St. Anthony & the Fishes
475 steps from the door of my apartment building,
in the Detroit Institute of the Arts, is an unsigned canvas attributed to Alonso Cano (1601-1667).
A painter, architect and sculptor from Granada —who studied under Diego Velázquez in Sevilla— Cano made this piece for the Convent of San Antonio de Padua in Sevilla.1
Two Franciscan friars stand on a promontory of rock. Fissures in the stone ask questions about this earthly place, their foundation.
A tree, with its lone branch, and a stump, its few leaves a muted green, offer little in the way of encouragement.
At the centre is a youthful Anthony of Padua in rapture.
Born Fernando Martins de Bulhões in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1195, he became an early follower of Francis of Assisi, taking his religious name and vows in Italy.
When, like Francis, Anthony saw his desire to preach the gospel and achieve martyrdom in Muslim North Africa frustrated, he is said to have turned to an ascetic life of prayer, study, and penance. And to have amplified his preaching against what, to his eyes, were rampant sin, errors of understanding, and outright heresies in his thirteenth-century northern Italian and southern French midst.
The painting captures a juncture in Anthony’s reportedly miraculous life when his preaching had been spurned in coastal Rimini, whose people came close to taking his life.
His words fruitless, Anthony is said to have wandered out of town. At the mouth of the Marecchia River, where it flows into the Adriatic, he finally found multitudes. Not of people, but of fish.
This medieval moment in which God’s word (even when delivered by so favoured a human vessel as San Antonio de Padua) had fallen upon deaf ears spoke every bit as eloquently to the anxieties of Spanish and Hispanicising Catholic Christians three centuries later, as it did to dreams of a universal, global conversion.
Cano’s was a late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century thoughtworld in which transoceanic Iberian imperial designs were somehow both expanding and foundering. And in which the spreading perseverance of Protestant rivals seemed to be joined by an array of other foes and contaminants (crypto-thises and -thats), as much from within as without.
Several artists took up the painterly theme, among them: Cano’s great Italian predecessor Paolo Veronese (1528-1588), who turns Anthony’s bleak headland into a kind of stage;
and successors such as the Asturian Juan Carreño de Miranda, active in Madrid (1614-1685);
the Venetian Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo (1727-1804, son of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo), who rendered a lively scene with pen in grey ink and brown wash;
and one Bernardo Rodríguez (active ca. 1775-1803) of Quito, in what is today Ecuador.2
UNLIKE THE OTHERS, with their pushing crowds of onlookers, sea-side stages, fussy emphasis upon Rimini in the distance, and (in Carreño de Miranda’s case) abundant winged putti, Alonso Cano keeps things simpler, lonesome, and stark.
Subtly illuminated in the pair’s dusk, Anthony of Padua's friarly companion soon draws the eye.
This older man —his toenails dark and worn by life— grasps at his cincture to steady himself. But he also cocks his head to one side and peers carefully. He is wonder and experience; wise scrutiny and proof. He is astonishment and endorsement.
The companion is to Anthony what other testigos soon became to any holy person whose life was investigated en route to possible beatification and sainthood. He bears witness, (in the face of internal and external critiques that vexed Cano’s Counter-Reformation, Spanish Catholic Christian moment) a most vital witness to a mysterious happening before his eyes. A miracle wrought by God through his brother.
The scene might have been amidst a bustling city square filled with wealthy, self-important people, intent on their errors, forgetful of God. People who haven't been listening, a place where an uncommon preacher’s warnings and exhortations have been falling on deaf ears.
Or, as here, the scene might best unfold at the mouth of a river, at the sea. Not so far from a bustling city square filled with wealthy, self-important people, intent on their errors, forgetful of God. People who haven't been listening, a place where an uncommon preacher’s warnings and exhortations have been falling on deaf ears.
When, in his own sermon before a congregation in São Luís do Maranhão, Brazil, in 1654, the Jesuit António Vieira took up the sermon of St. Anthony to the Fish, he played upon Jesus's characterisation of preachers as “the salt of the earth” (Matthew 5:13). Salt impedes corruption, he notes. But it can fail to forestall the rot for several reasons. The preaching might be false or poor, for instance. And it also can happen that “the earth does not let itself be salted,” that “listeners” do not hear, and choose, instead, to “serve their own appetites.”3
Rimini and its appetites —for Cano— have been left behind. The city may or may not be made out in the misted distance of his canvas.
WHAT MATTERS, WHAT Cano yearns for his viewers to see, is in the barren centre and foreground.
Anthony's feet are concealed beneath his habit. And as he leans forward, his arms stretch out, giving the impression of one taking flight.
In this moment of inspiration, his very attachedness to the earth (upon which others must remain) is in question; and contemporary devout across the early modern Spanish world could thrill to Anthony’s iteration, his iconographic recalling, of Christ and of the beloved Francis.4
LOWER LEFT, GATHERING in the sea beneath Anthony’s outstretched hand, are some unnaturally attentive fish.
They rise as one from the water, their heads turned, their bulbous eyes fixed upon the friar, desirous of his words.
Ten of the fish are rendered with care; the rest blur, amidst the water and dreamlike haze.
***
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Long attributed to Francisco de Herrera, the Elder (1576-1656), recent scholarship contends that this painting is the work of Alonso Cano, completed either in the decades before or just after his royal appointment as canon in the cathedral of Granada in 1652. This period saw Cano create a number of compelling paintings and sculptures for churches in Seville, in Granada and in Málaga. On this “lost painting’s” creator and probable provenance, I am indebted to the research behind the note published in the Bulletin of the DIA: Notable Acquisitions, 2000–2015: 89: 1/4 (2015), 44–45 (illustrated), which is what first drew me to the canvas soon after I moved to Detroit. See especially Jorge Bemales Ballesteros, Alonso Cano en Sevilla (Seville, 1976), 121; Antonio Martínez Riploli, Francisco de Herrera 'El Viejo,’ (Seville, 1978), 193–194. catalogue no. 22; Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez, Carreño, Rizi, Herrera y la pintura madrilena de su tiempo, 1650–1700, exhibition catalogue (Madrid, 1986), 352; and Enrique Valdivieso, Pintura barrocca sevillana (Seville, 2003), 248, working off John S. Thacher, "The Paintings of Francisco de Herrera, The Elder,” Art Bulletin 19: 3 (September, 1937), 375..
Suzanne Stratton-Pruitt, El arte de la pintura en Quito colonial (Philadelphia, 2011).
António de Vieira, “Sermon of Saint Anthony to the Fish. Preached in São Luís do Maranhão in 1654, three days before embarking secretly for Portugal,” in The Sermon of Saint Anthony to the Fish and Other Texts, translated by Gregory Rabassa (Dartmouth, MA., 2009), 21; 21-23; 21-70.
Santa Cruz Pumacallao ((1635-1710), whose Profecía appears below this note in my text, was a native Andean master painter. His series of canvases portraying the life of St Francis (begun 1667) caught the eye of the viceroy of Peru —Pedro Antonio Fernández de Castro, the Conde de Lemos— who visited Cusco in 1668-69, as the former Inkaic capital was being rebuilt in the wake of the devastating earthquake of 1650. For the “Profecía S. Juan Evangelista”: Álbum de las pinturas que representan el nacimiento, vida, milagros, santidad y último trance de nuestro seráfico padre San Francisco: ejecutadas hace tres siglos para la orden franciscana de Santiago de Chile y en cuyo convento se hallan (Zurich, 1971).
I always read this as a moment where Anthony is just falling to his knees. In any case, a perfectly vertiginous pose
A deep, subtle, thoughtful juxtapositioning and exegesis of Cano's painting. You quietly encourage the reader to walk with you and then walk on with their thoughts when you leave them.