Van der Weyden (1400–1464) was a Dutch Renaissance painter, active in a time period and ecclesial culture flush with mystical theologies rooted in the Song of Songs, many of which are reflected in his treatment of the Pietà subject-Mary receiving the dead Christ in her arms after his Crucifixion.
Having seen the impact of the saints on Undset’s literary art, let us see how they impacted the visual arts, taking up the example of Rogier van der Weyden’s painting of the Pietà (above, and viewable in high-resolution here). Surely this would be a most effective Christian apologetic. Undset would urge us to consider a third “argument,” a sort of combination of Ratzinger’s two: art about the saints. Her art is a part of Norwegian culture, the work of a woman converted by the saints, aimed at the possibility of making more saints. Catherine, were such children of God, converting culture one by one, and allowing the Church to “realize” herself. Because God is our eternal blessedness, a child of God becomes a blessing for his fellows.”
Catherine of Siena, Undset says, “If a man loves God, he will be able to love his neighbor, attain wisdom, and to be just and truthful. For Sigrid, the saints were loci of Revelation and living Beatitudes, capable of communicating the love of God with great persuasion, and so making a culture more and more Christian. Indeed, she understood her own Norse culture to have been transformed-converted-by the saints. So I had to submit.” In this experience of God’s friends, Undset considered herself just one of the many who were so affected by the saints. Undset had converted to Catholicism (from Atheism) in 1924, and when asked about her conversion, she replied, “I had ventured too near the abode of truth in my research about ‘God’s friends,’ as the saints are called in Old Norse texts. Undset won the Nobel Prize in 1928 for her trilogy, Kristin Lavransdatter. Sigrid Undset (1882–1949) was herself an artist and a convert. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger once reported that “the only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb.” In this month marked by the feast of All Saints, I wish to take up examples of the truth of Ratzinger’s statement, one from the literary arts and one from the visual arts, both related to the saints.
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