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Sacred Artists for the Eucharistic Revival

Sarah Cortez on December 28, 2023

Picture it (above): The St. Edmund’s Sacred Art Institute located in Mystic, CT has issued a call to U.S. artists for entries of artwork for a National Eucharistic Revival Art Exhibit.

“We are working with the National Eucharistic Congress and the Blessed Michael McGivney Pilgrimage Center in New Haven, CT to gather artwork nationally for the exhibit that begins next May 2024,” says Deacon Francis Valliere, executive assistant to the CEO and coordinator of the St. Edmund’s Sacred Art Institute. The Benedict XVI Institute has agreed to cosponsor and promote this contest.  To further this ambitious broad-based national call for entries, the Institute has already benefited from the strong leadership team of Anthony Visco and Dan DeLouise.

As artistic director of the Institute, Anthony Visco brings an international reputation based on decades of teaching, consulting, and fulfilling commissions in liturgical and sacred art.  Recipient of a Fullbright-Hayes grant in Italy, he studied the Florentine School of Art and Architecture as a young man, and his career has continued to soar. Twice awarded the prestigious Arthur Ross Award for sculpture within a Classical setting, Visco has also been awarded the Henry Hering Memorial Medal by the National Sculpture Society. Always in demand as a mentor and teacher, Visco also directs the Atelier for the Sacred Arts in Philadelphia, PA. Of particular importance to the current Eucharistic Revival exhibit, Visco brings his experience participating in the 43rd International Eucharistic Congress in Philadelphia, his hometown, in 1976. “There was an exhibit of liturgical and sacred art at the Convention Center. Many commissions were given to artists and their works can still be seen in our churches.”

Dan DeLouise, the Institute’s artist-in-residence as of October 2023, is a previous gallery artist-owner whose career spanned both the worlds of commercial illustration in the toy and game industry and the plein-air traditions of fine art painting before his transition into the sacred art world. Also an award-winning artist in each phase of his career, DeLouise brings a passion for seeing God’s beauty in the external world of natural creation. “There is something about painting in nature that brings us closer to the hand of God, the ‘Ultimate Creator,’ whose designs we as artists so often strive to imitate. It becomes almost impossible not to contemplate the heart of God as we begin our own works by observing the vast beauty in the gifts of nature.”

Uniting Valliere, Visco, and DeLouise is a love for the sacred arts born in a love of God. This love for the Divine has shored up these men through the hard choices and tough situations engendered by trying to follow God’s will in their own sacred-art careers. “Faith is going to require us, at some point, to step out into the unknown,” says De Louise speaking about his own transition from creating art for the secular world into the world of sacred art. “With each move I made in a direction towards Him [God] in my work, I began to gain confidence watching how He would provide for me each step of the way.”

Another important value uniting these three men is their desire to create opportunities for sacred artists to learn skills, create community, and be ready for commissions, exhibitions, and visibility. This desire to assist artists forms the sturdy foundation of the men’s work at the Institute as they work to create a vibrant center where artists at all stages of their careers can come to learn and be nourished by the joy of advancing in their skills while finding spiritual nourishment in daily Mass, 24/7 Adoration, and the opportunity for spiritual direction. “Our goal is to bring together sacred artists . . . to promote the sacred arts and fill the churches, institutions, homes, and galleries with God’s sacred beauty, “ says Valliere, “With Anthony Visco directing the curriculum and Dan DeLouise onsite, we are working to bring the best instructors to teach on the Island.  We aim to be a nationally known Sacred Art Institute employing the highest caliber of teachers.”

At present, plans for the juried art selected for the Institute’s Eucharistic exhibit include an April 2024 opening exhibition at the Institute’s Enders Island location in Mystic, CT.  Then the exhibit will travel to the Blessed McGivney Center in New Haven, CT from May to August 2024. A selected group of works will travel to the Lucas Oil Stadium in mid-July for the National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis, IN.  Negotiations are underway for additional locations.

One of the sacred artists who have responded to the call for entries is Ann Schmalstieg Barrett, an instructor at Franciscan University and the Sacred Art Institute at Enders Island, among other institutions: “I am indebted to artists of previous generations who have revealed the mystery and beauty of the Eucharist through their work. One source that deepened my devotion to the Blessed Sacrament is St. Thomas Aquinas’s prayer ‘Adoro te Devote’  Set to a simple melody, it offers poetic imagery that has greatly enriched my meditation. I see the chant expressed in Jan Van Kessel’s painting entitled ‘Altar Niche with Symbols of the Eucharist,’ created almost 400 years after Aquinas entered into eternal life. It is exciting to continue the work of these artists and the many others who have helped to illuminate the hearts of the faithful to perceive the beauty of the Eucharist.”

Another artist responding to the call is Eric Armusik, a Pennsylvania-based Classical figurative artist for three decades. He says, “We must reanimate the world for Christ. It’s imperative for faithful artists to rebuke the darkness of the modern world that has failed humanity and deprived us of beauty.  There is no greater gift we have received from God than the Eucharist and attending Mass regularly . . . As Catholics and artists, we are responsible for sharing the truth and inspiring faith.”

The call for entries on the Institute’s webpage lists various possibilities of Eucharistic themes from the Old and New Testaments to spark creative ideas, such as the Marriage Feast at Cana, Manna in the Desert, the Miracles of the Loaves and Fishes, and Elijah fed by the ravens. The list is replete with reminders that many great saints had a profound relationship with Jesus Christ in His Eucharistic Presence. From St. Tarcisius, an early Christian boy-martyr in pagan Rome, to the more recent Blessed Carlo Acutis, a soccer-playing teen in Italy, the annals of Christianity contain saints devoted to the Eucharist, such as St. Peter Julian Eymard, St. Padre Pio, St. Teresa of Calcutta, and many others.

Deeper than any list of names, however, is the mystery and miracle of Christ’s Presence in the consecrated bread and wine. The Catechism of the Catholic Church in paragraph 1337 reminds us to see the Eucharist as the fulfillment of Christ’s pledge of love: “The Lord, having loved those who were his own, loved them to the end . . . In order to leave them a pledge of this love, in order never to depart from his own and to make them sharers in his Passover, he instituted the Eucharist as the memorial of his death and Resurrection, and commanded his apostles to celebrate it until his return.”

Grounding the call for entries and the desire to curate such a broad-based Eucharistic Revival exhibit is their wish to bring the spiritual gift of a closer relationship with Jesus Christ to a wide range of viewers across the U.S. All three men express their own love of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist in eloquent terms. For Valliere, “I find no greater peace than when I am in the presence of the Eucharist. As a deacon, I have the honor and privilege of celebrating a Holy Hour with Exposition [of the Blessed Sacrament] . . . I feel a closeness to God and an inner peace surpassing any other experience.”  DeLouise says: “[There is] a spiritual nourishment that I have only found in the reception of our Eucharistic Lord.”  And Visco gives us this peek into one of his experiences during Eucharistic Adoration:  “It was a Sunday afternoon and the only lights were the burning candles. I was alone with a friend who had converted to the Catholic Church. We watched the natural light fade and the church became darker as the sun set . . . afterwards we spoke of how we were watching and experiencing Time and Eternity, how the fading light was Time and the Eucharist remained Eternal . . . the experience stayed with me.”

Just as Visco’s experience in the lowering dusk as he prayed in front of the Eucharist allowed God to speak into his deepest heart, the images in the National Eucharistic Revival exhibit will open people’s hearts and souls to be formed by God’s holy will. The current deadline for the submission of digital entries is February 20, 2024.  Further details are available at https://www.endersisland.org/national-eucharistic-art-exhibition

Sarah Cortez is president and founder of Catholic Literary Arts, www.catholicliteraryarts.org. An award-winning freelance writer and editor, she is a contributing editor at Catholic Arts Today. She writes for the National Catholic Register and Texas Catholic Herald.

The Great Renaissance Artist You’ve Never Seen Before

Charlotte Allen on February 12, 2020

The National Gallery of Art has put on an extraordinary exhibit of a great Renaissance artist who is almost unknown outside his native land: Alonso Berruguete (ca. 1486-1561) was the first and greatest sculptor of the Spanish Renaissance.

He is little-known outside of his native country, however, because much of his artwork is embedded in the massive gilded wooden retablos that he built as towering backdrops for the main altars in cathedrals and monastery churches in and around his native Valladolid in central Spain. The retablos, multi-leveled and crammed with multiple images, carved and painted, of Christ and the saints, some of enormous size so they could be seen by worshipers far below, cannot be transported. And the cities of Valladolid and Toledo, where Berruguete did most of his work, are slightly off the tourist trail, so few Americans are familiar with his sculpture.

For me and for many, that just changed as a result of this exhibition:

St. Benedict converting the Goth Zalla (monastery of San Benito el Real, Valladolid)

Fortunately for American lovers of art and especially sacred art, during one of its periodic anticlerical phases during the 1830s, the  Spanish government xpropriated and forcibly secularized the site of one of Berruguete’s most impressive altarpieces: the Benedictine monastery church of San Benito el Real in Valladolid.

Berruguete’s 40-foot-high retablo was mostly destroyed in this burst of iconoclasm and many of its sculptures ended up in a municipal museum. That made it possible for them to travel outside of Spain, and their portability has enabled the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to assemble the first major U.S. exhibition of Berruguete’s work.

The exhibition includes some of his most impressive sculptures from San Benito and nearby churches, together with paintings, drawings, and pieces by other Spanish artists who were contemporaries of his that give his output an artistic context. The exhibition, scheduled to run through February 17, is a small one: just 40 artworks in two rooms. It is complicated by the fact that Berruguete, like many successful artists of his time (and Andy Warhol in our own day), employed a workshop of apprentices to help fill his numerous commissions, so it is difficult to ascertain how much of any particular sculpture is actually the work of his own hand.

Ecce Homo (monastery of San Benito el Real, Valladolid)

Yet all of them—figures of the crucified Christ and his mother, saints, and Old Testament prophets–bear the mark of Berruguete’s unquestioned ability to meld wood, gilding, classical technique learned from Italian Renaissance masters, and a flair for emotional expressiveness into sculptures of astonishing religious intensity.

Valladolid, about 120 miles north of Madrid, was the capital of the kingdom of Castille during Berruguete’s lifetime and thus, effectively, the capital of Spain itself. Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castille were married in Valladolid in 1469, and their most famous protégé, Christopher Columbus, died there in 1506. Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, lived and worked in Valladolid. Berruguete’s father, Pedro Berruguete (ca. 1450-1504), was also an artist, even more talented as a painter than his son, if a Madonna and Child of his on exhibit at the National Gallery is any indication.

Pedro had brought the Renaissance to Spain in a different fashion, introducing a Flemish “Northern Renaissance” style of painting that influenced many Spanish artists besides himself. After Pedro’s death, his son Alonso, then age 18, took off for Italy, where he lived in Florence and Rome for thirteen years and developed his talent for sculpture, befriending and assisting Michelangelo, Andrea del Sarto, and Filippino Lippi, among others. He also became one of the early promulgators of Mannerism, the 16th-century artistic style that emphasized extreme emotive expression—often via elongated figures in contorted positions–over classical harmony in composition.

When Berruguete returned to Spain and transformed his Italian training into an alabaster relief titled The Resurrection for the cathedral in Valencia, his work suddenly became in high demand. The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella and heir to the Spanish throne, made him court painter and sculptor in 1520. He turned from stone sculpture to wood, the traditional material of the medieval Spanish retablo, and his workshop in Valladolid, together with other patronage from Charles, made him a wealthy man. He continued to work in wood, marble, and bronze until his death at nearly age 80.

Adoration of the Magi (Chapel of the Epiphany, church of Santiago Apostol, Valladolid)

Crucifixion (monastery of San Benito el Real, Valladolid)

The retablo sculptures of Berruguete on display at the National Gallery, lavishly gold-painted and brilliant with color, are nearly always twisted figures caught in moments of emotional agony or religious ecstasy. A sculpture from the San Benito church depicting Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac displays a crouching, open-mouthed, nearly nude Isaac, his hands bound behind him and his body bowed over with terror (his figure resembles one of Michelangelo’s male nudes on the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling), while the gray-bearded Abraham gazes at the viewer in as much torment as his son. Two wooden prophets writhe in the divine power that inspires them. The most thrilling of Berruguete’s statues in this exhibition are his crucified Christ flanked by his mother, Mary, and the apostle John; their enormous figures once crowned the pinnacle of the San Benito retablo. Mary and John, both wrapped in swirling, voluminous gilded garments, grieve for the dead Christ, but more calmly, as seems fitting, than the emotion-charged figures from below. As for Berruguete’s Christ, his body, gray in death and looking as though it were carved from stone, seems utterly at rest, the bloody work of redemption complete.

For Americans—and others of the New World—Berruguete’s sculptures will resonate in an additional way. The Spanish colonizers of the Americas brought their retablo tradition with them to the churches they built there. Artistic styles changed over the centuries, but anyone who has visited the California missions or the cathedrals in, say Mexico City or Cusco, will find Berruguete’s lavishly decorated wooden edifices startlingly familiar. We have one of Spain’s greatest sculptors to thank in part for one of our own architectural traditions.

Charlotte Allen is a D.C. based arts reporter for Catholic Arts Today and the author of The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus.

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