Sargent's truncated 'Triumph': art and religion at the Boston Public Library, 1890-1925 - painter John Singer Sargent

Sargent never intended the latecomers, Synagogue and Church, to stand at the apex of his cultural evolutionary scheme. Rather, like Renan, he understood both institutions to represent premodern dimensions of religion; he endorsed an understanding of the two that eventuated in the library's labeling them the "Medieval Contrast" ("medieval" here was understood not just as a historical period but also as a reference to the superstitious, primitive, and archaic).(41) In this rendering, both Synagogue and Church had been superseded by the still emphatically Christian but also emphatically more expansive Sermon on the Mount. The sources Sargent cited for Synagogue and Church (Reims, Strasbourg, NotreDame in Paris) suggest the weighting that the artist claimed he intended; the sculptural programs of the medieval cathedrals placed the allegorical figures in supporting roles, directing the spectator to the primary Gospel scene or narrative. Like Renan, Sargent anticipated a religion free of external forms and institutions. Like Renan, he positioned the Sermon on the Mount as religion's pinnacle, as the foundation for all future expressions. The fact that the Sermon technically represented an event chronologically prior to the doctrinal crystallizations of the Middle Ages and Counter-Reformation was inconsequential. Sargent's plan freed the Sermon from historical sequence anti recast it in subjective, experiential, and spiritualized terms. The Sermon on the Mount now represented the summation of a revolutionary religion of the heart.

If for Sargent and many of his contemporaries, religion had ceased to be "materialistic" dogma or institution, what remained was subjective experience. From this perspective, the external trappings of religion gave way to interior imagination and will. As T. J. Jackson Lears argues in No Place of Grace, the cultivation of these qualities constituted one significant adjustment to the late-nineteenth-century crisis of religious and cultural authority.(42) Taking his lead from Renan, Sargent relocated and reaffirmed a sense of the ultimate in the individual's inner relationship with a divine spirit. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, in a manner at least outwardly consistent with Sargent's understanding, liberal Protestant exegeses of the Sermon on the Mount frequently described the Kingdom of God announced in the scriptural text in spiritualized and even aestheticized terms.(43) Agnostic Violet Paget (an author and critic who wrote under the pseudonym Vernon Lee), the painter's childhood friend, recognized that the appeal Renan held for Sargent was not simply archaeological. In fact, she suggested, Renan offered Sargent the perfect combination of archaeology and imagination. Renan's scholarly works provided objective documentation of a movement toward the authority of the subjective in religious experience. In a brief essay written in response to Sargent's Pagan Gods, Lee commented: "when all the exegetic learning of Renan may have grown obsolete, his [imaginative] visions of patriarchs and prophets will still remain as art."(44)