Seeing the Unseen: The Representation of Visions in Golden Age Painting and Writing

Leon Battista Alberti's influential treatise De pictura, completed in 1435, begins with the statement that the proper subject of painting is the imitation of things that can be seen. In this essay I propose to examine the ways in which Golden Age artists and writers rose to the challenge of representing the realm of the unseen, both in vision paintings and in literary descriptions of such experiences, which cannot, by definition, be an imitation of anything visible in the natural world. It has become commonplace to compare the elongated bodies and ecstatic gazes of El Greco's figures with the mystical writings of San Juan de la Cruz.¹ San Juan is not an unqualified admirer of the visual arts as a means of understanding divine mysteries, because they are creatures, human productions which cannot possibly do justice to the unseen and unseeable grandeur of God.² In any case, his works were not published until 1618, four years after the death of El Greco, who had probably never heard of him or read a single word by him.³ It is San Juan's older contemporary, Santa Teresa de Ávila, whose accounts of visions in her spiritual autobiography, the Vida, offer the closest and most interesting parallels between artistic and literary representations of visions. Both she and the artists I shall be considering were careful to distinguish the world of human experience, which can be depicted or described as it appears to the corporeal eyes, from communications which reveal an unseen, heavenly world and which therefore involve a different kind of 'seeing'.

In discussing the relationship between painted and written representations of visions, I shall pay particular attention to the place of reading as the necessary preparation for prayer and meditation, which in exceptional cases may lead to vision, the highest form of understanding of the truths to which the written word points but which only the divine Word can fully communicate. In vision paintings reading is symbolized by the presence of books, generally set to one side and apparently abandoned, sometimes closed, sometimes still open. In vanitas paintings books usually (but not invariably) represent the futility of human knowledge in the face of death. It is therefore tempting to assign them an analogous role in vision paintings, closed or discarded books suggesting that reading human words or even the divinely inspired text of scripture cannot give access to the truth imparted through direct communication in a vision.⁴ I shall argue that such a temptation is to be resisted. I shall also consider the place of reading in Teresa's spiritual development and of sacred art in her attempts to explain how her visions are not imaginative recreations of what she has seen with her physical eyes. I shall give particular attention to the linguistic strategies she adopts to mark the difference between what can be seen with the eye or the imagination and what cannot.

Vision paintings pose problems for the modern viewer, who may be sceptical of the nature of such experiences and unfamiliar with the pictorial language they embody. To dismiss them as the products of a gullible age in which people were unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality is, however, to miss the subtlety which Victor Stoichita, for example, has shown them to possess, once we have learned to read their encoded language. Religious paintings of the period conventionally separate the earthly and heavenly planes by a symbolic barrier of radiant clouds, which form a boundary, if not an impenetrable one, between them. Within or above them lies a reality which is accessible only to the eye of faith and cannot be seen and depicted by the artist as part of the visible world. This pictorial language has its roots in the biblical imagery associated with theophanies, that is, when God's presence is mysteriously and indirectly revealed to human beings. These encounters are among the most dramatic moments of the biblical text: the cloudy pillar of the Exodus (Exod. 13.21–22); Moses on Mount Sinai (Exod. 19.16–20); Isaiah's vision...