Art History

The Morgan, the Moon, and the Eucharist

I poured the wine into the chalice our church had given me. In the one-sixth gravity of the moon the wine curled slowly and gracefully up the side of the cup. It was interesting to think that the very first liquid ever poured on the moon, and the first food eaten there, were communion elements. —Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, describing the 1969 moon landing in Guidepost Magazine (October 1970)
The custom of elevating the Host did not become a general practice of the Church until the thirteenth century. Continue Reading
A Cabinet of Vanities

Among liturgically concerned responses to the previous post, one of them gave me a start:
On Corpus Christi, at a Manhattan parish, we had to sing an entrance song which begins, “We are here to tell our story, We are here to break the bread, we are here to know our rising from the dead . . . ”
Here to tell our story . The Gospel of Me. The all-encompassing Cosmic Me. The lyrics lend new meaning to the adjective catholic , do they not? Continue Reading
Modernism: An Apologia

Modernism in the arts is an indefinite term. Like fascism , the word gets bandied about despite the absence of any firm idea of what it means. Even the editors of Modernism: 1890-1930 , a widely used text, fell back on this:
The name [i.e. modernism] is clear; the nature of the movement or movements … is much less so. And equally unclear is the status of the stylistic claim we are making. We have noted that few ages have been more multiple, more promiscuous in artistic style; to distil from the multiplicity an overall style or mannerism is a difficult, perhaps even an impossible task.buy
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Our Fall

Myth does not share the status of history. buy vardenafil online https://medicalcoder.io/wp-includes/sitemaps/providers/php/vardenafil.html no prescription It is not a factual chronicle of primordial events but a poetic insight more profound than an account of incidences ab origine , lost to us in time. Its dignity lies in what Jacques Maritain called creative intuition: “that intercommunication between the inner being of things and the inner being of the human Self which is a kind of divination.” Poems originate in the individual self; myth commences in communal instinct, the collective Self.buy Continue Reading
In the End, Perhaps, Lightness of Heart

I came to Hans Sedlmayr’s Art in Crisis, first published in 1948 , through Roger Kimball’s essay in which he termed the text a “blistering polemic.” I confess a weakness for blistering polemics. Nothing warms the heart faster in these imperiously nonjudgmental days. Morevover, Sedlmayr’s cultural pessimism conforms more convincingly to fallen man and his ever-falling times than our current dalliance with the saving powers of beauty. For a concise bio of Sedlmayr go directly to the Dictionary of Art Historians. Continue Reading