The Book from the Kingdom of Shadows

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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) of a male model whose testicles are visible, 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

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

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 religious 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

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.