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Wrestling with an Angel – Reflecting on Kauffman, J-P. (2003) [trans. Clancy, P.] Wrestling with the Angel: The mystery of Delacroix’s Mural London, Harvill Press.

Kauffman’s book is categorised as Art History and I went to it to widen my interest in the motif or icon of Jacob’s wrestle with the Angel. I found a book that certainly illuminates the creative process and justifies seeing it as a ‘trial’ in the life of an artist, but it matters more as an account of how and why artistic motifs attain their interest. Andrew Motion, reviewing the book in 2003, identified the wrestle, as interpreted by Kauffman’s mix of autobiography, research and reflection, with a dual self. One, by some form of emotional attachment, unites body and ideal ego whilst the other sees a struggle between them[1]. Although I would not claim that there is any necessity for spiritual ambiguity in any other reflective viewer of art in their attention to the struggle Kauffman finds in himself, there is I think much that is worth attention.

My own interest in the motif came from coming across a particular 13^th Century (in the ‘Trebizon Empire’) Byzantine fresco (a lunette in the outward wall of the inner walls of the North Porch of Aghia Sophia) to which I was attracted by a book by Anthony Eastmond[2]. Eastmond argues that the tripartite icons of this lunette – including Jacob’s dream of the ladder, the wrestle with the Angel and Moses at the Burning Bush are all pre-figurative Old-Testament types in Byzantine thought of the Theokotos (that which bears God – the Virgin Mary).

I found lots of evidence for this but nothing to explain the particular composition of the lunette, particularly of the centrality in which the Angel’s head, face and halo is placed. Had the lunette been complete, it is likely that that face would be immediately under a representation of God the Father. I read a lot which showed that the classical features of that face are more to be expected in the thirteenth century when another return to classical Greek and Roman models was facilitated, particularly under the Comnenian rulers restored at Trebizond.

The beauty of the Angel’s face cannot be explained alone though by classical modelling. That scultural head belies a body that transfigures into the very landscape the figure slips behind, such that Jacob’s knee is pressing upon the representation of mountain (the porphyry rock of Christ and the Comneni) and river (the green which represents the flow of life). Yet our Angel if celestial and of earth is also viscerally embodied as he fights flesh to flesh, his hand seeking the thigh on which he will wound Jacob.

The hand seeking Jacob’s thigh has visibly pulled up the celestial blue dress of Jacob, enabling the show of classical folds in cloth that stress irregularity within regularity, another mark of classicism.

If the angel is or figures Christ, which some readings of the Greek Pentateuch allow (I won’t bore you with the evidence), then this might explain how love in the body is seen as double: as an agon (struggle against mere embodiment) and active seeking of closer attachment (that uses and shows itself in the contact of bodies).

But all of this is not offered as anything but speculation. What I wanted to illustrate is that Kauffmann will never be alone in finding mystery in the motif. He too explores the mix of antagonistic body and the erotic, something he explores by comparing Delacroix’s use of the motif with that of Rembrandt (121f.).

Yet whatever else comes from that comparison, and Kauffman brings out much, neither picture is composed in the same way as the lunette (as a compositional arrangement of iconic figures) nor as each other – Delacroix’s picture is, as Kauffman discovers as if a discovery, is really a picturing of trees that dwarf the human, even when it struggles with the divine, whilst Rembrandt’s central mix of bodies emphasise touch as tenderness when the world seems most antagonistic.

In Gauguin, struggle is the stuff of mere animal joy – a point I can’t fail to see when I compare the dancing cow with the beast of 4-legs made by the wrestlers. We needn’t see this as reductive. In Gauguin flesh takes wings. I sense something of this in more symbolist treatments of the motif, especially Odilon Redon.

I think I’d like to explore all this – but will I? I doubt it. To write here is merely to mark the joy just looking and reflecting allows – it’s a relief from the academic and shouldn’t be offered as anything other than playful struggle with the materials of art. But sometimes play feels so much more serious than art-history.

I see something of this in Kauffmann too – despite his greater scholarly depth than anything here – a need to play outside the prisons that confine us. In one of my favourite versions, that of Salvator Rosa, that prison is the inexorability of time and mutability itself