Led By the Spirit

Hungry, exhausted, and exposed, Christ’s humanity is placed front and centre in the story of his Temptation.

The incarnation binds Christ to the fallen, material world. Through his own embodiment Christ offers a means to move toward salvation and ultimately to overcome the vulnerabilities of the bodily state. After all, when Christ refuses to turn the stone into bread he highlights spiritual sustenance over human appetites: ‘It is written, “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God”’ (Matthew 4:4 NRSV).

Drawing on his skills as a portrait painter for the Catholic elite in Cologne, Bartholomäus Bruyn conjures up the uncanny likeness of the recently-deceased Martin Luther. The painting visualizes the threat of Protestantism in a Catholic city that was surrounded on all sides by reform movements. The clear hierarchical composition attempts to mitigate this danger. It transports the viewer from the earthly realm to the divine along a vertical axis whose entry point is a representative of the church. This patron kneels at the margins of an untamed natural space that offers visual pleasure as the gaze moves to the vibrant landscape, then to the city’s temple, and eventually to a towering mountainous spire of rock. Barely visible behind Luther, an elephant and grazing camel (frequent features of paintings of paradise) connect this lush wilderness to the garden of Eden prior to humankind’s fall.

Celebrating the natural world alongside Christ’s transcendence of it, the red robes of the ecclesiastical patron and of Christ direct the viewer’s gaze upward to where the two other temptations are depicted: the second temptation on the pinnacle of the temple is visible in the distant city on the right, and the rocky summit where the devil departs and Christ is attended by angels juts up high above the entire vista.

At the Sacro Monte in Varallo, the temptations are similarly linked with ascetic retreat in a natural environment, but the setting for the first temptation is distinctly hostile, while the later episodes take place in a distant idyllic landscape. The natural world is prominently represented by the diverse animals that congregate in the foreground and interrupt pilgrims’ views of the biblical subject as they contemplate the work. Exotic as well as local species include a lion tearing into the flesh of a deer, a wild dog with suckling pups, a bear, cheetah, and porcupine, and a pure white crane. The representation of nature certainly appealed to the lived experience of pilgrims who had travelled to the alpine location. At a threshold between the Catholic Italian states and Protestant Switzerland, the Sacro Monte was founded in a mountainous area long-associated with witchcraft and heresy.

And yet the natural world does not only connote moral peril. Milanese ecclesiasts like Archbishop Federico Borromeo advocated private meditation on images that assembled impossible scenes of nature’s diversity (Jones 1988). After all, it was a divine imperative that led Christ to make his retreat: ‘Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness’ (Luke 4:1 NRSV). Pilgrims to the Sacro Monte were invited to travel to this pilgrimage destination in order to expiate their sin and—like Christ—to reaffirm their faith.

Five centuries later in Milan, Piero Manzoni would reject orthodoxy of any kind, whether religious, political, or artistic. The transformation of twenty-five factory-produced bread rolls reconfigures the material and psychological realities of everyday life as American-style capitalism was imported into postwar Italy (Silk 1993). No perspectival depth or virtuosic effects coerce or connote. Colour is rejected in favour of a materially-dense but pictorially vacant surface emptied of the artist’s hand. Standing before Achrome with Bread Rolls, newly-liberated Italians confronted their own growing faith in the commodity object. With a profoundly agnostic attitude, Manzoni challenged the status of the commodity as much as the moral certitudes of Catholic dogmatism.

The three artworks in this exhibition foreground the physicality of the world and of images. Like Christ’s incarnate body, visual images can mobilize religious reflection and lead the viewer from the mundane to the spiritual. Bruyn’s detailed application of oil paint creates convincing visual effects of physical presence through the vibrant colouring, subtle shadows, and hazy light associated with Netherlandish art. At the Sacro Monte the life-size polychromed sculptures seem to emerge out of frescoed walls with an uncannily lifelike presence. The unsettling physicality of real bread dipped in clay in Piero Manzoni’s Achrome with Bread Rolls celebrates material presence over representational effects. By implicating their viewers in a scene of palpable realism that tests the boundary between life and art, each of these artists heightens the psychological drama of Christ’s confrontation with a series of individual choices about his own physical existence and his faith in the divine.

References

Jones, Pamela. 1988. ‘Federico Borromeo as a Patron of Landscapes and Still Lifes: Christian Optimism in Italy ca. 1600’, The Art Bulletin 70.2: 266–72

Silk, Gerhard. 1993. ‘Myths and Meanings in Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’Artista’, Art Journal 52.3: 65–75