The Sacred and the Profane
- Matthew Sargent
- Jun 22, 2021
- 10 min read
Updated: Mar 30
The sacred’ and ‘the profane’ might sound, at first, like the sorts of technical terms intelligible only to theologians and religious scholars. On closer inspection, however, it appears that they mean vastly dissimilar things to people from many different walks of life. Not only do the words ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ appear in the titles of numerous paintings and orchestral and choral compositions, showing that the relationship between the two has been a topic of interest for artists and musicians alike, but the dichotomy has also been the subject of lengthy written treatments by anthropologists, sociologists, and philosophers. The sacred-profane opposition is often considered to have its origins in the work of Scottish orientalist and Old Testament scholar William Robertson Smith, who lived during the second half of the nineteenth century.[1] Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert, both students of Émile Durkheim, were among the earliest thinkers on the continent to build upon Robertson Smith’s research into the sacred and the profane, and indeed Durkheim’s ideas about how the two were interrelated, a subject covered in his groundbreaking 1912 study The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, were profoundly influenced by the work his pupils had previously undertaken. Since then, British anthropologists Jack Goody and Edward Evans-Pritchard, and the Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade have been some of the many academics to have investigated the sacred-profane opposition.[2] In more recent years, the phrase ‘sacred and profane’ has occurred in the names of everything from podcasts to documentaries on the Lakota Sioux.[3]
But although Robertson Smith may have been responsible for popularizing the dichotomy, in no way should we suppose, as Jan Bremmer does, that the opposition only originated around 1900. There is good evidence to suggest it had existed long before that. Lindsay Mann observes that the sacred-profane opposition underlies much of John Donne’s metaphysical poetry.[4] Moreover, Gregory Nagy has argued that, although the songs of Sappho and Alcaeus might seem worlds apart, what unites them is the logic of the sacred and profane.[5] Perhaps we should regard Nagy’s arguments with a degree of suspicion, however, since in neither Sappho’s nor Alcaeus’ poetry is the opposition between the two made explicit. It might be argued that such a distinction is implicit. But, even if this were the case, one could object to this mode of interpretation on the grounds that, rather than examining these poems in a manner sympathetic to the contexts in which they were composed, we are instead looking at them through the distorted lens of our modern scholarly preoccupations. We have no idea as to how residents of Archaic Lesbos conceived of sacredness or profaneness. Furthermore, it seems inevitable that, whenever one undertakes to reduce the content of a poem or other work of literature to a straightforward binary opposition, one ends up overlooking much of its richness of language, complexity, and profundity.
Literature aside, several paintings and musical compositions have also made use of the sacred-profane dichotomy as a structuring device. Amongst those artists and musicians to have taken inspiration from the relationship between the sacred and profane are: Claude Debussy, composer of the 1904 Danse sacrée et danse profane; Benjamin Britten, whose last major choral composition, from 1974-75, was the Sacred and Profane song cycle; and the Baroque painter Giovanni Baglione, best known nowadays for his rivalry with Caravaggio and for his painting Sacred Love and Profane Love, which exists in two versions, exhibited in Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie and Rome’s Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica respectively.
Britten
The question remains, what makes one piece of music more ‘sacred’ or ‘profane’ than the next? In the case of Britten’s song cycle, a lot of it has to do with the lyrics. Britten selected and set to music eight short medieval poems, dating from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. It is believed he discovered the texts in Reginald Thorne Davies’ 1963 book Medieval Lyrics: A Critical Anthology,[6] which was published a few years before Britten began work on Sacred and Profane. Scholars have chosen to divide up the ‘lyrics’ (another word for song) into two groups, the secular and the religious. This is because collections of medieval lyrics, such as those housed in the Harleian Library, are known to have included both secular and religious songs. Secular lyrics frequently had an instrumental accompaniment and formed the basis of many popular songs, including drinking tunes like the ‘Song of Lewes’. Religious lyrics, on the other hand, did not always have an accompaniment and were generally written for liturgical use. The ‘profane’ songs in the collection (nb here, ‘profane’ is being treated as roughly synonymous with ‘secular’) discuss topics such as love between man and woman, the joyousness of springtime, and the arrival of winter, while the ‘religious’ songs (which we might, in turn, call ‘sacred’ lyrics) concentrate on Christ’s Passion and, in particular, his crucifixion; in fact, the seventh lyric, Ye that pasen by, is written from the perspective of Christ as he gazes down from the cross, and urges onlookers to contemplate his suffering and sacrifice.
Debussy
If, then, the poems that Britten uses provide the key to explaining his collection’s title, what are we to make of Debussy’s Danse sacrée et danse profane? The two dances are joined together to form a single movement, lasting approximately ten minutes in total. Writing to Manuel de Falla in 1907, Debussy referred to the distinctive ‘colour’ of each of the dances, comparing the ‘gravity’ of the one with the ‘grace’ of the other. With the opening bars of the danse sacrée, Debussy is said to be creating an atmosphere of ancient religiosity, an effect he achieves through a combination of almost medieval harmonies and chant-like phrases in the strings. It has been suggested that he is endeavouring to reproduce the sounds and character of Roman or Classical Greek music, and that he writes the harp part in such a way as to deliberately evoke that instrument from antique times, the lyre. The danse profane, on the other hand, is of a decidedly exotic character. In French, the adjective ‘profane’ often comes with connotations of earthiness and sensuality, and we cannot fail to be struck by the more ‘impressionistic’ and lush style of the second dance. The harp line, here, is especially redolent of Spanish music. It is also interesting to note in this context that the cross-strung harp is believed to have originated in Renaissance Spain. Along with the sea, Spain was one of Debussy’s great loves; its bright colours and rich, expressive music intrigued him. Many of the composer’s other works, as well, show signs of having been influenced by Spanish music, such as the piano piece La puerta del vino and the three movements of Ibéria (the second of Debussy’s three Images pour orchestre).
But where did Debussy get the idea to write one dance which was ‘sacred’ and another that was ‘profane’? Does his familiarity with the sacred-profane dichotomy suggest that the opposition was more widely known about than we might initially expect? Or did the inspiration to write a piece about the ‘sacred and profane’ come from somewhere else, somewhere other than the intensely academical works of Durkheim and Robertson Smith? Perhaps Debussy was struck by a painting he had come across, maybe one that was even in Rome at the same time as he was living at the Villa Medici, where he stayed for a period of two years during the 1880s. Ultimately, this is pure speculation—to my knowledge, there is no evidence linking Debussy’s two dances with either Baglione’s Sacred Love and Profane Love or Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love. What this article aims to highlight is the possibility of a connection between Debussy’s composition and one or both of these paintings. The Galleria Borghese, where Titian’s work is displayed, did not open until 1903, and the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, where one version of Baglione’s painting is exhibited, did not start welcoming visitors until 1893, so in both cases the establishment of the gallery postdates Debussy’s residency at the French Academy in Rome.
But perhaps—yet more conjecture—he found out about them some other way. This is not impossible, nor is it inconceivable that seeing the painting(s) inspired Debussy to write a composition to do with the sacred and profane. In fact, we know for certain that one piece of music Debussy wrote, the symphonic suite Printemps, was inspired by his experience of seeing a painting by the Italian Renaissance master, Sandro Botticelli. The painting in question, Botticelli’s Primavera, graced the walls of the Villa Medici during the years when Debussy lived there, and it made such an impact upon the composer that he undertook to capture, using music, the exuberance and vitality of the characters represented on Botticelli’s canvas. Given Debussy had already used this painting as a source of inspiration for one of his compositions, what was there to stop him from using other paintings as further sources of inspiration? Of course, what this thesis of mine fails to establish is that it was a painting that provided the inspiration for the title of Debussy’s Danse sacrée et danse profane.
Baglione
It remains for me in the concluding part of this article to sketch some of the major interpretative theories about Titian’s and Baglione’s ‘sacred and profane’ paintings. Baglione was, in addition to being an accomplished draughtsman and painter, an art historian. His 1642 book on the lives and times of artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Le Vite de’ Pittori, Scultori et Architetti, which contains biographies of Caravaggio, Carracci, and Orazio Gentileschi, among others, also has an entry about Baglione himself. There he explains how he made for Cardinal Giustiniani ‘two paintings of two Divine Loves, holding under their feet the profane Love, the World, the Devil, and the Flesh’.[7] This might be taken as concrete proof that the titles which the two paintings go by nowadays were the ones the artist always intended his artworks to have. It is commonly believed that Baglione meant Sacred Love and Profane Love to be a response to Caravaggio’s Amor Vincit. Orazio Gentileschi’s deposition from the libel suit that Baglione later brought against Caravaggio certainly seems to suggest Baglione set out to rival Caravaggio so as to curry favour with the Giustiniani. Although we are hardly able to take Gentileschi’s testimony at face value,[8] not least because the information he gives is often imprecise or categorically wrong, we cannot doubt that Baglione was consciously imitating aspects of Caravaggio’s style, such as his dramatic use of chiaroscuro and the abruptness of presentation. Baglione’s painting has also been read as a visual accusation of sodomy against Caravaggio. The devil in the bottom left-hand corner of the Rome picture has frequently been identified as a caricatured portrayal of Caravaggio (nb we might observe how, by contrast, the face of the devil in the Berlin version is turned away). It could be, therefore, that Baglione is drawing attention to Caravaggio in more than one way, and in neither instance is he being particularly subtle.
Titian
If we turn from Baglione’s to Titian’s painting, the difference could not be more striking. While Baglione’s Sacred Love and Profane Love is an agonistic painting, conceived as a retaliatory response by one artist to the work of another artist, Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love was commissioned to mark the occasion of a grand, aristocratic marriage, that of Niccolò Aurelio, chancellor in the city government of Venice, and Laura Bagarotto of Padua. An overview of some of the different interpretations of Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love will suffice to show the multiplicity of scholarly approaches to this most enigmatic of paintings. Walter Friedlaender drew attention to the connection between Titian’s work and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,[9] a romance by the fifteenth-century writer Francesco Colonna. He hypothesized that the seated figure on the left of the painting was Venus, and the standing one on the right was Polia, a figure from Colonna’s narrative, who has recently joined the service of the goddess of love. Erwin Panofsky argued that the two women represent the Twin Venuses of Neoplatonic philosophy,[10] who personify transient and eternal love respectively. Eugene B Cantelupe, in turn, asserted that Titian’s painting is an exploration of the dual nature of love in Platonic philosophy and Christian doctrine. He believed Sacred and Profane Love to be ‘an allegory of pagan-Biblical love’[11] and highlighted the complex symbolism of much of the painting’s iconography. For instance, Cantelupe regarded Adonis, whose sarcophagus we see in the painting, as a pagan prefiguration of Christ, in that just as Christ returned to life, so Adonis was resurrected, after having been killed whilst out hunting. Both Christ and Adonis, therefore, can be viewed as symbols of rebirth and eternal life.
The task of deciphering the meaning of Titian’s painting is made infinitely harder, however, in view of the fact that Sacred and Profane Love was not even the work’s original title, in all probability. The first mention of the painting occurs in a poem of 1613, where it is listed as ‘Beauty Adorned and Beauty Unadorned’. We cannot even be certain whether this was the name Titian used to refer to his work. What, then, is contained in the title of a painting? It is more than just a label. It is a description of that painting’s subject matter. Nor is it just that, for, as Paul Barolsky notes, ‘description is never mere description’, it is also implicitly interpretation.[12] So much of our understanding of Titian’s painting hinges on the particular title we use to describe the work. Not much is ultimately knowable or definite about Sacred and Profane Love, apart from the circumstances surrounding its creation. But in many respects this is what makes it such a captivating artwork. We must try our best to make sense of the painting’s complex imagery but, without the parameters of interpretation suggested by the work’s original title, the title given it by the artist, we can afford to be much freer in our ‘reading’ of the picture than might otherwise be the case. Who the two women in Titian’s painting are meant to be, no one knows. But what arguably matters just as much is who people think they are. And the fact that we are still asking these questions, and still discussing this painting centuries after it was made, goes to show what a timeless and fascinating work of art Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love really is.
Matthew Sargent
Matthew Sargent is a third-year undergraduate in Classics at Trinity College, Cambridge. Among his diverse interests are Greek historiography, literature, and political thought. He was the joint recipient of the 2020 Porson Prize, for Greek verse composition. He hopes to do an MPhil at Trinity, focussing on leadership theory and paraenetic discourse.
[1] Jan N Bremmer, ‘“Religion”, “Ritual” and the Opposition “Sacred vs. Profane”’ in Fritz Graf (ed), Ansichten griechischer Rituale: Geburtstags-Symposium für Walter Burkert (BG Teubner 1998) 25.
[2] ibid 28.
[3] Jack Goody, ‘Ritual and Religion: The Definitional Problem’ (1961) 12(2) The British Journal of Sociology 142; Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford University Press 1965); Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and Profane: The Nature of Religion (Willard R Trask tr, Harcourt 1959).
[4] Lindsay A Mann, ‘Sacred and Profane Love in Donne’ (1986) 65(4) Dalhousie Review 534.
[5] Gregory Nagy, ‘Lyric and Greek Myth’ in R. Woodard (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Mythology (Cambridge University Press 2007).
[6] Christian Damon Stirling, ‘A Study of Britten’s Unaccompanied Choral Cycles’ (PhD dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 2015) 106ff.
[7] Maryvelma Smith O’Neil, ‘Giovanni Baglione - Seventeenth-Century Painter, Draughtsman and Biographer of Artists’ (DPhil thesis, Oxford 1992) 42ff.
[8] ibid 44.
[9] Walter Friedlaender, ‘La Tintura Delle Rose (the Sacred and Profane Love) by Titian’ (1938) 20(3) The Art Bulletin, 320-1, 323-4.
[10] Richard Brilliant, My Laocoön: Alternative Claims in the Interpretation of Artworks (University of California Press 2000) 78.
[11] Eugene B Cantelupe, ‘Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love Re-examined’ (1964) 46(2) The Art Bulletin, 224.
[12] Paul Barolsky, ‘Sacred and Profane Love’ (1998) 17(3) Notes in the History of Art 25.
