Bross Lecture | Epiphany: an irruption.

Please join us for what promises to be a ground-breaking lecture series focusing on the theme of “Violations of hierarchy in premodern painting,” presented by Christopher Woods, Professor, Department of German, New York University.

This lecture series: The lectures trace an alternative morphology of European art structured by neglect of the rules of perspective; trespassing across frames; intrusion of the still-unnarrated world into the narration; prophecies and other foldings of time; and the limitless contagions of pathos. The urgent or drastic approach especially to narrative painting generated effects of inevitability and emotional intensity. The scope is 1250 to 1650, from the late medieval period to the Baroque: a sea of time navigated with the help of three technical terms that describe such “violations”: metalepsis (the inapproprate inhabiting of one rhetorical trope by another); parenthesis (an interruption understood either as a side-by-side arrangement or as a hierarchical embedding); and epiphany (the manifestation of the radically Other).
This lecture: Epiphany, or the manifestation of the divine, is the very paradigm of a violation of hierarchy. Jusepe de Ribera’s tremendous canvas, one of his few mythological paintings, depicts the alighting of the goddess Venus on earth and her discovery of the dead body of her mortal lover, the hunter Adonis, gored by a wild boar. The spheres of divine and human touch. The bodies of the lovers are pressed into the form of hieroglyphs, levelling the figure-ground hierarchy that ought to structure such painted virtual spaces. Adonis’s body is flattened into the flower it will become.

Libidinal dynamics is the great subject of Baroque painting, here set in motion by a trespassing: Venus, foreseeing her lover’s end, had exhorted him to caution: “Be bold, but not too bold!” Ribera, in search of pathos, the extremes of bodily suffering and spiritual fortitude, mostly plumbed Christian martyrology. His dynamics were mainly monosexual, not differential. Here he chastely clothes his Venus. Venus is both hunter and hunted, and Adonis too.
This painting can be contextualized within the modest sphere of the ex voto, or private devotional image recognizing a divine intervention resolving a crisis. In the ex voto of the Blessed Camilla, a modern Italian holy woman, the sky opens to allow for communication with the mortals below, mother and daughter. Camilla is the patron saint of bad marriages; here all the husbands are absent. In the ex voto, as with the Blessed Caterina in Bologna, and finally in the Ribera, the truth about the co-involvement of pathos and beauty is disclosed only on the margins of the religious sphere. The switchings and substitutions are a webbing or mesh that bind together the anthropological and the aesthetic.