Significant Turning Points in Art & Theology
Here is one version of moments that were significant turning points in art & theology. This isn’t the only way to look at things. I will give a lot of credit for this view to Richard Viladesau (2000) Theology and the Arts: Encountering God through Music, Art and Rhetoric. New York: Paulist Press.
Sometimes the transition periods themselves last for more than a hundred years, and sometimes the transition will start in one place but not catch on in another place until many years later.
Early 300s: Christianity Legalized in the Roman Empire
Before: Most Christian art is related to personal objects (e.g., signet rings, lamps, sarcophagi) or family burial sites (e.g., catacomb paintings). Some house churches have artworks on the walls. In these cases, the art is meant to symbolize a spiritual ideal or truth or membership in the Christian community. Popular are those themes relating to new life, such as miracles and the Jonah story, and themes that suggest the life of the community, such as meal themes, the Good Shepherd, prayer, and the Apostles.
After: First Christianity is legalized, and then some decades later it becomes the official religion of the Empire. Churches are built & decorated, and Christianity emerges from the shadows. Portraits of Christ, Mary, & the Saints are common. The art is still symbolic of the ideals of Christianity, but this is in keeping with the sense of the whole world’s being symbolic of the heavenly realm but faulty and imperfect. Icons are understood as windows to the eternal realm in that they share the same “form” with Jesus or the saint they depict. Emphasis shifts from the idea of new life to the triumph of Christ the King.
Around 1300: High Middle Ages Morph into the Renaissance
This turning point is relevant only to the Christianity of Western Europe. The art tradition in Eastern Christianity (Byzantine, Russian, Ethiopian, Coptic, Greek) did not experience these changes.
Before: Christian art decorates churches and illuminates Bibles and prayer books. It is still symbolic of heavenly truths and other spiritual ideas. Theology is mostly happening in monasteries and is grounded in the practice of reading Scripture prayerfully and often, spiritually or symbolically. Painting is rather flat or two-dimensional, and even sculpture is often fairly two-dimensional.
After: Theology’s main home moved from the monasteries (monastic theology) to the universities (scholastic theology) between 1100 & 1300. Rather than contemplative reading of Scripture as the base of theology, reason, logic, and systematization are the new approach. In this approach, God isn’t something far away & completely mysterious. Because of God’s Revelation and Creation, some aspects of God’s nature, God’s being, can be thought out and defined. God is ‘substantial,’ and human beings can know something of ‘substance.’ Artists are no longer painting symbols but are trying to paint solid forms, ‘substantial’ figures that look like they lived and breathed.
Around 1600: Renaissance Morphs into Baroque/Enlightenment
This turning point is relevant mainly to the Christianity of Western Europe. The art tradition in Eastern Christianity did not experience these changes for the most part. Russia experienced impact in the secular art tradition but only minor impact in the icon tradition.
Before: Painting and sculpting the human form had reached representational perfection in the late 1400s & early 1500s with the superstar artists Leonardo da Vinci & Michelangelo Buonarroti. Leonardo perfected the depiction of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. Artists are painting the perfection of human beauty, the perfection of God’s world. The Crusades and the Black Death cause a shift in Europe toward a more urban, mercantile, trade-based economy, and humanism or a focus on human values is a natural outgrowth of Scholasticism. This same spirit of learning and exploration fills people like Columbus and Magellan. This humanism also results in a challenge to Roman Christian authority. Reformers protest abuses that have arisen in Roman Catholicism. Luther, Calvin, and others break off from the Roman Catholic Church in what is called the Protestant Reformation.
After: The art world tires of painting perfection. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio in particular understands God as being for real people—poor, sinful people—not for perfection and beauty. He starts painting real life, which is dirty and imperfect. Peasants with dirty feet kneel before Mary and Jesus. But this ushers in permission to paint other aspects of real life that don’t obviously relate to God. Secular subjects become popular with the merchant class; the Church and the nobility are no longer the only patrons of the arts. On the thinking side of things, Descartes says, “I think, therefore I am.” He doesn’t say, “God made me, therefore I am.” This is a shift of thinking of enormous proportions. He can’t prove that God made him, but he can prove that he is thinking. Scientific method, basing conclusions on evidence observable through the senses, is the great new thing. God takes a back seat for many thinkers.
Late 1800s: Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, & Freud
This turning point is very relevant to the Christianity of Western Europe & North America. The art tradition in Eastern Christianity has, for the most part, not experienced these changes. In the rest of the world, atheism has a presence but in a different way than in Europe, Australia, & North America.
Europe, Australia, & North America
Before: In Europe, Australia, and North America, secular subjects are far more common than Christian subjects in the art of the 1700s and 1800s, partly because most Protestants are a bit uneasy about the risk of idolatry, and partly because Catholics had a building and decorating boom in the 1600s, but art production dropped off after that. Artists’ attention to secular subjects turns especially toward landscapes and grandeur, or what is called, the ‘sublime.’ Sometimes these works managed to convey both the beauty and the vast, magnificent power (sometimes frightening power) of nature. Sometimes these are understood as a reflection of God’s grandeur. But most of the explicitly Christian art is safe. Catholics don’t want to stretch any boundaries at the risk of violating accepted Catholic doctrine; Protestants don’t want to risk idolatry or Catholicity.
After: This turning point began with Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, & Freud and their respective turns away from religion, but the transition period may not be over yet. The two World Wars, especially the Holocaust and the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki speak loudly to many people of an absence of God, rather than God’s presence. After World War II, Eastern Europe suffers religious suppression similar to the suppression in Russia during the Soviet Era. Positivist thinkers ridicule religious belief. Many 20th-century artists held atheist worldviews. Sometimes this results in artworks that simply ignore Christianity; other times it results in sharp critiques of Christianity. More often, atheist artists, when they engage religion at all, do so as if in dialogue. Art asks questions of Christianity rather than promoting it, as it had done for more than a millennium and a half. Throughout this time, Christian artists are making Christian artworks, but they are not in the majority, and they often use modern styles, resulting in new ways art expresses Christianity. (For how to engage with abstract art, see Making “Sense” of Abstract Art.) In the last few decades, we are seeing philosophy turn back toward God. It will be interesting to see how the art world handles this shift.
Russia & China (& Eastern Europe)
Before: Russia before the Communist Revolution (1917) is an empire whose major religious community is Orthodox Christian. Icons are the primary form of Christian art, and they are made as regularly as they ever have been. Christian presence in China has grown and has been abolished several times before the missionary boom in the 1700s and 1800s. Because much of that missionary presence is Protestant, there is not a noticeable Christian art culture. World War I causes a reduction in the number of missionaries, but the indigenous Chinese Christian community is growing during the 1920s and 1930s. Under Japanese occupation from 1931 to 1945, especially after Pearl Harbor in 1941, Western Christian missionaries are mostly expelled from China or taken prisoner, so the Chinese Christian communities develop largely without Western influences.
After: In the Soviet Union, religion is suppressed, and anti-religion campaigns are waged again and again from 1917 until the late 1980s. In China it is discouraged from 1949 until 1966 and is then actively persecuted during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Religion continues to be discouraged in China until the 1990s. In Eastern Europe, religion is suppressed off and on from the late 1940s to the 1980s/1990s. The relationship between atheism and Christianity is different in these places than it is in Western Europe, Australia, and North America. In these latter places, people are free to either believe in God or not believe in God; on the surface, there is little at stake for the person deciding. In the Communist countries where religion is repressed and/or persecuted, a lot is at stake. People hold on to God and religion as a vision of hope, as a hope that someday they will be freed from totalitarian oppression. Some of the Christian art in these places has tried to accommodate the political forces; some of it has critiqued the oppressive regimes. It will be interesting to see what happens with the art as these countries embrace market forces and globalization in the absence of the persecutions that tend to mobilize and solidify Christian identity.
Asia/Pacific (except China and Australia), Africa, Central and South America
Before: European colonization of the rest of the world began in the 1500s but really took hold in the 1600s and 1700s. With armies and merchants come missionaries. The missionaries bring European Christianity to the Americas, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia. The people meld the European Christianity with their own cultures so that in practice, Christianity takes on hybridized forms. This is true in the Christian arts produced in these places as well. Ironically, Christianity is sometimes one of the rallying points for nationalism when these peoples revolt against the colonizers. (North America and Australia are colonized for different reasons than these other places, so their history is a bit different.) Christian missionaries generally maintain a presence in these places after they gain independence from their colonizers.
After: Because Christianity is often a core part of a people’s national identity, the atheism of Communist politics, science, philosophy, and Freudian psychoanalysis seems to be less influential in these places. Even where the political ideas take hold, the anti-religion aspects do not. Instead, Marxism is intertwined with Christian ideas of liberation. In these cases, the liberation is not so much from totalitarian Communism (as it is in Poland) but from the economic and political oppression of governments that are exploiting the people for the sake of business interests. Christian art is often created to encourage such liberation, as in South Africa where art is part of the movement to overcome Apartheid. As globalization continues, it will be interesting to see what direction Christian art takes. When oppression is lifted, people tend to turn to religion less often.
