Truth & Reality

To celebrate the sooth anniversary of Fra Angelico's death, the Vatican last week opened a great exhibition of his paintings drawn from as far away as San Francisco. Pope Pius XII himself addressed a crowd of artists and officials at the opening of the show, took occasion to offer some philosophic thoughts on the nature and state of art.

Fra Angelico. the Pope pointed out. lived in an age of transition; it was as violent as the present. One of the first Renaissance masters, he invented and perfected new means to express eternal truths. His pictures, said the Pope, present an "ideal world whose atmosphere glows with peace, holiness, harmony and joy. whose reality is in the future when finally justice will triumph on the new earth and in the new heavens."

Pope Pius conceded that art "need not have an explicitly ethical or religious mission. Art, being in the language of the human spirit ... is in itself sacred in so far as it interprets God's work." Then he added a warning addressed specifically to the faddists of modern art and by implication to the empty messengers of any artistic age: "If the language of art gave voice to false, empty and confused spirits not in harmony with the Creator's design, if instead of lifting the mind and heart it stirred the baser passions ... it would degrade itself by denying its own essential aspect. It would be neither universal nor perennial as is the spirit of man."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.