Reflections: Giotto, Realism, and Kensington (in reverse order).

My friend “Berto” recommended that I read the Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty. It’s a critically acclaimed work of non-fiction published in 2021 on the history of Purdue Pharma, the now-bankrupt American drug company that was responsible for developing and pushing the painkiller OxyContin. The book tells this story through the lives of the Sackler brothers who in 1952 purchased a small drug manufacturer and made it into the leading supplier of prescription opioids. Before reading this book, I knew very little about opioids or the pharmaceutical industry. I still have no background knowledge to judge how truthfully this history is represented in the book. Nonetheless, the book is a good read. It’s well-written and satisfies the desire for details. Those details are woven into a sweeping multi-generational narrative culminating in the present-day opioid epidemic that is still unfolding today. Purdue Pharma filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2019. In December of 2023, the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments on whether members of the Sackler family ought to be shielded from liability for Purdue Pharma’s business practices. These practices included aggressive marketing strategies that knowingly misled and misrepresented the addiction risks associated with OxyContin.  

Anyone walking or driving through the Kensington neighborhood in Philadelphia has witnessed the plight of opioid addiction. Knowing this plight first-hand is another matter; the scene in Kensington is a very real one. But my brief exposure to Kensington is not what I want to write about here. I don’t intend to single it out because of the extraordinary circumstances surrounding opioid addiction. Instead, I want to focus on the realness of Kensington. This is a realness that makes it like any other place in the world, whether urban or rural. I want to focus on this realness through the lens of art.

Realism in art is largely a Western phenomenon in both painting, film, and literature. Because it crosses into multiple genres and fields, it can have multiple meanings that are associated with various histories and contexts. Broadly, realism is associated with subject matter and representation that focus on how things “are” in their ordinary and everyday presentation. Even in religious art, realism focuses on the plainness of the suffering Jesus, for instance, showing him to be afflicted and frail. Arguably, realism in painting starts in mid-1200s Italy with precisely this shift in the work of artists like Giotto and Duccio. Up to this point, much of religious art borrowed from Byzantine-style depictions of Jesus as triumphant-king. Even when nailed to the cross, Jesus is shown to be sanguine, confident, and “in command.” The famous San Damiano Cross from whence Jesus “spoke” to St. Francis of Assisi is an example of the Byzantine art that dominated the Christian world up to that point.

But by the 1200s, the Byzantine Empire was undergoing its own crises of imperial power. While Jesus is King, he is not the worldly leader of the Byzantine Empire. Italy on the other hand was witnessing religious renewal after long cultural and religious stagnation. The itinerant activity of newly emergent mendicant orders brought about a renewed emphasis on voluntary poverty. By disavowing status, influence, and material wealth, the mendicant orders lived as itinerant preachers who subsisted hand-to-mouth either as day-laborers or beggars. The spirituality of these orders had a direct impact on religious art and particularly on depictions of Jesus. In this renewal, while Christ is certainly King, he is also the Son of Man who voluntarily suffered and continues to suffer with, in, and for all Creation. Christ appears as suffering in the world around us. Crucially, he appears as servant to his own subjects. St. Francis’ spirituality speaks of his desire as a subject of Christ, the King, to follow his Lord into this mode of servitude as lesser-brother—the subject must follow his Lord wherever he goes. Francis "sees" his Lord in the flesh.

In art and in realism, there lies a recognition that the ordinary or “plain” manner in which things are present to us hold real value and meaning—that this manner of presence carries symbolic and narrative import. There is a "reality" to this manner of being. Put differently, realism re-presents things “as” they are present to us. It is in paying attention to these real things that the “realness” of truth, beauty, and love are communicated to us. This realness includes the divinity of Christ. Concurrently, this focus and attention on “realness” is not the same as an insistence on post-Enlightenment or Existentialist notions of facticity. Realist art is not journalism or reportage, nor is it confined to the objecthood of the subjects at hand. These subjects are multidimensional and multifaceted carriers of meaning rather than fixed quantities or even qualities within neat and linear systems. Jesus is Son of Man and Son of God. He is a person with whom one enters into relationship, not a static and unidimensional fact within a system of control and prediction. Voluntary poverty focuses on the beauty of Christ because it relinquishes control over Him who is not an object of fact but is a living person.  

Likewise, art has the power to tell stories that are real. Reading The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky is like holding up a mirror to one’s own psychology without having to read a diagnostic manual. The realness of the characters lies in the position taken by the author on how and where truth, meaning, and value reside and are revealed. A narrative is an integrated whole that is identifiable in such a way. The meaningfulness of each constituent part is in how it relates to a meaningful whole without collapsing into a unidimensional function. If some element is dissonant, it is because it is dissonant in relation to the whole. Furthermore, the mere appearance of dissonance means that this element is already something of value in relation to the whole even prior to its being dissonant. It is not simply the aesthetic equivalent of a systems functionalism. Aesthetic choices are not mere stylistic choices. A work is “good” when it is particularly revelatory of its quality as a work of art.  

Getting back to Jesus Christ is to get back to the Image of God. It is to get back to the realness of suffering. It is real because Jesus is real. The suffering is not Christ, but Jesus, the Christ, suffers. It is to say that the truth in suffering is the truth itself. This truth gives meaning to suffering. The redemption in suffering is the Jesus who suffers it. And to get back to reality is to get back to all that exists as it is being made by God in the present, and in his presence. As reality is present to us, and in how it is being presented to us, it unfolds the presence of Jesus before us. The only reality that I can have—even in my own being, in my own preoccupations and thoughts—are those grounded in the Image of God. The only thing that exists is Love. This is a living faith that finds expression in the here and now. God’s reality dwells in all places and in all Creation. Such was the beauty that survived in the midst of collapsing empire, political disarray, and social dysfunction. What is the realism in art for today?