What is beauty? How can we capture in art what is sacred? What role does the Virgin Mary play, and why Eastern art has much to teach us to achieve contemplation?
Art has an awesome power, which is the power of beauty, which is in its fullness in God. He is truth, goodness, and beauty together, and, as this is a little intimidating, Our Lady helps us a little to enter into this mystery. Art is like a bridge to know the Lord.
Art, or the search for beauty, is a way to reach faith. Many painters, musicians, and artists have represented the Virgin Mary. They have looked at a woman, with a real existence, historically documented, and they have been able to see beyond; through her, they glanced into this source of beauty that is God.
Analyzing the different historical representations of the Virgin, we see that, since the Renaissance, the representations of the Virgin help us mostly in the devotional part, because she appeals to our feelings.
If we want to go a bit earlier... we can go to Byzantine art, which has nothing to do with our perspective or with our color code. But it is a theological, catechetical art, which is intended for a society in which we no longer live, because now we need everything to enter through our eyes, and we are not used to exercising our sensibility as well as our intelligence.
However, the contemplation of beauty comes through the senses, but also through the intelligence. What does an icon present? The Virgin Mary, for example, the Theotokos, the Eleusa, the Virgin of Tenderness? We understand tenderness as something sappy, of making caresses, but God's tenderness is something else, which He manifests through the Virgin. It is an incarnated love, and where the Child Jesus is, there is each one of us. There is the Virgin, who knows your problems, who takes you in her arms and caresses you.
We are very badly accustomed to consumer art. We scroll from one image to another, but we contemplate very little. It is important to understand that the Lord gives us a language for each moment, each historical epoch has its language, its sensibility, and its spirituality.
Everything that helps you to have this encounter with beauty comes from God because beauty has its source and its purpose in God. If a simple watercolor of a nun helps you, good for you.
Now, what do these manifestations have in common, that they help us?"
That they follow the three properties of beauty, as St. Thomas Aquinas said: the first is harmony or proportion; then, integrity, that is, that each part is harmoniously related to the others; and, the third, is clarity.
When he speaks of clarity, it is a brightness, a radiance in art, in nature, or in human relationships that have beauty. Everything that has beauty has an echo of God, and we can approach it knowing that it leads to God.
Some excerpts from María del Camino Viana.
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