The Temptation of Christ

Martin Luther is cast as the devil in this painting of the Temptation of Christ which forms part of an altarpiece made for a Carmelite monastery in Cologne. Painted when the Catholic Church viewed Protestantism as a dangerous heretical movement north of the Alps, this work brings biblical history into direct conversation with the recent past.

Bartholomäus Bruyn focusses on the first temptation, which unfolds on a barren plateau of rock beside a figure of an unknown episcopal patron (kneeling at bottom left). The notorious Reformer offers a rock in his left hand. The index finger of his right hand hovers just above it, the curled knuckles of his other fingers lightly grazing its surface. Luther’s gesture stands out against his distinctively Protestant black robes, focussing attention on the demand ‘If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread’ (Matthew 4:3).

The pointing index finger of Christ’s left hand echoes that of Luther’s right hand only to reject his provocation. Whereas Luther’s other hand clutches the stuff of the earth, the Son of God raises his to gesture beyond the earthly realm and upward to the space above the bishop who kneels in the foreground.

The mirrored action of Christ’s and ‘the devil’s’ opposing hands signals the moral opposition between them. Similarly, their stance and posture produce both visual and narrative tension. Luther’s left leg awkwardly crosses his body as it moves toward the Son of God, drawing attention to his monstrous talons and curling tail. Christ steps toward Luther, drawing attention to his bare left foot. His bent right leg leads our eyes downward to the man of the church whose red robes visually and symbolically connect him to Christ.

Christ’s delicate balancing act heightens the most dramatic moment in this narrative of individual choice. Of course, Christ’s response to the Devil would have been well known to viewers of this altarpiece, but their own responses to temptation would have been less certain. Crucially, the beholder’s visual communion with Christ is arbitrated through the bishop in the foreground, who is placed between us and the Saviour. This compositional strategy echoes the role of the bishop during the sacrament of Eucharistic Mass, privileging and celebrating the mediating role of the church in the salvation of the soul.

References

Tümmers, Horst-Johs. 1964. Die Altarbilder des Älteren Bartolomäus Bruyn: Mit Einem Kritischen Katalog (Cologne: Greven Verlag)

Unlike Christ, who refused to transform stone into bread (Matthew 4:4), Piero Manzoni decisively transformed bread into stone.

His 1961 work Achrome with Bread Rolls is formed of a tightly-packed grid of bread rolls which, when hung on a wall, seems as monumental as a marble frieze. Manzoni covered each roll in a slurry of kaolin, a naturally white clay, and let them harden before affixing them to a white painted panel. The pure whiteness of the undulating surface heightens the relief. Irregular knotted forms nestle side by side, pulling the eye along the uniform rows and between the round forms, down to shadows cast on the flat panel surface.

Manzoni produced a number of Achromes during his short career, each composed of natural or artificial materials chosen to create highly tactile surfaces. Evacuated of colour, clay-soaked bread, canvas dipped in gesso, bleached cotton balls, and raw fibreglass deny the representational or expressive aims of perspectival figurative painting. Meaning in these works is not about representation but about an evocation of the physical presence of the everyday object that engages the body as much as the eyes.

In this respect, Manzoni also challenges the visual abstraction of the Modernist monochrome through his celebration of the material world. Smell, touch, and taste are activated by the bread rolls, which are ubiquitous on Italian tables. Viewers recall piles of the familiar knotted buns stuffed with paper-thin swathes of mortadella, or pulled apart to soak up pools of tomato sauce from a plate of pasta.

And yet Manzoni frustrates the appetite. Instead of a soft, floury surface, viewers are confronted with a smooth hardened shell: cold liquid clay absorbed into the substance of the bread and dried to an inedible stone-like object. Eucharistic transformation of bread into the body of Christ is upended here: bread is transformed into Art.

But if Manzoni plays the role of the provoking heretic and omnipotent god-figure in this work, his devilry deals in the frustration of desire, rather than its satisfaction.

References

Mansoor. Jaleh. 2001. ‘We Want to Organise Disintegration’, October 95: 28–53

Christ’s first temptation is brought dramatically to life inside a pilgrimage chapel at the Sacro Monte ­di Varallo. The Sacro Monte (or Holy Mountain) is a unique pilgrimage site perched on a rocky bluff above the town of Varallo at the base of the Italian Alps.

Originally founded in 1491 as a spatial replica of pilgrimage shrines in the Holy Land, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it came to comprise forty-five chapels narrating different episodes from the gospels. Early modern pilgrims knelt at carved wooden partitions to peer through openings and meditate on sculpted and painted representations of Christ’s life. The painted backgrounds merge almost seamlessly with the three-dimensional sculpture to create a consistent and dramatic sense of space. Brightly painted lifesize sculptures seem to emerge from the perspectival frescos that cover the walls, floor, and ceiling of the architectural interiors.

Located near the rear wall of this barrel-vaulted chapel, the sculpted figure of the devil cradles a stone in his outstretched left palm. His other hand is raised in invitation as he turns to face the Son of God, who lifts his opposing hand in rebuke. The devil’s muted brown and green robes visually connect him to the painted wilderness behind him. A clear moral opposition between the figures is suggested by the contrast between these drab robes of the devil’s and the brightly-hued red and blue robes worn by Christ (symbolising his incarnation and divinity respectively). Christ is also distinguished from the jostling swarm of beasts represented in the rocky wilderness of the foreground: snarling, pacing, suckling their young, and devouring prey.

Behind the sculptures, and painted on the chapel walls, Christ and the devil are depicted in conversation in roughly the same scale as the sculptures. Standing closely together, Christ looks away from Satan, suggesting his rejection of the second and third temptations. These are represented further in the distance within a jewel-toned, atmospheric landscape. The Edenic vista connects the scene to the alpine terrain outside the chapel, contrasting with—and perhaps tempering—the ominous natural world that is represented in three dimensions in the foreground.

References

Göttler, Christine. 2013. ‘The Temptation of the Senses at the Sacro Monte di Varallo’, in Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Wietse de Boer and Christine Göttler (Leiden: Brill), pp. 393–445