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503 - Franciscan Exegesis |
Franciscan Exegesis
"In the 1480s, Giovanni Bellini painted a large panel which is now generally known as 'St. Francis in Ecstasy'. . . . The painting is one of the greatest works of one of the greatest painters of the Western tradition, so understanding it is an exceedingly important enterprise... Images and symbols, the great symbolic forms, are the shaping forces of our spiritual lives. We become what we behold."
JUDGING from a great many books reviews, it is widely considered part of the birthright of reviewers and the nature of their professional obligation to tell authors how they should have written their books and niggle them to pieces with corrections of their errors. While I may have been guilty of these things in the past, I am happy to be relieved of all responsibility toward either enterprise in the case of an important book which I not so much review as use for an occasion to say something on religion and art.
The book in question is John V. Fleming's From Bonaventure to Bellini: An Essay in Franciscan Exegesis. The author is Professor of Comparative Literature and chairman of the English Department, Princeton University. It would be a bold person, indeed, who would challenge the author in matters of detailed control of the Franciscan literature that constitutes the body of his evidence. There must be only a handful of specialists who are competent to do so, and I am not one of those. Beyond that, in every point where I am competent to judge, I am convinced that Fleming has made his case and, further, that the case is a very important one to make.
My task becomes, then, the presentation of the book, primarily in its own terms but also in a way that I can hope will make it both attractive and accessible to as many readers as possible. It is one of those books directed to several audiences, yet those things of primary interest to one audience are very much of the substance of what it has to say to other audiences. It is an iconographical puzzle of the first order, and much of the book is given over to a solving of that puzzle. But the solved puzzle constitutes an introduction to a mode of thinking and a type of spirituality that very much needs to be known. But first the puzzle.
John W. Dixon, Jr. is Professor of Religion and Art, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Nature and Grace in Art (1964) and The Physiology of Faith (1979). He is here reviewing, and making his own critical comments on, John V, Fleming's From Bonaventure to Bellini: An Essay in Franciscan Exegesis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982, $25.00). The reproduction of Bellini's painting, "St. Francis in the Desert" (copyright the Frick Collection, New York) is reprinted with the permission of the museum.
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I
In the 1480s, Giovanni Bellini painted a large panel which is now generally know as "St. Francis in Ecstasy." Fleming prefers the title "San Francesco nel deserto." While the painted landscape is most like the hinterlands of Venice, the landscape of the story is La Verna in the Casentino. Since the Casentino is one of the loveliest regions of Tuscany and, therefore, one of the loveliest regions on earth, the English implications of "deserto" hardly seem apt. The painting is one of the greatest works of one of the very greatest painters of the Western tradition, so understanding it is an exceedingly important enterprise. It now hangs in the Frick Gallery in New York, and it is undoubtedly one of the greatest works of art on this continent.
The painting hardly needs any excuse beyond its own singular being. By common consent, it is extraordinarily beautiful, both in itself and in its rendering of the beauties of nature. For those with a deficient view of both art and the Renaissance this is considered enough. Even so, the picture has heretofore been one of the unsolved mysteries of art history. It corresponds to nothing that art historians are accustomed to, and it is full of details that seem clearly to require accounting for, a rabbit appearing in a crack in the rocks, a splintered tree trunk, a curious sea bird, a donkey, and so it goes on and on. Even the subject is unclear. It could be Francis rejoicing in the dawn light over the beauty of the created order, which accounts for the generally accepted title, but that does nothing for the plethora of curious details. The traditional methods of the art historian have not sufficed to make very much progress in the deciphering of the work.
Not that art historians are unused to deciphering iconographic details. On the contrary, puzzle mongering is the staple of dissertations and of articles for the Art Bulletin. The trouble is that, in some areas, art historians don't know enough and don't know that they don't know enough. Further, they are often badly handicapped by not knowing enough about religion in general and Christianity in particular. They simply have not known how to cope with such a work as this. Fleming is not an art historian. He teaches literature and his special scholarly interest is the Franciscan literature of the Middle Ages. Thus we have here a salutary example of cross-disciplinary fertilization.
Fleming claims not to have known of this painting until he was given a copy of Millard Meiss's fine monograph on it. He does not pretend to deal with it as an art historian would. That is not to say he is insensitive to the visual qualities of the work, for he is not. His few remarks on the subject are acute and sensitive. But his major contribution is to iconography.
Generally speaking, iconographical analysis, even in the hands of a master like Erwin Panofsky, is one of the duller genres of scholarship. Fleming has a happy literary and intellectual gift to make his account of such dry-as-dust material as fascinating as a detective story. It would be hopeless to try to suggest, much less reproduce the charm of this aspect
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of the study. Suffice it to say that no detail of the picture escapes his interpretive skill, and I for one am entirely satisfied with each explanation. If I am right in my judgment, Fleming would already have achieved a major result, for no one else has come even approximately close to such an account of this painting. I could summarize his explanations, that the rabbit is Moses, that the painting inseparably links Francis and Aaron, that the event is a reproduction of the Feast of the Tabernacles, and on and on, and the result would be wholly misleading. So much of iconographical research is exactly that kind of puzzle-mongering, and the iconographer assumes his work is done when he has made these identifications. Not so with Fleming, whose identifications are one set of threads in a far more complex fabric.
To understand the painting, it is necessary to understand one of the fundamental modes of medieval and Renaissance thought, namely typology. Typology is not a stranger to the academy, but most people who do not specialize in it know it only as a quaint, outmoded fashion of thinking that equates the Brazen Serpent with the Crucified Christ and such like parallels with no particular point to them. Granted that many medieval writers could carry the typological method to an absurdity, matched only by some of our more ingenious iconographers, but that happens with all human systems of thought. What we have is a very powerful, very humane method of thought.
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II
It is odd that we should so often think of typology as an outmoded manner of thinking, a judgment that can be made only by those who have torn apart the seamless web of time and nature. It is odd because we have not given it up altogether although, in the absence of a sense of the integrity of time and the world, we can only do it in the characteristically impoverished fashion of a simple psychologism. Thus, we have the curious notion of the "role model." The composition of our faculties, for example, is supposed to be determined not by the academic merits of the candidate but by the necessity for providing "role models" for each group among the students. Since there is never any question of what particular characteristics of the role model are to be valued for their inherent worth, the role model seems characteristically to be a model only in having achieved some measure of success, which is not exactly what the earlier thinkers had in mind. Something akin to typology turns up in literary criticism through a mixture of dimly understood parallels, an inadequate sense of figura mixed in with a very poorly understood notion of the Jungian archetype, and we get Billy Budd as a "Christ figure," a burden which poor Billy is quite incapable of carrying.
It was not always so. Typology is not so simple a matter as seeing artificial conjunctions of things, making arbitrary connections between similar things, although there has most certainly been God's own plenty of that done, then and now. Essentially, typology is a mode of biblical exegesis which sees biblical heroes and biblical stories as exemplars of essential reality. Fleming illustrates this, from Pope Gregory the Great: "Gregory does not find this disturbing; on the contrary, he finds it entirely just and congruent that the virtue that manifests its power in the miracles recorded in the Scriptures manifests it still in the lives of modern holy men who are its heirs. Of Benedict, Gregory writes, 'This man was filled with the spirit of all just men.' The biblicism of late medieval hagiography is no less radical. How, indeed, could it be otherwise? The God of Bernard and of Dominic and of Francis is none other than the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob. He who sustained the vineyards and valleys of Judah sustains those also of Umbria and Burgundy" (pp. 28-29).
God's spiritual economy is whole and entire, a seamless web which links past and present in one great act of revelation. The great revelatory acts are not simply parts of the historic past but also of present immediacy. The model is enacted before the eyes of the faithful who can, through contemplation, train themselves to the model. "Thus," Fleming can say, "the alter Christus is not a 'theme' of Franciscan thought but a fact about Francis of Assisi" (p. 140).
It is this factuality of the type that so clearly distinguishes what Fleming understands typology to be from the understanding in contemporary scholarship. It is an idea so fantastic to the contemporary scholar, so impossible of true belief, that many cannot imagine any truly sane
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person holding it, except, perhaps, as a consequence of the limitations of the "age." The discovery and interpretation of typology is a kind of puzzle-solving which is quite antithetical to the thought of those who created it.
This is one dimension of typology, the coinherence of time and the events of history. But there is another dimension as well, and here the painter comes most distinctly into his own. It is not simply the coinherence of God and history but also of God and nature. Once again, Fleming is particularly useful in cutting through the prejudices of the modern historian. For the historian, the Renaissance was a secular age, and nature appears in Renaissance art as delightful for its own sake. There is, for historians, a choice that they would make themselves but also impose on Renaissance artists, that a thing can be symbolic or it can exist in its own right but not both.
Fleming is very and usefully blunt: "Berenson's view of Bellini, at least as far as this painting is concerned, was not merely wrong but corrupting. Religious subject matter does not provide in this painting an occasion for visual 'realism.' Rather, wonderfully real things are the vocabulary of a privileged but coherent religious language. Nor is it satisfactory to say, with a recent critic, that the painting combines symbolism and realism. The real things are symbolic. To put this another way, real things are here the occasion of religious truth" (p. 58).
This is a theme which, if pursued further, would revolutionize the study of symbolism. Malcolm Cowley once remarked, "If it isn't real, it isn't a symbol." This is wholly consistent with the tradition of symbolic thinking which Fleming is expounding.
Again, this is rooted in the Bible. "The fundamental guarantor of medieval literary reality was the Bible, filled with things so real that none could be realer. God, the divine Maker, was the craftsman of real things: real stone, real trees, real doves. All scriptural truth was grounded in the basis of truth, the literal sense" (p. 59).
The principle Fleming is here expounding applies not only to Bellini but to a major part of Renaissance art. I would go so far as to say that, so far from being "secular," non-religious, as ordinary history has it, Renaissance art was a major rethinking of the meaning of Christianity. Fleming has placed Bellini securely at the center of that rethinking, but it is a much more inclusive phenomenon than just Bellini.
These two principles, typology as the coinherence of history and naturalism as the coinherence of nature, are essential to understanding a distinctive mode of Christian spirituality, and they are also essential to the understanding of this painting. However general may be the application of the typological principle, it has a peculiar intensity in Bellini's painting, or, in Fleming's words, the painting has an unusual "iconographic density.". Francis was not, for the Franciscan and for many others as well, an ordinary Christian. He drew together into his person the many themes of salvation history. Bellini found the means to
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weave all the great motifs together, but, as Fleming points out, these ideas were taken for granted in Venetian Franciscan circles of the 1480s. The Franciscan movement had an unparalleled role in the church "leadership, renewal, and prophetic purification" (p. 160), a re-living of the deliverance of the Exodus. Francis was not simply a saint among others, he was different in kind. His was the final call to penance. Bellini has created the visual equivalent of the Franciscan scheme of imagery. We may no longer see the world in quite that way, but before we succumb to the simple psychologism so characteristic of our own day, we might reflect seriously on the more universal truths made accessible by such a painting as this.
III
I have made certain assertions about the merits and the importance of Fleming's book as an elegant example of iconographical reasoning, enabling us to understand a great work of art as we had not been able to do before. It is delightfully written, making a work of scholarship a matter of considerable charm and attractiveness and accessible as it might not otherwise be. Beyond this, it is an introduction to a mode of spirituality that deserves to be better known. It is to this last point that I wish to return.
The question that has troubled me is that of the use of Fleming's book. Any careful reader will learn from it the essential principles of typological thinking, principles that governed the biblical writers as much as it did the commentators and the artists of later periods. God made all things. Therefore, the created order and the order of history fulfill the divine plan and manifest the sacred structure of God's creation. It is not, therefore, in any degree surprising if correspondences appear, for both are part of the sacred order. Contemplation of the correspondences is thus a way of participating in the sacred order. Bellini's painting is a guide to this mode of spirituality while at the same time providing its visual equivalent of the correspondences and a visual exegesis of the Franciscan texts.
So far so good. But what does that have to do with us? We might thereby be led to a deeper appreciation of someone else's spiritual disciplines, but, in the absence of any such understanding of creation, how can we participate in it ourselves?
Under the old positivisms, the question is without meaning. The most a study like Fleming's could have accomplished would be to help us understand a mode of thought, an action, which other people used, thereby helping us understand one another better. But it would be only a quaint mode of thought, no longer defensible in our age. We need, however, no longer be quite so sure of that, for we now know much more than we used to know about how the human mind and spirit work. We are not willful substances acting independently of our context, but integral parts of it inescapably immersed in the processes of the natural world. Within that involvement, we are distinctive from all creatures in
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having been granted or developed a consciousness that makes our involvement problematical to us. Our attempt to cope with that problematic is the source of all our cultural creations, for we create structures of images that enable us to place ourselves within our experience. In an all too abbreviated argument, our imaginative structures, our images, our symbols are not something we use but something we are. They are ingredient to us as persons, constituting us as human beings.
Thus, we incorporate our models into ourselves, becoming what we image to ourselves as the true purpose, the true structure of existence. Images and symbols, the great symbolic forms, are the shaping forces of our spiritual lives. We become what we behold. It is as though there were a continuing creation, forming us according to those things we choose to contemplate most seriously and so incorporate into ourselves.
Typology, therefore, is in its own new way as relevant to us as it was to the biblical writers, those who relived the biblical images as Francis did, as Bonaventura set out, and as Bellini made visible. Unfortunately for our spiritually lazy lives, it does not come easily. It requires prolonged study of the sacred history and close contemplation of those things that embody the sacred history. Our understanding of the process may be more psychological than earlier peoples, with their sense of the literal connection of things, might like, but it is nonetheless our way of doing things. If they will permit us that, we can continue to go to them for instruction.