I am in Rome at the Galleria Borghese wandering back and forth between the two Davids: Bernini’s marble sculpture David (1623-1624) and Caravaggio’s painting David with the Head of Goliath (1610). Inside my shoulder bag is the recently published book J’ACCUSE by Francesca Albanese, the UN’s Special Rapporteur in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. I am thinking of justice, or maybe beauty; perhaps I am thinking of both simultaneously.
“Yes, there is beauty and there are the humiliated,” wrote Albert Camus. I see the two Davids as the utmost expression of Camus’ affirmation. The two works invite questions of the relation between beauty and justice, the nature of resistance, the role of violence, heroism and martyrdom; it is impossible for us to avoid thinking of Palestinian resilience and resistance against the more than half a century of Israeli Occupation.
The biblical tale of David and Goliath is now occurring in many places where there is the inevitable conflict between the powerful and the powerless, between the haves and the have-nots, but nothing as obvious, as exact, as tragically representative as in Palestine.
For the purpose of clarity it is best to point out who is David and who is Goliath in this conflict. In I Samuel chapter 17 verse 4, Goliath is described as “a champion… over nine feet tall. He had a bronze helmet on his head and wore a coat of scale armor of bronze weighing five thousand shekels; on his legs he wore bronze greaves, and a bronze javelin was slung on his back. His spear shaft was like a weaver’s rod and its iron point weighed six hundred shekels.”
The overwhelming similarity in excessive weaponry of Goliath and the State of Israel is not farfetched. Israel the fourth most powerful army in the world after the U.S., Russia and China with an annual military aid of more than $3.8bn from the U.S., equipped with the most advanced surveillance and high-tech weapons on the planet and supported and tolerated by the rich democratic countries of the West. David on the other hand has only a staff in one hand and a sling with “five smooth stones… in the pouch” in the other—like the Palestinian resistance who has no air-force, no tanks, no naval ships, but a handful of arms and rocket-propelled grenades. Such is the meagerness of their defense that the late Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said was wont to remark: “The disparity in power is so vast that it makes you cry.”
Baroque naturalism, a stylistic rebellion against the superficial exaggerations of Late Mannerism, was related to the confidence of the emerging secular knowledge—the revolutionary advances in the sciences and philosophy—the discoveries and theories of Galileo, Newton, Copernicus, Kepler, Descartes, Sir Thomas Browne, Cudworth, Locke—paved the way for a new understanding of the universe. Secular revolution sought to challenge the established doctrines of the Church; it hailed reason and the rational faculty, instead of faith, as the way to interpret the world. Moreover, it attempted to draw up a new concept of man.
Within the contour map of the Baroque, Man suddenly became an agent, conscious, capable of thinking for himself, and through sheer human will could transform his environment and change his destiny. The symbol of the young David accurately mirrors this new meaning of man. Thus the fascination of Caravaggio and Bernini.
Unlike the static marvel of Michelangelo’s David, Bernini’s is dynamic: physically and psychologically. In his pose he is about to shoot his sling against the looming Goliath. The twist of his torso, the tension in his arms and limbs, the protruding muscles, the forward thrust of the right leg, the outstretched left foot which carries the weight of his body are details which characterize the Baroque fascination with human movement, rendering the space in which it stands a tangible quality. Even the facial expression recounts an active psychology, in complete contrast to Michelangelo’s David whose sublime, platonic stare invites solemnity and reverence, Bernini’s David provoke, defy—biting his lower lip, his eyebrows protruding, his stare focused rather than blank, the whole face contorted into indignation. In front of a Bernini sculpture one feels that something is going on.
The transition from the static to dynamic allowed the Baroque artists to view space and time in human actions; they perceived movement in nature; they recognized that the principal aspect of beauty is motion. Man is now perceived as an acting creature: he finds his purpose in his capacity to resist the pressure of his environment: man is acting in history.
By using David as a model Bernini intimates us to what human action implies; in David the action takes the form of resistance—that natural spirit of revolt. The anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin:
“Action, the continuous action, ceaselessly renewed… dictated by circumstances, temperament, and the means at disposal. Sometimes tragic. Sometimes humorous, but always daring.”
The three-dimensionality of Bernini’s David evokes that “feeling of independence and that spirit of audacity” in man “for whom the act is one with the idea, for whom prison, exile, and death are preferable to a life contrary to their principles… that it is necessary to dare.”
I have seen many times that similar stance of David in the images of the Palestinian youth during the grim years of the Intifada; those young hopeless boys throwing stones against the formidable Israeli tanks. Like David all they had were their courage, resourcefulness, misery, and a few stones. They had nothing to lose. Most prophecies are consigned to the text than to the visual; very rarely does a sculpture itself become a prophecy. Bernini’s David in which heroism is captured in its three-dimensionality eloquently prophecises the Palestinian spirit of revolt in the face of colossal oppression. But unlike David, the Palestinian youth see no victory in the horizon.
The young men who breached the fences of Gaza in 7 October of last year were mostly young men in their twenties who grew up in the inhumane conditions in a small strip of land called Gaza. What is Gaza? Jewish scholar of the Israel-Palestine conflict Norman Finkelstein describes Gaza:
“The narrow coastal strip is among the mostly densely populated areas on the planet. More than 70 percent of its two million residents are refugees, while more than half—one million—are children under the age of eighteen. For over a decade Israel has placed this speck of land under a devastating siege. Fifty percent of Gaza’s workforce is now unemployed, 80 percent depend on international food aid, and 96 percent of the tap water is contaminated.”(1)
To give an overall view of the situation in occupied Palestine as a whole, let me quote at length the legendary champion of Palestinian rights Edward Said:
“Consider what Israel's unrelenting war against the undefended, basically unarmed, stateless and poorly led Palestinian people has already achieved. The disparity in power is so vast that it makes you cry. Equipped with the latest in American-built (and freely given) air power, helicopter gunships, uncountable tanks and missiles, and a superb navy as well as a state of the art intelligence service, Israel is a nuclear power abusing a people without any armour or artillery, no air force (its one pathetic airfield in Gaza is controlled by Israel) or navy or army, none of the institutions of a modern state. The appallingly unbroken history of Israel's [57]-year-old military occupation… of illegally conquered Palestinian land has been obliterated from public memory nearly everywhere, as has been the destruction of Palestinian society in 1948 and the expulsion of 68 per cent of its native people, of whom 4.5 million remain refugees today. Behind the reams of newspeak, the stark outlines of Israel's decades-long daily pressure on a people whose main sin is that they happened to be there, in Israel's way, is staggeringly perceptible in its inhuman sadism. The fantastically cruel confinement of [2.2] million people jammed like so many human sardines into the Gaza strip, plus the nearly two million Palestinian residents of the West Bank, has no parallel in the annals of apartheid or colonialism. F-16 jets were never used to bomb South African homelands. They are used against Palestinians towns and villages. All entrances and exits to the territories are controlled by Israel (Gaza is completely surrounded by a barbed wire fence), which also controls the entire water supply. Divided into about 63 non-contiguous cantons, completely encircled and besieged by Israeli troops, punctuated by 140 settlements (many of them built under Ehud Barak's premiership) with their own road network banned to "non-Jews," as Arabs are referred to, along with such unflattering epithets as thieves, snakes, cockroaches and grasshoppers, Palestinians under occupation have now been reduced to 60 per cent unemployment and a poverty rate of 50 per cent (half the people of Gaza and the West Bank live on less than $2 a day); they cannot travel from one place to the next; they must endure long lines at Israeli checkpoints that detain and humiliate the elderly, the sick, the student, and the cleric for hours on end; 150,000 of their olive and citrus trees have been punitively uprooted; 2,000 of their houses demolished; acres of their land either destroyed or expropriated for military settlement purposes.”(2)
This piece was written in August of 2001 and yet the realities have not changed if not gotten worse (read Francesca Albanese’s J’ACCUSE). It is within this apocalyptic world that the perpetrators of 7 October lived their whole lives, a place unsuited for human living. Many professional observers have described Gaza in the most horrific terms possible: “a concentration camp,” “an open-air prison,” “a ghetto,” “a human rubbish heap,” “a sinking ship,” “a toxic slum.”(3)
It is necessary to note this to provide a background of what led to the events of 7 October which Finkelstein describes as a “slave revolt.”(4) A violence which did not occur in a vacuum, rather the fruit of the evils of Israeli Occupation, abetted, financed, and supported by the West. Therefore, should it surprise or shock anyone if young men in the most helpless, hopeless, desperate corner on the planet at a certain point revolt?
One is led to ask this question: why is it so easy to condemn the crimes committed by Palestinians while almost impossible to hold Israel accountable for its more than half a century, very well-documented, internationally recognized war crimes?
The answer lies in the media: the entire Western media have colluded in presenting the counter violence of the oppressed as aggression while the true aggressor is portrayed as acting in defense. The wide scale distortion of events has made it impossible for the oppressed to justify their valid and legal right to resistance while encouraging the oppressor to mobilize all their resources to justify their oppression to the point of total annihilation of the oppressed. In fact almost all television interviews regarding the conflict begins with—“Do you condemn Hamas?”
This game of condemnation according to the rules of Western media works in two ways both in the benefit of the oppressor. 1) He who refuses to condemn Hamas is accused of anti-semitism—a label that has been used and abused to silence and stifle the critics of Israeli government. 2) He who condemns Hamas, it follows, therefore must allow Israel, regardless of International Law to get rid of Hamas however apocalyptic the outcome might be. Through the formidable power of the media the oppressor set the terms of debate, restrict dialogue, and supply ideological orientation.
Both criteria leave no room for the oppressed to consolidate their right to resist, to frame their own struggle, to claim the language of their suffering. But who could judge the valid rules of resistance if not those who experience oppression daily in all its existential and structural forms? To suggest, encourage, impose on the oppressed the option of non-violence is to invalidate and diminish their experience—to disavow their attempts at resistance altogether!
As to the question of non-violence, Indian author Arundhati Roy talking about her experience with peasant rebels of central India wrote:
“What are you supposed to do? Are you supposed to go on hunger strike? Can the hungry go on hunger strike? Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience? People have the right to resist annihilation.”
The worse: there is a visible audience but it prefers to look away. Speaking truth to power only falls on deaf ears. The repeated refusal, the learned apathy, the institutional indifference, the disguised hostility of the International Community is more than enough proof that the oppressed are spared the necessity of having to justify the “objective” means of resistance they want for their struggle; they stand outside the point of view of objectivity: they have the right to resist annihilation. South African freedom fighter Nelson Mandela:
“Over and over again, we had used all the non-violent weapons in our arsenal—speeches, deputations, threats, marches, strikes, stay-aways, voluntary imprisonment—all to no avail, for whatever we did was met by an iron hand. A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle, and the oppressed is often left with no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor. At a certain point, one can only fight fire with fire.”(5)
“David ran and stood over him. He took hold of the Philistine’s sword and drew it from the scabbard. After he killed him, he cut off his head with a sword.” (I Samuel chap.17 verse 51)
Although Caravaggio had lived a little before the significant scientific discoveries of the 17th century (he died in 1610 of mysterious circumstances the same year Galileo published his revolutionary celestial observations) he seems to have anticipated through his art the impending radicalism of the Baroque world-view. His use of naturalism coincides with the nascent scientific inquiry. Caravaggio’s aim was to discard the idealization rampart in academic art which has become a doctrine in Late Mannerism. The aesthetic principles he developed in his late works were a kind of devotion to depicting how the marginal lived: bearing all the imperfections and suffering of life. His late works were for the art what Galileo’s discoveries were for astronomy and Descartes’ method was for philosophy. One could say that it was Caravaggio who gave Baroque art its impetus.
In David with the Head of Goliath, Caravaggio repudiates all manners of idealization and empty ornamentalization of Late Mannerism. David’s facial expression as he holds the sword in one hand and the head of Goliath in the other evokes the aesthetics of justice—that of the oppressed judging the oppressor; he finds in David the necessity of violence as the definitive answer of justice.
Caravaggio’s ominous level of realism is not merely a byproduct of the naturalist trend he learned in the studio of Peterzano his teacher, rather his realism comes from the world he chose to live in: the world of the marginal, the dark streets: a world where delinquency, vagrancy, and violence do not permit any sense of sentimentality or romanticization. Any form of idealization for Caravaggio is a kind of injustice. The somber and unsettling quality of his images breathed not only the atmosphere of the Counter-Reformation but the ruthlessness of the environment in which they lived. (In the painting “The Death of the Virgin” Caravaggio took a drowned prostitute as his model.)
Throughout his brief life as a painter Caravaggio caused much indignation and disapproval from fellow artists. The young Poussin, a pioneer of the French Baroque, famously described a painting of Caravaggio as “disgusting,” “vulgar,” “ugly.” The contempt perhaps was due to Caravaggio’s inability to idealize the world that he lived in. His use of chiaroscuro seems to be a revolt against the vanity and superficiality that characterized Late Mannerism. His interest in the darkness—the darkness that envelopes the background of his paintings—almost amounts to a refusal to misrepresent those whom the light has missed: a fidelity to the marginal, the forgotten. It is in the darkness that one’s humanness is laid bare.
A mother in Gaza: “War and death terminology seeped into my children’s minds. From a young age, they started asking questions about planes, and the explosions they heard. Once, my son asked me to show him the hole where martyrs were put… No child should ever need to experience that… They’ve witnessed all Israeli aggressions, big and small. I can no longer tell lies or tell them when it’ll end.”(6)
The notoriety of Caravaggio’s life seems to correspond to the style he developed in his art. Perhaps his uncompromising naturalism is partly due to his pugnacious character: quick-tempered, provocative, arrogant, passionate. Biographers note his delinquency, his love of brawling, drunkenness, his neurotic passion for trouble-making which landed him not a few times in jail; his police records and trial proceedings are as dark and vast as his works; he even committed a murder which pushed him into a life of permanent exile. For Caravaggio, violence is a perspective from which society can be judged without any recourse to false morality and hypocritical religiosity. Violence is the language modern society understands best.
Yet the violence he enacted in his life was very different from the violence he evokes on behalf of David. Through violence beauty and justice become inseparable. The violence of the oppressed, the possibility of revenge, of the humiliated claiming their human dignity against the powerful through the final act of desperation and eventually triumph is, for Caravaggio, both just and beautiful.
There is no irony in the way Caravaggio and Bernini express their ultimate sympathy for the stand point of violence (both artists are capable of brutality). They knew and lived through the workings of power, the intrigues and corruption of the Church from which they benefited and at times collaborated in the pursuit of wealth and fame. But their art—their vision of David speaks to us today with an urgency of the all-important distinction between the violence of the powerful and the violence of the oppressed. Anti-colonial historian C.L.R James remarked:
“The cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression. For the one aims at perpetuating resented injustice, the other is merely a momentary passion soon appeased.”
In Bernini’s David beauty and revolt are reconciled as a natural tendency; the act of violence is justified by the greater violence of the oppressor. “He has always known that his dealings with the colonist would take place in the field of combat,” wrote Frantz Fanon. “So the colonized subject wastes no time lamenting and almost never searches for justice in the colonial context.”(7) In Caravaggio’s justice and beauty are achieved only when the oppressed has finally enacted their judgment on the oppressor. Justice, true justice, abstracts from every code of established morality, from every rule or law. The violence of resistance bypasses moderation and partiality, precaution and legality are held in abeyance. Justice cannot claim to objectivity or partiality or even to the existence of law (sometimes it happens that the law is used to perpetrate injustice) for to do so is to make justice a mockery, a privilege for those who can afford it. Justice is not merely a term but a condition only applicable to and only affirmed by the oppressed.
Israel’s response since October has been an endless orgy of mad killings, of constant bombings, of wholesale extermination, of deliberate starvation… all the refinements of cruelty which Israeli soldiers continually display for the whole world on social media without shame or pity and with total impunity and silence from the West. Brutality and dehumanization have become normalized in the Israeli treatment of Palestinians. Acts of evil have become a sort of social media entertainment. Israeli soldiers film TikTok dances while bombs are falling on Palestinian civilians in Gaza; the same soldiers post their videos of Palestinian captives being humiliated and treated like animals: blindfolding them, undressing them, shooting at them willfully, running over their corpses by tanks or bulldozers as though they were the most normal things in the world, taking childish joy in horror and a quasi erotic pleasure in the dehumanization of their victims. Death has become a banal social media reel. Kropotkin writing about the tragedy of the Paris Commune quotes the bestial Versailles soldiers as they rounded up the Communards echoes the behavior of Israeli soldiers towards the Palestinians:
“You shall perish, whatever you do! If you are taken with arms in your hands, death! If you use them, death! If you beg for mercy, death! Whichever way you turn, right left, back, forward, up, down; death! You are not merely outside the law, you are outside humanity. Neither age nor sex shall save you and yours. You shall die, but first you shall taste the agony of your wife, your sister, your mother, your sons and daughters, even those in the cradle! Before your eyes the wounded man shall be taken out of the ambulance and hacked with bayonets or knocked down with the butt end of a rifle. He shall be dragged living by his broken leg or bleeding arm and flung like a suffering, groaning bundle of refuse into the gutter. Death! Death! Death!”(8)
It is this darkness of settler colonialism to which the Palestinians have been subjected for the last 75 years; especially today when everything (90%) of Gaza has been reduced to rubble—hospitals, schools, mosques, universities, housing buildings, shops, UN facilities: an entire culture and history on the brink of obliteration.
Caravaggio’s late works are an equation between darkness and light. The darkness that encloses his images is death as depicted patently in the painting Saint Jerome writing (1605-1606) also in Galleria Borghese. The light which scarcely redeems and atones derives from the capacity of the people to survive. Caravaggio’s images act not out of the darkness but because and despite of it. This also parallels the darkness that surrounds the space in Bernini’s David; a space that is often ignored and unacknowledged that accumulates into such a scale of terror and destruction that makes violence an absolute moral principle as objectified in the story of David. A question of the right to resist annihilation.
It is curious that (if one looks closer) in Caravaggio’s painting there is an inscription on David’s sword—H – AS OS which has been interpreted as an abbreviation of the Latin phrase humilitas occidit superbiam (humility kills pride). The massive revolt of 7 October has shaken the Goliath that is Israel. But the terror and destruction continues without pause, while international conferences still argue for a ceasefire the number of victims, mostly children, is augmenting each day. Starvation has set foot in Gaza. The terrorism of crazed settlers in the West Bank is out of control. Israeli military has doubled its repression in East Jerusalem as Ramadan commences. All around the world massive demonstrations of solidarity by mostly young people are beginning to challenge their governments’ immoral complicity in Israel’s unquestioned illegal occupation.
“Yes, there is beauty and there are the humiliated,” writes Albert Camus. “Whatever may be the difficulties of the enterprise, I should like to never be unfaithful to either one or the other.” Risking arrest and physical abuse from the police and condemnation from academic institutions and vilification by corporate media, the relentless street demonstrations for Palestine by young people in many parts of the world carry out this task of faithfulness with utmost ardour and compassion.
Notes:
2. Edward W. Said, From Oslo to Iraq and the Roadmap (Great Britain, 2004), p. 92
5. Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (Great Britain, 1994), p. 94
7. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of The Earth, (France, 1961), p. 43
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