An article I wrote entitled "Heaven Made Manifest: An Architectural Solution for The Spirit of the Liturgy," unpacking what Papa Ratzinger's writings and the Motu Proprio mean for ecclesiastical architecture and planning in both the ordinary and extraordinary forms, was published in a recent edition of Antiphon: A Journal of Liturgical Renewal (12.3, 2008), including some illustrations from my hand. The full article should eventually be posted on the Society for Catholic Liturgy website, but in the mean time, here's a few of the images I prepared for its publication, a number of liturgical designs in various permutations of the Viennese Sezession style, chosen mostly because of its ability to bear simplification fairly easily, thus allowing a way around budgetary constraints that has not been yet explored in great depth.







And here are some sketches for a hypothetical cathedral I imagined for the Steubenville diocese, dedicated to the Triumph of the Cross. The larger of the two has been featured here before, but the smaller study is new.

One of our readers and a friend and colleague of mine, Evan McWilliams, recently passed on a great discovery to me he'd made while visiting the cathedral archives at St. John the Divine in New York, two proposals by the great Cram for the cathedral's high altar, which sadly never came to pass. I had heard rumors of their existence, but had no idea what the finished product had looked like, nor how far the design had gotten before being abandoned. Evan writes:

Part of my archival research this past week involved a look at the various incarnations of a reredos for the cathedral. There are multiple versions by R.A. Cram from the 1930s and correspondence indicating a possible design by J.N. Comper dating all the way back to 1915. Below are two of Cram's designs and a picture of the apse without reredos more or less as it currently stands as well as a photo of the Seville reredos that inspired his ideas for a proper design. I think the lack of a good focus for the amazing length and height of the nave really does the building as a whole a disservice. Cram said in a 1935 letter to Bishop Manning, "Having lived in the shadow, so to speak, of the Seville reredos, I realize its incomparable majesty and its unique place in the sphere of religious art. I thought I could visualize the cathedral, when once the choir is reconstructed [this took place in 1939 --E. McW.] and the great screen taken down, with this great area of smouldering gold drawing the whole thing together." His vision was, as always, impeccable.

Instead, sadly, there is nothing, and the great chancel, a stupendous and vast liturgical space, centers on a broad, low altar and an odd assemblage of candlesticks and Asiatic pots. Only something spectacular and gigantic could fill that gap. Fortunately, the designs are there if anyone has the sense to look.


An earlier proposal for the reredos. In some ways, this is a more nuanced design than the final proposal, but I think it lacks the weight and mass to serve as the focus for the gigantic nave and even bigger crossing.



The final design for the reredos which, as Evan notes "relates much more successfully to the apse and the building as a whole." Its massiveness and rich gilding are the only thing that can stand out in the vast space, while there are quite a few moments of subtlety, such as the Comper-like fan-vaults that crown the vast structure.


Note how oddly cluttered and at the same time empty the sanctuary seems without any sort of reredos. A temporary one of some sort existed before the '40s, when it was demolished to give an uninterrupted vista to...well, not very much, actually. But even that older altarpiece was itself rather underpowered from the few photos I have seen of it.


Seville. Evan: "Smouldering gold is right. Fantastic."

A very charming low-relief woodcarving of St. Swithun by the English church furnisher Martin Travers; the patron saint of rain is shown with a lining of droplets inside his cope and a sun in splendor for a morse, a wonderful bit of iconographic 'wit.' The lettering below is also particularly fine. (Source)

A rhyme runs:

St Swithun's day if thou dost rain
For forty days it will remain.
St Swithun's day if thou be fair
For forty days 'twill rain na mair.

Saint Swithun receives his patronage due to a postmortem weather miracle of sorts, as Wikipedia notes:

Swithun was buried out of doors, rather than in his cathedral, apparently at his own request, so that "the sweet rain from heaven may fall upon my grave" [and also, as an act of humility, the feet of travellers: ubi et pedibus praetereuntium et stillicidiis ex alto rorantibus esset obnoxius -MGA]. In 971 it was decided to move his body to a new indoor shrine, and it is said that the ceremony was delayed by 40 days of torrential rain, a sign of Swithun's displeasure at the move. (Source).

His feast is coming up on July 15, so be sure to bring an umbrella.

As an aside, I find it interesting there is no patron saint invoked against rain, suggesting perhaps getting a bit wet is a strictly modern concern.

My previous post on one of the odder subgenres of Victorian art--well-fed cardinals leading a chaste but jovial dolce vita--and its peculiar, if light, mood of anticlerical satire, inspired an excellent and lavisly-illustrated post on the subject by Mr. Adam Mitchell Bond, over at his site, the Gentleman's Journal Do have a look round. Whatever the original intent of the painter, the paintings themselves are hard not to love in this dour age. Especially this one, which not only reminds one of our Sovereign Pontiff's love of cats while at the same time being a potent argument for the return of the tufted fascia, as one of our own readers has commented.

Matthew Alderman. The St. Bernard Triptych. Ink. June 2009.
Private Collection, New York.

To round out this series, I would like to leave you with one image showing the three panels placed together in context. In the original, the drawings are placed in three separate windows in a single mat, but this arrangement is closer to how I had initially planned to do the piece. You will note how the relative simplicity and austerity of the Holy Shoulder illustration contrasts the more feminine richness of the vision of the Virgin--an idea that came to me, in part, through the contrast of the Nativity and Passion elevations of the Sagrada Familia; and the black-and-white outline of the Cross provides a touch of asymmetry within this relatively balanced composition, creating what our friend Davis d'Ambly might term "incident." I will also say I am particularly pleasedwith the way the vision of Our Lady turned out, as I redrew her figure several times to get the proportions to where I was satisfied with them.

I do not have much more to add, though you will see how in the combined panels, Christ and Our Lady appear much higher in their panels than St. Bernard, the space above the head occupied by the Cistercian arms. This was because of my concern that placing all three at the same height might appear to reduce the Incarnate God and His Mother to mere attendants. Instead, while the saint in glory moves up within the composition as opposed to his more earthbound poses on either side, his glory is nonetheless placed within a hierarchy, with a clear space above for the the Virgin and her Son.

For enlargements of this work, and descriptions of its symbolism, you should see Part I, Part II and Part III posted earlier this week.

***

Our readers occasionally ask if I do commissions. I do, quite frequently, for occasions ranging from ordinations and entrances into the convent to birthdays and even a few logos for orgainzations and companies. I am presently preparing to design a large tapestry, which opens up all sorts of interesting vistas. Please feel free to contact me if you are interested. There are also many other fine illustrators out there on the web who would be glad of work. While our role today is, in great measure, to preserve our heritage, if this renewal is going to go anyhwere, it must also be to expand it forward in time through the creativity of new work--vetus ars nova, "old art in new ways."

The following is a conversation between the pastor and three junior curates in a Boston parish around the time of World War I, taken from Henry Morton Robinson's charmingly-drawn clerical potboiler, The Cardinal, 1950, pp. 59-60:

"I'd like to instruct some boys in plain chanting."

The proposal infuriated Monaghan. "There'll be no plain chanting in St. Margaret's. This is a parish church, not a--a basilica." He pronounced the word as if it were the name of a disease.

Father Lyons sipped weakly at his glass of milk. Stephen stepped into the breach. "I'll train some altar boys, Father."

"The job is yours. And no fancy stuff, mind you. Just the responses in decent Latin, and some sense of respect for what they're supposed to be doing up there on the altar. You understand?"

"I understand, Father."

Pastor Monaghan said grace hastily and rose from the table, eager to get at the cigar he kept locked in a humidor in his room. The three curates sat silently looking at one another.

"What's he got against plain chanting?" the milky one asked petulantly. "It's very beautiful. Pius X wrote a Motu Proprio about it, you know."

"So he did," said Steve. "Isn't that the one where he says the mechanical instruments are no substitute for the glories of the human voice?"

"That's it," said Milky eagerly. "The Sovereign Pontiff urges upon all Catholic pastors the importance of training choirs of children in plain chanting. Furthermore"--evidently Father Lyons had the docment by heart--"he inveighs against the laxity of responses from the congregation and says that--"

"Listen, you two," put in Paul Ireton. "Consider the facts surrounding the writing of that Motu Proprio, will you? In the first place, Pius X was a Patriarch of Venice. Remember Venice, the place that held the glorious East in fee? No motorboats in the canals, no electric lights--just a lot of gondolas, singing boatmen, palaces on stilts, and all that. Fine. That's the tradition Pius X was working in. But now you get a man like our pastoricus here, a gadget-loving westerner who doesn't know a square note from a round, living in an industrial town where electricity is cheap. Why in heaven's name should he prefer plain song to the nice ten-thousand-dollar electric organ he's just installed?"

"But plain singing is a heritage from the earliest Church," said Milky.

"Plus three centuries of British--that is to say, Anglican--tradition," said Paul Ireton. "You wouldn't expect a man sprung from landlord shooters to embrace the practices of the landlord, would you?"

"You're being rather parochial," sniffed Milky.

"You mean," corrected Paul Ireton, "I'm being rather Boston-Irish."

Steve sipped his coffee, reserving judgment. He had always wondered what curates talked about; surely it couldn't always be as good as this.

Here is the final panel in the sequence of images in my recent commission depicting events from the life of St. Bernard. (See the other two here and here). The three are displayed together in one frame and my client hopes to use it as the focus of a small house altar.

Matthew Alderman. Christ Reveals the Wound of the Holy Shoulder to St. Bernard. Ink. June 2009. Private Collection, New York City.

The event depicted concerns this vision of St. Bernard:

It is related in the annals of Clairvaux that St. Bernard asked our Lord which was His greatest unrecorded suffering, and Our Lord answered: "I had on My Shoulder, while I bore My Cross on the Way of Sorrows, a grievous Wound, which was more painful than the others, and which is not recorded by men. Honor this wound with thy devotion, and I will grant thee whatsoever thou dost ask through its virtue and merit. And in regard to all those who shall venerate this Wound, I will remit to them all their venial sins, and will no longer remember their mortal sins." (Source).

There are also a number of prayers and devotions to the Holy Shoulder, such as the following:

O Loving Jesus, meek Lamb of God, I miserable sinner, salute and worship the most Sacred Wound of Thy Shoulder on which Thou didst bear Thy heavy Cross, which so tore Thy flesh and laid bare Thy Bones as to inflict on Thee an anguish greater than any other wound of Thy Most Blessed Body. I adore Thee, O Jesus most sorrowful; I praise and glorify Thee, and give Thee thanks for this most sacred and painful Wound, beseeching Thee by that exceeding pain, and by the crushing burden of Thy heavy Cross to be merciful to me, a sinner, to forgive me all my mortal and venial sins, and to lead me on towards Heaven along the Way of Thy Cross. Amen.

The image depicts Our Lord bearing His wound to the saint, surrounded by the implements of the Passion, the arma Christi of the cross, and a small shield depicting the Five (Other) Wounds. I was unable to ascertain which shoulder the wound was on, as Christ is shown carrying the cross on either shoulder depending on the circumstances, so I chose the one that suited the composition best.

I will post an image showing the three panels together in context Monday.

Stolen blatantly from a Jesuit friend's email colophon:

"The literary decline had begun earlier and by mid-century the country had entered into the dark night of bad taste."

--Fr. William V. Bangert, SJ, A History of the Society of Jesus, ch. IV: "1615-1687:Challenges From New Political and Cultural Hegemonies", sec. 4: "Portugal and Spain."

From a friend's wall posting on Facebook:

...he [a rubrician] manages still to be confusing every so often, such as this one point where I think he's calling for the thurifer to employ quantum physics so as to walk through a priest.

Ah yes, the Jedi rite.

The Transalpine Redemptorists (or, more correctly, the Sons of the Most Holy Redeemer) recently went on pilgrimage to the Holy City. Among other stops, they had a look round the Oratory, where they discovered a very curious object indeed:

When Saint Philip decided that he would no longer go on the pilgrimages to the 7 basilicas, he allowed this life-sized image to be painted of him and to be carried on the pilgrimage in his place. It was therefore painted during his lifetime!

I was initially baffled by this bit of history, until it occurred to me it had to be St. Philip having a little joke at the expense of his followers, perhaps reminding them that it was the churches they were going to see, not him. Plus, from a man who specialized in kooky penances like ordering one of his spiritual children to wander round Rome in a fur coat at the height of summer, ordering his disciples to carry round a giant cardboard cutout of himself would definitely be business as usual. And commissioning such an object would be a pretty good act of mortification (in a roundabout, backwards sort of way) from a man whose quest to be holy without anyone figuring out led him to shave half his beard and hide his breviary behind a comic book.

One wonders, though, if rival gangs of Jesuits would waylay them and steal Philip Neri as a prank...oh, wait, never mind, I'm confusing that with the time my high-school quiz bowl team stole the opposition's lucky cutout of Captain Janeway and hid it in a tree. My mistake.

Some images from the extraordinary Goodhue-designed Altar Book, here taken from the propers for Easter Sunday. Click to enlarge - it's worth it!

The French composer Charpentier authored six separate Te Deum settings; only four remain extant. This one, the most famous, is thought to have been composed for use in the victory celebrations following the Peace of Steinkirk in 1692. Incidentally, the Flemish battle of the same name gave its name to a sort of cravat worn on informal occasions in the court of Louis XIV.

Perhaps this is less of a no-brainer than one might assume. One common line of argument I had read suggested the relics had been stolen and dispersed by Saracen pirates sometime during the early Middle Ages, so it is somewhat of a relief to discover they're still down there. More intriguing is the fact the bones, like St. Peter's, were wrapped in purple cloth, suggesting they were treated with reverence and swathed with costly fabric from a very early age.



I am also intrigued by the recent discovery of a fresco depicting St. Paul with many of the same characteristics most images of him possess today--long beard, high forehead, a bit balding. One scholar theorizes this image actually derives from depicting Peter and Paul with the ancient pagan iconography of the great philosophers--a fascinating idea, and one I even rather like, but one I am somewhat skeptical about, even if I love the idea as Peter playing the pragmatic Aristotle to Paul's more mystical, abstracted Aristotle or Plotinus. It may well be the case. But the splendid images of Christ as a young, majestic Phoebus Apollo and many other borrowings from Greek myth that pop up in early Christian symbolism, while they persisted fairly late in some quarters (I know of some quite charming Byzantine images that show the shepherd David being inspired by a muse-like figure while an allegorical representation of nature pops up amid the hills; there is occasionally a personification of the Jordan that looks like Neptune's brother shown in images of the Baptism of Christ as well), they did eventually die out, and much of our Christian iconography can be organically traced back to Syrian sources. I certainly see nothing wrong with this Greek heritage, and rather enjoy its revival for limited engagements (Christ the Sun of Justice, etc.) but I wonder if perhaps this portrait of Paul has a different origin. I just wonder why these visual traditions would make the cut, and not the others. I am speaking here as a rank amateur, and there may be a great deal I am missing.

Furthermore, much of this speculation seems to rest on the fact portraiture was forbidden to Jews of Paul's time. I am unsure if this is true, but I do know that around this time there was pretty substantial figural art appearing in the mosaic pavements of numerous synagogues, which suggests a laxer attitude towards the prohibitions against image-making than one might imagine at first glance. And Paul would be, anyway, the first one to remind you that Mosaic Law was no longer binding on the new Christians.

Continuing our excursion into one of my latest illustration commissions, a sequence of images depicting events from the life of St. Bernard done for a client in New York City, here is a view of the central panel, depicting the saint in glory.

Matthew Alderman. S. Bernard of Clairvaux. Ink. June 2009. Private Collection, New York City.

Above his head, two angels bear the coat of arms of the Cistercian Order, while below, St. Bernard bears his crozier in his right hand, the abbatial veil curling around its shaft. His posture is derived in part from Zurbarán's marvelous painting of St. Francis upright in the tomb (ca. 1630/34). Numerous smaller details depict the saint's various attributes in discrete ways--the bees worked into the foliage of his crozier-head, representing his title of Doctor Melifluus; the arms of the Templar Order, whose rule he wrote, on the knob of its staff; another shield depicting the mitres of the three dioceses he rejected; an angel presenting him with a model of the abbey of Clairvaux, and a scroll inscribed with the opening passage of the Canticle of Canticles, on which he frequently preached.

For those of you who missed it, the first installment of this series can be found here. Tomorrow I will share the final panel in the sequence, depicting Christ's revelation of the Holy Shoulder to the saint.

A random touch of architecture: these golden onion domes crown the collection of chapels known as the Terem Churches in the Moscow Kremlin. The cross springing from the crescent, I am told, is said to represent Christ issuing from the womb of the Virgin.

A fun reflection on the Colombian tomato festival-cum-massive food fight La Tomatina and conversion to the Catholic faith from Fr. Longnecker is over at his blog, Standing on My Head.

One of our readers was curious about the painting of the laughing cardinal I posted Monday. I'm not sure who the artist was, or even where I ran across it online, but it's an example of a curious subgenre popular in the 19th century showing richly-dressed churchmen lounging about in equally opulent interiors. (The example above is by the Frenchman Georges Croegaert). In some cases, there's a touch of the absurd to them, such as one I ran across of a rather tubby cardinal in scarlet choir cassock fishing off the side of a bucolic riverbank. (Though considering cardinals often wore the sacred purple to the opera before Garibaldi put the papal court in mourning, this is, while weird, less weird than one might suppose.) There is probably a touch of anti-clericalism to such rollicking depictions of the clergy, especially given the excess of ormolu that crouds the background, though nearly all the examples I've seen tend towards a low-grade, rather sympathetic view of their subjects. I suppose such satires only maintain their bite of if one assumes that the sacred priesthood must always be ashes and frowns.

Here are a few of the more entertaining examples of the species I've found trawling the web. The following are by Bernard Louis Borione, a French academic painter who was particularly associated with the theme.








Another example of the style by a different artist, Leo Herrmann.

Bertram Goodhue's handsome design for a bishop's throne for the unbuilt Los Angeles Episcopal Cathedral.

I recently completed a large commission for an original piece of art for a client in New York City, a series of three interrelated illustrations of scenes from the life of St. Bernard. I hope to share each of the three panels with our readers over the next few days, concluding with the three placed together in context.

Matthew Alderman. S. Bernard Healed by the Virgin.
Ink. June 2009. Private Collection, New York City.

This image is derived from an event described in St. Bernard of Clairvaux: Oracle of the Twelfth Century by the Abbé Maria Theodor Ratisbonne, a convert and the brother of the more famous fellow-convert Alphonse Ratisbonne:

One day, however, his [St. Bernard's] sufferings became so excessive that, no longer able to bear up against them, he called two of his brethren and begged them to go to the church and ask some relief of God. The brethren, touched with compassion, prostrated themselves before the altar, and prayed with great abundance of tears. During this time, Bernard had a vision which ravished him with delight. The Virgin Mary, accompanied by St. Lawrence and St. Benedict, under whose invocation he had consecrated the two side altars of his church, appeared to the sick man. "The serenity of their faces," says William of St. Thierry, "seemed the expression of the perfect peace which surrounds them in Heaven." They manifested themselves so distinctly to the servant of God that he recognized them as soon as they entered his cell. The Virgin Mary, as well as the two saints, touched with their sacred hands the parts of Bernard's body where the pain was most acute; and, by this holy touch, he was immediately delivered from his malady; and the saliva which till then had been flowing from his mouth in a continuous stream ceased at the same time.

I used this commission, in part, to experiment with some stylistic elements derived from the work of the Irish stained glass designer Harry Clarke, whose work has appeared here in the past. The edging of sea-shells along the Virgin's cloak is partially inspired by Clarke's work, and also refers specifically to St. Bernard's devotion to the Virgin as Star of the Sea; the saint is thought to be the first to have invoked the Virgin under this title. The star motif on the Virgin's morse also recalls this. St. Bernard and St. Lawrence are visible in the background, with the ill saint curled up at the bottom of the panel.

Tomorrow, I will post an image of the central panel, showing the saint surrounded by his attributes.

A Morisco leader, who in his youth was page to [Hernado de] Talavera [first archbishop of a re-Christianized Granada] recalled how the archbishop went through the mountains of Granada to preach and say mass. Since there was no organ for music he made the natives play the zambra (a traditional dance), and during mass he always said the greeting, 'The Lord be with you,' in Arabic. 'I remember this,' the Morisco reminisced, 'as if it were yesterday."

--Henry Kamen, Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492-1763, p. 20.

Perhaps I'm not the only one, but my first reaction upon hearing that Michael Jackson had died of a heart attack was, "Wow, how weird," hardly a marker of Christian compassion. I felt a bit bad about this, but I said a brief prayer, and got on with things. Jackson was a deeply disturbing individual, for sure, but the creepy folks in the world need our prayers, too. So I figured that was that.

However, the matter came back to mind when I ran cross a nice little post on the First Things "First Thoughts" blog, linking the cult of celebrity that explains Jackson--and Princess Di, and La Hilton, and all the rest--with the curious case of "Saint" Guinefort, a valiant greyhound who defending a child from a snake, and got killed by his master for his trouble. The animal somehow managed to acquire a sort of popular, unapproved folk-cultus after death, until a local Dominican put a stop to this charmingly sentimental nonsense.

Popular devotion, it must be admitted, has netted quite a few great saints in its time--nearly everyone in the martyrology who lived before the turn of the last millenium owes his halo to a popular canonization that persisted due to the Chestertonian democracy of the dead, but such hauls also frequently included a lot of very odd and eminently forgettable people: some who were quite pious, if probably fictional, such as the baby Rumwold, who preached a sermon after his baptism and promptly died; Muirghein, who was turned into a mermaid for 600 years and appears to be a figment of Celtic imagination; or Josaphat, who appears to be a thinly-Christianized version of Buddha (considering some Buddhist sects appropriated the imagery of Christ on a white horse from Revelation, it's a fair trade).

Others were not so holy. The "martyr" Gotteshalk was killed in battle, and San Simon de Guatemala (a relatively rare instance of a post-medieval popular cultus) was actually a French revolutionary. And some, we've not got a clue. St. Amadour was some guy whose body they found quite randomly; admittedly incorrupt, but one does wonder.

For all our talk of romantic decentralization in the early Church, it's a good thing infallible Rome took over the process during the Middle Ages to make sure all the i's were dotted and t's crossed. (That being said, I am not letting Rome off the hook for crossing Sts. Ursula, Catherine, Barbara, et al., off the list, because a) being absurdly beautiful princesses holding all sorts b) given their veneration has stood at the heart of Christendom for ages, unlike some marginal greyhound or garbled French philosopher, we can be assured that someone upstairs was picking up the phone when we pray to them even if it might be a wrong number. But Catherine's Catherine and a three-day-old talking baby is another.)

We see some of this indiscriminate, if heartfelt, scrounging for the sacred, in today's cult of celebrity, as well. And in it, a lost opportunity for us, as Richard Scott Nokes notes in his piece:

In both cases, the cults were propelled by two engines: the ignorance of the people, and the desire to venerate. As with the angels, we are created as creatures of praise. We seem to be hardwired to praise something, to worship anything. Just as we will eat rotten food and filthy water if no healthy food and clean water are available, we will venerate dogs and celebrities if we see no truly worthy objects of veneration before us.

Etienne’s effort to stamp out the cult of Guinefort failed because he did not address the need of the people to venerate. Their impulse was good; it was simply directed at the wrong object and without providing a new object for veneration, Etienne was dooming the people of Sandrans to eventually drift back to their old ways.

It does the Church little good to cluck and shake our heads at the dismaying display of veneration for Michael Jackson, for in truth he is a martyr, a martyr to our culture’s true god: Celebrity. If we simply cut down Celebrity’s Asherah poles—John & Kate, Paris Hilton, Barack Obama—we leave the job half-completed, ensuring new idols will spring up in their place. If we take away rotten food and filthy water, we must replace it with healthy meat and milk. The worship of false saints, be they greyhounds or pop stars, needs to be replaced by the worship of the Lord. As the Philistines found with their idol Dagon, false idols cannot stand in the face of the one true Lord (1 Sam 5:2-5).

Once again, everything can be a call to conversion. Let's not blow it again, this time.

A fine piece of liturgical illustration, showing the distinctive style of the Belgian journal Bulletin Paroissal Liturgique published in the twenties, and an inspiration for my own work.