St. Peter Healing the Sick with His Shadow (Acts 5:15-16) 1670 - 1680

Editor: This is Jean-Baptiste Jouvenet's "St. Peter Healing the Sick with His Shadow," dating from 1670 to 1680. It's a red chalk drawing on paper. It’s currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The gridded structure over the artwork almost flattens the drama of the subject into a pattern. How would you interpret the choices Jouvenet made with composition and materiality? Curator: Notice the grid, of course. This divides the plane into discrete units of measurement, implying an architecture, if you will, upon which the figuration can be systematically erected. Note the dynamism suggested in the upper register; a series of gestural loops, suggestive of angels, clouds, and the heavens. How does that contrast with the gridded underlay? Editor: It does feel as though it adds another layer, or perhaps an instability, over the material form. It has a dreamlike or ethereal presence juxtaposed to something with rigid constraint. Curator: Precisely. Observe how the red chalk itself—a dry medium—necessitates hatching and cross-hatching, creating visual textures even in areas intending to represent smooth skin or fabric. Does that affect how you read the subject? Editor: It definitely highlights the process of creation, showing the layers of building and adjustment, as the figures are constructed from these marks. The figures are almost geometric in some way, not realistic but structural. Curator: And what about the orientation? Vertical, like the church altarpieces or painted ceilings that might come later, the planar dynamism held by structural rigor, or maybe a formal relation between earthly suffering and divine grace? Editor: I hadn't thought about it that way, but I see how the artist's structural and material choices shape that narrative and add a dialogue between form and content. Thanks for your insights.