Aurelio Porfiri
I was lucky enough to be born and raised (and still live) in an area of Rome that is full of beautiful churches (and basilicas). I have always considered it to be a grace, as it has educated my eyes and my spirit to beauty according to what has always been the intention of the Church, that is, to attract through visible beauty to invisible beauty.
This was well understood by the medieval people: “Omnia visibilia quaecumque nobis visibiliter erudiendo symbolice, id est figurative tradita, sunt proposita ad invisibilium significationem et declarationem … Quia enim in formis rerum visibilium pulchritudo earum consistit … visibilis pulchritudo invisibilis pulchritudinis imago est” [All visible objects are proposed to us for the signification and declaration of invisible things, instructing us, through sight, in a symbolic, that is, figurative way… Since in fact the beauty of visible things consists in their form… visible beauty is the image of invisible beauty.] (Ugo di San Vittore, In Hierarchiam coelestem expositio, PL 175, coll. 954 and 978 in U. Eco, Art and beauty in medieval aesthetics, my translation).
If it is true that beauty can sometimes mislead us – “Beware of the objects to which you feel attracted” (St. Louis Maria Grignion de Montfort, Maxims of divine wisdom) – we cannot, however, live without beauty, which is that of the human bodies or that of artistic forms. And the Church has always understood this, at least until a recent past, and also strongly promoted it.
Let us recall what Pius XII said in 1947 in the encyclical Mediator Dei: “In all things of the Liturgy these three ornaments, of which Our Predecessor Pius X speaks: holiness, that is, which abhors any profane influence; nobility of the images and forms to which every genuine and best art serves; finally, universality which – while preserving legitimate regional customs and traditions – expresses the Catholic unity of the Church. buildings and sacred altars. Let everyone feel animated by the divine word: ‘The zeal of your house has devoured me’; and let him work according to his strength, so that everything, both in the sacred buildings, and in the vestments and in the liturgical furnishings, even if it does not shine through excessive richness and splendor, it is, nevertheless, its own and clean, since everything is consecrated to the Divine Majesty. We have already criticised those who, with the excuse of restoring the ancient, want to expel the sacred images from the temples, we consider it our duty here to resume the poorly educated piety of those who, in churches and on the altars themselves, propose to venerate, without just reason, multiple simulacra and effigies, those who exhibit relics not recognized by legitimate authority, finally those who insist on particular things and of little importance, while neglecting the main and necessary, and thus make religion ridiculous, and demean gravity of the cult.” In short, there was great care for art in the liturgy.
I would like to point out, as an example, that of the floors that are called “cosmatesque,” which are found in some basilicas in my area. It seems that the term “cosmatesque” was conceived by an architect named Camillo Boito in 1860, in an article in which he defined a certain flooring technique used by marble workers in the 12th / 13th century (Arda Lelo, The cosmatesque style). It seems that the name comes from the fact that one of these marble workers was called magister Cosma.
The cosmatesque floor is an example of how it is not necessary to make usefulness to prevail over beauty, but of how beauty can also be useful: “In addition to the undoubted artistic value of these floors, it should be remembered that they also had a dividing function of space, defining a series of different levels in which the central nave is the protagonist in which there is a rotary movement composed of quincunx and guilloche, while in the side aisles geometric motifs alternate that fill the rectangles giving the composition an a-directional and static character in contrast with that of the central nave” (Arda Lelo, The Cosmatesque style). That is, these floors, in addition to a search for the beauty of the whole, were also made for liturgical purposes, to ensure an adequate division of spaces. Let us also not forget that they are an example of the transmission of craftsmanship within family groups, a little as it has always been for the art of organ building, which guaranteed a transfer of technical and aesthetic skills within families.
The contemplation of cosmatesque floors brings us back to the problem of form, even in the liturgy, a problem that has become more and more aggravated in recent decades. The teacher of aesthetics Stefano Zecchi states: “Knowledge subordinates the multiplicity of phenomena to the unity of a formative principle, inserting the particular into a universal order. Form is a knowable unit; where there is no form there is no knowable unity, but only an empty movement of sensations and perceptions that do not synthesize a meaning. Art without form is this meaningless nothingness. Art is knowledge; it is, in itself, an original formative activity that does not end in representation: it is creative energy that transfers a specific symbolic meaning, a form, into the multiplicity of phenomena. Art does not reflect an empirical fact: it symbolizes it in a form. Without this activity there is no art” (The armed artist).
Today what happens is that an alleged usefulness in the liturgy is preferred, depriving the faithful of the surprising meaning revealed by artistic languages when they are used with wisdom and taste. The crisis of the liturgy is also a crisis of form, an aesthetic short circuit that impoverishes the faithful of a sure means to rise to supernatural heights. (Photo: Wikipedia)
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