Historical Background

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Painting has always been associated with the life of the Church. From the time of the Catacombs it has been used in ecclesiastical ornamentation, and for centuries after Constantine, religious art was the only form of living art in the Christian world. Its fecundity has been wonderful and even now, although much diminished, is still important. Until the Renaissance the Church exercised a veritable monopoly over this sphere. Profane painting in Europe dates only from the last five centuries and it took the lead only in the nineteenth century. It may therefore be said that throughout the Christian Era the history of painting has been that of religious painting.

It would be absurd to seek to place the Church in contradiction to the Gospel on this point, as did the Iconoclasts in the eighth century and the Protestants in the sixteenth. The doctrine of the Church has been clearly enunciated by Molanus in his "Historia SS. Imaginum" (Louvain, 1568). It is truly remarkable that such a magnificent development of artistic thought should proceed from a purely spiritual doctrine preached by humble Galilean fishermen who were ignorant of art and filled with the horror of idolatry characteristic of the Semitic people. Far from reproaching the Church with infidelity to the teachings of her Founder, we should rather acknowledge her wisdom in rejecting no natural form of human activity and thus furthering the work of civilization.

The very fact that the Church permitted painting obliged her to assign it a definite object and to prescribe certain rules. Art never seemed to her an end in itself; as soon as she adopted it she made it a means of instruction and edification. "The picture", says the Patriarch Nicephorus, "conceals the strength of the Gospel under a coarser, but more expressive form." "The picture is to the illiterate", says Pope St. Gregory, "what the written word is to the educated." In like manner St. Basil: "What speech presents to the ear painting portrays by a mute imitation." And Peter Comestor says, in a famous text: "The paintings of the churches are in place of books to the uneducated" (quasi libri laicorum). "We are, by the grace of God, those who manifest to the faithful the miracles wrought by faith"—thus the painters of Siena express themselves in the statutes of their guild (1355). The same ideas are contained in the "Treatise on Painting" of Cennino Cennini, and in France in the "Livre des Métiers" of the Parisian Etienne Boileau (1254). In 1513, at the height of the Renaissance, Albrecht Dürer wrote: "The art of painting is used in the service of the Church to depict the sufferings of Christ and of many other models; it also preserves the countenances of men after their death." Almost the same definition is given by Pacheco, father-in-law of Velasquez, in his "Arte de la Pintura", printed at Seville in 1649.