Desiderius Lenz, The Divine Canon. Art and Rule of the Beuron School. Castelvecchi Publisher, 2015. Part One

Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
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Desiderius Lenz
Canone divino. L’arte e la regola della scuola di Beuron
[The Divine Canon. Art and rule of the Beuron School]

Edited by Paolo Martore

Part One

Castelvecchi publisher, 2015

Beuronese Art School, Ceiling of the Chapel of the Crucifixion at Monte Cassino (1880)
Source: http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kfa1907_1908/0276

Canone divino (The Divine Canon) presents for the first time to the Italian public the writings of Father Desiderius (aka Peter) Lenz (1832-1928), founder of the school of art of Beuron. A name that will not tell much to most readers, but that deserves to be rediscovered. Father Desiderius, in fact, is the organizer, between the second half of 1800 and the first two decades of the twentieth century, of a revival of sacred art in hieratic and anti-naturalist sense, conquering the interest of many artists: thanks to Jan Verkade, also a member of the Benedictine monastery of Beuron in the Black Forest, his art influences Nabis painters such as Maurice Denis and Paul Sérusier; the Beuron school participates with great success at the exhibition of the Viennese Secession in 1905; finally, several art critics believe that the 'aesthetic geometry' of Father Desiderius has somehow played a role in the birth of Cubism. Let us make a premise: on all these topics, we would like to refer to the second part of Francesco Mazzaferro’s post entitled Jan Verkade, Cennino Cennini and the search for spiritual art during the First World War, already published on this blog.

The Monastery of Beuron in the Margraviate of the Hohenzollern
Source: http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kfa1907_1908/0272

The Chapel of St. Maurus in Beuron
Source: http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kfa1907_1908/0272

Here we try to address other issues that seem equally important. The Italian edition of the work, curated by Paolo Martore, presents a collection of writings by Desiderius Lenz. It must be immediately said that the artist, in the course of his long life (he died at 96 years old) tried several times to publish a text that could disclose in a complete manner his thought, but for one reason or another he never managed to do it. The essays that appear in this book are chronologically from 1865 to 1921 and are due in part to Jan Verkade, who tried, in the closing years of the life of Desiderius, to help him develop a writing which would be as clear as possible.

These texts are accompanied by the introduction that Maurice Denis wrote for the French translation of The Aesthetics of Beuron, published between 1904 and 1905 and edited by Paul Serusier; as well as an article (also commented in the post mentioned before) entitled The Art of Beuron, written in 1929 by a young Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI. Finally, a broader comment is displayed by Hubert Krins, curator of the archives of the Abbey of St. Martin of Beuron, who has in particular the advantage of being contemporaneous to us.

The testimonies of the Beuronese art

It must be said that the Beuronese art is characterized by its monumentality: art, by its nature, must be monumental. Unfortunately for us, many of the testimonies of the works of the Beuron monks were lost during the bombing of World War II. Just think, for example, that from 1876 to 1880 first, and then from 1885 to 1887, the monks of Beuron worked in Italy for the restructuring of the Tower of the Convent of Monte Cassino; and always at Montecassino they worked in the crypt from 1899 to 1910. The decoration of the Tower is irretrievably lost; the Crypt instead was restored after the Second World War. Today the few original testimonies are found in the chapel of Saint Maurus, near Beuron, and the convent of San Gabriel in Prague. The pictures you find in support of this review are taken from an essay dedicated to Beuronese art, published in 1908 in the German art magazine Die Kunst für Alle, edited by Fritz Schwartz and of which the University of Heidelberg has digitized a copy in his virtual library. Many of these works - it is repeated – unfortunately do no longer exist anymore.

Beuronese Art School. Cartoon for a mosaic in the Crypt of Monte Cassino (1904)
Fonte: http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kfa1907_1908/0273

Beuronese Art School, Detail of the Crypt of Monte Cassino - Mosaic and work in sculpture
Source: http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kfa1907_1908/0276

Peter Lenz

Peter Lenz was born in 1832. During his youth he attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, under the influence of the Nazarene movement and Peter von Cornelius in particular. The art of the Nazarenes, their elegance, simplicity, and the return to the purity of spirit and feelings fascinates him immediately. Thanks to the same Cornelius, Lenz gets a scholarship which enables him to move to Rome. Here, he stays three years, and makes at least two discoveries. The first is the religious one. To him, Pius IX looks like a giant. These are the last years of the temporal power of the Church; those in which - so to speak - the Papal States are reduced to only Lazio, and the Church feels surrounded, even physically. On the purely theological ground, Pius IX responds to these threats by issuing new dogmas: that of the Immaculate Conception and the one which decrees the papal infallibility. In 1864, Pius IX condemns as an error the progressive and liberal thinking, with an encyclical. The faith of Lenz is powered by the dogma. One can even say - and it will be a constant factor throughout his life - that his artistic career is characterized by the constant search for a dogma (which he calls "canon") to be applied in art, just as it happens in the religious sphere. To be precise: for Lenz, art is art because it is religion. This is the way God has chosen to reveal himself to the mankind. Art does not exist outside of religion: realism and naturalism exist, like a fake imitation of nature, ultimately based on the study of the naked human body: all aspects that must be severely condemned.

Where does Peter look for his dogma? In the study of Greek vase painting. But the real stroke of lightning is the (purely literary) meeting with the art of the old Egyptians. Lenz immediately understands that this is revealed art; a revelation of the only possible art, focused on the representation of archetypal and normative images, based on principles consisting in numbers and measures. To the study of old Egyptian art he will devote the entire life. After a few years spent in Tyrol and in Berlin, Peter is fascinated by the experience of the new Benedictine monastery of Beuron, where there is a group of monks who are already dedicated to the study of Gregorian chant: the application of the dogma to the music. Lenz enters Beuron in 1872, founds there the school of painting, along with other members who have experienced the same spiritual path, and becomes Father Desiderius in 1877. With the exception of periods spent abroad for art assignments as those in Monte Cassino, his  existence will be all consumed within the walls of Beuron.

Beuronese Art School, Madonna with Saints (fresco in the Monastery of Monte Cassino), 1880
Source: http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kfa1907_1908/0274

Beuronese Art School, Flight into Egypt from the "Life of Mary" , 1883
(cartoon for a tempera picture for the Abbey of Emmaus in Praga)
Source: http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kfa1907_1908/0278

To square things

There is a first, serious contradiction in the thinking of Peter Lenz; something which he himself realizes immediately and describes in his notes: How is it possible to look for a dogma for sacred art and recognize it just in the models of old Egyptians and Greeks? How can one refer to a pagan experience to rediscover the true Christian art? Here - it is clear - we are not talking about matters of personal taste. Art is a matter of faith, and if, for example, Lenz depicts the Madonna in forms that clearly remind us the Goddess Isis, it is not for his personal taste. Of course, a historian of religions could explain us that the transformation, over time, of the cult of the Goddess Isis in the Madonna is precisely what has happened to humanity over the millennia; but here the father Desiderius is not the unaware heir of an iconographic tradition. The Madonna of Lenz is similar to the Goddess Isis because old Egyptians know the measures and standards of representation of women. This needs to be explained exactly by making reference to religion. Lenz’s intellectual research is based on a passage of the Old Testament on God which says “Thou has ordered all things in measure, and number, and weight". Numbers: reality consists of numbers. There is a divine geometry which means that the One is in Three and the Three is in One (Father, Son and Holy Spirit). Now, since God created man and woman in his image and similarity, it follows that Adam and Eve were the ideal figures of man and woman (I do not think it is a surprise if we point out that in the writings of Lenz appears a condemnation of Darwinism - see. p. 40). Then, Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden, but they handed down to posterity the harmony of God's creation, the canon of proportion. Through the Jewish patriarchs, this harmony came to the old Egyptians; and the Egyptians first, the Greeks later on were able to recognize it, preserving it although believing in false idols:

Beuronese Art School, St. Benedict's death (fresco in the Chapel of the Crucifixion in Monte Cassino), 1880
Fonte: http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kfa1907_1908/0281

Beuronese Art School, Angels (Cartoon for a frescoed frieze in the Chapel of St. Maurusina Beuron), 1871
Source: http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kfa1907_1908/0282

"The art of the ancients knew the sacred laws of order and logic, of the true divine proportion in the nature: the laws transmitted in origin (from Paradise). Thus, through rule-based beauty, art managed to make progress on its path towards the good and true; it was able to identify them and maybe even fill through them simple souls with enthusiasm. Certainly, it could not teach what is good; or, rather, he could do it to a certain point with morality, but not with faith"(p. 81).


End of Part One
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