Inventing Falsehood, Making Truth: Vico and Neapolitan Painting by Malcolm Bull

Author:Malcolm Bull
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-12-16T22:00:00+00:00

3.2.

Francesco Solimena, Conversion of Saul, Sacristy of San Paolo Maggiore, Naples (Photo: Luciano Pedicini).

Paul’s conversion was considered by him to be an appearance of the resurrected Christ on a par with that experienced by the other apostles.7 Like Thomas, he is offered an individual revelation. But Paul is denied the (false) certainties of autopsia. According to Harvey, “He who . . . forms no conception of the subject from the evidence of his own eyes, is virtually blind.”8 And Paul, far from seeing for himself, is actually blinded by the light—as Voragine puts it, “blinded to be enlightened in his darkened intelligence.”9 Here, as in Vico’s story of the giants, the lightning is not the enlightenment, but it produces enlightenment nevertheless.

Solimena has imagined the conversion of Paul as something like a battle scene, with horses and soldiers falling all over the place. He was not the first to do so. Giordano’s paintings of the subject do the same, both following Rubens, who painted the subject several times. Bartoli had used the example of a battle scene painted by a blind man to illustrate the improbability of the theory of atomism. Here, according to De Dominici, Solimena displays the very qualities that chance could never produce: “beauty of coloring, nobility of appearance, perfect ideas, diversity of physiognomy, and excellent composition with the most beautiful contrapposto.”10

It is the unexpected flash of light breaking through the clouds that causes the horses to bolt and the soldiers to run in fear (figure 3.2a). It hits the edges of things, transforming the cloak of the horseman on the left into a sheer ridge of light, striking the side of his horse’s head so hard that it shies away, and leaving the soldier ahead of them completely backlit, save for the upper edge of his shield. In every case, this heavenly light exerts a powerful centrifugal force, its impact pushing figures out from the center of the composition toward the aureole of shadow that surrounds it. And yet the movement of the viewer’s gaze, and that of the figures in the foreground, goes in the other direction, into the picture. The painting is also lit from the top left where the natural light from the window of the sacristy doubles with the softer light emanating from Christ above the clouds. This is the light that is reflected on the back of the soldier’s breastplate in the left foreground and through which the figure on the lower right stretches out his arm. Despite the dramatic chiaroscuro of the central scene, no contours are lost in the shadows, for there is always another source of light to hold them in the visual field.

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