A Sketch by God the Painter?
Andrew R. Casper, An Artful Relic: The Shroud of Turin in Baroque Italy. Penn State University Press, 216 pp., 5 color, 43 b&w illustrations, $50 cloth.
Much of the most important Renaissance and baroque art was made for sacred settings, and so transferring these artifacts into the public collections involves an important change in focus. Now the same artifacts are seen and described very differently.
Traditional academic art history secularized these sacred artifacts, allowing us to set these sacred works in the art museum alongside art from other cultures and modernist secular paintings and sculptures. Now, however, some scholars are taking a real interest in understanding the religious roots of pre-modern European visual culture. And so they want to understand Christian relics that are like some older artworks.
In the Gospel of Matthew, the description of what happened after Christ’s crucifixion is laconic and seemingly straightforward. “And when Joseph had taken the body, he wrapped it in a clean linen cloth” (Matthew 27:59; King James translation). Mark and Luke also say that after his crucifixion, Christ was wrapped in linen. In the Gospels, that shroud was just a banal item, adding a descriptive detail to the narrative. Suppose, however, inspired by the hermeneutic tradition, we ask: What that linen might mean? Once we acknowledge that every detail of anything, however slight, associated with Christ’s life could be deeply meaningful, that question deserves serious discussion. If we could locate that ancient fabric, what might close study of it teach us?
When in the fourteenth century a French knight displayed to pilgrims what he claimed was that blood-stained shroud, naturally that discovery attracted a great deal of interest. And so this cloth was acquired by the House of Savoy, and exhibited in Turin. The shroud had been damaged by fire in 1532 and its survival was thought to be miraculous. In 1578 this relic became famous when it was adored by a very famous priest, Cardinal Carlo Borromeo, in a scene commemorated by an anonymous painter. And so then, thanks to its fame, the shroud was much commented on by baroque writers, and in 1694 installed in a chapel by the renowned late Baroque Turinese architect Guarino Guarini. Just as some certain great modern scholars (art historian Meyer Schapiro, philosopher Saul Kripke) have a mystique because they decline to publish many of their lectures; and some pianists (Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, to name one) have a mystique because they do few performances; so the shroud has a mystique, I think, because you can visit the church where it’s installed, but not normally see it. Indeed, Casper mentions that he has viewed it only once. Near to Guarini’s chapel, where the shroud is installed, the Most Holy Shroud Museum in the crypt of the Most Holy Shroud Church, in Via San Domenico 28, Turin offers a very complete presentation of relevant memorabilia. There you can see many photographs of it, but not the shroud itself. In that way, the shroud’s like some famous paintings which are not accessible to the public. Anyone with the price of admission to the Vatican can see Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. But his last paintings, Conversion of Saul (c. 1542–1545) and Crucifixion of St. Peter (1546–1550) are not viewable.
When in the fourteenth century a French knight displayed to pilgrims what he claimed was the blood-stained shroud of Christ, naturally that discovery attracted a great deal of interest.
The shroud of Turin has been much discussed by commentators interesting in asserting (or denying) its claim to be an authentic relic. Already in the fourteenth century, one Catholic bishop called it a fake. So, too, did John Calvin. But nowadays a number of Protestants think that it is genuine. And the Catholic Church takes no stand. Thanks to the limited scientific studies that have been permitted, there are legitimate doubts that the fabric is two thousand years old or that the red markings on it are blood. Casper doesn’t take up these questions of authenticity, but offers the first art historical account dealing with discussing “how it was understood as a sacred image in the era of its rapidly expanding public cult.” And that topic, it turns out, is interesting enough to deserve a book length discussion. The reason that the shroud is so interesting is clear if we consider one painting that he reproduces, Giovanni Battista della Rovere’s Deposition of Christ (1620), in the Galleria Sabauda, Turin. At the bottom we see Christ’s body on top of one half of the linen, with the rest of the fabric draped over him. And at the top, held by the angels, is an image of the shroud. The shroud thus is both “a material participant in the passion that contains traces of the body that touched it and also a true likeness, in the manner of a relief print, of Christ’s suffering and death.” In the seventeenth century, the shroud was thus thought to be very much like a painting.
Understood anachronistically, then, the photographs of the shroud may thus remind a modern viewer of an X-ray image of the body. That, of course, is a modern interpretation. Baroque scholars understood the shroud in the terms of their aesthetic theorizing. It was called a sketch by God-the-painter, using Christ’s blood as pigment. As artistic representations make dead things appear to be alive, so God the supreme painter made this image using his own body. As Casper says: “To properly ‘incarnate’ is . . . to make living flesh out of inert materials.” And just as nowadays we make replicas of admired paintings, so in the seventeenth century, admirers of the shroud asked that copies be made. More exactly, the shroud doesn’t just represent Christ, in the manner of a painting or sculpture, but was, if authentic, made by and of his body. Like a photograph, it is an indexical representation of its subject.
Understood anachronistically, then, the photographs of the shroud may thus remind a modern viewer of an X-ray image of the body.
Casper’s book doesn’t take any stand on claims about the shroud’s authenticity. That’s irrelevant, he claims, “for understanding the historical significance of this mysterious object. ” I do understand his reluctance to enter into that debate, especially because there is so much pnline discussion of this issue. Still, when in the epilogue he speaks with disappointment of “its rather diminished place in today’s collective imagination,” I am unsurprised. I grant that the shroud has a very interesting history. If it might be an artifact made by direct physical contact with the body of Christ, then (whatever we conclude about its theological significance), it is an extraordinarily interesting artifact. But if, rather, as may be more likely, it is merely a seven-century-old forgery, then surely it is much less interesting to anyone but specialist scholars like Casper, who employ it to reveal the aesthetic theorizing of the baroque. This excellent book reveals the distance between baroque and present day aesthetic theorizing.