Visual Arts: Late in his life, the French artist, Eugene Delacroix, completed what is regarded as his finest religious painting, situated in the Chapel of the Angels in the Parisian church of Saint-Sulpice.
Its subject is an odd biblical episode. Jacob, journeying back to Canaan, is attacked by and wrestles all night with a stranger, generally taken to be an angel. When the angel cannot prevail against him, he injures Jacob with a touch that withers his thigh. Delacroix's treatment is lush and generous. The struggle is enacted in a verdant setting. Jacob is fiercely determined, the angel calm, aloof, in control.
By the time he worked on the mural, over a six-year period from 1854, Delacroix was no stranger to large-scale, decorative public commissions. As with the Saint Sulpice painting, they were relatively calm productions for the master of romantic turbulence, whose most infamous works, including The Death of Sardanapalus, aroused much controversy for their chaotic, orgiastic violence. But there was a paradox at the heart of Delacroix's character. In the critical climate of the time, he was regarded as exemplifying impassioned Romanticism, as opposed to the cool neo-classicism of Ingres. Yet for all the overt passion in his work, he was uneasy at being identified in this way. He was, as Baudelaire wrote in his obituary, "passionately in love with passion and coldly determined to seek out the means to express passion in the most visible manner". He anatomised passion, in other words, in a cooly dispassionate manner, and this coldness comes through in his work as it did in his dealing with others during his lifetime.
Wrestling with the Angel is a personal account of Jean-Paul Kauffmann's fascination with Delacroix's mural and the circumstances of its creation in Saint Sulpice.
It is subtitled and presented as a mystery. Saint Sulpice, the blurb suggests, is "a mysterious church". Kauffmann, a fan of Inspector Maigret, "investigates the painting"; he searches for clues and follows a trail. However, it soon becomes clear that there really is no mystery as such, or certainly not one amenable to a conventional solution.
This is not to suggest that the book disappoints. On the contrary, Kauffmann positively luxuriates in his quest, vague and undefined though it is, and he brilliantly communicates the immense pleasure of being immersed in a world densely textured with layers of history and meaning. "Wherever we may be," he remarks of the art critic friend who first introduced him to the Delacroix, "Leopold finds a link with a literary authority, an artist or a historical event." And that is exactly what he does himself with Saint Sulpice and Delacroix.
If at times we seem all but lost in a maze of anecdote and information, an intellectual maze that has a direct physical counterpart in the labyrinthine interior of the huge, rambling and disintegrating church, it is because "everything is a source of reference to something else". Nothing more so, of course, than painting. The history of painting is a hall of mirrors reflecting endlessly back through the centuries. Delacroix's source is a biblical tale, but we cannot help but view his work in the light of the efforts of others who have tackled the theme. And we cannot help but speculate as to its personal significance for him.
Was he referring to the artist's struggle in society, or to scepticism versus faith? Yet Kauffmann's real question is not so much what the painting might symbolise as what lies behind it, and, he eventually implies, we may be better off not knowing.
While working as a journalist in the Lebanon, Kauffmann was kidnapped in 1983 and only released five years later. Hence the book's meditative subtext, relating to ideas of imprisonment and freedom.
In a sense Delacroix was of course imprisoned by and in his work. Single-minded, obsessed, a little like Kauffmann himself as he becomes engrossed in the skewed world of Saint Sulpice, with its decaying stone, hidden rooms and eccentric inhabitants. "I thought", Kauffmann reflects on his involvement with the painting, "I could fill a void; all I did was make it larger." Sometimes, as here, the solution to a riddle is another riddle. Yet in this hugely likeable, humane and elegant study, Kauffmann demonstrates the efficacy of art. Delacroix may not, perhaps cannot, provide the answers he had hoped for, but in the end the painting and the church, for Kauffmann as for Delacroix, comprise not a prison but a working space, a space for dreaming and speculation. And there is something wonderful in that.
Aidan Dunne is Art Critic of The Irish Times
Wrestling with the Angel: The Mystery of Delacroix's Mural. By Jean-Paul Kauffmann, translated by Patricia Clancy. The Harvill Press, £14.99