Claude Lorrain - Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba

Claude Lorrain
Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba
1648
oil on canvas
National Gallery, London

Theatralization of Painting

A canvas by Claude Lorrain is often built of several framing structures set one behind and inside another.  This is the scenic space of the Italian theater – a silhouetted series of receding apertures accentuating perspective at multiple points and on multiple planes: here, for example, the columns at left between which is glimpsed the mast of a ship in process of arriving or departing. 

Indeterminacy of Time or Location 

Often, it is difficult to say if a scene transpires in the morning or the evening, if the sun is rising or setting.  The painter's intention is to capture a moment of transition, the shift from one state to another.  Thus, "embarkation" – the departure for somewhere else – and in the case of the Queen of Sheba the distance is great, since her realm corresponded in some sense with absolute distance for the 17th-century viewer.  It was located outside the farthest borders of the Roman Empire.  In the mind of a painter who lived in Rome, this was a sort of America, a world beyond the frontier, a land of discovery and mystery.    

But we are here concerned with the departure of the queen from her distant country on a voyage to the kingdom of Solomon.  Here is the biblical account, from the first Book of Kings: "And when the Queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon concerning the name of the Lord, she came to prove him with hard questions.  And she came to Jerusalem with a very great train, with camels that bare spices, and very much gold, and precious stones.  And when she was come to Solomon, she communed with him of all that was in her heart.  And Solomon told her all her questions: there was not anything hid from the king which he told her not."  According to Christian tradition the time of Solomon dated much earlier than the Roman Empire.  Yet to paint this earlier epoch Claude employs the architectural vocabulary of the Romans.  It is as if the country of Sheba represents the Roman future, like a prefiguration of the New Jerusalem.    

The Theater of History

This canvas dates from 1648.  It falls between the first phase of Corneille's theater and that of Racine.  The period was marked by unification of territories and language under the rule of Richelieu, who aimed at making Paris dominant over the rest of France.  Important social changes accelerated, with two large classes pulled into greater and greater competition.  The nobility was losing ground; real power was evaporating, even as empty privileges expanded.  The former influence of the nobles gradually faded, like a setting sun, while the bourgeoisie irresistibly ascended.  We read in Proust how such real-world diminishments among the Guermantes crystalized as increased snobbery: they no longer possessed significant authority, so clung the more fiercely to their remaining prerogatives of inherited wealth and the glamor attached to their ancient name.       

The Queen's Foot

In the middle ground at right, the queen is about to set foot in the small boat that will carry her out to the ship.  Descending the quay, she raises the edge of her robe.  The spectator remains suspended at this decisive moment.  The revealed foot no doubt represents an image of beauty, like that of Cinderella, but this beauty is perhaps strange, exotic, troubling.  The Koran is the first source that raises questions about this foot, in the Surah called The Ants.  Solomon, who has heard reports of the queen, sends her a letter, to which she responds by sending him a magnificent throne, and then coming to meet him herself.  It was said to her, "Enter the palace!"  But when she saw it, she thought it was a pool, and she tucked up her clothes, uncovering her legs.  Solomon said "Verily, it is a palace paved smooth with a slab of glass."    

In reference to this enigmatic passage all sorts of traditions grew up, including one that attributed to the Queen of Sheba a goat's foot that she wanted no one to see.  Claude Lorrain most certainly had not read the Koran, but Rome was a crossroads of merchants from all over the Mediterranean who might well have conveyed some of the legends that turned the Queen of Sheba into a still more mysterious personnage, suggesting for her an affinity with fauns or the devil. 

In his Voyage en Orient, Gérard de Nerval ridicules King Solomon.  Balkis, Queen of Sheba, appears before him as the mocking representative of happiness. 

– translated and adapted from Le Musée imaginaire de Michel Butor: 105 œuvres décisives de la peinture occidentale (Paris: Flammarion, 2019)

Peter Paul Rubens - The Great Last Judgment

Peter Paul Rubens
The Great Last Judgment
1617
oil on canvas
Alte Pinakothek, Munich

Peter Paul Rubens
The Great Last Judgment
(installation view)
1617
oil on canvas
Alte Pinakothek, Munich

 An Immense Fragment

This work is immense, nearly twenty feet tall, yet gives the impression that one is viewing only a small portion of the Last Judgment.  Christ, isolated atop an arch of clouds, raises the elect with his right hand while commanding the damned downward with his left.  God the Father is half hidden behind more clouds above, and one can just make out the hovering dove of the Holy Spirit.  

Thrust closer to the viewer is a massive spiraling loop of human bodies, nearly all of them unclothed.  Nudes like these, generously built, with ample rolls of flesh – notably the women, but also the men –  are characteristic of Rubens.  On ground level people are rising from their tombs; we can even pick out among them a death's head.  All seem astonished by what is happening.  Along the left edge, female angels help these voluptuous figures to rise.  Other angels welcome and greet them on their arrival, while on the opposite side angels are assisting the descent with similar amiability.  Between the two, St Michael and the trumpeters of the Apocalypse.       

The Counter-Reformation

With the Council of Trent, baroque sensuality came into its own.  Defying Protestant sects, the Church officially endorsed splendor and pomp, newly emphasizing the theatrical aspects of religion (so strongly condemned by reformers), while overseeing the resurgence of what amounted to paganism.  In this period wealth was lavished on extravagant forms of "sacred" display everywhere from Mexico to Rome.  Difficult to imagine a Last Judgment more opulent than this one – the flesh of the damned every bit as appetizing as that of the saved.  Rather than bodies in glory, the spectacle is of glorious bodies.  

– translated and adapted from Le Musée imaginaire de Michel Butor: 105 œuvres décisives de la peinture occidentale (Paris: Flammarion, 2019)

Francisco de Zurbarán - The House in Nazareth

Francisco de Zurbarán
The House in Nazareth
ca. 1635-40
oil on canvas
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio

Francisco de Zurbarán
The House in Nazareth (detail)
ca. 1635-40
oil on canvas
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio

Learned Ignorance

Sophisticated painting touches us much more if something also remains of naiveté.  This is what we appreciate in Konrad Witz or le Douanier Rousseau.  They are marvelous, but also somewhat comical.  We think we can see all the way around them.  But it is they who see all around us, and they detect our own naiveté – by means of their humble but formidable mastery, by means of their "learned ignorance" – as philosophers of earlier ages called it.   

General Tone and Local Tone

Zurbarán illustrates an important point about the history of color in painting: the opposition between general tone and local tone.  Certain painters hold that when painting a blue garment, it must be entirely blue in order to be recognized as such.  Thus, in Zurbarán, the robe of the adolescent Christ is entirely blue; that of the Virgin is entirely red, and moreover the same red, varied only by differences in value – that is, darker or lighter.  

Beginning with the Venetians and grand Mannerists (as already in Michelangelo, in certain passages on the Sistine ceiling), clothing can be rendered in variable colors.  Textiles painted by these masters sometimes change tone according to location; they respond within their folds to the solicitation of neighboring objects.  Artists are then described as painting "local" tone.  They choose to look not at what they know about the color of the object, but at how the object reacts under light.  Thus, a red garment may appear at a certain moment in a certain place as orange or even as blue.  This was the insight that would later lead to Impressionism.    

Celestial Colors

Color that resists the temptations of the environment can, in Zurbarán, attain extraordinary intensity.  The artist is above all known for his near-monochrome works – his Carthusians and his Franciscans dressed in their habits – these are brown or white from head to toe, bathed in a brown or white light.  But there are other works with more contrast in the colors – saints, for example, wearing elegant vestments.  Indifferent to earthly compromises, his colors partake of eternity.  

Isolation of Objects

The isolation of "general" color accords, in still lives, with the isolation of objects.  In this painting, Zurbarán places articles side by side, while in a typical Dutch still life, for example, they would overlap – Zurbarán rather cuts them off from one another.  He paints each as purely sufficient unto itself.  In this way their forms are brought to the highest level of contrast, as are their colors. 

Between the Virgin and Christ is a large table with a half-open drawer.  It is set at an angle and rendered in a perspective that makes it appear to tilt toward us.  The effect suggests a formal offering.  At right are two books, one leaning on the other, though with minimal contact.  The upper casts a crisp shadow across the lower.  On the other side, an isolated book lies open with pages leafing themselves apart as if to show us their contents.     

The Premonition

The Virgin watches the adolescent, occupying himself with a crown of thorns – bizarre activity.  For her, this is a premonition of evils to come.  The embroidery needle she holds in her hand becomes the sister of those thorns, as if she is inscribing a prophecy with it.  Next to the Virgin, on a small table lost in shadow, is set a bouquet of flowers, roses and lilies, prominent in litanies to Our Lady.  At lower right, two white doves evoke the sweetness of this family life, revealed as so precarious.  Near the feet of the two figures, a work basket with two swathes of fabric, one gleaming white, the other heavenly blue.  On the left, an empty pottery bowl.  

Through a window at upper right, we can make out storm clouds moving in a dim and sombre atmosphere, inadequate to illuminate the interior – which is instead lit from the left by a glowing beam inhabited by floating cherubs.  The light falling on both objects and figures, though, is so harsh that it gives the impression of emanating also from us, who gaze along with the painter upon this scene of our meditation.  

– translated and adapted from Le Musée imaginaire de Michel Butor: 105 œuvres décisives de la peinture occidentale (Paris: Flammarion, 2019)

Rembrandt - The Blinding of Samson

Rembrandt
The Blinding of Samson
1636
oil on canvas
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

The Bedroom-Cavern

Delilah is "a woman in the valley of Sorek," we read in the Book of Judges. "And the lords of the Philistines came up unto her, and said unto her, Entice him, and see wherein his great strength lieth, and by what means we may prevail against him, that we may bind him to afflict him; and we will give thee every one of us eleven hundred pieces of silver."  We are not told whether or not Delilah was a Philistine.  When she had handed Samson over to the lords, they "brought him down to Gaza" in Palestine.  It was, then, among these hills that the drama occurred, not only in Delilah's house, but in her bedroom.  For Rembrandt, it is even in her bed – a sumptuous alcove, offering shadowy hiding places capacious enough to conceal the attackers.  A nocturnal theater-scene, half-enclosed by thick sea-green curtains swept into studded tie-backs, evoking a marine grotto.  Coverlet, hangings, the whole tangle of bedclothes heave under light and shadow, like waves.     

The three Philistines who restrain Samson are accoutered like the mercenary brigands to be encountered everywhere during the Thirty Years' War.  The one sprawled on the ground below the victim is losing his helmet, held on by only one fastening.  The dagger-wielder is entirely sheathed in fine metalwork.  Chaining the victim's wrist, the third is positioned so as to display quantities of gold trim and brocaded edgings.  The two remaining Philistines are decked out à la turque, especially the one in red with baggy striped bloomers, but the other also, with more stripes and a prominent plume.  Lastly, the crucial dagger, actively thrust into the eye, features a blade as elaborately rippled as a Malayan kriss. 

Delilah is armed with scissors.  Only Samson is completely disarmed.  Scarcely dressed, he kicks upward, wielding his raised foot like a cudgel.  With his right hand he grabs at something we can only interpret as part of the upturned bedding, but which will suggest for the believer versed in sacred history the archetypal weapon associated with Samson, the fresh jawbone of an ass with which he beat down a thousand Philistines.  Yet it was with naked hands that he annihilated the lion as if it were a lamb.  And it is with naked hands alone, once his hair has regrown, that he will pull down the temple of Dagon, one of the chief gods of the region, represented in a form half man, half fish.  

Rembrandt's Three Women

At the period of this picture, the painter was in love with  his new wife, Saskia van Uylenburgh, whom he had married in June 1634 and who died on 19 June 1642.  We know that she was from a prosperous but humble family, her father working as a miller.  The marriage was viewed as a misalliance, with Saskia's class-origins well below Rembrandt's.  

After her death, the artist hired a nurse, Geertje Dircx, widow of naval trumpeter, to care for his son Titus, born in 1641.  She lived in the household from 1643 to 1648.  He then dismissed her, accusing her not only of lewd conduct, but with having sold to a pawnbroker the jewels and ornaments he had entrusted to her and which had belonged to Saskia.  Geertje retaliated by suing Rembrandt for breach of promise.  Ordered by the tribunal to pay her a pension, the painter succeeded after some years in having her committed as a madwoman to the prison in Gouda.   

About 1649 Hendrickje Stoffels entered Rembrandt's service, remaining with him until her death and routinely posing in the studio. 

His only legal wife, then, was Saskia, whom the artist painted and drew obsessively, often with the same jewels as those worn by Delilah, a figure evidently modeled on Saskia. The Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden displays a matrimonial double portrait in which the young bride wearing these jewels is seated on the knees of her husband, who has donned a costume of levantine military finery and brandishes a tall beaker of wine. 

Rembrandt
Marriage Portrait of Rembrandt and Saskia
in the guise of the Prodigal Son
1635
oil on canvas
Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden

The Purse

On the curtain-covered sideboard against the left wall of Delilah's chamber, held down by a golden jug, there is a looped blue object overhanging the edge which can be identified as a silk purse.  It surely contains silver brought by the Philistines to pay for the betrayal.  All the same, it is too small to contain the entire amount, eleven hundred shekels.  At five shekels to the ounce, eleven hundred would weigh almost fifteen pounds.  Perhaps the purse contains a supplementary gift, a sort of tip.    

At this period Rembrandt was a relatively rich and famous painter, but Saskia's fortune was a good deal better assured than his.  In her will, Saskia left everything to their son Titus, only a year old when she died, giving Rembrandt access to the income, but on condition that he not remarry, a provision that partly explains his subsequent conduct.  

Four years after Saskia's death, the artist's financial situation had become so worrisome that his parents-in-law instituted a lawsuit.  Plainly a spendthrift, Rembrandt was threatened with a court-appointed conservator – as later was Baudelaire – an episode leading one to surmise that his relations with his parents-in-law had always been difficult.  He continued to struggle with creditors for the rest of his life. 

Temptations

In the Book of Judges, Samson is a "Nazarite" – such individuals were consecrated to God and were forbidden to cut their hair, which in Samson's case was the source of his prodigious strength.  Indulging in wine to drunkenness was also proscribed, lest it obstruct the reception of divine inspiration.  Likewise, the temptation to pursue women was severely discouraged: one surmises that Delilah encouraged drinking so that Samson would sleep soundly.  In the opera by Saint-Saëns she sings him to sleep.  Rembrandt has taken the wine he was drinking with Saskia in the Dresden painting and hidden it in the curiously-worked golden jug with its cover on the sideboard in Delilah's boudoir.  Partly concealed behind the jug is a goblet, also gold.  

– translated and adapted from Le Musée imaginaire de Michel Butor: 105 œuvres décisives de la peinture occidentale (Paris: Flammarion, 2019)

Bartolomé Estebán Murillo - The Angels' Kitchen

Bartolomé Estebán Murillo
The Angels' Kitchen
1646
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Intersection of Styles

Realistic in his portraits of beggars, ethereal in his canvases of the Immaculate Conception, Murillo draws on his entire range of manners in this singular work.  Realism is expressed by abundant still-life elements underlining the fact that we are in a kitchen, though it is also the site of mystical ecstasy – a Franciscan brother levitates in mid-air.  According to legend, this monk while at work preparing a meal was uplifted by such emotion as he meditated that angels descended from Heaven to work in his place so that everything would be ready on time.  Three men then enter the kitchen, stumbling upon this extraordinary scene, but are unable to perceive the angels.  

Angelic Workers

These angels have wings, their normal attribute, yet also have their feet on the ground.  Incarnate angels, they take on lowly jobs: fetching water, setting the table, grinding something in a mortar.  Two cherubs, also clearly of flesh and blood, fat-bottomed as those by Rubens – robust little fellows – handle spices.  

The devotee suspended above the floor, despite his ecstatic demeanor, remains entirely human and carnal; it clearly requires a genuine miracle to maintain him aloft.  The food and cooking utensils give every evidence of providing for hearty appetites: a magnificent cauldron, a big haunch of meat, a substantial pitcher for the wine.  

The Last Shall Be First   

The angels descend and the brother rises.  Associated with him are the generous but rustic objects we see, this peasant crockery which an angelic light reveals as beautiful.  He is the lowest of the monks, but the first to be raised high in holiness.  And he will be the one above who welcomes the powerful, if they prove able to clothe themselves in a humility equal to his.

– translated and adapted from Le Musée imaginaire de Michel Butor: 105 œuvres décisives de la peinture occidentale (Paris: Flammarion, 2019)

El Greco - Burial of the Count of Orgaz

El Greco
Burial of the Count of Orgaz
1586-88
oil on canvas
Iglesia de Santo Tomé, Toledo

Three Levels

On the first level along the bottom of the composition we see the literal burial of the Count, still attired in splendid armour (like a carapace defying death); his body is supported by two ecclesiastics in elaborate brocade vestments.  These are, in fact, St Augustine and St Stephen, miraculously present, lowering the Count with greatest care into the tomb.  

The burial scene is delimited above by an extended line of faces, like dots marking a border.  The line is closed on each end by a group of three more ecclesiastics: including, on one side, a Franciscan who represents St Francis; on the other, the officiant in a white surplice, and next to him, with a magnificent cope, another figure who is undoubtedly a bishop.   

The border-marking row of faces – where the eyes within the row compose another, narrower line – suggests a musical score with notes tilted in this or that direction.  Above this lyrical introduction, the crowning passage is dominated by the figure of Christ in Heaven, accompanied by a celestial host of saints, the most prominent being the Virgin, St Peter, and St John the Baptist (seen largely from the back).  They are present to welcome the soul of the Count, wispily represented as a new-born baby rising in the arms of an angel.  

Exchanges

The frieze of faces, gazing some toward Heaven and some toward Earth, serves at the same time to separate the two realms and to align them.  These spectators of the Count's interment are equally able in spirit to witness his ascent.  The priest in the white surplice, seen from the back in an attitude of adoration, is the agent who enables the opening of this glorious sky.  The earthly assemblage, watching over the metamorphosis and ascension, inhabits a nocturnal atmosphere, as if sharing a collective dream.  Flames of torches are outlined against a murkily simplified landscape background.  The figures are detached from their surrounding darkness, even as the luminous heavens overlay an actual night in an actual graveyard. 

Bodily Distortions

Stylistic evolution is perceptible from lower to higher: figures at ground level are proportioned somewhat more conventionally; they are much less elongated compared to those in the sky, compared to the beings the ground-dwellers themselves ultimately hope to become.  Heaven incites a lifelong aspiration to rise into eternity.  Christ's draperies roll away from him like clouds, within which the blessed find refuge.  Bodies, within His orbit, are ruled by new laws of gravitation and breathe a new air.  

El Greco
Burial of the Count of Orgaz (detail)
1586-88
oil on canvas
Iglesia de Santo Tomé, Toledo

The Boy and Death

At bottom left, who then is that young page or prince who points his finger at the Count?  We might imagine that this is his son, obliged by noble idealism to carry on the earthly duties of the deceased.  But scholars assure us that this is in reality the son of the artist.  Thus, it is the painter who perpetuates the life of his son by means of the painting.  On the portion of the handkerchief protruding from the child's pocket appears the signature of El Greco and the date 1578, which is not the date of the work, but the date of the birth of the boy.   

This youth is the figure in closest proximity to us, the one positioned at our own height, and who seems to be saying that despite his tender years death also menaces him. 

– translated and adapted from Le Musée imaginaire de Michel Butor: 105 œuvres décisives de la peinture occidentale (Paris: Flammarion, 2019)

Caravaggio - Basket of Fruit

Caravaggio
Basket of Fruit
ca. 1596
oil on canvas
Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan

Brushmarks

The surface of a drop of water is perfectly smooth. It was in the rendering of such drops that Caravaggio came closest to trompe l'œil.  They are so striking in this painting that one wonders, for an instant, if actual drops of water haven't fallen onto its surface.  This testifies to a marvelous technical finesse, and certainly in these passages one can detect no trace of brushwork.  This finesse, this illusionism, stands out by contrast against the frank and visible brushwork on the fruit and leaves, and against the wide, dashing strokes with which the "abstract" background is laid in, strokes whose direction oscillates in response to the orientation of the light.  

Shadow and Light

That orientation is precisely accounted for on each water drop.  This collection of tiny spheres, consistently treated so differently from the rest of the canvas, form something like a network, a mesh that encloses and pulls together the whole.  The gaze that begins by fixating on one of them is automatically driven to seek out others.  But the cohesive role conferred by light on the water drops is not the only consequence of the general function Caravaggio has assigned it in the service of his quite singular naturalism and his commitment to delve deeply.  In his work, basically, the form that light carves out on a shape, the luminous portion, succeeds in rendering the shape solid and "present" in relation not only to its own shaded portion – which will simply establish the form and volume of that object in isolation – but also in relation to the lighted portion of the object next to it.  

From Offering to Offertory

The basket rests on a piece of furniture or a shelf of which only the edge is visible.  We tend at first to assume that this edge is the same as the outward limit of the canvas, but soon notice that the basket slightly overlaps this boundary, even casting a small shadow below itself: advancing toward us, it invites us to come and examine its contents more intimately.  The basket theme reappears in other important Caravaggios: the Boy with a Basket of Fruit (Borghese Gallery, Rome), and especially The Supper at Emmaus (National Gallery, London).

Caravaggio
Boy with a Basket of Fruit
1593
oil on canvas
Galleria Borghese, Rome

Caravaggio
The Supper at Emmaus
ca. 1601
oil on canvas
National Gallery, London

These three versions lead us to perceive in the Basket of Fruit the redeployment of a scriptural and liturgical theme – which raises in its turn the thorny question of what place such still-life paintings were able to command, what role they were able to play in the religious and mental evolution of the 17th century and, by extension, the wider modern epoch.  

– translated and adapted from Le Musée imaginaire de Michel Butor: 105 œuvres décisives de la peinture occidentale (Paris: Flammarion, 2019)

Hans Holbein - The Ambassadors

Hans Holbein
The Ambassadors
(Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve)
1533
oil on panel
National Gallery, London

The Crucifix and the Skull

If no more than a brief look is given to this picture, the viewer is bound to miss the silver crucifix painted in profile in the upper left corner, half hidden by the magnificent draperies.  Once this detail has been spotted, it is as if we are confronted with a theater curtain behind which another scene is concealed, or at least as if we are peeping into the wings.  The splendid arrangement of objects, no less than the two ambassadors themselves, then appear to be elements in a masque.  The impeccable layout seems not quite so assured, the composure on the faces of the two men not quite so complete; the poses may not have been assumed quite so unselfconsciously as we first thought, or more accurately as we would have first thought without the presence of that enigmatic object thrust toward us from another world.   

Even though the two dignitaries and the whole collection of accompanying paraphernalia are equally immersed in a datable past, that alien thing with its grimacing curves appears to exist in the beam of a projector off to the right.  If we position ourselves on that side of the painting, as close as possible to the frame and the wall, we can perceive that the "thing" is a skull, systematically distorted and only recognizable from this one angle – a spectre so troubling as to have been initially unnamable.

The Lurking Menace

Now, in the year 1533, the date when King Henry VIII was excommunicated by Pope Clement VII, there were good reasons to be haunted by fear.  Death was already casting its shadow over Holbein's protectors, Thomas More and John Fisher, disgraced for remaining Catholic after the Anglican Schism, abruptly deprived of royal favor and honors, and before long to be executed.  

Thinly disguised, death lurked everywhere: in the whims of the great, in popular rebellions, in religious controversies, as well as in the pestilence that spread unchecked through the streets – including the plague that would kill Holbein in 1543.  The dance of death threatened every class, and no level of privilege could resist it.  

– translated and adapted from Le Musée imaginaire de Michel Butor: 105 œuvres décisives de la peinture occidentale (Paris: Flammarion, 2019)

Albrecht Altdorfer - The Battle of Alexander

Albrecht Altdorfer
The Battle of Alexander
1529
oil on panel
Alte Pinakothek, Munich

The Instability of the World

This is the Battle of Issus which resulted in the defeat of Darius II of Persia by Alexander of Macedon.  This is the victory of the western world over the eastern world.  In its time, this resonated like the inverse victory of the Ottomans over the Byzantine Empire and the taking of Constantinople, then renamed Istanbul, a disaster that Altdorfer's contemporaries continued to dream of avenging. 

The picture is of modest size – slightly more than a meter wide – yet gives the impression of being immense because of the profusion of details.  Seen from a distance, each warrior blends into the vast armies, with the exception of the protagonists, one fleeing the other.  Perhaps some ambitious scholar has counted the combatants, who can in many cases be distinguished from one another by their arms and headgear – plumed helmets for the Macedonians, turbans for the Persians – but even without counting it seems certain that at least a thousand are individually depicted.  

We find ourselves before an extremely extensive landscape, which we view from a great height.  There is no ordinary foreground, where objects would be notably enlarged: the painter has positioned us in a sort of hot air balloon ahead of its time.  We contemplate the scene below as it extends into a far distance that is yet minutely delineated – the encampments at the entrance to the city spread out on the right, then a strait between mountains that ultimately mingle with the clouds.  The sun appears to be descending into a sort of tunnel: its departing brightness picks out highlights among the soldiers all the way up to the foreground, while an even, golden light continues to bathe the entire battle, a light whose source seems to be elsewhere, even from the opposite direction, as if the rising of this same sun next day is already perceptible.   

Albrecht Altdorfer
The Battle of Alexander (detail)
1529
oil on panel
Alte Pinakothek, Munich

The Curve of the Horizon

Beyond the right-hand scenery – temples, ruins, mountains – the landscape extends toward an uneven horizon that, beneath the solar tunnel, presents an outline that is clearly curved.  This fact is aligned with a transformation in world-view.  Since antiquity, some had hypothesized that the world was round, but this remained no more than a theory.  It was only now that the first circumnavigation had been accomplished.  The discovery of America coincided closely with the fall of Constantinople.   Ancient and contemporary history are superimposed here by Altdorfer (regardless of the fact that the victorious side in the battle is reversed).  Echoing the sun as it sets into an abyss on the right, the Islamic moon, in its own tunnel, rises at top left. 

The Heart of War

The multiplicity of combattants around the pursuit between the two monarchs who embody their armies is such that we can't always tell the two sides apart.  Lances, banners, bows, shields are compressed into a single mass of whirling layers.  These are human clouds reproducing on earth a storm in the heavens. 

Centered high above and suspended from some sort of rod in the sky, a large inscribed tablet describing the battle and inviting us to pick out the protagonists from the apparent chaos, appears to oscillate like the needle of a compass.  Whatever transpires will be determined and explained by the divine will.  Anchored to either side of the tablet, swathes of shimmering fabric crack in the wind.  Attached below is a fringed tassel from which hangs a vertical cord, seemingly immobile, with a ring tied to the end.  This marks the point of view we would need to inhabit for full comprehension of the action below, a species of magnifying glass hanging over history, promising to compensate for our remoteness, to protect us from confused despair and grant us the power to isolate from the mass each of these individuals.    

– translated and adapted from Le Musée imaginaire de Michel Butor: 105 œuvres décisives de la peinture occidentale (Paris: Flammarion, 2019)

Albrecht Dürer - Adoration of the Holy Trinity

Albrecht Dürer
Adoration of the Holy Trinity
(Landauer Altarpiece)
1511
oil on panel
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

The Three Persons

God the Father holds in his extended hands the arms of the Cross to which Christ is nailed.  Eternally crucified, eternally buried, eternally resurrected.  Angels hold open the paternal golden mantel lined in green.  The figure of Christ occupies a triangle with its point at the bottom, the Father occupies another (superimposed on the first) with its point at the top.  Together, the two shapes form a Seal of Solomon.  Suspended above is the dove of the Holy Spirit.

Celestial Hierarchies

Father and Son combine almost like a double exposure.  Troops of angels with complete bodies partially encircle this image.  Another circle is deployed around the dove, but these are cherubs composed of nothing but heads. 

Beyond this central grouping, numerous saints are ranged, males on the right, females on the left.  We see David with his harp, Moses with the Tablets of the Law, Agnes with her lamb, Catherine with her wheel.  

Below this chorus of the elect, a second crowd includes, on the left, the Pope and a Cardinal with a group of women who could be nuns, and on the right, the Holy Roman Emperor with several warriors and another contingent of women.  

All these beings are suspended in the sky above an immense landscape, but compared to the celestial population its details are minuscule: a large river in the center, with shorelines, rocks, trees and clouds spreading away on either side.   

Signatures

At right within the landscape stands a man who is Albrecht Dürer himself: this is a signature "in person" on the painting.  He offers it to the spectator, and of course also to the divinities and worthies in the sky.  

The artist rests his hand on an engraved slab that certifies it is indeed "Albrecht Dürer who made this picture in 1511 at the season of the birth of Christ."  This message is signed with the Dürer monogram, an "A" enclosing a "D" – the given name apparently more significant than the family name.  A triple signature, which corresponds to the image of the Holy Trinity.  And that, without even speaking of the generalized signature constituted by the painting itself. 

– translated and adapted from Le Musée imaginaire de Michel Butor: 105 œuvres décisives de la peinture occidentale (Paris: Flammarion, 2019)

Dieric Bouts - Ascent of the Elect / Fall of the Damned

Dieric Bouts
Ascent of the Elect
ca. 1470
oil on panel
Palais del Beaux-Arts de Lille

Dieric Bouts
Fall of the Damned
ca. 1470
oil on panel
Palais del Beaux-Arts de Lille

Diptych 

Two panels – one paradisal, of the sort usually positioned to the left – the other infernal, which would typically be seen on the right.  Between the two we would expect to have – as in the majority of Flemish altarpieces at this period – a third panel representing the Last Judgment.  But no trace of one has ever been found.  

In fact, the left-hand panel does not exactly represent Paradise, but the view toward Paradise.  In a garden comparable to the lost Eden, happy souls are guided by angels toward a sort of trampoline where they will be vaulted up to Paradise proper.  

The Path of the Elect

In this semi-divine garden, vestibule to the definitive garden –  which is no doubt beyond any possibility of representation in its mystical splendor – clear water flows between banks littered with precious stones, among which grow plants sufficiently detailed that we can identify them.  

In the middle-ground stands a fountain from which issue the four rivers one regularly encounters in depictions of the terrestrial paradise.  Here is the description in Genesis: And a river went out of Eden to water the garden and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.  The name of the first is Pison, that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold, and the gold of that land is good; there is bdellium and the onyx stone.  And the name of the second river is Gihon, the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia.  And the name of the third river is Hiddekel, that is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria.  And the fourth river is Euphrates.    

In the foreground we see a group of souls, nearly nude, conducted by an angel viewed from the back, wearing a splendid chasuble.  In the distance, other angels lead other groups toward the celestial embarkation.  The horizon is very beautiful, already having reached the level of Claude Lorrain in the way the trees are handled.  Clouds form a sort of tunnel, within which tiny soul-specks are wafted toward Heaven.  

Dieric Bouts
Fall of the Damned (detail)
ca. 1470
oil on panel
Palais del Beaux-Arts de Lille

Hell without an Exit

No way to leave Hell, it appears.  In the same way the good are wafted into the sky, the evil sink endlessly into the pit, mistreated by demons shown in the guise of a rich variety of nasty animals.  The damned are completely nude, but not immodest – their anatomy is admirably austere.  The crepuscular horizon outlines rocky crags with flames shooting in every direction, and the infernal sky is filled with fearsome creatures.  A demon with bat wings prepares to drop one of the damned into the pit, another seizes one as he plunges.

Double Distance

Distance plays an important role among all the Flemish primitives.  It represents the yearning for an elsewhere.  The vestibule-garden already constitutes a distance from the quotidian earth.  Within that distance the trampoline-hill is yet more distant, and furnishes access to the ultimate distance of Heaven.  

In Hell, distance actually occupies the foreground – in the imaginations of the tortured.  The upper register – that crepuscular anti-sky from which the damned are falling – is in fact our own world.    

– translated and adapted from Le Musée imaginaire de Michel Butor: 105 œuvres décisives de la peinture occidentale (Paris: Flammarion, 2019)

Jean Bourdichon - Grandes Heures d'Anne de Bretagne

Jean Bourdichon
Grandes Heures d'Anne de Bretagne
Calendar Page - January
ca. 1503-1508
tempera on vellum
Bibliothèque nationale de France

Jean Bourdichon
Grandes Heures d'Anne de Bretagne
Calendar Page - February
ca. 1503-1508
tempera on vellum
Bibliothèque nationale de France

Jean Bourdichon
Grandes Heures d'Anne de Bretagne
Calendar Page - March
ca. 1503-1508
tempera on vellum
Bibliothèque nationale de France

Jean Bourdichon
Grandes Heures d'Anne de Bretagne
Calendar Page - April
ca. 1503-1508
tempera on vellum
Bibliothèque nationale de France

Jean Bourdichon
Grandes Heures d'Anne de Bretagne
Calendar Page - May
ca. 1503-1508
tempera on vellum
Bibliothèque nationale de France

Jean Bourdichon
Grandes Heures d'Anne de Bretagne
Calendar Page - June
ca. 1503-1508
tempera on vellum
Bibliothèque nationale de France

Jean Bourdichon
Grandes Heures d'Anne de Bretagne
Calendar Page - July
ca. 1503-1508
tempera on vellum
Bibliothèque nationale de France

Jean Bourdichon
Grandes Heures d'Anne de Bretagne
Calendar Page - August
ca. 1503-1508
tempera on vellum
Bibliothèque nationale de France

Jean Bourdichon
Grandes Heures d'Anne de Bretagne
Calendar Page - September
ca. 1503-1508
tempera on vellum
Bibliothèque nationale de France

Jean Bourdichon
Grandes Heures d'Anne de Bretagne
Calendar Page - October
ca. 1503-1508
tempera on vellum
Bibliothèque nationale de France

Jean Bourdichon
Grandes Heures d'Anne de Bretagne
Calendar Page - November
ca. 1503-1508
tempera on vellum
Bibliothèque nationale de France

Jean Bourdichon
Grandes Heures d'Anne de Bretagne
Calendar Page - December
ca. 1503-1508
tempera on vellum
Bibliothèque nationale de France

Noble Piety

Books of Hours are gatherings of the prayers that pertain to each canonical hour, and which the clergy were obliged to recite daily.  Distinguished laypeople, as is here the case with Anne of Brittany, might also, as a sign of devotion, make daily use of a breviary (an authorized abridgement).  The canonical hours of prayer are designated by ancient names: Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, Nones, Vespers, Compline.  Books of Hours also contained selected Scripture passages and pious poems.  

Months of the Year   

In the margins surrounding the text of his calendar pages Jean Bourdichon, identified by some art historians with the Master of Moulins (though there is uncertainty about this), brought together all of nature: birds, butterflies, flowers and fruit.  For this volume Bourdichon also executed about fifty paintings that occupy entire pages, free of text.  Within a fixed format, each month of the calendar is uniquely illustrated.  Above the calendar proper (inset like other text pages) floats the appropriate sign of the zodiac: the Water Bearer for January.  Below is a landscape with a seasonal scene: in the snow, a warmly dressed figure approaches the entrance to a house.  February, under the sign of the Fish, is illustrated with a feast of stuffed poultry and charcuteries associated with Mardi Gras.  March, under the sign of the Ram, shows the pruning of vines in front of a Renaissance château.  In April, under the sign of the Bull, women pick flowers in a garden before a château with a fairy tale aspect and a certain resemblance to the palace at Urbino.   

Compositional Ingenuity

Each of these landscapes seems to occupy the whole page, as if the rectangle of calendar text in the middle could be lifted off.  The artist has worked out schemes that permit all the significant elements of each scene to be disposed around the edges.  In general, what matters most in a picture tends to be placed in the center, but here the essential is found in the margins.  This technique evolved from the border grotesques of illuminated manuscripts that gradually became more and more elaborate.  One is reminded of the Essays of Montaigne, who was initially motivated by the text of the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude composed by his recently deceased friend La Boétie – a text circulated clandestinely – to write his own responses, as if shaping a funeral wreath for his friend.  

Intertwined Symbols

The seasons following one another, the harsher and the kinder, ask also to be read as the seasons of a life.  In the month of May, there is an image in a garden of twins, personified by a tree trimmed into three sections – rooted in an artificial hillock also ascending in three sections – with objects hanging from the branches, recalling the traditional May Day competition of climbing a greased pole to grab hanging treats.  The viewer is meant to reflect on the progress from childhood to maturity, and thence to senescence.  Every least morsel of vegetation solicites interpretation.  This sort of symbolism strikes us as highly medieval, but in fact the same system endured through succeeding centuries, although the subtexts gradually took on more subtle concealments. 

The Universe as Pipe Organ

In June, under the sign of Cancer, peasants are shown mowing, one sharpening a scythe.  In July, under the sign of the Lion, the grain harvest begins in sight of a large farm building backed by naked mountains of rock.  In August, peasants winnow the grain, their filled sacks accumulating in front of an urban edifice.  There is a harmony between cosmic time and the system of liturgical time that humans are obliged scrupulously to observe: the latter is structured to align precisely with the divine order.  If people do not succeed in doing what they are supposed to do at the time they are supposed to do it, everything will shift out of place and collapse in ruin.   

  

Autumn and Winter

September, under the sign of Libra, is the season for harvesting vineyards: a worker treads grapes in a large vat to produce wine.  In the month of October, under the sign of the Scorpion, the farming cycle recommences: behind sowers in the foreground, oxen till the land, at the horizon of which stands a city with its ramparts and monuments.  November, under the sign of Sagittarius, carries us to the pigpen, where hogs are cared for and fattened.  In December, under the sign of Capricorn, the pigs are killed for the Christmas feast and preserved to be eaten over the course of winter – in a landscape newly re-covered with snow.       

– translated and adapted from Le Musée imaginaire de Michel Butor: 105 œuvres décisives de la peinture occidentale (Paris: Flammarion, 2019)

Jean Fouquet - Construction of the Temple of Jerusalem

Jean Fouquet
Construction of the Temple of Jerusalem
ca. 1470-75
tempera on vellum
Bibliothèque nationale de France

Jean Fouquet
Construction of the Temple of Jerusalem (cropped)
ca. 1470-75
tempera on vellum
Bibliothèque nationale de France

Jean Fouquet
Construction of the Temple of Jerusalem
(workers above)
ca. 1470-75
tempera on vellum
Bibliothèque nationale de France

Jean Fouquet
Construction of the Temple of Jerusalem
(workers below)
ca. 1470-75
tempera on vellum
Bibliothèque nationale de France

Architecture Inside a Book

We know of many panel paintings by Jean Fouquet, but it is as a book artist that his reputation is matchless.  Among the numerous works he illustrated, perhaps the most memorable is The Jewish Antiquities by Flavius Josephus, a Jewish writer of the first century after Christ, retelling in twenty books the history of the Jewish people since their beginnings.  In the 15th century scholars became interested in documenting Jewish origins as related to the Bible.  This curiosity led somewhat later to the study of Greek texts, to the igniting of the Reformation, and to historical inquiries that ended by eroding the authority of Holy Writ.         

Book illustration allowed Fouquet to explore the art of landscapes and cityscapes.  He challenged himself to represent architecture using a variety of approaches and viewpoints, taking a particular interest in the building-up process, as here, and in the tearing-down process, as in the fall of Jericho or the demolition of this same temple of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar.  

Construction Site

The temple does not share the same floorplan as a cathedral.  The sanctuary, housing the Arc of the Covenant, is described as a cube in the first Book of Kings – "twenty cubits in length, and twenty cubits in breadth, and twenty cubits in the height thereof" – yet it is evidently being constructed in the same manner as cathedrals in Fouquet's century.  The Biblical account also is the source that specifies an overall treatment of exterior gilding.  At the moment we are given to observe, this process has not been completed: the gold layer has not yet reached the roofline.      

The construction site remains active around this nearly-finished cathedral.  Groups of workmen bustle about.  We see stonemasons busy with their tools.  Visible on top of the building is the crane hoisting up blocks to support the dome, the crowning ornament of the structure, which other images show as complete.  This is the temple within which were installed the famous, spiraling Solomonic columns which Bernini attempted to reproduce in Rome for the baldacchino inside St. Peter's.   

The Palace of the Poor

King Solomon, positioned within a loggia of his palace, surveys the course of his newest enterprise.  Power gazes at its reflection, since a project of this type implies wealth, stability, strength.  Courtiers ascend a stairway, arriving at the palace to observe for themselves the good progress being made across the way, while the faithful enter the temple itself carrying holy candles and offerings.

The rising edifice with its surroundings represents the society from which it springs, but it also represents the building of the book, as it is transcribed and painted.  Fouquet proposes a new reading of the text of Flavius Josephus, but also of the Bible, taken together as a whole, for which he is inventing new images, concentrating in the small spaces of his pages the immense scope and variety of nature and the creative intensity of laboring humanity. 

– translated and adapted from Le Musée imaginaire de Michel Butor: 105 œuvres décisives de la peinture occidentale (Paris: Flammarion, 2019)

Enguerrand Quarton - Pietà de Villeneuve-lès-Avignon

Enguerrand Quarton
Pietà de Villeneuve-lès-Avignon
1455
tempera on panel
Musée du Louvre

Enguerrand Quarton
Pietà de Villeneuve-lès-Avignon
(Mary Magdalen)
1455
tempera on panel
Musée du Louvre

Enguerrand Quarton
Pietà de Villeneuve-lès-Avignon
(Donor)
1455
tempera on panel
Musée du Louvre

 

Enguerrand Quarton
Pietà de Villeneuve-lès-Avignon
(Dead Christ)
1455
tempera on panel
Musée du Louvre

The Author

The charterhouse of Villeneuve-lès-Avignon possessed two important paintings, of which one, The Coronation of the Virgin (which remains in the village, though now housed in its own small museum) is documented as the work of Enguerrand Quarton.  The other, this Pietà, is today in the Louvre.  Given that it bears the same date and shares many common characteristics, it is tempting to attribute it to the same painter, but on this point scholars do not unanimously agree.

Inscribed Haloes

In The Coronation of the Virgin there are no inscriptions, but they are numerous in the Pietà.  The Magdalen and St John the Evangelist would have been immediately identifiable, even for the least educated Christian.  By contrast, we are ignorant of the identity of the donor, and no documents have survived to aid us.  As for Christ, there is a nimbus of rays, but no lettering. 

The names of the three saints are not painted but incised within their haloes and are initially difficult to decipher: Johannes Evangelista, Virgo Mater, Maria Magdalena.  Only by patient examination can we reconstitute the words, letter by letter.  These designations are not present to facilitate our identification of the protagonists, which we would already have understood at first glance, but to encourage us to pronounce the sacred names as often as possible.  They are not meant to be legible without a certain delay: we are obliged to give them our full attention.  We confront here the same intention that inspired the amazing characters spelling out inscriptions in the tombs of ancient Egypt, meant to trigger the requisite pronunciation of the names of the deceased.  Deliberately distorted lettering plays a similar role in modern advertising.  The circular arrangement around each head contributes to this deacceleration, this retardation of the reading process, certain letters even set down in reverse.  

Enguerrand Quarton
Pietà de Villeneuve-lès-Avignon
(the Virgin)
1455
tempera on panel
Musée du Louvre

The picture is in some sense structured around five golden circles: the three haloes, Christ's nimbus of rays, and the star in the form of a jeweled clasp on the outside of the Virgin's robe, stella matutina, star of the morning.   

The absence of a name inside the nimbus of Christ is as important as the presence of names inside the others.  He remains in a state of misidentification, miscomprehension.  Only with the Resurrection will He reveal beyond any doubt his double nature.    

The Heavenly Inscription 

The celestial golden background is enclosed by a long inscription in smaller characters that demand even slower reading: O vos omnes qui transitis per viam attendite et videte si est dolor sicut dolor meus.  (O thou who pass on this path, pause and consider if any sorrow exists comparable to mine.)  The words are attributed to the Virgin in the offices for Good Friday and Holy Saturday.  First, rising vertically on the left, the message asks us to pause on a reading-path that is normally horizontal, next it requests in the middle of the phrase and of the image that we stop and gaze, and finally, descending on the right, adjures us to animate within ourselves the Virgin's sorrow.  Pious manipulation.       

Between Earth and Sky

The donor, at left, is presented with striking realism.  This is the portrait of an actual person, while the sacred actors can better be described as idealizations of sorrow.  They serve as the link between the gold of Heaven and the earthly Jerusalem, at left, a cityscape with domes and pinnacles unrolling along the horizon toward a red hill, and, far to the right, a mountain that punctuates the tableau.  Earthly Jerusalem is called to become heavenly.  Christ through the mystery of the incarnation transforms the heavenly to the earthly, and vice versa.  His extended arm ends in a partly open hand bearing the mark of the nail that was driven through it.  This wound is the doorway to Heaven.     

– translated and adapted from Le Musée imaginaire de Michel Butor: 105 œuvres décisives de la peinture occidentale (Paris: Flammarion, 2019)