Embodied Eye by Morgan David

Author:Morgan, David
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2012-07-20T16:00:00+00:00

Devotion to the Sacred Heart took the form of penitence and was clearly associated with the Eucharist, the body of Jesus. According to Alacoque, Jesus had instructed her to take Holy Communion “as often as obedience will permit thee.”42 The devotion was tied closely to the Eucharist in order to provide a personalized sense of divine presence in the sacrament and to direct devotional response to the sacrament and its reputed abuse. In images like Batoni’s, the Sacred Heart was the body of Christ returning the viewer’s look. Attachment to the heart of Jesus was a Baroque figuration that followed the late medieval material devotion to the body of Jesus—Corpus Christi, the Wounds of Christ, the scourged body of Jesus’s Passion, the Eucharistic host, forms of embodiment which we saw informed late medieval visual piety reflected in the Veil of Veronica (see figs. 11 and 12) and that relied on the sort of imagery produced by Dürer (see figs. 5 to 8). But the Baroque piety was one that selected the intimacy of the heart as a way to engage Jesus in an emotionally compelling exchange, a relationship of romance, affection, tender intimacy, and even eros, in the case of Alacoque herself. The association of the Heart with a portrait of Jesus whose look sought out the penitent viewer enhanced the interactive appeal of the heart as a special form of touching and being touched by the Savior.

The power of the new devotion for its adherents resided in intensification of atonement and penitence as embodied and visual practices. And it was precisely this that attracted opposition to the devotion and its visual forms. Galliffet opened a brief chapter on pictures of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary with a sad acknowledgement that the image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus has “even been subjected to a kind of persecution on the part of the opponents to the devotion to the Heart of Jesus.”43 He claimed that the Heart was “the centre of those sufferings that worked out our redemption.”44 The heart, physical expression of Baroque inwardness and embodied spirituality, was the site of the injury Jesus received in life and in the disregard for the Eucharist ever since. Because the heart was understood to be the seat of a person’s life, it served as the vehicle of suffering and feeling. Addressing the heart of Jesus with adoration and petition was therefore of special efficacy. Galliffet considered the visual aspect of the devotion to be of central importance because reparation was readily made through honor paid to the image:

This ought to be one of the chief interests of those who are devout to the Heart of Jesus: they should zealously endeavour to obtain this glory for the Sacred Heart, in order thereby to make reparation for the injury the devil has done it, by inspiring men with a dislike for its picture. They should have the picture exposed for veneration with the greatest possible magnificence in churches, in houses, in private oratories.

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