Maurice Denis and the Sacred Heart
In these two Maurice Dennis paintings, the Sacred Heart of Jesus bursts forth with Heaven's light amidst the darkness and suffering of the Crucifixion.
A French painter and a faithful Catholic, Denis was devoted to his wife and seven children, whom he often featured in his art. His flat painting style has an intimate glow, reminiscent of icons, and brings forth the interior life of his subjects.
Denis was also an intellectual painter and wrote numerous books on aesthetics and even a history of art. He helped found the Nabis and Symbolist movements, which re-engaged spiritual and historical subjects after the Impressionists focused on more mundane subjects and scenes of nature.
Although these paintings of the Sacred Heart seem to depart from classic imagery—a longer haired Jesus holding his heart outside of his body— they harken back to the devotion's roots—when Longinus pierced Jesus’s Heart on the Cross. “One of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water” (Jn 19:34). St. John Paul II comments on the significance of this passage in a catechesis to a Totus Tuus group:
Jesus was already dead. He died before the two criminals who had been crucified with him. This is a proof of the intensity of his sufferings.
The thrust of the spear, therefore, was not a new suffering inflicted on Jesus. It served rather as a sign of the total gift which he had made of himself. It was a sign marked in his very flesh by the piercing of his side. It may be said that with the opening of his heart, it was a symbolic representation of that love through which Jesus had given everything and would continue to give everything to humanity.
In the painting “Crucified Sacred Heart,” Maurice Denis connects the Heart of Jesus and to the sacrament of the Eucharist—where the wounded Heart of Christ becomes a source of healing and light for us.
The painting is almost abstract, but still intimate. Two Marys stand at the feet of the Cross, their arms outstretched in anguish. Behind the Cross, three women clothed in white habits seem to sing prayerfully.
The presence of the altar servers at the foot of the Cross places the “Crucified Sacred Heart” in a liturgical context and emphasizes how the reality of Christ’s sacrifice is made present during Mass.
In the painting, Denis paints the Crucifixion in an enclosed garden dotted with white flowers. The way he depicts the garden and the arches behind it is reminiscent of how his favorite painter, Fra Angelico, used enclosed gardens in his own paintings during the Renaissance.
By painting the Crucifixion in a garden, Denis connects the Cross to the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden and reveals how Christ’s loving sacrifice and his resurrection re-open the Garden of Paradise for us. The altar servers remind us that we are brought back into the sacred garden during Mass.
Behind the scene of the Crucifixion, women clothed in white process up to a priest (or is it Jesus?) to receive Holy Communion on their knees under an arched building which opens to the garden of the Crucifixion. The arches are in some ways reminiscent of a church but the airy openness also gives the procession a sublimity amidst a dark purple background. The background is somber yet also a regal reminder that Christ is paradoxically on his throne while on the Cross.
Denis often painted processions to symbolize our pilgrimage to heaven—as in the “Landscape with Green Trees” below— and the procession in “Crucified Sacred Heart” seems to fit that theme. The dark scene is bathed in a heavenly light emanating from the wounded Heart of Jesus, reminding us that when we partake in the Eucharist, we participate in the Heavenly Banquet and rest in Jesus’s Sacred Heart.
The imagery of these paintings also incorporates many of the epithets from the Sacred Heart litany . Behind the Cross, the Temple imagery reminds us that in the Crucifixion, Christ and his Sacred Heart become the “Holy Temple of God.” By partaking in the Eucharist, we also become a dwelling for God. When Jesus's side is pierced, water and blood flow as they do “from the right side of the temple” (Ezekiel 47:1).
The glow surrounding Jesus's wounded Heart reveals that it is the “Gate of Heaven” which illuminates the way we are to live. As Saint Catherine says, “All the way to Heaven is Heaven because Christ is the Way.” Through Christ’s Sacred Heart, our wounds are transformed and the love of Heaven is made present to us.
The Sacred Heart is also a refuge for our weariness and suffering. Both of Maurice Denis’s paintings of the Sacred Heart communicate this truth, but Christ's compassion is most explicit in the 1930 painting, where he rests his head on his mother. In this painting, Dennis illuminates the epithets from the litany: “Sharer in our sorrow,” “Acquainted with grief,” “Fountain of life and Holiness.”
The way their faces touch recalls the famous icon, the Virgin of Tenderness, where Mary mourns for the death of her son, which was made known to her by Simeon. In Denis’s painting, Mary mourns and Jesus takes her underneath his breast and comforts her. Though his glowing Heart bears witness to his divine nature, his expressive face bears witness to the depths of his human suffering. Mary rests her head on the Sacred Heart of her Son, which glows with the passion of his divine sacrificial love. In this silent and sorrowful moment, Heart speaks to heart. Mary’s grief here shows us the deep union between her heart and the Heart of her Son, the Heart of God himself.
Ultimately, we are called with Mary to conform our own heart to his Sacred Heart. As Pope Benedict says, the Heart of Jesus “invites us to step forth out of the futile attempt of self-preservation and, by joining in the task of love, by handing ourselves over to him and with him, to discover the fullness of love which alone is eternity and which alone sustains the world.”
What do you notice about these paintings?
What do you think about Maurice Denis’s depiction of the Sacred Heart?