some anti-hegelian thoughts

that is, a few madonnas

I’ve been thinking about the Hegelian narrative of art history that argues there’s a progression towards greater representation of nature and a greater presence of the christian incarnation as time goes by.

Apparently what this amounts to is that Raphael, Renaissance Italian painter, is just about the best ever, and of course Hegel means that quite literally:

“. . . Raphael proceeded to the most complete fulfillment of the demand mentioned above. In him, that is to say, there were united the supreme spiritual feeling for religious subjects, as well as the full knowledge of and affectionate attention to natural phenomena in the whole liveliness of their color and form . . . . The perfection of painting in these great masters is a peak of art which can be ascended only once by one people in the course of history’s development.”

Well, ok, maybe.

But if Raphael is the best painter, what’s the best subject for a painting that represents nature and incarnation in one? Let’s find out:

“The ideal centre and chief topic of the religious sphere, as has been explained in our consideration of the romantic form of art, is love reconciled and at peace with itself. Painting has to portray spiritual subject-matter in the form of actual and bodily human beings, and therefore the object of this love must not be painted as a purely spiritual ‘beyond’ but as actual and present. Here we may specify the Holy Family, and above all the Madonna’s love for her child, as the absolutely suitable ideal subject for this sphere.”

Ok, great. What does this look like?

Small Cowper Madonna, Raphael, 1505, owned by DC’s National Gallery but not on view

And!

Raffael, Die Sixtinische Madonna, 1512/13 in Dresden’s Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister

OK Hegel I’m listening, jolie blonde, aimable brun. I’m starting to feel some skepticism, however. I dearly love going to see all the Madonna/child paintings there are, yes. And it makes sense that this arrangement of subjects is eminently suitable for the notion that Hegel has in mind. But I’m stuck on the notion that other paintings, say Byzantine imperial or European medieval, don’t capture the presence and actuality of the moment, but get caught in “a purely spiritual ‘beyond.’” For Merleau-Ponty reasons, I don’t think there’s one proportion, color, or shape of the human body, represented visually, that has primacy over the others. The senses don’t give us visual images in the straightforward way we often believe them to, and even though for Aristotelian reasons I certainly think they give us true shapes and testaments to what really exists and is there, I don’t think Raphael’s rounded young women are peak Mary incarnate. (I’m also stuck on a theme from the gospel of John, that people are continually see actual Jesus and fail to recognize him, although that’s a tale for another day.)

What I would have said, before messing with Hegel, is something like: that each image, painting, or sculpture of Mary and child, or for that matter, the annunciation, presentation, and so on, give us a fragment of what it would mean for this moment to exist in our own sensorial presence. I suppose I mean this Platonically, and so potentially, rather eastern orthodoxically, that paintings of the Madonna &Child participate in something that, even if we were to see it with our own eyes, we might fail to recognize it for what it’s worth. As such, various paintings might do this more or less well; and to be sure, it’s a heck of an art project assignment in the first place: do divine human in two different and yet world-historically altering guises at once, together—Go! Don’t mess it up . . . I started with a fairly Hegelian understanding about the possibility of understanding this moment a very long time ago, when I first started going back to church. I suppose it’s a funny record of the slow sort of changing of my thought to register how wrong I think he is now about what the artistic representation of this moment ought to be and do and look like. I think I even find the Raphael to be somewhat reductively “human,” as though his paintings are insisting too hard that everything we want can be expressed simply by a better knowledge of anatomy, or a slightly less imposing-looking girl.

In conclusion, a few earlier Madonna/Childs that I am fond of, with a build-up to my favorite:

Enthroned Madonna and Child, c. 1250/1275, National Gallery DC

I would quarrel with the Hegelian who claimed this Mary wasn’t human, and also with Hegel’s own notion that Raphael’s baby expresses the innocence and purity of, well, a toddler, and so Christ, better than the funny oddly smaller, partly adult partly child pictured here. Part of the oddity of children is that they never stay still in how they look from one moment to the next; there’s no one moment that is all childhood, frustratingly, just an infinitely shifting unfolding movement within becoming.

Jan van Eyck, The Annunciation, c. 1434/1436, at National Gallery in DC

Hegel compares van Eyck unfavorably to Raphael, so of course I include this favorite painting here. Mary’s gaze is focused on what is not yet present; the angel smiles because he can already see it. This contrast plays with the divine beyond and the divine presence in a lovely way; also the angel’s wings could make anyone smile in return.

And finally, a painting I came across again in the summer of ‘22, and the strongest catharsis I’ve ever felt from unmoving image alone:

Madonna with the Child and Scenes from the Life of St Anne, Filippo Lippi (Firenze 1406 ca. – Spoleto 1469), at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, Italy

I have so much to say about this one, so I won’t spoil it too much. But I deeply prefer this to the Cowper Madonna: it has the qualities that Hegel wants, it sees both Mary and the infant Christ in their human/divine relations, but it retains the breaks of perspective that I love in medieval paintings, as well as the slightly uncanny wise-child eyes of the baby, both as real as and beyond the infants I’ve known. Here Mary comes from her own mother, Anne, in the background, but Mary is also troubled, by what she’s already experienced and what might be yet to come. If she looks down, if she takes the fruit, redeemed pagan pomegranate, what will she come to see and know next? We hang on the breath of the two, together.