W

hen historians of art apply the term sacred art to any and every work

that has a religious subject, they are forgetting that art is essentially form. An art cannot properly be called sacred solely on the grounds that its subjects originate in a spiritual truth; its formal language also must bear witness to a similar origin. Such is by no means the case with a religious art like that of the Renaissance or of the Baroque period, which is in no way distinct, so far as style is concerned, from the fundamentally profane art of that era; neither the subjects which it borrows, in a wholly exterior and as it were literary manner, from religion, nor the devotional feelings with which it is permeated in appro priate cases, nor even the nobility of soul which sometimes fi nds expression in it, suffi ce to confer on it a sacred character. No art merits that epithet unless its forms themselves refl ect the spiritual vision characteristic of a particular religion. Every form is the vehicle of a given quality of being. Th e religious subject of a work of art may be as it were superimposed, it may have no relation to the formal language of the work, as is demonstrated by Christian art since the Renaissance; there are therefore essentially profane works of art with a sacred theme, but on the other hand there exists no sacred work of art which is profane in form, for there is a rigorous analogy between form and spirit. A spiritual vision necessarily fi nds its expression in a particular formal language; if that language is lacking, with the result that a so-called sacred art borrows its forms from some kind of profane art, then it can only be because a spiritual vision of things is also lacking. It is useless to try to excuse the Protean style of a religious art, or its indefi nite and ill-defi ned character, on grounds of the universality of dogma or the freedom of the spirit. Granted that spirituality in itself is independent of forms, this in no way im plies that it can be expressed and transmitted by any and every sort of form. Th rough its qualitative essence form has a place in the sensible order analogous to that of truth in the intellectual order; this is the signifi cance of the Greek notion of eidos. Just as a mental form such as a dogma or a doctrine can be the adequate, albeit limited, refl ection of a Divine Truth, so can a sensible form retrace a truth or a reality which transcends both the plane of sensible forms and the plane of thought. Every sacred art is therefore founded on a science of forms, or in other words, on the symbolism inherent in forms. It must be borne in mind that a symbol is not merely a conventional sign. It manifests its archetype by virtue of a defi nite ontological law; as Coomaraswamy has observed, a symbol is in a certain sense that to which it gives expression. For this very reason traditional symbolism is never without beauty: according to the spiritual view of the world, the beauty of