Art: Gifts for God

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Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea, in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came three wise men from the east to Jerusalem, saying, “Where is he that is born King of the Jews?” . . . And, lo, the star, which they saw in the east, went before them, till it came and stood over where the young child was. When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy. And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary, his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense, and myrrh.

Great religious art requires a faith and a tradition. Once the art of Christendom had both. Last week the world, seldom in history so much in need of faith, looked to its artists at Christmas time for inspiration adequate to its need, and found little or none. For modern artists are conspicuously unblessed by faith or tradition.

Yet if they tend to obscure instead of illuminate the miracle of Christmas, it is not altogether for lack of trying. Behind the locked door of his Paris studio, 76-year-old Georges Rouault paints Christs as glowing and brittle as stained glass. They are done with devotion (Rouault is an ardent Catholic), but their deliberate crudity is almost as obvious a barrier to appreciation as the lock on his door. When British Sculptor Henry Moore was commissioned to carve a Madonna and Child for a church, he resolved to “meet the subject half way,” as he put it, by substituting a limited realism for his usual smooth abstraction. The compromise was recognizably human, in a streamlined sort of fashion, but inertly bland as stone could be.

In the U.S., Salvador Dali used a Christmas angel and Star of Bethlehem for a timely nylon ad—a painting hardly more offensive than the mawkish Madonnas and cute little representations of Jesus in most modern chromos, Sunday-school picture books and Christmas cards. Largely, they were hack work, to be judged in the same charitable spirit as cards featuring Santa Claus, Christmas trees and blazing hearths. Either as art or religion they did not pretend to much. As Sculptor Moore himself remarked, without a sigh: “The great tradition of religious art seems to have got lost completely in the present day.” What on earth had happened to it?

Frescoes by Candlelight. For nearly 2,000 years, artists have followed the Wise Men to Bethlehem, bringing gifts to celebrate the birth of God as man. The quality of their gifts has depended as much on their times as on themselves, and what they brought was sometimes meaningful, sometimes beautiful, but not always both together. If the early Christians who painted frescoes by candlelight in the catacombs of Rome had not sufficient skill to match the underground fire of their faith, Raphael, who worked with consummate grace for a triumphant Church, lacked their pent force.

But in the dawn of the Renaissance which produced Raphael, there were painters whose art, compounded of form and fire equally, remained a major triumph of the Christian world. The city of Florence was no bigger than Peoria, Ill., but in a single century—the isth—she blossomed with the paintings of Masaccio, Ucello, Botticelli, Luca della Robbia, Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, and a score of others.

Manhattan last week might be proud of its “three miles of Christmas trees” along Park Avenue, but that pagan procession of lights was dim and chill compared with the magnificence of the Nativity Plays which almost every Renaissance Italian witnessed. Machiavelli mentions one so elaborate that its preparation kept all Florence busy for six months.

Fireworks in Heaven. Such pageants usually began with street processions leading to the churches and cathedrals where the plays were performed. When all were inside, and waiting in one vast hush for the wonders to begin, God the Father would suddenly appear above them, on an airy platform surrounded by choirs of angels, flowers and revolving wheels of fireworks whose sparks, floating upwards like distant suns among the vaulted shadows, more than once ignited, the roof.

Below God’s platform stood a second, wider one, representing the earth, and the scenes enacted there were surprising not for their grandeur but for their truth to human nature. In one version, the shepherds were three Apennine comics: Nencio, Bobbi and Randello. Nencio inclined to be difficult; he refused to go in search of the Child until after breakfast. The shepherds offered their cloaks to the Madonna for blankets, begging her not to be offended by the goat smell. Then one of them turned to the audience, and exclaimed: “Think how the Blessed Virgin had not so much as a bed or sack to protect her, nor fire to warm the icy air, and that the Lord of the world had neither mattress nor cushion on which to lie!”

Since the audience was composed not of bored parents at a school play but of participants in an eternal mystery, all must have shared the shepherd’s compassion.

The painters designed scenery for the Nativity dramas, and afterwards labored in their silent studios to preserve the immediacy of the plays in paint. One who succeeded was an obscure master named Bernardino Luini, living in Milan. For such artists as Luini, the birth of Christ was not merely a historical event to be celebrated in its proper season, but .an ever-present reality—as immediate as the birth of one’s own son—and so he saw nothing strange in taking it from its temporal context and creating a contemporary Italian Bethlehem. The result was sometimes as stilted-looking as an amateur theatrical, but its wholly unsentimental sweetness more than compensated for that. The sweetness in Luini’s pictures could not be mixed on a palette or applied with a brush; it was an inner achievement of the artist himself, a personal innocence and joy, which gave greatness to paintings like the Nativity.

Almost nothing is known of Luini beyond the fact that he painted a great deal, and died in 1532. He may once have studied with Leonardo da Vinci, for though his drawing is less acute than Leonardo’s, it has the same sinuous elegance—like a strand of hair afloat on the wind. But unlike Leonardo, he never painted a monster or a mask of rage or caught a tempest in his brush. Luini was limited and narrow, but like a narrow window standing open to the sun.

The peaceful radiance in the window of Luini’s art dazzled Critic John Ruskin,*who called him “ten times greater than Leonardo.” Luini, he wrote, “paints what he has been taught to design wisely and has passion to realize gloriously.” In that sentence, Ruskin neatly underlined the double dependence of religious art.

Piety and Patrons. Such a harmony of heart and hand belonged to an all but unknown painter named Alesso Baldovinetti, whose Madonna and Child appears on TIME’S cover this week. In any other age, Baldovinetti’s talent might have made him the master of his day; while he lived he was known chiefly for his piety and craftsmanship. It was a time when painters and patrons, by common consent, chose God and His saints as the ultimate subject of art, and every studio apprentice planned on growing up to paint Him. It was an age in which Florentines could put in a contract, besides the mundane measurements, the stipulation that their cathedral be designed “so as to be worthy of a heart expanded to much greatness.” That spirit suffused the whole city; the images of its faith stood everywhere. They were at least as close and familiar as the Hollywood dreamworld is today, and more vivid —especially at Christmas.

Neither Luini nor Baldovinetti was aware of the fact, but while they painted, the astronomer Copernicus was calmly pulling the earth out from under their studios. Even in the Renaissance, a scattering of prophets such as Savonarola kept repeating that man is mere dust; but never before Copernicus did anyone suspect what out-of-the-way dust man was. When Copernicus squeezed the world into a ball and set it spinning through the blackness of outer space, he did much to destroy the importance of man in art as well as in the universe.

Since Copernicus, scientists, in trying to explain away the miracle of Christmas, have only increased the mystery. So most modern painters—the expressionists who try to satisfy themselves with flaunting their own fragile tatters of personal experience, and the abstractionists who take refuge in a pseudo-scientific picture of life as a composition of light rays and whirling particles—necessarily hide their gifts at Christmas. The only truth that many of them recognize is in the atom, which gives off not radiance but radioactivity.

Blood in the Landscape. By the chilling glare of the atom, the dawn of the Renaissance seems a time of earthly happiness. It was indeed an age of Faith and Hope, but not often of Charity. Revenge was a point of honor, and perennial feuds cursed the children of families and states alike. The blood of the unjustly slain, which flows like an ever-widening river through the embattled landscape of European history, was already running deep.

Though man has never yet succeeded in damming that river, he has created, at moments in history, a few things so enduringly peaceful that they seem independent of its red flow. The monumental art created in the 15th Century’s peculiar climate has stood through all kinds of historical weather. Today huge, and sometimes forbidding, art museums hang the treasures of the Renaissance on their walls, there to be seen by several million Americans who each year visit Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum and the National Gallery in Washington. Thousands of Christmas cards, crisscrossing in the mail, carry reproductions of the 15th Century masterpieces, and an infinite variety of imitations. In these ways the great religious art of the past has become gifts to mankind, reopened by each succeeding generation.

Giovanni Bellini achieved more than one such masterpiece, creations not only of his own genius but also of the age and place in which he lived. While Baldovinetti labored in Florence, and Luini in Milan, Bellini breathed the glittering, clear splendor of Venice, which lay like a wide galleon of marble and mosaic moored to the Adriatic shore. Bellini’s father, brother and brother-in-law (Mantegna) were all famed painters, who brilliantly adapted and modified in varying degrees the jewel-hard Byzantine art which trade with the East had brought to Venice. Giovanni Bellini did more; he created a new kind of painting in which observed and ideal reality became inseparable.

His first Madonnas perfectly mirrored the Byzantine ideal; he gave the Virgin smoothly arched brows, like two bows, and a delicately pursed mouth, in the accepted tradition, and made her cool and peaceful as a cloud. And she never changed, essentially, in all his later paintings of her; she only became more real, more human and more alive each time. Before he died, Bellini’s faith and art had combined to create Madonnas like the one here reproduced, which were credibly like the Virgin the Wise Men found at Bethlehem: a living woman, and the Mother of God. The compassion in that Madonna’s look, and in her hands which both protect and present the Child, touches eternity.

*For Critic Ruskin criticized, see BOOKS.