Nicholas Wolterstorff (author of the recent Art Rethought: the social practices of art) says this about John Skillen’s book Putting Art (back) in Its Place:

Enter the website
that provides dozens of photographs of the artworks-in-their-place discussed in the book.

For a preview of the book, read the Introduction here.

MORE COMMENTS FROM READERS:

"Using the early Renaissance in Italy as case study and model, Putting Art (back) in Its Place makes a powerfully persuasive argument for how art can and, more importantly, why art should play a significant role in shaping the life and aspirations of a community—civic or ecclesial. For those who ask why Italian Renaissance art and culture so captivates and conjures up a wistful longing for some lost ideal, this book provides at least part of the answer. Drawing on his many years of experience building intentional community for students in the hilltown of Orvieto, John Skillen skillfully unveils the power of works of art made for a particular people, place, and purpose and lays out a compelling vision for how art can inform—even shape—communal life in a voice that is truly his own—winsome, learned, and authentic."
—Rachel Hostetter Smith, Gilkison Distinguished Professor of Art History, Taylor University

“Putting Art (back) in Its Place has solid academic credentials, but it is not ‘academic’ in the sense that word is too often used. The book springs from John Skillen’s long residency in Italy and his intimate knowledge of Italian Renaissance art, and makes an impassioned argument that the visual arts can deepen our life together. He draws extensively from history to propose roles for art that are absent today, hoping that art might again live with us instead of continue its solitary confinement in museums and galleries.”
—Theodore Prescott, sculptor and Emeritus Professor of Art at Messiah College, website here.

“Dr. John Skillen releases his long awaited book—which asks what role art can play at the heart of our communities (again!). He discusses powerfully the essential role it played in Italian culture over a 300 year period (before, during, and immediately after the Renaissance) revealing the depth of connection made to the deepest wellsprings of meaning and belonging.

Dr. Skillen then moves us into a receptive frame of mind, offering hope and challenge as we consider a vital place for art once again—putting it (back) to work in its capacity to ‘say’ those things embedded in memory, imagination, and the future vision of a people. A must read.”
—Bruce Herman, painter, public speaker, board member of IMAGE Journal, leading figure in the organization Christians in the Visual Arts, Lothlórien Distinguished Chair in the Fine Arts at Gordon College, website here.

“Putting Art (back) in Its Place is an excellent resource for those teaching classes in art appreciation and also for church leaders who long for quality music, architecture, and visual art in their churches once again. While dealing with topics that are at once historically rich and theologically deep, the book is approachable and easy to read for those with some background in the arts. As an added bonus, the book also offers access to a website which allows readers to visually see all of the pieces of art being discussed within the text—a wonderful advantage for today’s visually-oriented student.”
—John Mark Miller, Adjunct Professor of Fine Arts, Dallas Baptist University

Keep reading for a synopsis of the book.

Attention to art in modern society, and approaches to its meaning, have focused mainly on the individual artist who makes the artwork. 

A basic assumption has been that the artist, whose creativity is a form of self-expression, requires and deserves maximum unconstrained freedom. The artwork has significance mainly in relation to the artist’s psyche, to her own take on the world around her. The artist is not answerable to any community that is expected to be appreciative of his creative work. The environments of the gallery and museum narrow the viewing of art to a clean aesthetic detachment, further displacing the artwork from any direct relevance for the purposes of a community. And the artwork’s monetary value depends on the degree of the status gained by the artist in the artworld.

Recent decades have witnessed a growing appreciation for the arts among a broad swathe of churches and faith-based communities, evident in their encouragement of artists, in more intentional use of art in worship, and sometimes in the use of the arts and artists in service ministries. In general, however, people of Christian faith, including the academic settings in which young Christian artists are trained, have accepted modernity’s artist-centric model for the value and purpose of art.

But if we think about it, to define the work of the art in terms of the individual autonomy of the artist awkwardly suits the identity of the church as a mutually-dependent body, where no individual is more important than another, where individual giftings and skills have value and purpose in their service of the body and in submission to its head.

A further irony is that even as folk of Christian faith are tuning into art, the modern model is losing its grip. The new avant-garde are the movements to encourage public art, collaborative art, environmental art, socially engaged art, art commissioned for particular places—art, that is, that operates in public space with communal purpose. 

In the view of the Studio for Art, Faith & History, we would do well to re-visit a long period of pre-modern European history for a more suitable model for defending and engaging the arts. For several hundred years in Italy (from 1250 to 1550, the period of the author’s experience and expertise) pretty much all works of art were designed for the use of a particular faith-informed community in a particular place. The artwork did its work in situ, assisting the community in the performance of those actions that defined its corporate work and identity. 

That art was valued across a broad cross-section of society is evidenced most obviously in the rich landscape of sophisticated decoration that marks the public and private places in which every sort of community association gathered to do its work. I think of the wonderful series of paintings in the hospital in Siena depicting the various aspects of caring for the sick. Monks and nuns ate their suppers in front of Christ’s Last Supper with his disciples. People received the sacrament before altarpieces that clarified precise aspects of the Real Presence of Christ to be embodied in the lives of the faithful. Town councils, such as the committee of Nine in Siena, prepared legislation under the frescoed gaze of images of the sources and effects of good and bad government. Orphanages, confraternity clubhouses, baptisteries and bell towers, even the sacristies where the clergy vested for the Mass: no zone of civic and religious life was off-limits to imagery intended to instruct, remind, inspire the work of the people.

We can distinguish several overlapping dimensions of the places where works of art did their work in the midst of community life.

We enter an architecturally distinct place designed to house a particular action. Artworks operated not by erasing or ignoring the architectural features of a room or building, but were integrated into the architectural givens, playing their own role in shaping the experience of the place. 

We enter the place of the liturgy. The art designed for a place drew the people into a particular “work of the people” (as liturgy means), highlighting and informing and inspiring the action. Artworks did not evoke a generalized appreciation, but came alive while experienced inside an action, whether celebrating a holy-day of the Church Year, or receiving one of the sacraments, or exercising judgment in a court of law, or dining as a community, or gathering as a family to celebrate a baptism or marriage, and so forth.

And almost always we enter the place of a narrative. To enter a room is to be placed inside a story that not only unfolds around us but draws us in as participants.

These three places of art serve as the organizational frame of John Skillen’s book Putting Art (back) in Its Place.

The author further argues that these three places in fact correlate with key erosions in the post-culture of our own time: the leveling of distinctions among places that confuses our sense of appropriate action for the occasion; the dissolution of corporately-accomplished actions that deserve a designated place, and, amidst a culture short-sightedly focused on the immediate, the general erosion of a sense of narrative, of a purposeful trajectory that unfolds over time, requiring commitment over the long haul.