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6 days ago | 
hilarywhite.substack.com | Hilary White
The idea of an iconographic programme - a cycle of images telling a sacred story - has a deep history, long predating Christianity. As we saw when we looked at the incredible 40,000 year old paintings of the Chauvet Cavern, human beings have always used ordered visual schemes to express spiritual and cosmological beliefs, hierarchy, power, and transcendence.
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1 week ago | 
hilarywhite.substack.com | Hilary White
If you stay strictly on the beaten tourist paths in this country, you’ll mostly see the things everyone already knows about. Baroque ceilings that roar for attention. Painters and sculptors who have whole wings of museums and libraries to themselves.
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2 weeks ago | 
hilarywhite.substack.com | Hilary White
Dear friends,I’m not feeling well and need to take a little time to rest and recover. I thought I should let you all know, since it unfortunately means I won’t be able to publish as planned. Last week I struggled to get just one post out, and I don’t think it was up to my usual standards. I’m soup-maxing, resting and taking very short walks, and will be getting away from screens for a couple of days. I’ll be back to writing as soon as I’m up to it, with luck, later in the week.
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3 weeks ago | 
hilarywhite.substack.com | Hilary White
In the year 800, on Christmas Day, Pope Leo III placed a crown on the head of Frankish king, Charles - later to be called “the Great” - and declared him “Emperor of the Romans”. This was a bold and somewhat shocking move, especially considering there already was an emperor in Constantinople, who might beg to differ. Behind this dramatic secessionist moment lay an already deep history of profound and growing rifts between East and West.
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3 weeks ago | 
corridor8.co.uk | Jack Nicholls |Hilary White |Anne Waggot Knott |Kirsty Jukes
They could be ordinary suburban houses. The camera journeys along hallways decorated in inoffensive greys and beiges; we see kitchens, bedrooms, lounges and an exterior bearded with ice, as if filmed in the middle of a harsh winter. Gradually, though, we see things aren’t quite right. Among the soft furnishings, a huge, sculpted finger lurks, while fleshy-looking textiles drape themselves over the king-sized bed. Paintings of car accidents and apocalyptic wastelands hang, unassumingly, on the walls.
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1 month ago | 
hilarywhite.substack.com | Hilary White
Twenty-one thousand years: that’s how long a singular cavern system in the Ardèche region of southern France remained locked, sealed away by a massive landslide. It boggles the mind to think about all that happened to humanity in that immense stretch of time, all those long, dark unrecorded centuries where we rose slowly from hunting and gathering, using stone and bone tools, battling to survive at the end of the last great ice age1.
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1 month ago | 
hilarywhite.substack.com | Hilary White
Quite a lot of us are watching the goings on in Rome right now, all waiting for the moment when the doors of the Sistine Chapel will close behind the cardinals. Then we’ll wait with fascination, and no little dread, for what will happen next. While the faithful pray for a holy successor, many of us are bracing ourselves for more turbulence. But it’s a little surprising, isn’t it? All this attention for one man in white, and an institution that was old when Charlemagne was crowned.
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1 month ago | 
hilarywhite.substack.com | Hilary White
It is difficult, across the long centuries, to feel the urgency of that year, but in 717, Christian civilization itself stood on the brink. In 718 we came within a hair’s breadth of extinction and survived, literally by the width of a wall. The fragile Christian kingdoms of the European West, still picking themselves up and reforming after the collapse of Roman order, might never have survived.
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1 month ago | 
hilarywhite.substack.com | Hilary White
Let’s take just a few minutes today for a brief look at one of the most important iconographic prototypes, one that we have all seen many times but perhaps haven’t yet looked at with close attention. On Holy Saturday, the Church falls silent. The tabernacle is empty, the altar is bare. There is no Mass. No chant. No light. In the eyes of the world, death is the close of the drama of the maddening and disruptive preacher from Galilee.
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1 month ago | 
hilarywhite.substack.com | Hilary White
Today we have a bit of a treat. A friend of mine who lives here in Narni, went down to Rome on Monday for a pilgrimage, none other than the traditional Seven Churches route. She wrote an account of it for us in her own words, and has sent along a great treasure of photos and video clips to share of these magnificent edifices - lots of mosaics and frescos and paleo-Christian architecture of early Christian Rome.
