Passion precedes knowledge. Tears precede ontology; shed tears weep for the unaware.
—NICHOLAS OF CUSA
A perusal of the range of meanings associated today with the word passion stands in marked contrast to its French seventeenth-century definitions. Most notably, whereas the modern sense of “passions” refers to psychological affective states that imply the expression of emotion or sentiment as extensions of subjective agency, these secular notions of sentience or sensibility no longer reflect the original religious significance of passion dominant until the latter part of the seventeenth century. The word passion derives from the Latin passio (signifying suffering or agony), and it designates the original, sacred meaning of passion as the Passion of Christ, during which he suffered death and passion to redeem the human race. In the latter part of the seventeenth century, the primacy of this Christological meaning of passion began to erode. This cultural development can be seen in Antoine Furetière’s (1619–1688) definition of passion in his Dictionnaire universel (1690), which was influenced by René Descartes’s (1596–1650) rationalist analysis in The Passions of the Soul (1649).1 Passion is first defined in a secular modality as signifying a term in physics relative to and opposed to an action, designating a natural body suffering the intervention of an agent. Only in the context of the second definition of passion as physical suffering is the original Christological meaning evoked. Capturing the secularizing impact of Descartes’s philosophical redefinition of the passions, Furetière’s dictionary definition represents a decisive turning point in the understanding of passion, an understanding that would cease to be founded on the pivotal relation of human sensibility and the sacred.2 At the end of the seventeenth century, the redefinition of passion in terms of notions of physical action and rational agency and the declining primacy of passion’s spiritual and sacred referents announced the advent of modern subjectivity.3
It is important to keep in mind, however, that the philosophical elaboration of rational subjectivity and passions in the earlier half of the seventeenth century overlapped with the spiritual and artistic renewal fueled by the Catholic Reformation. Whereas Descartes’s philosophical outlook led him to privilege rational agency and the capacity of the soul to know and master its passions, Georges de La Tour’s pictorial representations continue to affirm the primacy of spiritual passions as vehicles for engagement with the divine. La Tour’s representations of spiritual passion provide an eloquent counterpoint to emergent philosophical attempts to bring subjectivity and its affective regimes under the aegis of reason and the will. The artist’s emphasis on the depiction of penitence reprised the doctrinal tenets espoused by the Catholic Reformation in response to the Protestant critiques and ultimate denunciations of indulgences and sacraments.4 Images of the seven sacraments were considered to be especially powerful as means of transformation, since they provide visible examples of spiritual life and conduct. Their purpose was to inspire people to “fashion their own life and conduct in imitation of the saints and be moved to adore and love God.”5 The symbolic efficacy of these images underlined their importance as intercessors in the transmission of faith.
The renewal of interest in St. Peter during this period reflected his role in bolstering theological arguments against Protestant critics, based on his primacy as an Apostle, his foundational role for the Catholic Church, and his position as forerunner to the institution of the papacy.6 Peter’s fallibility, resulting in his denial of Christ, which was followed by his deep repentance, outlines a spiritual passage that embodies penitence. The central issue with penance lay in the question of its satisfaction, “which the believer was obliged to offer to God in atonement for his sins, in the hope of receiving grace and salvation,” as Irving Lavin noted.7 For Catholics, genuine repentance was crucial, and this involved confession, the detestation of sins, and the amendment of actions required for the remission of sins.8 The efficacy of penance in removing the obstacle that keeps the soul away from God relies, however, on an expression of affect, understood as heartfelt sorrow, rather than on mere will or design. The devotional literature of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries emphasized the blindness of faith and privileged the heart as the vehicle for spiritual devotion. As Michel de Certeau observed, these spiritual writings called upon an exile of the self from its worldly condition in order to open up one’s heart to God.9 But this giving over of oneself to the divine requires self-renunciation to the point of self-dispossession, a loss that is not easy to endure given the human propensity for self-love and deception.
La Tour’s works bear the challenge of representing spiritual processes that rely on changes of heart. But how do La Tour’s depictions of outward expressions of the passions provide insight into passions hidden in the innermost recesses of the heart? It is significant in this regard to consider the contrast between La Tour’s depictions of Peter’s repentance and his contemplative depictions of Mary Magdalen discussed in the previous chapter. In a marked departure from the pictorial traditions of the time, which used exaggerated facial and gestural displays, La Tour eclipsed the expressive qualities of Mary Magdalene’s face, thus emphasizing her spiritual insight and communion with the divine.10 These minimized expressive manifestations of passions in depicting Magdalene’s repentance stand in marked contrast to his depictions of Peter’s denial and subsequent repentance. This may well reflect the fact that Mary Magdalene’s passage from sin to conversion is untainted by the denial that follows Peter’s conversion and apostolic calling. In the pages that follow, the affective implications of La Tour’s depictions of St. Peter’s denial and repentance are explored in order to elucidate the precise nature of his betrayal. Interrogating instances of spiritual lapse when human passions become subject to worldly gambles, these paintings are examined in light of gambling scenes showing acts of cheating. Peter’s spiritual lapse is also considered as a figure for the betrayal of painting, since its material nature renders it susceptible to deception, manipulation, and duplicity. These works raise the question of how painting may be redefined spiritually in order to emerge as an instrument of penance.
Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.
Psalm 119:105
In La Tour’s devotional nocturne St. Peter Repentant, also known as The Tears of St. Peter (1645, Cleveland Museum of Art; see Plate 9), Peter is depicted as an elderly man weeping, consumed by guilt, grief, and regret, his hands folded in imprecation in a penitential gesture. His sin is to have denied Christ thrice before the rooster crowed, as Christ had predicted he would earlier that night at the Last Supper. The expressive power of Peter’s outpouring of emotion is magnified by the illumination of his face and hands by a light that appears to shine down on him from a vent or an aperture.11 The source of illumination explicitly figured in the painting is a large burning lantern with luminous rays illuminating Peter’s feet. But the lantern’s flame as a light source is occluded by the lantern’s rim. La Tour’s treatment of light reflects a distinction between two forms of light: one divine, eternal, hidden, and occult (lux) and the other, natural light, which is visibly manifest (lumen).12 Counter to conventional expectations, it is not the light from above that is associated with the divine but rather the occulted light of the lantern sitting on the ground at Peter’s feet.13 The meaning of the lantern’s anomalous placement emerges in light of the biblical epigraph above: “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” (Ps. 119:105). This verse illuminates Peter’s lapse from his rightful path in failing to be guided by Christ’s prophetic words regarding his betrayal. The lantern’s position also points to Christ’s washing his disciples’ feet at the Last Supper, a gesture that Peter strongly resisted: “Thou shalt never wash my feet.” But Jesus answered him, “If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me” (John 13:8), thus affirming the bonds of faith that tie the disciples in service to Christ and the Lord. Subsequent passages (John 13:9–15) suggest that the gesture of cleansing Peter’s feet anticipates his future betrayal and thus contamination in sundering the bonds of faith. Peter’s spiritual adhesion through ritual, binding him in community with Christ, is underlined by the depiction of the barely perceptible vine rising over the head of the cockerel. This minute visual detail that has no formal or larger pictorial significance recalls Christ’s words to his disciples: “I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing” (John 15:5). These visual clues (Peter’s feet and the vine) do not yield their meaning unless activated by scriptural prompts, which enable the transformation of sight into spiritual insight.
Considered from a pictorial perspective, the two sources of illumination in St. Peter Repentant compete for the attention of the beholder. How are we to explain this double representation of light, which stands in contrast to La Tour’s other contemplative nocturnes, which are dominated by a single light source from a burning candle, a flaming brazier, and so forth? This painting is unique because it is both a diurnal and a nocturnal work.14 It deliberately combines two genres of painting that La Tour had kept separate: His diurnal works represent allegorical treatments of worldly subjects, and his nocturnes mostly depict moments of spiritual contemplation and repentance. The presence of these two sources of light brings together the competing spiritual and worldly meanings associated with Peter’s spiritual love and worldly guilt. Moreover, the occultation of light sources in both daylight and night scenes alludes to Peter’s betrayal of Christ in both human and divine terms.
Next to Peter is a cockerel, whose visual presence bears witness to Christ’s words predicting Peter’s denial of association with his master. Despite Peter’s protestations of loyalty and his expressions of readiness to follow Christ to prison and death, Christ predicted: “I tell thee Peter, the cock shall not crow this day, before that thou shall thrice deny that thou knowest me” (Luke 22:31–33). The ringing words of Christ’s prediction of Peter’s denial are inscribed into the contemplative muteness of La Tour’s painting. The sound of the cock’s crow, heralding the approach of dawn, is the audible reproach and reminder of Peter’s serious spiritual lapse. Marking Peter’s failure to bear witness to the divine, the cockerel’s crow makes audible the voice of conscience heralding Peter’s bitter tears of repentance.
Let us now look more closely at Peter’s face, the manifest locus for the expression of passions and the visible canvas of his sense of betrayal and regret. Peter weeps, his eyes brimming with tears, while from his slightly open mouth escapes a sigh or perhaps a sob. Weeping implies defacement, disfiguration of the outward countenance or appearance of a person, exteriorizing human affect through physical expression. It attests to the presence of an emotion, or conviction, by mobilizing the visual and vocal apparatus of the body, and it can act as the voice of conscience or erupt as bodily expression before consciousness has time to express its intent. To weep is to obscure the clarity of consciousness as figured through the seeing eyes by covering them with a veil of tears. This momentary blindness that robs the eyes of the capacity to see also unveils their capacity for addressing and communing with others. As Jacques Derrida has noted in Memoirs of the Blind, weeping reveals the very truth of the eye insofar as it is destined for imploration rather than just vision:
Deep down, deep down inside, the eye would be destined not to see but to weep. For at the very moment that they veil sight, tears would unveil what is proper to the eye. And what they cause to surge out of forgetfulness, there where the gaze or look looks after it . . . would be nothing less than aletheia, the truth of the eyes . . . to have imploration rather than vision in sight, to address prayer, love, joy, or sadness rather than a look or a gaze.15
The gaze, veiled by tears, thus testifies to the power of address implicit in the eyes, to its apocryphal blindness, and to the revelatory impulses exceeding the objectifying grasp of sight. Peter’s weeping emerges as testimony of his bond to Christ, appealing for forgiveness through penance and prayer. The effacement of his sight through weeping figures the cleansing potential of tears, attesting to their purifying efficacy and redemptive powers. La Tour’s rendering of Peter’s penitential tears helps us understand their compelling nature, since, according to St. Bernard, the “tears of penitents are the wine of angels” in their thirst for men’s salvation.16
It is one thing to will to be false, and another not to be able to be true.
ST. AUGUSTINE, Confessions 3.6
Why does Peter weep so bitterly? Why is his repentance so painful and enduring that in his old age he found not just the noise of the cockerel but of all fowl unbearable and had them put to death?17 Abhorring the intrusion of sounds, of children playing or of ritual chants, he shut his ears with woolen earplugs, reducing the world about him to the primordial silence he had enjoyed as a fisherman.18 The reasons why Peter’s repentance is so bitter and painful emerge from an examination of La Tour’s last signed, dated, and documented painting, The Denial of St. Peter, or St. Peter’s Denial of Christ (1650, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes; see Plate 10).19 In this work, Peter’s denial of his association with Christ, prompted by the questioning of the maid to his left holding a candle, is placed at the left margin of a scene in the foreground depicting soldiers throwing dice for Christ’s clothes. The soldiers’ downward gazes and impassioned involvement in gambling, figured by the leering face of the soldier seated on the right, refocus the beholder’s attention on the dice. But the vigilant gaze of the soldier standing on the far right redirects the beholder’s look back to Peter’s exchange with the maid. The similarity between Peter’s left hand and the hand of the soldier throwing the dice connects these otherwise disparate scenes by suggesting a visual link between Peter’s denial and the soldier’s gamble. Like Peter, the soldiers are blinded by their passions and unaware of the spiritual risks of their game. The juxtaposition of these two scenes places Peter’s spiritual betrayal in a secular context where the gamble for the vestments of Christ stands in for Peter’s spiritual lapse.20
La Tour’s attempts to highlight Peter’s spiritual lapse visually abuts the difficulty of representing a verbal exchange in a pictorial representation. The beholder can gain access to Peter’s denial only through his words as heard or read in the Gospels. This demand for the illumination of scriptures as a condition for seeing the painting pits the testimony of the Word against the visual conceit of painting. While examining in detail the nature of Peter’s denial, it is important to recall that prior to denying knowing Christ in front of public witnesses, Peter had already unwittingly denied Christ’s Passion and sacrifice by saying: “This shall not be unto thee,” only to be severely reprimanded by Christ: “Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence to me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men” (Matt. 16:22–23; Mark 8:32–33). Christ’s rebuke of Peter’s denial reflected his recognition of Peter’s spiritual weakness. Peter’s blindness, his incapacity to “see” and recognize Christ’s sacred destiny, was denounced in terms of his temptation by worldly concerns.21 Undeterred, Peter reminded Jesus of the sacrifice he and the other Apostles had made in answering his call and asked Jesus about their expected rewards (Matt. 19:27; Mark 10:28; Luke 18:28). Thus, even before his explicit denial of Christ, Peter’s lack of spiritual insight and his fallibility were revealed by his incapacity to address spiritual issues other than through the worldly language of calculated risk and reward.
But in what sense is Peter’s denial a gamble? And in what way are the meanings attached to the divine and the human endangered through submission to calculated risk? A closer look at the Gospels reveals the dangers inherent in Peter’s denial. In St. Matthew’s Gospel, we are told that Peter followed Christ from a distance to the high priest Caiaphas’s palace, where he watched the attempts to seek false witness against Christ. After Christ’s condemnation to death for blasphemy removed the need for further witnesses, Peter was approached by a maid who recognized him as a companion of Jesus. Attempting to avoid providing any witness at all, Peter claimed not to understand: “I know not what thou sayest.” When questioned by another maid, who had also seen him with Jesus, he denied knowledge of the man with an oath: “I do not know the man.” When accused that his mode of speech (referring to his dialect or expression) revealed his association with Christ (“Thy speech betrayest thee”), Peter began to curse and swear, saying: “I know not the man” (Matt. 26:69–75). Intended to blind his hearers to the deception he enacted upon them, Peter’s vehement denials amount to a disavowal of any knowledge of Christ.
These denials represent a major spiritual failure on Peter’s part because the act of bearing public witness constitutes an essential element of discipleship: “Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven. But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven” (Matt. 10:32–33).22 Indeed, denial understood as the failure to acknowledge Christ before other men amounts to betrayal. Moreover, this act of disavowal also results in self-betrayal, since it disowns the denier of Christ’s troth and intercession before his Father in heaven. Peter’s secular lapse, his denial of the maid’s question in terms of what was said, is echoed by his spiritual lapse, his denial both of knowing and of recognizing Christ in both human and divine terms. Peter’s gamble to avoid giving testimony against Christ through deliberate deception thus ends in a betrayal of both Christ and himself. Having wagered his word, Peter is betrayed by his expression because his speech eludes his intent and counters his attempts at deception. Blinded by temptation to manipulate worldly appearances and by his faith in his own capacities for deception, he loses sight of Christ’s prophetic words regarding his betrayal.
La Tour’s decision to depict Peter’s denial in the context of a secular gambling scene reprised a pictorial tradition that goes back to other tenebrist artists such as Gérard Seghers, Nicolas Tournier, and Valentin de Boulogne.23 His choice was at odds, however, with Caravaggio’s pictorial treatment of the subject, The Denial of St. Peter (c. 1610, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), which focused exclusively on the choreography of verbal and gestural exchanges between Peter, the maid, and a soldier.24 By situating the sacred in the margins of a gambling scene, La Tour suggests a connection between modes of spiritual and secular betrayal. Moreover, when examined in light of La Tour’s other moralizing works, such as The Dice Players (1650, Preston Hall Museum, Stockton-on-Tees; see Plate 11) or his earlier The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs (1630–1634, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth; see Plate 12) and The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds (c. 1630–1634), also known as The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds (Cardsharp) (c. 1635, Musée du Louvre, Paris; see Plate 13), Peter’s spiritual gamble takes on additional social, moral, and artistic resonances. Moreover, gambling, manipulation, and betrayal raise issues also central to La Tour’s pictorial project insofar as they allude to the illusionist and deceptive qualities of vision and painting itself. Indeed, his depictions of gambling encourage an allegorical reflection on the “betrayal” that may be at work in painting as a visual medium.25 In the nocturnal Dice Players, the deliberate eclipse of candlelight figures the blindness of the player on the left, whose passion for dice prevents him from noticing that he is being relieved of his purse by the man standing behind him. The man’s detached body posture, smoking a pipe and gazing off into space, distracts the viewer’s attention from his hand, which is shown in the act of removing the purse. Emphasizing his social aspirations, his pipe smoking alludes to his pretensions as a gentleman while engaging in ignoble behaviors. However, what makes this scene initially hard to see is the painter’s seductive focus on the fractured reflections of candlelight on the armor breastplates and cuirasses, which are visually arresting in their own right. Captivated by the beauty of reflected light on armor, the beholder is distracted by this visual lure and disabled from seeing this scene for what it is, namely, the explicit depiction of an act of thievery.
The blindness of ordinary vision, rendered manifest in the inability to “see” things shown in full light, is also at issue in La Tour’s earlier diurnal paintings The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs and The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds. Illuminated to the point of overexposure, the excess pallor of white light lends a theatrical look to the scene, thus alerting the beholder to its artifice and contrived character. While the faces are largely blanched out, void of expression and reduced to the consistency of masks, the detailed renderings of costumes in all their gleaming ostentation capture the beholder’s eye. This fascination with the display of worldly vanity initially impedes a deeper understanding of the allegorical and moralizing significance of these works. The exceptional attention vested in capturing the physical appearance and material details of clothing in The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs and The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds as well as in The Fortune Teller (1630–1634, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; see Plate 14) lends to their surfaces a “willfully glittering superficiality.”26 The dazzling display of colors and the richness of the fabrics comment on the seduction of worldliness, its superficial appeal, and its deceptive qualities. Such captivating depiction and prominent display also attest to the virtuosity of the painter’s hand in duplicating appearances. However, these marks of pictorial mastery prove deceptive to the extent that they distract the beholder from considering the betrayals at work in these paintings.
Recalling the artifice of his renditions of light, the rhetorical flourish of La Tour’s depiction of clothes emphasizes their staged air, marking their affinity to theatrical costumes and masks. Conisbee remarked on La Tour’s “love of costuming,” urging scholars to “assess the relative roles of the contemporary, the archaic, and the theatrical in the attire of La Tour’s protagonists.”27 Their luxury and ostentation caution the beholder against the deceptive role they play on the stage of the world. Referring to forms of social impersonation and manipulation, these allegorical scenes depict manners of dress that mask modes of being based on ignoble behaviors. In The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs and The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds, the figure on the right, the young man playing cards and being fleeced, is elaborately attired in rich and colorful embroidered brocades, silks, and ribbons, bejeweled, coiffed, and sporting a dashing feather. Scholars have traditionally identified this figure with the Prodigal Son, whose youth and inexperience make him an ideal victim.28 But La Tour’s pictorial rendition of this biblical parable (Luke 15:11–32) focuses on the so-called prodigal son’s entrapment in worldly deception rather than on his repentance.29 By representing the young man’s excessive attention to his dress and external appearances, the image emphasizes his aspirations to a worldliness he does not yet possess. The prodigal son’s deliberate efforts to sustain his social pose mark his inattention to spiritual matters, a fate he paradoxically shares with those who are trying to deceive him. The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs and The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds pictorially suggest that the problem is not reducible simply to the prodigal son being deceived by cheats, since self-deception also plays a role in his victimization. His attention to the game and worldly appearances, which makes him vulnerable to deception, is also what renders him complicit in his own self-deception, suggesting that his lack of self-knowledge leads to self-betrayal. The focal shift depicted in these paintings from social mores to deeper allegorical and moral meanings also assumes theological connotations that help elucidate a connection between these works and La Tour’s depiction of the penitent St. Peter.
La Tour’s representation of the blindness of the Prodigal Son to all forms of deception, including self-deception, preempts his capacity to take spiritual action. Deceived by the glitter of worldliness, this prodigal son is compromised in his capacity to repent and seek the forgiveness achieved by putting “off the old nature with its practices” in order to “put on a new nature,” a renewal based on spiritual “knowledge after the image of its creator” (Col. 3:9–10). The point is that penitence is not reducible to a mantle of words because true penance requires action, which reflects the assumption of a new manner of being and enactment through performance. The painting reveals that this prodigal son has failed in hearing the “Word” and drawing profit from it by repenting and thus changing his actions. His supposed innocence in ignoring his father’s words, which reprise scriptural injunctions, entails an act of inadvertent betrayal in both human and sacred terms. The blindness and self-deception implied in continuing in ignorance suggest that his ears have been “shut,” an imperceptible reaction requiring no deliberate thought but that is no less an act for all that.
In The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs and The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds, the beholder finds himself or herself in the same position as the young gambler on the right, who is shown as being blind to deception. By focusing on his cards, he fails to see the complicit glances of the other players orchestrating his deception. Manipulating the expressive quality of their eyes’ oblique looks, the cheat and his accomplices around the table gamble on and subvert the spiritual meaning of the face as a “mirror of the soul” and of the eyes as “doorways to the soul.”30 Intercepting and establishing complicity with the look of the beholder, the cheat on the left shows off his hand. His gesture of showing his cards resonates with the artist’s deliberate display of painterly virtuosity. By specifically pointing out his deception as a visual trick intended to dupe the unsuspecting player, the cheat’s gesture alludes to the manipulable nature of human passions and to the blindness inherent in ordinary vision and faith in the visible world. Moreover, the cheat’s display of trickery also cautions the viewer against the painter’s “sleight of hand,” in his reliance on an illusionistic medium that is liable to deception. Through choreographed eye and hand gestures, these gambling works stage scenes of social betrayal highlighting the arbitrary and deceptive nature of human passions.
A similar deception is staged in The Fortune Teller, which shows a young man captivated by the predictions of a fortune teller—while her assistants steal his gold medal and purse. Instead of reading cards as in the paintings of cheats, the deception is here perpetuated by a reading of palms.31 Not only do they prove distracting, but such “readings” represent a misdirection, even a subversion, of the spiritual functions associated with reading. Recalling St. Peter’s denial, the betrayal here is enacted through speech and supported by the complicit glances of the fortune teller’s assistants. The seduction of the fortune teller’s words, holding out a promise of future satisfaction, blinds this prodigal son to his present condition. Wrapped up in words, which hold a false promise of his destiny, he is distracted from seeing: His inattention to others is a sign of his inability to see, to know, and to recognize himself. He is blind to the young assistant who is cutting the gold chain of his decorative medal, which bears a barely legible Latin inscription of a promise of love and fidelity (amor and fides). The broken chain attests to the breach of trust implied in thieving and to the violation of biblical commandments implied in her act. It also bears witness to the thief’s self-betrayal, understood as a break in faith with the promise to uphold religious mandates. These depictions of the Prodigal Son, shown as fleeced in a card game or swindled by a fortune teller and her minions, represent moments of moral and spiritual lapse, moments when human passions become subject to worldly speculation and negotiation. The betrayal displayed by these works relies upon a complicity with the beholder that is staged by painting, thereby revealing painting’s visual conceits and potential for betrayal as a medium for portraying spiritual passions.
What a strange vanity painting is; it attracts admiration by resembling an original we do not admire.
PASCAL, Les pensées
The processes of physical reflection by which nature produces images contrast with the painter’s skills in recreating and compiling them in a painted image. Attesting to the painter’s craft in capturing the seductive glimmers of the visible, these reflections allude to painting’s betrayal, its potential to deceive or even blind the beholder. The pictorial representation of light in The Denial of St. Peter recalls the treatment of light in St. Peter Repentant. However, in The Denial of St. Peter, the depiction of the physical sources of light is deliberately obscured. The light of the burning candle on the left is blocked by the maid’s hand, and the candle illuminating the faces of the Roman soldiers is hidden by the body of the soldier in the foreground. This deliberate eclipse of light—its suggested presence is perceptible only through shards of radiant reflections on pieces of armor and clothing—lends the painting a tenebrous atmosphere. Suppressing the spiritual associations with light through its physical occultation, La Tour figures Peter’s betrayal and spiritual lapse when he was blinded by worldly concerns. Although it deflects direct sources of light, The Denial of St. Peter is awash in a plethora of secondary reflections that mark the consummate mastery of La Tour as a painter of light. Indeed, the painting brings together a veritable artistic compilation of various types of reflection, cataloging the spectrum of its physical manifestations from fully lit to fragmentary renderings as mere gleams and glitters of light.32
But there is a third source of light in The Denial of St. Peter, which is barely visible on the lower left and almost hidden by the table: a burning brazier whose hot embers hardly give off any light. The brazier’s presence suggests that the maid confronting Peter may have drawn light for her candle from it. Insignificant at first sight, this detail gains importance once we recognize its treatment in La Tour’s works as a pictorial theme in its own right, reprising La Tour’s renditions of “blowers of light” from the same period (see Plates 20 and 21). These scenes, which will be examined at length in Chapter 4, refer to the capacity of the human breath to kindle a fire or flame, as a way of figuring the powers of the spirit to ignite the passions. Reiterating his depiction of a girl blowing on a brazier, the glow of the brazier holds out the promise of Peter’s repentance following his denial. La Tour’s reprising and transposing of figures, or even scenes, from profane to sacred contexts reflects a pictorial approach that he relied on repeatedly, as François-Georges Pariset noted: “La Tour places the same figure in works of opposing intention, modifying them slightly, especially in their expression. We have here, not a model based on reality, as one would be likely to think, but a synthesis of models, a mosaic of true details.”33 Based on pictorial artifice and invention rather than on a model based uniquely on reality, La Tour transferred and transposed profane details or scenes into sacred renderings, suggesting that their meaning is not preset, since they derive their significance from the way they are used. This would suggest that the sacred significance of visual details emerges from their pictorial treatment and disposition rather than from what they visually refer to or conventionally represent.
This brings us back to the question of why La Tour brings the scene of Peter’s denial into conjunction with the profane gambling scene in The Denial of St. Peter. Why does he relegate the scriptural narrative showing Peter’s betrayal to the margins of a gambling scene whose profane logic competes for the attention of the beholder? This pictorial strategy is at variance with Federico Borromeo’s recommendation in De Pictura Sacra (1624) to avoid giving prominence to secondary or profane subjects that may obscure the primacy of sacred subjects. He added that profane backgrounds should be relinquished from sacred pictures in order to become independent pictures in their own right.34 Indeed, La Tour’s juxtaposition of the profane and the sacred diverges in important ways from earlier pictorial traditions, which visually sought to distinguish and separate them as incompatible and incommensurable realms of being. In her discussion of the structure of pictorial space in Netherlandish devotional painting of the sixteenth century, Ingrid Falque observed that often its depiction is not coherent, thereby suggesting the interpenetration rather than the merger of two different worlds.35 In many visionary paintings of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, the saint occupies the lower portion of the canvas while the subject of his or her visions floats above in a distinct spiritual realm demarcated by clouds or other atmospheric effects. According to Victor Stoichita, such verticalization of visionary experience accompanies the splitting of levels of reality into the terrestrial and the celestial.36 La Tour’s pictorial approach counters such verticalization, and hence a visual hierarchization of the sacred, by juxtaposing these scenes on a horizontal axis. La Tour preserves the demarcation of the biblical account of Peter’s denial while expanding its meaning through its extension into the allegorical gambling scene, thus combining opposing pictorial genres in one painting. As a result, the beholder’s visual access requires the traversal of this pictorial threshold, constituted at the crossing of genres and of sacred and profane spaces. The Denial of St. Peter renders explicit the challenges faced by the painter in regard to the figuration of the sacred. It suggests a conception of painting for which sacred meaning is not lodged in the visual content of the image but rather requires traversal and unfolding, that is, a spiritual exercise akin to contemplative meditation rather than mere seeing.
But does The Denial of St. Peter also figure the gamble of the painter, who must cast his lot with a medium that is liable to deception and has difficulty keeping troth with its spiritual mission? The painting stages La Tour’s paradoxical relation to the pictorial image insofar as the artist must rely on visual and pictorial conceits even as he tries to overcome them by breathing spirit into the beholder’s experience of the work. La Tour was not alone in his attempts to rethink the spiritual role of the pictorial image; his efforts reflected ideas promulgated in Lorraine by theologians such as the Jesuit teacher Louis Richeôme.37 Richeôme describes the process of spiritual insight as moving from perceptual seeing (which he called “dumb pictures”) to verbal accounts of images (“speaking pictures or pictures that serve for the ears”), leading to their allegorical decipherment.38 This contemplative strategy implies moving from the visible to the legible and culminates in their allegorical melding: The energy of the “dumb” painting is destined to move the believer’s soul, which is subsequently illuminated by the “talking painting” of the literal explanation, before the final stage of illumination is obtained in spiritual allegory.39 Like Richeôme, La Tour approaches the visual image as a contemplative device, one where pictorial details act as intermediaries for the emergence of spiritual meaning. La Tour’s paintings rely on visual images in recognition of their galvanizing potential for mobilizing the soul, but they also attest to his efforts to hold the visual import of images at bay. Using pictorial images as vehicles for spiritual meditation, La Tour enables the beholder’s passage from physical to spiritual seeing, thus reclaiming painting’s mediating efficacy as an instrument of penance.
Referencing a verbal denial standing for and figuring a spiritual lapse unrepresentable in the visual realm of painting, La Tour’s Denial of St. Peter confronts the beholder with the blindness of ordinary vision and with a critique of painting as an instrument of faith. Painting’s illusionist gamble holds out the seduction of worldly sights while risking the betrayal or eclipse of spiritual insight. La Tour’s insistence on the illumination of faith reflects his attempts to distinguish the representation of spiritual passion from its worldly counterparts. The spiritual agenda of La Tour’s depictions of St. Peter promotes a dispossession of subjective agency insofar as spiritual passion implies radical passivity and receptivity achieved through an opening of the heart, rather than through reliance on reason or mere exercise of will. But this spiritual approach also attests to a redefinition of painting, since it mandates a renunciation of the radiance of the visible along with a decentering of the viewing subject. This may help explain the distinction between La Tour’s depictions of Mary Magdalene’s spiritual passion, as defined by blind love and loss of the self, and Peter’s denial, as defined by his conceit to risk deceit by manipulating worldly appearances, leading to his unwitting act of spiritual betrayal. Echoing the Gospels, La Tour suggests that the expression of spiritual passions is not open to manipulation or speculation because it involves passion understood in its primary sense as a blind act of love, one that takes place in a register that eschews the visual realm of painterly expression. Counter to the emergent rationalist discourse in Descartes, which posits expression as a function of manipulation and mastery of the passions that enable the self-definition and appropriation of subjectivity, La Tour proposes a notion of spiritual passion based on the dispossession and ultimate loss of self.40 By elaborating the spiritual and pictorial betrayals at work in the attempt to manipulate passions for deliberate effect, he affirms mystery rather than mastery as a defining condition for subjectivity.