ars longa

Ten years ago I gave a talk at Vassar College and participated in some conversations with faculty of various liberal-arts colleges. During those conversations I met and had some great chats with an art historian named Andrew Tallon. We hit it off, I thought — he seemed at once utterly gentle and immensely intelligent — and I started scheming ways to get him to Baylor. I thought he would be a great conversation partner, particularly for those of us interested in Christianity and the arts — I especially wanted to introduce him to my colleague Natalie Carnes, who works on the theology of beauty. And I also thought that Andrew, who was a Catholic Christian but did not feel especially comfortable being vocal about his faith, might benefit from spending some time around people who are quite public about their Christianity.

We exchanged some emails, but eventually Andrew fell silent, and later I learned that he was gravely ill with cancer. I never did manage to get him to Baylor. In November of 2018 he died, aged 49.

When I met him, Andrew had already made a complex series of high-resolution digital scans of the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris — a building that had obsessed him since he spent a year as a child living in Paris. (His birthplace was Leuven, Belgium.) He told a journalist that “There was a biblical, a moral imperative to build a perfect building, because the stones of the building were directly identified with the stones of the Church” — that is, the people of God. “I like to think that this laser scanning work and even some of the conventional scholarship I do is informed by that important world of spirituality. It’s such a beautiful idea.” It turns out that, however diffident Andrew was, or thought he was, about his faith, that faith informed his work thoroughly.

And when the cathedral was maimed by a terrible fire in April 2019, just a few months after Andrew’s death, everyone involved in the restoration immediately realized that Andrew’s work would prove invaluable in the enormous task facing them.

So when I saw images of the completely and magnificently restored cathedral, my first thought was: Well done, Andrew. Well done, good and faithful servant. I hope you can see what you helped to make possible.