The Lost Art of Attentive Viewing

Living amidst a high-tech culture, surrounded by digitally replicated images, ironically we have lost the ability to be attentive viewers of traditional paintings. Though today we have the ability to see more—just at the click of a mouse—we actually perceive less. Christians, as it turns out, have the most to lose, because the visual art of past centuries carries in potent form a substantial legacy of Christian beliefs and values. Loss of meaningful access to this rich heritage is yet another way of choking off the voice and witness of Christian wisdom within the wider culture. What is perhaps equally lamentable is that most Christians will scarcely notice this form of cultural demise be cause they themselves have long since lost interest in these visual treasures of their own heritage. Indeed, are not modern Christians known as people of the word?

If any written words might persuade such Christians—and others—to also look beyond words, then John Drury’s illuminating and persuasively illustrated Painting the Word: Christian Pictures and their Meanings is a strong candidate for that task. Drury makes a compelling case for the need to learn how to engage the Christian art of the past, and, in so doing, succeeds in captivating the attention of the reader/viewer as he leads us deeper into the images he illustrates and discusses. His vividly illustrated text is therefore a model of what it advocates: the cultivation of careful viewing skills and the rewards this brings, when applied to Christian art. It can enlarge our understanding of the central themes of Christian belief and, in so doing, motivate our actions.

The Incarnation and The Artist: The Word Made Flesh

Given the propensity of modernists—and most of all Christian modernists—to trust words and view images as deceiving, many may be skeptical that much is to be gained by attending to images. Some years ago, Margaret R. Miles, in her book Image as Insight: Visual Understanding in Western Christianity and Secular Culture (Beacon Press, 1985), argued for the ways that art and architecture of the past shaped religious understanding and ethical values much as media images influence attitudes in modern society. She also argued for the value of the visual arts as a form of historical documentation, offering a complementary and at times contrasting viewpoint to that preserved in written forms of documentation. In arguing for the complementarity of image and language— and thus for the validity of the artist’s work and calling—Miles embraced the Romantic notion of art as an address to the affective and emotional side of human experience, in opposition to the Enlightenment faith in reason, as articulated by language.

For his part, Drury takes a rather different tack. He advocates a form of criticism—both biblical and art historical—that combines the detached and historical mode of the Enlightenment with a poetic mode of Romanticism, so hoping to combine the subjective power of the latter with the objective precision of the former. Furthermore, in defining the artist’s role, Drury sees in the central belief of Christian faith, the Incarnation—the Word made flesh—a primary metaphor of the artist’s task: to embody truth in visible form. The artist takes invisible things—”thoughts, feelings, theology”—and makes them accessible by means of sight, thus a “sort of transubstantiation,” as when, in the words of John’s Gospel “the Word was made flesh … and we be held,” which Drury sees as a resonant motto for artists.

The Bible, Drury points out, is a book containing many visionary moments that have been translated into the medium of words. He sees the Christian artist as one who is often engaged in a reverse process—as the book’s title suggests: translating words back into visionary images. In making the invisible visible, artists function as “God’s spies.” Yet, if artists “are to make the mystery of things visible,” Drury recognizes that they are going to have to go further than theologians down “the ethical road of incarnation, with all its sacrifices” and with “the love for the world of mortal appearances which it demands.”

Much of the freshness and appeal of Drury’s book derives from the fact that he is a theologian who has himself attended carefully to the “world of mortal appearances,” as embodied in visual art. His observation of the subtlest of nuances within a painting—as well as his mastery of language fitting to the description of visual perception—manifests an acute visual sensitivity such as one might associate with a nineteenth-century writer such as John Ruskin. By combining such visual acuity with his theological knowledge, Drury goes a long way toward fulfilling his ideal of developing a form of criticism that combines Romantic sensitivity with Enlightenment precision. Painting the Word offers a rare combination of the theologically informed perspective combined with attentive viewing, so that form and content receive their due.

In this respect, Drury both departs from and conforms to postmodern art historical practice. He conforms, in that he eschews a strictly formalist reading of art and unashamedly capitalizes on his theological perspective, without attempting to screen that behind a guise of modernist objectivity. Yet he also departs from post modern practice in his careful respect for the visual evidence and his call to exercise a much neglected skill—careful viewing of the object, rather than excessive theorizing, in which the object itself often gets lost. Indeed, it is his view that much art history suffers from “a failure of viewing,” whereas attentive viewing, as he seeks to demonstrate, can illuminate and motivate.

Viewing Through Secular or Christian Lenses

Drury is also acutely aware that the process of viewing—whether viewing art or viewing the world—is itself not a neutral process. Without reference to any viewer-response theories current within art criticism, Drury considers differences of perception that arise from viewing through a secular or Christian lens. With respect to the Christian art of the past, he sees the need to provide “a frame” for the modern secular viewer, since the past is like “a foreign country to us where things are done differently,” even if done in response to the same underlying human concerns.

This is not simply a question of our modern unfamiliarity with the “world of sacraments, sacrifices and altars,” but also impinges on how we regard the world of nature. Thus, in the landscapes of Rubens, Drury sees a fine example of how a devout Christian of the mid-seventeenth century saw the world, when free to paint it as he wished. Likewise, in the mundane realities of Velazquez’s early paintings done in Seville; though they are secular in subject, Drury perceives them as inscribing a Christian vision of human society: they manifest a way of handling the ordinary in the spirit of the doctrine of the incarnation of the divine—infusing the everyday rituals of life with a spirit of exchange and charity.

A Meditation on Sacrifice and Exchange

Like a traditional Christian altarpiece, Drury’s Painting the Word is organized symbolically in the form of a triptych, in which two “wings” frame the central “panel.” A discourse on viewing forms the first outer wing. The central panel comprises a series of exercises in viewing works treating the chief events of Christ’s life (on which painters themselves focused). The closing wing considers how the core values embodied by Christ’s incarnation—sacrifice and charity—are in turn incarnated into the realm of secular culture and manifest in art. This structure is symbolic inasmuch as Drury believes that the essence of Christianity is about how sacrifice and exchange brings renewal. In his view, which follows Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s model of secular Christianity, the dross of institutional religion must be purified by subjecting itself to the same process of sacrifice in order to bring forth cultural renewal in the form of love incarnate in the world.

The notion of exchange is central to Drury’s understanding of Christianity. It is carried throughout the book by a series of related concepts: sacrifice and exchange; linkage and crossing over; giving and receiving; descent of the divine into the human; and, ultimately, the sacrifice of traditional Christian ritual to give birth to love incarnate in the secular world. Drury relates the centrality of exchange in a Christian view of life to the doctrine of the Trinity, but notes that the quality of mutual regard, as “the source and cement of human society,” has been inscribed more obviously in the image of the Madonna and Child.

Within the central “panel” of his “triptych,” Drury takes the reader/viewer through a close scrutiny of a series of paintings high lighting the life, passion, and resurrection of Christ. He shows how the rituals of annunciation, incarnation, giving and receiving, sacrifice and exchange are inscribed not only in the subjects of these works but also in the very structure of their pictorial composition, in the movement of lines, the relationships of colors, the directional force of rhythms and patterns of shapes, human gestures, eye glances, and the distribution of space and light. It is Drury’s intent to arrest our eye for as long as it takes for the nuances of such art to arouse our consciousness to grasp that sacrifice precedes, is inherent in, and should follow after the act of looking. As Drury himself summarizes it: sacrifice is the subject of painting after painting; sacrifice is inherent to the act of painting and in the act of attentive viewing; and, in turn, sacrifice is manifest in such painting as the way to live—individually and socially, in going beyond the self.

The last section of Drury’s book concerns the process of carrying Christ’s teaching into the secular world. He uses aspects of the art of Rubens and Velazquez as examples of his vision of a secularized Christianity, in which the ordinary is sanctified through the same Christian principles of sacrifice and exchange, giving and receiving. Then, in a short epilogue, which most traditional Christians will find troubling, Drury presents his own vision of a form of Christianity viable for our own time—as inscribed in two late works of Cezanne (both in The National Gallery, London). In the one, An Old Woman with a Rosary of 1895-6, Drury sees an image of the power of memory and imagination residing in the inner life after the outward forms of religion have been shattered. In the other, Cezanne’s The Large Bathers of 1894-1905, Drury sees the realization of ultimate exchange: individuals participate in community, and all live in harmony with nature.

Others may conclude that in this ultimate exchange Christianity has not realized its ultimate goal, but rather has been lost to sight, leaving only bodies with no appearance or grounds for individuality set in an elusive, Arcadian dream of natural harmony. Indeed, Drury’s final examples may serve the reverse function of reminding readers that Christian art in any traditional sense is long since defunct.

While those who hold to a traditional view of Christian faith may wince to see such faith slipping off the edge of Drury’s final “panel,” it would be a great loss if this tempted them to close the wings of his triptych, and give it no further thought. This is a book that can open new worlds for Christian and non-Christian alike. It demonstrates compellingly what it seeks to restore—acute visual sensibility—and it shows, through image and word, something of the marvel of the Incarnation and its power to transform life. Drury’s particular perspective also serves as a salutary reminder that traditional Christian faith is in fact dead if it fails to precipitate the incarnation of love in the secular world.

E. John Walford is Professor of Art History at Wheaton College. He is the author of Jacob van Ruisdael and the Perception of Landscape (Yale Univ. Press).