From the Nebra Sky Disc to Roy Lichtenstein's pop art, and from Rubens and Ribera to American Howard Russell Butler, the solar eclipse has been depicted in painting for millennia, mixing religious symbolism, scientific curiosity and aesthetic fascination.
On 12 August the Moon will once again pass in front of the Sun across much of Spain, and for a few minutes there will be a total solar eclipse visible that day. It will be far from the first time an eclipse has left humanity speechless.
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Nor will it be the first time someone has tried to capture it with a paintbrush. For centuries, painters, illuminators and engravers have attempted to fix on canvas, fresco or copper plate something that in reality barely lasts 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 the same object, although it does not actually depict an eclipse: it is, rather, the most distant precedent of that obsession with giving an image to what happens in the sky.
Herodotus himself recorded how a solar eclipse managed to interrupt a battle between the Medes and the Lydians in Asia Minor, an episode both sides interpreted as a sign.
In the Middle Ages, eclipses became a perfect narrative device for one very specific episode: the death of Christ. The Italian painter Taddeo Gaddi depicted, in a triptych from 1330 that is now held by the New-York Historical Society, a Moon drawing near to the Sun above the cross. A century later an anonymous Valencian artist did the same in a panel (the painting is called "Crucifixion") now hanging in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, though with an ochre-toned sun that suggests its creator had probably never witnessed a total eclipse and did not really know how to represent one.
The phenomenon also appeared alongside other marvels: the Augsburg Book of Miracles, a mid-16th-century manuscript, depicts the total eclipse of 1483 together with the locust plague that devastated Italy that same year.
The Baroque, between faith and emerging science
In the Baroque era, depictions of eclipses grew more technically ambitious without losing their symbolic weight. José de Ribera painted in his 1643 "Christ crucified", now in the Fine Arts Museum of Vitoria, an almost translucent lunar disc that allows the outline of the Sun behind it to be glimpsed, while Rubens went a step further in his triptych for Antwerp Cathedral: in "The Elevation of the Cross" (1610-1611) he portrayed the onset 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 the eclipse paintings of the period sprang from religious faith. Antoine Caron titled his 1570-1580 canvas, 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 making geometric calculations", revealing that what really interested the painter was the astronomical phenomenon.
By the 18th century, Donato Creti had painted a series of oil works on astronomical observations commissioned by Count Marsili, who presented them to Pope Clement XI in an effort to persuade him to fund an observatory in Bologna. And it worked, because the observatory was built shortly 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 the 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 semi-nocturnal landscape.
The phenomenon also lent itself to political satire: a French almanac from 1706 showed Louis XIV sitting on his throne in front of the Sun, alluding to his nickname "Sun King", and included in one corner the eclipse of 12 May that year, which coincided with a French military defeat during the siege of Barcelona.
When the brush was put at the service of science
By the late 19th century, before photography could properly capture the solar corona, some artists turned their paintings into instruments of precision. The Frenchman Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, better known today for having accidentally 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 was eventually turned into a chromolithograph as part of 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 portrait painter, 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 a few 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 at Princeton, at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and at the Buffalo Museum of Science.
From Expressionism to pop art
In the 20th century, eclipses continued to be a source of purely artistic inspiration. 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 total phase of an eclipse arrives and passes into a superposition of circles and curves characteristic 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 excuse to play with the contrast between light and shadow.
On 12 August, when the Moon once again covers the Sun over Spain, thousands of people will take out their phones to photograph the event. For much of history, the only way to preserve it was precisely that, a paintbrush, a handful of minutes and the memory of someone who dared to look up.
