Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  His tardy emergence as a star of late-Gothic limewood sculpture, the popularity that overrode scholarly antagonism, and the uneasy feeling among explicators of German culture that he was somehow not quite German enough: these derive, it may be, from the sculptor’s curious tenderness, a preoccupied dreaminess that sets him apart from what Georg Dehio, in his Weimar-era History of German Art, called “the simple efficiency of our nation.” To him Riemenschneider seemed to “make a concession to beauty, with ethical and artistic sincerity, which was unexpected for German art of that time.” A Netherlandish influence, by way of Strasbourg, has been proposed to explain the strangeness.

  What we seem to have, most conspicuously in Riemenschneider’s large male figures, is an attempt to express spirituality while acknowledging the heightened awareness of human individuality that came with the Renaissance. The faces on the High Gothic portal figures of the Chartres, Amiens, and Reims cathedrals, though individual, are relatively smooth; only beards and a few forehead wrinkles age them, their eyes are unnaturally far forward in their faces, and there is a tendency, vivid at Amiens, to a dreamy smile. They stare over our heads toward a glory close at hand; Riemenschneider’s socketed eyes, with their creased lids, also stare over our heads, but at something farther away. The figures from Strasbourg in this show, the applewood Virgin especially, still have the round Gothic stare, whereas the eyes, say, of Mark from the Münnerstadt altarpiece (1490–92) and of the Seated Bishop (c. 1495–1500) usually displayed at the Cloisters, are weeping eyes—eyes weeping, unlike those of the crucified Christ from Darmstadt or the left-hand woman of the Mourning Women (c. 1510) from Stuttgart, without an immediate reason to weep.

  Riemenschneider’s figures are deeper sunk in the mire of this world than the Gothic statues, and their aspirations to rise above it leave them little margin for smiling. Of course, the medium of limewood permitted him greater precision in carving than limestone afforded the Gothic sculptors; his virtuosity extends itself in the bumps and sags of aging faces, such as those of the Cloisters bishop, the wonderful Saint Matthias from Berlin (c. 1500–5), Zebedee from the Victoria and Albert (c. 1505–10), the Saint Anne from Munich (c. 1505–10), Nicodemus in the big Lamentation from Grossostheim (1515), and the unignorable fat man at Simon’s table in one of the relief panels from the Münnerstadt altarpiece.

  Such fleshy realism, in the younger figures, can become sensual; the throats and hands of his Virgins, the only exposed flesh save for their faces, are attentively rendered. Their hands, with their manneristically extended fingers and sometimes grotesquely elongated thumbs (see that of the 1495 Virgin from Cologne), have been much praised, but I was struck by the delicately muscled throat of the Virgin from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (1490–95) and by those of two female saints brought forth, for this exhibit, from private ownership: That of Saint Catherine shows its delicate rings of fat; the Virgin from Hamburg (c. 1503–5) has enough soft flesh under her dimpled chin to remind us that chucking beneath the chin was a favored medieval form of sexual play. It is this Virgin, incidentally, who is most successfully united with the Child—holding him securely but up for display, turned to face his cosmic audience.

  Riemenschneider, Virgin and Child (Hamburg), c. 1503–5. Limewood. (Photo Credit Ill.2)

  Riemenschneider, it is known, had four wives—two called Anna and two called Margarete—and his females, with their snug small bosoms and outthrust abdomens, are executed with a confident verve. The S-shaped pose, with a hip cocked to take the weight of a holy child or ponderous holy book held in a curved arm, is iconically standard, and a pose not given this swing would be too, well, wooden. Still, Riemenschneider’s female statues made me wonder if the emphasis, by posture and costume both, on a woman’s belly wasn’t a medieval equivalent of the valorized bosom and derrière of modern fashion: the visual signalling of a gender characteristic, heightened in these Gothic carvings by deep, often oval drapery folds leading the eye up from the peeping feet to the area of the womb.

  The uses of sculpture in a culture with no direct connection to classical humanist art are somewhat problematic. How lovely should a Virgin be? Some of Riemenschneider’s—the one in the three-person fragment from an Adoration in Nuremberg (1485–90) and the late studio piece carved from an inferior piece of limewood (1521–22)—are very lovely, or are made to seem so in the catalogue photographs. Their real presence is less striking, less glamorous. As I say, the statues are generally mounted high, and their gazes search the space over our heads. Their realism aims to take us to the edge of an immaterial realm. Small statuettes for private worship arose in the late-medieval period, as part of the privatizing of religious experience that would flower, or collapse, into Protestantism. These figures, fanatical in their detailed working, were designed to be tactilely cherished: a contemporary book of devotions instructs the worshipper, “Kiss the beautiful little feet of the infant Jesus who lies in the manger and beg his mother to let you hold him for a while.”

  Does color add to the seductive persuasiveness of statuary? The Middle Ages thought so, at least in its church interiors, as we can see in Catholic churches to this day. Riemenschneider is associated with the shift to uncolored carving; if not the originator of it, he was an early convert. Most of the items in the exhibition are monochromatic wood, which does not mean that they were always so. Fashions changed: some works which Riemenschneider intended to be without paint looked so bare to their public that paint was soon added, whereas the nineteenth century so strongly preferred “honesty toward the material” that it stripped statues of paint which the centuries had left shabby in any case. The polychroming was not done in the sculptor’s studio, but by a separate guild; the application of glazes, pastes, gilding, and sizing was a complex, gluey affair and filled in the finest details of the carving. The presence of very fine carving and textural stamping indicates that the sculptor intended the work to go unpainted. The few colored pieces at the Metropolitan show confirmed this twenty-first-century viewer’s prejudice that paint makes the statue less persuasive—more toylike, more visually brittle, more clearly “off.” Uncolored, of one natural substance, the statues occupy a realm of their own rather than enjoy a second-rate, inanimate status within ours. Mimesis does best with a restricted set of tools. Just as black-and-white movies had a stylized finality before the onset of Technicolor, so statuary in abandoning color became both more intimate and more impressive. Images self-professedly from the hand of man extract from us a leap like the leap of empathy; we are no longer children to be fooled into idolatry, into thinking a tinted simulacrum is inhabited by an actual spirit.

  Yet something is lost in the sophistication. The representational statues we most trust are those which, in marble or metal, seem solid enough, sturdy enough in the round, to receive a spirit if one were, in answer to a Pygmalion’s prayer, to descend. For that reason, we like to see the backs finished; Riemenschneider’s little pearwood Adam from Vienna (1495–1500) is in fact least gawky when viewed from the back. A statue should exist in God’s circumambient eye; there is a savor of bad faith to not-quite-three-dimensional fabrications designed, with careful distortions, to present a satisfactory illusion—stage sets within the holy theatre of the Mass. Of course, church interiors were to become more theatrical yet, in the Baroque spectaculars that accompanied the Counter-Reformation—a spillage of marble statues above the columns and a painted cupola receding straight up to heaven in a flurry of pink putti bottoms.

  It occurred to me that my unease with mild, melancholy, masterful Riemenschneider had a Protestant accent, a touch of puritanical iconoclasm. Iconoclasm, and a whitewashed starkness of church interiors, was to follow Luther’s revolution in Northern Europe. Most of what made the objects of Christian faith concrete—holy relics, indulgences, idol-like images—were renounced. The crucifix became a symbolic cross, without a man on it. Riemenschneider participated in this sublimating, though he died a Catholic—his tombstone portrait has a rosary in its hand. But his sa
ints and gods represent an anxious humanity, a citizenry possessed by the invisible but not bodying it forth. They wear no halos, even in carved low reliefs, as from the Münnerstadt altarpiece, where it would have posed no mechanical problem to impose them. The exemplars of the new faith are heroic inwardly, their struggles and ardor written on their faces in a calligraphy of wrinkles and careworn resolve. When transcendent worth can wear no outward sign, the interesting amorphousness of democracy descends. In these galleries of complex visages and deeply carved, agitated draperies we feel the feudal hierarchies (though still puissant enough to jail and torture Riemenschneider and end his career) slipping away, ebbing from nations and the heavens, leaving mankind as we see it here—heroic, wistful, and willing to “make a concession to beauty.”

  Singular in Everything

  EL GRECO, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 7, 2003–January 11, 2004.

  The strangeness begins with his name, which was properly Doménikos Theotokópoulos; he always signed his works thus, often in Greek characters, but in Italy he was called Il Greco, and in Spain Domenico Greco or El Griego. The solecism “El Greco” is what stuck. Born in Crete, trained in Italy, he found recognition and employment only in Toledo, the capital of the Spanish Counter-Reformation, teeming with Neoplatonists and idealistic priests burning to take back Europe from the Protestants or, that hope failing, to make an implacable stand in the Spanish heartland. In Toledo, in his mid-thirties, he found himself, and was indulged. The king in Madrid, the conscientious and grimly pious Philip II, spurned the immigrant painter’s efforts to become one of the decorators of his pet project, the gigantic Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial. The king had ordered the prior to equip El Greco with materials, “especially ultramarine,” for a commission on the martyrdom of Saint Maurice, but rejected the finished work, on grounds that modern critics speculate about: perhaps Philip didn’t like the contemporary portraits the painter had included, or the fact that the martyrdom itself is relegated to the middle background. El Greco, undoubtedly pious, set exalted fees, inaugurated many financial disputes, and operated on the edge of the iconographically permissible. His admirer Francisco Pacheco, who was to become the teacher of Velázquez, found that “El Greco made statements that were paradoxical and contrary to received opinion.” In his Arte de la pintura, Pacheco wrote that the Greek was “singular in everything, as he was in painting.”

  Had El Greco not invented himself, no one like him need have existed. Dutch genre painting might not have produced a Vermeer, or Venetian art a Titian, but the many close approaches would make a gap hard for even the most intuitive art historian to notice. El Greco, on the sparser cultural ground of Spain, looms as a brilliant anomaly, with a large workshop but no followers, and his antecedents in Italian mannerism flamboyantly consumed within his peculiar ardor. Yet his name didn’t cross the Pyrenees during his lifetime (1541–1614), and it wasn’t until the nineteenth century (as in the case of Vermeer) that his reputation as a master took shape. Delacroix and John Singer Sargent owned copies of El Greco’s works; Cézanne did a copy of one, A Lady in a Fur Wrap (late 1570s). In the twentieth century, the homage becomes passionate, at the expense of Velázquez: the Met quotes on the exhibit’s walls Picasso (“Velázquez! What does everybody see in Velázquez these days? I prefer El Greco a thousand times more. He was really a painter”) and Matisse (“When I saw [Velázquez’s] work in Madrid, to my eyes it was like ice! Velázquez isn’t my painter: Goya, rather, or El Greco”). Jackson Pollock listed El Greco among his five favorite painters, and in his groping apprentice years copied into his notebooks rather Cubistic analyses of details in El Greco reproductions, focusing on the linear rhythms of the drapery; five pages are on display in the Met’s gallery of drawings, a few steps from the six second-floor rooms where some eighty works by El Greco are proudly on display.

  On the day of the preview for reporters and special friends of the museum, a mellifluous, mutually congratulatory speechifying from the various experts, directors, curators, and financial powers responsible for the show—the first major retrospective in this country since 1982—drowned out any concern that, for the twenty-first-century art public, these large, lurid, hyper-Catholic canvases, with their tormented compositions and insipidly pretty, pasty faces, might reawaken the qualms of Philip II and seem too singular, and even—dare I say?—repellent.

  In 1983, the cleaning of an icon kept in the Holy Cathedral of the Dormition of the Virgin, on the island of Syros, Greece, uncovered the name of Doménikos Theotokópoulos, and this small but ambitious painted panel, containing many figures in a partially gilded tableau, together with a damaged representation from an Athens museum of Saint Luke as himself an icon painter, reminds us, at the exhibition’s outset, that El Greco began as a producer of holy artifacts, of icons still Byzantine in their rigid postures, zigzag clothing folds, and rudimentary perspective, though some attempt to render depth in the Italian manner was made. Crete at that time was a possession of the Venetian Republic; it was to Venice, and then Rome, that he travelled in his mid-twenties, studying the work of Titian and Tintoretto, Correggio and Parmigianino, and reading Vasari’s Lives. He retained, however, an icon maker’s way of thoroughly using his space and of resorting to stark white highlights, which give fabric in even his later work a coarse and implausible shine; white outlines impart to the cityscape of his magnificent View of Toledo (c. 1597–99) its spectral ghostliness. All his life, except for his secular portraits and the celebrated View, he produced religious images designed to be seen in a church’s dim candlelight, at some distance; in such settings his garish colors and failure to provide High Renaissance perspective were virtues of a sort. His most striking invention, his flattened space, with a twisting, gray, close background spilling down from explosive skies, suits a church niche and the abstracted glance of worshippers. Roger Fry in 1920 wrote of El Greco’s “peculiar power of creating, as it were, a new kind of space, a space of which we have no actual experience, but which we accept as peculiarly enhancing the emotional tone of the scene.” It permits, Fry went on to observe, the large figures to “seem to move freely in a vaster space than any actual scene of such dimensions would allow.”

  As the viewer moves through the early rooms, holding works from the 1560s and 1570s, he painfully feels the painter’s struggle with Italianate perspective, its large colorful crowds distributed over receding marmoreal vistas. His several treatments of Christ Healing the Blind and The Purification of the Temple never achieve persuasiveness or the stage-front drama that would become characteristic. The second tableau, with its agitated knot of figures being whipped by a Christ athletically up on one foot, was more congenial to El Greco’s sense of concentrated action, and versions are displayed from as late as (roughly) 1600 and 1610. In the latter, grotesque elongation stretches Christ to an ineffectual slenderness, his whip all but hidden by his upraised hand; the arch giving in other versions onto an outdoor street has been sealed shut; a wildly gesticulating woman and cherub have been added, out of scale, to the extreme left edge; and, higher up on this edge, a marble nude (Adam?) threatens to shimmy right out of his niche.

  As El Greco settled more securely into his visionary mode of attenuated anatomy and surreally compressed space, he arrived at a nervous, crumbly brushwork, a dashing dry treatment conspicuous in the monstrously ungainly Laocoön of the early 1610s and the fine, rather homoerotically charged portrait of the poet-priest Fray Hortensio Félix Paravicino (c. 1609). En route to this furry and electric texture his brushstrokes worry in a wormy way at forms that don’t really engage him. The two Pietàs of the 1570s echo the triangular monumentality of Michelangelo’s unfinished sculpture (probably known to the painter through an engraving) without Michelangelesque solidity; the bodies have the weight and tint of chalk while the sky looms in broad slabs, one of which, in the Pietà of 1575, actually eclipses, by a feat of vaporous occlusion, the tops of Calvary’s three crosses. Other unpleasant, primitive representati
ons, all from the early 1570s, include The Adoration of the Shepherds, as Stygian as a cellar; Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata, a golden landscape with a leaden flow and a nonplussed saint; and Mount Sinai, tall brown heaps suggesting towers of excrement or mourners wrapped in mud, dabbled with tiny figures and constructions feebly adapted from a woodcut by Titian. El Greco did not have an easy time converting himself from the brittle, formal style of Eastern Christianity to the physical realism of the West.

  This triumphant physical realism, of which Michelangelo was the epitome, posed a problem for religious representation: the more vividly anatomical and muscular the figures became, the less spiritual they seemed. Michelangelo’s drawing of a fully fleshed Christ floating up out of the tomb, and his sculpture of the beautiful young body lying in the Virgin’s broad lap, were as far as visual humanism could be stretched to illustrate the Christian story; the broad-chested frontal nude, with penis, hurling judgment out upon mankind on the great wall of the Sistine Chapel may have been godlike, but he wasn’t the meek, conflicted Jesus of the Gospels or the hieratically stiff deity of medieval tympana showing the Last Judgment. How to get past all this more precisely limned sinew and muscle and keep a grip on heaven, on the immaterial other world? Raphael and Leonardo softened their anatomical mastery with sweet, half-smiling facial expressions, and Pontormo, whom Michelangelo had commended as a successor, brilliantly bestowed an impossible lightness upon his figures, so that in his pastel-colored Transportation of Christ (c. 1527–28) the foreground figures carrying Christ’s dead weight support themselves on a few unbending toes.