Moralia Secondary Paratext
Throughout the Moralia, Gregory grounds the spiritual exercise of his reading in creative exegesis, promising hidden strata of meaning concealed by a rough facade. Expounding the utility of images to stimulate contemplation of the mysteries, Gregory’s allegories offered a natural index of pictorial devices whose verbal form could be put to stunning visual effect. To elucidate the spiritual analogy of word and image, Gregory describes God in the language of art, comparing the logos to a pigment, which spreads in its cup as it is ground (manuscript). Like Gregory, in the Disputa Raphael captured the transmission of the divine through visual metaphors, equating the Word with painterly technique. Scholars have often noted the liberal use of gold in the painting, which seems incompatible with Raphael’s otherwise stoic classicism and by the second half of the fifteenth century had largely gone out of fashion. The distribution of gold in the painting, however, should not be understood as a simple statement of papal opulence, or as a mere homage to the altarpieces and apsidal mosaics of Rome’s early Christian churches. Rather, the gilding in the fresco is better understood as a spiritual actor, an essential character in the unfolding Christian drama.
As one might conclude from this metaphoric order, Gregory’s discussion of gold in the Moralia is bound to the heavenly metaphor of the sun, by then a popular allegory for Christ in art and literature, and a relationship that Raphael visualized in the colors and shapes of the Disputa. Just as gold has interchangeable meanings for Gregory, so too does the sun, and like gold, Gregory’s various interpretations are always reconciled under the power of divine truth. Associating the coming of Christ with the “rising of the true sun,” Gregory identifies the light that bathes mankind as the emanating splendor of God’s grace. In an especially lucid passage, Gregory turns to meteorological symbolism to explain the experience of spiritual enlightenment.
Gregory explains further that God’s wisdom glows increasingly brighter in the souls of man as the logos gradually becomes known through the written word. The Christian equation of the sun (detail, spatial) and the Son of God was nothing new for either Gregory or Raphael, but the close physical and visual proximity of the Moralia, the altar, and the figure of the pope suggests that the artist was engaged with the figurative tokens of Gregory’s theology. In Raphael’s fresco, Gregory the Great is one of only three theologians who sees heaven’s invisible landscape emerging above; the two others, Ambrose and Sixtus IV, also set forth Christ’s presence in the Eucharist. Gregory’s exceptional characterization in the painting—sitting with an open book as he experiences visionary communion with the divine—leads us back to the text of the Moralia. Not only is Gregory cast according to the premise outlined in his writings—that is, attaining divine wisdom through the contemplation of Holy Scripture—but his gaze carries us across transcendent planes of light reminiscent of his expositions in the Moralia. As in the text, in the Disputa the rays of truth radiate from the supreme light of the sun, which ascends in brilliant golden orbs toward the Father; and just as in the entry, ascending toward the heavenly source, rings of angels populate the illuminated vault like sparkling stars reflecting the light of God.
Further Reading
Baxandall, Michael. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.