Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This essay advances a theological reappraisal of Impressionist painting as a modern mode of sacramental perception capable of renewing the contemplative imagination within a disenchanted West. While recent scholarship has interpreted Impressionism as a limit case of aesthetic immanence, reducing vision to light, temporality, and surface, this study argues that such immanence is not closed. Drawing on Aidan Nichols’s distinction between art made for the liturgy and art tutored by it and informed by David Fagerberg’s account of liturgy as the right ordering of reality itself, the argument proposes that Impressionist form can be evaluated according to precise theological criteria. Sustained ekphrastic analysis of Monet’s Portal of Rouen Cathedral in Morning Light (1894), Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire (c. 1902–1904), and Messiaen’s Louange à l’Immortalité de Jésus (1941) is brought into conversation with Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology of givenness, Pavel Florensky’s theology of perspective, and Augustine’s account of distentio animi. Read in this light, Impressionism emerges not as indifference to the sacred, but as a discipline of attention that disposes artist and perceiver toward participation in a liturgical reality already given in creation: a modern praeparatio evangelica whose formal achievements, though historically bounded, remain theologically available. The argument does not presume that Impressionist form is theological in intention, but that, when attended to with sufficient formal discipline, it may be recognized as consonant with theological accounts of perception.
Source: Religions
DOI: 10.3390/rel17060718
Author: Dominic A. Aquila
Institution: University of St. Thomas - Texas
Language: English
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,172
OpenAlex ID: W7165027476