Photos from the CMAA 2026 Sacred Music Colloquium

We are glad to share some photos from the liturgical celebrations held last week during the Church Music Association of America’s 36th Annual Sacred Music Colloquium at the St. John Newman Center at the University of Illinois in Champaign. The event took place from June 22 to 26, and drew over 200 participants, who gathered to learn more about the Church’s treasury of Sacred Music through chant, polyphony, and organ repertoire.

On Tuesday, June 23, a Votive Mass of the Holy Angels was celebrated in English and Latin, with a new English Mass Ordinary, the Missa Mystica, commissioned by the CMAA and composed by Christopher Mueller. The propers were sung in both English and Latin by the Men’s Schola, directed by Dr. David Hughes, and by the Women’s Schola, directed by Fr. Mark Bachmann, OSB. Our section-leader ensemble was directed by Paul French, who sang a motet by Guerrero, while Christopher Berry directed all the participants in singing a motet by Peñalosa. The organist for this Mass was Michael Olbash.

Continue Reading this Article. . .

Historian Breaks New Ground in Vatican II Research, with Special Attention to Liturgical Reform

People today often ask questions like: “What in the world happened at the time of Vatican II, that the Church seemed in such an unholy hurry to change? Why were the changes so drastic and so sudden? What were the causes, the motives, the expectations, the assumptions about reform and its expected fruits? Who were the main actors? Was it planned out or random? Who benefited (cui bono)? How responsible were the bishops for it, versus the middle managers, versus the laity?” and so forth. It can be very hard to disentangle so many threads.

This is why professional historians exist. Professor Hanael Bianchi has spent 10 years researching, at the nitty-gritty level, how Vatican II was received and implemented in a particular (and very important) diocese, using archival materials, period documents, and firsthand accounts. The resulting book, A Liberal Revolution: The Implementation of Vatican II in the Archdiocese of Baltimore, will leave a permanent mark henceforth on all studies of the period.

Bianchi answers the above questions, one after the next – and brings the receipts. In an era of endless podcasting and spitballing, the disciplined work of research is more necessary than ever if we wish to gain a well-documented and well-organized account of complex events, while overturning faulty theories and clumsy generalizations from (…yes…) every part of the ecclesiastical spectrum.

While the Second Vatican Council has generated a large scholarly corpus, A Liberal Revolution is the first close-up history to be written of a single diocese in the years immediately following it. Using the see of Baltimore as a case study and drawing exclusively on primary sources, Bianchi reconstructs how the decrees of the Council in faraway Rome – and, more tellingly, the new ideas and attitudes prompted by it – were implemented and experienced on the local level, in parishes, seminaries, religious communities, retreat centers, and chancery offices.

The claim that the Church “embraced the modern world” after Vatican II is well known; this book sharpens it by focusing specifically on liberalism as the framework through which implementation took place. The study begins by tracing the dismantling of inherited traditions, then turns to the rise of individualism within Catholic life and governance, before arriving at its most original contribution: an analysis of the emergence of a dense church bureaucracy that embodied and enforced a liberal worldview.

Although the story told in these pages is a tragedy, A Liberal Revolution is no polemic; rather, it is a work of careful historical analysis grounded in years of research. It will not only contribute to the scholarly understanding of Vatican II and its aftermath but also offer guidance to Catholics seeking a path toward genuine renewal, grounded in a thorough and accurate assessment of what actually happened. Understanding the whats, hows, and whys of postconciliar disruption – a topic that, so far from fading into the past, has grown to be a most urgent task for the present – finds in Bianchi a uniquely capable guide.

NLM readers will find especially valuable Part 1, “Attack on Tradition and the Rise of the New,” divided into “The Priesthood Revolts,” “Novelty in Music and Architecture,” and “Liturgical Confusion.” Among other topics, Bianchi's presentation of the data concerning how the different age groups reacted to new policies shows that radical change was in fact extremely popular with the younger set of seminarians and priests (at least, until they left the seminary or the priesthood, as many of them did), and, at the same time, that diocesan policies repeatedly found ways to empower these reformatory forces while marginalizing older priests who were skeptical of the changes or even wished to continue with the traditional Mass in Latin. There is also liturgically relevant material in Parts 2 and 3.

Famed sociologist Dr. Stephen Bullivant, Professor of Theology and the Sociology of Religion and Director of the Benedict XVI Centre for Religion and Society at St. Mary’s University in London, calls A Liberal Revolution “a richly detailed account... an impressive piece of scholarship, beautifully written, very compelling, and highly recommended.”

Dr. Anne Hendershott, Professor of Sociology at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, concurs: “With historical precision and narrative force, this book shows how reforms reshaped Catholic life in unexpectedly negative ways, with consequences that still reverberate through the Church today.”

Veteran journalist and founder of the Catholic Culture site, Philip Lawler, finds in the book a crucial tool for understanding the bureaucratic mentality that has morphed into synodality: “[Bianchi documents how] the post-conciliar era saw a spectacular proliferation of offices, boards, and commissions at the diocesan level. This new bureaucracy developed its own interests in spurring change, regardless of either the formal directives of the Council or the wishes and needs of the faithful.”

Finally, poet and liturgist Barry Spurr sums up the effusive reactions of the book’s initial readers: “The importance and necessity of this book cannot be overstated. Bianchi reveals the destructive effects of the late 1960s mindset at the parochial level.”

A Liberal Revolution is available in paperback, hardcover with dust jacket (both pictured here), or ebook, either directly from the publisher Os Justi Press or from any Amazon site around the world. At both places, you can “look inside” to read the Introduction.

How Every Painting Is Built, Part 2 of 2: Line, Tone, Colour

Last week, we looked at the choice of medium in painting – why it matters, what the main options are, and how the properties of each shape the kind of image an artist can make. This week, we turn to the three elements that lie at the heart of the painted image: line, tone, and color. Together with the handling of detail and distance, these form the complete visual vocabulary that every artist draws on, whatever his tradition or period.

Using Line and Tone to Represent Form

When we look out of a window and take in a view, we distinguish one object from another through visual contrast in their shapes. A person standing in a beam of light against a dark background is clearly visible; the three-dimensional form of his face is legible because of the variations in light and shadow across its surface – a bulbous nose, sunken cheeks, the curve of the jaw, and so on. An artist can represent this contrast in two ways. The first is to represent the boundary between a light shape and a dark shape as a line.

In this portrayal of a knight by the English monk Matthew Paris, from the 13th-century Westminster Psalter, we see a skilled use of line to depict form. Paris controls his line with enough assurance to give it a graceful, flowing quality, a beauty comparable to fine calligraphy. Notice also how he varies the width and darkness of his lines. He does this for two purposes: first, to direct the viewer’s eye toward the parts of the composition he considers most important, since a thicker, darker line draws attention more strongly; and second, to indicate the degree of contrast between an object and its background. Where a light shape sits against a much darker one, the contrast is high, and a bold line is appropriate; where a pale shape sits against a slightly darker background, the contrast is low, and only a thin, pale line is used. Where there is effectively no contrast at all, the skilled artist will allow the line to disappear entirely, even though he knows the edge of an object is there. The less skilled artist tends to put the line in anyway, because he knows intellectually that the edge exists, and this will overrule what his eyes are actually telling him. Line drawing is easy to do poorly – it is how most children begin – but demands genuine subtlety to handle well.

Where line represents contrast by marking a boundary, the second approach represents it by painting tonal values directly, as the eye sees them. This is harder than it sounds. Most people must be trained to observe what the eye actually sees rather than what the mind constructs after processing visual information, and what the mind constructs is always conditioned by memory and prior knowledge of the object. Consider this self-portrait by Rembrandt:

Here, there are no lines at all. Everything is a tonal value, and any apparent edge is simply the junction of a lighter and a darker area. This allows Rembrandt to convey the shape of the face without an outline. He is also willing to let edges dissolve where the tonal contrast is low: the right side of the figure here is barely distinguishable from the background. This points to a deeper distinction between the two approaches. Line tends to show edges and discontinuities; tonal painting can express the gradually changing internal variations of a three-dimensional surface, which is why it lends itself more to high naturalism.

In practice, most artists combine the two approaches, with one playing a supporting role to the other. Matthew Paris is a good example: predominantly linear, but with enough internal tonal variation to suggest the three-dimensional character of the forms. Having considered line and tone, we can turn to the third element – color – which brings its own particular difficulties.

Color

Color can also be used to describe form, but it is the most difficult of the three elements to handle well, for reasons that are easy to overlook.

Consider a grayscale image of something colored in nature. Red and yellow can generally be distinguished, since red tends toward a darker tonal value in monochrome, but red and blue are much harder to tell apart. I can remember watching Liverpool and Everton soccer matches on a black-and-white television in the 1960s: Liverpool in deep red, Everton in deep blue, indistinguishable from the waist up. Fortunately, Everton wore white shorts and Liverpool red, which settled the question. (I am a Liverpool supporter, incidentally.)

The reason this matters to the painter lies in how the eye works. The human eye reads both monochrome and color simultaneously, using different receptor cells (rods and cones) in the retina, and the brain can assess three-dimensional form from tonal and color variation in combination. But while the mind processes this information with ease, it is extremely difficult for the artist to represent it faithfully. Colors do not simply become darker or lighter in shadow. They may shift toward blue in shade, or toward yellow and green in bright sunlight, even though the actual color of the object has not changed. This means that to paint color accurately, the artist must observe what his eye receives rather than what his intellect tells him the color ought to be.

There is a further complication: colors shift not only with light and shadow, but also with distance, through what is called color perspective. The green of leaves becomes progressively bluer the further away they are, which is why mountain ranges always appear blue on the horizon - hence the song about the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Tonal contrast also decreases with distance, so that those blue mountains become not only bluer but lighter the further away they are. The skilled naturalistic artist must hold all of these variables in balance simultaneously, and few manage to do so well.

Here is one who did:

In Vermeer’s The Art of Painting (c. 1666), notice the large draped curtain pulled to one side. We judge the actual color of its pattern by looking at the mid-tones, the areas neither bleached by direct light nor lost in deep shadow. Vermeer has shifted the colors so that what is blue in full light becomes reddish in the shadow, and vice versa; yet the eye reads the fabric as a consistently colored pattern, because the brain automatically compensates for exactly this kind of variation. To do this in paint, Vermeer had to observe the colors as his eye received them, rather than as his intellect classified them, suppressing the very interpretive process by which we normally make sense of what we see. This capacity is rare. Most Baroque masters simplified the problem by concentrating on tonal variation and applying Vermeer’s kind of color sensitivity only at the main focal points.

Closely related to the handling of color and tone is the question of how the artist represents distance itself - not just the color shift of distant objects, but the whole problem of conveying size and space on a flat surface.

Judging Distance and Size

If we see a figure in a painting, we may estimate his height by comparing him to familiar objects nearby - a door, a table, another figure. But we also judge distance by the resolution of detail: when something is far away, we cannot distinguish its finer features as clearly as when it is close. A good artist knows this and uses it. One of the most common errors of beginners is to paint distant objects with as much detail as near ones - every leaf on a distant tree painstakingly rendered. This creates an image that is somehow mentally exhausting, overloaded with information the eye would never actually receive at that distance. Both the Pre-Raphaelites and the modern photorealists can be guilty of this, and in different ways the results share a quality of incongruity: the painting is the product of technical accomplishment, but somehow we sense, even if we do not know why, that something is visually wrong.

Yet this same principle, once understood, can be turned to deliberate and powerful effect. Artists who consciously heighten detail at apparent distances and, in doing so, deliberately override natural perception can imbue their images with a symbolic or heavenly quality. In heaven, to behold something fully is to know it fully; heightened detail across an entire picture plane suggests a mode of seeing that is not bound by natural distance. Gothic painters such as Duccio and Van Eyck, and iconographic painters such as Andrei Rublev, understood this and used it consistently. Their images carry a sense of participation in a different order of reality - one where the ordinary limits of perception do not apply. There is a skill in using this as a visual tool: for the break from naturalism to work, everything else present in the painting must support the idea that we are looking at heaven, so that the heightened level of detail no longer strikes the viewer as incongruous.

The Last Supper by Duccio, Italian early 14th century, egg tempera on wooden panel

Putting It All Together

The artist composes his picture as a whole by weighing and combining these elements - line, tone, color, detail - in different proportions and with different emphases. The resulting balance between naturalism and abstraction, between depicting the visible world as it appears and representing realities that transcend it, characterizes the style of a given work and the tradition to which it belongs.

It is commonly said that a good artist knows the rules, and a great artist knows when to break them. I do not think this is quite right. These are not arbitrary rules but principles grounded in how images actually work, and the genuinely skilled artist does not break them - he applies them differently depending on what he is trying to represent. The same principle of detail and distance is applied one way when painting the natural world, where detail diminishes with distance, and another way when painting heavenly subjects, where it does not. What looks like rule-breaking is usually the consistent application of a different set of governing assumptions about the nature of the subject. The failure of the Pre-Raphaelites and photorealists is not that they broke the rules but that they applied naturalistic conventions to subject matter and compositions that would have been better served by something else, producing an incongruity they did not recognize and could not resolve. 

Perhaps a distinction in motivation should be made here between the Pre-Raphaelites and the Photorealists. The Pre-Raphaelites were generally Christian in motivation and sought to reestablish the late-Gothic style of artists such as Van Eyck, who preceded the Italian Renaissance exemplified by Raphael. This is was part of the broad Victorian neo-Gothic movement that was connected with Anglican and Catholic Christianity in England in the 19th century. What was a very successful movement architecturally was, in my opinion, less successful artistically for the reason I gave above. However, even with this handicap, many examples of their art can still be striking and beautiful and are redeemed in my eyes because the symbolism and choice of subject are handled well and otherwise in harmony with a Christian worldview. Certainly, it is preferable to much contemporary art! 

The Photorealists, however, are materialists who deliberately pack their images with detail in order to reflect their false assertion, from a Christian point of view, that what they represent has no meaning or significance, and they reject the idea that a man is anything more significant than a collection of atoms that we happen to call a man. For them, the collection of atoms we call a man has no more significance than the collection of atoms we recognize as a cigarette butt on the floor.

Our English Coasts or Strayed Sheep, William Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelite tradition, English, 19th century; oil on canvas

This framework - line, tone, color, medium, and the handling of detail and distance - is the vocabulary that all visual artists share. The three great traditions I will be exploring in subsequent posts, the iconographic, the Gothic, and the Baroque, each represent a coherent and internally consistent way of deploying that vocabulary. An artist working within one of those traditions handles the elements in broadly the ways characteristic of that tradition, and this is what makes the tradition recognizable. At the same time, the greatest artists within a tradition are recognizable as individuals: Velázquez, for instance, is unmistakably a Baroque painter, yet equally unmistakably himself. Some elements of his handling - his way with tone, his restraint with line, his management of color perspective - are shared with other Baroque painters; others are distinctively his own. Understanding the vocabulary makes it possible to see both things at once.

The Spinners by Diego Velázquez, Spanish, 17th century, oil on canvas. Manages color and tone, and varies the focus and detail impeccably. My teacher in Florence, Charles Cecil, told me that he was the first to show the spokes of a turning wheel invisible to indicate its motion.

The Canonization of St Maria Goretti

From the archives of British Pathé, a brief report on the canonization of St Maria Goretti, which took place on the feast of St John the Baptist in 1950. Today is her feast day in the post-Conciliar Rite, the anniversary of her death in 1902. The report mentions the remarkable fact that her mother, who was then 84, was present for the ceremony, and shows her watching the ceremony from a window overlooking St Peter’s Square; four of her six siblings were in attendance. It does not mention that her assailant, Alessandro Serenetti, who underwent a very remarkable conversion through her direct intervention, was also present. The story of the rest of his life after his conversion is such that it would not be surprising if he himself were someday canonized, much like the Blessed Carino, the assassin of St Peter Martyr.

The Legend of Simon Magus

Until the year 1881 [note], the Roman Breviary included among the lessons during the octave of Ss Peter and Paul part of a sermon of St Maximus of Turin, a Church Father of the late 4th and early 5th, of whom very little is known. This sermon recounts a famous legend concerning the death of the Apostles as follows.

The Fall of Simon Magus, by Benozzo Gozzoli, 1461-62

“On this day, then, the blessed Apostles shed their blood; but let us look to the cause for which they suffered, namely, that among other miracles, they also by their prayers brought down the famous magician Simon in a headlong fall from the empty air. For when this Simon said that he was Christ, and claimed that as the Son he could ascend to the Father by flying, and, having been lifted up by his magical arts, had at once begun to fly; then Peter knelt down and prayed the Lord, and by his holy prayer, overcome the magician’s flight. For his prayer ascended to the Lord before the flight did, and his just petition came there before (Simon’s) wicked presumption did; Peter, being set upon the earth, obtained what he asked for before Simon could come to the heavens whither he was headed. Then did Peter set him down like a prisoner from the lofty heights, and dashing him down with a steep fall onto a stone, broke his legs; and this, as a reproach of what he had done, so that he who had just tried to fly could suddenly no longer walk, and he that had taken on wings lost the use of his feet.” (Sermo 72 de natali Ss Apostolorum Petri et Pauli)

Church Fathers even earlier than St Maximus, such as St Justin Martyr and Arnobius, knew of the tradition that Simon Magus, who sought to buy the power of the Holy Spirit from St Peter (Acts 8), was in Rome at the same time as the Eternal City’s founding Apostles. The apocryphal Acts of St Peter tell the story that Simon sought to win the Emperor Nero to his teachings, which he would prove to be true by flying off a tower built in the Forum specifically for this purpose. As he was lifted up into the air by the agency of demons, Peter and Paul knelt on the street and prayed to God, whereon Simon was dropped, and soon after died of his injuries.

In the unintentionally hilarious 1954 historical epic The Silver Chalice, Simon Magus is played by the great Jack Palance, wearing what is perhaps the very worst super-hero costume ever made. (Palance, by the way, was born Volodymyr Palahniuk, to a Ukrainian Greek-Catholic father and Polish mother, in Pennsylvania mining country. This movie saw the debut of another world-famous actor, Paul Newman, whose performance earned him a Golden Globe nomination; despite this, Newman himself once called it “the worst motion picture produced during the 1950s.”)

The legend goes on to say that the enraged Nero arrested Peter and Paul and threw them into the Mamertine prison before their execution. There they converted the two wardens, Processus and Martinian, in whose acts it is told that St Peter caused a well to spring up from the ground so that he could baptize them. The site has been venerated as the place of the Apostles’ imprisonment for many centuries, and pilgrims can still visit it to this day; a plaque near the door lists the famous Roman prisoners, such as King Jugurtha of Numidia, who were killed there, the Saints who suffered and died within its walls, and the later Saints who have come to venerate the site.

On the opposite end of the Via Sacra, the principal street of the Roman Forum, Pope St Paul I (757-67) built an oratory dedicated to Peter and Paul, nicknamed ‘ubi cecidit magus – where the magician fell.’ This oratory contained as its principal relic the stone upon which St Peter knelt to pray for the defeat of Simon Magus and the vindication of the Christian faith. It was later demolished, but the stone itself is preserved in the nearby church of Santa Maria Nuova.

Photo by JP Sonnen. The Italian inscription above says “On these rocks St Peter set his knees when the demons carried Simon Magus through the air.”

[note] In October of 1880, Pope Leo XIII added the feast of Ss Cyril and Methodius to the general calendar, and assigned their feast to July 5th. The day within the octave of the Apostles was chosen to express the hope for the reunion of the Orthodox Slavs, originally evangelized by Cyril and Methodius, with the See of Peter; this is also stated in the proper hymns of their Office, which were composed by the Pope himself. Their feast was celebrated on this day from 1881 to 1899. At the end of 1899, the feast of St Anthony Maria Zaccaria, founder of the Clerks Regular of St Paul (also known as the Barnabites, from the titular Saint of their mother church in Milan) was extended to the universal calendar, and placed on July 5th, the day of his death in 1539; Ss Cyril and Methodius were then moved to the 7th. In the post-Conciliar calendar, they were moved again, to the day of Cyril’s death, February 14th.

Kicking St Irenaeus Around

June 28 is traditionally the feast day of Pope St Leo II, who died on that day in 683, after a reign of less than 11 months. The Liber Pontificalis records that on the previous day he celebrated the ordination of nine priests, three deacons, and twenty-three bishops; it is not said that it was the ordination ceremony that killed him, but the heat of Rome in June and the inevitable length of such a ceremony make this seem likely more than coincidence. The principal achievement of his pontificate was the confirmation of the acts of the Sixth Ecumenical Council, the third of Constantinople, which condemned the Monothelite heresy; being fluent in Greek as well as Latin, he personally made the official Latin translation of the council’s acts. It is one of the oddities of hagiography that his predecessor St Agatho, in whose reign the council was held, and whose intervention (through his legates) in its deliberations was acclaimed with the words “Peter has spoken through Agatho!”, has never been honored with a general feast day in the West, but is kept on the Byzantine Calendar. Leo, on the other, was a Sicilian, and therefore born as a subject of the Byzantine Empire, but is not liturgically honored in the East.

In this altar in St Peter’s Basilica are kept the relics of three Sainted Popes named Leo, the Second (682-3), the Third (795-816) and the Fourth (847-55). The altar of Pope St Leo I (440-61) is right next to it, and Pope Leo XII (1823-29) is buried in the floor between them.

Even older than the feast of Pope Leo is the vigil of Ss Peter and Paul. The vigils of the Saints originally consisted solely of a Mass, penitential in character, celebrated after None in violet vestments, without a Gloria, Alleluia or Creed; prior to the Tridentine reform, they had no presence in the Office in the Use of Rome. (Back when there were plenty of canonical and monastic churches, such foundations would have celebrated two Masses in choir, that of St Leo after Terce, and that of the vigil after None, just as was done with the feasts of Saints which occur in Lent.) In the Breviary of St Pius V, vigils were extended to the Office, following a custom of medieval German Uses, an unusual example of change in an otherwise very conservative reform. At Matins, a homily on the day’s Gospel is read, and the prayer of the vigil Mass is said at the Hours; everything else is done as on the feria until Vespers, which are the First Vespers of the feast. However, the vigil of Ss Peter and Paul, because it coincides with St Leo, was reduced in the Office to one lesson at Matins (the ninth) and a commemoration at Lauds.

At Lyon, the ancient primatial see of Gaul, the day was kept as the feast of St Irenaeus, and the vigil as a commemoration. In his book On Illustrious Men, St Jerome mentions the famous martyrdom of St Pothinus, who was Irenaeus’ predecessor in the See of Lyon, but says nothing about the latter’s death, the date and circumstances of which are unknown; it is a rather later tradition that he died a martyr. It may very well be that his feast found its way to the vigil of Ss Peter and Paul at Lyon because of the famous passage in his book Against the Heresies (3.3.2) in which he attests to the primacy of the Roman See as follows. “For it is a matter of necessity that every Church should agree with this Church, on account of its preeminent authority – that is, the faithful everywhere – inasmuch as the Apostolic Tradition has been preserved continuously by those who are everywhere.” In 1921, Pope Benedict XV extended his feast to the general Calendar on his traditional Lyonese date, moving Pope Leo II to July 3rd, the next free day on the calendar, and the day of his burial according to the Liber Pontificalis.

The crypt of the church of St Irenaeus at Lyon. In 1562, the church was severely damaged by the Huguenots, who also destroyed the Saint’s relics, and played a game of soccer with his skull. After more destruction in the revolution, it was rebuilt in 1824, and the crypt renovated in 1863. Despite these vicissitudes, the crypt may still be regarded as one of the oldest religious buildings in France; relics of certain local martyrs were venerated there already in the later part of the 5th century. The church was originally dedicated to St John the Baptist. (Photo from Wikimedia Commons by Xavier Caré.)

In the Breviary Reform of 1960, St Irenaeus was moved to July 3rd, and Pope Leo II suppressed, in order to free June 28th up entirely for the Mass and Office of the vigil of Ss Peter and Paul. This was fundamentally a rather odd thing to do, since so many of the vigils then on the general Calendar, (including all those of the other Apostles, and, inexcusably, those of the Epiphany and All Saints) were abolished by the same reform. Less than a decade later, however, with the promulgation of the Novus Ordo, vigils in the classic Roman sense, penitential days of preparation for the major feasts, were simply abolished altogether, “freeing” June 28th from the one observance which had hitherto been absolutely universal on that date, the vigil of Ss Peter and Paul. St Irenaeus was therefore moved back to that date, freeing July 3rd for the transfer of the Apostle St Thomas from his historical Roman date, December 21st, to the date on which the Syrian church commemorates the transfer of his relics from India to Edessa.

This may seem to be just another case of what Fr Hunwicke once described as the freezing in pack ice of the Roman calendar, which keeps Irenaeus on a day which he held for ten years, while the post-Conciliar Rite has restored him to his historical Lyonese date. It should be noted, however, that Lyon itself moved his feast 4 times. After it had been kept on June 28th for centuries, Archbishop Camille de Neufville de Villeroy (1654-93) formally raised St Irenaeus to the title of Patron of the archdiocese, and moved his feast to November 23rd, displacing the very ancient feast of Pope St Clement. Patronal feasts were holy days of obligation in the Ancien Régime, and since adding another holiday to the end of June, right in the middle of harvest season, was judged excessive, his feast was transferred. (Thanks to Mr Gerhard Eger, one of the authors of Canticum Salomonis, for this information.) In the Neo-Gallican reform of Abp Antoine de Montazet (1758-88), which was a catastrophe for the Use of Lyon, it was fixed to the Sunday after the feast of Ss Peter and Paul. In the 1860s, the Missale Romano-Lugdunense was promulgated (basically the Missal of St Pius V, with a great many Lyonese customs added to it, including the rites of Holy Week), and St Irenaeus was fixed to July 3rd. Finally, in the 20th century, he was returned to his traditional date.

The Lord’s Prayer

Lost in Translation #164

After saying the Praeceptis salutaribus, the priest recites or intones the Lord’s Prayer:

Pater noster, qui es in cælis, sanctificetur nomen tuum. Adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in cælo et in terra. Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie, et dimitte nobis debita nostra sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris. Et ne nos inducas in tentationem.

℟. Sed libera nos a malo.

Which is traditionally translated as:

Our Father, Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name; Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation.

℟. But deliver us from evil.

It is beyond the pale of this little study to examine the long and robust tradition of commentaries on the Lord’s Prayer by the Church Fathers and medieval Doctors. Here, we limit our concerns to two: The placement of the prayer after the Canon, and how that placement shapes our reception of it.

Post Canon

In defending his decision to follow the Eastern custom of reciting the Our Father after the Canon, Pope St. Gregory the Great argues that it would be inappropriate to have any other prayer besides the one composed by Our Lord Himself follow the [manmade] Canon. The pairing is also appropriate when one considers an alternative name for the Canon used in the Middle Ages: “The Dangerous Lord’s Prayer.”

The Lord’s Prayer is related to the Canon in other ways as well: just as the Preface is the prologue to the Canon, the Lord’s Prayer is its epilogue. One can see this in the similarities between the Preface and the Lord’s Prayer. Both are introduced after a period of silence with the priest saying or intoning aloud, per omnia saecula saeculorum. Both have beautiful chant settings that are sung by the priest alone, both have responses from the congregation (the Sanctus and Sed libera nos a malo), and both use the word salutare. One could say that the Preface is the pro-logos, the Lord’s Prayer is the epi-logos, and in between is the Logos, made flesh and now dwelling sacramentally among us on the altar. In the words of Fr. Pius Parsch:

According to the great Pope [Gregory the Great], the Our Father is not so much a preparation for the Holy Banquet, as a consecration prayer, in the ancient sense of a prayer for the offering of the sacrifice. For this reason, in the Roman liturgy, it is recited by the celebrant alone, whereas in the Greek liturgy it is considered the table prayer of the congregation, who therefore recite it in common as a family about to approach the sacred banquet. According to Gregory I, therefore, the Our Father should be considered the completion of the Canon, corresponding to the Preface, in such wise that the Preface and the Our Father mark the beginning and the end of the Canon, which is recited in mystical silence. [1]

Needless to say, this ancient arrangement in the Roman Rite is undermined when the entire congregation sings the Our Father, a practice that reduces the similarity between the prologue and the epilogue. The practice is also a violation of a tradition as old as the Our Father itself in the Roman Rite, for Gregory the Great states that in contradistinction to the Greeks, at Rome the Lord’s Prayer is said a solo sacerdote.

St Gregory the Great, 1626/7, by the Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbarán. 

Another indication, incidentally, that the Canon and the Lord’s Prayer are meant to function together is the placement of the Solemn Nuptial Blessing over the bride and groom at a nuptial Mass. The intention seems to have been to place the prayer close to the Consecration at the nearest possible liturgical juncture. That the blessing was placed after the Lord’s Prayer rather than after the Great Amen suggests that the Canon and the Lord’s Prayers were seen as a practically indivisible unit.

Contextual Meaning

The Lord’s Prayer is also, of course, the beginning of the Communion Rite, thus forming a bridge between the Consecration and the reception of the Eucharist. It is when we view the Lord’s Prayer as a preparation for Holy Communion that its petitions take on added meaning.

“Our Father, who art in Heaven.” When the priest says these words, he is supposed to be staring at the Host. There is something almost ironic addressing the Father while looking at the Son and saying that God is in Heaven when He is also right before your eyes. But in a way the Eucharist, albeit in a veiled manner, is the fulfillment of John 14, 9: “He that seeth Me seeth the Father also.”

“Hallowed by Thy name.” The prayer does not say “Holy is your name” (although it certainly is), but “May your name be made holy or sanctified” (sanctificetur nomen tuum), as if we could increase the holiness of God’s name. God is maximally holy, and nothing on earth can change that. But His name can be rendered less holy by being “profaned” insofar as His chosen people, who are in a sense His representatives on earth, give Him a “bad name” by their behavior. In Ezekiel 43, 8 we read: “And they profaned My holy name by the abominations which they committed: for which reason I consumed them in My wrath.” The key, then, is to “hallow” God’s name by good behavior, but how can we be good without God? We cannot, and so we pray for help. As St. Cyprian of Carthage notes, when we say, “Hallowed be Thy name,” we mean, “May Thy name be hallowed in us”—that is, may we be transformed by sanctifying grace or holiness in order not to besmirch God’s name. [2] And to become further transfomred by sanctifying grace, we partake of the Eucharist.

“Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.” Both of these petitions can be seen in light of what has gone before and in light of what is about to happen. When the priest turned bread and wine into Body and Blood, there is a way in which he already brought the Kingdom of God to earth, and there is a way in which He already did God’s will—namely, he obeyed the command, “Do this in memory of Me.” But when he and we receive Holy Communion, we also do God’s will and we also strengthen the bond between Him and us and each other, the Mystical Body of Christ, perhaps contributing to the coming of the Kingdom.

“Give us this day our daily bread.” Not surprisingly, this petition was interpreted by the Church Fathers to refer to the Eucharist, even when the Lord’s Prayer was said outside of Mass. The Eucharistic connection is even stronger in the version of the Our Father mentioned in St. Matthew’s Gospel: “Give us this day our supersubstantial bread.” (6, 11). With Holy Communion God is about to grant this petition of ours.

“Forgive us our trespasses.” Before the days of the second Confiteor, reciting this line before receiving Holy Communion was thought to absolve venial sins. In a sermon St. Augustine says:

If perchance, in consequence of human frailty, our thought seized on something indecent, if our tongue spoke something unjust, if our eye was turned to something unseemly, if our ear listened complacently to something unnecessary, it is blotted out by the Lord’s Prayer in the passage: “Forgive us our trespasses,” so that we may approach in peace and so we may not eat or drink what we receive unto judgment. [3]

“Lead us not into temptation.” This is one of the most fascinating verses of the New Testament to ponder because it ties into so many other verses. Here, we ask the Father not to do the very thing He did to His Son, “who was led by the Spirit into the desert, to be tempted by the devil” (Mt. 4, 1) (Yes, it was the Spirit who led Jesus, but who sent the Spirit if not the Father?) And yet we also read that God “will not suffer you to be tempted above that which you are able” and will help you “be able to bear it.” (I Cor. 10, 13) “Lead us not into temptation” is surely one of the “hard sayings” of Scripture (see Jn. 6, 61), and rather than grimace at it, we should embrace the challenge of wrestling with it.

Alas, not everyone agrees. In 1969, the Consilium for Constitution on Liturgy published Comme le Prévoit On The Translation of Liturgical Texts for Celebrations with a Congregation, which contains the following statement:

The correct biblical or Christian meaning of certain words and ideas will always need explanation and instruction. Nevertheless, no special literary training should be required of the people; liturgical texts should normally be intelligible to all, even to the less educated. For example, temptation as a translation of tentatio in the Lord’s Prayer is inaccurate and can only be misleading to people who are not biblical scholars. [4]

The assumptions of the authors are debatable, namely, that “temptation” is inaccurate and that only biblical scholars can understand the Lord’s Prayer (we wonder if the Lord would agree: would He command all of His disciples to use this prayer forever, knowing that only an elite would ever understand it?). Perhaps it is for these reasons that none of the official “vernacular” translations followed the advice of this document—not, that is, until 2019, when Pope Francis approved a request from the Italian bishops to change e non ci indurre in tentazione to non abbandonarci alla tentazione or “do not abandon us to temptation.” The allegedly problematic word “temptation” remains, but the ne nos inducas (Mē eisenkēs hēmas in the Greek) has been altered, despite the fact that the Greek verb in question eispherói (eis+phero, to lead into) is unambiguous.

“But deliver us from evil.” One petition that does admit of valid different interpretations is this one. Since Latin lacks a definitive article, libera nos a malo can mean “deliver us from evil” or “deliver us from the Evil One.” The original Greek has the definitive article in this verse, which is why Eastern churches use the latter translation. The Eastern versions, therefore, have the advantage of being more faithful to the biblical text, more vivid, and more evocative of Christ’s temptation in the desert, when He overcame the Evil One. The Latin, on the other hand, is more expansive, asking for protection not only from the Evil One, but all evils: sin, misfortune, illness, etc.

The fact that “But deliver us from evil” is a response from the people (respondentibus omnibus, as John the Arch-chanter says in the eighth century) gives this moment a special meaning. The lay faithful, listening to the Our Father as they did to the Preface, now affirm all that they have heard. “Basically, therefore,” Josef Jungmann concludes, “the people say the Our Father along with the celebrant. It is the people’s Communion prayer.” [5]

Notes

[1] Parsch, The Liturgy of the Mass, trans. Frederic C. Eckhoff (St. Louis, Missouri: Herder, 1940), 284. See Michael Fiedrowicz, The Traditional Mass: History, Form, & Theology of the Classical Roman Rite, trans. Rose Pfeifer (Brooklyn: Angelico Press, 2020), 107.

[2] Cyprian of Carthage, Treatise IV.12.

[3] Augustine, Sermo Denis 6 (229): Quia, sicut est humana fragilitas, si forte aliquid quod non decebat cogitatio nostra concepit, si aliquid lingua quod non oportebat effudit, si aliquid oculus sicut non decebat aspexit, si aliquid auris blandius quod non oportebat audiuit, si forte aliqua talia contracta sunt de huius mundi temptatione et uitae humanae fragilitate, tergitur dominica oratione, ubi dicitur dimitte nobis debita nostra; ut securi accedamus, ne quod accipimus in iudicium nobis manducemus et bibamus.

[4] [Comme le prevoit 15. a.

[5] Josef Jungmann, S.J., The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development, vol. 2 (New York: Benzinger Brothers, 1951), 288.

A Solemn High Glagolitic Mass Celebrated in Australia

Yesterday, the feast of the Most Precious Blood, saw an historic occasion for the preservation of the traditional Roman liturgy. Following a number of sung Slavonic Masses of the Melbourne Croatian chaplaincy in recent years, the Croatian Catholic community of Sydney was blessed with its first ever High Mass according to the traditional Slavonic Missal (i.e., the “Vajs” Missal of 1927). It is believed that this is the first of its kind for the Croatian diaspora of Australia since a High Mass celebrated in Adelaide prior to the Council. (The current owner of the Missal used, Fr Velimir Maglica, was present for this Mass as a child).

For readers unfamiliar with the Glagolitic (or more correctly, Slavonic) Mass, this liturgy traces its origins to the missionary work of Ss Cyril and Methodius to the Slavs. Following much controversy, the Slavic people were eventually afforded the peculiar privilege of celebrating a Western liturgy not in Latin, as was the norm throughout the West, but an adapted form of Slavonic, the historical ancestor of modern Slavic languages such as Croatian, Czech, Polish, and Bulgarian. This liturgy differs not only in language, but all in many aspects of its chant. Despite its origins in the work of the Moravian Mission, it would ultimately be on Croatian lands that this unique use would (until relatively recently) be best preserved.

Australia, though far from this liturgy’s native soil, is home to a sizeable Croatian diaspora, among whom the unique case of the “Glagolitic” Mass, its associated script, and musical heritage are well known and celebrated, though seldom experienced - even despite the fact that its regular celebration still remains a part of living memory (one parishioner, for instance, was able to recall serving Slavonic Masses in one parish and Latin Masses in another). Aside from the local Croatian-Australian contingency, the packed church for yesterday’s celebration included a handful of faithful from overseas, including those who had travelled from as far as Czechia, Slovakia, Ukraine, and Italy.

The Mass was celebrated by Fr Mateusz Markiewicz IBP, who is no stranger to the traditional Slavonic liturgy, having previously offered it for the faithful of Zagreb; the deacon and subdeacon came in from Adelaide and Perth respectively to assist. The Mass featured an Ordinary and Propers fitted to Gregorian melodies and accompanied by organ. More characteristically “Glagolitic” melodies could be heard, for instance, in the Epistle, which was sung according to a traditional tone from the island of Hvar. Altar cards used previously in Melbourne returned to Sydney for the occasion. As for the missal, it was discovered in Zagreb before making its way to Melbourne, and eventually Sydney, where it will remain on loan for future Masses.

Where “nostalgia” remains among the most common charges against the Church’s traditional liturgy, this Mass for the Most Precious Blood testifies to the fact that the traditional rites touch the hearts of the faithful for far deeper reasons. Many if not most present at the liturgy were regulars not of traditional communities, but regular Croatian chaplaincies, and so experienced the traditional rite of Mass for the first time. While the (relative) familiarity of language surely facilitated, it is apparently that the beauty of the rites were a part of the overwhelmingly positive reception, for which reason future celebrations are already being planned. We are very grateful to Mr Danijel Uremović for sharing this account with us, and to New Ark Films for the photographs.

Continue Reading this Article. . .

The Feast of the Visitation 2026

Dost thou see Elizabeth discussing with Mary, the Mother of God: Why hast Thou come to me, o mother of my Lord? For if I had known, I would have come to meet Thee. For thou bearest Him that reigneth, and I the prophet; Thou the Giver of the Law, and I him that receiveth it; Thou the Word, and I the voice of him that proclaimeth the coming of the Savior. (The ingressa of the Mass of the Visitation in the Ambrosian Rite, also sung at one of the two Masses on the Sixth Sunday of Advent, which has the same Gospel.)

Videsne Elisabeth cum Dei Genitrice Maria disputantem: Quid ad me venisti, mater Domini mei? Si enim scirem, in tuum venirem occursum. Tu enim Regnatorem portas, et ego prophetam: tu legem dantem, et ego legem accipientem: tu Verbum, et ego vocem proclamantis adventum Salvatoris.

The Visitation, 1306, by Giotto, in the Arena Chapel in Padua, Italy.

A Speculative Origin Account of the Folding of the Corporal

The following article was written by Zsolt Orbán.

In the Roman liturgy, a corporal is the name given to the square cloth placed on the altar cloth during Holy Mass to lie under the chalice and the host. However, this cloth is not unique to the Roman liturgical tradition; it is found in many ancient traditions, and its purpose is the same everywhere: to prevent even a single crumb or drop of the Holy Body and Blood from dropping to an unworthy place.

The size, colour, and shape of the cloths used in the liturgy – whether rectangular or square – vary greatly, but they share one common feature: they are folded in the same way, always inward from two directions into three sections, to prevent any crumbs of the Eucharist that may be on them from scattering. This is how they are folded according to the Roman tradition and likewise the Copts fold them the same way (they do this with every cloth used on the altar, since they have several), and this is also how the antimension is folded according to the Byzantine tradition.

Byzantine antimensia

The use of a cloth — present in all major liturgical traditions, used on the altar, and in direct contact with the sacred species — and the manner of its folding may suggest that this is an ancient common apostolic practice.

Speculative Origins

But where might the use of the corporal and its characteristic folding method in liturgical traditions originate?

Below, I outline a speculative explanation of origin that is a source of joy for those who live in the faith of the Resurrection, for I propose that the use of the corporal might be traced back to Christ, and might have become an ancient practice of the Church through Saint John.

Saint John’s role is unique among the apostles. He was the only apostle whose distinguishing mark was that he was “whom the Lord loved.” However, the divine love manifested toward him was not an expression of our Lord Christ’s human sympathy, but sprang from God’s justice, for it was a just response to the apostle’s greater love. This is why Saint John was entrusted with the task and honour of caring for the Virgin Mary, and this greater love was also evident in the fact that he was the only apostle present at the crucifixion.

His greater love is also evident in the events following the Resurrection. We see in him with an attitude of respect born of love, for although he ran faster than Peter and thus reached the tomb sooner, he still waited for the older apostle to enter the tomb first. “Then cometh Simon Peter, following him, and went into the sepulchre, and saw the linen cloths lying.” We see in him the sensitivity of love, which is why he speaks of the empty tomb from Saint Peter’s perspective, as if he knew it only from Peter’s account: “And the napkin that had been about his head, not lying with the linen cloths, but apart, wrapped up into one place…”

But the hidden yet most obvious sign of his love is his famous statement: “Then that other disciple also went in, who came first to the sepulchre: and he saw, and believed.”

The reason the Apostle John came to faith more quickly was his greater love. There was something in the empty tomb that St. John describes just as St. Peter saw it, but which Peter did not actually notice, since it was not he who “saw and believed,” but the youngest apostle, whom the Lord loved. And this something was not merely the empty tomb, nor merely the empty linen cloths and the face cloth, but the way the face cloth was laid: separately, folded up. Therefore, it was likely the way it was folded that led Saint John to recognize that Jesus had risen, and he immediately came to faith, the first among the apostles.

Only Jesus could have folded the cloth the way the cloth he saw in the tomb was folded, and only someone who, out of his burning love for the Lord, had observed and cherished in his heart every tiny detail, event, and gesture related to him could have recognized this. This is why Saint John came to faith from such a sign sooner than anyone else.

The Shroud That Led to Faith and the Memories

Without taking into account, refuting, or confirming the various studies and convictions regarding the different cloths, we can state with a clear conscience that when the apostles entered the tomb, they saw, among other things, what we now call the Shroud of Turin and the Sudarium of Oviedo.According to my interpretation, St. John may have come to faith upon seeing the Sudarium of Oviedo, which is less well-known today than the Shroud of Turin. A whole series of St. John’s memories might have been connected to this cloth and the way it was folded.

The Sudarium of Oviedo (source)

The most immediate memory, of course, was the events following the removal from the cross.Although the Gospels make no mention of Joseph of Arimathea — who purchased the shroud — being present at the execution, he may have been among those watching from a distance, since he was quickly informed of Christ’s death. But if he only saw it from a distance, he might not have known exactly how much Christ’s face had been disfigured by the blows, or that blood was flowing from his nose and mouth; therefore, he might not have prepared a cloth capable of absorbing such a large amount of blood. Therefore, for this purpose, they may have used an everyday piece of clothing that was at hand, that is, a sudarium. This may also explain why this cloth was not made of the same quality of material as the expensive Shroud of Turin purchased by Joseph of Arimathea.

And perhaps this sudarium was precisely the Sudarium of Oviedo, an 84 x 53 cm cloth similar to those commonly used in that era as an accessory to cover the head or neck, which protected against the heat of the sun or, when pulled over the nose, against dust — as can be traced back to the name sudarion, the Middle Eastern scarf known as the sudra.

Whose sudarium might have been at hand beneath the cross? Could it have belonged to Saint John? It may have been his scarf that was placed over the head of the dead Christ to catch the blood flowing from his nose and mouth, perhaps even before he was taken down from the cross.

Perhaps still earlier memories of Christ could have been tied to this sudarium. For example, at an earlier Easter, when the multiplication of the loaves — also described by Saint John — took place, whose “liturgy” was a precursor to the Holy Mass, is it not highly likely that Christ spread out a cloth on the grass, performed the motions of breaking the bread over it, and then called for the collection of the leftovers so that he himself might fold up the cloth after the miracle? And if the apostles had not prepared food for the event (as seems evident from the narrative), the cloth was likely a makeshift solution; perhaps it was even St. John’s sudarium. And if this is what happened, it is no coincidence that the sudarium of the apostle who most deeply contemplated and understood the Eucharist served as the “corporal” during the multiplication of the loaves.

But whether the cloth at hand was his sudarium or another’s, the beloved disciple saw Jesus folding the cloth, and the manner in which He folded it. And who else would have been situated by Providence to observe how Christ folded the sudarium after breaking the bread, if not the most beloved disciple? Moreover, he saw that the way it was folded was not ordinary, since in everyday life one generally does not need to fold a cloth in such a way that nothing falls out of it, not a single crumb.

If St. John truly saw all this and truly remembered it, wouldn’t he have recognized, upon entering the tomb, that his own bloodstained sudarium was not where it had been left, but was set aside separately and folded just as Christ had done after the multiplication of the loaves? And wouldn’t he have known immediately that only Jesus could have folded it that way? And if He folded it, then He lives!

And if the folded sudarium was indeed significant in St. John’s conversion, and reminded him of the way Jesus Himself folded the “corporal” in the foreshadowing of the Holy Mass, isn’t it logical that, based on this sign, he would interpret the way the cloth was folded in the tomb as a call to “do as I have done”? And if he interpreted it this way, wouldn’t he have passed it on to the other disciples? Thus, it would be no surprise that all liturgical traditions fold the corporal in this manner.

Folding the corporal in the Latin Rite (for the benefit of both amateur and professional sacristans, along with the method of cleaning and starching, so that this knowledge may become widespread — accompanied by a sister’s lively commentary):

An introduction to the Byzantine antimension and how it is folded:

An 11th-Century Musical Miscellany

Here is another treasure from the website of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, a musical collection produced for the abbey of St Martial in Limoges in the first quarter of the 11th century. (Département des Manuscrits, Latin 1121. As explained below, today is the patronal feast of the evangelizer of the Aquitaine region in south-western France for whom the abbey is named.) Different parts of the manuscript was copied and illustrated by various hands; almost all of the illustrations are found within the first 42 folios (out of 247), and there are none after the 90th. It contains a wide variety of the classic medieval liturgical elaborations: tropes, proses, sequences, processional chants etc. While it was produced, Guido of Arezzo, who popularized the use of diastemic notation (i.e. written on a staff) was still alive, but his innovation did not take off everywhere at once, and so here we see the notes written adiastemically. I here include all of the illustrations, and have highlighted them by cropping the pages.

The abbey of St Martial was an extremely important center of musical production, and played an important role in the early development of polyphony; see this article from Wikipedia for more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Martial_school

A prose for Christmas, which begins with the words “Quem quaeritis in praesepio – Whom do ye seek in the manger”, a play on the words of the angel at the Lord’s tomb, “Whom do ye seek in the tomb?”

The verso of the same folio.

The feast of St Stephen

An eagle for St John the Evangelist

The Holy Innocents; as is common in medieval liturgical manuscripts, many of the illustrations have no relationship to the feast to which they are attached.

Continue Reading this Article. . .

How Every Painting Is Built, Part 1 of 2: Choice of Medium, and Why It Matters

This is the first of two posts on the visual vocabulary of painting – the fundamental elements every artist works with, and how the way those elements are handled is what gives a painting its style, connects it to (or separates it from) a tradition, and marks it as the work of a particular individual. Next week’s post will take up line, tone, and color. This week, we begin with something that underlies all of those: the choice of medium.

Magistrate of Brussels, Sir Anthony Van Dyck, Flemish, 17th century, oil on canvas. 

The Visual Vocabulary 

Vincent van Gogh, oil on canvas, 19th century. Van Gogh uses oil in thick, doughy, opaque layers of paint, a technique called impasto. This is different from the way Rembrandt or Van Dyck used the medium, with thin layers of translucent paint. 

Medium

Early in the process, the artist must decide on a medium. Very often, he will have spent years mastering one particular medium and will favor it throughout his career, based on a choice made early in training. The recommendation for an artist seeking mastery is to focus primarily on one medium, then, once it is thoroughly understood, adapt what has been learned to other media. The artist who masters egg tempera first will find it easier to incorporate mosaic, fresco, and even carving into his skill set. The very best artists are capable across many media, but some stay focused on their one favored medium throughout their lives.

For the painter – the example I will use throughout this discussion to illustrate points that apply more generally – oil, watercolor, mosaic, fresco, and so on look very different and have distinct qualities that make them appropriate for some works but not for others.

In nearly every type of paint, the source of color is the same. Yellow ochre, for example, is an iron oxide formed naturally and dug out of the ground. To use it, the artist must find a way to get it to adhere to his chosen surface. He does this by placing the pigment in a binding medium that is sticky enough to hold the particles of color and fix them to the surface, and transparent enough for the pigment to remain visible once dry. Placing the pigment into a medium in this way is called tempering. If the medium is egg yolk, the paint is called egg tempera. Oil paint results from tempering pigment with linseed oil. Acrylic paint uses a chemically derived plastic as its binder. For watercolor, the binder is gum arabic. Encaustic suspends pigment in warm liquid wax, which solidifies as it cools. In mosaic, pigment is held within small solid lumps of ceramic or glass — called tesserae — which are embedded in wet plaster to create a pixelated image. In fresco, pigment is suspended in water and applied directly to wet plaster; as the plaster dries, it bonds chemically with the pigment, making the painting part of the wall’s structure. In every case, regardless of medium, the color yellow ochre is produced by finely ground particles of yellow iron oxide. These are some of the more traditional media; new ones are constantly being developed.

Portrait of the Boy Euteches, likely 2nd century AD, painted in encaustic. 

Each has distinct practical properties related to the binding medium, and those properties determine what a given medium is suited for. To begin with, each medium interacts with and reflects incident light differently, profoundly affecting how it looks. We can easily distinguish yellow ochre watercolor paint from yellow ochre oil paint, for example, because their optical properties differ: one looks pale and colors subtly, letting the paper substrate show through, while the other looks rich and deeply colored.

These optical differences also determine how far a given medium allows the artist to create the illusion of depth – and this also has a direct and powerful bearing on style. When Rembrandt layers multiple thin, transparent glazes of dark-colored oil paint over a surface, he creates the illusion of a deep, rich shadow into which we almost feel we could walk. The same technique applied in egg tempera produces nothing comparable – the result tends to look more like soot on the surface. Rembrandt almost certainly did not understand the physics that explain this difference, but he could see it, and that is what mattered to him. The icon painter, by contrast, wants his image to remain resolutely two-dimensional. He does not choose oil but opts instead for egg tempera, mosaic, or fresco, because the flat, stylized quality of those media serves the symbolic purpose of his image.

Samson and Delilah, by Rembrandt, 17th century, oil on canvas.

Alongside these optical properties, the purely physical characteristics of a medium also shape the choice. Mosaic and fresco are durable and permanent, but are fixed to the building’s structure, so they cannot be moved. Egg tempera is equally permanent and, because it can be applied to wooden panels, is well suited to portable images, such as icons carried in procession. Encaustic is more delicate because the melting point of wax is low, but, like tempera, it does not lose its color over time and can also be used for portable works. Oil paint is durable and, unlike the other media mentioned, flexible, so it can be applied to canvas, making paintings comparatively light and easy to transport; however, it is less permanent than other media because the binding medium tends to brown over time. When a 300-year-old oil painting looks dark and dingy, it is usually not dirty – it appears so because the linseed oil is no longer transparent.

All of this raises an interesting historical question. It is often said that the invention of oil paint in the 15th century enabled the development of naturalistic painting. I doubt this is quite right. Both eggs and linseed oil had always been readily available to artists who, until the 19th century, made their own paint (linseed oil, made from flax, is thought to have been in use for around 8,000 years). There is no particular technical difficulty in tempering pigment with either. Artists in any working studio would likely experiment with available materials and soon discover their different properties. As long as the intention is to paint in a highly abstracted style that minimizes the illusion of depth – as in iconographic and early Gothic art – there is no advantage in using oil. Only when an artist wants to paint more naturalistically does oil become the obviously superior choice. But I suggest the desire to paint naturalistically preceded the change in medium. It was the era’s philosophical developments – a changing worldview that sought a new kind of image – that prompted artists to reach for oil and set aside egg tempera. Technique follows philosophy, not the other way around.

A good artist chooses his medium to suit the kind of image he intends to make.

Christ the Gardener, by Martin Earle, contemporary English, in egg tempera

10th century mosaic, Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, the flat look of the images arises from the medium

Imaginary landscape by David Clayton. Oil on canvas. I used multiple thin layers of paint placing translucent thin lighter layers above darker ones to create a misty effect. This is the inverse of a glaze, and is called a scumble.

Winter Sun on Pavey Ark, watercolor by William Heaton Cooper, English, 20th century