La aparición de San Francisco de Asís al Papa Nicolás V, con donantes (Saint Francis of Assisi Appearing before Pope Nicholas V, with Donors) by Antonio Montúfar 1628
The following essay was submitted for ARTF 111 instructed by Dr. Martina Hesser of San Diego City College on 21 July, 2020.
INTRODUCTION:
This paper will describe and discuss an original artwork from a virtual visit to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Artwork chosen for this paper is titled “Saint Francis of Assisi Appearing Before Pope Nicholas V, with Donors (La aparición de San Francisco de Asís al Papa Nicolás V, con donantes) by Antonio Montúfar in 1628. This particular artwork stuck out mostly because of an attraction to low-key images. The culmination of messaging in cultural works will also be a focus. Museums could do well by creating a more personalized and interactive experience. Shifting through pages is informative, but lacks cowbell.
DESCRIPTION:
Montúfar paints stylized characters based on legend and real people. Characters are dressed in expensive clothing with individualized posing. Oil on canvas this piece measures 42 1/2 x 34 1/4 in, unframed. This is not a bright painting, but the use of a single candle is inferred to be so powerful that its radiance flows throughout the entire space, from left to right, including those who would be backlit. Each protagonist has their own gesture with exception to the three figures, dressed in very regal black clothing, in the lower left which have similar 3/4 pose. The similarity, if not exact, head tilts and shape of their faces add to the children’s unquestionable familial resemblance. The eyes easily flow clockwise from the child in the foreground to the father, then sister in the bottom left corner of the frame. Further clockwise, the eyes move to and above a monk to a priest in white holding a large stick with a lit candle at the end. Up to this point, movement up to the left is made easier by the 3 steps in the middle of the frame. This entire transition clockwise is mirrored in the right of the frame starting with a pious image of Pope Nicholas V kneeling in red papal attire.
PRESENTATION OF RESEARCH:
The pious image of Pope Nicholas V kneeling in red papal attire adds a much needed punch to the dark and cryptic nature of the scene. The painting itself has a coarse look to it, similar to using a high ISO setting on a DSLR camera in low light. With only 3 light sources visible within the painting itself, it is easy to imagine how dark the actual scene would have been in the Tomb of Saint Francis of Assisi in 1449. The robe of Saint Francis has a thick, fuzzy, wool-like textural appearance to it. Characters within the painting are slightly out of scale, especially the Peruvian family at the bottom left corner. In real life they would have been tiny in comparison to the other characters, given the dimensions implied in the painting. Linear perspective does not seem to be used, but vertical and horizontal lines do help to define negative space framing the main subject.
A suggestion in the curator notes, by Ilona Katzew in 2008 states, “The lavish attire of the donors suggests that they were members of Peruvian nobility.” Standing in front of this piece the obviousness of skill and forethought would be evident. Next thought that comes to mind is, “what was the impression it would have given an indiginous person in the Americas when this new and powerful force spread throughout the New World?” Conversion of local peoples to Catholicism was a multifaceted program that experienced a number of challenges. Due to the lack of written language or outright obliteration, not much commentary from indiginous peoples about their experience of conversion has survived. R. Po-Chia Hsia’s commentary on the book The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico by Robert Ricard reads, “He details the writings of the friars, many of them in Nahuatl and other indigenous languages; describes their attempts to segregate the indigenous populations from contact with Spanish settlers and the Spanish language; and discusses various doctrinal (Eucharistic devotion), cultural (morality plays in indigenous languages), and charitable works (hospitals and schools) of the missionaries. He presents information on the Christian education of native elites while not forgetting to address the problem of native resistance (Po-Chia Hsia page 225, par 1).” This one-sidedness of history has led to a forgotten narrative and perspective in Christianity.
The Catholic Church did well to commission enough works to continue a collection of information, spanning generations. Messaging is typically embedded in: symbology; iconography; inference of perspectives; ideas like: tenebroso, contrapposto and the many riddles of light and shadow that sway human emotion. But the artistic injection of patrons into historical events to associate themselves with the divine, or as divine themselves, is contradictory to the historical record. Crawford Gribben writes about the irony of rhetoric in religious teachings in Rhetoric, Fiction and Theology: James Ussher and the Death of Jesus Christ. False narratives were exported on a massive scale from those in power in Europe to indiginous peoples in far away colonies. Mercantilism grew lockstep with colonialism and profits flooded to Europe during the 17th century. “The problem with the painters was not just their historical inaccuracy, though that issue could be raised; their very method of finite representation limited the utility of their art. Rejecting the twin dangers of open exegesis and closed representation, Ussher was arguing that theological veracity required the exploration of textual liminality, an exploration that ‘proper speech’ allowed but religious art and high Calvinist theology did not (Gribben page 54, para 2).” An example of this is the Peruvian Family who were obviously not alive in 1428 when Pope Nicholas V visited the Tomb of Saint Francis — that visitation itself is also sourced in legend.
“Binary Thinking” is best defined in the context of having simple contrasting minds about an idea: something is either good or evil; was it God or the Devil; angels or demons; did someone say something divinely inspired or was it heresy? The lack of grey area narrative in religious rhetoric had been making the rounds endlessly for generations. The results of this type of brand messaging have been cultivated and delivered to far away lands where the cultural practice would be at deadly odds and continues to present. In her article Context Matters: Studying Indigenous Religions in North America, by Sarah J. King, she writes,
“How do we understand this claim of Alfred’s that indigenous teachings are diminished by being thought of as an actual religion? He is making a political argument. Scholars of religious studies recognize that the social and political origins of the term ‘religion’ shape the study of religion in broad and critical ways, by defining what does and does not count as religion. Since the origins of ‘religion’ and its study are Christian, religion has historically been defined in terms of belief, and often as the beliefs of individual people (Nye, 2008).” Through the colonial process, as European Christians moved around the world, they struggled to understand the diverse cultures and philosophies they encountered. They brought the category of ‘religion’ with them, to help them order and understand the unfamiliar (Asad, 1993). In indigenous North America, individual beliefs are much less relevant than relationships and ceremonies. Nonetheless, indigenous ways of life have been recast in Western terms, made into ‘actual religions’, in order to render them more familiar. Even the use. of the word religion to describe the lives of indigenous people is a part of this process, since the category of ‘religion’ arises in Western (and not indigenous) epistemology. The challenge, then, is that those who use the ideas and practices of Western knowledge systems in order to understand indigenous ‘religion’ can end up decontextualizing them, turning them into poorer versions of Christianity.”
SUMMARY:
The idea of doing something over and over again expecting a different result gets no one anywhere. We know this because of the evolution of art itself taking us from naturalistic observations made on cave walls to today’s mixed media artists. It is terrible how the deadly spread of Colonialism during European Expansion was made possible by the many wonderful innovations in art. As we are now in a Renaissance, it is imperative that artists look again to the past for inspiration. We must explore the histories, cultures and arts through other languages and lenses to know ourselves better as humans.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gribben, Crawford. “Rhetoric, Fiction and Theology: James Ussher and the Death of Jesus Christ.” Seventeenth Century, vol. 20, no. 1, Spring, 2005, pp. 53 — 76. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/0268117X.2005.10555550.
King, Sarah J. “Context Matters: Studying Indigenous Religions in North America.” Religion Compass, vol. 7, no. 11, Nov., 2013, pp. 498 — 507. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1111/rec3.12066.
Hsia, R. Po-Chia, “The Catholic Historical Review: One Hundred Years of Scholarship on Catholic Missions in the Early Modern World.” Catholic Historical Review, vol. 101, Apr., 2015, pp. 223 — 241. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1353/cat.2015.0052.
