We are pretty chuffed with ourselves at the moment, to use one of my wife’s Anglicisms. Our self-congratulatory sentiments are stimulated by the fact that, for the first time since the beginning of Covid we made a trip to the big city under our own steam. The meeting with our friends Susan and John at the Dante Reunion (reported on two blogs ago) was so much fun that we determined to repeat it as soon as possible. Susan suggested a joint visit to the Frick Collection, temporarily moved from its Renaissance palazzo on its Fifth Avenue corner, closed for doubtless spectacular renovations, to a brutalist box on Madison Avenue. It was there—the Frick Madison--where we all met up, as though by magic at exactly eleven o’clock last Friday.
What I am calling a brutalist box is to other people a distinguished building by Marcel Breuer. It is one of the former homes of the Whitney Museum, most recently transported to magnificence at the foot of the High Line in lower Manhattan. In fact the Frick Madison is a box of boxes, the walls of which suggest the genre used for lining victims up to be shot. But their emphatic mural functionality emphasizes the virtues of the paintings placed against them. I used to “know” the Frick paintings very well, as I visited them several times each year. But seeing them after a long visual drought, and in these settings, was truly to see them anew.
There is space for the images to spread out and revel in a new independence. Though of course the space is limited, and the curators had to leave out some very old favorites. In exchange there are some things I had never before seen, including some rarely displayed Fragonards in a dedicated Fragonard room, or perhaps I should say cell. Fragonard was a genius, but his subjects go a long way toward summarizing the provocations behind what Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Ernest calls “the worst excess of the French Revolution.” There is also a dedicated Rembrandt room. Imagine having the dough to have a dedicated Rembrandt room. Those robber barons!
To one of their paintings—the Star of India in the museum’s opulent jewelry box, as it were —the curators have devoted a whole room of its own. I know this painting particularly well, so well that I regard myself as its spiritual owner. (Spiritual ownership saves a lot of money on insurance premiums.) I refer to the work usually simply called “the Bellini Saint Francis,” produced by the great master Giovanni Bellini in the late fifteenth century. What he called it, and what it is, was San Francesco nel deserto, “Saint Francis in the wilderness.” The “wilderness” is crucial to the painting’s conception. It is the wilderness through which the Hebrews marched toward the promised land, where Moses received the Law, whence John the Baptist emerged, to which Jesus retired at the beginning of his mission, in which St. Anthony of the Desert established the vision of Christian asceticism, a vision reinterpreted by Francis on the wilds of Mount Alverna in Tuscany. I believe this is the greatest European Renaissance painting in the United States, and that is saying quite a lot.
Renaissance paintings can have meaning no less than do Renaissance poems. So I published a detailed iconographic study of the painting using, for the first time really, the learned Franciscan sources, popular and arcane, upon which Bellini himself was obviously relying either directly or indirectly.* What Bellini has to say is very profound and very erudite, though conveyed through visual images anyone with an eye for detail will appreciate for their living “truth to nature”. Forty years later I wish I had done things a little differently. I might have toned down some of my soupy Franciscan rhetoric, and I should have caught the single primitive Franciscan book in which most of Bellini’s major themes had indeed been brought together in a single literary “source” of sorts. But I do not apologize for directing a few sallies in the direction of some great art historians, who did their best over two generations to “secularize” the painting, often making of it a kind of horticultural study.
Nearly every detail in this painting has a Christian spiritual “meaning”, many of them very specifically related to Franciscan history and theology. Though he was not learned in scholastic theology, Francis himself did nurture a strange selective erudition. He adopted for his personal “sign” and signature, the tau cross, essentially a majuscule Latin “T”—the actual form of the cross used in Roman crucifixions. This tau became a therapeutic sign in the middle ages, often on the costumes of hospital workers, because of a passage in the prophecy of Ezekiel (9:14f.): God commands an angel to spare the few righteous persons in Jerusalem in the following way: “Go through [the city of Jerusalem] and set a mark upon the foreheads” of the few penitents who will be saved from the righteous slaughter to come. That is the authoritative translation of the passage in The Holy Scriptures as translated by the Jewish Publications Society; the Septuagint (the old Greek translation of the Hebrew) has for “mark” semneion, “sign”, root of English semiotics. But the Latin Bible (the Vulgate of Jerome), which was canonical for our late medieval writers, has the reading signum Thau since tau, usually spelled thau, did come to mean “mark” or “sign.” In this the Hebrew letter was like other cross-words indicated graphically in modern European languages by the letters x or t (plus sign). “X marks the spot.” Illiterates could make an X-mark on legal documents as the place indicated (by others) as “his mark.” “Hot cross buns!” Cruces (crosses) marking editorial issues in learned editions of old texts. The tau had already become a “sign” of Anthony of the Desert (often called the Father of Christian monasticism); it became Francis’s signature, and the sign of the Order of his humble brothers, and in the later Middle Ages the sign of the hospital Order of Antonines. (There are many identifiable desirable plants in the Bellini’s landscape but also a few weeds, and if I go too deeply into them for your comfort in this paragraph and the next, I promise to end with gastronomy.)
Saint Anthony of the Desert
An indispensable iconographic attribute for Anthony had been the tau-shaped walking stick. Though usually a complete “T,” artists did a streamlined version of the head of the cane with a half handle. To the viewer's view in the extreme lower right of the Bellini there is one leaning up against the latticed frame of Francis’s little dwelling. Notice that Francis has left his sandals behind to go and gaze at Bellini’s version of the burning bush. That is because Francis is a modern version of Moses, who must respond to God's command (Exodus 3:6) “Take your sandals off your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.” Incidentally and iconographically, his rustic cell is a Christian version of the shacks or “booths” erected for the Jewish harvest Festival of Succoth/Booths, when harvesters slept overnight in the fields for a brief period of the year. I here lack the leisure to explain the eschatological associations the festival had accrued in the Judaism of Jesus, but you can find something about them in any decent commentary on Matthew 17. What regularly makes medieval and Renaissance paintings so inexhaustibly rich from the intellectual point of view is their silent appropriations of the allegorical biblical commentaries of a thousand years of monastic exegesis. But Bellini gave me some help I couldn’t get from the Bible.
When I found myself becoming long of tooth but short of breath and increasing unsteady of gait, a lucky wind-fall of a black locust limb on my son’s farm allowed me to make my own version of his homemade walking stick. That you yourself are lame need not mean your cane has to be lame as well. Unfortunately, physical prosthesis is probably as close as I will ever get to the saint I so greatly admire. But I do have an important national affinity. I still eat Italian food with the best of them, as I discovered over scrumptious polenta when John and Susan treated us to lunch at a classy little trattoria just around the corner of 73rd south of Madison.
*From Bonaventure to Bellini: An Essay in Franciscan Exegesis (Princeton University Press, 1982.)
