A Wedding in London

Art and theology tie the knot: An interview with Chloë Reddaway.

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Have theology and art ever really been separate? When an eighth-century monk uses ink, dyes, and calfskin to illuminate the Scriptures, it’s hard to know when the theology ends and the art begins. And when a modern sculptor is invited into a cathedral to elegantly emphasize its sacredness, shoehorning the result into the categories of pure “art” or pure “theology” seems absurd. One of the best scholars I know to help us see this necessary convergence is Chloë Reddaway. “The Virgin’s womb is full; the tomb is empty; and the mercy of God is wider than my imagination,” as she once put it. With her equally brilliant colleague Ben Quash at King’s College London, the two of them give us a sense of how art history and criticism are galvanized, not restricted, by serious Christian thought. Ben launched a Bible commentary, the Visual Commentary on Scripture, from the Tate Modern in London in 2018, and he and Chloë just launched a book titled Theology, Modernity, and the Visual Arts from the Inner Temple (home of the Temple Church) in London, the result of years of work with a team of international scholars. Following the book launch event, I asked Chloë some questions about this fusion of fields in hopes that North American conversations might eventually catch up.

The Virgin’s womb is full; the tomb is empty; and the mercy of God is wider than my imagination.

Matthew J. Milliner: First off, can you tell us a bit about the project that eventuated in this gorgeous book?

Chloë Reddaway: This book represents a distillation of research presented and discussed at a series of symposia we held between 2018 and 2022. A group of scholars met annually during that time to think about the different ways in which art and Christian theology have interacted in modern times. The project was part of a larger meta-project, based at Duke University, which began by considering theology, music, and modernity and is still hard at work on theology, literature, and modernity.

We undertook the visual arts strand at King’s. Led by Ben Quash, our symposium group gathered theologians, biblical scholars, art historians, and curators for discussions that took place in arts institutions rather than theological faculties. We met at the Royal Academy, here in London, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and at the Bode Museum and Akademie der Künste in Berlin. Each meeting was accompanied by a public event featuring artists and scholars, and in each city we visited galleries and studios and talked to contemporary artists about their work and its engagement with Christianity. Throughout the project we were trying to understand what questions the visual arts pose about Christ and modernity, and what truths about Christ and modernity they ask us to face.

As a way of structuring this potentially vast subject, we employed four prepositions that might direct or reflect forms of relationship between art and Christianity. So we thought about art with Christianity, art instead of—or even against—Christianity, art about Christianity, and art for Christianity. The book follows this structure, grouping the chapters prepositionally (by way of focus rather than as a restriction).

MJM: Can you tell us a few things about this book and what about it breaks new ground?

CR: This is a book that strongly refutes the idea that the relationship between art and theology was fatally wounded by the advent of modernism and buried forever by contemporary art. The story told here is of something much more complex and interesting: a conversation between art and theology that is sometimes argumentative or even accusatory and sometimes conducted in furious whispers, often misheard, misinterpreted, ignored, or silenced, at other times challenging or rallying, and also—perhaps surprisingly frequently—welcoming and inviting. Like conversations within a family over generations, there are struggles and rapprochements, times when everyone gets along beautifully and times when past injuries resurface, causing trouble or calling for healing.

Above all, this book brings to the surface a host of narratives and interactions that invite readers to reconsider what they might think they know about modern and contemporary art and religion. God is not dead, at least not in the gallery, and art and Christianity have a huge amount to talk about today—as indeed they always have.

God is not dead, at least not in the gallery, and art and Christianity have a huge amount to talk about today—as indeed they always have.

Inevitably, this isn’t always a barrel of laughs. It’s a book that looks with a steady gaze at some exceedingly painful things. There is a great deal here about death, suffering, injustice, and the crucifixion of love. Many of the chapters deal with contemporary ethical concerns. Neil MacGregor talks about the plight of refugees through works by Issam Kourbaj; Frances Spalding considers the climate crisis with Maya Lin; Rebekah Eklund looks at the history of racial representations of Jesus from the nineteenth century to Mark Doox’s Our Lady of Ferguson and All Those Killed by Gun Violence; and your own chapter tackles very complicated questions of colonialism and Christianity through the outrageously playful work of Cree artist Kent Monkman.

Transport by Antony Gormley, installation at the Canterbury Cathedral (photo by Gary Rogers).

Other chapters start with a particular way of looking: Christine Joynes discusses the often unremarked biblical allusions of works by Cornelia Parker and Donald Rodney; Felicity Harley-McGowan elegantly uncovers continuities between early Christian and medieval ways of “showing” people Jesus and contemporary sculpture by Antony Gormley; and Jennifer Sliwka takes a sidelong look—through medieval squints and contemporary painting by Michael Simpson—at the very idea of seeing holiness.

Still others consider such theologically thorny matters as doubt (Jonathan Anderson with Robert Rauschenberg) and justification by faith (Daniel Siedell with Luther, Cranach the Elder, Rilke, and Cézanne) or the nature of the risen body (David Taylor with Edward Knippers). I can’t do justice to all the contributions here, but this gives some idea of the scope. I’ve already put chapters on course bibliographies (it helps that, like all the volumes in the Brepols Arts and the Sacred series, it has masses of large colour photographs), and I know it is a book that I’ll come back to both for teaching and for my own edification.

MJM: My hope is that theology and art won’t require another reconciliation but will settle back into a long and happy (if sometimes frustrating) marriage. What are your future plans to ensure this takes place?

CR: The Centre for Arts and the Sacred at King’s College London has ongoing projects and programs, including our partnership MA with the National Gallery, a seminar series in Sacred Traditions and the Arts with the Courtauld, and, of course, the Visual Commentary on Scripture. We’re also at the start of a new project that is all about the foundations and horizons of theology and the visual arts.

As a relatively new discipline within the academic study of theology, theology and the visual arts initially developed in a somewhat haphazard fashion, and until really quite recently there was very little structured development of the field in its own right. Now publications are increasing and interest is running high, but the infrastructure of the discipline is still unstable. There are some big gaps on its bookshelves, and the whole enterprise feels rather precarious.

Now feels like the ideal moment—a kairos if you like—to try to consolidate what we have and think more strategically about where we want to go. We want theology and the visual arts to be a confident, secure presence in theological academies, in the church, and in conversations with art history and art criticism, both in universities and in museums and galleries. We want this to be the norm rather than the exception. A couple of years ago in Berlin, after our last Theology, Modernity, and the Visual Arts symposium, you and I and Jonathan Anderson and Ben Quash agreed that what we all desired was to “normalize the union of Christian theology and the visual arts of the past, present and future.” I strongly believe that theology and the visual arts should not be an added extra in theological education; thinking about and getting involved with materiality, sacramentality, human imaginings of the divine—these aren’t things that should be optional thinking for the fortunate. This is the stuff of life, and matter matters, fundamentally, to an incarnational, pneumatological understanding of life. All of which means that there is work to do to strengthen our foundations and build on what we have so that it becomes—in the best possible way—normal.

Thinking about and getting involved with materiality, sacramentality, human imaginings of the divine—these aren’t things that should be optional thinking for the fortunate.

Our new Theology and the Visual Arts project is part of this work. In particular, we’re trying to respond to some of the problems that those of us who work in this field face. One of the big issues is that people are often isolated and so many crucial discussions have simply never happened: we need new conversational communities. Another problem is the absence of some crucial texts: we need a sustained discussion of hermeneutics and method in theology and the visual arts, and an extensive exploration of systematics through the visual arts. (We’re trying to produce both.) And there are still very few public events at which theology and art sit side by side: we need more opportunities to invite people into these enriching interactions.

This project is trying to do something about these three issues in particular. We have a group of scholars working collaboratively, we’re addressing some of the big gaps on the subject’s bookshelves, and we’ve launched a series of public lectures in theology and the visual arts (the first of which took place in July this year with Neil MacGregor and Jonathan Ruffer thinking about art and Christianity on public display). I hope that in a few years’ time, when someone asks, “What is this subject and how do you do it?” we will be better able to answer them and have a better range of resources to give them.

MJM: The Visual Commentary on Scripture is ongoing and continues to be an extraordinary free resource for scholars, theologians, pastors, and lay people. Would you mind pointing out a few highlights from the many mini-exhibitions?

CR: The Visual Commentary on Scripture is a series of individual “exhibitions” structured around a biblical text and three artworks that are brought into conversation with that text by an author who writes a short commentary about each of the three artworks they’ve chosen and a longer one that brings them all together. The Scripture and the artworks illuminate each other through a kind of three-way conversation between themselves and the author.

There is a great variety of artworks and authorial voices among the 370 or so passages now online (there are another hundred in the pipeline, and the aim is to cover the whole Bible eventually), so you can browse for hours or look at a new one every day. But one of the less-known highlights is the video channel, which has introductory videos and some video exhibitions, and also (if you keep scrolling down the page) a host of beautiful short films called “Unlocking Christian Art at the Bode-Museum & Gemäldegalerie,” which explore the lives of Jesus and the Virgin Mary through these two Berlin art collections. I really recommend them.

MJM: Somehow in your own work on the Renaissance, you managed to keep theology and art in fruitful conversation. My students and I find your books indispensable. To those without access to them, can you tell us what inspired these projects and some key discoveries?

CR: Thank you! I should start by saying that I’m not an art historian: I’m a strange species of theologian who looks at pictures (which I find infinitely preferable to reading most theology), but until recently I worked mostly with historic artworks. I’m not writing art history; I’m trying to think theologically with historic objects that are part of a living faith. Many people start with written theology and then use it to understand artworks; I tend to go the other way around, starting with the artwork and discovering something theological through it.

My interest is always in trying to understand how works of art might form and transform the relationship of the viewer to God. “Inspiration” is a rather grand word, but I think my projects have started with a strong (often unexpected) emotional and spiritual response to a painting, and a desire to understand that by trying to articulate what I think might be happening in or through that painting. And then wondering if I could do that in a way that might be intelligible and useful to other people. As someone whose faith is far more experiential and sacramental than propositional, I’m trying to explore a way of understanding theology, of doing theology, that is holistic—embodied, cerebral, emotional, and religious all at once. I want to understand how some artworks might produce the kind of theologically informed experience that is both thought and felt, analyzed and encountered, explored rationally and experienced relationally at the same time.

I’m trying to explore a way of understanding theology, of doing theology, that is holistic—embodied, cerebral, emotional, and religious all at once.

The first book I wrote about Renaissance art (Transformations in Persons and Paint: Visual Theology, Historical Images, and the Modern Viewer) is about fresco cycles in churches in Florence. It is an attempt to understand how these embedded images work with the places they inhabit to shape the people who visit or live with them. The starting point for that project was really Fra Angelico’s Annunciation in Cell 3 at San Marco and the apparently empty space in the middle of it, which is so pregnantly full of new life and salvation. Looking at frescoes in San Marco, in the Bardi Chapel of Santa Croce, the Brancacci Chapel, and others showed me something about the importance of place, of images that shape their viewers, and about the relationality of paintings and viewers. Picture, place, and person make a triangle that creates a space in which new things happen and transformations are possible. The paintings are all fourteenth and fifteenth century, and their original contexts are very important in helping us to understand them. But these works are still part of a living faith—still potential sites of spiritual encounter—and I was trying to write for viewers today too.

The second book (Strangeness and Recognition: Mystery and Familiarity in Renaissance Paintings of Christ) is about the dynamic of strangeness and recognition at work in so many biblical texts, the strange things that happen when God is the subject of human communication, and how all that connects to the strange ways in which some Renaissance paintings of Christ respond to the extraordinary, frankly crazy, task of trying to paint someone who is fully human and fully divine. I wrote it (and made some films about the audacity of Christian art) while I was working at the National Gallery in London as the Ahmanson Fellow in Art and Religion. I was repeatedly struck by the sense that the classic gallery installation can easily undermine the sheer shock and surprise that we can sometimes experience in encounters with art, and that the experience of estrangement (or of what pseudo-Dionysius calls dissemblance) might be very important to the recognition of divine mysteries. It’s easy to feel that we “know” what these pictures are “about” because we recognize their subjects, or periods, or schools, but some artists are exceptionally good at reminding us that we actually know vanishingly little about the mystery of God—and (importantly) at making us want to know more.

Strangeness or defamiliarization or whatever we want to call it can be very effective at doing this. Some kinds of artistic strangeness are quite blatant, like the big snail at the foot of St. Francis in an altarpiece by Carlo Crivelli (a true master of weirdness) and the garland of fruit that casts shadows onto the canvas it is painted on in the Vision of the Blessed Gabriele and thus casts doubt on all the spatial relationships in the painting and between the viewer and the painted space. But other artists use strangeness, dissemblance, disruption, things that trip us up, in ways that might take us longer to notice. When we look at something like the Virgin and Child by Verrocchio and di Credi, we might think that we understand what we’re seeing, but we don’t: those beautiful figures, flanked by angels, are being revealed to us in a lyrical, if quite peculiar, landscape, from beyond a fur-edged, damask curtain that is hanging from . . . well, from what? Where are we? Where are they? What exactly is going on here? It’s strange. Of course, it’s not “peculiar” if we think of it in terms of visions, of revelation, of the curtains that covered precious paintings, or indeed of the incarnation, but that moment of dislocation and uncertainty is so often what brings us to the recognition of what is most important in what we’re seeing. Christ breaks through the veil, through the curtain; the Virgin makes that possible; here they are in a world that is our world but not as we usually look at it. That’s not strange in the sense of freaky, but because we are pushed back from the painting for a moment, our glib assumptions about what we’re seeing are stopped in their tracks for just long enough to let in some humility.

Detail of The Vision of Blessed Gabriele, ca. 1489, by Carlo Crivelli, National Gallery, London.

So it’s a book about paintings that confound our expectations and defamiliarize their subject matter, paintings full of ambiguity and mystery that disturb our expectations and—by making us less sure of ourselves—reconnect us to the extraordinary mystery of the incarnation. It is also, like the fresco book, about how we can enter into transformative and person-like relationships with paintings and what difference that can make.

MJM: Could you give us your top two or three theological insights that were inspired while working at the National Gallery?

Christian art is audacious, impossible, strange, inadequate, and surprising, and this is as it should be.

CR: That also sounds rather grand, but I think spending so much time with those paintings helped me to articulate three things in particular that I have found useful.

One is that Christian art is audacious, impossible, strange, inadequate, and surprising, and this is as it should be, because the very fact that the grammar of visual communication ultimately breaks down under the pressure of trying to paint God’s involvement in the world means that those pictures invite us to continually rediscover our relationship with God and the world around us. We can never be complacent in our understanding; we are called again and again to something so far beyond our comprehension that some painters seem deliberately to remind us that we can’t understand it. There’s a powerful example of this in the exquisite Annunciation by Filippo Lippi, where, at the deepest point of the perspective, beyond the intersection of the message of the angel and the divine light descending, we run slap into a wall and have to return to the surface. Lippi can’t show us the moment of the incarnation, but he can show us that we can’t see it.

Detail of Fra Filippo Lippi’s Annunciation, ca. 1450, National Gallery, London.

The second is that paintings can indeed be person-like; we can have non-symbolic relationships with them, and they can inspire, indict, undo, and reconfigure us. We can converse with them through what Jean-Louis Chrétien calls “antiphonic silence.” The more we attend to them, the more we relate to them and the more we find that we speak about them in terms akin to an encounter between persons.

And the third is that if paintings are person-like, people are also like pictures. We are re-presentations: dissimilar, estranged, and question-raising, just like paintings. In attempting to re-present God, whose image people (in a flawed way) re-present, painted images re-present both God and flawed human selves. When visual language disrupts itself with the truthful inadequacy of dissemblance, it leaves open the possibility of human transformation through a personal exchange that leads through estrangement to recognition, rediscovering the familiar within the strange, the new and renewed within the familiar, and the ultimately unspeakable, unpaintable mystery of the incarnation.

MJM: It’s going to take me a while to absorb the depth of what you just said, Chloë. In the meantime, you’re currently working on a stained-glass project. What inspired this project, and why did you choose this particular artist?

CR: I’m working on ecclesiastical stained glass by the contemporary British artist Thomas Denny, who has made windows for over fifty churches, cathedrals, and abbeys in England, as well as a few further afield. From reglazing the tracery of medieval windows whose glass has long been lost, to work in completely modern settings, Denny makes windows that respond to their particular location (within the building and in the local geography and community) and that consistently bring the natural world into churches to an unprecedented degree. The intention is that this project will become both a catalogue raisonné of his work and an exploration of his glass in relation to the theology of the medium of stained glass itself.

Denny began as a landscape painter, and I grew up with his painting on the walls at home and then began visiting his windows in Gloucestershire and Dorset as his stained-glass career took off. I realize in retrospect that they were hugely spiritually formative for me, and that was something that I wanted to understand better. He is very well known now, and I contributed a piece to a beautiful book of essays about his glass that has just been updated, but I think his work needs something more extensive. We are commissioning new photography of the many unphotographed early windows, and I’m currently doing site visits, watching him work, and asking a lot of questions! I’m also taking great delight in discovering the incredible richness of medieval commentaries on windows and glass, how they relate to sacred buildings and to Scripture, and how we might be transformed by their light. It’s a project that is full of ideas of revelation and vision, and the dynamism of an art form that, because it depends on light, is continually changing. I’ll be able to tell you more in a couple of years.

Still of stained-glass artist Thomas Denny from Alex Wright Films.

MJM: Currently, a few programs specialize in this exciting intersection (for example, King’s, St. Andrew’s, and the Duke initiatives). How would you advise young people who want to pursue this field themselves?

CR: University programs are one way of thinking about this, and if you want to learn intensively, that might be the right thing for you. But I would encourage someone to study at postgraduate level only if that is important to them for reasons other than some future career goal that might or might not materialize. Find a teacher you think you can learn from and a research environment that shows an interest in the things you’re most drawn to, and do it for love and for joy.

Universities do not have a monopoly on knowledge or experience. Between public art collections great and small, some churches, and the internet, anyone can look at artworks, and that is the important bit.

Universities do not have a monopoly on knowledge or experience. Between public art collections great and small, some churches, and the internet, anyone can look at artworks, and that is the important bit. Nothing beats seeing things “in the flesh,” so do that when you can; but digital technology gives us such wide-ranging access to collections now, and many libraries are increasingly accessible. We can see and read things that people even twenty years ago had no way of getting to. Museum websites are becoming better and better, open-access online material is so much more available, things like the Visual Commentary on Scripture and the National Gallery’s film channel are there for anyone, and so many lectures are now recorded and free for public viewing. University courses can be wonderful, but they are not the only way to learn about this.

You don’t have to study via an academic route; you can just look and ask yourself what you see and what difference that makes. Read something, learn a bit more about what you saw, and then look again the next day and see something you hadn’t noticed. Take pleasure in it.

MJM: Thank you, Chloë!

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Date:
- August 27, 2024
Topics:

Chloë Reddaway

Chloë Reddaway is McDonald Agape Research Fellow in Theology and the Visual Arts and the deputy director of the Centre for Arts and the Sacred, King’s College London. She is interested in how artworks form and transform relationships with God. Her publications include Transformations in Persons and Paint: Visual Theology, Historical Images and the Modern Viewer, Strangeness and Recognition: Mystery and Familiarity in Renaissance Images of Christ, and Theology, Modernity, and the Visual Arts (with Ben Quash).
BIO
Matthew J. Milliner

Matthew J. Milliner is professor of art history at Wheaton College. He is the author of The Everlasting People (InterVarsity Press, 2021) and Mother of the Lamb (Fortress Press, 2022).
BIO

A Wedding in London

A Wedding in London

Chloë Reddaway

Matthew J. Milliner

A Wedding in London

Art and theology tie the knot: An interview with Chloë Reddaway.

H

The Virgin’s womb is full; the tomb is empty; and the mercy of God is wider than my imagination.

God is not dead, at least not in the gallery, and art and Christianity have a huge amount to talk about today—as indeed they always have.

Thinking about and getting involved with materiality, sacramentality, human imaginings of the divine—these aren’t things that should be optional thinking for the fortunate.

I’m trying to explore a way of understanding theology, of doing theology, that is holistic—embodied, cerebral, emotional, and religious all at once.

Christian art is audacious, impossible, strange, inadequate, and surprising, and this is as it should be.

Universities do not have a monopoly on knowledge or experience. Between public art collections great and small, some churches, and the internet, anyone can look at artworks, and that is the important bit.

Chloë Reddaway

Matthew J. Milliner

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Chloë Reddaway

Matthew J. Milliner

A Wedding in London

Art and theology tie the knot: An interview with Chloë Reddaway.

H

The Virgin’s womb is full; the tomb is empty; and the mercy of God is wider than my imagination.

God is not dead, at least not in the gallery, and art and Christianity have a huge amount to talk about today—as indeed they always have.

Thinking about and getting involved with materiality, sacramentality, human imaginings of the divine—these aren’t things that should be optional thinking for the fortunate.

I’m trying to explore a way of understanding theology, of doing theology, that is holistic—embodied, cerebral, emotional, and religious all at once.

Christian art is audacious, impossible, strange, inadequate, and surprising, and this is as it should be.

Universities do not have a monopoly on knowledge or experience. Between public art collections great and small, some churches, and the internet, anyone can look at artworks, and that is the important bit.

Chloë Reddaway

Matthew J. Milliner

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