On the Wall or Over the Altar

In today’s second “On the Square” article, art historian Matthew Milliner reflects on whether art made for use in worship should hang in museums at all, as a Vatican scholar has suggested moving Raphael’s painting of the Transfiguration out of the Vatican’s own museum and back into a church. It’s not an easy question, Milliner writes, especially when many museums are trying

to situate themselves in the era following the collapse of the Enlightenment ideals that generated museums in the first place. Rampant secularism still, of course, endures in many museums; but others have been attempting if not to replace religious settings, at least not to forget them, and even sometimes—however cautiously—to evoke them. (And this is to say nothing of the religious foundations that have founded their own museums, such as St. Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt or Austria’s Melk Abbey.)

He offers an answer, based on the story of the Transfiguration, in Raphael Among the People .

By the way, for those of you who don’t read the comments on “On the Square” articles, you may want to look at those on Stephen Barr’s Much Ado About “Nothing” , as Dr. Barr has joined in.