Stories of Art

These days it is one of the most popular tourist attractions in Paris, but it has always been controversial. La Basilique du Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre, commonly known as Sacré-Cœur is a church, dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The idea to build the church was first proposed in 1870 and it was directly linked to the disastrous defeat of the French army at the battle of Sedan. A number of prominent (and very religious) Frenchmen decided that a church should be built on the steep hill of Montmartre, so that the entire city would be able to see it. They believed that France was being punished for its moral decline since the French revolution. By 1870, French politics had been very volatile for almost a century as the political system of the country kept changing from monarchy to republic to empire and back to monarchy and so on. That year, the second empire ended, and the third republic began. One large faction in the country was conservative and religious and often in favour of monarchy or empire. The other big faction was republican, meaning that they favoured a republic and often one of a more socialist kind with at the very least a separation of church and state. So, the religious right wanted this church and the left saw it as a direct attack on their republican ideals. That is why the people who wanted it build, had to raise the funds for it themselves and whenever there was a conservative government, they were helped by the state with large subsidies and whenever there was a left-wing government, they were actively opposed. For that reason, it took some 40 years to build it. For instance, Prime Minister George Clemenceau managed to halt its construction twice, but was never able to end the project completely. Some leftist politicians are still opposed to it. As recently as 2022 they tried to block its nomination to become a national monument of France.
Still, I guess most tourists are unaware of any of this as they visit Montmartre to see the church or take in the spectacular views of the city, or both.

La Basilique du Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre, Paul Abadie, 1875-1914, Paris.

Now there’s an unattainable body image. I know social media is filled with pictures of impossibly beautiful people. Pictures that are posed, staged, photoshopped and put through ever more sophisticated filters to make even the most mundane situation look like an epic event. Obviously, this altering of reality in images is not new. Artists throughout time have embellished the favourable and hidden the lesser bits of their subjects to make better pictures. But in this case, I think the artist went just a little too far.
This is Hercules by Hendrick Goltzius. He made it at a time when it was fashionable to depict lots of muscles in extreme poses. They loved to exaggerate proportions and parts of the anatomy to make a point. The subject of Hercules is ideal for this sort of thing because he is superhuman. We see him performing some of his heroic feats in the background. These things he could only do because he was insanely strong, and that was because he was a son of Zeus/Jupiter. Apparently, Goltzius thought that that was best expressed by giving him a number of muscles that ordinary humans do not have. So, if you are going to the gym to work on your beach body, sorry, no matter what you do, you will not end up looking like this. In real life that is.

The Great Hercules, Hendrick Goltzius, 1589.

This painting has been popping up in my social media feeds, and it seems to spark some controversy. Apparently, many people think that this is an AI generated image. And I guess it is not surprising that we are having these discussions these days. I come across all kinds of AI images, some of which could easily fool me, but when in doubt, I have plenty of old school methods to check. However, for people who don’t have their own collection of reference books, it must become increasingly difficult to tell real from fake.
This painting really was made by Van Gogh. He made it while he lived in Arles in 1888. There is even an earlier drawing of the same girl that is now in the Guggenheim collection. This one has long been in the private collection of René and Madeleine Junod, until they donated their collection to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Chaux-de-Fonds. Apparently, it is not on permanent display, so if you are planning a trip there, and this is what you want to see, you should call ahead to make sure it is there.

Fillette aux Cheveux Ébouriffés, or, Girl With Dishevelled Hair, Vincent van Gogh, 1888, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland.

You rarely see this story in paintings. It is the apocryphal story of the poisoned chalice. There are two versions of it. In one, st. John the Evangelist is arrested and taken to Rome to be tried by the emperor. In the other, he is confronted by a priest of Artemis, but from that point onwards the stories are pretty much the same. So, st. John is brought before the emperor/priest and they have a discussion about the comparative merits of their gods. At some point, John is challenged to drink poison to see if he survives. John accepts, so they bring in a chalice and two condemned prisoners. These two have to drink first just to test the poison. They do and they die. You can see them lying behind St. John. So, then John blesses the chalice and the poison and asks for protection. He drinks all of it and nothing happens to him. A little while later, he also brings the two condemned men back to life (which, if I were a sceptical man, I would see as a sign that the poison didn’t work in the first place).
Now, the story itself is rarely depicted, but the object involved became one of the main attributes of st. John the Evangelist. He is usually depicted holding a chalice and often you can see a little snake popping out over its rim to symbolise the poison inside.

St. John the Evangelist Blessing the Poisoned Cup Intended to Kill Him, Wilhelm Stetter, 1519, Musée Unterlinden, Colmar

Isn’t this just the cutest painting ever? This sweet young girl hugging her dog, her name is Jane Bowles. It is hard to imagine today just how original this composition was in 1775. Portraits, even those of children, tended to be much more formal. Here we see a girl, only three or four years old at the time, who seems to have just stopped running around (judging by the blush on her cheeks) and spontaneously pulls her spaniel towards her. Sir Joshua Reynolds, who painted this portrait, always wanted to spend some time with his subjects before painting them. He wanted to get to know them, talk to them, have discussions, so he could better understand them. This made him very successful at portraying the intellectual elite of his time. These were his people. He was very much part of that elite as students of art history all know, because at some point during their studies, they have to read his treatises on art. These are typical of his age and tend to come across, to modern readers, as more than a little pompous. So how did this man approach the commission for a portrait of such a young child? Well, apparently, he went to dinner with the family. He sat next to Jane and spent the whole dinner telling her stories and doing magic tricks. Little Jane loved it, and because of that, she was delighted when she was taken to his studio to sit for her portrait. So, this happy, open look we see on her face is something she probably genuinely showed him.

Miss Jane Bowles, Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1775, Wallace Collection, London.

Today it is known as ‘the Merry Family’, but that is not really what this picture represents. We see a family, and clearly, they are merry, but there is more to it than that. This is one of the many cautionary tales in Jan Steen’s work.
So, what do we see here? Well, a family has gathered and they are partying, playing music and day drinking. Then, as now, people would not object to having a party once in a while, but here the adults are setting a bad example for the children. We can see that, because at the front of the group, young children are drinking as well. On both the far left and right of the paining, kids are playing with pipes. This is apparently something they have seen adults do and they are copying their bad habits (even though smoking was not yet believed to be unhealthy, it was considered lazy because you were idle while doing it).
Just above the kids on the right, we can see a piece of paper. On it, there is a Dutch proverb: “Soo d’ouden songen soo pi**en de jonge”, which translates to: “the way the elders sang, so the young ones will squeak”, meaning that kids copy the behaviour of the elders around them. Jan Steen took a bit of liberty with the spelling of the proverb. The word ‘Pijpen’ would usually be spelt either ‘piepen’ or ‘Pypen’. Because of that, the word can also be pronounced in a way that doesn’t mean ‘to squeak’, but sounds like the word ‘pipe’. That can mean both smoking a pipe or playing bagpipes, both of which we can see in the painting.

The Merry Family, Jan Steen, 1668, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

This is a painting of nepotism. It had long been a popular practice for popes to surround themselves with cousins and nephews. A pope could give many important and lucrative appointments to his relatives so their whole family would benefit from his pontificate, and at the same, these nephew cardinals were often amongst the very few people a pope could really trust. This particular pope took his nepotism seriously. He supposedly wrote to his brother:”God gave us the papacy, now let us enjoy it”. The original letter is lost, so we can’t be sure if he actually wrote it, but he certainly behaved like it. He made several cousins and boyfriends cardinal, others he gave various noble titles and offices. He himself had been the beneficiary of quite a bit of nepotism as well. I mean, it is not as if he worked his way to the top. He was made a cardinal when he was 15 by Innocent VIII, who was, of course, a relative.
Leo X can also be seen as a caution against the practice. He turned out to be one of the worst popes in history. When he died, he left the church bankrupt and ruptured beyond repair. On the other hand, he was a great patron of the arts, so at least he gave us some good paintings and churches.

Portrait of Pope Leo X and his cousins, cardinals Giulio de' Medici and Luigi de' Rossi, Raphael, 1518, Uffizi, Florence.

Thank you so much for all your responses to yesterdays post. It really is very helpful because it tells me there are many different aspects about images like these to discuss. So lets get started.
One of the things people seem to object to in the Cruz painting I posted yesterday, is that you can barely see his wounds. This is pretty common in images of the resurrected Christ. It is done that way, I think, for a combination of reasons. One is to follow the story. After Jesus had died, his body was laid in a tomb. It was customary to wash a body before it was buried and so presumably, they washed the body of Jesus. So, the blood would be gone, especially since he would no longer bleed. You could argue that the gospels even refer to this. When Christ appears to his apostles, he points out his wounds almost as if they are not obvious to see. But there is a much more important reason why he is depicted with only the wounds in his hands, feet and side, and not the bruises and cuts from the crown of thorns and the beatings he received. Here he is the risen Christ, he is victorious over death and no longer fully human, more divine. This is a very different aspect of him from the man who suffers during the Passion. So when he is depicted during his torments, we see all the ways in which he is hurt, because that is the point of that part of the story.
When he is resurrected his wounds don’t bother him anymore.
This is also why he is in such great shape after the resurrection. Compare for instance this Risen Christ by Michelangelo. This is not during the passion. We can see this because he holds attributes of his tortures that he could never hold in the story.
By the way, the loincloth was added much later.

Risen Christ, Michelangelo, 1519-21, Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, Rome.

I confess I don’t get the controversy. This poster, based on a painting by Salustiano García Cruz, was placed all over Seville to announce the sacred week, hoping to get more people to go to mass. However, some people claim that the image is somehow offensive and evil, and I just don’t see it. I mean, if they are talking about the red background, they could have something of a point. It is a bit bright and ‘in your face’, but apparently nobody complained about that. Instead they say that it is overly sexualised or ho******ic and that makes me wonder if any of these people have visited a museum or a church in the last 500 years or so. Images of the resurrected Christ tend to show him (almost) naked. How else are we to see the wound in his side? And let’s face it, he tends to be in shape. I have never seen an image of Jesus as a bald man with a beer belly (come to think of it, my body type is severely underrepresented in Christian imagery, but that is a story for another time).
So what do you think? Is this an overly sexualised Jesus? And if so, why? And also, why would people call it ‘ho******ic’, instead of simply ‘erotic’?
I am curious to hear your thoughts, so let me know in the comments.

Poster for the Sacred Week in Seville, based on a painting by Salustiano García Cruz.

He must have used Luke for inspiration. Fra Angelico was a friar who lived and worked in San Marco in Florence for many years. There, he decorated many of the cells of his fellow friars with these wonderful fresco’s. This one can be found in cell nr. 8. We see the women at the holy tomb. They came there on Sunday with spices to embalm the body of Jesus. There, they found an empty tomb and an angel that told them that Jesus had arisen. Now, the gospels don’t agree on many of the details. One of those is the number of women present. Mark 16:1 says three, Matthew 28:1 says two but Luke 24:10 says “Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James and the other women”, so he keeps the number open to interpretation.
Here we see Mary Magdalene peering into the tomb, while the other women stand back a little. It is set in a cave, which corresponds with the gospels. The burial place is often seen as a cave or cavern with a tomb placed inside.
I love how Jesus is hovering behind them. None of the people present see him, but he is there.

The Women at the Tomb, Fra Angelico, between 1439 and 1443, San Marco, Florence.

It is a horrible moment, the death of Jesus. His body is broken and we can see he is dead from the wound in his side. Still, in this painting Velázquez managed to make him look dignified, noble, even powerful. The scene is stripped of all context. We don’t see the people who were supposed to be at the cross, we see no background. There is only the focus on Christ himself. With the dark background, it is almost as if he is lit up by artificial lights. I suppose we should see this as divine light.
It looks straightforward, but there are subtle details. For instance, the body is placed in a contraposto, where the weight of the body is placed a bit more on one leg then the other. It makes him look more solid, more real somehow.
By the way, at the time that this was painted, there was a discussion going on about the number of nails used in the crucifixion. Traditionally, it was depicted with three nails. That meant the feet were placed one over the other with s single nail through both. But an alternative view had come up where both feet were placed side by side with a nail through each foot separately and standing on a support. This was more than just an artistic choice. In Spain in particular it became a theological debate. The sort of thing that Jesuits would write treatises about. I don’t know if the argument was ever settled by the church, if one side or the other ever won. If it did, I do know they were then ignored by artists the world over, because from the 17th century onwards both versions were used in art.

Christ Crucified, Diego Velázquez, between 1632 and 1636, Prado, Madrid

Someone is pregnant, or perhaps not. This physician is looking at a flask of urine, hoping to determine just that. We can see that he is a learned man from the anatomy book and the globe on the right. The woman standing next to the doctor is possibly his patient, but we can’t be sure. She is carrying a type of bucket that was typically used by servants when running errands for their mistresses. So we are made to wonder if she is there for herself or on behalf of someone else. If you zoom in and look behind her, you can see Cupid in the pillar over her head. This obviously refers to the origin of her, or her mistresses, problem. She is clearly not happy. Is she worried about an unwanted pregnancy or is she anxious because they have been having trouble conceiving? These problems were as common in the 17th century as they are today. The difference is that at the time, there was next to nothing anyone could do about them.
Relationship problems, extramarital pregnancies, or not being able to conceive, these things occupied the minds of people then, just as much as now. In a painting like this, we are deliberately given hints in several directions, so that we will automatically start imagining the story behind the picture.

The Physician, Gerrit Dou, 1653, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.