By Jan Dalley - August 29, 2009
The phrase “sacred art” gives us trouble these days. Despite all the parallels we draw between art and religion – descriptions of art galleries as the new cathedrals, and so on – to most modern minds art, although it may be spiritually significant, is resolutely secular, even worldly.
A ‘costalero’ carries a religious statue during a procession in Asturias, Spain
But it wasn’t always so. In the 1490s, the hot-headed young artist Pietro Torrigiano punched his fellow student Michelangelo in the face and broke his nose, and had to leave Florence in a hurry for fear of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Michelangelo’s patron.
The hapless Torrigiano went to work in London and later in Seville, where he made fine sculpture in terracotta. One day there was an altercation with a client over the fee for a terracotta Pietà and, in a rage, Torrigiano took his mallet and smashed the piece – which was, after all, still his own property, since it hadn’t been paid for. But when the Inquisition’s authorities heard about the incident they threw the poor man into prison – where he languished miserably until his death – for the crime of defiling a sacred image.
Alonso Cano’s ‘Saint John of God’, c1655
Now then, the 21st-century rationalist wants to ask – at what point in the process did that sculpture, that lump of clay, become sacred? Is this an argument about intentionality? Or is sacredness, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder?
