Cain and Abel

The Oratorian art collector Virgilio Spada (1596–1662) became patron of the Sienese artist Niccolò Tornioli soon after he moved to Rome in 1635. It was under Spada’s patronage that Tornioli painted this version of the fratricide (a subject which he depicted on at least three occasions). It was made for the presbytery of the Barnabite church of San Paolo in the papal city of Bologna in 1643. Its scale and furious violence intentionally correspond to the sculptural group of the beheading of St Paul that Alessandro Algardi completed for the high altar of the same church at the same time.

Cain and Abel are represented larger than life-size. Tornioli seems to be suggesting by this that the first generation of Adam was a noble race of giants. Despite being a killer, Cain retains a certain grandeur of stature; he is favoured by God as the founder of the first city on earth, and is later able to negotiate with God (Genesis 4:13–16).

We do not get to see the victim’s face as he lies on his right side, his left arm forcefully restrained by his killer. The wicked one, with tousled hair and upraised arm, levels a savage jawbone with which he will mercilessly bludgeon his brother. Abel is compliant and accepting of his death, a true prototype of Christ’s willingness at Calvary.

At least Virgilio Spada seems to have had cordial relations with his own elder brother, the noted art collector Cardinal Bernardino Spada (1594–1661). And both brothers, living in early seventeenth-century Rome, would have known very well Origen’s Exhortation to Martyrdom in which he declared that ‘what was said of Abel, when he was slain by the wicked murderer Cain, is suitable for all whose blood has been shed wickedly’ (Exhortation to Martyrdom, 50). This Abel was a fitting presence in a setting where Christ’s innocent sacrifice was continually being pleaded in the Mass, and in a church dedicated to St Paul, whose death was that of a martyr.

References

Greer, Rowan A. 1979. Origen: An Exhortation to Martyrdom, Prayer, and Selected Works, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press)

Weston, Giulia Martina. 2016. Niccolò Tornioli (1606–1651): Art and Patronage in Baroque Rome (Rome: Artemide)

In 1541, Giorgio Vasari (1511–74) arrived in Venice to decorate a temporary theatre for a play by his fellow Tuscan, Pietro Aretino. Other commissions quickly followed, including one from the Augustinian canons of Santo Spirito in Isola, on one of the remote islands in the Venetian lagoon. They asked Vasari to design three large ceiling paintings which would accompany a new altarpiece depicting the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost by Titian (who was some twenty years Vasari’s senior).

Vasari left Venice without fulfilling the commission, and Titian stepped in to complete it. (Later, in 1656 the three paintings were incorporated in the sacristy ceiling of Santa Maria della Salute.)

All three of the ceiling paintings play with contrasts between faces seen and faces unseen. In two it is the victim’s face that is presented. Abraham turns away from us to look skywards at the angel as the boy Isaac looks piteously out at us from the top of the pyre; David’s upraised prayerful hands obscure his face while Goliath’s severed head is angled in our direction. But in Cain and Abel, it is Abel whose face we cannot see. Here, Titian captures something of the violent anonymity of victimhood.

Cain—this ‘first disciple of the Devil’ as St Basil called him (Reau 1956: 96)—has already bludgeoned Abel and is about to kick him over the edge of a rocky ledge, while bringing down a second blow on him. Abel’s head wound, with blood pouring out over his tousled hair, cries out to the viewer for justice.

It was only from the thirteenth century onwards that artists in the Western tradition began to depict the altars that Cain and Abel were presumed to have constructed (ibid 1956: 94)—though there is no specific mention of altars in Genesis 4. Perhaps this reflected the enhanced sacerdotal authority of a sacrificing priesthood.

The two stone votive altars in this painting intensify the work’s dramatic effect. Behind the brothers a black cloud of smoke swirls skyward from Cain’s rejected offering, threatening to engulf him, while the pure flame of Abel’s offering rises from a more clearly visible altar in the right foreground. Abel’s left hand reaches towards it in vain, as if making a last appeal to God.

References

Biadene, Susanna and Mary Yakush. 1990. Titian Prince of Painters (Venice: Marsilio Editori), pp. 255–61

Campbell, Stephen J. 2019. The Endless Periphery Toward a Geopolitics of Art in Lorenzo Lotto’s Italy (Chicago: Chicago University Press), pp. 246–49

Puttfarken, Thomas. 2005. Titian and Tragic Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press), pp. 101, 103

Reau, Louis. 1956. Iconographie de l’Art Chrétien, vol. 2 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France)

The Bible is silent on the means that Cain used to kill Abel but artists variously depicted a branch from the tree of life, an axe, shovel, stone, baton, or club as the murder weapon—for biblical commentators were convinced that the death was vicious: ‘It was such a death, whereby Abel’s blood was abundantly shedd, and that in many places. For the word is in the plural vox sanginum [sic], the voice of his bloodes’, wrote Andrew Willet in 1605 (1605: 60).

The Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens was born in religious exile in Germany to a Calvinist father and a Roman Catholic mother (in whose faith he would be brought up). His father had fled the Spanish Netherlands to escape persecution for his beliefs. In the turbulent years of the Counter-Reformation, Rubens may well have drawn upon his experiences of Europe’s violent divisions to give his treatment of the Cain and Abel narrative its extreme vehemence.

He portrays Cain as an angry ‘Hercules’. Following Jan van Eyck’s 1436 Madonna and Child (where the murder appears as a sculpted detail on the armrest of the Throne of Mercy), Rubens depicts an ass’s jawbone as the instrument.

The two protagonists are portrayed as men of his own epoch: rough, muscled woodsmen who occupy the whole canvas. Cain rages over his brother, who is rendered yet more vulnerable by his cloak having fallen away so that he is almost naked. Both contorted bodies could be the work of Michelangelo, the muscularity of whose work Rubens would have been able to admire when he lived in Rome.

The siblings are illuminated by the flames of Abel’s sacrifice on the altar behind them which burns brightly under the louring sky. Cain has dragged his brother to the side of the altar on which his own offering of first fruits has failed to find favour with God (Genesis 4:5). Rather than depict Abel as a resigned martyr for faith, Rubens paints the anguish of betrayal, surprise, and shocked disbelief.

Night hovers over them both. This will allow Cain to dissemble that he does not know where his brother is when he is later challenged by God (Genesis 4:9)—a lie that identifies him as a true son of his father (Genesis 3:9–10).

References

Willet, Andrew. 1605. Hexapla in Genesin: that is, a sixfold commentarie upon Genesis (London)