by John Berger
In Donatello’s David the young man’s sex is discreetly in its proper place – like a thumb or a toe. In Michelangelo’s David the sex is the body’s centre and every other part of the body refers back to it with a kind of deference, as if to a miracle. As simple and as beautiful as that. Less spectacularly, but none the less evidently, the same is true of his Bruges Madonna and the sex of the infant Christ. It was not lust but a form of worship.
Given this predilection and all the pride of the Renaissance genius, what would you say his imaginary paradise might have been? Might it not have been the fantasy of men giving birth?
The whole ceiling is really about Creation and for him, in the last coil of his longing, Creation meant everything imaginable being born, thrusting and flying, from between men’s legs!
Remember the Medici tomb with the figures of Night and Day, Dusk and Dawn? Two reclining men and two reclining women. The women modestly fold their legs together. Both men part their legs and, pushing, lift their pelvises, as though waiting for a birth. Not a birth of flesh and blood and not – heaven forbid – of symbols either. The birth they await is of the indescribable and endless mystery which their bodies incarnate, and which will emerge from there, from between their parted legs.
And so it is on the ceiling. The visitors in the Chapel floor are like figures who have just dropped from between the feet and out of the skirts of the Prophets and Sibyls. OK The Sibyls are women, but not really, not when you get close: they are men in drag.
Beyond, are the nine scenes of the Creation and there, at the four corners of each scene, sit the amazing, twisting, immense, labouring male nudes (the ignudi), whose presence commentators have found so difficult to explain. They represent, some claim, Ideal Beauty. Then why their effort, why their longing and their labour? No, the twenty young naked men up there have conceived and just given birth to all that is visible and all that is imaginable and all that we see on the ceiling. Man’s loved body up there is the measure of everything – even of platonic love, even of Eve, even of you.
He once said, talking about the sculptor of the Bevedere Torso (50 BC): ‘This is the work of a man who knew more than nature!’
And therein lay the dream, the coiled desire, the pathos and the illusion.
In 1536, two decades after he finished the ceiling, he started to paint the Last Judgement on the gigantic wall behind the altar. Maybe it’s the biggest fresco in Europe? Countless figures, all naked, mostly men. Other writers have compared it with the late works of Rembrandt or Beethoven but I can’t follow them. What I see is pure terror and the terror is intimately connected with the ceiling above. Man on this wall is still naked but now the measure of nothing!
Everything has changed. The Renaissance and its spirit is finished. Rome has been sacked. The Inquisition is about to be set up. Everywhere fear has replaced hope, and he is growing old. Maybe it’s like our world today.
Suddenly the pictures of Sebastiao Salgado come to my mind: his photos of the Brazilian gold mine and of coal miners in Bihar, India. Both artists are appalled by what they have to depict, and both show bodies strained to a similar breaking point, which, somehow, the bodies endure!
There the resemblance ends, for Salgado’s figures are working and his are monstrously unemployed. Their energy, their bodies, their huge hands, their senses, have become useless. Mankind has become barren, and there is scarcely any difference between the saved and the damned. No dream remains in any body, however beautiful that body once was. There is only anger and penance – as if God has abandoned man to nature and nature has become blind! Blind? Finally, it’s not true.
He lived and worked for another two decades after he painted the Last Judgement. And when he died, at the age of eighty-nine, he was carving a marble Pietà. The so-called unfinished Rondanini Pietà.
The mother who holds up the limp body of her son is in roughly carved stone. The son’s two legs and one of his arms are finished and polished. (Maybe they are the remnants of another sculpture he partially destroyed – it doesn’t matter: this monument to his energy and solitude stands as it is.) The crossing line, the frontier between the smooth marble and the rough stone, between the flesh and the block of rock, is at the level of Christ’s sex.
And the immense pathos of this work comes from the fact that the body is returning, is being breathed back with love into the block of stone, into his mother. It is, at last, the opposite of any birth!
I’ll send you Salgado’s photo of Galician women wading into the Ria de Vigo, searching in the month of October for shellfish at low tide …
11
Rembrandt and the Body
At the age of sixty-three he died, looking, even by the standards of his time, very old. Drink, debts, the death through the Plague of those nearest to him are amongst the explanations of the ravages done. But the self-portraits hint at something more. He grew old in a climate of economic fanaticism and indifference – not dissimilar to the climate of the period we are living through. The human could no longer simply be copied (as in the Renaissance), the human was no longer self-evident: it had to be found in the darkness. Rembrandt himself was obstinate, dogmatic, cunning, capable of a kind of brutality. Do not let us turn him into a saint. Yet he was looking for a way out of the darkness.
He drew because he liked drawing. It was a daily reminder of what surrounded him. Painting – particularly in the second half of his life – was for him something very different: it was a search for an exit from the darkness. Perhaps the drawings – with their extraordinary lucidity – have prevented us seeing the way he really painted.
He seldom made preliminary drawings, he began painting straightaway on the canvas. There is little of either linear logic or spatial continuity in his paintings. If the pictures convince, they do so because details, parts, emerge and come out to meet the eye. Nothing is laid out before us as it is in the work of his contemporaries like Ruysdael or Vermeer.
Whereas in his drawings he was a total master of space, of proportion, the physical world he presents in his paintings is seriously dislocated. In art studies about him this has not been emphasised enough. Perhaps because one needs to be a painter rather than a scholar to perceive it clearly.
There is an early painting of a man (it’s himself) before an easel in a studio. The man is not much more than half the size he should be! In the marvellous late painting Woman at an Open Door (Berlin) Hendrickje’s right arm and hand are the size of those of a Hercules! In Abraham’s Sacrifice (St Petersburg) Isaac has the physique of a youth but in proportion to his father is no larger than an eight-year-old!
Baroque art loved foreshortenings and improbable juxtapositions, but, even if he profited by the liberties won by the Baroque, the dislocations in his paintings are in no way similar, for they are not demonstrative: they are almost furtive.
In the sublime St Matthew and Angel (The Louvre) the impossible space over the Evangelist’s shoulder for the Angel’s head is furtively insinuated, as if by the whisper the Angel is whispering into the writer’s ear. Why in his paintings did he forget – or ignore – what he could do with such mastery in his drawings? Something else – something antithetical to ‘real’ space – must have interested him more.
Leave the museum. Go to the emergency department of a hospital. Probably in a basement because the X-ray units are best placed underground. There are the wounded and the sick being wheeled forward, or waiting for hours, side by side, on their trolleys, until the next expert can give them attention. Often it is the rich, rather than the most sick, who pass first. Either way, for the patients, there underground, it is too late to change anything.
Each one is living in her or his own corporeal space, in which the landmarks are a pain or a disability, an unfamiliar sensation or a numbness. The surgeons when operating cannot obey the laws of this space – it is not something learnt in Dr Tulip’s Anatomy Lesson. Every good nurse, however, becomes familiar by touch with it – and on each mattress, with each patient, it
takes a different form.
It is the space of each sentient body’s awareness of itself. It is not boundless like subjective space: it is always finally bound by the laws of the body, but its landmarks, its emphasis, its inner proportions are continually changing. Pain sharpens our awareness of such space. It is the space of our first vulnerability and solitude. Also of disease. But it is also, potentially, the space of pleasure, well-being and the sensation of being loved. Robert Kramer, the filmmaker, defines it: ‘Behind the eyes and throughout the body. The universe of circuits and synapses. The worn paths where the energy habitually flows.’ It can be felt by touch more clearly than it can be seen by sight. He was the painterly master of this corporeal space.
Consider the four hands of the couple in The Jewish Bride. It is their hands, far more than their faces, which say: Marriage. Yet how did he get there – to this corporeal space?
Bathsheba Reading David’s Letter (The Louvre). She sits there life-size and naked. She is pondering her fate. The King has seen her and desires her. Her husband is away at the wars. (How many millions of times has it happened?) Her servant, kneeling, is drying her feet. She has no choice but to go to the King. She will become pregnant. King David will arrange for her fond husband to be killed. She will mourn for her husband. She will marry King David and bear him the son who will become King Solomon. A fatality has already begun, and at the centre of this fatality is Bathsheba’s desirability as a wife.
And so he made her nubile stomach and navel the focus of the entire painting. He placed them at the level of the servant’s eyes. And painted them with love and pity as if they were a face. There isn’t another belly in European art painted with a fraction of this devotion. It has become the centre of its own story.
On canvas after canvas he gave to a part of a body or to parts of bodies a special power of narration. The painting then speaks with several voices – like a story being told by different people from different points of view. Yet these ‘points of view’ can only exist in a coporeal space which is incompatible with territorial or architectural space. Corporeal space is continually changing its measures and focal centres, according to circumstances. It measures by waves, not metres. Hence its necessary dislocations of ‘real’ space.
The Holy Family (Munich). The Virgin is seated in Joseph’s workshop. Jesus is asleep on her lap. The relation between the Virgin’s hand holding the baby, her bare breast, the baby’s head and his outstretched arm is absurd in terms of any conventional pictorial space: nothing fits, stays in its proper place, is the correct size. Yet the breast with its drop of milk speaks to the baby’s face. The baby’s hand speaks to the amorphous landmass which is his mother. Her hand listens to the infant it is holding.
His best paintings deliver coherently very little to the spectator’s point of view. Instead, the spectator intercepts (overhears) dialogues between parts gone adrift, and these dialogues are so faithful to a corporeal experience that they speak to something everybody carries within them. Before his art, the spectator’s body remembers its own inner experience.
Commentators have often remarked on the ‘innerness’ of Rembrandt’s images. Yet they are the opposite of ikons. They are carnal images. The flesh of the Flayed Ox is not an exception but typical. If they reveal an ‘innerness’ it is that of the body, what lovers try to reach by caressing and by intercourse. In this context the last word takes on both a more literal and more poetic meaning. Coursing between.
About half of his great masterpieces (portraits apart) depict the act or the preliminary act – the opening of the outstretched arms – of an embrace. The Prodigal Son, Jacob and the Angel, Danaë, David and Absalom, The Jewish Bride …
Nothing comparable is to be found in the oeuvre of any other painter. In Rubens, for instance, there are many figures being handled, carried, pulled, but few, if any, embracing. In nobody else’s work does the embrace occupy this supreme and central position. Sometimes the embrace he paints is sexual, sometimes not. In the fusion between two bodies not only desire can pass, but also pardon or faith. In his Jacob and the Angel (Berlin) we see all three and they become inseparable.
Public hospitals, dating from the Middle Ages, were called in France Hôtels-Dieu. Places where shelter and care were given in the name of God to the sick or dying. Beware of idealisation. The Hôtel-Dieu in Paris was so overcrowded during the Plague that each bed was ‘occupied by three people, one sick, one dying and one dead’.
Yet the term Hôtel-Dieu, interpreted differently, can help to explain him. The key to his vision, which had to dislocate classical space, was The New Testament. ‘Who lives in love lives in God and God in him … We know that we live in him and he in us because he has given us of his Spirit.’ (The First Epistle of John. Ch.4)
‘He in us’. What the surgeons found in dissecting was one thing. What he was looking for was another. Hôtel-Dieu may also mean a body in which God resides. In the ineffable, terrible late self-portraits, he was waiting, as he gazed into his own face, for God, knowing full well that God is invisible.
When he painted freely those he loved or imagined or felt close to, he tried to enter their corporeal space as it existed at that precise moment, he tried to enter their Hôtel-Dieu. And so to find an exit from the darkness.
Before the small painting of A Woman Bathing (London) we are with her, inside the shift she is holding up. Not as voyeurs. Not lecherously like the Elders spying on Susannah. It is simply that we are led, by the tenderness of his love, to inhabit her body’s space.
For Rembrandt, the embrace was perhaps synonymous with the act of painting, and both were just this side of prayer.
12
A Cloth Over the Mirror
The late Rembrandt self-portraits contain or embody a paradox: they are clearly about old age, yet they address the future. They assume something coming towards them apart from Death.
Twenty years ago in front of one of them in the Frick Collection, New York, I wrote the following lines:
The eyes from the face
two nights look at the day
the universe of his mind
doubled by pity
nothing else can suffice.
Before a mirror
silent as a horseless road
he envisaged us
deaf dumb
returning overland
to look at him
in the dark.
At the same time there is a cheek, an insolence, in the painting which makes me think of a verbal self-portrait in a story I like very much by the American polemicist and fiction writer, Andrea Dworkin:
I have no patience with the untorn, anyone who hasn’t weathered rough weather, fallen apart, been ripped to pieces, put herself back together, big stitches, jagged cuts, nothing nice. Then something shines out. But these ones all shined up on the outside, the ass wigglers, I’ll be honest, I don’t like them. Not at all.
Big stitches, jagged cuts. That’s how the paint is put on.
Yet, finally, if we want to get closer to what makes the late self-portraits so exceptional, we have to relate them to the rest of the genre. How and why do they differ from most other painted self-portraits?
The first known self-portrait dates from the second millennium BC. An Egyptian bas-relief which shows the artist in profile drinking from a jar that his patron’s servant is offering him at a feast where there are many other people. Such self-portraits – for the tradition continued until the early Middle Ages – were like artists’ signatures to the crowded scenes being depicted. They were a marginal claim that said: I also was present.
Later, when the subject of St Luke painting the Virgin Mary became popular, the painter often painted himself in a more central position. Yet he was there because of his act of painting the Virgin: he was not yet there to look into himself.
One of the first self-portraits to do precisely this is Antonello da Messina’s which is permanently in the National Gallery, London. This painter (1430-1479) who was the first
southern painter to use oil paint had an extraordinary Sicilian clarity and compassion – such as one finds later in artists like Varga, Pirandello or Lampedusa. In the self-portrait, he looks at himself as if looking at his own judge. There is not a trace of dissimilation.
In most of the self-portraits that were to follow, play acting or dissimilation was endemic. And there is a phenomenological reason for this. A painter can draw his left hand as if it belonged to somebody else. Using two mirrors he can draw his own profile as if observing a stranger. But when he looks straight into a mirror, he is caught in a trap: his reaction to the face he is seeing changes that face. Or, to put it in another way, that face can offer itself something it likes or loves. The face arranges itself. Caravaggio’s painting of Narcissus is a perfect demonstration.
It is the same for all of us. We play-act when we look in the bathroom mirror, we instantly make an adjustment to our expression and our face. Quite apart from the reversal of the left and right, nobody else ever sees us as we see ourselves above the washbasin. And this dissimilation is spontaneous and uncalculated. It’s as old as the invention of the mirror.
Throughout the history of self-portraits a similar ‘look’ occurs again and again. If the face is not hidden in a group, one can recognise a self-portrait a mile off, because of its particular kind of theatricality. We watch Dürer playing Christ, Gauguin playing the outcast, Delacroix the dandy, the young Rembrandt the successful Amsterdam trader. We can be moved as if by overhearing a confession, or amused as by a boast. Yet before most self-portraits, because of the exclusive complicity existing between the eye observing and the returned gaze, we have a sense of something opaque, a sense of watching the drama of a double-bind which excludes us.