Rilke's Sebastian and the PaintersAuthor(s): Jane Davidson ReidSource: Art Journal, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Autumn, 1967), pp. 24-39Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/775188Accessed: 18/10/2008 23:45

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Jane Davidson Reid

Rilke's Sebastian and the Painters

The museums of this world are full of Saint Sebas- tians. For one who first learned to observe him through Rilke's eyes the very exploration of these pictures is fasci- nating. Not that all satisfy-a value judgment to be defined, I trust, in the following paragraphs; indeed, the number of cloying representations can irritate, can tempt one to ask a question Friedrich von Schlegel1 asked long ago: Is martyrdom a fit subject for painting, or, we may extend it, for poetry? But this is a question we can post- pone while we read Rilke's "Sankt Sebastian" and look at the pictures.

Four of these pictures return again and again to the mind's eye: those by Titian, Pollaiuolo, Mantegna, and Botticelli; perhaps also the Perugino in the Louvre, the Giovanni Bellini in the Accademia, Venice, and the Tin- toretto of the Scuola di San Rocco. They are satisfying for different qualities, of course; but they do seem to share a tension that comes nearer expressing the heroic than do the more conventional, often sentimental versions.2

Why is this true and what relation does the answer bear to Rilke's poem? As an hypothesis I should guess that the answer, one definition of that value judgment in

"satisfy," is involved in the preoccupation in each of these seven paintings with the saint as man in himself, his attitude toward his suffering; with the fact that he is still terribly in this world, that in no one of these major works does an angel dart out of the heavens to relieve him, to crown him. Here is a strength of spirit which the modern man can admire with a whole heart. These pic- tures show the mystery of faith without any of its embar-

rassing accompaniments of externals. The saint's figure offers a paradox, one which Rilke perceived early in his career: "Sankt Sebastian" is one of a large number of

poems in his Neue Gedichte, 1907, treating medieval sub-

jects.

Wie ein Liegender so steht er; ganz hingehalten von dem grossen Willen. Weit entriickt wie Mutter, wenn sie stillen, und in sich gebunden wie ein Kranz.

MRS. REID, wife of Prof. B. L. Reid of Mount Holyoke

College, teaches English at the University of Massachu- setts. She attributes her interest in poetry and art to the

teaching of Ernest C. Hassold and Justus Bier at the Uni-

versity of Louisville. !

Und die Pfeile kommen: jetzt und jetzt und als sprangen sie aus seinen Lenden, eisern bebend mit den freien Enden. Doch er lichelt dunkel, unverletzt.

Einmal nur wird seine Trauer gross, und die Augen liegen schmerzlich bloss, bis sie etwas leugnen, wie Geringes, und als liessen sie verachtlich los die Vernichter eines sch6nen Dinges.3

In J. B. Leishman's translation:

Like one lying down he stands there, all

target-proffered by his mighty will. Far-removed, like mothers when they still, Self-inwoven like a coronal.

And the arrows come, and, as if straight out of his own loins originating, cluster with their feathered ends vibrating. But he darkly smiles, inviolate.

Only once his eyes show deep distress, Gazing in a painful nakedness; Then, as though ashamed of noticing, seem to let go with disdainfulness those destroyers of a lovely thing,

Leishman notes that "Sankt Sebastian" was written in the winter of 1905-06 at Meudon4 where Rilke was acting as secretary to Rodin. From the letters we know that Rilke has not only been in Paris but that he has visited both Russia and Italy fairly recently; that he has been at

F. V. Schlegel, The Aesthetic and Miscellaneous Works, Letters on Christian Art, 1802-04, tr. by E. J. Millington (London: Bohn, 1860), p. 87. 2I am thinking here of such pictures as those by A.

Vivarini, by C. Crivelli and by Matteo di Giovanni in the National Gallery, London; by Cima; by Sodoma in the Uffizi; or by Castagno (attributed?) in the Metropol- itan. Perhaps it is mere accident: these "sentimental" ver- sions usually represent an angel bearing a crown to the

suffering saint, a detail conspicuously absent from the more "satisfying" works. It may be worth noting, ironi-

cally in passing, that J. A. Symonds called the Sodoma the "very best" of Sebastians, Renaissance in Italy, p. 366. 3Rainer Maria Rilke, Neue Gedichte (Zurich: Niehans und Rokitansky Verlag, 1949), p. 49. 4Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Works, Volume II: Poetry, tr. by J. B. Leishman (London: the Hogarth Press, 1960),

pp. 158-59. One may wish to see other translations: M. D. Herter Norton's Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (New York: TV. W. Norton, 1938); Jessie Lemont, Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943).

ART JOURNAL XXVII 1 24

Fig. 1. Botticelli, Saint Sebastian. Berlin, Photo courtesy of Staatliche Museen

Berlin-Dahlem, Gemaldegalerie.

Chartres with Rodin in January.5 He describes his visit with Rodin also to Notre Dame, December 2, 1905 in a

passage remarkable for its tone, its receptiveness to ideas of sainthood.6 Leishman guesses that "Rilke would seem to have had more particularly in mind that [picture] by Botticelli in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum at Berlin."7

Some years ago, by a process of elimination and of

intuition, I concluded that Botticelli's Sebastian (Fig. 1) came closer than that of any other painter to Rilke's mood: the testimony of Leishman, who spent himself so

devotedly on the whole of Rilke's art, makes me very happy. The claims, however, of Mantegna seem worth

considering. But, as will be apparent, the Titian and the Pollaiuolo, although so powerful in their own ways, do not visually agree with the specific words of the poem; nor does the Perugino in one crucial detail. Yet when the

degree of spirituality and the particular intensity and

simplicity of composition are at issue these all have some-

thing to say, if only by way of contrast. (Bernini's early Sebastian is also ruled out of consideration because of its

pose-as of a dead (or unconscious saint) almost sitting against his tree trunk.)

Meanwhile let us ask: What in Rilke's attitude made him receptive to the strength of these conceptions of Se- bastian? Made him equally proof against the sentimental

conception? In his essay on Rilke and Nietzsche, Erich Heller perceives a central fact, perhaps incidentally help- ful for our specific problem:

Happiness for them [Rilke and Nietzsche] is not, as it was for Schopenhauer, in the absence of pain; it is the fruit of so radical an acceptance of suffering that abundant delight springs from its very affirmation.8

Perhaps this passage provides some clue to the ar-

resting quality of "Sankt Sebastian," the excitement

centering most urgently in the second stanza, beginning in medids res:

'Selected Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1902-1926, tr.

by R. F. C. Hull (London: MacMillan & Co., Ltd., 1946),

pp. 76-81. 'Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke: 1892-1910, tr. by Jane Bannard Greene and M. D. Herter Norton (New York, W. W. Norton & Co., 1945), p. 195.

TLeishman, S. W., V. II, p. 159. SThe Disinherited Mind (New York: Meridian Books,

1959), p. 131. Mr. Heller also notes that this attitude was

stressed by Rilke "as early as his Tuscan Diary," (ibid.,

p. 132), that is, as early as 1898, at a time when the poet was exploring Botticelli in Florence. The unorthodox

approach to Christianity which Rilke was to develop culminating in The Duino Elegies is dealt with superbly in Mr. Heller's book.

25 Reid: Rilke's Sebastian and the Painters

"Und die Pfeile kommen: jetzt und jetzt." At the same time this excitement is almost classically controlled, not only by the careful but natural rhyming within the near-sonnet of thirteen lines, but by the imagery and tone of the whole. The rhythm-particularly in the last five lines, separated as if a sestet, and all one long sen- tence-seems to gather up from the subject all the pain and all the strength bearing that pain in a final, sad music of triumph. The emphasis of this last stanza, in- deed of the whole poem, falls on the last words: "eines schonen Dinges." So it is that the poem itself becomes

something like that wreath (Kranz) of the first stanza in which Sebastian has bound himself.

Such embodiment of heroic spirit within a quite physical description; such employment of the objective correlative; such tension and resolution of subject with its theme-all these valuable habits Rilke had deliberate-

ly tried to learn from Rodin,9 and later would find affirmed by Cezanne. One result is that this treatment of a medieval subject is no less classic than his treatment of a classical, say in the Apollo poems from the same Neue Gedichte. Both the "Friiher Apollo" and the Archai- scher Torso Apollos" have captured in their sonnet form the most central excitement. Eudo C. Mason, speaking of Rodin's influence on the method of the New Poems, I and II, says that Rilke, "the delicate, elusive poet of in-

wardness, has in his own way become monumental. Near-

ly all these poems have a concrete, external theme."'0 He also pointedly calls attention to the new slowness of

tempo, so that "each image presents itself deliberately and nothing is slurred or blurred.""

The "Sebastian," in its restraint classical, in its sub-

ject medieval, has something of the baroque in its excite-

ment, in its reversal of arrows. For the martyr, pierced with the arrows of his executioners, is, in the higher real-

ity of the poem, the sender of arrows into the hearts of

men. The psychic movement, then, which the poet per-

See Selected Letters, 1902-1926, tr. R. F. C. Hull; H. F.

Peters, Rainer Maria Rilke: Masks and the Man (Seattle:

University of WVashington Press, 1960); W. L. Graff, Rainer Maria Rilke: Creative Anguish of a Modern Poet

(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press,

1956). '0 Rilke, Writers and Critics Series (Edinburgh, London:

1963), p. 52. I Ibid. Mr. Mason shows the significance of Rilke's ar-

rangement: ". . . each of the two volumes is introduced

with a sonnet on Apollo as the god of poetry and, still

more, of definite forms, while the second volume con- cludes with a poem evoking the glorified Buddha as the still undifferentiated permanent centre of pure being from which all particular, changing phenomena emanate -an indication that the extravert objectivity of the

poems is not intended dogmatically or finally," ibid., pp. 52-53.

ceives in his subject, makes its demands on the reader, just as the last words of the "Archaic Torso of Apollo," written in 1908, were "Du musst dein Leb2n andern.""'

And it is in this psychic movement, or in its lack, that our various painters speak from their subject.

From the opening line the reader must focus on the

paradoxical, on the violated-inviolable, on the passive- actor: "Wie ein Liegender, so steht er."'3 Here is a target, but one "ganz hingehalten von dem grossen Willen." The simile for withdrawal, "like mothers when they suckle," is simple, elemental: it is this withdrawal which

gives him strength, his "wreath" of otherness to bind him

together as the physical life trickles out with the blood. This poem offers a splendid example of C. M. Bowra's

judgment of Rilke's similes "in which no modern poet has equalled him." [The simile is] "not mere decora-

tion, nor strictly speaking, decoration at all, [but] vital to the poem."14

The reader is struck with the quietness, with the ab- sence of outer force. Those who martyr Sebastian are not there, save in their shimmering arrows, "eisern be- bend mit den freien Enden." No rope binds the figure in the poem;l5 on the contrary. his "own great will" keeps him upright and strong to send those arrows back, as if

they "sprang out of his own loins." Yet the rain of arrows does continue: "Und die Pfeile kommen; jetzt und

jetzt," an acute, swift movement to be reversed in the next line, "eisern bebend mit den freien enden," the "iron shivering with free ends" giving an almost unbear- able quivering pain; but as if springing from the body of the martyr, transfiguring victim into protagonist. Of this

rhythm Bowra noted that the arrangement of the words

"Der Neuen Gedichte Anderer Teil, p. 119. (This sec- ond volume is dedicated "A Mon Grand Ami, Auguste Rodin.") "Note the repetition of the idea (and sound) of "Lie-

gender" in the last stanza where the eyes also "liegen schmerzlich bloss." Other conceptions of Sebastian,

though masterly in their own right, have obviously chosen a part of the story beyond that of Rilke's concern. For example, the two Frenchmen, Georges de la Tour and Delacroix have their dramatic poems, Lamentation with Sainte Irene and Holy Women Succouring Saint

Sebastian, which provide each artist with depth to poetry far beyond most of the conventional altar-pieces and

panels. 14 C. M. Bowra in Rainer Maria Rilke: Aspects of his Mind and Poetry, ed. W. Rose & G. C. Houston (Lon- don, 1938), pp. 114-115. This is a simile peculiarly Ril- kean in its preoccupation with the psychic experience of women. 15Neither does Botticelli show any rope; though the saint's hands are held behind his tree by some force, we do not see by what force.

ART JOURNAL XXVII 1 26

and of the lines marks the "contrast between the moving arrows and the unmoved saint.'16 Now with the last line of the second stanza comes another paradox: all his ac- tion is silence, stillness, calm, a "dark smile" of one who cannot be hurt because he has withdrawn into his coron- al; he is beyond reach of earthly pain.

So far the mood is heroic; but in the last five lines Rilke does something immensely characteristic both in rhythm and in interpretation. For a new paradox is un- derscored: Sebastian is human, after all, for his eyes do show that "Trauer gross." His pain is naked, but his eyes "lie open" to it only once. "Einmal nur,"l7 and it is shortly over; as if "ashamed of noticing," as Leishman translates, he seems "to let go these destroyers of a lovely thing." In the German the sound pattern is perfected: the repetition of sound in "Augen," "liegen," "leugnen" and "Geringes" is then loosed in "liessen" and "los" (in which penultimate line the rhyme of the first two lines of the stanza finds fulfillment). Also, as counterstrength to this loosening movement, comes the decisive, hard "cht" in "verachtlich" and "Vernichter," reechoing the sym- bolic sound of "steht" (as against "Liegender") of the very first line of the poem; and "jetzt und jetzt," then "lachelt dunkel, unverletzt" closing the second stanza. This harsh consonant suggests the only requital Sebastian makes his despoilers. Again they are not his despoilers, but the "despoilers of a lovely thing": the spiritual?

The spiritual transformation? One is reminded of the inscription on the scroll at the bottom of Mantegna's Venice Sebastian: "Nihil nisi divinum stabile est; coetera fumus." Yet such a reminder, though apt for Mantegna's view (by this time quite "spiritualized" in the more or- thodox Christian sense)18 somehow misses the strength of the poem. Such transformation is one of Rilke's chief themes, uttered in poem after poem, until in the Seventh Duino Elegy he can say surely:

Nowhere, beloved, can world exist but within, Life passes in transformation. And, ever dimin- ishing, outwardness dwindles.1'

; Ibid., p. 112. 7 A similar construction may be noted in "Der Panther"

(Neue Gedichte, I, p. 46); in "Friiher Apollo" (ibid., p. 9); in the Fifth Duino Elegy, Duino Elegies, tr. and introduced by J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender (New York: T. WI. Norton & Co., Inc., 1939), p. 46ff. " For Mantegna's development of the theme see particu- larly E. Tietze-Conrat, Mantegna: Paintings, Drawings, Engravings, Complete Edition (New York: Phaidon Press, 1954), and Paul Kristeller, Andrea Mantegna (London: Longmans, Green, 1901), p. 138. Kristeller dates (p. 141) this Ca'd'Oro Sebastian, with his agonized heaven-ward

gaze, and very youthful aspect, as the last in Mantegna's series beginning with the Louvre work, continuing with the Kunsthistorisches work in Vienna (p. 169).

But while we are speaking of transformation, or transla- tion to another realm, it is worth noting that nowhere in Rilke's poem is there an angel with crown or deliverance from the skies; consequently nothing that forces his Se- bastian to look heavenward. (Sebastian, the sainted man, is performing the transformation; the heaven-sent deliv- ery is within his own soul and body.) Indeed, if he looks anywhere, it is at us, above his tormentors, his gaze once naked, then ashamed of noticing those "destroyers."

This gaze of naked pain so close upon the smile, "dark" but "inviolate," is central in Rilke's picture. This rules out, as direct inspiration, I suppose, Titian's magnificent figure on the right wing of the Altar-piece of the Church of SS. Nazzaro e Celso in Brescia (Fig. 2), since there the saint is shown in profile, his dark hair falling over his darkened face as his body strains not to give way, the great right arm roped high above his drooping head. There is no smile possible here; also no arrows are lodged in the loins and only one in the chest.20 Rilke might, however, have seen Titian's frontal version in St. Petersburg, since he spent so much of his impressionable youth in Russia with Lou Andreas-Salome; here the head seems to be that of a young boy, in agony, certainly with no smile, and with no arrows in the loins. (Titian's young Sebastian (1504) in Venice at the Salute (St. Mark with the Plague Saints) is strong, athletic, with eyes downcast; and does not seem close to Rilke's mood.)

Next we may consider the Pollaiuolos' tremendous Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian in London (Fig. 3). With its large landscape of Roman ruins and its symmetrically placed archers, athletically practicing their skills against a realistic Arno valley, this masterpiece somehow does not suggest Rilke's mood. Though no one can deny the abundant energy of the despoilers-six in the foreground alone-Sebastian himself seems to show nothing that could be called a smile of the inviolate. One observes that no arrows lodge in the loins, a literal point of difference to be sure. For the large effect, the archers, stringing their bows, taking aim, are so absorbing as to crowd the saint out of the painting. But who is to say

"1R. M. R., Duino Elegies, tr. by J. B. Leishman and

Stephen Spender, p. 61. The German: "Nirgends, Ge- liebte, wird Welt sein, als innen. Unser Leben geht hin mit Verwandlung. Und immer geringer schwindet das Aussen," p. 60. 20 See Claude Phillips, The Earlier Work of Titian (Lon- don, 1897), p. 86, who calls the Brescia figure "athletic," not spiritual. This painting dates 1522, whereas the Hermitage conception is supposed to be much later (1570- 73) according to Charles Ricketts, Titian (London, 1910), p. 150. Sir Kenneth Clark considers the Brescia Sebastian in his category of pathos, remarking that Titian had "borrowed freely" from the Laokoon. (The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, Mellon Lectures, 1953, reprinted New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1959, p. 343.)

27 Reid: Rilke's Sebastian and the Painters

Fig. 2. Titian, Saint Sebastian right wing of alter piece in church of Saints Nazzaro and Celso, Brescia.

what vision sprang from which given details? All I can record is my feeling that there is little kinship between this master painting and the poem.

Rilke knew Venice21 as early as 1897 and again in

1903, returning many times, so that he may well have studied Tintoretto's figure in the upper hall of the Scu- ola di San Rocco (Fig. 4). Ruskin called this the "most

majestic Saint Sebastian in existence." To him the figure looked dead (the lighting might account for this): "It is dead, and well it may be, for there is one arrow through the forehead and another through the heart; . . . sent ap- parently with the force of thunderbolts."22 Tintoretto's saint is boyish, his body contorted by arrows seeming to

pin his legs together. His tree leans back in a diagonal, he with it, a strong halo encircling his head. Without the classical repose suggested in Rilke's "withdrawnness" and without the excitement of returning the arrows, Tinto- retto's excitement is of the suffering body, caught unmis-

takably against its will by its own cruel destiny. The "re- cumbent" stance of the poem is not matched here. El Greco is said to have followed Tintoretto's example in Palencia Cathedral. Rilke's passion for El Greco and his love of Spain are real, but they do perhaps belong to a later period.23 But he was so much at home in Venice, centering several poems of the Neue Gedichte there, that the possibility of his having been moved by Tintoretto's saint is strong, though the physical details are different.

Also in Venice is a noble Sebastian by Giovanni Bel- lini. The lone figure is youthful but composed and

thoughtful-a contrast to the Tintoretto. Bound on a

simple tree, arrows through neck and chest, body and

legs, he is nevertheless singularly straight, not sentimen- tal, looking out directly at us but without any smile. A beautiful and dignified conception, perhaps more spiritu- al than some others, Bellini's saint seems less complex than Rilke's.24 In its calm simplicity it reminds one of

21 Selected Letters, 1902-26, tr. by Hull, pp. 22-3, 39, 211, 226,230, 301-4, 381. 22 John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (Boston, n.d.), Vol. III, p. 361, and Ruskin quoted by Evelyn March Phillips, Tintoretto, London, 1911, pp. 75-76. 23Rilke traveled to Spain in 1912 for the first time; our poem is 1905-06. But on Spain see particularly Graff, op. cit. See also El Greco (Phaidon Press, 1938), pi. 16; Sebas- tian is a tall youth with a small head and no smile; he is kneeling, looking up, with one arm roped up; there is only one arrow. The position is quite different from that of Tintoretto's figure.

Now in the Accademia, the panel is from a polyptych of the Scuola della Carita. Berenson reproduces in Italian Pictures of the Renaissance, Venetian School, I. PI. 202.

ART JOURNAL XXVII 1 28

Fig. 3. Pollaiuolo, The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, London, National Gsalery,

Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees, The National Gallery, London.

that by Antonello da Messina in Dresden, a kinship which Kenneth Clark notes.25

Mantegna's Sebastian in the Ca'd'Oro, whose scroll with its explicit warning of the mutability of human life, the triumph of the spirit over the "smoke" of our tran- siency, has already been noted, is apparently a late work. Paul Kristeller speaks of the effect of this third version by Mantegna as "floating in a crescendo of suffering."26 The degree of "spiritualization" does seem even greater here

'Kenneth Clark in Landscape into Art (Boston: Beacon Paperbook, 1961), p. 23, also discusses the Dresden Sebastian as an Antonello da Messina. The A. da Messina is reproduced by Berenson, The Italian Painters of the Renaissance (New York: Phaidon, 1952), pl. 328. (There is no smile). This same picture seems to be attributed to Giorgione by Giuseppe Fiocco in his Giorgione (Ber- gamo, 1948), pl. 5. 26 Kristeller, op. cit., p. 141. He speaks also of the "em- phatic and almost exaggerated rhetorical effects in these latest works." (Ibid.) No smile is discernible. See also E. Tietze-Conrat, op. cit., p. 27.

Fig. 4. Tintoretto, Saint Sebastian, Venice, Scuola di San Rocco.

than in the earlier Vienna treatment, where a young, curly-haired saint suffers a cruel arrow through the head and in which a tiny rider in a cloud to the upper left of the panel adds mystery to interpretation.

But as fine as these conceptions are, to me they seem feeble beside the Mantegna Sebastian (Fig. 5) in the Louvre, dated comparatively early both by Kristeller and E. Tietze-Conrat. Here is a work (more complicated in composition than either of the later versions) inexhaust- ible, full of meaning, strength, subtlety, and, so far as I can judge, without any detail at variance with Rilke's view. But the principal effect is the uncompromised no- bility of the figure, its splendid but unstrained strength, its great maturity of expression. The actual face is that of a man, not of a boy-as so many other versions make him out. The coloring with its grey-blue sky with heavy clouds, its central shaft of fluted Corinthian column with its broken arch of the same shading against which the magnificent body stands, the relic foot of a statue which once stood where Sebastian now stands, the grey-green

29 Reid: Rilke's Sebastian and the Painters

growth of leaf coming up from these ruins, and the casu- al life of the present among ruins of civilization in the

background vista to the right of the panel-all these de- tails are simple yet arresting. None of these details de- tracts from the strong, mature figure, pierced ten times. The eyes look up but with no hint of that sentimental

gaze sometimes attributed to the saint. The really mar- velous details for me, however, are the almost incredible hideousness of the human faces, the archers just caught in the lower right corner: the low look of fear and cun-

ning on the one face looking back; the heavy insensitivi-

ty, evil-eyed and happily determined, on the partner, the bald torturer. Having accomplished their simple work

they are walking away, pursued by superstition, we may conjecture; they do not look at Sebastian, nor he at them.

Perhaps they are on their way to another job. (Indeed, the first archer is startlingly like a shepherd in Manteg- na's Adoration of the Shepherds in the Metropolitan where his ugliness is no less accentuated by its expression of humility.) We are shocked, but somehow amply satisfied; here are the despoilers worthy of Sebastian's dis- dain. His faint halo is just visible against the grey col- umn.

Mantegna was clearly fascinated by his subject-and more than equal to it. This Louvre version has the "firm

severity of a major"27 [key], an "uncompromising truth- fulness in the representation of action and form-even the rudest, as, for example, in scenes of execution." Here is "reality, with all its contrasts as they exist in nature."28 Yet there is

almost absolute repose; there is no attempt of the

body to escape from its torment, and the face ex-

presses an inspired gentleness, a spiritualization of

suffering which strongly contrasts with the Hercu- lean structure of the body and the realism of bodily pain. It was, however, not the artist's intention to

point a contrast-such as baroque art loves-between

bodily strength and the resignation of a Christian

martyr; there is nothing ecstatic in Mantegna's "Se- bastian." . . The mood is elegiac, but the develop- ment of form does not seem to suit the mood.29

The clarity and very objectivity of the Paris paint- ing, keeps it in the mind's eye. If we turn to Berenson, who loves Mantegna so deeply and criticizes him so free-

ly, we may be somewhat surprised. Berenson, of course, noted the "Romantic" aspect of "Mantegna's attitude to-

27 Kristeller, op. cit., p. 138. 28

Ibid., p. 140. 29 Ibid. I find Kristeller's analysis masterly, but cannot

quite accept the judgment of his concluding sentence. He then speaks of the Vienna picture as only a few years later than that of the Louvre, and the Venice treatment as the culmination of the trio.

Fig. 5. Mantegna, Saint Sebastian, Paris, Louvre, Photo courtesy of Musees Nation- aux, Paris.

wards Antiquity"; but he goes further to say that he was "naively romantic."30

[Mantegna's] visual acquaintance [with the classi- cal past] being confined to a few plastic representa- tions, he naively forgot that Romans were creatures of flesh and blood, and he painted them as if they had never been anything but marble, never other than statuesque in pose, processional in gait, and godlike in look and gesture.31

While this holds true for much of Mantegna's work, particularly, and I think, with beautiful effect in such

0 Berenson, Italian Painters of the Renaissance, p. 147. 3 Ibid.

ART JOURNAL XXVII 1 30

pieces as the Samson and Delilah in London and the Ju- dith in Dublin, I do not believe that Berenson would

have extended this criticism to the Louvre Sebastian. Here the saint's body has still the flesh shading, particu-

larly subtle against the grey column and the grey loin-

cloth, while the ruddiness of the archers is all too vital.

Berenson, in passing, levels another criticism: he re- marks that "although a painter of Christian mysteries, [Mantegna] betrays little Christian feeling."32 Would Berenson have seen the Louvre saint as merely stoic? Per-

haps it is the best of the Roman in the martyred, con-

verted Roman soldier-saint; but it is certainly also simul-

taneously deeply Christian. As for practical considera-

tions, we recall that Rilke was devoted to the Louvre, and had enjoyed the chance of spending much time there at this period with Rodin.33

With the beautiful Perugino, also in the Louvre, and equally accessible to the poet, Berenson is enrap- tured:

The large "St. Sebastian," enframed under an arch which opens out on Eden, and measuring, not as in

plein-air painting, a mite against infinity, but as man should in Eden, dominant and towering high over the horizon.34

This is certainly a fine description of the Perugino in itself. Berenson, was not, of course, thinking of it in

connection with Rilke. When one does, the Perugino seems feebler. As a matter of physical detail there are

only two arrows, one in arm, one in upper chest, so that

the urgency of "jetzt und jetzt" is lost; for another, the saint looks calmly to heaven and seems hardly to be

suffering. Something about the placement of the left foot

suggests a dance position, detracting from realism. For a final difference there are no despoilers, no hints even of

their presence. With all these possibilities why did Leishman note

Rilke's especial kinship with the Botticelli Sebastian,

(Fig. 1) a judgment which had been almost a conviction with me for many years? Now in the Kaiser Friedrich,35

32 Ibid., p. 148. With the three Sebastians in mind, I can

hardly accept this judgment. Although Berenson pays real tribute to Mantegna's tremendous genius he notes that "the humanist in him was always killing the artist."

(Ibid., p. 157.) Again, that he was "archaistic rather than archaic in his intention." (Ibid., and especially p. 152.) 33 Unfortunately I have not found any specific reference to this picture in his letters. 4 Ibid., p. 126. (This Perugino is called "sexless" by J. A.

Symonds, The Renaissance in Italy (Fontana Library, 1961), p. 215. " See reproduction in colour in Lionello Venturi, Bot-

ticelli, with notes by Ludwig Goldscheider, London, Phaidon Press, 1963, PI. 5. It is perhaps noteworthy that the Tree is introduced. Mantegna's versions all use some

the lovely narrow panel was painted 1473-74 for the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Florence, perhaps for the feast of Saint Sebastian, the 20th of January. The tall young figure looks calmly out at us, full face; pinned by arrows through leg, abdomen and chest to his tree he inclines to his left, his black hair framing the pensive face, his eyes fixed on the spectator in a firm, conscious control. The body is a youth's, firm also and undistorted

by pain; he stands against a background with tiny, dis- tant Gothic towers and bridges, where the archers on foot follow horsemen with standards back to the world and their next assignment. One infinitesimal figure on the

grass looking up into the halcyon sky, perhaps towards the martyr's tree. Another leans over to pluck something from the water. Goldscheider points out a detail's

significance; on the left "the departing soldiers continue their cruelty, although they find no better victims than the birds high in the air."36

The composition is completely Sebastian's; there are no human figures remotely near him and no angels in the

sky, a serene blue. Self-contained, indeed inviolate, the

figure is, according to Sir Kenneth Clark, the one exam-

ple of a "satisfactory nude in repose" achieved by Botti- celli or Pollaiuolo, who were usually "concerned with embodiments of energy or ecstatic motion."37 Repose is

certainly there, also the quality of being "satisfactory," although L. Venturi, pointing out that this was painted when Botticelli "was barely thirty," seems to have found it less so: he calls it

... a gallant attempt at the nude, carefully studied in its anatomical construction, with the head in- clined in sentimental fashion, to show that we have to do with a martyr. The chiaroscuro is studied with a care unusual in Botticelli's works, but for this very reason the linear rhythm is less striking.38

On the contrary Y. Yashiro calls this the "greatest triumph of Botticelli in Nature-study," and places it as a

strongly realistic work.39 Ruskin, of course, is famous for his statement that

Botticelli was the "only painter of Italy who understood the thoughts of heathens and Christians equally,"40 al-

columns, as if to perpetuate the story of the historical martyrdom of Sebastian in the Colosseum during Dio- cletian's reign. Also the Numidian archers are given close- up attention in Mantegna's Louvre version, whereas Botticelli's perspective is far more Gothic and less "real- istic." 36 Ibid. 37 Clark, op. cit., p. 91. 38 Lionello Venturi, op. cit., p. 9. 39 Y. Yashiro, Sandro Botticelli, and the Florentine Ren- aissance (London: Medici Society Ltd., 1929), p. 22. 40 ohn Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, quoted in L. Venturi, p. 10.

31 Reid: Rilke's Sebastian and the Painters

though he was not referring specifically to the Saint Sebastian. The heroic body and the heroic soul are certainly presented here. One notes the quietness, the complete absence of writhing, the lovely equilibrium in the deep look as in the attitude of the body itself. One might be tempted to say that this picture is a humanist's dream of man offering himself for men. No angel offers early and easy relief from intolerable suffering.

The heroism is, however, saddened by the Christian tradition; the "sorrow of this world" does trouble the beautifully composed eyes. One recalls J. A. Symonds' friend's remark that Botticelli sounds the "echo of a beautiful lapsed mythology which he has found the means of transmitting."41 In this painting the body might be that of Hercules; the head is Christ's.

This double vision does not imply a divided unity; perhaps it is partly the quality which persuades Berenson that Botticelli was "indifferent to representation and in- tent upon presentation."42

And it is this habit of conceiving rather than

picturing that links Botticelli to Rilke; one feels this in-

tuitively. One has only to read the poem once again, re-

calling others in the same collection, to see that for the

poet, as for the painter, the "representative element was mere libretto."43 Again and again Rilke resees the subject of a poem so radically that the tradition seems to survive most explicitly in the title: "David Sings before Saul," "The Setting Out of the Prodigal Son," "Adam," "Eve," to mention a few. No one poem is orthodox representa- tion. They are, one and all, presentations of the poet's psychological insights, reconstructions of an inner drama. Sometimes, of course, this habit is annoying. But in the

41J. A. Symonds, The Renaissance in Italy: The Fine Arts (New York: Capricorn, 1961), p. 182. Walter Pater's

judgment may be apposite; that Botticelli's persons, both

"profane and sacred" are "comely, and in a certain sense like angels but with a sense of displacement or loss about them . . . the wistfulness of exiles, conscious of a passion and energy greater than any known issue of them" ... "a sentiment of ineffable melancholy." The Renaissance

(Fontana Library reissue, 1961), pp. 72-73. 42B. Berenson, Florentine Painting of the Renaissance, p. 67. 4 Ibid., p. 69. Cf. also C. M. Bowra where he speaks of the general conception behind the Neue Gedichte: "Ril- ke's theory, then, might be regarded as an attempt to harmonize and combine two different views of poetry. On the one hand it demanded the fullness which comes

from living in the imagination, from yielding to every impression, and in this it recalls the Romantics . . . on the other hand it recalls Mallarme's conception of the ideal poem as something absolute in itself and free from anything that might be called the private tastes of its maker." Aspects, op. cit., pp. 92-93.

"Sankt Sebastian" it has borne real fruit. There is no copy work, no commentary, but a reliving, an explora- tion. It is this tendency to see the old thing new that makes Rilke so often seem both "classic" and "romantic." He seems, again in Berenson's terms, "archaic" but not "archaistic"44 (by the time of New Poems, following Rodin and Cezanne) and in this region of the mind, perhaps, he met Botticelli. For we easily agree with Pater that Botticelli was of the type that "usurps the data be- fore it as the exponent of ideas, moods, visions of its own."45

Rilke, then, like Botticelli, creates rather than de- picts. Sebastian is, for him, one who remains, unlike the vanishing race of mere humans. For Sebastian by his spir- it has helped in the transformation.46 The "world with- in" has been fixed in the poem, bound in the wreath while the merely "outward" life of centuries has been "dwindling." As early as the Second Elegy, Rilke was ask- ing: "Does the cosmic space we dissolve into taste of us, then?"47 To this human dissolving he counters the "god- like bodies" of "a grander restraint."48 And later, in the Ninth Elegy, he cries out again:

Why, when this span of life might be fleeted away as laurel, a little darker than all the surrounding green, with tiny waves on the border of every leaf (like the smile of a wind):-oh why have to be human, and, shunning Destiny, long for Destiny? ...49

In the final elegy with an echo, a little reminder in the imagery, the poet contrasts the race of men with the race we might become "bursting into jubilant praise."

We wasters of sorrows! How we stare away into sad endurance beyond them, trying to forsee their end! Whereas they are nothing else than our winter foli- age, our sombre evergreen, one of the seasons of our interior year...."50

Sebastian is not such a waster of sorrows: he is not "staring away into sad endurance beyond them, trying to foresee their end" as so often the less satisfying saints in

Berenson, p. 259. 45Pater, p. 44 (See also Rilke [Letters, 1892-1910, p. 29] on this very trait in Botticelli.) 46 See particularly Duino Elegies, The Seventh, and note 19 of this paper.

Duino Elegies, p. 31. 4 Ibid., p. 33. 49 Ibid., p. 73. 50 Duino Elegies, p. 79, for Rubens see Max Rooses, Rubens (Philadelphia, 1904), Vol. I, p. 141. The Berlin Sebastian is said to be a self-portrait of Rubens' youth. The writhing figure is not transcendent, as it seems to me. Jacob Burckhardt calls this Rubens "grandly ple- beian." (The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Phaidon, 1937, p. 38.)

ART JOURNAL XXVII 1 32

his brother-pictures are staring, as, for example, Rubens'

young Sebastian stares, his boyish face lifted to heaven but his body so warmly of this world; instead he is look-

ing deep into our eyes to see if we can understand with him. He has garlanded himself in his "winter foliage" al-

ready. Rilke's love of Botticelli runs through his letters;

particularly in 1904; and in preparation for his Italian

journey as early as 1897 he had been reading "in the most various books on Italian Renaissance Art. . . . [He was] "especially fascinated by . . . Sandro Botticelli."51 W. L. Graff says that Botticelli "seemed like a stray and distant brother of the Russians"52 to Rilke at this time.

The legends of the saints were intimate reading for the poet: Graff remarks specifically of the "Sankt Sebas- tian" that "this sort of serene detachment which comes from an inner, indestructible core of innocence and unity is not different from that which Rilke demanded of the artist and of himself."53 Graff's chapters on "Poet and Saint" are rewarding but too complex to be discussed here; to quote Rilke once more: "In lovers and in saints renunciation and fulfillment become at bottom identical."54

"Sankt Sebastian" is unashamedly a lyric poem, as the great Mantegna and Botticelli, the Titian and Tinto- retto are lyric paintings, but the design of reality is clear in all. This may return us to Schlegel's question: is mar-

tyrdom a fit subject for painting? or for poetry? His chief

worry had centered upon the "lack of concentration," the lack of "one powerful focus."55 He also recognized a vast

gulf between the arts of poetry and painting, deriving perhaps from Lessing's classic statement in the "Laocoon."

The master [of the "Laocoon"] was striving after the highest beauty, under the given circumstances of

bodily pain. This, in its full deforming violence, it was not possible to unite with that. He was obliged, therefore, to abate, to lower it, to tone down cries to sighing.56

51 Letters, 1892-1910, p. 29. 52 Graff, op. cit., p. 91.

3 Ibid., p. 201. 5 Briefe aus Muzot, p. 142. (This essay does not, of course, pretend to consider all the Sebastians Rilke may have known. Omissions are obvious. Memling's Triptych in the Louvre with its slim saint bound to a tree at left being shot at by two archers, as well as his "Martyrdom of St. Sebastian" at Brussels, may have been favorites with Rilke; we do not know. The Griinewald Issenheim altar-piece at Colmar is also likely to have been known to him.) 5 Schlegel, op. cit., p. 87. 8 G. Lessing, Laocoon, tr. by W. A. Steel (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1930), p. 13.

Perhaps it is this very necessity of "abatement" in the representation which makes imaginative vision for the painter or poet more possible-and hence for the

spectator or reader. As Lessing added:

The more we see, the more must we be able to add

by thinking. The more we add thereto by thinking, so much the more can we believe ourselves to see.57

It is just this quality of calling forth the thinking re-

sponse which occasionally leads artist and poet to the same subject "without implying the slightest degree of imitation or common aim between them."58 Lessing warns us further against slavish comparison of detail. For him the important thing is "whether both of them have had complete freedom, whether they have, in the absence of any outward compulsion, been able to aim at the

highest effect of their art."59 Religion, in the sense of or- thodox values and symbols, he finds to be one of these "outward compulsions."

The composition of these two Sebastians did come at a period peculiarly "free" both for poet and painter. Bot- ticelli in 1473-74 was free to transfigure, to present his own vision, freer by far than he was to be after his con- version to the teaching of Savonarola. Rilke, similarly, in the years 1905-06, had not yet come upon the apocalyptic visions of his "angelic orders." In youthful maturity each had been free to attempt the "highest effect of their art."60 Yet in each there was also another freedom-free- dom from the tyranny of the senses, freedom from the

physical reality whose depiction was an end in itself. There is nothing naturalistic about any of these versions,

nothing, as Wallace Stevens might say, that deforms the mind.61

But the subject itself remained, inexhaustible. In a letter of 1912 Rilke spoke of martyrdom as being a state where "pain, no matter where it comes from, instantly turns into pure power, just as in a work of art hardness and even ugliness . . . reveal themselves as strength."62 This power, in its quietness, in its purity, provided the

poet with the vitality which was to transform the idea into spirit. Schlegel had said that "perfection consists in the union of the idea and the vitality,"63 every defect in

proportion of these elements leading to mannerism. Rilke often fell into such imperfect balances; man-

nerism was a very real danger in his art and sensibility, but one from which he longed to work himself free. Does this help to account for the extraordinary stilled excite- ment in Rilke's saint? for the counterattack of his arrows, for his smile? There is surely no power to prevent the

poet's composing his own picture--not a composite of his favorites nor a depiction of any one of them, but his own answer to all "destroyers of a lovely thing," the "Kranz" of art, the true meaning and reward of martyrdom.

In 1912 Rilke writes a letter speaking of Rodin's art.

(Continued on page 39)

33 Reid: Rilke's Sebastian and the Painters

profession of sculpture. With the exception of two works,7 all other sculpture which Flannagan created dur-

ing these two years dealt with the human figure. Through the animals which he carved on the Chest Flan-

nagan seems to have discovered his talent, an innate feel-

ing for capturing the proper essences of these creatures. It is as if the Chest were a lexicon, a source like the medi- eval Bestiaries, of animal motifs from which Flannagan would compose for the next seventeen years, or until his death. Having once been stated here on the sides of the Chest, certain animals never change as they appear and

reappear in his later work. Only two (the tiger and the

turtle) from some twelve animals represented fail to be realized by Flannagan in later three-dimensional form. As his paintings and drawings were in the beginning a source for his sculpture, so now the menagerie seen as re- liefs on the Chest becomes a source. Having once set down these images and gone through the process of carv- ing, these animals appear to have become thoroughly committed to Flannagan's visual memory. He does not

forget either their poses or their contours. From the Chest eventually evolved five elephants, thirteen mon- keys. two giraffes, numerous cats, coiled snakes, camels, two frogs, and several horses. The Chest became to Flan-

nagan what the Gates of Hell were to Rodin. Like the early anonymous artists who illustrated the

Bestiaries, Flannagan chose animals which seemingly have a natural grotesqueness to them, those which were not domesticated and those which tended to be exotic. In the latter category the giraffes, camels, and elephants sug- gest in our present world their direct relationship to pro- totypes living during the earliest evolutionary stages of the earth itself. His choice is but a reminder of how Flan-

nagan, consciously or unconsciously, followed a pattern of primitivism with tenacity and constancy. His refer- ence to both the medieval and prehistoric carries us to arts, to symbols, and to creatures both living and imagi- nary which can be considered as primary, as fundamen- talist. This fundamentalism is an important tenet of the

practicing primitivist. Beyond iconographic, symbolic, and compositional

detail, Flannigan in his Chest expressed another tie to medieval art. That he chose to make a chest rather than some other piece of furniture seems significant. Chests during the middle ages were considered major items whereas in the twentieth century they have assumed a much lesser role. His idea for such an historiated kind of chest may have been afforded by his contact with medi- eval works in the museums of both Minneapolis and New York City.8 The medieval furniture maker used oak wood predominately which he joined by pegs and often stained darkly; Flannagan has followed this medieval

'Both sculptures are giraffes, one now in a private col- lection in Philadelphia while the other is in the collec- tion of the Art Gallery, University of Notre Dame.

profession of sculpture. With the exception of two works,7 all other sculpture which Flannagan created dur-

ing these two years dealt with the human figure. Through the animals which he carved on the Chest Flan-

nagan seems to have discovered his talent, an innate feel-

ing for capturing the proper essences of these creatures. It is as if the Chest were a lexicon, a source like the medi- eval Bestiaries, of animal motifs from which Flannagan would compose for the next seventeen years, or until his death. Having once been stated here on the sides of the Chest, certain animals never change as they appear and

reappear in his later work. Only two (the tiger and the

turtle) from some twelve animals represented fail to be realized by Flannagan in later three-dimensional form. As his paintings and drawings were in the beginning a source for his sculpture, so now the menagerie seen as re- liefs on the Chest becomes a source. Having once set down these images and gone through the process of carv- ing, these animals appear to have become thoroughly committed to Flannagan's visual memory. He does not

forget either their poses or their contours. From the Chest eventually evolved five elephants, thirteen mon- keys. two giraffes, numerous cats, coiled snakes, camels, two frogs, and several horses. The Chest became to Flan-

nagan what the Gates of Hell were to Rodin. Like the early anonymous artists who illustrated the

Bestiaries, Flannagan chose animals which seemingly have a natural grotesqueness to them, those which were not domesticated and those which tended to be exotic. In the latter category the giraffes, camels, and elephants sug- gest in our present world their direct relationship to pro- totypes living during the earliest evolutionary stages of the earth itself. His choice is but a reminder of how Flan-

nagan, consciously or unconsciously, followed a pattern of primitivism with tenacity and constancy. His refer- ence to both the medieval and prehistoric carries us to arts, to symbols, and to creatures both living and imagi- nary which can be considered as primary, as fundamen- talist. This fundamentalism is an important tenet of the

practicing primitivist. Beyond iconographic, symbolic, and compositional

detail, Flannigan in his Chest expressed another tie to medieval art. That he chose to make a chest rather than some other piece of furniture seems significant. Chests during the middle ages were considered major items whereas in the twentieth century they have assumed a much lesser role. His idea for such an historiated kind of chest may have been afforded by his contact with medi- eval works in the museums of both Minneapolis and New York City.8 The medieval furniture maker used oak wood predominately which he joined by pegs and often stained darkly; Flannagan has followed this medieval

'Both sculptures are giraffes, one now in a private col- lection in Philadelphia while the other is in the collec- tion of the Art Gallery, University of Notre Dame.

practice. Thus, the Chest to some degree illustrates what Carl Zigrosser was to observe about Flannagan later, that, "He would have felt at home in the Middle Ages...."9

Other examples of Flannagan's urge to fashion func- tional objects are known, i.e., a house, still extant, which he built for Miss Rollins at New City, New York, with its

sculptured ceiling beams and hand-carved lampholders, or several large, carved wooden screens, now lost, which he created for both patrons and himself.10 However, these other objects assume a minor role when compared with the bed, the dining table, or the remarkable chest. These three objects will always represent a major direction in the early sculpture of Flannagan as well as an unlimited source of ideas for his stone sculpture which was to begin in 1925 and to continue until his death. s Cf. a Spanish Altarpiece, Castillian, Late XIV Cent., Cloisters Collection (Accession No. 25.120.257), New York City, purchased in 1925, the year in which Flanna-

gan's Chest was carved. Photographs of the medieval

galleries at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts taken in 1915-1917, the years when Flannagan was in the Art School located in this building, show several oaken chests.

Dorothy C. Miller, ed., The Sculpture of John B. Flan-

nagan, New York, 1942, p. 9. 10 See Boyne Grainger, "We Lived in Patchin Place: An Annal," unpublished typewritten manuscript in posses- sion of Mliss Grainger, New York, 1961.

RILKE'S SEBASTIAN AND THE PAINTERS (Continued from page 33)

The words seem applicable to his own best work in the Neue Gedichte, especially to "Sankt Sebastian":

The thing is definite, the thing of art must be still more definite; taken away from all mere chance, re- moved from all unclearness, lifted up out of time and given to space, it has become capable of eternity.64

57 Ibid., p. 14. 58 Ibid., p. 33. 9 Ibid., p. 39.

60 One may note the same for Mantegna in his calm, real- istic mastery of the Louvre version, to be followed by the Vienna and Venice "compulsion" of the spiritual. 61 Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel, Essays on Real- ity and the Imagination (New York: Knopf, 1951), p. 161. 62 Selected Letters, 1902-1926, tr. by Hull, p. 212. 63Schlegel, op. cit., p. 295. J. A. Symonds had noted of the Sodoma (his favorite Sebastian, but not mine): "Suf- fering, refined and spiritual, without contortion or spasm, could not be presented with more pathos in a form of more surpassing loveliness . . . bold thought of combining the beauty of a Greek Hylas with the Chris- tian sentiment of Martyrdom." Renaissance in Italy, p. 366. o Rilke quoted by Eudo C. Mason, op. cit., p. 56.

practice. Thus, the Chest to some degree illustrates what Carl Zigrosser was to observe about Flannagan later, that, "He would have felt at home in the Middle Ages...."9

Other examples of Flannagan's urge to fashion func- tional objects are known, i.e., a house, still extant, which he built for Miss Rollins at New City, New York, with its

sculptured ceiling beams and hand-carved lampholders, or several large, carved wooden screens, now lost, which he created for both patrons and himself.10 However, these other objects assume a minor role when compared with the bed, the dining table, or the remarkable chest. These three objects will always represent a major direction in the early sculpture of Flannagan as well as an unlimited source of ideas for his stone sculpture which was to begin in 1925 and to continue until his death. s Cf. a Spanish Altarpiece, Castillian, Late XIV Cent., Cloisters Collection (Accession No. 25.120.257), New York City, purchased in 1925, the year in which Flanna-

gan's Chest was carved. Photographs of the medieval

galleries at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts taken in 1915-1917, the years when Flannagan was in the Art School located in this building, show several oaken chests.

Dorothy C. Miller, ed., The Sculpture of John B. Flan-

nagan, New York, 1942, p. 9. 10 See Boyne Grainger, "We Lived in Patchin Place: An Annal," unpublished typewritten manuscript in posses- sion of Mliss Grainger, New York, 1961.

RILKE'S SEBASTIAN AND THE PAINTERS (Continued from page 33)

The words seem applicable to his own best work in the Neue Gedichte, especially to "Sankt Sebastian":

The thing is definite, the thing of art must be still more definite; taken away from all mere chance, re- moved from all unclearness, lifted up out of time and given to space, it has become capable of eternity.64

57 Ibid., p. 14. 58 Ibid., p. 33. 9 Ibid., p. 39.

60 One may note the same for Mantegna in his calm, real- istic mastery of the Louvre version, to be followed by the Vienna and Venice "compulsion" of the spiritual. 61 Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel, Essays on Real- ity and the Imagination (New York: Knopf, 1951), p. 161. 62 Selected Letters, 1902-1926, tr. by Hull, p. 212. 63Schlegel, op. cit., p. 295. J. A. Symonds had noted of the Sodoma (his favorite Sebastian, but not mine): "Suf- fering, refined and spiritual, without contortion or spasm, could not be presented with more pathos in a form of more surpassing loveliness . . . bold thought of combining the beauty of a Greek Hylas with the Chris- tian sentiment of Martyrdom." Renaissance in Italy, p. 366. o Rilke quoted by Eudo C. Mason, op. cit., p. 56.

39 Forsyth: The Early Flannagan and Carved Furniture 39 Forsyth: The Early Flannagan and Carved Furniture