The Golden Calf

The unfaithful in this medieval illustration by William de Brailes worship in stillness. There is no hint of the pre-festival revelry suggested by Scripture (Exodus 32:5, 6) in the sober worshippers. Despite idolatry’s long association with sexual immorality, de Brailes imagines this moment of idol worship devoid of sensuality. His illustration suggests a subtler critique of how the senses go awry.

While the worshippers are modestly dressed and solemnly composed, their eyes betray their idolatry. They are all fixed in an identical, unbroken gaze at the golden calf. With their heads craned upwards, they are literally a ‘stiff-necked people’ (Exodus 32:9). They have given themselves over to what much of the Christian tradition, following Augustine’s gloss on 1 John 2:16, calls ‘the lust of the eyes’.

But this is a strange lust. Where the calf in the scriptural story was made from gold earrings (Exodus 32:2–4), the calf in this image is brown, the same shade as the horns growing out of Moses’s head (a common way of representing Moses in this scene, resulting from the Vulgate’s translation of Moses’s ‘shining’ in the descent account of Exodus 34:29 as Moses’s ‘horns’). The most visually enticing aspect of the scene is the gold-leaf background, made from the same material as the calf described in Scripture. Might this colour choice further distance idolatry from sensuality, as if to affirm that the problem of idolatry lies not in gazing at gold any more than idolatry comes necessarily coupled with sexual immorality? The trouble with idolatry, this image seems to imply, lies not in the senses; nor is the solution to idolatry the repudiation of pleasure that comes by way of them. Instead of denying sensual energies, this illustration proposes to redirect them by using gold—not to mark an idol but the background—thus evoking by it the divine presence uncontained by any particular object.

References

Augustine. Confessions, Book 10, chs 30, 35.

The viewer’s eye is drawn both to the gleaming calf that commands the top half of Nicolas Poussin’s Adoration of the Golden Calf (1633–34) and to the worshippers circling that calf in dancing adoration. The movement, energy, and crowdedness of the bottom half stand in tension with the stillness and relative emptiness of the top half. Below, the arms of the worshippers stretch out to one another and up toward the calf, while above, the calf’s hoof, necklace, and eyeline all point back down, and so the gaze circulates between these two sights: the unmoving, dead idol and the lively ones giving themselves over to it.

It is easy to miss Moses coming down the mountain in dark fury, his tablet raised. This is not the shining Moses who descends Sinai for the second time in Exodus 34 but the Moses described in Exodus 32, descending unnoticed to the dancing and noise (vv.17–19). Placed far in the background, Moses is so much smaller than the revellers and the calf, and so much more obscure. It is easy for the eye to glide over this one who bears divine presence and instead circle with the dancers, moving between their revelry and the idol’s bright presence. As art historian Richard Neer (2006) has argued, this is an image that warns about the dangers of images, about how they can tempt us to devote ourselves to false divinities. In rendering the golden calf so visually appealing, Poussin shows the viewer how easily her eyes are drawn to idols.

But, of course, this is not simply an iconoclastic message. Poussin warns about images, not verbally but visually. This painting may perform a sort of therapy, helping us to see God better in the world; teaching us to look in the shadows for the divine presence descending; exhorting us to wait patiently for the glorious presence and content ourselves, in this time of waiting, with a God who may come in shadows and traces.

References

Neer, Richard T. 2006. ‘Poussin and the Ethics of Imitation’, Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, 51/52: 297–344

Draped in blue cloth, Francis Picabia’s calf is not golden. Nor is it clear that it is humanly-made. The calf’s grey, muscular torso, evokes classical marble sculptures of the Minotaur, but its pink-tinged nose suggests life. Its teeth are bared crookedly and menacingly, though it offers no attention to the objects it threatens. Its eye—the one that is not obscured by shadow—looks off to the side, half-closed. What kind of idol is this?

Based on a photograph of a dead calf by Erwin Blumenfeld (The Minotaur or The Dictator c.1937), Francis Picabia’s painting Adoration of the Calf (1941–42) interprets the biblical scene of idolatry loosely. Important details have been changed from both the description in the scriptural text and the tradition of golden calf paintings. Gone are the sumptuous golds of medieval and Renaissance interpretations of the scene. The worshippers have become mere hands and arms, extended in adoration. The divinity they adore is not intelligent, but it is clearly powerful. Its muscular figure, its regal blue garment, the way it dominates the scene, the way the canvas is itself over one metre high—they suggest literally brutish political force. This is an idol of blind power.

The role of sight, in Picabia’s painting, is inverted. Where many have interpreted the golden calf story as a parable about the dangers of sight, Picabia’s painting offers a visual warning about the dangers of not seeing. Blindness abounds: it is not clear the worshippers see the calf (since we can’t see their eyes). The calf certainly does not seem to see the people, or anything with much focus or clarity. The painting in this way warns of the golden calves that arise in the political sphere, playing on our fears and draping themselves in the costumes of legitimate governance. To see them for what they are, that is the hope to which the painting exhorts us.