Tea at Trianon: The Context of Belief

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

Sunday, December 3, 2017

The Context of Belief

From The Catholic Herald:

Is something lost when a painting is removed from a church or a private chapel? Can you still have a profound, prayerful, religious experience even in a crowded gallery? “Oh, I don’t have the slightest doubt that it’s possible,” says Finaldi. “I do think, though, that much has been lost.” Many of the paintings in the Sainsbury Wing, for example, “come from a church environment, or, anyway, a devotional or faith context of some sort. A place where people would have looked upon these images as if looking on the divine. They would have looked on a painting of the Virgin Mary and appealed to her for their sick family members and asked for her graces to be given.

“So the context is lost, not just the physical context, but over time the belief context has become much, much weaker. To the point where people often don’t know what they are seeing in some of these pictures.”

This is partly a problem of education. The school syllabus is ever more secular. Children are not taught Bible stories, hymns, and saints and their attributes. How do you bring on a new generation of art historians – of art lovers and gallery-goers for that matter – if they cannot tell Delilah by her shears and St Anthony the Great by his pig?

“It is worrying,” says Finaldi. “Not just because these are Christian references that are not being understood or picked up. It’s about the cultural environment in which a generation emerges. There is a rich visual language tradition, a rich symbolic language in literature, which we find increasingly difficult to understand if we are not attuned to allegory, if we are not familiar with the great themes of classical antiquity and the Bible. If we are not aware of the background, then our experience is impoverished.”

The myths of antiquity are as essential as the Bible to our understanding of Milton, Shakespeare, Titian, Veronese and Botticelli. We need to know Ovid, Homer, the Old and New Testaments. “Whether it is Noah or David and Goliath: these are stories that are embedded in our psyche and in our culture,” Finaldi says. “To know the sources is always an enriching experience. It’s not about being clever. It’s not about declaring a position with regard to religion. It’s about understanding the roots of our own culture, how we got to where we are.” (Read more.)