From the Crucifixion to pop art: how humanity has painted solar eclipses
On 12 August the Moon will once again pass in front of the Sun over much of Spain, and for a few minutes midday will turn into twilight. A total solar eclipse will be visible that day, and astronomical...
On 12 August the Moon will once again pass in front of the Sun over much of Spain, and for a few minutes midday will turn into twilight. A total solar eclipse will be visible that day, and astronomical associations are already organising preparations for the event. By no means will this be the first time an eclipse has left humanity open-mouthed.
Nor will it be the first time someone has tried to capture it with a paintbrush. For centuries, painters, illuminators and engravers have tried to fix on canvas, fresco or copper plate something that in reality lasts only a few minutes.
When the sky darkened and the world trembled
Before astronomy existed as we understand it today, an eclipse was, quite simply, terrifying. The 'Nebra Sky Disc', a Bronze Age bronze artefact found near Halle in Germany, already shows the Sun, the Moon and the Pleiades together on a single object, although it does not depict an eclipse proper: it is rather the most distant precedent of that obsession with giving a visual form to what happens in the sky.
Herodotus himself left a written record of how a solar eclipse interrupted a battle between the Medes and the Lydians in Asia Minor, an episode both sides interpreted as a sign.
The Middle Ages found in the eclipse a perfect narrative device for one very specific episode: the death of Christ. The Italian painter Taddeo Gaddi depicted, in a triptych dating from around 1330 that is now held by the New-York Historical Society, a Moon approaching the Sun above the cross, and a century later an anonymous Valencian artist did the same in a panel (the painting is called 'Crucifixion') now hanging in the Thyssen-Bornemisza, although with an ochre-coloured sun that suggests its author had probably never seen a total eclipse and did not really know how to paint one.
The phenomenon also appeared alongside other wonders: the Augsburg Book of Miracles, an illuminated manuscript from the mid-16th century, illustrates the total eclipse of 1483 accompanied by the locust plague that devastated Italy that same year.
The Baroque, between faith and emerging science
With the Baroque, the depiction of eclipses gained technical ambition without losing its symbolic charge. José de Ribera painted in his 'Christ Crucified' of 1643, today in the Museum of Fine Arts of Vitoria, an almost translucent lunar disc that allows the outline of the Sun behind it to be glimpsed, while Rubens went a step further in his triptych for Antwerp Cathedral: in 'The Elevation of the Cross' (1610-1611) he rendered the beginning of a solar eclipse with striking realism, although he had to draw the full contour of the Moon so that viewers could recognise both celestial bodies.
Not all eclipse paintings from the period sprang from religious faith. Antoine Caron titled his canvas from around 1570-1580, now in the Getty in Los Angeles, 'Dionysius the Areopagite converting the pagan philosophers', although it is better known as Astronomers observing a solar eclipse: a celestial globe, an armillary sphere and a figure doing geometric calculations reveal that what really interested the painter was the astronomical phenomenon.
By the 18th century, Donato Creti had painted a series of oils on astronomical observations commissioned by Count Marsili, who presented them to Pope Clement XI in order to persuade him to fund an observatory in Bologna. And it worked, as the observatory was built shortly afterwards.
Romanticism and the taste for the sublime
The 19th century, with its fascination for the grand and the inexplicable, produced some of the most picturesque scenes in the genre. Ippolito Caffi portrayed the eclipse of 8 July 1842 over Venice ('Solar eclipse over Fondamenta Nove') from an aerial perspective, and Russian painter Ivan Aivazovsky, better known for his seascapes, turned into a kind of nocturne the total eclipse he observed in 1851 from Feodosia ('Solar eclipse in Feodosia').
The phenomenon also lent itself to political satire: a French almanac from 1706 showed Louis XIV sitting on his throne before the Sun, in allusion to his nickname of 'Sun King', and included in one corner the eclipse of 12 May that year, which coincided with a French military defeat during the siege of Barcelona.
When the paintbrush served science
Towards the end of the 19th century, before photography could properly capture the solar corona, some artists became instruments of precision. The Frenchman Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, better known today for having accidentally introduced the gypsy moth into the United States, found his true vocation in astronomical drawing and travelled with his son to Creston, in the Territory of Wyoming, to observe the total eclipse of 29 July 1878 ('Total eclipse of the Sun').
That scene was eventually turned into a chromolithograph as part of a portfolio of 15 plates published in 1882. A few decades later, the American Howard Russell Butler took that documentary vocation even further.
A former physics student turned portrait painter, developed a shorthand method of noting shapes and colours that allowed him to work with barely two minutes of totality. Using those notes and some supporting photographic plates, he painted the 1918 eclipse in Oregon during an expedition by the US Naval Observatory, and repeated the feat with the eclipses of 1923 in California, 1925 in Connecticut and 1932 in Maine.
The resulting triptych was exhibited for years at the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and half-scale copies exist in Princeton, at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and at the Buffalo Museum of Science.
From expressionism to pop art
The eclipse went on to inspire, now in a purely artistic key, throughout the 20th century. Paul Klee devoted a watercolour to it ('Solar eclipse (Sonnenfinsternis)'), and Roy Lichtenstein, towards the end of his career, translated the speed with which totality arrives and passes by layering circles and curves in a manner very typical of pop art in his 1975 work 'Eclipse of the Sun'.
Since then, the phenomenon has never ceased to appear on the contemporary art market, whether as an almost scientific study or as a purely colouristic pretext for playing with the contrast between light and shadow.
On 12 August, when the Moon once again passes in front of the Sun over Spain, thousands of people will take out their phones to photograph the phenomenon. During much of history, the only way to preserve it was precisely that, a paintbrush, a handful of minutes and the memory of whoever dared to look up.
