Banca is an Old Italian word for a table, or bench, of a type used by the first banking families, in the markets of cities like Florence or Siena, as they conducted their business of lending and exchanging money. Banca rotta was a broken table and refers to the practice of literally breaking the table into pieces should the lender (or banker) run out of funds. Both words have evolved into common language as ‘bank’ and ‘bankrupt'.
The potential of the table to break is laden with symbolism for the precariousness of the soul in a much-loved painting by Caravaggio, The Calling of Saint Matthew in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome (1599-1600). Commissioned by Cardinal Matteo Contarelli and dedicated, as was the custom, to his saintly namesake, it was Caravaggio’s first major church commission following his relocation to Rome 7 years earlier.
Much has been written about the hand of Christ in this picture, seductively beckoning Matthew to his true calling, echoing the hand of God in Michelangelo’s famous Sistine ceiling. I have always been more captivated by the hands at the table. Twitching, counting and recounting, restless and agitated while Christ’s hand hovers motionless below the artist’s trademark diagonal shaft of light. They remind me of Dante’s punishment for money-lenders in the seventh circle of his Inferno, forever condemned to a pitiful existence in which their hands are continually moving, counting the imaginary money that has now deserted them, having no currency in the afterlife.
“Darkness is where light is not” wrote Rudolf Wittkower about the electric charge of religiosity with which Caravaggio deploys his chiaroscuro - didactically leading us towards the spiritual heart of the painting. Those objects, or figures, in the light are the ones in sharpest focus, those who languish in the gloom are forever trapped within it. In St. Matthew’s gospel, which Caravaggio shows him writing in another painting in the same chapel, the evangelist describes the eye as “the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness.” Matthew equates this ocular duality to one’s spiritual obligations,
“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”
This, then, is the truth told by the painting; Matthew’s realisation that his ‘calling’ is not to count and collect money at a dirty table - a table which at any time can break. Matthew is the only participant in the painting who truly ‘sees’ the significance of Christ’s gesture - all other sight-lines lead elsewhere (or nowhere). It is Matthew’s hand that points to himself, mesmerised by all that his identification by Christ entails. Matthew, whose soul is not destined for bankruptcy. I have taken many groups of students to Rome to study Caravaggio’s paintings but it always here, in the Contarelli Chapel, that they are lost for words and can only stare at the drama that unfolds before their eyes.
Chardin’s House of Cards c.1735, is one of a series of four similar paintings on this theme made by the French artist, each one an elegant contemplation of a solitary figure and objects in light and space. Hailed by Chardin’s great champion, the philosopher, Denis Diderot, as “the great magician”, Chardin conjures a moment of tension and anticipation from a quiet painting of patience and a moment of pause. The boy’s concentration is palpable as he places his next card on the delicate structure on the baize lined table.
Nothing is over or under-stated in Chardin’s paintings. His economy of colour and style masks a meticulous and lovingly rendered record of a moment in time. A moment not wasted but neither fully industrious; one of quiet distraction such as we have all experienced during the pandemic, as time takes on a different character.
In a composition full of verticals and horizontals, the strongest, vibrating sight-line is the diagonal cast from the boy’s eye to the card he is about to use. The fragility of the endeavour makes it so incredibly poignant - what lies ahead for this young boy, wearing an apron and a hat - perhaps tasked with job of clearing the tables the morning after a game of cards? Will the ‘house’ survive or collapse? Is this a subtle recognition of the nature of our human endeavours or a paean to the value and beauty of play? Philosophical arguments concerning the distinct and special nature of childhood were emerging in France and elsewhere in the middle of the 18th century and Chardin seems to be in tune with Rousseau’s plea to allow children their own diversions, "Why rob these innocents of the joys which pass so quickly?”. Chardin captures the temptation to which we may all succumb - to place a card precariously on top of another in a tantalising attempt to build something high and solid from such flimsy materials.
Chardin’s father was a cabinet maker so the artist knew a thing or two about furniture. Here, the card table reveals a drawer open into the viewer’s space containing a card which appears to be the king of diamonds, or possibly hearts. Is this a clue as to the boy’s fate, or a delicious piece of tromp l’oeil to delight the eye? Often with Chardin, it is both.
What Chardin does in his lyrical renditions of the ordinary moments in life is to suffuse them with an elegance and dignity which we rarely afford to our own ‘downtime’. Edward Hopper is another artist who elevates the everyday, not to the point of glamorisation, but to render it comforting and rewarding. We live in a world that is saturated with distractions and imagery that can transport into other lives and away from our own, too often dismissed as humdrum and unsatisfactory. Hopper reminds us that most lives are lived in a modest and ordinary fashion; that there is merit in mediocrity.
Tables can get in the way in paintings; impose themselves between figures in a composition or erect a barrier - as much psychological as visual - disrupting a connection between the viewer and the subject(s) of a painting. There are many well-known examples of this: Degas’ L’Absinthe (or At The Café, as titled by the artist), Cassatt’s At Tea and Sickert’s Ennui. Hopper visited Paris between 1906 and 1910 where he was probably influenced by all three of these great exponents of cumulative and silent observation.
The great Realist author, Flaubert, regarded his practice as the “breathless listening of the eyes”. In his painting, Automat, of 1927, Hopper is breathlessly listening to the solitary young woman sat a gleaming white stone table - like an altar - framed against a cinema-sized expanse of night seen through the window. She is alone, but is she lonely? She looks sad, but she does not necessarily provoke the same response in us. We empathise with her in her moment of quiet contemplation and pause as she lifts her cup of coffee from its saucer. She is not a victim of her isolation within the pictorial space, but probably the architect of it.
Automats were a dining trend across America, hugely popular between the two World Wars, where hot drinks and snacks could be retrieved from a coin-operated machine at every hour of the day and night. Surprisingly enlightened for the 1920s, automats also reserved tables specifically for the use of single women. Is Hopper’s young woman alone, then, as a result of personal choice? Has she acknowledged that to be at one with oneself is to never be lonely?
Image credits
Caravaggio - The Calling of St. Matthew, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome
Jean-Siméon Chardin - Boy Building a House of Cards, Waddesdon Manor
Edward Hopper - Automat, Des Moines Art Centre, Des Moines
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