Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
In our series of reflections on Franciscan spirituality, we're going to begin to look at the importance of art in life, in the spiritual life, and in the Franciscan tradition as well. Dante, in his Inferno, synthesizes the genesis and the relations of art and nature when he says in his 11th canto, he says, "Philosophy for one who understands points out, and not just in one place, how nature follows as she takes her course, the divine intellect and divine art. When it can, your art would follow nature, just as a pupil imitates his master, so that your art is almost God's grandchild," he says. So art that follows nature is almost like God's grandchild, according to Dante. 
A good artist, a child of God, giving birth to a work of art is almost like giving God a little unique grandson or granddaughter, says the Franciscan Third Order poet. Art has its place in the life of the spirit and also its autonomy too. Actually, it's one of the highest forms. It reveals the Absolute with a capital A, and in doing so, it has theological foundation. 
In order to better penetrate its origins, you have to go back to the principle of everything, to the Blessed Trinity, and in it, admire God, who's the first and incomparable artist. In the generation of the Word, the splendor of the glory and stamp of God's nature, as we read in Hebrews 1:3, the image of the invisible God, Colossians 1:15, the Father sculpts his divine substance in a living and perfect self-portrait, identical to him by nature, distinct by person, a self-portrait in which he contemplates and loves himself.
The Word is therefore the art of the Father, as St. Augustine says. He's the most beautiful one, as St. Bonaventure notes. In creation, we admire the second artist, the inspirer of every human art, the Incarnate Word in which all things were created and everything subsists, says St. Paul, Colossians 1:16-17. The Word Incarnate, exemplar of every perfection, is the source of all beauty. All creatures, from the smallest birds to the greatest mammals, from the cedars of Lebanon to the little blades of grass which we find along the street, they're all beautiful because they reflect a ray of the beauty of Christ Jesus. 
St. Augustine says in his Confessions, "You, Lord, have made them. Because you are beautiful, they are beautiful." And in his work, True Religion, Augustine says that there's no one among the creatures, which does not manifest something harmonious and proportionate in its kind, not by virtue of a particular science, he says, but by an order inherent in its nature, regulated by the supreme law of harmony. 
Even more so, the creatures couldn't even exist if they were deprived of their own beauty, which inserts them into the general harmony of things. The Word Incarnate, in whom there is life, as we read in John 1:4, communicating outside of himself, creates images of himself. He produces a most perfect art, a type, and a model of every true art. 
In that way, all creation really is a great work of art, an art of peerless beauty and harmony. Bonaventure, in his Commentary on the Sentences, says, “The Son is called the archetypal world and the full art of all living things according to the eternal disposition.” After the Word Incarnate, man, made in the likeness of God, man is the third artist. He grasps the spark of what is true in creation and transfigures it in his own imagination, which is the forge of aesthetics, and he expresses it in the beauty of his works. 
In this way, says Dante, human art is the grandchild of God because it imitates the nature and the work of God himself. Every artist conceives the work that he's going to make first within himself. Then he makes it real outside of himself, molding the material in its design, its colors, or its sounds or words. In doing so, he does imitate God. He imitates the Father in his generation ad intra of the Word. He imitates the Word Incarnate in the creation of the whole universe. 
But the difference between God and man is, of course, measureless. It's infinite. Man doesn't generate an interior word, nor does he create any substance. Rather, he recreates, he reshapes. He reveals the reality grasped by his senses and transfigured by the fantasy according to his own intuition.
Man also has need of a technique which is like the law of the spiritual being that's finite and works in the material, whereas God is sovereignly free because he's perfect and has in himself law and harmony. Or better, in himself, he is eternal law. He is eternal harmony. So in his artistic work, man simply imitates God, conceiving and expressing something that's a reflection of the Incarnate Word, which being the supreme beauty and the most sublime reality, remains the highest and unattainable ideal to which man always tends, even if not in a conscious way. 
One could even say that the essence of art, and as much as it's an expression of beauty, the essence of art is a search for the divine because only God is the supreme beauty. But a divine which we can express can only be an incarnate design, and the incarnate design, the incarnate divine is Christ Jesus himself. Jesus is the infallible master of what is true. He's the perfect operator of the good, and he's the complete synthesis of beauty. 
As the Word of God, Jesus is the expression of uncreated beauty. As man, he's the ideal of created beauty, the central animator and inspirer of Christian art. The torment of every true artist should be to reveal in beauty the mystery of Christ Jesus. 
But every person really is an artist in a more profound sense because every person can accomplish the greatest work of art. What's the greatest work of art? To sculpt the image of Jesus Christ crucified in our souls, to reshape, to mold oneself in one's interior disposition, to reshape within us the features of Christ who's our model and the ideal toward which we tend, which should be the goal of every person.
And in that case, every person would be a true artist. Let's ask Our Lady then for the grace to cooperate with her as she seeks to carve out the features of her Son in our own minds and hearts.
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.