Letting Art Become Prayer in the Work of Fr. Dunstan Massey, OSB, at Westminster Abbey, Mission, BC
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Letting Art Become Prayer in the Work of Fr. Dunstan Massey, OSB, at Westminster Abbey, Mission, BC Kathryn Wehr, Managing Editor Keywords Fr. Dustan Massey OSB, Westminster Abbey BC, Benedictine artists, monk artists, Benedictine abbey, Catholic art and architecture, Benedict and Scholastica Some readers may have had the pleasure of visiting the Dominican Convent of San Marco in Florence—now a museum—where the fifteenth-century friar-artist Fra Angelico adorned each of the cells with a tempura fresco of a scene from the lives of Christ and the Virgin Mary. One can easily imagine being a novice brought to his cell and told: this will be your scene to contemplate; this art will become an integral part of your prayer. Click for larger view View full resolution For the Benedictine monks of Westminster Abbey in Mission, British Columbia, Canada, the art of Fr. Dunstan Massey, OSB (1924–) has played a similar role. Having entered as a trained artist, Father Massey has been called upon over the course of his long monastic life to adorn various parts of his monastery in paint and sculpture. Even now, at age 98, he is working on a new Stations of the Cross series.1 His work not only adds color and sacred subjects to a modern concrete abbey church and buildings, but also enriches the prayer of the monks and all who come to pray with them. [End Page 156] Click for larger view View full resolution The Last Visit of Benedict and Scholastica, from the series The Life of St. Benedict, 1966– 1967, Fr. Dunstan Massey, OSB. Tempura and India ink. 5'6" by 2'8". Westminster Abbey cloister walk, Mission, BC. Used with permission. The selection on this issue’s cover is from an area not often seen by visitors, but regularly seen by the monks: the closet in the cloister walk containing the cucullas, or choir robes. Above this large closet are three paintings of the life of St. Benedict, with subjects taken from Gregory the Great’s Dialogues. Each measures 5'6" by 2'8".2 Our cover, which is from the third panel, shows the discussion between Benedict and his sister Scholastica and how as the evening wore on and Benedict announced he must depart, Scholastica bowed her head and prayed for God to send a storm to prevent him from leaving. When Benedict heard the thunder and lightning, “he was dismayed and said: ‘God forgive you, sister. What have you done?’ She answered, ‘Look, I asked and you wouldn’t listen. So I asked my Lord and he listened.’ . . . So it was entirely right that she who loved more should accomplish more.”3 The full panel also has a scene taken from the next chapter of the Dialogues, where Gregory the Great recounts how three days later Benedict “looked up and saw the soul of his sister leave her body and fly to the heavenly heights in the form of a dove.”4 [End Page 157] With that in mind, one can now picture the Westminster monks putting on their cucullas and being reminded again and again of the Lord’s response to Scholastica’s great love. This art, in turn, infuses their prayer. While Father Massey’s subjects are always sacred, his style is clearly modern and we can see a kinship with his major influences: William Blake, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, and the Old Masters.5 His early monastic work drew from the Beuronese style—a late-nineteenth-century sacred art school based at the Benedictine abbey at Beuron, Germany, which blended naturalism with classical poses and proportions.6 Massey describes his technique in this Life of St. Benedict series as a turning point in his style toward a more spatial and angular composition with more subtle shading: The flat, hard-edged linear manner of Beuron gave way to a fully modeled chiaroscuro within a spatial composition, all of which would characterize the later work. The silvery shading of a monochromatic underpainting (with diluted India ink) allowed the modeling to register with subtle tonal variations. This was so even when a single colour value was laid over light or dark in the underpainting. Lighter...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.099 | 0.031 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".