The Dark Ages

Any adult who has received a Catholic education and survived will have plenty of “interesting” stories to tell of the more mystical or, as we liked to call them, weird aspects of the faith, which were usually remnants of the theology born during the time not so affectionately known as the Dark Ages. (They prefer the Middle Ages now.) Domenico di Pace Beccafumi, better known simply as Il Beccafumi, died on May 18, 1551, as the Dark Ages were giving way to the enlightening humanism of the Renaissance. Born 1486, Beccafumi, whose name translates roughly as “catching smoke,” painted the dark, smoky Self-Portrait above around 1525, at the height of his career. Little did he suspect that he was one of the last of his kind, the last of Mannerist painters of the Sienese School of Il Sodoma and others. For modern art lovers, the Florentine School stretching from Giotto to Michelangelo and Botticelli overshadows the work of their Sienese cousins, but the art of the Sienese Mannerists, particularly that of Beccafumi offers us a glimpse of the medieval Catholic mind.

Perhaps the most repulsive of all the torture-centered saints is Saint Lucy (above), painted by Beccafumi in 1521. It was common to portray saints with some token of the method of their martyrdom. Even Michelangelo’s Last Judgment shows several saints in the circle around Christ brandishing the weapons of their own destruction. Because legends has it that Saint Lucy’s eyes were gouged out before her execution, she is often shown holding her eyes. Because she’s holding the eyes, or other times (as here) displaying them on a plate, while the eyes in her head are restored, I was confused as a child as to whose eyes she was actually serving up for our viewing, uh, pleasure. The gruesomeness of this imagery emphasized the physicality of the saint’s suffering to a mostly illiterate church-going population. In an age of plagues and all-around short life expectancy, suffering was the common coin of life, the language people understood easiest. Saint Lucy’s eyes to my modern eyes seemed grotesque, whereas the eyes of a sixteenth-century boy may have recognized them as par for the course.

It’s hard for us to step into the shoes of Beccafumi and think like him and the people he worked for because we live in a post-Renaissance, humanist world (or at least like to think we do). We just don’t see ourselves as fallen into sin as Beccafumi’s time did. Beccafumi’s Christ in Limbo (above, from 1530-1535) shows Christ’s Harrowing of Hell during the time between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. Today, the idea of Christ’s Harrowing of Hell and his visiting of the good, but unbaptized souls relegated to Limbo seem politically incorrect in our polytheistic world. Beccafumi might have sensed the unfairness of this doctrine of the early church by sympathetically portraying the souls approaching Christ and asking for redemption. Beccafumi unbalances the composition by outweighing Christ on the left with the abundance of dead on the right. Christ’s expression mixes both compassion and almost surprise at how death had undone so many. Yet, in Beccafumi’s world, rules are rules. Christ’s crucifixion opened the gates of Heaven for the Old Testament saints awaiting that redemptive moment, but for the unbaptized remainder, nothing could save them from a life of aimless limbo. My bleeding liberal’s heart would have made me a bad Medieval man, but I really should judge Beccafumi’s theology since I don’t know how I would have acted in his time and place. Beccafumi’s art is truly a glimpse into another worldview at the near the very end of its reign.

Eyes Wide Shut

With the definite exception of Sodoma, Guercino may be the owner of the worst nickname in Western art history. Born February 8, 1591, Giovanni Francesco Barbieri earned the nickname “Guercino” or “squinty” in Italian because of his crossed eyes. Despite that infirmity, Guercino taught himself how to draw and paint and eventually came under the influence of Lodovico Carracci and his cousin, Annibale Carracci. The Getty Museum’s current exhibition Captured Emotions: Baroque Painting in Bologna, 1575-1725 and the companion catalogue (my review here) show how Guercino fit in with the Bolognese Baroque School with works such as Angels Weeping over the Dead Christ (above, from 1618) that portray the deep human, psychological drama of such subject matter. Guercino painted Angels Weeping over the Dead Christ on copper, which helped make the deathly pallor of the fallen Savior gleam with a special, pearly light. The angels mourning over Jesus’ body strike the perfect balance of supernatural and natural, allowing mortal viewers to empathize and join them in their grief.

The Bolognese Baroque School always managed to keep some distance stylistically from the often overwhelming influence of their near contemporary, Caravaggio. Caravaggio revealed the incredible potential of chiaroscuro like no artist who had come before. Guercino and the Bolognese painters appreciated Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro but had less affection for the gritty realism of his works that would often use prostitutes to model the Virgin Mary. Guercino’s Samson Captured by the Philistines (above, from 1619) beautifully captures the power of Caravaggio-esque lights and darks to generate high drama, but the realism here never falls into the gutter. Stefano Pierguidi, in his essay, “The Naturalistic Strand in Bolognese Baroque Painting” in the Captured Emotions catalogue, sees the relationship between Guercino and Caravaggio as “a dialogue carried out at a chronological and geographical distance.” It’s entirely possible that Guercino knew Caravaggio only by reputation or by his influence on other artists when he painted Samson Captured by the Philistines, which makes Guercino’s ability to recreate the master’s special effects even more remarkable.

Whereas Caravaggio was reckless, perhaps mad character, Guercino was a stable, reliable artist. In 1621, Pope Gregory XV invited Guercino to Rome, where the artist began to amass a small fortune in commissions. A lightning-fast draftsman, Guercino completed he completed 106 large altarpieces in addition to more than 140 paintings in his lifetime. The official seal of approval from Gregory XV, however, tamed what few wild impulses Guercino inflused into his art. In the last stages of his career, Guercino turned to a controlled, classical style as seen in works such as Saint Romuald (above, from 1640). The saint’s stunningly white robe recalls the whiter-than-white whites of Bartolomeo Schedoni, a precursor to the Baroque style from the generation previous to Guercino’s. As much as I love the color and technique of Guercino’s Saint Romuald, I can’t help but miss the emotional connection earlier works such as Angels Weeping over the Dead Christ still make. Saint Romuald strikes a hokey pose of devotion that only the gleaming gown saves from complete triteness. The angel behind the saint belongs to an earlier time, before artists tried to humanize such beings. Perhaps it was only in his earlier days that Guercino saw the potential for his art clearly, before success and prestige narrowed his vision to that point that we have to squint to see his talent in the late works.