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

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, Cartoon for a Station of the Way of the Cross in the Church of Santa Maria in Stuttgart, 1887
Source: http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kfa1907_1908/0283

Go back to Part One

The canon

In his commentary, Hubert Krins summarizes point by point the contents of the canon. The contents are difficult to grasp, mind you, as numbers are charged with a mystical and symbolic significance. We are displaying hereafter part of the reasoning (see pages 27-28), referring to the explanatory note on paged 127-137:

1. "God ordered all things in measure, and number, and weight...
2. Lenz contrasts the basic geometric figures, especially the regular solids, with the Trinity essence of God, in the following way: the square, or cube, is attributed to God the Father; the triangle, or the tetrahedron, to Christ; the circle, or the sphere, to the Holy Spirit.
3. Since God created the man in his image, it follows that, for Lenz, a measure - a sacred geometry - exists even justifying the archetype of the human image. The original sin, however, has obscured this rule, which was manifested again only in Jesus Christ.
4. This original human image is structured in two different but equivalent ways: male and female. For, without a man, does not exist any image of femininity; and without the Virgin, the Word would have not have had the possibility to become man. For Lenz, Virgin Mary is the key figure, the norm of the female gender.
5. Lenz believes that one can reduce the normative image of the man to the root function [...] He obtains the normative image of the woman [...] from another root, the root of 5 [...]: the diagonal of the double square, i.e. the golden section.
6. The aesthetic principles learned by divine revelation constitute the entire premise of the religious art of the future".

Beuronese Art School, Illumination for a Gospel
Source: http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kfa1907_1908/0284

Reality and symbolism

The ultimate goal of the artist is to represent reality according to what is "typical" in it. The concept of being "typical" is fundamental here: it does not mean what is typical of each individual or object; in short, it does not indicate the particular, the different; but, rather, it points out the idea (of clearly platonic origin) that substantiates it. The typical is expressed through the transposition of a geometry that Lenz called, not by chance, "aesthetic". And this geometry is a direct expression of the divine essence. Playing with words, we could say that, for Lenz, the reality is expressed by the symbol. All art based on the (more or less selective) imitation of nature should therefore be rejected as a whole. In this sense, the history of art in the new reading by Father Desiderius is exactly the opposite of what, for example, Burckhardt had proposed only a few years earlier: if in fact painting is saved until the age of Giotto (and of Cennino Cennini, quoted on p. 96) because, albeit unconsciously, that painting is based on traditional and decorative elements, the real degeneration consists of the Renaissance. Where "Renaissance" means, generally, all the art that makes use of perspective, as a means of two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional reality. There are whole pages devoted to a radical rejection of all art movements after the discovery of perspective. Here, for example, a passage dedicated to Michelangelo. We all know that the historical judgment of Michelangelo has been, over the centuries, controversial, and that, especially between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the proponents of the idea of ​​beauty did not fail to criticize harshly. Well, in the eyes of Lenz there is no distinction between Michelangelo, Raphael and the Carracci:

Beuronese Art School, Picture of the Gable of the Chapel of St. Maurus in Beuron, 1871
Source: http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kfa1907_1908/0290

"A century later, when art took a step further by turning sharply toward the realist method, following the example of those teachers, arose a school that, while growing, dissipated the sublime element of solemn harmony. Michelangelo, the bearer of this school, was the artist least equipped with that element. He more than anyone else (according to his successors) helped make the compositional imbalance a technique for its own sake. Instead of clarity of content, therefore, he introduced and established the art on torment and anxiety [...] I find it easy to admit that, in his time, Michelangelo was unquestionably a giant; nevertheless, today he is the artist to be avoided like the plague, because after him whim and torment have reverberated without any control over almost three centuries, and still sap to death our bones"(pp. 61-62).

Beuronese Art School, Altar of the Chapel of St. Maurus in Beuron
Source: http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kfa1907_1908/0285

To an inattentive reader it could look a complete absurdity that Desiderius Lenz, a supporter of an "aesthetic" geometry, rejects the imitation of nature by identifying the greatest of all evils in the discovery of perspective. In the end, perspective is geometry, and Piero della Francesca, for example, is inextricably artist and mathematician. But we must be aware that we're talking about two different geometries. The geometry of humanists is centred on man as the measure of all things; the aesthetic of Lenz has God at its centre and the perception of the harmonic drawing of creation through faith.

Beuronese Art School, The elders of the Apocalypse (fresco in the Chapel of the Crucifixion of Monte Cassino), 1880
Source: http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kfa1907_1908/0291

However, if we abstract a moment (and it is not easy, in the case of Lenz) from religious motivations that underlie his ideas, it is easy to see how the new religious art of the Benedictine Father, based on symbols and geometric solids, may have affected the Symbolists (and therefore, for instance, the Nabis painters) and somehow brought forward by some decades abstract art, especially Cubism. This is the main legacy that the school of Beuron deliver us, today.

Beuronese Art School, Project for the Votive Church of St. Elizabeth in Vienna (1897)
Source: http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kfa1907_1908/0286

The religious art, Reformation and the Counter-Reformation.

We confess that, going forward in reading, we wondered what would be the attitude of Lenz vis-à-vis the great historical events involving art and Christianity in the sixteenth century. We are talking, of course, of the Lutheran Reformation on the one hand and of the Council of Trent on the other. As known, the outcome of the Council of Trent is the creation of a set of rules iconographic that the artist must respect in terms of the policy of images. These rules are essentially set by Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti in his Discorso intorno alle immagini sacre e profane (Discourse on the sacred and profane images) of 1582.

Beuronese Art School, Crucifixion (fresco in the Sanctuary of St, Benedict in Monte Cassino)
Source: http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kfa1907_1908/0288

As expected, in the eyes of Lenz, the policy of images set by the Counterreformation does not represent the turning point that actually was in the Catholic artistic world. Religious art was already polluted by realism; nor could the new rules imposed by the Council be those rediscovering the dogmatic rules of the Canon. Simply, even before Luther, religious art was such only in name. As an evidence of this, Desiderius cites the fact that, not by coincidence, almost all the miraculous images of the West were either directly derived or inspired by Byzantine art (see. p. 51). But let us follow better the reasoning:

Beuronese Art School, Fresco on a pillar in the Chapel of St. Maurus in Beuron, 1871
Source: http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kfa1907_1908/0289

"Since then [note of the editor: since Humanism] there was only a nominally religious art, an art that did not require anything more from anyone. As shame was gone, it was difficult that there was an art really religious, pure and holy. [...] At this point, art, even that of the Holy Church, was now a question of profane naturalism; of ideal remained only the sacred name that adorned it, or the high-sounding title, or the wonders of the natural beauty and of nature itself. [...]

Then, the union of these forces represented a ruinous flow for the sanctity and purity of art, or for everything that affects the dignity, morality and decorum that is up to sacred art to preserve; a flow in which art could certainly prosper, and indeed prospered, in the spirit of pseudo-humanism, with every human, carnal seduction (e.g. Raphael etc. ...). [...]

Beuronese Art School, Frescoed frieze in the Chapel of St. Maurus in Beuron, 1871
Source: http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kfa1907_1908/0293

Beuronese Art School, Frescoed frieze in the Chapel of St. Maurus in Beuron, 1871
Source: http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kfa1907_1908/0294

In the art of the South [editor's note: meaning that of the countries not affected by the Lutheran Reformation] [...] the emancipation of the flesh took place without any regard for discipline and sanctity nor, therefore, for ecclesiastical art; each pulse of (too human) freedom received the encouragement not by the Church, but by the Spirit of Time [note of the editor: the famous and very German concept of Zeitgeist is always used by Lenz in a negative sense], which – with its seduction power - raged without limits or qualms. With the fruits of this degenerate art [editor's note: it is impossible not to make an improper but suggestive, comparison with the Nazi degenerate art] the visible emanation of the Holy Church was distorted and the names assigned to her by the devotion only served as a cover to divert attention and muddy waters.

In the North [editor's note: in the countries of the Reformation] this was considered as a perversion of Christian art, as a departure from the spirit and feeling of the Church (i.e. of Christ), without any extenuating circumstances. The indignation was general, so that the very principle of the authority of the Church was disputed and so another demon was evoked: the separation from the Church of Christ and the rejection of his tradition"(pp. 111-112).

Certainly, not a conventional judgment, which certainly let many, even within the Catholic church hierarchy, raise their eyebrows. It seemed however appropriate to show it, as it demonstrates that the reading of the Canon of Father Desiderius can be exciting and full of ideas.