It's truly horrifying how much diabolical 'religious' art is out there.
One reason it's considered a good thing nowadays is because when folks tack on the 'religious' to it they think that excuses everything. It must be OK because it's 'religious'. As if in fact that meant the normal rules of virtue and vice did not apply -- not that anyone in general knows these at all.
But as if being "religious" were what excused all, so one would set aside one's judgement. Make a horrible sculpture of a secular subject well, you might admit it's horrible. But then you make it of a religious subject, and so it must be OK. Rather than in fact, it being even more an evil, to craft something immodest, unedifying, lacking in virtue, blasphemous, sacrilegious and put it in a religious context.
The whole point of religious art is to inspire virtue not be edify in the opposite way. And yet so many artists are trained in the sensual school, lacking all virtue, and then are asked to paint, sculpt, craft some religious subject. And what do you expect such people to do with the images of the saints when they get their dirty hands to work?
Even if held to the strictest standards, what will they not devilishly like to slip in? To push to the border, to try to get excused because of the overall subject.
So then they do their evil, with all their sensualist training, rather than crafting it with an eye towards virtue and inspiration. And perhaps they have some great skill in sensualist "craft". So it gets put in a museum, a cathedral, a chapel, a shrine, perhaps even in the Vatican museum, or a fresco, or this or that.
And then it sits there for a few hundred years because modesty is rare and no one is willing to get rid of it. All the while doing evil, and perhaps some purer souls are inspired by it too and ignore the evil -- though they are nevertheless disedified to regard depicted vice as fine because it is displayed in that context.
And then the worldly "art" historians all celebrate these people as if in fact they were good artists and had produced good works, and how priceless they all are as art (because they are old, and by these skilled in sensuality artists that please the worldly). How they would cry out if these works were, as they should be, covered up, or better destroyed!
But if you look at for example icons, it is not about the sensuality, it is about virtue and hidden meanings, giving the viewer something to meditate on, something to draw towards Heaven, not towards the earth.
The whole history of conflict over icons has some moral lessons in it.
Topic: New image of St. Michael (Read 5184 times)