Timothy Verdon is an art historian and scholar with 50 years of experience in the field but when he talks about prayer in the lavishly illustrated Art and Prayer (Paraclete Press), he writes as one who knows his subject firsthand.
I had the opportunity to meet Verdon recently at the Museum of Biblical Art in New York where he has been the curator of an exhibit of sculpture from the Duomo museum in Florence. (To see more images from that show and from the Duomo, check out the slideshow below.)
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As Verdon reemphasizes in his book, this art from the Renaissance was created at a time when most viewers were illiterate. They couldn’t read the Bible, could only listen to its stories. They turned to paintings and sculpture to better understand the Word – and we still can.
“Images put before believers can in fact teach them how to turn to God in prayer,” he writes.
The images themselves might look simple but the theological concepts can be profound. For instance, a fourteenth-century painting of Mary praying before the infant Jesus in swaddling clothes reminds us of the basic fact that we can all pray to Jesus.
But Verdon goes on to say “that the same woman who prays before her newborn Son in our fourteenth-century painting will in fact later teach Him to walk, talk, and say his prayers: for He is contemporaneously true God and true man, outside but also inside time.”
This notion is fundamental to prayer “because – as all who turn regularly to God know – if on the one hand it is we who seek His help with our needs, on the other it is He who sought us first. Prayer, if properly motivated, is always free, and yet our freedom is itself His gift.”
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Most of this art, like the sculptures in the Duomo, were done for churches and these are naturally places for prayer, not just bricks and mortar. He quotes Augustine, saying, Christians “do not constitute a house of God unless they are cemented together by love.”
But just seeing art is the believer’s pilgrimage in our desire to grow closer to God.
“The desire to see God is not mere curiosity but a deep impulse of Christian faith. ‘The Word was made flesh, he lived among us, and we saw his glory,’ the prologue to the fourth Gospel affirms (John 1:14), and another text attributed to Saint John insists that, in Jesus Christ, “Life was made visible: we saw it and we are giving our testimony, telling you of the eternal life which was with the Father and has been made visible to us” (1 John 1:2). Similarly, speaking of Christ, the Pauline letter to the Colossians states simply: ‘He is the image of the unseen God” (Col. 1:15).
Verdon has lived in Florence, Italy, for most of the last 50 years. For those of &us who can’t drop everything and fly to Florence to hear him and see the works of the Duomo, I hope this slideshow helps. To hear him talk, turn to his book, Art and Prayer.
It is a rich, meditative read, as satisfying as prayer, and I believe it will enhance anyone’s prayer life.
