R. B. Kitaj (American, b. 1932) Eclipse of God (After the Uccello Panel Called Breaking Down The Jew's Door), 1997-2000 Oil on canvas, 36 x 48 in. The Jewish Museum , New York: Museum purchase; Oscar and Regina Gruss Memorial Fund and S. H. and Helen R. Scheuer Family Foundation, 2000-71 ©R.B. Kitaj/VAGA, New York, NY/Marlborough Gallery
	Eclipse of God refers to the Italian Renaissance artist Paolo Uccello's painting The Miracle of the Profaned Host (1467-68), commissioned for a church in Urbino. The narrative tells of a woman who sells a sacred Host to a Jewish merchant, who then throws it into a fire. Miraculously, according to the story, the host bleeds under the wall of the house into the street, which alerts local Christians who break down the door and rescue the Host. The Jewish merchant and his family are eventually burned at the stake for this crime against the Christian faith. What is lost in this narrative is another story, however. At the time of Uccello's commission, the radical Franciscan friars in Italy were engaged in an anti-Semitic campaign in order to establish the Monte di Pieta-loan agencies that sought to end Christian dependence upon Jewish money lenders, replacing such usury with their own source of capital. Kitaj uses a variety of techniques to underscore power struggles involving religion and money. He employs rigid, geometric forms to portray the mob, in all of its intolerant fury, which acts in the name of God (spelled out on the figure in the foreground), and casts the Jews in a sympathetic light by painting them with a looser, more expressionistic brushstroke. The underlying power struggle over the source of capital is further dramatized by the gradual disintegration of the Jews.