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Monday, July 27, 2009
SISTER Wendy Beckett is best known for her BBC television series on the history of art, which have taken her all over the world and been seen by millions.
She came late to the study of art history, but, in her dual roles as author and television presenter, she has more than compensated since. She claims not to know how many books she has written, and, given that her primary vocation is a religious one, it seems best she be believed; the tally is more than 20, but she says "only three of these were big books."
Beckett is not just a nun; she is also a hermit and would live a life of isolation were it not for her interest in art. Born in South Africa, and raised in Edinburgh, Beckett joined the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur in 1946, and studied English at Oxford. She trained as a teacher and returned to South Africa, to lecture at the University of the Witwatersrand. In 1970, she suffered health problems and abandoned teaching. She was granted a papal dispensation to become a consecrated virgin, and went to live in a monastery in Norfolk, under the care of the Carmelite nuns.
A caravan on the monastery grounds is Beckett’s home to this day. For some years, she translated medieval documents, before deciding, in 1980, that she would like to pursue art history. Beckett devotes most of her time to prayer, apart from the two hours or so she gives to work each day. She seldom communicates with anyone, apart from her prioress and the nun assigned to bring her food and fresh laundry. Despite the high profile her television work has brought her, she rarely grants interviews; on this occasion, she has agreed to be contacted at the home of her friend, a Catholic priest, as she has neither a phone nor the internet.
The interview is a task she feels obliged to undertake in deference to her publishers, to promote her new book, Encounters with God: In Quest of the Ancient Icons of Mary, a slim tome that recalls her travels to Rome, the Ukraine and Sinai to view a number of icons of the Virgin Mary. The title, she hastens to explain, is not her own. "I’m not much good at titles," she says. "I had intended calling the book The Eight Surviving Pre-iconoclastic Icons of the Virgin, but that was not considered snappy enough. Someone suggested calling it The Lost Virgins, but that was inaccurate, of course. But what I was doing was looking at the icons through encounters with God, and opening up to the spiritual world, and that was how we settled on the book’s title, in the end. The subtitle, In Quest of the Ancient Icons of Mary, helped describe it a little better, I think."
The icons in question date from the early centuries of Christianity, a time when such artworks are not widely known to have existed. Thousands of these Christians icons are believed to have been destroyed in the Byzantine Iconoclasm – a period from 730 to 842, when a series of emperors of Byzantium banned religious images – and it is little short of miraculous that any have survived. Beckett says their existence came as a surprise to her.
"I had known of the existence of icons from the 10th century on, but not from before then," she says. "Then, an art catalogue came out that had a big focus on these icons, and that opened my eyes to how mysterious they were. They’re beautiful; they’re just so different, so poetic and unconventional."
At her publishers’ request, Beckett travelled to Rome to see a number of the icons there. "But there were two others I couldn’t see in Rome. So, I made the pilgrimages to Kiev and to Sinai. It was very much a journey of discovery, of discovering the pre-iconoclastic images of our faith." Beckett likens her investigation of the icons to an archaeological dig.
"Archaeologists often discover layers of ash, where everything from a particular period was wiped out," she says. "There was definitely a layer of ash in the 8th and 9th centuries. These icons are the lucky survivors; it was wonderful to get so close to them."
The icons Beckett travelled to see are, as the title of her book suggests, of the Virgin Mary rather than of Jesus, but, she says, "in a way they are icons of the child Christ, as much as of his mother."
Different theories exist as to why there are no surviving portraits of the adult Jesus, from his own time or from many centuries afterwards. One school of thought has it that it would have been considered a sacrilege for an artist to describe the face of Jesus, but Beckett says there may also have been more practical considerations, that early Christian artists avoided portraying a literal image of Jesus for fear of persecution by the Romans.
"From 200-300 AD, there are written references to images of Jesus, but none survived before the 6th century," she says.
"As far as we can understand from the catacombs, the only images there are of Jesus are of the Good Shepherd, which the Romans would not have understood as relating to the Lord. As far as they were concerned, the Good Shepherd could have referred to any shepherd, so they would hardly have understood what the artists were about, or wanted to punish them for it. The early Christians also used the image of the lamb or the fish; the Greek word for fish is written the same as Jesus."
The idea of signing their works would have been entirely alien to the icons’ makers, partly out of modesty, but also to protect their identity.
"We know absolutely nothing of the artists," says Beckett. "The icons were painted as acts of worship and it is only sheer happenstance that these eight have survived. At various times, each of the eight has been my favourite. The image on the cover is very strange, when you see it first, for instance, but then you realise it has great grace and beauty. But the quality of all the icons is very high. One is said to have been sent to Mount Sinai by the Emperor Justinian, so that would obviously have been a work of top quality."
Beckett’s book is fleshed out somewhat with a section on some other early Christian artworks, which depict the Biblical story of Jonah and the whale.
"I hadn’t known that these sculptures of Jonah, which are kept in a museum in Cleveland, were in existence," she says.
"At first, I was very dubious about them. But they were made for an early Christian family, along with busts of the husband and wife. All these images of Jonah and the whale are of God rescuing the soul and delivering believers from harm, of course. And I was glad to use the images in the book, as they depict another aspect of Christianity."
Beckett has claimed more than once that she is retiring from writing and television work, but it seems that art is too powerful an influence to resist.
"I love Cezanne more than anyone, I think; I couldn’t single out any one of his works. And Poussin; his two series on the seven sacraments are among the greatest works ever painted," she says.
Beckett sees her devotion to God, and love of art, as compatible, and understands the need for the faithful to create religious images, whether they be of Jesus or the Virgin Mary.
"It’s a deep instinct in all Christians to want to see something, though they know that God is invisible," she says. "Every Catholic household would once have had an image of the Sacred Heart, for instance, which was not great art, but it was still art. It’s the same with Hindus and Buddhists, they also have their religious images, while Islam has its wonderful calligraphy, which is almost like abstract art."
Beckett is 79, but is already at work on a follow-up to Encounters with God, provisionally titled Iconic Christ, Icons of our Lord, which she hopes to finish late this year, or early in 2010.
"There’s also talk of making a documentary on Encounters with God," she says. "I’d like to see it made, but I wish someone else would do the narration." Perhaps surprisingly, Beckett is no great fan of her television work, and seems oblivious to how popular a figure it has made her. "I’ve never actually seen any of the five television series I’ve presented," she says. "The community here in Norfolk has seen them, but I’d rather not."
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