The Secret Mind of Art

This beautifully written and erudite book takes the reader on a soul-making transformational journey in a reflective encounter with twelve of the most significant works of the European tradition: the Pantheon, Gislebertus’ Last Judgement on the cathedral in Autun (it was interesting to learn that depictions were rare before the 12th century), the front of Notre Dame de Paris, the Baptism of Christ by Piero della Francesca, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, two versions of David by Donatello and Michelangelo, Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling and Last Judgement, Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne, the Villa Barbaro by Palladio, William Blake’s illustrations of the Book of Job, van Gogh’s Sower, and finally Cezanne’s depictions of the Montagne Ste Victoire – as it happens, I had the privilege of contemplating six such paintings exhibited together in the Grand Palais in the late 1980s. A central theme is art’s capacity ‘as a means of bringing reality to the threshold of invisible’, also represented as the vertical/transcendent dimension or, in the case of the Pantheon with its celestial eye, a portal of initiation.

An important point to bear in mind is that we do not see these works of art in the same way as their contemporaries. Art history itself has been naturalised away from the sacred and towards empiricism and even deconstruction. The ideas informing many of these great works are no longer widely understood, such as the mediaeval Christian-Platonic spiritually dynamic cosmos based on a theology of light. The author proposes that Michelangelo’s David is shaped by Plotinus’ question: ‘How are you to see into a virtuous Soul and know its loveliness?’ (p. 92) The citation following gives a beautiful answer – too long to quote here. Van Gogh’s Sower is seen in the light of Jesus’ parable and contrasted with his final harvest painting. We learn that Cezanne sometimes paused for minutes between brushstrokes, mysteriously transmuting the invisible into the visible, as Rilke intuited. This leads the author to conclude that we need to rediscover initiation into the mysteries, and that sacred art may be a portal for ‘the transmission of a spiritual truth of non-human origin.’ (p. 171)