Catholica: The Visual Culture of Catholicism

Thames & Hudson have produced a superb and readable guide to Catholic culture in all its distinctiveness, emphasising a little perhaps the Catholicism Triumphant of the Hispanic World over the Catholicism of the Martyred and the Militant.

It is encyclopedic. It will be merely an aide memoire with superb illustrations for most people raised in a Catholic environment - nostalgic perhaps for lapsed or 'recovering' or atheistic Catholics - but it should give a rounded and sympathetic account of the culture to anyone outside it.

What the author Suzanna Ivanic, a Czech-origin academic scholar of religiosity, gives us is a sense of the totalitarian nature of High Catholicism and how it employed the arts as a full-bodied sensorium embracing show more every aspect of life both now and in the hereafter.

I can well envisage a similar book on the much shorter human experience of High Socialism or on the longer one of Buddhism - belief systems that extended from theory to controlling institutional structures and thence entering into both social and private life using image and the senses to do so.

One can see why the Protestant North feared Catholicism much as America feared Communism. Wherever it took hold 'triumphant', it demanded a totality of engagement that extended not only from the cradle to the grave but from the city and guild down to the innermost thought.

And it was often a beautiful system both in theory and in practice even if it became gaudy and tacky at the level of the 'volk'. Some of the greatest works of humanity were produced in the service of this totality. The book gives us a context for such art and the art itself .

Ivanic does not try to do too much (Catholics themselves may well find things they did not know but not too many such things). The text is far from academic. A lot of the work is, like the subject of the book, about showing rather than telling and this proves refreshing.

She themes her tale from the text (the belief system's intellectual core) through its heroes who explicate the text through to the clerical structures that hold everything together as a total working system.

She then looks at the role of the cathedral as show place for faith, at devotion in the home, pilgrimage and carnival, the communal aspects of Catholicism, Catholic spirituality in the individual and, finally, that sensorium of experience that so upsets the Protestant mind set.

Images range from third century wall paintings to a twenty-first Valentino dress via artists from Bosch and Breugel through Caravaggio and Velasquez and Zurbaran through to those minor artists who still maintain the iconography in the age of scepticism and the modern.

'Great works' and exemplars are effectively used to explain key Catholic concepts and experiences ranging from The Last Judgement, the Saints and Cathedral Facades through to Calvary, the Sacraments and Prayer. The whole becomes a full education into an alien, recalled or felt culture. show less

A beautifully illustrated exploration of Catholic art, symbols, and material culture that helps readers interpret religious imagery; more cultural and visual than doctrinal or devotional.