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It is often said that art galleries today are the new cathedrals – places that people visit to replenish the spirit in a secular age. But for many centuries, cathedrals functioned in the manner of art galleries. Walk into any cathedral in Western Europe, and you will discover countless examples of beautiful art works, from intricate wooden carvings and metalwork to moving marble sculptures and exquisite painted altarpieces.
“After Classical antiquity, Christianity became the predominant power shaping European culture,” explains Jennifer Sliwka, curator of art and religion at the National Gallery in London. “After Theodosius I made Christianity the official state church of the Roman Empire in 380, works commissioned for any spiritual, civic or political purpose were meant to reflect this new belief system.” As a result, Sliwka points out, “Roughly one third of the paintings in the National Gallery’s collection of Western European art are of religious subjects – and nearly all of these are Christian.”
In galleries of modern art, however, the proportion of works treating Christian subjects is much smaller. After centuries of artists actively soliciting the patronage of the church, religion and art are no longer such natural bedfellows. Indeed, in the wake of modernism, it sometimes feels as though art and religion are now strangers to one another, or even downright hostile. “When visiting a contemporary gallery or art fair, I rarely expect to see works that treat religious subjects,” says Sliwka.
Shock doctrines
When contemporary artists tackle Christian subjects today, they often do so in an iconoclastic, ironic, disrespectful or subversive fashion. Think of the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan’s satirical sculpture La Nona Ora (1999), in which Pope John Paul II lies on a red carpet, crushed by a meteorite that has just plummeted from the heavens; or Piss Christ (1987), a photograph by the American artist Andres Serrano, in which a small plastic crucifix is submerged in a glass of urine.
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