian) folk in Orvieto and in Italy in general, there is an honest appreciation of, and pride in, the riches and excellence of their artistic heritage. But that tradition has become museum-ized. Modern-day people seldom look to the treasured masterworks of the Renaissance for any light these might shed on their own lives. But by reconfiguring these scenes, painting them through a mastery of methods and media both old and new, and by revivifying “typology” (bringing people of our own time into the settings), Herman was recasting their own tradition in a new light. Without corniness or sentimentality, stepping down out of the loft studio and allowing a contemporary audience openly to participate, Bruce played his part in restoring immediacy to these stories from once-sacred scripture, recovering the Jewish girl Miriam (theotokos) as one of us. Like the muralists of the Italian tradition, Herman was attempting to recover, in his contemporary images of Mary, our own potentiality as ordinary people to whom angels might appear and who might just be honored enough by a Divine Lover to be given free choices on which whole histories depend.
After the exhibition in Orvieto, a patron came forward, generous beyond hope (and as theologically and artistically astute a patron as any Fra Angelico could have hoped for). Thanks to this patron’s generosity the panels were shipped back to Herman’s studio in the States, where the artist worked for two years to complete the work. The final form of the work changed considerably from a set of eight separate narrative panels to two large altarpiece triptychs.
In the meantime, I oversaw a move of the Studio for Art, Faith and History to another convent, in a sufficient state of ruination to allow us more scope – more blank walls – for our task of “giving back” a fractured and fragmented sacred art tradition to our contemporaries. Ironically, the planned location for Herman’s two Marian triptychs in our new location, monastery San Paolo, is exactly the same as in Istituto San Lodovico: the chapel originally designed for the cloistered “religious,” set in inverse symmetry to the main church open to the laity.
Installed in monastery San Paolo, Herman’s paintings can do their work amidst a living community of students, faculty, artists, and pilgrims -- prompting meditation, inspiring devotion, guiding the liturgical work of the gathered company of worshippers, and arousing an inspirational desire among young apprentices to pursue disciplined training in their craft.
Herman’s triptychs in fact represent a “translation” of Marian pictorial tradition for each of the several audiences which the Studio for Art, Faith & History seeks to bring together in “sacred conversation.”
