Frick Madison

San Francesco nel deserto (G. Bellini)

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

 

 

         Actual autograph of Francis of Assisi

 

 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.  

 

Walking stick by G. Bellini

Walking stick by J. Fleming

 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 73^rd south of Madison.

 

 *From Bonaventure to Bellini: An Essay in Franciscan Exegesis (Princeton University Press, 1982.)

 

Medieval Orientalism

 

 

I rarely compare myself to Ovid, and must presume that most of my readers share that virtue with me.  But I must bow to circumstances—said circumstances being the following.  Because I try to mix things up in this blog, I am reluctant to deal with scholarly and “medieval” topics in successive weeks.  That’s how Ovid felt about his own literary effusions.  Apparently worrying that he was in danger of getting the reputation of a Johnny OneNote erotic poet, he sat down to write a martial epic—you know, like the big boys, Homer and Virgil.  You probably also know that the verse form required of the Latin military epic is the hexameter, a line of six metrical feet, as opposed to love poetry, in which hexameter and pentameter (five-foot) lines alternate in couplets.  But the moment he wrote his first hexameter lines, Ovid tells us, diabolical Cupid, who was watching over his shoulder, reached down and plucked away one of his meters.  So he had to write the Amores instead.  The devil made him do it.

 

Well, I was already mulling this over during my recent experience  in some very unkempt local woods where I sometimes walk, when I stumbled (figuratively, fortunately) upon the fallen fruits of two osage orange trees I had not before noticed. That probably would have led to my Uncle Wayne’s tales of tank warfare in the hedgerows of Normandy.  But just then there arrived in the post from my friend John Raimo, inveterate reader and pusher of good reading, the gift of something good to read, a very slim volume entitled Double Portrait: Saint Francis in Dante and Giotto.*  Dante was a great writer, Giotto a great painter, and both were Florentines, possibly born within a year of each other.  Francis is perhaps the most famous male saint in the Roman Church.  So it is an inevitable topic, and hardly new, though here treated in an engaging way by Massimo Cacciari, an ex-Communist philosopher, prolific public intellectual, and former mayor of Venice.  I read most of this book in a couple of sleepless hours of the night, and knew immediately that I would have to put the osage oranges back on ice.  Which is indeed what you do have to do with osage oranges if you want to stratify the seeds.  But it just so happens that the subject of visual and literary treatments of Francis by medieval painters and writers has been one of my long-standing interests.  That is doubtless why John sent me this little book, and it explains why it was at least plausible that the Franciscan Institute should award me their Francis Medal a few years back.

 

The linkage of both Giotto and Francis with Dante is almost inevitable, and there have been many essays inspired by it.  Cacciari’s own emphasis is that, in his view, the visual “take” of Giotto and the literary one of Dante present two very different Francises.  This is a little less surprising than Cacciari tries to make it. 

 

                 Massimo Cacciari 

Indeed it was nearly required by what must certainly have been Giotto’s closely invigilated commission to do the famous Assisi sequence.   Francis had been a challenging and controversial figure since his arrival on the historical scene at the end of the twelfth century.  There are probably twenty versions of Saint Francis current even now, the most popular in this country being the peacenik animal lover and supervisor of bird baths.  In the time of Dante and Giotto—both of whom were born decades after Francis’s death—differing visions about the meaning of Francis were still not entirely resolved within the Church.  Was he simply the remarkable founder of a remarkable new religious order?  Or was his proclamation of a doctrine of absolute “evangelical” poverty a unique and apocalyptic intrusion of sacred history?  Certainly that doctrine was a challenge and a threat to many—particularly people who were financially comfortable, beginning with Francis’s own father.

 

Conflict between these two visions brought strife into the Order, and to a degree the whole Church, throughout the later thirteenth century and into the fourteenth.  In the 1260s there was an attempt to suppress all the earliest accounts of Francis and supplant them with one officially sanctioned biography by Saint Bonaventure, the head of the Order.  This book is a literary masterpiece that comes very close to reconciling two irreconcilable visions, and it is the main textual source for most paintings dealing with the narrative content of Francis’s life, including Giotto’s.  Dante’s “word pictures” are much more daring and adventurous.  In a short essay one example will have to serve.

 

        Giotto di Bondoni

 

 Giotto's Francis

 

In the Divine Comedy Dante’s treatment of Francis is part of a “double portrait” different from the one of which Cacciari writes.  It is balanced by a portrait of Dominic, founder of the Order of Preachers (Dominicans).  In Dante’s poem Francis is praised through the voice of Thomas Aquinas, greatest of Dominican theologians; Dominic is praised by Bonaventure, greatest of Franciscan theologians.  Many contemporaries believed that the two founders were divine messengers sent by God to renew the Church.  They found many signs in the Bible to encourage their belief.

 

For example, there are between ten and twenty thousand species of birds known to ornithologists.  And since Noah is supposed to have had seven pairs of each, the sound track of his navigation must have been symphonic.  Yet the Bible singles out only two birds for designated roles.  To scout out whether the Flood is truly receding he sends off first a raven and then a dove.  The allegorical meaning of this initiative was obvious to thirteenth-century apocalyptics.  For the renovation of the Church following the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 God had sent into the world two great new missionary armies: the black friars (Dominicans) and the gray friars (Franciscans)--the colors of the habits of the principal mendicant orders.  But if you are going to be truly apocalyptic, your best bet is not Genesis but the Apocalypse (Book of Revelation) itself.

 

Dante and his book

 

Here are some of the words (the English of which no two translators share) with which Dante introduces Francis.  “[In Assisi] was born into the world a sun, as sometimes it arises from the Ganges.  But he who speaks of this place should not say Ascesi, which would be speaking short, but Oriente, if he would speak properly.”  Ascesi, a far-fetched pun on the Italian name of Francis’s birthplace, is a Latin preterit from ascendo—to rise.  Oriente comes from another verb of similar meaning—orior—but one that very early took on the job of denoting the sunrise.  For people everywhere that was a phenomenon that appeared in the east—that is, the Orient.  So Francis is not merely a solar riser, but an oriental solar riser.  The evangelist Luke, weaving together a medley of old Hebrew prophecies, wrote thus of the prophetic mission of John the Baptist to announce the coming of Jesus  “to give knowledge of salvation unto [Israel] by the remission of their sins, through the tender mercy of our God, whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us” (Luke 1:77-78)  It is obvious what Dante had in mind.  The most radical of the poverty fanatics insisted that Francis of Assisi, Francis of the Arising, was the Sixth Angel of the Apocalypse.  And I saw another angel ascending from the rising of the sun, having the seal of the living God…(Rev. 7:2).  That “seal” was the markings of the stigmata, the very wounds of crucifixion transferred to the body of Francis from the body of Jesus Christ, the dayspring from on high and the chief of all Risers.  Francis was an alter Christus, a “second Christ”.  It’s mind-boggling, but that is what Dante is actually saying (Paradiso 11:49-54).

 

Many historians continue to insist that there is an “unchanging human nature” that enables us to feel considerable confidence about writing of past societies very different from our own.  But even our own documentable familial, tribal, national, political, religious, and cultural pasts—meaning those well recorded in public and private records—are enough to challenge this assumption.  I am now in my eighties, and when I compare what I know about the lives of my grandparents with what I know about the lives of my grandchildren, I feel I am already halfway to encountering two different species.  And that is before we have even scratched history’s surface.   The differentness—or to use a fancy word, the alterity—even within groups of linguistic hegemony and blood kinship over a period of not more than a hundred and fifty years—is truly astonishing.  And they hardly even rank as “historical” in the way we think about history.  The medieval European materials I touch upon here widen the lens on the totality of human history only very slightly.  The past is truly the most foreign of foreign lands.  And we inevitably tend to try to remake it according to our own contemporary liking.

 

*Massimo Cacciari, Doppio ritratto: San Francesco in Dante e Giotto.  (Milan: Adelphi, 2012), pp. 88.