Ordeal by Roses

“To me photography can be simultaneously both a record and a ‘mirror’ or ‘window’ of self-expression.”

 Eikoh Hosoe

 
 

Yukio Mishima photographed by Eikoh Hosoe

 
 

Bara (薔薇, “rose”), also known as the wasei-eigo (English words coined in Japan) construction “Men’s Love” (メンズラブ) or ML, is a Japanese jargon term for a genre of art and fictional media that focuses on male same-sex love, usually created by gay men for a gay audience. The term bara in relation to gay material for men originated in the 1960s, possibly as a result of Bara kei (Ordeal by Roses, published in 1961), a collection of semi-nude photographs of the gay author Yukio Mishima by photographer Eikoh Hosoe, and was reinforced by the early and influential gay men’s magazine Barazoku (薔薇族, lit. “rose tribe”), founded in 1971 and the first gay magazine in Asia to be sold at mainstream bookshops.

 
 

Killed by Roses or Ordeal by Roses (Bara-kei, 1961–1962). The series of dark, erotic images centered on the male body  was set in Mishima’s Tokyo house, positions Mishima in melodramatic poses.

 
 

Born inJapan in 1933, he decided to become a photographer at age 18. Since then Mr. Hosoe has been established himself as an internationally acclaimed photographer and professor. Mr. Hosoe has consistently pursued personal original directions in his work, focusing on the dialogue between men and women, life and death, the supernatural, theatre, and the nude and the landscape. His photographs have been recognized in major exhibitions spanning Asia, Australia, Europe, and the US, at venues including the Yokohama Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institute, the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, the Museum of Modern Art, the International Center for Photography, and The Ikeda Museum of 20^th Century Art. The Howard Greenberg Gallery has long represented his work in NYC. The many books of his work include Man and Woman; A Place Called Hiroshima; Ba-ra-kei: Ordeal by Roses; Eikoh Hosoe: Aperture Masters of Photography; Embrace; Butterfly Dream, and recently re-released by Aperture, Kamaitachi. Hosoe has been the director of the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts (Kiyosato, Yamanashi), since it’s opening in 1995. He has lead workshops in Japan and abroad.

Homoerotic photography has also been accredited as contributing to the bara genre, with Tamotsu Yatō and Haga Kuro mentioned by Tagame in particular.

 
 

*More photographs by Heikoh Hosoe on The Genealogy of the Style‘s Facebook Page:
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Tempted with a Melancholy Persistence

“For a long time I had not approached the forbidden fruit called happiness, but it was now tempting me with a melancholy persistence…”

Yukio Mishima

Confessions of a Mask

 
 

Mishima photographed by Shirou Aoyama (1956)

 
 

Photograph by Tamotsu Yatō

Leaning Against a Dusky Tree

 
 

仮面の告白 (Confessions of a Mask) is Japanese author Yukio Mishima‘s second novel. Published in 1949, it launched him to national fame though he was only in his early twenties.

The main protagonist is referred to in the story as Kochan. Being raised during Japan’s era of right-wing militarism and Imperialism, he struggles from a very early age to fit into society. Like Mishima, Kochan was born with a less-than-ideal body in terms of physical fitness and robustness, and throughout the first half of the book (which generally details Kochan’s childhood) struggles intensely to fit into Japanese society. Due to his weakness, Kochan is kept away from boys his own age as he is raised, and is thus not exposed to the norm. This is what likely led to his future fascinations and fantasies of death, violence, and sex. In this way of thinking, some have posited that Mishima is similar.

Kochan is a homosexual, and in the context of Imperial Japan he struggles to keep it to himself. In the early portion of the novel, Kochan does not yet openly admit that he is attracted to men, but indeed professes that he admires masculinity and strength. Some have argued that this, too, is autobiographical of Mishima, himself having worked hard through a naturally weak body to become a superbly fit body builder and male model.

 
 

San Sebastiano, Guido Reni, c. 1615

 
 

Mishima’s adolescent hero has a very special sexual fantasy after he recognized the high sexual appeal of depictions of St. Sebastian. In fact, his first ejaculation comes from staring at a picture in an art book of a painting of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian. Kochan fantasy is represented on the above cover of Mishima’s novel.Excerpt from Confessions of a Mask, wherein Yukio Mishima recalls his (“his character’s”) first ejaculation and masturbatory experience regarding this image:

 
 

Suddenly there came into view from one corner of the next page a picture that I had to believe had been lying in wait there for me, for my sake.
It was a reproduction of Guido Reni’s “St. Sebastian.”

The black and slightly oblique trunk of the tree of execution was seen against a Titian-like background of gloomy forest, and evening sky, somber and distant. A remarkably handsome youth was bound naked to the trunk of the tree. His crossed hands were raised high, and the thongs binding his wrists were tied to the tree. No other bonds were visible, and the only covering for the youth’s nakedness was a coarse white cloth knotted loosely about his loins.

I guess it must be a depiction of a Christian martyrdom. But, as it was painted by an esthetic painter of the eclectic school that derived from the Renaissance, even this painting of death of a christian saint has about it a strong flavor of paganism. The youth’s body—it might even be likened to that of Antinous, beloved of Hadrian, whose beauty has been so often immortalized in sculpture—shows none of the traces of missionary hardship or decrepitude that are to be found in depictions of other saints; instead there is only the springtime of youth, only light and beauty and pleasure.

His white and matchless nudity gleams against a background of dusk. His muscular arms, the arm of a praetorian guard accustomed to bending the bow and wielding of a sword, are raised at a graceful angle and his bound wrists are corssed directly over his head. His face is turned slightly upward and his eyes are open wide, gazing with profound tranquilty upon the glory of heaven. It is not pain that hovers about his straining chest, his tense abdomen, his slightly contorted hips, but some flicker of melancholy pleasure like music. Were it not for the arrows with their shafts deeply sunk into the his left armpit and right side, he would seem more a Roman athlete resting from fatigue, leaning against a dusky tree in a garden.
The arrows have eaten into the tense, fragrant, youthful flesh and are about to consume his body from within with the flames of supreme agony and ecstasy. But there is no flowing blood, nor yet the host of arrows seen in other pictures of Sebastian’s martyrdom. Instead two lone arrows cast their tranquil and graceful shadows upon the smoothness of his skin, like the shadows of a bough falling upon a marble stairway.

But all these interpretations and observations came later.

That day, the instance I looked upon the pictures, my entire being trembled with some pagan joy. My blood soared up; my loins swelled as though in wrath. The monstrous part of me that was on the point of bursting awaited my use of it with unprecedented ardor, upbraiding me for my ignorance, panting indignantly. My hands, completely unconsciously, began a motion they had never been taught. I felt a secret, radiant something rise swift-footed to the attack from inside me. Suddenly it burst forth, bringing with it a blinding intoxication…

Some time passed, and then, with miserable feelings, I looked around the desk I was facing. A maple tree at the window was casting a bright reflection over everything—over the ink bottle, my schoolbooks and notes, the dictionary, the picture of St. Sebastian. There were cloudy-white splashes about—on the gold-imprinted titled of a textbook, on a shoulder of the ink bottle, on one corner of the dictionary. Some objects were dripping lazily, leadenly, and others gleamed dully, like the eyes of a dead fish. Fortunately, a reflex motion of my hand to protect the picture had saved the book from being soiled.

This was my first ejaculation. It was also the beginning, clumsy and completely unpremeditated, of my “bad habit.”

 
 

 
 

Yukio Mishima’s seppuru. Photo: Tamotsu Yatō

Muhammad Ali as The Patron Saint of Sports

“The April 1968 Esquire cover of Muhammad Ali posing as the martyr St. Sebastian was one of the most iconic images of the decade, tying together the incendiary issues of the Vietnam War, race and religion. The image is so powerful that some people of a certain age remember where they were when they saw it for the first time. “

Associated Press

 

 
 

Muhammad Ali posing as Saint Sebastian, the patron saint of sports

 
 

SOURCE OF INSPIRATION

 
 

Saint Sebastian,  Francesco di Giovanni Botticini, ca. 1446–1497

 
 

 
 

“In 1967, Muhammad Ali, the world’s heavyweight champion, refused induction into the Army. He had converted to Islam, and under the tutelage of Eliah Muhammad he became a Black Muslim minister. When Cassius Clay became a Muslim, he had also become a martyr. In 1968, while he was waiting for his appeal to reach the Supreme Court, I wanted to pose as St. Sebastian, modeled after the 15^th-century painting by Botticini that hangs in the Metropolitan. I contacted Ali and explained this idea and he agreed to fly to New York to pose. At the studio, I showed him a postcard of the painting to illustrate the stance. He studied it with enormous concentration. Suddenly he blurted out, “Hey George, this cat’s a Christian!” I blurted back, “Holy Moses, you’re right Champ!” I explained to Ali that St. Sebastian was a Roman soldier who survived execution by arrows for converting to Christianity. He was then clubbed to death, and has gone down in history as the definitive martyr. Before we could affix any arrows to Ali, he got on the phone with his religious leader, Eliah Muhammad. Ali explained the painting in excruciating detail. He was concerned about the propriety of using a Christian source for the portrayal of his martyrdom. He finally put me, a non-practicing Greek Orthodox, on the phone. After a lengthy theological discussion Eliah gave me his okay. I exhaled and we shot this portrait of a deified man against the authorities. When I saw the first transparency, I believe my exact words to photographer Carl Fischer were “Jesus Christ, it is a masterpiece” Esquire had a sensational cover, and it was reproduced and sold as protest poster. Three years later the Supreme Court unanimously threw out Ali’s conviction. Allah be praised!”

George Lois

 
 

Around that time, Esquire had been featuring controversial covers dreamt up by George Lois, a former ad man. Lois has been widely credited for shaping a generational shift that reflected a turbulent era’s need for change, but he didn’t act alone. For fourteen years, starting in 1963, Carl Fischer consistently photographed the Esquire covers capturing the decade’s revolutionary changes during a time of an unwanted war, a sexual revolution, and a demand for civil rights.

 
 

 
 

We worked over the telephone. Lois never made layouts, never made drawings for the covers. He just had the idea of what the cover should be and he would call up and say, “We have a story about Ali and the fact that he lost his title. Why don’t we do something with him as Saint Sebastian?” And that’s the way it worked on all the covers. I would work out the problems of how to do it and Lois would sometimes show up at the shoots if they were in New York, which was the case here.

I had the arrows made by a model-maker in New York. I assumed we’d paste them on and that would be the end of it. Unfortunately, when you pasted the arrows on, they hung down. They didn’t stay horizontally as they should. So we made an elaborate device; we put a pole above Ali and hung monofilament lines, little fishing lines, from each arrow up to the pole. You could see the lines, slightly, on the final print, and they were retouched out. But they were hard to see because they were thin and transparent.

 
 

 
 

Nowadays, we wouldn’t have had that problem; we would’ve put the arrows in [digitally]. But at the time, they had to be pasted on him physically. It was a long, boring process. Ali had to hold the position for an hour.

Carl Fischer

 
 

SUCCESORS

 
 

Tom Cruise. Radar magazine, September/October 2006

 
 

“Sebastien Moura is St Sebastian” in Refresh.  June/July 2007. Photo by Aleksandar Tomovic

 
 

John Galliano. Esquire magazine 75th anniversary (2009)

 
 

Stephen Colbert. August 2009 issue

 
 

October 2009 issue. Ricky Gervais chose to restage a 1968 cover shot of Ali cover which showed boxer with six arrows piercing in his body

 
 

Esquire UK, 20th anniversary (2011)

Pierced by Arrows

Anonymous Nuremberg (XV cent) : St Sebastian (c. 1440). Bibilothèque Nationale (Paris, France). Woodcut.

 
 

Saint Sebastian is commonly depicted in art and literature tied to a post or tree and shot with arrows. This is the most common artistic depiction of Sebastian; however, according to legend, he was rescued and healed by Irene of Rome. Sometimes Sebastian is known as the saint who was martyred twice.

The earliest representation of Sebastian is a mosaic in the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo (Ravenna, Italy) dated between 527 and 565. The right lateral wall of the basilica contains large mosaics representing a procession of 26 martyrs, led by Saint Martin and including Sebastian. The martyrs are represented in Byzantine style, lacking any individuality, and have all identical expressions.

As protector of potential plague victims (a connection popularized by the Golden Legend) and soldiers, Sebastian occupied an important place in the popular medieval mind. He was among the most frequently depicted of all saints by Late Gothic and Renaissance artists, in the period after the Black Death. The opportunity to show a semi-nude male, often in a contorted pose, also made Sebastian a favourite subject.

 
 

His shooting with arrows was the subject of the largest engraving by the Master of the Playing Cards in the 1430s, when there were few other current subjects with male nudes other than Christ.

 
 

Andrea Mantegna

 
 

It has been suggested that the first picture was made after Mantegna had recovered from the plague in Padua (1456–1457). Probably commissioned by the city’s podestà to celebrate the end of the pestilence, it was finished before the artist left the city for Mantua. According to Battisti, the theme refers to the Book of Revelation. A rider is present in the clouds at the upper left corner (pic. 1). As specified in John’s work, the cloud is white and the rider has a scythe, which he is using to cut the cloud. The rider has been interpreted as Saturn, the Roman-Greek god: in ancient times Saturn was identified with the Time that passed by and all left destroyed behind him.

 
 

Giovanni Bellini (1460-64)

 
 

Sandro Botticelli (1474)

 
 

Albretch Dürer

 
 

Giovanni Antonio Bazzi “Il Sodoma” (1525)

 
 

The saint is ordinarily depicted as a handsome youth pierced by arrows. Predella scenes when required, often depicted his arrest, confrontation with the Emperor, and final beheading. The illustration in the infobox is the Saint Sebastian of Il Sodoma, at the Pitti Palace, Florence.

 
 

Cesare Da Sesto (1523)

 
 

El Greco

 
 

 San Sebastiano curato da un angelo (St Sebastian Healed by an Angel), Giovanni Baglione, c. 1603

 
 

Anton Van Dyck (1621-1627)

 
 

Peter Paul Rubens

 
 

José de Ribera (1651)

 
 

St Sebastien Attended by St Irene, Georges de La Tour, (c. 1649)

 
 

Honoré Daumier, 1849-52

 
 

A mainly 17th-century subject, though found in predella scenes as early as the 15th century, was St Sebastian tended by St Irene, painted by Georges de La Tour, Trophime Bigot (four times), José de Ribera, Hendrick ter Brugghen and others.

 
 

The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, by Ángel Zárraga (1911)

 
 

This may have been a deliberate attempt by the Church to get away from the single nude subject, which is already recorded in Vasari as sometimes arousing inappropriate thoughts among female churchgoers. The Baroque artists usually treated it as a nocturnal chiaroscuro scene, illuminated by a single candle, torch or lantern, in the style fashionable in the first half of the 17th century. There exist several cycles depicting the life of Saint Sebastian. Among them are the frescos in the “Basilica di San Sebastiano” of Acireale (Italy) with paintings by Pietro Paolo Vasta.

 
 

Antonio Bellucci, c. 1716-8

 
 

Saint Roch with Saint Jerome and Saint Sebastian (after a picture attributed to Alessandro Oliverio), John Singer Sargent, circa 1880-1881

 
 

Egon Schiele painted a self-portrait as Saint Sebastian in 1915

 
 

During Salvador Dalí’s “Lorca (Federico García Lorca) Period”, he painted Sebastian several times, most notably in his “Neo-Cubist Academy”

 
 

While Lorca was not a practicing Catholic, he was fascinated by Catholic liturgy and ritual, leading him to seek inspiration from religious themes such as the lives of saints which he would have studied while reading The Golden Legend by Jacobus de Vorgine. Sebastian relate to Lorca’s poetics as well as his relationship to Salvador Dalí.

 
 

Gabriele  d’Annunzio come S. Sebastiano, A. Salvini. In 1911, the Italian playwright Gabriele d’Annunzio in conjunction with Claude Debussy produced a mystery play on the subject.

 
 

St. Sebastian with St. Irene and Attendant,Eugène Delacroix, 1858

 
 

The American composer Gian Carlo Menotti composed a ballet score for a Ballets Russes production which was first given in 1944. In his novella Death in Venice, Thomas Mann hails the “Sebastian-Figure” as the supreme emblem of Apollonian beauty, that is, the artistry of differentiated forms; beauty as measured by discipline, proportion, and luminous distinctions. This allusion to Saint Sebastian’s suffering, associated with the writerly professionalism of the novella’s protagonist, Gustav Aschenbach, provides a model for the “heroism born of weakness”, which characterizes poise amidst agonizing torment and plain acceptance of one’s fate as, beyond mere patience and passivity, a stylized achievement and artistic triumph.

Sebastian’s death was depicted in the 1949 film Fabiola, in which he was played by Massimo Girotti.

 
 

In 1976, the British director Derek Jarman made his debut film, Sebastiane, which caused controversy in its treatment of the martyr as a homosexual icon. However, as several critics have noted, this has been a subtext of the imagery since the Renaissance.

 
 

Also in 1976, a figure of Saint Sebastian appeared throughout the American horror film Carrie, directed by Brian de Palma

 
 

Pietro Vannucci Perugino’s painting (c. 1495) of Saint Sebastian is featured in the  movie Wit  (Mike Nichols, 2001) starring Emma Thompson. Thompson’s character, as a college student, visits her professor’s office, where an almost life-size painting of Saint Sebastian hangs on the wall. Later, when the main character is a professor herself, diagnosed with cancer, she keeps a small print of this same painting of Saint Sebastian next to her hospital bed. The allusion appears to be to Sebastian’s stoic martyrdom – a role the Thompson character has willingly accepted for the betterment of all mankind. There may be a touch of authorial (or directorial) cynicism in making this “saintly” connection.

 
 

Still from R.E.M.’s  Losing My Religion (Tarsem Singh, 1991) promotional music video

 
 

*I will be posting more artistic representations of St Sebastian on The Genealogy of Style´s new Facebook page
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Appearances Can Be Deceiving

Stills from Lisa the Skeptic (Directed by Neil Affleck and written by David X. Cohen)

 
 

Lisa the Skeptic is the eighth episode of The Simpsons‘ ninth season, first aired on November 23, 1997. On an archaeological dig with her class, Lisa discovers a skeleton that resembles an angel. All of the townspeople believe that the skeleton actually came from an angel, but skeptical Lisa attempts to persuade them that there must be a rational scientific explanation. The episode’s writer, David X. Cohen, developed the idea after visiting the American Museum of Natural History, and decided to loosely parallel themes from the Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, which dealt with issues of separation of church and state and the debate between creationism and evolution. The episode received generally positive reviews.

It has been discussed in the context of virtual reality, ontology, existentialism, and skepticism; it has also been used in Christian religious education classes to initiate discussion about angels, skepticism, science, and faith.

 
 

Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes (A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings), is a short story by author Gabriel García Márquez written in 1955. It was inspired by a young boy named Armand Tait and his life as a farmer.

 
 

A group of The Simpsons enthusiasts at Calvin College have also analyzed the religious and philosophical aspects of the episode, including the issue of faith versus science. The episode has been compared with Gabriel García Márquez’s short story A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings and utilized as a teaching tool in a Saugerties, New York grade school class. In an exam on the subject, students were asked to use details from both  A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings and Lisa the Skeptic, in order to analyze the quotation “Appearances can be deceiving”.

Property of a Lost Thing

…”Everything that I had lost

Is mine, irretrievably mine

So distant from me that it is abandonment.”

Mario Benedetti

Property of a Lost Thing 

 
 

The phrase “losing my religion” is an expression from the southern region of the United States that means losing one’s temper or civility, or “being at the end of one’s rope.” Michael Stipe told The New York Times the song was about romantic expression.

He also told Q that “Losing My Religion” is about “someone who pines for someone else. It’s unrequited love, what have you.”

Stipe compared the song’s theme to Every Breath You Take by The Police, saying, “It’s just a classic obsession pop song. I’ve always felt the best kinds of songs are the ones where anybody can listen to it, put themselves in it and say, ‘Yeah, that’s me.'”

 
 

Michael Stipe participated on the production, packaging and photography of the album’s artwork, alongside Frank W. Ockenfels

 
 

The song was released as the first single from the group’s 1991 album Out of Time. Based around a mandolin riff, Losing My Religion was an unlikely hit for the group, garnering heavy airplay on radio as well as on MTV due to its critically acclaimed music video. The song became R.E.M.‘s highest-charting hit in the United States, reaching number four on the Billboard Hot 100 and expanding the group’s popularity beyond its original fanbase. It was nominated for several Grammy Awards, and won two for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal and Best Short Form Music Video.

The music video for Losing My Religion was directed by Tarsem Singh. As opposed to previous R.E.M. videos, Michael Stipe agreed to lip sync the lyrics. The video originated as a combination of ideas envisioned by Stipe and Singh. Stipe wanted the promo to be a straightforward performance video, akin to Sinéad O’Connor‘s Nothing Compares 2 U. Singh wanted to create a video in the style of a certain type of Indian filmmaking, where everything would be “melodramatic and very dreamlike”, according to Stipe.

 
 

Still from The Sacrifice (A. Tarkovsky, 1986)

 
 

Still from Losing my Religion music video

 
 

The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, Caravaggio, c. 1601–1602. This picture is probably related to Saint Matthew and the Angel (1602) and the The Sacrifice of Isaac (1603), all having a model in common

 
 

“Consider this…” (around minute 2:26)

 
 

Final scenes

 
 

Martirio di San Pietro (Crucifixion of Saint Peter), Caravaggio, 1600

 
 

The video begins with a brief sequence inside a dark room where water drips from an open window. Buck, Berry, and Mills run across the room while Stipe remains seated. A pitcher of milk drops from the windowsill and shatters, and the song begins. Director Singh drew inspiration from the Italian painter Caravaggio and Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky‘s The Sacrifice . The video is laden with religious imagery such as Saint Sebastian and Hindu deities, portrayed in a series of tableaux.

 
 

St. Matthew’s Passion (According to Caravaggio)

Detail from the 6th/7th century mosaics of the basilica of SS Cosmas and Damian in Rome. On the left is a winged man with the Gospel, a symbol of St Matthew the Evangelist.  The reason this is his symbol is because his Gospel starts with Jesus’ genealogy. The winged man represents Jesus’ human nature and incarnation.

 
 

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio burst upon the Rome art scene in 1600 with the success of his first public commissions, the Martyrdom of Saint Matthew and Calling of Saint Matthew. Thereafter he never lacked commissions or patrons, yet he handled his success poorly. He was jailed on several occasions, vandalized his own apartment, and ultimately had a death warrant issued for him by the Pope.

 
 

The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew (1599–1600)

 
 

The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew is a painting by the Italian master Caravaggio. It is located in the Contarelli Chapel of the church of the French congregation San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, where it hangs opposite The Calling of Saint Matthew and beside the altarpiece The Inspiration of Saint Matthew, both by Caravaggio. It was the first of the three to be installed in the chapel, in July 1600.

The commission (which, strictly speaking, was from his patron, Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte, rather than from the church itself), caused Caravaggio considerable difficulty, as he had never painted so large a canvas, nor one with so many figures. X-rays reveal two separate attempts at the composition before the one we see today, with a general movement towards simplification through reduction in the number of figures, and reduction – ultimately elimination – of the architectural element.

Caravaggio left off the Martydom and turned his attention to the companion piece, the Calling. This drew on his own earlier genre-pieces, Cardsharps and The Fortune Teller, but writ large. Apparently re-inspired, or perhaps with renewed self-confidence, Caravaggio turned back to the Martydom, but this time working in his own idiom. The third version dropped the architecture, reduced the number of actors, and moved the action closer to the viewer; more than this, it introduced the dramatic chiaroscuro which picks out the most important elements of the subject, in much the same way a spotlight picks out the action on a stage, but centuries before spotlights were imagined, and chose to represent the moment of greatest drama, as the murderer is about to plunge his sword into the fallen saint. This is the version we see today, the action caught at the moment of highest drama, the bystanders reduced to supporting roles by the sharply selective light, the whole giving the impression of a moment seen as if in a lightning flash.

 
 

Calling of Saint Matthew (1599–1600)

 
 

The painting depicts the story from the Gospel of Matthew (Matthew 9:9): “Jesus saw a man named Matthew at his seat in the custom house, and said to him, “Follow me”, and Matthew rose and followed Him.” Caravaggio depicts Matthew the tax collector sitting at a table with four other men. Jesus Christ and Saint Peter have entered the room, and Jesus is pointing at Matthew. A beam of light illuminates the faces of the men at the table who are looking at Christ.

Pope Francis has said that he often went to San Luigi as a young man to contemplate the painting. Referring both to Christ’s outstretched arm and Matthew’s response, Francis said, “This is me, a sinner on whom the Lord has turned his gaze.”

Over a decade before, Cardinal Matthieu Cointerel (in Italian, Matteo Contarelli) had left in his will funds and specific instructions for the decoration of a chapel based on themes related to his namesake, St Matthew. The dome of the chapel was decorated with frescoes by the late Mannerist artist Cavalier D’Arpino, Caravaggio’s former employer and one of the most popular painters in Rome at the time. But as D’Arpino became busy with royal and papal patronage, Cardinal Francesco Del Monte, Caravaggio’s patron and also the prefect of the Fabbrica of St Peter’s (the Vatican office for Church property), intervened to obtain for Caravaggio his first major church commission and his first painting with more than a handful of figures.

The Calling hangs opposite The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew. While the Martyrdom was likely the first to be started, the Calling was, by report, the first to be completed. The commission for these two lateral paintings — the Calling and the Martyrdom — is dated July 1599, and final payment was made in July 1600. Between the two, at the altar, is The Inspiration of Saint Matthew

 
 

Saint Matthew and the Angel (1602). It was destroyed in 1945 and is now known only from black-and-white photographs and enhanced color reproductions.

 
 

In the first version of The Inspiration of Saint Matthew, Saint Matthew and the Angel, the angel invades St. Matthew’s personal space and engages in what appears more direct intervention than divine inspiration. The angel intertwines with the old man, apparently whispering inspiration into his ear. The rejected painting can be compared to the earlier Caravaggio canvas of the Rest on the Flight into Egypt.

 
 

The Inspiration of St Matthew (1602)

 
 

In the work featured on the altar, the angel belongs to an aerial and sublime dimension, enveloped in an encircling rippled sheet. The restless Matthew leans to work, as the angel enumerates for him the work to come. All is darkness but for the two large figures. Matthew appears to have rushed to his desk, his stool teetering into our space. His expression is sober.

 
 

The Evangelist Matthew inspired by an Angel, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, 1661

 
 

Famous while he lived, Caravaggio was forgotten almost immediately after his death, and it was only in the 20th century that his importance to the development of Western art was rediscovered. Despite this, his influence on the new Baroque style that eventually emerged from the ruins of Mannerism was profound. It can be seen directly or indirectly in the work of Peter Paul Rubens, José de Ribera, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and Rembrandt, and artists in the following generation heavily under his influence were called the “Caravaggisti” or “Caravagesques”, as well as Tenebrists or “Tenebrosi” (“shadowists”). Art historian Andre Berne-Joffroy said of him: “What begins in the work of Caravaggio is, quite simply, modern painting.”

The Issue of Happiness

“This world is not a place where we can be happy. It wasn’t created for man’s happiness, though many believe this is the reason of our existence. I think we are here to fight, so that good and evil can clash within us, and good may prevail, thus enriching us spiritually. It’s difficult to say whether we are happy or not: it doesn’t depend on us… There are times when one regrets being born, but life also gives us surprising things that, alone, are worth living. The issue of happiness doesn’t exist for me: happiness as such doesn’t exist.”

Andrei Tarkovsky

 
 

Sculpting in Time

Andrei Tarkovsky was hardly the first or only filmmaker to engage with questions of temporality in film. Michelangelo Antonioni (obsessed with ennui and empty spaces), Andy Warhol (given to provocatively long running times) and Chantal Akerman (fixated on everyday ritual and minutiae) all made important contributions to the “cinema of duration,” to use a term coined by the critic André Bazin.

 
 

 Andrei Tarkovsky

 
 

But Tarkovsky, whose famous long takes signal a profound mistrust of the rapid montage of revolutionary Soviet cinema, was perhaps the most single-minded believer in the transcendent ability of the moving image to express what he called “the course of time within the frame.” He spoke of “the pressure of time” and described the process of finding a film’s rhythm as “sculpting in time” — a phrase that provided the title for his collection of essays.

In the Light of Individual Experience

 Images from the set of Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)

 
 

“Anyone who wants can look at my films as into a mirror, in which he will see himself. When the conception of a film is given forms that are life-like, and the concentration is on its affective function rather than on the intellectual formulae of poetic cinema (where the aim is manifestly to provide a vessel for ideas) then it is possible for the audience to relate to that conception in the light of individual experience.”

Andrei Tarkovsky

Sculpting in Time

The Eternal Recurrence of All Things

Photographs by Chema Madoz

 
 

“Whoever thou mayest be, beloved stranger, whom I meet here for the first time, avail thyself of this happy hour and of the stillness around us, and above us, and let me tell thee something of the thought which has suddenly risen before me like a star which would fain shed down its rays upon thee and every one, as befits the nature of light. – Fellow man! Your whole life, like a sandglass, will always be reversed and will ever run out again, – a long minute of time will elapse until all those conditions out of which you were evolved return in the wheel of the cosmic process. And then you will find every pain and every pleasure, every friend and every enemy, every hope and every error, every blade of grass and every ray of sunshine once more, and the whole fabric of things which make up your life. This ring in which you are but a grain will glitter afresh forever. And in every one of these cycles of human life there will be one hour where, for the first time one man, and then many, will perceive the mighty thought of the eternal recurrence of all things:- and for mankind this is always the hour of Noon”.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science)*

 
 

*The book’s title uses a phrase that was well-known at the time. It was derived from a Provençal expression (gai saber) for the technical skill required for poetry-writing that had already been used by Ralph Waldo Emerson and E. S. Dallas and, in inverted form, by Thomas Carlyle in “the dismal science”. The book’s title was first translated into English as The Joyous Wisdom, but The Gay Science has become the common translation since Walter Kaufmann‘s version in the 1960s. Kaufmann cites The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1955) that lists “The gay science (Provençal gai saber): the art of poetry”.

Person to Person

Tom had no idea how long he had been sitting there. It did not matter. She would never call. Yet, deep inside, he still believed in his power over her.

 
 

He always had power over her. Tom knew how to make her cry.

 
 

Even now, when he thought of her, it was her body that he missed. He wanted to touch her.

 
 

By leaving him, her absence gave her a power over him that she had never had when they were together. Tom was filled with an anxiety he could no understand.

 
 

He began to think that he saw her everywhere.

 
 

 
 

His room was filled with a terrible melancholy without her. When he would return, he hoped she would somehow be there. He was always disappointed.

 
 

He wondered if she would let a stranger touch her the way he had. He wondered if she had let strangers touch her when they were together.

 
 

Leaving a shop one afternoon, he saw her unobserved. Tom was paralyzed and could not move or speak. Later he realized that he was relieved that she had not seen him.

 
 

He dreamt one night that she came and kissed him, and with that kiss she entered his body. She looked through his eyes and listened with his ears. In the morning nothing had changed.

 
 

Tom found an old night gown of hers in the bottom of his closet. He liked to drape it over his head. It still smelled of her body.

 
 

Soon he began to wear a rose in his lapel, because it was her favorite flower. Her favorite things became his favorite things.

 
 

He hated himself for sitting there. He hated her for making him want to sit there. Tom began to believe that he could will her call, that his need for her could make her call him.

 
 

Suddenly, he knew, at that very moment she was dialing him. It was true. His power had made her call. Now the telephone would ring.

 
 

“Hello, no Tom isn’t here anymore. I know he’ll be sorry that he missed your call.”

Time is Eternally Present

Portrait of T.S. Eliot by Cecil Beaton, 1956

 
 

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

T.S. Eliot
Burnt Norton

Now Becoming Then

“When I say, ‘this is now’, it becomes then. There is no now, it appears to us as a moment, but the moment itself is an illusion. It is and isn’t, and this illusion is a series of about-to-be’s and has-beens, that put together seem an event. It is a construction, an invention of our minds. Its familiarity makes it invisible. Our lives are real dreams that have been just one moment, all at once, now.”

Duane Michals

 
 

Now Becoming Then, Duane Michals, 1978