Certain Agonies, or El Greco & San Juan
I.
Fig. 1. El Greco (and workshop?), Agony in the Garden, 1590, oil on canvas, 40 in × 52 in, National Gallery, London.
“The spirit is willing, but the Flesh is weak.” [1]
“His sweat was, as it were, great drops of Blood falling down upon the ground.” [2]
The Flesh of Christ is weak. Sweat exudes from it, ripples downwards, and falls, momentarily, in great drops of Blood.
Blood forms eddies: the swirling cloak of Christ, red pools of iron, sometimes of ochre or vermillion, and, later, of carmine. Carmine is a red lake, a lac de sang—a lake of blood. The source of one red flows into another. This pigment contains the flow of Castilian conquests. Carmín emerges from the Latin carminium, by following the Arabic carmesí (or insect). Yet the source of El Greco’s lake of blood flows from Mesoamerican soil: from cactus, to cochineal, to Xicalpextle or “collecting bowl,” where dazed insect bodies dry in the sun.
El Greco reserves carmine for the lips of his son. [3]
Fig. 2. El Greco, Portrait of Jorge Manuel Theotocópuli, 1597–1603, oil on canvas, 32 in × 22 in, Museo de Bellas Artes, Seville.
II.
My father, let this cup pass Me by. Nevertheless, let it be as You, not I, would have it. If this cup cannot pass, then I will drink it. Your Will be done! [4]
Christ repeats this prayer three times, as if once for each Apostle: Peter, John, and James. Their bodies bend and ripple through a gossamer sheet. A cloud descends to enfold them in a baroque upheaval. [5] The Apostles exist in a dream-state of the Son’s prayer. They will soon long to return to it.
A second John: Juan de la Cruz, born before Domeniko’s first year, conjures a second cloud of unknowing [6], a longing in the darkest of nights:
O guiding dark of night!
O dark of night more darling than the dawn!
O night that can unite
A lover and loved one,
Lover and loved one moved in unison. /
And from the castle wall
The wind came down to winnow through his hair
Bidding his fingers fall,
Searing my throat with air
And all my senses were suspended there. /
I stayed there to forget.
There on my lover, face to face, I lay.
All ended, and I let
My cares all fall away
Forgotten in the lilies on that day. [7]
III.
“The Spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” [8]
Christ accepts His torment in unity, “Knowing all that would happen to Him.” Judas’s betrayal appears in His, and our, vision. [9] Juan’s cares fall: forgotten, ground-wards, entre las azucenas, between the lilies. Juan suggests an agony embraced. The body of Christ is, like a lover, caressed. This is the image Juan beholds.
Fig. 3, San Juan de la Cruz, Crucifixion Sketch, c. 1550, ink on parchment, 3 x 4 in, Monasterio de la Encarnación, Avila.
Three tear-drops of blood fall from the upper hand.
“Relation comprehends violence, marks its distance.” [10] Beauty and ecstasy obscure agony. A landscape sublimates violence.
Once more, Juan’s words as he composes them:
Dejando mi cuidado / Entre las azucenas olvidado.
Leaving my care / amongst the lilies, forgotten.
IV.
One imagines traces of it: this care amongst painted lilies. Blood, once flowing, is now “forgotten amongst” the mineral particulates of a quiet landscape.
Fig. 4, El Greco, View of Toledo, 1596–1600, oil on canvas, 47.8 in × 42.8 in, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
It is no longer Gethsemane, but Toledo. There appears, no longer, Adam’s anamorphic skull. Instead, El Greco gives us the site of a cell, in which another body has been distorted. It is the body of Juan. There—in the priory beneath the city’s alcazar, directly below the blue aperture of Domeniko’s sky—lies the visionary’s darkened cell.
And something leaves me dying,
I know not what, of which they are darkly speaking. [11]
Imprisoned, in isolation, Juan composes a canticle. His verses live as a whisper, recited in solitude for nine months. The human soul searches in despair for its Beloved, until soul and Beloved are united together.
Thus is his Garden El Greco’s momentary Paradise:
Let us go forth to see ourselves in Your beauty, To the mountain and the hill,
Where the pure water flows:
Let us enter into the heart of the thicket. [12]
Fig. 4, Detail.