Here’s a quick question. After the arrival of Christianity in Europe and before the Renaissance, much of the music, painting, sculpture, and architecture produced in the West had a religious subject or was inspired by religion. And yes, I know that there are exceptions (ballads, secular portraits, Dürer’s rabbit, etc.), and I know that much of the religious music was commissioned by sponsors or employers (Bach, etc.). And yes, there were hardly any novels until secularism had taken hold in the Renaissance. But the great cathedrals, the Last Supper, some of the great sculptures of Michelangelo, and some of the greatest paintings of Leonardo would not exist without religion, whether it was a subject of the art or simply an inspiration for it.
And so my simple question: if religion had not existed at all in the West (I’m not talking about the Middle East or Far East), how would art be different?
Would the greatest artists, sculptors, and composers simply have devoted their talents to depicting or writing music about secular subjects: portraits, scenes of everyday life (e.g., Vermeer), landscapes, and the like. Maybe we’d have works as great as The Last Supper, The Passion of St. Matthew or the Pietà, but they wouldn’t have Christianity as their subject.
If you say, well, patrons were responsible for great religious art, and the artists simply did their bidding, my response would be: so what? Patrons may have been imbued with religious sentiments, for everyone was a believer, and those patrons simply commissioned art that corresponded to their sentiments. That is still religious art produced because of religion.
One thing I know for sure: we wouldn’t have the great cathedrals of Europe. But would we have other buildings just as beautiful? I don’t think so.
I am not of course saying that religion has been a net benefit to civilization. But perhaps it was for art, at least for a while.
As Richard Dawkins would say, “Discuss”.
Oh, and here’s a great piece of religious art to inspire your answers:
Several years ago, I walked by The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine with some friends. We paused to look at the magnificence of the architecture, and then I said, “And to think that all of this is in service to a delusion.”
I posted that comment on Twitter. It didn’t go over well.
Maybe artists would have practiced more diligently on how to paint cats. I would gladly trade pictures of religious iconography for better pictures of cats.
And the CAThedrals, too???
This and above had me smiling, with my cat snuggled at my feet. So far as the question for discussion, I have no idea, but it gives me pause for thought.
You mean “paws for thought”!
🙂
Please! I just saw a tow truck with ‘We are on our tows!’ written in big yellow letters on its side.
Why do you think we would not have buildings just as beautiful? I’m not saying we would, but I want to know why you think not.
To contrast, I’d want to look at sort of wandering vagabond music – the music expresses where they were, what they were doing. Maybe telling stories, news, traveling the countryside in caravans …
I.e. Bach is expressing this feeling of deep meditation in an established area of stability, the church – Mozart then sometimes blended the feeling of wild social party lifestyle with a new development of harmonic/melodic expression …
Hard to pinpoint! But the difference is clear.
I think this is useful counterfactual amusement…
From about 1400BCE on, there might have been more genre painting, more landscape, and lots more portraits.
I agree–follow the money. Commissions would have come from royalty and eventually wealthy merchants.
The mystical/spiritual inclination and the psychology of art making and perception are very closely related. Art is very similar to religion, as it uses storytelling, metaphors, symbols, and aesthetic taste to convey ideas. Art shows us that the secular and atheist/agnostic can be as spiritual as the religious.
Yes. Religion is one way for humans to expand their small family and relative groups to include and work cooperatively with strangers or semi-strangers. The tepes in Turkey (Gobekli, Karahan and other sites) believed to be 8,000 to 10,000 years old, included pillars and other carved stones that archeologists believe had a religious component and were carved and erected by small groups of hunter gatherers working toward a common purpose. I love YouTube.
The West had great art, especially sculpture, epics, drama, and architecture… the Greeks.
Religion smothered it. Rome attempted to revive it, but the designation of Christianity as the state religion drew the smothering blanket up to the neck.
If that had not happened, and Christianity remained a tiny cult, the Renaissance might have arrived earlier.
No cathedrals, but perhaps skyscrapers.
I have always been drawn to religious iconography and architecture. The exception being depictions of the crucifixion and gruesome self-flagellation. Cathedrals, missions and mosques inspire awe in me. I remember a neighbor of mine who became a good friend, upon entering my house, noting that one of the first things I told her about myself was that I didn’t believe in god and despised organized religion, but with the exception of a few landscapes every piece of art I had displayed was religious. It’s beautiful stuff is all I can say. I love both the geometric aspects of Islamic art, architecture, etc with its use of reflective pools, minarets, etc and the very personal Christian sculptures of saints. I love it all. I’m glad it’s there. Could something other than religious fervor have given rise to such dedicated, intricate art? I don’t know.
Look at the various masterpieces of ancient Greek and Roman art that weren’t religiously inspired. The level of quality in sculpture and painting (as can be seen with any visit to the major museums of Rome and Naples, or the Met in New York) was extremely high but took a nosedive when Christianity became prevalent, not just because the Roman Empire was collapsing but because Christianity was fine with direct, primitive art that focused on Jesus. It took a thousand years for art to recover and return the heights the Greeks and Romans had taken it. Christianity has also inspired more bad than good art: think of the thousands of paintings of the simpering Madonna with her ugly child, the masochistic monotony of all those crucifixions, the boring sanctimony of the saints, etc. Just imagine if those artists had been encouraged to turn to great myths instead, or great historical events. Michaelangelo’s Pieta is great, but so is Laocoön and His Sons, by an unknown ancient Greek sculptor.
The Greek and Romans were not secular, and I think they generated many pieces that were inspired by religion (of gods and so on). But also of their mythological heroes, which is sort of a religious expression.
The Romans did create great public architecture and urban spaces. Yet if I were to be forced to name only one building of the greatest beauty, power, and innovation it would be the Pantheon. Religious passion has inspired some of the greatest architecture and art across time and cultures.
Also, Laocoön was a priest and those serpents were sent by the gods. So: religious sculpture.
I think the question should be “What would western art be without the money from religion?”
Human creativity has no limits. Art in Islamic Spain is a good example. But with no sponsors, you cannot build the Sistine Chapel and you cannot paint the Sistine Chapel.
🎯
Agreed!
Pre-Christian Rome had wealthy patrons of the arts too. The very rich Maecenas, close friend of Augustus, sponsored the works of great poets such as Virgil, Livy and Horace.
The Romans (and previous Western empires) also had monumental religious architecture, paeans to gods and heroes, statues which even today are considered outstanding, etc. etc. Christian art built on that legacy. They didn’t call it the Re-naissance for nothing; and much of that art dealt with Pagan themes (much to the annoyance of the Church).
(Not Western, but half a day spent wandering the mostly-ruins at Karnak was at least as intense for me as Notre Dame, Chartres, et al.)
For sculpture and painting, I see no net gain from Christianity. Without it, artists could have continued already long-established traditions of realism through centuries that are now marked by a retreat into highly stilted, formalistic visual representation by artists who were no longer capable of realistic depiction.
For literature, I think the gain without Christianity would have been greater: Longus and Heliodorus had already got the novel going, and that could have developed as a secular form, while poetry would certainly have benefited from being able to cover a far greater range of human experience than the Church allowed.
Music is a difficult case, because we owe so much of the development of music as a high art to the invention of notation (which allows composers to build structures far more complex than any non-notated musical culture possibly can). Notation arose in church music (in the 10th century, as a way of ensuring uniformity of liturgical practice across Christendom), but unlike sculpture, painting and literature, there were no well-developed or widespread previous notation traditions from Antiquity that an alternative timeline could have drawn on. Would it have arisen anyway, in some other context? Possibly, though it’s sobering to realize how seldom in world history the invention of a method of notating music has even been attempted. In terms of subject matter, great religious choral works might easily have had poetic of philsophical texts instead — as began to happen in the 18th century in Europe — while opera, when it began in the late-16th century, drew specifically on Antique secular traditions from the start. The 16th century also saw the first development of purely instrumental repertoires of music, which from the start have arisen from secular as well as religious impulses.
Architecture, which PCC specifically mentions, is perhaps the strongest case for a significant contribution from Christianity. Large and impressive public buildings obviously predated the adoption of Christianity — palaces, basilicas, temples, theatres, stadiums etc. — and they would have continued to develop and expand into new forms. The particular concern of cathedrals with coloured light and highly decorative stone-carving would probably not have emerged in the same way, or at the same time, though the Pantheon in Rome gives an idea of how a similarly awe-inspiring interior space, lit by an oculus rather than windows, might have continued to develop into new forms, which we would today cherish with similar feelings of wonderment. The use of (plain) window-glass itself obviously predates the Roman adoption of Christianity, so there’s no reason to suppose it wouldn’t have continued and brought ever-greater amounts of light into buildings.
Great response!
Hebrew musical notation (for liturgy) actually predates Christian by several centuries; other Near East systems even predate the Hebrew.
Secular musicians appear to have enjoyed little status until classical composers became so revered in the 19th century. They lacked long-lasting and widely-respected institutions to preserve and improve upon their knowledge.
Danny — Indeed, and in Ancient Greece too. But all of them are limited in ways that prevented them developing beyond their initial specialist use (mainly, that they designate only relative, not absolute pitches, and that they lack precise metrical and rhythmic information). The fact that Western notation did encode these parameters was probably accidental, but it created capabilities in the system that allowed it to expand beyond its original purpose.
Good points all.
Both antiquity and early modernity onwards demonstrate that the arts would’ve been just fine. Demand for secular art was and is plentiful.
Conversely, I do not believe that Christianity smothered art – the stylistic changes of the mid- and late Roman empire predated the ascension of Christianity (the Portrait of the Four Tetrarchs comes from the height of Christian persecution and if you show that thing to anyone without context, they’ll invariably call it ‘Medieval’). Post-collapse, funds dry up for a while, which reduces both volume and skill – this, of course, would happen regardless of religion or not.
It is telling that once funds appear again, in the financial capitals of Europe, art starts having a secular aspect again as well, in southern Germany and Flanders, soon Italy as well, and then everyone follows suit in very short order.
There is an argument for architecture being something of an exception. Not in the sense of the church enabling the construction of grandiose structures that wouldn’t have been built otherwise. Palaces can be aplenty, too.
But a palace belongs to a king, a nobleman, someone very rich. They’re private property.
A church is for everyone (more or less). Churches can be interpreted as palaces for the public.
And I have a hard time seeing that being emulated by a secular west. Not until the industrial revolution.
I agree with your emphasis on economics. I’ll add that it conflicts with the prevailing theory in academia that the art of early Medieval Europe could not possibly have been worse, it was just different and the artists did not even want to do anything differently.
Mhm. It’s true that stylistic choices matter a lot (some paleolithic cave paintings being remarkably impressive), and as noted, the stylistic changes began centuries before Rome fell.
But at the same time, one cannot help but note that, for instance, early crowns looked rather makeshift on comparison to what came before, and I have a hard time believing that this was intentional. In much the same way, the Carolingians were absolutely amazed by the works of muslim artisans they occasionally received as gifts, and those works were very much /not/ ahead of antiquity. This implies demand for skills that simply weren’t available locally, yet weren’t ‘New’, either.
Stylistic changes undoubtedly mattered, but the early medieval era (c. 500- 600 to 900- 1000 AD) did see a massive loss in population within formerly-Roman territories, a deterioration of infrastructure, the disappearance of secular education, losses in efficiency from a drastic reduction in long distance trading, an absurd degree of quasi-permanent warfare. Britain deteriorated into what were basically chiefdoms (that were then Viking’d for good measure), even if British historiography insists on calling them kingdoms, to the point where cities actually and pottery almost disappeared from the island. Gaul saw the Franks in constant strife with their neighbours, Germania was just building itself up (where it hadn’t been abandoned by tribes looking for greener pastures), the Balkans experienced wave after wave of slavic and steppe invasions, Italy was turned into something vaguely resembling a post-nuclear wasteland by Justinian’s wars against the Ostrogoths and Langobards.
It’d be rather weird if these events /didn’t/ cause a significant loss of not immediately survival-relevant skills. You survive the apocalypse by being a farmer, not by being a painter.
This didn’t last throughout the entire early medieval period (it actually looked like the post-Roman kingdoms would maintain the Roman legacy until Justinian’s Restauratio Imperii wrecked the mediterranean starting in the 530s, and by 750 AD, recovery was noticeable), but for something like 200 years, it really was pretty damn bad, and a lot that’d been lost had to be relearned.
Yes, the stylistic change away from realism can be seen happening almost in real time if one looks at sculpture in the second half of the 3rd century — compare the portrait busts in the Capitoline Museum of Maximinus Thrax, a marvel of psychological insight made just as the third-century crisis was beginning but talented sculptors, trained in more stable times, were still around, with that of, say, Probus, less than fifty years later, when the last generation of truly accomplished sculptors had died off and the economic circumstances of the empire no longer supported the meticulous training required by, nor the wealth needed to commission, their successors. By the time of Constantine another 30 – 40 years later, the resulting crudeness and simplification of style had become set, as it were, in stone, and Constantine’s image, whether in marble or in bronze, had become stylized into a cartoonish mask compared to the subtlety and realism artists were routinely accomplishing a century earlier. Constantine’s adoption of Christianity then gave the new style official imprimatur, and we can see its unrealistic characteristics being extended and emphasized in the religious art that then followed, particularly in the eastern empire, for the next thousand years. When western artists eventually began to try again to evoke psychological insight and recognizable humanity in their religious painting and sculpture, rather than a series of distant masks, they had an immense deficit to overcome, and it took nearly two hundred years to move from the first glimmerings in Giotto to the final re-attainment of Antiquity’s level of realistic depiction in Donatello and Michelangelo, more than 11 centuries after they had been lost.
Powerful feelings and emotion create great art. Religion is not the only powerful feeling.
Love has inspired incredible art. Think of the Taj Mahal. Of love sonnets by Shakespeare, Barrett Browning and Neruda. Klimt’s ‘The Kiss’. ‘Tu che di gel sei cinta’, Liu’s suicide for love in Turandot.
Political events can stir deep feelings. ‘The Last of the Clan’ by Thomas Faed still moves me deeply whenever I look at it.
War and death are major contributors to great art. Picasso’s Guernica. Dido’s Lament by Purcell. Górecki’s “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs” is one that I have to limit, especially the 2nd movement, as it is distressing as well as beautiful. Living art like Jeremy Deller’s project “We’re Here Because We’re Here” for the Battle of the Somme centenary was a genius idea. I recommend a Google.
Käthe Kollwitz’s sculpture Mother with her Dead Son (Pietà) is just as powerful as the marble sculpture shared above. Perhaps even more so as Pietà is a real man, Kollwitz’s son, who died in WWI.
I could easily add many more things to this list.
There is no doubt that religion has inspired a vast amount of art but, without it, I’m sure that we would have spent that money on other art as I think that appreciating beauty and creating art is an innate part of being human.
🎯artists will use many things for inspiration. Religion is as you say just one facet.
No doubt power and wealth in Europe and the Mediterranean would have accrued to a different set of people with different ambitions, but art is associated with all kinds of societal institutions throughout history. Without churchmen to siphon off wealth, even grander mansions and palaces for the moneyed might well have kept the sculptors, stonemasons, glaziers, et al., equally inspired.
There was a great deal of inquiry and original thinking from individuals and learning houses BCE, CE. I beleive just different great art and architecture would have evolved and thinking relgion was needed to stimulate great works is short changing those of our cultural past.
This is not to say what we have now is not because of relgion, mores the pity, just it would have been of different subject material. The night sky comes to mind let alone the act of dying, defeat, winning in battle adding they would not have been constrained by religion.
How many works have gone because of ideology, blundering, sacking, freedom to persue alternatives might have been dangerous.
I’ve amused myself with the thought a lot of the ancients near and far did what they did because they didn’t have radio, tv, internet, fast cars, a refrigerator full of food.
Unfortunately we still have their religion.
The Renaissance was a combination of the intellectual flowering of rediscovering classical thought mixed with the homogeneous acceptance of Christianity. The great cities of the Renaissance and the Church had wealth. Wealth is required for monumental works such as you note. I see the intellectual sophistication expressed through the emotions of religious belief funded by wealth resulting in these great works. The fact that we still are moved by them today- even those of us who are not believers- shows their power. The cathedrals are magnificent, and their form is absolutely dependent on the religious beliefs of their designers and purpose. Would they have made something equivalent without Christianity? No. They would have made something equivalent to skyscrapers and compounds for the wealthy.
Looking at the Pieta, why does this move us? Because it shows grief, sacrifice, love- just to start. Would he have done this without tying human emotion to something they considered on a higher plane-Christianity? I don’t think so.
I don’t see why not. For a poignant, emotion-inducing ancient Roman statue check out The Dying Gaul.
Yes it is deeply moving. I always showed a slide of this to my students.
Non sequitur.
Of course there would be religion, just not a violent monotheistic version in foot steps of the Assyrians.
And of course there’d be art.
More important is we would still very likely have democracy.
And about a millennium sooner.
Minus Saxon slaughter, Crusades, pogroms, witch burning.
Or perhaps there would be an even more violent, oppressive monotheistic religion called Islam ruling over the West.
I posted this 8 hours ago but system did not accept:
“We’d still have had religion?
Greece then Rome
And fancy architecture?
Ditto.
But not Crusades or Inquisitions.
OR ISLAM.”
Emphasis added.
?
Democracy in the west was first smothered by the Roman civil wars era, ending with Augustus.
The collapse of the WRE did… not really bring it back, as the Germanic successor kingdoms were, well, successor /kingdoms/.
Regional democratic (we’d call them oligarchic; landowners voting and such) institutions appear in some areas through a combination of difficult access, relative wealth and outside threats (free cities, Frisian peasant republics, Swiss federation), although the middle one increasingly lost its democratic character over time as wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a few families.
The Church had precisely nothing to do with the disappearance of ‘democracy’ 400 years before its integration into European power structures, nor was it particularly suppressive of the democratic structures that did appear in the middle ages.
Indeed, a fairly strong argument can be made that the distinct difference between the church and worldly powers and the constant conflicts between them were a key ingredient for the appearance of democratic structures – throughout the medieval era, for damn near a millenium, the church questioned the validity of kings and their decisions. The idea of absolute power in the hands of a king was never accepted. Throughout the medieval era, for damn near a millenium, kings questioned the validity of bishops and their decisions. The idea of absolute power in the hands of the church was never accepted.
It is telling that the (brief, barely lasting a century) period of absolutism occurred after the church had finally been broken as a significant political power (post-dating the thirty years war). It hadn’t been possible before.
If anything, the constant questioning of religious authority by worldly powers, and worldly authority by religious powers, lasting for a thousand years, deeply ingrained the idea that there is no absolute power in European political philosophy. Which in turn helped fuel modern conceptions of democracy.
While a strict dichotomy between medieval Europe’s church/king antagonism and China’s absolutism or the combination of church and king in one person within Islam is probably an exaggertion (certainly, we’re not exactly short of Sultans and Khalifs having, err, issues with local Imams, although the power differential there was certainly much greater than it was in Europe), Europe was certainly rather extreme in its conflict between church and state. And it was this conflict that ultimately brought down both, bishop and king alike.
Nix the church and leave only a king, and you don’t get democracy. You get China without the imperial examinations, with local warlords replacing bureaucrats.
I sense in some of the above comments an attitude reminiscent of the long-outdated “Dark Ages” label. The classical tradition did not die. It moved eastward with the Roman emperors and was adapted. The surviving mosaics of Hagia Sophia from the 9th to 11th centuries testify to great technical skill, as does the illuminated Paris Psalter of the 10th century, with its more realistic portrayals and classical elements. The stylized depictions of religious art, particularly as seen in Eastern icons, might not be to everyone’s taste, but it is simplistic to dismiss this as loss of ability. It was a choice. The Byzantines, who called themselves Romans, displayed the Horses of San Marco and many other classical works, valuing the beauty and realism. Moreover, the Renaissance in the West owed much to the preservation of classical texts and art by religious adherents in Constantinople and in monasteries scattered throughout the former Western Empire. Given our disposable culture, presentism, and illusions of progress in all domains, I think it highly doubtful we would have been more judicious in passing on the treasures of the past. And we certainly would have been unable to carry out projects over centuries as was done with many of the great cathedrals; in some jurisdictions today, you could barely complete the permitting process in that time.
How would art have differed, without Christianity, and if we keep our focus on the West—ignoring the continuity of Greco-Roman heritage in the East? If there had been no Church, what would have filled the power void after the collapse of Rome? Likely not a concentration of power, with its vast patronage system and funding. This suggests an art localized and tribal. Perhaps if we go northward we could see an answer. Art elsewhere would have likely taken the geometric patterning and animal motifs of the Viking Oseberg ship and the exquisite 7th century cloisonné work of the Anglo-Saxons found at the Sutton Hoo burial site. It would have looked much like the Lindisfarne Gospels of the early 8th century and the Book of Kells of the early 9th century that retain the intricate geometric stylization and animal motifs of much of the pre-Christian influence.
I would take Chartres over a skyscraper any day—as long as I could retain my dental care. Counterfactuals like this are, indeed, thought provoking. One could also ask what would exist of our political structures, ideas of “self” and “individuality,” and our conceptions of human rights were it not for those men who created beauty far beyond what we seem capable of today. One could wonder who has lost what in an era in which more than a few scholars scoff at those like Matthew Arnold who would pass on “the best that has been thought and said.”
Colonialism would’ve been different without the Catholic and Protestant missionaries.
I use them as they’re the Christian denominations that seem to have done the most of it. I think a few others did some.
The 1986 film “The Mission” is an excellent exploration of the conflict between religious missionaries and secular colonialism.
Yeah, idealized but it happened.
In all fairness the people there were caught between a rock and a hard place.
Then we get Mother Teresa.
“One thing I know for sure: we wouldn’t have the great cathedrals of Europe. But would we have other buildings just as beautiful? I don’t think so.”
I would not necessarily disagree, but Trump’s recent visit to Windsor Castle, and travel throughout Europe, suggests that monumental architecture, some of it even beautiful, has often been private (Downtown Abbey?) or part of the structure of royalty or an aristocracy. Religious structures can often call upon resources that are not available to private individuals, and their beauty may reflect the abundance of resources rather than the validity of religious beliefs, but sometimes multigenerational royalty can achieve some impressive results as well.