In Search of the Sacred Image by Aidan Nichols, O.P.

Abstract

Reviewed by: In Search of the Sacred Image by Aidan Nichols, O.P. Dianne Phillips Aidan Nichols, O.P. In Search of the Sacred Image Leominster: Gracewing, 2020 xii + 274 pages. Paperback. $22.50. Fr. Aidan Nichols’s most recent work on the role of art in the Christian tradition focuses on the revivals of Byzantine and late medieval style in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century religious art. Essentially a history of Christian art from 1800 to 1950, it surveys artists who rarely appear in the historiography of modern art. An admirer of the Byzantine icon as the consummate model of Christian imagery, Nichols begins his search for a pictorial tradition appropriate to the modern Western Church with a chapter on the revival of interest in the icons of the Old Believers in nineteenth-century Russia, and ends with a lengthy chapter on the French Catholic artist, Maurice Denis (1870–1943). Chapter one, on the revival of interest in medieval Russian icons, explores how their eschewal of the naturalism characteristic of Western art dating from the Renaissance to c. 1900 appealed to the aesthetic concerns of the European avant-garde. Artists like Matisse and Kandinsky responded enthusiastically to the rejection of spatial illusion, the simplified forms, and the symbolism that endowed Byzantine icons with a mystical aura that nineteenth-century academic and secular art lacked. Chapter two surveys the rediscovery of Italian and [End Page 200] Netherlandish late medieval style—the art of the “Primitives,” e.g., Giotto and Fra Angelico—among nineteenth-century European religious artists. Nichols traces the history of the Nazarenes, an influential group of mostly German artists who had resided in Rome in the early years of the movement. Chapter three discusses the revival of late medieval art and architecture in England, especially the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood whose members favored a veristic style, often rendering their subjects with acute precision and sometimes taking an historicist approach to biblical subjects. Chapter four, on the revival of hieratic art, returns to the subject of Byzantine style in nineteenth-century France, owed in part to the discoveries of French antiquarians in the eastern Mediterranean. Valued for its antiquity and therefore regarded as more authentically Christian, it was appropriated for church architecture, e.g., Sacré-Coeur. The scholarship of French Byzantinists on the style and iconography of Byzantine mosaics, frescoes, and icons, and their transmission to the West via Italy, had a notable impact. In his exploration of hieraticism, Nichols also devotes attention to the School of Beuron, whose members were affiliated with a congregation of Benedictine monasteries. They favored Archaic Greek and Ancient Egyptian style as characteristic of wisdom–oriented societies, producing religious works whose formal qualities anticipate Art Deco. Chapter five considers the promotion of Russian medieval icons as part of the state’s nationalist agenda and describes how the Soviets consciously cultivated the market for icons among Western collectors as a source of revenue. Nichols also examines the important role played by Russian émigré artists in France after the Revolution in the preservation of the Old Russian icon tradition. Many of the strands of the preceding chapters converge in the sixth chapter on the art and, even more, the writings, of Maurice Denis. Nichols asserts that “what Denis represents is probably the furthest a Western Catholic can go in the direction of a fully adequate sacred art, lacking as he or she does a background in the canonical iconography of Byzantine-Slav Orthodoxy, the most successful of all historic styles the Church has employed” (219). A devout Catholic and supporter of Maurras’s Action française, Denis deeply admired the symbolism of the Byzantine tradition and the art of Fra Angelico. [End Page 201] He appreciated the work of Puvis de Chavannes, Japanese prints, Gauguin and Cezanne, but rejected the naturalism of the Impressionists, the “pure painting” of Matisse, and the abstraction of Cubism. Travel to Rome increased his appreciation for classical composition and, later in life, he even embraced Venetian colorism and Baroque passion. In his writings on art, Denis grappled with the question of the relationship between art and nature, advocating for “‘Symbolism regenerated through objectivity’, or, again, ‘Symbolism leaning on nature and reason’ so...