Page 32 - The mystery of faith

I n 1545, the Church convened their sixteenth Ecumenical Council in Trent with the express purpose
of countering attacks by doctrinal reform movements. Equally, since the 1530s the Church had
become increasingly concerned with the unchecked mannerism in religious imagery, and the final
session of the Council held in 1563 included short and rather inexplicit passages concerning religious
images, which were to have great impact on the development of Catholic art. While previous Catholic
councils had rarely felt the need to pronounce on these matters – unlike Orthodox ones, which often
ruled on specific types of images – a decree was passed which confirmed the traditional doctrine that
any religious image represented only the event or personage depicted, and while such images could be
an invitation to veneration and contemplation, they could not be worshiped themselves. The Church
now emphasized the role faith should play in the form and function of religious imagery (iconodulism),
and espoused this role not only in terms of the individual ‘cults’ of the saints, but also as a means of
fostering amongst the faithful those saintly virtues that fortified the Catholic faith. The act of
veneration was now directly related to its attendant image, and was, moreover, distinguished from the
act of worship, which was in fact discouraged. Therefore, the more realistic an image was, the more
immediate and profound the response it evoked in the faithful, resulting in a greater sense of mysticism,
and, ultimately, a stronger attachment to the Catholic Church.

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PERFECTING THE DIVINE IMAGE AND THE LIMITATIONS OF SPEECH

T he quest to create an image so perfect that it evokes a sense of the divine has driven artists for
millennia. In 432 BC, Phidias (c. 480 – c. 430 BC), acknowledged as the greatest of all Greek
sculptors, reached the pinnacle of his achievement in the colossal statue of Zeus at Olympia, one of the
Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. This huge chryselephantine statue (covered in gold and ivory) was
said to be so potently realistic it was believed to be the very embodiment of the god, omnipotent, and
even appearing to possess the power to condemn or pardon ordinary mortals. Legend has it that upon
its completion Phidias asked Zeus to send him a sign of approval, and in reply the god is said to have
given the sculptor his ringing endorsement by hurling a thunderbolt at his feet.3

In a similar vein, one of the more oft-repeated anecdotes in the history of Michelangelo recounts how,
while working on his famous Moses (completed 1515), he was so caught up in his ingenious illusion of
liberating the prophet’s actual form from the marble block, that he repeatedly begged the work: ‘Speak
to me! Speak to me!’4 Certainly, such strange behaviour might have been considered irreverent (if not
outright blasphemous) of a Christian artist engaged in the process of realizing such a sacred subject as
Moses, but while such a fervent grasping for the ‘divine’ would not have been intolerable in an ordinary
believer, it was perhaps more permissible in an artist.

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