Painting Jesus: not as easy as it looks
August 24, 2012, 12:12 pm
Posted by Mollie Wilson O'Reilly
I’ve seen some bad church art in my day, but I’ve never seen anything quite like this “restored” Ecce Homo fresco in Spain. Sometimes the line between devotion and vandalism is surprisingly thin.
An easy target for mockery.
I like the restoration better than the original. I hope the lady who did it doesn’t get in trouble (the article said there might be legal action).
The effect is not unlike the effect achieved by the rocker ladies in the Orthodox cathedral, even if the intentions were maybe 180 degrees apart. The line between malevolence and incompetence can sometimes be hard for an outsider to see.
I am reminded of the cross outside of the newer Church at Fatima, and the cross inside the newer Fatima Church, which also appear to be examples of vandalism rather than mere incompetence.
When I was a kid my friend’s uncle proudly repaired her navy parochial-school oxfords with ox-blood leather patches, causing tears of horror, love, mortification and laughter. If this fresco was in our Bronx parish, he might well have done the same thing. I love these people!
I’m with Irene. ALL the portraits of Jesus and ALL the portraits of Mary with their eyes rolling up to Heaven are blasphemy, a worse category than terrible art. Where are the censors when we need them?
OK. I’ll calm down.
“ALL the portraits of Jesus and ALL the portraits of Mary with their eyes rolling up to Heaven are blasphemy, a worse category than terrible art.”
OK, I’ll bite: How come?
A priest one time told us not to sing “Amazing Grace” because we are not “wretches” but people of God. I was shocked, as this hymn has been played at scores of family funerals from time immemorial.
It pleases me a great deal that this became a meme so quickly.
OK, I’ll bite: How come?
Jean,
Jesus and Mary are in heaven. They should be looking down.
A Lutheran theologian, on hearing a sweetened version of “Amazing Grace” that changed “a wretch like me” to “someone like me,” remarked, “If I’m not a wretch, grace is not amazing.”
When we go before God on Judgment Day, he’s going to ask us to show him what kind of work of art we’ve made by the use of our freedom, and I’m afraid that all too often what we’ll offer him will be no better than a child’s smeared finger-painting, and we’ll have to hope that he’ll find it good enough. So God bless the woman’s effort, even if I don’t myself think the original was worth preserving, much less restoring.
But Jesus on the Cross isn’t in heaven yet, David Nickol.
Fr. Komonchak, I agree with the Lutherans and Calvinists. We may be people of God, but that doesn’t mean we’re not downright crumb-bums most days.
“.. all too often what we’ll offer him will be no better than a child’s smeared finger-painting, and we’ll have to hope that he’ll find it good enough.”
Yes! This lady is like the Juggler of Notre Dame and this is the gift she had to give.
Maybe Cecilia Giménez knew something Elías García Martínez didn’t.
From other reports I’ve read, it appears the woman was somewhat pressured into taking on the restoration. I can’t help but feel sorry for her. She may not have been fully up to the task, but she clearly tried to do her best.
As for John Newton including “wretch like me” in his “Amazing Grace,” he obviously thought it apt personally given his slave trading background before his conversion, but aren’t we all “wretches” that need saving in some aspect of our own lives? I’d be happy to list my many failings but for the brand new Commonweal policy (initiated a millisecond ago) on the length of posts. ;)
I kinda think there’s something cubist going on in the restoration = repainting.
I’ve heard “wretch” retranslated as
(1) soul
(2) saved and set me free
I dunno, most of the time I and a lot of the people I know are just plain old garden-variety wretches. And I agree with the Lutheran: why the grace if we are not wretches? The word certainly does smack the much-vaunted American “self-esteem” in the tooshie, doesn’t it?
When I first heard the hymn Amazing Grace I was moved. Now whenever I hear it -I experience it as if I were watching a movie or t.v. show;the “iconic” [what's the word for music as oppossed to image?]cliche of what you hear when trying to incorporate religion into the situation. It comes across as shallow [not the song itself but the decision to play that song], a superficial appeal to religion rather then an expression of a genuine religious impulse. Like no real religious impulse or even much thought went into the decision but rather the easiest and most oft heard song that says -now we’re being religious.It just irritates me every time.
When I first saw pictures of the restored sistene chappel -it looked to me like I was looking at a cartoon .I could not believe it.
“Wretch” has a lot in common with the Calvinist doctrine of total depravity.
Salvation, I believe, means a lot more than just reconciliation. It’s all about elevation. Grace is elevating. So we’re being saved, rather than having been saved, and being found, and learning to see, to fear, to trust… The action of grace, for Catholics, has an ongoing aspect.
Agree, Jim, that softening the words in prayers is lame. E.g., remember the Hail Holy Queen? We were “poor banished children of Eve” “mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.” But the bishops dropped the poor banished and turned the valley of tears into the land of exile.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salve_Regina
Jean –
I’m having trouble putting my finger on why it’s blasphemy. It has something to to with the intrinsically useless and therefore unconditionally unnatural gesture of eye-rolling. What does rolling your eyes back up into your skull mean??? That you’re really stupid, that’s what it means. (Didn’t your Mama teach you that if you kept doing that one day they wouldn’t roll back down?) Or the eye-rolling could be an attempt to say, “Double-sigh, Isn’t this whole cock-eyed scene beyond trivial??” OK, so maybe He’s supposed to be looking up to Heaven at His Father, but that would make Him guilty of a very primitive heresy — that God is way up there in the starry sky like Zeus or somebody. No matter how I interpret the eye-rolling it comes out unworthy or stupid of Jesus. Besides, from what I can see, the artist put Him in a fancy robe. That never happened either.
The story was on CNN. They think it’s charming. Not the restoration, the old lady.
Ann, I think the notion of Jesus looking up to heaven being blasphemy is kind of a modern notion. Gesture, pose, and facial expression had specific meanings in ancient and medieval iconography in the Western Church. So, of course, did the symbols around the figure.
The “language” of gesture, pose, and facial expression is somewhat different in the Byzantine/Orthodox tradition, but no less specific.
I suppose that we’re so used to seeing these images that we have come to see them as trite, but it’s only because, I think, that we do not really understand what they’re saying.
FWIW, there is a scene in “The Queen” (with Helen Mirren playing QEII) when she comes face to face with a stag in the Scottish highlands. That moment is poignant and pregnant with ancient iconography–the stag, particularly in British Celtic iconography (probably because of its Druidical associations), was a medieval symbol for royalty in the temporal realm, and Christ in the heavenly. The stag looks at her full in the face, as the saints in ikons do, and it is a moment of challenge. You are at sea, Elizabeth. What will you do, as a child of God with a special place on earth, at a time when your people are hostile to you, and your family seems to be falling apart? Can you rise to the occasion. Can you pull things together again?
The fact that Prince Phillip is bent on shooting the stag (utterly clueless) and that the stag is eventually shot by a rich American (underscoring Britain’s place in the pecking order of Western powers), also underscores the disarray of Elizabeth’s situation.
These scenes are very brief, but utterly brilliant.
Ann: Was Jesus guilty of that “very primitive heresy”? See Mt 6:1, 9 ["Our Father, who art in heaven"], 10, 20, 26; 7:11; Mk 6:41….
I’m sure Calvinists love the word “wretch,” but John Newton, who wrote the hymn, was an Anglican priest, and Calvinists and Anglicans have kind of a rocky history …
It might also be useful to remember that in the 18th Century, “wretch” carried the sense of depravity and sin, but denoted an individual who had suffered from his sin and was pitiable as a result. Which seems to me to be our relation to God. We ever stand in need of grace.
Interesting to not that “wretch” is often preceded by the adjective “poor.” in literature.
Possibly the hymn doesn’t suit Catholic doctrine, but because of the family associations, I’m not ready to give it up nor see it as generic religious background muzak.
Also interesting that Newton’s father was a Catholic.
My eldest daughter, named Grace, attends Catholic school where she occasionally needs to write an essay about the saint she’s named after. I try and explain to her that she’s not name after a person but after a really fabulous attribute of God that going to let us all go to heaven some day. My daughter is so far unimpressed; I wish they talked more about grace in school and church; I think its important and doesn’t get enough play.
JAK –
According to my Greek dictionary ouranos also means “better world”. Surely Jesus didn’t mean that His Father was up there around Saturn or whatever. I say He meant “Our Father Who art in a better world”.
Jean –
Yes, signs meanings do get changed. But today what rolling your eyes means is not “looking into the sky for God”. I suppose I just think that the metaphor of the sky as Heaven is and always was a bum one — what the sky mainly is is empty, so likening Heaven to is doesn’t get us anywhere. And if you mean it literally, as some people do, then it’s heresy.
So what did “assumed into Heaven” mean? That’s for the exegetes to figure out.
When Jesus prayed to his Father, he looked up to heaven because that is God’s abode, from which his Spirit descends and his voice resounds–all in the Gospels. The mere looking up to heaven or the expectation of great gifts from heaven need not, as in very pious paintings, be suspected of endorsing a very primitive heresy.
I guess I see looking up simply to mean “not here” but elsewhere.
Or, looked at another way, Jews like Jesus once had the notion that God lived on a mountain. So you’d look up to see the top of a mountain.
Or, again, “I lift mine eyes to the hills,” a nice metaphor for looking beyond the mortal coil on this plane (plain) of existence and being uplifted by the “hills.”
Or take it this way: God is above us all. We look up at our parents, so we would perhaps reasonably look up to our Father in heaven.
I can’t think of anymore linguistic tricks to justify the looking up bit. It’s just an iconic metaphor, but one of those visual “proofs” people haul out to demonstrate that people in the Middle Ages were so dumb they thought heaven was up in the sky. My guess is that medieval people were far more plugged in to metaphor and symbol than we are now. It’s we who might be slow on the uptake here.
I never rolled my eyes when my mother was looking, but I used to cross them at my brother to indicate I thought he was an idiot, and was told by my Gramma that “God will spite you and leave them that way.”
Gramma’s ideas about God and His famous spite were interesting. She was a Lutheran, but I don’t think a lot of her ideas would have passed ELCA muster …
Let’s not forget that the image under discussion is an Ecce Homo. That is, a devotional portrait of Christ during his Passion — particularly at the moment when he is brought before the crowds by Pilate (hence the title, “Behold the man,” from John 19:5). Pace Ann, Jesus did wear a fancy robe once: the Roman soldiers put it on him, along with that crown of thorns. So Jesus’s expression in these images is meant to be woeful as well as prayerful, pained but not hopeless.
Yes woeful or, similarly, wretched. Though not a wretch like me because Jesus was God even in His passion and didn’t need saving but was saving everyone else through that redemptive act.
(See, despite the fact that the Commonweal Powers hate my side-tracking and tangents, I usually do revolve around the general topic at hand. But I’m thread hogging. Maybe I can think of something to irritate Grant with on the ACA thread he started above. Or maybe I should just go finish grading papers, which probably accounts for my need to come over here and read something sensible every couple of hours.)
At Mass this evening, the priest in his homily was talking about how if things get hard and we’re asked the question, will you leave, too, we should turn to God for help; he told the story of John Newton on the ship and we all sang Amazing Grace. I thought that was very serendipitous after reading about Newton here today.
(He did not talk about Gimenez Jesus, though).
OK, so Heaven (the sky) can be a metaphor for Heaven (a better place). But surely you guys don’t really think that Jesus intended the faithful to interpret the term literally, especially when He knew that there were people who would, and probably did, do exactly that??
At any rate, since *He* didn’t mean it literally, it seems to me it’s silly for an artist to paint Him *as if He did* mean it literally — as if He would look up to the sky in order to talk to His Father. It falsifies both Him and His message.
And another thing — look at His elongated neck and how His head is tilting over so far it looks like it’s going to fall off. It reminds me of the paintings of those loverly and miserably unhappy women by Rossetti. Unreal.
Mollie — where does it say they put a *fancy* or rich robe on Him? I don’t remember it that way.
Ann, as far as emotional responses to devotional art go, de gustibus. But the image under discussion here is hardly a radical departure from tradition. The Ecce Homo is a very common, if old-fashioned, trope in Christian artwork, and the painting at the center of this story is a very standard version of said trope. The familiarity of the image is, at least I would guess, a big part of what has made this story so fascinating/amusing to so many people around the world.
When it comes to the details of the Gospels, on the other hand, there is no need to rely on your memory. All four Gospels say that the Roman soldiers clothed Jesus in a scarlet or purple (read: rich) robe to make him look like a king. And the Gospels say many times that Jesus “looked up to heaven” as he prayed. Fr. Komonchak has already provided you with chapter and verse of several such instances.
81-year-old Cecilia Giménez has taken to bed with an anxiety attack due to the stress of her newfound fame as art restorer and promoter of the previously little known artist Elías Martínez. No one seems to have asked whether she might have mysteriously envisioned the subject more clearly than he did.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/24/spain-europe-news
If the painting below (which anyone–ANYONE–would readily identify as being decidedly goofy) can launch one of history’s most significant spiritual revolutions, then I see no reason as to why Ecce Homo a la Giménez need be seen as a lost cause:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/Kruis_san_damiano.gif
By the by, it’s not as though what people in the 1st Century thought in terms of cosmology is lost to us–so I really have no idea as to why anyone would doubt that Jesus was being literal when he talked about God being in heaven.
Here are a couple of D.G. Rossetti miserable beauties::
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_Willow_(Rossetti
)http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5b/Rossetti_-_Pia_de_Tolomei.JPG
See?
Maybe the old lady had better understanding of Jesus == and taste — than Rossetti and Martinez, just less art.
Hi, Abe,
It’s only goofy because we’re not plugged into the aesthetic. This is a piece meant for serious contemplation by those who looked at it. I’m by no means an expert at this stuff, but I find it quite interesting–more interesting than the Ecce Homo head before and after la Giminez.
Take a tour:
At the tippy top is God’s hand in a gesture of blessing. Jesus looks to heaven on the cross (i.e., up). I’m guessing he is watching himself lead people to heaven even as he is dying. The stole he is wearing might be a winding sheet that is unraveling to show that he has conquered death. Just a guess.
Angels support the cross pieces under his arms and also point at him, acknowledging him as the Lord and the events as ordained by God.
In the mid-section are his mother and others at the foot of the cross (they are labeled), supporting him (take that many ways). They have expressions of contemplation rather than grief; they invite us to see what’s going on as a real flesh and blood event (the blood is done quite symmetrically and artfully), but as a great mystery. Below the onlookers are two littler figures who represent lesser witnesses (you and me).
And there are some haloed figures underfoot, but they’re scratched up, and I’m not sure who they are.
Taken altogether, is underscores the notion that Christ is the beginning and the end, than in his end is the beginning, that his nature is divine as well as human, and that his death and resurrection are all part of God’s plan.
Isn’t something similarly symbolic and not necessarily representational going on in Jewish medieval art?
http://www.brandeis.edu/now/2011/july/images/religiousart/artifactSS05.jpg
I was definitely being facetious, Jean–I love the painting, even if I do still think it’s goofy (Jesus kind of looks like he’s on the cross, waiting for the bus).
I like the San Damiano piece for itself, but i also like it because of its distinction from early Renaissance crucifixes more obviously dependent on the Gothic style (I’m thinking Cimabue, Giotto, and so forth). If those crucifixes were important players in the push for the deepening of spiritual experience among the laity (a push led in no small way by the Franciscans) in that their aesthetic inspires emotional contemplation of the Passion, it still remains that the all-together less poignant San Damiano is still the one that got the whole ball rolling by inspiring Francis.
I think that Ecce Homo’s like Martinez’ tend to suffer from their failure to supply narrative. I mean, an Ecce Homo takes a motif like the Man of Sorrows–which is an effective way of representing Jesus, but one that stands outside of any narrative context familiar from the gospel story–and re-inserts it into the actual Passion narrative by supplying context (i.e., the presentation of the humiliated Jesus before the people). But with Ecce Homo’s like the one by Martinez, the narrative’s been stripped down again, but the pathos of the Man of Sorrows isn’t returned.
Also: http://tinyurl.com/9cg8azw
Ann, Rosetti even made his relatives look miserable:
http://preraphs.tripod.com/images/dgrossetti/christinaandfrances.jpg
Abe, no fair trapping the literal-minded! Clearly you know more about this stuff than I do, but I have wondered whether medieval art, with a little nudging, might be interesting to the Millennials in their post-literate cluelessness. I hate to mix the sacred and the profane, but a cross like San Damiano functions something like a splash page in a graphic novel, say, “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.” You get a sense of the characters and hints about the story and how everything will fit together. Plus the kids have all got ADHD, so they like things that are “busy.”
Poor Bob Ross seems to be turning into a meme of bad art. Maybe he deserved it, but he could put a three-year-old to sleep faster than anything on PBS, including Mr. Rogers, so the man wasn’t without some kind of talent.
OK, bedtime for me.
Where were you two months ago when I was trying to teach Millennials about that painting? I’ll have to remember that.
Trying to teach Millennials how to do in-text citations. No way to work medieval art into that, no matter how hard I try.
The poor woman is probably horrified and embarrassed.
This sort of thing reminds me of how – in a small parish I know of, the priest and parishioners decided to repaint the church without expert advice. They ended up with a too-dark and simplified color scheme and so to compensate, installed the dreaded cool white fluorescent tube lighting – Ufda!
Oh well – They meant well, and it will do I guess, until the next paint job.
She did Ok on the robe and the scroll towards the bottom I guss, but the face looks more like a Picasso.
Actually, I find the ugliness of local parish churches endearing. Over the decades people add something that’s usually gaudy and awful (the origin of godawful, maybe?) that represents the bad taste of a new generation or ethnic group.
The local parish here is just starting to get interesting with its mish-mash of Madonnas (Our Lady of Perpetual Care, the Virgen de Guadalupe, and one carved by a now deceased parishioner and painted in day-glo colors with a pink plastic rosary draped around her shoulders like a python), the Aryan-looking, blue eyed Holy family, some minimalist plaques for the Stations, pews that have been shored up by the Men’s Club, a white lace curtain with birds on it someone crocheted for the confessional in case you still want to be behind a screen, the smell of bathroom disinfectant, weak coffee, and occasional whiffs of incense or easter lillies.
Ecce Homo courtesy of Sra. Giminez would fit right in.
Cecilia may not have had the benefit of a Google search on:
“Shroud of Turin” face reconstruction
That could have offered her a reality base for her artistic inspiration.
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Shroud+of+Turin%22+face+reconstruction&hl=en