The Vision of Saint Bernard marks Fra Bartolomeo's return to art in 1504.

Solemnity of St. Bernard of Clairvaux August 20

Bernard of Clairvaux (+ 1153) is considered the last of the Fathers of the Church and is a Doctor of the Chrurch.

  

The Vision of Saint Bernard (1504),

Fra Bartolomeo (1472-1517),

Uffizi Museum, Florence, Italy.

BEFORE FRA BARTOLOMEO (nicknamed Bacciol joined the Dominican Order, he had been an ardent disciple of the firebrand preacher Savonarola. He was spellbound by the apocalyptic warnings proclaimed from the pulpit at San Marco by the controversial friar who condemned the citizens of Florence for their decadent ways, and artists in particular for adopting pagan themes while their religious works lacked humility and reverence. Baccio participated in the "Bonfire of the Vanities" whereupon artists who had a change of heart submitted their secular and irreverent works to the flame. He even barricaded himself inside the Dominican priory of San Marco with five hundred other supporters when it was stormed by a mob opposed to the theocrat's mystical rule of the Republic. Baccio promised God he would become a friar himself if his life were spared. He survived only to see his hero tried, hanged, and burnt at the stake in 1498. He had once painted a portrait of Savonarola as a prophet. Now chastened by his vow, Baccio donned the cowl of a Dominican and withdrew from making art for a number of years.

The Vision of Saint Bernard marks Fra Bartolomeo's return to art in 1504. The friar was commissioned to paint it as an altarpiece for a nobleman's private chapel. In this work he brings to the subject matter an austerity of style that is reflective not only of Savonarola's views on sacred art, but those of Saint Bernard as well.

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) was the dynamo behind the Cistercian reform, a movement within the Benedictine family to return to the rigours of its primitive rule. A theologian, a judge, a diplomat, and preacher, a poet, a mystic, and an advocate of Marian devotion, Bernard left his imprint on art history by disagreeing with the sumptuousness advocated by Abbot Suger whose monastery chapel of Saint Denis on the outskirts of Paris exemplified the new dazzling effects of Gothic art and architecture. Suger believed that only the finest embellishments were worthy of sacred space, and he decorated his sanctuary with golden vessels, stained glass, carved capitals, tapestries, and lustrous vestments. Suger felt that more is better' But Bernard found such finery a distraction to the contemplative soul, stunting the imagination and making it passive before the dazzling effects of art. For Bernard, then, less was better for the soul, and he advocated a kind of artistic minimalism that could prompt, but not derail, a prayerful monk toward contemplation of things beyond the material world. In the Cistercian monasteries, clear glass was preferred over stained-glass windows, silver was substituted for gold vessels, walls and vestments were unadorned. One could go so far as to say that Bernard presaged the aesthetics of Protestantism, the Enlightenment, and Modernism, as early as the twelfth century. But one thing is clear: in their advocacy for a sobriety and noble simplicity in art, qualities that would enkindle devotion and reverence in the viewer, Savonarola and Bernard were kindred spirits. Fra Bartolomeo's painting reflects this.

When he was the prior of San Marco, Savonarola created visual images in his homilies to great effect, and he encouraged those Dominicans not gifted in oral preaching to pursue the study of the plastic arts in order that they might preach visually in ways that could distil complex theological ideas into beautiful and simple images. It was his idea that God and man ought to communicate through art, but it was art's role to be pure and chaste in this sa­cred venture, and be free of all useless artifice and ornamentation.

Bartolomeo's rendition of Saint Bernard's vision of the Virgin Mary is far less fussy than an earlier version of the subject painted by Filippino Lippi in 1485. The Dominican has anchored the right side of his painting with three saintly figures standing before a landscape: Benedict, whose ideals Bernard sought to rekindle; John the Apostle, whose custody of the Virgin Mary was mandated from the cross (a miniature scene depicting the crucifixion is included here as a painterly footnote); and the kneeling Bernard, who preferred the spiritual inspiration found in nature to that found in the dusty tomes of monastic libraries. The stigmatisation of Saint Francis of Assisi and his meeting with Saint Dominic are tiny visual quotations lost in the decorative hills behind these three figures. But the overwhelming majesty of the Madonna and child borne aloft by angels on the transcendental left-hand side of the painting accentuates the fact that Bernard's vision was the product of an intense and direct contemplation of the Mother of God, using no artifice as its springboard. In fact, the sensuality that Bernard disclaimed in the material decoration of Suger's church is ironically surpassed by the sensuality that arises in some of his own mystical visions.

For instance, a more common iconographic motif of Bernard's apparition of the Virgin is based on an ecstatic encounter that happened to him in Speyer Cathedral in 1146. In that vision, Bernard beseeched Mary to be his mother too, and it is recorded that the Virgin took her breast and expressed her milk onto his lips, fortifying the eloquence of his preaching. This imagery is known as "The Lactation of Saint Bernard", and it became more popular than the staid vision depicted here by Baccio. If such flamboyant phantasms are a by-product of monastic austerity, it was not Fra Bartolomeo's aim to imitate it. His noble restraint in this painting can be attributed squarely to Savonarola's proprietary influence on his work. Later, however, Dominicans of the more extravagant Baroque era borrowed that popular lactation motif from the Cistercians and applied it visually to their equally eloquent founder, Saint Dominic, proving that while artistic styles come and go and reforming influences wax and wane, a good story can be shared, and it lasts for ever.

• Fr. Michael Morris, O.P.

Professor, Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, Berkeley, CA, USA.

To view this masterpiece in greater detail, visit: www.magnificat.com

MAGNIFICAT: The Art Essay of the month. August 2012