THE POWER OF THE IMAGE
For all his inflexibility, Borromeo was an immensely charismatic and transformative individual. He changed his world, and has been rightly remembered as one of the most dynamic figures in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. In the words of Ludwig von Pastor, author of The History of the Popes, ‘he stands as a milestone in the history of the Church, at the boundary line between two epochs, the dying Renaissance and the triumphant Catholic reform.’26 As the first resident Archbishop of Milan for nearly a century, he cast a giant shadow over the city throughout the 1570s and early 1580s.
There is good reason to believe that the acts and ideas of Carlo Borromeo played a profound part in the formation of Caravaggio – an artist whose greatest gift would be an unprecedentedly stark and vivid naturalism, deeply attuned to the ideals of Counter-Reformation piety that permeated the city of his youth. Borromeo embodied more than just a particularly direct and messianic form of piety. His faith was rooted in an intense, spectacularly visual imagination. Borromeo’s way of believing in Christ – which involved putting Christ at the centre of his life not in an abstract way, but as actually as possible – depended essentially on a process of mental projection identical to that required in painting pictures.
In early life Borromeo had been strongly influenced by the founder of the Jesuits, St Ignatius Loyola. He had read and followed Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, a work that placed great emphasis on the role of visualization in Christian meditation. Loyola specifically advised his readers to visualize Christ’s sufferings, insisting that the necessary prelude to any deep and serious meditation on Christ’s Life and Passion was a mental process that he termed ‘composition, seeing the place’. What that involved was, in effect, a kind of internalized version of the act of painting itself: ‘In contemplation or meditation on visual things, as in contemplating Christ our Lord, who is visible, composition will be to see by the eye of the imagination a physical place where that thing is found which I wish to contemplate. By a physical place I mean, for example, a temple or mountain, where Jesus Christ, or Our Lady is found, according to that which I wish to contemplate.’27
The Ignatian belief in the power of visualization carried within it the implication that if worshippers can see the image of Christ in their mind’s eye, then they can empathize with his sufferings all the more fully – opening themselves to that emotional involvement which leads to the deeper forms of meditative experience. But the idea was not new to Loyola. It goes back to the Middle Ages, and finds especially powerful expression in the writings of the early followers of St Francis of Assisi. A good example is an early Franciscan tract entitled the Little Book on the Meditation on the Passion of Christ Divided According to Seven Hours of the Day, which describes the exercise thus: ‘It is necessary that when you concentrate on these things in your contemplation, you do so as if you were actually present at the very time when he suffered. And in grieving you should regard yourself as if you had our Lord suffering before your very eyes, and that he was present to receive your prayers.’28
A late thirteenth-century guide to prayer entitled Meditations on the Life of Christ, probably written by a Franciscan friar from Tuscany, vividly demonstrates how such practices developed. The process involved ever more complicated and detailed visualizations, so that a succession of almost cinematic images would follow, one after another, in the mind:
reflect on the benignity of the Lord in having to sustain persecution so soon and in such a way … He was carried to Egypt by the very young and tender mother, and by the aged saintly Joseph, along wild roads, obscure, rocky and difficult, through woods and uninhabited places – a very long journey. It is said that couriers would take thirteen or fifteen days; for them it was perhaps two months or longer. They are also said to have gone by way of the desert, which the children of Israel traversed and in which they stayed forty years. How did they carry food with them? And where did they rest and stay the night? Very seldom did they find a house in that desert. Have pity on them, for it was a very difficult, great and long exertion for them as well as for the Child Jesus. Accompany them and help to carry the Child and serve them in every way you can … Here there comes a beautiful and pious, compassionate meditation … These and other things about the boy Jesus you can contemplate. I have given you the occasion and you can enlarge it and follow it as you please.29
The rise of this form of popular devotion was closely linked to the development of painting, from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries and beyond. Throughout Western European Christendom, and especially in Italy and the Low Countries, artists competed with each other to create convincing illusions of actual presence, developing new techniques such as mathematically calculated perspective to paint ever more convincing images of the life and sufferings of Christ. Painters made their pictures as realistic as they could in order to assist worshippers in their own acts of mental picture-building. The common goal was to summon up the events described in the New Testament as vividly as possible, so that devout Christians might imagine themselves present as actors at the scene – mourning the dead Christ, for example, or helping to tend him as an infant on the Holy Family’s flight to Egypt, as the author of Meditations on the Life of Christ had written. Religious painting and religious meditation were, in fact, branches of the same activity.30
But by the middle years of the sixteenth century the relationship between art and religious contemplation in Italy had become less straightforward. In the more sophisticated artists’ circles, the idea of appealing to the popular devotional imagination with images of painstaking realism was regarded with disdain. Art became seen instead as an idealized, generalized language for the expression of higher thought. Michelangelo, the outstanding painter-sculptor of the High Renaissance, deliberately distanced himself from the pious naturalism of earlier religious painting, which he associated above all with the oil painting traditions of Flanders: ‘They paint in Flanders,’ he contemptuously remarked in the 1540s, ‘only to deceive the external eye, things that gladden you and of which you cannot speak ill. Their painting is of stuffs, bricks and mortar, the grass of the fields, the shadows of trees, and bridges and rivers, which they call landscapes, and little figures here and there. And all this, though it may appear good to some eyes, is in truth done without reason, without symmetry or proportion, without care in selecting or rejecting.’ It was a form of painting, he concluded, fit only for ‘young women, monks or nuns, or certain noble persons who have no ear for true harmony’.31
But Michelangelo’s subtle, poetically allusive and metaphorical ideal of art seemed, to many in the Roman Catholic Church, to be increasingly out of tune with the times. His use of the idealized nude figure was considered scandalous and his famous cycle of paintings for the Sistine Chapel ceiling was systematically censored in the late 1550s with the addition of a multitude of decorously placed fig leaves. Religious art was a highly controversial subject. Protestant reformers had attacked religious images altogether, on the grounds that they violated the Second Commandment (‘Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image’). The Catholic clerics who assembled at the Council of Trent had their own counter-argument, based on centuries of Church tradition. They resoundingly defended religious paintings and statues as divinely ordained tools for transmitting the messages of the Bible to the illiterate poor. But, at the same time, they acknowledged that many religious artists had forgotten their fundamental role to aid and assist devotion. It seemed clear to most of the leading formulators of Counter-Reformation policy that artists had become so caught up in abstruse ideas, so concerned to demonstrate their own ingenuity and originality, that they had forgotten the humility required of them as servants of the will of God. Not only was the Sistine Chapel ceiling censored, but the Venetian artist Paolo Veronese was publicly castigated for including all kinds of irrelevant details in a painting of The Last Supper. The Venetian Inquisition, which called Veronese to account for himself, was outraged by the presence in that
picture of parrots, dwarfs, buffoons and, worst of all, Germans (regarded with detestation throughout Italy ever since Charles V’s army led by Lutheran Landsknechts had sacked Rome in 1527). The painter was forced to find an ingenious solution to the dilemma, which he did by changing both title and subject: Veronese’s Last Supper became instead a depiction of Christ in the House of Levi.
Such developments marked a great shift in attitudes. During the Renaissance religious artists had come to believe that, within fairly loose constraints of Christian orthodoxy, they were free to interpret and depict the stories of the Bible as they liked. As a result of the Counter-Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church set new and stringent limits on the presumed freedom of artists. The principal aim of this policy was to replace the Renaissance cult of freedom and originality with the ideals of artistic duty and responsibility. The second half of the sixteenth century witnessed a widespread call to order – a movement intended to take religious art back to the values of an earlier and supposedly purer time. Carlo Borromeo was at its forefront. As well as containing recommendations of every kind about church architecture and decoration, his Instructiones set out his views on art with typical forthrightness. No animals or other distracting details should be included, unless actually mentioned in the biblical text that the artist had been instructed to illustrate. In the seventeenth chapter of his book, devoted to the correct representation of sacred events, Borromeo determined the appropriate fines and punishments for artists who failed to meet the strictest standards of decorum. In Milan, errant artists as well as heretics were liable to come to the attentions of the archbishop’s famiglia armata. No painter could be in any doubt about what was required of him. Images should be clear and direct. It was the job of art simply to educate spectators and move them to penance.
Borromeo’s influence on art in his native Milan is well documented. Simone Peterzano, the feeble late Mannerist painter with whom Caravaggio would sign a contract of apprenticeship, developed a sparer and more austere style in direct response to Borromeo’s pronouncements. The archbishop himself owned a collection of paintings that, to judge by its contents, he is likely to have used in his meditations. According to an inventory of 1618, these included an Adoration of the Magi by Titian, an Agony in the Garden by Antonio Campi and an Annunciation to the Shepherds by Jacopo Bassano (all three paintings can be seen, today, in Milan’s Pinacoteca Ambrosiana). Such works reflect his taste for the art of Venice and the Veneto, and his marked preference for small-scale devotional pictures. But the most intriguing aspect of Borromeo’s taste, for the student of Caravaggio, is his implicit rejection of high art in favour of more traditional, popular visual representations aimed squarely at the promotion of mass piety. Within five years of becoming Archbishop of Milan, he had sold his entire personal collection of art and given the proceeds to charity. This was an act consistent with his personal asceticism, indicating that Borromeo shared the widespread belief – propounded by supporters and opponents of the Reformation alike – that money spent on ‘dead’ images of Christ, i.e. paintings, could be yet better spent on Christ’s ‘living’ images, namely the real flesh-and-blood poor.
THE SACRED MOUNTAIN
Borromeo was not against religious art per se, but he had forceful likes and dislikes. There was a powerfully retrospective cast to his thought. He believed that the best solution to the problems of the modern Catholic Church lay in a return to the past. As a corollary to that, he favoured popular spectacle over the intellectual abstractions of supposedly sophisticated ‘High’ Renaissance art. Long after he had sold his own paintings, Borromeo continued to sponsor and support particular forms of popular Christian visual spectacle – events and phenomena that were literally ‘vulgar’, in the sense of being aimed directly at the vulgus, the crowd, the general mass of people. Borromeo himself staged numerous theatrical performances of his own extreme ideal of Christian faith. In times of trouble or pestilence for the city, he would march barefoot through the city of Milan with thousands of his supporters, all in sackcloth and ashes. Such processions might themselves be seen as a form of choreographed visual art.
Borromeo’s theatricality was another reflection of his belief in the value of constantly remembering and re-enacting the life of Christ – whether actually or in the mind’s eye. It was deliberately unsophisticated, direct and immediate, and that was part of its point. Borromeo was intentionally attempting to revive the emotive methods of the itinerant medieval friars such as Francis of Asissi and his followers. The teachings of Francis had unleashed a flood of early Renaissance painting on the walls of churches throughout fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy, clear images bringing Christ’s message to the poor. But Francis had also helped to found yet more popular and rabble-rousing forms of artistic expression – not only penitential processions of the kind imitated by Borromeo, the pious medieval equivalent of performance art, but also a very particular type of folkish mise-en-scène in which painted statues were arranged to conjure up events from the Bible. The first and most widely copied example of this was the crib that Francis created at the monastery of Greccio for the Christmas of 1223: a three-dimensional mock-up of the Nativity, complete with painted carvings of Mary, Joseph and the infant Christ, it was all done, in his words, ‘to bring home to the people of Greccio what the birth of Christ at Bethlehem was like’.
Francis’s innovation of celebrating the Nativity with the creation of a crib proliferated and mutated. Over the following centuries it produced other, far more elaborate traditions of folk art, including the so-called sacro monte, or ‘sacred mountain’. It was here that several of the most vital elements of popular piety – including the practice of empathetic visualization of the life of Christ, the ideal of religious meditation and a much enlarged version of the sculptural arrangement devised by St Francis in the crib – all came together in a single carefully orchestrated experience.
The earliest sacro monte came into being at the end of the fifteenth century when a Franciscan friar named Bernardino Caimi decided to re-create the sites of Christ’s life and passion – ranging from Bethlehem to Nazareth, from Gethsemane to Mount Sion – in the mountains above the town of Varallo, in what is today the Piedmont region. Caimi received papal permission and support for his plan, which involved the construction of numerous chapels linked by mountain paths. Each chapel was to contain polychrome figures acting out the stories of the Bible. Eventually a total of forty-five such chapels were built, allowing pilgrims who climbed up to them to travel even further in spirit – journeying all the way from Original Sin, where they would encounter Adam and Eve tempted by the serpent, to Golgotha, ‘the place of the skull’, where Christ was crucified. Carlo Borromeo spent the last days of his life on just such a pilgrimage, ascending the mountain at Varallo and praying day and night among its painted figures.
Somewhat decayed, and much restored during the intervening centuries, these sculptures remain in situ today. Some of the figures are carved; others are formed from terracotta or stuffed fabric. The effect is inconsistent but full of lively touches of naturalism, somewhere between sculpture and waxwork theatre. The chapel of the Massacre of the Innocents is particularly vivid and gruesome, with its goitred executioner and grieving mothers, its floor strewn with dismembered babies. The sacro monte took the kind of interior, spiritual journey advocated for centuries in manuals of prayer and meditation, and turned it into an actual, physical itinerary, with suitably moving or horrifying scenes for the traveller moving up the mountain to witness at each new point of arrival. The sacred mountain gave a palpable form and structure to the instructions contained in devotional handbooks such as the fifteenth-century Venetian text The Garden of Prayer – books that, like the Franciscan prayer manuals before them and Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises afterwards, counselled the worshipper to summon up a chain of places and images as vividly as possible within the space of the mind:
The better to impress the story of the Passion on your mind, and to memorize each
action of it more easily, it is helpful and necessary to fix the places and people in your mind: a city, for example, which will be the city of Jerusalem – taking for this purpose a city that is well known to you. In this city find the principal places in which all the episodes of the Passion would have taken place – for instance, a palace with the supper-room where Christ had the Last Supper with the Disciples, and the house of Anne, and that of Caiaphas, with the place where Jesus was taken in the night, and the room where he was brought before Caiaphas and mocked and beaten … And then too you must shape in your mind some people, people well known to you, to represent for you the people involved in the Passion – the person of Jesus himself, the Virgin, Saint Peter, Saint John the Evangelist, Saint Mary Magdalen, Anne, Caiaphas, Pilate, Judas and the others, every one of which you will fashion in your mind.32
The sacred mountain was designed to ease the process of devotional visualization. The worshipper must make the physical effort of ascending from one chapel to another, but once inside each space he or she would find that the job of visualization had already been accomplished. The images at Varallo were begun by the artist Gaudenzio Ferrari in the late fifteenth century, but they were ultimately destined to be created, re-created and continually restored in a centuries-long collaborative process involving generations of sculptors, craftsmen and architects. What those images did was, precisely, to re-create scenes from the Bible as if enacted by ‘people well known to you’.
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