Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) did not merely paint differently from his predecessors — he made a different theological claim. Where Renaissance sacred art placed the divine in idealized, luminous, transcendent figures remote from everyday human experience, Caravaggio placed it in darkness, in the specific, in the body of a peasant woman who might be found dead in the Tiber River. His St. Matthew was a rough-handed laborer. His Virgin was the corpse of a drowned woman, her feet bare, her body swollen. His apostles were old men with dirty feet. The scandalized reaction of his patrons (several paintings were refused by the churches that commissioned them) was the appropriate response to what he was doing: insisting that the sacred was not located above human experience but within it — in the darkest, most specific, most physical moments of human life. The Council of Trent (1545-1563), the Catholic Church's response to the Protestant Reformation, had demanded that sacre...

Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) did with marble what Caravaggio did with paint: he made the sacred physical, the spiritual bodily, the transcendent tactile. Where Renaissance sculpture sought the ideal form — the perfected body in its classical equilibrium — Bernini sought the momentary: the exact instant of transformation, the precise second when one thing becomes another. His Apollo and Daphne captures the millisecond in which a woman becomes a tree, her fingers already sprouting leaves, her feet already rooting; his Rape of Proserpina shows Pluto's fingers pressing into Persephone's thigh so realistically that viewers reach out to touch the marble to confirm it is not flesh. His Ecstasy of Saint Teresa — the centerpiece of the Cornaro Chapel in Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome — depicts the Spanish mystic at the moment of divine union described in her autobiography: the angel's arrow piercing her heart, her body collapsing in an ecstasy that is simultaneously spiritual ...