F
friardchips
Guest
Renaissance paintings are responsible, IMO, for a huge part of the way we think about our Creator and all His Heavenly array.
Paintings obviously helped in one way, for many centuries, to keep alive the imagination for the Christian belief.
Renaissance artists didn’t have modern technology and so this was their medium and paintings achieved in part what photographs and films achieve now, and used in religion often to express that which was ethereal, or hard to summon up in one’s mind.
The semiotics of paintings, due to their requirement, were often the key to the artist’s own thinking but also worldly elements were used as pictorial devices to express the spiritual.
I think sculptures to do with Christ’s life and Our Lady are the upside of more traditional methods of artistry. The Pieta, for example, is sublime. And we can see evidence of semiotics in there even, as Our Lady was usually made bigger than her Son, to show the enormity of the role she undertook and strength of faith in enduring such suffering.
Less helpful are images with angels. For the Christian who knows his or her faith the following does not pose an issue for the most part as we can simply view images for being lovely in their expression of the delicacy of love with which the Creator formed all of His creation. But some devices do make it difficult to form a relational bond with our Heavenly friends, and if it doesn’t for us then it does for those outside the Church who might look at our belief from a scientific point-of-view, and I think the divide is partly due to the romanticism of some of these images which stick in the mind so rigidly that it is hard to prise them away from reality.
You see, Angels don’t need wings. Demons and satan don’t have wings and they are fallen angels. Wings are a device used to express beings that are lofty and from the Heavenly heights - the Firmament above - and used to express a world which is different to our own. We know that angels don’t need wings because they are spirit form. Renaissance brought about artistic devices that stuck in the minds of St. Michael in particular, who is often pictured with a sword, and yet we know the sword is a figurative sword, representing truth, the word of our creator, and doesn’t need an actual sword because he is an angel, a spirit.
IMO, we could do with images of angels that are not so fanciful. Not that I think more romantic images of angels are bad, I love some of them, but it might be helpful if we begun to see angels a little more clearly for what and who they really are. Another poster’s thread awakened to me this need. Maybe to bring our faith up-to-date instead of living in the Renaissance at a time when they didn’t possibly understand these things in the way we can.
I don’t remember anywhere in Scripture an angel being described as having wings. As far as I am aware, they are beings of light, who can enter any place in reality, according to their position, and can enter into one’s dreams. No wings needed.
St. Pio described the title of Angel as its job - images of Angels might be nice when put into their real context and taking their real form into account.
The way history has moved on and the gap has lessened a little bit in understanding between what is real and what is not, are images of the Creator Himself, who was often pictured as an old man with a white beard sitting in a cloud. No one could say these images don’t express a divine quality and are not beautiful but for a long time this kind of image was not helpful for those to see the truth of Christianity from an outside perspective.
Thoughts, opinions?
Paintings obviously helped in one way, for many centuries, to keep alive the imagination for the Christian belief.
Renaissance artists didn’t have modern technology and so this was their medium and paintings achieved in part what photographs and films achieve now, and used in religion often to express that which was ethereal, or hard to summon up in one’s mind.
The semiotics of paintings, due to their requirement, were often the key to the artist’s own thinking but also worldly elements were used as pictorial devices to express the spiritual.
I think sculptures to do with Christ’s life and Our Lady are the upside of more traditional methods of artistry. The Pieta, for example, is sublime. And we can see evidence of semiotics in there even, as Our Lady was usually made bigger than her Son, to show the enormity of the role she undertook and strength of faith in enduring such suffering.
Less helpful are images with angels. For the Christian who knows his or her faith the following does not pose an issue for the most part as we can simply view images for being lovely in their expression of the delicacy of love with which the Creator formed all of His creation. But some devices do make it difficult to form a relational bond with our Heavenly friends, and if it doesn’t for us then it does for those outside the Church who might look at our belief from a scientific point-of-view, and I think the divide is partly due to the romanticism of some of these images which stick in the mind so rigidly that it is hard to prise them away from reality.
You see, Angels don’t need wings. Demons and satan don’t have wings and they are fallen angels. Wings are a device used to express beings that are lofty and from the Heavenly heights - the Firmament above - and used to express a world which is different to our own. We know that angels don’t need wings because they are spirit form. Renaissance brought about artistic devices that stuck in the minds of St. Michael in particular, who is often pictured with a sword, and yet we know the sword is a figurative sword, representing truth, the word of our creator, and doesn’t need an actual sword because he is an angel, a spirit.
IMO, we could do with images of angels that are not so fanciful. Not that I think more romantic images of angels are bad, I love some of them, but it might be helpful if we begun to see angels a little more clearly for what and who they really are. Another poster’s thread awakened to me this need. Maybe to bring our faith up-to-date instead of living in the Renaissance at a time when they didn’t possibly understand these things in the way we can.
I don’t remember anywhere in Scripture an angel being described as having wings. As far as I am aware, they are beings of light, who can enter any place in reality, according to their position, and can enter into one’s dreams. No wings needed.
St. Pio described the title of Angel as its job - images of Angels might be nice when put into their real context and taking their real form into account.
The way history has moved on and the gap has lessened a little bit in understanding between what is real and what is not, are images of the Creator Himself, who was often pictured as an old man with a white beard sitting in a cloud. No one could say these images don’t express a divine quality and are not beautiful but for a long time this kind of image was not helpful for those to see the truth of Christianity from an outside perspective.
Thoughts, opinions?
Very beautiful indeed!
