James Clifton, director of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, lectures at BYU on paintings of different scriptural accounts of Christ healing the blind.
PROVO, Utah (Sept. 18, 2014)—A few years ago, James Clifton, director of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation for the Museum of Art in Houston, sat on a bench at the Louvre, enraptured with Nicolas Poussin’s painting Christ Healing the Blind. While there, he was approached by a Dutch ophthalmologist who told Clifton that Christ, by touching the blind man’s eye, was crouching a cataract, an ancient process of pushing the lens to remove a cataract.
“I’m not saying it’s correct,” Clifton said, “every interesting painting evokes a variety of readings.” Clifton shared this experience with the BYU audience at a lecture sponsored by the department of Humanities, Classics, and Comparative Literature and the department of Art History.
Clifton said other art experts have said that Poussin used color theory to show how the painting goes from blindness to light. Of these different interpretations, he said that while he doesn’t find fault in these variations, often the focus of the painting is lost. “The painting comes to be about the practice of light rather than the historical event of Christ healing the blind.”
He added, “What a viewer gets from a picture is not simply what a painter puts into the picture, but what the painter brings to the painting, which varies as each individual varies.”
Clifton explained that Poussin’s Christ Healing the Blind could represent one of many scriptural accounts from the New Testament of Christ healing the blind: Matthew 9, Matthew 20, Mark 10, Luke 18, or John 9.
Poussin’s work doesn’t exactly fit the setting of any of these scriptural accounts, so people have criticized his works. Clifton explained that “similitude and fidelity to scripture are desired. There are some circumstances that the painter can’t change without criticism.” Clifton argued that painters undertake to teach with the brush what a historian writes with words. Often painters try and show as much of the subject as they can, Clifton said.
In comparison to Poussin’s painting, Clifton showed and explained Philippe de Champaigne’s Christ Healing the Blind. Champaigne depicted the moment just prior to the healing rather than the healing itself. Clifton said, “You can see the eagerness of the blind men…Jesus makes them participate in their own healing.
Continuing, he said, “The calling is a prelude to the miracle. I argue that Jesus’ miraculous healing of the blind – healing of spiritual blindness – is enacted precisely in this moment of calling.”
He referred to Poussin’s version that depicts a man who sees the healing process with disbelieving eyes. “The one who is blind believes; the one who does not see does not yet believe.” He added, quoting John 20:29, “blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”
Clifton concluded by saying that by discussing different interpretations of paintings, the varying opinions allow others to see new ideas. He said, “The viewing of paintings act as a prompt for conversation, speculation and imagination.”
Matthew Ancell, an associate professor of interdisciplinary humanities and comparative literature, said, “These paintings perform visual scriptural interpretation… any painting necessarily does so since the visual details are not in the text.”
For more information on Clifton and the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, visit their website.
—Stephanie Bahr Bentley (B.A. English ’14)