A year of sacred art
Where we've been, and where we're going
Where we started
When I started this Substack publication in April 2021, it was really just on instinct. I’d been blogging on and off since 2004, but had fallen out of the practice. Much of my attention had turned inward since the earthquakes in 2016, and I was undergoing a massive re-organisation, and reordering of my own personal little world.
But since moving to Narni in November 2021, I’d felt strongly a new chapter was starting, having been purged somewhat of the prior obsessions (Church politics and the pope and all that).
Welcome new subscribers, both paid and free, and I hope you enjoy this little reflection on how we got started, and where it’s all going. I have only one announcement on this New Year’s Day; I’ve turned off the automatic paywall thing that locks every post older than three months. It just seemed unfair; stuff that you can see as a free subscriber should be stuff you can always see.
We’ve got lots of stuff going on in 2025, big changes coming, but for now, we’re all still enjoying the holidays. In Italy it carries on until the day after Epiphany, so happy Christmas, Happy New Year and Happy Epiphany to all.
At the Sacred Images Project we talk about Christian life, thought, history and culture through the lens of the first 1200 years of sacred art. The publication is how I make my living, supported by subscriptions, so apart from plugging my shop, there is no advertising or pop-ups. It’s my full time job, but it’s still not bringing a full time income, so I can’t yet provide all the things I want to and am planning for.
You can subscribe for free to get one and a half posts a week.
For $9/month you also get the second half of the third post, plus a weekly paywalled in-depth article on our great sacred patrimony. There are also occasional extras like downloadable exclusive high resolution printable images, ebooks, mini-courses, videos and eventually podcasts.
At the Met, I found this gorgeous painting by Bartolo di Fredi, a successor (after the Black Death) to the great Sienese masters Duccio di Buoninsegna and Simone Martini, and have created a standing masonite panel print from it.
I think it would make an elegant addition to a prayer corner or mantel.
You can order one here:
A hesitant start
But, though I had started my own study of the great tradition of Christian sacred art in 2019, it took a while for the idea to write about it here to coalesce. After the move there was a long gap, and then in June 2022 the idea took shape with something of a manifesto, why our mostly unexamined narrative about western art is just plain wrong:
Western academia holds as self-evident that for every useful purpose, art didn’t start until a thousand years after Christ. And even then everything produced was hijacked by the Church, which was the only power around that could afford to commission works. This was the dark state of affairs until the blessed dawning of the Renaissance freed the world from the darkness of oppression and superstition…
Art is correctly understood as the reflection and expression of a given culture; whatever a culture has to say it will say it with art. It expresses not only the culture’s interests and priorities, but its way of thinking, its self-understanding and cosmological outlook. So if your art is irrelevant and stupid what more do we need to know about the culture it comes from?
I guess I needed a cause to fight for. But things really got started in March 2022 with a set of posts about why the Renaissance is in fact a great departure, philosophically as well as artistically, from the then-twelve hundred year old tradition of Christian sacred art, and how it had led us astray as a civilisation.
When most western Christians think of sacred art, they will usually think of something like this. Leonardo da Vinci’s name enjoys a semi-deified connotation in our minds, associated with the very pinnacle of mastery in the High Renaissance. It almost seems like a blasphemy to us to speak a word of critique, let alone criticism. (So, here goes…)
No one would dispute that this is a magnificent work of art, the very pinnacle of craft. But a Byzantine (eastern) Christian would insist that it can’t be called “sacred art” and has no place in a church.
Hitting the stride in 2024
It took a while longer to really get into a regular routine, and start thinking bigger with a more systematic approach. The idea of turning this hobby blog into the foundation of a professional online publication where we “we talk about Christian life, thought, history and culture through the lens of the first 1200 years of sacred art” came into focus at last in December last year.
This was when we started establishing a kind of method to the madness, with themes developing like, “Know your sacred art terms” on the Trecento and the Romanesque (Romanesque P2 and Romanesque P3) periods as well as more technical work like “What are the Canons?”
We revisited the Renaissance, and why the new direction taken by the Medici billionaires took western Christendom off course. We talked also about more interior things, how looking at authentic sacred art can carry us along in the spiritual life, with the “Deep looking” series.
Deep Looking - how to look at art
He’s seen this image all his life in books, films and on television, on posters, calendars, cards and adverts. He walks into the room and simply can’t quite believe he’s in the same room with this indescribably famous thing.
You know the paintings I’m talking about.
Developmental psychologists know that we learn visual intelligence as we develop our mental faculties in infancy and childhood. We can be trained as children to really notice things, to understand what we’re seeing, but our technological culture right now mitigates hard against that. Children aren’t taught to see, they’re taught to desire distraction. Even adults who were once used to prolonged concentration say their ability to read and notice the world has been diminished by their online habits.
And why learning to draw will give you superpowers.
We got into some controverted issues, like the mosaic work of disgraced former Jesuit Fr. Marko Rupnik, and how his work and the modernist Catholic art trends in general, illustrate the Byzantine concept of “iconographic heresy.” We talked about the use of AI generated images in place of authentic human work, and how that has played on previous errors and misdirections to create something unholy.
And we asked the most vexed question of all in the modern discourse on art, “What is it, anyway?” in which we challenged the commonly repeated expression “art for art’s sake,” talked about “techne,” craft and why human agency has to be part of it.
In our strictly historical explorations, we’ve gone from the archaic art of Dura Europos, to Greco-Roman Egypt and the Fayoum mummy portraits and their likeness to later Byzantine art, to the Coptic art of the desert monks, to Byzantium, to the great flowering of the Carolingian Empire (here and here) and on to the many faces of the Gothic.
We also did quite a lot of deep-diving, looking closely either at particular works or the artists themselves and their influences on the tradition.
And we’ve taken a few trips, to see local delights like the Romanesque churches here in Umbria, to Florence, Siena and Subiaco, and to see the almost forgotten treasures like the Crypta San Magno.
Finally, we’ve started exploring “classical” Christian spirituality, the things the Desert Fathers and ancient monks knew, in a sub-section called Philokalia; for love of beauty.
The Unlocked Door
It’s been quite a year. But we’re not nearly done yet. Work proceeds on a number of larger projects, including the ebook on the great European dissolution of the monasteries and monastic life, in which governments began seizing monastic lands through the 17th to 20th centuries. On the list are also a mini-course on the Wilton Diptych and the larger homeschooling curriculum of the general overview course on the history of sacred art.
Despite all the to-ing and fro-ing between subjects, eras and artists (which could definitely stand to be a little more organised, I’ll readily admit) a few things have become clear in the last year;
there’s really no bottom to this rabbit hole once you’ve dived in.
I’m definitely committed to continuing the work into the indefinite future
other people are getting a great deal of benefit out of it all.
A long time ago I worked out a method of “discernment” for life that I call the “rat-in-a-maze” school. Basically, you focus your intentions on “doing the will of God, whatever it might be” and you try stuff. You say, “Well, Lord, I don’t really know what I’m doing, so I’ll just have to trust that you’ll steer me.” Then you start trying things that seem like plausible possibilities.
Like a rat in a maze, you “smell the cheese” and you try a door. If this door, or the next one, is locked - if the thing you try turns out to be impossible - you try the next one until you find one that opens, and go through it. As long as you are still “smelling the cheese” - thinking about and intending to do the will of God - I’ve found that the general direction, however muddled it might look as you go along, will end up being the right one. Keeping the right intentions, I’ve found, is the key that unlocks a lot of doors.
What doesn’t work is making a detailed plan and trying to force it to happen, strictly according to your own will. It can be difficult to trust that the thing you need will come along at the right time, but in all this time, it always has.
All this rather mysterious section is in the way of a hint. So well have things gone with this publication, that the time seemed ripe for expansion of the work. All sorts of ideas have come along, but none of it really had a clear way forward until a few months ago; someone came along and proposed the next step. It’s taken me a while to work up the courage to take it (an odd result of becoming fairly well known is that I’ve become intensely shy) but after a meeting a couple of days ago, the trigger has been pulled.
I said in a Note the other day that “big changes… YUGE…” are coming to this publication, and in the coming days I’ll be making some announcements of changes to come and how it might affect readers and subscribers. Don’t worry; it’ll be more, not less, of the same.
All along, however up or down my mood, I’ve smelled the cheese while doing this work. And now a door has opened right in front of me, largely without my even having tried it, and I’m going through. I’m going further up and further in, and bringing you all along with me, if you’re willing.
Heartfelt thanks
This year has been a journey of extraordinary discoveries and immense, dizzying personal growth, and quite honestly, the reason it happened was because you came along with me. I can’t express enough how much your presence here as a reader, a subscriber, a commenter, a companion, has made all the difference in the world. Whether you’ve been a long-time reader or you’ve just joined us, thank you for being part of this community, and coming with me on this adventure.
Come further up and further in!
Merry Christmas, Hilary! May God bless you and prosper your work.
Keep up the good work! I just recently discovered your writing in the last few months but I have thoroughly enjoyed reading through your backlog of work. What you are doing is much needed in today's world, and especially, in today's Church. May it be blessed!