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We have forgotten our art, so we have forgotten who we are

The traditions of Christian sacred art, an integral part of our religion that goes back to the earliest possible times, are nearly forgotten in the Latin/Western Church, though they are still a vivid part of Christian life in the Eastern, Byzantine world. Where general knowledge of Byzantine art is part and parcel of being a Byzantine (or Orthodox) Christian, a deep knowledge of the 1200 years of Christian art of the west before the Renaissance is almost unknown among western Christians. It has been relegated to the status of mere academic niche interest, and western Christians have been deprived of a deep spiritual and cultural connection to their religious roots.

The Perugia Altarpiece, Fra Angelico. Perugia National Gallery

Since the 1980s there has been a grassroots movement in the Western, Latin Church towards greater knowledge of doctrine and Scripture, but there has been no accompanying movement about our artistic patrimony. And it is into this gap that I hope this website can step and make a meaningful contribution.

Trecento (14th century) Umbrian altarpiece. Perugia national gallery.

Plans - courses, ebooks, podcasts, videos and more

This site is expanding from an occasional blog to a full-blown website about Christian sacred art. I started just by sharing the fascinating things I’d been learning, and interest has grown tremendously. In January this year, I was able to turn on paid subscriptions, and then it became an integral and major part of my job.

The programme here is two posts a week, one for the general-interest audience of free subscribers, and another going into things in more depth for the paid membership.

Additionally, I’ve started work on the first of a series of course “packages” that will cluster materials and expand on our topic - the history and meaning of Christian sacred art through the ages and across cultures. These course packages will be available to buy as downloadable PDFs, either as single topic packages or clustered together (and discounted). They will be made available for purchase as “digital products” at my online store here: Hilary White; Sacred Art Shop.

Sacred Images

I have added the sub-section to this site called, “Sacred Images: 1200 Years of Christian Sacred Art,” where most of our posts for paid members will go. These are intended to supplement the courses.

This (mostly) paid section will be the place where anyone who has purchased a course package and has become a paid member/subscriber, can find supplemental in-depth articles and other materials. In the works are interviews and podcasts with experts as well as videos and downloadable/printable high resolution images from museum sources - to supplement their investigations.

Mini-courses will also be made available in this section for paid members as free downloads. These will be made available to non-paying subscribers for purchase at the shop. These will zero in on a particular object or item of interest - the Ghent Altarpiece, the Fayoum mummy portraits of Roman Egypt, or the Coptic frescoes of St. Catharine’s Monastery, for example.

All the courses will, eventually, be gathered together to make up a full curriculum - to buy all together or in pieces - suited to homeschooler families, groups and individuals with a special interest in our subject.

A lot of this is still in development and I am learning how to do quite a lot of things as I am doing them. More features will become available as the (still very new) Substack platform develops them. As more people subscribe to the paid posts, I will also be able to upgrade the material offered. (This week I’ll be trying out my new gimbal for making smart-phone videos of the sacred art in Narni and close by, for example. I still need a microphone and my good digital camera needs fixing. “Grado per grado” as the Umbrians say, “step by step”.)

The Substack chat for paid members will complete the picture, where we can have a virtual space to meet and talk and exchange notes.


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I’m a painter who writes.

Why am I doing all this? 12 years ago, I was the Rome and European correspondent for an online international Christian news service. To prevent that from driving me into a state of despair, I started taking classes at a private atelier in Rome in classical academic drawing.

Drawing is the basis of all visual art. I had this drilled into my brain for 4 years of study at a private drawing and painting atelier in Rome. Samples from my sketchbooks of that time.

I did that for four years, bringing my skills in observational drawing up to a professional level. But for a long time I didn’t know what I wanted to do with that training.

Icon commissions from the last couple of years.

Then, four years ago, in late November 2019, I took a class in Byzantine iconography, and a whole new life was launched. The class finished at almost the exact moment Covid19 struck the world, and all that came with that. I was living alone in a farmhouse in the central Italian countryside, and literally didn’t have anything to do during all that insanity but paint and work in my garden.

Gardens in Narnia, April 2022

Many people reported having their lives changed significantly during that period, and I’m one of them. In that time of isolation and focused work, I left the journalism and activism world behind, and entered a new phase of life. I’ve been painting and studying traditional Christian sacred art, east and west, every day since then.

In November 2021 I moved to the little town of Narni, Umbria where I knew a new phase in that new life would begin. When I launched this website in April 2021 I wasn’t sure what I was doing, and it didn’t see much use. But starting in June 2022 I’d come to understand that there is a great desire among Christians in the west for knowing more about their artistic patrimony and started pointing my work focus in that direction.

I’m still a student

I want to make one thing very clear; I’m not an expert. I don’t have a degree of any sort in this stuff. I’m a student who has fallen in love with these lost treasures, these inestimably precious but mostly forgotten things of our culture’s great past. What I do have, apart from a lifetime of love of art, is training and experience as an investigative journalist: I know how to find things out, ask the interesting questions and talk to experts and write down my discoveries in language accessible to laymen. I’m of the school of journalism that says the journalist isn’t an expert, but stands in for Everyman, Joe Regular Guy. I am really just a person in love, and am looking for a community of other people in love with the same things, and are looking for the same deep and true connection to our Faith that I’m looking for.

You can subscribe for free; I’ll continue producing a post a week of general interest for unpaid subscribers. If you are interested in going deeper, the membership fee is just $9/month. Sign up for a year’s worth for $100.

I hope you will come along with us.

HJMW

The Sacred Images Project is a reader-supported publication, which means there won’t be any advertising. To receive new posts by email and make my work possible, I hope you’ll consider subscribing for free, of if you’re already here, upgrading to paid. It’s just $9/month.

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Christian life, thought, history and culture through the lens of the first 1200 years of sacred art.

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Retired from 11 years of news reporting on Catholic and political issues, now painting and writing about faith, art and culture.