EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Is Stoning Stephen Grinding Colors?

In the wider world of art history where the word "art" has not been properly defined, the search for meaning is more complex and difficult than it is here. If biologists studied different types of trees without agreeing on what a tree was, they too would sound confused. That's why the search for likeness in unlike things, which is the mental process involved in all insight not just pictorial, is so much simpler at EPPH. Knowing what art is, that it is self-referential and internally directed, we can look for similarity with a narrower focus. History, politics, sociology, religious dogma, the artist's biography and psyche and all manner of other fields, while still useful and potentially significant, are less productive areas of inquiry than inner-focused spirituality and the artist's studio. That's what led me to read a 15th-century instruction manual by Cennino Cennini on how to paint. I reckoned that if we knew more about the objects and processes used in Renaissance studios, we would more readily recognize poetic metaphors. The list of studio items in the first few pages alone surprised me, many of them common objects in art in other settings. Here's a small sampling:

bread, chicken bones, mortar & pestle, small earthenware pots and pans, olive oil, red and green wax, well-water, spring-water, willow branches, feathers, coal and sheep parchment.

Remember, of course, that many of today's factory processes had to be done by hand in the studio, the making of everything from paints, palettes and paper to a wide variety of brushes and other implements. They naturally needed more materials. They did shop too, often at the druggist's. What first caught my attention was the then-strenuous method for grinding pigment. Each color had its own process depending on the nature of the original substance. In general, though, Cennino claims that the longer you work the pigments on a stone slab the better, suggesting tongue-in-cheek that after 20 years of pounding you might get an even more perfect color. Here are his instructions for grinding black pigment on red porphyry: 

"Then get a stone to hold in your hand, also of porphry, flat underneath, and rounded on top in the shape of a porringer, shaped so that your hand may be able to guide it readily, and to move it this way and that, at will....."¹

That brought to mind a painting I have written on (above), Rembrandt's The Stoning of St. Stephen (1625). Isn't that what the executioners are doing?  Don't they have in their hand a rounded stone that they can guide readily towards their target this way and that? Besides the killers have Rembrandt's features and others have noted that in several of his paintings he suggests a kinship between the pigments he used and human flesh.² Could that mean, then, that Rembrandt's assassin in "grinding" a stone into Stephen is creating human flesh and "painting Stephen", the figure of Stephen? Alpers moreover thinks that Rembrandt almost always staged his scenes as if they were "a studio event".³ 

Many scenes of Stephen being stoned are similar. In this example by Lorenzo Lotto (above top, with a detail below) the killers have an L-shaped shadow at their feet laid over a second smaller L (for Lorenzo Lotto). Besides, their figures, especially the central one, are darkly contoured as though they are just in front of the painting in the studio, not inside it. 

In support, there is a giant unseen "eye", the artist's obviously, which looks upwards with the executioners gathered around his "pupil". Neither Lotto nor Rembrandt are likely to have independently invented any theme. As with others discussed on EPPH, they would have used the old threads that run through art to weave a new canvas, not created something out of nothing. 

For instance, a much-earlier illumination of Stephen's martyrdom seems to support my argument about pigments because Stephen and his executioners are each dressed in a boldly different color. And blood which often signifies liquid paint runs from Stephen's head where the stone meets his skull. Even the rocks are marbleized and are not just any old stone. That, too, may have significance.

You might wonder if the killers in all these pictures are not working rather too hard to be grinding pigments. The action, though, to create paint out of pigment would itself be a metaphor for the creative struggle, not only to conceive a masterpiece but for the artist to investigate his or her own self as Rembrandt and others do in their art. St. Augustine wrote in his Confessions:

“O Lord, I am working hard in this field, and the field of my labors is my own self. I have become a problem to myself, like land which a farmer works only with difficulty and at the cost of much sweat.”⁴

While St. Stephen's murderers are definitely artists involved in some creatively sweaty struggle, I cannot be certain yet that they are grinding colors metaphorically even if I strongly suspect it based on past experience. Nevertheless, Cennino's instruction manual seems a promising mine in which to discover poetic metaphor. You should try it yourself.

 

1. Cennino d'Andrea Cennini, The Craftsman's Handbook (Il Libro dell'Arte), trans. Daniel V. Thompson, Jr. (New York: Dover) 1954, pp. 4-19

2. Jonathan Sawday citing Svetlana Alpers in The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge) 1995, p. 149

3. Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (University of Chicago Press) 1988, p. 58

4. Jennifer Bryan, Looking Inward: Devotional Reading and the Private Self in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press) 2008, p. 65