Ars Gratia Artis: The Freedom of the Arts in the Twentieth-Century Liturgical Reform and Today

T freedom of the arts in liturgy is not an uncontested proposition. Yet both the history of worship and of art confirm that in every liturgical epoch the plastic arts have struggled to maintain a groping search for their own proper character even when pressed into service of the liturgy. Historical examples abound; one thinks of late-classical art when rigid frontalism replaces naturalistic GrecoHellenistic form – a new expression taken up by the burgeoning Christian cult.1 In pre-Carthusian Benedictine worship, as at Suger’s Saint-Denis, one finds symbolderived art exhausted to the point of visual Gnosticism where only the instructed may enter into its complex liturgical and theological meanings. A Gothic art, born in Rheims and achieved at Amiens proposes a new clarity in scale, proportion, movement and, above all, the human form.2 At the same moment in Italy, Giotto abandons medieval and Byzantine tendencies for the solid and classicizing sculpture of Arnolfo di Cambio. Painted figures have faces and gestures that are based on close observation. Art now evidences a new self-awareness. At stake is no longer the idea above the senses, iconic-symbolic attributions, but the desire to portray visual perspective and idealized optical reality. Then arrive the massive Baroque cycles breaking the bounds of liturgical space [Figure 1]. The swirling images are more concerned with the classicizing allegorical themes of Cesare Rippa and the artistic manipulation of perspective meant to induce a surreal ecstasy of