Art for art's sake

What will happen to our work when we die? Most of it will be destroyed, of course.

Courtesy Buffalo Religious Arts Center.

With its imposing Romanesque spire, the former St. Francis Xavier Church looms over its surrounding neighborhood. This is working-class Black Rock, at the northernmost tip of the city of Buffalo, but the church isn’t unique. As was true in so many northeastern cities, the Catholic Church was the center of working-class and immigrant life in Buffalo. Stand on the top of the parking ramp on the Broadway Market and try to count the spires surrounding you in the East Side. You’ll lose track before you finish.

Having grown up in a Catholic family in Buffalo, I’ve been in many of these churches. Their parishes may have slumped into disrepute, their worshippers moved to the suburbs, but as long as there were people around to care for them, their sanctuaries were treasured spaces.

Courtesy Buffalo Religious Arts Center.

What the mega-church is to modern worshippers, the 19th- and early 20th-century Catholic church was to immigrants. Some of them, like St. Stanilaus, Mother Church of Buffalo’s Polish community, seated thousands in their heyday. They were filled with beautiful windows, statuary, paintings and tile work, often imported at great cost from Europe.

A combination of demographics and scandal has led to many of those great churches being shuttered. What to do with them is a problem facing cities like Buffalo. They’re not suitable for most modern purposes (including worship), but they are too important to tear down.

Courtesy Buffalo Religious Arts Center.

St. Francis Xavier Church has moved on to new life as the Buffalo Religious Arts Center, founded in 2008. Its vision is acute and forward-thinking, so much so that I’m afraid it’s ahead of its time. Usually a period of iconoclasm and destruction must be endured before we sweep up the few remaining bits of art and hang them on museum walls.

Courtesy Buffalo Religious Arts Center.

This came to mind because I was recently asked a related question: “Have you made any provision for what will happen to your unsold artwork when you die?” It was such a cheerful thought that I took the living will I’d been filling out and stuffed it in the woodstove.

Like every artist, I have a pile of unsold artwork hanging around my studio. What happens to it will be determined by the market, not me. If my work is selling well at the time of my death, my kids can hire an art curator to market it posthumously. If I’ve been forgotten in the scrap heap of time, they can take my unsold paintings out to the burn pile and get rid of them. Once I’m dead, it’s of no importance to me.

Courtesy Buffalo Religious Arts Center.

That’s the first step in the inevitable winnowing of an artist’s oeuvre, and in fact, until recent times, nobody really thought much about it. It’s what drives up prices for dead artists’ work.

Looking at what we have in museums is, in fact, very instructive about this process. It’s absurd to think that no artists before the Impressionists ever sketched a meadow or drew an abstract sketch, but very few examples of these survive. The Greeks and Romans left us the pantheon of gods and heroes. Medieval and Renaissance art was concerned with our relationship with God. Landscape sketches and abstractions weren’t important to the culture of the time, so they were ignored and ultimately destroyed.

Christmas Carol, excommunicated

“Christmas Angel,” by Carol L. Douglas

I was listening to Mantovani’s “Christmas Carols” (1954) with my young friend Casey Jones Costello, who is my go-to guy for all things mid-century and musical. If modern Christmas music annoys you, you should give this album a listen: it’s your grandparents’ Christmas.

The album includes—of course—the 19th century carol “O Holy Night.” This lovely melody has been recorded by everyone from Enrico Caruso to Josh Groban. It is many people’s favorite (including mine). Imperiously commanding all humanity to “fall on your knees!” is as close as I’ll ever get to being an operatic diva.

The lyrics to “O Holy Night” were written in 1847 by Placide Cappeau. His hand having been shot off at the age of eight, Cappeau was unable to follow his father into the family barrel-making business.  Instead, he took degrees in literature and law and became a successful dealer in wine and spirits. He was a writer on the side, hanging with the young poets who formed the literary group called the Félibrige, dedicated to preserving the Provençal langue d’oc.

“Santa,” by Carol L. Douglas.

In short, Cappeau was the perfect traditionalist type to pen a poem for Christmas Eve services, as his parish priest requested. According to Cappeau, he wrote Minuit, Chrétien on a stagecoach to Paris somewhere between Mâcon and Dijon.

For music, he turned to his pal Adolphe Adam. Adam was the son of a prominent composer and musician, but his own career was not so august. Having failed to secure a Prix de Rome at conservatory, he went on to write vaudeville music. At the time he wrote the music to “O, Holy Night,” he was deep into a failed scheme to open a fourth opera house in Paris.

“O Holy Night” premiered in Roquemaure in 1847 by opera singer Emily Laurey. It was an immediate and enduring hit. Adam himself called it the Marseillaise of French Catholicism.

“Christmas reindeer ornament with double rainbow,” by Carol L. Douglas

And therein lay the rub. Europe was fast approaching the revolutions of 1848. In France, they would end the Orleans monarchy forever. Revolution is in general no respecter of religion, and the French Revolution of 1789-1799 had been particularly brutal for the Catholic Church and its clergy.

The Church recognized the song for what it was—a pop tune, not sacred music—and its composers as primarily socialist reformers, not Catholics. “O Holy Night” was excommunicated and would stay that way for decades.

Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother;
And in His name all oppression shall cease.

Imagine that being translated into American politics of the time, which was galvanized by the question of slavery. In 1855, New England transcendentalist minister John Sullivan Dwight (widely credited as the first music journalist), translated “O Holy Night” into English. It was a hit in New England, and remains one everywhere today.

Catacombs of Priscilla

The orans posture (hands up, pleading) is a common trope in religious art, but the audience implies a preacher. From the newly restored Catacombs of Priscilla. (All images from the Catacombes de Priscilla website.)

Newly restored frescoes in the Catacombs of Priscilla have ignited a firestorm of speculation about whether the early church allowed women priests. I read these stories thinking this was another case of the popular press suffering from too little knowledge. Now I’m not at all sure they're wrong.

The dominant cults of Rome at the time, including the Imperial Cult, honored women as members of the imperial family, priestesses, and goddesses. The Christian citizens of Rome would not have found a woman in the role of priestess to be particularly strange.

Among the images in the Catacombs’ Capella Graeca is a fresco of the Fractio Panis, showing six men and one woman breaking bread in the Eucharist. No, she’s not the central priest, but then again, is there one?

Paul—often cited as the authority for keeping women from religious roles—refers to Phoebe as a “deacon” in Romans 16:2 and clearly held Priscilla in high regard as a teacher and missionary.

That the catacombs are called after Priscilla and not her husband, the Consul Aquila, is in itself informative. The couple is mentioned six times in the New Testament. Acts 18 claims that the couple had recently come from Rome to Corinth where they met the apostle Paul (implying that Christianity had been taught in Rome before Paul got there).

Paul’s prohibitions against women preachers seem to conflict with his delight in the work of women like Priscilla. But this is just another example of the syncretic thinking of the ancients, which we moderns seemingly cannot embrace. It was Aquila who became a bishop in Asia Minor and not Priscilla, but Christianity had a way of adapting itself to the political realities of place. At any rate, they were both martyred, so for them it’s all water over the dam now.

A beautiful image of Christ with his lambs from the Catacombs of Priscilla.

The Catacombs of Priscilla are among many such catacombs in Europe. Generally, these were also used for religious services when Christianity was suppressed. In the case of the Catacombs of Priscilla, that was the mid-second century through fourth century AD, a time of intermittent but violent suppression of the new Christian religion.

This was not an insignificant site in the early church. Two early popes—Marcellinus (296 -304) and Marcellus I (308-309) and many martyrs are entombed there, and many other popes and martyrs were once there but have been removed elsewhere.

The previous interpretation of the frescos was that they illustrated the deuterocanonical story of Susannah. Why such a minor story would receive such treatment in such a prominent tomb is inexplicable, and the Fractio Panis, above, makes no sense in that context.

There are three major burial chambers in the Catacombs:  the “arenarium” or sand-quarry, the cryptoporticus, (an underground area to get away from the summer heat), and the hypogeum with the tombs of the Acilius Glabrio family, of which Priscilla was a member. 

It would be a pity to view the Catacombs of Priscilla only through the lens of gender equality. It contains some of the earliest known wall paintings of saints and Christian symbols, including the oldest known Marian paintings, from the third century AD.

Still, the gender equality question is fascinating, and this meticulous restoration brings the issue to light.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!