When Jean Hagstrum, in
The Sister Arts, classifies Donne as “unpictorial and undescriptive”, his prime example of this is that “Donne appears less interested in portraits as works of art than in the way they appear to stare at you from the wall wherever you stand”.
1 Hagstrum, Sister Arts, p. 113. Hagstrum cites Milton Rugoff as his source, who describes this as “typically Donnean… just the sort of odd phenomenon to catch Donne’s fancy”. John Donne’s Imagery (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), p. 109. As we have seen, in other contexts Donne seems particularly interested in portraits, as owner and subject of several. But it is true that Donne’s recurrent references in the sermons to “a well-made, and well-plac’d picture, [which] looks alwayes upon him that looks upon it”, do not correspond to Hagstrum’s definition of the “pictorial” as “an image … capable of translation into painting or some other visual art … imaginable as a painting or a sculpture”.
2 Hagstrum, Sister Arts, pp. xxi–xxii. What Donne develops in this metaphor is not the subject matter of the picture but the experience of viewing it. While not “pictorial” in Hagstrum’s sense, the metaphor is very much concerned with spectatorship, with ways of looking.
3 W. J. T. Mitchell defines spectatorship as “the look, the gaze, the glance, the practices of observation, surveillance, and visual pleasure”. “The Pictorial Turn”, in Picture Theory (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 16. Donne’s unpictorial picture sets up a mirror relation between picture and spectator – between God and man – that is dynamic rather than static.
This image of a portrait recurs four times in sermons preached between 1619 and 1622. The first dated occurrence is in the “Sermon of Valediction at my going into Germany”, given on April 18, 1619, before his departure on a diplomatic embassy to Germany with James Hay, Viscount Doncaster. Preaching on memory, he instructs his listeners to
go to thine own memory; for as St
Bernard calls that the stomach of the soul, we may be bold to call it the Gallery of the soul, hang’d with so many, and so lively pictures of the goodness and mercies of thy God to thee […] And as a well made, and well plac’d picture, looks alwayes upon him that looks upon it; so shall thy God look upon thee, whose memory is thus contemplating him…
4 Potter and Simpson, eds., Sermons, p. 237. The last dated occurrence is from a sermon given on Easter Monday 1622 where he preaches on ways of contemplating the face of Jesus:
See him in that seal which is a copy of him, as he is of the father; see him in the Sacrament. Look him in the face as he lay in the manger […] Look him in the face in the Temple […] Look him in the face, as he look’d upon Friday last; when he whose face the Angels desire to look on […] was so marr’d more than any man […] and then look him in the face as he look’d yesterday[…] rais’d by his own power […] Look him in the face in all these respects, of Humiliation, and of Exaltation too; and then, as a picture looks upon him, that looks upon it, God upon whom thou keepest thine eye, will keep his Eye upon thee. (Sermons, 4: 130)
The picture metaphor is also to be found in two undated sermons on the Penitential Psalms, which are estimated to be from the period 1616–1619.
5 Paul Stanwood identifies a series of sermons preached on the penitential psalms, which he argues are from the beginning of Donne’s preaching career, “as early as 1616 and likely before travel with Doncaster in May 1619”. “Donne’s Earliest Sermons and the Penitential Tradition”, in John Donne’s Religious Imagination: Essays in Honour of John T. Shawcross, ed. by Raymond-Jean Frontain and Frances M. Malpezzi (Conway AR: UCA Press, 1995), p. 366. The first refers to the universal applicability of King David’s life story, while the second is again on the virtue of looking at God:
His example is so comprehensive, so generall, that as a well made, and well placed Picture in a Gallery looks upon all that stand in severall places of the Gallery, in severall lines, in severall angles, so doth Davids history concern and embrace all. (5: 299).
So our eyes waite upon God, till hee have mercy, that is, while he hath it, and that he may continue his mercy; for it was his mercifull eye that turned ours to him, and it is the same mercy, that we waite upon him. And then, when, as a well made Picture doth alwaies looke upon him, that lookes upon it, this Image of God in our soule, is turned to him, by his turning to it, it is impossible we should doe any foule, any uncomely thing in his presence. […] Can any man give his body to uncleannesse, his tongue to prophanenesse, his heart to covetousnese, and at the same time consider, that his pure, and his holy, and his bountifull God hath his eye upon him? Can he looke upon God in that line, in that Angle, (upon God looking upon him) and dishonour him? (9: 368)
These recurrent references to pictures that look back at their viewer have prompted critics to seek the source of Donne’s knowledge in treatises on visual art. Liam Semler finds parallels for the specific technique employed in this “well-made picture” in both Richard Haydocke’s translation of Lomazzo’s
Trattato dell’arte and in Nicholas Hilliard’s
Art of Limning. Lomazzo praises “Cimon Cleondus [who] did much beautifie the arte by finding out the fore-shortning of Pictures, casting the countenance so artificially, that it seemed to looke every way”, while Hilliard includes in his closing list of topics: “Howe to make the picture seeme to looke one in the face which waie soe ever he goe or stand”.
6 Semler, English Mannerist Poets, p. 52. See Lomazzo, A tracte, p. 7; Arthur F. Kinney and Linda Bradley Salamon, eds., Nicholas Hilliard’s Art of Limning (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1983), p. 45.Yet although Donne’s knowledge of the visual arts and art theory undoubtedly underpin his interest in this particular metaphor, his use of this particular image is strongly reminiscent of a theological source, Nicholas of Cusa’s
De Visione Dei (1453). In this influential treatise Cusanus explores ideas drawn from mystical theology through the analogy of a painting whose eyes seem to follow its viewer around the room. This “omnivoyant icon” is used to elucidate the idea that the intellect must try to see God, although God cannot be seen. Milton Rugoff is right when he claims this is “just the sort of odd phenomenon to catch Donne’s fancy”.
7 Rugoff, John Donne’s Imagery, p. 109. The image seems so “typically Donnean” that it is almost surprising to find that it does not originate from his own observations. But Donne’s repeated use of it in the sermons establishes connections with the thinking of Nicholas of Cusa that are perhaps more revealing of his method than an original metaphor based on his own observation might be.
In the twenty-five chapters of his
De Visione Dei, Nicholas of Cusa takes the example of the “well-made picture” as the starting point that allows him to elaborate on ways in which his readers’ experience of physical sight could help to approach the understanding of God. When he originally sent his treatise to the Abbot and brothers of the Benedictine Abbey of Tegernsee in Southern Germany, he evidently enclosed an actual painting, an “image of someone omnivoyant, so that his face, through subtle pictorial artistry, is such that it seems to behold everything around it”. He tells his addressees that he proposes to “attempt to lead [them] – by way of experiencing and through a very simple and very common means – into most sacred darkness”.
8 Jasper Hopkins, ed., Nicholas of Cusa’s Dialectical Mysticism: Text, Translation, and Interpretive Study of De Visione Dei, second edition (Minneapolis: Arthur J. Banning, 1988), p. 113. Hereafter references to De Visione Dei will be abbreviated DVD in the text. He will “convey [them] by human means unto divine things”, he explains, by means of “a likeness”. He gives famous examples of many such “excellently depicted faces”, including “the one of the preeminent painter Roger in his priceless painting in the city hall at Brussels”.
9 Rogier van der Weyden, whose lost mural The Justice of Trajan and Herkinbald in the town hall in Brussels reportedly contained a self-portrait of the artist, looking out of the painting. A copy survives in a tapestry in the Historiches Museum, Bern. Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting [1953] (New York: Icon/Harper and Row, 1971), vol. 1, p. 248. In his introduction Cusanus illustrates at length how the “omnivoyant figure” or “Icon of God” may function:
Hang this icon somewhere, e.g., on the north wall; and you brothers stand around it, at a short distance from it, and observe it. Regardless of the place from which each of you looks at it, each will have the impression that he alone is been looked at by it. […] [M]arvel at how it is possible that [the face] behold each and every one of you at once…. Marvel at the changing of the unchangeable gaze.
Moreover, if while fixing his sight upon the icon he walks from west to east, he will find that the icon’s gaze proceeds continually with him; and if he returns from east to west, the gaze will likewise not desert him. He will marvel at how the icon’s gaze is moved immovably. (
DVD, 115)
10 I am very grateful to Piers Brown for first drawing this passage to my attention. Eugene Cunnar also identifies Cusanus’s De Visione Dei as Donne’s source in “Illusion and Spiritual Perspective in Donne’s Poetry”, in Aesthetic Illusion: Theoretical and Historical Approaches, ed. by Frederick Burwick and Walter Pape (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1990), pp. 324–336. Comparisons between Donne and Cusanus, though not of this specific passage, have also been suggested by Isamu Muroaka, “Donne to Cusanus”, Eigo Seinen (The Rising Generation) 114 (1968): pp. 216–217 and Mitsuo Arakawa, Shinpishiso to Keijijoshijintachi [Mystical Thought and Mystical Poets] (Tokyo: Shohakusha 1976). Many thanks to Makiko Okamura for generously translating these articles for me. Michael Martin also suggests Cusanus as an influence in his chapter “A Glass Darkly: Donne’s Negative Approach to God”, in Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 47–84, though he does not develop the parallels with Nicholas of Cusa at any great length.Donne’s repeated appropriations of this passage all condense Nicholas of Cusa’s account of the reciprocal nature of the omnivoyant gaze.
11 Donne does not explicitly cite Nicholas of Cusa in any of his references to the omnivoyant icon. There can be no doubt that Donne knew Cusanus’s work, however, since in his Essays in Divinity (written in 1614 or 1615), he refers to the Cusan’s work on the Koran, Cribratio Alkorani: “The Alcoran… had received Cribrationem, a sifting by Cusanus…” and clearly indicates that he has read it, as he goes on to observe that Luther could certainly not have read Cusanus’s book “for else he could not have said that the Cardinal had only excerpted and exhibited to the world the infamous and ridiculous parts of [the Koran], and slipped the substantial”. John Donne, Essays in Divinity, ed. by Evelyn M. Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952), p. 9. He may possibly be referring to De docta ignorantia in a sermon preached at St Paul’s when he discusses “a learned ignorance, which is a modest, and a reverent abstinence from searching into those secrets which God has not revealed in his word” (9: 234), although the concept of docta ignorantia is not original to Cusanus and is also used by Augustine. Martin cites this passage in the context of Donne’s knowledge of Nicholas of Cusa in Literature and the Encounter with God, p. 62. Three out of the four times that Donne uses the analogy in a sermon, his message is a variation on “God upon whom thou keepest thine Eye, will keep his Eye upon thee” (4: 130). His virtually word-for-word repetitions of the “picture [that] looks upon him, that looks upon it” in the three longer occurrences of the metaphor create a chiasmus that echoes the reciprocal gaze of Cusanus’s image, and unpacks the condensed Latin pun
De Visione Dei which means, in the words of Jasper Hopkins, both “
God’s vision of creatures [and]
creatures’ vision of God”.
12 Hopkins, “Interpretative Study”, Nicholas of Cusa’s Dialectical Mysticism, p. 17 (emphasis in original).Donne does not appropriate Cusanus’ imagery wholesale, but selects carefully to integrate it into the needs of his sermon. With his reference to the “Gallery of the soul” in the 1619 sermon Donne characteristically expands Nicholas of Cusa’s idea, both internalising the image by making it hang in “the Gallery of the Soul” (2: 237) and multiplying it. While Cusanus has one painting being watched in wonder by multiple spectators, Donne furnishes his gallery with “so many, and so lively pictures” but mentions only one witness. In both metaphors, God is the picture. Man contemplates God; but in Donne’s version he contemplates God in multiple examples. In many ways Donne’s gallery here resembles Marvell’s later and better-known exploitation of a similar idea, “The Gallery” (1648–1649), which is widely celebrated as an original and creative extension of the possibilities of the internal image, hanging multiple images of the same woman in the gallery of the soul:
Clora come view my soul, and tell
Whether I have contrived it well.
Now all its several lodgings lye
Composed into one gallery;
And the great arras-hangings, made
Of various faces, by are laid:
That, for all furniture, you’ll find
Only your picture in my mind. (ll. 1–8)
13 Andrew Marvell: The Complete Poems, ed. by Elizabeth Story Donno (London: Penguin, 1972), pp. 40–41. Marvell’s biographer, Pierre Legouis, celebrates his ability to “renovate the hackneyed metaphor by enlarging it. His imagination reveals itself spacious without strain”.
14 Pierre Legouis, Andrew Marvell: Poet, Puritan, Patriot (Oxford, 1965), p. 31. Marvell’s internal gallery, with its descriptions of Clora’s multiple faces, does correspond to Hagstrum’s category of the
pictorial, and Hagstrum praises Marvell’s originality in adapting Giambattista Marino’s “largely literal”
Galeria (1619–1620) “into a psychological metaphor; Marvell’s gallery is in the soul”.
15 Hagstrum, Sister Arts, p. 114. Such praise for scope and invention must equally apply to Donne’s gallery of images of God’s mercy, which predates Marvell’s by about thirty years, and is virtually contemporary with Marino’s poem.
16 Marino’s Galeria was translated into English by Samuel Daniel in 1623 (Hagstrum, Sister Arts, p. 114). For Hopkins,
De Visione Dei is Nicholas of Cusa’s “sole
literary masterpiece”.
17 Hopkins, “Interpretative Study”, p. 44 (my emphasis). It provides Donne with a metaphor that helps him to theologically elucidate the intellectual sight of the unseeable God, but it is also a literary model that parallels and perhaps to some extent inspires Donne’s own method of using analogies drawn from material art to illustrate abstract theological ideas. Rather than linking Donne to the world of material, representational artwork, the image of the picture that “looks alwayes upon him that looks upon it” leads, in the words of Cusanus, towards “divine things”, towards “the most sacred darkness”, towards, in fact, that which cannot be seen.