To the responders of Question #3, Joelle Hodge gave us helpful definitions of the fine arts (“primarily for aesthetic reasons and not for functional use”) and the common arts (in which “people can participate in and benefit from on some level”).

The “common arts” may be a term common among classical Christian schools but seldom used in wider society. We speak of carpentry and cooking (etc.), but seldom gather all such skills into a single word, as did Hugh of St. Victor in his 12th-century Didascalicon, as the “mechanical” occupations. (Hugh’s set of seven such manual occupations included fabric making, medicine, and theatrics—surely odd fellows to us!)

“Fine arts” is often used to designate the arts curriculum in schools and universities, and plenty of art museums, like Boston’s, are called museums “of fine arts.” Museums and galleries expect a proper comportment from visitors: whispering, no loud arguing with your friends, no touching, no eating . . . often with hands behind the back, a slow stroll from piece to piece, leaning forward without getting too close: I call it the museum gaze.

The nomenclature of fine arts is in fact a late-comer to the long historical tradition of the liberal arts, only kicking-in in the late 18th century. The category of the fine arts was fertilized by Romanticism, liberating the autonomous freedom of the artist to paint or sculpt as he or she wished, not beholding to a commission that prescribed theme, size, materials, and placement. On the downside, the artist had no assurance of reliable income. Commercial galleries came along, serving as middlemen between artists and buyers, or collectors. The artist could dream that his work might gain a place in a fine arts museum.

In the settings of galleries and museums we feel the beauty with no action required. Our experience is for “aesthetic reasons and not for functional use,” in Joelle’s phrase: a passive beholding without moral responsibility.

Across a much longer history of the liberal arts tradition—before Romanticism—works of art were put to work, expected to clarify and enhance the works of the people as they gathered in churches and chapels, in town halls and piazzas, in monastery dining halls and meeting rooms, in the palazzi of the wealthy; assisting the work enacted at the altar, in the baptistry, from the pulpit, and around the public fountain. Works of art were woven into the fabric of the city and community.

Circling around the central committee room in the 14th-century Town Hall in Siena are frescoes elaborating the virtues and vices that make for good and bad government. Raphael’s famous frescoes on the four walls of Pope Julius’s library did the job of a visual card-catalog of the Pope’s books in theology and philosophy, poetry and jurisprudence. “Last Suppers” were almost always painted on the end-wall of monastery refectories, drawing the community into the place of our Lord’s final instructions. We go to the Uffizi Museum to see Botticelli’s masterpiece, “Primavera.” In fact, the painting was commissioned by a father as attractive edification in the bedroom of his teenaged son. (See E.H. Gombrich’s essay, “Botticelli’s Mythologies,” in Symbolic Images [40-41].)

I’m coming to the persuasion that it would be more fruitful to set aside the binary pair of fine and common arts and recover the older use of “art” as applied to any number of trained skills: “the art of preaching,” “the art of cooking,” “the art of needlepoint,” “the art of joinery,” “the art of public speaking,” and so forth.

I can think of no better touchstone than the Belltower alongside the Duomo in Florence. Wrapping around the lowest two sections is an encyclopedic series of bas-relief medallions representing the arts of human being and civic welfare. Not surprisingly, the cardinal and theological virtues, the seven sacraments, the seven liberal arts, have their places. More striking to us will be the sets of the arts that mark and enhance the collective life of the city: the arts of jurisprudence, medicine, architecture; the skills of agriculture, animal husbandry, blacksmithing, navigation, weaving, woodworking, sculpture, painting, ceramic, music, and, not to pass over, the art of festivals!

The arrangements suggest no particular hierarchy among these livelihoods, no sharp distinction between mechanical arts and creative arts, between fine and common. In fact, the purpose of the Belltower is to gather together the worthy skills and the virtues of character needed to foster a strong, societal fabric. I think of the phrase “arts of thriving”—in the definition of the common arts given to us by Joelle.

A personal observation: The rapid loss of hand-skill in our own age is no less worrisome than the public erosion of the skills of language and thought. Many of us in contemporary society —pecking our way through the day with thumbs on our smartphones—have become “all thumbs.” Our hand-held technologies have subverted our bodily engagement with our families, our neighbors, and the natural environment around us. We check our weather app rather than stepping out the front door to register temperature and humidity. We can’t keep track of bird populations or tree health. In the car, we pay more attention to our map app than to the actual terrain around us. We don’t settle long enough in the same place to recognize long-term patterns and the changing needs of neighborhoods. 

I look to our classical Christian schools to splice together creatively the liberal and common arts.

"The museum gaze"