Visionary Experience in the Golden Age of Spanish Art

Victor I. Stoichita

• Editorial: Reaktion Books
• Año: 1997
• ISBN:
  9781861895448
• Categoría: Art
• Categoría: Art General

In this original and lucid account of how Spanish painters of the 16th and 17th centuries dealt with mystic visions in their art, and of how they attempted to "represent the unrepresentable", Victor Stoichita aims to establish a theory of visionary imagery in Western art in general, and one for the Spanish Counter-Reformation in particular. He reveals how the spirituality of the Counter-Reformation was characterized by a rediscovery of the role of the imagination in the exercise of faith. This had important consequences for painters such as Velazquez, Zurbaran and El Greco, leading to the development of ingenious solutions for visual depictions of mystical experience. This was to crystallize into an overtly meditative and didactic pictorial language.That Spanish painting is both cerebral and passionate is due to the particular historical forces which shaped it. Stoichita's account will be of crucial interest not just to scholars of Spanish art but to anyone interested in how art responds to ideological pressures.

1 Framing the Beyond:
The Quest for a Definition

VISIONARY ACCOUNTS

Until the last quarter of the sixteenth century, visions and the visionary experience do not seem to have been the particular preoccupation of Spanish artists. This kind of representation was not, however, completely absent. A randomly chosen example illustrates the way in which the painters of the period handled it.

Juan de Juanes’s St Stephen in the Temple (illus. 1), which at one time hung in the church of S. Esteban in Valencia, takes a well-known passage from the Acts of the Apostles, which describes how Stephen, the first Christian martyr, expounded his views on the house of God before the high priest. His opinion – ‘we are not to think that the most High dwells in temples made by men’s hands’ – provoked the anger of the people in the synagogue:

At hearing this, they were cut to the heart and began to gnash their teeth at him. But he, full of the Holy Spirit, fastened his eyes on heaven, and saw there the glory of God and Jesus standing at God’s right hand. ‘I see heaven opening,’ he said ‘and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.’

Then they cried aloud, and put their fingers into their ears; with one accord they fell upon him … ‘¹

In his painting, Juan de Juanes was faced with solving two fairly thorny figurative problems: first, that of the narrative account (so that the spectator could understand what Stephen was saying), and second, that of the narrative painting (so that the viewer could understand what Stephen was seeing).² He used an apparently simple technique to achieve this: the narrative account is inscribed in a book held open in Stephen’s left hand, while with his right Stephen is pointing to a window where Christ appears in the clouds.

The diagonal formed by Stephen’s arms crosses the area of the representation, ‘polarizing’, so to speak, word and image, and making them at the same time accessible to the spectator. However, the men of the synagogue do not see what Stephen sees or what the spectator also has the privilege of seeing. All they can hear are the blasphemous words spoken by Christ’s disciple, which they reject vehemently.

There is a refinement in this representation of the conflict between Stephen and the Jews that needs to be highlighted. The martyr’s right arm at a certain point crosses the raised arm and clenched fist of one of his opponents. This significant crossing, which seems to personify the conflict being enacted, takes place at the centre of a pillar. We are in the Temple at Jerusalem and this pillar is, symbolically, the very axis of the Temple. At the top of the pillar, near the capital, is the grotesque face of a pagan god. Other idolatrous figures populate the place: on the right we have the back view of a nude, another nude adorns the high priest’s throne, and a statue that looks more like a caricature than a religious image stands on the left cornice near the window.

Between these enactments the heavens open to reveal the image of the ‘true God’, a god whom the men of the synagogue wish neither to see nor to know. This window–vision contrasts with the oculus behind Stephen that is a symbolic representation of the empty heavens, the antithesis to the apparition of the true God. The real vision is thus set against the simple ‘hole’ in the same way that Stephen’s faith is contrasted with the lack of faith of the people of the Temple.

And yet the conflict between Stephen and the Jews has nothing to do with the problem of images but rather with the concept of the Temple itself. It would appear that Juan de Juanes was very well informed since he incorporated into the painting a whole range of sophisticated references relating to this concept. Initially the word templum was acknowledged to mean ‘heaven’. Later the word denoted a rectangle delineated in the sky, a consecrated area destined to be contemplated. Only much later did it signal a religious place.³ Important Spanish texts of the period reveal that the early recognition of the Temple as being the divinity’s celestial dwelling, was still in vogue.⁴

In Juan de Juanes’s painting, Stephen invites us to take the path that will lead from the false temple to the real one. Moreover, his expression and gesture invite us to contemplate God in his real Temple. But considerations of a doctrinal nature prevented him from depicting, as the text would have demanded, God the Father;⁵ the painter limits himself to framing, within the rectangle of a (false) window, the Son of Man only, surrounded by the glory of God.

1 Juan de Juanes, St Stephen in the Temple, c. 1565, oil on canvas, 160 × 125. Museo del Prado, Madrid.

Juan de Juanes does attempt, however, to render in a commendable fashion the restrictions he had imposed on the text (and the painting). The book that Stephen is showing the spectator (an obvious anachronism since it is in fact the Acts of the Apostles) is no more than partially accessible. Only a section of the first page is decipherable, while the remainder is strategically eclipsed by Stephen’s hand and arm. The text that can be read (‘I see heaven opening and the Son of Man’) complements the image opposite the painting (Jesus in the clouds). The following line of the text (‘standing at God’s right hand’) and the remainder of the image (the figure of God the Father) are missing. The spectator may, of course, attempt to compose the rest by imagining the subsequent section of the text and by completing the fragment of heaven revealed by the window.

Juan de Juanes’s approach is typical of the ways in which the problem of depicting the visionary account were dealt with in sixteenth-century Spanish art prior to the arrival of El Greco: the representation of the vision is the culmination of a narrative and an integral part of the account, presented in the form of a painting within a painting.

ASSEMBLING VISIONS

The earliest references to the Vision of St Bruno (illus. 12), a painting that originally hung in the Carthusian monastery of Val de Cristo, attribute it to the Valencian painter Juan Ribalta with the date 1621–2.⁶ Both the identity of the artist and the date have recently been challenged. For somewhat dubious stylistic reasons, the name of Juan Ribalta’s father, Francisco, and an approximate date of 1609 have been proposed.⁷ Yet it is highly unlikely that the painting is that early, as Bruno is depicted as a saint endowed with an aureole. Since Bruno, founder of the Carthusian order, was not canonized until 1623, it is more likely that the original dating – 1621–2 – documented by sources is the correct one, and that the painting was conceived within the context of the campaign that led to Bruno’s canonization.

As with so many other paintings of the Counter-Reformation, this one is a valuable piece of evidence:⁸ it offers the spectator–believer a chance to see one of the key episodes in Bruno’s life, when the heavens opened instantly to reveal a vision of the Divinity in the form of the Trinity. Hence the subject of the painting is the visionary act seen as a saint’s privileged experience, and it is in this role that it will now be examined; not so much for its specific characteristics, which, frankly, are of little importance, but as a typical example of the tesitmony-painting.

Ribalta’s Vision of St Bruno was to inspire a whole series of reflections that focused directly or indirectly on a school of painting of which this one is part. Through this painting, the sponsor(s) of 1621–2 no doubt wished to make seen (and make believe) what the canonization hearing proclaimed when it closed in 1623. The painting is dominated by a fairly straightforward rhetoric. The axis of the painting is created by Bruno’s body, the left hand holding the rule of his order and the right an olive branch. Around him are four bishops and two monks. Each has been identified by art historians,⁹ and each is connected with the story of the Carthusians. The only one not to be identified is the one on the extreme left whose body is cut by the frame. His marginal position and the way he is praying would suggest that he is not only a Carthusian monk but the painting’s sponsor.

At the centre of the painting stands the Saint. Lying at his feet are the episcopal mitre and crozier that, according to legend, Bruno turned down. Eyes raised to heaven, he contemplates the Trinity.

The painting’s message becomes clearer if one compares it to another whose merit as a model is undeniable – Raphael’s St Cecilia (illus. 2), ‘the first altarpiece to make ecstasy its actual theme’.¹⁰ Moreover, Ribalta’s representation of the visionary experience would be difficult to understand if Raphael had not already provided a compositional blueprint that was to have incalculable repercussions for the whole of Western art. But there is nevertheless a shift in emphasis, a split in the figurative language that could not be more significant.

Raphael highlights musica mundana as the antithesis of musica coelestis:¹¹ so whereas the musical instruments of this world lie on the ground, Cecilia directs her gaze to the heavens where the angelic recital is taking place. The heavens are barely open, the Divinity not visible. Cecilia’s body acts like a hyphen between the ‘still-life’ at the lower extremity of the painting and the breach that gives onto infinity at the upper extremity. But neither world infiltrates the other and it is propinquity that constitutes the principle governing the whole composition.¹²

2 Raphael, St Cecilia, 1514, oil on canvas, 220 × 136. Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna.

Ribalta, on the other hand, does not emphasize propinquity so much as continuity. In the period, spanning more than a century, that separates the two works, profound changes in the status of the religious painting were seen, as all aspects of Ribalta’s compositions confirm.

In relation to Raphael’s painting, Ribalta’s is conceived from further away, thus allowing for the inclusion of a greater number of characters. If Raphael was inspired (while at the same time effecting significant changes to it) by the iconography of the sacra conversazione,¹³ and perceived the representation of the vision to be more a personal addition to this iconography, then in Ribalta’s painting everything is organized around the vision and the visionary act. The whole of the painting is a carefully construed network. The characters who surround St Bruno, and who form a kind of Carthusian pantheon, are also parts of this network, whose ultimate aim is to communicate the visionary experience to the spectator viewing the painting.

It is interesting to note how Ribalta has taken Raphael’s idea and given St Augustine’s episcopal crozier a special place. But what was not much more than a suggestion in Raphael’s work (that is to say, the crozier’s role as agent linking heaven and earth) becomes much more conspicuous in Ribalta’s. The Carthusian bishops’ croziers connect the two levels of the painting, and we need to ask ourselves why the function of this interrelated object has been emphasized. The answer is, I think, to be found in the overall message that Ribalta’s painting wishes to communicate.

As with all visions, Bruno’s is the expression of an inner experience that is both personal and incommunicable. And to the religious authorities of the time, the great danger of the visionary experience lay precisely in its inherent nature, in the fact that it allowed for direct communication with the Sacred without the intermediary of the Church. And this was the principal reason why throughout the sixteenth century, a great era of Spanish mysticism, the visionary experience was considered by the Church to be somewhat suspect, even dangerous.¹⁴ Not until after the Council of Trent, but more particularly in the seventeenth century, did the religious authorities begin to exploit visionary experiences with their own interests in mind. To achieve these they needed to find an effective way of controlling visions in order to re-present them to the faithful after they had passed through the filter of the ecclesiastical authorities.

One way of making the private, visionary experience available to the public was through visionary ...