Holy Cross’ Cantor Art Gallery to Feature Works of Art Important to Catholic Culture and Worship

WORCESTER, Mass. – The Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery at the College of the Holy Cross will present Catholic Collecting, Catholic Reflection 1538-1850: Objects As a Measure of Reflection on a Catholic Past and the Construction of Recusant Self-Identity in England and America from Feb. 22 to April 13. The show’s curator is Virginia Raguin, visual arts professor at the College.

The exhibition contains more than 60 objects, most from Jesuit institutions across the United States and in England, and includes centuries-old and extremely rare stained glass, liturgical vestments, paintings, books, sculpture and other works of art important to Catholic culture and worship. More than half of the pieces have never before been exhibited in the United States.

A series of public events in conjunction with the exhibit opening will be held at the Cantor Art Gallery on Feb. 22:

* 4:30 p.m. Gallery talk by Virginia Raguin, who will discuss the value of the pieces of art. * 5 p.m. Holy Cross Chamber singers, under the direction of choir director Pamela Getnick, will perform music by Renaissance master Josquin des Prez, featuring a setting of the text "Ave Maria ... Virgo Serena," one of Josquin’s best loved works. * 5:30 - 6:30 p.m. Reception

Ten international academics and museum professionals will reflect on the broader issues of the problematic search for meaning in the display of one culture by another in a symposium titled "Religion Matters: Art, Piety, Destruction, and the Politics of Display" on Feb. 26. To see the schedule and abstracts of talks visit: http://college.holycross.edu/projects/catholiccollecting.

The exhibition focuses on the preservation of religious objects by Catholics during the "penal times" under British law. These objects, acquired with great risk, embodied the faithful’s bonds with God, church tradition, and each other. When suppressed, many Catholics during this period came to identify their faith with the prayer books, paintings, and objects of ritual such as Mass vestments and chalices that they were able to obtain or hide. These Catholics became known as recusants — recusing themselves from oaths of loyalty and participation in the state-sanctioned religion. The Society of Jesus (Jesuits) played a major role during this period, in terms of both missions in England and in the colony of Maryland, created as a sanctuary for Catholics in 1634.

Among the Jesuit institutions that have loaned objects for the Holy Cross exhibition are: Stonyhurst College, Lancashire, England; Campion Hall at the University of Oxford, Oxford, England; Georgetown University; Loyola University, Chicago and Holy Cross. The exhibition groups stained glass, alabaster carving, manuscripts, printed books, liturgical vessels, paintings and vestments, including the prized chasuble given to Westminster Abbey by Henry VII.

A major focus will be on the Mass and altar furnishing. Several chalices were produced for Jesuits on clandestine missions in England; one traveled with the Jesuits to Maryland. A series of essays accompanying the exhibit profile aspects of piety, politics, and art, including the early missionary work of the Society of Jesus in England and the Maryland Colony.

A fully illustrated catalogue of 224 pages will be published jointly with the Catholic University of America Press.

One of the major goals of the exhibition is to encourage active interpretation and invite a variety of audiences to reflect on what these objects meant to people of the past. The Chaplains’ Office at Holy Cross will incorporate the exhibition as part of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, and 20 members of the faculty will utilize the show as an element in their courses. One course will train students to act as interpreters for a variety of age groups — from school children to senior citizens — who will visit the gallery. Participants in local parish Lenten programs and Confirmation classes will also be welcomed to tour the gallery, and experience what the objects reveal about Catholic beliefs and the stories of their preservation.

Catholic Collecting, Catholic Reflection 1538-1850 is also occurring during a significant celebratory year for the Jesuits. The year 2006 marks the 450th anniversary of the death (1556) of its founder, St. Ignatius of Loyola and the 500th anniversary of the birth (1506) of two of his fellow students and companions, St. Francis Xavier and Blessed Peter Faber. Jesuit Jubilee 2006 is being celebrated internationally, with events planned at the Jesuit colleges and universities as well as Jesuit provinces the world over. For listings of the many educational events marking this year, visit www.jesuit.org.

The hours for the Cantor Art Gallery are Monday - Friday, 10 a.m. - 5p.m., Saturdays 2 - 5 p.m. The gallery is closed March 4 and 11. Located in O’Kane Hall, 1st Floor, College of the Holy Cross, 1 College Street, Worcester, MA, 01610. Admission to the gallery is free. Public parking is located on Linden Lane, gate 2, off College Street.

For more information, call the Cantor Art Gallery at 508-793-3356 or visit the Gallery’s Web site at: www.holycross.edu/departments/cantor/website/index.html.

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BACKGROUND FOR Catholic Collecting,Catholic Reflection 1538-1850

The Broad Context

The focus on the motivation for collecting forces us to address equally vehement motives for disuse and even destruction of beautiful religious objects. Religious works of art that have survived from the Middle Ages in England have done so in the face of aggressive campaign of destruction. The Taliban’s prohibition of art and the destruction by dynamite of what was then the largest Buddhist image in the world is an example. The deadly struggle over possession of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, known to the Islamic world as the Haram al-Sharif, testifies to the mesmerizing function of the place and the tangible object to the cultural identity. We see the history of possession in the importance of the restoration of objects taken from Jewish citizens by the National Socialists in the German pogrom — sold on the art market and ending up in collections of American Museums. The itinerary of the work of art — here sacred objects — has become a major contemporary interest. Important Catholic families of England who preserved works of art are the Howards, Arundels and Jerninghams who are represented by collections in the United States. The Jerninghams were among the first to collect large-scale panels of stained glass from the monasteries closed in Europe around 1800. The windows that once adorned the family chapel are now dispersed to places like the Harvard University Art Museums and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Bulter-Bowdens were a Catholic family that kept the single extant copy of the now widely read and studied Book of Margery Kempe. Lancashire families were particularly strong in maintaining the Catholic faith. The Towneley family is well known and the family home Towneley Hall is now maintained as a museum. The Towneley Cycle of medieval English drama takes its name from the single manuscript preserved by the Towneley family.

The exhibition has several categories. Medieval Objects Preserved by Recusants

Textiles: "Opus anglicanum" ("English work") prized embroidered vestments produced in England were unparalleled in medieval textile work, and one of England’s chief exports. Unique objects, including a vestment commissioned by Henry VII for Westminster Abbey, will be featured. The chasuble was part of a set of more than 30 vestments now reduced to two, saved from public destruction by transport out of England. Manuscripts: Stonyhurst has several medieval prayer books called "Books of Hours" showing iconoclastic disfigurement, prayers defaced and the faces or eyes of the saints in the illumination scratched out. These objects are not simply splendid examples of medieval illumination, metalwork, or textiles, each object communicates the history of the people who valued — or feared it. Alabaster: Carving in alabaster was one of the primary arts associated with England, site of the best-known quarries. A form of gypsum, alabaster is relatively soft when mined, facilitating its carving. It hardens slightly after exposure to the air and also accepts color and gilt well. Thus it was an ideal material for complex sculpture for interior decoration of shrines and altars. Stained glass: Once England’s dominant form of monumental painting, stained glass was destroyed by iconoclasts, and more perished through neglect. Small remnants have now become exceedingly precious, such as images of Saints Katherine and Agnes from East Anglia, surviving as an overlooked panel in the upper reaches of a window.

The Battle of the Books: Printed books, many profusely illustrated, formed a part of the verbal and visual polemic that engaged Catholic and Protestant Europe from the 1550s-1680s. The Decem Rationes (Ten Reasons for the Truth of the Roman Church) was written by the Jesuit marytr Edmund Campion in 1581. Printed at a secret Catholic press, 400 copies were distributed at Oxford University, one of the surviving five will be exhibited. The small book, De Persecutione Anglicana Libellus, written by Robert Persons in Rome, 1582, contains 117 pages with six pages of engravings that include Campion’s capture and death. Ecclesiae Anglicanae Trophaea was published in Rome in 1584, and illustrated by engravings after the paintings of English martyrs from earliest to present times that were installed in the English College in Rome and renowned throughout Europe.

Catholic devotional items commissioned in England/Ireland during suppression: These objects include chalices and vestments without their hallmarks — allowing the silversmith to remain unknown. Stonyhurst has 17th-century vestments and Mass textiles that were secreted in homes in Lancashire and worn by the martyred St. Edmund Arrowsmith. A silver chalice made during English prohibition is dated 1684 and is now in the Martin D’Arcy Gallery. The chalice is inscribed so that it is possible to know that it was made as a gift of Elizabeth Rookwood to the Jesuit missions in East Anglia. A hand-carved tiny shrine with the Instruments of the Passion was made by one of the young men educated abroad in Catholic schools who returned to England. A series of liturgical vessels brought with the Jesuit missions to Maryland include a chalice secretly produced in Elizabethan times and used in Charles County in the early 18th century. For expedience, base metals rather than the traditional silver and silver gilt were sometimes pressed into service. A pewter chalice and paten of presumed Maryland manufacture long associated with the missions date to about 1650-1700.

Items commissioned or acquired on the Continent and brought into England: These items include an "agnus dei," a disk made from the papal Easter Candlestick and given to the Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion. He had the item with him when arrested by government agents. He hid it (wrapped in indulgences) in the ceiling of a grange. It was discovered only in the 1930s when the building was being repaired. A series of 17th-century oil paintings on copper in the style of Van Dyck were important from the Low Countries by the Shireburns. Small in size, they present biblical narratives and saints’ images popular in Catholic countries, but abhorrent in England.

The Gothic Revival, when religion becomes collectible art: The 19th-century saw both rehabilitation of the art of the Middle Ages and the restoration of legal right to religious dissidents most associated with medieval culture. Catholics, some of the first to be interested in the field collected medieval stained glass from the Continent. Around 1800, Sir William Jerningham built a new family chapel near Norwich and placed imported medieval glass in its windows. These panels are now in numerous collections in Europe and America, including the Worcester Art Museum’s Donor Portrait of Prior Peter Blommeveen, 1510-30. Augustus W. N. Pugin, a Catholic, made Gothic a dominant building style for all of England. The Victoria and Albert Museum, founded with a "secular" purpose, to acquire examples of ancient craft and design that would serve as inspiration for contemporary artisans, acquired medieval art. Most of these objects originated in religious contexts. The disputed past of England became "our" past with little reference to fractious dispute or the role of the government in the destruction and suppression of religious subject matter. With the Gothic Revival the medieval past achieved a new national aura.