The Catechetical Review - Communicating Christ for a New Evangelization

Articles Under: Catechizing with Art

To view a full resolution of this artwork on a smartboard, click here . In the traditional hierarchy of painting, still life has often been viewed as the lowest genre to pursue. While history and religious painting served a moral or spiritual purpose, frequently involving an engaging narrative or drama, still life painting served to depict believable props rather than focusing on the objects themselves. This changed in the Dutch Golden Age as commercial prosperity in the port cities increased the wealth of the 17th-century middle class. With interest in beautifying their homes, the modest still life increased in popularity,... Read more
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To view a full resolution of this artwork on a smartboard, click here . Any first impression of The Procession to Calvary by Pieter Bruegel the Elder is telling. I can still remember my initial encounter with it. The scene came across as a chaotic, dizzying whirlwind of activity. Beyond the larger mourning figures in the foreground, I felt a deeper disturbance in the picture, the source of which remained unknown. It seemed to reverberate through the crowd that thronged the landscape, like ripples pushing through the water after a stone has been thrown in. The sheer number of figures... Read more
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Many moons ago, when I was a young social work student in North Dakota, I was required to take a course called “Indian Studies.” One of the books for the course was titled Black Elk Speaks . It was the moving account of the experience of the life of indigenous peoples prior to the arrival of the white European settlers, as seen through the eyes of a Lakota elder named Nicholas Black Elk. John Neihardt, the man who penned the book in the early 1930s, had a sense of the urgent need to preserve a record of what native life... Read more
To view a full resolution of this artwork on a smartboard, click here . The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary is a beautiful dogma of the Church that conveys to the faithful the importance of the Blessed Mother. In 1950, the apostolic constitution Munificentissimus Deus (The Most Bountiful God) was promulgated by Pope Pius XII. It declared that Mary was assumed into heaven—body and soul—at the end of her earthly life. Many traditions gathered from ancient sources tell us of Mary’s life after the scriptural conclusion of the apostolic age. The whole Church, in both in history and in... Read more
“The option or love of preference for the poor . . . is an option, or a special form of primacy in the exercise of Christian charity, to which the whole tradition of the Church bears witness. It affects the life of each Christian inasmuch as he or she seeks to imitate the life of Christ, but it applies equally to our social responsibilities and hence to our manner of living, and to the logical decisions to be made concerning the ownership and use of goods ” — St. John Paul II [1] Saints Love the Poor The saints of... Read more
To view a digital version of the artwork click here . The Ghent Altarpiece, also known by the title The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb , is one of the most famous images in art history. The additional title is important as a signal to the viewer to pay close attention to where the image leads us through an evocation of the narrative of salvation. Jan van Eyck was born in the fourteenth century in present-day Belgium and settled in the city of Bruges, where he accomplished his major works during the Northern Renaissance. He and his artist brother Hubert... Read more
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To view the art on a smart board click here. “What are those five naked boys doing in my Holy Family?” [1] Thus exclaims Agnolo Doni in Irving Stone’s novel The Agony and the Ecstasy upon seeing the tondo (round painting) he had commissioned from Michelangelo. Whether or not the real Agnolo Doni found the picture surprising in 1509, viewers today may well find the inclusion of such background figures strange. The presence of five nude youths is not the only puzzling thing about the Doni Tondo . The arrangement of the principal figures is most unusual. Although the Virgin... Read more