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COMING SOON: Sunday, October 10th, 10:00 AM: The Binding of Isaac: A New Solo Cantata by Delvyn Case
All Saints Anglican Church, 67 Friend Street, Amesbury, MA (parking behind the church)

*** This art-in-liturgy event is open to the public. ***

All Saints Anglican Church, in collaboration with the Studio for Art, Faith & History, will host the world premiere of a solo cantata by Boston-based composer Delvyn Case — a musical composition that places us in the midst of God’s call to Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac (Genesis 22).

Written for an ensemble of six instruments and a single soprano voice, this brief cantata can be performed in a concert hall. But this premiere version places the musical drama in the liturgy of the Sunday morning worship, adding a deeper resonance to the Sacrifice of a greater only-begotten Son, a Second Isaac, remembered in every celebration of the sacrament of Holy Communion.

Providing the backdrop of both liturgy and cantata will be a twelve-foot-high painting of the Crucifixion by contemporary artist Bruce Herman. In Herman’s evocative image, Adam bends over at the foot of the Cross, hands raised. The figure of Mary stands in deep meditation on both sides of the Cross, young in one side, older in the other. Herman’s altarpiece deepens our understanding of Jesus as the Second Adam, and of Mary – she who said “Be it unto me according to Thy Word” – as the obedient Second Eve.

Conducted by the composer, this new work will be performed by soprano Rose Hegele, one of Boston’s most sought-after performers of contemporary music, and six musicians drawn from ensembles such as the Handel and Haydn Society and the Boston Pops.

Following the service, visitors as well as All Saints parishioners are welcomed to a conversation with Delvyn Case, Bruce Herman, Rev. Justin Howard,
rector of All Saints Church, and John Skillen, director of the Studio for Art, Faith, and History, and initiator of this event.

January 13 - 23, 2022: In the footsteps, and into the caves, of Saints Benedict and Francis

*** This special Pilgrimage-Retreat is already fully booked. ***

This ten-day Retreat, based in Orvieto, focuses on the 6th-century Saints Benedict and his sister Scholastica, and 13th-century Saints Francis and his female counterpart Clare, with several day-long pilgrimages to the still-out-of-the-way and stunningly beautiful places where these figures understood and deepened their peculiar callings, including Subiaco, the Eremo delle Carceri, Greccio, La Verna.

December 27, 2001 - January 11, 2022: Jerusalem & Athens Winter Seminar in Orvieto,
in collaboration with Gordon College’s Jerusalem & Athens Forum Honors Program and the honors program at Valparaiso University

Dr. Skillen has directed a number of these Winter Seminars, making available to a wider circle of students, alumni and adult learners the theme for which the Jerusalem and Athens Forum honors program is named: “What has Jerusalem to do with Athens, the Church with the Academy?,” the still-lively question posed in 198 C.E. by the early church father Tertullian. Guest teacher Dr. Tal Howard (holder of the Duesenberg Chair in Christian Ethics at Valparaiso University) will take up the concepts and vocabulary of the virtues and vices of human character (for example, the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude, described and analyzed with care and precision by Aristotle and Cicero), and explores how this moral vocabulary was adopted and adapted by thinkers such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas to render it compatible with Christian faith. Among the questions to be explored: What is a good life? What is a good society? What is virtue and how does one acquire it? What is vice and how can one avoid it? What is the relationship between the pursuit of virtue and the pursuit of salvation? What is the relationship between individual virtue and public/social responsibility?

Dr. Skillen’s role is to highlight the pervasive visual depiction of the virtues and vices in public art in medieval and Renaissance Italy—an important means by which the vocabulary of virtues and vices got into the eyes, ears, minds and psyches of ordinary people as guides to perception, judgment, and choice-making in real life. Excursions to Rome, Siena, Florence, and in Orvieto itself will give material grip and context to our study.

Students enrolled at Gordon College receive academic credit for the JAF Winter Seminar, but adult learners of any age are welcome to participate in the Seminar, pending on spots available.

For detailed information and answers to Frequently Asked Questions, and to apply, visit the program website.

October 16 2021: Dr. Skillen delivers an illustrated lecture on “The Work of Art in the Works of the Church,” hosted by the Eliot Society (Maryland)

As described on the Eliot Society website,

In recent decades, a growing number of Christians—even those from church traditions formerly suspicious of the arts—are warming up to the idea that artworks can serve in the various practices of the life of faith. Scripturally sound and aesthetically sophisticated works of art can guide our prayer, help catechize those new to Christian faith, and shape the environments of our missional work. To help us imagine possibilities, John Skillen will offer examples from a long period of Christian history when the arts were put to work in the collective life of the church in more places and in more ways than most of us nowadays can imagine. Not only churches but also hospitals, orphanages, the meeting rooms of parachurch organizations, baptisteries and bell towers, dining halls and cloisters in monasteries, town halls and civic fountains and public squares—all were places of serious decoration and design expected to be compatible with Christian faith.

***This illustrated lecture will be posted on the Studio website after the lecture***

September 9, 2021: Dr. Skillen gives an illustrated lecture for Gordon College’s Jerusalem & Athens Honors Program, on the long-lived classical-Christian tradition of the Virtues and Vices.

Arranged in 7’s, examined in treatises by the philosophers and theologians, exhorted by the preachers, and visualized in the arts, the virtues and vices were part of the religious, social, and cultural landscape. The culminating question posed by Skillen is how we can account for the rapid erosion in recent decades of the ‘currency’ of this moral vocabulary.

***This illustrated lecture will be posted on the Studio website.***

Fall 2021

Dr. Skillen’s entry on Mural Painting will shortly appear in the Encyclopedia of the Reception of the Bible. For many centuries, the depiction and interpretation of Scriptural episodes in the visual arts, often in large-scale wall murals, shaped significantly how people learned, and remembered, and linked together the narratives of the Bible. No simplistic ‘Sunday School’ illustrations, such murals offered what we may call a “visual hermeneutic” of Scripture that was sophisticated, thought-provoking, and widely shared by communities.

Dr. Skillen is a contributor to a book for Christian institutions of higher education to use in their first-year seminars, titled Learning the Good Life: Wisdom from the Great Hearts and Minds that Came Before. The editors of the anthology—Jessica Hooten-Wilson and Jacob Stratman, of John Brown University—state that “we want students to be introduced to the best that has been thought and said at the beginning of their academic pursuits, in hope that this invitation to the great conversation will lead to greater flourishing for them in their higher education career, but more importantly, for the work to which God is calling them.” Skillen’s selection will be the passage in Pope Gregory the Great’s Life of Saint Benedict, written in the form of a dialogue between Gregory and his student Peter, when Peter, in a moment of profound discovery, realizes the parallels in Saint Benedict’s life with figures in the Bible (Moses, Elijah, Elisha, David, Peter).

September 2021: The Studio for Art, Faith & History resumes activities curtailed during the year-and-a-half of the coronavirus pandemic

January 2021: Dr. Skillen’s new book Making School Beautiful: Restoring the Harmony of Place (Classical Academic Press, 2020) is now available for purchase. The “Look Inside” feature includes all of the Introduction and chapters 1 and 2. In addition, a designated webpage provides full-color captioned photographs of the dozens of works of art found in gray-scale in the book itself. See the page on this website devoted to the book.

January 2021: A word from Dr. John Skillen, director of the Studio for Art, Faith & History
In September 2020 I retired from Gordon College, after 37 rewarding years as professor of medieval and Renaissance stuff, and as founding director of the Orvieto Semester program (which remains under the gifted leadership of Matthew Doll). Although the Studio will no longer operate under the umbrella of Gordon College, it will carry on with gusto as an independent entity.

The Studio’s home-base in Orvieto remains in place. However, the circumstances of the Coronavirus pandemic obliged us to cancel the Studio-sponsored 2020 Summer Seminars, as well as those planned for January 2021 and June-July 2021.

February 2020: Dr. Skillen was interviewed by Brian Brown for a podcast of the Anselm Society’s Centric Genius series, exploring how artists can find a place at the center of communities of Christian faith, rather than on the periphery. Link to podcast here.

January 2020: The Studio continued its longstanding collaboration with the Orvieto-based KaminaTeatro. Theater artist Andrea Brugnera prepared a beautiful script of the real-life story of the courageous community of Carmelite nuns who, during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, refused to leave their convent during the suppression of all monasteries. They were martyred at the guillotine on July 17th, 1794. Vessilli di un Dio Morente (the banner of a dying god) was performed in the theater space of what was the Carmelite monastery in Orvieto. See the brief article about the play on the Studio website, with photographs from the production.

January 2020: Two Winter Seminars in Orvieto
In tandem with the regular seminar on Virtue & Vice: the Good Life in the moral philosophy, literature, and art of medieval-Renaissance Europe (supported by the Jerusalem & Athens Honors program at Gordon College), Dr. Skillen added a new seminar imagined by Dr. David Goss, director of the College’s Museum Studies and Public History program. Goss’s program benefits mightily from Gordon’s location at the epicenter of historic New England. Not only Boston but nearby towns such as Concord and Lexington, Salem and Ipswich, Gloucester and Newburyport are rich with conventional museums and house museums, but also with real houses and churches and public buildings built ‘back in the day,’ still being lived in, modified, repaired, re-purposed. But in Orvieto, students have 2,500 years more of history under their feet, literally. What are the challenges faced by “interpreters of history” in a place such as Orvieto, marked by an infinitely-complex palimpsest of layers, distinguishable yet fused together? That was the theme addressed by this new seminar.

December 2019: The editor of ARTS, the journal of the Society of Arts in Religious and Theological Studies, commissioned Dr. Skillen to write a lengthy essay on the decoration of the Duomo of Orvieto, from the bas-relief panels on the façade, to the Chapel of the Holy Corporal in the left transept, to the fresco cycle of scenes from the life of Mary in the apse area behind the altar, to the stupendous frescoes in the San Brizio Chapel on the End Times and Last Judgment, to the bronze-cast great central doors depicting the Seven Works of Mercy. Skillen’s argument is that, taken together, these works of art present a visual theology of the doctrine of the Incarnation, as God’s modus operandi from beginning to end of salvation history. (Publication of ARTS has been on hold until Fall 2021. Skillen’s essay is now posted here on the Studio website.)

December 2019: Dr. Skillen contributed an Advent-themed post for the “Bible Engagers” Blog of the American Bible Society, on the theme of “Enriching your reading of Scripture through the visual arts.” For centuries, the hearing of Scripture went hand-in-glove with the seeing of Scripture in works of visual art that surrounded worshippers in churches. And the hearing of the Bible was coordinated with the unfolding of the Church Year. In fact, many of the still-famous paintings of the Italian Renaissance are keyed precisely to the liturgical calendar and its systematic reading of Scripture in the Lectionary. Read the blog-post here.

December 2019: Dr. Skillen was asked to write an Advent-themed entry for the blog of CIVA (Christians in the Visual Arts). He focuses on three works of art keyed to the season. Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Adoration of the Shepherds, is an altarpiece still “in situ” in the chapel of the Sassetti family in the church of Santa Trinità in Florence. Skillen then describes the dramatization of the Nativity in an entirely different media: a contemporary version of the medieval “Second Shepherds Play,” performed on several occasions in Orvieto by theater artist Karin Coonrod and her Compagnia de’ Colombari. Then, to remind us that the theme of Advent in the Church Year is to prepare for Christ’s Second Coming, Skillen turned to the stupendous wall murals on the End Times and Last Judgment frescoed in the San Brizio Chapel of the Orvieto Duomo by Fra Angelico and Luca Signorelli. Read the blog-post here.

October 2019: Dr. Skillen was invited to contribute to an ambitious and on-going new project: the Visual Commentary on Scripture. Directed by Ben Quash, and a team of U.K.-based scholars, VCS is “a freely accessible online publication that provides theological commentary on the Bible in dialogue with works of art. It helps its users to (re)discover the Bible in new ways through the illuminating interaction of artworks, scriptural texts, and commissioned commentaries.” Contributors select three artworks from various time periods and countries, commenting on each, with a concluding brief essay comparing all three. Skillen was assigned the story of Jesus’s visit to the house of sisters Mary and Martha and their brother Lazarus, as recounted in Luke’s gospel, chapter 10 (38-42). A treatment of the two sisters by Fra Angelico operates in a then-millennium-long custom of associating Martha’s distracted serving and Mary’s absorbed listening to Jesus as figures of the contrasting ‘active’ and ‘contemplative’ lives. Fra Angelico treats active and contemplative response as two sides of one coin. A painting by Johannes Vermeer brings the three figures into an intimate triangle, while Diego Velázquez places the episode in the background of a contemporary domestic kitchen scene. From this link to Skillen’s entry, one can explore other entries in this expanding project of visual commentary of Scripture.

September 2019: Dr. Skillen’s paper on saints Francis and Dominic and the Arts of Devotion, delivered at Trinity Western University’s annual Arts + Spirituality conference, was selected for inclusion in TWU’s Verge: a journal of the Arts + Christian Faith (vol. 3 2019). Read the essay here.

June 2019: Dr. Skillen’s essay on the influence of Rhetoric on the visual arts in Renaissance Italy was published, with lots of photographs, in the CiRCE Institute’s FORMA journal (Spring 2019, pp. 30-39). Skillen highlights the fascinating parallels between visual patterns and verbal patterns, and the same “rhetorical” concerns exhibited by painters in their attentiveness to the audience of a painting, to the particular setting of the artwork, and to the purposed effect of the painting. Skillen argues that the only broadly-available vocabulary for such obviously-deliberate patterns in visual design during the epochs of classical-medieval-Renaissance European culture was that of rhetoric.

April 2019: Dr. Skillen was a keynote speaker (along with Hans Boersma and Junius Johnson) at the Colorado Springs-based Anselm Society’s annual Imagination Redeemed conference. Referencing artworks from pre-modern Italy, Skillen outlined how the “Works of Art” can again enrich the “Work of the Church” in our own time.

February 2019: The winter theater project in the Studio’s regular collaboration with Andrea Brugnera’s KaminaTeatro was a dramatization of the Legend of San Giuliano. Julian, a rapacious hunter, receives the prophecy from a dying stag that he will murder his parents. Julian leaves home to escape his fate, but (Oedipus-like) he unwittingly accomplishes the horrific deed. In penitential remorse, Julian serves for years as a humble ferryman and giver of succor to those in need, including a leper who, hosted by Julian, assures Julian that God will grant mercy. Brugnera’s script draws deeply from the novella of the legend by Gustave Flaubert. The dramatic monologue was performed in the church of Sant’Andrea under a fragmented fresco from the fourteenth-century, recently recognized by Andrea’s wife as depicting this story of uncontrolled wrath, repentance, and renewal. See the brief account of the project, with photographs and the appreciative coverage of the local newspaper, here on the Studio’s website.

October 2018: For Samford University’s annual “Teaching the Christian Intellectual Tradition”—focused in 2018 on “Teaching Dante”—Dr. Skillen highlighted the rich presence of “liturgical practice” in the sanctifying work of the penitent souls in the Purgatorio as “a gate into the Divine Comedy.”

July 2018: The Studio for Art, Faith & History’s summer project in theater, again as a collaboration with KaminaTeatro, was a play about Saint Juvenal—San Giovenale in Italian—to whom Orvieto’s beloved church of San Giovenale (founded in 1004) is dedicated. This fourth-century missionary bishop came from north Africa to bring the gospel of Christ to the southern part of Umbria. His arrival in the Umbrian town of Narni is dramatized in one of the plays transcribed in a manuscript from 1405. Andrea Brugnera strengthened and augmented the script into a life of Saint Juvenal, with several of Orvieto’s own immigrants from Tunisia participating in the scenes from Juvenal’s early life. Read the essay on the Studio website about the play.

See accounts of other of the Studio’s projects in theater on the website.

January 2018: The Studio, in collaboration with CIVA’s then-director Cameron Anderson, hosted a retreat that brought together a genial company of Collectors, Curators, and Commissioners for the purpose of tampering with the modern assumptions that artists alone make artworks, that artists work best with a minimum of external interference, and that other folk—such as those who collect art or curate shows or run galleries—come along afterwards to get artworks out of the studio into places where they can be seen, enjoyed, and (as artists and gallerists hope) purchased. The question “Who makes the art work?” invites us to bring the roles of others into the picture.