Nature, Artifice, and Interpretation

Giovanni Bellini's Saint Francis

This is about a rendezvous with the sun. It has just risen, but already the sky is bright and the earth is full of color. Its sphere cannot be seen, but its yellow touches every corner of the landscape, warming the distant city like a blanket, swirling into the leaves, flashing on the face of rocks, delineating every crevice. It overflows those corners, expanding the roughly four-foot-tall, near square of canvas into something spacious and familiar as the world. Its radiance is measured with unnerving precision, as if with a light meter. It demands a response just that fresh, open, and exacting—from the man standing at the painting's heart, from the believer, from anyone.

The man is easily recognized as St. Francis from his light brown cassock and tonsure. Any Renaissance Venetian would also quickly notice the wounds of the crucified Christ on his hands. The painting, completed by Giovanni Bellini (d. 1516) just past the middle of his long career and now in the Frick Collection in New York, clearly shows the popular saint's traditional features, intensely focused expression, and rural cell furnished sparingly with a skull.

Bellini has somehow encompassed both the ecstasy that was held to accompany the stigmata and the solitude and community with nature of a life spent in contemplation. The first miracle was said to have been given to only the holiest of men. The other, Bellini plainly insists, has been the gift of even fewer.

A miracle

To ask how Bellini could combine the richness and austerity of the saint's legend is to look for the subject of the painting, and art historians cannot agree on one. Conventionally, Francis is shown in meditation or else receiving his miraculous markings. In the first case he sits alone in his cell. In the latter story he kneels, while rays from an angelic source pierce his hands and chest and a brother Franciscan bears stunned witness. Bellini's St. Francis has abandoned his quiet cell to stand alone, erect and looking skyward. His chest is unbared. The only radiance is of that glorious sun.

A few art historians have wanted a way to fit the painting's features more exactly, a discipline of art history traditionally called iconography. And they found in the saint, then the icon of a new humanism, a good source for folk tales. Francis, after all, combined life among ordinary people with the appeal for the elite of austerity and intellect. He wrote hymns, so one story goes, and his wide-open mouth may mean that he is in the midst of one. More ingenious still, Milliard Meiss has found another miracle. In a fitting response to Francis's ecologically aware piety, the sun is alleged once to have shined at night. Perhaps the herdsman far in the background indicates how people, and even animals, were fooled into beginning their daily rounds.

This is the wrong time and place, however, to look for hidden doctrine. Like Francis's life, the painting wishes to be plain as day. In postcard reproductions, its careful outline drawing can suggest the dense symbolism typical of the Northern Renaissance. Even in person, detail emerges the longer I look. A rabbit peeps out from between rocks like a refugee from Where's Waldo, while the artist's signature, on convincingly rumpled paper, hangs not far in front of a tiny drain spout. Still, Bellini's lighting integrates and softens rather than differentiates details. It lets in air and reverence rather than isolates a refuge for fine points of doctrine. Nothing seems out of place, least of all that gorgeous sunlight.

Besides, hidden meanings are at least as hard to support from the literal evidence as any traditional ones. In a Renaissance picture about music, the singer invariably holds a prop. The painting has signs everywhere, but not a guitar. Anyhow, and in the unlikely event that a painter of the day could express such nuances with only a gaping stare, Francis looks to me more surprised than lyrical. Then, too, whatever the saint is doing, I can almost hear the silence. Moreover, if the sky deviates from natural sunlight, I am fooled quite as much as the cattle.

Putting the books aside

Any interpretation should drive back to the painting's center, Francis's ecstatic reception of the day. Song would be only a sign of that elation, strong daylight its awakener. Because the folk tales take both sun and music as manifestations of God and nature, they therefore naturalize the very subjects of older paintings—the saint's meditations and the miracle of his taking on the marks of God. I am insisting, in other words, not on hidden, more literal evocations of stranger themes, but on a naturalized representation of familiar ones.

I accept St. Francis's gesture as the conventional representation of his stigmatization, unconventionally stripped of its symbolic context. It anticipates the patient waiting of Vermeer's women, shorn of their stories but full of longing. What then does he covers with his outstretched, wounded palms? It is the ordinary tokens of life's daily rhythms. If those rhythms seem miraculous, that will turn out to be because not even a painting can dissolve the tension between the natural and the human.

Putting the books aside to talk in simpler terms would not have made sense in a painting of barely a decade earlier. Before Bellini, humanism had hardly penetrated Venice. Presumably earlier Florentine artists named Veneziano had left their city of origin for a more advanced location. Now a painter could dispense entirely with obvious subject matter and place a figure as the object of attention. From here on, the barest of human gestures can tell a story, because one can no longer dismiss the chance that they are there is.

Before Bellini, too, sunlight could not have been a principal in a religious drama. Andrea Mantegna before him was a pioneering draftsman and humanist, but Bellini's mastery of oils has obliterated his older cousin's dry contours. In leaves of the great tree at the left supple greens, browns, and yellows intermingle; the artist had overpainted on his still-wet medium. Thin glazes of oil paint, influenced by Antonello da Messina, underscore the crisp rock face. It is impossible to say whether formal and technical innovations have driven content or the other way around. Bellini inherits his craft, sees its potential, and annihilates its limits.

Bowing to nature

The sun lies just beyond the painting's frame, the light resides in the oils of the canvas, and the landscape is identical to the horizon and picture plane. Bellini's innovations take the naturalism of these features as one pole, the figure as another. Put differently, a painting's boundaries and the Renaissance's remarkable means of representation may be opposed to the subject at its center.

Look at how they play off each other excitedly. The tree bends toward the saint. The rock face curves behind to embrace him. Vines twist to outline his cell. The velvety sunlight sharply etches the anatomy of his cheeks. Nothing here is clearly natural, supernatural, or artificial. A viewer's eyes can follow as one line of indentation in stone is adapted to a man-made seat. The irregular crevice gives way to drainage, intruding upon nature and returning to it; but no demarcation point can be found along the way. This is neither the city depicted at top left, nor a self-contained landscape like the sheer rock at the upper right, but an altogether different world. Here it is unclear where nature or civilization leaves off.

Just as the sun and the tree bow to meet Saint Francis, he has turned to meet them. He leaves behind him the cave, with its darkness and dry skull recalling death. His face shows excitement, if not utter shock, but his open arms indicate a welcoming acceptance. He gestures with one hand toward the peeping rabbit, with the other to a water jug. In different ways, he is reaching out to springs of life, indifferent to what is natural or his own, just as oil painting uses new means to unite the viewer with the seen.

In this natural world as seen by the artifice of painting, art is the only holy witness needed to complete an old tale. The sun and Francis's spirit within are the only carriers of the stigmata, together entirely insensible to the obstacle of his robe. In this reinterpretation of a miracle, a saint has turned away from solitude and death to embrace life. In the process he finds the marks of death on his physical body, but underneath each mark lie new signs of life. The painting's unity of nature and humanity, like the individual taking on the emblems of crucifixion, itself emulates the textual account of a god's assumption of human death and consequent promised gift of life.

The paradox of refusal

Francis serves as a reminder that the most meditative art gains its strength from the narratives it invokes and refuses. Not only abstraction, but much else since Manet responded to the official salon by cutting up another work now in the Frick, makes sense as a kind of productive refusal. Like Francis's monasticism, but sometimes a lot sexier, modern art has never been a refusal of the world. Like Bellini as well, it breaks the boundaries between artifice and nature.

To work in oil, to live by studying the world, and to face the meaning of old texts on the spirit is the painter's way of facing the same paradox as Francis. The more the painter copies the appearance of natural things, the greater the artifice, and the harder it is to tell whether the artifice is highlighted or better hidden. Starting with the Renaissance and reaching its climax in Modernism, it becomes harder, too, to know when art enriches old meanings or disregards them, when its formalism is the bearer of significance—or the whole point. As it makes sense of the rising or setting of the sun, this art puzzles out the depth and fragility of human self-understanding and delight.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Bellini's Saint Francis is in The Frick Collection.