by Steve Rockwell
The problem of making images of what we see and don’t see, what we believe and don’t believe manifests at critical points in history. As events unfold and are recorded, their divisions and distinctions are made clear.
The Cerasi Chapel in Rome rejected this 1601 first version of Caravaggio’s Conversion of St. Paul. Crowded, theatrical, and filled with supernatural action, it’s dramatically different from the later more well-known painting. Here, Caravaggio paints a visible Christ in the heavens accompanied by an angel. Saul has just fallen from his horse. Soldiers, a rearing horse, and swirling movement fill the composition as a brilliant light pours downward from the divine apparition.
The question remains, “Why did the patronage heirs of the Cerasi Chapel reject the first effort by Caravaggio?” It has been suggested to have been too complicated and unconventional. Significantly, the artist here had painted the miracle as a public spectacle rather than a private spiritual experience. Caravaggio’s early ambition had been to advance the monumental in Renaissance art with his own brand of naturalism. His first version renders the heavenly figures corporeal. In the second version they are invisible. Now with Saul’s physical blinding, the viewer is “blinded” to his heavenly vision, as are Saul’s companions.
Caravaggio’s second treatment is, in fact, more truthful to Luke’s Book of Acts account. Chapter 9:3-4 “And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven: And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?” Verse 7: “And the men which journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing a voice, but seeing no man.”
Caravaggio was part of an emergent Baroque art that arose directly from the conflict between the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. While the Catholic Church employed art as a weapon to fight Protestantism, Protestants introduced a new iconoclasm that stripped church interiors of icons, saints, and martyrs, for a secular art, emphasizing landscapes, portraits, and genre scenes. Dutch Baroque and Rembrandt typified this shift.
Image storms, or “Beeldenstorms,” as they were called, swept through Protestant regions, crowds destroying centuries of Catholic art, statues, and stained glass. It is no mystery why Vermeer’s preference was everyday domestic scenes with realistic portraits, landscapes, and still lifes.
The Renaissance and Catholic world had already endured its own “Bonfire of the Vanities” about a century before Caravaggio. A huge pyramid in the Piazza della Signoria was set on fire at the direction of Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola. Not just paintings and drawings, but musical instruments, books and manuscripts, jewelry and fine clothing, just about anything associated with beauty, ergo vanity, went up in flames.
The Christian world, however, had essentially “settled” the issue of image depiction by the 8th century at the second council of Nicaea (year 787), in great part courtesy John of Damascus, one of the last great Church Fathers of the Eastern Christian tradition. Monk and theologian, he had summarized in “The Fount of Knowledge” that because God truly became human in Jesus Christ, the invisible God took on a visible human nature. Therefore, Christ can legitimately be depicted in images. The Incarnation affirmed at Nicaea made sacred art theologically defensible. Subsequently, how this has played out through the course of art history speaks for itself in its manifold movements.
(to be continued)