Tea at Trianon: Walking Inside Christian Eschatology

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, June 24, 2025

Walking Inside Christian Eschatology

From Hilary White at The Sacred Images Project:

In last week’s post for all subscribers, we talked about the iconographic programmes; the carefully planned cycles of images in fresco or mosaic, that covered all the surfaces of the interiors of Byzantine and western early medieval churches. These cycles structured how sacred images were arranged to tell the story of salvation, that would have been understood by worshippers, transforming the space inside the church into an elevated, sanctified place where those realities were made present.
In many churches, all the way up to the late Gothic (or “proto-Renaissance”), a typical feature of these programmes was the back wall of the church - the opposite end of the nave from the sanctuary, or the west wall - being decorated with often shocking and arresting images of the Last Judgment. This was an innovation that came to Western Christendom during the 11th and 12th centuries.
In today’s post for all subscribers, we’ll look closely at three examples of these commanding scenes, starting in the period when Italo-Byzantine was established throughout the Italian peninsula and was beginning to merge into the Romanesque style. We’ll look at Torcello’s Basilica of Santa Maria Assunta, a mid-11th century grand, multi-tier mosaic cycle and Sant’Angelo in Formis (Capua) early 12th c. where Romanesque style first appeared. We’ll briefly compare these antecedents to the great fresco of the Arena Chapel in Padua, where Giotto took the motif and translated it into his more naturalistic style. (Read more.)