WHEN it comes to describing the process of transcendence within the realms of art, the Swiss-German thinker Frithjof Schuon (1907-1998) makes a remarkably simple but effective observation. “Speaking in human terms,” he says, “certain Renaissance artists are without a doubt great, but their grandeur becomes insignificant when faced with the grandeur of the sacred, it is as if the genius is concealed; what predominates is an impersonal, vast, mysterious intelligence. The sacred work of art has a perfume of infinitude, the imprint of the absolute. The individual talent is there disciplined; it mingles with the creative function of the entire tradition, which cannot be substituted, much less surpassed by the mere resources of man.”
As is so often the case with Schuon, a most pertinent and succinct point comes to us by way of some quite beautiful and inspiring prose. Within the sphere of art itself, that which became widespread during the Medieval period as the one-dimensional representation of Christian allegory, particularly in relation to Mary and Christ as iconic mother and child, was entirely focussed upon God as a presence that was perceived as being at the very centre of the universe. Indeed, there are hundreds of Madonnas in which Mary’s hand extends to present the Baby Jesus to the eye of the beholder, thus being shown to respectfully diminish her own importance in relation to the Divine.
With the coming of the Renaissance period, however, the artistic emphasis shifted somewhat and man himself took centre-stage. One thinks of Hans Holbien the Younger’s classic work of anamorphosis, The Ambassadors (1533), which depicts two elaborately-dressed aristocrats standing beside the scientific paraphernalia of the Tudor era. God, on this occasion, is completely absent and in this respect the painting may be interpreted as one of the first real examples of humanist art. Notwithstanding, of course, the fact that the lurking presence of a deathly skull and a broken lute-string is designed to convey the notion that all was certainly not well in the Renaissance period itself. Whilst the work in question is indisputably brilliant, it does appear to echo Schuon’s own sentiments that something is missing.
As Julius Evola (1898-1974) notes in his 1961 text, Cavalcare la Tigre, the coming of the Renaissance is particularly significant in that historians have since “ignored, or considered as positive, the counterpart, that is, the more or less conscious and complete separation from transcendence. All the splendour and power of ‘creativity’ of that period should not blind us to this basic tendency.” Ironically, in a frantic attempt to undermine the Christian religion the efforts of the secular protagonists have, to a large extent, incapacitated the ability of the ‘concealed’ genius who once relied on the sacred as an artistic springboard in the way that a poet depends on the muse.
