A Landmark in Liturgical Art

Extract

The worst enemies of an art are those of its own household, the people with natural talent but no aesthetic education, and whose technical training too often merely gives them greater facility in expressing and more show of authority in propagating their own bad taste. For how many art schools, even among the best, teach anything of the general and fundamental principles on which all craftsmanship should be based? In an age of classic art instinctive good taste might be looked for as part of natural talent, but in these days the critical faculty is warped before it has time to develop, by low standards in music, literature, architecture and art in the narrower sense of the word, whether domestic, decorative or pictorial. Even Rubens, for all his genius, did not escape the coarsening influences which the later Renaissance left behind it; and his pictures could never be universally loved for their beauty as are those of a Fra Angelico who, although his drawing is not always accurate, had lived in fourteenth century Florence. How many potential musicians might be found in a jazz band, writers among journalists who have never read an English classic, and artists in the perpetrators of the so-called devotional art displayed in ‘Catholic repositories.’

L'ouvroir liturgique, quoted in Vestments and Vesture (pp. 220-221) on the subject of professional workshops, says:

The unlucky thing is that everyone imagines that he himself possesses that quality of good taste which, in the realm of the beautiful, occupies the position which belongs to good judgment in the realm of reason—innate qualities both of them, but capable of development by practice and study. They require a clear vision, deliberate choice, and the power of drawing the particular out of the general . . . The aesthetic part of the work should be allotted to persons with aesthetic gifts and training.