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The Book of Famous Paintings

Helen Barnes-Bulley May 25

Can you still be moved by religious art if you don’t believe in God? Is our response to art even measurable? In a world where Catholicism is fast losing its sheen, how do we now come to understand works like Botticelli’s Madonna or Michelangelo Pieta? In the March edition of Meanjin, Helen Barnes-Bulley answers these questions and more, travelling from the books of her childhood to the very basilicas, churches and galleries of Italy. A brief extract is below, and you can read the full essay on our editions page.



‘If you don’t believe in God then you really can’t have the same response to a religious work of art’, she announced, ‘as someone who does believe in God.’

It was late summer, and I was sitting in the drawing room of a writers retreat on a sunny afternoon, yellow light pouring in through the long windows, the kind of afternoon that makes you feel mellow and benevolent towards all humankind. Until my companion said that.

We’ll call her Catherine, after one of the saints. She’d like that. She was a woman who reminded me of a high school principal I once had, one much admired by the girls, but rather forbidding if she carpeted you for not wearing your hat and gloves, or for hitching your tunic a few inches too far above the knees. Catherine had come to the retreat to work on a book and I’d been asked to talk with her about it. I was suitably surprised when she announced her aim was to refute the arguments in Richard Dawkins’ recent book The God Delusion, since she possessed no relevant qualifications for such a task, even if such a task had been feasible.

She was, it became clear, an offended Catholic.

Was it true, I thought, that I couldn’t feel the same about Giotto’s frescoes in Padua or Raphael’s Madonna of the Goldfinch in the Uffizi if I didn’t share Catherine’s beliefs?

In the way we do I forgot about her statement for a while and then it suddenly came back to me when I was sorting through my messy book collection one day and came across an old copy of the New Testament. And that book then reminded me of my father’s book of famous paintings that my sister and I had loved as children, and which had contained quite a few works of art with religious subjects.


 

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