Divine Presence in Spain and Western Europe 1500–1960: Visions, Religious Images and Photographs

Visions depicted [with Images]

102 Visions Depicted Photography brought an immediacy to the depiction of visions, but at the same time presented a basic problem , one that has always been present for people seeing others have visions: by definition one cannot see what only seers see (Fig. 47). For documentary photos of visionaries, the proof and the attraction of the photos, like that of many mystical paintings and sculptures of the baroque period , was the transformation of the seer’s faces and their bodies by what they saw looking upwards (Fig. 48). The artistic conventions involved in pose and gesture were absorbed by both seer and photographer. We saw how Francisco Martínez described his imagined pilgrim angel with upturned eyes and Jean Salvadé learned to turn his eyes upwards and cross his hands on his chest when faced with awkward questions (such as the one put by an Irish reporter: “Have you had your first communion?”). Seers at the apparition site of Ezquioga, in the Spanish Basque country (1931–1934), were told that rolled-back eyes were a sign of a true vision , and the pious photographers who depicted them waited to click, cropped to isolate and selected to print poses like those of visionaries in baroque art. (Figs. 49–50.) At Ezquioga and elsewhere, seers whose poses were awkward or unartistic were not photographed at 103 all, or only by skeptical photojournalists.8 In any case, the visionaries themselves were the spectacle people came to see, not what the visionaries were seeing, and in photos the faces in vision tend to be pointed up by the intent gaze of onlookers. But however selective the photographers, the transformation of seers during visions was not terribly different from experimental subjects in vision pose, as in photos by Duchenne de Boulogne in 1862,9 seers when they were not having visions, as in 1864 studio portraits of Bernadette,10 studio models in prayer for the postcard trade (Fig. 51), ordinary people posing in prayer like this Spanish family by a household altar (Fig. 52), or any well-lit faces looking intently upward like this Belgian magazine cover from 1933 (Fig. 53). And in any case, people had become accustomed to photographs as the measure of reality, but, as in real life, the invisibles were not in the picture. Artists, of course, could depict the seer and the seen. Painting, observed Alberti in the fifteenth century , “contributed considerably to the piety that binds us to the gods.”11 In late medieval and early modern painting, as the Romanian art historian Victor Stoichita has shown, the “vision” was often separated from the real by height, by angle of displacement, and mandorlas or clouds.12 (Figs. 54–55.) 104 But this option, while it continued with the old schema in drawing, painting, exvotos, prints and postcards into the age of photography, had diminished authority compared to the scientific power of the photograph (Figs. 56–63). So other solutions were sought that could capture the story of apparitions succinctly and convincingly. At La Salette postcards were sold combining photographs and art that depicted the visions and mapped their location. Photo postcards also showed the regular retelling of the vision events at the different locations . You see the pilgrims at the vision place hearing the apparition story, but you are looking at them as they look at the priests telling the story or the statues depicting it, and neither you nor they are seeing the Virgin Mary herself. One way to make the art cards more dramatic, in keeping with the older technique of translucent painting and the effect of lantern slides, was translucent postcards that when held up to light could show the invisible. Developed first as souvenirs of World Expositions to depict day and night scenes, Spanish card publishers refined this technique to depict apparitions of the Virgin at Montserrat and Ezquioga (Figs. 64–67). A more common solution was to use actors representing the seers and the seen, posed in positions al- 105 ready recognizable from conventional representations by artists (Fig. 68). We see these scenes as well on postcards from theatrical representations, especially from outdoor summer stages. And very early, film, shown as a regular option of the pilgrimage experience at Lourdes, became the most dramatic way to witness the vision experience. The reproduction of vision grottos with images placed in seen positions meant that in some way, almost everywhere in...