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HOMO . LOQUENS FROM A BIOLOGICJl.L STANDPOINT
by
Curtis Wilson
St. John's College
Annapolis, 1"..aryland
Septeil'ber, 1975
�The words homo loquens, in the title I announced for this lecture, mean
speaking man, man the speaking one. As a designation for the human species,
homo loquens perhaps has an advantage over the official zoological designation,
homo s~piens, man the sapient, wise, discerning one, the one who savours the
essences of things. The human capacity for loquaciousness is somewhat more
obviously verifiable. But what has that capacity to do with things biological?
This is a complicated and problematic topic. Forgive me if I first approach
it by slow stages, then attempt a gingerly step when the going becomes treacherous~
I wish to begin with a small technical matter, an aspect of the physiology of
speech-production.
Respiratory patterns in different species of air-breathing vertebrates
differ in many details. Different species have special regulatory systems,
adapted to special behavior patterns. There is the panting of dogs, specially
adapted for cooling; birds, during flight have the unique ability to increase
their intake of oxygen a hundredfold; the sperm whale can go without breathing
or dive for 90 minutes, the beaver for 15, man for about 2 1/2; and so on. All
these differences are species-specific.
In a human being, the respiratory patterns during quiet breathing and during
speech are remarkably different (see Table I). The volume of air inhaled, as
shown in the first item of the table, increases by a factor of 3 or 4 during
speech. The time of inspiration, as compared with the time for a complete cycle
of inspiration plus expiration, decreases by a factor of 3. The number of breaths
per minute tends to decrease drastically. Expiration, which is smooth during
speechless breathing, is periodically interrupted during speech, with a build-up
of pressure under the glottis; it is during expiration that all normal human
vocalization occurs. The patterns of electrical activity in expiratory and
inspiratory muscles differ radically during quiet breathing and during speech.
Both chest and abdominal musculature are utilized in breathing, but during speech
the abdominal musculature is less involved, and its contractions are no longer
fully synchronized with those of the chest musculature. In quiet breathing,
one breathes primarily through the nose; during speech, primarily through the
mouth.
More than you wanted to know, I'm sure. My point was to show that breathing
undergoes marked changes during speech. And remarkably, humans can tolerate
these modifications for almost unlimited periods of time without experiencing
respiratory distress; witness fillibusters in the U. s. Senate. Think now of
other voluntary departures from normal breathing patterns. If we deliberately
decide to breathe at some arbitrary rate, say, faster than ordinary -- please
do not try it here -- we quickly experience the symptoms of hyperventilation:
light-headedness, giddiness, and so on. Similar phenomena may occur when one
is learning to play a wind instrument or during singing instruction; training
in proper breathing is requisite for these undertakings. By contrast, talking a
blue streak for hours on end comes naturally to many a three-year-old. The
conclusion must be that there are sensitive controlling mechanisms that regulate
ventilation in an autonomous way during speech. More generally, it is evident
that we are endowed with special anatomical and physiological adaptations that
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enable us to sustain speech for hours, on exhaled air.
Do we speak the way we do because we happen to possess these special adaptations,
or did these adaptations develop during evolution in response to the pressures of
natural selection or the charms of sexual selection? I think there is no way of
answering these questions; it is difficult enough when one can refer to skeletons,
which fossilize; behavioral traits do not. But whatever the answer, there is
still this further question, whether the genetic programming for speech extends
beyond the mere provision of vocal apparatus? Might it not, in addition,
determine the make-up and structure of language in a more detailed and intimate
fashion?
Such a question runs counter to views that are widely held. Is not language,
after you have the voice to __
pronounce it with, fundamentally a psychological and
cultural fact, to which biological explanations would be largely irrelevant? Do
not languages consist of arbitrary conventions, made up in the way we make up the
rules of games? Wittgenstein speaks of language as a word-game, thereby likening
it to tennis or poker. Is it not apparent that the conventions of any particular
language, like the rules of :tennis o::-: poker, are transmitted from generation to
generation by means of imitation, training, teaching and learning? Are not
these the important facts about language, the facts that reveal to us its nature?
Until recently, students of linguistics and psychology have tended uniformly
to answer these questions in the affirmative. To many, the extraordinary
diversity of human tongues has seemed argument enough against any assumption of
linguistic universals, that is, characteristics of language imagined to be
rooted in human nature. The reductio ad absurdurn often mentioned is the attempt
of the Egyptian king Psammetichos to determine the original human language. As
reported by Herodotus, Psammetichos caused two children to be raised in such a
way that they would neither hear nor overhear human speech, the attendants
being instructed meanwhile to listen out for their first word. The report was,
that is was Persian. The experiment is said to have been repeated in the 13th
century by Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, and again around 1500 by James IV
of Scotland, who was hoping that the children would speak Hebrew, and thereby
establish a biblical linec:_ge for Scotland. No result was reported.
Stress on the arbitrariness of language has been enhanced by a coalition
between linguistics and behaviorist psychology. Behaviorist psychology is led,
by its premisses, to the view that language is merely an arbitrary use to which
the human constitution, anatomical and physiological, can be put, just as a tool
can be put to many arbitrary uses by its manipulator. A recent account that
views language in this way is the book Verbal Behavior by B. F. Skinner. Along
with other behaviorist scientists, Skinner holds that all learning can be explained
by a few principles which operate in all vertebrates and many invertebrates.
The process is called operant conditioning. Learning the meaning of a word,
Skinner holds, is like a rat's learning to press a bar which will cause a buzzer
to sound, announcing "food pellets soon to come". Learning grammar, likewise,
is supposed to be like learning that event A is followed by event B, which is
in turn followed by event c. Many an animal can be trained to acquire associations
�-3-
of this kind. Skinner would hold that there is nothing involved in the acquisition
of language _that is not involved in learning of this kind.
Unquestionably, we would be mistaken to deny the importance or the power of
the conditioned reflex, either in language acquisition or in other learning.
The experimental psychologists have recently announced that even the visceral
organs can be taught to do various things, on given signals, with rewards provided
immediately afterward to reinforce the action. We are told that rats, with the
reward held out of another shot of electrical juice in a certain center of the
brain, have been taught to alter their blood pressures or brain waves, or dilate
the blood vessels in one ear more than those in the other. Similar achievements
in operant conditioning are held out as a bright future hope for humans. What
rich experiences in self-operation are not in store for us?
On the other hand, the successes of this technology do not necessarily
tell us much about the character of what it is that is being conditioned. The
behaviorist treats the organism as a black box; he controls the inputs and
records the outputs; what goes on in the box is not, as he claims, an appropriate
concern of his. He cites the similar situation in quantum physics. In the case
of quantum phenomena, the physicist cannot successfully describe what is there
when he is not looking, not using probes that interact with whatever it is. But, _
between the situation in quantum physics and the situation in the study of animal
behavior, there is this difference. Animal behavior goes on, observably so,
· even when the animals are not being experimented on. May it not be important
to try to observe this behavior, before we .set out to change it, as we can, so
frighteningly, do?
Those who study the behavior of animals in their natural habitats nowadays
have a special name for their study, Ethology. Long hours of patient observation,
much of it during the last 50 years, have demonstrated how intricate, how unexpectedly adaptive, how downright peculiar, are the patterns of behavior specific
to particular species of animals. Many of the patterns function as communication:
the elaborate courtship rituals of birds, the less elaborate ones of butterflies
and certain _ ish; the way in which two dabbling ducks, on meeting, lower their
f
bills into the water and pretend to drink, as an indication of nonagressiveness;
and so on. Among these behaviors, there is one tha.t has been called truly
symbolic. That is . the dance of the honeybee, the symbolism of which was first
recognized and deciphered by Karl von Frisch in the 1940's. Let me describe
it briefly (see Figure I) •
The dance that a forager bee performs in the dark hive gives, by a special
symbolism, the distance and direction of the food source she has found. If, for
the Austrian variety of bee, the food source. is less than 80 meters away, she
performs a round dance, running rapidly arouna in a circle, first to the left,
then to the right. This in effect says to the hive bees: "Fly out .from the
hive; close by in the neighborhood is food to be fetched."
�-4If, on the other hand, the food source is more than 80 meters away, the
forager will use the tail-wagging dance. The rhythm of the dance tells the
distance: the closer the source, the more figure-of-eight cycles of the dance
, per minute. The tail-wagging part of the dance, shown by the middle wavy line
in the diagram, tells the direction, in accordance with a curious rule. On
the vertical honeycomb_ in the hive, the direction up means towards the sun,
and the direction down means away from the sun. If the tail-wagging run points
60° left of straight up, the food source is 60° to the left of the sun, and so
on. Directions with respect to the sun have been transposed into directions
with respect to gravity, the directions are reported with errors of less than
30.
This same dance is used in the springtime when half the bees move out of
the hive and form a swarm, seeking a new nesting place. Scout bees fly out in
all directions, then return and dance to announce the location they have hit on.
It is important, of course, that the selected spot be protected from winter,
winds, and rough weather, and that there be abundant feeding nearby. The
surprizing thing is that not just one nesting place is announced, but several at
the same time. The dancing and the coming and going can continue for days. By
their dances the bees engage in mutual persuasion, inciting one another to inspect
this site or that site. The better the site, the longer and more vigorously the
the returning bee dances. The process continues until all the scout bees are
dancing in the same direction and at the same rate. Then the swarm arises and
departs for the homesite it has thus decided upon. Mistaken decisions are few.
The dance
human language
the language a
depends solely
of the honeybee is symbolic in a genetically determined way. That
is not genetically determined in the same way is easy to show:
child learns, whether Swahili, Cantonese, Urdu, or any other,
on the language of those by whom he is brought up.
·
The vocabulary of a human language is not genetically fixed. However, I
do not believe that the discussion of the biological foundations of language
can properly end at this point.
My reasons for saying this are two. In the first place, there are certain
features of human speech which are not found in the natural corrnnunication
systems of animals, but which are found universally in all known human languages,
present or past. The existence of these features is, at the very least,
consonant with the possibility that there is a genetic foundation underlying
human speech. The facts appear to be most easily accounted for by assuming
that there is such a foundation, , forcing human speech to be of a certain basic
type.
Secondly, this same assumption receives support from the study of primary
language acquisition in children. It is not that Psammetichos was right,
or that children if left to themselves would commence to speak proto-IndoEuropean
or any language resembling
adult human language. All genetically determined
traits depend for their appearance to a greater or lesser degree, on features
of the environment. The genes or genetic factors do not of themselves determine
an
�-sbody parts or physiological or behavioral traits. Rather, they determine
developmental processes, which nonnally succeed one another in a determinate
way, but can be profoundly affected by environmental influence. These facts
point to the possibility that genetically determined traits might appear only
in the course of maturation, and then only in response to specific influences
from outside the organism. Ethologists inform us of many instances of speciesspecific, genetically based behavior that emerge only in this way. An example
is imprinting. Thomas More described it in his .Utopia. Chicks or ducklings
or goslings, a few hours or days after hatching, enter a critical period. Whatever object they first encounter during this period, within certain limits of
size, and moving within appropriate limits of speed, they begin to follow,
and continue to follow through childhood. The object followed can be, and
usually is, the mother; but it can also be an ethologist like Konrad Korenz
on his hands and knees, or something stuffed at the end of a stick. Failure to.
develop imprinted responses during infancy may cause behavioral abnormalities
in the adult bird -- abnormalities that cannot be corrected by later training.·
Imprinting is only one of many known species-specific characteristics or
behaviors that appear in the course of development, in response to what are
sometimes called "releasers", environmental stimuli of specified kinds. It
will be my contention that important features of human linguistic capacity are
of this kind.
After discussing these two points, I shall conclude with certain reflections
on what they might mean.
I begin, then, with three features of human speech that do not appear to
be found in the natural communication systems of animals (see Table II) :
1.
Phonematization
2.
Concatenation
3. · Granunar
What is meant by phonematization? The vocalizations heard in the human
languages of the world are always within fairly narrow limits of the total
range of sounds that humans can produce. We are able to imitate, for instance,
the vocalizations of mammals and birds with considerable accuracy, given a little
training, but such direct imitations never seem to be incorporated in the vocabularies of human languages. In all human languages, the meaningful units, words,
or more strictly speaking, morphemes, are divisible into successive, shorter,
meaningless sounds called phonemes. Morphemes are the smallest meaningful
units into which an utterance can be .divided. A morpheme can be a single word
such as "water"; it can be more than one word as in "spick and span"; and it
can be less than a single word, as in the "er" in "whiter", which turns the
adjective "white" into a comparative. Phonemes are the meaningless sounds into
which morphemes can be di.v ided. A phoneme is not, strictly speaking, a single
sound, but rather a small class of sounds; it can be defined as the smallest
�-6distinctive unit functioning within the sound system of a language to make a
difference.
Refinements aside, the central fact I wish to convey is this:
in all languages, morphemes are constituted by sequences of phonemes. This
is a fact that the inventors of the alphabet were probably about the first to
come to understand.
The fact could have been different. One can imagine a language in which
the symbol for a cat was a sound resembling a miaow; in which size was represented
by loudness, color by vowel quality, and hunger by a strident roar. Morphemes
in such a language would not be analyzable into phonemes.
All human languages are phonematized, but each language uses a somewhat
different set of phonemes, in each case a small set.
Parrots and mynah birds excel other animals in the imitation of human
speech, but i t is doubtful that they speak in phonemes. The matter could be
put to a test.
A parrot that had heard only Portuguese, and had acquired a
good repertory of Portuguese words and phrases, could be transferred into an
environment where he would hear only English, and have the opportunity of
repeating English exclamatory remarks. If these remarks emerged with a
Portuguese accent, the n it would be clear that the parrot had learned Portuguese
phonemes, which he proceeded to use in the vocalization of English words.
In
the opposite case, we would conclude that the parrot had the capacity to imitate
sounds accurately, but had not acquired the habit of using phonemes for the
production of speech.
In the human child, speech by the same test would turn out to be phonematized.
The second general characteristic of human speech I have listed is concatenation. Human utterances seldom consist of single morphemes in isolation;
in no human speech-community are utterances restricted to single morphemes;
in all languages, morphemes are ordinarily strung together into sequences.
To
be sure, the peoples of many, perhaps most cultures, are less garrulous than we;
they use language only in certain circumstances and only somewhat sparingly,
while we talk a good deal of the time. It is nevertheless true that humans
in all speech-communities concatenate morphemes.
The third property presupposes concatenation; it is the property of grammatical or syntactical structure. By "structure" I am going to mean a set of
relations that can . be diagrammed. In no language are morphemes strung together
in purely random order. Native speakers of a language normally agree in
rejecting certain utterances as ungrammatical, and in recognizing certain
other utterances as grammatical. According to Noam Chomsky, for instance, the
sentence "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is grammatical, though meaningless or nearly so; the concatenation ... furiously sleep ideas green colorless",
the same words in revers e order, is ungrammatical.
The one concatenation admits
of a syntactical diagram, the other does not.
�-7It is generally assumed in linguistics that the grammar of a language is
completely describable by means of a finite and in fact small set of formal
rules. For no natural language has such a description been achieved as yet,
otherwise one could program a computer to utter the grammatical sentences in
the language. Apparently the mechanism involved in the grammar of a natural
language is complex. I shall return to this topic again; the point now is
just the W1iversality of grammar -- a relatively complex kind of system -- as
a feature of human languages.
All three properties I have described are, so far as the available evidence
indicates, without cultural histories. Phonematization, concatenation, grammatical
structure, are features of all known human language, past or present. And although
languages are always in process of change, it is not the case that these changes
follow a general pattern from a stage that can be called primitive to one that
can be called advanced. No known classification or analysis of human languages
provides any basis for a theory of the development of language from aphonemic,
non-grammatical, or simple imitative beginnings.
These facts are consonant with the hypothesis that there is a genetic foundation underlying human speech, forcing it to be of a certain basic type, and in
particular, to have the features I have just described. In support of this
hypothesis, I take up now the development of language in the child.
The first sound a child makes is to cry.
Immanuel Kant says the birth cry
has not the tone of lamentation, but of indignation and of aroused
wrath; presumably because [the child] wants to move, and feels his
inability to do so as a fetter that deprives him ·o f his freedom.
More recently a psychoanalyst has written of the birthcry:
It is an expression of the infant's overwhelming sense of ir.feriority
on thus suddenly being confronted by reality, without ever having had
to deal with its problems.
In view of the anatomical immaturity of the human brain at birth, these adult
interpretations are rather surprizing. No doubt the infant in being born undergoes
a rude shock. But crying is a mechanism with a number of importan~ functions;
one of the earliest is clearing fluid out of the middle ear, so that .the child
can begin to hear. The mechanism is ready to operate at birth, and the infant
puts it to work. The sound made in crying changes slightly during childhood,
but otherwise does not mature or change during one's life. Crying is not a first
step in the development that leads to articulate speech; it involves no articulation;
the infant simply blows his horn without operating the keys.
A quite distinct sort of vocalization begins at about the 6th or 8th week
after birth: little cooing sounds that appear to be elicited by a specific
stimulus, a nodding object resembling a face in the baby's visual field. A
�-8clown's face painted on cardboard, laughing or crying, will do for a while.
The response is first smiling, then cooing. After about 13 weeks it is
necessary that the face be a familiar one to elicit the smiling and cooing.
During cooing, some articulatory organs are moving, in particular the tongue.
The cooing sounds, although tending to be vowel-like, are not identical with
any actual speech sounds. Gradually they become differentiated. At 6 months
they include vocalic and consonantal components, like /p/ and /b/. Cooing
develops int.o babbling resembling one-syllable utterances, for instance /ma/,
/mu/, /da/, /di/. However, the babbling sounds are still not those of adult
speech.
The first strictly linguistic feature to emerge in a child's vocalizations
is contour of intonation. Before the sound sequences have determinable meaning
or definite phonemic structure, they come out with the recognizable intonation
of .questions, exclamations, or affirmations. Linguistic development begins not
with the putting together of individual components, but rather with a whole
tonal pattern. Later, this whole becomes differentiated into component parts.
Differentiation of phonemes is only approximate at first and has to be progressively refined. The child is gradually gaining control of the dozen or so
adjustments in the vocal organs that are required for adult speech. By 12 months
he is replicating syllables, as in "mamma" and "dada". By 18 months he will
normally have a repertory of three to 50 recognizable words.
I have described this development as though mothers were not trying to
teach, but of course they normally are.
It is nevertheless a striking fact
that these stages emerge in different cultures in the same sequence and at
very nearly the same ages, and in fairly strict correlation with other motor
achievements.
Detailed studies have been made of speech acquisition among the
Zuni of New Mexico, the Dani of Dutch New Guinea, the Bororo in central Brazil,
and children in urban U.S.A.; in all cases, intonation patterns become distinct
at about the time that graspin9 between thumb and fingers develops; the first
words .appear at about.the time that walking is accomplished; and by the time
the child is able to jump, tiptoe, and walk backward, he is talking a blue
stre:i.k. Among children born deaf, the development from cooing through spontaneous
babbling to well-articulated speech-sounds occurs as with normal children,
but of course the development cannot continue onward into the stage at which
adult words are learned through hearing. Among the mentally retarded, these
developments are chronologically delayed, but take place with the same correlation
between various motor achievements. Given the variety of envirorunental conditions
in these several cases, it seems plausible to attribute the emergence of
linguistic habits largely to maturational changes within the growing child,
rather than to particular training procedures.
The specific neurophysiological correlates of speech are l .i ttle known,
but that there are such correlates and that they mature as speech develops is
supported by much evidence. The human brain at birth has only 24% of its adult
weight; by contrast, the chimpanzee starts life with a brain that already
weighs 60% of its adult value. The human brain takes longer to mature, and
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more happens as it matures, including principally a large increase in the number
of neuronal connections. A large part of the discernible anatomical maturation
takes place in the first two years; the process appears to be complete by about
14 years of age. By this time the neurophysical basis of linguistic capacity
has become localized in one of the two cerebral hemispheres, usually the left.
If by this time a first language has not been learned, no language will ever
be learned. Speech defects due to injuries to the brain that occur before the
final lateralization of the speech-function are usually overcome; but if the
injury comes after lateralization, the speech defect will be permanent.
Capacity for speech does not correlate uniformly with size of brain.
There is a condition known as nanocephalic dwarfism, in which humans appear
reduced to fairy-tale size; adult individuals attain a maximum height of between
two and threefeet (see Table III). Nanocephalic dwarfs differ from other dwarfs
in preserving the skeletal and other bodily proportions of normal adults. Brain
weight in these dwarfs barely exceeds that of a normal newborn infant. The
brain weight of the nanocephalic dwarf, given in the middle row, is only a
little over a third of that of a 2 1/2 year old boy, but the ratio of body
weight to brain weight is equal to that of a 13 1/2 year old boy. These
dwarfs show some retardation in intellectual growth, and often do not surpass
a mental age-level of ~ or 6 years. But all of them acquire the rudiments of
language, including speaking and understanding; they speaJc grarm:natically, and
can manufacture sentences which are not mere repetitions of sentences they have
heard. The appropriate conclusion appears to be that the ability to acquire
language depends, not on any purely quantitative factor, but on specific modes
of organization of human neurophysiology.
One further point concerning the neurophysiological basis of language. The
main evidence here is provided by aphasias (aphasia= a +~ava1, not+ to speak).
These are failu~es in production or comprehension of language, resulting from
injuries to the brain. And this evidence argues, for one thing, against regarding
language ability as being encoded simply in a spatial layout of some kind, say
a network of associations in the cerebral cortex. Subcortical areas are involved,
as well as cortex. The aphasias most frequently involve, not disruption of
associations, but rather disruption of temporal order, affecting either phonemes
in the production of words, as in spoonerisms, or words and phrases in the production
of sentences. The patient is unable to control properly the tempcral ordering
of these units, and as a consequence they tumble into the production line
uninhibited by higher syntactic principles. In general, the sympton is lack
of availability of the right thing at the right time.
Language is through-and-through an affair of temporal patterns and sequences.
The neurophysiological organization required for this cannot be simply that of
associations. In the making of speech-sounds, for instance, certain muscles
have to contract, the efferent nerve fibers innervating these muscles are of
different lengths and diameters, and as a consequence the times required for a
�-10-
nerve inpulse to go from brain to muscle differ for different muscles. Hence
the nerve im.pulses for the production of a single phoneme must be fired off
from the brain at different times, and the sequences of impulses for successive
phonemes must overlap in complex ways. In the simplest sequential order of
· events, it thus appears that events are selected, not in response to immediately
prior events, but in accordance with a hierarchic plan that integrates the
requirments for periods of time of several seconds' duration. All this patterning
in time is thought to depend on a physiological rhythm of about 6 cyles per
second, in relation to which other events are timed. Arrangements of this
complexity do not come about by learning. The evidence here, as well as the
observations I have already described as to the way voice-sounds develop in
children, points to the existence of an innate mechanism for the production of
phonemes, one which is activated by a specific input, the appearance of the
human face, and which matures in stages.
Could anything similar be argued for competence in syntax, the ability
to understand and produce grarn.~atical sentences? Here you will undoubtedly
be more doubtful, for surely the grammars of different languages are different.
Please recall that the sets of phonemes used in different languages are also
somewhat different. The universality of phonematization is compatible with
different languages employing different. subsets of the humanly possible phonemes.
The claim for universa~ity of grammar must be of similar kind. The grammars
of human languages are not of just any imaginable kind of ordered concatenation
of morphemes. Rather, they derive from a certain subclass of the imaginable
orders, a subclass involving phrase structure and what has been called "deep
structure". The production of grarrnnatical sentences turns out to pose requirements similar to those necessary for the temporal ordering of phonemes; a
serial order in which one element determines the next is insufficient; there has
to be hierarchical organization, in which elements connected with one a,.,other are
separated temporally in the production line.
Let me return now to the description of stages in the primary acquisition
of language by a child.
At about the end of the first year of life, the child normally utters his
first unmistakeable word. For a number of months, while the child is building
up a repertory of about 50 words, he utters only single-word utterances. He
frequently hears sentences like "Here is your milk", "Shall daddy take you by-by?",
and so on, but he will neither join together any two words he knows nor can he
be induced to do so on request. Does he lack the memory or the vocalizing
power to produce a two-word utterance? The evidence is against these suppositions.
Then, roughly between 18 and 24 months, he suddenly and spontaneously begins to
join words into two-element phrases: . "up baby", "baby highchair", "push car",
and so on. What explains the shift?
An important observation at the one-word stage is that these single words
are given the intonations or pitch-contours of declarative, interrogative, or
�-11-
hortatory sentences. The single-word utterances seem to function in meaning
in the same way as sentences will function later cm: "Doggie" might mean,
for instance, "There is a dog". When the two-word construction "push car"
appears, it is not just two single-word utterances spoken in a certain order.
As single-word utterances, both "push" and "car" would have primary stresses
and terminal intonation contours. But when they are two words programmed as
a single utterance, the primary stress and higher pitch come on "car"; and
the unity of the whole is indicated by the absence of a terminal pitch contour
between the words and the presence of such a contour at the end of the sequence.
What appears to be happening is that the child is by stages increasing
his span, his ability to plan or program longer utterances. Grammar is already
present in embryo. Further development will be a process of successive increases
in span or integration, on the one hand, and progressive differentiation of the
parts of utterances on the other.
Imitation plays a role in this process, but it is seldom mere parroting.
In Table IV I have listed some imitations actually produced by two children,
whom I shall call Adam and Eve; both were about two years old.
First note that the imitations preserve the word orderof the model, even
when not preserving all·the words. This is not a logical necessity; it is
conceivable that the child might reverse or scramble the order; that he does not
suggests that he is processing the utterance as a whole. A second fact to
notice is that, when the models increase in length, the child's imitation is
a reduction, and that the selection of words is not random. The words retained
are generally nouns, verbs, and less often adjectives: words sometimes called
"contentives", because they have semantic content; their main grammatical
function lies in their capacity to refer to things. The forms omitted are what
linguists call "functors", their grammatical functions being more obvious than
their semantic content. The omission of the functors leads to a kind of telegraphic
language, such as one uses in wiring home: "Car broken down; wallet stolen; send
money American Express Baghdad". In the child's telegraphic utterances, how
will the appropriate functors come to be introduced?
While the child engages in imitating, with reductions, the utterances
of the mother, the mother frequently imitates, with expansion, the utterances
of the child (see Table V). The mother's expansions, you will note, preserve
the word order of the child's sentences, she acts as if the child meant everything he said, and more, and it is the "more" that her additions articulate.
She adds functors. The functors have meaning, but it is meaning that accrues
to them in context rather than in isolation. The functors tell the time of
the action, whether it is ongoing or completed; they inform us of possession,
and of relations such as are indicated by prepositions like in; on, ~' down;
they distinguish between a particular instance of a class as in "the highchair",
and an arbitrary instance of a class, as in "a sandwich"; and so on.
�-12How or to what extent these adult expansions of the child's utterances help
the child to learn grammatical usage is uncertain. It has been found that
inunediate imitations by the child of just uttered adult sentences are less
frequently well-formed than spontaneously produced utterances. The view that
progress toward adult norms arises merely from practice in overt imitation of
adult sentences is clearly wrong. The child rather appears to be elaborating
his own grammar, making use of adult models, but constantly analogizing to produce
new and often mistaken words or forms.
Take pluralization (see Table VI) . In English there are a few irregular
plurals, as of mouse, foot, man. The child normally regularizes these plurals:
mouses, foots, mans.
Instead of foot vs. foots, some children give feet for the
singular, feets for the plural. One does not get an initial fluctuation between
foot and feet, such as one would expect if only imitation of adult forms were
a _ work.
t
Most English plurals are regular and follow certain formal rules. Thus we
have mat vs. mats, but ~atch vs. matches. Words ending in sibilants, such as
match, hors e , b o x, add a vowe l before the..§_ of the plural. Children have difficulty
with pluralizing these words, and tend at first to use th e singular form for
both singular and plural. Sometime s a child will analogize in such a way as to
remove the sibilant, substituting for instance, for box vs. boxes, the singularplural pair bok vs. boks. Then at some point the ch~ld produces the regular
plural of a sibilant word, say, boxes. Frequently when this happens he may
abandon temporarily the regular plural for non-sibilant words, so that one gets
foot vs. footses. What is happening? Overlaid on the child's systematic analogic
forms, there is a gradual accumulation of successful imitations which do not fit
the child's system. Eventually these result in a change in the system, often
with errors due to over-generalizing.
Consider also the past tense inflection, which in English bears considerable
similarity to the plural inflection (see Table VI again). There are regular
forms like walk-walked, and irregular ones like go-went. Among the regular verbs,
the form of the past d e pends on the final phoneme of the simple verb:
so we have
pack-packed and pat-patted. In the case of past-tense inflection in contrast
with pluralization, however, the most fre q uently used forms are irregular, and the
curious fact is that the child often starts regularizing these forms before having
been heard to produce any other past-tense forms.
Thus goed, doed, corned appear
among the first past-tense forms produced.
The analogizing tendency is evidently
very strong.
· The occurrence of certain kinds of errors on the level of word construction
thus reveals the child's effort t.o induce regularities from the speech he is
exposed to. When a child says, "I buyed a fire car for a grillion dollars,"
he is not imitating in any strict sense of the term; he is constructing in
accordance with rules, rules which in adult English, are in part mistaken. At
every stage, the child's linguistic competence extends beyond the sum total of
the sentences he has heard. He is able to unders tand and construct sentences
�-13-
which he cannot have heard before, but which are well-formed in terms of general
rules that ar·e implicit in the sentences he has heard. Somehow, genius that
he is, he induces from the speech to which he is exposed a latent structure of
rules. For the rest of his life, he will be spinning out the implications of
this latent structure.
By way of illustration of this inductive process, and .of a fur~her stage in
the achievement of grarrunatical competence, let me indicate some aspects of the
development of the noun phrase in children's speech (see Table VII). A noun
phrase con~.ists of a noun plus modifiers of some kind, which together can be
used in all the syntactic positions in which a single noun can be used: alone
to name or request something, or in a sentence as subject, object, or predicate
nominative. The table at the top gives a number of noun phrases uttered by Adam
or Eve at about two years of age. Each noun phrase consists of one word from a
small class of modifiers, M, followed by one word from the large class of nouns,
N. The rule for generating
these noun phrases is given below in symbols: NP ·
is generated by M plus N.
The class M does not correspond to any single syntactic class in adult
English; it includes indefinite and definite articles, a possessive pronoun, a
demonstrative adjective, a quantifier, a cardinal number, and some descriptive
adjectives. In adult English these words are of different syntactic classes
because they have very different privileges of occurrence in sentences. For the
children, the words appear to belong to a single class because of their common
privilege of occurrence before nouns; the lack of distinction leads to ungranunatical
combinations, which are marked in the table by an asterisk. Thus the indefinite
article should be used only with a · comrnon count noun in the singular, as in
"a coat"; we do not say "a celery", "a Becky", "a hands". The numeral two we use
only with count nouns in the plural; hence we do not say "two sock". The word
"more" we use before mass nouns in the singular, as in "more coffee", and before
count nouns in the plural, as in "more nuts"; we would not say "more nut". To·
avoid the errors, it is necessary not only that the privileges of occurrence of
words of the class M be differentiated, but also that nouns be subdivided into
singular and plural, common and proper, count nouns and mass nouns.
Sixteen weeks after Time I, at Time II, Adam and Eve were beginning to make
some of these differentiations; articles and demonstrative pronouns were now
distinguished from other mewbers of the class M. Articles now always appeared
before descriptive or possessive adjectives, and demonstrative pronouns before
articles or other modifiers.
Twenty-six weeks after Time I, the privileges of occurrence had become
much more finely differentiated. Adam was distinguishing descriptive adjectives
and possessive pronouns, as well as articles and demonstrative · pronouns, from
the ' residual class M; Eve's classification was even more complicated, though she
was a bit younger. Also, nouns were being differentiated by both children:
proper nouns were clearly distinct from common nouns; for Eve, count nouns were
distinct from mass nouns.
�-14Simultaneously with these differentiations, further integrations were
occurring: the noun phrases were beginning to occur as constituents in longer
sentences; the permissible combinations of modifiers and nouns were assuming
the combination privileges enjoyed by nouns in isolation. Thus the noun phrase,
for Adam and Eve, was coming to have a psychological unity such as it has for
adults. This was indicated by instances in which a noun phrase was fitted between
parts of a separable verb, as in "put the red hat on". It was also indicated
by substitution of pronouns for noun phrases in sentences, often at first with
the pronoun being followed by the noun phrase for which it was to substitute,
as in "mommy get it my ladder", or "I miss it cowboy boot".
Whether any theory of learning at present known can account for this sequence
of differentiations and integrations is doubtful.
The process is more reminiscent
of the development of an embryo than it is of the simple acquisition of conditioned
reflexes or associations. What is achieved is an open-ended competence to comprehend sentences never before heard, in terms of a hierarchical structure, that
embeds structures within structures.
To illustrate, let me use, not a child's sentence, but an example that Chomsky
excerpts from the Port Royal Grammar of 1660 (see Figure II). The sentence is:
"Invisible God created the visible world".
The sentence may be diagrammed as
shown in the figure; Chomsky calls these diagrams phrase markers. There is a
phrase marker for what he calls surface structure; this has the function of
determining the phonetic shape and intonational contour of the sentence. And
there is a phrase marker for what he calls deep structure; this shows how prior
predications are embedded in the sentence, and determine its meaning.
Are formal structures like the one indicated by this diagram really operative
when linguistic competence is being exercised? There are a number of indications
that this is so. One indication is the extent to which the understanding of language
involves resolution of ambiguities, or disambiguation as it is sometimes
massively put. Consider the sentence "They are boring ' student~" (see Figure III) .
This has two different interpretations, which are represented by the diagrams
on the screen.
In interpretation A, the word "boring" is linked with the word
"students"; the students are thus characterized as boring.
In interpretation B,
the word "boring" is linked with the word "are", which thus becomes the auxiliary
verb in the present progressive tense of the verb "to bore", it is the students
who are being bored, by certain other persons designated by "'.:he pronoun "they",
but otherwise mercifully unidentified.
In an actual conversation, the context
of meaning would have led us to apply, as quick as a thought or perhaps more
quickly, the correct phrase marker to the interpretation of the sequence of uttered
sounds.
Other examples show how deep structures are essential to understanding
(see Table VIII). Consider the two sentences:
John is eager to please
John is easy to please.
�-15-
These sentences have the same surface structure. But a moment's thought shows
that the word "John" has two very diffe·r ent roles to play in the two sentences.
John in the first sentence is the person who is doing the pleasing; in the second
sentence he is the person who is being pleased. John is the underlying subject
in the first case, and the underlying object in the second case. Deep structure
or grammar is involved in understanding the difference in meaning of the two
sentences.
An opposite sort of case occurs when the surface granunars of two sentences
are different, although the meaning is essentially the same. Consider this
sentence in the active mode: "Recently seventeen elephants trampled on my
summer home".
Now consider the following sentence in the passive mode: "My
summer wa.s trampled -on recently by seventeen elephants." A native speaker of
English feels that these sentences are related,that they have the same or very
similar meanings. Yet their surface structures are very different. Recognition
that both sentences are describing the same event presupposes that speaker anJ.
hearer refer them both to a single deep structure embodyin~ the single meaning.
Something similar happens in recognition of similarity between visual patterns,
where there is no point-to-point correspondence between them.
Now all of this is unlikely to . seem astonishing, for it is' very familiar,
You and I, like the bourgeois gentilhomme, have been speaking and listening to
more or less grammatical prose for a long time now. People living at the seashore
are said to grow so accustomed to the murmur of the waves that they never hear
it. Aspects of things that could be important to us may be hidden by their
familiarity. The point I have been seeking to make is one that is due to Noam
Chomsky, a linguist I have been depending on more than once this evening. The
grammaticality of human languages involves properties that are in no sense
necessary properties of a . system that would fulfill the functions of human
communication. A grammar, for instance, in which statements would be generated
· word-by-word, from left to right, so to speak, so that any given morpheme would
determine the possible classes of morphemes that might follow it, is a kind of
grammar that might have been used, but was not. Instead, human speech involves
dependencies between non-adjacent elements, as in .the sentence "A.Tlyone who says
that is lying", where there is a dependency between the subject noun "anyone"
and the predicate phrase "is lying". All operations in human languages,
transforming, for instance, an active into a passive sentence, or a declarative
into an interrogative sentence, operate on and take account of phrase structure.
Example: we form the1nterrogative of the English.sentence, "Little Mary lived
in Princeton",. by introducing an auxiliary to the verb ("Little Mary did live
in Princeton"), then inverting the order of the auxiliary and the noun-phrase
which is the subject, to get "Did Li.ttle Mary live in Princeton?" It would be
entirely possible to form interrogatives in a different way independently of
phrase structure. There is no apriori reason why human languages should make
use exclusively of structure-dependent operations. It is Chomsky's conclusion
that such reliance on structure-dependent operations must be predetermined for
the language learner by a restrictive initial schematism of some sort, given
genetically, and directing the child's attempts to acquire linguistic competence.
�-16Put differently, one does not so much teach a first language, as provide a
thread along which linguistic competence develops of its own accord, by processes
more like maturation than learning.
The Chomskian analysis requires that we take one more step. The fact that
deep structures figure in the understanding and use of language shows that grammar
and meaning necessarily interpenetrate. The child's grammatical competence
matures only along with semantic competence, the organization of what can be
talked about in nameable categories and hierarchies of categories. This process,
like the development of grammatical competence, involves successive differentiations.
Sensory data are first grouped into as yet global classes of gross patterns,
and then subsequently differentiated into more specific patterns. The infant who
is given' a word su.ch as "daddy", and has the task of finding the category labelled
by this word, does not start out with the working hypothesis that a specific,
concrete object, say his father, uniquely bears this name. Rather, the word
initially appe ars to be u s ed as the labe l of a general and open category, corresponding
to the adult category of people or men.
Infra-hwnan animals are taught with
difficulty, if at all, to make the generalizations involved in naming, whereas
children fall in with the ways of names automatically.
Name s, other than proper
names, refer to ope n and flexibl e c l a s ses, which are subj e ct to e xte nsion and
differentiation in the ~ourse of languag e usage.
Catego rization and naming
involve relations between categories; nothing ever resides in a single term;
~ means nothing without £ and probably ~ and ~; £ means nothing without .5:..
and c and d. Children go about assimilating the relations that are embodied
in language, not me rely imitatively, but in an active, inventive, and critical
way.
They are full of impossible questions:
"How did the sky happen? How did the sun happen?
like a lamp? Who makes bugs?"
Why is the moon so much
At first, they are ultra-literal in their reactions to idioms and metaphors.
When grandmother said that winter was coming soon, the grandchildren laughed
and wanted to know: "Do you mean that winter has legs?" And when a lady said "I'm
dying to hear that concert", the child's sarcastic response was, 11'Then why don't
you die?" Sometimes reconciliation of adult requirements requires genius.
Chukovsky reports that a four-year-old Muscovite, influe nced both by an atheist
father and by a grandmother of orthodox faith, was overheard to tell her playmate:
"There is a god, but, of course, I do not believe in him." The active analogizing
and generalizing of 4- and 5-year olds is discernible in the odd questions they
can put:
"What is a knife -- the fork's husband?"
"Isn't it wonderful? I drink milk, water, tea, and cocoa, but out of
me pours only tea."
"What does blue look like from behind?"
�-17For a certain period, there is a special, heightened sensitivity to the strangeness
of words and their meanings; by age 5 or 6 this talent begins to fade, and by
7 or 8 all traces of it have disappeared. The need has passed; the basic principles
of the child's native language have been mastered.
What is it that has in fact been gained? We say, knowledge of a language.
But what is a language, my language? Thoughtfully considered, this is a wellnigh impossible question, because a language is .not a simple object, existing
by itself and capable of being grasped in its totality. It exists in the
linguistic competence of its users; it is what Aristotle would call an actuality
of the second kind, like the soul, or like knowing how to swim when you are
not swirruning. Through it I constitute myself a first-person singular subject,
by using this short word "I", which everyone uses, and which in each seems to
refer to something different, yet the same. And through it I am brought into
relation with others -- the ubiquitous "you" -- and with the public thing that
is there for both you and me, a treasury of knowledge and value transmitted
through and embedded in language.
We hear language spoken of as "living language", and there is evidence
enough to make it more than a metaphor. Language reproduces itself from generation
to generation, remaining relatively constant, yet with small mutations, enough
in fact to account for-its growing and evolving, leaving vestiges and fossils
behind, and undergoing speciation as a result· of migrations,, like Darwin's
finches on the Galapagos Islands. A change here provokes an adjustment there,
for the whole is a complex of relations, mediating between a world and human
organisms that are a part of it. The way a word is used this year is, in
biological lingo, its phenotype; the deep and more abiding sense in it is its
genotype.
It is we, of course, who are accomplishing all this; but we do not know
how we accomplish it. It is mostly a collective, autonomic kind of doing, like
the building activities of ants and termites, or the decision-making of bees.
It takes generation after generation, but we are part of it whenever and however
we utter words or follow them in the sentences th.at we hear or read, whether
lazily or intently, whether with habitual acceptance or active inquiry. Always
the words are found for us, and fitted with meanings for us, by agents in the
brain over which we exercise no direct control. We can either float with the
stream, sometimes a muddy tide of slang and jargon and cliche, or struggle cross
stream or upstream. Sometimes we can, sensing the possible presence of a meaning,
attempt a raid on the inarticulate; we can launch ourselves into speech, discovering what it is that we mean as we proceed. We "articulate"; the word once
meant division into small joints, then, by an effortless transition, the speaking
of sentences. There are unexpected qutcomes. We may find that our utterance is
ungrarrunatical or illogical; or we may discover that the connection of ideas
leads in directions we had not previously considered. In any case, phonetic,
syntactical, and semantic structures are being actualized in time, without our
quite knowing how. Yet we can strive after that lucidity and precision which,
when achieved, make language seem transparent to what there is.
�-18I have already been carried beyond the two propositions I set out to defend,
and in doing so, I have moved into a region of ambiguity. The question as to
what is determined by nature, independently ofus, and what is man-made, is an
ancient and disturbing question, embedded in old etymologies and myths.
(See Table IX). In more than one language, the word "man" is derived
from "earth". So it is in Hebrew: Adam, "man", comes from the word for "ground".
As shown in the upper diagram, the IndoEuropean root for "earth" gives us "man"
and "human" as well as "humus". The notion here is that of the autochthonous
origin of humans, their origination from the earth itself; it is a notion found
in early cultures all over the world. An implication would seem to be that man
is like a plant in his naturalness. On the other hand, as shown in the lower
diagram, the IndoEuropean root "wiros", "man" or "the strong one", leads not
only to virile but, staggeringly, to world, suggesting that man makes himself
and his world.
The dicho~omy, the tension, emerges in the Theban cycle of myths (see Table X).
Following a suggestion of Levi-Strauss, I am listing elements of it in chronological
order from left to right and from the top downward, but in columns, to show the
repetition of similar elements. Cadmus is sent off to seek his sister; he
kills a dragon, a chthonic monster, that will not permit men to live, and sews
the teeth of the dragon in the earth; from the teeth sprout up armed men who
kill one another, all except five who become the ancestors of the Thebans. In
column I are listed events of the myth in which blood relations seem to be given
too much importance. In colu..~n II are listed murders of brothers by brother,
of a father by a son: here blood relations are brutally disregarded. Column I is
thus opposed to column II. In column III, chthonic monsters that were killing
off humans are themselves killed by men; we can interpret this as a denial
of the autochthonous origin of man, an assertion that man has now become selfsufficient, himself responsible for his continued existence. In column IV .a re
listed the meanings of the names of the Labdacidae, including Oedipus; the
etymologies all indicate difficulty in walking or in standing upright. In myths
throughout the world, this difficulty in walking or standing is characteristic
of the creature that has just emerged out of the earth; the names given in column
IV thus constitute an assertion of the autochthonous oYigin of man. Column IV
contradicts column III, just as column I contradicts column II. The myth
de?ls with a difficulty of one sort, not by resolving it, but by juxtaposing
it to another, parallel type of opposition. Neither man's rootedness in nature
nor his transcendence of nature is unproblematic:
The study of language and its acquisition by children indicates that our
language has genet~c foundations or roots. These, however, have their fruition
only under appropriate conditions, only through culture. Man is by nature
a cultural animal. He does not fabricate his linguistic culture out of whole
cloth.
On the one hand, it becomes conceivable that a universal grammar and semantics
might be formulated, describing the species-specific features and presuppositions
that characterize human linguistic behavior universally. On the other hand,
nature's gift of language brings with it an apparent freedom from deterministic
necessity not previously present. Most of our sentences are quite new; it is
�-lguncommon for one sentence to come out the same as another, though the thoughts
be 1;.he same. Our utterances are free of the control of detectible stimuli.
The number of patterns underlying the normal use of language, according to
Chomsky, is orders of magnitude greater than the seconds in a lifetime, and
so cannot have been acquired simply by conditioning. While the laws of generation
of sentences remain fixed and invariant, the specific manner in which they are
applied remains unspecified, open to choice. The application can be appropriate.
Articulate, structurally organized signals can be raised to an expression
of thought.
Achievement here is subject to change and old laws, and it depends on a
sensitivity to old meanings as well as new possibilities. It requires both
strength and submission.
�TABLE I
Respiratory Adaptation in Speech
Breathing
Quietly
During Speech
3
3
Tidal volume
·soo-600cm
Time of inspiration
Time of
inspiration + expiration
about 0.4
about 0.13
Breaths per minute
18-20
4-20
Expiration
Continuous &
unimpede d
Periodically interrupted, with increase
in subglottal pressure
Electrical activity in
expiratory muscles
Nil or very low
Nil or very low at
start of phonation;
then increases rapidly
and continues active
to end of expiration
Electrical activity in
inspiratory muscles
Active in inspiration & nil during
expiration
Active in inspiration
& in expiration till
expiratory muscles
become active
Musculatures involved
Chest & abdominal,
closely synchronized
Mainly chest; slight
de synchronization
between chest and
abdominal muscles
Airways
Primarily nasal
Primarily oral
1500-2400cm
�FIGURE I
ROUND DANCE
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TAIL-WAGGING DANCE
-· - -.....
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�TABLE II
Species-specific Features of Human Speech
1.
Phonematization
"Morphemes":
the smallest meaningful units into which an
utterance can be divided.
Examples:
water
spick and span
"er" in "whiter", "taller", etc.
"Phoneme":
the smallest distinctive unit of sound functioning
within the sound system of a language to make a
difference.
Examples:
/p/ vs. /b/
/t/ vs. /d/
Phonematization: all morphemes in all natural human languages
are divisible into phonemes.
single morphemes are strung together into sequences,
rather than being used in isolation.
2.
Concatenation:
3.
Grammar or Syntactical Structure:
in no human language are
morphemes strung together in purely random order.
Examples (Chomsky) :
Grammatical:
furiously"
Ungrammatical:
colorless"
"colorless green ideas sleep
"furiously sleep ideas green
�TABLE III
Comparative Weights of Brain and Body in Humans,
Including Nanocephalic Dwarf, Chimpanzees, and Monkeys
Body Wt.
(kg)
Brain Wt.
(kg)
Human (male)
2-1/2
13-1/2
1.100
12.3
yes
Human (male)
13-1/2
45
1.350
34
yes
Human (male)
18
64
1.350
47
yes
INanocephalic
dwarf
12
13-1/2
0. 400
34
ye_s_u_
Chimp (male)
3
12-1/2
·o.4oo
34
no
47
0.450
104
no
0.090
40
no
I
Chimp (female)
adult
Rhesus monkey
adult
3-1/2
Ratio
(Bcdy : Brain)
Speech
Acquisition
Age
I
�TABLE IV
Imitations by Adam and Eve, Two years of Age
Model Utterance (parent)
Child's Imitation
Tank car
Tank car
Wait a minute
Wait
Daddy's brief case
Daddy brief case
Fraser will be unhappy
Fraser unhappy
He '.s going out
He go out
That's an old-time train
Old-time train
It's not the same dog as Pepper
Dog Pepper
No, you can't write on Mr. Cramer's
shoe
Write Cromer shoe
a minute
Contentives
Nouns:
Daddy, Fraser, Pepper, Cromer;
tank car, minute, brief case, train, dog,shoe
V~rbs:
wait, go, write
Adjectives:
unhappy, old-time
Functors:
the possessive inflection 's
the modal auxiliary will
the progressive inflection -ing
the contraction of the auxiliary verb is
the preposition on
the articles the and an
the modal auxiliary can
�TABLE V
Adult Expansions of Child Pronouncements
Utterances of Child
Mother's Expansions
(Additions circled)
Baby highchair
BabyE in the ) highchair
Mommy eggnog
Mommy(£ad herleggnog
Eve lunch
Eve~ having1lunch
Monuny sandwich
Mommy
Sat wall
~sandwich
~sa~wall
Throw Daddy
Throw\it t~ Daddy
Pick glove
Pick(!he'j glove
&J
�TABLE VI
Plural Inflection
Regularization of irregular fonns:
Singular
vs.
Plural
mouse
mouses
foot
foots
feet
feets
man
mans
or:
Words ending in sibilants
First Stage:
(as well as horse, match, judge, etc.)
treated as both singular and plural
~ox
bok vs. boks, in analogy with normal
Possible Second Stage:
"s" pluralization, replaces box vs. boxes
Third Stage:
after box vs. boxes is produced, then we also
get foot vs. footses, hand vs. handses
Past Tense Inflection
goed
corned
/
come
went
~came
buyed
doed
do
---------
~did
/
buy"-....
~bought
�TABLE VII
TIME I:
Noun Phrases with Generative Rule
A coat
That Adam
Big boot
*A celery
That knee
Poor man
*A Becky
More coffee
Little top
*A hands
*More nut
The top
· *Two sock
Dirty knee
My Monuny
· Two shoes
My stool
*Two tinker toy
NP ~ M +
N
M
a, big, dirty, little, more, my, poor, that, the, two
N
Adam, Becky, boot, coat, coffee, knee, man, Monuny, nut, sock,
stool, tinker toy, top, etc.
TIME II:
A.
Subdivision of Modifier class with Generative Rules
Privileges peculiar to articles
Obtained
Not Obtained
A blue flower
*Blue a flower
A nice nap
*Nice a nap
*A your car
*Your a car
*A my pencil
*My a pencil
Rule:
B.
NP -7.
Art + M + N
(Not:
NP --7 M + art + N)
Privileges peculiar to demonstrative pronouns
Not Obtained
Obtained
*That a horse
*A that horse
*That a blue flower
*A that blue flower
* Blue a that flower
Rule:
NP --7 Dem + Art + M + N
*Ungrammatical in adult English
�FIGURE II
Chomskian Phrase Markers
"Surface Structure"
Sentence (S)
~
Subject
(Noun Phrase)
Predicate
/~
/~
Noun
.
. Adjective
t
.Invisible
t
God
Verb
Object
\
the visible world
created
"Deep Structure"
Sentence (S)
·~
1~
Predicate
Subject
/\
God
/~
Object
Verb
S
/l~
Subject
J,
God
Copula
J
is
Pred . Adj.
-}
invisible
J
Created
l~ S
//~
Subject Copula Pred.
the world
J..
the world
"' .
is
\.
Adj.
visible
�FIGURE III
"They are boring Students ... :
Two Interpretations
Interpretation A
Sentence
Predicate ,
Subject
~ Nominative
Predicate
j
I
Verb
I
I
Adjective
Copula
Pronoun
students
boring
are
They
\
J
I
j
~Noun
Interpretation B
Sentence
/~
Predicate
subject
I~
verb
Pronoun
j
They
Object
I~
Progressive
Aux
j
are
\
boring
\
Noun
\
students
�TABLE VIII
Evidence For "Deep" Structure
Surface structures the same,
deep structure different:
John is eager to please.
{ John is easy to please.
Surface structures different,
Recently seventeen elephants
trampled on my summer house.
deep structures the same:
My summer home was recently
trampled on by seventeen elephants.
Visual patterns recognized as similar,
although no point-to-point correspondence exists between them.
--
-7
~-
�TABLE IX
Some Etymologies
_/7
gum an
(Germanic)
dhghem
------------~----------.-:.-gumen
'
(IndoEuropean)
(Old English)
= "earth"
= "man"
homo, humanitas ·
(Latin)
humus
(Latin)
="mould", "ground"
chthon
(Greek)
= "earth"
human
(English)
humus
(English)
chthonic ----,...autochthonous
(English)
= "fromthe earth
itself"
= . "of the earth"
vir---(Latin)
= "man"
--->- virile
{English)
wiros
(IndoEuropean)
= "man"
we.r
(Germanic,
Old English)
="man", "the~
strong one"
~
weorold ~ world
(AngloSaxon)
(English)
= "age of man",
"world"
alt, old
(AngloSaxon)
= "age"
�TABLE X
I
Blood relations
overemphasized
II
IV
III
Blood relations
underemphasized
Chthonic monsters
that would not
permit men to live
are slain by men
Difficulties in
walking straight
and standing
upright
Cadmus seeks
his sister
Europa,
ravished by Zeus
Cadmus kills
the dragon
The Spa rti (the
sown dragon's
teeth) kill one
another
Labdacus (Laius's
father) = "lame"
Laius (Oedipus' s
father) =
"left-sided"
Oedipus kills
his father,
Laius
Oedipus kills
the Sphinx
Oedipus "swollen-foot"
Oedipus marries
his mother,
Jocasta
Eteocles and
Polyneices, brothers,
kill one another
Antigone buries
her brother,
Polyneices,
despite
prohibition
Column I
Column II .. Column IV
Column III
�Bibliography
(In the preparation of this lecture I made use of the following books: the book
by E. H. Lenneberg, as well as the book edited by him, was particularly useful.)
Benveniste, Emile, Problems in General Linguisitcs (Coral Gables, Fla.: University
of Miami Press, 1971)
.,
Chomsky, Noam, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1965)
-------------, Cartesian Linguistics (New York:
-------------
Language and Mind (New York:
Harper & Row, 1966)
Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1968)
CrYstal, David, Linguistics (Penguin, 1971)
Frisch, Karl von, The Dance Langua ge and Orientation of Bees (Cambridge, Mass.
Belknap Press of Harvard, 1967)
Goldstein, Kurt, Language and Language Disturbances (New York, 1948)
Lenneberg, E. H., The Biological Foundations for Language (New York:
& Sons, 1967)
John Wiley
Lenneberg, E. H. (ed.), New Directions in the Study of Language (Cambridge, Mass.:
M. I. T. Press, 1966)
Lindauer, Martin, Communication Among Social Bees (New York:
Lyons, John, Noam Chomsky (New York:
Atheneum, 1967)
Viking Press, 1970)
Saussure, Ferdinand de, Course in General Linguistics (ed. Bally & Sechehaye; tr.
Baskin; New York: 1959)
Skinner, B. F., Verbal Behavior (New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1957)
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
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formallectureseriesannapolis
Text
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paper
Page numeration
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34 pages
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Title
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<em>Homo loquens</em> from a biological standpoint
Description
An account of the resource
Typescript of a lecture given on September 19, 1975 by Curtis Wilson as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Creator
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Wilson, Curtis
Publisher
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St. John's College
Coverage
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Annapolis, MD
Date
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1975-09-19
Rights
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St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online.
Type
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text
Format
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pdf
Language
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English
Identifier
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lec Wilson 1975-09-12
Relation
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<a title="Sound recording" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3670">Sound recording</a>
Deans
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a715ac5c895949d67ad8e9052c322938.mp3
d0ee594456840281f563f2772ece653d
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
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formallectureseriesannapolis
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
audiotape (Tape270)
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
<em>Homo loquens</em><span> from a biological standpoint</span>
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture given on September 19, 1975 by Curtis Wilson as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Creator
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Wilson, Curtis
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1975-09-19
Rights
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St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online.
Type
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sound
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
mp3
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
lec Wilson 1975-09-19
Relation
A related resource
<a title="Typescript" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3652">Typescript</a>
Deans
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a704208e72c40428abc052f69004b701.mp3
edce5fa96846e8e65c88525d493057a2
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
wav
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
01:03:15
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Title
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<em>The Student</em>, by Anton Chekhov: A Story About Us Told and Glanced At
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture delivered on November 3, 2017, by Louis Petrich as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Petrich, Louis
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-11-03
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make typescript copies of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online."
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
sound
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
mp3
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Petrich_Louis_2017-11-03
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/b4c8cf160d212f19ef6557c0ee686648.jpg
f67b7516f61c942e4f98ce66020f6089
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
Photographic Archive—Annapolis
Description
An account of the resource
<p>The Greenfield Library photographic archive houses over 5,000 photographs. The photographs in the collection document the history, academic, and community life of St. John’s College. The Library’s mission is to organize and preserve these unique visual materials, and to provide access to this collection. </p>
To learn more about our photographic use policy or to obtain high resolution images, please see the <strong><a title="Photographic Archive Use Policy" href="http://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/libraries/greenfield-library/policies/#photographicarchivepolicy" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Library’s Photographic Archive Use Policy</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Photographic Archives" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=7">Items in the Photographic Archive—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
photographicarchiveannapolis
Still Image
A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Photograph
Physical Dimensions
The actual physical size of the original image
20.5 x 25.5 cm
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
<span>Dwight D. Eisenhower Speaking at a Podium at the Opening of the Francis Scott Key Auditorium and Mellon Hall, St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland</span>
Description
An account of the resource
<span>Dwight D. Eisenhower speaking at a podium at the opening of the Francis Scott Key Auditorium and Mellon Hall, St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland, May 22, 1959.</span><br /><br />Eisenhower's speech is reprinted in <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=miua.4728423.1959.001&seq=462">Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1959: containing the public messages, speeches, and statements of the president, January 1 to December 31, 1959. Washington: Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Service, General Services Administration, pages 416-419</a>.<br /><br />A recording of Eisenhower's speech is available from the <a href="https://catalog.archives.gov/id/329120284">National Archives</a>.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Warren, Marion E.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1959-05-22
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this photograph.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Still Image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
jpeg
Subject
The topic of the resource
Eisenhower, Dwight D. (Dwight David), 1890-1969.
Weigle, Richard Daniel 1912-
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SJC-P-2469
Honorary Alumni
Presidents
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/395fe6f2b8804b1b070963ce09d7f3e1.mp4
39e11fea1fcb27c9fbbe9e4f0100a4da
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Moving Image
A series of visual representations imparting an impression of motion when shown in succession. Examples include animations, movies, television programs, videos, zoetropes, or visual output from a simulation.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
live YouTube webcast
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:52:03
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
<span>Ulysses: Does Your Life Matter? The Conspiracy Against Knowing Who You Are and How to Fight This Conspiracy with Amor-Matris</span>
Description
An account of the resource
Video recording of a lecture delivered by Annapolis tutor David Townsend on March 26, 2021 as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Mr Townsend describes his lecture: "Ulysses names Amor Matris—mother-love—as the passion most strongly opposing the tyrannical conspiracy against knowing who you are. Mothers are certain that their children deserve love and freedom. People infused with Amor Matris cannot be dominated without their consent. Tyrants cannot control people who love this deeply. Via the stories of the three main characters, Ulysses gives you a purpose-driven way to free yourself, your native land, your dearest associations, your working life, your family and friends, and your soul."
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Townsend, David L., 1947-
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2021-03-26
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a typescript of my lecture available online."
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
moving image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
mp4
Subject
The topic of the resource
Love, maternal
Joyce, James, 1882-1941. Ulysses
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Townsend_David_2021-03-26
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/499d77fed3c616f2dab52c7806ee2e61.mp4
add3744da74637264f675b79046187ac
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Moving Image
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mp4
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01:01:15
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<span>W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, and the Democratic Catastrophe of the Color Line</span>
Description
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Video recording of a lecture delivered by Jared Loggins on April 16, 2021 as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Mr. Loggins is an Assistant Professor of Black Studies and Political Science at Amherst University. His research and teaching interests are in black political thought, religious studies, and modern and contemporary democratic theory. He is about to publish his first book, which he co-authored, that “explores a critical theory of racial capitalism in the work of Martin Luther King Jr.”
Mr. Loggins describes his lecture: "When W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, at the dawn of the twentieth century, the now famous formulation in The Souls of Black Folk that 'the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,' he was issuing something of a prophecy. Du Bois foresaw catastrophe in a failure to regard the flourishing of African-Americans in the United States as of central concern in the American polity. Souls imagined racial domination as a shared 'democratic' catastrophe, and one that can be understood as taking on world significance in his later work. In seeing the catastrophe of racial domination as shared, Souls established Du Bois as a towering political theorist on the question of what freedom demands on both sides of the color line."
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Loggins, Jared A., 1992-
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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2021-04-16
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A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a typescript of my lecture available online."
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moving image
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mp4
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Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963. Souls of black folk
African Americans--Social conditions
United States--Race relations
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Macfarland, Joseph C.
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English
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Loggins_Jared_2021-04-16
Friday night lecture
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827475f3faf89363e548a9d65516a45c
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An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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wav
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00:55:11
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1001 Nights of Marcel Proust
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture delivered on February 11, 2011, by Patricia Locke as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Locke, Patricia M.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
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2011-02-11
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A signed permission form has been received giving blanket permission to make recordings of lectures and to make them available in the library and online.
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sound
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mp3
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Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922. À la recherche du temps perdu
Arabian nights. Selections
Storytelling
Sleep. Stages
Sleep. Psychological aspects
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English
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LEC_Locke_Patricia_2011-02-11_ac
Friday night lecture
Tutors
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https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/13a3f6b41c31910812b583216545994a.pdf
669ffc000efd5ac51cbe1d8dcc741d45
PDF Text
Text
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
13. 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer)
CHARLES G. BELL
ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
or
1260 CANYON ROAD
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501
September 1995
Last Revised January ‘96
�Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM
87501
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
13: 1400 — Pilgrims All (Chaucer)
1)
Hubert and Jan van Eyck 1425-9, Adoration of the Lamb, from the Altarpiece of St. Baron, Ghent; first, video detail, center
1a) Same, detail, upper left
V1b) Same, detail, upper right
1c)
From the same altarpiece, Panels of Just Judges and of Knights of the Cross
Music:
Dunstable, Ave Regina Coelorum, close, Cape, ARC 3052
Twenty-five years after Chaucer’s death in 1400, and the Van Eyck Adoration of
the Lamb heightens the features of his world: the force of robed leaders, commoners,
churchmen —
I saw his sleves purfled at the hand
With fur ...he was a fair prelaat —
in a landscape of precise spring — such human filling in of Gothic symbol as Dunstable,
also by 1425, achieves in harmony.
(end Dunstable)
Yet what the proudest, earthiest, lustiest of those Chaucerian characters was
headed toward
2)
William the Englishman 1180-84, East Chapel (“Becket’s Crown”), Canterbury Cathedral
English Norman, c. 1100, Crypt, Canterbury Cathedral
William the Englishman, 1179-84, Trinity Chapel Ambulatory, Canterbury
Cathedral
2a)
2b)
was Canterbury, 12th century shrine of Becket — sacramental blue and gules burning in
the vaulted gloom — from that time when even the popular burden was “Worldes blis ne
last no throwe.”
Music:
9/1995
English 13th cent., “Worldes blis ne last no throwe,” RCA V-LM6015
1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer)
1
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
It is of the essence also of the Waning of the Middle Ages, that the ground of
Contemptu Mundi still sounds under Chaucer:
This world nys but a thurghfare ful of wo,
And we been pilgrymes, passing to and fro.
("Knight’s Tale")
(fade Worldes Blis)
Meanwhile English architecture, by a kind of skeletal adaptation had reached from
Canterbury toward the open clarity of a stately hall.
3 or V3) Early English, 1250-60, Five Sisters Window, York Cathedral (CGB ‘80)
First was Early English, 1250, the lancet heightening of the Five Sisters Window
in York — just as English thought in Bacon took its own more earthly-immediate way.
4)
4a)
Decorated, 1286-1306, Octagonal Chapter House, Wells Cathedral
Same, especially the fan vaulting (CGB ‘84)
Second the Decorated, as in this 1300 Chapter House of Wells, generates out of
Geometric the Curvilinear wreathings which would inspire French Flamboyant — while
in thought Duns Scottus led Occam to the empirical outwardness and spiritual intuition
aimed at Renaissance and Reformation. It is no clearer, on the surface, how Occam’s
study of suppositio (one thing’s standing for another), with its hair-splitting — as of
“mobile confused distributive suppositio” from “immobile confused distributive
suppositio” — widens creed for a future Cartesian structure reared on causal reason,
Va5) Same as 5, video detail of the lierne vaulting (CGB ‘84)
5)
Perpendicular, 1337-57, Choir of Gloucester Cathedral with great East Window; Digital adds east window detail
than how the marvelous involution of lierne vault, culminating, mid-14th century, in
Gloucester Choir, can shape Renaissance out of Gothic; yet the passage from Canterbury
apse to the wide-windowed fabric of Perpendicular, must emerge, like the chordhumanizing of music, as a shift from other-worldly severity, through sacramental purity
and elaboration, toward earthly vigor in the now Nominal scholastic frame.
a6)
English Perpendicular, 1337-1412, Cloisters, Gloucester Cathedral
June 1996
1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer)
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�C.G. Bell
6)
6a)
Symbolic History
Late Perpendicular, 1426-80, Divinity School, Oxford (CGB ‘80)
Same, 1445-88, Duke Humphrey Library, above the Divinity School,
Bodleian, Oxford
From which the road is open to the 15th-century perfection of a ceremonial space
(as music from its Gothic resources brought the polyphonies of Dunstable), here the
Oxford Divinity School, smaller than the great Perpendicular cage carved out of the
Romanesque choir of Gloucester. Thus followers polish gems from Chaucer’s great mine
— the Scot Henryson that bright windy night after hail, when he made The Testament of
Cresseid:
I mend the fyre and beikit [baked] me about,
Than tuik ane drink my spreitis to comfort,
And armit me well fra the cauld thairout;
To cut the winter night and mak it short,
I tuik ane Quair [Book] and left all uther sport,
Writtin be worthie Chaucer glorious,
Of fair Creisseid, and worthie Troylus.
7)
7a)
Flemish Civic Gothic, 13th cent. (rebuilt after World War I), Cloth Hall and
Belfrey, Ypres
Again, Hubert and Jan van Eyck 1425-9, Adoration of the Lamb, Patriarchs
and Prophets to the left, Ghent
From Siena and Florence to London (as here in Flemish Ypres), guild and trading
life had reared civic halls, thronged by Chaucer’s time with all his faculties: the
Merchant with his forked beard, determined to keep the sea open between Orwell and
Middleburg; the Seargeant of the Law, quoting the statutes and cases since King William,
and for whom all was fee simple in effect; those guildmen clothed in one livery; and
churchmen in so many — bustling the belfried square.
Va8) Jean Pucelle, 1343, whole of f. 25, Belleville Breviary, Bibliotheque
Nationale, Paris; first, video detail, upper left
8)
Same, lower left, Cain and Abel, etc.
8a) Luttrell Psalter, 1335-40, Harvest Cart Going Uphill, British Library, London
8b) Misericord Carving, c. 1400, Sow and Piglets, Worcester Cathedral
June 1996
1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer)
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Symbolic History
In poetry too, as in the arts, the mundane style had been ripening over the North
since the late 13th century, as in Ruteboef (“Dieus m’a fait compagnon a Job”):
God has companioned me with Job
When he wiped me at a swab
Clean of all I had.
This right eye that was my best,
Webbed and blind, has left me lost,
To grope my road...
And now my wife has borne a brat
And my horse slipped on a slat
And cracked his leg:
The nurse is at me like a plague,
Grabbing money by the bag,
For baby’s pap and souse,
Or he’ll be back to yell in the house. (CGB)
A sentiment paired, after 1400, in the Second Shepherds Play:
I have more cradles to rock than ever I had...
A house full of young fat,
The devil knock their skulls flat,
Woe to him has much brat
And little bread... (CGB)
The lively details of sacred art.
a9) Peter Parler aus Gmund, 1379-93, Self from the triforium, Cathedral, Prague
Vb9) English Carving, c. 1380(?), Effigy of St. John the Baptist, detail, from old
church of St. Nicholas, now in Hereford Cathedral (CGB ‘84)
9)
C. Sluter, c. 1390, Philip the Bold of Burgundy, Chartreuse, Dijon (CGB ‘80)
9a) Same, upper detail; video pans on slide 9, while slide show works from an old
photo (formerly V9); digital, like video, pans on 9
In the ground of self- and earth-denial we are watching the rise of a vital
antithesis, of self and earth as modes of Western assurance and power. In the age of
Chaucer they still claim the sacred embrace. Let us begin at the end with the Retractions
the poet appended to the Parson’s Tale:
I biseke yow mekely, for the mercy of God, that ye preye for me that
Crist have mercy on me and foryeve me my giltes; and namely of my
June 1996
1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer)
4
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
translacions and enditynges of wordly vanitees, the whiche I revoke in
my retracciouns...
(a list follows of most of his works)
and many a song and many a leccherous lay; that Crist for his grete
mercy foryeve me the synne... that I may been oon of hem at the day of
doom that shulle be saved...
Music:
French, early 15th cent, from Tuba Gallicalis, Nonesuch H-1010
In this proudest portrait of Chaucer’s time by the chief sculptor of full-robed
human force, Claus Sluter’s 1390 Philip the Bold of Burgundy is on his knees. With
Chaucer, what he repents of is not simply what we would call sin, but the earthly fabric to
which his commitment is so strong: the art he cultivates, the music of the Tuba
Gallicalis.
(end Tuba Gallicalis)
10)
10a)
E. Anglian (Norwich), c. 1330, Nativity from Life of Virgin, Cluny, Paris
Same, detail (can be videoed from 10)
Music:
English, c. 1310, Agnus Dei, Seraphim, SIC-6052 (2,5)
The backward-looking part of every Christian treasured an etherial thinness,
where sacred and secular dream timelessly — islanded in contempt of the world, the
sensuous poignance of the real (English, 1330):
June 1996
1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer)
5
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Nou skrinketh rose and lylie flour,
That whilen ber that suete savour
In somer, that suete tyde;
Ne is no quene so stark ne stour,
Ne no levedy so bryht in bour,
That ded ne shal by glyde.
Whoso wol fleyshlust forgon,
And hevenè blis abyde,
On Jesu be is thoht anon,
That therlèd was ys side.
11)
(fade Agnus Dei)
Simone Martini, 1325-26, St. Clare, S. Francesco, Lower Church, Assisi;
+ V detail
In Simone Martini’s Ars Nova Italy, that distance is refined like an aesthetic
perfume, of which Chaucer’s 1370 Book of the Duchess distills a Northern essence,
reaching back, past the Romance of the Rose, toward Chrestien’s “land from which no
stranger returns.” It is there, deeper than dream psychology, that the Man in Black
reveals what we have already learned:
12)
12a)
Spanish, 14th cent., Queen Elisenda de Moncada tomb, Pedralbes Monastery,
Barcelona
S. Martini, 1333, Entombment of Christ, detail, Staatliche Museen, Berlin
“I have lost more than thou weanest.”
“Allas, sir, how? what may that be?”
“She ys ded!” “Nay!” “Yis, be me trouthe!”
“Is that youre los? Be God, hit ys routhe!”
And with that word ryght anoon
They gan to strake forth; al was doon
For that tyme, the hert huntyng...
We have a sudden insight that the modes of joy and pain, the very modes of
feeling, of being, shift like styles of dress. Medieval grief is sharp, fragile, enigmatic.
13)
13a)
Sebastiano del Piombo, c. 1517, Pieta, Museo Civico, Viterbo, Italy
Same, upper detail
Far from the voluminousness of a l6th century sorrow.
June 1996
1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer)
6
�C.G. Bell
Music:
Symbolic History
Willaert, pub. 1539, O Crux Splendidior, opening, Odyssey 32 16
0202
Its landscape of shadowed space (del Piombo) did not exist in Chaucer’s experience, any
more than a solemn music of chordal grief (Willaert, 1539). These realms had no more
been explored than Columbus’ America.
(fade Willaert)
14)
Visigoth to 14th cent. but esp. 13th cent., Porte de l’Aude, Wall of
Carcasonne
V14a) Same, another view
Chaucer’s first period, before the Ars Nova impact of the Florence he visited in
1373, looks to the older Gothic and Chivalric. Let the fortifications of Carcasonne and
two scenes of the chase, with “Au tens pascour,” as vigorous a secular motet as the late
13th century offers, revive that Ars Antiqua.
Music:
French, late 13th cent., Au tens pascour — Lautre jour, AS 71
1st 15) E. Anglian, c. 1300, lower detail of Beatus Page, Peterborough Psalter,
Bibliotheque Royale, Brussels
1st 16) Upper-Rhine, c. 1320, Manessa (Minnesinger) MS, Walther von Thüfen,
upper detail; University Library, Heidelberg
(end Au Tens pascour)
2nd 15) Again, Peterborough Psalter,whole Beatus Page; video: lower half only
To shift from the Peterborough Psalter,
2nd 16) Again, Walther von Thüfen, whole page (here video also repeats 14, of
Carcasonne)
or the Minnesinger delights of Walther von Thüfen — or from the fortifications of
Carcasonne —
1st 17)
1st 18)
June 1996
Italian Gothic, 1297-1310, Palazzo Publico, Siena (CGB ‘86, from the
town heights); while video takes a detail from V1st 17, a wider view over
town and countryside (CGB ‘86)
Simone Martini, 1328, Guidoriccio da Fogliano, horseman, center of the
fresco, Palazzo Publico, Siena (V1st 18: shows more background)
1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer)
7
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
V1st 19) North Italian, 1329, Equestrian monument of Can Grande della Scala,
with pedestal, Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona
to the city halls of Italy, here Siena, is to feel the sudden stretching of Chaucer’s
tetrameter in the House of Fame (c. 1375-80?) when the line straight out of the Divine
Comedy breaks in: “O Thought, that wrot al that I mette...” Thus the Eagle lifts the poet
to a vastness where he loses the poem. In later works he speaks the fulness of
pentameter:
To Troie is come this woful Troilus.
Just so the Gherardellus Caccia against the older motet, or the new horseman,
Guidoriccio (and then Can Grande), against the old:
Music:
2nd 17)
2nd 18)
2nd 19)
1st 20)
21)
Gherardellus de Florentia, c. 1360, Tosto che l’alba, Decca DL
79428
Closer view of the Palazzo Publico and tower from the square itself;
while video takes a closer detail from the lower part of 1st 17 (CGB),
adding from the same slide a detail of the upper part of the tower
Detail, upper front, of the Guidoriccio, horse and rider, which video
and slide show share
Upper part of Equestrian Can Grande — of which video takes a closer
detail (front)
Pisan (Traini) c. 1348, Allegory of Death, detail of Hunt, from old
Alinari print, Camp Santo, Pisa; + V closer detail
Pisan (Traini), same, whole fresco (1938 Alinari colored photo)
(end Gherardellus)
2nd 20)
Left side of 21, with Hunt, etc.; with various video details, from 20,
21, and V2nd 20
For 2nd 21) Central part of 21: beggars, Death, corpses, etc., with various video
details
1st 22)
Lower right of 21: Death advancing toward the Garden of Delight;
with video preview of the Alinari print of the Garden
3rd 21)
Varied detail of 21: beggars, Death, corpses, and souls; with close
video details from Va3rd 21 and V3rd 21a (soul tugged by angel and
devil)
3rd 21b)
Upper left detail of hermits
June 1996
1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer)
8
�C.G. Bell
a2nd 22)
June 1996
Symbolic History
Detail of music in the Garden
1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer)
9
�C.G. Bell
2nd 22)
Symbolic History
Same, whole Garden of Love from the fine old Alinari print (From the
9 slides of the show and 4 video extras, the video shapes 14 views of
the fresco.)
The mid-century Pisan Allegory of Death (a bad reproduction made before it was
ruined in the last war) epitomizes late Gothic — a moral vision, yeasty with new life.
Where the rock gulley of the fallen world sprouts ephemeral flowers, a troop of
hunters encounter three corpses. They draw back; one holds his nose. Above the coffins,
a hermit displays the scroll of our vanity.
And the whole scene opens for us: right of center, a bat-winged Death swings her
scythe over mounds of bodies. Beggars, the blind and halt, petition her to take them —
“cumber-worlds” like forsaken Troilus: “Delyvere now the world.../ Of me, that am the
wofulleste wyght...” Capricious as Fortune (“That holds but by a wire”) she advances
into the orange grove of delight, where Cupids, already on the wing, lead long-fingered
ladies (Langland: “And ye, lovely ladyes, with youre longe fyngres”) in music and
courtly love.
Death mows. And the moisture-laden souls breathe from the mouths, to be borne
up and away by angels, or stuffed by demons in the flaming hill; or as twice in Dante,
tugged, above and below. Better in this brunt to join the Dark Age hermits on the hill.
So Petrarch brings his spent years to a pious close:
Now I go grieving for the days on earth
I passed in worship of a mortal thing...
But regret cannot quench the flames of a lifetime:
vegghio, penso, ardo, piango, e chi mi sface
sempre m’è inanzi per mia dolce pena...
I wake, I brood, I burn, I weep; she who wounds me
Is with me always in my honied grief. (CGB)
Chaucer too brings the Troilus to a poetic Retraction:
June 1996
1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer)
10
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
O yonge, fresshe folkes, he or she,
In which that love up groweth with youre age,
Repayreth hom fro wordly vanyte,
And of youre herte up casteth the visage
To thilke God that after his ymage
Yow made, and thynketh al nys but a faire,
This world, that passeth soone as floures faire.
23)
Jan van Eyck, 1427-29, Eve, detail, altarpiece, St. Bavon, Ghent; + V closer
detail (video closes with a double of Adam and Eve, from V23a)
But that wise counsel melts in the burning touch Chaucer’s art was part of:
Hire armes smale, hire streghte bak and softe,
Hire sydes longe, flesshly, smothe, and white
He gan to stroke, and good thrift bad ful ofte
Hire snowisshe throte, hire brestes rounde and lite:
Thus in this hevene he gan hym to delite,
And therwithal a thousand tyme hire kiste,
That what to don, for joie unnethe he wiste.
In the deepening incarnation of late Gothic, Chaucer looks back to 1300 psalters and
forward to the Van Eyck Eve, painted twenty seven years after his death.
24)
Limbourg Brothers, 1413-16, Eden, detail, Tres Riches Heures, Chantilly
Even the Limbourg Eve follows him by 13 years; yet in sensuous caress Chaucer may
surpass the bubble Eden of the Tres Riches Heures:
Wher is myn owene lady, lief and deere?
Wher is hire white brest? Wher is it, where?
The beauty and question of earth cuts the age of faith like a sword.
25)
25a)
Lor. Maitani, 1310-30, Creation of Eve, Façade, Duomo, Orvieto (CGB ‘84)
Same, detail (also CGB '84); while video uses V25 and V25a
The antecedent refinements are in trecento Italy — Maitani, on the façade of
Orvieto. In music it is Landini, blind organist of Florence who smoothes Ars Nova
progressions almost to the limpid grace with which the 15th century begins.
June 1996
1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer)
11
�C.G. Bell
Music:
26)
Symbolic History
Landini, c. 1370(?), Gram piant’ agli occhi, opening, (Cape) AS 63
Andrea Bonaiuti, 1365, girls dancing, detail from the Spanish Chapel, Florence; + V detail from V26a
(cut Landini)
A sweetness rivalled in Chaucer’s English:
Now welcome, somer, with thy sonne softe,
That hast this wintres wedres overshake,
And driven away the longe nyghtes blake!
27)
27b)
Same, whole fresco, Triumph of the Church, Spanish Chapel, Florence;
+ V details and a return to the whole (replacing slide 27a: same fresco, detail
of dancing girls and adjacent allegory)
Most of the same fresco from bottom up through the gate of heaven (CGB '59),
from which the video selects the figures by the Church, below
In Boccaccio’s Decameron a joy-loving company withdraw from the scythe of the
Black Death in Florence; yet even the escape is planned in the church of Santa Maria
Novella, to which the ladies return when their ten days of story telling are done. And if
we ask the context of these Spanish Chapel dancing girls, we find them to the right, in an
allegory of the Triumph of the Church (through the cloister of that same Santa Maria
Novella); we see their child gaiety yield, just above, to music and thought, from which a
man in green rises (Boccaccio, Chaucer) to kneel, nearer center, and prepare by confession for Christ’s judgment gate, over the Cathedral of Florence — the plan lately agreed
on, 1366-8, though the dome would not be built for sixty years.
From the triple portal spilled all phases of medieval life. Even Chaucer’s most
ribald characters have their sacred tie. Like Troilus, “withinne the temple... pleyinge,”
they play on pilgrimage.
a28)
b28)
28)
English (Westminster), c 1265-70, Douce Apocalypse, Lamb opens the first
seal, MS page 13, Bodleian, Oxford
English Carving, c. 1380(?), St. John the Baptist, now Hereford Cathedral
(CGB ‘84; cf. Vb9, above); + V detail
Again, Douce Apocalypse, The Temple Opened in Heaven, page 41, Bodleian,
Oxford
June 1996
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Symbolic History
When the visionary soul of England, revealed in the Douce Apocalypse about
1270, expands to the new century, Judgment finds in Langland a witness solider than this
St. John:
In a somer seson whan soft was the sonne,
I shope me in shroudes as I a shepe were,
In habite as an heremite unholy of workes,
Went wyde in this world wondres to here.
Ac on a May mornynge on Malverne hulles
Me byfel a ferly of fairy me thoughte;
I was wery forwandred and went me to reste
Under a brode banke bi a bornes side,
And as I lay and lened and loked in the wateres,
I slombred in a slepyng it sweyved so merye.
Thanne gan I to meten a merveilouse swevene,
That I was in a wildernesse wist I never where,
As I bihelde in-to the est an hiegh to the sonne,
I seigh a toure on a toft trielich ymaked;
Va29)
Vb29)
29)
Italian MS, later 14th cent., Picture of Dante’s Hell; video: detail only
English, c. 1400, MS of Marco Polo, scene of Venice, Bodleian, Oxford
Jean de Bandol and Nic. Bataille, 1379-81, Four Horsemen, Apocalypse
Tapestries, Angers; + V detail
A depe dale binethe a dongeon there-inne,
With depe dyches and derke and dredful of sight.
A faire felde ful of folke fonde I there bytwene,
Of alle maner of men the mene and the riche,
Worchyng and wandryng as the worlde asketh.
Music:
Guillaume de Machault, c. 1370(?), 4v Motet, Christe qui lux es —
Veni creator spiritus, close (Munrow) ARCHIV 2723045 (3-b)
Like Piers the Plowman, like Guillaume de Machault’s four-voice cry for Christ
the Light and Creator Spirit, the Angers tapestries body forth Apocalypse. What bore on
Rome and the early Church, Nero and the Legions, seats itself in the corruption and crisis,
the expected radical reform of the estates of Europe and France: it is the good —
Langland’s Piers, Chaucer’s Farmer and Poor Parson — who face the Horsemen, or the
Dragon.
(close Machault)
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a30)
Symbolic History
Same, Four Apocalypse scenes, with one of the seven Bishops of Asia,
Angers Tapestries
Detail of such a group (underexposed; CGB ‘89) from which the video hints
dimly at the symbolic borders, above and below; digital omits this
Again, from the Angers Tapestries, same Bishop of Asia; video: detail only
Vb30)
30)
The clustered fours of scenes, with the canopied Bishops of Asia, are framed, like
Giotto’s frescoes at Padua, in a symbolic space, a top border of angels, stars, clouds; a
base of flowered earth; between, the anagogical Coming is of here and now. The very
spirit butterflies of the seven churches display the married wings of Anjou lillies and
Bretagne ermine.
1st 31) Chartres Cathedral, c. 1210, Devil and Sinner, from the South Portal
Gothic from the first had symbolic immediacy. Take Hell and the Deadly Sins.
What happens over four hundred years from Chartres
1st 32) Rubens, c. 1620, Fall of the Damned, Alte Pinakothek, Munich; whereas
video draws from the Aachen copy a group of Gluttons (CGB '74)
to Rubens is the fleshly engrossment of a spiritual dread, an orgy of amplification, which
the time of Chaucer and Langland focuses.
2nd 31) Again, Chartres, another Devil and Sinner
The Ancren Riwle, like Chartres, is of about 1210:
The sluggard lies asleep in the devil’s lap, his dear drab, his minion.
The fiend lays his muzzle close to his ear, and prompts him just as he
pleases.
2nd 32) From the Aachen Gallery copy of Rubens' Fall of the Damned, a group of
gluttons (CGB '74); here video shows only closer details
Spenser’s 1590 procession of the Sins is squeamish of its flesh:
...loathsome Gluttony... on a filthie swyne;
His belly was up-blowne with luxury...
And all the way, most like a brutish beast,
He spued up his gorge, that all did him deteast.
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Symbolic History
(Faerie Queen I, iii, 21)
It is Ben Jonson’s pig-woman, fat Ursula (Bartholomew Fair), who plays the Rubens’
role:
Is she your quagmire, Daniel Knockem? is this your bog...
Twere like falling into a whole shire of butter...
Ursula:
Hang ‘em, rotten roguy cheaters, I hope to see ‘em plagued one day —
poxed they are already, I am sure — with lean playhouse poultry, that
has the bony rump sticking out like the ace of spades or the point of a
partizan, that every rib of ‘em is like the tooth of a saw; and will so
grate ‘em with their hips and shoulders as — take ‘em altogether —
they were as good lie with a hurdle...
(Ursula falls with the pan)
Curse of Hell, that ever I saw these fiends! Oh! I ha’ scalded my leg,
my leg, my leg, my leg! I ha’ lost a limb in the service!... Are you
under-peering you baboon! Rip off my hose, an you be men, men,
men!
33)
Freiburg Master, c. 1300, Lust, West Porch, Freiburg Minster; with a video
detail
If we move in by a century from either side, we come, around 1300, to the
Freiburg Lust, her suggestive hand rutted by the hoof of a goat; or in Manning, Handling
Sinne, the couple who lived by the church:
One night there he knew his wife,
In fleshly deed, such was their life;
But God was displeased; he willed it nought,
So near the church, such deed were wrought:
They might no more be pulled asunder
Than dog and bitch — at which men wonder... (CGB)
34)
Grünewald, 1515, Temptation of St. Anthony, detail, Isenheim Altar, Colmar;
video splits to details, below and above
On the 1500 side, it is Grünewald, with Dunbar’s Dance of the Sevin Deidly Synnes:
Priests came in with bare shaven necks,
Then all the fiends laughed and made gecks,
Black Belly and Bawsy Brown.
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Symbolic History
Lechery, that loathly corse,
Came snorting like a big-bagged horse —
With him, an ugly crew...
They led each other by the terses;
If they fouled with their erses,
There was nothing you could do. (CGB)
35)
Taddeo di Bartolo 1393, Lust, from Sadistic Hell, Collegiata, San Giminiano;
+ V detail
Midway, are the earthy Sins of Langland: Lechery —
Each maid I met with, I made her a sign
Seeming to sinward; some I would taste
About the mouth, grope some beneath,
Till our wills were one, and to work we go...
I lay by the loveliest and loved them never after...
(CGB after Coghill)
In Italy the grotesquerie mounts from Dante’s brawls around the boiling pitch and
the fart of Malacoda (Bad-tail), “del cul fatto trombetta,” to the 1393 San Giminiano
sadistic hell, where the devils handle their bad-tails “in swich manere it may nat been
expressed.”
36)
Same, detail of the dung-glutton Usurer, San Giminiano
Or where the squatting fiend dungs gold into the pursed-out Usurer.
As Langland says:
For a whore of her arse-winnings may better tythe
Than an arrant usurer, so help me God.
But it is the drunkenness of Glutton for which Langland is best known.
1st 37) Genoa MS, late 14th cent., Tavern, from De Septem Vitiis, Ad. MS 27695,
14r, British Museum, London
Under school-of-Giotto fertilization, as in this manuscript also of the Sins, a surge
of late-Gothic realism parallels Chaucer’s third style.
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Symbolic History
1st 38) Beauvais, late 15th cent., Misericord, Wife wheelbarrows a drunk husband,
from Abbey of St. Lucien; now Musée Cluny, Paris (CGB ‘80)
Turn up the choir seats in the churches. From about 1380 on, the misericords the priests
had carved there were of the foibles of flesh — a drunk husband trundled home in a
wheelbarrow.
2nd 37) Same, Tavern scene, detail
Here is Langland’s Gluttony:
There was laughyng and louring and ‘let go the cuppe,’
And seten so til evensonge and songen umwhile,
Tyl Glotoun had y-globbed a galoun an a jille.
2nd 38) Drunk in a Wheelbarrow detail (video draws from 1st 38)
His guttis gunne to gothely as two gredy sowes;
He pissed a potel in a pater-noster-while,
And blew his rounde ruwet at his rigge-bon ende,
That alle that herde that horne held her nose after,
And wusched it had be wiped with a wispe of firses...
39)
V39a)
H. Bosch, 1475-80, Gula, from Seven Deadly Sins, Prado, Madrid
Same, but a wider view of the table of Sins
He stumbled on the thresshewolde and threwe to the erthe.
Clement the cobelere caughte hym bi the myddel,
For to lifte hym alofte and leyde him on his knowes;
Ac Glotoun was a gret cherle and grym in the liftynge,
And coughed up a caudel in Clementis lappe;
Is non so hungri hounde in Hertford schire
Durst lape of the levynges so unlovely thei smaughte.
Bosch begins his work, around 1475, with the Seven Deadly Sins, still in the spirit
of Langland. In English literature the 15th century is called Chaucerian; and indeed, the
crucial turn was taken, in all the arts, by 1400.
a40)
June 1996
Peter Parler aus Gmund, 1380-85, St. Cyril, St. Vitus’ Cathedral, Prague
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Symbolic History
1st 40) Bohemian, Peter Parler and circle, c. 1385, Portrait Bust of Wenzel von
Radecz, Triforium carvings, Prague Cathedral
The late-century realism of the Parlers in Prague speaks the independence running
from Wyclif, translator of the Bible, 1383 —
Lord! What cursed spirit of lying stirreth priests to close them in stones
or walls for all their life, since Christ commandeth to all his apostles to
go into the world and preach the Gospel —
to Huss, whom the Council of Constance seeded by fire. Langland of false priests:
Thow myghtest better mete the myste on Malverne hulles,
Than gete a momme of here mouthe but money were shewed.
And “I will become a pilgrim, and wander as wide as the world lasts/ To seek Piers the
Plowman, who can put down Pride.” Even courtly Chaucer upholds the Lollard Parson:
But riche he was of hooly thoght and werk...
…Cristes loore and his apostles twelve
He taughte, but first he folwed it hymselve.
1st 41) Parler Circle, 1375-78, Emperor Charles IV, Triforium, Prague Cathedral
Though another of the Prague heads, this of the smiling Emperor Charles IV, goes
as far toward Renaissance, reminds us how deeply and humanly one are Renaissance and
Reformation, a wave with divided crests.
2nd 40) Again Wenzel von Radecz, closer view
Thus triadic fauxbourdon
Music:
2nd 41)
2nd41a)
V2nd 41b)
3rd 41)
Apt MS, later 14th cent., Jesu, nostra redemptio, close SAWT 9505
A Ex
Again, P. Parler, Charles IV bust, closer view
Peter Parler, 1380-85, Prince Wenceslas profile, Prague Cathedral
Same, Prince Wenceslas, full face
Again, Charles IV, another of the whole bust
and filligree Ars Nova:
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Music:
Symbolic History
English, late 14th cent., Johannes Alanus, last phrase from “Sub
Arcturo,” Phil. SAL 3722
meet in Dunstable; the bluntness of Piers Plowman and early refinement of Chaucer meet
in The Canterbury Tales. What had separated out of Occam and Dante would rejoin again
and again, as the Medici and Savonarola fuse in Michelangelo.
“Here is God’s plenty,” Dryden said of Chaucer. And Kahler:
A new alertness of sense — all senses for the first time flung wide —
an untramelled life-delight, give him a power to see and record, far in
advance of his age.
Though to be born in advance means, as with Thoreau, “in the very nick of time.” How
else could Prague Cathedral (1375) endow an emperor with so Chaucerian a smile? What
is the source of that canny well-being?
Bifil that in that seson on a day,
In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay
Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage
To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,
At nyght was come into that hostelrye
Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye,
Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle
In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle...
1st 42) Loisel and Privé, 1397, Connetable du Gueslin, St. Denis; + V detail
That observed reality hangs in the oblique blessing of faith, permits a transmoral
keenness, as with Pandarus, or when Chaucer’s Miller insists on his tale of bawdry:
The Millere, that for dronken was al pale,
So that unnethe upon his hors he sat,
He nolde avalen no man for his curteisie,
But in Pilates voys he gan to crie,
And swoor, “By armes, and by blood and bones,
I kan a noble tale for the nones...
Bothe of a carpenter and of his wyf...”
4th 41) Again, Emperor Charles IV in his niche, with coat of arms
Music: French, late 14th cent., “Contre le Temps,” Seraphim SIC-6052 (2-9)
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Symbolic History
In music a like suspension enriches four decades from Machault to Dunstable with
dancing harmonies explored in a last loyalty to the bare fifth chord, as in this late 14thcentury “Contre le Temps”.
If such vitality wells from the folk, it fills the arts of church and court: here an
emperor;
2nd 42) Again, Connetable du Gueslin
there the High Constable of France.
43)
43a)
43b)
(fade Contre le Temps)
Jacquemart de Hesdin, 1406-09, Grandes Heures, f42, det., Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris
English late Gothic, late 14th cent., Grotesque: The Blue Man, Roof boss
from the Gt. Cloister, Canterbury; here video returns (with the Lochaimer
Lied) to a closer detail of 43
Célebre Angevin, 15th cent., Carving on Maison d’Adam, Angers
It is in the sacred books of princes, the Duc de Berry’s Great Hours of the Virgin,
that fabliaux grotesques swell toward Peter Brueghel, called Peasant. Is this the mock
priest of whom the Wife of Bath said “Ther is noon oother incubus but he,” or Nicholas
bared at the window?
For that Chaucerian element take a German 1450 tupping song: a peasant goes to
the woods with his axe; the nasty priest comes to his wife; rhythm tells the rest:
Music:
Lochaimer Liederbuch, 1452-60, Es fur ein pawr gen holcz,
ARCHIV-3222
(fade Lochaimer)
Against that cursed up-and-down — “He priketh harde and depe as he were mad”
—
44)
Franco-English, late 14th cent., Chaucer reads to the court, Troilus MS, Corpus Christi, Cambridge; + V detail
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Symbolic History
Chaucer reads to the modish knights and ladies of Richard II’s court — one of the artcaterpillars of the garden. Why not the gilded dawn from the “Knight’s Tale,” dear to
early Shakespeare, who would stage the fall of gracious Richard:
The bisy larke, the messager of day,
Salueth in hir song the morwe gray,
And firy Phebus riseth up so bright
That al the orient laugheth of the light,
And with his stremes dryeth in the greves
The silver dropes hangynge on the leves...
45)
Franco-Flemish, c. 1465, Palamon and Arcite, René d’Anjou’s Livre du Cuer,
Vienna; first, video detail
Or the scene of the friends looking from the tower at Emily gathering flowers, as in this
15th-century illustration of the same Boccaccio story. What joins the Knight and Miller
is the closing prayer — “God save al this faire compaigny!” and “The tale is doon, and
God save al the rowte!” To balance in faith Romance-of-the-Rose idealism and peasant
force.
46)
Franco-Flemish 1320-30, Luxuria, Dahlem Museum, Berlin; + V detail
What diversity that unreformed church could hold. Here is Absolon, parish clerk,
“that jolif was and gay,” twenty years before Chaucer was born. It is a theme treated also
in a 1400 poem:
Jankin at the Agnus
Bereth the pax-brede:
He twinkled but said nowt,
And on my fot he trede,
Kyrieleyson.
Benedicamus Domino,
Christ from shame me shilde:
Deo gracias, therto —
Alas! I go with childe,
Kyrieleyson.
47)
Limbourg Brothers, c. 1413-16, February, detail, Tres Riches Heures, Chantilly; + V closer detail
June 1996
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Symbolic History
Where two peasants warm themselves in the February cottage of the Tres Riches
Heures, we pick up the quaint connection — the Wife of Bath’s unflagging interest in
“oure bothe thynges smale” — which are not just to tell a female from a male, nor for
purging of urine, but to give us as many a merry fit as Solomon was refreshed withal:
I will bestow the flower of all my age
In the acts and in the fruit of marriage.
48)
48a)
Parler Circle, 1375-78, Anne of Swidnica, Triforium, Cathedral, Prague
Same, a different view and lighting; + V detail
Music:
Alanus, late 14th cent., Sub Arcturo (opening), Phil. SAL 3722
This motet by John Alan (Alanus), Chaucer’s English contemporary, the Prague
bust of Anne, wife of the smiling emperor (pilgrims all), share the naive joy of Chaucer, a
delight aware — in the legacy of faith and resignation — of facts which would darken
later joy. The sensuous awakening is nowhere fresher than in mismatched Alisoun:
Fair was this yonge wyf, and therwithal,
As any wezele hir body gent and smal...
Hir filet brood of silk, and set ful hye.
And sikerly she hadde a likerous ye.
Ful smale ypulled were hire browes two,
And tho were bent and blake as any sloo...
Hir mouth was sweete as bragot or the meeth,
Or hoord of apples leyd in hey or heeth.
Wynsynge she was, as is a joly colt,
Long as a mast, and upright as a bolt.
49)
Lochner, 1447, Lady, detail, Presentation in the Temple, Hessische Landesmuseum, Darmstadt
V49a&b)
Same, wider details: of the Lady's group, and of the Presentation
Whit was hir smok, and bryden al bifore
And eek bihynde, on hir coler aboute,
Of col-blak silk, withinne and eek withoute.
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Symbolic History
The tapes of hir white voluper
Were of the same suyte of hir coler...
A brooch she baar upon hir lowe coler,
As brood as is the boos of a bokeler...
(fade Alanus)
In Lochner’s 1440 spelling out, that visual delight still grows, innocently resilient, on the
church margin of the grave.
V & D a50) Tomb: Eleanor of Castile, 1292 bronze, west minster Abbey
50)
French, from Amiens, c. 1402, Cadaver tomb, Cardinal Jean de la Grange,
Mus. Calvet, Avignon
50a)
Beckington cadaver tomb, c. 1450, detail, Wells Cathedral (CGB ‘84)
The grave too takes new force. Early Gothic tombs favored earthlessness. As
body mounts on Fortune’s wheel, its wrongs and corruptions prepare, by a Dance of
Death, for the tragic stage. Here is the memento mori of Cardinal de la Grange, died
1402.
There cam a privee theef, men clepeth Deeth,
That in this contree al the peple sleeth...
The rioters in the Pardoner’s tale encounter him:
An oold man and a povre with hem mette...
“Why artow al forwrapped save thy face?
Why lyvestow so longe in so greet age?”...
“Lo how I vanysshe, flessh, and blood, and skyn!
Allas! whan shul my bones been at reste?
He points them to the wood where they find the treasure for which they stab and poison
one another.
Even Moral Gower touched on greatness when he told of the “Trump of Death.”
51)
Claus Sluter, 1404-05, mourning monk, from the Dijon Monument to Philip
the Bold, Cluny, Paris; + V detail
June 1996
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Symbolic History
The fleshing-out marks every institution. Sluter, Fleming active in Dijon, is the
greatest art contemporary. His mourning monk from the Tomb of Philip the Bold has just
the cut of Chaucer’s churchmen:
This ilke monk leet olde thynges pace
And heeld after the newe world the space.
A realism which as before finds its Gothic limit in Van Eyck:
52)
Jan van Eyck, 1436, Canon van der Peale, from Madonna, Musée Communal,
Bruges
His heed was balled, that shoon as any glas,
And eek his face, as he hadde been enoynt.
He was a lord ful fat and in good point;
His eyen stepe, and rollyinge in his heed,
That stemed as the forneys of a leed...
A fat swan loved he best of any roost.
53)
English, 1348, Tomb of Hugh, Lord Dispenser, detail, Tewkesbury Abbey
With chivalry Chaucer may cling to the idealism of the past. Though a child when
this Tewkesbury tomb was carved for Hugh, Lord Dispenser, he presents a Knight of such
high calling (though some have scrupled at his battles):
he loved chivalrie,
Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisie...
He was a verray, parfit, gentil knyght.
a54)
b54)
54)
Probably Flemish in Paris, 1412-13, Effigy of Pierre d’Evreux-Navarre, detail, Louvre
Same, Pierre’s Wife, Catherine d’Alençon, detail, Louvre
Same, Pierre d’Evreux-Navarre and his Wife, full figures, Louvre (but half
figures videoed from V54)
Where this 1412 Pierre d’Evreux-Navarre seems a schemer of the new century —
more a Man of Law than a Knight, meek as a maid, who never spoke villany to anyone.
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Symbolic History
His wife, with her ten pounds of coverchiefs on her head —
Boold was hir face, and fair, and reed of hewe.
She was a worthy womman al hir lyve —
might be contending with the Wife of Bath who knows best “the olde daunce.”
While the study of the couple as such reminds us how many of the Tales deal not
with chivalric romance, but with the chief problem of the middle class, marriage.
55)
German, c. 1340, Knight and Bride, carving, Rottweil, Chapel Tower;
+ V detail
German, 1340, love-troth, exchange of rings — Chaucer’s Knight invokes that
domestic dream:
And thus with alle blisse and melodye
Hath Palamon ywedded Emelye.
And God, that al this wyde world hath wroght,
Sende hym his love that hath it deere aboght…
And Emelye hym loveth so tendrely...
That nevere was ther no word hem bitwene
Of jalousie or any oother teene...
56)
56a)
Bohemian, 1363-65, Charles IV and Anne, over the door of the Chapel, Karlstejn Castle, Prague
Same: wider view of the Chapel door and decoration
More apt, after problem tales of marriage, is the trusting solution of the Franklin’s
Tale, which by trial and honour re-cements a union in such “soverereyn blisse” as Charles
IV and Anne set Master Theodoric to paint above the chapel door of Karlstejn Castle.
57)
57a)
57b)
57c)
57d)
French, c. 1390, Double: [A] Charles V of France; and [B] Jeanne Bourbon;
upper details of standing sculptures, Louvre
Same, detail of Jeanne Bourbon
Same, detail of Charles V
Same, full length double; while video returns to 57: busts
Another detail of Charles V
June 1996
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Symbolic History
From Paris, 1390, comes a sadder couple. We have quoted the Wife of Bath
before with this Jeanne Bourbon:
Unto this day it dooth myn herte boote
That I have had my world as in my tyme...
The flour is goon, there is namoore to telle;
The bren, as I best kan, now moste I selle...
While the confessional smile of her husband, Charles the Wise, explores such
psychological depths as Chaucer’s “gentil Pardoner” with his yellow hair and gelding
voice:
For though myself be a ful vicious man,
A moral tale yet I you telle kan,
Which I am wont to preche for to wynne...
Like the corrupt church which channeled such art, the Pardoner gives his fabulous
sermon, concluding — as he brings out variants of Boccaccio’s “feather of Gabriel” (or
Heywood’s “buttock bone of the Pentecost”) —
lo, sires, thus I preche.
And Jhesu Crist, that is oure soules leche,
So graunte yow his pardoun to receyve,
For that is best; I wol yow nat deceyve.
a58)
58)
English or French, c. 1395, Wilton Diptych, National Gallery, London; right
panel: Virgin and Child, with Angels; while video first shows (from V58) the
whole Diptych, then a central spread of a58 (using either slide)
Same, the whole Diptych: Richard II introduced to the Heavenly Host; of
this, the video narrows to a detail of Richard and Mary, then returns to the
whole (frames are too bright in 58; video uses V58)
We have still to mention the sacred gem of Chaucer’s time, The Pearl. Both it and
the Gawain are by a poet of Western dialect, difficult, but as beautiful as the music the
dreamer heard on the flowered grave of his daughter:
Yet thoght me never so swete a sange
As stylle stounde let to me stele.
There his body falls:
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Symbolic History
Fro spot my spyryt ther sprang in space,
My body on balke ther bod in sweven;
My goste is gon in Godes grace,
In aventure ther mervayles meven.
Taught by Dante, he sees across the stream, in the jewelled company of the Lamb,
His precious perle wythouten spotte.
The Wilton Diptych, also of the late century, shows Richard II introduced to such
a band on such a shore.
1st 59) Franco-Flemish, c. 1390-1400, St. Christopher, van den Bergh Museum,
Antwerp
As for the clear stream down crystal cliffs, a late century St. Christopher wades in
such bright water. We know, as we cross 1400, the perfection of that nominalist focus on
particulars.
1st 60) Dirk Bouts the Younger, c. 1480(?), St. Christopher, Alte Pinakothek, Munich
In Dirk Bouts the observation grows precise, without losing preternatural clarity.
Style surfaces in art.
2nd 59) Again, Franco-Flemish, c. 1390-1400, St. Christopher, detail
Through the abstraction of language, can we assign Chaucer or The Pearl a place in that
spectrum? This is their century.
2nd 60) Again, Dirk Bouts, St. Christopher, detail
Is this theirs, or Villon’s earth-emergence?
61)
French MS, c. 1400(?), Lancelot du Lac, f.7, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris
So with Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight: from the flatness of the Chivalric
tradition (this Lancelot of the same time) —
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
This kyng lay at Camylot upon Krystmasse...
With alle the wele of the worlde thay woned ther samen,
The most kyd knyghtes under Krystes selven,
And the lovelokkest ladies that ever lif haden —
62)
Franco-Flemish, c. 1465, Love gives Desire the Heart of the King, Le Livre
du Coeur d’Amour, National Library, Vienna; + V detail (V62a)
it ripens toward the intimacies of the fifteenth century Book of the Heart of Love — as
Love here at night, the lady seducer at dawn comes to Gawayn’s bed:
And Gawayn the god mon in gay bed lyges...
And as in slomeryng he slode, sleghly he herde
A littel dyn at his dor...
Hit wats the ladi, loflyest to beholde...
And ho stepped stilly and stel to his bedde,
Kest up the cortyn and creped withinne,
And set hir ful softly on the bed-syde...
a63)
63)
Simone Martini c. 1340?, Virgin of the Annunciation, whole seated figure,
Royal Museum, Antwerp; video: upper half only; digital: double, Angel &
Virgin
Same, half figure; while video shows a close detail
For that filling in of the concordantly human, set one of Simone Martini’s
haunting Virgins (her response to the “Ave” equivocal as Lorenzo of Florence’s 14th
century “Hosannah")
Music:
64)
Lorenzo of Florence, c. 1350(?), close of Sanctus, Seraphim SIC6052
Jan van Eyck, 1432, Virgin of the Annunciation, upper half of the figure, Altar, St. Bavon, Ghent; + V detail: head of Virgin (V64a)
against Jan van Eyck’s devout Handmaiden of the Lord — while Dufay, in his Alma
Redemptoris Mater, gives the scene his tenderest 15th-century chords:
Music:
Dufay, c. 1433, Alma Redemptoris Mater, close, (Cape group)
ARCHIV 3003
That span of eighty years Chaucer divides.
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�C.G. Bell
a65)
65)
65a)
Symbolic History
Gaston Phebus, c. 1405-10, Le Livre de la Chasse, Hunting and Killing the
Fox, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; + V detail
Same, Hunting deer
Same, Coursing the Stag
In music it is Ciconia, born before, died after — Flemish-Italian, like Chaucer a
blend of North and South. His madrigal warning foxes against dogs seems early, though
such 14th-century sharpness spills over the century in Gaston Phebus’ Book of the Chase.
Music:
Ciconia, c. 1380-90(?), I cani son fuori, beginning, MHS 899
Chaucer’s visionary hunt in “The Franklin’s Tale” is so stylized:
Forestes, parkes ful of wilde deer;
Ther saugh he hertes with hir hornes hye,
The gretteste that evere were seyn with ye.
He saugh of hem an hondred slayn with houndes
And somme with arwes blede of bittre woundes...
Or the Green Knight’s chase while Gawayn is sleeping:
The does dryven with gret dyn to the depe slades...
What! thay brayen, and bleden, bi bonkkes thay deyen...
Hunteres with hyghe horne hasted hem after...
66)
66a)
66b)
V66c)
66d)
(fade Ciconia)
Boucicault Master, c. 1405-08, Flight to Egypt, whole page with border,
MS 2 f90v, Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris
Same, upper spread
Same, lower spread
Same, detail: landscape only, with another video detail
Same, the inner picture, without the flowered border
That jewelled nature widens in the Canterbury Prologue, to a harmony of the
vernal and peopled earth:
Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the younge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.
By 1400, the Amen of Ciconia’s Gloria, in sequential phrasing of voiced
harmonic space, parallels this Boucicault Master’s 1405 conquest of the dimensional
earth.
Music:
Ciconia, c. 1400(?), from Gloria (Amen), Telefunken SAWT-9544-A
Here the essential truth of Renaissance is caught in works almost contemporary with
Chaucer.
67)
Limbourg Brothers, c. 1413-16, May, Tres Riches Heures, Chantilly
One speaks of the International Style as preparing for 1425 — for the Van Eycks
in Bruges, for Masaccio in Florence. So music moves toward Dunstable and Dufay. In
Burgundy the Tres Riches Heures is the masterpiece of that transition.
68)
Jacobo della Quercia, 1414-19, Rhea Silvia, from the Fonte Gaia, Palazzo
Publico, Siena (CGB '86)
In Tuscany the early work of Della Quercia as graciously points the way.
With these comes Ciconia’s last and richest piece, the “O Rosa Bella”, which
Dunstable also would set.
a2nd 67) Again, May of the Tres Riches Heures, center spread
2nd 67) Again, Tres Riches Heures, close detail of the same May
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Music:
Symbolic History
Ciconia, c. 1405-10, O Rosa Bella, first half, Deller, RCA Victor LM6016
2nd 68) Again, Rhea Silvia, upper half of slide 68
a69)
Jacobo della Quercia, 1406, Tomb of Ilaria del Caretto, viewed from her
right, detail, Duomo, Lucca (CGB ‘80)
69)
Same, whole Tomb, viewed from her left
69a)
Same, upper half of the figure, viewed from above
(fade O Rosa Bella)
Della Quercia’s 1406 tomb of Ilaria del Caretto initiates a type as much of the
Renaissance as Shakespeare’s Juliet. Does Chaucer’s Prioress, with her love-brooch (of
which no Roman apologist should rob her) live at all in that new world?
On which ther was first write a crowned A,
And after Amor vincit omnia.
Va70)
Ghiberti, 1401, Abraham and Issac, model, center spread of whole, Bargello,
Florence
Same, detail of Abraham and Isaac
70)
The tide did not wait for 1425. It was in the first year of the century that the
contest for the Baptistery doors brought this winning model from the 20 year old
Ghiberti. England was not so far but that Sir John Hawkwood had lately led the forces of
the Florentine Republic. Had not the Pardoner come all hot from Rome, the veil of Our
Lady and the sail of St. Peter in his wallet? If the Island he came to was backward in
antique recovery;
71)
71a)
English Misericord, c. 1360(?), Smiling Expulsion, Worcester Cathedral
Same, upper detail
its humblest arts (from Occam down) could reshape Christianity to affirm the life of the
world. In this Worcester Misericord, Adam and Eve and the angel who drives them from
the garden smile — Felix Culpa:
Adam lay ibounden,
Bounden in a bond;
Four thousand winter
Thought he not too long;
And all was for an appil,
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
An appil that he tok,
As clerkès finden
Wreten in here book.
Ne haddè the appil takè ben,
The appil taken ben,
Ne haddè never our lady
A ben hevenè quene.
Blessèd be the time
That appil takè was;
Therefore we moun singen
“Deo gracias!”
72)
Limbourg Brothers, c. 1414-16, Eden, Tres Riches Heures, Chantilly;
+ V detail
It is not just a modern insight that the bubble-Eden of the Limbourg Brothers is
also a womb, from which the expelled are born into the wayfaring Pilgrimage of the
world. What Wycliff and Hus had begun would culminate in Milton: “I cannot praise a
fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised, and unbreathed... where that immortal garland
is to be run for, not without dust and heat.”
73)
73a)
Massaccio, c. 1426, Expulsion, Brancacci Chapel, Carmine, Florence
Same, Expulsion, detail, waist up
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
By 1426 Masaccio had molded the body and passion of man’s explusion into a
tragedy of regenerative nobility. What heightens the sorrow gives the clue. Adam and
Eve are coming into light. As is said in Lear: “Out of heaven’s benediction to the warm
sun.” In the cloud-cold of England, a symbolic claim.
1st 74) dei Grassi and Belbello, c. 1380-1420, Nativity Page, from Visconti Hours,
National Library, Florence; while video takes a detail combining the stable
scene with the angels and shepherds on the heath
All over Europe now, from 1380 on, as the juggler in the old romance danced for
Our Lady, humanized piety plays sacred games. How thin, after Giotto, the miniatures of
dei Grassi and Belbello; yet how instinctively earthborn.
1st 75) English, 1410-20, Shepherds from the old Choir Stalls, Exeter (CGB ‘80)
1st 75a) Same, Shepherds, detail, upper right (CGB ‘80); + V closer details
In 1400 England, rood-lofts and choir stalls later destroyed (this surviving
fragment from Exeter) enact guild drama — The Second Shepherds’ Play: (each enters
complaining)
We silly shepherds that walk on the moor...
No wonder, as it stands, if we be poor...
As ye ken
We are so lamed
Hard taxed and maimed...
By these gentry men. (CGB)
The second, of marriage:
These men that are wed have not all their will...
In bedroom or bed they say not their fill...
If I read e’er epistle, I have one for my dear
As sharp as a thistle, as rough as a briar... (CGB)
The third against floods and Fortune:
Was never since Noah’s flood such floods seen... (CGB)
a2nd 74)
2nd 74)
June 1996
Again, Visconti Hours, from Nativity Page, shepherds, below
Same, Shepherds and Nativity, center; first, video Nativity detail
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
So Mak appears, and as they are napping, steals a sheep, which he and his wife
wrap in swaddling, as if she had borne a child. Across the guild-stage Christ lies in the
manger, while here Gill croons over “a horned lad in cradle.” After a vain search, the
shepherds try to kiss Mak’s child, and the cheat is discovered (“He has a long snout”).
On the heath once more, they are sent to Bethlehem by the angel.
2nd 75) Same as 1st 75, Exeter Shepherds; + V details of faces
Hail, comely and clean! Hail, young child!
Hail, Maker, as I mean, of a maiden so mild...
Have a bob of cherries!
The second:
A bird I have brought to my bairn.
Hail, little tynemop,
Of our creed thou art crop!
I would drink on thy cup,
Little day starn.
And the third:
I bring thee but a ball:
Have and play withal
And go to the tennis. (CGB)
76)
English, c. 1400, Flagellation, Retable, Norwich Cathedral; + V detail
The acuteness that shapes that delight caricatures Christ’s torturers. It is again
Bosch who would culminate what is here begun:
lst Torturer:
2nd Torturer:
3rd Torturer:
4th Torturer:
Lift up this tree among us all.
Yea, and let it into the mortice fall,
And it will burst his chest.
Yea, and tear him limb from limb!
And it will crack each joint in him,
Let see now who does best. (CGB)
a1st 77) German, c. 1400, Crucifixion with Saints, Pähl Altar, Bavarian National
Museum, Munich; + V detail
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
1st 77)
Symbolic History
Master of St. Veronica, c. 1400, Large Crucifixion, detail, WallrafRichartz Museum, Köln (CGB '74); digital uses whole
At the core of these 1400 Passions, whether Flemish, English, German, most of
all, of the soft-eyed broodings from Cologne, simple pity redeems Gothic pain, as when
Mary speaks in the Wakefield (or Townley) play:
Such sorrow for to see,
My dear child in thee,
Is more mourning to me,
Than any tongue can tell.
The terminal complexities of Ars Nova lose touch with this human breadth
developing in the North:
Music:
Matteo da Perugia, c. 1390(?), “Amen” from the Gloria, O.L. 1
(close)
Its voice is the plain fauxbourdon of England:
For 2nd 76) German or English, early 15th cent., Crucifixion, Courtauld Inst. of
Art
Music:
England, c. 1400, Old Hall Credo, “Patrem,” Col. DX 582 (78)
(fade)
Or as polished and disseminated from Avignon:
2nd 77) From 1st 77, Veronica Master, Crucifixion, upper detail; where video then
picks up the Saints on Christ's right (John, Mary, Peter), the slide show returns to the Crucifixion panel of a77, Pähl Altar
Music:
English, late 14th cent., Kyrie de Angelis, opening, SAWT 9505 AEx
(fade)
It was not only the leaders and the great who turned Europe from earthless
devotion; it was the Gothic folk, working in common piety, to ground the Christian
legend in the time, space, and cause of mortal possibility.
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
a78)
b78)
78)
Symbolic History
Claus Sluter, 1395-99, Moses and David, from the Moses Fountain,
Chartreuse de Champmol, Dijon
Same, from Moses Fountain: David, Jeremiah and Zachariah
Same, Moses detail
If we return, within that ground, to the strongest artist of Chaucer’s time, to Sluter,
whose Moses fountain in Dijon mediates whatever is monumental from Donatello to the
Baroque, fulfilling the manhood promised from Occam —
The pope may not deprive men of liberties conferred on them by God
or by nature —
to the praying Lollards —
When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman? —
we may seem to have left Chaucer behind, a jesting courtier. Though in fact the poem it
was said he wrote on his deathbed, the “Ballad of Good Counsel,” is the greatest
expression of the new self-reliance. He speaks to his pilgrim soul:
Forth, pilgrim, forth! Forth, beast, out of thy stall!
Know thy country, look up, thank God of all;
Hold the high way, and let thy spirit lead;
And truth thee shall deliver, it is no dread.
a79)
79)
Franco-German, c. 1300, Head of a Prophet, Main Portal, Strasbourg
Same, another head from a prophet holding a scroll
To mark how far we have come from the lean, fierce abasement of a century before, set
Strasbourg against Sluter, and with it an English poem, also of 1300, on the vanity of the
world:
Were beth they biforen us weren,
Hundès ladden and hauekès beren
And hadden feld and wode?
The richè levedies in hoerè bour
That wereden gold in hoerè tressour
With hoerè brightè rode;
Eten and drounken and maden hem glad;
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Hoerè lif was al with gamen i-lad,
Men kneleden hem biforen,
They beren hem wel swithè heyè
And in a twincling of an eyè
Hoerè soulès weren forloren.
Va80)
80)
Again, Moses Fountain, side view of Zacharias
Same, Head of Zacharias from the Moses Fountain, Dijon
From that, to the amplitude of Sluter’s Zacharias, or Chaucer’s self-rule — as if
Dante had come from mountain hierarchy to this plain of the forthright man:
Forth, pilgrim, forth! Forth, beste out of thy stal!
Know thy contree, look up, thank God of al;
Hold the heye way, and lat thy gost thee lede;
And trouthe thee shal delivere, it is no drede.
June 1996
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�
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SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
15. 1500: Explosive Balance
CHARLES G. BELL
ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
or
1260 CANYON ROAD
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501
September 1995
Last Revised January ‘96
�Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
15. 1500: Explosive Balance
1)
Leonardo da Vinci, 1483 ff., Bombard with shrapnel, Ambrosiana, Milan
Music: Isaac, c. 1485(?), Alla Battaglia, Decca DL 79424
1500 goes off like one of Leonardo's shrapnel shells, hurled from the foul
bombard, shedding small shot, "causing," he writes, "great terror to the enemy, with great
loss and confusion."
The martial music of Isaac,
2)
Rubens, 1615, copy of Leonardo, 1503, Battle of Anghiari, Louvre, Paris
the unfinished frescoes of battle, in which Leonardo and Michelangelo vied on the walls
of the Florentine Palazzo Vecchio, set the type of force for centuries — as Rubens made
this copy, from a copy of the lost Leonardo.
(fade Isaac)
Va3) Leonardo, 1503-5, Mona Lisa, whole, Louvre, Paris
3)
Same, Mona Lisa, detail
Music:
Mantuanus, c. 1495, Frottole, Un Sonar, NY Pro Musica, Decca
79435
How does Renaissance, a point of balance between old and new, cultivating in all
arts the myth of calm — Leonardo;
4)
Giorgione, 1505-10, Sleeping Venus, Gemäldegalerie , Dresden
Giorgione; this Mantuan frottole of winds and waters, "Lirum, bililirum"; Sannazaro's
Arcadian dream, "Alma beata e bella," "Blest and beautiful soul, who freed from bonds"
— how does that promise admit of so fierce a cleavage?
(fade
Frottole)
9/1995
1500: Explosive Balance
1
�C.G. Bell
5)
Symbolic History
Pisanello, c. 1415(?), Luxuria, drawing, Albertina, Vienna
Was it the turbulence of shooting in a hundred years the narrows of such a
transformation as from Pisanello's 1415 Luxuria, lean Gothic lust burning its sinful
allure? — Scotch Dunbar of 1500 still working in that vein:
Sum kissis me; sum clappis me, sum kyndnes me proferis ...
And a stif standand thing staiffis in my neiff...
And Marlowe's Lechery flaunting it to the century's end:
I am one that loves an inch of raw mutton better than an ell of fride
stock-fish...
2nd 4) Giorgione, Sleeping Venus, detail; video, first a closer detail
Was Renaissance everywhere islanded in a brimstone which syphilis would fire
from the New World; so that Machiavelli's Mandragola-seduction might curl the fingers
of Giorgione's acceptance:
What your cunning, my husband's folly, a mother's venality and the
wickedness of a confessor, has won me to for a night ... I wish to have
forever.
2nd 5) Again, Pisanello, Luxuria, detail
Not to mention the dialogues of Aretino, where of whores, nuns and wives, only whores
ply an honest trade.
6)
6a)
6b)
Riemenschneider, 1495, Eve from the Marienskapelle, half-length, Museum,
Würzburg
French MS, 1450(?), Vapor Bath, MS Franc. 289 Fol 414, Bibl, Nat., Paris
Again, Riemenschneider, Eve (head and bust)
Music:
Glogauer Liederbuch, c. 1477-88, Ich bin erfreut, Archive 3033
On the other side, the purity of flesh lured the North too, as in the famous public
baths
and
love-mystic
heresy
of
Adamites.
In
the
June 1996
1500: Explosive Balance
2
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Germany where Luther was growing up, Riemenschneider and the Glogauer Songbook
wreathe the voluptuous Garden: "not under the law but under grace" — "nicht unter dem
Gesetz, sondern unter der Gnade."
7)
7a)
H. Bosch, 1503-4, Garden of Delights, from center, Prado, Madrid
Same, a closer detail (1996 video revision)
(fade Glogauer)
While in the art of Bosch, counterpole to the Italian, equally sought after in Spain,
the landscape of venery is composed to such a Garden of Delights, that what stands in the
triptych between eating forbidden fruit and choiring in musical hell, has been thought one
of those Adamitic celebrations of Eros.
As the upstaging of sex implies, the bombard of 1500
a8)
8)
Verrocchio, 1479-88, The Colleoni, seen from the south, on its pedestal; Venice
(CGB '48)
Same, front view, nearer, from below; + V detail, V8a
Music:
Isaac, Alla Battaglia, as above, conclusion
is not merely the intensification of war, of those Italian and European battles from which
Machiavelli learned lessons as shrewdly real as the Colleoni by Leonardo's master,
Verrocchio:
Men must either be caressed or else annihilated ... War is not to be
avoided, and can be deferred only to the advantage of the other side ...
A prince should therefore have no other aim or thought but war ... the
end justifies the means ...
9)
9a)
Double: [A] Mantegna, 1449-54, Soldier from Martyrdom of Christopher,
Eremitani, Padua; and [B] Leonardo, 1503, Study for the Battle of Anghiari,
Budapest (slide show first takes these singly, then the double)
Leonardo, C. 1488-90, Study for the Sforza Monument, silverpoint, etc.,
Royal Library, Windsor Castle (video then repeats the double, 9)
It may be said of men in general that they are ungrateful, voluble,
dissemblers, anxious to avoid danger and covetous of gain ...
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
So-called virtues may lead to ruin, so-called vices to security; Caesar
Borgia's cruelty united the Romagna.
It is not merely that such satanic realism, passed down in the faith-world, as from
Mantegna's soldiers to Leonardo's Anghiari sketches, marks the deepening war, until the
French sack of Milan destroys Leonardo's Equestrian Sforza, and Boiardo in Florence
breaks off the make-believe of his Orlando:
Yet even as I sing, O saving God,
I see all Italy in flame and fire
From these bold Gauls, come down again rough-shod
Across our country, wasting everywhere... (CGB)
10)
(end Isaac Battle)
Double: [A] Honnecourt, 1225-50, Diagrammatic figures, Sketchbook XXXV,
Bibl. Nat., Paris; and [B] Leonardo, c. 1492, Vitruvian Man, Accademia,
Venice; + singles [slide show takes A before the double, B after; video presents
double, detail of A, repeat of double, then B]
Less crucial the literal war than the symbolic, that reason, long dutiful to creed,
even in Roger Bacon, empiricist:
We perceive by the first proposition of Euclid that if the Person of God
the Father be granted, a Trinity of equal persons presents itself —
as unchecked by brute fact as Honnecourt's 13th-century geometries (left) — reason now
seated in the earth-fabric, takes the lead from revealed archetypes: Leonardo, as in the
Proportions of Vitruvian man, making that natural bondage the object of our love.
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Symbolic History
So the battle to be joined is not of Florence against Pisa, or of Milan against
France; it is the battle of values.
11)
Roman (Etruscan), 2nd cent. B.C., Scipio Africanus(?), Louvre, Paris
"In ancient times," Machiavelli writes in the Discourses, "men were stronger ...
which I believe founded upon the difference of their religion and ours ... The Pagan
religion deified only men who had achieved great glory, such as commanders of armies
and chiefs of republics ... placing the supreme good in grandeur of soul, strength of body,
and all such qualities as render men formidable." (Though this 2nd-century B.C. bust
called Scipio Africanus is not as strong as Michelangelo would have made it.)
12)
Roman Christian, later 3rd cent., Good Shepherd statue, Cleveland; + V detail
(as in slide V12a); digital puts detail first
"While our religion glorifies more the humble and contemplative than men of action,
placing the supreme happiness in humility, lowliness, and a contempt for worldly objects
... These principles seem to have made men feeble."
Yet even Nietzsche, who followed that line, admits a working paradox, by which
denial has stretched the bow of spirit.
13)
Norman-French, c. 1320, Dragon and Beast cast into Hell, Apocalypse MS,
Cloisters, NY
Music:
G. de Machault, Hocquetus David (from bar 105), OL-3
Like the hocket dissonance of Guillaume de Machault, the dragon and beast of the
Cloister Apocalypse inflame their Leviathan depths with a force unparalleled in the
ancient world, a vulcanism that flung up towers of church and state.
(end Machault)
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
Va14)
Symbolic History
Nardo di Cione (with Orcagna?), c. 1355, Hell detail, Lake of Blood; S.
Maria Novella, Florence (CGB '59)
Orcagna, 1360, The Damned in Hell, fragment; Santa Croce, Florence
14)
"Where are all the great Florentines," Dante asks of Ciacco in the mud of the third
Circle, and hears: "Deeper, among the darker souls, weighed down by sundry crimes."
And we see them, "magnanimous" Farinata, Tegghiaio, Brunetto Latini: "You taught me
how man makes himself immortal" — great-souled heroes, in hell. Thus Machiavelli:
Doubtless these means are cruel and destructive... neither Christian nor
human ... and to be avoided... The life of a private citizen would be
preferable to that of such a king...
15)
15a)
15b)
15c)
15d)
Florentine, 1492, Death-mask of Lorenzo il Magnifico, Medici Palace,
Florence
Mantegna, c. 1470(?), Engraving: Bacchanalia, with Silenus; + V detail
Michelangelo, 1535-41, Double: details from the Last Judgment, [A] Death
Mask, and [B] a Devil's head in Hell; Sistine Chapel, Vatican (digital: only
Death's head)
Botticelli, c. 1485, Madonna of the Pomegranate, detail, Uffizi, Florence
(video: detail of head only from V15c)
Verrocchio, c. 1480, Lorenzo dei Medici, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.
(while video repeats [A] of 15, the Death Mask ; not digital
Nevertheless, if one wishes to maintain power, it is this that is
required.
As much as any work of art, the death-mask of Lorenzo il Magnifico records that
value-cloven pride: mind reaching out to Copernicus in Poland and Columbus in
America; the carnival passion of Lorenzo's own songs (CGB):
Music:
Isaac, c. 1490(?), Donna di dentro, New York Pro Musica, Decca
DL-79413
Here we are now, old and young,
Glad and lusty, female, male;
Hail to Bacchus, Venus, hail;
Join in pleasure, dance and song;
(music down)
the vanity he faces through it all:
June 1996
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Symbolic History
Sola sta ferma e sempre dura Morte —
Nothing holds, nothing endures, but Death;
the alternate words for tunes of delight:
(again up)
How great your beauty and your goodness,
Virgin, merciful and holy —
Lorenzo himself being patron of doom-preaching Savonarolla.
16)
A. Pollaiuolo, c. 1470, Hercules and the Hydra; Uffizi, Florence
How brief and undercut that keenness Florence and the Medici had fostered:
Pollaiuolo's Hercules, like Botticelli's Spring and Leonardo's science — courage, beauty,
intelligence — on the whirls of corruption Machiavelli saw and succumbed to, putting
Borgia's treacherous henchman, Michelotto, in command of the Florentine militia, for a
sellout with hardly a battle.
(end Donna di dentro)
a17)
17)
17a)
Donatello, 1445-48, Entombment of Christ, stone relief, Sant' Antonio,
Padova
Niccolo dell' Arca, c. 1485(?), Pieta, detail, S. Maria della Vita, Bologna;
+ V closer detail
Prato Master, c. 1430-40, Unbelievers, detail, Cathedral, Prato (video briefly
returns to the detail of 17)
Music:
Compere, pub. 1503, Crucifige, de Van, etc., AS-80
Crucifige! Donatello pierced the Renaissance in Padua. Penitence veers back
from the North, as Savonarolla is called to San Marco from Ferrara. But in this dell' Arca
Pieta and the Passion motets, reform rides humanist liberation. So the trumpet that
roused Savonarolla was Virgil's warning from the severed roots:
Heu! Fuge crudelis terras, fuge litus avarum —
Fly, fly the ruthless land, the shore of greed.
June 1996
1500: Explosive Balance
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7
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Symbolic History
No medieval voice rages in those sermons against pagan Florence and the Church of
Rome:
they have not only destroyed the Church of God, but built up another
... of sticks, Christians dry as tinder for the fires of hell ... The only
hope that now remains to us, is that the sword of God may soon smite
the earth.
As the dying Lorenzo turned his back on that holy arrogance, lightning struck the
cathedral dome, a comet flared, the Florentine lions fought and the most beautiful was
killed.
18)
Florentine, early 16th cent., Death of Savonarolla (1498), S. Marco, Florence
"Give the people of Florence their freedom," said Savonarolla — already risking mobrule, opening private houses to the search for vanities. Well, he would learn at his own
trial how much his populace cared for justice and truth. While Machiavelli, observing the
fires from the Palazzo Vecchio, would write: "all unarmed prophets fail."
19)
Botticelli, 1500-5, Mystic Crucifixion, Fogg, Cambridge, Massachusetts;
+ V detail
Savonarolla:
In my imagination I saw a black cross over the Babylon of Rome, and
on it was written Ira Domini, and above it rained every weapon and
hailstones and stones, with thunder and lightning ... and dark and
abysmal weather. And I saw another cross, a golden one, that came
from the sky to earth over Jerusalem, and on it was written
Misericordia Dei, and there the weather was serene, clear, and very
bright ... And I saw angels arrive with the red cross ...
Botticelli's break with the Medici past reflects those doomsday sermons.
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20)
20b)
Symbolic History
Italian, 1450-55 and 1492-5, Room of the Liberal Arts, Borgia Apartments,
Vatican; + V detail (which the slide show replaces with 20a, Pinturicchio,
1492-1503, fresco from the same apartments — also added to video in '96)
Raphael, 1517-18, Portrait of Pope Leo X with Cardinals; Uffizi, Florence;
first, video detail
Music:
Tromboncino, c. 1500, Ostinato vo seguire, Nonesuch 71071
Savonarolla's attack was on the Borgia Pope Alexander VI. It is hard, from the
restraint of his Vatican apartments, or of the Tromboncino that might have been played
there, to picture the Nero of whom we read: he vying with his bastard Caesar for the
favors of daughter-sister Lucrezia; of their famous poisonings; or how that Cesare with
the bow of Apollo shot prisoners as they dodged in the courtyard, while the golden-haired
Lucrezia and the Pope looked on.
Then Pius, and the warring Julius II, Michelangelo's patron, and in 1513 the
banqueting Medici, Leo X: "Since we have been given the Papacy by God, for God's
sake let us enjoy it." — whom Luther would address in 1520, between rage and naive
hope: (end Tromboncino)
Leo, most blessed father...I have never thought ill of you personally ...
I have called you a Daniel in Babylon ... but I have truly despised your
see, which neither you nor anyone else can deny is more corrupt than
any Babylon or Sodom ... the most shameless of all brothels, the
kingdom of sin, death and hell.
a21)
21)
Signorelli, 1499-1500, The Damned, Cathedral, Orvieto; plus V lower detail
Same, vertical near center (from these and a closer slide, V21a, the video
draws two details, one above and one below)
Music:
June 1996
Josquin des Prez, c. 1500(?) (pub. 1519), from Miserere, AS-107/8
1500: Explosive Balance
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Symbolic History
It is not that Gothic energies, from Savonarolla to Counter-Reformation, cease or
slack off, but that they clothe themselves in carnal fabrics. Sodomite Signorelli flexes the
Medicean arts in a foreshadowing of Michelangelo's darker Judgment.
At a time as complex as any in world history, Europe becomes a voltaic pile,
stretched over electric fields of north-south, Gothic-classic, Christian-humanist,
medieval-modern — blending hues in every heart and work; while power explodes to the
New World and implodes in Protestantism — how is such a folded convolution to be
exhibited at all?
The amplest ingathering is in the music of Josquin des Prez.
22)
22a)
Dürer, 1498, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Woodcut, Berlin
Same, detail [video takes its detail from 22]
His Miserere-forging of angular rythm and massive chord, impels Dürer's Four
Horsemen, that Gothic apocalypse — the Angers tapestries lashed to physical storm —
down over the Italy of Signorelli and of Michelangelo, where Dürer made art pilgrimages,
and Josquin passed most of his productive life.
(end Miserere)
a23)
23)
Dürer, 1514, Melancholy,
Washington, D.C.
Same, whole engraving
Music:
engraving,
detail,
National
Gallery,
Josquin des Pres, c. 1498(?), from Dulces exuviae, DL 9410
But there is another Josquin and another Dürer: this laurel-crowned Melancholy
heaped round with attributes of thought, idleness, suicide; Josquin's handling of Dido's
last love lament, "Dulces exuviae" — as if, in classical renewal, Lucretius' ennui must
deepen (under the rays of light over ocean) to the brooding flaw of Hamlet.
(fade Dulces Exuviae)
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a24)
24)
24a)
Symbolic History
Bramante, 1502, Tempietto di S. Pietro in Montorio, Rome
Bramante, 1480-90, S. Maria presso S. Satiro, interior, Milan
Same, another view
It is most of all in architecture that 1500 Europe is cloven by the Alps. The
classical orders, coffered vault and dome dominate Bramante's Italy. But if we seek in
music, where no classical orders survived, a comparable cleavage, what is most Italian —
those chordal lauds and frottole that point to operatic song — were written not only by
Tromboncino and the rest, but by Flemish Josquin.
Music:
a25)
25)
25a)
Josquin des Prez, c. 1490(?), In Te Domine Speravi, (opening
phrase), Angel S-36926
(fade)
French Flamboyant, 1500 ff., N Transept of Beauvais, central portion, color
French Flamboyant, 1500 ff., N. Transept of Beauvais, night-lighted;
+ V detail
French, 15th cent., Flamboyant Rose Window, Sainte Chapelle, Paris (CGB
'59)
While in the North, Gothic spills over 1500 in a lacy network of stone, often (as
here at Beauvais) completing 13th-century structures. While late Gothic verse ties knots
of rhyme: (Henryson) "Superne/ Lucerne,/ Guberne this pestilens;/ Preserve/ and serve/
That we not sterve thairin;" (or Dunbar) "Haile yhyng, benyng, fresche flurising!/ Haile
Alphais habitakle!/ Thy dyng ofspring maid us to syng/ Before his tabernakle."
For a musical parallel, it is again Josquin who twines the contrapuntal as well as
anyone. Thus the six-voice canonic close of the motet Benedicta:
Music:
a26)
26)
Josquin des Prez, c. 1510(?), Benedicta es caelorum regina, close
ARC-2533 110
Late Gothic, 1387 ff., Milan Cathedral, section of Façade and South side
(CGB '80)
Italian Gothic, 1386-1887, Pinnacles over the crossing, Cathedral, Milan
June 1996
(end Benedicta)
1500: Explosive Balance
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Even in architecture, the geographical divide is deceptive. Through the whole
Renaissance and into the centuries after, Milan Cathedral was sprouting minarets over a
city given to the smooth accords of Bramante and Leonardo.
27)
27a)
Tudor Ceiling, 1478 ff., on Norman 1141-80, Christ Church Choir, Oxford
(CGB '86)
Same, another view (while video and digital detail slide 27)
While the tendrilled fans applied now to churches of the North, build a
ceremonious earthly bower within the inherited sternness of the Medieval. So the
plainsong floreations of Wolsey's choirmaster, Taverner, enwreathed the Tudor
transformation of Christ Church Norman Choir.
Music:
28)
V28a)
28b)
Taverner, c. 1525(?), "Aromata" from Dum transisset sabbatum,
Argo RG-316
Jörg Syrlin the Elder, 1469-74, Pythagoras in the Church of Ulm; + V detail
(cf. V28)
Same, double: [A] Cimmerian Sibyl and [B] slide 28, Syrlin's Pythagoras
Same, Cimmerian Sibyl from the Ulm Choir stalls
In the stained glass soaring of Ulm, Syrlin's minstrel Pythagoras sings as with
personal passion. (So many songs caught up in sacred masses):
Western wind, when wilt thou blow,
That small rain down can rain?
Christ, if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!
Like the German, "Es ist ein Schnee gefallen":
A deep snow has fallen
Before the snows are due,
Boys pelt me with snowballs,
My path is lost in snow.
My house yawns at the gable,
Our years have made it old,
The doorbolts are broken,
My little room is cold.
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Symbolic History
Sweet love, in loving pity,
Shield me from my woe;
Fold me to your body,
And let the winter go. (CGB)
Ach Lieb, lass dich's erbarmen,
Daß ich so elend bin,
Und schliess mich in dein Arme!
So fährt der Winter hin.
29)
29a)
29b)
29c)
Double: [A] Hugo v. d. Goes, 1476-8, Portinari Altar, detail, Uffizi,
Florence; and [B] Ghirlandaio, 1485, Adoration of the Shepherds, detail,
Santa Trinita, Florence
Detail similar to A of 29, from Hugo v.d. Goes Altar (CGB '59)
Again, 29, Double
A closer detail from the Ghirlandaio Adoration (cf. B of 29)
About 1478, the Portinari Altar by Hugo van der Goes of Bruges was set up in
Florence. The realism which delighted the town climaxed in the shepherds (left),
pressing in, as from carols and mystery plays:
When Wat to Bedlem cum was,
He swet, he had gone faster than a pace;
He found Jesu in a simpell place,
Betwen an ox and an asse.
(He was a gud herdès boy)
Ut hoy!
For in his pipe he made so much joy.
Seven years later Ghirlandaio, to whom Michelangelo was apprenticed, painted
his harmonious response. These familiar shepherds enter into a stable thatched over a
classical ruin, where the feed-trough is an inscribed sarcophagus. No wonder they have
the conscious measure of Poliziano's pastoral vignettes:
June 1996
1500: Explosive Balance
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
To see the rustic as he tends his sheep
Unbar the gate for the passing of his flock.
Or delle pecorelle il rozo mastro
Si vede alla sua torma aprir la sbarra...
30)
30a)
M. Schongauer, c. 1485(?), Adoration of Shepherds, Gallery, Berlin-Dahlem
Same, detail (video makes two details from slide 30)
In the homespun ripening of this Schongauer, which Dürer would make Lutheran,
we have a German version of what Renaissance Christendom, with Erasmus as its ablest
spokesman, everywhere hoped for, a kind of Biblical humanization by quiet reform:
The sun itself is not as common and accessible to all as is Christ's
teaching ... I would that even the lowliest women read the Gospels and
the Pauline Epistles. And I would that they were translated into all
languages ... that the farmer might sing some portion of them at the
plow, the weaver hum them to the movement of his shuttle, the
traveller lighten the weariness of his journey with such stories as these.
31)
Maitre de Moulins, c. 1498, Madonna in Glory, central panel of triptych,
Moulins Cathedral
That heritage of faith freed and naturalized is a 1500 starting point. Let the threevoice canon from Josquin's Ave verum corpus, in its first Dijon recording, with the Maitre
de Moulins' Virgin in Glory, express what was shared from Memling to Metsys and from
Perugino to Raphael:
Music:
32)
32a)
33)
Josquin des Prez, late 15th cent., (pub. 1503), 2nd phrase of Ave
Verum Corpus, old VM-212 (1)
Same, detail, top left: angel
Same, detail, lower right: angels
Same, detail, center: Madonna and Child (here video returns to the whole
panel; not so digital)
(end Josquin)
The formative genius of the 1500 enrichment was Leonardo,
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1500: Explosive Balance
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�C.G. Bell
34)
34a)
Symbolic History
Leonardo da Vinci, 1483-86, Virgin of the Rocks, Louvre, Paris; + V detail
Same, detail, Madonna and angel; + V detail of angel (V34a)
and he had entered the promised land (Vasari's "terza maniera") twenty years before.
Music:
Fr. Bossinensis, c. 1495(?), Lauda, New York Pro Musica, Decca
79437
In music the shift was from the medieval
painting: to render "a proportioned and
indeed, who came to the service of Sforza
lyre, applies (with Aron and Gafori) the
adding of parts to what Leonardo stressed in
harmonious view of the whole." Leonardo
as a musician playing a fantastic skull-shaped
same spatial sense to music: "the union of
proportional parts sounded simultaneously." In the 1500 Laude, how like the sfumato,
which shadows Leonardo's space, is the melting of tonal fullness in complicities of minor.
(fade Bossinensis)
Can we draw from Leonardo's Notebooks the heart of that mystery?
a35)
35)
Same, upper section of the whole
Same, detail of rocks
Shadow partakes of the nature of universal things, which are all more
powerful at their beginning and grow weaker toward the end ... And
drawn on by my eager desire, having wandered for some distance
among the overhanging rocks, I came to the mouth of a huge cavern
before which for a time I remained stupefied ... my back bent to an
arch, my left hand clutching my knee, while with the right I made a
shade for my lowered and contracted eyebrows; and as I leaned one
way and then the other to see if I could discern anything ... suddenly I
was aware of two contrary states, fear and desire, fear of the
threatening dark cavern, desire to see what marvels it might contain ...
Longing for the source ... like that of the moth for the light ...
a36)
36)
36a)
Leonardo 1481-2, Adoration of the Magi, central group, Uffizi, Florence
Same, detail of Leonardo self and two heads (cf. also V36a)
Same, closer detail of the two heads
In the god-like expansion of nature and man, something has replaced the demon
adversary of Christian good. What Leonardo saw from his summit of thought was not
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
only the fury of war ("Della crudelta dell' Omo") but deeper, the smiling enigma of force
— as in Carnot's Second Law — that energy quickens by its own decay:
Force I define as an incorporeal agency, an invisible power ... It is born
in violence and dies in liberty; and the greater it is the more quickly it
is consumed ... It desires to conquer and slay the cause of opposition,
and in conquering it destroys itself ...Without force nothing moves.
(Axiomatic, that in the 1500 dream of calm, where Satan slacks off, entropy appears.)
For the strongest contrast of that South and North, against Leonardo, 1452-1519,
a37) H. Bosch, c. 1490, Death of a Miser, Nat. Gal., Washington, DC (CGB '60)
37 Same, Central portion (CGB '60) [video takes this first, then a detail from a37]
set Bosch, c. 1450-1516, deep in transreal Gothic, what spoke at the same time in
Everyman, English morality play from the Dutch:
Here shall you se how Felawshyp and Jolyte,
Bothe Strengthe, Pleasure, and Beaute,
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Symbolic History
Wyll fade from the as the floure in Maye;
For ye shall here how our Heven Kynge
Calleth Everyman to a general rekenynge.
Give audyence, and here what he doth saye...
[God] Where are thou Deth, thou myghty messengere?
… Go thou to Everyman,
And shewe hym in my name,
A pylgrimage ...
The structures are medieval. But as in a process of mineralization, every grain has been
replaced; in the cast of art and drama Bosch meets with Leonardo.
38)
Dutch(?), c. 1440, Mouth of Hell, 99 from Cath. of Cleves Hours, P. Morgan
Library, NY; + V detail
For centuries his forbears had been filling in and individualizing Gothic (this 1440
Hell-gate as mouth and arse), fitting Christian vision to the feel of man and matter. The
moral fact boiling from the church close to the square in all those guild towns may be
measured by the stage direction in The Castle of Perseveraunce: "Loke that the Devil
have gunne-powder brennynge in pypys in his handis and in his eris and in his erse whan
he gothe to battayle."
39)
H. Bosch, 1503-4, Triptych of Delights, closed, Creation, Prado, Madrid;
+ V detail; not digital
So the created earth painted on the closed wings of Bosch's Garden of Delights
may be medieval in conception — an egg of land and water, cloud and sky, closed in a
crystalline shell — but its space reaches into the future, wonderful as the iconography
with which Bosch peoples it. Revolution floats in amniotic calm, before the battle of
values begins — visionary as Ockeghem's Mass for the Dead.
Music:
June 1996
Ockeghem, c. 1480(?), from Missa pro defunctis, Ubi est Deus
tuus, ff., ARC 2533-145
1500: Explosive Balance
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�C.G. Bell
40)
40a)
Symbolic History
Bosch, same, central panel, plus detail: procession around a pool
Same, closer detail (revised into video in 1996)
(fade Ockeghem)
1500 Dunbar's grosser sins:
Then Idleness at the second call
Came like a sow from a mud hole;
He had a sleepy snout.
Many a swag-bellied sluggish glutton,
Many a lazy slut and sloven
Were servants in his rout... (CGB)
41)
41a)
41b)
41c)
Same Bosch, whole triptych open
Same, left panel, lower detail
Same, central panel, detail
Same, right panel, upper half of Hell
The spread altar reaches from Adam and Eve through the pursuit of happiness, to
a hell landscape of Satanic mills. Obrecht's Marian Mass for 3 to 7 voices, and tied by a
cabala of number symbols, has that spectral vastness.
Music:
42)
42a)
Obrecht, c. 1500(?), Marian Mass, from 2nd Agnus, ARC 198-406
(fade)
Same, top of Hell
Detail of same, blood-red stream (here video takes two details from 42)
But it is the older Ockeghem who rides the hell-energy cresting under halcyon
calm: "save the soul from fiends and from the lake of hell" — "de manu inferni et de
profundo lacu."
Music:
Ockeghem, again Requiem Mass, "de manu inferni", etc.
(fade)
A window into the soul of Europe on the verge of colonial conquest and Protestant war.
And with Bosch — as if sprouted from the aspri sterpi of Dante's wood of suicides —
compare Gawain Douglas, 1501:
My ravished spirit in that desert wasteful
Drew to the margin of a river hateful,
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Symbolic History
That like Cocytus, the ugly stream infernal,
With its vile water made a hideous trouble,
Spilling overhead, blood red, and impossible
It should have been a river natural ...
43)
Bosch, 1505-6, St. Anthony Triptych, center detail, Lisbon, Portugal
This loathly flood like rumbling thunder routed,
Wherein the demon fish so elvish shouted
Their wild yelps deafened and benumbed my hearing;
At those grim monsters my weak spirit doubted.
None through the soil but spunky trees there sprouted,
Combust, barren, bloomless, no leaf bearing,
Old rotten runts wherein no sap was working,
The most part waste, with withered branches moulded;
It was a den well fit for murderers' lurking.
44)
44a)
Bosch, 1510 ff., detail (lower right), Temptation of Anthony, Prado, Madrid
Again, Bosch, Triptych of Delights, from central panel, Lovers in a bubble
Wherefore I was myself right sore aghast ...
The whistling wind blew many a bitter blast;
The bare limbs rattled; I could scarcely stand.
Out through the wood I crept on foot and hand.
The river stank, the trees they clattered fast.
That soil was nought but marsh and slime and sand.
(CGB)
Small wonder if earthly joy, stemming such a demonism as would haunt
succeeding centuries, should be ensphered by Bosch in vegetable bubbles.
45)
45a)
Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1506-7, Youth in masquerade dress, Windsor Castle
Giorgione, c. 1504, Madonna enthroned, with St. Liberale and St. Francis,
Castelfranco, Veneto
Was not the humanist hope of Leonardo and his time so islanded? — the 1507
symposium Castiglione celebrates in The Courtier, a discourse opened by della Rovere,
who would kill his sister's lover next year, a cardinal then for smiling at him, and
connive, it was said, at the sack of Rome; while Bembo, poet-climber and libertine,
afterwards Papal secretary and Cardinal, closes it with a paean to Platonic love:
June 1996
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Symbolic History
let us climbe up the staires, which at the lowermost steppe have the
shadow of sensuall beautie, to the high mansion place where the
heavenly, amiable and right beautie dwelleth, which lyeth hidden in the
innermost secretes of God ...
a46)
46)
Same, detail of Madonna and landscape
Same, detail of landscape only
Meanwhile the dawn has come, nature espousing the flight of the soul:
When the windowes then were opened on the side of the Pallaice that
hath his prospect towarde the high top of Mount Catri, they saw
already in the East a faire morning like unto the colour of roses, and all
starres voyded, saving only the sweete Governesse of heaven, Venus,
which keepeth the boundes of the night and day ...
Though the gleaming nature of this Giorgione background was dawning everywhere —
even in English poetry:
Tyll at the laste I came to a dale
Beholdyinge Phebus declynynge lowe and pale,
With my greyhoundes in the fayre twy lyght
I sate me downe for to rest me all nyght.
47)
47a)
Flemish, end 15th cent., Romance of the Rose, Garden entrance, MS Harley
4425 f. 12b, Brit. Mus., London; + V detail (V47), ‘96 revision
Giorgione, c. 1504, detail of St. Liberale from Castelfranco Madonna, Veneto
That is from Hawes' Pastime of Pleasure, Graunde Amoure's quest for love and virtue —
still, like this Flemish miniature (also of 1500), cultivating the Garden of The Romance
of the Rose: (Hawes)
Amyddes the garden ... there was resplendysshaunt
A dulcet sprynge and mervaylous fountayne ...
Besyde whiche fountayne the most fayre lady
La bell pucell was gayly syttynge...
In the interfusion of Gothic and Rebirth, the airy transparency of the miniature ripens, as
the myth of chivalry swells toward Ariosto.
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a48)
48)
Symbolic History
Dürer, 1489-90, St. John's Cemetery, Nuremberg, stolen from Bremen
Kunsthalle
Dürer, 1494(?), The Wire-drawing Mill, Berlin-Dahlem
From 1490 on Dürer had applied those skills to a landscape liberation of the
forest-cleared and fruitful Germany, before the outbreak of religious wars — against Hell
Bosch, a faith as natural as Cornish would voice in Tudor English:
Pleasure it is
To hear, iwis,
The birdès sing,
The deer in the dale,
The sheep in the vale,
The corn springing;
God's purveyance
For sustenance
It is for man.
Then we always
To give him praise,
And thank him than,
And thank him than.
49)
49a)
Leonardo da Vinci, 1494-7, Last Supper, S. Maria d. Grazie, Milan
Same, center section (video draws this detail from 49)
The easy polarities of century and geography blur; 1495 finds both Bosch and
Dürer in the North, in Italy the Piagnoni beside Leonardo. Though what was uppermost
was humanist — the Christian myth composed to classical drama. In Josquin's deep
Lament for Ockeghem, nymphs of the woods and streams join in the Requiem Aeternam:
Music:
a50)
50)
50a)
51)
52)
53)
Josquin des Prez, 1495, Deploration sur la mort d'Ockeghem, pt. 1,
ARC 2533 145
Same, group on Christ's right
Same, group on Christ's left
Same, the figure of Christ
Leonardo, c. 1495, Study for Head of Christ, Brera, Milan
French, c. 1500, Entombment, L'Epines, near Rheims (CGB '59)
Same, detail (CGB '59)
June 1996
(end Part I, Deploration)
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Symbolic History
a2nd 52) Again, Leonardo, Last Supper, Christ detail (while video holds to 53,
Entombment detail)
2nd 52) Again, L'Epines Entombment
With Josquin's lament, written in Italy to a French poem, for a Flemish master, we
have ranged Leonardo's Last Supper, most famous picture in the world, with this
anonymous Entombment carved in a pilgrimage church near Rheims. How Christian
Platonism has quieted Gothic pain. Erasmus:
He is the true theologian who teaches ... that all good men should be
loved and cherished equally as members of the same body, that evil
men should be tolerated if they cannot be corrected ... that those who
mourn are blessed and should not be deplored, and that death should
even be desired by the devout, since it is nothing other than a passage
to immortality ...
2nd 51)
Leonardo, Study for the Head of Christ
From the same essay:
What else is the philosophy of Christ, which he himself calls a rebirth,
than the restoration of human nature originally well-formed.
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Symbolic History
In the Christ study, as in most of his works, Leonardo proclaims that restoration.
V3rd 52) Again, L'Epines Entombment, whole (while slide show goes directly to
3rd 53, below)
The new tomb grows shadowed and calm — as in Stephen Hawes:
After the day there cometh the derke nyght,
For though the day be never so longe
At last the belles ryngeth to euensonge ...
3rd 53)
Again, L'Epines Entombment, detail (slide show uses 3rd 53 here and for
the preceding entry)
The transforming death poem had been written in Italy in the 1480's by the
imprisoned politician and humanist Collenuccio. Though the close turns to Christ, who
in dying made death sweet and beautiful ("Dolce e bella morendo fe' la Morte"), the body
of the ode invokes Platonic release
54)
Tullio Lombardo, after 1501, head, Guidarello Guidarelli Tomb, Accademia,
Ravenna; plus digital detail
as "sacra", "splendida", "generosa", "inclita," the comfort of the soul come pure from
heaven, weary of a world of tumultuous and elemental war. This hymn to death — for
every shipwrecked soul the port of healing:
O porto salutar, che sol conforte
D'ogni naufragio il mal, splendida Morte
swells with the personal pity and anodyne which caused the statue of Guidorello, warrior,
who died in 1501, to be kissed and prayed to as to a romantic saint.
a55)
55)
Raphael, 1509-10, Leonardo as Plato, School of Athens, Vatican, Rome
Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1512, Self Portrait (red chalk), Royal Library, Turin
In the general amplification, not only Pico della Mirandola acclaimed man as
unlimited self-maker:
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Symbolic History
Thou, restrained by no narrow bounds, according to thy own free will,
in whose power I have placed thee, shalt define thy nature for thyself ...
Ficino had extended the Platonic flight to a temporal progress toward Godhead:
the soul desires, endeavours and begins to become God, and makes
progress every day...Hence our soul will sometime be able to become
in a sense all things; and even to become a god.
How could Machiavelli, facing the 1512 Leonardo, think Christianity had sapped will and
drive; where the inner dynamic, against the Classical, was so recklessly advanced?
56)
Peter Vischer, 1509-19, St. Paul from the Sebaldus Tomb, Nürnberg
Whatever wrought the change was active also in the northern towns. Peter
Vischer cast this St. Paul in Nuremberg about the time Leonardo sketched his own image
and Raphael chose it for Plato's in The School of Athens — conscious nobility seeding
itself over Europe.
Yet in that augmentation a deeper cleavage, as between reason and heart, was to
rack the century. It is the separation of enlightened conforming humanism
1st 57)
Dürer, c. 1510(?), Self as Christ at the Column, drawing, Schloss, Weimar
from militant conscience as categorical guide. "I laid a hen's egg," said Erasmus; "Luther
hatched a bird of another kind." Dürer's possession by the nude self as the Man of
Sorrows, recalls Luther's insistence as he tore up the Bull: "so hilf' mir Gott, ich kann
nicht anders."
For 2nd 56) Again, Vischer, from the Sebaldus Tomb, St. James the Younger
suppose [Erasmus had answered Luther on Free Will] that in a certain
sense it is true ... that God works both good and evil in us, and rewards
His own works in us and punishes His evil ones. What a door to
impiety this pronouncement would open ... if spread abroad in the
world.
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a2nd 57) Dürer, 1522, Self as the Man of Sorrows, drawing, Kunsthalle, Bremen
2nd 57) Again, Dürer Self as Christ at the Column, detail
Against that dialectic prudence, Luther flames in Christ-seizure:
God foresees, purposes, and does all things according to his
immutable, eternal and infallible will. By this thunderbolt free will is
utterly dashed to pieces ... Peace and tranquility of flesh are, with you,
of greater consideration than the Word of God ... Let me tell you this ...
I am seeking an object so great it ought to be maintained and defended
through death itself, even if the whole world should be hurled into
chaos and reduced to nothing.
And yet Erasmus, in his strangest work, In Praise of Folly, reaches, like Dürer's
Christ-man, toward the revelation of comic paradox — Lear's fool, Cervantes' mocked
knight as saving clown.
58)
Bosch, 1515-16, Christ Bearing the Cross, Beaux Arts, Ghent; + V detail
(from b59)
Since in praising folly "in a way not wholly foolish," Erasmus juxtaposes three masks:
the laughable (as of "old women in heat") which opens to the life-giving illusion of
Sisyphus: "all things are presented by shadows, yet this play is put on no other way"; the
mask of depravity, which he castigates; and third, in the last reversing chamber of the
Silenus, the noble follies of Platonic thought and Christian charity, where a taste of future
happiness drowns our knowledge of the world.
Bosch's 1515 Bearing of the Cross has no weirder transition.
Va59)
b59)
59)
Same, close detail of Bad Thief and Mockers
Same, wider central detail
Same, close detail of St. Veronica and a mocker
In taking up the weight of the new century and of Leonardo's grotesques, late
Bosch prepares for the Protestant agony: earth and soul so fallen that man is mere
stercus, a pile of dung, which only the snow of Christ can cover, so that God looking
down may see the purity of his own salvation. Luther:
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Symbolic History
The human will is a beast between. If God sit thereon, it wills and
goes where God will ... If Satan sit thereon, it wills and goes as Satan
will.
Yet how satanically ambiguous God's Lutheran sitting: "When I fart in Wittenberg, they
smell it in Rome."
a60)
60)
Altdorfer, 1520-25, The Nativity, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna;
+ V detail
Altdorfer, 1510, Rest on the Flight, Staatl. Mus., Berlin-Dahlem; + V detail
From 1500 to 1520, before the North became a battleground, the life that would
polarize and harden, swirls in the temporal wake of art-loving and indulgence-peddling
Rome. Is there a richer delight than in the fairy-tale Christianity Altdorfer shares with
folk song:
Es ist ein' Ros' entsprungen
Aus einer Wurzel zart ...
Luther too joins that dance in his Gabriel hymn:
Vom Himmel hoch da kom ich her,
Ich bring euch gute newe mehr ...
Not to mention the Rose of Sharon wonder of his Bible: "Ich bin eine Blume zu Saron
und eine Rose im Thal." Luther's favorite musician was Senfl, whose most fetching piece
is a Christmas Bell Song. This Catholic joy smiles the immediacy of Protestant birth.
Music:
June 1996
Senfl, c. 1525(?), Bell Song (Das Glaut zu Speyer), AS 51
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61)
Symbolic History
Altdorfer c. 1525, Madonna in Glory, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59);
+ V details [V61a, a detail, Madonna and Child (CGB '59) not yet used
Same, detail of Angel musicians to the left, revised into video ‘96, (CGB '59)
Same, detail of Angel musicians to the right (CGB '59); video: smaller
details only, above and below
Grünewald, 1511-15, Isenheim Altar, center, detail of Angel Concert,
Colmar
Same, whole center panel, Angel concert and Madonna and Child
Same, another Angel musician
Same panel, detail of Madonna under the Baldachin
a62)
62)
a63)
63)
V63a)
63b)
(end Senfl)
In Grünewald, joy sharpens with the prick of pain. So the great Faust-cry of
Hutten: "The spirits awake, there is love and joy in living" — "Die Geister erwachen; es
ist eine Lust zu leben" — sounds from the breaking wave.
History is powered by tragic excess — Reformation only to be pushed by a
temperament capable in its prime of Luther's imperative of Freedom:
I declare that neither pope, nor bishop, nor anyone else, has the right to
impose so much as a single syllable of obligation upon a Christian man
without his own consent ...
Why were Christ and all the martyrs put to death? ... because, without
consulting the preservers of old knowledge, they brought forth a new
thing ...
64)
64a)
Grünewald, c. 1506-8(?), Small Crucifixion, Nat. Gal., Washington, D.C.
(CGB '60); + V detail
Same, right detail (CGB '60)
and after, of lashing out at the poor who had taken his freedoms to heart:
Against the thieving and murdering Hordes of the Peasants: Who so
can, strike, smite, strangle or stab, secretly or publicly ... such
wonderful times are these that a prince can better merit Heaven with
bloodshed than another with prayer ...
(The poor thereafter to call him not Luther but Lügner — Liar.)
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The Grünewald legend has this core of truth, that Mathis Der Maler did go
Lutheran, against his church, his patron and his daring art.
Music:
Taverner, c. 1525(?), Magnificant (opening), AS 91`
And in England, the fiercest genius of music, Taverner, repented, after 1528, of
"Popish Ditties," destroyed what he could, and closed his life breaking church windows
and despoiling altars.
(fade Taverner)
a65)
b65)
65)
Hans Holbein the Younger, 1519, Portrait of B. Amerbach, Kunstmuseum,
Basel
L. Cranach the Elder, c. 1502, Portrait of Dr. Johannes Cuspinian, detail,
Reinhart Collection, Winterthur
Same, whole picture
What survives that visionary adventure? — the humanist North roused to
Erasmus' (1509) "Age of Gold":
Reason is as great as a king ... a divine counsellor, presiding in its high
citadel, remembering its origin, it thinks of nothing sordid, of nothing
base ...
Hutten, a precursive Tom Paine, summoning German youth:
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Come hither all ye who want to be free. Here the tyrants shall be
smitten, here the bondage shall be broken. Where are you, freemen?
Where are you nobles? Men of great names, where are you?
Luther:
Every Christian is anointed and sanctified in body and soul with the oil
of the Holy Spirit —
an early portrait by Cranach, 1502, fresh with that morning — what remains, when genius
is consumed in polemic? As Erasmus (1521) would complain:
And the more I loved the inborn ability of Hutten, the more I grieve
that it was snatched away from us by these disorders ... For what did it
avail to have Reuchlin, burdened enough thus far, weighed down with
heavier ill will? ... Luther could have taught the evangelical philosophy
with great profit to the Christian flock ... if he had refrained from those
things which could only end in disturbance ...
66)
66a)
L. Cranach the Elder, 1550, Self Portrait, Uffizi, Florence; video: first a
close detail
Same, detail of head and shoulders
The last portrait of Cranach, half a century later, gives a solemn answer: in the
deeper hardening of Europe, of which Erasmus grieves in his last letters:
The Anabaptists, a race of men frenzied and devoted to death, have
inundated lower Germany ... Vives writes that John Vergara, together
with Brother Tovar and several other learned men, is in prison. You
know, I imagine, that the three most learned men in all England are in
jail: the bishop of Rochester, the bishop of London, and Thomas
More, a dearer friend than any other I have ever had —
man withdraws into a stronghold of consciousness: "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott"; "Aus
tiefer Not schrei ich zu Dir" — "From the depths of need I cry to thee".
67)
Spanish, B.C. to modern, Barcelona, View of Barrio Gotico; video: first
details, below and above
Old Barcelona summarizes 2000 years in the history of Spain. What is visible
ranges from Roman at the heavy-walled base, through Gothic and Flamboyant, to a
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
filigree of rococo at the crown; though buried below are cyclopean walls of the preGreek, Greek shards and marble, traces of Carthage; while the city spreads beyond to the
Art Nouveau fantasies of Gaudi.
The Spain of Colonial conquest rested on that base, with all the levels of period
style.
68)
68a)
Spanish Romanesque-Gothic, 1188 ff., Portico de la Gloria, Santiago de
Campostello; + V detail
Same, closer detail
Music:
Ripoli MS, c. 1200, Credit Frigus, 2-voice Easter Conductus (vocal
entrance), MHS-OR-433
At the end of the 12th Century at Compostello, Romanesque is shading into Gothic, as in
France, but with an archaic wild excess. And in the contemporary conducti from Ripoli,
note-against-note chords dance Isle-de-France rhythms.
(fade
Credit
Frigus)
69)
69a)
69b)
Spanish MS, 1415, Rafael Destornes, Judgment page, Barcelona Missal,
Cathedral Library, Barcelona (video: upper half only)
Same, lower detail, Hell
Same, upper detail, Saints (here video shows the whole)
Music:
Barcelona, end of 14th cent., Agnus Dei, close, Candide CE-31068
By 1400, French, Italian, and Flemish have fused as everywhere into an
International Gothic, which in Destornes sets up one of many signs on the way to Bosch.
In Catalan music also, the Hocket of Machault and the Italians softens toward familiar
style.
(close Agnus Dei)
70)
Bartolomé Bermejo, 1490, Pietà of Archdeacon Desplà, Cathedral, Barcelona;
+ V detail
During that century the most impassioned realism was absorbed from Avignon,
Flanders and the north Italian, to toughen in Bermejo, 1490 — as in the music of de la
Torre — to a Cid militance of carnal faith: "Adoramos Te Senor".
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Music:
71)
71a)
Symbolic History
Ferdinand de la Torre, c. 1490, Adoramos, Tinayre (refrain), Lumen
32020 (fade)
Alejo Fernandez, c. 1520, Virgin of the Navigators, Alcazar, Seville; first,
video detail: ships below
Spanish, 15th cent., Castle Valencia de Don Juan, Leon
Music:
Juan del Encina, c. 1515(?), Una Sañosa Porfia, Cape, EMS-219
At this point the daring of a Genoese navigator opened the New World to a
crusading energy which had barely consolidated a sub-continent broken by Dark Age
invasions, Moors, and chivalry. All the nations of Europe have been mad, and so
variously no one could name the maddest, but the Spanish must rank high. What went
over the sea in German imperial dress and with all the financing and skill of Flemish
bottoms, under the protection of course of the Papal Virgin, had the outward style and
softness of high-renaissance Italian; but it bore from the windy uplands where Gothic
Moorish castles were still being built and ballad laments of the fall of Granada sung a
chivalric mysticism that would lash Conquistadores from Mexico clear to Panama and
Colorado.
(fade Encina)
72)
Classic Teotihuacan, 1st cent. B.C. to 3rd cent. A.D., view of Teotihuacan
For ships from the engineering West to encounter the stone age was not so
remarkable. What must have staggered the moral being was to confront a civilization in
some way higher than their own, though evolved in isolation from a primitive base and
without even the use of the wheel: cities larger and richer than theirs, an astronomical
calendar, libraries of religion and law, and an art that left Dürer speechless when he saw
its spoils in Antwerp: a civilization with an already mythic past, Teotihuacan, deserted a
thousand years before, its Pyramids of the Sun and Moon and Street of the Dead called by
the living Aztecs work of the Gods;
73)
Classic Maya, c. 800, Temple of the Cross, Palenque (Jean Coureau)
a New World of wonders, spread out in time and space — six-hundred miles south and
east the Maya ruins, Upland, Lowland, Peninsula, lost in forest — Palenque, sun-lit,
under a leafy sea, a life, music, and poetry fabulous then, irrecoverable now.
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�C.G. Bell
74)
Symbolic History
Classic Maya, c. 800, Sacred Cigar Smoking, Temple of the Cross, Palenque
(CGB '78); + V detail; not digital
Though the carved plinths and stele, as this from the Temple of the Cross at
Palenque, some death-god or panther-priest smoking a ritual cigar — cult scenes alive
with what Christendom had long since banished into hell — recover one thing for us
instantly: the crusading Christian jolt in the presence of a tradition so refined and so
idolatrously savage, alien as the Popol-vu sequence this relief suggests, when Hunter and
Seven Hunter (and later Hunter and Jaguar Deer), gone to the Underworld House of
Darkness where the gods hot-seat them and laugh like a swarm of flies, are given cigars
they must smoke all night and return in the morning unconsumed.
75)
Aztec, 15th cent., Coatlicue of the Serpent Skirt, Arch. Mus., Mexico;
+ V detail
And as if to raise the strain beyond psychic endurance, the antithesis had grown in
the Aztec empire to such sublimity and terror as this colossal Goddess of the serpent skirt,
found later under the charred ruins of what had been the greatest city in the world, drives
home — a more than Moloch, more than Bhagavad Gita divinity of vulture and snake, a
monolyth of rattle, talon and fang, which all the human sacrifices of Montezuma's rule of
art, justice, and wisdom could not appease.
76)
76a)
French Romanesque, early 12th cent., Knight spears a demon, Tavant, Indreet-Loire
Gerona Beatus, 975, f 134 v, Christian warrior spears a snake
What could Christian chivalry do, pledged since Roland to archangelic war — this
knight spearing a devil in the 12th cent. frescoes of Tavant — Columbus too having told
the Cuban chief (where no Caribs would survive) that "the first cause of his coming was
to instruct them in godly knowledge and true religion" (though he was then amassing
gold) "and especially to punish the cannibals and such mischievous evildoers" — what
could that conquering Inquisition do with a mystery as beyond its ken as the plumed
serpent, but melt into bullion its ornaments and idols, and gathering from cities and
libraries all codices, pictographs and writings, to the priestly censing and sprinkling,
eradicate, in one giant auto-da-fe, the entire civilized evidence of a world they would
occupy — as a virus takes over the genetic mechanism of the host.
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Symbolic History
While Luther at the same time threw his inkwell at the devil, to exorcise what
blasted him within.
77)
Post-classic Maya, 15th cent., Tulum, evening, coast of Yucatan (Enrique
Franco)
By 1518 Juan de Grijalva was exploring westward from the island of Cozumel.
His chaplain describes towns on the coast of Yucatan, and to the south a walled city, the
ruins now of Tulum:
next day a little before sunset, we perceived far in the distance a town
or village so big that the city of Seville could not appear larger or
better; and a huge tower was seen in it.
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Symbolic History
It was the beginning of the thrust that would take Cortez to the throne of Mexico.
78)
78a)
H. Bosch, 1503-4, Delights Triptych, Hell, detail, Prado, Madrid; + V detail
Bosch, c. 1504, Last Judgment, Hell detail, Kunsthistorisches Museum,
Vienna
At the heart of that conquest lies an exploit, weird as the Satanic invention of
cannon in Paradise Lost. When the assault hinged on gunpowder, the cavalier Montaño,
with four other Spaniards, climbed to the three mile high crater of Popocatépetl, and was
lowered in a basket, repeatedly, four hundred feet into a deeper hell-hole of smoke and
flame, to scrape off sulphur from the lava walls. That fiery brimstone fed the final
massacring charge on Mexico City. Palpable, that the damned eruption Bosch divined in
panels fondly acquired by the Spanish crown, powered the reduction of new worlds.
In Irving's Columbus, as signs of land multiply and no land appears, the sailors
think them signs of the devil, "delusions beguiling them on to destruction";
a79)
b79)
Leonardo, 1513, Girl pointing in a landscape, Windsor Castle; first, V detail
Double: Leonardo [A] 1513-16, John, Louvre; and [B] 1483-86, Angel from
Madonna of the Rocks, Louvre [here video repeats a79, Girl pointing]
while Columbus praises "the goodness of God in thus conducting them by soft breezes
across a tranquil ocean ... with fresh signs guiding them to a promised land." Against
jealous temptation, the kindly Rewarder of the temporal quest. And the proof was at
hand, the land, though it, too, might seduce with power.
But whatever the backward urge or forward danger, the die was cast; Leonardo's
angel and John were smiling, his girl pointing across the stream, his bearded face was
wise with futurity.
79)
79a)
Giorgione, 1504-10, La Tempesta, Accademia, Venice [somewhat cropped in
the video]
Same, detail, with both figures (while video shows separate details, woman,
then man)
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�C.G. Bell
79b)
Symbolic History
Same, double: closer details of the man and woman (while video returns,
through a lower spread with both figures, to the whole)
Music:
Again, Mantuanus, c. 1495, Lirum bililirum, Decca DL 79435
Giorgione learned it from Leonardo, the accord of nature and man, this Gypsy and
Soldier (his own birth illegitimate), like a Rest on the Flight with a nude Mary and
profane Joseph. Was that enchantment as merely ideal as the Pastoral Elegy Sannazaro
now wreathed in the harmonies Milton would love and pursue? —
Thee shepherd, thee the woods and desert caves,
With wilde thyme and the gadding vine o'regrown,
And all their echoes mourn.
— I fiumi il sanno e le spelunch' e i faggi ...
And like "Lycidas", Sannazaro's lament leads to an Arcadian paradise ("Where, other
groves and other streams along,"):
Altri monti, altri piani,
Altri boschetti e rivi
Vedi nel cielo, e più novelli fiori ...
Till all that heaven rejoices
To hear their new and unaccustomed voices ...
If any spirit of love among you dwell,
Oaks of shade and gloom,
Cast here a shadow for this quiet tomb. (CGB)
Se spirto alcun d'amor vive fra voi,
Quercie frondose e folte,
Fate ombra alla quiete ossa sepolte.
80)
80a)
Giorgione, "La Tempesta", background, with lightning
Same, closer detail of lightning
What is the gift of art if not to make dream real? But the symbolic dream, of total,
ambiguous reality. Giorgione's Gypsy Family, the richest strain of Venetian HighRenaissance, takes its usual title — La Tempesta — from its cloud and lightning sky, a
demon flash in the beckoning of calm.
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35
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Leonardo:
Force is of brief duration, because it desires perpetually to subdue its
cause, and when this is subdued it kills itself ... One ought not to desire
the impossible ...
(close Mantuanus)
June 1996
1500: Explosive Balance
36
�
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1500 : Explosive Balance, Symbolic History, Part 15
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SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
14. 15th Century: Early Renaissance
CHARLES G. BELL
ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
or
1260 CANYON ROAD
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501
July 1994
Last Revised January ‘96
�1
Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
14. 15th Century: Early Renaissance
1)
Giovanni dei Grassi, c. 1398, Annunciation, Visconti Hours, National
Library, Florence; + V detail
Soon after 1400, Ciconia, Flemish-born Italian, closed his career with the
ceremony motets, which initiate in music the spatial clarities of Early Renaissance.
Music:
Ciconia, 1400-10, O Virum — O Lux — O beate Nicholae, SAWT9505
At the same time art formed an horizon of humanizing sacred brightness — the
International Style — from this 1398 Dei Grassi, in Italy,
2)
Broederlam, 1393-99, Annunciation, from reredos, Museum, Dijon; first,
video detail
through Burgundy and France (this Dijon Broederlam),
3)
English Alabaster relief, c. 1420?, Annunciation, Cathedral, Wells; + V detail
across the Channel, to the winsome alabaster reliefs of England;
4)
Cologne, c. 1410, Madonna, etc., Johnson Collection, Philadelphia (CGB '74);
first, video detail
back to Cologne, where the softest jewelling of all runs from this 1410 Madonna,
5)
Lochner, c. 1435, Madonna in a Rose Arbor, Walraff-Richartz Museum,
Cologne; + V detail
to the ultimate child-wonder of Lochner, as late as 1440. So we
might return by the Rhine and Danube,
7/1994
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�2
C.G. Bell
6)
Symbolic History
Fra Angelico, 1434-35, Coronation of the Virgin, detail, Uffizi, Florence
(CGB '59); + V closer details
to the gold-leaf devotions of Fra Angelico, in Florence —
7)
Ghiberti, 1404-09, Annunciation, North Door, Baptistry, Florence; first,
video detail
city of Classical recovery in Gothic grace.
(End Ciconia)
Here Ghiberti's early work on the Baptistery doors had opened the century.
8)
Michelangelo, 1497-99, Pieta, whole, St. Peter's, Rome; + V detail
By its close, art gathers its force in Michelangelo's first Pieta, music in the death-lament
which Isaac, Fleming at the court of Florence, wrote for Lorenzo il Magnifico, died 1492:
Music:
9)
10)
11)
Isaac, 1492, "Quis dabit capiti meo aquam?" last section, Decca
DL-79413
Same, detail: Mary's head; + V detail of 11
Same, detail: Christ's hand; + V detail of 8
Same, detail: Christ's body; + V return to 8, first a detail, then the whole
(close Isaac)
At such advance of consciousness in the science of incarnate sway, we heirs to its
later pride feel a shudder of tragic awe.
12)
Lascaux Cave 20,000 B.C., wall of main hall, detail, animals; video: close
detail only
As if the whole rational-realist thrust of civilization were an age-old mistake,
some Luciferian fall from mythic immediacy. So it was at the Greeks that Charles Olson,
in his Black Mountain lectures on history, pointed the finger of Nietzschean blame:
"Man lost something just about 500 B.C.,
13)
7/1994
Franz Marc 1913, Deer in the Forest, Phillips Gallery, Washington D.C.;
+ V details
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�3
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
and only got it back just about 1905 A.D."
Music:
Alban Berg 1920-6, from 3rd Mvt, Lyric Suite, V-LM-2531
(As in Marc's magic forest, Berg's Lyric Suite, Rilke's "Exposed on the peaks of the
heart"?)
Of uncleft consciousness indeed there moves
Many about, many a qualmless hill-beast,
Moves and delays. And the great inviolable bird
Circles the summit's virgin refusal. But here,
Unsheltered, here, on the peaks of the heart... (CGB)
14)
(fade Berg)
Double: {A} Michelangelo 1522, Fury, black chalk, Uffizi, Florence; and
{B} Francois Rude 1833, Head of La Guerre, Arc de Triomphe, Paris
Surely, if we pursue the revolution by which a Michelangelo hell-fury becomes
the summons of a national Arc de Triomphe, arrogating its brazen Book of Law and iron
Book of War over space, time and cause — who would not ask where history went
wrong?
15)
Double: {A} Aegean, c. 2000 BC, Head of Cycladic idol, Louvre, Paris; and
{B} Greek (from Delos), c. 100 B.C., Bronze head, National Museum, Athens;
and video detail (from V15B)
And the modern appeal to the pre-Greek, Cycladic and abstract, is of a piece with
Olson's oblique claim, that at the beginning of the Periclean century something happened,
by which man was broken from the functionalities of nature and tribe; that it was
philosophic scrutiny of self and world which stamped the brow-furrowing of
consciousness on centuries to follow.
Though if that palpable resolve to compose symbolic reality to the deliberate
measure of man, was a mistake,
16)
7/1994
Egypt, Old Kingdom, Dynasty V, c. 2400 BC, Ranofer, Prophet of Ptah
(head), Egyptian Museum, Cairo
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�4
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
it was not made once only, but before and after: 2400 BC, when Egypt became the cradle
of civilization by great discoveries that way;
17)
Greek (Attic), c. 490 B.C., Korê of Euthydicos, Acropolis Museum, Athens
subsequently, by the Greeks, this Saphic Kore of 500 BC; and again (marking another
2000 years) as Christendom emerged from the trance of medieval seizure. And strange
— if mistake — that it should produce, in each case, an expression of such vernal delight:
the Archaic smile renewed
18)
18a)
Baldovinetti, c. 1450(?), Madonna and Child, Louvre, Paris (CGB '80);
+ V details; with a digital return after 18a
Baldovinetti, 1460-62, detail of Arno Valley, Nativity fresco, Vestibule,
Santissima Annunziata, Florence [revised into video, ‘95]
in this Baldovinetti Virgin, as pure as fetching, seated on some Florentine height over the
discovered Val d'Arno. So the beauty of earth, an orphic voice through Dante's dead land
— "La dov' esser de' giocondo" — "There, where one ought to be happy" — blooms in
15th-century Poliziano:
To behold the valleys and hills and air pure,
Grass and flowers, rivers cold and clear;
To hear the birds sing and the waters sound
And low wind murmuring among the fronds;
See apples heap the earth and bend the trees,
And the ripe wheat run in billows like the sea. (CGB)
(E le biade ondeggiar come fa il mare.)
As if a drunk who must end in murderous sick despair (our ravaged civilization of
the "Bateau Ivre") could still look back to a morning age, when the first Promethean
draughts had awakened to life and love, in what remains perhaps the most loveable of our
centuries, the fifteenth.
19)
Bernardo Daddi c. 1335?, Madonna etc., detail, National Gallery of Art,
Washington D.C. (CGB '75); + V details
Trace the waking from the century before. In a Daddi Madonna, the burning
mystery of Dante's praise:
7/1994
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�5
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Vergine madre, figlia del tuo figlio:
Maiden and mother and daughter of your son,
Humble and exalted beyond every creature,
Determined goal of eternal counsel — (CGB)
termine fisso d'etterno consiglio —
Music:
Landini, c.1360(?), Va pure, amore; organ & harp, Zurich, Odys.
3216017
has lightened (like the music of Landini) through Boccaccio,
O regina degli angioli, O Maria:
Mary, Queen of the angels of heaven,
Adornment of the sky, whose smiling features,
Star of the sea, guide into their haven
Wanderers from the way, your witless creatures... (CGB)
(cut Landini)
20)
V20a)
Botticelli, c. 1485, Madonna of the Magnificat, detail, Uffizi, Florence;
(video closer detail only); then
Same, cropped whole from video file
toward the 15th century ease of Belcari's sacred plays:
Lily of May, flower of blessedness,
With chastity and all the virtues else
Adorned, of every kind and loveliness —
We honor you above all saints and angels. (CGB)
What Botticelli would culminate in this Magnificat Madonna — Europe refining
from the Gothic past some Beulah wedding of earth and heaven: "You shall no more be
called Desolate...for your land shall be married."
21)
22)
7/1994
Jan van Eyck, c. 1425, Madonna in a Church, Dahlem Museum, Berlin;
+ V detail
Same, a closer central detail
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�6
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Bruges, 1425: Jan van Eyck's church remains mystical; that sun shines from the north, as
on Dante's Paradise; but it irradiates, like daily realities, the Gothic lines, the angels in the
choir, the pageant Queen. Such the light in an English Advent poem:
I sing of a maiden
That is makeles,
King of all kinges
To her sone she ches.
He cam also stille
There his moder was,
As dew in Aprille
That falleth on the grass.
He cam also stille
To his moderes bour,
As dew in Aprille,
That falleth on the flour.
He cam also stille
There his moder lay,
As dew in Aprille
That falleth on the spray.
Moder and maiden
Was never non but sche;
Well may swich a lady
Godes moder be.
Music, if nothing else, would make us treat 15th century Europe as a whole. To
hear what those angels might be singing in the van Eyck choir, we turn to Dufay,
23)
V23a)
Hubert and Jan van Eyck 1427-29 (double), {A} Singing angels; and
{B} Angels playing instruments, Altarpiece of the Lamb, Ghent
Same, detail of A of 23, singing angels
Music:
Dufay, c.1430(?), Gloria ad modum tubae (Munich) AWT 9439
at the same time bringing the musicians nearer, as in the Ghent Altar of the Lamb. Yet
Dufay's Gloria in the manner of trumpets, with canon above and ostinato below,
24)
7/1994
Luca della Robbia, 1431-38 (double), Choirboys from the Cantoria, Duomo
Museum, Florence; for the double, video takes details, reversing the order: see
A and B of V24 (CGB '86) in video file; digital adds to double one detail
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�7
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
is from about 1430, when Italianate-Flemish Dufay was with the Papal choir. So Luca
della Robbia's Florentine choirboys would serve as well.
25)
Benozzo Gozzoli, 1459, Angels and background detail, Medici Chapel,
Florence; digital adds one detail (CGB '86)
Or Gozzoli's angels, past mid-century, from the Medici Chapel;
26)
Piero della Francesca, 1470, Angel musicians from the Nativity, National
Gallery, London
or Piero della Francesca's, from the London Nativity.
27)
Luca della Robbia, Cantoria (double), Dancing, Duomo Museum, Florence;
video replaces with details of singles V27 {A} (CGB) and V27 {B} in video file;
digital adds to double, one detail (CGB '86)
As worship turns to dance, it will be Luca della Robbia again;
28)
Donatello, 1433-38, Cantoria of Dancing Genii, Duomo Museum, Florence;
with V details
or from Donatello's facing Gallery, the more bacchanalian abandon of dancing Genii.
(end Dufay Gloria)
This is new wine in the old faith bottles —
29)
Fra Filippo Lippi, c. 1460(?), Madonna with Angels, Uffizi, Florence
(CGB '59); + V details, cf. V29a and V29b (CGB '59)
Browning's Brother Lippo stealing in from a night frolic to paint
On Jerome knocking at his poor old breast
With his great round stone to subdue the flesh.
It is Vasari who tells how Lippi chose the novitiate Lucrezia as model for a Prato
Madonna, finished nun, as it were, with the picture, took her off to be his mistress,
7/1994
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�8
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
thereafter portrayed as Mary, and their lively urchins as Christ and the angels — religion
as sprightly as Charles of Orleans' Confession:
My gostly fader, I me confesse,
First to God and then to you,
That at a window — wot ye how? —
I stale a cosse of grete sweteness...
30)
Fouquet, c. 1450, Agnes Sorel as Mary Enthroned, Louvre, Paris; + V detail
But I restore it shall doutless...
And that to God I make a vow...
While French Fouquet turned Charles VII's Agnes Sorel to a Mary of pneumatic bliss — a
levity naive as its embrace in faith:
Chiamo il dolce Gesù e canto, canto —
But to Mary mild and Jesu child, I sing, I sing... (CGB)
31)
Fra Filippo Lippi c. 1441-47, Coronation of the Virgin (video alternates the
whole with details from that and from 32)
Some years before the meeting with Lucrezia, Lippi had painted the Uffizi
Coronation of the Virgin, in which, by the startlingly personal St. Lucy below (with her
children), the later affair seems prefigured. For Browning this is "the Prior's niece who
comes/ To care about his asthma..."
Oh that white smallish female with the breasts,
She's just my niece —
whom Lippi has chosen for this picture: "I shall paint/ God... Madonna.../ Ringed in a
bowery flowery angel-brood / ...i' the front... a saint or two" —
32)
Same, Lippi Coronation, detail front, right (old hand-colored Alinari photo)
the artist himself then (as Browning thought), in his monk's robe come up, as from a dark
stair, mazed, until that "sweet angelic slip of a thing" intercedes: "This man did the
work" (as on the scroll) "iste perfecit opus".
Such the Ave Regina Dufay troped for himself: "Miserere supplicanti Dufay";
7/1994
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�9
C.G. Bell
Music:
Symbolic History
Dufay, 1464, from Antiphon, Ave regina caelorum, Miserere...
Dufay (Planchard) MHS 4743A
(fade)
or the lighter greeting of his Month of May Rondeau, "Karissime Dufay vous en prye..."
Music:
Dufay, 1423-29, from Ce Moys de May, (Cape) EMS 206
(fade)
33)
Double: {A} Lippi(?), c. 1435, Monks from a fresco, Carmine Cloister,
Florence; and {B} Lippi, 1460-64, Girls at the Dance of Salome, Duomo,
Prato; + V details from V33 {A} and V33 {B})
It is likely that in the fresco fragment in the Carmine Cloister (left) the young
Lippi has represented his delight in whatever is perceived (Browning, from Vasari):
First every sort of monk, the black and white,
I drew them, fat and lean. . .
7/1994
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�10
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
While as late as the Prato frescoes, two girls whispering of Herodias' demand for John the
Baptist's head, make such discovery unforgettable.
34)
Fra Angelico & school, 1447-50, St. Laurence giving alms, detail, Capella
Nicolina, Vatican, Rome (video: lower spread of whole V34, then closer
detail)
Was not Lippi's art-sire, the saintly Fra Angelico, entering Renaissance by the
same observational road? — his mid-century St. Laurence distributing alms dominated by
the blind beggar (right), where spirituality springs exactly from heightened sense. So
Browning's Lippi, studying the watchmen, calls for "a bit of chalk".
35)
French Gothic c. 1230, Faggots for Winter, West Front, Notre Dame, Paris;
first, video detail
Music:
Perrin d'Angecourt, 13th cent., "Quant voi a la fin d'estey," AS-18
We have seen the secular hauntingly suspended in the synthesis of creed, sharp as
this winter from Notre Dame. In a Goliard poem: "De ramis cadunt folia," the bleak
time burns with love; so too with Perrin d'Angecourt, 13th century Troubador. (close
d'Ancecourt)
36)
Lorenzetti c. 1340, Winter, fresco border, Palazzo Publico, Siena; + V detail
Music:
Guillaume de Machault, c.1360(?), Rondeau, Puis qu'en oubli,
(Cape) ARC 3032
In Lorenzetti's 14th-century Winter the mystery is distilled through a realism,
strange as the "smoky rein" in Chaucer, which keeps Creseyde at Pandarus' house for the
consummation required. So Dante in the Vita Nuova speaks with the ladies who pity
him:
And as sometimes we see water fall mingled with white snow, so it
seemed their talk issued forth mingled with sighs.
Guillaume de Machault's double-leading-tones,
37)
7/1994
Lorenzetti, c. 1340, detail from Good Government in the Country, Palazzo
Publico, Siena; (video: first a closer detail, using Va37)
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�11
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Lorenzetti's panorama of a well-governed countryside, have offered such exploratory
translations of reality. Each detail of that vast spread —
In Augoste in a hygh seysoun,
Quen corne is corven wyth crokes kene —
holds the dream of spacelessness.
38)
(fade Machault)
Pol de Limbourg, 1413-16, July, Tres Riches Heures, Chantilly (first,
V details: reaping, then shearing)
Music:
Arnold de Lantins, c.1420?, Puis que je voy (Cape), AS-39
With the 1400's estrangement ebbs. The Calendar of the Tres Riches Heures,
Burgundian Rondeaux (this Arnold de Lantins), breathe natural air. Even the plays of
1400 Flanders accomplish the human passage: Sandareen tells her new knight of her
seduction by the baron who has cast her off; she speaks in the metaphor of a blossoming
tree from which a falcon has robbed one flower; and he says one flower is nothing, to
speak of it no more, it will not set him against the tree he loves.
In English the greatest poetry of the seasons is from Gawayne and the Green
Knight. We trim to summer and the coming on of fall:
After, the sesoun of somer wyth the soft wyndes,
Quen Zeferus syfles hymself on sedes and erbes;
Wela wynne is the wort that waxes theroute,
When the donkande dewe dropes of the leves,
To bide a blysful blush of the bryght sunne.
39)
Same, October, Tres Riches Heures; + V detail
Bot then hyghes hervest, and hardenes hym sone,
Warnes hym for the wynter to wax ful rype;
He dryves wyth droght the dust for to ryse,
Fro the face of the folde to flyghe ful hyghe;
Wrothe wynde of the welkyn wrasteles with the sunne,
The leves lancen fro the lynde and lyghten on the grounde,
(those alliterations heightening every mood — as in the miniature, the face of the sower
of winter wheat)
7/1994
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�12
C.G. Bell
40)
Symbolic History
Same, December, Tres Riches Heures; (video has details only, below and above)
And al grayes the gres that grene wats ere;
Then al rypes and rotes that ros upon fyrst,
And thus yirnes the yere in yisterdayes mony,
And wynter wyndes again, as the worlde askes, no fage...
(The 1400 castle rising behind, like the one Gawayne sees over the December woods:
Towers set up between, pinnacled ful thick,
Turrets with carved tops and chalkwhite chimneys.)
41)
Same, April, Tres Riches Heures; with video details
Gawayne must precede the Tres Riches Heures. But Charles d'Orleans, English captive,
here writing in French, more than matches its period harmony:
Le temps a laisié son manteau
De vent, de froidure et de pluye,
Et s'est vestu de brouderie,
De soleil luyant, cler et beau...
Riviere, fontaine et ruisseau
Portent, en livrée jolie,
Gouttes d'argent et d'orfaverie,
Chascun s'abille de nouveau,
Le temps a laissié son manteau.
42)
(fade de Lantins)
Grimani Breviary, c. 1510, April, Biblioteca Marciana, Venice; + V details.
Music:
Josquin des Pres, c.1500(?), from La Spagna, 5-voice basse
danse, Seraphim SIC-6104 (3)
With Lang's rendering —
The year has changed his mantle cold
Of wind, of rain, of bitter air;
And he goes clad in cloth of gold,
Of laughing suns and seasons fair...
All founts, all rivers, seaward rolled,
The pleasant summer livery wear,
With silver studs on broidered vair;
The world puts off its raiment old,
7/1994
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�13
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
The year lays down his mantle cold —
we have moved from the Limbourg Calendar to its Grimani translation a century later
(time of Josquin), in the robes and haze of bourgeois realism — such a filling-in as that of
Arthurian romance over the three-hundred years from Chrestien to Malory.
(end La Spagna)
43)
Pol de Limbourg, January, Tres Riches Heures, Chantilly; + V details and
return to the whole.
Music:
Ciconia, c. 1405-10, from O Rosa Bella, (Deller) RCA VLM-6016
Since the Tres Riches Heures — here January — like Ciconia's 1400 setting of "O Rosa
Bella" — has still a trace of the old chivalric suspension of space, time and cause. When
Chrestien's Lancelot, seeking Guenevere, has crossed the sword bridge into "the land
from which no stranger returns," he is viewed from a tower window by King Bademagu,
"very scrupulous and precise about honor and what was right," and by his son and
opposite, the Queen's captor, Meleagant, "who never wearied of villainy, treason and
felony."
(end Ciconia)
44)
Grimani Breviary, c. 1510, January, Biblioteca Marciana, Venice; + V details
and return to whole; digital first gives a double of 43 and 44
In Malory, 1470, there is no good king Bademagu and no symbolic land. With an
armed force Mellyagraunce surprises the Queen at Maying and takes her to his castle
seven miles from Westminster. Launcelot gets word. Mellyagraunce's archers shoot his
horse. He forces a driver to take him up in what for Chrestien was the mysterious cart.
From a bay window, the Queen
aspyed by his shelde that he was there hym self sir launcelot du lake;
and thenne she was ware where came his hors ever after that charyot,
and ever he trade his guttes and his paunche under his feet. Allas sayd
the quene now I see well and preve that wel is hym that hath a trusty
frend.
As in the Grimani densening, the very knights and queens accept the probabilities of the
middle class.
7/1994
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�14
C.G. Bell
45)
45a)
Symbolic History
Jan (and/or Hubert) van Eyck, 1422-24 (or 1413-17?), Baptism, from the Tres
Belles Heures de Notre Dame, Museo Civico, Turin; video has details only (cf.
Va45), returning to a cropped whole after 45a (cf. V45b)
Same, Voyaqe of St. Julian, from "Turin Hours", section of same MS burned in
1904
Music:
Dunstable, c.1420(?), from O Rosa bella, (Cape) ARC-3052
If there are turning points in history, the van Eyck miniatures from the Turin
Hours — by one or both brothers and surely from the 1420's or before — are the point of
departure for all the realism (trees, water, atmosphere and distance) to follow. They
succeed the Limbourg brothers as this Dunstable "O Rosa Bella" does the Ciconia (just
heard) — not finer, not better, but polyphonically, sensuously, melodically advanced. As
Martin le France wrote, Dufay and Binchois, against the early century of Carmen and
Cesaris:
Have assumed the English style
And followed after Dunstable.
(end Dunstable)
That mutation of 1425 differentiates the New Europe
46)
Rublev, Russian, 1422-27, Trinity, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
from everything that had gone before. The 1400 softening of International Style had
cognates as far as the Byzantine — most tellingly in Russia. Though the gentlest art of
the West seems physical beside the mystic accord of Rublev's weightless angels, forming
(at their Abraham supper) the flower-frail round of a Trinity.
47)
Claus Sluter, 1395-99, Head of Christ, Chartreuse de Champmol, Dijon;
+ V detail
In Europe that horizon of grace becomes, as with Sluter, a Renaissance launching
ground. Thus the incarnate Christ which crowns his Dijon Fountain.
Music:
7/1994
Apt MS., late 14th cent., Jesu nostra redemptio, 1st stanza, SAWT9505
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�15
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
In the Apt "Redemptio" hymn, the revolution of immediacy takes the same center.
The melody has risen from medieval tenor to descant; the bass settles down, seeking
faux-bourdon chords; second progressions begin to yield to those of the fourth and fifth;
that simple ordering of harmonic space founds the Renaissance Lauda:
(cut Apt MS)
48)
Belbello da Pavia, c. 1412-30(?), Creation of Eve, Visconti Hours, National
Library, Florence (video: details only, cf V48)
Music:
Joh. Simon de Haspre, c.1400(?), "Ma doulce Amour," Odyssey
32-160178
History moves by the precipitation and inbreeding of opposites: Gothic
flamboyance spills into the very years of humanist solemnity. Thus the miniatures of
Belbello, completing the Visconti Hours, with the terminal dissonances of Ars Nova: de
Haspre.
(fade de Haspre)
49)
Giovanni di Paolo, c. 1430(?), Entombment, Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore;
first, video details
Siena is the most startling art-bastion of a Gothic-Byzantine heightened by new
experiment. In Giovanni di Paolo's Entombment, Peter does not interrupt, but casts a
trans-real shadow on the gold light itself of the grave.
Music:
Cyprus, c.1420, Amen (close), from the Gloria, A.S. 126, B
In music, the French court of Cyprus, until its 1426 sack by the Sultan, tops the
isorythmic brilliance of the school of Machault — from the Amen of a Gloria.
These pockets of fantastic continuance are not merely backward-looking. Their
symbolic agitation, gathering material force, will break into the Renaissance again and
again, as Savonarola would stir Medici Florence, or Mannerist distortion climax in El
Greco.
(end Amen)
50
7/1994
Lorenzo Monaco, 1413, Nativity, Predella of the Coronation, Uffizi,
Florence (CGB '48); + V detail
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�16
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
In Florence the lingering transition works wonders of mystical sweetness,
Monaco, Gentile, Fra Angelico. Brolo's hymn to the Virgin, "O Celestial Light",
melodizes the starry blend.
Music:
51)
Va52)
52)
Bart. Brolo, c. 1410-20(?), O Celestial Lume (close), AS-l,
(#8 in US)
Gentile de Fabriano, 1423, Shepherds from the Nativity, detail, Predella of
Magi Altarpiece, Uffizi, Florence (CGB '48)
Fra Angelico, c. 1425-30, Gate of Light, top left of Paradise Garden, from
Last Judgment, San Marco, Florence
Same, Paradise Garden, whole; and video details (from 52 or V52)
(end Brolo)
It is the celestial light of that chant which the saved enter in Fra Angelico's
paradise, most childlike of those blessed gardens so much preferred to hell by Villon's
mother: "La joye avoir me fay, haulte Deesse." What came from the Song of Songs,
through the well-spring of Revelation and the smiling depth of Dante's shores "painted
with spring's miraculous colors", has grown as artlessly innocent as the Mary of the Lauds
— "Madre e Sposa,/ candida olente rosa" — herself that orchard enclosed, its fragrant
herbs, its clear fountain of life: (Belcari) "viva fontana e chiara vena."
53)
Claus Sluter 1394-1404, Well of Moses (David, Jeremiah & Zachariah),
Champmol, Charterhouse, near Dijon
The quantum leaps of history are not entirely localized. We cannot say when the
limpid grace was penetrated by the humanist wedge. There had been Claus Sluter in
Dijon, precocious as English Chaucer.
Va54)
Vb54)
54)
Brunelleschi, esp. 1420-36, Dome of the Cathedral, Florence, detail
Roman, esp. Hadrian, 120 AD, Pantheon (rear), Rome (detail of CGB '86)
Again, Brunelleschi, Cathedral with Dome against a cloudy sky
While, in Florence, Renaissance center, Brunelleschi's dome has not lost the
bareness of the 1368 plan, that stamp of God's Gothic barn, which gives it a strength over
all other domes. Vasari stresses Brunelleschi's 1403 sketching from Roman temples and
measuring of the Pantheon. But Hadrian's brooding cement mass could hardly have
suggested the levitational soar of Santa Maria del Fiore, its curve, as Vasari quotes
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Symbolic History
Brunelleschi, that of a pointed arch. Whatever Rome inspired, the double shell of this
ribbed and self-buttressed vault looked for its engineering to the Gothic North.
1st 55) Masaccio 1425-26,
+ V closer detail
Tribute
Money,
detail,
Carmine,
Florence;
And Masaccio's noble art — by whatever blend of Giotto, nature, the Classic —
fulfills Medieval incorporation: to sanctify these sensuous presences. Had not Paul and
John promised a glorified body, in which we shall be sons of God and like him? Had not
Thomas Aquinas (II of II, 23, 1) made Charity Friendship, under the daring of cohumanity
with God — quoting Christ: "No longer will I call you servants, but my friends"?
As for music, there was nothing antique to recover. Renaissance had to shape its
forms from the polyphony of the Middle Ages.
Va2nd 54) Again, Brunelleschi's Dome, nearer view (from 1st 54)
For 2nd 54) Same, Cathedral of Florence, interior, nave (CGB '86)
It was Dufay who wrote the motets for the 1436 consecration of this cathedral. Their
swelling four-voice canons share in its grandeur. Yet a witness to that pomp paraphrases
12th-century Suger on the anagogical gift of the New Light:
During these moments I enjoyed so much delight that it
partaking on earth of the life of the blessed.
Music:
seemed to me I was
Dufay, 1436, Nuper Rosarum Flores (last 4-voice section)
BASF 30249
2nd 55) Again, Tribute Money, detail, head of John
56)
Uccello 1436, Equestrian painting of Sir John Hawkwood, Duomo,
Florence; first, video detail
(with Dufay "Amen" close)
Humanist assertion, Roman recovery, civic pride meet in sacred containment.
Uccello had just painted the equestrian Hawkwood in the Cathedral where Dufay's music
was performed. And in the "Amen" of that praise of Florence, the condottiere vaunt
seems made in chords.
57)
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Donatello, 1443-53, Gattamelata (from below), Piazzetta, Padua
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�18
C.G. Bell
V57a)
V57b)
Symbolic History
Same, detail: profile from the left (cf. 14th Century 74)
Same, another view, upper spread
Literature, after the 14th century, ebbs, weighed down by too much Latin revival.
Yet Alberti, humanist architect, breaks Gothic continuance with the first sonnet of
Renaissance rhetoric and universalizing consciousness. Petrarch's residual bareness:
Solo e pensoso i piu deserti campi —
Vo misurando a passi tardi e lenti —
Alone and sad I measure empty fields —
yields to a motion almost that of Shakespeare: "Consum'd with that which it was
nourish'd by." (Alberti, with Donatello's Gattamelata):
Io vidi gia seder nell'arme irato
Uom furioso, e pallido tremare...
I saw of late an armed and furious man
That for his anger trembled and was pale,
Va58)
58)
Same, detail, profile, from the right
Same, detail of the horseman
And eyes I saw whereof tears trenchant ran
For too great heat that did the heart assail;
And I beheld a lover so long brood
That he for sorrow could not weep or wail,
Nor rarely saw those that could touch no food
Because of hunger that had made them frail;
I saw a vessel float and veer with wind
Which wind too great did founder in the flood,
And watched the greyhound as he coursed the hind
For too great swiftness lose her in the wood.
Thus I beheld how nature doth dispense
To most of wishing, least of consequence. (CGB)
1st 59) Masaccio, 1423-27, The Trinity, Santa Maria Novella, Florence (video:
CGB '59 glazed slide, V59)
Perspective typefies the new ordering, art-precursor of natural science. Here
Masaccio applies Brunelleschi's conception. How the vault looms, viewed, like the great
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Symbolic History
robed figures, from below; while the cross, breaking that system, meets us head on. This
theoretic space, this space of mind, will make as clear as possible the divergent modes of
Florence
60)
Jan van Eyck, 1434, Arnolfini Marriage, National Gallery, London;
+ V details.
and (against it) of Flanders — Jan van Eyck's contemporary space of eye. In this
Arnolfini betrothal the capture of reality proceeds by awakened sense and skilled hand —
in textures, shadowing and touch, beyond anything Italy would produce for generations.
Though if the recessive lines of floor, ceiling, window, bed, are in fact plotted, they form,
as in the school of Giotto, separate convergences. Of course, an interior scanned by an
actual viewer will have as many meeting points as the fixes of the scanning eye. What is
in question is not reality itself, whatever that may mean,
2nd 59) Again, Masaccio Trinity, upper detail (video pans this from 1st 59 or V59)
but space heroically formulated by the mathematics of Florentine mind. It is that
universal grasp which lifts the Masaccio to the verge of awe. Meanwhile, in both
pictures, the new techniques become sacramental; they reconstitute devotion. This frontal
Father, the kind of image Cusanus would call "omnivoyant", viewing all viewers, brings
the sacred into spatial grandeur.
2nd 60) Again, van Eyck, Marriage (video: details only, from 1st 60 and V2nd 60)
Yet even the van Eyck records a sacrament of marriage (Panovsky): the clogs
("put off your shoes, for this is holy ground"); the single candle for the Eye of God; the
painter as witness, seen in the mirror ("Jan van Eyck was here"). If what revolutionizes
faith in Masaccio is the theoretical and classical, here it is the pietistic pervasion of the
Brothers of the Common Life.
61)
Double: {A} Venetian, finished 1434, Ca d'Oro, Grand Canal; and {B} Alberti,
1446, Palazzo Rucellai, Florence, + V single of {B}
Such counter-thrusts compose the time-wave. Within the bounds of Italy, Venice
and Florence present a complementarity. In Venice the Gothic tracery of the Ca d'Oro
finished 1434 (left); from Florence twelve years later, the Rucellai Palace by Alberti, with
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Symbolic History
its classical pilasters and rustic masonry — share in the individual and worldly
emergence.
62)
Flemish Civic Architecture, 1402-54, Hotel de Ville, Brussels
From the same years, the town hall of Brussels — extending the European axis
from Tuscany to Flanders — speaks the North in no way backward, its Flamboyant stone
spired to a search as boldly Faustian.
Va63)
63)
Fra Angelico, 1430-34, Descent from the Cross, detail of Christ, San Marco
Museum, Florence
Same, whole; + V central detail (from V63a)
Music:
Dufay, 1452, Qui tollis, Missa "Se la face ay pale,"
Seraphim S-60267
(Munrow)
Art and music convey the embryonic interworking of that web of commerce and
skills, letters and science. Let this Descent from the Cross, begun by Lorenzo Monaco
before 1425 and finished by Fra Angelico, be the Florentine harbinger. For music we
choose, from Dufay's 1450 return to Italy, the Qui Tollis from his first tenor Mass, "Se la
face ay pale" (brilliantly sung by Munrow's Consort).
We cannot tell if Angelico's expressive composition, with even the central rise of
the foliated frame,
(fade "Se la face ay pale" Mass)
64)
Roger van der Weyden, 1435-40, Descent from the Cross, Prado, Madrid;
with video details (video using V64, of greener coloring)
Music:
Dufay, 1472, Qui tollis, from Missa "Ave regina caelorum"
MHS 4743A
suggested (perhaps through a woodcut?) Roger van der Weyden's Prado Descent, with its
central rise and framing filigree. Here, although the shallow space and gold ground look
backward, the fleshed and robed passion of these sufferers surges ahead. So in Dufay, the
fabric of sound deepens over twenty years to the Qui tollis of his last mass, "Ave regina
caelorum," sung at the dedication of the Cathedral of Cambrai.
(fade "Ave regina caelorum")
65)
7/1994
Ghiberti, 1425-52, East Doors, detail of Eve, Baptistry, Florence
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�21
C.G. Bell
V65a)
V65b)
Symbolic History
Same, Creation & Expulsion of Adam and Eve
Same, Upper four reliefs (with video return to 65, closer detail of Eve)
Music:
Italian, 15th cent., Perla Mia, Nonesuch 71071
In music, the aesthetic balance of Italy — as influential, as in the other arts — works
through the humbler forms of Laude and Frottole. One piece, "Perla mia", may stake out
the hidden claim (the words, and perhaps the tune, by Giustiniani from the early century,
the setting, it seems, somewhat later) — such smooth harmonies as Ghiberti wrought into
the final doors, those Michelangelo thought worthy to be the gates of Paradise.
Throughout the century the great Northern composers are in continual touch with this
melodious soul of Italy.
(fade Perla Mia)
Va66)
Vb66)
66)
Bourges, 1195-1260, Cathedral, from south-east
Same, Piers and Vaults (Sam Adams' slide); also digital
Same, interior, Nave and Choir (CGB '84)
Music:
School of Paris, c. 1240, 2-voice Melisma, Ille, last section,
(Tinayre) Lumen 32,013
Over 200 years, the Gothic architecture of the North had unfolded from the
structural severity and mystical distance of 13th-century Bourges, — this theology of
triune lights (with a school of Perotin melisma) —
(close Ille)
Va67)
67)
Norman to Perpendicular, 1094-1500, spire 15th cent., Norwich (CGB '84)
Same, interior, 14th cent., apse and windows, 15th cent. vault; + V detail
Music:
Worcester Harmony, c. 1310, from Puellare Gremium, History of
Music in Sound II, RCA-V LM 6015
to foliate, through the next century, the traceried wealth of England — so Norwich choir
— music sweetening from the Worcester Fragments, around 1300, (fade Puellare) to
Benet, on the eve of Dunstable.
Music:
68)
7/1994
John Benet(?), early 15th cent., from Sanctus "Jacet granum"
Nonesuch H-71292
(fade)
German, esp. 15th cent., Nave and aisle of Ulm (CGB '59)
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�22
C.G. Bell
V68a)
V68b)
Symbolic History
Jorg Syrlin the Elder, 1469-74, Double: [A] Pythagoras; and [B] the
Cimmerian Sibyl, from the stalls of Ulm Cathedral
German 15th cent., nave to aisles, St. Georgskirche, Nördlingen, West
Germany (CGB '59)
Music:
Paumann, c. 1450, end of Benedicite, (Tinayre) Lumen 32012
By 1450 those Gothic branchings had ripened, as here at Ulm, a columned and
lighted pre-reformation hall. While the blind organist Paumann wreathed the Benedicite
in triadic harmonies.
(close Paumann)
By the paired Rebirth of North and South, this last Gothic shares in the spatial
ease of early Renaissance —
69)
Apulian, c. 1160, aisle to nave, Bari Cathedral (CGB '84); + V return to Ulm
interior (detail of columns and vault from 68)
more than all the round-arched precursors of Italian Romanesque, from Lucca and
Florence to this 12th century Cathedral of Bari in Apulia. What if they are called Protorenaissance? That proto goes centuries back, as to a solemn crypt — as far from the
lightening of Ulm,
70)
V70a)
Brunelleschi, 1436 ff., aisle and nave of Santa Spirito, Florence (CGB '59);
video: upper detail only
Same, another view (CGB '84); then video returns to 70, lower detail, Aisle
and Nave
as from Brunelleschi's lofty liberation of the Roman Basilica from the weight of Rome.
In music, Dunstable, who worked on the Continent, influenced from Italy and
known there, spearheaded such 1425 changes. His "Veni Sancte Spiritus", "Come Holy
Spirit", esteemed and sung through the century, gives mystical love the breath and
hypnotic weaving of sensuous sound. Of the sustained Cape recording we hear only the
closing section.
Music:
7/1994
Dunstable, c. 1425(?), Veni Sancte Spiritus (bar 121 ff.)
VLM 6016 (2)
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�23
C.G. Bell
71)
V71a)
Symbolic History
Donatello, 1411-13, St. Mark, Or San Michele, Florence
Same, detail of head, new angle
When Michelangelo praised Donatello's 1412 St. Mark, it was not for Roman
face, nor for Gothic robe, but for sacred humanization: "It would have been impossible to
have rejected the gospel if preached by such a straightforward man as this."
72)
Masaccio, c. 1426, Peter and John heal the sick, Carmine, Florence (video
divides to details, above and below)
Masaccio's concern with earth, to show common men in the commonest alley of
Florence, does not preclude but empowers a deeply religious art. Peter and John walk
forward, wrapped in thought; Peter's shadow heals the sick and lame.
73)
V73a)
Same, detail of Peter and cripples (video works from V73)
Same, face of the cripple huddled on the ground
One, risen, prays; another rises; a third huddles, the uplifted face lighted around caves of
mouth and eye.
74)
Hubert and Jan Van Eyck, 1426-27, Mary detail, Altar of the Lamb, Ghent;
first, video detail of face
(close Dunstable)
Over the contrast already made, of medium and style, the brothers van Eyck serve
the same transformation. Everything of the world, stuff, jewels, hair, lends light and
touch to the heavenly.
75)
Same, God, detail, Altar of the Lamb; + V detail
Here, also from the Ghent altar, is another of Cusanus' omnivoyants:
If I strive in human fashion to transport you to things divine, I have
found nothing better than an image which is omnivoyant... such... I call
the icon of God. This picture, brethren, ye shall set up in some place...
and each of you shall find, from whatsoever quarter observed, that it
looks at him as if it looked at no other...
1st 76) Roger Van der Weyden, 1450-60, Deposition, Uffizi, Florence
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Symbolic History
In the Flemish succession of mid-century, and in creative exchange with Italy, the
humanization of the gospel proceeds — here Van der Weyden, from during or after his
Florentine stay.
1st 77)
Fra Angelico, 1439-45, Noli me Tangere, San Marco, Florence
V1st 77a) Fra Angelico, c. 1440, Annunciation, San Marco, Florence
In Italy too; as the powers of Masaccio fill out the forms of Gothic tenderness, the
'forties and 'fifties fruit in saintly celebration, as present as Angelico's garden where
Christ greets the Magdalen.
In music Ockeghem, Dufay's successor, holds an all-time summit of heavenly
polyphonic weaving, the serene stretching and enhancement of Dunstable's fabric.
The works of the Florentine organist Squarcialupi are lost. The Italian pieces that
remain, from Romanus of 1416 to Gaffurio toward the end of the century, are not
recorded.
Va2nd 76) Roger Van der Weyden, c. 1430-35, Annunciation, Left Wing of the
Magi Altar, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59)
2nd 76)
Again, Van der Weyden, Deposition, detail (video works from 1st 76)
In any case, the Flemings were dominant; and there is no one, before or after, who
could suspend such a web of besouled breathing as Ockeghem. Here the "Qui tollis"
from the Mass: "Ecce Ancilla Dei".
Music:
Ockeghem, c.1470(?), Qui tollis, Mass: Ecce Ancilla Dei,
21512-1
BAS-
2nd 77)
Fra Angelico, Noli me Tangere, detail, San Marco, Florence
V2nd 77a) Beato Angelico, 1439-45, fresco, Coronation of the Virgin, upper detail,
San Marco, Florence
78)
Domenico Veneziano, c. 1450, Madonna and Saints, Uffizi, Florence
(CGB '59)
In Veneziano the old triptych turns to a colonnaded space, in which a calm of
form and pastel color
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C.G. Bell
79)
Symbolic History
Piero della Francesca, 1463-65, Resurrection, cropped, Borgo San Sepulcro;
+ V detail
looks to Piero della Francesca: this Resurrection of God in Olympian flesh and Robe.
(Music: Quoniam) Here, with as rapt an omnivoyant as art offers, we conclude Cusanus'
vision:
As in a mirror, an icon, a riddle,
80)
Same, Piero, head of Christ
I see life eternal, which is nothing else but that blessed regard, that
gaze of love which never ceases to behold.me, even the most secret
places of my soul.
81)
Fouquet, 1453-55, Trinity in Glory, Hours of Etienne Chevalier, Chantilly,
+ V detail
In mid-century France, Fouquet has shown forth the rose-courts of blessing. And
Cusanus:
For with Thee to behold is to give life, to inflame by love's imparting,
and in imparted flame, to let me drink the dew of gladness, drink and
be infused with the fountain of life, copartner with Thee and thy Son in
immortal bliss,
82)
Memling, 1479, Baptism detail, Left Wing, St. Catharine Altar, Bruges
the source of all delights, the maximum, undeprived, of every rational
desire, than which a greater cannot be conceived.
By 1480, in Bruges, Memling clothes the simple Coming in a fruitful ease of earth
and waters.
83)
V83a)
Botticelli, 1481-82, Adoration of the Magi, center detail, National Gallery,
Washington D.C. (CGB '60); cf. V83, same, wider view (CGB '60)
Same, closer detail of Madonna and landscape (from CGB '75)
At the same time in Florence, Botticelli refines the mystical to an aesthetic of
starred fabrics and translucent veils. (end Ockeghem)
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�26
C.G. Bell
84)
Symbolic History
Jacobo della Quercia, 1425-38, "In the Sweat of thy Brow," bronze relief,
doors of San Petronio, Bologna
But Gothic had been stretched from the start between peace and frenzy, the peace
enriching its texture, the frenzy more material in drive. By the 1430's, della Quercia's
bronze doors in Bologna have passed the bequest of power to Michelangelo.
85)
Double: [A] Masolino and [B] Masaccio, both c. 1425, Temptation and
Expulsion, details, Brancacci Chapel, Carmine, Florence
In the Brancacci chapel of the Carmine, we feel it like a Gospel command — that
passage from the Gothic line and mystery of Masolino's innocent Temptation, to the
tragic expulsion of Masaccio. Masolino had chosen this pupil and collaborator; yet how
those quiet sinners of his Eden must have gazed across the chapel toward their nobler
expulsion — "Paradise well lost!"
86)
Pisanello, c. 1435, St. George and the Princess fresco, Sant' Anastasia,
Verona; + V closer detail with gibbet
So too in Pisanello's 1435 fresco of St. George and the Princess: with the housing
of beatitude, force too knits its fabric. The attack is of realism itself, a keenness of seeing
and being which arose out of Gothic (that gibbet here against the sky) —
until all the Magdalens and beggar rogues of soul-levelling Christendom meet in Villon
and Fat Margot:
87)
Pisanello, same fresco, detail of gibbet only, two hanged men
Come back, whenever you're in rut
To this brothel where we hold our state. (CGB)
Retournez cy, quant vous serez en ruit,
En ce bordeau ou tenons nostre estat!
Or, to match Pisanello's detail:
I am Francois, I confess,
Born in Paris, near Pontoise,
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�27
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Symbolic History
And by six feet of hemp-grass,
My neck will learn the weight of my ass. (CGB)
88)
Andrea del Castagno, 1447, Last Supper, center, Convent Santa Apollonia,
Florence (video shows first a closer detail from Va88, then draws a wider
center from V88, of the whole)
In Florence before mid century, the pastel calm of Veneziano is complemented by
Castagno, here from a Last Supper. "Can you minister to a mind diseased?"; Castagno:
"I will set its diseases visibly before you." Among the variegated marble panels of this
room, that where Judas sits (across from Christ), traces the hell-whorls of his jealous
thought.
Va89)
89)
Francesco Cossa (or del Cossa), c. 1470, Month of March, middle detail,
Schifanoia Palace, Ferrara
Same, detail of a peasant
As the factual comes to parity with its faith containment, an expression is first
possible (as in the Ferrara Months, by Cossa, about 1470), lean and hard as Gothic, yet
already of Breughel's Renaissance earth. Dante had led the way, as in the metaphor of
Inferno 24, where a peasant takes the frost for snow:
...when the hoarfrost on the ground
copies the likeness of her white sister…
and the peasant who needs fodder rises
and looks out and sees the fields all whitened,
and turning back to the house, smites his thigh... (CGB)
90)
Same, March vineyard; + V detail
By the time of these Cossa frescoes, such calendar observation (this March
Vineyard) was the life of Mantuan (Turberville's translation, 1567):
The man that earst did sowe
And tillde his stonie soile,
hath let a fielde his plowe
And takes his ease: the wearie ground
it selfe doth slumber nowe.
The Shephierd having shutte
his dores, and caught his cloake
Keepes house: Neara eke doth sitte
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15th Century: Early Renaissance
�28
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
at home in smothering smoake
At Chimnie nooke, and plies
hir pottage Pot apace...
91)
Rohan Hours, c. 1425(?), January, detail, National Library, Paris
In the Rohan Hours, from about 1425, such realism had incised, within Gothic,
the biting winter of Villon's Legacy:
Sur le Noel, morte saison: (Kinnell)
Near Christmas, the dead time
When wolves live on the wind
And men stick to their houses
Against the frost, close by the blaze...
92)
Fouquet, c. 1450, Medallion Self-Portrait, Louvre, Paris; + V detail
In Fouquet's Medallion, self assumes that edged precision. No wonder the
Testaments so worked on Pound and Eliot — Villon in the first (called Small) penning
his bitter bequests until the ink is frozen and the candle blown out; in the second, called
Great, Villon himself burnt-out:
En 1'an de mon trentiesme aage —
In the thirtieth year of my age,
Having drunk my fill of shame...
Written in the year 'sixty-one
When the good king delivered me
From the harsh prison of Meung... (CGB)
93)
Pollaiuolo, c. 1470, Hercules and Antaeus, Uffizi, Florence
I spit phlem as white as cotton,
Gobs as big as tennis balls...
Thanks to God and Jacques Thibault
Who gave me cold water... underground... (CGB)
In Florence that carborundum would hone Pollaiuolo's Hercules and Antaeus to a
scalpel —
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15th Century: Early Renaissance
�29
C.G. Bell
94)
94a)
Symbolic History
Pollaiuolo, c. 1460(?), Girl's profile, Poldi-Pezzoli, Milan; + V detail
Pollaiuolo, c. 1475, Apollo and Daphne, National Gallery, London
Music:
Dufay, c.1440-50(?), Adieu m'amour, Cape, EMS-206
under which beauty thins to the wistful delight of the Poldi-Pezzoli girl, mostly attributed
to that same anatomist Pollaiuolo. As if for all freshness and joy Dufay's "Adieu
m'amour" were sounding. So the wailful brightness of Villon's best-known ballade, "des
dames du temps jadis":
Dictes moy ou, n'en quel pays,
Est Flora la belle Rommaine...
Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?
Of which Rossetti, for all his "yester-year", caught something;
Where is Echo, beheld of no man,
Only heard on river and mere —
She whose beauty was more than human?
But where are the snows of yester-year?
95)
English, c. 1460, Sculptured corpse from Beckington Tomb, Cathedral, Wells
(CGB '84)
(fade Adieu m'amour)
Villon's ballade is introduced by a description of death, sharp as those tombs
where (sometimes) worms and mice crawl from the sculptured corpse — yet of strange
beauty (Symons):
No, I am not, as others are,
Child of the angels, with a wreath
Of planets or of any star.
My father's dead, and lies beneath
The churchyard stone: God rest his breath!
Va96)
96)
V96a)
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Donatello, 1455-58, Mary Magdalen, upper half, Duomo Museum, Florence
(CGB '86)
Same, head, another view
Same, detail of hands
15th Century: Early Renaissance
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I know that my poor old mother
(And she too knows) must come to death,
And that her son must follow her...
After comes the old Helmet-maker, with
Peaked chin, and cheeks all waste and dead,
And lips that are two skinny rags — (Swinburne)
elsewhere compared with this Donatello Magdalen. Though the Magdalen might stand as
well for Villon's mother in her "Prayer to our Lady":
I am a woman, very old and poor;
I know nothing; I cannot read at all.
a97)
97)
V97a)
Stef. Lochner, 1440-45, Last Judgment, upper detail of saved, WallrafRichartz Museum, Köln (CGB '74)
Same, detail of damned and gorilla-devil (CGB '74); while V97 uses a central
detail of saved and damned (panned on the video from 98, the whole)
Same, lower detail of saved soul and angel, panned from a97
Music:
Dufay, c. 1450, Mass "Se la face ay pale"
sancto Spiritu, (Munrow) Seraphim S-60267
from Gloria, "Cum
But when I go to church, I see on the wall
A painted heaven where harps and lutes are,
A hell also, where damned spirits boil.
One gives me happiness, the other fear.
Give me the happiness, Goddess of the sky,
To whom all sinners should render, without guile,
Theirs and themselves in love and humble prayer —
And in this faith I mean to live and die. (CGB)
Va98)
Vb98)
98)
Same, Lechery detail from Usury and Lechery slide (CGB '74)
English perpendicular Gothic 15th c., Doom Painting, c. 1475, St. Thomas
Church, Salisbury (CGB '86)
Lochner Last Judgment, whole (CGB '74)
— Lochner's Judgment reviving for us, with the vigor of a Dufay Gloria, what was
painted in all the churches of Christendom, the timeless drop, without which the action of
Renaissance loses its stretch and tuning. As the Helmetress says of earth's joy:
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Que m'en reste il? Honte et pechié.
(close Gloria)
For 1st 99) Donatello, 1445-48, Pieta, bronze relief, Sant' Antonio, Padua; which
video prefaces with 2nd 99, Donatello, Padova Crucifix, upper half
In Donatello's Christ, in Villon's Everyman-self, the rising tragic twist is of the
enobled, but mortal frame (Symonds):
Whoever dies, dies with much pain;
For when his wind and breath are sped,
His gall breaks on his heart, and then
He sweats, God knows that sweat of men!
(No need to ask how God knows.)
Son fiel se creve sur son cuer,
Puis sue, Dieu scet quelle sueur!
Significant for the whole Pascalian reversal of Promethean Renaissance, that
Donatello, spearhead of pagan recovery and sensuous enfleshment, should also have led
in the break to penitential force. From his Padua altar,
1st 100) Mantegna, c. 1490-95, foreshortened Dead Christ, Brera, Milan
the Passion whirl spreads and mounts through Mantegna, from the early frescoes to this
foreshortened Dead Christ. And in music too the stress of the humanist wedge driven
into Gothic swells toward the late century and Reformation. Curious, that where we
invoked Ockeghem, supposed canon-tormenter, for floating ease, we call on Obrecht,
supposed softener, for the fevered counter-pole.
2nd 99)
Music:
Donatello, 1444, bronze Crucifix, upper half, Sant'Antonio, Padova; while
video takes a closer detail
Obrecht, c.1480-90(?), 3rd Kyrie, Missa Fortuna Desperata, Decca
DL 79413
2nd 100) Again, Mantegna, Dead Christ, cropped
101)
Botticelli, 1495, Deposition, Poldi-Pezzoli Museum, Milan; + V details
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Such the cry of contrition which shook Botticelli and burned Savonarolla.
102)
Cosimo Tura, 1474, Pieta from the Roverella Polyptych, Louvre, Paris;
+ V detail
(close Kyrie)
And already by the '70's, in the Ferrara from which Savonarolla would move to
Florence, Cosimo Tura had forged, from Gothic and Donatello, an anticipation of
Mannerist and Baroque, strange, as in later literature, Gongora and Donne.
103)
Antonella da Messina, 1475, Crucifixion, Beaux Arts, Brussels; with video
details (cf. V103a)
Music:
Obrecht, c.1480-90(?), 2nd Agnus, Missa Fortuna Desperata,
Decca DL 79413
Yet through the same years, Antonella da Messina, absorbing into Sicilian postGothic the space of Florence, with the nature and oil techniques of Flanders, was
preparing (even in this Crucifixion) for the rich calm of Venetian high Renaissance.
While Northern composers (here from the Agnus of the same Obrecht Mass) have steeped
their counterpoint (fade Obrecht) in the chordal expressiveness of Italy:
Music:
Italian Frottola, c. 1490(?), from Rusticus, ut asinum..., AS 77
here a peasant's lament for his dead donkey (and had those humanists heard that early
Christians vere rumored to have worshipped a crucified ass?)
(fade Rusticus)
104)
104A)
104B)
Quadruple: used in old 80 slide show, and now in digital; it combines 104A
and 104B as listed below. From these, the video opens with singles of the
Donatello (Va104), and of the Angelico (from Vc104)
Double: {A} Donatello 1415-16, St. George, head, Bargello, Florence; and
{B} Michelangelo 1501-04, David, head, Accademia, Florence
Double: {A} Fra Angelico 1434?, Angel of Annunciation, Magi Panel, San
Marco, Florence; and {B} Botticelli 1501, Mary from Mystical Nativity,
National Gallery, London
If the style-work of the 15th century is the articulation of humanist islands within
the eddying continuance of Medieval faith, it is in Florence that the unconscious change
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(drop added to drop until crystallization nears) most dramatically presses toward
conscious reordering. There the precursive souls, from Donatello (St. George, 1415) to
Michelangelo (David, 1501-4), magnify the reasoned assertion of power. While others,
from Angelico (1430) to Botticelli (1500) refine the spirit and line of Gothic, but with
such ripening of the sensuous and aesthetic, as involves them in the same vortex.
105)
Double: [A] Mantegna (above), c. 1468, Triumph of Silenus, British Museum,
London (Engraving); and [B] Donatello (below), 1455-57, Bacchic Revel, base
of Judith, Piazza della Signoria, Florence; first, video singles
Music:
Josquin, before 1500(?), from El Grillo, New York Pro Musica,
Decca DL 79435
The polarity, working to climax, had shown itself in Donatello. On the pagan side
— with Josquin's frottole, "El Grillo" — come Lorenzo de Medici's satyrs and nymphs in
Bacchic dance:
Or da Bacco riscaldati,
Ballon, saltan tuttavia —
taking up the levity of Donatello's sportive relief (below) — no doubt seen by Mantegna
on his 1466 Florentine visit (compare his Triumph of Silenus, above).
(fade El Grillo)
106)
Donatello, 1455-57, Judith and Holofernes, bronze, Piazza del Signoria,
Florence; with video details (first, below; then of Holofernes)
Yet Donatello's carousing amorini
Music:
Josquin des Pres, close of Mass, Ave Maris Stella, Decca DL
79435
adorn the base of his most puzzling late bronze, Judith hacking off the head of
Holofernes. That harrier of Israel dies drunk. The cushions beneath him seem spouting
wine skins. So the Bacchantes in Poliziano's pioneer Opera (Isaac's music lost) display
the head of deviant Orpheus: "Evoé Bacco, Bacco". Over all sex-death puzzles of this
bronze pillar of flesh, one thing is clear, that the tension of the century and of Donatello
himself, between pagan delight and penitential seizure,
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Symbolic History
107)
Same, upper detail of Judith; video uses V107 (same, different framing)
V107a) Same, another view, upper detail only
has been spanned in a prophetic monument.
But Josquin too worked over that divide: against the Grillo, and from the same
Petrucci record, his Mass, Ave Maris Stella, raises the plea to the Lamb of God to a last
strident cry. (close Josquin) Such Savonarolla's "Oimè":
All Italy has asked the Judgment of war and plague...
Return to Jesus Christ, his Mother and meek Spouse;
Quit the inveterate vice of your godless ways. (CGB)
108)
Botticelli, 1474, Adoration of the Magi, Uffizi, Florence (cf V108, CGB '59);
+ four video details (three from V108a and V108b)
No one lived both myths, pagan and Christian, more poignantly than Botticelli.
His 1475 Medicean Adoration of the Magi assumes the bel viver of his master, Lippi.
Old Cosimo kneels to the child; in front, his son Piero (both dead by that time) faces the
radiant Giuliano, soon to be murdered in the Pazzi conspiracy. Far right, looking out, we
cannot miss the proud painter, Alessandro. Far left, Lorenzo, citizen-ruler holds court.
Poliziano, prodigy of Renaissance poetry, fawns on him — a caress even Lorenzo's horse
toothfully resents.
(Digital adds 108c, Botticelli's Giuliano — see Face and Landscape 34 or 34a; then
108d, central detail of Venus from the Spring)
Perhaps a year after this painting, Giuliano's love for Simonetta (Vespucci by
marriage) would come to the climax of the January 1476 tournament, over which he,
victor, would crown her queen.
On April 26th of the same year, Simonetta's death of consumption ranked their
love with Petrarch's and Dante's. On the second anniversary of her death, Giuliano's
assassination turned it to myth. As Poliziano had written (for Giuliano):
She seemed Minerva in act, Venus in face...
a109)
7/1994
Botticelli, 1478, Primavera (Spring), whole, Uffizi, Florence; + V detail
(using Va109 center)
15th Century: Early Renaissance
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C.G. Bell
109)
Symbolic History
Same, Botticelli Primavera, upper left quadrant; + V detail: (to which add
close-up of the little cloud, from V109a)
or in La Giostra:
Candida e ella, e candida la vesta,
Ma pur di rose e fior dipinta e d'erba...
In Botticelli's Primavera, realm of that Simonetta Venus, Mercury with his wand
disperses gathering clouds. How Dante's simultaneous levels of literal, political, moral
and anagogical meaning, might reconcile our critics: —
If Simonetta comes to this grove through the dispersed cloud of death, it remains
Tuscan elysium, from which Good Counsel would banish clouds to ensue. As Striggio
would write for Monteverdi's Orfeo more than a century later: "Deh, sommi Dei,/ Non
torcete da noi benigno il guardo."
110)
Botticelli, c. 1842, Pallas and the Centaur, Uffizi, Florence (CGB '59; video
shows upper half only
So with Botticelli's Pallas and the Centaur: the contention of political or moral
ignores the same Dante-to-Can-Grande. No doubt the delivery of Reason from man-beast
is guided by Minerva; yet her dress, adorned with the Medici emblem, surely hints at
Lorenzo and some feat of diplomatic control.
111)
Botticelli, 1483(?), Venus and Mars, National Gallery, London; + V detail
Is the control more threatened in this Mars and Venus of perhaps a year later? It
is cheerful when Venus as Humanitas prevails over Mars as discord. So at Alexander's
marriage (Lucian) cupids played with his armor. But this loved-out Giuliano-Florence is
in jeopardy. He sleeps, while those lusty satyrs with the lance stir up a hornet's nest.
That the pun on Vespe (wasp) suggests the patronage of Simonetta's Vespucci, can only
complement the danger, which, as in Biblical prophecy, is both past and future.
112)
7/1994
Botticelli ,1490, Head of St. John from Madonna of San Barnabas, Uffizi,
Florence
15th Century: Early Renaissance
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Symbolic History
By 1490, in the head of St. John from the Barnabas altar, Botticelli wakes to the
fullness-of-time being announced by Savonarolla in his San Marco sermons of that year:
The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare the way of the
Lord."
113)
Botticelli, c. 1494-95, Calumny of Apelles, Uffizi, Florence; + V details
(using V113, Uffizi slide?)
By the old view, Botticelli's reconstitution (c.1495) of Apelles' Calumny,
described by Lucian — an innocent man slandered before a Midas-eared king and
dragged to judgment, with the blackrobed penitence to follow, and the final pure
revelation of naked truth — was aimed, on the political level, at the papal censure of
Savonarolla: Botticelli (here his late works confirm Vasari) shaken by those Apocalyptic
sermons. A strange caution, to discredit that, while making an issue of this hall, carved
with pagan and Christian subjects — as if the painter had not devoted those years to
reading and illustrating Dante, whose Purgatory reliefs enforce, by just such polarity, the
cleansing of politics and spirit.
114)
Double: Botticelli 1492-97, Dante drawings, {A} Inferno 18 and {B} Paradiso 6, E. & W. Berlin (video singles only; see file)
Perhaps Botticelli bore his share of Calumny as well: as in Vasari's story:
"Without any education, and scarce knowing how to read, he writes a commentary on
Dante!" But who else pursued almost to the point of starving, soul's ascent from the rank
grovelling of the Bad Ditches, to the flame-geometry of Beatrice's Empyrean? In soul as
in paint, where was the link, but in Botticelli, to Leonardo and Michelangelo?
115)
Piero della Francesca, c. 1455, Bearing the Sacred Wood, Frescoes of the
Legend of the Cross, San Francesco, Arezzo (video: detail only)
From mid-century (as under the pastel calm of Piero della Francesca — here one
of the Arezzo frescoes, where a laborer carrying the timber destined, centuries after, for
the true cross, becomes a mystic prototype of Christ)
116)
7/1994
Piero della Francesco, 1465(?), portraits of Federigo de Montefeltro and
Battista Sforza, Duke and Duchess of Urbino, Uffizi, Florence
15th Century: Early Renaissance
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
what was heightening force and counterforce was the emergence of the new man (new
woman) — the harmonious space of Piero's religious art complemented by the
transforming boldness of his portrayed patron, Federigo de Montefeltro of Urbino, here
with his Sforza wife.
117)
Double: {A} Hugo v.d. Goes, c. 1471(?), head from Magi Adoration, BerlinDahlem; and {B} Mantegna, 1480, head of archer from St. Sebastian, Louvre,
Paris
As the century advances, such assertion swells under the visible interpenetration
of Flemish realism and the revived antiquity of Italy — (left) one of the Magi from a
Hugo van der Goes altar, about 1470, in the tradition of van Eyck and van der Weyden,
though already humanized from the South; and (right) ten years later, absorbing and
Romanizing that Flemish skill, this archer from Mantegna's St. Sebastian.
118)
Double: {A} Fr. Laurano, c. 1470, Battista Sforza, Bargello, Florence; and
{B} Pollaiuolo, c. 1475, Giuliano da Medici, Bargello, Florence (with video
singles: B, then A)
In Florence, two portraits, from 1470 and '75, by Laurano and Pollaiuolo, of a
Sforza daughter and a Medici son, juxtaposed, enact Renaissance drama. But what
Machiavelli would concentrate in the 1518 Mandragola, had been voiced before 1500 and
in Spain, in the tragi-comedy of the high-born Melibea and her seduction by the
somewhat lower Calisto, with the help of the old bawd Celestina. Calisto's passion:
If God would give me, for the sight of you, a seat among his saints in
heaven, I would not take it;
his idolatry when asked "Are you a Christian?"
I am a Melibean. I acknowledge no other deity in heaven while she
remains on earth;
Melibea's proud purity:
Vete, vete de ahí, torpe — Go, wretch; I cannot tolerate one who
would plant in me the delights of illicit love;
her vulnerability to Celestina, that hag "who could move stones to lechery by her art" —
shape tragedy:
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119)
Symbolic History
Double: French Renaissance, c. 1455, Figures from the House of Jacques
Coeur, Bourges; first, V details of the singles: Va119 and Vb119 (CGB '81)
"My daughter, why have you left me to despair, weeping and lonely in this vale of
tears?" — "¿Por qué me dejaste triste y solo in hac lachrymarum valle?"
In France, with Jacques Coeur, merchant-prince of Bourges — his motto "A
vaillans coeurs, riens impossible" — Renaissance assertion, battling Medieval Fortune
and the brittle world, had sowed that tragic field. Founder of French trade with the
Levant, rescuer of the national currency, who financed Charles VII's wars and fought at
his side to oust the English from Normandy, who built chapels and established colleges
— Coeur, betrayed by the King and accused without pretext of plotting and poisoning,
was tried by his enemies, fined what might now be a hundred million dollars, and thrown
into prison, his goods divided among the king's favorites. After five years he escaped, but
died of sickness as he led a fleet against the Turk for the relief of Rhodes.
At the windows of his Bourges house, these carved servants, man and maid, look
out for their master's return.
120)
Double: {A} G. da Milano, 1365, Birth of the Virgin, Santa Croce, Florence;
and {B} Ghirlandaio, 1486-90, Birth of St. John the Baptist, Santa Maria
Novella, Florence; alternating with video singles, or details (V120A and
V120B)
Music:
Osw. v. Wolkenstein, from 14th-cent. Italian, Ave Maria (instr.)
ARC-3033
Measure in Florence that advance of earthly assurance — here two sacred births:
(below) of the Virgin, by Giovanni da Milano, later 14th century — with von
Wolkenstein's transcription of Italian Ars Nova;
(fade v. Wolkenstein)
Music:
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H. Isaac, pub. 1506, Missa la Spagna, Agnus Dei, Seraphim
SIC 6104
15th Century: Early Renaissance
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(above) Ghirlandaio's 149O Birth of St. John the Baptist — with Isaac's Mass formed of
Spanish dances — attuned to this coffered room, festive with robed ladies, where a fruitbearing girl billowing in, seems almost to have arrived from Magna Graecia.
121)
121a)
Ghirlandaio, 1486-90, Visitation fresco, central section, Santa Maria
Novella, Florence
Same, upper detail
It is what this outdoor scene from Ghirlandaio's same Santa Maria Novella
frescoes perfects: this meeting of Elizabeth and Mary by a walled piazzale across the
Arno — those heady youths leaning over, where something like the Old Palace towers
from below.
122)
Memling, 1489, Reliquary of St. Ursula, view of one side, St. John's Hospital,
Bruges; + V detail
In Bruges that late-century enrichment peaks to the gold-housed and jewel-bright
miniatures of Memling's Reliquary of St. Ursula — Christian life and martyrdom (as in
Isaac's dancing Agnus Dei) aglow with delight.
(end lst Agnus)
123)
Memling, 1489, Same, 1st scene, Arrival in Cologne (video: details only, below
and above)
Music:
Isaac, 1484, reset c.1500(?), Isbruck, ich muss dich lassen,
Syntagma SIC-6052
Memling's individual scenes, this Arrival in Cologne (with the death-annunciation
in the upper chamber) are as feelingly suspended between the poignance of the story and
the gladness of earth, as Isaac's homophonic farewell to Innsbruck: "Isbruck, ich muss
dich lassen".
124)
Pinturicchio, 1503-08, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini frescoes, East Wall
Library, Duomo, Siena (CGB '86)
In Italian magnification of Flemish precision, Memling's reliquary sequence
expands to the architectural and perspectival vistas with which Pinturicchio, soon after
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Symbolic History
1500, muralled the Sienese Cathedral library — such tour-de-force panoramas (from the
life of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, left, the
a125)
125)
Same, Aeneas Journey to Basel, fresco; + V detail of travellers (from Va125)
Same, Pinturicchio, Journey, upper part, detail of storm
Journey to Basel, with its background of harbor and storm) as if the "open road" of Isaac's
songs —
(fade Isbruck)
Music:
Isaac, before 1500(?), from Tmeiskin was jonck,
I,5,B2b
AS (33RPM)
"Glück ist in allen Gassen"; with this refrain from his Flemish "Tmeiskin was jonck" —
(refrain and fade) were spun quod libet to a glad Missa Carminum.
Music:
126)
Isaac, c. 1506(?), Missa Carminum, 2nd Hosannah, MHS 1777
(end Hosannah)
Luca Signorelli, 1499-1504, Resurrection of the Dead etc., Duomo, Orvieto
(CGB '84); + V detail
Music:
Josquin des Pres, pub.1519, from Miserere, AS 107(A)
Yet here as earlier, the claim of earth advances an always more physical doom.
So, with Pinturicchio, comes an Umbrian complement, Signorelli — his masterpiece the
Apocalypse fresoces at Orvieto — this Resurrection of the Dead. It is a mood to which
Josquin continually returns: "Miserere!"
(fade Miserere)
127)
Gutenburg Bible, c. 1454, Illuminated Page, Proverbs, New York Public
Library (video shows first two details, inserting between them: V127a) 19th
century color engraving of the 1450 event; so returns to 127, 2nd detail, then
whole)
Why is this manuscript so mechanical, its illuminations so dull? The question is
unfair, since this landmark of progress is the Gutenberg Bible, printed in German Mainz
about 1454. It is mechanical because it was set from moveable type and could be
reproduced toward a limit which in our time pumps books on and off the cartel shelves
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
like the tasteless apples of a supermarket. Dull in illumination because it no doubt
employed what Adam Smith would acclaim as the time-saving principle of division of
labor. The multiplied power of Renaissance was to rest on the output of the press; but it
will remind us how history dismantles one wall to build another that (as in Greece, bardic
memory disappeared with the written word) the sacred and aristocratic glory of the
parchment manuscript could only go under in Europe's forward rush.
a128)
Verrochio and Leonardo, 1472-75, Annunciation, Uffizi, Florence
(CGB '59); + V detail
Vb128) Verrochio and Leonardo, c. 1473, Baptism of Christ, Uffizi, Florence; close
detail: head of the Leonardo angel to the left
128)
Same: Baptism of Christ, whole, (video shows center spread only)
Music:
Pierre de la Rue c.1500?, Sanctus from the Missa Ave sanctissima
Maria, (Munrow) Seraphim SIC 6104
Meanwhile, a genius was growing up in Medici Florence who would bring
Renaissance thought, science and art to such a harmony as in the spacings of de la Rue's
six voice Sanctus. The old account of Leonardo as Verrocchio's apprentice painting a
beautiful angel (left) in the master's Baptism (c. 1473?) has been confirmed by Bode's
study of the oil glazes —
129)
Same, Baptism, detail of Angels and Landscape (which video draws from 128)
which, with X-ray analysis, has also given the landscape above to Leonardo. In this
luminous spread of water under rocks, the boy seems to have envisaged what would
become the geology of his notebooks:
130)
Same, Landscape detail (or V130)
130a) Leonardo, c. 1505, Mona Lisa, detail, Louvre, Paris
V130b) Leonardo, 1508-10, from Virgin and Child with St. Anne, detail with
background, Louvre, Paris
I perceive that the surface of the earth was from of old entirely filled
up and covered over in its level plains by the salt waters, and that the
mountains, the bones of the earth, with their wide bases, penetrated
and towered up amid the air, covered over with much high-lying soil.
Subsequently incessant rains have... stripped bare part of the lofty
summits... so that the rock finds itself exposed to the air... And the
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
earth from the slopes and mountains has raised the floors of the seas...
and caused the plain to be uncovered...
Cusanus "privative infinity" sheds privation, becoming almost the cosmos "Won from the
void and formless infinite".
(cut de la Rue after "Sabaoth")
131)
131a)
Leonardo, 1513-16, John the Baptist as Smiling Precursor, Louvre, Paris;
+ V detail
Leonardo, c. 1514, Self, red chalk, Library, Turin (video, detail only)
As the wisdom of age had touched the boy, child-promise smiles on the old
Leonardo — this Louvre St. John as Precursor — with Pico della Mirandola:
Let a certain holy ambition invade the mind so that we may not be
content with mean things but may aspire to the highest things and
strive with all our force to attain them: for if we will to, we can...He
who is a seraph, that is, a lover, is in God; and more God is in him, and
God and he are one.
Though the smile is ambiguous in Leonardo's Notebooks:
Behold now the hope and desire of going back to one's own country or
returning to primal chaos... of the man who looks forward to each new
spring... and does not perceive he is longing for his dissolution... as
elements... imprisoned...long for the source...
What has the Precursor precursed?
a132)
Leonardo, c. 1483 ff., Great Crossbow on Carriage, Ambrosian Library,
Milan
132)
Leonardo, 1483 ff., Scythed car and armored tank, British Museum, London
V132a) Leonardo, 1483 ff., Bombard with shrapnel, Ambrosian Lihrary, Milan
It would be as in Shelley:
Although a subtler sphinx renew
Riddles of death Thebes never knew.
Had not most of the 1482 letter to Sforza promised instruments of war:
7/1994
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�43
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
I have plans for destroying every fortress...not founded upon rock... for
making cannon... engines for attack or defence... ships which can resist
the fire of cannon... armoured cars... which will enter the serried ranks
of the enemy with their artillery... and behind these the infantry will be
able to follow without opposition...
Talents applied, more than his art, in the service of Il Moro and Cesare Borgia — that
Caesar, Machiavelli also would have enabled.
In the floating Utopia of High Renaissance, the modern world, with its explosive
potentialities, is born.
133)
Dürer, "1500," Self as Christ, Alte Pinakothek, Munich; with V details
So with person. In this Dürer, inscribed 1500, Cusanus' omnivoyant God-man
becomes the deepest reflection of the mirrored self. As Eckhart had said in a passage that
would stir Luther: "God has become man in order that I may become God." Was that not
the call of the Luther Bible: "zu der herrlichen Freiheit der Kinder Gottes"?
The first history of music on records (the Parlophone "2000 Years") paired, with
the Dufay Trumpet Gloria already heard, Josquin's Et Incarnatus from the Missa Pange
Lingua — "and was made man."
Music:
Josquin des Pres, c.1500-10(?), Et Incarnatus, close, Parl. R-1019
Thus — Berlin chorus and all — the Western Incarnation takes up the cross of the world.
134)
Michelangelo, 1536-41, Last Judgment, detail of Trumpeting Angels, Sistine
Chapel, Rome; first, video detail
Music:
Cabezon, c. 1540-50, opening, Tiento de 4 Tono, Videro, GSC52 A
Michelangelo, in the storm to follow ("Tuba mirum spargens sonum"), felt also in
the Tientos of Cabezon, must have dreamed sometimes of the Lorenzo de' Medici
Florence of his youth.
(fade Cabezon)
7/1994
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�44
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Va135) Botticelli 1482, Birth of Venus, Uffizi, Florence (CGB '59); detail of Venus,
upper half from slide 136
135)
Same, whole picture (which video crops)
Music:
Isaac, c. 1485(?), Helas, 3-v, viols (Cape), AS-43
There Botticelli had brought Gothic line to an ultimate clarity of nostalgia in joy
— leaves, waves, blown roses, the pure Platonic nude — as Poliziano had described in La
Giostra, that unfinished romance which carries in germ the whole future of paganizing
poetry and art:
A woman born of the waves, lovesome and free
In every act, in her face more than human,
Wafted by lively zephyrs to the shore
Upon a shell, while heaven smiles upon her... (CGB)
136)
Same, figure of Venus (CGB '59); here video takes from 135 Venus and the
figure to our right)
You would have sworn the goddess came from the wave,
Gathering with her right hand her golden hair,
The other lifted, the sweet fruit to save
From greedy spoil; and as she touched the shore
With sacred feet, seen herbs and flowers pave
The barren strand...
(CGB)
137)
138)
Same, detail of figure to the right (CGB '59)
Same, detail of figures to the left (CGB '59); to which video adds Venus' face
(again from 136), with a return to 135, the whole picture
...and marked with what light air
Three nymphs accost her and her coming hail
And close invest her in a starry veil. (CGB)
Michelangelo could have remembered the music too, Isaac — not the brooding
Lamentation but ballades sighed by the viols, as wistfully glad as the receding curves of
Botticelli's shore.
In that backward looking, even Michelangelo, or whoever, after him, has been
most partisan in the embattled grandeur of Promethean consciousness, might drop, like
7/1994
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�45
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Milton's Adam and Eve, "som natural tears."
Isaac Helas)
139)
(fade
Flemish, c. 1460-70, Virgin and Child with Mary of Burgundy, detail, Hours
of Charles the Bold, National Library, Vienna (Landsburg), (video ranges
from whole over various details)
Since part of every soul must yearn (like the imprisoned elements) for a naive
anonymous grace — here from Mary of Burgundy's Book of Hours, the daily reading in
that same book become an allegorical window. Such quiet pre-selfhood lightens an
English wedding fragment from the time:
The maidens came
When I was in my mother's bower;
I had all that I would.
The bailey beareth the bell away;
The lily, the rose, the rose I lay.
140)
Same, Mary of Burgundy, whole (while video continues with details)
The silver is white, red is the gold;
The robes they lay in fold.
The bailey beareth the bell away;
The lily, the rose, the rose I lay.
And through the glass window shines the sun.
How should I love, and I so young?
The bailey beareth the bell away;
The lily, the lily, the rose I lay.
— As frail, as bright, as the unmatched maiden of the other poem:
...As dew in Aprille
That falleth on the spray.
Moder and maiden
Was never non but sche;
Well may swich a lady
Godes moder be.
7/1994
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�
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SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
19. 1600: The Tragic Divide
CHARLES G. BELL
ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
or
1260 CANYON ROAD
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501
May 1994
Last Revised June 1996
�Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM
87501
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
19. 1600: The Tragic Divide (Shakespeare)
a1)
Michelangelo 1536-41, The Last Judgment, detail, Sistine Chapel, Vatican,
Rome
For 1st 1)
Cornelis van Haarlem, by 1588 (copy?), two followers of Cadmus devoured bv
a dragon, Ovid Metamorphoses, III 1-151, National Gallery, London
It is current to think of history as made by those who enact it;
but enacted, it builds a landscape of the causal must-be: "there is special providence in
the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come."
In that topology of spirit, there are watersheds and mountain divides — none more
charged, "twixt...extremes of passion," than that through which the arts and thought, the
very space and humanity of the West, passed around the century mark of 1600.
That range, which is the apocalyptic inturning of Renaissance pride and power,
For 1st 2) El Greco 1608-14, view and map of Toledo, detail, Museum, Toledo
El Greco scaled in painting, Giordano Bruno in flaming act and word: "He who in
himself sees all things, is all things."
In poetry, the radical violence of Marino, Gongora, de Sponde and Donne finds its
height and depth
For 1st 3 and 2nd 2)
El Greco c. 1610?, view of Toledo, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
City (video: detail only)
in the storm and madness of Shakespeare's King Lear:
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Symbolic History
Let the great gods
That keep this dreadful pother o'er our heads
Find out their enemies now. Tremble thou wretch,
That hast within thee undivulged crimes,
Unwhipped of justice. Hide thee, thou bloody hand;
Thou perjured, and thou simular of virtue
That art incestuous. Caitiff, to pieces shake,
That under covert and convenient seeming
Has practiced man's life.
2nd 1)
3rd 2)
2nd 3)
Music:
El Greco 1610-14, St. John's Vision: the Fifth Seal, Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York City (CGB '74); first, video detail
Same, close detail of figures, center (CGB ‘74)
Same, of figures to the right (CGB '74)
Gesualdo 1611, Aestimatus sum, opening. (Craft) Col. Y 32886
Close pent-up guilts
Rive your concealing continents, and cry
These dreadful summoners grace. I am a man
More sinned against, than sinning...
In music. the chromatic venture is at its peak in Gesualdo da Venosa — here from
the 1611 Responsories.
(on "liber")
Va4) Same, Vision (CGB '74; upper spread of 2nd 1)
4)
El Greco, 1605, Adoration of the Shepherds, Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York City
4a) El Greco, 1612-14, Adoration of the Shepherds, Predo, Madrid; copy in
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
(fade Gesualdo)
In El Greco after 1600, Apocalypse and Nativity stir the same frenzy. So in Lear
the comic and tragic are fused and transcended. With Lear going mad: "Hast thou given
all to thy two daughters? and art thou come to this?" Edgar pretending to be mad: "This
is the foul fiend Flibertigibbet: he begins at curfew and walks till the first cock"; the Fool
clowning like a madman: "Prithee nuncle. be contented; 'tis a naughty night to swim in"
— we are caught in the delirium of a chromatic capriccio, where sorrows lighten with
electrical play.
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Symbolic History
5)
French, Tapestry, c. 1510, Sight, from The Lady and the Unicorn, Cluny,
Paris; + V detail
V5a) Same, from Lady and Unicorn Tapestries, Hearing (video: detail only)
In that crucible of transformations the dreaming thin idealism of the Gothic past is
consumed — the 1500 poignance of The Lady and the Unicorn, with de la Rue's
"Incessantly my poor heart laments":
Music:
a6)
6)
Pierre de la Rue, c. 1510(?), Incessament mon povre cueur
lamente, (Cape) EMS 213
Poussin, c. 1628, Inspiration of the Poet, right detail, Louvre, Paris
Same, whole (video takes these from a lighter slide, V6)
and is reborn in the spatial earth and human confidence of the Baroque:
Music:
Louis Couperin 1650-60(?) from Chaconne, Suite in D, Leonhardt,
VICS-1370
Louis Couperin's chordal celebration of our mastery — like Rubens, like this Poussin,
pride made art, art ripened into pride. The deities praised in Cymbeline are temporally
responsive, temporally benign:
Laud we the gods,
And let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils
From our blessed altars. Publish we this peace
To all our subjects...
a7)
b7)
c7)
7)
(fade Couperin)
S. Vouet Tapestry, 1627, Finding of Moses, Louvre, Paris; + V detail
Arras Tapestry, c. 1430, Offering of the Heart, Cluny, Paris
Again a7, Vouet Moses (video: detail only)
Double: [A] Arras Heart, b7; and [B] detail of Vouet Moses, a7
Music:
Dowland, 1600-04, Lachrimae Antiquae pavan, viols and lute,
VICS-1338
It is the contrast I experienced long ago at a tapestry exhibit in the Metropolitan,
where, standing at the portal of two rooms — in one the dreaming flatness of late Gothic
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
(this most refined allegory of The Offering of the Heart), in the other the Cartesian vaunts
of Baroque (this 1627 Finding of Moses, designed by Vouet and woven in the preGobelin factories of the Louvre) — I thought of Shakespeare (with the musical glory he
invokes, this Dowland) a bridge over that style-gap, as between two separate civilizations,
though indeed they were one; the grandchildren of the first manor could actually have
been working in the second.
(fade Dowland)
8)
8a)
8b)
English, c. 1590(?), Elizabeth I, "Ditchley Portrait," National Portrait
Gallery, London; + V detail
Jacobean, 1607-11 ff., Robert Lyminge (for Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury),
The Library, Hatfield House, Hertfordshire
Again 8, Elizabeth I (video: detail only, from 8)
So Elizabeth stands on her island between the Gothic flatness and the opulence to
follow —
This... demi-paradise...
This precious stone set in the silver sea...
Against the envy of less happier lands...
The Armada cloud is at her back, before her the sunlit calm of Good Hope, which the late
plays wrest from storm and ignorance, "these surges/ Which wash both heaven and hell."
Thus Bacon in the New Atlantis:
The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes... and the
enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things
possible.
Though the pictorial flatness reminds us how far the Medieval stars still ruled over
Shakespeare's nativity.
9)
Elizabethan, late 16th cent., Sheldon Tapestry, rural pleasures (video: two
details only, one from V9a)
His early songs, Sheldon tapestries, the plaintive turns of lute and virginals
(Farnaby's "Dreame," "His Rest") carry the inconsequent bright awakening through the
century:
Music:
June 1996
Giles Farnaby, c. 1590(?), "His Dreame," (Dolmetsch) Col 5713
1600: The Tragic Divide
4
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
When daisies pied, and violets blue,
And lady-smocks all silver-white,
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue,
Do paint the meadows with delight,
The cuckoo then on every tree
Mocks married men, for thus sings he,
Cuckoo.
Cuckoo, cuckoo. O word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear.
a10)
10)
10a)
(cut Farnaby)
Rubens, c. 1608(?), Samson and Delilah, National Gallery, London (video:
detail only)
Rubens, c. 1608, Mulay Ahmad, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; first, V detail
Tintoretto, 1579-81, Temptation of Christ, Sala Grande, Scuola di San Rocco,
Venice
Music:
T. Tomkins, published 1622, from "When David Heard," Odyssey
32 16 0171
But Shakespeare died in the volitional grandeur he helped to form — as of
Tomkins' Absalom or of this Mulay Ahmad painted by Rubens five years after Othello
had dignified his own crime and self-punishment:
(fade Tomkins)
It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul —
Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars —
It is the cause...
And say besides, that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by th' throat the circumcised dog,
And smote him — thus.
But such human power still walks the symbolic stage, as in old moralities,
between a star-fretted heaven and the cellar traps of hell. The expanded Renaissance
earth
al1)
Giselbertus, 1130-40, detail of Weighing of Souls from the Last Judgment,
Cathedral of Autun, Saone-et-Loire
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1600: The Tragic Divide
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�C.G. Bell
b11)
11)
Symbolic History
Hans Reichle, 1602-07, Lucifer detail, bronze St. Michaels' Group, façade of
Zeughaus, Augsburg
French Romanesque, c. 1075, Soul between Devil and Angel, St. Benoit sur
Loire
reels under the Dark Age battle. It is that demi-devil Iago, the negation of Jahwe's "I am
that I am," who has so ensnared Othello, body and soul, that he cries for the lash of fire:
Whip me ye devils
From the possession of this heavenly sight...
On the same "bank and shoal of time" where flights of angels are to sing the sweet Prince,
Hamlet, to his rest, Lady Macbeth, summoning spirits to take her milk for gall, goads her
tempted thane to "jump the life to come."
Banquo:
The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray 's
In deepest consequence.
From the earliest carvings of Romanesque,
12)
12a)
Hieronymus Bosch, 1500-02, Good and Evil Angels, detail of the Haywain,
Prado, Madrid; + V closer details
Same, entire Triptych (video: center panel only, from V12a)
to 1500 Bosch and beyond, the reappearing pair of Good Angel and Bad from the scaffold
of God and the scaffolds of World, Flesh, and Belial attend Mankind in The Castle of
Perseverance. Even Marlowe's Faustus sits in his study between the same prompters:
Good:
Faustus, repent, yet God wil pitty thee...
and the Evill:
Ay, but Faustus never shal repent.
In Shakespeare the Medieval ground lies most exposed in the early Histories —
Hastings:
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
O momentary grace of mortal men,
Which we more hunt for than the grace of God!
Who builds his hope in air of your good looks
Lives like a drunken sailor on a mast.
Ready, with every nod to tumble down
Into the fatal bowels of the deep.
13) El Greco, 1578, Adoration of the Holy Name, The Escorial, Spain
13a) Same, detail lower right (while video shows from 13: first, upper half, then
two lower details, then the whole); 13a is from El Grecol's Sketch, National
Gal.lery, London.
Music:
Pomponio Nenna, c. 1610(?), Tenebrae, Responsoria, Nonesuch
H-71277
In that ghostly forehall to the Day of Wrath (chromatic now with all Pomponio
Nenna shared with Gesualdo), El Greco's Philip II (though cushioned) prays to the Holy
Name, over the Leviathan mouth of hell. Mad Tom:
Nero is an angler in the lake of darkness. Pray, innocent, and beware
the foul fiend.
For both Lear and Gloucester the turning point is prayer:
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are...
...I have ta'en
Too little care of this!
and:
Heavens, deal so still,
Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man
...feel your power quickly.
So distribution should undo excess,
And each man have enough.
Charity itself become Utopian!
14)
14a)
El Greco, c. 1610, Laocoön, National Gallery, Washington D.C. (CGB '75);
+ V upper left detail
Same, Laocoön, center detail (CGB '75); video returns first to 14
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Under a conscious pagan surface of plural gods and daemonic nature —
(skip in Nenna to "Exclamans")
As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport —
and far transcending the opposite tragic truth, the wheel of retributive justice —
The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us —
Lear more than any other play builds a Christian mystery of love out of humbled pride:
Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither;
Ripeness is all.
From the same time, El Greco's Laocoön turns the Homeric fable and recovered
Hellenistic carving to a sacred involvement of the human family in the toils of the godsnake.
15)
Same, closer detail of Laocoön (CGB '75); with video details (also from V15a
and 14)
Gloucester:
Let me kiss that hand —
Lear:
Let me wipe it first, it smells of mortality.
But can El Greco's fevered art rise with Lear through Christ and the woman taken in
adultery:
Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand;
Why dost thou lash that whore?
to the old king's waking in Cordelia's care?:
(close Nenna)
Do not laugh at me,
For as I am a man, I think this lady
To be my child Cordelia... Pray you now,
Forget and forgive; I am old and foolish.
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
16)
16a)
Symbolic History
Jacob de Gehyn II, 1603, Devil Sowing Tares, pen and ink, Staatl. Mus.,
Berlin
Bertoia Parmese, 1570-72, Judgment of Paris, detail, National Gallery,
Washington D.C. (CGB '75)
On Shakespeare's stage, as in any perspective field by his contemporary Jacob de
Gheyn, the devil may be sowing symbolic tares. Where is the cave in Macbeth called
Acheron? is Hamlet mad or sane? how does the 24 hour action of Othello go with the
time implied: "What keep a week away, a month"; "The deed of shame with him a
thousand times committed" — in 24 hours? If these flights rest on Medieval
earthlessness, they show such mastery of earth's dimensions as the spatial foreshortenings
of Tintoretto and the Mannerists. Where the causal mingles with the symbolic, the
dramatic why broods "yet hanging in the stars."
17)
English late 13th cent., Harlech Castle, Wales; first, V detail
Music:
13th cent., In Seculum Artifex, "Jolly Minstrels," VICS-10049
The history Shakespeare chronicles begins with King John, 1200, a time when
even the secular held the chivalric distance of sacred surrender. If the crisis of tragedy in
Shakespeare is a crisis in Christendom, what it requires (over the Judgment ground) is a
world-affirming grandeur as far from Harlech Castle as is 13th-century song from chordal
pomp or the mighty line.
(fade In Seculum)
Va18)
Jacobean, 1607-11 (Robert Lyminge), Hatfield House, South Front (detail),
near London (slide show substitutes a18, Hardwick Hall, 1590-94, South
Front)
Same, Hatfield, interior, The Long Gallery
Again, a18, Hatfield exterior, wider view
Vb18)
18)
Music:
William Byrd, c. 1600(?), In Nomine à 5, (viols, Jaye) Turnabout,
TV 34017
Whereas in the history plays, everything from Constance Plantagenet —
Here I and sorrows sit,
Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it —
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
to the fall of Wolsey —
I have ventured,
Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,
This many summers in a sea of glory —
might be enacted in the Jacobean courtyard of Hatfield House to the swelling harmonies
of a Byrd In Nomine.
(fade Byrd)
19)
Limbourg Brothers, 1413-16, February, Tres Riches Heures, Chantilly;
+ V details
Yet for all his vastness, Shakespeare is happy heir to the naive vitalities of Gothic:
this Limbourg winter, the birds, the drifted road, the woman blowing her nails:
When icicles hang by the wall,
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipped and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
Tu-whit, tu-who,
A merry note.
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
20)
Flemish MS, c. 1510, February, Grimani Breviary, St. Mark's Library,
Venice; + V detail
The Grimani variation moves a hundred years toward the fulness of Shakespeare's
nature and clowns:
When all aloud the wind doth blow,
And coughing drowns the parson's saw,
And birds sit brooding in the snow,
And Marian's nose looks red and raw.
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
Tu-whit, tu-who,
A merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
By Shakespeare's birth that Gothic observation was opening
21)
21a)
21b)
P. Brueghel, 1565, Hunters in the Snow, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna
(CGB '59)
Same, detail of bird and mountains, upper right
Same, detail of hunters, lower left (CGB '59)
to the recess of Brueghel, the foreground hill dropping to a valley under snow peaks and
the bird's wing, a funnel of force into which we, like the hunters, are drawn.
So the winter of Gawain and the Green Knight, 1390 —
When clear cold water, shed from the clouds,
Froze before it could fall to the fallow earth...
And clattering from the crest the running stream
Hung over his head in hard icy-ikkles —
broadens through Douglas, 1510 (CGB):
Over crags and dark brows of the broken rocks
Hung long icicles like giant hoary locks...
And the wild geese also were clacking and crying,
In the dark night above the city flying;
through Sackville's 1563 Induction,
The naked twigs were shivering all for cold,
And Spenser's Winter,
Chattering his teeth…
Whil'st on his hoary beard his breath did freeze,
to Shakespeare's:
...the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter's wind...
22)
P. Brueghel, 1568, Peasant Dance, detail of piper, Kunsthistoriches, Museum,
Wien; video: first, central detail from the whole, see Va22
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
All over Europe, as the Renaissance deepens, the features of Shakespeare's world
take form: folk life in Brueghel gaining in volume, as from mystery plays and farces,
through Rabelais, toward Sancho Panza, Bottom, Dogberry:
Come hither neighbor Seacoal… You are thought here to be the most
senseless and fit man for the constable of the watch. Therefore bear
you the lantern. This is your charge. You shall comprehend all
vagrom men...
23)
23a)
23b)
23c)
Elsheimer, 1609, Night Flight to Egypt, whole, Alte Pinakothek, München
Same, Night Flight, detail of sky (cf. Giants 80; while V takes a detail from
23)
Rubens, 1637-40, Landscape by Moonlight, Courtauld Institute; + V detail
Again 23, Elsheimer, Night Flight, cropped (CGB '59)
Music:
Dowland 1612. From Silent Night, close, (Deller) SRV-306 SD
On the Keplerian divide of 1600, German Elsheimer turns nature to an infinite
starry dark, a Sidereal Messenger, as rich and Italianate as the chromatics of Dowland's
"From Silent Night".
Hard to realize, in the nocturnal glory of the Juliet balcony scene:
But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?
that the only scene-painting is in Romeo's vow:
by yonder blessed moon...
That tips with silver all these fruit tree tops.
A description slightly extended in The Merchant of Venice:
The moon shines bright. In such a night as this,
When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees,
And they did make no noise...
and
Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.
June 1996
1600: The Tragic Divide
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12
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24)
Symbolic History
Mantegna, 1474(?), Gonzaga Court, Ducal Palace, Mantua; first, V detail
To nature must be added the Renaissance court, jester (here dwarf) and all. It
begins, with Mantegna's 1474 fresco of the Gonzagas, to have the right Twelfth-Night
look, the combined retinue, if Duke Orsino had married the Countess Olivia.
a25)
25)
Titian, 1532, Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici, Palazzo Pitti
Moretto da Brescia, c. 1525(?), "Alas I desire too much," National Gallery,
London
V25a) Veronese (1553-4) Juno pours gold on Venice, Doge's Palace, Venice (CGB '59)
The individual Claudios and Benedicks first perfect the airs in which even the
19th century conceived them, when the followers of Giorgione — Titian, Lotto, Moretto
— painted such portraits as this inscribed: "Alas, I desire too much." Not only The
Merchant of Venice, where Portia is the golden fleece and everything hinges on gold, not
only Shakespeare, but the whole northern late Renaissance is artfully Venetian.
26)
P. Pourbus, c. 1580(?), Court in a Park, Wallace Collection, London;
with V details
Music:
Morley, 1595, Now is the month of Maying, Westminster XWN
18764
Like a Morley "fa-la-la," Pieter Pourbus blends north and south in this mannered
banquet in a park, 1581, as if the jester Touchstone had lured all the "country copulatives"
to an As You Like It hymen, by Jaques’ "ducdame" burden — an "invocation to call fools
into a circle."
(cut Morley)
a27)
27)
27a)
27b)
N. Hilliard, 1572, Man aged 24, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Hilliard, c. 1590(?), George Clifford, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich;
+ V detail
Hilliard, 1588, "Shakespeare as Mercury," Victoria and Albert Museum,
London
Hilliard, c. 1585, Sir Walter Raleigh, miniature, National Portrait Gallery,
London
Music:
June 1996
William Byrd, c. 1590(?), Wolsey's Wilde. Landowska, G-AD 1014
(78)
1600: The Tragic Divide
13
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Symbolic History
In England the same blend produces the best match for the airier moods of
Shakespeare. Hilliard expresses as finely as anyone the high Platonic idealism which
lingers somehow from the Lady of the Unicorn and the Offering of the Heart:
Romeo:
I dreamt my lady came and found me dead —
Strange dream that gives a dead man leave to think,
And breathed such life with kisses in my lips,
That I revived and was an emperor.
(Romeo and Juliet, V, i)
(fade Wolsey's Wilde)
If only we could find (like a chest of old viols) actors so clean ("speak the speech...
trippingly... beget a temperance that may give it smoothness"), perhaps even Hamlet
could be restored to the veiled nuance of consort-tone, with which the revival of early
instruments has blessed the harmonies of Byrd.
28)
28a)
28b)
English, c. 1590, Tomb of The Good Earl of Warwick, St. Mary's, Warwick
English Tomb Effigies, c. 1576, Monument to Alex Denton, d. 1576, and his
first wife Anne, died in childbirth, 1566, Hereford Cathedral, South Transept
(CGB '84)
Again 28, Earl of Warwick tomb, detail
Music:
William Byrd, c. 1590(?), Earl of Salisbury Pavan, viols, G-DB 2416
(78)
In death as in life a dignity, ultimate containment of the tragic storm:
O here
Will I set up my everlasting rest;
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh...
The agony of Marlowe's Faustus returns to the choral ground:
Cut is the branch that might have growne full straight,
And burned is Apollowes Laurel bough...
Even in Lear a moral order survives in which the gored state can be maintained. Like this
effigy of Warwick, Wolsey carries nobility into the grave.
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Symbolic History
I feel within me
A peace above all earthly dignities,
A still and quiet conscience...
29)
29a)
Hilliard, c. 1590(?), Man leaned against a tree, Victoria and Albert Museum,
London; + V detail
Spanish, 1486, Tomb of Don Martin Vasquez de Arce "el Doncel," Siguenze
Cathedral; + V detail
It is surely a gift of Shakespeare's "blessed plot, this realm, this England," that the
dainty groupings of Rosalind and Orlando, Viola, Feste, Orsino —
If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it...
That strain again — it had a dying fall —
could revive, after Lear, in the romance deepening of The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline:
Fear no more the heat o' th' sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages:
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone and ta'en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
30)
30a)
(close Salisbury Pavan)
El Greco, 1594-1604, Female Portrait, Johnson Collection, Museum,
Philadelphia
Double: [A] Botticelli, 1482, Birth of Venus, detail of head, Uffizi, Florence;
and [B] attributed to El Greco, now to Sofanisba Anguissola c. 1585, Woman
with Ermine, Stirling, etc., Museum, Glasgow
Yet also in that island the wormwood of El Greco's "La Desilusionada" had fallen.
The lightly balanced joy of the early comedies slides into a vortex of evil; the clowns
thicken to the bawd and pander Pompey Bum: "Does your worship mean to geld and
splay all the youth of the city?" Troilus, "The argument of a cuckold and a whore,"
bequeaths us nothing but Pandarus' diseases. As if Botticelli's Venus had been infected
with such a brand as
takes off the rose
From the fair forehead of an innocent love,
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Symbolic History
And sets a blister there...
a31)
Caravaggio, 1607-08, Beheading of St. John the Baptist, Malta (video: left
group only)
Same, detail, head of old woman
Same, closer detail of left group
Double: [A] Caravaggio, 1586-98, head of the Medusa, Uffizi, Florence;
and [B] El Greco, 1590-1600, Crucifixion, detail, Angel and Magdalen,
Prado, Madrid (1996: this has been replaced in the slide show and video by
31a, Double: [A] Caravaggio, 1600, Fleeing youth from Martyrdom of St.
Matthew, S. Luigi dei Francese, Rome; and [B] El Greco, 1605-10, Stunned
guards from Resurrection, Prado, Madrid)
b31)
31)
V31a)
Yet we search in vain for a specific inception of what has been called the
"Baroque disillusionment" — however the more than Othello rhetoric of dark —
O heavy hour!
Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse
Of sun and moon, and that th'afrighted globe
Did yawn at alteration —
fan out from Caravaggio's 1600 Rome and Naples. Earth's betrayal is ubiquitous: it fell
on Abelard, Petrarch, Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Spenser, as on Jonson and Donne:
"all in fragments, all coherence gone." The pain of Fulke Greville's
If nature did not take delight in blood,
She would have found more easy ways to good,
appears in Shakespeare's earliest tragedy — and the least resolved — Titus Andronicus:
O why should nature build so foul a den,
Unless the gods delight in tragedies?
What changes, even with pain, is the style — Caravaggio's Tenebrist weight, against the
space-dissolving whirls of El Greco. Is Shakespeare affined to both?
32)
Michelangelo, 1492, Battle of Centaurs, Casa Buonorotti, Florence;
+ V detail
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Symbolic History
The Florentine embodiment had set the terms for the crisis of 1600. In
Michelangelo's beginnings, 1492, year of Lorenzo il Magnifico's death and Columbus'
discovery, power wars on itself. heightened and consumed. The phases of cathartic pain
— Hybris, Dikê, Soteria — swell toward an incarnate Trinity: Hegel's Fathering Idea,
alienating Passion, synthesis as Comforter; for Blake the Innocence, dire Experience,
Renewal of prophetic history.
33)
Michelangelo, 1508-12, Adam Created, detail, Sistine ceiling, Vatican
The dawn hope Michelangelo drew from that Florence: Pico's human wonder,
man lifting himself on the wings of choice beyond the stars. While Shakespeare's early
rapture is Platonic love, transplanted from the same humanist ground:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments.
34)
Michelangelo, 1530-33(?), "Young Giant" (1st Captive), Accademia, Florence;
+ V detail
But Michelangelo's liberation strikes on a rock of impossibility as hard as any in
Shakespeare:
Down, down I come, like glistering Phaeton,
Wanting the manage of unruly jades...
Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence...
He that hath suffered this disordered spring
Hath now himself met with the fall of leaf...
a35)
35)
Michelangelo, 1542-50, Conversion of Paul, Pauline Chapel, Vatican
Same, detail of Paul
Pathos and glory fuse: Michelangelo's Paul thrown down and struck blind by the
lightning of God. So Gloucester's reversal in Lear: "I stumbled when I saw... our mere
defects/ Prove our commodities." His dying reunion with Edgar, "His flawed heart...
burst smilingly," is the clue to Lear's immortal insight. as he dies, that Cordelia is coming
to life: "Look on her, look, her lips,/ Look there, look there." "Upon such sacrifices... the
gods themselves throw incense."
June 1996
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36)
36a)
Symbolic History
Michelangelo, 1542-64, Rondanini Pieta, Castello Sforzesco, Milan;
first, V detail of Mary's head from 36a
Same, upper detail
Music:
Vicentino, 1567, Heu mihi, opening, Vanguard. HM - 34 SD
Though it is in his last broken Pieta, from the time when Vicentino first rounded
the chromatic sea, that Michelangelo went beyond what any other artist, in any other
image, has ever made of tragedy:
No, no, no, no; come let's away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness...
And we'll wear out
In a walled prison, pacts and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by th' moon...
a37)
37)
(fade Vicentino)
Michelangelo, c. 1539, Brutus, whole bust, National Museum (Bargello),
Florence (for this color whole, the video uses Va37, a black-and-white detail
of the face)
Same, Brutus, a black-and-white view of the shoulder and full face
What broke the Rondanini Pieta, applied an infinite torque, even to revived
antiquity. Like Michelangelo's Brutus, Shakespeare's Romans have a flawed grandeur
unknown to the pagan past. North's Plutarch:
Antonius spake... Of all them that had slain Caesar. there was none
but Brutus only that was moved to do it, as thinking the act
commendable of itself... the other conspirators... for some private...
envy...
against Shakespeare:
This was the noblest Roman of them all.
All the conspirators save only he
Did that they did, in envy of great Caesar;
He only, in a general honest thought,
And common good to all, made one of them.
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Symbolic History
His life was gentle, and the elements
So mixed in him,
38)
Rembrandt, 1661, Conspiracy of Julius Civilis, National Museum, Stockholm;
first, a video detail, from Va38
that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, this was a man.
Only the great can parallel the great. The next depicted conspiracy of such
magnitude comes from as far after Shakespeare as Michelangelo was before him — and
in the deepened formal contrasts of Huyghens’ light and shade — it is Rembrandt's
mutilated Oath of Julius Civilis (Batavians, in this case, against Rome).
39)
Roman late Republican, c. 35 B.C., Bust of Mark Antony, Museum,
Narbonne
But Antony is the Roman whom Shakespeare most titanically reshapes. Set this
Republican bust of him against Cleopatra's praise:
His legs bestrid the ocean, his reared arm
Crested the world...
or Antony's going off:
Sometime we see a cloud that's dragonish,
A vapour sometime, like a bear or lion...
They are black vesper's pageants...
thy captain is
Even such a body...
40)
40a)
Double: [A] Roman c. 20-10 B.C., Livia(?) (or Octavia?), Copenhagen; and
[B] Graeco Roman (Africa) c. 40 B.C.(?), head of Cleopatra, Cherchel, Algeria
(video also shows 40A singly)
Single 40B, again Cleopatra
This matron on the left — Octavia, or her sister, Augustus' Livia — fits
Enobarbus' description: "Octavia is of a holy, cold, and still conversation." (Menas)
"Who would not have his wife so?" (Enobarbus) "Not he that himself is not so; which is
Mark Antony... "He will to his Egyptian dish again..." Against the female policy of
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Symbolic History
Rome, this Hellenized Cleopatra (right), as ideal as sensuous, might give a base for
Shakespeare's soaring: "Age cannot wither her." But for the fatal extravagance of their
love — "The crown o' th' earth doth melt... O withered is the garland of the war" — for
images of the sensuous swoon and lethal rapture, "full-drawn, ascendant, like the word
expire"
a41)
b41)
41)
Michelangelo, 1520-34, Night, from the Medici Tombs, Florence (detail of
face from front and below; while video shows profile detail of Va41)
Same, Night, frontal view of head and torso; while video, Vb41, shows the
stretched-out body
Same, Night, profile, vertical of head, arm, breast; from which video takes a
close up, then a frontal head and body from V41a, returning to a profile and
breast of 41)
(Wilbye's "Draw on Sweet Night") —
Music:
Wilbye, 1609, "Draw on Sweet Night," (Deller) Quintessence PMC7143
where can we turn but to Michelangelo — the sleeping Night for which he wrote:
Caro m’ é ‘l sonno...
Sleep is dear to me, and better to be stone...
Therefore do not wake me; alas, speak low —
(CGB)
Pero non mi destar, deh: parla basso! —
a carving we can seriously contemplate, even as we read of Cleopatra’s “dateless bargain
to engrossing death”:
(fade Wilbye)
Give me my robe, put on my crown, I have
Immortal longings in me. Now no more
The juice of Egypt's grape shall moist this lip.
Yare, yare, good Iras; quick. Methinks I hear Antony call...
I am fire and air; my other elements
I give to baser life...
— (O eastern star!)
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Symbolic History
Peace, peace.
Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,
That sucks the nurse asleep?
— (O break! O break!)
As sweet as balm. as soft as air, as gentle —
O Antony!
42)
Titian, 1538, Venus of Urbino Uffizi, Florence; + V detail (note alternates:
CGB '59 slide, with gold frame, and without, V42)
Titian, as different from Michelangelo as Venice from Florence, runs a similar
threefold course, however richly its phases overlap. He begins with sensuous delight.
Though Juliet, Portia, and the rest do not appear on stage in so frank a pose as this,
Shakespeare shows as much in the double-play which constitutes his bawdry:
What, with my tongue in your tail? Nay come again
Good Kate...
We shall ne'er win at that sport, and stake down.
O that she were
An open et cetera, thou a poperin pear.
I would I were thy bird. —
Sweet, so would I;
Yet I should kill thee with much cherishing.
43)
Titian, 1570-76, Tarquin and Lucrece, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna
Titian's later life is a deepening involvement in that tragic century. By 1570 his
Tarquin and Lucrezia, in shade and flaming impasto, has more of Othello than of
Shakespeare's mannered Rape of Lucrece:
Yield to my love; if not, enforced hate,
Instead of love's coy touch shall rudely tear thee...
44)
Titian, c. 1570 ff., Shepherd and Nymph, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna
(CGB '59)
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Symbolic History
But a third phase is implicit in those post-tragic works where primordial and
heroic forms loom through a brushwork like incandescent passionate flakes. In one of the
last and greatest of his pictures, Titian returns to the Arcadia of his youth, as if to show,
with Cervantes in Part II of Don Quixote, the cost of a profound well-being. This
pastoral,
2nd 43)
Tarquin and Lucrece, detail
with the Lucrece of the same time, might form a Winter's-Tale pair: from jealous rigor:
if powers divine
Behold our human actions, as they do,
I doubt not then, but innocence shall make
False accusation blush, and tyranny
Tremble at patience...
Look down,
And see what death is doing —
2nd 44)
Shepherd and Nymph, detail (CGB '59)
to the recreated Enna of a shearing feast:
O Proserpina,
For the flowers now, that frighted thou let'st fall
From Dis's wagon: daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty...
You gods, look down,
And from your sacred vials pour your graces
Upon my daughter's head.
45)
Pol de Limbourg, 1413-16, August, Tres Riches Heures, Chantilly (video:
lower detail only)
In the brittle poignance of Gothic there was no room for that shadowed
epithalamium of the conscious heart. What Pericles calls "the shores of mortality" had
not been widened for its "great sea of joys". Between the "naked villainy" and "holy writ"
of Richard III, a thin soil, vernal with flowers, brightens the rock of our wretchedness.
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
a46)
46)
Symbolic History
Master of the Rohan Hours, c. 1418-20, Death and Judgment, Bibl. Nat.,
Paris, details of corpse, to which video adds detail of God and whole (Va46)
Double: [A] again, a46, Rohan Master's Death and Judgment; and [B]
Holbein (Hans the Younger), c. 1525, Dance of Death, woodcuts, The Old
Woman #19 (video replaces the double with a detail of B, the Holbein)
The happiness, which in early Shakespeare remains inconsequent — "Lord what
fools these mortals be" — yields, in 1400 miniatures and poems, at the slightest erosion,
to the old bleached skull:
The lif of this world
Is reuled with wynd,
Wepinge, derknesse,
And steriinge;
With wind we blomen,
With wind we lassun;
With weopinge we comen,
With weopinge we passun.
With steriinge we begynnen,
With steriinge we enden;
With drede we dwellen,
With drede we wenden.
The whole age of faith had voiced that lean tragic ground, yet could not rise to the proud
forms of tragedy.
Although from first-Gothic to Chaucer, from this Rohan Hours page to Dürer and
Holbein, the quickening life pulse sharpens a cadaver-dance and death's head
contemplation —
a47)
47)
47a)
Durer, 1521, St. Jerome, Museum Nat. de Arte Antiga, Lisbon
H. Golzius, 1614, "Quis evadit, nemo", drawing, Pierpont Morgan, New York
City; + V details
Giorgione, 1505-10, Sleeping Venus, detail, Gallery, Dresden
Music:
Gibbons, 1618, close "Behold thou hast made..." (Deller) VICS1551
it is only in the time of Shakespeare (of the verse anthems of Byrd or of this Gibbons),
when the romance of late-Renaissance has gauded the doublet and plumed the cap,
June 1996
1600: The Tragic Divide
23
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
plumped lip and cheek and brightened the eyes of mortality, that the sun of glory, as in
this Golzius, lures the tragic tulip from the skull:
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excesse,
Eat up thy charge?
Only then that Hamlet — as the gravedigger singing
In youth when I did love, did love,
Methought it was very sweet,
throws up the skull of Yorick, "a fellow of infinite Jest," at whose lips the child-prince
had hung ("Where be your gibes now? Your gambols?") — can weigh loss against an
As-You-Like-It dawn, when he had courted the fair Ophelia in ideal love, before the
Ghost walked or flesh was so far sullied:
But look, the morn in russet mantle clad,
Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill.
a48)
48)
48a)
El Greco, 1584-1610(?), St. Gerome as Cardinal, Museum Bonnat, Bayonne
Elizabethan, c. 1570(?), Pleated picture, Mary Stuart and a skull (two views),
National Portrait Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh
Jacob de Geyn II, c. 1600(?), Seated Gypsy(?), Prof. Altena, Amsterdam
Of course tragedy is reared on the old pessimism of earth. But what exploits of
power have wrought, from Dark Age Alcuin's "vermibus atque cibus", Hotspur's fall of
pride: "For worms, brave Percy. Fare thee well, great heart." So in this pleated picture,
its corrugations viewed from left and right: Mary Queen of Scots and a death's head —
(Shakespeare)
Like perspectives, which rightly gazed upon
Show nothing but confusion; eyed awry,
Distinguish form...
Thus Macbeth meteors to the tragic ground:
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
49)
(end Gibbons)
H. Eworth, English 1591 (copying from 1550), Sir John Lutrell, Dunster
Castle, Somerset; first, a video detail (cf. V49)
If contempt of the world is one pole of the tragic tension, man's belief in its worth
is the other. An age of great tragedy takes its tone from that stretch. Sir John Lutrell
strides the ocean under the laurel favor of the gods, one of those Elizabethans a
contemporary described: "free, stout, haulte, prodigall of life and blood."
50)
50a)
Tintoretto, c. 1550(?), Sebastiano Veniero, Prado, Madrid
Tintoretto (attr.), c. 1560(?), Portrait of a Sculptor, Alte Pinakothek, Munich
(CGB '59)
From Italy north runs a wave of self-validating pride: Tintoretto's Venetians;
Marlowe's aspirers, robed in the mighty line — Tamburlaine:
Nature that fram'd us of foure Elements,
Warring within our breasts for regiment,
Doth teach us all to have aspyring minds...
Still climbing after knowledge infinite...
a51)
51)
Andrea del Sarto, 1527, St. Michael Weighing Souls, Predella panel, Four
Saints' Altar, Uffizi, Florence; + V detail
Titian, 1545, Portrait of Pietro Aretino, Pitti Palace, Florence; + V detail
But the titan will — "Here, Faustus. try thy braines to gaine a deitie" — strikes on
the Satanic compact:
Adders and Serpents, let me breathe a while:
Ugly hell gape not, come not Lucifer.
Ile burne my bookes, ah Mephastophilis.
(Exeunt with him.)
Titian's Aretino, "poison-flower of the Renaissance," fits Jonson's Volpone, Shakespeare's
fallen Angelo:
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Symbolic History
But man, proud man, Dressed in a little brief
authority, Most ignorant of what he's most assured, His glassy essence,
like an angry ape, Plays such fantastic tricks before High Heaven
As make the angels weep.
Va52)
Hilliard, c. 1600(?), George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, Nelson Gallery,
Atkins Museum, Kansas City
Titian, c. 1570, Punishment of Marsyas, Mus. Naz, Kromeriz, Czech.
Michelangelo, 1555-64, Rondanini Pieta, Milan (video takes a detail
from 36, above)
Tintoretto, 1587, Self-Portrait, Louvre, Paris; + V detail
b52)
c52)
52)
There lies the crux of tragedy: man, on the old morality stage, blown to such
"fantastical puff-paste":
It will come. Humanity must perforce prey on itself, Like monsters of
the deep.
What such currents have washed over they reduce to scoured rock, bones of the once
assertive. But there remains a shattered Pieta, gathering incredible tenderness in its ruin:
"No cause, no cause"; or some last death mask, as of Gloucester or Lear, inalienably
noble — Tintoretto's final self-portrait, pride divinely broken and affirmed, reaching
beyond itself with matchless power:
O sun,
Burn the great sphere thou mov'st in. Darkling stand
The varying shore o' the world...
53)
English (Droeshout), pub. 1623, First Folio engraving of Shakespeare;
+ V detail
Laughable, in the flash of Promethean genius and thunder of tragic words, to turn
back the pages to the quiet impersonal mask of the folio engraving. Beyond the giants of
the Continent forged in the furnace of spiritual war, could the sweet swan of Avon, in the
easy success of his investments and art, opening trim lips to the curse and blessing of all
that lives —
Thou must be patient; we came crying hither.
Thou know'st, the first time that we smell the air
We wawl and cry... —
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54)
54a)
54b)
54c)
Symbolic History
Double: [A] Hilliard, c. 1590, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, National
Portrait Gallery, London; and [B] Rembrandt, 1629, Self, Dean Cavat
Collection, London
Again, Hilliard's Dudley, the single A of 54
Again, Hilliard and Rembrandt, the Double 54
Again, Rembrandt, Self, the single B of 54
mediate the deepening of humanity and art, as from Hilliard about 1590 (left), with
Morley —
Music:
Morley, 1600, "It was a lover and his lass, (Cuenod) Westminster
WL5085
a realm of Puckish caprice and changing loyalties,
And those things do best please me That befall preposterously,
where moral questions hardly arise, and happy endings can grace the discomfiture of testy
Egeus, Malvolio, even of Shylock's malice (fade Morley) — to Rembrandt, 1628 (right),
with Schein —
Music:
J.H. Schein, 1623, from Die mit Tränen säen, near start, MHS
4288
over the moral divide, so causally aware, that reconciliation is hard to come by, must be
paid for at a commensurate, almost at a tragic price:
Methought the billows spoke, and told me of it;
The winds did sing it to me; and the thunder That deep and dreadful
organ-pipe, pronounced
The name of Prosper...
(fade Schein)
Only fifteen years separate that Tempest utterance, which basses the world's
trespass, punishes, and rewards,
55)
School of Parmagianino, c. 1560(?), Allegorical Landscape, detail, National
Gallery, Washington, D.C. (CGB '75); + V detail and return to the whole
from the tetrameter yearning of Oberon and Titania:
June 1996
1600: The Tragic Divide
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Then my Queen, in silence sad, Trip we after the night's shade. We the
globe can compass soon, Swifter than the wandering moon. — Come
my lord, and in our flight, Tell me how it came this night, That I
sleeping here was found, With these mortals on the ground.
As if from Platonic withdrawal, all things earthly "Like far-off mountains turned into
clouds" (this 16th-century transreal dance of spirits), weightless as the astronomy of
angelically guided spheres,
56)
56a)
56b)
Rubens, c. 1630, Feast of Venus, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna (CGB
'59); + V detail
English Tapestry, 1611, detail from Four Seasons, Hatfield House
Again 56, Rubens' Feast of Venus
we rode the voluminous and life-affirming masque of Rubens' Feast of Venus toward the
astronomy of Newton's gravitating masses. So Shakespeare:
You nymphs called Naiads of the windring brooks,
With your sedged crowns and ever-harmless looks,
Leave your crisp channels... You sunburnt sicklemen of August weary,
Come hither from the furrow, and be merry...
Though what we need is not simply a dance of nymphs and reapers, but the whole
"majestic vision" of The Tempest.
57)
Jacob de Gheyn II, c. 1600(?), Witches' Kitchen, Staatliches Museum, Berlin
(video: three details only, from left to right)
Between the two, lies the nightmare passage of De Gheyn and Macbeth, energized
out of Bosch's demonic seizure:
Fair is foul, and foul is fair; Hover through the fog and filthy air...
Round about the caldron go; In the poisoned entrails throw. Toad, that
under cold stone Days and nights has thirty-one Sweltered venom
sleeping got, Boil thou first i' th' charmed pot... Finger of birthstrangled babe, Ditch-delivered by a drab... Double, double, toil and
trouble; Fire burn and caldron bubble...
58)
58a)
Jacob de Gheyn II, c. 1600(?), Sleeping Nude, A. Ulrich Mus., Brunswick
Spranger, c. 1600(?), Venus and Adonis, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
In De Gheyn that souring fell also on flesh, Titian's voluptuous ideal loaded with
"the strong'st suggestion our worser Genius can": "It is not words that shakes me thus —
pish! — noses, ears and lips." What wrenches love, from Donne ("Spermatique issue of
ripe menstruous boils") to Swift ("Oh Celia, Celia, Celia shits!") rages in the tragedies:
The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to't With a more riotous
appetite...
59)
Jacob de Gheyn II, c. 1600(?), Witch and Familiar on a Monster, Christ
Church, Oxford; + V detail
As in de Gheyn's witch visions, the pure offering of the heart, that "silly sooth" of
the "old age," becomes the imposthume of Hamlet's fever:
Nay, but to live In the rank sweat of an
enseamed bed, Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty.
The new fulness of flesh heightens the task, with the need of vindication. Donne's
"dialogue of one" from the "Ecstasy" of his own love and marriage: "To our bodies turn
we then,"
60)
Rembrandt, 1635, Joseph and Potiphar's Wife, etching, Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam; + V detail and return to the whole
"Else a great prince in prison lies," will not answer for Milton's Fall or Rembrandt's wife
of Potiphar: (Leontes)
No barricado for a belly. Know't; It will let in and out the enemy With
bag and baggage.
(and Iago)
Didst thou not see her paddle with the palm of his hand?... Lechery...
61)
Rembrandt, 1668, Jewish Bride, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (CGB '59);
+ V detail
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
But it was not true of Hermione, nor of Desdemona. The muddy imputation falls
off under the death-cadence of an old song: "sing, willow, willow, willow." Rembrandt,
too, in one of his last works, as if looking back, "dallying with the innocence of love,"
reconstitutes, in embodied, earth-shadowed harmonies, that blessedness of the soul:
As I hope For quiet days, fair issue, and long
life, With such love as 'tis now...
62)
Hilliard, 1572, Elizabeth I, National Portrait Gallery, London; + V detail
Our pictures have ranged over Europe; yet even in Shakespeare's island, where art
after the Reformation lagged, we might trace the threefold transformation. The ideal
phase fares best. Hilliard's Elizabeth has the refinement of Spenser's:
Tell me. have ye seene her angelick face,
Like Phoebe fayre?
Her heavenly haveour, her princely grace
can
you
well
compare? The Redde rose medled with the White yfere, In either
cheeke depeincten lively chere.
Her modest eye,
Her
Maiestie, Where have you seene the like, but there?
63)
63a)
Isaac Oliver, c. 1600(?), Nymphs and Satyrs, drawing, Royal Collection,
England
Same, Nymphs, etc., center detail; while video takes two details from 63
The deepening comic bacchanal that runs from Titian to the compound mass of
Rubens pairs English Oliver with a wicked Wylbie madrigal on satyrs: "Fain wouldst
thou turn and yield them their delight."
Music:
64)
Wylbie, 1609, from "Fly not so swift", (Randoloh) Westminster L
5221
(fade)
Lagneau, c. 1600-10, Young Man in a Fur Cap, Beaux Arts, Lille;
first, video detail
While the
to-be" "pale cast
work is a man...
"gloire et rebut,"
June 1996
introspection which throws over many works of 1600 a "To-be-or-notof thought" (Lagneau's morbid youth) — Hamlet's "What a piece of
paragon of animals... quintessence of dust," suggesting Pascal's later
"Pride and garbage of the universe" —
1600: The Tragic Divide
30
�C.G. Bell
65)
Symbolic History
Hilliard, c. 1600(?), Man against Flames, Victoria and Albert Museum,
London
stretches the lightness of the English miniature in Hilliard's Man holding a Locket against
a Background of Flame:
The time is out of joint, O cursed spite, That ever I was born to put it
right... Look here upon this picture, and on this, The counterfeit
presentment of two brothers...
66)
Tintoretto, 1591-92, Christ on the Sea of Galilee, National Gallery,
Washington D.C. (the video omits this whole, going to 66a, detail)
Same, detail: Sea and Ship; + V closer detail
Preview close-up of 67, El Greco Landscape; then a video return to 66a
66a)
V66b)
Music:
Giovanni Gabrielli, c. 1610(?), Quem Vidistis (near close), Eng.
Decca SDD 363 (cf. London STS-15256)
Even the masterly assault on the physical universe, that superscript of light on
darkness, which Tintoretto passed (like a harpoon of St. Elmo's fire) to Cretan El Greco,
who bore it to Spain — while music built to the vast chromatic chords of Giovanni
Gabrielli, on which brasses blazon, voices leap and trill —
67)
El Greco, c. 1610, Toledo Landscape, detail, Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York City
El Greco, Laocöon, detail of background (taken from slide 14)
V67a)
such a storm as Lear was invoking:
Blow winds, and crack your cheeks. Rage, blow...
...all germenes spill at once
That makes ingrateful man —
68)
68a)
68b)
(fade Gabrielli)
Sir Nathaniel Bacon, c. 1600, Rocky Landscape, Ashmolean, Oxford
Sir Nathaniel Bacon, c. 1620, Self, from Gorhambury Collection, Earl of
Verulam
Closer view of 68, Bacon Landscape; first, video detail
June 1996
1600: The Tragic Divide
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
even that has a humble English cognate in a little landscape by the painter amateur,
Nathaniel Bacon. So too the musical daring of Italy spills over the north, mostly in
smaller forms — Weelkes, "O care":
Music:
a69)
69)
Weelkes, 1600, "O Care, thou wilt despatch me, opening, Decca
STS 15165 (fade)
Claude Lorrain, 1630's, Tiber above Rome, detail, British Museum, London
Same, Tiber, whole, watercolor
Music:
William Lawes, c. 1635(?), Sonata #8, opening, Arco ZRG 555
The storm has passed in the music of William Lawes.
What went into the 1600 vortex was the thousand year old doom of the world,
intensified by the new glory of that world condemned. What comes out is the causal
order of human command, the landscape of harmony, most luminous in Claude Lorrain.
70)
Inigo Jones, 1638, Scene for Luminalia, Chatsworth Estates
And here too, in English art, Inigo Jones' night scene from Luminalia, an ink-wash
randomly splashed, holds the chrysolite of the classical dream ("What seas, what
shores...")
The music of the spheres! List my Marina.
71)
Rubens, c. 1615-17, Shepherd with flock in woods, National Gallery, London
Such the volitional grandeur of the 17th century, in which Shakespeare died —
Rubens' early pictures entering London about the time Prospero took his leave of it:
Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves,
And ye that on the sands with printless foot Do chase the ebbing
Neptune, and do fly him When he comes back...
by whose aid — Weak masters though ye be —
72)
Rubens, c. 1620(?), Philemon and Baucis, storm detail, Kunsthistoriches
Museum, Wien (video uses V72, an older detail; replace?)
I have bedimmed The noontide sun,
called forth the mutinous winds,
And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault
June 1996
1600: The Tragic Divide
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Set roaring war. To the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt...
(Rubens in ten years to unleash his own tragic storm)
But this rough magic I here abjure.
a73)
73)
Rubens, 1635-37, Landscape with Rainbow, Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Rubens, c. 1638, Landscape with Shepherds and Flock, National Gallery,
London; + V detail of sunset
Music:
William Lawes, Sonato #8, 2nd Movement, Air, Arco ZRG 555
and when I have required Some heavenly
music — which even now I do —
To work mine end upon their senses that This airy charm is for, I'll
break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, And deeper than did ever plummet
sound I'll drown my book...
Rubens too issuing, in age, to the light-streaming landscape of recovery and
reconciliation.
(cut Lawes)
In The Winter's Tale the way to that sunlit pastoral is over the flap-dragoning sea:
a74)
74)
Rubens, c. 1624, The Storm, detail, Franz König Collection, Haarlem
Rubens, c. 1624(?), Shipwreck of Aeneas, Berlin-Dahlem Museum; + V details
I would you did but see how it chafes, how it rages, how it takes up the
shore...
And if the chromatic scale, as so many have said, is such a chaos and devouring gulf, it is
exactly over that ocean of formlessness that the ordered tonalities of major and minor had
to be sought. The defiance and victory of that voyage have ultimate expression in the
Chromatic Fantasy by Sweelinck, Dutch organist, who died in 1621. It builds, with
Rubens’ night storms, a peak of energy in all art.
Music:
Sweelinck, c. 1610-20(?), Chromatic Fantasy, opening and close,
SVBX-5316 (1)
June 1996
1600: The Tragic Divide
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�C.G. Bell
75)
76)
76b)
Symbolic History
Rubens, c. 1620-25(?), Philemon and Baucis Landscape, Kunsthistoriches
Museum, Vienna (CGB '59); with video details (one from 72)
Rubens, same, Philemon and Baucis, stream detail (CGB '59); + V details (as
V76a)
Same, Rubens' Philemon and Baucis, detail of drowned mother and child,
lower left (CGB '59)
(skip in music)
a77)
77)
77a)
Rubens, c. 1618, Battle of the Amazons, detail, Alte Pinakothek, Munich
(copy of CGB '59, Larger Declaration 35)
Rubens, c. 1628(?), Thunderstorm at night, Neuerburg Collection, Hamburg;
+ V detail
Again, Rubens' Storm, whole (cf. a74)
(end Sweelinck)
The probability matrix we likened at the start to a folded landscape of spirit looms
in its bewildering complex of dimensions. The vectors of all phases are at every moment
alive and working. Shakespeare, El Greco. Gesualdo, then Sweelinck and Rubens, seem
to have scaled the energy peak of the range.
a78)
b78)
78)
78a)
Jos de Momper, 1600, Vista from a Grotto, National Gallery, Washington
D.C. (CGB '75)
de Momper, c. 1600-1610(?), Mountain Landscape, detail, Alte Pinakothek,
Munich (CGB '59)
Same, Mountain Landscape, whole (CGB '59)
N. Hilliard, c. 1595, an unknown poet, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Music:
Gibbons, c. 1610(?), Fantasia "In nomine" à 5, opening, ARC 3052
But there were easier passes through the same divide, into the silvery landscape Momper
had brushed with Prospero's vision; as Gibbons filled the demi-paradise of English
houses with strains of proud melting — Baroque substance still lightened by Gothic
insubstantiality.
These our actors, As I foretold you, were all
spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air! And like the baseless
fabric of this vision The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit,
shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a
June 1996
1600: The Tragic Divide
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little
life Is rounded with a sleep...
(fade Gibbons)
The brave new world is
1st 79) Michelangelo, 1556-64, Rondanini Pieta, Sforzesco, Milan; here video
substitutes a detail from 3rd 79b (CGB '80)
humanized and sustained only by what it won from tragedy. In that miraculous infolding
of heart, by which Lear and Cordelia prepare for a restoration they do not live to enjoy, a
beatitude of earth is born of its own denial.
a80)
Titian, c. 1570, Madonna and Child, National Gallery, London (or Va80,
detail)
1st 80) Rembrandt, 1668, Jewish Bride, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (copy of 61, CGB
‘59); video: detail only
So substantial an Innocence, won from the lair of Experience, could not have
appeared in the earlier plays; it was an element unknown to the world, then being shaped
by the titans of 1600. For the arts are no less exploratory than science, open realms of
being, shoulder out time, forge truth.
In the sacred tenderness of the old king's waking —
Cordelia:
O you kind gods, Cure this breach in his abused nature, Th' untuned
and jarring senses, O wind up Of this child-changed father —
an earthly love (Rembrandt's saving ground)
2nd 79)
Again, Rondanini Pieta, detail: the faces, with Mary’s left shoulder; while
video shows an upper detail of 2nd 79a
2nd 79a) Same, frontal full-length color (so too the video)
is alchemized, as from the last pity of Michelangelo:
Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound Upon a wheel of fire, that mine
own tears Do scald like molten lead.
June 1996
1600: The Tragic Divide
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Let Monteverdi, at the close of his 5-voice "Zeffiro torna," sound that expansion
of possibility. By a storm-crossing of the chromatic sea (Donne's "new Philosophy calls
all in doubt"), we reach a harbor
2nd 80)
Again, Jewish Bride, figures cropped (CGB ‘59); video: closer detail of the
man only
of utopian tones. Donne: "No man is an Island, intire of itself; every man is a peece of
the Continent, a part of the maine." And Campanella: "The sun strives to burn up the
earth, not to produce plants and men, but God guides the battle to great ends."
Music:
Monteverdi, 1614. close of "Zeffiro torna," Cambridge CRS 1708
3rd 79) Again, Rondanini Pieta, view from the right of the whole curving statue
3rd 79a) Same, detail of the two faces; video of Mary’s only
3rd 79b) Same, from right, upper detail (CGB ‘80); since video previewed this slide
for its 1st 79, it returns here to a detail of that 1st 79 slide for its V3rd
79b
3rd 80) Again, Jewish Bride, detail of hands
(close Monteverdi)
As the Shepherd says in The Winter's Tale:
Thou mettest with things dying, I with things new born."
June 1996
1600: The Tragic Divide
36
�
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Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound
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Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series.
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37 pages
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1600 : The Tragic Divide, Symbolic History, Part 19
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Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010
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�9661 - 9691
�Dedication
From the Editor and Staff
This book is dedicated to the Class of 1996, whose graduation coincides with the 300th anniversary of St. John's
College.
Table of Contents
From the Editor.
President's Message
Dean's Message
Around Campus (I)
Tutors
Reality
Sports
Around Campus (n)
To our 300 years
Croquet, Waltz, Lola's
Around Campus (HI)
Seniors
Yearbook Staff.
Blank Page
3
4
5
6
12
32
34
42
66
72
78
82
112
113
We wanted this book to be more than a set of your pictures,
we tried to make it a beautiful present. Many changes were
made to fit the purpose.
First, the quality: fifty rolls of film were taken to establish a
higher share of quality photos; out of those only the very
best shots were selected. Fifteen color pages instead of the
usual eight were supplied (and the price of the book is still
$35.00!). Pictures of seniors: we really tried to represent the
graduating class in color and quality.
Every section was thoroughly designed. For the first time
both the President and Dean were ask to open the book.
Every senior (except those who refused) is represented in the
Senior Section. For the very first time every tutor is given
space in the book (again, except those who declined our
offer). We designed a chapter with professional writing and
archive photos to honor our history and tradition.
Cover, color and design, font, point size, end pages — all
were given thought and attention, and hours of work.
We sincerely hope you like it.
Note to underclassmen: we apologize for not giving you
enough attention. Your time will come very soon. Good luck.
Sincerely,
Dimitry Fedotov
Editor in Chief
�Farewell from the Dean
March, 1996
On May nineteenth of this year, at twothirty or so in the afternoon, you will
suddenly be transformed from enrolled
students to graduated alumni. The ceremony that works this magic is called
Commencement, a word that hides half
the truth, for if something great is in the
offing, something wonderful is also at an
end: four years in which you belonged
more to yourself and more to us than
ever you will again. You were here to
shape yourself by learning, and you
accepted us as the guardians of your
studies. From now on your activities will
have new aims, and we will no longer be
entitled to guide your progress.
To the Class of 1996,
Greetings and congratulations! It is a semisweet duty I will soon perform, shaking
your hands, handing you your diplomas,
and wishing you well as you leave this
particular "way-station and begin your
journey beyond — probably semi-sweet for
you too.
Your diploma signifies our respect for your
capacity to learn and your effort in beginning that challenge so well. That, of
course, is the source of our sadness, that
you are leaving us in mid-conversation.
The remedy to this is the source of the
good we will enjoy when we hear from
you over the years: What are you doing?
What are you thinking? What are you
learning? Who are you sharing your lives
with? How are you helping others?
You can be sure that we will want to hear
and to talk and to correspond with you
because we have been together for four
big years, engaged in one common activity.
Our learning together is surely the best
foundation for a lifetime of friendship.
"Your diploma signifies our
respect for your capacity to
learn and your effort in beginning that challenge so
well."
Please keep in touch and farewell
Sincerely yours,
" We care about how you do
in the world both because
we have learned to love you,
and also because hi your
lives, we feel, lies the corroboration of this college."
No question, the campus will feel
empty that Monday after, empty and
ghostly. If some of you happen to have
stayed on, you will feel a little like
changelings; a day ago you were for us
putative grown-ups whom we secretly
worried about as children, and now you
have suddenly become certified adults
who happen also to be quite formally
our offspring, our nurslings — for that is
what the word alumni means — and
whose fortunes we will follow openly
and eagerly. We care how you do in the
world both because we have learned to
love you, and also because in your lives,
we feel, lies the corroboration of this
college.
Believe me, we will miss you, and we
hope you will miss us (but not too
much). And remember that while your
students status was rightly transient, as
alumni you are ours forever.
So farewell and fare well!
Christopher B. Nelson
President
Fondly,
<CJ&^ f- W. KS
Eva T. H. Brann
Dean
�;•• • >-:^
Look,we were studying before YOU barged in with that dumb camera.
Let's hear it for the smoking ban!
Matt Bralthwaite in his own little world.
�Avik tells about his favorite movie "Species
No, I don't think roasting [he Navy goat is a good ide
�11
�THE FACULTY
12
The faculty watches as the members of the senior class receive their diplomas and hood:
What does it mean to be a tutor? To be a professional
student: to read the most complicated works of philosophy
and question one's opinions every year. To be a leader: to
guide class with one's questions towards an elusive truth.
To face 18 year old naive, ambitious, idealistic, talented
freshmen every year and see them grow and transform.
13
�15
�16
�Nicholas Maistrellis
:
•
• • • • " ; - . . , ; :•:,:;,:
larvey Flaumenhaft
Kathryn Kinzer
I IfflSiHBl£eidbrnian
Librarian
�David L.
Townsend
������REALITY '95
"The maturity of man - that means, to have reacquired the seriousness that one had as a child at play."
-- F. Nietzsche
Thanks to Dan Speck and Jon Spooner the Grand Old Party was a total success: theme, organization, service, music and games — all deserve an "A+". The weather miraculously complemented
their plan: full of sun and madness Friday and Saturday, followed by a quiet and rainy Sunday
for sleep and rest.
The following pictures are intended for two kinds of people. Those who were physically absent
will learn about the school's best party and wish they had been there. Those who were mentally
absent will be provided with examples of their glory and magnificence.
Fighting goes under water and ..
The moment of truth: Ends and Means are ready to fight for the glory after the Dean
inspiring speech.
^, __
,
... ,
oV'rt: :;F ,>""£.• , ;r :-r 1 il :t: ;:. H • W.
32
Flower children: Daniel Insetta and Matt Braithwaite groovin' on a Sunday afternoon
�ATHLETICS
St. John's Athletics are much like it's Academics - rare, multi-faceted, and intense (and aimed towards the Good, of course).
Though St. John's is primarily considered an 'intellectual school', any red-blooded Johnnie knows that time spent in the gym is as
much an exercise in philosophy as discussions at the seminar table are. Classes push students to debate and discuss; they struggle
•with the ideas of Kant and sack Troy with Homer. The playing fields push students to practice and test ideas and beliefs while
offering an outlet from the rigors of academic life. Philosophers develop as contemplation becomes action; the passionate battle
cry is heard, "I play therefore I am!"
Many Johnnies claim that these athletic rituals are, indeed, necessary for happiness, a balance, and at the very least - sanity. Tutor.
Abe Schoener, insists that the successful execution of a left handed lay-up is as good for one's soul as many of the books on the
program. Countless members of the community, be they tutor or student,can be found worshipping at Temple Iglehart on any
given day, any given season.
Basketball is a passionate past-time, and other sports follow close behind. The women's soccer team, known as the Kuvai (or the
hell bitches), the crew team and the fencing club participate in matches against other colleges; soccer, basketball, volleyball and
handball compete within the college community. Throughout the school year, other special athletic events are held such as bike
races, marathons, and ping-pong and basketball tournaments. Most weekends, students and faculty can be found donning their
team colors and rushing fearlessly to the field to partake of the joy of battle.
At quieter moments, however, when the gym is nearly deserted and the noise has died, you can find a hopeful Johnnie or two
casting an eye wistfully backwards as they exit the Temple. Their gaze falls on the shirts that hang so gloriously from the ceiling;
these are the trophies of the outstanding athletes that have come before. The mysterious names branded on each shirt have grown
in mythic proportion in the minds of the students who frequent the gym. At such moments, desire blazes in the hearts of the
hopeful as they dream of their jersey someday hanging, retired, amongst the greats.
Tackle Basketball?
�STJOHN'S
COLLEGE CREW
7e wish we were still asleep! Left to right: Leigh Fitzpatrick, Jehanne Dubrow, Sarah Fremont. Kelly Lyons, Lea Fisch, Anne Dude, Rebekah Jongewaard, Dani Schaffe
The few, the strong, the cold - Chris Stevens, Matt Carter, Vince Dude
36
Cl*eW - Back Row: Marcel Potvin, Ian Nyberg,
Matt Carter, Todd Pytel. Middle Row: Hai Sun,
Christine Coalwell, Karin Ekholm, Aaron Silverman,
Chris Stevens, Carter Snead, Leigh Fitzpatrick, Eve
Gibson, Kelly Lyons, Joshua Hendrix, Sarah
Fremont. Front Row: Aimee Nichols, Dani Schaffel,
Pia Thadhani, Erin Bonning, Nelson Hernandez,
Anne Dude, Cindy Lutz, Rebekah Jongewaard, Leo
Pickens.
Crew: They all get along so well!
37
�ATHLETIC TRAINING PROGRAM
ick Michelle Smith Greta Pittard, Gjergji Bakallbashi, Haakon Maxwell, Josh Hendrix, Nate Suma, Felix Leslie, Tess Coburn, Alex
Kathleen Tinning, Carrie Killoran, Erin Bonning, Kate Wilson, Erin Hearn, B. Good, Justice Schunior, Raphael Jankovic, Adnet
While doing push-ups it occurs to Stuart that he might be at college on the wrong side of K
George Street, but he soon realizes this is absurd.
At the top of the hill, the participants of Homeric Training ask the immortal question:
we clone yet?"
Drew pumps some iron.
39
�40
Leo Pickens - super rcf.
Miilincla Campbell juggles the ball while Sarah Fremont and Pia Thadhani follow in pursuit
Fancy foot work by Adrien Gehring.
41
�- • • • "„-
"»>
•B1 * ••
Our friends at Marriott. Standing: Dale Jacobs, Curtis Wilkerson, Damion Day, Alexander Johnson, Craig Pratt. Seated; Cheryl
Heseman, Diannese Butler, Nelly Simms, Sylvia "Wilkerson, Pal Wilkerson.
•1\2
Keep these doors locked at all times.
43
"Whe
�44
Oh that Carl, he's so dreamy
Before the ORAL.
45
�I -"#11
46
• • • i ^
• • •^ ™
47
�48
49
�SEMINAR
There are several ways to organize one's learning. Seminar is one of them.
St. John's College has chosen it as a major. What if the curriculum were
changed and the campus were different? What would be left from the St.
John's we know? I would hope that even if all else were lost, seminar would
remain. This organization of group learning is based on a premise that none
in the classroom knows the right answer, including the tutors. This does not
mean that the existence of absolute truth is questioned; but it does mean
that if there is truth, then it would be easier to find through group effort.
Over four years students develop true respect for different opinions. Misconceptions are more likely to be viewed as abandoned truths rather than
personal faults.
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51
�January Freshman Seminar: Mr. Williamson and Mr. Gu. From Left to Right: Keelin Daly, Amy
Humphrey, Krista Taylor, Alexander Berkobein, Elizabeth Bush, Nathan Zweig, Sarah Dawson, Adam Mahler, Daniel
Rogers, Prinny Stephens, Samuel Garcia, Karl Boyno, David Bohannon, China Layne, Matthew Coleman, Elena
Andriolo, Michael Hraber, Santiago Navarro-Monzo, Gary Temple, Marc Reiner, Mr. Gu. Not Pictured: Mr. Williamson,
Freshman Seminar: Mr. Sterling and Mr. Goldberg. Back Row: Ethan Press, Todd Pytel, Matthew
Calise, Mr. Sterling, Andrew Merkel, Adrian Bowles. Middle Row: Andre Scalfani, Mr. Goldberg, Nelson Hernandez,
Louvenia Magee, Dana Ostrander, Robin Roland, Rebecca Elliott. Seated: Erin Jakowski, Heather Richardson, Daniel
Mazal, Elizabeth Sudduth. Not Pictured: Reynaldo Miranda, Kathleen Tinning.
Michael Adams.
HB^BiHiiHMHM^HiHiMM^^H^^M
January Freshman Seminar: Mrs. Berns and Mr. Badger. Standing: Christine Curran, Benjamin Gloss,
Leslie Phipps, Ruthanne Rhone, Courtney Klayko, Stephen Cavey, Mr. Badger, Mrs. Berns, Anthony Chiarella, Mark
Johnson, Carl Smith, Shelby Blythe, William Hitchner. Seated: Rodino Anderson, Paul Chandler, David Opalinsky,
Jonathan Pezold, James Finlayson, Hermes Bojaxhi. Not Pictured: Victoria Hendrickson, Magdalena Kulik, Paul
Lochner, Dan Toulson.
52
Freshman Seminar: Ms. Lassowsky and Mr. Tuck. Back Row: Joshua Louis, Cleveland Kersh, Eve
Gibson, Mr. Tuck, Elinor Sawyer, Benjamin Thornber. Middle Row: Hayes Moore, Jennifer Connor, Ms. Lassowsky,
Genevieve Fewell, Ganesha Vazquez. Front Row: Colby Cowherd, Nicolas Richardson, Carrie Robinson, Heather
•McCarthy. Not Pictured: Jenny Peckenpaugh, Adam Smith.
53
�Freshman Seminar: Ms. Heines and Mr. Sachs. Back Row: Christian Moser, Ms. Heines, Robert Mihail,
Samuel Davidoff, Tessa Coburn, Johnny Hayes, Mr. Sachs. Middle Row: Jay Henry, Derek Alexander, Kristin Woodfin,
Rebecca Schunior, Aimee Nichols. Seated: Maureen Gallagher, Joshua Emmons, Kristin Jacob, Abigail Gibbs, Melissa
Coleman. Not Pictured: Nathan Carpenter
Freshman Seminar: Ms. Kraus and Mr. Russell. Back Row: Marcel Potvin, Ms. Kraus, Christopher Jordarl
Krishna Mehta, Robert Holbrook, Kevin Galvin, Brian Shea, Mr. Russell. Middle Row: Piroska Kopar, Jill Ahern, Karin
Ekholm, Catherine Stirling, Michael Soejoto, Corey Sebastian, Kelly O'Malley, Kara Fenske. Seated: Ward Kashiwa,
Gjergji Bakallbashi.
54
Freshman Seminar: Mr. Fisher and Mr. Braithwaite. Standing: Nathan Suma, Olivia Morgan, Lauren
Bishop, Johan Swindler, Malachi Kenney, Anna Boozer, Sheena Otto, Iddrisu Tia, Corinne Smyth. Seated: Blake
Ingram, Joshua Hendrix, Joseph Richardson, Anna-Clare Milazzo,Christina Ruffino. Not Pictured: Mr. Fisher, Mr.
Braithwaite.
Freshman Seminar: Mr. Salem and Mr. Townsend. Back Row: Kristin Scott, Samuel Hart, Mr.
Townsend, George Phelps, Brian Austin, Matthew Kemp, Ryan Simpson. Middle Row: Gabriella D'ltalia, Jessica
Morgenstern, Deborah Carlos, Hastings Shannonhouse, Erin Gage, Mr. Salem. Front Row: Michael Busch, Benjamin
sPeakmon, Federico Buccellati. Not Pictured: Nan Hobson.
55
�Sophomore Seminar: Ms. Langston and Mr. Zeiderman. Back Row: Danielle Tabela, Heather Miller,
Sophomore Seminar: Dr. Capozzoli and Ms. Ruhm von Oppen. standing Melina Hoggard, Leah
Mr Zeiderman Jefferson DuBose, Ganwise Fewtrell, Stephen Kagarise, Sara Barker. Middle Row: Julie Stubanus, Leigh
Fitzpatrick, Jean Tally, Carrie Killoran, Ian Robertson, Ms. Langston. Seated: Mark Binet, Whitney Peterson, Asta
Almenas, Valdimir Mashenko. Not Pictured: Phillip Jumonville, Daniel Lee.
Fisch, Amy Robertson, Suzanne Crane, Rodolfo Hernandez, Jeremy Melvin, Dr. Capozzoli, Felix Leslie, Christopher
Bush, Andrew Paolone, Darren Gardner, Ms. Ruhm von Oppen, Jihan Shekem. Seated: Heidi Grossenbacher, Pamela
Bergson, Dana Schaffel, Heather Deutsch, Jennifer Borell, Crystal Welliver. Not Pictured: Lauren Connolly.
Sophomore Seminar: Ms. BlitS and Mr. Page. Back Row: William Sothern, Timothy Pomarole, Jennifer
Levy, Clarke Madden, Ryan Emery, Benjamin Rettig, Mr. Page. Middle Row: Ms. Blits, Nadia Qurashi, Sara Tonnessen,
Mary Ford, Sarah Knutson, Lea Pitkanen. Seated: Cindy Lutz, Camille Finefrock. Not Pictured: Max Fink, Christopher
Jones.
56
Sophomore Seminar: Mr. Edisis and Mr. Umphrey. Back Row: Joshua Burleigh, Joshua Rogers, Mr.
raisis, Benjamin Carlson, Mr. Umphrey, Shawn Steward, Robert Young, Luis Salas, Timothy Winslow. Front RowNathan Greenslit, Jessica Covitz, Jill Cantine, Anne Dude, Vira Feliciano, Emily Maglathlin, Beatrice Robbins Not
Pictured: Tom Kurland, Kelly Lyons.
57
�Sophomore Seminar: Mr. Cosans and Mrs. Higuera. Back Row: Leon Strand, Alan Pichanick, Josiah
Rowe Kevin Davis. Middle Row: Dawn Shuman, Jacqueline Camm, Nicole Standley, Nicole Page, Lucinda Boynton,
Greta Vittard. Seated: Nicholas Pignone, Rebekah Jongewaard, Mrs. Higuera, Mr. Cosans. Not Pictured: Lorna Anderson Christian VanSant, Sarah Vinson, Lili Zarghami.
•MI^^^^^B^^^^^^^M^^—
Sophomore Seminar: Mr. Maistrellis and Mr. Smith. Standing: Mr. Smith, Mr. Maistrellis, Amelia
Marcetti, Cristina Gaetano, Keith Bemer, Thaddeus Verhoff, Michael Goree, Joseph Marcucilli, Hai Sun, Marjorie
Truman,' Nathan Sherrard, Collomia Charles, Daniel Wood. Seated: Margaret Nicholson, Christine Papavasiliou. Not
Pictured: Stuart Davenport, Juliana Martonffy, Erin Rowe.
58
Sophomore Seminar: Mr. Milner and Mr. Sageng. Back Row: Joseph Knight, Patrick Donahue, Mr.
Sageng, Mr. Milner, Mitchel Hopper. Middle Row: Benjamin Rickles, Margaret Ross, Matthew Johnston, Laura Spencer,
Scott Larson, Sherwin Beck. Front Row: Alexandra Boozer, Lura Groen, Katharine Wilson, Dora Jacobs, Larissa Parson,
Alexis Martinez. Not Pictured: Marianne Thompson, Ariel Szabo.
Sarah Knutson gets in some last minute studying before class.
59
�Junior Seminar: Mr. Franks and Mr. Wyatt. Standing: Jeremy Schaub, David Veazey, Genevieve
Goodrow, Mr. Franks, Mary Lynch, Richard Schmechel, Lee Hoggard, Corey Comstock, Mr. Wyatt. Seated: Laura
Collins, Annemarie Catania, Reiko Gregg, Alexander Bilik. Not Pictured: Lydia Aybar, Robin Banks, Mary Duncan,
Walter Harris, Becky Lange.
Junior Seminar: Mr. Barbera and Mrs. Renaut. Standing: Mrs. Renaut, Maura Tennor, Matthew
Braithwaite, Kira Chancy, Zoe Andriolo, Juan Villasenor, Johanna Baumann, Erin Bonning, Remington Korper, Jehannl
Dubrow, Jonathan Pomerance, Anthony Cole, Beth Laster, Taylor Hudnall, Mr. Barbera. Seated: Benjamin Bloom,
Aidan Kelleher, David Haber. Not Pictured: Patricia Travis.
60
Junior Seminar: Mr. Dink and Ms. Seeger. Back Row: Ms. Seeger, Ian Brennan, Derek Barclay, Samuel
Dillehay, Mr. Dink. Front Row: Laura Spess, Lynette Dowty, Forrest Norman, Joseph Manheim, Sarah Fremont,
Christopher Stevens, Jong Chung, Kit Linton. Not Pictured: Matthew Buttrill, Rana Choi, Rachel Davis, Kate Classman,
Lydia Polgreen.
Junior Seminar: Mr. Cohen and Mr. Doskow. Back Row: Matt Freitas, Evan Phillips, Haakon Maxwell,
J™- Doskow, Zackary Smoll, Jeffrey Travis, Liam Gracly. Front Row: Jennifer Coonce, Amy Hu, Heicli Jacot, Rebecca
Michael, Sarah Bridges, Ian Kelley, Mr. Cohen. Not Pictured: Loraine Freeman, Danielle Insetta Erin Smyth Tulia van
Keeven.
'
61
�Junior Seminar: Mrs. Maschler and Mr. Yee. Standing: William Marshall, Judith Neely, Anton Fedyashin,
Anne Kniggenclorf, Kevin Gardner, Mr. Yee, Thomas Tandaric, Dana Reynolds, Vincent Dude, David Polgreen,
Stephen Urich, Gjergji Bojaxhi. Seated: Geraldine "Griffin" Perkins, Mrs. Maschler, Christopher Simpson, Luke Trares.
Not Pictured: Jonathan Andrews,Andrew Keenan.
Senior Seminar: Mr. ComenetZ. Standing: Mr. Comenetz, Alexander Pickands, Kendall Golladay, Sophia
Fajardo, Carl Grunert, Matthew Carter, Christopher Ranck, John Williams, Sonia Kamal, John Michels. Seated: Colin
Thurman, Robin Locke, Felicity Strachan. Not Pictured: Adrienne Jakowski, Paul Krause, Jonathan Spooner.
Junior Seminar: Mr. Blaustein and Mr. Datchev. Back Row: Lucinda Montgomery, Joshua Parish, Haye«
Adams, Adam Marker, William Erskine, Mr. Datchev, Kamielle Shaffer. Middle Row: Damon Kovelsky, Sarah Morrison,
Erin Monberg, Jesse Berney, Seth Milliken, Mr. Blaustein. Seated: Aline Gram, Malinda Campbell, Pia Thadhani. Not
Pictured: Benjamin Ilka, Todd Stregiel.
Senior Seminar: Mr. Schulman. Standing: Bryce Ferric, Matthew Caswell, Jing Wang, Dara Trought, Daniel
Stromberg, James Knerr, Ian Nyberg, Mr. Schulman, Lydia Rolita. Kneeling: Clara Murray, Wesley Beato, Jennifer
s, Jennifer Donnelly, Kathryn Thorn, Peter Rubenstein. Not Pictured: Dimitry Fedotov, Carl McLaughlin.
62
63
�Senior Seminar: Mr. Burke. Standing: Allen Ziegenfus, Robert Ottoboni, Jeffrey Palmer, Melissa McKibben,
Hannah Gillelan, Melissa Gate, Mr. Burke, Marshall Kass, Christopher Anderson, Sarah Stanley, Thomas Donehower.
Seated: Brian McGuire, Keith Forrest, John Sifton. Not Pictured: Heather Calvert, Yu Hang, Elliott Holland.
Senior Seminar: Mr. Lenkowski. Standing: Mr. Lenkowski, Marybeth Guerrieri, Christopher Landers,
Jeremiah James, Elsa Roth, Mikel-Meredi Weidman, Adam Wing, Aaron Silverman, Susan Rzucidlo, Amanda Norman,
Richard Schmidt. Seated: Joella Klinghoffer, Andrew McCarthy, Daniel Speck, Kristin Leake, Franck Roark, Sarah Bittle.
Senior Seminar: Mr. Kalkavage. Back Row: Laurin Wollan, Jeffrey Berger, Svetlana Mendyuk, Jeffrey Gara,
Ryan Madison, Sharon Soper, Sallie Pullman, Mr. Kalkavage. Middle Row: Carter Snead, Candace Feit, Lenka Rosolova
Gabriel Silvers. Front Row: Heather Niemeyer, Jeanne Detch, Erin Hearn. Not Pictured: Kevin Doyle.
Senior Seminar: Mr. Verdi. Standing: Erin Wright, Aaron Lewis, Mr. Verdi, Avik Mohan, Peter Rispin, Valerie
Garvin, Mark Whipple, Renate Lunn, Sean Leadem, Peter Smith, Adrien Gehring. Seated: Janice Cater, Kirk Duncan,
Carla Eehevarria, April Walters. Not Pictured: Hilary Cumberton, Nathan Jongewaarcl.
64
65
�300 Years of Liberal Arts: the St. John's Legacy
by Emily A. Murphy, A'95
Assistant Registrar and Curator of Photographs, Maryland State Archives.
In 1696, a grammar school was founded in Maryland's new capital
of Annapolis "... for the education of the youth of this province in
good letters and manners..." as the charter said. The grammar school,
named King William's School in honor of the King of England, was
intended to be the first step in founding a college in Maryland, since
colleges cannot be started until there are students educated to enter
them. However, efforts to turn King William's School into a college
foundered in the General Assembly of Maryland for almost a hundred
years. It was not until 1784 that the Assembly chartered St. John's
College, which was to combine King William's School's grammar
school with a college - thus, St. John's could educate a man from the
cradle to his B.A. St. John's, combined with Washington College on
the Eastern Shore, was to be the University of Maryland. Although the
university idea quickly fell apart, St. John's survived, and even
flourished when the General Assembly appropriations allowed. In its
early years, St. John's played host to many eminent people, including
General George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette. As the
college established itself, the campus grew. McDowell Hall, the
original building, was followed in 1837 by Humphreys Hall, built as
a dormitory for the college and preparatory school students, and as
a dining hall and library. Paca-Carroll House was built in 1855 for
faculty housing; Chase-Stone House in 1857 as the president's and
vice-president's house, and Pickney Hall also in 1857 as a dormitory
for the college students.
During this time, although the books would change, the curriculum basically followed the pattern of most Amercian universities at
that time: a fixed curriculum based on the Greek and Latin classics.
The students would have to memorize their lessons and recite them
for professors.
The Civil War disrupted St. John's a great deal: the college
students melted away to join both armies, and the U. S. Army took
over the campus buildings. However, a single professor kept the college
charter in force by teaching a class of the younger students in the
Annapolis City Hall. After the war, the students gradually returned to St.
John's, finding it a little frayed at the edges due to the army occupation.
In 1885, the military program, which had been at St. John's in variorj;
forms since 1820, became a compulsory program, and the student,
became cadets, drilling and marching in their gray wool uniforms. By thi
early 1900's St. John's had placed in the War Department's list
Distinguished Military Colleges, and stayed there until the program was
disbanded in 1923. The prominence of the military program led to anothi
spurt of growth on campus: Woodward Hall, the library, laboratories, am
armory, was completed in 1900; Randall Hall, the mess hall and senioi
dorm, in 1903; and Iglehart Hall, the gym, in 1909. With the new regime!
the curricula had changed to one tending toward free electives, and aftei
the military program ended, free electives were established. Howeverj
although our sports teams were unbeatable, by 1937 the truth was that thi
college was broke and had lost its accreditation. As a result, the bo
visitors and governors was willing to let two young men, Stringfellow Bar!
and Scott Buchanan, try an educational experiment: The Great Booffl
Program.
The New Program, as it is also known, is a fixed curriculum, based
the Greek and Latin classics - a return to the early years of St. John's. WM
is new about the program is the way in which the books are studied!
instead of memorized recitations, students are encouraged to think and
discuss the books in their seminars and tutorials.
Barr and Buchanan's educational experiment has been a success. In
the last 58 years, the campus has grown still more, with Campbell Hall
built in 1954 as a women's dormitory, a new heating plant in 1951, and
Mellon Hall completed in 1958. The New Program has proved that it
adapt as times change, and it is certain that the Great Books, and St. John'
College will see another century of growth.
Early '40's: Thar looks like an even mi
�The '5<>'s: U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower stands side by side with St. John's President Richard D. Weigle at the dedication ot Mellon H
68
The'20's: Another [J. S I
�70
The 50's: Librarian Charlott
71
�CROQUET
The 1995 Croquet Team
Craig Sirkin, Imperial Wicket
Jon Crimmins, Reuben Marshall, Sean Stickle, Matt Caswell, Jon Spooner, Ned Freeman, James Knerr.
John Sifton, Micah Pharris.
�MID-WINTER
WALTZ PARTY
Leah Fisch explains the finer points of waltzing to Marianne Thompson
Waltz parties and romance go hand in nan
Tockl Pytel and Eve Gibson
74
75
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S.VTOl
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78
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�SENIORS
82
83
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But those who wait for the
Lord shall renew their
strength, they shall mount
UP with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be
weary, they shall walk
and not faint
Isaiah 40:31
Matthew Carter
�Hilary Lauren Cumberton
87
�Dimitry L. Fedotov
Sophia Rebeca Faiardo
fiat shall we say who have Knowledge carried to the heart?
-Allen Tate
Adrien Portia Gehring
�Non in dialectica complacuit
Deo salvum facere populum suum
-Ambrose (Defide, I, 5, 42)
Marybeth Guerrieri
It looked good natured, she thought;
still it had very long claws
and a great many teeth,
so she felt it ought to be
treated with respect.
-Lewis Carroll
Erin Naomi Hearn
First you must gain insight into the natural world. You must Learn
to see the depths of its reality. If you glance casually over things of
this life, their real significance eludes you... Knowledge surrounds
Us in an infinite variety of form. Do not slight any of them or take
ttny of them lightly.
Morihei Ueshiba O Sensei,
Founder ofAikido
�August 26, 1992
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93
�"Laughter I have pronounced holy:
you higher men, learn to laugh!"
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Nathan D. Jongewaard
Joella Klinghoffer
James Sanville Knerr
�"/ belive in and conceive a thousand contrary ways of life..."
-Montaigne
'A wolf is fed by its feet. " -Russian Proverb
Melissa Lynn McKibben
Mark
Anthony
Whipple
/ never live alone, I never walk alone my posse's always ready
and they're waitin' in my zone.
Marshall Phillip Kass
I guess by now you can take a hunch, and find that I am the baby of
the bunch: But that's okay I still keep in stride all I'm here to do is just
wiggle your behind.
All my love to the Family and Friends.
�Love is a trick played on us by evolution. Pleasure is tbe bait laid down by tbe
same. There is only power. Power is of tbe individual mind, but tbe mind's
power is not enough. Power of tbe body decides everything in the end, and only
Might is Right.
-T. H. Whitte
It was a mournful conclusion. He locked up the observatory and descended the
stairs, hoping that his dreams would contradict bis thoughts.
-W. Churchill
"Better well hanged than ill wed." -Shakespeare
Svetlana Mendyuk
98
99
�Abby Clara Murray
"The Lord called me from the womb;
From the body of my mother He
named me...
He said to me, "You are My
servant, Israel,
In whom I will show My glory."
Isaiah 49: 1,3
Sallie Fairlight Pullman
100
Amanda Elizabeth Norman
�I» "'""!
SENIOR ESSAYS
MR. CHRISTOPHER ANDERSON
MS. JENNIFER BATES
MR. WESLEY BEATO
MS. SARAH BITTLE
MS. HEATHER CALVERT
MR. JEFFREY GAliA
MS. RENATE LUNN
MS. VALERIE CABVIN
The Shapeless Vapoun
An Investigation of the Beautiful
Soul and Morality in Hegel's
Phenomenology of Spirit
Intuition and Arithmetic
\Vhy is Socrates a Paradox? Love
and Logos hi the Phacdrus
MR. RYAN MADISON
A Ministry of Faith:
The Response to the Revelation
of Disciple-ship in Christ
MS. ADKJBN GP.HRIMG
A Second Look at the Legendary
Seducer Don Juan
"Ritrovai": A Re-Encountering
of the Self in Dante's Inferno
MS. HANNAH GILI.KLAN
MR. BRIAN McGUIUi;
A Subject That Interests Us Above
All Others: A Study of the
Foundations of Morality
MR. KENlMil GOIJ.ADAY
a
,yfe
The Spiritual and the Perverse:
The Agonizing Reality Revealed
by an Antithetical Union
4; ; :
Rationality, Autonomy and
Freedom; An Examination of the
Essential Concepts in Kant's
MR. MATTHEW CASWELL
MS. MELISSA CATE
MS. JANICE CATER
MS. HILARY CUMBERTON
MS. JEANNE DETCH
MR. THOMAS DONEHOWER
MS. JENNIFER DONNELLY
MR. KEVIN DOYLE
MR. KIRK DUNCAN
An Examination
of Motion
MS. MAKYBETII Gl'ERKQiKI
Theodicy: Guilty Before AH For
All: The eternal questions in
The Brothers Karama/ov
:
VIS. YtJ HANG
, • ; vi
MS. l:i(]N HF.AKN
g:
MR. ELLIOTT HOLLAND
MS. ADRIENNE JAKOWSKI
MS. SOPHIA FAJARDO
MR. DIMITRY FEDOTOV
MS. CANDACE FEIT
MR. KEITH FORREST
102
Recollection and Redemption:
The presence of Dante's
early work La_Vita_Nuova in
The Divine Coim-dv
'
Higher Medicine: The
Transcendent Fxperiences in
War and Peace
;
;;
\;.
,
MK. JOHN SIFTON
il:^,
^!S;
"''&
;
; ,1 ; -::?«1>
The Effect of Ludwig
Wittgenstein's Concept of Public
ReaUty on the Traditional
Study of Ethics
MR. ;^\RON SILVERMAN
"
...»
~-i : :
The Role of God in
Verdi's Otello
MR. GABRIEL SILVERS
Love's War and Peace
;1;:
MR. PETER SMITH
The Identity of Odysseus:
Disguise and Recognition in
Homer's Odyssey
;
>l-^f
MR. ORLANDO SNEADg
!;:•"
\s Retreat from
Humanity Itl^lBift's
Gulliver's Travels
Tableaux Russe
MR. JOHN MICHELS
Relations Between Men ia
Melville's Benito Cereno Co^
afc
MR. AVIK MOHAN
The First Principles of Morality:
M*
A Look into Aristotle's NJcomachean
Ethics and Kant's Groundwork of the
Me tap
The Enchiridion of Well-Being:
Melville's Instruction in
• • ^ • ; ; '"-•
MS. CLARA MURRAY
MS. HEATHER NIEMEYEK
0
Capitalism: The First
Perpetual Motion Machine
|
What is Proof?: An
Examination of the Different
Forms of Persuasion, Both
Logical and Rhetorical.
The Horror and Beauty
of Gray in MelVille's
B_ejiito_Cereno |
|
|
MR. NATHAN JONGEWAAED
Monolith
MS. SO.NIA KAMAL
On Prince Channings.
Frogs, Love Marriages and
Arranged Ones, ::
Morality and Mystery: Marlow's
Transformation in Conrad's
Heart ql' Darkness
MS. JOEM.A KIJNGHOEFER
"England hath been Mad7': A
Look at a Corrupt Kingdom in
Richard HI
'But I Digress...': An Examination
of Digression and Textual Authority
hi Laurence Sterne's Tristram
Shandy
The Gambit of
Master Babo
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN
RECOLLECTION, LANGUAGE, AND
THOUGHT or If Uons could talk, why
we would not be able to understand
them.
Rule and Compliance:
The Master/Slave Relationship
in Xenophon's Oeconomicus
MS. SARAH STANLEY
Holding It All Gently:
Galway Kinnell's
The Book of Nightmares
Akhilleus, First in
Beauty, First in Might.
Honesty and Idiocy in
Pride and Prejudice
God and Man in
Dostoevsky's Demons
MR. WIUJAM TIIUKMAN
Religious Picture-Thought and
its Movement into Absolute
Knowing
Newton and Leibniz on
Matter and Soul
Knowledge of a Sage,
Wisdom of a Child: An
exploration of Puck
MS.JING WAN(i
Analysis of Aristotle's
Ethical Virtue and
Practical Wisdom
MS. MIKFIrMIiKEDITH WEIDMAN
"Tis a Gift to be Simple:"
Tolstoy's Blessing of Simplicity
in War and Peace
Pascal and the Imagination
W. PETER RISPIN
Certainty and Validity for
Geometry and Kant's Critiqijg
^
•':;. "'
The Validity of
;=V
Mathematical Propositions
MB. CHRISTOPHER I ANDERS
MK. SEAN I.EAHEM
On Time in Augustine's
HR. FRANCK ROARK'
Gulliver's Philosophical Voyage:
Pride and Virtue in
/•,.,
IS. LYDIA ROIJTA
The Liberation of the Will
Through Kaniian Morality
A Look into the Eye of the Voyeur:
The Role of the Observer in
Baudelaire's "Les Petites Vieilles"
A Light In The Underground
The Reign of the Sage:
Cosmology and Politics in
the Tao TejChing
The Angelic Butterfly: The
Story of Purgation in
Dante's Divine Coim-dy
VIS, CHRISTOPHER RANCK
MK. PAUL KKAUSF.
MR. JONTHAM SPOONER
MS. APRIL WALTERS
The Divine Sword:
The Road To Inner Peace
Through The Military Arts:
: = ;; ;
A Study of Zen hi the
fi<>. Em_No Sho add Ikilio Ivaden Sho
>1S. SALUF. PULLMAN
^
Equality at the Cost of
Freedom: Why is Rousseau
an Enemy of Factionalism?
MS. DARA TROUGH!
The Highest of Arts:
An Exploration of Thoreau's
Views of Man in Walden
''•',•_
MR. ALEXANDER PICKANDS
IS. 1EIVKA ROSOLOVA
Proper Statecraft for Proper
People: An Examination ol
Political Necessity in
Edmund Rurke's Reflect ions
on the Revolution in France
The Fight for Independence:
An Exposlulalory Understanding
of HegcFs "Independence and
Dependence of Self-Consciousness
lordship and Bondage"
The Theater of Katerina
Ivanovna In The Brothers
Kanmiazoy
Through The Tempest
Prospero Sees: Pleasure
In Natural Order
MS. KATHRYN THORN
The Search for Truthe
The Pilgrimage of the Will in
of Piers Plowman
:=S
MR. MAKSHAI.I. K.VSS
The Birth of Absolute S
On Consciousness' s Progreli&n
through the Hegelian Dialectic
of Morality
'^
|
|
Ife
'IP;
MR. DANIEL SIROMBFRG
The Change in the Conception
of Nature from Aristotle to Kant
1H. .JEFFREY PALMER
:;!
MS. SHARON SOI'ER
:
=;:V:':
v"Fn:
MS. FELICITY STRACHAN
"Le Cirneticre marine'' The
Pendulum of Sense and Intellect
tlR. ROI5ERT OTTOBONI
The Exegesis of anlfpbhorism5:
Ascetic Ideals in the Third Essay
of On the Geneology of Morals
::
MK. DANIEL SPECK
MR. IAN NYBERG
The Place of God: Origins
of Newton and Leibtii/'s
Absolute Time and Space Debate
"Stronger, more ,l ; vil, and
more Profound; ;fi»o more
Beautiful": The Future of
Philosophy in Nietzsche's
Beyond Good andjj^Jl
-'fi/l
j ;
r
'
lljl ''•:::•::'•"
The Genesis of Morality
in Rousseau's Emile
MS. AMANDA NORMAN
A Harmony Of Natures:
The Necessity of Human
Experience In Unifying The
Conflicting Natures of
Plalo'S Guardians
£:W:
•
\^K •
1~
Plato s View On Education:
What Would Confucius Say?
MR. JEREMIAH JAMES
MR. AARON LEWIS
MR. BRYCE FERRIE
RICHARD SCHMIDT
!; ; = ;
"1:'l -:k
MS. SVETLANA MENDYUK
SOCRATES AND THE CITY;
An Examination, of Socrates'
Defense of Philosophy in
Plato's Apology
MR. JAMES KNERR
MS. JEAN ECHEVARRIA
MS. MELISSA MeKIBBEN
;||
;;
Should We Feel Sorry
for Melos?
;!;
||
Myself Creating What I Saw
Reality, Imagination, and SelfExamination in Jane Austen's
Hamlet
]f
MR. CARL MCLAUGHLIN
The Artificial Mail vs. the
Ultimate Design of the Universe:
Hobbes and Hegel on Freedom
and Man's Nature
The Beautiful Balance:
A Study of Schiller's
I.etiers on the Acsiheiic
Education of MgHl
MR-
'^|%.
Emma
The Memento of Class In the
Symbolic logic of Rertrand Russell
•: '•.
: :
Natural Knowledge and Morality
Rosemary, Fennel, Columbine
and Rue, But No Violets: An
ol Morals
"Lift up your eyes on high|ppd
see...": An examination o|lpfe
birth of irrational numhis^
Kant's Theory of the Moral
Self: Unity as the Condition
for Completeness
MS. SUSAN RZUCIDLO
\t En Se MiiHiplianl
A Reading of Baudelaire's
"Utie Charogne"
•*M*?>
MK. CARL GRUNRRT
MR. MATTHEW CARTER
K
MR. ANDREW MCCARTHY
The Dangers of True
Happiness in a Legitimate
State
Metaphysical Consequences
of a Mathematical System
= "
From the River to the Ocean:
Society vs. Nature in !he
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
and "Benito Cereno"
r
:-:™
vIS. ELSA ROTH
Marriage and Happiness
Jn War and Peace
The "Mechanism" of Freedom:
An Exploration of Concepts in
the Metaphysics of G. W. Leibni/
MR. JOHN WILLIAMS
Faith, Despair, and the
Practice of Religion
MR. ADAM WING
A Fear of Hegel
MR. LAURIN WOLLAN
IR. PETER KUBENSTFJISf
The Failure of a Good Man's
Ideals in Ihe Practical World,
as shown in Dostoevski's Idiot
Is Pure Knowledge
Dependant Upon
Comprehended History?
MS. ERIN WRIGHT
In Defense of Rousseau's
Natural Man: !he Growth of
the Beautiful Child
MR. ALLEN ZIEGENFUS
!he Relation of Suffering
and Beauty in Princess Marta
103
�Chris
Ranck
"What do you want
to do tonight?"
'Same thing we do every night
Try to take over the world!"
Peter Rispin
�Erin Elizabeth Wright
Would you like to knou
It's that I've put
I've put onfyjny talent ini^i
La, tout n 'est qu 'ordre et beaute,
Luxe, calme, et volupte.
- Baudelaire
Richard V. L. Smith
Susan Irene Rzucidlo
Franck Roark
�108
�1
I
Colin Thurman
Allen Ziegenfus
When she reached this passage, Princess Maiya sighed and
looked round into the pier glass that stood on her right. The glass
reflected a feeble, ungraceful figure and a thin face. The eyes, always
melancholy, were looking just now with a particularly hopeless
expression at herself in the looking glass. She flatters me. thought
the princess, and she turned away and went on reading. But Julie did
not flatter her friend: the princess's eyes - - large, deep, and luminous
(rays of warm light seemed at times to radiate in streams from them),
were really so fine, that very often in spite of the plainness of the
whole face her eyes were more attractive than beauty. But the princess
had never seen the beautiful expression of her eyes; the expression that
came into them when she was not thinking of herself. As is the case
with every one, her face assumed an affected, unnatural, ugly expression
as soon as she looked in the looking glass.
Tolstoy, War Cr Peace
110
Congratulations an
Best Wishes
lass
in
�Yearbook Staff
Editor-in-Chief
Contributing Editors
Principle Photographers
Production
Production Assistant
Contributing Photographers
Writers
Contributing Staff
Special Consultant
Special Thanks
Dimitry Feclotov '96
Betsy Blume 75
Emily Murphy '95
Heather Niemeycr '96
Juan Villasenor '97
Keith Harvey
Kim Kern '89
Reynaldo Miranda '99
Aaron Silverman '96 John Michels '96
Christine Coalwell AGI'96 Amy Marcetti
Lauren Connolly '98
Vivian Ronay '65 John Bidahl
Dimitry Feclotov '96 Chris Ranck '96
Jackie Camm '98 Camille Finefrock '98
Michael Goree '98
Chris Denny '93
Terence Whiteside
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the St. John's College Alumni Association
for funding the Tutor Photo Project, Barbara Goyette, 73, who
supplied photos from the files of the "Reporter"; Leo Pickens,
"78 and Brian Good, '89, for their assistance with the Sports
section, and Jeff Bishop, '96, for his patience and support as
the yearbook project became more unwieldy and threatened
to engulf the entire second floor of Carroll Barrister.
Many thanks to the 1996 Yearbook Staff for producing the
book. A book that, at times seemed to hang by a thread has
turned out to be the best produced since I revived the
yearbook over a decade ago. Those who came through for us
as we pushed for completion, in a kind of frenzy of creative
exertion, deserve thanks. Our long weekends were well spent.
This page is blank for two reasons. First, one might like to get one's friends' addresses and signatures before leaving
Annapolis (why not put them in the Yearbook). Second, the page symbolizes our future: it is untouched, undetermined. It is completely up to us to choose it: its shapes, images, colors. There are no limits. Good luck, Class of 1996!
Betsy'Blume 75
Adivisor
113
�• i Eim •
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whose contributions made the yearbook possible!
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Yearbooks
Description
An account of the resource
This collection contains yearbooks from St. John's College in Annapolis, MD. Yearbooks are sometimes referred to as the "Rat Tat", "Cicerone", or "Canvas". This collection includes all published yearbooks since 1896. Please note that yearbooks were not published every year.<br /><br />Holdings: <br />1896 v. 1<br />1898 v. 2 - 1899 v. 3<br />1901 v. 4 – 1912 v. 15<br />1914 v. 17 – 1918 v. 21<br />1920 v. 22 – 1945/1946<br />1947 – 1951/1953<br />1957<br />1982<br />1986 – 1990/1991<br />1992 – 2001/2002<br />2015/2016 – 2017/2018<br />2021/2022 - 2022/2023<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Yearbooks" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=21">Items in the Yearbooks Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Contributor
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
yearbooks
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
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paper (bound book)
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
119 pages
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
1696-1996 [Yearbook]
Description
An account of the resource
St. John's College Yearbook for the year 1996. Dedicated to the Class of 1996, whose graduation coincides with the 300th anniversary of St. John's College.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Fedotov, Dimitry (Editor in Chief)
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1996
Rights
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St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Type
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text
Format
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pdf
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
1996
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/df853bd1a45fba3632c1e6bafcbd87b1.pdf
95efce658052f2d88d8e3126a73bf996
PDF Text
Text
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
23. 1700: The Comic Divide
CHARLES G. BELL
ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
or
1260 CANYON ROAD
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501
April 1994
Last Revised January ‘96
�1
Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
23. 1700: The Comic Divide
1)
Double: [A] Rigaud, 1701, Louis XIV and [B] Watteau, 1717, L'Indifferent;
both Louvre, Paris
Double: details of 1, [A] and [B]
1a)
The Divide of 1710, from the heroic and rational Baroque to the mock-heroic and
wistful Rococo, is peculiarly the comic divide; since those opposites — assertive fulness
and ironic play — suggest the blending poles of comedy itself: exuberance and mockery.
Typical that grandeur and ridicule so meet in both styles that the change from
Louis XIV to Regency (as from Cartesian command to Berkeleian subjectivity) seems
merely a change of emphasis. What else informs historical contrasts but subtle shifts of
stress between wedded contraries?
2)
2a)
H. Rigaud, 1701, Louis XIV, Louvre, Paris; first, a video detail (Va2)
Testelin, 1648, Portrait of Louis XIV as a Boy, Versailles (video returns to 2,
upper body detail
Same, detail of legs; + V return to the whole (see V2)
2b)
Music:
M.-R. Delalande, c. 1695, From lst Suite, Musiques Royales,
Turnabout TV 34232
When Riguad's 1701 Sun King steps from his throne, as to the supper music of
Delalande, the trailing vast fleur-de-lys robe raised on aging cork-heeled legs (already his
vanity in Testalin's portrait fifty-three years before), that heroic proclamation — not
throne, not crown, but self: "L'etat c'est moi" — bears the burlesque of Vanbruch's 1696
Lord Foppington:
Mr Mend Legs, a word with you; the calves of my stockings are
thicken'd a little too much. They make my legs look like a chairman's...
let
the
next
be
the
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1700: The Comic Divide
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
thickness of a crawnpiece less — (Aside) If the town takes notice my
legs are fallen away, 'twill be attributed to the violence of some new
intrigue.
(fade Delalande)
Yet the break at Louis XIV's death in 1715 — from pomp's overreach
3)
3a)
3b)
Watteau, 1717, L'Indifferent, Louvre, Paris; + V detail
Watteau, 1712, detail of Jupiter and Antiope, Louvre, Paris
Return to 3, L'Indifferent, upper detail
to the precise wit of Watteau — is one of the sharpest in history: in drama, the softening
from Molière to the delicious sentiments of Marivaux, "A Game of Love and Chance"; in
music from Lully and Delalande to Couperin's plaintive Concerts, the first in fact written
to soothe the ailing king's last years.
Music:
Fr. Couperin le Grand, c. 1710(?), Echos, 2nd of Concerts Royaux,
Vanguard Cardinal S-10029
Thus in England the fragile ironies of Pope's 1714 "Rape of the Lock":
Belinda still her downy pillow press'd,
Her guardian sylph prolong'd the balmy rest:
'Twas he had summon'd to her silent bed
The morning-dream that hover'd o'er her head?
A youth more glittering than a birth-night beau,
(That ev'n in slumber caused her cheek to glow)
Seem'd to her ear his winning lips to lay,
And thus in whispers said, or seem'd to say:
"Fairest of mortals, thou distinguish'd care
Of thousand bright inhabitants of air! …
For 2nd 2)
V2nd 2a)
Music:
French Baroque, c. 1680, Louis XIV as Roman Emperor, MS Fr. 7892,
Biblioteque Nationale, Paris
Le Brun, 1663-75, Tapestry, Louis XIV at Dunkerque, detail,
Versailles (CGB '59; cf slide 57)
Again, Delalande, from lst Suite, close
— that Pope succeeds Dryden's 1685 "Threnodia Augustalis":
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(fade Couperin)
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A Warlike Prince ascends the Regal State,
A Prince, long exercis'd by Fate…
False Heroes made by Flattery so,
Heav'n can strike out, like Sparkles, at a blow;
But e're a Prince is to Perfection brought,
He costs Omnipotence a second thought.
(end Delalande)
What can so swell the heroic tympanum
For 2nd 3)
Watteau, c. 1717(?), The Gamut of Love, National Gallery, London
but the birth of precious ridicule — mutation of bouyancy and disenchantment?
4)
N. de Largilliere, 1696, Ex Voto to St. Genevieve, with the Magistrates of
Paris, Church of St. Etienne du Mont, Paris; first, video details (see V4 and
cf. 24)
By the end of Louis' reign, a France ruined by extravagance and war was in the
hands of such tax-farmers as the forthright Lesage shows us in Turcaret:
I marvel at the course of human life! We pluck a coquette; the coquette
devours a man of affairs; the man of affairs pillages others: and all this
makes the most diverting chain of knaveries imaginable — un ricochet
de bourberies le plus plaisant du monde.
Largilliere's 1696 devout magistrates of Paris cloak the travesty of that ricochet.
a5)
Vb5)
5)
V5a)
Watteau, 1720, Shop of Gersaint, whole; Charlottenburg, Berlin
Same, detail: portrait being packed away
Same, detail, left side
Same, detail, right side (to which video adds closer details of 5 and V5a)
No wonder, twenty-four years later, in Watteau's Shop of Gersaint, the wigged
Virtu of the old Louis, painted by Lebrun and acclaimed by Molière at the close of
Tartuffe:
We live under a prince wise in the ways of the world,
Whose great soul sees the truth through every mask,
Whose steadfast reason admits of no excess —
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Symbolic History
that pomp is stowed in straw in a packing case, from which the painter himself beckons a
nostalgic beauty. Thus at the close of the school of manners Molière's France began,
Sheridan's improvident auctions the stern portraits of his family past. As in Johnson's
"Vanity of Human Wishes":
From ev'ry room descends the painted face,
That hung the bright palladium of the place...
For now no more we trace in ev'ry line
Heroic worth, benevolence divine;
The form distorted, justifies the fall,
And detestation rids th'indignant wall.
But what if, with the picture, normative reason should be deposed, ushering in the
passionate successor?
Va6) Hans von Aachen, c. 1596(?), Joking Couple, Kunsthistorisches Museum,
Vienna
b6) B. Strozzi, c. 1625(?), Vanity (old woman making up), Private Collection,
Bologna
Vc6) Velasquez, c. 1628(?), Los Borrachos (The Topers), or Triumph of Bacchus,
detail, a peasant, Prado, Madrid
6)
Same, whole
High comedy is a type and mirror of purposive aim. In every act of purpose — as
when we reach for something — the central thrust is trained on its goal by a feedback
correction of misses. So in the comic antinomy, Dionysian release, breaking tame
symmetry in a dance of the grotesque, takes the blaze of corrective mockery, by which its
overflow is guided home — from Aristophanes to Twain and Chaplin, ironic mantle of
generative force.
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Symbolic History
In the Gargantuan Renaissance, the poles seem to fuse in Windmill assault or
Falstaffian celebration; in the social comedy of Method, from Molière to Austen, reason
separates a truth-core, etched round with the acid of vanity and hypocrisy scorned. Velasquez' 1628 praise of Bacchus and castigation of drunk peasants straddles the line, at once
Quixotic and normative.
a7) Van Dyck, 1622-27, Marchesa Balbi, National Gallery, Washington
Vb7) Velasquez, 1635, Filippo IV of Spain on horseback (variant of the Prado
painting), Pitti, Firenze
7)
Bernini, 1650-1, Bust of Duke Francis I d'Este, Mus. Estense, Modena
V7a) Jean-Louis Lemoyne, 1703-04, Bust of Jules H. Mansart, Louvre, Paris
7b) John Nost, c. 1698, Digby Memorial, S. Transept, Sherborne Abbey, Dorset
(CGB '84)
7c)
Again Bernini, Bust of Duke Francis I d'Este, closer view
Music:
Fr. Turini, 1624, Sonata in A, 2 vls & continuo, Telef. AWT 9461-C
But when Bernini's 1650 Duke of Este had proclaimed over Europe the code and
canon of reasoned grandeur, what were all those courtly aspirants with their art- and
stage-reflections to do but assume the stance of that saltimbanque nobility (Dryden's
Alexander: "None but the Brave deserves the Fair"): in France the Bourgeois
Gentilhomme M. Jourdain preposterously apes; in England, the Dorimants and Bellairs,
Harcourts, Mellefonts, Mirabells, who pace the Restoratian stage? Though of course the
manly center will be rimmed
(Grave to allegro)
8)
Bernini, 1665, Caricature of a French Cavalier, Gab. Naz. Stampe, Rome;
first, video detail
with the misses and exaggerations of Sir Fopling Flutter, Sir Novelty Fashion, Sparkish,
Lord Froth, Tattle, Witwoud, Petulant. Is it not thematic that the man who schemed the
ultimate inflation, Bernini, also, and at the same time, invented its caricature — the very
idol, in this French Cavalier, pricked and deflated by comic scorn?
(fade Turini)
9)
4/1994
Egyptian, Dyn XIX, c. 1250 B.C., One of four colossal statues of Ramses II,
on the Great Temple, Abu Simbel
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Symbolic History
Perhaps the heroic has always occasioned playful divisions on its ground. From
Soser and Khafre to Tut and this Ramses II, the enthroned Pharoah was the image of
power, as epic for Egypt as Homer's warriors for the Greeks. But when in tomb-paintings
of the same XIXth Dynasty, the same judgment seat
10)
Egyptian, Dyn. XIX, c. 1300 BC, Cat serves a throned mouse, Brooklyn
Museum
secures for a royal mouse the service of a cat, we recall those Iliad parodies once ascribed
to Homer — the Battle of Frogs and Mice, in which Aristotle found the comic source,
how mice, armed with beanpod greaves and peanut helmets, attack the frogs armed with
rushes and snail-shells, until the Myrmidon crabs intervene.
Va11)
b11)
11)
Breughel, c. 1557, St. Anthony Landscape, National Gallery, Washington,
D.C. (CGB '60)
Vincenzo de' Rossi, c. 1560(?), Hercules and Antæus, Palazzo Vecchio,
Firenze
Domenichino, c. 1620(?), Apollo and Cyclops, with the Aldobrandini dwarf,
National Gallery, London
Now, as the epic mode revives, the take-offs also stake a claim: Cervantes —
Scarce had..Aurora... display'd her rosy graces to mortal eyes from the
gates and balconies of the Manchegan Horizon, when the renowned
Knight Don Quixote... forsook the voluptuous down;
or under baroque hardening, Tassoni's 1622 Rape of a Bucket: a Bolognese assault on
Modena,
In which they make horrible war for a bucket
And go back home in triumph and racket — (CGB)
Fanno per una Secchia orribil guerra,
E Tornan trionfanti a lor terra —
model in Dryden's England for Hudibras, and then, as the title reveals, for Pope's "Rape
of the Lock." Compare Pope's mock-heroics with this fresco Domenichino painted for
the Aldobrandini: the negligence and punishment of their dwarf against a simulated
tapestry of Apollo and the Cyclops:
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Not louder shrieks to pitying Heaven are cast,
When husbands or when lap-dogs breathe their last;
Or when rich China vessels, fall'n from high,
In glitt'ring dust and painted fragments lie!
12)
Longhena, 1631-56, Santa Maria della Salute, Venice (CGB '59); first, video
details
Music:
Benevoli, 1628, 53-v. Festival Mass, Et Resurrexit, Epic LC 3035,
near opening
If earthly exultance is a ground of laughter, even the religious Baroque must surge
that way, as in the formal leaps of Benevoli's Et Resurrexit, or the dome and volutes of
La Salute, everywhere on the point of overplaying such magnificent powers — pious
exhuberance denying mockery.
(fade
Benevoli)
13)
V13a)
13b)
Bernini, 1657-66, St. Athanasius, head, High Altar, St. Peter's, Rome
Guarini, 1667, 36-arch Dome, East end, Duomo, Turin (CGB '84)
Same, more central detail (CGB '84)
Carissimi's "Deum de Deo" from the Mass for Five and Nine takes up the dance of
Bernini's High Altar or Guarini's Turin Domes —
Music:
14)
Carissimi, c. 1660(?), Deum de Deo, Missa a quinque et a novem,
MHS-lllO
(fade)
Pozzo, 1688-94, side of nave ceiling, St. Ignazio, Rome (CGB '48)
which carries to the end of the century in Pozzo's Ignazio ceiling, or in the Christmas
Concerto of Corelli:
Music:
Corelli, by 1699, lst Allegro close, Christmas Concerto, ARC-3147
15)
V15a)
Pozzo, 1688-94, Center, nave ceiling, St. Ignazio, Rome (CGB '48)
Pozzo, 1685, left transept, Nave ceiling, St. Ignazio, Rome (CGB '48)
16)
Churriguerra, 1693-96, High Altar, Esteban Church, Salamanca, Spain
(video divides to below and above)
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(end Corelli)
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Symbolic History
It fills the Spain of the organist Cabanilles with Churriguera's altars;
Music:
Va17)
17)
Cabanilles, c. 1700, from Tiento XVII, de Pangue Lingua, MHS
3069 (B,1)
Mexican, 16th-17th cent., Dome at sunset, Santo Domingo, San Cristobal,
Chiapas (CGB '78)
Mexican, 1659-90, Ceiling, Rosary Chapel, Santo Domingo. Pueblo
(CGB '74)
(end Cabanilles)
and crowns Indian Mexico with the gold of earth-conquest.
Va18)
18)
Prandtauer, 1702 ff, Monastery of Melk, Danube near Vienna (CGB '59;
video takes a detail here from Bach 74, over the town)
Same, West front from below (CGB '59); + V detail
From Rome and Venice the power of High Baroque strikes north over the
Danube, rearing, as to the festal pomp of Biber's St. Polycarp Sonata, the imperial
monastery of Melk.
Music:
Va19)
b19)
Vc19)
19)
H.I.F. Biber, c. 1690(?), St. Polycarp Sonata, near close, SAWT
9537-A Ex
Same, 1702-26, interior of Melk, detail of Cloister Library (CGB '59)
Same, a corner of the Library (CGB '59)
Same, Cloister Hall, detail (CGB '59)
Same, Chapel, Choir & High Altar, detail (CGB '59)
(end Biber)
Though German music, at this Melk turn of the century, peaks 400 miles to the
north, in the fugal toccatas of Buxtehude.
Music:
Va20)
20)
4/1994
Buxtehude, c. 1690(?), Toccata in F Major, close, (Hansen)
Nonesuch H 71188
E.Q. Asam, 1717-25(?), Assumption of Mary, Choir and Altar (from the
Nave), Rohr, Bavaria (CGB '59; video first shows a detail of Mary and the
Angels from Bach 49); digital varies this order
Same, Assumption of Mary, Altar from side (video: detail only)
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C.G. Bell
Music:
Symbolic History
J.S. Bach, 1723, Magnificat, Instrumental opening, Bach Guild 555
— A sacred exuberance flooding over the century, through the lifetime of Bach: here
Asam's boisterous ascent of Mary from tomb to angel-light: Magnificat.
(fade Bach)
What should the courts be where religion has become the bouyant opera of
material praise?
VA of 21) Sir Peter Lely, c. 1660(?), Self-Portrait, Collection of Mrs. H.N. Lely
21)
Sir Peter Lely, Double: [A] c. 1660(?), Self-Portrait, Collection of Mrs.
H.N. Lely; and [B] c. 1650(?), Portrait of a Woman, British Museum,
London; + video detail of [B], from VB of 21
21a)
S. Cooper, 1643, Viscountess Fauconberg (Cromwell's Daughter),
Collection of E.M. Hodgkins
21b)
W. Dobson, c. 1645, The Artist with Sir Charles Cotterell and Sir
Balthazar Gerbler, Albury Park, Guilford
21c)
Cooper, c. 1650(?), William Lenthall, National Portrait Gallery, London
21d)
Le Brun, c. 1665(?) Portrait of Henri de la Tour d'Auvergne, Viscomte de
Turenne, sketch for a tapestry, Versailles; where video has used: Sir
Charles Lely, c. 1658, Robert, 2nd Earl of Sunderland, Knole, near
London (see V21d)
In Dutch Lely, fad of the English court after Van Dyck, Bernini's Duke of Este sires
manly virtue thinning into mannered dress. Etheridge (1676):
next to the coming to a good understanding with a new Mistress, I love
a quarrel with an old one.
Wycherley's Horner (1671) who has himself declared impotent (as from something caught
in France) that his cuckolds may not suspect him. Lady Fidget:
...could you be so generous, so truly a man of honour, as for the sakes
of us women of honour, to cause yourself to be reported no man? No
man! and to suffer yourself the greatest shame that could fall upon a
man, that none might fall upon us women by your conversation? but,
indeed, sir, as perfectly, perfectly the same man as before your going
into France, sir? as perfectly, perfectly, sir?
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Though the loving Country Wife almost explodes everything. Her jealous husband is
being assured of Horner's impotence:
Why, thou jealous fool, dost thou doubt it? he's an arrant French
capon.
Country Wife:
Tis false, sir, you shall not disparage poor Mr. Horner, for to my
certain knowledge…
Others:
— O, hold! — Stop her mouth! — Upon my honor, sir...
The lie prevails:
Cuckolds, like lovers, should themselves deceive.
In that field, Molière's good is moderation:
The rigid virtue of the ancient sages
Is out of key with present usages… (Bishop)
Like the "nature" Boileau says art should follow, it is style, groomed by wit.
22)
22a)
N. de Largilliere, 1703, The Artist with his Wife and Daughter, Louvre
(CGB '80); + V details
Strozzi, c. 1625, Vanity, Private Collection, Bologna (detail of b6)
And yet it overweens. Molière (with Largilliere):
Men never will keep to the golden mean;
They will spoil and pervert a noble aim,
By exaggeration, carrying things too far.
(CGB, after Bishop)
The cosmetic arts of Pope's beautiful Belinda are those Congreve marvelously misapplies
to the earthquaked old face of Lady Wishfort, that "antidote to desire," so "prone to the
iteration of nuptials" — as Erasmus' Folly had said: "they pluck out hairs from the
strangest places; they display their withered and foul breasts":
Lady Wishfort:
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He has put me out of all patience. I shall never recompose my features
to receive Sir Rowland with any economy of face. This wretch has
fretted me that I am absolutely decayed. Look, Foible.
Foible:
Your ladyship has frowned a little too rashly indeed, madam. There
are some cracks discernible in the white varnish.
Lady Wishfort:
Let me see the glass. — Cracks, sayest thou? — why, I am errantly
flayed — I look like an old peeled wall. Thou must repair me, Foible,
before Sir Rowland comes, or I shall never keep up to my picture.
What Lady Wishfort is to the Belle,
23)
V23a)
23b)
V23c)
23d)
Claudio Coello, c. 1690(?), Portrait of Charles II of Spain, Prado, Madrid
Daniel Mytens, 1629, 1st Duke of Hamilton, National Gallery of Scotland,
Edinburgh
Cooper, 1665, Portrait of Anthony Ashley, 2nd Earl of Shaftesbury,
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Ghislandi, c. 1700(?), Portrait of a Gentleman in a Tri-Cornered Hat, Poldi
Pezzoli Mus., Milan
Coello, c. 1690(?), Charles II of Spain (detail of 23)
the fop is to the Beau. We approach the type wherever Baroque might decks a puny
center — as with poor sickly Charles II of Spain. On the English stage, it is as if
Shakespeare's "waterfly" Osric (" 'A did comply with his dug before 'a sucked it") had
absorbed, with the exiled Court of St. James, the preciosities of Molière's France, to
become Etheridge's Sir Fopling Flutter — "He went to Paris a plain bashful English
Blockhead, and is return'd a fine undertaking French Fopp."
— He thinks himself the Pattern of modern Gallantry.
— He is indeed the pattern of modern Foppery. He was Yesterday at
the Play, with a pair of Gloves up to his Elbows, and a Periwig
more exactly Curl'd than a Ladies head newly dress'd for a Ball.
— What a pretty lisp he has!
— Ho, that he affects in imitation of the people of Quality of France.
— ...his looks are more languishing than a Ladys when she... leans her
head carelessly against the side of a Box i'the Playhouse.
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a24)
24)
V24a)
Symbolic History
N. de Largilliere, 1696, lower detail of Magistrates, St. Genevieve Ex-voto,
St. Etienne-du-Mont, Paris (video: right half only)
Same, right detail (video: closer details only)
H. Rigaud, 1728, Count Phil. L.W. Sinzendorf, Kunsthistorisches Museum,
Vienna
By the end of the century, Largilliere's Magistrates vie with Vanbrugh's Lord
Foppington:
Gad's curse! Mr. Foretop, you don't intend to put this upon me for a
full perriwig?
Foretop:
...Why, as God shall judge me, your Honor's side-face is reduc'd to the
tip of your nose.
Lord Foppington:
My side-face may be in eclipse for aught I know; but I'm sure my fullface is like the full-moon.
Foretop:
Heaven bless my eye-sight... an't please your honor... the broadest
place I see in your face does not seem to me to be two inches diameter.
Lord Foppington:
If it did, it would just be two inches too broad; for a perriwig to a man
should be like a mask to a woman, nothing should be seen but his eyes
—
Foretop:
My Lord, I have done; if you please to have more hair in your wig, I'll
put it in.
Lord Foppington:
Passitively, yes.
Foretop:
Shall I take it back now, my lord?
Lord Foppington:
No; I'll wear it today, tho it shew such a manstrous pair of cheeks, stap
my vitals, I shall be taken for a trumpeter.
In Molière, vigor is less lost under the mannered wig.
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C.G. Bell
a25)
25)
25a)
25b)
25c)
Symbolic History
Jan Steen, c. 1650(?), The Village School, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin
Jan Steen, c. 1660, "No medicine for love", Alte Pinak., Munich
Le Nain Brothers, c. 1645(?), from Peasant Family, peasant, Louvre, Paris
Again, Steen, "No Medicine for Love," detail (video takes other details from
25, the whole)
J. Steen, 1660s(?). Sick Lady, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
He is closer to the mid-century realism of the North, the clean fugues of Pezel.
Music:
4/1994
Pezel, pub. 1685, Intrade for Brasses, Anthologie Sonore 2
1700: The Comic Divide
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
That comic play, as in Jan Steen's "No medicine for love," rides a grandeur of ordered
space. Such Molière's absolute clarity of character and action, against which Restoration
drama blurs its complexities of plot and person. Yet Molière transcends the realism of
the Small Masters. As La Fontaine wrote: "Under this stone, where Molière lies alone,
Plautus and Terence lie, three dead in one."
So in Le Medecin Malgré Lui, Sganarelle, woodcutter, taken for a physician by
the trickery of his wife, fumbles a girl who plays dumb for love: "Here is a pulse which
denotes that your daughter is dumb"; and when father, lover, and all pay him, he finds
doctoring a good trade:
Maybe I'll stick to medicine the rest of my life... For whatever you do,
good or bad, you get paid the same... If a cobbler spoils leather, he has
to pay; but here you can spoil a man and it costs you nothing... It's
always the fault of the one who dies. You don't hear the dead man
complain of the doctor who killed him.
In The Hypochondriac there is Purgon's curse at the refusal of his clyster:
— That in four days' time you enter on an incurable state… that you
fall into a dyspepsia.
— Ah, M. Purgon!
— From a dyspesia into a dissentery; from a dissentery into a dropsy.
— Mercy, M. Purgon!
— From a dropsy into the privation of life, where your folly will bring
you...
Or the closing chorus of mock-doctors in Pidgin Latin:
Vivat, vivat, forever vivat,
Novus doctor… et manget et bibat,
Et bleedet et killat.
(1739 translation)
a26)
b26)
26)
4/1994
(end Pezel)
Cornelis Troost, c. 1737-41, Cuckold Scene, detail, Print Collection, BerlinDahlem Museum, Berlin
J. Steen, c. 1665, Girl Eating Oysters, Mauritshuis, The Hague
Again, Troost, Cuckold Scene, whole; first, video close detail
1700: The Comic Divide
�15
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
By the 18th century, French Classical has permeated Dutch realism with its comic
themes. The mocking maid through the half-door, her fingers raised to her forehead like
horns, tells after what discovery the magisterial husband hides his face, leaving his wife
in tears. It is cuckoldry, on which Molière, with a girl-actress for sportive bride, tellingly
dwells — Arnolphe in The School for Wives:
I know all the tricks, all the devices
That ladies use to victimize their husbands...
And so I've taken adequate precautions.
The girl I'll marry is an innocent,
And her simplicity is my protection. . . (Bishop)
While Chrysalde counsels proportion:
Why should the actions of a wife determine whether a man is worthy,
or not, of honor? … Does breach of trust make her, make him, a
monster? A gentleman treats cuckoldry with reason.
Though Troost's print is as mild as 18th-century Addison;
27)
27a)
Charles LeBrun, 1661, Chancellor Sequier, Louvre, Paris (CGB '80)
Same, upper center detail (while video takes five details from 27, whole)
whereas Molière's blend of classical balance and rolicking farce is of the high baroque,
never rococo, never Watteau-light. LeBrun's equestrian Chancellor hints at such a comic
seriousness, where the formal is real, poetry has wit, state and grandeur wear a mocking,
urbane smile.
Such aims attend the heroic normalization of verse which advances in France
from Malherbe (English Waller's model) to the swelling periods of Boileau, where "a just
cadence has reduced the muse to obligatory rules" — "Une juste cadence" "réduisit la
muse aux règles du dèvoir." The proof of the achievement is that it could contain
Molière's verse plays, Racine's tragedies, and even in Boileau, not simply the reason of
his Art poetique, but the Pascalian shadow of Les Folies Humaines:
Often of all our evils reason is the worst —
Souvent de tous nos maux la raison est le pire.
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
And where was reason going in the guise of this chancellor with his mocking
smile? The year of the picture is 1661.
Va28)
Le Vau, Le Brun, Le Notre, 1656-60, Chateau Vaux le Vicomte, side view,
SE of Paris (CGB '80)
Same, interior, Round Hall under Dome (CGB '80)
Same, exterior, front view from distance (CGB '80); + V detail
Vb28)
28)
That August, Nicolas Fouquet, libertine Superintendent of Finance, invited Louis XIV
and the court to a fête at his Chateau Vaux le Vicomte, just completed by the team of Le
Vau, LeBrun, and Le Notre, later to create Versailles. Lully's violins played; there was a
farce by Molière, followed by a tremendous firework (Artefice de Feu). La Fontaine
wrote:
Tout combattit a Vaux pour le plaisir du Roi,
La musique, les eaux, les lustres, les étoiles —
All contended at Vaux for the king's applause:
The music, the waters, the lights, the stars. (CGB)
But "heaven was jealous of it" — "Le ciel en fut jaloux." Nineteen days later the subject
who had out-pomped a king was imprisoned — as it turned out, for life.
For 2nd 27) Again, Chateau Vaux le Vicomte, interior, corner of Mirror Room
(CGB '80)
Chancellor Sequier could have agreed with Molière's Philinte:
Perfect reason flees every extremity;
Warns wisdom itself: be wise with sobriety. (CGB)
The convergence of mannered Séquier, baroque Lully, cork-heeled Louis, La Fontaine of
sage Fables and Molière of truth-telling farce,
2nd 28)
Again, Vaux le Vicomte Chateau, nearer front view (CGB '80)
in the showiest palace of pre-Versailles France, has import. Ages of formal pomp incline
to the comedy of manners.
29)
4/1994
Indian (Islam), 1632-52, Taj Mahal, Agra, India; + V detail
1700: The Comic Divide
�17
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
And in one of those resonances the world gives hints of, our Renaissance and
Baroque coincide, over Asia, with a noble opulence (soon to be imitated in the rococo), a
Taj-Mahal grandeur,
30)
Indian (Nepalese), 16th cent., Dancing divinities, Private Collection, Rome
charged, in illumination and sculpture, with meticulous abandonment, refined out of the
sacred energies of centuries before. It is the more and more courtly dance of divinity.
31)
Japanese, 16th cent., mask of the "Ugly Woman" ("Oto"), Nat. Mus., Tokyo;
+ V detail
Nowhere has civilization achieved higher life-style than in late Muromachi Japan.
A mask designed for "Ugly Woman" roles seems to reach across land and ocean to the
praised improvisations of the Commedia del Arte. But what speaks in it like a comic
oracle is the blend of the vital and grotesque, the corrective energy of the art-laugh.
32)
Upper Paleolithic, c. 23,000 B.C., Venus of Willendorf, Natural History,
Madrid; + V detail
We know nothing of the use or intent of Cro-Magnon fertility fetishes; yet here, in
the earliest carvings we possess, generation revels in an all-time archetype. In burlesque
New Orleans, it is "the biggest baby-doll of them all" who keeps her dancing mass continually in the air, a captive balloon in defiance of gravity. In Molière, it is the Mock
Doctor's enthusiasm for the ample wet nurse: "Ah nurse of my heart... there is one, not
far from here, who would be happy just to kiss" (as Bishop will translate "les petits bouts
de vos petons") "to kiss the sweet utensils of your trade."
Va33)
33)
V33a)
33b)
4/1994
Hellenistic, 3rd-1st cent. B.C., Double Comic Mask, Mus. Barracco, Rome
Hellenistic, 3rd-lst cent. B.C., terra cotta of comic actors in masks (Life,
Feb. 8, 1963)
Classical Greek, Peloponnesian from Palestrina, 2nd half of 4th cent. B.C.,
Aphrodite on a Goat (cover of a box mirror, detail), Louvre, Paris
Greek (Macedon, tomb at Derveni), c. 330 B.C., Krater, Dionysus, etc.,
Mus., Thessalonikê
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�18
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Like any polarity, the vital-and-ugly admits of infinite field solutions: How keen
the satyr discovery of the Greeks — Aristotle's Ridiculous: "a mistake or deformity not
productive of pain... the mask, for instance, that excites laughter." Though the rapturecloses of Aristophanes should have brought even the Stagirite nearer to mockery's ecstatic
core.
The Birds:
…to the nuptial couch!… Take hold of me by my wings and let us
dance... Oh joy! Io paean! Tralala! victory is thine, oh thou greatest
of gods!
Lysistrata:
Appear dancers, and the Graces with you... Apollo... Dionysus...
Aphrodite. Io Paean! dance, leap, as in honor of a victory won... and
Artemis… a fillet binding thy tresses... strike thy divine hands to
animate the dance; aid us to praise the valiant goddess of battles,
Athene of the Brazen House!
Va34)
b34)
34)
Attic cup by Makron, c. 470(?) B.C., Satyr and Maenad, Mus., Munich
Greek, 6th cent. B.C., Phallic Monument, Sacred precinct, Delos
Græco-Roman, 1st cent. A.D., Phallic Fountain, House of Vetii, Pompeii
— The Lysistrata standing as near as any play to comic center: the deed of kind, with its
life-giving clown. When the oath of the Athenian and Spartan women, "to refrain from
the male part altogether," has brought their warring men, like stalking herms, to treat for
peace and coition:
Could any man's back and loins stand such a strain?
— Ye gods in heaven, the pangs I suffer! —
it is the phallus that leads to god-celebration.
Even in the Neronian lust of the Satyricon, the Priapus of this Pompeian fountain
holds some sacred claim:
a land so infested with divinity, one might meet with a god more easily
than with a man.
35)
4/1994
French Romesque-Gothic, 1145-50, Shepherds, right of West Portal, Chartres;
+ V detail
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�19
C.G. Bell
35a)
Symbolic History
Rohan Hours, 1425(?), Shepherds’ Dance, f85 v, Bibl. Nat., Paris
Like everything of the pagan earth, comedy went down in Christian faith. When it
revives in the church close it is under the transformation of innocence — these sely
shepherds of Chartres, naive as Chrestien's description of a bridge, which is the sharp
blade of a sword:
There was never such a bad bridge, nor one whose flooring was so
bad… It is badly made and badly built, and the construction of it is
bad.
From this 1140 carving to the mystery plays of the 15th century (the shepherd to the
Christ child: "Have here a ball/ And go to the tennis"), we sense how the Germanic word
"selig," blessed, innocent, would change to the English "silly," stretching the salvation
comedy of innocence,
Music:
Lochaimer Liederbuch, 1452-60, "Es fur ein pawr gen holcz,"
opening, Arc-3222
Va36)
German late Gothic, 1352-61 (attributed to Heinrich Parler), Portal of
Frauenkirche, Nuremberg, Bavaria
Vb36) English (E. Anglian), early 14th cent., Psalter of the St. Omer family, detail
of Beatus page, Add. MSS 39810, British Museum, London; + V detail
Vc36) Grandes Heures of the Duc de Berry, 1406-09, pl. 64, detail, "Mock Priest";
Biblioteque Nationale, Paris
d36)
German, 1480 (Erasmus Grasser), A Moorish Dancer (standing), City Hist.
Mus., Munich
e36)
Bellini, 1515, Lady at her Toilet, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
(CGB '59)
1st 36) E. Grasser, c. 1480, Another Morisco Dancer (crouching), Stadtmuseum,
Munich
with the profane juggling and farce that boil up from folk Gothic, Corpus Christi
interludes, between-sports, Grasser's 15th-century Morisco Dancers, this Lochaimer germ
of Don Giovanni's demonic patter-song; (fade music) or the English ballad of the proud
lady and the juggler:
Here beside dwelleth
A riche barons doughter;
4/1994
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�20
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
She wold have no man
That for love had sought her,
So nise she was.
She wold have no man
That was made of molde,
But if he had a mouth of gold
To kisse her whan she wold.
So dangerus she was.
There of hard a joly juggeler
That laid was on the grene,
And at this ladys wordès
Iwis he had gret tene,
An angred he was.
He juggeled to him a well good stede
Of an old horse bone,
A sadill and a bridill both,
And set himself thereon.
A juggeler he was.
1st 37)
V2nd d36)
V2nd e36)
2nd 36)
For 2nd 37)
French Gothic, 1260-70, Smiling Angel, head, Rheims
Detail of d36, above: Standing Moorish Dancer
Detail of e36, above: Bellini, Lady at Her Toilet
Detail of 36, above: Crouching Moorish Dancer
[B] of double 38, below: Franco-German, c. 1280, Prince of this
World, head, Cathedral Museum, Strassburg
He priked and praunsed both
Beffore that lady's gate;
She wend he had ben an angell
Was come for her sake.
A prikker he was.
He priked and praunsed
Beffore that lady's bowr;
She wend he had ben an angel
Come from heven towre.
A praunser he was…
The day began to passe,
The night began to come,
To bed was brought
4/1994
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�21
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
The fair jentell woman,
And the juggeler also.
The night began to passe,
The day began to springe,
All the birdès of her bowr
They began to singe,
And the cokoo also.
'Where be ye, my mery maidens,
That ye come not me to?
The joly windows of my bowr
Look that you undo,
That I may see!
For I have in mine armès
A duke or elles an erle.'
But whan she lookèd him upon,
He was a blere-eyed chorle.
'Alas!' she said.
She lade him to an hill,
and hangèd shuld he be.
He juggeled himself to a mele pok;
The dust fell in her eye;
Begilèd she was.
God and our Lady
And swetè Seint Johan
Send every giglot of this town
Such another leman
Even as he was.
38)
V38a)
38b)
39)
40)
4/1994
Double of 1st and 2nd 37, above: [A] French-Gothic, 1260-70, Smiling
Angel, Rheims; and [B] Franco-German, c. 1280, Prince of this World,
Strassburg; + V detail of each
Basler Münster, c. 1290, The Deceiver and a Foolish Virgin, from a cast,
Basel Museum
Mantegna, c. 1468, Triumph of Silenus, detail, British Museum, London
Salvator Rosa, c. 1650, Head of a Faun, Albertina, Vienna; + V detail
Goya(?), c. 1824, Self in a Tall Hat, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna;
first, a video detail
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�22
C.G. Bell
Music:
Symbolic History
French, c. 1250-60, Alle Psallite cum Luya, vocal, Seraphim SIC6052
In two smiles we read the radical Christian heightening of the poles of comic
possibility (wide as from Shakespeare's Tempest to Jonson's Volpone; yet fused in one
troped Alleluya) — the Rheims angel smile of Grace; and the Strassburg smile of the
Tempter, the Prince of this World. (end Alle) That equivocal vitality reaches forward
from the Gothic root; through Renaissance,
4/1994
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�23
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Music:
Mozart, 1787, Finch' han del vino, Don Giovanni, Angel 3605 D/L
through the satyr espousal of Rosa's baroque, toward Storm and Stress, the rape aria of
Don Giovanni, as revolutionary a seizure on the comedy of manners as Goethe's Faust; as
this smile the old Goya painted or inspired, resurrected from the beast-base of the snarl.
Such the humor of Kant's Critiques, where reason sharpens its weapons to depose itself
and crown the intuitive successor.
(end Mozart)
a41)
41)
V41a)
41b)
J. Fouquet, 1453-55, Job on his Dung Heap, Hours of Etienne Chevalier,
Musée Condé, Chantilly
Florentine, c. 1525(?), Bust of Machiavelli, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence
Giulio Romano, 1540(?), The Lovers, Hermitage, Leningrad
Valerio Cioli, 1558-70(?), Morgante, Duke Cosimo's Dwarf, astride a turtle,
Giardino di Boboli (video then returns to 41, Bust of Machiavelli)
By the 15th century, medieval farce had begun the amplification which would lead
to Molière: — Pathelin, shyster, out-cheated by the baaing shepherd with his "bump of
villainy". But it is first with Machiavelli, who even in his bust smiles like a roguish
Leonardo, that fabliaux realism is invested in the spatial harmonies of Renaissance,
without loss of natural immediacy. In the Mandragola, the beautiful Lucrezia is to be
seduced. Parasite Ligurio suggests a spa to the learned dolt her husband:
—
—
—
—
Did you see the sea at Leghorn?
What do you think? Of course I saw it.
How much bigger is it than Arno?
Than Arno? Why it's four times — no, more — six bigger —
seven bigger — I tell you, you don't see anything but water, water,
water. (CGB)
— …e non si vede se non acqua, acqua, acqua.
42)
42a)
After Q. Massys, 1510-20, Ugly Queen of Tunis, National Gallery, London
School of G. Romano, 1530-32, Jove and Olympia, Palazzo Te, Sala di Psiche,
Mantua (video returns to a detail of 42, the Ugly Queen of Tunis)
We have seen that surge engender on gargoyle farce a progeny of giants strange as
Massys' Queen of Tunis — Rabelais, with codpiece distending the monk's habit — as
when Panurge, rejected by a lady, sprinkled her clothes, in church, with an extract made
from a hot and salt bitch:
4/1994
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�24
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
All the dogs in church came running, big and little, laying out their
yards and pissing all over her… A tall greyhound bepissed her head;
some her sleeves and others her crupper; the little ones pissed on her
pattens. Panurge laughed and said to a lord of the city: "I think that
lady is in heat, or has been covered lately by a greyhound." Then he
left... and wherever he saw dogs in the street, he would give them a
kick and say: "Get along! Join your fellows, in the devil's name."
43)
Bronzino, c. 1546, Exposure of Luxury, National Gallery, London; + V
details
The comic-tragic cleavage has mostly ruled the stage. Yet Bronzino's Allegory of
Cupid, Venus, and Time, sometimes called the "Exposure of Luxury," is a comic picture,
applying the heroic mythology of Raphael and Michelangelo in a Mannerism of fancy
play — as in the court comedy of Lyly:
Cupid and my Campaspe played
At cards for kisses; Cupid paid.
Though there was no such brilliance of Cupid-lust in English until heroic Dryden toyed
with it:
He showed her his arrow, and bid her not fear,
For the pain was no more than a maiden may bear;
When the balm was infused, she was not at a loss
What they meant by their sighing and kissing so close;
By their praying and whining,
And clasping and twining,
And panting and wishing
And sighing and kissing,
And sighing and kissing so close.
a44)
b44)
44)
School of Leonardo, c. 1505, Leda and the Swan, Borghese Gal., Rome
Titian, 1559, Rape of Europa, Isabella S. Gardner Museum, Boston
Tintoretto, 1550, Vulcan, Venus, Mars, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59);
+ V details, then again the whole
The revived mythologies of Poliziano, Ariosto, and the rest prompt the visual.
Marlowe, of Venus' temple in Sestos:
4/1994
1700: The Comic Divide
�25
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
There might you see the gods in sundrie shapes,
Committing headdie ryots, incest, rapes;
For know, that underneath this radiant floure
Was Danaes statue in a brazen tower,
Jove slylie stealing from his sisters bed,
To dallie with Idalian Ganimed,
And for his love Europa bellowing loud,
And tumbling with the rainbow in a cloud:
Blood-quaffing Mars heaving the yron net,
Which limping Vulcan and his Cyclops set…
In the Venetians such scenes range from the tragic, through high romance, to this comic
Tintoretto: Vulcan reflected in the mirror like an old woman, inspects the Venereal
premises, while Cupid feigns sleep, and the phallic helmet of Mars pokes from under the
bed.
Music:
a45)
45)
V45a)
Vicentino, c. 1571, close of Petrarch "Passa la nave," Bach, Guild
HM 34 SD
G. Arcimboldo, 1570(?), The Summer, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien
Arcimboldo, 1560-70, Water (fishy-face), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien;
+ V detail
Arcimboldo, 1563, Winter, (head of a gnarled tree), same museum
In the deepening value crisis of the late century, even comedy and pastoral darken;
while mocking experiments — Arcimboldo's heads formed of vegetables or of fish —
accompany the chromatic upheaval of music: Vicentino.
(end Vicentino)
In Bruno, the hermetic fury of magic swells with modern science, a cauldron of
the tragic and grotesque. Of all Renaissance plays, his Candellaio is the weirdest, fuzing
the visionary
4/1994
1700: The Comic Divide
�26
C.G. Bell
46)
46a)
46b)
Symbolic History
An. Carracci, c. 1585, The Bean Eater, Colonna Gal., Rome
Rubens, 1612-15, Toilet of Venus, Vaduz-Lichtenstein Collection; + V detail
Rubens, 1608(?), detail of Sampson and Dalilah, National Gallery, London
(video repeats 46, The Bean Eater)
with the brute physicality which in this early Carracci looks to the Baroque. Carubina is
to meet with her old candlemaker, he taking her in the dark for the mistress he thinks he
has charmed; she plots it all:
I'll come on hot with kisses like a bear. When I gnaw his cheeks, you'll
hear him yell in the next room. "My heart, my life," I'll say; "soft, or
we'll be overheard..."
I'll get his tongue between my teeth and bite until he screams some
more. "O love, O sweetheart," I'll whisper, "passion drives me wild."
I'll pretend to want him before we go to bed, get him ready, egg
him on; but before the King of Glory can come in, 1'11 squeeze his
root and cullions like wringing out a wash, and pant: "My own, to
have you in my hands."
When you hear him howl the third time — and I'll twist until he
howls — then come into the room, all of you, with lights; and we'll
see. (CGB)
Against the diabolic grossening which would lead to Ben Jonson:
Sirrah, I'll strip you — What to do? Lick figs out at my —
47)
V47a)
V47b)
47c)
47d)
G. Lytens, c. 1617, Winter Scene, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien (CGB
'59); + V details
Same, Another winter scene, Aachen Gallery (CGB '74)
Roeland Savery, 1610, Mountain Landscape with Woodcutters, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien (CGB '59); + V detail
Jan Brueghel, 1599, Little Bouquet in a Clay Jar, close detail, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien
Brueghel, 1609, Harbor City, Alte Pinak., Munich (CGB '59); + V detail
angel make-believe enwreathes The Tempest and The Winter's Tale, fills art with naturelove (Lyten's Gypsy snow-pleasures, romantic as Huck Finn), spins the lute arabesques of
Dowland's incomparable fantasies.
4/1994
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�27
C.G. Bell
Music:
a48)
b48)
48)
V48a)
V48b)
Symbolic History
Dowland, c. 1610(?), Fantasy, (Bream) beginning and end, RCA
V LDS 2656
H. Goltzius, 1604, Venus, Bacchus, Ceres, etc., Hermitage, Leningrad
J. de Gheyn, c. 1590(?), Mother and Child studying drawing book, Print
Room, Staatliche Museen, Berlin
H. Avercamp, c. 1615(?), Storm on the Coast, Berlin-Dahlem Mus., Berlin;
first, a video detail
Rubens, c. 1632(?), Homecoming from the Fields, Pitti, Firenze
Frans Hals, c. 1622, A Couple in a Garden, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
In Bacon, Gilbert, Harvey, reasoned exuberance proliferates observational
science. The later novel, Dickens and all, lurks in the melodrama of humors. In the
neglected sketches of 1600, Golzius, de Gheyn, Velvet Brueghel, this Avercamp, man
walks the animate stage of earth, winds, and waters.
(end
Dowland)
49)
49a)
J. Jordeans, 1638, The King Drinks, Royal Museum, Brussels; first, a video
detail
J. Jordeans, c. 1640, The Feast of the Bean King, close detail,
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien
In Rubens and his school (this Jordeans' "The King Drinks") myth riots in the
physical. So drunkenness on the English stage thickens from Iago's "Potations pottle
deep" and Anthony's "Cup us till the world go round," to that Heywood carouse where
revellers take the house for a ship tossed by storm:
To cast their lading overboard...
All fall to work, and hoist into the street...
Stools, tables, trestles, trenchers, bedsteads, cups,
Pots, plate and glasses; here a fellow whistles,
They take him for the boatswain; one lies struggling
Upon the floor, as if he swum for life;
4/1994
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�28
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
A third takes the bass-viol for the cockboat,
Sits in the belly on't, labours and rows,
His oar the stick with which the fiddler played...
50)
50a)
V50b)
50c)
G. Honthorst, c. 1625-30, Merry Flea-Hunt, Öffentliche Sammlung, Basel
G. Honthorst, 1625, The Procuress, detail, Central Mus., Utrecht;
+ closer V detail
Rembrandt, 1646, French Bed, Amsterdam
Again 50, Merry Flea-Hunt, detail
Jonsonian comedy points again and again to the northern Caravaggiesque.
Honthorst's Merry Flea-Hunt reaches from the joking lust of Falstaff: "She's neither fish
nor flesh, a man knows not where to have her," to Otway's Sir Jolly Jumble, old pimpvoyeur:
My Ganymede!... She's thine, boy... plump, soft, smooth, wanton! Ah
rogue!.. here's shoulders... here's a leg... I will kiss thee ; ha, ha, he,
he... a toad...
Odd, I love... to see a pretty wench and a young fellow touze and
rouze and frouze and mouze... faith dearly!... I'll pimp for thee, dear
heart; and shan't I hold the door? shan't 1 peep, ha?... if thou hadst her
in thy arms now between a pair of sheets, and I under the bed to see
fair play, boy... gemini!... there would be doings! O lawd, 1 under the
bed! (Enter whores) .... Bubbies! Oh, law, there's bubbies — odd, I'll
bite 'em... Tickle me a little Jenny — do! he he, he he!
51)
Poussin, c. 1629-30, Nymph carried by satyr, Gallery, Cassel; + V details
Even moral Spenser had played the wag with satyrs — when old Malbecco finds
his wife among them:
Nine times he heard him come aloft ere day,
That all his hart with gealosie did swell.
Even elegiac Poussin shows such a nymph as Beaumont sends into the woods in his play
otherwise called The Faithful Shepherdess:
From one danger I am free;
No man on earth can ravish me —
I am so willing. . .
4/1994
1700: The Comic Divide
�29
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
The haste of the fruit-bearer, the white flesh on brown, the turnabout play on riding, the
drape between the satyr's legs, like a Shakespearean pun, the cupids, voyeurs surely, like
Sir Jolly — yet beside the later erotica of Boucher or Fragonard, this holds the heroic
vein.
a52)
b52)
J. Steen, 1650-60(?), The Poultry Yard, detail, Mauritshuis, The Hague
Le Nain Brothers, 1645(?), Peasant Family, whole, Louvre, Paris (this video
whole yields in the slide show to peasant and wife; plus video: woman to
the left, from Vb52; woman, far left, from V52a; and man, right of center,
from V52b)
In England realistic comedy is cut off by the Puritan closure of the stage; though
the genre equivalent in painting flourished in Calvinist Holland through much of the
century. In France the peasant realism of the Le Nain brothers parallels that liveliest
ingredient of Molière — thus at the opening of The Mock Doctor, Sganarel's fight with
his wife, and the backfiring intervention of a neighbor — she: "Why do you stick your
nose in? Suppose I want to be beaten?" But to approximate the style condition of
Molière, that wonderfully articulated folk stem must be engrafted with a noble scion —
Va53)
53)
French Renaissance, 1518-27, Chateau d'Azay-Le-Rideau, Indre et Loire
French Renaissance, 1519 ff., Chateau de Chambord; first, video detail
Music:
Attaignant, 1529, Tant que vivray, lute, Turnabout TV- 34137S
the courtly splendor growing in Royalist France since the Renaissance Chateau de
Chambord, or the lute songs and dances of Attaignant. But the 150 years from this
Francis' hunting lodge on the Loire,
(fade Attaignant)
54)
54a)
4/1994
Le Vau and others, 1669-85, Garden Façade, Palace of Versailles
Same, corner view; with video return to a detail of 54
1700: The Comic Divide
�30
C.G. Bell
Music:
Symbolic History
Le Sage de Richée, pub. 1695, Lute Ouverture, Turnabout TV34137S
to Louis XIV's Versailles, swells airy Renaissance to the heroic assertions of Baroque.
And even within the limits of the musing lute, as played by the same performer, the
passage from 1529, to Le Sage de Richée, 1695, loads the chords with grandeur. (fade Le
Sage de Richée)
How much more when the orchestra of Lully took up the orgulous overture —
Music:
a55)
55)
V55a)
Lully, 1675, from Thesée Overture, (slow, fast) from Col. M-376
Same, interior, Ambassadors' Staircase, Versailles
Le Vau, Mansart, Le Brun, 1668-79, ceiling of Salon de Venus, Versailles
(CGB '59); + V detail
Le Brun, c. 1650-61, detail of ceiling fresco, Galerie d'Hercule, Hotel
Lambert, Paris
as in those royal apartments by Le Vau, Mansart and LeBrun, where the whole life of the
King, among heaped geometries, wreathed and stuffed with precedents of power, became
a state display.
But the very structure of the French Overture opposes to the majesty of the
opening grave
56)
Le Brun, 1663-75, Tapestry, Louis XIV visits the Gobelin factory, Versailles
(CGB '59); + V details, return to whole, and a closer left detail
a faster moving section of fugal play, as if we had gone from the embattled virtu of
Corneille to Molière's ingenious toyings in the high costumed mode:
THE STAGE OF THE ROYAL THEATRE AT VERSAILLES
Molière (alone):
Come along, ladies and gentlemen. Why don't you come out? The
devil take your delay… You'll drive me mad.
Actor:
It's you who'll drive us mad. We don't know our parts, so what are we
to do?
Molière (Towards Louis XIV):
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Well, the king won't be here for two hours, let's rehearse and see if we
can hit on something.
(end Lully)
Or among the tapestries glorifying the reign, turned to this one where Le Brun leads the
Grand Monarch to see the Gobelin works. So Dryden passes from The Conquest of
Granada to Marriage à la Mode —
Why should a foolish marriage vow,
Which long ago was made,
Oblige us to each other now,
When passion is decayed? —
without abandoning the stance of the beau monde.
57)
57a)
Le Brun, 1663-75, Tapestry, Louis XIV at Dunkerque, Versailles (CGB '59)
Same, detail, left (from CGB ‘59 Larger Declaration 39)
Music:
Lully, 1675, Thesée, Marche des Sacrificateurs, Col. M. 376
And even when the king, mounted on Bernini's horse of Constantine, appears at
the siege of Dunkerque — as in that Dryden heroic Conquest:
Heaven has not destined you so soon to rest:
Heroes must live to succour the distrest...
Into the press of clashing swords we'll go,
And, where the darts fly thickest, seek the foe —
the royal claim so curls with irony, we might wonder if the last courtier to the left were
not the admired original of Lord Foppington.
58)
Le Brun, 1665-80, Tapestry, detail, Crowning of Louis XIV, Les Gobelins,
Paris (here video adds a closer detail of 57a, above)
How can the honnête homme in all his formal nobility, but walk the tight-rope of
Molière's Misanthrope between unmannered bluntness and sauve hypocrisy? — an
argument Wycherley would stuff with English life and color:
Lord Plausible:
If I did say or do an ill thing to anybody, it should be sure to be behind
their backs, out of pure good manners...
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Manly:
And if I would say or do ill to any, it should be to their faces... Why
should a man be troubled with the flattery of knaves if he be not a fool
or cully; or with the fondness of fools, if he be not a knave or cheat?
Va59)
59)
F.L. Juvarra, 1729-33, Stupinigi, through the gate, Palace near Turin
French, c. 1690, Painted Fan, The Ball (Le Loir, Histoire du Costume)
We are particularizing an axiom of historical change, that the polarity which sets
Baroque grandeur against Rococo play must be structurally bedded in both styles; as this
1690 ball in the baroque salon thins toward the Mozartean ironies which would bring
down the curtain on the Ancien Régime. In music the rift is bridged by the foremost
composer, François, the great Couperin, whose Third Lesson of Tenebrae, amplified in its
first festal recording,
For Va60) Mansart, 1699-1710, Royal Chapel, Apse, from courtyard, Versailles (a
detail previewed from 2nd a60, below)
60)
Mansart, Coypel, etc., 1699-1710, interior of Chapel at Versailles
culminates the French Baroque — such a "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, convertere ad
Dominum Deum Tuum," as Bossuet preached in this Versailles Chapel, to the admiration
of the court he served next to God:
Behold! Columns that lift to the sky the boast of our nothingness…
Voila... des colonnes qui semblent vouloir porter jusqu'au ciel le
magnifique témoignage de nôtre néant...
2nd 59)
Again, Painted Fan; + V detail
Yet Couperin launches the closing great Jerusalem fugue from a skipping confession of
weakness, as if some salon lady, waving such a fan as this, had fluttered "the liquefaction
of her clothes".
Music:
Couperin le Grand. 1714, Third Tenebrae Service, V-1235-6, from
"de qua non poter surgere" to close
2nd a60) Again, Royal Chapel, exterior, Apse (video: closer detail only)
V2nd 60) Again, Interior of Chapel at Versailles (detail of 60, above)
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C.G. Bell
61)
62)
63)
Symbolic History
Versailles Chapel, lower nave and choir (CGB '59); with V details
Same, upper row of columns and apse (CGB '59); first V detail
Same, vault, with Coypel painting (CGB '59); video: details only, below
and above, then a return to the apse painting, detail of 62, above
(end Tenebrae)
From Coypel's heroic religiosity,
64)
Watteau, 1716, Les Deux Cousines, Marquis de Ganay, Paris; + V detail
to the frail dream of Watteau, seems to crowd into the fewest years a centennial
demarcation.
Music:
Couperin le Grand, c.1715-20, from Les Folies Françaises, 2nd
through 5th (Landowska), Couperin Society
But Couperin found no difficulty in going from the Lamentations of Jeremiah to the most
precious miniatures on the Follies of France — like Watteau's little canvases, plaintive
diversions of the Regency.
65)
Watteau, 1720-21, Judgment of Paris, Louvre, Paris; + V detail (Folies 3)
In Watteau a Rubens Judgment of Paris turns to a parody in the vein of Pope:
"To arms, to arms!" the fierce virago cries,
And swift as lightning to the combat flies...
(So when bold Homer sets the gods in arms,
Towered Olympus rings with loud alarms).
66) Watteau, 1718(?), The Music Party, Wallace Collection, London (Folies 4)
V66a) Same, detail of musician
Yet whatever the loss and longing of these deft ironies, in space and person they
cling to the noble norm; instruct us that the death of the Grand Monarch and waste of
heroic war ("It was a famous victory") drove the thinnest wedge into the confidence of the
West.
For 1st 67) Watteau, 1717, Gathering under an Arcade, right section, Dulwich
College, London, which video replaces with three details
(Folies 5)
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Symbolic History
In The Rape of the Lock —
Hither the heroes and the nymphs resort,
To taste a while the pleasures of a court;
In various talk th' instructive hours they pass'd,
Who gave the ball, or paid the visit last;
One speaks the glory of the British Queen,
And one describes a charming Indian screen;
A third interprets motions, looks and eyes;
At every word a reputation dies —
that derision celebrates Augustan values.
(Cut Folies)
1st 68) Watteau, c. 1718(?), Gilles, Louvre, Paris
In the "Essay on Man", our Pascalian paradox —
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world —
meets Leibnitzian surety:
And spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.
2nd 67) Again, Gathering under an Arcade, whole; + V details
2nd 67a) Same, detail of dancing to the left
Watteau's wigs, robes, poses, this Baroque arch and piers, still voice what we
would hear if we could freeze the full chords of Couperin's music — as indeed we almost
do in his Passacaille "Vanity of Human Wishes".
Music:
Couperin, c. 1717, Passacaille (from 1st into 3rd Refrain),
(Landowska) Couperin Society Album
It is hard to decide whether Congreve's last refinement of manners in his 1700
Way of the World, has crossed the Watteau divide:
(1st Couplet)
Mrs. Millamant:
I won't be called names after I'm married; positively I won't be called
names.
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Mirabell:
Names!
Ay, as wife, spouse, my dear, joy, jewel, love, sweetheart, and the rest
of that nauseous cant, in which men and their wives are so fulsomely
familiar... let us be very strange and well-bred; let us be as strange as if
we had been married a great while; and as well bred as if we were not
married at all...
Va2nd 68) Watteau, Gilles, with frame (CGB '80); + V detail
2nd 68a)
Same, closer detail
(2nd Couplet)
But when the dowager Duchess of Marlborough, after Congreve's death in 1728,
had a wax effigy of him made to sit by her at table, and the better to suggest the gouty
genius, let the feet be regularly blistered and annointed by his doctor, that was comedy in
the new mode of Watteau's Gilles, of Marivaux and Sterne, an overplaying of le sentiment
du coeur.
(fade Passacaille)
a69)
69)
69a)
Wrenn, 1664-69, Sheldonian, detail, Oxford (CGB '59)
Sir Peter Lely, c. 1650-55, Henry Sydney, Penshurst, England
Giacomo del Po, c. 1690, Expulsion, detail of The Fall, Metropolitan
Museum, NYC (CGB '74)
Music:
Henry Purcell, c. 1685, Canzona, Golden Sonata, Purcell Society
Album
In England as in France, the 17th-century Baroque, by its brisk facility of
command, enacts the soul of comedy. Thus Lely's Henry Sidney, or the Canzona of
Purcell's Golden Sonata. Is the delight of precise imitation a comic delight? (fade Purcell)
The canon, anyway, was the form taken by Purcell and the Restoration for the lusty catch:
"Adam caught Eve by the furbelow/ And that's the oldest catch we know."
a70)
b70)
70)
70a)
V70b)
English late Baroque (Sir John Vanbrugh) 1705-22, Blenheim Palace, SW
view, Oxfordshire; + V detail
Same, detail of North Court (CGB '84)
Same, North Court through iron gate (CGB '84)
Same, a darker detail (CGB '84)
Same, a variant detail (CGB '84)
Music:
4/1994
Lully, 1668, Overture to George Dandin (Le Grand Divertissement
Royal de Versailles); Musical Heritage Society 704
1700: The Comic Divide
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
From Versailles, the Lully Overture — Grave and Allegro — spread over Europe,
like all the Sun-King assertions of architecture, dress, reason, statecraft, war. So when
Vanbrugh, playwright and architect, came to design for the Duke of Marlborough the
most heroic mansion in England, how could his genius not yoke those perennial steeds of
comedy, fat and lean — ostentation and ironic wit? (allegro) With what repartee the
north gate, with its iron curls and gilded sharp flower-flames, pricks the swelling vaunts
of the wide-winged court. Was not Vanbrugh, maker of Lord Foppington and Tunbelly
Clumsy, to break off his unfinished Journey to London (and his life) with the lurid
awakening of Sir Francis Headpeice:
— ...And why will you be in a passion, Sir Francis?
— Because I came here to breakfast with my Lady (Arabella)...
expecting to find my family set round a civil table with her, upon
some plumb-cake, hot rolls, and a cup of strong beer; instead of
which, I find these good women staying their stomachs with a box
and dice, and that man there, with the strange periwig, making a
hearty meal upon my wife and daughter.
Va71)
71)
71a)
V71b)
71c)
V71d)
71e)
J. Thornhill, c. 1710, etc., upper section of 71, used here for two close video
details
J. Thornhill, c. 1710, Painted Hall Ceiling, Former Naval Hospital,
Greenwich (slide show: whole; video: upper half only)
I. Jones, (Wrenn and others), 1616 ff. and 1694 ff., The Queen's House,
Naval Hospital, etc., from the Thames, Greenwich, London (CGB from
Milton Vb42)
Ch. Le Brun 2nd half of the 17th cent., Gobelins Tapestry, The Elements:
Water, as restored by Colbert, Gobelins Mus., Paris (here video first shows
the whole of Thornhill's Painted Ceiling
Hawker, c. 1680-85, Charles II, National Portrait Gallery, London (video:
upper half only)
Kneller, c. 1706, John Churchill, lst Duke of Marlborough, Nat. Port. Gal.,
London
Again, Thornhill's Ceiling, lower detail
Music:
Purcell, 1689, Overture, Dido and Aeneas, l'Oiseau-Lyre, 50216
When Thornhill in the Great Hall ceiling at Blenheim, or in this of the Greenwich
Naval Hospital, exalts the conquering England of William and Mary, who can
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
unscramble Homeric epic from Battle of the Frogs? Does it match the Grave of Purcell's
Dido Overture, with the Dryden "Year of Wonders" where Pope began?
The time shall come, when free as seas or wind
Unbounded Thames shall flow for all mankind,
Whole nations enter with each swelling tide,
And seas but join the regions they divide.
(Music: Allegro)
Or is it the rush and edged wit of the succeeding allegro — the Dryden Swift
belittles in the "Battle of the Books"?
the helmet nine times too large for the head, which appeared situate far
in the hinder parts... like a shrivelled beau, from within the penthouse
of a modern periwig.
With the takeoff on War, in A Tale of a Tub?
the true foundation of grandeur and heroism... necessary to establish
subordination... as also to purge bodies politic of gross humours...
72)
W. Hogarth, 1743, Marriage a la Mode II, Breakfast, National Gallery,
London; + V details
In England as in France the fugue fiercens as peanut virtue rattles in the great
shell: — Hogarth's "Morning After the Party" in the spendthrift mansion of Marriage a la
Mode, Swift's Modest Proposal for maintaining the destitute of Ireland:
(fade Dido)
I have been assured by a very knowing American... that a young
healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing,
and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked or boiled... I
grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for
landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents,
seem to have the best title to the children...
This would... increase the care and tenderness of mothers toward
their children... Men would become as fond of their wives during the
time of their pregnancy as they now are of their mares in foal... nor
offer to beat or kick them (as is too frequent a practice) for fear of a
miscarriage...
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73)
V73a)
V73b)
V73c)
73d)
V73e)
Symbolic History
French Engraving, 17th cent., "Monkey-Shines," Abbé de Marolles
Collection
Huet, 1760(?), Mural from Salon des Singes, detail, Chantilly, France (here
video returns to a detail of 73, "Monkey-Shines")
Callot, 1631, Siege of La Rochelle, detail, British Museum, London
Callot 1631, Siege of the Isle of Ré, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien
Callot, c. 1633, from the Miseries of War: Plundering a Large Farmhouse,
left detail
Same, right detail (here video returns to another detail of 73, "MonkeyShines")
The ironic masque of manners had inevitably hit on the court-mockery of
monkey-shines, as in this French engraving, good-humored as Molière. There is a card
game of Monkey belles at Chantilly, and Chardin did several versions of the Apeantiquary. But as the rift widened between the façade of divine right and the stink of
world wrong, Swift, in "hatred, disgust and contempt," turned the whole "execrable crew"
into dung-flinging Yahoos:
I gave [my Houyhnhnm master] a description of cannons, culverins,
muskets... pistols... battles, sieges... plundering, stripping, ravishing,
burning and destroying... He said whoever understood the nature of the
Yahoos might easily believe it possible for so vile an animal to be
capable of every action I had named, if their strength and cunning
equaled their malice. But... it gave him a disturbance in his mind, to
which he was wholly a stranger before.
It is this disturbance which tells us that corrective comedy has swung to something
lacerative, an abhorrence destructive of the good it reached for.
Va74)
Vb74)
c74)
Vd74)
74)
4/1994
Magnasco, c. 1720-30, Storm Scene with Fleeing Monks, lower detail,
Brera, Milan (note: videos before ‘94/5, use for Vb74 &c74 a CGB
foreground of Vd74)
Magnasco, c. 1730(?), Monks' Library, J. Brass Collection, Venice
Same, 1730-40, Interrogation, Kunstinstitut, Frankfort am Main
Magnasco, c. 1735(?), Landscape with Figures, upper detail, National
Gallery, Dublin (CGB '74)
Magnasco, 1712(?), Punchinello Playing the Guitar, Gatti-Casazza
Collection, Venice; + V detail (cf. V74a)
1700: The Comic Divide
�39
C.G. Bell
Music:
Symbolic History
Domenico Scarlatti, c. 1730(?), Sonata in F Minor, (Landowska)
Society Album
We minimized the rift opened in France by the Baroque debacle. In Swift it
strikes deeper, undermining the exuberance which still exalts the style. And in the
weirdly lighted satires of Magnasco, (North Italian, early 18th century) forms are
wrenched in a violence as darkly radical as the savage indignation of Swift. We have
related it before to the chromatic fury of Domenico Scarlatti. No doubt these are comic
arts (with the possible exception of Bach's Passions, tragedy was the lack and failure of
the age), but it is a comedy of Storm and Stress, seeded with the bitterness of what would
later be called "La Comedie humaine".
(end Scarlatti)
Va75)
Vb75)
75)
V75a)
75b)
75c)
Piranesi, 1743-45, Le Carceri X, 1st State, Nat. Gal., Washington, D.C.
Same, XI, 2nd State (pub. 1761)
Same, XIV, 2nd State, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.
Same, detail
Piranesi, 1743-61, Carceri X, 2nd State, detail of Chained Captives,
National Gallery, Washington, D.C. (cf. Va75)
Blake, c. 1795, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Frontispiece Tate
Gallery, London; + V detail
Music:
Alessandro Scarlatti, c. 1710(?), lst movement, close, Concerto
Grosso in F Minor, Telefunken 89-80059
And what Pascalian vertigo of the young Piranesi would seize exactly on the
vaultings of spatial command to exhibit, in his mid-century Prisons, the rational order of
the phenomenal gone from Cartesian glory to nightmare bondage? — a doom here sprung
upon us by a contradiction: that the two great piers to the left are joined by an arch which
must hold the plane of the picture, though we see it reaching back in space.
And already in Alessandro Scarlatti (Domenico's father), the fugue, Baroque
structure of reason affirmed, flexes with menace,
(fade Alessandro Scarlatti)
Music:
4/1994
William Friedemann Bach, c. 1750(?), from Sinfonia for 2 Flutes
and Strings, Fugue, MHS 3474
1700: The Comic Divide
�40
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
to become, in the moodiest of Bach's sons, Wilhelm Friedemann, almost the battleground
late Mozart and Beethoven would make of it.
Between the first state of this engraving and the second, Blake was born, to cry
the skull caves of space and time — Blake, too, trained on satire — 1784:
Ha ha ha said Inflammable Gass, [Voltaire] was the glory of France —
I have got a bottle of air that would spread a plague...
76)
V76a)
Fr. Boucher, 1752, Reclining Girl, Alte Pinakothek, München; + V detail
Rubens, 1636-40, Diana and Nymphs Surprised by Satyrs, Kaiser Friedrich
Museum, Berlin; + V detail
In that ferment, for salon France to go on refining more sensuous provacations in
the courtly mode, comedy sliding over into Casanovan Memoirs — this Luise Murphy on
her belly, so disposed as to suggest the addition of a succubent king, a picture in which
Boucher pimped for Louis XV, who took the bait, and the mistress — how that
confrontation delayed fosters the explosion of '89, the terror of '93.
(fade W.F. Bach)
Sex has always seemed our funniest attribute. The Fontaine-Congreve fable of an
impossible task for the devil, to straighten a ringlet curl, could not be so diverting if the
hair in question were not "A tendril of the Ciprian vine/ Shade of the labyrinth of love."
But sexuality itself does not make high comedy; it must be caught up in a godhead
mocked and believed.
77)
V77a)
Double: [A] Gainsborough, c. 1760(?), Lady Innes, Frick Collection, NYC;
and [B] Greuze, 1760(?), Broken Pitcher, Louvre, Paris (video uses only
singles and details: see video file, A and B of V77)
Blake, 1794 (copy of 1826), Songs of Experience, 39, “The Sick Rose,”
Library of Congress
In Gainsborough's England middle-class humanity assumes the formal robes.
From Addison's Sir Roger to Fielding's loveable Fanny and Joseph, Sophie and Tom
Jones, with Parson Adams and the rest (on the angel side of the Christian smile), a new
nature softens toward the geniality of Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer. But in such
complicity with the mocked Lady Boobies, Tow-wowses, cheats and hypocrits (heirs to
4/1994
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�41
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
the devil-strain of grinning possibility) that the Enlightened rose-garden knocks under, as
in the Greuze Broken Pitcher, to the spouting Faustian lion. (Blake)
O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy…
78)
Pietro Longhi, 1751, The Rhinoceros, Ca' Rezzonico, Venice; first, three video
details
In Venice from mid-century, the thinning masquerade of high style barely hints at
the volcanic buildup of what Blake would have called "the Antediluvians who are our
Energies." Though surely that master of symbol would have recognized Longhi's
Rhinoceros, under the dividing barrier of consciousness, as the great suppressed Behemoth of Job, gawked at by the puppets of empty dress, while the managing barker
brandishes the cut-off phallic horn, long famous as a drug of aphrodisiac power.
Thus, over a Europe as international as ever before or after, the comedy of
manners — Goldoni in this Venice, Beaumarchais in France, Lessing's Minna in
Germany, in England Sheridan's brittle take-offs on the genteel —
79)
79a)
79b)
Goya, 1791-92, La Boda, detail, Prado, Madrid (for which video substitutes
Va79, La Boda, whole)
Goya, c. 1798-1805, The Naked Maja and The Clothed Maja, Prado, Madrid
(by video numbering b, c, and d79: first single details, then double. Here
video inserts 79, Goya, La Boda, detail, as V79)
Goya, 1777, Dance on the Banks of the River Manzanares, Prado, Madrid (by
video numbering 79a)
or in the art of Spain this Goya cartoon of mismarriage — everywhere that comedy yields,
like the Bastile, to the revolution of nature and heart. In Blake's reversal of Heaven and
Hell, it is from the burning infinite of creative desire that Reason's establishment has
distrained its goods. Its "Messiah fell & formed a heaven of what he stole from the
Abyss." A rape the original sadist, Marquis de Sade, deviantly applied in his erotica,
4/1994
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�42
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Justine 1791, Julliette 1792 — de Sade, called ''the freest spirit...in the most imprisoned
body."
While Mozart closes Don Giovanni, after the hero's demise, with a chorus of the
"good little people" singing the customary sweet song.
Music:
Mozart, 1787, Don Giovanni, from the closing chorus, Angel 3605
(or London A4406)
But how thin and posed the morality of reason has become. (fade Mozart) If, in this
comedy of outbreak, exuberance and mockery have fused as in the Renaissance, it is
under a reversal of sign. Molière's corrected good has dwindled to the trivial mask;
Va80)
b80)
80)
80a)
Goya, 1788, St Francis of Borgia at the Deathbed of an Impenitent, version
in the Cathedral of Valencia, whole
Goya, 1788, same subject, in the fiercer oil sketch, Marquesa de Santa Cruz
(slide show: whole; video: detail only)
Goya, 1815-24, Disparate Desenfrenado, engraving (Proverbs 10), Prado,
Madrid; + V details
Picasso, 1934, The Minotaur, drawing, S.W. Labrot, Jr., Hobe Sound,
Florida
Music:
Mozart, 1787, Don Giovanni, Close of the Hell-descent, Angel 3605 (or
London A4406)
while the excess once castigated, now in flaming reach and fall, flaunts a passionate
banner. Even in Goya's Proverb of "Unbridled Folly," where lust reverts to the oldest
centaur radical of the horse — as Lear said: "The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to it
with a more riotous appetite" — the old irony swirls in the modern ambivalence. Thus in
Don Giovanni, before the manikins usurp the stage, Dionysian eruption in the formal
house of cards has affirmed the cry of Blake:
Energy is the only life and is from the Body, and Reason is the bound
or outward circumference of energy...
What the outcome is to be, Faust and Nietzsche have left our time to discover.
(end of Damnation)
4/1994
1700: The Comic Divide
�
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Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound
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Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series.
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1700 : The Comic Divide, Symbolic History, Part 23
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Text
sc/m-bolic
Througfi Sigfit and Sound
33.
1890:
fluant-Garde Break
CHARLES G. BELL
ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
or
1260 CANYON ROAD
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501
January
1994
Last Revised June 1996
La>*^
�Caiarles Greenteaf Ben, 1260 Canyon Boad, Sanfa Fe,J«vi87501
synfiOLxc KisTOJxy
Through Sight and Sound
33.
Med
189B - fluant-Garde Break
'■='^'9®"“'’. Prelude (from Moser, CGB Greg.
vnlo-f*"” “
>>efore the "mad flight" (Dante's "(olle
with a P TT
"Fonr q“":“
®
*^“'®kura Japan.
Eliot's lines from the
Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves, perpetually in its stillness.
bevnnJ**
Romantic, incarnate stretch
beyond possibiltty had flawed the West with Symbolist rupture that sky-leap and crazing of the temporal fabric.
V2a)
------------\
(Arrau)
Against that ancient East, Delacroix's mid-19th century Jacob
wresting with the angel, like stormy Liszt, fables the Faust champion, out of Judgment Hebrew by Promethean Greece.
Yeats, in A Vision:
June
1996
1890
Avant-Garde Break
1
�SSymboIic Histoiy
C.G. BeU
A civilization is a struggle to keep self-control, and in
this it is like some great tragic person... (fade Liszt) The
loss of control over thought comes towards the end:
first a sinking in upon the moral being,
a3) Qauguin, 1888, ^iHsion after tfie Sermon, (ktaiC, Scot. !J^t. QaC., T,dhifur0fi
3 ) Same, wfioCe
then the last surrender, the irrational cry, revelation —
the scream of Juno's peacock...
Music:
Satie 1890, First Gnossienne, close, Philips PHS 900-179
In Gauguin's 1888 Jacob and the Angel, Symbolist vision breaks
so far with nature ("Art is an abstraction," Gauguin wrote) that the
padre and his witnessing congregation could only laugh at the artist's
wish to hang that picture in the church.
And who took Satie's piano pieces of the strange names, the
1890 Gnossiennes, as musical compositions at all?
(fade Satie)
SFor Znd 2)
(DeCacrovo 1852, OKe 5ea at (Dieppe, from CoUection ^eurdeCey, (Baris
It is the abandon of Rimbaud's "Bateau Ivre," "Drunken Boat" of
1871,* once guided (like this Delacroix) by the ropes of its haulers,
traficking in Flemish wheat or English cottons, under the stupid eye
of lighthouses, "I'oeil niais des falots".
for 2nd 3) Qaupuin, 1889, SeCf-Portrait, (J^tionaC QatUry, ^asfiwyton, (D.C.
2nd 3a)
gtmyuin, 1892, fatata U (MiU, (HationaC galCery, Wasfiinyton (D.C.
Gauguin has cut loose from that life-class, job and family,
celebrates Rimbaud's take-over: (Wallace Fowlie)
Comme je descendais des Fleuves impassibles...
As I was going down impassive Rivers,
I felt no longer guided by the haulers;
Yelping redskins had taken them for targets.
Having nailed them naked to colored stakes
June1996
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�C.G. BeU
Sjymbc^ EBstoiy
aux poteaux de couleurs.
What if the "waves... eternal rollers of victims," which have washed
him clean of wine stains and vomit, have also "scattered rudder and
grappling hook"? — he is bathed "dans la Poeme/ De la Mer."
4)
Ignaz ^untfier(F), c. 176S(?), fKeratd Singdj entrance, (Diessen am Simmersee
(CQ‘B ’59); first, "U detaU
Music:
J.S. Bach(?), c. 1730, from Cantata No.53, "Schlage Doch,"
Westminster SL 5197
If the angels of "the Babylonian starlight" brought in on the
Classical world "a fabulous formless darkness," their Western suc
cessors of Rococo ceremony, here Bach and Gunther, have filled even
the last call with sensuous promise: "Schlage doch Gewiinschte
Stunde." Where is Yeats’ fierce incursion of the absolute, a glittering
sword out of the East";
(fade "Schlage doch")
aS) !l(pman 'Byzantine, 9tfi cent., SbigeCmosaic, S. ^assede, 9(pme
6S) 9doreau, 1897, 'Dead Lyres, iJdoreau Mus., Taris
5) DouBCe: [J4.J 9tfi cent., S^ngeC mosaic (aS); and [‘B] Dead Lyres (65)
where Rilke’s "Every angel is terrible" — "Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich"?
The 9th-century mosaic vault of Sf:~Praxecrs“in Rome'is'wfdeeyed with the Dark-Age revelation which dissolved earth’s assur
ance. But that messenger was contained in creed. How frenzied now
the Zarathustra cry to the rending infinite — Moreau’s last sketches
(1897) for the unpainted "Dead Lyres":
the great lyre of the soul... has just silenced... all... those
voices that glorified nature; this superb lyre is raised,
held by a dark, terrible angel armed with the cross of
blood...
So Rilke, 1912, as TEufope armed for war, would pace the bastions
of Duino over a storm sea, and catcli, as if roared by wind:
Juztel996
1890 — Avant-Garde Break
3
�C.G.BeU
^ymboluc BSstofy
Wer, wenn ich schriee, horte mich denn aus der Engel
Ordnungen?
Who, if I cried, would hear me then among the angel
orders?
6)
6 a)
MuruA, 1893, iJie Cry, 9^twnaC QaUery, OsCo; + ^ cCose detaiC
Vduncii, 1899-1900, dlanu ofLife, OdgHomU QaUery, OsCo
*1^66) Same,
Cry, intermediate detaiC
Music:
Mahler, 1909, 9th Symphony, 1st movement, dissonant passage,
(Horenstein) Vox Box 116
Was Munch's 1893 "Cry" (after Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque,
Romantic) a yet wilder charging of the personal and temporal, or its
dissolving return to the transpersonal abstract? The poles define the
art. Since the insufferable loading of romantic realism, as in earlier
Munch, climaxes here in a stylization which becomes its mask. So
Strindberg abstracted his ghastly marriages into more and more
symbolic dramas. And does not the suspension of tonality in dis
sonance — what Mahler (1860-1911) advanced in his symphonies
like a throttle, to the culmination of this, the Ninth — deflect Liszt's
blatant major to an estrangement of the cry it heightens?
(fade Mahler on drum-roll)
S^or 2nd S) 9doreau, 1876, SaCome (Dancing Before (Herod, (Sdoreau 9dus., (Paris
Naturalist Manet deplored the influence of Symbolist Moreau:
Moreau has chosen the wrong path... He leads us to the
incomprehensible.
While we want everything to be
understandable.
That realist-romantic rift had stamped the century.
But the poles
were always inbreeding:
Rouault and Matisse would study with
Moreau.
9^or 2nd 6) 9dundi, 1893, (PuBerty, (MuncB 9dus., OsCo (video uses MuncB, 1894,
J4ju>(Uty, Munch Mus., OsCo, V2nd 6)
June1996
1890 — Avant-Grarde Break
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�C.G.BeU
Symbolic History
By report Expressionist Munch visited there. "The camera," he said,
"cannot compete with painting so long as it is impossible to use it in
heaven and hell."
1st 7)
Cezanne, 1860, Louis-^uguste Cezanne (tfie painter's fatfier), ih(p.tionaC
Qa(£ery, London
Cezanne, whose revolution peaked as Munch's began, must
have thought himself on the other side — from the violent Daumier
realism of his youth (boyhood friend of Naturalist Zola);
1st 8) Cezanne, 1873-7S, Tanorama of lAitvers,
Inst., Cfiicago (C^CB '74))
through his Pissarro awakening to landscape apprehended in light
and air (this 1873 Panorama of Auvers):
9)
Cezanne, 1890-92, Lhe Card iPCayers, CourtauCd gallery, London
to the objective formalization of the actual, as in these Card Players
of 1890 to '92 — he practiced Manet's science of the physical.
2nd 8) Cezanne, ^Panorama cfJ4upers, detail (CQ^ '74)
Yet Cezanne throughout was overriding the real:
sionism is already an abstract of brush work planes;
his Impres
2nd 7) Cezanne, LLe (Painter's Ifatfier, detail-foideo-f^0tn4st-7)-------------------------his radical first caricatures leap from the prose journalism of Zola
toward the visionary Baudelaire he memorized: "The Voyage",
0 Mort, vieux capitaine, il est temps!, levons I'ancre!
the worm-kissed transcendence of "A Carrion"; the repeated specter
of "The Seven Old Men" in their "ant-swarming city."
IFor 3rd 8) Cezanne, 1894-98, IForest of Ifontau^Ceau, (Rpcds,
9det., (N)yc
3rd 8a)
Cezanne, 1883-87, VdteSte. Victoire, (Pfiidips CoCCection, Wasft., (D.C.
June 1996
1890
Avant-Garde Break
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�C.G. BeU
j^ymboHcHistQE^
From Baudelaire's "Correspondences" — (CGB)
Nature is a temple where from living pillars
Will come from time to time a confused phrase;
One passes there through a forest of symbols,
As under the scrutiny of familiar eyes...
Vast as the night, or as the light of day, '
Perfumes, sounds and colors correspond...
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clart6,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se repondent. __
Cezanne’s analysis points to Rimbaud:
A, black, E, white, I, red, U, green, 0, blue: vowels,
I will tell one day the latence of your birth. (CGB)
2n(£ 9) Cezanne, OTte Car(C TCayers, Stephen Claris O^C; + VcCetaiCs
2nd: 9a) Cezanne, 1900, La n/kiOe au ChapeCet,
QaC., ^ndon; + ^detaiC
These Card Players, Munch’s Cry — from the same years — grip
though differently, Rimbaud’s Season in HpIII made every hope vanish from my mind. With the
lunge of the beast I leaped on every joy to strangle it...
Misfortune was my god... Spring brought me the idiot’s
terrifying laughter... (CGB)
Music:
Bruckner, 1891^, 9th Symphony (original.version), forte before
close (timpani), Deutsche Gram. Gesellschaft 29333
And in the 9th (unfinished) symphony by Mahler’s first master
Bruckner, also from 1891 to ’94, the rip-saw of dissonance cleaves a
Choral and fugal buildup of studied polyphonic form.
(music pause)
10)
Cezanne, 1896, The Lahe of Plnnecy, Summer, CourtauCd Inst., London: -first
video detail
■'
10 a) Same, a central detail (from which video tahfs only two closer details)
Music:
June 1996
Same Bruckner, close cont., tranquil
1890 — Avant^arde Break
6
�^yxnbolic Ifistory
C.G.BeU
But the dissonance yields to a close as calm, as classically
harmonious, as Cezanne's 1896 Lake of Annecy. ("I will arise and go
now, and go to Annecy"...)
Yet there is a puzzle in Cezanne's classicism, his admiration for
Poussin and belief that he himself was reconstituting that noble
order of planes. Since the cubist colors here emerging from tree and
mountain, water and sky, effect a prismatic diffraction of Poussin’s
Cartesian space, as new to the world as the wave equations of Max
well. Did Bruckner so reconstitute the polyphony of Renaissance and
Baroque — Wagnerian chromatics exploding Gabrielli?
(fade Bruckner)
11) (BuzHs (U Chavanms, 1889-93, tti (study), 9dus., CUvedand; ivith-video detaiCs
Music:
Franck,1884, Fugue from Prelude, Chorale, etc, opening V-LM
1822
The 19th-century cult of Bach, as in Franck's Prelude, Chorale
and (here) Fugue, is cognate with Cezanne's espousal of Poussin, as
with Puvis de Chavannes, who in this sketch for a fresco of Summer
also revived the dream of classical order — like the Parnassians in
poetry, Heredias:
Maternal earth, who to the gods would seem
Yet gracious, with each spring, as for a tomb.
Brings to the broken urn acanthus bloom... (CGB)
Fait... Au chapiteau brise verdir une autre acanthe...
But all that is somehow backward looking,
aU) Cezanne, c. 1890-94, (Batfiers, Louvre, (Baris; + ^ detaiC
12) Same, 1900-0S, CZHe (Bathers, S4rt Institute, Chicago; + ^detail
against Cezanne's always vibrant Bathers, or the pointillism of Seurat
__ both esteemers of Puvis — however mired (with Franck s chromatics) in the. reeds of the 'SO's.
Cade Franck)
June 1906
1890 — Avant-Garde Break
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�C.G. BeU
Symbolic Histbay
"Take eloquence, said Verlaine, "and wring its neck." Perhaps
only Reger, especially in the Bach-based cello suites, projects formal
Baroque beyond Wagner, toward the modern stripping —
Music:
Reger, c. 1910(?), from Fugue of Cello Suite 1 (Feuermann) Col.
ML 4678
a leap as far as Mallarme made from the Parnassians:
The
Will
The
The
(CGB)
virginal, vigorous and beautiful today.
it tear for us with a blow of its drunken wing
hard, forgotten lake which haunts under frost
transparent glacier of flights that have not flown!
Le transparent glacier des vols qui n'ont pas fui!
(fade Reger)
Only by vivifying abstraction could the arts of that late century
repossess
13)
C.(D. ^riedTicIt, 1821, Mi(C(Cay, O^dersac/isiscfies Landestmiseum, iHunover;
+ (CetaiC
the natural health of Goethe a hundred years before, which Friedrich
and Beethoven would carry over into the Transcendental yearning of
1820.
Music:
Beethoven, 1825-7, A Minor Quartet, from Trio of 2nd Movement,
Col. M5S 677
____________.
Goethe: "Happy only is the soul that loves" — "Gliicklich allein/ ist die
Seele, die liebt." All those now used up "Laughing suns and pastures
bright,/ And Maytime harvests of delight" — Mailied;
Wie
Mir
Wie
Wie
herrlich leuchtet
die Natur!
gl^zt die Sonne!
lacht die Flur!
14) HAiTtwr, c. 1826, iJ\{ortCal^ ^Terrace, 9^t. QaC., Wasfi., CD.C (CQCB '60)
14 a) Same, detaiC (C(j‘B '60), wfUch video may tal^from 14
(fade Beethoven Trio)
June 1996
1890 — Avant-Garde Break
8
�C.G. BeU
Symbolic IBstoiy
In 1820-England that first immediacy ("0 blithe New-comer")
yields to a moodier colouring, as of autumnal Keats:
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness...
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.’
While in Turner’s Mortlake Terrace, where the sun spills over, dis
solving the wall, earth's diffraction into light and air has begun. ’
Van go£fi, 1887, WfUaifieU witd !jrCyin£ Lark, Van GoaH Museum,
JimstercCam
ISa) Same, detail (video tfien returns to the rvhoCe)
15;
By the Avant-garde break, what vertigo of electric technique
lifts Expressionist joy from its Gates of Hell base — the flight of Van
Gogh's lark hair-triggered to an anguished opposite. So Rimbaud:
I know skies split with lightning, waterspouts.
The surf and currents; I have known the night.
And dawn exalted like a flock of doves...
I would have shown children those sunfish
Of blue waves, the fish of gold, the singing fish. (CGB)
...ces dorades
Du flot bleu, ces poissons d'or, ces poissons chantants.
Music:
Bartok, 1934, close of the 5th Quartet, Concert-Disc CS-501
t
Bartok, fifty years later, closes his Fifth Quartet with such a
"Drunken Boat" injection of the Beethoven trio.
16) Van Qosh, 1890, Crows over a ComfieCd, Van Qogh Mus., Slmstadam
16 a) Same, Crows, detail (to which video adds another, from 16)
Rimbaud through the 70s, Van Gogh through the ’SOs. most in
tense spirits of the time, both cracked up. Van Gogh’s rapture of
wings over wheat closed in by 1890 to the last road, disappearing
June 1996
1890 — Avant-Garde Break
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�C.G.Ben
l^ymbolic BSstory
under a fatal flight of crows. Rimbaud's sabotage was of his poetry —
by that tropical buming-out he had predicted in A Season in HellMy day is done. I am leaving Europe. Sea air will
burn my lungs. Lost climates will tan me... I will have
gold.
I will be lazy and brutal... But now I am
accursed... (cf. Delmore Schwartz and Wallace Fowlie)
The poet-angel, the Gdnie, "0 fertility of the mind and vastness of the
universe" (Illuminations^ goes under: "Je voudrais me taire."
17)
^riedricd, c. 1820, ^Evening, iSQedersacfisiscties Landesmuseum, ^Hanover;
first, video detaU
Music:
Beethoven, 1825-7, A-Minor Quartet, Heilige Dankgesang,
opening. Col. MSS 677
Or there is night, the quiet Friedrich and Beethoven distilled
again from Goethe:
Over all hills
Is peace
Through all trees
You can trace
Hardly a breath;
The birds are asleep in the wood;
Wait; soon, like these.
You too will rest. (CGB)
18)
y^riedricd, 1835, ^RiesengeSirge, l^landerer at Evening, 5dg.tional QaCCery,
West EerCin; first, video detail
liber alien Gipfeln
1st Ruh,
In alien Wipfeln
Spurest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vogelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.
(fade Beethoven)
June1996
1890 — AvanM^arde Break
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�Symbolic History
C.G.BeU
19)
^an Qo^fi, 1890,
witfi Cypresses, a Sit cropped., 9Qrd(hr-9du^ Museum,
OUerCo
19 a) Same, an upper detaiC
19 S) Van QoyS, 1889, Starry 9^St, detaiC, Museum of Modem Pirt, O^C (ivSUe
video ta(^ wSoCe and two details from VlSS)
By 1890 even in England the "Winter Heavens" of Meredith hint at the
form-twisting of Van Gogh:
Lengths down our road each fir-tree seems a hive.
In swarms outrushing from the golden comb...
While Hopkin's evening —
...frightful a nightfall folded rueful a day...
The times are nightfall and the light grows less;
The times are winter and a world undone —
that "Evening strains to be time's vast womb-of-all, home-of-all,
hearse-of-all night." Though the Victorian island had hardly passed,
with the Symbolist Continent, through the collapsing antinomies, the
yea-and-nay fusion of Eternal recurrence: (Nietzsche)
This world: a monster of energy, without beginning,
without end... a becoming that knows no satiety, no
disgust, no weariness... this Dionysian world of the
eternally self-creating, the eternally—self-xiestroying7.T —
my "beyond good and evil"... This world is the will to
power — and nothing besides! And you yourselves are
also this will to power — and nothing besides!
Yet Hopkins could almost have spoken for Van Gogh:
...This to hoard unheard.
Heard unheeded, leaves me a lonely began.
1st 20) ConstaSCe, c. 1823(.F), Hsee Tsunf^s, 9{amstead ydeatfi, Victoria and MSert
Museum, London (sCide show: wfioCe picture; video: cropped)
June 1996
1890 — AvantGardeBreak
11
�Symbolic His&ny
C.G. BeU
Of course the break had shown at the peak of Transcendental
and Romantic inebriation, most strikingly at the art surface with
Turner, or this Constable;
21)
J^riedricd, 1830~3S, ^ad to tfie Cemetery, ^Easter, (Baron *Tfiyssen
(Bomemysza, London
at the brooding core with Friedrich (this last Easter Road to the
Cemetery). In poetry it was Holderlin above all, in whom nostalgia
for the infinite began to crack the canons of utterance, compressing
the two-fold time-symbol of the God's indwelling and soul's deserted
winter into that almost fragment
2nd 20) ^ain, ConstaSCe, Tree 'Trun^ (sCide sfiow: detaiC; video: first, cCoser
detaiC)
called "The Half of Life" — "Halfte des Lebens":
Wreathed with yellow pears
And with wild roses, hangs
The land in the lake,
0 blessed swans.
And drunk with kisses
You dip your heads
In the holy sobering water. (CGB)
Mit gelben Birnen hanget
Und voll mit wilden Rosen
Das Land in den See,
Ihr holden Schwane,
Und trunken von Kussen
Tunkt ihr das Haupt
Ins heilignuchterne Wasser.
2nd 21) l^ain, y^rUdricd, (I(pad to the Cemetery, detail
2nd 21a) y^riedrkh, 183S, Wood and Stvamp at Sunrise, Qoethe Vdus., S^ranhfurt
Where alas shall I catch
At blooms in winter, where
At the light of sun
And earthy shadows?
June 1906
1890 — Avant-Garde Break
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�C.G.BeU
Symbolic History
Speechless and cold
Stand the walls; in wind
The vanes clatter. (CGB)
Weh mir, wo nehm' ich, wenn
Es Winter ist, die Blumen, und wo
Den Sonnenschein
Und Schatten der Erde?
Die Mauern stehn
Sprachlos und kalt, im Winde
Klirren die Fahnen.
22)
V22a)
226)
V22c)
lumer, 1832, CfiUde 9{aroC(Cs Ti^rimage: Italy,
^aUery, London
burner, 1823, “Bay ofBaiae, ^ate Qtdiery, London
HAimer, 1833, QrandCanal, Venice, Ulyde.Codection, Qlen J^cdls,
burner, c. 1829, J^lorence, British 9duseum, London
Music:
Mendelssohn, 1833, Italian Symphony, 2nd mvt, opening, RCA-VLSC-2221
A testimony to the rifted love of Romantic, that rapt Holderlin's
god-claim abuts on the desired Italy of Childe Harold and Turner, of
Mendelssohn's Symphony, or Shelley's "wild West Wind" —
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave’s intenser day.
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet the sense faints picturing them —
the whole post-card dream on which generations were reared.
(fade Mendelssohn)
23)
burner, 1835-40, WatercoCoT, Boats at Sea, British Museum, London
Yet in some watercolor sketches, unlike the canvases he
dressed for show. Turner could cleave through all that, as in the
performing art of music no composer perhaps did or could; so these
boats at sea anticipate the negative capability of the minimal —
Rimbaud:
June 1996
1890 — Avant-Garde Break
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�C.G.BeU
Symbolic Histcny
I wrote silences; I wrote nights.
pressible, fixed vertigoes...
I recorded the inex
Elle est retrouvee!
Quoi? I'etemite.
C'est la mer melee
Au soleil.
iMxmetj 1872, Sunrise, 94ms. 94armottan, iParis (since stoCen)
24 a) Same, (ktaiC (video uses *1)24 and returns to tde zufioCe)
246) Monet, 1875, *Woman witd a ^ParasoC, Sdrtist's Wife and Son, 9(fltionaC
gaPCery, Wasfiington, *D.C. (video: detail only)
24)
It is found again!
What? Eternity.
It is the sea
Mixed with the sun.
(cf. Fowlie)
Was Monet's Sunrise, from the same year as that Rimbaud, on the
same track?
Impressionist eternity pursued through a shimmer of
light and air? — Emily Dickinson's
I'll tell you how the sun rose, —
A ribbon at a time...
Or later, Wallace Stevens:
The body dies; the body's beauty lives.
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave, interminably flowing...
V.
No objects, but modes; relations, but of no substance; the wave
motion of light, and no ether to be waved.
Music;
Saint-Saens, 1873, Cello Concerto, 2nd movement, cadenza, etc.
Col. M 30113
In that France of the '70's, after the Franco-Prussian War,
where first-impressionist lightening joined Symbolist estrangement,
and Saint-Saens and his pupil Faure (played by Leonard Rose on one
record) formed the Society for French Music,
June 1996
1890.-—. Avant-GardeSreak
14
�C.G.BeU
^ymbofic History
aZS) WfiistCer/c. 1867-68, ^ J^rtist in 6is Studio, SUrt Inst., CRicago; + Vdetail)
25) H/RistCer, 1875, O^ctume in ‘BCacR^and QoCd: ^ ^alCing 5(pcR^t, Institute of
SLrts, (Detroit
25a) Same, (h^ctume, detail
and began the etherialization of Wagnerian chromatics, distilling out
its heavy Germanic tug toward resolution (fade Salnt-Saens) (as if the
modal and Eastern already beckoned beyond tonality: Faur6) __
Music:
Faure, 1883, Elegie, cello and orchestra, Op.24, close (from flute)
Col. M 30113
in that Paris, an American, Whistler, as much as any, leavened
Western realism with the Japanese print — this "Nocturne in Black
and Gold: The Falling Rocket" — to provoke in England Ruskin's
slander, with the Pyrrhic victory of Whistler’s suit: "Can you explain
to the jury, Mr. Whistler, what constitutes a work of art?"
The
monocle scans them. "That is manifestly impossible."
Was the root shift of the modern away from the spatiality of
cause
from Spinoza’s "God as an extended thing"?
(close Faur6)
26)
goCden (PsaCter (MS, c. 880, David xvitfi (Musicians and Dancers, St Gad+ *1^ detail
‘ ^
"
In the representation of motion, this 9th-century David with
Musicians and Dancers claims as bodiless a symbol-world as Carolingian astronomy, where Alcuin, to clear up for Charlemagne an
assumed disappearance of Mars (they had lost sight of it for several
years), contrived a muddle of solar glow, latitude and longitude, all
aimed at the caprice and irregularity of the merely physical.
2 7) DoCCavuoUo, 1470, (Battle of (My.de Warriors, (Petit (PaCais, (Paris
2 7a) Same, detail; + two closer video details and a return to the xvfioCe
Music:
June 1996
M. Pesenti, c. 1480(?), Dal letto me levava (de Van) AS-77
1890 — Avant-Garde Break
15
�C.6. BeU
Slymbolic H]st(»y
With Pollaiuolo, 1470, motion and force take up the physical, as
in the chordal Frottole, or the pulleys and levers by which Leonardo
embodies the animate:
Force with material movement and weight with per
cussion are the four accidental powers in which all the
works of mortals have their being and their end...
where there are neither sinews nor bones there cannot
be any force exerted in any movement made by imag
inary spirits.
(end PesentI)
Yet that lean anatomy
28)
HiiiBens and Studio, c. 1620, (Drun^n SiCenus and Crexv, 9dg-tionaC QaCCery,
London; + VdttaiC
Music:
Scheldt, 1621, Canzone Gallicam, brass, opening, Candide
31004
was a century and a half from the billowing flesh and voluminous
riot of the circle of Rubens, the ground-bass order of baroque
(Scheldt), Galileo's demonstrations of the mechanics of mass:
Since I assume matter to be unchangeable and always
the same, we are no less able to treat it rigorously
than if it belonged to mathematics.
(fade Scheldt)
29)
(BCaf^, 1804-18, SlCBion turns from fiis daugflters, ^Binder Jerusalem, p. 47
Blake assaults that formulation no less in thought than'* in the
representation of body and motion.
The Atoms of Democritus
And Newton's Particles of Light
Are sands upon the Red sea shore
Where Israel's tents do shine so bright.
30)
^Bicasso, 1908, Dryad, Jlermitaye, Leningrad; xoitfi video details
June 1996
1890 — Avant-Garde Break
16
�C.G. BeU
History
30a) OCripCe: details from [Ji] Spanis/i 9dSj Cate lOtd cent., TscoriaC (Beatus, f18,
T,ve; [(BJ fBjiBens, 1622, {Marie de {Medici at {MarseiCCes, douvre; [C] {Picasso,
1907, {DemoiseCCes dSlvi£non, {Museum of {Modem Art, {J^C
If Cubism reverts to a dynamic of the abstract, it is not by
Blake’s vision, but by a method like that of the sciences through the
Cubist early century: Planck, 1900; Einstein’s 1905 paper merging
the discrete physics of atoms and the continuous physics of waves,
leading through the quantum ambivalence and indeterminacy of
Bohr and Heisenberg, to Schrodinger's wave mechanics, its mathe
matics a crushing, by reciprocal fiat, of the "least-action" velocities of
mass-point and propagated wave.
No one doubts in physics that
something was revealed. And if not in the art, why should it have
multiplied its value a thousand fold?
That sequence, from abstraction, to mass in motion, and back to
the formal and abstract,
31)
graeco-iKpman ({Pompeii), 1st cent. A.'D., fresco, (fmit and game, {Mus. 3^.,
{^CfipCes
reappears in the still life; though this Pompeian richness of fruit and
game foreruns the phenomenal certainty of the West — heir to what
Heidegger would call the Greek "tuning of wonder," its instinctive
space to go down in the spiritual undertow of the Dark Ages.
32)
ZurBaran, 1633, App[es(?) on a {Pewter {PCate, {Mus. Cat., (BarceCona;
+ detaiC (where sCide show has a32: ZurBaran, 1633, tripCe stUCUfe, Simon
{J^rton, Los PlttgeCes, foCCowed By 32)
Music:
German, c. 1670, Viola d'Amore Sonata, from 2nd Grave AS 19-B
When the still life resurfaces, through the vibrance of Renais
sance to the weight of Baroque (this Zurbaran, with a tensile ground
bass sonata), one feels the conscious science, not only of those fruits,
but of the projective space in which they hold substantial being —
summit for all time of that Galilean matter:
"unchangeable and
always the same."
June 1996
1890 — Avant-Garde Break
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�C.G.^U
(Symbolic Bistory
3*3) Cfiardin, 1764-65, TCums, (Private CoCCection, (Baris; first, xndeo detaU
33 a) Same, detail (wfiUe video dratvs a closer detailfrom 33)
Music:
J.S. Bach, Chromatic Fantasy, opening, Edwin Fischer, Piano, V8680/1
One
sentation
Zurburan's
surface of
might say Chardin holds to the grandeur of the old repre
as much as anyone after the Baroque debacle; but
geometry of lighted recess wavers toward a brushwork
color play.
So in Bach's Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, tonal heroics is
suspended in, accidental transtonality.
(fade Fantasy, begin Fugue)
34) Liotard, 1782, (Pears, figs, pCums, Mus. dS4.rt et ddlistoire, Qeneva
34 a) Same, detail
Liotard's last still life, 1782, in its spatial detachment, might
almost be taken for a century later. While Bach’s Chromatic Fugue,
even more than the Prelude, has that clean hypostasis of formal
relations, which has launched it again and again into modernity
(fade from Fugue beginning to close)
35)
Cezanne, c. 1900(7), Still Life witfi Melon, watercoCor, (Private Collection;
first, a vuko detail
35a) Cezanne, 1882-85, La Mer a L'^Estague, CoC. Pederin, Paris
as when Fischer, thirty years into the century which this Cezanne
began, reshaped it on the piano, for our between-war world.
(close Bach)
But to see Western history as a dimensional conquest returning
to the abstract is to obscure what dimensionality contained —
36)
Ingres, c. 1810, Portrait of tfU Sculptor Paul Lemoyne, (S(g,Cson QaCCery,
d^nsas City, Missouri
36a) Ingres, 1810, OUe SLrcHitect Jean-Paptiste (DesdeBan, detail, Mus. of Dec.
SLrts, Pesan^n
36B) J^ain, 36, Portrait ofLemoyne, detail
June 1906
1890'— Avant-Garde Break
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�C.G. BeU
l^ymboKc IBstory
the maturation, outbreak and crisis of conscious person:
stamped on the classic form, of this portrait. Herder:
what Ingres
All beings have their centre In themselves, and each
stands in proportioned relation to the rest; all depend
on the equilibrium of opposed forces, held together by
organizing power...
i
Novalis: "Nature is visible spirit; spirit invisible nature."
feel yourself sprung from the highest God!" Robespierre:
Goethe: "0
Kings, aristocrats, tyrants of every description, are
slaves in revolt* against the sovereign of the earth,
■ which is the human race, and against the legislator of
the universe, which
is Nature.
V
*
Yet the wine of the god-self was always changing to the other
draught, Hdlderlin, Pindaric rhapsodist, at length desired:
But let one reach me
Brimmed with dark light
The foaming beaker full.
That I may rest;
Since sweet
Under shades would fall that sleep.
(CGB)
Es reiche aber,
Des dunkeln Lichtes voll,
Mir einer den duftenden Becher,
Damit ich ruhen moge; denn siiss
War unter Schatten der Schlummer.
3 7)
^ouBCe: [A] T^ypt CDynasty
c. 2600 (B.C, (Bust ofTnnce S^l^-3{af, J^ine
Arts, (Boston; ancC [(BJ (Dynasty X^III, *TeC Antama, xvoocCcn fieacC from a
harp, Louvre (first, vuCeo (ktaiCs of A and ‘B)
If a culture matures by individuation from mythic cult, and if
individuation is always fraught with danger — a Pandora box of
consciousness -—• we should find from culture to culture a recurrent
ripening, as here in Egypt, from Fourth Dynasty prince to time-ofIkhnaton carving from a harp — a paradigm of early against late.
June 1998
1890 — AvantTGarde Break
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�C.G. BeU
Symbolic IBstoxy
38) (DouBCc: [SI] Jitticj c. 550
iHfiittpin 5{e(id, Liouvre.) dtuC [*B]~^£eXpndH(tti(?)
2nd ctnt. (B.C, CaGmacfias (once ccdhdSeneca), Mus.
V^pCes
In, the Classical theater, such a leap takes us from the keen
Archaic smile of the 6th-century B.C. Rampin rider, to the burdened
Alexandrian bust, probably of the librarian Calimachus, though once
called Seneca — baffled in either case.
39)
(DouBCet [^] OCtnec, 800’400 ‘B.C; Qiant 5kadfront £ja ‘l^enta, (Mus., JaCapaj
and [B] CCassicaC Maya, c. 700 ‘^.(D.l?), Stucco Bead from BaCenyue, Mus.
SlntBropoCoyy, Mctqco City
Even in Mexico and Central America, the oldest monuments, the
giant Jaguar-man heads of the Olmec, simplify to a primitive force of
monumental stone; while the refined Maya stuccoes, as this from
Palenque 1500 years later, suggest the romantic brooding and
sensuous complexity of a life-mask (though the nose-bridge pre
cludes that).
40)
(DouBCe: [Si] (Dirl^ Bouts, 1464-67, SeCf from Last Supper, St. Beter's,
Louvain; and [B] Corot, c. 1835, SeCf zvitB BaCette, Uffizi, BCorence (video
adds details from'sinyCes *l7405L and ‘1/40B)
In the West, the realistic self-portrait arises out of the
Medieval.
Less than four hundred years separate this Dirk Bouts
detail, from Corot’s The Artist with a Palette. That Corot, in simple
modesty, has also taken the stance of a craftsman, heightens the
build-up — from Dirk Bouts' assumed appearance in the creed-room
of a Last Supper, to the 19th-century unfettered looming, as if seen
from below — a measure, over that span, of the amplification of the
earth-claim.
a41) Laf^ Constance Master, c. 1480, CoupCe from Megory, detail of Covers,
Qerman Mas., MuremBery
B41) Same, detail of the lady (to wBicB video adds detail of tBe man)
41) Same, the ivBoCe scene of tBe Covers
Music:
Junel^e
H.Fink, c. 1490(?), Ach Herzig Hertz, A.S. 51
1890
Avant-Garde Break
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�C.6. BeU
l^ymboEc Histoiy
Consider Eros. In the Middle Ages it had kindled a Chivalric
flame, but earthless, mystical. As the thickening plot of space, time,
and cause foreclosed on chivalry, married love advanced its bour
geois hopes — curiously enough, first in the book of a King, James of
Scotland, whom Venus — "Worship my law... And I your confort here
sail multiplye" — and Minerva —
"Desire," quod sche, "I nyl it noght deny.
So thou it ground and set in Cristin wise"
bring to the guerdon of his "blisfull aventure":
In youth, of lufe,- that now from day to day
Flourith ay newe, and yit forthir, I say.
So in Finck's love songs, or in this Lake Constance detail, we
feel that validation, but modestly — these lovers form one scene in an
Allegory on Life and Death.
(cut Fink)
42)
yosepd-Marie
1773, l^mpCe of tHyimn, ^^ecture. de CdamBiry, Savois;
witfi video details
Music:
Mozart, 1791, The Maaic Fluto. "Tamino mein," Deutsche Gram
2709 017
Under what panoply of bliss marriage parades in this French
Temple of Hymen, 1773, cognate (if only the artist had some of
Mozart’s genius) with the trial and union of The Magic Flut^P^,tTiino... Tamino... mine... what happiness."
Our grandmothers
featured such engravings on their walls.
(fade Maaic Fluted
a43)
‘Bocffin, 1878, Weddiny Journey, upper section, 0dp.t. gaC., (BerCin;
+ V cCoser detail
643) Same, Wedding Journey, Cower section; + ^ detail of a43)
43) JLgain, Wedding Journey, wdoCe picture
Music:
June 1996
Brahms, 1878, vioiin Concerto in D major, slow movement RCAVICS 1028
1890 — Avant-GardeJBreak
21
�Symbolic Histoay
C.G. l^U
Though by that time what the world dreamed toward was no
allegory of the old regime, but the Freudian enfleshment of Bocklin's
"Wedding Journey," love's garlanded, flute-blowing descent down the
shaded cleft into the honeymoon valleys of the South. It is the over
loading of desire, which the concert repertory pushes like a drug;
Brahms’ Violin Concerto; in poetry the addiction of romantic penta
meter: "Far folded mists and gleaming halls of morn" — that Ten
nyson vibrato fulness of loss and wish:
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall...
And after many a summer dies the swan.
44) iMonet, 1873, ^iJie ^Poppies, Louvre (Jeu cCe (Paume), (Paris
44 a) Same, dCetaiC (tufiUe video puts the zufioCe Between details)
Such paradisical longing stretches the realistic hovel.
It fills
the Poppy Fields of Monet's light and air as with flesh memories of
Meredith's "Modern Love":
We saw the swallows gathering in the sky...
Love that had robbed us of immortal things.
This little moment mercifully gave.
Where I have seen across the twilight wave
The swan sail with her young beneath her wings.
What Wallace Stevens so breathed
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink.
Downward to darkness on extended wings —
that he fought it the rest of his life.
45)
(Rffdin, 1889, the LtemaC IdoC, (Ppdin Museum, (Paris; + 9/ detail
The notion of Brahms as a reserved master of design, obscures
the soar and sob. Through the Impressionist veils of that Paris, Ro
din's "Eternal Idol" bends ideality to the flesh-loading of Baudelaire:
jTxnel996
1890 — Avant-Garde Break
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�C.G. BeU
^ymbofic History
Evenings illyminated by the charcoal glow __
Les soirs illumines par I’ardeur du charbon.
when:
I thought I breathed the perfume of your blood __
Je croyais respirer le parfum de ton sang...
And it is just that Eden bubble of promissory touch,
(fade 2nd movement)
46)
c. 1882, rEhe gates of 9{eCC, Hipdin 9vCus., {Paris (wfiicfi tHe video divides
into detaiCs, aBove and BeCow)
Music:
Brahms Violin Concerto, continued, begin 3rd movment
which involves Rodin, and the whole Romantic world, inner and
outer, in the turbulent enormities of The Gates of Hell — as the slow
movement of the Violin Concerto requires the finale's inflated battle
to affirm.
3rd movement)
47)
SamueC {PaCtner, c. 18S0(F), Slmos Simon CottCe, {\(fitionaC {Portrait GaCCeru,
London; + 'l^detaiC
4 7a) J7E. {MiCCais, 1852, OpBeCia, {Cate QatCery, London
How does estrangement enter that Faust-night of Care?
Even in England and by 1850, the beauty of the ideal (Palmer's
portrait of Cottle) seems withdrawn from the actual. Yet that refined
estrangement keeps the old techniques of. ordered command __
Arnold's "Dover Beach", Tennyson's "idle tears":
Break, break, break.
On thy cold gray stones, 0 sea!
the resolve of "In Memoriam":
June1996
1890 — Avant-GaMe Break
23
�C.G.BeU
BSstoiy
I hold it true whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all..
a48)
48)
Cezanne, 1869, Tfie Temptatim ofSt. Slntfiony, ‘BuftrCe y^oundation, Zuricfi
Cezanne, 1870-71, '9vCan in a Strata 9{at ('Boyer), Odet. 9/tus., 9>0yC; first,
video detail
'U48a) Cezanne 1880, SeCf-Tortrait, detail, Louvre, Taris
Music:
Mussorgsky, 1874, Pictures at an Exhibition, opening. Turnabout
TV 34258
As Yeats would write after the first World War:
We had fed the heart on fantasies.
The heart's grown brutal from the fare...
And planned to bring the world under a rule.
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.
When Mussorgsky and Cezanne charged the rtiusical hnd art
salons with something of the same bull-violence (Man in a Straw Hat,
1871; Pictures at an Exhibition, 1874), a break was made with the
romantic ideal and its vulnerability. How much nearer to Camus'
Stranger than to those lost dreams of Palmer, Tennyson, Brahms.
(fade Mussorgsky)
49)
iBarmagianino, c. 1523, Self in a conveTcmirror, HQinstfiist. 9dus., Vienna
V49a) iMaster of S4u7(erre, 1537, (Descent into the CeCCar, Stadtische (Kynstinstitut,
y^raiihfurt
496)
deCC SlBSate, 1555-60, Landscape zvith 9den Tlireshiny 'Wheat, 9dus.,
(fontaineSCeau
Parmagianino's youthful self-portrait in a convex mirror is one
of the wildest pictures of the 16th century. Yet its experiment is
rationally grounded in the optics of the mirror.
The stormiest
adventures of Renaissance are landward; those voyagers do not, as
Baudelaire's, "partent/ Pour partir". Thus with Du Bellay's Odyssean
sonnet: (CGB)
Jux»1996
1890 ^ Avant-Garde Break
2A
�C.G. BeU
Symbolic History
Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage...
Happy who like Ulysses after a fair voyage...
Comes home to employ the experience of his age...
Better my fathers' house than Roman palaces,
Loire than Tiber, my hill than the Palatine;
Better than ocean air, the sweetness of the Angevine.
Et plus que I'air marin la douceur Angevine.
SO)
V\{anet, 1879, (Portrait cf^eor^e Moore, detaiC, Met. Mas., O^C
^SOa) Manet, 1876, (Before the Mirror, §uggenheim Museum, 9^C
SOB) Manet, 1873, Sur Ca (Plage, Musie du Jeu de (Paume, (Paris
Where the iiew art, even in observational quiet (this detail of
Manet's George Moore), is suggestively adrift. Against Du Bellay's
sonnet, take Mallarme's on the Sea Breeze, "Brise Marine". He sits at
home, in Paris, with his wife and child, before him the unwritten
blank of the page. He drowns in ennui: "The flesh is sad, alas! and I
have read all the books" — "La chair est triste, h61as! et j'ai lu tons
les livres"; he thinks to sail, inviting storms, towards "shipwrecks lost
without masts, without masts or fertile islands... But O my heart,
listen to the sailors' song!":
...les naufrages
Perdus, sans mats, sans mSts, ni fertiles ilots...
Mais, 6 mon coeur, entends le chant des matelots!
SI)
^an Qogh, 1887, SeCf-(Portrait, V. Qogh Mas., Sbnsterdam
*l7Sla) ^an Qogh, 1890, Self-(Portrait (Qreen), detail, Louvre, (Paris (video then
returns to a close detaid of SI)
Mallarme dreamed and wrote in the wifely embrace of that
room. But Van Gogh (Self Portrait, 1887), embarked with Rimbaud in
the Bateau Ivre, took the shoreless voyage all the way: (CGB after
Fowlie)
I sailed until across my fragile cords
Drowned men spinning backward sank to sleep.
June1996
1890 — Avant-^arde Break
25
�C.G. BeU
^ymbotic mstary
Now I, a lost boat in the hair of caves.
Hurled by tempests into the birdless air.
Whose water-drunk carcass would not be fished up
By Hansa sailing ships or armored Monitors...
Who ran, spotted with electric crescent moons —
Qui courais, tache de lunules 61ectriques...
Lucifer-Ahab broken to what climax of pity?
52)
*l^an Qogfij 1888, (Portrait of an Victor, 5(fdCCer-fM^uCCer (\{us., OtterCo;
+ (UtaiC
52 a) Cezanne, 1890-95, ^oy in a (Rg^cC Waistcoat, (BiirfiCe CoCCection, Zurich (video:
detail only)
I, who trembled, hearing at fifty leagues.
The rut of Behemoths and heayy Maelstroms,
Eternal spinner of blue immobilities,
I regret Europe with its ancient parapets!
But in truth, I have wept too much! Dawns are rending.
Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.
Acrid love has swollen me with intoxicating torpor^
0 let my keel burst! Let me go down into the sea!
Through that split century of revolt — self-pity, tender
memories, backward longings arise: Impressionist domesticities,
Renoir's girls, Degas' Dancers, the sigh under Seurat's pointillism,
even Cezanne's Boy in a Red Waistcoat, resonate toward Yeats' Prayer
for his Daughter:
53)
(Picasso, 1906, (Portrait of Leo Stein, drarviny, (Museum of ^rt, (Baltimore:
+ detail (here video adds a detail of sCide 806, from the close of the shozv:
(Picasso, 1924, (Paul in a Clozun Suit, .Artist's Collection)
And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all's .accustomed, ceremonious...
Though he himself, has paced storm-battlements
June 1996
1890 — Avant-Grarde Break
26
�C.G. BeU
SymboBn HiigtoTy
Imagining... the future years...
Dancing to a frenzied drum...
So Picasso, at the onset of abstract rupture (1906) calls back photo
realism for the romantic representation of Gertrude Stein’s brother
Mais, vrai, j'ai trop pleure!
and:
Fileur eternel des immobilites bleues,
Je regrette 1 Europe aux anciens parapets!
I long for that Europe of the ancient parapets!
54)
>2aire, ^rt^o bronze 94:ask, 5(pcl^fdCCer CoCCectum,
MetropoCitan Museum cf m, 9^0 first, video detaiC
But Picasso had already fixed his sights on an impersonal
primi ive containment for all demonic possessions, the African mask,
in which the terminal and personal shame of Rimbaud's "Drunken
Boat might pronounce beyond personality, clean:
Je ne puis plus, baigne de vos langueurs, 6 lames __
I can no longer, bathed in your languors, 0 waves.
Follow in the long wake of cotton boats
Nor traverse the fanfare of their flags and flames
Nor swim under the horrible eyes of prison ships.’
— As m all satyr wisdom from Homer down, death-acceptance turned
to life-force.
first, vuCec dose
S5a)
mcasso, 1308, ‘Woman witfi a fan, hermitage, Uningrad
V55c) (Picasso, 1908, ifriendsfivp (L'Sdmitie), (Hermitage, Leningrad
June 1998
1890
Avant-Garde B^ak
27
�^ymbolieHistoiy
C.G.BeU
How would it operate in the post-individual and luxuriant
West? An art fad? A Dionysian birth? Where Rilke, the same years
as this 1908 Picasso, in the Malte Brigge "Other Self," saw the facds of
Paris
wear out... split and fold... be changed in succession...
The last is worn through in a week, has holes in it...
gradually the lining — the no face — comes through,
and they go about with that...
Or he sees the woman, sunk inward, her head in her hands:
At his step... the emptiness clattered... she took fright,
was torn too quickly out of herself... the face remained
in the hands... to see a face from the inside... the flayed
head without a face.
The excitement of Cubist art is as clear as the record every
where of broken content, what moved toward the World War and
totalitarian seizure — Yeats (that "last romantic"):
We, who seven years ago
Talked of honour and of truth.
Shriek with pleasure if we show
The weasel's twist, the weasel's tooth.
The marvel of the Negroid and Cubist is its changing devaluation,
outrage and despair to abstract strength — the dance of Zarathustra:
"zur Umwertung aller Werte."
1
56) y^ragonard, 1780, ^ete at !^m6ouU£et, QulBenJoan CpCCection, LisBon
56a) Same, detaiC of stream (into zofiidi video inserts a detail cf the sBip, from
V56B)
The first turning of royal France from court ease to the risk of
wild nature is deliciously toyed with by Fragonard in his painting of
a Fete at Rambouillet. So Johnson's Rasselas — "he whose real wants
are supplied, must admit those of fancy" — searches the woods and
June 1996
1890 — Avant-Grarde Break
28
�Symbolic Histoty
C.G. Bell
cliffs of the Happy Valley for an escape from those "soft vicissitudes
of pleasure and repose":
He examined the cavern through which the waters of
the lake were discharged; and... discovered it to be full
of broken rocks, which... would stop any body of solid
bulk...
57) C.T>. g^Twiricfi, 1818, CftaOiCGffs of ‘KS£en, fKginfiart, Wintertfiur
57a) Same, CfiaCliCCiffs, centraC detail, from 'wfiicfi video draws two closer details
(cf. V57al and a2)
In Friedrich's "Chalk Cliffs of Riigen" that mannered grotto-play
advances to the awed contemplation of cliffs and mountain torrents,
which, from romantic poetry and the tales of Hoffmann, would seize
on Poe ("A Descent into the Maelstrom", 1841):
The "little cliff" upon whose edge he had so carelessly
thrown himself... arose, a sheer unobstructed precipice
of... rock, some fifteen or sixteen hundred feet from
the world of crags beneath us... In truth, so deeply was
I excited by the perilous position of my companion,
that I fell at full length upon the ground, clung to the
shrubs around me, and dared not even glance upward
at the sky...
"You must get over these fancies," said the guide.
58)
(Bavarian (Romantic, 1869-86, (hlg.uscfiwannstein, S'H^ of (Municft (video uses
^58)
But what Symbolist enactment of the European Weird, could
lead from Friedrich's nature mystery to the actual Wagnerian extra
vagance the mad king of Bavaria, Ludwig II, reared at Neuschwanstein in the chain of Valhalla-imaginings which let to his suicide? As
if the whole Alpine landscape were haunted
59)
giorgio de Cftirko, 1908, (Jlpsta^ia of the Infinite, (Museum of (Modem Strt,
(Nirc
^59 a) g. de Chirico, 1913-14, Singuish cf (Departure, 5llBrigh.t gallery, Buffalo,
(N!/
June1996
1890 — Avant-(5arde Break
29
�C.G. BeU
Sjymbolic Histoxy
by a ghost of the surreal, future, to be painted in 1908 by Giorgio de
Chirico, in this "Nostalgia of the Infinite" — Neuschwanstein of the
now consciously alienated mind, as immediate, and remote, as the
Castle Kafka's Land Surveyor sees but never reaches, phones and is
bureaucratically shunted from, evasive ultimate of religion turned on
itself.
Even when Kafka's surrealism had been confirmed by the Great
War, the many had no notion how his Castle and Trial, his Meta
morphosis into cockroach and the like, applied to their daily lives.
Va60) n^ozuer detaiCfrom sCide 58, Odg'Usdvwannstein,
60)
5Lnierican QingerBreacC, 1886, LumBertnan's Bouse, ‘Eureka, CaCifomia;
first, xHxCeo detaiCs
How could Ludwig n have known what Masque of the Red Death his
fairy castle was to accommodate? How much more purblind the new
rich of Gilded America must have been to the ghostly estrangements
which nightmared their gingerbread — as in the meeting on the stair
of James' Turn of the Scre.w
The apparition had reached the landing half way up...
in the cold faint twilight, with a glimmer in the high glass and another on the polish of the ,oak stair below,
we faced each other in our common intensity...
Like that candy-manufacturing malaise and soul-closure from which
at the turn of the century. Hart Crane would be born to the exile of
the poetry nonsense that strained his nerves (Dante's prurient "mal
protesi nervi").
61)
fFJC. (hCesserscBmidt, c. 1770, Carved SeCf, 9duseuin, TressBur£, Qermany;
+ V detaiC
Music:
Shostakovich, 1945, close of 9th Symphony, Col. M 31307
In the energized West, enlightened well-being has long over
played its cheer.
Extrapolate, from Messerschmidt's 1770 grinning
self, to Shostakovich's 1945 "merry little piece" (the 9th Symphony),
June 1996
1890 *— Avant-Garde Break
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�C.G. BeU
^J^mbolic History
its close carrying the comfort of Papa Haydn to an assertion the more
urged for 200 years of irreversible trouble — an always toothier lie
even to its jolliest participants.
Shostakovich)
‘i'aezj
Semini, c. 1619,
(a. of imUc sOde 62) fbtma Dannata, ‘SaC. di Sp(ma,
62)
(Bernini, c. 1619, (DouBCe: [H] (DatnnecC ancC f(B] BCessecC SouCs, (PaC. cCi
Spagna, 9(pme
V62a) Bemint, c. 1619, (B (rf 62) S^ima Beata, TcU. diSpagna, Bsmie
Since already the twenty-year-old Bernini had stumbled on the
disturbing truth, whether universal, or a curse of Faustian civiliza
tion, that in the pairing of saved and damned, the creative energy of
his own face had to operate ^ on the satanic ,side; while peace and
blefssing would furnish a female of such wall-eyed mawkishness as
must enforce angel-limitation from Blake's Milton to Nietzsche's
creeping Christian,
63)
Basttmn Joflnson, 1869,,for 1869 painting of tfie Boy LincoCn (I(^ing,
So how would Eastman Johnson’s charcoal of the imagined boy
Lincoln reading (sketched after the Civil War though still in the hope
of pioneer humanity) _ how would it hold out against Baudelaire’s
Au Lecteur,
To the Reader," published twelve years before: "and
we feed our pleasant remorse as beggars nourish their vermin"?
64)
(Daumier, 1863, ^TBe !l(gader,
Center, (Des Moines, Iowa; + V detail
Daumiers Reader of 1863 more sustains that dedication to
Satanic loves: "It is the Devil who holds the strings which move us "
Johnson’s glowing Lincoln would know nothing of that worst vice of
all, 1 Ennui, hookah-smoking boredom of Romantic decadence:
Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre delicat.
Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable,
mon frere!
June 1996
1890 — Avant-Garde Break
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�C.G.BeU
^ymlx^ic H]stda:jr
A close Eliot would take up in The
Waste
I.and.
without even
troubling to' translate.
65)
Victorian, 1897, T>mtnon([ JuSiCu, (Progress since 1837, iCCustrated: London
Odg.'WS', + V details
65a) Van Qo^fi, 1885, Lhe (Potato Xaters, (Rij^mus., ^Lmsterdam (video: detaiC
only)
656) 9dundi, 1891, (Rite Lafayette, (NfitionaC QaCCery, Oslo
No one can doubt progress. From Roger Bacon, to Francis Bacon,
to Priestley, to this celebration of Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, 1897,
with its sixty years of sail to steam, coach to train, lamp to electricity
— the vision of technocracy builds a spread in time, from burning
apex to the diffusion of common acceptance; while the counter-spark
condenses in the mass — Hopkins: "And all is seared with trade;
bleared, smeared with toil."
The question is not of Progress, but of its Satanic bent — as
simple as whether the Devil is real.
The same split has attended the view of the city.
though a journalist, framed the poles:*
O’Henry,
Far below and around lay the city like a ragged purple
dream, the wonderful, cruel, enchanting, bewildering,
fatal, great city.
6 6) 5ldCeT and SuCCivan, 1890-91, WainrvriyRt ‘Budding, St. Louis, (Missouri
66 a) Currier and Ives, 1862, Central (ParR, ‘Mater, Skating, detaiC, (Rpy. (Rj-ng CoL,
(^
666) SuCCivan, 1907, CkandeCier detaiC, farmers' and (Merchants' ‘BanCu
Ckvatonna, (Minnesota
66c) (M. (Prendergast, 1901, Centred ParR^ ‘Mutney (Museum, (Mlf
Whitman’s first focus in Democratic Vistas is on the surge of
material possibility which, thrusting up the 1890 Wainwright Build
ing in St. Louis (Adler's steel skeleton hung with Sullivan’s patterned
brick), would put architecture at the vanguard of the modem:
June 1996
1890 — Avant-Garde Break
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�C.G. BeU
Symbolic History
Whitman
After an absence, I am now again (September 1870) in
New York City and Brooklyn... The splendor, pic
turesqueness and oceanic amplitude and rush of these
great cities, the unsurpassed situation, rivers and bay,
sparkling sea-tides, costly and lofty new buildings,
facades of marble and iron, of original grandeur and
elegance of design... the flags flying, the endless ships,
the tumultuous streets, Broadway, the heavy, low,
musical roar, hardly ever intermitted, even at night...
these I say... give me... a continuted exaltation and
absolute fulfilment...
A67) g. ‘BdCoivs, J9p9, 9Cfie Lone 'Tenement, 9^tionaC gallery, 'Washington, 'D.C.;
+ 'U (CetaiC
67) 9{. (Daumier, 1863, 'Washerwoman, (MetropoCitan 'Museum of Art, (S^C
(video: detail onCy)
t
But we have already mentioned Baudelaire's antithesis;
Fourmillante cite, cite pleine de reves.
Ant-hill city, city full of dreams.
Where the specter in plain day grips the passer-by.
It is the "unreal city" Eliot, like that specter, seizes on in The Waste
— where Baudelaire had encountered in self-multiplying repli
cation his seven old men, bent and eternal as this Daumier Washer
Woman (shoulders hunched again in the child) — at which his soul __
old dismasted hulk, danced, and danced/ Across a monstrous sea
without a- shore." (CGB)
Et mon ame dansait, dansait, vieille gabarre
Son mats, sur une mer monstreuse et sans bords!
IfreiKh (g. 'Eiffel), 1887-89, 'Ihe Eiffel 'Tozuer, night storm, (Paris (video:
detail only)
'17068) ']7an gogh, 1889, 'Uan gogh's 'Bedroom at Arles, 'l7incent van gogh (Mus.,
Amsterdam
c68)
'l/an gogh, 1889) On the 'Threshold of Eternity, Hg-oller-lMuller Museum,.
Otterlo, UTolland
a68)
June 1996
1^0 — Avaii1>€rarde Break
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�C.G. BeU
68)
^ymboHd Histoxjr
*Uan Q
1886, (Boots witfi Laces, f^ij^museum, l^bnsterdam
In the modern break, what so drives us without bourne, is art’s
tragic enactment of cloven value: the Eiffel-towered city, its victories
of steel and dynamo, our cage and defeat; while the dejecta of that
aim. Van Gogh's Room or Chairs, his face-clutching man "On the Edge
of Eternity," become the crushed-out oil of Heidegger’s essential
truth:
a well-known painting by Van Gogh... a pair of peasant
shoes and nothing more. And yet from the dark open
ing of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread
of the worker stares forth... Under the shoes slides the
loneliness of the field-path as evening falls... The art
work lets us know... what the equipment, the pair of
peasant shoes, is in truth. This entity emerges into the
unconcealedness (Greek: aXiiGeia) of its being.
a69) Manet, 1863, Le ^Dejeuner sur CfierBe, oiC s^tcfi, CourtauQC Inst., London;
+ tcpo V details
69) Same, Le (Dejeuner sur CdeTSe, Louvre (jeu de (Paume), (Paris (first, a video
detail)
Music:
Mussorgsky, 1866, "Why should Your eyes" Artia ALP 704
(3rd sect.)
No wonder, whereas Renaissance art-advances were a civic
delight, each phase of this avant-garde unveiling occasioned hue and
cry.
Whatever deft liberation of the urbane tickles our left-bank
senses in Manet’s 1863 Luncheon on the Grass, the old moral and
spatial connections are falling away. As in Mussorgsky’s 1866 "Why
should your eyes," so rich in the bass of Kim Borg, those transmodulatiofts and short-cuts were creeping in which would leave the
composer unplayed until Rimsky-Korsakoff had revised out the
idiosyncracies. In Paris, at the Salon des Refuses, connoisseurs could
always titter:
"Where is the background?" "Why make a farce of
Giorgione?" and "What are those girls up to?"
(end Mussorgsky)
Juik1996
1890 — Avant-Grarde Break
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�Symbolic EBstoacy
C.G.BeU
70)
Japan,
Cate 18tfi unt.,
Tea Ceremony; tobocCBCoc^ print; + V
(CetaiC
70a) J{dl^ai 1827-30, Ono Waterfall, lUoodBCoc^prmt (video: detaiConly)
706) 9donet, 1872, IRdjatta d. Jlr^enteuil, Louvre (Jeu de iPaume), Paris
Music:
Gamelan Orchestra of Bali, Sekdar Gadung, close, BAM LD 096 M
When the great causal rhetoric which Renaissance, Baroque,
and Enlightenment had bequeathed as their noblest heritage, was to
be thinned toward Verlaine's "rien que nuance" — the non-Western
everywhere pointed the way.
What the patterned flatness of the
Japanese print, its casual composition and haunting remove, sug
gested for the circle of Manet, the Gamelan music of Bali would effect
for Debussy when he heard it at the Paris Exposition of 1889. How
elegantly the shadows of tensile harmony might be withdrawn.
(close Gamelan)
Music:
Debussy, 1910, Voiles (close). Preludes, Bk. I, (Gieseking) Col.
Odyssey 3236- 0021
Frail as Debussy's own Prelude depiction of Sails.
(end Voiles)
71) Monet, 1866-67, Women in idie Qarden, Louvre, Paris; + V details
71a) Monet, 1880, Woman Seated Under Widows, 9^tionaC QaUery, Was6., P>.Cs
+ V detaiC
Under the sway of the Japanese, of Manet's figures and
Boudin's color-lightening, Monet caught the ephemeral play of a
garden. .
Music:
Faure, 1879, Trio, 2nd mvt. of 1st Piano Qrt, RCA ARL 1 -0761
But that was in 1866, when Debussy was a child, and thirteen years
before Faure matured to the airy delight of this First Piano Quartet.
Though Verlaine (at 22) had just published a book with such garden
moments:
We were alone and walking in a dream
(Nous etions seul a seule et marchions en revant)...
June1996
1890'^' Avant-Garde Break
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�C.G. BeU
Symbolic History
How the first flowers have the sweetest scent
(Ah! les premieres Hears qu'elles sent parfum&s!)
Or the Autumn Song of violins sobbing in the heart, which, as much
as any poem, refines pure sound:
Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De I'automne
Blessent mon coeur
D'une langeur
Monotone.
So the chromatics of Faure moves toward an abstract repose.
(fade Faur4)
72)
(DauBigny, 18$8, Mominy, fortnerCy ^ermitaye, now Moscow; first, V detaUs
Music:
Liszt, 1863, Etude, Waldesrauschen, opening, Philips 6500 043
The musical antecendents are as complex as the Beethoven to
Wagner scene. But a piano sequence might reach from the Nocturnes
of Field, through those bolder .ones of Chopin (the D-Flat Major close)
to Liszt, who in such studies as this Waldesrauschen went as far
toward nuance as anyone around mid-century.
In art, the freshening of landscape flowed from the Romantic
English through Barbizon France, where Daubigny evoked light and
air over earth and water. But to see how sharp a break was still to
be made, set this oil-sketch of Morning
(fade Liszt)
73)
Monet, 1869, La grenouiCCere (froygery), MetropoCitan Museum of llrt,
■9frC; + ‘UdetaiC
^
73 a) Monet, after 1920, Les (DeuT^ LtoiCes, Oranyerie, (Paris
'U73B) Monet, c. 1920(F), Water-CiGes, 9fationaC gatCery, London
Music:
June 1996
Debussy, 1888, En Bateau, opening. Petite Suite, 2 pianos.
Turnabout TV 34234
1890 — Avant-Garde Break
96
�C.G. BeU
^mbcdic History
against Monet's wave reflections not twelve years later (1869),
where space and motion atomize into abstract impressions. Though
the musical contrast leads us to 1888, Debussy's "En Bateau," from
the Little Suite for two Pianos.
(fade En Batteau)
Music:
Debussy, 1905, from Reflets dans I'eau
Images. Bk.I, (Gieseking) Angel 35065
(arpeggios).
Since that post-impressionist phenomenon called musical Impres
sionism does not climax its suspension of tonal rhetoric in wave-play
("Reflets dans I'eau") until Debussy's Images of 1905, contemporary
not with Monet’s rippling Froggery, but with the advancing abstrac
tion of his Lily Ponds.
(fade Images)
a74) Van Qo^fi, 1888, Cafe atO^fit, !lQ;d(leT-Mu(hrMus., OtterCo
6 74) ‘Domenico Veneziano, c. 1480, St. Jofin in tfie Desert, 9\(fitionaC QaCCery,
‘Wasfiit^ton, D.C. (C^(B '60)
c74) Van Qo^d, 1886-87,14tfi cfJuly, Jaggd-JdifvnCoseTCodection, iVintertfiuT
74) fRsnoir, 1879, Oarsmen at Cdatou, O^ational gcdlery, ‘Wasd., D.C.
74 a) iRgnoir, c. 1869, Luncdeon (ftde ‘Boatvny Tarty, Jlrt Inst., Cdicago
Avant Garde having set the conditions for always more radical
revolt against establishment, even, by their acceptance, the estab
lishment of its own styles. Renaissance, in this sense, had not been
avant garde.
Its explorers could move with society toward the
shared ordering of space, time, and cause. This new elite forms a
cadre recruited within that now entrenched civilization, and, as the
military term implies, at war with its traditional values.
But the current can always eddy,
Music:
Faure, 1886, 2nd Piano Qrt, 1st mvt, 2nd theme, RCA V LSC 2735
Renoir harnessing to the art customs of the past (Titian, Rubens,
Watteau) the^ revolt of free composition and broken color, for the
more cheerful accommodation of elegant status quo.
So in the
musical salon, Faure and the rest tamed Wagner. No doubt art is
June 1906
1890 — AvanlrGsorde Break
37
�Symbolic Histpiy
C.G.B^U
celebration; but what is to be celebrated?
of bourgeois delight?
75)
The fragile Gallic shimmer
(fade Faur6)
Moreau, c. 1880(?), Jlt^eCs of Sodom, Moreau Mus., (Paris; first, video
detaiCs
Or, through a surface of romantic dark, Moreau's assault of
Symbolist angels, the holocaust overthrow of the physical by spirit?
Music:
C. Franck, 1883, Le Chasseur Maudit, close, Westminster
WL 5311
As with Franck’s symphonic mysteries against the charm of Faur6,
(end Franck)
who can say which is more Avant Garde?
a76) TautQau£uin, 1898, Hdie ^fiite (Horse, (Paris, Louvre
76) gau£um, 1897, ‘ZTte (Batfiers, Mg-tionaC QaiCery, Wasfiin£ton, (D.C.; + ^ detail
Music:
Debussy, 1893-4, Prelude a I'Apres midi d'un Faune (opening).
Col. MS 6077
So it was attuned to that older Symbolist pain and Faustian
attack that a post-impressionist corps, withdrawing from the already
prosperous circle of Manet, turned Impressionist weapons against
the ephemeral ease of Impressionist savoir-faire: — Gauguin, seeking
realms as visionary as of Mallarme's Faun:
Nymphs, I shall see the shadow you became.
«
Couple, adieu; je vais voir I'ombre que tu devins.
— though salon-eased perhaps in the music Debussy wrote for the
poem.
(fade I'Apr^s midi d’un faune)
77)
Van Qoyfi, 1888, LLe (SQgfit Cafe, Slit gadery, O^aCe University; + V detail
Van Gogh, radical as Rimbaud: "I accustomed myself to plain hallu
cination"; "At last I held sacred the disorder of my spirit" — "Je finis
par trouver sacr6 le d6sordre de mon esprit." Consumptive Laforgue,
praying that "whirlwinds and floods... sweep the leprosy of cities...
June 1^6
1880 — Avant-Garde Break
38
�C.G. BeU
l^ymbofic EBstoxy
that nothing be known of this rotted, brain which was the earth, one
day" — "De ce Cerveau pourri qui fut la Terre, un jour!" — Laforgue,
for whom on all the peopled stars "a fraternal outcry will be raised
against God" — "Ce sera centre Dieu la clameur fraternelle!"
C^zditnC/ 1900/ ‘BeruC in tfic (^cu£/ T'l^dCtcv CBcirciss CoCCcction/ ycUc ^ftwini
Sfiow (video cropped BeCow)
678). Cezanne, 1900-04, *Tfie (BCue Landscape, ^Hermitage, Leningrad; + ^17 details
78) Cezanne, 1898-1900, !I(pc^ at 'BiBemus, ^oCfcjvang Mus., Tssen
®
Cezanne, most rooted in the past, most looming over the future,
shaping from personal neurosis and ennui an art as Olympian in
well-being as Whitman’s, yet as radically compulsive as Rimbaud's __
Cezanne, great beyond parallel, though with cognates everywhere;
from Verlaine, "The sky above the roof/ Si bleu, si calme!/ A tree
above the roof/ Sways its fronds./ The bell in the sky you see/ Softly
sounds..."; through Mallarme, obsessed with "The Azure": "Je suis
hante. LAzur! lAzur! I'Azur! rAzur!"; Rimbaud (closing the vowel
poem we earlier began — Fowlie):
O, supreme Clarion full of strange stridor.
Silences crossed by worlds and angels:
— O, the Omega, violet beam from His Eyes.
— O rOmega, rayon violet de Ses Yeux!
to Valery (1920):
When, on the abyss, a sun takes repose,
iPure works of an eternal cause.
Dream is knowledge in a time that shines.
Le Temps scintille et le Songe est savoir.
*]/a79) Seurat, 1884-86, La Qrande Jatte, detaiC, J4rt Inst., CBicago
B79) Odauriude VCamincki 1906, Landscape xvitB 9(^d OIrees, .d^tionaC Museum
of Modem. Slrt, Baris
Vc79} Bicasso, 1911-12, Clarinet Blayer, detail, B>. Cooper CoCCecthn, London
June 1996
1890 — Avant-€rarde Break
�Symbolic ffistory
T9)
T9 a)
(Bo(xioni, 1911, forces of tfie Street, iBrivate Cofection, (BaseC, SwitzerCaiuC;
+ video detail f upper section
Same, detail of Cower section
When those post-impressionist assaults have been absorbed —
with the others, Seurat, Ensor, Munch — in the chain-reacting iconoclasm of Avant-Garde, to kindle by 1905 the Fauves, "Wildmen,"
more fiercely improvising with color and form; and when that salvo
has yielded in Paris to Analytical Cubism, and over Europe touched
off Blaue Reiter, Suprematist, Futurist darers of the pure abstract,
this 1911 Boccioni, "Forces of a Street" — as in the 1910 Manifesto, no
less the forces of the coming World War:
Music:
Schdnberg, 1912, Pierrot Lunaire #13, Col. M2S 679
A roaring motor car that looks as though running on
shrapnel, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace... We wish to glorify war, the only health giver
of the world, militarism, patriotism, the destroying
arm of the Anarchist, and the beautiful ideas that kill...
— in the desperate ecstasy of that increasingly global enactment of
The Drunken Boat (music too, in Schonberg, pursuing the Wehrmacht
attach on tonality)
(close Pierrot #13)
80) iK^noir, 18T6, QirCwitfi Watering Can, CMpdoncd gallery, ‘Washington, 2).C
80a) Bonnard, 1929-32, Little girl xuith Dog, (Private Collection, fontaineSleau,
france
806) (Picasso, 1924, (Paul, the Slrtist's Son, Artist's Collection (video: detail only)
80 c) (Pissarro, 1881, (Peasant girl with a Stichi Louvre, (Paris (video: detail only)
80d) Again, from 80, (Renoir's girl, detail; + V closer detail efface
Music:
Chausson, 1880, "Les Papillons," RCA V LM-6153
— under successive revolts, how could there not be successive pinings
back, as to Renoir's Girl in a Garden (with Chausson's Butterflies, "Les
Papillons"), a tenderness already of the past, though Bonnard would
enchant it forward — such a prayer as Yeats' for his Daughter, such a
wish as Picasso's in his children. Had not the most infernal rebel of
June 1996
1890 — Avant-Garde Break
40
�
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Text
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
25. 18th Century: Voltaire's Smile
CHARLES G. BELL
ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
or
1260 CANYON ROAD
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501
May 1994
Last Revised January ‘96
�2
Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
25. 18th Century: Voltaire's Smile
1)
Pierre F. Lejeune, c. 1760, Bust of Voltaire (profile), detail, Landesmuseum,
Stuttgart; + V, whole bust (from 2nd 1)
1a) Houdon, c. 1770(?), Voltaire (full face), National Gallery, Washington, D.C.
V1b) Houdon, c. 1777(?), Voltaire in age, detail, Louvre, Paris
1c)
Double: [A] whole Lejeune Bust of slide 1, and [B] Houdon, c. 1778, terra
cotta Bust of Rousseau, Mus., Orleans; while video shows a detail only of B
Music:
Rameau, published 1741, 5th Piece de Clavecin en Concert,
lst movement, A.S. 30
At the French heart of the 18th century lies Voltaire's smile, witty as the octave
leap in Rameau's 5th Concert de Clavecin.
Martin concluded on the whole that man was born to live in the
convulsions of inquietude or the lethargy of boredom... "Let us work,"
he said, "for it is the only way to make life tolerable."...Their little land
produced abundantly. Cunegonde was ugly indeed, but she became a
fine pastry cook... Not one of their company was idle... As for
Pangloss, he would say to Candide:
"All events are linked in this best of all possible worlds: If you had
not been kicked on the breach out of that beautiful castle because of
your love for Lady Cunegonde; if you hadn't been seized by the Inquisition, traversed much of America on foot, run your sword through the
baron, and lost those sheep you brought from Eldorado — you
wouldn't be here eating citron comfits and pistachio nuts."
"You have spoken well," said Candide; "but we ought to cultivate
our garden."
(fade Rameau)
Is this the smile of scoffing or the smile of reason? (Locke):
5/1994
18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile
�3
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
The candle that is set up in us shines bright enough for all our purposes
—
And yet the Enlightened smile, in the confidence game of 18th century, was somehow
modulating from Locke's reason toward Rousseau's heart.
2)
French Gothic, c. 1260, Smiling Angel, Portal, Rheims Cathedral; + V detail
Music:
French, c. 1280(?), Secular Motet: En mai, quant rosier sont flouri
(with Robin and Marion duplum and tenor) Munrow, ARC 2723045
(#12)
Contrast the smile of grace — a Rheims angel from another century of formal
synthesis, the 13th — its art, its music a sprightly overflow of heaven onto earth — the
motet, still vowed to the Church modes and bare-fifth chords, yet flowering in the
melody, rhythm, words of the May morning, the loves of Robin and Marion —
(fade En mai)
Would the two smiles have told us
2nd 1) Again, Lejeune's bust of Voltaire (profile), whole
that where the century of Voltaire was working toward the least action calculus of a
mechanical universe of conserved energy (Maupertius, the Bernouillis, Euler,
D'Alembert, Lagrange, La Place),
2nd 2) Again, Smiling Angel, detail of same or another Rheims Angel
the chief scientist of the Thomistic century, Roger Bacon, even as he writes in his Opus
Maius On Experimental Science —
I now wish to unfold the principles of experimental science, since
without experience nothing can be sufficiently known —
seeks higher truth:
a3) French Gothic, c. 1250-60, Dragons and Foliage, Rheims Cathedral
Vb3) French Gothic, c. 1240(?), Capital of Choir, Joshua and Caleb fight over
grapes, Rheims Cathedral
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3)
Symbolic History
English Decorated Gothic, 1280-1300, Leaves (vine) on Capital in Chapter
House of Minster, Southwell; + V detail
But experience is of two kinds; one is gained through our external
senses... This experience is both human and philosophical... but this
does not suffice, because it does not give full attestation in regard to
things corporeal owing to its difficulty, and does not touch at all on
things spiritual... For the grace of faith illuminates greatly, as also do
divine inspirations, not only in things spiritual, but in things corporeal
and in the sciences of philosophy.
So the realism of leaves which adorns the capitals of Gothic cathedrals (here of
the vine at English Southwell) sprouts as ravishingly in the sacred, as Bacon's prophecy
of lenses:
from an incredible distance we might read the smallest letters... an
army might appear close at hand... we might cause the sun, moon and
stars in appearance to descend here below.
4)
4a)
V4b)
4c)
G. dei Grassi, c. 1380-90, antlered deer, sketch, Accad. Carrara, Bergamo
A. Pisanello, c. 1440, The Vision of St. Eustace, National Gallery, London
Same, The Vision of St. Eustace, right detail, National Gallery, London
Again, G. dei Grassi's sketch of an antlered deer; first, video detail
In this Giovanni dei Grassi, late 14th century, the art of nature comes from the
sacred (here the Vision of Saint Eustacius) into the perfection of its own powers. Such
Buridan's formulation (against Aristotle, and by appeal to experience) of the "impetus" by
which mass retains an impressed motion. So 250 years before Descartes and Galileo,
Nicholas of Oresme (French Bishop) graphs such intensities as velocity and acceleration,
along such an extension as time:
sometimes it happens that velocity is increasing while acceleration is
decreasing... accelerations can take place uniformly or difformly in
various ways...
(What was he observing but pendulums, harmonic functions, falling bodies?)
5)
Il Rosso, c. 1523, Moses and the Daughters of Jethro, Uffizi, Florence;
+ V detail
V5a) Same, c. 1527, Dead Christ with Angels, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
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V5b) Dürer, 1511, Adoration of the Trinity, foreground detail, Kunsthistorisches
Museum, Wien (CGB '60)
5c)
Elsheimer, 1609, Night Flight to Egypt, right detail, Alte Pinakothek,
München
V5d) Rubens, c. 1624, Het Onwaer, The Storm, detail, Konig Collection, Haarlem
That insular rebirth swells to the 16th century, this Il Rosso, where the physical
and dynamic struggle within Biblical legend (Moses and the Daughters of Jethro). So,
within the frame of the past — of Aristotelian motion, Ptolemaic geocentricity and
Church dogma (no vast empty spaces in God's universe; no spots on the ethereal sun; no
change in the sphere of stars; and "as Holy Writ declares, it was not the earth but the sun
Joshua commanded to stand still") — the new astronomy of worlds in space struggles
through Copernicus: ("Nothing stands in the way of the movability of the earth"), Tycho
Brahe ("this new star is not some kind of comet or fiery meteor... it is a star shining in the
firmament itself — one that has never previously been seen before our time, ...since the
beginning of the world."), Gilbert's globes of earth, moon, sun, planets as gravitating
loadstones: "the agent force abides in bodies themselves... not in the interspaces."
6)
6a)
6b)
6c)
6d)
Rembrandt, 1632, Anatomy Lesson, Mauritshuis, The Hague
C. Huygens, 1703, from De Motu Corporum, Picture of boat, etc.; + V detail
Leibniz, c. 1700, Impact equations with Cartesian graph, drawn by CGB
(video: details only, above, then below)
Again Rembrandt, 1632, Anatomy Lesson, detail; first, video closer detail
Rembrandt, 1656, another Anatomy Lesson (of Dr. J. Deyman), Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam
In Rembrandt's Anatomy Lessons (this of 1632, or the fragment from 24 years
later), the drama of mind invests a space-world of lighted mass, causal force — what
Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, would formulate through the century: Huyghens, in
Rembrandt's Amsterdam, solving the impact of two elastic spheres, viewed by his
wonderful postulate, as on a moving frame of reference — a boat, seen from the shore; so
that each case can be adjusted to one of symmetry, where, the center of gravity stilled,
equal momenta are exchanged.
But that visualization was not required. We had only to mathematize the common
first principle that the motion of body is conserved, admitting the division by which any
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Symbolic History
body can be both one and many, in this case the summed whole and a rebounding two. If
in elastic impact, the momentum of the total mass and the relative velocities of its
colliding parts must both be preserved, Leibniz' three equations automatically arise, for
the conservation of inner velocity, for the momentum of the whole, and (the two
compounded) for the energy of the masses times their velocities squared.
But if all matter must follow these laws, every motion in the universe becomes a
clockwork determined from beginning to end. The snare Leonardo, talking of the wonder
of force, had implied, but failed to see ("Without force nothing moves" and "there cannot
be any force exerted in any movement made by imaginary spirits"), that noose is being
sprung upon us.
Is not the lighted drama of either Anatomy Lesson the temporal appearance, in
such a clockwork mill as this cadaver, of the paradox springs of life and motion? But had
Rembrandt, or anyone else of that century (except perhaps Pascal) felt the foreclosure of
Cartesian mechanization?
7)
7a)
Rubens, 1618, Landscape with a Wagon, Hermitage, Leningrad; + V details
Rubens, c. 1635(?), Evening Woods, Neuerburg Sammlung, Hamburg
This 1618 Rubens Landscape is still mysteriously organized, as in exploratory
polyphony, all over the canvas. To the left, is an Elsheimer memory of the reflected
moon; on the right, day expatiates over open fields; center, above the wagon, which
seems to be stuck, though lurching down hill, an incredible rock pocket glows like a
Resurrection cave. In science we recall the speculative daring which leaps (before the
formulation of method) from Gilbert:
As for us, we deem the whole world animate, and all globes, all stars,
and this glorious earth, too, we hold to be from the beginning by their
own destinate souls governed and from them also to have the impulse
of self-preservation —
to Kepler:
The celestial movements are the work... of soul acting in accordance
with bodily powers... the ellipse bears witness to the natural bodily
power and to the emanation and magnitude of its form.
8)
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Jacob v. Ruisdael, 1665, A Forest Marsh, Hermitage, Leningrad
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V8a) Same, Ruisdael's Forest Marsh, center detail
V8b) Ruisdael, c. 1665-69 Landscape with Waterfall and Castle, National Gallery,
London (video: upper detail only)
8c)
Ruisdael, 1660-65(?), A Waterfall in a Rocky Landscape, National Gallery,
London
8d) Salomon van Ruisdael, c. 1660, Estuary with Sailboats, Staatl.
Kunstsammlungen, Kassel; + V detail
V8e) J. v. Ruisdael, c. 1660(?), Sunlight through Clouds, Louvre, Paris
On the other side (of Cartesian formulation). Ruisdael's Forest Marsh of 1665, has no
such independent vitalities of scene. Meaningful details can be made only by closing in,
as under increasing magnification, on the focal center of the reflecting pool and
waterfowl. It is what was unfolding, through that mid-century, in Spinoza's philosophy
and in propositional physics, from the logic and mathematics of axiomatic deduction.
Descartes, 1644:
That God is the first cause of motion, and that He always conserves an
equal quantity of it in the universe.
Newton, about 1690:
Law I: Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion
in a straight line, unless it is compelled to change that state by force
impressed upon it.
Law II: The change of motion is proportional to the motive force
impressed; and is made in the direction of the right line in which that
force is impressed.
Law III: To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction: or,
the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and
directed to contrary parts.
The mystery of action withdraws to the unstated dilemma: that impressed force
can only live (and die) one with the change it is supposed to cause.
9)
French late Gothic, 1517 Choir with late Renaissance (1600-05) Jubé or roodloft, detail to the right, St. Etienne du Mont, Paris (CGB '59)
V9a) Same, detail to the left (CGB '59)
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10)
Symbolic History
Same, 1517 Choir with the rood-loft and spiral stairs (CGB '59); from these
the video shows four details and then the whole
Music:
Sweelinck, c. 1600(?), Echo fantasie (Videro), G-DB 5214 (78)
Let architecture and music repeat the focal formulation from Mannerist (or late
Renaissance). to Baroque: — here an Echo Fantasie by 1600 Sweelinck, with the fanciful
rood-loft of the same date, in the Flamboyant choir of St. Etienne du Mont, Paris.
(fade Sweelinck)
Va11)
Vb11)
11)
Va12)
12)
Roman Baroque, S. Maria in Vallicella, frescoed and decorated, 1647-56,
Cortona and others, Rome
Lanfranco, 1621 ff., ceiling detail, S. Andrea delle Valle, Rome
Rainaldi, 1663-67, S. Maria in Campitelli, interior, Rome (CGB '86);
+ V detail
Bernini, 1658-70, Main elliptical vaulting, S. Andrea Quirinale, Rome
(CGB '86)
Bernini, 1663-66, Scala Regia, Vatican Palace (to St. Peter's), Rome
Music:
Frescobaldi, 1635, Toccata per l'Elevatione, AS 4
Whereas in the 1660 church structures of Rainaldi and Bernini, as in the toccatas
and canzone of Frescobaldi, methodic consciousness centralizes the weighty masses of
the Roman Baroque.
(fade Frescobaldi)
Va13)
13)
V13a)
J. Prandtauer, begun 1702, Melk, Danube, Austria
Same, Melk, part of Church and S. Tower (CGB '59)
Same, Melk, interior, Library (CGB '59)
With that heritage the German 18th century began: Melk on the Danube, 170226, and far to the north, the old Buxtehude, whose organ-playing Bach would walk 200
miles to attend.
Music:
Buxtehude, c. 1700(?), close, Toccata in D minor (Kraft) VBX-29
(end)
Meanwhile, the Great-Chain-of-Being philosophy and science was carried across
1700 by Leibniz, born in Leipzig and variously active from Berlin and Hanover to Mainz,
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Holland, Paris, London. In that Europe it must have seemed that the stair of progress
could mount without limit, each worker, by the method of experimental reason, adding,
through publication in the academies of learning, verifiable truths to the achievement of
the past, the promise of the future.
a14)
b14)
14)
Same, Melk courtyard with S. Nepomuk (CGB '59): + V detail
Same, Melk, interior, Church (CGB '59)
Same, Melk, interior of the Dome (CGB '59)
Music:
Again, same Buxtehude, close, but starting earlier
In regard to the question already raised:
How is motion conserved through
physical exchanges? — nothing could reach further than Leibniz' three equations, of
which the last — for live-force, where velocity squared matches the height through which
a weight falls (the work to lift it there) — led to a cosmic insight: that such absolute
force (to be called energy) is the eternal ground of the world; that even when friction
damps the momentum of a body, there is no loss, but a complex exchange between the
motion of the whole and of its molecular parts. Leibniz:
But this loss of total force, this failure of the third equation, does not
detract from the inviolable truth of the law of the conservation of the
same force in the world. For that which is absorbed by the minute
parts (as heat) is not absolutely lost to the universe, though lost
for...the concurrent bodies.
(close Buxtehude)
Va15)
b15)
Vc15)
d15)
Ve15)
15)
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Schlüter, 1698-1700, Chained Captive, from the Great Electors' Monument,
Berlin; first, video detail
Schlüter, 1698, One of 21 Masks of Dying Warriors, Zeughaus, Berlin
(video, detail only)
Again Schlüter, another Chained Captive, from Electors' Monument, Berlin
Schlüter, 1705, Death, from the Sarcophagus of Queen Sophia Charlotte,
Dom, Berlin
Schlüter, 1700, Tomb: Death and Child, detail, Nikolaikirche, Berlin
A. Schlüter, c. 1698, another one of 21 Masks of Dying Warriors,
Zeughaus, Berlin
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Yet in Andreas Schlüter, chief architect and sculptor of that northern Germany,
what Wagnerian premonition disposed his carving to chained captives, hooded figures of
death, dying Warriors from Germanic myth?
Music:
Buxtehude, c. 1700(?), Passacaglia in D minor (close), Nonesuch
H-71188
So in Buxtehude's B-Minor Passacaglia, the ground-bass celebration of order
rounds on itself in a chromatic brooding, to evoke Bach's Passacaglia in C Minor.
And even in a science throned over Baroque debacle and vagrant moods — in
Leibniz' proclamation of active force as the substance of change, there lurks the Eleatic
axiom of changelessness, Aristotle's: "surely the substratum cannot cause itself to move."
The vital mystery once invoked to stir inert matter, becomes a reservoir, powerless to stir
itself. The Deist clockwork yawns over an entropic void which the Romantic century
would unveil — the contradiction that energy, though eternal, can only run down hill, to a
stagnation in which it denies its name.
a16)
16)
16a)
Rigaud, 1701, Louis XIV, Louvre, Paris; + V details
Double: [A] Again, a16, Rigaud, Louis XIV; and [B] David, 1810-12,
Napoleon in his Study, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.
Right side of Double, David's Napoleon; here, video shows six details only,
then returns to 16, the double
In France the century of Voltaire (the rational utopia of Eldorado at its core —
though Candide had fretted there) begins with the formal assertion of this Louis XIV,
1701, who sustains the robe of Divine Right not by the old Judgment Throne, from which
he has risen, but on his own high-heeled legs, pillars of the rational pomp that was
pouring, in all the arts, from Versailles over Europe — "the agent force... in bodies
themselves..."
That century breaks into the 19th with the more pragmatic boast of Napoleon,
Faustian self-maker — the painter David well aware of ringing the changes on Rigaud's
Louis. This emperor also rises, his sheathed sword on the heraldic honey-bee chair,
working throne of Rousseau's Lawgiver. Had not Rousseau's 1762 Social Contract
voiced the world's most ironic prophecy? —
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There is still one country in Europe capable of receiving laws: it is
Corsica… I have a presentiment this little island will some day
astonish Europe.
The candle has burnt to a nub; the clock stands at 4:13; under the Egyptian lion desk lies
Plutarch's tome of the past, of the great Greeks and Romans; above, just signed, and the
goose quill pen laid down, is the scroll of the Napoleonic Code.
Between those great thrusts of Baroque and Revolution, the 18th century enacts its
civilized play.
17)
Wm. Hogarth, 1743-4, Marriage à la Mode #4, The Countess' Levée,
National Gallery, London; + V details and a return to the whole (where slide
show has only one detail, a17, left of center, and then the whole)
Music:
Boyce, pub. 1760, Symphony #1 in B flat, from closing Allegro,
BG S-70668
— Thus in the England of Boyce and Hogarth: this fourth scene from Marriage à la
Mode, the Levée of the Countess (that woman in the yellow dress having her hair curled),
a rich alderman's daughter married to a sickly Earl (the fop who sips chocolate, his hair
also in curlers, though the music, with the other lady's raptures, would seem enough to
curl it) — the Countess's lover, a lawyer who will kill the Earl in a duel, lounges on a
sofa; a black boy in front points to a statue of horns; on the wall Correggio's Io, cloudembraced, instructs the clandestine in their play.
(end
Boyce)
Va18)
18)
18a)
Fragonard, c. 1770(?), The Two Lovers, Leopold Rey Collection, Sion
Fragonard, c. 1776, La Chemise enlevée, Louvre, Paris; first, video detail
Fragonard, c. 1770(?) The Peeping Children, Louvre, Paris
Music:
Rameau, Impatience, Cantata, 2nd recitative, "Les Oiseaux,"
(78 Album) Technichord 2
In Fragonard's Paris, as to the sensuous seduction of Rameau, Cupid pulls off
madam's nightgown — a curious art-focus in 1767, France already on the whirls sloping
toward Revolution.
(close Recitative)
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19)
V19a)
19b)
V19c)
Symbolic History
Luis Paret, c. 1770(?), Charles III dining before his court, Prado, Madrid;
first, video detail
Tiepolo, 1764-66, "Apotheosis... Spanish Monarchy," detail, Royal Palace,
Madrid
Again, Paret, Charles III dining, detail, Prado, Madrid
Watteau, 1717, Embarkation for Cythera, detail of a couple, Paris, Louvre
Music:
Soler, c. 1770(?), from Concerto No. 1 for two organs, opening,
Col. MS 7174
In the Spain of Scarlatti's devotee Soler, and about the time of the American
Revolt, Paret shows an Enlightened Charles III dining before his court. Above, Tiepolo's
frescoes carry the glorification of the Spanish line from Baroque Italy into the
apprenticeship of Goya. To the cost, the irreality, of keeping up the old-regime façade
around the would-be royal liberals of the Age of Reason, summon Lord Chesterfield:
It is an active, cheerful, officious, seducing good-breeding that must
gain you the good will and first sentiments of the men and the
affections of the women. You must carefully watch and attend to their
passions, their tastes, their little humours and weaknesses, and aller...
au devant.
(fade Soler)
Va20)
b20)
20)
Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1748, Self-Portrait, National Portrait Gallery, London
(video: detail only)
Ant. Ralph Mengs, c. 1775, Self-Portrait, Hermitage, Leningrad
Pieter von Verschaffelt, c. 1760(?), Bust of Himself, Historisches Museum,
Speyer; + V detail
Music:
Haydn, 1764, Symphony No.22 in E flat ("Der Philosoph"), HSLP
1009
But something else was coming to birth: an immediate declaration of human
value, Burns: "A man's a man for a' that"; and "That man to man the world o'er/ Shall
brithers be for a'that." We read it in this self-portrait by the sculptor Verschaffelt, active
in Mannheim while the symphony was developing there, when Haydn, following the
Mannheim lead, wrote his 22nd, called "The Philosopher".
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21)
V21a)
V21b)
V21c)
21d)
Symbolic History
Alan Ramsay, 1766, Portrait of J.J. Rousseau, National Gallery of
Scotland, Edinburgh
Gainsborough, 1754, Self-Portrait, Marchioness of Cholmondeley's
Collection, Norfolk
Fragonard, 1773-76, The Donkey's Stable, Veil-Picard Collection, Paris
Ramsay, 1754-55, The Painter's Wife, National Gallery of Scotland,
Edinburgh
Liotard, c. 1765(?), Portrait of the Artist, Museum of Art and History,
Geneva
The man who gave his name to all that was Jean Jacques Rousseau. Does the
portrait by the Scot, Ramsay, hint at the complexities under Rousseau's appeal to Nature?
(On the Origin of Inequality)
That men are bad; my sad experience proves. But man is naturally
good, as I have shown... It is the spirit and inequality of society, that
perverts our natural inclinations.
(Emile)
Respect childhood... Allow nature to act in her way... Is it nothing to
be happy? To jump, play and run?… What would you think of a man
who, in order to turn his whole life to profitable account, would never
take time to sleep?... Reflect that childhood is the sleep of reason.
(Confessions)
How came it to pass that I, a man of naturally expansive soul,
...consumed by the desire of loving, without ever having been able to
satisfy it completely, saw myself approaching the portals of old age,
and dying without having lived.
(fade "The Philosopher")
22)
V22a)
V22b)
22c)
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Fuseli 1799-1801, Silence, from the destroyed Melancholy, Kunsthaus,
Zurich
Anne Girodet, 1808, The Funeral of Atala, Louvre, Paris
J. Vernet, 1777, The Storm, Calvert Mus., Avignon
John Flaxman, c. 1780(?), Chatterton takes Poison from the Spirit of
Despair, Private Collection, England
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22d)
22e)
Symbolic History
Carstens, 1795, Night with her Children, Sleep and Death, Schlossmuseum,
Weimar
Canova, c. 1818-22, Lament for Abel, Gipsoteca, Possagno
Impulse so trusted opens through Revolution to Romantic: to Fuseli's turn of the
century Silence from his destroyed Melancholy. It leads in France to Chenier:
Pleurez, doux alcyons!... la jeune Tarentine!
Son beau corps a roulé sous la vague marine...
In England Cowper compares his life of insanity and despair with that of another
castaway:
No voice divine the storm allay'd
No light propitious shone;
When, snatch'd from all effectual aid,
We perish'd, each alone:
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelm'd in deeper gulphs than he.
In Germany the brooding of Klopstock passes from Hölty
Und die einsame Träne
Bebt mir heisser die Wang' herab! —
to Goethe:
Wer nie sein Brot mit Tränen asz...
Der kennt euch nicht, ihr himmlischen Mächte.
In Italy, Alfieri's tragic preoccupation vaults over 1800 to Leopardi:
Amaro e noia
La vita, altro mai nulla; e fango è il mondo.
23)
V23a)
23b)
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Telescopes, 1609 and 1897, Galileo's and Yerkes 40"x64', Splendour of the
Heavens, p. 41
Harvey, 1619(?), Experiments on a bandaged arm, from Circulation of the
Blood
Air Pressure, 1654 (pub. 1672): Demonstration of Guericke's air pump
against the pull of horses, detail of engraved plate
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V23c)
23d)
V23e)
V23f)
23g)
Symbolic History
Astronomy and Physics 1676 (pub. 1730): Roemer, Design for "The Finite
Velocity of Light", from the moons of Jupiter as timed across Earth's orbit
Newcomen, c. 1726(?), Early Pumping Steam Engine
Galvani, 1792, Experiments with Animal Electricity
Lavoisier, late 18th cent., Reconstruction of his Lab, Conservatoire Mus.,
Paris
Herschel, 1789, 40-foot Telescope, Slough, England
But science (from Galileo's telescopes to the Yerkes refractor, 40 inches by 64
feet) held to the course Pascal had long discounted:
we burn... to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation
whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite.
1609 and '18:
Kepler's Laws;
1619:
Harvey proves the Circulation of the Blood;
1637:
Descartes' Analytical Geometry;
1654:
Guericke's air pump against the pull of horses; thereafter, his electric machine;
1660:
Boyle's Gas Laws;
1676:
Roemer clocks light from the moons of Jupiter;
1678:
Huyghens, the theory of light as waves;
1687:
Newton's Principia; 1675-1717, his corpuscular optics;
18th century:
Newcomen's steam engines with Watt's improvements;
1735 and after:
Linneus, Systema Naturae;
1745 and after:
Electricity pursued by Franklin, Galvani, Volta;
1749:
Buffon, Newtonian synthesis of cosmic evolution;
1774:
Priestley; 1777: Lavoisier — an oxygen-based chemistry of combustion;
1789:
Herschel's great reflector;
1798:
Cavendish measures the gravitational constant to weight the universe;
end of the 18th century:
La Place, probability, Celestial Mechanics: God? "No need for that
hypothesis".
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24)
V24a)
24b)
V24c)
V24d)
V24e)
Symbolic History
Starlight, prism and spectrum, from Book of Knowledge, Vol. 9
Astronomy: Full Moon as Photographed by Apollo VIII
Rainbow, 1981, East, from 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe (CGB '81)
Aurora Borealis, photo by Tarnjörn Lörgren
Goya, 1788-89, Blind Man's Bluff, Prado, Madrid
Photograph of Lightning bolt (cf. Nature, slide 59)
A tower to the Infinite. (This imagined spectrum from the light of a star.) Yet the
romantic close of the century was also to trigger in the science of thermodynamics which
the older Carnot, strategist of the Revolution, would leave to his son, the dilemma
foreseen in Leibniz, that indestructible energy may go slack. So for the theology of
rational science, Pascal had the last word: "But our whole groundwork cracks and the
earth opens to abysses." — the particle-wave ambivalence of light deeply bedded in 18th
century (in England from Newton to Young); the ambivalence of matter as atom and
field, working from Galvani toward the assumed stretched bands of Faraday's electric
force, in void.
The two stories we seem to be telling of 18th century — one an art vagary of
reason's mockery and heart's search, the other a scientific dream of unlimited progress —
begin to converge.
Va25)
25)
F.E. Juvarra, 1717-31, detail of Basilica di Superga, on a mountain near
Turin
Guatemalan Baroque, 1638, 1668, and 1728, Señora del Carmen, Antigua
(CGB '74)
Through the first quarter of the century, while Melk was raising High Baroque
over the Danube, and the great vaunt was flowing out everywhere, from Bernini and
Borromini of Rome, through Juvarra in Turin and the Churrigueresque in Spain, all the
way to this earthquake-destroyed, 1728-rebuilt, and again destroyed Señora del Carmen in
Guatemalan Antigua — through those same years,
Va26)
Vb26)
Vc26)
5/1994
J.B. Pater, c. 1725, Fête Champêtre, Dublin (CGB '74)
Lancret, 1720, Dance in Pavilion, Schloß Charlottenburg, Berlin
Watteau, 1720, L'Enseigne de Gersaint, detail, from the left side, Louvre,
Paris (all the above are replaced in the slide show by d26)
18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile
�17
C.G. Bell
d26)
26)
V26a)
Symbolic History
Lancret c. 1720(?), Le Moulinet, detail of the lower half, Staatliche Gal.,
Berlin; from this, video shows a couple only, bottom right
Same, the whole; here video shows only the lower half
Rigaud, 1735, Pres. Gaspard de Gueidan playing bagpipe, Mus., Aix-enProvençe; digital variies this sequence, dropping some V slides
Music:
Fr. Couperin, 1722, 4th Concert Royal, beginning of last movement, Nonesuch 73014 ("Courts")
Couperin in Paris, with Watteau and his followers, here Lancret, were refining the
sentiment and fragile wit of Rocooco. In England Congreve marks the transition
(Millamant's contemplation of marriage in The Way of the World, 1700):
My dear liberty, shall I leave thee?...'tis more than impossible —
positively, Mirabell, I'll lie abed in a morning as long as I please.
Mirabell:
Then I'll get up in a morning as early as I please.
Millament:
Ah! idle creature, get up when you will...
Pope polished the verse —
Snuff, or the fan, supply each pause of chat,
With singing, laughing, ogling, and all that —
which Gay would apply in "Trivia":
The ladies gayly dres'd, the Mall adorn
With various dyes, and paint the sunny morn...
You'll sometimes meet a fop, of nicest tread,
Whose mantling peruke veils his empty head...
Him, like the miller, pass with caution by,
Lest from his shoulder clouds of powder fly...
a27)
27)
5/1994
(fade Couperin)
Magnasco, 1731, Church Thieves attacked by skeletons, Chiesa di S. Maria
Assunta, Campomorto (Pavia); + V detail
Magnasco, 1720-30, Monks in a Landscape, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam;
video: upper detail only
18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile
�18
C.G. Bell
27a)
V27b)
Symbolic History
Magnasco, c. 1720-30, Storm scene with fleeing Monks, detail, Brera,
Milan; video: closer detail (then video returns to a lower detail of 27)
Hogarth, 1733-35, Debtors' Prison, Soane Museum, London
Music:
Tartini, c. 1745, from Siciliana, Sonata #2 for Violin and Cello
SAWT-9592-B
But the 18th-century break sharpened also within Rococo a fierce counterpole to
the courtly; Magnasco's irony of monks in the old skull-caves of earth, the dissonances,
here of Devil's-trill Tartini, speak what from darker Baroque (Dryden) —
When I consider life, 'tis all a cheat...
I'm tired of waiting for this chemic gold,
Which fools us young, and beggars us when old —
through Swift (as of religious sects, worshippers of wind, inspired — literally, blown
into) —
with every man a pair of bellows applied to his neighbors breech...
after certain gripings, the wind and vapours issuing forth, having first,
by their turbulence and convulsions within, caused an earthquake in
man's little world, distorted the mouth, bloated the cheeks, and given
the eyes a terrible kind of relievo. At which junctures all their belches
were received for sacred, the sourer the better, and swallowed with
infinite consolation by their meager devotees —
clouds to Johnson's "Vanity of Human Wishes":
That life protracted is protracted woe…
28)
(fade Tartini)
Diezenhofer, Hildebrandt, etc., 1711 ff., Pommersfelden, Stables (CGB '52);
+ V detail
Music:
Bach, 1721, 3rd Brandenburg Concerto, from close of lst
movement, London LPS 226
In Bach's Germany, Rococo innovation, courtly or splenetic, is carried, like the
Brandenburg Concerti, on the great surge of residual Baroque. Conceive the Palace of
Pommersfelden from the pomp of these stables!
5/1994
18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
29) Same, Pommersfelden, main house across the grounds (CGB '52); + V detail of
reflection
(the two adagio chords)
30) Same, Pommersfelden, inner detail of the Banqueting Hall (CGB '52);
+ V closer detail of the ceiling
(closing allegro)
Though even in Bach, or in the decoration of Pommersfelden — within the might
of Baroque — the style-lightening of Rococo is brilliantly advanced.
(fade 3rd Brandenburg)
a31)
31)
Same, Pommersfelden, Stairhall (CGB '52); + V details
G.R. Donner 1735, St. Martin and the Beggar, from High Altar, Dom,
Pressburg; + V details
Music:
Bach, c. 1720(?), from 2nd movement, Concerto in D for 2 Violins
and Orchestra, SAWT 9508-A Ex
Yet through that extravagance and preciosity, the classical and pre-romantic was
being explored — a melodious interfolding in which Bach's Largo of the Concerto for
two violins seems to outdistance the works of his sons. In Viennese sculpture, Donner's
St. Martin and the Beggar, cast in lead, so rounds its conscious contours. In poetry
Klopstock's Messias (in classical hexameters, the first three cantos, published in 1748, the
others thereafter) evokes out of Milton such neo-Attic Baroque:
"Seraph, I will descend... Follow me, my chosen, in your beauty from
afar." — (CGB)
"Seraph, ich steig' hinunter... Folge mir, mein Erwählte, in deiner
Schöne von fern nach." (Canto 5)
32)
V32a)
V32b&c)
Donner, 1739, detail from Andromeda Fountain, Altes Rathaus, Vienna
Donner, 1737-39, River Goddess, from Neuer Markt Fountain, Vienna
(CGB '77)
Same, a River God, Variant views (CGB '77)
Donner's Andromeda is a fountainhead of that swelling idealism. "These the
seraph freed, and robed their new aspiring forms in deathless radiance" — "Diese
verklärte der Seraph und goß unsterbliche Strahlen/ Um den neuen, schwebenden Leib."
5/1994
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33)
Symbolic History
Zimmermann, 1755-57, Ceiling, Gods of Olympus, Great Hall, Nymphenburg,
Munich; + V detail (CGB ‘59)
Zimmermann's last ceilings melt Baroque and Rococo, Renaissance and Classical
into a rainbow of academic romance. (Klopstock):
On the other verge of the road of suns raised himself
Upon his gleaming chariot, Eloa, against whose coming
Through all heaven beat a thousand-voiced acclaim
That rang about the golden axles. Behind him like clouds
Billowed his robes and streaming hair... (CGB)
34)
V34a)
V34b)
(fade Bach)
French, 1762, Frontispiece of de Fontenelle's Sur la Pluralité des Mondes
(video: center detail only)
Composite photo of Milky Way Galaxy (cf. Now III, C of slide 154a)
M83: Spiral Nebula in Centaurus (Malin photo); then video returns to the
whole of 34, + another detail
Even the new astronomy is whipped into Klopstock's God and Seraph journey
from heaven to earth:
The Almighty passed the star-field named the Milky Way,
(A thousand stellar miles, the space from sun to sun
His measure) as he neared a world where men also
Were found, like us, but innocent, immortal forms... (CGB)
Kant's 1755 Island Universes are nebular systems of suns, like our Milky Way; so this
1762 edition of de Fontenelle's Sur la Pluralité des Mondes floats the solar system in a
cloud of angel-faced stars, each circled by planetary worlds.
a35)
35)
F.X. Schmaedl, c. 1760(?), Bavarian Baroque, Rottenbuch, Bavaria
(CGB '59); video: horizontal detail only
Same, Pulpit, Rottenbuch, Bavaria (CGB '59); while video shows three
details: above, below, and below but closer
Music:
5/1994
K.P.E. Bach, 1749, from Magnificat, "Fecit potentiam," Bach Guild552
18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile
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Symbolic History
It was within Bach's lifetime that his own sons took up the gallant style of Italy,
France, and Mannheim, parallelling (against the weight of the old Baroque) the passionate
levity of Rottenbuch Pulpit. Let K.P.E. Bach's Magnificat, composed a year before
Johann Sebastian's death, rear the expressive arch to Haydn and Mozart.
(fade "Fecit Potentiam")
For Va36) Schmaedl, Rottenbuch; video returns to a closer detail of a35
36)
Same, Pulpit, detail of Luke (CGB '59); + V detail
Music:
K.P.E. Bach, Magnificat, continued, from "Deposuit", Bach Guild552
In the St. Luke of that pulpit, Baroque force, by the always more personal
involvement of the advancing century, anticipates Storm and Stress.
(fade "Deposuit")
37)
37a)
Maulbertsch, c. 1755, Holy Family with Saints, Österreichische Galerie, Wien
Same, horizontal detail (which video replaces with three details)
Music:
K.P.E. Bach, Magnificat, continued, Esurientes (2nd repeat, vocal)
BG-552
In painting Maulbertsch is the master of that search, where the base of Italian
chiaroscuro is stretched and whirled on the agitations of person.
(close "Esurientes" vocal)
38)
Joh. Mich. Fischer, 1732-39, Façade of Diessen, Bavaria (CGB '59);
+ V details
Music:
K.P.E. Bach, Magnificat,
"Esurientes", BG-552
continued,
Instrumental
close
of
As emotion ebbs, Philip Emanuel's instrumental texture is as suave as Johann
Michael Fischer's caressing of Diessen façade.
(close "Esurientes" section)
a39)
Vb39)
5/1994
D. and J.B. Zimmermann, 1746-54, Die Wieskirche (among fields and
snowy mountains; CGB '86)
Same, Die Wieskirche, from the south-west (CGB '86)
18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile
�22
C.G. Bell
39)
Symbolic History
Same, detail of West front, sun and shadows (CGB '86)
Music:
Haydn, 1766, "Great" Organ Mass No. 2 (E flat), opening,
Deutsche Gram. LPM 18 756
The Meadow Church (Die Wieskirche, finished 1754), is Zimmermann's final
gem of openness and delight. Haydn had written his first mass while it was building; the
second, the "Great" Organ Mass (whence this Kyrie) followed the church by 12 years.
Amazing, in a cult and tradition so ornately sectarian, heart's appeal to nature.
(fade Haydn)
Va40)
Vb40)
40)
Same, interior, detail: windows, columns, and fanciful arches
Same, interior, stucco and fresco (CGB '59)
Same, wide angle view upward toward choir (CGB '86)
Music:
Mozart, 1779, "Coronation" Mass (C Major), Benedictus to Hosanna, Nonesuch H-1041
To enter the Wieskirche, is to pursue Rococo almost to the Coronation
extravagance and joyful immediacy of Mozart.
(end Hosannah)
Va41)
41)
V41a)
Cuvillies, 1734-39, Hall of Mirrors, Allegory of Water and Fishing, stucco
detail, Amalienburg, Nymphenburg, München
Same, wider view, mirrors and ornament, (CGB '59; cf. Bach a65)
Same, through a door (CGB '59); to which video adds another detail of slide
41
Music:
J.S. Bach, from Prelude, Fugue, and Allegro in E-flat (interlude in
fugue), (Landowska) RCA-V-LM 1217 (1) (or VIC 1594)
In the hunting lodge of the Nymphenburg, Cuvillies had brought Rococo
lightening to its secular triumph — the silver frosting of a mirrored filigree. But did not
the old Bach himself tend that way whenever he touched the harpsichord in the manner of
Couperin?
(fade Landowska)
For the fused polarity of Baroque against Rococo, we go from this hall of the
Amalienburg a few miles north,
5/1994
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�23
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42)
V42a)
V42b)
Symbolic History
Asam Brothers, 1717-35, detail of carved vault, Weltenburg Cloister,
Bavaria (CGB '59); first, video closer details
Same, whole ceiling, carved border and fresco (video cuts to half)
Same, half of the ceiling fresco (CGB '59)
Music:
Bach, 1709(?), Toccata and Fugue in D minor, close, (Kraft) Vox
PL 11-440
to a vault the Asam Brothers were constructing about the same time (1735) at Weltenburg
on the Danube. Yet the same Bach whose harpsichord interlude matched the one, in his
organ toccatas and fugues, gives the other its strongest cognate. But the stretch from this
mighty Baroque
(end Toccata and Fugue in D minor)
2nd 41)
Again, 41, Amalienburg, wider view; while video shows a lower section of
41
to the weightlessness of Cuvillies, exhibits the 18th century already in Berkeleian flight
2nd 42)
Detail of 42; while video pans to a closer detail
from the solidarities of Leibniz, of assertive cadence, muscled gesture, intestinal clouds
— the whole conscious rhetoric of the formulated earth.
43)
French Flamboyant, c. 1510 (on 13th cent.), Frieze of the Sanctuary, St.
Pierre, Caen (CGB '74)
V43a) Same, Sanctuary, c. 1520 ff., St. Augustine, with a Flamboyant vault
(CGB '74)
Music:
Paumann, c. 1455, "Des klaffers neyden" (Tablature), pos. organ,
ARC 3222
It is a winging which might take us back, at least 200 years, to a prior vaulted
filigree — the last defiance of space and mass in the lacework of Flamboyant stone (St.
Pierre in Caen), with a setting by the 15th-century blind organist, Conrad Paumann, of
Nuremberg.
(fade Paumann)
5/1994
18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile
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44)
Symbolic History
English, 13th century, 1540, and 1753, Neo-Gothic, Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire
(CGB '67); with video details
Small wonder the wished revival of the style Congreve had called "rude as
Gothic" was already under way.
Music:
Thomas Arne, 1738, from Comus, Dance of the Naiads, Largo,
L'Oiseau-Lyre OLS 141 (side 3)
It is always a happy surprise, traveling abroad, to move from the ostentations of
the courtly Continent, to the special green of rural England. Is the charm of Lacock
Abbey backward or forward looking? A 13th-century monastery was here, which became
a Tudor House at the Reformation, yet it was tenderly Gothicized after 1750, and what
estate near Bath would so perfectly fit the romance of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey?
45)
English revived Gothic, 1740 (from 15th cent.), Blue Drawing Room, St.
Michael's Mount, Cornwall; + V detail
So Thomas Arne, enamoured of Elizabethan music, Shakespeare and Milton, was
reviving and exploring, as in his 1738 Comus, a style of pre-romantic and ballad
simplicity.
About the same time, at St. Michael's Mount in Cornwall, the 15th-century Lady
Chapel of another ancient priory became such a neo-Gothic parlor as any of Austen's
heroines 60 years later might have visited in demure pursuit of eligible Knightleys,
Bingleys, Brandons, Bartrams, Wentworths.
(close Arne Dance)
46)
French Romanesque Castle, 11th cent., Loches, Keep, Indre-et-Loire
V46a, ‘95 Edit) R. Haldingham, c. 1290, Mappa Mundi, Hereford Cathedral
V46b) English, 1066 ff., Scolland's Hall, Richmond, England
To have come, from the 11th-century castle, to that house, is as clear a progress as
in experimental science — however we reserve the right to prefer the castle (provided we
are not required to live there); indeed, some have similarly chosen the God-synthesis of
medieval thought (though Pound said "Aquinas map not valid now") over a technology
which cannot deal with its atomic and industrial wastes. Maybe, with wall-hangings and
the fire-logs of a forested land, they kept cheerful enough in those halls and towers
(though we can hardly conceive it);
5/1994
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47)
Symbolic History
English Paladian (C. Campbell), 1722, Stourhead House, Wiltshire (CGB '59);
+ V detail
but the Palladian delight of Stourhead, which Fielding would turn to Tudor brick,
preserves from 1722 what our millionaires might still aspire to live in. (Though heating
and plumbing, even since the Jamesian era, have advanced, again, at some cost to the
globe — the question of science and progress being always the hidden cost.)
Va48)
48)
48a)
48b)
English Paladian (Roger Morris), 1736-37, Bridge, Wilton House, Wiltshire
Thomas Gainsborough, c. 1751-2, The Painter, his Wife and Daughter,
Marchioness of Cholmondeley, Houghton
Same, detail
Gainsborough, c. 1780(?), Margaret Gainsborough, National Gallery,
London
Music:
Thomas Arne, Comus (continued), Ballad: "On every hill in ev'ry
grove"
Anyway, as the Palladian and Gothicizing scene of musical Arne and Fielding
would remind us, the familiar mode of freehold humanity had been made lovable, from
early in the century, by Addison's Sir Roger de Coverley — a country right-mindedness
which reaches through novels and essays, the early paintings of Gainsborough (this about
1751, the artist with his young wife and daughter), to Goldsmith, who spreads it over
Europe, and to Fanny Burney, whose Evelina prepares for the balanced good of Austen:
(fade Arne)
Persuasion:
There they returned again into the past, more exquisitely happy,
perhaps in their re-union, than when it had been first projected; more
tender, more tried, more fixed in a knowledge of each other's character,
truth, and attachment; more equal to act, more justified in acting.
a49)
49)
P. Longhi, 1740-45, Artist Painting a Lady's Portrait, whole, National
Gallery, Dublin (CGB '74); first, video detail
Same, Lady's Portrait, detail (CGB '74); video: closer detail only
Music:
5/1994
Haydn, 1755, Trio of Quartet Op. 1, #6, Haydn Quartet Society
18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile
�26
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
It is a study in the dialectic of one-many, to compare Pietro Longhi's Venetian
mid-century family scene (a lady escorted by her husband for her portrait). How little it
shares in the English openness of manner, yet how unmistakably is embraced in a single
horizon of enlightened emergence from the artifice of court. And could not Haydn's
plucked-string trio from an Opus 1 Quartet have moved either way — to the Italy from
which it was inspired, or to the England which would make Haydn's music a household
entertainment?
(fade Haydn trio)
a50)
50)
Fr. Boucher, 1759, Pan and Syrinx, National Gallery, London
Boucher, 1748, The Triumph of Venus, National Museum, Stockholm; first,
video detail
Music:
Rameau, c. 1740(?), from L'Impatience, Air gai, Technichord T-2
(78)
Meanwhile, even in Paris, bastion of absentee noble play, of which Lord
Chesterfield:
I should have thought that Lord
, at his age, with his parts and
address, need not have been reduced to keep an opera whore in such a
place as Paris, where so many women of fashion generously serve as
volunteers —
Boucher sweetening the opulence of Baroque for the Venus Triumph of all those highborn volunteers; Rameau seductively reclaiming the heroic cantata;
51)
J. H. Fragonard, c. 1765, The Bathers, Louvre, Paris (CGB '80); first, video
detail
(fade Rameau)
Fragonard (past Boucher) subliming into pure fluff the copulative drive of flesh, as if
revolution and all could be staved off by nymphic sprees —
52)
52a)
Boucher, 1750, Landscape with a Mill, Musée, Orleans; first, video detail
Mill House by Mique and H. Robert 1783, Marie Antoinette's Hamlet, Park
of the Petit Trianon, Versailles, France
even in that Paris, must not romantic wish have been as deeply seated as Rousseau was
read, repudiated, and admired? Boucher himself, between sports of sea-girls, brushes his
5/1994
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Symbolic History
1750 Mill with the sighs that would lead Marie Antoinette to her cottage retreat in Versailles park.
Let it box the compass that Rousseau in his operas (for he also wrote music)
seems to outdo Fragonard;
Va2nd 51)
Vb2nd 51)
Fragonard, 1780's, The Stolen Kiss, Hermitage, Leningrad
Fragonard, c. 1770(?), The Two Lovers, close detail, Leopold Rey
Collection, Sion (cf. Va18)
For 2nd 51) Fragonard, c. 1785, The Fountain of Love, The Wallace Collection,
London
Music:
J.J. Rousseau, 1752, Le Devin du Village, "Avec l'objet de mes
Amours," AS 54
(fade)
For 2nd 52) Boucher, 1755, Landscape with a Water Mill, National Gallery,
London; first, video detail
Music:
Rameau, 1737, Minuet from Castor and Pollux, Decca CA 8153
(78)
while witty Rameau, as in this minuet from Castor and Pollux, wakes the strain that
would flow through Glück and Mozart into a century of longing.
53)
Chardin, c. 1745 (or 1733?), Soap Bubbles, National Gallery, Washington D.C.; first, video detail
Chardin, indeed, through two generations of court frolic, had quietly pursued the
plastic composition of fables of the heart.
(fade Rameau)
1st 54) Joseph Vernet, c. 1745, The Ponte Rotto (Rome), Louvre, Paris; first, video
detail
Before mid-century, the cult of the antique, of which Winkelmann would become
spokesman, was drawing pre-romantics to Rome. Vernet sketched the Ponte Rotto in
1745. And it was he who, at the same time,
5/1994
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Symbolic History
For 1st 55) Richard Wilson, 1755(?), View of Rome from Villa Medici, Ashmolean
Museum, Oxford (cf. V1st 55)
guided the deeper genius of Richard Wilson into landscape. The radiance of Cuyp is
recovered, in inwardness — as in Kant, will secures what pure reason had forfeited. In
music, the first fruit of that revival is Gluck's Orpheus, with the wistful dance of Elysian
spirits.
V2nd 54) Again, Vernet, Ponte Rotto, closer detail (while slide show goes at once to
2nd 55)
Music:
Gluck, 1762, Orfeo ed Euridice, Act II, Che puro ciel, London
LL 924 (B)
In English poetry, Gray's "Elegy" still breathes that solemn hush: (1750)
2nd 55)
Richard Wilson, 1760(?), Oil sketch: River with Ruins, National Museum,
Wales
2nd 55a) Same, central detail
2nd 55b) Christian G. Schütz, c. 1770, Valley of the Main with Thunderstorm,
Neue Pinakothek, München (CGB '59); + V detail, from V2nd 55c (to
which video adds from 2nd 55, R. Wilson, a detail, far left)
The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;
Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tow'r
The moping owl does to the moon complain
Of such as wand'ring near her secret bow'r
Molest her ancient solitary reign...
Collins had caught it in the "Ode to Evening" (1746):
Then lead, calm vot'ress, where some sheety lake
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Symbolic History
Cheers the lone heath, or some time-hallow'd pile
Or upland fallows grey
Reflect its last cool gleam.
(fade Orfeo and skip to chorus)
a56)
56)
Gainsborough, c. 1785, Landscape with a Bridge, National Gallery of Art,
Washington D.C.; + V detail
Gainsborough, c. 1785, Landscape, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
City (CGB '74); + V detail
(One of Gainsborough's misty late landscapes here enacting the Ode):
But when chill blust'ring winds, or driving rain,
Forbid my willing feet, be mine the hut
That from the mountain's side,
Views wilds, and swelling floods,
And hamlets brown, and dim-discover'd spires,
And hears their simple bell, and marks o'er all
Thy dewy fingers draw
The gradual dusky veil.
Winckelmann's Greek mode become the mode of nature, the people's mode of feeling and
earth, the romantic classicism of Goethe's Herrmann und Dorothea, or of Wordsworth's
appeal to rustic life and the language of men.
(fade
Gluck's Orfeo)
Va57)
b57)
57)
George Stubbs, 1770, White Horse Frightened by a Lion, Walker Gallery,
Liverpool; + V detail
Stubbs, 1765, Lion Attacking a Horse, Yale University Art Gallery, New
Haven
Stubbs, 1769, A Lion Devouring a Horse, Tate Gallery, London; + V detail
Music:
Haydn, 1772, from Fugue for 4 subjects, 4th movement of C Major
Quartet, 0p. 20 #2, (Tartrai) Qualiton SL PX 11-332a (last twofifths)
In the polar reversal by which Cartesian reason, turned to Deistic clockwork and
courtly pose, unseats itself and points to the intuitive successor (an action opened by
Berkeley and climaxed by Kant — Swift near the beginning, where reason drives the
man mad; Paine toward the end, mad for an Age of Reason), in that scrimmage under the
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Symbolic History
polite surface of the world, the roofed unconscious of Blake's creative Hell, where Haydn
was revitalizing the fugue as a ground of struggle, and George Stubbs (1769 Lion
Devouring a Horse) turned animal realism to savage symbol — there everything splits
from itself and fights on both sides.
(close Haydn Fugue)
58)
58a)
Sir Joshua Reynolds, c. 1765(?), Portrait of Dr. Johnson, Tate Gallery,
London; + V detail
Reynolds, c. 1776, Dr. Samuel Johnson, Knole, Kent; + V detail
Sam Johnson in mid-stream holds the fort of mind, in the knowledge of its own
and the world's vanity, sustained by a promise which faith could only credit, reason not
confirm. Of course he condemns all romantic and Rousseaunian innovators: "Truth sir,
is a cow which will give such fellows no more milk; sir, they are gone to milk the bull."
Yet his immortal letter to Chesterfield is, under its formal robes, the most independent
outbreak in the language:
Seven years, my Lord, have now passed, since I waited in your
outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door; during which time I
have been pushing on my work through difficulties of which it is
useless to complain, and have brought it, at last, to the verge of publication, without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or
one smile of favour...
The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had
it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am
indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it;
till I am known, and do not want it...
Having carried on my work thus far with so little obligation to any
favourer of learning, I shall not be disappointed though I should
conclude it, if less be possible. with less; for I have been long wakened
from that dream of hope, in which I once boasted myself with so much
exultation,
MY LORD,
Your lordship's most humble, most obedient servant,
SAM. JOHNSON
Va59)
Vb59)
5/1994
Daniel Chodowiecki, 1771, engraving, the Artist's Family, National Print
Gallery, Berlin
Double: [A] Frans Hals, c. 1625, La Bohemienne, Louvre, Paris and [B]
Hogarth, 1740(?), Shrimp Girl, National Gallery, London
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c59)
59)
59a)
Symbolic History
Jean-Baptiste Greuze, 1774, The Twelfth-Cake (detail), Musée Fabre,
Montpelier (video takes detail from 59, whole)
Same, Twelfth-Cake, whole
Double: [A] Greuze, c. 1765, The Morning Prayer, Musée Fabre,
Montpelier, and [B] Greuze, c. 1768, The Broken Pitcher, detail, Louvre,
Paris (video takes these singly from V59a A and B)
In Johnson's circle, Goldsmith published The Vicar of Wakefield in 1766, a novel
which took Europe, most of all Goethe's Germany, by storm. Here the plot in the grand
manner, where good, ensnared by hypocrisy and evil until the world seems such a vale of
dark that only the old appeal beyond time will serve, is suddenly delivered to the
vindication of this best of all possible worlds — that Baroque cadence is here stretched to
the limit. Within its Leibnizian action, the Vicar and all his family (delivered from prison
and oppression) become homespun models of truth and sensibility, calling mannered
Europe to such values as Greuze, taking the pulse of his aristocratic clientelle, would
enshrine, eight years later, in his picture of "The Twelfth Cake" — almost a pastiche of
Goldsmith.
In the attempt to recover simplicity in an age of social artifice and irony, only
fierce genius can avoid the mawkishness of Greuze (those crouching babes at Morning
Prayers, that Pitcher Broken on the spouting phallic lion).
60)
V60a)
60b)
Double: [A] George Morland c. 1790(?), Soldier's Return, Lady Lever Art
Gallery, and [B] A. Brouwer, 1635-8(?), Interior with peasants, Alte
Pinakothek, München (video takes these singly, substituting for the
Brouwer his Card Players, from the same gallery, see VA and B of 60)
Double: A of 60, Soldier's Return, with 60b, Guinea Pigs, both Morland
Morland (same date and gallery?) Guinea Pigs (here video shows details
only, below and above)
So what could we expect of poor George Morland, who wrote his own epitaph
"Here lies a drunken dog"? He was sold too short to give even his boozing scenes the
Brouwer force of Burns:
a merry core
O' randie, gangrel bodies
In Poosie-Nansie's held the splore
To drink their orra duddies...
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What then when even Burns, in "The Cotter's Saturday Night," slips to the tearful verge:
At length his lonely cot appears in view,
Beneath the shelter of an aged tree;
Th' expectant wee-things, toddlin, stacher through
To meet their dad, wi' flichterin' noise and glee.
His wee bit ingle, blinkin bonilie,
His clean hearth-stane, his thrifty wifie's smile,
The lisping infant prattling on his knee,
Does a' his weary kiaugh and care beguile,
And makes him quite forget his labor and his toil.
61)
V61a)
V61b)
V61c)
61d)
Gainsborough, 1777-78, The Honourable Frances Dunscombe, full-length,
The Frick Collection, New York City
Thomas Rowlandson, 1802, Blood Royal, detail, British Museum, London
William Blake, 1794 (copy of 1818), Urizen plate 20, Burning Babe,
Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress, Washington D.C. (here video
adds a half-length detail of 61, Lady Dunscombe)
Gainsborough, 1785-86, Lady Sophia Charlotte Sheffield, National Trust,
Waddeson Manor, Bucks (standing figure, from which video draws a halflength detail)
Same, Lady Sheffield, detail, head and shoulders, from which video takes a
close-up of the face, then returns to a half-length of 61, Lady Dunscombe
No social painter of England rose as Goya did, from courtly praise (this
Gainsborough Lady Dunscombe), through such irony as Rowlandson's, to Revolutionary
vision (as in Blake). If mockery lurks under these robes and studio props, it is not overt;
nor would the sitter have claimed the resemblance to Lady Teasle in Sheridan's School for
Scandal of the same year:
The hypocrite Joseph Surface, seducing her:
Ah, my dear madam... 'tis this very conscious innocence that is of the
greatest prejudice to you... What makes you run into a thousand little
imprudences? — Why, the consciousness of your own innocence...
Lady Teasle:
So... then I must sin in my own defence, and part with my virtue to
secure my reputation?
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Though even in Sheridan, mockery yields to the Handel cadence of vice discomfited and
virtue wed.
62)
Thomas Lawrence, c.1810(?), Julia, Lady Peel, Frick Collection, New York
City; + V details (cf. Panavue, V62)
It would cost the next century a groaning to cast that heroic baggage. Yet in the
Frick Gallery there is a room where one may take in, at a glance, Gainsborough's
optimism of limitation, and on the other wall, the sensuous vulnerability of Lawrence's
Julia, Lady Peel — ripe for Scott's Bride of Lammermoor, for the Brontes' Jane Eyre and
Wuthering Heights, Hardy's Tess, or, in The Return of the Native, Eustacia Vye.
The 18th century, by the lure of Voltaire's smile, prone to an infection of heart.
63)
Guardi, 1784, Balloon Ascent over the Giudecca Canal, Staatliche Museen,
Berlin-Dahlem (video: details only)
In Venice the seventy-year-old Guardi shows us a gas balloon rising over the
Giudecca Canal, while the beau-monde of what was already Revolutionary Europe, look
on, though dressed still in the manner of court — like Goethe and Beethoven when they
met the noble party and Goethe bowed and stepped down. Through the play of fashion
some defiant giant release is stirring, as from deep in the mineral veins of earth. Proud
Beethoven walked on; but it was Goethe's Mephisto who had said: "This puff of
hydrogen will do it" — and they were lifted into the air.
64)
V64a)
64b)
Venetian Gothic, 1424 ff., Doge's Palace, West Façade, Venice (CGB '59)
(video: detail only)
Same, Doge's Palace, wider view
Italian late Gothic, c. 1380-1452 ff., Apse of Milan Cathedral
Music:
Matteo da Perugia, c. 1400(?), Gloria in Excelsis, OL 1 (78)
For the taste of progress go back 400 years, the Doge's Palace, trecento in style,
though 1424 and after, with the Ars Nova Gloria of Matteo da Perugia — Italian lateGothic, a style like the Rococo, of cunning complexity — yet how stripped to line and
structure,
5/1994
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65)
V65a)
Symbolic History
Andrea (Bonaiuti) da Firenze, acc. 1343-77, Church Militant and
Triumphant, detail, Spanish Chapel, Florence (CGB '59)
Same, Spanish Chapel, closer detail (CGB '59)
how clean of wishful personality; in the symbolic Florence of this Spanish Chapel
Allegory of the Church, humanity, as in Chaucer, is keenly emergent: no pompous "all is
best," no sentimental longing.
66)
Florentine MS Illumination, late 14th cent., Annunciation (Initial R) Add.
MS 35254C, British Museum, London; + V details
The Annunciation, in this initial from a choirbook, is as reconciled (in all the flare of its
decoration) to its creed-given spacelessness, as the faces to their vacancy, or music to its
bare fifth intervals.
(fade Gloria)
67)
V67a)
French Rococo, 18th century, Salon of the Chateau de Champs
German Rococo, 1745-47, for Frederick the Great, Music Room, Sans-Souci,
Potsdam
Music:
Philibert de Lavigne, c. 1740(?), from Sonata in C for Recorder and
Continuo, "La Barssan," start of Rondeau, SAWT-9570-B
In the French Rococo salon, the civilized recess is as ornately, as formulably filled
as the time-space fabric of material causality, or (under the inventive floreation of
recorder delight) the harmonic assertions of the enlightened ground.
(fade Rondeau)
68)
68a)
François Casanova, 1772, Beauvais Tapestry, Country Pastimes, detail,
Mobilier National, Paris (video: closer details only, above and below)
English Classical Baroque (James Gibbs), 1737-48, Radcliffe Camera, Oxford
(CGB '84); first, for digital, V68a, wider view (Adams)
Music:
Same as above , but close of Tambourin, SAWT-9570-B
In tapestries of "Country Pastimes," our very picnic clownings, our ironies of wit,
affirm the plenum of the ordered universe: "All is best, best, best."
(end Sonata)
5/1994
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But that completion and closure of the phenomenal, that rounding of the wheel,
summons the old antagonist.
Against the dream of methodic science: that though men (even scientists) may
fall in love, despair, kill themselves, or (like Pascal) get religion, still the great tree of
knowledge grows —
69)
69a)
V69b)
69c)
Joseph Wright of Derby, c. 1774, The Old Man and Death, detail,
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; first, video closer detail
Istrian late Gothic (Vincent of Kostav), 1474, Dance of Death fresco, Guild
Church, Beram, Yugoslavia
Zurbaran, 1639, Fra Gonzalo de Illescas, detail, skull, etc., on table,
Geronimite Monastery, Guadalupe, Spain
Piranesi 1743-61, Carceri XIII, engraving, 2nd state
Music:
Again, Tartini, Siciliana, SAWT - 9592 B (as with slide 27 above)
comes a hiss from that very tree: "The fruit of science is death." What is the Age of
Reason giving birth to but its own antithesis? But when, with Wright of Derby, 1774, the
skeleton appears in the crumbling garden, it is no backward motion. The old Dance of
Death was painted on church walls: "Rest of their bones and soul's delivery." It is upon
energy now, where all action has reared its eternal claim, that the withering of entropy
will fall. Carnot's irreversibility of the physical. Blake:
The same dull round, even of a universe, would soon become a mill
with complicated wheels.
(close Tartini, 2nd phrase)
70)
Viennese, c. 1800-10, Astronomical clock, Uhrenmuseum der Stadt Wien;
+ V details; digital, central detail
1800: a final overflow of the post-Newtonian century — the famous passage from
Laplace, with a Viennese Astronomical clock:
If an intelligence, for one given instant, recognizes all the forces which
animate Nature, and the respective positions of the things which
compose it, and if that intelligence is also sufficiently vast to subject
these data to analysis, it will comprehend in one formula the
movements of the largest bodies of the universe as well as those of the
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minutest atom: nothing will be incertain to it, and the future as well as
the past will be present to its vision. The human mind offers in the
perfection which it has been able to give to astronomy, a modest
example of such an intelligence.
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Symbolic History
It is what Whitehead (after Faraday's fields had finally led to Indeterminacy)
would call "misplaced concreteness." Against the tick of that astronomical clock, against
motion's subsiding pool —
a71)
V71)
71a)
V71b)
71c)
71d)
71e)
Blake, 1795, color print from design of 1780 or earlier: Glad Day, British
Museum, London (slide show, whole; video, detail)
Double: [A] Blake, Glad Day (cf. a71); and [B] Blake 1794 (1818 copy),
Urizen pl. 18, Los in Flames, Library of Congress, Washington D.C., cf.
71a)
B of the double V71: Los in Flames (slide show, whole; video, detail)
Blake, c. 1803-05, Ezekiel's Wheels, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Antonio Canova, 1795-1815, Hercules and Lichas, National Gallery of
Modern Art, Rome
Canova, 1787-93, Cupid and Psyche, Louvre, Paris
Blake, 1825-27, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Pl. 1, Fitzwilliam
Museum, Cambridge (video: two details only, above and below)
Blake from the 1790's had raised the Son of Morning — from the only axiomatic source
of life as unpredictable, creative paradox:
Without contraries there is no progression. What the religious call...
Evil... is the active springing from Energy... Energy is Eternal Delight.
And when his arm-spread Day turns to Los at the forge of Imagination, sheathed in the
battle-fires of energy's operation in the inertial world — however many thereafter might
espouse (with conservative Burke) the propriety and balance of an old regime, Blake
through Reign of Terror and the dragon-scaling of the Orc Cycle, would still affirm:
Bring me my bow of burning gold! Bring me my arrows of desire!
For Glück (as for Blake's repudiated Swedenborg), Hell's dissonant outbreak
Music:
5/1994
Glück, 1762, Orfeo ed Euridice, from the Taming of the Spirits, Act II,
Col-LL 924
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Symbolic History
is to be calmed by successive applications of Orphic harmony.
(fade Gluck)
How radically Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell has broken with that mid-century.
Is it in Mozart, or first with Beethoven that music espouses the Faust compact,
Hegel's Passion, the Dionysiac cry of Hölderlin:
The rescuer I hear then in the night, hear Him kill as he frees, and
beneath, full
Of fetid weeds, I see the earth,
As by
second sight, an enormous fire. (CGB)
(Shau ich die Erd', ein gewaltig Feuer.)
72)
72a)
J. L. David, 1787, Death of Socrates, cropped, Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York City (CGB '74); video uses V72, uncropped whole, + V detail
David, 1784, The Oath of the Horatii, Louvre, Paris; + V detail
In France the ferment had been rising since the 1762 publication of Rousseau's
Social Contract:
When each citizen is nothing and can do nothing without the rest… it
may be said that legislation is at the highest possible point of
perfection.
An absolute moral law of the cloud-wrapped General Will.
In the representations which from about 1783 David gave to Classical scenes of
heroism or revolt (tight as if Cartesian formulation could be reèndowed by fiat), we feel
the closing in of that "Republic of Virtue":
Robespierre:
If virtue be the spring of a popular government in times of peace, the spring of
that government during a revolution is virtue combined with terror...without
which virtue is impotent.
Babeuf:
a single man on the earth more rich, more powerful than his fellow men...
destroys the equilibrium... Perish, if needs be, all the arts, provided real
equality abides with us!
73)
5/1994
David, 1794, Self-Portrait in Prison, Louvre, Paris; with video details
18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
In 1794 David, briefly imprisoned, painted this baffled self-portrait. Perhaps he
felt, with Chenier, in "La Jeune Captive":
And even as she, those with her in that place
Feared the closing of their earthly course.
Though Chenier's death testament would not apply:
A certain Andre Chenier was among those five or six whom neither the
general frenzy, nor avidity, nor fear, could induce to bend the knee
before crowned assassins, to touch hands stained by murders, and to sit
down to a table where they drink human blood.
("s'asseoir a la table ou l'on boit le sang des hommes.") Since David came quickly to
terms, and would again as Napoleon's court painter.
74)
Goya, 1777, The Parasol, Prado, Madrid; + V detail
Music:
Mozart, 1787, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Romanza, Angel 35098
Only the genius of Goya could wear the richest robes of the artifice it was to
revolutionize, making this parasol play of the '70's as poignant as the lighter Mozart:
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.
(fade)
75)
V75a)
75b)
V75c)
Goya, 1795-97, Self-portrait, drawing, Metropolitan Museum, New York
City; + V detail
H. Fuseli, c. 1780, Self-portrait with Chalk, detail, Victoria and Albert
Museum, London
Fuseli, c. 1785(?), Prometheus, drawing, Kunstmuseum, Basle
Fuseli, c. 1800(?), Satan Fleeing from Athuriel's Spear, Cleveland Gallery
(CGB '81)
Music:
Mozart, 1788, Symphony No. 40, from last movement, C-D3S691
By the mid-nineties Goya had loosed the furies we tie in music to Beethoven.
Though Mozart, too, in some late works, this G Minor Symphony of 1788, rode the rising
storm.
5/1994
(fade Symphony #40)
18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile
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C.G. Bell
Music:
Symbolic History
Beethoven, 1798, Sonata #8, Op. 13, Pathetique in C Minor,
(Schnabel) 1st movement, Seraphim ID-6063
While Gauss, discovering Euclid's space of the parallel postulate no more
demonstrable than a curved space of hyperbolic asymptotes, wrote the elder Bolyai:
If it could be proved that there can be a rectilineal triangle greater than
any area, I could demonstrate the whole of Euclid... But however far
apart the vertices, the area might fall below a given bound...
a76)
76)
V76a)
David, c. 1794, Death of Bara, detail, Musée Calvet, Avignon
Canova, c. 1787, Death of Adonis, second terra cotta model, Gipsoteca
Canoviana, Possagno near Treviso
Same, first terra cotta model, Gipsoteca, Possagno
— a Lobachevskian gulf from which that Bolyai would vainly warn his son:
(Pathetique continued)
I have traversed this bottomless night, which extinguished all light and
joy of my life. I pray you, leave the science of parallels alone.
By 1800 Beethoven had not only written the First Symphony, the First Concerto,
the first string quartets and the Prometheus Overture, but the Grande Sonata Pathetique,
which so overwhelmed his contemporaries.
Canova, 1797, answering from Italy the muster of a revolutionary art in almost
every country of Europe.
(Pathetique continued)
77)
77a)
77b)
J. A. Koch, 1796, Waterfall, whole, Kunsthalle, Hamburg; + V 77, Double:
details, above and below
Same, Waterfall, upper detail (CGB '86)
Same, Waterfall, lower detail (CGB '86)
1796: the German Romantic landscape begins with this Koch: the human figure
(right) reduced from the shepherd below to an insect-sized being above.
(fade Pathetique)
5/1994
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Symbolic History
The Sublime had appeared in Edmund Burke as a transrational element, born in
pain of the Great, Dark and Terrible, yet somehow stronger than its smooth contrary, the
Beautiful, founded on pleasure, engendering "in the soul that feeling which is called
love". It is the germ of Blake's Angelic and Satanic, of Nietzsche's Apollonian and
Dionysian. And what the transition of 1800 would require is the leap from calm balance
to the cascade of energy. In Kant, the Sublime almost, but never quite, becomes the
pedalpoint of such a modulation:
The mind feels itself set in motion in the representation of the sublime
in nature; whereas in the aesthetic judgement upon what is beautiful
therein it is in restful contemplation. This movement... may be compared... with a rapidly alternating repulsion and attraction produced by
one and the same object.
(Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, ch. 27)
78)
78a)
Turner, 1797, Moonlight — A Study, Tate Gallery, London
Same, a central detail; + V closer detail
Music:
Beethoven, 1798, Pathetique, Op.13, continued, Adagio, (Brendel)
Murray Hill S 34564
With Beethoven's Pathetique Adagio and Turner's Moonlight — A Study (1797) —
however few were aware, matter in motion was giving ground. What was emergent, from
Galvani's electricity and muscle response, Goethe's Metamorphosis of Plants, or
Evolution (from the older Darwin to volitional Lamarck) — requires what Whitehead
would call "entwined... modal presences". Faraday (1854)
My physico-hypothetical notion... accepting the magnet as a centre of
power surrounded by lines of force... views these lines as physical lines
of power... or as a state of tension...
— Things dissolving to force-fields, as under Turner's moon.
1st 79)
79a)
Runge, 1799, Self-Portrait (Crayon), Kunsthalle, Hamburg; V, detail only
Triple: Portraits: [A] Hegel, c. 1820 [B] Hölderlin, 1792 and [C] Schelling,
c. 1810; here V returns to 79, Runge, Self
In 1799, the German painter Runge made this glowing crayon of himself. It is not
that Baroque confidence has gone under. Wordsworth is at least as certain as Dryden;
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Beethoven as rapt as Buxtehude. The constructions of space and cause, art, harmony,
plot, are retained. That trio of schoolmates, Hegel, Hölderlin, Schelling are no less fired
with God in the world than Leibniz was. But there has been a shift of ground. (fade
Beethoven Adagio)
Hegel might frown if we said: "Voltaire and Rousseau have led you
through the scoff of Reason to the trust of Heart. Since Hegel calls his history Reason's
actualization in the world. If we protest: "But your reason makes war on itself, works by
passion; you forge a dialectic of contradiction"
80)
V80a)
80b)
Double: [A] portrait of Leibniz, c. 1700, steel engraving; and [B] Solimena,
c. 1710, Self Portrait, detail, Uffizi, Florence
Detail of the same engraving of Leibniz
Again, Solimena, whole self-portrait
— how easy for him to remind us that Leibniz (complex as the Solimena of this 1710
self-portrait) had planted contradiction in the very Monad, making a multiplicity of
change in that changeless One the primary fact of perception:
The passing condition which involves and represents a multiplicity in
the unity, or in the simple substance, is nothing else than what is called
Perception.
Both Liebniz and Hegel soar to giant syntheses. How could they, as men, but use
what men have: reason, passion, intuition? Yet those seemingly constant words, man,
reason, and the rest, also undergo style-changes. Solimena's formulated claim (undercut
by protective irony)
2nd 79 and for 2nd 80) Runge, Self
yields in Runge to the risk of romantic dream. Though even the dream takes up the
program of the past.
80+1)
80+1a)
V80+1b)
80+1c)
80+1d)
5/1994
Lejeune's Voltaire, again 1
Houdon's Rousseau, again B of 1c (cf. V1c)
Canaletto, 1754, Rotunda at Ravelagh, National Gallery, London
Brunel, 1836-64, Clifton Suspension Bridge, Avon Gorge, Bristol
David, 1797-98, General Bonaparte, Louvre, Paris
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Was Voltaire's smile of mockery, progress, or revolution? At the center of The
Wealth of Nations, published 1776, in which Adam Smith launched the science of
economics — a book crammed with the ironies of exploitation and capitalist self-seeking,
there lurks the "invisible hand," sure pilot of the murderous barque of history (the "agent
force" gone beyond bodies themselves):
As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to
employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct
that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every
individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the
society as great as he can. He generally indeed, neither intends to
promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting
it...he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other
cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of
his intention.
— As if Pangloss's providence had heaved up into Hegel's cunning war of Reason. "Let
us cultivate" — but which garden?
5/1994
18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile
�
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Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound
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18th Century : Voltaire's Smile, Symbolic History, Part 25
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Chairl^s G. Bell, 1260 Canyon Road, or St. John's College
Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501
SYMBOLIC HISTORY: THE HUMAN ARTS - THROUGH SIGHT AND SOUND
XXXIV:
1)
1900 Bi
Crisis of the Abstract
Claude Monet 1882, The Cliff Walk, Art Institute, Chicago
MUSIC: Faure 1879, Piano Quartet, 1st mvt close, RCA-ARI 1-0761
If desire is a lack, romantic desire (footnote: cf. the Meno
paradox of learning) is loaded...
In Monet, in Faur^, in Verlaine,
wish is the sensuous inverse of fulfillment: "How blue the sky was,
and how great our hope" — "Qui'l etait bleu, le ciel, et grand,
I'espoir."
This flowered headland cries to the wind the wistful
beatitudes of light and air.
(fade Faure)
✓
Such poignance Chausson would learn from Faure, though swayed
already by the younger Debussy:
MUSIC: Chausson 1891-2, soft passage half through 1st mvt. Concerto
OP« 21 for Vn, Piano & Str.Qr; Orion 73134 (Mace MC S 9074) (fade)
2)
Gustave Moreau 1896-, Jupiter and Semele, Moreau Museum, Paris
MUSIC: same Chausson, 1st mvt, near the beginning, forte
*
Yet the Chausson concerto just paired with Monet, equally swells
toward" the. Wagnerian counterpole of Symbolist Moreau — this 1896
Jupiter and Semele, of which the artist wrote:
Semele, penetrated by the divine effluence...dies
struck by lightning, and with her dies the genius
of terrestrial love, the genius with the goat hooves...
It is an ascension toward th,e upper spheres... Death
on earth and apotheosis in immortality...
How far from Renaissance this late revival of its tragic themes.
3)
B. Cellini 1553, Perseus -with the Head of Medusa, Loggia della Sig
nor la, Florence
MUSIC: Mhdarra c. 15507, Fantasia (rtaniera de Ludovico, con falsas
— ARC 2533-183
(B-5) '
Benvenuto Cellini, by his own account as overcharged a
�1900 B - 2
C.G. Bell
n
revolutionary as any of the Avant Garde, poured the bronze
Perseus in 1553, under trials set forth in the Autobiography.
After a quarrel with the Duke of Florence ("My lord, you do not
understand my art"), he fires the furnaces.'
The house roof takes
the blaze; a sudden fever drives him to his bed.
When rain and _
wind have caked the bronze, a slacker twisted in the shape of an
S appears:
"You are attempting an enterprise which the laws of
art do not sanction, and which cannot succeed."
Cellini resurrects,
piles on oak, hurls all his pewter in the melt, opens the sluices
to an explosion and flash of flame.
No man, they say, could have
brought it off, only some powerful devil.
'Vulnerable, as Faust.
Yet the achieved Perseus is a victory of light, for which Cellini's
elation was prayer: "I fell on my knees:
'0 God...who didst rise
from the dead and ascend to heaven...'"
Even the dissonant works of Renaissance, Mudarra's "falsas" . .. ,^
El Greco's Laocoon, have a containment like Lear: "The wheel has
«•
4)
come full circle, I am here."
(end Mudarra)
Paul Klee 1916, Stars above Evil Houses, Gustav Zumsteg col'n, Zurich
MUSIC: Alban Berg 1926, Presto Delirando f-rom Lyric Suite, (begin
--------- then skip) Deutsche Gram., from LPSt 2713066,- Rec.5-a
But the new art tears containment in a life-and-death ecstasy,
a rite of'passage, where the very record of loss, incapacity,
negation, turns by paradox to a yea-frenzy of the absolute.
From
Rimbaud's "Bateau Ivre" to the first World War, that transformation
prevails.
And even when trench stalemate had betrayed its dominant
Yes to the great recessive
and the backlash of Dada was
cracking the whip of the absurd — even then, how soon, in Klee's
1916 "Stars over Evil Houses", or the programatic despairs of
Schonberg or Berg (this tenebrous Presto Delirando from the Lyric
�1900 B
'Bell
3
Suite), how soon Spenglerian fall — "the dance of the dream-led
%
masses down the dark mountain" — phosphoresces, a self-affirming
energy.
5)
(fade Berg)
Wm. Blake 1799-1800, Bathsheba at the Bath, Tate Gallery, London
That going under of the physical and spatial, Blake's art
had prophecied: "the world will be consumed in fire...displaying
the infinite which was hid."
In this 1800 Bathsheba seen by
David, the Beulah garden is at once of the Fall ("Cruel sacri
fices had brought Humanity into a Feminine Tabernacle in the
loins of Abraham and David" J 27) and of love's redemption
(Bathsheba, Hittite adulteress, on the line to Mary); "O Divine
Humanity!__ If I were Pure I should never Have known Thee..."
In his solitary precursing of Avant Garde, Blake made
Christianity his point of' departure.
6)
M.v.Marees 1885, Hesperi^es Triptych, Neue Pinakothek, Munich—(CGB 59)
MUSIC: Wagner 1870, Siegfried Idyll (orig.) near close, London LL 525
By 1885, under the sway of Wagner (this Siegfried Idyll) and
of Nietzsche —
When the Dionysian powers rise with such strength as
we are experiencing at present, there can be no doubt
that, wrapped in a cloud, Apollo has already descended
to us; whose fullest and most beautiful effects
coming generation may perhaps behold
,
Hans von Marees, in this pagan triptych (unconsciously tied to
Blake's abstraction), sets the serpent-guarded Eden of renewal
in the Hesperides.
Nietzsche:
"Blessed race of Hellenes
What must this people have suffered, that they
might become thus beaiitiful!
(fade Wagner)
How was that stable of Faustian yearnings to be cleansed?
7) P.Cezanne 1900-05, Bathing Women, Mus. of Art, Philadelphia
�C.G. Bell
With Cezanne the disruption of the personal and formulable
crystallizes past loss the dynastasis of that overthrow.
perhaps Ives, in New England, of all places, pursued a like
purging - as in the First Symphony, written while he was still
a student at Yale.
At the same time Mallarml's aesthetic of
..pure poetry" broke off (1898) with the picture pages of A Throw
of Dice, the poem constellated by the annihilation, LE HAZARD, of
its objects^
"collapsed/ by the indifferent neutrality of the
- "neutrality identique du gouffre".
(gnd I^)
Manet 1869- olvmpia, Jen de Paume (LouvrenParis
in the abstract stripping of romantic flesh, Manet s 1863
Olympia focussed the art breakthroagh and social outrage.
This
take-off on Titian.s Venus of Urbino (itself an adulteration of
Giorgione.s idea - like Shakespeare's "If hairs be wires,
black wires grow on her head") short-circuited normal responses,
amorous, moral, even practical.
As Courbet complained: "flat...
like the Queen of Spades coming out of a bath."
If Baudelaire played such a role, his lushness of Spleen and
Ideal is 'far from the Queen of Spades.
9)
j.-A. Ingres 1814. Odalisque. Louvre> Paris (CGB-- 8^
T +- Tnrrnfao 1814» Where the tradition of the 19th
In the coolest Ingres, lox'i,
century harem Odalisque begins, the style of Fountaineble
already swells with seductive touch.
Prom Baudelaire the climactrc
poem would be "The Jewels", "Les Bijoux"
La tres chere etait nue
. .. ses bijoux sonores
�Bell
1900 B - 5
...Passion's child, born where the sun
Showers triple light, and scorches even the kiss
Of his gazelle-eyed daughters.
Though this voluptuous dream has hardly entered the bordel of
erotic ennui and decadence, which made "The Jewels" be censored
from the 1861 Fleurs du Mai:
She was recumbent, and let herself be loved...
File etait done couchee, et se laissait aimer...
-- gP^^bet 1856, Girls by the Seine, Petit Palais, Paris
Courbet's 1856 "Girls by the Seine", even more than his nudes,
advances the passion-throttle commensurately with Baudelaire:
A certain candour coupled with lasciviousness
Gave a new charm to her metamorphoses...
gysic:
12)
Saint-Saens 1875, Samson et Dalila, oboe cadenza to Bacchanal
—------- --- RCA Viet LM-184 8
Renoir 1870, Odalisque, Nat. Gal., Washington DC
It is the risky coloration which runs in music from Berlioz
through Bizet, this Saint-Saens Dalilah, to a whole Scheherazade
horizon.
(fade Bacchanal)
And in this Renoir 1870 Odalisque, the langorous flesh of
Courbet’, more exotically clothed, has — at the risk of calm —
almost been wallowed in.
Whereas Baudelaire even as ravished by
Joanne Duval's flashing world of metal and stone...where sound
is mingled with light" —
ou le son se -mele a la lumiere —
il)-- Cezanne 1873, A Modern Olympiar, Louvre. Paris
�1900 B
C.G. Bell
6
even as he lifts to the adored, couched at the height of the
divan, a passion "deep and gentle as the sea, which mounts
toward her as toward its cliff" must draw release from that
poison.
Cezanne would take up the scene in his extraordinary mockery
of Manet's Olympia — as if the grotesque were one rescue from
the Scylla vortex.
BACK;
again 12, Renoir 1870, Odalisque, Nat. Gal., Wash. DC.
Since rescue was required.
The new worship must rear on lubricity
itself a paradox of equilibrium — what would drive Renoir from
this lush indulgence toward nudes like Maillol's later bronzes, of
statuesque repose.
Again 13)
Cezanne 1873, A Modern Olympia, Louvre, Paris
But how — at the condemned erotic bound of "Les Bijoux":
Her eyes fixed on me, like a tame tiger.
With a vague air of trance she varied her poses -how is Baudelaire to refine the postures of a West Indian mulatto
to a contemplative counterpart of the mystical?
14)
Van Gogh 1887, Oval Nude, Barnes, Merion; or From Rear, Priv., Paris
No artist pl\ambed that Flower of Evil maelstrom more reck
lessly than Van Gogh after his 1886 arrival in Impressionist Paris.
And her arms, her legs, her hips and her loins.
Polished, smooth as oil, undulent as a swan.
Passed before my eyes, clairvoyant and serene.
And her belly and her breasts, clusters of my vine.
Et son ventre et ses seins, Oes grappes de ma vigne.
In that tactile seizure where, as with Dante's damned, "fear
turns into desire", it is no longer the woman flesh-throned on the
divan
who looks down, but the poet "from crystal rock", at the
"hips of antiope", "the torso of a boy" — those posture, which
�-r Bell
1900 B
7
advance, as to dislodge his spirit from the.height.
Ou calme et solitaire elle s'etait assise.
15)
Gauguin 1897, "Nevermore", Courtauld Institute, London
If Van Gogh's calm was in question, Gauguin variously assumed
the Baudelaire mystique of contemplative Eros, as in this
Tahitian "Nevermore" (another variation on Manet's Olympia),
"to suggest", he said, "by means of a simple nude, a certain longlost barbarian luxury."
But for Baudelaire, a romantic half-century before, the selftransendence of spleen asked a more excruciating stretch.
As
'
he wrote:
into this atrocious book I put all my heart, all my
tenderness, all my religion (travestied), all my
hatred.
On her
savage brown complexion the rouge was superb —
Sur ce teint fauve et brun le fard etait superbel
By a sensuous art of sex, to bewitch pure flame from the devouring
cleft itself —
16)
H.Matisse 1905, The Gypsy, Mus.de 1'Annonciade, Saint Tropez
MUSIC: Stravinsky 1909-10, Firebird, harp etc. 1/3 way. Col.MG 31202
(but orig. version better)
what Joyce would do with Molly Bloom's "I will", what Agee with
«
the girl sleeping on the floor: "as if flame were breathed forth
from it" — though these, like Matisse's 1905 Gypsy
(or Stravinsky'
Firebird), lend the attack of another century to the arcane glow
of Baudelaire's last stanza:
And the lamp at last being resigned to die.
It was the fire alone which lighted the room;
Which, every time it uttered a sigh of flame.
Flooded with blood that amber-colored skin.
Et la lampe s'eta'nt resignee a mourir,
Comme le foyer seul illuminait la chambre.
�1900 B
C.G. Bell
Cheque fois qu'il poussait un flamboyant soupir/II inondait de sang cette peau couleur d'ambre
(fade Firebird)
17)
Matisse 1906, Luxe Calme et Volupte, Col'n H. Matisse (Skira)
—A Tantrie prolongatio of fire and blood.
In the oil of verbal texture, Baudelaire might seem a romantic
decadent; but in the ambiguity of crushed opposites — Spleen
become Ideal:
the "Harmonie du Soir" that so moved Joyce, where
through an evening drowned in curdled blood, memory shines like
a monstrance; or in the untranslatable refrain of that other poem
Matisse mythologized in 1906, the "Luxury, calm and pleasure ,
"Luxe, calme et volupte" — in Baudelaire's unmediated elation by
negation, we have crashed the gates of the Modern:
(Yeats)
I must lie down where all the ladders start.
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
18)
I.K.Brunei 1857, Steamship Great Eastern under construction, photo:
Institution of Mechanical Engineers^ London
Even the Faust of mechanical power was cloven -- Priestley's
technocratic hope already undercut in Franklin's 1780 letter:
'
It is impossible to imagine the height to which
may be carried, in a thousand years, the power
of man over matter...O that moral science were
in as fair a way of improvement...
Whatever euphoria drove Brunei to engineering marvels:
j^ailroads, bridges, this 1857 iron ship, the Great Eastern,
a wonder city to cut the night ocean in lighted luxury, broke in
morbidity and suicide — the industrial call clotting round the
soul like Baudelaire's evening, "le neant vaste et noir", where
the "tender heart" enshrines its luminous past.
In the Crystal Palace of Exposition Europe, ambivalent progress
19)
Edw. Burne-Jones 1880, The Golden Stair, Tate Gallery, London
brewed ambivalent dream:
"the great four-leafed clover of modern
�^Bell
^
1900 B
9
idealism" (as they were praised): Bocklin, Moreau, Puvis de
Chavannes, Pre-Raphaelite Burne-Jones of this "Golden Stair".
'And 'might not the Great Eastern, or any of her more practical
successors of the Jamesian era, have adorned their steel salons
with Botticelli-inspired visions of such secretly erotic beatitude
— Rossetti'e "Blessed Damozel" who leaned "From the gold bar of
Heaven", "And laid her face between her hands,/ And wept.
(I
heard her tears.)"?
20)
Monet 1877, Gare Saint-Lazare, Art Inst., Chicago (or Louvre, or
double)
When Monet in 1877, frequenting the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris,
painted the same scene through variations of cloud and hour —
the steam blue against background sunlight, or white against an
overcast gray
he cut through those argiiments of nostalgic
heaven and industrial hell.
irradiation of the actual:
But what is signified?
Hardly Vermeer'
(Traherne)
Your enjoyment of the world is never right, till
every morning you awake in Heaven__ look upon the
skies, the earth and the air as Celestial Joys.
Monet s naturalist delight is in the art changes of abstract percep
tion — a "Sea Surface Full of Clouds".
In the art detachment of
any such station, Tolstoi's Anna KareAina (the novel finished that
same year) might have gone under the wheels:
A luggage train was coming in. The platform began
to sway...she knew what she had to do...A feeling
such as she had known when about to take the first
plunge in bathing came upon her..."What am I doing?
What for?"...
21)
G.Eiffel 1887-9, The Eiffel Tower, Paris (CGB '80, or other, night?)
Since the Paris Exposition of 1889, the Eiffel Tower has
expressed for tourists everywhere the joy of the Impressionist
with the excitement and utility of the sky-race of skeletal
�1900 B
C.G. Bell
steel.
Though not even the designer claimed a utility beyond
the view -- that abstraction concretized (so
Hugo's Hunchback or Michelet's Tableau.
Barthes) out of
But the great precursors
are the tempted Christ, and in Goethe's Faust, Lynceus on the
tower:
Born for seeing.
At watching skilled.
Pledged to the tower,
I delight in the world
Zum Sehen geboren,
Zum Shauen bestellt,
Dem Turme geschworen,
Gefallt mir die Welt.
Thus he sees the ship at sunset enter the harbor, and that night
thd burning of the house of the pious old couple.
’
When.scientific vision had girdered the 984 foot tower over
the Seine, aviation was anticipated, and the vibrant geometry of
Cezanne strangely parallelled.
The delight, however, is of
Rimbaud's "Drunken Boat", of Mallarme's "Sail past fertile
islands":
"But 0, my heart, hear the sailors' song
entends
le chant des matelots!"
22)
Renoir 1881, Boating Party, Phillips Gallery, Washington, _DC
MUSIC: Faure 1879, Piano Qrt Op-15, 2nd Mvt,
No doubt (as in Faure) Avant Garde was always tempted to a
compromise of genial cultivation.
No doubt Renoir was as gifted
as any foi; the color-glad depiction of life as pleasantly lived,
perhaps that ease left him vulnerable to the form-crisis and
sterility of 1883 — on the way to which even the lustiest group
scenes, this Boating Party of mashers, top hats, flirts, puppy
kissing girls, entrain surface realism in a sort of Joycean search
for radical value.
So the plucked-string Scherzo of early Faure
(fade) reaches toward the remoter harmonies it drew from Debussy.
�1900 B - 11
/ Bell
23)
Manet 1882, Bar at^the Folies-Bergere, Courtauld Inst./ London
Nor was it merely a dictate of Puritan morality, that James,
from The American (1877) to The Ambassadors (1903) should alienate
the Impressionism he handled so well.
As in late Monet, Cezanne,
Seurat, there was an abstract imperative.
Even Manet, oldest of them all, who had begun the revolution
by a detached flattening of dark Spanish realism, who in the
success of his forties had joined Monet in pure color and open air,
arrived by 1882 (a year before his death) at the mysterious and
formal illusions of A Bar at the Folies-Bergere,
(end Debussy)
where everything beyond the foreground bottles and the musing
girl is reflected in a mirror:
her back, the looming customer,
theater and lights — Platonic images.
24)
Pissarro 1877, The Red Roofs, Louvre, Paris
Pissarro was at the center of the Impressionism, originator with
Monet of its theory and practice.
But he is also the radiant
for Post-Impressionism to follow.
From 1871 to '77 his teaching
brought Cezanne to a threshold of light.
One might think to
^see in this Pissarro landscape of Red Rooves how much Cezanne
could have learned from him.
But the painting, from the last
year of the Cezanne association, dramatizes the teacher as learner.
25)
Cezanne 1873, House of Pere Lacroix at Auvers, Nat. Gal., Wash., DC
Without what Pissarro taught, Cezanne's early violence would
hardly have lightened to this "House of Pere Lacroix".
Yet
Cezanne painted the picture in 1873, four years before Pissarro's
"Red Rooves".
In the interplay of that Avant Garde, effect con
tinually circles and acts as cause.
MUSIC: Satie 1888, Gymnopedie 1, Philips PHS-900-179
�1900 B
C.G. Bell
26)
Pissarro 1887, Woman in an Orchard, Louvre, Paris (Jeu de Paume)
^
Again Pissarro, from 1887, time of Satie's first radically
neglected piano compositions (.this from the Gymnopedies, to be
orchestrated by Debussy) — Pissarro, teacher of everyone, might
seerii in this orchard to have gone as far as Impressionism could
in preparing for Neo-Impressionist Seurat, with his consuming
science of minute color spots.
But here too the influence goes
the other way -- the master swayed by a pupil's genius.
27)
Seurat 1884-5?, .Morning Walk, study for The Seine at Courbevoie,
Ittleson Col'n, N.Y.
Since more than five years earlier, Seurat, studying with
Pissarro, had begun those ravishing sketches in which color
division works from observed nature toward a final harmony of
abstract "color-luminist" control — scores of studies, in
charcoal and oil, exploring and fixing the intellectual geometry
of the great pointillist monuments, where Impressionism becomes
its own antithesis — Baudelaire's passion- throned on cyrstal
rock: — Valery:
This tranquil roof where pigeons promonade
Trembles between the pines, among the tombs;
Noon, the just, composes there with fire
The sea, the sea, forever rebegun 1
28)
.t.
Seurat 18B4-5, Afternoon on.the Grande Jatte, Art Institute, Chicago
The Grande Jatte is as total a fulfillment of Seurat's method
as any.
What mappings of the scene, open-air studies and stage-
set division of the players, remote from each other as the charac
ters of a Chekov play, produced this life-size frieze, where all
motion, all life is stilled — not merely as every carved .or
painted object must be, but in doctrinal soul, proclaiming a
metaphysics of changeless remove — as Valery would invoke the
sun at the zenith ("midi le juste"), a Zeno paradox to immobilize
�ell
1900 B - 13
that "Cemetery by the Sea":
Zenon! Cruel Z^on!
Z^on d'Elee!
_Zeno! Cruel Zeno! Zeno of. Elea!
Have you fixed me with that arrow winged
That whirs and flies and cannot fly the place?...
X) sun...What tortoise shadow for the soul,
Achilles, with his great stride, motionless.
29) -
(close Satie)
Double: Van Gogh 1888; Van Gogh's Yellow Chair with Pipe, Tate,
London; and Gauguin's Arm Chair with Candle, V.Gogh Mus., Amsterdam
In a direction opposite to Seurat's, Van Gogh too ricochets
from Pissarro, his Parisian catalyst of 1886-8.
The concert-
dependence of music must have stacked the odds against a Van
Gogh as composer.
But in poetry Rimbaud comes near enough —
his Season in Hell, like Van Gogh's Chairs, record of a destruc
tive friendship:
letters of 1873, to Verlaine:
Come back...everything will be forgotten...Yes, I was
in the wrong...Be brave. Answer me quickly. I cannot
stay here much longer...Yours, all my life.
Rimbaud.
So while waiting for your wife and your death, you are
.going to struggle, wander about and bore people. . .But
it is you who will be wrong in the end, because, even
after I called you back, you persisted in your false
sentiments... Think of what you were before knowing me...
These Chairs, Van Gogh's with the pipe, Gauguin's with the
candle, testify to that other love-hate, when an imagined accord
broke under the nerve-frayed fact, and Van Gogh sliced his ear,
sent a piece of it to, a prostitute, beginning the reductive con
finements which would grind to his suicide — as if life had to
hold to norms of outmoded pretence, or tear itself to pieces —
the vulnerability of avant-garde.
30)
A. Bocklin c. 1880?, Faun and Throstle, Neue Pinakothek, Munich
MUSIC: Debussy 1892-4, Prelude a I'Apres-midi d'.un faune, .Col.f'iL 6077
•
(last thirdT
From the Bohemian modernity of Paris, it is strange to turn
�1900 B
C.G. Bell
(0Y6n es we sound Debussy's Feune) to the jromantic lingeiring of
Germany, Bocklin's pagan make-believe — to sense the Dionysiac
affinity with Mallarme's Eclogue or this Prelude, and at the same
time to note the demarcation;
that in Bocklin (as in Brahms, say)
romantic longing still accepts the old forms; its Symbolist quarrel
with the space-time fabric of will and cause has not yet disabled
the harmonic and representational modes — the reason and morality
of bourgeois assurance.
31)
That break drives us forward from Bocklin.
Gauguin c. 1893, Indian Queen, Mme Desjardins, Paris
to Debussy's Post-Impressionist contemporary (who also began with
Pissarro), Gauguin, 1893, where space itself, like chordal harmony,
invokes a dissolving magic.
So Maetetlink, the same year, in Pelleas and Melisande (for
which Faure, Debussy, Sch5nberg and others would compose music),
suspends a mystery, beyond fathomable ground, vague as the forest
pool where Melissande loses her wedding ring: — Golaud to
Melisande in the wood:
Come with me. The night will be very dark and cold...
(She) Where are you going?
(He) I do not know.
I am lost also.
%
(The Avant-garde paradox of the lost guide):
Venez avec moi. La nuit sera tres noire et tres froide...
Ou allez-vous?...Je ne sais pas. Je suis perdu aussi...
32)
H. Rousseau 1897, Sleeping Gypsy, Mus. of Modern Art, N.Y._C_^
Henri Rousseau, le Douanier, customs man, found his way, by a
self-taught primitivism of naive vision and dream color, through
the same barrier of *the objective and outward into a mystery more
immedia-te than Gauguin's, 'some haunted realm of the Faun, where
the Symbolist flows over into the Surreal
this Sleeping Gypsy
of 1897, gone, unanswerably, beyond the phenomenal veil.
�< Bell
33)
1900 B
15
Odilon Redon c. 1905?, Le Cyclope, Kroller-Mviller Mas., Otterlo
At the same time Redon completes the circle to a more
abstract handling of Moreau — this one-eyed Cyclops rising like
a phallus over the earth vaginal fold of the sleeping' Galatea —
dream changes rung on Mallarme:
34)
ripe pomegranates, purple, burst and murmur with bees,
and our blood aflame for her who will possess it
flows for the timeless swarm of all desire.
At the hour when this wood is tinged with ash and gold
A feast flares up amid the extinguished leaves,
AEtna, on your slopes, by Venus visited...
(end Debussy)
Degas 1876, L'Absinthe, Jeu de Paume (Louvre), Paris
In Degas, Impressionist realism broke through a first
devotion to Ingres and an interest in Moreau.
As with the
naturalism of Zola or DeMaupassant, Hardy's Satires of Circumstance
\
or Chekov's heartbreak comedy,
the content of civilized despair
is carried over into an objective lightening of technique.
In
this study called Absinthe, a laceration as in Dostoievsky or
in Gorki's Lowest Depths, seems less the work of philosophic
pessimism than of accident, as in the snapping of a camera.
MUSICj Mussorgsky 1874, Pictures at an Exhibition (piano). Ballet of
“
Chicks in their Shells, Turnabout TV, 34258
Where the world falls in on itself, with hardly a whimper,
I
the challenge of Mussorgsky's eerie Pictures (this "Ballet of
Chicks in their Shells"),
35)
(fade Mussorgsky)
Degas 1890-95, Dancers in Blue, Jeu de Paume, Paris
will bleed through the lightest 1880 Scherzo-Valse by Chabrier.
MUSIC; Chabrier 1880, Scherzo Valse, Rubinstein, RCA LSC 2751
In that Absinthe context the radiant delights of theatre and
ballet, which Degas painted from the early '70's until increasing
blindness drove him in the 'nineties to cloud-rich pastelles
�1900 B - r
C.G. Bell
.and finally to modelling ("Death", he would say, "is all I
think of"), form a contrast so polar, one has to ask:
Is this
realism, or an escape into artful dream; or is realism itself
the escape, the earth-claim luring as the Sleepsong in Faust.
(fade Chabrier)
36)
Toulouse-Lautrec 1896, Maxime DeThomas,
(Dale) Nat. Gal., Wash.,DC
Some nostalgia of the infinite was driving through Degas'
Absinthe and beyond, seizing on maladies of body or soul (Avantgarde strategy of creative negation), turning vulnerabilities into
powers: — so, with the high-born dwarf, Toulouse-Lautrec, in
this portrait of Maxime DeThomas, Bohemian connoisseur, lifedeformity speaks oracular depression, biding the next thrust of
the style-apocalypse.
While Henry George, American economist, who died in 1897, wrote
of other things, than art:
As public spirit is lost...as reforms become hopeless,
then in the festering masses will be generated volcanic
forces... Strong unscrupulous men...will become the ex
ponents of blind popular...passions, and dash aside
forms that have lost their validity.
37)
Toulouse-Lautrec 1894, The Bed, Louvre (Jeu de Paume), Paris
If Toulouse-Lautrec ever inclined to genial affirmation —
obverse of the DeThomas pathology — it is in this 1894 evoca
tion called "The Bed"; though like any obverse it affords another
view of the same coin.
So Joyce's brothel of Circe would yield
in Ulysses to the bed of Molly Bloom, she
reclined semilaterally...left hand under head, right
leg extended in a straight line and resting on left
leg, flexed, in the attitude of Gea-Tellus, fulfilled,
recumbent, big with seed...
(thinking joyful adultery):
he does it and doesnt talk I gave my eyes that look
�Bell
1900 B - 17
with my hair a bit loose from the tumbling and my
tongue between my lips up to him the savage brute
Thursday Friday one Saturday two Sunday three O
Lord I cant wait till Monday.
The sword will again be mightier than the pen, and
in carnivals of destruction brute forge and wild
frenzy will alternate with the lethargy of a
declining civilization.
Ensor, Flemish contemporary of Dutch-French Van Gogh (though
Ensor lived on and on), was possessed by symbols of destructive
carnival, as in this detail from his huge 1888 Entry of Christ
into Brussels.
How the demons of Bosch and Breughel, in Ensor’s
Ostend isolation, bear down, angels with the vials of wrath.
They had staged a Romantic comeback in Hugo and windy Wieftz;
now the Expressionist fin-de-siecle opens to them.
39)
Cezanne 1888, Mardi Gras, Pushkin Museum, Moscow
Yet the same year, 1888, Cezanne distilled Carnival into
something quite different.
Mere estrangement and transvaluation
(since no one can explain what is humanly intended) have been
lifted to a well-being as enigmatic as any in Don Quixote —
though of the order, as we implied with Seurat, of Chekov's 1903
Cherry Orchard, that sublimation of pain into incongruous laughter.
It seems the right genius could ride those a[lternate "carnivals
of destruction" and "lethargy of a declining civilization", winning
its art—image (cleansed in the abstract)
40)
^o-Americhn, Maya 7th-10th c.AD, Terra cotta Aristocr;,^. mus.
~^throp. , Mexico City
back to the unfathomable vitalities of ages to which understanding
and causal entry no longer apply — this Maya terracotta of about
�1900 B C.G. Bell
the 9th century, where representational refinement almost makes
us one with its aristocratic herald:
"0 Kin," - and we cannot
go on, because time and the Spanish auto-da-fes have left us
ignorant of whom he would address or what he might say; so we
can only repeat, as with Cezanne’s wilful suspension, "Magrcair'
ca.anne 186S. Sorrow (Mary Ma2dalen)x^g!Z£^r,^a£j:S
But with Cezanne we have a context, life, a history in which
.we share - the rebellion that spanned Europe from this 1866
tear-drop Magdalen called Sorrow (with Mussorgsky's "Catacombs"
from the 1874 Pictures at an Exhibition)
ii;
Cezanne 1900. Old Woman in a Cape, Mat. Gal., London
to this Cezanne Old Woman with a Eosary of 1900, rim of no man s
land.
Here the abstraction of Landscape, Bathers, of the mysteri
ous Mardi Gras, assume a function the Pre-Columbian has lost:
to
shape, of romantic Angst, an Aquarian containment.
over forty years Cezanne was forging that He^ of Darkness,
411 Cezanne 1866, Sorro«^.I£u:^
from some Tess of the d'Urbervilles pain.
As if, m the poetizing
of cyclidal fall, we had gone from Arnold's disenchantment:
Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age.
More fortunate, alas 1 than we...
.for the world which seems
TO lie befor^’ufe like a land of dreams...
Hath really neither joy, nor love, no
g
Cezanne 1900, 01dJjoman^n_A,CaESxJgl!l^^gS^
to what Yeats distilled from Nietzsche and his own crazy Jane.
aTf tfLoSf if thiroSe'^SoJd 'Pejoice! '
�1900 B - 19
Bell
43)
Picasso 1901, The Poet Savartez, Mus. Modern Western Art, Moscow
MUSIC: Stravinsky 1909-10, The Firebird, Lullaby close. Col MG 31202
.
I
I
I.. .1. . . . . . . . . . .
.. .
l.l
It was easier to inherit Cezanne's abstraction than his
OlymEjian maturity.
illusion.
Picasso had to begin, 1901, again with dis
So later with Joyce and Eliot; even Yeats had opened
his 'poetry with "The woods of Arcady are dead", his plays with
"the world's more full of weeping than you can understand."
It
was a blue mood the young Stravinsky (so time-tied to Picasso)
would exploit in the Lullaby of The Firebird.
(Lullaby into Victory finale)
44)
Double: Cezanne 1887-9, large Bather, Mus. Mod. Art, NYC;
S Picasso 1905-6, Nude Boy with Horse, Paley Coll'n, NY
But as Stravinsky, out of nostalgic sleep, could always stage
a Firebird victory, Picasso's Virile force had begun by 1906
to break the Blue spell.
And what could better precipitate an
energized opposite than the
absolute magnitude (left) of
Cezanne's Bathers, this standing youth — to receive a softer
poignance in Picasso's Boy and Horse (led without rope, a manbrute meld).
It was Rilke who would write in 1907 of "that development... in
me which corresponds to the immense forward stride in the Cezanne
paintings"; while his sonnet on an "Archaic Torso of Apollo" (how
it "breaks out of all its contours/ like a star:
no place/ that does not see you.
for there is
You must change your life")
points as much to Cezanne and Picasso as to the early Greek.
45)
Matisse 1905, Pastoral, Priv. Coll'n, Paris
(fade Firebird)
While Picasso was moving through Blue and Rose
toward Negroid and Cubistic, an
ecstatic complement appeared in
pure color, those Dionysiac Fauves, led by Matisse, most versatile
�1900 B
C.G. Bell
and life-loving of them.
Though darker Mann (1911) would turn
this pastoral dream, with Death in Venice Aschenbach (Brook-ofashes) to "the promiscuous orgy (grenzenlose Vermischung) of
his own fall".
narain 1906. L'Estaque, Three Trees, Ayala & Sam Zacks, Toronto
AS for Derain — this 1906 L'Estaque — with Dufy, Vlaminck,
Braque and the rest - who would have believed that such heirs of
individual outbreak, joined in a group fervor, could become
almost indistinguishablY charged?
Yet how many composers of the
time (from the older- Debussy -to the rising generation) might
share in the designation "Fauves"?
By 1907 the last movement of Schonberg's Second String Quartet
advances from chromatic tonality to the atonal setting of George
"Transport" - "Entruckung": "I breathe an air from another planet"
_ "Ich fuhle luft von anderem planeten."
I have seen sidereal archipelagoes! and islands
Whose delirious skies open to the voyager:
in these unfathomed nights do you sleep your exile.
Millions of golden birds, 0 future Vigor.
i
�1900 B - 21
/Bell
-*• Rilke of that .future, 1912, First Duino Elegyc
...Wirf aus den Armen die Leere...
...Fling the emptiness from your arms
into the spaces we breathe — maybe that the birds
should feel the expanded air in more intimate flight.
(close Bartok)
48)
Picasso 1908, Friendship (L'Amitie)-, Hermitage, Leningrad
The crested wave still breaking.
MUSIC: Stravinsky 1912-13, from Le Sacre du Printemps, Col. MG 3 1202
Thirty-seven years after Rimbaud's South Sea frenzy —
I have watched the fermentation of enormous swamps
Where giant serpents devoured by bedbugs
Fall down from gnarled trees with black scent —
Picasso (1908), as by a voodoo of jungle and Negroid, hammers
Blue-period loss ("Hurl the emptiness from your arms!") into
primitive and cubistic gain.
Four years later Stravinsky would
break into the fertility climax of the Rite of Spring.
(fade Stravinsky)
49)
Polynesian Easter Islands c. 1400?, Colossal monolithic heads
What was in fact longing over into the new century — some
dinosaur upheaval through the crust of civilized restraint,
romantic idealism and ennui — was deeper than sense, beyond
conscious control; as if suppressed demons and gods, these Easter
Island huge volcanic monoliths, with prehistoric and African, all
primitive rebelling loci in the Freudian and group unconscious
(Rilke's "buried guilty river-god of the blood" — "verborgenen |
schuldigen Fluss-Gott des Bluts") had heaved up to seize their [
day:
Yeats to Florence- Farr, 1890:
Has the magical armagedd'on begun at last?
S^'O)
Picasso 1910, Girl with a Mandolin, Penrose Collection, London
�1900 B
C.G. Bell
MUSIC; Debussy 1910, Preludes Bk I, from ”Les Sons et les parfums
■---------------— tournent dans 1'air du soir", Philips PHC 5-012
^
Though in the ambivalence of Picasso, what had begun as rape
could always be methodized and refined to seduction.
This 1910
"Girl with a Mandolin" suspends the langour and elegance of Blue
and Rose in formal analysis.
While Debussy, in the Preludes of
the same year, has begun a systematization of the semitone mode
of chords in fourths.
51)
(fade Debussy)
G.Braque 1910-11, Composition with Violin (Behind Appearance, p. 12)
Which Schonberg, Berg and Webern continually advanced toward
the technique of the twelve-tone row.
Here Schonberg, of 1911:
MUSIC: Schonberg 1911, Six Little Pieces for Piano (#5), Dover HCR 5285
Also by 1911 Braque, working as one with Picasso, had brought
the abstraction of things to a threshold of corrugated space, a
tensile geometry, beyond which in one sense art could not go.
Yet to ring the changes on that non-objective claim would take
half a century.
52')'
(end Schonberg)
Theophanes the Greek 1378, St. Macrobius, det. , Cath. of Transfig
uration, Novgorod, Russia
In 1378 Theophanes the Greek had fresqoed the Cathedral of
the Transfiguration in Novgorod, Russia.
MUSIC: Russian 10th-16th c.. Entombment chant (near close) Anth.
—------------------ —------------- Sonore LP AS 10 (A-5)
That the Eastern Slavs, in the time of Chaucer's humanity and
lusty realism, 'should have held to the crypts of world-dissolving
and "otherworldly power with which Dostoievsky's mystics still
contend, dramatises, in the leap to the modern, what Trotsky
calls "the messianism of backwardness."
53)
(fade Troparion)
V.Tropinin c. 1818, Portrait of Artist's Son, Tretyakov Gal., Moscow
�'Bell
1900 B - 23
MUSIC: Glinka 1845, Symphony on Two Russian Themes (near opening)
VJestminster XWN 184 57
In Tropinin's ideal portrait of his son about 1818, the old
theophany yields (as with this Glinka, or the untranslatable
Pushkin) to a radiant opposite, fruit of liberal England, Revo
lutionary France and Romantic Germany — trust in the worth of
man and world (though Pushkin complements that glow with Byronic
irony).
In Tropinin's picture, the give-away flush of sentiment
takes us back to Rousseau:
The Russians 'will never be perfectly civilized
because their civilisation was attempted too hastily...
takes us forward to Dostoevsky's depiction of The Possessed heirs
of such enlightened dream.
54)
(Glinka:
forte and fade)
Kandinsky 1909, Murnau with Rainbow, Stadtische Galerie, Munich
MUSIC: Scriabin 1909-10, Prometheus: Poem of Fire (near close), London
------------------------------------------------------------- OES 6915
In the early century quickening toward war and revolution,
Russia's avant-garde 'leap was extraordinary
it would turn out, -mostly in exile-.
though made,
At the time of this 1909
Village Scene, Kandinsky was 43, had absorbecj Impressionism
'‘twenty-five years before, was living near Munich at Murnau,.
and was just entering the crucial phase of his art, when he
would found (with Franz Marc) the Blaue Reiter — in touch
with the musical iconoclasm of Stravinsky,. Schonberg, the
Scriabin of this 1910 "Prometheus:
Poem of Fire".
Through Fauve mastery, Kandinsky was advancing
55)
Kandinsky 1911, All Saints Day II, StSdtische Gal., Munich
toward a mystical color music in which objects would disappear,
this 1911 "All Saints Picture" (trumpeting angel above), of which
�C.G. Bell
1900 B
the artist wrote:
^
In many ways art is similar to religion...was the
New Testament possible without the Old? Could our
..."third" revelation be thinkable without the
second?
That Superman Judgment clue, with subsequent abstractions —
flood and cannon turned to vital ecstasy — lift us on the tide
of New Apocalypse which also inspired 'Scriabin's Poem of Fire.
(close of Scriabin)
He wrote:
I am desire, I am light...I am the boundary,
i am the summit. I am nothing. I am God...
I shall not die, I shall suffocate in ecstasy.
Though he died not long after of blood poisoning, from a boil
on the neck.
56)
M.Chagall- 1911, I and the Village, Mus. of Modern Art, NYC
From Jewish family life in a suburb of Vitebsk, Marc Chagall
shaped such fantasies as "I and the Village", 1911; although he had
lived in Paris for a year, absorbing Fauve color and the non-perspectival rythms of Cubist space.
But what he poured into that
crystal architecture was a new imagery of memory and symbolic ’>•
dream.
As Andr^ Breton, later spokesman of Surrealism, would
write:
I
V^
in 1911, and through Chagall alone, metaphor
■made its triiimphal entry into modern painting.
Yet those metaphors — "the cow who used .to talk to us", the magic
spray of flowers, trance-green face of the artist inspired, are
not, as with Dante,, or even Blake, systematic, but subliminal,
associative mystery for its own sake.
57)
G.Balia 1913, Velocita d'automobile + luci, M.G. Neumann Coll'n,
Chicago
Now various Italians, also in touch with Paris, spurred
�ell
1900 B - 25
Cubism (with or without Fauve color) to the cinematic transcript
of motion (this Ballo "Velocity of Automobile + Lights"),
actualizing the dynamic of the 1910 Futurist Manifesto;
We exto11 the love of danger... rebellion...the
double quick step...the box on the ear, fisticuffs
^otor-car, its frame adorned ^ith greafpi;;s,
libraries, shjant the canal^?;
flood the museums; demolish, demolish the venerated
•••
That utopian unrest would read itself through socialism, war.
Fascism, industrialization, to a belated echo in Spender's
"Express" (Internationale);
Steaming through metal landscape on her lines
She plunges new eras of wild happiness
up strange shapes, broad curves
And parallels clean like the steel of guns.
AJelaunay 1912, Windows on the City (Ist Part. 2nd
Replica), Kunsthalle, Hamburg
By 1912 Parisian Delaunay opened, for Blaue Reiter contempo
raries, the Orphism of his "Windows", described in passages of
inspired delirium;
Impressionism is the birth of Light in painting,
Lignt in nature creates movement of colors
Art in nature is rythmic__
to reach the limits of sublimity, it must
approach our harmonic Vision; clarity.
Clarity will be color, proportions; these
proportions are composed of various simul
taneous measures within an action.
This .action must be representative harmony,
the synchromatic movement (simultaneity) of
light, which 'is the only reality...
As Apollinaire would close his Delaunay poem;
The window opens like an orange
The beautiful fruit of light —
Le beau fruit de la limi^re.
Yet It is curious that in Mallarme's earlier "Les Fenetres",
such openings of abstract radiance were an escape, as from the
�1900 B
C.G. Bell
sad hospital of soul's confinement;
^
I flee and lean at all the casements...
Blessed in the eternal dews of that glass
Which the chaste morning of the infinite gilds.
That escape become Delaunay's "only reality".
59)
Franz Marc 1913, Tierschicksale, Kustmuseum, Basel
MUSIC; Schonberg 1910-13, Die Gluckliche Hand (climax) Col.M2S 679
In Franz Marc, as in Schonberg's "Die Gluckliche Hand" (while
the Great War neared), the tumult of elation crests in terror —
as if the metaphorical vase of culture,- violin-bowed up the scale
of natural and unnatural resonances towards a euphoria of self
transcendence, should be stretched ahd shattered before our eyes.
Mark's "Animal Fate" projects Leonardo's prophecy of a ravaged
nature —
Nothing on earth or under the earth or in the waters
but shall be pursued, molested and destroyed —
into the Symbolist subconscious Rilke also shared;
...throttling growths and bestial
preying forms!...How he loved that interior world...
...seines Inneren Wildnis,/ diesen Urwald in ihm.
When Mark, most searching German artist on the scene, fell
%
in 1914, who could follow the burning call of George?;
"You
who have, circled the flame, hold to the faith of the flame!"
"Bleibe der flamme trabant!"
60)
(fade Schonberg)
Q.&O. Wright 1903, Flyer (with Langley's 1896 steam model), Smith-sonian. Wash., DC
In 1896, year of Moreau's "Jupiter and Semele", with pictures
we have seen by Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec, this Langley steampowered plane (above and small) brought the dream of flight almost
home — though his model could not lift a man.
In 1903, when
�/ Bell
1900 B - 27
the old Cezanne was touching off the excitement of the Fauves,
this larger Wright brothers biplane accomplished the first
heavier-than-air powered and piloted flight.
Like all adventures
of Avant-garde, it would prove ambivalent.
61)
R.de la Fresnaye 1913, Conquest of the Air, Mus. Modern Art, NYC
Ten years later, when Fresnaye painted his Cubistic and
Delaunay-inspired "Conquest of the Air", who could have told
how far these cloud-hung airmen at the drafting table were
plotting the sky-strategy of the war so soon to be loosed over
Europe — theirs the only war-vision which would not appallingly
bog down in trench mud-holes, where Nietzsche's expected trans
valuation would concrete toward a mustached phoney of frenzied
outwardness.
62)
European Armour c. 1535, to Francis 1st from Ferd. of Tyrol?, Mus.
de L'Armee, Paris
If the paired offence and defence of -toothed Tyranosaurus and
horned Triceratops ±ook them both under, it was with Duckbill and
all the rest.
So the" warning against armament, like all the
lessons of history, remained equivocal.
In the West (where evolution has not completed its proof) the
mechanized type of force was conceived from the start — armored
knight on aritfored horse charging peasant field or village like
the precursive ultima-te of ironclad war.
Although the horse-name
of chivalry embraced a damsel-succoring code.
63)
Photo World War I c. 1917, stalled Tank, U.S. Official Pictures
After 1916 the true tanks caterpillared in, and some, like
tar-poOl Dinosaurs*, were -stranded, swivel of what Nietzsche had
hailed:
I am delighted at the military development of Europe...
the period of quietude and Chinese apathy is over...
�1900 B -
C * G • HgH
Rilke's first war elation, George's account in his long poem Per
Krieg of the first Demian hope for spirit out of material destruc'
tion, Kastorp's leap from the Magic Mountain into sacrifice —
such soul-surmises cloud to Owen's "Anthem":
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns...
The shrill demented choirs of wailing shells
And bugles calling for them from sad shires...
64)
George Grosz 1918-22, from Ecce Homo: Twilight, watercolor, pub.
1923, repr. 1965
So to the embittered post-war of George Grosz's book of
cartoon derelictions, Ecce Homo, Behold Man.
Plunged into that
"hell where youth and laughter go" (Sassoon), would not the crazed
vessel at last be shivered in the Untergang Spengler imperatived:
"Bare your necks to the blade 1"
And what of America, whose vital delivery had s'prung the
trench stalemate — America, barely emerged from pioneer assurance,
how would she take to what war had hardened
65)
Toulouse-Lautrec 1899, Private Room at Le Rat Mort, Courtauld, London
from fin-de-siecle Toulouse-Lautrec, this "Private Room at Le
Rat Mort"?
Could the Jamesian traveler have missed, under
Impressionist verve, the Vampire metamorphosis of Baudelaire? —
The woman meanwhile from her strawberry mouth.
Twisting her body like a snake...
Let fall these words, charged with the odor of musk;
Zola's 1880 Nana, dead of smallpox in a Paris seething with
Franco-Prussian war? —
The' pustules had invaded the whole of her face...
The left eye had foundered among bubbling purulence;
the other, half open, was a ruinous black hole...a
reddish crust was peeling from one of the cheeks and
invading the mouth, which it distorted into a horrible
grin...And over this mask of death, the beautiful hair
still flowed like sunlight downward in rippling gold.
�Bell
1900 B - 29
Acade..,
MUSIC:
Scott
Joplin
c
IRQ?
r>v.
•
■
========g^^g=^i=^i^l^=gg^g4gal,^^
tape I. ^
George -Luks, through the Naturalist
. .
arisian tra-ining, saw in pre-war 1905
, . ^
his boisterous New York claim:
glass of surh p>
gj-ass Of such European and
a -roai •-i^ reality proportioned to
Who taught Shakespeare ter^hn-i rT,.^o ^
Or George Luks?
Guts>
f Rembrandt?
^—.That s my technique!
Ana Drelsser, in studied pursuit of Deter^inist Zola, had
Closed his first novel (1900, with sister Carrie rooming alone
,ret those who would answer Spengler with the plea of a New
world culturally new, were Ignoring the continuity of culture
Ashcan affirmation was a Whitmanesgue phase of an Avant-garde
everywhere transvaluing the negative,
hnd. what, in civilised
content, comprised more negatibn than the worksongs, blues and
lazz which, gathering head in the unlettered proletariat of Black
America (New Orlpanc;
°* "his joplln 1897 ragtime).
The Circus. T.onvrs
Kould.irresistably conquer the worlds
■
v.,.--
,
(fade Joplin)
Monde, Nonesi^^TTT^
And Within the sophistication and science of Pointillism,
what stripping to Circus, music-hall
f music hall and ^ive, occurs in the last
patterned reductions of gfan-m-i.
Seurat - an affinity that would open
post-war orchestration
ation to
to thr^
the ki
blue notes and rythmic firewater of
Harlem's elemental "Yeah'"
^ean.
du Monde".
mhnc -fv-n
Thus from Milhaud's "La Creation
(fade Milhaud)
3rd whistle)
C01.D3S 783
!
�C.G. B^eTT
Ives was the composer who from his earliest works gave the
disruptive triumph of modernism an American stomach for every
thing from the great tradition, to hymns and pop tunes. .
68)
Prenderqast 1901, Central Park, Whitney Museum, NYC_
After Homer, Eakins and Ryder, no American artist had such force;
though various painters between realism and the all-out abstrac
tions of the 1913 Armory Show, share a natural vigor with Ives.
Here is Prendergast's patchwork "Central Park" of 1901.
(fade Ives)
with the slow movement from the Second Symphony:
MUSIC: Ives 1897-1902, 2nd Symph., 3rd mvt, near close. Col. D3S
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe.
As a calm darkens among water-lights...
The day is like wide water, without sound.
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Ove'r the seas, to silent Palestine...
Why should she give her bounty to the dead...
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow...
These are the measures destined for her soul...
70)
Eilshemius 1909?, Contentment, Kleemann Gallery, NY
Like Stevens' lady, Eilshemius quickens the Bacchic myth:
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to_the sun.
Not as a god, but as a god might be.
�. Bell
1900 B
31
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise-•.
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice.
The windy lake wherein their lord delights.
The trees, like serafim, and echoing hills...
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.
(end Ives Adagio)
71)
Arthur Dove 1910, .Abstraction No. 2, Downtown Gallery, NYC
As early as any of the Europeans, Dove, from upstate New York,
who had known the Fauves in Paris, moyed to the delight of pure
color forms (1910).
Though if the scanning eye could have taken
in thdse numbered abstractions as dwellingly as tjie time-art of
tones forces upon, the ear
MUSIC; Ives 1897-1902, 2nd Symph., close, last Mvt. Col. D3S 783
it would surely have experienced ^ shock, as from the fanfares
and unresolved dissonance with which Ives concluded that Second
Symphony*.
72)
Macdonald-Wright c. 1915, Abstraction on Spectrum (Organization 5)
Art Center, Des Moines, lA
After the 1913 Armory show’, when European Modernism first
struck America in force, the country was divided between mass
realist
reaction (last bars of_ Ives)
Avant-garde handful
of artists "(and even buyers) caught up in the European Fauve and
abstract.
Ma’cdonald-Wright, in this 1915 Abstraction on the
Spectrum, rapturously pursued the color-circle Synchronism of Delaunay.
73)
Double:/ Cezanne 1900-06, Bend in the Road, Walter Bareiss (cf. Munich)
& Delaunay c. 1912-13, Window, Museum, DiSsseldorf, Germany
In the juxtaposition of a Cezanne (left) from about 1900, and
a Delaunay Window of 1912 to '13, we ride — ecstatic as Holderlin
and Nietzsche, for the coming of the gods — the comber of an abstract
surge peaking up the shoal as far back as the 1870's in Cezanne
�1900 B -
C.G.> Bell
or in the "Drunken Boat" precosity of Rimbaud.
Morton Schamberg c
74)
1917, Miter box and plumbing trap entitled God,
Mus., Philadelphia
What a break, when Dada, beginning in World War Zurich of
1916, had espoused the ridicule of a civilization gone wrong, and
Morton Schamberg — 1917, Philadelphian, in the New York Circle
of Duchamps, could give the title "God" to this found sculpture
of a miter box and a cast iron plumbing trap — not a mockery
alone, but like William Carlos Williams on the pretence of a
hearse:
75)
"Knock the glass out!/ My God — glass,
my townspeople!";
Joseph Stella 1913, Battle of Light, Coney Island, Yale Univ. Gal.
MUSIC: Ives 1910-16, 4th Symph., 2nd MVt, 4th of July close, Col.D3S 783
The Italian Futurist Stella, who would also settle in America,
had brought the Armory show to its color-action peak with the glad
riot of his Coney Island — as Ives, the same years, unleashed
the Fourth of July scherzo of his Fourth Symphony.
easier the art we can gawk at.
How much
No one would hear the Ives for
fifty years; but Century Magazine gave Stella's "Battle for
Light" a color reproduction:
a daring interpretation...of the dazzling light, the
noise and ceaseless motion...so evident in America...
Had he merely represented the physicai...(the artist)
believes that he could not have given the rythm of the
scene, which transforms the chaos of the night, the
lights, the strange buildings and the surging crowd
into the order, the design and the color of art.
(end Ives)
76)
Stella 1922, The Bridge, 5th panel, Newark Museum
The disillusion of the war did not undercut Stella's celebra
tion of America as Futurist land.
Though the early century ardor
tightened, like Twelve-tone harmony, here to the bound geometries
of the Bridge Panels.
�. -Bell
1900 B
33
It was the theme under which Hart Crane, from 1924 to '30, hoped
to affirm America:
f
How many dawns chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him.
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty...
—' Till elevators drop us from our day.
Always Crane's vision lets him drop:
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets.
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt balooning,
A jest falls, from the speechless caravan.
In the gulf of Munch's Cry, how could the "curveship" of the
Bridge "lend a myth to God"?
77)
Francisco Goya 1812-19, Bullfight in a Village, Royal Academy of
San Fernando, Madrid
In the old revolutionary world of Blake, Goethe, this Goya,
there was a separation of light and dark; the brute seizure
spoke its ritualistic containment — what in music gripped the
magnification of dissonance from Mozart:
MUSIC: Mozart 1788, near close of 1st Mvt, Jupiter Symph., Col. B3S 891
through Beethoven.
MUSIC: Beethoven 1804, 3rd Symph, 1st Mvt before recapit., Deutsche
■“
---------------- Gram. LPM 18 802
78)
Pablo Picasso 1935, Minotauromachia, det. of Beast, etching
Since Zarathustfa, we are one with the world beast.
Picasso:
If all the ways I have been along were worked on a
map and joined up with a line, it might represent a
Minotaur.
BACK:
again 77)
Goya, Bullfight in a Village
In the uncontained emancipation of dissonance as such —
BACK:
again 76)
Stella 1922, The Bridge
what Schonberg would take for his battle cry —
BACK:
again 75)
Stella 1913, Battle of Light',.'Coney, island
�1900 B
C.G. Bell
soul flames the antinomy of the unresolved, consuming in
revelational delight the crucible of its tensile ground.
'After Rimbaud's "Drunken Boat" ("0 let my keel burst;
0 let me go down into the sea")
.cain 74) Schamberg 1917, God_^Miter.A^lHBbiS^^£g£n-^jii^^^
Hart crane despaired of a reconciling Bridge (Letters of 1926):
At times it seems demonstrable that Spengler is
.
■ T-+frVici
mone and more licks his
r^;o“if!;inT^f£without^Sidge;'in?Sl2ctually judged the whole theme and
project seems more and more absurd...
' ,ca)n-73)
Double, ^^esaHia^fter,190^H)l^glaunay^^
?iofw?irsefi^hfi?rSf/airti:fgreJt“iiiircrackers in Valhalla's parapets;
Again 74)
Schamberg 1917, God
the sun has set theatrically
while Lafdrge, Eliot and others of that kidn y
have whimpered fastidiously...
..Mn 75)
Stella 1913, Battle of Light, Coney Islajjd
But Picasso could have said the same about working in the
" wake of that disruptive fervor (from Cezanne down) which he
himself, with Fauves, Cubists, Blaue Reiter, had inflamed,
;'cain 76)
Stella 1922, The Bridge
up to the break and restrictive deliberations of post-war.
again 77)
Gova 1812-19, Bullfight in a Village,
Since all arts after that crisis had to grope gackward and for
ward for a "Tower Beyond Tragedy".
But where Hart Crane slipped
from the stern of the Orizaba,
Again 78)
Picasso 1935, Minotauremachia det-. of Beast
Bartok had mounted (1928) the fierce lunge of the Fourth Quartet.
Bartok 1928, Fourth Quartet,_J,as^ivt^_g^gs^^^
�Bell
1900 B - 35
Picasso turned the beast outbreak (Yeats' "Violence upon the
road;
violence of horses") to the 1935 Minotauromachia,
Hi-- Picasso 1935, Mintauromachia, det. of child, L, etching
where a child
poignant as the one who in Rimbaud ".launches a
boat frail as a butterfly of May" — confronts with candle -and
flowers (Yeats' "0 may she live like some green laurel")
-- again 78)
Picasso^ Minotauromachia, detail of Beast
the shared dread of Crete (Yeats too "Imagining in excited reverie/
That the future years had come,/ Dancing to a frenzied drum__ ").
Again 79)
Picasso, Minotauromachi, detail of Child, L.
Crane would ignore Yeats in that prophecy of no gr^at poet
after adolescent Rimbaud; but it was just Crane's despair which
Yeats had hammered into "The Second Coming" of 1920: the gyre of
negation pierced by the Thirteenth Cone, God-sphere of tragic
miracle.
80)
Picasso, Minotauromachia, whole
•V
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
^
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood—dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight; somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun.
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last.
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
(end Bartok)
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound
Contributor
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St. John's College Meem Library
Description
An account of the resource
Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series.
Text
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Original Format
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pdf
Page numeration
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35 pages
Dublin Core
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Title
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1900 B : Crisis of the Abstract, Symbolic History, Part 34
Description
An account of the resource
Script of Part 34 of the symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell.
Creator
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Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010
Publisher
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St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Santa Fe, NM
Date
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[1988-1990]
Rights
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St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Type
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text
Format
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pdf
Language
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English
Identifier
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SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_34_1900_B--Crisis_of_the_Abstract
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Yearbooks
Description
An account of the resource
This collection contains yearbooks from St. John's College in Annapolis, MD. Yearbooks are sometimes referred to as the "Rat Tat", "Cicerone", or "Canvas". This collection includes all published yearbooks since 1896. Please note that yearbooks were not published every year.<br /><br />Holdings: <br />1896 v. 1<br />1898 v. 2 - 1899 v. 3<br />1901 v. 4 – 1912 v. 15<br />1914 v. 17 – 1918 v. 21<br />1920 v. 22 – 1945/1946<br />1947 – 1951/1953<br />1957<br />1982<br />1986 – 1990/1991<br />1992 – 2001/2002<br />2015/2016 – 2017/2018<br />2021/2022 - 2022/2023<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Yearbooks" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=21">Items in the Yearbooks Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
yearbooks
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper (bound book)
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
240 pages
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
1915 Rat-Tat
Description
An account of the resource
Rat-Tat 1915 Key Edition, Volume XVIII. Published annually by the Junior Class - St. John's College.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Moon, Orville M. (Editor-in-Chief)
Bielaski, Fred L. (Assistant Editor-in-Chief)
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
The Horn-Shafer Co.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Baltimore, MD
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1915
Rights
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St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
1915
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Yearbooks
Description
An account of the resource
This collection contains yearbooks from St. John's College in Annapolis, MD. Yearbooks are sometimes referred to as the "Rat Tat", "Cicerone", or "Canvas". This collection includes all published yearbooks since 1896. Please note that yearbooks were not published every year.<br /><br />Holdings: <br />1896 v. 1<br />1898 v. 2 - 1899 v. 3<br />1901 v. 4 – 1912 v. 15<br />1914 v. 17 – 1918 v. 21<br />1920 v. 22 – 1945/1946<br />1947 – 1951/1953<br />1957<br />1982<br />1986 – 1990/1991<br />1992 – 2001/2002<br />2015/2016 – 2017/2018<br />2021/2022 - 2022/2023<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Yearbooks" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=21">Items in the Yearbooks Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
yearbooks
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper (bound book)
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
234, 24 pages
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
1921 Rat-Tat
Description
An account of the resource
1921 Rat Tat, Vol. XXIII, Published by the Junior Class of St. John's College.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Heil, F. M. (Editor)
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
The Read-Taylor Company
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Baltimore, MD
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1921
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
1921
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Yearbooks
Description
An account of the resource
This collection contains yearbooks from St. John's College in Annapolis, MD. Yearbooks are sometimes referred to as the "Rat Tat", "Cicerone", or "Canvas". This collection includes all published yearbooks since 1896. Please note that yearbooks were not published every year.<br /><br />Holdings: <br />1896 v. 1<br />1898 v. 2 - 1899 v. 3<br />1901 v. 4 – 1912 v. 15<br />1914 v. 17 – 1918 v. 21<br />1920 v. 22 – 1945/1946<br />1947 – 1951/1953<br />1957<br />1982<br />1986 – 1990/1991<br />1992 – 2001/2002<br />2015/2016 – 2017/2018<br />2021/2022 - 2022/2023<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Yearbooks" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=21">Items in the Yearbooks Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
yearbooks
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper (bound book)
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
253 pages
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
1922 Rat_Tat
Description
An account of the resource
Rat Tat 1922, Vol. XXIV. Published Annually by the Junior Class of St. John's College.
Creator
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Baxter, W. C. (Editor-in-Chief)
Publisher
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The Read-Taylor Company
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Baltimore, MD
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1922
Rights
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St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
1922
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31e4a4ba2439609963a60b6e5090fdfc
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Yearbooks
Description
An account of the resource
This collection contains yearbooks from St. John's College in Annapolis, MD. Yearbooks are sometimes referred to as the "Rat Tat", "Cicerone", or "Canvas". This collection includes all published yearbooks since 1896. Please note that yearbooks were not published every year.<br /><br />Holdings: <br />1896 v. 1<br />1898 v. 2 - 1899 v. 3<br />1901 v. 4 – 1912 v. 15<br />1914 v. 17 – 1918 v. 21<br />1920 v. 22 – 1945/1946<br />1947 – 1951/1953<br />1957<br />1982<br />1986 – 1990/1991<br />1992 – 2001/2002<br />2015/2016 – 2017/2018<br />2021/2022 - 2022/2023<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Yearbooks" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=21">Items in the Yearbooks Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
yearbooks
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper (bound book)
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
247, xvii pages
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
1923 Rat-Tat
Description
An account of the resource
1923 Rat Tat. Published annually by the Junior Class of St. John's College. Vol XXV
Creator
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McCauley, David R. (Editor-in-Chief)
Publisher
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Capital-Gazette Press
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1923
Rights
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St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
1923
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