REGINA: Tell us about the typology in Gothic art.
Daniel: In Gothic art, visual forms reflect invisible truths. God is like a light that illuminates the world; everything created reflects it, and teaches us something of God.
Typology connects the events of the Old Testament to events in the life of Jesus Christ in the Gospels. The Old Testament is like a shadow of the New. To use an example taught by Christ Himself, the serpent raised by Moses in the wilderness that healed the snakebitten Israelites from their wounds is a type of Christ lifted up on the Cross to heal us from sin. The Church Fathers applied this method to every word of holy writ, and the artists followed their teaching.
REGINA: And the natural symbolism?
Daniel: This symbolic vision was directed also to the natural world. Beasts, birds, plants, stones, celestial bodies all have allegorical meanings. I maintain this tradition, and expand it - for example, by applying it to American or Australian animals. Because the sun represents the full revelation of God in the New Testament, I draw saints with gold haloes. Because the moon represents the Old Testament, I draw prophets and patriarchs with
silver haloes.
REGINA: What is ‘sacred mathematics’?
Daniel: The Church Fathers interpreted all of the numbers that appear in the sacred scriptures symbolically, for it was God who ordered all things in number and measure and weight. Three represents divinity, for God exists in three Persons. Four represents mankind and the created world; the time and space inhabited by mankind have four basic divisions, the seasons of the year and the cardinal directions that correspond to the rivers flowing out of Paradise. The interaction of Heaven and Earth, of God and Man, is represented by twelve and seven, the product and sum of three and four. This is why twelve and seven appear again and again in holy writ.
REGINA: You say you’re a revivalist, not a re-enactor depicting previous art.
Daniel: I don’t think of Gothic as a historic style that requires me to pretend that I am making art living in 12th Century. I think of it as an especially excellent kind of Christian art that upholds principles that are always and everywhere true, even now. If we read the Old Testament, we can still see prefigurements and illustrate them. If we look at the natural world we can still symbols in plants and animals. I do not feel obligated to use symbols that are based on faulty knowledge of the natural world - for example, a pelican reviving its dead chicks with its blood - but I do feel obligated to seek the symbol with the knowledge that I have.
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