On 12 August the Moon will once again cover the Sun over much of Spain, and for a few minutes there will be a total solar eclipse visible that day. It will be nowhere near the first time an eclipse has left humanity speechless.
Nor will it be the first time someone has tried to capture it with a paintbrush. For centuries painters, illuminators and engravers have tried to fix on canvas, fresco or copper plate something that in reality lasts only a few minutes.
When the sky darkened and the world trembled
Before astronomy existed in the way we understand it today, an eclipse was, quite simply, terrifying. The “Nebra Sky Disc”, a Bronze Age bronze artefact found near Halle in Germany, already shows the Sun, the Moon and the Pleiades together on a single object, although it does not strictly represent an eclipse: it is rather the earliest known precedent of that obsession with putting an image to what happens in the sky.
Herodotus himself left an account of how a solar eclipse came to interrupt a battle between Medes and Lydians in Asia Minor, an episode both sides read as a sign.
The Middle Ages found in the eclipse a perfect narrative device for one very specific episode: the death of Christ. Italian painter Taddeo Gaddi depicted, in a 1330 triptych now held by the New-York Historical Society, a Moon approaching the Sun above the cross. A century later an anonymous Valencian artist did the same in a panel (the painting is called “Crucifixion”) that now hangs in the Thyssen-Bornemisza, although with a sun in an ochre tone that reveals that its author had probably never witnessed a total eclipse and did not really know how to portray it.
The phenomenon also appeared alongside other marvels: the Augsburg Book of Miracles, a mid-16th-century manuscript, illustrates the total eclipse of 1483 accompanied by the locust plague that devastated Italy that same year.
The Baroque, between faith and nascent science
With the Baroque, depictions of the eclipse grew in technical ambition without losing their symbolic weight. José de Ribera painted in his 1643 “Crucified Christ”, now in the Fine Arts Museum of Vitoria, an almost translucent lunar disc that lets the outline of the Sun behind be glimpsed, while Rubens went a step further in his triptych for Antwerp cathedral: in “The Elevation of the Cross” (1610–1611) he captured the beginning of a solar eclipse with striking realism, although he had to draw the entire contour of the Moon so that viewers could recognise both celestial bodies.
Not all eclipse paintings of the period were born of faith. Antoine Caron titled his canvas from around 1570–1580, now in the Getty in Los Angeles, “Dionysius the Areopagite converting the pagan philosophers”, although it is better known as Astronomers observing a solar eclipse: a celestial globe, an armillary sphere and a figure doing geometric calculations reveal that what really interested the painter was the astronomical phenomenon.
By the 18th century, Donato Creti had painted a series of oils on astronomical observations commissioned by Count Marsili, who gave them to Pope Clement XI to persuade him to finance an observatory in Bologna. And it worked, as the observatory was built soon afterwards.
Romanticism and the taste for the sublime
The 19th century, with its fascination for the grand and the inexplicable, produced some of the most picturesque scenes in the genre. Ippolito Caffi portrayed the eclipse of 8 July 1842 over Venice (“Solar eclipse at Fondamenta Nove”) from an aerial perspective, and Russian painter Ivan Aivazovsky, better known for his seascapes, turned the total eclipse he observed in 1851 from Feodosia (“Solar eclipse in Feodosia”) into a kind of nocturne.
The phenomenon also served for political satire: a 1706 French almanac showed Louis XIV seated on his throne before the Sun, in allusion to his nickname of “Sun King”, including in one corner the eclipse of 12 May that year, which coincided with a French military defeat during the siege of Barcelona.
When the paintbrush was put at the service of science
In the late 19th century, before photography could properly capture the solar corona, some artists became instruments of precision. The Frenchman Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, better known today for having inadvertently introduced the gypsy moth into the United States, found his true vocation in astronomical drawing and travelled with his son to Creston, in the Territory of Wyoming, to observe the total eclipse of 29 July 1878 (“Total eclipse of the sun”).
That scene ended up being turned into a chromolithograph in a portfolio of 15 plates published in 1882. A few decades later, the American Howard Russell Butler took that documentary vocation even further.
A former physics student turned portraitist, he developed a shorthand method for noting shapes and colours that allowed him to work with barely two minutes of totality. Using those notes and some supporting photographic plates, he painted the 1918 eclipse in Oregon during an expedition by the US Naval Observatory, and repeated the feat with the eclipses of 1923 in California, 1925 in Connecticut and 1932 in Maine.
The resulting triptych was exhibited for years at the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and half-scale copies exist in Princeton, at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and at the Buffalo Museum of Science.
From Expressionism to pop art
The eclipse went on inspiring artists, now in a purely artistic vein, throughout the 20th century. Paul Klee devoted a watercolour to it (“Solar eclipse (Sonnenfinsternis)”), and Roy Lichtenstein, towards the end of his career, translated the speed with which the totality of an eclipse arrives and passes into a superposition of circles and curves very typical of pop art in his 1975 work “Eclipse of the Sun”.
Since then, the phenomenon has continued to appear on the contemporary art market, whether as an almost scientific study or as a purely chromatic pretext for playing with the contrast between light and shadow.
On 12 August, when the Moon once again moves in front of the Sun over Spain, thousands of people will take out their phones to photograph the phenomenon. For much of history, the only way to preserve it was precisely that, a paintbrush, a handful of minutes and the memory of those who dared to look up.