Magnificat – A short history of the project

by Bruce Herman

Twenty-five years ago a friend, John Skillen, and I began a series of directed discussions about sacred art traditions and aspects of the Italian Renaissance in particular — and what relevance these traditions might have for our own era — both for teaching and for renewing our culture. Somehow we had both found in Italy the life-pulse of the best of past Christian culture: its poetry, its art and architecture, and its thinking about what it means to be human (including its wine and food!).

The fact that the Italians of the late medieval and early Renaissance had begun to mine classical pagan culture for meaning did not seem coincidental. What is there in the grand vision of Athens and Rome that had relevance for small, embattled city-states in 15th C. Italy? Moreover, what similarities were there for us, marooned as we felt in little islands of intellectual sanity (we thought so!)?  The imperial aspects of those cultures were not lost on us, but what inspired us via the Italians was not the political machinery but the vision of humanness, beauty, and civility. The shadow cast by power is a daunting problem, and cultural authority, it seems, is never completely independent of political power. But that’s another story and another set of issues. Our vision was one of attempting to reclaim a certain coherence, meaning, and beauty in the sacred traditions, despite accusations that all this was puerile because hopelessly retro.

Retro or not, part of our inspiration came from the felt need to build an island of learning and peaceful reflection – that might serve as respite from the noise, chaos, and meaningless-ness of much barbaric contemporary culture. The Gordon College program in Orvieto, Italy is really the fruit of those conversations, and the current painting project on the life of the Virgin is a test case of those communally shared sets of meanings. You can see immediately why John and I were attracted to Mary: she is contemplative in the face of troubling times. Both the angel Gabriel and the prophet Simeon spoke of grave things attending the birth of Jesus, but she doesn’t panic or become cynical — she reflects and stands firm. What we need in our own times is a sense of purpose and calm that allows a similarly reflective stance. Rather than chasing the moving target of relevance (which for years has mostly yielded irony) we were seeking sincere meaning and shalom — human flourishing as exemplified in Mary’s calm bearing.

Another factor in our thinking about the Renaissance and Italian religious art was the dominance in our own time of irony as a mode of being — not just cleverness or wit, but a habit of the heart that shrinks from embracing meaning with sincerity. Even the word seems to cloy: sincerity. But that is what we were beginning to aim for in our thinking, and in my case in the work of my art studio. The Mary project grew out of these conditions and conversations, and the particulars of the projects and its history have been articulated well by John Skillen in his essay in magnificat – the book that accompanies the Mary paintings.