With an Appearance by Sufjan Stevens
For the better part of Donatello's career, his artistic output reflected both the passions and the turmoil of his soul. Donatello's sculptures, which captured strikingly the essence of struggling humankind, were massive and heavily muscled. Some of them appear almost tied to the earth by the weight of their own bodies. Arguably, these sculptures also express the troubled spirit of this brilliant Renaissance sculptor.
But in the last years of his life, Donatello's work took a different turn. When he died, he left unfinished his final, symbolic message: a human body, bulk carved away to reveal the slender "soul." I wonder if Donatello, long haunted by the laws of God, found peace with his Creator as his life came to a close.
I feel a kinship with Donatello, with the spiritual searching that his work finally reveals, and especially with that enigmatic, unfinished sculpture. God finds it necessary, I think, to carve our lives away until what is left can be redeemed - transformed through the glory of a resurrected Christ. But first there is the carving away, the paring down, the taking. As Sufjan Stevens sings on Illinoise, in the midst of "All the glory that the Lord has made,""He takes
and he takes
and he takes."
The taking away, the stone-dust-reduction, is the process the Bible calls sanctification, and I don't like it. But as Donatello sometimes reminds me, this divine carving is a purely earthly process, set in a temporal time frame. In other words, the taking will end when eternity sets in - and then the transformed children of Christ will be free, bodies and souls, to live in the fully realized kingdom of God. All painful changes complete, every tear wiped away.
We won't be elongated or disembodied but we will be disinterred from our sin and free from every crack and fault line. This is a process I can live with - I hope that Donatello found a way to live with it too.
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Donatello: Carving Stone to Free the Soul
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3 comments:
Wonderful thoughts. John the Baptist words about Christ, "He must increase, I must decrease," came to my mind as I read the post. God is indeed stripping away "all the vain things that charm me most" (and some of these vain things happen to be things I deem as "spiritual pursuits")in order for his Spirit to have free course in me. It is painful. Being a disciple does not come without cost. Yet, as Paul (and your post) states, the losses are truly gain. The stripping away is a continual pulling farther and farther back of the veil that keeps me from seeing Christ more clearly. From seeing Christ who is my life.
Thanks for shedding sunlight on my rainy day.
LEV
This post seems to come from nowhere, in the best sense of that phrase: in all the time I've been coming here and reading your blog, I don't recall your ever having written about art before. Certainly, you've not written about it so strikingly and compellingly.
More, please.
"John the Baptist words about Christ, "He must increase, I must decrease," came to my mind..."
That about sums it up, doesn't it? That, and "a continual pulling farther and farther back of the veil that keeps me from seeing Christ more clearly." It's refreshing to see how often this "blessed" taking away is mentioned in the Bible.
"I don't recall your ever having written about art before...More, please."
Thanks, John! I'll do what I can, although my ability to comment meaningfully on art pales in comparison to your own. The Renaissance holds a special interest for me: human pride and divine leanings clash so dramatically, on such a vivid stage.
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