Apart from a few fascinating lectures with colour slides from Quentin Bell at Sussex University back in the mists of time, and reading Rookmaaker’s classic book Modern Art and the Death of a Culture, I am not much versed in the visual arts.
However, for my birthday this year I found myself being taken along to London’s Victoria & Albert Museum to view a special exhibition. It is titled ‘The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900’ and remains open until July 17. It proved an interesting jaunt, not least from seeing Andrew Lloyd Webber with a couple of friends shuffling along with the rest of us punters past the exhibits.
Taming the beasts
The period covered by the exhibition is the 40 years following the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, which, along with German higher criticism, had done much to undermine Christianity among the English middle-classes. Perhaps the Aesthetic Movement can be seen as an attempt to create some kind of non-religious ‘faith’. It was a coming together of artists like Rossetti from the Pre-Raphaelites, William Morris of the Arts and Crafts Movement and others like James MacNeill Whistler to create a cult of beauty. Beauty was seen as carrying the possibility of lifting mankind out of barbarity and bringing meaning to life. I suppose that vision is best articulated by a very wide painting which you meet early in the exhibition entitled ‘The Syracusan Bride leading wild beasts in procession to the Temple of Diana’ by Frederic Leighton, painted in 1865/6. Here the gorgeous bride and her bridesmaids are seen walking with leopards, lions and tigers fawning on them as if their bestial instincts have been pacified and tamed by the presence of feminine beauty.
The re-emergence of heavy shepherds
What would you think if you received a letter from your church leaders that read like this? ‘Are church members …