The Destruction of Art by Dario Gamboni

Author:Dario Gamboni
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: REAKTION BOOKS

‘St-Sulpice’

This critic implied that in most other churches open eyes were ‘offended’ – to use a phrase we have often encountered – by the sight of what surrounded them. Why was it so? By the turn of the century, the normal conditions of commission, creation and reception of church decoration and liturgical objects had long been in contradiction with the very definition of artistic activity. This may be illustrated by a telling anecdote from the life of Raphael Ritz, an artist from the Valais, then an essentially rural and Catholic part of Switzerland. In 1863 Ritz returned after studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf, and attempted to collaborate again with his father, a craftsman-painter of altar-pieces and portraits. This proved to be impossible, and he expressed on one occasion the distance separating his newly acquired conception of art and what was required of him by omitting to sign an altar painting on which the peasant who paid for it had obliged him to add wings with kneeling children; in 1865 he went back to Düsseldorf.19 Of course, in less remote places and especially in cities, control was rather exercised by ecclesiastical authorities and may have been more subtle, but the problem was not essentially different. This situation provoked a selection and a specialization of artists who either had personal (religious, moral or political) reasons to choose this undervalued field of activity and in some cases try to revalue it, or who failed in more prestigious enterprises and fell back to a relatively secure source of income. Melchior Paul von Deschwanden for instance, another nineteenth-century painter from a rural and Catholic part of Switzerland, returned to his native Stans after meeting Overbeck in Rome. He worked essentially for the Church, executed with his pupils many hundreds of altarpieces and devotional pictures inspired by Raphael and the Nazarenes, and replied to those who objected to the traditionalism and sentimentality of his production that he ‘painted for pious souls and not for critics’.20

The Gothic Revival, the construction and restoration of churches, transformations in religious practices and a resultant growing demand for decoration, liturgical objects and domestic religious images, also promoted the creation and development of semi-industrial and industrial workshops, which employed old and new means of reproduction to provide more products at lower prices. The sequels to these technical and commercial transformations were denounced in general terms as a ‘substitution of industry to art’, together with photography, photosculpture, or casting.21 In 1853 a French priest regretted that pious images and objects were ‘abandoned to inferior industries that make a traffic of ignorance and simplicity, render piety spiritless and sometimes even insult Christian dogmas and feelings’.22 This was the time when, in Paris, many shops selling articles deplete settled in the quarter around the church of St-Sulpice. Not all the Paris shops that sold articles de piété were located there, and Paris was not alone in providing France – not to speak of other countries – with such articles. But ‘St-Sulpice’

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