By MENACHEM WECKER

FLORENCE, ITALY . When Edvard Munch cracked open his father’s bedroom door, he was cooling off after storming out of the house in the aftermath

of a fight. The Norwegian art-ist, famous for “The Scream” (1893-1910), was raised Lu-theran but didn’t share the devout faith of his father, whom he called “obsessively religious to the point of psy-chosis.”

It was natural that tem-pers would flare during a theological argument. The painter argued that no matter the severity of one’s sins, one could only suffer in hell for a maximum of 1,000 years; Dr. Christian Munch was adamant, however, that the wicked suffered a thousand times a thousand years in damnation.

Observing his father un-detected, Edvard Munch saw something he had nev-er before observed: his father kneeling in prayer. Munch closed the door, retired to his room and, unable to sleep, started to draw what would become the basis of his wood-cut “Old Man Praying” (1902).

“The soft light on the night-stand cast a yellow glow over his night shirt. I filled in the colors. As soon as it was fin-ished, I went to bed and slept soundly,” Munch wrote, as quoted in a publication of Oberlin College’s Allen Memo-rial Art Museum.

An impression of the wood-cut — another sold at Chris-tie’s in 2013 for $120,000 — ap-pears in the final room of the Palazzo Strozzi’s exhib-it “Divine Beauty from Van Gogh to Chagall and Fontana” (through Jan. 24) in Florence.

In some ways, Munch’s por-trayal of his father epitomiz-es many of the issues that sur-face in the show: the coexis-tence in religious art of the sublime and the deeply trau-matic, the struggle between faith and skepticism, and shift-

ing perceptions of those ten-sions and of the appropriate ways to delineate them in art.

Florence Cardinal Giuseppe Betori decided that it was im-portant to stage a show like “Divine Beauty” at a secular museum, according to Ludovi-ca Sebregondi, one of the ex-hibition curators.

“He wanted to ensure that the debate on religious art was not restricted to a sin-gle type of audience, but that the exhibition would prompt a discussion on the ways in which artists have addressed the theme,” Sebregondi said.

The curators chose to lim-it the show’s scope to the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries for two reasons, according to Se-bregondi. First, another co-terminous show in Florence, “He Became Flesh: Contem-porary Art and the Sacred” hangs a five-minute walk away at the Basilica of San Lorenzo (through Jan. 9), and that show addresses more re-cent works.

And, more importantly, the Palazzo Strozzi’s exhibition timespan signifies a centu-ry of the “rebirth of religious art,” in which “the ethical val-ues that were demanded of the art world helped to restore religious themes to their place as one of the categories con-sidered aesthetically pleas-ing,” Sebregondi said.

The exhibit, which is or-ganized thematically, fea-tures quite a few works by well-known artists: Munch’s “Madonna” and “Madonna II” (both 1895-1902); Georges Rouault’s “Ecce Homo” (1952) and “Veil of Veronica” (1946); Max Ernst’s “Crucifix” (1914); Van Gogh’s “Pietà (After Dela-croix)” (circa 1890); Henri Matisse’s “Green Chasuble” (1951); Jean-François Millet’s “Angelus” (1857-59); Marc Cha-gall’s “White Crucifixion” (1938); and Picasso’s “Christ on the Cross” (1896-97). The last two are worth reflecting upon further.

Chagall’s painting, from the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, is Pope Francis’ favorite (NCR, May 9-22, 2014). During its stay in Italy, the work traveled to the Florence Baptistery, where the pope viewed it on Nov. 10.

“Pope Francis appeared pleased and engaged as he viewed the Chagall painting,” according to an Art Institute of Chicago release, which add-ed that the pope told Douglas Druick, the Art Institute’s di-rector, “Caravaggio and Cha-gall are my favorite artists.”

The release stated that it was the first time the pope had seen the Chagall painting, which Druick called “a match-less moment in the life of this painting.”

The Picasso oil-and-char-coal work on paper, creat-ed when the artist was in his teenage years, drew consider-able controversy for its under-developed head.

“Some have likened Christ’s head to a dog or a wolf,” notes the Palazzo Strozzi wall label, “but blasphemous intent is unlikely in a 15-year-old.”

Asked why Picasso, who had already gotten himself into quite a bit of trouble as a teenager, couldn’t have in-tended the work to be blasphe-mous, Sebregondi admits that the artist was “a very preco-cious youngster.” However, she said, “at the age of 15, one is undoubtedly still too young to be able to countenance the full problematique that lies behind an image such that of the crucified Christ with an animal’s head.”

The young artist likely was unaware at the time of Roman crucifixions with dog’s heads in catacombs, or depictions of saints with dog’s heads, ac-cording to Sebregondi.

She added that Picasso, “de-spite his openly avowed athe-ism,” is not blasphemous in his 1930 “Crucifixion,” which is in the collection of Paris’ Picasso Museum.

Picasso’s “Christ on the Cross” comes about halfway through the exhibit in a sec-tion titled “Crucifixion, Depo-sition, Resurrection.”

It is preceded by sections on “From Salon to Altar,” “Rosa Mystica,” “Life of Christ: The Annunciation to the Virgin Mary,” “Nativity and Child-hood of Christ,” “Miracles and Parables,” “The Passion” and “Last Supper, Via Crucis.”

The rest of the exhibit is ar-ranged in sections on “Depo-sition, Pietà, Resurrection,” “Severini: Mural Decoration from Spirituality to Poetry,” “Architecture,” “The Church” and “Prayer.”

The sections, Sebregondi said, are meant to move from the “crucial turning point” in the 1860s — when Pope Pius IX opened the Vatican’s first religious art museum amid a time otherwise typified by art-ists displaying a “certain hes-itancy” toward religious art — through “calmer and more contemplative” sections, such as those devoted to the Virgin Mary.

The exhibit was designed to evoke the architecture of a cloister, with open arches that “allude to the spaces of mod-ern art,” she said.

Some works, such as Munch’s “Madonna II” were included for their ability to “trigger a debate,” according to Sebregondi.

Another such work is Wil-liam-Adolphe Bouguereau’s “Flagellation of Jesus Christ”

(1880), which, per a wall label, “caused a stir when the art-ist allowed aesthetic consider-ations to prevail over the dra-matic austerity traditionally associated with the subject.” In 1880, the artist was criti-cized for “imbuing the flagel-lation with the mood of a typ-ical Salon picture, thus caus-ing aestheticism to prevail over a sense of drama.”

To modern eyes, the paint-ing, like most of Bouguereau’s works, is likely to conjure a good deal of sentimentality, and that’s true of many of the more illustrative works in the exhibit.

Exceptions include Glyn Warren Philpot’s “Angel of the Annunciation” (1925), which casts the viewer as Mary, as the angel kneels, with cloak aflutter, and offers a lily. The viewer gets to de-cide not only whether to be open to the angel’s appear-ance, but also to the frame as a religious painting.

Jean-François Millet’s “An-gelus,” on loan to the exhib-it from Paris’ Musée d’Orsay, has generated a different sort of notoriety. The work depicts a man and a woman, with heads bowed in prayer, stand-ing in a field breaking from digging potatoes.

They recite the prayer de-voted to the Virgin surround-ed by a pitchfork, a basket and a wheelbarrow. In the dis-tance, the field dissolves into a yellow, purple, pink and green sunset, and what ap-pears to be a church steeple peeks out from over the hori-zon. As the title betrays, the bells are indeed ringing, call-ing people to prayer.

In 1865, Millet said, “The idea for ‘The Angelus’ came to me because I remembered that my grandmother, hearing the church bell ringing while we were working in the fields, always made us stop work to say the Angelus prayer for the poor departed.”

The work, notes the exhib-it wall label, has become a

“global icon for spirituality as-sociated with the sentiment of nature and of man’s toil, conveyed in the simple yet sol-emn gestures of the two fig-ures who stand out against a sweeping landscape.”

The Musée d’Orsay website is quick to caution that the work is a “childhood memo-ry” and “not the desire to glo-rify some religious feeling; be-sides Millet was not a church-goer.” (No word on why some-one who didn’t go to church couldn’t also want to glorify a sense of the sacred.)

When the Louvre tried to purchase the work in 1889, “it triggered an unbelievable rush of patriotic fervor,” the site notes, and in 1932, it was “lacerated by a madman.”

Had she had unfettered ac-cess to show whatever she wanted in the exhibit, Se-bregondi would have paired the Millet with Salvador Dalí’s “Atavism at Twilight” (1933) at the Museum of Fine Arts in Bern, Switzerland. Mil-let’s work clearly influenced Dalí, who had seen a copy of it in the school he attended as a child. Dalí turned the man into a skeleton; moved the wheelbarrow upon the skel-eton’s head, and set the scene in the wilderness, rather than a field.

Seeing Millet’s work aroused an “obscure sense of anguish” in Dalí as a child, “a sense of anguish so strong that the memory of the two silhouettes was to stay with him for many years,” accord-ing to Sebregondi.

“Displaying his picture alongside the painting that in-spired it would have allowed us to muse on how an idyllic 19th-century work of religious art turned into a very disturb-ing picture in the 20th centu-ry,” she said.

[Menachem Wecker is co-author of

Consider No Evil: Two Faith Tradi-

tions and the Problem of Academic

Freedom in Religious Higher Edu-

cation.]

THEOLOGYNATIONAL CATHOLIC REPORTER DECEMBER 18-31, 2015 3a

‘Divine Beauty’ exhibit traces religious art’s ‘rebirth’

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, “Flagella-tion of Jesus Christ” (1880)

—Art courtesy of Palazzo Strozzi

Glyn Warren Philpot, “Angel of the Annunciation” (1925)