Sacred Art

A journey to the primordial language at the source of all dreaming, art & mythmaking... In 1945, on a hill overlooking the Nile, a Gnostic text was accidentally unearthed after having been buried for seventeen hundred years. Within its aged pages there appeared the mysterious fragment: enter through the image. Taking this as his starting point, the noted Visionary artist L. Caruana guides his reader through a labyrinth of imagery, exposing the forgotten image-language at the root of all dreaming, art and mythmaking.... Drawing examples from a diversity of ancient cultures (Buddhism, Alchemy, Gnosticism) and from contemporary Visionary art (Dali, Fuchs, Johfra), many beautiful and intriguing symbols are illuminated with crystal clarity. Retracing the steps of 20th century mythmakers (Hesse, Kazantzakis) and scholars (Jung, Campbell, Eliade), Caruana opens our eyes to the ancient mythic patterns underlying our lives. As many fascinating dreams are offered and decyphered (Baudelaire, Descartes), a new key is given to us for the elucidation of dreams. By the end of this richly-illustrated study, we come to see how our own daily experiences are, in fact, heroic adventures culminating in rare moments of epiphany. We discover that our own lives are nothing less than "...a gradual unfolding of the Sacred."

In this article, I share my experience of participating in the shooting of the episode "Visions of God" in the third season of “The Story of God with Morgan Freeman” (http://natgeotv.com/ca/the-story-of-god-with-morgan-freeman ). The show aired in the National Geographic channel on Tuesday 19 March (2019) in the U.S. and Canada -- and April 27 in France and later in other places around the world. In the episode, I am taking Mr. Freeman through the Chartres Cathedral (France) and discussing how sacred architecture may be a gate to God. The program was shot in early November 2018. The article provides another perspective on the episode/program. Here is a link to the website version of the article : https://faithandform.com/feature/talking-with-god/ 

“The Story of God With Morgan Freeman” is available on natgeo.com/tv, Amazon, iTunes, Netflix, and other streaming media providers.

Our recent studies have shown that the phenomenon of the ‘spatial
icons’ played a great role in the sacred spaces of Byzantine churches and influenced several forms of artistic creativity. They appeared
in the air like visions, mediating in the transforming of a beholder
from earthly to heavenly realm. These images had a special meaning in the church space, which was conceived, according to Byzantine liturgical commentaries, as the ‘Heavenly Kingdom on Earth’. The Air with the dramaturgy of Light was a leading means in the forming of this sacred environment.  The paper deals with a new hypothesis concerning the phenomenon of luminous clouds in the domes of Byzantine churches. As recent studies have convincingly demonstrated, within the space of Justinian’s Hagia Sophia, which originally did not have any figurative images, the image of God was created by the most sophisticated system of lighting, including natural light of the sun, moon and stars, reflected by the golden mosaics, marble decorations, silver furnishings and vessels, as well as by the fire burning in innumerous, sometimes moving, lamps and in thousands of candles visible through the transparent smoke of incense. I argue that theidea of the luminous cloud was significant and quite alive in the minds of the sixth century people, when Hagia Sophia of Constantinople was being created. It  also preserved its significance in later phenomena of Byzantine hierotopy and iconography, including contemporary Russian Orthodox church, sometimes without any historical memory of the performative nature and the symbolical concept of the luminous cloud as the Kavod —Doxa — Slava Bozhia.

There are some who see art as a supplement to our lives; art is considered the activity of the wealthy. History, however, shows the contrary: it shows that since the time of the first primitive cultures, humans needed art–especially visual art–even before they developed a written language. Human needs to see in order to understand, and they want their senses to witness all the ideas in their minds. The divinity has never been far from these attempts; all cultures try to picture the god that they believe in; even Moses wanted to see the God who talks to him.
Christianity did not deactivate this desire in human beings but rather used it in a brilliant way to aid the faithful to worship the unseen God. In his “Letter to Artists,” his holiness Pope John Paul II says that the Church needs art, and art needs the Church: art makes the invisible world of God visible through the attractiveness of beauty.2 During the rise of Christianity, early Christians tried to present their faith by writing and through signs and symbols, as exemplified by the art of the catacombs.
First, this paper will briefly discuss the early attempts to represent the Trinity with all their theological successes and failures: from the symbolic representation to the anthropomorphic representation, which may be separated into the vertical and the horizontal and which was highly developed through the centuries. Finally, the vertical representation of the Throne of Grace will be discussed from a theological viewpoint in order to show that it may be theologically considered as the most accurate representation of the Trinity.

The Cistercian abbey church plan with its flat east end--the famous "Bernardine plan"--is one of the most distinctive and written about church plans of all of medieval architecture, and has traditionally been thought to owe its origins to the architectural standards of Bernard of Clairvaux (the leading ecclesiastical politician of Europe) and to the overriding concern of simplicity.  However, this view appears to have largely come about from the influence of modern architecture on modern scholars.  Instead, it can be shown by reading this plan--in conjunction with the Cluniac apse-echelon plan and the well-known pilgrimage plan--through the monastic sacred economy, through a close understanding of contemporary accounts, and especially with reference to current monastic architectural theory (particularly regarding materials, craftsmanship, and public access), that the "Bernardine plan" is not really by Bernard at all but is better thought of as "the classic Cistercian plan," a compromise plan of lower spiritual standards, aimed at a broader institutional acceptance.

In questo primo volume sono illustrati gli esiti degli studi e delle ricerche correlate agli interventi di restauro eseguiti su ventisei opere d'arte all'interno del Laboratorio di Restauro del Museo Diocesano di Palermo. Si tratta di un gruppo molto variegato di veri e propri capolavori, comprendente dipinti su supporto ligneo, tessile e lapideo, sculture in marmo, legno e cartapesta, mosaici e numerosi oggetti d'arte decorativa, dagli arredi alle suppellettili liturgiche e ai manufatti di carattere devozionale.
I singoli studi sono presentati in forma di schede tecnico-conservative che raccolgono tutti i dati acquisiti in occasione degli interventi di restauro e suddivisi in aree tematiche: sono dunque presenti informazioni di carattere tecnico e conservativo concernenti gli elementi identificativi delle opere, le modalità esecutive e i materiali costitutivi, lo stato di conservazione, la storia e la natura di eventuali interventi eseguiti nel passato, la descrizione del restauro attuale (metodologie, enti e professionalità coinvolte, ambiti di esecuzione, indagini diagnostiche, documentazione, iniziative connesse alla valorizzazione e pubblicazioni scientifiche); le schede sono inoltre corredate di un ricco apparato fotografico/grafico che accompagna ed integra i dati descrittivi nonché di una bibliografia storico-artistica di riferimento selezionata per ogni manufatto.
L'iniziativa di realizzare tale collana di studi nasce dalla volontà di condividere e rendere fruibili i risultati di accurate ricerche, osservazioni ed indagini che negli anni hanno accompagnato il recupero dei beni artistici di interesse religioso condotto per l'Arcidiocesi di Palermo. Si intende così offrire a studiosi ed appassionati un'ampia casistica di esperienze e conoscenze relative a numerose opere d'arte, eterogenee per tipologia e problematiche conservative ma accomunate dal medesimo approccio nello studio e nei principi di intervento.

Chartres has a long of history of being a shrine of worship particularly devoted to the image of the Virgin Mary.  It has long been a center of pilgrimage in her honour, a focal point for people seeking her intercession for healing, to witness the relic of the Tunic of the Virgin, to worship the Lady of the Underground statue, to attend one of the four feasts dedicated to the Virgin (the Nativity of the Virgin Mary, the Purification of the Blessed Virgin, the Annunciation, and the Assumption of the Virgin)  ; all attesting to the notion, believed by many Christians of the time, that the Virgin herself regarded the cathedral of Chartres as her own special palace.

This brief study purports to examine the important theological/narrative role she played through a comparative examination of three important examples of the several  ‘Enthroned Virgin’ or ‘Madonna and child in Majesty’ iconographic images at Chartres; namely, the Right Porch Tympaneum of the West Façade, the North Rose Window, and the ‘Blue Virgin’ stained glass window.

Em nossos estudos sobre a Escola de Arte de Beuron e a sua chegada ao Brasil, levantamos a hipótese de que esta tenha sido empregada na decoração de outros espaços litúrgicos, seja parcial ou em sua totalidade, por artistas vinculados à Escola de Arte Beuron ou influenciados pela decoração da nova Basílica de Nossa Senhora de Assunção, inaugurada em 1912, decorada entre 1914 e 1922 por Dom Adalbert Gresnigt (1877-1956) e Ir. Clement Maria Frischauf (1869-1944). Para verificação desta hipótese, visitamos algumas igrejas decoradas entre as décadas de 1930 e 1940, na cidade de São Paulo,  com a análise dos ciclos pictóricos da Capela do Colégio e Faculdade de São Bento de São Paulo, Basílica de Nossa Senhora da Assunção e Santuário Eucarístico Nossa Senhora da Penha, além de fragmentos pictóricos da Igreja do Rosário de Campinas pintados por Thomaz Scheuchl. Também sabemos que este artista recebeu encomendas para execução de trabalhos gráficos, como suas contribuições para o Almanaque da Basílica Nacional de N. Senhora Aparecida, cuja capa é de sua autoria, sendo possível a existência de outros trabalhos desconhecidos até o momento presente.
Palavras-chave: Thomaz Scheuchl, Escola de Arte de Beuron, arte sacra, arte e liturgia, imagem religiosa.