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MICHAEL HEALY, Stained Glass Artist
Thomas MacGreevy

In the centuries that followed the Protestant Reformation pretty well all the ecclesiastical buildings which had been erected in Ireland both before and after the Norman invasion were laid in ruins. And until Catholic Emancipation, practically nothing was set up in place of the lovely things which had been destroyed. When church building did start again, the age of bad architecture had arrived. With a few exceptions — most of them in the classical style — the churches and chapels built in the last hundred years or so are, architecturally speaking, of poor quality. It took three generations for an Irish architect of genius, Scott, the designer of the basilica at Lough Derg, to appear. But we have only a very few buildings by Scott. For architecture is the most expensive, as it is the most communal, the least individual, of the arts. The arts that are dependent on architecture, however, sculpture and, in the case of church architecture especially, the art of stained glass painting, these may come to fruition more easily, and be more widely distributed over a given area than good architecture. A big stained glass window costs no more than a small picture of the same quality. And a beautiful window may be set up even in a church that, as architecture, is undistinguished. That is where the subject of this study comes in.

Michael Healy was born in Dublin in 1873. He died at Mercer's Hospital, Dublin, in September, 1941. Outside a very small circle his name is hardly known. And yet for forty years he was quietly but unfailingly beautifying our land, doing all that a great artist could do to give worthy expression to the religious life of the people of Ireland. The pioneer artist of the modern Irish stained glass movement, it is largely owing to his genius that to-day there are few places in the country which are more than twenty miles from a major work of modern art. In Dublin and the greater towns something in the way of visual art has, of course, always been happening, if it was no more than the erection of a terrace or crescent or square of well-designed houses. But for hundreds of years the visual arts were practically unknown outside the towns. Nowadays, however, if you drive, say, a hundred miles, through almost any part of Ireland you will find that you can stop at least half a dozen times, go into churches, and look at stained glass windows which represent the most venerated figures and events of religious history, very often of our own religious history, and represent them with an elevated tenderness of feeling, a beauty of draughtsmanship, and a splendour of colour, that were only rarely surpassed in the works of the great stained glass artists of medieval France or the painters of Renaissance Italy. And what is more important than their being there for art-loving travellers is the fact that these windows are there to stir the imagination of people of sensibility who live in remote places. There are there in nearly every county, from Cork to Antrim, from Wexford to Donegal, at Mayfield and Bushmills, Gorey and Letterkenny, in Sligo and Mayo, Roscommon, Leitrim, Fermanagh, Clare, Tipperary, Kilkenny, Laois, Kildare, Meath, in Cork city, Galway city, Dublin city, above all at Loughrea — they are there to induce that mood of meditation and recollection which only genuine works of religious art can induce, and, more profanely considered, to constitute standards of taste and artistic points of departure, and not only for grown-ups but, even more important, for artistically gifted children.

Forty years ago, then, a movement was started to break with the bad mass-production pseudo-religious art that was coming in large quantities from abroad. And the pioneer artist of it was this Irishman of the people, sprung from the humbler ranks of society, yet a man of extraordinarily wide range of understanding and power of interpretation, and a master of the richest and most fastidious sensibility both in colour and draughtsmanship, Michael Healy.

It was indirectly through Harry Clarke, the most brilliant stained glass artist of a later generation, that I, myself, first came to understand what a great artist Michael Healy was. Harry was a contemporary and friend, and I used sometimes to borrow his bicycle in order to get to places and things worth seeing which were at a distance from a railway station, St. Doulough's church, near Malahide, for instance, and Jerpoint Abbey, near Thomastown. On a Saturday, getting on for twenty years ago now, Harry lent me the bicycle to go to Clongowes to see Mr. Keating's then fairly new Stations of the Cross in the School Chapel. I am not discussing the work of living artists here, so I must not dwell on that remarkable series of modern Irish paintings. What I was not prepared for in the Chapel at Clongowes was a radiantly gleaming window behind the altar which represented scenes from the life of St. Joseph, Josep

Joos van Cleve. Madonna and Child

Who painted what when? To many, that recalls what turned them off art history. I call it an invitation to see. Sometimes, too, it has the appeal of a good mystery.

A passion for art

A journalism professor from Florida A&M had turned to Renaissance Europe for the secrets of Kabala. In a painting in Cincinnati, he may have discovered as well a story of missionaries, the conquest of the New World, botanical scrutiny, and belief.

This may well sound like outtakes from a certain movie, but it does not require murder, self-flagellation, or even lame dialogue. An attribution simply means asking if the artist at hand would have or could have done the job. As I have described for a controversial attribution to Jan Vermeer, an answer hinges on the totality of a painting's subject, style, and technique, which is why art takes words. These in turn direct one to historical documents, close technical examination, and what one can see with the naked eye. And this time, a work's history extends to everything from biology to the history of scientific discovery and to cultural anthropology.

In Joos van Cleve's Madonna and Child, which dates from before 1535, the infant Jesus reaches for his mother and for three cherries—the number associated with the Trinity and the fruit with paradise. His affection for Mary and her association with salvation already has doctrinal implications. In the process, the child seems to flee two flowers in his mother's right hand. To a believer, he has every reason to fear.

A carnation's nasty thorns and red flowers had made it a symbol of the Passion. When travelers with Hernando Cortés, the Spanish conqueror of Mexico, found a relative with deeper reds and spinier petals, they could hardly resist naming it a passion flower. In the painting, the miraculous new flower tops the older one. They could be growing out of the same stem—if a stem could somehow start over after a burst of pink.

However, Michael E. Abrams has a problem with this picture. Word of the discovery did not reach Europe for decades, starting with a physician around 1570 and drawings by Jesuits in 1608. Prints of Passiflora incarnata circulated more widely in Europe only later still. He cites a remarkable series, documenting biodiversity in Virginia and issued in London.

Could Joos have somehow had an inside track, both to dozens of then unfamiliar species and to an apparent revelation. Could the attribution to Joos instead have a serious flaw? Abrams wrote the Cincinnati Institute of Fine Arts to ask. Although I can hardly claim to have played a role beyond offering another lay opinion, he also got in touch with me—as has the Tallahassee Democrat.

The economy of vision

Andy Haslit, the curator, insists on the attribution. He can trace the painting, which entered the collection in 1981, only as far back as 1913. However, he can rely on agreement among other art historians. I hate to judge a work of art in reproduction, but I reached same conclusion.

Joos, formerly known as Master of the Death of the Virgin, takes his name from Cleves, on the lower Rhine. He moved to Antwerp around 1510. There, under the influence of Quentin Massys and Jan Gossart, he furthered a style known now as Flemish Mannerism. One can see it in the painting's acrid colors, heavy shadows, and hard finish.

At the same time, Mannerism often revisits the past, Joos stood as a classicist. He looked to the early Renaissance, as in a close copy after Jan van Eyck. He also introduces Italian models to Northern Europe, much as Hans Memling had in his portraits many years before. In copying van Eyck's Madonna in a Church, he beefs up her proportions, and the Madonna in Cincinnati has the same weighty folds of drapery and rounded faces. The motif of a carnation goes back to a more famous Madonna in Munich, by Leonardo da Vinci—perhaps his first painting on that theme and among the first paintings to embody High Renaissance ideals. The pyramid here, completed by the arm at left and architecture at right, also recalls Leonardo.

Joos, then, almost surely had no contact with flora across the ocean, but plenty of contact with this canvas. Abrams himself, however, realized another possibility, for if Joos had painted the Madonna, another hand could have added the second flower much later. Could someone at least look closely at the painting's surface to see? Major scholars historians who ascribed the painting to Joos, such as Max Friedländer, never thought to ask.

I found Abram's third possibility a no-brainer. First, symbolism requires that the natural world speak in an economical language. One flower growing out of another just will not do. Besides, it does not look terribly naturalistic. Moreover, I had to suspect the black background. Black hides a multitude of sins, much as in clothing, and indeed I began to wonder if it effaced the carnation's thorns. Joos himself did as much as anyone to add detailed backdrops, broken