Trying to explain the effect of Denyse Thomasos’ immense, complex, abstract paintings, Fr. Dan Donovan reaches for St. Thomas Aquinas.

The Vatican Museums comprise 54 galleries of which the Sistine Chapel is undoubtedly the most famous. They exhibit more than 20,000 significant pieces of art, a mere fraction of the works in the collection of over 70,000. These include sculptures, paintings, maps and more, with the pièce de resistance being Michelangelo’s Volta della Cappella Sistina, a High Renaissance art masterpiece painted in only four years by the 33-year-old prodigy.

Our world is filled with positive and negative spaces — cracks and openings, fissures and holes. It is human nature to want to fill these spaces, whether through words into silence or action into stillness. How often have we seen someone babbling to fill in an uncomfortable silence, unable to let the stillness take hold?

Christmas is a time to celebrate for Fr. Herman Falke each year, but that celebration will be special as he marks the release of his latest book.

VATICAN CITY -- Adam Piekarski, a homeless man from Lódz, Poland, never imagined that the sketches he would draw in his free time while waiting for the public showers near Bernini’s Colonnade would lead to the opportunity of a lifetime.

When Pablo Picasso said “The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls,” it wasn’t a casual remark. Picasso thought a lot about his own soul, the soul of the Spanish nation, the soul of 20th-century modern art, and he thought about it in very Catholic terms.

The Diocese of Hamilton is home to a Heritage Edition of The Saint John’s Bible. It is a fine art reproduction of a handwritten and hand-illuminated Bible that was created in collaboration with Saint John’s Abbey and University and celebrated British calligrapher Donald Jackson. 

When Emmaus O’Herlihy prays the Magnificat every evening, he’s thinking about how young and powerless Mary was when she discovered she was pregnant and carrying the Saviour of the world.

Flowing from the brush of Sir Peter Paul Rubens, the art of persuasion is monumental, overwhelming, seductive and never quite as straightforward as it might at first appear.

Former Toronto cardinal, Aloysius Ambrozic, wasn’t a big collector of art.