An interview with Matthew Conner, Catholic Artist and Catholic Art Institute Featured Artist
Matthew Conner joins the podcast to discuss his sacred art drawing from the Gothic and Iconographic styles. Matthew has done considerable research about Sacred Art and was influenced by the writings of many modern and traditional Catholic clergy, artists and philosophers. Please see the bibliography below.
Discussed in this episode is Anthony Visco's "Four Canons of Composition" lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cf0N2Mo6Huk
Dr. Denis McNamara's presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3c1OrRusGk
Matthew Conner's website: https://www.matthew-conner.com/
Catholic Art Institute Featured Artist Page: https://www.catholicartinstitute.org/matthewconner
Sacred Art - Naturalism & Symbolism Annotated Bibliography:
Aidan Hart, Techniques of Icon and Wall Painting.
Inter alia, discussion of preserving physical qualities of saints's likenesses while symbolically revealing
qualities of their identity.
Clayton, David. The Way of Beauty
Several chapters develop the three schools mentioned in Pope Benedict's work.
Deville Adam, "Aidan Hart on His Splendid New Book about Icons", http://easternchristianbooks.blogspot.com/
2014/09/aidan-hart-on-his-splendid-new-book.html
"every formal, stylistic element of liturgical art, be it visual, musical or architectural, must aim to show the
world transfigured and to create the right state of soul conducive to prayer," - Aidan Hart
Gorbunova-Lomax, Irina. The Icon: Truth and Fables.
Inter alia, a salutary critique of certain over-mysticizating tendencies in the Iconographic mode.
(St) John of Damascus, On the Divine Images
On the eschatalogical reality of icons and their veneration.
McNamara, Dennis. Liturgical Architecture: a Balthasarian Approach , Communio 32.
Develops Hans von Balthasar's "beauty that reveals the ontological reality" which draws on the earlier
maxim «Pulchritudo veritatis splendor », Beauty is the splendor of truth.
Pius XII, Pope. "Mediator Dei", 195.
"Modern art should be given free scope in the due and reverent service of the church and the sacred rites,
provided that they preserve a correct balance between styles tending neither to extreme realism nor to
excessive 'symbolism,'..."
«Recentes imagines ac formae, ad materiam aptiores, ex qua hodie conficiuntur, non sunt generali modo
atque ex praeiudicata opinione spernendae ac reiciendae; sed rationibus illis aequabiliter ac recte
compositis, quae neque ad nudam contendant rerum imitationem, nec ad nimium « symbolismum », quem
vocant, ac necessitatibus potius spectatis christianae communitatis, quam peculiari artificum iudicio atque
ingenio cuiusque suo, oportet omnino eam nostrorum temporum artem liberum habere campum, quae
sacris aedibus sacrisque ritibus debita reverentia debitoque honore inserviat;,... »
Ratzinger, Joseph. Spirit and the Liturgy , pt iii, ch 1.
Reflects on three major schools of Sacred Art: Iconographic, Gothic and Baroque. Each uses a different
mode of approaching the transcendent: eschatalogical reality for the former, incarnational particulars for the
later and conjoining of the two in the Gothic/Early Renaissance. cf Plato and Aristotle's ideal and
hylomorphic concepts.
(St) Thomas Aquinas, ST I, Q 50, a 3, ad 3.
"since only through sensible things can we come to know intelligible ones"
«quia ad cognoscendum intelligibilia non possumus pervenire nisi per sensibilia»
