Hawkwood

Naked or Nude?

2010-08-11T13:32:00.013+02:00

It must be one of the most 'frequently asked questions' in art. Whole books have been written on the subject, and it is one of art's most explored and enduring themes. So what actually is the difference between 'naked' and 'nude'? In seeking an answer for myself, rather than diving into my own library, I'll see if I can come up with some of my own ideas with the help of artists whose treatment of this theme I particularly enjoy.

Dutch Artist George Hendrik Breitner called his painting (above) Seated Half-Nude. His model is 'half-nude' because the artist shows the woman in the act of removing her chemise - an intimate moment. We might normally think that with such a private gesture she would be 'half-naked', and yet Breitner's title alone tells us that she is 'nude', and not 'naked'. Where does the difference lie? For me, it lies in the artist's own attitude, and in his treatment here of the painting itself. Breitner's brushwork is so chiselled and monumental, the forms so sculpted in paint, that he lifts his model away from the everyday through the sheer force of his artistry. The woman whom we see in the canvas is at the same time both an individual - the artist's model - and a more universal 'everywoman': a created form which emerges from the paint in slabs of light and shadow. It is this 'more than the everyday world' aura that makes this woman 'nude'.

This study (above) by contemporary digital artist Craig Mullins displays the same freedom of brushwork - although in this case the artist's 'brush' is a digital one. And Mullins, every bit as much as Breitner before him, is 'at work' here. We feel in the brush lines the striving to understand and describe the planes of the model's body: the arch of the back, the skin stretched taught below the rib cage. The artist is not out to capture feminine beauty, but to reach an understanding of the forms which the model's anatomy describes. And again, as with Breitner's model, Mullins is little concerned with a portrait of a specific individual. The woman's face is articulated with the same rough but incisive brushwork as the rest of the figure.

With the treatment of the nude by Boris Zaborov (above) we are in a radically different setting. Here this removal of the figure from the everyday world is pushed even further by the artist's use of a neutral background. It could be anywhere, at any time and place. Contradictorily, Zaborov's model is a specific individual, her face anything but anonymous. She gazes steadily out at us from her drifting world, as if afloat in a passing dream.

But why need the figure be nude at all? Another often-asked question. Different artists will give different reasons, but my own reaction is again to do with this removal from the everyday. The clothes we wear express much, both about who we are as individuals, and about the time and the place in which we live. For this reason, models who are fully-clothed become 'portraits' almost by default. Clearly, with a nude model there must be another factor at work.

In a very real sense, to step out of one's everyday clothes is to step out of time - to remove oneself from any context with the everyday world. To be nude is not to be naked. It is for this very reason that for a model to be nude can prove to be an empowering experience. Javier Valhonrat's composition (above), from his Possessed Space series, is a clear example. However 'boxed-in' the artist has chosen to portray her, this model in her nudity has all the freedom to occupy an 'eternal now'. For her to have worn even so much as basic underwear would have looked downright ludicrous, and this is what we sense.

So if all these images are what being 'nude' is about, and if we can define it through these examples, where does that leave 'naked'? If nudity removes someone from the everyday, then nakedness must do the opposite. And indeed: you are naked if you are about to climb into bed with your lover. You are naked if you are about to step under the shower. And if you as a model leave your clothes in a neat pile on a chair of the artist's studio, and step forward with the thought that you are serving the needs of art, then with that step you leave the everyday world to become empoweringly nude!

In Sunlight and Shadow

2010-07-01T11:44:00.012+02:00

Two robed men engaged in conversation are about to descend a wide flight of steps, to the sides of which friezes of winged angels swirl and flow around the pillars that the men are about to pass between. Both the men and the steps are bathed in bright sunlight, and the scene seems at first idyllic. But behind the two figures rises an impenetrable wall of tall Lombardy poplars, their shadows so dense that it seems almost as if we are staring into the darkness of space. The work's title confirms the foreboding. This is Steps to the Tomb (below), by the American illustrator Franklin Booth.

Like his fellow-countryman Maxfield Parrish, who also was active in the 1920's, Booth strove to create worlds redolent with the romance of a sunlit age that never was. But something in Booth’s makeup kept pulling him towards darker regions; his compositions so often feature tombs, burials, dark interiors, walls of shadows too dark to penetrate. To what extent Booth himself was aware of this hankering after the darkness is unclear; what is certain is that his body of work, executed almost entirely in chiselled pen strokes and black ink, is masterful in the range of tones and textures which he created with his limited choice of medium.

Even in small details of his work (the footer of a decorative border, above), there is a reaching out, a gesture of longing, that we feel will go unrequited. Who are these beseeching robed figures? We do not know, and the artist does not tell us. At times Booth's subject matter is more direct, as in Burial (below). Here the composition is - quite literally - half in shadow, half in light. To the right: towering sunlit spires and a congregation of figures emerging from a walled garden. To the left: darkness and shadow, as a priest reads the burial service while mourners contemplate a casket and the mysteries of mortality. Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust, reads the tomb's inscription.

With The End of the Way (below), we have crossed the threshold. Booth actually takes us beyond death to the realm that awaits. The robed soul, airily floating on tiptoe, is received by a bearded angel to be guided further. In the background, figures on the path are still approaching, dwarfed under towering piled cumulus.

In The Healed Ones (below), the artist carries us even further into the beyond. Souls drift through the airy spaces as light as the clouds behind them. In the foreground, the 'healed ones' of the work's title are welcomed by other heavenly guides. Booth's masterful pen style is here very apparent. The face and arms of the central female figure are described entirely with varying thicknesses of continuous pen lines.

This device of the artist's of setting foreground figures against distant backgrounds is abandoned in The House of Rimmon (below). Here the groups of figures are distant and anonymous, as we are led through layers of foreground shadows into sunlight and then back into far shadows again. Booth's chiselled linework seems here almost to make the shadows come alive and drift like smoke up to the building's vast roof. It could be the stage set of an opera.

Franklin Booth was in one sense a jobbing illustrator. He made his living producing line drawings to illustrate articles for the magazines and periodicals of his day - Good Housekeeping, Scribner's Magazine, and others. Sometimes his work was produced for individual books, as with his vignette for The Flying Islands of the Night (below), by James Riley.

What sets Booth's work apart is his truly masterly pen technique, with which he described forms and textures, light and shadows - and even a suggested effect of colour - through his pen alone. And there is a darkness there which is the darkness that leads to the tomb. But the artist also carries us beyond these shadowy places to show us other realms. Death, Booth seems to wish to reassure us, is not the end of the way.

The images for this post were made from scans taken from the book The Art of Franklin Booth, which is itself a 1976 facsimile reprint edition of a tribute to Booth published originally in 1925. This much-treasured book has been on my bookshelf for the last thirty-odd years, but I learned only recently from the Internet that this facsimile apparently is even more scarce than the original, with only thirteen known copies catalogued! So as I now realize, I own the fourteenth, and this post therefore reflects a homage to Booth’s art more rare than I myself was aware of at the time that I compiled it.

The Tainted Lips of Angels

2010-05-28T19:29:00.007+02:00

It is not quite what we expect. We see familiar-enough elements here - the background of decorative blooms, the two sublime faces in profile, the haloes, and the open book which these other elements suggest is a hymnal (below). All of these combine to convey something angelic, saintly and devotional. And yet the woman in the foreground (and therefore presumably the second woman behind her) is naked. Why this should be so can only be *answered by saying that this was the way in which the artist Louis Welden Hawkins chose to portray her in his painting The Haloes. Why, then, is this element disconcerting?

The language of art has encouraged us to associate the portrayal of haloes and hymn books with religious devotion. Bare breasts generally are not considered to be part of this mix. And yet here those elements are seen together. Whether we consciously think of it in this way or not, Hawkins' painting subtly challenges us to redefine the way in which we might regard such religious iconography. Had the artist opted for a simple willful blasphemy (as others such as Felicien Rops have done), then it might be both more offensive, more explainable - and perhaps less interesting. And yet there is nothing of that here. The two faces express only demure devotion (detail, below).

Hawkins' painting seems to strand us in a paradoxical no-man's-land between the sacred and the secular. It is orthodoxy passed through a filter of paganism. A year later it seems that paganism gained the upper hand in the artist's Autumn (below). Here the woman appears comfortably to belong to the natural world. Her eyes are closed in the breeze that bends the rushes, and that caress is carried along the horizontal watery reflections in the background to lift her floating hair. Perhaps Hawkins intended his figure to express a nature spirit, although even if she is human then she surely has one foot in such invisible realities.

In Autumn, the element of nakedness belongs with the classical world of nymphs and Arcadian glades. But the artist is not yet done. With Innocence (below) we are presented with yet a third type of nakedness, as Hawkins continues to ring his subtle changes on this theme. As in The Haloes, there are two naked women portrayed, but this time the theme is of innocence and temptation.

The background (detail, below) portrays in a faux-woodcut style reminiscent of Albrecht Dürer's works the whore of Babylon from the Book of Revelations, holding the poison chalice of abominations and riding the seven-headed beast. The partially-hidden woman with writhing Medusa-like hair - evidently the temptress - offers a symbolic sphere/apple to the innocent, who with a Latin crucifix around her neck eyes the sphere wonderingly.

Ever-mysterious, the artist portrays this crucifix-wearing woman of naked innocence with her hands crossed beneath her breasts. She holds two olive branches, while the lilies in the foreground underscore the symbolic language of pure unblemished innocence. But the expressions of the two women - the temptress and the innocent - seem almost interchangeable. Can innocence 'corrupt' the fallen, as much as the other way around? Far from being curiosities of art symbolism, Louis Welden Hawkins offers us in these three depictions of women in their nakedness unexpected depths of meaning and interchanges of roles. And these women are naked, rather than nude, although what that difference actually is I'll maybe save for another time!

Artist: Louis Welden Hawkins
Work: The Haloes, 1894
Medium: Oils
Location: Private collection, Paris

Artist: Louis Welden Hawkins
Work: Autumn, 1895
Medium: Oils
Location: Victor Arwas collection, London

Artist: Louis Welden Hawkins
Work: Innocence, 1895
Medium: Oils
Location: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

*What Hawkins had in mind is more fully answered by a text that once was a part of the painting's original frame but which has now been lost, which read: 'They sing the songs of angels with lips still tainted by earth.'

The Knight, Death and the Devil

2010-04-25T14:47:00.020+02:00

In full Gothic *armour a knight rides purposefully through a rocky ravine (below). His gaze is fixed firmly upon the way ahead, denying himself the distractions that might lie to either side of his chosen path. Under the very hooves of his steed a lizard scuttles to safety. On the stump of a tree lies a human skull, a grim reminder of the folly and illusion of human vanity. A hound, the knight’s faithful companion on his lonely journey, runs alongside.

The knight is escorted or harrassed by two beings: on the knight’s right the figure of Death raises his hourglass (below), reminding the knight that his mortal days are already numbered and noted. Death’s mount, a scrawny nag, wears a bell around its neck: both the bell and the hourglass convey the passing of time. Behind the knight strides the horned and cloven-hoofed Devil, shouldering a pikestaff.

In his portrayal of the figure of Death, the artist has avoided the conventional ‘grim reaper’ approach. We see here no skeletal hand clutching a scythe; Dürer’s treatment is more tied to grim reality, and the more compelling for it. On the face the dried skin stretches taughtly away from the bone, exposing the skull beneath. Medusa-like serpents writhe and coil, entwining themselves around the crown of Lord Death, although here their appearance has more of the worms of the grave than of scaled and glittering snakes. The matted and straggling pale hair and beard which frame the terrible face are portrayed with the unflinching conviction of a 16th century observer who had encountered such a face often enough, perhaps beside some infrequently-used country road, and certainly on a gibbet.

As with Dürer’s depiction of Death, his Devil as well denies us the option of a comfortable way out (above). There is nothing to snigger at here; no hint of capering caricature which allows us reassuringly to say to ourselves, ‘see, he’s not real after all…’. On the contrary, Dürer has forced in front of our gaze a horror so minutely observed in its detail that it presents the impression that it almost could be classified by science. From the bizarre curving horn that arcs above its head to the grotesque drooping wattles which hang beneath its grimacing snout, every changing texture of horn, hair, flesh and fangs has been captured with the same apparent accuracy of observation and fidelity to reality that the artist used to portray the exotic animals which he later encountered in the Antwerp Zoo. Even the rolling-eyed squint seems unnerving rather than comical: is the Devil looking directly at us, or not? When the Devil looks like this, we may hope that his attentions fall elsewhere.

With the creation of The Knight, Death and the Devil, Dürer’s engraving burin appears almost to have taken on a life of its own, seeming thoroughly at home among this controlled churning of matted hair and metal, of rock and bone and stunted vegetation. The Devil’s crescent horn almost scoops the background wall of rock along with it in a fluid wave of engraved curves. The neck muscles of the knight’s horse seem more sculpted than engraved (above).

Dürer's house in Nuremberg was not far from an *armourer's, and the artist would have seen such knights in life. His watercolor study (above) clearly served the artist as a reference for his engraving. Although it has been suggested that the idea of the noble knight had by Dürer's time declined, this is only partly true. Knights always were a *mercenary class, even something of a rabble, and our own ideas of chivalry belong to the pages of romantic fiction.

The statuesque bearing of the knight’s mount evidently drew its inspiration from Leonardo da Vinci’s sketch (above) of his proposed equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza, the Duke of Milan, which Dürer would have seen on his Italian trip. When Leonardo’s sketch is reversed, as shown here, the similarity to Dürer’s own drawing is readily apparent.

In no work that he produced before or after this were Dürer’s powers in the engraving medium so expressively at one with their subject. It is as if the artist in Dürer sought passionately to embrace the new ideas of the Renaissance which he had encountered in Italy, but something in his Northern soul, recognising it as alien, struggled to assimilate it. The landscape through which this stoic knight journeys, both mental and physical, is wholly Gothic.

Artist: Albrecht Dürer
Work: The Knight, Death and the Devil, 1513
Medium: Engraving
Location: The Art Institute of Chicago; The Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco; Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas; Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University; The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, and with further prints from the engraved plate in other international museum collections.

Artist: Albrecht Dürer
Work: Study of a knight, 1495
Medium: Watercolor
Location: As yet untraced, but I'm still searching!

*The fluted pattern was as much functional as decorative, and served to give the metal extra strength.
*see my previous post: A Wild Man and a Willing Lady
*Hence the term still currently in use of 'freelance' (literally: a lance freely available for hire). See further my previous post on Sir John Hawkwood: A Knight of Dark Renown (My apologies: for inscrutable cyber reasons this link is not active. Please scroll down my sidebar for the working link.)

The Thingness of Things

2010-03-28T12:32:00.007+02:00

A letter rack (below) holds an assortment of mismatched objects: a pair of sewing scissors and a pincushion, a horn comb and a string of pearls, a cameo, a bronze medallion and a red wax seal, a pocketbook inscribed with the date 1664, and a rolled-up pamphlet and a quill which evidently has seen better days. These things seem like mysterious clues to the identity of their unknown feminine owner. The artist who painted these objects - Samuel van Hoogstraten - leaves us wondering.

Film director Luis Buñuel coined the perfect phrase for that common experience which we all have of encountering such everyday objects. Buñuel called it 'the thingness of things'. Whether these objects happen to be a dining table, or the pieces of fruit in a bowl that sits upon that table, they occupy the same familiar material reality as we ourselves do.

When artists set out to describe this 'thingness' in an image, the result is a still-life (the painting of apple blossoms which includes a not-so-still living lizard, two butterflies and a catapillar by Balthasar van der Ast, above). Now to be honest, this was one subject which, when we were given such an assignment at art school, I practically had to jab myself with my pencil to prevent myself from dozing off with boredom. But although my own choice of subject matter lies in other directions, and a tastefully arranged empty bottle, a china jug and a fruit bowl don't really do it for me, there certainly are any number of artists who have chosen to make this particular province of art their own.

What could be more ordinary than a bundle of asparagus? But when that asparagus is painted by Adriaen Coorte (above), its stark simplicity and luminous lightfall seem to generate a compelling power: a true manifestation of its 'thingness'. As, for the same reason, do the three salmon steaks by Francisco Goya (below). The intensity of these works (their 'asparagus-ness', their 'salmon-steak-ness') is only increased by the artists' choice of dramatic velvet-shadowed backgrounds.

If Goya's empty blackness daringly fills half of the space of his composition, what are we to make of Juan Sanchez Cotán's bizarre still-life featuring a quince, a cabbage, a melon and half a cucumber (below)? The eye of the viewer slides uncomfortably down the suspended quince and cabbage to land upon the ledge of the niche where the melon and cucumber (or what is left of it) are lying. The intense black nothingness which swallows up most of the space seems almost shocking. I am left wondering just how startling the artist intended his off-beat composition to be. It was, after all, painted four hundred years ago!

All those years ago, fresh game was a normal item on the European menu. That game included fowl, and fowl regularly found their way, not only onto the dinner plates, but onto the canvases of still-life subjects. Frans Cuyck van Myerop's treatment of what to our contemporary eyes is perhaps a strange choice of subject matter (below) is certainly more original than most. These two birds (I'm guessing that they are a small woodcock and a *bittern) hang against a white plaster wall, their shadows giving them a three-dimensional reality that is further enhanced by the artist's clever use of a painted black frame into which the wing of the bittern intrudes. At least dead things have the advantage of keeping nice and still while they're being painted, and the artist's treatment of the plumage textures and patterns is masterfully convincing without the brushwork being laboured.

The artist Cornelis Gijsbrechts presents us with a still-life as curious as it is inventive (below). For the still-life is a painting which actually features a still-life painting within it as part of the still-life. Central in the composition is a rather conventional still-life painting of grapes and other fruit. But the painting, which is peeling away from its wood mount (a trademark touch in Gijsbrechts' art), in its turn shares a shelf with the belongings of the artist: his palette and brushes, rag and glass dipper (for linseed oil), and his clay pipe and tobacco tin. And on the wood panel next to the painting the artist himself puts in a cameo appearance as a portrait miniature. Gijsbrechts' painting manages to be at the same time both charming and rather disconcerting, stranding the viewer in an uneasy no-man's-land between different visual illusions.

Both van Hoogstraten and Gijsbrechts (and in the image shown here, also Cuyck van Myerop) specialised in the form of still-life known by the French phrase tromp-l'oeil (literally: 'fools-the-eye'), in which visual sleight-of-hand is used (painted frames and shadows, etc.) to confuse what is real and what is part of the painting. But it is not so much the eye which is fooled, as it is the brain which interprets - or misinterprets - what the eye is seeing, challenging our confidence to define exactly where reality ends and illusion begins.

Artist: Samuel van Hoogstraten
Work: Tromp-l'oeil Still-Life, 1664
Medium: Oils
Location: Dordrechts Museum, Dordrecht

Artist: Balthasar van der Ast
Work: Still-Life with Apple Blossoms, 1635
Medium: Oils
Location: Staatliche Museum, Berlin

Artist: Adriaen Coorte
Work: Asparagus, 1697
Medium: Oils
Location: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Artist: Francisco Goya
Work: Three Salmon Steaks, 1808-12
Medium: Oils
Location: Oskar Reinhart Collection, Winterthur

Artist: Juan Sanchez Cotán
Work: Still-life with Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber, c.1600
Medium: Oils
Location: Museum of Art, San Diego

Artist: Frans Cuyck van Myerop
Work: Still-Life with Fowl, 1670's
Medium: Oils
Location: Groeninge Museum, Bruges

Artist: Cornelis Gijsbrechts
Work: Still-Life with Self-Portrait, 1663
Medium: Oils
Location: National Gallery, Prague

The Coorte image is from the Rijksmuseum website. All other images are from the Web Gallery of Art.

*The bittern (Botaurus stellaris) is now on the list of endangered species with a Red status (in severe decline and at serious risk), and has become one of the rarest of British breeding birds. The woodcock (Scolopax rusticola) is on the endangered list with an Amber status (in general decline). Source: Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

Blood on the Earth

2010-03-21T15:53:00.038+01:00

Carried on a makeshift pallet of hides and wooden poles, an elderly woman (below) attempts to comfort her two listless grandchildren. The woman's back is supported by a deer: a trophy of the hunt. Four men, their bodies straining with the effort, carry the heavy pallet forward. Other figures trudge wearily alongside it, or trail to the rear, their heals kicking up dust from the dry and seemingly-barren earth. It is a formidable tableau: the unforgiving parched landscape, muscle and sinew, hides and skins, primitive axes and spears, all combine to convey a rough and bleak desolation. But what commands our attention is not so much this striking central group, as the gaunt figure who leads it.

We can assume by his advanced age that it is the man's *wife who is being borne on the pallet, and it is therefore his sons and extended family who form the escorting group. But who is this greybeard patriarch? Every knotted sinew of his body seems taught with inexpressible remorse. His shoulders appear as if bent under some terrible unseen burden (detail, below). His gaze is not raised to the horizon which he walks to meet, and towards which his hand mutely gestures, but downwards to the dry earth at his feet. The title of the painting tells us all that we need to know. It is Cain, by the 19th-century artist Fernand Cormon. We might think that we are familiar with Cain's story, but here is my brief take on those terrible events.

Imagine a supreme being with, apparently, such an acquired taste for blood that he accepts the sacrifice of first-born lambs offered to him fresh from a shepherd's own flock, but turns up his nose at the offering of crops - the bounty of the earth - made to him by that shepherd's farming brother. A little far-fetched, perhaps? We might expect to find such a picky deity among the pantheon of petulant pagan gods, but this is the serious scenario presented to us in the Bible's *Book of Genesis. The brothers in question are, of course, the children of Adam and Eve: Cain and Abel. Abel being the shepherd who offered the blood sacrifice, and Cain being the well-intentioned (and undoubtedly equally hard-working) agriculturalist.

Whatever inscrutable reason God had for rejecting Cain's offering, human nature being what it is, God must have realised that his seemingly illogical choice of one brother's offering over the other's was asking for trouble. And it came. For as we are told, jealous Cain slew his brother (*Gustave Doré's image, above), thus inventing both homicide in general and fratricide in particular. In the next part of the story, God, to whom all things presumably are known, then has to ask Cain where his missing brother is. 'Am I my brother's keeper?' Cain famously replies.

God, seeing the *bloodsoaked earth, then utters a curse upon Cain. The worst curse, in fact, that a farmer could endure: the earth will no longer yield its bounty to Cain. But as a gesture of mercy God gives the murdering brother a mysterious mark - the Mark of Cain - as a protection against vengeance from others. The accursed farmer then wanders the Earth, finally settling 'in the land of Nod, east of Eden', to found the first city. The city eventually collapses upon the aged Cain, *killing him in the same year that his father Adam dies.

Now, whether this story is for you a matter of faith or a folktale, it's certainly a story with a lot going for it. Jealousy, murder, retribution: all the right plot buttons are pushed. And of course its drama appeals as a classic theme for artists to portray. Some choose the moment of greatest physical drama: the act of murder itself. Others such as Doré opt for the immediate aftermath, laden with the implied consequences of the horrific deed. Unusually (and perhaps more originally), Cormon portrays the wandering Cain. Cormon's painting carries the implication, through the aged Cain and his attendant generations (detail, above), of just how long Cain's wanderings have lasted.

Cormon evidently was at home with such material. He would later go on to portray various scenes from our Neolithic and bronze-age past (The Return from a Bear Hunt in the Stone Age, and other scenes, above) for the Musée des Antiquities Nationales in Paris. Although this project was never completed, even his sketches for the proposed mural scenes are full of the aura of an ancient past (his sketches portraying Spinning and Fishing, below left, and Hunting and Agriculture, below right).

The transition from Cormon's portrayal of the Biblical Cain to these archaeological museum murals is a seamless one. The group of figures in Cain walk straight out of the Stone Age, even if the artist's vision of the Neolithic is typically a 19th-century one. In portraying the story from Genesis in such a way, Cormon makes his subjects not merely Biblical, but epic: figures, not from folklore, but from our archaeological collective past. In these straggling outcasts we see our own ancestors, and Abel's spilt blood on the earth is still as fresh as today's headlines.

Artist: Fernand Cormon
Work: Cain, c.1880
Medium: Oils
Location: Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Artist: Fernand Cormon
Work: Return from a Bear Hunt in the Stone Age, 1884
Medium: Oils
Location: Musée des Antiquités nationales, Saint-Germain-en-Laye

Artist: Fernand Cormon
Works: Spinning and Fishing, Hunting and Agriculture, 1897
Medium: Thinned oils over pen and ink
Location: Musée du Petit Palais, Paris

*The ex-canonical Book of Jubilees identifies Cain's wife as his sister, Awan. This is, after all, just one generation removed from the first man and woman, and Cain had only his siblings from which to choose a partner. The gene pool sure was limited back then.
*Genesis 4: 1-16. For all those various Biblical 'begattings', read on from verse 17.
*Doré perhaps included the snake in his scene as a nod to the Hebrew tradition that Cain was actually the son of Eve and the serpent, and therefore intrinsically a doer of 'evil'. Maybe it's just my overheated imagination, but you practically can hear the serpent saying to Cain, 'Good job, Son..'
*Apparently God had no problem with Abel soaking the earth with the blood of innocent animals (who also were, nota bene, His own creations) in His name.
*In the Book of Jubilees' version.

Girl in a Kimono

2010-03-12T11:54:00.024+01:00

She was born in 1877 in Zaandam, in the province of North Holland. When she was 16, *Geesje Kwak (a name perhaps as unlikely-sounding to Dutch ears as it is to other languages) moved with her sister Anna to Amsterdam to settle into the safe young ladies' profession of milliner. There, among the ladies' hats and bonnets, ribbons and bustling clients, she might have remained in obscurity, her name - and her features - unknown to art history. Except that one day her path crossed that of the artist George Hendrik Breitner.

Breitner, already something of a name in the art world of the time, had recently acquired a studio on Amsterdam's Lauriergracht (Laurel Canal); one of the prettiest parts of the city. In 1892 the artist had visited an influential exhibition of Japanese art in The Hague (which style had earlier inspired Vincent van Gogh, among others), and he had enthusiastically acquired several kimonos and some decorative room screens as a result.

Now a year later, the artist's chance meeting with the young milliner seems to have lit a spark of inspiration, and Geesje found herself being asked - on a paid professional basis - to pose as a model in the kimonos. Breitner, then 36, seems to have been meticulous about details. There is an existing notebook in which he recorded the various dates and hours when Geesje posed for him, and the amounts which she was paid for her time.

The notebook suggests a methodical, business-like approach to the model sessions, but the series of paintings which resulted makes it plain that Geesje had something - an x-factor - which tapped into a true well of inspiration for the artist. Breitner's brushwork in the canvasses shows extraordinary verve and confidence, as if nowhere was it necessary to go over the same brushstroke twice. They are images which indicate that the artist knew exactly where he needed to go to achieve the result required, and what he needed to do to get there.

Posed either in a red or in a silvery-white kimono, Geesje is there in the canvasses as a tangible presence, even when only her face and her hands are visible. Breitner never allows that presence to be swamped by the surrounding patterns of cherry blossoms, birds, carpets and room screens which swirl busily around her; the balance between the naturalistic treatment of the model and the eddying patterns is always perfectly maintained.

Always a restless innovator, Breitner made extensive use of the relatively new medium of photography as a tool, and built up his own reference library of photographs of the subjects which became his principal themes. It is thanks to the artist's embracing of this medium that we have so many views of the Amsterdam of the time, not just as it was, but as it was in the process of becoming, with building works in progress and tramlines (for horse-drawn trams) being laid down. And indeed; among his collection we also come across his photographs of Geesje, some of which (below) are clearly intended as references for his paintings.

One photograph by Breitner in the Leiden Museum print collection (below) shows a thoughtful Geesje posing hand-on-chin. This gelatine-silver print offers us perhaps our clearest look at the girl who inspired the artist. I wonder sometimes what she must have thought about it all. Was she bemused? Was she flattered by the unexpected attention? In any event, she did not feature further in Breitner's work. There are two reasons for this.

The first reason is that, incomprehensibly, the series of paintings featuring Geesje met with either an indifferent or a scoffing critical reception when they were exhibited. The critical reaction was cold enough, apparently, to discourage the artist further in this direction, and he went on to other themes and subjects. The second reason is Geesje herself. Two years later she emigrated with her older sister Niesje to Pretoria in South Africa.

We have one last spectral glimpse of Geesje (above), together with her older sister, taken by a professional photographic studio in Pretoria. Just two years after the photograph was taken, Geesje died before reaching her 22nd birthday. The canvasses which are her legacy are now prized among the museum collections which house them, and the one which is now in a private collection reached an auction price in 2003 of almost *€600,000.

Artist: George Hendrik Breitner
Works: Girl in a Kimono (Geesje Kwak)
Medium: Oils
Locations (from the top): Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1893). Gemeentemuseum, The Hague (1893). Private Collection (1893). Enschede Museum (1894). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (1894).

Source: George Hendrik Breitner, 1857-1923: schilderijen, tekeningen, foto's, by J.F. Heijbroek, Kees Keyer, et al. Uitgeverij Thoth, Bussum, 1994.

*Curiously (and perhaps ironically), when given its correct Dutch pronunciation, the name actually sounds like the word 'geisha'.

*$818,700

A Wild Man and a Willing Lady

2010-02-26T13:07:00.027+01:00

It is the evening of the 28th day of January, in the year 1393. In Paris, the 25 year-old King Charles VI, still recovering from a period of severe mental instability, is pursuaded by those who should have known better to give a masquerade. The performers - six excitable youths, among them the king himself - are costumed as wild men, their diabolical garb consisting of ragged strands of rope stuck to linen with pitch and resin which has been sewn skin-tight over their undergarments. Masks of the same recklessly volatile material cover their faces, hiding their identities. Few of the guests who pack the feasting hall realise that the king himself is one of the six, and with the burning torches on the wall safely out of reach, the six grotesque and shaggy forms begin to prance among the amused and excited guests.

A latecomer enters the hall unexpectedly, torch held aloft the better to see the mysterious wild beings who caper near him in the flickering shadows. A spark falls. Amusement turns to horror as the dancers one after the other are transformed into living torches. One dancer burns to death on the spot. Another escapes by leaping into a vat of water that is being used to cool wine. The life of the king is saved by the young Duchess of Berry, herself only fifteen. Recognising her sovereign, and with great presence of mind, she throws her voluminous skirt over him protectively, shielding him from the flames (above). The three other performers, wretchedly burned - as are several guests who attempt to rescue them - survive for several days of lingering agony before dying of their wounds.

This tragedy, with bitter irony, has become known to history as the Bal des Ardents - The Dance of the Burning Ones. But supposing that the evening had passed without incident? How would history then remember the event? Simply as The Dance of the Wild Men, perhaps. But where did the idea for such bizarre costumes come from? These hairy beings, neither fully human nor wholly beast, seem to have had their origins in the beliefs in such ancient spirits of the forest as Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, the northern European equivalent of the god Pan. Certainly these wild beings seem to have had a hold upon the imagination of Medieval Europe, and appear regularly in coats-of-arms such as those of the Swiss Arms of Kyburg (above), which also features a rather demure wild woman - as does this 15th-century playing card (below), which portrays as one of its Queens a wild woman posed with that equally-fantastic and appealing animal, the unicorn, giving us two fantastic beings for the price of one.

There seems to be any number of these early depictions of wild men and women, sometimes even shown with their shaggy offspring in cosily-domestic family groups. But what I am looking for is a portrayal in art: a wild man, as it were, for art's sake. No great surprise, then, to discover two of them painted by that master of the fantastic, Albrecht Dürer. In Dürer's painting they appear upon the side panels flanking his 1499 portrait of the influential - and decidedly stern-looking - merchant Oswolt Krel (below). True to form, Dürer presents us with a brace of splendid club-brandishing wild men. But even these two lively examples are posed within a *heraldic context, and clearly are painted on commission.

Four years after painting his portrait of the merchant, Dürer produced another wild man. This time in the form of an engraving, his Coat-of-Arms with a Skull (below) shows us a wild man worth the money. Although this wild man is again in a heraldic setting, the artist seems here to be creating an image for his own pleasure. Because the woman wears a bridal crown, there is a theory that the print is intended as a political allegory - the 15th-century equivalent of today's newspapers' political cartoons.

The central helmet is magnificent, and reveals in its detail the artist's familiarity with the real thing. In the Louvre is a watercolor study of three views of a jousting helmet (below, left), which Dürer made a few years earlier. The artist's house in Nuremburg was near an armourer's, so such material was readily to hand for Dürer to study. And indeed: if we see the two helmets in isolation and next to each other (below, right), with the engraved version facing the way in which the artist would have engraved it onto his plate, then it is clear that Dürer used this very watercolor as a reference for his engraving.

But what of the skull itself? Dürer's eye was as acute in its perception of detail as any in art history, and he certainly knew well-enough how to accurately draw a correctly-proportioned human skull. This particular skull is not it. To me, this skull with its enlarged cranium shows every indication of hydrocephalic deformity. And yet nowhere in any commentaries on this engraving by other writers can I find even a mention of this bizarre truth. What did the artist wish to indicate? Was this strange detail part of an allegorical commentary? I do not know, and perhaps the reason why others gloss over this detail is because they do not know either!

Working in a medium which he had made his own, Dürer's engraving burin articulates a whole tonal scale of textures, from the multiple pleats of the lady's dress to the eddying plumes and heraldic feathers of the helmet, from her own smooth feminine skin to the alien hairiness of the wild man. They seem as mismatched a couple as can be imagined. And yet the lady in question, fashionably dressed in the well-to-do Nuremburg style, seems anything but unwilling to receive the advances of her shaggy admirer (the detail, above). Dürer's sly humor seems to indicate that this particular beauty and her beast might well find true happiness together after all!

Artist: Albrecht Dürer
Work: Portrait of Oswolt Krel, 1499
Medium: Oils
Location: Alte Pinakotek, München

Artist: Albrecht Dürer
Work: Coat-of-Arms with a Skull, 1503
Medium: Engraving
Location: Prints from the engraved plate are housed in the collections of the Bayly Art Museum, University of Virginia, Charlottesville; the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco; the Worcester Art Museum; the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Gallery of Canada; The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, and others.

Artist: Albrecht Dürer
Work: Three views of a tournament helmet, c.1498 (the spurious date of 1514 and Dürer's monogram at the top have been added by a later unknown hand)
Medium: Watercolor
Location: Musée du Louvre, Paris

Sources: The 15th-century image of the Bal des Ardents by Jean Froissart comes from A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, by Barbara W. Tuchman. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1978, which title also contains a complete account of the Bal and its historical circumstances. The stained glass image of the Wild Man and Woman supporting the Arms of Kyburg (c.1490), attributed to Lukas Zeiner, is from The Curated Object website. The 'Animal Queen' playing card (c. 1465) is in the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, München.

Albrecht Dürer: Genius of the German Renaissance, by Norbert Wolf. Taschen, 2006.
Dürer, by Martin Bailey, Phaidon Press, Ltd. 1995.

*The coat-of-arms on the left panel, which itself features a wild man, is Krel's, and the one on the right panel is that of his wife, Agathe von Essendorf.

Familiar, Unknown Places

2010-02-19T12:04:00.012+01:00

It is a landscape which seems to take in all the world. Low in the foreground an arched bridge spans a lazily meandering river. The river, golden in the hazy light, flows leisurely down from a series of high lakes that nestle in the shadows of the surrounding mist-shrouded peaks. This monumental landscape (below), which seems newly-emerged from the very act of creation in the morning of the world, might appear familiar to you. It might perhaps give you the feeling that you have seen it somewhere before, but you cannot quite place where. And yet I guarantee that you have not; certainly not as you are seeing it here.

Well, now you have scrolled down, and have discovered (if you have not guessed already) that this epic landscape is in fact the background to that ultimate icon of art: Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. But it is the background as it has never before been seen. This weblog having something of an off-center focus, I'm going to overlook the lady herself, because it is this background landscape which has fascinated me for many years. Is it really possible that the most overly-familiar image in the whole of art still can yield a secret or two? Well, apparently; yes it is. Because while studying a print of Leonardo's masterpiece (and which was, apparently, his own favorite among his works), it suddenly occured to me that if the two sides of the painting were joined together, then the landscape on either side would actually connect to form a whole, and a second landscape not normally visible would appear.

So I digitally stitched together the two opposite sides of the painting (above). The match was remarkably close - more so, in fact, than I had expected. By using a digital technique known as cloning, I could use the master's own brushwork to repair the central join, and also to erase the portions of the portrait which intruded into my frame. It's a somewhat finicky process, but once it was completed, I was looking at the background to the Mona Lisa as a landscape in its own right. Now, the question that you're asking, of course, is: did Leonardo intentionally plan the landscape to wrap around in this way? Honestly, I have no idea, although I would answer: probably not. But his works are so full of tricks and secrets (they made Dan Brown's bank manager smile contentedly, after all) that in Leonardo's mysterious world, anything seems potentially possible. And even were it to be down to simple coincidence, then it's still an intriguing one.

Seen in this way, in all its primeval grandeur, Leonardo's background landscape rather reminds me of those early Chinese landscape masterpieces which, due to their scroll format, present us with similarly grand vistas. The artist Xu Daoning (Hsu Tao-ning) carried these visions of vastness to their ultimate expression (above). By painting his landscape on a roll-out scroll, he created a scene too monumental to take in at once (click on the image to view the effect - the scroll would have been unrolled for viewing from right to left), for his scroll is almost 3 meters (9½ feet) long. The eye travels along the length of the panoramic composition as it would when viewing nature itself.

The fishermen in their boats (the detail, above), anonymously distant, add a brief human element, but in the overall scale of the artist's composition they are easily swallowed up among the surrounding rivers and peaks which dwarf them. With these awesome Chinese landscapes, unlike with Western art's Leonardo, there never were any figures in the foreground. The landscapes were the subject.

So would it be possible to view any more of these landscapes by Leonardo without their intervening foreground figures? The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (above) has a similar landscape to the Mona Lisa which is equally monumental in its space and vastness. Without this time wrapping it around itself, but still by using the same cloning technique to erase the foreground figures, I set to work, and the landscape emerged.

My cloned version of this second background (above) produced another vista of mist-shrouded peaks and deep river valleys. But unlike the Chinese visions of four to five centuries earlier, Leonardo's 16th-century European world was not the age for such landscapes to be treated as subjects in their own right. My digital treatments here of his background landscapes therefore cheat time as well as his own creative reality. However far the artist's towering outside-the-box genius could reach, it still could not encompass the idea, which the art of Song Dynasty China had long embraced, that such landscapes not only could be a worthy subject in their own right, but could, by their expressive power, reflect something of the human condition back to their viewers (by Wu Yuan-Chih, below).

But neither Leonardo's background landscapes nor the imposing panoramas of the Song were exact depictions of existing places, neither were they intended to be such. Just as these early Chinese landscapes were based upon the views seen in such regions as the Huangshan Mountains, Leonardo's landscapes were based upon views of the southern Alps, without quite being either. They are landscapes with a plus factor: places familiar, yet unknown, remaining essentially the unique inner visions of the artists who created them.

Artist: Leonardo da Vinci
Work: Mona Lisa (aka: La Gioconda), c.1503-05
Medium: Oils
Location: Musée du Louvre, Paris

Artist: Hsü Tao-ning
Work: Evening Songs of the Fishermen, Song dynasty, c.1049
Medium: Ink and light color on silk handscroll
Location: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City

Artist: Leonardo da Vinci
Work: The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, c.1508-10
Medium: Oils
Location: Musée du Louvre, Paris

Artist: Wu Yuan-Chih
Work: The Red Cliff, Song Dynasty, 12th-century
Medium: Ink on silk handscroll
Location: National Palace Museum, Taipei

Sources:
Leonardo, by Bruno Santi. Constable, London, 1975
Chinese Art: The Five Dynasties and Northern Sung, by Jean A. Keim. Methuen and Co., 1962.

Digitally cloned composits and analysis graphics by Hawkwood

Beautiful, Naked and Chained to a Rock

2010-02-12T14:33:00.015+01:00

Take the portrayal in art of an ever-popular myth. It has three essential ingredients: a swooning heroine, beautiful, naked and chained to a rock; a dashing hero, suitably armed and equipped by the gods; and a terrifying sea monster whose approach churns the sea to fury. Now, you might think that to do this myth any sort of justice these three elements should not be reduced any further, but in practice the hero and the monster sometimes are relegated to an insignificant background position, or even dispensed with altogether (as in the version by Edward John Poynter, below); the naked heroine, never.

First, the myth (I'll try to be brief). Perseus was the son of the mortal woman Danae and mighty Zeus (a cracking story in itself, which I'll save for another time). Equipped with a glinting shield (on loan from the goddess Minerva) and winged sandals (on loan from the god Mercury), and fresh from his conquest of the gorgon (she whose hideous gaze turns those who meet it to stone, even as the severed head which our hero carries - for his own safety - in a pouch), Perseus is flying (courtesy of those winged sandals) over Ethiopia when he spies a beautiful (aren't they all?) maiden, naked (of course), and bound to a rock by the shore. She is (she shyly explains) Andromeda, daughter of Cepheus (the king) and Cassiopeia (the queen).

Andromeda's mother's vanity prompted her to boast that she was more beautiful than Poseidon's sea nymphs (Gustave Doré's painting, above). Bad idea. Slighted, Poseidon sends a grotesque monster to ravage the coast, whose reign of terror can only be placated by the king and queen including their daughter on the atrocious monster's menu. Swift as thought, Perseus wings over to the anguished royal parents. Apparently not above driving a good bargain under pressure (even as the frightful monster bears down upon the rock), our hero offers to dispatch the monster in return for the maiden's hand. The deal is done and dusted, as (after a suitably heroic struggle) is the monster also. Happy parents. Hand in marriage. All's well that ends well.

Unsurprisingly, artists have found this heady mix of heroic derring-do, female nakedness and fanciful monster irresistible. And with the heroine's nudity safely placed within an allowable classical context, it was all brakes off for the portrayal of this myth through several durable centuries of art history. But consider the versions above (and there are many, many more), painted by *six different artists over some two centuries. Whether by Rubens, Titian, or others, it's difficult not to notice, not so much the individuality of these interpretations of the myth, but just how samey they are, with the main difference seeming to be whether Andromeda is swooning to the right or to the left. And another element has crept in. Perseus is sometimes depicted astride the winged horse Pegasus, which actually belongs in another myth, and whose rider was the hero Bellerophon (who dispatched that clumsy-to-imagine monster, the Chimera). It seems that myths, once they become entangled with each other, are difficult to unravel. Even in filmed versions (Clash of the Titans), Perseus now rides Pegasus.

The painting within this style and time frame (16th-18th centuries) which to me offers something more than the others of its kind is by Joachim Wtewael (above). The eye moves comfortably in a clockwise direction around Wtewael's composition, and he includes enough background detail of buildings and helpless citizenry to make us aware of the scope of human life and society that has fallen within range of the monster's ravages. And what a monster. Gone are the unconvincing rubber-toothed curiosities of the artist's contemporaries. Wtewael's monster is so imaginative in its colorful and decorative detail that we find ourselves almost regretting that this splendid beast must meet its end. The foreground as well is strewn with an acutely observed still life of sea shells and human bones. And Wtewael at last provides us with an Andromeda worth saving. By golly, if I wasn't such a coward I'd consider rescuing this particular Andromeda myself.

Painted a century before Wtewael's version, the narrative painting of Piero di Cosimo (above) is a world away in style, and stays remarkably close to the original myth. At first sight, di Cosimo's painting might seem somewhat over-full and confusing. But in an age before the graphic novel, the artist includes different scenes from the myth in this one image. Things become more comprehensible when viewed as their separate elements (below).

Perseus (1) flies to the rescue, and does battle with the monster (2) as the bound Andromeda (3) recoils in anguish. On the shore, King Cepheus (4) and his court and consort (5) avert their eyes in dread, anxiously awaiting the outcome of the contest. The day is won, as Perseus and the rescued princess rejoin the king (6), amid general rejoicing, waving of fronds, and playing of various exotic musical instruments. di Cosimo's painting is full of lively and colorful detail, from the carefully detailed costumes to the curious cloud-veiled peak in the distance, which perhaps signifies Olympus, the abode of the gods.

Journeying forward to the 19th century, Gustave Doré (who portrayed the sea nymphs above) offers us a wonderfully sensual Andromeda, frantically retreating (as much, at least, as her bonds will permit) from the advancing monster's slathering jaws (above). As well she might, because our hero is nowhere in sight. And with the gape-jawed monster this close to the frantic heroine, he'd better hustle before the monster rewrites the myth. Doré here uses the cool grey of the dark rock face and the backdrop of even-darker sky to brilliant effect, making the pale and naked heroine seem all the more vulnerable.

Painted 22 years after Doré's version, Frederic, Lord Leighton's portrayal of the myth (above) certainly utilises his flair for the drama of the moment, but - presumably unintentionally - radically alters the myth's emotional landscape. Here, uniquely, the monster is not only not in the sea, but by its stance seems actually to be offering protection to the cowering Andromeda, shielding her (or so it seems) with its wing from the hero's onslaught while taking the hit from Perseus' arrow.

A sea monster with wings? What was the artist thinking? Well, for me it's forgiveable, because Leighton's monster was among the first to be painted after the discovery and naming of dinosaurs, and that sense of dinosaurian conviction is tangible in the monster's believable anatomy. For his artist predecessors, such gigantic reptiles were firmly in the realms of myth. For Leighton, living in the last half of the 19th century, they suddenly were a long-vanished but very real part of our world's distant past, and with the naming of dinosaur fossils and their first life reconstructions, the monsters of myth had become several shades less fantastic.

Artist: Edward John Poynter
Work: Andromeda, 1869
Medium: Oils
Location: Private collection

Artist: Gustave Doré
Work: Oceanides (Naïads of the Sea), c.1860-69
Medium: Oils
Location: Private collection

Artist: Joachim Wtewael
Work: Perseus rescuing Andromeda, 1611
Medium: Oils
Location: Musée du Louvre, Paris

Artist: Piero di Cosimo
Work: Perseus frees Andromeda, c.1510
Medium: Oils
Location: Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

Artist: Gustave Doré
Work: Andromeda, 1869
Medium: Oils
Location: Private collection

Artist: Frederic, Lord Leighton
Work: Perseus and Andromeda, 1891
Medium; Oils
Location: Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Source: Bulfinch's Mythology, by Thomas Bulfinch. Abridged edition, Dell Publishing, 1967

*Top row, left to right: François Lemoyne, c.1510. Carle van Loo, c.1735-40. Peter Paul Rubens, c.1639-40. Bottom row, left to right: Carlo Sarecini, c.1610. Guiseppe Cesari (Cavaliere d'Arpino), 1602. Vecellio Tiziano (Titian), c.1553-59.

Digitally restored scans and analysis graphics by Hawkwood.

The Sham Dairymaid

2010-02-03T13:21:00.019+01:00

In the park of the palace of Versaille, where all things conform to an ordered, symmetrical fantasy, there is a corner of rustic asymmetry - though no less fantastic than the rest. This pocket-handkerchief collection of buildings includes a cottage with an attached watermill (below), a barn and a dairy. It is known as Hameau de la Reine (the Queen's hamlet), and was purpose-built in the 1780's to allow Marie Antoinette to indulge her pastorale fantasies. In a time when the aloof aristocracy considered that to pretend to be a hard-working peasant was quite the most charming thing, the Queen would retire with her ladies-in-waiting to Hameau, dress themselves as dairymaids and shepherdesses, and milk cows suitably chosen for their docility using custom-made porcelain pails emblazoned with the Queen's monogram.

It was against this indulgent social backdrop that the artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze formed his career. While sojourning in Italy, Greuze fell in love with a countess who was one of his pupils. But with his love apparently unrequited, he returned to Paris and instead married the daughter of a bookseller. As his willing and available model, the young Anne-Gabrielle seems to have been an artist's dream come true, for not only did she possess a face which typified the ideal beauty of the time (The White Hat, below), but by using her as his costumed subject, Greuze could exploit the prevailing aristocratic taste for portrayals of a sham and impossibly romanticised pastoral life.

It was this bookseller's daughter who inspired the two works for which the artist is now best known. The Milkmaid (below) is pure charade. The satin dress is hardly authentic farm attire, and the delicate hand which loosely holds the milk ladle clearly has seen little of hard work. The ladle, and even the pony with its wicker baskets, are no more than props in a piece of contrived theatre in which this sham dairymaid is the featured actress. But with her dairymaids-are-easy pose and her come-hither eyes, she reached an audience who themselves were indulging in the same fantasies, and so were willingly convinced.

With The Broken Pitcher (below), we see the same subterfuge at work. Anne-Gabrielle, again clothed in satin, was no more likely to have fetched water from the local fountain than she was accustomed to struggle up at four in the morning to milk the lowing herd. But with this subject there is an added frisson of eroticism in the evident (to use today's ludicrously coy term) wardrobe malfunction, and in the pitcher's symbolic suggestion of shattered virginity. This symbolism is enhanced by the position of the clutched hands, and by the blooms cradled in the folds of the dress that will not now receive the water which they need to remain fresh.

When we become aware of these included elements, the seemingly-innocent escapism of The Broken Pitcher gains a darker and more forceful dimension (the detail, below). Seen in this light, it is not so much a portrayal of beauty, as it is of beauty despoiled; not so much a picture of innocence, as of innocence lost. But whose? By all accounts, Anne-Gabrielle was anything but the demure creature that she seems from her husband's canvasses. Rather, her extra-marital sexual escapades, which she apparently took no precaution to conceal either from her husband or from society in general, seem to have driven the artist to despair. Poor Jean-Baptiste. Disillusioned with his marriage, and also with the critique which his attempts at classical subjects prompted from the then all-powerful French Art Academy. Even the small fortune which his successful works generated was squandered by the extravagant frivolities of his wife. But worse was to follow.

To play at being servants and farm labourers when the real labourers were starving was, of course, a recklessly immoral indulgence. A few short years later, the Revolution came to Marie Antoinette's make-believe farm in the palace grounds, and the queen, abandoning her porcelain milk pails and her fragile fantasies, was led away to the guillotine. Unlike the queen and many of her social standing, Greuze avoided losing his head. But he did lose everything else. At age 76 he found himself destitute, with his art being rejected as superficial, sentimental and - that most damning of French adjectives - bourgeois. Jean-Baptiste Greuze died four years later, and was buried with only two mourners in attendance.

Greuze' art went from fashionable demand to scornful rejection, both during his own lifetime and beyond. It seems that only with a certain historical distance can we now see that he in fact succeeded in capturing a specific spirit of his time. That such a spirit had drifted away from harsh social realities was nevertheless something which the artist portrayed in his canvasses, and with hindsight becomes a valid historical statement in itself. And his portrayals of his wife (detail of The White Hat, above) offer images that are at the same time both innocent and coquettish, capricious and mysterious, aloof and alluring, and ultimately enigmatic. And that is art enough.

Well, I had thought to end this particular post with the above statement, but then discovered that New York's Frick Collection has a pastel portrait (detail, above, and below) of Anne-Gabrielle which Greuze painted ten years after The White Hat. Ten years can be a long time in a marriage. A world of difference separates the Anne-Gabrielle portrayed in The White Hat from the Madame Baptiste of 1790.

By 1790 the Revolution had already begun, and the social landscape which formed the basis of Greuze' art was being swept away. But it is the domestic transformation which marks Anne-Gabrielle's expression here. The mystic porcelain beauty of ten years earlier has vanished. In her place Greuze now shows a woman of resigned and weary irony. The sad disillusionment which guided the artist's hand does not make for a comfortable viewing of this sardonic portrait, but it does demonstrate Greuze' accomplishment, both artistic and human, in capturing the painful emotions of his failed relationship. Three years after Greuze painted this bittersweet portrait, and 34 years after he and Anne-Gabrielle married, the couple were finally divorced.

Artist; Jean-Baptiste Greuze
Work: The White Hat, 1780
Medium: Oils
Location: The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Artist; Jean-Baptiste Greuze
Work: The Milkmaid, ca. 1770
Medium: Oils
Location: The Louvre, Paris

Artist; Jean-Baptiste Greuze
Work: The Broken Pitcher, 1771
Medium: Oils
Location: The Louvre, Paris

Artist; Jean-Baptiste Greuze
Work: Madame Baptiste, 1790
Medium: Pastels
Location: The Frick Collection, New York

Sources:
The World's Greatest Paintings, Vol. 1, ed. by T. Leman Hare. Odhams Press, Ltd. 1936
Eccentric Spaces, by Robert Harbison. André Deutsch, Ltd. 1977 (for the material about Hameau). Additional biographical information from The Wallace Collection database.

Scan of The White Hat: Harrick. Digitally restored scans of The Milkmaid and The Broken Pitcher: Hawkwood. Madame Baptiste image: The Frick Collection.

Visitations

2010-01-29T11:15:00.007+01:00

In the closing years of the fifteenth century the city of Florence was home to an unlikely artists' partnership. Fra Bartolomeo was, as his name suggests, a simple-living and pious Dominican monk, gentle and retiring by nature. His studio partner, on the other hand, relished his reputation as a wild and woolly party animal, as partial to the bottle - and to the Florentine ladies - as he was to the tavern which he kept that allowed him to indulge his appetite for both. His name was Mariotto Albertinelli.

The studio co-operation of this apparently mismatched pair lasted until 1498 (The Annunciation, painted by both artists in 1497, above), when the good friar retreated to a monastery to continue working in devoted seclusion, leaving his pleasure-loving partner to complete several of his unfinished studio works. Five years after this, the congregation of Saints Martino and Elizabetta approached Albertinelli with a commission. He was asked to produce a large-scale work on the theme of the Visitation (below). Scripturally, this was the occasion related in Luke's Gospel when Elizabeth, the future mother of John the Baptist, is visited by her younger cousin Mary, the mother-to-be of Jesus. The figures of the two women in Albertinelli's composition would be life-size.

Now, although his surviving works are competent enough, Albertinelli does not appear to have been a particularly inspired painter. But with his commission for the Visitation, the artist seems to have lifted himself beyond both all that he previously had produced and his own stormy temperament to create a work of deep and sublime tranquility. I'm also inclined to think that only Italian genius - and perhaps only Florentine genius at that - could have produced this particular combination of luminous colors. But why do Albertinelli's colors produce an effect of such intense harmony?

When a standard color wheel is superimposed upon the scene (above), we can see that the orange of Elizabeth's robe and her olive green dress is complementary to (that is: opposite to on the wheel) the rich blue of Mary's robe and the warm red of her dress. In color theory, secondary green is complementary to primary red, and secondary orange is complementary to primary blue. In Albertinelli's composition, these colors circle around each other in a kind of dance in the costumes of the two women. Where the colors appear in the artist's composition is as critical as the colors themselves.

The elder of the two cousins leans forward to kiss her visitor in greeting (the detail, above). This simple gesture of affection, which is the whole focus of the painting, is dramatised by the background architecture. Hardly intended as a realistic building, Albertinelli deploys his background as if it were a stage set, the single arch with its Renaissance columns echoing the altarpiece curve of the painting's shape. The artist creates a perfect symmetry: the top of the painting itself and the columned arch share the same center (below), which circle also contains the action of the two women as they lean towards each other in greeting.

Well, all of the above having been said, any amount of color theory and compositional analysis is in the end not enough to explain, not only why the painting as a whole is such an unquestioned masterpiece, nor even why it is so dramatically better than this artist's other works. How is it possible that an artist notorious for his erratic and fiery temper, his drinking, and his dedicated pursuit of the pleasures of the flesh, nevertheless produced a work of such intense sublimity? Perhaps something of the spirit of his former pious friend and studio partner remained with him. Or perhaps he had his own visitation of the spirit, inexpressible in words, but able to be glimpsed through his one supreme masterwork.

Artist: Mariotto Albertinelli
Work: The Visitation, 1503
Medium: Oils
Location: Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

Sources:
The World's Greatest Paintings, Vol. 1, ed. T. Leman Hare. Odhams Press, Ltd. 1936

Scans from the Web Gallery of Art (see my sidebar links). Superimposed color wheel element by Don Jusko at colorwheel dot com. Analysis graphics by Hawkwood.

In the Land of Giants

2010-01-16T16:40:00.018+01:00

It was the land of the Patagons. Their name appears on old maps of the region (below), and in travellers' accounts which - literally - enlarged upon the prosaic truth by giving these natives gigantic stature. And so the land which we now call Patagonia became to the sixteenth century the Land of Giants. Which, in a way, it is; although the giants are in the landscape, for the giant snow-clad peaks of the Andes mountain chain end on its southernmost shore.

My thoughts drew me to this remote region when I noticed that my *prehistory blog had attracted a visitor from Ushuaia, a settlement overlooking the Beagle Channel at the southernmost tip of Tierra del Fuego in Argentinian Patagonia (the map, below). I enjoy it when my blogs draw what for European me are far-flung visitors, so to have one from what is regarded as the southernmost city in the world was kind of cool.

Although my own travels in South America took me no farther south than Peru's coastal desert, the region of Patagonia is one of those names in geography that reek of travellers' tales and stunning landscapes. So when in 1979 in my local library I came across a book by the then-unknown author Bruce Chatwin whose very title promised to take me there in spirit, I borrowed it and took it home. This was the hardcover edition of In Patagonia, and I devoured it from cover to cover. The book - and Chatwin's own quest - begins with a childhood memory of his grandmother showing him a piece of preserved leathery skin which she duly explained was from a 'brontosaurus'. As Chatwin later learned, it was in fact a fragment of the preserved skin of a Megatherium (the reconstruction by Zdenek Burien, below) - an extinct elephant-sized ground sloth - from a cave in Patagonia. Haunted in later years by this memory, Chatwin sets off to find the location of the creature's former habitat.

Whether or not Chatwin finds it, and what he encounters along the way, makes for exhilarating reading, and the book was still fresh in my thoughts when I was contacted by the art director of Pan Books. He was excited about a new title that Pan planned to publish under their Picador imprint, and wanted me to produce the cover art for them. Well, you can guess the rest. My brief was to use one strongly dominant and rather unreal color for a Patagonian landscape. The view which I chose was of the spectacular *peaks in the Cerro Torre Los Glaciares National Park, and I chose a dominant green tint to suggest the effect of moonlight (below). Most of my cover art took a working week to produce, but my painting for In Patagonia was completed in just two days flat, and went like a breeze.

Unusually for Picador, the art director opted for a 'wrapround'-style format (below) for the illustration, framed by a wide margin. Generally, the shelf-life of a paperback cover is some one or two years before it is reissued with a different cover. But the cover art for In Patagonia went on to establish a personal record for me, the Picador edition going through a total of eighteen reprints with the same cover over a ten-year period, before Penguin Books took over the publishing rights and used their own photographic cover. But as things turned out, that was not quite the end of my professional involvement with the land of Patagonia.

Twelve years after this, the award-winning wildlife documentary film company Partridge Films approached me to produce painted geophysical maps and the title design (below) for their film about the wildlife of the region, Patagonia: A Land Unknown. Sitting in the Partridge Films studio hunched over their editing machine, I had my first shocking look at the sequence of film in which killer whales deliberately beach themselves to seize young seals - a sequence that later also appeared in David Attenborough's own wildlife series.

I had hopes of producing cover art for more of Bruce Chatwin's titles which Picador subsequently published. But by this time a different face was seated at the art director's desk, and it never happened. These things have so much to do with timing, and with the individual personalities involved - and with the luck which makes these disparate factors coincide.

Artist: Hawkwood
Work: In Patagonia, 1979
Medium: Acrylics
Location: Collection of the artist

Sources:
In Patagonia, by Bruce Chatwin. Picador edition, Pan Books Ltd. 1979
Prehistoric Animals, by J. Augusta and Z. Burien. Paul Hamlyn Ltd. 1960

*Chasing the Raptor
*These peaks were also featured to spectacular effect in Werner Herzog's 1991 film Scream of Stone.

The author Austin Whittall has his own excellent and comprehensive blog about the mysterious and mythical wildlife of Patagonia, both extinct and legendary, at: Patagonian Monsters

Through the Seventh Gate

2010-01-02T16:01:00.032+01:00

Although astronomy can explain such phenomena as eclipses, the alignments of moons and planets still hold something mysterious: these phenomena retain the aura of mystic events. In the 11th-century, in the country that was then the land of Persia, there lived an astronomer by the name of Omar ben Ibrahim al-Khayyami, who, when he was not occupied with astronomical calculations, for his pleasure wrote a series of verses which offer universal reflections on life, on death, and on implacable fate.

Seven centuries passed. Half a world away in Victorian England, a rather indifferent writer named Edward Fitzgerald decided to compose a translated version of the ancient Persian verses. Something mysterious happened. From the alignment of minds that were the Persian astronomer and the Victorian writer emerged an extraordinary poet who resembled neither, and who - at least in English-speaking minds - eclipsed both. In the West we know those verses as the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, and it is Fitzgerald's translation (which is more of an interpretation) which from its first appearance in 1851 established itself as the definitive and familiar English version.

In Fitzgerald's version, Omar comes across as a cheerfully practical fellow, as fond of his wine as he is of a bit of philosophy, full of good humor in the face of an unforgiving and unrelenting fate. Perhaps inevitably, Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyám attracted the production of several lavishly illustrated editions, including one by the American artist *Elihu Vedder. In 1913 a sumptuous version illustrated by the Irish artist René Bull was published. First editions of the Fitzgerald/Bull version are now rare, but in 1973 I came across one (which, I admit, is now worth several hundred times above the modest amount that I originally paid for it) in an antiquarian dealer's in London's Kings Road.

Most of Bull's illustrations burst with decorative color, but when he came to tackle the verses dealing with human death and fate, rather than continuing in the same style, he seems to have racked things up a notch to transcend his decorative approach. Here, his images resonate with an authoritive power, his color palette is limited to muted tones (the first two, above, and below), and his pen drawings (above) become both dramatic and vivid.

Basically, Omar's simple advice as interpreted by Fitzgerald is that a simple acceptance of circumstances is very different from a passive submission to blind fate. So (says Omar) take things as they come, and live in the moment as you find it, without regret. For all moments, once past, will never return. Or, as Fitzgerald has Omar say in perhaps his most famous verse:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

Below, in sequence, are the four numbered verses which accompany the first four illustrations in this post. And if any reader would like to obtain a copy of the Fitzgerald/Bull edition, it is currently available as a modestly-priced contemporary reprint.

31

Up from Earth's Centre through the *Seventh Gate
I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate,
And many Knots unravel'd by the Road;
But not the Knot of Human Death and Fate.

32

There was a Door to which I found no Key:
There was a Veil past which I could not see:
Some little Talk awhile of ME and THEE
There seemed---and then no more of THEE and ME.

33

Then to the rolling Heav'n itself I cried,
Asking, "What Lamp had Destiny to guide
"Her little Children stumbling in the Dark?"
And---"A blind Understanding!" Heav'n replied.

53

With Earth's first Clay They did the Last Man's knead,
And then of the Last Harvest sow'd the Seed:
Yea, the first Morning of Creation wrote
What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read.

Artist: René Bull
Work: Illustrations for The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, 1913
Medium: Watercolor and pen and ink
Location: Whereabouts of the originals are untraced. Most are presumably in private collections.

Sources:
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Rendered into English Verse by Edward Fitzgerald, Illustrated in Colour and in Line by René Bull. Hodder and Stoughton, 1913 (first edition)
The Enigma of Edward Fitzgerald, appearing in Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952, by Jorge Luis Borges. Translated by Ruth L.C. Simms. University of Texas Press, 1964

*See my November 2009 post, The Lair of the Sea Serpent, for more of Vedder's work
*In the ancient world, Saturn was regarded as the seventh planet

The Grail, or Something Like It

2009-12-31T16:13:00.013+01:00

In his book about the *Grail, John Matthews makes the point that the quest for the Grail is never truly over. I would add that the reason for this is not so much that the Grail will never be found, but that what the Grail actually is, and what it represents, is different for those who quest after it. Sometimes we find what we are looking for, and sometimes we don't. And sometimes what we find is not that which we originally had sought.

Whatever it is that you seek, I hope that you may find it - or something very like it - in the year to come. And even if you do not do so, then I hope that your journey is still an interesting one.

A prosperous and rewarding 2010 to my followers, to my readers, and to all fellow bloggers!

Artist: Hawkwood
Work: The Quest, 1989 (digital version: December, 2009)
Medium: Acrylic, with digital elements
Location: Private collection

Source: *The Grail: Quest for the Eternal, by John Matthews. Thames and Hudson, 1981

A Winter Silence

2009-12-24T14:26:00.022+01:00

Exactly one hundred years ago the Dutch biscuit company Verkade released with their products a series of collectors' cards. The cards were from paintings commissioned from the artists Jan van Oort and Jan Voerman, and it became an engaging passtime for many households at that time to paste the cards into the albums, descriptively written in period Dutch by Jac P. Thijsse, which Verkade issued for the purpose.

Many of the albums were themed around the nature and wildlife of The Netherlands, and the paintings, and the albums with their cards, passed into Dutch folk art and became collectors' items - so much so that various facsimile editions were subsequently issued. The most recent reissue depicting the four seasons (which are the four albums which I have) even included a set of cards to cut out and paste á la the style of the originals.

Well, I have to admit that, several years later, I still haven't gotten around to pasting in the cards (give me a break; there are one hundred and forty four in each complete set). Maybe it's something to do with the times. Not that I'm impatient, because I can cheerfully muster the wherewithall to labor for hours customising HTML codes. But there might be another reason.

Because truth to tell, it is not so much the more well-known paintings on the cards that have my attention, as it is the pen drawings which decorate the albums. So I guess that (perhaps rather ungraciously in the eyes of Dutch folk culture!) the cards are for me rather redundant, as I apparently find that the albums with their black-and-white illustrations are already satisfying-enough in themselves. A modest credit on the albums' title pages mentions that these are by 'L.W.R. Wenckebach'.

Wenckebach's illustrations hold up throughout the series, but it is those which appear in the Winter album that truly shine (the six images shown here). With remarkable economy of line, snow-covered fields, canals and Dutch farm houses are conjoured from Wenckebach's pen lines, their darkness made more stark by the areas of paper which have simply been left blank to convey the covering blanket of whiteness.

Pollarded willows so typical of the Dutch landscape bend over a frozen canal. A woman carrying pails (presumably of animal feed) makes her way over the snow to a farm house door. Boats frozen fast into the ice lie immobile by a snowy bank. On the edge of a village a bridge spans the snow-covered ice of a river. The atmosphere of crisp winter silence is tangible.

As it happens, outside my window the snow does indeed lie thick on the ground at the moment, and despite a couple of attempts at a thaw, remains much as it fell several days ago. A perfect opportunity for contemplating these superb line drawings by L.W.R. Wenckebach, and for bringing them to an audience as international as they deserve.

Artist: Ludwig Willem Reymert Wenckebach
Works: Illustrations for the album 'Winter', 1909
Medium: Pen and ink
Location: Untraced

Source:
'Winter', by Jac P. Thijsse, published originally by Bakkerij 'De Ruijter', Firma Verkade & Co., 1909. Facsimile edition issued in 1997.

The Sheltering Snow

2009-12-10T10:02:00.016+01:00

At the beginning of the fourth century, in the city of Mérida, a young Spanish girl was martyred. During these early centuries of the new Christian faith, and the perceived threat which it presented to Imperial Rome and the established order, instances of - and opportunities for - dying for that faith were frequent enough. What perhaps is remarkable in the case of Eulalia is that, even at such a tender age (she was no more than twelve or fourteen at the time) she appararently actively sought her own martyrdom.

Knowing her daughter's declared willingness to make this supreme sacrifice, her mother attempted to hold Eulalia within the confines of her home. But her daughter escaped, found her way to the occupying Roman magistrate, and announced that she refused to sacrifice to the Roman deities. The instruments of torture were laid before her, and it was explained to her that all that she needed to do to avoid their use was to make a simple offering of a little salt and incense, which were then provided for her for that purpose. Eulalia remained resolute. The inevitable sentence was summarily executed. She was stripped. Her flesh was torn from her body with iron hooks, exposing bone. She was then staked, and burning torches were passed over her ragged flesh. Death finally came through suffocation from the inhaled smoke.

Legend steps in to elaborate upon history. At the moment of her death, a white dove appeared to issue from her mouth and ascend to heaven. When her mutilated body was cut down and laid upon the ground, a deep snow suddenly fell to clothe the broken and naked young corpse with a covering shroud of purest white. Redemption can take many forms. For Eulalia, it came in the form of the gently-falling snow so unexpected that the hardened soldiery, standing in the flakes of drifting white, were stunned to awed silence. Future canonization duly followed.

This is the story which the painting by Victorian artist John William Waterhouse (above) purports to portray. But if legend can elaborate upon history, then art, apparently, can elaborate upon both. The version of events as portrayed by Waterhouse would seem both accomplished and disturbing. Accomplished, because the artist has opted for a composition as dramatic as it is difficult to bring off, with its acute foreshortening of the principal figure of Eulalia, and its restrained and atmospheric palette of muted earth reds and cold grays. Of course Waterhouse was both an accomplished draughtsman and storyteller - as his hugely-popular Lady of Shalott, painted three years after his St Eulalia, testifies. But his treatment of Eulalia's martyrdom contains disquieting undercurrents.

The artist's model who posed for the young saint was clearly no girl at the threshold of her teen years, but a mature young woman (the inverted detail, above). And the powdery layer of snow - surely one of the central elements of the story - does anything but discreetly cover the lifeless half-nude body. Not even the most inoffensive suggestion of mortified flesh is apparent. Instead, the artist has opted for a symbolic flowering of spreading hair; an element that was already being considered in his preparatory sketch (below). That Eulalia had lustrous long tresses is known. But what is also known is that these were burned away by the torches. In these details - or rather, in the lack of them - Waterhouse presents us with a version of history which strays beyond being merely idealized to being actually sanitized. But for whose protection? For the artist's? For the sensibilities of his viewing public?

History already offered the artist the solution to this visual dilemma: the grievously mangled body of Eulalia was covered by the sheltering snow. And not the light dusting which Waterhouse shows, but a drift deep enough to make the body discernible only by its general outline. But it would seem that in his choice of a mature model, and in leaving that model unblemished and literally exposed, Waterhouse succumbed to the temptation to portray a whiff of mild Victorian *eroticism whose dubious inclusion was a betrayal of the very subject which he had chosen to portray.

Waterhouse was a master of such subtly suggestive treatments, and the studied slipped-off-the-shoulder costumes of such subjects as Psyche (the detail, above) must have had the thoughts of his Victorian audience racing with adventurous possibilities. But when he came to paint such a sensitive subject as Eulalia's martyrdom, was there not some small voice which said to him that such a voyeuristic treatment, however mild, was not merely inappropriate, but a really bad idea? Apparently not.

And the historical Eulalia? The passionate and intense sincerity of the young can burn more fiercely even than that of maturity. But is this enough to explain the young girl's fervor for, and active seeking out of, such a gruesome and horrifying death? And the Roman authorities and those who carried out their directives? Clearly such monstrous inhumanity is inexcusible in the name of any faith. But history sometimes becomes a mirror, inverting previous events. Almost exactly a century later, the horror which Eulalia suffered was again exemplified by the bestially cruel death - in a church at the hands of Christian monks - of Hypatia of Alexandria, one of the most enlightened and progressive pagan minds of her age. Eulalia had hardly begun her teen years when she died. Hypatia was forty five. Perhaps such terrible acts owe less to any perceived threats to a faith than they do to a dark and frenzied *misogyny.

Today, December 10, is Saint Eulalia's day.

Artist: John William Waterhouse
Work: Saint Eulalia, 1885
Medium: Oils
Location: The Tate Gallery, London

Artist: John William Waterhouse
Work: Study for Saint Eulalia c1885
Medium: Pen and ink with grey and brown wash heightened with white on paper
Location: The Tate Gallery, London

*This theme is also discussed in my post of November 2: 'Five Women and Four Serpents'.
*A hatred and loathing of women.

The Phantom of the Opera

2009-12-01T21:25:00.024+01:00

This is the story of one of my pieces of cover art, and how it came into being. It is August, 1993. I receive a phone call from the art director at Puffin Books, who explains that Puffin are planning a major re-issue of their series of literary classics, and would I be interested in producing the cover art for Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera (*below) for them? Within a few days I receive contracts to paint the Phantom and *three other Gothic classics for Puffin: Bram Stoker's Dracula, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Mystery and Terror, together with some color mock-ups from the art department of the cover designs for the new Puffin Classics series as a whole, which indicate where the title panel will be placed.

These Gothic titles are now out of copyright, which means that there are plenty of editions issued by other publishers to vie for attention in the bookshops with what Puffin will be offering. For me this is an agreeable situation, because if there are half a dozen different editions of the same book from which a potential purchaser can choose, then generally it's all down to the cover to help sway the choice that is made. At this stage I myself have no clear idea of how I am going to approach the illustration for the Phantom, other than to be guided by Puffin's request that I feature the respective 'monster' of each Gothic on the cover.

I sift for some vision of how the Phantom – Erik in Leroux’s story – might look. The American edition which I have to hand shows only the eerily-deserted grand staircase of the Paris Opera House on the cover. It's a professionally accomplished illustration, but there's not a phantom in sight - imagined or otherwise. And the films? The 1925 silent version with Lon Chaney, Snr., once seen, remains indelibly in the mind, resonating with the authentic power of a dream, or of a nightmare. Subsequent versions tend to offer a suave and rather romantic Erik who remains discreetly masked. I make a decision to ignore all previous interpretations and go back to Leroux's original text.

The airy baroque interiors of the Paris Opera House are transformed under Leroux's pen into spaces which become dark, brooding, and strangely claustrophobic in their vastness (above, and below). Leroux's opera house is at the same time both the same as, yet different from, the opera house of reality. It is a world closed in upon itself, and it is only in the air of this other opera house that Erik can breathe and live out the events of his tragic life. When one begins to read the book, one begins to breathe the same air as Erik, and his presence - even on the many pages in which he does not directly appear - is tangible. I scan the pages for a description of Erik's appearance: the cadaverous face, the yellowed skin stretched taught over the bone, the lack of a nose, the inexplicable glowing lights in the dark recesses of the eyes. As with a reading of Frankenstein, one becomes so familiar with the subsequent interpretations of others that the author's own description of the character comes almost as a shock.

I make some tentative sketches in pencil. The face described by Leroux seems so genuinely appalling that I find myself drifting towards a masked portrayal after all. I look through some pictures of stylish Venetian carnival masks. But Erik's mask is of black cloth. Not much help. Perhaps I can solve the problem by showing Erik unmasked, but keeping him as a dark figure in a corridor of shadows. I make another sketch. The result looks melodramatic - the very thing I'm trying to avoid. I decide to abandon the idea of attempting to show any atmospheric background, and zoom in on the face alone until it fills the entire cover area (my pencil sketch, below). It's only a rough sketch, but immediately I have the feeling that Erik is staring back at me. I work some more detail into the sketch and fax a copy to the art director. He offers enthusiastic encouragement for the idea.

Now begins the tracking down of reference material that might help me with the actual painting. Pictures of the Egyptian mummies in the Leiden Museum of Antiquities, and a photo of the naturally-mummified body of a priest in the Colombian Gold Museum, all become grist to the creative mill. I coat the face of my obliging son with a flour-and-water paste, then crackle-dry the resulting goo with my wife's hair dryer, studying the effect. On a canvas board I have previously applied a coating of ivory-colored oil paint with a palette knife. This ensures that the texture of the canvas will not appear too pronounced in the final reproduction, and provides me with a suitable ground on which to begin the painting. The board is about three times larger than the printed cover will be, as I know from experience that my work tends to look best in print when reduced by this ratio. But this will make the face which I am about to paint considerably larger than life-size, and my planned in-your-face approach to the Phantom becomes a shade more daunting.

I begin painting the main areas of tone with a monochromatic earth-brown oil color, and progress to the point where I must break in order to allow this first stage to dry. I prop the board against a chair in a corner of my studio. At this stage it resembles an old daguerreotype, and l'm tempted to leave the final painting with something of this look to it. As a rule, my cover paintings tend to be strongly color-themed, as this greatly enhances the impact of the printed image when it appears in the bookshop, and this seems to hold particularly true for the Gothics. There is a good reason why the original silent film version (above) of Leroux's tale packs a greater punch than any later Technicolor version. I'm now left with time on my hands as I wait for this first stage to dry. On an impulse, and to make economic use of my own time, I begin painting *Frankenstein (below). From where I'm sitting I can see the first painting, and as Mary Shelley's tragic creature takes shape in front of me, Erik continues to watch me from the corner.

And so it continues, as these two feared and tragic beings gradually assume their finished form. The atmosphere in my work area becomes noticeably more oppressive. I begin to suffer from headaches, and my wife complains - with justification - of my own increasingly morose behavior. My studio becomes a no-go area for my impressionable seven year-old daughter, and I myself start to question my own wisdom in involving myself so closely with such material. Normally I prefer not to paint at night, as artificial light distorts the accuracy of colors. But now I find myself drawn to my studio over several successive evenings, working by the hard-edged light of a halogen lamp, manipulating the brush to create the blotched and mottled texture of Erik's skin. I actually enjoy the surrounding shadows. In the yellow-white halogen light I experimentally exhale smoke from my pipe onto the painting, wreathing the Phantom in a drifting cloud. The effect is wonderful, and I try to translate it into paint, making the shadow areas which surround the face less dense, until the darkest areas of the painting are the eyes themselves: twin ovals of unknowable space, in each of which a distant sun is burning, exactly as described by Leroux. The last touch is to surround these two suns with a red coronal glow, and the painting is complete.

Fifteen years later I returned to the painting to rework it digitally (above) for a more current portfolio of my work, adding some faded blooms and a page from the score of La Traviata. Perhaps it is an unexpected point to make, but during the creation of the original painting, as with the other Gothics, I did not intentionally set out to try and be scary. Rather, I attempted to approach these images as straight portraits, striving to keep the expressions relatively neutral. I think that readers always feel when someone is actually trying to make them scared, and the natural reaction to this tends to lead to the opposite effect. Those who have seen my 'portrait' of Erik tend to comment on a certain inexplicable gentleness in the face. It is this sensitivity of spirit, trapped as it was within a nature coupled with explosions of cruel frenzy and the despair of unappeasable loneliness, which to me represents the true horror of the Phantom.

Artist: Hawkwood
Work: The Phantom of the Opera, 1993
Medium: Oils
Location: Collection of the artist

Artist: Hawkwood
Work: Frankenstein, 1993
Medium: Oils
Location: Collection of the artist

Artist: Hawkwood
Work: The Phantom of the Opera, 2008
Medium: Scanned painted, photographic and textual elements
Location: Cyberspace

Sources:
'The Phantom of the Opera', by Gaston Leroux. Puffin Classics edition, 1994
'Frankenstein', by Mary Shelley. Puffin Classics edition, 1994

This post has been partially rewritten from my article which originally appeared in the Spring, 1995 edition of the Phantom fanzine BENEATH THE MASK. My appreciative thanks go to the founder of the British-based Phantom Appreciation Society for contacting me via the publisher to communicate her glowing response to my cover art on behalf of the Society. "All of us.."(her letter to me ended) "..have our own visions of how Erik must have looked - you have captured that vision for us." Feedback from the reading public is one thing, but to have received this reaction from such a critical audience is praise much-valued!

*My cover for this edition of the Phantom is generally available to see on the Internet, although these other versions - and the printed cover itself - tend to give my original colors a strong orange cast. For my image for this post, I have matched the colors to my original painting.

*I subsequently received commissions to produce cover art for three further Gothic titles: Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. But by this time, further editorial hands were involved, and it is the Phantom, and the covers for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Edgar Allan Poe's Tales, which remain my own favorites, being the three titles to reach the bookshops virtually intact from my original planned sketches.

*See my post of September 13: ‘Monsters Have Light Inside’.

The Lair of the Sea Serpent

2009-11-27T15:24:00.012+01:00

Obliging monsters have always rushed in to fill the gaps in human knowledge. When far lands were still unexplored, and the vast stretches of ocean which divided them were still uncrossed, our imagination peopled those unknown lands with improbable giants whose heads in the tropic sun steamed like puddings, and the untraversed seas were stocked with huge coiling serpents that would rise up from the deeps to seize terrified sailors from the decks and gollop them down whole - and presumably still alive to regret the experience all the more.

We have inherited the depiction of such scenes from previous centuries, and they invariably brim with action and lurid detail. All the more startling, then, to encounter such a monster as portrayed by 19th century artist Elihu Vedder (above). What makes Vedder's sea monster so effective is its sheer matter-of-factness. Not only does the scene offer no trace of stirring action; Vedder actually depicts the glistening serpent calmly at rest, sunning itself unconcernedly among the dunes by the shore. In the distance a sandy peninsular stretches into a calm blue sea, and the sky speaks only of fine, warm weather. Every element in the painting is the antithesis of the way in which such fantasies have traditionally been portrayed, as in the engraving (below) from Konrad Gesner's extensive 16th century catalogue, which cheerfully included such fantastic creatures alongside more commonly-known animals.

It is a further irony that Vedder painted his basking sea serpent in an age when global exploration and enlightened knowledge of the intervening centuries had confined such threatening creatures to the human imagination. Ironic, because even though we know (as Vedder's audience also knew) that such an animal is the product of fantasy, we find ourselves willingly convinced by the existence of Vedder's monster. In contrast, Gesner's writhing horror, if it touches us at all, might raise no more than an amused smile.

Vedder's first painting shown here was in fact a second version painted some thirty five years after his more finished first version (above). It is always interesting to see the ways in which an artist has chosen to alter things between different versions of the same subject, and the first version is notable for its daring composition. Here, the artist has chosen to break a compositional rule and has used the horizon to split the canvas into two equal halves. And not only that, but the top half is just unbroken empty sky. The effect achieved is of great space and distance. Even the clouds lying on the horizon are less defined than in the later version, and we feel that this huge panorama of empty sky, azure sea, and sandy dunes is indeed the realm of the oh-so-believable monster lying before us.

The monster seems peaceful enough. But would we dare to venture past it and take the path between the dunes that leads down to the shore? We are, after all, in an alien realm. It is the realm, not only of the creature itself, but of the artist's own vivid and extraordinary imagination.

Artist: Elihu Vedder
Work: The Lair of the Sea Serpent, 1899
Medium: Oils
Location: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Artist; Elihu Vedder
Work: The Lair of the Sea Serpent, 1864
Medium: Oils
Location: The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

A Winter Shadow

2009-11-18T15:10:00.012+01:00

Here in northern Europe the long winter evenings are drawing in, and today's strong winds are stripping the few remaining dead leaves from the trees. There they lie beyond counting on the damp ground, then briefly sail up again like a club of kite surfers as the wind catches them. And apart from the fact that this year it is unseasonally mild, for me it's typical November weather. It was the same two years ago, when while out walking with my dog I stooped to pick up just one leaf out of the hundreds that lay around me.

The leaf had evidently been lying on the damp ground for some time, for much of the membrane between the veins had already rotted away, leaving a lace-like network so fragile that I dare not even place it in my pocket, but carried it in my hand until I was home again. I laid it carefully upon the glass platen of my scanner and scanned it in (above, but please note that this is a large image, and, for those with a slow Internet connection, clicking on the image may mean that it will take some time for it to load). Now a digital image, the full intricacy of the leaf's details could be examined on my monitor (the detail, below); more effectively, in fact, than if I were looking at the original leaf with a magnifying glass.

The scan was sitting on my hard drive for a few weeks before I hit upon the idea of using it as the main design element for a presentation cover of the music A Winter Shadow, by Swedish metal band Tiamat, which I was then compiling for a digital portfolio of my work. By converting the image to a negative, and adding a mirrored section of the leaf itself to create a more complete symmetry (below), the effect of a skeletal wintery darkness was emphasised.

Further layers and textures, mostly derived from close-ups of the leaf's own patterned filigree, helped to enhance the depth surrounding the leaf's shape, and suggest the idea of a fragile preserved pressed botanical specimen framed for display in some cabinet of curiosities. The added title typography completed the image (below).

And what of the leaf itself? Lying undisturbed on the damp ground outside, the fragile structure had survived, but in the dry warmth of my studio it soon dehydrated and disintegrated into a papery nothingness. The resulting scan is therefore all that remains: a winter shadow indeed, the ghost of a ghost.

Artist: Hawkwood
Work: A Winter Shadow, 2007
Medium: Digital, derived from scanned natural material
Location: Cyberspace

The music A Winter Shadow is featured on the Tiamat album The Astral Sleep.

Between Two Fires

2009-11-09T20:59:00.011+01:00

The table is set with simple fare: a loaf of bread, a green glass flagon of red wine, and a portion of pie ready to be served up onto a peuter plate. Hands crossed upon each other, the puritan is poised to say grace so that his meal can commence (below). If only it were that straightforward. Uneasily he glances around at one of the two distracting serving maids who are the 'fires' of the painting's title, as the other leans confrontingly towards him from the opposite side of the oaken table. Whichever way he turns, he must meet the coquettish gaze of one or other of them. Clearly they mean no real ill, but the puritan's starched dignity presents too soft a target to resist for a little harmless teasing, and the sprig of seasonal *mistletoe decorating the chandelier provides the excuse for their taunts.

It would be easy to dismiss as sentimental the now-unfashionable narrative style of this painting by Massachusetts-born Francis (Frank) Davis Millet. But to do so would be to do the painting an injustice. The narrative elements aside, Millet's canvas captures an interior light so tangible that we might have to look to Johan Vermeer for a quality of light as intense as this. Vermeer was, of course, the master of such interior light, and could deploy his genius to summon it's magic seemingly at will. From what I have seen of his other work, Millet captured it only once; in this painting. But that 'once' is so sublime, that everything in the painting, from the wine flagon to the rack of clay pipes on the serving table (detail, below) seems coated with this same cool light and soft, diffuse shadows so typical of a European interior.

And Millet deploys his color palette with great assurance. The overall muted warm and cool greys are offset against russet greens and browns, which are themselves counterpointed by the stark blacks of the puritan's garb and the bold broad stripes of the second maid's bodice and sleeves (detail, below). The textures as well are tangible. The white linen of the tablecloth, the coarser textile of the first maid's striped underskirt, dark wood, brass, glass, peuter, copper and flagstone floor are all given their due attention.

The scene is, of course, artifice. Millet apparently used a professional model - a Miss Green - to pose for both of the serving maids. And the puritan has the body of one of Millet's male models, with the face of a dour Scottish neighbor - a certain Linsay MacArthur - superimposed to capture the required facial expression. The interior was Millet's own home - the 14th century Abbey Grange in Broadway, Worcestershire. But knowing these details need not detract from Millet's accomplishment. The tableau is so charming that we find ourselves wanting to be convinced by the scene.

En route to the United States in 1912, Frank Millet took a first-class passage on the maiden voyage of the White Star Line's R.M.S. Titanic. He was last seen alive helping women and children into the lifeboats as the striken vessel settled lower into the water. His body was recovered from the North Atlantic waters, and taken for burial to East Bridgewater Cemetery, Plymouth County, in his native Massachusetts, where it now rests.

Artist: Francis Davis Millet
Work: Between Two Fires, c.1892
Medium: Oils
Location: The Tate Gallery, London

Sources:
'Catalogue of the Tate Gallery's Collection of Modern Art other than Works by British Artists', by Ronald Alley. Tate Gallery and Sotheby Parke-Bernet, London 1981.
'The World's Greatest Paintings, *Vol. II', edited by T. Leman Hare. Odhams Press, Ltd., 1934.

*My image for this post has been scanned from the above volume. Luxurious for their time, the color plate reproductions of this three-volume publication are nevertheless inevitably coarse by today's standards. For this reason I have not been entirely successful in eliminating the dot-screen with anti-aliasing, but as far as I have been able to trace things, this still represents the best image of this painting currently available on the Web, and I hope that other readers will enjoy seeing its details - just click on the first image here.

*For anyone reading this who is unfamiliar with European Christmas traditions (several of which, such as the mistletoe and the traditional tree, have been borrowed from earlier pagan customs): a sprig of mistletoe is hung inside. Anyone who happens to find themselves beneath the mistletoe is duty-bound to grant a kiss to the person who asks them.

Five Women and Four Serpents

2009-11-02T14:58:00.015+01:00

"Her black python, the great serpent.. was believed to be born of the earth's clay, since it emerges from the earth's depths and does not need feet to move over it; its progress recalled the rippling of rivers, its temperature the ancient, viscous darkness full of fertility, and the circle it describes, as it bites its own tail, the planetary system.." "The heavy tapestry shook, and above the cord holding it up, the python's head appeared. It came down slowly, like a drop of water running along a wall, crawled among the scattered garments, then, its tail stuck against the ground, reared up straight; and its eyes, more brilliant than carbuncles, fixed on Salammbô."

This vivid passage from Salammbô, Gustave Flaubert's 1862 novel of ancient Carthage, conveys all the exotic, erotic, and primal emotions that are recognisable elements of the woman+serpent theme. Flaubert's experimental novel, radically original for its time, sought to convey narrative through the sheer force of description. Lighting, color, scents and extended lists of exotic treasures are piled upon each other to create an atmosphere almost top-heavy with incense, ancient music, tapestries, ornaments, and precious stones and metals - an atmosphere captured in Gaston Bussière's sensual painting of the scene (above).

Flaubert's novel provides us with one of the most memorable woman+serpent encounters in fiction, but if we look to history for such an encounter, then the name which probably most readily springs to mind is that of Cleopatra, the queen of the Nile who reigned as one of the occupying Greek Ptolemy dynasty. The queen's elected form of suicide - to allow herself to be bitten by a poisonous asp (a small North African viper) has proven irresistible subject matter for artists; most of whom have taken the route of Jean-André Rixens (above).

Here, the queen who conquered the heart of Mark Anthony is portrayed as a suitably palid marble-colored corpse, her nudity eroticised by the partial covering of bed linen which reveals more of her body than it conceals (the detail, above). And any signs of the grim realities which are the symptoms of death by snakebite - swollen limbs blackened by necrosis with accompanying extensive morbid dermal blistering - are tastefully overlooked; as indeed they are in all such treatments of this subject. And where is the serpent? The picture could be a 'spot-the-snake' competition, because I have yet to find it.

Rixens' Cleopatra is one of many of it's kind, where the artist concerned has succumbed to the elements offered by the theme as an apparent pretext to show swooning and mostly nude female flesh. This would also seem to be the case with the version by Jan Massys (above), where the deadly reptile is reduced almost to a piece of decorative jewellery, and where the moment of death seems imbued with an orgasmic mysticism, as Massys reclines his classically-posed Cleopatra in pained yet graceful abandon to expire upon brocade cushions before a charmingly pastoral - and decidedly European - backdrop.

Compare Rixens' and Massys' treatments of the incident to Swiss symbolist Arnold Böcklin's version (above). Böcklin's Cleopatra was painted only two years earlier than Rixens' version, but here the artist plunges us into a very different world indeed. Böcklin steers himself deftly past any easy-option eroticism to confront what is actually happening. The dark shadow of Death itself slowly descends as a tangible black veil over the queen, and we are left in no doubt whatever that this is a flesh-and-blood woman who is actually in the act of dying. It is a brave and powerful image that, once seen, echoes in the mind.

But for all their varied treatments, one thing which unites the above paintings (at least; the three in which the serpent is visible) is the rather nonchalant - even unconvincing - way in which the snake itself has been portrayed (the detail from Bussière, above). The female anatomy on view is correct enough for us to conclude that the artists made use of models (although Massys seems to have relied upon a somewhat shaky memory), but the poor serpent is clearly from those artists' imaginations. It just is not that snakey.

Reason enough to include my third woman: an anonymous and mysterious femme fatale who seems to be a combination both of Cleopatra and of Salammbô. Charles Allen Winter's Fantasie Egyptienne (above), for all its formalised decorative background, presents us with a snake worthy of the name. This reticulated python (yes, it even can be identified by type) is clearly a living reptile, as serpentine as they come.

The sheen of moving light upon the scales, and the bunched muscle and rippling belly scales of the animal's coils (the detail, above), are as confidently portrayed as the woman's body (curiously, human knees are tricky things to convey convincingly in paint, but Winter carries off even this detail with surety), and the pattern of the floor mosaic (note the two scuttling frogs!) is a stylised version of the reptile's own markings. No attempt is made to provide the woman with a historically authentic costume, but the title of the piece makes it plain that this is, in any case, intended as a work of fantasy.

A journey into Ancient Greek mythology produces my fourth woman. Harmonia could claim stunning parentage, being the daughter of the gods Venus and Mars. She was also the wife of Cadmus, the hero and founder of the city of Thebes. But misfortune followed the couple, for Cadmus had killed a sacred serpent, and for this violation the gods meted out rough justice by transforming him into a snake. Evelyn de Morgan's treatment of this story (above) conveys all the bewilderment of Harmonia, as the transformed Cadmus attempts desperately to embrace his beloved wife with his coils.

The serpentine writhings are vividly conveyed by de Morgan, and even if the artist does take liberties with the serpent's length, the bewildered anguish of Harmonia (the detail, above) is plain enough. And despite her nude heroine, de Morgan understands well enough how to keep any eroticism in check with a combination of classical pose and poigantly-expressed emotions. But what became of Harmonia? It seems that in the end the gods were merciful in their own inscrutable way. Rather than granting Cadmus his former human state, Harmonia was herself transformed into a serpent. In the wilds of the Grecian landscape the two snakes sometimes can be seen together, entwined passionately in each others' coils.

Salammbô, Cleopatra, the unnamed Egyptienne, and Harmonia. That is a count of four women and four serpents. There is no serpent to accompany my fifth woman, for the fifth woman is herself the serpent. Isobel Gloag's The Kiss of the Enchantress (above) portrays a lamia, that seductive creature of legend that is half-woman, half-snake, claiming her knightly victim. On the banks of a twilit river lined with pollarded willows, the knight willingly succumbs to the creature's embrace as startled rabbits scuttle away. We are left to guess the outcome of this mysterious encounter, but in spite of the crucifix which he protectively clutches, a combination of encircling coils and equally-encircling thorny briars suggest that this knight's fate is already sealed.

There is, of course, another famed woman+serpent combination whose portrayal has been a much-favored and diversely-treated theme of artists through the centuries. But this post being my longest to date, that story will now have to wait. And far and forbidden Eden is a story in itself.

Artist: Gaston Bussière
Work: 'La Scène du Serpent', from Salammbô, 1910
Medium: Oils
Location: Musée Municipal des Ursulines, Macon

Artist: Jean-André Rixens
Work: The Death of Cleopatra, 1874
Medium: Oils
Location: Musée des Augustins, Toulouse

Artist: Jan Massys
Work: Cleopatra, c.1565
Medium: Oils
Location: Galleria Antiquaria L'Intrigo , Milan

Artist: Arnold Böcklin
Work: Dying Cleopatra, 1872
Medium: Oils
Location: Untraced

Artist: Charles Allen Winter
Work: Fantasie Egyptienne, 1898
Medium: Oils
Location: The Collection of Barry Friedman Ltd., New York

Artist: Evelyn de Morgan
Work: Cadmus and Harmonia, 1877
Medium: Oils
Location: The de Morgan Centre, London

Artist: Isobel Lilian Gloag
Work: The Kiss of the Enchantress, c.1890
Medium: Watercolor
Location: Private collection

Sources:
'Salammbô', by Gustave Flaubert. Translated from the French by A.J. Krailsheimer. Penguin Classics edition, 1977.
'Femme Fatale: Images of Evil and Fascinating Women', by Patrick Bade. Ash and Grant Ltd., 1979.
'Bulfinch's Mythology', by Thomas Bulfinch. Modern abridgment by Edmund Fuller. Dell Publishing, 1967.

The Book from the Kingdom of Shadows

2009-10-25T12:02:00.013+01:00

I seem to have something of a dilemma. My present state of indecision is the result of my acquiring a book; in this case, a book which was offered to me by an antiquarian dealer. This particular dealer - I will call him Meneer (Mr) H - is the joint owner of a bookshop which overlooks the main canal that runs through the city of Utrecht. Now, Utrecht is probably my favorite city in the Netherlands, so any excuse to visit the shop and browse around is good enough, and Meneer H knows me now by sight.

Last week found me in Meneer H's shop once again, and knowing my taste in these things, he disappeared briefly into a small annex and reappeared with a leather-bound volume (my photo, above) which he placed upon the glass-topped counter for my inspection. At first glance the book seemed a puzzle. The leather covers (probably calfskin, although this is not certain) were a dark, nondescript greyish-brown, and felt somewhat oily to the touch. 15th century, I guessed. But the ribbed spine did not match the covers, and seemed to be from a later period by perhaps as much as a century. Meneer H considered it to be a hybrid binding - one which, due to damage or for some other reason, has been partially rebound at some stage of its history. I agreed.

The book had been acquired by Meneer H from an estate clearance auction. The deceased (for insurance purposes) had itemised the volume in his collection as 'Het Boek van het Schimmenrijk' - The Book of (or from) the Kingdom of Shadows. But 'schimmen' is an elusive word to translate. It implies not merely shadows, but illusions, false realities, the deceitful appearance of things - even ghosts. The clue to the book's name could be found in the carefully lettered Gothic script on its cover (the scanned detail, above). As near as I can make it out, the phrase reads:

"Om dat de Schimmen zijn ongetru, Darr om gha ik in den ru"

Now, this is 16th century Dutch, almost as remote from contemporary Dutch as Chaucerian English (which it curiously resembles). But by converting it into approximate modern Dutch ("Omdat de Schimmen zijn ontrouw, daarom ga ik gekleed in rouw") my best shot at a translation is this: "Because the Shadows are untrustworthy (or unfaithful) - that is why I go clad in mourning." The color of mourning is black, and I have this mental image of some unknown, black-robed figure, broken from some deep loss, despairing, betrayed, disillusioned, after an encounter with.. what, exactly? The tone of the phrase, and the capitalised term 'Schimmen', implies something dark. Written across the front of the book, it reads almost like a warning.

Above the two-line phrase, and written by a different, perhaps much earlier hand, are the two words: 'Escharoth' and 'Malchut' (the scanned detail, above). To whom - or what - do these names refer? Demonic entities? Down almost the entire cover run four deeply-scratched furrows, having the appearance almost of the raking tracks of great claws or talons. But even all these features are not the most curious.

On the paginations fore-edge are two metal clasps. Outwardly, there is nothing unusual about these, as such clasps are seen on many books of the period. What makes these clasps unusual (and which is the reason why I managed to acquire the book at a 'sight unseen' price) is that there seems to be no means whatever for unfastening them. They are, therefore, not so much clasps, as seals. The book cannot be opened.

And that is my dilemma. Having become the owner of the book, should I force the metal seals to discover its contents? Would it even be 'safe' to do so? Since it has been in my house, I have noticed an oppressiveness in my studio where it is now kept with the rest of my collection. Is the book perhaps dangerous? Is it even real? Of course it's not! After all, I did say that the 'Schimmen' were not to be trusted..

Happy All Hallows' Eve to my readers!

Artist: Hawkwood
Work: The Book from the Kingdom of Shadows, 2009
Medium: Digital (composite textural, lighting, typographic and other effects created using Photoshop CS and Ulead Photo Express software). Font for the 'demon' names: 'Aquiline'. Font for the 'Schimmen' phrase: 'Dürer Gothic' (yes, it actually was designed by Albrecht Dürer). The 'talon marks' were created wholly digitally with Photoshop embossing filters. Now you know!

Thanks to Henderickx and Winderickx antiquarian and second-hand bookshop, Utrecht, for the inspiration.

The Villa by the Sea

2009-10-19T21:31:00.017+02:00

Waves break upon a rugged shoreline. Tall Lombardy poplars bend in the salt wind from the sea. Nestled among the trees we glimpse a shadowed colonnade overlooking the waves. The colonnade, topped by statuary, fronts other structures; perhaps these rooms are inhabited. We cannot know this for sure, although partial ruins in the foreground suggest that the rest of the building may also be deserted. Sometimes we see a lone black-shawled woman on the shore. At times this lone figure appears to be a black-garbed nun, and on other occasions she seems to be dressed in some secular classical garment. Pensively, she gazes out over the waves. Sometimes she is not there at all.

The reason for the woman's changing appearance is due to the fact that she appears in different painted versions of the same scene (the 1878 version, above). This is the Villa by the Sea, painted by the 19th century Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin. As with his famous Isle of the Dead series, Böcklin returned repeatedly to this same villa as a subject; certainly it seems to have held a particular fascination for him. So far, I have tracked down six different versions, from the preparatory oil sketch (below), to mention of a version which Hitler, for his own darkly inscrutable reasons, apparently commandeered as spoils for his private collection. I say 'mention', because this version (whose only surviving evidence is a partially visible but still identifiable framed painting glimpsed over Hitler's shoulder in a poor-quality photograph) has now been lost.

Apart from the figureless sketch, it is the four versions which survive - and there may well be more which my searches have yet to turn up - that all show these variations of the solitary woman. With minor architectural adjustments, the villa itself remains recognisably the same (below). Its appearance has a convincing draftsmanship, for Böcklin, in order to make ends meet, painted Roman villas and other Italianate landscapes to meet the popular taste of the time.

So although such paintings might not have been as close to his heart as the more mysterious, ambivalent, and altogether more powerful works for which Böcklin is now rightly known, they clearly had their spinoff benefits in terms of knowledge gained, and this knowledge the artist ploughed back into his own fabulous and brooding villa by the sea (the other two versions, below).

All of this begs the question as to why, exactly, did the artist return to this subject so often? Artists do so for various reasons, of course. To fully exploit the potential of a particular theme, or simply because the subject matter appeals to them. But this villa of Böcklin's is a very specific place; and an imaginary place at that. I am sure that whoever reads this will have had that common dream experience of returning to the same location in different dreams, and often over extended periods of time. Perhaps some similar thought continued to draw Böcklin back to his imaginary villa. Perhaps the actual repetition of painting it was a mysterious magic that made the villa more real for him. And perhaps it worked.

Artist: Arnold Böcklin
Work: Villa by the Sea, 1878 (the first version shown here, and the last version which the artist painted)
Medium: Oils
Location: Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt

Other versions shown are in various collections. Specifics for these have proven particularly difficult to trace, so anyone with more information is welcome to leave that information as a comment here.

The Little Shepherd and the Little Vampire

2009-10-12T16:38:00.011+02:00

Under the vast blue bowl of the sky a shepherd boy lies sprawled upon a grassy hilltop, shading his eyes from the glare of the sun (below). We know that it must be the height of summer: the sun is directly overhead, and the boy's light clothing, and the insects which float busily in the air around him, all tell of the season. The boy's eyes are closed. We cannot know his dreams and thoughts, but our own childhood memories must somewhere contain scenes and experiences such as his, and with these to draw from, we can readily identify with his summery daydreams.

The picture was painted by the Bavarian artist Franz von Lenbach in 1860, when the artist would have been just twenty four years old. When viewed as a whole, von Lenbach would seem to have had a respectable if rather standard career, painting the portraits of the notables of his day, from Bismarck to Pope Leo XIII, as well as several notable composers, including Richard Wagner and Clara Schumann (below). He apparently also worked on commission as a copyist - that is, an artist who paints copies of the works of other known artists so that his clients could own a 'genuine' Velázquez or some other masterpiece to hang in their private collections.

Fast forward from the painting of the shepherd boy another forty three years to 1903, just a year before the artist died. This time, von Lenbach turns his canvas upon himself and his own family (below). We are shown the artist himself, together with his wife Lolo and their two daughters Marion and Gabriele. But it is certainly not just in the loose, scrubbed-on treatment of the brushwork that sets this work so dramatically apart from the little shepherd. No happy and contented family here, for von Lenbach opted to follow the prevailing fashion and portray his nearest and dearest with all the moody and brooding intensity which was 'The Look' of the time.

In fact, going on the way in which they have been painted, we might only be mildly surprised if Frau von Lenbach and the youngest daughter Gabriele (detail, below) opened their mouths to reveal predatory vampire fangs. The half smile which plays on the girl's mouth is betrayed by those evil-intentions eyes (just cover over the mouth to see what I mean). Let's face it: would you want your daughter to have little Gabriele as a playmate? One shudders to think what she does to her dolls. Well, fortunately we can assume that this was not how the von Lenbachs looked in their day-to-day existence, any more than a snapshot of a happily smiling and consciously posed family group is typical of that family's everyday appearance.

It is as if between the happy smile and the glowering frown there lies an ungraspable something which perhaps is what we think of as 'everyday life'. Both the smile and the frown are therefore somewhat artificial: unnatural states contrived by the camera or by the artist's brush. And between the little shepherd and the little 'vampire' is an artist's entire career, moving from summery innocence to something darker, changing in ways which the young twenty four year-old artist could not imagine.

Artist: Franz von Lenbach
Work: Shepherd Boy, 1860
Medium: Oils
Location: Schack Gallery, Munich

Artist: Franz von Lenbach
Work: The Artist with his Family, 1903
Medium: Oils
Location: Lenbachhaus Gallery, Munich

Would You Adam and Eve It?

2009-10-05T13:32:00.019+02:00

As a Londoner myself, I have an ear for Cockney rhyming slang; that colorful banter of London's East End which substitutes a rhymed phrase for the word otherwise used. Thus: plates of meat = feet, apples and pears = stairs, trouble and strife = wife, butcher's hook = look, and so on. It's a simple code language, which becomes a notch more complicated when the rhymes are dropped - as in practice they often are. So: plates = feet, butcher's = look, apples = stairs, etc. And even further: 'beady minces' = mince pies = eyes. You catch on fast. ;)

No prizes for guessing that in this slang, 'believe' is substituted by 'Adam and Eve'. After all, this pair of names has become embedded in our culture, whether the original scriptural account is personally meaningful to us or not. Although this significance or otherwise is not the point of this post, it seemed like a plan to have a look at two contrasting portrayals of the subject and to see where things lead.

Albrecht Dürer engraved his masterpiece portrayal of the subject (above) in 1504. Dürer’s Eden is a place not without its whimsical charms. Here, as we can see, a sleepy cat can lie peaceably close to a quietly approaching mouse, and an otherwise northern European wood, stocked with rabbits, deer, and even a domestic cow, can also accommodate an incongruous tropical parrot. And almost overlooked in a top corner, this nimble-footed goat (detail, below) seems to be searching for new adventures. The shadows of the forested background lend an almost dimensional quality to the contrasting classically posed figures, and Dürer's engraving burin creates an astonishingly varied textured surface of leaves, bark, rock, flesh and flowing hair.

If we want to analyse the inner harmony which Dürer's scene radiates, we can find it in his use of the so-called Golden Section (or Golden Mean) rectangle. Dürer would have learned of the construction of this famous proportion, used in art and architecture since the Ancient World, during his stay in Italy. The method of its construction (below) is simple enough: a square is bisected, and from the base line an arc is swung from the top corner back down to the extended base line. The resulting rectangle is 1 unit high by phi long, the mysterious phi measure (as with pi) being both mathematically constant and indeterminate.

An artist can use such devices as the Golden Section rectangle to control and enhance drama in a scene. In preparation for his engraving of Adam and Eve, Dürer made this pen and wash study (below). The poses of the figures are identical to the subsequent engraving (which Dürer would have engraved onto his metal plate the same way round as the sketch), but whereas in the study Eve is on the same eye level as Adam, in the engraving Dürer has placed her slightly lower.

When a Golden Section rectangle is superimposed upon the two scenes (below, in which the sketch is transposed to match the printed engraving), in such a way that the principal vertical construction lines align with the median lines of the figures (and also, as it happens, with the median line of the tree), the reason for the alteration between the study and the engraving becomes clear: in the engraving, the 'sweet spot' of the rectangle (here highlighted) now falls exactly at the point of greatest drama - the place where Eve's fingertips touch the fruit offered by the serpent.

Dürer's masterpiece influenced those artists who came after him, but finding an example from our own time of a depiction of the subject whose creation has been motivated by a genuine scriptural sincerity (rather than by a tongue-in-cheek irony) has proven difficult. The Creation *Museum in Kentucky has produced its own version for its displays (below), which at least meets my criterion of its creators being driven by a genuine religious belief in their subject material. And that, to me, is the single most puzzling thing about it.

For in spite of the undoubted religious sincerity of its creators (and who could cling more loyally to literal readings of Biblical texts than a creationist?), this particular depiction of Adam and Eve presents us with a scene from Eden as maudlin as it is trite. All the power, mystery and wonder of one of our culture's most potent and enduring stories has here been reduced to the appearance of a banal theme park attraction - and by the very people who presumably believe in its actuality the most. No Golden Section rectangles here to enhance any radiant harmony of the scene. Instead, we are presented with an Adam whose niftily-trimmed beard and 80's-style hairdo matches nicely with Eve's one-length-covers-all hair. Eve might here be shown in a state of innocence before the Fall, but she was clearly made by uptight post-Fall hands and minds that evidently were guiltily troubled by even a glimpse of female breasts.

And although Dürer at the beginning of the 16th century might not have been deflected by such issues, in this day and age the depiction of such an obviously Caucasian Adam and Eve raises questions of racist bias that I'm sure some must find both ludicrous and offensive. A theme park-style Eden? Would you Adam and Eve it?

Artist: Albrecht Dürer
Work: 'Adam and Eve' (aka: 'The Fall of Man', aka: 'The Fall'), 1504
Medium: Engraving
Location: Prints from the engraved plate are housed in various museum collections, including The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, The Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, Ohio, The Cincinnati Art Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, and others. The drawing in pen, brown ink and wash is housed in The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.

Artist(s): Preparatory staff of the Creation Museum
Work: Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, 2006
Medium: Painted fiberglass cast from sculpted originals, synthetic hair, and other materials
Location: The Creation Museum, Petersburg, Kentucky

Sources: Original Golden Section rectangle research, diagrams and applications by Hawkwood.

*It can only be an irony that in an apparent striving after a spurious academic respectability by describing itself as a museum, the ultra-Christian (and anti-science) Creation Museum named itself - presumably unknowingly - after the pagan temple of the Muse in Ancient Greece, which is the source of our word 'museum'.

Between Good and Evil

2009-09-30T12:53:00.023+02:00

What is the difference between good and evil? It would seem to be a straightforward question, and we might consider that the answer is clear-cut enough for us to define the difference without too much difficulty. But is it? Much that we are faced with seems to occupy an ambivalent grey area between the two, and shades of meaning and personal perceptions blur the boundary even further. But if we look at things in absolutes, then outright good and outright evil, and the difference between them, would seem to be readily defined.

Perhaps the most easily recognised symbol which defines that difference is the familiar pentagram. When the apex of the pentagram points upwards (above, left) we consider it to be 'good', and when it is inverted (above, right) it is considered 'evil'. But all ideas come from somewhere, so where did these particular ideas come from? Historically, the pentagram is ancient, stretching back to Babylon, and beyond even that to Sumer, which at its most ancient is divided from our own time by some six millennia. Those things which we now think of as being the cornerstones of our civilisation seem to have begun in far-off Sumer, from the art of writing, formal education and social laws, to astrology and astronomy. And it is among the planets that the pentagram's origins are to be found.

According to the Earth's direction of travel, the planet Venus - the morning and the evening star - orbits the sun in the opposite direction, in retrograde motion. The effect of this is that, when observed from the Earth, the movement of the planet appears to loop back upon itself. Over an eight-year period, this apparent looping traces out a five-pointed figure in our night sky (above), which seems to have been at the heart of the pentagram's origins and its association with both the planet Venus and the goddess, by whatever name she was known.

And Venus the goddess always was ambivalent. Whether she was Inanna of the Sumerians or *Ishtar of the Babylonians (above), she was a goddess whom it paid to keep on the right side of. Creator and destroyer, virgin and whore, she was the goddess of love and war in whom extreme opposites united. So it follows that these powerful opposing forces are already present in the pentagram, whichever way up it happens to be. And in the night sky, in space, there is no 'up' or 'down' anyway.

Our own association of the inverted pentagram with evil seems to be quite recent; the result of a demonising - both literally and figuratively - by the Christian church, which saw the two upward-pointing apexes as the horns of the devil, whose appearance it associated with the horned pagan Celtic god Cernunnos (above). So pagan/horns/devil/evil were terms which became entangled with each other, providing us with the version of the Devil as he is popularly pictured - an ironic twist in the language of symbols which has cheerfully been made use of by such metal bands as Tiamat (below).

So, at least when it comes to the language of symbols, 'good' and 'evil' are qualities expressed by whether a pentagram points upwards to heaven, or whether it is inverted downwards - presumably signposting the way to Satan's realm. The pentagram remains the same. What alters is the angle, as it turns through a half circle of 180° to point either straight up or straight down. But does it? Look at the pentagram (my image, below), and the two markers at the lower left (that is: at 6 and 7 o'clock).

To become either 'good' or 'evil', the pentagram in reality needs only to rotate the nearest of its five points between these two markers either to be pointing straight up or straight down. So as the two markers on the lower circumference indicate, the difference between a pentagram whose apex points heavenwards and a malign inverted pentagram is not 180°, but a turn through a mere 36°. The difference between good and evil is, it would seem, considerably less than we imagine.

Artist: Hawkwood
Work: Between Good and Evil, 2008

Medium: Digital, with elements from the works of Robert Fludd (17th century), Athanasius Kircher (17th century), Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (16th century) and Eadweard Muybridge (19th century)

Location: Cyberspace

Sources:

'The Treasures of Darkness: a History of Mesopotamian Religion', by Thorkild Jacobsen.
Yale University Press, 1976.

Tiamat logo by Kristian Wahlin

A news item about the Ishtar carving can be read here: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1126046.ece

The Cernunnos image is from a cauldron dating from the 3rd century BCE found at Gundestrupp, Denmark, and now in the Danish National Museum, Copenhagen.

*As well as the five-pointed pentagram, the goddess Ishtar is also associated with an eight-pointed star, perhaps marking Venus' eight-year long five-times looping cycle.

Fear and Loathing in the Sistine Chapel

2009-09-22T16:57:00.035+02:00

Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi once dismissed Michelangelo's work with the scoffing word: 'beefsteak'. In fact, it's only relatively recently that I have been able to overcome my own resistance to his art to really examine what is there. And what is there is both magnificent and strange. When I look at his frescoes for the Sistine Chapel ceiling (admittedly by proxy, as I have not seen the actual building), I really wonder how he got away with it - and that he apparently continues to do so.

Forget about the storm of controversy that raged around Cosimo Cavallaro's recently banned life-sized chocolate sculpture of Christ (the work's title, My Sweet Lord, was clearly facetious) that rattled the windows of religious sensibilities. Right there on the ceiling of one of Catholicism's holy of holies, larger than life and for all to see, is a bizarre mix of paganism, gay pride, and the least flattering depiction of the Almighty that I know of in all of Western art. It's true enough that one painting in the chapel, that of God creating Adam, with its detail of the hands of God and Adam outstretched towards each other (above), has become one of the iconic images of our culture. But what are we to make of the God (below) whom the artist depicted creating the plants?

Assuming that we knew neither the artist nor the setting, but nevertheless were given the information that this was a portrayal of the Christian deity, it's hard to resist the suspicion that it would provoke either affronted howls of protest or guffaws of ribald wisecracks, depending upon the beliefs or otherwise of the viewers. It's downright cheeky - in both senses of the term. But Michelangelo gets away with it. Why? Because he's Michelangelo? Because it's the Sistine Chapel? Because we know this? Do five centuries of veneration intimidate believers into respectful silence? I wish that I knew.

Flanking the nine principal scenes on the ceiling, and serving to separate them visually, are twenty large male nudes (in fact, there are nineteen, as the twentieth now survives only as an incomplete disjointed head and leg). The reasons for the inclusion of these figures is mystifying; any relevant Biblical symbolism, if it existed, would seem to be lost upon all except the artist. The figures are clearly at their ease amongst the writhing Biblical turbulence which surrounds them: their languid poses (three of the more decorous of the twenty figures, above) would have made these nudes comfortably at home on the walls of some temple in pre-Christian Ancient Greece - or even decorating some chic gay bar. And yet here they are gracing a chapel: a Christian place of worship. Why are they there? There can only be one answer: they are there because they were the artist's preferred choice of subject matter.

Perhaps it is not so much the nudity of these figures which seems misplaced, as the pagan ethos which they project; an ethos which is as alien to Christian tradition as the artist's mystifying inclusion of the *sibyls - the oracles of the pre-Christian Ancient World - whose placement on the ceiling gives them equal status with the prophets of the Old Testament (the prophet Daniel, above left, and the Libyan sibyl, above right). Placing such figures alongside each other is no different in substance from, say, placing the figure of Christ next to the sun god Apollo. In his choice of figures and subjects, Michelangelo was not merely mixing cultures. He was mixing faiths.

The surviving study which the artist made for the Libyan sibyl (above) confronts us with a further enigma. The artist's model was clearly male. Another sketch in the Uffizi Gallery (the last image, below), also of a male model, matches the pose of the female statue of the personification of Night (below, seen with her accompanying owl), created by the artist as part of the mortuary monument to Giuliano Medici. And looking at the statue, it's difficult to resist the thought that the woman's breasts look like nothing so much as the two halves of a buttered muffin which have been stuck on almost as a reluctant afterthought. Even given the artist's Mannerist style of exaggerating for dramatic effect, and given all the individual variations in the human female figure, Michelangelo seems here to be straining anatomical credibility.

If we join up the dots, Michelangelo is himself telling us what we can infer from history: that being in the presence of female flesh, even were it to be in the form of passive nude artist's models, was apparently a fearful - even a loathsome - experience for him. So much so that when needs must, he preferred to use male models even for female subjects. That's okay, of course, and to each his own, for the artist's towering genius carries it all off with the self-assurance of a titan. But the next time that overly-vocal conservative Christian sensibilities manage to get a chocolate Christ (or somesuch equivalent artwork) banned from public exhibition, let them reflect upon the homoerotic elements of the Sistine Chapel's frescoes and their idiosyncratic creator.

All of the above images in this post are to be seen in any good art book about Michelangelo's work, as well as, of course, in their original settings. Am I offended by what is included here? Not remotely. I am, however, both offended and alarmed by those self-appointed conservative forces - of whatever religious persuasion - which succeed in arbiting what others can and cannot see.

Artist: Michelangelo Buonarroti

Work: The Sistine Chapel ceiling, 1508-1512 (the wall of the Sistine Chapel, whose subject is the Last Judgement, was begun by Michelangelo twenty four years later, and completed in 1541)

Medium: Fresco

Location: The Sistine Chapel, Vatican City

Sources:

'The Penguin Dictionary of Art and Artists', by Peter and Linda Murray. First issued in 1957. Revised and reprinted multiple times.

The fresco images are from the excellent scans available at: http://www.wga.hu/

*The art historians Peter and Linda Murray propose that the sibyls' presence is based upon their apparent prediction of the coming of the Messiah. But this, as tends to be the case with prophesies, is clearly open to willful interpretation.

Monsters Have Light Inside

2009-09-13T14:53:00.012+02:00

They were lying piled up inside one of those coinslot dispenser machines on the way out of my local supermarket. 'Monsters have light inside!' announced the enthusiastic notice on the machine. Apparently it was the best English that the unknown translator who worked for the Chinese toy company could muster to convey the glow-in-the-dark feature of these children's plastic monsters. Horned, tentacled and goggle-eyed, the garishly-coloured mini monsters lay curled up inside their individual round plastic bubbles, looking like they were incubating and waiting to hatch.

So.. do monsters have light inside? Take a look at the rabbit below. It is not a digital trick. It is a real, living rabbit (whose name happens to be Alba) which has been treated with the DNA of a fluorescent jellyfish. Result: a glow-in-the-dark bunny which apparently otherwise suffers no ill-effects from its treatment. Unless someone can come up with an example, I can think of no instance in nature of a mammal which has this characteristic. So Alba is a very unnatural hybrid created by human intervention. Poor wabbit. One wonders just how long it will take for such manipulative tricks to hit the clubbing curcuit. And if we think of monsters as being unnatural creations, then Alba is indeed a monster of a sort - and with a 'light inside'.

The monster which features in that great classic of gothic horror, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (my image below), is portrayed in a disturbingly nuanced way in Shelley's text. Far from being a mere shambling horror, it struggles with its own awareness of the differences which set it apart from the rest of all humanity. Its self-loathing and sense of isolation are what drive it to commit acts of terrible and despairing violence. That it comes to despise Victor Frankenstein, its creator, seems within the story's context to be both logical and inevitable. Shelley's genius created an enduring myth whose tragedy lies in its pathos. Her monster is tragic exactly because it is self-aware enough to struggle with what it perceives to be its own lack of 'light inside': its lack of human spirit.

Monsters in our own day and age have come to mean movie monsters. The monsters in the alien/predator film franchise (below) perhaps have had their horrific edge dulled through mere familiarity among their fans, to the extent that it is now difficult to know how else they can shock. As someone who remembers being in the audience of the very first public screening in London of Ridley Scott's original 1979 film Alien, the sense of shock and dread among those seated around me was palpable. Since then, much has changed. Monsters, apparently, should not become too familiar. And these particular monsters certainly have no 'light inside'. Scott's original alien was shocking exactly because it was so dispassionately unreasoning. Humans were nothing more than a warm and nutricious source of incubation for a necessary stage of its life cycle. There are examples enough of this parasite/host relationship right here on our own planet.

But all the monsters so far mentioned here have in some way been created by humans. Ridley Scott's alien and Victor Frankenstein's monster, which is ultimately Mary Shelley's own creation, and even the plastic mini monsters in my supermarket, have all been products of the human imagination. Are there real monsters? Considering the odds, there must be so many unknown forms of life out there among the stars. But are they monsters? By our human standards, and if we knew about them, I'm sure that quite a few of them must be. Do they have 'light inside'? Well, some, like the green-glowing Alba, literally might have. How about in the figurative sense? Perhaps we had better hope so.

Artist: Eduardo Kac, based upon the work of French geneticist Louis-Marie Houdebine
Work: GFP ('green fluorescent protein') Bunny, 2000
Medium: Live albino rabbit with genetic material from the jellyfish Aequorea victoria
Location: Presently unknown. Alba has been reported dead, but this is unconfirmed

Artist: Hawkwood
Work: Frankenstein, 2008
(based upon artwork originally commissioned from and published by Puffin Classics, 1994)
Medium: Digital, incorporating original artwork in oils and material from the works of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, 16th century, and from the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, 15th century.
Location: Cyberspace (oil painting in the collection of the artist)

Alba photo by Chrystelle Fontaine

Original design of Ridley Scott's alien by H.R. Giger

Two Towers

2009-09-11T13:25:00.022+02:00

Now and again you can just get lucky. It happened to me when on a second-hand bookstall in my local market I discovered a first edition (at a decidedly non-first edition price) of Paul Foster Case's book on the Tarot. First published in 1947, this volume has since become a classic of its kind. It contains illustrations by the author with accompanying commentaries on the twenty two so-called Major Arcana cards which comprise the core of a complete seventy-eight card Tarot deck. These Major Arcana cards feature powerful archetypes which have - with variations - endured since their inception in the 15th century, and continue to be redesigned and re-visioned by artists today (the Tarot cards by Salvador Dali, below).

Now, whether you view the Tarot as a powerful tool for divination and personal insight, or as a distracting and dubious 'Devil's picture book', the archetypes exist. And to consider whether or not their power is real enough, and still potent, we can have a look at Case's drawing for Arcanum 16: The Tower (below left). Case's image, which has endured in its essential features for five centuries, shows us a fate-struck edifice. The building is clearly afire: flames shoot from the casements and lick upwards as a man and a woman helplessly plunge headlong to the ground below. Clouds of smoke continue to billow away into a dark sky, and one feels that once the events have run their course, the destruction portrayed in the scene will be complete.

Adjacent to Case's drawing is a terrible and familiar image from our own times. Five hundred years after its first appearance, the archetype of the Arcanum tower intruded its way into our reality in a traumatic and shocking way. Since the events of eight years ago, the world has changed. It is not better, just different. Desired or not, the perpetrators of those events have ensured that, for many, their beliefs and creeds have become synonymous with intolerant and uncaring acts of monstrous inhumanity. But archetypes are more powerful and more potent than the human minds which contemplate them. Neither are those same human minds in control of them, no, not even when they seek to reproduce them. And when such elemental symbols appear in our world for real, the full consequences are not to be foreseen.

Artist: Paul Foster Case

Work: Arcanum 16 - The Tower, 1947

Medium: Pen and ink

Location: Unknown

Sources:

'The Tarot: A Key to the Wisdom of the Ages', by Paul Foster Case.

Macoy Publishing Company, 1947. Reissued by Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2006

'The Art of Tarot', by Christina Olsen. Abbeville Press, 1995

Dali Universal Tarot published by U.S. Games Systems.

Flight and Pursuit

2009-09-09T17:10:00.020+02:00

The name of 19th century artist William Rimmer might not be one that springs readily to mind among rock fans. But it is Rimmer's picture of a gesturing angel (below) that was used as the now-familiar logo for Led Zeppelin's Swan Song Records.

Rimmer was an Englishman who settled in Massachusetts. He made a notable career as the author of several books on human anatomy for artists, and was also a sculptor who produced several bronzes that are striking for their writhing and compacted energy (his fighting lions, below).

But the works of Rimmer which perhaps linger the most in the mind are the select number of paintings which have as their themes a secretive something which does not yield its story as readily as might at first seem apparent. His 'Master Builder' (below) presents us with a portly architect gesturing towards the site of (or perhaps overseeing the progress of) some future - and presumably grandiose - creation. The architect's costume is vaguely classical, without defining any specific culture or period. At his heels slink two fantastic creatures, dog-like without actually being dogs. Sharp-snouted and six-legged, they are the beasts of dreams. Behind them a bearded onlooker attends the architect. But even these extraordinary elements in the painting are not what seizes our attention.

The robed architect stands sturdily upon a stone ashlar. But this solid-looking ashlar seems suspended impossibly over the void. Logic fights to tell us that the weight of the heavily-built architect must surely force the unsupported stone to give way. But it does not. Neither is there anything in the confident stance of the figure to suggest that he considers himself to be in any immediate danger. No amount of staring at Rimmer's painting will solve the unyielding mystery.

Rimmer's painting 'Flight and Pursuit' (above), also seems to provoke more questions than it answers. What is clear is that the man who is plainly in headlong flight is being pursued - but by whom, or what? And for what reason? In front of us we see a second figure; but the gilded wall behind is visible through this figure. Is the desperate man being chased by a ghost? It is unclear whether the space between the archway in which this second insubstantial figure appears is a parallel corridor or a large mirror which reflects something that is otherwise invisible. And on the floor behind the man the artist shows us a shadow cast by something that is outside the frame. This strangely-ornate building of ghosts and shadows, of pursuer and pursued, gives us no feeling of finding a way out, however fast we run.

These two paintings of Rimmer's are governed by the logic of dreams. That is their power. Perhaps only in dreams can any answers be found to their mysteries.

Artist: William Rimmer

Work: Master Builder, (undated)

Medium: Oils

Location: Private collection

Artist: William Rimmer

Work: Flight and Pursuit, 1872

Medium: Oils

Location: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Sources:

'Nineteenth-Century Romantic Bronzes: French, English and American Bronzes, 1830-1915',

by Jeremy Cooper. David & Charles, 1975.

'Audubon, Homer, Whistler and Nineteenth-Century America',

by John Wilmerding. Lamplight Publishing, 1975.

Fallen Angels

2009-08-30T12:24:00.028+02:00

All that it takes is one rotten apple. In the case of the hosts of heaven, that was *Samyaza (my image below), an Earthward-gazing angel whose eye had fallen upon the comely 'daughters of men', as described in the ex-canonical Book of Enoch (see my previous post). Samyaza got together a coalition of the willing: two hundred angels known as the Watchers, who swore a terrible oath of allegiance before descending down through the heavenly realms to determine just how easy Earth girls were. By the time the company arrived on our planet they had acquired bodies of flesh and blood. And flesh and blood were what they were after.

But the Watchers were prepared to give as well as to take. One of their number, Azazyel, gave to men the dubious gift of the arts of weaponry and warfare, and he showed women how they could enhance their beauty with trinkets, jewellery and makeup. The world became a place of lost innocence, of desecration, of suffering. And the half-angel offspring of the Watchers born to Earthly women, the Nephilim, proved to have voracious appetites, gorging their way through every living thing: the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, crawling reptiles, and the fish that swam in the waters. But then the humans around them also went onto the menu. Enough was enough.

The cries of despair coming from the human world were heard in heaven. The five archangels - Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, Suryal and Uriel - joined battle with the wayward fallen angels. Raphael bound the troublemaking Azazyel fast, Gabriel incited the Nephilim to an act of terrible mutual slaughter, and Michael bound Samyaza and the rest of the company deep beneath the earth, where they shall remain until the End of Days.

It certainly makes for a tremendous story. An epic clash of forces classically portrayed as good pitted against evil, which endures in our own contemporary culture through such films as Star Wars and many another. But is this primal battle the stuff of folk culture which belongs with our other sacred texts and mythologies? Or is it something more? As with so much else, it gets down to what you choose to believe. Supposing that these fallen angels were something more than just a story? Supposing that these beings really walked among us in those ancient times? If this was so, and if the Watchers really existed, then who were they?

Were the Watchers in reality perhaps all-too-Earthly visitors from a then-less familiar geographical region, strangers come from a strange land? Or were they even extraterrestrials visiting our planet to throw a few alien genes into the human mix, as has been speculated on the wilder shores of probability by some credulity-stretching theories? The case for the first option is argued cogently and even credibly by Andrew Collins in his book 'From the Ashes of Angels' (the striking cover art, above).

The second option comes from the writing of Zecharia Sitchin in 'The 12th Planet'. Now, I realize that Sitchin has a huge fan base out there, but for my taste his left-field ideas are too easy to disprove. His entire postulation rests upon the existence of an undiscovered planet - Nibiru - within our solar system, the chosen home planet for his alien Watchers. Nibiru, claims Sitchin, has a highly elliptical orbit, which is why its proximity to the Earth is so infrequent. But alas for his theory, the laws of planetary motion dictate that such a large planet as he claims Nibiru to be would be bound to settle into a near-circular orbit around the sun, making his entire theory impossible based upon this one crucial factor. Still, if you like the ‘ancient astronauts’ style of speculative theories, then this book will do it for you. Me, I'll stick with something a little more down-to-earth.

Artist: Hawkwood
Work: Samyaza, 2009
Medium: Digital with sculpted elements
Location: Cyberspace

Sources:
'Fallen Angels and the Origins of Evil' (see my previous post).
'From the Ashes of Angels', by Andrew Collins. Michael Joseph, 1996.
'The 12th Planet', by Zecharia Sitchin. Avon Books, 1978. Reissued by Harper, 2007.

*The name Samyaza later slipped into Christian tradition as Satan. Since nomenclature for the Watchers varies with translation, the spelling of names here follows that of the original 19th century translation of the Book of Enoch by Richard Laurence.

Visit Andrew Collins' website at: http://www.andrewcollins.com/

Dude, Where’s My Prophet?

2009-08-01T14:38:00.019+02:00

In the ancient times before the Deluge, mysterious beings known only as the Watchers, the ‘sons of the gods’, looked down from the heavens on high, and seeing the comely ‘daughters of men’, descended to our world to party. The results of these unions were the Nephilim, human on their mothers’ side, and on their fathers’ side… well.. what, exactly? Quite a body of speculative literature has grown up around this brief but intriguing passage from the Book of Genesis. The Biblical explanation is that the Watchers were some kind of fallen (literally) angels, who during the long descent from their ethereal heights gradually acquired material bodies the closer to our world they became. For this and other passages the Book of Genesis can make for intriguing reading. And yet where it might be expected to expound upon significant details, the text instead yields only tantalizing glimpses, more shadows than substance. One is left with the feeling that there is more to tell, but that something, somewhere, is missing. And it is.

I have just completed reading the Book of Enoch. Enoch, the companionable prophet (my imagined portrait, above) who was the seventh generation from Adam. Enoch, whose lengthy description of his visit to the heavenly abode is among the finest and most stirring passages of visionary writing that I have come across. Enoch, who is the source for much detail that we feel is otherwise missing from Genesis. The identity of the serpent in Eden (and how it came to be there). A description of the actual fruit that hung on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (it wasn’t an apple!) that grew in the Garden. The true cause of the Deluge (the brief reason given in Genesis, that it was ‘the wickedness of men’, always did sound to my ears like a not-very-adequate justification for pulling the plug on an entire planet). In short, it is the sympathetic voice of the prophet Enoch who supplies so much of the detail that seems to be lacking in Genesis.

The Book was known from a text written in Ancient Greek (above), but remained unread in the West until the Scottish traveller James Bruce returned from Ethiopia with a copy in the 18th century. This was later translated into English by Richard Laurence, and further existence of the original version, written in Aramaic (below) was confirmed when fragments were discovered among the Dead Sea scrolls in 1947.

So where is Enoch? Or rather: where is Enoch’s Book? Because (except, curiously, in Ethiopia) it failed to make it into the Biblical canon. The reason, apparently, was that the Church fathers considered aspects of the Book to be heretical, particularly the key question of immaterial angels being able to take on material bodies. And so Enoch hit the cutting room floor. Which I for one consider a tragedy of editing, not just because of the information that without it remains puzzlingly uncertain, but also because the book contains such fine passages of visionary writing.

And the Nephilim? Because Enoch certainly provides us with more information about them than their brief mention in Genesis. Well, another time, perhaps..

Artist: Hawkwood
Work: The Prophet Enoch, 2009
Medium: Digital painting with photographic elements
Location: Cyberspace

Sources:
'Fallen Angels and the Origins of Evil', by Elizabeth Clare Prophet. Summit University Press, 2000. Contains the complete original translation by Richard Laurence and other ex-canonical texts, and much additional explanatory material (including all canonical Biblical references to Enoch), and also hints at intriguing personal speculations of the author’s.

'The Lost Prophet', by Margaret Barker. Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2005.
An excellent short introduction to the material by a recognized Biblical scholar.
Richard Laurence's complete translation is available online at:
http://www.johnpratt.com/items/docs/enoch.html

The Deception of Mirrors

2009-07-29T16:48:00.012+02:00

A mirror's most familiar deception is to reverse whatever appears before its surface. But art creates its own realities, and mirrors, when they feature in an artist's canvas, tend to obey the rules of these other realities rather than those of the everyday world. The deceptively ordinary-seeming black-framed mirror which hangs on the far wall of Johan Vermeer's 'A Lady standing at the Virginals with a Gentleman' (below) appears faithfully to reflect the lady in question. But does it?

A careful look at this detail (below) reveals a subtle difference. The woman standing in the room with her back to us is looking down towards her right hand where it apparently touches the instrument's keyboard. But her reflection shows her rather glancing towards her companion to her right. The mirror's rebellious reflection does not, after all, faithfully obey its counterpart in the room before it. Why should this be? Infrared analysis of the painting reveals that the artist originally had the woman looking more to the right, as the mirror records. But for whatever reason, Vermeer slightly altered the angle of her head to the position as we see it, while leaving her reflected image unaltered. The mirror therefore records her original stance - as well as a tantalising glimpse of the leg of the artist's own easel beyond the table, and so establishing Vermeer's ghostly presence in his own canvas.

A century further on in time. Jan Ekels the Younger presents us with another Dutch interior, and another mirror. In 'A Young Writer Trimming His Quill' (below), the artist shows us a scene which appears to owe much to Vermeer's influence in its atmospheric lightfall from the window and it's interior calm. On the wall hang a gaming board with its companion bag of pieces, and another black-framed mirror. Unlike Vermeer's mirror, this mirror does indeed appear accurately to reflect its subject, and it is thanks to this device that we are shown the young writer's features.

But this second mirror reveals a deceit perhaps more disturbing than Vermeer's mirror. For the angle of the mirror - and cold logic - tells us that the artist's own reflection must have been visible behind the writer. And yet the space is blank, reflecting only a similar wall to the one on which it hangs. The artist has chosen to make his presence a mysterious invisibility (detail below).

We can reasonably deduce that Ekels simply decided that to include his own image in the scene would have been too intrusive to his painting's solitary calm. That the mirror allows us to see his subject's face is purpose enough for its inclusion. But this aesthetic decision meant being disobedient to the mirror's rule. Ekels' mirror is, it turns out, no more faithful to reality than Vermeer's.

But such is the force of mirrors that on a more unsettling level we might feel that more has been erased by Ekel's denying mirror. Everyday experience insists that, as we stare into Ekels' mirror we fail to see, not only the artist, but ourselves.

Artist: Johan Vermeer
Work: A Lady Standing at the Virginals with a Gentleman, 1660
Medium: Oils on canvas
Location: The Queen's Collection, Buckingham Palace, London

Artist: Jan Ekels the Younger
Work: A Young Writer Trimming His Quill, 1784
Medium: Oils on canvas
Location: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Sources:
'Een Eeuw Apart: Het Rijksmuseum en de Nederlandse Schilderkunst in de 19de Eeuw'
by Wiepke Loos, et al. Rijksmuseum-Stichting, Amsterdam, 1993.
'Vermeer and the Art of Painting'
by Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr. Yale University Press, 1995.

All Things Must Pass

2009-07-25T16:46:00.010+02:00

Eighteenth century German artist Johann Jakob Haid is perhaps not among the more iconic names in art, but during his lifetime he secured a reputation for himself as a portrait and botanical artist, portraying both his fellow artists and noted scientists of the day, and producing other commissioned portraits (below), as well as illustrating a number of botanical books. But the work from his hand which seems the most to have endured is ironically a still life whose subject is transience.

Haid’s mezzotint Alles ist Eitel ('All is Vanity', below) belongs to the durable tradition in art known as Vanitas (‘Vanity’), in which the chosen items in a still life arrangement serve to portray the ephemeral nature of existence. Human vanity is folly, says this tradition, for all things must pass.

The artist's image offers us a still life of perishables: the candle’s flame will be extinguished, the fragile soap bubbles will burst, the blooms will wilt and fade – even the ruin on the vase’s decoration hints at the passing of empires. The hourglass suggests the rush of time, and the human skull – the key element in any vanitas picture – reminds us of our own mortality. The still life which fills the lower half of Haid's frame is in stark and dramatic contrast to the dark and empty upper half of the image, whose impenetrable shadows hint at the unknown which waits beyond life itself.

In contrast to the confidently-painted skull in the vanitas still life by Pieter Claes of a century before Haid (above), an uncertainty in the anatomical details of the skull suggests that the artist might have used a medical illustration for his reference, rather than having the actual object in front of him to study. But with the flowers, Haid clearly is on familiar ground, and the knowledge gained from his botanical illustrations manifests itself in the details of every petal, and in the veins of every leaf.

Intriguingly, the highlights on the soap bubbles are in the form of both a star and a cross (detail above). In including these distinct details, did Haid wish to hint at some further meaning? It is difficult to know. And what of the writing materials and the two books? The artist seems to suggest that even an imagined path to immortality through creating works which endure beyond our own lifetimes is also folly, for the books remain shut, and the scroll is left unwritten.

So is all vanity? The flowers which Haid portrayed in such meticulous detail so far have survived two and a half centuries beyond their real-life counterparts, and the soap bubbles with their mysterious details drift on through the air.

Artist: Johann Jakob Haid
Work: Alles ist Eitel, c. 1750
Medium: Mezzotint
Location: New York Public Library

Two Faces of Mystery

2009-07-17T08:58:00.019+02:00

Time has not been kind to Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece The Last Supper (below). The work was originally painted in tempera on the wall of the Santa Maria delle Grazie refectory in Milan, but within twenty years of its completion in 1498 the surface of the paint had begun to flake away. Continued deterioration of the painting prompted various ill-advised restorations during the subsequent centuries, until its major contemporary restoration undertaken between 1978 to 1999.

Recent attention has been given to the disciple seated to the right of Jesus. The portrait is of.. who, exactly? Tradition tells us that it is the disciple John, but the restoration (below) reveals a face that, when seen divorced from its context, could readily be described as female. Some sources assign the identity to Mary Magdalene, the woman with the alabaster jar. Is this a shocking heresy? Not necessarily. After all, even if this face is female, Leonardo was painting an image that reflected his own idiosyncratic personal beliefs. So what we are looking at is the artist’s version of events; the truth as he saw it. Exactly why Leonardo should have chosen to portray Mary as a disciple sitting at Jesus' right hand (surely a place not without its significance) is another issue altogether, and addressing it is not my purpose here. What fascinates is the serenity which this face radiates.

For if ever there was a face in art that is touched by the spirit, then surely it is this face. When viewed together with the vigorously masculine figures of the other disciples in the painting, which variously recoil in shock, gesture animatedly to each other, and reveal very human reactions to the news of the betrayal that will come from one of their own, this most feminine face uniquely remains aloof, resigned, above and beyond the turbulence of the emotions which storm around it. It is a face whose silent poise already knows how events will unfold, so has no need for shocked reaction. Leonardo’s genius has created a face whose profound serenity reflects the true mystery of the spirit.

But this is about two faces of mystery. To visit the second face we need to do some travelling; an extra forty nine million miles further out from the sun than our own Earth, in fact. On the dusty plains of the planet Mars a vast face seems to be regarding us (below). This is not the more famous and supposed artificially constructed ‘face’ in the Martian Cydonia region, but a face of pure and near-perfect pareidolia - a construction of chance. Hills, cliffs and gullies conspire together to mold from the Martian landscape a human face so compelling that, even though we know that it is contrived by chance, our brains go on insisting to us that we truly are gazing at a ‘real’ face. Try looking at it through half-closed eyes: it becomes even more real. We might even find this face with its crown of Martian cliffs rather disturbing, although it’s features are hardly hideous, or even ugly. Why should this be so?

Perhaps the unnerving quality which this Martian face seems to possess is exactly because it is so real, and yet is the result of chance. The more radically convincing an example of pareidolia is, the more it seems to have a life-force of its own: a something which has invaded our reality, and is trying to make its presence known to us. After all, if a face this real appeared in wet sand in our driveway – or even on a slice of toasted cheese – we’d be auctioning it on eBay.

Here are two faces. One is sublime, the mysterious product of an artist’s genius. The other is a counterfeit, created naturally, yet unnatural: a deception which is dependent upon interaction with the human mind for its existence, as perhaps are many such mysteries.

Artist: Leonardo da Vinci
Work: The Last Supper, 1498 (completed)
Medium: Tempera
Location: Santa Maria delle Grazie refectory, Milan

Sources: 'Leonardo' , by Bruno Santi. Constable. 1978
'The Templar Revelation' , by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince. Bantam Press. 1997

Mars Global Surveyor orbiter image from NASA

A Knight of Dark Renown

2009-07-11T19:33:00.006+02:00

In what is now Italy, but what in the 14th and 15th centuries was a fragmented network of rival and restless city-states, enterprising soldiers of fortune found themselves in a sellers' market. These mercenary leaders of men, the condotierri ('contractors'), hired out their military services either to Milan or to Florence or to other city-states, and were not shy about changing their allegiance from one city-state to the other, and even back again, as the expediencies of the moment dictated. Then, as now, whatever the language used by these mercenary captains, and whatever their countries of origin, what talked the most eloquently was money.

Two such condotierri were the Italian Bartolomeo Colleoni and the Englishman Sir John Hawkwood, commander of the notorious White Company. Although a century divided these two men from each other in time, they led similar and somewhat parallel careers, swapping sides a number of times with ready alacrity. But apparently there was a difference in temperament between the two.

Where Colleoni seems to have been moderate and even-tempered, Hawkwood was ruthless and morally ambivalent. Where a trail of sound strategy and successful campaigns might lead you to Bartolomeo Colleoni, a trail of sound strategy, successful campaigns and civilian corpses would as likely lead you to Sir John (there is no clear historical record of Hawkwood formally receiving the order of knighthood, and the 'Sir' could have been a self-assumed title designed to increase his prestige and bankability).

Art has left us two likenesses of these captains of expediency. Bartolomeo Colleoni was foresighted and practical enough to bequeath a sum towards the erection of an equestrian statue in honor of himself (below). The work was sculpted by Andrea del Verrocchio, cast in bronze, and erected in the square in front of the Church of Saint John and Saint Paul in Venice. But the realization of Hawkwood's monument, as with his dubious altruism, was more problematical. Some four decades after his death, and another four decades before Colleoni's death prompted the creation of his own bronze likeness, the grateful Republic of Florence, overlooking the fact that Hawkwood had on more than one occasion in the past actually fought against the Republic, decided to honor John Hawkwood with his own equestrian statue.

But it was decided that the commission should be, not an actual bronze statue, but a painting of a statue (above). What could have prompted such a curious compromise? Perhap it was the artistic limitations of the time, for another few decades would pass before such artists as Verrocchio and Donatello would successfully revive the creation of such grand sculptural works; the first of such statues since Roman times. Perhaps it was the compromising forces of financial expediency, for the production of such bronze works would have been as epic in their cost as they were in their scale. Whatever the reasons, this painted, two-dimensional statue would be commissioned from the artist Paolo Uccello, and executed in fresco on the wall of Florence Cathedral.

A comparison of these two works of art is both revealing and puzzling. For it is Verrocchio's bronze of Colleoni that positively bristles with vigor and agressive energy. As portrayed by Verrocchio, Colleoni's hatchet features glare down at us from his steed with haughty and imperious disdain. In contrast, Uccello's Hawkwood, who in life appears to have been the embodiment of the way in which Verrocchio portrayed Colleoni, seems to sit astride his mount with all the amiable contentment of a public official riding in a parade.

How could this be? Even given that this fresco is the earliest work that we can attribute to the artist, this is, after all, the work of Paolo Uccello. Uccello, whose ground-breaking use of perspective gives such you-are-there flair and writhing action to his monumental 'Battle of San Romano', which he was to paint a few years later, and which was to catch the attention of no less a personage than Lorenzo de Medici.

Opinions differ as to whether the reasons were to do with the seething politics of the age, or whether there were any grounds for objection based upon the artistic conventions of the time. Whatever the reasons, the fact remains that upon completion of the work Uccello was asked to entirely repaint both horse and rider. Ultraviolet analysis, together with an existing sketch, reveal that Uccello's original Hawkwood was altogether more Hawkwoodish. This first, invisible Hawkwood is in full armour, with baton commandingly raised and charger ready for the fray.

A pity indeed that Hawkwood's monument was not realised in the form of a Colleoni-style bronze statue, rather than as a mere painted version of one. Bronze denies the ready amendments possible with a layer of paint. And Uccello's knight of dark renown would more likely have expressed exactly those ruthlessly commanding Hawkwood qualities of character had it not been compromised by alteration.

Artist: Paolo Uccello
Work: Monument to Sir John Hawkwood, 1436
Medium: Fresco
Location: Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence

Sources:
'John Hawkwood: An English Mercenary in Fourteenth Century Italy'
by William Caferro. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.
'A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century'
by Barbara W. Tuchman. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1978.