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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:
5/1994
1600: The Tragic Divide
1
�C.G. Bell
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
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�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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�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:
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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
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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.
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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 —
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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.
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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
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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.
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1600: The Tragic Divide
(end Dowland)
12
�C.G. Bell
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
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�C.G. Bell
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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�C.G. Bell
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,
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
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."
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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.
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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,
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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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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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�C.G. Bell
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:
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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
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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
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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
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�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
33
�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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SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
20. Baroque Formulation
CHARLES G. BELL
ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
or
1260 CANYON ROAD
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501
January 1993
Last Revised January ‘96
�Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
20. Baroque Formulation
1)
Guercino, 1621, Aurora ceiling fresco, vertical section, Casino Ludovisi, Rome
(video, center-spread only)
Same, horizontal view of whole (video, horses only)
Same, detail of 1 (video then returns to the horizontal whole of 1a)
1a)
1b)
MUSIC:
Monteverdi, 1607, Orfeo, Toccata into Prologue, ARC-3035
If Baroque is to signify a period style (that, more or less, of the 17th century), its
character cannot be the faulted irregularity of the word's origin, whether from a strained
syllogism or a lopsided pearl; we must deepen our search for its quality, at the same time
allowing that no element, neither abandon nor control, tactile realism or ideal grandeur,
space, radiance, chiaroscuro, or in music monody, homophony, chromatics, can specify a
style, but only the ethos-bearing configurations in which such moments are combined.
(Music) It is by idea that we recognize, date, and name: as Guercino's Aurora, 1621,
Monteverdi's Orfeo, 1607.
Not only the space-crowding and shadowed passion of this Guercino render it
Baroque; (Fade music) since what it rivals,
2)
Guido Reni, 1610 ff., Aurora, Rospigliosi Palace, Rome; + V details
the 1610 Guido Reni,
MUSIC:
Monteverdi, Orfeo, cont., Lasciati i monti, ARC-3035
is of the same style-horizon, and yet two centuries would extoll its classical ordering —
as richly formal, as voluptuously academic as the Parnassus Milton evokes at the close of
Comus, 1634:
1/1993
Baroque Formulation
1
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
To the Ocean now I fly,
And those happy climes that ly
Where day never shuts his eye,
Up in the broad fields of the sky:
There I suck the liquid ayr
All amidst the Gardens fair
Of Hesperus, and his daughters three
That sing about the golden tree:
Along the crisped shades and bowres
Revels the spruce and jocund Spring,
The Graces, and the rosie-boosom'd Howres,
Thither all their bounties bring,
That there eternal Summer dwels,
a3)
Poussin, 1631, Realm of Flora, Gallery, Dresden: detail of group center-left
(first, a video detail of Flora, standing)
Same, whole picture
3)
And West winds with musky wing
About the cedar'n alleys fling
Nard and Cassia's balmy smels.
Iris there with humid bow,
Waters the odorous banks that blow
Flowers of more mingled hew
Than her purfl'd scarf can shew,
And drenches with Elysian dew
(List mortals, if your ears be true)
Beds of Hyacinth, and roses
Where young Adonis oft reposes,
Waxing well of his deep wound
In slumber soft, and on the ground
Sadly sits th' Assyrian Queen …
MUSIC:
Orfeo, continued: Mira deh Mira, and Ahi Caso acerbo, opening
A classic joy, complicit, as in the Orfeo or in Poussin's Realm of Flora,
4)
4a)
1/1993
Same, detail to the right, with Hyacinthus and others
Slide: closer detail of Hyacinthus alone; or video pan detail of 3: far left, the
suicide of Ajax
Baroque Formulation
2
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
with the ripe sob of grief. What these works share — in light and calm, in shade and
pathos — is the swell of heroic formulation, what stretches the Orfeo between flown
recitative and figured bass.
(Fade Orfeo.)
Va5) Annibale Carracci, c. 1603, Flight to Egypt, Doria, Rome, with frame arch
entire (CGB '86)
5)
Same, with part of frame arch (CGB '86)
5a) Same, detail of barge (CGB '86)
5b) Poussin, 1648-51, Landscape with a Snake, National Gallery, London
MUSIC:
Orfeo, Act III, Sinfonia III and Possente spirto, opening, ARC-3036
Indeed, a polar tension of the age we call Baroque — like every such, spectrumblended in artists who seem opposed — sets on one side the balance taught by the
Eclectics: this 1603 Carracci Holy Family come to Egypt, like Monteverdi's Orpheus, by
Charon's barque.
("Possente
spirto")
All his life Poussin would seek that dignity of landscape planes;
a6)
Claude Lorrain, 1645-6, The Judgment of Paris, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; + V detail of landscape to the right
Claude Lorrain, c. 1655(?), Cephalus and Procris, National Gallery, London;
+ V detail
6)
Claude would suffuse its rural fact with Arcadian vision; while music from Monteverdi
(Fade violins) to the French Chambonnieres,
MUSIC: Chambonnieres, c. 1660(?), Chaconne (Landowska) V. 15180
wakes such strains as Virtue does in Comus:
At last a soft and solemn breathing sound
Rose like a steam of rich distill'd Perfumes,
And stole upon the Air, that even Silence
Was took ere she was ware, and wish't she might
Deny her nature, and be never more,
Still to be so displac't. I was all eare,
1/1993
Baroque Formulation
3
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
And took in strains that might create a soul
Under the ribs of Death …
(Fade Chambonnieres.)
Va7
Caravaggio, 1605-06, Death of the Virgin, Louvre, Paris (video: center detail
only)
b7) Same, closer detail of Mary (video: horizontal spread)
7)
Caravaggio, 1602-04, Entombment of Christ, detail, Vatican
7a) Caravaggio, 1600-01, Conversion of St. Paul, detail of Paul struck down;
Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome (cf. V7a)
V7b) Caravaggio, 1598-1600, Martyrdom of St. Matthew, S. Luigi dei Francesi,
Rome (video: center only)
Against that measured tread, Caravaggio, by 1600, had forged the counterpole of
Tenebrist passion.
But the same Orfeo which gave us classical parallels, darkens to chromatic pain.
MUSIC: Orfeo, from Act II, I languidi lumi and chorus, ARC-3035
The same Comus which twined Hesperian gardens, initiates the brooding
vindication of Paradise Lost:
(Chorus: Ahi caso acerbo)
But evil on it self shall back recoyl,
And mix no more with goodness, when at last,
Gather'd like scum, and setl'd to it self
It shall be in eternal restless change
Self-fed, and self-consum'd, if this fail,
The pillar'd firmament is rott'nness,
And earths base built on stubble.
a8) Same, Martyrdom of St. Matthew, detail of killer
Vb8) Caravaggio, 1609, Raising of Lazarus, detail, Mus., Messina
8)
Rembrandt(?), 1651(?), Descent from the Cross, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.
8a) Rembrandt, 1648, Supper at Emmaus, detail, Louvre, Paris (cf. V8b)
V8c) Rembrandt(?), 1657, Crucifixion, Clark Museum, Williamston, MA (video returns to a detail of 8, Rembrandt, Descent from the Cross)
1/1993
Baroque Formulation
4
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Already the prophet scourging "The dark Idolatries/ Of alienated Judah," and "Moloch,
horrid King besmear'd with blood/ Of human sacrifice …"
The deepening of that naturalism of light and shade as it spreads from Caravaggio
to the solemn pity of Rembrandt, does not alter whatever conscious formulation flexed
the bow of the Great Baroque. Pagan and Christian, south to north, runs one groundswell of mighty style, as when Monteverdi's operatic song sires the Pietistic German of
Heinrich Schütz: "For you are my Helper, my Helper and my Saviour, my God …"
MUSIC:
Schütz, 1636, close of Cantata "Eile Gott" (Psalm 40), (Meili) AS-28 (end)
9)
German, c. 1030, MS 1640, f 117v, Christ on the Sea of Galilee, Hessische
Bibliothek, Darmstadt; + V detail
V9a) Regensburg or Salzburg, c. 1040, Christ on the Sea of Galilee, Staatsbibliothek, Munich (with video return to 9)
In six centuries we have come from the symbolic calligraph of this storm on the
Sea of Galilee, the boat of the world on the fallow waves (fealu wegas) of Germanic
wandering — Cynnewulf: "anxious the struggle/ To bring our barks to land over the dire
sea surges/ The Son of God our rescue." Here he sleeps in the presaged Leviathan of
death and hell.
MUSIC:
Catalan, 11th cent., from "In eadem quippe," Gerona MS, Musical
Heritage, OR-433
While the sequences and tropes of 1000 contract all things to the Dark Age center of
Gregorian voice and parallel melisma.
(Fade Catalan.)
10)
V10a)
V10b)
V10c)
V10d)
Rembrandt, 1633, Storm on the Sea of Galilee, Gardner, Boston
Schönfeld, c. 1640, The Flood, Mus. Kassel: two details only
v.d. Neer, River Town Ablaze, National Gallery, Dublin (CGB '74)
Details of 10: Rembrandt's Storm on the Sea of Galilee
Rembrandt (and Flinck), 1636, Sacrifice of Isaac, Alte Pinakothek, Munich
(CGB '59) (video: detail only)
MUSIC:
1/1993
Schütz, 1636, same Cantata, “Eile mich”, opening, AS-28
Baroque Formulation
5
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
The same scene in Rembrandt confronts the new physics with the life-imperative
of Protestant will: Schütz, Eile Mich, Gott zu erreten.
Fleming has such a storm poem ("Des Donners wilder Plitz schlug von sich
manchen Stoss"):
The lightning from its cloud struck endless blows;
Mortal men stood wan; the torn sky trembled
Resounding to the crash; earth under crumbled,
Sank below my feet; the cracked ground uprose
To meet my fall, yawned tomb-wide, to enclose
My pilgrim days. I took to the sea: tumbled
In rage it swelled cliff-high; my carrack, humbled,
Broke mast and split and settled to its close.
(Skip to "immer sagen")
Before, behind, on all sides round was fear;
Above destruction and beneath the grave;
There was no mother's son to help or save;
And yet I was unbowed, thought life as dear,
Nor fled impending death or when or where,
Safe in the arms of my Redeemer's care. (CGB)
(Close organ phrase.)
11)
Cologne, c. 1400, St. Veronica's Veil, Alte Pinakothek, Munich; + V detail
Within the shorter span, set Veronica's nakpin, Rhenish early 15th century — and
the Christe Eleison from Dufay's first mass —
MUSIC:
12)
Dufay, c. 1420, 3rd Christe Eleison, Missa sine Nomine, Lyrichord LLST7234
(Fade Dufay.)
Fetti, c. 1620, Veil of Veronica, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; + V details
against Fetti's handling, about 1620 — with the Crucifixus from Carissimi's Mass for Five
and Nine.
MUSIC:
Carissimi, c. 1650(?), from Crucifixus, Missa a Quinque et a Novem,
MHS-1110
So Marino's Adone asserts the primacy of the tactile:
1/1993
Baroque Formulation
6
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Every other sense can be deluded by false objects; this one only is true,
faithful minister and father of delights; the others possess parts of the
body; touch extends its power through the whole, and in universal act,
seizes on all things. (CGB)
(Fade Carissimi.)
13)
Michelangelo, 1513-16, Moses, detail, S. Pietro in Vincoli, Rome
No wonder the turn to Baroque was once assigned to Michelangelo. But the transpersonal might of his Renaissance ingathering is far
14)
Rubens, 1603-4, Judas Thaddaus, Prado, Madrid (video: detail only)
from the conscious rhetoric of the century of Rubens, or of Milton's blind touch:
In darkness, and with dangers compast round,
And solitude; yet not alone, while thou
Vist'st my slumbers Nightly, or when Morn
Purples the East … (Paradise Lost, VII)
15)
V15a)
Persian, c. 1400(?), Jonah and the Whale, Metroplitan Museum, NYC
Double: [A] Japan, 607 A.D., Bronze Buddha, Horgu-ji, Nara; and
[B] Kamakura, 1328, Shinto deity as Bodhisattva, Fine Arts, Boston (video
returns to 15, Jonah and the Whale
The spatial filling-in of the symbolic is not confined to the art-history of the West.
The whole current of the later world may have run that way, as in the Japanese garden
refinements of the Buddha. To pass from this 1425 Persian representation of Jonah, as
flat as Gothic,
16)
Iran (for Shah Tamasp), 1527-28, Rustrum Cleaves a Witch, Book of Kings,
Metropolitan Museum, New York City (video shows detail only)
to the adventures of the Book of Kings a hundred years later, is to parallel the Italian
Renaissance — as Gentile Bellini's sketch of a Turkish artist might remind us — in touch
with the Moslem East.
1/1993
Baroque Formulation
7
�C.G. Bell
17)
Symbolic History
Simone Martini, 1315-21, Madonna from the Maestas, Palazzo Publico,
Siena
Same, wider section
V17a)
But only Europe goes from thinness and ideality
MUSIC:
Jacobo da Bologna, c. 1340, Fenice fu, close, ARC-3003, or AS-59
(already in 14th century Ars Nova and Simone Martini exploring later modalities),
(Close Fenice fu.)
Va18)
18)
El Greco, 1577-79, The Trinity, upper detail, Prado, Madrid
Same, closer detail of Father and Son
through a dynamic crisis, both symbolic and physical — so Victoria and El Greco —
MUSIC:
Victoria, pub. 1605, from Kyrie of Missa Pro Defunctis, Vox DL-690
(Close)
19)
Francesco del Cairo, 1630-35, Herodias, detail, Metropolitan Museum, New
York City (CGB '74)
V19a) Same, whole, including frame (CGB '74)
19b) Bernini, 1668-70, Angel with Scroll and Crown of Thorns, S. Andrea delle
Fratte, Rome
MUSIC:
Frescobaldi, 1630, from Voi Partite mio sole, (Meili) AS-79
to an art of volitional command, as causally flexed as the moments of a Newtonian force
array. So the tragedies of Corneille turn on heroic obligation — family against king, love
against honor; as when the Cid discovers in the insulter of his father the father of his love:
Miserable vengeur d'une juste querelle —
Whichever way, fierce anguish follows me …
I draw the sword of pain,
To seek, alas, the father of Chimene. (CGB)
Frescobaldi's recitative plucks the reflective chords of the viscera.
(Close Frescobaldi.)
1/1993
Baroque Formulation
8
�C.G. Bell
20)
20a)
V20b)
For V20c)
Symbolic History
Rembrandt, 1629, Self Portrait, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '53)
Rembrandt, c. 1634, Self Portrait, Uffizi, Florence
Rembrandt, c. 1628, Self Portrait, Stattl. Kunstsammlungen, Kassel
Video goes here to a21 (see below)
At the center of the change lies the validating subjectivity of the infinite self, as
much a point of departure for Rembrandt, 1629, as for Descartes' "wonderful science" —
its 1619 discovery, in the famous "room with a stove", described in the Method, of 1637:
As for the opinions I had received up to that time, I thought it better to
make a clean sweep and throw them all away. … Thus, seeing that our
senses sometimes deceive us, I was ready to suppose that there was no
such reality as they give us images of; and because reason can err,
even in geometry, I rejected what before had seemed the surest proofs;
moreover, since such thoughts as come to us waking can also visit our
sleep, I resolved to treat all that had entered my mind as no more real
than the figments of my dreams. But in the act of thinking all was
false, it came to me as necessary that I, who did that thinking, must be
real. Thus observing that the truth: I think; therefore, I am, was so
certain that no extravagance of the skeptics could ever shake it, I took
it boldly for the first principle of the philosophy I was in search of …
[Discourse on Method]
a21)
21)
Rembrandt, 1630, Self Portrait, bareheaded, Aerdenhout, Holland (video
returns to a close detail of 20, 1629 Self Portrait, Munich)
Rembrandt, 1628, Man in a Window-lighted Room, National Gallery,
London; + V detail
By an axiomatic leap the self Descartes discovers is not merely the doubter, dreamer,
nightmarer (from whom little in the way of certainty could be deduced), but an eternal
thinking substance, clear and sufficient assurance of God and causality, with its
mathematical plotting of world, perception, and all, along equational abscissas of space
and time:
All points of those curves … which admit of precise measurement
must bear some rapport to all points of a straight line, a relation which
can be expressed by means of a single equation…
If then we should take successively an infinite number of values for
the line y, we should obtain an infinite number of values for the line x,
and therefore an infinity of different points, such as C, by means of
which the required curve could be drawn…
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22)
22a)
V22b)
22c)
Symbolic History
Rubens, c. 1638(?), Sunset with Cattle, Louvre, Paris
Ruisdael, 1660-70(?), Sunset in a Wood, Wallace Collection, London
Claude Lorrain, 1660, Juno, Io, and Argus, National Gallery, Dublin
(CGB '74)
Rembrandt, 1643, Etching: The Three Trees, Rijksmuseum
In ordered infinitude the landscape from this late Rubens through Claude,
Rembrandt, and Ruisdael matches the science from Galileo to Huygens, Leibniz, and
Newton. Descartes' System of the World must have been one of the proudest of these
constructions. He burned it when Galileo was condemned; but a guarded summary appears in Book V of the Methode:
I showed how the greatest part of the matter in the original chaos must,
in accordance with natural laws, dispose and arrange itself in such a
way as to present the appearance of heavens; how in the meantime
some of its parts must compose an earth and some planets and comets
and others a sun and fixed stars…
I next came to speak of the earth and to show how … mountains,
seas, fountains, and rivers might naturally be formed in it, the metals
produced in the mines and plants grow in the fields; and in general,
how … things purely material might, in the course of time, become
such as we at present observe them …
How far that looming space of thought takes us
23)
Jan van Eyck, 1435, Landscape detail from Madonna with Chancellor Rolin,
Louvre, Paris
For V23a - a24)
Video repeats 22c, Rembrandt's Three Trees
1st 24) Zurbaran, 1633(?), Cup and Three Vases, Prado, Madrid
from the naive delight observation had opened for Jan van Eyck, through a sacred loggia
beyond the Virgin and a donor's praying hands; or what giant intrepid will exchanged this
magic kingdom for that weighty republic of cause?
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Galileo best states the axiom of material validity which dignifies the new world,
and which lifts the still life to an apotheosis of the actual — Spinoza's "Reality and
Perfection … one and the same."
1st 25) Hugo van der Goes, 1476-78, Portinari Altar, detail of wheat and flowers,
Uffizi, Florence (CGB '59)
Sagredo, Galileo's priest of establishment, has expressed the old weightless geometry
"where mere size cuts no figure." But it does not explain the physical, leaves it to
Reason's antagonist, "the irrational imperfections of the material."
For Va2nd 24) Zurbaran, detail of 24, Cup and two of the vases
2nd 24)
Same, detail of the cup (to the left, with saucer)
Salviati saves us by incorporating the mathematical logos in the motions and forces of
things, converting bondage into glory. But he can only redeem the physical by its
idealization: "Since I assume matter to be unchangeable and always the same." It is that
incarnate axiom which haloes the tactility of a Zurburan goblet and bowl.
2nd 25) Memling, c. 1480, Chalice of St. John the Evangelist, National Gallery,
Washington, D.C.; + V detail
Where a 1480 Memling Chalice of St. John, as perfect in observation, abides in the
mystery of symbol, the cup of that snake-fallen body Christ drank as Second Adam — the
same snake Moses raised on the rod, to become the Rood.
For 1st 26) Tintoretto, 1548, St. Mark rescues a Saracen, detail, Accademia, Venice
(CGB '59)
At the climax of the whirl which led from spaceless hovering to material
formulation, Bruno, burned in 1600, as Inquisition sapped the terminal freedom of
Venice, acclaims himself Hermetic seer of a God-irradiated universe,
For 1st 27)
Tintoretto, 1550-3, Creation of Animals, Accademia, Venice (CGB '59)
daring as Tintoretto's charged effluvia of light:
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Behold now, the man who has pierced the air and penetrated the sky
… who has broken down those imaginary divisions between spheres
… and thrown wide the doors of truth … stripping the veils and coverings from the face of nature…
For 1st 28) Same: Expulsion detail of The Fall (CGB '59)
All those creatures who may not gaze upon the lights of heaven, but
are destined to dwell in the infernal circles of Pluto's dark prisonhouse, when they hear the dread summons of Alecton's furious horn,
spread wide their wings and veer away in rapid flight toward their
abodes.
For 1st 29) Tintoretto, 1577, Moses Strikes the Rock, ceiling, Scuola San Rocco,
Venice (CGB '48)
But those who were born to see the sun, full of thanksgiving at the end
of the loathsome night, dispose themselves to receive in the very center
of their eyes' crystal globe the long expected rays, and with unaccustomed gladness in their hearts, lift up hands and voices to adore the
East …
For 2nd 28-27)
Tintoretto, c. 1562, Removing St. Mark's Body from Alexandria, Accademia,
Venice (CGB '59) [V2nd 28 only, since V2nd 27 shows a view of the Sala del
Collegio, other than the CGB of 2nd 26, below.]
Such the confidence of Vieta's algebra, 1591: "This Universal Mathematics
enables us to attack the proud problem of problems … For there is no problem which
cannot be solved.”
In music that climax of late-Renaissance, everywhere exploring polychoral and
instrumental masses, chromatics, even recitative — what Monteverdi would establish as
conscious Baroque — attends Giovanni Gabrielli, Venetian teacher of 1600 Europe.
With the old Harvard performance of his "In Ecclesiîs," our slides advance through
Tintoretto to the final explosion of El Greco:
MUSIC:
1/1993
Giovanni Gabrielli (pub. 1615), In Ecclesiîs, Cambridge CRS 201
(accompanied by all of the following slides)
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2nd 26)
V2nd 26a)
Va3rd 27)
b3rd 27)
3rd 27)
3rd 28)
Va2nd 29)
Vb2nd 29)
2nd 29)
For 1st 30)
For 1st 31)
V1st 31a)
For 1st 32)
1st 32a)
1st 33)
Symbolic History
Venetian (da Ponte, Veronese, etc.), c. 1575, Sala del Collegio, Doge's
Palace, Venice (CGB '48)
Same, Sala dello Scrutinio, Ceiling, 1580 ff. (CGB '48)
Tintoretto, 1566, The Finding of the Body of St. Mark
From the same, detail: the Saint appears; Brera, Milan
Tintoretto, 1588-89, Sleep of St. Mark ("Pax tibi Marce"), Accademia,
Venice (CGB '59); + V detail: angel above
Same, detail of the lighted figures below (CGB '59)
Tintoretto, 1565, two pans from a crucifixion detail of the vast Scuolo di
San Rocco canvas, Venice (CGB '59)
Tintoretto, 1562-6, two pans from St. Mark Rescues a Saracen at Sea,
Accademia, Venice (CGB '59, of the whole; CGB detail of an oarsman
used above as 1st 26)
Tintoretto, 1581-84, Venice Queen of the Sea, Sala del Senato, Doge's
Palace, Venice (CGB '48); video: two details only
Tintoretto, 1592-4, The Last Supper, Church of San Giorgio Maggiore,
Venice
El Greco, 1570-75, Annunciation, Prado, Madrid
El Greco, 1579-84, Disrobing Christ, Munich (CGB '59)
El Greco, 1610-14, Opening of the Fifth Seal, detail, upper half,
Metropolitan Museum, New York City
Same, detail, center right (CGB '74, from 1600, 2nd 3)
El Greco, 1613-14, Betrothal of the Virgin, Museum Bucharest
(preceded by a video detail of the upper half)
(End Gabrielli)
This Betrothal of the Virgin is one of El Greco's last pictures. Here humanity has
been purged, as by Shakespeare's wheel of fire.
2nd 32 and 2nd 31)
El Greco, 1608-14, View and Plan of Toledo, upper detail, Museo del Greco,
Toledo
But the tragic alchemy of 1600 was accompanied, in the Spain of El Greco's
adoption, by an ultimate transcendence of the comic —
Cervantes there writing the strangest and wisest book of the Western world. Like every
ultimate, Don Quixote defies art-cognates; yet it is tied to the late Renaissance vast and
mysterious expansion of the value world.
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2nd 30) Tintoretto, c. 1590(?), Crucifixion, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59); + V
detail, left
Tintoretto's play of electric powers in a still symbolic space of dark portends the Don's
descent into the Cave of Montesinos, with his other dream adventures:
A vast lake of boiling pitch, in which an infinite multitude of fierce
and terrible serpents are swimming, from which a doleful voice is
heard: O Knight, who gazest on the dreadful Lake … make known thy
valour by casting thyself into the midst of these black burning surges
… or thou art not worthy to behold the wonder of the seven castles
seated under these gloomy waves.
2nd 30a) Tintoretto, 1592-94, from the Last Supper, detail, upper left, Flambeau
and Angels, San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice
— wonders actualized in the masquerades of Part II:
Now the night grew darker and darker, and several shooting lights
were seen glancing up and down the wood, like meteors or glaring
exhalations from the earth. Then was heard an horrid noise …
3rd 31)
3rd 32)
2nd 33)
El Greco, 1584-86, Burial of Count Orgaz, detail of the dead body, Santo
Tome, Toledo
Same, wider detail of the Burial Group and Mourners
Same, the whole: Burial below, Heaven-Arch above (Note: from these
three slide-show images, plus six others in the video file — a3rd 31,
3rd 31a, 3rd 31b, 3rd 31c, 2nd 33a, and 2nd 33b — the video draws a
sequence of twelve Orgaz visuals.)
Staggering, the transcendence by which a ground of resigned dying sustains the
vital fulfillment of Erasmus' High Folly, where Quixote's madness —
to offer my arm and person against whatever danger fate presents … in
this Age of Iron to restore the Age of Gold
en esta nuestra edad de hierro para resucitar en ella la del oro …
becomes, for all its uncertainty ("subject to the discipline of blows, hunger and thirst …
rags, want, and misery," and "I do not know what success I may have in this depraved
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Symbolic History
time"), the soul's calling: "the religious soldier to be preferred before the religious
monk"; so killing sheep as if they were armies, Quixote's grinders knocked out by the
slung stone, Sancho peering in when the Balm of Fierabras brings up the knight's gorge
and drowns them both in vomit, are raised to the loveable courage of the adventure of the
Lions — humanity past fiction, spirit above sainthood.
Yet, as in El Greco's Burial of Count Orgaz, nobility is swirled in another
judgment, so in Quixote the imperative of self-dedication breaks to a death-humbling —
the very sky-aspiring transvalued by return to the common ground of Christian (and
tragic) faith. Such human grandeur under dissolution of form peaks the Renaissance
watershed to the great Baroque.
34)
V34b)
34c)
Veronese, 1573, Feast in the House of Levi, Accademia, Venice; + V detail
(made from slide V34a)
Veronese, 1562-64, Wedding at Cana, detail of center: musicians, Louvre,
Paris
Same, Wedding at Cana, detail to the left
Conceive the expansive opulence of late Titian, Tintoretto, this Veronese, caught
up in the action, description, language of Don Quixote, most of all when Part II swells
incalculably beyond Part I — Camacho's feast a mere sign:
The first thing that blessed Sancho's sight there was a whole steer
spitted before a fire that seemed a flaming mountain; round it six
capacious pots or ample coppers, in which entire sheep seethed as
conveniently as pigeons …
35)
36)
V36a)
1/1993
Rubens, 1636-38, The Great Kermess, whole, Louvre, Paris (video draws two
details from this slide: right and left above)
And for drink Sancho told above threescore great skins of wine … The
scent of the fried meat put him in such a commotion he could hold out
no longer, but accosting one of the cooks, he begged leave to sop a
luncheon of bread in one of the pans … "Take a ladle, man, and skim
out a pullet or two." … "I see no ladle, sir," said Sancho. "Blood and
suet," cried the cook, "what a helpless fellow …"
Same, detail to the left; video: left-below (cf. CGB '80: V35-36)
Again, Veronese, Wedding at Cana, detail of far right (video here repeats 35,
The Great Kermess, whole)
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36b)
Symbolic History
Again, The Great Kermess, detail of dancing figures
He soused into a pot with a kettle, fishing up three hens and a couple
of geese at a heave: "Here, friend, take this, and make shift to stay
your stomach with this scum until the time to eat …"
— conceive that abundance (called Mannerism, but to what a manor born) never again to
be paralleled in wealth of imagination, spilling over into the coagulations of Rubens'
Kermess; but the whole humorous outpouring
37)
El Greco, c. 1600, Portrait of a Bearded Man, Prado, Madrid
as if taking place in Inquisition and Colonial Spain, and through the dream-gate of El
Greco's dynamic idealism — in that image we almost feel the fitness of Cervantes,
stretched from the Venetians, through El Greco,
38)
V38a)
Rubens, 1603, Duke of Lerma, sketch, Louvre, Paris; + v detail
El Greco, 1603-07, Adoration of the Shepherds, detail, Prado, Madrid
toward the youthful proud consciousness of Rubens. And it was in the chivalric and
ecstatic Spain of 1603 that the painter-diplomat sketched this armed and mounted Duke
of Lerma — one of those nobles who by Cervantes' supreme invention of his fiction's
coming to life as read, might have entertained the actual Knight of the Woeful Figure.
Though Lerma and Rubens seem of the new age, across the formulating divide, where
Don Quixote, like English Shakespeare, had clung to the dream transitions of the Platonic
past.
39)
Carlo Maderno, 1607-14, Façade of St. Peter's, Rome
Rubens was traveling from Rome, center of the histrionic concretion of Baroque:
the 1612 façade of St. Peter's, which like all conscious gestures may protest too much.
MUSIC:
40)
1/1993
Anerio, c. 1600(?), from Introit, Requiem Mass, G-DB 1572 ("et tibi")
Bernini, 1624-33, Baldachin, looking up to Michelangelo's 1546-64 Dome, St.
Peter's, Rome (Video inserts upper part of 2nd 40, Baldachin and Choir, and
from slide 41, detail of a Baldachin bronze angel, Bernini, 1624-33)
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Symbolic History
But in the complementarity between the Baroque force of Bernini's Baldachin and
the solemn Renaissance of Michelangelo's dome — which was the Sistine Choir
invoking, 50 years ago, when they stretched the motets of Palestrina and his school, here
Anerio?
(Fade
Anerio.)
2nd 39) Again, St. Peter's Façade: a Papal Blessing (CGB '48)
Surely the forging of Baroque (as of Cartesian thought, or of tonality from the
church modes) must reduce, under billowing might, complexities of nuance.
So Benevoli's 53-part Festive Mass of 1628, for six contrasting choirs with
instruments and basso continuo — against the dynamic weft of Gabrielli — heaps up
merely harmonic voices in columnar masses of sound.
MUSIC:
Benevoli, 1628, Mass for Saltzburg Cathedral, from the Qui tollis, Epic
LC-3035
2nd 40) Again, Bernini's Baldachin: from the Nave, to the Choir
41)
Slide: Bernini, 1624-33, Bronze angel from the Baldachin. Video: detail of
1st 40: Column of Baldachin, looking up to Dome; and just before it, a
detail of V1st 40, variant of the same (CGB '86)
42)
Pietro da Cortona, 1633-39, Glorification of Urban VIII, whole ceiling,
Barberini Palace, Rome; (CGb '86) + V detail
42a)
(Fade Benevoli.)
Same, closer detail, with Barberini heraldic bees (CGB '86)
In painting, the deployment of Renaissance techniques for cumulous assertion
crowns the stair hall of the Barberini Palace with Pietro da Cortona's praise of its Urban
VIII — flattery not the least conspicuous brilliance of the Baroque. Cortona's model
a43 and Vb43)
From Correggio, 1526-30, Assumption of the Virgin, angel details, Cathedral,
Parma
43) Same, detail, including the Virgin (video divides into two details.)
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Symbolic History
was Correggio. But the Correggio ceiling breathes the fresh discovery of 1530. So the
polyphonic swirls from Fevin and Gombert to Victoria's "O Magnum Mysterium"
etherealize the pomp they mediate.
MUSIC: Victoria, pub. 1572, from O Magnum Mysterium (Allelluya), HMV-L1017
(Close)
What of Palestrina?
44)
Raphael, 1513-14, Sistine Madonna, Gallery, Dresden
Is his tie to the Sistine perfection of Raphael, from eleven years before he was born?
45)
Titian, 1516-18, Assumption of the Virgin, I Frari, Venice
Or does his taking up the rhetoric of the century, from Titian's 1518 Assumption,
46)
El Greco, 1577, Assumption (with frame), Art Institute, Chicago
to the always more swelling ascents of his own time (Baroccio, this 1577 El Greco),
anticipate the Baroque?
For 1st 47) Guido Reni, 1616-17, Assumption of the Virgin, Vatican (In slide show,
this goes to 2nd 47; 1st 47 becomes Guido Reni, c. 1607, Coronation of the
Virgin, National Gallery, London)
Yet not even these have the conscious mass and assertion, which first appear after
Palestrina's death, as in Guido Reni.
For 2nd 46)
Choir of I Frari, 1330-1417, with Titian's Assumption of the Virgin
Altarpiece, Venice (in slide show, also 2nd 45)
With such proclamation altars, spread over a hundred years,
V for 2nd 45)
Baroccio, Night Nativity, Ambrosiana, Milan
we seek the affinities of the Sanctus of Palestrina's most famous mass, mythically
associated with the Council of Trent and the vindication of polyphony.
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Symbolic History
2nd 44) Again, Raphael, Sistine Madonna; video: two details only
MUSIC:
3rd 45)
V3rd 45a)
Palestrina, by 1555, Sanctus, Missa Papae Marcelli, ARC-3182
Again, Titian, Assumption; video: center of picture
Correggio, 1523-28, Madonna called "Il Giorno," detail, Galleria,
Parma
Correggio, 1530, Nativity called "La Notte," detail, Gallery, Dresden
Again, Baroccio, Night Nativity, detail of V for 2nd 45
Again, El Greco's Assumption of the Virgin (from nearer)
Detail of Reni's Coronation of the Virgin (slide: 1st 47)
Reni's Assumption of the Virgin [cf. V1st 47] (video shows two
details)
Michelangelo and others, 16th cent., St. Peter's from the Janicula
(south side), Rome (CGB '86)
Michelangelo, 16th cent., Dome-vaultings, St. Peter's, Rome
V3rd 45b)
Va3rd 46)
3rd 46)
Va2nd 47)
2nd 47)
1st 48)
V48a)
(Close Palestrina Sanctus)
For 3rd 47)
Guido Reni, c. 1627, Immaculate Conception, Metropolitan Museum,
NYC (CGB '74); video: detail only
That hosanna, even in formal triumph, less suggests Guido Reni's Miltonics —
So maist thou be translated to the skies,
And give resounding grace to all Heav'ns Harmonies —
Va2nd 48) Vignola and della Porta, 1568-84, Façade of Il Gesu, Rome (CGB '86)
2nd 48)
Same, interior (variant views for video and slide show)
than the Counter-Reformation solemnity Michelangelo passed to Vignola and della Porta.
The barrel vaults and dome of Il Gesù, reared 1568-84, in the lifetime of Palestrina, draw
late-Renaissance to a gravitating center of the Baroque, and a shrine of its 17th century art
—
1st 49) Palladio, c. 1550, Villa Rotonda, Vicenza, Italy, (CGB '59)
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Symbolic History
models of the future fulfilling the style of the past. So with Palladio's mid-century villas
or Tasso's heroic Conquest of Jerusalem:
Floods clap their hands, on mountaines dance the
pines,
And Sions towres and sacred temples smile,
For their deliv'rance from that bondage vile. (Fairfax)
1st 50) Palladio and Veronese, 1561-62, Villa Barbaro (called Maser), Fresco, Lady
and Nurse, as on a Balcony, Northern Italy
So too with Veronese's 1561 decoration of Palladio's Villa Maser. Later Baroque
imitation cannot obscure the free dynamic of its Venetian Renaissance.
1st 51) Raphael, 1511, Galatea, Farnesina, Rome; video: detail only
MUSIC:
Seb. Festa, pub. 1526, Se'l pensier, close, Nonesuch H-71097
Set the pagan recovery of Raphael, with the Frottole emergence of the Festas,
1st 52) Pietro da Cortona, 1637, The Age of Gold, Pal. Pitti, Florence
V1st 52) Fresco with frame (CGB '48); + V details (52 & V52 are used alternately
here and below, for video and digital)
MUSIC:
Monteverdi, 1632, Zeffiro torna, opening, Boulanger, VM-496 (or LP)
against Pietro da Cortona's Age of Gold, more than a century later. The history of the
madrigal is encompassed between them, from clear dawn, to the proclaimed wreathing of
earth-moods, as Monteverdi turns the form to operatic duet and chaconne.
(Fade Zeffiro.)
2nd 51 and for 2nd 50 slide)
Again, Raphael, Galatea, whole
Yet the 1590 madrigals from Monteverdi's inspired youth — this to the words of
Tasso, "Ecco mormorar l'onde," and in the always unsurpassed Boulanger performance,
recall the pure ease of high Renaissance.
V for 2nd 50)
Again, a detail of V1st 52: Cortona, The Age of Gold
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With which style, which century, do they compare?
Va2nd 49) Palladio, c. 1558, Villa Foscari, called "Malcontenta," Italy
2nd 49)
Palladio, c. 1550, Villa Rotonda, down entrance lane (CGB ‘59); video
also repeats, from 1st 49, that view of the Rotonda (CGB '59)
MUSIC:
3rd 50)
V3rd 50a)
V3rd 50b)
3rd 51)
2nd 52)
53)
54)
Monteverdi, pub. 1590, Ecco mormorar l'onde, MV-496, or Ser. 60125
Veronese, 1561-62, Salon, a frescoed corner, Villa Maser, Asolo
Same, Maser, frescoes, Sala di Bacco, landscape detail
Same, fresco from a side room, Hunter at a door
Again, Raphael, Galatea, detail (video: above and below)
Again, Cortona, Age of Gold, detail (video takes two details, above
and below from V1st 52)
Domenichino, c. 1610(?), The Chase of Diana, detail of the hunt,
Borghese Gallery, Rome
Same, foreground detail of bathing nymphs (CGB '48)
(Close Ecco mormorar l'onde)
For 2nd 53-54)
Again, Domenichino, Diana's Hunt, whole; + V detail: bathing nymphs
If Palestrina looked back, Monteverdi's sequence over a descending bass swells
toward Domenichino's heightened Baroque: Diana's nymphs of the chase, and of the
pool.
55)
V55a)
Tintoretto, 1578, Ariadne, Bacchus and Venus, Anticollegio, Doge's Palace,
Venice
Titian, 1556-59, Diana and Acteon, National Gallery of Scotland,
Edinburgh
We have said no element defines a style. The change in music might seem to be
from free polyphony to the harmonic binding of figured bass. When the inwrought play
of Tintoretto's 1578 Ariadne, rich as the Tasso that flowed into Spenser's Bower of Bliss:
Two naked Damzelles (in the fount he spied) …
As that faire Starre, the messenger of morne,
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His deawy face out of the sea doth reare:
Or as the Cyprian goddesse, newly borne
Of th' Oceans fruitful froth, did first appeare:
Such seemed they… —
Va56)
56)
Caravaggio, c. 1600, Amor Victorious, detail, Staatliche Museen, Berlin
Caravaggio, c. 1596, Lute Player, Hermitage, St. Petersburg
shifts to Caravaggio's light-centered seduction of touch, is it like the tightening into
recitative? And does Ben Jonson's ripest lyric parallel that conscious moulding?
Slow, slow fresh fount, keep time with my salt teares;
Yet slower yet, O faintly, gentle springs;
List to the heavy part the musick beares,
Woe weeps out her division, when she sings…
Where the debt to Tasso is already through the baroque of Marini.
Va2nd 55)
2nd 55)
MUSIC:
Titian, 1560, Diana and Callisto, Kunsthist. Mus., Vienna (CGB ‘59)
Again, Tintoretto, Ariadne, Bacchus and Venus, detail
Luzzaschi, c. 1580(?) (pub. 1601), O Dolcezze, SAWT-9466-B
But what do we mean by a shift from the polyphonic? There had been lute songs
throughout the Renaissance. The accompanied madrigals of Luzzaschi, performed at
Ferrara in the '70s and '80s, push toward the Dowland style-verge of the century to follow.
(Fade Luzzaschi.)
Va2nd 56) Caravaggio, 1591, Sick Bacchus, detail, Borghese Gallery, Rome
Vb2nd 56) Caravaggio, 1591-94 (?), Musicians, detail, Met. Mus., New York City
2nd 56)
Again, Caravaggio, The Lute Player, detail, Hermitage
Yet the Florentine continuo experiments of 1600 had still to forge a reductive
concentration, stretched on the rack of heroic recitative. Caccini:
MUSIC:
Caccini, pub. 1601, Amarilli (close) MIA 1
(End)
Peri:
MUSIC:
1/1993
Peri performed 1601, Gioite al canto mio, (refrain) from Euridice, MIA 1
(Fade.)
Baroque Formulation
22
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Like everything in the Baroque, Caravaggio's shadowing
Va57)
57)
Leonardo da Vinci, 1503-06, Madonna of the Rocks, detail to the right,
with the Angel, National Gallery, London
Same, Madonna of the Rocks, detail of the Angel's head
has Renaissance parentage. But how far the inner-glow of Leonardo's twilight is from
Caravaggio's logic of the physical. As far as Caccini from his lute-song origins — Cara:
MUSIC:
a58)
b58)
Vc58)
Vd58)
58)
M. Cara, c. 1500, from S'io siedo a l'ombra, Candide CE-31017
(Fade)
Double: [A] El Greco, 1603-05, Madonna, detail, Hospital de la Caridad,
Illescas; and [B] Caravaggio, 1605, Madonna of the Serpent, detail,
Borghese Gallery, Rome
Double: [A] El Greco, 1608-14, Angels from Baptism, Hospital de S.
Juan, Toledo; and [B] Procaccini, c. 1610, Magdalen, Brera, Milan
El Greco, 1608-14, Assumption over Toledo, detail, El Greco Museum,
Toledo
El Greco, 1603-05, Coronation of the Virgin, detail, Hospital de la
Caridad, Illescas
El Greco, 1608-14, Baptism of Christ, detail of Angels, Hospital de San
Juan Bautista, Toledo (cf. [A] of a58)
Even with the chromatics of 1600, as revolutionary as El Greco's astigmatism or
Caravaggio's chiaroscuro, it is not half-tone progression which differentiates (any more
than it was monodic song), but rather the formal method of its handling — how changed
from late Mannerist to Baroque (both about 1610) — from Gesualdo, with El Greco —
MUSIC:
Gesualdo da Venosa, 1600-10(?), Ora pro nobis close of Ave, dulcissima
Maria, (Deller), VICS 1364
(End)
from that frenzy of spirit,
59)
V59a)
1/1993
Procaccini, c. 1610(?), Magdalen, Brera, Milan; video: detail only
Gentilleschi, c. 1610, Saint Cecilia and the Angel, National Gallery,
Washington, DC (CGB '75)
Baroque Formulation
23
�C.G. Bell
V59b)
Symbolic History
Guercino, c. 1620-25, Angels Weeping over Christ, detail, National Gallery,
London (detail of duplicate from Mozart 51)
to the swooning flesh of Procaccini, with a phrase from Viadana, also to "dulcissima
Maria":
MUSIC:
L.G. Viadana, pub. 1615, O dulcissima Maria, opening, ARC 3217 (Fade)
As that Italy radiates to the North,
1st 60) Elsheimer, c. 1598-1600, Baptism of Christ, National Gallery, London
(Video uses whole, then detail, of angels above; slide show, for 1st 60,
substitutes Elsheimer, c. 1599, Rest on the Flight, Berlin-Dahlem Museum
— a detail of which becomes V60a.)
or northerners are drawn to the peninsula, artists like Elsheimer create transitional
Baroque from Gothic line and Renaissance ideal. So Kepler's Epitome of Astronomy
blends mathematical induction with speculative overreach …
If Earth was to move like a planet, what was required (against Aristotle's ethereal
bodies perfecting their circles by angelic intelligence) was a physics of the heavenly built
on the inertia of earthly mass. Such an earth-physics would first be published by Galileo
in 1638. By that time, Kepler had based his astronomy on God-given wheels, invoking
Gilbert's magnetism only to squeeze them to the ellipses his calculations had revealed.
For 1st 61)
Rubens, c. 1610(?), Annunciation, Dublin Gallery (CGB '74) (Video adds the
original 61, now 2nd 61 in the slide-show: Rubens 1609-10, Annunciation,
Kunsthist. Mus., Vienna (CGB '59)
A wild Rubens blend of the ideal and empirical, Kepler staggeringly reckoned
from Brahe's observations the three enduring laws, meanwhile juggling the ratios, roots,
and powers of planetary size, mass, intercept, motor virtue (of which he could know
nothing) trying to bring the orbits and archetypal reason into line: "stamped with the
adornment of harmonic proportions."
1/1993
Baroque Formulation
24
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
In music, Praetorius effects such a vast synthesis of Gothic and Venetian,
polyphony and recitative. We take a phrase from his setting of Luther's "Vom Himmel
hoch":
2nd 60)
Slide show has the original 60: Elsheimer, Baptism, from which the video
makes a closer detail of the angels above
MUSIC:
M. Praetorius, pub. 1619, from the Polychoral Vom Himmel hoch,
Nonesuch H 71242
2nd 61) Rubens, 1608-09, Annunciation, Vienna, (CGB '59); video: detail only
62)
Same, Rubens, Annunciation, detail of Angel (CGB '59)
(Close "sagen will")
Rubens rapt angel of 1609 marks the divide to inertial mass.
63)
V63a)
63b)
El Greco, 1570-75, Boy Lighting a Candle, Capodimonte Museum, Naples
Same, detail
El Greco, 1612-14, Adoration of the Shepherds, detail: Head of a shepherd,
Prado, Madrid (closer detail of V38a)
Up to that point, the material search itself had swirled with trans-reality: — El
Greco's 1570 boy lighting a candle, the night climax of Bruno's Candelaio, or even the
porter in Macbeth:
If a man were porter of hell-gate, he should have old turning the key.
Knock, knock, knock. Who's there in the name of Beelzebub…
Drink, sir, is a great provoker of three things …
Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep, and urine …
So Bruno's compatriot, Nola, choir-master at Naples, limns three blind beggars
singing for alms:
MUSIC:
64)
V64a)
1/1993
Giov. Domenico da Nola, c. 1560(?), Tre Ciechi siamo, close, Everest
3179
Caravaggio, c. 1594, The Fortune Teller, Louvre, Paris
Same, detail of hands
Baroque Formulation
25
�C.G. Bell
V64b)
64c)
64d)
Symbolic History
Le Valentin, 1620(?), The Cheat, Dresden Gallery, detail (first videod
backward: revised ‘94 — preceded by 64c below, + V detail — and
followed by 64d)
Caravaggio, 1594-95, Cardsharps, Kimbell Museum, Fort Worth
Georges de la Tour, The Cheat, Kimbell Museum, Fort Worth
By the turn of the century, Caravaggio has put such realism on the shore where
Ben Jonson's Fox and Alchemist make it lawful prey — Volpone's clever Mosca to the
doddering deaf Corbaccio:
Mosca:
Corb:
M:
C:
M:
C:
M:
C:
Volp:
M:
C:
M:
C:
M:
C:
65)
Georges de la Tour, c. 1620(?), Fortune Teller, Met. Museum, New York City
(The slide of the whole, CGB '79, with details, four in the slide show, two
more in the video file, provide nine video images, varying the a65, b65, 65, 65a
and 65b order of the slide show.)
M:
C:
1/1993
You're very welcome, sir.
How does your patron?
Troth, as he did, sir; no amends.
What! mends he?
No sir, he is rather worse.
That's well. Where is he?
Upon his couch, sir, newly fall'n asleep.
… I have brought him an opiate here, from mine own
doctor, 'tis but to make him sleep.
[Playing sick] Ay, his last sleep, if he would
take it.
He has no faith in physic … I often have
Heard him protest that your physician
Should never be his heir.
— Not I his heir?
Not your physician, sir.
— O no, no, no.
I do not mean it … How does his apoplex?
Is that strong on him still?
— Most violent.
His speech is broken and his eyes are set,
His face drawn longer than 'twas wont.
— How? how?
Stronger than he was wont?
Drawn longer than 'twas wont.
Baroque Formulation
— No sir; his face
— O, good!
26
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
M:
C:
M:
C:
MUSIC:
Is ever gaping, and his eyelids hang.
— His mouth
— Good.
A freezing numbness stiffens all his joints
And makes the colour of his flesh like lead …
Good symptoms still … sure I shall outlast him!
Orl. Gibbons, Fantasy on the Street Cries, "New Mussels," ARC-3053
Marvellous, the comic vigor, as that delight in the actual and its castigation strikes
root in the North: Fantasies on Street Cries, Weelkes, Deering, this Gibbons; the
overflow of the Jacobean stage up to the Puritan closure: A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, A
trick to Catch the Old One, the boiling Kermess of Jonson's Bartholomew Fair (1615) —
though with vignettes as sharply focussed as this La Tour Fortune Teller, locket cutter,
Gypsy thieves. "I would fain see that cutpurse you talk of," says Jonson's silly Cokes in
the play; while Nightingale the Ballad Singer draws the crowd — Trash ("Will your
worship buy any gingerbread"), Leatherhead the toy-man, fat Ursula, Mooncalf, and all
— so that Edgworth, his accomplice, can pluck the dandy clean. As in the picture: "A
man might cut out his kidneys and he never feel 'em."
(Fade Gibbons.)
66)
El Greco, c. 1610-14, View and Plan of Toledo, detail, Greco Museum, Toledo
(Video begins with Va66, a wider detail)
Again the 1610 transition: from El Greco's giddy perspectives, or in Shakespeare,
"the dread summit of the chalky bourn" imagined from the flat stage of Lear:
Gloucester:
There is a cliff whose high and bending head
Looks fearfully in the confined deep;
Bring me but to the very brim of it …
Edgar
How fearful
And dizzy 'tis, to cast one's eyes so low …
I'll look no more
Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight
Topple down headlong …
67)
1/1993
François de Nome, called "Monsu Desiderio," 1623, Ruins with St. Augustine
legend, Private Collection, London
Baroque Formulation
27
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
— through the visions of the so-called Monsu (eddies of nightmare formed under the jets
of Baroque reality; yet reality takes the lead)
68)
V68a)
Rubens, 1618-20, Landscape: Ruins of the Palatine, Louvre
Poussin, c. 1629-30, Narcissus and Echo, Louvre; + V detail
— to Rubens' ruins of the Palatine. So Webster's Duchess congeals the electric malice of
Lear to a brooding earth-presence — summoning the echo with which Monteverdi had
answered Orfeo's "ahi, pianto" and "guai."
MUSIC:
Monteverdi, 1607, from Orfeo, Act V, two echoes, ARC 3036
(Fade.)
For 2nd 67) Variant, Monsu, Ruins, National Gallery, London; + V detail
Webster:
—
2nd 68)
Yond's the cardinal's window. This fortification
Grew from the ruins of an ancient abbey;
And to yond side o' the river lies a wall,
Piece of a cloister, which in my opinion
Gives the best echo that you ever heard,
So hollow and so dismal, and withal
So plain in the distinction of our words,
That many have supposed it is a spirit
That answers.
Detail of Rubens, Palatine; + closer V detail
—
I do love these ancient ruins.
We never tread upon them but we set
Our foot upon some reverend history:
… but all things have their end:
Churches and cities, which have diseases like to men,
Must have like death that we have.
—
"Like death that we have."
—
Now the echo hath caught you.
—
It groaned, methought, and gave
1/1993
Baroque Formulation
28
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
A very deadly accent.
1st 69) Caravaggio, 1607-08, Beheading of St. John the Baptist, whole, Cathedral,
Valletta, Malta
V69a) Same, detail to the right, men behind bars
—
"Deadly accent."
—
I told you, 'twas a pretty one: you may make it
A huntsman, or a falconer, a musician,
Or a thing of sorrow.
—
"A thing of sorrow."
—
Ay, sure, that suits it best.
—
"That suits it best."
Va70 Left of same picture: video details, above and below
70) Same, detail of the face of the old woman
—
'Tis very like my wife's voice.
—
"Ay, wife's voice."
—
… I would not have you go to the cardinal's tonight:
Do not.
—
"Do not." …
—
Echo, I will not talk with thee,
For thou art a dead thing.
—
"Thou art a dead thing."
—
My duchess is asleep now,
And her little ones, I hope sweetly: O Heaven,
Shall I never see her more?
—
"Never see her more."
—
I marked not one repetition of the echo
But that; and on the sudden a clear light
Presented me a face folded in sorrow …
1/1993
Baroque Formulation
29
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
This Caravaggio face
2nd 69 and 2nd 70)
Same: Beheading group (of which video shows also a detail);
while V for 2nd 70 returns to the whole picture (from 1st 69)
is from his 1608 Beheading of John, where the villainy which had fascinated the
Renaissance assumes the weight of body. So the tragedy of revenge, from Kyd — "O
life! no life, but lively form of death" — to Webster — "My soul, like to a ship in a black
storm,/ Is driven, I know not whither."
Let the content and structure of the sonnet attest that upheaval of values:
71)
71a)
Parmagianino, 1535-37, Portrait called Antea, Capodimonte Museum, Naples
Same, upper detail; + V: two more details
Nothing was ever simple, but one pole of Mannerism was the balance treasured from
Renaissance, the fitting of matter to form, perfect in this Parmagianino as in Surrey,
Spenser, early Shakespeare — the end-stopped claspings of sonnet rhyme:
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st;
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
72)
72a)
72b)
72c)
1/1993
Beccafumi, c. 1524, Fall of the Rebel Angels, Pinacoteca, Siena
Same, detail below
Same, middle detail (video makes two: right and left)
Same, upper detail (digital then repeats the whole)
Baroque Formulation
30
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
The other Manneristic pole is the outbreak of wild alchemical force, Beccafumi's
1524 Fall of the Rebel Angels, Renaissance-Gothic aimed through El Greco at Blake.
While Shakespeare's crisis wrenches the syntax of the sonnet almost to the sprung stress
of Hopkins:
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoy'd no sooner, but despised straight;
Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallow'd bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad:
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and prov'd, a very woe;
Before, a joy propos'd; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows, yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
1st 73) Rubens, c. 1620, Small Last Judgment, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59;
of which the slide show uses a middle detail)
In Rubens, the fire-frenzy conglomerates, a saturation point, as earthly
engrossment heightens the violence of salvation.
Va2nd 72)
Michelangelo, 1536-41, Last Judgment, struggling figures from the
lower right, Sistine Chapel, Vatican
For 2nd 72) Same, Saved souls; video: detail only
Michelangelo had felt it: "Rend the veil, break down the wall" — Squarcia'l vel tu
Signior, rompi quel muro"; even Ariosto had toyed with the fallen need of force:
2nd 73)
1/1993
To render pity to hearts penitent
Is ours below, to draw them up with love,
Maugre their own will, is God's, above. (CGB)
Again, Rubens, Small Last Judgment (CGB '59); slide show now presents
it whole, video in three spreads: upper, middle, and below
Baroque Formulation
31
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Now as world-nature thickens toward Descartes, the impossible stretch for a God
whelmed in bulk — "As though heav'n suffered earthquakes, peace or war" (Donne) —
curdles in Judgment paradox:
At the round earths imagin'd corners, blow
Your trumpets, Angells, and arise, arise
From death, you numberlesse infinities
Of soules, and to your scattred bodies goe;
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom warre, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despaire, law, chance, hath slaine …
(conscious rhetoric, buckling the pentameter)
74)
74a)
Rubens (or copy), 1619-1620, Crucifixion sketch (for the Church of the
Recollets, Antwerp), Aachen Gallery (CGB '74); + three video details
Procaccini, 1618-20, Raising of the Cross, National Gallery of Scotland,
Edinburgh (video: detail only)
As at the forge of Rubens, Donne violates the sonnet for a salvation conceived as
rape:
Batter my heart, three person'd God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow mee, 'and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to 'another due,
Labour to 'admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason, your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weake or untrue,
Yet dearely 'I love you, 'and would be loved faine,
But am betroth'd unto your enemie,
Divorce mee, 'untie, or breake that knot againe,
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you 'enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.
1st 75) Rembrandt, c. 1660, Self-portrait with palette, Kenwood House, London;
video: large detail and face detail only
75a)
Rembrandt, 1661, Homer Dictating, Mauritshuis, The Hague; + v detail
1/1993
Baroque Formulation
32
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
MUSIC:
Mathew Locke, c. 1665, Fantasy 5, G Minor, chromatic opening,
Westminster WGS 8242
By mid-century the chromatic, in Mathew Locke, moves under brooding control.
While with blind Milton the sonnet has passed its crisis; Renaissance articulation
convolves into the vaulted reach of consciousness:
(Skip to chromatic rise.)
When I consider how my light is spent,
E're half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide,
Lodg'd with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide;
Doth God exact day-labour, light deny'd
I fondly ask. But patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies,
1st 76) Rembrandt, c. 1656, The Artist's Son Titus reading, Kunsthistorisches
Museum, Vienna (CGB '59); video: detail only
God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his milde yoak, they serve him best, his state
Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o're land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and waite.
(Fade Locke.)
V2nd 75) Again, 1660, Self-portrait with palette (here, whole, from 1st 75)
2nd 75a) Rembrandt, 1669, detail of the last Self-portrait, Mauritshuis, The Hague
— as darkened as Rembrandt, neglected in gathering age; yet as deeply sure of self,
ordered earth, and causal God — Descartes' lonely doubter, who closes his meditations:
"qu'il y a un Dieu … et qu'il n'est point trompeur" —
And I ought not to doubt the truth of these presentations … for since
God is no deceiver, it follows necessarily that I am not herein
deceived …
Under the great assertive thrust
1/1993
Baroque Formulation
33
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
2nd 76) Again, Titus reading, a closer detail
by which the faith postulates have moved into time, making their peace with thinking self
and causal world, an entire realm of human and earthly good is as quietly assured as the
lights on Rembrandt's Titus, reading.
1st 77) Elsheimer, c. 1609(?), Tobias and Raphael, National Gallery, London
Perhaps Elsheimer, in Caravaggio's Rome, first took the glow of that
transcendental paradise, where Tobias is guided by the angel — a promise Gibbons
harmonizes in a 1623 Song of the Church: "Oh, my love, how comely now":
MUSIC:
O. Gibbons, 1629, Oh, My Love (a phrase) ARC-3053
a78)
Elsheimer, c. 1610(?), Two Childhood Guardians (from a set of six),
Petworth House; with V details
1st 78) Poelenburg, c. 1620(?) (after Elsheimer), the same Guardian Saints, Pitti,
Florence (CGB '48)
How humbly Poelenburg takes it up — twin guardians of natural childhood, angel
and saint. While Herbert, from his rural parish, sounds the quietest benediction.
V2nd 77) Two video details from slide 77: Elsheimer, Tobias and Raphael
V2nd 78) Poelenburg, two other Guardian Saints from the Pitti set of six (these,
CGB '86); + V detail ; digital, double only; after Domenichino
(While the slide show, for 2nd 77 and 2nd 78, uses Domenichino, c. 1612,
Tobias Landscape, National Gallery, London; see Va1st 80, below)
Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky;
The dew shall weep thy fall to-night
For thou must die.
Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye;
Thy root is ever in its grave,
And thou must die.
Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,
A box where sweets compacted lie;
1/1993
Baroque Formulation
34
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
My music shows ye have your closes,
And all must die.
Only a sweet and virtuous soul,
Like a seasoned timber, never gives;
But though the whole world turn to coal,
Then chiefly lives.
79)
Bernini, 1657-66, Cathedra Petri or High Altar, St. Peter's, Rome (video:
lower detail only)
The Baroque arose out of Renaissance and humanism. However the grand
manner vaunt the inflations of creed and court, its chordal and spatial loyalties were to the
temporal good. Beyond the mammoth holies Bernini applied to St. Peter's, lay the Rome
Va1st 80)
Domenichino, c. 1612, Tobias Landscape, National Gallery, London (detail of
slide 2nd 77-78, above)
For 1st 80)
Claude Lorrain, 1631, Flight to Egypt, Belvoir Castle, Leics. (better the whole of
2nd 80)
where the landscape of recovery spread from Elsheimer and Carracci to Domenichino,
Poelenburg, this early Claude. So the fortissimo of Monteverdi's Exultent caeli cradles
his tenderest "O Maria," in an epiphany of power and heart.
a2nd 79) Again, Bernini, Cathedra Petri, upper detail, St. Peter's, Rome; video uses
the top of 1st 79
2nd 79) Same, Cathedra Petri, detail of the Dove window and Angel Glory; video
details the center of this slide
MUSIC:
2nd 80)
Monteverdi, 1629, from Exultent Caeli, Decca SDD 363
Claude Lorrain, c. 1631, Rest on the Flight, Clark Institute,
Williamstown, Massachusetts; video and digital detail
(with "O Maria" — fade.)
1/1993
Baroque Formulation
35
�
Dublin Core
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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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36 pages
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Baroque Formulation, Symbolic History, Part 20
Description
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Script of Part 20 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell.
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Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010
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St. John's College
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Santa Fe, NM
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English
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SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
21. Milton: Mind's Dark Glory
CHARLES G. BELL
ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
or
1260 CANYON ROAD
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501
June 1995
Last Revised July 1996
�Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM
87501
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
21. Milton: Mind's Dark Glory
1)
1a)
Rembrandt, c. 1629, Self Portrait in a Gorget, Mauritshuis, The Hague;
with V details
Rembrandt, 1629, Self-Portrait, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59)
Music:
H.Schütz, 1629, Sinfonia from Fili Mi Absalon, Symph. Sac. I, 13
Nonesuch H-1160
"The Egotism of such a man", said Coleridge, "is a revelation of spirit." He was
not speaking of the Rembrandt of this 1629 Self-portrait, nor of the Schütz whose Lament
for Absalon, of the same year, has a prelude for trombones; but of Milton — the youth
Wordsworth imagined "with his rosy cheeks... And conscious step of purity and pride" —
since childhood serious as his own Christ in Paradise Regained "to learn and know and
thence to do/ What might be public good" — Milton, who in the "Nativity Ode," also of
1629, joined his "voice unto the Angel Quire" — his style, as he would say, "by certain
vital signs it had… likely to live." What willful reason rays its god-space through the
palpable obscure?
(fade Schütz)
2)
2a)
Rembrandt 1661, Self-Portrait as St. Paul, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
(CGB '59)
Same, detail (video then returns to whole)
Thirty-two years later, Rembrandt, in age and increasing neglect, turned as often
to his own deep-shadowed form — a lighted Gospel witness, himself the Apostle Paul.
While Schütz, in a Germany ravaged by thirty years of war, put off the lavish
choirs and instruments of Venice, to deepen in his Passions the drama of solo song and
choral motet:
Music:
July 1996
Schütz, 1664, Last recitative and Kyrie, close, St. Matthew Passion
ARCHIV 3172
Milton: Mind's Dark Glory
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a3)
b3)
3)
Symbolic History
Rembrandt, 1648, Supper at Emmaus, cropped; Louvre, Paris (video uses Va3)
Rembrandt, 1661, Risen Christ, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59); video:
detail only, cf Vb3
Rembrandt, 1660, St. Peter Denies Christ, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; first,
V detail
(end Passion)
After the Civil War and its dangerous service, Milton ("eyeless in Gaza — under
Philistian yoke"), returned from "they also serve who only stand and wait" to his old
promise: "to celebrate in glorious and lofty Himns the throne and equipage of God's
Almightinesse"; he wrote Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes —
though as earth-betrayed as Rembrandt's Peter after the arrest of Christ.
a4)
4)
Rembrandt, 1658, Philemon and Baucis, National Gallery, Washington, DC
(CGB '60)
Same, detail of group around the table (CGB '60); + closer video details
Yet as Jove and Mercury graced the hut of the pious Philemon and Baucis in
Rembrandt's pagan parallel for Christ's sacrament, Milton's dark house received the
invocation to light: "Bright effluence of bright essence increate":
Music:
John Jenkins, c. 1640(?), 6v. Fancy, beg. & end; Argo RG 73
...but thou
Revist'st not these eyes, that rowle in vain
To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn;
So thick a drop serene hath quencht thir Orbs,
Or dim suffusion veild. Yet not the more
Cease I to wander where the Muses haunt
Clear Spring, or shadie Grove, or Sunnie Hill,
Smit with the love of sacred song; but chief
Thee Sion and the flowrie Brooks beneath
That wash thy hallowd feet, and warbling flow,
Nightly I visit:
5)
5a)
Rembrandt, 1662-63, Homer Dictating (fragment), Mauritshuis, The Hague;
+ V detail
Rembrandt, c. 1638, Landscape with Stone Bridge, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
(which video follows with 6b below, Rembrandt's Mill — as if it were V5b)
nor somtimes forget
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Those other two equal'd with me in Fate,
So were I equal'd with them in renown,
Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides,
(This Homer, to whom Rembrandt also turned in his last decade.)
And Tiresias and Phineus Prophets old.
Then feed on thoughts, that voluntarie move
Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful Bird
Sings darkling, and in shadiest Covert hid
Tunes her nocturnal Note. Thus with the Year
Seasons return, but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of Ev'n or Morn
Or sight of vernal bloom, or Summers Rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud in stead, and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the chearful waies of men
Cut off, and for the Book of knowledg fair
Presented with a Universal blanc
Of Natures works to mee expung'd and ras'd,
And wisdome at one entrance quite shut out.
6)
6a)
6b)
(fade Jenkins and skip)
Rembrandt, 1661, St. Matthew and the Angel, Louvre, Paris; first, video
detail
Rembrandt 1629-30, Artist in his Studio, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Rembrandt, c. 1650, The Mill, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC;
while video takes lower left detail of waves, etc. (cf V6b) — returning
thereafter to a detail of 5a, Landscape with a Stone Bridge
So much the rather thou Celestial light
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight.
As the angel to Rembrandt's Matthew, Milton's Heavenly Muse:
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Symbolic History
...dictates to me slumbring, or inspires
Easie my unpremeditated Verse...
(Paradise Lost IX, 22-3)
If Baroque self is peculiarly a revelation of spirit, it is that from these Miltonic
centers (as in Jenkins' fantasy on one theme) the tensile world orders itself in light and
shade, like God's sensorium in Newton’s Query.
(fade Jenkins)
Va7)
7)
7a)
V7b)
Georges de la Tour c. 1630-35, Mary Magdalen with a Night Lamp, Louvre,
Paris (CGB '80)
Same, detail, Mary Magdalen with a Night Lamp
George de la Tour, 1630-35, The Education of the Virgin, detail of Hand and
Candle, The Frick Collection
Same, whole of same picture, Frick
So the tactile flows from the night-lighted Magdalen of Georges de la Tour,
conceptual, as in the Meditations of Descartes:
...impossible to doubt that I am in this place, seated by this fire, clothed
in a winter dressing-gown, that I hold in my hands this piece of paper...
Yet like others... I sleep... I have dreamed I was in this place, clothed
and before the fire, when I was naked in my bed... Though now I am
awake; it is with conscious deliberation that I extend this hand...
I see light, hear noise, feel heat. Suppose one says these sensations are
false; it cannot be false that I think I perceive... Take this wax, just
come from the hive; it has still the sweetness of honey, the smell of
flowers; it is hard, cold, can be worked, when struck it sounds... Let it
be placed near the fire... its flavor exhales, its odor evaporates, its color
changes, it loses its shape, becomes liquid, struck it does not sound.
Does the same wax remain? No one doubts it... Something remains,
extended, malleable, moveable... an intuition of mind...
8)
Velasquez 1618, Kitchen scene with Christ, Mary, and Martha, National
Gallery, London; first, video details, cf V8a
Let me close my eyes, stop my ears, turn my senses from things, efface
them as empty and false; so in inward gaze... I will seek little by little
an awareness of what I am... I am a thinking being and possess in my-
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Symbolic History
self an idea of God... the thinking cause of my being... since what is
cannot be produced by what is not...
Once I have discovered that God exists and that he is no deceiver, it
follows that whatever I see clearly and distinctly must be true... With
such clarity I see that the certainty and truth of all sciences rests on the
knowledge of the true God.
As in Velasquez' kitchen scene with the picture-window of Christ, Mary and
Martha, the daily is secured by the divine presence. We know from his first biographer,
that even Descartes' Method had the seal of prophetic dreams.
9)
9c)
9d)
Velasquez, c. 1657-59, Las Hilanderas, Prado, Madrid; plus various video
details, cf. V9a + b
Velasquez, 1634-35, Surrender of Breda, Prado, Madrid; video: detail only
Velasquez, c. 1620?, St. John in the Wilderness, Art Institute, Chicago
Music:
Frescobaldi, 1627, Aria, "La Frescobalda," Richard Stark
Again in Velasquez's Weavers, the richer by forty years, the foreground vibrates in
the myth of the alcove, where helmeted Minerva (before a tapestry of Titian's "Europa")
blights overweening Arachne. While in music the noble falls of Frescobaldi's Aria spread
over Europe, (close Frescobaldi) swelling the cadences of the Spanish harp.
Music:
Diego Fernandez de Huete, late 17th cent., Cancion Italiana from
Archive 198-458
And in the rhyme-flexed grandeur of Calderon's La Vida es Sueño, 1635 ("My life
stands in the level of your dreams"), substance is secured, as in Descartes, by a method of
doubt which seems its negation. Like Beggar Sly taken in drink to be a lord, Sigismundo,
oracle-haunted prince, who knows only a mountain prison, is conveyed in sleep to the
palace as heir. He breaks into the predicted passions and is returned to wake in his rock
fastness:
De todos era señor
y de todos me vengaba.
Sólo a una mujer amaba...
Que fué verdad, creo yo.
en que todo se acabó
y esto solo no se acaba.
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a10)
b10)
c10)
10)
Symbolic History
Velasquez, c. I649-51, The Toilet of Venus, National Gallery, London;
+ V detail
Velasquez, 1656, Las Meninas, detail, right of center, Prado, Madrid
Same, from Las Meninas; detail of the artist
Same, Las Meninas, whole (video, lower spread only)
I was lord of all
and I took vengeance on all,
I loved only one, a woman...
And that was true, I believe,
For the rest has faded away,
This only does not fade. (CGB)
But it is just the conviction of insubstantiality —
What is life but a frenzy?
What is life but a cheat?
It is a shadow, a story,
And the greatest goods are not great;
For we dream that we are dreaming,
In a life that is dream throughout — (CGB)
¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí.
¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión,
una sombra, una ficción,
y el mayor bien es pequeño;
que toda la vida es sueno,
y los sueños sueños son. —
which brings him (by a leap like Pascal's wager) to value and nobleness:
I say that I am dreaming,
and that I wish to do well, since
good deeds are not lost, even in dream — (CGB)
Que estoy soñando, y que quiero
obrar bien, pues no se pierde
el hacer bien, aun en sueños.
Music:
July 1996
(fade Cancion Italiana)
Diego Fernandez de Huete, cont. from Cancion Franzesa, ARCHIV198-458
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Symbolic History
Fit, that Velasquez's masterpiece, alone in a small room in the Prado, can be
viewed in a mirror; since the artist looks out, painting the real reflection in which the
king* turns as he leaves the room, another picture of him, with the queen, glowing, as in a
lesser mirror; while the proud painter, before our eyes, lifts a peep-show court into worldsubjectivity.
*[Rather the marshal of the palace]
Va11)
11)
Velasquez, 1650, Entrance to the Grotto, Villa Medici, Prado, Madrid
Velasquez, 1650, Pavilion of Ariadne, Villa Medici, Prado, Madrid;
+ V details
Perhaps Velasquez's dream is most mysterious in the Villa Medici landscapes —
that Cartesian dream of noble and reasoning substance, transforming the world into
thought, as Milton's friend and colleague Marvel did in his poem on a Garden:
(Where) all the flowers and trees do close
To weave the garlands of repose...
Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness:
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade...
12)
12a)
12b)
(end Cancion Franzesa)
Rembrandt, 1630, Jeremiah foresees the Fall of Jerusalem, whole, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (CGB '59)
Rembrandt, 1636, Samson Blinded by the Philistines, Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt; then a video return to the figure of Jeremiah, from 12
Again Jeremiah, close detail (from CGB '59, Pascal 55)
From Roman villa to religious North: Milton's life and Latinate art vault that span.
But it was the dark-light span of Europe: Rembrandt's Jeremiah foreseeing the fall of
Jerusalem. So Calderon's Rosaura peers into the prison of Sigismund:
The door — or tomb-mouth rather —
Stands agape, and from its center
Night is born, of inner dark engendered... (CGB)
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Symbolic History
— desde su centro
nace la noche, pues la engendra dentro.
(Chains' sound within.)
Or Milton, of Melancholy:
Of Cerberus, and blackest midnight born,
In Stygian Cave forlorn...
Find out some uncouth cell,
Where brooding darknes spreads his jealous wings...
Here the phenomenal, later to appear the determinist outcast of Cartesian
cleavage, is still felt, dreamed and held, an overflow of god-filled consciousness, its light
and darkness palpable, its heightened oppositions reasoned and will-wrought into one.
13)
Poussin, 1629-30, Narcissus and Echo, Louvre, Paris (CGB '80); with three
video details
Such heroics of the tactile Baroque, the French share in a classical phase —
Music:
Charles Mouton, pub. 1698, Allemande, "La dialogue des graces
sur Iris" (lute), Turnabout TV 34137S
as when Poussin, in Rome, wills from Raphael and Titian tableaus Racine might stage, or
French lutenists resound — a style to which Milton relates, in the Renaissance-love of his
youth, at Horton, conjuring "Lycidas" from Latin, Greek, and Sannazaro:
Return Sicilian Muse,
And call the Vales, and bid them hither cast
Their Bels, and Flourets of a thousand hues.
Ye valleys low where the milde whispers use,
Of shades and wanton winds, and gushing brooks,
On whose fresh lap the swart Star sparely looks,
Throw hither all your quaint enameld eyes...
Bid Amaranthus all his beauty shed,
And Daffadillies fill their cups with tears,
To strew the Laureat Herse where Lycid lies...
14)
Poussin, 1630-33?, Cephalus and Aurora, National Gallery, London;
+ V detail, and again the whole
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Symbolic History
Ay me! Whilst thee the shores, and sounding Seas
Wash far away, where ere thy bones are hurld,
Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,
Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide
Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world;
Or whether thou to our moist vows deny'd,
Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old,
Where the great vision of the guarded Mount
Looks toward Namoncos and Bayona's hold;
Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth.
And, O ye Dolphins, waft the haples youth.
(end Mouton)
Though in early Milton, as in all Baroque, the Classical
a15)
Rembrandt, 1644, Christ and the Woman taken in Adultery, National
Gallery, London; while V takes upper details from 15 to follow: Rembrandt,
Presentation in the Temple (cf. Va15)
b15) Again from 15 to follow, a close detail of Simeon and the Holy Family
15)
Rembrandt, 1631, Presentation in the Temple, whole, Mauritshuis, The
Hague; or wider variant, V15
V15a) English Baroque (N. Stone), c. 1637, Portal of St. Mary's, High Street,
Oxford (CGB '84)
15b) Sir Cristopher Wren, 1673-1711, St. Paul's Cathedral, London (CGB '77)
meets the contrary dark space of Rembrandt, the pedal organ of Scheidt.
Music:
Samuel Scheidt, pub. 1624, Modus Ludendi organo pleno
pedaliter, (close) from Vox: SVBX-5316
To love the high embowed Roof,
With antick Pillars massy proof,
And storied Windows richly dight,
Casting a dimm religious light.
There let the pealing Organ blow,
To the full voic'd Quire below,
In Service high and Anthems cleer,
As may with sweetnes, through mine ear,
Dissolve me into extasies,
And bring all Heav'n before mine eyes.
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Symbolic History
Though what more suggests Rembrandt's 1631 Simeon temple — Oriental? Renaissance?
Baroque? revaulted out of Gothic — comes later in Milton, when the fallen angels, by
organ-pipe moulds, breathe such a temple from the gold-ribbed soil of Hell:
Anon out of the earth a Fabrick huge
Rose like an Exhalation, with the sound
Of Dulcet Symphonies and voices sweet,
Built like a Temple, where Pilasters round
Were set, and Doric pillars overlaid
With Golden Architrave...
Va16)
b16)
Vc16)
16)
(end Scheidt)
Again St. Paul's Cathedral, Interior, Dome, painted by Thornhill c. 1710
Michelangelo and others, 1546-90, Interior, Dome, St. Peter's, Rome
Egypt, 19th Dyn. c. 1250 BC, Death Temple of Rameses II, Thebes
Egypt, 19th Dyn. c. 1250 BC, Rock Temple columns of Rameses II as Osiris,
dawn light, Abu Simbel
What are the time-space reaches of Milton's "fabrick huge"? "Reason," he said, "is
but choosing." His was the first to shape, as from "veins of liquid fire," an entire world —
Creation to Judgment, with theology, philosophy, poem and plot, even the suspensions of
syntax and light-and-shade deployments of style — from the sensorium of inner power,
and in resonance with the dark might of his own time and personal trial. Symbolic
History takes perspective in his words: Egypt:
Not Babilon,
Nor great Alcairo such magnificence
Equal'd in all thir glories...
when Ægypt with Assyria strove
In wealth and luxurie.
(Paradise Lost I, 717 ff.)
Though the monuments for Milton lie under sacred shadow:
...Locusts, warping on the Eastern wind,
That ore the Realm of impious Pharaoh hung
Like Night, and darken'd all the Land of Nile...
(Paradise Lost I, 341-3)
17)
Neo-Babylonian, 604-562 BC, Ishtar Gate of Babylon, Staatliche Museen,
Berlin (video: upper-spread only)
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Milton: Mind's Dark Glory
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Symbolic History
V17a) Same, detail, lion, from the facade of the throne room
So when Satan shows Christ the kingdoms of the world:
There Babylon the wonder of all tongues,
As antient, but rebuilt by him who twice
Judah and all thy Father David's house
Led captive, and Jerusalem laid waste,
Till Cyrus set them free...
(P.R. III, 280-4)
In that palace
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Symbolic History
18)
Rembrandt, 1635, Belshazzar's Feast, National Gallery, London
V18a) Same, video detail of Belshazzar
Belschazzar saw the writing on the wall at the feast Rembrandt magnifies, he like Milton
hammering the tyranny and luxury of the East into one Biblical bullion:
High on a Throne of Royal State, which far
Outshon the wealth of Ormus and of Ind,
Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand
Showrs on her Kings Barbaric Pearl & Gold.
Satan exalted sat, by merit rais'd
To that bad eminence... (Paradise Lost II, 1-6)
Va19) Persian (Darius I and Xerxes I), 5th cent. B.C. Ruins of Persepolis
Vb19) Persian, 518-460 B.C., Staircase leading to Audience Hall of Darius I, "The
Immortals," Persepolis
19)
Persian, 518-460 BC, Ruins of Persepolis, Columns and Gate of Winged
Bulls
Till Cyrus set them free; Persepolis
His City there thou seest...
(P.R. III, 284-5)
Now Persia, the tyranny that had freed the Jews, turned on the other race who (in
Miltonic tension) held the love and loyalty of the West:
Xerxes, the Libertie of Greece to yoke
...over Hellespont
Bridging his way, Europe with Asia joyn'd
And scourg'd with many a stroak th' indignant waves.
(Paradise Lost X, 307ff)
Symbolic assault — Asia, Moloch and all —
As when a Vultur on Imaus bred —
(P.L. III, 431)
ravening:
Va20) Acropolis, 5th cent. BC ff., from Philopappou Hill, Athens (CGB '77)
20)
Same, 420-406 BC, Erechtheum, Porch of Caryatids, Athens
20a) Same (Mnesicles), 437-431 BC, Propylaea, Entrance to the Acropolis, Athens
(CGB '77)
July 1996
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Symbolic History
Where on the Ægean shore a City stands
Built nobly, pure the air, and light the soil,
Athens the eye of Greece, Mother of Arts
And Eloquence... (Paradise Regained IV, 238-41)
It had been the goal of his travels:
When I was preparing to pass over into Sicily and Greece, the
melancholy intelligence which I received of the civil commotions in
England made me alter my purpose; for I thought it base to be
travelling for amusement abroad, while my fellow-citizens were
fighting for liberty at home —
(Second Defence)
Recalled from that journey, he would address the Aereopagitica as to the assembly of free
Athens: "where books and wits were ever busier than in any other part of Greece." It is
always "Those Greeks
a21)
Roman 1st cent. BC to 3rd cent. AD, Forum, through the Arch of Severus to
the Temple of Castor, Rome
21)
Etrusco-Roman, c. 80 BC, The Orator Aulus Metellus, bronze, Archaelogical
Museum, Florence; + V detail
V21a) Another view of the Roman Forum, through mist
and Romans, the objects of our admiration."
Nor can it do more than heighten the Blakean puzzle of the poet's tie to Satan, that
the Tempter in Paradise Lost —
As when of old som Orator renound
In Athens or free Rome, where Eloquence
Flourishd, since mute, to som great cause addrest,
Stood in himself collected, while each part,
Motion, each act won audience ere the tongue,
Somtimes in highth began, as no delay
Of Preface brooking through his Zeal of Right —
(Paradise Lost IX, 670-7)
persuades Eve; since in the Second Defence, Milton so addresses the revolutionary world:
I imagine myself not in the forum or on the rostra, surrounded only by
the people of Athens or of Rome, but... from the columns of Hercules
July 1996
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Symbolic History
to the Indian Ocean, I behold the nations of the earth recovering that
liberty which they so long had lost...
22)
Roman (Philomelion), c. 30 AD, Bust of Tiberius, Louvre, Paris
V22a) Roman, c. 30 AD, Tiberius' Villa, ruins, Capri (CGB '80)
22b) Roman, 15-37 A.D., Cameo: "Gemma Augustea," Tiberius, after Panonian
victories, greeted by the spirit of Augustus; Kunsthistoriches Museuen, Wien
Milton knew the complexity of that loss:
As cruel Tiberius would wish, "When I die, let the earth be rolled in
flames."
(Against Prelaty)
This Emperour hath no Son, and now is old,
Old, and lascivious, and from Rome retir'd
To Capreæ...
with purpose there
His horrid lusts in private to enjoy,
...his Throne
Now made a stye...
(Paradise Regained IV, 90 ff.)
Of which Christ tells the cause:
That people victor once, now vile and base,
Deservedly made vassal, who once just,
Frugal, and mild, and temperate, conquer'd well,
But govern ill the Nations under yoke...
(Paradise Regained IV, 132 ff)
23)
Roman, 161-180 AD, Equestrian Marcus Aurelius, Bronze, Piazza del
Campidoglio, Rome, (video: detail only)
V23a) Same, another view, closer detail
Now it is Marcus Aurelius opposing Christian faith with pagan self-control, "Vain
wisdom all, and false Philosophie":
July 1996
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Symbolic History
The Stoic last in Philosophic pride,
By him call'd vertue; and his vertuous man,
Wise, perfect in himself... contemning all
Wealth, pleasure, pain or torment, death and life...
Ignorant of themselves, of God much more,
And how the world began, and how man fell
Degraded by himself, on grace depending...
(Paradise Regained IV, 300 ff.)
a24)
Roman, 312-15, Head of Colossal statue of Constantine, Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome
Roman Christian, 4th cent., Genii among Grapes, vault mosaic, Santa
Costanza, Rome
Roman-Christian, c. 320 ff, Lateran Baptistery, Rome
Vb24)
24)
But corruption had begun with the church itself, that "universal tetter of impurity"
Milton attacks in his Church-Discipline:
there is nothing wanting but Constantine to reign, and then Tyranny
herself shall give up all her citadels into your hands (aspiring
Bishops)... as if the heavenly City could not support itself without the
props and buttresses of secular Authority... with Constantine's wealth...
Antichrist began to put forth his horns... Formerly (saith Sulpitius)
Martyrdom by glorious death was sought more greedily, than now
Bishoprics by vile Ambition are hunted after...
On the Papal Empire Dante and Milton would blame, yet love its arts (this Lateran
Baptistery, often renewed, gilded Roman still),
25)
Russian Steppes, 6th-7th cent., Horseman?, silver-gilt, Historical Museum,
Kiev; + V detail
fell the Germans, pushed by the horse-Nomads of the Steppes:
A multitude, like which the populous
North Pour'd never from her frozen loyns, to pass
Rhene or the Danaw when her barbarous Sons
Came like a Deluge on the South, and spread
Beneath Gibraltar to the Lybian sands. (P.L. I, 351-5)
July 1996
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Symbolic History
The Dark Age metaphor of hellish legions loud with the organ voice.
Va26) French Gothic, 13th cent., West Facade, Reims Cathedral
Vb26) French Gothic, early 13th cent., North Window, Rose and Lancets, Chartres
Cathedral (CGB '59)
26)
Same, North Window, detail of Rose, with Kings of Israel and St. Anne
Neither Milton nor his age thought much of Gothic Christianity, Babylonian
idolatry of creed-captive grace:
Wolves shall succeed for teachers, grievous Wolves,
Who all the sacred mysteries of Heav'n
To thir own vile advantages shall turne
Of lucre and ambition, and the truth
With superstitions and traditions taint...
(Paradise Lost XII, 508-12)
The same "grim Woolf with privy paw" his youth had threatened with "that two-handed
engine at the door" — though his art-soul espoused those "storied Windows" and "the
studious Cloyster's pale".
27)
Rubens, 1635-40, Tournament in the Courtyard of a Castle, Louvre, Paris;
+ V details
What he had treasured most from Gothic was Chivalry:
In Fable or Romance of Uthers Son
Begirt with British and Armoric Knights…
(Paradise Lost I, 580-1)
From the Latin "Damonis" we know that around 1639 (when Rubens gathered this late
fruit of the same vine), Milton's planned epic, in the vein of Ariosto and Spenser, was to
have celebrated the matter later scorned in Paradise Lost:
Not sedulous by Nature to indite
Warrs... heroic deem'd... or to dissect
With long and tedious havoc fabl'd Knights
In Battels feign'd...
28)
July 1996
English, later 14th cent.(?), Old Radnor Church, South Wales (CGB '65)
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16
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V28a)
28b)
Symbolic History
English, 13th-15th cent., York Minster from Southeast
English, 14th cent., Merton College Library, Oxford (CGB '85)
And of course it was within the late Gothic attested by almost any parish church
of England (or Wales) that the humanization began which Milton ties to Chaucer's Parson
and to the man who "after so many dark Ages" first broke "the huge overshadowing train
of Error":
And had it not been the obstinate perverseness of our Prelates against
the divine and admirable spirit of Wickliffe, to suppress him as a
schismatic and innovator, perhaps neither the Bohemian Husse and
Jerome, no nor the name of Luther, or of Calvin had ever been known:
the glory of reforming all our neighbors had been completely ours.
(Areopagitica)
Since for Milton, even now "in the reforming of Reformation itself," what does God do
"but reveal Himself... as his manner is, first to his Englishmen?"
29)
29a)
29b)
Florence, esp. 1300-1500, general view of the city, Italy (CGB '59)
Brook in Vallombrosa, above Florence to the East (CGB '86)
Dona Creti, 1711, The Astronomical Observations: The Moon, Vatican
Collection
At the same time, that other motion reached the height which made Renaissance
Florence the Athens of the Western world. Milton writes of the 1638 visit, which
produced his glowing Italian poems:
In that city, which I have always most esteemed for the elegance of its
dialect, its genius and its taste, I stopped about two months...
(Second Defence)
It was fall. What memories later crowded upon him:
Thick as Autumnal Leaves that strow the
Brooks In Vallombrosa, where th' Etrurian shades
High overarch't imbowr...
(Paradise Lost I, 302-4)
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and:
...the Moon, whose Orb
Through Optic Glass the Tuscan Artist views
At Ev'ning from the top of Fesole.
Or in Valdarno to descry new Lands,
Rivers or Mountains in her spotty Globe.
30)
(Paradise Lost I, 287-91)
Mino da Fiesole, 1453, Piero de' Medici, Bargello, Florence; first, video
detail
No time will ever abolish the agreeable recollections which I cherish of
Jacob Gaddi, Carolo Dati, Frescobaldo... and many others.
On his way home:
I got safe back to Florence, where I was received with as much
affection as if I had returned to my native country...
Yet those men must have been politic shadows of the free humanity that spearheaded the
Renaissance two centuries before.
31)
Bronzino, 1545, Grand Duke Cosimo I, detail, Medici Palace (from the
Uffizi), Florence
V31a) Same, whole; though video crops it below
Corruption had been swift. The Medici pawns of 16th century French and Spanish
rule suggest the villanies of Jacobean drama: Revenger's Tragedy, The White Devil. Such
the Neapolitan who protested that his civility had been restrained by Milton's speaking
with so little reserve on matters of religion.
32)
V32a)
Michelangelo, 1536-41, Last Judgment, Hell detail, Sistine Chapel, Rome;
+ V closer detail (cf. V32)
Same, Last Judgment, detail, Resurrection of the dead
Michelangelo had flexed his might against that slipperiness. How could Milton,
before the Sistine Judgment, but catch the battle roll of his own "Heroic Verse," "ancient
liberty recover'd...from the troublesome... bondage of Rimeing":
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Rocks, Caves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens, and shades of death,
A Universe of death, which God by curse
Created evil, for evil only good,
Where all life dies, death lives, and nature breeds
Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things,
Abominable, inutterable, and worse
Than Fables yet have feign'd, or fear conceiv'd,
Gorgons and Hydras and Chimeras dire. (P.L. II, 621-8)
Though Milton is a century beyond Michelangelo in that Baroque loading which was
gathering head
33)
Giotto, 1306, Last Judgment, detail of the Damned, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua
(video: closer details only, below then above)
from the Gothic precision of Giotto and Ars Nova (here Machault) —
Music:
Guillaume de Machault, c. 1350?, Motet: Hareu!, Seraphim: SIC6092
a clarity in which Dante's Hell-circles share (those sharp man-and-snake transformations
in the bolgia of thieves — even the glowing mosques of the City of Dis incised, "red as if
come from the fire")
(fade Machault)
Va34) Rubens, c. 1620 (copy), Fall of the Damned, detail, lower right, Gallery,
Aachen (CGB '74)
b34) Same, whole (copy of CGB '74, slide 28 of Period Styles; of which Video here
takes a lower detail)
34)
Same, detail, middle right, with Hydra (CGB '74)
— from that, to the cloud-swallowed depths of Rubens and Schütz —
Music:
H. Schütz, 1625, Heu mihi, opening, Cantiones Sacrae, Nonesuch
H-71062
that "darkness visible" King James rhetoric —
clouds they are without water, carried about of winds... Raging waves
of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars, to whom is
reserved the blackness of darkness for ever —
(Jude)
had prepared for Milton's "vast typhoean rage":
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Seest thou yon dreary Plain, forlorn and wilde,
The seat of desolation, voyd of light,
Save what the glimmering of these livid flames
Casts pale and dreadful? Thither let us tend
From off the tossing of these fiery waves...
(Paradise Lost I, 180-4)
(fade Schütz)
Va35) Detail of 35, lower left, Martyrdom
35)
El Greco, 1580-82, Martyrdom of St. Maurice, Escorial, Spain (video: lower
section only)
35a) El Greco, c. 1579, Allegory of the Holy Name, detail, lower right, National
Gallery, London (Video takes its detail from V35a)
The energy climax before that thickening, marks the Spain of El Greco and Lope
de Vega, bound in opposite likeness with Shakespeare's England. Against
that pitchy Cloud of infernal darkness, where we shall... never more
hear the Bird of Morning sing —
Milton lauds, in the closing prayer of his Church-Discipline, the felicity of "this Britannic
Empire... with all her Daughter Islands about her,"
That we may still remember in our solemn Thanksgivings, how for us
the Northern Ocean even to the frozen Thule was scattered with the
proud Shipwrecks of the Spanish Armada, and the very maw of Hell
ransacked, and made to give up her concealed destruction, ere she
could vent it in that horrible and damned blast.
a36)
b36)
c36)
36)
N. Hilliard, 1576, An Unknown Woman Aged 31, miniature, Victoria and
Albert Museum, London (which video precedes with a detail of 36, Oliver's
"Sydney")
Robert Peale the Elder, 1603, Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales and Sir John
Harington, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
English, c. 1580?, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Bodleian Library, Oxford
Isaac Oliver, c. 1584?, "Sir Philip Sydney," Royal Collection, Windsor
Music:
July 1996
John Milton, 1601, — "Fair Orian, in the morn"; ARCHIV ST 2533
347
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And indeed, beside Counter-Reformation Spain, there is an airy freedom to
Elizabeth's England, where Milton's father wrote a madrigal for the Oriana triumphs of
the Queen — though already the family humor seems moral: "What lives those ladies
led!"
(fade Fair Orian)
Music:
Wm. Byrd, c. 1580-90(?), from Six-Part Pavan, SAWT 9481-A Ex
"I was born," Milton wrote in the Second Defence, "at a time when the virtue of my
fellow-citizens, far exceeding that of their progenitors in greatness of soul and vigour of
enterprise... had succeeded in delivering the commonwealth from the most grievous
tyranny, and religion from the most ignominious degradation."
The pose and face of Philip Sydney over Hampton Court should not impugn his
fiery quality, nor the lightness of a Byrd Pavan its magnitude of soul.
Va37) Elizabethan (Robert Smythson), 1568-80 and after, Longleat, Wiltshire,
from far off (CGB '59)
37)
Same, Longleat and Park, Wiltshire, nearer (CGB '59)
V37a) Same, close view of the building (CGB '59)
Those great 16th-century mansions — Longleat in its Wiltshire park — carry their
richness with a lightsome grace; and there is truth in what Milton wrote, even of the titan
Shakespeare:
If... sweetest Shakespear fancies childe,
Warble his native wood-notes wilde...
(fade Byrd)
Though there was a darkening around 1600, even for Shakespeare.
38)
Elizabethan and Stuart, early 17th cent?, Westwood House, near Droitwich,
Worcestershire (CGB '59)
V38a) Same, closer view of Front (CGB '59)
Music:
T. Tomkins, 1610-20(?), Pavan in A minor, EA-0028
From the mansions that dot the Island, take any built or rebuilt under the Stuarts
— this Westwood House, now broken into flats — the assertive portals and curves of
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Milton's century creep in. And if we advance through the same years in a sequence of
Pavans, we experience such a densening gravity of sound. Thus from Byrd to his pupil
Tomkins — though we could cite as well Cooper, Dering, Ferrabosco.
a39)
Jacobean (Robt. Lyminge), 1607-11 & ff., South Front, Hatfield House,
Hertfordshire (copy of 1600, slide 18; video draws from the original)
Vb39) Same, interior, The Marble Hall
39)
Same, interior, The North Gallery
39a) Inigo Jones, 1638, Luminalia, Scene 1, Night, Trustees of Chatsworth Settlement, Derbyshire, England ; lower center, detail, moon and reflection
39b) Formerly pre-Tudor, 1456-86; changed to Jacobean, 1603-08, by T. Sackville,
Spangled Bedroom, Knole, Kent
Towred Cities please us then,
And the busie humm of men,
Where throngs of Knights and Barons bold,
In weeds of Peace high triumphs hold,
With store of Ladies...
Comus, presented at Ludlow Castle in
1634, with parts taken by the Lady daughter and Viscount sons of the Earl, seats the poet
in chivalric pride, as of Hatfield House and the stately pavan (skip forward in Tomkins) as
surely as his early poetry mellows from Shakespeare:
Not only that "L'Allegro," but Milton's courtly masque,
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The Sounds, and Seas with all their finny drove
Now to the Moon in wavering Morrice move,
And on the Tawny Sands and Shelves,
Trip the pert Fairies and the dapper Elves... (Comus)
As the Pavan in
Tompkins receives a chromatic burden, (music) Milton suffuses
Shakespeare's clear chalice with conscious touch.
Night hath better sweets to prove,
Venus now wakes, and wak'ns Love —
40)
41)
(end Tomkins)
Rubens, c. 1609, Self with Isabella Brandt, Alte Pinakothek, Munich
(CGB '59); first, video detail
Rubens, c. 1635, Helene Fourment and their Son, Alte Pinakothek, Munich;
+ V detail (CGB ‘59)
Music:
Scheidt, 1621, from Pavan in A, SAWT 9461-B
On the exposed Continent the baroque flexing is stronger. Against Oliver's
Sydney, even the lightest early Rubens — 1609, the artist with his first bride — deploys
formulable masses.
So the North German Scheidt concretizes the Pavanne. And in whatever gossamer
of fabric and light the old Rubens wraps his young Helene and their son, we note, as with
Scheidt's tonal rhetoric on the same chromatic motif, a weighty change of state, as from
air to earth.
(fade Scheidt)
Va42) Inigo Jones, 1616-35, Queen's House, SE view, with Loggia front:
Greenwich, London (CGB '74)
Vb42) Again Queen's House, from the Thames with Wrenn & Webb, Naval
Hospital (CGB '74); video detail only
42)
Again the Queen's House, north front (CGB '74), + V detail
42a) Same, Queen's House, South Loggia (CGB '74); or from V42a (CGB ‘74)
Meanwhile, in the London of Milton's youth, Inigo Jones, launching Palladio
toward the proportionate hopes of 18th century, framed the perfection of the Queen's
House in Greenwich. At the same time, English song, in quiet harmony with Caccini and
Peri, moved from Dowlands' fullness of late Renaissance —
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Music:
Symbolic History
Dowland, 1600, Flow my tears, A. Schøtz, HMV DB 5270
(fade)
to the word-matched Baroque of Lawes' Comus settings: "Harry whose tuneful and well
measur'd Song":
Music:
H. Lawes, 1634, Comus, close of "From the Heavens." M. Theriault
& R. Stark
(fade)
43)
Same, Queen's House, interior, Spiral Stair (CGB '74)
V43a) I. Jones and others, 17th cent., Queen's House, Naval Hospital, etc., from
Greenwich Observatory (detail only of CGB '74 slide); then video returns to
Spiral Stair
Music:
Jenkins, c. 1640(?), Fancy with continuo, beginning; Argo RG 73
(lst, side B)
With the ease of Inigo Jones' spiral stair, that England mounts from Renaissance
past, toward Enlightened and Romantic future, as gradually as ground-bass harmony
infilters the retrospection of the English viol fantasy — from Byrd and Gibbons, through
William Lawes and Jenkins to Locke and Purcell, as great a body of music as exists.
Jenkins most of all, quietly writing throughout Milton's life, sounds what is called for in
"L'Allegro":
44)
English post-Gothic, c. 1630, Christ Church Stair, Oxford (CGB '59); first,
video details
And ever against eating Cares,
Lap me in soft Lydian Aires,
Married to immortal verse
Such as the meeting soul may pierce
In notes, with many a winding bout
Of lincked sweetnes long drawn out,
With wanton heed, and giddy cunning,
The melting voice through mazes running;
Untwisting all the chains that ty
The hidden soul of harmony.
And in the visual music of Christ Church stair at Oxford, the fan-vault of Tudor Gothic is
revived for the palatial wreathing of 1630. (fade Jenkins) So William Lawes, killed
fighting for the King against Milton's party, magnifies Taverner's "In Nomine."
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a45)
45)
Symbolic History
Central detail, same Rubens as 45 (slide only)
Rubens, c. 1615-17, Peasants with Cattle, National Gallery, London; while
video begins and ends with the whole, shifting between to various details
But in rugged boldness these six-part Consorts rival the expanse of Rubens:
Music:
Wm. Lawes, c. 1625?, close of In Nomine, 6 pt. Consort No.l; ZRG55
(end)
Even bookish Milton claimed that Brueghel earth:
While the Plowman neer at hand
Whistles ore the Furrow'd Land,
And the Milkmaid singeth blithe
And the Mower whets his sithe,
And every Shepherd tells his tale
Under the Hawthorn in the dale.
From polyphonic Rubens, organized all over the canvas, each part and detail a
picture of its own,
1st 46) Rembrandt, 1638, Obelisk landscape, Gardner Museum, Boston; + V detail
to the obelisk of Rembrandt, centered in the vortex of light against shade, is such a shift
as Milton's, from the genial amble of "L'Allegro" to the controlled enormity of Paradise
Lost, structured like a single sentence from opening theme to final vindication ("long is
the way/ And hard, that out of Hell leads up to Light"), as glowing a clair-obscure as
Milton's landscape metaphor, when the fallen angels break up their conclave:
As when from mountain tops the dusky clouds
Ascending, while the North wind sleeps, o'respread
Heavn's chearful face, the lowring Element
Scowls ore the dark'nd lantskip Snow, or showre;
1st 47) Ruysdael, c. 1660, Landscape, Uffizi, Florence; to which video adds a
preview of 2nd 47, Ruysdael, Cornfield
If chance the radiant Sun with farewell sweet
Extend his ev'ning beam, the fields revive.
The birds thir notes renew, and bleating herds
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Symbolic History
Attest thir joy, that hill and valley rings.
Yet in music, Baroque so blends polyphony and ground-bass, that Miltonic and
tenebrist might attends both — thus a polyphonic fantasy by Mathew Locke:
for 2nd 46) Rembrandt, 1639, Stormy landscape, Anton Ulrich Museum, Brunswick
(which video has preceded with another detail from 1st 46, the Obelisk
Landscape)
Music:
M. Locke, c. 1660?, D Minor Suite,Opening, West. WGS-8242
(fade)
against a German ground-bass Sonata of about 1670 (with Ruysdael)
2nd 47)
Ruysdael, c. 1660?, Cornfield; Gallery, Aachen (CGB '74)
V2nd 47a) Ruysdael, 1660's(?), Coup de Soleil, Louvre, Paris (here video adds from
1st 47: Ruysdael, Uffizi Landscape, a close detail)
Music:
German, c. 1670, from lst mvt. Sonata for Viola d'Amore, AS-19
(close)
"That which purifies us," says Milton, "is trial, and trial is by what is contrary."
48)
Veronese, c. 1580?, Annunciation, detail, National Gallery, Washington D.C.
(CGB '75); first, video close-up of angel
Contrary as a Puritan's sensuous love for Catholic art. From Tasso's Gabriel (time
of this Veronese), who "shooke his wings with roarie May-dewes wet" (Fairfax), through
Crashaw's Marini:
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Heaven's golden-wingéd herald late he saw
To a poor Galilean Virgin sent:
How low the bright youth bowed, and with what awe
Immortal flowers to her fair hand present —
comes the messenger of Milton's "Nativity Ode":
With Turtle wing the amorous clouds dividing,
And waving wide her mirtle wand,
She strikes a universall Peace through Sea and Land.
49)
Carracci, c. 1598, St. Anthony tempted and saved, National Gallery, London;
+ V details
49a) Salvator Rosa, 1660?, St. John the Baptist in the Wilderness, Art Gallery
and Museum, Glasgow
V49b) Barocci c. 1590?, Rest on the Flight to Egypt, Vatican Museum, Rome
Music:
de' Cavalieri, 1600, Rappresentatione di Anima et di Corpo, III
(from "Il fuoco"), ARCHIV 2708 016
Dei Cavalieri's Oratorio of Soul and Body, saved and damned; Carracci's St.
Anthony tempted and blessed — where heaven fronts Tasso's opulent devils:
He lookt like huge Tiphoius loos'd from hell
Againe to shake heav'ns everlasting frame;
as inflated by Marini:
His eyes the sullen dens of Death and Night
...(where) a dark drove
Of Dragons, Hydras, Sphinxes, fill the grove —
("al foco")
to that Baroque contrast Milton, even before his Italian travels, gave its lushest cognate:
The lonely mountains o're,
And the resounding shore,
A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament;
From haunted spring, and dale
Edg'd with poplar pale,
The parting Genius is with sighing sent,
With flowre-inwov'n tresses torn
The Nimphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.
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(skip in music)
Since:
Our Babe to shew his Godhead true.
Can in his swadling bands controul the damned crew...
a50)
50)
Caravaggio, 1594-96, Rest on the Flight to Egypt, whole, Doria Gallery,
Rome; + V angel detail
Same, detail of Madonna and child, with landscape and pool
And all about the Courtly Stable,
Bright-harnest Angels sit in order serviceable.
(fade dei Cavalieri)
There would be no Milton without such clandestine caress — Caravaggio, Marini,
Monteverdi —
Music: Monteverdi, 1610, Vespers, Laudate Pueri, opening, SAWT 9501/2 A
the sensuous as never before: Eve, reflected in the pool:
...a murmuring sound
Of waters issu'd from a Cave and spread
Into a liquid Plain... I thither went
...and laid me downe... to look into the cleer
Smooth Lake, that to me seemd another Skie...
A Shape within the watry gleam appeerd...
(Paradise Lost IV, 453 ff.)
Through art's soft Italian touch
Va51) Attr. Bernini, c. 1650?, Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici, Louvre, Paris
51)
Bernini 1615-16, Monsignor Giovanni Batista Santoni, S. Prassede, Rome;
+ V detail
(as through Bernini's Monsignors) Milton sought the strength for which Wordsworth would
invoke him:
(fade Vespers)
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...thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee —
on his tour declaring his faith to "the composed and wary magnanimity of the Italian."
Chiabrera was writing of Columbus:
Great souls chosen for a glorious work
In their elected labor take delight,
Nor can the petty curb of common blame
Deflect the noble from the path of fame. (CGB)
But it was safe to praise Columbus. What of Campanella, long in prison for a grandeur
like Milton's own? —
Since power and knowledge cannot move
But as love fire the will;
That Trinity I praise and ever shall:
The Primal One of Wisdom, Power, Love. (CGB)
Va52) Bernini, c. 1637-38, Bust of Pope Urban VIII, over-life-size, Gallery Barberini, Rome (CGB '86)
52)
Same, black and white, head, from another angle
Urban VIII was Pope. Bernini carved him the year of Milton's visit. In the
Aereopagitica the Italy of that face becomes an argument against censorship:
their learned men... did nothing but bemoan the servile condition into
which learning amongst them was brought; that this was it which had
damped the glory of Italian wits; that nothing had been there written
now these many years but flattery and fustian. There it was that I found
and visited the famous Galileo grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition,
for thinking in Astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought...
53)
Rubens, 1622-23, Marie de' Medici at Marseilles, Louvre, Paris; first, video
details: below, then above
The Scots revolted against the Prayer Book, and Milton returned to an England
where flattery of high Church and State swelled the new art of the balanced couplet. So
the famous Waller — who attained as they said, "in his eighteenth year... a style which
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will perhaps never be obsolete" — inflated Prince Charles' 1621 sea-danger to almost the
height of fustian that Rubens bestowed on Marie de' Medici, Queen-Mother of France:
Now had his Highness bid farewell to Spain,
And reacht the Sphere of his own Pow'r the Main.
Five Years later Waller hailed what proved a naval disaster:
Where-e'er thy Navy spreads her canvas Wings,
Homage to thee, and Peace to all she brings...
In Milton's words: "the trencher fury of a rhyming parasite."
a54)
54)
54a)
54b)
Van Dyck, 1621-22, Self Portrait, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59);
video, detail only
Van Dyck, 1639, Sir Thomas Wharton, Hermitage, Leningrad; + V detail
Vouet, c. 1634, Ceres, with Harvesting Cupids, National Gallery, London
Van Dyck, c. 1635-40, James Stuart, Duke of Richmond and Lennox, The
Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood
Music:
William Lawes, 1634, Triumph of Peace, Symphony, Nonesuch H1153
Rubens' pupil Van Dyck was at the court painting Cavaliers ("Gather ye rosebuds
while ye may"):
Shall I, wasting in despair,
Die because a woman's fair...
If she be not fair to me,
What care I how fair she be?
and:
Why so pale and wan, fond lover?
Prithee, why so pale?
If when looking well can't move her,
Looking ill prevail?...
Now the irony of "Lycidas":
Were it not better don as others use
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
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Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair?
turns in the pamphlets to attack: what "flows at waste from the pen of some vulgar
Amourist."
(end Lawes)
55)
55a)
55b)
55c)
Attributed to Rembrandt, 1645, A Man Reading, Sterling and Francine
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts; first, video detail
Double: (A) Botticelli (copy?) 1478, Giuliano de’ Medici, Portrait Academy,
Carrara; and (B) 1490, St. John the Baptist, detail, from Altar of Madonna,
Saints and Angels, Uffizi, Florence
Rembrandt, 1653, Faust in his Study, etching, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Rembrandt, 1631, Scholar in Lofty Room, National Museum, Stockholm;
+ V detail
Music:
Albert, 1640-50, Kirchenkantata, Ritornello, old Tinayre Album,
Columbia 7073 D
Whether or not by Rembrandt, the searching Man with a Book defends (with
Albert) the other side, Evangel against Cavalier, reenacting on the expanded stage the
Florentine rift of a century and a half before, between Medici and Savonarolla.
(fade Albert)
And now Milton, with the prose he called his left hand, took up the trumpet to
"blow a dolorous... jarring blast."
Read any books whatever come to thy hands, for thou art sufficient
both to judge aright and to examine each matter... Truth is... a
streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression,
they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition. A man may
be a heretic in the truth; and... though his belief be true, yet the very
truth he holds, becomes his heresy... Give me the liberty to know, to
utter and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties...
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Symbolic History
a56)
Rembrandt, 1642, Nightwatch, detail of man armed with a pike,
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (CGB '59); + V wider view of same, from 56
b56) Same, vertical section left of center (CGB '59); video: upper part only)
56)
Same, whole (CGB '59)
V56a) Rembrandt, 1648?, Young Woman in Bed, National Gallery of Scotland,
Edinburgh
Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant Nation rousing herself
like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks:
Methinks I see her as an Eagle mewing her mighty youth, and kindling
her undazzled eyes at the full mid-day beam: purging and unscaling
her long-abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance; while
the whole noise of timorous and flocking birds, with those also that
love the twilight, flutter about, amazed at what she means, and in their
envious gabble would prognosticate a year of sects and schisms.
Rembrandt also in his prime celebrated the Guard of his Dutch Republic, turning
the usual portrait row into a sect-of-one search for the dissevered body of Truth. What
blind gabbling it too must have occasioned for all who lacked the trust which is Milton's
axiom of freedom: "Who knows not that Truth is strong next to the Almighty?"
A faith hard to hold through the fury that greeted those pamphlets of free church,
free state, free marriage.
Va57) El Greco, c. 1570, Christ Cleansing the Temple, National Gallery, Washington, DC
57)
Rembrandt, 1626, Christ Drives the Money Changers from the Temple, Pushkin Museum, Moscow; + V detail
The Cleansing of the Temple had become a symbol for Reform and Counterreform: thus with El Greco, or with this 1626 Rembrandt. Compare the violence of
Milton's sonnet:
I did but prompt the age to quit their cloggs
By the known rules of antient libertie,
When strait a barbarous noise environs me
Of Owles and Cuckoes, Asses, Apes and Doggs.
As when those Hinds that were transform'd to Froggs
Raild at Latona's twin-born progenie
Which after held the Sun and Moon in fee.
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Va58) Bosch, 1515-16, Christ Bearing the Cross, detail of Christ and mockers,
Musée des Beaux Arts, Ghent
58)
Same, closer detail: three mockers
But this is got by casting Pearl to Hoggs;
That bawle for freedom in their senceless mood,
And still revolt when truth would set them free.
License they mean when they cry libertie;
For who loves that, must first be wise and good;
But from that mark how far they roave we see
For all this wast of wealth, and loss of blood.
But if men are such brawling hogs (as Bosch had painted them a century before
Rembrandt), how is the temple to be cleansed? The Peasant War had led Luther from
Christian Freedom to revolutionary reversal: "Reason must be deluded, blinded and
destroyed."
2nd 57) Again, Rembrandt, another detail of Money Changers
So Hobbes, Milton's older contemporary, by a Machiavellian materialism of
motive and a logic of atomic reduction, proves that men cannot, like bees, find natural
agreement, but must snatch at artificial covenant against greed, hatred and "the condition
of Warre... of every man against every man."
2nd 58)
Again, Bosch, Bearing the Cross, whole; video: details only, upper and
lower right
Thus nothing but the Satanic Leviathan of unquestioned tyranny prevents the contrary
worst: "continual feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore,
nasty, brutish and short."
But though Milton would repeat in Paradise Lost the passionate servitude of the
fallen: "true Libertie/ Is lost, which alwayes with right Reason dwells"; and in Paradise
Regained, how "to free/ These thus degenerate, by themselves enslav'd?" — it did not
undermine his search for
a59)
Durer, 1500, Self as Christ, Pinakothek, Munich
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Symbolic History
b59)
Wouwermans, 1646, Cavalry Making a Sortie from a Fort on a Hill,
National Gallery, London
c59) Samuel Cooper, c. 1650-55?, Portrait of Robert Lilburne, Victoria and Albert
Museum, London
Vd59) Cooper, 1655?, Oliver Cromwell, miniature, National Portrait Gallery,
London
59)
Cooper, c. 1657, Oliver Cromwell, Duke of Buccleuch Collection (video, detail
only)
"The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth." The Messiah of Paradise
Regained has dreamed of liberation: "to subdue... proud Tyrannick pow'r/ Till truth were
freed, and equity restor'd." Not all the Nimrod hunt of war — "On each hand slaughter
and gigantic deeds... scattered.../ With Carcasses and Arms th' ensanguin'd Field" —
estranged Cromwell's Latin Secretary from the cause. Only the manifest danger of
freedom's turning on itself:
O citizens... if after being released from the toils of war, you neglect
the arts of peace... your peace will be only a more distressing war...
your very bowels will be continually teeming with an intolerable
progeny of tyrants...
(Second
Defence)
and to Cromwell (here in Samuel Cooper's miniature):
if you, who have hitherto been the tutelary genius of liberty... should
hereafter invade that liberty which you have defended... a most
destructive blow will be levelled against the happiness of mankind...
Helpe us to save free Conscience from the paw
Of hireling wolves whose Gospell is their maw.
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Against the temptations of his place, Cromwell tried to deserve the praise of that sonnet:
"our chief of men" — repeatedly exhorting Parliament in Miltonic words:
Is it ingenuous to ask liberty and not to give it? What greater
hypocrisy than for those who were oppressed by the bishops to become
oppressors themselves...
60)
Wrenn and others, 1694 & ff, Naval Hospital, through gate, Greenwich
(CGB '75); first video detail of gate latch
V60a) Same buildings, looking towards the gate (CGB '75); video shows only the
building to the right
60b) Wrenn, I672-79, interior, St. Stephen's, Walbrook, London
Music:
Purcell, 1692, Allegro of Symphony, Ode for St. Cecilia's Day,
Vanguard SRV 286 SD
So ends what Thoreau would call "the last significant scrap of news" from
England. Though much continued under the pomp of Restoration. Now the blind regicide,
unhanged, returned to his lonely epic task. As if, through the Purcell of trumpet display,
we should hear the dying falls of those da gamba fantasies with which his composing
began;
(end Allegro)
a61) Rembrandt, 1660, Esther, Hanan & Ahasuerus, Pushkin Museum, Moscow
Vb61) Rembrandt, 1661, The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis, detail, National
Gallery, Stockholm
c61) Rembrandt, 1659, Moses with Tables of Law, Berlin-Dahlen Gamäldegalerie,
Berlin
61)
Rembrandt, 1650, Man with the Golden Helmet, Staatlische Museen, Berlin;
+ V detail
Music:
Purcell, 1680, opening, Fantasy 5, B flat minor, ARCHIV 3007
and be drawn back to the tenebrist weight of Rembrandt and of Milton — 1ike his own
Noah, "the only son of light in a dark age" — as Wordsworth would take it up:
Uttering odious truth,
Darkness before, and danger's voice behind,
Soul awful! if the earth has ever lodg'd
An awful Soul.
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Symbolic History
But did even Milton shun one truth: — that a God of the absolute, who reasons (as
Pope would quip) "like a school divine" against the quest of knowledge claimed in the
Aereopagitica, has no choice but to "retire... and put not forth his goodness" while Satan
takes up the suppressed resolve, not to crook the servile knee and sing forced hosannahs:
What though the field be lost?
All is not lost: the unconquerable Will...
Fall'n Cherube, to be weak is miserable
Doing or Suffering...
Awake, arise, or be for ever fall'n.
(Paradise Lost I, 105-6, 157-8, 330)
For 2nd 60) Desjardins (Martin van den Bogaert), c. 1665(?), Bust of Mignard,
Louvre, Paris
The whole of Baroque exhibits wilful arrogation, and Milton overweens more
than the vaunters of Bernini outwardness (as Heroic-couplet Dryden is reported: "This
man cuts us all out, and the Ancients too.") No doubt he must pay the cost of proud
command.
For 2nd 61) Rembrandt, 1655, Self, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna (CGB '59)
But that he shares with Rembrandt, whom moderns more and more esteem; while
everybody from Pound down knocks Milton, righteous pole of the Western big-top. It
seems that, against Rembrandt,
62)
W. Faithorne, 1670, Milton, engraving, National Portrait Gallery, London;
+ V detail
V62a) Engraving of Hegel, c. 1820; then video returns to a detail of 62, Milton's
face
July 1996
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Symbolic History
Milton suffered some repressive closure — as if the soul-body and moral war had made a
battleground of his heart.
We have said he was the first to rear a universe from the immanence of Self. Was
he not also the last? Since no one after could conceive himself, on every front, of
thought, poetry, politics, an instrument of God's final purpose in the world. The later
god-possessed, Goethe, Hölderlin, Hegel, Whitman, inherit divided realms: "The owl of
Minerva flies only in the deepening dusk." But to control so much, and lose love's center,
raises the "Gerontion" question: "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?"
Even the Aereopagitica grounds strength on the test of NO.
Va63)
b63)
Vc63)
63)
Michelangelo, 1497, Bacchus, Bargello, Florence, (upper detail of slide)
Same, whole view, from the front (video, upper half only)
Same, profile; + V detail from a63
Same, Head of Bacchus, full face
He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming
pleasures, and yet abstain...
That denial becomes the crux of Milton's works.
Perhaps only Michelangelo, in the Florentine cleavage of Medici and Savonarola,
had set abandonment so voluptuously against itself — this Bacchus of his youth fattening
the soil for Comus ("To roule with pleasure in a sensual stie"):
Within the navil of this hideous Wood,
Immur'd in cypress shades a Sorcerer dwels
Of Bacchus, and of Circe born, great Comus...
And here to every thirsty wanderer,
By sly enticement gives his banefull cup...
How can Milton build but with the passion the restrainer, as Blake says, "stole from the
Abyss"? Comus:
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Wherefore did Nature powre her bounties forth
With such a full and unwithdrawing hand...
And set to work millions of spinning Worms,
That in their green shops weave the smooth-hair'd silk
To deck her sons...?
1st 64) Titian, 1523, Bacchus and Ariadne, National Gallery, London (slide show
crops the whole; video shows whole (from 2nd 64), + a closer detail)
But all that energy —
Midnight shout, and revelry,
Tipsie dance, and Jollity.
Braid your Locks with rosie Twine
Dropping odours, dropping Wine —
subsists in Comus under the disapprobation and animadversion of "lean and sallow
abstinence":
The wonted roar was up amidst the Woods,
And fill'd the Air with barbarous dissonance...
From the Bacchic art of Titian,
1st 65) Utewael, 1607, Diana and Actaeon, copy of upper part, Kunsthistoriches
Museum, Vienna (CGB '59) (video: whole, from 3rd 65)
through the Mannerist ballet of 1600 (these nymphs of the chase at the transformation of
Acteon),
1st 66) Rubens, 1630-40, Diana and her Nymphs Suprised by Fauns, detail, left;
Prado, Madrid, (video: whole, from 3rd 66)
down to the fleshy rapes of Rubens,
1st 67) Poussin, 1636-37, Bacchanalian Revel before a Herm, detail, left, National
Gallery, London (video: whole, from 2nd 67)
or Poussin's formality of touch — it is hard to find a foreclosure like Milton's — from the
mild prudery of "Lycidas,"
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Symbolic History
Rough Satyrs danc'd, and Fauns with clov'n heel,
From the glad sound would not be absent long,
Va2nd 66)
b2nd 66)
2nd 66)
Rubens, 1635-37, Slaughter of the Innocents, Alte Pinakothek,
Munich (CGB '59)
Same, lower right detail (CGB ‘59)
Again, Rubens, Nymphs Surprised by Satyrs, detail, right (video: left
detail)
to the Paradise Lost excoriations of Stuart licence:
And in luxurious Cities, where the noyse
Of riot ascends above thir loftiest Towrs,
And injury and outrage: And when Night
Darkens the Streets, then wander forth the Sons
Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine.
Witness the Streets of Sodom... (P.L. I, 497-503)
But drive farr off the barbarous dissonance
Of Bacchus and his Revellers, the Race
Of that wilde Rout that tore the Thracian Bard...
(P.L. VII, 32-4)
2nd 65) Again, Utewael, Diana and Acteon, detail, lower right (video from 3rd 65)
2nd 65a) Rubens, c.1636?, Shepherd Scene, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB 59)
Against that inversion set the Elizabethan: Weelkes' madrigal in the Oriana
collection to which Milton's father had contributed. Whether this music belongs to the
swirl of late Renaissance, or deploys (as might almost seem) the weight of Rubens' first
Baroque — its force is life-affirming.
Music:
Weelkes, 1601, As Vesta Was (Oriana), close, Argo ZRG-643
2nd 64)
Again, Titian, Bacchus and Ariadne, whole; + V close detail
V2nd 64a) A. Caracci, 1588-89, Venus and Adonis, Kunsthistoriches Museum,
Vienna (CGB '59)
3rd 65)
Again, Utewael, Diana and Acteon, whole, (CGB '59); video: center
detail only
Va3rd 66) Rubens, 1636-40, Dance of the Peasants, Prado, Madrid
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3rd 66)
2nd 67)
Symbolic History
Again, Rubens, Nymphs Surprised by Satyrs, whole (video, right detail
only)
Poussin, Revel before a Herm, whole (video details right then left)
(close of Weelkes)
The close of Comus tries to validate a festive joy:
To triumph in victorious dance
O're sensual Folly, and Intemperance.
But the staid lady and youths mince it in an "earth cumber'd... the wing'd air dark't with
plumes."
68)
Blanchard, c. 1630, Angelica and Medoro, Metropolitan Museum, New York
City (CGB '74); with video details
In post-Renaissance Christendom, the conscious validation of flesh may overween
— Shakespeare's "a green goose a goddess." As Blanchard, with Cartesian touch, strokes
Ariosto's erring Angelica: Milton inflates the sensual as man's imparadising claim:
half her swelling Breast
Naked met his under the flowing Gold
Of her loose tresses hid: he in delight...
Smil'd with superior Love... (P.L. IV. 495-9)
nor turnd I weene
Adam from his fair Spouse, nor Eve the Rites
Mysterious of connubial Love refus'd:
Whatever Hypocrites austerely talk...
Haile wedded Love...
(P.L. IV, 741 ff)
The very angel glows rosy red when Adam asks how spirits mix by touch.
Va69)
Vb69)
Vc69)
Vd69)
July 1996
Coptic, 5th cent. A.D., Angel Contending with a Demonic Leda and the
Swan, Coptic Museum, Cairo
English Romanesque, early 12th c., Adam and Eve, fresco on Chancel wall,
St. Botolph's, Hardham (Sussex)
Gislebertus (Burgundian), c. 1120-40, Eve, St. Lazare, Autun
Michelangelo, 1508-11, Temptation of Man, Sistine Ceiling, Vatican, Rome
(slide show has combined Va, c and d69 into a single triple: a,c,d69)
Milton: Mind's Dark Glory
40
�C.G. Bell
69)
Symbolic History
Mabuse, 1523-26, Adam and Eve, drawing, Albertina, Vienna; + V details
Christianity had fought the brush fire of sex since before the Coptic relief of an
Angel contending against Leda and the Swan. But neither in the Catacombs nor in the
early Middle Ages (Pneumatic Eve deflated to angular skin-bags), nor in the dreamromance of that Eve at Autun, is the fall sexualized; even the force-forms of Michelangelo (Eve encrotched athwart the conspicuous male) keep body clean. It seems to go with
the Protestant-tending North that Mabuse's 1525 torrid Eve reaches for both fruits at the
same time. But this is fabliau-comic; Milton's reason does not smile:
Against his better knowledge, not deceav'd,
But fondly overcome with Female charm...
As with new Wine intoxicated both
They swim in mirth, and fansie that they feel
Divinitie within them breeding wings
Wherewith to scorn the Earth: but that false Fruit
Farr other operation first displaid.
Carnal desire enflaming... (Paradise Lost IX, 998 ff.)
70)
Rembrandt, 1639, Adam and Eve, etching, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam;
+ V details
In Rembrandt, touch raises the same danger. By a verism almost grotesque, he
dodges; though the light on what Milton will call "those mysterious parts" flirts the bait
the poet devours:
There they thir fill of Love and Loves disport
Took largely, of thir mutual guilt the Seale,
The solace of thir sin, till dewie sleep
Oppress'd them, wearied with thir amorous play.
(Paradise Lost IX, 1042-5)
71)
Rembrandt, 1636 (reworked 1650), Danae, Hermitage, Leningrad;
+ V details
As Rembrandt knew, Jove's coming to Danae in a shower of gold had become a
symbol of bought love, the same which Milton opposed to the hailed "connubial":
...not in the bought smile
Of Harlots, loveless, joyless, unindeard,
July 1996
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Symbolic History
Casual fruition, nor in Court Amours... (P.L. IV, 765-7)
The leaning cupid Eliot would take up ("From which a golden Cupidon peeped out")
weeps and wrings his hands. But the Olympian glow of the natural body, makes Adam's
To the Nuptial Bowre
I led her blushing like the Morn... (P.L. VIII, 510-11)
mawkishly unclean. Was Milton's luck with Eros so poor?
72)
Sir Peter Lely, c. 1650-60?, Portrait of a Woman, Carrara Academy, Bergamo
V72a) Coques, c. 1670, Portrait of a Man, National Gallery, London (video: detail
only)
V72b) Coques, c. 1680, Portrait of a Lady as St. Agnes, National Gallery, London
(video: detail only)
V72c) Rubens, c. 1635, Bathsheba at Fountain, Gallery, Dresden (video: detail
only)
72d) Rubens, c. 1615, Sampson and Delilah, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59)
Let this unknown English lady take us back to 1643, when the poet left his house
and pupils, to return with a seventeen-year-old wife from the Royalist stronghold of
Oxford. She fled to her family in a few days. Milton wrote The Doctrine and Discipline
of Divorce:
it may yet befall a discreet man to be mistaken in his choice... The
soberest and best governed men are least practised in these affairs...
many who have spent their youth chastely... while they haste so eagerly
to light the nuptial torch... may easily chance to meet, if not with a
body impenetrable, yet often with a mind to all other due conversation
inacessible... nay, instead of being one flesh, they will be rather two
carcasses chained unnaturally together; or, as it may happen, a living
soul bound to a dead corpse...
Only when the Royalist cause was ruined, and Milton was in high place, did the girl,
father and all, rejoin the household. It was long after Mary Powell's death that Adam
lectures hapless Eve:
He never shall find out fit Mate, but such
As some misfortune brings him, or mistake...
Which infinite calamitie shall cause
To Humane life, and houshold peace confound.
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Symbolic History
(Paradise Lost X, 899 ff.)
Or Sampson, Dalilah:
To break all faith, all vows, deceive, betray,
Then as repentant to submit, beseech...
If in my flower of youth and strength, when all men
Lov'd, honour'd, fear'd me. thou alone could hate me
Thy Husband, slight me, sell me, and forgo me;
How wouldst thou use me now, blind...
Va73) Charles Beale (English), c. 1650?, Young Girl, draped head, from his
sketchbook, Morgan Collection, New York City; though video has shown first
a detail of 73: Jane Myddleton
73)
Samuel Cooper, c. 1665, Jane Myddleton, Beauchamp Collection, England
Milton had a second wife. who died in childbirth after 15 months. This is not a
portrait of her, though of that time. Already England could foreshadow the human
immediacies of Jane Austen:
Methought I saw my late espoused Saint
Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave...
But O as to embrace me she enclin'd
I wak'd, she fled, and day brought back my night.
Despite the second wife, or the serviceable third, denial holds the center. Not only Comus
is founded on the "yet abstain" of the Aereopagitica.
a74)
Double: [A] Blake, c. 1799-1800, Eve Tempted by the Serpent, Victoria and
Albert Museum, London; & [B] Blake, 1807-08?, Paradise Regained: First
Temptation, Collection T.H. Riches, Esq. (video takes these singly)
74)
Blake, c. 1804 (copy of 1815), Title page to Milton, Rosenwald, Library of
Congress; + V detail
74a) Guercino, c. 1650?, St. John in the Desert, National Gallery, Dublin
(CGB '74); digital replaces this Guercino with V74b Rosa
V74b) Rosa, c. 1660?, River Landscape with Apollo and the Sibyl, Wallace
Collection, London
74c) Blake, c. 1808, Satan calling up his Legions, Victoria and Albert Museum,
London (video detail only)
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Symbolic History
In ParadiseLost it is Satan to Eve: "Die?...By the Fruit? it gives you life to Knowledge...";
in Paradise Regained, Satan to Christ: "All men are Sons of God... I also" — both trials
requiring the pre-judged negative. Not even Samson can fulfill his mission without once
more "fencing his ears" against "Dalilah's sorceries."
No wonder Blake had to revive that "ruin'd man" from the Polyp of Ulro, that he
might "break the Chain of Jealousy from all its roots."
The glory of the great Baroque is also its "misplaced concreteness" — as if the
radiant universe of besouled transcendence could be grasped in the spatial causality and
fugal syntax of assertive non-contradiction. So Bacon, Locke and Newton deify (as Blake
saw it) "the vegetable glass of nature." So (he wrote) "In Milton the Father is Destiny, the
Son a Ratio of the five senses, and the Holy-ghost, Vacuum!" But of Milton only could
Blake add (in warring identification): "he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without
knowing it."
a75)
Claude Lorrain, 1630-35, The Herdsman, National Gallery, Washington,
D.C. (video: close detail, lower left only)
75)
Claude Lorrain, c. 1635, Landscape with a Goatherd, National Gallery,
London (video detail lower right only, with return to a landscape detail from
a75, The Herdsman)
75a) same, Goatherd, lower section
V75b) Lorrain, 1645-46, The Judgment of Paris, detail of landscape, right of center,
National Gallery, Washington, DC; with return to Herdsman, left portion
Music:
Purcell, 1680, 5v Fantasy on one note (lst half), ARCHIV 3007
In Paradise Lost, in Claude, in Purcell, is it bondage or transcendence when
thought, down tensile fields, gropes the new syntax of consciousness?
Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet,
With charm of earliest Birds; pleasant the Sun
When first on this delightful Land he spreads
His orient Beams, on herb, tree, fruit, and flour,
Glistring with dew; fragrant the fertil earth
After soft showers; and sweet the coming on
Of grateful Eevning milde, then silent Night
With this her solemn Bird and this fair Moon,
And these the Gemms of Heav'n, her starrie train:
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Symbolic History
(skip forward in music)
But neither breath of Morn when she ascends
With charm of earliest Birds, nor rising Sun
On this delightful land, nor herb, fruit, floure,
Glistring with dew, nor fragrance after showers,
Nor grateful Evening mild, nor silent Night
With this her solemn Bird, nor walk by Moon,
Or glittering Starr-light without thee is sweet.
(Paradise Lost IV, 641-56)
(fade Purcell)
After Purcell's Fantasy on one Note, the polyphony of searching modulation finds
a last controlled amplitude in the Ricercare the old Bach wrote on King Frederick's tune.
Music:
J.S. Bach, 1747, 6v Ricercare from The Musical Offering, Westminster WL 5070
Va76) Rembrandt, 1631, His Mother as Prophetess Hannah, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (CGB '59)
Vb76) Rembrandt, 1640, Holy Family, detail, Louvre, Paris
c76) Rembrandt, 1634, Etching: The Angel Appearing to the Shepherds, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (with video details)
Vd76) Rembrandt, 1665, Christ and Woman of Samaria, Staatliche Museen, Berlin
e76) Rembrandt, c. 1639, The Entombment of Christ, Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow; video: detail only
Vf76) Rembrandt, 1639, The Resurrection of Christ, Alte Pinakothek, Munich
76)
Rembrandt, 1636, Christ's Ascension, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59)
video, upper detail only
So the Miltonic simile reaches out and rounds on itself:
His Legions... Thick as Autumnal Leaves... in Vallombrosa... or
scatterd sedge Afloat, when... Orion... hath vext the Red-Sea Coast,
whose waves orethrew Busiris and his Memphian Chivalrie, While...
they pursu'd The Sojourners of Goshen, who beheld... Carkases And
broken Chariot Wheels, so thick bestrown Abject and lost lay these...
(Paradise Lost I, 301-312)
Thus the inversion and stretch of the opening sentence — "Of Mans First
Disobedience" (with all hanging clauses and phrases:) "and... of... whose... into... and...
with... of... till... and... Sing Heav'nly Muse..." — mirrors the long inversion and quest of
July 1996
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Symbolic History
the poem, until the angel at the close melts history into Divine plan: "O goodness infinite... That all this good of evil shall produce... more wonderful Then that by which
creation first brought forth Light out of darkness." And as Christ had said in Book III:
"Thou wilt not leave me in the loathsom grave," now all "the Starres of Morn... see him
rise... fresh as the dawning light."
77)
78)
Claude Lorrain, 1668, Hagar Expelled, detail, lower left, Alte Pinakothek,
Munich, (CGB '59)
Same, Hagar Expelled, whole (CGB '59); while between 77 & 78, video
mingles details of the two
And as "Lycidas" after grief and blessing returns to today and tomorrow, calm:
Thus sang the uncouth Swain to th'Okes and rills,
While the still morn went out with Sandals gray...
At last he rose, and twitch'd his Mantle blew:
To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new.
so Paradise Lost settles from the deep passions of Rembrandt, into the elegiac peace of
Poussin and Claude, which had always paired in Milton with tenebrist might — this late
and luminous Claude — Hagar banished into silver-gray:
We may no longer stay: go, waken Eve;
...from the other Hill...
The Cherubim descended...
Gliding meteorous, as Ev'ning Mist
Ris'n from a River o're the marish glides...
In either hand the hastning Angel caught
Our lingring Parents, and to th' Eastern Gate
Led them direct, and down the Cliff as fast
To the subjected Plaine; then disappeer'd.
They looking back, all th' Eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late thir happie seat,
Wav'd over by that flaming Brand, the Gate
With dreadful Faces throng'd and fierie Armes:
Som natural tears they drop'd, but wip'd them soon;
The World was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:
They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
Through Eden took thir solitarie way.
79)
Rembrandt, 1668-69, Return of the Prodigal Son, Hermitage, Leningrad
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V79a) Rembrandt 1636, Sampson Blinded by the Philistines, detail, State Museum,
Frankfurt
V79b) Rembrandt, 1626, Tobit and his Wife, video detail of Tobit, Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam (CGB '59)
79c) Again, Return of the Prodigal Son, upper half
Milton had always thought, along with the epic, of the drama, "wherein Sophocles
and Euripides reign." And as Rembrandt in his last year felt his way into the Return of
the Prodigal, Milton took up, like a suffering of his own, the blind trial and death-victory
of Samson:
O loss of sight, of thee I most complain!
Blind among enemies, O worse then chains,
Dungeon, or beggery, or decrepit age!...
O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,
Irrecoverably dark, total Eclipse
Without all hope of day!...
The Sun to me is dark
And silent as the Moon
When she deserts the night
Hid in her vacant interlunar cave.
As in the Oedipus Colonos of Sophocles, the death of the hero leads the Chorus
beyond tragedy:
Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail
Or knock the breast, no weakness, no contempt,
Dispraise, or blame, nothing but well and fair,
And what may quiet us in a death so noble.
Va80) Rembrandt, Double: [A] 1629, Self Portrait in a Gorget; and [B] 1669, Last
Self Portrait, both Mauritshuis, The Hague
80)
Rembrandt, 1669, Last Self Portrait, Mauritshuis, The Hague (or V80)
80a) Faithhorne, 1670, Portrait of John Milton, National Portrait Gallery,
London (cf. slide 62)
V80b) Rembrandt, 1657, Self Portrait, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh
80c) Again 80, last self, detail
As Spinoza knew, that is the only form Tragedy can take in the eternal rightness of
Reason: "It is the nature of reason to conceive things under the species of eternity... that
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Symbolic History
is, intellectual love toward God is part of the infinite love with which God loves himself."
But Spinoza's love, like the last self-portrait of the dying Rembrandt, may go beyond that
egotism which, to add a word to Coleridge, is a somber revelation of Spirit. In the
formulated pride of Baroque, where Rembrandt moved always to inclusion, did Milton,
proudest of all, let selfhood exclude and foreclose?
Or had Eve's "Forsake me not thus, Adam," and true repentant tears besouled also
for his blindness the great wheel of right? —
All is best, though we oft doubt,
What th'unsearchable dispose
Of highest wisdom brings about,
And ever best found in the close...
His servants he with new acquist
Of true experience from this great event
With peace and consolation hath dismist,
And calm of mind all passion spent.
July 1996
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(close Bach Ricercare)
48
�
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SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
22. Pascal: Humanist Reversal
CHARLES G. BELL
ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
or
1260 CANYON ROAD
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501
June 1995
Last Revised January ‘96
�1
Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM
87501
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
22. Pascal: Humanist Reversal
al)
Eustache Le Sueur, 1645-48, Death of Raymond Diocre from Life of St.
Bruno, Louvre, Paris; video: detail only, preceded by a detail of 1
Eustache Le Sueur, 1645-48, Death of St. Bruno, whole, Louvre, Paris
1)
Music:
Carissimi, 1650: Jepthe, from recitative: ''Heu, heu, mihi", Arc 3005
Pascal's Pensées were left unfinished at his death in 1662:
Humble yourself, weak reason, be silent, foolish nature; learn that man
infinitely transcends man; and learn from your Master your true
condition, of which you are ignorant. Hear God!
(skip in Jepthe to near close)
In the religiosities of that mid-century — this Le Sueur Death of St. Bruno from
Paris;
2)
2a)
Zurbaran, c. 1645, St. Francis, Fine Arts Museum, Boston
Zurbaran, 1633, Fra’ Jeronimo Perez, Academia de San Fernando, Madrid;
video: two details only, with a return to 2, St. Francis, detail
from starker Spain, Zurbaran's St. Francis; in music the oratorio deepened by Carissimi
— how the proud art of reason buckles with need.
Humiliez-vous, raison impuissante! Taissez-vous nature imbécille.
Aprenez que l'homme passe infiniment l'homme, et entendez de vostre
Maistre votre condition véritable que vous ignorez! Ecoutez Dieu!
(end Carissimi)
3)
El Greco, c. 1600(?), St. Francis and the Lay Brother, Monforte de Lemos;
first, video detail
V3a) El Greco, 1603-07, Pentecost, detail: head of a Saint, Prado, Madrid
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3b) El Greco, 1600-1610, Christ on the Cross, Art Gallery, Cleveland (CGB'81)
V3c) Again, St. Francis and the Lay Brother, detail of 3
Music:
Lassus, 1550-52, Carmina Chromatico, Prophetiae Sibyllarum,
introduction, Nonesuch H 71053
That was the call of Christ from the start. Fifty years before Zurbaran, El Greco
had painted St. Francis — Renaissance skills hurled with Inquisitional frenzy against
Renaissance itself.
So the chromatic daring of music (here Lassus); the pentameter force of the
anonymous:
No me mueve me Dios para quererte,
El cielo que me tienes prometido...
Tu me mueves, Señor...
To the love of Christ on the cross our love is given,
And not from fear of hell or hope of heaven...
If heaven were not, I would love you still,
And I would fear you if there were no hell;
However hopeless of all hope of favor,
As now I love you, I would love forever. (CGB)
(end Carmina Chromatico)
But between El Greco
For 2nd 2)
Zurbaran, St. Francis, upper detail (where the video shows an upper detail of
slide 2, the slide show uses the Leon variant of the same subject)
and Zurbaran (as between Lassus and Carissimi) the focussing of Method has occurred,
which in thought is called Cartesian.
For 2nd 3)
Again, El Greco, St. Francis and the Lay Brother; but where video uses a
closer detail of slide 3, the slide show goes to the Brera, Milan version
If we speak of the immolation which threads Christendom — ''Humble yourself,
proud reason'' — El Greco might seem absolute;
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4)
Ph. de Champaigne, 1662, Ex-voto, Sister Catherine and Mother Agnes,
Louvre, Paris
V4a) Same, right detail
if of the Pascalian moment, what El Greco lacks is what boldens to spatial relief this Exvoto painted by Philippe de Champaigne for the Jansenist convent of Port-Royal, where
Pascal's sister was a nun and moving spirit, and to which, through her love and spiritual
sway, Pascal was converted in 1654. Between El Greco and this voluminous assertion of
piety
5)
Rubens, 1615-18, Scholar (called von Thulden), Alte Pinakothek, Munich
(CGB '59); + V details
there is a 1600 antecedent: Ruben's manifesto of the compact of flesh and reason — like
the Galilean science Pascal mastered in his teens, to proclaim in his 1647 treatise on the
pressure of the air:
Let all the disciples of Aristotle gather their strongest arguments... to
account if they can for these phenomena through nature's horror of a
vacuum; if they cannot, let them acknowledge that experiments are the
true masters we must follow in physics; that what has been done on the
mountains has overthrown the universal belief that nature abhors a
vacuum, and has disclosed a truth which can never perish —
6)
Frans Hals, 1639, Portrait of an Officer, National Gallery, Washington,
D.C.; + V detail
V6a) Hals, c. 1615, Shrovetide Merry Makers, Metropolitan Museum, NYC
(CGB '74)
that nature has no horror of a vacuum, that she does nothing to avoid
it, and that the weight of the mass of the air is the real cause of all the
effects hitherto attributed to that imaginary cause.
We must ask who begins, during Pascal's youth, with a proclamation of reality
reared on the physics of Rubens and the Caravaggiesque? One such is Hals. Perhaps his
tavern-blustering is remote from the megrims of intellectual Pascal (even in the supposed
dissipation of Pascal's youth);
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a7)
Hals, 1664, Women Guardians of the Almshouse, detail of central figure,
Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem
7)
Same, whole, the five women; with video details
V7a) Same, detail of three women to the left
7b) Same, detail, four women to the right
but the portraits Hals painted in age, in the almshouse —
Music
M.A. Charpentier, c. 1680, from Third Tenebrae, Vide, Domino…";
Nonesuch H-1040 or -71040
this, two years after Pascal's death, of the guardian women there — record some kind of
encounter with "Pyrrhonian" terror:
Let us imagine a number of men in chains; and all condemned to
death, where some are killed each day in the sight of the others, and
those who remain see their own fate in that of their fellows, and wait
their turn, looking at each other sorrowfully and without hope. It is an
image of the condition of men...
...se regardent les uns et les autres avec douleur et sans espérance,
attendant à leur tour. C'est l'image de la condition des hommes...
Severe as the lamentations Carissimi's pupil Charpentier wrote for the Reform nuns of
Pascal's Port-Royal: ''Her people sigh and seek bread... how vile, Lord, I am become.''
(fade Charpentier: "…vilis")
8)
van Gogh, 1885, The Potato Eaters, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; + V detail
As the first to penetrate the new universe and fall into the void beyond, Pascal
pioneered for the existential modern. And for reasons not dissimilar, late Hals points to
19th-century Van Gogh, who, like Rimbaud, spent his Season in Hell:
I am in the lowest depths and I have forgotten how to pray... the harbor
of wretchedness... under a sky stained with fire and mud. Ah! the
rotten rags, the rain-soaked bread, the drunkeness, the thousand loves
that crucified me... At least I will ask forgiveness for having fed on
lies...
9)
English, c. 1377, Bronze effigy of Edward III, head, Westminster Abbey,
London; + V detail
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The proud lie was harder to cultivate in the Middle Ages; no buildup for Pascalian
reversals in the continual gauntness of the fallen fact. Power itself wears such a deathmask as this of Edward III, victor of Crecy, who died deserted by all. "Tragedy," says
Chaucer's Monk, "is to tell ''
Of hym that stood in greet prosperitee,
And is yfallen out of heigh degree
Into myserie, and endeth wrecchedly.
10)
V10a)
Donatello, 1438-43, David, back view, Bargello, Florence
Same, side view, body to knees
Music
M. Cara, c. 1490(?), Non è tempo d'aspettare (instr.) Allegro 72
Only with humanist daring can atonement swell toward Savonarolla. First
Donatello, as in this marvellously profane David, herald of the sensuous claim, shaped
with Renaissance body, (fade Cara) its shadow:
11)
Donatello, 1455-57, Pieta, Victoria and Albert Museum, London; first, video
detail
Music:
Josquin des Prez, c. 1490(?), from the Stabat Mater, verses 4 and
5, AS 73
a compulsion of penitence for that interruption of creed-light. So Josquin's Stabat Mater
breaks chordal grandeur on the Cross.
(fade Josquin)
12)
V12a)
Michelangelo, 1526-33, Day, detail of back, Medici Tomb, Florence
Same, detail of face and shoulder
From the aged Donatello the buckling of soul passed to his most titanic successor,
Michelangelo, in whom the earth-thrust flexes with consciousness of power, longing,
imperfectibility. Thus Pascal a century after:
We burn with desire to find a solid ground and an ultimate sure
foundation on which to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our
whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses...
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And already in Michelangelo, that orogeny yields
13)
Michelangelo, 1556-64, Rondanini Pieta, detail, Sforzesco, Milan; + V closer
detail
to a fault and syncline, which holds in personal fragmentation, our whole incapacity and
need for grace — Herbert's "Pulley," Pascal's ''corruption of nature and redemption by
Christ'':
Certainly nothing offends us more rudely than this doctrine; and yet
without this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we are
incomprehensible to ourselves. The knot of our condition takes its
twists and turns in this abyss, so that man is more inconceivable
without this mystery than this mystery is inconceivable to man.
14)
Titian, 1557, Annunciation, Church of San Salvatore, Venice
At the same time in Venice Titian cycloned paint in the dynamics of late
Renaissance,
1st 15) Tintoretto, 1583-87, Flight to Egypt, left side, with Mary, Joseph, and
Christ, Scuolo di S. Rocco, Venice
a tumult which, through the whirl and forked lightening of Tintoretto,
1st 16) Jan Müller, 1590, Baptism of Christ, whole, Staatliche Graphische
Collection
spreads to the Mannerist north (this ecstatic Baptism by the nineteen year old Jan Müller);
and of course, with El Greco, to Spain.
Va2nd 15) Tintoretto, 1579-81, Resurrection, Scuolo di San Rocco, Venice
2nd 15)
Again, Tintoretto, Flight to Egypt, whole: figures (left), landscape
(right); [earlier videos had a detail only, V2nd 15, of Mary and background, now revised to the whole]
What would shift the soul from the Magian euphoria of Bruno for a centerless
infinite of innumerable animate worlds, to the vertiginous retreat of Pascal?
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We sail a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty. When we think to
attach ourselves to any point and fasten to it, it eludes our grasp, slips
past us and vanishes forever.
2nd 14) Again, Annunciation, detail, angels (above); + V detail (below), Gabriel and
Mary
Awash on Gesualdo da Venosa's chromatic sea, do we cry with Burney, 18thcentury lover of order: "shocking and disgusting to go from one chord to another...
composed of sounds wholly extraneous and foreign to any key to which the first chord
belongs?"
Music:
Gesualdo, pub.1611, Moro Lasso
BGS-5051
(from 2nd Moro), Vanguard
3rd 15)
Again, Tintoretto, Flight, landscape; video substitutes V3rd15a,
Tintoretto 1583-87, St.Mary of Egypt, center detail, Scuola di San
Rocco, Venice; and V3rd15b, Tintoretto, 1592-94, The Last Supper,
upper left, flambeau, S. Giorgio Maggiore, Venice
2nd 16)
Again, Müller, Baptism of Christ, lower section; first video, upper
section, heavenly choir
V2nd 16a) Jan Brueghel, c. 1604(?), Aeneas in the Underworld, detail,
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (CGB '59)
2nd 16b) Jacopo Bassano, 1574, Deposition (Night), Kunsthistorisches Museum,
Vienna
Va17)
El Greco, c. 1610-14, Laocoon, detail, National Gallery, Wash., D.C.
17)
El Greco, c. 1607-13, Immaculate Conception, [or, The Assumption of
the Virgin?], landscape detail (lower left), Museo de Santa Cruz, Toledo
(end Gesualdo)
So far as Pascal's experience is of drifting in a universe of infinite recess:
V17a)
18)
Again, Tintoretto, landscape from the Flight to Egypt, 3rd 15
Again, El Greco, 1607-13, from The Immaculate Conception, lower half of
the painting; while video turns instead to the Virgin of the upper half
(see V18)
Our reason is always deceived by fickle shadows... what does it matter
that man should have a little more knowledge of the universe? Is he
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not always infinitely removed from the end?... I hold it equally impossible to know the parts without knowing the whole, and to know the
whole without knowing the parts in detail...
All the principles of sceptics, stoics, atheists, etc. are true. But their
conclusions are false, because the opposite principles are also true...
The sceptic Arcesilaus who became a dogmatist...
such giddiness should relate back to El Greco, or to Gesualdo's trans-tonality.
Yet between their exploratory wildness
Va19)
Bernini, c. 1625(?), Narcissus, Schleissheim Gallery, nr. Munich (CGB '59);
here a detail from a2nd 19, below
Caravaggio, 1594-96, Narcissus, Borghese Gallery, Rome
19)
and Pascal, comes the formulated order of Baroque. The faith-leap of the Pensées is by
Cartesian calculation:
What shall man do in this state? Shall he doubt whether he is awake,
whether he is being pinched, whether he is being burned? Shall he
doubt whether he doubts?
Caravaggio had forged the regrouping in art.
20)
Christofano Allori, 1610, Judith with the head of Holofernes, Pitti, Florence
(CGB '48)
But method was ascendent in the Italy of Galileo: the Carraci in Bologna and Rome, in
Florence this Allori, heavy with the rhetoric of touch — mistress-model Judith carrying
the artist's own deep-shadowed head.
a2nd 19) Bernini's Narcissus (cf. Va19); here video narrows to a closer detail
2nd 19) Again, Caravaggio's Narcissus, upper detail; + V lower detail
In music the shift is from the atonal shorelessness of Gesualdo, to the modulating
chromatics of Monteverdi, at every moment on tonal course.
Music:
June 1996
Monteverdi, 1614, Lasciatemi morire (from repeat) 5v. madrigal on 1608
Arianna aria, Boulanger, Seraphim 60125
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Symbolic History
V2nd 20) Again, Allori, Judith, two video details, below and above (from 20)
21)
Same, a separate close detail of Holofernes head (CGB '48)
22)
Ribera, 1620-30(?), Death of Adonis, Art Gallery, Cleveland
(end Monteverdi)
(The youthful Ribera, Spanish Neapolitan, stretching Caravaggio for this Death of
Adonis.)
23)
V23a)
V23b)
V23c)
23d)
Bernini, 1622-25, Apollo and Daphne, full-length, Borghese Gallery, Rome
Same, half-length
Same, detail of Daphne
Same, upper detail of Apollo and Daphne
Bernini, 1665, Louis XIV, Versailles
In sculpture Bernini established the heroic theater of regulated passion — as selfwilled and classical, as surging and restrained, as Waller's couplets in ''The Story of
Phoebus and Daphne applied," for a century and a half the most admired copy of verses
in the English tongue. The poet, too,
…pursues…, the Nymph with his Harmonious Lay,
Whom all his Charms cou'd not incline to stay;
Yet what he Sung in his immortal Strain,
Though unsuccessful, was not Sung in vain;
All but the Nymph, that should redress his wrong,
Attend his Passion, and approve his song.
Like Phoebus thus, acquiring unsought Praise,
He catcht at Love, and fill'd his arms with Bays.
Yet how fiercely, in that context of courtly wit, finding its European center in the
Paris of Louis XIV (whom Bernini would twice portray),
24)
French-German Glass, c. 1200, Christ Throned, Dom, Straßburg (CGB '59);
first, video details
the oldest hunger of the West seized on Pascal,
Music:
June 1996
Perotin, lv. Conductus, Beata Viscera, opening, (Tinayre) Lumen
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wrenching him from the booming mainstream into the eddy William James would call of
the twice-born — though neither the world-calcining stare of 1200 Strasbourg, nor
Perotin's angular Byzantine have Pascal's clarity of rational terror:
When I see the blindness and the wretchedness of man... lost in this
corner of the universe... incapable of all knowledge, I become
terrified... It is the heart which experiences God and not the reason.
(fade Perotin)
25)
Fra Angelico, 1439-45, Transfiguration fresco, San Marco, Florence;
+ V detail
Music:
Dufay, c.1440(?), Flos Florum, close, Archive-2533291
How simple and pure, how grateful, in the Christ of Angelico, in the harmonies of Dufay,
the first accomodations of the divine to temporal possibility.
(end Dufay)
26)
26a)
Guercino, 1640(?), Christ, Acad., Carrara, Bergamo; + V detail
Bernini, 1661-63, St. Jerome, detail, Chigi Chapel, Siena Cathedral
Music:
Monteverdi, 1610, Duo Seraphim from the Vespers, SAWT 9501-2
By the century of Pascal, the God-man swells with embodiment: the eternal and infinite
become on the stage of Guercino and Monteverdi as tactile as the enfleshed loves of
Marino, or that ''soft and nectarous bosom" — "molle tuo nettareo seno" in which
Scipione Errico wished to appease his languid spirits:
Let sight yield to feeling, eye to mouth,
Gaze and beholding perish with the light;
The god is blind and finds his way by touch. (CGB)
(fade Monteverdi)
Pascal geometrizes that heightened fever of flesh, Donne's ''Batter my heart, three
person'd god."
a27)
Vb27)
27)
June 1996
School of Avignon, c. 1455, Villeneuve Pieta, whole, Louvre, Paris
Enguerrand Charonton, 1453-54, Coronation of the Virgin, Hospice of
Villeneuve-les-Avignon; + V detail
Again, Villeneuve Pieta, central detail (cf. a27)
Pascal: Humanist Reversal
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V27a)
Symbolic History
Same, close detail of Christ's head
Let poems of three centuries plumb the passionate vortex of sacred love. The
most sustained English lyric of the 15th century, "Quia amore langueo” (“that I languish
of love”), is enacted, like this Pieta of Avignon, on the visionary crust between heaven
and hell:
In a valey of this restless minde
I sought in mounteine and in mede,
Trusting a trewe love for to finde.
Upon an hill than I took hede;
A voice I herde, and neer I yede,
In huge dolour compleininge tho,
"See, derè soule, how my sidès blede,
Quia Amore langueo.''
Upon this hill I fond a tree,
Under the tree a man sittinge:
From heed to foot wounded was he;
His hertè blood I segh bledinge;
A semely man to ben a king,
A gracious face to loken unto.
I askede why he had peininge.
He seide "Quia amore langueo."
Va28)
b28)
28)
Botticelli, 1495-1500, Pieta, detail: Mary at Christ's Head, Alte
Pinakakothek, Munich (copy of CGB '59; from Michelangelo 53a)
Same, whole (copy of CGB '59, from Michelangelo 53)
Same, the Magdalene at Christ's feet (CGB '59)
"I am true love that fals was nevere;
My sister, mannès soule, I loved her thus;
Because we wolde in no wise discevere.
I lefte my kingdom glorious.
I purveide for her a paleis precious;
sche fleith, I folowe, I soughte her so;
I suffrede this peine piteous,
Quia amore langueo.
''I crowned her with bliss, and sche me with thorn;
I ledde her to chaumber, and, sche me to die;
I broughte her to worschipe and sche me to scorn;
I dide her reverence, and sche me vilonie.
June 1996
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Symbolic History
To love that loveth is no maistrie.
Her hate made nevere my love her fo.
Axè me no question why,
Quia amore langueo.
Through Botticelli, passion has that ideality.
1st 29) Correggio, 1530-34, Jupiter and Io, whole, Kunsthistorisches Museum,
Vienna
But when Correggio brought Io to sexual ecstasy in Jupiter's cloud-arms
1st 30) Michelangelo, 1537-41, Saved Soul Rising, detail of Last Judgment,
Vatican, Rome
the sacred was bound to follow, as in Michalangelo's detail of the ascent of a woman
saved.
2nd 29) Again, Jupiter and Io, detail; + closer video detail
Thus when the love songs of Solomon entered the Jewish canon as the dialogues of God
and soul, the fusion heightened mystical and profane. With each translation, Vulgate,
Luther, King James, the erotic spreads wider immortal wings. In English no love poem
can compare with the Song of Songs:
I am the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valleys...
2nd 30) Again, Michelangelo's Saved Soul Rising, detail (video pans from 1st 30)
Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.
[Quia amore langueo.]... Until the day break, and the shadows flee
away, turn, my beloved, and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the
mountains of Bether...
31)
31a)
English, late 15th cent., Madonna, Winchester Cathedral (CGB '74)
Massys, c. 1510(?), Madonna Standing with the Child and Angels, Courtauld
Inst. Gal., London; video: detail only, with a return to the Winchester
Madonna, detail
Return, return, O Shulamite; that we may look upon thee.
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Symbolic History
From the English Madonna of Winchester, late fifteenth century (with the quiet
Tudor harmony still espoused by Byrd),
Music:
Byrd, c. 1580(?), Mass for Three Voices, opening of Agnus, ARC3533-133
(fade)
1st 32) El Greco c. 1595, Mary from Holy Family with St. Anne, Hospital of John
the Baptist, Toledo (video uses V32)
32a)
El Greco, c. 1585-90, Mater Dolorosa, Thyssen, Lugano
V32b) El Greco, c. 1584, detail of the two Marys from Disrobing of Christ, Alte
Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59; cf. Mozart 10); here video returns to a closer
detail of 1st 32
to the tenderest El Greco's (with the swelling flow of Palestrina):
Music:
Palestrina, pub. 1590, Mass: Aeterna Christi Munera, 2nd Agnus,
opening, Argo ZRG-5186
(fade)
art perfects the sensuous incarnation of Grace.
At the same time, in the "Ascent of Mount Carmel" by John of the Cross, the
climax of that God-swoon possesses a folk stanza
2nd 31) Again, Winchester Madonna, detail (so video, from 31)
simple as the Winchester Madonna, or the "Quia Amore Langueo'':
En una noche escura,
con ansias en amores inflamada
oh dichosa ventura!
salí sin ser notada,
estando ya mi casa sosegada.
a2nd 32)
J. Gossaert (called Mabuse), c. 1510(?), Night Nativity, old Seemann
prints (cf. Now Alpha 91)
For 2nd 32) F. Barocci, c. 1590(?), Nativity, Ambrosiana, Milan
June 1996
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Symbolic History
How miraculously the ballad structure fills, setting grammar and all aswim:
A escuras y segura
por la secreta escala, disfrazada,
O dichosa ventura!
a escuras, en celada,
estando ya mi casa sosegada.
En la noche dichosa,
en secreto, que nadie me veía,
ni yo miraba cosa,
sin otra luz ni guia,
sino la que en el corazon ardía
1st 33) El Greco, c. 1600, St. Andrew, Zuloaga Mus., Zumaya (N. Coast of Spain)
V33a) El Greco, 1590-95, St. John, detail from The Crucifixion, Prado, Madrid
Aquesta me guiaba
mas cierto que la luz de mediodía,
adonde me esperaba
quien yo bien me sabía,
en parte donde nadie parecía.
Oh noche, que guiaste,
oh noche amable mas que el alborada,
oh noche, que juntaste
Amado con amada,
amada en el Amado trasformada!
34)
El Greco, c. 1608(?), Agony in the Garden, Cathedral, Cuenca; + V detail
En mi pecho florido,
que entero para el solo se guardaba,
allí quedó dormido,
yo le regalaba,
y el ventalle de cedros aire daba.
El aire del almena,
cuando ya sus cabellos esparcía,
con su mano serena,
en mi cuello hería
y todos mis sentidos suspendía.
Quedéme y olvidéme
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Symbolic History
el rostro recliné sobre el Amado,
cesó todo, y dejéme,
dejando mi cuidado
entre las azucenas olvidado.
In no poem is translation more incommensurate:
2nd 33)
Again, El Greco, St. Andrew, detail
In the dark of night
With love inflamed
By luck, by chance
I rose unseen
From the house hushed in sleep.
Safe in the dark
By a secret stair
My luck my chance
And night for a veil
I stole from the house of sleep,
2nd 33a) Tintoretto, 1583-87, Mary Magdalen, central detail, Scuola di San Rocco,
Venice (cf. Giants in the Earth, 2nd76)
By chance of night
By secret ways
Unseeing and unseen
No light, no guide
But the flames that my heart gave —
Led by those rays
Surer than day
I came where one waits
Who is known to me
In a place none seemed to be.
2nd 33b) Michelangelo, 1555-64, Rondanini Pieta, detail of Christ and Mary,
Sforzesca, Milan (CGB '80)
Night that guides
Purer than dawn
Night that joins
Lover and loved
And the loved into Lover changed.
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Symbolic History
In my flowered heart
That is only his
He lay in sleep
Lulled by the breeze
The fanning of the cedars gave.
2nd 34) El Greco, 1585-86, Agony in the Garden, National Gallery, London
Down turrets that air
With hand serene
As it stirred in his hair
Gave my throat a wound
That took all sense away.
I ceased, I was gone
My face to his own
All passed away
Care and all thrown down
There among the lilies where I lay. (CGB)
35)
Bernini, 1644-52, Ecstasy of Santa Theresa, Santa Maria della Vittoria,
Rome; + V detail (from V35)
It is in Bernini that religion most displays that orgasm — ''Cupid in shape of a
swain did appear,/ And showed her his arrow.'' But in the century now of Pascal's wager
and of Crashaw's Theresa of the Flaming Heart:
By all thy brim-filled bowls of fierce desire,
By thy last morning's draught of liquid fire;
By the full kingdom of that final kiss
That seized thy parting soul, and sealed thee His...
36)
36a)
V36b)
Caravaggio, 1598-1601, Calling of St. Matthew, S. Luigi dei Francese,
Rome; first, video previews 37, Heads of Matthew and Christ
Same, Calling of St. Matthew, left; + V detail
Same, detail of young courtier
In Caravaggio's epoch-making canvas, a hypnotic Christ calls Matthew from the
money-tables — enactment of the 1600 revolt and humbling of earthly power. Herbert
caught it in the dialogue of ''The Collar":
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Symbolic History
I struck the board, and cry'd, No more,
I will abroad...
Sure there was wine
Before my sighs did drie it: there was corn
Before my tears did drown it.
Is the yeare onely lost to me?
Have I no bayes to crown it?
No flowers, no garlands gay? all blasted?
All wasted?
Not so, my heart: but there is fruit,
And thou hast hands.
37)
V37a)
Same, Double: heads of Matthew and Christ
Same, detail of Christ
Call in thy death's-head there: tie up thy fears.
He that forbears
To suit and serve his need,
Deserves his load.
But as I rav'd and grew more fierce and wilde
At every word,
Methought I heard one calling, Child!
And I reply'd, My Lord.
38)
V38a)
V38b)
38c)
P. Damoustier Sr., c. 1575, Unknown Man, Hermitage, Leningrad
N. Hilliard, c. 1600(?), George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, Nelson
Gallery, Kansas City
El Greco, 1586, Burial of Conde de Orgaz, detail of a head, Santo Tomé,
Toledo
Caravaggio, 1608, Alof de Wignacourt, Louvre, Paris; video, detail only (cf.
V38c)
We have seen Renaissance liberation, with Montaigne, or in the portraits of his
time, look, as into a mirror, to find a scar, a cicatrice, those melancholy suspensions of
illusion Hamlet-Pascal gleaned from the Essays:
Man is neither angel nor brute, and the unfortunate thing is he who
would act the angel acts the brute...
Why do we follow ancient laws and customs? Is it because they are
more sacred? No, but because they are unique... as we obey superiors,
not because they are just, but because they are they are superior...
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Symbolic History
We do not sustain ourselves in virtue by our own strength, but by the
balancing of two opposed vices, just as we remain upright admidst two
contrary gales. Remove one of the vices, and we fall into the other...
39)
An. Carracci, 1590-1600, Self-Portrait on an Easel, Hermitage, Leningrad;
+ V details
By 1600 the value crisis fans out from the Italy of this haunted Carracci self to the
English School of Night: ''What Geomantike jaw howles in mine eares,/ The echoised
sounds of horrorie?'' Marino:
The never-blessed mortal who is born
Into this life of misery discovers,
Sooner than the sun, sorrow and weeping; his morn
Of birth beholds him rage in swaddling covers
Bound; a boy then, with pap not pleased
Forever, under the whip he leads his days;
When with advancing age that lash is eased,
Chance and love impel him devious ways,
Destroyed, renewed; penury, plague he bears;
Tired and lifeless, stooped, a breaking wave,
On a prop of wood he leans his antique years
And crawls at last into the closing grave,
Ravished away; wherefore I moan this message:
"From the womb to the tomb is a brief passage." (CGB)
40)
V40a)
V40b)
Velasquez, 1639, The Court Jester Calabacillas, Prado
Velasquez, c. 1648, The Buffoon Don Sebastiano de Mora, Prado, Madrid
Velasquez, 1656, from Las Meninas: head of a dwarf, Prado, Madrid
"Dalla cuna alla tomba è un breve passo."
As Shakespeare's clowns darken to Velasquez's court jester, that Marino ore of
''To be or not to be" reduces to Pascal's aphorisms:
Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death… It is the
struggle that pleases us, not the victory... We are falsehood and
contradiction; we disguise ourselves from ourselves... Human society
is founded on mutual deceit... Human life a perpetual illusion... A
dream a little less inconstant...
June 1996
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a41)
Symbolic History
Velasquez, 1622, The Poet Luis de Gongora, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston;
video defers this portrait, as to V41a, replacing it here with a detail of 41
Morazzone, c. 1610, St. Francis, Brera, Milan; first, video detail
Velasquez, 1623(?), Portrait of a Gentleman, Inst. of Arts, Detroit; with
video return to another detail and again the whole of the Morazzone, St.
Francis
41)
V41b)
Music
Trabaci, c.
Guild 129
1610-1620(?),
Consonanse
Stravaganti,
Music
The Marino of Spain was Gongora — De la brevedad engañosa de la vida —
such violence as the Caravaggiesque (this Morazzone), or in music the Neapolitan
Trabaci:
The driven arrow does not seek the mark
On which it fiercely bites — nor chariot round
In festal course over the voiceless sand
A goal predestined — with more secret work
Than our impetuous age, muffled in murk,
Lurches toward its end, If any stand
In doubt brute as he is, of sense unsound
The daily sun is the comet of his dark.
— Cada sol repetido es un cometa —
Will Carthage confess it, and you not bow?
You are at odds, friend, if you go your ways
Coursing for shadows and embracing snares.
The hours will not suffice to pardon you,
Those hours that are wearing out the days,
The days that gnaw the leavings of our years. (CGB)
42)
42a)
42b)
J. Callot, 1615, Temptation of St. Anthony, drawing, Victoria and Albert
Museum, London
(end Trabaci)
Callot, 1633, from "The Miseries of the War," The Oak of Hanged Men, Dover
Callot, 1634, The Temptation of St. Anthony, etching, British Museum,
London; while the video shows details of slide 42; (see V42c, d)
June 1996
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Symbolic History
From Italy to the Gallic wit of Callot (to engrave, after this St. Anthony, the
horrors of the Thirty Years War, his famous oak hung with fruit of corpses) we remain in
the turbulent eddies that rim the Baroque jet — what turned Donne, brightest talent of
1600 England, into ''wits forge and fire-blast, meaning's press and screw," distilling from
Shakespeare's "siren's tears'' and ''limbecks foul as hell within'' a denser potion:
The worlds whole sap is sunke:
The general balme th'hydroptique earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the beds-feet, life is shrunke,
Dead and enterr'd; yet all these seeme to laugh,
Compar'd with mee, who am their Epitaph...
Blasted with sighs, and surrounded with teares...
...O, selfe traytor, I do bring
The spider love, which transubstantiates all,
And can convert Manna to gall,
And that this place may thoroughly be thought
True Paradise, I have the serpent brought...
Va43)
43)
P. Lorenzetti, 1321-28, Deposition, St. Francis Lower Church, Assisi
Same, detail
As if, over the harmony Renaissance had dreamed, Gothic pain were flooding
back: The twisted stark urgency of Lorenzetti's Deposition, of Machault's Crucifixus;
Music:
Guillaume de Machault, c. 1364(?) Crucifixus from Mass, (Deller)
Vanguard HM-1SD
the perennial ''Ubi sunt'':
O foode of filthy woorme, oh lump of loathsome clay...
Why gloryest thou so much...?
but changed, that flat anguish of symbolic relations
Va44)
44)
44a)
June 1996
Rubens, 1612, Descent from the Cross, study for Antwerp Cathedral altar
piece, Courtauld Institute of Arts
Rubens, c. 1612-14, Lamentation over the dead Christ, Mus. Berlin-Dahlem;
+ V detail
Rubens, c. 1620, storm detail from Philemon landscape, Kunsthistorisches
Museum, Wien; + V closer detail
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Symbolic History
Renaissance-impregnated: Frescobaldi now,
Music:
Frescobaldi, pub. 1635, Ricercar dopo il Credo (Videro), HSL2072
or Rubens: body, robe, torch-lighted thews, the rhetoric and closure of space, no
transrational loopholes. In a sonnet by de Gombaul such conglomerate force overvaults
us:
The voice that measures earth from pole to pole,
The hope and terror of the quick and the dead,
That drew from nothingness both body and soul,
And made the whole world at a breath, a word;
The voice that roots up cedars and tall firs,
But leaves the white thorn and its blossoms whole,
That spares the sheepcot and the lowly shed,
And lays in ruins the pride of the Capitol;
45)
Zurbaran, c. 1638-39, The Vision of Fra’ Pedro de Salamanca, Monastery of
Guadalupe; first, video detail
Great sky-resounding voice of the thunderer,
To which the rock hills and oak forests roar
Which guides to their right end all things that are,
Which heights above and deepest places fear,
And forms that are not yet, and shades who were —
That voice calls, my soul, and you do not hear. (CGB)
(fade Ricercar)
As in Donne's "at the round earth's imagined corners...," physical infinity looms through
Judgment. How that voice resonates between the first line and the last:
La voix qui retentit de l'un a l'autre Pole...
Mon ame, elle t'appelle, et tu ne l'entens pas. —
The seen, the heard, overpowering as in Zurbaran's Vision of Brother Pedro of
Salamanca.
46)
June 1996
Zurbaran, c. 1629-30, Vision of San Pedro Nolasco, Prado, Madrid;
+ V detail [Alternates, V46 and V46a, could be used instead]
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V46b)
Symbolic History
Zurbaran, 1630, Immaculate Conception, Our Lady of Carmen College,
Jadraque (or V46b detail: upper spread)
Music:
Frescobaldi, 1627, Toccata quinta sopra i pedali, (Videro)
GDB5214
But surely the Baroque disillusion crucial to Pascal was paired with a vindicating
confidence in the ways of God and man; thus in the Pedro Nolasco vision, again with
Frescobaldi, Zurbaran's lights beckon almost as serenely to the other world as in
Vaughan's Silex Scintillans:
I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great Ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright...
O fools, said I...
To live in grots and caves, and hate the day...
But as I did their madness so discusse,
One whisper'd thus,
This Ring the Bride-groome did for none provide,
But for his Bride.
a47)
47)
Gentilleschi, c. 1620, Three Martyrs, whole, Brera, Milan; + V details
Same, closer detail of Tiburtius
In Italy Gentilleschi gives his Vision of Three Martyrs a gleam like that of
Vaughan's Ascension Hymn:
They are all gon into the world of light...
I see them walking in an air of glory...
Resume thy spirit from this world of thrall
Into true liberty.
— the physical rayed through, the ''gilded Cloud'' of Vaughan's "Retreate'' — "through all
this fleshly dresse/ Bright shootes of everlastingness."
Happy those early days when I
Shin'd in my Angell-infancy!...
O how I long to travell back,
And tread again that ancient track."
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Symbolic History
That I might once more reach that plaine,
Where first I left my glorious traine;
From whence th' inlightened spirit sees
That shady City of Palme trees...
a48)
48)
48a)
Rubens, c. 1615, Eldest daughter, Liechtenstein Gallery (CGB '59)
Ch. Beale, 17th cent., Self from Sketchbook, Pierpont Morgan, N.Y.
Rubens, 1637-40, Landscape by Moonlight, Courtauld Institute, London;
video: detail only
But if angel infancy is so near, Cartesian introspection must contain in psychic
duality, with Pascalian loss, Transcendental blessing: the thirteen-year-old Cowley
stealing to the fields to read and dream, and to write the ode that ends "I have lived
today''; the pre-romantic self quietly attested in the sketchbook of Charles Beale; the
nature rapture of Traherne:
A Magnanimous Soul is always awake. The whole globe of the earth
is but a nutshell in comparison of its enjoyments. The sun is its lamp,
the sea its fishpond, the stars its jewels, men, angels, its attendants, and
God alone its sovereign delight and... complacency...
You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your
veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars.
49)
L. de Jong, Dutch, c. 1670(?), Shooting Party, whole, Gallery, Dublin (CGB
'74)
Aelbert Cuyp c. 1660(?), A Hilly River Landscape, National Gallery,
London
Vermeer, 1660, Gentleman and Girl with Music, Frick Collection, N.Y.C.
V49a)
49b)
And as we have seen before with Elsheimer, late Rubens, Claude, so in Jan Both,
Cuyp, this de Jong, the landscape of common occurrence will glow as if turned to light.
Traherne, from Centuries of Meditations:
The corn was orient and immortal wheat which never should be reaped
nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to
everlasting... The green trees when I saw them first through one of the
gates transported and ravished me... The Men!... Immortal Cherubims!... and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty!
June 1996
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a50)
50)
50a)
50b)
50c)
Symbolic History
Vermeer, 1658-60, The Little Street, Delft, Rijkmuseum, Amsterdam
Same, c. 1658, View of Delft, Mauritshuis, The Hague
Same, 1665, Vermeer's Studio, detail, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien
Again, Vermeer, View of Delft, central detail; which video replaces with
details from the whole, of city and of sky
Fabritius, 1652, View of Delft, National Gallery, London
Boys and girls tumbling in the street were moving jewels; I knew not
that they were born or should die... The City seemed to stand in Eden
or to be built in Heaven... The skies were mine, and so were the sun
and moon and stars, all the world was mine; and I the only spectator
and enjoyer of it...
or from "Wonder"
How like an Angel came I down!
How bright are all things here...
I nothing in the world did know
But 'twas divine.
In Vermeer's pictures — as Wordsworth would take up the theme — "The earth,
and every common sight... did seem/ Apparelled in celestial light...", flowing with
Traherne's "Seas of life, like wine."
(end Toccata sopra i pedali)
Even Bunyan, cramped with fear of earth's Enchanted Ground, still sheds some
natural radiance on Christian's human shore.
51)
Rembrandt, 1642, Nightwatch, central detail, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
(CGB '59)
V51a) Same, left of center, man loading gun and girl richly dressed (from CGB '59;
cf. Milton b56)
51b) Rembrandt 1631, Ascension of Christ, det., Alte Pinak., Munich
51c) Again, Nightwatch, a wider detail, including the previous ones; while video
goes to the whole (from CGB '59; cf. Milton 56)
Is. not Pascal's century, in and out, sacred and secular, the world's chief age of
certitude? Even politics in the Dutch Republic, England, the New World, rode a Biblical
wave in which the empires of Assyria, Persia, Greece, and Rome must yield to the Fifth
June 1996
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Symbolic History
Monarchy under the present Kingship of Christ. If that was the lunatic fringe, here is
Milton, 1641:
amidst the Hymns and Hallelujahs of Saints some one may perhaps be
heard offering... in new and lofty Measures to sing… Thy marvellous
Judgements... whereby this great and Warlike Nation... casting far
from her the rags of her old vices, may press on... to be found the
soberest, wisest, and most Christian People at that day when thou,
Eternal and shortly-expected King, shalt open the clouds... (Church
Discipline)
And for that great harvest "had we but eyes to lift up, the fields are white already."
History is the interpenetration of gyres in which Pascal challenges such hope — as
from the studio of Rembrandt in the 1640's came the great civic "Night Watch''
52)
Rembrandt (or school), c. 1644, Christ at the Column, Wallraf-Richartz, Köln;
+ V details
and a cluster of nude sketches, in one of which flesh is stripped again to Michelangelo's
final core of martyrdom — against the surge of reason and earth, the old renege of space,
air, pride, plume, glory ("quia absurdum est")
It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is
incomprehensible that He should not exist; that the soul should be
joined to a body, and that we should have no soul; that the world
should be created and that it should not be created...
Who will unravel this tangle? Nature confutes the skeptics and reason
confutes the dogmatists... Seeing too much to deny and too little to be
sure, I am in a state to be pitied...
Is this Christian faith of neo-Christian denial?
And have we a cognate in music when Schütz puts off polychoral pomp for the
Passions of his old age?
53)
Caravaggio, 1596-98, Head of Medusa, Ufizzi, Florence
His earliest compositions come from Gabrielli's 1600 Venice, where Mannerist
energy spilled over into the method of Caravaggio,
June 1996
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54)
Symbolic History
J. Heintz, 1599, Satyrs and Nymphs, whole, Alte Pinakothek, Munich
(CGB '59)
engendering first strains of Baroque — this Heintz,
For 2nd 53) Again, Head of Medusa, detail
Schütz' chromatic madrigal on the vipers of love:
Music:
Schütz, pub. 1611, Feritevi, opening, Dover, HCR-ST 7287
(then skip to close)
For 2nd 54) Again, Satyrs and Nymphs, detail; + V closer details (copy of CGB '59;
darker original in video file)
(close of Feritevi)
55)
Rembrandt, 1630, Jeremiah foresees the Fall of Jerusalem, detail,
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (CGB '59); video takes a wider view from
Milton 12 (CGB '59), then a close detail from 55
Rembrandt, 1642, David and Absolam, Hermitage, Leningrad; with a
final video return to 55, Jeremiah, detail
55a)
By 1629 Schutz' Absalom commands as dark and affirming a glory as
Rembrandt's 1630 Jeremiah — gold alchemized out of tragic mass:
Music:
Schütz ,1629, Fili mihi Absalon, from vocal section, Nonesuch H1600
(fade)
But when Schütz discards that splendor
56)
V56a)
56b)
V56c)
June 1996
Rembrandt, 1661, Risen Christ, Alte Pinakothek, München (CGB '59)
Rembrandt, 1661, Christ with a Pilgrim's Staff, Metropolitan Museum,
NYC
Rembrandt, 1660(?), Titus in a Monk's Habit, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Rembrandt, 1661, An Apostle in Prayer, The Cleveland Museum of Art,
Ohio
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Symbolic History
for the ravaged Germany of the 1664 Passions, he still nobly affirms. Neither in him, nor
in late Rembrandt's reduction to mystery, do we encounter the Pascalian crisis of life
doubt.
Music:
57)
Schütz, 1664, from St. Matthew Passion, Christ and Osterlamm
chorus, ARC-3172
Rembrandt, 1654, Three Crosses etching, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; + V detail
The pity of Schütz and Rembrandt is free of loss and terror. Pain here is as
cosmically vindicated as with Milton. As Spinoza said: "The knowledge of evil is
inadequate knowledge.'' Even in the starker immediacy of etching, the anguish of the
Cross is curtained in aisles of radiance, by which it is spatially atoned. How far phenomenal dark, lifted on the wave of being, still declares the glory of God —
58)
Goya, 1810-20, Disasters of the War #36, "Tampoco"; + V detail
a contrast with Goya may suggest — after the experience of a hundred and fifty Pascalian
years. The socio-religious revolutions have become secular; Cartesian wonder has
become Cartesian bondage. What would Poussin, who gave his life to nature as
Universal Reason, make of this space? With Swift and Voltaire reason itself has soured.
It seemed bitter enough when Pascal sharpened Montaigne:
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it
from religious conviction.
Here, they do not even claim that sanction. Already, as in Dostoyevski, introspective
malice breaks out.
59)
Rembrandt, 1655, The Flayed Ox, Louvre, Paris; + V details
Rembrandt's Flayed Ox has been belabored as his most tragic self-portrait, his
''existentialist illumination of the condition of man''; and perhaps it is his most Pascalian
picture, most honed to the paradox of fact:
Must we kill to prevent there being any wicked? This is to make both
parties wicked instead of one... What will you say is good?... Not to
kill? No; for disorder would be horrible and the evil would kill the
June 1996
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Symbolic History
good. To kill? No; for that destroys nature. We have truth and
goodness only in part and mixed with falsehood and evil.
Yet the whole carnal realm, against Goya, remains God's burning recess.
In music, the fiercest application of Frescobaldi's keyboard mastery was by the
north German Frohberger, famous over Europe for the dissonant fire of his Toccatas and
Suites:
Music:
Frohberger, c. 1650-60, from Toccata No. 3 in G (close), RCA
VICS-14
A60) Rembrandt, c. 1629-30, Laughing Self, Rijksmus., Amsterdam (CGB '59); here
video introduces B of the double (60, to follow)
60) Rembrandt, Double: [A] the 1629 Laughing Self, and [B] the 1665 Laughing
Self
60B) Rembrandt, 1665, Self-portrait laughing, with a bust of Heraclitus(?),
Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Köln; then the video once more repeats the two
self-portraits, early and late
(end Frohberger)
In Rembrandt's laughing self portraits from early to late, the Medieval smile of
grace (under a Brueghel transformation, as in the field of Montaigne's urbanity and
Shakespeare's clown-life) takes the brunt of Baroque disillusion, and comes up in the
1665 Laughing Philosopher, weirdly suspended between Rabelais and Swift. If there is
such a category as Pascalian comedy, this indescribable laugh-leer should define it:
Quelle chimère est-ce donc que l'homme... what monster, chaos,
contradiction, quel prodige! Judge of all things, imbecile worm of the
earth... pride and refuse of the universe — gloire et rebut de l'univers.
But Moliere's progress from easy farce through the 1666 Misanthrope of the mocked ideal
("me laissez enfin/ Dans ce petit coin sombre, avec mon noir chagrin''), to Le Malade
Imaginaire of 1673, in which the dramatist was seized with tubercular hemorrhage as he
described such symptoms, himself playing the Imaginary Invalid —
N'y a-t-il point quelque danger a contrefaire le mort?
Is there no danger in counterfeiting death? —
is a progress of Pascallan kind.
June 1996
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a61)
61)
Symbolic History
Tycho Brahe, pub. 1598, Great Mural Quadrant, in his observatory of
Uraniborg
Egyptian (XVIIIth Dynasty), c. 1570 B.C., Relief: Ikhnaton Adores Aton,
Museum, Cairo; + V detail
In our search for Pascal's cognates, we have underplayed what distinguished him
most, that his reversal occurred in the context of Cartesian science, that realm newly
"won from the void and formless infinite"; that he renders science back to faith.
No doubt, in the Bible, the wonders of the world are invoked in God's praise (so
Ikhnaton adores the sun orb):
Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion... that calleth for the
waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth: the
Lord is his name. (Amos)
The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth forth
his handiwork. (Psalms)
— though already there may be doubt whether God is praised by ignorance or knowledge:
Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? (Job)
Va62)
Dalmation Byzantine, mid-6th cent., Atrium and Baptistry of Euphrasius'
Basilica, Porec, Istria, Yugoslavia (CGB '77)
Same, interior of the Basilica (CGB '77)
Same, mosaic apse (CGB '77)
Antioch, 6th cent., Rebecca from Vienna Genesis, f. VII, 13, National
Library, Vienna
b62)
Vc62)
62)
Music:
Byzantine Chant, Mt. Athos, Easter Eve, Distribution of Tapers,
ARCHIV 2533 413
In any case, Early Christian Illusionism, after Greece and Rome, reflects, with
Byzantine chant, the turn from earth-knowledge as a road to God:
Tertullian:
After knowing Jesus Christ, we need no investigation...
Augustine:
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Symbolic History
another form of temptation assails me... a certain vain and curious
itch... of making experiments by help of the flesh, which is masked
under the title of knowledge and learning...
What ensues is the Dark Age retreat into symbols.
63)
(fade Athos chant)
Giovanni di Paolo, c. 1450, John the Baptist in the Desert, Art Institute,
Chicago; first, video details (cf. Va63 and Vb63)
Music:
Guillaume de Machault, c.1370(?), from Ma fin est mon
commencement (instr.) SER SlC-6092
From that earth-alienation, the lean rebirth of Gothic (in music Guillaume de
Machault) would spill over 1400, as in Sienese Giovanni di Paolo — where the
Renaissance recovery of nature hangs between the alchemical nominalism of the Red Sea
above, with the allegorical rock-desert into which John the Baptist walks (without the
diminution of distance), and the exploratory pocket of recessive fields.
(end Machault)
a64)
Vb64)
64)
van Eyck, 1428-29(?), Francis receives Stigmata, detail, Sabauda Gallery,
Turin (cf. also Johnson Collection, Philadelphia
Fouquet, c. 1470, Joshua, The Fall of Jericho (with Loire landscape), Antiq.
Jud., Nat. Bibl., Paris
Fouquet, c. 1470, David hears of the Death of Saul, Antiq. Jud., Nat. Bibl.,
Paris; + V detail
Music:
Hayne van Ghizeghem, c. 1465(?), from A la audienche, second
half, Seraphim SIC-6104
But the Van Eycks had already shown the expanse of nature, which Jean Fouquet,
by 1470, applies in Biblical scenes, to the noble valley of the Loire. So music (here
Hayne van Ghizeghem) harmonized its tonal space. While the humanists restored natural
philosophy as pleasing to God. Pico della Mirandola:
And nothing moves a man forward to religion and the worship of God
more than the assiduous contemplation of the wonders of God... When
we have explored these wonders bv means of this natural magic... we
shall be inspired more burningly to the worship and love of the Artist.
(end Hayne van Ghizeghem)
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For 2nd 63) Bosch, c. 1507(?), Hell, detail, Alte Pinakothek, München (copy of
CGB '59; cf. Michelangelo 55)
V2nd 63a) Bosch, 1480-85, Crucifixion, Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts, Brussels
(CGB '59); video: detail only
V63b)
Bosch, 1500-04, Visions of the Hereafter, detail: Tunnel to the
Empyrean, Palazzo Ducale, Venice
When Luther took the opposite tack, calling reason "the Devil's chief whore" (die
höchtste Hure die der Teufel hat"), it was as if he would drive back to spaceless
surrender:
True Christian divinity... commandeth us not to search out the nature
of God; but to know his will as set forth in Christ... When thy
conscience standeth in conflict, wrestling against the law, sin and
death... there is nothing more dangerous than to wander with curious
speculations in heaven and there search out God in his incomprehensible wisdom... how he created the world, and how he governeth it.
For 2nd 64) Bosch, 1510-16, Temptation of St. Anthony, detail, Museum of Art,
Lisbonne
As always about-face was impossible. Luther's tracts employ the rationality he
opposed. Even Bosch's hell-holes would evince spatial command. And the century from
Fouquet
65)
65a)
Brueghel, 1557, Landscape with Parable of the Sower, National Gallery,
Washington, D.C., (CGB '60); + V foreground detail)
Same, detail of landscape background (CGB '60)
Music:
Palestrina, c. 1560(?), from the 8th Ricercare (Hypomixolydian)
Nonesuch HC 73014
to Brueghel launches us on the dynamism we have often stressed, insular calm expanded
to a world-drop, here for the Parable of the Sower — while Calvin, against Luther,
programs science to the glory of God:
His essence is indeed incomprehensible... but on all his works he hath
inscribed his glory... Of his wonderful wisdom, both heaven and earth
contain innumerable proofs; not only those more abstruse things,
which are the subjects of astronomy, medicine, and the whole science
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of physics... Adepts, indeed in those liberal arts... are thereby enabled
to proceed much further in investigating the secrets of Divine
Wisdom...
— A lead from the 16th-century ricercare (here Palestrina), with the the visionary soaring
of Brueghel's 1557 panorama,
(end Ricercare)
a66)
66)
V66a)
66b)
A. Brouwer, c. 1635-37, Landscape by Moonlight, Kaiser Friedrich
Museum, Berlin
Seghers, c. 1620, Mountainous Landscape, Uffizi, Florence; + V detail
Harvey, pub. 1628, Experiment on the veins of a bound arm, from
Circulation of the Blood
Rubens, c. 1638, Cattle Drinking at Sunset, Louvre, Paris
Music:
Francesco Cavalli, 1656, from Sonata for 12 instruments, Musical
Heritage Society 860.
to the 17th-century ground-bass antiphonal Sonata (Cavalli), with the brooding cloud
physics of the first infinite landscapes of Method: this Seghers, which Rembrandt may
have owned and touched a little, from about 1620, when Descartes had glimpsed his
"wonderful science," to redound with Newton to "the counsel and dominion of an
intelligent and powerful Being.''
At the same time Harvey was conceiving the material flow of the blood from
circulatory nature:
The moist earth warmed by the sun gives off vapors, which, rising, are
condensed, to fall again, moistening the earth. By this means things
grow. So also tempests and meteors originate by a circular approach
and recession of the sun. Thus it happens in the body by the
movement of the blood... So the heart is the center of life, the sun of
the Microcosm, as the sun itself might be called the heart of the world.
(end Cavalli)
Va67)
67)
June 1996
Rubens, 1635-40, Landscape with the Chateau de Steen, whole; National
Gallery, London; where the video previews 67b, Rubens, 1638, Landscape
with Shepherd and Flock, National Gallery, London
Rubens 1635-40, again Chateau de Steen Landscape, vertical detail,
National Gallery, London (which video takes in sections, lower and upper)
Pascal: Humanist Reversal
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67a)
67b)
Symbolic History
Caravaggio, 1609, Resurrection of Lazarus, detail, National Museum,
Messina
Rubens, 1638, Landscape with Shepherd and Flock, National Gallery,
London ; which video here narrows to a sunset detail
In these divine raptures, reason was continually leading itself on, turning
Cartesian dream into Substance. When Gassendi wraps a universe of Lucretian atomic
reduction in a sort of late-Rubens glow of vitalism:
Whatever is in the fire existed first in the wood, but in a latent state...
whatever substance is in the soul… first existed in the food, seed or
other matter which produced it... Nature is not accustomed to pass
from one extreme to another but by intermediate stages... unconscious
matter becomes conscious by an exactly similar gradation...
Pascal's rapier cuts the luminous haze:
Man cannot conceive what a body is, still less what the mind is, and
least of all how a body would be united to a mind. This is the
consummation of his difficulties, and yet it is his very being...
With the Cartesian fabric always subject to Pascalian doubt, is it only temperament which
throws us from ''you never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your
veins..."
Va68)
b68)
Vc68)
68)
V68a)
68b)
Contrasting moonrise vidoed from a66, Brouwer's Moonlit Landscape
Rembrandt, c. 1638, Landscape with a Church, Duke of Alba and Berwick,
Madrid
Ruisdael, c. 1660, The Jewish Cemetery, The Dresden Gallery version of this
subject
Ruisdael, c. 1660, The Jewish Cemetery, Institute of Arts, Detroit
G. de la Tour, c. 1630-35, Mary Magdalen with a Candle, detail only of the
skull she holds, Louvre, Paris
Rembrandt, 1656 (fragment), The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Deyman,
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
to ''The eternal silence of those infinite spaces frightens me"? Or is there a historical
drama, like Herbert's "Collar," from ''I struck the board" to "Child..." which leads from
one to the other?
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And what we seek is not simply the 17th-century darkening into prayer, Gryphius'
"Der schnelle Tag ist hin —
The swift day now is done. the night with banners blown
Leads up a world of stars. Men of earth weary
Forsake the fields of toil. Where birds and beasts were known,
Dark broods and solitude. How has our time gone by!...
Lord, when the labored body sleeps, let soul awake,
And when the last come day will my such evening make,
Gather me from the valley of shades to thee! (CGB)
Not that, but the gall to stare through the impasto glazes with which Ruisdael irradiated
Huyghen's formulable wave-fronts of light, his vector solutions of mass-imapct — to see
(like the skull oi El Greco's Francis or La Tour's Magdalen) the phenomenal foreclosure
of soul and God, the causal changelessness that attends all reasonings by symmetry and
equation — Leibniz' mill, in which one would never find anything to explain perception.
Blake's Urizenic determinism of "the same dull round'': such a loss as left no road but a
gambler's desperation.
69)
V69a)
V69b)
Photograph of Eagle Nebulae M 16 and Stars, Kitt Peak, Arizona
Bok Globules, etc. in Lagoon Nebula, thought to be collapsing into stars;
Scientific American, 1977
Nebulae, Orion and Horsehead, from Galaxies
While nature seemed indifferent to which philosophy, of matter or spirit, to which
emotion, of joy or fear. If Galileo's telescope had shown him all the stars and nebulae of
modern astronomy, it could not have heightened his rapture: "Other stars in myriads.
never seen before... The Galaxy or Milky Way... clusters of stars." But we have just
quoted Pascal's response: "Le silence eternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraye."
Let man then contemplate the whole of nature in her grand majesty...
The whole visible world is only an imperceptible atom in the ample
bosom of nature... It is an infinite sphere, the center of which is
everywhere, the circumference nowhere... From the little cell in which
he finds himself lodged, I mean the universe, let him estimate at their
true value the earth, kingdoms, cities, and himself. What is man in the
Infinite?
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70)
V70a)
70b)
V70c)
70d)
70e)
Symbolic History
Hooke, 1665, Magnified Louse from Micrographia
Mite photo, from Das Leben unter dem Mikroskop
Volvox: protozoan colonies, with daughter spheres, Natural History
Computer-graphics model of DNA, detail, Scientific American, October 1985
Hairy house mite, from Das Leben unter dem Mikroskop
Birth of the Universe, Atomic and subatomic particles, Big Bang fireworks,
Smithsonian, May 1983
But to show him another prodigy, equally astonishing, let him examine
the most delicate things he knows.
(Robert Hooke then preparing his Micrographia, to be published in 1665 — this louse.)
Let a mite be given him, with its minute body and parts incomparably
more minute, limbs with their joints, veins in the limbs, blood in the
veins, humors in the blood, drops in the humors, vapors in the drops...
Perhaps he will think that here is the smallest point in nature. I will let
him see therein a new abyss... In the womb of this abridged atom, let
him see an infinity of universes, each of which has its firmaments, its
planets, its earth, in the same proportion as in the visible world; in each
earth animals, and in the last, mites, in which he will find again all that
the first had... without end and without cessation... Our body... imperceptible in the bosom of the whole, is now a colossus, a world, or
rather a cosmos, in respect of the nothingness which we cannot reach.
How could this marvellous and prophetic vision have done anything but enrapture the
recipient? Its microscopic study would be the delight of Leeuwenhoek through the last
fifty of his ninety years,
71)
V71a)
71b)
V71c)
71d)
V71e)
V71f)
71g)
V71h)
June 1996
Microscopic Nature, c. 1702, Hydra, Alga spirogyra, and protozoan stentor,
The Life of the Pond
Protozoan Cilliate: Stylonchia, The Lower Animals
Same, Vorticellas
Same, Protozoan: Stentor Coeuleus
Variant detail of 71, the polyp, Hydra
Spirostomum and Paramecium, The Lower Animals
Coral Alveopora, with damsel fish, Wonders of Life
Amoeba and Paramecium, Our Amazing World of Nature
Coral reef with saber-toothed Blenny, Our Amazing World of Nature
Pascal: Humanist Reversal
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Symbolic History
beginning with his 1674 examination of pond water:
In summer the water becomes whitish... I took up a little in a glass
phial, and examining it next day, found green streaks, spirally wound,
serpentwise... Among these there were besides many little
animalcules... their motion so swift and various, 'twas wonderful to
see...
...Two sorts had long tails, wherewith they were linked fast to little
roots of duckweed. In structure, these little animals were fashioned
like a bell, and at the round opening they made such a stir, that the
particles in the water thereabouts were set in motion... Further, I
discovered a little animal whose body was at times long, at times
drawn up short... its eight horns made in a marvellous manner...
…I saw with wonder quite 1000 living creatures in one drop of water.
The same glissando from all to nothing would stir Leibniz to ecstasy:
Every portion of matter may be conceived as like a garden full of
plants and like a pond full of fish. But every branch of a plant, every
member of an animal and every drop of the fluids within it, is also
such a garden or such a pond... ad infinitum...
There is therefore nothing uncultivated or sterile or dead in the
universe, no chaos, no confusion...
72)
72a)
V72b)
V72c)
Rubens, c. 1642, lower left detail, corpses from Baucis Flood Landscape,
Kunsthistorisches, Wien (CGB '59)
Same, wider detail of the flooded stream (copy of CGB, 1600: The Tragic
Divide 76)
Same, most of the Flood landscape (from CGB 1600: The Tragic Divide 75;
then video returns through a detail of 72a to the late Rubens' Landscape
with Shepherd and Flock, from 67b, above)
Rembrandt, 1636, Landscape with a Baptism, Niedersachsisches
Landesmuseum, Hannover
Where Pascal clutches for the handrail:
For in fact what is man in nature? A Nothing in comparison with the
Infinite, an All in comparison with the Nothing, a mean between
nothing and everything...
Limited as we are in every way, this state which holds the mean
between two extremes is present in all our impotence. Our senses
June 1996
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perceive no extreme. Too much sound deafens us; too much light
dazzles us; too many concords are annoying in music, too many benefits irritate us... Extremes are for us as though they were not. They
escape us and we them.
The word "thrill" is "thirl," to pierce. We have seen "the ethereal thrill" of
incommensurate nature break over 1600 — from Tintoretto, through El Greco, to the
storm-scapes of Rubens — this flood detail from a year after Pascal's birth. But Rubens
was advancing toward a testimonial glow. Rembrandt transmutes the dark, like Milton:
''there plant eyes, all mists from thence/ Purge and erase.''
Va73)
D. Teniers, c. 1660(?), The Rich Man being led to Hell, detail, National
Gallery, London
Bernini, 1645-52, Ecstasy of St. Theresa, detail, Santa Maria della Vittoria,
Rome
Salvator Rosa, c. 1670(?), Landscape with Tobias and Angel, National
Gallery, London
Rosa, c. 1650(?), Witch, Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome
Rosa, c. 1660(?), The Temptation of St. Anthony, Galleria Palatina (Pitti),
Florence (video detail)
b73)
Vc73)
Vd73)
73)
The root-system of Pascal's reversal is widespread. But does any artist so
precisely turn reason on itself, superimpose dread on confidence, sacrifice formulation to
the existential: "This is our true condition"? As if Bernini had really drowned in
Theresa's swoon; as if Calderon had dissolved glory into dream. Salvator Rosa lacks size,
though his untamed nature would sway later centuries, and his witch scenes and
temptations train Bosch on Goya, conscious as Milton's Sin and Death:
Nor uglier follow the Night-Hag, when call'd
In secret, riding through the Air she comes
Lur'd with the smell of infant blood, to dance
With Lapland Witches, while the labouring Moon
Eclipses at thir charms...
a74)
74)
74a)
P. Puget, 1670-72, Milon de Crotone, Louvre, Paris
Poussin, 1660-64, Winter, The Deluge, Louvre, Paris; with video details
before and after the whole, including:
Same, detail to the left, snake below, Ark above; + V detail of the Ark
June 1996
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We are searching the general form of the Baroque crisis. In tragedy it would
require the reappearance of snake-dread within Corneille's structure of heroic virtu. But
that is to specify Jansenist-trained Racine, with his romantic mutation of pain: Phèdre,
study of a damned soul, its sobbing excess only assuaged by what our actors discard,
swallowing final e's in prose screams — the great formalities of meter and rhyme:
Une femme mourante et qui cherche à mourir...
Tout m'afflige et me nuit, et conspire à me nuire…
Objet infortuné des vengeances céleste,
Je m'abhorre encore plus que tu ne me detestes.
Les Dieux m'en sont temoins, ces dieux qui dans mon flanc
Ont allumé le feu fatal à tout mon sang...
— an imagery acoil with labyrinths and monsters; hope itself gliding into Phèdre's
bosom-womb like an adder:
Et l'espoir, malgré moi, s'est glissé dans mon coeur.
The snake-attended Deluge from Poussin's last years works such deliberate
containment of outrage — a shock like that Voltaire and Enlightened Europe would
receive from the earthquake of Lisbon; and, as in Pascal, the church-ark is the only hope.
75)
V75a)
Poussin, 1660-64, Summer, Ruth and Boaz, Louvre, Paris
Poussin, 1644, Extreme Unction, National Gallery of Scotland,
Edinburgh
For V2nd 74) a central detail from The Deluge (video from 74)
For V2nd 75) Again 75, Summer, upper left detail (video from 75)
But Poussin's Flood is the Winter of a seasonal four, of which the Summer
Harvest of Ruth and Boaz, from the same time, shows the opposite bounty of nature
under the tree of life and in harmony with God.
It is a tribute to Pascal's "Know, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself,"
that with the announcement of his paralyzing truth, everybody did not abandon rational
science and fall on their knees — ''parce que les principes opposée sont vrays aussy" —
as true as Pascal's own projective geometry or probability. That first alarm of Fear and
Trembling was the Janus face of a Cartesian Method which was far from having spent
itself. To how many it must have seemed, as with Milton's Adam and Eve, that
June 1996
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The World was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide...
76)
76a)
Vermeer, 1699(?), Geographer (Mathematician?), Städelsches Kunstinstitut,
Frankfurt; + V detail
Cuyp, c. 1670(?), River Scene with view of Dordrecht, Wallace Collection;
+ V detail of the sky
Thus Newton, pushing the Calvinist program of a God-exalting science, enjoyed
his greatest years of invention, as lighted by the earth-window as the variously-named
Mathematician by Vermeer:
In the beginning of the year 1665 I found the method of approximating
a series and the rule for reducing any dignity of any binomial into such
a series. In the same year, in May, I found the method of tangents...
and in November had the direct method of fluxions, and the next year
in January had the theory of colors, and in May following I had
entrance into the inverse method of fluxions. And the sams year I
began to think of gravity extending to the orb of the moon, and…
deduced that the forces which keep the planets in their orbs must be
reciprocally as the squares of their distances from the centers about
which they revolve… All this was in the two plague years of 1665 and
1666, for in those days I was in the prime of my age for invention, and
minded mathematics and philosophy more than at any time since. . .
a77)
Vb77)
Vc77)
Vd77)
77)
Sir Christopher Wren, 1673-1711, St. Paul's Cathedral, London from the
S.E. (CGB '77); which the video takes as two details, above, then below
Same, interior, Nave looking west
Same, again exterior, from the S.E., but near and looking up (CGB ‘77)
Same, from the S.E.: South Transept and South-West Tower (CGB '77)
Same: Dome; which the video divides into below and above (CGB ‘77)
Music:
Purcell, 1694, Te Deum, opening, RCA VICS-1407
It was then, just after the death of Pascal and the fire of London, that Wren
assumed the rebuilding of St. Paul's, as slow in finishing as Newton's Principia, and like
that book, or Purcell's "Te Deum," a symbol of reasoned command. What specifies that
command? Despite Newton's hatred of the word, he builds on predictive mechanism, a
clockwork of equational forces:
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The whole burden of philosophy seems to consist in this — from the
phenomena of motions to investigate the forces of nature, and then
from these forces to demonstrate the other phenomena...
He ends with an assumed demonstration of the Being who "governs all things, not as soul
of the world, but as Lord over all..."
We have ideas of his attributes, but what the real substance of anything
is we know not... much less... of God. We know him only by his most
wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final causes... a god
without dominion, providence and final causes... could produce no
variety of things… And thus much concerning God; to discourse of
whom from the appearances of things, does certainly belong to Natural
Philosophy.
How cleanly Pascal would have dispatched that double-talk.
78)
78a)
Grinling Gibbons, c. 1680(?), Boxwood of Sir Christopher Wren, R.I.B.A.
Collection; the video shows the upper half, then a close detail
Kneller, 1702, Sir Isaac Newton, National Portrait Gallery, London
In Grinling Gibbons beautiful boxwood, Wren, who kept Newton writing the
Principia and "System of the World," exhibits the ascendent rationality and temporal
claim of Restoration, Royal Academy, Purcell, Locke and Dryden. Yet in refinement of
ironic sensibility, he implies Pascal. Under just such certitude, Berkeley would deny the
external: such humanity in Swift would embitter to merely rational horses and odious ape
men:
(cut Purcell)
when I behold a lump of deformity and diseases both in body and mind
smitten with pride, it... breaks all the measures of my patience.
a79)
79)
V79a)
79b)
June 1996
Magnasco, c. 1740, Christ and Peter on the Sea of Galilee, whole, National
Gallery, Washington, D.C. (CGB '75); while video defers this, showing here
an upper detail of Christ from 79b
Same, detail, Christ and Peter on the stormy Sea (CGB '75)
Magnasco, c. 1740, matching Baptism of Christ, also National Gallery,
detail of dove against rocks and waves (CGB '75); here video adds: stormtossed ship from a79; the whole of a79; then Peter from 79
Again, the scene of 79, but a detail of Christ only, beckoning (CGB ‘75)
Pascal: Humanist Reversal
40
�C.G. Bell
Music:
Symbolic History
Domenico Scarlatti, c. 1740(?) Sonata in F Sharp Minor, old
Landowska album
The sharpest art sign after 1700 that Pascal's spatial terror is working underground
and must crop out again, is Magnasco's dissolution of landscape into a brushwork frenzy,
where for all Christ's impassioned summons, Peter sinks. While Scarlatti and Bach intensify the chromatic bypass of tonal reason.
If Pascal suffered some merely private malaise of womb-sickness and God-need,
that flaw — like Kafka's ghetto-neurosis — gave him a vulnerability the future would
increasingly share.
(end Scarlatti)
"God is, or He is not." But to which side shall we incline? Reason can
do nothing here: there is an infinite chasm between. A game is being
played at the extremity of that infinite distance, where heads or tails
will turn up: What will you wager? According to reason, you cannot
do either; according to reason you cannot leave either undone... let us
weigh the gain and loss in believing that God is... If you win, you win
all: if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then, without hesitation, that
He is.
a80)
Vb80)
c80)
80)
Zurbaran, 1658, St. Francis in Meditation, Alte Pinakothek, München
Here video previews slide 80: Pascal’s Death Mask, whole
Ch. Le Brun, 1689, Small Nativity, Louvre, Paris; + V detail
Pascal’s Death Mask, 1662, whole; here video shows a detail (cf. V80)
Music:
M.-A. Charpentier, c. 1670(?). from Dialogue entre Madeleine et
Jesus, French Columbia (78) DFX 43
We cannot know if that faith-leap was backward or ahead; whether the earth-yea
or earth-nay was the deeper motion of mind. But the Christian, since Paul, had to be
thrown from the horse to be reborn; though the Baroque-humbling was less to the ground
of earth-denial than to the pietistic caress of Charpentier's Dialogue between Christ and
the Magdalen.
Thus the talisman of conversion found on Pascal's dead body records:
"renonciation totale et douce" — "renunciation total and sweet"; and "joy, joy, joy, tears
June 1996
Pascal: Humanist Reversal
41
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
of joy" — "joie, joie, joie, pleurs de joie."
(end Charpentier)
June 1996
Pascal: Humanist Reversal
42
�
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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
4/1994
1700: The Comic Divide
�2
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":
4/1994
(fade Couperin)
1700: The Comic Divide
�3
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
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 —
4/1994
1700: The Comic Divide
�4
C.G. Bell
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.
4/1994
1700: The Comic Divide
�5
C.G. Bell
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
1700: The Comic Divide
�6
C.G. Bell
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:
4/1994
1700: The Comic Divide
�7
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
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)
4/1994
(end Corelli)
1700: The Comic Divide
�8
C.G. Bell
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)
1700: The Comic Divide
�9
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?
4/1994
1700: The Comic Divide
�10
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
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:
4/1994
1700: The Comic Divide
�11
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
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.
4/1994
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�12
C.G. Bell
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.
4/1994
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�13
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
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�14
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
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�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.
4/1994
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�16
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
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�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
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�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;
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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. . .
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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
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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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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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C.G. Bell
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
�36
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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�37
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
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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
1700: The Comic Divide
�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
1700: The Comic Divide
�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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Text
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
24. Bach: Fort of Post-Baroque
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
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
24. Bach: Fort of Post-Baroque
Music:
Bach, 1723-50, Cantata 34, O ewiges Feuer, opening, MHS 1574
1)
J.B. Neumann, 1743 ff., Vierzehnheiligen over fields, near Bamberg (slide
copy, nearer, from slide 80+1, CGB ‘52); then a video preview of 8a, below
2)
Same, still nearer, from the entrance path (CGB '52); video: detail only
3)
Same, interior (CGB '52)
4)
Same, central space with High Altar (CGB '52)
V4a) Same, High Altar in center (CGB '52)
4b) Same, ceiling fresco (CGB '52)
5)
G.A. Viscardi, Asam Brothers, and others, 1718-41, Fürstenfeld, Nave
through ironwork (CGB '59)
a6) Fr. X. Schmädl, c. 1740, Chancel detail, Rottenbuch, Bavaria (CGB '59)
Vb6) Same, from Choirscreen, detail of David and angels, from the side (CGB '59)
6)
Same, David detail, against the vault (CGB '59)
a7) J. Dietrich, 1738, Top of High Altar, Diessen am Ammersee (CGB '59)
b7) Marx Kriner, 1739, View of Nave ceiling through gate of ironwork, Diessen
am Ammersee (CGB '59)
7)
J. Dietrich, 1738, Augustine, etc., High Altar, Diessen am Ammersee
(CGB '59)
8)
Asam Brothers, 1732-36, Archangel Michael, fresco detail, Maria-Viktoria
Hall, Ingolstadt (CGB '59)
(cut "O Ewiges Feuer")
8a) Another view of Vierzehnheiligen, entrance path (CGB '52)
8b) Again 8, Michael, a wider view (CGB '59)
With the opening of Bach's Cantata 34, "O ewiges Feuer" — "Eternal fire,
fountain of love" — we have gone from the pilgrimage church of Vierzehnheiligen,
through Fürstenfeld, Rottenbuch, and Diessen, to an Asam fresco detail of Michael's old
victory over the dark, but endowed, like the Bach brook of love with all the timpani of
concerted power.
a9)
b9)
French Gothic, 1190-1220, Apse exterior, Chartres Cathedral (CGB '59)
Same, Choir interior, Chartres Cathedral (CGB '59)Vc9)
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Vc9) Same, Clerestory of Apse, Chartres Cathedral (CGB '59)
The West has many summits, from the flame-leap of Gothic, the thrilling century
around 1200 (in music the bare-fifth mystery of Perotin, yet a mystery so severely
organized that this triplum on two syllables, "Virgo," builds entirely over tenor F, but for
one rise to G, a heaven-smile at climax, with the return, under B-flat tension, again to F,
the chord of the fifth, then unison — a "modulation" in which the whole claim of time
beckons through timelessness) —
Music:
9)
a1O)
b10)
10)
11)
12)
13)
14)
V14a)
Perotin le Grand, c. 1200, Organum Virgo, (Cape) EMS 201
Same, Pier of the Crossing, Chartres Cathedral (CGB '59)
Same, Ambulatory, Chartres Cathedral (copy of CGB '59, Gothic I, 68)
Same, 1200-25, Glass, Madonna and St. James, Chartres
Again, Chartres, windows of Ambulatory Chapel (CGB '59), which video
replaces with V10, French Gothic, 1160-1212, Nave and Choir, Soissons
(CGB '59)
French Gothic, 12th-13th cent., St. Pierre, Chartres, interior (CGB '59)
Same, St. Pierre, Chartres, buttressed Apse (CGB '59)
Swiss French Gothic 1160-1250, Death of the Virgin, detail, South Portal,
Lausanne Cathedral
Mosan, c. 1200, oak and polychrome Madonna (Sedes Sapientiae), Diocesan
Museum, Liège
French Gothic, c. 1200, Head of Mary from Virgin and Child, polychrome
and gilt oak, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
(close Perotin)
from that skyward yielding, the Lady of the soul's romance,
15)
a16)
16)
16a)
17)
Kandinsky, 1914, Composition, Guggenheim Museum, New York City;
+ V detail
Kandinsky, 1913, sketch for "Orient," detail, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
Kandinsky, 1913, Composition: Storm, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
Kandinsky, 1914, Picture with 3 Spots, Guggenheim Museum, New York
City.
Kandinsky, 1912, Autumn, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.;
first, V detail
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
to the parabolic outbreak of force in our century (a venture of spirit too costly ever to be
paralleled: Rilke's "Überzäliges Dasein entspringt mir im Herzen" — "Existence past
number wells up in my heart" — Kandinsky and Bartok) —
Music:
Bartok, 1927, close of the 3rd String Quartet, Concert CS 501
(close Bartok)
against that beginning or that end, the spire of Gothic descent or storm of Symbolist
return,
18)
18a)
19)
Asam Brothers, 1732-36, Maria-Viktoria, Altar Wall, Ingolstadt (CGB '59)
Same, High Altar (CGB '59); + V details
Same, Maria-Viktoria, Altar with ceiling fresco (CGB '59); first, video lower
detail
19a) Same, expanse of ceiling fresco (repeated for V24, below)
20) Same, the group of Mary and Angels; + V details
20a) Same, God the Father group; first, V detail
21) Same, Christ, Dove and Angels (video: details only, left and right)
a22) Same, Abraham and Isaac
22) Same, David, Pegasus, Europe, etc. (video: details only, above and below)
22a) Same, Africa, elephant, snakes, etc.
23) Same, Fountain of Grace, hunting pearls; + V detail
V24) Same, again 19a, Mary group with Fountain below
25) Same, widest view, altar with Fountain, Mary, etc.
how rooted in the harmony of God's best of all possible worlds are the grandeurs between
— from the 1730's, Asam's Maria-Viktoria, with a patchwork from the Gloria of the B
Minor Mass.
Music:
Bach, c. 1733, B Minor Mass: Gloria opening; Domine Deus,
opening; Cum Sancto Spiritu, close; (Scherchen) Mus. Guild S630
(close Gloria)
From such Leibnizian pomp of heaven and earth, the four Continents, arts and
collegiate learning imbued with humanizing grace,
26)
Roman Mosaic, 9th cent., Madonna, St. Zeno's Chapel, St. Praxed's, Rome;
+ V detail
�C.G. Bell
26a)
Symbolic History
French Gothic, 13th cent., Interior, Nave looking west, Rheims Cathedral
(CGB '74)
Music:
Gregorian (Solesmes), Spiritus Domini replevit, Pentecost, French
Decca 7543
how strange, how secret, the descent into the crypt that underlies the West, the Dark Age
Mary of St. Praxed's in Rome, where symbol has almost shed the assertions of earth, even
while the Gregorian text acclaims: "The Spirit of the Lord fills the orb of the world".
(fade Gregorian) — A retreat as far prior to the anagogical upsurge of Gothic as its
vaulting of soul-force had been
a27)
27)
27a)
Roman early Baroque, 1591-1628 ff., Maderna with frescoes by Domenichino,
Sant' Andrea della Valle, Rome (CGB '86)
Baciccia, 1674-9, Ceiling of Il Gesu, Rome (video: three details only)
Same, detail (CGB '86); video: lower section only
from the proclaimed opulence of Baroque. It is the stretching of that incarnate antithesis,
as in Baciccia's Victory of the Holy Name and Satanic overspill, which would knock the
props from great church art; and it had seemed, as 1700 approached, that the crisis neared
— the mummery of sacrificial aggrandizement, as when Monteverdi whoops it up in the
anchoritic words: "Fugge, fugge,"
"Flee, my soul, from the world" —
Music:
Monteverdi, 1620, Fugge anima mea
10022
(close), Vanguard VCS-
a strange parade of withdrawal.
a28)
b28)
28)
Raitenhaslach, Bavarian Romanesque, then 17th cent., painted and stuccoed
under Zick, Zimmermann, et al., 1735-43, view from entrance (CGB '59)
Same, organ loft (CGB '59)
Zick, et al., c. 1739, St. Bernard ceiling, Raitenhaslach, Bavaria (CGB '59);
with video details
Bach is full of such swellings, where the depraved singer today squeals like a pig
under a gate: "the chains of Hell and Jesus' Blood"
�C.G. Bell
Music:
Symbolic History
Bach, 1723-50, Cantata #74, Alto aria, a phrase, MHS 1574
and "throw yourself in his arms".
Music:
Bach 1723-50, Cantata #155, Soprano aria, opening, MHS 1388
(fade)
Does not the flesh-loading of the old mystical content produce such curiosities as
this Raitenhaslach Visions of St. Bernard — the saint on his knees (right) to lap Christ's
fountain of blood, and again (left) for the milk stream from Mary's breast — South
German, six style-centuries from Bernard's ascetic dreams?
a29)
29)
Bernini, 1657-66, Cathedra Petri, or High Altar, St. Peter's, Rome;
+ V detail
Double: [A] Bernini 1657-66, St. Augustine, High Altar, St. Peter's
Rome; and [B] E.Q. Asam c. 1735, Augustine, Weltenburg
Yet who can deny, over the paradox of assertive abnegation, the seriousness of
high Baroque, even in the grandiloquence Bernini lends Peter's Chair, or the young poet
Pope, Virgil's "Messiah" (1712):
The seas shall waste, the skies in smoke decay,
Rocks fall to dust. and mountains melt away;
But fix'd his word, his saving power remains:
Thy realm for ever lasts, thy own MESSIAH reigns!
And it is just the gift of the Germans to extend the art of sacred heroics beyond the
mocking debacle of French Regency and English Pope, which is our theme and inquiry —
the gift of E.Q. Asam to carry Bernini into the 18th century on his own ground, and with
more worship;
30)
Again, Asam, Augustine, B of 29 (video: detail only)
Bach's related genius, but beyond the Asams, beyond all his contemporaries, writers,
artists, other composers, Vivaldi, Telemann, Handel, to make that stronghold of belated
Baroque an eternal Passion center of Christian and human truth.
a31)
Zurbaran, 1635-40, detail of Christ, from Crucifixion, with the painter,
Prado, Madrid
�C.G. Bell
Vb31)
31)
Symbolic History
Rembrandt, 1632, Descent from the Cross, Alte Pinakothek, Munich
The whole of a31, Zurbaran, Crucifixion with the painter
Music:
J.S. Bach, 1729, St. Matthew Passion, "Und um die neunte
Stunde" etc., ARC-2712001
The deeply pietistic sharing in the Passion, which would culminate in Bach's
settings, as in these last words according to St. Matthew, with the following Chorale, was
not merely Protestant, but Counter-Reformation as well: so with Zurbaran's 17th-century
Crucifixion and the Painter;
a32)
32)
Rembrandt, 1633, Raising Christ on the Cross, centerspread with self-portrait
of the artist, Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Same, detail of artist (with video detail of Christ from whole and a closer
detail of the artist; then, video returns to Vb31, Rembrandt, Descent, upper
detail; while slide show introduces 32a, Rembrandt, c. 1637-41, Deposition,
National Gallery, London)
Music:
Same, opening of Chorale, Wenn ich einmal soll scheiden
(fade)
though the example which most anticipates Bach is perhaps that Munich raising of the
Cross, into which Rembrandt has introduced his own sorrowing face. As so often, it is as
if Bach had endowed the soul of Rembrandt with the musical emotions of the last and
richest Baroque. Thus the closing modulations to which he subjects the Passion Chorale,
"Wenn ich einmal soll scheiden" (close of Chorale) — building on the intensity and
tenderness of the German past: Albert, nephew of Schütz:
Music:
33)
33a)
H. Albert, c. 1640, from Kirchenkantate: Bekehrung zum Herren
"Kommst du"; (Tinayre) Col. M-431
(fade)
M.B. Braun, 1712, St. Jude the Apostle, upper detail, National Gallery,
Prague
Same, detail of face
By the time of Bach, the more-than-Racine rhetoric of passion, like all the
energies of earth, has been magnified; this Apostle Jude by Braun in Bohemia, might be
Bach's St. Peter, or the tenor soul of man, at the cockcrow of denial.
�C.G. Bell
Music:
34)
Symbolic History
Bach, 1723-7, St. John Passion, from #18: "und ging hinaus und
weinete bitterlich," Odeon ST E 80668-70
M.B. Braun, 1726, St. Jerome before his Cave, near Kuks, Bohemia;
first, V detail
Music:
Bach, same, cont., close of #19, "Meine Missetat"
(end)
Braun's 1726 Jerome before his cave so crying the penitence of his "Missetat" has
almost the terror of Blake's Nebuchadnezzar, imbruted specter of man. To entrain in
sacred participation all divisive powers of post-Renaissance self and world, without being
daunted by the gulf between,
35)
Rembrandt, 1668, Return of the Prodigal, Hermitage, Leningrad; + V details
is the victory of the religious Baroque — as certain in Bach's Passions as in this ultimate
Prodigal by Rembrandt. How the Matthew-Passion pours on Peter's denial not the rancor
of the St. John "Misdeed" but the balm of a comfort aria: "Erbarme dich."
Music:
Bach, 1729, St. Matthew Passion, from 46-7, "weinete" and "erbarme" ARC-2712001
(fade)
2nd 34) Again, St. Jerome, another detail
2nd 34a) Maulbertsch, c. 1760(?), Raising of the Cross, place unspecified
Though both Passions are formed in the Baroque antinomy of actual wrong and
reasoned vindication, that of John heightens the negative, as in the fierce Bass aria and
chorus: "Eilt!" — Hasten! — Where? — To Golgotha":
Music:
2nd 35)
Bach, St. John, from 48, "Nach Golgotha" Od. ST E 80668-70
(fade)
Again, Rembrandt, Prodigal's Return, detail
Which the Matthew Passion as determinedly parallels with assuagement: "Come ! Stay!
— Where? — In Jesus' arms."
Music:
St. Matthew Passion, continued, from 70: "Sehet, kommt,"
(Scherchen) West. Gold WGM 8318-4, side 7
(fade)
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
But must we always go back before Bach's birth for an art suggestion of his deep
and shadowed containment?
36)
36a)
E.Q. Asam, 1733-35, Resurrection of Sinners, St.-Johann-Nepomuk Kirche,
Munich; + V details
Same, Resurrection of the Just
The earthquake resurrection of the dead from the Matthew Passion —
Music:
Bach, St. Matthew Passion, cont. (73) Earthquake, ARC-2712001
(fade)
that cry which stretches creed — has startling parallels in this E.Q Asam.
37)
37a)
Rembrandt, 1638, The Risen Christ appearing to the Magdalen, Buckingham
Palace, London; + V detail
Rembrandt, c. 1650-55, Landscape with Ruins, Gemäldegalerie, Cassel
But for the evening peace and nature-love which follows (though the German soul has
always leaned that way) we are pressed again to Rembrandt — Christ as gardener to the
Magdalen.
Music:
38)
Bach, Matthew Passion, cont. (74), Bass, "Am Abend"
2712001
ARC-
C.D. Friedrich, 1817, In Memory of John E. Brewer, Charlottenburg;
+ V detail
(fade "Am Abend")
Or forward to Friedrich's landscape symbols, this memorial to a lost friend, the Gothic
city through the gate of death, beyond estranging water.
a39)
Zimmermann, 1746-54, Die Wieskirche, against snowy mountains, Southern
Bavaria (CGB '86; copy of 18th Century a39)
Vb39) Same, detail of West front, sun and shadows (CGB '86; copy of 18th
Century 39)
39)
German Baroque, 1746-58, Birnau am Bodensee, in landscape (CGB '66)
39a) Abbey of Our Lady, 18th cent., Zwiefalten, Germany
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Yet the German Baroque, above all styles, breathes harmony with the flowering
earth, as in the poems of Bach's contemporary, Brockes (his lyrics included in the St. John
Passion), a poet at his best in nature: on The Nightingale:
Die aus so enger Brust und mit so kleiner Kehlen
Die grössten Wälder füllt durch ihren Wunderschall —
that song-wonder Blake would compare with the scent of flowers: "how from so small a
center comes such sweets,/ Forgetting that within... Eternity expands/ Its ever-during
doors."
The title of Brockes book is the very key to Baroque: Earthly Delight in God —
Irdisches Vergnügen im Gott:
In the cool of night, in pensive mood,
I walked, and saw of late where a cherry stood,
Blossoming in the light of the moon,
That nothing whiter could be seen or known.
It was as if a great snowfall
Had heaped the branches and each bough
Down to the smallest twigs with snow
Clustered in rounds of pure white balls.
Surely — I said — it would be sought in vain,
Over all the earth, to find a whiter thing.
But as I shifted here and there,
My sight still lifted to the tree,
I caught by chance, in a space of sky,
A single clear and shining star,
Far brighter than the blossoms were.
I thought: how the beauty of earth, all God has given,
Dwindles in the brightness of his heaven. (CGB)
a40)
40)
40a)
E.Q. Asam, 1731-32, St. Anne, Joseph and the infant Mary, Osterhofen, near
the Danube (CGB '59); video: detail only: angels with a huge crown
E.Q. Asam, 1733-35, Trinity, detail, from St.-Johann-Nepomuk Kirche,
München
E.Q. Asam, Same, wider view, from which video takes only a close detail, then
previews 46: pan-detail of Apse and Trinity
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
It is not canvases that hold the German art of Bach's time, but churches and
palaces, entire. The greatest artist, E.Q. Asam, like his brothers, is architect, sculptor,
painter. It is significant that our search for a Passion parallel of the right depth and
humanity led us back to Protestant Holland and Rembrandt.
Music:
Bach, Johannes-Passion continued (58), "Es ist vollbracht"
But against even Bach's greatest moments — that lonely "consummatum est" ("Es ist
vollbracht") from the Passion according to John — E.Q. Asam, Catholic Bavarian,
marvellously holds nis own — most of all in the brooding Nepomuk Church he and his
brothers designed and built at their own cost beside their house in Munich, with an apselighted Trinity which gives the florid Baroque its darkest glory. To have preserved that
solemnity into the generation after Watteau and Couperin, Swift and Pope, is not Bach's
triumph only, since Asam shared in it too.
41)
Dürer, 1511, The Trinity, Woodcut; + V detail
As the resemblance (less in form than spirit) to Dürer's 1511 Throne of Grace
might suggest, it is the heritage which made Machiavelli praise Republican Germany
above all Europe for probity and religion; though of course what we are in search of is
deeper than morality, a God-immediacy by which that rapt people so miscarried in our
century.
42)
South German, c. 1340, Christ and St. John, Staatliche Museen, Berlin;
+ V detail (cf. V42)
Back and back in time the intimacy sustains itself — South German, early 14th
century, and the loving union of Christ and John, both wrapped in the blood-lined robe of
flesh, has a spirit parallelled nowhere else, tied to the soul-soaring of Meister Eckhardt:
God is all things; all things are God. The Father begets me, his son,
without cessation. I say more: he begets in me himself and in himself
me. The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God
sees me. My eye and God's eye are one eye.
43)
Master of Naumburg, c. 1270, Head of Christ on the Cross, Dom, Naumburg
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
And it is in Naumburg, from a century earlier — the 13th — that the dying
saviour first receives the human reality of each and all. How is Bach thinkable without
that consummation?
44)
German, 10th or 11th cent., Head of St. Metronus, Abbey, Gernrode
We pursue it further, into the Dark Ages. This battered Metronus head from Gernrode,
illuminates the 10th or 11th century with a testimonial inwardness unique in that Europe
— the sacred accomplishing itself in subjectivity: "Es ist vollbracht." (close)
45)
Roman Christian, 3rd cent., Orant, detail, Catacombs of Priscilla, Rome; video
having picked up more of the figure from Va45
No doubt the deepest origin is in the Christ-man himself, incarnate mediator for
the West; but if we trace that Logos to its third century art-beginnings, we feel, as in
Gregorian, the passions of flesh dissolve in mystery; we can hardly distinguish the hollow
hush of "Crucifixus" from a "Resurrexit" attested as by the empty tomb..
Music:
46)
46a)
Gregorian, Crucifixus and Resurrexit, Credo I 4th mode, Solesmes,
London 5632
(fade)
E.Q. Asam, 1733-35, St.-Johann-Nepomuk Kirche, interior from entrance,
München (CGB '59)
Same, Apse with Trinity; first, video detail of Christ
By the time of Asam and Bach, Incarnation has mounted creed in other body and
robes on quite another stage. The outraged cry of "Let him be crucified"
Music:
Bach, St. Mathew Passion, continued (from 54) "Lass ihn
kreuzigen"
(cut)
demands a Leibnitzian calculus of containment: "O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden":
Music:
Bach, St. Mathew Passion, continued (63) from "O Haupt voll
Blut..."
(cut)
1st 47) Same, Apse and Trinity (detail taken from Mozart 53, CGB '59); while video
pans to an angel, upper left
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
The great organ fugues — as for the Passacaglia — go as far as assertion can in
empowering the dissonant antithesis:
Music:
Bach, 1708-17, Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor, close, (Biggs)
Col-MS 6261
1st 48) E.Q. Asam, 1723, Assumption of Mary, High Altar (from church aisle),
Rohr, Bavaria (CGB '59)
Thus in the B Minor Mass, where the Gregorian Creed is to be set, the tympanic
Resurrexit seems to pile the Asam altar at Rohr, of Mary's Assumption from the grave,
For 2nd 47 and 2nd 46)
Again, Asam Nepomuk Trinity: slide show has a wider view of 46a; while
video returns to the frontal view of slide 40 (plus a Christ detail)
For 3rd 47)
Here the slide show repeats the frontal view of 40; while the video details
Mary's tomb from the Assumption (see V3rd 47 in the video file)
on the chromatic grief of the Nepomuk "Cruxifixus."
Music:
Bach, close of Crucifixus, B Minor Mass, from Angel 3500 C
(end Crucifixus)
2nd 48) Again, Asam, Assumption of Mary, from nearer (CGB '59); first, video
previews 49, Mary and Angels ascending
49)
Same, Assumption of Mary, nearer and above (CGB '59); video: details
only: Mary, then angels; also from 2nd 48, tomb with apostles
50)
Same, below, closer: tomb with Apostles (CGB '59)
51)
Same, nearer, Apostles to the left (CGB '59)
52)
Same, above, Heaven, with Mary rising (CGB '59)
52a)
Same, Mary, a side view (slide copy of 1700 #20, CGB '59); then video
returns to detail from 52, Heaven
Music:
Bach, opening of Resurrexit, B Minor Mass, Angel 3500 C
(fade Resurrexit)
In the Baroque engrossment of Gothic heaven, mystical rapture lifts a weight of
Cartesian bulk, which, as in Leibnitz, it has entrained in its cosmic surge:
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Souls act in accordance with the laws of final causes through their
desires, ends and means. Bodies act in accordance with the laws of
efficient causes or of motion. The two realms, that of efficient causes
and that of final causes, are in harmony, each with the other...
According to this system, bodies act as if (to suppose the impossible)
there were no souls at all,
53)
V53a)
Asam Brothers, c. 1735, Assumption above High Altar, Kloster Weltenburg,
Bavaria (CGB '59)
Same, a nearer view of figures against the vault (CGB '59)
and souls act as if there were no bodies; yet both body and soul act as
if the one were influencing the other...
The totality of spirits must compose the city of God... a moral world
within the natural world... Another harmony between the physical
realm of nature and the moral realm of grace... brings it about that
things progress of themselves toward grace along natural lines... Under
this perfect government... everything must turn out for the well-being
of the good... not only for all in general, but also for each one of us in
particular...
As Leibnitz kindles formal Descartes,
a54)
54)
French-German, 1st half of the 14th cent., Stained Glass windows,
Strasbourg Cathedral (CGB '59)
German, 14th cent., Gothic, Stained Glass window, Cathedral, Augsburg
(CGB '59); + V detail (cf. V54a)
Medieval German mystics had enflamed the Scholasticism of Paris. From Suso on his
cross studded with nails, 1350, the "Sursum Corda" — "Lift up your hearts" — rises like
the burning windows of Augsburg:
I set before my inner eyes myself in all my being, with body, soul, and
all my faculties, and placed around me all the creatures God has
created, in heaven, on earth, and in all the elements, birds of the air,
beasts of the forests, fishes of the sea, and thereto all the little
dustmotes which shine in the rays of the sun, and all the little waterdrops which ever fell or fall from dew, snow, or rain — and wished
that each and all of these things had a sweetly swelling sound of harps,
well prepared from the innermost essence of my heart,
�C.G. Bell
55)
55a)
Symbolic History
Grünewald, c. 1511-15, Vision of God, upper detail from Madonna and
Angels panel, Isenheim Altarpiece, Colmar
Same, larger context, Heavenly Glory
so that there would rise up from them a new and jubilant hymn of
praise to the beloved, gentle God from evermore to evermore. And
then the longing arms of my soul spread out toward the countless
beings of all creation, exhorting and inciting them even as a zealous
precentor incites his fellow-singers to sing joyfully and to offer up
their hearts to God: Sursum corda.
So Grünewald incites the Renaissance to a fire-vision of glory spilling from and returning
to the Father. Now that German continuity
1st 56) E.Q. Asam, 1731-32, Glorification of the Lamb, Osterhofen (detail of CGB
'59); first, video closer detail
haloes the vaults of Asam with lighted angels, at Osterhofen, on wings around the Lamb.
Again Leibnitz gives a clue to the German genius which could hold the mighty style of
Christian Baroque into the Salon century, raising the rational and phenomenal to mythic
ecstasy.
1st 57) Bernini, 1657-66, Angel window (over Peter's Chair), St. Peter's, Rome
(video: wider variant, V1st 57)
Against the Asam, set Bernini's 1660 paradigm. This tangle of rays and angels is
as calculatedly cool as the forces of a Newtonian wheel. And the World System, which in
Newton, despite his ardent wish, becomes a clockwork of vectorial force,
2nd 56) Again, Asam, Glorification of the Lamb (whole of 1st 56, CGB '59)
is glowingly sustained in Leibniz by the vital antinomies of Energy. Indeed, the shift
from a physics of force and momentum to one of energy (from MV to MV2) fills the
universe with the ubiquitous ground of nature as fluctuant substance.
2nd 57) Again, wider: Angel Window and Peter's Chair; while video narrows to a
Window detail, V2nd 57
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
The poles always mingle. Leibniz is rational too, but not with so Galilean a
command of heaven as matter in motion. And how remote from outward Bernini,
58)
58a)
V58b)
Münstermann, 1631, Head of Moses, Altar detail, Parish Church, Tossens,
N. Germany
Münstermann, 1637, Evangelist Matthew, upper detail, pulpit of the
church in Holle
Münstermann, 1631, from Head of John the Baptist, Altar, Parish Church,
Tossens (CGB '57); video narrows to a close detail
is this 1638 Moses by his North German contemporary Münstermann, steeped in the
Hermetic mysticism then voicing itself in Jacob Böhme:
When the will resigns and surrenders to God's Ground, it sinks beyond
itself, beyond all grounds and points of view, into the only place where
God is revealed, where He works and wills. It has become a no-thing
to its own ego-self... God lives within it... as fire reddens iron: so that
it loses its darkness... and glows with the Love-will that rules and
works in all. (CGB)
— Böhme, of whom Silesius would write later in the century:
As fish in water, as in earth the plant,
Bird in the air, sun to the firmament,
Or salamander to his fiery haunt,
God's heart is Jacob Böhme's element. (CGB)
— Silesius, to write the same of his own eternal I:
I also am God's son: I share his company.
His Spirit, Flesh and Blood are known to him in me. (CGB)
Ich auch bin Gottes Sohn, ich sitz' an seiner Hand:
Sein Geist, sein Fleisch und Blut ist ihm an mir bekannt.
a59)
59)
Martin and Michael Zürn, 1634, The Rose Garland Altar, Münster,
Überlingen; + V detail
Justus Glesker, c. 1650(?), John the Baptist, detail, National Gallery,
Munich; + V detail
Music:
Buxtehude, 1680-87, from Ich bin eine Blume zu Saron, ARC-3096
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Before Bach's birth, the art of German Baroque (this Glesker John) shares in
Silesius' rapture:
The rose is without purpose, asks neither how nor why;
It blooms because it blooms, selfless as earth and sky. (CGB)
Such the leaven Buxtehude caught up from Schütz, Albert, Hammerschmidt. And it was
Buxtehude's evening concerts ("I am the rose of Sharon") which Bach, in 1705, walked
200 miles to hear.
(fade Buxtehude)
60)
60a)
Glesker, 1648-53, Grieving Mary from a Crucifixion, Dom, Bamberg
Same, another lighting (video: upper detail only)
Where immediate person pours into the sacred, the romantic is foreshadowed. So
with Glesker's grieving Mary, or the haunting oboe unison as watchman's horn in
Buxtehude's "I sought by night... him whom my soul loves":
Music:
61)
61a)
61b)
62)
Buxtehude, 1680-87, from "Ich suchte des Nachts," ARC 3096
(fade)
M. Willmann, 1666, Miracle of St. Bernard, Museum der Bildenden Künste,
Breslau
Same, detail of carriage, with a video return to the whole
Same, detail of landscape
Same, another detail of landscape
And in this rare German landscape of the time, by Willmann — the devil charmed into
piecing out, with his own body, St. Bernard's broken coach wheel — we are startled by an
earth and sky webbed with the lightning of Grünewald, as energized as the viola da
gamba line from Buxtehude's "Jubilate":
Music:
63)
Buxtehude, 1680-7, Gamba introduction from Cantata II, Lumen
32050
(end viola da gamba)
E.Q. Asam, c. 1735, High Altar with St. George, Weltenburg Cloister
Church, Bavaria (CGB '59); video uses wider variant, V63
�C.G. Bell
63a)
V63b)
63c)
63d)
63e)
Symbolic History
Same, from the oval Nave (CGB '59); video starts with a wider variant,
V63a, then goes to a detail from 63a
C.D. and E.Q. Asam, 1717-35, View across the Danube of the same Cloister
Late Roman Baroque, 1685, Andrea Pozzo, detail of ceiling fresco, San
Ignazio, Rome (CGB '86)
Again, Asam Brothers, Weltenburg Cloister Church, detail of ceiling stucco
(copy of CGB '59, see 18th Century, 42)
Again, the St. George Altar (horizontal detail of 63, CGB '59); video: closer
details only
Music:
Bach, c. 1735(?), Cantata #50, Nun ist das Heil, BG 555
Both Bach and Asam cling to that chain of life-marvel, which reaches from
Gothic and Altdorfer all the way to Wagner and beyond. The charged adventure of
George, the Lady, and Dragon, flanked by Bernini columns and saints, with every feature
of the cloister church of Weltenburg, wrought by the Asam brothers as if from one
precious stone, is full of such pictorial exuberance as Schweitzer has stressed in Bach.
(skip in Cantata to near close)
Incredible, that 1735 continuance and heightening of expressive powers, the
Great-Chain-of-Being faith of the century before, from Galileo and Descartes to Newton,
Leibnitz, the vast contructions of Bernini and Boromini, Pozzo and Baciccia, or of the
France of Louis XIV, brought to a grandeur unmatched before. and at a time when
Baroque assertion might seem to have spent itself,
(end Nun ist das Heil)
64)
V64a)
64b)
Fr. Mansart, 1643-50, Hall of Mirrors, Chateau Maisons-Lafitte
Mansart, Le Brun, Coysevox, 1678 ff., Salon de la Guerre, Versailles
Le Vau and Le Brun, 1671 ff, Escalier des Ambassadeurs, Versailles
In France we have seen the rational heroics of the Sun-King, this first Mansart hall
of mirrors in the Maisons-Lafitte, swell to the methodic sublimity of Versailles, the
overreach of Lully's Overtures:
Music:
Lully, 1686, Overture to Armide, opening, HSL-2072
(fade)
�C.G. Bell
a65)
Vb65)
65)
Symbolic History
Fr. de Cuvillies, 1734-39, from Hall of Mirrors, Allegory of Water and
Fishing, Amalienburg, Nymphenburg, Munich (copy of CGB '59, see 18th
Century 41)
Same, whole wall (then video details from a65)
Same, another stucco detail (cf. 18th Century, Va41)
Music:
J.S.Bach, c. 1627, Partita #2, Courant, close, Landowska, VIC
1594
(fade in)
We have seen, we have heard it break, with the 18th century, to the playful
arabesques of rococo asymmetry, which spread over Europe and in all the arts: we pick it
up here from Munich, 1735, the hall of mirrors in the Amalienburg. Bach absorbed it as
he did every style, grafting the fragilities of Couperin and Rameau onto the earlier base.
(close Courant)
Most of all it frills the chamber-play of Telemann
Music:
66)
V66a)
66b)
66c)
Telemann, Mus. de Table, from E Minor Ouverture, ARC 73234-35
(fade)
J.B. Zimmermann, 1727-36, Steinhausen, piers and ceiling (CGB '59) (with
video detail of Eve, etc.)
Same, another portion of the ceiling (CGB '59)
Same, Die Wieskirche, upper detail of Choir (CGB '86); while V66b copies
18th Century Vb40: same, wider spread (CGB '59)
Same, Die Wieskirche, columned height of the Choir
Music:
Telemann, c. 1640(?), Magnificat in C, close, PHM 500-104
And against the Roman weight of the Asams, the Zimmermanns lace and
embroider Steinhausen (as here) and finally Die Wies’ with a Tiepolo and Louis Quinze
brilliance as of porcelain, though with an Eden simplicity of the pastoral. The result is an
ecclesiastical delight unparallelled, unless in those always more operatic masses and
Magnificats — as from Telemann (close Magnificat) to Mozart almost at the century's
end:
Music:
Mozart, 1779, "Coronation" Mass in C, Gloria, Amen, Nonesuch H1041
(close)
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Religious display in Bavaria has not struck so desperately
67)
H. Rigaud, c. 1700, Cardinal de Bouillon, Musée des Beaux Arts, Perpignan
on the clarity which had etched the final pomps of 1700 France, high Church and high
state, Versailles, tax-farming, the Wars of the Spanish Succession, with mockery. The
skeptic wit of Voltaire, Holbach, the Encyclopediasts, already peeps through the playacting of Rigaud's Cardinal de Bouillon, angel kiddies and all — as if to voice
a68)
Vb68)
68)
68a)
Watteau, 1708-09, Decorative panel, with monkeys, Private Collection
Zimmermann, 1746-54, Die Wieskirche, video pan on detail of slide 66b,
above (CGB '86); video then returns to a68, decorative panel
Watteau, 1717, Gathering Under an Arcade, Dulwich College, London (cf.
1700 67); + V detail
Same, detail of dancers and fountain
what Watteau might share with Congreve: "No more of that nauseous cant." Watteau's
training under Audran as a painter of arabesques — those wave, shell, and flower forms
with which Zimmermann would pendulate whole churches — must have shielded him
from the heavy hangover of Le Brun. But he goes beyond decorative buoyancy.
Music:
Fr. Couperin, 1713, from La Favorite, Landowska, Soc. Album
The break with the heroic uncovers a frail poignance of ennui and lonely heart, which
Verlaine had only to romanticize: (Symonds)
Your soul is a sealed garden, and there go
With masque and bergamasque fair companies
Playing on lutes and dancing and as though
Sad under their fantastic fripperies...
As in Couperin, so in the tearful light of the Dulwich College "Gathering" (detail), the
very fountains seem to sob:
Au calme clair de lune triste et beau,
Qui fait rever les oiseaux dans les arbres
Et sangloter d'extase les jets d'eau,
Les grands jets d'eau sveltes parmi les marbres.
(fade Couperin)
�C.G. Bell
Va69)
69)
Symbolic History
Magnasco, c. 1740(?), Gathering in a Garden, Palazzo Bianco, Genoa
Magnasco, detail from the far right of the same picture
Music:
Domenico Scarlatti, c. 1740(?), Sonata in F Minor, K 184 (L. 189)
close, Nonesuch H-1094
By 1735 — Bach and Asam then at their height — French languor and precious
ridicule show in Italy through the dark and chromatic passions of Magnasco and
Domenico Scarlatti.
(end Scarlatti)
70)
Norbert Grund, c. 1760, Minuet in a Park, National Gallery, Prague (video:
details only)
In that Germany, where Norbert Grund was already prettying his teacup gardens
with minuets in the plaintive mode, the old Bach held the great fugal fortress almost
alone. What had happened in France forty years before. now stretched the generation-gap
of his own musical family. Those brilliant sons, from Wilhelm Friedemann through
Philipp Emanuel to Christian, all courted the modish amours of the style galant:
Music:
Johann Christian Bach, c. 1770(?), Sinfonia in B flat Major, 0p.18,
#2, plucked string section from the Andante, Chamber Music
Society, CM-6
(fade)
1st 71) G.L. Bernini, 1658-70, Glory-dome over altar, Sant' Andrea al Quirinale,
Rome (CGB '86); + V detail
While the outmoded father, Johann Sebastian, brought his last enormous powers
to bear on the fugue. Nothing but the Newtonian and Leibnizian synthesis of the world
had expressed Baroque command as completely as formulated fugal polyphony. As the
daring cupola of the last Bernini
Va1st 72) C.D. and E.Q. Asam, 1717-35, whole ceiling, stucco and fresco,
Weltenburg Kloster/Danube (video: central spread only)
1st 72)
Same, the lower half of the fresco (CGB '59); + V detail: Asam leaning in
(from V1st 72a)
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
reads itself over into the light-hung ceiling of that George-and-the-Dragon church of
Weltenburg, where clouds and carved angels, with an ecstatic Asam (top right) overflow
the rim — so Bach, for the final work of a God-affirming lifetime.
1st 73) Bernini, 1655-67, Piazza of St. Peter's (from the Colonnade roof), Rome
set himself to systematize, in constructions of every complexity, simple, augmented,
diminished, mirrored, and with added subjects, the whole Art of the Fugue, culminating
what had swept from 17th century Italy — the spatial conquest of Bernini's Piazza of St.
Peter's
1st 74) J. Prandtauer, 1702-18 ff., Kloster Melk, Austria (detail of 3rd 74, CGB 59)
— north over the Danube: in music Fux' Gradus ad Parnassum, in architecture the
supreme Monastery of Melk, after 1702 — as if synthesizing power would proclaim itself
to the world.
1st 75) English landscape gardening, 1741 ff., Stourhead Park, Wiltshire (CGB '59)
Almost no work of Genius is harder to parallel than the Art of Fugue. It seems the
apotheosis of the great organizing will of Europe's most formal centuries — what in
England by 1740 had shaped whole countrysides of forest, lake and park: Stourhead,
where nature receives the idyllic touch of art.
1st 76)
N. Poussin, c. 1644-45, Landscape with St. John on Patmus, Art
Institute, Chicago
A perfection devised a hundred years before, when Poussin accorded heroic
landscape to the geometry of planes, a fugal abstraction to inspire Cezanne.
1st 77) Rembrandt, 1653, Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York City
All the greatest art of the 17th century has that canonic eternity, working through
the richest matter of sense and world — Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of
Homer.
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
1st 78) Zuccali, 1701-04, and Effner, 1720-26, Lower Hall, Neues Schloss
Schleissheim (CGB '59)
In Bach's Germany such panel painting seems to disappear; the Parnassian nobility
shifts to architecture, bearer of the ritual dream.
For 1st 79) Double: J.S. Chardin, [A] left, 1734, Philosopher Reading, Louvre,
Paris; and, [B] right, 1733, The Water Urn, Museum, Stockholm
Of course the whole rococo is imbued with formal design; but in France only
Chardin holds the seriousness of the old Baroque, its sense of space as metaphysical —
what composes this Philosopher to a still-life. or a still-life to philosophy.
For 1st 80) Double: [A] Rembrandt, 1669, Last Self-Portrait, Mauritzhuis, the
Hague; and [B] Goya 1815, Self-Portrait, Prado, Madrid
Finally it is in Goya that the grand manner of the Western centuries of confidence
breaks through Revolution to an ultimatum of Baroque self in fugal plasticity.
For 2nd 79 and 2nd 78)
Jan Vermeer, c. 1660, The Girl with a Red Hat, Mellon Collection, National
Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (CGB '62)
We have no choice, for Art of the Fugue cognates, but to invoke so extended a
span. Since it is to the outpost of the century before that Bach mounts,
For 2nd 77) H. Matisse, 1905, Portrait with the Green Stripe, Royal Museum of
Fine Arts, Copenhacen
most of all at the end of his life, and to such solitary eminence, that he belongs
simultaneously to the past, and to the abstract search of the future, even down to today.
For 2nd 76) Asam Brothers, 1717-35, Stucco from Forehall, Kloster Weltenburg,
N. Bavaria (CGB '59)
The Art of Fugue is another of those life-studies we have to hint at in the closing
minutes of a show. Best to focus on
For 2nd 75 and 2nd 74)
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Borromini, 1650-59, St. Ivo, upper part, Rome (copy of Blake, 43, CGB '86)
the last great quadruple fugue, intended for three new invertible subjects combined with
the leading theme; though unfinished, it is still the longest fugue Bach wrote;
2nd 73) F. von Erlach, 1717 ff., Church of San Carlo, Vienna
so even with this fragment of a vast work, we must start part way through with the second
and faster theme, hear it combine with the first. Then yield to the four-note grandeur of
the chromatic
For 2nd 72) E.G. Haussmann, 1746, Portrait of J.S. Bach, place unspecified;
+ V detail
signature, Bach: B - A - C - H (H the designation of B natural), with the beginning of its
unbelievable measuring against the other themes. So the fugue breaks off, in a trailing
voice, as if Bach had dropped it on his death-bed.
Music:
a2nd 71)
2nd 71)
3rd 72)
For 3rd 73)
3rd 73a)
3rd 74)
V3rd 74a)
3rd 75)
3rd 76)
3rd 77)
For 3rd 78)
3rd 79)
a2nd 80)
2nd 80)
Bach, 1750, Art of Fugue, close of the last, (Münchinger), London
CSA 2215
Another CGB '86 variant of Bernini, Sant' Andrea al Quirinale [at
present, slide show only, but to be revised into the video]
Again, Bernini, Sant' Andrea al Quirinale, spread opening of Heavenly
Glory (video: details only, right, then left)
Again, Weltenburg, ceiling fresco (CGB '59); video returns, for details
only, to 1st 72 [add to video Va3rd 72, whole fresco]
Again, St. Peter's Piazza, the sweep of the curved colonnade
Same, the triple colonnade, from within
Again, Melk, at evening (here, original slide CGB '59)
Same, another view, from the Danube
Stourhead, another view, twilight (CGB '84); video: two details only
Poussin, 1643, St. Matthew and the Angel, Staatliche Museen, Berlin
Again, Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, detail
Schleissheim Hall, another angle (CGB '59)
Again, Chardin, Philosopher Reading
Again, Rembrandt, last Self Portrait, detail
Again, Goya, 1815 Self Portrait, detail
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
(here Art of Fugue trails off)
2nd 80a)
Francisco Goya, 1820, Goya and his Doctor, Minneapolis Institute of
Art (video: detail only)
Yet Bach, like the 70-year-old Goya, did not die then and there. Though it was
not long after, as he lay in a darkened room, too blind to write, that he dictated a fugal
prelude for the Chorale "Wenn wir in Höchsten Nöten sein" — a pilgrim, in his death
need, calling on God.
80+1)
Again, Vierzehnheiligen over fields; with video detail and return to whole
(CGB '52, original of slide 1)
Like Vierzehnheiligen over fields and woods, that last polyphony of faith, printed with
The Art of Fugue, has the serenity of an Eden-earth recovered by love.
Music:
Bach, 1750, Wenn wir in Höchsten Nöten sein, close, (Münchinger)
London CSA 2215
�
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Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound
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St. John's College Meem Library
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Bach : Fort of Post-Baroque, Symbolic History, Part 24
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Script of Part 24 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell.
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Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010
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St. John's College
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Santa Fe, NM
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[1988-1990]
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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):
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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)
5/1994
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)
5/1994
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)
5/1994
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
18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile
�15
C.G. Bell
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".
5/1994
18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile
�16
C.G. Bell
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
�19
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
18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile
�20
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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
18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile
�23
C.G. Bell
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
�24
C.G. Bell
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
18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile
�25
C.G. Bell
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
18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile
�27
C.G. Bell
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
18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile
�28
C.G. Bell
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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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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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)
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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,
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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)
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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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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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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)
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David, 1794, Self-Portrait in Prison, Louvre, Paris; with video details
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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.
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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)
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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
18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile
�43
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
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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SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
26. Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative
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
�1
Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
26. Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative
1)
Joseph Lange 1782-83, Mozart (unfinished), Mozart House, Salzburg;
+ V detail
Same, Mozart, close detail
1a)
Music:
Mozart 1785, Concerto No. 21 in C Major (K.467), 2nd movement,
piano entrance, Col. ML 4791
Mozart wrote the C Major Concerto in 1785, six years before his death as a
pauper near the age of 36. Can art add to the prodigy of the music — especially an art as
limited as that of the Salzburg portrait? Yet, against the pomps of 1700, even this
bespeaks an enlightened sensibility, hung between assertive claims of Baroque and
Revolution. From that valley, where reason in Voltaire mocks itself, yielding after midcentury to Rousseau's cult of heart, what fine-spun enigmas of confidence and disillusion
rise through Werther's natural rapture and suicidal pain: "Our only happiness our spring
of sorrow."
(fade Concerto 21)
2)
2a)
Goya, 1798, G. M. de Jovellanos, Collection Viscountess of Irueste, Madrid
Same, de Jovellanos, detail of figure; + another V detail of 2
Two years later Mozart, shifting to the string quintet and the key of G minor,
risked an ultimate poignance.
Music:
Mozart 1787, Quintet in G Minor, K.516, Col. ML 5192, (excerpts
through three movements, with 16 slides as ff; other music
interposed as called for)
while Goya, born before Mozart and to live a generation beyond him, in his portrait of
Jovellanos, endangered Spanish liberal, robes in high style a melancholy lyrical as Burns':
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
The wan Moon is setting behind the white wave,
And time is setting with me, oh.
Music:
a3)
3)
Fade Quintet and advance almost half through the 1st movement.
Goya, 1793-94, Corral de Locos, detail, Meadows Museum, Dallas
Same, whole; with other V details (cf. V3 and V3a)
Like Cowper's "stricken deer that left the herd" —
I sum up half mankind
And add two thirds of the remaining half,
And find the total of their hopes and fears,
Dreams, empty dreams —
we plumb a private recess where Rembrandt's irradiated space has shrunk to a corral of
twelve Bedlamites, too sharply felt ever to be forgotten. And it is not merely private.
Goya releases the unconscious of neo-gothic Europe: visions of terror,
(fade and skip to close of 1st movement)
4)
Blake 1793, Dream of Thiralatha. Canceled plate from America, British
Museum, London; with V details before and after whole
visions of longing. Blake, born a year after Mozart, though he would just outlive
Beethoven, was already stretching obscurity and neglect with imperative symbols. Here
"the virgin that pines for man" conceives, under the drooping phallic trunk, a winged kiss
in the Vale of Leutha: "As when a dream of Thiralatha flies the night."
(from end of 1st movement to melody-repeat, 2nd movement)
5)
5a)
Canova, 1787-93, Cupid and Psyche, Villa Carlotta, Tremezzo (cf. 5a, Louvre)
Same, Cupid and Psyche, Louvre (CGB '80; video adds a detail of 5, Villa
Carlotta)
Through the academic skill of Canova that ferment turns the Cupid and Psyche,
begun the year of Mozart's quintet, to another Dream of Thiralatha.
What staggers us in this fin-de-siècle is the complexity with which Ancien Regime
opens its Baroque and Rococo heritage of sophisticated resource to Enlightenment,
Storm-and-Stress, Romantic and Faustian desire: "To wing mountain caves by
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
moonlight... Bathe body in fountains of dawn."
movement)
6)
(to trio of 2nd
C.D. Friedrich, c. 1818, Woman at Sunset, Museum Folkwang, Essen;
+ V detail
In that Sehnsucht, Kantian soul finds itself alien to the Cartesian and Lockean
earth it had thought to master:
Meine Ruh ist hin,
Mein Herz ist schwer,
Ich finde sie nimmer
Und nimmermehr.
The phenomenal melts toward the 1800's transparency of this Caspar David Friedrich.
But the longing beyond earth has threaded Christendom throughout. Let our
search for a Mozartean match test a sequence of elegiac refinements
7)
German (Rhine) Gothic, c. 1220, Synagogue, Strassburg (CGB '59); + V details
from the 1220 height of Gothic down. How could the blindfolded and spear-broken
Synagogue of Strasbourg but distill love-banishment? Yet the pure thinness of those
lines, before Renaissance or Baroque were thinkable, exclude Mozart's mood (fade
Mozart), suggest their own supersensual sliding through dissonances of second and third
to the unsullied vacancy of fifth and octave:
Music:
a8)
8)
Perotin, c. 1210, close of Organum Virgo, EMS-201 (so back to the
Mozart Quintet)
Ambrosio Lorenzetti, c. 1340, St. Dorothy, detail, Pinacoteca, Siena;
+ V detail (Va8)
Same, St. Dorothy, detail of face; + V closer detail
And on the green underpaint of the 14th century, the rose-tinted saints of Simone
and the Lorenzetti, this flower-bearing Dorothy, require, in haloed estrangement, some
music of mood-suspension, (fade Mozart) Machault's Ars Nova, haunted by ambiguities of
double leading tone.
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Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative
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C.G. Bell
Music:
9)
Symbolic History
Guillaume de Machault, c. 1370(?), from Lasse! Comment oublieray, ARC-2565-052
(so to Quintet, end of 2nd movement and on to third movement)
Botticelli, 1495, La Derelitta, Pallavicini Collection, Rome; first, a video
detail
Botticelli, c. 1490-1500(?), Noli me Tangere, Johnson Collection, Philadelphia;
+ V detail
Again, La Derelitta, detail
9a)
9b)
By the late 15th century, Botticelli blends into Florentine Renaissance the last
Gothic strain, eternizing what Pater would call the ineffable sadness of Exiles — this
Tamar-soul shut out:
Such coats young Tamar and fair Rachel's child
Put off, when He was sold and she defil'd. (Fairfax)
But if temperament curiously affines the clean-cut melancholy .of Botticelli to the wistful
perfection of the Mozart adagio, it is over a gap as vast (fade Mozart) as from the
Chansons of Poliziano, Isaac, this Busnois.
Music:
a10)
10)
Busnois, c. 1480(?), Chanson, Seule apart moy, from last stanza,
Nonesuch H 71247
(fade to Quintet, 3rd movement, agitated)
El Greco, 1584-87 (variant of 1577-79), Disrobing Christ, Alte Pinakothek,
München (CGB '59)
Same, detail of holy women (video adds details of a10 and 10)
As Renaissance fills out its energized forms, tragic power sweeps us from the
melting of G Minor. Even the expressive break of El Greco asks such trans-personal
chromatics as spread from Italy to all Europe: (fade Mozart) thus the 1600 France of the
old Claude le Jeune.
Music:
Va11)
11)
5/1994
Claude le Jeune, before 1600, Helas, mon Dieu, close, DL-9629
Poussin, 1629-30, Et In Arcadia Ego, Chatsworth Settlement, Chatsworth,
England
Poussin, 1638-39, Et in Arcadia Ego, Louvre, Paris; + V detail
Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative
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C.G. Bell
Music:
Symbolic History
d'Anglebert, c. 1672, opening, Tombeau de Chambonnieres, VICS-1370
While the Baroque at its most tranquil, these Poussin shepherds deciphering a
tomb inscription: "I, too, in Arcadia," moves to the formulated chords of the century of
Descartes — a grandiloquence Mozart and his time (fade d'Anglebert) have outgrown.
(to Mozart Quintet, mid 3rd movement)
12)
12a)
Watteau, 1717-19, Mezzetin, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Watteau, 1720(?), Lady Awaiting Her Lover, Musée Condé, Chantilly (video
returns to Mezzetin, detail; then again Lady, detail)
Only with the Watteau-turn to the 18th century does the plaintive introspection of
rococo under the façade of grand style approach the horizon of Mozart. While music too,
in Couperin and Rameau, hints at a like possibility;
(fade Mozart)
Music:
Rameau, published 1741, opening 2nd Movement, 5th Piece de
Clavecin en concert, (Ars Rediviva) Parliament PLPS 605
but in miniatures Goya and Mozart would liberate and magnify.
(fade Rameau)
13)
J.H. Füssli (Fuseli), 1790-95, Portrait of a Girl, Collection R. Ganz, Chicago;
+ V detail
(to Mozart Quintet, in 3rd movement)
Though it is not a question of physical size, or even of the preeminence of the
artist, but that 1790, as in this Füssli Portrait of a Girl, is a post-rococo and pre-romantic
hatching-ground, where modernity, with its transfiguring reach and risk, is already astir.
As Beethoven was told when he went to Vienna: "Receive the spirit of Mozart from the
hands of Haydn."
Yet what he received ripened toward another future.
14)
14a)
D. G. Rossetti, c. 1863, Beata Beatrix, Tate Gallery, London; first V detail
Same, upper detail; with various video details
(Mozart, 3rd movement, agitated repeat)
5/1994
Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
The pre-Raphaelite revival, under the myth of Dante, of soul's timeless hunger (this
Blessed Beatrice by Rossetti), has slipped from Mozart in the other direction (fade
Mozart) — too lush of romantic touch, searching the sensual for a mystic clue — Isolde's
dying swoon.
Music:
15)
V15a)
Wagner, 1857-9, from Liebestod, Tristan and Isolde, RCA Vic. LM
6700 (5)
(fade)
Picasso, 1901, Mother and Child, Maurice Wertheim, New York
Picasso, 1903, The Tragedy, Chester Dale Collection, National Gallery,
Washington, D.C. (video returns to Mother and Child)
Music:
Stravinsky, 1910, Lullaby from The Fire Bird, Col. MG 31202
And as that voluptuous transcendence of earth mounts through Picasso's Blue and
Rose toward the ecstatic break of Cubism, Stravinsky's Fire Bird speaks how far music is
shedding the tonal canons in which Mozart had robed expressive pain. (fade Fire Bird;
again Mozart Quintet, close of third movement) What the resonances reveal over all
diversity, all anachronistic likeness,
16)
Goya, 1786, The Marquesa de Pontejos, National Gallery, Washington D.C.;
with V details
is the power of the time-strand — the 1786 fitness of Goya, where the courtly dress and
ironic play of France, this park of cloudy trees out of Fragonard, trembles toward that
future —
17)
17a)
Friedrich, c. 1824, Trees by Moonlight, Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Köln
Same, detail, Tree and Moon; + another V detail
(Mozart continued, 4th movement, opening)
toward Friedrich's dissolution of outwardness, when late Beethoven and Schubert would
confirm the soul-search Mozart had deepened even into the last movement of the G
Minor Quintet.
How far Berkeley, early in the century, had taken the turn to subjective nature, one
might not have known until Coleridge's use of him in 1796:
All... organic Harps diversely fram'd
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Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all?
18)
Chinese (Sung), c. 1220, Liang K'ai, Crows and Willow, Museum, Peking;
+ V detail
(fade the Mozart Quintet)
In the reduction of the picture to sure plane and line, Friedrich explores an affinity
the modern has felt with the Orient, with that calligraphy of mood-soul the Chinese by
1200 had shrined in the thought and poetry of ink on silk. Yet what could Liang K'ai
have revealed to Friedrich but what Kant had mediated, the shift from outer to inner,
while the representation of the outward is quietly maintained.
Whatever 1820 Friedrich might have treasured in the Chinese,
19)
Fr. Boucher, 1742, Emperor of China gives Audience, Museum, Besançon;
+ V details
is far from that picturesque fable of royal pomp 1740-Boucher had found there.
Music:
Mozart, 1782, Overture, Entführung aus dem Serail, Deutsche
Gram. 2709-021
Though Mozart had embraced those poles: the Turkish Seraglio, with piccolo, trumpets,
triangle, and cymbals, from five years before the Quintet in G Minor.
(fade Seraglio)
20)
Muslim (Sicilian Fatimid), c. 1140, Capella Palatina Ceiling, Palermo
V20a) Venetian Byzantine, 1069-74, with later Mosaics 12th-13th cent., Cupola
of the Pentecost, St. Mark's, Venice
We pick up what we are attuned to. Western cultivation of world art can only
clothe in foreign tongues what is nascent and native. The ceiling of Roger II's Palatine
Chapel in Palermo was surely executed by Muslims from Fatimid Africa; but its
Byzantine ritual of gold in dark, speaks the 12th-century Romanesque which hosted those
kindred jewelings.
21)
5/1994
Gentile Bellini, c. 1490(?), A Turkish Artist, Gardner Museum, Boston
Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
By the end of the 15th century, Gentile Bellini's sketch of a Turkish artist,
however aware of the Persian parchment miniature, favors the cleanness of
foreshortening, space, and gathered robe which the early Renaissance was focused on.
22)
Mughal Islamic, 1639 ff., arch and ceiling from the Red Fort, Delhi
And what the Western Baroque and Rococo found in the palatial East after 1600 was the
splendor their own courts were ripe to rival. Yet the luxury of inlay decoration, whether
from Chinese porcelains or Mughal India,
Va23)
23)
23a)
Spanish Rococo, 1740-72, Sacramental Chapel, Church of San Mateo,
Lucena; + V detail
Capodimonte, Porcelain Room 1757-59, Museo Capodimonte, Naples
Same, closer horizontal view; + V details from 23 and 23a
was caught up in the dynamism of 18th-century Europe.
Music:
Pergolesi, c. 1735(?), Sinfonia in F, 4th Movement, Presto, 1st
repeat, Nonesuch HC 3008, side 4
In Capodimonte Naples, the feather curliques and Chinese figurines mount another body
of fate, whose radiative conquest coincides with its art absorption — no less of the West
than the tonal tensions of the music Mozart was heir to: Pergolesi.
(music)
Yet even in that energy, Baroque grandeur yields to precious line; bulk thins, like
the 1710 universe of Berkeley:
For...things... Their esse is percipi, nor is it possible they should have
any existence out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them.
(close Pergolesi)
Va24)
24)
V24a)
5/1994
English, 1687-1707, State Drawing Room, Tapestries woven c. 1635,
Cartoons by Raphael, Ceiling by Laguerre, Chatsworth, Darbyshire
Wallis and Laguerre, c. 1700, Painted Hall, Chatsworth, Darbyshire
English, 1700-03, probably designed hy Thomas Archer, West Front,
Chatsworth, Darbyshire
Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative
�9
C.G. Bell
24b)
Symbolic History
Wrenn and others, end 17th cent. and after, Naval Hospital, Greenwich,
London; first, video detail
Music:
Charpentier, c. 1690(?), from Offerte of Instrumental Mass,
Nonesuch 71130
A break from the heroic past: from the 1700 halls of Chatsworth, the music of
Charpentier. These forms swell with Cartesian substance, with the certainty which
crowns Locke's Primary and Secondary analysis of reason's limitation:
Wherever we perceive the agreement or disagreement of any of our
ideas, there is certain knowledge; and wherever we are sure those ideas
agree with the reality of things, there is certain real knowledge. Of
which agreement of our ideas with the reality of things having here
given the marks, I think I have shown wherein it is that certainty, real
certainty, consists.
a25)
25)
Germain Boffrand, c. 1740, French Rococo, Salon de la Princesse, Hotel de
Soubise, Paris; first, video detail
Watteau(?), c. 1708, Panel wlth decorative figures, Besançon de Wagner
Collection; + V details
Music:
Rameau, 1735, from Indes Galantes, Rigaudon I, L'Oiseau Lyre
SOL 60024
How far from the tone of solid Locke is Voltaire's skeptic praise of him in The
Ignorant Philosopher:
Locke confirms me in the opinion that there are no innate ideas, that it
is absurd to say the will is free... that I cannot know any substance, as I
can have no ideas but of their qualities... that the words matter and
spirit are mere words...
The first thinning, the diversion of incipient ennui in elegant play, with its
fondness for motifs from Renaissance, Pompei, and China, appears in those arabesques
Watteau painted about 1708 in the studio of Audran — to be imitated by a generation of
followers. The link to Couperin and Rameau (this dance from Rameau's Gallant Indies)
is patent; and it was during the same years that Berkeley, as in the passage just quoted, let
reason deprive itself at once of its chief field and power — of physical reality and of
5/1994
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Symbolic History
intellectual abstraction.
(end Rameau)
a26)
b26)
26)
26a)
Porcelain (Meissen), 18th cent., Old Lover Group, Conservatori, Rome
Double: [A] Boucher, c. 1760, (woven in Beauvais), Chinese Fair, Palazzo
Reale, Turin; and [B] Chippendale, c. 1760(?), Chinese Bedroom, Victoria and
Albert Museum, London
Sicilian Chinoiserie, 1799, Ceiling of King's Bedchamber, Chinese Palazzina,
Palermo
Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1784-88, Cupid untying the girdle of Venus, Hermitage,
Leningrad (The video draws on these four slides, along with V-A and V-B of
the double, taking them in the following order: a26, detail; 26, lower half; A
of b26; B of b26; 26, upper half; 26a; and again from 26, a close detail.)
Music:
Mozart, 1782, Entführung, Overture, continued, Deutsche Gram.
2709-021
Since the Crusades, the West had been too intently fixed on its own Eurekan
action, vision, and art to experience the sophisticated restlessness with which the 18th
century, called (as with the consciousness of Vico) Augustan by the English, now scours
the globe for fashionable novelties. From Boucher's France to Chippendale's England,
from the porcelain factories of Dresden to this Sicilian Chinese palace at the end of the
century, the Janissaries of Sultan Soul, Candide and the rest, press the world-search for
pleasure. But as with the Abyssinian inhabitants of Johnson's "happy valley... gratified
with whatever the senses can enjoy", the romantic disquiet of Rasselas distills exactly
from those "gardens of fragrance," those "fortresses of security."
(fade Seraglio overture)
27)
V27a)
Chinese, Ming, c. 1500(?), Soul Tower of Emperor Yung-lo, Near Peking
Chinese, Ming, 1368-1644, Temple of the God of the Universe, South City
of Peking
Though that Europe of Chinoiserie, of Johnson's Abyssinia and Mozart's Seraglio,
was still Europe, as far removed as Don Juan or Childe Harold from the ceremonial
repose of the East it ransacked — the Ming Tombs and Hall of Sacrifice near Peking.
Thus with a wilder frenzy, Pound, late Symbolist off-shoot of that Byronic need, seizes
5/1994
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Symbolic History
on every chateau vestige of mythic health, from Homer to the Italy of Dante, or the
dynasties of HAN, SUNG, TANG.
a28)
Vb28)
Vc28)
28)
28a)
Robert Archer, 1764-73, Kenwood House, Hampstead, London
Neumann, c. 1719-35, Würzburg Residence, from Garden Terrace (CGB '86)
South German Baroque, 1713, Cosmas Damian Asam, Jupiter as Satyr to
Antiope, fresco detail, Schloß Alteglofsheim, Bavaria
Robert Adam, 1760-69, Ante-Room, Syon House, Milddlesex; + V detail
Neumann, 1719-35, and Tiepolo, 1751-53, stair-hall, Würzburg Residence
In England, as in Germany, the stance of Reasoned grandeur persists, but
undercut, as with Swift, Pope, Berkeley, Hume. Handel clothes German Baroque in
European Enlightenment.
Music:
Handel, 1739, Concerto Grosso in D, Op.6, #5, Largo to Allegro,
Decca LX 3055
The sophistications of Couperin and Scarlatti prank the amplitudes of his Concerti Grossi.
So the Adam's interior of Syon House, from the 1760's, with verd-antique columns
dredged from the Tiber, slicks English Augustan confidence almost to the Roman
Augustan display of an empire stretching through known space and time. (fade Handel)
Even in Mozart the old chord-parade would uphold all ironies of wit and pangs of
heart.
Music:
a29)
b29)
Vc29)
29)
Mozart, 1790, Cosi fan tutte, Overture, close, Angel-3522-c
Horace Walpole, 1747-63, Library, Strawberry Hill (CGB '74); first, video
detail
Same, Strawberry Hill, exterior (CGB '74)
Chinoiserie (Lightfoot), c. 1775-80, Chinese Tea Party within alcove,
Claydon House, England
Horace Walpole with Thomas Pitt, 1747-63, Gothic ceiling, Strawberry
Hill, Twickenham (CGB '74; video: three details only)
And already in the sons of Bach, what was upheld was Storm and Stress and pre-romantic
experiment.
Music:
5/1994
C.P.E. Bach, c. 1765(?), from Fantasia #2, C Major, M.H.S. 1549
Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
At the same time Horace Walpole, whose 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto revived the
Medieval terrors that would swell through Scott to Frankenstein and Dracula, was
finishing his Twickenham Gothick hall, Strawberry Hill, just while Syon House was
building down the Thames. We remember Claydon House, Bucks, with its Chinese room
and its Gothic room varying the classic and rococo. Yet Walpole's house avoids the
mopes of his fiction; its abandonment of space for line is as parlor-frail as the fantasias of
C.P.E. Bach, of whom Mozart said, "He is the father, we are the children." Revival goes
by opposites, implies the lack of the thing revived. This fan-vault is laid on in decorative
plaster, like the gold-fret of a snuff-box.
(close K.P.E. Bach)
30)
30a)
V30b)
English Tudor, 1500-12, Chapel of Henry VII, Westminster Abbey, London;
first, video detail
English Norman, 1141-80 with vault of early 16th cent., Christ Church,
Oxford (video uses CGB '59 variant, V30a)
English late Perpendicular, 1446-1515 (Tudor), King's College Chapel,
Cambridge
Music:
Taverner, c. 1525(?), In Nomine for viols, Bach Guild 576
But the stone-lace of Westminster Abbey, Walpole's model, supports itself, a
floreation of structure. No doubt the Tudor In Nomines of Taverner were forgotten. (fade
Taverner) But it was some such recovered polyphony that Beethoven transcended in the
C# Minor quartet —
Music:
a31)
31)
Beethoven, 1826, Opening, C# Minor Quartet, Col. M5L 277
C.D. Friedrich, 1819, Ruined Cloister and Cemetery in snow, formerly
National Gallery, Berlin (destroyed 1945)
C.G. Carus, 1830-31, Dresden at Dusk, G. Schäfer Collection, Obbach; video:
details only, center and above
turning it, as in Friedrich or this Carus, to a mystery of person and mood. Not this 1830
heir to twilight space asserts spatiality, nor the Gothic it tenderly looks back to;
(fade C# Minor)
a32)
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G. Guarini, c. 1666, Dome of San Lorenzo, Turin
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C.G. Bell
32)
Symbolic History
Guarini, 1667, Dome, Santissima Sindone Chapel, Turin (CGB '84)
but the reading over, from Renaissance to Baroque, of transfinite Gothic into cosmic
physicality — the rib-vaulted radiance of Guarini's Turin domes. Here was dimensional
voyage, as by dead reckoning, ahead. Against it Walpole's filligree thins to Style Galant
— Christian Bach against the old Johann Sebastian.
33)
V33a)
Lombard, c. 1050-75, Heavenly Jerusalem, detail, St. Piero al Monte,
Civate; + V closer detail
Same, whole ceiling
Music:
Elegy for William the Conqueror, d. 1087, opening, Everest 3452
As in music and thought, but visibly in art, space is of the essence. The Lombard
Heavenly City of 1050 was remote from such dependence; it did not (any more than the
plainsong Elegy for William the Conqueror) make vaunted earth the locus of its power.
Yet the common and repeated truth of Western conquest — from spacelessness,
(fade 1087 Elegy)
a34)
Vb34)
34)
34a)
Andrea Pozzo, 1683-94, Ceiling of St. Ignatius, detail, east end (?), Rome
Same, NE corner detail
Same, St. Ignatius, whole ceiling fresco (video shows: first, the west half of
34; then, a34; next, central spread of 34; then, Vb34; finally, 34, the entire
ceiling)
Another view of 32, Dome of SS Sindone Chapel
Music:
J.S. Bach 1731-3, Gratias (opening), from Gloria, B. Minor Mass,
(Klemperer) Angel SC 3720
to the enormous assertion of space, not only for earth but for God — takes total force
under the frescoed vault of the Triumph of St. Ignatius in Rome.
The musical form of that mastery was the polyphonic fugue; as in Bach's Gratias
(fade Gratias) but, since the Renaissance, an ambiguity had been seated in the fugue,
related to what would later seem the Satanic mill of Reason, Blake's "loom of Locke,
whose Woof rages dire, wash'd by the Water-wheels of Newton..." — since the great law
of Baroque whlch swells thought and morality, music and art, can suggest either the
praise or dread of the destinate.
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Symbolic History
a35) Piranesi, 1743-45 ff., engraving, The Prisons XV, 2nd State
35A) J.M. Fischer, 1735-51, Michaelskirche, Berg am Laim, München (CGB '59)
V35) The double of 35A, and 35B
35B) Zuccali, 1710 ff., interior, Dome, Ettal, Bavaria (CGB '59)
Music:
J.S. Bach, 1723-7, "Wir haben ein Gesetz" (opening), St. John
Passion, Odeon STE 80668/78
From 1500 down, Passion motets and cries of the crowd had hammered the stretto of
canonic entrance, as in the protest of Bach's Passion According to St. John: "Wir haben
ein Gesetz!" — "We have a law." Yet more typically in Bach (fade), the fugue (with that
domed and towered might which took South Germany by storm) sounds the predictive
majesty of God.
Music:
a36)
36)
J.S. Bach, Gratius agimus, (conclusion), B Minor Mass, Angel SC
3720 (end)
Piranesi, 1743-45 (2nd State, 1761), Carceri V, engraving (video shows three
details only: upper, middle, and lower; while slide show, after the whole, adds
b36, lower half of the same Carceri V, with lions)
Same, Carceri (2nd state) VII; + V details (cf. V36a)
Music:
Mozart, 1791, Kyrie (fugue), Requiem, Columbia ML 5012
Meanwhile by mid-century, and most startlingly in Piranesi, the great "I think" of
Baroque space becomes a prison frenzy of "I nightmare" — as if the mind-vaulted
immensity were crying out with Blake's Urizen: "Wir haben ein Gesetz":
is there not one law for both the lion and the ox?
And is there not eternal fire and eternal chains
To bind the phantoms of existence from eternal life?
Such the "mistaken Demon of heaven" Rousseau thought Voltaire made of God (though
for Blake both were mockers) — from the Confessions:
I received a copy of his poem on the destruction of Lisbon... Voltaire,
while always appearing to believe in God, has never really believed in
anything but the Devil, since his pretended God is nothing but a malicious being, who, according to him, finds no pleasure except in doing
injury...
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Symbolic History
It is in such fugal seizure that Mozart closed his religious output, with the Requiem Kyrie,
a fugue on the leap of a diminished seventh; while Goethe's Gretchen, 1790, swoons
under the Dies irae: "Grimm fasst dich!" and "Weh! weh!"
(fade Requiem)
a37)
37)
37a)
Rembrandt, c. 1631, Scholar under a Spiral Stair, Louvre, Paris; + V detail
Rembrandt, 1631, Scholar in a Lofty Room, National Museum, Stockholm
Same, central detail; while video takes two details from 37
It was with another certainty that thought in Rembrandt had possessed the
luminous dark. Spinoza:
the mind, in so far as it truly perceives a thing, is part of the infinite
intellect of God... and therefore it is as necessary that the clear and
distinct ideas of the mind are true as it is that those of God are true... It
is the nature of reason to perceive things under a certain species of
eternity.
Music:
Schütz, 1648, "Auf dem Gebirge" opening, MHS 1467
what music could sound in that room of "Milton's solitary Platonist" —
Till old experience do attain
To something like prophetic strain —
but the polyphony of high Baroque, from a Schütz opening (fade Schütz) to a Bach close:
Music:
38)
V38a)
38b)
38c)
Goya, 1801, Interior of a Prison, Barnard Castle, Durham
Blake, c. 1795, frontispiece, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Tate
Gallery, London
Again, Goya, Prison, detail of 38; first, video closer detail, then V38b
Again, Goya, Corral de Locos, detail of slide 3 (while video uses V38d)
Music:
5/1994
J.S. Bach, 1717, Mensch, bewein' dein' Sünde gros, close,
(Schweitzer) Col M-310 (78), cf. Odyssey 32 26 0003
Mozart, 1791, Requiem, continued, Dies Irae, Col. ML 5012
Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
But in Goya's Pascalian prison ("l'image de la condition des hommes"), the lighted
vault, like all the skull-caves of Blake, plays a converse role, the web of reason's law,
gray and hoary dark, as with Swift's Struldbrug Immortals:
opinionative, peevish... morose... dead to all natural affection..
So Johnson's Rasselas, searching "the choice. of life", at last descends with the old
astronomer, who has lived by the illusion that he guides the sun and seasons ("I can only
tell that I have chosen wrong") into the catacombs of the dead, a universe of "matter…
inert, senseless, and lifeless" where our only hope comes from "higher authority".
It is first with Kant's Critique, 1781, that Reason, by its own pure skill, exhibits
the vaulting of its cave: the four unanswerable antinomies: the necessity and
impossibility of infinite space and time; that there must and cannot be any simple
substance; that free will both is and is not; that God as absolute cause can be alike proved
and denied.
39)
39a)
V39b)
39c)
39d)
V39e)
Goya, 1783, Self-Portralt, Agen, France; first, video detail
Blake, 1793, Earth, from the Gates of Paradise, British Museum, London
Blake, 1793-4 (Copy M, of 1800), Shackled Covering Cherub, Frontispiece,
America, privately owned
Reynolds, c. 1776(?), Dr. Samuel Johnson, National Trust Property, Knole,
Kent
Again, 39, Goya, Self, detail
Goya, 1799, Self Portrait (Caprichos), Prado, Madrid
Music:
Mozart, 1791, Requiem, continued, Tuba mirum, Col. ML 5012
(opening then fade)
What would lift the Age of Revolution from Johnson's prayerful return to "higher
authority," Goya caught in this self-portrait of 1783 — a defiance to which he continually
returns — soul's resolve to break its own prison. Blake: "When thought is closed in
Caves, then love shall show its root in deepest Hell." But Blake's love would thunder like
his Rintrah, like Rousseau's heart, Hegel's passion, Faust's Satanic compact.
Music:
5/1994
Mozart, 1788, first fugal passage, Finale, Jupiter Symphony, #41, C
Major, Columbia D3L 291
Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative
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Symbolic History
And had not rational-pessimist Johnson ("Must helpless man in ignorance sedate/ Roll
darkling down the torrent of his fate?") answered "Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry
on the nonexistence of matter" not with reason at all, but, as Boswell describes,
striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he
rebounded from it, "I refute it thus."
How far does Mozart prepare for Beethoven's translation of the fugue into the
will's battleground with "the army of unalterable law", for Kant's moral imperative and
final Strife of the Faculties:
For what is man but the original creator of all his representations and
concepts; what should he be but the first author of his own deeds?
(fade Jupiter)
a4O)
Vb40)
Vc40)
40)
J. Both, c. 1640(?), Italian Landscape, Wallace Collection, London
J. Both, c. 1640, Italian Landscape, Mauritshuis, the Hague (for Vb40,
gone orange, slide show now has b40, J. Both, c. 1645, Rocky Landscape,
National Gallery, London)
Albert Cuyp, 1660-64, Horsemen and Herdsmen, National Gallery of Art,
Washington D.C.; first, video detail
Agricola, c. 1700(?), Landscape, Pitti, Florence (CGB '48)
Music:
J. Rosenmüller, pub. 1670, from Sonata #2 in E Minor,
Esoteric 517
The Baroque had glowingly possessed what Blake had to reforge from alienated
man and matter — "To see the World in a grain of sand/ And Heaven in a Wild Flower."
Such "deep and dazzling dark" had been the element of Silesius, 17th-century Cherubic
Wanderer:
Time is like eternity, eternity like time;
Never bring division in that golden clime. (CGB)
It poured from Rosenmüller's sonatas, as in Grimmelshausen the hermit sings in the night
wood: "Komm, Trost der Nacht, O Nachtigall!" — "Comfort of night, come
nightingale"; or as the alchemical light of Both and Cuyp floods this 1700 landscape by
German Agricola, an irradiation of the actual.
(cut Rosenmüller)
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C.G. Bell
41)
Symbolic History
J.A. Koch, c. 1830(?), Mountain Lake, lower detail, Museum, Basel
(CGB '80); video shows first an upper detail from 2nd 41, the whole picture
Music:
Schubert, 1826, Andante of Trio No. 1 in B Flat Maj., Op. 99, WL5188
But the Transcendental begins, like a Schubert farewell, to dissolve the material in
symbol and dream — "The light that never was on sea or land." Koch's 1830 Mountain
Lake is as spectral as that twilight pond in Goethe's Elective Affinities where Ottilie
totters in the boat, loses the oar and drowns the child.
(fade Schubert)
42)
R. Wilson, c. 1762, Kew Gardens, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.;
+ V detail
Music:
Mozart, 1778, 2nd Movement, Violin Sonata in C Maj., K. 296,
Murray Hill S.4356
The melting had begun in the 18th century, as in this Wilson, Kew Garden,
Pagoda and Bridge; it pervades the wistfulness Mozart's first violin sonatas drew from
Italy, from Mannheim and the sons of Bach; it had been the message of Berkeley:
visible ideas are the language whereby the governing Spirit on whom
we depend informs us what tangible ideas he is about to imprint upon
us...
2nd 41)
Again, J.A. Koch, Mountain Lake, whole, Basel (CGB '80)
which Coleridge would rephrase:
The... shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God.
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all and all things in himself...
(fade Mozart)
For 2nd 40) Van der Neer, c. 1650(?), A Canal Scene by Moonlight, Wallace
Collection, London (video having returned first to a detail of 40, the
Agricola Landscape)
Kant shows the change. His mid-century "Origin of the World" still glows with
Leibnizian science:
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Symbolic History
matter... by natural evolution... strives to fashion itself... If the
grandeur of a planetary world in which the earth... is scarcely
perceived, fills the understanding with wonder; how are we astonished
to behold the infinite multitude of worlds and systems which form the
extension of the Milky Way! How transported beyond astonishment
when we realize that the nebulae are other such star systems, as
innumerable as vast...
For 3rd 41)
C.D. Friedrich, 1818, Woman on the shore near Rügen, Reinhart,
Winterthur
Fifty years later the same Kant would write:
I learned that philosophy... is not a science of all sciences or anything
of the kind, but a science of man, his images, thoughts and deeds.
Va2nd 42) Richard Wilson, c. 1760-70(?), Study of a Landscape, National
Museum, Wales (cf. 18th Century, 55)
2nd 42)
Again, Wilson, Kew Gardens (of which video shows a detail only)
2nd 42a) Joseph Wright, 1780-89(?), Moonlight Landscape, Museum, Brighton
As Wilson daydreams from his baroque models, Blake distills Milton into the
Poetical Sketches of his teens: "To the Evening Star":
Thou fair-haired angel of the evening,
Now, while the sun rests on the mountains, light
Thy bright torch of love! Thy radiant crown
Put on, and smile upon our evening bed!
...Let thy west wind sleep on
The lake; speak silence with thy glimmering eyes,
And wash the dusk with silver...
The German cognate is in Klopstock (though his Messias vexed Blake at stool),
"Wilkommen, o silberner Mond" —
Welcome, silver moon, beautiful
Silent companion of the night;
So begins that gloaming elegy to the lost friends of his youth:
Your graves are heavy with moss:
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Symbolic History
Happy the time when I could behold with you
The rose flush of dawn, night a silver glow. (CGB)
O wie war glücklich ich, als ich noch mit euch
Sahe sich röten den Tag, schimmern die Nacht!
Va43)
43)
43a)
Again 1, Lange's Mozart, detail
Goya, 1785, Self-Portrait, Collection Count of Villagonzalo, Madrid
Same, 1785, Self, detail; + V closer detail
We seem to be stating a paradox, that the time of Mozart, Kant, Goethe and the
rest plays opposite roles — detaches itself from the spatial assertions of Baroque, yet
more wilfully seizes on the assumed helm of earth-control. But is that not what Kant had
learned: that philosophy is not the metaphysics of the Absolute, but "a science of man,
his images, thoughts and deeds." It is what the Invisible Chorus tells Faust: "You have
destroyed the noble world... Build it again, in yourself." And why not repeat Blake: "that
all deities reside in the human breast."
Goya's 1785 Self thins everything to transparency — but charged — the dielectric
of a capacitator.
If Mozart gathers up the century, he, as much as anyone, should heighten that
antinomy.
Va44)
44)
V44a)
Canaletto, 1729, Return of the Bucintorno on Ascension Day, whole, Crespi
Collection, Milan
Same, central detail; + V closer detail
Canaletto, c. 1740, The Square of Saint Mark's, National Gallery of Art,
Washington D.C.; first, video detail
Music: Domenico Scarlatti, c. 1735, Sonata in E Major, end of 1st section;
K. 380, (Kirkpatrick) ARC 2533-072, or (Landowska) DB 4965 (78)
The satiric break of Magnasco and Watteau had pierced the Great Baroque when
Canaletto began to turn the reality of Venice into a sparkling Capriccio. His 1729 Feast
of Ascension Day, with this Scarlatti Sonata Landowska used to call The Parade, retains
the focus of objective brilliance from which the inward shift of the century would move.
(cut Scarlatti)
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Symbolic History
But early Mozart could cultivate that sharpness, even in the style of sensibility,
marked by the shift from harpsichord to pianoforte.
Music:
a45)
45)
Mozart, 1778, Allegro, Sonata in B Flat, K. 333, Siena Pianoforte,
Counterpoint 53000
Canaletto, 1726, Harbor of St. Marks, National Museum, Cardiff, Wales;
+ V detail
Same, close detail of couple
And already Canaletto's perspective camera opens, like the plays of Goldoni, to a
rush of wind-blown impressions — the path Watteau had blazed for 18th-century art.
(fade Mozart Allegro)
In Venetian music it was the Galuppi of Browning's poem ("Dear dead women,
with such hair, too") who explored the sonata form with the sons of Bach and Haydn.
Music:
46)
V46a)
46b)
Galuppi, c. 1760(?), close of Andante, Sonata #9, F Minor Nonesuch H-71117
Fr. Guardi, c. 1760(?), Giudecca with the Zitelle, National Gallery, London
Guardi, Santa Maria della Salute, lower detail, National Gallery of
Scotland, Edinburgh
Guardi, c. 1770, View on the Cannaregio, National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C.
By mid-century Guardi had put the crisp representations of Canaletto through a
filter of coloristic mood, turning the landscape to an evanescence of light.
(end Galuppi)
Va47)
47)
Panned detail of Gondolier, from 46, Giudecca
Guardi, 1784-89, Gondola on the Lagoon, Poldi-Pezzoli Museum, Milan;
+ V detail
Music:
Mozart, 1787, Rondo in A Minor, K. 511 RCA-L SC-7062
While Guardi's works when he was seventy and more, from the time of Mozart's
A Minor Rondo, move as far as that exquisite Cantilena toward the felt nuances of the
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Symbolic History
Romantic and Impressionist century.
(fade Rondo)
48)
48a)
H. Fuseli (Füssli), 1781, Nightmare, Institute of Arts, Detroit; + V details
(see V48,detail)
Fuseli, 1790, Thor, in Hymir's Boat, Battling the Midgard Serpent, Royal
Collection, London
On the musing suavities of that Europe broke Füssli's Nightmare of pseudoGothic, a pre-Freudian attack of nerves, more startling when reflected in the clear spring
of Mozart and of the Minuet.
Music:
Mozart, 1788, from Minuet (after trio), Symphony #40, G Minor, K.
550, Col-D3L-291
But it was everywhere the Werther shadow of Enlightenment. Yet neither the acid of
Swift nor of Goya, not Gothic Revival nor Storm and Stress, could deeply score the
civilized fabric of Cartesian assurance. If the crisis was social and temporal, it called for
stronger temporal cures.
(fade
Mozart)
49)
49a)
Simone Martini, c. 1340(?), Deposition, Musée Royal des Beaux-Arts,
Antwerp; first, video detail
Barna da Siena, c. 1367, Bad Thief, detail of Crucifixion, Collegiate Church,
San Gimignano
Music:
Philippe de Vitry, c. 1330(?), Impudenter circumivi,
2723-045 (2b)
close, ARC
Man had hardly begun to strip to the penitential severities and bare soul drama of
true Gothic: Simone Martini's arm-flung gesture of the scarlet Magdalen, de Vitry's
isorythms, the hue and cry of the Divine Comedy.
(end de Vitry)
1st 50) Tintoretto, 1559, Deposition, Accademia, Venice
Against that sharpness, from Raphael and Michelangelo, from this 1560 Tintoretto, from
Tasso and Renaissance tragedy, from the great polyphonies of Rome and Venice, we have
traced the swelling claim of a new pathos,
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Symbolic History
1st 51) Guercino, c. 1620-25(?), Angels Weeping over Christ, National Gallery,
London
in its spatiality of tenebrist formulation — as here with Guercino —
1st 52) Rembrandt, 1632, Descent from the Cross, Alte Pinakothek, Munich
calling for the crisis of post-tragic and Pascalian pain.
1st 53) Asam Brothers, 1733-35, Trinity, apse, St. John Nepomuk, München
(CGB '59)
We have seen the Asam Brothers carry such Baroque power into the skeptic complexities
of the 18th century. The age of Mozart is residuary legatee to that two-hundred year span
of Crucifixion rhetorlc.
V for 2nd 52 and 2nd 51)
Feichtmayr and Christian, 1747-58, Christ on the Cross, detail of Pulpit,
Zwiefalten, Bavaria
Let us gather it first in a chromatic 12-voice Crucifixus by Lotti, a work surely known to
Bach and Mozart.
2nd 50) Again, Tintoretto's Deposition (video: detail only)
2nd 50a) Tintoretto, 1563, Pieta, Brera, Milan
Music:
Lotti, c. 1720(?), Crucifixus à 12, V-20410 (78)
3rd 51)
Again, Guercino, Angels and Christ; + V detail
3rd 52)
Again, Rembrandt, Descent, central detail
V3rd 52a) Rembrandt, c. 1639, The Entombment of Christ, Hunterian Art Gallery,
University of Glasgow
2nd 53)
Asam Brothers, closer view of the Trinity (video uses first a detail of 1st
53, then of V2nd 53)
1st 54)
Tiepolo, c. 1730(?), Christ Carrying Cross, lower detail, San Alvise,
Venice
(end Lotti)
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Symbolic History
Of all the artists who Spread the Venetian grand manner over Germany and to
Spaln, Tiepolo was the most sought after. The youthful Goya was formed in his wake,
with gallant and classical promptings from Mengs.
55)
Günther, c. 1763(?), Pieta, upper detail, Weyarn, Bavarla (CGB '59; video
shows the whole, from 2nd 55)
From the South German sensualization of Rococo (Günther, who carved into the time of
Haydn and Mozart),
2nd 54) Again, Tiepolo, Carrying Cross, whole; + V detail (cf. V2nd 54)
from the delayed Baroque of Tiepolo, we pursue the chromatic Passion — with Mozart
now, from the 1782 C Minor Mass: Miserere —
Music:
2nd 55)
56)
Mozart, 1782-3, C Minor Mass, K. 427, from the Qui tollis,
Deutsche Gram. SLPM 138 124
Again, Günther, Pieta, whole (CGB '59); video, details only
Goya, 1798, Arrest of Christ, Sketch, detail, Prado, Madrid; first, video
closer detail
(fade Qui Tollis)
to Goya's pushing of the Tenebrist into Revolution, seven years after Mozart had died.
Va57)
Vb57)
57)
Zimmermann and Schmaedl, 1751-55, Andechs Cloister Church, detail,
Bavaria (from CGB '59)
Same, upper high Altar, close detail (from CGB '59)
Same, Choir loft (CGB '59); + V detail
Music:
Mozart, 1777, close of Credo from Missa Brevis, Decca DL 710091
Into the Baroque ingredient, whip the lighter Rococo, those wave, shell, and
flower forms with which Zimmermann sprinkled Bavaria. Though Andechs was finished
a year before Mozart's birth, its curves invite his early masses.
(end Credo)
a58)
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Donner, 1737-39, River Goddess, New Market Fountain, detail, Vienna
(CGB '77)
Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
For 1st 58) Günther, c. 1764, Angel from a pedestal, Weyarn, Bavaria (CGB '59);
+ V detail
From 1600 down (in the Carracci, Poussin, the sensuous swoon of Bernini), Neoclassic had refined its softer charms within Baroque. So in the 18th century, Donner's
Vienna fountains had smoothed rococo toward this Bavarian Günther. It is the blend that
leads in English poetry from Milton, to Collins' "Ode to Evening":
If aught of oaten stop, or pastoral song, May hope, chaste Eve, to
soothe thy modest ear, Like thy own solemn springs, Thy springs, and
dying gales...
Such voluptuous mood Klopstock would pass to early Goethe — "On the Moon":
For 1st 59) Günther, c. 1765(?), Herald Angel, Diessen am Ammersee, Bavaria (copy
of CGB '59, Avant Garde Break 4); + V detail
Happy he who without hate From the world withdraws, Holds in love a
single friend And with him enjoys All, that to men of earth, Closed
from mind and sight, Through the labyrinth of heart, Wanders in the
night. (CGB)Was, von Menschen nicht gewußt Oder nicht bedacht,
Durch das Labyrinth der Brust Wandelt in der Nacht.
a2nd 58)
Günther, c. 1764, Annunciation, wide view of the whole, Weyarn,
Bavaria (CGB '59)
b2nd 58)
Same, upper section of the pair (CGB '59)
For 2nd 58) Same, detail of Mary (CGB '59)
Though in the abandon of sacred rococo and personal love, Mozart's Laudate
from the Vespers outsoars them all.
Music:
Mozart, 1780, from Laudate Dominum Solemn Vespers, K. 339,
Nonesuch H-1041
For 2nd 59) Same, detail of Gabriel (CGB '59)
60)
Same, Annunciation, closer view of the whole (CGB '59) [From these five
slides, the video shows: the whole; detail of Mary; detail of Gabriel; closer
details of each; and upper section of the pair.]
(fade Laudate)
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Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative
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C.G. Bell
61)
Symbolic History
Veit Stoss, 1517-18, Annunciation, St. Lawrence Church, Nuremberg;
+ V detail
Of what earthly color and touch 1500 had seemed, approaching it from the Middle
Ages. Looking back from Günther and Mozart, how brightly thin and pure the
Nuremberg Annunciation by Stoss, or the Tudor carol of Mary to her son: "Ah, my dear":
Music:
a62)
62)
62a)
V62b)
62c)
English, c. 1500, Fayrfax MS, "A, My dere," Vanguard VCS-10022
(close)
F.A. Bustelli, c. 1760, Bavarian Porcelain, Lady's Maid and Valet, upper
section, Nymphenburg, Munich; + V details of Maid and Valet
Same, Maid and Valet, whole
Liotard, 1744-45, Girl with a Cup of Chocolate, Dresden Museum; video:
detail only
Liotard, c. 1750, Portrait of the Countess of Coventry, Museum of Art and
History, Geneva
Chodowiecki, 1768, Party in the Tiergarten, Leipzig Museum; video: detail
only
Music:
Mozart, 1786, "Ding, ding" aria, Nozze di Figaro, Deutsche Gram.
SLPM 138697-99
In the porcelains of Dresden and Munich — this 1760 Valet and Lady's Maid from
the Nymphenburg — the angel and Virgin have taken up residence, both satiric and
celebratory, in the rococo parlor, to advance, under that trivial surface, such life-claims as
the English novel was making — say Fielding in Joseph Andrews. No style component
more delighted Mozart than this gallant play; and its radical humanizing becomes the
revolution of The Marriage of Figaro.
But as Baroque was penetrated by Rococo, (cut Figaro) so the courtly artifice
assumed the balance and candor of Enlightenment, of which the musical focus was ln
Mannheim. By 1750 Johann Stamltz there had perfected those symphonies and clarinet
concertos the young Mozart would take in before his 1778 fruitless stay in Paris.
Music:
5/1994
Johann Stamitz, c. 1750, from 1st movement, Clarinet Concerto, B
flat Major, ARC-3092
Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative
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C.G. Bell
63)
V63a)
63b)
Symbolic History
J.H. Tischbein (Elder), 1756, Landscape with Chateau Wabern, in the
Schloss Fasanerie, Fulda
Caspar Wolf, c. 1780(?), Lauterbrunnen Glacier, Art Collection, Basel
Thomas Gainsborough, 1748-50, Robert Andrews and his Wife, National
Gallery, London; first, video detail
On the great estates life and art move to the open, natural as Mr. Allworthy and
Squire Western, or as George Washington along the Piedmont and Tidewater. (fade
Stamitz). That easy freedom quickens the symphonic style Haydn learned from Stamitz
and the sons of Bach: "Le Matin":
Music:
64)
Haydn, 1761, from 1st movement Symphony #6 (Le Matin, Turn.
Vox TV 34150S
Gainsborough, c. 1755(?), Couple on an Estate, Dulwich College, London;
first, video detail
The English were bound to take to Haydn. Where else is his break with the
volutions of Baroque and Rococo so paralleled as in those portraits of couples among
groves and fields, lively as Tom Jones and Sophie Western, which Gainsborough began
to paint after 1750?
(fade
Haydn)
a65)
Vb65)
c65)
65)
Honoré Fragonard, c. 1770, The Marionettes, A. Veil-Picard Collection;
+ V detail
Fragonard, 1769(?), Sleeping Bacchante, cropped figure, Louvre, Paris
Fragonard, c. 1765, the Bathers, detail, Louvre, Paris (cf. Vc65, whole)
Again, Bacchante, whole, Louvre, Paris
It was in Fragonard's Paris that Mozart staged his 1763 triumph as wonder-child
performer, and his 1778 failure as the mature composer of whom Haydn had said to father
Leopold:
Before God and as an honest man I tell you that your son is the greatest
composer known to me either in person or by name.
Music:
5/1994
Mozart, 1778, close of 2nd movement, Sinfonia Concertante in E
flat Maj., K.297B, Angel 35098
Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative
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How could the French not perceive that Mozart (as in the E Flat Sinfonia
Concertante he wrote there) could light abandons of love, with an art beyond that of
Fragonard's most voluptuous Bacchantes — touching the sensuous with the wand of
Oberon:
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxslips and the nodding violet grows...
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night...
66)
66a)
Fragonard, 1771-72, The Meeting, Frick Collection, New York City; first,
two video details, then whole
Same, The Meeting, the lover, lower right; video takes first the girl, left, then
the lover, right
Music:
Mozart, 1778, same, close of 3rd movement., Angel 35098
— not realize he could send his secrets forth on display and parade, dramatize them for
kings on operatic walls and never compromise their prophetic force or soul of sweet
delight, never quite reduce them to Gretry dance or Fragonard fluff.
(end Sinfonia
Concertante)
67)
Same, The Meeting, lower portion, the pair (video continues with the lover)
Music:
68)
Mozart, 1787, Don Giovanni, from Zerlina's Wedding, close of
dance, etc., Angel 3605 D/L leading into "Là ci darem lo mano"
Levitsky, 1773, Pastoral played by Ladies of Smolny Institute, Russian State
Museum, Leningrad; video: first two details, then whole
After Paris Mozart had 13 more years to live — time to give ultimate voice to that
late-century meeting of Baroque and Rococo, Sentiment and Neo-classic, Storm and
Stress, Revolution, pre-Romantic — which had spread over Europe — here Levitsky, as
far as Russia. In such pastoral play as by these noble young ladies of Smolny Institute,
Don Giovanni lures country-bride Zerlina to his paradise castle "to heal the pangs of an
innocent love."
69)
5/1994
Goya, 1786(?), Autumn, Grape Harvest, Sketch for tapestry, Clark Institute,
Williamstown, Massachusetts; with V details
Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
The artist closest to Mozart in age, originality and courtly training was Goya.
Through the opera years of Mozart's prime, Goya was producing sketches and cartoons
for the Royal tapestries, art-summit of the same style-blend of polish, irony and gallant
passion.
("Là ci darem" coninued: "Andiam!" )
70)
Goya, 1788-89, Blind Man's Bluff, cartoon, Prado, Madrid; + V detail
71)
Goya, 1812-19, Burial of the Sardine, San Fernando Academy, Madrid;
+ V details
(end "Là ci darem lo mano")
Meanwhile, the bite of Storm and Stress more and more agitates the mannered
joy, lashing it toward a crisis of insurgent frenzy: this Goya Burial of the Sardine; the
love-drive of Don Giovanni, inseparable from demonic possession.
Music:
72)
72a)
72b)
Mozart, 1787, Don Giovanni, from Overture, Angel 3605 D/L
(fade)
Goya, 1796-97, Duchess of Alba, Album Aa, Her Welcome, National Library,
Madrid
Same, upper detail of figure; + closer V detail
Double: Goya c. 1802, [A] La Maja vestita, and [B] La Maja desnuda;
Prado, Madrid (video: details only, first of A, then of B; cf. 1700, Vb&c79)
Music:
Mozart, 1790, Cosi fan tutte, #25, from Per pieta (da capo), Angel
alb.3522C/L (side 5)
In Cosi fan tutte (1790) Mozart transcends the whole horizon of light courtliness
— somewhat as Goya did in 1796, when he took up residence with the Duchess of Alba,
his love before and now widowed. On the first page of the Sketchbook she greets him.
As Klopstock wrote:
She looked at me; her being hung With that look upon my being, And
round us spread Elysium. (CGB)
So Faust, when the Devil mocks his play with Gretchen, shrines a mortal passion in
eternal words: "Ewig, ewig!" It is the bloom Mozart's love arias can always engraft on
scorn: (fade aria) as Alfred Einstein says:
5/1994
Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Mozart raises the banner of pure beauty,
73)
Goya 1796-97, Duchess of Alba Album, page 2, Welcome, from the rear,
National Library, Madrid; + V details
Music:
Mozart, Cosi, continued, #26, from Aria, Donne mie, la fate a tante
without forgetting the old cynic in the background laughing himself to
death.
The Duchess on the second page of the same Goya album... So the fickle delights of
Mozart's ladies lead through the title pharse, "Thus they all do" —"Cosi fan tutte,"
74)
74a)
Goya, 1797, The Duchess of Alba, Hispanic Society of America, New York
City; with V details
Goya, 1791, The Manikin, variant of sketch for Madrid Tapestry, Armand
Hammer
Music:
Mozart, Cosi fan tutte, continued, close of the opera, Angel Alb
3522 C/L
to a reconciling whirl ("in mezzo i turbini") with something of the fever of Goya's "Burial
of the Sardine". While the imperious Duchess, toward the end of that passionate year,
points to an inscription, "Solo Goya," of which the artist afterwards erased the first word
— not Goya alone.
(end
Cosi)
75)
Goya, 1797-98, from Caprichos, Dream of Lying and Inconstancy, National
Library, Madrid; + V detail
And in the Caprichos an etched Dream shows how near that dark angel "of lying
and inconstancy" brought Goya to despair. A new lover arrives, shushing for silence to
the two-faced Duchess and her duplicious maid, while the painter clings to his barebreasted lady's arm.
No doubt the Cosi fan tutte cry of betrayal
Music:
5/1994
Mozart, 1790, Cosi fan tutte, #27, "Tradito, schernito" phrase
Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
(fade)
a76)
76)
Schinkel, 1814-15, Queen of Night, from Magic Flute design, National
Gallery, Berlln
Goya, 1810-20, Los Desastres, #30, Ravages of War, detail, Madrid
was sharpening not only to the Requiem fugue, but even in the gaiety of The Magic Flute,
toward the Queen of Night and perfidious Moor.
Music:
Mozart, 1791, The Magic Flute, from close, Overthrow, 3 -DC 2709
017
As the horrors Mozart did not live to see, would build in Goya to Disaster etchings as
fierce as anything in art.
a77)
b77)
77)
77a)
Schinkel, 1814-15, Temple of Reason, National Gallery, Berlin; + V detail
J.M. von Rohden, 1800-10, Tivoli waterfall, Kunsthalle, Hamburg
Goya, 1810-20, Los Desastres, #80, Si resuciterá?; + V detail
Goya, same, #82, This is the Truth; + V detail
But the Queen of the Night is thrown down; the lovers are united, wisdom and
beauty under the sun-lord of Masonic Brotherhood.
(fade Overthrow)
Music: The Magic Flute, close, continued: "Die Strahlen der Sonne" etc.
(fade)
The vast good humor of the opera
Music:
The Magic Flute, continued, skip to finale
flows as benignly through crisis to renewal as Condorcet's History through nine past ages
toward the fabulous tenth (of which he wrote in hiding as he waited to be seized by the
passionate mob). Even Goya, who had seen the souring of that first Enlightened hope,
closes his somber "Desastres" with the death and resurrection of Truth: "Si resuciterá?"
And if the rays had not answered with Milton — "Who knows not that Truth is strong
next to the Almighty?" — we might turn to an aquatint later discovered, where the same
bosomed radiance greets a bearded peasant, with whom Tolstoy also would identify.
(end Magic Flute)
78)
5/1994
Gainsborough, 1787-88, The Woodsman, Pierre Jeannerat, London; + V detail
Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative
�32
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
From the overlapping chronology of 1791, Alfred Einstein concludes: "Mozart's
last work is not the Requiem; it is Die Zauberflöte, in which he has compressed the
struggle and victory of mankind."
Society painter Gainsborough had closed his life twelve years before with a moral
deepening of the comic vein, a woodsman in thunderstorm trusting the God of nature, as
Tamino and Papageno trust the basso profondo of Freemason Sarastro-von-Born.
a79)
79)
Goya, 1820-23, La Leocadia by a Tomb, Prado, Madrid
Goya, 1827, The Painter's Grandson Mariano, George Embiricos, Lausanne;
+ V detail
And Goya, having filled his country house near Madrid with the Black Paintings
that seemed a final grim testimony, shut it behind him and moved from repressive Spain
for four last years in Bordeaux, and an art sometimes — as in this 1827 portrait of his
grandson — strangely affirmative. So the young Nicholas Bolkonsky at the end of War
and Peace, revives the romantic dreams with which the novel began.
Like Goethe and Hegel, Beethoven, Blake, even Goya, Mozart closed his life with
the humanized myth of redemption. It is true that the explicit program is called that of
Reason (a loyalty early Goya had shared);
80) Goya, 1825-27, The Milkmaid of Bordeaux, Prado, Madrid
80a) Same, Milkmaid, detail
80b) Blake, 1794, Frontispiece, Songs of Innocence, Shepherd with Pipe, Library of
Congress(?) (while video has used an upper detail of V80b, the 1794 Songs of
Experience frontispiece, shepherd and cherub)
80c) Blake, 1875-90, Oberon, Titania, and Puck, with Fairies Dancing, Tate
Gallery, London
80d) Blake, engraved (dated) 1780, colored 1794-96, Glad Day or the Dance of
Albion, detail, British Museum, London (video takes its detail from V80d, the
whole)
though Berkeley, with Pascal before and Rousseau after, had already pointed from
Reason to Heart. Tolstoy would learn that Masonic Enlightenment is not the road. But
5/1994
Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative
�33
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
how could time exist, if experience at every moment did not leave consciousness seared
with its transforming mark?
Anyway (like Goya's Milkmaid of Bordeaux) The Magic Flute works by delight.
If Zarastro praises reason, Tamino glories in that reconciling flute;
Music:
The Magic Flute, from Scene 6, "O so eine Flöte"
(fade)
Papageno sounds his bells;
Music:
The Magic Flute, from Scene 14, "Das klinget' etc.
(fade)
the three magic boys have promised a morning
Music:
The Magic Flute, from Scene 25, "Dann ist die Erd' ein Himmelreich"
(fade)
where mortals shall be as gods.
5/1994
Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative
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Mozart : Age of Critique and Imperative, Symbolic History, Part 26
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Text
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
27. The Larger Declaration
a1)
1)
Ralph Earl, 1792, Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth and wife Abigail,
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford Connecticut; + V details, left, then right
M.M. Sanford, c. 1830(?), Washington at the Battle of Princeton; N.Y. State
Historical Association, Cooperstown.
Music:
American, c. 1760(?), Yankee Doodle, tune played by Dick Stark,
organ
Our aim is not to cut history to size, but to share in its deepest unfoldings; and
what has been deeper than the Constitutional achievement of the United States of
America? So the Federalist:
whether societies of men are really capable of establishing good
government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever
destined to depend, for their political Constitutions, on accident and
force.
The fine arts, however, present us with an anomaly. Against the visionaries of
England and the Continent — Blake, Goethe, Goya, Mozart, Beethoven — what
conventionalized these shores points the irony to which our third century is vulnerable.
In a world seeded by tragic complicities of that Europe, what can this "Battle of
Princeton" teach us, but to whistle "Yankee Doodle," and hope humor will bring us
through?
(end Yankee Doodle)
2)
G. Stuart, 1795, Washington, "The Vaughan Portrait," National Gallery,
Washington, D.C.; + V detail
The stiff look of Stuart's Washington has been blamed on false teeth, but Paine's
1796 letter seats the falseness deeper:
I declare myself opposed to almost the whole of your administration;
for I know it to have been deceitful if not perfidious... Monopolies of
every kind marked [it] almost in the moment of its commencement.
June 1996
The Larger Declaration
1
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
The lands obtained by the revolution were lavished upon partisans: the
interest of the disbanded soldier was sold to the speculator; injustice
was acted under the pretence of faith; and the chief of the army became
the patron of the fraud...
3)
Blake, 1793, The Argument Page: Oothoon and the Flower, Vision of the
Daughters of Albion, Lord Cunliffe; + V detail
V3a) J.S. Deville, c. 1807, Life Mask of Wm. Blake, Fitzwilliam Museum,
Cambridge, England (detail of a67)
Could this be the America of which Blake wrote in 1793: "For the soft soul of
America, Oothoon wandered in woe..."? Or had that America arisen, an ideal and
longing, in the heart of Europe? Yet Blake had thought of emigrating there, as to a
geographical place:
Tho' born on the cheating banks of Thames,
Tho' his waters bathed my infant limbs,
The Ohio shall wash his stains from me:
I was born a slave, but I go to be free.
2nd 2) Stuart, Washington, another detail of 2
Blake's goal, anyway, was not the federal actuality of rich and poor, proprietary
law, slavery, and compromise which Tom Paine had lately brought news of — when (as
the story goes) he was saved from arrest by Blake's shrewd or prophetic warning.
2nd 3)
2nd 3a)
Blake, c. 1795, Oothoon and the Flower, color print, British Museum,
London.
Anonymous, c. 1790, American Quaker Meeting, Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston.
Oothoon's search was for some Land of Heart's Desire — what Western
Civilization had always dreamed of, the Kingdom of God made flesh in the love and
freedom of here and now.
June 1996
The Larger Declaration
2
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Was Rousseau's claim for that here and now —
taking men as they are and laws as they might be made... to establish
some just administration of the civil order —
at last, by Hamilton's "great improvements" in "the science of politics": "balances and
checks," "Confederacy" and "representation" to be instituted — though in defiance of
Rousseau's dictum that "Sovereignty cannot be represented"?
4)
4a)
Romanesque, Languedoc, c. 1130, Prophet holding a Scroll, detail of portal,
Moissac.
American, Anonymous, c. 1780(?), Appalachian Pass, Corcoran Gallery
There had been a change, of course over the years, in the whereabouts of the
Kingdom of God and how it was to be realized. For Abelard in the 12th century:
Jerusalem est illa civitas...
Jerusalem is the city of everlasting peace...
Now it was over a continental expanse which would have seemed before to defy
democratic possibility that "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" were to be secured.
5)
Blake, 1793 (1799 copy), Orc in Flames, America, plate 17, Paul Mellon; first,
video detail
Even Blake's Kingdom (which in the continuity of Christendom he called
"Jerusalem"), though somehow of the spirit ("all deities reside in the human breast"), had
still to be forged, like Faust's, by rebellion against every outward dogma and hierarchy,
whether of priest or law — Blake, rearing himself across the page in the flaming delight
of Energy: "Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires."
6)
American, Anonymous, c. 1800, The Sargent Family, National Gallery,
Washington, D.C.
V6a) Rufus Hathaway, M.D., 1790, Lady with her Pets, Metropolitan Museum of
Art, NYC.
By the subtlety of historical assimilation something of that revolt has penetrated
even the naively conservative America of 1800, quietly shaping an individual good in the
June 1996
The Larger Declaration
3
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
secular and domestic (Blake's "lineaments of satisfied desire"). But it is a likeness in opposites: here an art of limitation, with all the risk of stuffiness and disappointment
attendant on such vegetative claims. As Emerson would take it up: "Things are in the
saddle, and ride mankind."
7)
Blake, 1795, Satan exults over Eve, Tate Gallery (formerly W. Bateson, Esq.);
+ V detail of Eve
Thus when Oothoon heads for the new land "over the waves... in wing'd exulting
swift delight," Bromion, possessive violence, brands her free desire with the name of
whore:
Thy soft American plains are mine, and mine thy north & south:
Stampt with my signet are the swarthy children of the sun;
They are obedient, they resist not, they obey the scourge...
a8)
b8)
8)
Gilbert Stuart, 1794, John Jay, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.
John Trumbull, 1806, Alexander Hamilton, National Gallery, Washington,
D.C.
G. Stuart, 1824, John Adams as an Old Man, Adams Collection, Waltham,
Massachusetts
Strange that the actual American achievement of a republic of compromise should
have seemed to the spiritual revolutionary not a triumph but a sell-out. Strange the
Founding Fathers should give no hint of any such dark awareness, though the radical
dreamers of Europe were always exhibiting themselves in a Faustian bond. Stranger that
skeptical Hamilton ("every man ought to be supposed a knave" and "the people is a great
beast") and John Adams, here shown in age ("whoever would found a state must presume
that all men are bad by nature"), should have helped to shape a tolerable republic.
a9)
Greek (Phidian), c. 440 B.C., Riace Bronzes, Young Warrior, rear view, Mus.
Reggio-Calabria, Italy; video: first, Va9, a varied rear detail; then, a detail of
a9
9)
Same, Young Warrior, right side, full-length; video: half-length only
9a) Same, Young Warior, front torso; which video replaces with head and
shoulders, from 9
V9b) Same, Double: half lengths of Young and Old Warriors
V9c) Again, Young Warrior, detail of head
June 1996
The Larger Declaration
4
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Yet why call it strange? Blake could repudiate the "silly Greek and Roman slaves
of the sword." But politics from Machiavelli to the Federalists had focussed, with searing
ambivalence, on the troubled freedom of those city-states — as charged with radiance and
danger as this Riace warrior lately recovered from the sea. Hobbes: "there was never
anything so dearly bought as these Western parts have bought the learning of the Greek
and Latin tongues."
Still, Doric and Ionic columns were on the rise. The book Washington kept by
him was not the Bible, but Plutarch's Lives of Famous Greeks and Romans, Machiavelli's
cycle of governments, each, by its own corruption, sliding to the next — degenerate
Royalty to Aristocracy, Aristocracy through Oligarchy to Democracy, Democracy through
mob-rule back to Tyranny — was Greek, clarified by Polybius from Plato. And it was
Polybius' dictum that the best state is "a composite of the three, as with Sparta and
Rome," which would provide so many Constitutions with Monarchic Executive,
Aristocratic Senate, and Democratic House — though all those ancient lessons sprang
from the Athens of this warrior, from Plato's dire celebration of Democracy, that "fair and
spangled state... the glorious beginning out of which tyranny springs."
10)
10a)
Jacques-Louis David, 1784, Oath of the Horatii, Louvre (CGB '80);
+ V detail
Same, Oath of the Horatii, detail; video: closer detail only
So the caution of the Founding Fathers may have been less strange than the
neglect of such Classical and Tory doubts by Robespierre: "Every institution that does
not suppose the people good and the magistrate corruptible, is vicious" — while he
played midwife to a Reign of Terror. So in art, David's Horatii conspire ("breathe together") like Rousseau's General Will. Gone is the caution of Madison:
The accumulation of all powers, Legislative, Executive, and Judiciary,
in the same hands... may justly be pronounced the very definition of
tyranny.
11)
C.W. Peale, c. 1787, Benjamin Franklin, Historical Society, Philadelphia;
+ V detail
June 1996
The Larger Declaration
5
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Was it luck or craft, the openness of a new land, or what, that enabled Americans
to stretch the limits of old Europe in so dangerous an enterprise as Revolution without
feeling its blasting effects, without even, as it were, taking off their 18th-century dress?
As Franklin, that always fortunate Poor Richard, drew lightning from the clouds — where
if the hemp cord had been more wet by the rain before he touched the ring, the new
Prometheus would have been consumed (like the less favored Russian who repeated the
experiment) by electrical fire.
a12)
b12)
12)
Houdon, 1784, George Washington, Boston Athenaeum
Houdon, 1783, Winter, Musée Fabre, Montpellier; the video takes the whole
figure from Vb12 (a wider view), then a detail from this b12
Houdon, 1785, Another Bust of Washington, Mt. Vernon; + V detail
As if the political climate which could nurture a Washington were as incompatible
with the art that could model his image, as in Jefferson's pragmatic notes for American
travellers abroad. Study Agriculture, he advises, useful mechanics, gardens, architecture,
"since we must double our houses"; but as for painting and statuary "it would be useless
and preposterous for us to make ourselves connoisseurs of those". Only a visiting
Frenchman, Houdon, has stamped the first president with the idealism of Jefferson's other
words:
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal;
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights;
that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness... for the
support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of
Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our
fortunes, and our sacred honor.
13)
13a)
J.H. Dannecker, 1797, Self-Portrait, full face, Landesmuseum, Stuttgart
Again, Dannecker Self, profile of bust; here, video shows in turn details of 13
and 13a
By the turn of the century, what Houdon's Washington and Jefferson's prose had
held in stately measure, receives more flagrant assertion over Europe, especially from
Germany, where world-hope, self-reliance, brotherhood and "Gefühl ist alles," cast such
a revolutionary person, as one might have assumed Jefferson to be. The sculptor
Dannecker presents himself as a glowing Schiller, herald of that Hymn of Joy ultimately
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set by Beethoven, 1823, in the finale of the Ninth:
embraced... the kiss of the world..."
Music:
a14)
14)
V14a)
14b)
Beethoven, 1817-23, 9th
(Toscanini), V-LM 6901
"All men brothers, ...millions
Symphony,
Finale,
Choral
fugue
Blake, engraved 1790 (colored 1794-96), Glad Day (or The Dance of Albion),
from the knees up, British Museum, London
Blake, 1790 (dated 1780), Glad Day (Orc-Albion) Engraving, British
Museum, London; + V details
Again, colored Glad Day, whole; + V upper detail
Blake, 1793 (1825-27 copy), from Marriage of Heaven and Hell, p. 27, from
"A Song of Liberty," Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Of Americans, only British-born Tom Paine, firebrand kindler of the Revolution,
anticipated that fervor. And perhaps one could have predicted his later trouble with the
"Power Circle" by trying to sort their competent faces with his passionate words —
though Blake can match him, and more: the so-called Glad Day, signed 1780, though
here in a print of about 1790, Albion as rebel Orc. So Tom Paine, from Common Sense,
1776:
0 Ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose not only tyranny but the
tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the Old World is overrun with
oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia and
Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and
England hath given her warning to depart. O receive the fugitive, and
prepare in time an asylum for mankind...
Yet Blake might better speak for himself, since he adds dimensions of boldness
Paine never dreamed of, defiance of whatever limits and binds — marriage, rational
science, and law:
Where the son of fire in his eastern cloud, while the morning
plumes her golden breast,
Spurning the clouds written with curses, stamps the stony law to
dust, loosing the eternal horses from the dens of night, crying
Empire is no more! and now the lion and wolf shall cease.
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15)
Symbolic History
Blake, 1793, Vision of the Daughters of Albion, frontispiece, Lord Cunliffe,
Blake Trust; + V detail
Chorus:
Let the Priests of the Raven of dawn, no longer in deadly black, with
hoarse note curse the sons of joy. Nor his accepted brethren whom,
tyrant, he calls free, lay the bound or build the roof. Nor pale religious
lechery call that virginity that wishes but acts not!
For everything that lives is holy.
As always, visionary hope sharpens the specter of what is: our shackled, fallen
convention (like dogs): "Bound back to back in Bromion's caves, terror and meekness
dwell."
16)
16a)
16b)
Savage, 1796, The Washington Family, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.;
+ V detail
Meissen (design by Kändler), c. 1750, Monkey Musicians; + V detail
Again, Savage's Washington Family, detail of Washington
Music:
Duport, 1792, Minuet danced for George Washington, Col. (78):
17072-D(a)
How far from the intensity of Blake and Beethoven is the father of our country as
Savage paints him with his family. Call for an accompanying music, and what sounds but
the Duport minuets, danced in 1792 for George and Martha in the prevailing artifice of
hair and dress. (Jefferson, 1778, having written an unknown Italian about importing a
band of sober and industrious persons: gardener, cabinet maker, etc., who could also play
French horn, clarinet, etc., and so provide music without enlarging one's domestic
expense: "the favorite passion of my soul, though fortune has cast my lot in a country
where it is in a state of deplorable barbarism." Duport, however, seems no more barbaric
than this painter is Savage.
17)
17a)
17b)
Double: [A] J. Trumbull, 1792, Alexander Hamilton, National Gallery,
Washington, D.C., and [B] Gainsborough, 1785, George IV as Prince of
Wales, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.
Left of Double, Trumbull's Hamilton; first, video detail
Right of Double, Gainsborough's George IV
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From the same year as the music, Alexander Hamilton (left), whom Jefferson
called "not only a monarchist, but for a monarchy bottomed on corruption."
And by a fortuity of likeness, from a few years earlier, Gainsborough's George IV
as Prince of Wales (right) — the scion of tyranny against an author of the Constitution
(until he left in a pet); yet style says with Lear: "Handy-dandy, which is the justice, which
is the thief?"
(close Duport Minuet)
Though it was Hamilton whose intellect (perfecting Rousseau), incomparably
stated the antinomies of rule:
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were
to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government
would be necessary. In framing a government, which is to be
administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You
must first enable the Government to control the governed; and in the
next place, oblige it to control itself.
It seems history requires an esprit de finesse to plot the variance of like from like.
Music:
A18)
B18)
18)
18a)
V18b)
Again, Duport, 1792, Minuet
B. Otis, c. 1816-20, Dolley Madison, N.Y. Historical Society, NYC
Goya, 1800, Whore Queen, from the Family of Charles IV, Prado, Madrid
(video, detail only)
Double: A18 and B18; + V close detail of A
B. West, 1802, Hope Family Group, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
W. Williams, 1766, Deborah Hall, Brooklyn Museum, NY
Suppose we go forward a few years and take in Dolley Madison, hostess wife of
the fourth President. We have known her since childhood and hesitated to accuse her by
name, though Blake would have had no trouble in recognizing "the system of moral virtue
called Rahab... Whore of Babylon" — in the White House.
And again a chance resemblance pairs her with Goya's ironically handled WhoreQueen. As if the difference between corrupt Europe and Federal American had been one
of awareness: the satanic complicity there fiercely faced, wreathed here in a simper of
good. And yet, as we are aware, a shift of a few degres in the average temperature makes
the difference between an ice age and a temperate clime.
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If we ask, is Duport's the music of a revolutionary America? — the answer it
returns is unmistakable: that the revolution Blake, and even Paine envisaged, did not
occur; that the Fathers never wanted it to occur; that the so-called American Revolution,
as everybody has long said, was in the deepest sense not a revolution at all.
As for the Washington minuets, we hear what they are and what they represent.
(close George and Martha Minuet)
19)
19a)
Watteau, c. 1717, Fêtes Vénitiennes, National Gallery of Scotland,
Edinburgh; video: details only
Watteau, 1718, Love in the French Theatre, Staatliche Museen, BerlinDahlem
Only by timidity are they distinguished from the whole 18th-century horizon of
courtly rococo and poignant style of sentiment, which from Couperin to Mozart (and in
painting from this Watteau to Goya) elaborated telling refinements.
On the coda of Mozart's Clarinet Quintet, where rococo and neoclassic stir with
far deeper content, let us thread mannered couples from 1717 to 1791 and from various
parts of Europe: France, Italy, Austria, Spain.
Music:
20)
21)
22)
Mozart, 1789, Clarinet Quintet, Coda of last movement., London
CM9379
Guardi, c. 1780-90(?), Conversation before the Stair of a Palace, Pinacoteca
dell' Accademia Carrara, Bergamo
Viennese Porcelain (Grassi), c. 1780(?), Portrait Painter, Museum für Kunsthandwerk, Frankfurt
Goya, 1791, Blind Man's Bluff, detail, Prado, Madrid
(close Mozart)
In that ferment of Europe, what depths underlie Goya's surface of elegant play.
a23)
23)
Fuseli, 1781, Nightmare, Institute of Arts, Detroit
Fuseli, 1790 version, Nightmare, Private Collection, Switzerland; first, video
detail
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Music:
Symbolic History
Mozart, 1789, Adagio in C Minor, K 546, (Busch) HMV (78)
DB 3391
The same Mozart who in the same years, on the eve of the French Revolution, when the
Duport minuet was being danced for Washington, wrote his Adagio and Fugue in C
Minor, a kind of suicide piece; the same Goya who, taking a cue from this 1790
Nightmare by Füssli, (the Fuseli of England) — as from the general cult of violence and
Gothic terror cresting under what Paine called "The Age of Reason" —
24)
Goya, 1799, The Sleep of Reason, Caprichios, etching, Prado, Madrid; first,
video details
would give the picture and motto for that incursion: "El sueño de la Razon produce
monstruos" — "The Sleep of Reason produces monsters." Goya's comment paraphrases
Paine: "Imagination deserted by reason creates impossible, useless thoughts. United with
reason, imagination is the mother of all art and the source of all its beauty." The language
of Enlightenment. But what the etching suggests is darker and more borne out by the age;
25)
Blake, 1795, Nebuchadnezzar, Tate Gallery, London; first, video detail
it is the insight of Blake, that rationality itself is a bondage, a dessication and sleep, which
stirs antithetical terrors, which becomes itself a terror, as the Storm and Stress gripping
Europe after 1770 is a counterpole of Enlightened progress — both Albion's Prince and
repressed Orc (like this imbruted Nebuchadnezzar) sprouting dragon scales (America).
(fade Mozart Adagio)
a26)
26)
Blake, 1794, "The Howling Terrors..." (Slavery), Europe: A Prophesy, plate 2
Goya, 1793(?), The Madhouse, Academy of San Fernando, Madrid; first,
video detail
Music:
Mozart, 1789, Fugue from Adagio and Fugue in C Minor,
HMV (78) 3391
When Mozart goes from the Adagio into the Fugue, the tempo and life increase,
but not the cheer. Since the celebrations of the great Baroque ended in Bach, the fugue
has shifted from deterministic glory to the terror of deterministic bondage. So with the
ratios of vaulted space from Rembrandt to this Goya Madhouse; so with the formulation
of the phenomenal from Descartes to Kant.
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27)
Symbolic History
Blake, 1794 ff., The Ancient of Days, Frontispiece to Europe, Keynes
Collection; + V detail
With Blake, Creation itself has become a fall into the compassed limits of the
equational.
28)
Goya, 1815-24, Disperates (Proverbs) 4, Big Booby, Prado, etc.; first, video
detail
Finally, when the old Goya lets the Big Booby dance, who will take up the jollity?
(fade Mozart Fugue)
29)
29a)
Tischbein, c. 1787, Goethe on the Campagna (c. 1787), State Museum,
Frankfurt
Same, Tischbein's Goethe, detail, head and shoulders
How did that European revolution, which should have exhibited the calm
command of this Goethe on the Campagna, come, like Goethe's own Faust, to be so
violently cloven?
Faust in the fable is a Renaissance man, issuing from the crypt of the Middle
Ages. But he is also a romantic revolutionary; and in that phase, against what closure
does he rebel? The anomalous convergence of 1500 and 1800 poses a vast question:
how the conscious assertion of liberty, mastery, and right has fared in the Christian West.
30)
School of Reichenauer, c. 1000, St. Matthew, Hillinus' Evangelair, Cathedral
Library, Cologne, ; with video details
Music:
11th cent.(?), Veni Sancte Spiritus, History of Italian Music RCA
Ital. LM 40000, Rec 1
Consider its opposite eight centuries before, the Dark Age ground of 1000: Earth
a symbolic battlefield for angelic and demonic powers, Man reduced to a spaceless
energy, crouched before expected Judgment in somber resignation of the phenomenal
realm with all those dignities later so grandly claimed — their very promise a temptation
to satanic pride: "To practice more than heavenly power permits."
(fade Veni Sancte Spiritus)
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In diametrical stand against that self-surrender,
31)
31a)
31b)
V31c)
31d)
Dürer, 1498, Self Portrait, Prado, Madrid; + V detail (use V31)
Dürer, 1506, Christ Among the Doctors, Thyssen Collection, Lugano
Dürer, c. 1500, The Lamentation, detail, Alte Pinakothek, München
Dürer, 1490-94, Young Couple, detail, Kunsthalle, Hamburg
Dürer, c. 1495(?), View of Nuremberg from the West, formerly Kunsthalle,
Bremen, missing since 1945; wider variant, V31d
Dürer, 1508, Praying Hands, sketch, Albertina, Vienna
V31e)
by 1500, the Renaissance — here Dürer — had given programmatic expression to the
new man, operating in a universe of ordered space, time, and cause, to which his
reasoning humanity is affined. We sense in all the arts Pico's discovered Dignity:
...0 great and wonderful happiness of man! It is given to him to be that
which he wills...if he cultivates vegetable seed, he will become a plant;
if the seeds of sensation, he will grow into a brute. If rational, he will
come out a heavenly animal. If intellectual, he will be an angel and a
son of God. If he... takes himself up into the center of his own unity,
then, made one spirit with God... he will stand ahead of all things.
Who does not wonder at the chameleon which we are...?
The poignance of this insular vision is its dawn hopefulness, as if it could not
foresee the length and stormy turbulence of the ensuing day, as if it assumed that the
Christian Middle Ages could be magically transformed into free humanistic
enlightenment, with a new art, a new philosophy, new values of life, science, democratic
free cities, an individually reformed religion…
32)
32a)
Leonardo, c. 1513, Drawing: Girl Pointing, Windsor; first, video detail
Leonardo, 1504-06, Leda and the Swan, Chatsworth Collection, Devonshire
Music:
Rossinus Mantuanus, c. 1495, Un Sonar (Lirum Bililirum), Decca
DL-79435
As in Leonardo's "Girl by a Stream," it is a smiling invitation to a promised land,
a land already present in the richness of the art. And in music, too, as suddenly present: a
1500 Frottole imitating winds and waters in a harmony of nature and love.
(fade
frottole)
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That Theleme beckons above,
33)
Bosch, 1500-04, Visions of the Hereafter: Hell, detail, Palazzo Ducale,
Venice; + V closer detail
while beneath lay the almost unaltered hell-message of the Middle Ages — Bosch
painting in the same years — the very techniques of Renaissance substantiating the
nightmare of damnation. Luther: "Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense and
understanding... and wish to know nothing but the word of God."
a34)
34)
P. Breughel, 1562, The Triumph of Death, detail (top right), Prado, Madrid
Same, whole; video: details only
Music:
Sweelinck, c. 1600, from Echo Fantasy, (Weinrich) Musicraft Alb. 9
(3)
The pity lay in this, that the floating humanist hope had to work itself out against
those demonic possessions — as in Breughel's documentary Triumph of Death. It could
not be actualized without the cleavage and cross-breeding struggle of new on old, the
Lutheran and Calvinist broils, Inquisition, Thirty Years War, the destruction of the most
progressive parts of Europe, with a harvest reaching across the Rhine to the madnesses of
our own age.
a35)
35)
Rubens, c. 1618, Battle of the Amazons, whole, Alte Pinakothek, München
(CGB '59); + V detail (Vb35, CGB '59)
Same, Battle of the Amazons, closer detail (CGB '59); + V detail from a35,
right
In Rubens, in Sweelinck's Echo Fantasies, the enormous energies of the Baroque
form in a tumult that also sweeps the English stage, from Lear's: "we cry that we are come
to this great stage of fools"; through Webster's: "In what a shadow or deep pit of darkness/ Doth womanish and fearful mankind live"; to Beaumont and Fletcher's Maid: "And
the trees about me,/ Let them be bare and leafless; let the rocks/ Groan with continual
surges; and behind me,/ Make all a desolation."
(end
Sweelinck)
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36)
36a)
Symbolic History
Rembrandt, 1630-31, Old Man Reading, drawing, Weimar Museum; first,
video detail
English, Anonymous, c. 1670, John Clark, Fortune, July 1942; + V detail
Music:
S. Scheidt, 1624, from organ Credo, AS 10 (next to last pedal
entrance)
When the great volitional grandeur speaks again, as in Rembrandt or the composer
Scheidt, it is with the Miltonic organ tones formed at the heart of a century of religious
wars: "Who knows not that truth is strong next to the Almighty?" In those organ tones,
what Thoreau would call the last important news from Europe, had been divulged —
which was essentially why the Revolution could be so slight in American in 1776. Its
homogeneous religious vanguard had been transplanted a century and a half before, from
the old world to the new — as if Cromwell, Milton, Rembrandt, Schütz, and Huyghens
had come with the Pilgrims, forgotten their intenser callings and become breeding stock.
(end Scheidt)
37)
37a)
Thomas Smith, c. 1690, Self-Portrait, Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts;
+ V detail
American, Anonymous, 1640's, John Winthrop
New England branched off from that stem, and it preserved, in stiff colonial form,
the dark religious claim, through a century of preachers debating out of the Bible rights
and sovereignty: tolerant Thomas Hooker:
The foundation of authority is laid, firstly, in the free consent of the
people... And whereas it hath been charged that through their
ignorance and unskilfulnesse, they are not able to wield such
privileges... the Lord hath promised to take away the veil from all
faces...
Against Winthrop, "Stewart of Theocracy":
We see not that any should have authority to set up any other exercise
beside what authority hath already set up.
Va38)
38)
June 1996
Bernini, 1669-70, detail of 38, Constantine,
Bernini, 1654-70, Conversion of Constantine, St. Peter's, Rome
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Symbolic History
Meanwhile, in Europe, as the humanist and rational forces of the Renaissance
slowly assert themselves, they do so in the great formal frames of Church and State:
Bernini in Italy, the Conversion of Constantine;
39)
Le Brun, 1663-75, Louis XIV at Dunquerque, tapestry, detail, Versailles,
CGB '59; + V closer detail
in France Le Brun: the thrust of Renaissance usurped and appro- priated by such
pompous formulations as the Monarch of the Sun — mounted on the same Bernini horse
— campaigning against the Protestant Lowlands. It is the deflection of humanist energy
through Baroque religiosity and the dangerously overblown heroics of courtly grandeur
that saddles the 18th century with a deeply cloven loyalty and aim. Hear the royal march
of Louis XIV:
Music:
40)
Lully, 1686, from Marche Royale, Turnabout TV 34232
French, c. 1680, Louis XIV as Roman Emperor, MS Fr. 7892, Biblioteque
Nationale, Paris; first, video detail
(fade Lully)
The heroic style is here so close to mock heroic that one might question what the
art means. The overstretched assertion that all is for the best in this best of all possible
kingdoms, pumped up through the Wars of the Spanish Succession and the virtual
bankruptcy of France, would break with the King's death to the Regency —
41)
41a)
V41b)
Watteau, 1716, L'Indifferent detail, Louvre, Paris
Watteau 1718(?), The Music Party, detail, The Wallace Collection, London
Again, The Music Party, whole
the delicious mockery and Rococo sentiment of Watteau. While music, with Couperin's
miniatures, breaks at the same time:
Music:
Couperin le Grand, Folies Françaises, opening, HMV D 8 4945 (78)
(fade)
Which brings us back to the century and style of the George Washington minuet.
Between the great assertive thrusts of Baroque and Revolutionary, the 18th century hangs,
in all its richness, a catenary of question and regrouping.
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42)
42a)
42b)
Symbolic History
Houdon, c. 1770(?), Voltaire, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.
Again, Tischbein c. 1787, Goethe on the Campagna, detail, State Museum,
Frankfurt (see #29)
Houdon, c. 1778, Bust of Rousseau, Mus., Orleans; then a video return to 42,
Bust of Voltaire
Like the Hegelian word aufheben, the 18th century plays a triple role: it
terminates in mockery the heroic vaunts of the great Baroque; it continues that basic
assurance under the ironically smiling mask of Voltaire; it raises up (Goethe on the
Campagna) in transcending form the human and utopian claim, shifting it from its old
center in reason toward a new center in the passion of creative will. As Werther says:
"Was ich weiss, kann jeder wissen — mein Herz habe ich allein." "What I know each can
know; only the heart is mine." How the Revolution will relate to this transition will vary
from place to place with the slightest shiftings in the social complex.
43)
Gainsborough, c. 1755(?), Talk in a Park, Louvre, Paris; + V detail
It is a subtle but telling shift from the novels of Marivaux to those of Richardson,
Fielding and Sterne; so too from the courtly airs Watteau disarmingly parodies, to the
mid-century English elegance Gainsborough and the rest partly mock and partly celebrate
on the parks and estates of England.
a44)
44)
American Colonial, 1730 ff., Westover (built by Wm. Byrd), lower James
River, Virginia
Jefferson, 1769-84, remodelled 1796-1809, Monticello, near Charlottesville,
VA (CGB '62)
An even smaller, but still significant migration takes us from the English house to those
Georgian imitations along the shores of the Chesapeake and James, or (most original and
natural) to Palladian Monticello.
Immediately two levels of revolution become possible:
45)
Ralph Earl, c. 1790(?), Daniel Boardman, National Gallery, Washington,
D.C.; + V detail
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Symbolic History
a kind of minimal level, which could only occur where the blend of middle class and
landed gentry was sufficiently benign and law-abiding to offer its own rather wigged and
robed convention of freehold elegance and Lockean law as the human base a
constitutional republic required. Against this milder possibility, a more deeply cutting
maximal likelihood was hardly to be avoided
Va46)
Fragonard, 1766, The Swing, detail of the woman, Wallace Collection,
London
Same, The Swing, whole
Same, The Swing, central detail
46)
46a)
where, as in absentee France, an eroded aristocracy seemed the parasitic artifice to be
uprooted before the natural man could expatiate in Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood.
Beside the liberal mean of the Colonies, this Europe was a complex of tensile
stirrings, convergent opposites: here the surfeit of rococo play, marriage á la mode, this
Fragonard husband[?] pulling a swing while the wife kicks a slipper to the underpeering
lover. Thus Jefferson (1785) opposed the education of American youth in Europe: "He
acquires a fondness for European luxury and dissipation
47)
Copley, 1771, Mrs. Humphrey Devereux, National Gallery, New Zealand
"and a contempt for the simplicity of his own country" — though forthright Englishmen,
Fielding and the rest, had written similarly about the dangers of going from England to
France. Surely there was a fine directness to the Copley Boston portraits of before the
Revolution;
48)
Chardin, 1771, Self-portrait in a nightcap, Louvre, Paris; + V detail
but plain humanity breathing republican spirit was cropping out everywhere, as here with
Chardin in France — like the enlightened couple in Joseph Andrews, Joseph's parents it
turns out — part of the natural and human Eden to be progressively reclaimed ("il faut
cultiver notre jardin").
Va49)
49)
June 1996
J.S. Copley, 1771, Ezekiel Goldthwait, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston;
video: detail only
Piranesi c. 1743-45, sketch for one of the Carceri, Kunsthalle, Hamburg
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V49a)
49b)
June 1996
Symbolic History
Piranesi, 1743-45, Carcere X, 1st State, detail of Captives, National Gallery,
Washington, D.C.
Piranesi, 1743-61, Carceri XV, 2nd State
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What distinguished America was the consistency of the simple, its lack of
antinomies. While under courtly Europe and under the Enlightenment, from early in the
century, as in Swift's Yahoos and Piranesi's prison scenes, there had yawned a splenetic
dark cellar (saeva indignatio). Was it the madhouse of avoidable corruption and cruelty,
or the doomed reversal of Renaissance reason and hope, the heroic fretted vault become
the dungeon of man irremediably flawed?
50)
Tischbein, c. 1786, Goethe at a Roman window, Goethe Museum, Frankfurt;
with video details
Music:
Mozart, 1787, "Deh, vieni alla finestra" from Don Giovanni, Angel
3605 DL
In that Europe, one morning of 1786, in the pre-romantic dawn of free humanity,
Goethe, child of courtliness and defiance, of Enlightenment and Gothic terror, leaned out
of a Roman window on his Italian Journey, and was sketched by Tischbein. It is like an
aria from Mozart's Don Giovanni. "Deh, vieni alla finestra"; Goethe might almost have
been singing it to a passing flower girl — or the girl who became his mistress, and he
wrote the poem of waking in the morning, his arm around her, his fingers strumming the
long hexameters on her back.
(fade Aria)
51)
V51a)
Goethe, 1787-88, Eruption of Vesuvius, sketch, Goethe Museum, Weimar;
first, video detail
J. Wright, c. 1775, sketch of the annual Fireworks, at the Castle of San
Angelo, Rome; Art Gallery, Birmingham, England (CGB '74)
Music:
Mozart, 1787, Don Giovanni, Stone-guest passage, Angel 3605 DL
But in the opera, seduction yields to the chromatics of Damnation. And Goethe,
in classical Rome, was writing of the rejuvenation of Faust in a Gothic Witches' Kitchen.
He practiced sketching also on that trip: here a guache of Vesuvius in eruption. Faust's
ambivalent cry was for Goethe himself, as for Revolutionary Europe: "Two souls, alas,
dwell in my breast" — "Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust."
(fade Stone-guest)
2nd 50)
V2nd 50a)
June 1996
Again, Goethe at a Roman window, detail of 50
Dürer, 1524, Portrait of a Gentleman, Prado, Madrid
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V2nd 50b)
Symbolic History
Rigaud, 1730, Louis XV of France at age 20, Versailles; video: detail
only
Goethe, in fact, at that Classical window and with his Gothic soul, was perhaps
the only man in the world who saw clearly and creatively what we now realize about the
divided relation of Revolution to the larger motion of the West: that there was a daytime,
conscious phase in which both he and Faust had to take up the fresh and liberating
humanism of the Renaissance — the 1500-promise of reason glimpsed only to be lost in
religious wars and hardening Method, courtly artifice and kingly foppery — had to act as
if those three hundred years had never intervened.
Va2nd 51)
M. Falbe, c. 1760, Portrait of J.M. Lüttichau, Gal., Dresden;
+ V return to 49b, Piranesi, Carcere XV, detail
For 2nd 51) J. Wright, 1774, Eruption of Vesuvius, Art Gallery, Derby
But of course they had — unalterably. It was not only the old dark and superstition to be
put aside by Jeffersonian light, but the false pomp of state, the wit and wigs of misguided
enlightenment, the web of analytic and mocking reason, the noble vault turned prison.
Here revolution explodes against all limitation and sane order, within and without; it
erupts
52)
52a)
52b)
Delacroix, 1828, Mephistopheles, Private Collection, Geneva; video, center
spread only (from V52)
Goethe (by J.G. Schadow), 1816, Life Mask, at age 67
Blake, 1793, Frontispiece, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Library of Congress
in Storm and Stress, titan rebellion, romantic hunger, and the Gothic novel, Delacroix's
dream-haunted revival of the Middle Ages of faith and mystery, which the other daylight
Faust would have planned to dispel. That Goethe could hold and use all that was the
greatness of which Napoleon remarked: "Voilá un homme." Thus the Wald und Höhle
(Wood and Cave) scene of Faust, with its cleavage (already anticipated in Werther's love
and suicide) between calm possession of nature and mind and a destructive satanism
raging like a cataract into the abyss.
That Europe, striving within and without against hereditary bondage, was already
driven "Beyond Good and Evil," into Satanic compact, or as Blake put it, The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell.
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53)
53a)
53b)
53c)
Symbolic History
Goya, c. 1815, The Giant, etching, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; video:
detail only
Blake, 1794 (1815/18 copy), Urizen, pl. 5, Rosenwald Collection, Library of
Congress; here the video returns to 53: Goya's Giant, whole
Fuseli, c. 1785(?), Prometheus, drawing, Kunstmuseum, Basel
Again, Goya's Giant, closer detail
Goya, about 1815, made Prometheus the symbol. Had not Goethe more than forty years
before written the poem that gave "Promethean" its new and ultimately Nietzschean
meaning? Jefferson would say: "I have sworn, upon the altar of God, eternal hostility
against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." But what of the tyranny of that
altar? Paine, the only American to assault it publicly, was reviled and ostracised. But
Goethe had long before spoken the words of Prometheus: "Bedecke deinen Himmel,
Zeus,/ Mit Wolkendunst..."
Darken your heaven, Zeus,
With dusk of clouds
And like a boy who lops off
Thistles, spend yourself
On oaks and mountain crags;
But this my earth
Look you let stand,
My house too that you did not build,
And this my hearth
Whose glowing fire
Incites your jealousy.
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I know nothing under the sun
More wretched than you are, gods.
On tithes of sacrifice
And breath of prayers
You feed penurious
Shreds of majesty,
And you would starve
If children and beggars
Were not hopeful fools.
When I was a child
I could not tell truth from lie;
I turned bewildered eyes
To the sun, as if an ear were there
Inclined to my complaining,
A heart like mine,
To pity and relieve.
54)
54a)
Goya, c. 1811, The Colossus (Mars), Prado, Madrid
Fuseli, 1802, Satan Calls Beelzebub from the Flames, Kunsthaus, Zurich
Who shielded me
Against the pride of titans,
Rescued me from death
And slavery?
You, sacred glowing heart,
Have we not worked these things?
And then deceived,
In youth and goodness
Poured out thanks and praise
To the sleeping fraud of heaven?
I honor you? Wherefore?
Have you once eased
the torments of the afflicted,
Once appeased
The tears of the disquieted?
Was I not wrought to manhood
By time the almighty
And fate eternal,
Your masters, as they are mine?
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55)
Symbolic History
Goya (or Eugenio Lucas), c. 1811, A City on a Rock, Metropolitan Museum of
Art, NYC, (CGB '74); with video details, the last: foreground (cf. unused
CGB '74, V55a)
Did you assume perhaps
I would disdain life
And fly to the wilderness
Because not all
My flowering dreams ripened?
No! Here I sit and fashion mortals
After my image,
A race of men to be as I am,
To suffer and to weep,
To relish, to enjoy,
And to despise as I do
You and yours. (CGB)
(Ein Geschlecht, das mir gleich sei,
Zu leiden, zu weinen,
Zu geniessen und zu freuen sich,
Und dein nicht zu achten;
Wie ich!)
The musical climax parallelling these haunting Goya symbols of about 1811 (this
"City on a Rock," its winged defenders hovering over the fire-assault of dark swarms) is
no doubt in Beethoven; but it was the Mozart of the courtly style and of the style of
frenzy
2nd 54) Again, Goya, The Colossus, upper detail
who also in the Jupiter Symphony (1788-89) had forged the affirming spearhead of
revolution.
Music:
2nd 55)
56)
56a)
V56b)
56c)
June 1996
Mozart, Jupiter Symphony, close of finale, Col D 3 L 291
Again, Goya, City on a Rock, right side (after CGB '74)
Baron A.J. Gros, 1796, Napoleon at Arcola, detail, Louvre, Paris
Gros, 1807, Napoleon at d'Eylan, Paris Louvre; video: upper detail only)
Same, Napoleon at Eylan, central detail
Cogniet, 1836, Volunteer National Guard leaving Paris, 1792; Versailles
(end Jupiter)
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We have cheated on Mozart by accompanying the last bars of the Jupiter with
Gros's rather windy Napoleon, but was it to be avoided where history cheated on the spirit
of Revolution, setting Rousseau's "General Will" at war with itself? As Shelley put it
later in Prometheus Unbound:
Names there are, Nature's sacred watchwords...
The nations thronged around and cried aloud,
…Truth liberty and love!
Suddenly fierce confusion fell...
Tyrants rushed in and did divide the spoil."
Wordsworth was in France, and described the first ecstasy:
...triumphant looks
Were then the common language of all eyes:
As if awak'd from sleep, the Nations hail'd
Their great expectancy: the fife of War
Was then a spirit-stirring sound indeed,
A Blackbird's whistle in a vernal grove.
a57)
57)
Klauer, c. 1790(?), Bust of Goethe, Goethehaus
Dannecker, 1794-1805, large Schiller bust, Schiller House, Weimar
Goethe was on the border and told in Hermann und Dorothea how the soldiers
came like liberators: "they planted the glad tree of freedom, promising that each should
be his own ruler."
Coleridge summed it up in his poem to Wordsworth — the fiery spirit Dannecker
aimed at in his busts of Schiller:
Amid the tremor of a realm aglow,
Amid a mighty nation jubilant,
When from the general heart of human kind
Hope sprang forth like a full born Deity!
Va58)
58)
Dannecker 1794, colossal plaster bust of Schiller, Weimar
Goya, 1799, Self from the Caprichos, Etching, Prado, Madrid; video: detail
only
Coleridge added: "Of that dear Hope afflicted and struck down..." And
Wordsworth: "It was a lamentable time for man." Goya, who would witness the guerilla
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Symbolic History
terrors of the Peninsular War, already lours from the page of his Capriccios, as if to
answer with a fierce Bronx cheer the rapt Schiller zeal which would miscarry so disasterously over Europe: "A plague on both your houses."
a59)
Vb59)
59)
Goya, esp. 1810-20 (pub. 1863), Disasters of War # 37, etching
Goya, 1814, Riot of May 2nd, 1808 at the Peurta del Sol, Prado, Madrid
Goya, 1814, The Execution of May 3rd, 1808, Prado, Madrid; + V detail
A generation lived through the shock of revolutionary reversal, driven back to the
dark wisdom of Milton: "Licence they mean when they cry liberty;/ For who loves that
must first be wise and good." So Coleridge: "The Sensual and Dark rebel in vain,/
Slaves by their own compulsion." And Goethe, after telling how the early rapture soured
into the atrocities of the Rhine invasion, returned to the same ground: "May I never again
in such contemtuous madness/ Look upon man! Better the beast in his rage/. Never let
him speak of freedom, as if he could rule his own passions." But Goya shaped the most
searing indictment of all, to show man once and forever the beast he is.
So the radiant opening of Beethoven's Third turns in the Fifth to the grim
hammering of fate.
60)
60a)
Ingres, 1810, the architect Desdeban, Musée des Arts Decoratifs, Besançon
Ingres, 1806, Mademoiselle Rivière, Louvre, Paris
(Against the Goya, an Ingres of 1810 liberation.)
Music:
a61
61)
Beethoven, 1804 (pub. 1806), Third Symphony, opening, Deutsche
Grammophon LPM 18 802
(fade)
Again, Goya, The Execution, detail of the victims
Same, larger central detail (which video follows with a still closer detail of
a61)
Music:
Beethoven, 1805 (pub. 1809), Fifth Symphony, lst Movement,
opening, Deutsche Grammophon LPM 18 804
(fade)
— though Beethoven brought the Fifth to transcendental victory.
Against that cloven Europe, torn by a violence as fierce as its vision is radically
soaring —
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62)
Symbolic History
Copley, 1771, Mrs. Goldthwaite (with fruit), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
how plain our American aspirations seemed, how wholesomely pursued and fruitfully
realized. Boston had produced a Revolutionary composer too, Billings, working in the
time of Copley and Charles Wilson Peale. Blamed by connoisseurs for using no
dissonance in his Fuging tunes, he wrote a short cacaphony, "Jargon," only two lines long,
ending:
2nd 61)
Music:
Goya, Execution, detail of the next to be Executed, Prado
Billings, esp. 1786-94, last bars of "Jargon," Col. MS 7277
Is it a joke, or an Ives' potentiality?
2nd 62) Copley, Mrs. Goldthwaite, upper half
2nd 62a) Copley, Mrs. Goldthwaite, detail of hand and fruit
What represents Billings is rather "Be Glad then America" — a gladness of the consonant
earth.
Music:
63)
Billings, esp. 1786-94, from "Be Glad then America," Col. MS 7277
(through the "Satisfied" phrase)
Ch. Wilson Peale, 1773-1809, the Peale Family, NY Historical Society;
+ V detail
(Same Billings: "Be Glad" phrase, then fade)
The closest America came to radical unrest was in Shay's Rebellion, a populist
uprising in Western Massachusetts in 1786.
64)
64a)
John Trumbull, 1786-94, The Declaration of Independence, Yale University
Same, Trumbull, The Declaration of Independence, central detail; then the
video returns to the right half of the whole, from 64
It sprang from post-Revolutionary manipulation of money and land, and was often
referred to in arguments for a stronger government and Constitution. What we hear of it
comes mostly from the outraged "men of property and station". Thus General Knox to
George Washington:
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...Their creed is, that the property of the United States has been
protected from the confiscation of Britain by the joint exertions of all,
and therefore ought to be the common property of all... we find we are
men — actual men — possessing all the turbulent passions belonging
to that animal, and that we must have a government proper and
adequate for him...
65)
65a)
Houdon, 1785, Thomas Jefferson, NY Historical Society; + V detail
Mather Brown, 1786, English portrait of Thomas Jefferson, American
Historical Art Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma; first, video detail
Jefferson wrote back from Paris, 1787, about the same "late rebellion in
Massachusetts":
...I hold that a little rebellion, now and then is a good thing and as
necessary in the political world as storms in the physical... It is a
medicine necessary for the sound health of government...
To have said that, and been named just after Secretary of State and later elected President,
speaks not only to the temper of Jefferson but to the breadth of that America. But it does
not clarify the naiveté of the optimism — to betray no sign of the European cleavage; to
make Revolution and practical Enlightenment one motion of the mind.
Yet if any American could have participated in the deeper moral shakeup of the
wider Revolution, it should have been Jeffer-son. He saw the beginning of the Terror in
France, and wrote after his return (1793): "My own affections have been deeply wounded
by some of the martyrs to this cause" (Condorcet would die the year after), "but rather
than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated."
a66)
Vb66)
66)
Jefferson, finished 1824, The University of Virginia, Rotunda, side view
(CGB '83)
Same, Lawn and Rotunda (CGB '86); video picks up Rotunda only
Same, Lawn, Rotunda, and West Range
Evil and disaster struck in his own family: not only that his cousin Lewis of the Lewis
and Clark expedition killed himself under the accusation of corruption in the Louisiana
Territory, but that his Kentucky nephews butchered a slave for a trivial offence before
their household and servants. Yet it remained for the poet Warren in our time to ask how
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Jefferson's dream was consonant with such satanic ties. Jefferson saw Hamilton's bank
corrupting the rural simplicity he depended on to save us "from eating one another as they
do in Europe." His sufficient answer was education, the University, his last and noblest
architectural vision, completed in 1824.
a67)
b67)
67)
J.S. Deville, c. 1807, Life Mask of William Blake, Fitzwilliam Museum,
Cambridge, England
Goya 1815, Self-Portrait, Prado, Madrid
Beethoven Death Mask, 1827 (the video then circles through 65, Jefferson,
52a, Goethe, back to this 67, Beethoven); + V detail
By that time in Europe, Goya, Beethoven and Blake were all closing their lives.
They had experienced idealism, revolution, terror, and repudiation; the creative hope had
been driven far down and under to reshape inner revolt out of desperate negation. In
those depths of confrontation one could hardly tell the cry of "Yes" from the cry of "No".
One would only know afterwards that the spiritual crisis of later civilization, even down
to our own day, had been unbelievably stared in the face.
If the mortal imprint could not itself reveal the trial and transcendence of spirit,
there would hardly be an art of portrait representation. Let the death mask of Beethoven
(against the unflawed smile of Jefferson) hint what price, through revolutionary hope and
agony, Europe had to pay for those geniuses of violence and inward turning:
octogenerian Goya and Goethe, Blake past 70, this titan of music dead at 56 —
Music:
Beethoven, c. 1824-26, Große Fuge, first bars (Busch) Col. M-X221 (78's)
(fade opening)
still shaking the fist of the last Great Fugue at a thundering sky.
Such the theme, and now the fugal entrance,
68)
Blake, c. 1805-10, The Great Red Dragon and the Woman, National Gallery,
Washington, D.C.
with two Blakes, two Goyas.
Music:
June 1996
Beethoven, Große Fuge, fugal passage, Col. MX-221
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69)
a70)
70)
71)
Symbolic History
Blake c. 1820, The Ghost of a Flea, Tate, London
Goya, 1820, The Fates, Prado, Madrid
Again, Goya, The Fates, detail; + V closer detail (V70a)
Goya, 1820-23, Saturn Devouring his Children, upper half, Prado, Madrid
This last Goya, of Saturn devouring his children, though it decorated the artist's
own dining room, is not a painted myth but an image of the universe,
72)
72a)
Same, Goya, Saturn, whole; + V close detail
Another Houdon Jefferson, 1789, differently lighted, Fine Arts Museum,
Boston; + V detail
flung in creative defiance in the face of God. Jefferson was in a position to have looked
at it and said "I see what you mean." But would he have looked? "I will not believe," he
wrote to Adams, Sept. 12, 1821, "that our labors are lost."
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As Sam Johnson said, "Nature sets her gifts on the right hand and on the left... no
man can at the same time fill his cup from the source and from the mouth of the Nile."
(Rasselas XXIX) The liberal hope and future of Spain was plowed into the peninsular
campaign and the making of Goya. "Useless and preposterous," Jefferson would have
said, "to buy art at such a cost."
Was not his the immunity for which Goethe would congratulate the New World
(1827): "Amerika du hast es besser..." "You have it better than our exhausted
Continent... no Medieval castles, no Gothic horror-trappings." As if regretting that Faust
could not have been, like Jefferson, of one soul.
a73)
73)
73a)
73b)
Thomas Cole, 1825, Landscape with Dead Trees, Allen Memorial Art
Museum, Oberlin, OH
Cole, 1833, The Titan's Goblet, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC
Same, Cole's Titan's Goblet, upper detail; + V lower detail (from 73)
A.P. Ryder, 1875-91, Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens, National Gallery,
Washington, D.C.
Music:
Gottschalk, 1846, Ossian Ballade, No. 2 (Piano), MHS 3135
But already Rip van Winkle, waked from his long sleep to Federal politics and the
"Almighty Dollar," felt a nostalgia for the dreamy past. As outward confidence waned,
our art too would shape inner realms (even New Orleans Gottschalk to compose Ossian
Ballades): so Cole's 1833 Titan Goblet, with cities above on the Platonic brim, and
darker ones on the rock bays below. Who knows what it can mean, but the longing
beyond what is — such a haunted mood as in Hawthorne's story of "Doctor Heidegger's
Experiment" with its other goblets and vase brimming with water from the fountain of
youth, which rejuvenates the faded widow and her three ancient rivals: "her warm breath
fanning each of their faces by turns... yet... the tall mirror is said to have reflected the
figures of the three old, gray, withered grandsires, ridiculously contending for the skinny
ugliness of a shrivelled grandam." For all Goethe's advice, we had still to face our
demons within and without.
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Va74)
Symbolic History
Ryder, 1890-1908, Macbeth and the Witches, Phillips Collectionn,
Washington, D.C.
Ryder, c. 1887, The Flying Dutchman, Smithsonian, Wash., D.C.
Ryder, 1890, Jonah detail, Smithsonian, Washington, D.C.
74)
74a)
Maybe Charles Brockdon Brown had given a hint just before 1800 in the Wieland.
That fanatical father's death in the agony of putrefaction after the flaming visit of his god
is not just Gothic fashion; it means something, and what it means is hardly Enlightenment. Not even Poe is an isolated caprice. Melville was preordained to set himself where
Goya had stood. And Ryder's "Flying Dutchman," another of those "hideous and
intolerable allegories," might have been informed by Moby Dick.
"This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me
a billion years before this ocean rolled.
75)
75a)
75b)
Raphael, 1510-11, School of Athens, Vatican
Same, School of Athens, Groups to Aristotle's left
Thomas Nast, 1871, Let Us Prey
Our great triumph, the political structure, framed by the counterpoise of checks
and balances, for a citizenry of worth and with the fortune of an expanding frontier, was a
vault of minimal law, irrespective of economics, health, the media, Platonic wholeness, or
Utopian plan — some 1500 noble School of Athens, where all sorts and conditions of
men could live in abstract legal equality, poor and rich, slave, even, and free, unspecified.
Though Rousseau had warned (and Paine and Jefferson echoed him) that in states of
economic disparity, "legal right... only serves to keep the poor in misery, and support the
rich in their usurpations."
a76)
76)
76a)
Currier and Ives 1860, The Catskill Mountains, Roy. King Col., NY
American Federal, etc., Chestnut St., Salem, Massachusetts
Francis Costigan, 1840-44, James F.D. Lanier House, Madison, Indiana
(CGB '82); the video then adds V76b, same, nearer, from the side (CGB '82)
All actual states are polyvalent suspensions in whose dynamic wished absolutes
are embodied and consumed. From the radiance of an America spreading over a
continent and through four centuries, what blessings shall we affirm, what threatened
values crown? The constitutional documents, with the court cases that almost made them
June 1996
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Symbolic History
real, have no art sign more compelling than the shaded lawns of an American avenue,
where brick and clapboard dwellings claim the equality of the commonwealth. Yet from
the merchant port of Salem (Hawthorne under the eaves, searching darker symbols),
through Philadelphia (along the Delaware), Annapolis, Georgetown, Charleston, to
Natchez, and north with the first frontier to Madison — "if ever the tree of time bore
richer fruit" — comes the backlash of our opulence:
To float a dream
Of lawns and houses down the Main Line,
We slag earth's ocean to a dying pool… (CGB)
a77)
77)
Antebellum, Natchez, unfinished 1861, Longwood, (CGB '62)
R.B. Hughes, 1834, John Trumbull, bust, Yale U.; + V detail
Like the rest of the world, we were bound to come to grips with the specter of our
fate. Though our fate is not yet clear. Hear the worst evidence:
After 1830, American busts, even of artists (this the painter Trumbull), too often
have that Roman look of self-righteous corruption which Lyndon Johnson exemplified in
our time.
D. H. Lawrence, in 1924, purported to find the "real American" hidden in the
books of Cooper, Hawthorne and the rest. He says of Deerslayer:
All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is
a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic,
and a killer. It has never yet melted... And when this man breaks from
his static isolation, makes a new move, then look out, something will
be happening...
78)
0. Mueller, 1919, Self, Neue Staatsgalerie, München; first, video detail
And of Moby Dick:
Melville knew. He knew his race was doomed. His white soul,
doomed. His great white epoch, doomed. Himself, doomed. The
idealist, doomed. The spirit, doomed... "Not so much bound to any
haven ahead, as rushing from all havens astern."
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I have searched American portraits and found none to fit the suicidal killer
described by Lawrence — only a German, Otto Müller, from the pre-Nazi bitterness after
the First World War. Maybe Lawrence as so often was projecting the European pain of
the years in which he wrote.
79)
79a)
79b)
Edward Hicks, c. 1848, The Peaceable Kingdom, Museum of Art,
Philadelphia
Hicks, c. 1845, Separate version of Penn's Treaty with the Indians (background detail in the above), Museum, Philadelphia
Chinese-American, after 1799, George Washington Ascending, Painting on
glass, Winterthur Museen; + V detail
While the United States, pursuing its manifest destiny in the Indian West, went on
toying with Hick's Peacable Kingdom...
Music:
Yankee Doodle again
Did the simplicity of American art reflect some naive flaw of the democratic
mind? — To escape the antinomies of the organic field (as the fire-release of freedom
against the leaf-bonding of the long-term good); even now, with movie hacks, to
amputate a patient (nation, world) disposed, at the least dumb incision, to fibrillate.
If that is the instinct of the herd, hostile to the keenness of the Riace bronzes —
De Toqueville: "in democratic republics... the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved"
— then D.H. Lawrence could claim the crystal ball; even Rousseau might have his say:
"On peut acquerir la liberté, mais on ne la recouvre jamais." — "Liberty may be acquired, but recovered, never."
(end Yankee Doodle)
a80)
80)
80a)
80b)
E.S. Field, c. 1860, Garden of Eden, Webb Gallery of American Art,
Shelburne Museum, Vermont
W.S. Mount, c. 1855, Banjo Player in Barn, Institute of Arts, Detroit; first,
video detail
Charlie Chaplin, 1936, from "Modern Times": Chaplin oiling the machine
Chaplin, 1936, "Modern Times," closing shot: Chaplin and Paulette Goddard 1
Two hundred years of incarnate vision, earth quickened toward entropic ruin, this
is the America that wrings our hearts.
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
Music:
Symbolic History
Stacey Samuels and Charlotte Bell, banjo etc., playing Jesse
James (taped by CGB)
But the pied piping, as of barefoot volunteers at Valley Forge, homespun cue for
Beethoven's Hymn to Joy, Yankee Doodle yields to the outlaw, Jesse James, by the youth
bums of Bowery and the Street, plucking like Mount's solitary Black smiler in a barn.
Has another humanity been at work under the march of America? And even at this ninth
hour can the humor of Franklin, Melville and Twain, the wry humor of Chaplin, come to
our aid?
As Galway Kinnell closes the Book of Nightmares:
On the body
on the blued flesh, when it is
laid out, see if you can find
the one flea which is laughing.
The closing shot is both a comic solution and the bleakest irony of the show — resuming the
fatal error of Adam Smith and Marx, that "Nature is inexhaustible and works gratuitously."
1
June 1996
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�
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Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound
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The Larger Declaration, Symbolic History, Part 27
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Script of Part 27 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell.
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
28. Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight
1)
Blake, c. 1790 (inscribed 1780), "Glad Day" engraving, British Museum,
London
Blake's Albion as rebel Orc (dated 1780, but engraved ten years later) announces a
threefold prophecy:
One: Innocence: In the "Glad Day" of free desire "everything that lives is holy":
(America 6)
Let the slave grinding at the mill run out into the field:
Let him look up into the heavens & laugh in the bright air;
...his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open...
For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease.
2)
Blake, 1794 (1818), Urizen, pl. 17, The Fall, Library of Congress (Rosenwald)
Two: Experience: In the material world that proclamation of hope enters an Orccycle, an eternal Fall, as from Lucifer to Satan: "serpent form'd... Lover of wild rebellion,
and transgressor of God's Law" (America 7). Where ''Rintrah roars and shakes his fires,"
Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood can only shade into terror: "The Winepress of Los is
call'd War on Earth."
3)
Blake, 1804-20, Jerusalem, pl. 76, Albion Worshipping Christ, Mellon
Three: Regeneration: In this plate from Blake's last prophetic book, Jerusalem,
the Orc-Albion of his rebel youth turns the cruciform joy toward Christ self-sacrificed on
the tree of prohibition.
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Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
These are not (and that is the crux of Blake's prophecy) Hegelian sequences of
time, but simultaneous states of every clarified vision.
For 2nd 2) Detail of The Fall
Thus the arm-spread gesture is preserved through the snake-wrapped fall into our
cramped Ulro of imbruted sense and mind's repression — a complicity of Blake-Orc,
Satan and Christ — "Luvah, King of Love, thou art the King of Rage and Death" (Four
Zoas, v, 42); and "The Lamb of God clothed in Luvah's Robes" (Four Zoas viii, 62) —
For 2nd 1) Glad Day, detail, worm, moth, etc.; video then shows the whole
2nd 1a)
Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1492, Canon of Proportions, Academy of Fine
Arts, Venice
2nd 1b)
Glad Day, center detail; + V detail of head
already shown in the "Glad Day," under which Blake would write (after 1800): "Albion
arose from where he labour'd at the Mill with slaves. Giving himself for the Nations he
danced the dance of Eternal Death."
In his break with the Venetian oil shadowing of his own time — "Go send your
Children to the Slobbering School" — Blake claimed the clarity and defining line of
Renaissance, Michelangelo and Raphael, the canons of intellectual form: "A tear is an
intellectual thing." Here he turns the proportions of anatomy as formulated by Vitruvius
and drawn by Leonardo and Dürer, into a leap of freedom.
Music:
Joseph Haydn, 1772, 4th movement (middle), F Minor Quartet,
Op.20, #5, Qualiton SLFX 1133a
Similarly in the Revolutionary fugue, baroque discipline heightens the defiance of
release.
First Haydn's Opus 20 makes the old order spirit's battleground.
(fade Haydn)
3rd 2)
Again, detail of The Fall; first, video close detail
Sixteen years later, Mozart took off in his fiercest fugue, the C Minor of 1788:
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Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight
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�C.G. Bell
Music:
2nd 3)
Symbolic History
Mozart, 1788, close, fugue of Adagio and Fugue K. 546, G DB
3391
(end)
Again, Albion Worshipping Christ, detail of Christ; first, video detail of
Albion
Beethoven climaxed the sequence in the Grosse Fuge of 1825.
Music:
4)
5)
Beethoven, 1825, from the Grosse Fuge,
through)
Col. M5L-277 (c. l/3
Blake, 1823-4, Job, (watercolor) pl. 14, upper detail, Angels as "The Morning
Stars," New Zealand
Same, pl. 15, above, God and Job, below, Behemoth and Leviathan, New
Zealand (video: lower detail only)
(fade Grosse Fuge)
That fugal energy presupposes the inwrought joy of conflict.
a2nd 4)
2nd 4)
2nd 4a)
Again, Job, pl. 14, central and lower sections: God, with Job group beneath
Same, whole; + V closer detail of angel-stars
Blake, 1825, Same, lower section, from the Engraved Design, Leviathan
beneath, British Museum, London
At the height of the illustrations for Job, the outcast of Uz, with whom Blake increasingly
identified —
that I cannot live without doing my duty to lay up treasures in heaven... I
have long made up my mind, & why this should be made an objection to
Me, while Drunkenness, Lewdness, Gluttony & even Idleness itself, does
not hurt other men, let Satan himself Explain —
Job sees his cloud-cave of misery and false friends, embraced in the cruciform likeness of
his Divine Imagination, with sun-reason and passion-moon, and above, the eternal
singing of the morning stars. Such the vision of which Blake wrote to Butts, the patron
who, as Palmer would testify, ''for years stood between the geatest designer in England
and the workhouse":
Till the Jewels of Light,
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Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight
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Symbolic History
Heavenly Men beaming bright,
Appear'd as One Man.
Who complacent began
My limbs to infold
In his beams of bright gold...
In the engraved plate, Leviathan coils in the margin below;
2nd 5)
Again, Job, (watercolor) pl. 15, whole, God shows Job Behemoth, and
Leviathan
while the next design shifts the threefold scheme downward. Job's God, above, points
through this cloud-hollow, to the depths of our subconscious Egypt, the time-and-space
sea of war and repression: "Behold now Behemoth" (and Leviathan) "which I made with
thee."
6)
Blake, 1808, Last Judgment, watercolor, Petworth House, Sussex (video: a
sequence of details only: cf. V6a, b, and c)
For Blake Judgment is the ecstasy which subsumes all that. It is not, as with the
orthodox (even Michelangelo), a post-temporal reward or punishment.
whenever any Individual Rejects Error and Embraces Truth a Last
Judgment passes upon that Individual…
His whole rejection of materialism and jealous condemnation, of "Bad Art and Science"
and the emergence of energy as Eternal Delight, swirls, as within a symbolic skull, around
the forgiveness of the redeemed Humanity:
Mental things alone are Real... Error, or Creation, will be Burned up &
then & not till then Truth or Eternity will appear. It is Burnt up the
Moment men cease to behold it...
Those thrown down on Christ's left are not vicious persons, ''but States Signified by those
Names" — stations, through which individuals pass.
7)
7a)
Last Judgment (1808) superimposed on life-mask of Blake (by J. S. Deville,
1823); with video details of forehead and features)
Life-Mask, 1823, (J. S. Deville), profile, National Portrait Gallery, London
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Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight
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Symbolic History
V7b) Blake, c. 1805, watercolor, God Writing Upon the Tables of the Covenant,
National Gallery, Edinburgh
V7c) Again, Deville Life-Mask, full face
7d) Blake, Double: [A] Songs of Innocence, 1789, pl. 25; and [B] Songs of
Experience, 1794, pl. 39; both (Rosenwald) copy of 1825-26, Library of
Congress, Washington D.C.; + V details
The whirling of that Judgment within that deep-browed head set Blake further
from the life (for him the death) of his time than any other creator has ever been.
I am laid by in a corner as if I did not Exist... Profit never ventures
upon my Threshold, tho' every other man's doorstone is worn down
into the very Earth by the footsteps of the fiends of commerce.
There elation —
I have Conquer'd, and shall Go on Conquering. Nothing can withstand
the fury of my Course among the Stars of God & in the Abysses of the
Accuser —
and loss —
Tuesday, Janry. 20, 1807, between Two & Seven in the Evening —
Despair —
with cheerful work — in Palmer's words "practically sane, steady, frugal and industrious'';
and in Blake's letters:
I go on Merrily with my Greek & Latin... am now learning my
Hebrew... I read Greek as fluently as an Oxford scholar... I live by
Miracle. I am Painting small Pictures from the Bible... The Ruins of
Time builds Mansions in Eternity —
sustained those "enjoyments of Genius'' which, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, look
"like torment and insanity." So Leigh Hunt of the 1809 Exhibition:
William Blake, an unfortunate lunatic, whose personal inoffensiveness
secures him from confinement... fancies himself a great master, and
has painted a few wretched pictures... unintelligible allegory... very
badly drawn... of which he has published a Catalogue... the wild
effusions of a distempered brain...
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Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight
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Symbolic History
So Wordsworth (shown the Songs of Innocence and of Experience thirty-five years after
their appearance — Blake still producing in always more divine obscurity):
There is no doubt this poor man was mad, but there is something in the
madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord
Byron and Walter Scott!
a8)
8)
Blake, 1804-18, Jerusalem (Rinder copy), pl. 76, Christ on the Cross, detail
(video: closer detail only)
Bernini, 1669, Terra-Cotta model, Equestrian Louis XIV, Gallery Borghese,
Rome; + V details
The price, in that Augustan extension of Baroque and Enlightenment, of Blake's
personal reshaping of radical Christianity.
Music:
Händel, 1742, Messiah, Overture, allegro (close), Philips C 71 AX
300 (side 1)
Since what had come to dominance in Christendom was the secular antithesis: the
rational, realist and assertive pomp of Bernini's Louis XIV: in thought "this Newtonian
Phantasm/ This Voltaire & Rousseau: this Hume & Gibbon & Bolingbroke/ This Natural
Religion," "Covering Cherubs... of the... Tabernacle of Bacon, Newton & Locke." We
cannot know if Blake, who sang his lyrics to his own tunes, would have specified also the
music which Europe was vaulting to the keystone of Händel's Messiah, though he implies
as much: "Music as it exists in old tunes or melodies... is Inspiration"; "Demonstration,
Similitude & Harmony are Objects of Reasoning..."
(fading the Overture)
9)
9a)
John Closterman, c. 1711, Duke of Marlborough, Royal Hospital, Chelsea
(video detail only, then whole after Blenheim Palace)
Sir John Vanbrugh, 1705-22, Blenheim Palace, North Court over Ha-ha (CGB
'84)
A grandeur the great Duke of Marlborough turned on its origins in the Battle of
Blenheim — as, in the monstrous palace so named, he outflanked the vaunts of Louis.
(having skipped to the close of the Overture)
10)
David, 1800, Napoleon on Horseback, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna;
+ V detail
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Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight
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Music:
Symbolic History
Cherubini, 1815, Symphony in D (close), RCA-LSC 3048
In the hundred year shift from Baroque through Neo-classic to Revolutionary,
what David's mounted Napoleon charges with romantic impulse is the old assertion —
still for Blake, Urizen's conquest of the space-plotted material earth: "Let each choose
one habitation/...One curse, one weight, one measure/ One King, one God, one Law." In
Cherubini, whom Napoleon asked why his music was so Germanic, complex, and noisy,
the crescendo of Haydn and Mozart swells toward Beethoven.
(end Cherubini)
Yet the very fugues we earlier compared with Blake coil in that plot we have
called his antithesis. As he himself wrote: "I must invent a system or be enslaved by
another man's".
How roundly our Western equestrians converge in formulable consciousness,
11)
11a)
South Indian Hindu, late 16th cent., Mounted Warrior, Horse Court,
Spirangam
Blake, 1793 (1825 copy), Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pl. 27, detail of
leaping horses, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
a contrast will reveal: this mounted warrior from South India about fifty years before the
Bernini Louis XIV. Its huge energies are mythopoetic. Of course it exists in space and
time, but not as determined there. Its battle is of another realm than Marlborough's at
Blenheim or Napoleon's crossing the Alps. With Blake, Western temporality seeks such a
realm.
Music:
12)
V12a)
Beethoven, 1807-8, 3rd Rasumovsky Quartet, last movement,
fugue, Col. ML 5587
Blake, 1809, The Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan, Tate
Gallery, London (here, video details only)
Blake, 1805(?), The Spiritual Form of Pitt Guiding Behemoth, Tate Gallery,
London (video then returns to Nelson Guiding Leviathan, detail and whole)
Though leaping eternal horses illuminate his pages, it is hard to think Blake could
have mounted monumental Pegasus — even had he been commissioned, as he proposed,
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Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
to fresco the halls of England (Beethoven commissioned by Count Rasumovsky). (fade
Quartet) Blake's most public designs were this Nelson guiding Leviathan and Pitt guiding
Behemoth, inspired, the Descriptive Catalogue tells us, by Asiatic and Biblical originals
seen in vision — source of all Greece and Rome owed to the Muse of Memory. Here, as
in "those wonderful originals'', ''more is meant than meets the eye." Nelson is Hero in the
ambivalent mode of Urizen, sterile delimiter: ''Father of Jealousy, be thou accursed from
the earth." He stands on the serpent of rational and material power, which Job would see
in the abyss; it wreathes and swallows the nations, reined by the haloed British angel of
Establishment: (Europe 10)
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Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Then was the serpent temple form'd, image of infinite
Shut up in finite revolutions, and man became an Angel,
Heaven a mighty circle turning; God a tyrant crown'd.
a13)
b13)
13)
13b)
Blake, 1827, Dante Engravings, Whirlwind of Lovers, detail, lower left, Brit.
Mus., London; with video details (cf. Va13 and views of the whole)
Blake, 1793, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pl. 20, Snake-Leviathan,
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Again, Whirlwind of Lovers, whole (video adds details of Paolo and
Francesca, Dante and Virgil, cf. V13a)
Same, detail of the englobed kiss
The French have submitted to paradox only in their broken, Pascalian phase.
English empiricists and Newtonians eschew it, Berkeley as rationally as any: ''Impossible
even for an infinite mind to reconcile contradictions." But the Italo-Germans, from Bruno
through Leibniz to Schelling, burn in the flame of mating opposites. Where they
systematize paradox, Blake intuitively rides it: "Without Contraries is no progression".
In his moony Beulah "Contrarieties are equally true" — far more in "the great Wars of
Eternity, in fury of Poetic Inspiration." At the Judgment close of Jerusalem, with the
eternal forms of nature and life (even Bacon, Newton, Locke, fourfold clarified) awaking
to immortality, Blake sees ''the all wondrous Serpent clothed in gems & rich array
Humanize."
So in the Dante engraving of Paolo and Francesca (at the end of Blake's life), it is
as the coiled suppressed snake of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell ("advancing toward
us with all the fury of a spiritual existence'') that the whirlwind sucks up lovers from
stormy Ulro, a fugal flame of bondage tilted skyward like a vine.
Music:
Beethoven, 1807-8. 3rd Rasumovsky Quartet, last movement,
close, Col. ML 5587
While Dante swoons under the radiant kiss to the ground of repressive thorns.
14)
Blake, 1793 (1825 copy), Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pl. 3, Fitzwilliam
Museum, Cambridge (now two slides, A: detail above, and B: detail below; to
which the video adds the whole, V14, and closer details) (end Beethoven)
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Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight
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Symbolic History
Blake was 33 when he began The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: "As a new
heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its advent: the Eternal Hell
revives," taking his own birth for the fulfillment of a Swedenborgian prophecy — Blake
stretched at the top of the page in the delight of creative fire; and below: "Attraction and
Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to human existence." The
page epitomizes Blake, both accepting and at war with the poised antinomies, Innocence
and Experience, the kiss of joy, the birth in pain.
Music:
15)
Again, Mozart, 1788, Fugue from the Adagio and Fugue in C Minor,
opening, G DB 3391
Blake, 1794 (copy of 1818), Urizen, pl. 24, The Four Elements, Rosenwald,
Library of Congress, Washington D.C.; first, video details
From his earliest years Blake was compelled to frame existence in recurrent
wheels of two, three and four; and yet to give himself in impassioned identification to a
freedom that defies them. Of these elements: Water, Earth, Air, Fire, prototypes of his
later Life-powers the Zoas, it is Blake's destiny to be Fire, yet linked with the others in
vital strife — (as in Mozart's C Minor Fugue) a frenzy almost intolerable to Hegelian
programmers. Such in Urizen is the petrifaction of Body through seven ages of dismal
woe:
A roof, shaggy, wild inclos'd
In an orb his fountain of thought;
or in ''The Mental Traveller'' the reciprocating historical gyres, from burning Babe and
Woman Old, through freezing Age and Female Babe, back to frowning Babe and Woman
Old:
She nails him down upon the Rock
And all is done as I have told.
June 1996
Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight
(fade Mozart Fugue)
10
�C.G. Bell
16)
Symbolic History
Blake, 1824-27, Dante Drawings, #4, Hell Gate, Tate Gallery, London;
+ V detail
This is the material world created in one sense by demonic Elohim, but more
deeply by Los and Jesus as an act of Mercy, to stay the fall toward Eternal Death,
weaving for the fallen a protective garment of generation. It is the hell to which Dante in
Luvah's red robe must be led by Virgil in the blue of Los. Its four continents appear
through flame, and under the sea of Time and Space the lost Atlantis of our unity,
"infinite mountains of light now barr'd out by the atlantic sea'' (Marriage of Heaven and
Hell, 25:8), ''when the five senses whelm'd in deluge o'er the earth-born man." (Europe
10:10)
17)
V17a)
17b)
17c)
Same, Dante Drawings, #60, Primeval Giants
Blake, 1793 (1799 copy), America, plate 14, detail, Snake from woman's
loins, Mellon
Same, America, plate 17, detail, Blake as Los-Orc, Mellon
Blake, 1793 (1825 copy), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 16,
Ugolino and his Sons, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Dante's Giants deep in hell become for Blake those five earth-sunk senses, ''giant
beauty and perfection fallen into dust" (Jerusalem 19:8), when man …closed himself up,
till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern'' (Marriage of Heaven and Hell 14).
Only touch (hardly differentiated here) opening through the entire body into the ecstasy of
sex (''The lust of the goat is the bounty of God"), yet smitten, like Job, with boils (Tiriel's
fifth daughter, left alive, but with her hair turned to snakes) — only touch affords a model
for cleansing the rest:
the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy
whereas it now appears finite & corrupt.
This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.
(Marriage of Heaven and Hell 14)
Yet the giants brood, whelmed in hell, like pot-bellied Hume, Concerning Human
Understanding: "there appears not, throughout all nature, any one instance of connection
which is conceivable by us." And Blake: "Doubt, doubt, & don't believe without
experiment."
June 1996
Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight
11
�C.G. Bell
18)
Symbolic History
P. G. Batoni, 1776, Marshal Cyril G. Razumowski, Razumowski Collection,
Vienna (with various video details)
Blake's Hell was just the Enlightenment court painters of the 18th century were
celebrating; as Battoni did this earlier Razumowski, with his classics and copies of
classics — (Blake)
the silly Greek & Latin slaves of the sword... We do not want either
Greek or Roman models if we are but just & true to our own
imaginations —
the displayed medals for royal intrigue — (Lord Chesterfield to his son)
I reccmmended to you in my last an innocent piece of art, that of
flattering people behind their backs, in presence of those who... will
not fail to repeat, and even amplify, the praise to the party concerned
—
Chesterfield, who as Johnson observed, taught the morals of a whore in the style of a
dancing master:
your dancing-master (he wrote that son) is at this time the most useful
and necessary of all the masters you have or can have.
While the Earl of Shaftesbury extended the decorum of dress to literature:
I hold it very indecent that a man should publish his meditations or
solitary thoughts. These are the froth & scum of writing which should
be unburdened in private and consigned to oblivion, before the writer
come before the world as good company.
19)
J. Reynolds, 1787, Lord Heathfield, Governor of Gibralter, National Gallery,
London; + V details
June 1996
Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Against that Old Regime of Form, this Reynolds 1787 defender of Gibralter seems
to herald the new republic of Humanity — as if Lord Heathfield were
George
Washington, roused by the strains of Lallan Burns: ''Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled":
Lay the proud usurper low!
Tyrants fall in every foe!
Liberty's in every blow!
Let us do or die!
Yet Reynolds was Blake's despised priest of establishment:
This man was Hired to Depress Art... A Pretence of Art: To Destroy
Art.
Reynolds or Chesterfield, Whig or Tory, all shared the Enlightened fabric Blake
had pursued from childhood with "contempt and abhorrence" — Montesquieu:
of the necessary tie between laws and the constitution of each
government, of its manners, climate, religion, commerce...
20)
Blake, 1794 (copy of 1818), Urizen, plate 3, Los striding in flames, Library of
Congress, Washington D.C.; + V detail
While Blake, Los-Orc striding in flame, cries what his cry almost makes true:
''Ages are All Equal, But Genius is Always Above the Age."
Music:
a21)
21)
21a)
Beethoven, 1807, Fugal bit from lst movement, lst Rasumovsky
Quartet, HS Q-41, or other
(Quartet fades for Hammerklavier)
Blake, 1794 (1815 copy), Urizen, plate 18, Los in Flames, Rosenwald,
Library of Congress, Washington D.C. (video: detail only)
Blake, 1804-18, Jerusalem (Rinder), plate 26, Hand and Jerusalem, Rinder
Collection
Blake, 1793, "Fire," from the Gates of Paradise (3rd State), Miss Carthew
Collection
June 1996
Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight
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�C.G. Bell
Music:
Symbolic History
Beethoven, 1818-19, Sonata in B Flat (Hammerklavier), opening of
fugue, Seraphim IC/ 6066
Yet in what sense above the age, where the cruciform gesture of delight hardens to
the vulture oppression of Hand — Jerusalem's news of freedom script for a Reign of
Terror:
Rebellion struck the tyrant dead,
Became a tyrant in his stead.
Thus the fugal play of the lst Rasumovsky turns to the time-tangle of the Hammerklavier
— of all late Beethoven fugues: as when Schindler visited in l819 and heard from the
next room the hammerings and howlings of the Missa Solemnis Creed, ''the door opened
& Beethoven stood before us with distorted features... as if he had been in mortal combat
with the whole host of contrapuntists, his everlasting enemies."
22)
Goya, 1815-24, Proverbs 7, Matrimonial Folly, etching (Dover); + V detail
(fade Hammerklavier)
The rational mode of that crisis had been satire, the acid of Swift, which spills into
the new century most fiercely in Goya — this Matrimonial Folly from the Proverbs.
Blake too had begun with satire, in An Island in the Moon:
Hail Matrimony made of Love
To thy wide gates how great a drove
On purpose to be yok'd do come;
Widows & maids & Youths also
That lightly trip on beauty's toe
Or sit on beauty's bum.
For 2nd 21) Blake, 1795, "Good" and "Evil" Angels struggling for a Child, Tate
Gallery, London (video: detail of "Evil" only)
No doubt all Blake's Ulro pictures have that cutting edge; and in The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell, the seven church houses of brick in which ''monkeys, baboons, & all of that
species"
June 1996
Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight
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�C.G. Bell
2nd 22)
Symbolic History
Again, Goya, Matrimonial Folly, detail
are ''grinning and snatching at one another... the weak... caught by the strong, and with a
grinning aspect, first coupled with, & then devour'd," as recklessly envenoms Swift,
23)
Chardin, c. 1736(?), Monkey Antiquary, Chartres (other versions, Louvre, etc.,
are variously dated)
as Swift's lacerated heart had soured the prevailing monkey-play — this pensive antiquary
by Chardin. With Storm and Stress, such irony is everywhere possessed by alienating
furies, personal, demonic, political. So Blake to the Reverend Trusler, who had contemned his pictures:
I really am sorry that you are fallen out with the Spiritual World... you
ought to know that what is Grand is necessarily obscure to weak men...
24)
Rowlandson, c. 1802, Blood Royal: the detested Duke of Cumberland,
British Museum, London; + V detail
Blake, 1825-27, Dante, plate 27, Hell 14, Capaneus the Blasphemer (as rebel
hero), British Museum, London
Blake, c. 1826, The body of Abel found by Adam and Eve, Tate Gallery,
London
V24a)
a25)
I perceive that your Eye is perverted by Caricature Prints, which ought
not to abound so much as they do...
The caricaturist was Rowlandson, whose caustic pen had etched every phase of Georgian
excess, as in this 1802 depiction of the hated Duke of Cumberland. But to Blake (though
republican friend of Tom Paine) the satiric, stripped of prophecy, seemed trivial. Again
to Trusler:
I know that This World is a World of Imagination & vision. I see
Every thing I paint in This World but Every body does not see alike.
To the Eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun...
Music:
b25)
Beethoven, 1818-9, Hammerklavier, closing fugue, conclusion,
Seraphim IC 6066
Caspar David Friedrich, c. 1810, Landscape with Rainbow, formerly
Staatliche Kunstsammlung, Weimar, now lost
June 1996
Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight
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c25)
25)
Symbolic History
Goya, 1825-28, Milkmaid, Prado, Madrid (video: detail only)
Blake, 1804-18 (printed 1820), Jerusalem, plate 37, Albion sustained by Christ
etc., Mellon Collection, Washington D.C.; + V details, as V25a
If the giants of 1800 share a prophetic reforging of the Enlightened and sophistic
heritage, Blake has this Pascalian distinction: In the others, when, as in Beethoven's
Hammerklavier, the demonic battle eases, (Hammerklavier, sempre dolce cantabile) it is
into the irradiated "calm that nature breathes among the hills and groves" (even Goya's
last Milkmaid takes that gleam); whereas in Blake, any such respite hangs between Ulro
and the flaming wars of Eternity, a sleep of dreams in moony Beulah: It is not nature but
Christ who sustains this fainting Albion ("between the Palm tree and the Oak of weeping"), Albion's left foot planted on the winged red sun of chaos, his knee as in false prayer
to that Druid oak of sacrifice, while below Urizen's starry sky, his Emanation, Jerusalem,
vegetates on an arc-bier in the sea of time and space, ravened over by the vulture specter
of possessive jealousy (caricature indeed, but far from Rowlandson). As the Reverend
Dibdin said: "The sublime and grotesque seemed...forever amalgamated in his
imagination." (fade Hammerklavier)
26)
26a)
26b)
Blake, 1804-1818 (printed 1820), Jerusalem (Census copy E, "Stirling"), plate
99, Reunion of Soul and God, Mellon Collection, Washington D.C. (video: details only)
Same, Jerusalem, Title page
August Klöber, c. 1812(?), portrait of Beethoven (video returns to a detail of
26a, Spectre of Jerusalem)
At the close of Jerusalem, in the union of soul and God, it is ambiguous (because
complementary) whether the dark-haloed brooding God is drawn down by the "eternal
womanly" into hell flames of generation, or she upward into the ecstasy where those
"furnaces of affliction" are the fountains of life. The text reads:
June 1996
Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight
16
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
All Human Forms identified even Tree Metal Earth & Stone, all
Human Forms identified, living going forth & returning wearied
Into the Planetary lives of Years Months Days & Hours reposing
And then Awaking into his Bosom in the Life of Immortality.
And I heard the Name of their Emanations they are named Jerusalem.
No wonder vegetated Southey fled from that visit when Blake showed him "a perfectly
mad poem called Jerusalem":
his madness was too evident, too fearful. It gave his eyes an
expression such as you would expect to see in one who was possessed.
What fear, in Christian England, of divine possession! Beethoven had it better in
Faustian Germany.
(here the Hammerklavier comes in again for the closing bars)
27)
Hogarth, 1758, The Bench, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; + V detail
The curse of satire, the blessing of heart, embrace the comic reality Fielding
admired in Hogarth. These 1758 judges on the bench are just such as bear the brunt in
Amelia, Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews: (the bribed justice of Joseph and Fanny)
''I have only ordered them to Bridewell for a month." — ''But what is
their crime?"..."A kind of felonious larcenous thing. I believe I must
order them a little correction too, a little stripping and
whipping"...''Still,'' said the squire, "I am ignorant of the crime — the
fact I mean." "Why, there it is in peaper,'' answered the justice...
(showing the deposition about the breaking of a twig)
''Jesu!" said the squire, ''would you commit two persons to Bridewell
for a twig?" — "Yes," said the lawyer, ''and with great lenity too; for if
we had called it a young tree, they would have been both hanged."
28)
Hogarth, 1757, Garrick and his Wife, Royal Collection, Windsor; + V detail
At the same, time, Hogarth painted this portrait of Garrick working late, his wife
teasing him to bed. Here is the impulsive humanity which — limbed round with the
scalpel of wit — makes Fielding promise his heroes and heroines a lifetime of actual
good:
June 1996
Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight
17
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Mr. Jones appears to be the happiest of all humankind; for what
happiness this world affords equal to the possession of such a woman
as Sophia, I sincerely own I have never yet discovered.
a29)
29)
Blake, 1800, The Infant Jesus riding on a Lamb, formerly Stirling Collection;
+ V detail
Hogarth, c. 1735-40, Satan, Sin, and Death, Tate Gallery, London
Fielding had still to wrestle with the Christian calling, from Parson Adams to
Amelia's benefactor: "If one of my cloth should begin a discourse of heaven in the scenes
of business or pleasure... would he not... be thought by all men worthy of Bedlam?" Even
Hogarth, beyond the enlightened field where Voltaire and Rousseau traffic in reason's
irony and heart's worth, felt a weird stirring (through Milton, Dante, and the Bible: as in
this Satan, Sin, and Death at the gate of hell) toward the evidence of things not seen —
yet so whelmed in the Cartesian bulk of operatic Baroque, as almost to have lost the
revelation it gropes for; though even this picture became for Blake a point of departure.
30)
V30a)
June 1996
Double: [A] Bosch, 1506-8, Fragment of a Judgment, detail, Alte
Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59); and [B] Rubens, c. 1620 (copy), Fall of the
Damned, detail, Aachen Gallery (CGB '74)
Titian, c. 1550-60(?), Martyrdom of St. Lawrence, lower detail, Jesuit
Church, Venice (video returns to the double, 30, and then shows a detail of
the Bosch, from V30A, CGB '59)
Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight
18
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
If spirit cannot speak without body, there remains a graded stair from stripped
symbol to spatial representation. Blake's continual rage against the post-Venetian —
labouring to destroy Imaginative power, by means of that infernal
machine, called Chiaro Oscuro... The spirit of Titian was particularly
active in raising doubts... Rubens is a most outrageous Demon —
springs from an absolute clarity: that in all the 17th- and 18th-century schools, the life of
Gothic invention (as in this Bosch detail) had been buried under the brown-shadowing
earth-laws of codified matter.
As Bosch had fleshed out Medieval symbol with Renaissance techniques,
31)
Blake, 1823-24, Job, plate 11, Thou affrightest me with Dreams, New
Zealand
Blake had to shear Newtonian fulness into prophetic reality, though like his radical
contemporaries, he sweeps the world heritage with him — in storm.
Job in the 11th design, "Thou affrightest me with visions," lies on the mat of
penitence under the cloven-hoofed and snake-wrapped God of his own jealous making:
And is there not eternal fire and eternal chains
To bind the phantoms of existence from eternal life?
a32)
32)
Joseph Vernet, 1773, Seaport by Moonlight, Louvre, Paris
Winchester, end of the 10th cent., Pentecost, Pontifical of Archbishop Robert,
Municipal Library, Rouen
In the Leviathan depths of reason's limitation, of which Eliot in our time would
write —
Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place —
what hungers must have mounted to break through again into the realm of vision (this
Winchester miniature from before 1000, where the Holy Ghost spills like molten metal to
a spaceless and selfless whirl of Apostles flattened on the rainbow arch of that upper
June 1996
Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight
19
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
room). What was Blake's madness but to heed some apostolic cry of modern
consciousness?
Va33)
b33)
33)
Blake, 1794 (copy of 1818), Urizen, plate 11, Urizen fettered weeps,
Rosenwald, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
Blake, c. 1804, Milton (Census copy D), plate 16, Milton advancing disrobed, Rosenwald, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
Blake, 1804-20, Jerusalem, plate 53, detail, Vala Throned on a Sunflower,
British Museum, London
At Felpham false-friend Hayley (in Byron's quip, "For ever feeble and for ever
tame'') tried to wean Blake from such "Abstract folly," to chain his ''feet to the world of
Duty and Reality." And as Blake wrote Butts, his own return to London was
that I may converse with my friends in Eternity. See Visions, Dream
Dreams, & prophecy & speak Parables unobserv'd & at liberty from
the Doubts of other Mortals...
— to see this Vala, beauty of nature, materialize into the Female Will, throned on the
sunflower of sexual desire (an ellipse of projective geometry):
(Ah, Sunflower! weary of time):
They took their Mother Vala & they crown'd her with gold;
They named her Rahab & gave her power over the Earth,
...to destroy the Lamb & Usurp the Throne of God
Drawing their Ulro Voidness round the Four-fold Humanity.
(Jerusalem 78: 15-20)
June 1996
Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight
20
�C.G. Bell
34)
Symbolic History
Roman Baroque, 1595 ff., Santa Trinita de' Monti with the Spanish Stair,
1723-26 (CGB '47)
Music:
Händel, 1742, Messiah #9, chorus: "0 thou that tellest" Philips C71
AX300
In the assertive rationalization of Christianity, Händel's Messiah, warhorse of
oratorios, stands at a Urizenic limit of opacity, culmination of a century and a half of
Baroque: — Rome: Santa Trinita de' Monti over the Spanish Stair;
35)
Piazza Navona, Rome: Bernini, 1647-52, Fountain; Rainaldi & Borromini
1652-57, St. Agnese, etc. [slide show CGB '48; video CGB '86 with detail from
CGB '48]
or the Piazza Navona with Bernini's Fountain and Borromini's Church, from which, they
used to say, the statue of the Nile veils his face.
(close Messiah #9)
36)
Claudio Coello, c. 1690, Charles II adoring the relics, Sacristy, Escorial (video:
details only, above and below)
Music:
Messiah #12. close of chorus: "unto us a Child". Philips C71 AX300
By 1690 in Spain, Coello had opened within a frame of florid marble and bronze
this extraordinary pomp of space.
37)
Mexican Baroque, early 18th cent.(?), Façade and Towers, Cathedral Taxco
(CGB '70) (video: upper detail only)
Mexican Baroque, finished 1752, façade detail, Cathedral, Zacatecas (CGB
'70)
V37a)
A grandeur which by the time of Handel had gathered native workmen and the remains of
Indian style, as at Taxco, into the sacred conquests of the New.World.
(close Messiah #12)
38)
Mansart, Coypel, etc., 1661-1722, interior, columned apse, Chapel at
Versailles (CGB '59); + V detail of painting
Music:
June 1996
Messiah #18, opening "He shall feed his flock" Philips C71 AX300
Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight
21
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Nor had the style-restraint of France held the Corinthian chapel of Versailles from
as flagrant a proclamation of Cartesian victory.
39)
Straub (with Günther?), c. 1767, Gabriel, High Altar, Berg-am-Laim,
München (CGB '59); + V detail
In Bavaria the currents from Italy and France fructify, as at Berg-am-Laim, in the
richest outpouring of all Baroque; yet its sensuous passions but complement the underlay
of heroic formulation and proud rationality.
(fade
Messiah #18)
40)
Sabastiani Ricci, c. 1712-16, Resurrection, sketch for Chelsea Hospital,
Dulwich College, London; + V detail
Music:
Messiah, #42. Halleluja, opening, Philips C71 AX300
About the time of Händel's coming to London, Ricci imported the festive Venetian
Baroque.
(fade Halleluja)
41)
41a)
41b)
V41c)
Thomas Archer, 1725, West Tower, Cathedral of Birmingham (CGB '74)
Borromini, 1650-59, Sant' Ivo, from the Courtyard, Rome (CGB '86)
Sir Christopher Wren, 1673-1711, St. Paul's Cathedral, London (CGB '77)
Same, another view of the dome (CGB '77)
Music:
Händel, Messiah, #52, Amen, close, Philips 671 AX300
While Thomas Archer, trained in Rome, gave the tower of Birmingham a wonderful
sweep of counterpointed curves.
If the grandiose display of earthly religion is a Blakean antithesis, it is an
antithesis which contains the fugue, already in creative struggle (like the 3-body problem
in Newton) stretching the rationale it exemplifies.
(close Messiah)
42) Double: [A] Bramante, 1499-1502, Tempietto, and [B] Borromini, 1642-60, Sant'
Ivo; both, Rome (CGB '86); + V single of St. Ivo (from 41a)
42a) Double: [A] Raphael, 1510-11, detail of Homer, Parnassus, Vatican, and [B]
Rembrandt, 1662-63, Homer dictating, fragment, Mauritzhuis, The Hague
June 1996
Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight
22
�C.G. Bell
42b)
Symbolic History
Double: [A] Bramente, Tempietto, Trastevere, Rome; and [B] Raphael, 1504,
Temple in La Sposalizio, Brera, Milan
In Rome two courtyard chapels oppose Bramante's High-Renaissance island of
calm, 1500 (left), to the Miltonic and Pascalian implosion of Borromini (right) 1650, that
wagered marriage of passion and method. From its first tactile declaration, the Baroque
was revolutionary, fantastically overpushing its always heroic might — to contain Blake's
heaven in the laws of earth.
Through what maze of paradox genius searhes its style-affinities — Blake
extolling Renaissance Raphael against Baroque Rembrandt, while Milton's dark Baroque
remained his creative center. "Grecian," he said, "is Mathematical Form: Gothic is
Living Form." What is implied for Bramante's Temple, so linked to Raphael's in the
Sposalizio?
43)
Double: [A] Borromini, 1650-59, Lantern of Sant' Ivo, Rome; and [B]
Borromini, 1649-52, sketch for the same, Albertina, Vienna (video uses Berlin
sketch for A; see V43)
What revealed of Borromini's spire-tribute to the heraldic Barberini bee? Surely its
Baroque incorporates, beyond Renaissance, the soul-leap of Gothic — how transparently
if, as in one of Borromini's drawings, we might experience at once its outward flaming
gyre and (right) the lanterned vault within.
44)
Double: [A] English Gothic, 1286-1325, Wells, Chapter House (CGB '84);
and [B] Borromini, 1650-59, St. Ivo Dome, within, Rome; + V singles
Here the teaching of Greece and Rome is caught up in a soaring as radical, as (three
centuries before) in the Gothic groining (left) of Wells Chapter House.
The music which most designedly challenges the possible is of the string tradition
Bach climaxed, where an essentially one-voiced instrument delivers itself of the
polyphonic and fugal. Thus Casals chose Bach's Sixth Cello Suite as the vehicle of
ultimate modern reach.
Music:
June 1996
Bach, c. 1720, Prelude, Cello Suite No. 6 in D Major, last part,
(Casals) Angel COLH 18
Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight
23
�C.G. Bell
a45)
b45)
Vc45)
Vd45)
45)
Symbolic History
Borromini, 1666-76, Façade detail, San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, Rome
Same, Façade, another view (CGB '86)
Same, Façade, detail over the main door (CGB '86)
Same, Interior, vault with organ (CGB '86); video: detail only
Same, Interior, vault (CGB '86); video: detail only
Again Borromini: San Carlo of the Four Fountains.
V45a)
a46)
Guarini, 1667, Sidona Chapel dome, Duomo, Turin (CGB '84)
Narcisco Tomé, 1721-32, The Transparente Altar, in the Apse of Toledo
Cathedral. Where the slide sequence opens with the central tower of carved
figures only, the video draws first from the lower spread of slide 46 the same
structure against clerestory windows of the choir.
Middle-height of the same carved tower: a gold-rayed marble whirl of Mary
and Angels
From the base of the same structure, an altar with Mary and the infant
Christ
Vertical slide of the same: the altar tower in the window-lighted cathedral,
from a glory-dome opened in the vault, down the pillar of saints and angels,
to the Madonna below; here the video shows a middle-spread of the whole,
and last a detail of the radiant heaven above.
Vb46)
Vc46)
46)
(end Casals Bach)
In Spain, Baroque daring peaks in the Transparente, where Tomé lifted the apse of
Toledo Cathedral for a carved and painted spill of angels from Heaven's vault above, to
an altar of the Virgin below. Here, as at the same time in Bach, what would seem the
Blakean opposite of pyrotechnic display, swells with conscious prophecy.
So Blake, to Butts, from Felpham:
I have written this Poem from immediate Dictation twelve or
sometimes twenty or thirty lines without Premeditation and even
against my will… & an immense Poem exists which seems to be the
labour of a long life… My heart is full of futurity.
47)
Double: [A] Roman Christian, c. 420, Crucifixion, from Ivory Pyxis, British
Museum, London; and [B] Irish, late 7th cent., Bronze, Crucifixion Plaque,
National Museum, Dublin (with video details of singles, A before, B after)
June 1996
Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight
24
�C.G. Bell
Music:
Symbolic History
Gregorian, Libera me (Burial Service), closing chorus, MHS
OP 349
In Blake's merger of flesh and spirit, time and eternity, self and Christ ("Mine has
a snub nose like to mine") the pendulum of Incarnation has swung all the way from ritual
abstraction of God's humanity — these Crucifixions from 5th-century Rome to 700
Ireland: the spaceless distance of Gregorian Chant (with its Celtic and other irrecoverable
offshoots) — to all of which Blake, in the arm-flung immediacy of Albion-Christ might
say, "thou readst black where I read white."
(fade with "saeculum")
48)
48a)
48b)
Grünewald, c. 1512-15, Crucifixion from Isenheim Altar, Museum, Colmar;
+ V details of John the Baptist and Christ
Same, closer detail of Christ
Same, detail of the group on the left
Music:
Morales, published 1543, Lamentabatur Jacob, (Turner) ARC ST2533 321
From the anguished Plague Crucifixes of 14th-century Germany, to this
Grünewald ordeal of sacred body, painted about 1515 for the abbey church and hospital
of the Anthonites in Alsatian Isenheim, we feel the build-up of Incarnate identification —
in music, the harmonic pain Morales learned from Josquin.
(fade Morales, after "Heume")
49)
Feichtmayr and Christian, 1747-58, Christ on the Cross, Pulpit, Zwiefalten
(video details only: above, below, and Christ's head)
June 1996
Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight
25
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Such passion, grappled into form, mediates the Baroque. In Bach's great
Chaconne from the Second Partita, the Caesarian extraction of so much glory from
scraped gut, adumbrates, in divine cat-fight, spirit's war on itself — as if Feichtmayr's
God had "pitched his mansion in the place of excrement."
Music:
Bach, 1717-23(?), from Chaconne, Partita #2, Odnoposov (or
better: H. Szeryng, DGG 2709-028)
By the end of Bach's life, Baroque was the matrix of pre-romantic, like that
Arcana Cœlestia, in which Swedenborg pours Divine Love and Wisdom through a
universe of nebular astronomy, fashioning salvation, as soul fashions body.
50)
50a)
Blake, c. 1799-1800, Agony in the Garden, Tate Gallery, London; + V detail
Blake, 1807-08, First Temptation, watercolor, from Paradise Regained, T.H.
Riches, Esq. (video: detail only)
The Blake of this Agony in the Garden was reared in the Swedenborg circle of
London. And though he left the prophet behind like the linen clothes folded at the tomb:
Any man of mechanical talents may from the writings of Paracelsus or
Jacob Behmen, produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with
Swedenborg's, and from those of Dante or Shakespear, an infinite
number —
he and his art consummate the personal transcendence of Northern Baroque — in his
case, of Milton.
(fade Chaconne)
How would Jane Austen's clergyman Pharisee —
nothing to do but be slovenly and selfish… his curate does all the
work, and the business of his life is to dine
— have seen this mystic heir to embodiment as anything but mad?:
Now the sneaking serpent walks
In mild humility
And the just man rages in the wilds
Where lions roam.
June 1996
Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight
26
�C.G. Bell
a51)
Symbolic History
Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1776-77, Lady Caroline Scott as "Winter," Duke of
Buccleugh, Bowhill, Selkirk
Reynolds, 1788-89, Master Hare, Louvre, Paris
Reynolds, 1777-80, Lady Elizabeth Delme and her Children, National
Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; + V detail
Blake, 1793 (copy of 1799), America (Census copy M), plate 11, below, Nude
Children Riding a Snake, Mellon
Same, upper detail, Boy riding a Swan
Blake, 1794 (copy of 1818), Urizen (Census copy G), plate 21, Chain of
Jealousy (Los, Enitharmon, Orc), Rosenwald, Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C. (video: detail only)
Vb51)
51)
51a)
V51b)
V51c)
Music:
Thomas Arne, c. 1751, Andante from Overture #1, Argo 2RG-577
"Active Evil, " said Blake, "is better than Passive Good." He must have shared
more with the great Baroque, as with Milton, than with the social sweetness of his time:
— easy Thomas Arne (through Christian Bach a likely influence on Mozart); this Sir
Joshua Reynolds — no contrary, but a negation. "Reynolds & Gainsborough" (Blake
wrote) "Blotted & Blurred one against the other & Divided all the English World between
them. Fuseli indignant almost hid himself — I am hid."
It was not just that the youthful Blake had shown Reynolds some designs and been
told to correct his drawing. Nor was it envy of what was beyond him. Blake could have
been successful. In his most productive period, he had taught the children of the wealthy,
and, as Tatham tells, so pleased patrons of rank that he had been offered the post of tutor
to the Royal family. Aghast, he surrendered his pupils, preferring want and his own art to
betrayal of principle. As Southey allowed in his caustic 1809 review: "Nothing but madness had prevented him from being the sublimest painter of this or any other country.
(close Arne)
52)
52a)
Gainsborough, c. 1759, Painter's Daughters Chasing a Butterfly, National
Gallery, London
Gainsborough, c. 1762, The Painter's Daughters, Victoria and Albert
Museum, London (video returns to details from Painter's Daughters Chasing a
Butterfly, then to left detail from Painter's Daughters)
June 1996
Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight
27
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Like every admired artist of the time, Gainsborough was on the social rack — as
between the lacy brilliance of Lady So-and-so and the unfeed sensibility of his own
daughters chasing a butterfly, or tousling each other. It was more and more the century of
youth: Rousseau's Emile, Pestalozzi's invention of progressive education, leading toward
Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality":
Thou little child, yet glorious in the might
Of heaven-born freedom on thy Being's height…
Mozart was freer than Gainsborough, and paid the price; but even in him there is a
spread between social performance and, as in the Romanza from the D Minor Concerto,
its inspired surpassing.
Music:
53)
Mozart, 1785, from Piano Concerto #20, K 466, Romanza, Piano
entrance ff., (Fisher) V. LCT 6013 (or Richter, Murray Hill S2957)
J.A. Houdon, c. 1777, Bust of Alexandre Brogniart as a child, Louvre, Paris
(cf. his Daughter Sabine, Huntington, San Marino, California); first, V detail
(fade Mozart Romanza)
Houdon, too, most delights in his salon skills when he models children, especially
his sylphid daughter Sabine.
a54)
54)
54a)
54b)
George Romney, c. 1780(?), Lady Arabella Ward, National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C.
Romney, c. 1781-83, Miss Willoughby, National Gallery of Art, Washington,
D.C.
Blake, 1805, "The Dog" (for Hayley's Ballad), British Museum, London
Jean Baptiste Isabey, 1812, Fürsten Katharina Bagration Skawronska, collection Fürst Franz Auersperg (video returns to a detail of Romney's Miss
Willoughby, from 54)
And Romney, who had wanted to paint Allegory and History, seems happiest
when his bombast ladies freshen in the fountain of youth toward Burns' Highland Mary,
or Wordsworth's Lucy, of whom Nature would say:
This Child I to myself will take;
She shall be mine, and I will make
A lady of my own…
June 1996
Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight
28
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Blake, after refusing the Royal Children Copley had lately painted, was saved
from destitution by Hayley, given a cottage in Felpham, and, of course, set to pick-thank
tasks, engraving after minor artists, decorating Hayley's Library, portraying the gentry in
miniature.
Miniature [he writes] is become a Goddess in my Eyes, & my Friends
in Sussex say that I Excel in the pursuit. I have a great many orders, &
they multiply.
Until the break his poem Milton treats in symbols, with the return to poverty in London:
Hayley… thinks to turn me into a Portrait Painter as he did poor
Romney, but this he nor all the devils in hell will never do…
55)
Blake, 1793 (copy of 1799), America, plate 7, Children Sleeping with a Ram,
Paul Mellon; + V lower detail
Perhaps Blake too is at his happiest with children, but his are of the Imagination,
out of Georgian context altogether:
Piping down the valleys wild
Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he laughing said to me:
"Pipe a song about a lamb!"
So I piped with merry cheer,
"Piper, pipe that song again";
So I piped: he wept to hear.
Or:
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?…
He is meek, & he is mild;
He became a little child…
56)
English MS, early 14th cent., Angel leads St. John to Heaven, MS Roy. 19B,
XII, 5v., British Museum, London; + V detail
Music:
June 1996
French, c. 1260(?), Codex Bamberg, Hoquetus VII, d'Amiens
longum/ In seculum (4th phrase); from (Munrow) Archiv 2723 045
Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight
29
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Blake's pastoral Beulah reaches far back to the living innocence of the Gothic,
which he copied as a boy in Westminster Abbey — this 1300 John, led up the symbolic
ladder, above what Blake would have recognized as the Vegetative world. But the prepersonal suspension in creed attested by the formal faces or the bare-fifths of the music,
could not have been the element of revolutionary Blake.
(close Hoquetus)
57)
57a)
Albrecht Dürer, 1496-98, Apocalypse Woodcuts, #14, Angel Locks Dragon in
Abyss (with a view of New Jerusalem); video: details only
Dürer, 1522, Self as Man of Sorrows, Kunsthalle, Bremen; first, video detail
Music:
Mouton, 1515, 8-voice motet, "Exsultet," 1st half, SAWT 9561-B
That City, which the Angel showed John from a spirit mountain, has come to
earth in Dürer, 1498, to spread over the plain by a river, like any of the Renaissance
towns of Germany — as the 8-voice "Exsultet" of Mouton incorporates soul's victory.
So where was Blake to look for renewal but in man's incarnate imagination: "Energy is
the only life, and is from the Body"; or as he said to Robinson: "Yes, Jesus is the only
God… and so am I, and so are you." His appeal was not to the Middle Ages, but to the
corporeal powers of Renaissance: Dürer, Raphael,
June 1996
Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight
30
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58)
58a)
Symbolic History
Double, Two Expulsions: [A] Jacobo della Quercia, 1425-38, door panel, San
Petronio, Bologna; and [B] Michelangelo, 1508-18, Sistine Ceiling, Vatican;
+ V singles
John Flaxman, 1778, Plaque from Vase of the Apotheosis of Homer, British
Museum, London
Michelangelo (right), with a prototype Blake could hardly have known, this 1430 della
Quercia. Yet surely the physical conglobing of symbol, exhibited in this sequence, was
what Blake had to reverse; as he says: "Thus is the heaven a vortex pass'd already, and
the earth a vortex not yet pass'd by the traveller thro' Eternity." (end Mouton, 1st half)
Though Michelangelo's fresco line, against the fog Blake scorned in Titian and Correggio,
is such a carrier of force as that process of relief-etching brother Robert, dead, showed
William in vision:
melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was
hid.
If Blake had known Florentine art before Michelangelo, could he have called Flaxman
"Dear Sculptor of Eternity"?
59)
Blake, 1795, Elohim Creating Adam, Tate Gallery, London; + V details
Yet he caught enough from doubtful prints (the 10-year-old boy at art auctions,
Langford's "little connoisseur": "from my earliest childhood… I knew the difference
between Raffaele and Rubens") to rival the ceilings of Catholic Rome — though shrunk
to the illuminated privacy of a page: this 1795 Creation and Fall crushed into one. In
Albion's "Chaotic State of Sleep, Satan & Adam & the whole World was Created by the
Elohim" (third of the seven eyes of God, creator and judge) "a very Cruel Being." Such
the dæmon who shapes, under cloud and by setting sun, this Adam stretched on the thorn
bank over the Sea of Time and Space, already wrapped in the snake-spire of sin and
doubt. How was Christian art to regain its ancient might but by such appropriation of
heretical power?
a60)
60)
Blake, 1825, Job, plate 13, God Appearing in a Whirlwind, British Museum,
London
English, late 13th cent., St. Peter from a Retable, Westminster Abbey,
London; + V detail
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For all Blake's "Gothic is living form," his art had no backward road. With the
personal fury of Goya and Beethoven, he had to launch Pascal into Revolutionary
transcendence. There is none of the anonymous refinement of cloister mysticism —
Westminster 1300 — with Richard Rolle of Hampole:
But fleschly lufe sal fare as dose the flowre in May,
And lastand be na mare than ane houre of a day,
And sythen syghe ful sare thar lust, thar pryde, thar play,
When thai er casten in kare til pyne that lastes ay…
Jesu es lufe that lastes ay, til Hym es owre langing;
Jesu the nyght turnes to the day, the dawying intil spryng.
Jesu, thynk on us now and ay, for The we halde our keyng;
Jesu, gyf us grace, as Thou wel may, to luf The withowten endyng.
61)
61a)
Raphael and School, 1518-19, Jacob's Dream, Loggia, Vatican
Blake, 1800-03, Jacob's Ladder, British Museum, London (video returns to
the Jacob's Dream of 61)
We can even understand Blake's admitting Giulio Romano, Raphael's chief helper
in the scenes of the Loggia, as his fourth art hero. These forms are still incised; the
famous capture of nature looks symbolic now; and what the scene shows is what Blake
was sure of: that the sleeper in moony Beulah is offered visions of the eternal stair. We
say "if Blake could have seen Giotto, Angelico, Botticelli"; but this Jacob's Dream gave
him what he required.
Raphael chanced on symbols, painting the Bible;
62)
Blake, 1827, Queen Katharine's Dream, National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C.; + V details
Blake searched all literature for images of his own symbolic themes. Here Shakespeare's
Queen Katharine, dying in detention, sees
a blessed Troupe
Invite me to a Banquet, whose bright faces
Cast a thousand beams upon me, like the sun…
It is not with but through the eye, as Los in Jerusalem
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…beheld the Divine Vision among the flames of the Furnaces;
Therefore he lived and breathed in hope…
(Jerusalem 62: 35-6)
So Blake, when his brother Robert died, saw the spirit rise from the body "clapping his
hands for joy." And thus his own death was described by Richmond:
Just before he died His countenance became fair — His eyes
Brighten'd and He burst out in singing of the things he saw in Heaven.
In truth He Died like a Saint.
63)
63a)
Fuseli, 1786-89, Titania and Bottom, Tate Gallery, London
Fuseli, 1793-94, Titania and Bottom, Kunsthaus, Zurich; first, video detail
Fuseli treats Shakespeare in another mode. His are illustrations, picturesque or
dramatic. It is a measure of Blake's isolation that in his life-search for co-workers he
found none nearer than this Swiss-English explorer of the grotesque and fanciful:
The only Man that e'er I knew
Who did not make me almost spew
Was Fuseli, he was both Turk and Jew.
And so, dear Christian friends, how do you do?
The artist who could say "Blake is damned good to steal from" had perception and
humor; and there is that story of the old Blake's joining the students at the Royal
Academy to sketch from the cast of the Laocoön, and Fuseli's saying: "What! you here,
Meesther Blake? We ought to come and learn of you, not you from us!" But what could
that irony have made of the Prophetic Books?
64)
64a)
64b)
Fuseli, 1780, Thetis Mourning over Achylles, Art Institute, Chicago;
+ V detail
George Romney, c. 1792, Witches Cave, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Blake, c. 1808, Satan Calling his Legions, detail, formerly Lord Leaconsfield
If we go back to a Fuseli drawing, Achilles mourned by Thetis, of 1780, the date
Blake engraved on his "Glad Day" (though ten years after), there is no doubt that the older
Swiss immigrant, already the stir of London and to influence David and Goya, helped
Blake to a whole vocabulary of Mannerist gestures. But such Storm-and-Stress
abstractions (with the related ink washes by Romney) end where Blake begins — their
theater, his Halls of Los in Golgonooza.
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It is hard to credit the obscurity of England's greatest living poet and artist. There
is the evening at Lady Caroline Lamb's, 1820, when Blake was invited
65)
65a)
65b)
65c)
Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1810, Viscount Castlereagh, National Portrait Gallery,
London
Blake, 1794, separate print from Urizen, plate 2, Enitharmon Floating at
Dawn with Infant Orc, British Museum, London; + video return to 62,
Blake, Queen Katharine's Dream, detail of Katharine
Again, Viscount Castlereagh, detail
Lawrence, 1819, Portrait of George IV, detail, Vatican Museum, Rome
with the courtly Sir Thomas Lawrence, who painted this portrait of Viscount Castlereagh,
English Foreign Secretary. Lady Charlotte Bury records:
Blake… an eccentric little artist… not a regular professional painter…
full of beautiful imaginations… one of those whose feelings are far
superior to his situation in life… I could not help contrasting this
humble artist with the great and powerful Sir Thomas Lawrence…
[Lawrence] looked at me several times whilst I was talking with Mr.
B., and I saw his lips curl with a sneer, as if he despised me for
conversing with so insignificant a person…
Later, at Linnell's urging, Lawrence bought and apparently treasured, among other
Blake, Queen Katharine's Dream. Who was truly powerful? The man who lived for his
vision, or the portrait flatterer of Castlereagh, of whom Byron had just written:
The intellectual eunuch Castlereagh
Cold-blooded, smooth-faced, placid miscreant!
Dabbling its sleek young hands in Erin's gore,
And thus for wider carnage taught to pant,
Transferr'd to gorge upon a sister shore,
The vulgarest tool that Tyranny could want…
Cobbling at manacles for all mankind…
As Blake had commented on Sir Joshua:
The Enquiry in England is not whether a man has Talents & Genius?
But whether he is Passive & Polite & a Virtuous Ass: & Obedient to
Noblemens Opinions in Art & Science. If he is; he is a Good Man: If
Not he must be Starved.
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66)
V66a)
66b)
66c)
66d)
Symbolic History
Samuel Palmer, c. 1826, A Hilly Scene, Tate Gallery, London
Palmer, 1830, Coming from Evening Church, detail, Tate Gallery, London
Palmer, c. 1826, Self-Portrait, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
Palmer, 1835, A Pastoral Scene, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
Blake, c. 1790-93, Marriage of Heaven and Hell (copy of 1794-5), Title
Page, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (video: detail only)
Blake, c. 1794 (copy c. 1818), Urizen, Title Page, detail, Book of Laws,
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
V66e)
In Blake's age, a group of young artists gathered around him. Palmer was the
genius among them, and the most possessed by Blake's vision. The little pictures he
painted at Shoreham before Blake's death change the phenomenal into imagination. As
Palmer quoted Blake on the vastness of space: "It is false, I walked the other evening to
the end of the earth, and touched the sky with my fingers." But Palmer, too, had to suffer
neglect, and he was not as strong as Blake, nor was his wife Blake's selfless Kate. His
career is a pathos of compromise. Perhaps the God-tie gives the clue. Palmer's
modernism is of art; Blake's of soul. It is typical that Palmer, who, seeing Blake in his
plain black suit among the swells at the Royal Academy, thought "How little you know
who is among you!" — that even Palmer prefaces his praise of Blake's sanity, genius, and
industry, with the proviso: "Without alluding to his writings, which are here not in
question." Palmer could not face the prophetic books without quaking at Blake's
heresies: "Misled by erroneous spirits… he suffered fancy to trespass within sacred
precincts."
And Linnell, who commissioned Blake for the Dante drawings and engravings,
wrote: "With all admiration… it must be confessed that he said many things tending to
the corruption of Christian morals…"
a67)
67)
67a)
Blake, 1820, Woodcut # 11 for Virgil's First Eclogue (Thornton), British
Museum, London
Blake, 1820, Same, #3, proof of 1st state, British Museum
Constable, 1813-14, Page from a sketch book, #1, Victoria and Albert
Museum, London
Among Blake's works, those that most inspired Palmer (or Linnell and Calvert, for
that matter) were the 1820 woodcuts for Thornton's Virgil, (another commercial disaster),
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Symbolic History
and surely, their alchemizing of nature is more than magical. For Palmer, they were pictures only, freed of the apostolic; though old Thenot, glad under the boughs of
fruitfulness against young Colinet, mournful under the oak of error, is, like all Blake,
mystically personal. Yet how romantically full, the nature through which his threefold
vision looks — like a Constable, of which he said: "Why this is not drawing, but inspiration." To which Constable: "I meant it for drawing."
68)
Giovanni di Paolo, 1455-60, St. Nicholas of Tolentino Saving a Ship,
Museum of Art (Johnson Collection), Philadelphia; first, video detail
When Blake rebelled from the visual as model — "Natural objects always did and
do weaken, deaded, and obliterate imagination in me" — he quoted Milton, preferring
"devout prayer for the hallowed fire" to "Memory and her Siren Daughters."
The historical shift Vasari had praised, from Gothic sharpness, as in this Giovanni
di Paolo storm at sea,
69)
69a)
Giorgione, Palma Vecchio, etc., c. 1510, Storm Miracle, Scuola di San Marco,
Venice (video: detail only)
Blake, c. 1824-26, Dante, plate 2 (Hell ii, 140), Dante and Virgil enter an oak
forest, Tate Gallery, London
to the cloudy bondage of the phenomenal net Blake ascribed to the malice of the
Venetians — and indeed this miracle of Venice saved from a ship of demons on a stormy
night, which Giorgione left for Palma and others to finish, is the first of its kind — Blake
saw that shift as tied to the deceits which, from the infernal trinity of Bacon, Newton, and
Locke, had spread oak groves and Druid temples over the Earth,
mocking God [he writes] & Eternal Life, & in Public Collusion calling
themselves Deists, Worshipping the Maternal Humanity, calling it
Nature and Natural Religion…
70)
Blake, 1804-05 (1815 copy), Milton, plate 42, Albion and Jerusalem on the
Rock of Ages, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; with video details
Music:
Haydn, 1796-98, The Creation, opening, Vanguard VRS 471/2
Yet we are struck again how awesomely Blake carries natural bodies, rock, sea,
and sky, across into symbol; what earth-life fills this eagle of prey transformed to the
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Symbolic History
Eagle of Genius ("lift up thy head!") as he wakes Albion and Jerusalem from their sleep
on the Rock of Ages (the actual sleep of History); and how the long slip of light on the
Sea of Time and Space unfolds space itself, with all its mood and longing: —
71)
Schinkel, 1803, View of Trieste, formerly Kronprinzenpalais, Berlin;
+ V detail
almost as in this Schinkel, or later in Courbet and Böcklin — or in the musical chaos shot
through with searching rays which Haydn's Creation bequeathed to Beethoven and
Wagner.
(fade Creation)
Once Cartesian reason had precipitated Pascalian paradox, there seemed two
directions mind could take: One: to forge a dialectic which, like calculus, might embrace
the exhibited antinomies in organic reaffirmation (Leibniz, Hegel, Whitehead). It was for
being of this camp that Wordsworth, Blake's "only poet of the age," was also called by
him "a landscape painter": "I see in Wordsworth the Natural Man rising up against the
Spiritual Man."
a2nd 70)
Blake, 1794, Europe, A Prophecy, Frontispiece, The Ancient of Days
(with compasses), Sir Geoffrey Keynes
For 2nd 70) Blake, c. 1804, Milton (Rinder uncolored), plate 38, detail of Albion
and Jerusalem on the Rock of Ages
The second, the Pascalian way — reverting to our disproportion and incapacity —
must strip the temporal for saving miracle: Kierkegaard's Christ in the moment now.
Yet no sooner are the possibilities formulated than they prove inadequate — any
polar field admitting of infinite life-solutions. Thus Blake, who abandons nature and
Cartesian reason, fires personal Christianity with more than Transcendental daring. In
this, he leaps at once backward and forward from the landscape men:
…in your own Bosom you bear your Heaven
And Earth, & all you behold, though it appears Without it is Within
In your Imagination of which this World of Mortality is but a Shadow.
For 2nd 71) Schinkel, 1815, Gothic Church on a Rock by the Sea, National Gallery,
Berlin; video: detail only
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2nd 71a)
Blake, 1804-20, Jerusalem (copy E), plate 28, detail, Vala and
Jerusalem in the Lily, Mellon Collection, Yale Center
No doubt the Faustian Germany of Hegel, Beethoven, Hölderlin and the rest
became the center of the landscape rapture — of the romantic irradiation of time. Even
Goethe's break with Newton was to rear a science of organic interplay, salvaging what
Blake would discard. As with Spinoza and Leibniz against Pascal, we cannot tell which
was the forward motion. At least Germany for a while seemed kinder to the creative. It
is curious that the strongest recognition of the old Blake came from a traveling German,
Götzenberger. He had seen many men of talent in England, he said, "but only three of
Genius, Coleridge, Flaxman, and Blake, and of these Blake was the greatest."
Va72)
72)
72a)
V72b)
Thomas Girtin, c. 1797, The Rocking Stone, Tate, London; video: detail
only
Girtin, c. 1802, Fells Near Bolton, watercolor, T. Girtin, Esq.
John Varley, c. 1810(?), Mountain Lake: Afterglow, watercolor, Victoria
and Albert Museum, London
Blake, 1797-1807, Vala (later, The Four Zoas), MS., plate 86, pencil and
crayon of Vala as a nude, British Museum, London
Of English painters, perhaps Girtin, in his early watercolors, best suggests the
solemn affinity of soul with a nature of "huge and mighty forms" which Wordsworth
enshrined in The Prelude and in "Tintern Abbey":
Until the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things…
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
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Symbolic History
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things…
Blake would not have overlooked that both passages close with the word "things"; both
seat godhead in nature;
Va73)
John Constable, c. 1825, Clouds over Branch Hill Pond, Hampstead Heath,
with a boy sitting on a bank, Tate Gallery, London
Constable, 1821-22, Streaming sun over Branch Hill Pond, Hampstead
Heath, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Blake, 1821, from Taylor's De Antro Nympherum, Odysseus Throwing the
Girdle, National Trust, Arlington Court
Detail of 73, Sunlit Branch Hill Pond
Blake, c. 1805, God Blessing the Day, Private Collection, Great Britain;
video: was detail, now revised to whole
Blake, 1804-18, Rinder Jerusalem, plate 25: Dominion of Vala, Rahab, and
Tirzah over the fallen Man; video first returns to 33, detail of Vala Throned
on a Sunflower [so revised. 1995]
Again, Branch Hill Pond, the sun-rayed central section; which video prefaces with a cloud-detail and closer cloud-detail of Va73)
73)
73a)
73b)
73c)
73d)
73e)
as Whitehead would say of The Prelude (and it is true of this Constable as well), show
nature "as exhibiting entwined prehensive unities, each suffused with modal presences of
others…"
Thus Coleridge:
Ah! slowly sink
Behind the western ridge, thou glorious sun!
Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb
Ye purple heath-flowers! richlier burn, ye clouds!
Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves!
And kindle, thou blue Ocean!
But when Blake sees "the real and eternal World of which this Vegetable Universe
is but a faint shadow," he sees all objects as human forms. Where Constable shows the
sun "as a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea," Blake cries:
O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying
Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty.
June 1996
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To paint landscape as real is Deism for Blake, enthrones Vala, emanation of Emotion
(Luvah) —
A creation that groans, living on Death,
Where Fish & Bird & Beast & Man & Tree & Metal & Stone
Live by Devouring —
Wordsworth: "Knowing that Nature never did betray/ The heart that loved her"; and
Coleridge: "I shall know/ That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure."
As if Chaos itself, in Haydn's Creation, has summoned from its depths the musical
ecstasy of Light:
Music:
a74)
b74)
Vc74)
74)
Haydn's Creation, continued, the phrase: "Und es war Licht"
(fade)
C.D. Friedrich, 1808, Morning Mist in the Mountains, Museum,
Rudolstadt; where videos have previewed 74: Mist in the Riesengebirge
[revised 1995]
Constable, 1821, Cloud Study, Horizon of Trees, London, Royal Academy;
where video has previewed b76, Cirrus Clouds, Victoria and Albert Museum,
London [revised 1995]
Friedrich, 1823, Lone Tree, Staatliche Museen, Berlin
Friedrich, Mist in the Riesengebirge, Neue Pinakothek, München
The paradox of the Romantic landscape is that where the old dimensional absolute
becomes in one sense merely a veil, it is a veil of working power — the huge sea of mist
Wordsworth saw from Snowdon,
The perfect image of a mighty Mind,
Of one that feeds upon infinity,
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Symbolic History
Which Wordsworth, in orthodox revisions, would later tone down.
misread The Recluse —
Blake had not
All strength, all terror, single or in bands.
That ever was put forth in personal Form —
Jehovah — with his thunder & the choir
Of shouting Angels & the empyreal thrones —
I pass them unalarm'd —
to cry out: "Does Mr. Wordsworth think his mind can surpass Jehovah?"
For the depiction of nature as living spirit, Caspar David Friedrich, north German
contemporary of Beethoven, looms over the century. So at the close of Beethoven's last
sonata, the solid soars into light and air.
Music:
75)
Beethoven, 1822, Sonata #32, Opus 111, near close, Seraphim IC6066
C.D. Friedrich, c. 1823, Drifting Clouds and Pool, Kunsthalle, Hamburg
— Friedrich's Pool under rising mist, such a reminder as Wordsworth's in The Prelude,
where "the hiding-places of [our] power seem open."
V75a)
Va76)
b76)
76)
Friedrich, 1825-30, Bohemian Landscape, Gemäldegalerie, Stuttgart
Friedrich, c. 1835, Twilight, Riesengebirge, National Gallery, Berlin
Constable, c. 1821-22, Study of Cirrus Clouds, Victoria and Albert Museum,
London [originally other Friedrichs; revised, as here, 1996]
Friedrich, 1824, Evening Sky, Kunsthalle, Mannheim
Constable and Turner painted views of nothing but sky; but their clouds are
actual, those of Friedrich, God-signs. As his wife said: "On the day he is painting air, he
may not be spoken to."
(close of Beethoven)
77)
V77a)
June 1996
Blake, 1795, Newton, Tate Gallery, London
Blake, 1825-27, Dante, plate 96, Paradise XXV: Saints Peter, James, and
John the Evangelist with Dante and Beatrice, British Museum, London
Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
As Plotinus said: "Cut away everything." And Christ: "If thy right hand offend
against thee, cut it off."
In conceiving Newton as sterile Urizen seated by the vegetative polyp under the
Sea of Time and Space to compass the abstract ratio of the five senses, Blake turned from
the art of irradiated Space. The synthesis most of the 19th century aspired to became for
him a delusion. "The natural world must be consumed" — one of Blake's convictions
which Crabb Robinson (as if he had never heard of the Bible) called "unintelligible."
a78)
Blake, 1825-27, Dante, plate 1, Inferno I: Dante, Virgil, Beasts, National
Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Blake, 1825-27, Dante, plate 9, Inferno V: Minos and the Lustful,
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Blake, 1825-27, Dante, plate 35, Inferno XIX: The Simoniac Pope, Tate
Gallery, London (video: upper detail only)
Vb78)
78)
Blake's universe was more perilous. As he had written Butts in 1802:
Temptations are on the right hand & left; behind, the sea of time and
space roars & follows swiftly; he who keeps not right onward is lost, &
if our footsteps slide in clay how can we do otherwise than fear and
tremble.
That Ulro was ever present — not the orthodox Hell of a punitive Nobodaddy he
reclaimed from Dante the last two years of his life.
Who knows, if Mozart had lived, he might have paralleled that realm. As for
Beethoven, only in the Grosse Fuge did he pierce radiant nature to the fission of such a
flaming core.
Music:
79)
Beethoven, 1825, Grosse Fuge, fierce theme in coda, Columbia
M5L-277 (with softer succession to slide 79)
Blake, 1825-27, Dante, plate 77, Purgatory ix: Lucia Carries Dante in his
Sleep, Fogg Museum, Harvard; + V detail
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Symbolic History
Gleaming through Purgatory, Blake sees Beulah:
a soft Moony Universe, feminine, lovely,
Pure, mild & Gentle, given in mercy to those who sleep…
80)
(Four Zoas I)
Blake, 1825-27, Dante, plate 90, Paradise xiv: Dante Adores the Flaming
Christ, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; first, video details, below
and above
In Paradise, the fire image of Christ becomes for Blake the ecstatic sacrifice in
every moment of simultaneous vision:
Soon all around the Heavens burnt with flaming fires,
And Urizen and Luvah and Tharmas and Urthona arose into
Albion's Bosom. Then Albion stood before Jesus in the Clouds
Of Heaven, Fourfold among the Visions of God in Eternity.
80+1)
Blake, c. 1795, Glad Day, color print, British Museum, London
Shakespeare:
Night candles are burnt out, and Jocund Day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.
Blake:
For… Rivers & Mountains
Are also Men; every thing is Human, mighty! sublime!
In every bosom a Universe expands, as wings
Let down at will around, and call'd the Universal Tent.
(Jerusalem 38)
Christian history telescoped to that eternal coming:
And suddenly there was with the angels a multitude of the heavenly
host praising God and saying:
Arise and drink your bliss, for every thing that lives is holy!
June 1996
Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight
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�
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Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound
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Blake : Fire-Fugue of Delight, Symbolic History, Part 28
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
29.
Faust:
Creative War of Spirit
a1) Peter von Cornelius, 1816, Faust and Mephisto on the Rabenstein, Graphische
Sammlung, Kunstmuseum, Düsseldorf
1) William Blake, c. 1808, Satan Calling up his Legions, formerly Lord Leaconfield
1a) Same, upper detail
Music: Beethoven, 1823, Finale of Ninth Symphony (opening), Col. SL-165
Y7 30051 (Walter)
The heroic vindications of 1800 are three: of Faust, of this Lucifer, of
Prometheus. "Faust," said Burckhardt, "is a genuine myth, a great primordial
image." But since the Renaissance, the Faust story had been waiting its time and
place; as the protomyth of Satan had waited for Milton or, as here, for the
culminant upheaval of Blake. The wave that lifts these actions — as on the Finale
search of Beethoven's Ninth — is a Revolutionary reversal by which a defiance
once outlawed beckons to new heaven and earth. (fade Ninth) So Blake shows
Milton's Archangel — Milton "of the devil's party without knowing it" — rousing
our Antediluvian powers (Energy the only life and Reason its outward bound)
from the fiery hell to which creed and law have consigned them:
The whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and
holy, whereas it now appears finite and corrupt.
At the same time, Lessing, and then Goethe, veered hell-compacted Faust from
self-destroying to self-saved.
2)
2a)
Goya, c. 1815(?), Prometheus, Aquatint, 1st state, Fine Arts, Boston
Same, upper detail
(Ninth up, search motif)
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Prometheus, too, had been seized on by Goethe in the Storm and Stress
1770s of his youth, when he took up the Faust legend he would work at for sixty
years (Prometheus to Zeus):
Here I sit and fashion mortals
After my image,
A race of men to be as I am,
To suffer and to weep,
To relish, to enjoy;
And to despise as I do
You and yours — (CGB)
Und dein nicht zu achten;
Wie ich!
A conception Goya, having stood the course of Revolution and Napoleonic war,
endowed, about 1815, with its giant ambiguity of threat and promise — the same
half-god Shelley would unbind and raise to cloud-ecstasy:
(Scherzo phrase)
To defy power, which seems omnipotent…
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent…
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.
a3)
3)
3a)
C.D. Friedrich, c. 1818, Woman at a Window, Staatliche Museen, Berlin
Double: [A] a3, and [B] P.O. Runge, 1809-10, Large Morning, detail,
Hamburg
Double: Detail of both the above (video does not use 3, only 3a)
(Adagio phrase)
But Shelley's rhetoric is far from the immediacy of Goethe's Faust, which
opens at its center to a love tender as the Beethoven adagio (fade Ninth), simple as
Friedrich's girl at a window — Gretchen: "For him only/ I look from the
window" — "Nach ihm nur schau ich/ Zum Fenster hinaus"; present, as when she
plucks the petals, "Er liebt mich — Liebt mich nicht"; yet ungraspable as the form
Faust had seen in the witch's mirror (as the Helen who melts to a mist which
carries him forward); it is the Gretchen he leaves in prison tied to guilt and loss,
her wrenching pain-prayer:
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Ach neige/ Du Schmerzenreiche/ Dein Antlitz gnädig meiner
Not!
later agleam — like Runge's Morning:
Neige, neige,/ Du Ohnegleiche/ … Dein Antlitz gnädig
meinem Glück!
(Again Ninth: search toward Hymn of Joy)
That Gretchen waits
a4)
b4)
4)
Double: [A] Caspar David Friedrich, c. 1818, Woman before the Sunset,
Kunsthalle, Hamburg, and [B] 4: Caspar David Friedrich, c. 1818, Mountain
Climber over Fog, Kunsthalle, Hamburg
Eugene Delacroix, c. 1827, Gretchen tempted in Church, Dessins, Louvre, Paris
Caspar David Friedrich, Mountain Climber, Hamburg
for Faust to return from Wood and Cave — Faust, who has there framed his
image against hers, as Friedrich opposed this climber on the last rock over a sea
of fog, to those studies of his own bride yearning at the window or across fields
to the sunset: (fade Ninth) Faust a cataract hurled from crag to crag (as Hölderlin
would take it up: "von Klippe/ Zu Klippe geworfen,/ Jahrlang ins Ungewisse hinab");
Gretchen an alpine cottage which he, hated of god, der Gottverhaßte, must hurl
into the abyss. No wonder imprisoned Gretchen will shudder at him, fiend
attended: "Heinrich, mir graut's vor dir."
And yet, as Goethe confessed, he could not have borne to write sheer
tragedy. That intolerable pain must fire regeneration. Thus in Hegel only
Philosophy sustains the pathos of history, only the knowledge that Reason
"makes war on itself — consumes its own existence, but in this very destruction
works up that existence to a new form…" (Ninth, Hymn of Joy, instrumental) We
know Friedrich's haunted climber looks toward death and transfiguration.
a5) J. Martin, 1817, The Bard, Newcastle-upon-Tyne; + V details, or Vb5, double
5) Isabey, 1805, Frontispiece, "Poems of Ossian," Bibl. Nat., Paris; + V detail
5a) F.P.S. Gerard, c. 1811, Ossian on the Shore (oil variant of the Isabey),
Kunsthalle, Hamburg
(fade Ninth)
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Everywhere the spirit of storm shook the old moorings. It had begun in
the 1750s; Gray had blown it up in the Pindaric passion of a Welsh Bard:
Ruin seize thee, ruthless King!
Confusion on thy banners wait …
In 1760 Macpherson published what he called translations from the old Gaelic of
Ossian; so a rant too cloudy for anything but a translation (though indeed it was
Macpherson's own) swept from the Scotch Highlands over England and all
Europe, reverberating in long echoes from Blake to Frankenstein, from Werther
to Hölderlin's Hyperion — through Beethoven, of course; even in France, where
the Faustian action was mostly political, it fueled the cause of freedom. Through
the neo-classic coldness of French Empire, Ossian spills his raptures, as he
invokes the heroes of war.
It is a phase of that anomaly by which the more and more actual seizure
on the forces of the world moves for its Hynm of Joy further and higher,
Music:
6)
6a)
6b)
6c)
Hymn of Joy, instrumental statement continued
K.F. Schinkel, c. 1815(?), Ideal Landscape, Nat. Gal., Berlin; + V detail, left
Same, detail, right foreground
Swiss, late Gothic, end of 15th cent. (orig. 13th cent.), Aigle Castle
Again, Schinkel, Ideal Landscape (detail, above)
into a kind of irradiated and transcendental dream, remote as this SchillerBeethoven "All men shall be brothers" from the 1823 Europe of Holy Alliance and
reaction. Schinkel, painter-architect, turns a Claude landscape to a German
vision, where a deer strays and a dove flies over boys who will shoot only at a
target.
It is like the castle somewhere up from the Aegean, where Faust and
Helen meet in Part II ("The God-deceived incur no blame") — the sign of their
union Helen's migration from classical hexameters to the Gothic mystery of
rhyme:
Helen:
How can I speak with that delicious art?
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Faust:
To learn is easy; it springs from the heart…
The soul sees nothing before or after this;
The moment, the moment only…
(Helen closes) is our bliss. (CGB)
So the castle dissolves to an Arcadian paradise, where the short-lived
Byron-Euphorion is born.
(fade Ninth)
a7)
Delacroix, c. 1826, Mephisto Over City, detail, Faust Illustrations
7)
Franz Klein, Beethoven Life Mask, 1812
7a &7b) Michelangelo, 1513-16, Heroic Captive, torso, then head, Louvre, Paris;
with video return to 7, Beethoven Life Mask
The original Faust had been thrown down by the "fiendful fortune" of all
who "practice more than heavenly power permits." But what does heaven
permit? It is not inscribed in the stars. (Ninth: search resumed, then voice) For the
new Prometheus, it can only be felt out by the daring of excess — as the
Beethoven of this 1812 life-mask (already shaking his fist at the sky) had to
stretch the symphony of Haydn and Mozart to vocal imperative. What sparks
off divinity has no fulfillment but attempted godhead. The dilemma is
suspended in Faust from the Prologue in Heaven —
Man must err as long as he strives —
Es irrt der Mensch, solang' er strebt —
to the last scene:
Wer immer strebend sich bemüht,
Den können wir erlösen —
Who always pains himself to strive,
That one we can
redeem. (CGB)
Striving destroys and creates — as in Blake, Hegel, Nietzsche. Against the
incapacity of sin-fallen man, Pico's self-maker had foreshadowed a new morality
of volitional risk — that Western venture which has crested in the Faust-wave.
(fade Hymn of Joy)
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8)
Symbolic History
Danubian, c. 5500 B.C., stone "Fish-Mouth Man," Lepenski Vir, Yugoslavia
Civilization must have been a Faustian enterprise from the start. When
the fish-mouth man of the Danube Iron Gate hammered himself, before five
thousand B.C. into the first free-standing stone monument of the human family,
he recorded such a daring as the plowing up and seeding of mother earth which
burned its way into the Oedipus myth; or the comparable assault on heaven for
which the Giants were thrown down.
9)
Egyptian, c. 2660 B.C. (Dynasty III), Step Pyramid and Temple, Sakkara
And when the step pyramids and papyrus temples rose 4600 years ago
over the valley of the Nile, a raid had been made on the kingdom of death surely
as great as that of the Babylonian Gilgamesh, pathfinder for saviour heroes of
how many faces, who went down (as Faust to the Mothers, stamping) to spoil
and harrow hell.
10)
10a)
Aegean (Thera), 16th cent. B.C., ships off a coast (Libya?), from Santorin, Nat.
Mus., Athens
Same, detail of upper left
And when that Hero would don the mask of Satanic compact, where
could he venture but in the old field of overweening and disaster? It had shaped
the myths Homer received from Achaian conquerors — that epos of ruinous
assault on an ancient city of the Gods — as in this twenty-foot Theran fresco of
ships deployed off a coast whose flora and fauna suggest Africa. Kazantzakis
had died before it was uncovered, but his Faust-Odysseus divines such an action.
The earthquake that destroyed that Atlantis
11)
Mycenean, 16th cent. B.C., Gold Mask, called Agamemnon, Nat. Mus., Athens
must have colored mythic fact — the gloomy pride and death-disaster which
made Schliemann call this Mycenean mask of hammered gold, from 300 years
before the Trojan War, the mask of Agamemnon, Aeschylus' type of hybris and
Ate: "But his unbridled heart drove him on to outrage, keen to sacrifice his
child." How near and far, Faust's curse on Hope, Faith, and Patience.
12)
Attic (Vulci), c. 475 B.C., Odysseus and the Sirens, Brit. Mus., London
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So the tragic question was seeded: to which end Arete will lead, Iliadic
ruin; Odyssean homecoming — Odysseus, who stopped the ears of his sailors
with wax, but bound himself to the mast to hear the Sirens' song (like Faust, to
experience all good and evil: "der Erde Weh, der Erde Glück zu tragen"); but
Odysseus brought it off, with Athena's aid, refurbishing his kingly line — a feat
of earth-management Goethe's dying hero dreams of:
… ein paradiesisch Land —
A land like paradise, won from the sea:
To tread that free ground with a people free. (CGB)
13)
Attic Krater (Pan Painter), c. 470 B.C., Artemis Kills Acteon, Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston
On the other side are the luckless aspirers — Acteon struck by Artemis'
revenge and the fury of his own hounds. As if the Iliad and the Odyssey —
destructive wrath and skilful homecoming — had defined forever the polar field
of searching fable: Ulysses in Dante banned to the Hell camp, infinite seeker
drowned; while Faust, who had begun there (Marlowe: "Mountains and hills
come, come and fall on me/ And hide me from the heavy wrath of God") finds
the redemptive shore: (CGB)
In his darkest urges, a good man
Will know and grope his way to the right course —
Ein guter Mensch, in seinem dunklen Drange
Ist sich des rechten Weges wohl bewußt.
14)
Roman, c. 20 B.C., detail of armor, Prima Porta Augustus, Vatican, Rome
(CGB '86)
Now the armored breast of Augustus (like Virgil's poem) fuses the
twofold theme: homecoming rule of the war-mastered earth; so the whole
Hegelian task of the Christian West seems foreshadowed, though in weighty
outwardness, as if, beyond the armor, we did not know what the breast
contained — hollow as the state of Faust's threatened Roman Kaiser.
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15)
15a)
Symbolic History
South German, 11th cent., The Sin of Adam and Eve, bronze door relief,
Augsburg (CGB '59); video: detail only
North Italian, c. 1100-25, Expulsion from Paradise, bronze door relief, S. Zeno,
Verona (CGB '59)
If what it held was soul-hunger, it devoured doctrine with a vengeance —
Dark Age fallen man, prayer- and faith-addicted (the Sin of the Augsburg doors).
From that ascetic vault ("Verfluchtes dumpfes Mauerloch," damned musty hole in
the wall; and "Das is deine Welt! das Heißt eine Welt!" that's your world; they call
that a world) Faust is in rebellion. Yet every attempt hurls him back to that
ground. From the grim Earth Spirit he wriggles like a worm ("Ein furchtsam
weggekrümmter Wurm"), and it is the Easter miracle ("In memory only,
reconsidered passion") that saves him from suicide.
Die Träne quillt, die Erde hat mich wieder!
He returns to earth, but not to the faith-fold. "Entbehren sollst du!
entbehren!" — "Renounce, renounce, is all they say."
16)
sollst
Nicholas of Verdun, 1180, Harrowing of Hell, Klosterneuburg Altar, near
Vienna; video: detail only
That was hardly just, any more than Nietzsche would be, to his Christian
launching. For Christ had broken hell and fetched Adam and Eve for the
ultimate ecstasy of glorified flesh.
Such upward daring in Gothic — in Leonin and Perotin,
Music:
Perotin, c. 1200, Sederunt, close of 1st Quadruplum, (Deller)
Vanguard HM 1 SD
in this Nicholas of Verdun enamel, or in Joachim's Third Kingdom — had sowed
the seed (as Goethe knew, with his heaven-close)
17)
17a)
Delacroix, 1830, Liberty leading the People, Louvre, Paris; + V detail
Same, detail of Liberty and corpses; video: corpses only
of all later harvests of utopian hope: Delacroix.
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Music:
Symbolic History
Berlioz, 1834, close of Harold in Italy, RCA-V LSC-2228
What we have long been tracing is the filling in of the temporal and earthly
chords (here Berlioz) of that claim, its Machiavellian, Hegelian, then Marxist
acceptance of ingredient negation, of the devil's pact which Hegel calls the
cunning of Reason, that it alienates itself in the passionate work of heroes who
must break the old law:
The idea pays the penalty of determinate existence and
corruptibility, not from itself, but from the passions of
individuals.
(end Berlioz)
In this Revolutionary transformation of the harrowing of hell,
18)
18a)
Rembrandt, 1653, Faust in his Study, etching, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Same, central detail
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Faust plays a mythic role. Midway between his origins and Goethe, he was
etched by Rembrandt, as he faces the sign of the Macrocosm, an episode neither
in the Faust Book nor in Marlowe. Where did it arise in the folk womb of Faust's
unfolding? And the sign, copied from a magic amulet Rembrandt knew, the
shadowy mother, the mirror she holds, are they cabala truth, or Goethe's
Schauspiel: what a show, but only a show. Between Rembrandt's truth-seeker
and the ironist in Goethe's vaulted room, what bitter lees have been drunk:
Habe nun, ach! Philosophie,
Juristerei und Medicin,
Und leider auch Theologie
Durchaus studiert, mit heißem Bemühn.
Da steh' ich nun, ich armer Tor!
Und bin so klug als wie zuvor… —
A disillusion the Transcendental had to transcend.
19)
Ottonian (Reichenau), c. 1000, Transfiguration, Gospels of Otto III, Royal Lib.,
Munich
The Faust-myth had arisen in the German soul. With Goethe it returns to
the matrix which even from 1000 had mysteriously charged the union of spirit
and nature: this Reichenauer Transfiguration, where God-colors in the sky call
flower-colors from the rock ground: that "mystic harvest of the fields of God"
brightening toward Wolfram's metaphor of dawn: "Its claws strike through the
clouds; with power it lifts up from the gray." — "Sîne klâwen durh die wolken sint
geslagen,/ er stîget ûf mit grôzer kraft."
20)
Altdorfer, 1529, Victory of Alexander, detail, Alte Pinakothek, Munich
In the vast expatiation of Renaissance: Altdorfer's battle-vista points to
Faust's rapture of following the sinking sun:
Schon tut das Meer sich mit erwärmten Buchten
Vor den erstaunten Augen auf…
Ich eile fort, ihr ew'ges Licht zu trinken…
Already ocean with its sun-warmed bays
Spreads from the hills to my astonished sight…
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And soul spreads wings to drink the eternal light…
(CGB)
It is Goethe's genius to have preserved in Faust, as from the 1500 fable,
Altdorfer's Renaissance discovery — yet joined with the romantic longing of
1800, to transcend that very phenomenology.
21)
21a)
21b)
V21c)
Friedrich, c. 1812(?), Two men by the sea at moonrise, Nat. Gallery, Berlin
Friedrich, 1830-35, A man and a woman contemplating the moon, detail, Nat.
Gallery, Berlin
Friedrich, 1807-08, Top half of Cross in the Mountains, Dresden Gallery
Detail of 21: Friedrich, Men at Moonrise
Music:
Beethoven, 1825, Cavatina: Adagio (opening), Quartet No. 13 in BFlat Major, Op. 130; Columbia M5L 277
Such yearning is distilled by Friedrich, whose pantheistic landscapes
Goethe admired: this moonrise sky a cathedral of light for the almost
disembodied soul; so by Beethoven's last slow movements, or by Goethe's "Selige
Sehnsucht," written (incredibly) the night his wife Christiane died: (three of the
five stanzas, translated by CGB)
From its woven bed of shadows
Mere enclosure falls away:
Love spreads new wings to the meadows
Of another mating play.
Tireless, upward; spaces dwindle;
Nothing hems declared desire;
God is light and light will kindle,
And the moth wings leap in fire.
Know, until you learn to weave
Such flame-dying into breath,
Everywhere you haunt the grave
Of the shadowed earth.
Und solang du das nicht hast,
Dieses: Stirb und Werde!
Bist du nur ein trüber Gast
Auf der dunklen Erde.
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In that pool of world-spirit, Faust reached the goal of Burckhardt's
Primordial.
(fade Beethoven Cavatina)
22)
22a)
J.G. Schadow, 1816, Goethe Life Mask (at age 67)
Goethe, c. 1780, Silhouette before a bust
The crucible was the Goethe of this 1816 life-mask. Poet and artist,
statesman, scientist, man of passion and of formal control, nearing 70 but with a
last consuming love for a young girl before him — he would have doubted being
paired with Beethoven, whose admiration he, always struggling for balance,
never quite returned. Mozart had been his younger contemporary and chosen
composer:
Music:
Mozart, 1787, Don Giovanni, Close of Act I, from London A-4406
the only man, he said, who could have set Faust — who indeed had done as
much in Don Giovanni. But that was of Part I. Neither in its damnation nor in
Mozart is the cresting of our Faust-wave.
It was as if Goethe had lived two lives. In 1770, at Beethoven's birth,
a23)
23)
23a)
Franco-German end of 13th cent., Prince of this World, Dom-Museum,
Strasbourg (CGB '59); video: top detail only
Double: [A] a23 (CGB '59); and [B] Houdon, c. 1777, Voltaire in Age, Louvre,
Paris
Single of 23B, Voltaire, upper detail
he was already a known poet, in Straßburg, celebrating German Gothic and
fomenting Storm and Stress. The smiling devil-prince from the Cathedral there
might be a forestudy for his own jester Mephistopheles, as he tempts Faust's
scholar to the lecheries of medicine, flirts with gossip Martha, bawdies with
witches and jokes his way through everything. But Goethe's joker did not simply
step from the Strasbourg façade. That Medieval tempter was joyfully innocent.
Whereas Goethe's Mephistopheles is as old and worldly-wise as Houdon's
Voltaire. It is in the aging of the smile, from Gothic delight to the ironic
rationalities of the author of Candide, that we feel the conscious weight of
history against which Revolutionary renewal — Blake's "happy, happy Love!
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free as the mountain wind!" — had to pit itself. As Tolstoi's Prince Andrei would
never live down his rationalist Voltaire father, so Faust is saddled to the end with
the grin of denial Gretchen abhors, that Ewig-Leere, Eternal-Empty, which mocks
his blind age with a pun on Graben and Grave.
(end Don Giovanni Act I)
Where Goethe transcends Mozart, is not in carrying that irony,
24)
24a)
Blake, 1785-90, Oberon, Titania, and Puck, Tate Gallery, London
Blake, 1793-95, Song of Los, plate 5, Oberon and Titania in Lilies, British
Museum; video: detail only
but in kicking off from it, into the transcendental. Or had The Magic Flute, like
early Blake, hinted at that too?
Music:
Mozart, 1791, Magic Flute, close of the Water Test, from Deutsche
Gramnophon 2709-017
(fade)
Though even vision bore the weight of history.
25)
Baldung Grien, 1514, Witches' Sabbath, drawing, Albertina, Vienna; video:
detail only
Goethe's witches are not those overflows of Gothic force Baldung Grien vitalized
in the time of the original Faust, when English Skelton was carousing with Elinor
Rumming:
Her loathly lere
Is nothing clear,
But ugly of cheer,
Droopy and drowsy,
Scurvy and lowsy,
Her face all bowsy,
Comely crinkled,
Wondrously wrinkled,
Like a roast pig's ear,
Bristled with hair…
a26)
26)
Jacob de Gheyn II, 1600, Witches' Sabbath, Ashmolean, Oxford, detail
Whole of same drawing
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Nor Jacob de Gheyn's more lurid witches of the time of Macbeth, a play
Goethe was reading those same years at Strasbourg, guided to Shakespeare by
Herder: cave, cat, bat, poisoned entrails and all. But witches had been alive in
1600, as the poet Fairfax wrote when his children were possessed, or as
Massachusetts Bay would painfully record. Hardly in tourist Rome two
centuries later, when Goethe sketched his Witch's Kitchen:
Au! Au! Au! Au!
Verdammtes Tier! Verfluchte Sau!
Versäumst den Kessel, versengst die Frau!
Verfluchtes Tier!
27)
Van Wynan (Ascanius), Dutch, c. 1710(?), Temptation of St. Anthony, Gallery,
Dublin (CGB '74); + V detail (to be added 1996)
He had to revive all that, from what had gone interplanetary and remote,
as in this Dutch fantasy after 1700. Enlightened Faust objects to the whole affair:
"this crazy sorcery goes against the grain … Haven't you found any other
balsam?" But the apes roll the gleaming globe of the world, Faust looks in the
magic mirror, and rejuvenation goes forward:
This drink in your belly,
You'll see Greek Helen in every filly.
28)
28a)
(CGB)
Goya, 1797-98, Witches' Sabbath, Fund. Lázaro, Madrid
Goya, 1797-98, Pretty Teacher, etching, Caprichos 68, Prado, Madrid
It is Goya, of the same time, who confronts the same task — that of Burns
in "Tam O'Shanter," with its "haunted kirk," "Auld Nick in shape o' beast,"
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Warlocks and witches in a dance…
Satan glowered and fidged fu' fain,
And hotched and blew wi' might and main;
or later of Hawthorne — of all who artfully summon the lost supernatural from
the depths: so Goethe's Walpurgis Night, with its old witch, like a split tree, with
"ungeheures Loch" — conscious revival rousing the unconscious:
Wer heute sich nicht heben kann,
Ist ewig ein verlorner Mann.
29)
29a)
29b)
Goethe, 1787, The Palatine, drawing, Goethe Museum, Weimar
Goethe, 1787, The Phlegraean Plain, colored drawing, same ('96 replacing
Claude drawing)
Double: [A] Goethe, 1787-88, Vesuvius in Eruption, ink and water-color; and
[B] detail of 29, The Palatine; both Goethe Museum
But the Goethe who tangled with the Middle Ages in Strasbourg became
the classicist of the 1786 Roman Journey, of this ink-wash of the Palatine, as of
the iambic dramas Iphegenia and Tasso. It was a year after his return from
Rome, and in the vein of classical command, that he began the soliloquy of
"Wood and Cave" — "Wald und Höhle":
Exalted Spirit, you gave me, gave me all
I prayed for… Nature for a kingdom, with power
To feel and to enjoy her. (CGB)
Though what follows is the converse gift, of the indispensable devil-companion:
So from desire I stagger toward enjoyment,
And in enjoyment languish for desire — (CGB)
those classical sketches brushed with the Storm and Stress of a Vesuvius in
eruption. That cloven one is the crux of Goethe's power; it is what inspired also
in Rome Faust's rejuvenation in the Witch's Kitchen.
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a30) Double: [A] Cologne Cathedral, 13th-19th cent; and [B] Andalusia, c. 1830,
near Philadelphia
30) Double: [A] Schinkel, 1810, Sketch for a burial chapel for Queen Luise,
Schinkel Museum, Berlin; and [B] Schinkel, 1816-18, Die Neue Wache unter
den Linden, Berlin
30a) Schinkel, 1834, Design for a Royal Hall on the Acropolis of Athens, Schinkel
Museum, Berlin
30b) Friedrich, c. 1830, Temple at Agrigento, Dortmund Museum; + V detail
In architecture Goethe and his age passed the rift to the romantic century:
the Gothic adoration which would complete, as at Cologne, cathedrals
abandoned for centuries; the temple-dream that would row the American East
and South with columns. Schinkel best exhibits it: this sketch of a burial chapel
for Queen Luise, 1810 — against his columned Museum or Watch under the
Lindens; or more tellingly, this unconstructed Royal Hall for the Acropolis of
Athens — as Faustian a flight as Hölderlin's toward a land he would never see:
Sacred Greece… feast-hall floored with ocean, tables
Mountain peaks, lifted time out of mind for a destinate
Coming. But where are the thrones and temples, where
The Vessels, brimmed once with nectar, delight of the gods,
with song?
(CGB)
Aber di Thronen, wo? die Tempel, und wo die Gefässe,
Wo mit Nectar gefüllt, Göttern zu Lust der Gesang?
31)
Altdorfer, c. 1525, Fall of Man triptych, with Bacchanal, Nat. Gal.,
Washington, D.C.; video: whole follows two Bacchic details
Music:
L. Senfel, c. 1525(?), close of Freundliches K, M.H.S. 1390
In blending Classic and Gothic, Goethe culminates what began in the
Renaissance. Witness his Bacchic chorus, rhymed as in Medieval Latin, with
which Mephistopheles' spirits sing Faust asleep. But in this 1525 Altdorfer, the
drunken left panel is subordinate to the Fall, of which it is one of the sinful
consequences. Pagan joy was as islanded as in the songs and dances of 1520
Senfel.
(end Senfel)
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32)
32a)
Symbolic History
Neumann, c. 1740, and G. Tiepolo, 1753, Stairhall with ceiling fresco [video:
ceiling only], Bishop's Palace, Würzburg
Same (Tiepolo), Kaisersaal Ceiling (CGB '86)
By 1753, when Tiepolo frescoed the Bishop's Palace in Würzburg with the
lustful gods of Olympus, the sacred dependence had been broken.
Music:
Vivaldi, 1726, Four Seasons, Autumn (opening), Turnabout
TV 34040S
As in Vivaldi's Seasons, opulent Autumn fruits around us. It may well have
been some such tour-de-force rapture of vaulted sky which suggested the
opening of Goethe's bacchic fantasy, "Das Einschläferungslied":
Let the stone-dark arches
Vanish above us,
Smiling reaches
Of blue ether crown us… (CGB)
33)
Feichtmayr and Christian, 1747-58, Angel, High Altar, Zwiefalten, Bavaria
German Baroque churches too had featured those lighted openings,
through which angels, melodiously unrobed, smile like girls at harvest home —
bright forms of heaven in the Faust poem.
(fade Vivaldi)
34)
V34a)
Mantegna, 1465-74, Ceiling, Camera degli Sposi, Ducal Palace, Mantua
Same, a central detail
The architect who decorates the chapel in Goethe's Elective Affinities
copies the pure sky and angels of early Renaissance. Mantegna stands at the
source of such a vanishing of vault into blue. Thus the spirits to Faust:
Schwindet, ihr dunkeln
Wölbungen droben!
Reizender schaue
Fruendlich der blaue
Äther herein!
A35) Pontormo, 1521, Autumn, Villa Medici, Poggio a Caiano near Florence, detail
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B35) Watteau, 1717, Embarkation for Cythera, detail, Berlin-Dahlem
35a) An. Carracci, c. 1595, Silenus gathering grapes, Nat. Gal., London
35b) Double: [A] P.O. Runge, 1808, Morning, small version; and [B] Böcklin, 1888,
Hymn of Spring
In the dissolved space a pagan harvest opens, like that Pontormo frescoed
for the Medici; but aflutter with wings and robes over arbors of lovers, as in
Watteau's rococo Cythera. Then grapes and wine, earth pouring streams of
wine. Could Vivaldi's Autumn have swelled to Beethoven without the Goethean
vision Disney would vulgarize? For us, let the Pastorale Scherzo and the Faust
Vintage advance through three centuries to the earth-meltings and soul-wingings
of 1810 Runge and 1880 Böcklin. (CGB translation follows)
2nd 34)
2nd 34a)
Music:
Again, Mantegna Ceiling, center
T. Zuccaro, c. 1555, Arbor fresco, ceiling, Villa Giulio, Rome (CGB '48)
Beethoven, 1808, opening,
"Pastoral," Vox PL 6960
3rd
movement,
Symphony
#6,
If the clouds would give place,
Through sundered blackness
Stars would glisten,
Suns without number,
Milder than ours;
Heaven's plumed powers
In beauty and yearning
Bend and sway to us;
2nd 35)
Double: [A] Pontormo Autumn; and [B] Watteau Embarkation for
Cythera
How the blown garments
Of gossamer cover
Meadows of clover,
Bowers where lovers
Hushed in fervor
Wreathe love forever,
Arbor on arbor,
Green leaves and tendrils;
And harvest clusters
Of grapes heap panniers;
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Va36)
36)
36a)
Symbolic History
An. Carracci, 1597-1600, ceiling, with Bacchus and Ariadne, Galleria,
Palazzo Farnese, Rome
Same, detail of the Silenus group
Lower detail of a37, Runge Morning, small version (CGB '86)
Crushed in presses
The red juice gushes,
Foams into torrents
Of blushing bright wine,
Streams that rush down
Crystalline channels,
Leave peaks and highlands
Gleaming behind them,
Spread into basins
Of ponds, lakes, and bays —
Breiten zu Seen
Sich ums Genügen
Grünender Hügel.
a37)
37)
37a)
Again, Runge Morning, small version (see A of 35b)
Runge, 1809-10, Morning, large version, Kunsthalle, Hamburg (CGB '86)
Same, upper detail (CGB '86)
Und das Geflügel
Schlürfet sich Wonne,
Flieget der Sonne,
Flieget den hellen
Inseln entgegen —
Shores flanked with pastures,
Flower-slopes of pleasure;
There the winged creatures
Skim purple ocean,
Dip, sip, and rising
Soar into sunlight,
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Bank over islands
Wave-borne on billows
That lap the shallows;
Hear clear voices
From echoing hollows
In choirs rejoicing
As they dance and scatter:
38)
Again, Böcklin, Hymn of Spring (see B of 35b); video: detail only
Some, air-nimble,
Climb sheer mountains,
In must-fountains
Others are swimming,
While sky-flights hover
On pinions of azure —
All singing, all craving
Life, and the far-figured
Stars of loving
Rapture and grace.
Andere schweben;
Alle zum Leben,
Alle zur Ferne
Liebender Sterne,
Seliger Huld.
(fade Beethoven, Pastorale)
Is Böcklin's the last phantom of that hypnosis?
39)
39a)
Correggio, c. 1530, Leda and the Swan, Museum, Berlin-Dahlem
Same, center detail
When Faust, stunned by the first embrace of Helen, is stretched again in
Northern darkness, Homunculus hovering above him reads his dream — a
description of this 1530 Correggio, which had come from France to Germany in
1763, after it had been wilfully damaged and in part repainted (Goethe did not
know that the three nudes are all Leda at different moments of the story):
Clear waters in a grove, and girls undressing,
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All beautiful… but one the rest surpassing…
Of royal line… laves her foot in crystal.
What rush of beating wings in the watery mirror?
The maidens flee; the queen, in tranquil play,
Sees the prince of swans glide to her knee. (CGB)
This avoids the abstract violence Yeats would give the scene:
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl…
Yet Goethe's Correggio myth speaks a related symbol: Helen, born of this
coupling, is the spirit of Greece; Faust dreams of that under Gothic vaults, as
Goethe yearned for the Italian Journey.
40)
40a)
Blake, 1804-20, Jerusalem, plate 28: Vala and Jerusalem in the Lily, Mellon
Collection
Same, detail
Faust [to Helen in Arcadia]:
…Know yourself a child of Godhead,
The primal world your paradise and home.
(CGB)
How far Blake's primal world (Vala and Jerusalem lifted in the Lily of Havilah
over the Sea of Time and Space) has put off the outwardness of Goethe. Not
even the love-fragrant lily of Hölderlin's "Farewell to Diotima" is so visionary:
Stunned I gaze at you; voices and sweet song,
As from former times, I hear, and the sweep of strings,
And golden, over the brook,
The lily breathes fragrance upon us. (CGB)
Und die Lilie duftet
Golden über dem Bach uns auf.
Hegel:
The essence of spirit is freedom, self-contained existence…
History is the exhibition of Spirit in the process
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of working out the knowledge of that which it is potentially…
a41)
41)
Blake, 1800-05, The River of Life, detail, Tate Gallery, London
Same, whole. Video adds another detail
In the German nations… the spiritual becomes reconnected with
the secular and develops this latter as an independent organic
existence. Freedom has found the means of realizing its ideal…
that man as such is innately free.
Not Goethe, not Hölderlin ("Einmal lebt ich, wie Götter"), not Hegel, lived spirit
more freely than Blake did. Yet how far his "River of Life" gleams in the dusk of
their temporal hopes: Hegel's State, Faust's land won from the sea, Hölderlin's
coming of the Gods in Germany. It is the modern, leery of historical promises,
who takes to eternal Blake.
Though Goethe has closed Faust (whatever that may mean) with "the
transient a likeness, the unattainable achieved":
Alles Vergängliche
Ist nur ein Gleichnis;
Das Unzugängliche,
Hier wird's Ereignis …
42)
42a)
42b)
Blake, 1823-24, Job watercolors, Satan appearing before God, from the New
Zealand set. Video shows details from the Engraving, British Museum.
Earth and Moon in Space, from Hutchinson's Splendor of the Heavens
Central detail of 42.
He had opened it (though the Prologue in Heaven was not written until
1797) with a takeoff on Job, a book Blake would engrave near the end of his life.
When Goethe's three archangels praise God's ordered realm in the manner
of that famous Ode by Addison:
The spacious firmament on high,
With all the blue ethereal sky,
And spangled heavens, a shining frame,
Their great Original proclaim —
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Goethe:
Die Sonne tönt, nach alter Weise
In Brudersphären Wettgesang,
Und ihre vorgeschriebne Reise
Vollendet sie mit Donnergang…
Und alle deine hohen Werke
Sind herrlich wie am ersten Tag.
which Shelley translates:
The sun makes music as of old
Amid the rival spheres of Heaven,
On its predestined circle rolled
With thunder speed…
The world's unwithered countenance
Is bright as on creation's day —
Blake bids the right-foot striding Satan of fiery energy throw down that Deist
clockwork of natural law, of which the family of Job in material prosperity clings
to the proscriptive letter.
43)
43a)
Blake, 1825, Job's Latter End, watercolor, British Museum, London
Blake, 1800-03, Jacob's Ladder, British Museum, London
In Blake's "Latter End of Job," the books of Natural Religion are closed and
the instruments of inspiration have replaced them. Similarly when Faust's curse
has destroyed the old world, the spirits counsel: "Build it again, in inwardness"
— "In deinem Busen baue sie auf." How can Goethe's Mephistopheles, a rationalist
mocker from the start (to be used and tricked by the world-shaping passions of
Faust) claim those spirits as his?
What powered the Faust-wave in history was doing Blake half-way, and
turning that half to a dialectic of earth-gain. It was the conversion of
transcendental inwardness to revolutionary leverage. No one in the wake of
Kant, Faust, Hegel — not even Nietzsche — was ripe for Blake's Newtonian
overthrow: "the outward Creation… to me… is hindrance & not Action; it is as
the dirt upon my feet, no part of me."
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44)
Symbolic History
Catalan Romanesque, early 12th cent., Hand of God, S. Clemente de Tahull,
Mus., Barcelona
Consider Faust's attempt to translate the opening of John:
εν αρχη ην ο λογος: "In the beginning was the Word." He balks that mere word
— Wort — should rate so high. Has he not resolved in the opening scene not to
traffic in what Hamlet called "Words, words, words"? Of course there is a
theological position, suggested by this 1100 Spanish creating God as symbolic
hand, according to which the ineffable speaks only by the sanctified and
transrational, which Faust has deposed.
45)
French Gothic, c. 1250, God sees Adam in his Thought, North Portal, Chartres
From creed-invested Word he turns to a kind of Platonic Reason as cause:
"Im Anfang war der Sinn." So in the 13th-century reliefs of Chartres, God, making
birds, sees Adam in his thought. The mystery has moved into the world, but in
idea, not physical. "Can it be merely Thought," Faust asks, "which works and
creates?"
46)
Michelangelo, 1508-12, God creating Sun and Moon, detail, Sistine, Vatican
He writes again: "Im Anfang war die Kraft!" — In the beginning was the
Power. Michelangelo, type of the creating divine, has always led the conscious
titans of history, Milton, most of all Beethoven; he seizes on art like a more
productive Faust. Yet as the translation Power still separates Prime Mover from
effect, Michelangelo shaped his giants in creed acceptance of the rounding of the
wheel — what made Goethe say: "I cannot even relish the essence of
Michelangelo, since I cannot see with such great eyes as he did." In fact,
Michelangelo claimed less. His power was above, not within. However he may
lean that way, his is not
47)
47a)
Rodin, 1897-98, The Hand of God, marble, Rodin Museum, Paris
Michelangelo, 1508-12, The Brazen Serpent, Sistine Vault, Vatican
the hand of God.
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Turning from the external and pre-existing Kraft, Faust cries: "The Spirit
helps me; I see my way," and he writes, "In the beginning was the Act" — Tat, the
uncaused and immanent deed. Cause becomes one with creation, Faust and
now, as "The Hand of God" is Rodin's hand, its Adam and Eve the Lovers he had
made. So with Melville's Ahab: "Is it I, God, or who, lifts this hand?" That is the
terminus of Incarnation — that raising of the flesh-snake (Mephisto, Strong-men
and all) on spirit's creative rod. "The history of the world for 3000 years," Goethe
said of Faust II; though that history (comprising Part I) is also the nautilus shell
of the poet's own life, shaped by the two souls struggling in his breast. So
Hegel's Spirit works itself up by the self-war of alienation to what but the worldconsciousness of Hegel himself?
48)
Chinese (Ching), rebuilt 1897, Altar of Heaven, Peking, China
That actualization of what Spirit is potentially has for Hegel historical
phases, dawning East to West, and variously named and numbered. "The
Orientals know only that one is free … the Greeks and Romans that some are free
… German Christendom that Man as such is free." But there are also the Ages of
man: Oriental Childhood, Egyptian and Persian Boyhood, Greek Adolescence,
Roman Manhood, Western renewal in age. That this Peking Altar of Heaven was
rebuilt in 1897 would not ruffle the timeless childhood of Hegel's "Only one is
free."
49)
Chao Meng-Fu, Chinese, c. 1300, Tao Yuan-Ming in the Mountains, Private
Collection
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"With China and the Mongols," he writes, "(the realm of theocratic despotism),
History begins… Individuals remain mere accidents… outside the One Power…
there is only caprice… no subjectivity."
Of how many millenia is Hegel speaking? And how to fit his tyrannic
formulation to the musing subjectivity of silk-scroll fact: Tao Yuan-Ming in the
Mountains, painted 900 years after, by Chao Meng-Fu?
50)
South Indian, 17th cent. (color restored), Minakshi Temple, South Gate,
Madura in Madras
But Hegel's Orient breaks in two: China, rigid one; India, flowing all. He
writes:
a wild chaos of fruitless variation, which must appear as
madness to a duly regulated, intelligent consciousness…
Everything — Sun, Moon, Stars, the Ganges, the Indus, Beasts,
Flowers — everything is a God… Spirit wanders into the
dream-world, and the highest state is annihilation.
A marvellous antithesis, and no doubt with truth enough for Forster to have
made it the theme of A Passage to India — not to mention its appropriateness to
this gate tower of the Minakshi Temple in Madras. But that is 17th century and
art-lush.
51)
Gupta Buddhist, late 5th cent., Lady of the Court, Cave XVII, Ajanta
What reconciles the BOOM of Marabar cave to the 5th century, when
India had assimilated the Greek (Hegel in reverse) and was expressing itself in a
fine consistency of Buddhist forms, from classical Gupta heads to the precise
observance of Ajanta frescoes?
52)
Peloponnesian, c. 460 B.C., Atlas head, Metope, Temple of Zeus, Olympia
One cannot deny that the living center of Hegel is the sequence of Greece
and Rome, to the birth of Christianity. There he knew and loved all the texts and
some of the art: "In Greece," (he writes)
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the Idea is united with a plastic form… immediately bound up
with the Real, as in a beautiful work of Art; the Sensuous bears
the stamp and expression of the Spiritual. This Kingdom is
consequently true Harmony, the world of the most charming
but perishable bloom.
And when he moves from that "geniality and joy of soul"
53)
Roman, c. 20 B.C., Augustus, Palazzo Capitolino, Rome
to the "abstract Universality of the Roman State, in which the Social absorbs all
individual aims" — with Augustus and the Aeneid, that shift (mediated by Plato)
from outward nomoi to a brooding responsibility which both trains and hollows
the soul for the subjective morality of Christendom — at that point we know that
Hegel has either made or discovered an elixer of historical truth.
54)
German (Rhine), c. 1291, Head, Rudolph of Hapsburg Tomb, Crypt, Speyer
So we follow him; but find that his hatred of the Medieval was so great —
A truculent delirium of passion renounces all that is worldly
and devotes itself entirely to holiness —
that all we can learn from him about the cathedral age (this 1290 tomb of Rudolf
of Hapsburg in the crypt of Speyer, with its gaunt repudiation of what Goethe
and Hegel stood for) is that "such an antithesis must arise in man's consciousness
of the Holy" to "establish the empire of thought actually and concretely." In
short, the Middle Ages had to be lived through to get to Hegel.
55)
Giotto, 1321, Head of bystander, Raising of Drusiana, S. Croce, Florence
So wherever we see a massive human dignity emerging in the
consciousness of spatial right, as in Giotto, 1321, or Dante at the same time: "I
crown and mitre you lord of your own," and
We were not made to live like brutes —
Fatti non foste a viver come bruti —
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we nod the head and say "Faustian precursors."
56)
56a)
Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1490(?), Man's head, drawing, Louvre, Paris
Titian, c. 1555, Self Portrait, Kaiser Friedrich Mus., Berlin
As the Renaissance heightens, the head wags increasingly — as for this
Leonardo sketch, with his proud words:
O thou that sleepest, what is sleep? Sleep is an image of death.
Oh, why not let your work be such that after death you become
an image of immortality: as in life you became, when sleeping,
as one of the hapless dead.
— wags for Bruno toward the giant century's end:
There is no need to cast the eyes toward the heavens, to raise the
hands, to frequent temples or intone to images… we have but to
enter into the inner self, remembering God is nigh, with us,
here, within us, the soul of souls, life of lives, essence of
essences.
57)
57a)
Hans Steinmüller, c. 1585, Apostle Simon, detail, St. Ulrich and St. Afra,
Augsburg; + V detail
Hiemer, 1792, pastel of Hölderlin, Schiller Mus., Marbach
— comparing this Steinmüller Apostle Simon around 1585, when Bruno in his
Farewell Address to Faust's University of Wittenberg was foretelling the rise of
German mind and spirit:
Here is being prepared the soil for the transplanting of wisdom
from the lands of Greece and Italy. May Jupiter grant that the
Germans may recognize their strength and aim for the highest,
and they will no longer be men, but rather reasonable gods, for
god-like is their genius.
It is what Hölderlin, schoolmate of Hegel and Schelling, now felt
happening around and in him, as the Zeus-eagle, from Indus and Parnassus and
"the votive hills of Italy"
Exultant, over the Alps, wings on at last
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And sees, wide-spread, the many-patterned lands. (CGB)
58)
58a)
Michael Sweerts, c. 1661, Self Portrait, Private Collection, Zurich; + V detail
William Blake, 1793, "Water" from Gates of Paradise Engravings, British
Museum
Music:
William Lawes, c. 1640(?), Paven from Sett No. 1 in G Minor,
Loiseau-Lyre, DSLO 564
An inebriation that swells in this 17th century Sweerts (Self), as in Lawes'
chromatic Paven, or Milton's dynamic truth:
if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken
into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition —
point of departure for Blake:
The man who never alters his opinion is like
standing water, & breeds reptiles of the mind.
a59)
b59)
c59)
d59)
e59)
59)
Dannecker, 1805-10, Large plaster bust of Schiller, detail, Weimar Library
Jacques Louis David, 1797-98, General Bonaparte (unfinished), detail,
Louvre, Paris
P.O. Runge, 1802, Self Portrait, crayon, Kunsthalle, Hamburg
C.D. Friedrich, c. 1810, Self Portrait, pencil and chalk, Staatliche Museen,
Berlin
Jacques Louis David, c. 1794, Death of Bara, detail, Musée Calvert, Avignon
Double: [A] Same as c59; and [B] Same as d59
Such Faust's dying strategy:
He only earns his Freedom and his life
Who takes them every day by force. (CGB)
Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben,
Der täglich sie erobern muss.
— A wave to break in Hölderlin: (CGB)
Look, we are it, ourselves; we, fruit of Hesperia —
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the godlike burden from which, stretched to madness, his "Blind Singer" prays to
be eased:
O nimmt, daß ichs ertrage, mir das
Leben, das Göttliche mir vom Herzen.
Take from my heart, that I may bear it,
Life, the godlike, take from me. (CGB)
(fade Lawes)
While the self-portraits of Runge and Friedrich (from about 1800 to 1810) witness
in art the Romantic polarity which Goethe's "dread hand" hammered into Faust.
60)
60a)
60b)
Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, c. 1765(?), Bust of Diderot, Louvre, Paris
P. Lejeune, 1760, Bust of Voltaire, Stuttgart Museum
Double of 60 and 60a (video shows detail of Diderot only)
Music:
Glück, 1761 ff., Don Juan Ballet, 19, Fandango, London,
STS 15169
But between the Baroque claim and the Faustian lies the ironic transition
of 18th century: Glück's Don Juan, Pigalle's fastidious modelling of the
Encyclopedist, Diderot — the Mephistic limitation Faust must override. Though
even that eddy looks Hegelian — a secularization, for which Spirit had again to
be driven back on itself. So the ironic debacle exemplifies a threefold dialectic of
Aufhebung. It cuts off the God-reason confidence of Baroque, turning Leibniz to
an absurd Pangloss. But in that stepping down, it sustains under the mask of
secular wit the bill of human values formerly delivered as divine. Yet to be so
sustained is also to advance; ironic sensibility, even in Diderot, transcends itself,
as if, in some future tense, aufheben, to up-heave, looked to the Faustian quest of
heart.
(fade Fandango)
a61)
61)
61a)
V61b)
H. Fuseli, c. 1777, Self Portrait, arms akimbo, chalk, National Portrait
Gallery, London
H. Fuseli, c. 1780, Self Portrait, head in hands, chalk, Victoria and Albert
Museum, London
Goya, 1799, The Dream of Reason Produces Monsters, Los Caprichos, detail,
Prado, Madrid
Again 61: Fuseli Self
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Music:
Mozart, 1785, Dissonant opening, String Quartet #19, C Major,
West. XWN 18047
Like Goya and Blake, Goethe is born to irony:
So here I stand, a poor fool,
As wise as when I went to school…
The fruit of all my study and art
This ignorance that burns my heart.
(CGB)
But it is an irony which, as in Mozart's Dissonant Quartet or Fuseli's 1780 Self,
swells through Storm and Stress toward the Romantic.
What gulfs are yawning under the prospect of self-command? When the
curtain opens it is the old Faust we see in the vaulted chamber; but the young
Goethe speaks, who had dodged suicide, he said, by enacting it in Werther (as
Dostoievsky, trying to bring health out of Crime, would let Svidrigailov, a kind
of Conrad Secret Sharer, take the rap for Raskolnikov) — Goethe of two souls:
With tentacles of lust one clings to the world,
The other soars for the Elysian fields. (CGB)
a62)
62)
(fade Mozart)
Tibetan Tanka, 16th cent. Mahakala, terror-god of Northern Buddhist
Pantheon, Brit. Lib. (Add. 8899). London (CGB '84)
Same, center detail (video takes only details, from both slides)
Music:
Tibetan, 16th cent. (Padma Sambava), from Mahâkâla Sandhana,
ritual to the Great Black Lord, Nonesuch H 72071
Eastern religions had embraced terror in the divine, as in this Tibetan 16th
century Tanka to Mahâkâla, Buddhist ego-destroyer, with his ritual praise, from
the same time and place. Was not the son of Pandu in the Gita shown the
universal God, "infinite of arms, eyes, mouths, and bellies"?
Terrible of fangs, O mighty master…
Licking with your burning tongues, devouring
All worlds, you probe the heights of heaven
With intolerable beams, O Vishnu…
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But when Werther saw "the spectacle of infinite life" change before him "into the
abyss of an always open grave," he headed for it. The complicity of devil in godman and god-history,
63)
63a)
63b)
C.D. Rauch, 1828, Self Portrait, bust, Nat. Gal., Berlin
Thorwaldsen, 1810-11, Self Portrait, Thorwaldsen Museum, Copenhagen; first,
V detail
Dannecker, 1805-10, Schiller, colossal plaster bust, Weimar Library
had still to be faced by Jefferson, by Rauch and Thorwaldsen, sometimes by
Beethoven.
(fade Mahâkâla Sandhana)
Music:
Beethoven, 1823, Finale, Ninth, cont. March: "Froh" etc.
Shelley:
The man remains
Sceptreless, free uncircumscribed, but man
Equal, unclassed, tribeless and nationless,
Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king
Over himself…
When Dante, so "self-crowned and mitred," steps from the Medieval frame, there
is something facile in the Euphoric soar. Goethe knew that Byron-boy must fall.
Even rapt Schiller:
Surely we must call him great who stands, his own law and
maker,
Controlling by mastery and worth the hostile schemes of fate;
But luck is beyond his dominion; the reach of conscious will
Can never claim for its own what envious Charis debars.
(fade Beethoven)
For 2nd 62) Tibetan, 18th cent., Embroidery, Yama (Death), Buddhist Protector,
British Museum
which Hölderlin intensifies: (CGB)
More deeply, more rendingly, Fate, all-levelling,
grips the inflammable heart of the strong —
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…die entzündbare Brust dem Starken.
For 2nd 61) J.A. Carstens, c. 1795(?), Self Portrait in pastels, Kunsthalle, Hamburg
Does the crest of the human claim coincide with its breaking?
When Kant had tracked reason to its self-defeating lair in the antinomies,
he had to avoid the Heraclitean rock: "Though reason is common to all (κοινος),
each lives as if he had a truth of his own (ιδιαν)." By the categorical command,
"act as if the rule of action could become a universal law," Kant thought to give
the moral imperative reason's common ground.
For 3rd 62)
Blake, 1793 (1799), Los-Orc in Flames, America: A Prophecy, plate 10,
Mellon
But in the ambiguities of good and evil, what actual precept can have that
character? Not even the commandments or the Golden Rule.
For 2nd 63) Blake Life mask, 1823, National Portrait Gallery, London
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Kant avoids the inescapable, that in the brunt of situations, only one
imperative remains categorical, the stripped reflection of moral necessity on
itself: "If you have to do a thing, do it!" An absolute without content —
subjective mockery of the hope for a rational ground. Blake: "The voice of
honest indignation is the voice of God." [The 1996 video revision will include
this quotation.]
64)
Samuel Palmer, c. 1826, Self with Halo, K. Preston Collection
It is Luther's "So help me God, I cannot do otherwise." It becomes the
dilemma of Kierkegaard's Abraham in Fear and Trembling — beyond external
correlatives, no way to tell the voice of temptation from the voice of God: "Kill
your son!" Blake's devotee Samuel Palmer, who would struggle all his life with
the inner calling against responsibility, hints at that in his weird 1826 self-portrait
with a halo.
a65)
65)
"Bismark Tower," 1891, Hamburg
George Kolbe, 1934, Self Portrait, bronze
Goethe, born 25 years after Kant, faced the demon Kant could not. But
however deep he went in two-souls and hell-compact, he clung to the perilous
hope of Lessing. While Hegel, born 20 years later still, set the passions (as stone
in a vault, by downward gravity, arches upward) "to fortify a position for Right
and Order against themselves." It is as if an Enlightened design were always
deepened and darkened, gouged with a more and more Bismarkian violence of
shadow.
Then Nietzsche, whose Zarathustran imperative transvalues value; yet he
rides the Faust-wave of Yea. And how could Hitler have entered the Rhineland
but under the same banner of categorical calling:
"And now, like a
somnambulist," he said, "I go the way God has chosen."
In 1934, George Kolbe, a sculptor the Nazis would acclaim, cast in a
bronze of himself the scored and eroded idealism of Spengler's post-Faustian and
post-Hegelian West.
a66)
A. Dürer, 1513, Knight, Death, and Devil, engraving, whole, Fogg, Cambridge
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66)
66a)
66b)
Symbolic History
Same, detail
P. Breughel, 1562, Fall of the Rebel Angels, whole, Beaux-arts, Brussels (CGB
'59); video has only a variant detail from this whole
Same, detail (CGB '59)
The Faust myth came into being with the German Renaissance, when
Dürer's Erasmian Knight, clad in Paul's armor of God, pursued his calling in sure
neglect of skull and reptile, Death and Devil. The Luther of Christian Freedom
was such a knight. We do not know what actual Faust in that morning followed
the call of which Goethe would make much: (CGB)
That I may know all links and ties
That thread earth's deepest mysteries —
Daß ich erkenne was die Welt
Im Innersten zusammenhält —
and the Faust Book and Marlow so little:
Here try thy brains to gain a deity.
Since Protestant reversal had intervened: Luther, scared by the Peasants' Revolt,
was calling reason "an ugly devil's bride," "a poisonous beast with many
dragons' heads." Whatever daring had stirred in Faust, the 1587 Book tramps out
like brush-fire.
67)
67a)
67b)
67c)
67d)
67e)
67f)
Agricola, De Re Metallica, published 1556, Mine shaft with pumps
Same, Tap-hole furnaces
Same, Various ways of descending into mines
Swedish Copper Mine, c. 1790, color print
Agricola, Steel forge with Bellows
Swedish Ironworks, c. 1781 (interior)
Welsh Irontown, 1780s, watercolor (also 1914: Crisis, V18a)
Meanwhile the wave outspread all private sequences. In Agricola, 1556,
mines with relays of stream-powered pumps, smelting furnaces and steel mills
hint at the body on which Faustian Europe rode; and there too the back-lash met
the mounting fact. Leonardo:
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All the animals languish, filling the air with lamentations; the
woods fall in ruin, hills are torn open to carry away the metals
that are produced there.
So Hölderlin would complain of man, rebellious to the sun-god, probing the
shafts of mountain caves: "doch gräbt er/ Sich Höhlen in den Bergen and späht
im Schacht."
Baucis in Faust II smells Satan in the great land-project:
In vain the workmen's daily racket —
Pick and shovel, slog and slam;
Where the flames by night were swarming
Stood next day a brand new dam. (Macneice)
But Adam Smith (1776) ascribed such powers to division of labor abetted by
machines:
in the trade of the pin-maker… divided into eighteen distinct
operations… performed by distinct hands… ten persons make
upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day… separately…
they could not each have made twenty, perhaps not one…
68)
68a)
68b)
Turner, 1844, Rail, Steam, and Speed, National Gallery, London
Same, detail
P.J. de Loutherbourg, c. 1800, Coalbrookdale at Night, Science Museum,
London
Before Goethe's death steam had entered the rivers and was taking to the
rails. The excitement of a power that could "lap the miles and lick the valleys
up," poets and painters expressed: this Turner, and even Thoreau:
When I hear the iron horse make the hills echo with his snort
like thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire
and smoke from his nostrils… it seems as if the earth had got a
race now worthy to inhabit it…
But the thrill was Faust-ambivalent. Thoreau knew also: "We do not ride on the
railroad; it rides upon us." Blake had tied the mills of industrial England to the
dark Satanic wheels of Cartesian determinism. By the later 19th century,
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mechanization was reenacting on the stage of history Goethe's death of the
Wanderer and pious old couple: "Unbridled fire… gives all three one funeral
pyre." No wonder Faust wants to free himself from that destructive Magic, "to
stand in Nature as a man again."
69)
69a)
Joseph Wright (of Derby), 1768, Experiment with an Air Pump, Tate Gallery,
London
Same, detail, center; + V: closer detail of dove and scientist
It was a fear that had been gathering with the advance of science. In 1768
the painter Wright had endowed this night demonstration of the death of a dove
in an evacuated jar with the ghastly take-over Mary Wollenstonecraft would
exploit in Frankenstein's creation of life.
Priestley might go on voicing the technocratic hope of indefinitely
extended Enlightenment:
Knowledge will be subdivided and extended; and knowledge,
as Lord Bacon observes, being power, the human powers will,
in fact, be enlarged… men will make their situation in the world
abundantly more easy and comfortable… and will grow daily
more happy… Thus, whatever was the beginning of the world,
the end will be glorious and paradisical, beyond what our
imagination can now conceive.
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But the optimism was more and more undercut: Wordsworth: "We murder to
dissect," and "Great God, I'd rather be a pagan, suckled in a creed outworn."
1st 70)
Rodin, 1877, The Age of Bronze, Louvre, Paris (lighted front view)
When Goethe's Faust knit up the radical poles of the West, it became a
seed-plot of the history to follow. We think of history as a time art, as if there
were crisis and then healing, or hope succeeded by despair; but the antinomies
are joined throughout — as in Rodin's 1877 Age of Bronze, wish and satiety meet
in pathos-elation.
1st 71)
Rodin, 1886, The Prodigal, Cantor Foundation, Beverly Hills, California
Yet style-colors shift like chords; there is a progression. As with Rodin, to
The Prodigal, nine years later.
If Faust from the start, like Eliot's devil of the stair, "wears/ The deceitful
face of hope and despair," it remains true that where Enlightenment stressed the
hope, post-Romantic and Symbolist stress the frenzy, if not despair, then lashed
by despair.
2nd 70) Again, Rodin, Age of Bronze (detail, upper half)
How many fate-defiers we would go on inventing, from Beethoven of the
death-fist to Melville's Ahab, Ibsen's Gant and Gynt, Conrad's Kurtz, the Sutpen
of Faulkner's Absalom. And as the cresting of the Faust-wave saw a reversal
from dark to light, from titan damned to titan saved;
2nd 71) Again, Rodin, Prodigal (detail, upper half)
already with Byron's Manfred a reversal of reversal crowns with celebration the
giant fact of destruction: Melville: "Better… to perish in that howling infinite…"
Conrad, where the dying whisper of "The horror" pierces to "all the hearts that
beat in the darkness."
3rd 70) Again, Rodin, Age of Bronze (variant upper detail)
3rd 70a) Same, closer detail
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The heaving search-motif of Beethoven's Ninth, to lead from opening
crisis to joy-finale:
Music:
Beethoven, 1823, 9th Symphony, 1st movement, repeated straining
phrase
would reach through the century — to Brahms — the heaves more ominously
goaded (as in the sequence of wars: Napoleonic, American Civil, World) toward
affirmations always harder fought for:
Music:
Brahms, published 1876, 1st Symphony, from 4th movement,
(Walter) Columbia ML4909 (search, drum-roll and theme)
a3rd 71) Rodin, c. 1886, Fugit Amor, Marble (from Gates of Hell, Paolo and
Francesca), Rodin Mus., Paris
3rd 71) Again, Rodin, Prodigal [slide: vertical whole; V: close upper detail]
So to Cesar Franck's D Minor of 1888.
Music:
Cesar Franck, D Minor Symphony, 1st movement, climb to theme,
West. WL-5311
(fade)
What seems to have outraged its first audience above all is that the Faustpoles, those germinal motifs of the Symphony, dark and light, indistinguishably
fuse in the Prodigal fever of the close.
Music:
a72)
b72)
72)
Cesar Franck, Symphony in D Minor, 4th movement, close
Blake, 1824, Dante plate 37, detail of watercolor, Circle of Lust, Paolo and
Francesca, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery
Blake, c. 1823-24, Job #5, Satan Goes Forth, watercolor, New Zealand set;
video: detail only
Blake, 1823-24, Job #3, Sons & Daughters Destroyed, watercolor, New
Zealand set. Video: detail only
A complementarity clouded, since the 1800 "Energy is Eternal Delight" of
Blake, Faust, Beethoven — that fugal joy keenly coiled in musical space.
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Music:
Symbolic History
Beethoven, 1823, 9th, Finale, continued, fugal passage
Are we pursuing time-plots, or the instantaneous blaze of ambivalence?
No doubt, both in one. Even of history Hegel knows: "In one aspect … with
Spirit there is no past, no future, but an essential now." While Faust's cry to the
moment: "Linger!" — "Verweile doch, du bist so schön!" — is optative: "If I could
reach the unreachable, I might say linger." So it wins the wager. Of himself,
Goethe wrote: "If I am restlessly active to the end" (and it was near the end)
"nature is obliged to find me some other form of being, when this one breaks
down under my spirit." In Blake's simultaneity, the Destroyer of Job's material
temples is one of those "tygers of wrath… wiser than the horses of instruction."
(fade Beethoven)
73)
73a)
Goya, 1810-20, etchings: Los Desastres de la Guerra, #69, Nada, Ello Dirá,
Prado, Madrid: "Nothing! It is spoken."
Same, Nada, detail: "Nothing"
Although the time-drama of Faust and Hegel would dominate the
century, timeless Blake's question remains — as when Mozart hurls down the
40th Symphony:
Music:
Mozart, 1778, Symphony #40, 1st movement, opening, Col. D3L291
or Goya this death-writer of "Nada" in the Disasters of the War —
(fade Mozart)
a74)
74)
Same: #80, Si resuciterá? "Will she revive?"
Same: #82, Esto es lo verdadero: "This is the Truth"
and beside it, in Mozart's case, and from the same months of furious
composition, the triumphant Jupiter:
Music:
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Mozart, 1778, Symphony #41, 1st movement, opening, Col. D3L291
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or with Goya the unprinted close of the Disasters, where Truth revives to bless
the procreant earth — the question remains, are these historical successions or
eternal states of the soul?
For 2nd 73)
For 2nd 73a)
Same Goya: #79, Murió la Verdad: "Truth has died"
Same: #79, detail (video replaces these with closer detail of Nada)
So when Goethe closed Faust I (1775, in prose, later versified) with
Gretchen in prison for the death of her mother and child, the intolerable:
I dare not leave; for me there is no more hope —
Ich darf nicht fort; für mich ist nichts zu hoffen —
Music:
Beethoven, 1823, 9th Symphony, Finale, near close, modal hymn
— to Joy-coda
2nd 74) Same: Again, #82, detail: This is the Truth
2nd 74a) Same: Double: details of [A] #69, Nada; and [B] #82, Truth
2nd 74b) Same: Double: details of [A] #79, Murió; and [B] #80, Revive? (video
replaces the doubles with a close detail of Goya #80)
the same Goethe to open Part II fifty years after with Faust's sleep (comforted by
the small spirits of nature) and his waking to new earth-quests, Helen, and that
land claimed from the sea — such a juxtaposition can be conceived as a progress
in life or history only because antinomies may in fact wear temporal wefts. But
the fire of Part I will consume the old couple in the free land; as Beethoven's Joyhymn must weave with the dissonances where it began.
(fade Finale on last suspension)
a75)
b75)
c75)
75)
P.O. Runge, 1807-08, lower detail of Morning, small version, Kunsthalle,
Hamburg (CGB '86)
Same, upper detail (CGB '86) (For this slide and the next, video shows only the
upper half of c75)
Same, whole (CGB '86)
Blake, 1820, from Thornton's Virgil, I xi, wood engraving
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(Faust II, scene 1, CGB — here slightly trimmed:)
(Twilight. Faust stretched on a flowery bank…
Ariel, to Aeolian harps:)
You whose airy circles weave this head,
Perform your elfin healing; touch the heart
And calm its raging fever; forbid remorse;
Draw out the rankling darts, that he may wake
Clean of terror; let the past be past.
Night is measured by four silences;
Fill them all with service:
First let him sleep pillowed on coolness;
And the dew that bathes him, bring from Lethe
Quiet forgetfulness; then the cramped tendons
Ease as he slumbers toward the dawning;
Last and noblest, let him wake,
And come again into the sacred light.
Chorus:
When evening blows
Over bordered fields,
Twilight falls
In perfumed veils…
Waters mirror
The sky's fire,
And the moon sheds sleep
On the world's floor.
(Blake here at his most realistic and classical, the little 1820 woodcuts he
made for Thornton's Virgil, yet symbolic as the Faust-healing: Beulah's "mild
and pleasant Rest.")
76)
76a)
76b)
Double: [A] J.A. Koch, 1805, Landscape with Rainbow, Staatliche
Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe; and [B] Constable, 1835, Stonehenge, watercolor,
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Same as A of 76 (video takes only separate details of A and B)
Same as B of 76
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Two rainbow landscapes: 1805: Swiss-German Koch fulfills the classical
harmony (as of Poussin and Claude) to which Goethe (and even Beethoven) gave
life-loyalty.
Chorus:
Old pains, old pleasures
Melt away;
The heart is whole,
Let it trust the day…
Renew your wishes
At the light.
Sleep is a chrysalis;
Shake it off…
From thirty years later: Constable's Stonehenge yields to the storm Goethe
himself had raised, though Goethe would question its force in others — as in
Beethoven and Hölderlin.
(A terrible uproar announces the sun.
Ariel:
Always in tumult light is born.
Drums, Trumpets. Deafened, blind,
Spirits creep in flower crowns;
Unhearables must not be heard.
Cower deeper, in leaves, in rocks;
Close your ears. The day breaks.
a77)
77)
Friedrich, 1807-08, Summer, Neue Pinakothek, Munich
Same, Friedrich, Summer, detail (CGB '59); video uses only the detail
Faust:
The pulse of life wakes in me, roused to greet
The mild ethereal gray. And earth that was steadfast
Through the long dark breathes the quickening air…
(Friedrich, too, in the calm of this "Summer," yearns through nature to
renewal.)
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The world is wrapped in a pale shimmer of dawn;
The woods are full of voices, living songs;
In low places pools of mist are poured,
That take the light of heaven and are pearl…
78)
Turner, 1798, Buttermere, A Shower, Tate Gallery, London
(Turner starting, 1798, with the old physical nature, shot through with the
symbols of Wordsworth and Goethe.)
Faust:
I lift my eyes to the hills. The highest peaks,
Already touched with light, announce the coming.
They drink the day before us, eternal brightness,
For which we lower creatures wait in longing.
And now the upland slopes and last smooth pastures
Receive the glory, which step by step descending
Down the long sequence of the folded ranges,
79)
Turner, by 1846, The Angel Standing in the Sun, Tate Gallery, London
Strikes: it strikes; and blinded,
I turn away, my eyes shot through with anguish…
(Turner ending almost fifty years later with a Faust allegory of the light he had
given his art to: the armed angel standing in the sun.)
We thought to kindle our life's torch a little;
A fire enfolds us… wraps us in its burning
Remorseless waves of ecstasy and wounding…
And so I set my back against the sun.
2nd 78) Again, Turner, Buttermere Shower, detail, rainbow
The waterfall that brims the rock chasm
Dilates the orbit of my sight with wonder.
From fall to fall it breaks in… fountains of spray,
At whose peak and crown, over-vaulting the storm,
A rainbow comes and goes, dying and born,
Hovering spirit of the downward shower.
I see it now: it images our striving —
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Itself an image, child of sun and water:
We only live in light's refracted color.
How balanced in his power the old Goethe, to go backwards,
2nd 79)
Again, Turner, Angel in Sun, detail
where romantic soul everywhere was surging ahead. But there are no backward
moves in genius. That wisdom of measure —
Im farbigen Abglanz haben wir das Leben —
informs Faust's infinite search. Have not the spirits of nature announced (though
they themselves hid from the dawn) "The noble soul that understands and seizes,
may accomplish all."
a80)
b80)
c80)
d80)
80)
80a)
Friedrich, c. 1835, Riesengebirge, Nat. Gal., Berlin
Same, detail (video crops one image only from a80)
Friedrich, 1809-10, Evening (sky), Kunsthalle, Mannheim
Detail of a3: Friedrich, Girl at Window (pre-1996 videos omit this)
Friedrich, c. 1830-35, The Evening Star, Frankfurt am Main.
Same, detail (video uses detail only)
But what can soul accomplish? It is the oldest God-mystery, Faust
thought to settle by the translation "Act" — Why should the One overflow?
Music:
Beethoven, 1826, close of Lento of Quartet #16, F Major, Opus
135, Columbia M5L-277
Beethoven did not close with the Ninth, but with the Late Quartets;
Friedrich leads nature to the infinite; when the Mystical chorus lifts Faust, we
have not gone back to Dante, we are in the noumenal, where inner Faust always
was — the Now climax of history — Thoreau: "God himself culminates in the
present moment…" It is the transcendental ascent at the heart of every tornadic
desire.
Das Ewig-Weibliche
Zieht uns hinan.
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The urge for the Eternal Womanly (as Gretchen) has prime-moved the
Faustian lunge and miscarriage; yet the womanly is its containment of saving
love. So Ewig Weibliche links arrow and wheel, Classic and Gothic, leaf and
flame.
Is Friedrich's boy less of the stippled ground, as he dances toward the
evening star?
(close of Beethoven)
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Faust : Creative War of Spirit, Symbolic History, Part 29
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Text
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
30. O Western Star (Whitman's America)
a1) Double: Engravings of [A] Thoreau and [B] Whitman (from 1855 Leaves)
Vb1) Again engraving of Whitman, whole
1)
Brady(?), called 1849-50, Photograph of Whitman (Black coat and holding
hat); first, video detail
Music:
Beethoven, 1812, from 7th Symphony, lst Movement, opening,
(Toscanini) V.LM - 6901 (9)
"Eastward I go by force," said Thoreau, "but Westward I go free." What deepening
eddies mark the westering stream. (music) From Beethoven's Third to his Ninth (here the
Seventh) the wave of I AM sucks up more and more of earth-silt and man's negation.
(fade 7th) Advancing through the mass of Schubert's great C Major.
Music:
Schubert fin. 1828, Symphony No.9, 4th Mov. close Col. ML 5619
So in the immediacy of Brady's 1850 photograph, "Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of
Manhattan the son," enfleshes Schleiermacher's 1799 creed:
In the midst of the finite to grow to the infinite, to be eternal at every
moment, that is the immortality religion offers.
(Schubert continues)
a2)
American, c. 1855, Photograph of Emerson, Antiquarian Society, Concord,
Massachusetts
2)
Mathew Brady, c. 1862, Photograph of Whitman (white shirt, open collar)
2a) Mathew Brady, 1862, Whitman with hat (age 43), New York Public Library
V2b) Mathew Brady, 1867, Whitman with arms crossed, National Archive
"I was simmering and simmering," said Whitman; "it was Emerson brought me to
boil." Emerson, dropping from "the great Stoic motto" its Pythian "Nothing in excess,"
turned that warning "Know thyself!" about-face:
currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or
parcel of God...
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(close of Schubert)
While from Schubert to Bruckner the yea-saying downs huge draughts of raw
matter, Wagner's passion, Whitman's concrete —
Who goes there? hankering, gross, mystical, nude —
crushing "a simple separate person" with the Demos godhead of space and time: "I
moisten the roots of all that has grown."
Music:
Bruckner, 1881-3, Symphony No. 7., close of last mov., Nonesuch
H-1139
I celebrate myself...
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass...
I know I am deathless,
I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter's compass,
I know I shall not pass like a child's carlaque cut with a burnt stick at
night...
Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am
touched from,
The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer.
This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds ...
(close of Bruckner)
a3)
b3)
c3)
3)
3a)
3b)
3c)
Thomas Cole, 1833, Schroon Mountain, Cleveland Museum of Art
Peter Birmann, c. 1800(?), View of the Rhine near Basel, Kunstmuseum,
Basel
Thomas Cole, 1846, The Oxbow, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
City
Thomas Cole, 1833-36, The Savage State, New York Historical Society, New
York City
Thomas Cole, 1846-47, Prometheus Bound, Philadelphia Museum of Art
Thomas Cole, 1833-36, Fall of Empire, New York Historical Society, New
York City
Again 3, Savage State, detail
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I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits, grains,
esculent roots,
And am stucco'd with quadrupeds and birds all over...
my elbows rest in sea-gaps,
I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents...
Music:
Beethoven, 1804, Waldstein Sonata, Op.53, opening, (Schnabel)
Angel, COLH 59
Waldstein. The Faust-search of that Germany set seed in America: to hold
Emersonian good through "all terrible balks and ebullitions." If music and even art trail
the god-grapplings of the word, those landscapes that fan out from the Hudson River to
the Mississippi, Rockies, Andes, have not neglected Whitman's "Spirit that form'd this
scene." In Cole's 1833 "Savage State," the first of five depictions of the same scene
through the rise and fall of empire, the mountain reared over the harbor from wild
through culture to moonlight and ruins speaks the titan identification for which Cole, in a
later picture, stretched a nude Prometheus on a snowier crag. "Be it life or death," said
Thoreau, "we seek only reality." But which would it be? Emerson's "In the presence of
nature a wild delight runs through man"; or Melville's "as ever all clouds choose the
loftiest peaks to pile themselves upon." Why not, as in Cole and Beethoven, both in one?
(fade Waldstein)
4)
Robert Feke, 1745, Reverend Thomas Hiscox, The Breakers, Newport, R.I.;
+ V details
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How Feke's Reverend Hiscox, of 1745, would have frowned on either arrogation.
If West is the open and exploratory, future and transcendental Now, the forest of
intuitive morality and dissolving shorelessness, its quest is in a space somehow round, as
Emerson, for all his optimism, saw in "Uriel":
In vain produced, all rays return;
Evil will bless and ice will burn...
Wherefore, as with other titans,
A sad self-knowledge, withering, fell
On the beauty of Uriel.
The ultimate Westward sail — "All bound as is befitting each, all surely going
somewhere" — must veer again East to authority, limit, past, the moral prison of the
Scarlet Letter.
In the time of this preacher Hiscox, Jonathan Edwards reverted from Berkeleian
speculation: "Bodies have no existence of their own... all is mental," to an absolute
Calvinism: "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God."
5)
English, c. 1670, Portrait of John Clark (Fortune, July '42, p. 85)
And from a century earlier, the free humanity portrayed in John Clarke, tolerant
Puritan, and voiced by Hooker or Roger Williams:
The Soveraigne origin and foundation of civill power lies in the
People... (who) may elect and establish what forme of Government
seemes to them most meete for their civill condition —
that Anne Hutchinson covenant of Grace
2nd 4 and for 2nd 5)
English, c. 1640, John Winthrop, American Antiquarian Soc.; first, V detail
was always eddying to reaction — Winthrop:
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We see not that any should have authority to set up any other exercise
beside what authority hath already set up...
To whom Emerson:
...not for all his faith can see
Would I that cowléd churchman be.
And Whitman, fierce as Blake:
Allons! from all formules!
From your formules, O bat-eyed and materialistic priests.
6)
6a)
John Greenwood, c. 1757-58, Yankee Captains Carouse in Surinam; Art
Museum, St. Louis; + two V details
Thomas Nast, 1879, A Dead Failure, lithograph
On one side vision stiffens to rigor; on the other, slides toward that May-pole
Merrymount Bradford called "beastly practices of the mad Bacchanalians". Within a
hundred years, the sea-captain descendents of stern Bradford and the rest were painted at
carouse in Surinam, swilling punch, one spilling it onto a sleeper's head, while another
pukes in his pocket. So Rembrandt's burghers decline to the Rake's Progress of Hogarth,
and after another century to the aged Hollow Men of Hawthorne's Custom House:
They spent a good deal of time, also, asleep in their accustomed
corners, with their chairs tilted back against the wall; awaking,
however, once or twice in a forenoon, to bore one another with the
several thousandth repetition of old sea-stories, and mouldy jokes, that
had grown to be passwords and countersigns among them.
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So the zeal of Revolution would wane to Whitman's Gilded Age:
the surfeit of prosperity, the demonism of greed, the hell of passion,
the decay of faith, the long postponement, the fossil-like lethargy,
7)
Colonial, c. 1770-90(?), State House, Annapolis, Maryland (CGB '60)
the ceaseless need of revolutions, prophets, thunder-storms, deaths,
births, new projections and invigorations of ideas and men...
And wherever the great buildings of civic virtue arose, in Boston, Philadelphia,
this Annapolis State House, where Washington surrendered his command (the dome
erected soon after), one had always to inquire how far the persons investing those noble
shells
8)
8a)
John Copley, 1764, Nathanial Sparhawk, Fine Arts Museum, Boston
John Copley, 1775, Mr. and Mrs. Izard, Fine Arts Museum, Boston
might be defecting to outward form: Copley's Sparhawk, like Franklin, a shrewd Yankee
Whig in the mantling robes of Europe. Franklin brought it off; but Tom Brainless in
Trumbull's Progress of Dulness. is refined at college from a farm boor to a city fop.
And would not Whitman, a century later, "look our times and lands searchingly in
the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease"?
Are there, indeed, men here worthy the name? Are there athletes? Are
there perfect women, to match the generous material luxuriance?…
Are there crops of fine youths and majestic old persons?... These cities,
crowded with petty grotesques... playing meaningless antics.
9)
Copley, 1765-70, Paul Revere, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; + V detail
Music:
Wm. Billings, c. 1776, Chester, Col. MS 7277 (from 2nd stanza on)
On the tide that rose toward Revolution — this Billings marching tune —
Copley's Paul Revere puts off lace and columns, unfallen man claiming freedom for good
laws and a good life.
So Crèvecoeur, French aristocrat. who came to the colonies in 1754, saw the
Frontier as a land of spirit, shaping the new American:
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An European... no sooner breathes our air than he... begins to feel the
effects of a sort of resurrection... he begins to forget his former
servitude... his heart involuntarily swells and glows; this first swell
inspires him with those new thoughts which constitute an American.
(end Billings)
10)
J.S. Copley, 1785, Youngest Daughters of George III, Royal Collection
But neither Crèvecoeur nor Copley could sustain the war of values, the crassness
and menace of patriot mobs. Copley fled to England, painted the royal children;
Crèvecoeur, in France, damned the outcome of the liberating dream:
worship the demon of the times, trample on every law, break every
duty, neglect every bond... become a clamorous American, a modern
Whig, and offer every night incense to the God Arimanes.
It was the reversal Lenau would experience a generation later:
For 2nd 9) John Copley, 1770, Eleazer Tyng, National Gallery, Washington D.C.
On the 8th of October I first put foot on American soil... Bruder, diese
Amerikaner sind himmelanstinkende Krämerseelen — Brother. these
Americans stink to heaven. They are shopkeepers, nothing but shopkeepers. No souls. Dead to the life of the spirit. Dog-dead...
2nd 10) Again, Copley, King's daughters, detail
it seems of the deepest significance that America has no nightingale. It
is a poetic curse...
Va11)
11)
Claude Lorrain, 1636, Seaport; Uffizi, Florence
Same, Lorrain's Seaport, detail
Music:
John Jenkins, c. 1640(?), close of a Fancy for 5 parts and organ,
in C Minor, Argo RG 73, Side A, No.3
Drab terminus of the utopian call of sea and setting sun, Claude's 1638 Harbor,
with a Jenkins fantasy, and Marvell's Pilgrim settlers, "Safe from storms and prelate's
rage": (c.1654?)
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Where the remote Bermudas ride,
In the ocean's bosom unespied,
From a small boat. that rowed along,
The listening winds received this song:
"What should we do but sing His praise,
That led us through the watery maze,
Unto an isle so long unknown,
And yet far kinder than our own?..."
Thus sung they, in the English boat,
An holy and a cheerful note;
And all the way, to guide their chime,
With falling oars they kept the time.
(close of Jenkins)
12)
12a)
William Hodges, 1775, Tahiti Revisited; National Museum, Greenwich,
England
Same, Tahiti, detail; + another V detail (cf. V12b)
We have skipped Marvell's description of the bounteous isle, where God has
provided "all foison":
He hangs in shades the orange bright,
Like Golden lamps in a green night,
And does in the pomegranates close
Jewels more rich than Ormus shows...
Music:
Mozart, 1791, "Ein Vogelfänger" from The Magic Flute, Deutsche
Gram. 2709 017
A sea-girt paradise, to revive again and again, this Hodges "Tahiti Revisited" of 1775
(time of Mozart) from which Melville, if he had not experienced the actuality, might
almost have taken the valley-pool of Typee:
All around its banks waved luxuriant masses of tropical foliage,
soaring high above which were to be seen, here and there, the
symmetrical shafts of the coconut trees... so many waving ostrich
plumes... The maidens of the valley... darted through the water,
revealing glimpses of their forms... some of the young men... brought...
a canoe from the sea... Fayaway... with a wild exclamation of delight
disengaged from her person the ample robe of tappa... shielding her
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from the sun, and spreading it out like a sail, stood erect with upraised
arms in the head of the canoe.
(fade Mozart)
In Moby Dick that verdant land is set in appalling ocean:
Music:
Beethoven, c. 1803, Sonata 17, D Min., 0pus 31, No. 2, "Tempest"
(Brendel), opening, Murray Hill S-34564
So in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and
joy,
a13)
13)
13a)
Turner, c. 1840(?), Waves Breaking Against the Wind; Tate Gallery, London
Copley, 1778, Watson and the Shark; Fine Arts Museum, Boston [There is
another version in the National Gallery, Washington, D.C.]
Double: [A] Goya 1799, The Dream of Reason Produces Monsters; Prado,
Madrid; and [B] Blake, 1805-10, Book of Job: Behold now Behemoth;
Morgan Library, New York City
but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep
thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!
But what choice has the heroic soul?
as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite
as god — so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite than be
ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety… 0
Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy
ocean perishing — straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!
(fade Tempest)
Copley's dramatization of Watson and the Shark is a quarter of a century before
Beethoven's Tempest, and three quarters before Melville. But one who had felt the New
World harden around him was on the titan track where Lenau, sailing west in 1832,
would chant:
Fly with the white clouds through the wide sky, white ship...
Foam behind me all the gray abyss
That holds the heart from freedom, its desire;
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and returning, from cities and a frontier "dog-dead to the spirit", would see a youth swept
overboard and drowned:
And the murderous old ocean smiled
At the sky, oblivious of wrong.
Had not Copley's contemporaries, Goya and Blake, glimpsed Melville's "gliding great
demon of the seas of life"?
Va14)
Middle Rhine, c. 1410, Paradise Garden; Staedelsches Kunstinstitut,
Frankfurt
Same, Paradise Garden, detail left
14)
Music:
Oswald von Wolkenstein, c. 1410-20(?) Sag an Herzlieb, close,
Archiv 3033
The paradise of the Middle Ages had been the hortus conclusus of the Song of
Songs, "my Love is a Garden enclosed." In that walled grace, where the resolving chords
are still the earthless fifths and octaves, pure as the art colors — ruby, gold, cerulean —
there is no moody filling in of romantic wish and pain.
(end v. Wolkenstein)
15)
Thomas Birch, c. 1830(?), The Delaware near Philadelphia, Corcoran Gallery,
Washington D.C.; + V detail, ships, right (V15a)
Music:
Beethoven, 1816, from An die Ferne Geliebte, "Ewiglich" etc.,
LHMV-1046
But when conscious paradise has touched the shores of old world and new, so that
Thomas Birch fills an outing on the Delaware with the time-fruit of Beethoven and
Schelling —
The birth of Spirit is the realm of history,
as the birth of light is the realm of nature —,
then soul is vulnerable. Wordsworth suffers in the sea-drowning of his brother not only
grief but the shock of moral betrayal:
I could have fancied that the mighty Deep
Was even the gentlest of all gentle things.
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Now "a power is gone, which nothing can restore."
(fade "klagt ihr Vöglein")
16)
C. D. Friedrich, 1821, The Wreck of the Hope, Kunsthalle, Hamburg
He sees:
That hulk, which labors in the deadly swell,
This rueful sky, this pageantry of fear!
Even Caspar David Friedrich, celebrant of earth-soul, painted in 1821 "The Wreck
of the Hope," in the stark geometry of "ice, mast-high, came floating by,/ As green as
emerald." Goethe had lived with the demonic; but the anguish of 1830 bodies forth the
lost illusion. Leopardi fears "the hideous power" of nature, "Mother in birth, stepmother
in desire" ("Madre in parto ed in voler matrigna"); De Vigny asked never to be left alone
with that goddess he knew too well not to fear ("Car je la connais trop, pour n'en pas
avoir peur.")
For 2nd 15)
Thomas Cole, 1839, Notch of the White Mountains; National Gallery,
Washington D.C.
And still Emerson would go on writing (1836):
Nature stretches out her arms to embrace man... a virtuous man is in
unison with all her works...
For 2nd 16)
John Martin, 1852, The Great Day of His Wrath; Tate Gallery, London
Until the bitter wave breaks in Melville with his white symbol of "the demonism of the
world":
all deified nature absolutely paints like the harlot. whose allurements
cover nothing but the charnel house within... The palsied universe lies
before us like a leper.
17)
T. Gericault, 1818, Raft of the Medusa; Louvre, Paris; first, video detail;
then, upper right (sail), from the Louvre oil sketch; while video, after '96,
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shows a clearer sail (V17a) from the Louvre oil, then V17b, the whole Louvre
sketch
Music:
Chopin 1842, Ballade #4, Op.52, close, Rubinstein, Vic. LSC-2370
Emerson's euphoria ("sins and the like are the soul's mumps and measles") turned
the battle of affirmation against dire fact to a time-drama in America ("he must make his
optimism good somehow against the eternal hell itself," said Melville). But in art and
music (here Chopin's 4th Ballade), the outcry punctuates the century. Gericault's 1818
Raft of the Medusa, from real disaster and shipwrecked France, verges, with Byron's
castaways, on metaphysical pain: Pierre: "Explain this darkness, exorcise this devil, ye
cannot." Yet a sail is on the horizon; the derelicts are saved. (close Ballade) As from the
Brontès to Dostoievsky, torment sounds the chords of regeneration. How else could that
arrogation of torment be borne?
18)
Giovanni di Paolo, c. 1440, Creation and Expulsion; Lehmann, Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York City
Expulsion was the creed account — Giovanni di Paolo's 15th-century depiction,
where God's creation of the circling universe caps a banishment which (like Moonshine
in the lanthorn) belongs in that wheel. All validities of nature and man hang in a bright
inconsequence of jewelled details stretching symbolic space.
19)
19a)
Thomas Cole, 1828, Expulsion from Eden, Fine Arts Museum, Boston;
+ V detail, right
Same, Cole Expulsion, detail left; + V return to the whole
But for Cole in 1828, symbols have assumed the body of the dimensional world.
The landscape of exile frames the contrast American writers would debate through the
century. Emerson faces the sunlit valley of Eden:
Standing on the bare ground — my head bathed by the blithe air and
uplifted into infinite space all mean egotism vanishes... The standard
of beauty is the entire circuit of natural forms.
It is what Lenau thought to find at the headwaters of the Ohio. But what he describes,
this Adam and Eve enter outside the rock-gate:
The red light of evening filters dimly
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Into the terrible reaches of the forest,
Where life and death have fought hushed together
A thousand years their ultimate grim wager...
In vain life stirs, in vain seeks some cranny,
Through stems of rot and mould, death's choking fingers.
Over four centuries, the attempt to realize God's kingdom in the mastered here and
now, had raised recurrent doubt how satanically flawed the achievement must be.
20)
Jean Fouquet, c. 1453-55, St. Margaret, Hours of Etienne Chevalier; Louvre,
Paris
In Fouquet, the pastoral and human blend in Gothic acceptance, so calm an earthpossession, one might not guess that the meeting of the haloed Shepherdess, St. Margaret,
with the Roman prefect, initiates her martyrdom.
If Renaissance so suspends reason's claim,
21)
El Greco, c. 1610, Laocoon, detail, National Gallery, Washington D.C.
(CGB '60)
those fierce breaks back (or forward) to apocalyptic dread, when "very force entangles/
Itself with strength" and the outward "rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct/ As water is
in water" (the Shakespeare Melville would take up so overwhelmingly:
Now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief... Toward
thee I roll, thou all destroying but unconquering whale... Thus I give up
the spear!)
those Judgment breaks, as in El Greco, 1610, attend the culminant throes
22)
22a)
22b)
Jan Both, c. 1645, Italian Landscape; Wallace Collection, London
Inness, 1865, Peace and Plenty, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Cuyp, c. 1660(?), A Road near a River, Dulwich Picture Gallery
of the temporal formulation itself — the 17th century conscious grasp (as in this Both,
inspirer of Cuyp) of a now light-ordered and light-transfigured phenomenal realm — a
rallying point for later America, as when Inness irradiates the close of the Civil War in
"Peace and Plenty". In such spirit Emerson and Thoreau quote Herbert:
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Man is all symmetry
Full of proportions, one limb to another
And all to all the world besides…
Music and light attend our head…
Traherne's 1670 Christian mysticism is pre-Transcendental:
That all the earth is one continued globe,
And that all men therein are living treasures.
That fields and meadows are a glorious robe
Adorning it with smooth and heavenly pleasures.
That all we see is ours... each one most blest…
23)
Magnasco, c. 1720-30, Storm with Fleeing Monks, detail, Brera, Milan;
+ V detail
Yet the turn to the next, and Swiftian, century can wrench "all that's kind to our
mortalities," as in reason's shipwreck, to the Magnasco storm and night-lighted barefoot
friars groping for the refuge of the old religious cave — like Faust's pious couple with
their chapel bell's "eternal bim-bam-bimmel."
Is it some "love of rags and cult of the wound" that sends Hester back to the
penance of the Scarlet Letter, or Hilda searching crypts and Dark Age towers in The
Marble Faun?
24)
Constable, 1828 version of 1802 sketch (in Victoria and Albert Museum), The
Vale of Dedham; National Gallery, Edinburgh; + V detail
But Enlightenment pressed on with our title to the fruitful earth. Even the
Romantic unrest is quietly domesticated in Old Crome, this Constable, Cotman, early
Turner — builds a free-brush doctrine of Lake-School good:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils...
Experience garnered for later pensive moods:
They flash upon that inward eye
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Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
25)
Durand, 1849, Kindred Spirits, Public Library, NYC (video uses V25)
The American affinity is more with the Germans — or, in Wordsworth, with the
pantheism of 1798:
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
In Durand's "Kindred Spirits" these affirmers of the ideal forest are Cole and Bryant ("To
him who in the love of Nature holds/ Communion with her visible forms...," TinternAbbey blank verse; "Whither, midst falling dew," Lyrical-Ballad); but they might almost
be Emerson and Thoreau:
The very globe continually transcends and translates itself, and
becomes winged in its orbit…
And if Emerson should squeeze in a word or two:
I yield myself to the perfect whole…
it would be Thoreau again, speaking of the beautiful bug which hatched out of the dry
leaf of an old table, "to enjoy its perfect summer life at last."
a26)
26)
V26a)
Washington Allston, 1818, Elijah in the Desert fed by the Ravens, Fine
Arts Museum, Boston
Allston, before 1837, Ship in a Squall; Fogg, Cambridge
Allston, 1804, Rising of a Thunderstorm at Sea, Fine Arts Museum, Boston
But from before 1820, Washington Allston, steeped in the alienation of baroque
Rome, had taken the other tack — like Gothic Poe:
Mountains toppling evermore
Into seas without a shore;
Seas that restlessly aspire,
Surging unto skies of fire...
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or the Poe Whitman dreamed, on "a vessel... torn sails and broken spars," through such a
storm as the "gallant ship" Melville saw painted in Father Mapple's church, "beating... off
a lee coast of black rocks and snowy breakers" — or the storm where Ahab candles the
sky's fire.
Toqueville called realism the American mode. But in the antinomy of the century,
which is always realism against transcendental and romantic, it is the Americans who (as
Thackery would say) espouse dream, the English, beef and ale. Though dreams have to
seem real. As Stuart joked, "Nobody could beat Mr. Allston in making water." But what
Allston mostly made was symbol: "I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of
thee."
a27)
27)
27a)
John Quidor, 1829, Rip van Winkle, National Gallery, Washington D.C.
John Quidor, 1832, The Money Diggers, Brooklyn Museum, New York City;
first, video detail, Vb27
Mathew Brady, 1845, Andrew Jackson, Brady-Handy Collection
Music:
Gottschalk, 1859, from Marche des Gibaros, Mus. Her. Soc. 3135
In music, Creole Gottschalk would exploit that vein — such chiaroscuro as Quidor had
drawn from Irving's Headless Horseman, Rip van Winkle, or the story illustrated here,
when a buccaneer's ghost (top right) scares night thieves from pirate gold. Though the
master scene of fire- and moonlit weird is Poe's of digging by lantern at a point
extrapolated from where the Goldbug fell through the eye of a tree-nailed skull — the
kind of grotesquery Tom Sawyer would delight in. While for Hawthorne those devils
Goethe thought the New World could be spared are real. The Witches' Sabbath seen by
Goodman Brown taints Faith and virtue everywhere. Thus, under the surface de
Toqueville staked out for the democratic arts, a ghostly battle is waged, of Transcendental
hope and demonic possession: "I look around me, and, lo! on every visage a Black Veil."
(fade Gottschalk)
28)
28a)
28b)
George Bingham, 1851, Daniel Boone leads Pioneers through the Cumberland
Gap, City Museum, Saint Louis, MO
American, 1846, The Murder of Jane McCrea, Historical Association of
Cooperstown, New York City
Again, 28, Boone and Pioneers, detail
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28c)
Symbolic History
American, c. 1858, The Railsplitter (Abe Lincoln), Historical Society, Chicago;
first, V detail
Emersonian promise goes West, as auspiciously as Dan Boone, in the painting by
Bingham of Missouri, leads settlers to the "Dark and Bloody Ground." But all those
earth-grabs have been claimed for Satan in "Young Goodman Brown":
I helped your grandfather the constable, when he lashed the Quaker
woman... I brought your father a pitch-pine knot, kindled at my own
hearth, to set fire to an Indian village...
Thus Boone was lawyered out of his holdings, and ended his life an embittered semisquatter. Toqueville:
Nothing can offer a more miserable aspect than these isolated
dwellings... An ark of civilization amid an ocean of foliage…
How depressing to the poet Lenau, as he wrote from Ohio:
You see no courageous dogs here, no fiery horses, no men of real
passion... It is sad to observe these burnt-out creatures in their burntout woods.
Yet Lincoln was growing up among them; in a few years Thoreau would build such a
shack by Walden Pond.
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a29)
29)
Symbolic History
C.G. Bingham, c. 1855(?), A Verdict of the People, detail, City Art Museum,
St. Louis
Bingham, c. 1851, The Country Election, also City Art Museum, St. Louis
(video shows 29 first, then a29, returning to a detail of 29)
That epic of Dan Boone sowed the Mississippi valley with the Jacksonian towns
Mark Twain would romanticize, and Toqueville study "to learn what we have to fear or
hope" from a revolution "which possesses all the characteristics of a Divine decree." But
what he found was not unrelated to Lenau's experience in a Baltimore boarding house:
They clang a great glutton's bell, and a hundred Americans throw
themselves into the room… each falls into a seat, bolts down his food,
springs up throwing back the chair, and rushes out to make dollars —
eilt davon, dollars zu verdienen…
This Bingham County Election ties the representational confidence of The
Federalist Papers ("reserved to the people of this country to decide... whether societies of
men are really capable"),
30)
Hogarth, c. 1754, Election Series, Chairing the Member, Soane Museum,
London (video shows details only)
to the event Pap describes for Huck: "I was just about to go and vote myself, if I warn't
too drunk to get there." If one falls back on Whitman's election poem of 1884:
The heart of it not in the chosen — the act itself the main, the
quadrennial choosing —
it is remembering that, in the century before, Hogarth had illustrated the electoral process
in four brawling pictures (this Chairing the Member, the last), about the time Sam
Johnson was writing:
Our supple tribes repress their patriot throats
And ask no question but the price of votes;
With weekly libels and septennial ale,
Their wish is full to riot and to rail.
31)
George Catlin, 1832, Pigeon's Egg Head, Smithsonian, Washington, D.C.
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31a)
31b)
Symbolic History
Edward Hicks, c. 1845(?), Tolerant William Penn, detail, Philadelphia
Museum?
Jacob Miller, 1837, Fort Laramie, University of Oklahoma Press
Catlin's depiction of the Yellowstone son of a chief before and after the corruption
for which he was killed by his tribe, hints at the vastest abuse of all, which most
Americans cloaked under "manifest destiny" — until the "Wounded Knee" soulsearchings of our time. De Toqueville:
The Lenapes. who received William Penn... have disappeared; and I
myself met with the last of the Iroquois, who were begging alms...
At the end of the year 1831. while I was on the left bank of the
Mississippi at a place named... Memphis, there arrived a numerous
band of Choctaws... I saw them embark to pass the mighty river... All
were silent. Their calamities were of ancient date and they knew them
to be irremediable...
The ejectment of the Indians... takes place... in a regular, and, as it
were a legal manner... It is impossible to destroy men with more
respect for the laws...
32)
H.F. Darby, 1845, Reverend John Atwood and Family, Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston; + V detail, and return to the whole
The family of the Reverend Atwood, Baptist, by the boy-painter Darby, seems to
exhibit, in Hawthorne's gloomy words: "the whole system of ancient prejudice,
wherewith was linked much of ancient principle." It must have been for this preacher
image (every member, as in Blake's Family of Job, with the open Book of Law) that
Emerson left his church, saying:
"Books are for the scholar's idle
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times..." "How can he remember well his ignorance," says Thoreau, "which his growth
requires…?"
It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern
one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
Of which Whitman concentrates the essence:
death under the breast-bones, hell under the skullbones... polite and
bland in the parlors.
a33)
33)
33a)
Thomas Cole, 1840, The Architect's Dream, upper detail; Museum of Art,
Toledo, Canada
Same, Architect's Dream, whole
Same, Architect's Dream, lower detail
Music:
Schumann, 1836, Fantasy, C Major, Op. 17, close of last mov.,
Richter, Angel 35679
Though de Toqueville did not find his way to Emerson's door, much less get on
the track of Thoreau's lost hound, horse, and turtle-dove, he felt something astir, a "wild
enthusiasm... for what is infinite":
I should be surprised if mysticism did not soon make some advance
among a people solely engaged in promoting its own worldly welfare.
True, there were camp-meeting revivals; but the real break was the irradiation of
the worldly itself: Thoreau's Now as immanent Coming:
God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more
divine in the lapse of all the ages...
Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to
dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
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This is a hybrid, a romantic mysticism, call to temporal possibility, as rooted in earth and
history as Hegel, this Schumann, as Cole's Architect, commanding all styles from
Pyramid to Gothic ("The passive master lent his hand/ To the vast soul that o'er him
planned"). From such a column of the East and past, Emerson exhorts Westward:
34)
W.S. Mount, 1838, The Painter's Triumph, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine
Arts, Philadelphia; first, video detail (cf. Va34)
We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe… We will
walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak
our own minds... A nation of men will for the first time exist, because
each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires
all men.
(fade Schumann at close)
In "A Painter's Triumph" Mount assumes the surface of the Dutch small masters
— democratic realism reaffirming 17th-century space. But his magic light is his own. "A
living dog," says Thoreau, "is better than a dead lion." And Whitman:
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign'd by
God's name...
Others will punctually come for ever and ever.
35)
35a)
G. C. Bingham, c. 1845, Fur Traders descending the Missouri, Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York City
Same, Fur Traders, detail; + another V detail
Perhaps Bingham's "Fur Traders descending the Missouri" is the most luminous
American picture: Thoreau: "Olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere."
Water is at the heart of it — Emerson's "Two Rivers" through which a deeper flows, "and
ages drop in it like rain" — the symbol, above all, that drew Thoreau to Walden Pond:
the water, full of light and reflections, becomes a lower heaven itself...
earth is not continent but insular...
Time is the stream I go a-fishing in... I would drink deeper; fish in the
sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars... I think that the richest vein is
somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining-rod and thin rising vapours I
judge; and here I will begin to mine.
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Bingham found the richest vein in the trading stream Mark Twain too would treat
with religious awe.
a36)
b36)
Allston, 1819, Moonlit Landscape, Fine Arts Museum, Boston
A.P. Ryder, 1890, Cove in the Moonlight, Phillips Gallery, Washington
D.C.
T. Eakins, 1872-76, The Pair-Oared Shell, detail, Philadelphia Museum of
Art
T. Eakins, 1873, The Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake, left detail;
Cleveland Art Museum
T. Eakins, 1871, Max Schmitt in a Single Scull, Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York City
Vc36)
Vd36)
36)
So Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter:
Letting the eyes follow along the course of the stream, they could catch
the reflected light from its water… "I have a strange fancy... that this
brook is the boundary between two worlds."
In Moby Dick the soul leans like Narcissus over the watery mirror, "the
tormenting mild image... we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the
ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all."
Where but in literature is such an unfolding of soul-search, from the effusive
benign of Emerson, heightened to mystery in Thoreau, through Hawthorne's knot of
wrong and Melville's war of spirit — from which Whitman, grappling with bare hands
and almost desperate hopes against the Grendel-Leviathan of the deep, welcomes every
pustulence of flesh, all catalogued negation, into the immanence of a dark divinity called
Light? In the art of the century, from Allston to Ryder, from Bingham to this transreal
Eakins, the darks and lights of that drama seem variously shuffled.
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37)
Symbolic History
Altdorfer, 1510, Forest with St. George and the Dragon, Alte Pinakothek,
Munich: + V detail
Yet from Renaissance to Romantic there is the change Auden has traced in The
Enchafed Flood. Consider the forest, Dante's Selva Oscura, Spenser's Wandering Wood:
in Altdorfer's enshrouding Other, it is just the path to the civilized and open, which the
great frog-mother dragon blocks for the battling St. George.
38)
A. B. Durand, 1855, In the Woods, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
City; video divides to upper and lower details
For Durand the ancient wood of error is the place sought,
the soul's home. Thoreau:
At the same time... we require... that land and sea be infinitely wild,
unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.
Hawthorne brings The Scarlet Letter to its climax by moving from the Puritan town to the
intuitive forest:
"What hast thou to do with all these iron men?... There is happiness to
be enjoyed..."
She undid the clasp that fastened the scarlet letter, and... threw it to a
distance among the withered leaves… she took off the formal cap that
confined her hair: and down it fell upon her shoulders... forth burst the
sunshine, pouring a very flood into the obscure forest...
The course of the little brook might be traced by its merry gleam afar
into the wood's heart of mystery, which had become a mystery of joy.
39)
A.J. Miller, 1859-60 (sketched 1837), Indian girl Swinging; Walters,
Baltimore
Such was the sympathy of Nature — that wild heathen nature of the
forest... with the bliss of these two spirits!
But Hawthorne had left Brook Farm with the cry that they did not know there was
such a thing as sin in the world. What the Baltimore painter Miller caught in this sketch
of an Indian girl, Hawthorne makes one pole of an inseparable pair: a region
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unredeemed, unchristianized... never subjugated by human law, nor
illuminated by higher truth...
40) William Page, 1843, Cupid and Psyche, J.D. Rockefeller III, New York
40a) Same, Cupid and Psyche, detail
— an ambivalence as dark as burning.
Music:
Verdi, 1853, from Il Trovatore, close of Leonora solo, Act IV, i, ff.,
RCA-V-LM-6008 (side 3 near end)
(No wonder the operatic cries of love and death in sensuous soaring sweep the age
—
Once more La Traviata sighs/ Another sadder song:
Once more Il Trovatore cries/ A tale of deeper wrong.)
So Page's Cupid and Psyche with its passionate oil-glazes, breaks on the nudes of classic
ideality as suddenly as Hester floods the pagan forest with a "smile... gushing from the
very heart of womanhood."
(Trovatore, side 4, "Ah, che la morte")
No golden light had ever been so precious as the gloom of this dark
forest.
And then that prophetess of a new truth speaks the inner imperative:
"What we did had a consecration of its own... We said so to each
other! Hast thou forgotten it?" "Hush, Hester!" said Arthur
Dimmesdale, rising from the ground. "No; I have not forgotten!"
41)
Double: Julia M. Cameron, c. 1865-70, [A] Ellen Terry; and [B] the
photographer herself; + video singles A and B
(Trovatore cont., Miserere)
But the hope of love withers to the Puritan scaffold:
"Is not this better," murmured he, "than what we dreamed of in the
forest?"
"I know not! ... Yea; so we may both die, and little Pearl die with us."
(Trovatore cont. "Riposa o madre")
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As in the deepest record of Victorian personality, Julia Margaret Cameron's high-souled
Madonnas, Echoes, Beatrices, complement the somber photographer herself; so the flood
of sun and Pearl's redemption ("A spell was broken... her tears... were the pledge") ("Ai
nostri monti") light Hester's return to the dark cottage of the Scarlet Letter, the symbol
that closes the fable, engraved on her tomb:
one ever-glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow: "On a field,
sable, the letter A, gules."
(fade "dormirò")
42)
Frederick Church, 1860, Twilight in the Wilderness, Museum of Art,
Cleveland; + V detail (cf. V42, CGB '81)
(Trovatore, cont. "T'arrendi — fuggi" & "Ha quest' infame")
As Thoreau observed in the agitations of Walden Pond, "the thrills of joy and
thrills of pain are undistinguishable" — the thawing clay forms of his Spring:
These foliacious heaps lie along the bank like the slag of a furnace,
showing that Nature is "in full blast" within...
So in Church's 1860 Wilderness, the winter twilight flames with affirmation. The devil in
Hawthorne's inkstand, to be exorcised by penfuls, was the inseparability of opposites, the
wild rose at the prison door. And when the black plummet of Hawthorne sounded the
mind of Herman Melville, Emerson's: "The visible creation is the terminus or the
circumference of the invisible world," turned to hideous and intolerable allegory:
(fade "0 fuggi, fuggi")
Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love,
the invisible spheres were formed in fright.
Va43)
43)
Horatio Greenough, c. 1840(?), Washington, front view, waist-up; Smithsonian, Washington, D.C.
Same, Greenough's Washington, 3/4 view, detail; + V close detail
The bare-chested Zeus-Washington Greenough carved in 1840, after absorbing in
Rome the heroics of Canova and Thorvaldsen, oversteps the original in more than nudity
— tells
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the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea;
while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the
treacherous slavish shore.
The resolve to found New Jerusalem on man's earth, with all concomitant cults of
nature, innate worth, freedom, progress and the eternal now, soars from Revolutionary
Tom Paine:
All the great laws of society are laws of nature... When precedents
fail... we must think as if we were the first men that thought...
through Emerson:
That which shows God in me, fortifies me. That which shows God out
of me, makes me a wart and a wen;
or from Jefferson: "That government is best which governs the least," through Thoreau:
"Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe — That government is best
which governs not at all" — toward the titan overreach of Melville's mid-century:
a44)
44)
Samuel Morse, 1812, Dying Hercules; Yale University Gallery, New Haven
William Rimmer, c. 1869, The Fall of Day; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston;
+ V detail
Is it I, God, or who that lifts this arm?
To which Starbuck has already answered:
God help thee, old man; thy thoughts have created a creature in thee:
and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture
feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.
(Trovatore, cont. "Prima che d'altri", 2nd time)
Did Rimmer, Boston sculptor-painter-doctor, whose work, shown in Paris, stirred
Rodin, know of William Blake? Or did Michelangelo beget likes? From Morse's Dying
Hercules, through Cole's Prometheus, to this Fall of Day, about 1867, the chord that
resonates is of archangelic overthrow — Ahab-Lucifer:
(when) the step-mother world, so long cruel... did seem to joyously sob
over him... Ahab's glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he
shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil.
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("Io moro" and fade)
45)
45a)
Emanuel Leutze, 1851, Washington Crossing the Delaware, Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York City
Same, detail
In 1851. as Melville was wrestling with his whale fable (like Delacroix's Jacob
with the angel), Leutze, for German revolutionaries, painted Washington Crossing the
Delaware. It too, over those 75 years, has become a god-wrestling — as when Ahab's
ship is sinking and Tashtego is nailing the flag to the subsiding spar, and the sky-hawk
intercepts his wing between the hammer and the wood, while the Indian freezes in death's
etherial thrill:
(Trovatore finale, from "Sia tratto al ceppo!")
so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak
thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab,
went down with his ship, which, like Satan would not sink to hell till
she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted
herself with it...
For between Melville's Moby Dick and Rilling's Fall of Day, our history too had
taken a tragic turn, and the celebrated war of freedom
("Egli era tuo fratello!")
a46)
b46)
46)
46a)
Mathew Brady, 1863, Confederate Caisson, Brady-Handy Collection
Alexander Gardner, 1864, Photograph of Walt Whitman, Feinberg Collection,
Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
Winslow Homer, 1866, Prisoners from the Front, Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York City
Same, Prisoners, detail
had worn down to the bitter war of brothers.
(close of Il Trovatore)
Melville, in neglect after Mobv Dick, turned ironic verse:
Your arts advance in Faith's decay;
You are but drilling the new Hun...
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Whitman — that child who "went forth every day,/ And the first object he look'd upon,
that object he became":
I... see myself in prison shaped like another man...
I am the hounded slave... I wince at the bite of the dogs —
Whitman nursed the wounded; and against Emerson's "I grieve that grief can teach me
nothing," he taught himself (and the painter Homer) to take up the whole crippling wrong
as if love could right it:
A sight in camp in the daybreak gray and dim,
As from my tent I emerge so early sleepless,
As slow I walk in the cool fresh air the path near by the hospital tent,
Three forms I see on stretchers lying, brought out there untended lying,
Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish woolen blanket,
Gray and heavy blanket, folding, covering all.
Curious I halt and silent stand,
Then with light fingers I, from the face of the nearest, the first, just lift
the blanket;
Who are you elderly man so gaunt and grim, with well-gray'd hair, and
flesh all sunken about the eyes?
Who are you my dear comrade?
Then to the second I step — and who are you my child and darling?
Who are you sweet boy with cheeks yet blooming?
Then to the third — a face nor child nor old, very calm, as of beautiful
yellow-white ivory:
Young man I think I know you — I think this face is the face of the
Christ himself,
Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.
47)
D. G. Blythe, 1863, Libby Prison; Fine Arts Museum, Boston; + V detail
Now the painter Blythe, in poverty and drink, took on the anguish of Libby Prison.
Melville hammers it too, like "a stake through the black heart of Andrew Jackson":
But all through the Seven Days' Fight,
And deep in the Wilderness grim,
And in the field-hospital tent,
And Petersburg crater, and dim
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Lean brooding in Libby, there came —
Ah heaven! — what truth to him.
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But Whitman —
tens and twenties of thousands of American young men... all sorts of
wounds... diarrhoea languishing, dying with fever... body's tragedies
bursting the petty bonds of art...
Whitman sees the new man "cool and unquestioned master above all pains and bloody
mutilations."
a48)
48)
Photo of Sojourner Truth, c. 1860-65
Alexander Gardner, April 9, 1865, Photograph of Lincoln, Meserve Collection
The categorical right, which from Thoreau —
The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to
be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good
behaviour —
through Hawthorne: "The world's law was no law for her mind"; and Melville: "unless
God does that beating... and not I" — would seize with fear and trembling on Huck Finn,
when he has come clean and written the letter to give up Jim:
I studied... I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide forever betwixt
two things... "all right, then, I'll go to hell" — and tore it up. It was
awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them
stay said —
that crisis has graved its care on Lincoln's face ("like a Hoosier Michael Angelo,"
Whitman said — here in the last photograph, the day of the surrender at Appomattox, five
days before he was shot) — this face the only artwork with the humanity of Whitman's
war poems: "Reconciliation":
Word over all, beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly
lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash
again, and ever again, this soil'd world;
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin — I draw near,
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white
face in the coffin.
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49)
49a)
Symbolic History
Greek Doric, late 5th cent. B.C.(?), Temple of Poseidon, Cape Sounion, Attica
(CGB '77)
Jefferson, completed 1824, University of Virginia, Lawn and Rotunda,
Charlottesville (CGB '83)
All over Europe, as Revolution rose and turned to Romantic, the columned image
of Greece summoned to the free future from an ideal past. Hölderlin's "forests of pillars
in the plain of the desert" loom like Promethean towers. In America, meeting houses,
Andalusia, Mount Vernon, Jefferson's University,
Music:
Songs of the Civil War, "All Quiet along the Potomac," from refrain,
New World Records 202
the temples of Natchez and Louisiana, claim the mantle of Greece. (fade) Most of all
with slave-holding apologists as the Civil War neared:
Music:
Same, from "We are Coming Father Abraham," refrain
Fitzhugh, decrying the wage-bondage of the North:
a50)
50)
V50a)
(fade)
Ante Bellum Natchez, c. 1850(?), Dunleith (CGB '80)
Ante Bellum, 1861, ruins of "Windsor" near Port Gibson, Miss. (CGB '80)
Same, "Windsor," another view (CGB '80)
We need never have white slaves in the South, because we have black
ones. Our citizens, like those of Rome and Athens are a privileged
class... Slavery protects the infants, the aged, and the sick...
Music:
June 1996
Same, from "We are Coming from the Cotton Fields"
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The Southerner is the Negro's friend, his only friend. Let no meddling
abolitionist... dissolve the friendship.
(close)
Inviting the ruins under which the writers of the South have been reared —
Music:
Same, from "Tenting tonight"
(fade)
though Windsor, near Port Gibson, Mississippi, like Faulkner's Sutpen's Hundred, was
burned after the war.
51)
E. Johnson, 1859, Old Kentucky Home, New York Historical Society, New
York City; + V detail (V51a)
Music:
Stephen Foster, 1854, Old Kentucky Home (flute), Col. M 32577
Fitzhugh's South smiles in this painting by Eastman Johnson, of New England —
as in the songs of Southern sentiment Stephen Foster wrote before he travelled there.
Though it took war and Reconstruction to draw the truth of Uncle Remus from Joel
Chandler Harris's otherwise feeble reporting:
(fade "Old Kentucky
Home")
"Howdy, Sis Cow," sez Brer Rabbit, sezee.
"W'y, howdy, Brer Rabbit," sez Miss Cow, sez she. "How you fine
yo'se'f deze days, Sis Cow?" sez Brer Rabbit, sezee.
"I'm sorter toler'ble, Brer Rabbit; how you come on?" sez Miss
Cow, sez she.
"O, I'm des toler'ble myse'f, Sis Cow; sorter linger'n twix' a bauk en
a break-down," sez Brer Rabbit, sezee.
"How yo fokes, Brer Rabbit?" sez she.
"Dey er des middlin', Sis Cow; how Brer Bull gittin' on?" sez Brer
Rabbit, sezee.
Music:
Songs of the Civil War, from "Dixie," a phrase, chorus
"Sorter so-so," sez Miss Cow, sez she …
52)
Winslow Homer, 1877, The Carnival, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York City: + V detail (V52a)
(fade Dixie)
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Music:
Symbolic History
Leadbelly, rec.1939, "The Boll Weevil," Fantasy 24715
In the sketches from Winslow Homer's 1875 stay in Petersburg, Virginia, the old
plantation sentiment has drained out and left the sharpness and color of Black rags and
indomitable jazz and blues, that would take the world by storm — the under-life Faulkner
would grope to in Dilsey's church or Nancy's cabin by the ditch in "That Evening Sun."
Though the outward poverty might almost vindicate Fitzhugh's scorn of emancipation.
(fade Leadbelly)
53)
53a)
53b)
53c)
Currier & Ives, 1868, "Westward the course of Empire …"; Roy King
Collection, New York
Erastus Field, 1875, Monument to the American Republic; Fine Arts
Museum, Springfield, MA
Currier & Ives, 1862, The Hunters' Stratagem
Again 53, Westward..., detail to the right
Music:
Charles Ives, 1896-8, lst Symphony, close, Col. D3S 783 (side 2)
But the Civil War was over: in the expansion which by 1900 would break in
Charles Ives, "Walt Whitman of American music" — the booming nation left the broken
South to nurse the first American experience of ruin. (close Ives) Currier and Ives titled
the 1868 print which pursues the railroad from the East over plains to the Rockies:
"Westward the course of Empire takes its way." Would the Concord rallying be
reenacted — Thoreau: "Old deeds for old people and new deeds for new" — but
forgetting Thoreau's "If a man should walk through this town and see only the reality,
where, think you, would the 'Mill dam' go to?"
Emerson had sounded the call:
Our log-rolling… and politics... fisheries, Negroes and Indians... are
yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes... and it will not wait
long for metres.
No wonder he hailed Whitman's Leaves:
the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet
contributed... I give you joy of your free and brave thought...
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Symbolic History
Did not its ubiquitous self range the continent, "Prospecting, gold digging, girdling the
trees of a new purchase"? Later chants lead westward:
I see... the Pacific railroad surmounting every barrier... I hear the
echoes reverberate through the grandest scenery in the world.
54)
American, 1870's, Reckless Driving (provenance unknown)
In that homesteading rush, regional authors spring up everywhere, and their postwar life is humor — Mark Twain. Startling, against Melville, to trace the evolution of a
comic genius: to see an author who starts in the easy journalist vein of this "Reckless
Driving in Frontier America," with "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County"
—
55)
Frank B. Mayer, 1858, Independence (Squire Jack Porter); Smithsonian,
Washington D.C.
— an author who absorbs (like Frank Mayer of Annapolis, in this 1858 portrait called
Independence) the innate benign of Emerson,
We interfere with the optimism of nature:
Wordsworth's "That we can feed this mind of ours/ In a wise passiveness," descending
through Thoreau's
I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a reverie... I
grew in those seasons like corn in the night,
and Whitman's "Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat," to Huck
Finn's "drifting down the big still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars" —
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Va56)
Symbolic History
Winslow Homer, c. 1872, The Nooning, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford,
Connecticut
Same, Nooning, detail
56)
— that an author who could bring the Intimations of Wordsworthian childhood and
Thoreau's "I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born" to
bear on a boyhood fresh as in Winslow Homer's 1870 studies of country schools —
turning Tom Paine's scorn of tradition governing beyond the grave: "It is the living who
are to be accommodated," to Huck's defiant pragmatism:
After supper she got out her book and learned me about Moses and the
Bulrushers, and I was in a sweat to find out all about him: but by and
by she let it out that Moses had been dead a considerable long time; so
then I didn't care no more about him, because I don't take no stock in
dead people.
57)
Again from Bingham, c. 1845, Fur Traders, central detail; first, a video detail
from slide 35
— that an author, apt to intuitive nature, Paine's "Government like dress is the badge of
lost innocence," and Thoreau's
I did not want to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish
to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary —
to keep soul in this earth-body, not shrink philosophy into a Stoic vault or Christian tomb
— rather, as Huck, skeptical of prayer, "set down one time back in the woods, and had a
long think about it" — to follow Thoreau at Walden pond past "an invisible boundary," to
"live with the license of a higher order of beings," abandoning the pretense of church
(those Kentucky feuders at the sermon with their guns), taking to the storm river, the sky
"ever so deep when you lay down on your back in the moonshine"; to float with the
riffling water: "You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft" —
58)
58a)
William Blake, c. 1806-09, Great Red Dragon and Woman; Museum,
Brooklyn, New York
Blake, 1795, Nebuchadnezzar; Tate Gallery, London
how strange, in the mode of laughter which well-being
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Music:
Symbolic History
Verdi, 1893, Falstaff, laughter, close of Act I, Col. M3S 750 (side 2)
shares with scorn,
Music:
Verdi, 1886, Otello, Iago's laugh, Act 2, London OS.25701
that Mark Twain, heir to such Rousseaunian goods — Emerson's pervasion of frontier
and market place — would be seized, like Blake, with the specter of the winged Dragon
harrying the woman clothed with the sun — Melville's "visible objects... are but as
pasteboard masks." Is it a comic revelation that the maker of the Jumping Frog and Tom
Sawyer should have closed his life in the solipsistic tortures of The Mysterious Stranger:
'It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no
universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a
dream — a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And
you are but a thought — a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a
homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!'
He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized, that all
he had said was true.
59)
Goya, 1791, The Little Giants, Tapestry Cartoon, Prado, Madrid
Goya had run such a comic course almost a hundred years before — his opening
jollity the court-play of the ancien regime: though among his tapestry designs, those of
children remind us how far the loves of Tom and Becky in the Missouri school rested on
Enlightenment, Emile, Goldsmith's village green, before the ideal village was deserted.
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From that delight Goya weathered (also through war)
Va60)
60)
Goya, 1820-23, Pilgrims of San Isidro, detail; Prado, Madrid
Same, Pilgrims, closer detail
to the 1820 gall and heartburn of the Black Paintings on the walls of his own Quinta del
Sordo near Madrid. If all comedy blends the bacchanal of good and the barbed
castigation of wrong, no wonder if its masters slip to the lacerative side (Swift before,
Chaplin in our time). Twain's comic peak in Huck Finn is inseparable from the tarred
Duke and King, Buck shot down in the feud, Colonel Sherburn's diatribe on man:
I was born and raised in the South, and I've lived in the North; so I
know the average all around. The average man's a coward... Now the
thing for you to do is to droop your tails and go home and crawl in a
hole.
Though Huck can still go to the circus, steal under the tent and revel in those "sureenough queens" — "a real bully circus."
61)
61a)
61b)
Goya, 1824-28, "Aun aprendo," black chalk drawing, Prado, Madrid
Double: [A] photograph of Mark Twain, 1899; and [B] Eaton, painting of
Melville (age c. 50) [video singles only]
Again 61, Aun aprendo, detail
Was it the Baroque heritage or his own resilience that brought Goya in his last
years through the black pit to the laughing myth of "Aun aprendo", "I'm still learning"?
And was it the vulnerability of Mark Twain himself or of romantic optimism that let him
sink always deeper into the cruelty of God and man, whether in exploited Congo or in
microscopic nightmare? Though his wit flashed to the end: "I came in with Halley's
comet. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's
comet." And he did — 1835 to 1910.
Whereas Melville, on tragic course, had already battled the worst, and in Billy
Budd come through to a sacramental calm. As Auden wrote:
Toward the end he sailed into an extraordinary mildness...
Thus the hero is executed under the Blakean fatherhood of Starry Vere:
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Symbolic History
the vapoury fleece hanging low in the East, was shot through with a
soft glory as of the fleece of the Lamb of God seen in mystical vision;
and simultaneously therewith, watched by the wedged mass of
upturned faces, Billy ascended; and ascending took the full rose of the
dawn.
But if we are contrasting comic and tragic trajectories, what of Goya's "Aun Aprendo"?
62)
62a)
62b)
Winslow Homer, 1864, Croquet Scene; Art Institute, Chicago
Winslow Homer, 1870, The Bathers, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC
Homer, again Croquet Scene, center detail
In America it is as if the specter of death under spangled robes had to be
encountered again and again, each time with a New World surge of delight and shock of
confrontation. How luminously Winslow Homer's (red, white, and blue) Croquet Game
of 1864 affirms.
Against Emerson's soul, Whitman claimed to celebrate the common and tangible.
And early James, turning from those Hawthorne visions he loved, would try to refine as
observational a fiction as Howells could. No doubt symbols lurk at the core: it is the
corrupt misreading of Daisy Miller's fresh light which makes Europeanized Winterbourne
say after her death:
I was booked to make a mistake. I've lived too long in foreign parts.
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Symbolic History
But the sunlit scene is actual — in The Portrait of A Lady. the ravishing Miss Archer's
arrival on the Touchett's Tudor lawn.
63)
63a)
Winslow Homer, 1899, The Gulf Stream; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC
Same, Gulf Stream, detail
Music:
Verdi, 1886, Otello, Act I, opening, London OS.25701
By 1899, Homer's realist surface buckles (as in Verdi's Otello) with the symbolic
crisis Melville had faced fifty years before — that demonic ubiquity which brought Henry
James to the close of "The Beast in the Jungle" —
he saw it... rise, huge and hideous, for the leap that was to settle him.
His eyes darkened — it was close; and instinctively turning, in his
hallucination, to avoid it, he flung himself, face down, on the tomb. —
So too the "huge and monstrous" alter ego of "The Jolly Corner."
It was for such seizure of "villain touch... windpipe squeezed in the fakes of
death," that Whitman haunted the opera (that 1863 letter from New York, of Medori
pouring out song "like a raging river" in a scene of love and poison):
Comrades... this is in singing and music... on a big scale... sometimes
the whole band and chorus all putting on the steam together... such
singing and strong rich music always gives me the greatest pleasure —
and so the opera is the only amusement I have gone to, for my own
satisfaction for the last ten years.
(fade Otello)
a64)
64)
V64a)
J.M.W. Turner, 1805-10, On the Thames, National Gallery, London
J.M.W. Turner, I840, Slave Ship, Fine Arts Museum, Boston
Same, detail, corpses in the sea [added to video in '96]
And Turner, who had begun before 1800 with the Thames, or Cromack Water,
agleam, night or day, sun or shower, with transcended Claude, by 1840 (Melville
returning from the South Seas, about to sail at once, like Bulkington, on the whaler
Acushnet) — Turner's Slave Ship loads the carnivorous sea with such a charnel-house as
would ravage again the wits of Black Pip, gone overboard:
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Symbolic History
Pip saw the multitudinous, God omnipresent, coral insects, that out of
the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs...
For 2nd 63) Winslow Homer, 1899, After the Hurricane — Bahamas; Art
lnstitute, Chicago
If Shakespearean tragedy arose on the climb from Medieval contempt of the world
to the formulated command called Leibnizian reason, there is an inverse tragic motion
down, as optimism transferred to romantic heart swirls once more in cosmic valuedrowning: Russell:
That man is the product of forces which had no prevision of the end
they were achieving... that all... are destined to extinction in the vast
death of the solar system...
Iago's nihilist creed: "I believe in a cruel God":
Music:
Verdi, 1886, Otello, "Credo in un Dio crudel," London OS 25701
2nd 64) Turner, Slave Ship, detail (video takes detail from 1st 64)
65)
J.M.W. Turner, 1836-7, Avalanche, Valley of Aosta, Art Institute of
Chicago
The destructive immersion had begun with the romantic itself — Turner's 1836
Avalanche in the Vale of Aosta — to peak by mid-century in Melville:
I feel now like a billow that's all one crested comb...
66)
66a)
A.P. Ryder, 1890, Jonah, Smithsonian, Washington D.C.; + V detail
Anonymous, 1879, Photograph of Walt Whitman (age 60), NY Public Library
And in American art about 1890 in the sea-allegories of Ryder, where habitable space
reverts to devouring whirls.
Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen
white surf beat against its steep sides: then all collapsed, and the great
shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.
(fade Otello)
But Whitman, also by 1871, had to rest the "soul's habitation" almost on Russell's
"unyielding despair":
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Democracy grows rankly up the thickest, noxious, deadliest plants and
fruits of all… We sail a dangerous sea of seething currents, cross- and
under-currents, vortices — all so dark, untried — and whither shall we
turn?
67)
67a)
Winslow Homer, 1896, The Lookout — All's well, Fine Arts Museum,
Boston
Anon., 1882, Photograph of Walt Whitman (age 63), NY Public Library
But as Homer's late works grip night and treacherous ocean in the near-abstract
endurance of a Lookout's "All's Well," Melville framed Billy Budd's sacrifice in Hegelian
history:
The opening proposition... rectification of the Old World's hereditary
wrongs... Straightway the Revolution itself became a wrongdoer... the
outcome of all... a political advance... for Europeans.
While Whitman bridled the leviathan of his Democratic Vistas:
Thought you greatness was to ripen for you like a pear?... you must
pay... with a proportionate price.
In an Otello stripped of Shakespeare's vindicating universals, the murdering suicide's last
gasp is harmony:
Music: Verdi, 1886, close of Otello, London OS.25701
68)
68a)
(fade)
J.M. Whistler, 1864, Symphony in White No. 2, Tate Gallery, London;
+ V detail
Same, Symphony in White, closer detail
Under the behemoth current West, it is curious to trace the eddies of eastward
refinement — during the Civil War, but in Paris and England, Whistler's pre-Jamesian
Portrait of a Lady, with its Hawthorne-sad reflection: while in Transcendental America,
behind the hedge and brick of an Amherst house, such a mirrored brooder spoke in Emily
Dickinson:
There's a certain slant of light,
Winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the heft
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Symbolic History
Of cathedral tunes.
Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.
None may teach it any:
'Tis the seal, despair, —
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air.
When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes 'tis like the distance
On the look of death.
69)
69a)
69b)
V69b)
V69c)
69d)
69e)
June 1996
Raphael Peale, 1823, After the Bath, Nelson-Atkins Gallery, Kansas City,
MO
A.U. Wertmüller, 1787, Danae and the Shower of Gold, National Museum,
Stockholm
Double: what the video separates as V69b and V69c, below
J.S. Sargent, 1884, Madame X, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
City
Rembrandt, 1646, The French Bed (etching), Amsterdam
Rodin, 1884, Eternal Springtime (bronze sculpture), Rodin Mus., Paris
Again 69, Peale's Bath, detail
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Emily offended against verse form; Walt also against the content of Peale's 1823
Girl Drying her Hair:
Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!
There had been Wertmüller's coital Danae modelled in Paris by court ladies and
exhibited after 1806 in Philadelphia at 25 cents a head. There would be Sargent's
Madame X with as much to cover as Chad's wonderful Comtesse in The Ambassadors.
But these are Dwight's "foul harlot Europe" against "fair Columbia." If Bradford had
confessed of Plymouth Colony:
not only incontinencie between persons unmaried... but some maried
persons also; but that which is worse, even Sodomie and Bugerie
(things fearful to name) have break forth in this land, oftener than once
—
Whitman was the first to celebrate
Breast that presses against other breasts...
Winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me...
How Emerson overlooked that in the Leaves is not clear; but the "Children of Adam"
brought it home:
Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of love,
white-blow and delirious juice.
So the man who had written "I greet you at the beginning of a great career," backed off,
until in 1865 he was quoted:
there is also Walt Whitman, but he belongs yet to the fire clubs, and
has not got into the parlors.
As if the cry, "Undrape! you are not guilty to me," had torn the sheet off Peale's still-life
nude.
70)
70a)
G. Courbet, 1866, Laziness and Sensuality, Petit Palais, Paris
G. Courbet, 1866, Les deux amies ou La Reveil, private collection, Paris
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Exposing the lusts of France, Courbet's Lesbians. Was the Whitman shock in part
of "things fearful to name" — his union of body and soul, a mystical oral tree:
I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn'd over
upon me.
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to
my bare-stript heart,
And reach'd till you felt my beard. and reach'd till you held my feet.
Though it was the "dear love of comrades" in Calamus that stirred British Symonds to the
question, from which Whitman reeled, claiming mistresses and bastards. Whitman's
loading of self, earth, and all with the lushness of either sex may remain mysterious; but
what–ever he worshipped, "firm masculine colter" or "brown melons of breasts," it was
not prurience:
everywhere an abnormal libidinousness... bad blood, the capacity for
good motherhood deceasing or deceas'd, shallow notions of beauty,
with a range of manners, or rather lack of manners (considering the
advantages enjoy'd), probably the meanest to be seen in the world...
71)
71a)
71b)
Thomas Eakins, 1883, Swimming Hole, Art Center, Fort Worth, Texas
Thomas Eakins, 1880, Female Nude (drawing), Phila. Mus. of Art
Again 71, Swimming Hole, detail
Eakins held with Whitman to the "sanity of birth, Nature, and humanity":
Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,
Twenty-eight young men, and all so friendly,
Twenty-eight years of womanly life, and all so lonesome.
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Symbolic History
She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,
She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window.
Which of the young men does she like the best?
Ah, the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.
Where are you off to, lady? for I see you,
You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.
Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather.
The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.
The young men float on their backs, their white bellies swell to the
sun... they do not ask who seizes fast to them.
They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending
arch.
They do not think whom they souse with spray.
a72) Thomas Eakins, 1877, W. Rush Carving his Schuylkill River Allegorical
Figure, Philadelphia Museum of Art
72) Thomas Eakins, 1908, William Rush and his Model, Acad. of Arts, Honolulu
72a) Thomas Eakins, 1877, Walt Whitman, Phila. Academy of Fine Arts
When Eakins, at 66, took up the celebration which had cost him an academy post
30 years before, he resumed the subject of John Rush, Philadelphia sculptor of about
1800, who had carved a statue of the Schuylkill. But Rush here becomes the old Eakins,
and the model, whom his touching chivalry aids from the pedestal (wonderfully plain and
sexual, as far from classic marble as Whitman's prostitute: "Not till the sun excludes you
do I exclude you") is the nude Pygmalion carved and Aphrodite turned to flesh. Whitman
too had sacrificed to that flesh. As he wrote in 1872:
in the United states [neither]... the chief Literary persons or organs...
admit Leaves of Grass as having any value, or recognize the author as
a poet at all... he has indeed been ignominiously dismissed from a
moderate government employment... for the sole and avowed reason
that he was the writer of the book... no American publisher will
publish it... many of the bookstores refuse to keep it for sale... and the
position of the author both as to literary rank and worldly prosperity, in
his own country, has been, and remains today, under a heavy and
depressing cloud.
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a73)
73)
Symbolic History
Double: [A] Monet, 1875, Woman with Parasol, Nat. Gal., Wash. D.C.; and
[B] Cezanne, 1900-5, Bathing Women, det., Phila. Mus. of Art
J.F. Millet, 1850, The Sower, Fine Arts Museum, Boston; + V detail
Is America behind Europe, strangely neck and neck, or, as Whitman dreamed,
searching somewhere in the van? Melville, Whitman, Homer, Eakins, Ryder, span the
French modern from Monet through Cezanne. But their style affinities are back, as to the
revolutionary commitment of mid-century — this Millet Sower, which Whitman would
admire in Boston 30 years after:
a sublime murkiness and original pent fury... Will America ever have
such an artist out of her own gestation, body, soul?
Whitman's "Years of the Modern" is as far from Impressionism as The Communist
Manifesto:
I see men marching and countermarching by swift millions...
Are all nations communing? is there going to be but one heart to the
globe?...
The perform'd America and Europe grow dim, retiring in shadow
behind me,
The unperform'd, more gigantic than ever, advance. advance upon me.
74)
74a)
74b)
I. Repin, 1885, Ivan the Terrible and his Son, Tretyakov Gal., Moscow
Double: Photographs of [A] Whitman and [B] Tolstoy
Again 74, Ivan and Son, detail
Music:
Mussorgsky, 1868-72, Boris Godounov (end of Act II), "I am
suffocating", beginning and ending (Chaliapin). Angel COLH 100
There are at present [wrote De Toqueville] two great nations in the
world, which seem to tend toward the same end, although they started
from different points: I allude to the Russians and the Americans... the
principal instrument of the Anglo-Americans is freedom; of the
Russians servitude... yet each of them seems to be marked out by the
will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.
And Whitman:
(without music)
You Russians and we Americans!... so unlike at first glance... yet... so
resembling each other... the idea, perennial through the ages, that they
both have their historic and divine mission...
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(Mussorgsky, voice)
Like the Americans, Repin in his 1885 Ivan the Terrible, clings to realism, though
with a violence which in Mussorgsky's Boris begins to disrupt the canons of the past,
stripping (as no doubt Whitman's "barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world" did)
toward something elemental. But Whitman against Boris seems light against dark.
(close Boris aria)
75)
Edouard Manet, 1877, The Suicide, Emil Buehrle Collection, Zürich
The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom,
I witness the corpse with its dabbled hair, I note where the pistol has
fallen.
Whitman saw the worst as clearly as Manet. He had shared a bed in the frame house in
Brooklyn with a congenital idiot brother (the bed Thoreau found unmade on his visit and
the chamber pot unemptied); there was the drunkard brother, married to a street-walker;
and a third, "the venerealee," who died of softening of the brain. But against Manet's
clever reporting (as Salvian said of the late Romans, "saturated with sardonic herbs"),
a76)
76)
76a)
Cezanne, c. 1887, detail of Mt. Ste. Victoire; Courtland Collection, London
[while video uses Va76, Van Gogh, 1888, The Sower, Kröller-Müller,
Otterlo]
Van Gogh, The Sower, detail of the sun
Again, Van Gogh, The Sower, whole (video: wider detail)
Whitman's also factual revolt — "What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me,"
and "the truest and greatest Poetry… can never again, in the English language, be
expressed in arbitrary and rhyming metre" — holds to its "wing'd purposes": "the moth
and the fish-eggs are in their place."
"Give me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling" —
that from 1865; and from The Song of Myself:
We also ascend dazzling and tremendous as the sun,
We found our own O my soul in the calm and cool of the daybreak.
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Symbolic History
It seems another style world, even from this of the prophetically seized Van Gogh —
however Van Gogh's color-splash and Whitman's incantation ("Walt, you contain enough,
why don't you let it out then?") press the God-rape on the immediate: "I believe the
soggy clods shall become lovers and lamps" and "I effuse my flesh in eddies, I drift it in
lacy jags." Van Gogh's advance is of the ruptured French Salon: technique, Rimbaud,
Symbolist art. Whitman is oceans west — and east — of there:
And love and faith, like scented roses blooming.
77)
77a)
Chinese, Ma Yuan, c. 1190-1230, Walking on a Mountain Path in Spring,
Ink and light colors on silk, Palace Museum Collection, Taichung; + V detail
Frank Pearsall, 1869, Photograph of Walt Whitman, NY Public Library
Music:
Chinese classical from "Water and Clouds over the Rivers Hsiao
and Hsian" (Ch'in), Everest 2427
From Emerson's "Brahma," "Find me and turn thy back on Heaven," through
Thoreau's Kourou artist timelessly carving a perfect staff, to Whitman's merging self and
all — as if, on thought's round globe, "facing West from California's shores" — in that
America, the affinity with Eastern wisdom was clear. Yet we have only to admire a Sung
landscape of such contemplation, this Ma Yuan, "Walking a Mountain Path in Spring," to
sense how far, in leisured refinement of poet-sage and Ch'in-bearing attendant, its
millenial evocation of distilled earth and body is from Walt's vulnerability of postCh'in
romantic universe and person:
(fade
setting)
I am an acme of things accomplish'd, and I an encloser of things to
be...
My embryo has never been torpid...
For it the nebula cohered to an orb...
Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths and deposited it with
care...
78)
78a)
78b)
F.E. Church, c. 1860(?), Morning in the Tropics, National Gallery,
Washington D.C.; first video detail (Va78)
Same, Tropics, detail left; video, closer detail
Same, Tropics, detail center
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Music:
Wagner, 1870-4, Götterdämmerung, from Siegfried's Rhine
Journey, Seraphim 60003
Whitman's "O my soul" finds its own in cosmic God-space:
To behold the day-break!
The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows —
a mystery Church learned from Transcendental Cole and painted in smooth-brushed
verisimilitude from the sunset Adirondacks to this Tropic Morning. If outwardness
begins to dissolve, it is into the shimmering vapours of Wagner's Rhine:
Press close bare-bosom'd night...
Night of south winds — night of the large few stars —
the landscape of mist in which Whitman's most moving lyrics swim, or drown — "SeaDrift":
Out of the Ninth-month midnight...
Down from the shower'd halo,
Up from the mystic play of shadows twining and twisting as if they
were alive…
Music:
Wagner, 1859, close of Tristan, instrumental coda; RCA-V-LM-1829 (or
6700)
Death. death, death. death, death, death...
The word of the sweetest song and of all songs...
The sea whisper'd me.
79)
79a)
Blakelock, c. 1885, Moonlight, Brooklyn Museum, NY
Same, Moonlight, detail
It is Tristan's tragic, infinite landscape (which Blakelock also moved toward, earth
floating in water and moon) that the Memories of Lincoln require:
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd,
And the great star early droop'd in the western sky
in the night,
I mourn'd, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring...
Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,
June 1996
O Western Star
Whitman's America
49
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.
(close of Tristan)
The affirmation of life, like everything transcendental, from Bach's songs of
death-love to Mahler's Lied von der Erde,
Music:
Mahler, 1908. Das Lied von der Erde, close: "Ewig," Seraphim
60191
is Nietzsche's joy, in love with eternity:
Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit,
Will tiefe, tiefe, Ewigkeit.
80)
80a)
80b)
Cox, c. 1887, Photo of Walt Whitman, "The Laughing Philosopher," Rutgers
Univ, detail; + V whole (V80)
Thomas Eakins, 1891, Photo of Walt Whitman (age 72), Philadelphia
Museum of Art
Photograph of Walt Whitman (age 35) c. 1854, Trent Collection, Duke
University Library; + V detail
As Thoreau answered on his deathbed, when asked "Have you made your peace
with God?", "I never quarrelled with him" — so Melville, in the fever of Moby Dick,
knew:
We were now in that enchanted calm which they say lurks at the heart
of every commotion... Even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my
being, do I myself... still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.
It was the seamark to which Whitman sailed, from the 1868
Passage to more than India!...
O darling joy! but safe! are not all the seas of God?
through Whispers of Heavenly Death,
Tenderly — be not impatient,
(Strong is your hold O mortal flesh,
Strong is your hold O love.)
to "Goodbye my Fancy" from his last years:
June 1996
O Western Star
Whitman's America
(close of Mahler)
50
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Good-bye my Fancy!
Farewell dear mate, dear love!...
The slower fainter ticking of the clock is in me,
Exit, nightfall, and soon the heart-thud stopping.
…Good-bye my Fancy.
Yet let me not be too hasty...
May-be it is yourself now really ushering me to the true songs, (who
knows?)
May-be it is you the mortal knob really undoing, turning — so now
finally,
Good-bye — and hail! my Fancy.
Where else had he been all along?
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women
my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love,
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap'd stones, elder, mullein and
poke-weed...
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love.
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another.
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
June 1996
O Western Star
Whitman's America
51
�
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O Western Star (Whitman's America), Symbolic History, Part 30
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Text
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
31. 19th Century: The Loaded Dream
1)
Double: [A] Wilkie, 1804-05, Self-portrait, National Gallery of Scotland,
Edinburgh, and [B] Toulouse-Lautrec, 1880, Self, aged 16, Toulouse-Lautrec
Museum, Albi; + V details of A and B, with returns to the double
Let an opening portrait-pair span our theme: the perilous reshaping of two
worlds, inner and outer. In Wilkie's 1805 Self (left), God-affirmed inwardness and
Rights-of-man outwardness arise together from the hopes of Enlightenment. In
Toulouse-Lautrec's 1880 Self at 16 (right), the backlash of such promise fires, in both
realms, the crisis of modernity.
Where first shall we take the pulse of what was leading, in the arts, from
transcendental assurance to Symbolist estrangement; in politics, from constitutional
debate to Marx and the anarchists?
a2)
2)
2a)
A. Böcklin, 1865, Villa am Meer (2nd form), Schack Gallery, Munich (copy of
CGB '59, Face and Landscape 68)
Böcklin, 1857, Pan in Reeds, Alte Pinakothek, München; first, video, upperspread
Same, Böcklin's Pan in the Reeds, lower detail 2b) Same, Böcklin's Pan, upper
detail
Music:
Brahms, 1891, Clarinet Quintet, from 2nd Movement, Deutsche
Grammophon, LPM 18278
If the century of Böcklin and Brahms is the Romantic century, Baudelaire's
"cimetière abhorré de la lune," its stretch of Spleen and Ideal, "0 serments! ô parfums! ô
baisers infinis," makes it an insurgent hatching ground:
That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout?
But if "Romantic," a recurrent pole in man and art, is to designate a time, it cannot
be in mere opposition to "Classical": both Hölderlin and Nietzsche were prophet-lovers
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
of Greece; the most daring pre-Symbolist of France, de Nerval, says the Muse has made
him "l'un des fils de la Grèce" — and from where else did Böcklin get his "great God
Pan, down in the reeds by the river"? Nor can Romantic simply oppose Realism: this
swamp dappled with sun, with even its frogs and scarab could not more imitate the visual.
It is that classical theme and realist body are possessed by some sensuous abandon of
romantic soul.
(fade Brahms)
3)
3a)
3b)
H Daumier, c. 1860(?), The Uprising, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.;
+ V detail
Daumier, 1848-49, The Fugitives, Collection of Mrs. William van Horne,
Montreal
Daumier, 1854, On the Barricades, National Gallery, Prague; video: detail
only
Music:
Chopin, 1841, Close of Ballade #3, A Flat Major, Op. 47,. (Casadesus ) Col .ML 4798 (or Rubinstein, RCA-V-LSC-2370)
Shift to the Revolutionary strand of the century: Daumier's realism, inspired by
the Socialist outbreak and brief Republic of 1848; Chopin, part of the musical build-up
(with Berlioz, Liszt, early Wagner, the firebrand Verdi); in literature, George Sand,
Lamartine and the rest, culminating in Victor Hugo, with his youthful definition of the
Romantic as "nothing but Liberalism in literature" — even Stendahl and Baudelaire later
amazed at their 1848 intoxication — all swept on a mounting wave of surge, reversal,
more radical quest to affirm — as Shelley's first poetic championing of the proletariat
after the massacre of "Peterloo," points down the century:
Men of England, wherefore plough
For the lords who lay ye low?
Wherefore weave with toil and care
The rich robes your tyrants wear?
If we ask what Daumier's force shares with Böcklin's mood, it may give a clue to
Romantic Soul: a tide of rising expectations, heightening touch and dream, wish,
vulnerability, despair.
(end Chopin)
1st 4) Böcklin, c. 1846 Idyll, Neue Pinakothek, München; + V detail
V4a) Böcklin, c. 1860(?), Triton and Nereid, Schack Gallery, München (detail from
copy of CGB '59, Nature 10)
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
It is the time-loading of all physical and psychic bases.
The romantic still carries that entire burden of articulated heart and world, as
Keats bears the weight of Miltonic pentameter: from Endymion:
One faint eternal eventide of gems;
to Hyperion:
Forest on forest hung about his head
Like cloud on cloud.
And Baudelaire, even as he moves toward the modern, luxuriates in such visceral
fullness:
Mère des souvenirs, maîtresse de maîtresses,
O toi, tous mes plaisirs, ô toi, tous mes devoirs!
1st 5) Henri Rousseau, 1907, The Snake Charmer, Louvre, Paris; the video having
first returned to 4, Böcklin's Idyll
V5a) Same, detail
Whereas Mallarmé draws the plug which drains that voluptuous "perfume of the
blood," refines the forms to a hyaline shimmer — as Böcklin's explicit "Idyll" yields to
the innuendo of "Douanier" Rousseau's Snake Charmer. Huxley casts such a spell in his
free translation of "The Afternoon of a Faun":
Between the reeds I saw their bodies gleam
Who cool no mortal fever in the stream
Crying to the woods the rage of their desire:
And their bright hair went down in jeweled fire
Where crystal broke and dazzled shudderingly...
Et le splendide bain de cheveux disparaît
Dans les clartés et les frissons, ô pierreries!
2nd 4) Again, Böcklin's Idyll, detail; + V return to a larger detail of V4a
Romantic had preferred the bases loaded, that we open all stops of the earth-organ
— thus the tonal sob-yearnings of Brahms, even in the encroaching estrangement of the
Clarinet Quintet —
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
Music:
V2nd 5a)
2nd 5)
Symbolic History
Brahms, 1891, earlier in the 2nd movement, Clarinet Quintet
(fade)
Rousseau, 1910, Dream, Museum of Modern Art, NYC
Again, Rousseau's Snake Charmer, central detail (video takes its detail
from 1st 5, whole
against the dissolving tonalities of Ravel's 1903 Quartet.
Music:
6)
Ravel, 1902-3, String Quartet in F Major, close 3rd movement,
Nonesuch H-1007
Aelbert Cuyp, c. 1660, The Maas at Dordrecht, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; + V details
Of course the rhetoric of fullness the 19th century had to shed was the heritage
from Baroque, with its proclaimed grandeurs of space, time, and cause — Leibnitz:
Therefore each individual substance expresses the resolves which God
made in regard to the whole universe.
We grasp it in the light-flooded distances of Cuyp, the ground-bass tensities of a Viola
d'Amore sonata, German about 1670.
Music:
7)
German, c. 1670, Viola d'Amore Sonata, lst movement, opening, AS-19
(fade)
Norbert Grund, c. 1670, Flat Sea Coast, National Gallery, Prague; + V detail
Music:
Haydn, 1772, from 3rd movement, opening, Quartet #1 of 0pus 20,
Qualiton SL PX 11 332 a
From that heroics much of the 18th century already lightens to the Berkeleian and
subjective, as in the Sons of Bach and early Haydn (here from the first quartet of Opus
20), or in such landscapes of sensibility as Norbert Grund's. Though, like Rousseau and
Gray ("Wanders the hoary Thames along/ His silver-winding way"), this pre-romantic
respects the court manners of rococo.
(fade Haydn)
a8)
b8)
C.D. Friedrich, 1828, Ships in Harbor at Evening, Gallery, Dresden
C.D. Friedrich, 1818, Woman on the Shore near Rügen, Winterthur
June 1996
19th Century
4
�C.G. Bell
8)
Symbolic History
C.D. Friedrich, c. 1916-18, Setting Sail, Morning Landesmuseum, Hannover;
+ V detail (here video returns to a detail of b8, then of a8)
Music:
Beethoven, 1807, 2nd movement, Second Rasoumovsky Quartet,
Col. ML 5596 (or Fine Arts Quartet, Everest SDBR 32)
Certainly, as far as transcendental melting goes, the Baroque vapored to a veil, it
attends the Kantian fruition of that idealism Berkeley had sowed, and to which this
Friedrich, with Beethoven, Coleridge, a whole 19th-century horizon are legatees:
Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea:
No truth therefore is more certain... than that all that exists for
knowledge, and therefore this whole world, is only object in relation to
subject, perception of a perceiver, in a word, idea...
The sea across which Friedrich's morning boats set sail is rayed through with the longing
which Schelling's "eternal One feels to give birth to itself." Such the ocean of Nietzsche's
rapture, in whose Seventh Loneliness the silver soul-fish swims from the bark; though
that timeless love, for all the miscarriage of Enlightenment and Revo-
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
lution, still clings to the tonal and spatial touch of earth — Romantic.
(fade Beethoven)
a9)
9)
Rembrandt, 1647, Night Rest on the Flight, detail, National Gallery, Dublin,
Ireland (CGB '74)
Same, whole (CGB '74)
From the same three centuries, fix on night: — 1647, Rembrandt's Rest on the
Flight, with Paul Gerhardt's "Evening Hymn." How the poem gleams in darkness, a sure
life-prayer:
Nun ruhen alle Wälder...
The woods are silent now...
The stars, golden, glow
In the blue halls of the sky...
God give you quiet slumber;
His gold-bright angels render
Armed watch at your bedside. (CGB)
Stell euch die güldnen Waffen
Ums Bett und seiner Engel Schar.
10)
Joseph Wright, 1780-89, Moonlight Landscape, Art Gallery, Brighton;
+ V detail
Another consciousness of ruins, lake, and moonlight broods over Wright of the
1780's, as over Claudius, whose "Abendlied" works mood-variations on Gerhardt:
Der Mond ist aufgegangen...
The full moon has risen,
Gold star-points glisten
Over heaven clear and bright;
The silent wood is shadowed;
Breathing from the meadows,
The mist comes strange and white. (CGB)
Der weiße Nebel wunderbar...
11)
11a)
C.D. Friedrich, c. 1836, Pines, Lake, and Moon, Dr. Schäfer, Obbach bei
Schweinfurt; video: detail only
Friedrich, 1820, Evening, Landesmuseum, Hannover
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
With Friedrich, as with Eichendorf's romantic hermit, the love of nature feeds the
love of death:
Comfort of earth, come, silent night...
I weary of the blind daylight;
The still wide ocean darkens.
Give rest, give ease of wish and want,
Until the dawn's eternal font
Through the dark wood sparkles. (CGB)
Komm, Trost der Welt, du stille Nacht...
Der Tag hat mich so müd' gemacht,
Das weite Meer schon dunkelt;
Lass ausruhn mich von Lust und Not,
Bis daß das ew'ge Morgenrot
Den stillen Wald durchfunkelt.
Novalis had turned from day to the comforting death-mother leaned over the
fevered child; as Poe would vulgarize it: "Quaff, 0 quaff this sweet nepenthe".
Music:
12)
12a)
Schubert, 1825, Nacht und Träume (Fischer-Dieskau and Moore)
LHMV-1046
Friedrich, 1830, The Fallow Field, Kunsthalle, Hamburg (CGB '86);
+ V detail
Friedrich, c. 1834-35, Rest at Hay Making, Gemäldegalerie, Dresden
Hölderlin's "Evening Fantasy" (like Friedrich's twilight landscapes, or Schubert's
Nacht und Träume) suffuses such earth-dusk with infinite longing:
Here by his cottage quiet in the shadow sits
The plowman, with the smoke of his hearth content.
Near in the peaceful village the bell of
Evening kindly calls to the wanderer.
13)
V13a)
13b)
June 1996
F. Schinkel, 1815, Gothic Church above a Cliff, Mod. Mus., Berlin
Carl G. Carus, Wanderer at the City Gate at Evening, lower spread
(Dr. Otto Frank, Munich, in 1933) [also, cf. 3rd 13]
Friedrich, 1817, City at the Rise of the of the Full Moon, Reinhart,
Winterthur
19th Century
7
�C.G. Bell
13c)
Symbolic History
Again, Schinkel, 1815, Gothic Church above a Cliff, upper detail, Mod.
Mus., Berlin
Back now the seaman turns to the harbor's home.
In far off cities gently the market shrouds
Its bustling noise, while the still arbor
Gleams with the affable meal of neighbors.
But I then, whither? Do not all mortals live
In reward and labor, with change of toil and rest
Finding their joy? Why for me only
Then does the bitter thorn not slumber? (CGB)
Wohin denn ich? Es leben die Sterblichen
Von Lohn und Arbeit; wechselnd in Müh' und Ruh'
Ist alles freudig; warum schläft denn
Nimmer nur mir in der Brust der Stachel?
(fade Schubert)
Against the dream radiance of Schinkel's Gothic,
1st 14) French, Early Gothic, 1134-1150/1195-1210, W. Front center, Chartres
Cathedral (CGB '59: video has used V14, wider variant (copy of CGB '59,
Gothic II 41)
V14a) Delacroix, 1822, Dante and Virgil in Hell, Louvre, Paris
V14b) Chartres Cathedral, West Front, with Towers
how stripped, how severe, the old Gothic of faith, which has plumed such emulation.
Music:
Franconian, c. 1250(?), Ave Virgo — Ave Gloriosa, (Tinayre)
Lumen 32018
Heine, having been called "a dismembered man... a divided soul, a Byron," wrote
in 1829:
... complain rather that the world itself is split in the middle. For since
the heart of the poet is the center of the world, it must at the present
time be lamentably torn apart... Once the world was whole, in antiquity
and in the Middle Ages; in spite of superficial struggles there was
always an inner unity and there were integrated poets. We honor these
poets and we rejoice in them, but every imitation of their unity is a lie
that every sound eye penetrates.
(fade Ave)
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
For 2nd 13) Friedrich, 1809-10, Abbey ruin in an oak grove, Schloß Charlottenburg,
Berlin
So Arnold, at the monastery of the Grande Chartreuse,
"Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born," implores:
"Take me, cowl'd forms, and fence me round,
Till I possess my soul again."
2nd 12)
Friedrich, 1825, Lonely House by a Forest of Pines, Walraff-Richartz
Museum, Cologne; to which video adds the whole of 11, Friedrich's Pines,
Lake, and Moon, and then a detail of 12, Friedrich's Fallow Field
But since Arnold's "strange disease of modern life" is in fact the fruit of Hegelian
consciousness, why not celebrate its ripe introspection — what Coleridge most shares
with the Germans:
No cloud, no relique of the sunken day
Distinguishes the West, no long thin slip
Of sullen light, no obscure trembling hues.
Come, we will rest on this old mossy bridge...
— which Victor Hugo distills in his early plays: Hernani:
Regarde: plus de feux, plus de bruit. Tout se tait.
La lune tout à l'heure a l'horizon montait;
Tandis que tu parlais...
Je me sentais joyeuse et calme, 0 mon amant!
Et j'aurais bien voulu mourir en ce moment.
June 1996
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9
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
For 3rd 13)
Carl G. Carus c. 1825, Wanderer at the City Gate at Evening, whole,
which video separates to upper half and lower half, and then returns to
13c, upper detail of 13, Schinkel's Gothic Church
Les Burgraves:
True, the sun is beautiful. Its rays —
The last — now set a crown on Taunus' brow.
The river gleams, the forests take the fire...
All nature is a flood of life and light! (CGB)
La nature est un flot de vie et de lumière.
Music:
Schumann, 1850, Feierlich, from Symphony No.3, Rhenish
Though the cult Gothic of Coleridge's "Christabel," Keats' "Eve of St. Agnes,"
Schumann's Cathedral in the Rhine Symphony, in Romantic fullness and repletion,
For 2nd 14) French Gothic, esp. 1210-30, S. Portal and S.W. Tower, Chartres
(CGB '59); video: lower detail only
V2nd 14a) Again, Chartres, c. 1210-20, detail of N. Portal (CGB '74)
is far from what it hungers after.
Music:
15)
15a)
(fade Schumann)
Same, c. 1250, from "Ave Virgo — Ave Gloriosa," Lumen 32018
(close)
P.O. Runge, 1806-07, Christ walks on the Sea, Kunsthalle, Hamburg;
+ V details
Blechen, before 1828, Stürmische See mit Leuchtturm, Kunsthalle, Hamburg
Renaissance, Baroque, Transcendental have intervened. Runge's 1806 Christ on the Sea
of Galilee shapes the world from subjectivity, no less than Goethe's Faust or "The Rime
of the Ancient Mariner":
And the coming wind did roar more loud,
And the sails did sigh like sedge;
And the rain poured down from one black cloud;
The Moon was at its edge...
The harbour-bay was clear as glass,
So smoothly it was strewn!
June 1996
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Symbolic History
And on the bay the moonlight lay,
And the shadow of the Moon.
What is reached for is Schelling's Primordial Will:
The primal longing moves... like a surging billowing sea... But there is
born in God himself an inward imaginative response... the first stirring
of Divine Being in its still dark depths...
Schelling's "birth out of darkness into light" is no less of good from evil:
The living Word enters as a firm and enduring center in battle against
chaos, and a declared state of war between good and evil continues to
the present time, when God reveals himself as Spirit, that is as
concrete actuality.
16)
Correggio, c. 1532, Jupiter and Ganymede, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien;
+ V upper detail
That revelation is not purely a life-motion. When Goethe made a poem of this
Correggio Rape of Ganymede, he gave it the dithyrambs of dissolving:
I come. But where?
Upward, upward...
Clouds of the sky
Bend to me,
Me; I am here,
Seizing, seized —
All-loving Father —
Upward on your breast. (CGB)
Mir! Mir!...
Umfangend umfangen!
Aufwärts an deinen Busen,
All liebender Vater!
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
17)
Symbolic History
P.P. Prud'hon, 1808, Psyche, Louvre, Paris (CGB '80); + V details
With such heart's wish Prud'hon stretches the Græco-Roman Psyche and the style
of Correggio. The surface is classical; but neither the vagabond soul of Chenier's loving
Neare, nor Keats' Endymion glimpsing his Goddess in dream, cave, or by plashing pool,
has wagered more desperately on "a thing of beauty is a joy forever." Against the Satanic
mills of actual flesh —
...a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue —
those "leaf-fringed legends" of "a Grecian Urn" ("Thou still unravish'd bride of
quietness"), that "draught of vintage" of "a Nightingale" ("Thou wast not born for death
immortal bird"), beat urgent wings.
18)
J.M.W. Turner, 1829, Ulysses deriding Polyphemus, National Gallery,
London; + V details
Music:
John Field, c.1825(?), from Nocturne in A flat major, near close,
MHS 4512
When Turner adds to Classical subject (here Ulysses deriding Polyphemus) not
only Romantic heart but a color-play that turns whatever could be touched and seen to
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn —
then, as in those Field Nocturnes, which inspired those of Chopin,
(fade Field)
Music:
Chopin, c.1830(?), from near close of Nocturne in E-flat Major, 0p.
9, #2, (J. Bolet) Everest LPBR 6079
such life and hunger for life initiate a dissolving (as Turner's blind giant melts into cloud
over rocks and sunset sea) which would run in art to Monet and Redon, in music to
Debussy and Scriabin.
(fade Chopin Nocturne)
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
19)
19a)
19b)
19c)
19d)
19e)
Symbolic History
L. Richter, 1837, Rhine-crossing at Schrekenstein, Staatsgalerie, Dresden
Same, detail of boat
Joh. G. v. Dillis, 1817-1831, Quirinal, Neue Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59)
Friedrich, 1810, Greifswald Harbor, Staatliche Museen, Berlin
Again, 19, Rhine-crossing, somewhat nearer; video: detail only
M. von Schwind, 1804, Waldkapelle, Schack Galerie, Munich
Music:
Schumann, 1850, from slow movement of Symphony #3, the
"Rhenish," Angel S.36689
What is the aim, on Richter's Rhine-crossing (or Schumann's Rhine) but to take as
one the riches of earth and spirit, to foster both nostalgias, of the finite and infinite — as
with Mignon and the harper in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister:
Do you know the land where lemon trees bloom? —
Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn...?
...Dahin, dahin,
Möcht ich mit dir, o mein Geliebter ziehn —
(fade Schumann)
a point of departure for Eichendorf's posthorn, and wanderers singing of the South, of
statues and fountains, by moonlight, in summer gardens. Always the orchestrations of
"Todeslust":
Die Sonne, Funken sprühend im Versinken
Gibt noch einmal der Erde Glut zu trinken...
Always the soul-flight of "Mondnacht":
And my soul spread her pinions
Wide in the kindred gloom,
Flew through the silent regions,
As if she flew toward home — (CGB)
Als flöge sie nach Haus.
Lamartine would suspend time's flight by returning alone to the lake where the
two, boating in silence, had heard, far off, oars and the harmonious waves:
Un soir, t'en souvient-il? nous voguions en silence;
On n'entendait au loin, sur l'onde et sous les cieux,
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Symbolic History
Que le bruit des rameurs qui frappaient en cadence
Tes flots harmonieux.
In Italy Leopardi rears such earth loves over "the infinite vanity of all" — "E l'infinita
vanità del tutto."
20)
M. von Schwind, c. 1860(?), Midday, Schack Galerie, Munich (CGB '59);
+ V details
Never in history had soul and the ideal so seized on world and flesh. As Jung
said, when Freud took off the psychic lid of Europe, he found the whole landscape
flooded with sex — Moritz von Schwind's rock-pooled mystery of Midday, queer as
Anderson's fairy tales: The Red Slippers, The Snow Queen. Those fish (like a
Shakespearean pun: "The bawdy hand of the dial... upon the very prick of noon") around
the hair-curtained form and reflection, dream-overcharge the pubic mandala. So in
Schumann's "Frauenliebe und Leben."
Music:
21)
Schumann, 1840, from Süsser Freund, Frauenliebe und Leben,
Decca CL 9971
Adolph von Menzel, 1847, Artist's Sister, Neue Pinakothek, Munich; first,
video detail
(fade Schumann)
Though what Adler would find was Will to Power; Jung, will to myth. As in
Menzel's 1847 study of his sister (like "Fräulein von Kulp/ Who turned in the hall,"
"Madame de Tornquist.../ Shifting the candles"), all the bases of desire are loaded.
22)
22a)
22b)
Julia Margaret Cameron, 1869, Double: [A] Sir J.F.W. Herschel, and
[B] Mae Prinseps as Beatrice
Right half of double, Mae Prinseps as Beatrice
Left half of double, Sir J.F.W. Herschel, detail; video adds closer details of
22a and 22b
Even the photographs — Julia Margaret Cameron's old Faust men and tender
Gretchen girls — voice it no less than the sonnet Victor Hugo, past eighty, wrote to
Judith Gautier: "La mort et la beauté sont deux choses profondes":
Death and beauty are too somber loves,
As deep in blue and shade as if to say:
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Symbolic History
Two sisters, alike fecund and destructive,
Bearing the burden of one mystery.
Loves, voices, looks, tresses dark and fair,
Be radiant; for I die. Hold light, warmth, solace —
You pearls the sea rolls in waves up the shore,
You birds that nestle, luminous, in the forest.
Judith, our destinies are nearer kin
Than one might think to see your face and mine.
The abyss of all opens in your eyes —
The same starred gulf I harbor in my soul.
We are neighbors of the sky, and for this cause,
That you are beautiful and I am old. (CGB)
Judith, nos deux destins sont plus près l'un de l'autre
Qu'on ne croirait, à voir mon visage et le vôtre;
Tout le divin abîme apparait dans vos yeux,
Et moi, je sens le gouffre étoilé dans mon âme;
Nous sommes tous les deux voisins du ciel, madame, Puisque vous
êtes belle et puisque je suis vieux.
23)
Egypt, New Kingdom XVIII Dynasty, c. 1370 B.C., Blind Harper, from
Mortuary Chapel of Patenemheb, Mus. Ant., Leyden
Has such romantic soul appeared before? No doubt in all ripe civilizations, there
is some filling in of conscious touch and longing — the blind harper from an Egyptian
tomb of the time of Ikhnaton.
24)
Graeco-Roman. lst cent. A.D. (from 3rd cent. B.C. original?), Spring, from
Stabiae, Nat. Mus., Naples
Or there are those frescoes, 1500 years later, from the Bay of Naples, a pleasure seat of
Imperial Rome, its Euripidean and Hellenistic refinements already centuries old.
25)
Chinese (Ming), 1470, Shen Chou reading in Autumn, Peking Museum;
+ V detail and return to whole
What civilization could be riper than Ming Chinese? — 1470, Shen Chou reading out of
doors — the poem:
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Symbolic History
The big trees exposed to the west wind are losing their leaves;
To be comfortable I've unfastened the collar of my robe;
Sitting here, I'm letting the time go by.
Doing nothing, I've turned my back on encroaching autumn.
I've not finished my book.
My spirit has gone wandering in the sky...
Who can fathom it?
Yet personality, in these anticipations, seems contained in ancient traditions of
philosophic and religious lore.
26)
Franz von Lenbach, 1860, Shepherd Boy, Schack Galerie, Munich; + V detail
Music:
Smetana, 1874-9, from Ma Vlast 4, Col. ML 4785, A, band 2
It had hardly ventured on the blossom-and-tear-bearing branch of Lenbach's 1860
Shepherd Boy, or Smetana's Bohemian Fields and Groves — all those Intimations of
Immortality from Wordsworth's:
...all the earth is gay;
Land and sea
Give themselves up to jollity...
Thou Child of Joy,
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou
happy Shepherd-boy!
to Longfellow's:
A boy's will is the wind's will
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.
27)
(fade Smetana)
French, 1316, Roman de Fauvel, Charivari sports, Bibliotheque Nationale,
fr. 146 f. 34r, Paris; + V detail
Music:
French, early 14th century, from Fauvel, Motet, Quant je le voi,
ARCHIV 2723045 (2 b)
Startling, that a civilization which would go so far in temporal deification, should,
in its Gothic phase, have reduced earthly delights to the mumming foibles of religious
feasts, under cowled disapprobation; while in that music the major and minor chords
essential to romantic joy and grief are passing tones; they melt with the dissonances of
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Symbolic History
earth into bare fifths and octaves, beyond the vanity of our moods.
(fade Fauvel)
28)
Petrus Christus, 1446-47(?), Portrait of a Girl, Staatliche Museen, Berlin;
+ V detail
Music:
Dufay, c. 1429(?), La belle se siet, opening, (Munrow) Seraphim
SIC-6092
How often we have traced, in that faith-ground, the ripening of what would
become romantic personality — how archly tempting here, in Dufay and Petrus Christus,
to the time-tree of consciousness.
(fade Dufay)
29)
Vermeer, 1660-65, Head of a Girl, Mauritshuis, The Hague; first, video detail
Music:
Bach, c. 1725, Bist du bei mir, close, (Schwartzkopf) Angel 35023
A fruit Vermeer's Girl with the Pearl Earring has gloriously eaten, and what is it
but wholesome and good to the taste, sustaining the earth-loves, to which Bach, for Anna
Magdalena, gave pre-romantic voice.
(end Bach)
30)
V30a)
V30b)
30c)
30d)
Geo. F. Watts, c. 1863, Ellen Terry (his wife), Kerrison Preston, Esq.;
+ V detail
H. Marees, 1863, Bath of Diana, detail only, Neue Staatsgalerie, Munich
(CGB '59)
Marees, c. 1870(?), Horse Leader and Nymph, Neue Pinakothek, Munich
(CGB '59)
Moreau, c. 1865(?), Leda, detail, Moreau Museum, Paris
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1864-70, Beata Beatrix, Tate Gallery, London;
video: close detail only
Music:
Duparc, c. 1870, L'Invitation au Voyage, 2nd stage, (Simoneau)
Westminster W 9604
In the 46 year old Watts' painting of his 16 year old wife, the actress Ellen Terry
(to leave him in a year), love, fevered as voluptuous, pants for the specter of a rose,
Petronius' "harbor for a stilled desire," "Luxe, calme et volupte," as in Baudelaire's
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Symbolic History
"Invitation to the Voyage" — supremely, as set, about 1870, by Duparc. But here we
should read a sheaf of Baudelaire, closing perhaps with the condemned "Jet d'eau," erotic
fountain: "Tes beaux yeux sont las, pauvre amante" — "Your beautiful eyes are tired...
Let them close" —
You, whom night so beautifies
That it is sweet, bent to your breast,
To hear the sad eternal cries
Weep to the bowl from the water's crest.
Moon, sounding drops, night serene,
The melancholy of your mien,
Is the mirror of my love.
The fountain fills the night
With flower-spheres,
That in the pale light
Of the moon's spears,
Fall from the height
Like a burst of tears. (CGB)
Tombe comme une averse
De larges pleurs.
31)
(end Duparc)
Japan, Kamakura, late 13th cent. Burning of the Sanjo Palace (1160), detail
of paper scroll, Fine Arts Museum, Boston
Have West and East converged toward modern consciousness? The burning of
the Sanjo Palace, as painted (a hundred years after) in thirteenth century Japan, is, like
Gothic, mytho-symbolic.
32)
Japan, Edo later 17th C., Gay Quarters of Kyoto, detail, Fine Arts, Boston
But this Edo screen of the pleasure quarters of Kyoto has the social irony and wit
of Molière and the English Restoration, with which it is contemporary.
33)
Japan, Hiroshige, 1857, Sudden Rain at Ohashi, Woodblock print; video:
detail only
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Symbolic History
While the Hiroshige woodblock of 1857 — A Sudden Rain at Ohashi — is abreast with
the realism and mood-drama of 19th-century Europe. If the world-community attests
such concurrence,
34)
Franco-Flemish, Tapestry, c. 1385, detail of Arthur, Nine Worthies, Cloisters,
NYC; first, video closeer detail
what has arisen in the West, to revolutionize everything, is the assertive consciousness of
person. Here it just shows itself, in the time of Wyclif and the first people's wars. As this
Arthur takes up the banner, under the angular asperities of creed-invalidation, Gawain,
flower of chivalry, returns from the Green Knight bearing about his neck the snaky belt of
his temptation and fall, symbolic frailty "of this crabbed flesh."
35)
35a)
35b)
V35c)
35d)
35e)
V35f)
Dürer, 1526, Joh. Klehberger, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien (CGB '59)
G. Romano, 1532-34, Cupola with Olympus, Palazzo Te, Mantova
Cranach, 1546, The Fountain of Youth, Berlin-Dahlem Museen, Berlin;
video: detail only
Giorgione, c. 1506, The Three Philosophers (section to the right), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien
Same, close detail of the bearded old Philosopher
Dürer, 1508, Martyrdom of 10,000, detail, upper left, Kunsthisthistorisches
Museum, Wien
Huber, 1522, Portrait of a Man in a Cap, Staatliche Museen, Berlin
In Dürer's 1526 portrait of that dubious operator Kleberger, ego seems to express
once and for all its earth-mastery. The same years, Vives, riding the wave that spread
with Pico's "Dignity of Man," describes a feast of the gods:
The universe was the amphitheater, in the skies the divine spectators;
the earth was a stage for the actors. ...They saw man, the mime of
Jupiter, take the mask of a plant, of a thousand wild beasts, then his
own: prudent, just, friendly, a political and social being.
The gods were not expecting to see him in more shapes, when
behold, he appeared as one of their own race. He had transcended man
and the lower gods, and was piercing into that inaccessible light-indark where Jupiter dwells, king of kings and of gods...
While Fugger launched modern capitalism, and Geismayr, leader of the Peasant's Revolt,
wrote his bill of reform:
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
All privileges shall be done away with, as they are contrary to the word
of God...
All city walls, castles, fortresses shall be demolished...
No profit is to be made, as all things are to be sold at cost...
36)
Rembrandt, c. 1655, The Polish Rider, Frick Collection, NYC; first, video detail
We have witnessed over Europe and America (that pioneer soil for Protestant and
free humanist dreams) how the complex of thrust and counterthrust builds a
transformational current, whose eddies and regressive whirls gather head and jet again
into the main stream, altering and darkening its course — as under the shades of
Rembrandt's Polish Rider, the deepened reality of Leonardo's Horseman strides into the
century of brooding Baroque and Milton's Commonwealth.
37)
Andreas Schlüter, 1698-1700, The Great Elector (Equestrian), Berlin;
+ V detail
Music:
J.K.F.Fischer, 1695, Fugato of Overture, Suite from Le Journal du
Printemps, AS 52
How even when that confidence hardens to a wigged pomp of state, (Schlüter's
Prussian Elector, Fischer's Overture in the style of Lully) such blatant mutants of the
humanist claim, hung as it were between Newton's synthesis and a Dryden heroic play,
carry the force that would drive through the ironic whirls of Rococo, to break out in the
inalienable Rights of Man — and what right, if not to Vives' enactment of the gods?
(end Overture)
38)
J.E. Liotard, 1765-70, in his garden near Geneva, Reichsmuseum, Amsterdam;
with video details
And already in the 1760's of Rousseau's éclat, Liotard had pastelled himself in his
own garden. in the mountain canton of Geneva, a way-mark to every Connecticut Yankee
in those dogmatic courts. So, on the Easter morning of Goethe's Faust, the people crowd
from stone gateways, mills, and vaulted churches, to the natural Resurrection of the Lord
("Sind sie alle ans Licht gebracht"). Had not even Pope said "An honest man's the
noblest work of God" — to be taken up by Burns: "A man's a man for a' that"?
39)
J.L. David, 1793, Marat Dead, Musée des Beaux Arts, Brussels
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
39a)
Symbolic History
Same, detail
And the world of inertia, oversurge, and backlash being what it is, what could
come of that plea but that Marat, champion of the people, murdered first by the
intemperance of his aims, should be stabbed by Charlotte Corday in the bath? Were the
dying words as she reported, "they shall all be guillotined"? David painted him, his truest
picture, art climax of Revolution turning on itself. Let it be stressed again that the
Romantic century — Schelling, Friedrich, Hölderlin, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Austen,
Beethoven, Schubert, Byron, Keats, Lamartine. Hugo — all varieties of Transcendental
immersion and socialist attack, work in the known shadow of that populist tailspin into
terror.
a40)
40)
J.L. David 1805-07, Coronation of Napoleon, Louvre, Paris (CGB '80); video:
detail only of Napoleon (cf. Va40)
J.L. David, 1824, Mars Disarmed by Venus and the Graces, Beaux-Arts,
Brussels; + V detail
As for David, he slid through the Coronations of Napoleon and of Josephine to the
slickness (in Brussels exile) of this Mars disarmed by Venus, with her aids. The 19th
century had to face that degradation too — Revolution gone as vapid as in Von Weber's
Freischütz.
Music:
41)
41a)
C.M. von Weber, 1820, Der Freischütz, Overture, close, (Toscanini) old RCA Victor 11-9172
Austrian Rococo, c. 1750(?), Millionenzimmer, Schloss Schönbrunn, Vienna
G. Tiepolo, 1725-26, Angel appears to old Sara, detail, Archiepiscopal Palace,
Undine
Music:
Telemann, c. 1737(?), Concerto for 3 trumpets, etc., from 2nd
movement, Nonesuch H-1017 (oboe)
So it was the 18th-century rococo, Telemann, and the Millionenzimmer at
Schönbrunn, which the royalist regimes of post-revolution would espouse. And why not?
Had not rococo shared in Enlightenment, its melodies everywhere beckoning to the heart,
its chords loaded with supposititious good?
(fade Telemann)
June 1996
19th Century
21
�C.G. Bell
42)
42a)
Symbolic History
French (Vautier), c. 1855, Queen Victoria and Albert greeted by Napoleon
III, Windsor Castle; video: details only
Friedrich, c. 1818, Woman at Sunset, Essen Museum; video: detail only
Music:
Berlioz, 1830, Symphonie Fantastique, from 2nd movement,
dance, London CM 9227
And what good could be greater than Napoleon III's entertainment of Queen
Victoria and Albert in a Paris showy as Berlioz' waltz in the Fantastique — but a show
gone hectic, like all the Vanity Fairs of Stendahl, Balzac, Flaubert, de Maupassant, driven
to a drugged frenzy — those death-wish Kuragins of War and Peace. Anatole, Ippolit,
white-armed Ellen, and through them "The Harlot's House" of Wilde:
The dead are dancing with the dead,
The dust is whirling with the dust —
into which from time to time yearning Emmas and Natashas are drawn.
(Berlioz cont., tender phrase, skip to fast)
a43)
43)
Viollet-le-Duc, 1858, Napoleon III and the Empress, owned by Madame
Viollet-le Duc
Thomas Lawrence, 1819, Portrait of George IV, Vatican, Rome; first, video
detail; cf. V43
"My dearest Clough," Arnold would write:
these are damned times — everything is against one — the height to
which knowledge is come, the spread of luxury, our physical
enervation, the absence of great natures, the unavoidable contact with
millions of small ones, newspapers, cities, light profligate friends,
moral desperadoes like Carlyle, our own selves, and the sickening
consciousness of our difficulties...
Great qualities are trodden down
And littleness united is become invincible...
(end Berlioz)
In a depiction of the century, put Sir Thomas Lawrence's 1819 George IV, nine and a half
feet high (and in the Vatican), on Byron's sinister side, counter-revolutionary background
of whatever he wrote and did.
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
44)
Symbolic History
William Blake, 1804-18, Rinder Jerusalem, p. 51, Vala's Lifeless Court (with
Hyde and Scofeld); + V details
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Symbolic History
And on his creative right the continuing fierce vision of William Blake, an eternal
doctrine of revolution against any crowned Vala's court of Submission and Death,
whether of Rights of Man or Socialist Manifesto — a radical Judgment, for which the
musical likeness seems always and only Beethoven's Great Fugue.
Music:
Beethoven, 1825, Grosse Fuge, from mid-section, Columbia M 5 S
677
Between those embattled extremes,
a45)
b45)
45)
G.F. Kersting, c. 1815(?), Lady Making Wreaths, National Gallery, Berlin
G.F. Kersting, 1827, Girl at a Mirror, Kunsthalle, Kiel; + V detail
G.F. Kersting, 1817, A Couple at a Window, G. Schäfer, Obbach; + V detail
Music:
Schubert, 1815, 2nd Symphony, 2nd movement, opening, Nonesuch H-71230
the neo-classic, all over Europe, crossing into the new century, took the quiet glow of
Transcendental and early Romantic, as in Kersting of the Friedrich circle, or the delight of
Schubert's early symphonies. Here the Faust and fire forms leave a space of calm for the
balancing of the leaf. Thus through all nature water counters fire, plant animal, grazer
hunter; and if there is truth in Goethe's extending the ratio to woman against man —
Women consider more how things are linked in life... since their fate
and the fate of their families depends on this continuity —
then it is fit that the ultimate perfection in art of the vegetable weft should be in the
novels of a woman, Jane Austen. (fade Schubert) Thus the Baronet, in Mansfield Park, of
his son and the poor cousin Fanny:
Sick of ambitious and mercenary connections, prizing more and more
the sterling good of principle and temper... he had pondered with
genuine satisfaction on the more than possibility of the two young
friends finding their mutual consolation in each other for all that had
occurred of disappointment to either... Fanny was indeed the daughter
that he wanted... With so much true merit and true love, and no want
of fortune and friends, the happiness of the married cousins must appear as secure as earthly happiness can be.
46)
J.A.D. Ingres, double: [A] 1806, Mlle. Rivière, Louvre, Paris; and [B] 1851,
Madame Inès Moitessier, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.
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�C.G. Bell
46a)
46b)
Symbolic History
Ingres, 1806, Mlle, Rivière, Louvre, Paris (CGB '80); video: detail only
Ingres, 1851, Madame Inès Moitessier, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.;
video: details only
Music:
Chopin, c. 1845(?), Waltz in C-Sharp Minor, 0p. 64, No.2 (Lipatti)
Odyssey St. 32 16 0058
Ingres had begun in that vein (left), this 1806 Mlle. Rivière, in the studied dress
and pose of the cult of nature. But if one leaps forty-five years, to a portrait from Ingres'
age (right), it is not just that the sitter is heavier and older, or the dress changed from
naive white to black Carmen and Cleopatra; what speaks through that is social — the
stuffy hardening of the Third Empire.
Against the dreams of Emma Rouault's youth — her futile wish for romance in
marriage:
Ah! if in the freshness of her beauty, before the soiling of marriage and
the disillusions of adultery, she could have anchored her life upon some
great strong heart... she would never have fallen from so high a
happiness —
comes the fate (as in a Chopin waltz) to which Emma Bovary is bound: that town circle
of hideous trade, the draper tempting her with money, the eternal monotony even of
clandestine passion, down to the blind man's song mocking her as she dies:
Maids in the warmth of a summer day
Dream of love and of love alway...
47)
Attributed to T. Gericault, c. 1818, Portrait of Delacroix, Musée des Beaux
Arts, Rouen; first, video detail (cf. V47)
Music:
Berlioz, 1834, Harold in Italy, 4th movement, beginning RCA Victor
LSC-2228
The focus on self as affirming center (Gericault's likeness) of his young friend
Delacroix) bares, under the flesh-claim, those "fallings from us" and "blank misgivings"
of Wordsworth's "Intimations"; Coleridge "Plucking the poisons of self-harm"; Berlioz'
Childe Harold. Since behind the romantic as Promethean,
48)
T. Gericault, c. 1818, Guillotined Heads, National Museum, Stockholm; first,
video detail
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
48a)
Symbolic History
T. Gericault, 1824, Mad Woman, Musée des Beaux Arts, Lyons
lie Gericault's later studies of corpses, guillotined heads, the criminally insane — waveof-terror reminders of Poe's macabre obsession, to be turned to sex by Baudelaire ("Une
Charogne"):
(viola)
Remember, my love... by the roadway, a hideous carrion... With legs
flexed in the air like a courtesan... The flies swarmed on that putrid
vulva... maggots... Over those rags that lived and seemed to breathe,
As if the romantic self were haunted — like Emma Bovary by the blind beggar:
She saw the hideous face of the poor wretch standing out against the
eternal night like a menace... She fell back upon the mattress in a
convulsion. They all drew near. She was dead.
(forte)
As Dostoievsky's egoists would be haunted by dreams of horses beat down and children
tortured.
49)
John Martin, 1812, Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion, Art Gallery,
Southampton; first, three video details
What flowed from "Kubla Khan" —
A savage place, as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover --
to Poe's "Ulalume" —
Well I know, now, this dim lake of Auber —
This misty mid region of Weir —
Well I know, now, this dank tarn of Auber,
This ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir —
is reflected in the English painter Martin, with whom Heine compared Berlioz — here the
wanderings of Sadak in search of the Waters of Oblivion. (fade Berlioz) Yet Martin's slick
art of nightmare stems from the same years
50)
Constable, 1816 ff., Weymouth Bay, National Gallery, London; + V details
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
as Constable's daytime celebration of the actual earth, which, like Jane Austen's peopled
scene, smiled through wars and rumors of wars. The radiant is Transcendental, as in early
Wordsworth:
…the sky
Never before so beautiful, sank down
Into my heart, and held me like a dream —
an almost German mystic presence:
…laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul;
but it gathers a fabric of descriptive color and feel ("Give me a Constable," they used to
say, "with the dew on it") — a vibrance later Wordsworth could bring off now and then:
There was a roaring in the wind all night;
The rain came heavily and fell in floods;
But now the sun is rising calm and bright;
a51)
51)
Constable, 1830-36, River Scene, with a farmhouse near the water's edge,
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Constable, c. 1830(?), On the River Stour, Phillips Collection, Washington,
D.C.; first, video detail, to the right
The birds are singing in the distant woods;
Over his own sweet voice the Stock-dove broods;
The Jay makes answer as the Magpie chatters;
And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters.
But Constable too had his polarity of peace and storm. What woke up the French
at the Paris show of 1824 (so that Delacroix took his Massacre at Chios from the Salon
wall to give it the brushwork of broken color), was late Constable's clare-obscure and fury
of palette, rooted in the Baroque crisis of Magnasco and reaching for the crisis of
Expressionism. As the painter said after the death of his wife: "Tempest on tempest rolls.
Still the darkness is majestic."
Some would limit "Romantic" to such Storm and Stress of body; but its core is
deeper: man and nature one incarnate godhead. "Malgré moi," de Musset protested,
"l'infini me tourmente."
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�C.G. Bell
52)
52a)
Symbolic History
Diaz de la Peña, 1871, The Storm, National Gallery, London; + V details
Theo. Rousseau, c. 1850(?), Sunset at Arbonne, Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York City
Where soul becomes world-flesh, art-violence is a measure of spirit's war on
itself. So with the earth and clouds Diaz de la Peña learned from Constable and fomented
for half a century (here from 1871). But through calm or fury runs the pantheist thread of
de Nerval's "Vers dorés" (Duncan):
Man, free thinker! do you believe yourself the one alone thinking.
In this world where life bursts forth in everything?...
— Un mystère d'amour dans le métal repose —
A mystery of love lies concealed in the metal...
Beware in the blind wall a gaze that watches you... Often in the
obscure being dwells a hidden God;
And like a nascent eye covered by its lids
A pure spirit grows beneath the skin of stones.
How Victor Hugo would spill that earth-soul through his early poems: "Tonight the sun
has set in a sky of clouds" — "Le soleil s'est couché ce soir dans les nuées..."
a53)
53)
Corot, c. 1826-28, Roman Campagna with Claudian Aqueduct, National
Gallery, London
Corot, 1855-60, Bathing Nymphs and a Child, Art Institute, Chicago
In such a field each artist shapes his own path, under relational probabilities.
Corot, beginning about 1826 with luminous scenes of Rome, both classic and early
romantic, would blur the dark of mid-century to a kind of salon Arcadia — a Greek cult
to metastasize in Bougereau, Puvis de Chavanne, Swiss Böcklin, as in academic sculpture
everywhere — reaching in poetry through Tennyson, Arnold, Swinburne, to the last
gentleman of the columned American south, William Alexander Percy, dreaming of
Sappho on the levee over the Mississippi.
a54)
54)
Hans Thoma, 1875, Valley of the Main, Neue Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59)
Delacroix, c. 1849(?), Sunset Sky, Pastel, Louvre, Paris; first, video detail
Music:
June 1996
Chopin, 1839, Sonata in B-Flat Minor, Op.35, from 3rd movement
(Funeral March), tender mid-section, with trill (Horowitz) V-LM-1235
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Men still thought of themselves as fleeting and nature as eternal — "the immense
and radiant world": "Je m'en irai… Sans que rien ne manque au monde immense et
radieux." Yet as man's power mounts iron, coal, and steam, the infinite drowning has the
feel of mutual death: — with Chopin's Funeral March Sonata, Delacroix and Leopardi
("Sempre caro mi fu quest' ermo colle"):
This lonely hill was always dear to me,
And this hedgerow, that from so wide a part
Of the ultimate horizon shuts the view.
But as I look beyond it, I conceive
A space which has no measure, a quiet not
Of man, a hush and void that draw the heart
Almost to the brink of fear. And as the wind
Noises in the leaves, I set that voice
Against the silence of the infinite,
And call to mind the eternal, and lost time,
And this that lives and sounds; and so it comes
In that immensity my thought is drowned,
And sweet to me is shipwreck in that sea. (CGB)
(heavy tolling of Funeral March)
E il naufragar m'è dolce in questo mare.
55)
G. Courbet, 1865, Stormy Sea, Louvre, Paris; + V details
To Delacroix's pastel Courbet adds mass and volume — a cloud-gathering
reached for in Tennyson:
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas...
That mood-space stretches out in Arnold's "Dover Beach":
...on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
In some Meredith "the largeness of the evening earth" clots round us like the blood of
Modern Love —
Moves dark as yonder midnight ocean's force...
To throw that faint thin line upon the shore.
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But it is Victor Hugo who most summons the storm — sailors gone down in "Oceano
Nox,"
Dans une mere sans fond, par une nuit sans lune —
until the creation he entered as a realm of light rounds to "A great wheel,/ Which cannot
move without crushing someone":
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Que la creátion est une grande roue
Qui ne peut se mouvoir sans écraser quelqu'un.
56)
56a)
Victor Hugo, 1858, Fantastic Landscape, Bibl. Nat., Paris
Hugo, 1859, The Hanged Man, drawing, Maison de Victor Hugo, Paris (here
video returns to 56)
Though when Hugo took to ink-wash and watercolor in the late 1850's, he cut
through space as Blake had done, reaching back to Bosch and ahead to the surreal — a
road he would parallel, with more knowing defiance of the forms, in his last poems: so
"The Trumpet of Judgment":
I saw a monstrous trumpet in the clouds...
Forged out of justice condensed into brass...
It lay on a mist that trembled, unfathomable,
Out of the world...
Oh, what night; nothing there has contour nor age,
And the cloud is specter and the specter cloud.
Et le nuage est spectre, et le spectre est nuage.
Revealing sea-mark for the youth who had declared: "Romanticism... is nothing
but liberalism in literature."
57)
V57a)
57b)
V57c)
57d,e,f)
Turner, c, 1843, Eve of the Deluge, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.
Same, detail, Sky with Birds (from V57a & c)
Same, detail with Alligator
Same, closer view of Flocking Birds (also from V57a & c)
Triple: [d] Constable, 1820-23, Pond in Branchhill, Hamstead, Evening,
Victoria and Albert Museum, London; [e] Pissaro, 1887, Woman in Field,
Louvre, Paris; and [f] Cezanne, 1900-06, Trees and Rocks, Museum of
Modern Art, NYC (slide show combines three vertical cuts from these pictures; while the video shows them separately, substituting for the second:
Monet, 1888, Antibes, detail, Courtauld Institute, London (see V57e)
Music:
Same Chopin Sonata, to last movement
The continuing optimism of the century seemed to be science. How the old
Turner's theory and practice of light gives his most pessimistic "apocalypse of heaven"
June 1996
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Symbolic History
(this Eve of the Deluge) the élan of an electrical discovery by Faraday or Maxwell. Or
pain-racked Darwin's Origin of Species:
to contemplate a tangled bank...plants of many kinds... birds singing...
insects flitting... worms crawling... and to reflect that these elaborately
constructed forms have all been produced by...Variability... the
Struggle for Life...Natural Selection...Thus from the war of nature...
the production of the higher animals directly follows. There is
grandeur in this view...
Was the art-cognate of science not the realism of the century, but the search beyond
realism? What gave Constable such headway against his moods but the pursuit of
painting as "scientific and mechanical"? Later the technique of pure color would rescue
Impressionists from the bogs of Baudelaire; while that, combined with geometric
analysis, would turn the splenetic solitudes of Cezanne to clarity. As he would say: "I
have only painted all my life to escape the ennui."
(final forte and close of Chopin)
a58)
58)
58a)
Anselm Feuerbach, 1870, Medea, formerly: National Gallery, Berlin
Feuerbach, c. 1865, Medea, Neue Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59); + V detail
Same, Munich Medea, detail of beach and waves (CGB '59); here video adds
another detail of 58
Music:
Wagner, 1857-9, Tristan and Isolde, from Overture, Stokowsky,
Victor LM 1174
Though the ambiguity which stretches the Wagnerian ocean of Feuerbach's Medea
broodings, also had its center in science. As late as 1847 Helmholtz could celebrate the
First Law of Thermodynamics:
The universe possesses, once for all, a store of energy which is not
altered by any change of phenomena, can neither be increased nor
diminished, and which maintains any change which takes place on it.
Yet Carnot had already proved the motive power of heat fixed solely by the
always equalizing temperature gradient — an insight clinched in Clausius' 1850
formulation of the spent energy in any system: "The entropy of the universe tends toward
a maximum" — which Kelvin's Second Law would give apocalyptic irreversibility:
Within a finite period of time past, the earth must have been, and
within a finite period of time to come the earth must again be, unfit for
June 1996
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Symbolic History
the habitation of man as at present constituted, unless operations have
been, or are to be performed, which are impossible under the laws to
which the known operations going on at present in the material world
are subject.
59)
George Stubbs, 1770, White Horse Frightened by a Lion, Walker Gal.,
Liverpool; + V detail
Music:
Haydn, 1772, from 4th movement, A Major Quartet, 0pus 20, #6,
fugue, near close, Qualiton SLPX 11 332-b
Since Rubens, art-power had seized on the beast — horse, pitted sometimes
against lion or tiger, in Blake's Bible of Revolution: "the tigers of wrath... wiser than the
horses of instruction." So Stubbs had painted them in that England (time of Haydn's
Opus 20 Quartets), island cognate for the Storm and Stress of the Continent — bold as
mad Christopher Smart's "Jubilate Agno": "For a Lion roars himself compleat from head
to tail" — (close of Haydn) and so freshly painted,
60)
Gericault, 1817, Horses Held by Slaves, Musée des Beaux Arts, Rouen; first,
video detail
they changed the art of Gericault when he came to England.
Music:
Beethoven, 1812, opening of 4th movement, 7th Symphony,
Columbia ML 5405
Though Gericault had already ventured on the horses, at the Corso in Rome, and with an
elevation of Classic and Romantic like Beethoven's in the Seventh Symphony.
(fade Beethoven)
61)
61a)
Delacroix, 1860, Horses Coming from the Sea, Phillips Gallery, Washington,
D.C.
Delacroix, c. 1843, Head of Lion Roaring, Cabinet des Dessins, Louvre, Paris
Music:
Wagner, 1869-74, Close of the Götterdämmerung (forte) 6-London
1604
By the event of Delacroix' 1860 Horses Emerging from the Sea, Wagner had
written Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Tristan. and much of The Ring. The cult of exotic
savagery (Delacroix' splendid tigers, as Clark says, his best self-portraits) was crudening
June 1996
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Symbolic History
toward Lesconte de Lisle's 1869 primeval earth of beast-death and volcanic blood, where
"the Creator panted in his creation" —
a62)
62)
Böcklin, 1878, Battle of the Centaurs, 2nd version, central detail, Meiner
Collection, Leipzig
Same, Centaurs, whole
setting for his sinister superman, Cain:
But beyond the lava heights of Gelboë-hor,
Charged with a boiling mist of savage smells,
Which bears and roaring lions spewed and fumed,
Sounded, like seas outraged by cyclone winds,
Death-rattles rising from those livid shades.
By 1874, Wagner had completed the Götterdämmerung, and Böcklin was midway in his
series of battling Centaurs. But what — in the fire-fall of Valhalla, when flames and
Rhine flood close the Twilight of the Gods — (music to melting) what is the import of
that rippling death-by-water, coming in like a tide of sensuous good?
For 63)
Monet, 1873, Autumn at Argenteuil, Courtauld Institute, London; first,
video detail
What the relation of Impressionism's poignant and shimmering dream to the
contemporary deep-rooted and wide-spread tree of Romantic and Symbolist pain? —
Count Axel's death persuasion:
2nd 62)
Again 62, Centaurs, lower detail
"Our existence is full, and its cup is running over."
Is it, as in the nether abyss of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, when, from the
cataract of fire and serpent-folds, the tiger-striped head of Leviathan rears,
tinging the black deep with beams of blood, advancing toward us with
all the fury of a spiritual existence —
and the frightened cherub flees,
June 1996
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2nd 63)
Monet, 1868, Along the Seine, Art Institute, Chicago; + V detail (for
which the slide show substitutes 63a: Monet, 1866-67, Women in a
Garden, Jeu de Paume, Paris)
and Blake finds himself
sitting on a pleasant bank beside a river by moonlight hearing a harper
who sung to the harp...
(close of Wagner)
Are Monet's bright visions outward or within?
In any case, it was at the heart of Wagner's Zarathustran and chromatic longing
that the tonal dissolutions of musical "Impressionism" (beginning with Saint-Saens)
would appear.
Music:
64)
Saint-Saens, 1868, Concerto No. 2 in G Minor, 0p. 22, from 1st
Movement, (Rubinstein and Ormandy) RCA-LSC 3165
J.B. Carpeaux, 1869, The Dance, façade of the Opera, Paris; + V details
Sculpture, denied the levitating science of color, hardly got the dance of delight
off the ground. Carpeaux' Opera nymphs may hint at a flaw in Romantic joy, even in the
greatest — those inadequate allegros, finales of works too searching to be rondo-resolved
— from Mozart's G Minor Quintet:
Music:
June 1996
Mozart, 1787, a phrase, last movement, G Minor Quintet, Columbia
ML 5192 (now Columbia D3S 747)
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Symbolic History
through the dry-leaf whirl after Beethoven's A Minor Adagio:
Music:
Beethoven, 1825, from closing Allegro, A Minor Quartet, Columbia
M5S 677
to the hectic flush closing Schubert's great string Quintet:
Music:
Schubert, 1828, from last movement, near close, C Major Quintet,
Columbia MS 6536
No wonder Beethoven tried radical finales: the choral of the Ninth, the visionary
variations of the last Piano Sonato, the Quartet Grosse Fuge.
For 1st 65) Rodin, 1882, from the Gates of Hell, lower left, Ugolino Group, Rodin
Museum, Paris
V1st 65a) Rodin, 1882, separate Ugolino group, bronze, detail, Rodin Museum,
Paris (or video can work from 2nd 65)
Melville: "The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows." Let Rodin's Ugolino
from the Gates of Hell, against Carpeaux's Dance, twist the intolerable theme of Ibsen's
Ghosts. As Oswald tells his mother of the inherited syphilis eating at his brain, he
contrasts the old view of life, "a state of wretchedness" under "punishment for sin,"
For 2nd 64) Rodin, 1886, The Kiss, Tate Gallery, London
2nd 64a)
Rodin, 1877, The Age of Bronze, detail, Louvre, Paris
with the awakening of Impressionist Paris (Goethe's Easter again, the souls come up from
vaults and cellars):
Oswald:
the mere fact of being alive is thought to be a matter for exultant
happiness. Mother, have you noticed that everything I have painted
has turned upon the joy of life?
And it is just this beaming happiness and presumptive good which is denied when, as the
mother pulling the curtains on the sunrise, com-
June 1996
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Symbolic History
forts her son, "Look, Oswald, what a lovely day we are going to have," the attack falls.
2nd 65) Again, Rodin, separate Ugolino group, whole; first, video detail of Ugolino
only
Oswald:
(who has been sitting motionless in the armchair, with his back to the
scene outside, suddenly says): Mother, give me the sun... (Oswald
seems to shrink up in the chair; all his muscles relax; his face loses its
expression, and his eyes stare stupidly. Mrs. Alving is trembling with
terror)
Mrs. Alving:
What is it? (Screams) Oswald! What is the matter with you? (Throws herself
on her knees beside him and shakes him) Oswald, Oswald! Look at me! Don't
you know me?
Oswald:
(in an expressionless voice...): The sun — the sun.
a66)
66)
66a)
Double: [A] P.O. Runge, c. 1802, Self-Portrait, Hamburg, and [B] Cezanne, c.
1875, Portrait of M. Choquet, Cambridge, England
Delacroix, c. 1824, Self-Portrait as Ravenswood, Louvre, Paris; video: upper
half only
Moritz von Schwind, c. 1850, Knight and Water Siren, Staatsgemälde
Galerie, Munich
Around the middle of the century Gerard de Nerval wrote the transforming
symbolist poem, "El Desdichado," from which Eliot quotes one line in The Waste Land
and paraphrases another in "Prufrock". But from Poe through Baudelaire to Mallarmé
and Rimbaud, Symbolism was abstracting itself from Romantic by a motion of estrangement. In Delacroix' early portrait of himself as Ravenswood, hero-suicide of Scott's
Bride of Lamermoor, we grope toward de Nerval's "Disinherited": (CGB)
Music:
Wagner, 1857-9, Tristan, Act III, shepherd's pipe, RCA-Victor 6700
(5)
Je suis le ténébreux — le veuf, — l'inconsolé,
Le prince d'Aquitaine a la tour abolie...
I am the darkness, widowed, unconsoled,
The Prince of Aquitaine of the ruined tower;
June 1996
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Symbolic History
My one star is dead; my lute, star-scrolled,
Burns with the black sun of an old despair.
67)
Böcklin, 1875, Triton and Nereid, 3rd form, old National Gallery, Berlin;
+ V details
Böcklin, 1875, still holds the intolerable Wagnerian longing, "Empty and waste
the sea," which in de Nerval (and even in Wagner's lonely pipe) begins to escape from the
causal fabric:
You who healed me in the night of the tomb,
Give me Posilipo and the Gulf again;
Rends-moi le Pausilippe et la mer d'Italie
You who fed my life with your bloom,
Give me the trellis of the rose and the vine.
...la treille où le pampre à la rose s'allie.
For 2nd 66) Delacroix, 1826, Study for Baron Schwiter, detail, Springfield, Mass.
Am I Phoebus or Love, Byron or Lusignan?
My forehead is red with the kiss of the Queen.
Mon front est rouge encor du baiser de la reine;
V2nd 67) Böcklin, detail from Sport of the Waves (CGB '59)
2nd 67) Again, Böcklin, Triton and Nereid, detail of Nereid, Berlin
I have dreamed in caves where sea-sirens rise.
J'ai rêvé dans la grotte où nage la sirène...
a68)
Vb68)
68)
68a)
V68b)
G. Courbet, 1845-46, Self with a Pipe, detail, Musée, Montpellier (or Va68)
M. von Schwind, c. 1845(?), Luring Wood-fay, Schack Galerie, München
Cezanne, 1866-68, Achille Emperaire, Private Collection; + V detail
Cezanne, c. 1670, Self-Portrait, Tate Gallery, London
Cezanne, 1866, Sorrow (Mary Magdalene), Louvre, Paris
Music:
June 1996
(fade Wagner)
Mussorgsky, 1868 and '71, Boris Godounov, from Prologue, Angel
S-3633
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Conqueror twice, I have crossed the Acheron,
Singing by turns to the Orphic lyre, the moans
Of the saint, the fay Melusina's cries. (CGB)
Les soupirs de la sainte et les cris de la fée.
With the 1860's, as in Cezanne's portrait of the painter Achille Emperaire, the
monstrous egg of longing begins to crack to the radical and elemental — Mussorgsky and
Dostoievsky also beginning what would culminate in Boris and The Brothers. But in that
revolt of "The Disinherited," who can tell whether the attack is religious, social,
aesthetic? Estranged from what Flaubert called society's "brutal course", Cezanne and
Marx meet in Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith, who
knows that it is glorious to belong to the universal... but that higher
than this there winds a solitary path; he knows that it is terrible to be
born outside the universal, to walk without meeting a single traveller...
Humanly speaking, he is crazy and cannot make himself intelligible to
anyone.
(cut Mussorgsky on dissonance)
Va69)
Goya, 1810-20 (published 1863), Los Desastres de la Guerra, first etching:
sad presentiments…
Goya, 1813-16, The Forge, Frick Collection, NYC; video: central portion
only
69)
The poles of day and night, outward and inward, had shadowed Rousseau's
Enlightenment with his melancholy. And as Storm and Stress struck through Revolution
toward Romantic, the schemes of head, the dreams of heart, meet in repeated
transformations, but hardening, from the liberal bourgeois to socialist labor; darkening,
from Transcendental to Symbolist. In the first decades of the century, Goya's message of
The Forge is contemporary with his black mythologies, Saturn Devouring his Children, a
Dog Buried in the Sand.
At the storm-center of the French Revolution, Babeuf knowing the rich had let
them down, gave his life in conspiracy for a "Society of Equals". His followers were the
link between Robespierre and the Manifesto.
a70)
M. van Raymerswaele, c. 1540, Two Tax Gatherers, National Gallery,
London
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
70)
70a)
Symbolic History
P. Brueghel Jr., 1620, Commodity Finance, Museum, Bruges
Same, Commodity Finance, detail
The sin which in Dante sets the Usurers clutching their pouches on the hot sand
and under flames at the edge of lower hell, had sprinkled the arts of Renaissance and
rising capital with satanic extortioners, as in this Peter Breughel the Younger, or about the
same time, Sir Giles Overreach in Massinger's Play:
[His agent Marrall speaks]
The... justice did his part, returning... the certificate,
Against his conscience, and his knowledge, too... to the utter ruin
Of the poor farmer.
Overreach:
Twas for these good ends
I made him justice... So he serve
My purposes, let him hang or damn, I care not;
Friendship is but a word.
71)
71a)
Daumier, 1834, The Legislative Belly, Lithograph; + V detail
Same, The Legislative Belly, another detail; + V closer detail
With Daumier, as everywhere in the 19th century, the attack is no longer religious
but social. And where the abuse had seemed exceptional, what is caricatured here is the
monthly assembly of ruling property, as Daumier titles it, "The Legislative Belly." So
Lesconte de Lisle, "To the Moderns": (Neff)
Murderers of Gods! the time is near
When, sprawled on a great heap of hoarded gold,
Having gnawed down to bare rock the nourishing soil,
Not knowing what to do with the days and the nights,
Drowned in the nothingness of utter boredom.
You will die stupidly, cramming your pockets.
This is the ubiquitous "Money-Bags" of Marx's Labour Process, who tries to justify his
existence: "Have I myself not worked... not performed the labour of superintendence?" —
While "His overlooker and his manager try to hide their smiles." [p.215, Modern Library
Giant]
72)
English Gothic Revival (Barry and Pugin), 1840-52, Houses of Parliament,
London; + V details
June 1996
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The hard-fought sin of Usury has become the baptized fabric of Christian society
— Marx:
The sphere within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labor
goes on, is in fact the very Eden of the innate rights of man.
[p. 195]
The English Houses of Parliament, built after the fire Turner painted, are a windowed
shell before the operations of imperial banking, manufacture and trade. Ironic inversion
— "the religious world is but the reflex of the real world" — that such a shell should take
the ancient sacred form of Perpendicular Gothic. But Marx's irony yielded to such a rage
—
The Pharisee of a capitalist denounces this brutality which he himself
creates, perpetuates, and exploits —
[p. 432]
that he perhaps undervalued the reform Christianity of those "fish-blooded" bourgeoisie.
73)
73a)
73b)
73c)
73d)
Photograph, 1870, Steam Hammer of 1861 in the Krupp Works, Germany;
+ V detail
John F. Weir, 1886, The Gun Foundry, from sketches made near West Point,
Civil War, Putnam County Historical Society, NY (here the video returns to
73, the Krupp steam hammer)
U.S. Industry c. 1880, Rails in a Steel Works, National Archives,
Washington, D.C.
T. Anschutz, 1880's, Steelworks, left detail, Kennedy Galleries, Inc.
Great Witley (ruined mansion), c. 1860, near Stourport Works, Worcester
(CGB '66)
Not so their Faustian power. That capitalist drone, who did not seem to labor or
even superintend, becomes the driving force of a process as staggering as the Krupp
steam hammer of 1861, apparent model in Chaplin's Modern Times:
In Industry [Marx writes] man succeeded for the first time in making
the product of his past labour work on a large scale gratuitously, like
the forces of nature.
[p.424]
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Now "the work of directing, superintending, and adjusting" [p. 363], required by "all
combined labour on a large scale," "becomes one of the functions of Capital". The result
is an industrialization labor could never have achieved on its own:
a mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories, and whose
demon power, at first veiled under the slow and measured motions of
his giant limbs, at length breaks out into the fast and furious whirl of
his countless working organs.
[p.416]
Here the Capitalist steps forth in giant boots — such a Faust of accumulations as dwarfs
Dickens' Hard Times Bounderby:
he ruthlessly forces the human race to produce... those material
conditions, which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of
society, a society in which the full and free development of every
individual is the ruling principle.
[p.
649]
Self-indulgent Money-bags is almost lost in this devotee. Yet "Two souls, alas, dwell in
his breast" —
A Faustian conflict between the passion for accumulation and the
desire for enjoyment.
[p. 651]
74)
74a)
Blake, 1789-94 (1826 copy), The Chimney Sweeper, Songs of Innocence and
Experience, Rosenwald, Library of Congress; + V details
Blake, 1794, Europe: A Prophecy, title page, detail, with Serpent of Materialism, Privately owned (Dover)
The predictable fall of that Faust-ambivalence distinguishes dialectic materialism
from the poetic cry against the same abuses: Blake's "Chimney Sweeper" —
A little black thing among the snow,
Crying "weep! weep!" in notes of woe!
"Where are thy father and mother, say?"
"They are both gone up to the Church to pray."
Compare Marx:
Previously the workman sold his own labour power... Now he sells his
wife and child. He has become a slave dealer... In spite of legislation
the number of boys sold in Great Britain by their parents to act as live
chimney sweeping machines... exceeds 2000... [p. 432-3]
June 1996
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But to forge that outrage, on the model of Newton's causality (which Darwin also
stretched by metaphor), to an equational science of value — Marx, in the face of an
organic unfolding of power-riches self-created, reverting to the old a priori "nothing can
come of nothing"
a75)
b75)
75)
Blake, 1793-94 (copy 1799 ff), America: A Prophecy, detail of Plate 5: Flame
erupts unde the snake-spiral of materialism
Again, Blake, 1794, Europe, detail of Plate 2: Social and racial oppression
H. Daumier, c. 1850(?), Third Class Carriage, Metropolitan Museum of Art,
NYC; + V details (the last video detail overflows into the a76 section)
and so deriving from the quantified ground of labor all productive machinery and
accumulations; where the organizing capitalist supplies nothing, nature costs nothing,
cooperation nothing, past labor, congealed in machines, works gratuitiously, and that
"live monster that is fruitful and multiplies" must be distrained from the only postulated
source:
The ownership of past unpaid labour is therefore the sole condition for
the appropriation of living unpaid labour on a constantly increasing
scale (p.638) —
to hammer outrage into the axiomatic net of Das Kapital, Blake might have thought a
Urizenic task.
Though the rhetoric glows like Luvah — like the dark oils of Daumier's Third
Class Carriage:
all means for the development of production transform themselves into
means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they
mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the
level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in
his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange him from the
intellectual potentialities of the labour-process...turn his life-time into
working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the
Juggernaut of capital.
[p. 708]
a76)
76)
van Gogh, 1885, The Potato Eaters, whole, V.V.G. Foundation, Amsterdam
(video places the whole after the 76 details)
Same, The Potato Eaters, detail; + V closer detail, then the whole
June 1996
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43
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
But all methods for the production of surplus value are at the same
time methods of accumulation; and every extension of accumulation
becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the
labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse.
[p. 708-9]
(So Van Gogh's Potato Eaters have sunk from Daumier's Third Class to The Lowest
Depths.) Marx:
Capital is dead labour, that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living
labour, and lives the more the more labour it can suck.
[p. 257]
In Van Gogh, who had preached in the mining region of Mons, evangelical
Christianity, socialist sympathy, and Symbolist art all meet in an Expressionist break and
"transvaluation of value".
77)
77a)
77b)
Russian Traditional, 1714, Domes, Church of the Transfiguration, Lake
Onega (or V77 horizontal variant)
F. Alexeyev, 1794, St. Petersburg, view of the Palace Embankment from Peter
and Paul Fortress, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
Russian (Renaissance-Byzantine), 1555-60, Cathedral of St. Basil, Moscow
Russia, battleground of Christian, Symbolist, and Socialist extremes, was a land
so bedded in the past that folk building of the 18th century combines the domes of
Byzantine and Tartar with the timbering of the Viking north — a land which now at the
style-surface telescopes French Rococo, English Liberalism and German Romantic,
surging toward the 1900's like Gogol's troika in Dead Souls:
And Russia, art thou not too flying onward like a spirited troika that
nothing can overtake... What terrifying onrush... What mysterious
force... never seen before. Ah, horses — what horses! Is the wind
hidden under your manes?... Russia, whither?... She gives no answer.
The ringing of the bells melts into music... everything on earth is flying
by, and the other states and nations, with looks askance, make way and
draw aside.
a78)
A. Ivanov, c. 1850, Boys Basking in the Sun, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
78)
Symbolic History
A. Ivanov, c. 1850, Head of St. John the Baptist, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
(video returns to a detail of Boys Basking in the Sun and thereafter to a detail
of John the Baptist
The troika is our clue to Gogol's plan, that Dead Souls, study of Russia in social
decay, should be the first of a regenerative trilogy. He is said to have written the second,
a Purgatory of Transition, but burned it dissatisfied, and again, after painful rewriting, by
mistake. The third, the Paradiso, was not attempted. This painter Ivanov spent the same
thirty years working toward a religious masterpiece, The Appearance of Christ before the
Multitudes, of which yearning sketches remain the best fruit. Dostoievsky too, who
shifted Crime and Punishment from suicide-course to salvation, intended a trilogy, of
which the present Brothers, centered in Ivan, would be the Inferno of a Pan-Slavic ascent
of Russia tried and saved. As Father Paissy says:
The Church is not to be transformed into the State. That is Rome and
its dream... On the contrary, the State is transformed into the Church,
will ascend and become a Church over the whole world — which is
the opposite of... Rome... and is only the glorious destiny ordained for
the Orthodox Church. This star will arise in the east!
79)
79a)
I.E. Repin, 1901, Portrait of Tolstoy, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg;
+ V details
Serov, 1937, Lenin's arrival in Petrograd in 1917, USSR (video adds, from 79,
a detail of Tolstoy's head)
That destiny was spiritual, but it has come to pass by material–ism, anathema to
the great men of the '40's — this Tolstoi, painted in age by Repin — a hint at the reversals
of the organizing play. Thus Le Maistre, Tolstoi's Napoleonic source, Catholic and
Royalist counterpole to the Liberal ferment, had become a feature of the court of the
Czars. In absorbing that skeptic absolutism, Tolstoi turns it to an intuitive surrender to
the divinity of the peasant mass, the prompting of Russian soul. So his Platon Karataev
("The Plato who cannot speak well") mediates Pierre's life-acceptance — with the
barefoot search in which Tolstoi would close his life. But for Kutuzov's enactment of the
Slavic will, already wrenched from Le Maistre's Machiavellian power-politics, to
incorporate itself by a further antinomy, the proletarian iconoclasm of Marx, for an
actualization the converse of Father Paissy's dream — is a dialectic the aristocrats of
Russian soul could hardly have anticipated.
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
80)
Symbolic History
M. Vrubel, 1890., Sitting Demon, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; + V details
Music:
Scriabin, 1903, Etude, 0pus 42, No. 5, close, (Horowitz) Columbia
M 31620
Vrubel's 1890 brooding Demon or Genie, its Symbolist forms breaking into the
abstract, closes the century. Let it stand with Scriabin, who made his life a medley of
visions extolling three things, the new Art, the new Gospel, the new Left: "There must be
no more money and no more poor." All his music was in preparation for a great tone
poem Mystery, for which he had invented a language of cries and ejaculations; it was to
be performed in a hemispherical temple in a lake in India (the reflection completing the
perfect sphere), and at its climax Nietzsche's leap to the Superman would occur, and
revolution be fulfilled in an ecstasy of Spirit.
Though he had bought a cork helmet to explore the site, the World War (as with
Thomas Mann, Hesse, and so many) intervened, turning The Poem of Fire to a baptism
grosser than those post-Romantics had conceived.
(end Scriabin)
June 1996
19th Century
46
�
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Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound
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19th Century : The Loaded Dream, Symbolic History, Part 31
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Text
(3^t
liA.^'hu.p
SO^^OLIC 9<ISi:o^
^rougH Sigfit ancC Sound
32.
Face and Landscape
(R6sum6 of Man and UJorld)
CHARLES G. BELL
ST. JQHNfS COLLEGE
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
/or
1260 CANYON ROAD
S^TA FE, NEW MEXICO S7^0l
July
1993
Last revised June 1996
�Cajaries Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501
\ \
^
HisTOny
Thrbuqb Sight ntnt Sounii
32.
al)
Face and Landscape (ROsumb of Man and UJorld)
gmrwtoaU, 1528, iktaUcfSt. Imt, 5{ermt, ma Landscape, IsenAeim Mtar,
CoCmar
The arts should be experienced first in their own right
But
they ate also the language of symbolic history, the history Novalis
recognized in poems and fables.
»
^
V
[Wenn] man in Marchen und Gedichten
Erkennt die wahren Weltgesqhichten.
To trace man's view of himself and his world, two sequences suggest
themselves, of face and landscape.
2)
LascauK, c. 20,000 ‘B.C, Cam (Paitititi£, (CetaiC, Man and •Buffalo
2 a)
Same, detaiC
In cave art neither appears. But in Lascaux (as in Trois Freres)
there is a related pair: inner and outer, man and beast It is hard U>
know what that bird-totem, phaliic man, is doing under the disembowelled buffalo.
Music;
African (Dattomeyl, Speech rhythms, Contrepoint MC 20.093
Do the gored, like the hanged, suffer erection; or is this magic, like
(fade speech rhythms)
African speech rhythms? One thing we note,
Music-
Central African Republic, Medicine Man's Chant, UNESCO; BM 30
L 2310
what is outward, the animals, could not be more real; what is human
wears the disguise of mask.
June
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and
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3)
Symbolic
History
Congo, *Bantu-(Ba[ega, Manyema region, recent, OvCasf^ 9^us. !I(pyaC de
C^frique, ^erxnieren
Mask, voodoo counterpole of the individuation, we are calling
Face — the human image usurped by demonic expiations — a primi
tive ground of unquestioning obedience to inherited tabus.
(fade Chant)
a4)
4)
Tgypt, (Dynasty II/, c. 2540 *B.C., ^I5ie Qreat Spfdwi in its pyramid setting
(xvfiUe video sfiozus Sp/tin?c alone)
Same, tHe SpHin^ aCone (rvfiUe video sfiozvs tfie head only)
Out of ritual surrender, face appears.
Music:
From Tibetan Buddhist Ritual for attaining the quality of spiritual
adepts, Barenreiter BM 30 L 2009
looms like Tibetan music (Egyptian music lost), this Cheops of the
Sphinx, proudly and joyfully lifted above the impersonal fates. No
accident these first Pharoah statues are records of immortal soul, of
Ka, in the eternal serenity of a temporal command, (fade Tibetan Ritual)
5)
‘^yp^j Dynasty XVlII, c. 1370 (B.C., Qyeen Vdgfertiti, (Berlin (3/4 face)
No sooner is face present than, like any embodied vitality, it is
caught in process, the cultural phases we need not repeat. Only, with
Nefertiti, to recall that what emerged in the Old Kingdom from the
trans-personal cult which gave it strength, has ripened by the Late
Empire into a mirror-haunted consciousness of ennui and quest.
6)
6 a)
DouBCe: [S4.] ^ttic, c. 540 (B.C., (PepCos (Kpri (Vdg.679) head, Sithens, SLcropoCis
(Museum; and [(B] (Rpman, c. 100 5L.D., (fCavian) Coiffured Cady, CapitoCine
(Museum, (Rpme
Coiffured Cady, (B of 6
So too in the sequence of Greece and Rome face emerges from
the primitive like a fresh discovery (left), clean of introspective
brooding. For all the sensuous delight of painted marble, it is a phe-
June
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic
History
nomenon of vital energy, beyond the personal — a wierdly smiling
immortal visitant.
Set it against a Roman patrician (right), where the civilized
preoccupation has become again the self-caressing search and satis
faction of the private — in this case, no doubt — rather hard and vul
gar soul. Roman satires run the gamut of her kind.
So much for the briefest hint at the art-vicissitudes of face over
twenty-seven hundred years.
7) (DouBCe: [SI] T,£ypt, 'Dynasty XVlII,. 1580-1314 'B.C, 'TomB fresco from 'TdeBes,
garden witB fisB (Bond, 'BritMus., London; and [B] (Paul (Kfee, 1930, Sid
9dar£inem, Jijinstmuseum, 'BaseC, SpitzerCand; ffien 7S4. and 7'Bfo(Cow separateCy
The art of landscape unfolds between convergences of begin
ning and end. This garden of New Kingdom Egypt (left), its trees flat
tened in ranks around a pool; Paul Klee's 1930 primeval memory,
"Ad Marginem" (right) bridge a spatial conquest of more than three
thousand years. The Theban fresco heralds a representation not yet
available; sophistic Klee dissolves all perspectival claims in the
haunted sun-tarn of psychic mystery.
8) (l(pman, earCy 1st cent. S4..(D., fantasy Candscape from tBe SKouse of S4^rippa
(BostBumous, Mas. 9dyz., (JdgpCes; + '17 detait (wBiCe sUde show goes to 8a, anotfier
Candscape from tBe same viUa)
In Greece, we know landscape developed through phases of
exploration and mastery.
Music:
Greek, 1st cent A.D., from Hymn to Kalliopeia, J.E. Butt, priv. rec.
But the examples that remain are Graeco-Roman backdrops for an
imperial age of luxury and exotic longing — dream evocations, with
drawing from the spatial conquest in which earlier artists took pride,
(end Kalliopeia) Even in the time of Augustus, this illusionistic melting
and search for gnosis hints at the abandonment of the earthly king
dom, with its cultivation of Phidian ivories and golden bees.
June
1996
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�C.G. Bell
9}
e
^
Symbolic
CRmese, StA-StA cent. (attr.
History
Wei) WautfaCC, Trw. ColC., Ma
It would seem a counsel of despair to turn from the already
superfluous challenge of Western history. Yet no treatment of landsea^ can quite Ignore the subtlest tradition of that art. Let this 8thor 9th-century Chinese waterfail, attributed to Wang Wei, remind us
what a Tao of Power was opened there into the deepest forms and
moods of nature, at a time when the West had suffered Barbarian
overthrow.
10} CaroCingum, c. SZO, St. Lufy, -EAAo GaspeC, ‘Epemmi
10a) Same, (ktaiC
^
n the Europe of those years, in the art of Charlemagne’s reviva It IS as if a great wind had blown through — Vico's barbaric re
newal — reducing landscape refinements to calligraphs of rock, strip
ping the person also of cultured nostalgias, down to the skeletal
energies of ascetic faith —
Music:
Gregoriart, before 1000, Adjuvabit (G. deVan), A.S. 34 side A
impersonal, though within the abstract personality of man-to-God
Lukes upward inner glance determinative.
(,ade Adjuvabit)
This IS the Dark Age creed-containment, within which the new
temporal forces develop and articulate themselves.
11) Qerman, 1Z50-60, face of Uta, CatfiedraC of 9^umBura
11a) Same, detaiC
And first, to hint, in three faces, at the whole Western systole
and diastole: 1250, Uta of Naumburg, from the century of the Ger
man romances, Instan and Isolt. The later unfolding of self and love
IS nascent in the Medieval ground, a longing heightened by timeiess
suspen^on
Uta at once a legendary queen on a cathedral facade
and a Cressid of secret love as sensuous as the fold of the robe on the
c ee . As with Dante's Paolo and Francesca, all that would inform
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�Symbolic
C.G. Bell
History
the romantic novel is prefigured, the more hauntingly for the enigma
of its loyalties.
Music:
Neidhart von Reuenthal, c. 1220, Mayenzeit, EMS 201
(fade)
From Minnesong
al2) ^Bens, c. 1629(F), *Ilfiomas tHbivari, ‘EarC cf JlruTuCeC, detaiB; Gardner i\Cus.,
(Boston
12) Same, xoBoCe
to Frescobaldi:
Music:
Frescobaldi, c. 1620(7), Canzona 7 "La Superba", Decca DL
79425
a jump of almost 400 years, and the personal and individual claims
which vivified the Middle Ages under the paradox of denial, have
stepped from the Thomistic frame, to issue their culminant procla
mation of secular command — Rubens' Earl of Arundel, in the confi
dence of late Renaissance and Baroque, the will to power magnifying
self and world.
(fade & skip, closing Canzona)
al3) Qaii£uin, 1889, SeCf-(Portrait, detaiC; (h(g.tion(U QdUry, Wasfwi£ton (D.C.
13) Same, zofioCe
Music:
Brahms, 1891, from slow mov.. Clarinet Quintet, D. Gram. LPM18278
Another 250 years ends in world-weariness and withdrawal.
The self has looked into the self, and behold, vacua et inana sedes; or
as Rimbaud wrote, "I took Beauty on my knees — and I found her
bitter."
(fade Brahms)
Here is Gauguin as the old Adam toying with the vine-snake;
but by the halo he is New Adam too, and how ambiguous a martyr
("my head, grown slightly bald, brought in upon a platter") —
Stavrogin, the horned saviour. Thus post-romantic ego Baudelaires
its ennui, prepares to go under; to clear the world stage for whatever
is to follow.
June
1996
Face
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Symbolic
History
14)
y^ranco-Qerman, earCy 13tfi cent., Camtina CBurana 9/CS, Summer, scenes
(iBove and BeCow; StaatsBiBCiothe^ MunicB
14 a) Same, upper sune only
In its similar course of emergence, conquest and withdrawal,
landscape suggests the phases of natural science. This 13th-century
Carmina Burana scene of summer represents a sort of alchemical
phase, where the powers of material nature are to be apprehended
immaterially, by allegorical rites and signs, as if things themselves
were symbols through and through.
15)
^m6. Lorenzetti, 1337-9, Qood government in the Country, ^PaCazzo fPuBCico,
Siena; right side offresco
15 a) Same, centred detaiC
By the 14th century the landscape opens out, with a transi
tional creak of hinges, to the panoramic expanse of Lorenzetti. As in
Petrarch's ascent of Mont Ventoux, we hang between prophetic space
and spaceless symbpl:
Today I climbed the highest mountain in this region,
Ventoso ... There is a summit higher than all the oth
ers... I looked around me: clouds were gathering below
my feet... the Rhone river was directly under our
eyes...
But he dissolves the vastness in allegory, opening his Augustine to
read the countertext:
And men go to admire high mountains... ocean, stars —
and lose their own souls.
It is the residual non-dimensionality of Gothic.
16) Leonardo da ‘Uinci, 1499, Storm over an SUpine VaCCey, Windsor CastCe
16 a) Same, upper detaiC (video having Begun xvith a centraC detaiQ
As we approach 1500, in the notebooks and drawings of
Leonardo, scientific thought and the landscape are simultaneously
June
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�Symbolic
C.G. Bell
History
transformed. The new mode of apprehension is spatial and causal.
With an exploratory rush of delight, thought enters the world fabric,
participating in its rational order as tested and confirmed by the
senses: "although nature begins with the cause and ends with the
experience, we must follow the opposite course ... begin with the ex
perience, and by means of it investigate the cause" Universal law is
reached for, though not yet captured in equations.
IT) (Beminij c. 1650(?), Sunrise over the Sea, dratving, HQrpferstich^Bmett, (BerCin
That conquest is the achievement of high Baroque. In science,
causality is pursued tb the Newtonian synthesis of the world. In this
Bernini sketch, what for Blake would become the mere ratio of the
senses, the sea of time and space and bondage of nature, is cele
brated exactly for its formulable nobility, the spatial recess tri
umphant with the rayed determinism of light.
18) C(D. ^Friedrich, 1834-35, %ist after ^Harvest, gemaCcCe£akrie, (DrescCen
18 a) Same, center (white video Coohs to the horizon and shy)
With Friedrich after 1810, the same methodic space, still glori
ous, has become the phenomenal veil, to be penetrated (as in Faust's
rapture of following the sinking sun) by infinite longing: the world,
says Coleridge, "of such hues/ As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet
he makes/ Spirits perceive his presence." Since the hunger for the
infinite is also a death wish, the pictures become hymns to death, as
in Holderlin's "Abendphantasie": "And there in light and air, let grief
and love flow from me" — "und moge droben/ In Licht und Luft zerrinnen mir Lieb und Leid!" Though no one had observed it yet, the
turning point to the "mysterious universe" had occurred also in elec
tro-physics.
19)
Cezanne, 1904-06, gardens, Les Loaves, (PhiCCips Cot, Washington CD.C. (to
which stide show adds 19a, a centred detaU)
No scientist sought the paradoxes that lurk already under Fara
day and Maxwell; the artists did not say they were going to stop
June
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic
History
representing nature. With the Impressionists it was to represent it
more precisely: the reflection of light at such a place and such a
time; with Cezanne (as in these gardens from his last years) to ex
hibit the geometries that underlie the visible — "to treat nature," he
shid "by the sphere, cone and cylinder." Yet the net result (as in the
increasingly refined abstractions of electric field, probability, wave
theory, relativity and quantum mechanics) was the dissolution of the
spatial and causal scene.
2 0)
(DouBie of20SI amCzm ff.
20SI) german, c. 1000, goUCen Madonna, head, ‘Essen; video, detaiConCy
20(B) S. JFrench (Landes), c. 1050, (Beams (f LieBanus on the 5lpocaCypse, J^Cood,
(BiBL (Hgi., (Paris; video, detaiC onCy
The sequence now again in more detail: portrait-like face and
represented nature. We begin, about the year 1000, with the virtual
negation of what we seek.
Music:
Organum, Musica Enchyridion, Sit gloria, MHS-
In the Golden Madonna of Essen, person
giography of cult and faith. Hammered
form, encrusting jewels and great agate
esque dark
these are not of the human,
tude: Ev ap%ri ev o Aoyoq.
bows to the transreal ha
gold on the stiff wooden
eyes gleaming in Roman
but revealed signs of beati
From fifty years later, a flood destruction from the Saint Severs
Apocalypse:' the flattened formal landscape, the figures of arbitrary
sizes and projections, all pressed to a symbolic dread. The earth of
which even Dark Age chronicles tell us is not the Europe we travel to
see, but a ghostly battleground of demonic and angelic powers. As
Paul had said:
"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but
against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the darkness
of this world."
21) french gothic, c, 1210, (HeCchisidehu (H, (PortaC, CathedraC, Chartres
21a) Same, detaiC
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History
A hundred and fifty years: who could have foreseen the vigor
to which the Christ-paradox of incarnation and earth-denial would
lead __ how much body the heaven-vector would entrain, lifting over
burgeoning towns three-hundred foot towers of stone? Under the
vaulting porches of Chartres the great prophets loom into time. Yet
all that human force assumes the eternal severities of the sa,cred
frame, canonical, hierarchical; it is the Gothic incorporation of the
mortal into the City of God. Perotin:
Music:
Perotin, c. 1210, close of Viderunt quadruplum, Ducretet,
Thomson 320 C 107
22) 5. ^yroC, earCy 13tfi cent., Mrahant & Isaac, S. 3(ico(>o, Qrissiano
22 a) Same, detaiC
What would become the Renaissance garden grows in that
church close. The artist here is of South Tyrol, early 13th century.
Where the text of Abraham and Isaac requires mountains, he fills the
background with snow-capped ice-cream cones of Dolomites, ar
chaically stylized, half spaceless; yet a shrewd thrust toward natural
observation.
23) StrasBourj, 1290-1300, O^ouny
23 a) Same, detaiC
from West CPortaC, Cathedral.
1300. The Kings of the Cathedral of Strasbourg have put off
the sacred severity of Chartres.
Music: ,
From Fauvel, 1316, Je voi douleur—Fauvel nous, etc. AS 91
We are already on the late-Gothic road to Chaucer's Squire: "A lover
and a lusty bachelor." In the loosening faith-world of this "Fauvel,"
Occam and Meister Ekhardt, the individual and secular surge with
vitality.
Though strength has still the lean bare-fifth enigma of
floating in the mystery it serves.
24) Srviss-Qerman, c. 1320, Manessa 9dS, Mnnesittyer Von Sune££e, University
LiSrary, ^{cidMas
June
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Symbolic
History
The hierarchic proportions — the boy small, though near, the heraldic
devices hung spacelessly - these are of the past. But the Minne
singer's leap up the mountain is real; and in so small a touch as the
projection of the horse's tail and hoof over the border, the drive has
been set up which in the Baroque would spill fallen angels over the
ceiling frame of II Gesu.
2SJ giotto, c. 1303j JoacMm returns to His fCocHs, ^ena CdapeC, Tadua
25a) Same, detail figures
But that late-Gothic turn in the North remains thin and imper
sonal against the sudden expansion of space and consciousness in
Florentine Dante and Giotto. True, these celery trees are still halfByzantine, and the background hills of stripped rock remind us of
Cennini's advice late in the century: "if you want to paint a moun
tain, set up a rock in the studio and paint it large; for what is a
mountain but a big rock?" But that alchemy of the nominal swells
with delivery. The great robed figures seem to shoulder out a space
of their own, as the Florentine heroqs stretch the theology of Dante's
Hell, or chromatic inflection strains the modes in da Cascia.
Music:
2 6)
Giovanni da Cascia. c. 1320(7), lo son un peliegrin, AS-I
Orcxgna, 1359, SeCf, from dleatH of Mary, Or San MicHeCe, !FCorence
The landscape here would be the Lorenzetti panorama, which
we have already seen. While Orcagna's self-portrait in his 1359
Death of M^y speaks the rise of secular person in the time of
Boccaccio
the kind of person no doubt who at the end of his life
will repent and make his Retractions, with Petrarch and Boccaccio
and Chaucer; yet so life-oriented that it is only , the lingering quaint
enigma of faith-suspension which distinguishes this late-Medieval
from early-Renaissance.
^3
2 7)
LotseCandiBnve, 1397, ConnitaBCe du guescGn, St. (Denis; + Vdetail
Having mentioned Chaucer, we should follow late-Gothic north
to St. Denis, 1397, time of The Cantp.rhiirv
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French, late 14th cent., Centre le Temps, Seraphim SIC-6052
The aesthetic refinement of Italy livens to realistic vigor. But the
suspension we have spoken of, that all temporal and secular values
are emergent, gives this character the cleanly observed force and
moral ambiguity of Chaucer's warty-nosed Miller, wanton Friar, or
hunting Monk with his eyes rolling in his head — a gusto which
would hardly survive post-Renaissance responsibility.
(fade Centre le Temps)
28) ^oC de Lim6ouT0,1413-16, Tres Niches 3Uures, June, 9dus. Condi, CdantUCy
28 a) Same, detaiC (video fiaviny shoxvn jirst a zvider detaiQ
Music:
Ciconia, c. 1405-10, 0 Rosa Bella, RCA V-LM 6016
By the 15th century the way of seeing has quietly changed
from the symbolic to the representational — gracious as the first
chordal space of Ciconia. A page of the Tres Riches Heures is a win
dow into a lovingly delineated spatial scene. Strange that so revolu
tionary a work could be so unobtrusively and thinly naive. There is
none of Lorenzetti's vastness of assault on the world; it is as if from
that great spread, details had been trimmed and perfected in the
early-Renaissance mode. Where the sign of the 14th century was a
residual bare ambivalence, here it is the last innocence of Gothic,
which makes no proclamation of the ultimate value of the new way.
(fade Ciconia)
29)
SCuter, 1393-99, Moses (fountain, detail of Moses, Cfiartreuse de CfiampmoC,
(Dijon; + ^ closer detail
Though just before 1400 some such humanist proclamation —
in religious terms, paralleling the preaching of Gerson in France and
of Huss in Bohemia — had been made by Claus Sluter, a Fleming ac
tive in Burgundy: this Moses, in the spirit of Chaucer's last invoca
tion to the soul: "Forth, pilgrim, forth! Forth, beast out of thy stall!"
While faux-bourdon filled the triad.
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Apt MS, 0.1390, Jesu, nostra redemptio, a phrase, SAWT 9505-A
(fade)
030) (DonateCb, 1423-36, Jermiaf^, iktcaC affimtC, CatIUdrat Museum, 7Carence
30) Same, atwtHer and mder detaU (video Having panned its 30a from this 30}
By 1425 the cutting edge of Renaissance was being honed in
many parts of Europe. Against the reform humanity of the North
the philosophic humanism of Fiorence centers in the recovery of
Roman antiquity by an act of the will. Yet the dynamic which
cleaves Donatello's Jeremiah from the Qassical is also Gothic bom. So
Dante's landless Ulysses, against the home-seeking oid Odysseus. As
for music, the star of that Florence was Flemish Dufay.
Music:
3X)
Dufay, c. 1425, from Le jour s'endort (at "da quelque mai") AS-3
Same, Candscape detaiC (video sfiows onCy tfiis 31)
(end "Le Jour s'endort")
The vastness of the Lorehzetti panorama reappears in Masac
cio, 1426. Granted the precise landscape refinements of the Limbourg brothers are lacking here.
This Trasimene expanse of the
folded Apennines, lake and blasted trees, has the inherited bareness
o Giotto; but there is a theoretical consciousness of space itself — of
laws by which to command it.
a32) Men arUjan Van ‘Eyci, c. 1425-32, MoratUm oftHe Lam6, Ghent
32) Same, upper lyht (shde show goes from a32 to 32; video hegins and ends
With 32, tnterposiii£ a cCosct detail)
The background of the Van Eyck Adoration of the Lamb, from
the same years, is the Northern complement; Florentine reason traiis
thm Flemish miracle of eye and hand. Its heavenly Jerusalem is
bright with every technique of foliage, light and air which High Re
naissance would require. No wonder it was said in Italy that Van
Eyck panels were worth their weight in gold. -While Dufay and the
other Italiante Flemings work in either style:
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Dufay, c. 1450(?), close of Kyrie, Mass "Se la face ay pale", AS-25
(end)
33)
^rmcH, c. 1465, Livre (Cu Cueur (CJ4mours ‘Espris, Cueur waf^, Vienna
The boldest explorations of 15 th century retain the sharp focus
of insularity.
Here a French chivalric miniature of about 1465.
Representational naivet6 and daring meet in the gold-leaf sun, cast
ing long shadows toward us from the trees.
We approach the
humanist perfection of what is still the middle-earth, transitional,
Cusanus' privative infinity of space and time.
34) ^ouiceCCi, c. 1478, giuCiano de'^ecCici,
QaC., Was/iinffton (D.C
34 a) ^Berpanto variant (rf same, detaU of fiead (zokUe video detaiCs 34)
So there is a 200-year sequence from Dante to Machiavelli, the
proud emergence of heroes in hell.
Music:
Ockeghem, c. 1475(7), Puzzle Canon: Prenez sur moi, Mus. Guild,
MS-134
With the Medici (here Giuliano, painted by Botticelli about 1478) we
stand on the verge of the battle of values — to throw down or
dynamically transform the old. The assertion could not be more
forceful, but with the hard ambiguity of being still a deadly sin. If
you want to rule, says Machiavelli, this is the method; to follow it is
not Christian or even human, and of course one should be a Christian;
but this is what power requires. Against such lean grandeur the
Baroque would claim philosophic sufficiency.
(end Ockeghem)
35) Leonardo, c. 1512, SeCf, cftaC^drawin^, Liirin, 5(pyaCLiSrary
35a) Same, detaU
Music:
Josquin des Pres, 1506, Requiescat close of Absolve, SAWT
9561-B
With Leonardo (1510-12), as with Josquin after Ockeghem’s
Puzzle Canon, we seem to have arrived at that god-like condition,
(end Josquin) Yet the battle of the 16th century has not quite been
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joined. The humanist island has grown to a continent, where man
expauates in universal potentiality, for the last time in the tacit grace
of the old dispensation, rich in the illusion that the new world can
ounsh in the lap of the old. Beyond that high-Renaissance noble
calm, humanization has no direct road. What lies ahead is a whirl of
transformation under trial.
3€)
Durer, c. 1494, Vuw ‘Toward: Trent, waurcohr, stolen, from ‘Bremen QaC.
Landscape too, in Dtirer's watercolor of Trent, from the glowing
years before 1500 (the youthful genius on his way to Venice),
reached a point beyond which reahsm — as the harmonious filling in
o Gothic perception — could go no further. Here, too, what the future
held was struggle, space buckling into vortices, through a century of
religious wars, persecutions and incursions of tragic darkness.
37)
H. ‘Bosch, c. isio-ie, ‘lemptatwn ofSt. Jdatthony, landscape detaU; Lishon
And already the new mastery was enforcing the eschatology of
udgment.. That is the dialectic of Reformation and Counter-reforma
tion — individuality and reason in Luther stirring the eddy of Pente
costal identification.
Strange that the strongest reality of 1500
should be the flaming recesses of Hieronymus Bosch’s hell-pockets.
38) ‘Direr, 1S26, Tortrait cfK. Mteschuher, ‘Bet{in-‘DaMem
38 a) Same, detaU
Now the liberation of the human and secular musters militant
powers under the great seal of righteousness.
Gone forever the
ohve-eyed Gothic distance. From the Catholic Humanist Diirer of
1500 to this Protestant Diirer of 1526, there is a buildup of assertive
volume — as if (as in the polyphonies of Stoltzer) whole new registers
nad been added to consciousness.
Music:
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39)
History
Mtdojfer, 1529, ^ (BattCe of 5Ue?cander, 5lCte (Bimkptfie^ Municfi (sCide
sfiozo adds first a39, a detail to the ri£ht)
39 a) Same, a Bach^round detail
(®nd Stoltzer)
No less, in Altdorfer's 1529 Battle of Alexander: the Magellanic
rondure of the curved earth, wheeling under the sun and moon, as
the empire of Persia falls. Even the sign, against the heraldry of the
Minnesinger MS, hangs with fluttering drapes in real space from the
picture frame. In fact, Copernicus had already revolutionized that
astronomical space, and been encouraged by two popes, in the clarion
decades of discovery, before the Counter Reformation put the jinx on
his delayed Revolutions.
40) 9dkheCaii£elo, c. 1543, 'Brutus, head, Bar^eCCo, S^Corence; +
detail (while slide
show Be£ins xvith a40, another close-up, and closes with 40a, whole Bust in
color)
Stretched in the field of titanic humanism and penitential re
form, the Renaissance rises to its first great tensile infolding; and as
always the mightiest spirit most kindles to the fervor, makes it most
his own. In the radiance that Florence spread over Italy and to
Rome, no spirit was as firecely strung to resonance as Michelangelo.
It is he who most deepens human possibility. In the face of his
Brutus (1543) Shakespearean tragedy first becomes conceivable —
the infinite pathos and transcendence of the flawed will.
Music:
G. Gabrielli, pub. 1597, Sonata pian’ e forte, AS 25 [through
slide 45]
41) fP. 'Breughel, c. 1568-69, Seascape, f}(unsthistorisches ^Museum, 'i/ienna
41a) Sume, detail
Past the midpoint of a century of tragic storm, artist after artist
runs the course from early works harmoniously auspicious, to deeper
immersion in the enchafed flood. Here Breughel's last picture, on the
proverb of the barrel and the hell-mouth whale:
a desperately
weathered sea-sorrow, to become a prevalent theme in Shakespeare.
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History
^ntoretto, 1550, {Procurator Jac. Soranzo, 5Lcca(Ccinia, Venice (CQ^ 59);
first, VdetaiC
In Italy after 1550, there is a shift from the tensile, as in
Michelangelo, to the kinetic — its musical crest in Giovanni Gabrielli.
With this early Tintoretto, the always increasing pride of person ex
hibits itself as an opulence of electric fire flashing in the also increas
ing and pervading world-dark.
43)
Tintoretto, 1591-92, Christ on the Sea of QaCiCee, {h(g.tionaC (^aCCery,
Washington (D.C.
Tintoretto's later works, from the time of Giordano Bruno's in
finite universe, push toward its climax the explosive vision, which by
1610 would stretch the frame and logos of every art almost to
breaking
nature a discharge of phosphorescence, the wind-heaped
water under a sky of rage.
44)
TC Qreco, c. 1600-10, Viezo of ToCecCo, MetropoCitan {KCuseum,
+ VfetaiC; white sCiKe show suSstitutes another, 44a (CG93 74)
’
I
j'{
^
i
It is in El Greco that the doomsday seizure of the magnified Re
naissance earth reaches a crux of visionary inturning. In the Toledo
Landscape, as in King Lear (1605-6), you cannot thrust a bodkin
point between the real and symbolic universe:
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!
45)
T,C Qreco, 1613-14, head of priest from {\Carria£e of the Virgin, {l(p.mania;
+ V detaiC
At the same time form and face undergo a tragic dissolution, as
if all human glory and nothingness had met. In the face of the priest
in El Greco's "Marriage of the Virgin", Lear's pride — "Of all these
bounds even from this line to this ... we make thee lady" — and
crushed humility — "Pray you now, forget and forgive. I am old and
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foolish" — merge in a stateliness pieced out of shreds and tatters, a
brushwork like straw tossed on a cyclonic wind.
(end Gabrielli)
46)
Caravaggio, 1602-04, IhCead of 0\laTy, T,n.tom6imnt of Cfirist, Vatican; first,
VcCoser detail
Music:
Sweelinck, 1610-20(?), Chromatic Fantasy, opening, SVBX-5316
Yet the kinetic spirals of Mannerism were exactly the crucible
in which the tactile and volitional formulations of Baroque were be
ing explored. No sooner is 1600 past than from Italy northward
(here Caravaggio) the expanding whirl (as in the chromatics of Swee
linck) coagulates into the rhetoric and histrionics of reasoned com
mand — though a reason (like Galileo's) schooled by brute fact and
tenebrist pain.
4 7)
diiiBens, c. 1624, 9{et Onwaer (THe Storm), Ifranz ^nig Collection, iKaarlen^
+ V detail
So too in Rubens, 1625, when the limitless storm spills over, it
is into a century of Cartesian Method. A critical point has been
passed, like that between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson: in the dyna
mism of release the energies, rational or emotional, have precipi
tated: from the realized Apocalypse to the Apocalyptic real.
(fade Sweelinck)
48)
iRsmtSrandt, 1629, Self-portrait, Isabella S. Qardner iMuseum, (Boston;
+ V detail
From the equivocal might and exploratory transhumanity
which make Lear unfathomable, person, by early Rembrandt (1629),
gathers itself into a philosophically validated, space-investing will.
Music:
Pachelbel, c. 1690(?), from Canon in D Major, MHS 1060 [to
slide 52]
a power like Spinoza's divinity: "Extension is an attribute of God, or
God is an extended thing." And it is by the formulable soul of light
that this Miltonic introspection presents itself, in the glory of spatial
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bondage, a reasoned justification of the ways of God to men — destinate as Pachelbel's Canon-passacaglia.
49)
^Rg,mBran(Ct, c. 1638, Landscape witfi Sridge and Boatmen, Slmsterdam
(Cg^'59)
49 a) Same, detaiC
So too with the Rembrandt landscape of chiaroscuro realism.
By the heroics of sun through cloud, nature is subsumed under a di
vine syntax, as tensely fought for as the somber affirmations of
Milton; while the realism affirms of all that ordering light: it is here
and now, these fields, that bridge with the boatman passing under.
As Spinoza says: "Particular things are nothing else than modifica
tions of attributes of God"; and "Reality and Perfection I understand
to be one and the same."
30)
n/eCasquez, 1656, ScCf-portrait from Las Odeninas, Trado, Madrid
The most impassioned Baroque assertion has an aspect of reasoned
mastery (even in Pascal, where, Car-tesian reason undercuts itself).
But in the great souls of the mid-century, here Velasquez, it is just
some Pascalian affinity which saves the art-assertion from flagrant
pride — a continuing antinomy of the poignance of space and the
pathos of reason.
51)
CCaude Lorraine, 1657, QaCatea Landscape, ^Dresden
The classical landscape peaks in Claude: here Acis and Galatea
of 1657, with Polyphemus on the promontory beyond the bay. Yet
that heroic world, like Prospero’s "cloud-capped towers" is visibly
melting into light: "Hail holy Light, offspring of heaven firstborn."
5Z)
‘Bernini, 1665, Bust ofLouis XlV, q/ersaiCCes
That which is overpushed recoils. It is in the French court of
Louis XIV that the Baroque assertion swells to a point from which it
could only break to the ridiculous. And it was only Rome that could
offer in Bernini the virtuoso brilliance to boost the king-image to an
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all-time sublime without letting it slip, (cut Pachelbel) Though we
measure the risk by the secular arrogation of the old religious
ground: "L'etat c'est moi."
aS3) Qodfrey
1700, VvCatfmo (Prior, detail; Trinity CoCC^e, CamBrid£e
53) Same, tfie xufioCe (wfiidi video puts B^ore and after tfie detaiQ
By 1700 that heroic inflation — Dryden's "Aloft in awful state/
The God-like hero sate/ On his imperial throne" — is about to yield to
Pope's:
"Here thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey,/ Dost
sometimes counsel take — and sometimes tea."
lyiusic:
F. Couperin, 1714-15, Concert Royal No.4, 1st Mov., Nonesuch
H 73014
Thus the Baroque yields to Couperin; thus Kneller's Mathew Prior,
even in the robes and pose of the vaunt, turns the flourishes of ex
pression and light into Swiftian mockery.
54) Watteau ,1717, CTndarquement pour CytBere, Louvre, (Paris
54 a) Same, detail (video pans a detailfrom 54)
The bubble of virtu breaks in a witty play of artifice. The
ironies of reason hide a growing sentiment of nature. It is the 18thcentury polarity:
mocking mind, searching heart.
In Watteau's
Island of Love those landscape depths of the Baroque become a pre
cious filigree, stage-set for the masque of manners, which is at once a
courtly game and a sigh for joy. Pope:
But now secure the painted vessel glides.
The sun-beams trembling on the floating tides;
While melting music steals upon the sky.
And softened sounds along the waters die;
Smooth flow the waves, the zephyrs gently play,
Belinda smiled, and all the world was gay.
a55) *BouclieT, 1746, fisfiin^ Landscape, ivfiole; 5l£rmita£e, Leningrad
55) Same, detail
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The artifice of landscape espaliered into park seems fulfilled in
Boucher's 1746 fishing scene — an arabesque of trees, clouds and
stream. Yet through that china veil, the cult of Rousseau begins to
touch everything with dream. (Couperin from 1st mvt to 2nd) So Marie
Antoinette played at shepherdess in her village in the Petit Trianon.
56) WUson, 1774, Ccider Idris, ^ate Qcdlery, London
56 a) Same, detaU (wfiicfi video can draw from 56)
The drive to forthright nature spurns that: (cut Couperin)
England, Richard Wilson, most of all his revolutionary "Cader Idris" of
1774.
But it is not the dimensional world reaffirmed.
Light
streaming space is stripped to the stark phenomenal.
Man seems
dwarfed, an exile. What begins to be verified is the Wordsworthean
relation to the "souls of lonely places" — Haydn's muted horns.
Music:
57)
Haydn, 1794-5, from Adagio of Symphony 102, Vanguard
SRV211SD [to slide 60]
jG. *Xocque, c. 1750-60, ^alz£rafv. ZwdBruckpt, ‘Bir^nfeCd
59)
The mid-century rift between genteel convention and the natu
ral man of heart is nowhere stronger than in Germany. The foppery
of Renaissance humanitas, undercut by two centuries of aristocratic
appropriation, could hardly show a prissier mask than in the Munich
Duke of Zweibriicken.
58)
^nton 5(g.pfiaeC 9den£s, c. 1750, SeCf-portrait (sUverpoint), SUBertina, Vienna
While the young artist Mengs, sketching himself about 1750,
reminds us that Rousseau's intuition held the seeds both of Revolu
tion and Romantic. The Social Contract: "Man is bom free, and is ev
erywhere in chains." And the Confessions: "the austere Jean Jacques,
serious citizen of Geneva ... became again the love-sick shepherd ...
and seeing nothing in existence worthy of my enthusiasm, I sought
nourishment for it in an ideal world ..."
59)
(B.O. !Kiin£e, c. 1803, SeCf-portrait, 9^nstfial[e, 9{am6ur£) + V detail
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Like the same person reborn stronger, Runge steps from the
18th-century drawing room onto the Goethean world-stage of 1803:
"Gefiihl ist alles" — "Feeling is everything." Man's proclamation of
grandeur had crested once in the rational hybris of the Baroque.
After a century of irony and enlightenment, it rallies under revolu
tionary command — the Faust-claim in Beethoven, Hegel, Holderlin,
that world-spirit is realizing itself through the shaping passions of
the heart and will. It is the final liberation of the Ego as a pheno
menon of hope.
60) HosepH S^ton ^cfi, 1811, ScfmadriSacfi
60 a) Same, upper cCetaiC
Leipzig Museum
The central urge of the Christian West had been to bring the
Kingdom of God from the timeless and spaceless to the here and now.
The free and transcendental self requires a free and pantheistic na
ture, untamed, "shoreless as God." Koch tried what romantics would
pursue in the mountain fastnesses of the world. While Wordsworth,
climbing Snowdon at night, saw, in a sea of mist under the moon:
... a blue chasm; a fracture in the vapour,
A deep and gloomy breathing-place through which
Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams ...
... in that breach
Through which the homeless voice of waters rose.
That dark deep thoroughfare had Nature lodg'd
The Soul, the Imagination of the whole.
(end Haydn)
61) C.(D. S^riedrich, 1810, SeCf-portrait (drawing), Mgtionad Q(dCery, ^erCitt
61a) Same, detaiC (sG.de onty)
Music:
Beethoven, 1824, Quartet #12 in E flat, Opus 127, opening. Col. M
5 S 677 [through slide 63]
Nothing takes us deeper into the night-brooding of earlyromantic than the face of Caspar David Friedrich, German landscape
mystic of 1810. Thrown back (like Beethoven in the late Quartets)
from revolutionary hope, soul turns its introspective retreat into a
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triumph of inwardness. As Friedrich wrote under increasing neglect:
"And so I spin myself into a cocoon and shall let time decide what
will emerge therefrom." So Schelling's process of creation:
the revelation of light in what was originally the prin
ciple of darkness ... That principle which rises up from
the depths of nature and by which man is divided
from God, is the selfhood in him; but by reason of its
unity with the ideal, this becomes spirit.
62)
^riedryi, 1819,
(DrescCen
men oBserving the mom (or annuCar ecRpse of the sun?)
Against the landscape of ordered harmony (the 18th-century
lord of the manor secure in the Lockean propriety of fruitful ground),
Friedrich abandons ownership altogether.
Earth and all begin to
eclipse, like the moon, into figments. As in Goethe's Walpurgis Night,
we have gone into the spheres of dream and magic: "In die Traumund Zaubersphare/ Sind wir, scheint es, eingegangen."
63)
(joya, 1820, 'J^modea' or fantgstu; *l?i^ion (front the Qyinta deCSordo), now
in the (Brado, Odadrid; + ^ detaiC
How variously landscape now veers back to the visionary, ab
stract, revelational. In Spain, Goya's 1820 Fantastic Vision from the
Quinta del Sordo, launches the older techniques of crisis — 1600, El
Greco; 1700, Magnasco — toward the modern.
(fade Beethoven)
64)
SamueCfBaCmer, c. 1826-30, ComfieCd By mootdight, 9(^nneth CCarf^
In the England of this Samuel Palmer, Blake was the total revo
lutionary, for whom the outward universe is the vegetative husk of
symbolic reality.
Music:
Schubert, 1828, slow opening, C Maj. Quintet, Col MS 6536
But landscape as such was more cultivated by the disciple, in those
Shoreham pictures of 1826-30 (time of Schubert), when Palmer's
youth was marvellously possessed by Blakean imagination.
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65) burner, e7(fii6itecC 1843,
65a) Same, a cCoser unter spread
History
-after the 2)e%e; CTate, London
While Turner, starting in the traditional manner of the Dutch
and Claude, threw all his academic skills into a program not unre
lated to Blake's (though their techniques were opposite) — an ecstatic
transformation of matter into light. Thus one of his last pictures,
"Light and Color, Goethe's Theory, the Morning after the Deluge,
Moses writing the book of Genesis," exhibited in 1843. (fade Schubert)
a66) DeCacroiTQ 1826, Study for‘Baron Schwiter, detaiC; SpringfieCd, 9dass.
66)
Same, luhoCe
Music:
Berlioz, 1830, Funeral March, opening, Symphonie Fantastique,
CM-9227
Not that Napoleonic assertion was a thing of the past. The 19th
century is dominated by the sort of titanism we have called the lib
eration of the ego, but shifting from its 1790 Enlightened base ("a
phenomenon of hope") to a Berlioz Gallows March ("a phenomenon of
despair"). This 1826 Delacroix portrait has absorbed Faust's satanic
compact, with Byron's "pageant of the bleeding heart". Rousseaus
pain has eroded his natural good. One begins to wonder how far the
human boast is suicidal.
(fade Berlioz)
67) Courhet, 1845-46, Man vH-th a Tipe (SeCf), Museum, MontpeCCier
67a) Same, detaiC
Music: . Wagner, 1857-59, Tristan & Isolde, from Prelude (Stokowsky
"Synthesis"), V-LM-1174
Twenty years more and we come to a face inescapable in such
a survey, the Courbet Self, paired in "Cycles" with Flaubert on world
sickness and a coming Dark Age. But the ennui and spleen of Baude
laire equally apply: "When with eyes closed as in an opium dream"
and "I am a burial ground the moon abhors" — "Je suis un cimetiire
abhorri de la lune." It is the mood Dowson brought to England:
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"Desolate and sick of an old passion," and for which Arnold, in his
purer way, had written a Fall-of-theWest program:
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full ...
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long withdrawing roar.
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
68) (Bocl^in, 1865j Vida am 9v[eer, Zndform, Scfiacf^^aC., 9dunidi (CQ^ '59)
68a) Same,.(CetaiC
Landscape takes up the "Dover Beach" burden. Bocklin suffuses
each rock, wave and cypress with Tristan and Isolde lushness of
Sehnsucht — as in the phrase Eliot culls for The Wasteland: "oed' und
leer das Meer;" or elsewhere from Nerval: . "J'ai rev^ dans la grotte
oH nage la sir^ne." Here the art problem of the century becomes in
escapable. Bl^e, and even Goya, had challenged the outward order.
With bourgeois consolidation, re^alism also regrouped itself, as if to
affirm our place in the dimensional. But its message is the reverse, is
Rilke's "that we're not very much at home in the interpreted world."
So how long can the techniques caress that world with the oily touch
of Baudelaire, Wagner and Bocklin?
69)
fHans von 9darees, 1863, Marees and LenSacfi, 9^ue (Pina^, 9dunicfi
(CQ^B '59); first, video detail
The soul is almost at cleavage, raised (as Yeats saw Nietzsche)
from the romantic gyre toward another, where Rocky Face laughs in
tragic joy.
(fade Tristan Prelude)
Music:
Wagner, 1857-9, Tristan, climax and interruption of Love Night,
London 5938
(fade)
And in Hans von Marees' portrait of himself and Lenbach, 1863,
Nietzschean violence turns to idiot laughter:
June
1996
Face
and
Landscape
24
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic
History
To offer up God to the void, that is the last mystery,
the sacrament of terror reserved for the generation at
hand. We have already felt it working in ourselves ...
70) Monet, 1888, J^ntiSes, (Duran(C-!^ueC, (Paris
70 a) Same, detaiC (wfUch video draws from 70)
''
From that bituminous immersion. Impressionism, by a shift of
attention from the. self to the science of light and air, drew Monet
and the rest from the visceral wake of Wagner and Zarathustra into
the plein-air of Argenteuil and Provence, the rainbow of broken color
— like a Faure scherzo — an art of delight.
Music:
Faure, 1879, Scherzo from 1st Piano Quartet, RCA-V-ARL1-0761
Of which, however, two things must be said: that the strains of
yearning distill through the brightness; and that (as we have implied
with modern science) reality itself, the landscape, begins to dissolve
under the analytical shimmer.
71)
(Rgnoir, 1876, (Portrait ofPd. Chocquet, ^ntertfmr} + V detaU
(fade Faur6)
Thus Renoir's 1876 portrait of Monsieur Chocquet slips quietly
beyond Marees' Confidence Man smile. What the palette clothes in
wistful gaiety is man's withdrawal from the temporal field. As in
Verlaine:
Ils n'ont pas I'air de croire a leur bonheur
Et leur chanson se mele au clair de lune ...
they have the air of not believing in their own happi
ness
and their song is mingled with the light of the moon.
While Faure yields to Debussy:
Music:
Debussy, 1893, from last Movl, Quartet, Nonesuch H-1007
72)
Van Qo£fi, 1889, Sdf, S. (Rpny, H^itney (Museum, (N^C
June
1996
Face
and
Landscape
25
�Symbolic
History
7Za) Van Qo^fi, 1885, ^Potato ‘Eaters, Van Qo^H Museum, Zlinsterdam
726) Van §036, 1887, Larl^over Wfieat ^ieti. Van gogh Museum, Slmsterdam
72c) Van QogR, 1889, SeCf, detail, Jeu de Paume, Taris (w6Ue V details 72)
Anyone who thought the spiritual hunger solved by picnic
outings along the Impressionist Seine, would be troubled by the case
of Van Gogh, which is not a private case, though all lives have that
dimension. From the den of the "Potato Eaters" he took the release of
broken color and went south, risking the manic "Lark from the Corn,"
to plunge with as bright a plumage into despair. As Hopkins, the
same years, shreds the canons of utterance for urgency:
I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste; my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
73) Van Qogh, 1889, Starry 9^6t, Museum of Modem Sirt, 9dg.w ^orf^
73 a) Same, detail (slide only)
Ecstasy and anguish have broken realistic depiction.
Again
Hopkins: "Our evening is over us; our night whelms, whelms and will
end us ... ware of a world ... where selfwrung, selfstrung, sheatheand shelterless, thoughts against thoughts in groans grind."
The
Trump of Doom sounds again, in the frenzy of private vision.
(Debussy, com.)
74) Ticasso, 1909, Seated woman, Penrose Collection, London
74 a) Same, detail
I
In the first decade of this century, Cezanne’s abstraction of the
visible world into geometry was carried all the way in Analytical
(^ubism
partly, as in this Picasso, taught by what was most primi
tive, the African mask. This demolition and discovery still rides the
Nietzschean soothsaying wave. So the Futurists ("and like young li
ons we go pursuing death"), with Rilke, George, Hesse’s Demian, Irish
Revolutionaries, and world-socialists too — hailed the superman call
to the shrapnel liberation of war.
(,3^3 Debussy)
June
1996
Face
and
Landscape
26
�C.G. Bell
Music:
Symbolic
History
Schonberg, 1912, from Pierrot Lunaire, 8: Nacht, Col. M 2S 679
75j
^ranz Marc, 1915-16, TyroC, 9^tte Tina^ Municfi (CQ(B '59)
75a) Same, detail (cf. glazed
59 in video fide)
Though we are closer to that mood in Franz Marc's Tyrolean
landscape from 1915, a year before he was killed in action. Seven
centuries had labored at the rationally ordered realm of space, time,
and cause. It was a release now, a Yea-saying, to sacrifice it on
Pierrot Lunaire's altar of Heraclitean Fire. "Every angel is terrible,"
wrote Rilke; "yet woe is me, I sing you down, almost death-dealing
birds of the soul, knowing what you are" — "Jeder Engel ist schrecklich. Und dennoch, weh mir, ansing ich euch, fast todliche Vogel der
Seele, wissend um euch."
(fade SchOnberg)
76)
dluTand, 1849, HQndredSpirits,
^or^^BudCic Library
In these images of face and landscape, the whole pride and
catastrophe of Western man beckons.
How could democracy in
America (1849) have done otherwise than reaffirm with the clarity
of everyday enlightenment that landscape meeting ground of
visionary and real, the irradiated space of a wild continent, ordained
Eden for a new race of reason and heart?
77)
(Ryder, 1870-90, MoonCiyfit Marine, MetropoCitan Museum, 9^rv Odor(<i
And how it would strike at those daylight Emersonian hopes,
that Ryder, after Melville and the Civil War and the Gilded Age,
would shut himself in a New York apartment, painting in solitude a
night nature of symbolic menace. El Greco's Toledo and Goethe's
Walpurgis Night win back in an American haunted by the sea.
78) (PoCCocRi 1952, Converyence, SldSriydt-dQioTQ ‘Buffalo
78a) Same, detail
Ridiculous, in three terminal slides to deal with a global cen
tury, as labyrinthine in warring ways as a Pollock "Bateau ivre" soulscape of drips and muscular movements, jerked off in peristaltic deJune
1996
Face
and
Landscape
27
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic
History
fiance of the old arrogation to order self and world. As if, possessed
from between the stars, we were breathing great gulps of
Pythagorean void.
Music:
Earle Brown, 1964, from Four systems for 4 amplified cymbals.
Col. MS-7139
If this is the space we operate in, we must search (with Earle Browne
in music) for other modes of operation.
(fade E. Brown)
In the lunge from willed depiction to a swirl where face and
landscape drown,
9(p[kvitz, 1934, Sdf-ToTtrait, Litfiograpfi, TftUaddpdia Museum
T9)
was it only the socialists who would uphold the blatancy of the old
claim, of man's responsibility for space and time? And even that
programmatic hope, in the between-war throes of the liberal West,
assumed in Kathe Kollwitz the age-old Roman shadowings of despair.
What does it mean for face to choose between this and the abstract
void? Are real leaders to be expected where the affirming image is
no longer real?
80) Mard^9(pt/idp, 1958, ‘Brown on TCum, franz Meyer CoCC., Zurix^i (wdere tde
video pans in and out on tdis intake, tde sCide sfiow £oes to two otder tRs>tfidp's:
80a, 1961, untitCed, Baca QaCCery; and 806,1961, iS/um6er 118, (DusseCdoif
Most modern art has taken another aim, to push to the thresh
old of sense what drove Wallace Stevens to slough off the images of
"Sunday Morning" on the Dump:
... to eject, to pull
The day to pieces and cry stanza my stone?
Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.
But what else besides the artist himself, Rothko, must go down
in the transcendental reduction of that purple pool?
June
1996
Face
and
Landscape
28
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic
History
We do not like to hear what the history of the images makes
commonplace: that art, as real, comes at a cost. "When the modes of
music change," Plato says in The Republic, "the fundamental laws of
the state always change with them." In the Roman empire, when
spirit turned from mastered outwardness to the abstract call beyond
that wavering veil, those anchorites, St. Anthony and the rest, knew
what they aimed at was the end of the world. As Yeats, in a time he
considered parallel:
Ah what a sweetness strayed
Through barren Thebaid
And by the Mareotic sea
When that exultant Anthony
And twice a thousand more
Starved upon the shore
And withered to a bag of bones.
What had the Caesars but their thrones?
June
1996
Face
and
Landscape
29
�
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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
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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
1890 — Avant-Garde Break
2
�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
4
�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
5
�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
7
�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
9
�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
10
�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
12
�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
13
�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
17
�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
18
�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
19
�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
20
�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
22
�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
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�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
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�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
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�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
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�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
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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
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�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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Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound
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1890 : Avant-Garde Break, Symbolic History, Part 33
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Text
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)
�
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Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound
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1900 B : Crisis of the Abstract, Symbolic History, Part 34
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Santa Fe, NM
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Text
Charles G. Bell, 126b'''Caii3y3n Road, or St. John's College
Santa Fe, Ne^r Mexico 87501
SYMBOLIC HISTORY — Through Sight and Sound
35t
Betveen Wars — 20th Century, Art and Politics
1) Rembrandt 1656, Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph, State Gallery, Kassel
(video begins vith detail)
la) Same, detail (vith video lb and other details)
MUSICt Albert 1640, from Recitative, Kirchenkantata, "Bist du nicht
. --- mit deinen Gaben", (Tinavre) Col.7073 D, Side 7
Begin vith the style-plateau of Europe, Rembrandt, 1656,
Jacob blessing the sons of Joseph, in the century of
Descartes and Newton (in music this Albert), when rational
science, chordal harmony, representational art, seemed to
constitute a divine order — Henry Moore:
That spiritual object, which we call space...
represents for us... the true and universal nature of
the continuous divine presence...
(end Recitativ^^
'
Bos?Sn (upplr
Daughters of E.D. Boit, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Stewart Gardner, Kus. of Fine Arts
2b) Again 2, Daughters of Boit, detail
Ill
^ ”»e, John Hay
^SIC: Hugo Wolf 1896^^0var dein Haus (Rita~ Streich) D.Gram. 138641
From this 1882 group portrait, through the First World
f
War, Sargent kept up the grand manner of figures lighted in
space.
But against Rembrandt or Velasquez, these daughters
of Boit in their Paris drawing room (with the music of Hugo
wold) seem as spaced out as the children of Henry James.
When a reality which once affirmed God and world has become
BO spectral, (fade Wolf) how is it to be maintained?
a3) Gino Seyerini 1915, The Armored Train, detail, R. Zeisler, NYC
[video only] b3) Andre Derain 1905, Le Faubourg, Collioure, priv. coll'n,
Paris
3) Double: Again a3, Severini's Train, whole; and Picasso 1938, Girl with
Cock, Museum of Art, Baltimore
3a) Again 3B, Picasso, Girl with Cock
j
�C.G. Bell
Between Kars - 2
MUSIC; Varese 1922# frorn-Americnie (Utah)# Vanguard SRV~274 SD
All during Sargent's lifetime and in all arts (Varese's doubleedged clang of Amerioue# 1922)# the converse vave had been
moxinting# through Cezanne# Post-Impfessionist# Fauve# to the
dissolving ecstasy of Ltuninism# Blaue Reiter# Futurism — this
1915 Severini (left)# where an armored train elides into rapture.
%
And when Picasso (right)# in the throes of a Europe bungling
through Fascism to Second War# struck back# it was not by realism,
but by the cleaver of post-Dada attack — this Girl with a Cock
of 1938.
[video only) a4) G. Kolbe (Nazi) c. 1935, Great Fighter
[video only] b4) Boccione 1913, Unique Form of Continuity in Space, bronze,
Civic Gallery of Modern Art, Milan
4) Double: b4, Boccione's Continuity; & a4, Kolbe's Fighter
4a) Reginald Marsh 1932, Tattoo & Haircut, Art Institute, Chicago
[video only] 4b) Marsh 1934, Negroes on Rockavay Beach, Whitney Museum of
American Art, NYC
4c) Again 4, Double, Conti^iuiiy & Fighter, upper detail
[video only] 4d) Again a4. Fighter, detail
[video only] 4e) Again b4. Continuity, detail
Though Establishment# even into nightmare times# resisted
modernism (whether of Yea or Nay)# as if it sabotaged old claims _
V
this 1913 Boccione (left)# "Unique Form of Continuity in Space."
(fade Varese)
No wonder# as the Free Enterprise flivver went into Depressionshimmies and mass cults took over (Mussolini# Stalin# Hitler# the
milder New Deal)# they backed art-reaffirmation of nature and man.
This 1935 Kolbe "Great Fighter" (right) damns the whole Boccione
experiment.
Yet how like# in that wilful assertion which pushed
with Futurists
toward the First# with Fascists toward the
Second World War.
Must not both wear like a shadow some Hollow Man suppressed
anaemia:
"Here we go round the prickly pear/. ..At five o'clock
in the morning"?
�.
Bell
Between Wars -
3^
a5) Maurice Utrillo C.1910, Rue des Abesses, Paris, Whitney Collection, NYC
[slide only] b5) Derain 1906, Charing Cross Bridge, Private Colection, New
York City
5
[video only] c5) Picasso 19b8, Standing Figure, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
5) Utrillo 1910-12, Rue du Chevalier de. la Barre, Coll'n. of Richard
Seewald (with video detail)
For there was a euphoria (from Revolutibn through romantic,
symbolist, modern, which it was always possible, by, temperament,
drink, or Pascalian vertigo, to slip off of ~ Hindemith, from 1922.
So alcoholic Utrillo's pre-war Paris clouds the Fauve-bright
scene -- like the Boston of Eliot's "Prufrock":
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question...
O, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.
6)
c. 1919?, Woman in a Large Hat, R. Lehman Collection, NYC
(with video detail)
Modigliani too, by addiction and consumption, fell beyond
Picasso's Blue and Rose into the enervations of that Lady whose
Portrait Pound — "your mind and you are our Sargasso
Sea", and "she is dying piecemeal/ of a sort of emotional anaemia" —
would turn over to Eliot* "Eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase",
and "I shall sit here, serving tea to friends".
(end Hindemith, sehr lanasam)
[slide only] a7) Kandinsky 1913, Improvisation 30 (Cannon), Art Institute •*'“
of Chicago
[video only] a*?) Kandinsky 1914, Picture with 3 Spots, Guggenheim Museum,
NYC
7) Double: Again a7, Kandinsky, Improvisation 30; & 1927, Points of an Arc,
private collection (with video details)
7a) Again 7B, Kandinsky Arc Points
_______ ^________ ____________________
MUSIC* Hindemith 1922-3, Same sonato, 4th Mvt, "Rasendes", Mace
------------------------------------------------------ MCS 9075
Kandinsky's early elation (left) had turned foreseen destruction
to a Symbolist Sieg Heil:
this 1913 Improvisation with firing
cannon and toppling materialist towers.
But Kandinsky himself
after Versailles (all those little doomed democracies carved
�C.G. Bell
Between Wars for exploitation out of defeated empires) Kandinsky (right)
tightened inebriation to a geometric aftermathi while the climax
movement of the same 1922 Hindemith, strait-jackets pre-war
iconoclasm.
F.A. Breuhaus, Bonn
Such the foreboding drumbeat Hofer, in 1920 Berlin, would bring
from Cubism and the blood-depletion of war.
AgaiVi Eliot had
penetrated to that skeletal mood in 1911 Paris;
"Rhapsody on a
windy Night":
Every steet lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum.
The last twist of the knife.
(end Hindemith, "Rasendes")
a9) Salvator Dali 1935, Nostalgic Echo, coll'n L.M. Maitland, close detail
b9) Clovis Trouille c. 1940?, Mon Tombeau, detail, artist's coll'n (with
video detail of bats)
9) Again a9, Dali's Echo, whole (with closer video detail)
In The Waste Land Eliot seems to have foreshadowed also the
Dali smart Surreal, this 1935 Nostalgic Echo, with its bell-clap^^
woman and skip-roping inversion;
A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.
10) Mack Senne’tt c. 1917, Bathing Beauties, Mus. Mod. Art, NYC (with video
detail)
As for Dali, after*Spain and Paris,, he was now sharing in
the continental fruitcake of America, everything from Rock of
Gibralter East to the Zaniest shenanigans of Hollywood — this
Mack Sennet 1917 Bathing Beauties;
give those girls anyway?
and what is Santa going to
a bag of diapers?
�9
Between Wars
C.G. Bell
5
11) John Marin 1922, Lower Manhattan, watercolor. Museum of Modern Art, NYC
____ (with video detail)_____________ __________ ____________________________
Yet the Ea^t too was pulsing with the vibrance of capital
expanding as never before toward boom and bust — staid insurance
companies housing JveS and Wallace Stevens, while John Marin
caught this 1922 Lower Manhattan, the sun going off Like an atonic
bomb at the heart of it.
Such affirmation as William Carlos
Williams risked in his 1917 "El Hombre":
It's a strange courage
you give me ancient star:
“ shine alone in the sunrise
toward which you lend no p^rt!
al2) 20th cent.. Swimming pool at the Hearst Castle, San Simeon, CA
12) Double: Inigo Jones Etc. 1647-52, Double Cube Room, Wilton House,
England; & Assembly room, Hearst**s San Simeon (1919)
12*a) Single of 12B, Hearst *s Assembly room________________ _______________
While incalculable fortunes rose and deployed themselves,
not yet for the modern, but in the acquisition and pastiche-display
of Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque.
Beside the ornate refinement of
Inigo,Jones' mid-17th century Double-Cube Room, Wilton House near
Salisbury (left), how ecclectic the ostentation of the Assembly
Room at ;5an Simeon, where William Randolph Hearst sat at the hub
of a tabloid ,empire to receive his guests.
Did the infinitely
varied surge and intemperance of that America admit of any limits
jt;
at ali?
al3) Nigerian (Olowe of Ise) 1895, Reception of first British Administrator
to visit Ekiti, carved doors from Palace of Ogoda, British Museum,
London, detail
13) Same, Carved doors, whole (video various details)---------- ---------MUSIC, central Africa, Burundi chant avec clthare (vhlsper-so^
By will or fate we had subsumed everything the conquering
West had dreamed or brought of against what was not yet called
the Third world:— this Reception of the first British administra
tor in Ekiti, Nigeria — Captain Ambrose like a sick bird, with
�C.G. Bell
V. -
Between Kars
6
his shackled bearers, confronting the Uoruba chief with his
wives and elders.
(fade Burundi>
Jttterbugglng In a Jake Joint, Clarksdale,
MUSICt Duke Ellington Orchestra 1938. from Battle of Swing
'
'
' - jjazz II tape, A.475)
But would not Kurtz meteoring down to the Heart of Darkness
symbolize the reverse conquest of beat rythm seeding New World
and Old with reckless revitalization — these indomitable Blacks
to a Juke Box in Clarksdale, Mississippi, 1939
.A'
(why not to Duke Ellington's "Battle of Swing", lately the
rage of Paris?)
(end Ellinoton)
15) Photoi Margaret Bourke-White 1937, -At the Tine of the Louisville
---- Flooa-, Eastman House, Rochester. NY (with video A.t.Hsi
_Blues, Odetta (from Blind Lemon Jefferson#) I just can't kfeep
from cryln' sometimes. RCA LPM 2573
all post*>Nretzschean modern, that wild release transvalues
the caustic betrayal of enlightened and romantic hope.
This 1937
photograph is entitled "At the Time of the Louisville Flood",
but the seeking blacks against that slogan-sale of the American
Way, might project from any Depression city the job or soup lines
of a crazed economy, everywhere veering toward violence.
16) Photo 1938, Mussolini & Hitler parading on Hitler's visit to Italy,
Florence (with video details) (cf» Atomic Age a76)*
I wa’s in Florence during Hitler's 1938 visit.
The Italians
hated the Germans, but Welcome signs plastered the walls.
From
windows, not to be raised above five centimeters, we saw the great
car pass between banks of soldiers, the Duce and FUhrer side by side,
one acting for the crowd, the other for his own romantic heart.
On every lamp-post loud-speakers had been hung, form which (to
offset Italians shouting for Mussolini) volleyed a raucous "Heil
Hitler, Heil Hitler?"
The corporal waved acceptance.
passed, the real cry eased, while the record-rehearsing
As the car
^
�Bell
Between Wars - 7
■legaphones boomed "Hile Hitler, Heil Hitler" ad absurdum.
Italian cleverness!
17J^Hans^Hofmann
wSSo S2an)
Of ArtV New
But who was being deceived?
Mfe's Picture History of World War ii
' Fantasia, University Art Museum, Berkeley, CA (with
?95fGallery, Nev YorX
^
Square: "Ascending", Whi tney Museum
MUSIC: Schonberq 1936, Fourth Quartet, opening. Vox SVBX 590. sidP> s
From that vortex beyond the human, of which Chaplin would make
fun and history destruction, the arts, the races banned as
degenerate:
this Hofman color Fantasia of 1943, with its stressed
discoveries of pure "push and pull...force and counterforce";
SchOnberg'E 1936 twelve-tone Fourth Quartet: the very sciences of
relativity and indeterminacy, also accused of decadence _ these
regrouped in America for a love-feast of modernity — euphoric
transvaluation of earth-upheaval.
Had what was exiled constituted
a kind of "Drunken Boat" danger: or search through danger for
radical renewal: or was it the protraction of a now fashionable
mode?
Could it be all in one?
(fade_SchSnber£)
18) Provencal Rom'q c. 1160, Bearded Apostle (head), Gilles-du-Garde, near
Arles (with video detail)_______________ _____
MUSIC: Leonin c.llSO, from Alleluva, at "In Azimus "(Oberlin etc.)
-- •
■
■■
... ..
— MHS 676 (Band 2)
"Eternity," said Bernard of Tours, called Silvestris, "is
I
that from which time must be bom and into which it must be
resolved."
But not all our art-stripping could revive the force
with which spirit first buttressed (over the bare-fifth voids of
Romanesque) the almost demonic stare of body overmastered by
God’s word.
(fade Leonin)
19) J. Dietrich 1738, St. Augustine (head), Diessen am Ammersee, Bavaria
(with video detail)
�C•G• 6g1X
Between Kars - 8
MUSIC: Bach 1733-8# from Quoniani, B Minor Mass (Karayan etc.)
■
------ --------------------------
Angel '3500 C
Nor our sensuous cultivation# our fulness of techniques and
knowledge# restore the sanctifying order of earth and man, which
the 1700's rhetoric of Baroque (here Dietrich and Bach) tirelessly
proclaims.
(fade Quoniam)
20) Rouault 1925, The Apprentice (self portrait). Museum of Modern Art,
Paris (with video detail)
20a) Rouault 1932, Christ Mocked, Museum of Modern Art, Paris (with video
detail)____ ______________________
MUSIC: Satie 1918, close of Socrate, Angel S-36846
In conscious disclaimer of that plenitude# Rouault's simulation
of stained glass# or this close of Satie's Socrate does not
resume the clean force of the pre-personal,
romantic# Eliot's 1911-12 "Prufrock":
its soil is broken
"I am no prophet _ and
here's no great matter" (close Satie) — a debility perfected by
1925 in "The Hollow Men": "...We are the stuffed men/ Leaning
together/ Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!" ... "Waking alone/
At the hour when we are/Trembling with tenderness/ Lips that
would kiss/ Form prayers to broken stone."
Between "This broken
jaw of our lost kingdoms" and faith "Falls the Shadow/ Life is
very Ipnq... For Thine is/ Life is/ For thine is the/
This is
^he way the world ends...Not with ^ bang but a whimper."
Had the spirit and exhuberance of the past worn down to
Eliot's neo-skeptic return to high church and state?
of"Moal: irtf'NYC** Dancer Accompanies Herself vlth her Shaaowe, Mus.
Hashlnston, Art Musenm, Portlana, &
American Gothic, Art Institute, Chicago
21a) Again 21B, Wood's Gothic (with video details)
Again 21A, Maurer's Washington
2l£j John Stuart Curry 1937. The Mississippi, eitv Mnsenm. st. Louis
By 1916 cliques of Americans had turned (with Gertrude Stein)
to clever or pained debunking,
if Man Ray and Schamberg carried
�o
»
r
Between Wars - 9
it with the wit of Dada» poor Maurer (left)» who scarificed
Impressionist success to the Cubism of Paris, gave that reduction
a melancholy of his own:
this George Washington of 1932, year of
the artist's suicide.
Appropriate to a time of Crash and Depression, that such
anaemia on the abstract side should be countered on the realist
by Grant Wood's 1930 American Gothic (right), its make-believe
of pitch-fork father and spinster daughter (ironically aproned
in circles and dots) prime for Eliot's slide through The Waste Landt
I think we are in rat's alley
Where the dead men lost their bones —
to the dry conversion of Ash-Wednesday (also of 1930) —
Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope..i
Wavering between the profit and the loss...
Yet in the realistic fiction of that horizon, Mississippi
Faulkner could sweep the impenetrable gloom of The Sound and
the Fury, Absalom, Wild Palms on an affirming thunderhead of
hallucinated prose:
___
22) Marie Hull 1936, An American Citizen (John Wesley Washington), Artist's
collection (with video detail)
^
w
c*.
22a) John McCrady c. 1936?, Swing Low Sweet Chariot, City Art Museum, St.
_____Louis, MO------------------ --------- —--------------------- ----—----, . . Because if memory
exists outside of the flesh it wont be memory because
it wont know what it remembers so when she became not
then half of memory became not and if I become
then all of remembering will cease to
Yes, he
thought, between grief and nothing I will take grie .
Marie Hull, Mississippi painter to be caught up later in the
excitement of the New York School, is no art-equivalent.
Though
this portrait, from the Depression, of "An American Citizen"
(another Washington), has the stamp of Faulkner's indomitable
Blacks— in Dilsey's church, the monkey-like preacher with the
great voice:
�Between Wars - 10
C.6. Bell
0 breddred! I sees de doom crack an hears de golden
horns shoutin down de glory# en de arisen dead vhut
got de blood en*de ricklickshun of de Lamb.
a23) Robinson Jeffers 1958# Photo by Edward Weston
[video only] b23) Photo Sept. 26, 1918, Mobile Railroad Gun at Baleycourt,
U.S. Official War Pictures
, .
n
^ ^
,
c23) Photo May 3, 1939, World War II, Chungking (China) bombed by Japan,
Life»e Picture History
d23) Photo: Crab Nebula in Taurus, remnant of Super-nova observed by
Chinese in 1054 AD
^
e23) Robinson Jeffers' Stone Tower, Carmel, CA (CGB 83)
f23) Yeats' Ballylee Tower with bridge (CGB '80)
23) Morris Graves 1940. Blind Bird. Museum of Modern Art, New York C_i^-West of the Black sway, Jeffers attempted a Dionysiac crucible
of terror*
He brays h\imanity in a mortar to bring the savor
From the bruised root...
I have seen these ways of God...
Unmeasured power, incredible passion, enormous craft:
... a certain measure in phenomena:
The fountains of the boiling stars, the flowers on the
foreland, the ever-returning roses of dawn.
As if three pockets of the English speaking world had approached
tragic resonance*
Jeffers' Carmel coast, Faulkner's Mississippi,
and (above the rest) the Ireland of William Butler Yeats.
Yet
these were word-kindlings, loosely linked to any art-stirrings
from the same or other soil ~ as from Seatle, Graves' 1940
V
Blind Bird.
24) Frank Lloyd Wright 1936, Falling Water, Bear Run, PA
24a) F.L. Wright 1936, Falling Water, South elevation. Night
24b) Photo: Windsor ruins near Port Gibson, MI (CGB '80)--------------Who is greater than Frank Lloyd Wright?
tragic.
Yet he defies the
Can even his masterpiece, this 1936 house cantilevered
over Falling Water, lift the ruins of time to an eternal sphere,
all presences abide?
It is what Yeats does in poems of
those years ~ "The Curse of Cromwell"*
I came on a great house in middle of the night,^
Its open lighted doorway and its windows all alight.
And all my friends were there and made me welcome too;
But I woke in an old ruin that the winds howled through;
And when I pay attention I must out and walk
Among the dogs and horses that xinderstand my talk.
O what of that, O what of that.
What is there left ^ say?
�’CVG'.«Bell
Between Kars - 11
25) Mondrian 1902, Trees on tKe R*»in
detail)______________ on the Gein, Gemeentemuseum, The Hague (vith video
Begin again.
MUSIC.
-------
,
Can ve typefy the style-current of the first third of the"
century?
Mondrian would »,ove in twenty years from this 1902
I«>tch landscape to a ruled abstraction of white and primary color
equares.
In the comparable break with tonal harmony, Pebussy,
up to 1890 was refining French Romantic
?vlth^vtdeo
Farmhouse, Gemeentemuseum, The Hague
towards musical Impressionism,
while art sought an abstract
color-music.
Yet what Of the ratios on which music had relied?
The ear
knows them by wave-overlay. but seeing blurs proportion, whether
Of space or color frequency.
stretched representation.
No wonder visual harmony has mostly
In this 1906 Mondrian (from four years
later than the first), landscape feels its way toward geometry.
(end Nocturne)
Mondrian c. 1911-1?, Horizontal Tree, Sidney .T.nis Gallery, w.w v„,.
^SlCi^bussv loot.
PaooHe.. unin^, ^t. PHC t ,n.,
si* ">ore years Mondrian climaxes that search for the
form underlay of nature, indeed the background of this Horizontal
Tree already admits the cubism of Paris.
With pebussy, a oomparable span might take us to the gamelan
inspired Pagodas of 1903.
detfu)^
detail
Composition, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (vith video
Almost within a year Mondrian had dissolved the espalliered
tree (with other natural objects) into a complex of straight and
curved lines forming planes of blue and tan - for which the title
�C.G* Bell
Between Kars - 12'-
now can only be "Composition".
t
It is the pre-war climax of
abstract experiment.
(fade Pagodes)
[slide only] a29) Mondrian Double: 1921 Composition with Red, Yellow and
Blue, The Hague; & 1922 Composition 2, Guggenheim Museum, New York City
29) Single a29A, Mondrian Red, Yellow Si.Blue (with video details)__________
MUSIC: Debussy 1915, from Etudes, Pour les notes repetees
Debussy did not live into the reductive tightening of the post
war twenties, in which, from 1921 to 1933, Mondrian’held to a
canon of perpendicular black lines, ruled on white and edged
with primary-color rectangles — though Debussy's last studies,
the Etudes of 1915, move that way.
Is Mondrian's abstract stripping the main stream of the time?
And what is its content?
Before I knew Wil.liam Carlos Williams,
I cited his "Between Walls" for such indirection:
Between Walls
the black wings
of the
hospital where
nothing
a30) Mondrian 1942-3, Broadway Boogie Woogie, Museum of Modern Art, NYC
30) Mondrian 1943-44 (unfinished). Victory Boogie Woogie, Coll’n Tremaine,
Meriden, Conn.____________________ __________________ _________________
will grbw lie
cinders...
in- %diich shine
the broken
pieces of a green
bottle
Though when I asked him afterwards if that shattered glass spoke
mere fragmentation, or the outcrop of beauty even from the
sterile — he, who hated to explain poetry, groaned:
"I meant
the latter."
So Mondrian in New York, 1943, brought the vibrance
\
of what he now called Boogie-Woogie, to this final unfinished
diamond entitled "Victory Boogie-Woogie".
(fade Etudes)
�C’
.G. Bell
Between Wars - 13
31) Duncan Grant 1910, Portrait of James Strachey, Tate Gallery, London
(with video detail
MUSIC; Vaughan Williams 1914, from London Symphony, into the 2nd mvt.,
"
-------------------------------- London LL 569
We cannot deny the trend of reattachment.
Duncan Grant, born in
India, trained in Paris, painter of the Bloomsbury group, might seer,
at first drawn to the abstract.
Into the Edwardian realism of this
1910 portrait of James Strachey, secure in its heritage from
Pre-Raphaelite and Degas —
32j._D_.._Grant 1912, Still Life, Courtauld Institute, London________ _______
he has absorbed, in this Still Life of 1912, Cezanne.
Perhaps
the early work of Vaughan Williiuns, as from the London Symphony,
finished in 1914, has some such blend of romantic and modern,
expressed in a richly |>ersonal idiom.
33} D. Grant 1913, The Tub, Tate Gallery, London (with video detail)_______
But Grant, by the next year, under the tutelage especially of
Matisse, ventured further into the modern experiment than
Vaughan Williams, perhaps, ever would.
Surely the painter's
admirers must have thought him launched into the proper orbit of
the century,
(fade London Symphony)
After the First War, however,
he made an about face and gave the rest of his life
34) D. Grant 1940, Haystack before trees, Tate Gallery, London
34a) Nolde c. 1945?, Surf, Kunsthalle, Hamburg
to a modern reconstitution of the realistic English landscape.
It was the sort of affirmation Vaughan, Williams aimed at in
the Fifth Symphony shift to E major.
MUSIC; Vaughan Williams 1943, Symphony No. 5. 1st Mvt, major theme
*
^
------------ -
Angel 35952
How crucial xs that earth—rallying to the decades of Between—war?
(fade Vaughan Williams)
�i ^
C.G. Bell
Between Kars - 14
35) Double: Wyndham Levis 1913, Composition, drawing, Tate Gallery, London;
and 1937, Red Portrait (oil), Grosvenor Gallery, London (with video
detail)__________________________ __ _____________________ _
Even Wyndham Levis, Blast and Tyro of English avant-garde, would
move from the Vorticist iconoclasm of his 1912-14 Compositions, to
the representational i>ortraits of the •30's, this in red, a haunted
recording of the very aesthetic anaemia, the very people his pen
vas satyrizing in The Apes of God.
36) Picasso 1901, Harlequin Leaning on his Elbow, Met. Mus., NYC (with
video detail)
[slide only] 36a) Picasso 1905, Acrobat's Family with a Monkey, Goeteberg
Museum, Sweden
What of Picasso,
style-maker of the century, — with
the only musician who rivalled his art-surprises?
As Hugo
Leichtentritt wrote, "There is not one Stravinsky) there are ten."
MUSIC: Stravinsky 1907 & ff, from Pastorale, Col M 30579
Picasso leads the way.
This Harlequin anticipation of Blue and
Rose is from 1901} whereas the earliest Stravinsky cognate seems
the 1907 Pastorale (here in a later setting for violin and
wind quartet).
(end Pastorale)
a37) Picasso 1907, Buste de Femme ou de Marin, Picasso Museum, Paris
37) Picasso .1907/ Head (sketch for Les Demaiselles d'Avignon), priv.
coll 'n.
MUSIC: Stravinsky 1912-13, from Sacre du Printemps, Col.MG ST 31202
Picasso's eruption of force advances from 1906-09, through the
t
Negroid to the violent beginnings of Cubism.
Stravinsky peaks
his upheaval a few years later in the Rite of Spring,
(fade)
38) Picasso 1921, Three Musicians, Museum of Modern Art, NYC (with video
detail) ___________________ ___________________________________________
IfflSIC: Stravinsky 1922-23, Octet for Wind Instrumf^nts. from 2nd Mvt,
“
--------------------- ---------- !— Close, Col M-30579
The post-war cleverness of cubism pervaded by the irony of
Dada and-Jazz, ties Picasso's 1921 "Three Musicians" to Stravinsky's
Octet for Wind Instrxaments, a year or so after,
(fade Octet)
�cVg.
Bell
Betveen Kars
15
a39) Picasso 1932, The Dream, Ganz Coll'n., Nev York, upper detail
39) Same, Picasso’s Dream, vhole (vith video detail)
MUSIC» Stravinsky 1939-40, Symphony in C, 2nd mvt, nr.opening,
—-- ---------- --- -------------- '
Deutsche Gram. 2530 267For the correlations of Picaisso's Classical delight and of his
Guernica terror, the Stravinsky time-sequence appears crossed.
This
Dream of 1932 (what would fetch daughter Maia from the vibrant new
model Maria-Therese) looks toward Stravinsky's most pellucid re
shaping of the Classical, the 1940 Symphony in C. (fade 'C* Symph.)
40) Picasso 1934, Bullfight, Ganz Collection, NY (with video detail)
MUSIC; Stravinsky 1927, Oedipus Rex, from Epilogue. Col M 31129
By 1934, Picasso's Bullfight series was prophetically warming up
(with Fascist Europe) for the Guernica.
But Stravinsky's tragic
blast had come earlier, as in this Oedipus Epilogue, of 1927 —
before his classical lightening,
(fade Oedipus Rex)
[video only] a41) Picasso 1924, Paul in a Clown's Suit, Coll'n of the
artist
41) Double; Picasso 19^23-4, Bird Cage, V.M. Ganz, NY; and a41, Paul in a
Clown's Suit
^
Clearly, in the dialogue of abstract flight and earth-return,
Picasso plays an ambiguous role — Picasso, who within a
year (1923-4), had always the style-choice of putting space
together, as in this clown portrait o£ his son Paul (right);
or of wrenching it apart, as in this post-cubistic "Bird Cage"
(left) ~ without any implied polemic of world loss or recapture.
42) Conrad Witz 1444, Miraculous Draught of Fishes, Museum of Art, Geneva
(with video details)
In Western history, however, the representational conquest has
been no matter of indifference, but a reality of power.
'
Let
five boating scenes plot that odyssey.
In Conrad Witz* 1444 Miraculous Draught of Fishes (cf. Luke 5),
with Christ's Walking on the Waves and Peter's sinking (cf. Mathew
14; blended in John 21), Renaissance observation has taken its
�C.G. Bell
Between Wars - I’B
stand in sacred legend, which opens to the delight of the
Lake, shpre an4 mountains near the city of Geneva — a birth of
nature in the miraculous, real by timeless suspension (everything
mirrored in the water but the risen Christ).
43a)^Same^“qfor»
Malta, Nat. Gal., London
Same, Storm detail (video, another detail
In our second the ship is going to pieces on the rocks.
It
is Paul's shipwreck on Malta, closing the Classical world, as the
shipwreck of Odysseus had opened it.
Acts; There arose a tempestuous wind, Euroclydon...
and falling into a place where two seas met they ran
the ship aground...but the hinder part was beaten with
the violence of the waves...and some on boards, some
on broken pieces of the ship...they escaped all safe
to land.
But what fills Elsheimer's Shakespearean scene is the night
violence of ocean:
(Othello) What from the cape can you discern at sea...
(Winter s Tale) The ship...swallowed with yeast and
froth, as you'd thrust a cork into a hogshead...
A world real by Cartesian and Apocalyptic ambivalence.
Hunting in the Estuary, Gallery Quirini----Stampalla, Venice (with video detail)
In Longhi's 1760 Duck Hunting in the Venetian Estuary, the
sacred sanction has receded.
Secular pleasure stands on its own.
Even the shadowed, heroic might it received from spatial formula
tion under religious war (as in Rembrandt) has lightened to
the wit of the salon century.
Though that comic ease holds the
great claims of nature and man in the moderation of aristocratic
propriety.
45) W.S. Mount 1845, Eel Spearing at Setauket, NY State Historical
Association, Cooperstown, NY (with video detail)
Worth^^”^^*”
a River, Amon Carter Museum, Fort
With Mount's Eel Spearing, the earthly hope has staked out
romantic holdings in the New World.
How quietly radiant the
�Between Kars
C.CJ. Bell
Transcendental pervasion:
17
(Thoreau) "The morning wind forever
blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted."
If
Longhi's four
servants have been replaced by a black woman, she is the Queegueg
who handles the gig, while the white boy paddles —
type for Buck and Jim,
proto
Only a throb of sentiment hints how near
we are to the breaking of earth's over-extended claim.
What
child of the Mississippi (or Brandywine) could rekindle
such radiance today?
Has not history itself imposed another
search by making (most of all in the New World) that vulnerable
ecology of individual wish and joy a laughter to the gods?
46) Paul Klee 1923, Scene from a Comic Operatic Fantasy "The Seafarer",
Frau Trix Durst-Haas, BasJLe, Switzerland
46a) Same, Comic Opera, detail (with closer video detail)
It is by no mere caprice that when Paul Klee (1923) took up
the boating and spearing, day becomes such dream-night as in
Joyce's Anna Livia Plurabelle (pub. 1928 — to be comprised in
Finnegans Wake)
Can't hear with the waters of. The chittering waters
of. Flittering bats, fieldmice, bawk talk...Can't hear
with bawk of bats, all the liffeying waters of...My foos
won't moos...My ho head halls...Tell me tale of stem
or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering
waters of. Night!
Klee's quarry has gone surreal -- sea-abstracts in a spaceless
monitor of raised and lighted water, which the hunting whimsy stabs.
The war of representation has been fought in the probabilityfield of the mind-invested globe.
"Wonder ye then at the fiery
chase?"
a47) Jan Vermeer 1667, The Guitar Player, Kenwood House, Hampstead, London
47) Vermeer 1665, The Studio, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (with video
detail)
MUSIC: Buxtehude pub. 1695, Largo from Sonata Op. 1 no. 3,
~
~
"
•"
-- Music Guild 121
Who can specify when the reasoned affirmation of world order
reached its eurt-peak?
Contradictory dimensionalities blur the
�Between Kars - *18. ^ '
C.G. Bell
question.
Yet we would not be far off, if we should choose, from
the century of Milton and Leibnitz, Vermeer's masterpiece.
The Studio — with the instrumental sonata then forming out of
chromatic polyphony in Rosenmuller, or this Buxtehude(end Buxtehude!
a48) Joseph Beuys 1962-67, Hasengrab, (see Shirmer, Munich: Beuys)
48) Dan Flavin 1968, Daylight, Pink & Yellow Flourescent Tubes, Leo
Castelli Gallery, New York
MUSIC: Cage 1958, from Fontana Mix, magnetic tape. Turnabout TV 34046S
■I
I
II
II
I
I
.1.1
nil
I 111
iM
■■■■■■
III
■■■
I
■■■!■
■
A
—
—
-I
Nor can the limit of the modern break with that humanly
proportioned cosmos be defined — whether in the Expressionist
or Futurist attack, in Dada or the Surreal, or the
extensions of the post-war abstract — here one of Flavin's con
structions with flourescent tubes,
^o too with music:
on what
scale can we weight the indeterminate abandon of Cage's Electronic
sound against his Silence?
(fade Cage)
49) Albrecht Durer 1495, Trees in a Mountain Landscape, watercolor, Kupf
Kab., Berlin
To confirm, around the 17th century, that upland of spirit
in form, take thr^e landscapes, as like in airy freedom as
their time-span admits of: — this 1495 Durer watercolor:
50) Claude Lorrain,1638-9, Landscape watercolor, British Museum, London
this Claude Lorrain drawing about 1639, with the conscious
pervasion of Saint-Amant, "Mon Oieul gue mes yeux sont contents/
De voir ces bois..."
51) Monet 1880, Woman Seated Under the Willows, National Gallery, Wash. DC
this sunlit Monet of 1880. Though chosen for some similitude
of instinctive lightness, each remains a compendium of its period
style.
2nd 49) Again Durer, Trees in a Mountain Landscape
2nd 49a) Same, Durer Landscape, detail
MUSIC: Brumel c. 1500, Du tout plongiet - Fors seulement, close
~ ......
•
...—Seraphim SIC-6104
,
�/e.l. Bell
Between Kars - 19
Dtlrer's observational discovery is suspended in the trans
personal gift of the creed-world, as sensuous a mystery as in
the rondeavDc of Josguin, or this Brumel.
(end Brumel)
2nd 50) Again Lorrain, Landscape watercolor
2nd 50a) Lorrain c. 1640?, Herdsman^ Resting under a Tree, British Museum,
________ London______________________________________ _____ __ ______
MUSIC; Cavalli 1654, Beato chi puo, Musiche Italiane Antiche 4
Even in so light a wash, Claude asserts the noble_ formulation
of the phenomena^(as in the mathematics of chordal harmony,
Cavalli's Blessed Solitude, "Beato chi puo"), its mood
tion by Descartes' universal knpwer;
think, therefore I am."
penetra
"I
( fade Cavalli)
2nd 51) Again Monet, Woman Seated Under the Willows
2nd 51a) Same. Monet's Woman & Willows, detail of woman----------------MUSIC; Faurg 1887, Les Presents (song). Hist. Mus. Sound,
In
Monet (as in Faure), all that inherited spatial grandeur
wimples toward the new evanescence ;
the great Miltonic moods
thin to the personal poignance of an almost sobbing delight.
(fade Faure)
52) Spanish (Silos) 1109, Commentary on the Apocalypse, MS Add 11695 folio
240, British Museum, London (with video detailsj------------ ------ ---»
MUSIC; Iraq. Roval Mode. His Image, voice, viol t lute; RCA V-LM-60_57
Before and after (or geographically around) the plateau of
Europe from the 15th through the 19th century, lies a world more
stripped to the timeless and spaceless; the primitive force of
this 1100 Beatus commentary
on the Apocalypse,from Silos, in a
Spain permeated by the Dark Age and Moorish (does the Royal Mode
of old Persian song preserve something of that faith-frenzy?)
(fade Roval Mode)
�C.6. Bell
Between Wars - -20
53) Boccioni 1912, Materia (his nother), G. Mattioli Coll'n, Milan (with
video detail)^
MUSIC; Schonberq 1912, Pierrot Lunaire, last stanza of 1st song;
■
■
- ---Col. M 25679
Such force erupts again after eight centuries in the faithhungry surfeit of self, to Expressionist and Futurist thrillspasms:
Boccioni's 1912 study of his mother, or from the same
vear Schonberc's Pierrot Lunaire — Nietzschean nilomanias. (fade
SchSnbero)
----------
a54) Goya 1788, The Meadow of San Isidoro, Pradd, Madrid, detail
54) Same, San Isidore, whole (and another video detail)
MUSIC; Mozart 1786, from Concerto 24 in C Minor, 1st mvt, nr close,
• —
.....
— - Murray Hill S-3906
Yet where could human fulfillment have affirmed "So far and
no further"?
Since already Goya's last possession of an 18th
century enlightened order was reaching from its lace and powdered
wigs to the liberation that would turn this festive meadow to a
Napoleonic battlefield <— a summons of which even Mozart felt
the dissonart call.
(Mozart forte, then fade)
55), Mark Pothko 1944, Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea, Mary Pothko (with
video details)
55a) Pothko 1949, Violet, Black, Orange, Yellow on White and Ped,
Guggenheim, New York (video detail only)
MUSIC: Messiaen 1940, Quatour pour la Fin du Temps 3 opening, Abime
— des Oiseaux, D. Gram. 2531 093
There was no stopping place, from that, to the soul-risk of
the wartime forties, Messiaen's Abyss of Birds from the Quartet
for the End of Time, with Rothko's Slow Swirl at the Edge of the
Sea, closing his Surreal apprenticeship, just before he melted
landscape to 'drowning color pools, (fade Messiaen on low note)
2nd 54) Again 54, Gova's San Isidoro, another detail
Let
six stations — from the Goya picnic,
2nd 55) Again 55, Pothko’s Slow Swirl, detail
to the Rothko swirl, trace the abstraction of the outward, the
surrealization of the within.
�Between Kars
C'.G. Bell
21
56) Constable 1825, Jumping Horse (center detail), Victoria & Albert
Museum, London_________ ______________________________________________
In Constable's Leaping Horse of 1825, how visionary eye's vision
has become.
But there is also the inner eye, and from 1800 to
now, it is as if those polar pairs of sight and dream
57) John Martin c. 1825?, Fallen Angels Entering Pandemonium, Tate Gallery,
London
57a) Same, Martin's Pandemonium, detail
had advanced together in revelational estrangement.'
Since time-linked with Constable's observation, and from the
seune quarter of England, John Martin was continually transforming
appearance into fantasy:
Milton's Pandemonium like Poe's
"Dreamland" — "I have reached these lands but newly/ From an
ultimate dim Thule —/ From a wild weird clime that lieth sublime,/
Out of Space ~ out of Time."
58) Montecelli c. 1880?, Under the trees by water's edge. Collection Alfred
Lambert (with video detail)
After 1870, whatever dislocation of the outward was peaking
to Van Gogh, cropped out here and there — in Marseilles with
the late works of Monticelli ~ this color impasto "Under trees
by water's edge". — as "earthworld, airworld, waterworld
thorough hurled" as the "bushybowered wood" and "marbled river"
of Hopkins "Epithalamion":
"What is water?
Spousal love."
59) Victor Hugo c. 1866, The Snake, Hugo Museum, Paris
While subjectivity itself, in Victor Hugo's "The Snake", about
1866, draws from Symbolist encroachment (Baudelaire's "Litanies
of Satan", or Meredith's "On a starred night Prince Lucifer
uprose") its alienating core.
60) Cezanne 1900->05, The Bathing Women, Nat. Gal., London
With the turn to this century, Cezanne's studies of landscape
and of human forms converge in those monumental still-lifes
called "Bathers" — this almost final one in London, whose solid
�C.G. Bell
Between Wars -* 2?
*
geometry is no more Euclidian than that of Lobachevsky or Riemann,
of Abbott's Flatland or Duhamel's Mount Analogue♦
61) Edward Munch 1895» Jealousy, Rasmus Meyers coll*n> Bergen
Over the same years Munch, moving oppositely, from inside
out, nightmared the canvas to a symbolic confession:
his jealous
friend Przybyssewski, whose Eve-wife Dagny plucks for the
artist the forbidden fruit.
[video only] a62) Picasso 1913, La Bouteille de Suze, Washington University
Collection, St. Louis, MO
62) Double: Braque c. 1914, Composition, Papier colle, Priv. Coll'n, Basel,
& Giorgio di Chirico 1913-14, Anguish of Departure, Albright, Buffalo
62a) Again 62B, Chirico»s Anguish (video detail)
I
As a wave mounts up a shoal, the motions of abstract and surreal
climb the slopes of the Great War, both cresting, 1913 and
one
in the paper collages with which Picasso and here Braque (left)
completed their cubistic analysis —— a reduction of the physical
beyond which, in a sense, art could not push on.
At the same time, with Giorgio de Chirico (right), the depths of
the sub-conscious poured out as in Freudian dream.
Could
the disillusions and Kafka—neuroses of war and post-war plumb
a more haunted surreal?
Without and within, we could almost
affirm 1914 as •the climax of experiment.
a63) Robert Rauschenberg 1955, Rebus,. Coll'n V. Ganz
63) Hans Arp c. 1920, Bird in an Aquarium, painted wood, Museum of Modern
Art, NYC (with video detail)____________________________________
Though if put to it, we
could surely—in the tide of Dada,
non-objective, op and pop, which has seemed ever since to rise
without limit all over the Western wrld -- extend the dual
sequence through Second World War to now.
So one who had thought
Chekov, Shaw and Chaplin had pushed heartbreak comedy all ■the
way, might yet
be startled, in Becket and Ionesco, by the
fuzed schizophrenia of that laugh-agony.
But have not the poles
also fuzed in this Arp cut-out, about 1920, Bird in an Aquarium?
4
Can we call it abstract.
,>.
S'
�C.G
Bell
Between Wars - 23
64J Joan.Miro 1924-25, Harlequin's Carneval. Albright Gal., Buffalo
and set against it as* surreal the diverting flea-circus of Miro's
Carnival, one of countless marvels in a field too complex to
be ordered, much less clarified ~ ^ough the professional analysts,
every year or so, would attempt just that, in ism-searching
too
tomes on "New Directions in Art"?
65) Mark Tobev 1941, Forms Follov Man, Seattle Art Museum
\
While all directions went on cross-breeding:
1941, West Coast
Tobey's "linear multiplicity", this "Forms Follow Man", abstraction
loosened to a "White writing" which mystically absorbs the
surreal.
Yet the same fusion can everywhere exhibit the other
leaning,
66) Darrel Austin c. 1940?, Europa and the Bull (cf. Life, 1940's) (with
video detail)
2^
•
as (for a West Coast complement to Tobey) in Darrel Austin —
this palette-knife swamp of Europa, lambent as the sphynxhaunted pools of Raintree County:
^
"He could see her pale form
turning over and over in a slow spiral floating away on green
waters..."
>
67) Double: de Kooning 1950-52, Woman I, Museum of Modern Art, NYC; and
Barnett Newman 1951, The Way I, Annalee Newman, NY
67a) Again 67A, de Kooning's Woman
67b) Again 67B, Newman's Wav
Finally, with the post-war Fifties, the New York School brought
to simultaneous culmination (on those huge canvases, pushed by
the vast resources of art-speculation), opposites transcending
the former poles, a color-action of violent
gesture (here
de Kooning, Woman I), and a passive mystery of spaceless colorspace (Newman's The Way I) right).
In the cross-section we have thus
made, from Goya to Abstract-
Expressionism, it might seem that the whole
drift
of the
modern, formal or romantic# was univocal — to dissolve all rational
�C.G. Bell
Between Wars - 24
programs of man and world in an inebriation of the depths, non
objective or subliminal.
If crisis was the cause, our misrule of
the mind-invested globe, how could the trend be opposed?
68) Albright 1927-30, Into the World There Came a Soul Named Ida, Art
Institute, Chicago (with video details)
Though it cannot be denied that the period of between-wars also
witnessed a realism of material reattachment.
What then,, if that
\
attachments soils its own material nest?
/\
Albright's 1927-30 "Into
the World There Came a Soul Named Ida" was as sure as Miss
I^nelyhearts to outrage all who thought such realism should be
life-affirming.
risk the distortion of a simplifying schema.
69) Quadruple: Top L: Delauney 1912-13, Suri #1, Stedeliik
Amsterdam; Lower L: Picabia 1917, Amorous Display, ^i^coll'n
Paris; Lower F: Cropper 1935, The Senate, detail^ Mus MoS ^r? "nyc
e9a,lL^ie
69b
69c)
69d)
69e)
irill:
Single of
Single of
Agian 69,
Single of
69B, Picabia's Amorous...
69C, Cropper's Senate
Quadruple slide
69D. Zvefvez's
Divide the field into four:
by an X-axis running left to right,
as from abstract and surreal to real and representational, across it
raise a Y, as from negation (below) to affirmation (above).
On
this Cartesian plot, counterclockwise rotation will compass the
art and politics from War to War.
The fire-rush of avant-garde
stands Heft and above, Delaunay's 1913 delight of sheer Sun-circle
energy.
Below it (also abstract, but negative), Picabia's 1917
Amorous Display toys with the machine mockery war and Dada had
already made of modern vision.
Below and to the right, .Cropper
revives earth-seated realism, although for‘mockery ~ this
Depression swipe at a senate of sleep and rant -- of which it
might be asked:
as well?
if the intent is negation, why not negate objects
Any answering claim of social message must sweep us
right and above where programmatic realism asserts the imperative
�“
C.6. Bell
Between Wars - 25
of its earth-yea — this 1934 Russian Communist portrait of
Kirov.
•
In this quadrant/ right and above/ art comes into
danger.
70) Doubles Michelangelo 1513-16/ Moses/ detail/ Pietro in Vincoli, Rome;
and Curry c. 1930?/ John Brown of Kansas/ Study for Fresco, Kansas
State Capital
I
So in Curry's John Brown of Kansas/ post-romantic indulgence of
t
the vill-to-power manifestly suggests (beside its Michelangelo
Moses-model) that heroism which/ as Eliot said in "Gerontion",
fathers "unnatural vices".
71) Doubles Michelangelo 1501-04/ Head of David/ Accadcmia, Florence; S.
Arno Breker c. 1938, Preparedness, Kunst, Vol 81
How ominously that could be the case, when at storm-center Nazi
rallying would require of every level — religion, politics,
science and art — the cheer of Mass-acclaim for the militance
of reaction, nothing more grimly enforces than Arno Broker's
"Preparedness" (right), its overweening also measured against
(i’
Michelangelo — the civic call of the David.
a72) Ernst Barlach 1914, The Avenger, 1956 D.S. Show
72) Barlach Double, again a72. Avenger; and 1927, Floating Angel, Cologne
Protestant Church
72a) Single 72B, Barlach's Angel, detail_____ ___________________________
Let Ernst Barlach, North German sculptor, friend of Kaethe
Kollwitz, attest the danger of that rocky narrows in the stream.
In response to the First War, which Nietzscheans, even Rilke,
hailed, Barlach's 1914 Avenger (left) bradished the blade of
Biblical warning:
Bword."
"Who take the sword shall perish with the
When such art-exhortation (with Barlach's cult of peasant
humanity, especially Russian) had thrown him into the solitude
of Hitler's condemnation, this 1927 floating angel (to be destroyed
by the Nazis and reconstituted after the war from a hidden cast),
became his dying prophecy, God's messenger hung in sightless
gloom over the hvunan shore.
�C.G. Bell
Between Kars
26 *
a73) Diego Fivera 1914, Las Figuras, Arkansas Arts Center Foundation
b73) Same, Fivera's Figuras, left detail
c73) Fivera 1914, Marine Fusilier, Nat. Inst. Fine Arts, Mexico City
73) Double: Deigo Fivera 1914, (c73) Marine Fusilier; and 1915, Zapata
Landscape, Nat. Inst. Fine Arts, Mexico City
^
73a) Again 73B, Zapata, detail (and closer detail)________________ ________ ^
Back to 1914. As the long-awaited. First World War came to Europe,
the also expecteci revolution was. under way in Mexico. IVhile Rivera
was with Picasso in Paris. When the abstraction which had affirmed
by dislocation# took both impacts# who could say whether it stood
now above or below# in the quadrant of Yea or of Nay# or if those
Opposites had merged?
MUSIC: Carillo 1913 & after, from Cristobal Colon ik etc, tones)
' *
— Old 78; Col 7357 M (close of side A)
Of his 1914 Marine Fusilier (Sailor at lunch)# though Rivera
would later assert: "l believe my Cubist paintings are my
most .Mexican"; or of the 1915 Zapata Landscape (Guerilla Fighter),
"It is probably the most faithful expression of the Mexican mood
that I have ever achieved" — his revolutionary compatriots
might
have judged (as of the micro-tone experiments of
Mexican Carillo): "Elitist imitations of international avantgarde. "
(fade Carillo)
a74) D. Fivera 1927, El Hombre ante los Elementos, fresco, Escuela Nac. de
Agriculture, Chapingo, Mexico
b74) Same, Fivera fresco, lower detail (with further video detail)
74) Same, Fivera fresco, wide angle (video various details)
MUSIC: Carlos Chavez c. 1930?, from Los Cuatro Soles (of water, air,
~
fire, earth) Ballet, Col. MQ 32685 (middle, soft-loud)
Whereas# when Rivera took up twelve years later the painting of
political and social frescoes for the post-revolutionary govern
ment — this School of Agriculture myth of man facing the elements
Earth# Air# (left) Water# (right) Volcanic Fire# with the machines
of their mastery (the very child sparking an electric arc) —
he had obeyed the other imperative# of monumental# patriotic
representation.
As if we had gone from Carillo's fractional
tones to Chavez folkloristic Ballet on the Mahuatl sun-cycles
of the same Four Elements.
�C.G. Bell
Between Wars - 27
[video only] a75) Jose Orozco 1939, Hernan Cortez Fresco, detail, ceiling
of auditorium, Hospicio Cabanas, Guadalajara
75) Same fresco, detail of Cortez
At the same time Orozco — though with more Expressionistic
attack
began his fresco celebration of national culture, which
would climax, 1939, in the vaulted auditorium of the Guadalajara
orphanage — this Marxist vision of Cortes as armored machine,
advancing in flames over mutilated Indians.
76) Sigueiros 1943, Self-portrait, Inst. N3C. de Bellas Art’es, Mexico City
(with video details)
Finally Sigueiros, third of the great moralists, makes of
his 1943 fist-advancing self a personal assertion of the whole
Mexican revolutionary claim — the pathos of between-war realism
raided to the partisan demand of the Second War crusade.
(fade Chavez)
77) Russian Byzantine 1065 and after. Church of the Intercession of the
Virgin, near Vladimir (with video detail)
MUSIC; Traditional Russian Chant, Liturgy for Lent, Psalm 141, solo;
— ....".......
"
--- ----- - "" '
Anth. Son. LP-10 A-2
In Russia avant-garde came as a late flowering from a more
primitive soil.
With what vis inertia the snowy wonder of the
Byzantine north held its own:
witness this 1065 Church near
Vladimir, altered through centuries, just such as Tolstoy's Godfolk would still have pilgrimaged to, with the old chant they
itfould have sung.
[video only] a78) Russian 15th-17th cent.. Walls and Tower, Kremlin of
Novgorod
78) Same, Novgorod Kremlin, another view with bells (with video detail)
(same music. Chorus)
And like the Renaissance impassioned harmonization of that
chant, the force of European revival spills into the ancient
city of Novgorod — in this 1490 wall and 1600 bell tower,
announcing Peter the Great.
(fade Liturgy)
�f
C.G. Bell
Between Wars - 28
79) Alexander Ivanov c. 1850/ Boys Basking in the Sun, unused study for
State Museum/ Leningrad
(with video
Christ's Appearance/r Russian
db«««« wwwsi
AJdAAAiUA.au
\«AWii
V A U tT ^
(Sof
a4 1 1
detail)
79a) I.E. Repin (Russian) c. 1881/ Cossacks Writing a Letter to the Turkisl®
Sultan/ Tretyakov Gallery. Moscow (with video detail)
MUSIC: Tchaikovsky 1866/ 1st Symph (Winter Dreams)/ 2nd mvt close,
------ ——--------------------- ------------------ -—--- SUM 5053
Curious, that even as the Russian soul tpok the full dose of
Romantic sickness (the consumptive refinement of Ivanov's midI
century studies for Christ's Appearance to the Multitude/ with
Tchaikovsky's First Symphony, called Winter Dreams), the infection
showed itself in the egoism of Slavophil world-calling:
Prince Odoyevsky -Weston Europe is on the highroad to ruin. We Russians,
on the contrary, are young and fresh and have taken no
crimes of Europe. We have a great mission
to fulfill. Our name is already inscribed on the tablets
of victory; the vicories of science, art and faith await
us on the ruins of tottering Europe.
(close Tchaikovsky)
Co-ll-n Of the Artist,
Prom that Romantic longing, the arts of Russia vper to modernism
with the rest of Europe.
In the sudden absorption of Fauve,
Cubist, Futurist, leading to Constructivism, came Natalia
Goucharovna, whose "Green and Yellow Forest" of 1912 (climax
year also for Stravinsky and Scriabin) lives the ecstatic explo
sion — knife-edge already designated on our Cartesian plot as
the quadrant convergence of left above and left below,
it is
the ambivalent violence and fragmentation Blok carried over into
his 1918 revolutionary poem. The Twelve.
81) M. Saryan 1937, Industry in the Mountains, State museums, USSR (with
video detail)
The Stalinist 'thirties saw the enforcement of proletarian
reaction.
The older painters adjusted as best they could; the
younger came fresh to the mass jubilee.
While the rebuke of
�f
^
’''C.G. Bell
Betveen Kars - 29
Shostakovich for musical experiments, mounted him on the warhorse
of the Fifth Symphony (1937).
MUSIC: Shostakovich 1937, Fifth Symphony, 1st mvt, clima?^ (Kousevitsky)
-------------------- ------------------------------------ Col. ML47 39
82) Seraphina Ryangina 1934, Higher and Higher, State museums, USSR (with
video detail)
83) Toitze 1935, Stalin at the Rvon Dam, USSR state museum
(fade Shostakovich)
2nd 82) Again Rvanoina’s Higher, detail
~ The modern apocalypse gone as sentimentally heartfelt as
the outpourings of Sholokov's Anna:
You know. Ilia, I perceive the future like a
distant magically beautiful music. Just as one
sometimes hears it in sleep...Kon't life be beautiful
under Socialism! No more war, no more poverty or
oppression or national barriers...
2nd 83) Again Toitze*s Stalin, detail
Though against the Nazi overstretching, this believed propaganda
might almost have tipped the heavenly scales to a prophecy of
Leningrad.
a84) F.C. Hassam 1918, Flag Day, Hirshhorn Coll'n
84) Paul Cadmus 1934, Coney Island, J.R. Stark Coll'n
84a) Same, Cadmus' Coney Island, detail
,
oa\
84b) KW II Photo 1943’, Dive Bomber Assembly Line (cf Atomic Age 80J-------MUSIC: Ives c. 1905?, Central Park in the Dark, climax. Col MS-6843
Ives* "Central Park in the Dark" from early in the century
shouts' the affirming vigor of American realism.
Cadmus' Coney
Island from 1934 wallows in negation — like the anti-life of
Farrell's Studs Loniaan:
(fade Ives)
click of the cue balls from where Stan Simonsky was
practicing. An elevated train rumbled. An auto
mobile whizzed by. A heavy-footed, well-formed
girl passed.
"How you like it?"
"Push-Push!" mumbled Mike.
In the confusion of data Spengler made the assessment which
disasterously misled Hitler — that the United States was too
decadent to be a cause
for concern.
�♦
C.G. Bell
*
A
Between Kars - 3t>’
85) Stuart Davis 1924, Odol, Coll'n Mrs. S. Davis
85a) Grant Wood 1932, Daughters of the Revolution, Coll'n E.G. Robinson
85b) Double: Norman Rockwell 1927, Sears Catalog Cover; and Kayne Thiebaud
1963, Girl with an Ice Cream Cone, Private Coll'n
85c) Double: Again 85, Davis' Odol; & Andy Warhol 1965, 4 Campbell's Soup
Cans, private coll'n
Ten years before Cadmus' cartoon-realism, Stuart Davis had
given negation the acid-bath of the abstract, joining Dada
in lower-left-quadrant debunking.
Cvunmings at the same time
hatched "Poem, Or Beauty Hurts Mr. Vinal"i
take it from me kiddo...
from every B.V.D.
let freedom ring...
Amer
i
ca, I
love.
You. And there*re a
hun-dred-mil-lion-oth-ers, like
all of you successfully if
delicately gelded (or spaded)
gentlemen (and ladies) — pretty
1ittleliverpi11hearted-Nujolneeding-There's-A-Reason
americans (who tensetendoned and with
upward vacant eyes, painfully
perpetually crouched, quivering, upon the
sternly allotted sandpile
—how silently
emit a tiny violetflavoured nuisance: Odor?
ono.
cqmes out like a ribbon lies flat on the brush
a86) Saint-Gaudens 1891, "Grief", monument for Henry Adams' Wife, Rock
Creek Cemetary, ‘Washington DC
b86) Same, "Grief", detail of face
c86) Frank Lloyd Wright 1907, Avery Coonley House, Riversdale, IL
86) F.L. Wright, Living Room, Coonley House
86a) Arthur B. Davies before 1909, Dream, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York City (with video detail)
MUSIC: Ives 1908, The Unanswered Question, opening Col MS 6843
Where was the rapture with which America had faced the century?
For Frank Lloyd Wright, the 1907 Coonley House opened fifty years
of radiance; and surely this living room accords with the myster-
�Bell
Between Wars - 31
ious web of Ives 1S08 Unanswered Question — though for Ives,
the power to compose would wane after the 1916 war.
And Pound, before the embitterments and crippling misjudgments
of the later century — how he glows with Sappho and Troubadour
and early Yeats:
Aupia
Be in me as the eternal moods
of the bleak wind, and not
As transient things are —
gaiety of flowers.
Have me in the strong loneliness
of sunless cliffs
And of grey waters.
Let the gods speak softly of us
In days hereafter.
The shadowy flowers of Orcus
Remember thee.
(fade Ives after dissonance)
a87) John Marin 1919, Sunset, Maine Coast, Museum of Fine Arts, Columbus
Ohio
87) Marin 1923, Ship, Sea and Sky Forms, an Impression, vatercolor, Mus.
Fine Arts, Columbus, Ohio___________________________________________
Before the war, through it and after, John Marin held to the
vital claim of his Maine and New York yatOrcolorsj but what
that thrill affirms, William Carlos Williams' 1935 poem "Yachts"
may clarify:
the whole sea become an entanglement of watery bodies
...reaching from the dead to be taken up
they cry out, failing, failing! their cries rising
in waves still as the skillful yachts pass over.
88) Hartley Double: 1914, Portrait of a German Officer; and 1937, Smelt
Brook Falls, City Art Museum, St.Louis (with video singles)__________
We can set up polarities of yea and nay, objective, non
objective; but how is time dramatized if the current rxans both
ways?
That Marsden Hartley, in Germany, 1914, called this
insignia-abstracted mockery (left) "Portrait of a German Officer";
while by the 'thirties, in Maine, his Constructivist schooling
would serve the representation -of natural scenes — is that part
of a trend, as from Gertrude Stein to Hemingway?
�Between Wars - 32
C.G. Bell
a89) Arthur Dove 1911/ Nature
89) A. Dove 1937/ Rise of the
89a) A. Dove 1913/ Ferry Boat
detail)
[video only] again 89/ Dove’s
Symbolized/ Art Institute of Chicago
Full Moon/ Phillips Coll'n/ Washington DC
Wreck/ Whitney Museum/ Nl’C (with video
Moon, detail
Early in the century American avant-garde had fortified a
position around Stieglitz in New York.
Yet as Hartley did/
Dove too from 1910 pure abstraction, tended, between wars, toward
representational recommitment.
Though his 1937 "Rise of the Full
I
Moon" admits only such depiction as Expressionist magic requires.
So Wallace Stevens describes the sunrise in "The Fed Fern":
The large-leaved day grows rapidly,
TUid opens in this familiar spot
Its unfamiliar, difficult fern.
Pushing and pushing red after red...
Infant, it is enough in life
To speak of what you see. But wait
Until sight wakens the sleepy eye
And pierces the physical fix of things.
90) Double: Georgia O'Keefe 1917, Light Coming on the Plains II, Amon
Carter Museum, Fort Worth, TX; jand 1929, Black Cross, NM, Art Inst.,
Chicago
90a) Single of 90A/ Again O'Keefe Light
90b) O'Keefe 1928, Wave, Night, Maine Coast, light, etc, Phillips Academy,
Andover, Maes.
90c) Single of 90B, Again O'Keefe Black Cross
Also Georgia O'Keeffe seems most abstract at the start.
though the 1917 watercolor (left) is called "Light Coming on the
Plains".
distance
One feels, no less than with Dove, such preternatural
as Wallace Stevens casts in the circling spell
of "The Snow Man", — "One must have a mind of winter/ To regard
the frost and the boughs" — a syntax that wanders, as over
•the land/ Pull of the same wind/ That is blowing in the same
bare place" (and returns)
For the listener, who listens in the snow.
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
By the 1929 "Black Cross, New Mexico", the artist has taken
on the landscape of the Southwest; yet the earth sought remains
�■f
Bell
Between Wars - 33
archetypal, — Wallace Stevens' "Cliffs of Moher rising out of
the mist,/ Above the real..."
a91) Bonnard 1916-20, Pastoral, Bernheim-Jeune Collection, detail
b91) Bonnard c. 1900, Woman with Black Stockings, Lord Fosslyn, Grt.
Britain
91) Again a91, Bonnard's Pastoral, whole
MUSICt Ravel 1909, Daphnis and Chloe Suite No. 2, Col MS 6077 (near
■'
..
beqinninqT
In Europe, in France, in Paris, the abstract current was also
\
countered, though not by the nature-awe of the New World,
Bonnard,
who at the sardonic turn of the century had exchanged Nabis
prophecy for post-impressionist delight, here, at the close of
the First War, and against the acid of Dada, greets the armistice
as with a memory of Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe — before the
shells had torn pastoral Arden.
(fade Ravel)
[video only] a92) Georges Braque 1913, La Table du Musicien, Kunstmuseum,
Basle
92) Braaue 1929. Still Life; Le Jour, National Gallery, Wash. DC
And when Braque, drafted from Cubist experiment to be wounded
and trepanned, returned convalescent to more than 40 years of
Btill-life synthesizing — were those color-muted geometries
fixations of the drier '20'8, or already, after pre-war collage
analysis, insistencies on a reliable realm: Rilke's "custom",
"Treusein einer Gewohnheit"; his saying "House, Bridge, Fountain,
Gate, Jug"?
93) Matisse 1907, Music, Museum of Modern Art, NYC (with video detail)
93a) Matisse 1909-10, Dance, Hermitage, Leningrad______________________ ^
For sensuous affirmation within the current of avant-garde
itself, Matisse asserts a presence as continuous as the lovers
/
and dancers of Yeats: "1 am of Ireland,/ And the Holy Land of
Ireland,/ Come out of charity,/ Come dance with me in Ireland."
So Matisse, from hie radical Fauve beginnings, left no more
doubt how strong that life-line was, than the Yeats of 1899:
�C.G. Bell
ocbween wars
fiddler of Dooneyl*
And dance like a wave of the sea.
detaf?)
T!hre& Sisters, Coll*n Mme Paul Guillaume (with video
Yet Matisse did not escape, in this 1915 "Three Sisters",
the waste-of-life tightening which, with the death pf brothers
and lovers, fell on so many.
j^en Yeats took
a darker turn that year:
The holy centaurs of the hills are vanished*
I have nothing but the embittered sun...
As for Bartok, it vas throuah the lean •twenties that he
would pare and spare.
(fade Barfnw'
95)’MatlMrc!®j922!'’|tifr”ife-‘ADnf
Bash. DC
Ivldeo
““
video detail)
o" PlhK Tablecloth, Nat. Gal.,
collection
Matisse, however, in this still Life of 1922, has already
recharged the sensuous.
•thirties.
That turn in music typefies the
Thus Bartok^s Violin Concerto.
It is what renews
Yeats' youth —
And pluck till time and times are done
The-silver apples of the moon.
The golden apples of the sun ~
more passionately in his age:
I carry the sun in a golden cup.
The moon in a silver bag.
96a)**Photo%fter”l940^°M?J?^®*^^< gouache on paper cutouts, prlv. coll'n
j
If
96b Aoaln
wheelchair, making cutouts
2S°i Again B6, Matisse's Dancers, upper deta-ti_________
As he approached 70 Matisse achieved an ultimate physicality
in a form of radical reduction, that of the paper cut-out.
Yeats had expressed it as the dilemma of age ~ body become
�1 ^
' C.G. Bell
Between Wars - 35
"a sort of battered kettle at the heel", while mind lived more
and more in "an old man's frenzy";
...Never had I more
Excited, passionate, fantastical
Imagination, nor an ear and eye
That more expected the impossible...
(fade Bartok)
Yet twenty years before this Matisse,
97) Chagall 1917-18, The Promenade, Russian State Museum, Leningrad (with
video detail)
as the First War had closed, Chagall, on vacation from Paris to
his native Vitebsk, painted such a picture of himself on "Promenade
with his wife Bella, joy lifting her high as a kite.
While the
Revolution, from which Chagall would go into exile, advanced
toward Theirmidor.
Was there an alienation and reattachment?
what?
Attachment to what?
Alienation from
If mystery is the attachment, it
comprises alienation.
98) Chagall 1933 S. 1945, The Wedding Candles, detail, private collection
(with further video detail)
Yet Chagall too was most abstract in those early works, whereas
in his later, as in this picture of the same Bella, begun in the
thirties, and transformed in 1945, after her death, when she
became the mystical Jewish Bride — mythic sentiment and the
luxury of paint are heightened together.
Chagall was in
Connecticut when he reworked this canvas;
99) Max Weber Double: 1917, Two Musicians, Museum of Modern Art, NYC; and
1944, The Wayfarers, Gallery of Fine Arts; Columbus, Ohio
99a) Again Musicians, detail
99b) Again Wayfarers, detail
[video various details)________________________________________________
but the Avant-garde response to the human plight was international.
The years that led Max Weber from Cubist detachment in the Paris
of 1917 (left; Two Musicians), to the vortex of 1944 (these
Holocaust refugees called Wayfarers — right), also took
Wallace Stevens from "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird":
�Between Wars
C.G. Bell
36
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a %raman and a blackbird
Are one ~
4
to his wartime "Martian Cadenza":
What had this star to do with the world it lit.
With the blank skies over England, over France
And above the German camps? It looked apart.
Yet it is this that shall maintain...
Mot the symbol but that for which the symbol stands.
The vivid thing in the air that never changes.
Though the air change...
100) S. Dali 1931, Persistence of Memory, Museum of Modern Art, NYC
100a) Dali c. 1936?, Face and Fruit Dish on Beach, Wadsworth Athenaeum,
Hartford, Conn.
In Wales, the bardic rapture of Dylan Thomas drove him from
early poems (1934) surreal as Dali's Persistence of Memory, with
its voodoo of limp watches —
Dawn breaks behind the eyes;
From poles of skull and toe the windy blood
Slides like a sea;
Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky
Spout to the rod
Divining in a smile the oil of tears —
101) Jack B. Yeats 1948, We Left Our Name on the Road...of Fame, Lord
Movne, Dublin (with video detail)
to such a yea-frenzy as Jack Ifeats, also in the 'forties,
blazoned abroad:
"We left Our Name On the Road...Of Fame".
Thus from Dylan's "Vision and Prayer":
I turn the corner of prayer and burn
In a blessing of the sudden
Sun. In the name of the damned
I would turn back and run
To the hidden land
But the loud sun
Christens down
The Sky.
I
Am found.
The slump of Between-Wars had become a launching pad:
102) Photo: New York City with Empire State Building, from RCA Observatory^
roof (with video detail)
�t ©.G. Bell
Between Kars - 37
Depression crucible of Europe» Russia, America, Japan,
hatching social euphorias:
Manhattan, as much as any art
sign, chain-reaction pile of transvalued negation, thrusting
through crisis and war to the Atomic Age, growth stocks, the
space-flight spiral of a new Avant-garde.
On the verge of that blast-off, let us recompose the
currents of the century — daring and reaction, with ,the
risk, pathos, transcendence of their infolded destiny — the
outward terror, the inward vision.
al03) Nijinsky in "L*Apres-midi d'un Faune", (recumbent), 1912
103) Nijinsky dancing "Afternoon of a Faun", London, 1912
103a) Nijinsky in "Le Spectre de la Rose", 1911 (with video detail)
103b) Again 103, Naiinsky dancing, upper detail
Perhaps the Fauve ecstasy of the early century peaked in the
Russian Ballet.
Even the stills of Nijinsky dancing the "After
noon of a Faun" in London, 1912, suggest the art rapture from
Matisse to Delaunay, Marc, Kandinsky — what Joyce made Irish
in the girl-on-the-strand epiphany of the Portrait (1904-14):
A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still,
gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic
had changed to the likeness of a strange and beautiful
seabird...Long, long she suffered his gaze and then
quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards
the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot...
—Heavenly GodI cried Stephen's soul, in an
outburst of profane joy...
...on and on he strode, far out over the sands,
sihging wildly to the sea, crying to greet the advent
of the life that had cried to him...
al04) Nijinsky 1919, arc drawing (female persona). Museum of Modern Art,
New York City?
104) Nijinsky Double: again al04. Arc Drawing; & 1922, Demon, watercolor,
Museum of Modern Art, New York City?
104a) Single of 104B, again Nijinsky's Demon
WozzgIc f
MUSIC: Be^ 1914-21,/from III,ii, murder of Marie, Col.Odyssey
33126 Slde^
Though beneath the projected joy of Nijinsky was the fleeing
feminine persona he recorded in the child limitation of his
�C.6. Bell
Between Wars<j- '38«-
arc'drawings; and# as he approached the break of dementia, the
mask of his demon pursuer Diaghilev.
That turn to terror is
implicit in the final dance Nijinsky talked of performing:
"Le Mariage avec Dieu"; Rilke had bared it in the destructive
angel, Berg in Wozzek's murder and suicide by the haunted pond.
[slide only] al05) Franz Marc 1913-14, Tyrol, detail Neue Pinakothek,
Munich (CGB *59)
105) Otto Dix 1914, War (Arms), Kunstmuseum, Duesseldorf (vith video
_____details) _______________ ______ ______________________
MUSIC: Richard Strauss 1889, from Tod und VerklSrung, death climax.
~
~
Angel S 35976
In Nietzsche, by an ambivalence typically modern, force
leaps to the quantum state of its own celebration — will to
Power c. 1887: "Dionysian wisdom: joy in the destruction of...
existing things, however good...We have to be destroyers."
So the sequences of Expressionism mount a transport of fragmentation
(this Otto Dix, Arms, of 1914), symptomatic of the Great War itself.
How the youthful Richard Strauss lashed his 1889 Death and Transjfjguration toward that high frenzy — (fade Tod u.VerklSrung)
to become the twelve-tone pact of Thomas Mann's Faustus.
106) Kaethe Kollwitz, 1907, Schlachtfeld, etching. National Gallery, Wash.
DC (with video detail)
106a) Same, Kollwitz.etching, lover detail________________ _________
MUSIC: Richard Strauss 1943, Metamorphosen, opening, Angel S 35976
It took a woman, Kaethe Kollwitz, to foreshadow the human
reality of that night trudge over No Man's Land: -- her Battle
field of 1907 pointing down the century, borough the Kaiser
miscarriage arid then the Nazi, to the bombed out Munich of 1943,
with the same Richard Strauss, in octogenarian gloom, composing
his last Metamorphoses.
(fade )
al07) Kaethe Kollwitz 1921, Lithograph, Gefallen
bl07) Kollwitz 1924, Lithograph, Nie wieder Krieg
107) Double of the Kollwitz lithographs
[video various details and order)
�^ f
C.G. Bell
^
Between Wars - 39
MUSIC: Metamorphosen cont., forte (3/4" into record)
And when the first trench slaughter had eased, it was Kaethe
Kollwitz whose lithographs would show the
Weimar
racking of the
soul — 1921,the despair of "Killed in Action", beside
the
1924 wish-spasm of "No More War", a cleavage romantic realism
heightens toward schyzophrenia.
It is still Hegel's paradoxical
rise out of a fruit turned to poison; still the Western cycle
as convergence of G&tterdammerung and paradisical hope.
(fade Metamorphosen)
al08) George Grosz 1915-22, "Dawn", vatercolor XV, from Ecco Homo
bl08) Grosz 1915-22, "Man is Good", vatercolor XII, from Ecce Homo
108) Schwitters 1919, Construction for a Noble Lady, Los Angeles County
_____Museum (with video detail) ________________________ ____________
MUSIC: Metamorphosen cont., piu forte (just before middle)
If the stock market searches economic futures, how
the depth-confessions Hitler would trample xinder, had
foretold the death of bourgeois values:
like the 1919 invective
of Pound:
home to old lies and new infamy
usury age-old and age—thick,
and liars in public places;
this Dada Schwitters, "Construction for a Noble Lady" — her imc
lost in the jvink assemblage of "a botched civilization" —
Schwitimers own poems of nonsense soxind:
"rakete rinnzekete/
rakete rinnzekete/ rakete rinnzekete/ Beeeee/ bO."
those Nazi art-banishers.
They knew,
Yet how pig-headedly wrong, to think
they could shore — against world hurricane
Adolf^w Hitler c. 1925?, Corinthian Ruins, Life, Oct. 30, 1939--whatever right they ranted to save.
Where Hitler's early paintings glean the nostalgia of ruins.
Staggering that the wielder of so timid a brush, veered into
�C.G. Bell
*
_
Between Kars^- *40^
politics to stave off Spenglerian decay, should have loosed such
Apocalypse on Europe.
(fade Metamorphosen)
liPl Paul Klee 1939, Aspiring Angel, private coll'n (with video dPfa.’i)
MUSICI Metamorphosen, cont. (slow, 1 * from end)
Geman Bodernism Went Into exile.
The year of Hitler's rise,
Klee, dirolesea from the oSsseldorf Academy, withdrew to his home
in Switzerland,
with what sad self-mockery this 1939, Aspiring
Angel comment, on the arti.f . approaching death and the disaster
Of the earth-scene.
(fade)
^ideo^mldrift^^detail)
H®^^ald, plaster. Die Kunst, 1943 (with
11.1a) Same, Herald, upper detail
MUSIC; Metamorphosen, cont.
(after pause.
Against that poignant foreclosure, official German art (like
a Wehrmacht invasion), stormed the northeast quadrant of our
style chart — the yea-cry of realist reaction.
Arno Bfecker,
most favoured eculptor of the Third Reich, modelled for all
the
totalitarian sanity and strength that must prop up the sagging
West.
(fade)
Gross 1938, A Piece of my World, Gallery, Newark NJ
Ijjaj Same, gross- My Vend, d.tsll f.ts.h
MUSIC; Metamorphosen, concl. (last bars)
Irom that upheaval, what could the old avant-garde of embittered
excoriation.do but record, from the stations of their exile (with
Mann and Hindemith in an already crusading America; or with
Strauss indeed, immured in wartime Munich), the confirmation of
their worst fears;
these mouldy scarecrow veterans of George
Gross's "A Piece of my World",
(end Strauss, Metamorphosen)
What we have followed to the pathos of this terminus, might be
called the outward motion.
�■
-I - -
.....
..—— =-
^;g. Bell
—
Between Kars - 41
.all3) Picasso 1937, Guernica, Final state, Picasso Museum, Barcelona
113) Picasso Double^ 1937, Studies for Horse and Woman with dead child
(video also singles)
A year earlier Picasso, painting for the Spanish Pavilion at
the Paris Exposition the great political picture of
between-wars (the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by
Nazi planes in Franco's hire), Picasso advanced from graphic
sketches — this anguished horse, still in touch with
^
*
%
Delacroix; this mother and dead child, charged withg the
residuum of romantic outrage —
114) Detail of Guernica, left, with woman and horse (final state)
to an apocalyptic abstraction, in which modern vision (by paradox)
vaults the falls of its outwardness.
It is what SchCJnberg stretched over a lifetime,
2nd 113A) Again Study for Horse
2nd 113B) Again Study for Woman and Child
2nd 113a)
Guernica, Study for Sun's rays & Corn from Warrior's
MUSIC; SchMnberq 1899, climax & epiohanv from the Transfjqnr«:>H
'
---- - Night, Turnabout TV 4032 S
from the climax and Epiphany of the Transfigured Night,
(skip to Epiphany and fade)
2nd 114A) Again Picasso Guernica, right detail, horse
2nd 114B) Again Picasso Guernica, left detail, woman and child
■£Pg.. 114a) Same, Guernica, detail of Flowers from Warrior's Sword Hand______
MUSIC; SchCfriberg 1936, from Violin Concerto, near opening. Col. M2S 679
to the,12-tone transemotionality of the 1935 Violin Concerto —
such a calcining as Camus would bring to the agonies of
La Peste (1947);
This hioman form,. .lacerated by the spear-thrusts of
the plague, consumed by searing superhuman fires,
buffeted by all the raging winds of heaven, was
foundering under his eyes in the dark flood of the
pestilence, and l^e could do nothing to avert the wreck.
(fade SchUnbera)
Without that Nietzschean crucible of dangerous conversion, how
could Rilke's Duino Elegies have brought (in the last) hazel
katkins from the land of pain?
�Between
C.G« Bell
\ ^
alls) Franz Marc 1913, The Bewitched Mill, Art Institute, Chicago (with
video detail)
115) Double: again allS, Marc's Mill; and Paul Klee 1922, Twittering
Machine, Museum of Modern Art, NYC
115a) Single 115B, again Klee's Twittering Machine
[video only] 115b) Klee 1924, Dance of the Red Shirts, private coll'n,
Bern, Switzerland
^
i
MUSIC: Webern 1909, first of Five Pieces, Opus 5, V-LM/LSC 2531
On the brink of the First War, when the Elegies were begun,
Franz Marc's Enchanted Mill had explored such transreal
discovery
as would lead Rilke, guided by a youthful sorrow, "from the streets
of the grief-city", far out ("Weit, wir wohnen dort draussen") —
Lightly she leads him on through the wide landscape of
Laments —
to the rock source of joy, "a carrying stream."
But Marc was
Jcilled at Verdun; and it was Klee, who in ironic miniatures,
whimsied by Dada and the Surreal, this 192*2 Twittering Machine
(right) , would pursue the Blaue Reiter search, even to the
Second War.
^
In music, Schonberg's pupil Webern — subtle and terse as Klee —
had been working since 1909, (here the first of his Opus 9 pieces),
toward an ultimate suspension of modernity.
But could either
Klee or Webern take up the starred secrets of Rilke's Symbolist
journey?
(fade Webern)
116) Lehmbruck 1911, Kneeling Woman, Municipal Museum, Duisburg (with video
detail)
116a) Same, Woman, detail of Head
MUSIC: Berg 1935, from Vln Concerto, Pt.II, before Death Agony,
---------------------------------- ;------ Philips ST 802 785 LY
For that transcendence of Romantic, "we, wasters of sorrow",
turn in music to Berg's 1935 Violin Concerto on the death of
Manon Gropius; and in art, why not to Lehmbruck, prodigy of the
mining Ruhr, who modelled this Kneeling Woman in 1911, about
when the roar of the Adriatic ^ave Rilke the opening of the First
Elegy, "Who, if I cried out, would hear me, among the angelic
�p ^^,G. Bell
Between Kars - 43
orders?", and soon after, of the Tenth: "That I, issuing at last
from destroying visions/ May break into jubillant praise for
assenting angels."
}^2\1913, Ascendant Youth, detail, Mun. Mus., Duisburg
117a} Same, Youth, whole
Lslides opposite order}
With Lehmbruck's Ascendant Youth of 1913, sorrow stretches like
Rilke's "tall teartrees", his "fields of blossoming', sadness", up
toward the stars of "the Land of Pain:..." (fade and skin tn
_____ ____
___
~
death agonv)
Varrlor, cement. Museum, Puleburg
The Great War whelmed Lehmbruck in the 1916 Fallen Warrior.
Such in Berg's Concerto, is the last agony of Manon Gropius.
But
when the Berg, from that 12 tone struggle, feels its way toward
Bach's hymn to death, "Es ist genug",
m
119) Lehmbruck 1918, Praying Woman, cement, Duisburg
_119a) Same, Praying woman, detail of head_______________________________
it is as if Lehmbruck had brought from war itself his 1918 Praying
Girl) or Rilke, in bhat rock gorge, discovered the spring of joy:
**die Quelle der Freude:*
They stand at the foot of the range.
And there she embraces him weeping.
Alone he climbs to the mountains of primal pain.
And never once does his step resound from the soundless fate.
(fade Bero)
120) Lehmbruck 1918, Heads of Lovers, cement, Duisburg
120a) Variant of 119, Praying Woman, Kunsthalle, Hamburg (CGB '86) (with
video detail)
120b) Again 120, Heads of Lovers, detail
MUSIC: same Bero, close
i*' Lehmbruck's final Heads of Loves, already breathing
the Orphism of his suicide, that we scale (with the close of the
m
Berg, and of the Rilke), the height of Between Wars — a mystery
we claim — earth wrinkling behind us like a pricked balloon.
�C.G. Bell
Between Kars 3gs
And yet, were they waking a likeness yithin us, the endlessly
look, they'd be pointing, perhaps, to the catkins, hanging
from empty hazels, or else they'd be meaning the rain
that falls on the dark earth in the early Spring.
— der fallt auf dunkles Erdreich im friiVijahr —
And we, who have always thought
of happiness climbing, would feel
the emotion that almost startles
when happiness falls.
I
Und wir, die an steiaendes Gluck
denken, empfanden die Rtihrung,
die iins beinah destfirzt,
wenn ein GlAckliches fSllt.
(close of Berg)
^
�
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Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound
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Between Wars -- 20th Century, Art and Politics, Symbolic History, Part 35
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PDF Text
Text
Symbolic'
C.G. Bell
synfiOLiC' ^t^sTOJly TFi’rougFw SigFvt ancC SouncC
36.
1)
Htomic Rge:
[istow
'-fH'
/
Frontiers Neio and Lost
Tfioto of1946, ^Picasso ivitfi J^rjcmfoise QiCot, Cote (CS^zurjgprVpSetmCs-
la)' ^S^Hit/-dtLai(
Music:
-j
Charlie Parker (1920-55, Saxophonist & Composer), Bird
Nest, from Jazztone LP
^ I'2,1^
Our search is infd the strange euphoria of the post-war world.
With what release of spirit Picasso, after the immurement of oc
cupied France (and as the saxophone harmonics of Charlie Parker,
miraculous bird, sounded the rebirth of jazz), with what release
Picasso moved to the Cote d'Azur with Frangoise Gilot, new mistress,
then wife, for his storm-happiest years (until she broke off, with
their two children in 1952). Though the tensions under all that
liberation were to seize on one such sun-bathing day, when former
model-love’ Dora Maar, also walking the beach, would drive a
crucifying heel into the sleeping Fran9oise's outstretched hand.
2)
(Picasso, 1946, La Hole (Ce Vivre, QritnaCdi Museum, LLntiBes;^ ^ cCetaU
Had not jazz put off the old chord-norms of the hunjanist claim
(music) for an energy as stripped to the radical as in nuclear* fire — all
particles accelerated? So with Picasso's abstractioiis:
whether of
satyr delight, this Joie de Vivre, also of 1946; or the converse its
bacchanal held in retrospection
(music skip toward cicse)
3)
(Picas0, 1944-43, Lhe CdarneC (House (Museum of Modem S4.rt (ETcfiiBition);
+ 1? detaU
this oil and charcoal summary of world outrage. The Charnel
House, from a year earlier — "painting," as Picasso said, "an instru
ment of war," and, "In former times... a painting was the result of
additions. For me, the painting is the result of destructions."
(music)
7/1994
Atomic Age:
Frontiers New and Lost
1
�. Bell
Symbolic
History
So by the acid bath of jazz, ghetto squaloigy^,
and Parker's
addiction turn to rhythmic drive-, keen for the abandon of either
Picasso extreme. It is the flame leap from "No" to "Yes," Existentialist
Sartre: "Man is condemned to be free."
(end Bird Nest)
4)
Joseph Wright of T>er6y, 1775, J^ireworhs for the eUction of Tope Tins
(Menen,
(Cetait
Trace that Chain-reaction of the West: as the 18th century
veered toward Storm and Stress, Wright of Derby revelled in this
papal firework. So Goethe, in the Elective Affinities would seal with
a firework festival the fate of his balanced couple, Edward and
Charlotte, now drawn like chemicals to Ottilie and the Captain:
Rockets roared skyward, bombs thundered, fireballs
traced the night, squibs coiled and crackled; there
were spouting wheels of sparks...crossing and weaving
together. Edward, whose heart was afire, fed eager
eyes on the spectacle of flame. But to Ottilie's gentle
and volatile spirit, this roaring and blinding birth and
decay gave less pleasure than pain.
5)
‘Turner, 1834, ‘Bumin£ of the JCouses of TarCiament, Museum, of JLrt,
ThiCacCeCphia; A,^detaiC
Music:
Liszf 1853, Sonata in B Minor, Allegro, near close, (Arrau) Philips
6500 043
^
And when Turner, learning that the Houses of Parliament were
ablaze (1834), passed the night in ecstatic sketching of that cata
strophe, did not the storm-topographer of an England veering from
Austen to the Brontes, also seal the fire-compact, as of Liszt's
B Minor Sonata?
6)
6 a)
‘lurmr, 1834, (Burning of tfo SHouses of TarCiament, waurcoCor, 'Brittsfi
Museum, on view at the Tate, London; +31^ detaiC
Turner, 1835, The ‘Burning of the Jhouses cf TarCiament, CCeveCancC Museum of
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But Listz s heavy chords, the spatial rhetoric of even the Turner
sketches, bare the Promethean complicity, the half-god struggle of
consciousness which J.H. Miller's Poets of Reality would make a postromantic syndrome, from Faust and Melville, through Conrad's Heart
of Darkness:
How many powers of darkness claimed him for their
own... Never before did this land... river... jungle, the
very arch, of the blazing sky, appear so impenetrable
to human thought, so pitiless to human reason...
through Yeats ^ of man.
Ravening, raging and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality...
down to
Eliot:
. . . De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled
Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear
In fractured atoms...
T)
Currier ancC Ives, 186S, J^aCC of ^Hicfimond, ‘llir£inia, fired By Confederate
rioters; + detail
Such Currier and Ives' attempt at the Civil War burning of
Richmond — reaching in Faulkner's Absalom to the combustion of
Sutpen's Hundred:
The entire staircase was on fire. Yet they had to hold
her... (Miss Coldfield)... clawing and biting at the two
men who dragged her back and down the steps as the
draft created by the open door seemed to explode like
powder among the flames, as the whole lower hall
vanished... Clyde... in that window from whi5h she
must have been watching... for three months — the
tragic gnome's face... against a... background of fire.
-ut/kA (/
From such exsufflicate and blown surmises (that war of
romantic values)
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8)
Japanese. (BuMfdstj !Heian, Znd ficUf of the 10th cent., iTii
86)
Same,
History
J^ire-£uard.ian,
William Carlos Williams seemed to have taken a direction as dia
metrically opposed as, in art, that of the ancient Buddhist Fireguardians — this 10th century silk-painting from Kyoto. So William's
"Burning the Christmas Greens" from about 1945, a time as serious as
any for fire-death poems, yet when all that unmistakably symbolic
Christmas foliage — "Green is a solace/ a promise of peace.../ those
sure abutments" — roars into "a landscape of flame," "a world! Black/
mountains, black and red.../ ...and ash white/" — "in/ that instant," we
break (as Williams, in the college crisis of which long after he would
write Marianne Moore, must have broken, from programmatic
morality and swelling utterance into the "inner security" of "despair...
I resigned, I gave up") so in the poem, by a leap of sheer immediacy,
we break:
breathless to be witnesses,
- as if we stood
ourselves refreshed among
the shining fauna of that fire.
How do the arts of our century attest that transformation?
9)
Miro^ 1917, The 9dan in pyjamas, CoTection of Mr. and Mrs. SanrneC Mono
Chicago, IL; + V detail
Music:
Bartok, 1917, from 1st Movement, 2nd Quartet (2nd forte passage)
Concert Disk CS-501, Rec. I, Side 2
Consider — with three excerpts from the quartets of Bartok — Miro"^
early, middle, late. 1917, Man in Pajamas, a First-War attack in the
mood of Kafka and with the weapons of Van Gogh, Expressionist,
Fauve. From the same year, Bartok's Second Quartet twists com
parable dissonances.
(fade Bartok 2nd Quartet)
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History
/
Miro, 1924, iHaumity, CoCUction of ^CamC(Penrose, Lon(Con<^V<U^
".hoS^rtefcS-So", Rec"?re"‘
By 1924 Dada and the Surreal have led Miro into a shorthand
of ironic play: Maternity - left and above, the mother’s haired head;
right and below, a skirt-pelvis with a displaced hole; two children, as
m Charity, a bald male below at a profile breast; above, a girl with
hair, at a breast full-view — these elements tied with Calligraphic
wire, the vertical, crossing a pluck like a floating worm. In Bartok of
the 1920's, the Pizzicato from the 4th Quartet seems to distill such
cleverness.
11) (Mtro, 1960, r[Ee!P^(C (Disl^ CoCCection of Mr. and Mrs. Victor (KCam, Off
11a) Same, (P^d'Dis!^ detail; witH various video details
Music:
Bartok 1939, from the last Movement of the 6th String Quartet,
Bartok barely lived into the Post war; but his Sixth String
Quartet of 1939 (here from the closa) has already found in avantgarde the mythopoetic renewal of transcendental. And in this Mir(<
Red Disk of 1960, Dada Rorschach is launched into an orbit of cosmic
excitement, as of the death-birth explosion of a star. Here is the
flame-tie to William Carlos Williams' effortless acceptance:
as if we stood
ourselves refreshed among
the shining fauna of that fire.
12)
^laPe,182S-27, 'Dante drawings, Purgatory 27, Dante Before ententuj the
fire, Mg-tionaC gallery of Victoria, MelBoume ;
mZjL
12a) Same, Purgatory 27, detail; VUm
More than a century before, Blake had hymned Regeneration
y such blaze. Would he have found it strange that the Second
World War, under deepening materialism and after the disillusions of
the First, should grow so yeasty with the now mass ferment — as if
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this Tharmas-Dante, entering at the summit of Purgatory the
liberating fire ("poi s'ascose nel foco che li affina"), were also for our
charnel house a passage through the threefold sleep of vegetative
Beulah into the fourfold kindling of creative desire? So N.O. Browns
Ap.^n.t Death is furiously impelled, from its Resurrection close,
toward the chapter sequences of what would become almost a Hippie
Bible — T.nve's Bodv: beyond "Boundary," through "Fire" and Free
dom" to the "Nothing" of Cage’s Silence.
al3) Samie-C TaCrmr, c. 1829, In a Sfiorefiam garden, detail, 9/ietoria and MBert
9d.usenm, London
13)
Same, Shoreham garden, rohoCe
Music:
Schubert,
1818, from Litaney auf das Fest aller Seelen,
(Schwarzkopf) Angel 35023
And when in Palmer (before 1830) Blakean vision touches a
Shoreham garden - as Schubert's "Ruhn in Frieden alle Seelen" loads
the litany for the Feast of All Souls with sensuous promise: The
kingdom of Love is within you —
(^^de Schubert)
14)
‘Bonnard, 1946-47, SUmond Lree in Blossom, Odg-tionaC Oduseum of (Modem
J4.rt, Baris 5
14 a) Same, Mmond Lree, detail; + various video details
Music-
Benjamin Britten, 1962, from War Rpquiam, near close, Decca
MET 252-3
Again, it is strange, in the pure flame of Bonnard’s 1946 flowering
Almond Tree, to open the curtains of war and Dachau searing to such
a renewal, in the shimmering now of modernity.
So the close of Britten’s War Requiem. Of 1962; so from St.-John
Perse, the Seamarks (Amers) finished 1957, its austerity swayed to
the groundswell of Blake and Whitman.
...We who perhaps one day shall die, proclaim
man as immortal at the flaming heart of the instant.
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.G. Bell
- Vhomme immortel au foyer de Vinstant.
Bu. in music we are confronted not only by an uP^-val m *e
classical tradition,
IS)
SolCock. 1947,
^
Joslyn 14n Mu^euv, OmU 9(s6r<^ka,
detail
but by the fertile anomaly of jarz. where ^ Pnmitivi^m attested from
Negroid to Pop received
G!laxy, absorbing
had moved into transcendental rapture, t
Tobey’s white-writing in the cosmic unleashing of
y
Nature'"
I am Nam
ai.n in American poetry the visionary claim opens to t _2
Ginsburg’s 1955 banana dock and rusted locomotive, with the smogdried Sunflower of that child-affirming Sutra;
Ig)
Tun,' (mtH tfo ^
bollock 1949, r^otosrav^d taftiU
palntwg Below) Lm, (KsmemBer 9, 19S9^^^^f‘tt
_ We're not our skin of grime,
bleak dusty imageless locomotive, were all beautiiu
uolfen sunflowers inside, we're blessed by our own
feed & golden hairy naked accomplishment-bodies
growing imo mad black formal stmflowers in the so^
fef soied on by our eyes under the shadow of the mad
mcoXte rYverbank' sunset Frisko hilly .mean
evening sitdown vision.
Yet who could forget that behind Pollock's star-cloud drips,
1933, Tainms, sam; and [Cj 1943,
v j,
Slpw CTort Cim;tvsasleaofl4.and'B,-rl-<~^
17c) 4^ C of 17, ‘iollocfu SBe-'Wolf
lay a violence abstracted (early 1930's, top) from his «^"‘To
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totems) to the fury of the wartime She-Wolf (below, 1943)? Could
the dance of galactic action sublimate such an explosion of self and
__
(end Dancing in the Dark)
61
18)
^
—
(DouSCe, ‘Ifwmas ^ Benton: [Si] 1917, StUC Life, 7ine SLrts, CoCumBus,
and tB] 1938-39, Tersepfwne, Bita Benton, tKjinsas City^
^
18 a) Lfwtnas Benton, 1938, SusannaH and tfu BCders, BaCaee of tHe Legion of
S{onoT, San Brancisco CSL
Benton, of Pollock at art school; "not an exceptional student...
incapable of drawing logical sequences. He couldn't be taught any
thing" (Life. Nov.9, 1959) — Benton, who had begun in Paris, 1917
(left), with awkward abstraction, and then come round, as in this
1938-9 Persephone endangered by Gloomy Dis as farmer, to Amer
ican scene (avant garde and reaction buffeting each other through
the century like Dante's misers and spenders in the Fourth Circle of
Hell: "Tieni!" and "BurlH") — Benton, staggered in age by the Ab
stract Expressionist outbreak: "The art of today is the art of the
1920's, which we repudiated" (had not the 1940 jLife collection of
American Painting pronounced: "The wave of French modernism had
spent its force by late 1929"?) — Benton had voiced the pioneer myth
where Pollock began:
A windmill, a junkheap... a Rotarian in their American
setting have more meaning to me than Notre Dame,
the Parthenon, or the heroes of the ages.
19)
BericCean (Ictynos, Bfiidias, etc), 447-32, Bartfienon from the BropyCaea,
In ^his Preface and Essays (1853 and '65) Mathew Arnold
blamed our poetry, from Shakespeare down, for sacrificing architec
tonic order to a brilliance of impression, image, effect. It was the
Greeks, he says, who understood "the poetical character of the action
in itself... They regarded the whole; we regard the parts." So it was
not our "poor, starved, fragmentary, inadequate creation," but criti7/19 94
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cism, that "disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best
that is known and thought in the world," which must point to such
epochs of affirming wholeness — though "we shall die in the
wilderness."
20J
^fiidias, 477-32 ‘S.C, Parthenon, ‘East Eed-iment, H&ad of SeCene's 3{orse,
‘Britisd Masmm, London (CQ‘B '77)
‘1720a) Same, Eartfienon, ^rtd frieze, detaiC, foutfis witd sacrificiaC o?o SLcropoCis
Museum. Mdens (C(fB '77)
Selene's horse from the Parthenon keeps Olympian repose,
even as he sinks, restive, with the moon-chariot, into the sea. It is
easy to project Arnold backward to the Greeks — the 4th Ode of
Sophocles’ Antigone (Fitts and Fitzgerald):
She raced with young colts on the glittering hills
And walked untrammeled in the open light:
But in her marriage deathless Fate found means
To build a tomb like yours for all her joy.
Hard to apply him forward.
allowed?
What would he have condemned; what
• If spirit builds against entropy, it is by complicity with flame,
whether in Greek tragedy or the atomic West.
a21)
621)
c21)
21)
EoCCocI^ 1948, Mfmder 1, Museum of Modem Sirt, 9^zu ‘ford^City
Irisd MS., c. 800, ‘Bood^of
f 34, detaiC, ‘Trinity CoCCe^e LiBrary, London
Leonarda (^f^nci, 1498, SaCa deCCa S4sse, Sforza CastCe, MiCan
‘Dou6C^'^^Tdcd^l93S, Seared, Sydney Janis CoCCection,
fordi and a21
Eodoedj MymSer 1 (UvV \d»A>
21a) Tlyain, 21J4, Eodoedf Seared
And what if abstraction, fragmenting the wholeness Arnold desired,
might purge the sickness he deplored — that private loss, become a
laughter to the gods?
What Arnold invoked is the oldest polarity of thought and
perception — from Heraclitus to Plato, one and many, form and flux.
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It was the field in which Pollock came to the breakthrough of his
drips _ as if the interweaving line of the Book of Kells, of Leonar os
branchings in the Sforzescb ceiling, had been seized on to compose a
personal agony. Yet how could the triumphal abandon of ftat apo
calyptic wallpaper, in euphoric balance from 1947 to 50 this
significantly entitled "Number One," above), exorcise the frustratio
it rooted in? Inaction would recur, with works of fiercer strugg e
this "Search" (below), his last, before he challenged death on a dark
road.
Was the consuming passion of the New York school the simul
taneous overthrow and mastery of form in flux?
zz>
Cezanm, c. 1860, muraC btubcape found under ■aaOfuper, Jos do ‘Bouff^
near SHTijen-Trovenu)
Music:
(CetaiC
Mendelssohn, 1843 (Overture 1826), Midsummer Night’s Dream
Cezanne, archetypal modern, began before 1860 with a classic^
commitment like Arnold's.
This oil-mnral found under the wa paper in the las de Boufffev then being built by Cezanne s father,
l«ans to the style the Carr^and Claude received from late Renais
sance It was a love whic^ would affect music from Mendelssohn s
Midsummer Night’s Dream Nocturne to our time.
Zi)
(lade Nocturne)
Ceainm, 1867-70, Die Jdurda, TPoferilrt Qotkry, Uvtrooob + "l^dcUiU
Music-
Borodin, 1876, close of 1st Movement„2nd Symphony, MHS 4013
But Cezanne, through the ’sixties, countered the classical with
as lurid a violence as any of the Russians — here from the First
Movement of Borodin's Second Symphony.
Would Arnold have heightened the condemnation he made of
his own Empedocles, against a morbid distress, without catharsis, of
which the representation is painful, not tragic?
(®nd A eg
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24)
History
Cezanne, 1885-86, OvCont Sainte-Victdre, O^etropoCitan O^luseutn of Art, O^tv
O^orli City;
Music:
Borodin^ 1876, Opening of Third Movement., 2nd Symphony,
MHS 4013
Marvellous, how Impressionism, absorbed into Cezanne s
ground of primitive force, houses the Poussin dream, but in a fabric
of always more daring modernity. Surely the great calm paintings of
the ’80's, this Mont Sainte-Victoire, confront Arnold with radical re
covery of classical dignity. In music the third movement of the
Borodin Second is at least comparably aimed; while the abstract
imperative in fiction must have pushed Tolstoi to War and Peace,
Melville to Mohv Dick and Billy BuddAndante)
25) Cezanne, 1904-06, 9^ont Sainte-Victoire, 9Qin^tmuseum, 'BaseC; A V fetaiC
—
Music:
---------
Borodin, 1876, close of Fourth Movement, 2nd Symphony,
MHS 4013
But Cezanne continued, up to the year of his death in 1906, the
more shimmeringly cubistic analysis of Mont Samte-Victoire. In this
rendition, perhaps his last, the dissolution of forms in a quilt of color
binds flux itself into compositional patterns, startling as the new
mathematics from Lobachevsky through Riemann, Dedekind, Cantor,
Hilbert, to Russell and Whitehead.
While the same Borodin Symphony moves^ in the last move
ment toward a comparable suspension of tonality.
aerobatics stirs euphoria.
Already such
Borodin)
26) BouBCe: Bicasso [A] 1895-96, first Covmunion, OvCtiseum Bi
and [B] 1969, Largeffeads, QaC. Hipsenyart, Lucerne (zHde^^
26a)
Again,
!g ^
u r
of 26:Larye Heads
Meanwhile, the 14-year-old Picasso had begun (1895) with this
First Communion (left), against which we set from 73 years later
(four years before the artist's death) an oil sketch called Large
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Heads".
Here the demolitions of world and art have come, in
Nietzsche's phrase, "as ia cleansing wind" to the Romantic charnel
house, blasting its sentimental verisimilitudes. After two wars, with
totalitarianism, earth-rape and nuclear juggling
paradox and
indignity fuse in the death-life of energy. Would that tragic return
have pleased or troubled the author of "Dover Beach ?
/
2 7) J^ranz von Stuck c. 1900(?), Mcndsum, oU Suimiw.
27 a) same,
^ I
Mahler, 1883-5, Lieder eines fahrendenden Gesellen (from the
last: "Ich bin ausgegangen...") VOX PL9100
Music:
For the clinging heart's miasma that wind had to clear away, let
Franz von Stuck's "Evening Star," with Mahler's early Songs of a
Wanderer," join the clandestine brew of Browning s Porphyria s
Lover":
And made her smooth white shoulder bare.
And all her yellow hair displaced.
And, stooping, made my cheek lie there —
to curdle in Meredith's Modern Love:
Ah what a dusty answer gets the soul
When sick for certainties in this our life!
Von Stuck's lighted house on the horizon (left) among trees, the
stream albng which a wife (surely) and lover have walked to kiss in
the glow of Venus — such visceral fullness as Mahler drew from
Brahms and Bruckner — fills a bog of romantic identification, where
(fa^® Mahler)
tragedy drowns in wish and waste.
28)
T>ou6U: [A] TicMsso, 1900, Lovers in the Street, ^^eum, (Mru^na; and f^B]
‘Brancusi, 1912, Lhe 9Qss, 9duseum, iPhiCadeCphia; + detam^ ^ ^
Music:
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Atomic Age:
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^
^
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'G. BeU
History
By 1900, in Picasso (left), the embrace shifts to a public street,
shedding romantic resonances; nature, morality, poetic ideals — a
detachment which, with Brancusi's 1912 Kiss, achieves physiochemical crystalization.
Is this minimaiiy altered block of stone
(right) carved in earnest, irony, or play? Snch indulgences have been
erased
So in Webern's 1913 Bagatelles, attenuation of melody and
chord precludes the moods of Mahler.
(end Bagatelles)
/
2mCZ7) Z^mn, von StudiMemlstem, dctaif erj -fCc€<rue,>,
Even O'Neil thought in Mourning Becomes Elegm "to see the
transfiguring nobility of tragedy in as near the Greek sense as one
can grasp it." Though his lacerations wind the gut out on a spoo .
"staring into the sunlight with frozen eyes.
2nd: 28) S^ain
of 28, 'Brancusi's !Kjss
Here before the first World War, that feedback howl was
damped. Though Arnold's Greek baby may have gone out with the
bath.
29) 9kkn7r<mf^tlu^'iSS7,'Eden,Co(k^ofthcS^t
29a) Same, •EtUn. /etaiffWfcl tfaiu
Music:
'^-‘1 ^
Morton Feldman, 1968, from False Relationships and the
Extended Ending, Composer Rec. Inc. SD 276
In the Post-war indeterminacies of graphic music — Morton
Feldman's "False Relationships and the Extended Ending
huge stained-canvas improvisations of Helen Frankenthaler, we find
ourselves spaced out from the old human condition. If this 1957
Eden, by its love-garden title and playful "hundred-hundred calli
graphy (is that God caught above, red-handed?), plays at passion
passion's involvement has melted away — albeit in a world of cold
war. Silent Spring, Korea, Viemam.
(•b''® Feldman
30)
Limoges 'EncrneC, c. 1200, fuUkr and Vancing Woman, from a CRat, •Sntish
9A.usamt, London
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30 a) Same, S^iddter and ivonmn, detail
Music:
English, 13th cent., from Bryd one brere (at words), Sawt
Q C n /I >rA
FY
In early Gothic, iconographic distance had been as automatic as
the suspension of earthly loves in ascetic creed. Yet passion, (m this
Limoges enamel of fiddling and dancing, or the English love song
"Bird on the briar") burns through that denial with a flame sharper
for its cowl of modality, bare intervals, the vacancy of yearning faces.
Who could conceive at that remove the danger of romantic abandon.
(fade Bryd one brere)
31)
Tintoretto, 1SS7, Susanna and SCders, detaiC, 0<iinstfiistonscfies Oduseum,
Music-
Giovanni Gabrielli, c.1585(?), Canzona a 5 (New Ybrk Brass)
In the Renaissance (here Tintoretto
expansive celebration of flesh is held
allegory, drama, myth, where the fires of
raised and sublimated. The boundary
with Giovanni Gabrielli) the
in the transpersonalities of
life and love can be at once
condition for Shakespearean
tragedy — Romeo and Juliet.
Thou art not conquered; beauty's ensign yet
Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks...
Antony
and Cleopatra:
Your crown's awry,
ni mend it, and then play
(fade Gabrielli)
is that cleanness of combustion.
fma-ecuA, 1S64, Taolo ami J^ramesca, ScfiMtgaCCay,^Cu^ (C§^ S9)
32)
32 a) Sam, francesaa,
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Brahms, 1855-75, Piano Quartet in C Minor, Op.60, from
3rd Movement, Andante (Festival Quartet), RCA VLSC 233U
Music:
Past 1860, time of Brahms, even myth and
legend—Dante
s
Paolo and Francesca:
But tell me, at the time of the sweet sighs
(al tempo de dolci sospiri)
By what and how did love bring it about
That you should know the dubious desires
(i dubiosi desiri)?
—
even Dante's creed-suspended flame becomes, in this Feuerbach, a
(fade Brahms)
lure to adulterous loves.
As that seduction sighs and writhes with Munch toward fin-desiecle — this love-death Madonna of orgasm, sheathed in a mantle of
mummy-embryo and sperm — w^ are whelmed in Expressionistic
paradox, that the abandoned cliniax of pain-passion is also its turn to
symbolic alienation. Strindberg: (Playing with Fire)
Daughter-in-law
I will run away too! We shall die together!
Friend (takes her in his arms...)
Now we are lost!... Fire of hell that burns and parches
all that was green and flowered! Ah!
(They part and sit down again in their former chairs.)
a34) (Picasso, 1932, Qirt at the (Mirror, detaiC, Museum of Modem Art, (hQCC
34) Same, §irC at the Mirror, whoCe
In Picasso's 1932 Girl at a Mirror, those morbid loves are
caught in a crystalline change, "pearls that were his eyes." What we
are looking at must be model-mistress Marie Therese. How her belly
swells with wish and pregnancy (though daughter Maia was not yet
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conceived); but the old vulnerabilities are distilled into color-forms.
The curtain has been drawn on the loading of the post-romantic bed.
3S)
‘WesseCtttann, 1967, Qreat Simerican
4198, WaCCTaf-^Kicfiartz Museum,
After the Second War, in the always rising market for
novelties, however corn-porny the pop-art titillation of Wesselmann's Great American Nude, number 98, mouth and tit disclaim the
hunger of the femme fatale. Euphoric euthanasia!
a36)
36)
ford MaddoTC •Brown, 1837, 'Ta^ •four Son, Sir,' detaiC, fate qaUery,
London
Same, fakg^ four Son, Sir," wHoCe; i\^^l7cCose detail
What had been intolerable in romantic pain, its arrogation to so
much, when, on the scale of Oedipus or LeM.> it deserved so little.
Ford Maddox Brown's 1857 protest "Take Your Son, Sir (womb-cloth,
crass father reflected in the mother-haloing mirror) brings home. So
Charles Bovary's bungling operation on the clubfoot (of the same
years). He has cut the tendon and strapped the foot for straightening
in his famous machine.
The strethopode was writhing in hideous convulsions...
the box was removed. ...the livid tumefaction spread
over the leg, with blisters... whence there oozed a
black liquid.
a3 7) •EdvardMuncfi, 1883-86, fhe SietChM, detail, Motional gallery, Oslo
3 7) Same, •Tfie Siet Child, whole
Gangrene, in fact, was spreading more and more.
Hyppolyte looked at Bovary with eyes full of terror,
sobbing: "When shall I get well?... How unfortunate I
am!"
The amputation follows:
A heart-rending cry rose on the air. Bovary turned
white to fainting... he listened to. the last cries of the
7/1994
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History
sufferer... like the far-off howling of some beast being
slaughtered.
Thirty years after that Flaubert, Munch, in The Sick Child,
began with the lacerative heritage.
38)
'Edvard Oduncfi, 1940, 'Betzueen tde CCocf^ and tfie Bed, SeCf-Bortrait, OduncH
Oduseum, Oslo; + V detaiC
By Munch's 1940 Self Portrait, "Between the Clock and the
Bed," a pain no less, goes almost funny-paper grotesque.
So in Faulkner's As I Lav Dying, where Cash has broken his leg
and the father has poured cement on it "to ease hit some," the scene,
through the eyes, of a boy (Vardaman), turns to idiot laughter:
Cash's leg and foot turned black. We held the lamp
and looked at Cash's foot and leg where it was black.
"Your foot Iboks like a nigger's foot. Cash," I said.
a39) Francis Bacon, 1964, HlenTietta Moraes, detail, Ian Stoutz^r, London;
+ V^^^detail
39)
!francis Bacon, 1964, (DouBCe Bortrait of Lucien Ifread and IfranliSiuerBacfi
(artist's collection?); +
detail
"I reckon we'll have to bust it off," Pa said... They
got the flatiron and the hammer. Dewey Dell held the
lamp. They had to hit it hard. And then Cash went to
sleep.
"He's asleep now," I said. "It can't hurt him while
he's sleep."
Music;
Stockhausen, 1961-65, from Momente, voices, instruments, etc..
Nonesuch H-71157/^nto 2nd record face)
Though for Francis Bacon — this so-called double Portrait of
Lucien Freud and Frank Auerbach (1964) — we should advance in
literature (perhaps with Stockhausen's Noise Momente) to the most
mutilated post-war extension of Faulkner's picaresque — Molloy.
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Symbolic
History
Beckett's fiction of a crippled anti-hero — as germane as the new
mathematics of fractals bridging, order and chaos, to the mauled flesh
40)
CDouBCe: [Si] Ticasso, 1939, (Portrait of SaBartes as SpanisB. Qrandee, Jirtist's
Collection; and.1(3] Ifrancis (Bacon, 1972, Sdf-(Portrait, (Jdar^orougB QaCCery,
(Kszo forSi
40a) Single
\r\.<LLX>
(Bacon, Sdf
Bacon singled out from the infinitely varied brilliance of Picasso (this
1939 Sabartes as Spanish grandee, left) — Bacon struggling through a
lifetime, doggedly (as in his 1972 self-portrait, right), to hang the old
carcass between abstraction and the pathos of touch — like Socrates,
asked in the Parmenides if dung has an eternal form.
41)
fronds (Bacon, 1964, (Cfiree figures in a (Ppom, fonds (dgtionaC d'Sirt
Contemporain, (Paris; + f detail
41a) (Bacon, 19S4, fwo figures in Qrass, (Private ColCn, (Paris
4lB) (Bacon, 19S3, frvo figutes, (Private Collection,
So from Beckett's Molloy. with one of Bacon's life-of-a-salesman
triptychs:
So you get up and go to your jnother, who thinks she is
alive... But could I crawl, with my legs in such a state,
and my trunk? And my head... Flat on my belly, using
my crutches like grapnels, I plunged them ahead of
me into the undergrowth, and when I felt they had a
hold, I pulled myself forward by the wrists... And from
time to time I said. Mother, to encourage me, I sup
pose... The forest ended in a ditch...and it was in this
ditch that I became aware of what had happened to
me...
I lapsed down to the bottom of the ditch... Molloy
could stay where he happened to be.
42)
(DouBle: [Si] (Picasso, 1940, Woman ‘Drejtng (Ker (Hair, (Museum of (Modem
Sirt, (NfC; and [(B] fronds (Bacon, 1964, left detail of 41 (,cj
42a) (Bacon, 1973, friptydi, Sirtist's Collection (video: left detaUonly)
42B) (Bacon, 1946, (Painting, Museum of (Modem drt, (MfC
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For body too, it is on the bitterest malformations of Picasso
(left: this 1940 Woman Dressing her Hair) that Bacon (right: detail)
has seized. How far down both he and Beckett root the Existential
claim: rMollov^ "deep down is my dwelling... somewhere between the
mud and the scum."
Even Beckett, Bacon, Stockhausen — in their agony — are post
war equilibrists.
(fade Stockhausen)
43)
gentiCe cCa ifManoj 1423,
O^tivity, Tr&cCeCCa, Uffizi,
(A
(Cg^B '48)vP^ d^&taiC
)
‘V43a) Same, detail of SHepHerds fmm^U'ffity
Music:
Brasart, c.
AS 27-a
1420-30(?),
from
0 Flos Fragrans,
2
'
near close, (Cape)
How many centuries the arts of the West have been wooing
and now breaking with Vala, Blake's luring goddess of Nature. After
that action, what can reattachment signify?
Consider Night.
In
Gentile da Fabriano and Brasart of the 1420's, how poignantly the
Burgundian loves of earth harmonize Gothic mystery.
(end Brasart)
44)
Gossaert (9daBme), c. 1S12, S{yony in the garden, StaatCiehe 9dmeen, BerCin;
detaiCs
Music:
Senfl, c. 1520(7), Asperges me, Domine, opening, MHS 1390
By the 16th century the wonders of the moonlit world, the enfleshed passions of man, have filled almost to plenum the old mysti
cal realm. In what Mabuse drew from Leonardo, Senfl from Josquin
(Asperges me — Cleanse me!), we approach a divide of spatial and
humanist transformation.
(fa^® Senfl)
43)
‘Fan di
c. 163C
Londonf^^detaiCs t
Music:
7/1994
Buxtehude, c.1680(7), Viola da Gamba interlude from Solo
Cantata, Jubilate, Lumen 32030, Side B
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Symbolic
History
With the 17th century (this Dutch Van der Near), with the cor
poreal harmony of Buxtehude (a viola da gamba phrase from the
antata Jubilate"), one cannot say the mystery has been annulled,
hough miracle seems almost resolved; wonder has taken its seat in
he moonlit expanse of nature itself, formulated, as by an experimen
tal science — Milton: "And o're the dark her silver mantle threw."
^
c. lS20,^mats in the. Sjishes, freks ‘Deutsches Xochstift
^Franl^urt-am-Main; + ‘VcCetaiCs
-nocnstijt,
Music:
Beethoven, 1826, Quartet 14, C-Sharp Minor op. 131
movement, midway, 2v etc., Columbia M5L 277
'
’
is.
Friedrich s night scene of swans in the rushes (about 1820)
of which he said. "The divine is everywhere, even in a grain of sand’
Here
depicted it for once in the rnshes" _ representation both
maintains and etherealizes the phenomenal. Nothing in the music of
tha time so disembodies harmony as the passage in the opening
anasy of the C Sharp Minor Quartet, where Beethoven thins the
fabric to a Renaissance-inspired polyphony of two and three.
(fade Beethoven)
4 7)
lBauCj(Cee, 193S, ‘WaCpurgis t%ht, ‘Tau QcUlery, London!^ cCetaik
Music:
Alban Berg
192^ from Lyric Suite, close of 4th movement
agio, Deutsche Grammophon 5 LP Stereo 2713066, Rec. 5a
’
has fi^,!“*
U
content
as flattened to the visionary, as in this "Walpurgis Night" - Baroque
d Classical given over for inspired child-doodling.
Marvellms
w at related magic Alban Berg has brought from the 12-tone rows of
the Lyric Suite, though with the twist of Between Wars.
(fade Berg)
of tH.-Hpthh.ot
Music:
7/1994
Messiaen 1940, from Quartet for the End of Time 5 Louannc A
lEternite de Jesus, Deutsche Grammophon St. 2531 093
^
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History
Messiaen, in a 1940 prison camp, had already entered (under
the designation "Quartet for the End of Time," here from the Move
ment "Louange d VEterniti de Jesus") into the orbit of weightlessness
— what, in Rothko a few years later, subsumes night and fire in colorfield voids — this Brown, Black, on Maroon — like Roethke's dark
come-through:
"Ye littles, lie more close"; and, "The right thing
happens to the happy man."
49)
1793, "I toant, I zoant,’ gates ofTaracCise 9, ‘BritisH UvCusetim, London;
^details
Take a theme — as central as any to the world action from the
Age of Revolution through our Wars — let it be Blake's from The
Gates of Paradise, 1793, a little engraving labeled "I want, I want" —
a ladder through the night sky reaching to the moon. For all Blake's
revolt from logic, this symbol of fallen desire is literal — the temporal
folly of. an eternal delight.
SO)
Miro, 1926, ‘Do£ ^ar^ng at the OvCoon, Sduseum of Art, ThiCadeCphia;
In Mir(^s 1926 Dog Barking at the Moon (though one thinks of
course of the nursery rhyme about the cow and "The little dog
laughed"), the surreal has cut loose from daytin^e moorings. Yet the
rift between dream and waking still flexes consciousness to weird
defiance, as symbolist-loaded as when atonality warred on tonality
in the music of those years.
Si) Qeorgia 0'J(g,^e,19S8, Ladder to the Moon, Artist's CoCCection;^^!^^e4!ai£^
Sla) Same, Ladde^^^mtaiC ^
has
Of her "Ladder to the Moon," 1958, Georgia O'Keefe writes:
At the Ranch house there is a strong handmade
ladder to the roof and when I first lived there I
climbed it several times a day to look at the world all
'round...
One evening I was waiting for a friend and stood
leaning against the ladder looking at the long dark line
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.G. Bell
History
of the Pedernal. The sky was a pale greenish blue, the
high moon looking white in the evening sky. Painting
the ladder had been in my mind for a long time
and
there it was — with the dark Pedernal and tlm high
white moon all ready to be put down ■XU'v^Tc^ ,
Though she must have known the Blake and the Miro, her
picture is as free of symbol or surreal tension, of any directive gravi
tation, as if it existed in interstellar space. Of an abstraction so auto
matic, what account can be given but hers of the visible; "I was
leaning against the ladder... and saw it so"? More detached than
William Carlos Williams "so much depends/ upon// a red wheel/
barrow// glazed with rain/ water// beside the white/ chickens.//
Was that letting go enough?
SZ)
Soviet SLrt,
Serov, 1937, Lenin's SLrrivaCin Tetrqgrad 1917, USS%^
Enough? even in Russia, that a society which had lived, for
better or worse, through the embattled polemic of the thirties — in
art, this Serov, of Lenin's 1917 arrival in Petrogrnd
S3)
Tiotr Ifomine, 196S, S{orses on the Coast, 'Le Mnsee 9(iisse, L7(hi6itwn
should settle for Fomine’s 1965 contented horse realism of a coastal
scene — happy days are here again?
54)
Chinese Communist, c. 1947, Li Shva Woodcut, ^fCood of zvrath.
Or' in China, that the Marxist "Flood of Wrath" Li Hwa climaxed
in this 1947 woodcut, and which Malraux had seen in Man's Fate as
drowning backward dreams
55)
Worl^r Qouaches from SCuhsien County (Li Xf-ht-min), 19S8 ff,, TFe/ifTfigging, Snowy i%h.t,' (fine Sirts iPuS, fPehim; +
should yield to the peasant gouaches from Huhsien County
Well
Digging on a Snowy Night — every personal concern put off for the
cartoon smile of achieved togetherness?
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56)
History
'DouBU: [Rj ^andinskn, 1910, Mstract iMatercotor, Mrs. %fl.ndinski}, ^arisj
aiuCtB] RrsfiiCe Qork^, 1945, OTte UnattainaBCe, Museum of 5lrt, (BaCtimore,
MCD; + VcCetaiCs
V ^ A'
^
One did not have to be a died-in-the-wool reactionary to
wonder — when Archile ^orky, New York Armenian, in his 1945
"Unattainable," (right) restaged Kandinsky's first total abstraction of
1910 (left) — how the global search, shooting the rapids of two great
wars, had come full circle to the glad frenzy of plucking the feathers
off outwardness. Let fly!
57)
(DouBCe: [51] Scfizvitters, 1920, iHair-naveC'Bicture, Lords QaCCery, London;
and [CB] 5ig.usclienBer£, 1964, ^ftaCe, JosepH 5C. HCirs^m
57 a) giotto, 1297-99, (Detail offresco: Devils driven out of 5irezzo By St. francis.
Upper CBurcfi, Ussisi
57B) J4£ainScfizvitter^5{air-naveC^(video: details only)
57c) Ayain, (BytiscBenBery 94lliale (video: detail only)
Or when Rauschenberg's 1964 Whale Composition (right), with
its ocean-bobbing space capsule, met Schwittei<^Hair-navel Picture v'
from forty years before — to question such Dada stacking of the cards
for the mass let-go of American Pop — "warmed over Schwitters.'
Compare poetic nonsense. Dante had used it for the fury of
Minos, hell guardian: "Papa Satan Aleppe," and again for Nimrod
over lowest Hell: "Raphel may amech zabi £mi."
But we have made more of Babel, from Morgenstern's early
century "Laleu, lalou, laloo," through the same between-wars
Schwitters —
bee bill/ bii bell/ baa ball/ bimm bimm//
bii bill/ bei bell/ baa ball/ bumm bumm//
bemm bemm/ bumm bumm/ bimm bimm/ bemm
bemm/// —
to international claques of such, who, adding belches, smacks, and
whistles, cluck the Art of Body-sounds.
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�•G. Bell
58)
Symbolic
History
5)ouBCe: [51] M. l^oBey, 1958, 5{awest, Marian W. jofinson,
^ ^
r
,
..
..
-------------
----
ancC
.
+
And when, in (1958, with no indication of directional influence,
these granite mottlings would appear — left, an amber Harvest by
Mark Tobey, child of Wisconsin and the Pacific; and right, French
Dubuffet's gray Marmalade-Matter-Light — both as far as quantum
mechanics from the emergent shapes of nature — what could one
surmise, but that art-prophecy, in the globe-rounding of modern
vision, had somehow closed on itself? Nietzsche: "Who stares into
the void long enough, the void will stare back at him.'*
59) l^laCdmuCCer, c. 18^0, Spring in tfie Vienna Woods f!Kunst, voCume 75)
59 a) Same, Spring, detaiC; + V closer detaifs
Music:
Copland, 1944, Appalachian Spring (Ormandy) RCA LSC-3184,
near close
Yet who could believe that the romantic delights of bourgeois
and Biedermeyer (this 1830 Waldmuller Spring in the Vienna
Woods) could be revived -again in Between-and Post-War Americ^
^ however the New Deal leaned that way; while Copland, who had
begun with tough experiments, by the 1940's was harmonizing
Appalachian Spring for those "soft ears" Ives had cried down. Could
romantic cultivation be called valid, as long as endangered wood-lots
remained for picnics and love-meetings?
(fade Copland)
a60)
Qeorg 9(pCBe, c. 1936-38, 9{gjei ScuCptor, (Dancer, formerCy (Kronprinzen(PaCais, (BerCin; + V detaiC
B60) l^xCoCf Wamper, c. 1938, VdCozvsfiip, from (Kunst, VoCume 81
60)
Qeorg Scfirimpf, c. 1933F, Osterseen, from (Kunst, VoCume 69
V60a) (jrant Wood, 1930, Stone City, -lozua, JosCyn 5irt (Museum, OmaBa,
Vfg-BrasBci (video returns to a detaiC of 60, Scfirimpf and then of B60,
Wamper
60B) MitCer, Qoervng, etc. admiring 'fwnest Qerman art,' LITT., Oct 2, 1939
60 c) MitCer and MussoCini, 1938, In (fCorence
Music:
7/1994
Richard Strauss, 1940-41, Capriccio, Overture, Angel 3580 C/L
Atomic Age:
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�Symbolic
rG. Bell
History
Could one build on those cinder-cones of reaction — every
where romantic nostalgias to be whipped by King Fish rant, "Share
the wealth" (and share the women), into will and power: to prop up
the big-top of the West? From Germany in the early 1930's, George
Schrirhpfs hundred-year-landscape-flashback, curiously tied to
Grant Wood — and why not to Strauss's wartime Capriccio (music) —
harmless, as the name Schrimpf —
/fSound: From "I can hear it now," Columbia MM 800
)
\__ (Narrator;)____ _______________ ________—------1933 was dark all over the world... Japan was already in
Manchuria, and the League of Nations was dying in Geneva...
(cannon)
until one sees Hitler, pinning the swastikas on all such echt-deutsch
confirmations.
inuecL^^Jy
61)
In Germany the Reichstag fire was history; so was the Weimar
Republic... In Italy Benito Mussolini had txanslaterLa. people's
search for security into savage conquest.4 (cries: "Duce")^
(DouSCe: [Pi] Pimo ‘Brel^rj 1930/ nucCe., from Zt,ICP{J^G^^ and [(B] fosepfi
dhoralQ c. 1938, dhe Muse, piaster, from OCunst, VoCume ^1
^
^6la) PLmo ‘Brek?-r, 1940-43, dhe PCerald, piaster for Bronze, (Die 9Cunst im
(Deutsehen iReicB, PfpvemBer '43 ejy ,
6IB)
Pigain, d'fioral^ Muse, (B of 61 (z^uijnde^retumfif^^61, ^ douBie)
Arno Breker (left), three years before Hitler came to power,
crayonned the life-urge that would shoulder his climactic sculptures,
"Preparedness" and "Hero," to the cliff of Nazi acclaim. While sensu
ous nudes hardened (right) to this astonishing Muse by Thorak. If
only the benighted Chancellor, bestowing the accolade, could have
divined, that it was for the Allied occupation they were stripping
those girls down.
a6Z)
7/1994
^£inai(C Marsft, 1936, Monday Migfit at tHe Met., Pirizona Museum,
ducson
Atomic Age:
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�':G. Bell
Symbolic
History
!R^£inaC(C Marsfij 1940, T,t[in£e !foCCies, Mr. ancC Mrs. Menry Luce III,
(video puts tf-is Setzveen 62 and a detail of 62)
^BsyinciCd MarsH, 1945, Strip ^ease in 9{g.zu Jersey, Senator ^iUiam 99enton,
62)
Mpiv Xorl^
f Sound: From "I can hear it now," continuiJ^j
(Narrator:)
________-—^
in ilcFTfertile America, fear and uncertainty lay heavy upon the
land... (Roosevelt): "For first of all, let me assert my firm belief,
that the only thing we have to fear is — fear itself."
From Hart Crane's "Winter Garden":
Her eyes exist in swivellings of her teats...
We wait that writhing pool, her pearls collapsed,
— All but her belly buried in the floor...
through Reginald Marsh's paintings of Burlesque — down to Parrel's
masturbating Studs:
^
leaned forward in his seat... he watched... four beefy
women... legs spread, orgiastically shaking their wob
bly bellies. Washed out, painted whores. But they
sure could shake that thing...
what cataleptic will conjures exhuberance out of waste of life:
"nothing to fear but fear itself
a63)
663)
c63)
I2d63)
e63)
Myzi O^Ht ^(dy, 1938^^rty (Day, MyremSery
CfiamBerCain in Munic^^938
nXVlI, (BCitzIqi^, Sept 1,1939, Qerman tan^s invade ToCand
TiWiI, ^rd 1940, Qerman troops on a Mprweyian Mountain (RyiCroad
WWII,\^m^uergu^^ay~194^(Painter: Charles CundaCC, detail, ImperiaC
li^ar Museum, London
Germans in Paris, throuyh Sire de rPriomphe
I2f63) (Photo, June 1940,
63)
Photo, WorCd War IlpY940, JdtCer's ‘Dance’ in the forest of Compieyne
(after the surrender of)france)
Sound:
"I ran heanitnow," continued
VlHitler's rabia over the Sudeten Germans, then cheers)
7/1994
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26
\
�r
r
Symbolic
G. Bell
History
But who would have chosen a dream recovery, hunting "Peace
in our time," through Rhineland, Austria, Chekoslovakia, Poland,
through the Phony War behind the Maginot Line (imaginaire), then
Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Holland Belgium, France —
Sound:
From "I can hear it now,"
(German radio announcement of the French-surrender)
(fade)
to Hitler's dance in the Forest of Compiegne for the French Surrender
— if photo-faked, no wonder it has the look of Tolstoi's child in the
carriage, pulling the strap and thinking he is guiding the team.
Since the Chaplinesque drollery of The Great Dictator
a64)
‘Botn6m^o^^^auCs^940-41^^
L
G4) (PHoto, WWlIj 1940, ‘BaitCe. of (Britain: TCanes aBove,, antiaircraft BeCorv
64 a) (Pfioto, WWII, c. 194Z, US.
sfieCCin^ O^rtfi S4frica ,
rode a physical and psychic release, which neither the arch-bungler
nor anyone else, once it was revved up, could steer, much less stay.
Like the rise and fall of dinosaurs, that roar of planes warping in
over the meager air-defenses of England was what we would live
through — in fact and in the rhetoric of Churchill: their darkest and
"their finest hour."
Music:
Wartime song, Liiy Mariene, (Mariene Dietrich) MCA-60137
■ 7" 45 RPM
Then the counter-rallying —
65) (Bfioto, 1943, (Divc-BomBer asscmBCy Cine (Mistair Cool^'s S4M‘E‘RICil)
65 a) (Beauvais, 5)estroyecC SLrea SlrouncC tfie CathedraC
irresistable thunderhead of war production, backing the myth of the
free and peace-loving peoples — this California assembly line of dive
7/1994
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History
bombers, 1943; with the Europe I would travel to under occupation
("Fire-scarred gaunt cathedrals out of ruins"):
I had seen you before, now after, when the last storm
Romantic recklessness involved you in
Broke over you, and your Atlantic children
Backlashed on the wind clouds of detonation...
a66) (Bfioto, 1945(?),S[ave LaBorers, 9{grdliatism
66) Tfioto, 1345j ‘Bmen, 55 men made, to Bury Jezuisft victim-^
Hitler's talk of realpolitik, his masterminding, fomented a
Europe more visionary than actual:
"Vengeance is mine," saith the Lord; "I will repay." These
SS guards at Belsen Concentration Camp, set to sort and bury the
rotting corpses of Jews (fade Lily Marlene) — surreal as the art the
Fuhrer had condemned — what a slide, to this,
a6T) Moritz von5cfi%oind, 1850-60, HQmBen Wunderfiom, 5cJiacligaC., Munich
B67) 5pitzzue£, c. 1850, ‘Boof^orm, 5cmmCwi£5cltatzer, 5cfizveinfiirt
67) 'DouBte: ,[5l] von 5cfimnd, WuTuBerfiorTtJa67^and [B]5pitzzve£, Booksaorm
^B6^
j / 6*7^
Music:
Mendelssohn, 1826, Fairies from Midsummer Night's Dream
Overture, Philips (Festive) 6570 021
from the Germany of a century before: Mendelssohn's Dream Over
ture of Bottom and the fairies, Moritz von Schwind's woodland rap
ture of a Bo)?s Wonderhorn (left), (right) Spitzweg's playful irony of
the Bookworm tottering on his ladder with more books than he can
manage. Does all history attest a change so swift — and terrible?
(fade Mendelssohn)
^8) (BoscB, 1500-04, hlscent to Meaven, (Doges' (PaCace, Venice (4 4
'^68) (Photo, 545WII, London5uBtvay as BomB sfteCter
^8) (DouBCe: [51] 14gain, Bosch, S4scent (tf8); and [B] Slgain, London 5uBzvay
(if8); +. V various singCes and detaiis
68 B) Menry Moore, 1940-41, 9\5WII, London LuBes, Bh-axviug of5Ceepers
7/1994
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�..-r----(or Henry Moore's drawing) the tubes
Bosch’s tunnel to Paradise. Spenders
J fire-bombea Lonuuu ...cv.
. I think continually of those who were truly great...
Sorn of the sun they travelled
a
short while toward
And left the vivid ait signed with their honour
iov " "And
death shall have
was reaching out for Dylan rrv,
Thomas'r,s "rrv
Cryjoy,
A
rdominion" the paean of "A Refusal to Mourn... .
Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter.
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins or n
Secret by the unmourning water
After
Ve'*fit*st^death, there
fm
is
mother.
no other.
M
^
Svanis^
e96)
music:
^
George Crumb 1970, from Black Angels, Electric String Quadet,
SVBX 5306 (3)
. a.d...i H..., ~
socialisl. haves ""f,''*r^'’'ne!loii.flux of follow.lraveling oppoaiKB,
that of Kurtz m Africa
with all iconoclasms of new art, music, poetry, down
The Ant’s a centaur in
Learn of the green world what can
Pull down thy vanity, I say pu
Y
Fascist Pound:
place...
Ho these marvellous utterances subscribe?
Atomic Age;
7/1994
Frontiers New and Lost
29
�Symbolic
History
fuartet? Or Motherwell's giant sixty or so variations on an Elegy for
the Spanish Republic — belated insistence that avant garde (even as
it rode a growth market of art-investment) remained loyal to the
left? Though one could have asked the Weathermen about that. Or
Diane Broughton hoisted by her own bombs, who had seen through
the light in Peace Corps Guatemala? Would her ghost have answered,
"Energy is the only life"?
(fade Crumb)
70)
(DouBCe: [J^j JosepB ComeCC 1940-5S, HBree
Trivate Collections] and
[B] 9(j l^rean Communist, Before 1977, CBoCCima, Do-cfie symBoC,
Cdangyongdac
70a) Sigain, ComeCCs BoTces (5L-of 70); + V various details
70B) lAgain, Xprean CfwCdma (B,of 70)
70c) Slide sBozv and video repeat the douBle 70
Over all convergences a rift was widening between West and
East. Had the two exchahged art roles? — the arcane, refined opium
dream of the Chinese sage in Malraux's La Condition Humain^ is
somehow paralleled by Joseph Cornell's 1940 to '55 haunted
souvenir boxes (above): Portrait, then Egypt (with bugs and red sand
glazed in under the bottles); and below, a Swan Lake for Tamara
Toumanova; while our old assertive outwardness now pylons up the
sky in this ^ollima, symbol of Communist Korea, over the city where
Kim II Sung was born.
Was it, for the West, "not with a bang but a whimper"?
a71) SUfredBinstein, 1947, photo Bhilippe Slalsman, Slastin^s (gallery Collection
B71) i^Bemont-(Dessoigne (Bada), 1920, Qrand Odusicien, I4.ndri Breton
Collection, Baris (same as 5L of 71); video: detail only
71) (DouBle: Sixain, [51] BiBemont-Dessoi^ne's Qrand Odusicien (B71); and
[B] H^ols (Wolfyan0 Schulze), 1945, Bateau Ivre, 9Qinsthaus, Zurich
V
71a) Wols', Bateau Ivre
Here, off the shoreless harbor of Now, perhaps it is time for a
confessional Gesture. After the \Apocalypse of the war, I was in
Princeton, drawn to those exiled \ great Europeans who hoped, in
thought and act, to redeem the atomic age.
7/1994
Atomic Age:
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G. Bell
Music:
History
Satie, 1913 (produced 1921), from Le Piege de Meduse (#6), Mhs
1475/6 (3)
I scrupled that the Dada Cynicism of the First War (this RibemontDessoigne, Grand Musicien, left) — which Satie had anticipated in Le
Piege de Meduse — dances for a stuffed monkey — should stage a
wilder comeback,
(fade Satie)
Music:
Hiiler (and Parman), from Avalanche, section
St 2549 006
as in Wol's Bateau Ivre (right), or Hiller's Avalanche.
bedevilling his Cantos with political nonsense.
1,
Heliodor
Like Pound's
a7Z) ITindrew WyetH, 1947, ‘Wind from tfk Sea, (Professor and (Mrs. CfiarCes tf{.
Morgan
72)
72 a)
726).
72 c)
72d)
S4ndre'W ‘Wyeth, 1949, ‘The (^x^enant. Museum cf American Art, (N^zo (Britain
Andrexu ‘i^eth, 1965, MonoCoyue, ‘WUCiam Weiss
5.1. QiCBert, 1949 (or Before?), detaiCfrom Chicayo (River, C.Q. (BeCC CoCCection
Again 72, ‘WyethfR^venant, detail
Andretu Wyeth, 1956, ChamBered (S(fiutiCus, Mr and Mrs (RpBert
Montgomery; + V detail
Music:
Douglas Allanbrook, c.1954, from slow Movement of 1st String
Quartet, tape
I had stared at the Decline of the West too long to require opti
mism, nor in art the ghostly revival of realism by which Andrew
Wyeth pqrceived himself through the dusty mirror of a Maine farm
house; or in music even the rich overlappings of Allanbrook's First
String Quartet. What I was fixed on could have grown out of Arnold,
or of what Faulkner (from my native state) would espouse in his
Nobel acceptance: "No room in his workshop for anything but the old
verities..." — verities for me no less of head than heart — a philo
sophic reconstitution of tragedy, transcending the art-poles of New
York modern and romantic person.
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:G. Bell
History
Yet when a student, Galway Kinnell, appeared, not unlike this
Revenant, in my Princeton study with his first poems — "all willing
worlds at once," "Darkness swept the earth in my dreams," and "We
were not misers in our misery" — it was as if a Vesuvius fountain had
gone off in the room; or to use his own Yeatsian words;
It seemed a star went burning down the sky.
(fade Allanbrook)
SiTC scuCptecC heads: ^rerud: Qothic 1200; TarCer c. 1383; ‘l^ischer, c. 1313;
(Bu0et, c. 1670(F); (Danneche-Tj 1803-10 (SchiCCer); Ti^Udt 1909
73 a) lAgain, 31 of 73, (french gothic
736) fl^ain, C of 73, Vischer head
73 c) Sixain, T, of 73, (Dannechffs SchiCkr
73 d) 3{gain, (f of 73, diHldt head
73e) 9^FdheCm LehtnBnicfu 1918, Seated fouth, (KatnBurg (Cg'B '87); + V detail
73f) Lehm6rucl^@18, 3{eads of Lovers, (DuisBur^ Museum
/
That was soon after Kinnell had chanced on a poem of mine,
dark with the cyclical burden for which I was photographing slides:
here (above): 1200, Gothic mystery; 14th century, Chaucerian
pilgrimage; 1515, a Christian saint in humanist pride; (then below),
1670 France, Baroque cradle of irony; 1810 bust of Schiller, ego as
defiant hope; early 20th century, Wildt, pain, on the road to
abstraction.
73
)
That consciousness speaks in the poem:
I, Flame of God, took flesh in the flame
Of earth's delight — pride, glory, fame.
With earth unsatisfied, the bleeding heart
Spent itself in romantic passion's part.
Worse-fevered now, passion be^ts at the gate
Ghiberti sealed, lost paradise of faith —
Last delirium, where self-pitying soul
Licks its own secretions, ooze of wounds.
Into the wished immortal gho^y balm.
And soiled with lust, leaps th^nviolable One.
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(3
�Symbolic
^G. Bell
History
So all paths lead me to myself and home;
And but for some faint whispering from the caves,
Some half-spelled message of the Sibyl's leaves,
I would quit hope. One promise holds hope green:
"In the rank of its own bubbling filth grows clean."
a74)
74)
“
74a)
746)
J.I. QiCBert, 19S0, iMarcfi (Dunes, Indiana, cropped, C Q. (Bed CoCIectum
3.1. giCSert, 1930, (Portrait of C.g. (Bed at tfie (Dunes, (Bed Codection;
detail
dstronomy, (Planetary (Hs^BuCa 'CraS' in (Taurus, 9{aCe Observatories
dlBetan danka, 16t6 cent., (Mabal^Ca, (Terror-god of (Kprthern (Buddhist
(Pantheon, detail, (British Library (Sddd. 8893), London (Cg(B 84)
74 c) (Polar Star dracll^s. Southern (Hemisphere
But the Spenglerian war was over. With Wyeth and Rothko, I
had staked out a new life — mine in Hutchins' Chicago. That winter at
the Dunes, in the cottage over Lake Michigan, Jim Gilbert, who tied
art affirmation and denial to the deepest realities of man and world,
painted this picture of me — Galway Kinnell in the same room,
sketching his "First Song" ("Then it was dusk in Illinois"), while I
wrote, undismayed — though New Deal, Stalinists, even Nazis had
hawked such programmatic goods:
Armageddon has always waited around the corner.
Whether for the individual or culture, the bombed
earth or sun-exploded solar system, or the assumed
world of matter crouched before Judgment — what dif
ference... The film over the meaningless and void is no
thinner than ever, the spectacle of life on that film
grander than before. The spiritual malady of our time
is mostly of faint heart — a kind of green-sickness in
girlsI yiAi
73) Slndrezv H^eth, 1946, Winter, w^ate^dection
73a) (Again, Wyeth winter, detad^S^^Cf^^^i^^
73b) Samuel (Mason, 1939, Susquehanna diiver SHCls, from giCtnan (Paul's 'Land of
(Promise,' *Bed Codection, Santa (fe
73c) Samuel (Mason,M^ods, Little (Pines (farm, (Bed Codection, Santa fe
7/1994
Atomic Age:
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33
�.G. Bell
Symbolic
History
If Wyeth had been in Chicago, teaching and painting, as Jim
Gilbert was, I would have shared in the release of his "Winter" — this
depicted recovery from his father's death:
"A neighbor boy all
topsy-turvy like a rolling stone," running downhill. "The boy," Wyeth
tells us.
"is really, me, at a loss... That hand drifting in the air...
my free soul, groping. Just over the hill was where my
father was killed. For the first time I was painting
with real reason to do it."
For me, too, some such recovery had led from Spenglerian war
to the Susquehanna River Hills, Little Pines Farm, Sam Mason ("He
dips the water from his own spring"), his daughter (Sub Regno Dianae
Bonae) —
This fall is my spring; down lost forest ways
Your frank eyes guide, the daughters
Of laughter run ...
that promise of a Married Land.
But Wyeth was by the Brandywinei3
a76)
576)
c76)
76)
76 a)
765)
76c)
QiCSert, C. 19/i4. Splf ^’nrtrait. f^aura f^iCdert rnCCit‘t
giCBert, 1350-5
QiCBert, 1943, Tlie 5B[ueStream, HvCartHa's ^^ineyarcC, 1
QitSert, c. 1962(F), OUe iR^cCStream, Laura QiCBert Co
QiCBert, c. 1938, ^l^^dCist^ vioCa MamUrfeCt CoCCeeti
QiCB'ert, 1950(^^^^mia^nes ‘Bluff, BelCCodeetion
Strain. 76, IRg'dStream^^'^^kk^
J.I.
And there was Gilbert, fighting the post-war like a battle of his
own, from such dark Spanish realism as Manet had begun with a
century before, through Impressionist lightening, to Cezanne's more
and more radical search for color form: Gilbert's rock streams, grayin-green, blue-m-brown, this (a few years after) red as Dante's
Bulicame, her^y/was representation, abstraction, symbol, all in one, so^
incredibly right, yet so cloaked in verisimilitude, that when, in the
7/1994
Atomic Age:
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34
3
�Symbolic
History
painter's absence. I lugged canvasses to
Ld said "too academic for us." And what did diey have on their
walls? imitationSof Dufy, little Klee's, little Albers'. The oo s i n
know where theVademy was. Could
b ue
or was it perennial? The market answered unreliably.
cheese is good, tomorrow yellow". As for the Go s t ey i
answer at aU. 'What could oue do but trust inner convicuon. For me.
A
this Red Stream became Nature itself.
‘UmirLnti 1950,
TT)
frr]
7ri,
Vermottt Landscape,‘BeU. CoiUctkin
~utiu„ i/tlie
19% t. im ^osai. m
Wif
'
/^B7 Lhc Law,^emp(e Beth Bt, Qary, Indiana;/^ detaiH^
Also in Hutchins' College was Hal Haydon, exploratory spirit
aware of what has slowly come to light, that our age is
_
liked a landscape, he gave it the pallette-knife. His lighted cit
reeled with white-writing, his close-ups with his own bifo“^ **
bling Perhaps a block print will catch him as well as anything,
gki® so doubled, dreams of flight - Icarus over the sea. How many
'j
'
FT*''"' ' ~~l I u'v-J
’
'■7
’
!
_________________ -
_
-------------- *—
Like Picasso taking to the beach after the war, li e t e
breakthrough of the New York School, like Adlai's speeches - we
were all lured from dark to light. But my response was in the
context of teaching Thucydides and Greek tragedy, those Chicago
years.
78) ■BucHminster fuCkr, 1967, ^coitsk Dcm, iHontred-Eitpo!^ Vi&.uM
■rsi) ‘Victorian, 7alhn
amtmy: + VM
786) Supemwa 1987A, Cover of Wtifk AmncM, August 1989
“
? ■; •-
1933 Chicago Century of Progress Fair, I then at the height of my
LTntific rapture, he exhibiting the streamlined Dy-a-on c. under
his energy-saving Dymaxion house, building seems alrea y
7/1994
Atomic Age:
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�Symbolic
;G. Bell
History
\
into the colonizing orbit of other worlds. Though this wonderful
geodesic dome, erected for the Montreal Expo of 1967, surely left its
prophet-designer with doubts about the use of his vision, even on
planet earth, much less on the moon or wandering stars.
f^xr fed)
'
'—II
Of course, Arnold's program of disciplined responsibility for the
balanced whole made sense, both for art and world. Though his
Empedocles proved rebellious to that aim, and his "Dover Beach"
found another close:
"Where ignorant armies clash by night."
Coleridge too, for Christabel, had aimed at a reconciling marriage; but
what opium-inspired possibility gave him was a fragment of demonic
possession:
In the touch of this bosom there worketh a spell
Whis is lord of they utterance, Christabel ...
By the hard lesson of Machiavelli, history has a gradient of its
own — for us of the post-war, earth as exploding star, our supernova
of spangled dysecology; and what is the art-gradient of that, but a
supermarket of widening the sphincter to the flux: "Look, Ma, no
hands!"
............. ..
79) Ll^^, (DecemBer 28jJ9S9j (DouBCe Cover
79 a) Same, Li^t: cov&r^^miEiC y
e issue; + V (Cetai^
A
Music:
The Beatles, 1967-70, from "All You need is love," Capital
SEBx 11843
At the turning point between the Fifties and Sixties, the society
of opulence and joyful leisure stuffed the Xmas issue of Life
Magazine with nothing but THE GOOD LIFE; and already the Beatles
were warming up for the Magical Mystery Tour, where "It's easy...
All you need is love" (though love seemed often the thing most
wistfully and wishfully lacking).
(fade "All You need Is love")
Music:
7/1994
The Beatles, from same record, "Strawberry Fields"
Atomic Age:
Frontiers New and Lost
36
�Symbolic
History
Would not those same Beatles' invitation to "Strawberry Fields" be
made on condition that "nothing is real"?
Surely the dream ship of past and future — New Deal, New
(fade "with eyes closed")
Frontier, Great Society —
80)
(DouBU: [SI] SleriaC Spraying of Tepper, Smithsonian, January, 1979; and
[(B] Utan InUrcontinentaCBaCistic OdissiCe, QCenn Jdartin Co., c. 19S9
80 a) Sixain, SLeriaC Spraying of (Bepper, Si of 80
806) Sixain JXtan, B of 80
was heading full speed for the simultaneous rocks of Silent_Spring
and Dr. Strangelove — eternal boom as ecology crisis, free-enterprise
as missile race and Vietnam War.
What speculative vacuum! A world crying to be steered from
exploding star into steady-state; yet no mind in politics or the media
could rethink any priorities. Against the life-and-death need of an
organic theory of economics, one party pushed an overstretched
Keynsian debit welfare; the other flopped like a headless chicken all
the way back to what they called Adam Smith; while communists
insisted on the blind-bridle of Marx's axiomatic materialism. Where
were the visions the crusade of war had kindled — or damped?
Music:
81)
Ll'fi
ouC;
Conlon Nancarrow, c.1950 ff., Study No. 3a for Player Piano 1750,
Arch Records S-1786 (1)
17, 1963, 'Birmingham, Mahama: "TJieyfijht afire that won't go
UaiC
Yet the photographed news, that global nerve-net still not at
tached to any brain, went on, in wild fibrilatiori, atomically, thrillingly active (Birmingham, 1963, the Black protest-marches, against
Bull Connor's hoses
82)
Same, LldT., ‘BCaehs versus (Potice and dogs
and dogs).
7/19 94
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History
While the composer Nancarrow, laboriously cutting into playerpiano rolls criss-crossed jazz-based rhythms, with time ratios beyond
the commensurate — of root-2, tu , or e — a year maybe of cutting.
83)
^eU^rapd Sivcnue, (Berl^fCey, CciCifornia, 1969,
‘Brozun pHoto, (Rsg
to produce a three minute bomb-burst of body-compelling yet bodydefying dance — as wierdly on target for the hippie wave of impos
sibility (Telegraph Avenue, 1969), as if Chaplin and the Marx
Brothers had been lashed together haywire, cyclotron accelerated.
84)
(PeopCe's Tarfu 1969 (S4pri£ ZOtfi and after), ‘Berl^eCey CaCifomia; ‘BaCCantine
Bool^
People's Park, that Berkeley 1969 junk lot confiscated from the
University of California for the free-work, free-speech, free-love
flowering. My daughter Charlotte, called Frankie on the Street, was
there, in euphoria.
83)
9{ationaC guard tal^ BeopCe's BarlQ 1969 (May 13-20), BaCCantine Bool^
Until the cowboy governor sent the troops with guns and teargas — as the man said in the Woodstock film: "It never should have
happened." But it did.
86)
Barrier fence around BeopCe's BarCg 1969 (May 20 ff.), Berks-Cey,
'B.aCCCantineBool^j^^
V86a) Trooper Uproom^Cants, 1969, BemCe's BarCu Ber((eCey, BaCCantine 3ooKs
1969^(^^l<§tei^,^BaCCantine
865)
Tear Qcissiny^
And all around the forbidden paradise the high chain-link fence was
set up, like hymen-— Cherubim versatilem... gladium. Woodstock.
(fade Nancarrow)
Sound: From Woodstock, August 1969, Cotillion SD 3-500:
voice: "draft resisters... Raygun."
then song: with Joan Baez, etc.
(fade)
7/1994
Atomic Age:
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/y
�Symbolic
Bell
History
7) Vietnam War, c. 1968, ‘ETcecution of a Viet Cong Prisoner <
587)
\/
Vietnam War, VvCardi 1968, ViCCage Burning after the 9\^assacre, 0\{y Lai,
Vietnam
U%
photo 1972, ^HgpaCm Strihe, Vietnam, Lung Eang VUCage
Vietnam, March 1968, Slaughtered peasant and Boy, My Lai, Vietnam
87)
87a)
Music:
Woodstock, August 1969, Country Joe and the Fish, Vietnam
Song, (Fixin' to Die Rag), Cotiiiion SD 3-500
Here the famous picture of a Napalm Strike on Tung Bang
Village (friendlies, it turned out); and Galway Kinnell, in The Book of
Nightmares:
Lieutenant!
This corpse will not stop burning!
(fade Woodstock)
d)ouB[e:.Char.Com^ ‘BdC. ffranhie) MJ^uring and [E] after Miter Te(wBe!s
/
iL oj m
With a wave, one formulates at least the physics which makes
a crest yield to a trough. In society the Hippie climax of People's
Park (Charlotte, left, in Blakean delight playing and singing: "I was
as clean," she said, "as a new-born child.") — the yielding of that crest
to a long^rough of reaction (Charlotte, right, fallen back to the
closure and heroin of the Street, where I sat with her for three days
and wrote "The Prodigal Father": Christ later, by her testimony, to
Jead her ^way) — such social breaking takes wav^^iders by surprise.
'arler c. 1385, 'bust. .............................
King Wenzel, Dom,
ible: Pari
niga, 1966, "Solitude", detail, Mexico ^ty (?;
^^Tho^h SYMBOLIC HISTORY might have foretold the odds of
that now mass eruption of romantic wish, against the gas and guns of
the beast with heads and horns. As if the d^bvn dream and lifedisillusion of th& Wes^had gathered itself into two images: (left) the
7/1994
Atomic Age:
Frontiers New and Lost
39
^
i/
�Symbolic
^C.G. Bell
History
<51/4
young King Wenzel of Prague, from the time when Chaucer wrote of
May:
I leave my books and walk to the mead
To see those flowers, white and red,
Which men call daisies
Come from that spring of liberatio^to Zuniga's Solitude (right) — or to
Borges, who returns blind to the books (from In Praise of DarknessV.
(El hombre que esta ciego/ sabe,..)
The man who is blind knows he will not decipher...
the books he ranks on the shelves, parchment, leather.
cloth.../\
g)
From south and east, west and north
the roads have led me to a secret center...
My wish is to die wholly;
to die with this companion, my body —
Quiero morir con este companero, mi cuerpo —
where was the courage to go
90)
^rencfi, from Liege, 1200-IS, SrCiraeCe of tfie fCozoering Catices, from Cfuisse of
CdarCemagne, CcitfiecCraC, SiacLen; + V cCetaiCs
(Spin the roulette of courage in ten slides.)
Like the Roland, this 1200 Miracle of the flowering lances
raises battle death to sainthood.
Certain knights of Charlemagne
wake to find their lances rooted and flowered, a sign they will be
holy martyrs that day. Roland's father, Milon, smiling, plucks his
lance frohi the earth, is embraced b^ Charles (in the tent), and rides
joyfully to battle.
91)
(Biero deCCa francesca, 14S2-60, victory of Constantine over 9rCa7(mtms, (CetaU,
SBoCy Cross frescoes, San francesco, SLrezzo; + V detail Cv^t
7/19 94
Atomic Age:
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�'C.G. Bell
Symbolic
History
The victories Piero della Francesca frescoed in his Legend of
the True Cross, after 1450, have expanded sacred myth to Renais
sance drama. One would be tempted to stage Shakespearean war
with this Homeric clarity, a dignity beyond the here and now.
Shakespeare, although a century and a half after Piero
9Z)
^eCasquez, 1634-35, SurrmcCer of‘Breda, Brado, Madrid; + ‘]/ detail <
and only a generation before Velasquez' Surrender of Breda — ties
Piero's mirage of early Renaissance to the weight and swelling con
sciousness of this Baroque. Though such willed heroics of earth
admits now a satiric converse —
93)
B)ou6Ce: Jacques CaCCot 1633, Les Misires et Ces MaCheurs de Ixi (Juerre, large
format, [JL] etcfiing 5 and [B] etcfiing 11; + ‘U details
Callot's bitter etchings of the 30 Years War: below, an attack on a
farmhouse where a man is being roasted in the great fireplace,
horrors Moscherosch and Grimmelshausen would describe and Vol
taire parody in the Candide. Yet Callot's captions still vindicate
heroic morality. Could our disillusion voice what is inscribed under
his famous oak of corpses? —
these ignoble thieves, hanging from this tree like evil
fruit, show that... vicious men sooner or later experi
ence the justice of Heaven.
94)
Qoya, 1810-20 {pu6. 1863), Los (Desastros de la Querra, #7 ((Dover)
%
As Goya approaches the existential stripping, a revolutionary
heroism, this "Que Valor!" "What Courage!" remains possible. Yet how
lonely such war-matyrs of heart. Chenier, of Chaflotte Corday: "You
thought by your death to revive France... Brave girl... One reptile the
less crawls in this slime."
95) (KstetHe (Kpllwitz, 1903, OutBrealu LiBrary of Co^r^h'^asBington D.C.;
+ ‘U detail
7/1994
Atomic Age:
Frontiers New and Lost
41
�r.G. Bell
90)
Symbolic
History
9^rencfi, from Liege, 1200-15, Mirade of tfie fCowering tances, from Chasse of
CdarCemagne, CatfiedraC, Siadien} + ^details
(Spin the roulette of courage in ten slides.)
Like the Roland, this 1200 Miracle of the flowering lances
raises battle death to sainthood.
Certain knights of Charlemagne
wake to find their lances rooted and flowered, a sign they will be
holy martyrs that day. Roland's father, Milon, smiling, plucks his
lance from the earth, is embraced by Charles (in the tent), and rides
joyfully to battle.
91)
(Piero deCCa CFrancesca, 1452-60, zHctory of Constantine over (Maj(entvus, detail,
(Holy Cross frescoes, San francesco, SLrezzo; + ^detail (V91a)
The victories Piero della Francesca frescoed in his Legend of
the True Cross, after 1450, have expanded sacred myth to Renais
sance drama. One would be tempted to stage Shakespearean war
with this Homeric clarity, a dignity beyond the here and now.
Shakespeare, although a century and a half after Piero
92)
Velasquez, 1634-35, Surrender of (Breda, (Prado, (Madrid; +
V detail (V92a)
and only a generation before Velasquez’ Surrender of Breda — ties
Piero's mirage of early Renaissance to the weight and swelling con
sciousness of this Baroque. Though such willed heroics of earth
admits now a satiric converse —
93)
(DouBCe: Sacques Callot 1633, Les Mislres et les MaCBeurs de la Querre, large
format, [51] etching 5 and ^B] etching 11; + V details
Callot's bitter etchings of the 30 Years War: below, an attack on a
farmhouse where a man is being roasted in the great fireplace,
horrors Moscherosch and Grimmelshausen would describe and Vol
taire parody in the Candide. Yet Callot's captions still vindicate
heroic morality. Could our disillusion voice what is inscribed under
his famous oak of corpses? —
6/1995
Atomic Age:
Frontiers New and Lost
41
�Symbolic
€.G. Bell
History
these ignoble thieves, hanging from this tree like evil
fruit, show that... vicious men sooner or later experi
ence the justice of Heaven.
94)
goya, 1810-20 (pu6.1863), Los (Desastros de (a guerra, #7 (Dover)
As Goya approaches the existential stripping, a revolutionary
heroism, this "Que Valor!" "What Courage!" remains possible. Yet how
lonely such war-matyrs of heart. Chenier, of Charlotte Corday: You
thought by your death to revive France... Brave girl... One reptile the
less crawls in this slime."
9$)
UQietfie ^(Czvitz, 1903, OutBreafu LiBrary of Congress, WasBington D.C.;
+ V detaiC
We think of the Great War as a breaking point; but when
Kaethe Kollwitz in 1903 cut her print of blind "Outbreak," no more
battle-strength remained than in Yeats' 1922 "Phantoms of Hatred :
The rage-driven, rage-tormented, and rage-hungry
troop.
Trooper belabouring trooper, biting at arm or at face
Plunges towards nothing, arms and fingers spreading
wide
For the embrace of nothing...
But those terrors were metaphorical.
96)
iK^rcfiner, 1915, MuUCatedSdf as SoCdkr, S^Oen 9duseum, OBerCin, OBio; first,
video detail
Trench warfare enforced a break-down reality. Kirschner, on
garrison duty at Halle prefigured his later suicide in the imagined
mutilation of this self-portrait with a nude model and lopped-off
right hand. Not even the English war poets, piercing "the old lie:
Dulce et decorum est...," seem as faith-blasted as this German.
97)
Soviet War Toster, 1941, ’^e Lnemy sBalC never escape our tvratB';
witB video details
6/1995
Atomic Age:
Frontiers New and Lost
42
�Symbolic
Music;
History
Prokofiev, 1944-45, close of Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible
In a people's reversal of that, the Russian defence of the Second
War, revived, with all the blatancy of conviction, the old heroism of
righteous will: "The Enemy shall never escape our wrath." While
Prokoviev and Eisenstein (under invasion) could make a warhorse
film of Ivan the Terrible voice that resistance — its closing chorus:
"At the scene of the great fire unified -Russia/ Gathers upon the bones
of the enemy!"
(end Prokofiev)
Though it is hard to distinguish patriotism from
98)
Jfoe fSs>sentfiaC (J^sociatecC iBress), 1945,
fHouse, fRpdiester, 9^; + VdetaiC
98 a) ‘WWII, c. 1943, CBougainvUh (Beacfifiead
propaganda.
CKgisiti£ on Ixvo Jima, ‘Eastman
The most rallying American image of that war, first in photo
graph and then in bronze, was the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima,
said to have been staged after the event. While the American radio
was advertising candy bars: "What are those boys on the atolls fight
ing for? For peace and the American Way — with Butterfinger!"
All that time I was writing "Studies in the Future," to feel out
the "rising and falling motions of a culture" — the rising, like the
Greek, where individuality empowers a colonizing free expansion;
until (in the disillusion and strife of that enterprise, the need
changing from release to an ordering)
ZncC 97) 5i£ain, Soviet War (Poster, detail
2nd 97a) Cfilnese Communist, 1958, Student parade in ‘Iten-an-men square, (Bering
comes (as with Rome) the falling or constrictive motion, where revo
lution itself takes on the character of regimen. Power shifts from the
liberators and developers to a new nation, born in discipline, which
can slowly loose itself as it binds the world.
S^or 2nd 98)
6/1995
Space SfiuttCe Laundung, 1981
Atomic Age:
Frontiers New and Lost
43
�Bell
r
Symbolic
History
So I wrote. But how did the assumed crisis of free confidence
in the West, the predictable malaise and self-question, go with that
euphoria of art and life which remains the subject of this study?
a99) James I. QiCBert, c. 1951, Staamp, Indiana (Dunes, near Cfticxigo, (BeCC
Coition
99}
Izapa (Cfuapas), c. 300 (B.C., SteCa SO, Sf^CetaC (Bartfi (Motfier, (h(g.tionaC
(Museum of Sbithropotogy, (Me?cico City; + V details
99 a) Same, Stela, detail; + V return to the whole
i
As when Galway Kinnell, after the glowing pioneer projections
of his Chicago years — "the cries of the prairie and moan/ Of wind
through the roots of its clinging flowers" — went abroad, plumbed the
avant-garde and came up with the prophetic nightmare of "The
Supper after the Last," for which comparisons might range from this
Pre^Maya Stela — a skeletal Earth Mother of death and birth,
placenta and foetus floating above her on an umbilical cord —
through the Beatus Commentaries of 11th-century Spain, to who
knows what in Picasso or Mird. In token of which range, let 1912
Schonberg launch the musical invasion.
Music;
Schonberg, 1909-12, from 1st of Five Pieces for Orchestra, Col. MS
6103
In our world such demonic seizure has recurrent reality — Kinnell:
that company eating chicken on a Dali shore, where the
of
I
...bearded
Wild man guzzling overhead...
who has not yet smiled...
Devours all but the cat and the dog, to whom he slips
scraps.
The red-backed accomplice busy grinding gristle,
’You are the flesh; I am the resurrection, because I am
the light.
I cut. to your measure the creeping piece of darkness
That haunts you in the dirt. Step into light —
I make you over. I breed the shape of your grave in
the dirt.
6/1995
Atomic Age:
Frontiers New and Lost
44
�Symbolic
aioo) Stuart'Boyi,13r9,C0a^psi«s Systems, c .
j;u(eo trims to a (UtaU
. ^
^BlOO) iPedersen, Warttc
lOOu)
HlSXOi y
<3 nftfie cCouBCe 100; uffUcfi tfU
of
schOnberg)
^ ^ loO, Bdow)
^
•CoCCapsins Systems, Lost Odessage, a
X^u,^«Cersm,-MuuicS<tulu<y,^ufiOO
----------
. .Ug century over-extended, as if to
With the New 0“®*=“°“
, nature and man always inore
call us back to nature “
^
^constructive return? Wa er
ominous, what was the substan
characters whose
Percy's novels, for all *®“
.'a ’catastrophe. That tore_
world seems already to have
perceptive and
boding has been shared Here
Ufe
powerful, though hardly known^ ^oijing the civilized fabric; but
as psychologist and teacher to i^hol g
^
when he puts brush to
^when a flash a white
what Klunell has lately burned into a P
msh sparkled": - this glare of r^ehng^^^
^
entitled "Collapsing Systems, 1^^
Light." While Doug Ped«s
aftermath of that
when
^c^’hLfthe sick, they shall aU end sicker.
alOl)
/•
Suscyh
^
1CIC9 a? SiasemraB, ‘Beuys sBoto
f
Jeftmny 1SS3,tovsr
%!m)
■Infiltrutiun,-Cmtrt georys
VdlOl) Beuys, 1966, 9^eit covi^risf.
. .
„„
^
”” “ *
^
has received more attention
attention
No European of the
tothest teach of avantihan the
^^aLt society and finally art. Shot down
garde becomes a protest agai
6/1995
A
Atomic Age:
Frontiers New and Lost
4i
�Symbolic
History
• ♦or of 1943 he was saved by the
the Eastern front m the win
regenerate warmth,
^rtars who covere^/^^X the — iZ” So fat and felt have
and wrapped it m felt... t
dominated hia
P
Pack, of 1969,
Gugrenhdm show. A Volhs-
sS:d "sil, each cattving a ilashUght, Mt and
elephants called to world rescue.
r.
• „ the European post-war modern
In style, and even in ‘"rting to that backing when Beuys
has owed much to America.
down a pile of dirt for the
climaxed his political de^^ ^
announcing disgust
Berlin Zeitgeist Show of 1982, at t
with all pretences of the art scene.
Kunstler".
aioz) CMsto, 1369,
wL)
9a)
nea Sy
9
(Msto,Savu,y^t«^^
Cfinsto,
• \ 1QR'^ from KoynsriisQUtsi
Ss?^'zSiSTAtSh?grn'gofP..'3,"Cioudsoape» ,
___ and
f .h, art-frontiers of« opulence
and
In a final overflow o
of landscape-and-earth
euphoria, come the ataggenns P
almost
ateration. Christo's ‘‘'at auch w
canvas to
lOnuug
r—
In music such packaging
P^“;"omTot^^^^^
in the program scores of Phihp
,omp i-
Williams'
Williams "Ii l®f
A'''- 8°o—
6/1995
a
Atomic Age;
Prnntiers New and Lost
Frontiers
46
�Symbolic
History
A year after Christo's Coast, Robert Smithson, reverting (as
"^others were doing) to the mystery of prehistoric earthworks, piled
this rock jetty, spiraling into Great Salt Lake. Here permanence was
no doubt intended, though it is rumored that the sidereal anchorage
is already covered by the rising water.
104) SpiraC QalaTQ) M 81 in Ursa Major, Tfioto, 9^vaC OBseroatory
104 a) SpiraC Qaicnqf M 83, ^Rjce University! or. Better, M§C 2997,
SiustraCian H^eCescope 93oari£
MaCin,
And above, our own milky way, with countless such galactic systems
(here M-81 in the Great Bear), put off their nebular sun-condensing
whorls — as in my Delta Return I saw the Mississippi from the air, in
curves and reverses, fling off ox-bow lakes on either side — the
whole flood-plain
(fade Glass)
...patterned still —
On the spiral shapes of melting, infinite seal
Of home-returning time on the transient floor.
Under star-cloud night, first matrix of that swirl.
alOS) PlstronomicaC distances yiven as train-times, c. 1911, detaiC, (BooB of
^CnowCedpe, VoCume /; + Vdoser detaiC
10S) Same, zuBoCe
105a) (Pierre-iPauC (Prudfum, c. 1804, 9{ead of 'l7en£eanu, S4rt Institute cfCBicago
105B) Orozco, 1936, ‘EC^Ion^re, detail. University of QtuidaCajara
Music:
Glass, same, late in Part IV, "Pruit Igoe"
No wonder as a boy I pored over this illustration in The Book of
Knowledge — astronomical distances conveyed by the travel times of
trains arcing from the earth-globe to moon, sun, planets, the nearest
star — imagining such star-wars as the great space-powers would
gravitate toward.
In Chicago, 1950, I waked from a dream not unlike the present
show, and wrote:
6/19 95
Atomic Age:
Frontiers New and Lost
^*‘*''*» rrew—anu—cnST
47
T
�Symbolic
History
To perceive in the scope of its profligacy the history —
that is the self-destruction — of the West, is to glimpse
no mere human folly, but one of those terrifying open
ings out of the organically wild and wasteful, the more
dire for its satanic sense of 4irection.
To see a group of living Christian nations, fostering
within their' contradictory self-seeking and Machiavel
lian policy a cradled bourgeoisie of idealistic hope and
criticism, bringing to bear on the faith that sustained
them the acids of the liberated mind — to see those
nations, as birds crack the shell, break through the
medium of protective tradition, the inheritance of
paradox unrecognized, into the vast of a valueless
freedom; to see that well-born folly change its nature
in the face of all it confronted and meeting became, to
the temporizing waste of violence —
106a) 9izUc, iStd-lGtfi cent., goddess nXazoCteotC in cdiCdBirtli, detaiC of dead,
(DumSarton Oads, Wasdin^ton, (DC
106) Same, HazoCteotC, wdoCe statue
the technically giant and spiritually withering nation
alities, as pettily suspicious as each business and freeenterprise man (though all were culturally one), un
dermining the other and debilitating the other, as if by
mutual murder to clear a space for the alien regimen
that would feed upon their ruin: this is the phenomen
on we have observed and lived through and been part
of, the whirl in which all values have changed; it is the
turning of liberation upon itself. The compelling ques
tion remains, was this our avoidable, even now cor
rectable folly, or is it the jealous law of every timebirth?
In The. Rook of Nightmares Galway Kinnell grows reconciled to
birth:
...Sancho Fergus,
my boy child, had such great shoulders,
when he was born his head
came out, the rest of him stuck...
5/19 95
Atomic Age:
48
Frontiers New and Lost
'MTTcry
and Lost
1
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Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound
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Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost, Symbolic History, Part 36
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Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010
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Text
Charles G. Bell,
1260 Canyon Road, or St. John's College,
Santa Fe, New Mexico
SYMBOLIC HISTORY:
37:
!•) , Japan (Heian)
87501
THROUGH SIGHT AND SOUND
20th Cent. C:
VJorld Melt
11th c. silk painting, Dai-itoku Myo-o, Fine Arts, Boston
MUSIC: Peking c. 1850 opera. Beheading a Son, opening, RCA-V LM 6057
How can an entropic universe be other than a tragic universe,
its glory reared on the leap of flame?
Our task is to celebrate
the dangerous radiance of the later West, without the soul-abandon
of. Jeffers' dance around the funeral pyre:
passed me,
saying, "I am Tamar Caldwell,
"Someone flamelike
I have my desire."
Not by an image of fire itself, or any of the burnings of
history, but by a silk painting from 11th century Japan, Dai-itoku
Myo-o, fire-guardian of the Buddhist Pantheon (with Peking opera)
we grip the pathos of the West in the life-death abstraction
)
of energy. .
2)
(fade music)
Fr. Gothic 13th-16th cent., N.Porch and N.Tower, Cathedral of Chartres
(CGB '59)
Had not the choice been made with Gothic - its last phase, as
in the North Tower of Chartres, called Flamboyant, after flame?
In music, the old descent of the Greek tetrachord, settling
through its Semitone to the Dorian tonic E - a recollection retained
in Gregorian:
MUSIC:
Gregorian, Easter Mass, dote of Terra treauit, MHS 915
— that downward scale inverts with early organum, climbs through
the leading tone to a forbidden tonic C:
MUSIC: School of St. Martial at Limoges, Melismat'ic Organum from
-------------------------- the Benidicamus Domino, Haydn Soc. L-2071
— Dante's Paradise of flame already fulfilled in Perotin:
‘
�20th Cent. Melt - 2
C.G. Bell
MUSIC: Perotin c. 1200, Quadruplum close of Sederunt, Cape, ARC-14068
3)
Phillipe de Loutherbourg c. 1800, Coalbrookdale at Night, Science Mus.,
London
With the blast furnaces of the 1800 Midlands, how earth-involved
the flames have become, Faust's sky-hunger conflagrant with the hell
compact — the combustion and flood of Wagner's Valhalla — soaring
to an always higher diapason.
Nietzsche:
"Above all a living
thing wants to discharge its energy."
‘
MUSIC: Wagner 1874, Gotterdammerung, close, Seraphim,
4)
1st Atomic Bomb-, July 16,
'45, N.M.
60003
("Trinity") (Al .Cooke, America, 334)
(close Wagner)
5)
G. Coustou
c. 1730, Portrait of his Brother, Louvre, Paris
MUSIC: Bach c. 1715?, Little Fugue in G Minor, opening, Biggs,
----- ----- '
-... ----- Col. MS6261
If dissolving is in question, what energized human greatness
(as in the character of a lost father) was to be treasured in that
Western assertive command of the incarhate field.
in the Age of Enlightenment, how Coustou's
Yet even here,
portrait of a brother,
reasonable as MontesquieuSpirit of the Laws, flames toward excess;
how even the most cheerful of Bach's fugues breaks in storm-tossed
inwardness, beyond measure.
6)
Canova 1803-22
-i
(fade Bach)
(a copy?), Bust of Napoleon,Gal.d'arte Moderna, Pitti,
Florence
MUSIC: Beethoven 1804-8, toward close 1st myt, 5th Symphonie,
--------. _ . --.
... Deutsche Gram. LPM-188 04
In Canova's Napoleonic transformation,
"makes war on itself".
(as Hegel says)
Revolutionary hope (Wordsworth's "A
Blackbird's whistle in a vernal grove")
with ardent eyes".
spirit
turns to "hissing factionists
Yet superimposed on that yielding up moral
�C.G. Bell
20th Cent. Melt - 3
questions in despair, the now existential will has seized the
grim hammer to forge something.
minimal or the maximal state?
Was Rousseau's Contract for the
Thus the motion of liberation which
had prevailed since Renaissance becomes the motion of constriction,
7)
Arno Breker c. 1938, Nazi Carving, Preparedness
which has Hitlerized the later West.
(Kunst *81)
(fade Beethoven 5th)
We will not sift the recorded sounds of National Socialist
rallies "With Songs and Cheers", for a music of the reign of
Professor Doctor Peter Raabe, blatant as Arno
Breker's 1938
"Preparedness" — as if totalitarian "Renaissance" could turn
back the clock of Spenglerian time, renewing the civic power of
Michelangelo's David against Eliot's "Gerontion" warning:
"Unnatural vices are fathered by our heroism."
Hitler:
)
We must be ruthless... Terror is the most effective
political instrument...A violently active, dominating
intrepid, brutal youth — that is what I am after...
8)
Paul Klee 1940, Death and Fire,
MUSIC: A.Berg 1935,
Klee Foundation, Bern, Switzerland
from Violin Concerto, death passage
Against the Nazi head set what its call to strength had exiled.
Paul Klee, most insistently subconscious of the great moderns, was
purged frpm the Dusseldorf academy in 1933.
He settled in Bern,
where he died in 1940, the year of this picture,
"Death and Fire",
a wry handling of his own and the world's dissolution.
Mein Kampf quell the fires by which it was forged?
But could
Berg's Violin
Concerto on Manon Gropius' death of polio-myelitis; Rilke's
surreal landscape of laments in the Tenth Duino Elegy, — with
everything from Einstein's relativity, Heisenberg's indeterminacy,
Godel' s anti-proof, back to Marx'* Manifesto and Rimbaud's "drunken
gnat at the inn's urinal,
in love with the barage and dissolved
�20th Cent, Melt
C.G. Bell
in a sunbeam"?
4
(fade music)
Did these, as so many
assumed, portend the decay of
Western power?
9)
Rom'q-Gothic Castle 1228, Chateau-de-Mer, Sidon, Lebanon
By 1228 the crusading drive of Medieval chivalry had left this
Chateau-de-Mer at Sidon, on the Lebanese coast of Asia Minor.
10)
Moorish in Spain 14th cent., Torre del Damas & garden, Granada
In Granada, this 14th century Torre del Damas, with its garden,
pool and Asian lion, marks the last Moorish foothold on the
contested sub-continent of Spain.
11)
Turkish in Europe 16th cent.. Old Bridge, Minarets etc., Mostar,
Yugoslavia
As late as the Renaissance the Ottoman Turk was pressing the
bounds of Vienna, holding Bosnia and Herzegovina, building this
Mostar bridge, minarets and towers in what would later be Austria
Hungary, and then Yugoslavia.
12)
V.Dyck c. 1633, Wm. Fielding,
Yet by the next century
1st Earl of Denbigh, Nat.Gal., London
(33 years after Queen Elizabeth had
licensed the East India Company), Van Dyck hugely captured what
was to become the whole Pukka-Sahib imperial westernizing of
the globe;
13)
John Nash & others 1815-21, The Royal Pavilion, Brighton, England •
With Brighton Pavilion, fashioned for George, Prince Regent,
from 1815 to '21, like an Eastern Pleasure-dome
(though with the
structural lightening of cast-iron), the counter-current of empire
draws the styles of exotic lands to the novelty-seeking core.
On
the tide of post-romantic desire, who is fo be conquered by whom?
14)
German Renaissance c. 1500, Dinkelsbuhl, center
(CGB *59)
No doubt the energy that would revolutionize every phase of
�M
C.G. Bell
20th Cent. Melt - 5
Western and human life had already, in the Renaissance German town
(here Dinkelsbiihl) , given Gothic testimony of its soaring dialectic,
the free individual empowered in the civic frame.
Yet even as the
«
traffic of another world explodes those towns, how remote they seem
15)
Empire State Building, looking up from the street, NYC
from the Empire State culmination of that Faustian alchemy.
In
a community of nations preparing again to tear itself to pieces.
New York was skyscraping center, that slogan-capitalist worldhive, with the stock-market of its troubled art soul: —
16)
Salvator Dali 1936, Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonitions
of Civil War), Arenburg Col'n, Philadelphia Mus.
Dali's 1936 "Soft Construction with Boiled Beans
(Premonitions of
Civil War)" dished up what was hatching from post-romantic,
depression and Fascism (as birds crack the shell).
In that
turning of liberalism on itself, transvaluing polarities were
everywhere dividing and inbreeding.
Left fought right, socialist
communist, Trotskyite Stalinist; yet ultimate right and ultimate
left converged in totalitarian seizure.
In art, realism rose
against avant-garde, avant-garde split abstract from surreal;
isms splintered and cross-multiplied; while through them all cut
the psychic cleavage of backward regret or forward euphoria -whether the manic-depressive should affirm or deny.
17)
CanoVa 1804-19, Theseus Battles the Centaur, Kunsthist. Mus., Vienna
In the Napoleonic upheaval, Canova thought to battle down
centaur violence, summoning the heroic image of Theseus
(though
already strength swells too much toward a Mussolini pugilist).
While in Schubert's last symphony, classical form still masters
the rebellious dissonance of Beethoven.
MUSIC: Schubert 1826, 7th Symphony, 2nd mvt, nearing close,
------ ——---------------------------------- — Col.ML 5619
(fade)
�C.G. Bell
20th Cent. Melt
6
18) j,ipschitz 193B, Rape ol' Europa. .bronze, Musee d*Arte Moderne, Pai is
Since Nietzsche's transvaluation of value, that brute seizure
Picasso's
IS our own-- Lipsckitz' Europa, like/
bull and minotaur.
assumpticns of conquering
So Schonberg's espousal of emanicipated
dissonance.
MUSIC: Schonberg 1936, Vln Concerto,- 2nd mvt, brief forte,
h through. Col. M2S 679
(fade)
Yeats, for all his concern with "traditional sanctity and
loveliness", must side with the "roof-levelling wind", the
irrational cry of Juno's Peacock, the "old man's frenzy" of
his own epitaph:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by.
19)
Raeburn c.
1810?, Rev. Robert Walker Skating, Nat. Gal., Edinburgh
Has the complicity of alienation removed us forevear from the
human image as Romantic inherited it from Enlightenment —
Raeburn's Preacher Walker skating, from the time of Wordsworth's
Prelude:
("Fair seed-time
had my soul")
We hiss'd along the polish'd ice...while the stars
Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west
The orange sky of evening died away.
Have we now the option of that Vicar of Wakefield wholeness?
20)
H.Matisse 1905, Joy of Life, study, Haas Coll'n,
S.Francisco
MUSIC: Ravel 1909, Daphnis & Chloe Suite II, opening. Col. MS 5397
When Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Seurat meet in the Fauves,
those "Wild Beasts"
(this Matisse 1905 Joy of Life), Symbolist
rupture and escape soar to mythic elation — as in Ravel's 1909
Daphnis and Chloe.
And although the Bacchic dream of Mann's
Aschenbach attends Death-in-Venice, it was still with the rapture
of Molly Bloom that Joyce would close the Dublin wanderings of
�M
M
C.G. Bell
20th Cent. Melt - 7
Ulysses, June 16, 1904:
and Gibralter as a girl where I was a Flower of
the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair...
and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I
thought well as well him as another and then I asked
him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked
me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and
first I put my arms around him yes and drew him
down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume
yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said
yes I will Yes.
21)
Picasso 1903, Life, Mus. of Art, Cleveland, Ohio
And though Picasso had begun in the Symbolist Blue vein of
early Yeats:
"The wind blows over the lonely of heart/ And the
lonely of heart is withered away/" — what Debussy had poured
into the last phrase of Maeterlink's Pelleas and Mellisande,
"It's the turn of the poor little child"
MUSIC: Debussy 1892-1902, close of Pelleas & Mellisande, Col. M3 30119
(whatever Spectre of a Rose would be enacted in the new Ballet of
Diaghilev or in the Diaghilev-haunted fate of Nijinsky) —
(fade Pelleas & Mellisande)
22)
Picasso 1907, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Mus. of Mod. Art, NYC
Picasso by 1907 would have broken through that "Hollow Man" anemia,
MUSIC: Stravinsky 1912-13, from Le Sacre du Printemps, Col. MG3 1202
striking d’eep into the mother-lode of Faust, Nietzsche and Rimbaud,
bulldozing for Joyce the abstract violence of Ulysses' Circebrothel, and for Stravinsky this 1912 Rite of Spring.
As Picasso
revealed, the crapping pose on the right is as much the earthmother crouch of delivery.
Was it not known from the start that
when stressed forms are broken, energy flames?
23)
(fade Stravinsky)
Franz Marc 1914, Heitere Formen (A Schardt, F. Marc p. 160)
Perhaps the visual ecstasy peaks
(Fauve, Cubist, Futurist)
A
i
�C.G.'^ Bell
20th Cent. Melt - 8
Franz Marc's 1914 "Happy Forms" — such an overflow as Rilke
gave words in the Second Duino Elegy, the perilous Archangel
t.
having advanced one step from behind the stars
(Leishman & Spender)
ranges, summits, dawn-red ridges
of all beginning, — pollen of blossoming godhead
(Pollen der bllihenden Gottheit,
Gelenke des Lichtes, Gange, Treppen, Throne...)
hinges of light, corridors, stairways, thrones,
spaces of being, shields of felicity, tumults
of stormily-rapturous feeling, and suddenly, separate,
mirrors, drawing up their own
outstreamed beauty into their faces again.
— "the eternal torrent" roaring its way through all realms,
inward, outward —
until creative ecstasy climaxes in
terror.
24)
Franz Marc 1914, Kampfende Formen, Neue Pinakothek, Munich
(CGB *59)
It is the break implied in this "Battling Forms", Marc's other
masterpiece of 1914, that year of the Great War, when man appeared
the Faustian bungler off migratory course (Rilke):
...outstript and late,
we thrust up suddenly into the wind,
to fall upon inhospitable ponds —
Und fallen ein auf teilnahmlosen Teich.
In 1911 the young poet Heym imagined the catastrophe he did
not live to see:
A great city sank down in yellow smoke.
Sucked without a sound into the ground;
Vast above the ruins War heaves his' brand...
25)
Geo. Davis 1916?,
"Putting out his eyes". Imperial War Mus., London
Only above the sodden trenches and barbed v/ire could that First
World action hold the Fauve adventure of Homeric war — Yeats,
"An Irish Airman Foresees his Death":
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
�20th Cent. Melt
C.G. Bell
9
I balanced all, brought all to mind.
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.
26)
Nevinson c. 1918, Bearing the Wounded Over No Man's Land (Studio:
Mod. Engl. Art)
Below, Rilke's first flame elation at the "hearsaid, remote,
incredible War God", with George's, and Hesse's, mired in the
this
of
doomed Hyperion landscape of/Nevinson and/Owen:
It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down sortie profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned.
Too fast in thought or death to be be.stirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared...
By.his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell...
"I am the enemy you killed, my friend...
27)
George Gross 1917-18, To Oskar Panizza, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart
George Gross's 1917-18 Kermess of Death whirls us from Owen
beyond embittered Sassoon -Does it matter? — losing your legs?...
For people will always be kind...
And no one will worry a bit —
to the armistice debunking of All Quiet on the Western Front and
No More Parad.es.
Under the Dada compact to mock, the surreal to
estrange. Pound hones
Hysterias, trench confessions.
Laughter out of dead bellies...
There died a myriad.
And of the best among them.
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,'
For a botched civilization...
28)
0.Kokoschka 1909-10, the Marquis & Marquise de Rohan-Montesquieu,
Nat.Mus., Stockholm, & P.E. Geier Coll'n, Rome
But the war shift from euphoria to bitterness was a change of
stress.
By 1910 Eliot's Prufrock seems
indecision of "entre deux guerres"
to have entered the
("I am no prophet — and
�C
20th Cent. Melt
• B011
here's no great matter").
10
At the same time Kokoschka, in Vienna
and Svvitzerland had uncovered the more blasted international
neurotics of Eliot's post-war "Gerontion":
Mr. Silvero
With caressing hands, at Limoges
Who walked all night in the next room...
Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room
Shifting the candles...
so the Waste Land also about 1919:
Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair
Spread out in fiery points
Glowed into words, then would be- savagely still.
"My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me...
I never know what you are thinking. Think."
29)
Brancusi 1919, Mile Pogany (bronze)
(Life, Dec.
5,
'55)
MUSIC: Stravinsky 1922, Octet for Wind Instruments, from First . Mvt.
--- ---------------------------------- ^---------------------- Col. SM 30579
In Brancusi's 1919 Mile Pogany, as in the jazz polyphonies
of post-war Stravinsky, abstract sophistication leaves no clue
to the mutilations style has plowed under.
In that civilization
of Chaplinesque extremes, what crack-ups were waiting under the
brilliance of League of Nations, boom and bust, flapper dress and
skeletal steel?
30)
(fade Stravinsky)
M.Duchamp 1912, Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, Mus. of Art,
.
Philadelphia
Before the war Duchamp had painted for the Armory Show of 1912
this Cubist and Futurist analysis of motion, charged somehow
with the excitement of the atomic physics of those years —
however the American public mocked it as "Nude Falling Down Stairs",
or "Explosion in a Shingle Factory".
31)
Duchamp 1915-23, The Large Glass: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her
Bachelors Even, Mus. of Art, Philadelphia
But the war made Duchamp too a mocker. New York leader of
�C.G. Bell
20th Cent. Melt
11
International Dada, with its nihilist debunking of civilized
values.
Such this "Large Glass: The Bride Stripped Bare by
Her Bachelors, Even"
philosophy)
(as bare as Wittgenstein would strip
—, this love-burlesque of scrap metal and pseudo
dynamo, to which Duchamp gave ten years of assembling and
laissez-faire destruct.
tion by negation,
Yet how soon in the Avant-garde affirma
its junk and nose-thumbing would point the path
of higher abandon (William Carlos Williams'
"No ideas but in
things"), to become the dynamic of a New Frontier.
32)
Mondrian 1936-42, Rythm of Straight Lines, H.Clifford, Philadelphia,
(now D^lsseldorf)
MUSIC: Varese 1931,
Ionization, Col. MS 6146
(about 2/3 in^after siren)
In the tightening of the '20's, Mondrian, who had begun by
abstracting from nature, stripped the canvas to ruled rectangles
of white and primary colors.
Was Varese on such a course in the
percussions and sirens of his 1931 Ionization?
Or Gertrude Stein
in her most arid reductions:
Red Roses.
A cool red rose and a pink cut pink, a
collapse and a sold hole, a little less hot...
Custard.
Custard is this.
It has aches, aches when.
Not to be.
Not to be narrowly.
This makes a whole
little hill.
Better'her dying question:
answer came):
33)
"What's the answer?"
(and when no
"In that case, what's the question?"
(end Varese)
Japanese (Early Edo)
17th c., Jodan-no-ma, room in Shin Shoin Katsura,
Imperial Villa, Kyoto, Japan
MUSIC: Japanese Koto(Izumi Kai), Rokudan: close, Everest 3206
How much of the modern has its cognates in Medieval, Eastern,
Primitive.
Such rectangular grids as Mondrian contrived for
panel painting
Imperial Villa.
unfold to articulated wonder in the Kyoto
The conscious inventive novelty of the modern --
�20th Cent. Melt
C.G. Bell
"Well then, what’s
the question?" recedes before the spatial
ceremony of this life-room.
34)
12
(end Koto music)
Le Corbusier & others 1937-43-, Ministry of Education, Rio de Janeiro
In architecture what had seemed the rectangular quirk of
painting gathers the powers of reinforced concrete, steel and
glass for the functional enclosure of space (so Le Corbusier's
Rio de Janeiro Ministry of Education).
The art struggle which
•
c
ruled lines had bypassed (Cezanne's life-fight for geometry in
nature) resurrects in the tensile strategy of rearing against
gravity (as Buckminster Fuller used to ask at architectural
meetings:
35)
"What does yctr building weigh?") .
Frank Lloyd Wright 1909-10, Robie House, Woodlawn Ave., Chicago, IL
(CGB *60)
The most extraordinary genius of architecture, Frank Lloyd
Wright, was also herald of a new America:
a new ideal of civilization...based on the freedom
of man's mind guided by his conscience...
Those wonderful houses, where nature flows in and out:
(Wright)
We have no longer an outside as outside. Now the
outside may come inside, and the inside may and does
go outside. They are of each other...
There can be no separation between our architecture
and our culture. Nor any separation of either from
our happiness.
— from the Prairie Houses of the early century, the great one
built for Coonley, or this for Robie in Chicago;
36)
F.L. Wright 1952, Mrs. Clinton Walker House, Carmel, CA
through the Pasadena houses of the '20's, or Pennsylvania "Falling
Water" from the '30's, to this on the Carmel coast, 1952 —
democratic vision, empowered by wealth and daring, went on
affirming itself, through war. Lost Generation, Depression, Nazi
�C.G. Bell
20th Cent. Melt
13
war, the advance of Communism, New Frontier, down to Silent Spring
and the napalm bombing of Vietnam.
Wright:
There is a new integrity in America, alive and
working with new means...for freedom and beauty —
yours and mine and our children's — in the realm
of the new architecture.
37)
Same, interior looking out to the ocean
What did that private ocean-pavilion of steel and glass affirm?
The splurge of America, the huge canvases of the N.Y. School,
oil slicks, the looming energy crisis?
Did it affirm its own
negation? -- not far away along the same beach, the hand-built
tower of stone from which Spenglerian Jeffers had written in the
1920's:
"meteors are not needed less than mountains:
shine,
perishing republic", and "This coast crying out for tragedy like
all beautiful places"..."Burn as before with bitter wonders,
land and ocean and the Carmel water."
The very year of the house
the vision of Adlai Stevenson would go down before Eisenhower
and Nixon:
38)
O land, 0 cities; and down to tbe salt sea again.
Grant Wood 1932, Daughters of the American Revolution, Art. Mus.,
Cincinatti
Both Wright's avant-garde and his dream of America having been
opposed,
since the eddies and cross-currents of between-wars, by
Philistine tradition — against which Grant Wood and Sinclair
Lewis had thought to wield an ironic scalpel:
There is a character in spectacles. '. .Babbitt' s spectacles
had huge circular frameless lenses of the very best glass;
the ear pieces were thin bars of gold.
In them he was the
modern business man; one who gave orders to clerks and
drove a car and played occasional golf and was scholarly
in regard to Salesmanship...With respect you beheld him
put on the rest of his uniform as Solid Citizen.
Yet what is such an art mocking but its own limitations,
consanguinities?
its
�20th Cent. Melt
C.G. Bell
39)
14
Picasso 1930, Seated Bather, Museum of Modern Art, NYC
Copland 1930, from the Eiano Variations (close) Dover HCR
MUSIC:
------------
- -----------
------- bT-7014A'~
Picasso's mandibled Bather voiced the same desiccation more
radically.
It was just the translation of worn-out content into
the elemental charge of distilled abstraction that gave inter
national modernism its hard vitality.
So Copland (with less acclaim)
in the hermetic experiment of
the 1930 Piano Variations.
40)
J.S. Curry 1929, Tornado over Kansas, Hadley Art Gal., Muskegan, MI
or RCA LSC 31^4
MUSIC: Copland -1938,
from Billie the Kid, 1st scene. Col. MS 6175
Meanwhile the counterdrive (this 1929 Curry) pushed sanity in
art and reattachment to nature and man — to avoid what Marsh
called "fantastic nonsense" and Benton of Missouri "sickly
rationalizations, psychic inversions and God-awful cultivations".
Life magazine and the WPA helped, Copland too, as if to show that
a clever man can change styles like dress, led music on the
tabloid tack.
(fade Copland)
Typical of the aesthetic war, that when Barnett Newman, in
1942, attacked "Isolationist painting, which they named the
American Renaissance... not an art but an expanded Currier and
Ives revival", he identified it with Hitlerism:
Art in America today stands at a point where anything
that cannot fit into the American scene label is doomed
to be completely ignored...an ever expanding school
of genre painters... telling the story of America's
life of humdrum...instead of the old oaken bucket, it
based its appeal on the hurricane cellar.
41)
Barnett Newman 1949, Concord, Met. Museum, NYC
from
MUSIC: ■ Subotnick (b. 19'33), Electronic Synthesizer/"Silver Apples of
—---------------------------- :------ the Moon", Nonesuch 47174 (Sf. Jno)
(hear close of Pt. Ill
�20th Cent. Melt
C.G. Bell
15
--here Subotnick-Though in a short time (while the synthesizei/ gained in music),
the work of Newman himself, this two-lined color-ground called
Concord, based on the European abstract, but rapturously, almost
(strange as the word seems) organically new, the mystic color
pools of Rothko, action swirls of De Kooning and Pollock,^ with
numberless variants of other experimenters — all that had pushed
the, representational in turn almost to the wall.
42)
(fade Subotnick)
Max Ernst 1943, The Eye of Silence, Washington Univ., Mus. of Art
Had reattachment been an eddy in the always remoter flight
from things of the earth; or is it a recurrent calling?
Dylan
Thomas at any rat:e, began (1934) with estrangement, surreal as
this Max Ernst, The Eye of Silence;
■ Light breaks where no sun shines;
Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
Push in their tides;
And, broken ghosts with glowworms in their heads.
The things of light
File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones...
43)
Jack B. Yeats 1952, The Morning Sea, J.D. Rockefeller, NY
But by 1946, the rapture of "Fern Hill"
("Down rivers of the
windfall light") or of "Poem in October", suggests an art as
immediate in earth-praise as the Irish landscapes of Jack Yeats,
painter-brother of William Butler Yeats, the poet:
t
It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon...
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days...
44)
P.Mondrian 1942-3, Broadway Boogie V'Joogie, Mus. Modern Art, NYC
MUSIC: Boogie Woogie (1936)
Count Basie, etc.
Did even Mondrian, in wartime New York, follow the trend of
�V
9
C.G. Bell
20th Cent. Melt - 16
earth-yea to the jazzing of his squares in what he called
"Broadway Boogie Woogie"— catchy as Cuininings' take-off on
first love as driving a car"
she being Brand
-new; and you
know consequently a
little stiff i was
careful of her and (having
thoroughly oiled the universal
joint tasted my gas felt of
her radiator made sure her springs were O.
K.)
i went right to it flooded-the-carburetor cranked her
up, slipped the
clutch... just as we turned the corner of Divinity
avenue i touched the accelerator and give
her the juice, good
(it
was the first ride and .believe i we was
happy to see how nice she acted right up to
the last minute coming back down by the Public
Gardens i slammed on
the
internalexpanding
&
externalcontracting
brakes Bothatonce and
brought allofher tremB
-ling
to a-:dead.
stand;Still)
(end Boogie Woogie)
45)
Diego Rivera 1932, Man and Machinery, Detroit Inst, of Arts
MUSIC: Honegger 1924, Pacific 231, (close). Vanguard SRV-274 SD;
-——— cf. Mussolov c. 1928, Steel Foundry or Symph. of Machines,
-------------------------------------------- old 78 PAT-X96300
The Left had begun Avant-garde,
politics.
iconoclastic in art as in
(MOssolov's 1928 Machine music communizes this 1924
�20th Cent. Melt
C.G. Bell
Honegger "Pacific 231".)
17
But the populist rallying, even as it
absorbed the radical, veered in counter-revolt against it.
In a
Mexico which called itself Marxist, Diego Rivera (with others)
forged abstract into realism, satire into proletarian acclaim.Meanwhile Left and Right enforced totalitarian conformity.
One was tempted to divide Western Civilization into three
overlapping spans:
1st, the mystico-ascetic or Medieval;
2nd, the
free-humanlst, rising from that ground to Renaissance vigor,
17th
century formulation, 18th and 19th century climax, with orgies of
lacerative individualism extending into this century;
3rd, the
ordered-materialist, growing from the industrial revolution to
the state assertions of pur time.
(end Pacific 231)
From the pragmatic perspective of this third, what was the
whole surreal and abstract wave but a bourgeois pathology?
As from the flight of Symbolist vision, the mass hardening
was a reactionary pathos of between-wars.
46)
0.Kokoschka 1913, Dolomite Landscape: Tre Croci, Horstmann Coll'n,
Hamburg
Against its blatancy, stands the wonder of the ultimate
modern: -- Rilke's last Duino Elegy, the Tenth, gleaming as far
as its "stars of the Land of Pain" — "Die Sterne des Leidlands" over the art scene.
MUSIC: Alb.Berg 1935, Vln Concerto, Philips ST 802-785 LY (opening)
What can we do but invoke it again, and with it, also the music
its death molting claims — Berg's Violin Concerto, which brings
the sensory renewal of the 'thirties to a like transcendence?
It was before the First War, and in the vein of rapt wonder
Kokoschka approached in that Austria, that Rilke received the
first fifteen lines, ending:
�20th Cent. Melt
C.G. Bell
18
We wasters of sorrows — wir, Vergeuder der Schmerzen -...though they are nothing else
Than our winter foliage, our somber evergreen...
Place and settlement, camp, soil and dwelling.
When the poet, in the trough of between-wars, found his way
back to these Elegies begun at Duino,
47)
Paul Klee 1915, Der Niesen, Hermann Rupf, Bern
the tenth had become a surreal pilgrimage:
How strange alas are the streets of the city of pain...
Franz Marc having fallen in the great blood-letting, who could
advance with Rilke out through the "wide landscape of laments" —
"die weite Landschaft der Klagen"?
plumbed the subconscious.
Klee, as much as anyone,
But can Klee's clever miniatures,
here Mount Niesen, behind the Lake of Thun, match Berg's requiem
for Manon Gropius, much less Rilke's ascent with the Early Dead?
(Leishman & Spender)
...in silence the elder Lament
brings him as far as the gorge
where it gleams in the moonlight, —
there, the source of joy —
48)
Kandinsky 1913,
Improvisation (The Flood), Stadtische Gal., Munich
MUSIC: still Berg, Vln Concerto, skip to stormy death
It was Klee's miraculous inventions which had mediated the
1
1920 change in Kandinsky.
Surely, there is a proportionality
between the pre-war and post-war styles in Kandinsky and Rilke.
The Apocalyptic storm by which Kandinsky turns his 1913 Flood
disaster to a color vortex of earth-swallowing spirit, matches
the 1912 stratum of the Tenth Elegy:
"that secret weeping may
blossom" -- "dass das unscheinbare Weinen bluhe", heart's looser
night-surrender to the inconsolable sisters' loosened hair.
49)
Kandinsky 1926,
Several Circles, detail, Guggenheim Museum, NYC
�20th Cent. Melt - 19
C.G. Bell
MUSIC; Berg continued into the Choral
While when Kandinsky comes, through Dada, Klee and Bauhaus,
to the ethereal geometry of this 1926 "Several Circles", it is as
if Berg had brought Bach's "Es ist genug" out of a 12 tone agony,
or Rilke, under pain ranges had found the "well of joy",
...with awe
she names it, says "Among men
it's a carrying stream"
—"Bei den Menschen/ ist sie ein tragender Strom"—
(fade Berg Vln Concerto & skip to the close)
So the close of the Berg,
like the Rilke — up heights seeded
with catkins and the spring rain — climbs the vanishing diapason,
to
the emotion that almost startles
when happiness falls.
die uns beinah besturzt,
wenn ein Gluckliches fallt.
(close of the Berg, without speech)
50)
Russian Byzantine 1508, Fresco of Last Judgment, Cathedral of the
Annunciation, Kremlin, Moscow
MUSIC: Russian 16th c(?), Christmas Hymn, Anthol. Sonore LP-10, A, 1
It is of crucial significance that the materialist nation of the
future, Rhssia,
should have remained so long immersed .in the
lavic appropriation of Byzantine,
(this 1508 Kremlin chapel),
an orthodoxy 19th century Slavophils must turn into an earth-might —
even to the passionate harmonization of all ancient chant,
Against so national a mystique, how could Marx say:
(fade chant)
"The working
men have no country"?
51)
Kiprensky 1827, Portrait of Pushkin, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
In the romantic westernization of that Russia, this portrayed
Pushkin, sad singer of autumn — "Sweet mournful days, lure of
�C.G. Bell
20th Cent. Melt
20
leave-taking eyes" — is .also the prophet a six-winged seraph
gave in the waste, eagle eyes, ears to hear the spheres "And the
green vine in the valley climbing", for his own lying tongue that
of the wise serpent, and for his human heart a coal of fire.
So
he wakes to the voice of God:
Wander the gray seas and earth roads
And burn men's hearts with this, my Word!
Was it then that he called to the mine prisoners of Siberia?:
The walls will crumble at a word...
And brothers give you back the sword.
52)
Malevich 1911, Taking in Harvest, Stedelijk Mus., Amsterdam
In the Avant-garde revolt of the first quarter of this
century, Russians leapt to the fore.
and Stravinsky, lived abroad.
representation kept pace,
Paris.
Though most, like Kandinsky
Not Malevich, whose break with
from year to year, with Munich and
With the exception of a brief stay in France,
1912, and
in Germany,
1926, he stuck it out, through war and revolution,
in Moscow.
In this 1911 Harvest Scene, the observed puts on the
barrels of cylindrical abstraction.
53)
Malevich 1913, Head of a Peasant Girl, Stedelijk Mus., Amsterdam
In this 1913 "Head of a Peasant Girl" Malevich moves, under
the impact of Picasso's cubism, toward what he would formulate
as "a feeling for the absence of the object."
By 1916 this compl
of curved foldings had also yielded to a Constructivism of plane
geometry, culminating in the
nuclear
ultimate of "Suprematism".
As Malevich wrote:
54)
Malevich c.
1915, Black Square, Russian Museum, Leningrad
Suprematism compresses all of painting into a
black square on a white canvas.
I did not have
to invent anything.
It was the absolute night
I felt in me; in that,- I perceived the creation,
and I called it Suprematism.
It expresses itself
in the black plane in the form of a square.
�s
20th Cent. Melt - 21
C.G. Bell
Though Diaghilev had observed in the cresting of 1905;
We are witnesses of...a new and unknown culture
which will be created by us, and which will
also sweep us away.
While the Revolution thought itself avant-garde, Malevich had
art power in Russia.
From Trotsky ("The mind of the artist will
limp after the reality the politicians are creating")
to Stalin,
reaction hardened (was it the outrage of that Internationale
where ground and trees were painted in loud geometries?)-
When
Malevich died in 1935, it was in poverty and neglect, his once
Bolshevik attempt called "Bourgeois formalism".
55)
Boris Johanson 1933,
Interrogation of two Communists, USSR
At what flaming acts and inertia of art that overthrow and
changing of the tinctures connived.
Here a 1933 Interrogation of
two Communists, with Shostakovich and Sholokov:
.
, <
(Kouseva tsky;
MUSIC: Shostakovich 1937, Fifth Symphony, 1st Mvt, before climax, /
=:
.. ■
-- Col ML 47 39
Bravely, proudly lifting his head, Podtielkov mounted
the stool beneath the noose, unbuttoned the collar
around his stout sv/arthy neck, and without the
tremor of a muscle, himself set the soapy rope...
"See -how few* are left to look on at our death...
You have been deceived.
The revolutionary government
will come, and you will see where the truth was.
The finest sons of the gentle Don you have laid
in that hole."
(fade Fifth Symphony)
Let this picture from the year Hitler came to power exemplify
the state realism Stalin also enforced.
56)
Pavlo Filonov c. 1935?, Fragment of Faces ("Hidden Soviet Art",
Life Mar.28, 1960)
MUSIC: Shostakovich 1936, close of Symph. 4, Melodiya-Angel SR-40177
And only long after, with the literary underground we know of,
paintings would appear of an Avant-garde suppressed under Soviet
�20th Cent. Melt
C.G,. Bell
conformity:
22
this mosaic of distrubed faces by Filonov, Leningrad
painter who died in 1941.
Suddenly one would realize what one
must have known before, that consciousness is like a gene-pool;
post-romantic civilizations may demand, resolve; but they cannot
obliterate what has been experienced by the soul.
It is a tribute to Shostakovich that in his experimental works,
condemned or quietly withdrawn, we are hypnotized toward that
other focus — as with the mysterious -close of the disapproved
Fourth Symphony.
57)
(close Shostakovich 4th)
Peter Blume 1934-7, The Eternal City, Mus. of Modern Art, NYC
When Mussolini in 1923 popped out of the Pandora box, among
battered books and broken statues of the Eternal City, he did not
'look so green-faced as Peter Blume would make him more than twelve
years later.
Lincoln Steffens in fact had thought him God's
clc.rifying thunderbolt.
asked.
"You're a correspondent?"
"You saw the war?
Revolution in Russia?
anything... Listen.
Yes.
Yes.
And the peace?
Well," he sneered,
Mussolini had
Yes.
And the
"did you learn
Do you think now any of the things you thought
before you saw the war, the peace and the revolution?"
But if that was God's thunderbolt, Steffens obscured the
■h'
turning of God on himself — how Futurist ecstatic rant and
d'Annunzio's foaming poems, leagued with Mussolini and castor oil
to make the trains run on time, might overshoot.
no more of the brotherhood,
"Let us hear
sisterhood and other bastard relations
of nations; all relations of nations are those of power"...
58)
Hitler c.
1920?,
early painting of a dream castle, Life 10/30/39
— So darkening Europe under Flying Fortresses.
Since meanwhile a most inadequate representational painter.
�20th Cent. Melt
C.G. Bell
23
the Austrian, Adolf Hitler, had concretized, and, in the bitterness
of German defeat and inflation, was deflecting his art from such
paintings as this castle (dream madhouse he might have escaped
from) to a Mein Kampf veering of Socialist Workers to the turgid
Right.
As Dante had said of the wrathful:
"Portando dentro
accidioso fummo."
With the Dachau smoke of that strange incinerator, the pathos
of moral rearmament and soul-hardening would spread over Europe
the fiercest realism of all.
59)
Adolf- Wamper c.
1938, Genius of Victory, Kunst Vol 81, 1933-40
In the "Genius of Victory" by Wamper (another Adolf), everything
from abstract and Expressionist, D^da and Surreal is forcibly
reversed in the Charles Atlas imperative of totalitarian renewal —
caricature of Nietzsche's call to higher living:
A ruling race can only grow from terrible and
violent beginnings.
Where are the barbarians
of the twentieth century?
(If only the Germans could have claimed a monopoly of theml)
60)
Double: Saint-Sever Apocalypse c. 1050, Flood, Bibl.Nat., Paris;
and Picasso 1937, Guernica, det. of Left portion, Barcelona?
"The tiger springs in the new year .
'
Us he devours."
T.S. Elio,t in "Gerontion" had voiced that cyclical Coming —
so "the innumerable clanging wings" and "Sailing to Byzantium"
of Yeats' War, Civil War and post-war Tower.
Even Picasso,
though more Socialist than Christian, has visibly rested his 1937
bombing of Guernica on a Flood destruction from the Saint Severs
Apocalypse of 1050.
So the Wasteland had shaped for its age a
mythology of earth-sabotage:
What is the city over mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens
Vienna London
Unreal...
Alexandria
�C.G. Bell
20th Cent. Melt - 24
(To which the Second War would add Warsaw, Rotterdam, Dresden,
and all the rest.)
Double: Picasso 1937, Guernica 1st State; and Final State
Against the Communist realism of Russia, Picasso's Partisan
testimony fragments space and abstracts emotion.
From the first
state of the Guernica (below) to the last (above), human content
(the redemptive pain of the warrior stretched out as if crucified)
is calcined and suppressed.
Yet in a pictography where perspective,
foreshortening, chiaroscuro go under, force flames some Heraclitean
inverse of negation.
While the claimants of world order cranked
up their rhetoric, Picasso locked horns with god in the whirlwind.
•_Picasso 1937, Guernica 2nd State det. Warrior's raised fist
rays & corn; and Final State det., sword hand with flowers
Even so, programmatic message — Rilke's hazel catkins from
the dead land, rooted far back in the Revolutionary and Romantic,
s
Weary the winters, at the last comes corn" — has
shaped in the photographed second state of the painting
(above),
such a sun-rayed promise of grain from the warrior's raised fist.
And although the symbolic arm was to disappear under the writhing
horse, it is in the final state (below)
hand of a dead woman,
spray of flowers;
that what had been the
long since painted out, would resurrect as a
Dante's "so long as hope puts up a blade of
green"; Rilke's "Heilkraut" of the Fifth Elegy, his "Singing plant"
on the peaks of the heart".
hand,
Leafing up from the clenched sword
it counters annihilation.
^_War II photo 1945, Demolition on Iwo Jima,
Eastman House,
Rochester
So where the First War had ended in capitalist debunking, the
Second swelled through Partisan alliance to a crusade of the
�20th Cent. Melt - 25
C.G. Bell
"Peace-loving Peoples", while Churchills's rhetoric
of "blood, sweat and tears" and "Fight them on the
beaches, fight them at
sea, fight them in the
air", revived the myth of heroic action.
--
How fragile, in the wa^ of Eliot's West:
I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain...
My house is a decayed house...
I an old man
A dull head among windy spaces.
and:
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
-- how vulnerable to My Lai.
64)
Joan Miro 1942, Woman & Bird in front of the Sun
Yet through the war and the decade after, down to the
overflow of Hippie wish, something extraordinary happened;
the partisan crusade incredibly veered through the reversal
of Cold War into New Frontiers and the dream of free enterprise
opulence.
At the same time those arts which had begun in Dada
mockery expand the same techniques (this 1942 Miro) to visionary
wonder.
In Finnegan's Wake of 1939, Joyce led all artificers
of transverbal myth:
We who live under heaven, we of the clovery
kingdom, we middlesins people have often watched
the sky overreaching the land. We suddenly have...
A kind of a thinglike all trayloggedthen
pubably it resymbles a pelvic or some kvind then
props an acutebacked quadrangle with aslant off
ohahnthenth a wenchyou may cuddler, lying with
�20th Cent. Melt - 26
C.G. Bell
her royal Irish uppershoes among the theeckleaves.
Signs are on of a mere by token that wills
still to be becoming upon this there once a here
was world. As the dayeleyves unfolden them.
In the wake of the blackshape...
65)
Arshile Gorky, 1944, "How mv Mother's Embroidered Apron
Unfolds in my Life", Coll'n Bagiev Wright, Seattle
MUbiC: Carter 1959. Str.Qrt 2, near close. Col RJi272l
At the same time the Turkish Armenian immigr^Kt
Gorki (up to his accident and suicide) had seized on
and was melting down the abstract and the surreal
extremes of Avant-garde, crashing through about 1941
to a subconscious plasticity of paint-fused
canvas, drips and all, as it has been called, "a
'
phenomenology of the invisibile".
�20th Cent. Melt - 27
C • G. Bel 1
Was the musical tie back to Ives, or to his followers, here Carter?
(fade Carter)
It was Gorki's flag which bannered the pfncer attack (action
painting and color field) of the New York School, of which Motherwell
would write:
The present vitality of American Art is connected with
the unparallelled depth of our democracy.
66)
0. Pollock 1943, Pasiphae, Coll'n Lee K. Pollock (or a later one?)
Pollock's liberation is like that of a Cage happening.
MUSIC: John Cage c. 1954?, from Variations IV, a live
performance. Everest 3132
In poetry it was the old Pound (though hardly democratic) whose Canto's
stirred such unleashing.
The stench of wet coal, politicians
............... e and ...........in, their wrists bound to their ankles
Standing bare bum
Faces smeared on their rumps, wide eye on flat buttock.
Bush hanging for beard,
Addressing crowds through their arse-holes.
Addressing the multitudes in the ooze,
newts, water-slugs, water-maggots...
howling, as of a hen-yard in a printing house,
the clatter of presses...
foetor, sweat, the stench of stale oranges,
dung, last cess-pool of the universe...
the great arse-hole, broken with piles,
hanging stalactites, greasy as sky over Westminster...
chewed cigar-butts, without dignity, without tragedy,
........m Episcopus, waving a condom full of black-beetles,
monopolists, obstructors of knowledge,
obstructors of distribution.
(end Cage)
67)
Franz Kline 1959, Initial. Robt. S. Scull. Gt. Neck, N.Y.
In that booming growth market of elemental art, when the international
Black Mountain voice of Franz Kline lets loose, in one of those huge
free-brush signatures (this of 1959, called Initial), what is that 100
inch vehemence of Chinese caligraphy turned to muscular release telling us
of?
If of Jung's "superhuman world of contrasting light and darkness"--
�20th Cent. Melt - 28
C.G. Bell
the primordial experience rends from top to bottom
the curtain upon which is painted the picture Of
an ordered cosmos, and allows a glimpse into the
unfathomed abyss of what has not yet become -What of Jung's warning:
"to which one is therefore in danger of suc
cumbing"?
68)
Jim Gilbert 1949?, Chicago River, detail. CGB & D^B, Santa Fe
And when that last old master, Jim Gilbert, about 1949, so aware
of post-war experiment, yet pursuing on his own the Cezanne problem
of color shapes through the visible (the darks of this detail not
unlike those of Kline's ink-writing), when Gilbert gloomed the Chicago
River, what does that melancholy bum see in the clouded water
but hints
of Asian war and ecological catastrophe — Pollock's open-throttle
democracy, slinging oil, ready to sling a rod?
RocKefexler, Ketropoli ta.n
69)
N. Amer. Indian, Mississippi Stage, Duck River, Stone Man, Mus. Prim. Art NYC
How much, all over the world, has been melted down into the restless
improbability of that chain-reaction.
With what timeless sufficiency
the stone man of the Tennessee Moundbuilders looks back at the museum
lookers of New York.
To tell those upstarts how long that forest crouch
could have been maintained.
70)
Oscar Howe 1962, Medicine Man, US Dept, of the Interior
MUSIC:
Native American Church, tape of chant with drums
Today, even in the Peyote-cult chant of the Native American church
(Christian), the irreversible trend is of the melting pot.
In this
1962 Medicine Man by Oscar Howe (a Sioux trained in Santa Fe), Indian life
gives theme and local color to a panal of which the consciousness and cubistic
techniques are world-modern.
711 Clas^sical Mava c. 700, Hill temple stripped of trees, Yaxchilan. Chig,pas
—^^-----------------------(Gertrude^om)
In 500 years Classical Maya culture had exhausted its habitat
�20th Cent. Melt - 29
C.G. Bell
(no doubt by cropping the jungle around such populations centers
as this Yaxchilan, sacred city in a great bend of the Usumacinta.
Abandoned about 1300, it is only now that the temples have been cleared
of whelming forest.
As when facing the monuments of the Near-East, of India, China, or
the Cambodian ruins of the Kingdom of the Khmers, we are staggered by the
contrasting glories of pre-Western man, each isolated fastness flowering
in its own life and style.
72) Maya c. 800, Jaina Style, painted pottery (whistle). Lovers, Bliss Coll_l£
---- ----Nat. Gal., wash. DC
—'■
''
.So in the late Classical Maya, the Gulf Coast island of Jaina
produced wonderfully refined painted pottery figurines, in which ari
stocratic life is depicted with a finesse and verve as of the Orient,
though with a fusion of beauty and the mocking grotesque elsewhere un
paralleled -- a tragi-comic individuation on its own human terms, to
which we have lost the clue.
73)
M. Ocoranza C. 1870?, The Withered Flower, Bellas Artes, Mexico DF
How weird, after the conquest, to see the whole expanse, from Toltec
through Aztec to Maya, take up the leavings of Europe — Ocoranza,
sentimentalist of the Federal District, receiving from Greuze of The
Broken Pitcher this erotic double-talk of lechery and morality
the
poor debauched girl tearfully contemplating her snapped lily.
74)
Orozco 1937, Hidalgo, fresco det.,
stairhall. Pal de Govierno, Guadalajara
No wonder the mawkish mummery broke to Orozco's frescoes of the
Revolution, where the Meschittf firebrand Hidalgo frees the enslaved masses.
Though that would-be socialist upheaval empowered another exploitation by
the few.
75)
Orozco 1939, Man of Flame, fresco, Hospicio Cabanas, Guadalajara
Prophetic, that the national series of between-war Orozcos should
A,
�20th Cent. Melt - 30
C.G, Bell
culminate in the cupola of the Hospicio Cabanas in Guadalajara, the
dilemma of the man of flames -- as with Kazantzakis' Odysseus -- that to live
is to be consumed, the ascent of man inevitably his conflagration.
76)
L. Garcia Guerreo 1961, Pintura 99, Priv. Coll'n, Mexico, DF
Meanwhile art-Mexico settled from the '30's peak of Expressionist
propaganda realism to the undifferentiated internationalism -- whether
weak or strong --
of Guerrero's flame and black abstraction, entitled,
after Kandinsky and the rest. Picture 99, 1961.
Nok Sculpture of Nigeria c. 600 BC,
77)
MUSIC:
-------
Terra Cotta Head, Inst, of Arts, Detroit
Malinke (14th c. Mali of E. African), Percussion Dance
(calabash water drums tuned in 4ths) 01ympic:Atlas 6110
The African Black enters art in the Nok terra cottas of Nigeria about
600 BC, these heads as charged with force as the drum rythms which, from
that continental base (here the 14th century Mali of East Africa) and
with unparallelled dispatch, would ravish the entire world.
78)
Hellenistic c. 1st cent.BS, Young Negro Musician, bronze, det. Chalons-sur-Saone
A measure of that power (with which Faulkner, who calls it indomitable,
has energized his fiction), that when it fans out 500 years later from the
Nile into Graeco-Rome, the most sophistic Hellenistic bronzes suddenly sway
with the pulse of black body and the throb of black soul.
79)
Eakins 1878, Negro Boy Dancing, watercolor, Metro. Mus, NYC
A measure — that when in Eakins' Emancipated Philadelphia (after the
Civil War) the lithe banjoist strikes up, it is recognizably in the same
beat; and when the boy responds for his father with a dance, it is with
the unaltered suppleness of abandoned ligatures.
No doubt, through all
vicissitudes, the Negro, as unmistakably as any group in history, will have
held his own. (fade Malinke drums)
80) Abu Salley (US Black) 1977, acquatint & etching; "And they tried to kill all
our Buffalo"; C.G. Bell Coll'n
�20.th Cent. Melt - 31
C.6. Bel 1
Yet when today's American Black rouses the Irish blood of his
ancient servitude, and under the Mohammedan name of Abu Salley, takes over,
in post-Gdya etching (with the hanged Christ), the dismembered totems of
our Indian tragedy -- "They tried to kill all our Buffalo" -- he is as
catastrophically world-modern as the French, or English poems of the New
Africa •
this Parkes, of Ghana, "Apocalypse";
In the last days'.
Strange sights shall visit the earth.
Sights that may turn to blood the moon.
This sun to midnight -- in the last days.
But now, when swords are not yet ploughshares.
And spears still spears...
Remember, my little ones...
If in this strange sub-human realm
Your eyes fall on a stone, a hard black stone.
Lifeless and muddy, that has grown a beard.
Pray children...ask no questions...
If perchance you see a hare that roars
Or an ape perched in a palanquin.
Look on in silence. Quickly pass by.
Quickly.
81)
Double: Attic c. 285 BC (replica). Head of Epicurus, Met. Mus., NYC; and Hadda
(Gandhara) c. 4th cent. AD, Stucco bust of an Ascetic, Mus., Kabul
MUSIC:
______
Bismillah Khan (Benares) Shehnai (cf. oboe) & acc't, Raga-Lalat, Odeon
V..:::::
------------MOAE 113
The excavations of the Indus Valley reach back to the earliest
civilizations of the third millennium; but the India we think of as primordial,
has elaborated its arts since contact with Alexander.
As Dion Chrysostom
records (c. 80 AD) : "even among the Indians, they say, Homer's poetry is
sung, having been translated by them into their own dialect."
If the epics
so implied .claim -- like the Vedas — the second millennium of Aryan conquest,
the earliest Sanscrit inscription remains of 150 AD; and who can rear a history
of thought, poetry and music over the flux of oral tradition?
In art, on the
contrary, we perceive at a glance the Indianization of the Greek philosopher
�•$
C.G. Bell
20th Cent. Melt - 32
image, from this urbane Epicurus (left) stemming from the 3rd century BC;
to the Gandharan ascetic of Hadda (right), in what is now Afganistan.
82)
Indian (Madya Pradesh) c. 1000 AD, Kandarya-Makadeo (Siva) Temple, Kajuraho,
N. India
When Bismillah Khan of Benares performs on the Shehnai (a kind of oboe)
this Raga-Lalat, a melody of morning pathos, to the tablat 16 beat Teental
rythm, that improvisation of today issues like robed Brahmins from the por
tal of the living past -- this lOOOAD Shiva temple in Madya Pradesh.
Here
no revolution has occurred; in art, in music, in the recitation of Sanscrit
hymns, it might seem timeless India was flowering still.
(jump to close of
■ Ra^
83)
Indian scene, on the banks of the Ganges in Benares (Hurlimann,)
Though the whole life of India, through British occupation, Ghandi
and the achievement of independence, cries out (as here on the Benares
banks of the Ganges) how desperately that soul-stretched land is caught
in the aTl-melting whirl of modern necessity ;
good nighti"
"Do not go gentle into that
It is the Third World of Galway Kinnell's "To a Child in
Calcutta";
In Calcutta, I thought.
Every pimp, taxi driver, whore and begger.
Dowsed for me through the alleys day and night -In Bandook Gulli I came upon you,
I
On a street crossed by fading songs
I held you in my arms
Until you slept, in these arms.
In rags, in the pain of a little flesh.
84)
Affandi (Indonesian Expressionist) c. 1940?, The Barber, Museo d'Arte Orientale,
Rome
And when Buddhist India spilled over into the Cambodian Kingdom of the
Khmers, how remote that jungle majesty from what the Wes tern-trained
Expressionist, Affandi, has recorded in his "Barber" -- not to speak of the
Manifesto now invading the Indonesian poverty- vacuum of coca-cola exploitation
�ts
20th Cent. Melt - 33
C.G. Bell
and napalm-war.
85)
China
(end Raga)
(Sung) c. 12th cent., Kuan-yin (Bodhisattva), Fine Arts, Boston
MUSIC: Ancient Chinese, Tzuey Ueng Charn, played on the chyn (zither), RCA-V-LM
---■ —----------------------------------------------------^--------------- 6057, Side 1, Band 1
Erom the imperial China of this 12th century polychromed wood; Kuan-yin
Compassionate Bodhisattva in the posture of Royal relaxatioi^a figure of
meditational command, with a zither tune of refined intoxication,
86)
(end zither)
Hua T'ien-yu (Chinese Sculptor) c. 1940?, Air Raid, Priv. Coll'n, Paris
the same time-vortex whirls us (about 1940?) into the "Air Raid" of Paris
trained Hua t'ien-yu; where Oriental mother and children, stretched on the.
wish and danger of romantic self and mechanized war, seek, like a bomb shelter,
the containment of abstraction.
Though again what would intervene would be
the Communist absorption of individual desire in a realism no lessTfestern
than propaganda gladness -87)
No. Korean 1975, "The Fatherly Leader Marshal Kim.II Sung with our Compatriots,
from Japan", Commun. Publication
here from the-Democratic People's Republic of North Korea, "The Fatherly
Leader Marshal. Kim II Sung with our Compatriots from Japan"
-- which,
though it purports to be most militantly of the East, has scarcely a trace of
anything Less Euro-American than pie in the sky.
Is not the touted
"Immortal Juche Idea" of the fatherly leader himself a plural rehandling of
the most blatant Victorian poem, Henley's "Invictus":
"I am the master of
my fate...the captain of my soul"?
At the same time that the East has materialized that promise -88)
India (N.W. Deccan)
MUSIC:
5th Cent., Gautama, the Buddha, Cave 10, Ajanta
Tibet, Lamaist Chanting, RCA-V-LM 6067, Side II, Band 1,b
the flower-child West, alienated from those goods, reverts to a quietism the
Orient has abandoned — this haloed Gautama Buddha of 5th century Ajanta, with
�20th Cent. Melt - 34
C.G. Bell
Tibetan drums and chant.
That an ancient cave religion, however, stemming
from the earth-denial and search of soul it shared with early Christianity,
could now, uprooted from its habitat, answer for mechanized man, seems as in
congruous as when a Buddhist monk rides a motor bike to his protest
immolation,
89)
(fade Lamaist chant)
Blue glow of Neutrons in a high flux reactor. Oak Ridge, Tenn.
and uses the gasoline to set himself on fire.
Here art images knock under; since that blue grotto of neutrons in the
water of a high flux reactor at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, says things no painting,
statue or building will ever say about the Promethean overweening of our three
fold world, its fission and fusion building to a threshold, whether of advance
or catastrophe is not yet decipherable in the cards.
90)
Double:
Paul Klee l903. Portrait of the Artist's Sister, and 1918, "Einst dem
Grau der Nacht enttaucht", both Klee Foundation, Bern
Is the spaceflight from connection the only art-vivifier, where syn
thesizing responsibility has gone stale?
Thus Klee from 1903 (left) to 1918 (right); and surely if realism offers so
little in the treatment of a loved sister, it must be time to dissolve those
constructs of the physical, into cryptographs of lettered color-squares:
"Einst den] Grau der Nacht enttaucht" — "Once from the gray of nighd; emerged/
The heavy and dear/ and strong from fire" -- with the rest of the fathomless
message, penned above and painted below.
91)
Mexico, Mahogany Logs on a pon. , near Lacanha, Chiapas (C6B '78)
Was there a tie, when the abstract chessboard took over, in the break
down of realistic cultivation — a link always stronger from war through
between-war and second war, to now (mahogany logs floating on a lake in the
vanishing Lacandon rain-forest, Chiapas)-- a tie between the miscarriage
of earth and of art-representation --
�20th Cent. Melt - 35
C.G. Bell
92)
Skylab nears reentry 1979, NASA (Smithsonian May 79)
as between the desperate gamble of other worlds (Skylab 1979, nearing
reentry), and the assault of abstract art on the secrets of the void?
93) Geo. Catlin 1836, Sioux Indians pursuing a stag in a- canoe, Smithsonian
------------- ----------- —-----------------Wash. DC
Wherever-polarities, (Empedocles'^Eros and Eris, Love and Hate)
are to be drawn, like light and dark, from the mottlings of the actual
-- all phenomena, all experienced states, though we give them polar
names (as bound and free), can no more coincide with their limits
than a hyperbola can touch its asymptotes.
Fire and water treated
as symbolic opposites are other than their haunting appearances in
nature and history.
As far back as Catlin's first studies of fhe
American West, this water-rich concord of man and nature sets firestick killer against grazer.
94)
Catlin 1830,
Prarie meadows burning, upper Missouri, Smithsonian, Wash.__DC
As here the same upper-Missouri sets, against the slow uprearing of
plant, fire -- both Heraclitean, all-consuming limit, and a seasonal
process, destruction contained in the form-building balances of nature.
Already Catlin's America is stretched over straining absolutes of leaf
and flam^.
95)
Japan (Heian Period)
MUSIC:
lOth-llth cent., Dai-itoku Myo-o, Fine Arts, Boston,
Peking c. 1850,opera. Beheading a Son, close, RCA-V-LM—6057 (1 ,6.)
So if they were indeed gods, those worshipped ambivalencies (this Daiitoku Myo-o, fire guardian of the Esoteric Buddhist Pantheon, with whom our
World Melt began — here too with Peking opera), they must have stared
through it all before, like Yeats' "Old Rocky Face" — laughing "in
tragic joy".
(end Peking Opera)
Foreseeing that at the end of romantic reversal and abstract splurge.
�20th Cent. Melt - 36
C.G. Bell
from between wars and after, to the Hippie disburdening of all restraint,
■96)
M. Rothko
1936, Self
Portrait,
estate of Mary A. Rothko
ther^ would come a man named Rothko, American, born in Russia 1902,
his 1936 Self Portrait the burnt-out malaise of old Europe landed in
Melting Pot New York, — that pathos of the '30's crying for the ab
stract conversion of the '50's, compared by some with Paul's cataclysm
by blinding light — though William Carlos Williams' "I gave up" had
explored the way -- based everywhere, from fceat defiance to drugged
hope, on the same desperate evidence, to boost ultimate negation into
transration orbit; -97V Rothko 1938, Subway Scene, Rothko Estate (Guggenheim Rothko show).
Foreseeable, he would try New Deal realism, still groping at age 36 —
this Subway, he would try, and fail, rather inconspicuously; until
surreal and abstract, Kandinsky, Miro, Gorky came to the rescue
98)
Rothko 1945, Primeval Landscape, Estate of the Artist (Guggenheim Show)
(this primeval Landscape of 1945) — as he would later theorize:
The progression of a painter's work as it travels
in time from point to point, will be toward clarity;
toward the elimination of all obstacles between the
painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer.
As examples of such obstacles, I give (among others) memory,
history or geometry, which are swamps of generalization
from’which one might pull out parodies of ideas (which are ghosts)
but never an idea in itself. To achieve this clarity is,
inevitably, to be understood -ignoring Jung's devouring abyss, where Idea, stripped of world-content
converges the limits of infinte and void -- what Sylvia Plath longed
toward in her "Poppies in July":
Little poppies, little hell flames,
Do you do no harm?...
A mouth just bloodied.
Little bloody skirts 1...
If I could bleed, or sleepl --
�■ »
45
20th Cent. Melt - 37
C..G. Bell
If my mouth could marry a hurt like thatl...
But colourless.
Colourless.
He on the verge of that, talking of myth and the collective un
conscious, yet drawing from the abstract surreal no such archetype as
Picasso's GLsrrrica, still searching, through dream roots, swirl and
vegetation, a 43 year old genius, not yet sure -- the private life
also in upheaval...
99)
Rothko 1961, Number 118, Nordrhein-Westfalen Coll'n, Dusseldorf
MUSIC: Messiaen 1940, Quatour pour la Fin du Temps, Beginning of last mvt,
----------------------------------- —---------------------------------- Deutsche Gram. 2531 093
When suddenly, 1949, almost ten years after Messiaen's Quartet for
the End of Time, Rothko, in touch with Barnett Newman, who had like
wise probed the surreal, and then struck deep into color pools crossed
by one or two (more vital than geometric) bands -- now Rothko, nearing
50, took up the rapturous drowning -- those soul absorbing color glows,
melting at the edges like cloud: -- such a breakthrough as the poet
Roethke's, though his led, outwardly, to
classical measure:
In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade...
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
How slowly dark comes down on what we do.
100)
(fade Messiaen)
Rothko 1970, Black on Gray, Acrylic, Anon, owner (Guggenheim show)
MUSIC:
same Messiaen, close of last movement
Although the soul-solitude of those paradox voids plagued Rothko
with continual self-doubt, for 20 years he pursued the logic and mystery
of that inmersion, culminating in the '60's in contemplative rooms of
such hypnotic panels.
Though of those for the Chapel of Religious
�20th Cent. Melt - 38
C.6. Bel 1
Meditation in Houston, arranged like ikons by singles and triptychs
(in suggested accord with the Passion of Christ) he said in disappoint
ment, shortly before his suicide;
"I was always looking for something
new
more."
He was 67, in poor health and with/family troubles; yet the
release of the primordial, to draw an always expected more from an always
attenuated less, until the infinite hangs on the zero, gives that death
symbolic dimension.
At the end, he thinned to acrylic in this horizoned Black on Gray,
whose Dark Light, draws us on, as to a landing on a formless planet, to
grope the alien atmosphere for whatever we once called our own.
... Is this the way
The world melts, on the wind suffers a cloud change?
(close Messiaen)
�
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Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound
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20th Cent. C: World Melt, Symbolic History, Part 37
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Script of Part 37 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell.
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Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010
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Santa Fe, NM
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[1988-1990]
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SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_37_20th_Cent_C--World_Melt
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Text
^(H
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SYMBOLIC ^HIS^O^
iZfirougli SigHi and Sound
38.
NOUl - Alpha
CHARLES G. BELL
ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
0
r
1260 CANYON ROAD
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501
March
1994
�St^nfiOLXC HXSTORy
Tlirou9fi Si^ht and, SouncC
38. Nouj - nipha
1)
M. QuentRer, 1761, WinUr: Saturn and*lme, (BarocRf J^estsaCe; + ^details
Music:
J,S. Bach, 1721, 6th Brandenburg Concerto, opening, LLP 144
Time has turned to a myth while I have thought to close
Symbolic History with a show called NOW, and still I ask: "Which
Now, the fleeting or eternal? Whose Now, mine or of the world?" For
five years that Immanence has defied me, while thirty-eight other
realms have been subdued, slide-taped, then videoed — until all my
Panzer divisions press this threshold, where the flying god with the
scythe, who mows the past, gathers that conscious harvest to sow a
future.
2)
Qoya C.1798, Spain,
Music:
and iHjstory, !JFine Slrts, ‘Boston; + ‘U detail
Haydn 1794, Symphony #101 in D Major, close of 2nd movement
("The Clock"), Westminster WL5102
In 1985 I thought a single NOW could be shaped along with the
four shows of this century — as if the modern rush would round to its
own containment.
Twice I announced deadline dates. The dates were
accomplished, but not the Now.Once I presented such fragments as
had been recorded. I resurrect the opening: (Haydn, continues through
forte)
3)
3a)
SLpoUo Module over the moon ^ (d
^
‘Triton, SatelUte ofpdgptune, 14n£ust 1989j
/l.
fa.
^
Either we cannot make a show of Now, or we have been doing
it all along, since all history is of nows, and it is all past. Waiting for
that Now is like waiting with Weil or Becket for God or Godot.
3/1994
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1
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic
History
In what sense is the moonflight and landing of 1969 (or
Voyager's '89 scan of Triton, satellite of Neptune) more with us than
the Age of Revolution or the Birth of Christ? Though all exist in
consciousness, where the oldest may mean most, we, the living, can
have lived through some and not through others.
4)
Victor !Hu£o, 1867, ‘Wave qfi\{y (Destiny, (Hugo's House, (Paris; + V detaiC
So there is a relative now of our own experience, cresting, like Victor
Hugo's Life-wave, toward an Absolute Now — Shakespeare's "pro
phetic soul/ Of the wide world dreaming on things to come". Surely
that soul, like ours, is a working presence^ where past and future
merge and are remade.
(close Haydn)
5)
(African ((RS’Cent) from (HfiotCesia (ZezuruF) (Demon (Has!^ (Museum fur
voC^rl^nde, HamSurg; first, V detail.
Music;
African drums from Haiti, Elektra ELK-130, B
Since nothing that has furrowed perceptive space-time is so
past or dead that it cannot be quickened to growth. Thus the oldest,
or if recent, most remote record of man's beginnings in the alienation
of mask (like the African beat which has wild-fired over the world,
here from a New World base in Haiti),
(end drums)
6) (Paul (Kfee, c.1920-24, (Mas^ (fCeditfieim QcUlery, ‘BerUn; + V detail
6 a) (DouBCe of 5 and 6
66) (DouBCe: [A] (Picasso, 1932, detail of Qid at a (Mirror, and[(B] (Maslu (F^a^
(Brit.ColumBia
Music;
from Jelly Roll Morton's Doctor Jazz, to Stravinsky, Histoire du
Soldat Suite, from 5th movement. Philips A 01193 L
could open through Picasso to this sophistic Klee of the Munich
1920s. Is Chaplin intended, or the blazing absurdity of Hitler, ha
ranguing first followers in the Hofbrauhaus?
While Jelly Roll
Morton's "Doctor Jazz" took art-Stravinsky by storm. From Rhodesian
mask, to mask return, history brings jungle voodoo to the soul crisis
of mechanized man.
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2
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic
History
Though the Now is more brain-involuted than any simple cut
can imply
(fade Stravinsky)
a7)
7)
Jan van T,yc(<u 1434, JimoCfiniManure,
Same, dehsi
Music;
QaCCery, London
^
Dufay, c.1440, Adieu m'Amour (Cape) AS 43, or EMS 206
a crux of the three-fold mystery of time: wheel of return, arrow of
advance, pool of what abides. Lear: "And we'll wear out in a walled
prison packs and sects of great ones that ebb and flow by the moon."
In that manifold, Paul was more real for Luther than the Papal bull
threatening from Rome. So the mirror inscription of Jan van Eyck's
Arnolfini Marriage — "Johannes de Eyck fuit hie," "Jan van Eyck was
here" — turns the moment to a testimony — not "was" but "is" —
present as the Dufay which might almost have sounded in that room;
though it had to die away and be reborn out of scholarship and
Cape's Pro Musica of Brussels; yet to a life as real as jazz.
8)
9)
^nne ^uefuman CrosSy, 1372-3, dleatfi of ^Brocris
Marda Simpson, '74, ^Uie TCace; Botfi CQ. & (DM. (BdC, Santa J^e
What longing of the modern soul, tender as Hellenistic nostalgia
(attested by the art of friends: Anne Buchanan Crosby's Myth of Procris, Marcia Simpson's The Place) has pushed the vielle poignance of
Dufay to recorded admiration?
(dose Dufay)
10)
(DouBCe: [Si] "Egypt, Dynasty I"U, c. 2700 (B.C., (Hs^erve JCead, (KjmstfOstorisefies Museum, "l^ienna, and [B] (Dpiasty XVlII, c. 1370 (B.C., (PCaster
Mas^Jrom Studio of scuCptor Ihutmose, Simama, (BerUn; + detaiC cf 10(B
From culture to culture we have witnessed that buildup of
yearning, as of sensuous person: Egypt, from the dawn smile of an
Old Kingdom head, to a plaster mask from a New Kingdom studio in
Ikhnaton's Amarna, so touchingly enfleshed, who can tell if its veri
similitude is modelled or cast from life?
3/1994
NOW — Alpha
�C.G. Bell
11)
Symbolic
History
(DouBCe: [J^j ‘Etruscan, c. 530 ®.C./ Sarcopfu^us, ^oung 5iiisBan(C and ^fe
(Cerveteri), VUCa QiuCia, fl(pme, and [(B] Znd-lst unU ‘B.O, OCd fHusBand and
Wife, ‘]/oCterra, Italy
So with Etruscan tomb couples, from 6th-century Odysseyan
god-favor, to a weighty mortality, after 500 years, under the civil
strife of Republican Rome. But is there not a time when the reverse
tide sets in,
IZ)
(DouBCe: ^Rpman HCeads: [H] 1st unt., front Ostia, and [B] 4tB unt., from
‘Uia 5ippia! BotB, Uiermae Museum, fRpme (C(fB
fomenting a mystery beyond the personal? Again Rome, from the
Julio-Claudian burden of temptation and responsibility, to a 4thcentury stripping off of that too-human consciousness — surely dis
solving here in some cult of immortality.
13)
‘DotiBCe: [51] !Rpman, Cate 4tfi cent. 5UD., Mosaic Bead, from ‘l^ida at CasaCe,
SiciCy; and [B] tRpman-CBristian mosaic, 5tB cent.. Bead of an Ancestor of
CBrist, S. Lorenzo, Milan
So to Augustine's dire antinomy of the City of Caesar and the
City of God. Two mosaic heads, 4th-century pagan, from a Sicilian
hunting villa, 5th-century Christian, a prophet from Milan, shift (with
the whites of the eyes) from dejected selfhood to the ecstatic frenzy
of creed.
14)
BouBCe: [SI] Sleyean (‘Uiera), c. 1500 B.C., fresco, fuCC-Breasted woman, and
[B] QreeRi c. TOO B.C., Warrior; BotB, MytionaC Museum, SltBens; first,
‘UdetaiCs
V
In Vico's youth-to-age sequence of cultures, barbarian
sion seeds again, on such late-cycle search, "divine and heroic
That rape is brought before us (as in Kazantzakis' Odyssey)
linking this Theran lady, from the Aegean luxury before the
war, to a Greek warrior of the folk-wanderings which brought
Iron Age.
3/1994
NOW — Alpha
incur
times".
by our
Trojan
in the
4
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic
History
IS)
(DouBCe: MicfuCan^eCo [A] lSOl-04, (David, Accxidemia, S^Corence, and
[(Bl 15SS-64, (Rgndanini (Bkta, Sforza CastCe, (fdiCan
ISa) Same, actaus,lMW^
uLlh. V Aa a ^
But the patterns we have applied to societies (as if they too
"must have like death that we have") are the groundswell of our
lives. From the proud, if troubled, command of Michelangelo's 1504
David, to the transfigured humanity he carved, in his last days, from
the abandoned Rondanini Pieta, is not only an outward motion from
youth to age, but a miraculous beginning, a reach beyond death itself.
16)
(DouBCe: (Hs-mBrandt [A] c. 1629, Self-(Portrait in a Qor^et; and [(BJ1669,
Cast SeCf-(Portrait; BotB (Mauritsfmis, iSie S{ci£ue; + video sin^Ces
And Rembrandt, a hundred years later, in two self-portraits in
the Mauritshuis, perfected his life-pilgrimage from this almost Car
tesian jubilance of youth: "I think; therefore, I am!", to the dying ac
ceptance of a defeat and malady which affirms mysteriously beyond
itself.
^al 7) LefimBrucCii 1907, (fdotfier and Cfuld, CfoCBsvang (Museum, Tssen
17)
Same,
Figm our own perilous century, no artist has made of his life .
and work as tragic and transcendent
prophecy as the German
sculptor Lehmbruck, genius child of a coal miner. Where is the af- firmation of sensuous flesh more rapturously ideaF than in this 1907/
Mother and Child?
al8) (DouBCe: detaUsofl8.Aand*B
18) SlouBCe: LefmBrucCi [A] 1911, SQteeCin^ Woman, and [(BJ 1913, Ascendant
O'outB; BotB, (MunicipaC(Museum, (DuisBur^; + video singCes
^ )>
From 1911 to 1913, as the artist labours "to
and reconstitute it as spiritual reality" (so August
assume a symbolic ambivalence. The tender pathos
"Kneeling Woman", the burdened overreach of the
3/1994
NOW — Alpha
disassemble body
Hoff), the sexes
of this Gretchen
striding "Ascen-
-5
,
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic
History
dant Man," rear toward the Great War the looming fatality of the
Faustian West.
19) (DouBU: LeftmSruc^ fJl] 191S-16, y^aCCen Warrior, (CetaiC; antC pB] 1918
laying QirC; Both, *Municipa( Museum, ^isBury
How the same polarity, carried through the defeat and embitterments of the War, joins the stark negation of this "Fallen Warrior"
(detail), to the always more disembodied hope (1918) of a "Praying
Girl".
20)
LefmBruc^
steads of Lovers, L>uisBur£ Museum (?)
Where else can such a sequence be brought to such a close as in
the volatile cement of the 1918 "Heads of Lovers," breathing, as we
have elsewhere said, "the Orphism of Lehmbruck's suicide" — a sui
cide of earth, which is" still, unbelievably, an earth-transcendence?
I
S^Zl) (B(al^, 1804-6, LfruuC Qateway, p. 70 ofStirCina lerusaUm.
(B21) ConstaBCe, 1835, Stonefieii£e, watercoCor, Victoria & MBert Mus., London
21) . dlouBCe of S421 and (B21
This is the freedom and bondage of history, that the past,
which conditions and limits, structures the realities of a creative
calling. We accept the likelihoods of the material; to enter and leave
a room we commonly use the door. But spirit too has such thresh
olds. The submission and defiance of soul is to feel them out — to
train probability on the wonder of a quantum leap. Thus Blake and
Constable, diverging from the 1800 ground, limn eternal opposites of
Stonehenge, inward and outward, of imagination and physicality.
22)
22a)
22B)
22c)
(Rgdon, 1883, Sea Slnemone, LitBograpB, MffiionaC QaUery Wasfiington, (D.C
(DetaiC(f22
vn-) f)
DouBCe (f22 and23 joriyinnf rifitB-^ndhpefftra^
Details of same
Music:
3/1994
Debussy, 1890(?), Reverie, Philips St PHC 5-012, side 9
NOW — Alpha
-6
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic
Redon's Anemone (wind-flower, soul-flower)
Debussy's "Reverie," or de Nerval's "Vers Dories":
History
opens
as
to
And like a nascent eye covered by its lids
A pure spirit grows beneath the skin of stones.
But here, after 1975, among Santa Fe friends, how radical the
estrangement of art has become (fade Debussy): Gardiner Jencks, com
posing like a secret Scriabin in Tesuque —
Music:
Gardiner Jencks, close of 1979 #21, recorded by C.G. Bell
no chord but is dissonant now, yet a dissonance guided, as by a new
law of tones, toward the meditational and home-seeking.
Z3)
1375, #1, CQ. (Bdlcodectum, Santa ^fe
23aj
cf23'jTcMn Japanese Sum CvrcCe
235)^^^^ul^23
(LZc>cj>^
2,3
"^
This picture by Phoebe Douglas of the Douglas clan, reader of
Dante and Middle English, Zen pilgrim, writer of haiku; a diabetic, she
was put on oral insulin, suffered a stroke, partial paralysis, the loss
of most of her speech — as caught as a jellyfish in a wave breaking
up the strand. Yet through that barrier she found a Sumi way, her
"Opus One" where shapes abstract a password of search and entrance.
(close Jencks)
24) iKefhnistic ruins under zoater, coast ofdiirl^ ("^tny)
24a) Sitfiens, 447
c. 143 J4.CD., (Partfienon over Odeum (C^(B '77)
So in the larger paralysis: when Graeco-Rome settled toward
the symbolic ruins which lie in water off Mediterranean shores, Au
gustine did not attempt to revive the lost Republic or Vergilian epic,
much less the Periclean city with its drama of tragic heroes thrown
to the ritual ground. Like today's world losses, that was all gone
beyond probability; and even genius must feel out the odds.
S
3/1994
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7
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic
History
25) ItaCian (Byzantine, 549, S. SipoCCinare in CCasse, (Hg.venna
25a) Tpfiesus, 5tfi cent., (Bust ofTutropius, HQmstfiistorisCfies (Museum, 14^n
Music:
Gregorian (Solesmes), Messe de la F6te Dieu, Oculis Omnium,
opening, French Decca St 7543 B (2)
Augustine took the gradient of the church of faith reared on
the pagan fall; yet in that submission he created revelational history,
The City of God, with spiritual autobiography, The Confessions, clue to
the inwardness of a civilization unborn,
26) Apse mosaic’from 25, S. ApoOinare in CCasse, SHeep in a green pasture
26 a) (Detail, photo ofSimone Weil, (MarseiCCe, spring 1941
26B) (Rgvenna, 6th unt., (Mosaic, Christ, detail, S. Apoltinare (^ijwvo
How many have felt our
Gregorian we hear was recovered,
the monks of Solesmes Abbey,
focus, the Easter of my 1938 visit,
Weil:
Now-imperative the same? The
under that cyclical supposition, by
where the Christ-search came to
in the mystical intensity of Simone
"Fall on your knees with love, as if this were
indeed the place where truth existed." I obeyed,
(fade Gregorian)
Yet how far into self-denial and humility, the Byzantine Creator
and Redeemer had fallen —
2 7)
Qreehi Cater 5th cent. (B.C., head offounger (Rjau Warrior, (Museum, (BsggioCaCaBna; +
detail
after the absolute life-fulness of this fifth century Riace Warrior, a
mortal, surely, but with the presence of a Greek God.
Such the
reality General Marshall claimed for Thucydides during the last great
war: "more contemporary than the daily news from the battlefields
of Europe." The antinomy has racked the West, from Christ to Now,
3/1994
NOW — Alpha
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic
History
Z8}
Cimc^ue, 1278-80) St. Srancis, detaiC fresco of Madonna andSingeCs, Lower
Cfiurdi ofSt. ^Francis, ^sisi
28a) Midi^mo, 1465, (Dante and fiis Toem, (Duomo, S^Corence; + ^detaUs
Music:
Italian,.!3th cent., Laud to San Lorenzo, Tinayre, Lumen 32018
Even after thirteen centuries, in the tide of renewal leading to
St. Francis and this Cimabue depiction of him (with a Penitential
Laude), Dante's answer to Virgil's pagan question: "Why do you not
climb the delectable mountain, which is the beginning and cause of
every joy?" can hardly surprise us: "Look! The beasts of sin!" Thus
the only road was down through Hell and up through Purgatory.
(fade Lauda)
29)
SeBastiano deC (PiomBo, 1516-18, Man in Sirmor, Wadswortfi SltBenaeum,
Sdartford, Connecticut; first, video detail
Music:
Don Luys Milan, 1535-6, Pavan #3, Pujol, AS 40A
So viewed, the Renaissance seems in part a Greek recovery, yet
clouded and complex, a displaced heir contending for perilous powers
— as in a portrait by Michelangelo's pupil, del Piombo, with a Milan
Pavan.
(cut Milan)
30)
*Bemini, c.1635, (Du^ (BaoCo Orsini, Castle of (Bracciano; + Vdetail
Music:
Busca, later 17th cent., Occhi Belli, Max Meili, AS 79
From then almost to now, a tide of rising expectations has bred
comic (or disastrous) effects.
Bernini's Duke Orsini of Bracciano,
Busca's "Beautiful eyes, don't blast me!" spread the wings of Baroque
bouyancy — under Papal privilege.
(cut Busca)
31)
ndiorwaldsen, 1810-11, (Bust of SHmself, Museum, Copenhagen; + V detail
Music:
Beethoven, 1811, Egmont Overture, close; DG-643 630, in the
Beethoven Edition, Vol. 11
By 1811, in Beethoven's Egmont, or Thorwaldsen's Self, the
world is swept from the old limits and enclosures on a revolutionary
3/1994
NOW — Alpha
9
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic
History
wave, culminant proclamation of human will as a phenomenon of
hope. Hegel: "man, as man, is free; it is the freedom of spirit which
constitutes its essence." Small wonder Greek sculpture was imitated.
(end Beethoven)
32)
CourBet, c. 1847, SeCf witB a (Pipe, CBarcoaC, WadstvortB Athenaeum,
9{ar^or(C, Connecticut
32 a) CourBet, c. 1844, Sdf zoitfi. (Buc^ifecC *BeCt, Lowore, Taris (xndeo, detaiC only)
Music;
Liszt 1862, Mephisto Waltz, close, Rubenstein, VLM-1905
By the middle of that century, in Courbet's Self (time of the
Communist Manifesto, of Balzac, Hugo, Melville, Wagner, this Liszt),
how stormily conscious of "the thorns of life" aftd "bleeding heart"
that self-asserting spirit has become.
(end Liszt)
a33) Qeor£e tRpuauCt, 1903, (Drun^n Woman, Museum of Modem 14rt, (Paris;
+ ^ detaiC
B33) (DouBCe: [3L] Matisse, 1903, Woman witfi Qreen Stripe, Copeniia£en, and [(BJ
(RpuauCt 1306, tragedian, (HafmCoser, Wintertfmr
33) (PpuauCt, 1903, ^Uie CoupCe, Le CCery CoUection, (Paris; + ^detail
Since Baudelaire's poems, since Flaubert's 1860 letter, the bru
talization of what was called the external world (though perhaps it
was within), had broken, as on late Rome, in. recurrent waves.
Reactions came equal and opposite. Just when the Fauves and even
Picasso rocketed into euphoria, Rouault gashed down.
Music:
Stravinsky, 1910-11 (revised 1947), from Petrushka, close, Col.
MG 31202
Rouault's Couple of 1905, like early Joyce, like the mocking of
Petrushka, strips bourgeois and romantic sentiment to Eliot's "lonely
men in shirtsleeves, leaning out of windows" ... "The burnt-out ends
of smoky days"...
34)
T,Ci Levin, c. 1963(F), (Prepnant SGppie, etcfiin£, C.Q. BeCC, Santa !f^e;
/ V detaiCs'
Vsik
3/1994
NOW — Alpha
VO
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic
History
Or "Apeneck Sweeney" jackknifing out of bed — a debunking carried
through Depression America to Santa Fe Levin's Pregnant Hippie.
(Society back to its vomit; another inveterate habit of Now.)
(fade Petrushka)
Has art, which we call creative, no power to make history, but
only to exhibit symptoms?
*]/a35) iI(puauCtj 1905, nJie y-cUCen *Eve,
(C^rt 9/[o((eme, Taris
35)
5(puauCt, 1906, {Prostitute at Mirror, Museum of Modem S^, {Paris
35a) {l^puauCt, c. 1924, *lHree Judges, {Private Codection, SxoitzerCand
In that case, Rouault displayed two. As in Hellenistic sculpture,
a waste-of-life, surfacing in the grotesque and ugly, presaged mys
tery cults; so Rouault's more-than-Toulouse nightmaring of prostitu
tion and greed, foments faith — "the hope only," says Eliot, "Of empty
men."
So the soul-search Flaubert predicted from romantic pain:
("We shall see a return of world-sickness.
Music:
Stravinsky, 1930, Symphony of Psalms, from 1; Philips A01193L
36) {pj^uauCt, 1936, Cfrrist xvitfi {pgised 5lrms, ^dmore, fEJ?
36a) Same, 1942, Cfirist Moc^d, Museum of 5lrt, Stut^art; + Vdetail (video
tfien returns to a detail of 36)
beliefs in the Last Day, expectations of a Messiah...") has been vari
ously wish-enacted, in Rouault's Christs, mediated by the color-forms
of stained glass; in the neo-sceptic detente of Eliot's Christianity:
"Teach us to care and not to care/ Teach us to sit still"; most power
fully in the ritual sequences of Stravinsky's Symphony of the Psalms
fusing the modern with Russian Byzantine and Gothic Perotin.
(close Stravinsky)
The first polarity of my 1930s youth was between that cyclical
Christ
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a3 7) ‘Ben Sfiafin, 1931-2, (Passion cfSacco and ‘Uanzetti, d^nnedy QcdCeries)
3 7) (Hj£fit-fiand£Toup, TidUtney Museum, (SUfC (video, details only)
and the socialist vision, more moving in the letters of Sacco and Vanzetti than in Ben Shahn's lean satire on that mal-trial and execution:
so Vanzetti's death-prophecy of a time when their passion ("the
taking of our lives — lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fishpeddler") will be seen as a triumph over "this bumt-out age where
man was wolf to the man".
a3S) Strunnikpv, 1929, (Partisan Lunev, ‘Tretya^v QaUery, (Moscow; first,
‘U details
38) (DouBCe: (H^uauCt, 1939, Cfirist (Moc^d, HBrams family, (MyC; and
[B] Sunni^v, 1929, (Partisan Lunev, as in a38, aSove
38 a) (DouBCe: BarlacB [H] 1914, Siven£er, and [B] 1938, (fCoating lln£d (video
taCifs these singCt^^c^<.
, n '2-,^ A
In Stalinist Russia the state realism of that cry had hardened to
such Partisan rigor of utopian claim as Sholokov's Bolshevists con
tinually voice:
The government must be thrown aside like an old rag.
The lords must be stripped of their fleece; they've
murdered the people too long... When every govern
ment is a workers' government, they won't fight any
more... One beautiful life all over the world... I'd pour
out my blood drop by drop to see that day.
Between so demotic a religion of the material, and the drooping
aesthetic of "briared hands" and "world wound" (another "Christ
Mocked" by Rouault), one hesitated, as before a crazed antinomy, less
inclined to say "I embrace the poles" than "a plague on both your
houses". Though my Augustinian poems of the early '40s saw the
Communist rallying as only a postponement of soul's confrontation
—some late-cycle resolve:
"To goad the world to order!"
That is the last spun thread, and when it severs?
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Then comes the timeless trial, the pure affliction,
Until we die in wisdom.
a39) HitCer at a (Parade, 1938,
‘W.W.II (cf. (Sfa^re 62) (video, detail oidy)
39) (Ma?c(Beclitndnn, 1944, SeCf-(Portrait, (h^ue Staats£atCerie, (Munidi (CQ(B '59);
+ V detaiC
For Symbolic History, however, it was necessary somehow to
participate in every crucial earth-search and experience, even of
National Socialism, which added another pole to the ChristMaterialist antinomy, another sort of face to the Western sequence
we have been pursuing.
Strange that Beckmann, always in flight
from the Nazis, should exhibit in this self-portrait (begun in Amster
dam and finished in New York, 1944), under an ironic and ques
tioning mask, the very hardening of German enterprise and Faustian
will, from which he had fled into exile.
a40)
^Euricfi, 1940, (Dunquerque, OdfftionaC Qf^ry of Canada
640) Soviet War (Poster, 1941, ^"l^he *Enemy ShdC (S^ver ‘Escape Our Wrat6'
(detail of Atomic 5\pe 125)
40) James QiWert, 1961, (RicEard (Jregg (canvas stolen, pHotoyrapfiedin 1967
6y CQ(B); + detaiC
Whatever Beckmann represented. Hitler's demonic attack im
possibly united the Anglo and free-enterprise West with the Com
munist East, in a crusade of "Peace-loving Peoples"; though after
victory had reinstated cold war, another contrary would appear,
between police-state Russia and the America of this Richard Gregg,
painted 1961 by his friend and mine, Jim Gilbert; Gregg, consultant of
Gandhi, Second War pacifist, welcomed as Micah Glenn into my Half
Gods — there a martyr to the hope of self-rule against the mass. For
that openness too was vulnerable.
41)
Cfiurdutt, (RgoseveCt andSta&n at Ofalta, LI^PE: W.W.II: + V details
Already one could have prophesied that global leadership was
likely to incline. West or East, to the best blend of productive free
dom and planned world-discipline. One asked; Which is more feasi3/1994
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ble. for capitalist energy to bind itself to the greater earth-good (as
Roosevelt surely intended); or for a socialist order of the whole to in
corporate the lively freedoms of incentive and criticism?
Before
Vietnam, it may have seemed that the odds were with the West.
42)
^eti Sfiafm, 1947, Spring, S4(Brigfit galCery, ^BuffaCo, 0^; + ^detait
But what of our post-war euphorias, from Boom to Hippie bust,
all media chain-reactions of my "Atomic Age" — tough-minded Ben
Shahn, American Hebrew Lithuanian, lured from social satire to this
romantic 1947 Spring? As if free enterprise could mount the parti
san wave, voicing the poetic raptures of Dylan Thomas:
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means.
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
43)
Cfmsto, 1943, Surrounding Islands, off Miami; first, ^ detail
But time was running out on that squandering of resources to
turn earth into an exploding star —for which the wildest art symbol
is Christo s earth-alterations — the latest, and most astonishing (for
fish off Florida) being the more than 7000 square meters of pink
plastic, promoted under the rapture of "Let a thousand islands bloom
— a garden in the sea."
a44)
644)
*Uc44)
d44)
Slustrian, c. 1770, grandfather dochi Chet Johnson, Santa fe
TngCish TCane Tree,
S4nnej(j Oxford (cgB '90)
CgB in ^Princeton Seech tree, Oct.1946
‘EdMarshaCC(Photo, 1973: Cg(B in apihon ooerSanta (pe
Music;
Return to Haydn "Clock" Symphony, opening of 2nd Movement.
Here, the first fruits of what I had called NOW, the Bondage and
Ereedom—of History, trailed off, groping through time for a deeper
underlay — not the ticking clockwork, but the cosmic tree, rooted as
far back as memory and evidence go; reaching up, through an abid
ing present, toward the promise of things to come. And because the
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first locus of that awareness is personal, I had variously introduced
the art and music of friends.
(Fade Haydn “Clock")
44) (Durftam Catlu(CraC, IGtfi-cmtury cCocl^in IZtfi-century Soutfi transept
44a) 9^remBer£ Christ, c. 1520-30, C.Q & (D.M. ^eCC (C§‘B '63); + ^(UtaiC
44B) ^Daumier, 1870, 5)on Qy-V(pte,
^Pimhpthehi Munich {cf V
Music:
Bach: return to 6th Brandenburg, close of 1st movement
But had I escaped from my opening: "Either we cannot make a
show of Now, or we have been doing it all along"? Was it clock-time
I had set up in the sanctum itself? As Virgil told Dante: "I will lead
you through an eternal place"; or Christ his followers:
"There be
some standing here who shall not taste of death, till they see the Son
of Man coming in his Kingdom." Was I no nearer, than in my other
shows, to the ultimate Now, which is eternal? Against that Protean
giant, Quixote had to sally out again.
(Close Bach, 1st movement)
44 c) ‘BarBara BruneCege / Bugcm fisher, CDouBCc ^inBoxo over SpicCer 5(pcl(j
Canyon dc ChcCCy (Sacred BCaces 1990); first, V detaU
(0 Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort :
Music:
45)
Eternity, you thunder-word.)
J.S, Bach, from the opening of Cantata 20, MHS 7281 Chorus,
title words: 0 Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort
(fade)
(DouBCe overCay: C.Q. BeCC, Lacanha xvater, Ceaves, stars;^^^video detaiC
45a) ZndoverCay: C.Q. Bed(, lo zvith voCcanoes, stars, etc.;
+
VdetaiC
Every, Now exists in consciousness. But consciousness is amor
phous, an emergence of self in all — Walt Whitman's "separate per
son" swirled with solids and liquids, roots, quadrupeds, birds. When
the spirit moved on the waters, its first commands were three:
"Divide! Divide! Divide!": light from darkness; a distinguishing fir
mament; and beneath, land from seas. How can our Now but cleave
into shows of self and world, a fused complementarity — the great I
AM and the small. Begin with the small.
46)
first WorhC War, 1918, US. photo, trenches under gas attache
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I was born in 1916, when the explosion of modernity seared
earth-soul with the tanks and machine guns, shells and gas of trench
warfare.
47)
ralCy for !HitCer's SOtH Birtfiday, 1939; video, details only
1 reached creative awareness as the totalitarian takeovers —
Mussolini's, Huey Long's, Stalin's — swelled to Hitler's. Such the
context of my 1936 Atlantic crossing in Delta Return:
I set my face to the wind, satanic compact.
In that Europe a Wagnerian screamed for thousands:
"Like a somnambulist I go the way God has chosen."
— Clouds to the hunger of storm ...
48) U^Came-tfirozvers moppiny up in the Tacific,
etc
48a) HdfutronyCozv at Oah^iRidye, n3SC(<f. ‘WorldOdeCt 89)
I came home to the consequent agony of all that.
The Half Gods, of a 1945 newsreel:
Thus from
Smoky Yanks turned a flame thrower on an embank
ment. Japs ran out burning. One veered toward the
camera, collapsed in a pile ten yards away. To moans
from the audience came the announcer's spruce words:
"the little yellow bellies are getting their medicine."
Next day the long and secretly expected bomb fell on
Hiroshima. The genie was out of the bottle. The war
was at an end.
49)
Currier & Ives, 1866, ^RgumG-ny a ‘Bend in the (Mississippi; + ‘17 detail
How far from such world explosion, the Huck Finn River of my
boyhood haunts — the side- and stern-wheelers still plying the ox
bow bends:
and at dusk from a floating
Log I have seen them go flickering down and down.
Bright bearers of cotton into those mirrored glooms.
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$0)
History
Currier and Ives, 186Z, ‘BomSardment and Capture of Island #10, on tHe
^Mississippi, IRgy ^n£ Collection
Though in the time of my grandparents that South (and North
too) had pioneered precursive war — in which the southern grand
father had fought; the northern one, who would come down river
later, seems to have battled only — if challenged — with his fists.
51)
Charles Q. Bed, photographer, conversation xoith himself
We see him, the old photographer, who would die before I was
born, in mystical conversation with himself. He had practiced his art
before the Civil War in the Ohio basin, with an earlier family. When
that broke up, he worked,
a52) C.Q. Bell, c. 1880, xvith his travelling studio-tent
52)
Bed, c. 1873(F), Bhoto of5(adie Owens, to Be his wife
after the war, with a portable studio, up and down the Mississippi,
until, in a Kentucky river town, he won that child beauty, come, with
a rose, for her portrait (as Fra Lippo Lippi finished his novitiate
model with the picture), took her down to Greenville, and set up
house and studio.
53)
(DouBle: [Si] Tde dreaming photographer, and [B] his driving wife;
+ ISsingle/
d-a
The elemental polarity that flexes my Now had an inverse ori
gin in that family. The gentle old photographer becomes the yielding
mystery of air and water; his wife the hardness and drive of rock
and fire. How could a son (my father) but love more the impractical
dreamer with his musing smile and art — love but not imitate, his
life-ambitions formed by the mother's daemonic will.
54)
B>ouBle: Bercy Bdl: [SL] Mouthful dreamer, and [B] fighting lawyer CV’
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Two photographs, from his teens through his twenties, take
him from the art-ideal of the father (his college hopes of being a
scholar, thinker, writer), to the mother's pragmatic claim — lawyerpolitician called home by family debt to an ultimately luckless race
for power.
55)
5)ou6Ce: [R] (Percy (BeU, c. 1900, and [B] 9(pm Oliver 5lrcfier, c. 1905(F);
+ detail of (B
1/5^,
Now his elements are earth and fire; he searches the state,
country, even abroad and chooses (Sylph and Ondine memory of a
dreaming father?) my nature-mystic mother — costly for him, but for
the protagonist of The Married Lanc^just the disposition of male and ^
female^romantic theory called for.
56)
(DouBCe: [5L] C.Q. (Bell, 1947, at Blac^lMountam CoUege, (hlC., and [IB] (Percy
Bell5r., c.1935, Qreenville, (Mississippi; + V single details
Let a snapshot of me from the summer of 1947, when I was
showing Symbolic History at Black Mountain College, with a 1935-6
portrait of my brother before he went to Sewanee, knit up the argu
ment of generative dipoles.
What speaks here is not simply the
androgynous blend, but the subtle order of the blending — from
which another contrariety arises. In me both natures are affirmed —
the father-force embraced in the mother's transcendental quiet.
In
my brother, most creatively brilliant of us, her tender sensibility
rides and repudiates the father's troubled quest.
57)
Bed 5^use, Qreenville, (MS (CQB, (March 1945)
Here is the house that father's ambition built for a wife who
did not require such outwardness. On the banks of what was once
Rattlesnake Bayou, it confronts River and slough with the fagade of
Greece. So I issued from the womb to the antinomies of Delta Return.
a58) Windsor ruin at dusl^ near (Port QiBson, (MS, (CQB '80)
58) Old CQB pHoto, 1912, Breal^ at (PantHer (forest
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In this night land and by the rising waters
We plant homes; kindle fire, and praise
In song, the death and void of love's return.
What pressed from over the levee was such a bore of water as
the old photographer snapped in this 1912 break at Panther Forest —
a punitive backlash which by 1927, with deforestation of tributary
valleys, slopes, ranges —
aSB) ffarn^umsefCooded to the ro<rf, 1927
%l,c)
6SB) (DeCta, 1927, iCCvnois Central
washed out
SB) ^lUe £reat flood of1927, ^reenzHUe. BdS ((Brown Studio)
gave Faulkner's Old Man its climactic setting — climax too of a boy's
earth-wonder:
the whole Delta from where the hills recede below
Memphis to where they bend back at Vicksburg, and eastward to the
Yazoo, a crescent 150 miles long by 60 deep — a million and a half
acres, with Greenville at its center — gone to swirling water.
60)
John S. Curry, 193S, ^The (Mississippi, St. Louis Slrt (Museum
Did heart and mind take sides?
(Delta Return^:
God of brown water and sun, you spawned these blacks.
Brood of-'your deeper wild, singing its songs.
Sign of your savage bounty on the land ...
I slipped to the prow
a61) (BrownStudio, 1927 flood, (Delta, tom up railroad
61) Slthens, Sth unt. (B.C. and after, Slcropolis, (CQ(B '77)
Where the river voiced its life in roaring mouths.
Sometimes Apocalypse seems the only road:
To join the avenger, pour this human form
Out in the blind occult, world-nature, storm.
Could even the tragic Greeks hold their templed headlands
without sacrificing, below, to the Furies in Python caves?
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6Z) fRit-Bens, c. 1625, 9^fit Li£fiinw£, ^ 5^uerBur£, 5(mt6ur0! + V detaiC
62a) ‘Ec^Ce O^Buta, 9dl6, 9{(Ue. OBseTvatoTiesTSiA.t^(.4^i GrgAyi-fe>
62 B) OUpes and sun, near Medina, CalaBria, Italy
^eny)
X
Such the pantheist celebration of Rubens’ night nature; such the
core of an organic physics I drew, from entropic paradox, in Iowa,
those March thunderstorms of 1944:
I walked into the woods and climbed a great oak,
clouds boiling above, batteries of lightning bursting
around; sat with my shoulder to the twisting trunk
and pondered the astonishing world... When I came
home I wrote: "All matter, systems, worlds and living
things express the need of energy to buttress against
its own decay. In this sense cosmic history is a height
ening and unfolding of the perceptive ambivalence of
energy: that its activity is the fall by which it dies, its
life in time a transcendence using and used by the de
structive urge.
a63) Snapshot, ‘BedCfHbuse, QreentHICe, MS, in 1927IfCood
63) Qmco-i^inan, 118-34 SL(D., Canopus, Hadrian's ViCCa (CQ(B ’87)
That house of mine, trying to uphold through world storm and
on such a floodplain, our always threatened heritage — as of Greece
and Rome, lodged in Christianity and revived through Renaissance to
the European plateau of thought, art and vision, law, conduct, humor
— the cultural polyphony I am fated to bring together and celebrate
in these shows:
a64) TaUadio, c. 1550, ^UCa ^Rptunda, near Vkenza, 3/4 front
64) Same, fuUfront view (Both CQ*B 1959; \
^
Palladio, with the voice-overlappings of Gibbons, "Ah Dear
Heart," sung almost sixty years ago by the London Madrigalists,
though with more sensitivity than any recording since;
Music:
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65)
Symbolic
History
Iiti£o Jones, 1616-35, TJie Q}ieen's 5(otise, from ^ soutfi, Qreemmcfi, London,
(Cg(B 74)
then the wonder of Inigo Jones' English adaptation, the Queen's House
in Greenwich (1616-35),
65a) Same, Qiteen's Jiouse, Co^gia oBove (C<fB 74; cf. JdiCton, 4Za)
with its south-facing loggia —
0, 66)
5{enry 5{oare,
Tadadian iBarf^ Stourfiead, WiCtsfUre
a harmony reaching down the centuries: in Stourhead Park, this
sylvan Pantheon over the lake;
66 a) Widiam 5(gntfor dhomas Co^, *EarC of Leicester, 1734-59, tHe JdarBCe 5MC of
tKoC^am, iMinfoO^ ‘England (tndeoS\>d7i7> "Mvro
OA^di
or, for an interior, the Marble Hall of Holkham — how that Classical
resolve assumes, as it nears our time, the retrospection of a lost
cause.
67)
Judge (Percy (Beds 1914 5Couse, Qreenxnde (Miss (C(fB '60); first,
detaU
(cut Gibbons at "must part”)
My Symbolic History house ("Elutings of freedom, cloud pillars
of our science"), heaved like a frog over media bogs — these United
Snakes of slogan capitalism — as if to turn Spengler's Untergang,
Jeffers' "dance of dream-led masses down the dark mountain," into a
cosmic celebration — a house so arched and shadowed by its oaks, it
was easier to drop assignments, steal out and swing the night
branches —
a6S, 68, 68a & 6) (Detai^^nd neca:::wBeh(^ Joe (Haydoc^s 1988 Cartoon for
^ 'CUdd of (Revolt'from Ddfa (Return (C^); ^r-otBerA^ defrtik
once (as my friend Haydock depicts from Delta Return^, by throwing
acorns at passing cars, to fetch the cops:
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The searchbeam took me: 'Hey boy, come down.'
My answer was a leap ... Beneath the moon, I swung
The trees' great circle and dropped to the ground.
Curious, this lighted Ariel clasps a twig fit to support a grass
hopper; where the dark alter ego, shadowed, but on no surface, grips
a solid limb. "Child of Revolt" is the title; and yet that book con
structs on the Delta floodplain a poetic triangle of three times fiveto-the-fifth-power.
Inside the house, our library, about the size of this showy room
in the Brighton Royal Pavilion, but nobler; our space lined all around
with books in glass-faced mahogany cases, those limited editions of
authors, America^, English, Continental, with translations from
Greece and Rome, Burton's Arabia, a sprinkling from as far as India,
China, Japan.
a70)
WfiistCer, c. 181S(?), (Prince (Rs£^nt as Cupi^, (RpyaC (PaviCion,
‘Brykton
70)
(Dorotfiea Lange, 1936 photo, (PCantation near CCgrhsdaCe, (hCS
70a & 6) 1937 judge (Percy (Be^, 'Lion in his (Den and '39 snapshot
Though even the Prince Regent might have offered a sounder
base for culture than the plantation backdrop of the Delta scene,
1936, such a planter group as I would drive my father to, in the
Depression, between the flood and dust — sit in an oven car by a
clapboard store.
While he talked, encouraged, farmed the claims...
Himself the most in debt, and the life-dream torn
By politicians and a failing farm.
Private loss and Hitler, our world-betrayal.
At night I have seen him when he could not sleep
Sit up in bed to light his pipe, the weak
Flame rising and falling like the pulse of his hope...
71)
Si. (Rpthstein, (Photo, 1936, (fleeing a (Dust Storm, ORfahoma
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While across the Mississippi, the great brown clouds of dust
came rolling in, driven, with migrant workers from the plains. Our
folk-plural of "children" had always been the Black one, "chillun".
These refugees gave it a drawling whine: "Miz Bail, You gwine bring
the chern?"
72) Ife (O^eria), 12tfi-14l£ cent.,
Oni, Bronze, (BritisB Mtiseuny + V (ktaiC
72 a) (Benin (9%eria), IStd-lGtfi cent., ^fCute (BCayer, (Britisfi (Museum (vMeo, detail
onCy)
Thus, to the problem of African Blacks, torn from jungle cul
tures (this bronze King of Ife) through slavery and emancipated
poverty, to sharecropper bondage — eighty percent of the population
of the Delta, living half-literate and in a flux of mores the master
culture feared (though they were loveable, and with a rhythm of
soul-music, art-attested from their origins) — to that problem was
added now the Depression influx of red-necks and po-whites, hating
those blacks and competing with them in a stalled economy.
73) ‘BddHbuse, coCumnedporch, south view (CQ^ 1945)
73 a) 14.frican (Bud *ECepfiant
Such the alluvium on which one had thought to build, like a
columned house. Western Culture:
sonnets, democracy, and
madrigals.
There, the wartime Halloween of 1916, I came into residence,
while the circus carts passed our house, rumbling from the train to
the south field; and my sister, almost two, being apprised of her baby
brother, squealed: "See the elephants!" As in "The Circus" of Delta
Return:
I
The swaying elephants and caged lions.
And curtained vans with the still sleeping stars.
74)
(Photo of C.Q. (BedIII, Sprite 1917, Qreenvide, (MS: first, video detail
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�*>
Jt
C.G. Bell
Here is
first memory
can just, by
and stare (it
bathroom.
TS)
Symbolic
History
my cheerful state, perhaps a year and a half after. My
cannot be from much later; since, as in the picture, I
propping myself on my arms and shoulders, lean over
is late at night) into the flushed toilet of my mother's
^fiirCpooC9^6xUa
in Canes ‘Uemtici, zuitfi companion
The experience is not at all scatological but cosmic. What I see
is a foaming vortex, clue to a Book of Knowledge quest of tornadoes,
whirlpools, spiral nebulae. Surely it was the wonder of science which
so imprinted my consciousness. Leonardo: "the sea at Piompino, all
foaming water."
a76) “Book ofKnowCedpe, ^oC. X, pp. 525Z-3, Qiui^ and^J/oCcanoes, detaiC
676) Same, zufioCe: dotiB[epa£e
76) Same, VoL DC, pp. 2916-7, from IchtByosaur tofossiC;^ Vdetails
That twenty-volume Book of Knowledge worked my first hyp
nosis by image and by word. Its illustrations from astronomy, geo
logy, evolution, physics fired the reading of my earliest years. Could
an heir to war and violence be unmoved by this double page of
earthquake and volcano?
Or one already swayed to the romantic
capture of time past in time present, not take up the earth-dream
(inspired by Leonardo) of these six panels, where Ichthyosaur and
his Mesozoic anibiance are fossilized for modem recovery?
77)
WinsCoto Ulomer, 1891, ^Hie Boatman, watercoCor, Brooklyn Museum; first,
V det'aiC
I hardly felt the reality of stories until the River and cave
exploits of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn gave my own such hankerings
deeper-than-life imperative. And when I came to art, how could my
thought not translate Homer's northern watercolor of a boatman to a
mythic convergence of Mark Twain's Missouri and my own Delta
sculling on our ox-bow lakes: Washington, Lee, and Bolivar?
^T6e BCeiades, neBuCous,
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78 a) (DouBCe: (Diagrams of B£fit [S^] as corpusdes^(^d [CB] as xvaves
(K.
Next, my two-and-0fte-half-inch refractor, through years of
book-guided sky-search, affirmed my organic existence and contain
ment in a form-building cosmos of galaxies, suns, worlds in space —
revelational backdrop for a planet run amuck.
Also from that
reading I grappled, before 1933, with the complementarity of light
as particle and wave, a creative antinomy central to my thought,
action, being — spring of that Odyssean many-mindedness our Now
requires of us for global sailing, as between Charybdis and Scylla.
79)
‘EcOwaT(C 9{opper, 1939,
yor^^MozHe, Museum of Modem Sin, MyO .
details
79 a) WaP^r (Percy, c. 1980, from Hdie Second Coming dust jac^t (video, details
onCy)
Of course we went to the movies, Saturday afternoons; though
not even the horror films, Dracula and Frankenstein, took me like the
river, earth and sky. Had I been a painter, I would hardly have
shown the Paramount, as Hopper did, magically commonplace; nor
with Walker Percy, who joined my school and grade in Junior High,
have named my first book The Moviegoer: though between his "cer
tification" and those "repetitions" by which a segment of "lapsed time
can be savored of itself," Walker (like Proust: "fragments of existence
removed outside the realm of time") has hypnotized duration, as I
would hypnotize the Now.
80) CPicago, 1933 WorCds (fair, viezuedST, across Qrant (Parp,
80a) CPicago, 1931-2, Pomeless unentpCoyed men in Qrant (Parli
Before going to the University of Virginia in the fall of 1933, I
spent much of the summer at the Chicago Century of Progress
World's Fair. For a Greenville dealer, I would drive old cars up and
new ones back, staying between-times, a week or so, at the Y, for
fifty cents a night. What had polarized my thought for years — the
promise of Science and break-down of Depression — peaked in the
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Exposition and unemployment of that dynamic city: homeless bums,
beggars, apple polishers, what a comedown, after futuristic dreams.
81)
WaC^r ‘Evans, 1936, ‘Tenant 9^amiCy, pfioto from Let ‘Us fUarv (Braise ‘Fatn/iiL<
2!£siy By names Tiyee; first, video details
81a) ‘BfiiC Everyood, 1937, Timerkan ‘Trayedy, mriyfit, ‘Bujfialo; video, detail
only
Science seemed to suggest a rational solution. My last year in
high school I had won first prize in the state with my own oration on
what Roosevelt had called the "Forgotten Man," that blight on
America, from northern cities to the tenant farms of Agee's Let Us
Mow Praise Famous Mgh, with Walker Evans haunting photographs.
My speech was the manifesto of a socialism I thought I had invented:
all men to work and share. But the apocalyptic rhetoric of its close,
those eagles of freedom stormed down in the worid- and intestinebroils of a lost democracy, pointed — like the stom^ the science I
loved — rather to a tragic outcome.
S2)
!l^eTS(m,fimsfied1824, ‘The Lazvn, ‘University of‘UiTyinia
‘1282 a) Same, ‘the Lawn thronyh portico coCumns
826) Same, view of the fHptunda (alC cg‘B, 1986)
It was at Virginia that the question of civilization, up or down,
anabolic or catabolic, would be pressed; at Jefferson’s University,
noblest monument of neoclassic in the world, reared against demo
cratic erosion
Hamilton's Bank heightening inequalities, until we
would come "to eat one another, as they do in Europe." Education
was Jefferson's answer — his plan for free schools of selective excel
lence
to go down before Jackson's egalitarian "same for all"; and
still the democratic poles remain unbridged, unstated: basic instruc
tion for all, not to preclude the pubUc training of a creative elite.
83) Thoto, c. 1940, Strinyfedow Earr andScott ‘Buchanan
83 a) Chicayo fair, 1933, ‘TraveC and ‘Transport ‘Buildiny (ivith video return to
‘Barr detail)
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At Virginia I encountered Stringfellow Barr (on the left here,
with Scott Buchanan),
Upset by the cyclical determinism of his
history lectures, I went up and tried to argue with him, advancing
against Spengler the science and architecture of the Century of
Progress, with the new and thrilling art of the color-organ — merely
the plus side of my Chicago conflict. In three minutes he turned the
Exposition to the commercial pastime of a late civilization, its shoddy
"As for the colorstructures like Alexandrian pleasure pavilions.
organ," he said, "it's a fad. But Bach is real; Beethoven is real." He
concluded:
"You can't argue about history unless you know the
artifacts."
S4)
"Egypt, c. 2540, (Dynasty IV, d^fre, 3/4 view, diorite, (Museum, Cairo;
+ ^ (CetaiC
84 a) Same statue, coCor, frontaC view <rf fiead, (Museum, Cairo
Music:
J.S. Bach, c.l740(?), Credo, Mass in B Minor, Angel 3500C
So I had to know them. By making the dean's list, I was freed
from classes. I took up art in the library, music in the music room.
This Old Kingdom Khafre I fixed to my wall:
a serenity to be
marvelled at, as Hawthorne's of the Great Stone Face. The older com
poser mentioned by Barr was Bach. From the B Minor Mass take the
Pose Barr's question:
Credo with the mighty ground-bass tread.
"does modernity offer such transpersonal individuation within the
wholeness of common faith?"
(fade Bach Credo)
V
85) "Egypt, c, 1370, (Dynasty X"Uin, face of coCossaC I^naton^
/\
85a) Same, c. 1370, Qyeen (M^fertiti, (luartzite witfi coCor, Cairo hn^o returns
to 85, detaU)
'
^
856) Iffmaton, coCor pr(rfik (f 85, (Museum^^m
5%^
85c) (DouBCe: [5L] SMaBaster fiead of (Kfaj^^nd [(B] pCaster mas^ of IkBnatoy ^
'Bai^ "Egyptian (Museum, "Berlin
"
^
Music:
Beethoven, 1825, "beklemmt" from Cavatina of Quartet #13
Go to the counterpole, Ikhnaton of the New Empire, here from
the colossal sandstone in Cairo; and since the later composer cited
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was Beethoven, why not sound a personal phrase, the mystical
beklemmt ("anguished") from the soaring Cavatina of the Opus 130
Quartet.
Though closer to us, Ikhnaton's sensuous hunger did not
reach my wall. Perhaps I felt I could supply that yearning myself.
Hardly the Homeric distance of Khafre's Old Kingdom. Already I was
caught in the stretch of what I had thought to argue. But could our
music, over eighty-five years, exhibit what Egyptian art had spread
over twelve-hundred — the shift from epic celebration to introspec
tive spiritual quest? Clearly, in Symbolic History. I had a life-work
before me.
(fade Cavatina)
a86)
86)
86a)
86B)
HacoBean, 1618, 9MC of T,7^ter Cottege, 07(ford (CQ(B '80)
CoCor-print of 0?ford, c. 1830(F), Bou^fit tBerc, 1936, By C<fB
‘Bavaria from 9lndedis ‘Totuer (CQB '59, cf (DeCta I,‘D,Z,c)
fCorencefrom the BiazzaCe MicBdanydo (C^ '59)
And now by luck I won a scholarship to Oxford, changed fields
from physics to English, and spent my vacations on the art-rich
Continent. The old polarity our house had reared over the floodplain,
assumed the form I would articulate in a Delta poem:
...domes and spires of Oxford through the cloud
Taking an aureole light in the meadowed land;
Or upland wheat fields of Bavaria,
Clean stands of fir under mountain snows;
Or down those mountains south to the heart's best
home.
Nest of the migrant wings, the Tuscan town
And singing towers of the Western dawn...
87) OCdC.Q. BdCpfioto, c.1912, Qremville, 9dS, from tfie river
87a) Broxvnphoto, 1927 fCood, ‘Washinyton 5ivenue, QreenviCCe, MS
But that poem ends with the periodic Delta Return:
As I, come back that evening, stood alone
Over this landing, on the levee's crown —
West the wide river, Venus, and the moon.
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And east three lighted blocks in the Delta's dark —
I felt the strangeness of being localized,
By an accident of birth to be held and hold
This poor spot of earth on the turbulent flood
A center always of the wheeling stars.
88) (Percy (BeCCjr., 1936-7, SouC(freecC, C.Q. (BeUcoition; first, video detail
88a) C.Q. (B^, summer 1937, '(Boundon a rvhed(rffvre'
For my brother had killed himself, and I had come to pass the
summer with my parents. Again Delta Return:
At your death I was abroad; I crossed
The ocean to a sad home. A grief unhouseled
As from beyond the tomb, settled upon me.
Here, one of his last watercolors, a feminine (yet phallic) Soul Freed,
like a bird from the hand.
Against it, I risk the almost opposite symbol I then drew and
colored. Bound to Life, as inscribed from King Lear:
"Bound on a wheel of fire ...
Tears like molten lead ..."
That fall, Oxford claimed me with new force.
89) Qerman, 1235fif., WedfHouse, (Jester (MauC6ronn;
89 a) Same, detail cftfie fountain
Music:
from French Motet c. 1250, Descende in Hortum, Lumen 32027
Gothic (though I had still to discover the music) became the
flame-center — that lightening of stone which, in the well-house of
Maulbronn cloister, joins the mystery of water. Dante:
And I saw light in the form of a river,
A river of fire between two shores
Painted with spring's miraculous colors ...
(fade Descende)
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a90) (DouBCe: [Si] Sroasti^ Banners from 90, and [B] MeniCing, 1487, 9/ir£in untfi
an SippCe, St. Jofins SBospitai, Bruges (video td(gs these singCy]^'^
90)
90) Vdgzi 9\^ht BfitCy, 1938, Tarty Bay, 9\BiretnBer£
90 a) Simo andTonte *Uecchio, (fBorence, from Ujfizi (CQB '39)
90B) QioT£ione, c. 1510, BastoraC Concert, Louvre, Baris (video, detait otiCy)
a
As if to preserve the complementarity of outward alarm and
soul-search, the Europe of our travels was racked, those years, by
successive crises, building to the outbreak of the Second War. Weird,
after 15th-century Bruges, to thread Germany, from the Night of
Crystal in Cologne (the streets, by scorched synagogues, sprinkled
with glass), south, through cities aglare with Hitler's rants and rallies
(this Party Night in Nuremberg), to the Tuscan complement of Memling's Bruges, Medici Florence.
A staggering contrast, to which, returning through Paris, music
would be added — that eight-hour day in the airless listening booth
of a record store, when the Anthology of Sound, Lumen, and the rest
would open at last their polyphonic treasures of the Middle Ages and
Renaissance.
a91) SBo^ein the (youn£er, 1523, Bortrait cfBrasmus^ Loux/re
91) MaBuse CJ.Qossaert), c. 1510, 9]]ght ih(g.tivity; + V detail
91a) Mante£na, erri?H3-53, Vir£in and Child, BerUn Museum
)
’
_
^
Let what that day began weave into this Now the riches of
before and after 1500 — Europe everywhere rising to its hopeful
peak of Christian humanity and charm — Mouton's "Nesciens Mater,"
with the art of the birth in the stable, sung by angels, hailed by
shepherds as we had read it around the Christmas tree from my
earliest years.
^
Music:
Jean Moutons^esoens Mater (Munrow) Seraphim SIC 6104
/
And Mary brought forth her firstborn son, and
wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a
manger, because there was no room for them in the
inn.
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a92) jean (Bourdicfum, c. 1506, !^el to Sfiepfierds, Qrandes j{eures of Sinne de
‘Bretagne, Bi6C, Vdffi., Baris; + ‘U detail
92) Qeertgen ‘Tot Sint Jans, 1490-5, 5{jgfit OdgUvity, j^tionaC QaUery, Tondon;
+ V detail
92 a) Meister des jdarietUeSens, 1460-80, Tlngels from Coronation (rf 9dary, detail,
S4lte Binal^tfie^ 9dunicfi (C^ 59)^
o-f
And there were in the same country shepherds
abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by
night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them,
and the glory of the Lord shone round about them:
and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto
them:
"Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of
great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is
born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is
Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you. Ye
shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes,
lying in a manger."
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude
of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, "Glory
to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will
toward men."
93)
Qrimani Breoiary, c. 1500-10, nativity, Marciana LiBrary, Venice (video:
details only, aSove and Bdow)
93a) Lucca della B^BBia, c.l450(F), (Madonna d^ (Mela, Bargello, (Florence
And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away
from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to
another, "Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see
this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath
made known unto us." And they came with haste, and
found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a
manger.
And when they had seen, it, they made
known abroad the saying which was told them con
cerning this child.
And all they which heard it
wondered at those things which were told them by the
shepherds.
But Mary kept all these things, and
pondered them in her heart.
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a94) (DouBCe: [Si] SMinom, c. 1500-14S0 ‘B.C., fresco, '{Parisienne,' iHera^ion
Museum and [(B] Qree^ c. 710 (B.C, smaCC Bronze zuarrioT, detaU, Mgtioncd
Museum SltBens
B94) *EBBo ^ospe(, c. 8Z5,f.6ov, St Mar^ ‘BiBB Mun. ‘Epemay
94) 9ipman, Ist-Zndc. SUD., SLrem, fBuCa, 0a[matia. (CQB.'T?)
94 a) fHjfman, ZZ5 SL(D., Tetronius' (Portico, ^uBurBo, Tunisia
94 B) CBartres, c. IISO, a O^ouny d^ny, (Bpyat (Ported, CatBedred
94 c) EcoCoyy 1990, (BraziBan rainforest Buminy
The other face of this early-cycle espousal was a first repudi
ation of the romantic I was rooted in. As if we must practice such a
stripping as from ripe Minoan and Aegean to primitive Greek. In a
poem written at an Oxford concert, 1939, I muse, like some future
Dark Age scop (so the author of the Anglo-Saxon "Ruin":
"Well
wrought this wall-stone, broken by Weird; the work of giants is
crumbling"). I wrote:
When these walls ivy covered stand in ruins.
Gray to the night of faintly altered stars.
And men beholding strike the savage harp
And sing the work of heroes, giants of old —
They will not know that in this crusted hall
Where music wails the specter of a rose,
A man of peace leagued with an age of wars.
Welcomed destruction, famine and the plague.
To find again, strength, without compromise.
As if cultures could go on forever, with Trojan Wars and bar
barian renewals. Though our own war and the ecology crisis have
spelled out \vhat we might have foreseen, that now the globe is at
stake — World Melt or melt-down.
a9S & 9S) (Birds soaring ayainst trees and cCouds (CQB '90; video reverses the
order and adds an overCay of tBz two)
9Sa)
(Ry-Bens, 1636, Chateau de Steen Landscape, detaU, (Hg.tionaC QaUery,
London
So even during the war, and in a place no more scenic than
Iowa, the spring of 1943* called me from "Augustinian Wisdom" to a
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celebration of nature — not simply a Romantic return. What sustains
this "Patterned Evening" is the organizing physics of entropic hjB
against down:
' ^
Image of the world, mirror to all time: —
Clouds, winds, and waves of light, senselessly
beautiful.
Moved by the force that moves, borne down the
stream.
Flung from the high to low, seeking repose;
And birds, bearers of life, that sing and soar.
Fired with a god-like will, breasters of the wind.
Beating bold wings up a torrent sky.
Feeding the sweet blaze of eternal desire.
9G) ^—' Sfvotdo, c. 1S30(F), St. SLntfwny tempted,
96a & 5) metaUs cf 96, SavoCdo
3 ^
San (Die^o
Princeton would have seemed a motion back to the closures of
East, from Emerson to Hawthorne, with sin and psychosis. Thus in
Savoldo's 1530(?) Temptation, St.Anthony, headed for that nature
Renaissance has opened, turns in terror, back to a Bosch pursuing
Nightmare. As I wrote on a conference of Atomic Scientists: "Still
mad Prometheans,/ Or broken drudges working death's weapons/
Irrelevant what cause. So all props prove/ At last abortive, built of
the crumbling tuff."
Such the departmental gab and hollowness, smart erosion of
honesty and courage, from which I did well to be fired, leaving the
old life behind me. Or was escape an illusion?
97) Turner, C.180S-10, On the Thames(?), ^{ptionaC QaTery, London
97a) Turner, c.1830, (Death on a (Pale 9{orse, Tate Qallery, London
Had not Turner been driven a century and a half before, from
the calm irradiation of an early oil sketch along the Thames, to the
Apocalyptic expressionism of this late "Death on a Pale Horse"? The
polarities had been dangerously entangled since Blake's Marriage of
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Heaven and Hell — or as he would say, since the Creation, which was
the Fall.
98) T,rich 9(gJi[er, pfioto By ^nide ^yCeisdman, 1351, l^estscfiriBt; first, video iUtail
98 a) QaCway IKjnneO, CBuBBed at Sehta,
iMarcfi 26,1965
Yet it was from Princeton that I received the Great Europeans
(Great - Germans one might say, but they were Jews), Erich Kahler,
wisest of them really, humanitarian philosopher-historian, whom I
described in his Festschrift, pacing the room, pulling his hair, talking
of transcendence, "while insights opened and spread around me like
realms of light; for there is no one else that can talk like Erich
Kahler."
And for an American power, the closest of my students, Galway
Kinnell, here clubbed by police at the Selma march, wakes in the
arms of a Black Madonna. How death crowds, in his love poems: "I
touch your face,/ I move my hand over/ Slopes, falls, lumps of
sight..."
a99) Qoya, 1824-25, 9(yde against rocl^, !fme 5lrts, (Boston; + V (UtaiC
99) Os^r (Kp^sfi^, 1914, *lHe ^Tempest, (Kpnstmuseunt, (BaseC; + ^ detaiC
99 a) Joan Jdiro, 1938, Sdf-portrait, J/T3o6y, 9^zv Canaan, CT; + V (CetaiC
What the old Goya, more than a century before, sought in the
form of a nude, her lights drawn by water dropped on blackened
ivory. "A cheek-bone,/ A curved piece of brow,/ A pale eyelid/ Float
in the dark,/ And now I make out/ An eye, dark,/ Wormed with faroff, unaccountable lights." Like Kokoshka's 1914 Tempest love for
Alma Mahler: "And now the day, raft that breaks up, comes on./ I
think of a few bones/ Floating qn a river at night,/ The starlight
blowing in place on the water,/ The river leaning like a wave toward
the emptiness." Yet all of these, heirs to Isolde's Liebestod, affirm
whatever brings us to this brunt.
Even Miro, in his 1938 Self-portrait, as he melts into shapes of
earth and sky: Kinnell: "How many nights/ Have I lain in terror,/ 0
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Creator Spirit, Maker of night and day,// only to walk out/ the next
morning over the frozen world/ hearing under the creaking of snow/
faint, peaceful breaths.,./ snake,/ bear, earthworm, ant...// and above
me/ a wild crow crying 'yaw yaw yaw' / from a branch nothing cried
from ever in my life."
alOO)
5100)
Cfiica£o from CS(ffiura£ ^History Museum (C(fB, Sept. '60)
CCaude Lorrain, 1678, Landscape vH-t^ Shepherds, !f(}m5a(d Museum, !Lort
Worth, Le^as
100)
SCoBBema, 1689, rChe Siventie, Mg-tionaC QaUery, London; + V detaiC
100a) CCatide Lorrain, 1648,
Tdnds'cape
Dancin£ S^igures, QaUery
Gloria ^amphdi, 9(pme
So I came back to the Chicago of my youth, to teach in Hutchins'
University, where Anti-fascist exile, Giuseppe Antonio Borgese,
ipomed_Jai:gfi*_ Tie~had ^written iiPIKTee fdng^S^S'lTpoenr orliiilife:
"Easter Sunday, 1945".
^
m/-
Music:
Boccherini, c.l775(?), Adagio, Sonata 6 (Casals) DB-1392
A
The Italian boyhood took the classical style of Manzoni, to be
imaged wherever that dream has fructified, from Claude, to Dutch
Hobbema's Poplar Avenue; in music, let it be Casals' Boccherini: —
"0 Sicilia, o Toscana, ove sostai
fanciullo, o dolce pian di Lombardia" (as translated):
0 Sicily, 0 Tuscany, where I paused
In boyhood, 0 sweet Lombardy plain,
M6asured by mulberry trees, fanned by the feathers
Of poplars, where no more I tread your ways.
Lifting my eyes to townships brown along
Your hills, or coming home to trusty eyenings
Seeking the marble pinnacles of Milan
Softened by the breathing of the meadows
Where the cloud lingered. Now no more — non piu;
(fade Boccherini)
alOl) Cams, c. 1830, Wanderer at the City Qate, (9(unst. 1932); video, details only
101) Ludzoi£ fHichter, 1837(?), DerSchrechgnstein, Mas. Leipzi£; + ^detail
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W'j't
101a) ^rC (BCecfien, iKeid^er^ T^ower, ^nstfiafh, ‘Bremen
10IB) ^Fnedncfi Lessing, c.l950(?), ‘WoodCed ^nge, watercoCor, ‘BerCin
Music:
Schumann, 1841, Symphony #1 ("Spring"), 1st movement,
opening, (Klemperer, New Philharmonia) Angel 36353
dich nicht, Deutschland, Erde meiner zweiten Friihe...
The German student-wanderings take the language of Goethe and
Holderlin (here with Schumann, Carus, Richter, Blechen):
Germany, land of my second prime, where clear
streams
Rushed through the fragrant darkness of the night.
The slowly yielding woodland night, and flowers.
Geraniums, from balconies at morning.
Laughed like a thousand girls, but I went, lonely.
Wandered from ridge to ridge, climbing bell-towers
Of immemorial red, listened to music
Enclosed in depths, and with my loving eyes
Held that strange beauty. Now no more! —
die fremde Schone mit verliebtem Auge
fasste: nicht mehr:
0 Tenebrae! 0 Aceldama!
(fade Schumann)
al02j
B102)
(DotiBCe: [^] ^RgmBrandt, 165S, y^CayedOTO Lot^e; and[‘B] Soutine, 1926,
Carcass of‘Beef, 9dme ‘Bignou, (Paris; ^ stng^duaUs
'] tmBy
(Marc CB^ad, 1947. ffCayedOtc, (Private CoC^tion, (Paris; + ‘1/details
102)
,
(Marc CfiagaCC, 1947 (on earCier sBptcBes) Hie (faCCing Singed, (Private
Collection, ‘Based
ui4\joPs-^ V’i/lo (^a
102a) Same, detail (xvitfi otfi^ ^^et^ from 102^j
In the last section of his poem, Borgese, in war-time America,
forges an English out of Shakespeare and the modern. Thus Rem
brandt's Slaughtered Ox, as symbolic as realistic, has variously in
formed our century. Here, in 1926, before the rise of Hitler, Soutine's
existential reminder already distills Holocaust.
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Music:
Symbolic
History
Bartok, 1943, Concerto for Orchestra, from 3rd movement (Elegy),
(Reiner) RCA AGL 1-2909
By Chagall's 1947 ox lapping its own blood. Holocaust was real;
but the alarm of the night town, the celestial warning voice, weave a
Crucifixion magic around Nazi Europe and the trial of the Jews. And
in Chagall's Falling Angel, variously painted from 1923 to 1947, as in
the Elegy from Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, or the close of Borgese's Easter poem — disaster flames affirmation:
You passers-by who stop and wonder
what I in uncommuning sounds lament;
it is as if I had left home at noon
and looked homeward before sundown; I see
the barns aflame, the house a rump,
the trees writhing in, desperate embraces; death
with claws of strangling smoke grips ground and air.
The silence is one shriek, one chasm the paths.
So let me step westward; my shadow is long.
In unmediated transcendence, that striding shadow is cast
exactly by the burning world-past — "my shadow is long".
(fade Bartok)
103) iPfioto of Qiuseppe ShvUmio (Bor^ese, Italy, Spriny, 19S2
103a) iHenry Moore, 1343-7, Tlie
(Private CoCCection
1036) S^yain 103, a closer view oflBoryese
Has Borgese, secretary of Hutchins' Committee to Frame a
World Constitution, editor of its magazine Common Cause, veered
here from planned Reconstruction to an Avant Garde firework af
firming the negative itself, that blaze of world destruction?
Any
such antinomy — form against flux, man's- stable earth against
Apocalypse — fuses in the actual. When Borgese read that poem, so
deeply rooted in its languages, yet so voiced that all languages
sounded like Italian, I sensed some modern liberation of dissonance
and flame. Yet the Roman will of that thrust-out lip, the conscious
command of tradition and form, decried the hermetic shell-game of
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modernity. It was Farinata who had raised himself up:
Farinata, che s'e dritto."
History
"vedi la,
al04) Josepfi MBers, 13S3, SBomage to tfie Square: SlscetuCin^; Wfiitney Vttuseum,
6104) James I. Qi£6ert, c, 1948, Trairie S^des (canvas version), ‘Estate; first,
vuCeo ^taiC
104) J. MSers, 1958, SBomage to tfie S<ju.are: SiitardanSo; Janis QcUCery,
Remembering my summer with the embattled Erich at Black
Mountain, where Albers and his followers were pursuing what would
become this "Homage to the Square", I wrote:
The modern abstract has been the expression of man
reduced from humanity to function or confronted with
that reduction, of nature desicated out of organic
interplay to symbolic paradigm... It abandoned spacetime for the boom of the Marabar caves. In opposition
to this, the new organic reaffirms the meaningful con
cordances of spirit and matter, of world and man.
(An affirmation for which Jim Gilbert, teaching at Chicago with me,
became my art-example, as in his prairie and city nudes — though he
deplored historical programs.)
As for the abstract, I had long felt the beauty of the Godel
Proof, to float mathematics again on paradox, the suspension of its
axiomatic claims — and not simply the beauty of that result; but of
the very proof, of abstraction trained to reflect on and delimit itself.
Yet what were the abstractions of Albers proving?
alOS) ‘Wiflem de 9(ponvn£, c. 1947, fBindiSfngd, SiSUtney Museum,
105) de %gonvngi c, 1945, ‘iHe Marshes, University Museum, CBerl^Cey (video adds
detaUs of al05, then of 105)
105a) (PisaneCCo, 1441-3, LeoneCCo dEste medat, verso, tripCe-faud youth
Meanwhile de Kooning, rendering Angel and Marsh, spread an
Action-Painting-wing of the New-York-School-flight — an energy
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�Symbolic
C.G. Bell
released by the dissolution of forms.
with the euphoria of flux?
History
Had not Plato ironically toyed
Socrates:
Their first principle is that...there is nothing but
motion .... everything is becoming and in relation, and
being must be altogether abolished... Thus in the
language of nature all things are coming into being and
passing into new forms; nor can any name fix or detain
them... 0 Theaetetus, are not these speculations sweet
as honey? And do you not like the taste of them in
the mouth?
With such modem excitement, I too had risked, from my youth,
a dialectic of paradox — though my aim was to enlarge reason, as
Socrates did by sophistic contradiction.
al06)
BIOS)
106)
CHicago ^eacfi, 57tfi-53rd, (Daimy & CaroCa (CQ^ 1931)
jTX. Wriyfitj 1909-10, 9(pBie 9{ouse, Cfucago (CQ(B '60)
!y.L.
1940, Lwiii£ area, LCoyd LettHs Odotise, LiBertyvUCe, IL, rvitfi
3am Overton &
(CQ% '60)
106a) ^et, ITtfi-century (DcUai Lama Talace, Lfiasa, zvithfCags
106B) 9(enry Moore, 1359-64, Standtn£ 3^i£ure, Bronze
106c) 9(prea: sBeCCiny of Inchon, 1950; Life at 9^ar
106(C) CfCaminy Santa Cfe sunset (CQ% Sum 1990)
And there I found myself by the windy shore of the Century of
Progress Fair, breasting Whitman's "oceanic amplitude and rush of
these great cities" — I, teaching, with humanities and history, art
appreciation, especially of the modem. From our leaded Tudor panes
we could look across to Wright's Robie House, or visit with friends
the one he built for his cousin near Libertyville. To take the thrill of
those spaces; to affirm again the daring of the West, the present
wonder of the world. In the glow of German Goethe, Schelling, and
the music of Beethoven, to span the global reach of Adlai's speeches,
the Marshall Plan recovery of Europe, what seemed the geniality of
British socialism, the advancing American pursuit of rights; to plant
that leaven of hope — though in the stubborn dough of Cold War,
Korea, cyclical history, the Greek tragedy and Thucydides I was
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic
History
teaching — such was the crucible of "Diretro al SqI,” affirmation of
tragic America, its title from Dante (Ulysses; "To sail beyond the
sunset" — that paean to "the mad flight," "il folle volo," that took him
under: "The sea closed over us, as it pleased another".)
alOT) Qeoj^ia. O'HC^efe, 1926, City 9^6% Tstate cfJ^rtist
107) (DouBCe: [J^j LaBrouste, 1862-8,
iRpom, ‘BiBC. 9{flt., (Boris) otuC
[(B] 9\(g,Tvi, (PaCace, cf
(under construction), (Turin; + V sinyCe detoUs
c/i^srudluS/\/V\oh.
On that peak and defile (our freedom aimed at Vietnam, our
boom at ecology crisis), my art class was responding to the new
architecture, as Georgia O'Keefe had in her New York phase — the
explosion of materials, the phenomenal expansion of powers (as from
the 1860s wrought iron reading room of the National Library in
Paris, to Nervi's post-war Palace of Work, here being built in Turin).
al08) SuMvan andITidCer, 1887-9, SUiditorium (Buildiny, CBicayo
108) A Qaudi, 1891 ff, LaSamada (famiBa, (BarceCona; first, video C^taiC
'fo e'\PefiKodL \f{x^
us\<U/' V'uS/tu—\
I was tracing from the 19th century the interplay within a
continuing polarity:
a straight-lined functionality, as of Bauhaus,
rooted far back in the Scott Mackintosh, Hoffman in Vienna, here, the
skeletal steel of Chicago's Sullivan and Adler; at the other extreme, a
fantasy of organic growth — sprung up like Jack's beanstalk, though
not overnight — Gaudfs 300-foot stone towers of the Barcelona
Church of the Sacred Family, begun in 1891 and still to be completed.
al09) 7.L. Wriyfit, 1954, desiyn, BetB SBoCem Synayoyue
Bl09) Wriyfti, 1954, same Synayoyue, (BBUodeCpBia (CQ(B 59)
109) 94hTy(tt, anotfier viezv of tBe same BuUdiny (C^,
^
.
V/
So to Frank Lloyd Wright's synthesis and transcendence of the
poles — here, in what he was then designing, this Philadelphia Syn
agogue, defying, as it were, all deaths by war and holocaust — one of
which Dylan Thomas had refused to mourn:
Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic
History
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness
And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn
The majesty and burning of the child's death...
alio) Mies v.cC. ^fie, c. 1968, vkiofrom 1‘BM(BuiCdin^, Cfucago; + V
BllO) (DeCaunay, 1910,
TiffeC^ower, JQmstmuseum, *Basd; video, details only
110) 91ou6Ce: [Jij (Ddaunay, 6110 TiffeC^l^ower; and [(B] ^^.L.^Wriyht, desiynfor
t6e MUe 9{ig6 Illinois, stiCC unSuiCt (video scans Wright's Shy City)>^
J0
So the fall of 1951 brings me to my own poem, "Beyond the
Sunset," with Beethoven, and a whole horizon of art.
Music:
Beethoven 1834, 3rd Movement (Adagio), 9th Symphony,
(Toscanini)-V-LM 6901, side 13
Driven home along the Outer-drive from a wine-tasting in the
Electric Club, by the fearless skill of Elizabeth Mann Borgese, I sat at
my desk, just able, with so much tasting, to hold the pen. But this is
what I scrawled:
over the gulf and soaring of the city
We came at dusk to the roof-garden rail.
Darkness flowed in the streets; the sheer beauty
Of towered steel rose in the violet air —
Bands and heights of light under the sky^ plumes;
Cars to the suburbs bum the long road lanes.
Delaunay's 1910 Eiffel Tower had expressed the ecstasy which
would lead Frank Lloyd Wright, after two wars, to conceive his still
unbuilt Mile High Sky-city, charged with Icarian overweenings:
tandem-cab, ratchet-guided, atomic-powered elevators!
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic
History
alll) UnitedOdg-tions ^uU(Cin£,
O^orf^City (indeo, details only)
111) IDeCaunay, 1910-12, La ^iCCe de (Baris, Mush (KyiionaC d^rt Modeme, (Baris;
first, video detail
Here on the terrace, drinking wine and eating,
^People of every nation, hearts unquelled
!Ky
By the • encroaching shadows, mingle, speaking
Tongues of kindred lands. Their voices tell
Of customs and of needs, of the fools who rule;
They are loose in talk and laughter, slurs and dreams.
(How my Dionysiac poem, beyond conscious programs of worldrescue, kindles a pyre of fatal celebration.) While from the luminist
rapture of Delaunay's 1912 City of Paris,
112) J.I. QiWert, c, 1948, (Brairie Vdydes (pond version); C^, Santa iTe
112 a) Copy ofSLttic, c. 430 (B.C; (Berides Bust, (BritisB (Museum, London
1126) (Bfiidian(?), c. 440 (B.C., lounger of the (Hjace Bronze Warriors, detail,
(Museum, (Rs££io-Ca(aBria
112c) (Detailof 112, QilBert; *BdlcoClection (andCQ(B photo)
Gilbert caught a vision of such Cezanne-nudes over prairie, bridged
river, cliffs like roofs of Chicago.
And the clouds relinquish the sun's brown setting.
Twilight deepens as the city glows.
Out of the past of another world-evening
Spirit has suffered, a great voice looms;
It i’s Pericles — with Athens at the bourn
Of her adventurous sailing into ruin:
"We are the school of Hellas. Wonder unending
Of after ages will be ours. We have
Made sea and land the highway of our daring.
If now obedient to the general law
We invite decay, the greatness we have known
Will be some break of beauty in that gloom."
113) (Mies v.d. (Rphe, 1938, Seayram ‘Building, (BarhiSLvenue, (M^fC; + *1^ detail
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�C.G. Bell
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History
113 a) Same, c. 1968, I(BM (BuUcCing, Cfiicc^o, side view, xvi^ trees (CQ(B '83);
+ video pan
1136) Same 6uUdin£, front view (CQ^ '83)
(Mies van der Rohe already raising his towers of steel and glass
in America):
These words echo in the mind. From dark flashing
Along the gray shore and the wash of waves.
Towers, and cars streaming. Up vibrant air reaching
Cones of light catch at the destinate planes.
The roar west and east. Here in the hum
Of mingled voices, careless freedom sings.
And we too have lived the dayspring and daring
Which all time will remember; we have seen
Over the earth-foreclosure of our wasting.
Still the incredible brightening of the dream...
Now promise is almost presence under the dome
Of night stirred with light and the rush of wings.
(fade Beethoven)
all4) Sane Overton^, 1990, Chicago window with weird manikin; + ^ detaiC
6114) Same, Skyscrapers of Chicago
cll4) Same, Street scene
114) Same, Shop vHndow rvith photo-mani%i and r^Cections
114 a) Same, again, the ma£e modd, nearer
Since the poem is elegiac, I have let it speak, though its pathos
was the flaw of the vision. Adlai's rhetoric had no escape from bas
tion enterprise, with the hot Koreas of cold war. So a sequel would
attend a later visit — a conversation with a manikin in a shop win
dow:
Chicago Twenty Years After
The city always taller over the shore;
The sirens of its promise heavier;
I almost caught in the dream rush as before.
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic
History
Ask the manikin whose mythic hair
Slogans a costly tweed: "Was the Western star
We pledged with life, tinsel as you are?"
Smiles lewd, smiles last: "What Promethean lure
Set your soul to sell, in a mortgaged store.
That three-piece suit of freedom, profit, war?"
allS) Laf^ ^BoUvar atuC^eer Crufu MS, c. 19ZS (BCuejUter)
6115) Be(X graves, Cemetery, greenvUCe MS (CgB '89, Blue fiCter); + ^ detail
^Hiver Bridge soutB. of greenvUCe, MS (Cg(B '89, Blue filter)
115)
115a) greenvUCe Cemetery (CgB Blue copy of UleCta III,U},3,d)
115B) Urau^ZuUb, 1988, pBoto overlay of tree and nlglit sBy
Meanwhile, the poems of westward flight fSongs for a New
America) were hardly done when I took the bus south (such a
polarity as X against Y) to visit my mother in that Delta of water,
night and void. The last return was to the cemetery and my father's
grave. There, past the trees and plantings, cars take the speedway
for the river bridge:
And say, like Herodotus' Libyans, we come to sleep.
For divination, on our fathers' tombs.
How can their ghosts but point us on and on:
Over poisoned fields, up a strand of steel.
Where a space-bridge arches a river star-coiled.
Such the graveyard close of Delta Return:
Therefore this dark of the water-spilled gray moon
And oaks by the river over the watered plain.
And moon-gray sky and sky's legend of stars.
Are the ebb and flow where we go up and down
The swirls of Delta night — space, place, haunt, home.
116)
Siztec, 1324-15Z1, Calendar or Sun Stone, Mytional Museum of
Sintfiropology, Mej(ico City; + V detaU
116a) greenvUCe Cemetery, Muffuletto angel ICgO '89; Blue filter; video shows
first a detaU of 115a)
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�C.G. Bell
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History
Break off. Quixote’s second venture, to probe the sfnall now for
the Now of consciousness, has come round also to a time-plot, in this
case personal. How far from the cosmic cycles (Tiger, Water, Wind
and Fire) of the Aztec Sun Stone. Where is the Sipapu opening from
self to world, the Apocalypse opening from world to All?
On the cast of a last hope, I take up the Five Chambered Heart
(poems of Love, Lust, Earth, Waste, Soul); focusing on those of the
fifth state (Soul), I set three to images, and why not music?
117) !fTiedricft, c,1818(?), Hkoo Men ‘Watcfi tfie Moon
over tHe Sea,
9{emuta£e, Leningrad (center-spread of tfie picture); + ^ detail
Music:
Alban Berg, 1935, Violin Concerto, (Grumiaux & Amsterdam)
Philips ST 802-785 LY, from the last forte to the close
There is the shift from self to earth, and greater, from earth to
cosmos. I once experienced it in a dream, to be treated thereafter in
fiction and poetry — in The Half Gods under the rubric "the Metamor
phosis of-the Cave."
118) USX Cokg- Wor^, Cfairston,
gfoomy viezo; first, V detail
Through labyrinthine closures of the planet we have raped and
soiled, we wander as though lost in an overarching cavern, an
underworld.
But since that vault is the fact of the sky-smogged,
trashed and poisoned globe, the poetic distillation (from the Five
Chambered Heart") takes the title of "World Cave."
119) Old ^ook of Xnozuledpe print of a torefi raised in Mammotfi Cave
The first response is of repudiation:
I light the torch
And lift it to inscribe in smoke
My curse, my warning on the wall.
IZO) Ceiling (Utailfrom Carlsdad Cavern, using BluefUter
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic
History
Then, as if the very blaze of wrong had kindled stalactite
sparks above, perception, groping the starred dark, shifts and widens
— as through speculations of earth:
Is it rock crystal
Shining? —
121) Qada (PCacida tomB, iRg-vetma, mosaic vauCt of stars; + V detail
to the illusionistic jewellings of Early Christian art, this star-dome at
Ravenna — the poem questioning:
Gold mosaics?
while the ceiling spreads and recedes, past the speed of light —
122) SpCendour of the ^leavens, Judy sl^, soutfi, over London; + ^ detail
the closure of the Platonic cave become this star-cloud universe of
worlds in space, with constellations of a symbolic destiny:
Shapes
I have known:
—three, a moving sequence in the summer sky
123) CQ(B's schematized pattern, prichfd and photqyraphed
as of pain, celebration, transcendence:
Cross, Lyre, Crown.
124) fP.fP. Jipos, C.1680F, Landscape with a Qrotto, !H£,rmita£e; video, detail ondy
125) Qlints on snow, undere7(posed, with hCuefidter (CQ^B '90)
126) l4nother of 123, aSove: 'stars' of Cross, Lyre, Croton
So, with a swifter sequence, the poem sounds again:
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic
History
World-Cave
I light the torch
And lift it to inscribe in smoke
My curse, my warning on the wall.
Is it rock crystal
Shining? Gold mosaics? Shapes
I have known: Cross, Lyre, Crown!
(Close of Berg)
12 7) Sunset (CQ*B SLu^ust '78)
127a) Larger copy cfSarafi il(p6inson's eye CCf ^
^
12 75) fHfiinBozo cast By crystal on a white surface (CQ^ ’90)
^127c) ^Bens, c. 1630, Cattle Lrinhing at sunset, tnash^detail, Louvre
The next poem is called "Speculum Mundi" — Mirror, or Image,
of the world. It came to me in age, as I watched another sunset,
aware that for Greek philosophy, seeing is a kind of mating, where
masculine light (form or eidos, image or speculum) begets in
receptive organs the things of sight. And imagining that I, body's
hatching place of sense, might soon, by a dissolving return, become
the light itself, I took up nature's love-death praise in a distillate of
mirrored words.
(For which the music can only be:
Beethoven's
"Heilige Dankgesang in der lydischen Tonart".)
[Six images follow, each circularly niasked]
128) ConstaBle, c. 1821, branch iKitt Tond, Hlampstead, Victoria and MBert
Mtiseum
129) Friedrich, 1834, 9(^t after ^Harvest, ‘Dresden Qallery
130) Splendour of die Hleavens. c. 1930, ‘Ihe OdidnightSun
131) Sarah IRpBinson's eye (C^ 1990)
132) Ifm-^ang Odontage, rvith sun and Sarah's eye (CQ‘B 90)
133) Idriedrich, c.1818, ‘Woman facing sunset, Museum, ‘Essen
Music:
3/1994
Beethoven, 1825-7, from the Adagio of the A Minor Quartet,
Opus 132, (Budapest) Col. MBS 677
NOW — Alpha
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic
History
Light through cloud now poured from the spent sun
Receiver I to the childing of your touch
I who next will be the very light
Poured down cloud for the receiving eye
Great either way sight cloud and sun
You into me with the same spending touch
As I then into you with child by my light.
(End Beethoven)
a,B,cl34)
Ci^fitest ey(posures erf 134, Bdow
V(C134
(BCan^ a wfiite screen (video onCy)
134)
C.Q. ^eU in recessive imayes formed By tBree mirrors
134 a) 14n asymmetric variant of the same
When the mirrored self
Fades into light
Beyond the light
Who calls?
I am nothing
But one with the one
That makes the nothing
All.
Remembering my grandfather's photo-montage of himself in
circular array, I had thought to close this Alpha search with mirror
reflections of myself, fading into light with the poem you have just
heard. But that was not the original poem. It had waked me from
sleep deep in the night when an old Princeton friend (as I would
learn) had died.
al35) LimBoury ‘Brotders, 1415-16, Sky-detailfrom Cfvrist in gethsemane, Ores
(Rudies iHeures 14Zv, Music Conde, CBantiUy [video first sBozvs a detail of
135, Belotv]
135)
(Frank^Zudo, 1388, pfioto-numtaye, niyfit sky over rocks
And the fading there was into star-strewn space. The poem (a ballad
stanza broken up and spread over eight lines) is too short for any
music but its own:
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic
History
Gnomic
The night each plows
A furrow of death
In the field of stars
Who calls?
I am nothing
But one with the one
That makes the nothing
AU.
3/1994
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49
�
Dublin Core
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Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound
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St. John's College Meem Library
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Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series.
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paper
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50 pages
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NOW -- Alpha, Symbolic History, Part 38
Description
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Script of Part 38 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell.
Creator
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Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010
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St. John's College
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Santa Fe, NM
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[1988-1990]
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text
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pdf
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SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_38_NOW--Alpha
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