I was struck by three paintings today, which I'd seen many times before, but which I'd never sat down in front of for any long stretch. The point, as it will be in the next adventures to the Louvre the following handful of months, was to sit with the paintings and let what would emerge. This present post will be about just one of those thick and eloquent paintings...
As I walked up into the Spanish painting room from the Porte des Lions I was struck first by Ribera's Saint Paul as a hermit, with his withered face and his yellowing beard, his head tilted and eyes cocked to one side listening to something from deep within his cave, the voice of God echoing from somewhere in the deepest dark...
I initially ignored the Deposition painting by Rivera, next to Saint Paul, but what struck me about the painting first was the seemingly unfinished face, sweet, pensive, and effacing, in the middle of that image, seeming to retreat into the shadows... That face, I think, must belong to Saint John the Apostle, Jesus' young friend, who is often seen leaning next to him, as in the swooning John of da Vinci's Last Supper to name the most well known example.
I have something about hands in paintings, and I will explore their importance whenever I feel it arises... Here there are, of course, many hands, six as far as I can see. And each has its own role in indicating to us what we may sense through this painting. I hesitate to say "what we ought to think" about it, because that, in the absence of any specific "translation" from a painter, would not be knowable to us, and even with such a "translation" much more, unplanned perhaps by the painter, could be suggested and implied by our own interpretations. Hands and facial expressions themselves are infinitely malleable to our interpretations, though they will in some sense direct our understanding. In any case, the three most important hands here are, I feel, those of John, the two wrapped in a gesture that can suggest many things, and Christ's one hand over his loin cloth, which I'll come back to. John (I think it is John! I'll do my research later, but these are meant to be spontaneous notes) holds his hands, fingers intertwined and wrists slightly cocked to one side, slightly grazing his face as he looks in, from the shadows upon the dying (or dead? I'll come back to this) figure of Christ. Are his hands in a gesture of prayer? Probably not, though it is suggestive of prayer. We see these kinds of gestures all the time at the foot of crosses, etc. Here, though, his fingers are interlocked and we sense an analogous introversion. This is a private scene. John has already begun to withdraw to absorb the inevitable: the death of his beloved friend. His deep cavernous eye sockets, buried in shadow below his brows give us a sense of an inexpressible grief that may be experienced only privately. His wrists are bent, indeed contorted, to indicate I think, that John is succumbing here to a very human grief, which prayer is unlikely to abate.
What about Christ's hand? The position of his hand over his loin cloth immediately brought to mind a focus upon one particular detail within Renaissance paintings that Leo Steinberg evoked in a book called The Sexuality of Christ. That detail is, as the title immediately suggests, that Christ's penis was indicated or clearly illustrated throughout the Renaissance "in order," in James Elkin's words, "to demonstrate that Jesus was fully incarnated, so that the miracle of his appearance on earth could be complete. He was not a half god who had sent his image to earth while remaining in heaven, but God himself, who could achieve perfect fusion of human and divine forms." Isn't this exactly what's going on here, in a beautifully subtle (one is inclined to say, a little to easily, baroque) way? I personally find Christ's hand here positively sensual, with his long index finger indicating where his penis would be, or perhaps gently holding it between his index and middle fingers. The long hand and fingers, part of what has been called a Mannerist aesthetic, accentuate the sensuality of the hand. This will seem odd of course in the context of a deposition scene... what's going on, I wonder?
Before those speculations, let me just bring up one beautiful woodcut illustration from an entirely different source, the Songe de Poliphile, a story first written in Italy (as the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili) then translated into French in the 1540s about a fellow named Poliphile who travels about in a dream, in search of his beloved Polia, while he is continually distracted by the beautiful architectural works - not to mention ethereal, lightly-clad nymphs - that appear to him without reprieve. I won't get into the detail of the work, but let me just say that it has a fascinating lascivious theme to it that appears to suggest that any form of discovery, scientific pursuit, and artistic creation is part and parcel of a fundamental erotic impulse, a way of being a sexual body in the world. The final woodcut illustration suggests this in the most subtle of ways, but reminds me of Leo Steinberg's thesis about the sexuality of Christ. Here's the whole thing, depicting the lucky Poliphile in the midst of many beautiful nymphs within the confines of a lovely garden:
If you look closely at Poliphile's gesture you'll see a curious thing:
This has taken us astray a bit, but I think in a fruitful way. Because what Poliphile urges us to believe - that to reach a "divine" sense of creativity, i.e. to be in some sense God, one must begin by being our bodies within the world and literally "building" upon that incarnation - is also, in reverse, what Ribera is reminding us about Christ: that for his mystery to be complete, God the divine and eternal entity must have been fully incarnated down to his sexuality into human form.
Let's turn to the bishop's face (bishop? I assume that by the red color of his garb, but of course there were no bishops to take Christ down from the cross). His is the only one that appears fully illuminated in profile. The others, as we have seen for instance in John's case, are partly illuminated or almost entirely obscured. Christ's, importantly is the only one that seems exactly half illuminated and half obscured (the illuminated half symbolically tending towards the sky, where he must tend according to what is promised by the story of the Resurrection). The bishop's face is thrust towards the face of Christ. We can feel the tension (I might call it an epistemological tension: the attempt to understand, to know, what is going on, what Christ's face can tell him) in the poise of his body and the kind though keen look of his eyes. In his sublime gesture, this "bishop" shows us, I feel, that this is the very moment of Christ's death (Christ's face shows this in another, symbolic way...). The painting is painting an infinitesimal, undefinable moment by the thrusting illumination of his profile. (Christ is usually dead on the cross we are told, but this painting suggests otherwise, to me).
Where, we are made to wonder, is Christ now? Where his spirit? Where is God? And yet this is God. "It is finished!" This very instant is the constitution, the ratification of the Christian God. Our vacillation before this ambivalent painting puts us, too, on the cusp of transcendence from the position of grave doubt. We must work from this instant forward. We must resurrect our faith at each instant before the vision of our dead God.
No comments:
Post a Comment