Visual Theology III Beauty and Faith
Part One: Imperfect Beauty: Visions of Fractured Faith
Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter.
Roger Scruton
Beauty and Faith is a two-part conference, the first of which will take place in New York City, 24-26 October 2025, and the second part in the UK, summer 2026. (Details forthcoming.)
Theme: The overarching conference will encourage comparative conversations between medieval and nineteenth-century religious art and architecture in order to understand the visual and historical trajectory of beauty and faith, fragmentation and renewal. We seek to examine how twenty-first-century responses to the nineteenth century’s relationship with medievalism enrich our religious imagination today. But more importantly, we do so to consider the anxieties of faith and their impress upon the future of Christian aesthetics.
Part One: Imperfect Beauty: Visions of Fractured Faith will take place primarily at the Salmagundi Club (founded in 1871) and will include a visit to the Met Cloisters (which opened in 1938).The event will run over three days, with two days of conference panels, roundtables, and artist conversations, followed by a third reflective day with a visit to the Cloisters and an opportunity for shared prayer. Pairing the Salmagundi—a club whose past members include British and American figures of note (e.g. William Merritt Chase and Winston Churchill)—with the Cloisters—with its transatlantic history and rich material and botanic environment—is designed to enable comparative conversations across our chosen continents and their respective visual cultures during the relevant time periods. Additionally, delegates will have a unique opportunity to hear from artists working today and to engage with contemporary and medieval art.
The Cloisters was first formed around five European medieval cloisters collected by the American sculptor George Gray Barnard during a period of study under Auguste Rodin. Perennially poor, Barnard scoured rural France for old medieval fragments and sculptures he could sell or study from, driven by the beauty of what he called ‘the patient Gothic chisel’. Believing the American ‘people needed a true living expression of those glorious old Abbeys and Cathedrals of the Old World here to step within’, Barnard shipped his entire collection to the U.S. in the 1910s. Although he aimed for medieval authenticity, these mere—albeit substantial—fragments were dislocated from the whole and could never replicate a particular site. The cloisters existed as an echo, an evocation of their past glory, yet they still expressed Christian and aesthetic devotion.
J.D. Rockefeller fascinated by all things medieval, later helped the Metropolitan Museum purchase Barnard’s cloisters. Rockefeller also financed the parkland for the (re)assemblage of the fragments, and further donated land opposite the Cloisters so that the view across the river would always remain unspoiled. The stone cloisters were then incorporated into a modern museum structure complete with several medieval-style gardens.
As such, the Cloisters represented a new vision of the old: an early twentieth-century inheritance not only of the nineteenth century’s interest in medievalism but also of the medieval age itself. Even today, the architectural space echoes the sacrality of its European material heritage while being simultaneously disconnected, fractured, and torn from it. In this sense, the site has an imperfect beauty to it: a body broken, yet new.
While the museum arguably expressed American innovation and optimism, the very bones of the cloisters are also an index of nineteenth-century European and British anxieties around the fragmentation of faith. These included concerns about Christianity’s foundations, the historicity of Scripture, and the veracity of Christ’s miracles. New theologies, which presented to some as more enlightened and empirical, and the ever-increasing diversification of ecclesiology exacerbated the sense that truths were being fragmented. Furthermore, the industrialization of Britain and the corresponding storm cloud of pollution compounded the sense of forced change and gave rise to a fear of the loss of beauty, widely evident in art and literature. The poetic intention behind Barnard’s original installation resonates with the dual anxieties of fractured faith and the decline of beauty.
In this context, we use the cloisters as a starting point for conversations about the space between brokenness and beauty, and to consider how art, in its many forms, can replant, remake, and reaffirm Christian truth, even when the results demonstrate synchronic anxieties between the past and the present, and faith and fragmentation.
We welcome papers that address the spiritual and theological aspects of these issues, not only from academics but also from clergy and visual artists. Proposals might include, but are not limited to the following aspects of the nineteenth century:
Art and the Church: the Gothic Revival in architecture; formal and philosophical aspects of the Aesthetic Movement in relation to faith; fabric fragments in church vestments and liturgical objects; controversial ’un-beautiful‘ biblical scenes and subjects in nineteenth-century painting; medievalizing views of painting and craft as a way of finding the truth; Bible illustration and efforts to represent Christian history (Gustave Doré, John Kitto, James Tissot, Henry Shaw); nineteenth-century collections of sacred medieval manuscripts and art.
Collecting and Curating: collections of religious and devotional objects; the library and the museum: beautifully arranged fragments of manuscripts and ruins, as evangelizing forces; the Christian implications of botany, ornithology, entomology, and other natural and medical studies through collection.
Denomination and Division: debates about beauty versus purity in liturgies and forms of worship; Anglican views on Tractarianism versus evangelicalism; arguments between Catholics and Protestants; questions on the nature of the One True Church; church planting among Protestants, and the growth of new monastic orders such as the Order of the Holy Cross and the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, among Catholics.
Doubt, Reversion, Conversion: artistic and natural beauty as an agent of conversion; the aesthetic impact of the Oxford Movement; anxiety and religious debate; famous doubts and questions (Josephine Butler, Florence Nightingale, John Ruskin) and famous conversions (Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Henry Newman, Oscar Wilde).
Evoking Eden: gardens and garden imagery in the Bible and in art; religious efforts to combat the destruction and fragmentation of the land; Christian arguments against industrialization, pollution, and animal cruelty; Eden and Paradise as moral imperatives; Realism, Naturalism, Tonalism as painterly responses to the beauties of nature.
Reform and Rescue: efforts to renew and reform broken bodies and spirits through ministry; revival and evangelization (the Salvation Army, Charles Finney, Dwight Moody, Elizabeth Ann Seton, Pierre Toussaint); beauty and cleanliness as expressions of reform.
Veneration and Pilgrimage: holy fragments in relics and reliquaries; spiritual dislocation and the idea of the pilgrimage; Victorian visions of the Holy Land; the disconnect of spiritual works of art from their original places; beautifying holy and sacred spaces as an act of worship.
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Please email your 250 word abstract and your C.V. to conference@visualtheology.org.uk by 30th April, 2025. Successful applicants will be notified at the end of May, and conference proceedings will be announced shortly thereafter. We also look forward to sharing our already secured keynotes.
Visual Theology is a symposia for conferences, publications, and art commissions that explore the relationship between the spiritual imagination and visual culture. Through academic and creative events, VT explores the rich tapestry of both historical and contemporary religious imagery and architecture in Europe and beyond. Embracing an interdisciplinary approach, VT encourages dynamic conversations between academic specialists, curators, theologians, professional artists, and church leaders. Exploring the value of religious imagery, particularly its place and function in the twenty-first century, VT seeks to encourage new forms of critical dialogue with a compassionate and objective eye, rather than a doctrinaire approach. VT is of relevance to those of all faiths and none. Its central tenet is to ask how sacred art and ideas of the numinous can play a transformative role in public discourse, public spaces, and public architecture.