The Russian Academy of Art in Florence 

I have just been given information about a school that teaches the traditional academic method according that  which developed in Russia in the 19th century, which seems to be a place that Catholics should think about for study. A former student of mine at Thomas More College, Jacqueline Del Curto, who went through our Way of Beauty program, has been studying there and is now about to go and do an apprenticeship with the British Catholic artist, my friend Jim Gillick in England. It seems to me that this represents the perfect training.

 The Russian Academy of Art in Florence, is one of a number of traditional schools that have been established in recent years. I am told that it was founded about three years ago and that the atmosphere is Christian – this is important, some of these traditional schools are antagonistic to the Church. It has the strong emphasis on drawing that one would expect at a school teaching traditional methods. As important as the teaching of the skill of drawing and painting are the ways that the artist is taught to introduce stylistic elements into the painting. This is done through control of the intensity of colour and focus (ie the blurriness of the image); and it is as important as the accuracy of the draughtsmanship in creating a picture of beauty that conforms to its tradition and the taste of the teacher is hugely important in governing this, because there are no set formulas that can dictate it.…

Look at this photograph of St Clare’s in Assisi, which is top in the series of photographs below, and at the Basilica of St Francis of Assisi in Santa Fe New Mexico, which is second. The first is 13th century and second was completed in 1886.

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As another in an occasional series that just relates pieces of music that had a great effect on me  I offer Schubert’s Impromptu Op 90 No4. I was a student at Oxford when I first heard this. It was at a formal college Christmas dinner of the Middle Common Room (the graduate students). It may surprise some people to learn that these were often quite rowdy affairs. Even though we were in the college dining hall (this was St Edmund Hall) and wearing black tie and tux, drink flowed freely (the drinking age in England is 18) and by then end food was being thrown across the hall. So if you have a picture of the typical Oxford University student as one who is highly sophisticated and cultured, think again. Instead, try to think of the BBC production of Jeeves and Wooster with Hugh Laurie playing Bertie Wooster, and a scene at the Drones Club. Usually, totally incidental to the conversation going on the front and centre, we see grown men, tux wearing toffs, throwing bread rolls being thrown left and right. This was the norm at college dinners that I went to, especially Christmas dinners. Despite all efforts of the dean to discipline students or to appeal to us to grow up it happened each year. In the end they gave up trying to stop us and made special wooden covers to go over all the portraits of past principles and notable Old Aularians.…

Here are some photos of ordinary gardens in Berkeley, California. I was visiting recently and just took these snaps as I wandered around the town. Berkeley has a temperate microclimate and so has a long growing season and very little frost. It is warmer and sunnier than Britain, which also has a temperate climate, and gets drier in summer, but rarely very hot. If you travel just 15 miles inland the temperatures can start to soar, especially in summer. I love to see the effort that the householders go to here.

This does rather blow my Americans-don’t-garden hypothesis, I have to admit…except for the last one.

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Are there any mathematicians out there who can tell me if this is nonesense? It might turn the whole of science upside down.

I recently did a posting about how the passage through sacred time might be viewed as a helical progression based upon the significance of the numbers 7 and 8 in the liturgy as commented on by St Thomas Aquinas. In the comments at the bottom of the article a regular reader called Alexey suggested that if this is so we can conclude that time exists in three dimensions. Here is his comment: Time then is more than one dimension. Just like, when traveling through space, it is not enough to say “I am at 40 degrees latitude”, — the longitude must be specified as well, so it is not enough to say “40 days passed”, one has to add “it is Thursday”.

What I fascinating idea. I have heard of multi-dimensional space (although really claim to understand the idea), but not three-dimensional time.

This immediately reminded me of someone I met years ago in Mountain View, California called Irwin Wunderman. His son was a friend of mine from my time studying engineering at Michigan Tech. Irwin was a brilliant man (he was in his seventies, I think, when I met him and he has since died). He was a PhD from Stamford, where he told me, his thesis was so advanced that even in awarding it his advisor told him that they weren’t sure that they fully understood it.…

Poussin

The following article is written by Dr Caroline Farey and John Casey and of the Maryvale Institute and first appeared in The Sower, which is published by the Maryvale institute and distributed in both the UK and the UK. It is available online at www.thesowerreview.com.

This is written about paintings of the Annunciation, but through it they describe very clearly the principles by which one can choose a painting for catachetical purposes. This is something that is very important, but additional to its appropriateness for a liturgical setting or for devotional prayer.

Caroline and myself will be teaching the summer residential weekends for the diploma offered by the Maryvale Institute, Art Beauty and Inspiration from a Catholic Perspective. The goal of this course is to understanding of the place of beauty in Catholic culture with a special focus on visual art; by this we hope to contribute to the formation of future artists and patrons who serve the church. The course is offered in the US through the Maryvale Mid-America Center at the Archdiocese of Kansas City, Kansas . It is design with  for working adults (and that means stay-at-home mums as well) living in any location, provided they can get to the first residential weekend. The dates of the first residential weekend are July 12-15 (Friday-Monday).   Even if you don’t wish to do the written work for the diploma, you would learn a lot if you chose to audit the course – attending the residential weekend and then working through the accompanying material at home at your leisure.…

Is gardening for beauty and delight a male or a female occupation? Talking to many here in the US, the impression I get is that people see growing food for produce, or rearing animals for food as a masculine thing; but growing a garden for its beauty? Definitely not. They will rear chickens in their back yard, but growing flowers? No, that is for girls.

In response to this I would say that the call of every man to cultivate the land, should have ‘three acres and cow’ is at once too narrow and too broad: narrow in that seems to imply that only a utilitarian view of cultivation; and broad in not every man is meant to be cultivating even three acres of land, but he should at least have a plant-pot and a geranium on the windowsill of his 3rd floor city-centre apartment! Adam was gardener; Christ, the new Adam, was mistaken for a gardener and my great grandfather was head gardener of the Duke of Northumberland (so the family lore goes). Also my grandfather was a keen amateur gardener and my father still is a devoted gardener, who also had a garden-nursery a garden design consultancy business. All were men! Perhaps this is a little family line of the ‘Downton Abbey’ old world pro aristocracy view of life in which every man has his proper place passing down through the family line, holding out against modernist utilitarian view of the land.…

Here are some photos St Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Newcastle, Maine. It was designed  at the end of the last century by the English architect Henry Vaughan. There are many beautiful neo-gothic churches in New England, and what generally comes to my mind when I think of this style is the grand stone churches of, for example, Boston or New York. Vaughan who was English but received many of his commissions in the US design in this grand manner too. St Andrews is different from these in that it is based upon medieval wattle and daub construction, such as All Saints in Crowfield, Suffolk which dates from the 14th century. Henry Vaughan designed only one other, to my knowledge in this country, half-timbered style. This is the Catholic church in Groton, Massachusetts and is currently not used.

I love Victorian neo-gothic and do not think of it as a pale imitation of something that existed earlier. To my mind, the architects of this period, starting with figures such as Pugin, are a model of how to look back at the past work and study the principles that define it and then create original work that both evokes that period and is an authentic architectural style in its own right. As such, I always think, they provide an example of how Catholic culture could be re-established today.

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 Two years ago, I wrote a  feature on the American artist Carl Schmitt (1889-1989).  What has prompted me to look at his work again is the publication of a beautiful book of his work called Carl Schmitt, The Vision of Beauty. Schmitt was a classically trained American artist who was a friend of Hilaire Belloc, who owned work by him, and who contributed a weekly column to Chesterton’s Weekly Review when Belloc was its editor. He was much travelled around Europe, but spent most of his adult life living in Connecticut. I like his still lives particularly see below and at www.carlschmitt.org). He was a faithful Catholic all his life and quite apart from his art his Catholic legacy is strong. He had 10 children who all kept the faith and one of whom was a priest. Descendants of Schmitt were involved at the instigation of Thomas Aquinas College in California and founded and still run Trivium School, an independent Catholic boarding high school with a great books curriculum. This is on the other side of the country and less than an hour south of Thomas More College, in Massachusetts. Sam Schmitt, who wrote this book and works for the foundation that works to preserve his memory is a scholar of chant and the liturgy and I met him before he took his current role when he was working with us at TMC. It was with great pleasure that I received this book to review.…

The Pattern of the Liturgy is a Model for Design in Beauty that Will Draw People To Your Work

In his book the Wellspring of Worship, Jean Corbon talks about the significance of the numbers seven and eight in the liturgy. In the Old Testament, seven is the number that signifies God’s covenant and so time is ordered according to it with seven days in a week. The book of Genesis describes the institution of this, of course, in the Creation story; and the symbolism is reinforced with the appearance of the seven-colour rainbow in the sky when Noah is saved and the covenant with all the earth is reinstituted. Eight is the number of new covenant ushered in with the incarnation, life,death and resurrection of Christ. So the eighth day is Sunday, which is simultaneously the first day of the next week and the last, the eighth of the previous one. The transition of the old to the new is symbolized by the operation of adding one to seven. 

In thinking about this, it causes me to think of the progression through sacred time not as a linear passage, but rather a helical one. As each day moves forward in time, we can imagine a vector shift that is forward and upward and turns an angle, so that by the time eight days have progressed, a full circle has been turned and the eighth is directly above the first. We have traced out seven days of the week, and then the significant addition of another day takes us to another Sunday, sitting vertically above the previous Sunday which is a pitch of the thread beneath it.…