LDS Perspectives Podcast Episode 29: Art in Sacred Spaces with Rita Wright (Released March 29, 2017) This is not a verbatim transcript. Some wording and grammar has been modified for clarity. Hello. This is Laura Harris Hales with the LDS Perspectives Podcast, and I m here today with Rita Wright to talk about the use of art in sacred space throughout the history of Christianity. Rita Wright is the director of the Springville Museum Art in Springville, Utah. She came to the museum in October of 2012 from the LDS Church History Museum, where she was the curator of art and artifacts for two years. Prior to that, she was the academic programs coordinator at the BYU Museum of Art, where she worked for eight years after teaching humanities at BYU for seven years. She received a PhD in European history at the University of Utah. Welcome, Rita. Thank you. Rita, tell us a little bit about exploring sacred space. You know it s interesting as I listened to you read my bio I realize how much influence my undergraduate degree had on it. I was in theater and was able to take an early theater history class from Dr. Harold Hanson, the one who really created the Hill Cumorah Pageant. At that time, we had to read a real archaic 19th century book called The Golden Bough by Sir James Frazure, where he talks about the sacred rites in the ancient world, and that kind of stayed with me through the years of being a mom and living in Southern California when my kids played at the beach. I would sit on the beach and read all of Hugh Nibley, all of Joseph Campbell, and The Power of Myth. The idea of sacred space started resonating with me, so when I went back to school to teach humanities and art history, I really focused on how the art, how the theater, how those experiences reflected sacred ideals.
This summer I was able to travel to St. Petersburg, and I was able to visit St. Isaac s Cathedral. I had the most incredible experience when I walked into that building. As you know, there s a stained-glass depiction of Christ. I felt the most incredible spirit in that cathedral, one I hadn t felt before, and it made me think, Why am I feeling this deep connection to this space? It was sacred to me, even though it represented a different religion. I realized that we have our sacred space in Mormonism, our temples, the Sacred Grove, but there s sacred space all over the world. Can you speak to that a little bit? That has been something that s fascinated me as well because as I ve selfassessed those responses to the opportunity to walk into a space of belief and faith that you may not even understand and to feel something. I like to call it the phenomenology of space. It s when all of those different aspects of the senses, of the other senses, those metaphysical senses we pick up on affect us on an emotional level. I would take students to Europe, and as you mentioned, they would say, Do we have to do another cathedral? They re all the same. They re all dark and gloomy. They re all apostate, or catholic, and they don t have the authority. I kept wondering then why are some of us open to all that those sacred spaces have to offer? I believe there s a great deal that comes through education because in our church experience, we have one kind of sacred space. We actually have two kinds, I guess, if we consider the temple. Our weekly meetings are in a very sparse, Protestant-type space. The pulpit is at the center, and the focus is on the word, as Martin Luther started suggesting during the Reformation. The sacrament table or the table of the Eucharist, that would have been center had we been in a cathedral, has been moved to the side over the years. We walk in, and we have a space that s unfettered with much imagery and the imagery, unfortunately, that often is in our church buildings, is a print, is not original work. I think, when you go into a space as you did, you sense the work, the narrative, the stories, but there is also a feeling that comes with engagement with an original work of art. I think we ve often times left our viewers in the church bereft of that kind of sacred encounter. Over the years I ve been very aware of the way different spaces have worked throughout Christianity. I got to visit the catacombs when I was in Rome and, of course, we have this very gothic image of people hiding in the catacombs and of it being this scary, dark place. I would have students http://www.ldsperspectives.com/2017/03/29/art-sacred-space/ Page 2 of 11
wander off and have to be very careful because there is a lot of mileage under the catacombs, but I started looking at the very simple imagery that was in these spaces. They were the places the early Christians were allowed to bury their family members, and they would go down and worship. They would have a meeting, a prayer meeting, or sometimes maybe a funerary type memorial. Family members, friends, not the professional artists of the Roman Empire, would sketch a little drawing, maybe of a fish that idea of Jesus Christ as the Savior of resurrection. They would show their individuals praying with their hands raised into the air, which is very familiar for people who have been to the temple or participated in other church rites. I started wondering how these dark, tufa tombs cut into the lava rock could be seen as so sacred for these people. Then, to move on to the way that Christian art develops during the Byzantine period and into the Medieval period, I was fascinated by the cathedral experience and why not only the cathedrals but also some of the other monuments to religion would touch me so. Why do you think that those initial sacred spaces started with the catacombs? I ve been in them, and I did notice the drawings. Some of them depict Mary and scenes from the Bible. Why did it start there instead of the cathedrals with early Christians? I think you had a group of people who were a little untethered from the art traditions of their society. You think about some of the things we say or might see in Pompeii, some of the imagery, which would have been the kind of work being produced during that first century, first second century of the Roman Empire. I think the Christian desire to express more fully their beliefs this new idea of their Savior, their redeemer being resurrected. They were looking to precedence in the Bible, so we see a lot of Jonah and the big whale of course. I think they were looking for a way, as humans have done since the dawn of time, to represent their feelings in a visual form. Not to use the double entendre, but wasn t Christianity still underground at this time? The Roman emperors hadn t fully gotten behind it. These people probably didn t have the money to commission great works of art in cathedrals at this time, did they? http://www.ldsperspectives.com/2017/03/29/art-sacred-space/ Page 3 of 11
Generally, the early Christians didn t. However, where we see the catacombs would be under a house church, a wealthy patron who had joined the church, would probably bring people to their home. Those were the first meeting places because, yes, the Christians at that point were not able to purchase property or to have property for their ceremonies. Patrons, some of them were women, which I find not surprising, but I find very gratifying that in the early churches they were struggling, these women would have people to their homes, and then the catacombs would be dug under the ground there. It could not be in the proper space inside the pomerium of Rome. The burials were not to be there, so the Christians, wanting to have the bodies and celebrate the idea of future resurrection, were building the catacombs and putting their loved ones there. It s interesting. A couple of weeks ago I was in Miami and went to kind of a graffiti town and then it reminded me that years ago, when I was teaching the catacombs at BYU, my daughter wanted to go to LA to a sidewalk memorial for some rock artist. When I went and saw these very pure, love signs for the rock artist, and we miss you, and flowers, kind of like Jim Morrison s tomb in Paris, that kind of graffiti-like out-pouring of emotion and thoughtful and memorium resonated with me as a way of showing how the early Christians must have wanted to acknowledge their dead loved ones. Back to taking the students on these trips to Europe to see cathedrals and their complaints about them being dark, and they didn t have all the light or truth that we have now. Were they correct in their assessments? Were the dark ages, this time where there was no light, and that s reflected in their cathedrals, or is it that we just don t quite understand what these early cathedrals represented through their iconography and architecture? I think it s all of those things. I think one of the dominant things that I noticed about particularly LDS students was that there was a strong anti- Catholic bias. As I started making connections through their experience in the cathedral, giving them some time to sit and ponder, I saw a change. In Canterbury Cathedral, of course, which was a famous pilgrimage site, I encouraged the students to join in as the Paternoster, or our father who art in heaven, was being said, their actions in these sacred places started bursting some of those preconceived notions about it being dark and dismal. I told them the story with Chartres Cathedral outside Paris that one of the bishops, at the time it was being built, wrote to another catholic http://www.ldsperspectives.com/2017/03/29/art-sacred-space/ Page 4 of 11
leader, telling them he could just not understand the devotion of the people who were leaving their work at the end of the harvest season, piling up all of their belongings in carts, and going to help build their cathedral. As I talk to LDS students, there s a lot that resonates because of the early saints building of our temples and that personal devotion. As I started making connections to their own experience, to the idea of pilgrimage, Oh that s crazy. People go, and they get little relics, and they worship, and they pray in front of a reliquary that has some sacred item of one of the saints. I said, We do pilgrimages. Everyone wants to, sometime during their life, go to the Hill Cumorah. They want to go to Jerusalem. They want to walk where Jesus walked, using a phrase that is so familiar. I said, These early saints, during early Catholic years, wanted to do the same. They wanted to go back to the sites where Jesus had been. They wanted to remember the apostles. A student starts seeing that perhaps it s not that different. They don t have to create this polemical juncture, saying, That s them. That s evil. That s wrong. Rather, they start saying, There really is a lot of that in what we do. As we start building this understanding, one misconception I think is when we look at the art work that we have now, they re generally portraits or they depict one scene. If I go into a cathedral in Europe sometimes I m overwhelmed by the whole Bible depicted in one cathedral. Why did they do that? Well, the cathedral was the Bible for the poor. You have to realize most of these people did not read. The liturgy s in Latin and many of them were just very common, lower class type individuals. They weren t able to have access to these gorgeous, illustrated Bibles. Some of the beautiful illuminated manuscripts were kept under lock and key, kept in the monasteries, kept in royal depositories, and so the normal person would go into worship and have to have the stories of the Bible depicted so that someone could refer to them. They had to be very clear, very iconic. I was with a group of students one time at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, and one of the other teachers was a French teacher. I said, What if we just go in and don t even talk and try to read this space as our Bible? We moved from section to section, and as you said, the narrative is there, these http://www.ldsperspectives.com/2017/03/29/art-sacred-space/ Page 5 of 11
images, they re very understandable, perhaps not to us today because we don t study that iconography. We don t know what, many times, the saints are holding in their hands, called the attribute. We do understand St. Peter holds keys. Why? Because Peter held the keys, and so he physically is holding keys in some of these. Some of the others are less clear to understand, but you can learn to read these symbols just as you would learn to find the symbolism in a book or even in the Bible. Some of these cathedrals are dark simply because they re old and they were built in a time where they didn t have electricity. When I visited the Sistine Chapel, my tour guide explained that the ceiling used to be very dark but then a Japanese donor came in and paid to have the Sistine Chapel ceiling cleaned. We found out once the grime was cleaned off, it s very light. Right. That s interesting you bring that up because there still is debate about when they cleaned it, did they take too many layers off? Did he have a darker finish on, and so it s one of those ongoing mysteries in art. We have, I think, as a predisposition in the late 19th century, we see archeologists in sand-filled areas, and we see these monuments and ancient temples as very sand colored and very colorless, but when they were originally created, many of them were brightly colored. The Parthenon, for example, in Athens was painted. The frieze was painted, and we ve had some reconsideration of that. Artists have done some renderings for what that might have looked like, but I think we ve been, as I said before, I think we ve been predisposed to a less colorful experience. When we go back into say some of the places in Ravenna, and we see this fabulous mosaic work, it was done for a theological and philosophical as well as spiritual reason, that mosaics and with the gold would cast light about differently, that it was about the theology of light, which of course we can talk about. We can talk about Parley P. Pratt and some of his discussions on light. We talk about light spirit. In some of these artistic techniques and some of the color presentation, there is much that we can find to connect to with this idea that light is filled with all colors. When my son was little, he had some medical issues. I think he was kind of afraid of dying. I told this story to President Monson one day as we were touring an exhibition, and this little guy said, I just don t want to be in a cold, dark place by myself, http://www.ldsperspectives.com/2017/03/29/art-sacred-space/ Page 6 of 11
and I don t want heaven to just be all white. I said, Why do you think heaven is all white? Because that s how it s always depicted. I said, You think about light. It s all the colors of the rainbow. That seemed to satisfy him, so as I go into some of these sacred spaces, and I see what seems to us garish and full of color, I tend to see them as very light-driven spaces full of the brightness of possibility of creation. We live in a world of symbols, and if you ve been educated in the world of art, you can pick out these symbols in these sacred spaces of early Christianity. Can you point to some of those symbols in other cultures and their sacred spaces that we would connect with as Mormons having the same kind of symbols in our sacred spaces or in the way we worship? I think there s a lot more there than we recognize if we stop and look at the geometry of the space and if we look at the mathematical harmony and proportions. I just opened an exhibition on the classical tradition where the artist used the golden mean. They used the sacred sequences of numbers. When we start looking at sacred spaces of other religions, we can see the power of that. One author of the gothic cathedral in general, Otto von Simson, talks about a cathedral being tuned to the harmonies of the heavens that it s so mathematically designed so that acoustically, experientially for the individual, they tie into those great proportions. We know the ancients did that in classic art and architecture. They wanted to tie into what would have been today, we would call sacred geometry, and they were trained in that. I probably had one of my most sobering spiritual experiences ever walking into Stonehenge. Of course, today we look at that as kind of an observatory, a connection with the cosmos, with the heavens, which is more in line with what originally it would have been used for. Not just a visitor site to come and watch different people doing pageantry, but it was a very sacred space where they could connect through those sacred symbols, those geometries, those forms, with the entire cosmos. The cathedral in Milan is quintessential gothic. If you look at it, you see pointy, pointy, pointy, but as you just said that has symbolism in itself. The pointy represents moving toward heaven and, of course, we can identify wanting to reach towards heaven through worship. http://www.ldsperspectives.com/2017/03/29/art-sacred-space/ Page 7 of 11
I had a British tour guide with the students one day that said, The gothic cathedral is all about height, light, and pointy bits. We all laughed but as I thought about that, and thought about the theology connected to it, of course that height, that pointing toward heaven, we see it in our steeples. We have steeples on our churches. We have steeples on the temple, that imagery of pointing heavenward. Her second, the height and light, that light is at the heart of the gospel. All things resonate. I was talking the other day with a friend about the force being in and through all things, about Dr. Strange learning to control those metaphysical aspects, that these gothic cathedrals, ancient temples, ancient hinges, were about making that connection to the heavens. I think the smallest child can learn: But when you come through the chapel doors, be still. You are passing through from an outside world, taking off many times, in many religious beliefs, your shoes, your outside clothing, and entering a sacred space. There is a brief, what we would call liminal space, of transition. A child can understand that. Our foyers in LDS churches could be transition points between the activities of classroom or singing or sharing time in the chapel. We have culturally not observed those as such so we generally go into the chapel very animated and chatty. That s kind of who we are culturally as a people, but as we look at how those different spaces were utilized in other religious experiences [we might reconsider how we use them]. I had a Japanese American artist do, one time, she created a little, she called it a womb like room from her Japanese tradition, but she asked that all of the museum visitors take their shoes off outside, go in one by one, and sit and meditate. We all can recognize that. We are asked to meditate daily and ponder the scriptures. Many times we don t really meditate. We don t get in that sacred transition space to clear thinking, to opening us up to what the spirit can direct. Let s talk about one more architectural element that is often used in these cathedrals, and that is stained glass. How does that reflect the worship of these Christians? We don t see that a lot in our meeting houses. Occasionally you ll happen across one that has the stained glass mural. I know there s one in Salt Lake of Joseph Smith and the sacred grove, but they re much more prominent in Europe. http://www.ldsperspectives.com/2017/03/29/art-sacred-space/ Page 8 of 11
Originally, stained glass was not utilized in the early gothic cathedrals for a decorative purpose. It complied with the theology of light. Abbott Sujay, who is the first that we generally talk about as identifying and utilizing the gothic style, wanted to be able to raise the walls higher, to be able to get that height and pointy bits, so he could get more light in through the stained glass. It was to represent a theological concept of Jesus passing through Mary s body as the light would pass through the windows, and it s this representation of glory and truth that is connected to Jesus Christ. That s why a lot of the stained glass windows will represent those early Christian stories and images. A lot of them even just have symbols on them. The grapes of the Eucharist or the wine, the boats on the water, those kinds of things. Those who have been through the Provo City Center Temple will know that there is beautiful stained glass in there. I sit on the Temple Art Evaluation Committee, and we have stained glass brought to us frequently to propose for temples. We ve been a long time coming, reclaiming that, but I think as we talk more about those theological ideas of light and color, and the narrative story as well, that we re seeing an easier adjustment to the use of stained glass in our sacred places. It is another one of those things, I think, kind of throwing the baby out with the bath water, that we don t have stained glass because, again, that looks very Catholic or it looks very medieval. Instead, we start to recognize it now both for its theological symbolic value but also for the beautifying these sacred places. I think sometimes we ve been turned off by the overabundance of depictions of Mary as well. Do you think that s been a problem? I do. I had a daughter who served an LDS Mission in a Spanish-speaking area in Los Angeles, and the first part of her mission was constantly, Mom I can t How do I walk past all of these statues of Mary to go into these cute homes? She said, It s just very off-putting for me. I wrote her back, and I said, I want you to stop and think about what the role of Mary was. Don t get caught up into other theological interpretations, but think about why we honor Mary and why the Catholics particularly. There have been some extreme positions and maybe by some not considered too extreme, of wanting to raise Mary up even to a more deified level, a theologically higher level within the Catholic Church. We ve seen since the 1960s, 70s, in our cultural world a greater http://www.ldsperspectives.com/2017/03/29/art-sacred-space/ Page 9 of 11
awareness of the role of women. Mariology, the study of Mary and her theological output and position in the Middle Ages, was a very important point. Many women authors responded to that, and we now have academics who are looking back at the way Mary was represented along with some of the early mystics and saints in the Catholic Church. I have found some very peaceful aspects of Mary. To look at the Pieta, one of the most calming, glorious images ever created. It s not meant to be proportionally accurate or Mary would be so much [smaller] than Jesus, but it s symbolically accurate in her overwhelming and, if you might say, oversized love of this son and what it meant to be losing him. I find the images of Mary wonderful. As I wrote to this young daughter, I said, Look to them for peace and comfort as many looked to them in those early Catholic experiences. We re approaching Easter, the most holy and sacred time in Christianity. What would you say to our listeners as we conclude, just briefly, about how we can appreciate sacred space more in our own religion, and the sacred space of others to help us as it was intended, come closer to Christ. In considering that idea of there is a special spirit around Easter time, is something if we open ourselves, as Katherine Thomas said, Up to the power of that feeling level, that we can start appreciating sacred place and those sacred events, those sacred rights that occurred, the reality of the resurrection has always been fascinating to me because it was something that identified us as Christians. As I mentioned, the catacombs showed Jesus rising from the tomb. I think as we contemplate sacred space and the relationship to Jesus Christ, I think as we ponder something like the labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral, it s not a maze. It s not meant to block our progress like we see rats in laboratory experiments. A labyrinth is intended to have us meditatively walk the labyrinth to a center where we can commune, where we can meditate and ponder for us, the life and mission of Jesus Christ. I love the idea of mixing the experiential with the mental and the spiritual because we find that bringing all of those aspects of our being together as we contemplate Jesus Christ, opens up new vistas and understandings. Many medical institutions, universities, and different scientific centers are actually incorporating labyrinths into their building sites, their grounds, and they re encouraging their patients that come for healing to walk the http://www.ldsperspectives.com/2017/03/29/art-sacred-space/ Page 10 of 11
labyrinth, to follow that spiraling course to a center place of focus and meditation. I think if we adopt that model, maybe even that actual experience, there are labyrinths around Salt Lake and, of course, around the world, that if we adopt that experience of thoughtfully, quietly, walking with focus toward a center, we can better contemplate the life and the gift of Jesus Christ. Disclaimer: LDS Perspectives Podcast is not affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The opinions expressed on this episode represent the views of the guests and the podcaster alone, and LDS Perspectives Podcast and its parent organization may or may not agree with them. While the ideas presented may vary from traditional understandings or teachings, they in no way reflect criticism of LDS Church leaders, policies, or practices. http://www.ldsperspectives.com/2017/03/29/art-sacred-space/ Page 11 of 11