Liturgy and Art

Abbey of St Augustine: liturgical notes

Art permeates the liturgy in all its manifestations: it confers heiraticity to the rite, and "creates" the ambience of the celebration. So music, architectural lines, colours and plastic forms, all interweave, each with its own language, to make the function of the Holy place more eloquent, and involve all those who enter more profoundly.
Pictorial art in particular, while it has a mainly decorative function, has taken on in the various ages different aims, going from symbolism reflecting a particular spiritual reality (see the Christian symbols of the catacombs: the cross, the anchor, the dove, the person in prayer), to representations of Biblical scenes with a clear salvational and prophetic message (Noah and the Ark, Daniel in the Lions' den) and so to bringing them together to represent the successive moments in the story of salvation in an unbroken narrative (episodes from Genesis, the Life of Jesus, the Passion and Death of Christ).
In the 14th century in particular the vast walls of the church became great frescoed pages: the so-called "Biblia pauperum". In the Abbey of St Augustine it is the presbytery that has the most important and greatest 14th century paintings of Vicenza. The life, passion, death and triumph of Christ highlight the fundamental themes of Christian catechesis in an immediate and powerful language, in which Evangelists, Doctors of the Church, Angels and Virtues counsel and guide the Faithful on their way to Redemption.

By Luca Sinigallia (Arts Office of the Diocese of Vicenza)