The History of the Church through 100 Masterpieces

Emergence of the Virtues

The History of the Church 36 Emergence of the Virtues “What Greek Antiquity did for the Muses, the Christian seventeenth century did for things spiritual, with yet greater finesse; it invented a Parnassus where, like beautiful maidens, the categories of the ideal hold court.” This comment on the “Christian Muses” by the academician and art historian Louis Gillet refers to the virtues, which had already been systematized by Saint Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. There are three theological virtues—faith, hope, and charity—and four cardinal virtues—prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. As they do not readily lend themselves to being illustrated, it took great ingenuity on the part of artists for the virtues to take on flesh. They mostly had recourse to allegories. Often assigned to ceilings, illustrations of the faith usually rely on an aggregation of symbols set amid ethereal ornamentation: the cross, angels, the Holy Spirit depicted as a dove, etc. The Virgin Mary is represented more frequently than Christ, since it takes a woman to personify a muse. Other artists have shown manifestations of the faith through simple and touching scenes. In this case too, devotion to the mother of Christ is most prominent. Maurice Bompard (1857–1935) Prayer to the Madonna Musée d’Orsay, Paris ...