Heaven on Earth : The Visions of Five Painters

What is it about the particularities of painting that has allowed artists to explore, in a variety of ways and with a sometimes surprising degree of freedom, the vexed relations between the mundane and the celestial? In his latest book Heaven on Earth (Thames and Hudson) art historian T.J. Clark draws on examples from Giotto to Picasso to provide an exciting new history of the depiction of the divine.

Professor Clark in conversation with LRB contributing editor Jeremy Harding.

Recording of the talk on October  15,  2018, London Review Bookshop

Information  on the book : Thames and Hudson 

About suffering they were never wrong, and the Old Master chosen by WH Auden to illustrate agony in a vacuum, the world’s indifference to tragedy, was Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s sumptuous painting of a pair of white legs disappearing into green water, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”. Who notices or cares? Bruegel’s “ploughman may/ Have heard the splash . . . But for him it was not an important failure”. And “the expensive delicate ship that must have seen/ Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,/ Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”

 Auden was writing in 1939. Bomb blasts and airborne terror made Icarus a modern icon. Matisse created a jazzy cut-out of the boy, elegantly adrift, in 1943. Picasso’s giant strip cartoon of a tattered apparition plunging head downward, helplessly splayed limbs reiterating Bruegel’s, inaugurated Unesco’s Paris headquarters in 1958. This “Icarus”, writes TJ Clark in Heaven on Earth, a finely wrought account of attempts from Giotto to Picasso to represent paradise, “is a defining and appalling statement of post-epic perspective . . . The battle for heaven on earth (the classless society, the thousand years of the purified race) was over”.

Utopian modernism has been Clark’s lifetime study, to which this book is an imaginative, original, heartfelt coda. A Marxist historian, professor emeritus at Berkeley, Clark unpicked the cul de sac of Malevich’s “Black Square” in Farewell to an Idea (1999), written in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s demise, and brilliantly awakened us to impressionism’s social radicalism in The Painting of Modern Life (1984). Now, in what reads like valediction, he mourns that “the wonderful easy godlessness of French painting . . . still my teacher of the beauty and depth that so-called secularisation can attain, has little to tell us, sadly, as men in orange jumpsuits plead for their lives on camera . . . In a time of renewed wars of religion, I find myself obliged to reach back to the late medieval and early modern.”

So to the smell of burnt flesh in Bruegel’s “Triumph of Death”, to soldiers killing civilians in ice-cold slaughter in the frozen horror of “Massacre of the Innocents”. Bruegel, peasant chronicler, material realist, perfect Old Master to enthral a Marxist, stands central in Clark’s story of painting’s potent scepticism “in merciless times”. In the “Land of Cockaigne”, Bruegel’s bloated figures collapsed from surfeit, bones skeletally tap-dancing across the table, mock the very concept of heaven. Yet in the painting’s relish for daily delight, its ivory haze, watery lightness, tilted surfaces of “all the contents of the world’s full stomach”, Bruegel accepts — celebrates, even? — human existence without transcendence.

In a fanciful but delightful trope, Clark traces art’s “new age” of questioning back to a black square framing Giotto’s doubting saint in “Joachim’s Dream”. The gorgeous angel of the reverie, forked tongue of hair rhyming with fading pink coat tails, surges through the sky-blue fresco. Neither wholly flesh nor spirit, at once translucent and opaque, it is an emblem of art leaping into life, the becoming of an image. Thus Giotto ties heaven to earth and inaugurates “the drive to match more and more of the detail and substance of the material world — the drive we now (half-guiltily) call European painting”.

 Clark unpacks that secularising impulse through Renaissance and baroque highlights. Veronese, accused by the inquisition of worldly ornamentation, defiantly defends art’s material abundance: “When I have some space left over in a picture I adorn it with figures of my own invention.” More mysteriously, in “Poussin and the Unbeliever”, Clark suggests the magisterially draped, veiled figure positioned beyond the sacred space in “The Sacrament of Marriage” is a sinister, marginalised outsider speaking for “life’s dividedness”.

Poussin called himself “I who make a profession of mute things”; artists through history have countered absolutist orthodoxies via the rich, ambiguous silence of images. That is worth remembering in our age of one-shot politicised art. Clark’s final juxtaposition hints as much: Bruegel’s “Tower of Babel”, satirising the folly of attempting heaven on earth, versus Vladimir Tatlin’s poignant idealist “Monument to the Third International”, which imitates Bruegel’s grandiloquent spiralling structure — and never got built.

“Utopias reassure modernity as to its infinite potential. But why? It should learn — be taught — to look failure in the face,” Clark warns in his final chapter, a desperate anti-capitalist rant entitled “For a Left with No Future”. Concluding a volume that gracefully skims a tightrope between attentive looking and political thinking, this sits oddly — yet it nails the emotional gravitas of Clark’s entire venture. For Heaven on Earth comes alive ultimately as Clark’s record of intellectual struggle to make love of pictures coexist with leftwing commitment, told with exceptional honesty and fraught faith in art’s encompassing of all human experience: “Icarus goes down to darkness, yes, but Joachim shakes off despair.”

Heaven on Earth by TJ Clark — paradise lost.  By  Jackie Wullschlager. The Financial Times  , October 26, 2018

It’s difficult to describe the intense blueness of the sky in Giotto’s 14th century fresco, Joachim’s Dream. Art historian T.J. Clark isn’t so sure that we should try. In his handsomely illustrated new book about visions of divinity, Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come (Thames & Hudson), Clark suggests how the ‘muteness’ of painting is spoilt by the clumsy assertions of language. Paintings, he explains, invite us to envisage things, rather than to articulate them with an almost impolite eloquence.

In Giotto’s image, an angel swoops down from an azurite sky, bearing good tidings for Joachim, who sleeps crouched at the foot of his modest hut. The painting suggests the possibility of heavenly beings that are close at hand, hovering in the upper reaches of our imperfect human realm. But it’s the smallest details – the fork of the angel’s hair, the black square at Joachim’s shoulder, the fold of his tunic at the lower edge of the frame – that Clark attends to.

These details alert us to how spatially disconnected these figures are to each other. There is a distance between them and it is about to be breached. Heaven is a place apart from earth, but still the angel descends to deliver to Joachim the news of his wife’s pregnancy. She will give birth to Mary, who will, in turn, give birth to Christ. This is a painting, Clark suggests, that catches a world just as it is about to be transfigured, on the cusp of an immense change.

If paintings invite us to see things differently, offering the glimpse of an alternative ‘life to come’, then it makes sense to understand them as political and philosophical objects as much as theological ones. The paintings of our earthly encounters with the divine might inspire us to think more radically about how the world could be. They might suggest ways of re-envisaging collective futures. Clark is never so bald as to assert this. He asks instead how the old masters sought to imagine another world, noticing how they were inspired, agitated and troubled by that task. And he calls upon them, specifically for the purposes of a modernity in which dreams of the future feel increasingly stalled or dangerously factional.

Clark trains his attention on five painters – Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Giotto, Pablo Picasso, Nicolas Poussin and Paolo Veronese – and their particular visions of ‘heaven on earth. There’s Poussin’s ceremonial Sacrament of Marriage 1648), in which the Virgin Mary, kneeling under a colonnade for her betrothal to Joseph, is crowded by a stream of interested guests, and Veronese’s bustling Christ in the House of Simon (c.1559–60), a noisy scramble of friends, disciples and dogs. Then comes Bruegel’s sprawled gluttons in The Land of Cockaigne (1567), reminding us of earthly sins, and Picasso’s The Fall of Icarus, a mural of a boy tumbling from the sky that was commissioned by UNESCO in 1958.

Clark gives to each painter his peculiar attention. In Giotto’s Raising of Lazarus (c.1303–05), he notices the way Christ’s extended fingers draw down the pounding blue of the sky to the plain colour of the earth. In Poussin’s Sacrament of Marriage, it is not Mary, but the upright, unnamed woman watching on from the left who seems to witness the scene differently. In Veronese’s Christ in the House of Simon, it’s the dog licking its paw near to the Magdalene washing Christ’s feet that draws out the humility of the earthly next to the grandeur of the sacred.

The pleasure of this book lies in the quality of these observations – Clark’s relentlessly keen attention to the small details that ought not mean a great deal but often send you reeling. He makes you want to squint close to the original, seeing it suddenly aslant. Painting, unlike language, he observes, ‘has at its disposal kinds of intensity and disclosure, kinds of persuasiveness and simplicity’. It is Clark’s trademark power of inspection, both profound and precise, that get us a little closer to these things. Giotto’s sky, he notes, is not just blue, but has a curiously mineral quality, a solidity, a ‘matter-of-factness’, even as an angel arcs by.

But does it make sense to come back to these paintings now? They are, Clark argues, more meaningful than ever in a contemporary culture marked by religious extremism and the apparent failure of political vision. ‘We need the wisdom’, he writes, ‘of men for whom the Massacre of the Innocents and the smell of heretics’ burnt flesh were commonplace.’  Perhaps. And yet, if the sentiment is true, the specification of ‘men’ still jars. Doesn’t it make sense to look to new mistresses, as well as the old masters, for visions of another world?  Still, this remains such a challenging book, probing and torquing, full of Clark’s own dynamic vision.

T.J. Clark’s Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come (2018) is published by Thames & Hudson.

What Can Historical Visions of Heaven on Earth Teach Us About the Future? By  Shahidha Bari. Frieze , December 3, 2018.