Article

Attention

Culture

14 February 2025

5 min read

Dispatches from the battlefield of imagination

The Age of Intellect has given way to the Age of Imagination.

Theodore Brun

Theodore is author of the historical fiction series The Wanderer Chronicles.

A collage image shows a person holding their head, with a wash of warm colours over the scene.

Jr Korpa on Unsplash

Twenty years ago today, I crossed the threshold of the Christian faith. It was a baptism of fire in a more literal and mystical sense than I care to describe (or indeed would be able to). And unlike many, I really can point to a day and a time and a place.

That night, perhaps unlike CS Lewis, I was not quite “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” But I was certainly the most bewildered. ‘What have I let myself in for?’ I wondered as I walked away from that church on a dark, wet January night. I was certain that in crossing that threshold I had entered a new world. Even if it was true, as I believed – or as I now knew - I sensed that it was dangerous too. There was a wildness to what I had just witnessed that was both thrilling and disconcerting. And yet, after that encounter, I could no more have turned away from what I had discovered than stop the world turning. As the mathematician Blaise Pascal discovered in his own ‘night of fire’ – “certitude, certitude!” is a very precious gift, and one worth holding on to.

Twenty years later, the landscape of faith in this country looks very different to the one in which I stumbled my way over the line. (Or through the back of the wardrobe might be a better metaphor.)

Back then, in 2005, the War on Terror was raging. If religion was discussed at all, it was generally reckoned a pretty rotten sort of institution. A regrettable historical hangover, an inheritance bequeathed to us by our more credulous ancestors of which we were doing well to divest ourselves, albeit too slowly for some. In this brave, new secular world, it was an increasingly commonplace view that religion ruined everything; beside which, it wasn’t true anyway.

These were the days when a certain form of atheism was ebullient and on the march. The Four Horsemen of Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett and Harris held the cultural conch for a time, and they weren’t letting go. The God Delusion came out in October 2006, quickly followed by God Is Not Great in early 2007. Religion (not sin) was the root of all evil. Reason^TMwas the exclusive intellectual property of the unreligious mind, untainted as it was by visions of that laughably silly Sky-Fairy in the heavens. The battlefield of apologetics was a much-contested landscape at the time. Truth was the prize - which both sides could at least agree upon - and many a debating hall was filled to bursting to watch each side’s sharpest minds slug it out.

God only knows how in such an intellectual atmosphere, I survived the shelling and carried through to the other side. But it’s telling that I had as my guide through the intellectual carnage, not voices of that age, but rather voices from further back in time. My old friend, CS Lewis, but also GK Chesterton, St Augustine, Dostoyevksy, and the potent words of the gospels to which they led me. Like wily old corporals, they saw me safe across No Man’s Land.

Even if I made it through, there’s no doubt it was the secularists who gained the cultural ground back then. That their intellectual case was unsound, it didn’t matter. Their propaganda was better – it was what people wanted to hear – and so Christianity was shoved out of the public square.

And now, two decades on, the war has moved into a very different theatre of operations. The Age of the Intellect has given way to the Age of Imagination as, unwittingly, the dry vacuum of secularism has sucked in contending spirits of another kind.

These days proponents and adversaries of the Christian faith jostle not in the dusty debating halls of our great universities, but on the battlefield of cultural consumption. Its topography formed of the movies we watch, the streaming channels we look at, the podcasts, music and media we endlessly gulp down.

Truth itself is no longer the prize, since the logical outworking of atheism’s ascendancy was to get what perhaps its proponents never bargained for: a post-truth age. What matters now is not so much what you believe, as what you attend to. The words and images which you consume. (Or which consume you.)

Walk the streets of any city and witness every passer-by glued to the screen nestled in their hand. Earphones clamped over their head. Distraction, saturation, enchantment: a cacophony of sound, a barrage of images overrunning the imagination to the point of madness. Until we have forgotten what it is like to sit patiently in silence with a still and empty mind. What it’s like to observe the world around us, to be available for the people around us.

But with what do we fill our imaginations now – that is the question? There lies the battle.

And so we find ourselves now moving through a world in which our capacity to create and consume is loaded with inestimably high stakes. It harkens back to Dostoyevsky’s famous line in The Brothers Karamazov: “The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.”

He’s right. Although the heart, the mind, the imagination cannot in any true sense be de-coupled from one another. (Is ‘soul’ a more encompassing word?)

And yet, of the two, the truly subversive combatant is God and not the devil. (Consider the Cross: the most subversive act in all reality.) It is God who is the invader here after all. He is the one taking back ground. His weapons are Truth, Beauty and Goodness. On the face of it, these are mild, even benign, abstractions. And yet in each is wrapped a potency as explosive as dynamite. Because with them, the spells that hold our imaginations captive can be broken. In an unguarded moment, He can slip through the enemy lines.

Witness the ear of culture’s recent harkening to the ancient truths and wisdom of our Judeo-Christian heritage. Nick Cave sings of a “Wild God” and to everyone’s surprise, people are starting to listen again. But he’s not the only one.

The inescapable wildness of God is that He cannot be contained; if His will is to break through, then He cannot be held back. As Mr. Beaver said of the lion Aslan, in answer to the fear: “Is he safe?”

“Who said anything about safe? ’Course, he isn’t safe. But he is good.”

As little image-bearers of this Creator, indeed as little creators in our turn, our creativity teeters on a knife-edge – it always has. An edge sharp enough to cleave heaven from hell. We’d do well to remember that. And that, being image-bearers of this wild God, no wonder we have a wildness of our own.

Yep. Twenty years has already been one heck of an adventure. But I suspect it has only just begun.

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Article

Art

Culture

10 February 2025

5 min read

Why is religious art still popular?

What looters, curators and today's public find in a genre that survives the centuries.

Susan Gray

Susan is a writer specialising in visual arts and contributes to Art Quarterly, The Tablet, Church Times and Discover Britain.

A painting depicts a man a prophet pointing skywards while another person sleeps on the ground

Detail from Parmigianino’s The Vision of St Jerome.

The National Gallery.

The museums of Europe and North America are filled with religious art. Why? Certainly, gallery goers of the nineteenth century, when many public museums were founded, were more likely to practice a faith than visitors in today’s global cities, but this does not explain religious art’s continuing appeal. If we are so much more secular than the folks in stiff collars and leg ‘o mutton sleeves who curated and donated to early museum collections, why is the religious art they championed still so popular?

Individual religious paintings’ chequered history, together with the formal elements of their composition, provide two lenses into the genre’s ability to resonate across multiple generations.

Celebrations around the National Gallery’s 200th anniversary, with its reappraisal of the earliest works to enter the collection, offers an ideal time to study the blueprints for public collections, which continue to shape the art we see today. The French Revolution is popularly credited as the genesis of public art institutions, as the art and fine furniture from displaced aristocrat’s palaces was put on display at the Louvre, opened in 1793. But the idea of a semi-public art collections had been present in Italy from the early eighteenth century, as families opened their palazzos and collections of classical art to visitors on the Grand Tour. Rome’s Capitoline Museum opened in 1734, as the papacy saw an opportunity to showcase the heritage of ancient Rome to the city’s wealthy tourists, and position themselves in the role of art patrons.

At the National Gallery, Parmigianino’s The Vision of St Jerome, 1526-1527, (reunited for the first time with rare preparatory drawings until 9 March) pulls on many of the threads that makes religious art, even in a secular age, enduringly powerful.

Painted when Parmigianino was only 24, and already being hailed as ‘Raphael reborn’, the painting is reputed to have stopped looting soldiers in their tracks, when they saw it in the artist’s studio during the 1527 Sack of Rome. The painting itself had an adventurous life, spending far longer in secular surroundings than it ever did in the religious settings it was intended for.

Commissioned as an altarpiece for a funerary chapel in Rome, the upheaval of the city’s occupation by the troops of Charles V saw The Vision of St Jerome stored, but not publicly displayed, in the refectory of a nearby church. Somehow during the terror and mayhem, the 3.5 metres high altarpiece, weighing nearly 100 kilograms, was transported from the artist’s studio across the city to safety.

Thirty years later a great nephew of the original woman patron, Maria Bufalini, took the altarpiece from Rome to the family’s Umbrian hometown of Citta di Castello. Had it instead gone to its intended Roman church San Salvatore in Lauro, it would have been destroyed by the church fire of 1591. The Vision of St Jerome stayed in the family chapel of Sant’Agostino, inspiring artists from the region, until around 1772 when Cardinal Giovanni Bufalini moved the altarpiece to the restored Palazzo Bufalini, placing a copy in Sant’Agostino. If the original stayed in the church it would have been ruined by an earthquake in 1789.

Having spent just over 200 years in a sacred setting, the painting was sold by the Bufalini heirs to an English art agent in Rome, setting sail from Livorno in December 1791 for its new life in England.

After inheriting Parmigianino’s Virgin and Child with Saint John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene (1535-40), George Watson Taylor, with his heiress wife Anna, added The Vision of Saint Jerome to the significant private art collection, displayed at their London Townhouse in Cavendish Square. In 1819 the painting was exhibited publicly in England for the first time when Watson Taylor lent it the British Institution, the forerunner of the National Gallery.

Four years later the painting fetched £3,202 at the sale of Watson Taylor’s collection, securing a higher price than Rubens’ Rainbow Landscape. It was purchased by the Reverend William Holwell Carr on behalf of the British Institution. The Vision of Saint Jerome hung in the National Gallery within two years of the institution’s foundation.

Once part of the nation’s collection, the mannerist style of Parmigianino, with its elongated limbs, twisted torsos, classical drapery and foreshortened perspective, provided a context to discuss the Biblical figures depicted in the work. A loosely draped, seated Virgin Mary holds a tussle haired child between her knees, who kicks one leg out, as if to step away. Beneath them John the Baptist points a massive arm towards the heavens, while a smaller scale St Jerome sleeps clutching a crucifix. Regency and Victorian Christians such as Howell Carr, and popular art historians Anna Jameson and Elizabeth Eastlake, wife of the Gallery’s first director Charles, saw the potential of art created 400 years ago to speak to the spiritual questions of their day. Shorn of a traditional religious setting, the message, and missional potential, of the work came across as powerfully as ever.

After surviving war, fire and earthquakes, The Vision of Saint Jerome was relocated to Manod Quarry in Wales from 1941 until the end of World War Two to escape the bombing of London. During this period, the National Gallery brought one painting out of storage to view in the empty Trafalgar Square landmark, the war weary public’s Picture of the Month. The tradition continues today.

For sleep -deprived, food -rationed, scared wartime Londoners Noli me Tangere offered a message of love, loss, transcendence and protection.

The first Picture of the Month, in 1942, was Titian’s Noli me Tangere, c. 1514. In a rather Italianate Garden of Gethsemane, with glowing sun and tumbling hills, Mary reaches out her hand to Christ. Having tended Christ’s crucified body in the tomb, Mary is grieving, and at first believes the figure before her is a gardener. To her astonishment he reveals himself to be the Christ, resurrected from the dead. Titian portrays the bittersweet moment after Christ’s miraculous return, when Mary comprehends that although Christ is present, she can no longer have any human contact with him, represented by her rebuffed gesture of touch. In common with all Christ’s followers, it is time to relinquish his earthly presence. While the kneeling Mary is bound to the earth, the standing Christ figure forms an arc over her, representing his protection of humanity.