Appetizing Objects
Fig. 1. Caravaggio, Madonna di Loreto, ca. 1604-06, 260 cm × 150 cm
In his Madonna di Loreto (Fig. 1), Caravaggio uses the Counter-Reformation ideals for artmaking to celebrate, through the rendering of feet, the varying degrees of subjectivity in process wherein one’s humanity begins to ascend simply due to exposure to objects of the divine. There is a level of supremacy to the aspirational perfectionism and inhabited naturalism of the foot as Caravaggio uses feet to convey how something so seemingly ordinary can be transformed into a transcendental phenomenon with such appetizing appeal.
Fig 2. The Sant'Agostino Chapel in Rome and a view of the work in the interior of the space.
Fig. 3.The interior of the Holy House of Loreto in Loreto, Italy with Pope Francis in prayer.
Bathed in bright, cinematic lighting only fit for the divine while simultaneously melting into stark shadows created by such brilliant luminosity, Caravaggio innovatively makes the foot the star of his Madonna of Loreto. Housed in the Sant'Agostino Chapel in Rome (Fig. 2&3), the work evokes the myth of Loreto when after the Virgin Mary’s ascension into Heaven, a choir of angels miraculously transports her home in Nazareth to Loreto, a small Italian town bordering the Adriatic Sea. Caravaggio depicts the precise moment when pilgrims visiting the aging holy site, symbolizing the material authority of the Catholic Church, encounter the physical manifestations of Mary and an infant Christ as he interestingly blesses the weary worshipers in the center of the canvas by using his feet.
Fig. 4. Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam, ca. 1508-12
Fig. 5. A detail in Caravaggio’s Madonna di Loreto as Jesus’ feet dangle appetisingly above the worshipers.
Appropriating the central gesture of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam (Fig. 4) with the act of creation revealed through the near touch of God and Adam, Caravaggio paints infantile yet perfected and full of life feet dangling appetizingly in front of two spiritually starved worshippers as each of Jesus’ feet softly slant toward a different pilgrim (Fig. 5). Prioritizing the visual legibility of the scene to a wide array of Counter-Reformation viewers, most notably the illiterate Catholic pilgrims that would make the journey to Rome to visit the Sant'Agostino Chapel, Caravaggio affectionately depicts Jesus giving meaning, the essence of life itself, to the believers through the microscopic amount of space between Christ’s big toe and the male worshippers fervently pressed fingertips.
Fig. 6.Diagonal running throughout the Madonna di Loreto.
As a sign of recognition of their faith, the sharp diagonal starting at the bottom right big toe of the male pilgrim (Fig. 6), Jesus’ left downward leaning foot serving as the midpoint, and ending at the crown of Jesus’ head receding into unknown, heavenly depths can be read as a process of ascendant becoming, a process of shedding material attachment and earthly sin to reach a perfected, divine state. There is an immediacy to the way Caravaggio provocatively immortalizes the process of ascension through a simple encounter with the sacred as Brendan Prendeville argues that “the discontinuities in Caravaggio, between one statuesque figure and the next … demand of [the viewer] an effort of attention that becomes an emotional engagement” [1].
Fig. 7. A detail in Caravaggio’s Madonna di Loreto of Mary’s unnaturally arched feet.
The result of this transcendental nature is expressed through the fetishistic hyper-femininity of Mary’s feet as Caravaggio renders her not only as an intermediary between humanity and the divine but also as a physical symbol for a completed subjectivity, serving as a sort of goal for the incomplete, human experience displayed by grime-encrusted feet of the kneeling peasants. Emerging from the pitch-dark void swallowing the left of the canvas, the Virgin Mary balances steadily on her thin and angular tiptoes, helping the infant Son of God welcome the fervent pilgrims (Fig. 7). The positioning of one foot —turned sideways, on full display for the viewer, almost in an instructive manner— is not natural, but rather, aspirational and idealistic, recalling the treatment of an adult Jesus’ foot in Rosso Fiorentino’s Dead Christ with Angels (Fig. 8).
Fig. 8. Rosso Fiorentino, Dead Christ with Angels, ca. 1526-27
Mary’s impossibly high arch, sans the feminized and sexualized six-inch stiletto heels that would be invented some three centuries later, display comfort and longevity in such a pose that transforms an awkward unnaturalness into perfected objectified othering. She is a being whose virtue is meant to be emulated as Caravaggio portrays her towering over the devout worshippers as they enthusiastically abandon their earthly materiality marred in sin. Someone as extraordinary as the mother of God yet simultaneously a person who had her subjective experience transformed and perfected through her unyielding love of God, Mary becomes a guide for transcendence through faith. Her feet’s cleanliness in this dusty, crumbling environment is contrasted with the dirt-covered feet of the pilgrims who serve as proxies for the actual worshipers visiting and viewing this monumental 260 cm × 150 cm altarpiece in the chapel (Fig. 9).
Fig. 9. A detail in Caravaggio’s Madonna di Loreto of the male peasant’s dirty feet singling an early, imperfect state.
The impurities of the man’s feet signal a bodily, earthly experience of poverty and hardship, not too dissimilar to the lived experience of Jesus and Mary described in the New Testament Gospels. Thus, Caravaggio emotively communicates to believers through the power of the Baroque image that one’s interiority can and will be fulfilled through their faith in Jesus as the Messiah, reaching a state of eternal perfection.
Notes
[1] Brendan Prendeville, “A Heartfelt Gesture: Separation and Feeling, Darkness and Illusion in Caravaggio,” Oxford Art Journal Vol. 36, no. [2] (2013): 198-199, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43826012.
