Humanity in the Arts

The critical question voiced by the art historian Moshe Barasch—"What tasks is the human figure made to fulfill in painting and sculpture, and how has it been employed by artists and understood by the viewer in varying periods?"—affects the interpretation(s) and valuing of the idea of humanity. Expressive of a diverse spectrum of religious values and cultural attitudes, the imaging of the human body has been instrumental in fertility rites, magical ceremonies, cult objects and rituals, idolatry, natural medicine, social advancement, intellectual achievement, and sacred correspondence. One of the significant components in the artistic renderings of humanity has been in the social and cultural constructions of gender, that is, what distinguishes the categories "feminine" and "mascu-line" in modes of behavior, demeanor, dress, and meaning. Biology determines sex, while society, from its privileged coordination of culture, economics, politics, and religion, conditions definitions of and attitudes toward gender.

An androgynous deity. Kuan-yin (China, 960–1279). © FOTO WETTSTEIN & KAUF; MUSEUM REITBERG ZÜRICH

Post-1960s scholarship, which introduced and incorporated the inclusion of the marginalized—that is, those previously neglected groups such as racial and ethnic minorities, the economically impoverished, and women—has prompted reevaluations of the canons and categorizations of Western history. Commensurately, this new scholarship critiqued and questioned the traditional litany of the distinctions between "East" and "West" from cultural, philosophic, and religious perspectives. Differing cultures define particularized patterns and structures for identical realities such as gender, as evidenced in the classical Mediterranean Aphrodite of Knidos (350 B.C.E.), the Indian Rukmini (tenth century), and the Chinese Kuan-yin (or Guanyin, 960–1279). Ostensibly these three images depict female bodies with some regional distinctions apparent, such as the small, almost adolescent breasts but thickened waist, wide hips, and heavy thighs on the Greco-Roman goddess of love as opposed to the narrowed waist and globular breasts on the Hindu deity of fertility or the wispy waist and prepubescent chest of the Buddhist purveyor of mercy and compassion. All three representations correspond to the principle of the human form as the vehicle through which the divine is expressed or manifested. All three interconnect in their gestural signs, which communicate the empathy between the feminine and fertility and the earth—from Aphrodite's right hand denoting female modesty, the site of generation, and sexual pleasure, to Rukmini's voluptuous display of her feminine attributes, to Kuan-yin's earthbound posture and right-handed gesture pointing toward the earth.

However, there is a disconnect here despite the ostensibly feminine presence of these three deities. For upon careful examination of physical characteristics there is the question of The allusion of spirituality in a classically inspired work. Apollo and Daphne (1622–1624) by Gian Bernini. Marble. © BETTMANN/CORBIS the gender ambiguity of Kuan-yin, who appears to be more androgynous than specifically male or female. Historians of religion, especially those specializing in Eastern religions, have debated the reasons for and the historical route of the transformation of the Indian Buddhist male bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara into the androgynous Chinese Buddhist bodhisattva Kuan-yin, who becomes ultimately the Japanese Buddhist female bodhisattva Kwannon. The present issue is not an attempt to unravel this religio-historical conundrum but rather to raise the question of cultural perceptions of gender and thereby of humanity. For by whatever name this deity is identified and by whatever anthropomorphic form configured, the fundamental questions of identification relate first to the fact that this is the deity of mercy and compassion—virtues that cultural conditioning may categorize as feminine or masculine—and second to cultural disparities in attitudes toward gender, meaning that the gestures, postures, and modes of behavior one culture (say, southern Europe) names as "male" and "female" are opposite to those of the Indian subcontinent or the Far East. Both in terms of artistic creation and scholarly interpretation, it is necessary to recognize that Western culture, and thereby Western scholarship, has traditionally been preoccupied with order and clarity. Gender distinctions and their ensuant visualizations may be more subtly rendered and understood in non-Western cultures and defy normative Western iconographic patterns, thereby proffering wider horizons for defining and evaluating universalized ideas of humanity.

The human body, whether male, female, androgynous, or hermaphrodite, is a carrier of meaning and values inscribed with subjective associations and objective perceptions, stylistic variations, and institutional identifiers. One of the most significant of those "inscribers" is religion. The enigma of religious art—the question of what makes art religious beyond the labeling of an image as religious—is a consideration in the visual comparison of the idea of humanity in Gian Bernini's seventeenth-century sculptures of Apollo and Daphne (1622–1634) and The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1645–1652). Each of these works is a "group" as opposed to an individual sculpture, that is, there is more than one person represented; in the former it is a mythological couple and in the latter an angel paired with the female mystic. So the dynamics of interaction between individuals becomes central to the ways that such sculptures project internally the idea of humanity. The Baroque characteristics of theatrical drama of the moment, of an upward swirling movement, and of theatrical lighting combine with a reaffirmed sense of the spirituality of the body to fashion an aesthetic that reflects the changing Counter-Reformation attitudes toward the human and the human body in opposition to the harmony, balance, order, and anthropocentricism of the Renaissance.

Bernini's two works challenge the viewer to consider the importance of posture, dress, and narrative in the projection of the idea of humanity through the vehicle of the human body in sculpture. Daphne appears almost completely uncovered, a nude female in the classic sense of the term as she gracefully swivels her body away from the clutches of her pursuer, the similarly minimally clad Apollo. The upward gyrations of her escape are transformed into an elegant series of curvilinear swirls of what appears to be drapery suggestively covering her pubic area and her left leg while skimming the inner edge of her right leg. Close observation, however, reveals that this drapery is the initiation of the trunk of the laurel tree that will enclose her and thereby protect her from Apollo. Her upraised arms curve into what had been her hands, which have transmogrified into laurel tree branches. Although both the running figure of Apollo and that of the metamorphosing Daphne are clearly modeled upon classical prototypes, Bernini's bodies lack the muscular weight and tension found in the classical Greek Zeus (Poseidon) or the classical Greco-Roman Aphrodite of Knidos. Despite the time factor—more than a century of cultural, medical, political, scientific, social, and theological advances—Bernini's figures appear softer to the eye, as if they were almost weightless and thus able to float off from the earth as opposed to the earthbound realistic renderings of the human body as muscled and monumental, characterized by the Renaissance. Further, this characterization of Apollo is that of a soft beautiful youth who hovers between masculinity and androgyny. Although the theme is secular, the ethereal quality Reverential or voyeuristic? The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1645–1652) by Gian Bernini. Altar of Cornaro Chapel, Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome. THE ART ARCHIVE /ALBUM /JOSEPH MARTIN of the sculpted bodies of Apollo and Daphne direct the viewer to consider the spiritual implications of this "chase."

Bernini's rendering of the bodily presence of the Carmelite mystic Teresa of Avila is almost bodiless as she sinks backward onto the rocky ledge (or cloud?) that is poised immediately beneath her. The lassitude of her body might suggest either a weightlessness caused by faint or trance or that graceful litheness of a ballerina as she "floats through the air." The vitality of this sculptured figure is the dramatic energy released by the swirls of drapery that envelope her while the elasticity of her protruding left hand and foot effect the pars pro toto of her swooned body. The tight whirling and spinning of the angel's robes contrast with the looser delicate layering of cloth that swallows the mystic's limp body. As opposed to the "in unison" posture of the two standing figures in Bernini's earlier work, the male angel stands erect as he looks down upon the supine figure of the female saint. The interrelationships thereby shift from one of physical or gender parity to one of dominance or empowerment. The visibly insubstantial nature of the saint's body creates an aura of spiritual apprehension.

The presence and signification of the familiar form of the angel as divine messenger directs the viewer to contemplate this work as religious art. The question becomes how an individual without a culturally trained Western eye or knowledge of Christianity would see these images. Is the attitude toward the body as corruptible, redeemed, or mystical unique to Christianity, Western culture, or even to this singular sculptor? The normative reading has been that this sculpture is a visualization of the sacramentalism of the human body in a moment of agapic love as appropriate to the Tridentine teachings of Roman Catholicism. Nonetheless, criticisms of this same image identify it as a secular, almost voyeuristic, depiction of female orgasm. The lens, then, through which images are seen ordains the method and mode of interpretation, as does the receptivity of the viewer, as discussed in the relatively new category of response theory (see Freedberg). Thus revisiting Barasch's question, it may now be paraphrased as: "What tasks is the human figure made to fulfill in painting and sculpture, and how has the viewer understood that image ?"