Art – Tony Lusvardi, S.J.

Screens & Sacraments: a response

Last week I was pleased to take part in a conference organized by at the Gregorian University’s Faculty of History and Culture and the Institute of Liturgy at the University of Santa Croce entitled L’edificio di culto e gli artisti: A 25 anni dal primo Giubileo degli Artisti (2000-2025). The theme was church architecture and art over the past 25 years. The conference brought together an impressive group of international architects, artists, and theologians.

My own rather modest contribution was to extend the reflection I began in November’s issue of First Things on “Screens and Sacraments.” The talk seemed to produce a good deal of agreement that we need to be more discerning in how we allow technology to intrude on our sacred spaces.

On a related note, I was also happy to read a quite generous response to my article from Kevin Martin of Raleigh, North Carolina in the January 2025 issue of First Things. He reports being “strong-armed against [his] better judgement into Zooming the liturgy during the first year of the pandemic,” but eventually abandoning the practice because it felt wrong for many of the reasons I discussed in my article. He wonders, however, if I do not concede too much by suggesting that it might be OK to continue to broadcast the Liturgy of the Word, while stopping at the Liturgy of the Eucharist.

It’s a thoughtful question. I’d begin by saying that I am by no means arguing that one must broadcast any form of worship, and I have no quarrel with the decision of Rev. Martin’s church to give up streaming altogether. At the same time, I’m not an absolutist when it comes to technology, and some of the goods that people claim from broadcast Masses are real. Sick parishioners in particular can be helped to pray by seeing images of the liturgy online and comforted by the sight of their home church and familiar faces. These might supplement pastoral outreach to the homebound, without replacing it. I’m a little more skeptical about the evangelical or formative value of e-liturgy, since I think its appeal is mainly to those who have already been sufficiently formed by real liturgy.

St. Matthew according to Caravaggio: a spiritual masterpiece

The Inspiration of St. Matthew, Caravaggio

One of the most remarkable places in this remarkable city of art is the Contarelli Chapel in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi, home to the St. Matthew trilogy of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Three paintings–The Conversion, The Inspiration, and The Martyrdom of St. Matthew–tell the story of the life of the saint, from his improbable calling to his death. The paintings are full of artistic drama, reflecting the artist’s own spiritual struggles and his attempt to find his place among Italy’s artistic greats.

Contarelli Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome

The paintings date from early in Caravaggio’s career (1599-1600), when he was at the apex of his success in Rome. Only a few years after painting the St. Matthew trilogy, however, Caravaggio’s artistic career was sabotaged by his own unruly passions–he was forced to flee Rome after murdering a man in a brawl. As I’ve argued before, the fact that Caravaggio sinned so spectacularly does not negate a deep thirst for God or his spiritual and sacramental sense. In fact, as so often happens, awareness of his sin may have heightened the need the artist felt for redemption. In one of his later works, which he painted while in exile for his crime, David holds the head of Goliath–who bears Caravaggio’s own anguished face.

David with the Head of Goliath, Caravaggio, Borghese Gallery, Rome

Conversion also drives the “plot” of Caravaggio’s St. Matthew cycle. The first of the paintings, The Call of Matthew, depicts the moment when Jesus walks into Matthew’s customs post where the tax collector sits among cronies, coins spread over the table in front of him. Light shines in from a window just over the Lord’s head and hits Matthew straight on as Jesus raises his hand and points an unrelenting finger, as if to say, “You.” The tax collector’s own finger rises to his chest and his eyes widen, as if to respond, “Who? Me?” Or perhaps he is trying to distract the Lord’s gaze by pointing to the ne’er-do-well next to him, whose eyes are still fixed on the coins. In either case, the painting captures all the passion and confusion of the call to conversion–the unrelenting gaze of God, the instinctual avoidance and doubt of the sinner who is called. Does Matthew think himself unworthy? Shy away from relinquishing the wealth he knows? Hesitate when truth itself dissolves the shadows of ambiguity he has woven around himself? Probably, all of the above.

Filippo and Filippino Lippi at Rome’s Capitoline Museum

Filippo Lippi, Madonna of Humility, 1420

Though I still have a few weeks of grading exams to go, summer is definitely here in Rome. To celebrate the end of classes, I took a morning off last week to visit a special exhibit at Rome’s Capitoline Museum. The Capitoline is one of several museums in the Eternal City that would be the top attraction anywhere else but gets overshadowed by the Vatican Museums and the Borghese Gallery. It contains a number of impressive ancient Roman sculptures and a couple of Caravaggios — antiquity and baroque being the two periods Rome is known best for. When it comes to Renaissance art, Rome takes second place to Florence (though, given the work of Michelangelo and Raphael in the Vatican, the competition is still stiff).

In any case, the Capitoline is hosting an exhibit this summer dedicated to the work of Filippo Lippi (1406-1469) and his son Filippino (1457-1504). I mentioned Filippo before for his wonderful frescoes in Spoleto’s cathedral depicting the life of the Virgin. Filippo grew up an orphan and very poor. He was raised in a Carmelite monastery in Florence and became a monk. His superiors noticed his talent and encouraged his artistic career. He proved, in fact, to be a better artist than a monk. While executing a commission in a monastery in Prato, he ran off with a 17-year old novice, Lucrezia Buti, who became the model for some of his most beautiful female figures. Filippino, you might have guessed, was the fruit of their union.

From John Paul II’s “Letter to Artists”

Every genuine artistic intuition goes beyond what the senses perceive and, reaching beneath reality’s surface, strives to interpret its hidden mystery. The intuition itself springs from the depths of the human soul, where the desire to give meaning to one’s own life is joined by the fleeting vision of beauty and of the mysterious unity of things. All artists experience the unbridgeable gap which lies between the work of their hands, however successful it may be, and the dazzling perfection of the beauty glimpsed in the ardour of the creative moment: what they manage to express in their painting, their sculpting, their creating is no more than a glimmer of the splendour which flared for a moment before the eyes of their spirit.

Believers find nothing strange in this: they know that they have had a momentary glimpse of the abyss of light which has its original wellspring in God. Is it in any way surprising that this leaves the spirit overwhelmed as it were, so that it can only stammer in reply? True artists above all are ready to acknowledge their limits and to make their own the words of the Apostle Paul, according to whom “God does not dwell in shrines made by human hands” so that “we ought not to think that the Deity is like gold or silver or stone, a representation by human art and imagination” (Acts 17:24, 29). If the intimate reality of things is always “beyond” the powers of human perception, how much more so is God in the depths of his unfathomable mystery! […]

Beauty is a key to the mystery and a call to transcendence. It is an invitation to savour life and to dream of the future. That is why the beauty of created things can never fully satisfy. It stirs that hidden nostalgia for God which a lover of beauty like Saint Augustine could express in incomparable terms: “Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you!”

From Pope St. John Paul II, Letter to Artists (1999)

The Conversion of St. Paul

It looks like a picture of a horse’s… well, of the back part of a horse. Caravaggio’s painting of the conversion of St. Paul in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome puts the story’s equine character front and center. What gives? The practical joke of a roguish artist?