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2 days ago | 
hilarywhite.substack.com | Hilary White
In April, we explored a little of the history, and the art, of the Christian Visigothic Kingdom of the Spanish peninsula, and talked about what happened when the forces of the Umayyad Caliphate invaded in 711. Today we will follow the Christian refugees north into the mountains, where a handful of survivors regrouped in the remote, forested mountains of Asturias.
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5 days ago | 
hilarywhite.substack.com | Hilary White
Why is it that in some ancient European churches, the most terrifying images in Christian doctrine are the last thing you see on your way out? After the Mass has ended, after Communion, after the final blessing, you’re leaving and you are confronted with the most fearsome images in all Christian art. Not Christ in the manger or the Good Shepherd or the Child in the arms of His mother.
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1 week ago | 
hilarywhite.substack.com | Hilary White
Dom Gerard Calvet was one of the great figures of the 20th-century monastic revival. Today we’re going to see what he said when asked by a secular journalist what the monastic life is for. In this guest post, written by our good friend Mother Marie, we look at the meaning of the monastic life itself, and its “usefulness” in a world that has abandoned God and is destroying itself at an alarmingly increasing pace. Monasticism is something utilitarian Modernia is probably incapable of understanding.
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1 week ago | 
hilarywhite.substack.com | Hilary White
It might seem surprising that this fresco of Christ Pantocrator, discovered in the apse of a small obscure church in the north of Italy, is so unusual that it caused a major re-write of the art-history timeline. It looks like any early Byzantine image that we’ve seen hundreds of times: serene, otherworldly, with the face symmetrical with classical proportions, modelled with lights and darks to give the impression of lifelike three-dimensionality.
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1 week ago | 
hilarywhite.substack.com | Hilary White
We can often have the impression, mostly from the way art history is presented in academia, that art in the West moved in a clean, straight line from early Christian mosaics to Gothic cathedrals and then flowered into the Renaissance; the ultimate goal to which all roads point. But that’s not at all what happened, either spiritually or artistically, and certainly not everywhere in “the West”.
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2 weeks ago | 
remnantnewspaper.com | Hilary White
One aspect of Pope Francis’ character that seems little-explored by the Catholic and secular media alike is his apparent disdain for contemplative religious life – a facet of Catholic life that could be described as the most purely religious of all the Church’s undertakings. The world does not understand it or want it. Therefore, it is something of a thorn in the Bergoglian side, and he has repeatedly expressed his contempt for it.
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2 weeks ago | 
hilarywhite.substack.com | Hilary White
Many western Christians who are not regularly exposed to them have an idea that all Byzantine or “eastern” iconography looks the same. It’s easy to see why: after 500+ years of adulating the illusionistic naturalism of the Renaissance, the stylized, formal and symbolic aesthetic of Byzantine icons can seem like a foreign world. And I think these stylistic differences are a big part of what keeps the two sides separated.
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2 weeks ago | 
open.substack.com | Hilary White
Christian life, thought, history and culture through the lens of the first 1200 years of sacred art. · Over 6,000 subscribersBy subscribing, I agree to Substack’s Terms of Use and acknowledge its Information Collection Notice and Privacy Policy“Hilary's deep love of beauty, truth and goodness shines forth in everything she writes. But she also won't spare the feelings of those who seem to want nothing better than to destroy any trace of the true world lying hidden, yet shining all around us.”
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3 weeks ago | 
hilarywhite.substack.com | Hilary White
I frequently use the word “Modernia” in my various online ramblings, a term I coined to summarise whatever this thing is that we all live in now - a kind of global nation of shared misery. Someone the other day asked me to define it, and why I capitalise it. What follows is the answer to that question. It’s a nation; but not one I ever want to belong to.
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3 weeks ago | 
hilarywhite.substack.com | Hilary White
If we want to understand the origins of medieval Italian sacred art - from the gold-ground icons of the Italo-Byzantine period to the monumental fresco cycles of the Romanesque and Gothic eras - we have to begin with the iconoclastic crisis in the Byzantine Empire. In the 8th and 9th centuries, a wave of imperial hostility and persecution toward sacred images - and the theology behind them - and those who used them swept across the Byzantine East.
