Sacred and Profane

Caracciolo's The Young Saint John in the Wilderness (this image is significantly darker than the actual painting and is cut off at the bottom excluding the staff)

Caracciolo’s The Young Saint John in the Wilderness (1610) presents the youthful Baptist reclining against a rocky outcropping. The dark background consists of a rock wall, a large boulder behind the figure, and one that he leans against. In the darkness a few vine-like plants can be discerned, sparsely curling around the rocky landscape. John is nude, a vibrant red cloth is draped over the rock against which he leans, and curves down over his loins. He gazes out at the viewer with his head tilted slightly back, almost as if he is nodding at to us to come closer. The backward leaning position of his head causes the left side of his face to fall into shadow, while highlighting the crescent shape of his right side from his small, delicate chin to his smooth cheek and curving brow with a slightly arched eyebrow, which seems to convey another invitation. His right arm rests against the large rock, his bare shoulder and forearm accented by the light streaming in from a source at the upper left of the canvas, and also by the contrast between his white flesh and the shock of red drapery caught by the same light. Our eye follows the horizontal line of his right arm to his delicately curved wrist and extended index finger that point inward toward his chest, as if yet another invitation to draw near. The diagonal of his pointing finger leads our eye across his chest, molded by shadow, to the crook of the elbow in his left arm, down the forearm highlighted by the source of streaming light, to the hand that gingerly clasps his right thigh. His left leg rests gently on his bent right, the diagonals of both echoed by his attributive staff lying on the ground in front of him, around which curls the white scroll proclaiming the coming of the Lamb.

The composition is unified through its single source of light which serves to highlight John’s luminous flesh and mold his light, yet muscular, physique through shadow.  Also unifying the composition is the pervasive sense of touch. This sense is drawn to our attention through the dramatic juxtaposition of cold, dark stone and warm, glowing skin, and radiant drapery, as well as through John’s sensual pose, with the contact between his hand and thigh specifically. He is rendered so sensually that his identity is at first difficult to ascertain. He seems closer to an amorous cupid figure than to the stoic, ascetic character of John.

This emphasis on sensuality and physical touch problematizes the sacred context of the image by inserting the profane. In this sense, “sacred” refers to the higher spiritual attributes of saintly figures conveyed through their disavowal of the physical, while “profane” relates to the physicality of the body exemplified through secular themes of the body’s most basic needs and drives. For example, a saint became sacred when their bodies displayed such holy perfection and triumphed so completely over the physical that they did not decompose in death. Likewise, saintly characteristics often include a casting off of the physical in the context of material comforts, sensuality, and sex drive, exemplified by figures like Mary Magdalene, who threw away her jewels and lived a life of pious poverty, the ascetic St. Jerome who isolated himself in a cell with only his writings and a skull, caring not for clothing or even food, and the virginity of the Madonna, who was able to conceive Christ without the physical act of copulation. In contrast, the profane body is concerned with materiality and the drives of the flesh, ranging from hunger to sexuality.

In contrast to these models of humans whose spirituality triumphed over their physicality, Caracciolo presents us with a holy figure that seems every bit as physical as he does spiritual, inserting an erotic tone into devotional imagery. The purpose of a devotional image, a painting of a saint, was to aid prayer and meditation by giving the devotee a poignant and detailed image to focus on and a holy life to contemplate. John can be considered a devotional image here because he is positioned in the wilderness, referring to the period of his early life when he cast off all of his physical comforts, including his clothing, to live an ascetic life in spiritual preparation of his coming mission to preach the arrival of the Messiah. His spirituality and saintliness is thus accented by his isolated location, as well as his nudity, which both reflect his rejection of earthly things, and his staff with its Latin phrase proclaiming his holy mission.

Set against these signs of spirituality and contradicting the contemplation of the piety of an acetic saint are the visual cues that direct our attention to his bodiliness. His overtly erotic pose echoing the reclining Venuses of the Venetian Renaissance, his suggestive look and gesture, and his hand grasping his inner thigh function to establish John as a sexual being, in direct contrast with the supposed acetic character we are confronting, who was said to have given up every comfort of the flesh, including, like Christ’s other close followers, the possibility of a family and thus the expression of sexuality. Further heightening the eroticism of the image is the brilliant red drapery which curls sensually over his young naked body. The painted texture of the drapery is smooth and its undulating angles are gentle, suggesting the cloth is a soft and luxuriant material. The drapery lies across the large boulder which John reclines upon, shielding his body from its coldness and imparting a sense of comfort in an uncomfortable local. This softness and comfort are in direct opposition to the typical garment associated with John: his camel hair tunic, which he adopted during his sojourn in the wilderness. The purpose of the hairy garment was to fulfill his basic need to cover his nudity, but to mortify his flesh instead of giving it warmth and comfort through its itchiness and coarseness. While covering his nudity, this red drapery posits an antithesis of the camel hair tunic by imparting bodily comfort and heightening John’s sensuality through the juxtaposition of the soft cloth and his supple body. Although the red drapery is not a foreign attribute of John—it refers symbolically to the love of God and the blood sacrifice of Christ—and is found in both of the young Saint John paintings by Caravaggio (Saint John the Baptist c. 1602, Saint John the Baptist c. 1603-05) as well as his depiction of the beheading of Saint John (1608), included by Caravaggio but curiously lacking in Caracciolo’s painting is the John’s fur garment. Caracciolo seems to suppress this characteristic reference to the mortification of John’s flesh that would detract from the erotic and sensual quality of the painting by causing us to consider the contempt John had for his physical body instead of causing us to absorb the pleasure of touch he expresses in pressing his hand against his inner thigh.

Caravaggio's Saint John the Baptist

Caracciolo’s conflation of the sacred and the profane is similar to the conflation of the two traits by Caravaggio in his controversial painting Death of the Virgin (c. 1601-03). Aesthetically, Caravaggio and Caracciolo both use a palette of deep reds and earthy browns, and cast their subjects in deep shadow with a single source of light entering from the upper left of the canvas. Thematically, both emphasize the bodily qualities of saints over the spiritual, and both contain a conspicuous red drapery that takes the place of a holy attribute.

Caravaggio's Death of the Virgin

In Death of the Virgin, the incorruptible body of the Madonna is not seen gracefully alighting to heaven to join her son, but instead lays heavily upon an awkwardly positioned plank-like bed. Gravity pulls her left hand limply downward, lolls her head backward, and tugs her ankles down over the edge of the bed, emphasizing her death and grounding her firmly to the earth while also drawing attention to the physicality of her supposedly holy body. Just as the sensual John presents and antithesis of the acetic John by highlighting the physical body of a being who by definition of his saintly status overcame the body, the gravity-bound Virgin presents the antithesis of the ascending triumphant Queen of Heaven. Her pale sickly flesh and slightly bloated face and hands insert the profanity of decay into a sacred image of the undecayable, just as the touch of John’s thigh inserted the profanity of sexuality into the image of an asexual being.  Her heaviness and decay depict her as a bodily human at odds with her spiritual, transcendent title.

Furthering the downward pull of Caravaggio’s composition, emphasizing the force of gravity rather than the miracle of ascension, is the red drapery that singularly occupies the upper third of the canvas. The drapery is attached at an unseen point to the ceiling, and then drops down from either side. On the right side it curves down and is attached to the wall, sagging in the middle, while on the left side it drops straight down, dangling lifelessly, at the mercy of its own weight. This drapery occupies the area of the canvas where one would typically find a grouping of heralding angels, puffy weightless clouds, and the outstretched hand of Christ drawing the Virgin up toward heaven.  The heavenly attributes of angles and clouds are replaced by the heavy physicality of the drapery which, accented by its downward angles and sagging folds, negates the possibility of the upward movement of the ascension. Thus the drapery plays a role similar to that of the drapery in Caracciolo’s painting by standing in for a saintly attribute and insisting upon the opposite of the attribute.

Both Caracciolo and Caravaggio conflate the sacred and the profane by depicting and highlighting the physical, bodily aspects of their holy subjects. They present problematic images at odds with orthodox traditions that show saints as human figures rather than spiritual beings through both what they include and what they explicitly leave out. The reason Caracciolo inserted the profane into sacred imagery is unclear, but what results from the conflation of dichotomous terms, even to the eye of the 21st century, is an arresting and captivating work which holds our attention through its ambiguity and aesthetic appeal.