In the visible there is never anything but ruins of the spirit.
—MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY, The Visible and the Invisible
The idea that the visual status of the sacred image may be in question and requires redefinition brings us back to considering in more detail the legacy of the iconoclastic destruction of images and the effect of the Catholic Reformation on the understanding of the pictorial image.1 While the ensuing controversies regarding sacred images in Lorraine influenced the development of La Tour’s approach, his response is notable in terms of his efforts to refigure the nature and retool the function of pictorial images. At issue here is not the Reformation per se but rather the Catholic reaction and response to it, which led to the emergence of new forms of viewer response. As the art historian Alexander Nagel has noted, these reformist trends in religious practice “drew emphasis away from the objective power of the sacraments and toward the spiritual experience of the believer.”2 Two questions come to the fore in considering the pertinence of these developments to La Tour’s paintings. First, how do concerns regarding the visual nature of the image as a vehicle for the sacred influence La Tour’s interrogations of painting? And second, how do his paintings lead to a reevaluation of the beholder’s position and possibilities of engagement with the spiritual, understood as the attainment of a way of seeing that implies new ways of feeling and being?
To address this issue, it proves helpful to refer briefly to a discussion of the role of Christian religious icons insofar as they stage the paradox of showing, or pointing to, the invisible in the visible. The philosopher and theologian Jean-Luc Marion proposed an understanding of the icon wherein the aim of the image is not found in itself but in a “crossing of the visible” that implies abandonment, self-emptying, or self-surrender (kenosis in Greek) of the image. This self-renunciation determines the icon’s ability to provide passage and thus be “crossed” or traversed rather than seen.3 Challenging the logic of modern imaging, which entails self-sufficiency, autonomy, and self-affirmation, icons do not ask nor expect to be seen but rather give themselves over to the beholder so as to enable seeing or being seen.4 However, in La Tour’s case and related instances of post-Tridentine devotional painting, we are no longer dealing with icons whose inexorable gazes stare out from the aperture of heaven, commanding the beholder’s response through prayer and veneration.5 Given over to spiritual contemplation and prayer, the meditative posture of the depicted figures attests to a withdrawal from the world, putting the visual on notice: Painting’s engagement with the viewer is rendered problematic, seeing is in doubt, and the image suffers. In this chapter, I examine La Tour’s representations of images of birth and death and mourning as devices for elaborating theological mysteries as well as for elucidating the provisional nature of the sacred image. The first part explores representations of the Incarnation (of the Word made flesh) as an event whose mystery tests the limits of figuration. This challenge, when extended to the language of painting, will enable image making to continue, but now freed from the logic of the image. The discussion then turns to La Tour’s depictions of images of death and mourning. Redolent with martyrdom and redemption, these lamentations are examined as commemorative instances of a past recalling the iconoclastic destruction of sacred images as well as the augurs of a future that posits the possibility of their redemptive renewal.
Colors are like words: Once the eyes see them, they sink into the mind just as do words heard by ears.
FEDERICO BORROMEO
La Tour’s now iconic painting The Newborn Child (c. 1645, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes; see Plate 22) has enjoyed an unusual and contradictory reception, one that nonetheless exemplifies the problems attendant to his work as a whole. Impressed by the painting’s “sublimity,” even while mistakenly attributing it to the brothers Le Nain, Hippolyte Taine (1828–1893) was captivated by the realism of La Tour’s depiction: “All that Physiology can say about the beginnings of a human being is there.”6 He described this work as showing two peasant women looking at an eight-day-old child sleeping, an interpretation that stands in marked contrast with the sense of wonder and mystery that Louis Gonse later expressed in 1900 at the spiritual connotations of this when seen as a nativity scene:
Do you know Le Nain? Are you aware of the strange and delicious painting at the Rennes museum, this Nativity drowned in shadows, where humble, tender and sweet silhouettes are illuminated by the reflections of such a mysterious light? This work haunts me. Each time I came back to Rennes, it charmed me all the more. It is a marvel of sentiment, candor and originality.7
Gonse’s reaction reveals the painting’s ambiguous status as it shifts between intimations of the secular and the sacred. The artist’s representation of light is imbued with mystery, which acts both to reveal and to hide the meaning of the scene. The painting confounds the beholder, for it offers in one image two incompatible visions: an ordinary depiction of maternity and birth in an agrarian world or a nativity scene representing the divine mystery of Christ’s conception and birth.
La Tour’s depiction marks a departure from the usual traditions of religious painting, leading Benedict Nicolson and Christopher Wright to comment: “La Tour keeps down the attributes of the Saints to a minimum, so persistently that confusion has resulted as to the nature of his subject matter.”8 Indeed, in La Tour’s Newborn Child, the absence of these iconographic indices undermines the beholder’s ability to identify this work as an instance of secular or of sacred painting, that is, as a genre scene or as a nativity scene that would celebrate the mystery of Incarnation. The painting’s ambiguous visual appearance is puzzling, and it compels the beholder to wonder how the visible image may lend itself to the promotion of contemplative devotion and the attainment of spiritual insight.
La Tour’s treatment of light and shadows is at issue in The Newborn Child and in The Adoration of the Shepherds (c. 1645, Musée du Louvre, Paris; see Plate 23), both as a figure of the Incarnation and as a reflection on painting’s spiritual aspirations. This presents no easy task, for as the art historian Mario Valenti has aptly noted: “The mystery of the divine Incarnation . . . represents a real challenge to the language of painting, since it tests the enunciative and theoretical abilities of painting itself beyond a single artist’s mere creative abilities.”9 La Tour’s representation of the mystery of the Incarnation understood as the Word become flesh (“Verbum caro factum est,” John 1:14) challenges the visual and representational scope of painting.10 By testing the language of painting and its theoretical abilities, La Tour’s pictorial meditation on the mystery of the Incarnation (understood as the union of the divine and human in the person of Jesus Christ) enables a metareflection on the nature of painting as a medium of incarnation.11
La Tour’s nocturnes are imbued with the language of light derived from the Gospel of St. John, which presents God as the principle of life that acts as the light of men: “In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not. . . . That was the true Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world” (John 1:4–5, 9).12 Although equated with light and enlightenment, this divine principle of creation figures the priority of the Word not as utterance but as divine logos: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). The Incarnation is presented not as an unfolding narrative but as an event whose mystery withholds itself from figuration and resists representation: “And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). This event articulates but does not explain; it merely marks the crossing of the divine Word or light into the world.13 Whereas Luke represents the mystery of the Incarnation by narrating Mary’s visitation by an angel and her “overshadowing” by the Holy Spirit, John marks the event of the Word become flesh, an event whose spiritual glory withholds its mystery from visual access or inspection.
La Tour’s attempts to figure the Incarnation are also informed by St. Luke’s account in the Gospels. While John relies on light to figure God’s agency and creative potency (“All things were made by him”; John 1:3), Luke evokes the effects of light, its generative capacity in producing shadows. By comparison, St. Matthew simply concludes that Mary “was found with the child of the Holy Ghost” (Matt. 1:18), an account that leaves the Incarnation altogether out of the picture. Luke’s narrative of the Incarnation is based on the Angel Gabriel’s visitation of the Virgin Mary and her reaction and response. Gabriel’s salutation affirmed that Mary, in conceiving and bringing forth a son, had been supremely blessed and favored by God. Responding to Mary’s perturbation at the news of conception, given her virginal status, Gabriel explained: “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee [Virtus altissimi obumbravit tibi]” (Luke 1:35). Thus the language of light and illumination that pervades the Gospel of John stands in contrast to St. Luke’s account of the generative power of the Holy Spirit to produce or cast shadows, that is, to “overshadow.” He figures the Incarnation in terms of the Holy Spirit’s power to cast its influence, like a shadow, thus attesting by analogy to the generative power of light.
Originally attributed to Gerrit van Honthorst (1592–1656), La Tour’s Adoration of the Shepherds is now believed to be the “Nativity of Our Savior” commissioned by the municipality of Lunéville and delivered to the governor of Lorraine, Henri II de Senneterre (also known as the Maréchal de La Ferté), in January 1645. Bought by the Louvre in 1926, this iconic work has become “France’s most celebrated Nativity.”14 Let us more closely examine this painting’s use of light, its spiritual connotations, and its physical manifestations. It shows a partially hidden candle that illuminates the scene, but this light is insufficient to account for the child’s radiance, which functions as a source of light in its own right. La Tour’s depiction of these two light sources is anomalous, since earlier pictorial traditions represented the Christ child as the sole source of light, given his exalted status as “spiritual light of the world.”15 La Tour’s use of night and light also reflects the influence of emblem books that were commonly used to illustrate and propagate scriptural passages. In his emblem book Della selva di concetti scritturali (The forest of scriptural concepts; Parte prima ove con varii concetti di varii discorsi spiegati.Venice, Barezzo Barezzi-Gioseffo Peluso; 1594, 1600), Giulio Cesare Capaccio’s comments on night and light from a spiritual perspective elucidate La Tour’s use of light imagery. Reprising a longstanding tradition, Capaccio distinguished between two forms of light: lux or luce, which is divine, eternal, hidden, and occult; and lumen, lume, which is natural light that is visually manifest. “Now you see two kinds of light, the first occult in the inspiration of the spirit, which also signified the light of the soul, the light that is enveloped in this lantern of the body; manifest light is that of the devil, which does not make known that immortal life.”16 Accordingly, the partially covered candle in La Tour’s Adoration of the Shepherds signifies the divine light that is occulted, thus figuring the Incarnation understood as the light of the soul “enveloped in the lantern of the body.” These analogies of Christ with a lantern or lamp reflect his worldly condition: Christ’s body hides his divinity because the nature of God is not perceptible with corporeal eyes.17 The painting refers explicitly to the discrepancy between a visual and a spiritual way of seeing that implies seeing the light inwardly rather than externally (John 20:29). The candle’s function as a physical source of light is overshadowed by the newborn’s radiance, who rather than abiding in the reflections of candlelight acts as a lamp that exudes its own light. The painting’s spiritual aspirations as an instrument of devotion is distinguished from its descriptive function as a record of the physical manifestations of light, casting painting’s visual language into doubt. Like Capaccio, La Tour warns the beholder against painting’s propensity to deceive and even betray its spiritual mission, given its dependence on images whose seductive properties rely on a physical understanding of light and vision.
Further examination of The Adoration of the Shepherds reveals La Tour’s attempt to distinguish between spiritual and physical illumination, for though bathed in the same light, the figures surrounding the child are surprisingly illuminated in different ways. Notably, the shepherd in the rear holding a flute is encompassed by the ambient penumbra and reduced almost to a specter, whereas the woman’s face next to him is illuminated by reflected light. Such inconsistency is physically inexplicable and pictorially implausible unless one considers the possibility that these reflections point to states of spiritual enlightenment. The reddish glow on Mary’s face reflects the radiance of light understood not simply as material semblance but as spiritual illumination: “Thus God is truly in all things, though invisible. . . . Indeed, we may well speak of the fire of charity, or the fire of the Holy Spirit, and especially of the fire of divine love.”18 This radiance figures what is otherwise unavailable to vision, that is, the inner light of spiritual conviction that reflects the affective tenor of her heart. As the color of fire, the red hue renders expressively manifest the presence of the spirit (pneuma), whose flame and fiery nature figures the inner light of spiritual passion.19 The association of the color red with spiritual connotations also reflects descriptions of the Virgin’s red mantle as “a garden of roses.” In early patristic traditions, Christ is spoken of as the light, or sometimes fire, which the Virgin received and bore.20
To contemplate is to look at shadows.
VICTOR HUGO
In addition to referring to St. John’s language of light, La Tour also relied on St. Luke’s evocation of shadows to characterize the mystery of the Incarnation. How can the painter show the shadow cast by the angel’s radiant message: “The power of the Highest shall overshadow thee” (“Virtus altissimi obumbravit tibi”; Luke 1:35)? Sir Thomas Browne privileged the notion of overshadowing as central to the mystery of the Incarnation: “The greatest mystery of Religion is expressed by adumbration.”21 Luke’s appeal to the notion of overshadowing refers to key scriptural passages in the Old Testament, which name God as the power on high hovering over the waters in the process of creation: “And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the water” (Gen. 1:1–2), followed by his fiat: “Let there be Light.” Luke reprised God’s creative potency, represented in Genesis as a moving force that preceded the existence of shadows or images, which were brought into being with the birth of light. Designated by “overshadowing,” St. Luke’s mysterious depiction of Incarnation thus emerges as a moment of creation that coincides with the birth of images and thus the possibility of painting (which relies upon effects of light and shadow).22 In his examination of the history of the shadow in art, Victor Stoichita noted that Luke’s formulation of God’s creative potency in terms of Mary’s “overshadowing” (episkiazein in the original Greek) only partly translates the now archaic meaning of an eastern, Semitic expression that referred to the magical and therapeutic powers of the shadow as figured by its inseminating power (as in Mary’s pregnancy), its powers of protection (as when someone is taken under one’s shadow), and its power to heal (a reference to the curative effects of Peter’s shadow; Acts 5:15–16).23
A closer look at La Tour’s depiction and use of shadows in The Adoration of the Shepherds reveals multiple references to the spiritual mystery of the Incarnation as understood in Luke’s terms as “overshadowing,” along with an implied reflection on painting conceived of as an art of shadows. The most visually striking is the shadow cast by the Virgin’s hands, crossed in prayer on her robe. This feathery shadow serves multiple purposes and bears witness to different modes of representation and being. It marks the presence of the spiritual while also alluding to the physical and pictorial use of light and shadow. The shadow of her crossed fingers recalls the flutter of bird wings and inscribes allusions to a dove, thereby figuring the Holy Spirit and pointing to the Trinity and the Incarnation: “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove” (John 1:32).24 The shadow cast by her fingers, crossed in prayer over her heart, serves to render visible the intensity of her spiritual conviction, but in so doing so, it also alludes to a secular understanding of painting as an art of depicted shadows.
Further references to the Incarnation and the Trinity are introduced by the presence of the lamb by her side, delicately nibbling on some trefoil sprigs lining Christ’s crib.25 Here, La Tour’s apparent concession to pictorial naturalism actually violates sacred convention, since even the straw lining Christ’s crib was venerated, as attested to by its inclusion in reliquaries. The lamb refers to the Incarnation (“Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”; John 1:29) and thus to Jesus’s sacrificial destiny and redemptive power. The three shadows cast by the trefoil sprigs on the surface of Mary’s dress provide further clues pointing to the trinitary nature of the Incarnation. And were we still to doubt the evidence of these indices, we have only to consider the covered terrine held out as an offering by the woman in the back. The terrine, which is a vessel made of clay, clearly constitutes a reference to God’s incarnation in Christ, whose humanity is like an earthen vessel. But who is this woman holding out the evidence of the Incarnation as literal fact? Is she a maid bearing a bowl of milk, as scholars have contended? Or do her red vestments, marked by golden glimmers of radiance, and the criss-crossed lacings on her bodice that spell out a sideways letter M suggest that she is more than the humble bearer of a bowl of milk, that she is herself a kind of living vessel who served to bear the divine, since as St. Anne she would be Mary’s mother and Christ’s grandmother? A servant bearing a bowl of milk is revealed by allusion to be the bearer of the daughter whose maternity will host and welcome the divine.
Erased by shadows, the shepherd with a flute in the back appears to be tipping or lifting his hat as a sign of recognition and in homage to the sacred nature of the newborn. His gesture of admiration announces as well as stands for the propagation of the news of Christ’s birth; it also serves as a metaphor for the caring and loving Christ who will protect and provide for the flock of his followers, as in the Parable of the Good Shepherd from the Gospel of John. The hand and body of St. Joseph at right are likewise largely hidden by shadow, alluding to his position as the “shadow” of God the father, who was charged with keeping Christ hidden and safe until his sacred mission had been publicly revealed.26 Thus, while bereft at first sight of manifest sacred indices or symbols, this ordinary scene turns out to be redolent of Scripture, as well as consonant with the imagery of emblem books, and, consequently, it may be seen as a profound meditation on the sacred. Scriptural and verbal considerations inform the image, helping cast new light on the painting’s visual meaning.
In addition to functioning as a meditation on the spiritual mystery of the Incarnation, La Tour’s use of shadows in The Adoration of the Shepherds also attests to a reflection on the status of painting as an art of shadows. Considered in physical terms, the shadow of Mary’s hands crossed in prayer (like other shadows in the painting) also functions as a reference to the operations of painting. The hand’s shadow embeds an allusion to the making of the painting as well as to its pictorial manner (a word whose etymology reflects the centrality of the hand, manus in Latin). By depicting the production and projection of shadows in candlelight, the painting stages and illustrates its powers of incarnation as a visual medium. Indeed, not only does this work allude to the representational power of painting insofar as it entails the generation of images; it also reenacts and performs the legendary birth of painting, namely, its genesis from the outlines of shadows. In his Natural History (c. AD 77–79), Pliny the Elder assigned the origins of painting to the Greeks, recalling that it supposedly began in “tracing lines round the human shadow [omnes umbra hominis lineis circumducta].”27 Subsequently, he reprised this idea in the legendary story of Butades of Corinth: “It was through his daughter that he made the discovery; who, being deeply in love with a young man about to depart on a long journey, traced the profile of his face, as thrown upon the wall by the light of the lamp [umbram ex facie eius ad lucernam in pariete lineis circumscripsit].”28 Robert Rosenblum has noted that frequent allusions to this legend can be found in historical and theoretical treatises of the seventeenth century by Frans Junius, André Félibien, and Vicente Carducho.29 Pliny’s narrative dramatizes the origins of painting by positing the shadow as a device for mnemonic recall (given its mimetic character) and calling attention to its creative potential insofar as the making of shadows inaugurates the advent of painting. La Tour’s depiction of shadows in his nocturnes reprises this popular legend, which enjoyed wide circulation during the seventeenth century, in order to allude analogically to painting’s incarnational potential in both spiritual and secular terms.
La Tour’s exploration of painting’s ability to create visual semblance through the manipulation of light and shadow reveals something fundamental about painting as a medium of incarnation. The touches of reflected light on the terrine and the shimmer and glimmer of fabrics glowing like embers on the red robes mark painting’s virtuosity, celebrating its attainments while inviting reflection on its limits as a visual medium. By depicting the glowing reflections of candlelight, La Tour turned the terrine and the shining fabrics into a mirror that renders manifest the operations of painting, thus highlighting its capacity for representation. His pictorial approach attests to a double strategy at work: On the one hand, deliberate displays of painterly virtue stage the seductive power of painting, and, on the other hand, the renunciation of this celebratory display serves to convey La Tour’s spiritual critique of vision and the vanity of painting.
Millard Meiss, in a classic article, pointed to a longstanding tradition of theologians and poets who explained the mystery of the Incarnation by analogy to the passage of sunlight through a glass window: “Just as the brilliance of the sun fills and penetrates a glass window without damaging it, and pierces its solid form with imperceptible subtlety, neither hurting it when entering nor destroying it when emerging: thus the word of God, the splendor of the Father, entered the virgin chamber and then came forth from the closed womb.”30 St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) compared the Virgin to a windowpane through which the light that figures the Word of God or the Holy Spirit passes into the earthly realm of the flesh, tracing the passage of the invisible into the visible. He reprised this analogy by reference to stained glass, specifying that just as a pure ray of light enters a window and remains unspoiled, even while taking on the color of the glass, so the Son of God “emerged pure, but took on the color of the Virgin, that is the nature of a man.”31 Like a glass or a stained-glass window struck by light, the Virgin acts as a portal, a site of crossing that marks the threshold between the profane and the sacred.32 These analogies that help elucidate the mystery of the Incarnation also became the vehicle for figuring the nature of spiritual illumination. Meiss observed that St. Bernard’s and later theologians’ reliance on images of the glass pane or stained glass crossed by light to illustrate the Incarnation is unusual, since these analogies borrow references from art (or architecture) instead of scriptural sources.33 Glass or stained glass as manmade artifacts dedicated to the service of God are conceptually “retooled” in order to serve as illustrative paradigms for the Incarnation as an object of devotion.
Bernard’s analogy of the Incarnation with a ray of light passing through a pane of glass also informs La Tour’s conception of painting, given the treatment of the visual image as a window that gives access to the sacred. Activated by verbal cues that traverse its visual content, the profane image opens onto the sacred, enabling the gleam of spiritual insight to illuminate the image. The opacity of paint is rendered transparent through the infusion of the Word, which illuminates and transforms its substance in order to enable a spiritual way of seeing and understanding. The word illuminates the image, permeating its pictorial substance through figurative allusions that promote insight rather than sight. Figured through the image of light passing through a glass window, the word casts new light on painting as the devotional idiom that strives to represent the sacred. Used to figure the mystery of the Incarnation, this analogy also enables meditation on the art of painting as a medium of incarnation. It serves to elucidate the metapictorial conditions and determinations that define it as a visual medium, as an art that reflects on its own making and the nature of representation. Indeed, the visual illustration of the mystery of the Incarnation can be seen as a metaphor for a new way of understanding painting, in which its visual nature is construed as a gateway to be crossed or, better, illuminated by the light of the word.
We now return to La Tour’s Newborn Child and the beholder’s dilemma in attempting to resolve the ambiguity engendered by the appearance of this painting, which wavers between the secular and the sacred. A closer look reveals that a small detail obtrudes on the seamless naturalism of this work, disrupting the physical reality of the scene: The candle (presumably hidden by St. Anne’s raised hand) casts three circular reflections (alluding to the Trinity) on the robes of Mary and her mother.34 Lit by candlelight, Mary’s thumb hints at the newborn’s gender as she holds the swaddled child, lest there be any ambiguity about his humanity. The shadow cast by the newborn’s head and the reflected light of the candle seem physically verisimilar, but the radiance of the neat circle of light between them is unexpected and visually puzzling. Rather than merely casting shadows, the newborn’s head appears to radiate light, thereby inscribing through its radiance the presence of spirit where shadows would be expected. While marking evidence of the Incarnation, the cultivated naturalism of this image enables the paradoxical conflation of incompatible and indeed exclusive realities. La Tour’s insistence on investing the sacred into images of the ordinary (or ordinary images) represents a post-Tridentine approach to the divine and the transcendent, an approach that no longer required reliance on supernatural effects, since it could be mediated through the everyday details of baroque naturalism.
However, La Tour’s originality lies not just in his naturalistic approach to religious subjects but also in the fact that he developed a new idea of painting. His paintings surrender their hold on the visible insofar as they allow themselves to be crossed, that is, traversed rather than merely seen.35 Undermining the primacy of the image and the act of seeing, his devotional works redirect the production of meaning by fostering new forms of viewer response designed to promote spiritual vision. They invite a new understanding of painting, one based on “images designed to appeal to the mind, to engage complex acts of reading and interpretation, rather than to serve as material fetishes or objects of quid-pro-quo devotional transactions.”36 Renouncing the lure of the visible, La Tour’s paintings give themselves over to the beholder enabling a new understanding of what it means to see.
. . . these external manner of laments are merely shadows of the unseen grief that swells with silence . . .
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Richard II
La Tour is believed to have painted two versions in vertical format of the tending of St. Sebastian: St. Sebastian Tended by Irene (c. 1649, Musée du Louvre, Paris; see Plate 24) and St. Sebastian Tended by Irene (c. 1649–1650, Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; see Plate 25). These works share largely the same iconographic content but vary significantly in their treatments of light and color.37 While the attribution of the Berlin version continues to occasion debate, a fate shared with most other versions of La Tour’s parallel paintings, Jacques Thuillier judged this work to be a second version by La Tour himself, an assessment backed by Philip Conisbee, who noted that, like prior multiple versions, this is not a slavish copy but a work that demands attention in its own right.38 The composition is staged on a diagonal, with the monumental procession of women mourners descending in a stately movement, coming to a stop before St. Sebastian’s prostrate body, presumed to be dead. While recalling the “diagonal cascade” of Caravaggio’s large Entombment of Christ (1602–1603, Pinacoteca Vaticana, Vatican City), La Tour’s St. Sebastian Tended by Irene is devoid of the expressive qualities associated with Caravaggio’s drama of mourning, emphasized through mourners’ hands raised up in gesticulation.39 Instead, La Tour’s deliberate eclipse of the mourners’ faces in the back suggests an inconsolable sense of loss. He silenced and effaced the representation of lamentation, an erasure of visual signs whose absence permits a sense of mourning to pervade the scene all the more emphatically. The other two mourners depicted are entirely absorbed in the sight of St. Sebastian’s martyred body. Kneeling, a young maid dressed in a red gown and bearing a torch reaches out for St. Sebastian’s inert hand in a gesture whose solicitude combines caring and mourning. A tear waiting to fall serves as a punctual reminder of her compassion suspended in time. Behind her, dressed in a simple black tunic with a rose-red veil, the widow Irene holds out her hands in a gesture that suggests a desire to lift and cradle Sebastian’s prostrate body.40 It is an action whose gestural vocabulary recalls the affective tenor of the history of Depositions from the Cross and the poignant lamentation of a Pietà.41
The painting depicts the discovery of the body of St. Sebastian suspended between death and life, a turning point that conflates the temporality of lamentation with that of care if he is found to be alive. St. Sebastian’s body lies on the ground, having been released from the ropes binding him to a tree, which resembles a Roman column. Framing the left side of the painting, this columnlike tree lends to the image the aura of an inner sanctum or a temple. It also acts as a temporal referent, inscribing allusions to Roman times (presumably to St. Sebastian’s historical context) as well as to the passage of seasons, marked by a barely noticeable oak leaf above. But this column also has important scriptural allusions (“Christ is the column”; Tim. 3:15), which are reinforced by the brightly illuminated torch with three distinctive meshes crossing one another in a subtle yet direct figuration of the Trinity. St. Sebastian is shown with his head thrown back and an arrow protruding from his heart, which has drawn one drop of blood. Staining the otherwise untouched surface of his marmoreal body, this speck of blood is the only visible trace of the physical violence suffered in his martyrdom. The arrow’s shaft casts a diagonal shadow on the saint’s body, marking its pristine surface like the stylus or gnomon of a sundial. This inscription of time’s shadow provides a cautionary note, even a warning, by suggesting that mortality touches not just the saint’s body but also the image representing it, thus questioning painting’s vain pretense to endure through time.
These temporal references are compounded by the inscription of the geometry of triangular shapes providing formal structure and rhythm to the image, which led several critics to comment on the “cubist” nature of the Berlin version particularly. The arrow’s cast shadow creates the apex of a triangle with the raised thigh, while his knee outlines the shape of yet another triangle underneath, which visually echoes the triangle created by the saint’s bent right arm on the ground. Juxtaposed against the line extending down to St. Sebastian’s ankle, the conically shaped helmet creates the outline of yet another triangle. This triangulation on the bottom level of the work is reflected throughout the painting: It is echoed in the triangle formed by the heads of the three mourners at the top, and another triangle runs from the widow to Sebastian’s body at its apex and extends to the attendant’s head, a shape echoed in her triangular red bodice.42 This repeated iteration of the number three by the meshes of the torch, by the geometry of triangles, and by the three female figures accompanying Irene insistently calls attention to the Trinity. Referring to the mystery of the threefold nature of the Father, the Son (Jesus), and the Holy Spirit, these Christological allusions emphasize the theological significance of Christ’s position as mediator between the divine and human realms.
La Tour’s choice of St. Sebastian as subject matter reflects the renewed currency of his veneration during the Catholic Reformation because of the fact that he was one of the earliest saints martyred. The visual depiction of his first martyrdom, when his body was pierced by arrows, helped procure his position as protector against the plague. Jacobus de Voragine’s account of the legend of St. Sebastian helps illuminate La Tour’s depiction, clarifying its special relevance to questions of idolatry. If St. George has been traditionally known as a slayer of dragons, Voragine’s legend of St. Sebastian establishes his indubitable standing as a slayer of idols. For his acts of saintly intercession invariably necessitated not just the denunciation but the complete eradication of pagan idols. A rapid perusal of his life identifies key examples of his destruction of idols and all forms of idolatry. Sebastian was a commander of the Roman Praetorian guard, a military rank he deliberately sought in order to aid Christians condemned to death for their refusal to forswear Christ in offering sacrifices to pagan gods.43 He acted as intercessor when their spirit was weakening by strengthening their faith and resistance to committing idolatry through the false veneration of idols.
Another incident recounted by Voragine in the Golden Legend serves to consolidate Sebastian’s unique position and mission as an anti-idolatry crusader and martyr. When asked to cure the prefect of Rome of a painful disease, Sebastian told him that “he would first have to renounce the worship of false gods and empower him to demolish his idols: then and only then would he regain his health.”44 However, when the shattering of “more than two hundred idols to fragments” failed to cure the prefect, Sebastian and his friend accused him of not recanting his beliefs: “We have shattered the idols and you are not cured. This must be because you have not renounced your false beliefs, or else you are holding back some idols.”45 And, indeed, this turned out to be the case, since the prefect admitted to having saved from the destruction a special room he had built representing the “order of the stars” (presumably the zodiac), which was used to foretell future events using astrological principles.46 Despite encountering resistance to the idea of dismantling the hidden room, given its great value (not just divinatory but also ornamental and pecuniary), Sebastian insisted that it be done: “As long as you keep the room intact, you yourself will not be made whole.”47 Sebastian mandated the destruction of idols and false images (whether visibly displayed or hidden from view) as a condition for the efficacy of prayer to take effect and bring about the prefect’s miraculous cure. In choosing to depict St. Sebastian, La Tour was returning to the origins of the church, to the first martyrs and particularly the saint who had battled idols and defended the nascent Christian faith against idolatrous pagan incursions.
They that make a graven image are all of them vanity.
ISAIAH 44:9
Every founder is confounded by the graven image: for his molten image is falsehood, and there is no breath in them.
JEREMIAH 51:17
St. Sebastian had a unique history: He was martyred twice by Diocletian’s henchmen, first by being almost killed by arrows and second by being beaten to death with stone cudgels. The fact of suffering two deaths earned him the distinction of being called “the saint who was martyred twice.” His first martyrdom, “death,” and miraculous recovery (“salvation”), through the compassionate care of St. Irene, figured Christ’s own martyrdom and resurrection.48 His second death was accompanied by the degradation of his dead body, which was disposed of in a sewer or privy. This indignity symbolically compounded his martyrdom by denying due recognition to his dead body with burial and mourning rites. But his dumped and defiled body would not be put to rest nor silenced: St. Sebastian appeared in a dream to St. Lucina, asking her to tend properly to his dead body. “In such a privy shalt thou find my body hanging at an hook, which is not defouled with none ordure, when thou hast washed it thou shalt bury it at the catacombs by the apostles.”49 The attempt also to martyr St. Sebastian’s remains by desecrating his dead body so as to deny its redemptive potential poignantly figures the fate of the sacred image savaged and profaned by iconoclasm. Not only were sacred paintings denounced and attacked in the name of idolatry, but their eradication also implied efforts to deny the very possibility of their existence. But where and how is St. Sebastian’s destiny as a slayer of idols figured in La Tour’s paintings?
And, what does it mean for the painter La Tour—a Catholic believer and maker of paintings liable to accusations of idolatry—to align himself with the anti-idolatry crusader and martyr par excellence? Closer scrutiny of the pictorial renderings of Sebastian’s martyrdom reveals the presence of metapictorial allusions that illuminate St. Sebastian’s pictorial representation as well as promote reflection on painting’s visual and temporal nature and history.50 For example, the depiction in the lower right of the helmet, glinting with the reflected light of the torch, attests to painting’s prowess in reproducing reflections of the physical world. But the helmet also acts as a temporal marker, a reminder of St. Sebastian’s history as a Roman soldier who used his military rank to foster his spiritual mission as a Christian believer. Other pictorial details emphasize dramatic shifts in pictorial conventions that mark time’s passage and allude to historical events. Consider the representation of Sebastian’s body, which Voragine described as being shot so full of arrows that “he looked like a porcupine,” an image often reprised in later pictorial traditions by showing his body pierced by multiple arrows. In his painting, La Tour referenced this biographical detail and pictorial history only as an absence, through deliberate erasure. Effacing the way St. Sebastian was traditionally represented, La Tour violated the pictorial conventions of the image by eradicating the indices of its prior history. He muted the violence aimed against St. Sebastian’s body by redirecting its force as a marker of sacred painting’s traumatic history.
In St. Sebastian Tended by Irene, the sole insignia left of St. Sebastian’s legendary martyrdom is the singular arrow that has pierced his pallid body, leaving behind a single drop of blood.51 This compelling and poignant detail constitutes the painting’s punctum (signifying a “point” or “prick” in Latin and derived from the Greek, designating a wounding or trauma). According to Roland Barthes, the punctum denotes a singular or personally touching detail that reaches out of the image, by “piercing” the beholder, as it were.52 This singular drop of blood is the sole trace of the saint’s spiritual passion and sacrifice. But as discussed earlier in the context of La Tour’s parallel paintings of St. Jerome (c. 1628–1630, Musée du Grenoble; and c. 1630–1632, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm), this drop of blood is also a drop of color, a dab of red pigment, whose physical trace attests to the substance and thus material nature of painting. The drop of blood marks painting’s condition as a medium whose materiality has to be traversed for the attainment of spiritual reality. However, at issue is not just the nature of painting as material medium but also its history, figured by the arrow’s cast shadow, which resembles the gnomon of a sundial. This scene of martyrdom, where St. Sebastian figures Christ’s Passion and sacrifice, also alludes to another scene of martyrdom, that of the pictorial image. As Joseph Koerner pointed out, “for some radical reformers, faith’s renovation required the destruction of images.”53 But this destruction of images put them in question and perpetuated their possibilities of existence. The Italian philosopher Mario Perniola suggested that the true innovation of Christianity after the Reformation is not reducible to the introduction of new pictorial conventions that broke with idealizing norms (by showing Christ’s decaying body) but rather “in having kept the possibility of the image alive after having questioned it.” And he concluded that only when the meaning and function of sacred images was challenged by the Reformation “did the problem of the image of Christ’s death present itself as a solution to the problem of the death of the image.54 This apparent paradox is further clarified by Victor Stoichita’s observation that not only did the Reformation encourage the “recognition of the image as an image” but also that attacks on sacred images were concomitant with the Catholic attempts to rediscover the powers of the image.55 But the attempt to keep the possibility of the image alive does not mean that the image could continue to be what it had already been. La Tour’s pictorial solution to this conundrum was to reconsider the pictorial image by focusing on forms of viewer response, since it is the reception of the image rather than its creation that incurs the charge of idolatry.56
How can the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, who promoted the destruction of pagan idols, be retooled as a commemorative figure of both the sacrifice and the redemption of sacred painting from the accusations of idolatry? Does this complex martyrology hold out the promise of a new conception of painting and the visual image? To pursue these questions further, we turn to the differences in light and color in the two versions of St. Sebastian Tended by Irene. The color tones of the Louvre version are cooler, allowing for a greater distinction and visibility of colors, whereas the Berlin version is a deeper nocturne, whose redder, warmer tones gleam like embers glowing in the dark.57 In the lighter Louvre version, the light and dark contrasts are less pronounced, thus allowing for a greater variety of color tones to come across. The vermilion red dress of the torchbearer stands out, along with the heavenly blue of the mourner’s headdress, her crossed fingers extended in prayer. So too do the delicate rose-pink tones of St. Irene’s headcover vie for our attention, along with the spectral, whitewashed coloration of the mourner behind, whose grief is hidden by a kerchief held to her face. The Berlin version is engulfed in a deeper darkness, drowning out the clarity of color and neutralizing it to a spectrum of reds, browns, and blacks, which almost erases altogether the figure of the mourner next to St. Irene. The enveloping darkness swallows the visibility of the mourner’s blue cowl and dissolves the outlines of her body. This leaves behind a void with only a sliver of her bent profile visible in outline, whose luminous trace recalls the shape of a waning moon. Dressed in a black robe effacing her body, the widow Irene leans forward, with her head bent, covered by a rose veil framing the warm, glowing carnation of her complexion. Such marked differences in the representation of color in the Louvre and Berlin versions draw the viewer’s attention to the effacement of color tones achieved through the intensification of light and dark contrasts. But does La Tour’s pictorial approach to color and to its effacement bear any relation to the painting’s subject matter of lamentation and mourning? In the Louvre version, the use of chalky blue, white, and delicate red colors recalls the palette of whitewashed tones common to fresco painting. By referring to fresco painting, the Louvre version draws attention to the plight of religious images after the Reformation. Suffering the indignity of being whitewashed by Protestant reformers, wall paintings were “put to death” by acts of defacement or downright erasure. These blank walls would attest to the destruction of not only pictorial history but also modes of spiritual devotion and being that relied on visual images as a stimulus for the cultivation of piety.
This sense of loss that mutely addresses the beholder from the blanked-out walls of churches in northern France and the Low Countries is poignantly recaptured in La Tour’s parallel versions of St. Sebastian Tended by Irene. Under the guise of lamenting St. Sebastian’s death (which also alludes to Christ’s Passion), these paintings also refer to another loss and another “passion” by mourning the ostensible death of the sacred image in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation.58 While relying on the same basic iconography, the Louvre and Berlin versions mark, through the differences in their color tones, particular ways of seeing and understanding St. Sebastian’s martyrdom both as an event in ecclesiastical history as well as an event in the history of painting. But in bearing witness to the destruction of sacred painting, La Tour also depicted the vanity of his own enterprise as a painter. He underwrote his intervention in the guise of the vertical column, or oak tree, on the left, whose towering stance inscribes references to the painter’s name, “La Tour,” a visual signature that marks his taking a stand on behalf of an image of martyrdom that also figures the martyrdom of the image.59 In so doing, he laid to rest the immortalizing conceit of painting in its power to bring time to a standstill by suggesting that paintings may share men’s mortal destiny. La Tour’s renderings of St. Sebastian’s martyrdom thus refer not just to hagiography but also to the violation suffered by images in response to iconoclasm. However, by mourning the “death” of the image, La Tour was not merely attending to past events; his pictorial lamentation, as the following pages will show, also prefigured the possibility for redemption.
The seer is poised upon the visible like a bird, hooked fast to the visible, not within it. And yet in chiasm with it.
MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY, The Visible and the Invisible
We have examined St. Sebastian Tended by Irene as a scene of saintly mourning and martyrdom that also refers to the “martyrdom” of painting in the wake of iconoclastic revolts. However, does St. Sebastian Tended by Irene also hold out the promise of renewal, of a new way of understanding St. Sebastian’s martyrdom and of envisioning the sacred image? To answer this question we now consider the painting’s hidden geometry, embedded in the monumental processional descent on a diagonal that constitutes the painting’s theological and affective armature. The major diagonal that cuts across from top right to bottom left is repeated and thus emphasized by shorter, parallel diagonals produced by St. Sebastian’s left arm, the shaft of the arrow, and his raised thigh. Moreover, as Nicolson and Wright have noted, the presentation of the heads and hands in St. Sebastian Tended by Irene creates “vertical bands cut across by the diagonal running from top right to bottom left,” leading them to conclude that “never before has La Tour insisted on so firm a scaffolding. It is as though he were now determined to perform for human beings what Saenredam had been performing for architecture.”60 They associated La Tour’s insistence on formal pictorial geometry with Pieter Jansz Saenredam’s emphasis on architectural renderings and rigor. However, Saenredam’s architectural depictions were not driven by formal considerations alone, as his representations of bare churches also bore witness to the erasure of sacred wall paintings by acts of iconoclasm. La Tour’s use of geometrical scaffolding as a pictorial device in St. Sebastian Tended by Irene invites further scrutiny in order to determine whether its formal rigor may reflect additional theological, historical, and pictorial determinations.
In St. Sebastian Tended by Irene, the processional sweep of the mourners ending at the column cuts across the descending diagonal to trace repeatedly the shape of a saltire cross. This recurrent geometry insistently embeds the theological scaffolding of the diagonal cross and the idea of crossing into the image. The more common upright Christian cross represents the union of the concepts of divinity and the world, at the intersection of the vertical and the horizontal lines.61 The sign of the cross was instituted by the Apostles to mark and spiritually commit to mind the principal mysteries of the faith: the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Redemption.62 The cross on a diagonal refers to St. Andrew’s cross (the saltire), on which he was crucified, marking his humbleness and piety in refusing to be martyred on the same kind of cross as Christ. La Tour was familiar with the saltire and displayed it on the left side of the background in his painting of St. Andrew (c. 1624, Walpole Gallery, London), which was part of a cycle of the Apostles he painted for the Albi Cathedral. However, in the parallel versions of St. Sebastian Tended by Irene, this diagonal cross is only figured through the descent of the mourners rather than explicitly shown.
By inscribing the shape of the diagonal cross through the processional descent of St. Sebastian’s mourners, La Tour visually emphasized the importance of chiasm as a guiding figure. Chiasm (chiasmus in Latin) is a term derived from Greek “crossing” (χίασμα), and it refers to a diagonal arrangement in the shape of the letter X (from χιάζω, chiázō in Greek).63 While lacking in actual mirrors, the St. Sebastian paintings repeatedly and insistently inscribe the mirrorlike mechanics of chiasm, which await the viewer’s activation. Building on the analysis of mirrors as chiastic devices and metaphors for painting in Chapter 1, it becomes clear that these references to chiasm as a diagonal crossover enable a new way of conceiving the operations of painting in relation to the beholder. These allusions serve to emphasize the idea of the pictorial image as a rhetorical device that figures the crossing from the visible to the invisible. By redefining the pictorial image as a portal to be traversed by the gaze of the beholder, these works lead to a new way of seeing whose figurative character redeems painting from its visual lapses.
Staging and performing the crossing of the visible, the stately procession of mourners in La Tour’s St. Sebastian Tended by Irene traces the attainment of a spiritual way of seeing effected through the passage from the visible to the invisible. But this traversal of the visible entails sacrifice and a death of sorts, since the pictorial image must sacrifice—even renounce—its visual countenance in order to reclaim its spiritual aspirations. Alluding to the martyrdom of painting in the wake of iconoclasm, St. Sebastian Tended by Irene commemorates painting’s demise while also upholding the possibility of its “redemption” as a medium for the representation of the sacred. We now begin to understand how the legendary figure of St. Sebastian, who was a destroyer of idols, could in La Tour’s chiastic reenvisioning of his martyrdom emerge as the savior of sacred painting. La Tour’s parallel versions of St. Sebastian Tended by Irene celebrate St. Sebastian as a figure whose mourning commemorates painting’s ostensible “death” even as it outlines the possibility of its redemptive renewal.