The Studio for Art, Faith & History encourages faith-based communities to weave the arts into the fabric of their work.
The website of the Studio, edited by John Skillen and managed by Gianna Scavo, hosts a miscellany of essays
by artists, historians, poets, and theologians, most of whom have participated in the Studio’s activities in Orvieto, Italy.

 

This essay by the director of the Studio for Art, Faith & History encourages faith-based communities and associations to put art to work in the places where they gather to do their work. Happily, some of the comments about the autonomy of the artist that begin the essay are gradually becoming out-of-date as new currents in socially-engaged art, community art, collaborative art, and commissioned art are recovering the legitimacy they once had.


The Studio for Art, Faith & History follows a now-mature form of classical-Christian schooling that weaves together the intellectual arts of thought and language and the cultural arts of poetry and visual art and the performing arts, together with the common arts of skilled handiwork. In this essay, Dr. Skillen sets the context of this new-old approach to learning.

“The experience cracked me out of a museum and gallery mentality and opened my eyes to the long run of centuries in medieval and Renaissance Europe when nearly all artworks were commissioned by or for a particular group for its use in a particular location.”

When we stand in a tradition we are not simply trying to maintain a status quo; we’re in the business of translating what is past into what is truly present and thereby extending and elaborating that tradition.

THE BODY BROKEN

Bruce Herman

A distinguished Italian theologian provides some points of reference for navigating Luca Signorelli’s masterful visual treatment of the End Times and the Last Judgment in the San Brizio Chapel. Translated from Italian by John Skillen.

The seven virtues and vices had a long shelf-life in Western cultural history, richly encountered in the arts, now defunct. Do they deserve to be resuscitated? Can the visual arts again play a role in revitalization?

Actors in white linens shower the crowd with tiny flower petals. This night’s itinerant theatre performance has transformed into a banquet in which actors and audience are no longer separated, the barriers gone. On these ancient stones is laid out a banquet of laughter, food and wine, and all are invited.

Our goal was to recover for a contemporary audience the rich set of resonances between a medieval play, a painting, a place, and a devotional text.

Why did the visual arts find such a welcome place in the preaching, teaching, and devotional practices of Franciscan and Dominican monasticism?

The Orvieto Duomo offers an example of decoration woven together into a coherent theme, namely, God’s investment of Himself from beginning to end in the human flesh formed “in his image.”

As an experiment in visual ecumenism, Bruce Herman and Matt Milliner brought together their studio art and art history classes to create a painting that questioned traditional Christian divisions.

The scenes from the life of Mary in the Orvieto Duomo are marked by “intimate glimpses” and a “tenderness of human interactions” (Sara James) among the holy family.

A number of months after we started attending St Cuthbert's, the music director approached me and said, "You write poetry. Do you want to write a poem for Pentecost?" My reply was an immediate, "Not a chance. I am not a religious poet."

Art creates another significant link between Gordon College’s part of the globe and the Servite monastery in Orvieto. In a lush eclectic gallery of the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum in Boston hangs a five-panel polyptych of the Virgin and Saints—a piece from the church of the Servi in Orvieto.

IL CONVENTO DEI SERVI

Agnes Howard

Italy is dotted with monasteries of obscure identity, old purposes being forsaken, antiquity and cultural value arguing for their preservation. What should be done with an old hulk of a building, often vast and sturdily built, graced with art or good views or fine acoustics?

On March 17, 1541, a noblewoman of a certain age in widow’s weeds appeared before the door of the Convent of San Paolo in Orvieto, seeking refuge. According to Jacob Burckhardt, she was “the most famous woman” of sixteenth-century Italy.