Time for a Change

Like a stubborn heifer, Israel is stubborn; can the Lord now feed them, like a lamb in a broad pasture? (Hosea 4:16)

Modelled in bronze relief by Donatello, St Anthony of Padua’s miracle could be read as a response to the prophetic question posed in Hosea 4. The townspeople of Rimini here stand in for the Israelites, and a mule performs the part of the heifer.

Anthony presented the beast of burden with the Blessed Sacrament, after the animal’s heretical Cathar owner had denounced Christ’s presence in the Eucharist. The mule, having been starved for three days straight, was presented with a choice between his meal and the Host. In front of what seems to be an altar, the result of Anthony’s experiment takes centre stage, highlighted by Donatello’s tripartite classicizing architecture. The animal not only prefers the Host’s spiritual sustenance to his feed; it even kneels in reverence. Ultimately, its owner would follow suit and become one of Anthony’s most pious followers.

The bronze relief was probably positioned on the back of the High Altar in Padua’s most important church: the Basilica dedicated to St Anthony. It was placed next to a locked tabernacle that would have contained the actual Host, the tabernacle in turn flanked on the other side by a relief of St Anthony’s Miracle of the New-Born Babe. By their placement, the two scenes had their meaning amplified through eucharistic connotations (Johnson 1999: 653–54).

‘Can the Lord now feed them?’. The answer to Hosea’s rhetorical (?) question is a ‘yes’ in Donatello’s relief. We see the mule, so reputedly stubborn—as, by extension, is his owner—turning from a heifer into a ‘lamb in a broad pasture’ (v.16).

References:

Johnson, Geraldine A. 1999. ‘Approaching the Altar: Donatello’s Sculpture in the Santo’, Renaissance Quarterly, 52.3: 653–54

Besides celebrating Andy Warhol as the quintessential artist of his time and place—the artist who held the most revealing mirror up to his generation—I’d like to recall a side of his character that he hid from all but his closest friends: his spiritual side. (Richardson 1992: 140)

With these words, the art historian John Richardson revealed Warhol’s hitherto ‘hidden’ Catholicism, in his eulogy addressed to the crowds that had gathered for the artist’s memorial service at St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York in 1987. He made this perhaps surprising remark not long after Warhol had made Repent and Sin No More!.

Warhol’s inherently verbal work reads as a warning, as does Hosea 4’s address to the Israelites: the classic prophetic call ‘Hear the word of the Lord, O people of Israel’ (v.1) is followed some sentences later by ‘the more they increased, the more they sinned against me’ (v.7). The people of Israel heard, but did not listen.

Notions of re-use and increase are fundamental to Warhol’s oeuvre. Reproduction and repetition are the artist’s trademark. For Repent and Sin No More!, the appropriated image took shape in two versions, a ‘positive’ and a ‘negative’, inverting the sober black-and-white of lettering and background. Their monochromatic make-up puts these works in a longstanding Christian tradition. In medieval and early-modern Europe for instance, black, white, and greys were used in the visual culture of Lent as a means for marking this period of penitence (Sliwka 2017: 27).

Repent and Sin No More! may in this sense pick up on the penitential associations of monochromatic art, in a reproducible medium and with the formal qualities that Warhol employed ever since he designed advertisements early in his career. Like Hosea’s Israelites, of whom he complains that the more they increased the less they listened, Warhol’s work in essence explores the same concept by using a mass reproduced text/image aimed at a rapidly increasing American population, an audience that was possibly equally inattentive.  

The positive and negative versions of Warhol’s work furthermore emphasize that his audience has a choice, one leading towards light, the other to darkness. Perhaps the ‘mirror’ held up to his generation, to which Richardson’s eulogy referred, was most confrontational in Warhol’s last works, especially Repent and Sin No More!.

References:

Richardson, John. 1992. ‘Eulogy for Andy Warhol’, in Andy Warhol: Heaven and Hell Are Just One Breath Away! Late Paintings and Related Works, 1984–1986 (New York: Rizzoli), p. 140

Sliwka, Jennifer. 2017. ‘Painting the Sacred’, in Monochrome: Painting in Black a White by Lelia Packer and Jennifer Sliwka (London: National Gallery), p. 27

If this indeed is A Butcher’s Shop or a Meat Stall, one wonders why two fishes (herring?) are displayed on a pewter dish among this cornucopia of meat. However, looking closely, a great variety of different foodstuffs appears. Among the beef, pork, and poultry, there are kippers too, and pretzels, pies, and dairy products, bathing in painterly light. Hosea’s ‘beasts of the field’, ‘birds of the air’, and ‘even the fish’, are here shown as having been ‘taken away’ by man (Hosea 4:3).

Then, the viewer is drawn to what could be called a background, but one that counterintuitively contains human action. On the right, a man is filling an earthenware jug with water from a well, surrounded by scattered oyster shells. Beyond, a second hung carcass acts as a curtain to an interior scene, with men and women around a table in front of a fireplace, appearing to have a sinfully good time. In the left background, a scene that is familiar: an older man guiding a woman on a donkey carrying a small child. This must be the ‘flight into Egypt’ of Joseph, Mary, and the infant Jesus.

Only then does one realize that the Holy Family is painted right above the fishes. The fishes, in fact, are crossed, and look like a crucifix. They are a clue to the fact that—beyond the narrative in the left background—Pieter Aertsen’s horror vacui ‘still life’ contains many explicit and implicit Christian references.

It balances virtue and vice. In the flight into Egypt scene Mary is handing out alms—or one could call it ‘spiritual food’ (Craig 1982: 6). Meanwhile, its counterpoint on the right appears in fact to be a brothel scene, invoking temptations of the flesh; flesh that is quite literally offered to the Butcher Shop’s ‘visitor’. The passage from Hosea seems to sum up this part of the composition well: ‘They shall eat, but not be satisfied; they shall play the harlot, but not multiply’ (4:10).

Aertsen’s plentiful painting seems to ask for introspection. Maybe, as well as temptation, there is redemption in the flesh as well—the very flesh that is fleeing to Egypt in the painting’s background?

References

Craig, Kenneth M. 1982. ‘Pieter Aertsen and the “Meat Stall”’, Oud Holland, 96.1: 6