Art, Architecture, and the Church
The artistic inheritance of the West is so strongly identified with Catholic images that no one would wish to deny the Church’s influence. Even here, though, the Catholic role has been significantly greater than simply providing the subject matter for Western art.
The very fact that we possess many of our artistic masterpieces at all is itself a reflection of Catholic ideas. The eighth and ninth centuries witnessed the growth of a destructive heresy called iconoclasm. Iconoclasm rejected the veneration of images, or icons, of religious figures. Indeed, iconoclasm went so far as to reject the depiction of Christ and the saints in art at all. Had that idea taken hold, the beautiful paintings, sculpture, mosaics, stained glass, illuminated manuscripts, and cathedral façades that have delighted and inspired Westerners and non-Westerners alike would never have come into existence. But it could not take hold, since it ran directly counter to the Catholic understanding of and appreciation for the created world.
Iconoclasm originated in the Byzantine Empire rather than in the West, though it claimed to teach a doctrine that all believers in Christ must accept on pain of heresy. It was introduced by the Byzantine emperor Leo III (r. 717–741) for reasons that remain obscure. The Byzantine encounter with Islam likely played a role. From the first century of the existence of Islam, when Muslims had overrun the Middle Eastern portions of the Byzantine Empire, the emperor in Constantinople had had to organize and struggle against this persistent and powerful foe. In the course of that struggle he could not help but notice that Islamic art was not representational at all. No depictions of Muhammad, the founder of Islam, were to be found. Eventually, Leo III began to consider abolishing the use of icons among Eastern Christians, on the grounds that perhaps the reason for continuing Muslim victories and Byzantine defeats on the battlefield was that God was punishing the Byzantines for their use of icons.
As far as the West was concerned, iconoclasm was a flagrant heresy. Christian art had depicted Christ and the saints for centuries by the time the iconoclasm controversy developed. The depiction of Christ in art was a reflection of the Catholic doctrine of the Incarnation. With the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, the material world, while nevertheless fallen, had been elevated to a new level. It was not to be despised, for not only had God created it, but He had also dwelled in it.
These were some of the grounds on which Saint John of Damascus condemned iconoclasm. John spent much of his life as a monk near Jerusalem. Between the 720s and 740s he wrote his Three Treatises on the Divine Images in response to iconoclasm. Naturally, much of his argument was based on biblical and patristic citations, as well as the testimony of tradition as a whole, with regard to the specific question of whether God really opposed the veneration of images, as the iconoclasts claimed. But he also offered important theological defenses of religious art. John detected within the iconoclast position a tendency toward Manichaeism, a heresy that had divided the world into a realm of wickedness, that of matter, and one of goodness, that of the spirit. The idea that material things could communicate spiritual good was utter nonsense to the Manichee. (In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Catharism, a variant of Manichaeism, pursued the same line of thought to suggest that the Catholic sacramental system must be fraudulent, for how could wicked matter—in the form of water, consecrated oils, bread, and wine—communicate purely spiritual grace to the recipient?) “You abuse matter and call it worthless,” John scolded the iconoclasts. “So do the Manichees, but the divine Scripture proclaims that it is good. For it says, ‘And God saw everything that He had made, and behold it was exceedingly good.’”1
John was careful to point out that he did not “reverence [matter] as God—far from it; how can that which has come to be from nothing be God?”2 But matter, which the Christian could not condemn as wicked in itself, could convey something of the divine:
I do not venerate matter, I venerate the fashioner of matter, who became matter [through the Incarnation] for my sake and accepted to dwell in matter and through matter worked my salvation, and I will not cease from reverencing matter, through which my salvation was worked. . . . Therefore I reverence the rest of matter and hold in respect that through which my salvation came, because it is filled with divine energy and grace. Is not the thrice-precious and thrice-blessed wood of the cross matter? Is not the holy and august mountain, the place of the skull, matter? Is not the life-giving and life-bearing rock, the holy tomb, the source of the resurrection, matter? Is not the ink and the all-holy book of the Gospels matter? Is not the life-bearing table, which offers to us the bread of life, matter? Is not the gold and silver matter, out of which crosses and tablets and bowls are fashioned? And, before all these things, is not the body and blood of my Lord matter? Either do away with reverence and veneration for all these or submit to the tradition of the Church and allow the veneration of images of God and friends of God, sanctified by name and therefore overshadowed by the grace of the divine Spirit.3
Thus theologians referred to Catholic theological principles in defense of art that depicted Christ, the saints, and the religious scenes that have defined so much of Western artistic life. In 843, the Byzantines themselves finally abandoned iconoclasm and returned to depicting Christ and the saints in art. The faithful greeted this reversal with joy; an annual celebration of the “Triumph of Orthodoxy”4 commemorated the return to traditional practice in the veneration of icons.
It is difficult to overstate the significance of the Catholic Church’s official opposition to iconoclasm (the Third Council of Nicaea in 787 condemned it). The ideas of Saint John of Damascus and his supporters later permitted us the luxury of the beautiful Madonnas of Raphael, the Pietà of Michelangelo, and countless other works of passion and genius, not to mention the great cathedral façades (which often depicted Christ, the apostles, and the saints) of the High Middle Ages. This favorable view of representational religious art cannot simply be taken for granted as something natural and inevitable; Islam, after all, has never abandoned its insistence on aniconic (non-image) art. Rehabilitating the iconoclast heresy in the sixteenth century, Protestants went on a rampage of smashing statues, altarpieces, stained-glass windows, and other great treasures of Western art. John Calvin, arguably the most significant Protestant thinker of all, favored visually barren settings for his worship services, and even prohibited the use of musical instruments. Nothing could have been further removed from the Catholic Church’s respect for the natural world, inspired by the Incarnation, and its belief that human beings, composed of body (matter) and soul, can be aided in their ascent to God by material things.
Arguably the greatest Catholic contribution to art, and the one that has undoubtedly and permanently influenced the European landscape, is the medieval cathedral. One art historian recently wrote, “The medieval cathedrals of Europe. . .are the greatest accomplishments of humanity in the whole theatre of art.”5 Particularly stunning are Europe’s Gothic cathedrals. Gothic architecture developed out of the Romanesque style in the twelfth century and spread throughout Europe to varying degrees from its origins in France and England. These buildings, monumental in size and scope, are characterized by certain distinguishing features, including the flying buttress, the pointed arch, and the ribbed vault. Their combined effect, including the much-admired stained glass of the Gothic tradition, is an extraordinary testament to the supernatural faith of a civilization.
It is no accident that a closer study of these cathedrals reveals an impressive geometric coherence. That coherence follows directly from an important strain in Catholic thought. Saint Augustine made repeated reference to Wisdom 11:21, an Old Testament verse that describes God as having “ordered all things by measure, number, weight.” This idea became common currency among a great many Catholic thinkers, particularly those associated with the great cathedral school at Chartres in the twelfth century. It played a central role in the construction of Gothic cathedrals.6
At the time that Gothic architecture was evolving from its Romanesque predecessor, more and more Catholic thinkers were becoming persuaded of the link between mathematics—geometry in particular—and God. Ever since Pythagoras and Plato, an important strain of thought within Western civilization had identified mathematics with the divine. At Chartres, explains Robert Scott, scholars “believed that geometry was a means for linking human beings to God, that mathematics was a vehicle for revealing to humankind the innermost secrets of heaven. They thought the harmony of musical consonance was based on the same ratios as those forming cosmic order, that the cosmos was a work of architecture and God was its architect.” These ideas led builders “to conceive of architecture as applied geometry, geometry as applied theology, and the designer of a Gothic cathedral as an imitator of the divine Master.”7 “Just as the great Geometer created the world in order and harmony,” explains professor John Baldwin, “so the Gothic architect, in his small way, attempted to fashion God’s earthly abode according to the supreme principles of proportion and beauty.”8
The geometric proportionality that can be found in these cathedrals is quite striking. Consider England’s Salisbury Cathedral. Measuring the cathedral’s central crossing (where its principal transept intersects the east-west axis), we find it to be thirty-nine feet by thirty-nine feet. This primary dimension, in turn, is the basis for nearly all of the cathedral’s remaining dimensions. For example, both the length and the width of each of the nave’s ten bays is nineteen feet six inches—exactly half the length of the central crossing. The nave itself consists of twenty identical spaces measuring nineteen feet six inches square, and another ten spaces measuring nineteen feet six inches by thirty-nine feet. Other aspects of the structure offer still more examples of an overall geometric coherence permeating the cathedral.9
This attention to geometric proportion is evident throughout the Gothic tradition. Another striking example is the cathedral of Saint Remi in Rheims. Although Saint Remi, which still contains elements of the earlier Romanesque style, is not the purest example of a Gothic structure, it already exhibits the attention to geometry and mathematics that would constitute such an arresting quality of this tradition. The influence of St. Augustine and his belief in the symbolism of numbers, as well as his conviction (once again) that God had ordered “all things according to measure, number, weight,” is immediately evident. The choir at Saint Remi is “among the most perfect Trinitarian symbols in Gothic architecture,” explains Christopher Wilson, “for the play on the number three encompasses the triple windows lighting each of the three levels of the main apse and even the number obtained by multiplying the number of bays in the choir elevations—eleven—by the number of stories, that is thirty three.”10 Thirty-three, of course, is the age that Christ reached while on earth.
Again, this desire for geometric precision and numerical meaning, which contribute significantly to the pleasure that aesthetes derive from these great edifices, is no mere coincidence. It derives from specifically Catholic ideas traceable to the Church fathers. Saint Augustine, whose De Musica would become the most influential aesthetic treatise of the Middle Ages, considered architecture and music the noblest of the arts, since their mathematical proportions were those of the universe itself, and they therefore elevated our minds to the contemplation of the divine order.11
The windows of the Gothic cathedral and the emphasis on light as it floods these enormous and majestic buildings are perhaps its most salient characteristic. It makes sense, then, that the architect would have appreciated the theological significance of light. Saint Augustine had conceived of human beings’ acquisition of knowledge in terms of divine illumination: God enlightens the mind with knowledge. This idea of God pouring light into the minds of men proved a potent metaphor for architects in the Gothic tradition, in which physical light was meant to evoke thoughts of its divine source.12
We first see a great church in the Gothic style in the Abbey Church of St. Denis, seven miles north of Paris. Here, the religious significance of the light pouring in through the windows in the choir and the nave cannot be missed. An inscription on the doors explains that the light elevates the mind upward from the material world and directs it toward the true light that is Christ.13
In designing his stupendous structure, the Gothic architect was thus profoundly influenced by Catholic thought. “As the worshippers’ eyes rose toward heaven,” writes a modern student of the subject, “God’s grace, in the form of sunlight, was imagined to stream down in benediction, encouraging exaltation. Sinners could be led to repent and strive for perfection by envisioning the world of spiritual perfection where God resided—a world suggested by the geometric regularity of cathedrals.”14 Indeed, everything about the Gothic cathedral revealed its supernatural inspiration. “While the predominantly horizontal lines of Greco-Roman temples symbolized a nature-bound religious experience,” writes one scholar, “Gothic spires symbolized the upward reach of a distinctly supernatural vision.”15 These great structures also convey to us something of the age in which they were conceived and built. No period of history that could have produced such magnificent works of architecture could have been utterly stagnant or dark, as the entirety of the Middle Ages has all too often been portrayed. The light that streamed into the Gothic cathedral symbolized the light of the thirteenth century, an age characterized as much by its universities, learning, and scholarship as by the religious fervor and heroism of Saint Francis of Assisi.
It is a rare soul who, in the twenty-first century, is still not overwhelmed by these cathedrals. One of the most recent studies of the Gothic cathedral, in fact, was written by a Stanford University sociologist with no professional training in architecture. He simply fell in love with Salisbury Cathedral in England and determined to read and write about this wondrous phenomenon in order to acquaint others with a treasure that so captivated him.16 Even a hostile twentieth-century scholar could speak admiringly of the devotion and patient labors elicited by the construction of the great cathedrals:
A splendid picture of the beautiful devotion of the people of a region in the erection of a magnificent cathedral is found in Chartres, France. That wonderful edifice was begun in 1194 and completed in 1240. To construct a building that would beautify their city and satisfy their religious aspirations the citizens contributed of their strength and property year after year for nearly half a century. Far from home they went to the distant quarries to dig out the rock. Encouraged by their priests they might be seen, men, women, and children, yoked to clumsy carts loaded with building materials. Day after day their weary journey to and from the quarries continued. When at night they stopped, worn out with the day’s toil, their spare time was given up to confession and prayer. Others labored with more skill but with equal devotion on the great cathedral itself. . . . Its dedication and consecration marked an epoch in that part of France.17
The Scholastic frame of mind has sometimes been credited with giving rise to the Gothic cathedral. The Scholastics, of whom Saint Thomas Aquinas is the most illustrious example, were intellectual system builders. They sought not merely to answer this or that question, but to construct entire edifices of thought. Their summae, in which they sought to explore every significant question pertaining to their subject, were systematic, coherent wholes, in which each individual conclusion related harmoniously to every other—just as the various components of the Gothic cathedral worked together to create a structure of remarkable internal coherence.
Erwin Panofsky has provocatively suggested that this was no coincidence, and that both phenomena—Scholasticism and Gothic architecture—emerged as related products of a common intellectual and cultural milieu. He provides example after example of intriguing parallels between the Scholastic summa and the High Gothic cathedral. For instance, just as the Scholastic treatise, in its examination of disputed questions, reconciled the positions of conflicting sources of equal authority—two Church fathers seemingly at odds, for example—the Gothic cathedral synthesized the features of preceding architectural traditions rather than simply adopting one and suppressing the other.18
The greatest outburst of innovation and sheer accomplishment in the world of art since antiquity occurred during the Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Renaissance is not easily pigeonholed. On the one hand, much of it appears to herald the coming of the modern world. Secularism is increasingly present, as is an increasing emphasis on worldly life rather than on the world to come. Tales of immorality are legion. Little wonder, then, that some Catholics are inclined to reject the Renaissance root and branch.
On the other hand, the Renaissance can with some justice be described as the fulfillment of the Middle Ages rather than as a radical break from them; medieval thinkers, like Renaissance figures, possessed a profound respect for classical antiquity (even if they did not accept the entire classical inheritance as uncritically as did some Renaissance humanists), and it was in the Late Middle Ages that we find the origins of important artistic techniques that would be perfected during the Renaissance. Moreover, so many of its masterpieces depict Catholic themes, and the popes themselves served as patrons of some of the greatest masters.
The truth of the matter appears to be as follows:
1. Important artistic innovations were already occurring prior to the time frame traditionally associated with the Renaissance;
2. In areas other than art, the Renaissance period was one of stagnation or even retrogression;
3. A trend toward secularism was certainly evident during that time, but
4. The vast bulk of Renaissance art was religious in nature, and can be enjoyed by us today thanks to the patronage of the Renaissance popes.
Let us consider these points one at a time. A century before standard chronologies say the Renaissance had begun, the medieval Giotto di Bondone, known simply as Giotto, was already anticipating many of the technical innovations for which the Renaissance would be so celebrated. Giotto was born in 1267 near Florence. A possibly apocryphal story has it that at age ten, while tending sheep, the young Giotto was using chalk to draw a sheep on the rocks. Cimabue, an innovative artist in his own right, is said to have seen the lad drawing, and was so impressed that he felt compelled to ask the boy’s father for permission to train Giotto as an artist.
Cimabue himself had been an artistic pioneer, transcending the formalism of Byzantine art in order to paint human beings with an eye to realism. Giotto would follow in his footsteps, carrying this emphasis on realism to new and important heights that would exert substantial influence on succeeding generations of painters. His techniques for depicting depth and rendering realistic art in three dimensions were of the greatest importance, as was his individualized depiction of human beings (as opposed to the more stylized approach that preceded him, in which the various individuals depicted were barely distinguishable from each other).
Thus in some sense it can be said that the Renaissance grew out of the Middle Ages. In areas unrelated to art, though, the Renaissance period actually constituted a time of retrogression. The study of English and continental literatures would hardly miss the removal of the fifteenth century. At the same time, the scientific life of Europe all but came to a standstill. With the exception of the Copernican theory of the universe, the history of Western science between 1350 and 1600 is one of relative stagnation. Western philosophy, which had flourished in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, has comparatively little to show for itself during the same period.19
One could even say that the Renaissance was in many regards a time of irrationalism. It was during the Renaissance that alchemy reached its height, for example. Astrology grew ever more influential. Persecutions of witches, erroneously associated with the Middle Ages, became widespread only during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
The spirit of secularism was certainly evident during the Renaissance. Although the doctrine of original sin was rarely denied in any explicit way, a much more favorable view of human nature and its potential became evident. With the coming of the Renaissance we see a celebration of the natural man, apart from the regenerating effects of supernatural grace, and his dignity and potential. The contemplative virtues, so admired in the Middle Ages as manifested in the monastic tradition, began to give way to the active virtues as objects of admiration. in other words, a secular understanding of utility and practicality, which would later triumph during the Enlightenment, began to denigrate the life of the monk and to celebrate instead the life of worldly activity evident even in the ordinary townsman. Secularism extended even to political philosophy: in The Prince (1513), Machiavelli produced a purely secular treatment of politics and the state, an institution he described as morally autonomous and as exempt from the kind of standards against which we traditionally hold the behavior of individuals.
That secularism was also evident in art. For one thing, the subject matter of art began to change as the patronage of art extended to sources other than the Church. Self-portraits and landscape scenes, secular by their very nature, began to flourish. Whether secular or religious, though, the very desire to depict the natural world as accurately as possible, so evident in Renaissance art, suggests that the natural world, far from a mere way station between temporal existence and supernatural beatitude, was considered something good in and of itself and worthy of careful study and reproduction.
Yet the vast bulk of the artistic work during the Renaissance depicts religious themes, and much of it comes from men whose art was deeply inspired by a sincere and profound religious faith. According to Kenneth Clark, author of the widely acclaimed Civilisation:
Guercino spent much of his mornings in prayer; Bernini frequently went on retreats and practiced the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius; Rubens went to Mass every day before beginning work. This conformity was not based on fear of the Inquisition, but on the perfectly simple belief that the faith which had inspired the great saints of the preceding generation was something by which a man should regulate his life. The mid-sixteenth century was a period of sanctity in the Roman Church . . . such people as Saint Ignatius Loyola, the visionary soldier turned psychologist. One does not need to be a practicing Catholic to feel respect for a half-century that could produce these great spirits.20
The popes, particularly such figures as Julius II and Leo X, were great patrons of many of these artists. It was during the pontificate of Pope Julius II, and under his patronage, that such figures as Bramante, Michelangelo, and Raphael produced some of their most memorable works of art. The Catholic Encyclopedia points to the significance of this pope in contending that
when the question arose as to whether the Church would absorb or reject and condemn progress, whether or not it would associate itself with the humanistic spirit, Julius II deserves the credit for having taken sides with the Renaissance and prepared the stage for the moral triumph of the Church. The great creations of Julius II, Bramante’s St. Peter’s and Raphael’s Vatican, are inseparable from the great ideas of humanity and culture represented by the Catholic Church. Here art surpasses itself, becoming the language of something higher, the symbol of one of the noblest harmonies ever realized by human nature. At the will of this extraordinary man Rome became at the end of the sixteenth century the meeting place and centre of all that was great in art and thought.21
Similar observations might be made of the pontificate of Leo X, even if we concede that he lacked the impeccable taste and judgment of Julius. “From all parts,” wrote a cardinal in 1515, “men of letters are hurrying to the Eternal City, their common country, their support, their patroness.” Raphael’s work, if anything, grew still more impressive under Leo, who carried on his predecessor’s patronage of this renowned painter. “Everything pertaining to art the pope turns over to Raphael,” an ambassador observed in 1518.22 Again we can profit from the judgment of Will Durant, who explains that Leo’s court was
the center of the intellect and wit of Rome, the place where scholars, educators, poets, artists, and musicians were welcomed or housed; the scene of solemn ecclesiastical functions, ceremonious diplomatic receptions, costly banquets, dramatic or musical performances, poetical recitations, and exhibitions of art. It was without question the most refined court in the world at that time. The labors of popes from Nicholas V to Leo himself in the improvement and adornment of the Vatican, in the assemblage of literary and artistic genius, and of the ablest ambassadors in Europe, made the court of Leo the zenith not of the art (for that had come under Julius) but of the literature and brilliance of the Renaissance. In mere quantity of culture history had never seen its equal, not even in Periclean Athens or Augustan Rome.23
This writer’s own favorite Renaissance creation, the Pietà of Michelangelo, is a strikingly moving work that reveals a profoundly Catholic sensibility. The pietà, which depicted the Virgin Mary holding her divine Son after the crucifixion, had been an artistic genre in and of itself for hundreds of years by the time of Michelangelo. These earlier pietàs had often been horrific to see, as with the Röttgen Pietà (c. 1300–1325), in which a distorted and bloodied Christ figure lay in the lap of a mother overwhelmed with grief. The fourteenth century, a period of great disaster and human tragedy, would see a great deal more depictions of suffering in religious art.24
The depiction of suffering has played an important role in Western art, particularly because of the emphasis that Catholicism has placed on the crucifixion rather than (as in the Orthodox east as well as in Protestantism) on the resurrection as the central event in the drama of redemption. Yet the intensity of that suffering is significantly diminished in the first and by far more famous of Michelangelo’s two pietàs. Michelangelo’s work, which has been called the greatest marble sculpture ever created, preserves the tragedy of that terrible moment without any of the gruesome and disturbing images that characterized earlier such works. The face of Christ’s mother is positively serene. Since the second century Mary had been called the “second Eve,” for just as Eve’s disobedience had led to mankind’s perdition, Mary’s conformity to God’s will, in consenting to bear the God-Man in her womb, made possible mankind’s redemption. That is the woman we see in Michelangelo’s sculpture: so confident is she in God’s promises, and so perfectly resigned to God’s will, that she can accept the terrible fate of her divine Son in a spirit of faithfulness and equanimity.
ART AND SCIENCE
In our discussion of the Church’s contributions to the development of modern science, we briefly explored how certain fundamental theological and philosophical ideas derived from Catholicism proved congenial to the enterprise of scientific inquiry. Oddly enough, our discussion of art can add still another explanation for the unique success of science in the West. It has to do with the development of linear perspective in art, perhaps the distinguishing feature of Renaissance painting.
It was in the West that perspective art, which involved the depiction of three dimensions in a two-dimensional artistic work, and chiaroscuro, the use of light and shadow, were developed. Both features had existed in the art of classical antiquity, and Western artists, beginning around 1300, revived them. It was only through Western influence that subsequent artists around the world applied these principles to their own traditional art.25
In The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry, Samuel Edgerton compares the perspective art developed in pre-Renaissance and Renaissance Europe with the art of other civilizations. He begins with a comparison of a Western and a Chinese rendering of a fly, and shows that the Westerner is much more attentive to the geometric structure of the fly. “In the West,” he writes, “we take it for granted that if we are to understand the structure of an organic as well as an inorganic subject, we must first envisage it as nature mort (like a Chardin still life), with all constituent parts translated into impartial, static geometric relationships. In such pictures, as Arthur Waley wryly remarked, ‘Pontius Pilate and a coffee-pot are both upright cylindrical masses.’ To the traditional Chinese this approach is both scientifically and aesthetically absurd.” The point of Edgerton’s comparison is to emphasize that “the geometric perspective and chiaroscuro (light-and-shadow rendering) conventions of European Renaissance art, whether or not aesthetically styled, have proved extraordinarily useful to modern science.”26 This is why Edgerton suspects it is not a coincidence that Giotto, the forerunner and indeed the founder of Renaissance art, and Galileo, the brilliant physicist and astronomer who has sometimes been called the founder of modern science, both hailed from Tuscany, and that the Tuscan city of Florence was home to both artistic masterpieces and scientific advances.
The commitment of geometric perspective in art was itself a product of the distinct intellectual milieu of Catholic Europe. As we have seen, the idea of God as geometer, and of geometry as the basis upon which God ordered His creation, was one of long standing within the Catholic world. By the time of the Renaissance, explains Samuel Edgerton,
a unique tradition rooted in medieval Christian doctrine was growing in the West: it was becoming socially de rigueur for the privileged gentry to know Euclidian geometry. Even before the twelfth century, the early church fathers suspected they might discover in Euclidian geometry God’s very thinking process.
Geometric linear perspective was quickly accepted in western Europe after the fifteenth century because Christians wanted to believe that when they beheld such an image in art, they were perceiving a replica of the same essential, underlying structure of reality that God had conceived at the moment of Creation. By the seventeenth century, as “natural philosophers” (such as Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton) came more and more to realize that linear perspective does in fact conform to the actual optical and physiological process of human vision, not only was perspective’s Christian imprimatur upheld, but it now served to reinforce Western science’s increasingly optimistic and democratic belief that God’s conceptual process had at last been penetrated, and that knowledge (and control) of nature lay potentially within the grasp of any living human being.27
Thus did the Catholic Church’s commitment to the study of Euclidean geometry, as a key to the mind of God and the basis upon which He ordered the universe, bear enormously important fruit both in the artistic and the scientific realms. This Catholic attraction to geometry led to a way of depicting the natural world that helped make the Scientific Revolution possible, and which would be copied by the rest of the world in the years to come.