Tracing back the roots of today’s rampant atheism, many analysts believe that the rot set in with the Renaissance. I agree. By reviving the aesthetic standards of Hellenic antiquity, the artistic giants of that period also brought back the pagan sensibility animating Hellenic art.
Greek gods busily copulating with human women on the slopes of Mount Olympus began to demand equal pictorial time with Christian imagery. As a result, art soared to new heights of brilliance, whereas people’s perception of God plummeted to new depths of vulgarity.
Let’s illustrate this observation by juxtaposing three acknowledged masterpieces by that sublime Renaissance artist, Michelangelo. We’ll end up with the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel on one side and the two Pietàs, in Rome and Milan, on the other.
The one in the Vatican was finished, the one in Milan’s Sforza Castle wasn’t, but here’s an interesting thing about Michelangelo. His unfinished sculptures tend to be more moving.
The finished Slaves exhibited at the Louvre are perfect, so much so that they leave me appreciative, admiring even, but cold. By contrast, his unfinished slaves at Florence’s Accademia touch me deeply.
(I know this isn’t a valid criterion of art criticism, but after a lifetime of contemplating art I usurp the right to equate my emotional response with the object’s quality.)
The two Pietàs are different, in that both are heart-rending. But the one in Milan, on which Michelangelo worked until a few days before he died, conveys the tragic scene even more poignantly than the other sculpture does. Still, this isn’t the comparison relevant to my subject today.
Bracketing the two sculptures together, let’s then follow the ubiquitous herds of tourists and have a look at that celebrated ceiling. I’ll try to consider its substance, not form, although it’s worth mentioning that, though Michelangelo was one of history’s greatest sculptors, I don’t think he was one of history’s greatest painters.
Then again, while his sculptures are now exactly as he left them, that Sistine Chapel ceiling has been retouched, restored and generally altered so many times (the last time from 1984 to 1990) that it’s hard to know how far the present has deviated from the past.
Yet the subject-matter certainly hasn’t changed, and the Catholic Church endorsed it enthusiastically. The scenes depicted all over the Chapel, including The Creation of Adam, were accepted as appropriate, theologically sound illustrations of doctrine.
Personally, I could have done without the depiction of Adam’s flaccid penis, but Michelangelo never did manage to conceal his amorous predilections even when broaching sacred subjects. However, the real damage was done by his portrayal of God the Father.
Judaism bans graven images of any kind, and creating pictures of God was a stonable offence in Palestine. It was the Incarnation that made iconography possible.
After all, Jesus Christ lived as a man for thirty-odd years, and painting or sculpting men wasn’t seen as creating graven images. Jews, and to a large extent Protestants, never issued such licence, but the two Christian orthodoxies, Eastern and Western, encouraged religious images both in and out of church.
But not the images of God the Father. Christian artists avoided pictorial depictions of the Father throughout the first millennium. Gradually, some such portrayals began to crop up in late medieval art, but only in the Renaissance did artistic representations of God the Father gain wide currency. (The Russian Orthodox Church banned that practice in 1667, during the Great Schism.)
Had the Catholic Church been blessed with foresight, it would have nipped that tendency in the bud. But the Church didn’t anticipate the massive assault on Christianity throughout Europe in the centuries following the Renaissance. That’s why it inadvertently armed the attackers.
More and more the masses shifted towards times heathen by imagining God just as Michelangelo and his contemporaries depicted him, as a muscular old man with an unkempt beard. That was straight Hellenic paganism, except that God’s living quarters were moved from Mount Olympus to a fluffy cloud in the sky.
Fast-forward to 1961 and the hysterical festivities all over Russia on the occasion of Gagarin’s flight. I remember Khrushchev, habitually tipsy, screaming from the tribune of the Mausoleum in Red Square that Gagarin had gone 327 kilometres up into space and seen no God. No fluffy cloud, no shaggy beard – hence no God.
Unlike Newton, Khrushchev stood on the shoulders of dwarfs, not giants. One such dwarf was Lenin’s Commissar for the Enlightenment, Lunacharsky, who staged a debate with a pro-Soviet prelate who was a neurophysiologist by previous trade.
The debate was held at the Bolshoi and it was well attended. A crowd of Red Army soldiers with an average of two years of schooling cheered Lunacharsky on. So encouraged, he shrieked: “Where is your God? Who has ever seen him?!?” The audience roared its approval, but the bishop came up with a good retort.
“I’m not only a priest,” he said, “but also a neurophysiologist. In that capacity, I’ve often held a human brain in my hands. I touched it, I felt it, I saw it. But a mind I’ve never seen.”
Communist godlessness was an extreme manifestation of a widespread phenomenon: malignant anthropomorphism vulgarising God and leading directly to atheism, via neo-paganism. But both Lunacharsky and Khrushchev built on a tradition going back to the Renaissance.
Even such accomplished thinkers as Hume demanded proofs of God’s existence. Creating his notorious ‘fork’, Hume postulated that all justifiable beliefs fell into two categories: provable either by logic and mathematics or by empirical experience. Religion was neither. Ergo, God doesn’t exist.
Unlike Lunacharsky and Khrushchev, Hume wasn’t a vulgarian, but that thought was vulgar. A man can neither prove the existence of God nor comprehend him by definition. A higher system can understand a lower one, but not vice versa.
Had Hume known how to think about such matters, he’d have realised that God doesn’t exist. It’s because of God that everything else exists – God is an unfathomable, life-giving force that can only be worshipped but not understood. Even a mind as intricate as Hume’s was inadequate to that task.
Such is the orthodox Christian response to demands for the kind of proof one expects in a laboratory. However, an anthropomorphised God, that bearded old man on the cloud, acquires a physical shape, thereby adding validity to demands for physical proof, especially if such demands spring from atheistic zealotry.
Getting back to Michelangelo, could it be his metaphysical premise that explains why, to me, his two Pietàs are artistic triumphs and that anthropomorphised ceiling an artistic failure? The two sculptures depicted the depictable, whereas the fresco didn’t.
Michelangelo’s genius was better revealed in a different, three-dimensional medium. However, even a truly great painter, such as Leonardo, could only show what the eye could see. Had he been given the Vatican commission, Leonardo would have been as stymied.
No, it wasn’t all Michelangelo’s fault, I wrote that in jest. But some of it was – he and his colleagues pushed the button, and the countdown is rapidly approaching zero.
I think the button was pushed long before the Renaissance. Perhaps it was all St Monica’s fault, who failed to ensure that her son was adequately instructed in Greek. This led St Augustine to think backwards about the Holy Trinity, putting the Divine Nature before the Divine Persons, and thus making the whole Western Church, from Boethius onwards, susceptible to the seduction of Sabellianism. Filioquism is one kind of Sabellianism, since it makes the Son a source of the Divine Nature like the Father, and Michelangelism is another kind of Sabellianism, since it makes the Father human like the Son. And in the Sarum Missal’s Collect for Trinity Sunday (translated literally in Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer), we find the ultimate Sabellian monstrosity of a prayer addressed to the Divine Nature.
But that’s enough theology. I share your liking for unfinished art. It’s a Romantic liking, and Romanticism at its best is a healthy reaction against the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Mutilated art is attractive for the same reason: could we admire either the Parthenon or the marbles rescued by Lord Elgin so much if they were complete, including their original painting and gilding?
Unfinished music is also appealing. Schubert’s Lazarus is more moving than any of his Masses, and Contrapunctus XIV of the Art of Fugue is evidently a teaser: subscribe to the Kingdom of Heaven to hear the rest!
You just mentioned my favourite piece of music (if I had to name one), especially as played by Glenn Gould. And I’m not going to argue about filioque — this disagreement has been known to lead to most unfortunate splits. Let’s just say filioque isn’t denying the three persons but treating them equally, rather than hierarchially.
Forty-three or forty-four years ago, I played a few fugues from The Art of Fugue with three of my friends. Participating in this astounding music is even better than hearing it. I’d never heard it before trying to play it, so I was overwhelmed.
Nevertheless, it’s really keyboard music, and the choice for me of best performer is between Gould and Helmut Walcha. No pianists or harpsichordists come close.
I hope you’ve heard (and watched!) Gould and Russell Oberlin performing Cantata No. 54. It’s my favourite YouTube video.
But my favourite performance of Bach is Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 with Adolf Busch, Marcel Moyse and the incomparable Rudolf Serkin as soloists. Serkin’s is the best Bach keyboard playing I’ve ever heard.
De gistibus and all that. For me, all pianists, not just Bach pianists, fall into two categories: Gould and everyone else. And, though I hate such rankings, Serkin wouldn’t be even close to the top of everyone else. Having said that, I haven’t heard that recording of the Brandenburg. One story I love about Serkin is that he once played the Diabelli Variations as an encore. By the time he finished there were two people left in the audience: his manager and his wife.
Michelangeli? Lefébure? Arrau? Schnabel? Haskil? Lipatti? Are they all merely “everyone else”? I think Lipatti’s Bach is as good as Gould’s, and I wish he’d lived long enough to record more of it. But the good sometimes die young, Feuermann, Ferrier and Neveu being other notorious examples.
The Diabelli Variations aren’t easy to like. They make the Grosse Fuge sound like Gilbert and Sullivan. But Serkin is my favourite in the late Beethoven sonatas, so perhaps he could persuade me to see some good even in the Diabelli Variations.
Please listen to the two recordings I recommended. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
Of those you’ve mentioned, I’d say Schnabel. All of them are fine pianists, of course. But Lipatti’s Bach as good as Gould’s? Seriously? I wouldn’t even mention them in the same breath — and neither would any pianist among my friends and wives. And what about Rachmanininov, Hoffmann, Gieseking, Kempf, Yudina, Sofronitsky, Richter, Gilels? It’s true that Gould wasn’t at his best in the late Beethoven sonatas, although his not very best is still better than most. He recorded those three immediately after he first did the Goldberg, in 1955 if I’m not mistaken. By the way, Yudina played a lot of Bach. Before Gould came along, her Goldberg was the best — and I bet you haven’t even heard her name. Fortunately, YouTube is full of her recordings.
You lose your bet, because I know Yudina’s name from Testimony and The Stalin Sonata. But I won’t impose a forfeit, because it’s true that I’ve never listened to her. I’ll correct that error.
Most of my musical friends share my reverence for Lipatti, but none of us is a pianist.
There are also Cortot, Rubinstein, Horowitz… the list of admirable pianists goes on and on. Pianists have the advantage over string players (and harpsichordists and organists!) of not having to worry about intonation, and they have the advantage over conductors of not having to worry about the second oboe being drunk. So a disproportionate number of the world’s most admirable musicians are pianists.
Actually, Penelope is in a direct line of descent from Cortot. Her professor at the Paris Conservatoire was Vlado Perlmutter, Cortot’s pupil. I’m not sure Rubinstein belongs in that company — he was a beautiful pianist, but a bit superficial. In that particular type of playing, Shura Cherkassky was at least as good. Horowitz was magnificent, especially in his later years. But when you get the chance, listen to Richter and Oistrach doing the Franck sonata. Chamber music doesn’t get better that that. As for Lipatti, he left some very good recordings, but nothing to warrant the cult surrounding him. Much of it is down to his early death, I think, which made him a tragic figure. Incidentally, Yudina was in the same class of the Leningrad Conservatoire with Sofronitsky and Shostakovich. Their class concerts must have been something to behold. Yet Yudina and Sofronitsky, while both magnificent, were as different as two musicians can be. So much for ‘schools of piano playing’.
I’m not a paid-up member of the Lipatti Death Cult, but the small amount of Bach he recorded seems to me to be perfect. And he has no plausible rivals in Bartók 3.
I know and love Oistrakh and Richter’s Franck, but if I had to choose, I’d very slightly prefer Thibaud and Cortot.
It’s Advent Sunday. Did you listen to BWV 36, 61 and 62 today? For the first time in perhaps twenty years, I didn’t. I chose Charpentier’s Advent Antiphons instead of Bach, and I enjoyed the experiment, but I probably won’t repeat it.
I didn’t. But they did John Taverner’s Gloria Tibi Trinitas Mass at church this morning, and Bach’s Nun Komm Der Heiden Heiland chorale as voluntary. Both were, well, glorious.
This is an interesting subject. I had not pondered the source of the “old man with a beard”. We have a series of videos that discuss Catholic catechism. One episode features responses to standard atheist statements against the existence of God, including the lack of visual evidence. The text even uses the phrase “old man with a beard”. The conclusion is that given their definition of God (as another creature among many), we have to agree that no such god exists. I should have taken more seriously my one semester of art history. If I had, I would be better prepared to respond, or nod knowingly. (And I still have a video course on understanding and appreciating great music waiting for my attention. The frequent discussions here make me regret I do not have that knowledge to pass on to my children.)