Renaissance Rome and Emersonian Boston: Michelangelo and Sargent, between triumph and doubt

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2002 by Shand-Tucci, Douglass

No more. And Sargent in the throes of the First World War emerges, in my thinking after reading Promey's study, as something of a prophet himself, however reluctant; surely he was the first to glimpse and record, as part of so historically and artistically ambitious a work as The Triumph of Religion, what now seems almost a foreboding that, whatever else it was going to be, the twentieth threatened to be exactly the horrific century it turned out to be. No wonder, indeed, that by its end the scales would be seen to be tipping back toward what Sargent would have seen as worse than superstition. Or that a bishop (indeed, the primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, Richard Holloway) would in one brilliant, heartfelt book after another, at the turn of the twenty-first century, take as his subject what one journalist has referred to as "the wound of religion"-not the triumph but the wound-an acknowledgment that the response at the end of the twentieth century of Western elites to Christianity can only be, however reverent or alert, doubt.

That is why the great blank panel over the staircase of Sargent Hall which Sargent had planned as the climax of his murals-never mind the Boston Public Library's utterly misleading guide-is perhaps now (whether deliberately or not on the artist's part) the most poignant and for me the most powerful part of The Triumph of Religion. It is a finale, this blank, for the twentieth century, after which who of us would presume to fill it? It is also a finale, after all, for this majestic cycle because so telling of its era and its trajectory in the long aftermath of Emerson's Boston.

The editor acknowledges the permission of the Trustees and President of the Public Library of the City of Boston to reproduce two of Sargent's drawings, and the assistance in this connection of the staffs of the Fine Arts and Print Departments. See also the library's excellent website on the Sargent murals, with color photographs and diagrams, and text by Sally Promey:

1Sally M. Promey, Painting Religion in Public: John Singer Sargent's Triumph of Religion at the Boston Public Library. (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999).

DOUGLASS SHAND-TUCCI*

* Douglass Shand-Tucci is a historian of American art and architecture and Boston/New England studies. His latest book, due out next April, is The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality, and the Shaping of American Culture (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2003). In the 1980s Shand-Tucci directed, with architect Daniel J. Coolidge of Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson, and Abbott, the first two stages of the Boston Public Library restoration, which recently was awarded the J. Harleston Parker Gold medal by the Boston Society of Architects.