In The Damned, which I am of course currently reading for the fortnightly book, the Crucifixion of Mathias Grünewald, from the sixteenth-century altarpiece sometimes known as the Karlsruher Altar and sometimes as the Tauberbischofsheimer Altar, plays a significant role. One of the most famous passages from the book is a detailed attempt to convey it in words; the character Durtal, who has been (like Huysmans) hobnobbing with the Naturalists has grown tired of what he sees as their tedious book-exercise approach and, seeking a richer kind of naturalism, discovers it perfectly expressed in Grünewald's painting. Part of the description (in a different and older translation than the one I am reading):
He shuddered in his armchair and closed his eyes as if in pain. With extraordinary lucidity he revisualized the picture, and the cry of admiration wrung from him when he had entered the little room of the Cassel museum was reechoing in his mind as here, in his study, the Christ rose before him, formidable, on a rude cross of barky wood, the arm an untrimmed branch bending like a bow under the weight of the body.
This branch seemed about to spring back and mercifully hurl afar from our cruel, sinful world the suffering flesh held to earth by the enormous spike piercing the feet. Dislocated, almost ripped out of their sockets, the arms of the Christ seemed trammelled by the knotty cords of the straining muscles. The laboured tendons of the armpits seemed ready to snap. The fingers, wide apart, were contorted in an arrested gesture in which were supplication and reproach but also benediction. The trembling thighs were greasy with sweat. The ribs were like staves, or like the bars of a cage, the flesh swollen, blue, mottled with flea-bites, specked as with pin-pricks by spines broken off from the rods of the scourging and now festering beneath the skin where they had penetrated.
Purulence was at hand. The fluvial wound in the side dripped thickly, inundating the thigh with blood that was like congealing mulberry juice. Milky pus, which yet was somewhat reddish, something like the colour of grey Moselle, oozed from the chest and ran down over the abdomen and the loin cloth. The knees had been forced together and the rotulæ touched, but the lower legs were held wide apart, though the feet were placed one on top of the other. These, beginning to putrefy, were turning green beneath a river of blood. Spongy and blistered, they were horrible, the flesh tumefied, swollen over the head of the spike, and the gripping toes, with the horny blue nails, contradicted the imploring gesture of the hands, turning that benediction into a curse; and as the hands pointed heavenward, so the feet seemed to cling to earth, to that ochre ground, ferruginous like the purple soil of Thuringia.
Above this eruptive cadaver, the head, tumultuous, enormous, encircled by a disordered crown of thorns, hung down lifeless. One lacklustre eye half opened as a shudder of terror or of sorrow traversed the expiring figure. The face was furrowed, the brow seamed, the cheeks blanched; all the drooping features wept, while the mouth, unnerved, its under jaw racked by tetanic contractions, laughed atrociously.
The torture had been terrific, and the agony had frightened the mocking executioners into flight.
Against a dark blue night-sky the cross seemed to bow down, almost to touch the ground with its tip, while two figures, one on each side, kept watch over the Christ. One was the Virgin, wearing a hood the colour of mucous blood over a robe of wan blue. Her face was pale and swollen with weeping, and she stood rigid, as one who buries his fingernails deep into his palms and sobs. The other figure was that of Saint John, like a gipsy or sunburnt Swabian peasant, very tall, his beard matted and tangled, his robe of a scarlet stuff cut in wide strips like slabs of bark. His mantle was a chamois yellow; the lining, caught up at the sleeves, showed a feverish yellow as of unripe lemons. Spent with weeping, but possessed of more endurance than Mary, who was yet erect but broken and exhausted, he had joined his hands and in an access of outraged loyalty had drawn himself up before the corpse, which he contemplated with his red and smoky eyes while he choked back the cry which threatened to rend his quivering throat.
The description is an implicit criticism in itself of Naturalism, I think; part of what Huysmans is suggesting that Naturalism as a literary movement could not accurately describe even a painting like this in this way, because it is blind to the kind of experience that is required to do so. This is a fundamental reason why Naturalism as a literary movement began to give way to Decadence, as it began to dawn on artists, and writers and illustrators in particular, that, despite Naturalism introducing powerful means of description, Naturalists were getting their vivid realism not by describing reality as it actually was but by chopping off experiences that did not fit their preconceptions of reality. When I did Barbey d'Aurevilley's Les Diabolique, I noted that a lot of his work was motivated (explicitly) by a sort of contempt for the literary scene's handling of both moral and natural evil, and Huysmans has a similar view, possibly less contemptuous but certainly just as tired of it. As Huysmans once put it to a friend in a letter, he was disgusted by the Naturalists trying to convince people that devilry was an old wives' tale or a chemical imbalance, and tired equally of occultists with their tired treadmill of examples, and wanted to write a story that taught the lesson that the Devil was real and ruled the world. This was not a theological position but an artistic protest against what was increasingly seen as the dishonesty of the art of the Naturalists when it came to dealing with actual human experience. Decadence arises from applying techniques of Naturalist realism not to the humdrum and everyday but to the interesting extremes, especially interesting extremes of good and evil, that require stretching those techniques in new directions.
[Crucifixion by Matthias Grünewald - 1. The Yorck Project (2002) 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei (DVD-ROM), distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. ISBN: 3936122202.2. Google Art Project, Public Domain, Link]
