In each painting, the brilliant red robe of St. John intensi¿ es the emotion,
although in van der Weyden’s painting, the saint assists the fainting Virgin
Mary, calling attention to the way her body echoes her son’s; in Rubens’s
painting, St. John supports the body of Christ, the main subject. In each
painting, the body of Christ dominates, one presented to us in an angular,
stark, frontal pose and the other, slumped and lifeless, sliding down a long
diagonal of sorrow. One may prefer one painter over the other, one style
over the other, but one cannot deny that each artist has found a consummate
expression of death and response to death. The particular expressivity of
each artist could be achieved only in his particular, personal style.
In our discussion of interpretation and style, we have also been deeply
concerned with context. Once again, it could not have been otherwise,
because the subjects we were dealing with were Christian subjects.
Christianity informed much of European culture throughout the Middle
Ages, the Renaissance, and the Baroque, and it remained a wellspring of
subjects and themes well into the 18th century. We will spend a good deal of
time looking at religious art, but to teach religious art is not to teach religion.
One does not have to believe to be moved by the cultural expressions
of religion.
We see Pierre Patel’s Perspective View of Versailles. Just as one does not have
to believe in a religion to be moved by its cultural expressions, neither must
one believe in the divine right of kings or absolute monarchy to be awed by
Louis XIV’s great palace at Versailles, a palace that would never have been
built in an era that was not autocratic and absolutist. We may disapprove of
the political system, but we remain impressed by the achievement, which
resulted from its political context.
Neither do we have to experience a political revolution to recognize the
passionate response of a painter who witnessed the events of July 1830 in
Paris, when the recently restored Bourbon regime was overthrown in an
uprising. We see one response in Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People
(1830). Delacroix could still think in the traditional allegorical mode, in
which “Liberty” could be personi¿ ed as a bare-breasted heroic woman
carrying the À ag but leading the real people of Paris forward in their struggle.
The power of contemporary events can stir the deepest emotions of an artist,