Tea at Trianon: Daniel Mitsui: The Innovative Traditionalist

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Daniel Mitsui: The Innovative Traditionalist

From Aleteia:

My outlook on religious art — and on everything, really — is traditionalist; that is to say, I believe that there is an objective content to religious art that is knowable from the way things were done in the past. The greatest merit of medieval art is that it honors this content.

In the art called Gothic, the traditions are vigorously presented. The Gothic artists managed to be both faithful and creative. Patristic exegesis informs every composition, and the theological and liturgical order is obvious. But otherwise Gothic art doesn’t look like anything that came before it; its inventors didn’t imitate an ancient precedent. It’s astonishing how quickly they mastered new technologies and new media, such as monumental sculpture and stained glass, and how quickly their influence spread among the Catholic nations.

I don’t think of Gothic as a mere historic style characteristic of a certain time and place; that would make of it a very boring thing. Rather, I think of it as the best example of an art made according to Catholic principles — principles that are enduringly true. Paradoxically, because Gothic art is indigenous to Christendom, it can communicate with the art of other traditional cultures especially well; the essential religious content is protected and the style is defined by something other than a chronological or national boundary. (Read more.)