101 – Spinning a Yarn

Diego Velázquez, ‘Las Hilanderas’, 1655-60, The Prado, Madrid.

Had Picture Of The Day not ended on a Saturday, then this would have been POTD 100 – for reasons which should eventually become clear. But I couldn’t shift Scrovegni Saturday, now, could I? And had I got my skates on during the Velázquez lecture (thank you to all those who could make it), this should have been the last painting I discussed, but, as you may have noticed, I tend to go on a bit. Anyway, here we are, a few days later, with ‘No. 101’.

This painting is, I suspect, almost as complex in its ambitions and implications as the far more famous Las Meninas. Like it’s illustrious predecessor (this is probably one of the last paintings that Velázquez completed) it is very much about the nature and power of art. I’m using the Spanish title, simply because Las Hilanderas sounds so much better than ‘The Spinners’ – and also doesn’t put me in mind of a 1960s folk group. There is another title – The Fable of Arachne – but neither really explains what is going on, nor is either entirely accurate. There is, after all, only one person spinning: the old woman at the front left. 

As it happens, Velázquez has illustrated three stages in the production of thread. The woman in the centre, wearing the red skirt, is reaching down to the ground for a ‘clump’ of wool. In her left hand is a carder – not unlike the working end of a broom, but with metal spikes. Carding wool is the process of separating the fibres, and lining them up.  Once done, the carded wool would be handed to the woman on the left, who attaches it to her distaff, leaning against her left shoulder. She is pulling out separate fibres with her left hand, and feeding them onto a thread on the spinning wheel, spinning them together to create an even, strong yarn, which will then be wound onto a reel. The woman on the right is then winding the spun yarn from a reel, or skeiner, onto a ball. It’s not clear what the girl on the far right is doing – possibly taking the balls elsewhere, or bringing the wool for the start of the process.  The woman on the far left is pulling back a curtain. At first glance it is not clear why – but I shall come back to her later! There is also a cat, playing with one of the balls of wool, probably because that is one of the essential functions of a ball of wool – to be played with by a cat (I think that’s what’s called a circular argument). 

Being brilliant, Velázquez manages to show us these stages in wool production while also creating a wonderfully balanced composition – with an old woman weaving on the left facing front, and a young woman winding on the right facing back. They are framed by younger women leaning in on either side, and in their turn, they frame the woman facing towards us, about to start carding the wool, in the centre. Even for Velázquez’ late style this central woman is remarkably freely painted, her face little more than a blur or blob. It’s intriguing to realise that one Spanish word for blob, blot, stain, or mark is borrón, whereas borra can be the sort of rough wool you would use as stuffing. As borrón can be used for the very painterly brushstrokes that Velázquez uses I would love to think – as several scholars have – that this is a deliberate pun.

Meanwhile, in the background, we have moved from raw material to finished product. The wool has been woven into tapestries, which hang on the walls of a brightly lit adjoining room, up a couple of steps almost as if it is a stage. The scalloped edges at the top confirm that these images are fabric, hanging from the walls, and tell us that they are attached in the corners of the room, and half way across the walls. As many tapestries do, they have decorative borders and a pictorial centre. There are five people in this room, who in some way seem to echo the five women in the foreground.

The two who frame the group on the left and right look into and out of this subsidiary scene respectively, with the woman on the far right apparently aware of our presence: she looks out at us as we look in at her past the women in the foreground. She is rather like Alberti’s ‘chorus’ figure who we have seen several times before (e.g. POTD 37), inviting us in, or warning us off. A woman in a blue dress and red shawl has her back to us, while the woman in the centre faces front. She is standing with her back to the tapestry, gesturing to a person wearing armour – a helmet and breastplate – and holding a shield. This is Minerva – Goddess of War and Wisdom – or Athena, if you prefer the Greek names. But as this is a tale from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, I will stick with the Latin. In her role as Goddess of Wisdom, Minerva was also inspiratrix of the arts, and, as it happens, a dab hand at weaving. But then, so was Arachne – the woman gesturing towards her. In fact, Arachne was so good that she even boasted that she was probably better than Minerva – she certainly claimed all the credit for herself, and denied that she owed anything to the goddess. Minerva was clearly not going to be happy about this, and, disguising herself as an old woman, came down from Olympus and challenged Arachne to a competition. They both wove tapestries. Minerva’s showed the twelve Olympian gods enthroned in their palace, with examples of the Gods’ punishment of overreaching mortals as a warning to the presumptuous Arachne in the corners. Arachne, on the other hand, wove the loves of the Gods – notably the many examples of Jupiter’s infidelities and dalliances with mortals. This angered Minerva, but she could not fault the craftsmanship – while she appreciated Arachne’s work, she was also envious of her talent. She was, as people might say nowadays, conflicted. And this made her even more angry – she shredded the tapestry and attacked Arachne with her shuttle. The poor girl couldn’t cope with this, took a rope, tied it into a noose and tried to hang herself. But Minerva prevented her – she grabbed the rope, with Arachne hanging from it, and transformed her into a spider – an arachnid, of course – hanging from its thread, destined to spin forever.

It has been suggested that the two most important characters in the foreground – the old woman spinning and the young woman winding – are in fact Minerva and Arachne. However, I don’t think that this is necessarily the case – they could easily be contemporary workers whose activities are effectively ennobled by comparison with ancient myth. Nevertheless, the links between the foreground and background are clear, and Velázquez cleverly charts the development from fluffy lumps of wool (or was that blots, or blobs of paint?) through carding, spinning and winding, to the end product, a glorious, faultless work of art, both appreciated and abhorred by none other than Minerva. The process of moving from craft to concept, from technical skill to intellectual complexity, was one of the major developments in art during the Italian Renaissance. However, in Spain, artists had never really had the same respect. As with Las Meninas, Velázquez is making great claims for his art, the art of painting, in this particular work. From mere blobs of paint he can tell a tale – or, to put it another way, spin a yarn – which shows how dangerous art can be. It can rouse great emotions, it can teach us who we are and what we are capable of, it can stop us being complacent – which is why so many regimes have sought to bend it to their own will. I will leave you to contemplate our present government, and its current dealings with the arts.

But, of course, there is more to it than that. There’s a girl pulling back a curtain, for a start. I can’t see that the curtain has any real function in this space, so what is she doing it for? I’m sure it relates to the tale, told by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History, about the competition between Zeuxis and Parrhasius, to determine who was the best painter. The rules were simple – each paints a painting, and then they decide which one is better. Once the works were completed, they went first to Zeuxis’ studio, where his painting was displayed behind a curtain. He had painted some grapes, and they were so good that when the curtain was drawn back birds flew down to peck at them – what could Parrhasius do that would be better than that? They headed off to Parrhasius’ studio, and he invited Zeuxis to go over and have a look. So Zeuxis went over to draw back the curtain, only to find out that it was a painting of a curtain. Zeuxis may have fooled the birds, but Parrhasius had fooled a person – and an artist at that. And Velázquez has done the same to us. Why is the girl pulling back the curtain? Well, she isn’t. There is no curtain. There is no girl, for that matter, it’s just a painting. But he’s so good that we end up talking about these things as if they are real. Did he know the story? Oh yes. All artists did by the 17th Century. I can’t help thinking that by pulling back the curtain, the girl is referring to the competition between Zeuxis and Parrhasius in order to reveal the story of another competition, the one between Minerva and Arachne – so are we to assume that Velázquez was also in competition with someone? Before I answer that question, let’s stick with the fabric. Surely there is also a comparison between the plain fabric of the curtain, and the elaborately pictorial fabric of the tapestries. And, if we wanted to take it even further, we could even stop and think about the fabric on which this is all painted – the canvas – but we won’t.

In another section of the Natural History Pliny praises a work by the artist Antiphilus called,  ‘the Spinning-room, in which women are working with great speed at their duties.’ You could argue that it was this painting that Velázquez was trying to recreate with Las Hilanderas – he is putting himself into competition with Antiphilus. Pliny was making the point that it takes great skill to recreate the sensation of movement in paint – he also refers to a painting of a four-horse chariot by Aristides, in which the horses were running. Inevitably, although Pliny doesn’t mention the fact, the wheels would have been spinning – and this is undoubtedly the effect that Velázquez is trying to achieve with the spinning wheel in his own work, the blurred, concentric lines creating the sensation of movement. By including the references to Pliny, and illustrating one of Ovid’s tales, Velázquez places his own work, in terms of craft and of concept, in relationship to the art of the ancients – but would he, like Arachne, be daring enough to challenge the gods? I’m just going to quote eight lines of the wonderful 18th Century translation of the Metamorphoses which I referred to when talking about Boucher’s Pygmalion (POTD 79) – and here is a link there to a contemporary translation as well. We are a little way into Book VI, where Ovid describes Arachne’s tapestry:

Arachne drew the fam'd intrigues of Jove, 
Chang'd to a bull to gratify his love; 
How thro' the briny tide all foaming hoar, 
Lovely Europa on his back he bore. 
The sea seem'd waving, and the trembling maid 
Shrunk up her tender feet, as if afraid; 
And, looking back on the forsaken strand, 
To her companions wafts her distant hand. 

The first of Jupiter’s exploits mentioned by Ovid is the Rape of Europa, and if we look at the tapestry as painted by Velázquez, the version that Arachne has woven is the one painted by Titian for Philip II. The Titian, now owned by the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston, and currently in the exhibition just about to re-open at the National Gallery, was copied by Rubens: Rubens’s version is displayed next to Las Hilanderas in the Prado, just to make the point. Rubens’s own painting of The Fable of Arachne – in which he too quoted Titian’s Rape of Europa – can be seen in the shadows on the back wall in Las Meninas – with the added justification that a copy of it, by Velázquez’ son-in-law Mazo, was actually in the room in which Las Meninas is set.

Not only can Velázquez chart the development from raw material to finished product, from unformed wool to refined tapestry – using blobs of paint to spin his yarn – but he can also acknowledge and recreate the works of the classical masters, while putting himself in the same tradition as Titian and Rubens – his own ‘gods’ of painting. Like Arachne, he challenges the gods, but unlike Arachne, he wins. From a purely personal point of view, I now relish the fact that the work that he quoted is a painting by Titian which I saw just a few days before lockdown, one of the last paintings that I saw – and it will be one of the first that I see when the National Gallery re-opens this week. It was, as you may recall, Picture Of The Day 1.

Titian, The Rape of Europa, 1562, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.

Day 100 – A New Life

Giotto, The Raising of Lazarus, c. 1305 Scrovegni Chapel, Padua.

We looked at The Raising of Lazarus a few days ago, in the dark and mysterious painting by Henry Ossawa Tanner in the Musée d’Orsay (Picture Of The Day 95). Admittedly his work is titled ‘Resurrection’ rather than ‘Raising’, but that might be a result of translation from the French – the story is the same, whatever, and the names of specific events, like the titles of certain paintings, tend to get fixed within the language. 

It’s interesting to note that Giotto does not spend too much time on Christ’s adult life – his teaching, and many miracles, are passed by, abbreviated along one wall into the most significant events. So far on this wall we have Christ Among the Doctors, The Baptism and The Wedding at Cana (POTD 87 & 93) – just a hint at his early life (the end of childhood?), the start of his mission and his first miracle. We then jump to the most significant miracle, perhaps: the promise of new life.

With the implacable movement of the Scrovegni narratives, Jesus arrives from the left of the pictorial field followed by some of the apostles – I can see four haloes, but there could well be others behind them, out of the frame. Two have already sprung into action – the one with yellow and blue is St Peter, but the other I would hesitate to identify. Jesus raises his hand in blessing, clear against the clear blue sky, in the middle of the space between himself and the crowd of onlookers. John 11:38 describes the nature of the grave: ‘It was a cave, and a stone lay upon it’. Giotto creates a hill for this cave, and as always, the landscape comments on the action. The hill leads up to the right, driving forward the narrative and lifting our eyes, a metaphor for the raising of Lazarus. Christ instructs them, ‘Take ye away the stone’ – which they have, with two rather small workmen holding the stone at an angle equivalent to the slop of the hill in the bottom right corner. However, just after this instruction (and before it is carried out), ‘Martha, the sister of him that was dead, saith unto him, Lord, by this time he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days.’

As I said the other day, Giotto makes this ‘stink’ visible – the woman on the far right covers her face with her blue cloak, and the apostle to the right of Lazarus has wrapped his cloak around his face. According to John 11:33-34, Jesus ‘cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus saith unto them, Loose him, and let him go’. And this is how we see Lazarus – although the napkin has already been loosed allowing us to see Lazarus’ deathly pallor. The crowd to the left throw their hands up in amazement.

Before I talk about the two women prostrate at Jesus’s feet I’d just like to point out a technical detail. As we have seen before, in The Nativity for example (POTD 87), Jesus’s robe was painted red in true fresco, with the ultramarine blue painted a secco – meaning that it much of it has worn way. On the right of this detail you can see Peter’s robe, which was not painted at all when wet, and only has a blue a secco layer. Originally, when all the paint was still there, Jesus’s robe would have looked far richer in colour, with the red showing through to make the blue look deeper, even purple, while Peter’s would have been a less intense blue. Not only would this have helped to emphasize their relative status, but it would also have drawn our attention to Jesus – while still making Peter look important.

And after some painting technique, I’d like to get technical with the bible. Who are the two women prostrate at Jesus’s feet? At first glance, it would seem to be straightforward: Mary and Martha, sisters of Lazarus. According to John 11:5, ‘Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus’ – they were friends. They lived in Bethany, and, according to verse 2, which is entirely in brackets in the King James Version, ‘It was that Mary which anointed the Lord with ointment, and wiped his feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was sick’. This particular verse ties in with others, in Luke’s Gospel, 7:37-38:

And, behold, a woman in the city, which was a sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster box of ointment, And stood at his feet behind him weeping, and began to wash his feet with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment.

The chapter ends at verse 50, with Jesus’s statement of forgiveness ‘And he said to the woman, Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace’. Almost immediately after this, in the second verse of the next chapter, Mary Magdalene is mentioned for the first time, ‘Mary called Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils’ – we are not told any more about this, but Mary appears regularly thereafter as one of Jesus’s followers, being present at the Crucifixion, and being the first witness to his Resurrection. After the entombment of Christ, Luke 23:55-56 and 24:1 says 

And the women also, which came with him from Galilee, followed after, and beheld the sepulchre, and how his body was laid. And they returned, and prepared spices and ointments; and rested the sabbath day according to the commandment. Now upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came unto the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared…

The ointment with which the ‘woman… which was a sinner’ washes Christ’s feet, this ointment in Luke 23, and the ointment in John 11:2 were all linked together. So were the statements that Luke’s sinner was ‘stood… behind him weeping’, that Mary (sister of Martha) was ‘weeping‘ in John 11:33, and the later statement in John 20:11 saying ‘Mary stood without at the sepulchre weeping’, to suggest that Luke’s sinner, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the sister of Martha, were all one and the same woman, often to be seen weeping with a jar of ointment. This isn’t a new idea by any means – it was Pope Gregory the Great who connected the three women in a sermon back in 591. And that is how the Catholic church continued to see Mary Magdalene right up until 1969 when Pope Paul VI recognised them as three separate people. The Orthodox Church had always seen them as separate, and many Protestants rejected the connection as well: Calvin certainly did, although Luther continued to believe in the composite identity. Nevertheless, as almost every image of ‘Mary Magdalene’ that you will see from Western Europe, from medieval to baroque and beyond is the product of the Catholic Church, it is the penitent prostitute that is depicted.

It helps us to separate the two women here, even though we cannot see either of them clearly. The woman in the foreground, with her head covered, is Martha, and behind her, hair still visible and wearing red, is her sister Mary, assumed to be Mary Magdalene, the ‘scarlet woman’ (sorry, younger generation, I can’t explain).

That got a bit technical I know, and I’m going to do the same again, although not quite in so much detail. I mentioned on Wednesday (POTD 97) that Hercules was a ‘type’ of Christ, and realised that, although I’ve hinted at this form of interpretation, I had never thoroughly explained it. It relates to the setting of the Wedding at Cana which we saw last week (POTD 93).

The picture is framed by two decorative strips, which look like inlaid marble, with a scene in the centre of each. I suggested that you might recognise one of them.

Here they are on a larger scale. On the left is Moses bringing forth Water from the Rock and on the right, The Creation of Adam – it’s not entirely unlike Michelangelo’s more famous version painted some two centuries later.

And this is how it relates to The Raising of Lazarus. The message is quite straightforward – God gave Adam life, and Jesus gives Lazarus new life. This is why the story of Lazarus is so important – it isn’t just Lazarus who has new life: the Christian message is that everyone has new life in Jesus. We are ‘born again’, to use the evangelical catchphrase. In the earlier example, Moses provided water, while Jesus turns it into wine – and later, wine becomes his blood. In both cases we are seeing typological interpretations of the Jewish scriptures. For Christian theologians it was vital that Jesus was the prophesied Messiah, so they combed through every verse of the Old Testament to find any potential relevance to Christianity – and even things which were not prophecies were seen as predicting something in the New Testament. So Moses as a whole was the type of Jesus. The word comes from printing – think of movable type. A metal letter ‘t’, say, is covered with ink and printed – and a ‘t’ appears on the page. It is something which creates the image of itself. So Moses, leader of his people, who gave them the Ten Commandments from Mount Sinai, is a precursor of Jesus, the leader of his people, who gave the Sermon on the Mount. In both, the ‘Mount’ is important. But it wasn’t just the Old Testament to which this form of interpretation could be applied. It was assumed that the classical civilisations had partially misheard God’s message and got it wrong. Nevertheless, they thought, Aristotle’s Prime Mover was bound to be the Christian God (POTD 98), and for that matter, Jupiter, King of all the Gods, must have been a misunderstanding for God the Father, while Juno, Queen of the Heavens, could easily be a foretelling of Mary, Queen of Heaven – or so they reasoned. The fact that Giotto uses small details to include this form of interpretation, giving greater depth to the meaning of the chapel as a whole, is a sign of his genius. I’m sure it’s not entirely his idea – Enrico Scrovegni would have had a suitable theologian on hand to tell Giotto what to paint – but Giotto was the one who decided what it would look like, and precisely how it would all fit in. These are the details which are all too easy to miss – but which, like salt, bring out the full flavour. And there are many more…

But for today, enough, already. And enough for a while, I’m afraid. This marks the end of Picture Of The Day, but clearly not of pictures… I will continue to blog from time to time – after all, we’re not even two thirds of the way around the stories of the Scrovegni Chapel – so Scrovegni Saturday will keep going. This website will function as a mailing list, as well, and I’m going to try to be more conscientious about updating the ‘diary’ page – I’ll let you know when I do! In the meantime, thank you all for your interest, for your support, and for all of your kind comments. And, like Lazarus, I’m wishing a great new life for all of us after lockdown. He and his sisters all ended up in the South of France, as it happens, but that’s another story. There are always many more.

Day 99 – Paradise

Giovanni di Paolo, Paradise, 1445, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Since yesterday, nothing drastic has happened – and so I give you a vision of Paradise, the rabbits, more numerous since the days of Adam and Eve, still nibbling peaceably at the grass. I don’t know about you, but back in the middle of March I can remember the last couple of friends I bumped into, or arranged to meet, in London, and not knowing how to greet them. There were a couple of awkward, slightly distanced hugs, and then a couple of bows… and then I was whisked away to Durham, and I’ve been here more or less ever since. Soon the demands of work will drag me back down to London, and soon we will be able to meet up with friends again. I know we can meet some, at a distance, already. But when will we start making physical contact? When will we shake hands, or hug, or kiss, and will it be one cheek or two? And will it look anything like Giovanni di Paolo’s Paradise?

Here we are at the end of time, and the resurrection of the body has brought these people together for the first time in centuries, if not millennia – for who knows when it will be? The people are spread across the surface like a medieval tapestry, with a screen of golden trees against a clear blue sky defining the limit of the garden, which is verdant, and growing with over-sized flowers. People meet in couples, or, in one case, a threesome, dressed to the nines, or with the humility of monastic orders. A large number of the men wear black and white, the habit of the Order of Preachers, better known as the Dominicans – which is the first clue about this painting: it was probably made for a Dominican church.

Some of the characters can even be identified. The two Dominicans greeting each other in the middle here – they’ve gone for the slightly distanced embrace – are none other than St Dominic himself, founder of the order, and St Peter Martyr. It’s a tiny detail, but there is a splash of red – blood – on the head of the man on the right. St Peter, a friend and follower of St Dominic, was killed when heretics attacked him in the woods outside Milan, hacking into his head with a knife. To the right we have St Anthony Abbot and two Dominican nuns. Now, you must forgive me if I can’t help thinking that Giovanni di Paolo, the strange and original genius of the Sienese Renaissance, wasn’t always being entirely straight laced. After all, what exactly are these three doing? It looks to me as if St Anthony is actually pushing the middle nun away – and that her companion is trying to hold her back. Seeing as one of the stories in which artists could exercise most fantasy was The Temptation of St Anthony, would I be wrong in suggesting that here temptation has been offered yet again, and, as ever, the good Saint has sailed through the test with flying colours (to mix my transport metaphors). To the left of the detail, we have the fashionable youth of the afterlife – men in their must-have red tights (like Tobias, in Picture Of The Day 4), including one with a chaperon (the fashionable headgear often seen in paintings by van Eyck), and two women in the same dress (houppelandes) – though fortunately, not the same colour. Imagine the embarrassment – all eternity in the same outfit! What becomes apparent quite quickly, though, is that Paradise is not for the poor.

There are more identifiable figures in the arc of characters spanning the middle of the painting. The Dominican on the left, who has a little bird whispering in his ear, was, in his life, inspired by the Holy Spirit. This is something that would usually identify St Gregory the Great, but he was a Pope – so this can’t be Gregory. As a Dominican it must be the Blessed Ambrogio Sansedoni, revered in Siena, even though he never made it into the canon of the Saints. There is clearly a good team dealing with hospitality in Paradise, as no one is left to themselves. Anyone who might have been more – heremitic, shall we say? – during their life has been greeted by an angel. Sansedoni certainly is, and so is the Pope, further to the right (sadly we don’t know which one this is). The two angels frame St Augustine, who is meeting his mother, St Monica, for the first time since she passed away in Ostia, as they were heading off to Africa. I hesitate to discuss the relationship between the cardinal, in his scarlet robes, and the extremely fashionable blonde boy in his spotless white hose, in case I say something that is entirely irrelevant to the painting.

The deer wandering into the garden at the top left tells us that the man in white is St Giles – it ran to him while being hunted, and the poor Saint was rewarded with an arrow in the leg. But it was a sign that St Giles was, during his lifetime, already closer to Paradise than the rest of us, as the animals were not afraid of him. It is for the same reason that the rabbits sit so peacefully, and do not scamper away: in Paradise everything is at peace. It is only the sinful they need fear. The other anonymous couples greet with differing degrees of intimacy, from holding wrists at arm’s length to full on hugging. There are even two – a monk and a merchant I’d say, towards the top right – whose greeting would now be interpreted as ‘namaste’ – with the hands joined in prayer, and a slight nod. I tried it a couple of times, but I’m not sure it was me. And then, in the top right corner, a young man and an angel, hand in hand, are going for a walk beyond the frame. But don’t be fooled – they are not leaving the picture, it’s just that the picture has left them. A golden glow emanates from behind the angel’s head and in front of the hem of his skirt. It emerges from behind the black cloak and white robe of another Dominican, who has been cut off, ultimately, if not in his prime. Although this now looks like the edge of the painting, it wasn’t: the panel was cut down at some point, and the golden frame painted all round the surviving section to disguise the fact. 

Originally these two panels – yesterday’s and today’s – belonged together, and would have been adjacent like this. I don’t have access to the full conservation history, so I don’t know if they were originally on the same plank of wood, or on separate sections. Nevertheless, the conception of ‘Paradise’ is the same in each, a flowery meadow screened off from the blue sky by a row of golden trees. In the second panel Paradise is more extensive, because there is nothing else to show – there is no need to include the four rivers, or, for that matter, the rest of the cosmos. It does make the trees look further away. They are smaller, after all, although on the whole Giovanni isn’t too worried about perspective: the people at the top are more or less the same size as the people at the bottom, one of the features that gives the ‘tapestry-like’ appearance. The trees are also painted in the same way, with gold leaf applied over the paint, much of which has worn off in the Paradise panel. But even together, this was not the full extent of the painting.

This is a reconstruction of the known remaining elements of the Guelfi Altarpiece, painted for the Church of San Domenico in Siena. The main panels have found their way to the Uffizi in Florence, and are signed and dated 1445. In the centre, as so often in Italy, are the Madonna and Child. They are flanked by Sts Peter and Paul, with Sts Dominic and Thomas Aquinas (another Dominican) on the outside. As it happens, the name is inaccurate – the polyptych was originally painted for a chapel dedicated to St Dominic, hence his inclusion in the main part of the altarpiece. Only later was it moved to the Guelfi Chapel, which was dedicated to St Anthony. If you want to know more about its origins, the Met catalogue entry is available online. The altarpiece was still intact, and already in the Guelfi Chapel, in 1649, when it was described in detail. The structure is a common one, with the upper elements of the altarpiece supported by a wooden box, which helps to stabilise the heavy wooden panels on which the Saints are painted. But, as an extra surface, this box could also decorated with a strip of paintings, known as the predella. The 1649 account described the predella as illustrating the Last Judgement, the Flood, and the Creation of the World. You might think that the last of these is the only bit that survives, but Paradise was originally part of the Last Judgement – however, for whatever reason (wet rot, dry rot, woodworm, theft or fire – there are always candles on an altar), most of it has been lost. However, we are lucky that Giovanni di Paolo regularly repeated compositions with which he was happy. Here is another predella panel, now in the Pinacoteca in Siena, which he painted for an unidentified polyptych.

The depiction of Paradise on the left is similar, if broader, to today’s picture – and you can see that the top right of it does lead into the golden light of heaven, as the glow behind the hand-holding angel suggests it would. We also see the resurrection of the body in the centre, with souls being ushered into Paradise on the left (at Jesus’s right hand, POTD 38), and thrust into hell on the right. Given that our painting should have been accompanied by The Flood, we must assume that this missing scene would have been on the far right, balancing The Expulsion from Paradise. Thematically they are linked: Adam and Eve are created, but fall, and are expelled. As a result mankind is sinful – so bad in fact that God decides to scrap the human race and start again, with Noah and Mrs Noah (POTD 37) as the new Adam and Eve. It’s such a pity that this does not survive – but at least we have these two gems. And, I suspect, because they have been separated from their original setting, they actually get far more attention than they would have done as part of a larger ensemble – they work almost better on their own. I’m sure that’s not true of all of us though – and I look forward to seeing as many of you as possible in person soon!

Day 98 – Out of Eden

Giovanni di Paolo, The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise, 1445, Metropolitain Museum of Art, New York.

I alluded yesterday (Picture Of The Day 97) to the medieval conception of the Universe, in relation to the tapestries across the top of the walls in the tower of The Lady of Shalott – so what better than to clarify that idea. And the best way to do that would seem to be by considering the way we have been thrown out of our usually comfortable worlds, and are now looking forward to an expected return, and the chance, finally, to meet and greet old friends. However, as I don’t know what lifestyle all of you used to live, I’m just going to assume that, compared to the worse aspects of lockdown, it was paradise. And that is where I shall assume we will return – although that return will come tomorrow.

Over two days I will look at two small paintings which were part of a larger whole. Today, we have a panel which shows The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise. On the left we have the entire cosmos, constructed like a multi-coloured onion in concentric layers, with God on the outside. His hand is pointing into the sky. It’s not uncommon to see this from our point of view, with the ‘Hand of God’ poking out of the blue – a good example would be Giotto’s Sacrifice of Joachim (POTD 66). In this case he is presumably creating something or other – possibly the plants, as I can definitely see some trees, but no birds or animals, which would make this Day 3 of creation. On the right of the painting we cut to ‘some time later’ – Adam and Eve have been created and tempted and are now being expelled from the Garden of Eden, pushed out by an angel past a row of trees bearing golden apples. Beneath them are four dark streaks – the four rivers of Eden, as mentioned in Genesis 2:10-14, where they are named as Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel and Euphrates. Although the third of these is usually interpreted as the Tigris, neither of the first two has been identified, although Gihon is recognised by some as the Abay River, or Blue Nile.

This is the detail which most fascinates me – the structure of the universe. I am comparing it with a diagram from Andrew Borde’s The First Book of the Introduction of Knowledge, published in 1542, as it is relatively clear. It expounds medieval cosmology, but it is based on the Ptolomaic world view, dating to c. 150 CE, which in itself goes back to Aristotle (384-322 BCE). Giovanni di Paolo had definitely seen a very similar diagram! At the centre we have the Earth, which contains two of the ‘four elements’, earth and water. The Earth is surrounded by the two remaining elements, ‘aer’ and ‘fyre’, as Borde spells them, equivalent to the pale blue and bright vermillion rings in Giovanni’s painting. Next comes ‘the Mone’ – or Moon – the planets Mercury and Venus, and the Sun. Giovanni paints their spheres pale blue, darker blue, a blue half way between the two, and a very pale yellow, with a rather worn representation of the Sun at the top of the relevant circle. The grey ring in the painting is occupied by Mars, followed by Jupiter and Saturn with two more blue circles. Outside these, occupying a far thicker and darker band, we see the signs of the zodiac – this is the sphere of the fixed stars, which I mentioned yesterday.  Finally there is a thin, dark blue ring. This is the ninth sphere, named by Borde as ‘the Crystalline Heaven’. He then adds two more which are not in the painting – ‘the First Moveable’ and ‘The Empyreal, Heaven, The Abitation of the Blessed’. There was some debate about the outer limits of the known cosmos (as there is today), and not everyone split the ‘ninth’ sphere into three as Borde does, referring to the single ninth sphere as the Primum Mobile or Prime Mover – or, as Borde has it, ‘the First Moveable’. Aristotle said that it was this which gave the movement to the inner spheres (he had as many as 55), which resonate in harmony – the Music of the Spheres. It wasn’t hard for Christian theologians to make the leap and suggest that Aristotle’s Prime Mover was in fact God, the source of all life, and to point out that we don’t hear the Music of the Spheres because the sin which Adam and Eve introduced into the world has created discord, and put everything off kilter. 

So, the Earth is made up of the four elements, and outside these were the seven ‘wanderers’ (‘planet’ comes from the Greek word meaning ‘wanderer’, and would have included the five ‘planets’ known to the ancients together with the Sun and the Moon). These seven were set into the first seven crystalline spheres, and the fixed stars (including the signs of the zodiac) were in the eighth. I suspect that originally the painting would have had an image of each of the planets on the appropriate sphere, but that the gold leaf has worn off – only the Sun and zodiac have lasted, presumably because they were bigger. The ninth sphere – the Prime Mover – effectively marks the edge of the cosmos, with Heaven on the outside, and that is where God can be found in this painting. Given that there were nine spheres, and, it was believed, nine choirs of angels, it made sense that each sphere would be moved by a different choir of angels – which is why, in the tapestry at the top of the wall in The Lady of Shalott yesterday, each planet is held by a figure with a halo. 

God himself is everything we would expect him to be – long grey hair, long grey beard, flying effortlessly through the sky. He wears a blue robe – which makes more sense than ever up above the sky. He also has a pale cloak, with touches of pink and blue – I suspect it used to be a purplish colour, but has faded. He is surrounded by blue heads with long blue wings, streamlined away from the direction of travel – these are the highest choir of angles, the Seraphim. We have met them before, I know, but I can’t for the life of me remember when! The ‘Empyrium’ which God inhabits is painted a glowing yellow, enhanced by the gold leaf of the halo, and by the golden beams of light radiating in all directions – he is like another Sun, being the source of all energy. The apples and leaves of the trees in Paradise are similarly gilded. 

The yellow is focussed around God’s head, and gradually fades into blue, becoming the blue of the sky on the other side of the painting. Thus, although God is shown in the act of creation, outside the cosmos, he is also looking across the sky to the sinful Adam and Eve, pointing to the world and telling them where to go – out of Eden. This explains his slightly grumpy look, I think, which is not consistent with his general demeanour during creation, when he regularly saw ‘that it was good’.

The angel also has gilded wings and a halo – which would not, in itself, be surprising, were it not for that fact that that is all he has. It could be the only naked angel I know – before Michelangelo’s far more manly ignudi, at least. The standard interpretation is that he is showing his compassion for Adam and Eve, but I don’t really buy that. I think this shows that he was in a state of grace, so had no shame, so wouldn’t have worried about clothes anyway. But then Adam and Eve don’t seem that bothered either, if we’re honest. They are looking back the way they’ve come, but without a huge amount of longing or regret. If anything, they seem a bit clueless, a bit like those people who you meet on your daily walk (I’m assuming you’ve been going on daily walks) who are apparently completely unaware that there’s a pandemic going on, strolling along without a care in the world, happily chatting away to each other, getting in your way, and failing on every level to comprehend the need for social distancing. They have been thrown out of Eden without their fig-leaf clothes (Adam and Eve, that is, not the people on your walk) although fortuitous leaves protect their very modest modesty. The same is true for the angel, who is blessed with a strawberry flower. This truly is Paradise – a word derived from Old Iranian, meaning ‘garden’ – and all of the flowers could be seen as symbolic in different ways. The strawberry, for example, doesn’t have a hard stone or thorns – and as such it is seen as a pre-lapsarian fruit, i.e. dating from before the fall. It was only at this point, according to the Bible, that thorns developed, to get in our way and make life tougher. Consequently the strawberry is, in itself, a symbol of Paradise. The lily to the right of the angel represents Mary’s virtue, and the rose (between Adam and Eve) represents her love. Mary herself was referred to as ‘a rose without thorns’ as she was free from Original Sin.  The carnations left and right are also symbols of love, but also give a nod to the idea of incarnation – which, with Mary, and thanks to Adam and Eve, will now be needed. The rabbits continue to nibble at the grass, unconcerned with all that is going on around them, and they will stay there, in Paradise, until we return… which, unless something drastic happens, will be tomorrow.

Day 97 – The Mirror Crack’d

William Holman Hunt, The Lady of Shalott, 1886-1905, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford CT.

Finally, after 97 days, I’ve found the perfect expression of the lockdown. I’m beginning to understand how this Lady feels. I suspect we’ve all been going through this for a while now – “I am half sick of shadows,” said the Lady of Shalott. I mean, imagine it, stuck at home on your own for you don’t know how long, faced with an undefined threat, and the only experience you have of the outside world is the luminous image on a single surface. It could be the television, I suppose, or your computer screen. Or it could just be a mirror. At least we know what the threat is, and why we might be socially distanced, or self isolating. The Lady of Shalott did not. I am certainly half sick of shadows, but yesterday the news came that, somehow, museums and art galleries will be able to re-open in a week and a half, and we will be able to see the real things, again, rather than looking at pictures of the pictures…

William Holman Hunt, one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, kept going in a similar vein for the rest of his life, his paintings paying close attention to naturalistic detail, and drawing their inspiration from good literature. Among the Pre-Raphaelite ‘heroes’ were the Bible, Dante, William Shakespeare, and Alfred Lord Tennyson, and their interest in the romance of the medieval past springs to a considerable degree from his. The Lady of Shalott is a case in point. Like several of Hunt’s later works it took years to complete, had a complex evolution, and exists in more than one version. I am showing you the example in the Wadsworth Atheneum in Connecticut, as I prefer its symbolism to that of the painting in the Manchester City Art Gallery – I also prefer the richer, deeper, brooding colours.

For his poem Tennyson adapted the Arthurian legend of Elaine de Astolat, written in Italian in the 13th Century as La Damigella di Scalot. Shalott, as it happens, is on the way to Camelot, which proves invaluable for the rhyme scheme, and there, in a tower on an island, a mysterious lady dwells, the victim of an undefined curse.

There she weaves by night and day 
A magic web with colours gay. 
She has heard a whisper say, 
A curse is on her if she stay 
          To look down to Camelot. 
She knows not what the curse may be, 
And so she weaveth steadily, 
And little other care hath she, 
          The Lady of Shalott. 

Basically, she is not allowed to look out of her window towards Camelot, and so she spends all her time weaving, her only knowledge of the outside world coming from a mirror, reflecting the world outside. And she weaves what she sees:

But in her web she still delights 
To weave the mirror's magic sights,  
For often thro' the silent nights  
A funeral, with plumes and lights
          And music, went to Camelot:  
Or when the moon was overhead,  
Came two young lovers lately wed:  
"I am half sick of shadows," said 
          The Lady of Shalott.

By this stage Tennyson has already told us that, ‘She hath no loyal knight and true’, so the sight of newly married lovers must have been particularly galling – and she no longer wanted to live her life vicariously, seeing a reflection of what was going on in the world outside. I suppose we at least have rested safe in the knowledge that there was precious little going on out there anyway. But even for the Lady things were going well, or well enough, until Sir Lancelot passed by on his way to Camelot, the perfect example of knighthood and of manhood – and she could no longer live by shadows, she had to see him, the real thing, and not some pale reflection:

She left the web, she left the loom, 
She made three paces thro' the room, 
She saw the water-lily bloom, 
She saw the helmet and the plume, 
          She look'd down to Camelot. 
Out flew the web and floated wide; 
The mirror crack'd from side to side; 
"The curse is come upon me," cried 
          The Lady of Shalott. 

…and this is the moment that William Holman Hunt depicts, the moment at which the unknown curse is unleashed. If you don’t know what happens next, I shan’t tell you, although one day I might show you a painting. However, you can read it for yourself. Tennyson wrote two versions – I’ve been quoting from the second version, published in 1842, but I’ll also give you a link to the first version of 1832, both curtesy of the Poetry Foundation. Feel free to compare and contrast.

We see the chaos that ensues when the curse is enacted. The Lady is tied up, wrapped around by the thread which now seems to have a life of its own. She appears almost trapped in her loom, a curious structure, with a circular frame resting on a series of elaborate legs, more like an unconventional museum railing to keep you away from a sculpture. The floor is paved in a geometric pattern fitting these legs – the whole room is defined by the curse, and the Lady has lived her life through its mysterious logic. I do not know how many legs there are, but I’m sure there must be twelve, the weaving governing every hour of her days and nights like a clock face. She is barefoot, but there are overshoes – or pattens – on the floor. Together with the circular mirror in the background, reflecting an unseen presence behind us, these are an unmistakable reference to Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, a major influence on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood from its foundation four decades before this painting was started. There are also irises, used in Christian art as a symbol of Mary’s suffering, their meaning coming from the old name ‘Sword Lily’, and the prophesy, to Mary, that ‘a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also’ (Luke 2:35). Two doves are flying away – they were the mythical birds of Venus, Goddess of Love, and I suspect that this is why Hunt included them. For Noah the Dove represented hope for the new world after the flood, and in the New Testament, the dove represents the Holy Spirit (POTD 89), but I am fairly sure that the dove did not become a symbol of peace until the 20th Century (if you can trust Wikipedia, which I often do, it dates to 1949, and a drawing by Picasso – which I can believe). If they are Venus’s doves, I think that, rather than love being freed, it is put to flight – but read the poem yourself and see! There is also a curious silver lamp. At its base you might be able to make out a crouching monkey – and we have already seen the monkey as a symbol of human baseness and ignorance in POTD 91. At the top of the detail, the lamp has a series of owls – sorry, they are hard to see, but I haven’t been able to find a high-resolution image. The owls represent the wisdom of enlightenment, embodied by the lamp, away from the darkness and ignorance symbolised but the monkeys at the base. Sunlight falls across the floor of the room, and over the weaving, which seems to unravel in front of our eyes. The shafts of light which fall onto the image – the art that the Lady has made from her isolated experience – are significant. To the left of her legs, we see a maiden in profile, and the back of a knight, moving away – surely our heroine and Sir Lancelot. And on the right, a figure bowing next to a golden cup – presumably the Holy Grail, the goal of the Arthurian quest.

At the top of the painting we see that the room has been decorated with the Lady’s work. The semi-circular section beneath the vaulting is decorated as a stylised sky, with a blue background and the heavenly bodies – the sun, moon and planets, as well as a globe with sparkling dots representing the crystalline sphere of the fixed stars. All of this reflects the medieval understanding of the structure of the universe, in which each of the heavenly bodies was governed by one of the nine choirs of angels, including one which moves the fixed stars on their daily rotations (fixed, as opposed to the wanderers, or ‘planets’ that is). This stylised reality is contrasted with nature itself – a blue sky with clouds seen through an opening at the top of the wall, through which it is just possible to see two doves flying – possibly the same doves at a later stage of their flight, or maybe two others. But all this just avoids the obvious – the most glorious Pre-Raphaelite hair in the most extravagant disarray. It flies out around her as if she is experiencing some form of whiplash, the power and energy of the curse electrifying every extremity of her body. It is wild, and unnatural, and fantastic – in both the contemporary and original sense of the word – and becomes a fabric in its own right.

The tension in her body as she tries to free herself from the thread is remarkable, like some sort of tarantella – a dance supposed to cure you of the bite of a tarantula. Remembering how spiders weave, and trap their prey, what could be more relevant? And remembering how Arachne wove, before Minerva turned her into a spider, another layer of significance is added. Both wrists bend back, the fingers curl, the arms held in front and behind, I cannot think she is doing anything else but dancing to free herself. Notice how the flashes of sunlight just catch the fingers looping the thread. Her body and face are in shadow – far more brilliant is the reflection in the mirror behind her. The Lady’s tower appears to be modelled on a Venetian 15th Century Palazzo, not unlike the Doge’s Palace, or the Ca’ d’Oro – or at least, the window is. In the mirror we see the window with its wide open spaces, and just inside the room we can see, reflected, the lamp, the loom and the weaving, with the light falling across it. And outside, in brilliant sunlight, Sir Lancelot, a Knight in Shining Armour, his sword raised, heading off into the distance, through the landscape described in the first stanza of Tennyson’s poem: 

On either side the river lie 
Long fields of barley and of rye, 
That clothe the wold and meet the sky; 
And thro' the field the road runs by 
          To many-tower'd Camelot; 

The mirror is framed in a similar way to the two images on either side – more of the Lady’s work – drawing the connection we have made before today about the relationship between mirrors and art: both are forms of imagery, the implication being that a great artist will make work that mirrors the world around us. And I suspect that the Lady of Shalott was a great artist, depicting her world with the honesty of long-suffering experience. However, here Hunt has chosen to represent things she would not have seen in the mirror – they are her own personal reflections. On the left, the image is easy to understand – the Madonna and Child, white against a blue background, with the baby Jesus lying on the grass – it could almost be a glazed terracotta relief by Luca della Robbia, popular, and copied, in Victorian England. On the other side the image is not so obvious – a naked man with a halo reaching up to take an apple. This is not Adam though, there are three women asleep at the foot of the tree. To the left of this youthful, muscular man we see a lion’s head: it is Hercules, with the skin of the Nemean Lion, taking the golden apples from the garden of the Hesperides (the sleeping women). But why the halo? Well, Hercules was seen as a type of Jesus (bother – I haven’t talked about typology yet) – let’s just say that he was seen as prefiguring Jesus, in that he was a hero who carried out a number of labours that involved good triumphing over evil. It’s not quite that simple, but let’s not worry about that right now. And of course, being a work of art, it will never be that simple. Even if he is a symbol for Jesus, there are also, inevitably, parallels with the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and the forbidden fruit, and the idea of temptation to which the Lady has just succumbed – particularly as this Hercules is such a fit, and handsome, and, let’s face it, naked young man, who just happens to be looking towards the Lady of Shalott as he takes the apple.

In between the images of the infant Jesus and the triumphing hero, we see the far more brilliantly illuminated mirror, reflecting the reality of the world, and the departure of Sir Lancelot. And we see the threads, creating their tracery through the room like a spider’s web. And we see other lines, as if etched across the reflecting surface, signalling the triggering of the curse: 

Out flew the web and floated wide; 
The mirror crack'd from side to side; 
"The curse is come upon me," cried 
          The Lady of Shalott. 

Soon, we will be freer to go out into the world to see real things. Please be careful. 

Oh, and, if you’re free this evening at 6.00 and are not half sick of shadows, there is still time to sign up for my talk Reflecting on the Power of Art about Diego Velázquez.

Day 96 – Clara Peeters

Clara Peeters, Stil Life with Cheeses, Almonds and Pretzels, c. 1615, Mauritshuis, The Hague.

There’s just time for a couple more reflections on art/in art before tomorrow evening. So far we’ve thought about mirrors as a symbol of both Vanity and Prudence (Picture Of The Day 92), and for their ability to create an image, which, like a painting, can both fascinate and enchant (POTD 94). Even though Narcissus’s name has become synonymous with vanity, in Ovid’s tale he was at first unaware that he was looking at himself – he just saw another person, conjured up as real and worthy of his love – which in its own way witnesses to the power of art . In today’s picture we can see several more ‘values’ attached to mirrors, or at least to reflections: they are used to create a greater degree of naturalism, and also function as a type of ‘certification’ – a guarantee that something has been witnessed – and even, as a form of self-validation.

Clara Peeters, Stilleven met kazen, brood en drinkgerei, c.1615 Paneel, 34,5 x 49 cm

This Still Life painting was created by an expert, there can be no doubt about that. Every surface is perfect, and seems to represent every object more accurately than any photograph could. It is also subtly, but brilliantly composed. I would say it’s highly realistic, but how often would you put your butter on your cheese? Or leave a table quite so crowded, with your valuable Chinese porcelain sticking over the edge? Everything has been manipulated, everything has been very deliberately arranged, to show off its qualities, and to show the artist’s skill. There are three different cheeses on a pewter dish, and on top of these is the butter. Some pretzels line up with the front edge of the table, and to their right a knife is sticking out, next to a porcelain dish with almonds, dried figs and dates – with other almonds and dates scattered on the table. A Venetian glass stands in front of a bread roll, part of which is cast in shadow, and next to this there is an earthenware jug with a pewter lid. The background is dark and featureless, so that the foreground objects seem to glow, almost mysterious and magical.

On the far left we can see that the pewter dish is shiny enough to reflect the largest cheese, with another reflection on the rim at the right. A darker cheese sits in front, and casts a shadow – the light is coming from the left – onto the larger one. Both are – or were – round, and the larger one has a smaller, rectangular cheese sitting on top. All three have rinds, and all three have been hacked into with a sizeable knife, the different surfaces giving a sense of their different textures. Yet another texture is visible in the scrapings of butter which sit on an earthenware dish atop the smallest cheese – they have been cut from the pat with a serrated implement, and curl over each other in a mound of golden goodness. In a wealth of detail, the most brilliant piece of observation must be the plug that has been taken out of the largest cheese with a circular gouge, the result of the cheese inspector taking a sample to check that the produce comes up to the standards required by the Cheesemakers’ Guild. A cylindrical hole emerges from the cut surface, although the ‘plug’, with its circular section of rind, has been reinserted. The right-hand edge of this cheese is in shadow, contrasting with the light shining onto the earthenware jug behind it, pushing the cheese forward, and pulling our eye back to the jug.

Both the dish and the knife are expensive objects. The former, in its delicate blue and white, with subtly scalloped edges, was a highly prized import. It would have been made in China towards the end of the Ming dynasty, during the reign of the emperor Wanli (1573–1620 – so contemporary with this painting). Wanli (or Wan-Li) porcelain became highly fashionable in the Dutch Republic, ultimately leading to the establishment of the Delft Porcelain Manufactory – still producing the familiar blue and white Delftware today. It fetched enormous prices at auction: one feature of this painting is that it contrasts everyday foods (cheese) with luxurious objects. Here it contains dried figs, dates and almonds – which, like the dish itself would have been imported, and considered a luxury. Like the cheeses, each has been displayed to show it off to its best advantage, and to show the artist’s ability with form, texture, and even, I think, density. 

The knife is also an expensive item, but it would have been produced locally. Known as a bridal knife, because they were made to be given at weddings, it is decorated with personifications of some of the virtues of the bride herself: these two are ones we have already met (POTD 42, 45 & 59). To our right (so nearer the end) is a woman carrying a cross – which would identify her as Faith even without the Latin word Fides inscribed underneath. Closer to the blade is another woman, pouring liquid from one jug into another, the standard representation of Temperance – she is watering down the wine. The inscription below only has space for the first four letters, Temp, as in English. But most importantly, surely, it also bears the name of the artist – Clara Peeters. This is her signature. She has put her name on the most prominent object, on the edge of the table and sticking out into our space, almost as if she is inviting us to pick it up and inspect it, a trick played by artists since the earliest days of trompe l’oeil painting.

We know very little about Clara Peeters – there are almost no documents that mention her – so most evidence comes from her work. About forty paintings can be identified, all of which are Still Lives, at a time when the genre was only just coming into its own – so she was one of the innovators. One of the few documents in which she is mentioned says that she came from Antwerp, and although she never became a member of the artists’ guild there, at least six of the panels she used were certified in Antwerp (like the cheese, everything was subject to guild regulations – unless you worked for a Royal Court). Even some of the knives in her paintings have the hallmark – and name – of the City of Antwerp on their blades. Some have suggested that putting her name on a bridal knife implies she was married, but there’s nothing else to support that – or, for that matter, to say that she wasn’t. Nor is there any evidence of when she was born or died – apart from the dates on eleven of her paintings, which range from 1607 – 1621. Presumably, if she was working in 1607, she can’t have been born much after 1590 – the latest date suggested for her birth. The Mauritshuis, which bought this painting in 2012, suggests ‘1580/90’, whereas the Prado, which owns four of her works, and hosted a monographic exhibition in 2017, is more specific, with ‘1588-90’. Both have to content themselves with ‘after 1621’ for the date of her death. 

There is another, really expensive import, on the right of the painting: a Venetian glass. Peeters has perfected the depiction of every different technique used by the Murano masters – there must be names for these, but I know next to nothing about glassware. It is beaded and stippled, though, and has gold incorporated into the glass in various places. This is where we see the importance of reflection for naturalistic depiction, as each reflection is slightly different according to whether the glass is plain or patterned, clear or golden, concave or convex. The light also catches the meniscus of the wine, and reflects from the back of the glass. There is a rhombus of light, the reflection from a window, which is presumably behind our right shoulder – so not the window from which the majority of light falls onto the objects in the painting. I can’t help thinking that there is something in between the window and the glass, though, as there is a shadow in the middle of the reflection. These highlights contrast with those on the earthenware jug, a local product but, given the lowly material, still of superb craftsmanship, notably in the stylised faun’s head on the vessel’s neck. The pewter lid is also depicted in all its intricacy, and has an even more important reflection – or even two.

A third of the way from right to left of the pewter lid, just emerging from the shadow, is a face, with a second, more distorted version, in the rim underneath. This is the artist herself, and these tiny, reflected self portraits were one of her ‘hallmarks’. I suspect that the shadow in the reflection of the window is her too. She was not the first artist to do this. Ever since the two figures were seen in the mirror of the Arnolfini portrait, it has been assumed that Jan van Eyck was one of them– although there is absolutely no way we can be sure. However, in his Virgin and Child with Canon van der Paele painted at more or less the same time, there is a standing figure reflected in the shield of St George, which is more likely to be the artist. However, we still can’t be certain it’s him. So why should we think this is Clara Peeters? Well, because she puts herself into quite a few of her own paintings, and the image is similar in each, given the limitations of representation – not only are the reflections small, but they are reflected on less-than-perfect surfaces.

  • Still Life withFlowers, Gilt Goblets, Coins and Shells, 1612, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe.

Not only that, but in some paintings, the reflected figure is holding a palette and paintbrushes. The detail on the right comes from the painting on the left – the gilt goblet towards the back on the right has at least six self portraits, one in each of the raised circles. Not only does the inclusion of these images vouch for her powers of observation, and her skill at reproducing what she sees, but it also asserts her position as at the artist – another type of signature – and her position as a female artist at that. Given that her paintings were included in collections across Europe, as far afield as Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Madrid, it also suggests that she was a successful one. And that is hardly surprising – she was brilliant. She should be better known!

Day 95 – Lazarus

Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Resurrection of Lazarus, 1896, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

We last saw Henry Ossawa Tanner painting a genre scene, The Banjo Lesson, in Picture Of The Day 81. Painted in 1893 during one of his few returns to the States after he had settled in France in 1891, he took it back with him to Paris, where it was accepted for exhibition at the annual Salon of 1894. This marked the beginning of his success, although, as yet, he was effectively unknown. The following year, two more genre paintings were accepted, but it was with Daniel in the Lion’s Den, painted in 1895 and exhibited the following year, that he really made his mark: Daniel was awarded an honourable mention by the jury.

That year, 1896, he painted The Resurrection of Lazarus, which, yet again, was exhibited the following year, as was the fashion. The Salon jury awarded it a third-class medal, and it was purchased by the French government for the Musée de Luxembourg, which, at the time, was the national collection of modern art: it is now in the Musée d’Orsay. Tanner had arrived. He was effectively the most successful American artist of his time in Paris.

The story of the resurrection of Lazarus is told in John 11:1-44 – I’ll just quote 38-44 below. He was the brother of Martha and Mary, friends of Jesus, and when he was sick, they sent for their friend. However, by the time Jesus got there Lazarus was already dead. Martha went out to meet him first, followed by Mary, who, when she saw him, ‘fell down at his feet’. Jesus asked, ‘Where have ye laid him?’ and was taken to the grave: 

It was a cave, and a stone lay upon it. Jesus said, Take ye away the stone. Martha, the sister of him that was dead, saith unto him, Lord, by this time he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days. Jesus saith unto her, Said I not unto thee, that, if thou wouldest believe, thou shouldest see the glory of God? Then they took away the stone from the place where the dead was laid. And Jesus lifted up his eyes, and said, Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me. And I knew that thou hearest me always: but because of the people which stand by I said it, that they may believe that thou hast sent me. And when he thus had spoken, he cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus saith unto them, Loose him, and let him go.

When we look at Tanner’s depiction of the story, it does not worry too much about the details of the text, apart from taking place in ‘a cave’. Jesus stands looking over the grave, which is dug into the ground and lined with white material, in excess of any standard shroud. Rather than ‘coming forth’, Lazarus is just managing to sit up, his left arm tense, the fingers and wrist arched, resting on the side of the grave, while his right rests on his chest. He eyes are open, but his facial expression is fixed, staring forward – what else would you do under the circumstances? He is tended to by an old man, who could easily be a hermit, presumably one of the people Jesus instructed to ‘Loose him, and let him go’ – in which case, the ‘napkin’ around his face has already been removed. 

The roof of the cave is propped up by a number of posts – there is one behind the ‘hermit’, and another two on the left of the painting, which frame our view. At the base of these two posts are what could be the stones ‘laying upon’ the tomb – although in the background, behind the right of the two posts, and above the heads of the crowd who have followed Jesus, Mary and Martha into the tomb, we can see light coming from the mouth of the cave, the sort of opening that could have had a stone rolled in front of it. Jesus’s gesture is not grand, or dramatic, but contains its own humility – the arms held slightly out, the hands almost pointing, almost ready to accept Lazarus, as he looks down towards him. 

Mary and Martha kneel on either side of Jesus. My guess is that the figure on our right is Martha, looking up towards him, calm and dutiful, whereas the grief-stricken figure, head in hands, is Mary. Both have ‘fallen down at his feet’, although the text only suggests that Mary did this – but that was before they had got to the tomb anyway. However, it was at that point that ‘Jesus saw her weeping’. Mary weeps often in the New Testament – it is one of the things that defines her. And if anyone who knows either of the Magdalene Colleges (Oxford or Cambridge, although I’m sure there are others) and wonders why they are pronounced Maudlin, it is the same word. ‘Maudlin’, meaning miserable comes from the medieval French version of ‘Magdalene’ – it’s not so far from Madeleine – and derives from images of the Magdalene weeping. Plus there is the hair, which is scrunched up on either side of her head, between her hands, in Tanner’s image, but we should talk about the Magdalene’s hair another day. There is no sign of the smell, something which many artists were careful to portray. As we shall see on Saturday, Giotto makes it quite visible.

All these thing aside, this is a very unconventional portrayal of the subject, and very different from the version we will see on Saturday. But then Tanner’s upbringing didn’t incline him to ‘traditional’ religious art. His father, Benjamin Tanner, was a minister, and then a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and had wanted his son Henry to go into the ministry. Having realised that this would not happen, he welcomed the change in direction of his son’s career as an artist, from painting genre scenes, to biblical narratives, as he was fully aware of the power of art.  As he himself said, 

By the presentation of visible objects to the eye, divine truths may be most vividly photographed upon the soul… In representation man does not, like the great Originator, create his own fiat, his world of mental objects. What he reproduces or constructs anew is in some way dependent upon what he has personally experienced.

If Henry did not want to preach, he could still minister through his art. Henry himself was dubious about the quality of much religious painting, if not downright damning:

It has very often seemed to me that many painters of religious subjects (in our time) seem to forget that their pictures should be as much works of art (regardless of the subject) as are other paintings with less holy subject… There is more ‘bogus’ sentiment in poor pictures – pictures in which the artist has tried to convince the world that nothing else was necessary – because he has nothing else to give. Religious art has come to mean an uninteresting, inartistic production. Who is to blame that this is true? The large number of painters of very mediocre attainment… have painted religious pictures because they have found that the selection of such subjects has enabled them to draw more attention to themselves than would their mediocre rendering of any other subject.

Some more cynical critics have suggested that Tanner had done just that. The genre paintings that were accepted in the Salons of 1894 and 1895 did not get him known: ‘History Painting’ – i.e. the depiction of important narratives – was how you made your mark, and it was how he made his. Although his father may have welcomed the development, not everyone did. Members of the black community regretted his decision to move away from African American subject matter, as seen in paintings like The Banjo Player (POTD 81). However, his approach was more subtle. In some way’s Tanner’s interpretation of Lazarus is not so very far from some of Michelangelo’s ideas on the tomb of Julius II, not that I think this was necessarily Tanner’s intention. It is interesting, but probably coincidental, that the Louvre, in Paris (where Tanner spent most of his adult life) is home to Michelangelo’s Dying and Rebellious Slaves. One interpretation of these is that they represent the human soul, enslaved to the body. For Tanner, Lazarus has been a slave to death – and now he is free. As a result, some critics relate Tanner’s interest in the story of the Resurrection of Lazarus to the end of slavery in the United States (the Emancipation Proclamation took place in 1863) . Others suggest it has a more personal significance – that Tanner himself was effectively returning to Jesus, he was ‘born again’ if you like, like Lazarus – and indeed, he wrote a letter to his parents in 1896 expressing his guilt abut his distance from the church.

But had he really moved so far from the idea of genre painting, one description of which would be ‘normal people doing normal things’? I’m not so sure. His biblical paintings are framed as if they are totally normal – no grandiloquent gestures, no superhuman, idealised people – just normal people doing normal things. Not the blonde-haired blue-eyed Jesus you might see in so much Western art, but someone who could so easily be from the Middle East.

And if we look among the crowd, it is a remarkably mixed group, a black man prominent among them. It suggests he is interested in a more universal, multicultural message. This would certainly fit in with his father’s own preaching, a good case in point being Bishop Tanner’s interpretation of the famous passage in Isaiah 11:6:

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.

In one of his sermons, Bishop Tanner suggested that this statement prophesied a time when, ‘men of all races, nations, and communities shall show how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity’. This crowd, unified in it’s astonishment, would seem to embody this very idea.

The one mysterious feature of the painting, not immediately apparent as such, is the lighting. If the mouth of the cave is in the far background, where is all the light in the foreground coming from? If you look at the way all of the people in the crowd are lit, you can only come to one conclusion: it is coming from the grave itself. This miraculous glow, a creamy light in the darkness, is a key feature in the palette of one very particular western European artist, whose chromatic and tonal range stretches from creams, through gold to the deepest browns and black: Rembrandt van Rijn.

Indeed, it is a painting by Rembrandt which is closest to Tanner’s conception of the work. Painted around 1630-32, it is relatively early, and so does not use the archetypal Rembrandt palette. It is now in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, but I’d love to know where it was in 1896, because the man who bequeathed it to LACMA hadn’t been born then. I don’t know if Tanner knew it.  But with Lazarus just managing to sit up, Christ standing above him, the apex of a pyramid formed with the two sisters on either side, it is remarkably similar.  One day soon the libraries will open, and I might be able to find out.

Day 94 – Narcissus

Claude, Landscape with Narcissus and Echo, 1644, National Gallery, London.

I last talked about Claude, one of the great innovators of landscape painting, when we were exploring the story of Psyche, and if you want to more about him, and why I think this artist who produced all his work in Italy was not really French, you might want to read (or re-read) Picture Of The Day 46. Today, I am adding to a mini-series on reflections, in preparation for my talk on Velázquez this coming Wednesday – although I doubt that this painting will make it into the talk!

Claude, 1604/5?-1682, Landscape with Narcissus and Echo, 1644, Oil on canvas, 94.6 x 118.7 cm https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/NG19

The story of Narcissus and Echo is told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, although the version I shall tell you is very much my own, honed by a couple of decades telling it to school groups in the National Gallery. Claude’s telling of the story might seem almost incidental. After all, the four characters depicted in the foreground take up relatively little space on the surface of the painting. The composition is typical Claude: dark trees take up the upper left-hand corner, with a shorter, lighter tree on the far right of the painting, still dark against the sky. These trees, growing in the middle distance, frame a view of the distant landscape, itself composed in a similar way, with a castle, darker than the luminous sky on the left, and a mountain, not as high, on the right. The foreground is the darkest part, getting gradually lighter as our eyes move towards the horizon. We are almost compelled to look to the distance, drawn towards the light. However, as so often with Claude, the sun is far higher than you might expect, above the castle, about a third of the way across the painting from the left.

Even if we get in closer the figures are not exactly prominent – we have to seek them out amidst the gloom. It is almost easier to see the port on the shoreline, two ships out to sea, with smaller vessels gathered around. A bridge crosses the mouth of the river, just to the left of what could be a castle. Closer to us a shepherd, following his flock, is about to cross another bridge going over a gully (on the far right of this detail). The river presumably winds its way as far as the foreground of the painting, although its route is lost behind hills and vegetation. The woman lying naked at the bottom of the picture rests her right arm on a jug pouring water – she is the source of this stream, and so the goddess of the river which flows down to the sea. Without her we would not have the pond with its mirror-like surface. Curiously X–rays have shown that Claude did not paint her naked – she has been subsequently undressed, her naked body painted over Claude’s clothes. Why not remove her? Well, the X–rays cannot specify how much of the original clothing remains, and were the nude removed, there might be precious little underneath – and by now she is part of the history of this painting. 

Above the River Goddess, in the foliage, there are two women looking down. The higher of the two seems content to look, holding back the branches to get a better view. The lower of the two lifts her left hand to call out.

They have come to see this man, leaning on one arm, peering down to look at the pond, his left hand raised – looking in awe at his own reflection. This is Narcissus, one of those people who was so unbelievably beautiful that absolutely everybody fell in love with him. But, of course, just because you look good on the outside doesn’t mean that you are good on the inside – and he was incredibly vain. Girls would go up to him and declare their love, at which he would just look down his nose at them, and say, ‘But you’re not good enough for me’. And before long this little corner of the Ancient World was literally littered with love-sick maidens. The gods and goddesses got together and decided to teach Narcissus a lesson, sending Cupid to make him fall in love with someone who would make him very unhappy. Cupid did as he was told, and shot him with one of his best golden arrows, so that Narcissus would fall in love with the next person he saw. Inevitably, because he was so incredibly vain, the next person he saw was his own reflection. Bewitched, he had no idea what was going on, and fell instantly and desperately in love. He said ‘Hello’. He said ‘You’re beautiful’. He even got as far as ‘I love you’ before realising that there was no reply. The beautiful boy was silent. So he tried ‘Why don’t you talk to me?’ but still got no response. So he reached out – and instantly knew he was onto a good thing, because as he reached out to his new-found love, the love reached out to him. In his enthusiasm Narcissus went to grab him, but a strange thing happened – he realised he was wet, in a pond, and the boy had vanished. This was not one of the side effects of love that he had been warned about. Still, he pulled himself together, climbed out, sat down, dried off… and when he looked back, the boy had returned. This time he was more cautious, reached out slowly – and the boy reached slowly back. He was clearly very timid, though: just as they touched, he disappeared. He must have run away. ‘I’ll wait till he comes back’, thought Narcissus. And then when he did, he just looked down, lifted his hand to hear the boy speak (in case he was very quiet) but he didn’t want to scare him away again so he stayed very still. He just… looked. And… waited… And…

Meanwhile, one of those girls who had fallen in love with him decided to take matters into her own hands, and headed out into the countryside to find him. Not only that, but she took one of her friends along for moral support – you know, the way girls do. Maybe the ‘my friend really fancies you’ approach would work. But in the end, she couldn’t wait, and called out to him herself. There was only one problem with that – she couldn’t speak. Or rather, she couldn’t speak any more. She used to speak a lot. You probably know one of these people – they seem to be able to talk constantly without drawing breath, and certainly without listening to a word that you ever say. She made the mistake of doing this to Juno once, when the Queen of All the Gods was on her way to stop Jupiter from indulging in one of his affairs, and Juno got so angry that she cast a spell on her. She could no longer speak – unless someone spoke to her first. And even then, she could only repeat what she had just heard. So you’d go up to her and say ‘Good Morning’ – ‘Morning, morning’ would be her reply. This was Echo. So here she is, desperately in love with Narcissus, who has already rejected her, and she wants to shout out to him – but she hasn’t heard anything so she can’t. And he’s not paying her any attention. I mean, even the River Goddess has taken off all her clothes, and he’s not paying her the blindest bit of attention either. He’s only interested in himself. What a Narcissist! Still – he says ‘Hello’.

So Echo replies ‘Hello! Hello!’. 

‘You’re beautiful’

‘Beautiful! Beautiful!’

‘I love you’

‘Love you – love you!’

‘Why don’t you talk to me?’

‘Talk to me! Talk to me!’ 

And there they were – stuck in the forest, she was transfixed, he was transfixed, though gradually with the dawning realisation that this was his own reflection, and it could never love him back. And the gods realised that, even if they had taught him a lesson, their plan had backfired. They didn’t want the countryside littered with the lovelorn, so they decided to make them fit in – and changed them – transformed them – metamorphosed them into something that did. Narcissus became… a narcissus. Next Spring, when the daffodils come back out, just have a look at them – they really do look as if they are looking down at their own reflections going ‘you’re gorgeous’. And in the detail above, on our side of the pond, just to the right of the River Goddess’s feet, Claude has painted some narcissi. And Echo? What happened to her? Well, she was so much in love that she simply pined away. She faded, and became invisible, and now she hangs out with the wind in all the sad and lonely places – caves and tunnels mainly – and whenever you call out to her, she will call back to you.

Claude, Landscape with Narcissus and Echo, 1644 https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/NG19

As I said before, the elements of this story seem tiny compared to the painting as a whole. You could cover Narcissus and his reflection with one hand, and it would turn into Landscape with nude and two women peering – no narrative at all.  And yet, as in The Enchanted Castle (POTD 46), the whole painting exudes the same bitter-sweet sadness, the same melancholy as the story. That was Claude’s great skill.

He does this with the placement of the sun, up in the sky, behind one of the smaller branches of one of the larger trees. It lights the clouds across the sky from the left, and the ones just above the castle, from above. Even in the detail of Narcissus, we see it lighting his left shoulder and leg, and even the side of his right arm, with which he props himself up. It is this Autumnal light which unifies the whole painting, and casts the melancholy mood. Narcissus might be small within the painting, but the whole painting tells his story. 

And the moral of the tale? It seems a little simplistic to settle on ‘don’t be vain and don’t talk too much’. This story speaks very powerfully about the power of speech – and the magic of art. We can fall in love with an image, but shouldn’t we get to know what is beneath the surface? If art is the mirror of nature, should we be wary of falling for its spell? Is the artist really reflecting what he sees, or creating a world of the imagination? And is what he creates any more ‘real’ than the reflection in a mirror? I think the answers to these questions will be different for each of us, depending on what we want art to be. I’ll leave it up to you.

Day 93 – A Baptism and a Wedding

Giotto, The Baptism and The Wedding at Cana, c. 1305, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua.

Bother. Oh bother. I hate it when I get things wrong. Last week I said that we would start today with The Baptism of Christ, saying that it was opposite Christ among the Doctors. But it isn’t, it’s next to it.  Here is the opened-up scale model of the chapel which I first showed you for Picture Of The Day 45 – it was made for an exhibition in Australia, apparently.

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There are six paintings in The Story of Joachim and Anna (POTD 66 & 73) at the top of the South wall (on the left of this photo – you can only see the last two scenes of the six), but only five in The Childhood of Jesus (POTD 87) because of the windows. And I tried to include six. Well, that’s what comes of trying to rush… I mean, covering six images in one blog, what was I thinking? I’ll add some dodgy edits to last week’s entry. Anyway, The Childhood of Christ ends with The Massacre of the Innocents, more-or-less opposite which, on the North Wall, is Christ among the Doctors – even as a boy he had started his Mission. So, the first three scenes in the middle tier of the North wall should look like this:

We have Christ Among the Doctors, The Baptism of Christ, and The Wedding at Cana. The first was discussed last week, and the Baptism is fairly straightforward – nothing compared to the Baroque complexities of Juan de Pareja’s version (POTD 89), although it’s more complicated than it might appear at first glance.

Jesus stands in the centre of the image, up to his elbows in the River Jordan, and completely naked. This was not unusual in Medieval painting, although Giotto is not exactly explicit. It was not unusual for Jesus’s genitalia to be visible, because this would emphasize the theological point that he was both God and man. But Giotto doesn’t feel compelled to drive the point home – there is so much humanity in his painting anyway. There is more interest, I would say, in the swirling water, and, just in case we didn’t realise that it is water, there is a fish swimming beside Jesus’s calves. God the Father appears on high with quite surprising foreshortening – yes we’ve seen Uccello do this upside down (POTD 37), but that wasn’t until 140 years after after Giotto was painting. A glow of white light radiates all around – but there are clear signs that paint has been lost. The blue sky, painted a secco, is not in a great condition, and the Holy Spirit has vanished completely – but I can’t imagine that he wasn’t originally there. Last week, and even the week before, we saw how important the ‘landscape’ can be for the narrative, and here is no exception. The rocks on either side, effectively forming a valley through which the Jordan flows, focus our attention down towards Jesus. They also act as a background for the secondary characters, whereas the protagonists – John the Baptist and God, in the persons of the Holy Trinity (even if we can’t see the Spirit) – appear against the sky.

The Baptist wears his traditional camel skin and pink cloak, and reaches over to Jesus from the shore, while angles stand on the other side of the river, holding onto Christ’s blue robe and red cloak. If you remember, Pareja had added a third angel, but here, Giotto has two additional figures standing in the background, one only visible because of a hint of a halo and a slice of his neck. John the Baptist also has two attendants, one of whom is a Saint, the other isn’t. For their identity we must see what happened after the account of the baptising of the multitudes in the Gospel according to John 1: 35-37 & 40:

Again the next day after John stood, and two of his disciples; And looking upon Jesus as he walked, he saith, Behold the Lamb of God! And the two disciples heard him speak, and they followed Jesus… One of the two which heard John speak, and followed him, was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother.

St Andrew is the one with the halo. Giotto depicts him as he is often seen in Italian art, with a long white beard and white hair, wearing green. He is considered to be St Peter’s older brother. In the other Gospels St Peter is considered to be the first disciple, whereas John makes it quite clear that Andrew was the first, which makes the Scots happy. Andrew also makes his way into The Wedding at Cana. 

This isn’t entirely surprising, as the John’s Gospel – the source for Andrew’s presence at the Baptism – is the only one of the four to recount this particular miracle, always seen as Jesus’s first. The young man in between Jesus and St Andrew could be the second of John the Baptist’s followers, who is not named in the quotation above, and who did not end up following Jesus – hence the lack of halo. But then that begs the question as to what he is doing at the wedding. Andrew’s glance seems to suggest that he too is curious. The account of the wedding takes up about a third of a chapter, but I’m going to quote it in full – John 2: 1-10:

1 And the third day there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee; and the mother of Jesus was there:

2 And both Jesus was called, and his disciples, to the marriage.

3 And when they wanted wine, the mother of Jesus saith unto him, They have no wine.

4 Jesus saith unto her, Woman, what have I to do with thee? mine hour is not yet come.

5 His mother saith unto the servants, Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it.

6 And there were set there six waterpots of stone, after the manner of the purifying of the Jews, containing two or three firkins apiece.

7 Jesus saith unto them, Fill the waterpots with water. And they filled them up to the brim.

8 And he saith unto them, Draw out now, and bear unto the governor of the feast. And they bare it.

9 When the ruler of the feast had tasted the water that was made wine, and knew not whence it was: (but the servants which drew the water knew;) the governor of the feast called the bridegroom,

10 And saith unto him, Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine; and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse: but thou hast kept the good wine until now.

It’s intriguing that Mary was there, and is mentioned first, but was not named – and also that Jesus’s disciples were also ‘called to the marriage’ – even though Giotto only shows St Andrew (well, there is limited space, I suppose, in these paintings). It is also interesting how Mary tries to take charge, only for Jesus to be downright rude to her, even if he does end up doing what she wants anyway.

On the left Jesus is giving very clear instruction to one of the servants, whose body language is not good. Crossed arms – and the facial expression – clearly indicate that he (I’m going for ‘he’) is not open to Jesus’s suggestion. But Mary (who clearly has some clout) has said ‘do whatever he saith unto you’ – and so the servant is listening attentively.

John recounts, ‘there were six waterpots of stone’ – and Giotto has painted all six. On the far right, a servant pours water into one of the pots (her – I’m going for her – face is turned away from us, a very delicate profil perdu), while the Governor of the Feast (I think we’d say Master of Ceremonies – or MC) has already drawn some of the wine, in a silver flagon – which has tarnished and now looks black. Mary raises her hand – as if to instruct him, maybe, or to find out how it is going. Her halo is gold – but it is also built up with a technique known as pastiglio. The wall is plastered, and for true fresco, painted while still wet. But you can add more layers of plaster to make a sculptural effect. In this photograph the fresco is lit (artificially) from below, and Mary’s three-dimensional halo casts a shadow on the wall above. From the floor of the Chapel it makes the halo look like solid light. 

The MC is one of my favourite characters in the entire chapel – a man who knows good wine because he has clearly sampled a lot of it – his belly is every bit as round as the waterpots which his form so clearly echoes. I’m also glad that he has brought his son along to help, and, in the fullness of time, I’m sure he would want him to take over the family business. Both have the same snub nose, narrow eyes, square forehead, rounded jawbone and protruding upper lip. The lad hasn’t developed the paunch yet, though.

This is not a great picture, I know, but it gives us a reminder of where we are, looking at the North Wall of the Scrovegni Chapel. At the top tier we see The Birth of the Virgin, The Presentation of the Virgin to the Temple, and The Suitors bringing the Rods (POTD 73 & 31), and then below, Christ Among the Doctors, The Baptism and The Wedding at Cana. Whereas the South Wall has windows, the North Wall does not – leaving space for decorative panels in between the different scenes. Notice how the top tier is decorated in a different way to the lower two, and elements of the decoration keep it quite separate. That is because the top tier involves Mary, and the material is not biblical. The middle and bottom tiers are drawn directly from the bible, though, and concern Jesus himself. Of the decorative strips, those in between the biblical scenes contain important references. Here are the details which occur between the first three scenes in the middle tier.

On the left, we have Circumcision, and on the right, Moses bringing forth Water from the Rock. Both relate to the Jewish scriptures – the Old Testament – and both imply that, as a result of Christianity, the old order has changed. Circumcision is followed immediately by The Baptism – and the implication is that, for men to enter into the Jewish faith they had to be circumcised, seen as an act of ‘making clean’, whereas in Christianity, this ritual has been replaced by Baptism. Circumcision is represented as a symbolic act, rather than using an Old Testament narrative, whereas the small scene showing Moses comes from Numbers 20:11. The Israelites were in the wilderness heading for the Promised Land, but had no water. Moses was instructed by God to strike a rock with his staff, and water sprang forth, thus providing for his people. In the Old Testament, Moses provides water for physical sustenance. In the New, Jesus not only turns that water into wine, but also, later, tells us that the wine is his blood – thus providing spiritual sustenance. And not only that – as the account tells us, he has kept ‘the good wine until now’ – a phrase which theologians interpreted as referring to Jesus himself. The Wedding at Cana is not only Jesus’s first miracle, but it also hints at the events of the Last Supper.

When seen next to each other it should be clear how the interpretation of The Wedding at Cana is enhanced by the image of Circumcision which precedes it: the new order has replaced the old. You will see that there is another decorative panel on the right, and you might be able to see what that is. If not… well, I’ll tell you net week. In the meantime, it’s worthwhile remembering the Jesus was not advocating abstinence. Christian teetotalism is a myth. Cheers!

Day 92 – Vanity vs Prudence

attributed to Ginevra Cantofoli, Vanity, n.d., Private Collection.

Occasionally I like a bit of a challenge, and today’s painting certainly qualifies. It was sold on the art market in 2009 (I think) as an undated work by the 17th Century Bolognese artist Ginevra Cantofoli, about whom there is almost no information available, and is now in a private collection. However, the main authority on women artists in Bologna in the 17th Century, Babette Bohn, is dubious about the attribution. But I’ve never let anything like that get in the way of a good story… So why do I want to look at it? Well, it’s a rather beautiful painting, I think, and deserves some attention, whoever it is by. I’m also interested in any artist I’ve never heard of before. I came across it because I’m also getting interested in mirrors: I’ll be delivering a Zoom talk about Velázquez and his interest in reflections this coming Wednesday evening (contact Art History Abroad if you’re interested!).  

We see a woman in a delicate lavender dress, belted at the waist, with a low cut neckline that has a richly embroidered border. A form of cape, made from the same lavender material, is pinned to her shoulder, and wraps around her waist in copious spiralling folds. A dark blue headdress, decorated with gold, is just visible as it touches her forehead, curving over her hairline, and holding down a plait which circles her head. Her blonde hair falls down the side of her face in waves, with a few strands lying on her pale flesh. This is not the strictly controlled coiffeur of the plait, but seems freer. Her left shoulder is brought forward, as if she were previously looking at the mirror, but she has now turned towards us, creating an interesting twist through the body – the turn of her head counteracts the reach of her left arm.

It is not entirely clear whether she is holding the mirror up, or resting her hand on it – the lower edge seems to rest on a shelf, implying that she could be twisting it towards us, allowing us to see an alternative view of her face, in profile, from a slightly low angle as a result of the position of the mirror. She looks at us, with an almost sphinx-like expression, challenging us, perhaps – or simply inviting us – to make up our own minds about what we see.,

Her left hand reaches across her body, fingers open and palm downwards. Underneath are a few golden elements, two of which look like jewelled pins – my guess would be that they are hair pins she has just taken out, and has dropped onto the table – which would explain why the curls to the left of her head flow more freely. 

Mirrors function in different ways in paintings, and are a good example of the complexities of symbolism. It is not always possible to pin down a single meaning for an individual object: context is everything. We’ve come across mirrors before. One was held by Prudence, one of the four Cardinal Virtues, at the lowest level of the decorations of the Scrovegni Chapel (Picture Of The Day 59). Prudence – the ability to make wise decisions based on experience – is often seen as relying on self knowledge, and hence the need for self reflection. Here is another example, in a painting by Elisabetta Sirani.

Elisabetta Sirani, Caritas, Fortitudo, Prudentia, Private Collection, Modena.

Not only do we have two women artists today, but in this painting we have three Virtues – it being an Allegory of Charity, Justice and Prudence. Giotto’s Justice was also discussed in POTD 59, whereas his Charity, one of the three Theological Virtues, appeared in POTD 45.  In all three cases Sirani’s choices for the Virtues are more traditional than Giotto’s, but that is undoubtedly because there had been more time for ‘tradition’ to develop. Charity, or ‘Love’, is shown with three children, one clambering over her shoulder, one breast-feeding, and another reaching up to play with the baby. I have often thought that ‘Charity’ in these cases should be re-named ‘Long Suffering’ – but it is undoubtedly Love! The central Virtue of the painting (in more ways than one) is Justice, holding her sword aloft in her right hand, with the scales of Justice put to one side in the other. She looks out to her left, into the middle distance, as if contemplating a judgement, whereas the other two both look towards her – as if to say, be charitable in your judgements, and make the right choice. Prudence points to her mirror with her right hand, and rests her left, which is holding the mirror firmly, on a sizeable tome – presumably containing all the knowledge needed to make a wise and cautious decision.

As I said when discussing Elisabetta Sirani (POTD 62 ), the study of her work is enormously enhanced by the log book that she herself kept, which lists around 200 different works (by comparison Artemisia Gentileschi, a far more famous 17th Century artist, was not as productive: about 120 works are known). In it, she lets us know that this Allegory was commissioned by Cardinal Leopoldo de’ Medici, one of her most important patrons. Apparently he was so happy with it that he gave her a cross, studded with 56 diamonds, as a reward. These three virtues were chosen as being those especially exemplified by the Medici family, who in the 17th Century were the Grand Dukes of Tuscany (you will notice that Modesty was not one of the Virtues that they claimed). Sirani signed the painting – rather presumptuously perhaps – on the hem of Justice’s bodice.

As well as being a very productive artist, and keeping good records of her works, Sirani was also important as a teacher. According to contemporaries, her most gifted student was Ginevra Cantofoli.  A couple of decades older than Sirani, her family had no previous connection to painting (unlike Sirani herself, who had learnt from her father). One of our main sources of information about her is Carlo Cesare Malvasia, the 17th Century version of Vasari in Bologna, who published his Lives of the Bolognese Painters in 1678. He heaps special praise on the women: not only does Bologna have great artists, he says, but has more talented female painters than anywhere else. He lists a number of paintings by Cantofoli, some of which are still in the churches for which they were painted. However, he does not always heap praise on her in particular. She may have been the best of Sirani’s pupils, but Malvasia describes at least one of her paintings as cattiva – i.e. ‘bad’ – and suggests that Sirani would often design and then correct Cantofoli’s work, citing at least three examples that he knew of.  If the Vanity is by Cantofoli, it would rank among her best works, and Babette Bohn is not convinced it is by the same hand as the verifiable paintings. 

It might be worthwhile comparing it to a self portrait in the Brera, the main art gallery in Milan. This is Cantofili painting a copy of what, in Bologna, was an especially famous painting, the Madonna di San Luca – a 12th Century work which, for a very long time was believed to have been painted by none other than St Luke himself (who, as you may have noticed, was not alive during the 12th Century). The composition of the two paintings is not entirely dissimilar – with the main character’s head tilted in one direction, balanced by another face on the other side of the picture, which, in both cases, is an image – one a reflection, the other a painting. Each also has an arm crossing the foreground. The faces are not entirely dissimilar either, sharing a sweet simplicity, a quality also apparent in the lack of articulation of the hands in the foreground of each. However – and this is tricky as the Brera painting is clearly in need of a clean, and a better photograph – the self portrait does not come across as being equally elegant, or for that matter refined. The subtle shifts in tone and colour in the Vanity are unmatched in the relatively drab draperies of the Self Portrait. I’m really not an expert, though – but as Bohn is not convinced, I would also hesitate to accept the attribution. 

Whoever painted it, though, it is a rather glorious image – but why is it Vanity rather than Prudence? Both have a mirror, after all. There are two things, at least, which sway the balance. First, there is nothing to say that this woman is about to make a decision based on knowledge or experience – no book, as in Sirani’s version, no desk, as in Giotto’s. And secondly, she is beautifully attired, with fine clothes and jewellery, some of which she appears to be discarding, as if she has realised that her focus on physical appearance and finery is ‘vanity’. In this respect, we are more likely to understand the concept in terms of Vanitas rather than ‘vanity’. As a modern concept, ‘vanity’ is about excessive pride and interest in one’s own appearance. In its origins, though, this was seen as ‘vain’ because it wouldn’t last. This is the way we use the word in the phrase ‘all that attention to your looks will be in vain’ – because we can’t always stay as we were when we were young (no, not you, of course, I know you are eternally youthful). As such ‘vanity’ refers to the vanities of worldly existence, all of which will pass away (in Christian terms). We should be relying on eternal values, rather than fleeting, superficial ones.

This then creates a problem, especially for a female artist. ‘Vanity’, in Italian, is a feminine noun – La Vanità – and so the personification is specifically a woman with a mirror. If any woman were to want to paint herself, she would have to look into a mirror to do so – and so the act of self-portraiture, for women, implies that they are embodying Vanity. Not only that, though: women were supposed to be meek, modest, and mild, keeping themselves to themselves and always averting their eyes. The female gaze had always been seen as a threat to men – but for an artist it was essential. This attitude was just one of the things that held women back: if they weren’t allowed to look at things, how could they possibly paint them? And even though Justice and Prudence are also represented by women – La Giustizia and La Prudenza – both of these qualities, in society, were part of a man’s realm. 

However, if you were really clever, as a woman, you could represent yourself as La Pittura – Painting – which Artemisia, of course, did (POTD 69). She uses a mirror in order to see herself – so for self-knowledge, and not for vanity. After all, art is seen as a mirror onto the world around us… which is what I will be thinking about this coming Wednesday. It is a symbolism used both by Jan van Eyck in his Arnolfini Portrait, and also by Velázquez in Las Meninas. As it happens, the latter was probably influenced by the former, as the Arnolfini Portrait was part of the Spanish Royal Collection in the 17th Century. But more of that on Wednesday (although no more about the Arnolfini – I’ve said enough about them already!)

Of course, the mirror does something else in the painting by Cantofili (?). As well as identifying the woman as ‘Vanity’, it also allows the artist to show us one woman from two points of view: full face, and in profile. This is a ploy sometimes used for portraits, allowing us to see more of the sitter. This painting could even be a self-portrait. It also confronts the nature of painting, a framed image of the world, just like the reflection in the mirror. We can see that it is a mirror, because the image is so much like the woman herself. But that, in itself, lends credence to the full-faced image, which is, in a different sense, a ‘mirror’ onto nature, a true reflection of someone’s appearance. I don’t know what the frame of this painting looks like, which is a pity. I would love it to be framed in the same style as the painted mirror, though.