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ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE
SANTA FE
ANNAPOLIS
JUNE 1997
EARTH SHRINES
Mireya Cirici, oil paintings
Inspired by the Mexican altars erected for the Day of
the Dead, Cirici spent four years painting this series,
which attempts to explore man's connection to the
divine. This wi ll be Cirici's first exhibit in Santa Fe.
Exhibit opens with a reception Friday, June 6, from 5
to 7 p.m. in the Fireside Lounge and continues through June 26.
GALLERY HOURS: Friday through Saturday, 5 to 8 p.m.; Sunday, 1 to
5 p.m. The Gallery is located on the second floor of Peterson
Student Center. For more information, p lease contact Ginger
Roherty at 505-984-6099.
�SHAKESPEARE IN SANTA FE, IN ASSOCIATION WITH ST. JOHN'S
COLLEGE, IS PROUD TO PRESENT
THE WINTER'S TALE
Directed by Nagle Jackson
Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights
July 6 through August 17
The Bard's late play is a romantic adventure filled with jealous fury,
magical sea voyages, young love and the healing powers of time.
Come early and enjoy savory gourmet picnic dinners by Wild Oats Dining, along
with Renaissance entertainment starting at 6 p.m. Performances begin at 7:30 p.m. in
the St. John's College Meem Library Courtyard. General admission is free. Preferred
seating is available with a contribution of $15 or $25 per person. For more information call 982-2910.
TEA AND SHAKESPEARE
Join Shakespeare and St. John's, with special guest Nagle Jackson, director of The
Winters Tale, for a few words about the Bard - his wit and wisdom, poetry, truth,
and continued relevance in our lives today. 4 to 5:30 p.m., Saturday, June 21, in the
St. John's College Coffee Shop. Call 982-2910 for reservations. Admission is $9.
CHILDREN'S FAIRY TALE HOUR
Charming tales for the little ones presented by Shakespeare in Santa Fe's Summer
Intern Program. 6 p.m., Wednesdays, August 6 and 13. Admission is.free.
Admission is free.
THE MYTH OF SANTA FE: CREATING A MODERN
REGIONAL TRADITION
Chris Wilson, University of New Mexico. The lecture will be followed by
a reception and book signing. 3 p.m., Sunday, June 22, in the Great Hall.
The "Speaking Volumes" Lecture Series is sponsored by the St. John's College Library
and Fine Arts Guild.
Admission is free to all lectures.
THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN CONSERVATISM: OR, IF
YOU THINK COMBINING ATHENS AND JERUSALEM
IS HARD, TRY ADDING PHILADELPHIA
John Agresto, president, t. John's College, 3 p.m., Wednesday, June
18, in the Junior Common Room.
Goo OF ISAAC
Phil Lecuyer, 3 p.m., Wednesday, June 25 , in the Junior Common Room.
ON OEDIPUS
REx
Basia Miller, 3 p.m., Wednesday, July 2 , in the Junior Common Room.
�CHARLES BELL
Tuesdays at 8 p.m. in the Private Dining Room.
Admission is free.
June 3:
1600: THE TRAGIC DIVIDE (SHAKESPEARE):
Vortex of transformation
June 10: BAROQUE FORMULATION: Quixotic rebirth,
Cartesian consciousness
June 17: EARLY CHRISTIANITY: From the origins to the fall of Rome
June 24:
1400: PILGRIM'S ALL (CHAUCER'S WORLD):
"In the
temple playing"
July 1:
Cycles:
Patters of history, early civilizations; where are we now?
FRANZ SCHUBERT
Peter Pesic, piano
D. 946; SONATA IN B-FLAT, D. 960
8 p.m., Friday, June 20, in the Great Hall.
THREE PIANO PIECES,
Admission is free.
BEGINNING LIFE DRAWING CLASS
THE ART OF SEEING
Six Saturdays, June 21 through July 26, 1 :30 to 3:30 p.m., $90.
This class will focus on concepts such as contours, negative space and
proportion as a way of learning to see and draw the human figure. For
more information on the class, please call Michele Beinder at 4664872. To register call the Student Activities Office at 984-6139.
Registration deadline is June 14.
LANDSCAPES
Peter Ruta, oil paintings
A retrospective of landscapes from the last 15 years, the exhibit will
provide a capsule history of Santa Fe's growth in that time.
Exhibit opens with a reception Friday, July 11, from 5 to 7 p.m. , in
the Fireside Lounge and continues through July 27 .
FRED HERSCH, JAZZ PIANO
With numerous personal albums, performances and producing credits on another 80
albums, and two Grammy nominations behind him, Fred Hersch has, as The New
Yorker said, stepped " into the front rank of today's pianists. "
8 p.m., Monday, July 28, in the Great Hall. Call for ticket information.
�U. S. Postage
PAID
ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE
S '
TA FF.
•
ANNAPOLIS
1160 Camino Cruz Blanca
Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501-4599
Please call 984-6104 to be placed on che
mailing list. Published ten times each year
by the Public Relations Office. Printed by
and with generous support from Academy
Printers, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Be dre .T a circle
th at ~hut me sutHeretic, rebel, a
thing te fleut.
But Leve and I had
the '.Tit te '.Yin:
we drew a circle
that teek him in.
1
-
0
Ed\Yin Markhi;..m
Non-Profit
Organization
Permit No. 231
Santa Fe, NM
�
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Santa Fe Community Calendar, June 1977
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Event calendar for the Santa Fe campus community, June 1977.
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St. John’s College
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Santa Fe, NM
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1977-06
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Calendar
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St.Tohn'u.---------------------------------------~
C"ollege
~-ommunity Events
October 1987
OCTOBER 2
Friday, 8 p.m.
OCTOBER 3
Saturday, 7&9:15 p.m.
~
~
LECTURE:
"On Euclid I-35: Equality and Identity" by
Mr. David P. Jones, St. John's College tutor. Free.
The Great Hall.
*FILMS: Vive La France!
"Jules and Jim" (Truffaut,
1961) and "Black Orpheus" (Camus, 1959). The Great
Hall.
OCTOBER 4
Sunday, 3-5 p.m.
GALLERY RECEPTION: Dedication and blessing of fresco
mural in Peterson Student Center by artist Frederico
Vigil. Other artists also represented in the gallery
exhibit: Bernadette Vigil, oil painting; Anthony
Carl Tsosie, sculptor and builder; Miguel Baca
Chavez, writer, composer. On display in the art
gallery, Peterson Student Center, through October 31,
Wednesday - Sunday, 1-5 p.m. or by appointment.
OCTOBER 6
Tuesday, 8:15 p.m.
SYMBOLIC HISTORY THROUGH SIGHT AND SOUND:
"Michelangelo-Storm Center" (man, style, culture,
world-soul). Dr. Charles Bell presents this new,
slide-enriched version of his show. Free. Junior
Common Room.
OCTOBER 13
Tuesday, 8 p.m.
SYMBOLIC HISTORY THROUGH SIGHT AND SOUND:
"FaustArchetype" (cresting in Goethe, Beethoven, Hegel).
Dr. Charles Bell. Free. Junior Common Room.
OCTOBER 16
Friday, 8 p.m.
LECTURE:
OCTOBER 17
Saturday, 7&9:15 p.m.
To Be Announced.
Free.
The Great Hall.
*FILMS: A Charlie Chaplin Festival. The Little Tramp
stars in "The Gold Rush" (1925) and "City Lights"
(1931). With shorts:
"The Immigrant" (1917), "The
Pawnshop" (1916), "One A.M." (1916). The Great Hall.
OCTOBER 20
Tuesday, 8 p.m.
LECTURE/SLIDE SHOW: Susan A. Kuss, artist and
teacher, will use historical and contemporary
paintings in her presentation, "The Art of Light and
Color". Free.
The Great Hall.
OCTOBER 20
Tuesday, 8 p.m.
SYMBOLIC HISTORY THROUGH SIGHT AND SOUND:
"Cycles"
(patterns of history, early civilizations, the Vicoquestion). Dr. Charles Bell. Free. Junior Common
Room.
OCTOBER 23
Friday, 8 p.m.
CONCERT: The Stanford String Quartet. This
performance supported, in part, with funds provided
by the Western States Arts Foundation, The New Mexico
Arts Division, and the National Endowment for the
Arts.
Beethoven: Quartet in F, Op. 18 No. 1
Bartek: Quartet No. 4
Dvorak: Quartet No 10 in E-flat
Tickets available at the door:
$7,
$3.50 students/senior citizens. The Great Hall.
*Film showings: 7 PM and 9:15 PM
Admission: S3 . Double Feature $4
Location: The Great Hall
Box Office opens: 6:45 PM
CHECK SWITCHBOARD FOR LAST
MINUTE CHA GES
Please Post
fur more information, call
982-3691, ext. 288
�OCTOBER 24
Saturday, 7&9:15 p.rn.
*FILMS: Dance the night away with Fred and Ginger!
"Swing Time" (1936) and "Top Hat" (1935), with a
short tribute to Big Band music, "Cab Calloway and
His orchestra in Hi-De-Ho" (1937). The Great Hall.
OCTOBER 27
Tuesday, 8 p.rn.
SYMBOLIC HISTORY THROUGH SIGHT AND SOUND:
"Greece,
the Tragic Myth and Deed" (Homer to Plato).
Dr. Charles Bell. Free.
Junior Common Room.
OCTOBER 30
Friday, 8 p.m.
LECTURE:
To Be Announced.
Free.
The Great Hall.
NOTE: The Calendar of Events is now mailed only to those patrons who
responded to last month's request to remain on the list. We welcome
newcomers, and will gladly reinstate others who may have previously found it
difficult to contact us.
Should you know anyone who might enjoy the Calendar,
please encourage that person to contact the public relations office, extension
288.
St. ohn's
ollege
1160 Camino de la Cruz Blanca
Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501
Address Correction Requested
BULK RATE
U.S. POSTAGE
PAID
PERMIT 0. 231
SA TAFE, M
�
Text
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2 pages
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Title
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Santa Fe Community Calendar, October 1987
Description
An account of the resource
Event calendar for the Santa Fe campus community, October 1987.
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St. John's College
Coverage
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Santa Fe, NM
Date
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1987-10
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St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
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pdf
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SF_Community_Calendar_1987_10
Calendar
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
1. Nature: The Perceptive Field
Part I
1)
Sunrise on the Lacanha River, Chiapas, Mexico (CGB)
Sound:
Various frogs, superimposed; Sounds of the Night, Houghton
Mifflin
Where to begin with what rounds on itself, a skein of endless complex — as if
Heraclitus' metaballon anapauetai, "hurled about it draws to rest," were crisscrossed,
augmented and diminished, within and without, interfused, like water glints, like the cries
of frogs. But that is to have begun already, with uncertainty, the amorphous swim of a
tropic stream — Thales, "all things come from water."
(end frog cries)
2)
Human Embryo, 6.5 weeks, Photographed by L. Nilsson, Time-Life Reproduction, from April 30, 1965
Sound: Heartbeat of CGB — stand-in for embryonic pulse
Goethe's homunculus in the wide sea. And what other source do we find, if we
grope systematic thought to its pre-child or pre-historic origins; organic body to Harvey's
embryonic pulse (fade heart);
3)
Orion Nebula, U.S. Naval Observatory
suns and worlds to the turbulence of galactic foam — that chaos which seems in Genesis
either God's first work, or the primal dark on which his spirit moves.
4)
Monet, 1914-18, Water Lilies, Sunset, detail; Orangerie, Paris
Music: Debussy, 1903-5, La Mer, near end of second movement, Columbia
MS 6077
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
In art, that all-beginning may have waited for the end: the dream-erotic meltings
of Mallarmé's "Faun," "on the air drowsy with tufted slumbers," Rimbaud's "le Poème/
De la Mer, infusé d'astres, et lactescent," that "sea, infused with stars, and lactescent," to
which Debussy gave tone-color; in painting what swirls through this post-Impressionist
Monet, symbolist Redon, the Fauves, to the whirlpool abstracts of Kandinsky's
Jugendstil.
(Fade Debussy)
5)
Jean Goujon, 1548-9, Nymph, Fontaine des Innocents, Paris
Music:
Francesco da Milano, 1536, Fantasia, Lute, Archiv 2533 73 (#6)
The commitment of early art (as of early music and thought) had been to the
crystalline; as if what it took to rear a culture out of nature — Egyptian, Classical, this
Renaissance nymph from a fountain by Goujon, or the lute fantasies of Francesco da
Milano — were the eternal clarity of reason, to set a temple of Parian marble over the
Hydra flux.
6)
Attic c. 500 B.C., Head of Korê #674, Acropolis Museum, Athens
The Greeks had expressed it forever, the sheer wonder of form's discovery. For
that shared logos of the intelligible, we would almost risk all. But we can no more rest
our thought on that Acropolis than in the reed bed of the faun. All history exists, and we
carry it in our cells.
(Fade Milano)
a7)
b7)
7)
Very Large Array, from southeast, New Mexico (CGB '87)
Circumpolar star-tracks over Anglo-Australian Reflector
Parabolas of Very Large Array, at sunset, San Augustin plains, New Mexico,
Smithsonian, July 1978
We are not our own embryo sculpting instinctive walls. The senses fell or were
channeled before we were men, mammals, reptiles, while we were still awash in the
Cambrian seas. Nor is it with the bare senses that we perceive. There is the lidless eye of
Palomar. The radio parabolas of mile-long arrays, of which computers are the sorting
nerves, scan the sky for quasars and black holes of cosmic death and origin.
8)
7/1995
Micro-organic decomposers in a pond, Smithsonian, January 1978
Nature: The Perceptive Field
2
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Even the tropic pool opens to the recess that terrified Pascal and delighted Leibniz
with the suspension of structure within structure forever — the microscopic stair of live
automatons.
Surely the first (though almost mind-dissolving) task of every fresh art and
thought is to yield to the breathing of that organically transformed Pythagorean void:
9)
9a)
Giant spring near Pujiltique, Chiapas, reflections (CGB '78)
Same, detail with ripples (CGB '78)
Void enters into the heaven itself from the infinite air, as though the
heavens were breathing; and this void defines the natures of things …
Then, on the liquid interface, one sees circles, geometric waves that spread in the
very flux of universal water. A calculable curve has arisen from the amorphous itself, its
propagated sinusoids the cancellate of whatever countless indeterminacies give the
molecular slide of fluidity. Clear as the cut of an archaic Apollo, Euclid smiles over the
surface of the Heisenberg pool.
a10)
10)
Colonies of Volvox (CGB scrapbook of clippings)
Volvox, large globular green algal colony, with daughter colonies, Natural
History, April 1975
Focus down, like Leeuwenhoek. Somewhere in the water you find Volvox, at the
divide between proto- and metazoan. (Whip your reason like the black horse; tell it,
"nameable divisions are not lost because they fuse.") You behold the root antinomy of
one and many over which mind and nature have been stretched from the start: the sphere
of cohesive oneness, yet visibly many, a colony of flagellate eye-spot cells. Such the
granules you see glistening, while the entelechy, barely taking up seat in and over them,
reproduces itself: those dark seedlings of other colonies, that swell until they break the
mother sphere — so death came into the world — another polarity thrust upon us before
its time — in one sense real, in another merely the abstracted limits of the life-death field.
11)
11a)
Globular Cluster in Hercules, M.13, Hale Observatory
Same, detail of the center
We have looked into the pond for a globe smaller than Pascal's smallest mite.
Now into space, if not for the largest, large enough, the globular cluster in Hercules, part
7/1995
Nature: The Perceptive Field
3
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
of our galactic system, only 40,000 light years away, with several hundred thousand stars,
the brighter, giants like Betelgeuse; even the faintest seen, larger and brighter than our
sun.
Consider the tug in and out of a configured thing. Contrary desires in a one are
insoluble; tension in substance is transrational. Thought must resolve that paradox in the
one-many (no other road), and for the senses, world-structure everywhere concurs. As
one matter the whole is drawn in; as many stars accelerated by that entropic fall together,
it fights entropy, thrusts out; the resultant is a pulsing boundary in space.
a12)
12)
Vasopressin molecule, hormone and neurotransmitter; image: Tripos Association of St. Louis, Scientific American, October 1985
Rhenish MS c. 1400, "Aurora consurgens," Zentralbibliothek, Zurich;
+ V detail
The same with an atom, molecule, elastic billiard ball. Lucretius' indissoluble atoms
could never have been validated for force-interplay. If he had known the axiomatic field,
he could have proved his atoms mystical. So as our search deepens, what were called
atoms, then primary particles, sign their dissolving, an interplay of parts, the whole from
bottom to top workingly aswim — the many and one even of the soul, which Plato
suspends over the whole of the Republic.
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Nature: The Perceptive Field
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Thus the alchemists, melting ancient and Eastern experience in the alembic of
mythic science, visualized the fusion of androgynous opposites, as fixed and volatile, in
the clutch of the blue eagle, rising over the heap of its own dead: "Aurora consurgens."
13)
13a)
13b)
Overtone nodes of a sounding metal plate, traced by salt grains (CGB '78)
Another example, but more dissonant and chaotic (CGB '78)
El Greco c. 1575-77, Pieta, Museum of Art, Philadelphia: V, detail only
Sound: From the vibrating plate
So music rises from the tensile one-many of vibrating ratios — that art which
more than all others imitates the universe itself; as if from this bowed and sounding metal
plate, where salt grains have danced into the still nodes between overtone waves (those
damped chords you hear above the fundamental), the whole interplay of harmony were
stretching acoustic space, from the tugs of dissonance, ratios forever jagged and
incommensurate, toward the proportioned accords of Pythagorean one and two, two and
three (End sound) — but so sensuously embodied that in a Gesualdo cadence our very
guts are entrained in the raging desire and fulfillment of Schopenhauer's "primordial
being."
Music:
a14)
b14)
c14)
14)
Gesualdo da Venosa, 1611, "Dolcissima" close (Deller) VICS-1364
(Close)
Circular array of fern fronds, Chiapas (CGB '78)
"Self-squared Fractal Dragon," Mandelbrot, Fractal Geometry of Nature
Newton's Principia, Lemma XI, with "horned angle" in red
Red and green leaves of the madron, Chiapas (CGB '78)
The departure of modern from classical (that is, post-Socratic) intelligence is
clear. For the ancients, paradox is reason's shipwreck; for a modern, the polar delineation
of its natural field. Whatever clarity we draw from the amorphous becomes the pole of an
antinomy. If that, for the claimants of cosmos-order, puts the mind in a bind (like the
"horned angle" Euclid set up as a pillared mark beyond which human daring should not
seek), for us of the infinite and infinitesimal it is not an end but a beginning, not a tie-up
but a calling.
Through all seasons the red and green leaves of the madron flaunt those metabolic
opposites, photosynthesis and digestion, which every plant to some degree combines. We
7/1995
Nature: The Perceptive Field
5
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
might assault the tree: "Do you build up or tear down? You can't have it both ways.
Why don't you decide?" It grows in the vast abrupt between.
15)
15a)
Double rainbow over Cerro Gordo, Santa Fe, NM (CGB '68)
Rainbow, looking east from 1260 Canyon Road, Santa Fe, NM (CGB '81)
Indeed Aristotle was warm when he wrote, of the Meno paradox of learning: "The
soul is so constituted as to be capable of this process." But Nature, too, is constituted for
high process; if not, soul would not be here.
The rainbow-covenant of no total flood is written in water; it reads: "Forms are
emergent" — though between "form" and "emerge" the copula is contradiction. Here the
nameable states, distinct to our very senses: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo,
violet (which we round on the color wheel like the musical octave; whereas in the
continuum the extremes disappear into ultraviolet and infrared), these colors, the
Pythagorean tones, the God-given numbers, all resonant responses, crown the relative
with absolute emergence from degree. And that spectrum is mathemable. Who would
not wonder at such beauty's formulable slide?
16)
16a)
Stream flowing through vegetation, Chiapas (CGB '78)
Joseph Cornell 1950s(?) "Dovecote" construction, artist's studio, Flushing,
New York
16b) Mandelbrot, "Gaussian Hills that Never Were," Brown Function, from Fractal Geometry of Nature
16c) Detail of 16: the flow of water
Pascal says, "There are no limits in things; laws would put them there and the
mind cannot suffer it." But both nature and mind would limit, and both can and cannot
allow it to themselves. Born to flux, can thought only solidify? Aristotle's Analytics:
Matter and Form, Nature and Art; Kant's "Experience consists of intuitions which belong
to the sensibility, and of Judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding" —
one pretends to think that way, makes a brave show; but is it not dried up from the start?
As Nietzsche laughed at poor old Kant: "How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?
And what was actually his answer? By virtue of a virtue — but unfortunately not in five
words …"
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
If Thinking with a capital T turns out impossible, Pascalian despair is not the only
answer. Water-skaters skate on water. They use, indeed, the plasticity and surface
tension which make those ripples models for the equational physics of electricity and
magnetism.
17)
17a)
Quartz crystal against ivy leaves (CGB '78)
Crystal cluster among ivy leaves, Santa Fe, NM (CGB '78)
But if water and solid are not the polarity of free and bound, what is? Does the
antinomy of determinism against sponte sua equally characterize all things? How could
it? Billiard ball physics is real; living choice is real.
There is a gradient of predictability, as between crystals and leaves. Just so in
nature the undergirding of number comes to the surface, crops out as from the amorphous
mottling of vines. We say by statistical cancellation; but it was here the ancients seated
gods and angelic intelligences — in the regularity of the stars. Here, too, Galilean
physics contrived those equations which have lured all knowledge in their wake. While
the universe of flow and growth laps those rocks like water, weaves over them like
fronds.
a18)
18)
Columnar basalt: Devil's Post Pile, Bishop, Colorado (Anders Bro '81)
Igneous rocks: obsidian, basalt, granite, pegmatite, gneiss (CGB '78)
"God forbid," said Blake, "that knowledge should be limited to mathematical
demonstration."
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Nature: The Perceptive Field
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Within rock only, and not all rock, but the rock element made by fire, of like
mineral composition and from the same region, runs the pentad from glassy obsidian,
center, blown from a volcano, cooled so fast it has no time to find the lattices of solid;
lower left, basalt, the same lava flowing out, cooled in mass, amorphous; left and above,
intrusive granite, its quartz, feldspar, and mica, under slower earth-cooling, sorted out,
like salt and pepper; diagonally below, pegmatite, that granite under long heat and
pressure enlarging its separate crystals; then upper right, gneiss, just such a granite buried
and remelted deep under, pulled and stressed like taffy, showing in igneous rock the fluid
lines of water.
19)
19a)
19b)
Sedimentary rocks, with concentric markings (CGB '78)
New Mexico marble, from a panel in the State House, Santa Fe (CGB '88)
Judge Percy Bell's 10-carat fire-opal (CGB '81)
Pascalian despair? Among the fathomless inventions of nature?
Those fire-rocks come to the surface; rains and streams wash them down; out of
clay and sand and the lime-gathering seas, new rocks are made, sedimentary. But now,
like an alluvial stream ox-bow-bending in the figure-of-eight infinite curves, whatever
water has shaped bears the print of water; even when mottled limestone, touched again by
intrusive fire, crystallizes in the branching tongues of marble.
Wherever polarities are set up, by us or by Nature, they have continually to be
swallowed in one, mirrored, reversed, transcended; or polarity itself falls into a stasis —
like Pascal's "skeptic Archesilaus, who" (by holding to his skepticism) "became a
dogmatist."
20)
20a)
Pacific Ocean, calm, low swell, Mazatlan coast, Mexico (CGB, morning,
April 24, 1978)
Another view of same
But mind and nature have deep inescapable axioms. As Waller said of age: "The
seas are calm when the winds give o'er;" and Aristotle: "Surely the substratum cannot
cause itself to move."
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That axiom, which physics calls the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or entropy,
is Eleatic. At Elea, they gave it unconditioned, the logic of identity, that Being remains
what it is. Applied to process, it became impractical: since no Being can come from
non-Being or go into another Being, change cannot exist. We hedge and fudge, but never
escape the hydra of the axiom, as that no substance, conceived as one, can stir itself. The
ocean needs the wind. And if the wind should die, as here on the Pacific, the waves work
less and less.
21)
Yen Hui, 14th cent., China, Wave and Moon, private collection
Ah, but the contrary axiom enters (for the mind is stretched over more antinomies
than Kant troubled himself with): that disparates cannot interact; the contrary is validated
for interplay only as subsumed under the one: if wind and water were not matter in
motion, neither could affect the other. Now they are one again, and "the substratum
cannot cause itself to move"; the closed system comes to rest. Sunlight must be brought
in to touch it off, the vector of impingement. But if light and matter are not kindred
energies, both electromagnetic, there is no means of contact. The blend dies again, that
heat-death which rational physics extrapolates from closed systems and from half the
axiom to the unformulable whole. Better the Chinese 14th century Yen Hui, who painted
waves as spirit, mystical self-movers, at once the matter and impinging power.
a22)
22)
Turbulent galaxy, M 82, Ursa Major (changed ‘96 to Centaurus Α) Sierra
Club, Galaxies
Detailed negative image of M 82 (changed ‘96 to new color image of M 82,
Sci. American, Feb. '96)
But what else has the physicist done, unwittingly, with that all-pervading and
vitalizing flow of energy, both substratum and élan vital? He may repudiate the words;
but how to characterize a cosmos of infinite energy transformations under paradox, each
parcel in its descent thrusting up another, or returning in its own gyre, where total mass
release attends the relativity sink of a black hole. In this exploding galaxy, M. 82, in the
Big Bear, where hydrogen filaments spread 14,000 light years above and below the
galaxy from some collapse and mass conversion of innumerable suns a million and a half
years ago — will the habit of living in a gravitational field instruct us which transfers of
energy, in that curved space, are up and which down?
23)
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Image reversals in facing mirrors, relief plaque of Christ and athlete (CGB '78)
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23a)
Symbolic History
Gorilla Diorama, Museum of Natural History, New York City (CGB '79)
Since our whole experience is like the image-reversals in confronting mirrors,
here a two-sided plaque my Mexican albanil gave me, Christ and athlete, Christ and
athlete, alternate forever.
Pascal pursues such dipoles, but not far enough: "They do not know that it is the
chase, and not the quarry, which they seek." Reflect it again: the quarry validates the
chase — as Erasmus had said: "Thus all things are presented by shadows; yet this play is
put on in no other way." And what of a world evolved by such play?
Suppose Kant's antinomies are reflected back on his prior reasoning. His certainty
that "the order of the appearances we entitle nature we ourselves introduce" becomes one
of Maxwell's asymptotes:
the only laws of matter are those which our minds must fabricate; and
the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.
— asymptotes abstracted from the temporal curve.
a24)
24)
James I. Gilbert, c. 1950, Dunes Wanderer, Ann Binyon, Chicago (CGB '81)
Detail of same (CGB '52)
Music:
Beethoven, 1822, Coda of Sonata 32, Op. 111 (Schnabel) V-LCT
1109
The first division might seem of self and other, though until Descartes went into
that room with a stove, no one had done much with it. It has come easy since; but not
every subjective doubt pulls from the Eleatic axiom self as eternal thinking substance,
world as formulable and extended substance, both secured by God as infinite substance
and eternal rational cause. And all with the unanswerability of Euclid, so long as the
equations are not held to the sliding ambiguities of any actual self, doubt, or world.
Of course, the Eleatic principle is true; causal reasoning rests on it. But in
Pascal's quaint phrase, the conclusions are false because the opposite principles are also
true. If only Pascal had leapt from there to the "Eureka" that, in baring the irreducible
polarities of soul and body, essence and relationship, one and many, particle and field, he
had made a first move toward showing existence as creatively adaptive within the
antinomies of the perceptive ground.
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25)
Symbolic History
Long-nosed gar in the Chicago Aquarium (CGB '60) [Slide show and Dig. use
alligator gar (CGB '60)]
For, against the Eleatic axiom (in causal form Descartes' proof that his own reason
must come from a reasoning God: "since what is cannot be produced by what is not"), we
cannot deny that the whole reasoning content of the world has evolved through Silurian
seas where the highest and brainiest were lungfish and ganoids, primitive as the belching
armor-plated prehistoric gar — though to watch him gorge, dumped in a minnow bucket
upside down, is to grant his life urge.
26)
L. Nilsson: Human Fetus, about 8 months, Life, April 1965
We need not ask the fetus to know, in every consciousness, the change of state
and flux of form for which Leibniz defined perception as the passing and manifold in the
one and simple. It was that coming-to-be of what-was-not that drove Kierkegaard,
desperate Eleatic, to mediate the creative by the one allowed ex nihilo, the birth of the
eternal in time. But that moment is everywhere, and everywhere decisive, if everywhere
causally prepared. The cosmic breath and emergence is the death-birth of God.
27)
Human sperm swimming, as toward egg, Life, April 1965
Thus reason stretches over the field of fact. Hegel, all out for generation in time,
keeps one dialectic foot, like the old oyster in Alice, firmly in the oyster bed.
Spirit is immortal, an essential now… The grades it seems to have left
behind, it still possesses in the depths of its present.
When sperm, which mill about until the egg is sensed and then ("our soul is
restless until it rest in Thee") turn heads all one way, up the long stream, like salmon, are
they purposive?
"It would be foolish," says Aristotle, "to deny purpose because we do not see the
agents deliberating." Where then does purpose stop? Do stripped homunculi bear the
organic future? Which one, of each 200 million? We can only answer: "Yes, and then
again, no."
V2nd 26) Detail of 26 [Slide variant: fetus at 28 weeks]
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Demonstrable purpose proves almost purposeless: "I'm going to move that book;"
and I do. But creative purpose is the knowledge groped for in the Meno: "Unknown, my
own." As embryology repeats phylogeny, Beethoven's Opus 111 coda relives his sketchbook gropings for the revealed.
Second 27) Closer view of 27), sperm swimming; + V detail
Second 27a) Fertilization, sperm penetrating human ovum, Life
(Fade Beethoven on first tonic note)
How can purpose repeat? How modulate the currents of predictive mass?
28)
28a)
Eucalyptus tree, Casa Pellizi, east of San Cristobel, Chiapas (CGB '74);
+ V detail
Sunlight through redwood forest, Smithsonian, July 1978
Forty years ago in a valley by a stream, I watched a flight of grackles from a tree.
I saw stream, clouds, winds, and light swept down in the formulable currents of Carnot's
law. But the tree rose, building with light into leaves; birds fountained up the air, Ventadorn's "lauzeta," heightening desire into song. Was it the old Emersonian rapture?
And striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.
I needed a base in physics. And there it was, at the heart of Newton's laws, as simple as
inertia: motion self-opposed. 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 heightening 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 destructive urge.
29)
Male antelopes lock horns, Africa, Reader's Digest Publications
Music:
Beethoven, 1826, from 2nd movement, F major quartet, Op. 135,
Columbia M5S 677
When the buck antelope, Uganda Kob, lunges forward, spurning the ground,
Earth's rotation is proportionately changed; when he leaps up, Earth's lesser leap down
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rocks the universe on minute gravitational waves. If two come together, the system is
balanced in the dynamics of elastic rebound. Then they lock horns, slightly splaying the
ground in static strain. They ride a mathemable clockwork — not only those creatures,
but the muscles cunningly flexed on the hinged and levered bones.
(Fade Beethoven, Op. 135)
No wonder, as Bacon said, knowledge becomes power.
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Here the polarity of sex is organized over the primal one of the force laws: "Equal
and opposite,"
30)
Bell girls pushing a car (CGB '78); + V detail
and "Force equals mass times acceleration."
Leonardo had stressed the mystery of force: "in conquering, it destroys itself."
Newton computes, as if the enigma were not there.
Music:
Again, Beethoven, Op. 135, 2nd movement
But it is, as in Beethoven's last quartet the most dynamic effect is of one voice leaping
through static chords. (Fade Beethoven) In the motion of a body, the force we think of as
cause cannot be applied until mass times acceleration, its assumed result, meets it in
counterforce. Hegel's root antinomy of gravity and spirit lurks in this paradox of inertia,
that mass resists motion only by moving.
31)
31a)
Sockeye salmon up a fall on Alaska's Russian River, Audobon, November
1975
Salmon migrating up river, from The Mating Game
When the sockeye salmon, after a life in the ocean, seeks the high streams of his
birth and reproduction, he renounces his life of growth with its desires, gives up feeding,
turns from silver to red, and grows the great hooked jaw useful only for his quixotic
chivalries. Where streams rush down, he plunges up, fighting and leaping to the pools,
not of his own, but of the kind's continuance — a symbol, against that falling water, of
anti-entropy.
But when Yeats wrote "Sailing to Byzantium," he treated that upward sacrifice (as
in Aristotle the form of one rank becomes the matter of the next) as the abandoned call of
flesh:
Music:
Again, Beethoven, Op. 135
The salmon falls, the mackerel crowded seas …
Whatever is begotten, born and dies …
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32)
32a)
Symbolic History
Byzantine mosaic, 10th cent., Justinian presents his church, Constantine his
city, to the Virgin; Church of Hagia Sophia, Constantinople
German, c. 1060, Werden Crucifix, detail, Werden a.d. Ruhr
Music:
Leonin, 1260-90, Deum Timê, Cape version, As 65
Against which — as we turn from Beethoven to Leonin at the spirit-center of Byzantine,
Romanesque, and Gothic — Yeats invokes the mosaics of Hagia Sophia ("Sages standing
in God's holy fire") for "the artifice of eternity":
Consume my heart away, sick with desire,
And fastened to a dying animal,
It knows not what it is …
33)
Tibetan Tanka, 17th-18th cent., Museo d'Arte Oriental, Rome
East becomes such a school of sublimation: that the serpent power coiled at the
base of the spine in the Muladhara Chakra be released to rise through the other chakras to
the thousand-petalled lotus of the brain, which opens into transcendental consciousness,
Samadhi.
34)
English Romanesque and Perpendicular, 1079-93 and 1366-1404, Nave and
Vault, Winchester Cathedral (CGB '74)
For the West, that terraced ascent is incarnate in the vaultings of Gothic, an
upward raising of stone by downward gravity, of which Hegel makes a symbol: "Thus
the passions … fortify a position for right and order against themselves."
(Fade Leonin)
35)
Sand and coral debris, beach near Cozumel (J.P. Coureau)
Between gravity and spirit, inert and vital, determinism and freedom, is there a
natural stair? The fragments of a coral beach define a base, nature morte, unorganized as
Lucretius' atoms, those shards of ships he pretended would come together. "On Margate
sands I can connect nothing with nothing."
Against that mere aggregate,
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36)
Symbolic History
Etch pits in cadmium sulphide, Scientific American, September 1967
the crystals of true atoms, where inner structure reaches up through electron bonds to the
lattice shown in these cadmium sulfide etch pits, are already workingly alive. But the ties
have found too soon the perfect order of the hexagon; between atoms and macro-crystal
there are no thresholds, no subdivisions of the vital chain. If entropy is disorder, this is a
specter of the contrary required.
37)
Model of a molecule of myoglobin, Scientific American, December 1961
In this three-dimensional model, the protein myoglobin seems to have bridged the
field between disorder and form, a polymer both unique and periodic, a structured
complexity of 2600 atoms, in coils of amino acid and other links around a molecule of
iron, ready to play a living part in storing oxygen in the muscles. How much we could
learn of structure (as of thought and society) from this product of a search which
polymerized the primal seas.
38)
Alexander Calder, c. 1940, "Little Spider," K. Perls, New York
"In 1932," said Calder, "a wooden globe gave me the idea of making a universe,
something like the solar system. That's where the whole thing came from." He calls this
mobile "Little Spider." But whether centipede, tree, galaxy, or macromolecule is left
unclear, provided it catch the swing of life in what must remain a machine — the parts,
by Leibniz' criterion, not machines ad infinitum.
a39)
39)
High speed photo: a fanned flame, Smithsonian, July 1979
Curves found in nature (drawn and photographed by CGB, 1978)
Compare it with the curves we trace in nature, as Pythagoras found the outcrop of
tone-ratios and made number the first principle of things. It is not such a Kantian
wonder; our equations describe what occurs: conics, here dark blue, how bodies move in
force-fields; sinusoids, here red, how motions spread in the elastic; the green of growth
and decay, change proportional to size, as wrapped on itself, a spiral; and the bell curve
— orange and black (Bell born on Halloween) — the distribution formed in a one-many,
tending to center and tending to spread.
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40)
Symbolic History
Spider web, morning, Huitepec, Chiapas (photographed by Doug Hall)
If each globe of dew outlining this spider's web were of elastic ether, it would
draw to a point and spread to all; let that Gaussian curve oscillate: it becomes a damped
wave — the electron, set at the base of nature like a mystic one. Every force-play hints at
that: this orbed mesh hung in the catenaries of triangular tension. Such the adaptive
geometries of soul and world.
41)
41a)
41b)
Double: Chambered nautilus, with fossil Eutrephoceras, Natural History,
February 1975
Sundial shell, Architectonica granulata (CGB '81)
Monolithic calendar stone, 16th cent., Aztec; Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City
So the spiral nautilus, with a fossil forebear from ninety million years ago. If cells
divide at a rate, he will grow like compound interest; curl him round a point, his shell is a
logarithmic spiral. But it is not pure; he began as a finite creature, and his growth must
end. Einstein's: math not certain as referred to reality, or if certain, it does not refer. But
what do we mean by refer, but that? — the congruence of metaphor — though of course
on the spectrum that leads from science to myth, the knowledge of things unseen.
42)
Sunset from Bahia Kino with Alcatraz Island, Sonora (photographed by
Enrique Franco, Mexico City)
The early Greek mind caught it all in one, like a god in marble. Empedocles:
Hear first the four roots of all things: bright Zeus (fire), life-giving
Hera (air), Aidoneus (earth), and Nestis (water) who moistens the
springs of men with her tears.
Those elements are archetypal in thought and world. Our science found ninety two (now
more), but the Greek four remained, cutting across ours as "change of state": earth as
solid, water liquid, vapor air; we tried to stop there, but could not avoid, as the sun-fire
came to Earth, an ionized fourth, plasma. And still they go round in the wheel of
transformations:
43)
Grass burning before setting sun, Chiapas (CGB, May '78)
Heraclitus:
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Fire lives the death of earth, air the death of fire, water the death of air,
and earth of water.
But when one sees in Chiapas at the end of rainless winter and the burning season,
how the sun sets through a haze where everything goes to flame, the four yield to the first:
"The greatest of these is fire" — from which things come and to which they will return
(already the whirl where the supreme itself is a pole: Ormazd and Ahriman, entropic up
and down, fire through the fabric of leaves, the tiger stalking herds).
What structures underlie the polar states? Plato stressed number: the triangular
pyramid of fire,
44)
Fountain with five-petalled flowers, Chiapas (CGB '78)
the twenty-sided icosahedron of water. Bernal at the University of London spent his life
searching that way. Against the regular coherence of crystals built on space-filling
lattices of three, four, six, he found the clue to the liquid state, irregular, but coherent,
incompressible, but shifting, in the number five, pentagonoids, which could never fill
space without sliding one on another. So the old myth of water as life-source would bring
from those always failing and slipping fives, these floating petalled forms —
45)
Double: [A] Computer-graphic image of DNA, and [B] a section through the
flower-body of Crespis, or Hawksbeard
with radiolaria and starfish — alien to the inert perfection of the mineral.
In the ten-fold star of this computer-graphic image of DNA, left: oxygen red,
carbon green, nitrogen blue, phosphorus yellow; and beside it a section through the
composite bud of Hawksbeard — it is as if we saw, from chromosome to flower, the
upwelling of the pentagonal. As Thoreau says of the leaf-forms in thawing clay:
No wonder that the Earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so
labours with the idea inwardly.
a46)
46)
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Protozoans: Paramecia dividing, Smithsonian, January 1978
Pre-Cambrian: Tribrachidium heraldicum, Scientific American, March 1961
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So nature labors with number. Every one by in and out becomes a dyad: oblate
dividing star, head and tail of paramecium, worm, fish. Where Pythagoras' female two
opens, it must leave a birth-gulf between: three. The flower trillium. Or in this PreCambrian fossil, unlike anything we know, an attempted animal pin-wheel of three
tentacled arms.
47)
47a)
Rectangular crystals of Barite, Natural History, February 1978
Dwarf cornel, Dogwood family, Flowering Plants of the World
Four is everywhere, the Timaeus cube for earth, Plato's most solid form; this
barite crystal, bonded like the post-and-lintel temple, or stable quadrate Rome. There are
fours in flowers too, cornel, with its four white bracts, though it may leaf and fruit in
fives.
48)
Snowflakes in colored light, Natural History, January 1972
Then the tyranny of frost. "There they lie," writes Thoreau, "like the wrecks of
chariot wheels after a battle in the skies … these glorious spangles, the sweepings of
heaven's floor, and they sing, melting as they sing, of the mystery of the number six, six,
six … " But suppose they change their tune as they thaw, from the rigor of six,
49)
Melting icicle, National Wildlife, February-March 1973
to a deeper mystery, the fluctuant, all-mothering five? — this icicle lapsing down to a
drop pulsing as it falls. Over that change of state, Earth's life and climate hang: the great
specific heat, the heat of fusion, the saving wonder that water grows denser as it cools,
sinking in convection, until four degrees centigrade, then rises, expanding to the
insulating shell of ice. Not only ice-skaters bank on that film.
To avoid the Germanic dialectic of opposites, William James seized on plasticity,
as with water slowed to a jell, hung between flux and form.
a50)
b50)
50)
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Bumblebee on thistle flower, Reader's Digest, Amazing World of Nature
Carpenter ants milk aphid "cows;" same reference
Horseshoe crabs on a beach, Natural History, February 1975
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The laws of nature he saw, with Peirce, as the fixed habits of matter. And we were fixing
ours, under the infinitesimals of will. "Organic matter," he writes, "seems endowed with
a very extraordinary degree of plasticity."
Those spiraling chains of polymers culminating in the genetic molecule of DNA
have brought the paradox of inertia to a creative threshold: they move by resisting; they
continually change and hold. At one limit the horseshoe crab has settled in for three hundred million years.
51)
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Lion-tailed macaque, India, International Wildlife, 1973
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At the other, some strange unrest has pushed toward new orders before the last
have spent themselves — from sea to land, to lurching dog-toothed reptile, to mammals
biding their time through the expansion of dinosaurs. Then, as Teilhard de Chardin says
(and we read it in the expression of this Indian lion-tailed macaque) "in the case of the
primates… evolution went straight to work on the brain."
52)
Cells, onion root tip (X 1,500), Scientific American, September 1961
Can the whole transcend without reduction of the parts? Even the growing tip of
an onion root rests on cell alignments which seem almost crystalline; until we note the
cell nuclei in all stages of mitosis and chromosome replication, the one-many raised from
abstract to a vital mix of generation in the tensile one.
53)
53a)
Weaver ants folding a leaf, Scientific American, December 1977
Same: using their web-secreting larvae
Evolution walks a knife-edge where each collective tends to harden like coral reef,
hive, or swarm. So weaver ants, in a triumph of caste breeding and cooperation by
chemical and tactile signals, turn themselves into a chain to fold a leaf, which they will
use their own web-secreting larvae to sew. Each myrmidon has paid the price of
togetherness, as like, you would say,
54)
Oak leaves, with variants of duck oak, Quercus nigra (CGB)
as the leaves of a tree. Yet these to the right come from one water oak growing in the
Mississippi yard of my childhood — visibly stretched between Spanish and willow oak;
while various oaks are sampled on the left. When scientists who refuse to think say
molecules of a kind are all alike, they mean we do not yet distinguish them. But as
Leibniz knew, no formed thing or moment can have the configuration of any other.
55)
Honeycomb of wild bees, Natural History, June-July 1976
From those generic dogma-words, "table" and "chair," to species and period
styles, it is a question of abstracting the forms which crown the relative.
The honeycomb, even of wild bees, suggests the repetitive mechanization of the
hive, the whole insect freezing, as into hexagons. But what of the moral and individual
bee,
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56)
56a)
Symbolic History
Bee flying between stalks of grass, Natural History, October 1966
Bee hive, von Frisch Dance, Encyclopædia Americana
navigating by solar coordinates, with his spatial sense and interior clock externally
corrected; or when he returns to the hive to report his flower-find by the von Frisch
dance, in which distance is given by the number of dance loops, direction by the angle at
which he cuts across, quantity of nectar by body waggles as he cuts? "Instinct" — we
mouth it as a dog a dry bone. But inwardness is there, with memory and choice, Blake's
"Vast world of delight, closed to your senses five." Though our senses give us the clue.
57)
57a)
From airplane window, flying over the Caribbean (CGB '56)
Double helix of DNA, O=red, N=blue, C=green, P=yellow; computer generated, Scientific American, October 1985
Think of Quincy Wright's metal masses rising against gravity and coming down
across the ocean. The physicist traces air pressure under the wing against downward
weight, the laws are in order; the chemist the energy of fuel against propulsion, all
determined, no purpose there; nothing unexplained but some minute forces applied to
levers in the pilot's cabin. Here the physiologist takes over, tracing energies through the
body, carbon cycle, triphosphate; as in Leibniz' mill everything is accounted for but for
some negligible nerve signals as the muscles contract. Now the neurologist; and he finds
entropy and conservation everywhere preserved, except perhaps for third-order
infinitesimals at the synapses of the nerves. The flight of the plane has been mechanically
accounted for, Wright says, "except for something like an infinite regress of
infinitesimals. Yet the whole was according to plan." Soul, a hazardous inference from
patterns of energy (where each "energy" is in turn such an inference from such
configuration) has been hunted down layer after layer of the organic stair. But it is just
the feedback organization of that stair which triggers soul's choice.
a58)
58)
Pedestrians from above, 48th and 5th Avenue, NYC, Scientific American
New York City, c. 1928, Lower Manhattan from the air, Encyclopædia Britannica
As we approach the unorganized, statistical cancellation yields predictive law.
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Look down, in the noon rush, at a New York intersection. Count the numbers
going in each direction, each on his own, sponte sua. You cannot predict for the
individual any more than for electrons in a wire; but you can write a current equation
which from day to day will hold rather well. Until an army comes, marching behind a
leader; he turns, they follow; the statistical laws are broken. Organization has loosened
determinacy. We seem almost in touch with a complementarity shared by nature and
mind.
59)
59a)
Long bolt of lightning, Natural History, June-July 1977
Bolts of forked lightning, Reader's Digest, Amazing World of Nature
Music:
Bach, 1749, Art of Fugue, close of last unfinished fugue, Rogg
(Organ), Angel SB-3-766
Yet even physical lightning, like a Bach fugue, cuts the creative path of history, an
indeterminate solution in the determinizing field. The friction-belts of rain build up the
potential to its breaking point of 100 to 1000 million volts. But the precise when and
where rest on the particular of some Napoleon ion, building its chance momentum to a
surge that creates more, starting the bolt down, though it zigzags at every unpredictable
crisis of pressure and the velocity of another leader ion. It delivers the charge, which
overshoots and in microseconds strikes back up and down the now blazed path
(embryology repeats phylogeny), though even there sometimes breaking away — no
absolute congruencies in space or time. So Bach's last fugue forges the inevitable, but so
uniquely that what he left unfinished must remain that way.
(end Art of Fugue)
a60)
60)
Detail of chick embryo, 5 days (CGB '87)
Whole of same (CGB '81)
Thought abstracts to the stripped antinomies; while nature elaborates its nets
between — rete mirabile: the beating pulse of a chick embryo furrowing the yolk with
vessels, bringing back nutrients to build the form. In the enigmatic marriage of essence
and relationship, we see, in a richer whole, what Leibniz saw when he wrote:
According to this system, bodies act as if (to suppose the impossible)
there were no souls, and souls act as if there were no bodies, and yet
both body and soul act as if each were influencing the other.
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The last clause feeds science, such an organism as the embryo itself: to map the complex
of thresholds and feedback relays, of enzymes and organizers, by which both whole and
part evolve.
61)
Hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, from Apollo VIII, Weltraumbilder
But the cosmos is the embryo, and every grouping in it swung in a great catenary
from the limit of inert aggregate toward self-determining transcendence. For in every
grouping, to some degree, the organized whole passes what could have been predicted
from the parts. Even this Caribbean hurricane, photographed from Apollo VIII, is a form
through which material swirls; if it did not hold a kind of self-shaping life of its own, it
would not even be real.
a62)
62)
Moscow, Cathedral of St. Basil and Red Square
Hitler at the Nuremberg rally, 1938, Life: Second World War
History is full of those vortices. When chemicals were linking toward polymers,
cells toward the metazoan, or now, when society swells with the supra-individual and
collective, evolution could not occur if, through each grouping, incipient soul did not set
up its circuits, altering the probability nexus of the parts.
Nineteen-thirty-nine Germany was so organized that when Hitler screamed on the
air those puny decibels threw huge masses of men, tanks, and planes into motion. It is
not Kant's separate aspects, phenomena determined and spirit free; the nerve nets of
actuation spell out Leibniz' "as if each were influencing the other." Each does, though
each is inferred from the field.
Part II
63)
63a)
7/1995
Cluster of galaxies in Virgo, 4-meter telescope, Chile, Scientific American,
November 1978
Galaxies: core of Coma Berenice supercluster, Schmidt telescope, Scientific
American, March 1982
Nature: The Perceptive Field
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Symbolic History
In the depths of space, a cluster of galaxies, each comparable to our entire Milky
Way with its billions of suns. At these distances, ten million light years and beyond, the
red shift attests the always swifter expansion of space itself. By the Einstein curvature of
that space, the antinomy Kant proved from reason itself, that space must be both finite
and infinite, has been fused, a curved return of closed infinity. By the suspension
between the bang fifteen billion years ago and Hoyle's steady state (or perhaps a pulsing
oscillation), the polarity of time, too, stands unresolved — that is, bridged.
64) Ion-glints from atoms in the tip of a tungsten crystal, Scientific American,
June 1957
If we drop with Pascal into the infinitesimal which he could only imagine, we
arrive, beyond microscope and electron microscope, at this scattering of an ion beam
from atomic shells in the tip of a tungsten crystal, where everything we have said of
crystal alignment comes again to the fore. But these are glints, not atoms. Do they prove
that atoms "are?" We cannot tie down that "are." Like everything else, atoms well from
situations, in this case rather abstract ones. Newton thought matter could not be hard
unless formed of harder atoms; for where else, to the causal Eleatic, could hardness come
from? We must conjure it up, an ingression, from inter-atomic vacuities by which these
ion glints seem crowded.
65)
65a)
Sub-atomic tracks in hydrogen bubble chamber, Scientific American, 2/64
Tracks of meson, muon, et al., Scientific American, 7/83
But it is not as Eddington thought that the particles are real and the table appearance.
Appearance and reality are asymptotes of our experience.
So in a cloud or hydrogen bubble chamber we catch traces of the smaller particles
from which those assumed atoms come into and go out of being like jellyfish, like all the
groupings entelechy rides on: these streakers from bottom to top, negative K mesons of
three billion electron volts from the Bevatron, barely bent to the positive right; to the left
one knocks up a proton; center, an electron dislodged from a hydrogen atom spirals in the
field. In other cloud tracks, these two, once called primary, yield to whole families of
wave-particle evanescencies. As Pascal and Leibniz saw, no bottom anywhere. How
else, where the axioms are contradictory?
66)
7/1995
Star spectra from objective prism, Random House, Astronomy
Nature: The Perceptive Field
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66a)
Symbolic History
Nebulae: Orion and Horsehead, Sierra Club, Galaxies
Put a spectroscope to the sky. The stars refract in color. Those rainbows,
magnified, bear dark absorption lines, signatures of elements in the stellar atmospheres
They vary with stellar types and temperatures; but the elements turn out the same as ours.
Over a cosmos of a billion light years and trillions of suns, the building from subparticles
to the chemical elements is akin. One form-urge everywhere.
67)
Organic matter from Orgueil Meteorite of 1864, Lamp, 1962
In the clouds of dust and gas called nebulae, the spectroscope picks up now the
bands of organic radicals, hydroxyl, methane, cyanogen, ammonia, root structures of life.
As soon as atoms cool and fill their electron shells, they take up chemistry. You can say
no God is needed, or say God is there — suit your temperament; but the Orgueil
meteorite, which fell in 1864, has carbonaceous chondrules with what some have called
"microfossils" suggestive of pre-life.
68)
Spiral galaxy M. 31 in Andromeda, Sierra Club, Galaxies
So the same work of building seems to spring everywhere from the nature of
things: the divine theater Bruno saw when he broke the crystalline, geocentric spheres.
Here, descending from the space-curved whole, we graze our near neighbor, the
Andromeda Galaxy, older red giants in the center and in the elliptical companions, newer
stars forming in the spiral arms.
a69)
69)
Star formation: Bok globules (dark) in the Lagoon Nebula, Sagittarius,
Scientific American, June 1977
Same, Eta Carina Nebula, Sierra Club, Galaxies
In our own similar galaxy we see what must be suns in the making, here in the
Lagoon Nebula in Sagittarius, where the gas and carbon dust collapses to small Bok
globules, dark against the background glow. In other hydrogen-rich regions, huge shock
waves plow through, as in a mackerel sky, sowing the cloud lumps from which giant stars
fall into glowing.
a70)
70)
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Sun during a major solar eruption, from Skylab orbiting space station in 1973,
Sierra Club, Galaxies
Plasma jets over sun surface, NASA, Natural History, November 1975
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Symbolic History
Hydrogen fusion kindled at the compressed and heated core transforms mass into
radiation (as Newton had speculated, "Nature a perpetual circulatory worker"); it heaves
up through the vast mass, setting the surface (as here of the sun) cycloning in
promontories of plasma — the radiant from which Earth, sheltered and beleed in space,
receives the energy for its terraced life.
a71)
71)
Professor Barnard, 1911, Jupiter, as from one of its moons, Splendour of the
Heavens
Saturn, Catalina Observatory, Scientific American, Solar System
As for the solar system, ejected from the sun or condensed with it from the same
cloud, where the old collision theory made it an incredible accident, we, maximizing its
likelihood, observe minute perturbations in the motions of nearer stars. And how to have
thought it rare where the great planets, too, have their systems, Galileo's Jovian satellites,
or the moons and planetesimal rings of Saturn. Though we do not know what chemistry
has evolved beneath those frozen ammonia and carbon dioxide clouds.
72)
Imaginary landscape on Mars, Splendour of the Heavens
No doubt something remote from the life we look for. The hope for planets
commensurate with ours has so far let us down. Here is an imaginary landscape of Mars
from The Splendour of the Heavens of the '30's, when Schiaparelli and Lowell had drawn
the elusive canals, and Edgar Rice Boroughs made the dying planet a seat of romance.
73)
Martian landscape radioed by Viking, Newsweek, July 1976
Though the cratered waste seen from our space probes had more the look of the
moon (no green fields, no canals); and this landscape Viking radioed home, July 1976,
has the reality and wonder of desolation. It is not even clear what the search for
microorganisms in the soil has revealed. One can still call soul ubiquitous; but the
lurching Mars man is not there.
74)
7/1995
Craters on Mercury, photographed March 1974, by Mariner 10, Scientific
American, The Solar System
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What the Moon, Mars, here Mercury share are the overlaid impact craters, where,
from the start of the solar system, meteors of all sizes have gashed down, melting the rock
and throwing up mountain walls.
a75)
75)
Meteor Crater, 40 miles east of Flagstaff, Arizona
Impact crater in northeast Quebec, The Solar System
Even the Earth, cushioned and eroded by air, has the not too ancient one in
Arizona, and from 200 million years ago this forty-mile-wide depression still to be traced
in the Canadian Shield.
76)
Earth-rise on the Moon, NASA, Random House, Astronomy
But our Earth, viewed from the airless and waterless Moon, has the look of a
paradise, so far as we can tell (though we are prejudiced) the only paradise in this
vicinity: ocean and forested land gleaming through its cloud.
77)
Aurora Borealis, photographed by T. Lorgren, Anthroposophic Press
True, it has natural deserts and its polar north. There the bending in of the
magnetic field displays in the colors of the Aurora Borealis how almost exposed we are to
the bombardments of space, the solar wind, a flux of charged particles, ionizing and
fluorescing the air.
78)
San Andreas Fault, California, Natural History, January 1972
Exposed, too, to volcanic violence — those great tectonic plates that make up the
Earth-crust shifting and drifting, crunching one into the other, cracking in flaws, heaving
up mountains and lava — this San Andreas Fault, which the young rely on, at any
moment, to sink California under the sea.
79)
Angel Falls, Venezuela, Reader's Digest, Amazing World of Nature
Music:
Beethoven, 1807-8, Symphony #6, "Pastoral," opening, Vox
PL 6960
It means something about the balance some call "dynamic homeostasy" that from
the bath of space rays, the violence of colliding continents and eruptive orogeny, Earth is
so soothed and contained that the age of Goethe and Beethoven could think its mountains
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Nature: The Perceptive Field
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
the peaceful work of water, slowly carved, as in this more than half-mile leap to the Great
Plain of Venezuela. What an Eden for the self-search — from organic chemistry to social
man — of the whole infolding Biosphere.
(fade
Pastoral)
80)
Birth of volcanic island off Iceland, Natural History, March 1967
Earth, air, fire, and water. When the volcanic island of Surtsey rose from the
ocean south of Iceland, those elements were again proclaimed. And now one
remembered Oparin's coacervates, the colloidal droplets he explored as the origins of life.
Let the primal seas receive from the reducing pre-oxygen atmosphere of water-vapor,
methane, ammonia, nitrogen, and the carbon oxides, the various amino acids which
Miller and Urey brought from them by electric spark. Let that soup thicken to a jell in the
pools of hot volcanic rock;
81)
81a)
81b)
Pre-life, self-organized microspheres, Natural History, 1968
Pre-Cambrian: assumed stromatolite beds, North West Australia, Scientific
American, October 1981
Same formation, wider view
then rains wash it back into the polymerizing seas. That protenoid rounds, as here, into
microscopic, double-membraned, osmotic spheres, which absorb amino acids, can grow,
can bud.
Give them a billion years in the warm seas, their working molecules trying all the
links and ties of carbon synthesis. Enzymes produce starch and maltose by the energy of
the glucose-phosphate bond. So came the master invention, the earliest photo-synthesis,
hydrogen sulfide splitting carbon dioxide, releasing oxygen by the energy of light,
transforming the globe from that reducing matrix of polymers to another of green and
purple sulfur bacteria oxygenating ocean and air. Thus to photosynthesis directly from
water, as in blue-green algae, fossilized in sediments more than three billion years old.
82)
Giant amœba, Chaos chaos, swallows a paramecium, Natural History, October
1967
The buttressing of particles from the antinomies of energy, of atoms into
molecules, molecules into adaptive polymers, polymers into cells, — stromatolite banks
7/1995
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of oxygen releasers — culminates in nucleated cells, eukaryotes, passing genetic variation
by sexual mating, each cell a kaleidoscope of rudimentary search, perception, choice, of
self-determining act — though this giant amœba, hunting and ingesting a paramecium,
bears the generic name of "Chaos chaos."
83)
Spore stalks of slime mold, Dictyostelium discoideum, Scientific American,
December 1959
In existing slime molds, the amœba goes social, reaches toward the metazoan. A
spore in a moist place emerges, feeds, divides: a colony of free-moving protozoans; they
exhaust the habitat; in a cluster one secretes acrasin; as the signal touches others they
converge, secreting more; like iron filings drawn to a magnet, eddies of cells swirl in: a
slug that creeps, then sends a stalk into the air; some dry into a stem for the common
good; others turn to a fruiting body, others to spores; the head breaks; each seed-amœba
bears the pre-fungoid whole.
84)
Moon coral, Favia pallida, Audubon, September 1976
The social polyp proliferates into coral — advance that falls back, as to sessile
plant, almost to mineral, an undifferentiated one-many; yet they build a skeleton of
limestone which makes them, as in the Great Barrier Reef, the most ponderous of living
things.
85)
The Cambrian Sea, Spring Books, Prehistoric Animals
With the Cambrian seas the fossil record known to Darwin begins, invertebrates
of all families, sponges, coral, jellyfish, worms, sea lilies, brachiopods, trilobites,
(ancestral in the great crustacean, scorpion, spider line); and among them, overshadowed,
chordates, evolving to first fish.
86)
Upper Carboniferous, with Meganeura, etc., Spring Books
Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, then the Carboniferous — over much of the
Earth, these swamps of great club mosses and tree ferns, our source of coal; spiders and
insects, huge cockroaches and dragonflies, and again, just emergent, from lungfish who
had crept to land and become amphibians (stegocephalian hardheads),
87)
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Upper Carboniferous and Lower Permian, Edaphosaurus, Spring Books
Nature: The Perceptive Field
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87a)
Symbolic History
Double: [A] South African, Permian, Moschops (Archaic pre-mammalian
reptile), Spring Books; and [B] Same, Triassic, Cynognathus, Wiley & Sons
the first true reptiles, waiting their turn. And hardly have those sprawling reptiles (this
herbivorous sail-fin) appeared, when theriodonts, in the Permian, hoist up on four legs
and differentiate dog-like teeth, giving rise, by the Triassic, to mammals.
88)
Jurassic and Cretaceous, Brontosaurus, American Museum of Natural
History, New York City
But as if each had to be tested by the tyranny of the past, mammals waited,
through the Jurassic and Cretaceous, the surge of reptiles into every habitat. In the
swamps, brontosaurus, seventy feet long and weighing, say, thirty tons. While the
ancestral possum cowered in the trees, though Brontosaurus was a plant eater.
89)
Mounted skeletons: Allosaurus over Brontosaurus, American Museum of
Natural History, New York City (CGB '79)
And would allosaurus have had time for anything as small as those mammals? When one
stands in the New York museum where the one hundred million year old skeleton still
ravens over brontosaurus, those Berkeleian questions of external reality — whether
science has invented a world from its own cognizance — no more arise than if the brute
should take out after us.
90)
Upper Cretaceous, Sea of Kansas, Pteranodon and Tylosaurus, Spring Books
Never was more adaptive radiation: up into the air, back to the ocean. The inland
seas of the last Cretaceous, 60 million years ago, swarmed with short- and long-necked
plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, while pteranodons glided above and swooped down for fish.
91)
Fossil Archæopteryx, Humboldt University, Berlin, National Geographic,
August 1978
Perhaps the active dinosaurs had already developed warm blood and a more
efficient heart. By the Jurassic, the most beautiful of fossil forms had appeared, that
toothed and feathered dinosaur-bird link called archæopteryx, found in the Bavarian
limestone in 1861.
7/1995
Nature: The Perceptive Field
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�C.G. Bell
92)
Symbolic History
Archæopteryx and small dinosaur, Spring Books
Here, too, a step toward a later style was taken before the former had run its course —
over the final Earth-grab of dinosaurs, these birds (with primates) just held their own.
Sound:
Birdsong
Had they already begun to practice song?
93)
Birds: Rufous fantail by its nest, Australia, International Wildlife, 5-6/73
Though in soul, the toothed lizard bird must still be a long way from what nesting
with its sacrifice brought to the eyes and musical throats, not to mention the migratory
intelligence, of our birds — here the Rufous fantail of Australia, caring for her young.
(cut birdsong)
94)
Reptile: Alligator, National Wildlife, February-March 1973
The reptiles that survived the startling general extinction at the end of the
Cretaceous are cold-blooded, sluggish, and primitive, relics of a state of being before that
of the dinosaurs. Of course, we should preserve them in the swamps and bayous; but to
go from this Permian reminder
95)
95a)
Jan "Flower" Brueghel c. 1610(?), Paradise, Berlin-Dahlem
Grey wolves howling, R. Fiennes, The Order of Wolves
Sound:
Wolf cries, American Museum of Natural History
to the golden age of ancestral grazers, of cats and dogs, mild Miocene, is like coming to
that Paradise where painters (here Velvet Brueghel) have brought together the birds and
mammals nourished in familial care. And already they cooperate in perceptive packs and
herds — wolves, almost as Kipling made them, with the roots of law and justice and their
stirring language of cries. Though surely they did not lie down with the lamb.
(fade wolves)
a96)
96)
7/1995
Porpoises, open-mouthed pair, Reader's Digest, Marvels of the Animal World
Same, pair rubbing noses, Chromolux
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And, against the marine reptiles, how much the mammals returned to the sea fit
the Greek myth of Arion, whom a dolphin carried to the shore. Who knows what that
intelligence (a brain larger than man's and with more neuron connections, though free of
manipular use and control) may hold in contemplation of ocean depths and soul's
contours; how much express in a language as liquidly mysterious as the music of the
hump-backed whale?
97)
Army ant queen groomed by workers, Natural History, December 1975
While army ant workers groom the swollen queen, her body all fat and eggs, of
which she can lay a hundred thousand, for workers specialized in size and task. Have
they weirdly anticipated how our mammalian "propinquity and property of blood" must
socialize?
98)
Megalithic building c. 1910, Africa, Roder, Paideuma, 1944
As late as 1910 Schröder photographed these megalithic builders in Africa, the
whole tribe, with sled and roller logs, dragging a stone dolmen to the village for a
monument. What self-renouncing frenzy of togetherness
99)
Bronze age, especially c. 1650 B.C., Stonehenge, photographed by Ant. Miles
set up the monuments of prehistoric Europe, Stonehenge, effected, as in the Nias
photograph by a population yoked into one by overmastering spirit — what we read of in
Romanesque church-building, nobles and all with yokes on their proud necks, in orgies of
penitential zeal: "The Lord thy God is a consuming fire."
100)
Moslems at Mount of Mercy, Saudi Arabia, Natural History, 1973
In the Moslem world, penitents of all nations and tongues still convene at the
Mount of Mercy, near Mecca, reminder of the tornadic faith that roared through history,
sweeping horsemen over Asia and North Africa and into Spain. Are these powers real?
With the god-visions and prophet texts that entrain them? As real as tornado, or the gene,
on which somatic building rides. Augustine and Pascal thought only Christianity had
miracles;
101)
7/1995
African tribesmen practicing image magic; Dial Press, Encyclopædia of
Witchcraft and Magic
Nature: The Perceptive Field
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Symbolic History
but miracle is the inner truth of every generating myth. Faith, like soul, is caught in the
paradox of all energy, a configuration-riding formaloid, which can always be analyzed
away. These African tribesmen with their image magic know as well as Rotarians at the
business of the day that what they have in hand is real.
And what else, against entropy and natural decay, microbes and tropical parasites,
holds those breathing dark bodies together but cascades of mythic power? — the very
laws of nature, habits of matter.
a102) Gislebertus, 1130-40, Last Judgment, Autun Cathedral
102) Great Serpent Mound of American Indian Adena-Hopewell Culture,
Newsweek, Sculpture
Thus Jung on the god and devil loci in the group unconscious:
There is nothing for it but to recognize the irrational as an everpresent
psychological function … its contents … psychic realities, real because
they work.
To combine Cartesian outwardness with Blake's creative imagination where all
deities reside, is a task for the Superman, that means, for each and all. Yet to see once,
clearly and distinctly, the Earth heaving into the thirteen-hundred foot ambivalent snake
shrine of the Adena-Hopewell culture in 1000 B.C. Ohio (Christ, too, the snake Moses
lifted on the rod), is to know that we have outlived that dry single vision a patient of
Jung's once expressed:
Doctor, last night I disinfected the whole heavens with bichloride of
mercury, but I found no God.
a103) Golden orb spider with grasshopper; Reader's Digest, Amazing World of
Nature
103) Female black widow spinning web, Natural History, February 1973. [In
video, 103 both precedes and follows a103. ]
If history is mythic and the Word its catalyst, "sweet science" must embrace myth
and word. When Blake thinks gins and poison, he sees spider, real as a black widow
sliding on its web:
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We beheld the infinite Abyss… the sun, black but shining; round it
were fiery tracks on which revolv'd vast spiders, crawling after their
prey…
Though like all, the spider is dual: Swift's caricature of the soul-spinning modern,
which Whitman affirms: "A noiseless patient spider … Till the gossamer thread you fling
catch somewhere, O my soul."
104) Kali ordeal by fire, Orissa, India, Natural History, January 1974
104a) Strip-mining Appalachians, East Ohio, Natural History, November 1974
Has the complementarity of good and evil begun with us? To avoid the
anthropomorphic is to avoid philosophy, since anthropos, too, came up the stair where his
art and knowledge, love and morality got their natures and their names.
This Orissa devotee of Kali, swung through fire seven times each way, is on the
sublime sacrificial tree that leads from the lock-jawed salmon, the bird feeding her young,
through Greek tragedy and the Paschal victim, to whatever mystery we enact in our crucifixion of the world.
O for a dialectic like Archimedes' lever.
105)
Conjugating bacteria, supermale colon bacillus and round female, Scientific
American, June 1961
Sex has been the deepest cleavage in the creative one, well of ideal and gross,
delight and pain. Here colon bacilli, electron-magnified a hundred-thousand times, erect
from phallic supermale to round female a comic kissing-bridge for chromosomes.
Now wherewith sholde he mak his paiement,
If he ne used his sely instrument?
So the Wife of Bath; but Chaucer's Creseyde says "Who yaf me drynke?" (Over the
corpse-littered fields of Troy.)
Music:
106)
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Wagner, 1857-9, Tristan, Potion & ff. (through slide 110), from
RCA-V 6700
Conjugation of snails, Helix pomatia, Natural History, 8-9/77
Nature: The Perceptive Field
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Who has brought off that loved war like snails? — where both are male and
female, equal, hermaphroditic. They fuse, each shooting into the other wounding and
sperm-bearing calcareous darts. So they retire to gestate and lay eggs. A balance in the
Amazonamachia which has reduced males sometimes to parasitic captives, females to
sessile breeding sacks.
107)
Crickets mating, female on male, Natural History, June 1979
Or the tension can become Heraclitus' lyre. The male cricket, after fighting off
others, rubs his wing covers, stridulating violins — vulnerable, since mate or predator
may hear. He sings until she covers him, feeding on juices secreted by those musical
wings.
108)
Hellenistic mirror case, love scene; Fine Arts, Boston
Human love was never more natural than in the Eros Kalos tradition of the
Greeks, where sex, with all its dark roots in birth and death ("To die, with thee again, in
sweetest sympathy"), mirrors the open gladness of Aphrodite. As with everything Greek,
one wonders if civilization reached its acme in that prime. How much, for later gains, we
risk and pay.
109)
Indian, c. 11th cent., Mithuna couple, Khajnraho Temple, Madhya Pradesh,
India
True, the East has raised the Hellenistic pleasure to a Nirvana rite; but the carved
ecstasy leaves their multiplying billion in the lurch.
110)
Boecklin, Triton and Nereid, Schack Gallery, Munich (CGB '59)
And whatever dislocation has torn the Christian West has wrenched natural desire
to the Wagnerian and perverse. As post-Romantic Boecklin's Triton blows his brooding
conch over the waves, this nereid fondles the sea-beast supermale. Such the Europe
Freud found flooded with neurotic sex.
(Fade Tristan)
111)
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A fallen spruce in the forest, Sangre de Cristo, near Santa Fe (CGB '78)
Nature: The Perceptive Field
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What of the other of the love-death pair? Death in nature withers away, that
flowing in and out the Stoics would make it — the fall and decomposition of a tree. As
with force and counterforce, death needs its opposite — life-consciousness.
112)
Hans Baldung Grien, c. 1517, Death and the Lady, Museum, Basel; + V pan
detail
Against the Renaissance inflaming of the will to live, the converse outrage
sharpens a dance of death. But the most macabre Holbein, or this Baldung Grien, is
Leibniz' perception, a breaking wave in what abides. Skelton:
No man may him hide
From Death hollow-eyed …
With his worm-eaten maw
And his ghastly jaw …
To whom then shall we sue?
113)
Italian-American, c. 1890(?), Angel through leaves, Greenwood Cemetery,
Brooklyn, New York
The death arts of Egypt still gaze through the change. And even this 19th-century
girl in Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn, wreathes the sadness of forever in a transience of
leaves. Death comes to be in conscious Being, its ground the I AM, by which it is
contained: "Sail out, eidolon yacht of me."
114)
Ben Ortega, 1967, Christ with spread arms, (CGB & DMB)
In the West, Love-Death took incarnate seat in the God-Man — mediation of the
yoked antinomies. When Ortega takes from an arroyo a branch where lignin striations
record the stress and twist of cleavage (so that, as Heraclitus says, struggle becomes
father of all things) and, using these zygote swirls, shapes a Christ, he works the tension
of nature to the symbolic sacrifice — racked from rock to sky for the song of men and
angels:
Who would praise the peace eternal
Must tune his harp in the war of its fibers.
115)
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Botticelli, 1500, Mystical Nativity, National Gallery, London; + V details
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Such the archetype of our dynamic. A balanced antinomy is sterile, whether in
thought or act. The One that holds antinomy becomes the arrow. So in Botticelli's
Mystical Nativity of 1500, the foreground devils retreat, trampled, stabbed to the ground;
angels embrace mortals in imminent revelation. The good-evil rift is suspended in God,
whose coming is past, future, and now. The spiral of time was never so implemented.
116)
Donatello, c. 1460, Christ before Pilate, with two-faced attendant, Bronze
Pulpit, San Lorenzo, Florence; + V detail
The contradictions of Socratic reason were fused in the man-god. By the
Renaissance, that faith-containment is shifting to existence; life itself begins to gather the
polar fields. In Donatello's Christ before Pilate, the Janus-faced servant looks both ways,
as to Jerusalem and Rome. Is not the word "double-mindedness" quoted twice from
James in the Mass of Donato's patron saint? Already the horns of dilemma are the
strength and tragic flaw of the Christian mind.
117)
Raphael (and Giulio Romano), 1518, Michael vs. Satan, Louvre, Paris;
+ V detail
Music:
Beethoven, 1805-8, Symphony #5, close, (Karajan) Deutsche
Grammophon LPM 18804
The myth of Lucifer applies to every spirit which can say "I am." Being,
displaced from the center, can only act from its own center, initiating creative history.
God had no way to operate but by granting freedom — which in evolution means the
miscarriage of adaptive quest. The civilization which moved from Raphael's Overthrow
of Satan to Milton's near glorification;
118)
Goya, 1815-24 (published 1864), Modo de Voler, from Los Disparates
and then to the Promethean reversals of the Age of Revolution: Beethoven, Goethe's
Faust, Blake, this Goya dream of flying — that civilization, more than any other, had
risked the experiment of the new, leaping from progress by chromosomes to progress by
the coup of law, equation, word. (end Beethoven Fifth) The wheel turned to an arrow
119)
Fountain from yard sprinkler (CGB '78)
must turn again with the wheel.
7/1995
Nature: The Perceptive Field
38
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Perhaps in cosmic extension entropy rounds on itself. But the fountain we see is a
form, the rise and apex of drops always curving to fall. To stop the gravity down would
stop the universe. Anti-entropy must weave over that, using particular decay, until the
entraining transcendence is itself entrained and used. Where the fountain becomes a
drop, curved in the greater rise — to which Pascal's knot will always apply: "seeing too
much to doubt and too little to be sure."
We of the modern West have felt the whole Earth swerve.
120)
Webs of Zilla x-Notata, normal and drugged, Scientific American, 12/54
Music:
Bartok, 1919, from The Miraculous Mandarin, near close, side A,
Bartok Rec. 301
Spiders on psychedelic drugs weave strange romantic webs. No doubt they will
catch fewer flies (carmina non dant panem); but weavers of the creative abstract might
prefer this bold, free venture to the standstill of the old symmetry. Has not the
Nietzschean West made a drug of the god-self?
121)
Schizophrenic drawing, 1922, Heidelberg Clinic, Prinzhorn
Which Rimbaud literally applied: "The poet makes himself a visionary through a
long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses." Startling, how close to our
center those 1920 drawings by Prinzhorn's schizophrenic patients strike — like the atonal
break of Mad Peter, Wozzeck, this Bartok Miraculous Mandarin. We have read it in the
nightmare fictions that have seemed most expressive of our age:
122)
Chaim Soutine, 1918, Self Portrait, H. Pearlman, New York
Kafka's Metamorphosis of man to huge cockroach, the Penal Colony, with its religious
torture machine. In art there are the Expressionists, this 1918 self-portrait by Soutine,
tenth son of a Jewish tailor, painting in the exile of Paris — precursors of some world
disease.
(end Bartok)
7/1995
Nature: The Perceptive Field
39
�C.G. Bell
123)
Symbolic History
Firefighter in aluminum and asbestos suit, National Geographic, August 1978
But crisis and disease inseparable from the triumph of technocracy: man
mastering the elements to whose wheel he was bound — here in a suit of aluminum and
asbestos become the salamander of fire, fighting a jet-fuel inferno at 2000 degrees
Fahrenheit.
124)
Undersea habitat, Oceanographics, Inc., International Wildlife, July-August
1974
Here — beyond what Roger Bacon dreamed of:
It is possible that devices can be made whereby … a man may walk on
the bottom of the sea or of a river —
he sets up his Ondine hydrolab in the ocean depths.
125)
Hydrogen bomb explosion over Bikini atoll, 1946, Life: Second World War
How to contain the ambivalence of such a Lucifer? Since never have the sunbright scales of armored supremacy more sonorously clanged on the logos of number
than in the science where racked-out nature flames the certification of "Energy equals
mass times the speed of light squared" —
126)
Botticelli, 1490, Augustine's Dream (predella), Uffizi, Florence (CGB '59)
That a civilization mediated by God crucified, and preaching the humbled
penitence of man — Augustine's dream of the boy dipping the sea into a pool on the
shore; and when the saint said, "You can never hold the ocean in that hole," the boy gave
the recurrent, pride-abasing answer: "Nor you the eternal in your finite mind" —
127)
Model of DNA molecule, with comparative skeletons, fish to man (CGB '78)
that a civilization beginning there should come out at the other pole of the incarnate field,
where the Jesuit father, Teilhard de Chardin should write of science (while we
contemplate what he implies, the double helix of DNA, with the plasticities of the
vertebrate skeleton):
7/1995
Nature: The Perceptive Field
40
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
The dream upon which human research obscurely feeds is
fundamentally that of mastering, beyond all atomic or molecular
affinities, the ultimate energy of which all other energies are merely
servants; and thus, by grasping the very mainspring of evolution,
seizing the tiller of the world.
128)
Carrier attacked by kamikaze plane, Life: Second World War
That assumption of the Light-bearer was put to the test by the Second World War.
It was soon clear how far evolution had shifted to organisms reared above man. An
aircraft carrier in the electronic navy had a brain-room distinct from the brain of anyone
in command; there radar sensings converge, thence guidance goes to the members —
guns and planes. But it was not clear how that higher organism related to Teilhard's
Omega dream. As he closed The Phenomenon of Man, Apocalypse was still there, from
which only a spiritual remnant would be saved.
129)
Launch Control Room 2, for Apollo expedition, NASA
In the automation since, the individual is more and more superseded, an eye, a
brain, a hand, woven in the network of sensors, computers, and adaptive relays. The
control chamber for the Apollo moon-launch visibly confronts us with the nerve-net of
something hyperzoan.
130)
First Moon landing, 1969, Apollo XI module with astronauts on lunar
surface, NASA
At the other end of which, the messenger molecules of a new genetic and evolutionary
leap put the first Earth footprints on the lava-dust of the moon. Where such an organized
success is possible, how is it
131)
Destruction of forest, near Lacanha, Chiapas (CGB '78)
that here, most of humanity creeps like slime mold over the globe — no, lower, like
unorganized bacteria on an agar plate, poisoning themselves in their own wastes; whole
populations seized by the oldest cancerous self-service, to breed and burn: as in the
forests of Chiapas we reel from the foretaste of what is occurring in all the great jungle
basins, once the lungs of the Earth.
132)
7/1995
Leaf-cutting ants, McGraw Hill: Life of the Jungle
Nature: The Perceptive Field
41
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
They say leaf-cutting ants are adapted to the balance of nature. One could have
said the same, before the hygiene bomb, of the rotational agriculture of jungle-burning
man. Those balances are lack of size or power. These leaf-cutters, millions per nest, can
rip up a plot of jungle, lugging the pieces on defoliated runways for their underground
fungus beds. It is Eden again, God risking Earth-fall, by the freedom of quest.
133)
Tornado from thundercloud, Kansas, Reader's Digest: Amazing World of
Nature
We see nature everywhere hung over violence. Out of the warming of air and
convection of clouds, the nourishing descent of water in the discrete drops of rain, we
hardly know yet how it comes that those cyclonic 300 mile-an-hour winds form and hold
their own over farmland, towns, and all.
134)
Planetary nebula, Crab in Taurus, Hale, Random House: Astronomy
The nuclear burning of the stars, which lights whatever planets have life, is poised
on instabilities. We do not have to explode the world. Nature can make bombs without
us. This enormous eruption of gas, the Crab Nebula in Taurus, remains from a flaming
supernova, observed by the Chinese in 1054 A.D. Through days of total release they can
give out more light than a whole galaxy of a billion stars. Though again birth pairs with
dying: the chemistry of life may have required such events.
135)
Raphael (with Giulio Romano), 1518-20, Transfiguration, Vatican; + V
details
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche makes Raphael's Transfiguration a symbol of
the Dionysian and Apollonian: below, the shadowed Earth-strife of the boy possessed by
demons; above, the visionary unity of the radiant and floating divine — an eternal contention. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud opposes Eros and Death, like Empedocles'
Love and Strife; though unlike the stern Greek, he finds temporal hope: "that eternal Eros
will put forth his strength so as to maintain himself alongside of his equally immortal
adversary."
a136) Una Handbury, c. 1980, The Phoenix, Albuquerque Zoo
136) Rodin, 1905, The Oceanides, derived from the Gates of Hell, Rodin Museum,
Paris
7/1995
Nature: The Perceptive Field
42
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Not surprising if in our century we have auguries of imperative convergence, the
sciences (Whitehead, Jung, Teilhard de Chardin) gaping with the philosophic and
mythopoetic; while poetry and fiction hunger for a world-epos — an obligation which
rests upon us, drawing us on. Yeats:
The half-read wisdom of dæmonic images
Suffice the aging man as once the growing boy.
But what are the images by which art or vision can gather its world? Two works, from
1904, oppositely aimed: Rodin's still voluptuous Oceanides, derived from the romantic
synthesis of his Gates of Hell;
137)
Cezanne, 1904, Mont Sainte-Victoire, Philadelphia Museum of Art
Cezanne's last study of Mont Sainte-Victoire rising over Arles — the sensuous
transformed to the abstract triangles, planes, and squares of analysis. If those were poles,
the task might lie between;
138)
Mondrian, 1921, Composition in yellow, red, blue, and black, Gementemuseum, The Hague
as between the most reductive abstraction the thrust of the modern has brought us to —
how incommensurate with what we seek — the plain or colored rectangles of so many of
the avant garde, here of Mondrian, 1921;
139)
Sunset from 1260 Canyon Road, Santa Fe, NM (CGB '78)
and that nature eye and camera record in the amorphous play of its formulable radiances:
"Clouds, winds, and waves of light, senselessly beautiful."
Curious: we have talked as if the task were of mind, poetry, and art, though
surely what should be uppermost is saving the planet left in our care.
a140)
b140)
c140)
140)
Enrique Franco Torrijos, photo of a Lacandon girl
Carola Bell, at Elbow Branch, Maryland (CGB '60)
Earth from space (Mexico, etc.) Y se Formaron Caminos
Calla lily with morning dew, Chiapas (CGB '78)
Music:
7/1995
Josquin des Prez, 1500-20(?), Agnus Dei, Seraphim SIC-6052
Nature: The Perceptive Field
43
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Nothing more crucial for that, than if the ambivalence of Love-Strife should
kindle everywhere the poem of tragic Earth as the sacrament of God — an infolding of
consciousness complex as the perceptive field, and as simple as a two-voice Josquin, or
the calla's rounding of its synergy of cells: "They toil not, neither do they spin; yet
Solomon in all his glory is not arrayed like one of these."
(close of Josquin)
7/1995
Nature: The Perceptive Field
44
�
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SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
2. Cycles
CHARLES G. BELL
ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
or
1260 CANYON ROAD
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501
July 1995
Last Revised June 1996
�Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
2. Cycles
a1)
1)
California Coast, Panorama, Wall Poster (Sandra)
Ocean waves under rowed clouds (Jean Coureaux)
Sounds: Of the beach: waves and gulls
Nature appears under the organizing image of the one-many, sequence within
sequence, parts building into wholes: the trees of a forest, rowed condensations of cloud,
wave on wave of the sea. The resonant necessity lies deeper than ocean, farther back than
water, in the conceptual stuff of energy. The paradox roots there: that energy must be at
one time the entire and continuing substratum of the world, and each embodied and
failing particular — that star, this flame, this breaking wave — our referents for the
whole.
(fade ocean sounds)
2)
2a)
Organic complex: tropical growth, Chiapas (CGB '71)
Small pendulum clock from Bavaria, 1959, C.G. & D.M. Bell
Sounds: Birdsong: The mockingbird
And since every actual energy can only exhibit itself in the rush and
consummation which is its death and manifest being, energy in the larger sense (the realm
of nature), is only to be maintained by constructive incorporation and transcendence of
repeated falls. This imposes on the organizing cosmos simultaneous models of the arrow
and the wheel: the wheel of fatal recurrence spiraling into an arrow of transformational
thrust — that being in fact the essence of time: those periodic same ticks of the clock, so
numbered that the future succeeds the past.
(fade
birdsong)
a3)
3)
7/1995
Spiral nebula: M. 83, Centaurus Group (D. F. Malin)
Jean's sequence of spiral nebulae (The Universe Around Us)
Cycles
1
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
As the very concept of wave implies, these groupings — which we see frozen in
spatial array (stars in clusters, into galaxies, to the cosmos) — claim, with likeness of
structure, likeness of temporal succession, exhibited from the least atomic parts upward
in an inwrought chain or stair.
4)
4a)
Forest oak from below, Mt. Huitepec, Chiapas, Mexico (Doug Hall, c. '74)
Double: [A] Teilhard de Chardin, Tree of Life; and [B] Diagram of human
development; both, Phenomenon of Man
So it is not surprising that the biological chart of evolution with its branches of
adaptive radiation, species rising, climaxing, and being replaced, narrowing to fossils
living or extinct, should assume the shape of a tree; or with Teilhard de Chardin, a plant
infolding at the summit to the lotus-crown Omega.
In human history Hegel has most radiantly detailed, by a four-fold upward pulse,
the self-realization of Spirit in time; but for those cyclical pulses he has also compellingly
stated the law of decay.
a5)
5)
Roman stucco, c. 160 A.D., Head from the tomb of the Valerii, Vatican
Roman, 2nd(?) cent. A.D., Portrait of a man, engraved glass, Mus. Civ.,
Arezzo
Music:
Greek 1st cent. A.D., Epitaph of Seikilos, J.E. Butt, priv. rec.
A face, a music, from the introspective decline of the Græco-Roman world; (end
Seikilos) and
here is Hegel:
The life of a people ripens a certain fruit; its activity aims at the
complete manifestation of the principle which it embodies. But this
fruit does not fall back into the bosom of the people that produced and
matured it; on the contrary, it becomes a poison draught to it. That
poison draught it cannot let alone, for it has an insatiable thirst for it:
the taste of the draught is its annihilation, though at the same time the
rise of a new principle.
Thus the draught of inward-looking, a debility in this Arezzo head (Augustine's "abyssus
humanae conscientiae"), would be a point of departure for the Christian private soul.
October 1992
Cycles
2
�C.G. Bell
6)
Symbolic History
Double: [A] Magdalenian, c. 16,000 B.C., Bison, Altamira, Spain; and
[B] Levant, c. 7000 B.C., Abstract hunting scenes, Cerro Felio, Spain. (Also
shown singly.)
All organized unfolding has its ups and downs; but the great cycles of soul which
Hegel took from Vico and passed to Spengler and Toynbee — are they limited to the
overreaching West, or as inescapably repetitive as Spengler's formulation? Can the
masterful animal paintings from ice-age caves (Altamira, 16,000 B.C.) record lost
Promethean stirrings, Cro-Magnon peaks of individual emergence?
And do the cryptographic scenes of the chase from eastern Spain 9,000 years later,
in their sophisticated doodling, betray late-cycle reversion to some cult of the symbol?
There are too few points to establish a curve.
7)
Double: [A] Aurignacian, c. 25,000 B.C., Ivory "Venus" (Lespugue), Mus. de
L'homme, Paris; and [B] Laussel, c. 20,000 "Venus" with horn, Mus.
d'Aquitaine
From earlier still — these beginnings of magic and art — the radical ivory curves
of the fertility fetish from Lespugue (about 25,000 B.C.) oppose the horn-brandishing
massive stone flesh of Laussel (perhaps 5,000 years later, with abstract against representational. There is no fiercer cleavage in civilization, linked somehow to the
transcendental bypass, against realistic cultivation, of the outward and physical. Who
knows if all history has oscillated in that tension? We hardly understand its working in
ourselves, much less in prehistoric images.
8)
Double: [A] Ifê, before 13th cent., woman's head, clay, Ifê Museum, Nigeria;
and [B] Contemporary Congo, Bakwele Mask, Mus. des Arts Africains, etc.,
Paris. [Also shown singly.]
Music:
Senegal Dance prelude, 21-string lamine Kora, Arion FARN 91018
What mystery of humanist rise and fall may underlie the pre-Renaissance
appearance (left), in the Nigerian centers of Ifê and Benin, of those wonderful clays and
bronzes of modulated touch, in an horizon which has everywhere reverted (as from the
subtleties of the 21-stringed Senegal kora)
(fade Senegal kora)
Music:
October 1992
from Witch Doctor Dance of the Baoule, Olympia Atlas 6110
Cycles
3
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
to the catalepsy of the voodoo mask, the beat of the Witch Doctor Dance?
(fade Baoule Dance)
Perhaps the limit of such reduction
9)
9a)
Alaskan Eskimo, recent, wood and fur mask, Kukokwim River, Smithsonian,
Washington, D.C.
Double: [A] Tusyan mask, Upper Volta, fiber and seeds, Müller Museum,
Geneva; and [B] Max Ernst, 1934-5, Bronze bird head, Gal. Beyeler, Basel
Music: Yurok Basket Song (A. Figueroa), New World Records 297 (b-6)
is in the conformity of placation rites Rasmussen recorded from an Eskimo shaman:
…we explain nothing, we believe nothing… We fear dearth and
hunger in the cold snow huts. We fear… the old woman at the bottom
of the sea who rules over all the beasts of the sea… We fear sickness
and evil spirits, the souls of the men and beasts we have killed
…Therefore, our fathers have inherited from their fathers the old rules
of life… We do not know how, we cannot say why, but we hold to the
rules, that we may live untroubled.
Could that be the primitive ground from which every civilization (as Oedipus plowed the
mother) must arise — the ground perhaps of its modern return?
Yurok
song)
(fade
October 1992
Cycles
4
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Yet it remains doubtful whether the Stone Age, Africa, early America, or the Far
East (though that would require another study) presents such affiliation of cultural surges
as strikes us in the West.
a10)
10)
Triple: [A] Dynasty IV, c. 2700 B.C., Boston Reserve Head; [B] Dynasty
XII, c. 1850 B.C., Sesostris III Head, Cairo Museum; and [C] Dynasty
XVIII, c. 1355 B.C., detail, golden coffin of King Tutankhamen, Cairo
Double: [A] Egypt, 1st Dynasty, c. 3,000 B.C., King Narmer tablet; and
[B] Dynasty XVIII, c. 1352 B.C., relief, King Tutankhamen's chair; both,
Cairo Museum
The type of cyclical progression is set by the earliest example, the Egyptian — a
rise and fall where each phase seems to generate, by a kind of fugal necessity, the phase
to follow; so that a whole civilization, spread over a changing population and through two
thousand years, proceeds, like an animate being, through a threefold oneness of
beginning, middle, and end: a pattern so right and beautiful it stands as a paradigm for
later cultures.
First is the unity, as clear through all style-change as that of any species or
nameable grouping in nature. Everything from this First Dynasty victory tablet, of preindividual and primitive force, to the New Kingdom subjective luxury of King Tut's
carved cedarwood chair (right), bears the recognizable stamp and character of Egypt.
a11)
11)
Triple, Egypt: [A] Old Kingdom, detail of diorite Khafre; [B] Middle Kingdom, Sphinx of Amenemhet III; [C] New Kingdom, limestone Ikhnaton, detail; all, Cairo Museum
Egypt, Dynasty IV, c. 2540 B.C., Chephren, front upper half, Cairo Museum
And yet this pervasive unity is broken into three distinctive parts (the Egyptians,
said Vico, dividing their history into ages of gods, heroes, and men), three epochs,
separated, like geological ages, by intervals of upheaval — though each, bridging the
intermission, picks up the threads of the same drama.
There is an Old Kingdom (third millennium) of discovery and keen individual
emergence — Khafre (or Chephren) gazing with vital calm beyond death.
12)
Egypt, Dynasty XII, c. 1820 B.C., Amenemhet III head, Cairo Museum
October 1992
Cycles
5
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
There is a Middle Kingdom (early second millennium) of somber control, the saddened
pre-Stoic fort of Amenemhet III.
13)
Egypt, Dynasty XVIII, c. 1370 B.C., colossal Ikhnaton from Karnap, Cairo
Museum
There is a New Kingdom (later second millennium) of opulent extravagance and spiritual
unrest: Ikhnaton just before he broke with the religion of the state.
However these phases may relate to those of subsequent cycles —
Second 11)
Profile of Khafre (or Chephren), same subject as 11
the Old Kingdom youth in the shelter of belief, to the early and fifth century Greek, or the
Western Gothic and Renaissance;
Second 12)
Again, Amenemhet III, detail of 12
the weighty responsibility under darker self-knowledge, perhaps to Republican Rome, or
with us to Milton and the shadowed baroque, or perhaps to an art of communist discipline
still in the course of being born;
Second 13) Again, Ikhnaton, detail of 13
Second 13a) Triple, same as a10
the New Kingdom of imperial display, novelty, and mystical yearning, to any age of latecycle luxury, whether Græco-Rome, or the recent or future West — however sketchily
these relations hold, the three Egyptian phases — dawn-life, embattled will, sensuous
repletion with spiritual search — have a kind of inner logic and credibility.
14)
Egypt, c. 3000 B.C., pre- or early dynastic lion, Berlin
The logic unfolds on closer scrutiny. It is from the stone age of pre-conscious
cult, with all its primitive bareness and primitive strength, that the Old Kingdom (c. 3000
B.C.) takes its origin, a tribal worship of natural powers and brute gods.
15)
Egypt, Dynasty IV, 2650-2500 B.C., Pyramids of Gizeh
October 1992
Cycles
6
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
In four dynasties and four hundred years, we climb to a conquest of stone and an
art never to be surpassed in affirming faith. The largest pyramid, of Cheops, is behind;
center is that of Chephren. We have just seen him in the severity of diorite smiling the
immortal well-being of the personal awakening in the ritualistic frame. The smaller
pyramid in front is of his successor Mycerinus,
Va16)
16)
Egypt, Dynasty IV, 2510 B.C., King Mycerinus and goddesses, slant view
of whole, Cairo Museum
Frontal view of same: King Mycerinus between goddesses (Video: detail
only)
who, touched with the same radiant command, advances through time and eternity,
supported on either side by the goddesses Hathor and Parva. It seems that only the birth
period of a culture, its age of tragic joy, can blend such formal strength with
representational immediacy, such solemn grandeur with vernal delight.
17)
V17a)
Egypt, Dynasty V, c. 2400 B.C., Seated Scribe, Louvre, Paris (with detail)
Same, detail of the head.
By the 5th Dynasty, the individual release, shifting from the more than human to
the here and now, reaches a climax of realism in the Seated Scribe, the living variety
caught in the instant and actual. Like any such cresting, this shows the incipient
weakness of the merely particular, against those cult figures borne through time by eternal
powers.
18)
18a)
18b)
Egypt, Dynasty VI, c. 2500 B.C., King Pepi, head, copper, Cairo Museum
Double: [A] Egypt, Dynasty VI, c. 2280 B.C., Ur-khuui head, Cairo Museum; and [B] Roman, c. 60 A.D., head of Corbulo, Capitoline Museum
King Pepi, detail of 18 (video from 18)
A weakness which, in the sensuously refined copper statue of King Pepi I of the
6th Dynasty about 2300, reflects itself for the first time in history in a ripeness of
nostalgic person — a relativism tied to the collapse of the Old Kingdom in wars and
feudal anarchy. Telling, that 600 years of dynamic rule should close with Pepi's soft art
of consciousness; prophetic also of all later fruiting of religious solace out of public
disaster, that the first preserved work of Egyptian literature, the debate with his soul of a
man weary of life, should be ascribed to Pepi's reign or soon after, when "The gentle man
October 1992
Cycles
7
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
has perished, but the violent man has access to everybody." It is Plato's "no politician is
honest," Yeats' "mere violence is loosed upon the world." But can the Old Kingdom
already smack of Rome? The poem ends:
Death is before me today
Like the recovery of a sick man,
Like going forth into a garden after sickness …
Death is before me today
As a man longs to see his house
When he has spent years in captivity.
a19)
b19)
19)
Egypt, Dynasty XII, 1842-1797 B.C., Sphinx of Amenemhet III, Cairo Mus.
Double: [A] Egypt, Dynasty IV, 2510 B.C., Mycerinus and Consort, Boston;
and [B] Egypt, Dynasty XII, 1850 B.C., Senusret (Sesostris) III, Cairo Mus.
Senusret III, head, Cairo Mus. (Same as [B] of b19)
That is the inherited disillusion and conscious flaw with which the Middle Kingdom has
always to reckon; and it could deal with it only by an equally conscious and labored
control. The least weakening, and the state yields again to war and invasion. To go from
the fresh earthly joy of the Old Kingdom to this assertive Senusret III (Dryden: "Heroic
virtue did his actions guide"), or the others who resurrect the Kingdom of Egypt as by an
act of will from the grave — is like the shift Hegel speaks of from Greece to Rome: "The
geniality and joy of soul that existed there have given place to harsh and rigorous toil."
Does such heavy regimen always bind the fragments of first introspective decay, as Rome
post-Alexandrian Greece?
Va20)
b20)
c20)
20)
Detail of b20, Thutmose III, profile of head
Egypt, Dynasty XVIII, 1482-1450 B.C., Thutmoses III, Cairo Museum
Egypt, Dynasty XVIII, c. 1450 B.C., Lotus and Papyrus, detail, Temple of
Karnak
Egypt, Dynasty XVIII, 1482-1450 B.C., Thutmoses III, Head, Deir al
Bahari
Where then is the resemblance between the New Kingdom and the empires of
Alexander and Napoleon? Can parallel lines cross: an Egyptian Alexander succeed
Egyptian Rome? Or must we take to Spengler's procrustean bed, where this Thutmoses
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III lies down with dark Tiberius, and in the West with whatever the next millennium is to
bring?
In any case, it is after a second period of anarchy (200 years, culminating in the
Hyksos invasion), that the pharaohs of the 18th Dynasty, taking the war chariot from the
invaders, carve out by conquest an empire and bureaucratic rule of more blatant material
splendor than Egypt had known before. How different the sophisticated imperial smile,
from that instinctive and eternal smiling of the Old Kingdom. Thutmoses' face is a
stylized mask of display, though under its regal conformity lurk the strains of romantic
flagrance.
21)
Egypt, Dynasty XVIII, c. 1450-25, B.C., Userhet hunting, Tomb 56, Thebes
And now for the first time we have an almost slick art of marvellous technical
facility applied to imperial theatrics. Not the decorations of Brighton Pavilion (for
George IV), nor of the steamship Normandy are more brilliant — while these tomb
carvings have the advantage of being real. Yet their reality is as earthly-thin as the
surface of the relief.
a22)
22)
Egypt, Dynasty XVIII, c. 1450-25 B.C., Semenkhkara and the Princess
Meritaten smelling lotus, Berlin
Egypt, Dynasty XVIII, c. 1370 B.C., Queen Nefertiti, Cairo Museum
That life is a veil of appearance — harpers and dancing girls, nobles smelling lotus
bloom; there is commerce and prosperity, the multiplication and refinement of pleasure.
Under that surface mounts a hunger which produces in the busts of Nefertiti the most
romantic of all depictions of woman — sensuous lips, raised chin, and wishful eyes, as if
desire must always increase with the repletion on which it feeds.
a23)
23)
23a)
Egypt, Dynasty XVIII, c. 1370 B.C., Ikhnaton and Nefertiti, with their
daughters, relief, Cairo (color)
Same, detail, Ikhnaton, daughter, and sun-orb
Egypt, Dynasty XVIII, c. 1370 B.C., Colossus of Ikhnaton, head, Cairo Museum
Finally, in the Amarna representations of her mystical pharaoh husband Ikhnaton,
the sensory longing and disillusion which undergird the whole New Kingdom, whiplash
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in a personal one-god revolution: Ikhnaton expressionistically distorted, a pentecostal
priest under the inspiring rays of Aton. He wrote:
I shall breathe the sweet breath
Which comes from thy mouth.
I shall behold thy beauty every day.
It is my desire that I may hear thy sweet voice
Even in the North Wind, that my limbs may rejuvenate with life
Through love of thee.
Give me thy hands, holding thy spirit,
That I may receive it and may live by it.
Call thou upon my name through all eternity,
And it shall never fail.
Surely this was a point of departure for the Hebrews who had entered Egypt in the
Hyksos period and would leave it under Moses a century and a half after Ikhnaton. A
lesson in the uses of adversity
that perhaps the most crucial turn in religious history should spring from what could so
easily be called the sickness and degeneracy of the revealed person of Ikhnaton.
24)
24a)
Egypt, Dynasty XIX, c. 1250 B.C., Rock Temple, Abu Simbel, with colossal
Rameses II statues
Egypt, Dynasty XIX, c. 1250 B.C., Rameses II smites his foes, relief,
columned hall, Abu Simbel
Ikhnaton's immolation of romantic ego to the mystical divine, for which he would
have changed the worship of Egypt, sacrificing empire, self, and all, was suppressed after
his death. As Jeffers says, "protest, a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and
the mass hardens." His successors beat back to a more fatuous imperialism, trying to
shore up a demoralized kingdom — Rameses II's giant attempts to outdo the vaunts of
Thutmoses III. As his Pentewere temple inscription runs:
Mine is the strength of a hundred thousand. I fall upon them like a
raging fire and lay waste their serried ranks: as a falcon among fowl I
sweep down on them; I strike and do not weary of striking.
a25)
25)
25a)
'92 insert: Egypt, Dynasty XXVI, c. 600 B.C.(?), head of a Saitic King
Egypt, Late Dynastic, c. 135 B.C., The Great God Bes, Louvre, Paris
Faiyum, Egypt, C. 100 A.D., Portrait of a man in a blue toga, encaustic on
wood, Pushkin Museum,Moscow
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From that conventional pomp we take a five century slide through the hollowness
and nostalgia of the Saitic Kingdom to the reversion ("in my end is my beginning") of the
beast-god Bes. Beyond are hybrid refinements — out of Egypt, by Greece and Rome.
The vital course was run: "consumed with that which it was nourished by."
26)
Mesopotamia, Early Dynastic (Fara phase), 2900-2685 B.C., Abihil, alabaster, Louvre, Paris
Music: Ugarit, c. 1400 B.C., Hurrian cult song, University of California
Through its long history, Egypt was not isolated; and the pattern of one-many,
where we began, would lead us to ask if Mesopotamian Ur and Sumer, from the time of
the Old Kingdom and soon after (or even the first cities of the Indus) shared in that phase
of keen discovery? —
27)
27a)
Babylonian, 18th cent. B.C., Stele of Hammurabi from Susa, detail, Louvre,
Paris
Sumerian (Babylonian), 18th cent. B.C., Hammurabi or donor, Awil-namor,
from Larsa, Louvre, Paris
whether Neo-Sumeria and Babylonia (Hammurabi's Stele of Laws) parallel the Middle
Kingdom of duty and obligation. Was the blood–stream and nerve-net of trade (as later
in Europe) sufficient to actualize so interwoven a history?
Here music, too, should offer a discovered analogue; but the chordal interpretation
of the Hurrian cult song from an Ugaritic cuneiform is so hypothetical, who can believe
this tune the old cow died by is quite what Ezekiel would object to in the "dark Idolatries
of alienated Judah?"
(cut Hurrian cult song)
28)
28a)
Cretan, c. 1600-1500 B.C., Palace of Minos, detail, Knossos (CGB '77)
Minoan, c. 1500 B.C., Youths bearing jugs, fresco from Knossos, Mus. Herakleion, Crete
Certainly the cultural web proliferates as we advance toward the New Kingdom.
And suddenly from maritime Crete comes an art (c. 1500 B.C.) which seems to telescope
what had gone before and to anticipate Egyptian luxury to follow. Its natural freedom
and airy humanity suggest a Minoan Age of Joy; yet that brief and sensuous smile attends
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the matured and sophisticated empires — ships bearing wine and oil and spices from
Egypt and Asia Minor to Greece and Troy. Here is an island peak of the submerged
continent from which the Homeric poems must in part derive.
a29)
29)
V29a)
Mycenean, c. 1225 B.C., "Tomb of Agamemnon," Mycenae, Peloponnesus
(CGB '77); dig. adds vb29, domed interior
Mycenean, c. 1500 B.C., The Lion Gate, Mycenae, Peloponnesus
Same, detail
The excavations on Crete and at Mycenae spurred a cyclical rethinking of Homer,
as in Kazantzakis' new Odyssey and in Yeats: "A shudder in the loins engenders there/
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower/ And Agamemnon dead." Against the threein-one of Egypt, the pre-Hellenic seemed divided like Græco-Rome into a Minoan phase
of discovery and a weightier power-phase involving a new conquering people centered in
Mycenae.
Here the invading Achaians, absorbing Cretan skills into a zone of ruder force,
built to Aegean hegemony, reducing the island of Crete itself to a tributary. The Lion
Gate of Agamemnon's city "rich in gold," carved four centuries before the Trojan War,
sets a type of the "successor power."
30)
Cretan (Knossos), c. 1500 B.C., "La Parisienne," fresco, Mus. Herakleion,
Crete; + V detail
Against which the art of waning Knossos has the sophisticated elegance of the
Hellenistic or recent European — indeed, this precious lady has been called "La
Parisienne." Assume she also lived in Troy; since by the 12th century of the Trojan
upheaval, all over the Aegean, such refinements must have been on the point of yielding
to inner violence and barbarian vigor.
31)
31a)
Peloponnesian, early 7th cent. B.C., Palladion, detail, Museum, Olympia
Attic, 740 B.C., Geometric krater from Dipylon Gate of the Kerameikos, Nat.
Mus., Athens (CGB '77); v. upper part; dig. whole and detail
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Soon after the Trojan War — in that time of troubles when Egyptian scribes
recorded, "the islands of the sea are restless" — Achaian Mycenae fell before fresh Greek
tribes from the north, culminating in the Dorians. So we reach the Dark Age birthplace of
Homeric myth; as Yeats says in A Vision: "I imagine the annunciation that founded
Greece as made to Leda … And that from one of her eggs came Love and from the other
War."
I had not read Yeats when I went to Crete and Greece in 1939; but when I saw the
8th century Greek Geometric — purpose renewed in the cleansing reversion to primitive
force —
For 2nd 30) Minoan, gold ring, 15th cent., B.C., ritual scene, from Knossos, Mus.
Herakleion, Crete
For 2nd 31) Greek, Geometric, c. 700 B.C., warrior from Thessaly, Nat. Mus.,
Athens
For 3rd 30) Aegean (Thera), near 1500 B.C., full-breasted woman, fresco, detail,
Nat. Mus., Athens
For 3rd 31) Double: [A] 3rd 30: full-breasted woman; and [B] 2nd 31: Greek
geometric warrior
3rd 31a)
Greek (Delos), 7th cent. B.C., Terrace of Lions, detail (CGB '77)
after the almost cloying sweets of Knossos (thinking of our own time and of late Rome), I
began unconsciously where Yeats had left off, with a poem affirming "The Geometric
Style":
Penance is, to pay for trespass, only
The path to pardon, and pardon's fullness not
Built but on hunger, wherefore Rome fell
And Cretan softness. Mournful stood many,
As when the whip strikes, self-wielded. Well
May the lash be longed for and lamented. What
Sage can affix our blessing, of pain or gladness?
Who gives his life finds it; paradox, such
Is our wisdom, and ends with grasping, lifeless
In conquest, as who runs and drops dead. Touch
No string of sorrow; the sweet sound rots
To the core. What is lost? Death. And ahead penitence,
Pain, crudeness, desert earth or worse, bare plots
Of stone, now known our last defendence.
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32)
32a)
Symbolic History
Greek (Spartan), c. 600 B.C., colossal head of Hera, Museum, Olympia
Ionian (of the islands), c. 550 B.C., attributed to Archermos of Chios, Nikê
from Delos, marble, National Museum, Athens (CGB '77)
By 600 (this colossal Hera at Olympia), the smiling keenness of the archaic
leavens the monumental bareness. As Simonides says: "Pray to the gods; with the gods
is power." What is individual and earthly is just nascent in what is common and divine;
yet the more alive for that containment. Of this force which in politics and thought was
already remaking the inner and outer worlds, Hölderlin writes:
So the gods of heaven come in, with such deep trembling
Down through the shadows their day-spring breaks
among
(translation: CGB)
Denn so kehren die Himmlischen ein, tiefschütternd
Aus den Schatten herab unter die Menschen ihr Tag.
33)
men.
gelangt so
Attic-Ionian, c. 520-10 B.C., Korê 675, + detail, Acropolis Museum, Athens
No sequence could illustrate as richly as the Greek the refinement, out of the style
of force, of a lyrically sensuous art of joy. The driving sharpness slowly slacks the string;
so pointed peaks wear to an alluvial plain. The blend of primitive ground and individual
emergence gives 6th century Ionic korai a Sapphic poignance of delight, with which only
the Western Gothic can be compared, though in another flight of spirit.
34)
Greek, c. 450 B.C., Poseidon Temple; and c. 550 B.C., Hera Temple (behind),
Paestum (CGB '85); + dig. closer Poseidon Temple
But since the triumph, tragedy, and inner deepening of Greek culture, expressed in
the resonances of thought, poetry, and the arts, requires at least a separate study, we trim
to the fewest cyclical hints: how vibrant, against the later consolidation of Rome, that exploratory wave which sent Greek colonies over the Mediterranean, raising temples on the
headlands of Sicily, Africa, Italy, France, and Spain.
35)
Attic, c. 460-50 B.C., Poseidon (or Zeus), bronze, National Museum, Athens
Thus we reach the acme, the mid-5th century of Pericles. In the perfection of the
representational and humanistic, every personal emotion and feature is still borne on the
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cresting of common faith and inherited laws. Like the great tragedies, especially of
Aeschylus, this Panhellenic and Olympian art is a reasoned vindication of the gods.
36)
V36a)
Praxiteles, c. 340 B.C., Hermes with the infant Dionysos, Olympia; first,
V detail
Double of full-length 35 and 36
There is almost no parallel for the swiftness of Greek fruition.
Music:
Euripides, 408 B.C., chromatic fragment from Orestes, Therriault
and Lynch, St. John's College, Santa Fe
What reared free city-states led them to the value-rending Peloponnesian War; the first
shoots of philosophy flowered in a sophistic questioning of everything; speculative
tragedy, which celebrated the gods in Aeschylus, in Euripides doubts and complains (here
the chromatic fragment which survives from his Orestes). From the fifth century B.C. to
the fourth is from the strength of the Periclean Zeus-Poseidon to the softness of this
Praxitelean Hermes.
(end Euripides)
a37)
b37)
37)
Detail of 35, Poseidon (or Zeus): head
Detail of 36, Hermes: head
Double: [A] a37, head of Poseidon, and [B] b37, head of Hermes
From the paean of the civic man-god — as Sophocles wrote in the Antigone: "Many a
wonder lives and breathes, but the wonder of all is man" —
"Πολλα τα δεινα, κουδεν ανθρωπου δεινοτερον πελει;" — to the relativizing
mellowness of an art so sensuously ideal that the strength of stone seems to dissolve in a
dreaming mist. What Arnold called "the dialogue of mind with itself" has begun.
Against the fifth century of tragic drama, the fourth seems a century of thought. In Plato,
the subjective search — a civic weakness — is also the first fruit of a meditative
detachment of soul which would open catacombs of inwardness under outward Greece
and Rome.
38)
Hellenistic, mid-3rd cent. B.C., Barberini Faun, Munich
The Barberini Faun, mid-3rd century, drunk and lechered out, shows one drift of
Hellenistic art, the conspicuous, even ugly exploitation of sensate variety. It is the sort of
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license moralists would later deplore when it came flooding from Greece into the sink of
imperial Rome.
But if we ask: what is that spraddled faun dreaming of?
39)
39a)
Hellenistic, 1st half of 2nd cent. B.C., female head, Alexandria
Double: [A] Egypt, late Dynasty V, Mathythy, Chief of Royal Farmers,
Brooklyn Museum; and [B] Egypt, Dynasty XVIII, c. 1362-52 B.C., goddess
head from tomb of Tutankhamen, Cairo Museum
it might (as in Mallarmé: "Ces Nymphes, je veux les perpetuer") reveal a complementary
aspect of the Hellenistic — a sensuous feminine form of romantic, almost spiritual
idealization. Between the titillation of appetite and the increasingly soulful search
beyond, the late Greek is strung. Does this art of conscious extravagance and nostalgia
correspond to the first Egyptian decay at the end of the Old Kingdom, under Pepi, or to
the more phthisic novelties of the New Kingdom? It is the genius of cyclical history not
to resolve questions so precisely phrased.
a40)
40)
Double: [A] Late Hellenistic (copy of c. 300 B.C. original), Alexander, Pella
Mus.; and [B] Etrusco-Roman 3rd-2nd cent. B.C., called Junius Brutus,
Conservatori, Rome
Single, Brutus from a40
And yet in the same centuries, more to the center of the Mediterranean, a nation
was rising to power which would enact, if any would, the Middle Kingdom part of
disciplined control. When the Greek second century historian Polybius set himself to
explain how the Greeks and Carthaginians had fallen into such debility, while Rome had
conquered the world, not all his reasoned analysis of constitutions would serve; he had to
invoke crescive morality, that where the Greeks were corrupt, the Romans of the time of
Scipio (or of this portrait, often called the elder Brutus) were at a peak of communal
dedication. Yet what we read in the portrait is that the dedication is post-conscious.
Rome, as successor-state, has not begun at the primitive ground of the pre-individual.
Greek awareness has been taken over, with all its liabilities, but in the hardening grip of
stoical self-rule.
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41)
Symbolic History
Double: [A] Egypt, Dynasty XII, c. 1860 B.C., Senusret (Sesostris) III, Met.,
New York; and [B] Roman, c. 60 B.C., unknown republican, Glyptothek,
Munich
How desperately that grasp would be needed, would be put to the test, patrician
portraits of the late Republic (right), under the temptations of power and in the throes of
civil war, make no doubt of. But the stress in which they are formed testifies not only to
the trials and vices of empire, but to the fighting strength of Rome through moral crisis.
If we have reached here a point of parallel with the Middle Kingdom (left), it will
teach us how radically, in the spiral of personality, the Roman, with its realistic (and
legal) establishment of a responsible private citizen, is from the brooding, still masklike
record of Egyptian consciousness in Sesostris III.
42)
Roman, c. 10 B.C., Augustus as Pontifex Maximus, head, Mus. Naz., Rome
Curious, how the torment and force of the late Republic seems ironed out by the
proclamation of Augustus — the smooth Virgilian statement of a golden age. Yet even
through its most pious idealization, the sensuous and weighty consciousness makes an
almost Napoleonic advance. Has our Middle Kingdom of Republican Rome become,
with the Principate, a New Kingdom?
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43)
Symbolic History
Roman, c. 14 A.D., Pont-du-Gard, near Nîmes, Provence
In what Pliny called "the boundless majesty of the Roman peace" (to which the
German chieftain: "The Romans make a desert and call it peace"), Augustus'
proclamation spread, in public buildings, roads, and aqueducts, from Britain and Gaul to
Africa and Asia — after the temples of Greece, engineering feats of a utilitarian civilization. Yet that whole outward empire, like the arched city itself, level upon level and
vault opening under vault, encloses what Greece and Rome had ripened:
a44)
44)
Roman, c. 66-68 A.D., Bust of Nero, Capitoline Museum, Rome
Roman, 66-67 A.D., Nero, obverse of coin, American Numismatic Society
the abyss of conscious personality, which, as the Classical fall looms, becomes a
dæmonic battleground, as if the world, polarized, had produced at one birth the Christian
faith and the Nero of this Roman coin, climaxing the outward rule and inner crisis of the
Julio-Claudian line. Though what Suetonius writes of Caligula caps Nero's bloodier
angling in the lake of darkness:
Finally seized with a mania for feeling the touch of money, he would
often pour out huge piles of goldpieces in some open place, walk over
them barefooted, and wallow in them for a long time with his whole
body.
45)
Roman Egypt, 1st-2nd cent. A.D., portrait of Eirena, Alexandria; + V detail
And now from all over the Hellenized empire, especially from Egypt and the East
(here Alexandria), under the façade of order which so impressed Gibbon: "the period in
the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy
and prosperous" — we catch the private citizen, in the tenderness of lonely withdrawal,
the old late-kingdom syndrome of sensory repletion and super-sensory desire, gazing
from banqueting halls, peristyles, tombs, wide-eyed, beyond time and space.
Music:
46)
46a)
Greek, 1st cent. A.D., Hymn to Calliopeia, J.E. Butt, priv. rec.
Roman, c. 50 A.D. (Herculaneum), Egyptian cult scene, Museum, Naples
Same, detail (video from 46)
October 1992
(end Hymn to Calliopeia)
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While from the first century on, little scenes testify to the coming in of mystery
cults from the East — as Eliot says:
When there is distress of nations and perplexity,
Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgeware Road
— Isis from Egypt, Mithras from Asia Minor, in that labyrinth, a twine of immortality.
47)
Roman, 260-68, portrait of Gallienus, Museo Nazionale, Rome
By the third century, imperial power (here Gallienus) is assuming the stylized
mask of symbolic and superhuman sanction, the features hardening and thinning to an
illusionistic surface, through which the lost soulfulness and almost satanic search records
its pain.
a48)
b48)
48)
Roman Christian, c. 3rd cent. A.D., catacomb tombs
Roman Christian, c. 250 A.D., fresco, room of the Velatio, Catacomb of
Priscilla, Rome
detail of b48, mother and child
Music:
Gregorian, Sanctus IV° from Mass XI (Solesmes) London 5632
And now, from the catacombs beneath that power-vault, taking the earthly
darkness as the medium of its life, comes the Christian transformation of temporal
estrangement, the burial cave become a place of birth.
Yet this art, like early chant or the Meditations of Augustine, still wears the
crepuscular softness and personality of the Classical world.
(fade Gregorian Sanctus)
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The direction of soul has changed; but body is not yet stripped; the wheel has not
come full circle
49)
Roman, 3rd cent., funeral stele in Barbarian style, Museum, Varna
to the ground of radical force. Though everywhere on the borders of the empire the
cleansing, savage bath waited for what Vico would first formulate: barbarian renewal by
sanctified violence, the cyclical return of "the pure and pious wars of the heroic peoples."
50)
Græco-Roman, c. 50 A.D. copy of 2nd cent. B.C., Aphrodite Kallipyge, Mus.
Naz., Naples; + V detail
Here, on the verge of the Christian West, let us note that the West also is a one
among many, itself part of an evolving world context, into which, in our day, it is
fatefully reabsorbed.
Strange, that late Classical luxury — such art as this Aphrodite Kallipyge, Venus
of the Sweet Arse, from Nero's Golden House — spread through the conquests of
Alexander as far as the Ganges —
Music:
51)
51a)
52)
Indian Classical Pahadi (Dhun), sarangi with tabla, V-LM 6057
Indian 8th-10th cent., Tree Goddess from Madhya Pradesh, Gwalior
Double: [A] 51; and [B] 52 (video doubles wholes, slide show details)
Rheims, c. 820, Gospel Book of Ebbo, St. John, Epernay; video: detail only
would inspire an Indian culture of rejuvenated vitality and religious joy (this 8th century
tree goddess from Madhya Pradesh). As if from the Greek source two civilizations had
diverged, both centered in the sacred, but one sanctifying the Eros of nature and sex;
(fade Indian raga)
Music:
Gregorian, c. 1000, from Easter Alleluia, (de Van) AS 81-B
the other repudiating body and world, time, space and touch (or trying to, though it
worshipped an incarnate saviour) — in its Dark Age strength (this Gospel book of Ebbo,
from Rheims just after Charlemagne) dissolving all sensory forms into symbolic
calligraphs — both arts of energy, both mystical, but the Western of ascetic denial, the
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Indian affirming the godhead of flesh. Of these, we turn to the more dæmonic release of
the cyclical West.
53)
German, c. 1060, Werden Crucifix (bronze), head, Werden a.d. Ruhr
The West, which by the year 1000, pared by the folk-wanderings of the Dark Ages
to the abstract acerbities of spirit (this angular Werden Christ), is again at the upswing of
the wheel of individuation. As Vico says: "We have observed the marvelous
correspondence between the first and the returned barbarian times."
(fade de Van Gregorian)
54)
54a)
Bœotian, c. 600(?) B.C., large archaic head, Nat. Mus. Athens (CGB '77)
Double: [A] 54; and [B] 53
And yet a Greek almost geometric head from the start of Classical culture, against
the Western, attests again to the Hegelian transformation over sixteen centuries. The
clean and impersonal, the Homeric energy of the Greek, is replaced in the Germanic —
for all its reductive stylization and automatic surrender of person to faith — with the most
intense and paradoxical core of mystical person, a selfless selfhood of god-bearing spirit.
It is the reshaping of man himself.
55)
For 1st 56)
Amiens, West Front, c. 1236 ff., photographed in the rain (CGB '74)
Church at Assy, c. 1940-45, altar tapestry, Apocalypse, (J. Lurçat),
French Alps
If 1000 was the Dark Age base of the cycle, in 200 years and all over Europe the
great cathedrals (here Amiens) are looming up into the rain and fog, witnesses to the
buttressing and incorporating theology of stone. From then until now (say, 750 years),
the Christian and post-Christian West has gone on. We mean to study it, century by
century, in some detail. Here we pose three cyclical questions:
57)
2nd 56)
Phidias, c. 435 B.C., Parthenon Frieze XLII, youth holding a horse,
British Museum, London; + V detail (to follow 2nd 56)
Rheims, c. 1240, statues from the West front, France (CGB '74)
Remembering the Greek, can we locate the Western peak of man in his pride?
When does the dialogue of mind with itself begin? And third: Where are we now?
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Fauré thought to compare the Parthenon age in Greece with that of the cathedrals
in France. But the mastery over stone, inherited from the Classical, seems to have fruited
early in the West. And what of personality? The saints of Rheims, in their timeless
stance, are far from the Phidian ripening where individuation goes over into softening
consciousness.
2nd 55)
French Gothic, 12th-13th cent., Notre Dame from Southeast, Paris
(CGB '53)
2nd 55a)
French Gothic, 1240-60, Bourges, W Portal, Last Judgment (CGB '84)
2nd 55b)
French Gothic, 1194-1225, Chartres, N. Transept, interior (CGB '59)
V3rd 56)
Detail of Rheims, W. Front, statues (or video from 2nd 56)
For 2nd 57) Double: [A] Parthenon detail, and [B] 56, Rheims statues, detail
Thirteenth century literature, scholastic philosophy, the organa of the school of Perotin —
those bare-fifths chords sounding the mystery of faith — hint how structural, severe, and
transhuman the cathedrals are.
Music:
Perotin, c. 1220(?), four-voice Sederunt, last quadruplum, close
(Cape) Archive 14068
(end Perotin)
This force is sacred and hierarchical; beside the Phidian touchstone, we sense it as barely
resident in the articulations of space, time, and cause.
58)
58a)
Giotto, 1304-6, Resurrection, Arena Chapel, Padua; + V detail
Same, detail of Christ
At the start of the next century, Giotto speeds the recovery of space and human
drama in painting. The glory of the art is beyond question; but the olive-eyed enigma, the
haunting blend of smiling and grief, hint how far the moods and modalities still hang in
the eternal frame.
a59)
59)
59a)
59b)
Jan van Eyck, c. 1430, Annunciation, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.
(CGB '60);
Same, detail (video uses this detail only)
Jan van Eyck, 1437, Madonna and Child, middle panel of triptych, Dresden
Gallery
Hubert and Jan van Eyck, 1427-9, Altar of the Lamb, angel playing organ,
St. Bavon, Ghent, Belgium; dig. adds angels playing instruments
October 1992
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59c)
Symbolic History
Same, choir of angels, detail only
Another hundred years: van Eyck, 1430; and the representational achievement is
almost complete: space and earthly things, jewels, robes, flesh; yet the smiling korai of
the 6th century B.C. seem nearer than Phidias. Is not the charm of this art the tentative
grace with which it accepts a Medieval sanction rather than assert its own? So with
Dunstable (or the Flemish musicians who follow him) — equally unassuming, though as
humanized in melody and chord.
Music:
Dunstable, 1435, Ave Maria, opening, (Syntagma) Seraphim
SIC 6052
a60 ) Piero della Francesca, c. 1455, Death of Adam, Legend of the True Cross, S.
Francesco, Arezzo (cropped)
60) Detail from left side of a60
(fade Dunstable)
By the mid-fifteenth century in Italy (Piero della Francesca), partly through
classical revival, partly through the growth of native awareness, we sense a first
resonance with earlier peaks of emergence — individual ripening framed in the
solemnities of common faith.
61)
Egypt, Old Kingdom, Dynasty IV, c. 2700 B.C., reserve head, Kunsthistorisches Mus., Vienna
We look back to the sure serenities of Fourth Dynasty Egypt, searching through all
that has changed — that purity against the cross-currents and paradox of the West — for
signs of resemblance, dim as faces traced in clouds.
62)
62a)
Ionian of Magna Graecia, c. 460 B.C., Birth of Aphrodite, Ludovisi Throne,
Thermae, Rome; + V detail (or Va62, whole, and V62a, head)
1992 insert: Double: [A] Detail of 62; and [B] Botticelli, 1477, head of
Flora from the Spring, Uffizi, Florence
Or to the ecstasy of the first Classical Greek, about 460 B.C., the Birth of
Aphrodite from the foam, the archaic smile softened and humanized, carried over into a
rich fruiting of joy: like the early Renaissance blend of Botticelli, but in a world of how
unflawed an immediacy.
October 1992
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�C.G. Bell
63)
63a)
Symbolic History
Leonardo da Vinci, 1503-5, Mona Lisa, Louvre, Paris
Same, detail (video may take this detail from 63)
Place it for a moment, as Pater did, beside the most famous Western smile, of
1503-5 (also softened from our archaic, the angel smile of Gothic), and let Pater
emphasize how far we are from mere recurrence. How would those white Greek
goddesses, he says be troubled
by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed!
All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and
moulded there … the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the
mysticism of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the pagan world, the sins of the Borgias …
64)
Raphael, 1509-10, Leonardo as Plato, School of Athens, detail, Vatican
Music:
Archadelt 1539 and Ortiz 1553, viol setting of "O felici occhi,"
(Wenzinger) Archive 14075
Though Leonardo, here shown as Plato in Raphael's "School of Athens," must
mark as nearly as anyone the first conscious Western peak of a man of infinite possibility,
believing in himself and his power to comprehend the all. Yet how long that visionary
hope would continue. Shakespeare's Prospero is a hundred years later than this 1510
philosopher.
a65)
65)
65a)
65b)
School of Athens, central figures
School of Athens, whole
School of Athens, architecture of the hall
English, c. 1600, anonymous portrait of Shakespeare, National Portrait
Gallery, London
Even more perhaps than with the "Leonardo" head (center), the grandeur of a new
order permeates the whole. That Renaissance dream of a vaulted heroic space, in which
the utopian life of man would be conducted, stands as a compelling symbol for the
Baroque, the 18th century, down to the Age of Revolution. While the airy basilica sounds
with the music of noble chords, which flowed from Renaissance Italy over Europe —
here an Ortiz ricercare on Archadelt's "O fellici occhi."
October 1992
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How far after 1500 is the Periclean height to be plotted? If great tragedy is made
the clue — life affirmed in destruction itself — the focus shifts to 1600 England; or if the
reasoned justification of the ways of God to men, to the century after, of Milton and
Leibniz — though even in its formulation, the method of reason would precipitate
Pascalian doubt.
(end Ortiz)
a66)
66)
66a)
[Not Video] J.B. Neumann, 1743-8, lower stair, from the side, Schloß Brühl,
near Cologne
Same, from under the stair
1992 insert: Same, facing the stair
Music:
J.S. Bach, c 1720, Cello Suite #6, Allemande, close, (Casals)
Angel COLH 18
Precision escapes us. Yet one thing is clear: as long as the heroic baroque
maintained itself in Europe — and in Germany it kept up a rearguard action well into the
rococo of the 18th century — human life (however limited to the few and eroded by
convention) was still conceived as treading such vastly vaulted halls.
(close Allemande)
Music:
Bach, c. 1720, cont. Cello Suite #6, start Courante, (Casals) Angel
COLH 18
Yet if we search that palace of Clemens Augustus in Brühl for the portrait of its
builder-owner, seeking as it were an inhabitant for such luminous spaces,
67)
Georges Desmarées, c. 1750, Clemens August, Schloß Brühl, with frame
we find his wigged and robed exsufflicance already an object of Lilliputian ridicule. If
there was a Western summit, Bach must have fortified its verge. Under the thrust of 18th
century satire a new search was beginning, Revolutionary and Romantic.
(fade
Bach)
68)
Aelbert Cuyp, 1660-4, Horsemen and Herdsmen, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. (CGB '75); + 68a, same, detail (CGB '75)
Music:
October 1992
Rosenmüller, pub. 1670, Sonata #2, 2nd movement, close,
(S. Marlowe, etc.) Esoteric 517
Cycles
25
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
To gauge that introspective shift, set (with the tensile harmonics of Rosenmüller)
this 1660 landscape by Cuyp — a baroque celebration of Cartesian space, a space like
God's sensorium, irradiated by the divine attribute of light, a world where men live and
move in the ceremonies of will and cause —
(end
Rosenmüller)
69)
C.D. Friedrich, 1808-9, Monk by the Sea, Schloß Charlottenburg, Berlin;
+ V detail; +69a, same, detail of sky
Music:
Beethoven, 1825-7, A Minor Quartet, Opus 132, Adagio, close,
(Budapest) Columbia M5S 677
against the space of Goethean Sehnsucht, "Allein und abgetrent / Von aller Freude/ Seh'
ich ans Firmament / Nach jener Seite," which Friedrich visualized in 1808-9 — a solitary
monk by the misty sea, the phenomenal infinite become, as in Kant, as in Beethoven's
"Heilige Dankgesang," an alienating barrier, a veil of Maya, through which spirit reaches,
in loneliness, beyond space and time. For Noumena.
(end Beethoven)
70)
70a)
Gustave Courbet, 1845-6, Man with a Pipe (self), Museum, Montpellier
Same, detail (video has detail only)
1845, Courbet Self, and the now familiar features of romantic sickness strike
home: the sensuous Narcissus, hanging over the watery mirror in self-love and despair.
Nor is the job of drawing the cyclical parallels left to us. We have only to quote
Flaubert's famous letter of 1860:
I am turning to a kind of aesthetic mysticism. When there is no
encouragement to be derived from one's fellows, when the exterior
world is disgusting, enervating, corruptive and brutalizing, honest and
sensitive people are forced to seek somewhere within themselves a
more suitable place to live.
71)
Byzantine (Ephesus), 5th cent., Eutropius head, Kunshistorisches, Vienna
(Fifth century Byzantine)
If society continues on its present path, I believe we shall see the return
of such mystics as have existed in all the dark ages of the world. The
soul, unable to overflow, will be concentrated on itself. We shall see a
October 1992
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26
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
return of world-sickness, beliefs in the Last Day, expectations of a
Messiah …
72)
Roman, late 1st cent., Flavian youth, British Museum, London; + V details
(A Flavian youth, first century A.D.)
But all this enthusiasm will be ignorant of its own nature, and the age
being what it is, what will be its basis? Some will seek it in the flesh,
others in ancient religions, others in art; humanity, like the Jewish
tribes in the desert, will adore all kinds of idols.
73)
73a)
Van Gogh, 1889, Self with bandaged ear, Block Collection, Chicago
1992 insert: Van Gogh, 1889-90, Last Self Portrait, detail, Jeu de Paume,
Paris; video returns to 73, detail (V73b)
We were born a little too early; in twenty-five years the points of
intersection of these quests will provide subjects for masters. Then
prose (prose especially, the youngest form) will be able to play a
magnificent humanitarian symphony. Books like the Satyricon and the
Golden Ass will be written once more, containing on the psychical
plane all the lush excesses which those books have on the sensual.
"Twenty-five years" — to the fin de siecle of Rimbaud, or of this Van Gogh.
What began then was an art, a thought, a politics of rupture, fiercely breaking with earlier
canons and norms.
74)
Egypt, Dynasty XVIII, c. 1370 B.C., Ikhnaton, profile relief, Berlin
Perhaps only once in history has a cleavage gone so deep into the fabric of a
civilization. The Amarna sculptures of Ikhnaton with their twisted outcry, the cultivation
of some superhuman stigmata, point to such a crisis in the soul. Yet what was there
recorded must have been isolated and mild
75)
75a)
Picasso, 1937, Weeping Woman, Collection Penrose, London
Picasso, 1937, Weeping Woman, Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts
beside the awareness of total and global catastrophe which has racked the World War
West — Picasso, with Carillo
October 1992
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27
�C.G. Bell
Music:
Symbolic History
Carillo, c. 1925(?), from Cristobal Colon, 1/4, 1/8, etc. tones; old 78
Columbia 7357-M
As we have said, all this must be studied in detail hereafter. But in the midst of a
stress which has presented itself alternately (or even simultaneously) as an explosion into
Nietzschean light or into Spenglerian dark, it remains to ask: where are we? which way
will the anguish move?
(fade Carillo.)
October 1992
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�C.G. Bell
76)
76a)
a77)
77)
Symbolic History
Double: [A] Roman Christian, late 4th cent., Christ with Apostles, Catacomb
of Peter and Marcellinus, Rome, and [B] Roman, c. 50 A.D., Claudius as
Jupiter, Vatican
Salvador Dali, 1955, The Sacrament of the Last Supper, National Gallery,
Washington, D.C.
Double: [A] Hellenistic, 3rd cent. B.C., Alexandrian bronze, head of a boxer,
Collection Dutuit; and [B] Rome, 69 A.D., Emperor Vitellius, Uffizi,
Florence
Claudius as Jupiter (same as B of 76; video shows detail only)
Toward the frenzy of catacomb religion? Or to a world ordered in the blatancy of deified
power? Or are these, as with Rome and Christianity, always complementary motions?
The answer attends a prior question which the looseness of our parallels has left
unresolved: whether what we have been living through is the first seizure, as in Old
Kingdom Egypt or sophistic Greece (Rome being still to follow), or is the hollow agony
of that self-wounding empire? Yet how could it be the latter when so far no successor
state has asserted the discipline of world-rule? We have been following the West and
forgotten the world.
78)
78a)
V.I. Mukhina, Russian 1937, Worker and Woman, Exhibition Ground,
Moscow
Same, detail (video may take this detail from 78)
There was a republic in the 'twenties and 'thirties which gave a Polybian
interpretation of the cycle (or sickle) — one half of civilization falling while the other
rose.
Music:
Shostakovich, 1927, 2nd Symphony, close, (Moscow) MHS
824958Z
And many looked, in liking or dread, for a future Pax Slavica.
But in the more than Faustian frenzy of that time, that art, with the war which
followed and the coming of the atomic age, it began to appear that the whole cyclical
investigation had come too late, when cyclical possibility had ended — or had shifted its
entropic predictions to the globe.
(end
Shostakovich)
October 1992
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�C.G. Bell
79)
Symbolic History
Triple, but first singly: [A] Chinese ceramics, 1st-2nd cent., jar with dragon
shapes; [B] Sung 12th(?) cent., Celadon, Kuan ware; [C] c. 18th cent., under
Emperor Ch'ien Lung, porcelain objects
Any art or craft admits of the cyclical. In the shapes and glazes of Chinese
ceramics, we might trace a maturation, from the severe strength of a first or second
century jar with dragon whorls, through the serene perfection of Sung celadon, and so to
the eclectic novelties produced for export under the 18th-century emperor Ch'ien Lung.
To describe such a sequence, from pre-personal strength, through individuation, to
refined unrest, might seem to relate it to the great Western cycles of consciousness;
though the drama here is more of technique, than of soul's art-mirrored self-search.
80)
80a)
Chinese (Ming), 1506, Shen Chou, self at 80, Peking Museum; + V detail
Sojono, 1954, self, Museo de Arte Orientale, Rome; + V detail
Since the very individuations of the Orient — Taoist, Confuscian, Buddhist (this
1506 self-portrait of Shen Chou at the age of 80) — held the distance and reserve of
figures on a mystic scroll. No doubt each temporal thing carries the stamp of its period;
yet in some sense that old East was, as Hegel insisted, a-historical.
How fateful then — from Communist posters to this 1954 self-portrait by Sojono,
Indonesian trained in Rome — how fateful to trace the contagion of Western ego — the
whole world seeded with that conscious fever, come up from the Sphinx of Egypt,
through Promethean Greece and Incarnate Christianity, to the power and risk of today.
If this was already the hatching-ground of an earth-cycle, what had the cycles
taught but their own impermanence?
Sound: Waves and gulls
80+1) Again, ocean waves under rowed clouds [See 1]; or CA coast, (CGB '83)
80+1a) Again, California coast [See a1]
For where were the barbarians in whose clean force we could bathe? Would they
not also have ecological destruction and nuclear bombs? Or could we afford those
continuing Trojan Wars? It was make or bust for the world, and one could only hope
Gertrude Stein was right when she wrote: "We cannot bust. Thank you."
October 1992
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Symbolic History
Though how to avoid it has become no clearer than when, in a poem from the end
of the last war, I saw the whole race: (fade sound) at the cliff's cornice, leaning into
space.
Yet the breath-furrowed ocean of time remains indeterminate, the searching
paradox, for which no cyclical history can extrapolate tomorrow's Now.
October 1992
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31
�
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SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
3. Greece: The Tragic Myth and Deed
CHARLES G. BELL
ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
or
1260 CANYON ROAD
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501
December 1995
Last Revised June 1996
�Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
3. Greece: The Tragic Myth and Deed
1)
Attic, c. 460 B.C., Zeus or Poseidon, bronze, Nat. Mus., Athens; video pans
to V1a, head and shoulders, then to 1b, waist up (both CGB '77)
Our aim is to see the fourfold pattern of god-given power, superhuman act, fall,
and inner ripening, fulfilled in the myth and arts, the history and thought of Greece.
If Greek culture excels them all, it is because it risked most of all. Its assault on
darkness had no cover but the morale of its own phalanx. It countenanced none of the
priestly protections of Egypt or the theological double-talk that has buttressed the
Christian West. In act and mind these men ventured on freedom — a city, as Pericles
said, open to the world; they ventured in the open, man against fate. No wonder the fire
so quickly burned its containment. As Heraclitus said: "What are men but Gods dying,
what the Gods but deathless men?"
2)
Græco-Roman (Pompeii) 1st cent. A.D., Icarus, Mus. Nat. Naples
Their mythology in this anticipates their history. Nowhere are there more legends
of the fall of daring, and no people enacted it as nobly as they. For three Biblical
examples — Satan, Adam and Eve, the Tower of Babel — Greece affords dozens. Three
come to mind in the category of flight: Phaeton and the sun-chariot, Bellerophon thrown
from Pegasus, this Icarus, from Roman Pompeii, twilight of the culture Homer began.
2nd 1) Again, Zeus or Poseidon, detail, head and upper body (CGB '77)
June 1996
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Symbolic History
A pathos of history that the Periclean Zeus-Poseidon holds the silence from which
it rose from the sea. Since music, that art the Pythagorean brotherhood made a cosmic
measure, of which witnesses attest the ecstatic power, only survives, unaccompanied, in
fragments of Hellenistic mood:
2nd 2) Detail of 2: Fall of Icarus
Music:
Hellenistic, 1st cent. A.D., Epitaph of Seikilos, Decca 20156
this epitaph of Seikilos, like the Pompeian Icarus, reminder of a mythic fall.
(end music)
a3)
3)
Double: [A] Dorian, Magna Graecia, c. 430 B.C., Wounded Niobe, Thermae,
Rome; and [B] Pergamene, 210-200 B.C., Marsyas, Louvre, Paris
Greek, c. 550 B.C., The Naxos Sphinx, Museum, Delphi (CGB '77)
The fate of hybris: Semele embraced Zeus in his divinity and was consumed;
Niobe boasted against Leto and became a stone weeping for her destroyed children;
Marsyas was flayed for vying with Apollo, Laocoon was killed with his sons by the
serpents of Poseidon. Even the fate of Oedipus, as Nietzsche stresses, falls on one who
had answered the riddle of the Sphinx. And among a variety of Giants and Titans who
fought Zeus or tried to storm heaven, comes the greatest, Prometheus, who has given his
name to all such attempts — the thief of fire, bound to the rock, a vulture's prey.
a4)
Attic, c. 520 B.C., Athena vs. the Giant Enceladus, Hecatompedon Pediment,
Acropolis Museum, Athens (as of 1938)
4)
Same, double (from two CGB slides; as of 1977)
V4a) Same, detail of Athena (CGB '77)
4b) Same, detail of Enceladus (CGB '77)
These Greek accounts are not just more numerous than the Biblical; they are
different in kind. The Jews bet on Jehovah; the Greeks (520 B.C., Athena and the Giant
Enceladus) play both sides: defiant will against avenging power. In that tension tragedy
is born — of the greatness which enobles as it destroys. With Satan, only the name,
"Light-bearer," and the line "O Lucifer, brightest of the sons of morning, how are thou
fallen," give the scapegoat and serpent of evil a trace of ambivalence (Babylonian?).
Where the Greek archetype is Prometheus.
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
a5)
b5)
5)
Symbolic History
Attic, c. 570 B.C., Calf Bearer, detail, Acropolis Museum, Athens
Ionian, c. 477 B.C., Charioteer, detail, Museum, Delphi (CBG '77)
Same, head and shoulders, profile
What, then, of classical measure? Is this an art of excess? Nietzsche's Dionysian "joy
even in destroying"?
Surely, Greek daring arises in a cult of limitation, with all its tribal warnings
against hybris. Even the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus is nominally on the side of
Oceanos:
Know yourself and reform your ways to new ways…
You are not yet humble, still you do not yield
to your misfortunes.
The chorus, as always, speaks the mean:
It is a sweet thing to draw out
a long life in cheerful hopes,
and feed the spirit in the bright
benignity of happiness:
but I shiver when I see you
wasted with ten thousand pains,
all because you did not tremble
at the name of Zeus; your mind
was yours, not his, and at its bidding
you regarded mortal men
too high, Prometheus.
(Grene)
6)
6a)
Greek, c. 470-56 B.C., Falling Lapith, from Zeus Temple, Olympia
Attic (Phidias?), 447-32 B.C., Pediment fragment from the Parthenon, torso,
Acropolis Museum, Athens (CGB '77)
But before the play ends, both chorus and audience join in the pathos of the halfgod's cry:
Bright light of the sky, and you, with swift
Wings, winds: springs of rivers; numberless
Laughter of the waves of ocean; earth, mother
Of all, and all-seeing eye of the sun —
Look and behold, what I from the Gods
Here suffer, I, who am born of the Gods. (CGB)
June 1996
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Symbolic History
ω διος αιθηρ και ταχυπτεροι πνοαι,
ποταµων τε πηγαι, ποντιων τε κυµατων
ανηριθµον γελασµα, παµµητορ τε γη,
και τον πανοπτην κυκλον ηλιου καλω
ιδεσθε µ' οια προς θεων πασχω θεος.
7)
Greek, c. 470-56 B.C., Head of a Seer (profile), from the East Pediment of the
Zeus Temple (now in the Museum), Olympia
In that tragic involvement lies what Hegel called the deepest intuition of the
human mind, that from suffering and destruction comes spirit: Oedipus as saving seer;
Prometheus Unbound; from the burning body of Semele, Dionysus, god of the vine and
tragic art, in the end of immortality.
8)
8a)
Greek, c. 470 B.C., Zeus and Ganymede, terra cotta, Museum, Olympia
Same, detail (upper half)
There is a profound trust here in vital seizure, human or divine — as in this rape
of Ganymede. So in the last chorus of Antigone, Dionysus, "Son of the Thunderer, born
of Iachos, God of many names," is invoked for the cleansing of Thebes, though the
purification that immediately falls is the death of Antigone, of Haimon, and Creon's
queen: "Come with clement feet down the long slopes… Thou Son of God, blaze for us."
A chorus of breathing fire:
ω πυρ πνειοντων χοραγ αστρων,
to the manic Lord:
τον ταµιαν Ιακχον.
9)
Greek plate, c. 490 B.C., Brygos painter, mænad, Munich
Even Plato, unwilling celebrant of the irrational, praises, in the Phaedrus,
madnesses which are divine gifts:
Again, where plagues and mightiest woes have bred in certain families,
owing to some ancient blood-guiltiness, there madness has entered
with holy prayers and rites, and by inspired utterances found a way of
deliverance for those who are in need…
June 1996
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Symbolic History
Thus the Bacchae, sacred destroyers, an ultimate mystery for Euripides.
10)
10a)
Græco-Roman, 2nd cent. A.D., Hercules leads Alcestis from Hades, Celeia
Museum, Yugoslavia
Double: [A] Christian, end of 3rd cent., Adam and Eve, Catacombs of SS
Peter and Marcellinus, Rome; and [B] later 3rd cent., marble: Jonah from the
Whale, Museum of Art, Cleveland
Music:
Mesomedes of Crete, c. 130 A.D.(?), Hymn to the Sun, old Decca
20156 (A)
And it is in the language and image of those mysteries (this 2nd-century A.D.
Alcestis harrowed from the dead by Hercules, as no doubt the chant of the Synagogue
absorbing the classical hymn, as here to the Sun by Mesomedes, Hadrian's favorite,
rounded toward Gregorian) that the Bible tragically regenerated itself, completing the Old
Adam with the New, the tree of Redemption from the tree of the Fall, Moses lifting the
snake on the cross to heal the sickly Hebrews, Jonah jubilant from the death and hell
whale. Had not Tacitus weirdly recorded, of the year 34 A.D., how the phoenix had been
born of its ashes in the east?
(fade Mesomedes)
11)
Attic, 447-32 B.C., Parthenon from Philopappos Hill, Athens (CGB '77)
But before the regenerative daring, which appears at the beginning of Greek culture and
ripens like a natural fruit, could mediate for the New Testament, it had to run its Hellenic
course. There we follow it, in art and history — the tragic myth completed by the tragic
deed. As Plato says in the Laws, "We will not need tragedy in our city, because we live
in tragedy."
Va12 or b12) - b12) used
Mycenae, c. 1500 B.C., Palace ruins, two views (CGB '77)
12) Cretan, c. 1450-1400 B.C., Throne Room, Palace, Knossos
Telemachus is amazed at the palace of Menelaus:
See what a blaze of polished copper and gold and electrum and silver
and ivory goes through this echoing hall. Surely the mansions of
Olympian Zeus must be like this, one great glory within…
(Odyssey, tr. T.E. Shaw, Book IV)
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The fateful sequence began before Homer with the fruiting of Greek myth out of
the Cretan and Mycenean fall. It is that past, going back even to Knossos and the East,
that is treasured in epic memory. In the Odyssey the bards already sing of Ilium.
a13)
Cretan or Mycenean, c. 1500 B.C., from the Vaphio Gold Bull Beakers, Nat.
Mus., Athens: the Tame Bull cup;
13 or V13)
Both cups, of Bulls Tame and Wild
13a) Details, Tame and Wild, from the same
Menelaus' gift — "a wrought mixing bowl of solid silver doubled with gold about
the rim. Work of Hephaestus" — or the cup of wrought gold Alcinous gives Odysseus
(Book VIII), might have been found in the Vaphio tombs (Sparta) with the golden
Beakers of Bulls, Tame and Wild, work of Hephaestus indeed. These were also objects
of trade or pillage, probably Minoan, about 1500 B.C. But for Homer, fine things come
from Syria. The King of Sidon, says Menelaus, gave it to him. The Dorian invasion has
erased the possibility of such workmanship in Greece.
14)
Cretan, c. 1300 B.C., Bull sacrifice from Hagia Triada Sarcophagus,
Heraklion, Crete
We can never know what details from the Homeric poems are storied antebellum
splendors. Ritualistic dependence on the gods seems essential for tribal Achaians of a
time of troubles — how the Iliad from beginning to end reeks with the smoke of
sacrificial hecatombs. But for an illustration, we must go to Crete from the time of the
Trojan War itself (Hagia Triada), observing, however, that the male-oriented Greek
would take over what is here the priestess' role.
15 )
15a)
Cretan, c. 1600 B.C. (or a forgery?), Ivory Snake Goddess, Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston: whole
Same: detail from the hips up
Curious that the names of the goddesses Athena and Hera (called, as if she were
ivory, "of the white arms"), like the wonderful Greek word for the sea, "thalassa," are not
Greek at all, nor Indo-European. Hera's wedding to Zeus must fable some blending;
Athena's owl and Apollo's snake suggest a mystery root beneath the Olympian; and the
first Greek art ties to this Cretan past, to which Homer seems to richly near.
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Music:
Symbolic History
Schubert, 1824-26, String Quartet No. 14 in D Minor, Death and
the Maiden, near close, 2nd movement, West L. 5052
(And if the Boston ivory must prove a marvelous fake, is it not — as Alexandrian editors
smoothed Homer to their taste — that we later romantics hail our own Schubertian
refinements as pre-Homeric Greek?)
a16)
b16)
16)
Reconstruction of 13th cent. B.C., Nestor's Throne Room, Pylos
Egypt, Dynasty XVIII, c. 1360 B.C., Nefertiti, Museum, Cairo
Double: details of [A] Thera, 16th cent. B.C., full-breasted woman, fresco;
and [B] Greek Geometric, c. 700 B.C., Warrior, bronze: both, National Museum, Athens (detail of Cycles, 3rd 31)
For there was a refinement to which Homer was heir — the frescoed palaces of
Pylos, Tiryns, Thera. Could the poet's own time have supplied him with that Helen who
in the Odyssey comes from "her high-coffered, incense-laden room" and, after alluding to
her Trojan vagary, mixes in the wine a pleasure-drug of subtle potency which she had
from Egypt? Yet for Homer, all that waned luxury is caught up in another view of life,
another bareness and another drive.
17)
17a)
Attic Geometric, c. 740 B.C., Krater from Dipylon Gate, National Museum,
Athens (CGB '77)
Same, detail of Funeral Procession (CGB '77)
What is in fact contemporary with Homer focuses the question: which age does
he reflect? Sunset or dawn? Dawn came earlier to his Asian Miletus than to mainland
Greece. Against the human fullness of the Iliad, the Attic funeral vases of 800 B.C. seem
strangely abstract. Yet the geometric patterns shared with the Hallstatt culture of the
Danube may remind us of the primitive in Homer, those repeated epithets, "swift-footed
Achilles" and the like — all the great formalities of saga-craft which led Coleridge to say:
"There is no personality at all in Homeric poetry," and, "Of course there was a Homer,
and twenty besides."
18)
18a)
Sardinian, 8th-6th cent. B.C., bronze chief, Cagliari; + V detail
Argive or Etruscan, early 7th cent. B.C., Krater, Naval Battle, Conservatori,
Rome
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For between Helen and her bard had come the Iron Age of stern reversion. This
8th century Sardinian god-chief might step from any Pelasgian island to voice what
Nietzsche called the "satyr wisdom":
Condemned to sorrows and to toil we live,
Rest to our labors death alone can give.
Hesiod, from barren Attica. Or the proverb echoed by Theognis and Herodotus and
Sophocles: "Best of all things not to be born… next best to pass as soon as possible the
gates of Hades." That pessimistic ground sounds under Olympian Homer:
…We to whom Zeus
Has assigned suffering from youth to old age,
Suffering in grievous wars, till we perish to the last man.
(Iliad, XIV, 85-7, tr. McCarthy, from Weil's French, )
Since among all creatures that breathe on earth and crawl on it,
There is not anywhere a thing more dismal than man is.
(Iliad, Lattimore, XVII, 446-7)
19)
19a)
Greek, c. 750 B.C., small bronze warrior, National Museum, Athens
Athenian jar, mid-7th cent. B.C., Polyphemus blinded by Odysseus, Eleusis
Museum, Greece
Something lifts the Greeks from that ground, sends them, even as they chant its
burden, smiling into battle over the wine-dark sea. The heroes to be broken by the gods
in that "Poem of Force" fight the gods themselves. Apollo cries in the voice of alarm:
…give back, son of Tydeus, and strive no longer
to make yourself like the gods in mind, since never the same is
the breed of gods, who are immortal, and men who walk groundling.
(Iliad, Lattimore, V, 440-2)
What makes Homer a revelation for Greece is less the old luxury than the new
force. It is the tremendous knotting of the primitive paradox by which pessimism and
resignation are swept forward in a rush of vital faith. Like a magnet or electric charge,
that flexed field of spirit carries the incalculable energies of the Greek way.
20)
20a)
Greek Geometric, c. 725 B.C., Oinochoe, Shipwreck, Ant. Sam., Munich
Chalcidian (Inscription Painter), c. 540 B.C., Greeks vs. Trojans, National
Museum, Melbourne
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20b)
Symbolic History
Gift of Naxos to Delos, 7th cent. B.C., Terrace of Lions (CGB '77)
It is the gift of this vitality that terrors are seized and affirmed as fierce delights.
An 8th-century shipwreck against the battle-deaths of the Iliad:
Idomeneus stabbed Erymas in the mouth with the pitiless
bronze, so that the brazen spearhead smashed its way clean through
below the brain in an upward stroke, and the white bones splintered,
and the teeth were shaken out with the stroke and both eyes filled up
with blood, and gaping he blew a spray of blood through the nostrils
and through his mouth, and death in a dark mist closed in about him.
(Iliad, Lattimore, XVI, 245-50)
Homer makes us like Zeus:
…rejoicing in the pride of his strength…
looking out over the city of Troy and the ships of the Achaians,
watching the flash of bronze, and men killing and men killed.
But the earliest Greek art has little to match Homer's richest descriptions:
As when in the sky the stars about the moon's shining
are seen in all their glory, when the air has fallen to stillness
21)
From Hagia Triada, Crete, c. 1500 B.C., Harvest Vase, Herakleion
and all the high places of the hills are clear and the shoulders outjutting,
and the deep ravines, as endless bright air spills from heaven
and all the stars are seen, to make glad the heart of the shepherd;
such in their number blazed the watchfires the Trojans were burning
there in the plain… a thousand fires, and beside each
one sat fifty men in the flare of the blazing firelight.
(Iliad, Lattimore, VIII, 555-63)
For anything of comparable evocation we have gone back, centuries before the Trojan
War, to that Cretan miracle of "The Harvest Vase."
Va22)
22)
22a)
22b)
June 1996
Corinthian, c. 650 B.C., Chigi Vase, Villa Giulia, Rome
Same, detail of horsemen and hunt
Attic, c. 570 B.C., "François Vase," Mus. of Archeology, Florence
Rhodian, later 2nd cent. B.C., The Laocoon, Vatican, Rome (CGB '86)
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But could we not have gone forward? Into the 7th century, when Corinth brings
the Minoan to a Greek rebirth — the Homeric wonder of beauty and elan:
And standing each beside his chariot, champing white barley
and oats, the horses waited for the dawn to mount to her high places.
(Iliad, Lattimore, VIII, 564-5)
For Homer's art relates three ways: to the Aegean past, the Geometric present, the
Archaic and Classical future.
We can never know how far the softer harmonies of the eighth century poem
reflect its sixth century Panathenean shaping from the oral body of epic song; thus Cicero:
"Peisistratus is said to have arranged in their present order the books of Homer, until then
in confusion" — not to mention the second century redaction by which Aristarchus
produced the final Homeric canon.
23)
23a)
23b)
Attic vase, end of 7th cent. B.C., Hercules and Nessus, Nat. Mus., Athens
Rhodian plate, c. 600 B.C., Menelaus and Hector fight over the body of
Euphorbus, British Museum, London
Corinthian, c. 640-30 B.C., Chigi Vase, top detail: Battle of hoplites, Villa
Giulia, Rome
As the seventh century advances, vase scenes (our clue to lost painting) coin the
epic and tragic myths — here Alcides killing Nessus, Alcides himself to die by the curse
of the centaur's blood — one of those fatal justices to be praised, an Iliad blending of
terror and delight:
…and the iron tumult
went up into the brazen sky through the barren bright air
(Iliad, Lattimore, XVII, 424-5) —
Achilles with his choice of life or fame, where the very word for excellence, αρετη,
points to Ares, War:
And now battle became sweeter to them than to go back
in their hollow ships to the beloved land of their fathers.
Lattimore, II, 453-4 and XI, 13-14)
(Iliad,
τοισι δ' αφαρ πολεµος γλυκιων γενετ', ηε νεεσθαι
εν νηυσι γλαφυρησι φιλην ες πατριδα γαιαν.
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24)
Symbolic History
Attic, c. 600 B.C., kouros, Metropolitan Museum, NYC (CGB '79); + V detail
In Homer, the antinomies stand clean and immediate. There is no rationale to
vindicate the Gods or to validate suffering: no ripe Sopohoclean "No cause for tears." In
the paradox of energy, the gods vindicate themselves. This youth, about 600 B.C. — type
of the Archaic Apollo, python-slayer, Marsyas-flayer, god of light and justice and of the
darts of pestilence, the sharp smile not of the lips only but of the whole sinewed and
triangularly jointed form, shoulders, belly, knees — has the unaccountability of myth —
aflame, like his sister when she caught Peleus' son by the hair; he turned about and
straightway knew Pallas Athene and the terrible eyes shining." (Iliad, I, 197-200)
a25)
25)
25a)
25b)
Corinthian, 6th cent. B.C., Temple of Apollo over fields, Corinth
Same, near, facing the corner (CGB '77)
Same, less near, corner from within, against mountains (CGB '77)
Hera-Temple, Olympia, c. 600 B.C. (oldest preserved) (CGB '77)
Though already in Homer fierce vitality receives classical design, as in the twogabled temple, perfected by 600 B.C. — at Corinth, or among the groves of Olympia. So
in the blind bard Herodotus placed four centuries before his own time, the force that built
the city state, that sowed the Mediterranean with colonies, and in Thales and
Anaximander raised the "Why" of natual philosophy, seeks its own harmony — between
tragic antinomies, the temple of justification.
Such in the Iliad is the resonance of pathos that arches from the parting of Hector
and Andromache:
For I know this thing well in my heart, and my mind knows it:
there will come a day when sacred Ilion shall perish…
(Iliad, Lattimore, VI, 447-8)
to Priam's begging Hector's body of Achilles:
I have gone through what no other mortal on earth has gone through;
I put my lips to the hands of the man who has killed my children.
(Iliad, Lattimore, XXIV, 505-6)
Which Achilles grants in companionable sorrow:
Such is the way the gods spun life for unfortunate mortals… (525)
But bear up, old man, nor mourn endlessly in your heart… (549)
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It is said, old man, you too were happy once (543) —
Και σε, γερον, το πριν µεν ακουοµεν ολβιον ειναι.
Since already, in the death of his friend and foreknowledge of his own fate, Achilles has
risen to the kind of insight which would become the catharsis of Attic drama: "Why I
wish that strife would vanish away from among gods and mortals." (XVIII, 104-5)
a26)
26)
26a)
Polymedes of Argos, c. 590 B.C., from Cleobis and Biton, Delphi, Museum:
Cleobis(?)
Same, the pair; + V detail
Same, Cleobis(?), detail (all, CGB '77)
The Greek myth, in all its vibrance of paradox, one could call the gift of the gods;
but its human containment and use becomes the Promethean work of man. Both polis
and tragedy ask moral reconstruction of the divine. Solon: "The works of hybris do not
endure for man." By "the will of the blessed immortals… justice is certain to come in
time." That warning he applied to the rich of sixth century Athens, channeling private
daring into a proud republic of freedom under law. And when asked by Croesus who was
happiest, he mentioned the Cleobis and Biton still seen at Delphi, who pulled their
mother in a chariot to the shrine in Argos, and received the gift of death in their prime of
youth and filial service.
How could Solon foresee that the communal deflection of heroic energy might
make the city state itself the new Prometheus?
a27) Attic, c. 570 B.C., Triton, Pediment of Hecatompedon, Acropolis Museum,
Athens
27) Same, nearer, facing the heads (CGB '77)
The incorporation of the ancient curse would lead in drama to the Eumenides and
Oedipus Colonus. So the snake, brute and terror figures of mythology are enshrined in
the Olympian Acropolis. Socratic reason has not yet excluded them. Nor in thought the
shaping daemon of contradiction. Pythagoras:
Void… enters into the heaven itself from the infinite air, as though the
heavens were breathing; and this void defines the natures of things…
In Heraclitus most of all the sphinx-triton of the fire-sea is smiling:
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The way up and the way down is the same… In the same rivers you
can and cannot step… All things take place by strife… Changing, the
all finds rest —
µεταβαλλον αναπαυεται.
28)
Cretan, c. 1600 B.C., Smaller Snake Goddess, Knossos Museum (light against
dark)
28a) Same, detail (light background)
But that grappling with the dark centers in tragedy. The dire enigma of the divine,
come down from the Snake Goddesses of Crete and the East, the terrible tales of heroes
hounded by arbitrary fates, have now to be tamed, as Apollo takes over "the hallowed
huge cave" (Choepheroe) of the Python. It is under that Apollo that Orestes becomes a
snake to cleanse his house: Clytaemnestra "dreamed she gave birth to a snake… gave it
her breast to suck… the creature drew in blood along with the milk." Orestes: "I turn
snake to kill her."
29)
Attic, late 8th cent. B.C., terra cotta Snake Goddess or Fury, found in the
Agora
From eighth century Athens comes this terra cotta Snake Goddess turned into a
Fury: "Women like gorgons… wreathed in a tangle of snakes." The Libation Bearers
invoke them in Aeschylus:
The death act calls out on Fury
To bring out of those who were slain before
new ruin on ruin accomplished.
(Choephoroe, 402 ff.)
a30)
30)
31)
Greek, c. 590 B.C., Gorgon Pediment, Corfu; detail: Gorgon's head
Same, center and right, Gorgon, with the hero, Chrysaor
Same, pediment cropped: Gorgon, Chrysaor and panthers
The task is, as in the sixth century pediment of the Artemis temple at Corfu, how
these Gorgon powers of night and the underworld ("we have chosen overthrow of houses,
where the Battlegod grown within strikes near and dear") are to be instituted in the state:
Let the old murder in the house breed no more.
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Symbolic History
(Choephoroe, 805)
It is from the old divine order to the new — under Promethean reconciliation —
as this hero Chrysaor springs from the Gorgon's blood. So Athena wins the Furies to their
own sacred cave:
I promise you a place of your own, deep hidden under ground… where
you shall sit on shining chairs… to accept devotions offered by your
citizens…
(Eumenides, 804 ff.)
We have begun to quote Aeschylus with the art of the centuries before him.
a32)
32)
32a)
Attic, c. 550 B.C., Korê wearing the Peplos #679, Acropolis Museum, Athens
Attic, c. 520 B.C., Korê #670, detail, Acropolis Museum, Athens
Attic, c. 500 B.C., Korê #674, detail, Acropolis Museum, Athens
Meanwhile, the marvelously preserved series of Athenian Korai shows in the glory of
marble the softening and humanizing of myth. Before 500 B.C. — the lyric sharpness of
Sappho:
∆εδυκε µεν α σελαννα
και Πληιαδες, µεσαι δε
νυκτες, παρα δ' ερχετ' ωρα,
εγω δε µονα κατευδω.
(The moon has set and the Pleiades; it is the middle of the night; time
passes, and I lie alone.) —
flows like an oriental hybris, into Pindar's matured celebration of pan-hellenic triumph.
a33)
Vb33)
33)
33a)
Double: [A] Archer, Darius I, 532-486, Frieze, Louvre, Paris; and [B] Attic (Kritios?), c. 485 B.C., Youth, Acropolis Museum (details)
Attic, c. 480 B.C., Kouros, Acropolis Museum, Athens (CGB '77) not dig.
Attic (Kritios?), c. 485 B.C., Youth, Acropolis Museum (CGB '77)
Double: as in a33, but three Archers and the whole Kritios
For triumph intervenes. 480 B.C.: after Xerxes had lashed the Hellespont, rebuilt
his bridge and crossed with his hundreds of thousands — when the Persian spy, looking
down on the pass of Thermopylae, saw the Spartan youth combing their long hair, and
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Symbolic History
foretold a pushover — he did not know that, for the time at least, there was power in that
beauty, an order of reason in that freedom. Simonides:
Stranger, bear this message to the Spartans:
We lie here, to their bidding, self-persuaded. (CGB)
Ω ξειν αγγελλειν Λακεδαιµονιοις οτι τηδε
κειµεθα, τοις κεινων ρηµασι πειθοµενοι.
And perhaps this Ephebe attributed to Kritios could have told a profound observer
that the world-empire of Persia stood no more chance than the Chthonic gods against
Olympian light.
34)
Greek, Aegina, c. 490 B.C., Head of Athena from the Temple of Aphaia, Glyptotheque, Munich
Herodotus' proud account is of the victory of an ideal: "Free they are, O King, yet
not wholly free; for law is their master… What their law bids them, that they do." For the
tragic stage, Aeschylus viewed the event from Susa, 1200 miles away. Strange, to make
the chorus of Persian calamity a praise of Greece: "Hellas own no mortal master, and her
sons are ever free."
35
35a)
Same, Archer, Glyptotheque, Munich
Same, detail
Or the narrated catastrophe of Salamis (where Aeschylus fought), when the Athenian
ships at dawn attacked the Persians in the straits, reverse itself in the "proud paean of
Hellenic might."
No play more bristles with warnings against hybris. But what of Greek hybris?
Athens had just converted the Delian League into an empire, secured the Bosphorus for
the import of grain and export of wine and oil, and was embarked against Egypt, oldest
kingdom of the world. Does Aeschylus blame the vaunt in which he shares — the civic
overweening which would run its course
36)
Attic, 460-50 B.C., bronze Zeus or Poseidon, detail, head and shoulders,
National Museum, Athens (CGB '77)
through the life and death of Pericles, to shipwreck on Sicily?
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Or was it more than one could expect of a people, to see that the achievement of
measure and clarity and reason, of joyfully ordered freedom, of drama and philosophy, of
civilization, was itself the boast of Prometheus: "I caused mortals to cease fearing
doom… I placed them in blind hopes… besides this, I gave them fire" — their greatness
and their flaw?
37)
Greek, 470-456 B.C., West Pediment of the Zeus Temple (cropped); + V detail
The Orestes trilogy is from the same years as the Zeus Temple in Olympia. In the
west pediment, centered in Apollo, the attempted bride-rape by the drunken centaurs,
against the Lapith defense aided by Theseus, sets brute nature and barbarism against the
Hellenic and rational. Yet once violence is loosed, the pediment becomes such a net of
destruction as weaves through the Agamemnon and Choephoroe: (Lattimore)
The struggling masses… knees grinding in dust,
the end will be destiny… (Agamemnon, 64 ff.)
a38)
38)
Same, West Pediment, Old Lapith Woman
Same, East Pediment, River God Alpheios or Kladeos
Since the old Lapith women who held the corners, a lamenting chorus to the
tragedy, have been renewed at a later date, we draw from the other pediment this river
god who might almost be the watchman "crouched like a dog on the roof of the Atreidae,"
under the destiny of the wheeling stars, looking for the beacon that should herald joy:
Now let there be redemption from distress,
the flare burning from the blackness in good augury.
(Agamemnon, 19-20)
Though what it heralds is the death of Agamemnon.
39)
Same, West Pediment, broken centaur head; following Va39, that head, with
surrounding fragments (Va39, not dig.)
The habitual warning ignored — "Let no lust seize on these men to violate what
they must not" (Agamemnon, 341-2) — as we move inward: "The curse… wrings
atonement from those high hearts that drive to evil" (Agamemnon, 374 ff.). And where is
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Symbolic History
the outlet from this "spider's web," this "web of death" — "fenced in these fatal nets,"
"the nets of ruin fence-high beyond overleaping." (Agamemnon, 1048, 1375, 1492)
40)
Same, left: Girl, and Centaur stabbed by Lapith; + V detail (dig. det. first)
Good and bad are caught in the same destiny: "Who shall claim he was born clear
of the dark angel?" (Agamemnon, 1341-2) "I struck him twice. In two great cries of
agony/ he buckled at the knees and fell." (Agamemnon, 1384-5) And the chorus: "The
bitter glory of a doom that shall never be done with; and all through Zeus… what here is
without God's blessing?"
41)
Same, Kneeling girl caught by the hair; video uses Va41 and V41a
Though "grace comes somehow violent" (Agamemnon, 183): Cassandra — "she
who swanlike cried aloud her lyric mortal lamentation out": "Alas for the wretchedness
of my ill-starred life… pain flooding the song of sorrow." (Agamemnon, 1444-5 and
1136-7)
a42)
42)
Same, right: Biting group
Same, right: Biting group, another view
Violence in the pediment climaxes in the biting group to the right, the boy-murder
to the left. And in Aeschylus: "A house… God hates… the shambles for men's butchery,
the dripping floor." (Agamemnon, 1090-92) "The drops come thicker, still fate grinds on
yet more stones the blade for more acts of terror." (Agamemnon, 1534-6) "The ghastly
food whose curse works now before your eyes." (Agamemnon, 1598) "Who shall tear
the curse from their blood? The seed is stiffened to ruin." (Agamemnon, 1565-6)
43)
V43a)
Same, left: Centaur nearest to Apollo, head
Same, left: Centaur nearest to Apollo, body
Yet as we move toward center, the figures and faces of struggle and revenge take
on choral dignity: "Yet from such as this the God, if he will, can work out strains that are
fairer" (Choephoroe, 340-1), — even the centaurs, as if they too were justified: "War
strength shall collide with war strength, right with right" (Choephoroe, 461); "the cure"
begins to show "through the fierce wreck and bloodshed." (Choephoroe, 475)
44)
Same, right: Perithoos' Bride Deiadameia, and Centaur Euritian
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In that middle play (The Libation Bearers), Orestes and Electra — "Hear me
Earth, hear me, grandeurs of Darkness" (Choephoroe, 399) — assume the beast to serve
the oracle: "For we are bloody like the wolf" (Apollo also called Lycian, the wolf-god)
"and savage born from the savage mother" (Choephoroe, 421-2)
45)
Same, Deiadameia, detail, head and shoulders
The ultimate outrage, the mother-murder, becomes for the chorus "temperate
things done in the house" (Choephoroe, 786): "with a great cry of Father, when she cries
Child, go on through with the innocent murder." (Choephoroe, 828-30)
46) Same, Apollo, with Centaur to his right;
V46) Same, Apollo, detail only (dig. omits)
Already we are under another sway — though for Orestes pain must flower: "I
grieve for the thing done, the death, and all our race… My victory is soiled and has no
pride." (Choephoroe, 1016-7) As the Furies come: "On this house… the third storm has
broken… Where shall the fury of fate be stilled to sleep, be done with?" (Choephoroe,
1065-67)
47)
Same, Apollo, head and shoulders
Only the divine can rule the Furies: "Do good, receive good, and be honored as
the good are honored." (Eumenides, 868-9) "Put to sleep the bitter strength in the black
wave/ and live with me and share my pride of worship." (Eumenides, 832-3) Thus in the
temple, as in the trilogy: "The power that holds the sky's majesty wins our veneration."
(Choephoroe, 960)
48)
48a)
Still from the temple of Zeus, Olympia, c. 460 B.C., Metope: Athena,
Heracles, and Atlas, Olympia Museum
Same, detail
So far the Promethean daring of Athens and Greece seems to have operated within
the containment of tradition and under the guidance of a god — as Athena here helps
Hercules hold up the sky, while Atlas brings the apples of the Hesperides.
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Even Empedocles, though Arnold thought he began "the dialogue of the mind
with itself," seems in his fragments still carried on the sacred wave:
Twofold is the coming into being, twofold the passing away of
perishable things: for combining both begets and destroys, and what
was combined is itself scattered, being now united by Love into one,
now each borne apart by the hatred engendered of Strife…
49)
Myron, c. 450 B.C. (Roman copy): Discobolus, Thermae Museum, Rome
But when thought in Protagoras had made "man the measure of all things," and in
Democritus had left only atoms and the void; when Gorgias turned Sophism into doubt:
"the criterion of truth is destroyed; there is no criterion, either of Being, or of the
possibility of its being known or communicated to others" — the method of Greek
inquiry (as in Aristophanes' Clouds) has undercut the divine sanctions on which the laws
of the state and their veneration rested.
a50)
50)
Parthenon, 447-32, B.C., from the Propylaean, Athens (CGB '77)
Same, Southwest corner with Metope, Athens (CGB '77)
When does Sophistic question strike at the confidence of Aeschylus and Olympia?
I remember a lecture by Blanckenhagen on the Parthenon, supreme achievement of
Pericles and Phidias, finished a few years before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War.
He treated it, as some do Oedipus, as a jibe at cruel gods.
The metopes, seen here at the top, were of battle on all sides:
51)
Same, Metope 1, Lapith and Centaur, Athens
Lapiths against Amazons, Trojans against Greeks, giants against gods. After the
pediment of Olympia, these conflicts seem as stripped as the brunt of Democritus' atoms.
1st 52) Same, East Pediment, south side: Helios' Horses, Dionysus, Demeter, Korê,
Iris; British Museum, London (CGB '77)
The great East Pediment, with its richly robed figures (where the horse-drawn
chariot of Selene sinks to the north, and that of Apollo rises to the south) must present the
central theme of Aeschylus, the coming of the new order of Athena and Apollo. Is it, as
in Aeschylus, a theodicy?
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1st 53) Same, part of the Frieze seen between columns, Athens
The frieze, which runs around the whole temple under the porch of columns,
shows the preparations for the pan-Athenian procession, with the procession itself to the
sacrifice. It ends on the East
a54)
54)
54a)
Same, East Frieze, Hera and Zeus, British Museum (CGB '77)
Same Frieze, Sacred Peplos, Athena and Hephaestos (CGB '77)
Second century copy of Phidias, 447-438 B.C., gold and ivory Parthenon
Athena, National Museum, Athens
with the gods, who talk among themselves, unconcerned, in the detachment Protagoras
had confessed of them, and been banished by the Athenians, though a friend of Pericles:
As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or
that they do not exist. For many are the obstacles that impede knowledge, both the obscurity of the question and the shortness of human
life…
Especially Athena (she had no altar in the Parthenon) turns her back to the offering.
The gold and ivory Athena from the sanctuary is known only in tawdry copies, but
she was shown in her aspect of terror — on her shield the battle with the Amazons, on her
shoes with the Centaurs, while on the pedestal the story of Pandora replaced the other
battles — the cruelty of the gods in preparing evil for man.
2nd 53)
Metope from the Parthenon, Centaur and Lapith, British Museum, London (CGB '77)
Is the usual view of the temple merely the vulgar view? Was the secret message
of Pericles and Phidias the indifference of the gods and the futility of sacrifice? (So far,
Blanckenhagen, as sophistic advocate.)
a2nd 52) Parthenon, West front, looking north, Athens (CGB '77)
2nd 52) Same, East Pediment: Leto, Diane, Aphrodite, British Museum, London
(CGB '77)
2nd 52a) Same, closer detail (CGB '77)
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Of whom the work asks the question: if in futility, why so harmonious, so
rapturous a celebration? We have forgotten the paradox of tragedy itself. Hesiod told the
story of Pandora as a case of divine malice — Hesiod, from the Greek age of belief: "I
will give men an evil thing, in which they may… embrace their own destruction." The
force of irresponsible gods, who have still to be worshipped, is the dark wisdom of ritual.
Of course, as reason penetrates that matter, there will come a breaking point when
the Gordian knot of stark faith cleaves and one is left with
3rd 53)Same, North Frieze, detail: youth leading a horse
Sophoclean vindication: "His destiny has found a perfect end"; or Euripidean doubt:
"The gods intended nothing but my woes and hate to Troy." Both stand, with the
Parthenon, at a peak of perfection; a kind of pathos and backward looking attends any
such cadence, where instinctive action melts into the ripeness of thought.
For 2nd 54) Same, Robed horseman, looking back, British Museum (CGB '77)
On such a knife edge of tragic and sceptical possibility, it is not easy to say which
has been chosen. Not even the contrast of Sophocles and Euripides is as clear as stylehistory makes it. But what speaks in the Parthenon is less hidden message than manifest
art. And in that, as in Oedipus Rex and Coloneus, the sacred has been made human;
55)
55a)
Same, East Pediment, Dionysus, British Museum, London (CGB '77);
+ V detail
Same, East Pediment, Horse of Selene, British Museum, London (CGB '77)
in the beauty of ritual, the paradox of God and man rises to a Dionysiac crest.
With the Peloponnesian War, the sequence of aspiration, hybris, fate, and ruin
spreads from myth and drama into history. No author has seen the tragedy he lived
through with such devastating clarity as Thucydides. In Pericles' Funeral Oration, from
the first year of the war, we take the wings of Man in his Pride:
We are the school of Hellas… the wonder of present and future shall
be ours… we have forced sea and land to be the highway of our
daring… realize the power of Athens, feed your eyes upon her, till love
of her fills your hearts; and when all this greatness shall break upon
you… remember… honor in action…
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56)
56a)
Symbolic History
Double: Riace Bronzes, c. 440 B.C.: [A] Younger, side; [B] Older, back;
Reggio Calabria Mus.; (For Riace slides, V has variants.) (dig. adds Older,
side; Younger front)
Same, another view of the Younger, head to hips (V. varies these)
The Riace Bronzes, keen as the reported Phidian warriors, Delphic
commemorators of Marathon, are the greatest Greek discovery since the Athenian ZeusPoseidon came from the sea. How they hold the divide between that Funeral Paean and
the Disaster Oration, in which (after the defeats of the second year of the war and the outbreak of the Plague, B.C. 430) Pericles bared the expediency of the vision:
What you hold is, to speak somewhat plainly, a tyranny; to take it
perhaps was wrong, but to let it go is unsafe.
In the daring of Athenian mind, the fall is foreseen and celebrated:
even if now, in obedience to the general law of decay, we should ever
be forced to yield, still it will be remembered… a city unrivalled by
any other.
57)
Attic, c. 435 B.C., Grave relief, battle scene, Villa Albani, Rome
"War the rough master" having carried off Pericles and left self-seeking factions,
the followers of Phidias, exploiting the techniques of the Parthenon, move through this
Albani Battle relief
58)
Attic, 430-25 B.C., Greeks vs. Amazons, Phygaleia (or Bassae) Frieze, British
Museum, London
toward whatever style of crisis the late century Phigalian freize exhibits. The ideal falls
away from such moral and political turmoil as Thucydides describes, 427 B.C., the
Revolution in Corcyra (and perhaps here we are closer to the frenzy of some Euripides):
For 2nd 57) Head and shoulders of Older Riace Warrior (dig. shifts order)
2nd 57a) Again, Riace Warriors: Older, front; Younger, back
Words had to change their ordinary meaning and take that which was
now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage
of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice… Frantic
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violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting, a
justifiable means of self-defense. The advocate of extreme measures
was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected…
For 2nd 56) Attic, 394-3 B.C., Dexileos Stele, Keramikos Museum, Athens
Meanwhile the moderate part of the citizens perished… The ancient
simplicity into which honor so largely entered was laughed down and
disappeared; and society became divided into camps in which no
man trusted his fellow.
For 3rd 57)
Same, lower right detail
It was the license Sophism had already bred, "making the worse appear the better
cause" — Thrasymachus' "justice is the interest of the stronger," which in 416, a time of
truce, infects Athenian policy in the outrage against Melos:
2nd 58)
Another detail: Phygaleia (or Bassae) Frieze
We shall not trouble you with specious pretenses… since you know as
well as we do that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer
what they must…
That was the hybris which led the next year to the madness of the Sicilian campaign.
59)
59a)
Scopas and others, c. 350 B.C., Amazon Frieze from the Mausoleum at
Halicarnassus, detail, British Museum, London
Same, another detail
How great the ambition which overreached itself, Alcibiades, most brilliant and
corrupt of Socrates' admirers, betrayed to the Spartans:
We sailed to Sicily, first to conquer, if possible, the Siceliots, and
after them the Italiots also, and finally to assail the empire and city of
Carthage. [Then] we were to attack Peloponnese… and so rule the
whole of the Hellenic name.
We have leapt from the Phigalian frieze to that of Halicarnassus, its 350
consequent, in the orgiastic manner of Scopas; but Alcibiades, too, had leapt ahead,
launching — as from Darius (Herodotus VII, 9) "We shall bring all mankind under our
yoke" — the dream which Alexander would make less visionary, but which would only
be actualized by the disciplined advance of Rome.
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a60)
60)
Symbolic History
Ionian, c. 400 B.C., Stele of Crito and Timarista, Mus. Rhodes; + dig. detail
Attic, c. 400 B.C., Funeral Stele of Hegeso, Nat. Museum, Athens; as above
In pride and sorrow, Thucydides records the Sicilian disaster:
This was the greatest Hellenic achievement… at once most glorious to
the victors and most calamitous to the conquered. They were beaten at
all points and altogether; all that they suffered was great; they were
destroyed, as the saying is, with a total destruction, their fleet, their
army — everything was destroyed, and few out of many returned
home.
What could follow that wreck of the outward polis, its laws and values, but an
inward, tragic fruit, as in the myth of Phaëthon's fall, in the garden of Euripides, where
Phaëthon's sad sisters by his grave
Weep into the river, and each tear
Gleams a drop of amber in the wave…
We feel it in the one fragment of music left from Euripides — as performed at St.
John's by Therriault and Lynch:
Music:
a61)
61)
61a)
Euripides, 408 B.C., fragment from Orestes, 1st Chorus, Theriault
and Lynch, St. John's College, Santa Fe
Attic (Ionian), c. 420-15 B.C., Erechtheum, N. Porch from the East, Athens
Same, N. Porch from the West (CGB '77)
Erechtheum from the Southwest, with the Porch of Caryatids
(end Euripides)
Or in Hecuba's poignant almost-justification:
Had He not turned us in His hand, and thrust
Our high things low and shook our hills as dust,
We had not been this splendour, and our wrong
As everlasting music for the song
Of earth and heaven!
(Gilbert Murray’s Trojan Women)
In the Euripidean close of the century, the Erechtheum had caught in architecture
the lyrical Ionic yearning of the Hippolytus chorus of escape, which Gilbert Murray made
a masterpiece of nostalgia:
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Could I take me to some cavern for my hiding
In the hill tops where the sun scarce hath trod…
a62)
62)
Same, Erechtheum, detail of a Caryatid
Parthenon, 447-38 B.C., Frieze, Profile of a boy, Acropolis Museum
To the strand of the daughters of the sunset
The apple tree, the singing, and the gold…
Where a voice of living waters never ceaseth
In God's quiet garden by the sea.
But the frieze of the Parthenon, in the reverie of all ripeness, of all acme, had
already reflected such moods, and it was with that outward betrayal and inward deepening
that Socrates ended and Plato began.
a63)
b63)
63)
Peloponnesian, c. 400 B.C., (from Benevento), Bronze head of an Athlete,
Louvre, Paris
Double: Ancient replicas of 4th cent. B.C. portrait busts: [A] Socrates,
Thermae, Rome; and [B] Plato, Holkham Hall, Norfolk, England
Another view of a63
The seeds of the fourth century and of the Hellenistic, and even of Hellenized
Rome, lurk in that 400 B.C. crisis, the gilded youth of Athens gathered (as in the
Symposium) around the questioning Silenus-Socrates (whose cloud-house Aristophanes
would burn) — Silenus-Socrates, to open, as votive statues did, to the Platonic doctrine of
ideas. Let that team of Plato-Socrates describe, in the eighth book of the Republic, what
had happened in that Athens, and would happen (as Thucydides says) "as long as the
nature of man remains the same":
When a democracy has drunk too deeply of the strong wine of
freedom, anarchy ends by infecting everything. The father descends to
the level of his sons; the master fears and flatters his scholars; old and
young are alike; and all things are ready to burst with liberty. Such is
the fair and glorious beginning out of which tyranny springs.
64)
64a)
Hellenistic, 162-50 B.C., Demetrius I of Syria(?), Thermae, Rome
Same, detail of head
The people have always some protector whom they set over them and
nurse into greatness. Some he kills and others he banishes, always
stirring up war that the state may require a leader. Who is valiant,
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high-minded, wise, is the enemy. So freedom, getting out of all order,
passes over into the bitterest form of slavery.
Here a Hellenistic king, perhaps Demetrius I, complements the gilded youth, Alcibiades,
say, at the banquet of love.
65)
From Zeus Temple, Olympia, 470-56 B.C., West Pediment, Theseus head
Let Demosthenes, trying to rouse the Athenians against the menace of Macedon,
make the contrast of old and new. (Here the old in art: Theseus, from Olympia)
66)
66a)
There must be some cause… why the Greeks were so eager for liberty
then and now are eager for servitude. There was something… which
overcame the wealth of Persia and maintained the freedom of
Greece…
Lysippus, 336-2 B.C., Marble replica of bronze Agias, detail, head, Delphi
Same, statue from the hips up (CGB '77)
Something, the loss of which has ruined all… What was this? Simply
that whoever took money from the corrupters of Greece was
universally detested… But now all such principles have been sold as in
the open market, and those imported by which Greece is ruined and
diseased… envy where a man gets a bribe; laughter if he confesses it…
the usual signs of corruption.
Art courting that new private world — a fourth-century marble after Lysippus.
67)
67a)
Attic, c. 380 B.C., Stele of Ktesileos and Theano, Nat. Museum, Athens
Same, detail of Ktesileos, upper left
Conceive the pity of this degradation.
Platonic cave:
Greek outwardness has become the
Behold! Human beings in an underground cave, chained, facing away
from the fire and from the light. Figures bearing images pass behind
them, and before them is a wall where shadows are thrown. They have
lived there since childhood, prisoners, as we all are. For them the truth
will be nothing but the shadows of images cast on the wall of a cave.
So the late-classical search is on: how to rise from the cave of matter to the light.
Though as long as power operates in pagan forms, there will be the stern duty of return to
the cave — the paradox and pathos of the human lot.
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68)
68a)
68b)
Symbolic History
Sicilian (Selinunt), c. 460 B.C.(?), detail of Hera, Museum Palermo
Magna Graecia, c. 460 B.C., detail from the Birth of Aphrodite, Ludovisi
Throne, Thermae, Rome
Attic, c. 500 B.C.(?), Athena in gilded bronze from a vessel, Acropolis
Museum, Athens
But it is not the tragic paradox, which enfleshed and worshipped dangerous
divinity — this fifth-century Hera unveiling herself on her wedding night, mysterious as
the destroying Aphrodite of Sophocles' Antigone (Yeats):
Overcome — O bitter sweetness,
Inhabitant of the soft cheek of a girl —
The rich man and his affairs,
The fat flocks and the field's fatness,
Mariners, rough harvesters;
Overcome Gods upon Parnassus;
Overcome the Empyrean; hurl
Heaven and Earth out of their places,
That in the same calamity
Brother and brother, friend and friend,
Family and family,
City and city may contend,
By that great glory driven wild.
Pray I will and sing I must,
And yet I weep — Oedipus' child
Descends into the loveless dust.
69)
Roman, 1st cent. A.D., from Praxiteles' Aphrodite of Cnidus, Cloister of the
Thermae, Rome (CGB '86)
It was exactly that ambiguous divinity that Socratic and Platonic reason objected
to — no paradox, no cruelty in the divine; so the world cleaves into tawdry outwardness,
the itch of passion, against the soul's search, that leaning of the alone to the Alone.
70)
Video double; slide & dig. singly: [A] Corinthian, mid-7th cent., Hunt from
Chigi Vase, Villa Giulia, Rome; and [B] Hellenistic, c. 330 B.C., Alexander
Sarcophagus, Lion Hunt, Istanbul Museum
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What was charged with spirit becomes counterfeit. The Homeric hunt of the
Corinthian seventh-century jug: Odysseus telling of "the boar's gleaming tusk that ripped
his leg while he hunted Parnassus with the sons of Autolycus," turns in the Hellenistic
"Alexander Sarcophagus" — for all Aristotle's validation of imitated sense and passion —
to one of the vigorous exertions of the Cave, the skilled mimesis of a slaughter yard, a
shambles.
Va71)
From mosaic, c. 200 B.C. after late 4th cent., Battle of Alexander and
Darius: Double: details of the two; but videoed singly
Same, the whole mosaic, National Museum, Naples
Double: [A] Apollonius of Athens, mid-1st cent, B.C., Bronze Boxer,
Thermae; and [B] Hellenistic, late 3rd cent. B.C., Drunk Woman, Capitoline
71)
71a)
The glow of Alexander has filled Hegel and all with raptures; but in the mosaic
copy of the fourth-century painting of his Battle with Darius, we are again thrown into the
cave-realm Arnold would write of: "And we are here as on a darkling plain, swept with
confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night."
How much more with the Hellenistic cult of the ugly: Apollonius' Boxer, the
Louvre Dwarf, the Capitoline Old Woman.
72)
72a)
Attic, c. 320 B.C., Figure from Stele 2574, Nat. Museum, Athens
Closer detail: face of same figure
What does the just soul do in such a state? One would like to legislate, of course,
"to save the country as well as oneself." That was what sent Plato on those bootless
missions to Sicily. But Socrates had already given the pensive description (and example)
of what was to come (Republic VII), comparing the philosopher in an evil time to one
fallen among beasts:
who seeing the madness of the many, and that no politician can be
honest and no champion will defend justice, is like a man who, in a
driving storm of dust and sleet, retires under the shelter of a wall,
content if he can live his own life pure and depart in peace, and with
fair hopes.
1st 73) Attic, 410-09 B.C., Nikê loosening a sandal, Acropolis Museum
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Symbolic History
In the Euripides fragment, what is transcribed as chromatic was perhaps in the
enharmonic or quarter-tone mode. The haunting phrase (with two indicated instrumental
entrances, unison to fifth) conveys a style of passion, expressive as the robe of this 410
post-Phidian Nikê.
Music: Repeat from Euripides, Orestes fragment, closing phrase
74)
Rhodian, c. 190 B.C., Victory of Samothrace, Louvre, Paris
(end music)
As that agitation dominates the Hellenistic, it often reappears — thus the 180 B.C.
Victory of Samothrace.
75)
Gilded bronze krater, c. 330 B.C., Museum, Thessalonikê
It relates to the Dionysiac art of Scopas, suggested in this fourth-century cinerary krater
from Macedon,
For 1st 76)
Late copy of 300 B.C. Portrait of Alexander, Museum, Pella
as also in Hellenistic portraits of Alexander, this, pursuing the ardour of Leochares.
2nd 75) Center-spread of 75: Krater (from Derveni tomb, Macedon)
The most ambitious piece of Greek music that survives is the First Delphic Hymn
of the second century, which with its original accompaniments must have been a rich
display piece,
2nd 74) Again, Victory of Samothrace, another view
with chromatics in the last section like those of the Euripides chorus. Nothing will revive
the wealth of Greek music, not even a private 1930's recording of the melody by Mr. Butt;
2nd 73) Again, the Acropolis Nikê relief (CGB '77)
but with such images as we have seen, it may be our best hint at one of the great
emotional delights of the Platonic cave. (The words are post-Pindaric, of the shrines of
Greece.)
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Music:
Symbolic History
Greek, 2nd cent. B.C., First Delphic Hymn, sung by Mr. Butt
3rd 74) Side view of the Winged Victory of Samothrace
3rd 75) A Dionysiac detail of the same Derveni Krater
2nd 76) Pergamum, c. 270 B.C., Portrait of Alexander, Istanbul
Of course with this School of Pergamum Alexander we are again in the cave
which outwardness had become — "swept with confused alarms." Plato had sketched
(Republic IX) the fate of the tyrant (the man Thrasymachus had called happy): he is, in
his waking state, what others are in their worst nightmares, enslaved, friendless, afraid,
and mad.
77)
Leochares, 340-30 B.C., Demeter from Knidos, British Museum (CGB '77)
Against it we project, from the lifetime of Plato, the Demeter of Knidos, to keep
up the oscillation — over the gulf of wider cleavage — from the more futile frenzy of
action, to the searching pathos of thought, seeking by recollection:
beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting, which without
diminution and without increase, is imparted to the ever-growing and
perishing beauties of other things. (Symposium)
78)
Roman, 211-17 A.D., the Emperor Caracalla, Conservatori, Rome
It was only under the universal empire of Rome, and five hundred years after
Plato, that the deepening and darkening of the cave reached its limit in the soulless
burden of the outward law;
a79)
79)
Statuette of the Young Christ, 3rd cent., upper half, Thermae, Rome
Same, closer detail (head)
Music:
Pre-Gregorian, 3rd-5th cent.(?), Sanctus, Mass for the Dead
(Solesmes) Decca 7532 A
only then that the wing-sprouting soul made a final break with pagan outwardness. When
it did, although its creed was of Christ's passion, it shunned the Classical style of passion
as far as it could (until the Renaissance for profound theological reasons would tie onto it
again); it leaned to neo-Platonism, even to the heresy of denying God's pain. And in art,
the tenderest early-Christian moments
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Symbolic History
(close Sanctus)
80)
From Tegea, c. 360 B.C., Head of Hygeia, National Museum, Athens
are in loving relation to that soft style of the ideal, which the followers of Phidias, most of
all Praxiteles (in touch with Plato), ripened as a tragic fruit from the rise and fall of
Promethean Greece. So Socrates in the Phaedrus:
There was a time when… we beheld the beatific vision… shining in
pure light, pure ourselves, not yet enshrined in that living tomb which
we carry about… prisoned like an oyster in his shell. Let me linger
over the memory of scenes which have passed away.
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�
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Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound
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Greece : The Tragic Myth and Deed, Symbolic History, Part 3
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Script of Part 3 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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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
4.
The Alexandrian Melt
CHARLES G. BELL
ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
or
1260 CANYON ROAD
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501
July 1995
Last Revised June 1996
June 1996
The Alexandrian Melt
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
4. The Alexandrian Melt
a1)
1)
Hellenistic from Rhodes, c. 190 B.C., Victory of Samothrace, from a distance,
side view, Louvre, Paris (CGB '80); + dig. horizantal detail
Same, Victory, nearer from the other side (CGB '80); V returns to detail of a1
(this slide lost; dig.uses other images)
Music:
Greek, 2nd cent. B.C., 1st Delphic Hymn V-LM/LSC 6057
From the wind-blown transport of the 190 B.C. Victory of Samothrace, a flight as
of the Cloud Chorus in Aristophanes' bitterest comedy: (423 B.C.)
Eternal Clouds, let us appear, let us arise from the roaring depths of
Ocean, our father; let us fly towards the lofty mountains, spread our
damp wings over their forest-laden summits, whence we will
dominate the distant valleys, the harvest fed by the sacred earth, the
murmur of the divine streams and the resounding waves of the sea,
which the unwearying orb lights up with its glittering beams…
2)
Same, Victory, front view (and detail); video shows two details instead
— to be versed by Oscar Wilde, "Cloud-maidens that float on forever,/ Dew-sprinkled,"
and re-sung by Shelley:
I am the daughter of Earth and Water
And the nursling of the Sky…
— the carved rapture no doubt paralleled in Greek music as well, before it had weathered
to neumes on Delphic stone. (fade Hymn)
From that,
3)
Coptic (from Bauit), 6th cent., St. Menas and Christ, encaustic, Louvre, Paris
Music:
June 1996
Yemenite Jewish, Hymn for Hasha'na Rabba, close, History of
Music in Sound, V-LM/LSC 6057
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Symbolic History
to the Coptic flattening of anchorites in the Egyptian desert; as if Plotinus' "cut away
everything" and "we rub the eye and it sees the light it contains — truest seeing," had
joined the cry of Synagogue chant.
(close of Jewish Hymn)
The break to such earth-denial,
4)
Victory of Samothrace, night-lighted, from the side; + V details
from such earth-claim, is as startling as any in history. And yet the West, in less than a
century, has turned in music from Franck's romantic wingings (Les Eolides):
Music:
5)
Cesar Franck, 1876, Les Eolides (climax), London CS 6540
(fade)
Coptic, Christ and Abu Menas, detail, Louvre
to the encaustic reduction of Varese.
Music:
6)
6a)
Edgar Varese, 1936, Density, solo flute (to 1st pause), Col. MS
6146
(fade)
Attic, c. 560-50 B.C., Marble Sphinx, Acropolis Museum, Athens (CGB '77);
+ V detail
Greek (Naxos), c. 550 B.C., Sphinx, detail, Museum, Delphi [Slide only]
Could the very Sphinx, who smiles from the Archaic Acropolis the Persians
would sack, have answered how far that transformation was latent in Dionysian and
Socratic Greece, how far an outcome of Alexander's fusing East and West (those earthdespising sages, Calanus and others, he sought beyond the Indus; Hebrew scriptures
seeded from Eleusis, reaching from Egyptian bondage and Ikhnaton's one-god zeal
toward Hölderlin's second Dionysus, sacrificial Syrian of "Bread and Wine")? Could the
Sphinx herself have told, or was it her wisdom only to propose the question? Since
where in history has such an antinomy been proposed without requiring for its answer:
Both in one!
7)
Greek, Lindos Acropolis with 4th cent. Temple of Athena
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Face two ways, toward the sheer Acropolis of Lindos on Rhodes: the island
Pindar praised in a golden ode, where in Hellenistic times the Victory of Samothrace was
carved — the columns of the 4th century B.C., though the rock had been a sanctuary of
Lindian Athena from its seizure by the Dorians, "descended," as Pindar says, "of old from
… the widely ruling race of Heracles."
8)
8a)
Paul's Harbor from Lindos Acropolis, Island of Rhodes (Simpson)
Greek, c. 460 B.C., Ruins of Zeus Temple, Olympia (CGB '77)
But if we turn — the temple now to the right, asserting columned Greece — it
was into the harbor below that Paul sailed on his way to Jerusalem. His great encounters,
Euroclydon and the Shipwreck, when the viper warmed by fire fastened on his hand and
he felt no harm, occurred in Crete and Malta on the final voyage to Rome. Yet here, by
the ruined temple over his storied Harbor, the second letter to the Corinthians sounds that
overthrow:
Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself
against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every
thought to the obedience of Christ.
9)
Cyprus, Neolithic, 6th millenium B.C., andesite idol, National Museum,
Athens
Take a stand nearer the center of that world-polis where Alexander thought to
embrace in Macedonian vigor and Athenian enlightenment everything Persia had ruled,
from age-old Egypt to hither India — a stand, say, on the island of Cyprus — and from
there, as in a partial derivative, scan the time manifold: first, this 6th millenium gray
volcanic idol: what cropped out, with tribal agriculture, from the whole family of man.
10)
Cyprus, 3000-2500 B.C., seated figure in stealite, Cyprus Museum, Nicosia
How varied the time scale of history. Almost 3000 years were required for the
transition to the symbolic sophistication and polish of this soapstone seated idol, on the
threshold of the Bronze Age, contemporary with early Sumer and Egypt and suggestively
with Cycladic pre-Greece.
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11)
Symbolic History
Mycenæan, 13th cent. B.C. Rhyton from Kition, Cyprus Museum, Nicosia
By the 13th century B.C., the Cycladic had focused to the Minoan; the Minoan,
spreading over the Aegean islands, had sowed Greece with the Homeric citadels of the
Mycenæan, then embroiled in the Trojan War. Even in Cyprus, this faience Rhyton
testifies to that culture, though the island was also in contact with mainland Syria, and
was ruled from New Kingdom Egypt, then at its Rameses Second peak of imperial power
and style.
12)
12a)
Cyprus, Iron I 12th cent. B.C., Horned God, bronze, Cyprus Museum,
Nicosia; + V detail
Egypt, Dynasty XIX, 13th cent. B.C., Osiris, Tomb #1, Dier el Medineh,
Thebes
By the next century this horned deity of bronze hints at the hardening of a time of
troubles, the folk-wanderings which brought in the Iron Age, and with Mycenæan decline,
the dominance of Asia. Yet the first Greek is nascent here, and who is this with head (or
helmet) horned? Dionysus, born by the myth in Bœotian Thebes, to Cadmus' daughter
Semele, is also called "Horned Bromius," god of earthquake and violence. But Cadmus
was a Phœnician, bringer of the alphabet; Dionysus, too, in Euripides, has returned to
Thebes, a new god, from triumphs in Asia. While his origin, for Herodotus, is that older
Thebes of Egypt; he is Osiris, its lord of rebirth from the grave. The cradle of Greece
already resembles the Alexandrian melt — though in Yeats' double-cone, under a change
of sign.
13)
Cypro-Archaic, early 5th cent. B.C., Bearded head with laurel leaves, Cyprus
Museum, Nicosia; + V detail
The folk-wandering brought in the Greeks — the Cyprian hero Cinyras, from the
time of the Trojan War. By the beginning of the fifth century, this laurelled head carries
the archaic smile over into what has suddenly become the Olympian pride of all Greece.
14)
14a)
Cypro-Hellenistic, end of 4th cent. B.C., Female head, Cyprus Museum,
Nicosia; + V detail
[Slide only] Cyprus, 4th cent. B.C., terra cotta head of a man, on loan to the
National Museum, Athens
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Symbolic History
Against it, the fourth century of Macedonian rule and Academic philosophy, witnesses, in
Cyprus as elsewhere, a soft ripening of art and soul. In Aristophanes' Frogs, the ghost of
Aeschylus blames Euripides. As if those choruses of pain and escape — the chromatic
fragment from Orestes,
Music:
Euripides, 408 B.C., fragment from Orestes, 1st Chorus, Theriault
and Lynch, St. John's, Santa Fe
or what Gilbert Murray gleaned, as from the Bacchae:
Where is the home for me?
O Cyprus, set in the sea,
Aphrodite's home in the soft sea-foam,
Would I could wend to thee;
Where the wings of the Loves are furled,
And faint the heart of the world!
— had seduced all of the Hellenic name.
15)
(end Euripides)
Cypro-Roman, 3rd cent. A.D, Mosaic pavement, Triumph of Dionysus, detail,
Villa Paphos, Cyprus
A Classical continuance of over six centuries, though the power-center has shifted
to Rome. How heavy now, in this 3rd century A.D. mosaic pavement from a Cyprian
villa, the mystery of Dionysus has become. As Yeats writes: "In pity for man's darkening
thought/ He walked that room and issued thence/ In Galilean turbulence …"
16)
Roman Christian, 1st half of 4th cent. A.D., Daniel in the Lion's Den, mosaic
detail, Mausoleum of Centcelles, near Tarragona, Spain
No wonder if in the same century, or the early fourth — though our example is from
Tarragon, across the Mediterranean — mosaics would shift from villa leopards of the
wine god to mausoleum lions of Daniel's Bible victory.
17)
Danubian, c. 5500 B.C., Fish-mouth man, Iron Gate, Yugoslavia
If we range now, expanding the cut explored in Cyprus, what lies at the base, from
China and India to Europe, is the neolithic idol — 6th millenium B.C., from the Iron
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Symbolic History
Gates of the Danube, whence the Indo-Europeans would flood the South, this so-called
"Fish-mouth man," weightiest of all.
18)
Peloponnesian, 6th millenium B.C., female idol, National Museum, Athens
Beside it at the same time, but from Greece, the Peloponnese, a female form is a miracle
of grace; as if dawn clarity was already welling from what would become Classic soil.
Without the implied world community, and kindling within it, an Aegean light, there
could have been no Alexandrian dream — much less the astonishing fact.
19)
Mesopotamia (Susa), end of 4th millenium B.C., Vase with saluki hounds,
Louvre, Paris
Three pots will display at a glance both the wide-spread common ground. and the
lyrical birth of the proto-Greek: here, end of the fourth millenium, from Mesopotamia, a
vase with stylized natural forms, at the top, cranes, then saluki hounds, below, the ibex,
huge-horned;
20)
Chinese, 3rd millenium, B.C., Jar with spiral design, Museum of Eastern Art,
Oxford, England
Chinese, third millenium, the abstract spiral of sea and growth already hinting, in this
infolding, at Yin-Yang;
21)
Minoan, c. 1800 B.C., Spouted Pithos from the old Palace of Phaistos
from Crete, early second millenium, this Minoan refinement and delight, sprung from the
world base, like Aphrodite, ocean-born.
22)
Egypt, Dynasty III, c. 2660-50 B.C., Statue of King Zoser, detail, Egyptian
Museum, Cairo
But a thousand years before Minos' Palace, with the beginning of Aegean traffic in
the bronze of the new age, and in complementarity with the stupendous rise of Old
Kingdom Egypt (here King Zoser, Third Dynasty — time also of that idol from Cyprus,
the seated figure we saw in the shape of a cross),
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�C.G. Bell
23)
Symbolic History
Cycladic, 2800-2200 B.C., from Keros, Harp Player, National Musuem,
Athens (CGB '77); + V detail (also dig.)
Cycladic carvings in crystalline marble (this luminous Harp Player in the Athens
Museum), refine something so free and fresh, so Apollonian, we almost hear the Bard
singing of Ilium, or Alcaeus and Sappho hymning wine and love:
Deathless Aphrodite, throned in flowers,
Daughter of Zeus, guileful enchantress…
Fight by my shoulder. (CGB)
Yet as always, cross-fertilization was required. The Hellenic could not have
arisen from the Cycladic alone.
24)
Egypt, Dynasty V, c. 1500 B.C., Cattle fording a canal, detail, Mastaba of Ti,
Sakkara
As Herodotus would discover, Egypt was for the Greeks the deepest source of
gods and arts, of civilization. Fifth Dynasty tomb reliefs from 2500 B.C. already pursue
the joyful representation of natural forms — this painted relief of cattle fording a stream,
from Sakkara, where the zig-zag overlay at the base marvellously suggests the flow of
water.
25)
25a)
Hellenistic (Attic), c. 150 B.C., Horse found off Artemisium, National
Museum, Athens
Same, front detail (CGB '77)
Though the leap from that to the Hellenistic animal, effects (as in the Alexandrian
mathematics and science which culminated in Archimedes) a hyperbolic approach toward
modernity. What startles in this Attic horse dredged from the sea is not simply the
mastery of life-sized free-standing bronze, but that two centuries before Christ we sense
the restless search and psychic liability of the later West — the calculus tug of Eudoxus'
method of exhaustion.
1st 26) Sumerian, c. 1650 B.C., Face of Peace, whole, Standard of Ur, British
Museum [Note: 26-29 reflect the '93 revision of the slide show; in the video,
the same material is not yet so well ordered — digital now bettered]
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�C.G. Bell
27)
Symbolic History
Sumerian, c. 1650 B.C., Face of War, Standard of Ur, British Museum,
London
Same, close detail
27a)
Meanwhile, from the start, the whole civilized theatre was preparing, by a
multiple first thrust, for the empires Alexander would assume. There the Greek would
not be the only rebel scion of Egypt: how many of the prohibitions and purifications
Herodotus noted in Thebes, surface also in Leviticus? And where are we headed, as early
as the Pyramids, in the art of Mesopotamia? — this inlaid "Standard of Ur."
That the two faces are paired, this a scene of battle,
2nd 26)
2nd 26a)
2nd 26b)
2nd 26c)
Peace, close detail
Mycenæan, 15th cent. B.C., Gold cups, National Museum, Athens
Aegean (Thera), 16th cent. B.C., fresco, from Akrotiri on Thera or Santorin
Michelangelo, c. 1525-34, Medici Tombs, San Lorenzo, Florence
the other a victory feast, might point to the Vaphio cups, Cretan or Mycenæan, opposed
reliefs of bulls wild and tame; or the discovered Theran fresco of an expedition, where
some see a contrast of Peace and War. In Homer, there is the Shield of Achilles, with its
alternate cities of law and marriage, of siege and death; or, in the classically inspired
West, Michelangelo's Medici Tombs, with the "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" of Milton.
a2nd 27)
2nd 27)
28)
29)
Double: Standard of Ur, details of Peace and War
Same, wider detail from War
Same, wider detail from Peace
Same, Double: more embracing sections of Peace and War
Music:
Hurrian Cult Song, c. 1400 B.C., Ugarit Cuneiform Tablet, University of California
But what the "Standard of Ur" brings to mind is not that Greek tradition, but the faithchronicles of the Chosen People — their songs of war and victory, as Miriam's "Sing ye
to the Lord, for he hath truimphed gloriously; the horse and his rider hath he thrown into
the sea." Yet the oldest Biblical texts, like this Ugarit hymn, hopefuly reconstructed from
cuneiform, are dated a thousand years after that Ur of the Chaldees from which Abraham,
father of Israel, is said to have migrated.
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Symbolic History
The Creation in Genesis stands in some relation to that of the Babylonian
fragments, with its first stirring on the waters, its confusion and conflict of gods, revolt of
Darkness, viper, and dragon.
a30)
30)
30a)
Mesopotamian, c. 2100 B.C., from Girsu (or Lagash?), terra cotta head of a
divinity, Louvre, Paris
Ur, Dynasty III, c. 2500 B.C., Ram caught in a thicket, British Museum,
London
Same, detail
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Symbolic History
The Biblical Flood, with Noah's Ark, owes more to the account preserved in the British
Museum tablets from 3000 or so B.C. But what the Hebrew successors of old Sumer
have effected, after Egyptian exile, in scriptures actually contemporary, from Achaian
epoi down, with Greece, is the transformation of a capricious polytheism to the postIkhnaton unity, moral justice, ultimately the mercy of Jahwe.
So the Ram caught in the flowering thicket, of gilded wood and polychrome, also
from Ur about 2500 B.C., might be waiting, vicarious averter of the sacrifice of Isaac,
when God tempted Abraham: (Genesis 22)
And Abraham stretched forth his hand and took the knife to slay his
son. And the angel of the Lord called … "Lay not thine hand upon the
Lad … And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold
behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham went
and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead
of his son.
31)
Indus Valley, c. 3rd millenium B.C., Priest-God-King from Mohenjo-Daro; +
V detail; also dig.
Music:
Hurrian cult song, continued, lyre
That ancestor civilization of the third millenium had also its Indus Valley cognate,
at the limit of the vast area Alexander would march over and his Seleucid successors
would Hellenize. And here too the cult affinities (as in this Priest-God-King from
Mohenjo-Daro) are with what, later, in the god-seeking Semitic east, would both absorb
and be polarized against the philosophy and art of the Greeks. Disheartening that for all
that pre-Hellenic fabric, stretching from Egypt and the Aegean, around the Fertile
Crescent to Persia, Bactria, India — and over the thousand years from these beginnings,
a32)
32)
Egyptian New Kingdom, Dynasty XVIII, 1422-11 B.C., Tuthmosis IV, Tomb
of Djeser-ka-re-seneb, Woman at her toilet, #38, Necropolis, Thebes
Same, Tomb of Nakht, Women Musicians, #52, Necropolis, Thebes
32a)
32b)
Same, Tomb of Menna, #69, Necropolis, Thebes
Detail of slide 32
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Symbolic History
through the tomb-paintings of New Kingdom Thebes — we have only one cult song from
Canaanite Ugarit on the coast of Syria, time of Ikhnaton, a conjectural harmony for voice
and lyre. What different music these houris of the Nile would have sounded. (close
Hurrian song)
Amid such luxuries the Israelites were slaves. We think of the oriental
love poems associated in the Bible with the amorous yoke of Solomon: "ships of
Tarshish bringing gold and silver, ivory, apes, and peacocks":
Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than
wine … I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the
tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon. … A bundle of myrrh is my
well-beloved unto me; he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts…
Yet Solomon lived five-hundred years after the scribe of this 18th Dynasty tomb;
33)
Græco-Roman from Pompeii, c. 30 B.C., Satyr and Maenad, Mus. Naz.,
Naples; first, video detail; so dig.
and the canticles named for him are commonly assigned to the third century B.C., when
the theocratic pocket of old Judah was invaded from all sides by the Hellenism of
Alexandria, the new sensuality of carving and fresco, of which a final luminous flourish
would be preserved in Pompeii. What Greek bloom has touched the interpreted God-love
of the Song of Songs?
Thy lips, O my spouse, drop as the honeycomb; honey and milk are
under thy tongue. … Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are
twins, which feed among the lilies. Until day break, and the shadows
flee away, I will get me to the mountain of myrrh, and to the hill of
frankincense.
34)
34a)
Aegean (Thera), 16th cent. B.C., Youth with Mackerel, National Museum,
Athens
Minoan from Knossos, c. 1500 B.C., Fresco of bull-jumping acrobatics,
Herakleion Museum, Crete
Meanwhile the culture which would conquer Israel and be conquered by it from
within had come to its first Aegean birth — a keenness to which the second, and
Homeric, would return. The frescoes of maritime Thera, buried under volcanic ash about
1500 B.C., the bullfights and natural forms of Crete (from the time of New Kingdom
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Symbolic History
Egypt) open, in cyclical history of soul, the glad possibility of a late-period cultivation of
sensuous yet airy delight — like Impressionist verve in a Europe of Symbolist pain.
35)
Egyptian, Dynasty XVIII, c. 1480 B.C., Temple for Queen Hatschepsut, near
Thebes
That whole horizon of Aegean pleasure, with the luxury of musical houris, in her
Nile temple the Amon-begetting of Queen Hatshepsut,
Ahmes awoke at the perfume of the god
and laughed in the face of his majesty —
whatever Herodotus tallies in the Greek debt to Egypt,
36)
Egypt, New Emp. Dynasty XVIII, c. 1370 B.C., Ikhnaton, Colossal Head,
Egyptian Museum, Cairo
pales under the one-god stare of Ikhnaton (about two centuries before the Trojan War).
What that enforces is the other debt, of Hebrew prophecy: Amos, by 750:
Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the
shadow of death into the morning … The Lord is his name …
Isaiah was not much later, though the writing continued over centuries — preparing for a
saviour child: "Behold a virgin shall conceive" … "unto us a son is given" … "a man of
sorrows … wounded for our transgressions …"
37)
Egypt, Dynasty XIX, 1304-1237 B.C., War relief of Rameses II, Rock
Temple, Abu Simbel; + V detail (not dig.)
But the New Kingdom extravagances of soul and flesh rested on imperial war, and
here too Rameses II smiting his enemies in the rock temple of Abu Simbel is more tied to
the oldest "Wars of the Lord" stratum of the Bible — the Ark Song of Moses:
Rise up, Lord, and let thine enemies be scattered;
and let them that hate thee flee before thee;
Deborah's Song in Judges:
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Symbolic History
At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down:
at her feet he bowed, he fell: where he
bowed, there he fell down dead —
a38) Egypt, Dynasty XIX, 1301-1235, Columned Hall, Great Temple of Amon,
Karnak
38) Another view of the same
Since ancient times the forest of carved columns in the Great Hall of Karnak near
Thebes has been called one of the Wonders of the World. It was built over dynasties, but
centrally during, and to commemorate Rameses II's wars with the Hittites, who were
fanning out from the highlands of Turkey. Yet this pillared hall marks the crisis of
Egyptian conquest and temple construction. The "eternal treaty" of 1820, here inscribed,
set Egypt on the long decline before Assyria. What else would have permitted the
Exodus of the Jews or their settlement in the Promised Land?
39)
Hittite, 14th cent. B.C., Lion Gate, detail, wall of Hattusas, central Turkey
For the Hittites, too, it was the turning-point toward the 1200 B.C. overthrow.
Though even at their prime (this 14th century Lion Gate in the four-mile wall of Hattusas)
they exhibit, after the civilizing Old Kingdoms, the primitive force of imperial legatees,
fortified against troubles to ensue.
a40)
b40)
40)
Mycenae, c. 1500 B.C., The Lion Gate
Mycenæan, c. 1200 B.C., Warrior Krater, National Museum, Athens
Same, slide detail of Warriors (video takes detail from b40)
The 1500 B.C. explosion had wrecked Santorin. The accompanying quake and
tidal wave must have shaken naval Crete. Mainland Mycenae — with its own Lion Gate
and Cyclopean ramparts, or this Krater of marching Warriors — also suggests the heavier
fate of the Successor Power, a power soon to spend itself in the Trojan Wars and
homecoming disasters which would feed tragic myth.
From these rowed myrmidons of 1200 B.C.,
41)
41a)
41b)
Anatolia, c. 800 B.C., Terra cotta relief of Phrygian soldiers, Ankara
Hittite, c. 1250 B.C., Frieze of Warrior Gods, Yazilikaya, Anatolia
Phrygian soldier, detail of 41
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Symbolic History
to these of Asia Minor four centuries later, the power collapse and folk-wanderings invite
a range of ephemeral shifting kingdoms. Between the Hittite and Egyptian retreat and the
more savage reversion of Assyrian rise (about 900), Phoenicians and Philistines,
Ammonites and Moabites strove; even Israel established the archetypal Kingdom of
David, with Solomon's palace and temple, as if to imitate on their own the monuments
they had slaved to build under Rameses II. While to the north, Ionians, Lydians,
Phrygians jockeyed with more barbaric Scythians in the shiftings Herodotus resumes.
a42)
42)
42a)
42b)
Assyrian (Nimrud), 883-859 B.C., Statue of Assurnasirpal II, British
Museum, London
Assyrian relief, 7th cent. B.C., Sacking a city, British Museum, London
Assyrian, 668-630 B.C., Sennacherib's Palace (Assurbanipal), Conquest of
Elam, detail, British Museum, London
Same, another detail, Defeated Elamites prostrate themselves
"The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold" … "I slaughtered them," said
Ashur-nasir-pal (ninth century), "With their blood I dyed the mountains red like wool …
Their young men and their maidens I burned in the fire" And (as in this 7th century Assyrian relief) "I carried off their spoil and their possessions. The heads of their warriors I
cut off, and I formed them into a pillar over against their city."
In 854 B.C. his son Shalmaneser III smote the Aramæans of Damascus and of
Hamath, allied with Ahab of Israel, who took the field (Assyrian record says) with 2,000
chariots and 10,000 men. The already divided Jewish kingdoms of North and South were
bled, subdued, dismembered.
43)
43a)
Assyrian relief, c. 700 B.C.(?), Elamites taken into captivity, Louvre, Paris
Babylon, early 6th cent. B.C., Reconstruction of Ishtar Gate, detail, Museum,
Berlin
When Sennacherib assaulted Judah about 700 B.C. (time of this relief of Elamites led into
slavery), he boasted of taking 200,000 prisoners. Though the great symbolic bondage for
the Jews, that punishment of which Isaiah warns, did not stem from Assyria, but from the
brief Chaldean empire of Neo-Babylon, its great city called the most glorious of the
ancient world. (Psalm 137):
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Symbolic History
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down,
yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion …
a44)
44)
Persian, 5th cent., Ruins of Persepolis, column, and Staircase of Apadana
Persian, 522 B.C., Darius I as Gilgamesh, Great Palace, Persepolis
Then the Persians captured Babylon, 539 B.C. and Cyrus freed the Jews and
restored the temple of Jerusalem. "Jahweh's annointed" Isaiah calls him. While
Herodotus, from the other side, heard Greek tidings: that Cyrus had been exposed as a
child, like Oedipus, for an oracle; and that Haparchus, his champion, had been fed his
own children, like Thyestes.
Here, in the ruins Alexander would make of Persepolis, Darius I, who also
favored the Hebrews and attacked the Greeks, fights a lion monster as Gilgamesh, Asian
Hercules and harrower of hell — cover for the horse-trickery that bungled to Marathon.
45)
Celtic (Halstatt), 7th cent. B.C., Grave cult wagon from Strettweg; Landesmuseum, Graz
The Persians, in passing, had subdued Thrace and Macedon. But north and west
lay the Indo-European pool of past and future invasions — this Celtic cult wagon, of the
7th century B.C., a bronze death goddess and her retinue. Had not Indics, Hittites,
Persians, Lydians, Lycians, Phrygians, Greeks, Umbrians, Latins, poured down from that
death-and-life source?
But between that Austria
46)
46a)
46b)
46c)
Ionic, 7th cent. B.C., Gift of Naxos to the Sanctuary of Delos, Terrace of
Lions (CGB '79)
Same, detail of a lion (CGB '79)
Attic, c. 600 B.C., Kouros, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
(CGB '79)
Post Cycladic, 625-20 B.C., Melian or Parian(?), Amphora found in Delos,
Apollo drawn by winged horses, National Museum, Athens
and its Aegean radiant, the day-spring had occurred, which the island of Delos would
commemorate, as in this 7th century B.C. Terrace of Lions, facing the sacred lake and the
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palm tree where the golden-haired Apollo, with Artemis, was born, as in the Homeric
Hymn:
Blessed Leto, rejoice, for you bore glorious children —
Apollo who shoots from afar and Artemis who loves arrows —
Even in rocky Delos under the Cynthian Hill,
Near to a palm-tree that stood beside the waters of Inopus.
In the Iliad, no calm Apollonian: (Lattimore)
Lord of the silver bow who set your power about Chryse
and Killa the sacrosanct, who are lord in strength over Tenedos … .
Terrible was the clash that rose from the bow of silver.
47)
47a)
47b)
Attic, about 530 B.C., Black-figured chalice of Exekias, Dionysus' Sea Voyage,
Munich
Same, upper detail
Same, lower detail
As charged as the later child of the Thunderer — this 6th century bowl of Exekias,
with the "Homeric" hymn:
I bring to mind Dionysos, son of burning Semele,
On a jutting headland by the shore of the fruitless sea,
A stripling with dark eyes, long hair and purple robe.
Tyrsenian pirates seized him, hurried to their doom.
Wind filled the sail, the crew hauled tight on either side.
Strange sights came upon them: sweet and fragrant wine
Filled the ship's black hull; ivy twined the mast;
A vine with clustered grapes spread out along the yard;
The god from the bow scowled and roared as a lion;
The sailors leapt as one into the foam-bright sea,
Changed to dolphins … (CGB, using Loeb)
As Ovid, six centuries later (?) details:
All — back arched and body blackened, flippered
Hands, legs gone to torso, crescent tailed —
Dove and leapt in spray, spouting water. (CGB)
48)
Egypt, 2510 B.C., King Mycerinus and his Queen, Fine Arts, Boston
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Historically, it was from late Egypt that Greece must have learned; but what it
reenacts is the spirit of the beginning. One would be hard-pressed to answer where art
has scaled such an Olympus as the Homeric poems — whether in the dawn-power of 4th
Dynasty Egypt (Mycerinus with his Queen, 1200 years before the Trojan War),
49)
49a)
49b)
49c)
Attic "Kroisos," c. 525 B.C., Funerary Kouros, National Museum, Athens
(CGB '77)
Michelangelo, 1501-03, David, mid-front, Accademia, Florence (CGB '86)
Another view of 49, "Kroisos" (CGB '77)
Attic, 510-500 B.C., Hermes, the Cecropides, and boy Erichthonius, Acropolis
Museum, Athens
or in those god-souled and muscled Kouroi of the 6th century Attic, at least two centuries
after Homer, though about the time the Athenian text of his poems was prepared. If what
we seek is the Homeric cognate, it must appear where the man-god, however inspired
from Egypt and Asia, strips to the canons of human excellence, of Aretê.
At about the same time David, whom the Renaissance would remake after the
Greek model, was humanized by the Deuteronomist, how differently: "a youth, ruddy,
and of fair countenance," facing Goliath:
Thou comest to me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a shield:
but I come to thee in the name of the Lord of Hosts, the God of the
armies of Israel, whom thou hast defied…
— To be met thereafter by the women dancing like Bacchantes to tabrets and song: "Saul
has slain his thousands, but David his ten thousands."
a50)
50)
Ionian relief, c. 525 B.C., North Frieze, Siphnian Treas., Mus. Delphi
(CGB '77); + dig. detail: lion
Ionian, c. 525 B.C., Siphnian Treasury Frieze, Gigantomachy, another detail,
Museum, Delphi (v + dig. first, closer detail)
As when a lion, murderous, springs among the cattle …
And their flanks heave with terror; even so the Achaians
Scattered in panic before Hector and Zeus, the great father.
(Iliad, XV, 630 ff, Lattimore)
As when a ravening fire breaks out deep in a bushy wood…
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So Atreus' son, Agamemnon, roared through the ranks
Of the Trojans in flight… (Iliad, XI, 155 ff, Lattimore)
How high Homeric metaphor, like this Archaic freize (of the Syphnian Treasury at
Delphi) lifts the earth-misery of town-destroying man: Godlike Achilles, lamented by his
immortal mother:
To a bad destiny I bore you in my chambers …
your life must be brief and bitter beyond all men's.
(Lattimore)
Joshua's attack on Jericho, events also of around 1200 told centuries after, shuns that
tragic detachment of the Olympian:
at the seventh time, when the priests blew with the trumpets, Joshua
said unto the people, Shout; for the Lord hath given you the city. And
the city shall be accursed … and all that are therein … only Rahab the
harlot shall live … Because she hid the messengers that we sent … So
the people shouted when the priests blew with the trumpets, and … the
wall fell down flat…
51)
Greek, 6th cent. B.C., Odysseus and the Cyclops' Ram (gilded bronze),
Museum, Delphi; + V detail
From the other, the homecoming myth of Odysseus, this escape from the cave,
tied to the Cyclops' ram — how remote the holiness of Israel: Joseph, with his cloak of
many colors, his bondage, fortune, and delivery, a chronicled exemplum of the Chosen:
be not grieved, nor angry with yourselves that ye sold me hither: for
God did send me before you to preserve life…
As God reveals to Jacob:
fear not to go down into Egypt: for I will there make of thee a great
nation…
Yet those radical opposites, to blend in the Alexandrian melt, must have
precipitated together from one Egyptian, near-Eastern and Aegean matrix — the daughter
Agamemnon sacrificed for war, Iphigenia, "strong born," of the same name with that
Yepthe-genia sacrificed in Judges, the Daughter of Jeptha, "mighty man of valour."
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52)
52a)
52b)
Symbolic History
Attic, c. 520 B.C., Athena vs. the Giants, from Hecatompedon, old Acropolis,
Athens (CGB '77)
Same, detail of Athena (CGB '77)
Same, detail of Giant (CGB '77)
Out of Greek myth comes also tragedy, that Dionysian-Apollonian knot of divine
terror and reconciliation which Greek art suggests in its Gigantomachias — this from the
sacred Pediment of the Hecatomb temple on the Pisistratid Acropolis — the Battle of
Athena with the giants — on the line that leads to the cry of Oedipus, which we, no more
than Yeats, can translate:
ιου, ιου; τα παντ' αν εξηκοι σαφη…
Ω φως, τελευταιον σε προσβλεπσαιµι νυν
O! O! All brought to pass! All truth! …
Light, I look my last upon you,
Found in bloodshed, birth and marriage all accursed.
(CGB)
How much more faith has given in the translation of Hebrew pain:
Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was
said, There is a man child conceived…
a53)
53)
53a)
Parthenon, 447-32 B.C., (from the Propylean) Athens (CGB '77)
Modern realization of the interior of Phidias' 447-432 B.C. Parthenon
Greek (post-Phidian), c. 340 B.C., Head of Zeus, Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston
A clue to some synoptic harmony of the ancient world that the Book of Job,
dramatizing Jeremiah's debate with God's justice: "wherefore doth the way of the wicked
prosper?" (a legend coming into the Bible perhaps from Babylon), seems to share the 5th
century with the Athenian climax of the same tragic inquiry — its cognate in art the
temple celebration of dangerous yet healing divinity: this reconstructed Parthenon
Athena, shielded and shod with myths of battle, and on the pedestal, Pandora tempted to
the God-given box of grief for man.
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Then answered the Lord unto Job out of the whirlwind and said:
Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee… Canst thou draw out
leviathan with an hook? … He is a king over all the children of pride.
But "the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning"; and the same blind
Oedipus of whom the chorus had said:
ιω γενεαι βροτων…
O generations of men, how I count you equal
with those who live not at all!
walked at Colonus, into immortal Light.
54)
54a)
Hellenistic (Pergamum), 180-160 B.C., Battle of Athena and the Giant
Alcyoneus, with Gê and Nikê, Staat. Mus., Berlin
Same, detail left
That Typhœan wrestling darkens from the 6th century through the Periclean 5th to
the Hellenistic pride of this Pergamum. What if Attic enlightenment idealizes its
Olympians against the Apollyon-winged and serpent-wreathed pathos of nature's giants?
Are not all whelmed in weightier struggle — as when Lucretius espouses Promethean
Epicurus against these very gods?
When human life lay, crushed by religion, grovelling on the ground…
a man of Greece first dared… unbar the gates of nature… for each
thing define its deep-set boundary mark. …Religion trampled in turn,
we, by his victory are exalted to the stars.
a55)
b55)
55)
Selinunt, 7th-5th cent. B.C., Ruins of Temples E, F, &G, Sicily
Sicilian Greek, c. 480 B.C., Giant Atlas from Zeus-Temple, Agrigente, Sicily
Same, another view (video also adds a detail of b55)
Greek measure, with its warnings against hybris, cannot hide the risk of Greek
daring. When we stand among the ruins of the mightiest temples at Selinunt, or here at
Agrigento, where Atlas, one of the Giants who supported the great entablature, was
thrown by earthquake, we gauge, through Olympian worship, the deeper than Oriental
excess — as Telemon Ajax, in The Iliad, contends with the gods.
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Nor can the Jehovah submission of Jerusalem obscure at the other center the
prophetic assumption of what, through the visions of Isaiah (28:1) — "The Lord … shall
punish … leviathan, that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea"
— through Daniel's great Image of Man, Ezekiel's Beasts and the Valley of Dry Bones,
was working toward Christian Revelation —
a56)
56)
Greek, 6th cent. B.C. to 132 A.D., Temple of Olympian Zeus, Athens
(CGB '77); video: upper detail only
Same, another view (CGB '77); video: lower detail only
as when the “Dies Irae” and the City of God first loom in Zephaniah (626 B.C. and after):
The great day of the Lord is near … a day of wrath … a day of waste
and desolation … of clouds and thick darkness. …
Sing, O daughter of Zion; shout, O Israel; be glad and rejoice … O
daughter of Jerusalem …
In Athens the gigantism overweens in the Olympieion under the Acropolis (here
its southwest corner, with a human figure). We tend to blame this disproportion on
Rome, since the temple was restored and finished by Hadrian. But the Seleucid
Antiochus had poured vast sums into a Hellenistic reconstruction, following the ground
plan (though not the Ionic order) of a temple begun by Pisistratus, 6th century B.C. tyrant
of Athens, under whom the Homeric poems were also said to have been ordered.
a57)
57)
Greek, 447-32 B.C., Parthenon, Acropolis, Athens
Attic (Phidias, etc.), 447-32 B.C., Horsemen, Frieze, Parthenon (CGB '77);
+ V detail (shown first)
The Parthenon, of half the size, is both the peak of affirming dignity, and (like the
Periclean Funeral Oration and the Disaster Oration) the turning point to an almost sighing
caress. In the most beautiful of the Horsemen, as he looks behind him, archaic and early
classical dream toward the elegiac sweetness of Praxitiles — as if this ripeness of face,
this perfect fall of robe, enacted at once both Sophocles and Euripides.
The book of Ruth is of the time:
Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for
whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy
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people shall be my people, and thy God my God. … The Lord do so to
me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.
But where the acme of the prophetic arrow?
a58)
58)
59)
Double of the two slides to follow
Attic, c. 500 B.C., Korê 674, Acropolis Museum, Athens
Praxitilean, c. 300 B.C., Head of a Girl, from Chios, Fine Arts Museum,
Boston
What the Parthenon straddled was the watershed between Archaic and Hellenistic
personality — that outward and inward softening, which no words need describe. But if
words were required, the maturation of consciousness would take us from Sappho's sharp
mystery (though blurred in Leonard's translation):
Death shall be death forever unto thee,
Lady, with no remembrance of thy name
Then or thereafter; for thou gatherest not
The roses of Pieria, loving gold
Above the Muses. Even in Hades' House
Wander thou shalt unmarked, flitting forlorn
Among the shadowy, averted dead.
to Poseidippus' moody 2nd century B.C. poem about Sappho, and her brother Charaxus'
passion for Doricha, in Egypt (here Lucas' Tennysonian shades not inappropriate):
Long since your bones have mouldered; long Doricha, the binding
Of your curls, long all the fragrance from your robe has passed away,
That you flung round fair Charaxus and caught him in its winding
And breast to breast lay drinking, until the dawn was grey.
But the white page of Sappho lives on and lives for ever,
Proclaiming your name also, your name thrice-blest, the while
That Naucratis shall remember, while ships shall breast her river,
Standing in from seaward to the long lagoons of Nile.
60)
Attic (after Calamis?), c. 400 B.C., Head of Apollo, Louvre, Paris; + V detail,
shown first; also dig.
Music:
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In the Louvre Apollo, that 400 post-Phidian and Euripidean hunger invites not only the
rise of Macedon, but, in the polarization of the ancient world, the seed of another
assurance.
For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the
Lord, as the waters cover the sea.
But for the flooding in of Habakkuk's tide, the human — here as in the Platonic
dialogue still rich with sensuous person and residual delight — must be hollowed by
centuries of Alexandrian ease and Roman rule.
61)
Attic, early 4th cent., B.C., Grave stele, National Museum, Athens (CGB '77)
Yet the soulful turn had been taken. Fourth-century Attic tombs assume the mood which
in the Greek Anthology pervades the late Classical. Plato voiced it in the epitaph Shelley
would translate as "Morning and Evening Star":
Thou wert the morning star among the living,
Ere thy fair light had fled;
Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus, giving
New splendor to the dead.
62)
Greek, c. 335 B.C., Fresco of a woman, Vergina Tombs, Macedon (dig. +
detail)
We pick it up from the Macedonian graves supposedly of Philip and his family,
this lately discovered fresco of Ceres (or, of the woman mourned), the earliest preserved
example of Greek painting. It was also in Macedon that Euripides died, having written
Iphigenia in Aulis — this chorus translated by H.D.:
But still we lament our state,
The desert of our wide courts,
Even if there is no truth
In the legends cut on ivory
Nor in the poets
Nor the songs.
Thus every fresh vigor as it takes up Greek rule, must take up the brooding of late Greek
consciousness.
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63)
Symbolic History
Græco-Scythian, early 4th cent. B.C., Warriors from a gold comb, Hermitage,
Leningrad; + V. detail (also dig.)
There will be flashes of life-renewal, as Greek skills pour to the barbarian tribes
(here the craft of the goldsmith adapted to the Scythian north of Thrace); but like the early
art of Rome, it is postconscious. Whereas the Celts of the 7th century funeral car had not
entered Zechariah's Judgment ground of sophistic soul:
In that day, saith the Lord, I will smite every horse with astonishment,
and his rider with madness … .
64)
Attic, 320-310, Grave stele of Aristonautes, Warrior, National Museum,
Athens (CGB '77); + V detail (also dig.)
As the pre-Roman force of this Attic soldier's tomb (c. 320 B.C.) may remind us,
Greek arms were never more distinguished. The century opened with the Anabasis of
Xenophon and his 12,000 stranded mercenaries, on the march through the whole of Persia
to the sea — "Thalassa!" — "to show the Hellenes they could bring their paupers over
here and make them rich." By 370 Epaminondas of Thebes had invented the phalanx of
fifty shields deep which Philip II of Macedon and Alexander would apply. The Greek
polis, however, had lost the helm; and without knowing it, all those warring souls were
swept in the vortex of Daniel's four kingdoms yielding to the vision of the ram thrown
down by the goat:
The ram which thou sawest having two horns are the kings of Media
and Persia. And the rough he-goat is the king of Graecia, and the great
horn that is between his eyes is the first king (Alexander).
65)
Greek (Macedon), c. 335 B.C., Ivory head (Philip II?) from Vergina Tombs,
Macedon; + V detail; not dig.
In this ivory head, presumably of Philip with his blinded eye, we read the halfcynical spread of shrewd Attic enlightenment among the northern Greeks. Philip had
been born the year the Spartans took the citadel of Thebes by treachery; as a Theban
hostage he had watched the tricky bickering of Hellas. His kingship saw the Phocians
mint the treasures of Delphi for their war. His death would touch off the sort of motherplotting so rife in later Rome (his son by Cleopatra murdered in her lap and she forced to
hang herself).
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66)
Symbolic History
Later replica of Greek (Cresilas), 440-430 B.C., Bust of Pericles, British
Museum, London
Far from the Athenian ideal of Pericles, the high truth of his words:
Our constitution … favors the many instead of the few; this is why it is
called a democracy … the laws … afford equal justice to all … in our
enterprises we present the singular spectacle of daring and deliberation
… although usually decision is the fruit of ignorance, hesitation of
reflexion …
67)
Attic (Leochares), c. 340-330 B.C., Portrait of the young Alexander, Acropolis
Museum, Athens (CGB '77); + V detail, shown first; so dig.
Before this Leochares Alexander we might ask if Olympia had yielded herself
indeed to Homeric Zeus as serpent. Hegel:
The Greek life is a truly youthful achievement. Achilles, the ideal
youth of poetry, commenced it; Alexander the Great, the ideal youth of
reality, concluded it… the freest and finest individuality that the real
world has ever produced… Both appear in contest with Asia …
But that absorbed Greek rapture goes flat in the apocryphal First Book of Maccabees:
Alexander… went through to the ends of the earth and took spoils of
many nations… whereupon he was exalted, and his heart was lifted
up… And after these things he fell sick… and parted his kingdom…
and then died… and evils were multiplied in the earth…
68)
68a)
Roman copy from Lysippos, 330-325 B.C., Azara Herm of Alexander, Louvre,
Paris
Same, detail
This portrait after Lysippos of Alexander, older and sadder, may admit more of
the mission Plutarch was to summarize: ("Fortunes of Alexander," Loeb)
He believed he came as a heaven-sent governor… for the whole
world… he brought together into one body all men everywhere,
uniting and mixing in one great loving-cup, as it were, men's lives,
their characters, their marriages, their very habits of life. He bade
them consider as their fatherland the whole inhabited earth…
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How desperately Hegelian the self-willed means. Barr:
Part of the myth he had… created before this year of 323 was that of
blood and agonizing death, of depopulation, of drunken orgy and
barbarous vandalism, of an insane striving for world conquest, and
above all of the paranoiac… hybris of a man determined to be God.
Though the last irony is of a self-mocking Achilles — that he foresaw, on his death, a
great funeral contest.
69)
Muslim (Shiraz), 1410-11, Iskander and the Water Nymphs, MS Addit.
27261 f 286, British Museum, London; + V & dig. detail
One would think the facts of Alexander marvel enough: his leaping into an Indian
city and fighting on, almost mortally wounded; his pouring out a helmet of water in the
Gedrosian desert, unwilling to drink before his thirsting men. Yet by the 2nd century
A.D., history, forgery, and folk myths had fused in the Romance of Alexander, to spread
through twelve centuries and from India to the Atlantic. Here (above) as Iskander,
crowned Muslim, he has crossed the Eastern Sea and come to a lake on an island, where
with a companion he spies on the water nymphs at play. It was a conquest beyond his
dreams.
70)
Chinese (from Chin-tsun), Lo-yang, Honan, 4th-3rd cent. B.C., Mirror with
gold and silver inlay of a hunting scene
History is the myth of the actual. What East-West links are implied by hunts, in
bronze enchased with gold and silver, from Chinese Honan, about the time of Alexander,
when Grecian goldsmiths were bringing realism to such Scythian scenes, we can only
guess.
71)
Chinese (or Alexandrian) 2nd c. B.C. - 1st cent. A.D. (?), Painted glass cup
from Begram, Musée. Guimet, Paris; + V & dig. detail
But in two centuries the refined arts of Alexandria had spread and seeded their
like along the silk route, through Bactria and Kabul to China — witness this vase of
Greek God-rapes, Europa, this Leda, found in Begram, Afghanistan, and published as
both Hellenistic and Oriental.
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72)
Symbolic History
Lucanian Greek, S. Italy, c. 380 B.C., Dolon Painter, Calyx Crater, detail,
Dolon ambushed by Odysseus and Diomedes, British Museum, London
Greek sculpture seems mostly epic or tragic. But vase painting, from the 5th
century on (here about 380, Dolon ambushed by Odysseus and Diomedes) can
marvellously catch the grotesque — as from Aristophanes: Dionysus and his servant in
the Underworld:
Slave! take up your load again!/ (Servant): Before having laid it
down?… Hire one of the dead, who is going to Hades… /(Dionysus):
Hi… you dead fellow there! Will you carry a package to Pluto for
me?/ Is it very heavy? — You will pay me two drachmae./ Two
dear!… Here are nine obols./ (Dead Man): I'd sooner go back to
earth…
a73)
73)
China, Sung; Chou Chi-ch'ang, 1184, Arhats bestowing alms on beggars, Fine
Arts Museum, Boston
Same, closer detail
Where is that vase-finesse of caricature line most pursued? It would be ridiculous
to look for Greek influence in a Chinese silk painting more than a thousand years later;
indeed the advance of international time, style, consciousness, tells in every wrinkle and
tatter of this Sung calligraph. But what lies definitively between the older Chinese and
this
74)
Japanese, late Jomon, 4th cent. B.C. (?), Clay figurine from Iwatsuki,
Nakazawa Collection, Tokyo
is the penetration of the Orient by the Hellenistic seated on Buddhism. What else
effected the upheaval between the clay figurines of B.C. Japan
75)
Asuka, 552-645 A.D., Bodhisattva, National Museum, Tokyo; + V. detail
and the 6th-century arrival (here in bronze) of the blessing Boddhisattvas? Even
Alexander might have been startled by the magnitude of that oblique conquest. But the
Japanese refinement
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76)
Symbolic History
China, Northern Wei Dynasty, 465-75 A.D., Sandstone Buddha, Shansi,
China
came from China — this smiling Buddha of warm rose sandstone at least a century
earlier; the Chinese
77)
Indian, Gandhara, 2nd-3rd cent. A.D., Gray schist Buddha, British Museum,
London
came from India — this Gandharan Buddha from the 2nd or 3rd century, the trading peak
of the Antonine Empire, and it testifies in the curves of lip and hair, the plane of forehead
continued to the nose, to the Alexandrian heritage; while these heavy eyes have translated
into nirvana the moody search of late Græco-Rome.
78)
Alexandrian Bronze, c. 1st cent. B.C., Perfume vase, head of Negro youth,
British Museum, London
Although Alexander was concerned about the source of the Nile, he pursued it
only in thought. Yet here, too, the civilization which bore his name reached out through
centuries to set up realms of thought of which he was hardly aware. It seems pure
accident when Hellenistic bronzes of Negro youths (this head as perfume jar)
79)
African, Benin, S. Nigeria, 15th-16th cent., Head of a queen mother, bronze,
British Museum, London
find Nigerian cognates, up to 15 centuries after, in Ife and (here) Benin. But surely the
metallurgic mystery had spread from Egypt and the upper Nile through Meroe and the
Berber North, to Ghana, Mali, and the lower Niger. The Yoruba are migrants from the
north and east, ultimately from the outreach of Alexandria.
80)
Acropolis of Athens, 5th cent. B.C. and ff., from Philopapou Hill (CGB '77); +
V detail
Every family tree has its own center, from which it expands back in geometric
progression to the roots of all ancestors, and forward to the limbs and branches of all
heirs. Until Paul preached in the Areopagus, Athens was Hellenistic center. Behind lie
the springs of Celtic North, Crete, Asia, Egypt; before, the vast acculturations under
Macedon and Rome. Even here, below the Parthenon, those tiered arcades — of the
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Theater of Herodes Atticus and the Stoa of Eumenes — hem the Periclean with GræcoRoman mass.
81)
Attic, 5th and 4th cent. B.C., Theatre of Dionysos, south of Acropolis, Athens
(CGB '77); + V detail, shown first; no dig. detail
In that same complex under the Acropolis the theater of Dionysus, its wooden
benches replaced (in Alexander's time) with stone, housed for that "School of Hellas" the
heart of ritual drama revealed in Aeschylus' Suppliants:
O Land of Hills, of all-just veneration,
What must we suffer?
ιω γα βουνι, πανδικον σεβας,
τι πεισοµεσθα;
A veneration which, from this small center, still spreads over the world.
82)
V82a)
Roman, Istrian, 1st-2nd cent. A.D., Vespasian's Arena, detail, Pula
(CGB '77)
Same, a wider view (CGB '77) [video file]; not for dig.
And when Rome flung its arches and vaults around the Mediterranean (here in Dalmatian
Istria — like the Colosseum itself, and built under the same Vespasian), everywhere in
that pomp
83)
83a)
Roman, 484 B.C., 117 B.C., rebuilt by Tiberius 6 A.D., Temple of Castor,
Rome
Roman Forum, B.C. to 4th cent. A.D. (CGB '48; copy of Rome 8)
rose the temple reminders of what was deeply bedded in Greece — as these Corinthian
columns of the Temple of Castor in Rome, reach back, from Tiberius' 6 A.D. rebuilding
— through the 117 B.C. construction, to the original, 484 B.C., in the great century of
Hellas. It was that community which prepared, through the Alexandrian, for New
Jerusalem.
84)
Egyptian Obelish, set up 10 B.C. by Augustus, Circus Maximus, now in the
Piazza del Popolo, Rome (CGB '86); + V detail, shown first
June 1996
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84a)
Symbolic History
Same, another view, evening silhouette (CGB '86)
And as Alexander in the conscious wedding of Greece, Africa, and Asia had gone
to the Oasis of Siwah in the Sahara and become the child of Ammon, whom the Greeks
called Zeus — so it was in the cards that Augustus should fetch from Egypt this obelisk to
be erected in the Circus Maximus (whence Sixtus V would move it to the Piazza del
Populo) — symbol of the incorporation of civilized history into the world-city of Rome.
85)
Alexandrian, 1st cent. B.C.-1st cent. A.D., Head of Homer, Fine Arts
Museum, Boston; V: detail only
For its poetic source that whole culture looked to the blind bard who sang of
Ilium. Yet Homer's poems — like this imagined portrait, like all those smooth Apollos
and Venuses the Renaissance would praise as Greek — must have been somehow ripened
and softened by Athenian and Alexandrian editing, culminating in Aristarchus about 150
B.C. (where earlier papyri vary among themselves and from our text).
86)
Greek, c. 640 B.C., Ivory "Daughters of King Proitios"(?), Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York City; + V detail, shown first; not dig.
Art, even a century after Homer (this ivory, thought of King Proitios' daughters,
who boasted of their beauty and, maddened by Hera, roamed ten years lusting for men),
would hardly have stirred such academic praise as The Iliad did in Joseph Andrews:
agreement of action to subject… manners… diction… propriety…
This is sublime! This is poetry!
If for Homer, Fielding could have been offered epoi of the Geometric Age, would
"propriety" have been his word?
87)
Greek, perhaps 1st cent. A.D., style of 500 B.C., bronze, Apollo of Piombino,
Louvre, Paris; + V detail, shown first; not dig.
In the bronze Apollo of Piombino, such clean archaizing, with imperial
sensuousness, had led to datings from about 500 to the 1st century B.C. Now coins
discovered in the core seem to prove it later still (despite the Dorian inscription on the
foot), a pastiche from the 1st century after Christ. Was Homer somehow refined for his
civilized role?
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88)
Symbolic History
Double: Hellenistic, 3rd cent. in Roman copies: [A] Sophocles, Lateran, and
[B] Demosthenes (from Polyeuctus bronze), Vatican, Rome; + V detail of the
pair; so dig., no singles
In the columned agorae of the Hellenistic cities, from Athens to Pergamum,
Alexandria to Rome, the cultural heroes took their places with the gods: here Sophocles
and Demosthenes, now in the Lateran and Vatican — the Periclean poet (two centuries
later) asserting Athens proud and free; Demosthenes, his Philippic struggle for a freedom
past. Though both, for Rome, enforced the civic claim: Virgil to shape a poem of such
command; Cicero to sound high-minded rhetoric against a foregone loss.
89)
Hellenistic copy, 1st cent. B.C.(?) from 4th cent. original, Bust of Euripides,
National Museum, Athens
Among these defenders of the old, the new men of 400 B.C. appeared:
Thucydides, realist historian; Democritus, Atomic inquirer; old Oligarch Aristophanes,
mocking his own values; this tragedian of disillusion, Euripides, to ride the tide of a more
broken age.
a90)
90)
Hellenistic, 3rd-2nd cent. B.C.(?), Portrait of Socrates, British Museum,
London [red background]; video: detail only
Same, another view (black and white); dig. to detail of a90
Though the man who cut the deepest swath of search ("wisest and justest and
best") was the one most driven to internalize the laws: "Men of Athens, I honor and love
you; but I shall obey God before you." Symptomatic, that in so seemingly Apollonian a
reasoner as Socrates, the Dionysiac strain of God-rapture should reveal itself, even to the
Silenus appearance and the aulus of Marsyas — as Alcibiades says in the Symposium:
My heart leaps within me more than that of any Corybantian reveller,
and my eyes rain tears when I hear (his words).
If the new Socratic love moults the wings of the soul toward the immortal possession of
the good —
a91)
Egypt, Dynasty XIX, c. 1250 B.C., Rameses II as Osiris, Rock Temple of Gerf
Housein, Nubia; + dig. detail
June 1996
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91)
Symbolic History
Egypt, Dynasty XIX, c. 1250 B.C., Death Temple of Rameses II, Thebes
had not Dionysus implied such things in his mysteries? It is Herodo–tus who traces him
and his rites to the Egyptian god of the dead, Osiris:
for the Egyptians do not all worship the same gods, excepting Isis and
Osiris, the latter of whom they say is the Grecian Bacchus …
I maintain that Melampus… having become acquainted with the
worship of Bacchus through knowledge derived from Egypt (I believe
from Cadmus, the Tyrean) introduced it into Greece.
Here Rameses II, as Osiris, stands by the piers of his funerary temple, arms folded in the
mummy cross with which he dies and wakes from the grave. The temple is in upper
Egypt, near Homer's
Thebes of the hundred gates, where through each gate two hundred
fighting men come forth to war with horses and chariots —
surely the name-city of Boeotian Thebes, where by the Greek myth Dionysus was born of
the thunderer and burning Semele.
a92)
b92)
92)
Leonardo da Vinci, 1511-15, Bacchus, Louvre, Paris
Attic (Vulci), c. 500 B.C., Kleophrades, red fig. Amphora, Dionysus, Munich
Pakistan, 3rd-2nd millenium B.C., Nude male, stone, from Harappa, National
Museum, New Delhi
In Euripides' Bacchae (c. 406 B.C.), the god is soft, plump, effeminate (as doomed
Pentheus mocks him — or Aristophanes' Charon: "Will you have the goodness to place
yourself there, pot-belly?"). But he is also the bull-horned Bromius of earthquake and
violence. He has returned to Thebes from Asia, like Alexander, having planted the vine
of his worship to the shores of the Indus. This fleshy nude from the Punjab might hint at
that — the first art work (2000 B.C., before the Vedic entry) where incarnate stone speaks
itself Indian. What tie to the Greek mysteries of tragic rebirth, the claim that Lycurgus,
Sparta's first lawgiver, had gone (like Alexander later) as far as India, to talk with the
naked wise men there?
93)
Greek Mosaic (Macedon) c. 300 B.C., Dionysus on a panther, from Palace,
Pella; + dig. upper detail
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93a)
Symbolic History
Hellenistic Mosaic, second half of 2nd century B.C., Dionysus riding a
panther, house of the Masks, Island of Delos (video uses detail of 93)
In this mosaic floor from Pella, the ecstatic god, with thyrsus, and grapegarlanded, rides the Persian Panther. So Pentheus:
I am also told a foreigner has come to Thebes from Lydia, one of those
charlatan magicians, with long yellow curls … flushed cheeks … the
spells of Aphrodite in his eyes.
Strange prototype for the other Syrian of grapes and grain. Yet the tie, in Euripides, to
Christian wonder is such, that resistant Arrowsmith, in the first Chorus, for one "blessed"
("makar" in the Greek) has produced a rhythmic Beatitude of nine:
Blessed are those who know the mysteries of god.
Blessed… who hallows his life…
Blessed… who wield … the holy wand of god…
Blessed, blessed are they: Dionysus is their god!
Immortal child of woman and Zeus, who also mingles West with East.
a94)
b94)
94)
Raphael, 1513-14, Liberation of St. Peter, central prison scene, fresco, Stanza
d'Eliodoro, Vatican
[Slide & dig.] Same, center with left side, guards by moonlight
Same, detail of center with right side, Peter's escape
When his Asian Bacchantes are captured and bound, the ropes fall off and they are
free; so the chains would fall from St. Peter when (as Raphael shows it in the Vatican) "a
light shined in the prison … the angel raised him up … And his chains fell off from his
hands." Or when Bacchus himself is imprisoned in Pentheus' stables, such earthquake
and lightning tear the fabric:
Dionysus:
Let the earthquake come! Shatter the floor of the world.
Chorus:
Look, the palace is collapsing! —
Dionysus is within. Adore him!
as at the Gospel death of Christ, or when Paul was deliverd in Macedonia:
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Symbolic History
And at midnight Paul and Silas prayed, and sang … And suddenly
there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were
shaken … all the doors were opened, and everyone's bands were
loosed.
a95)
95)
95a)
Double of 95 and 96: [A] Etruscan, c. 470 B.C., fresco detail, Triklinius'
Grave, Tarquinia; and [B] Etruscan, 3rd-1st cent., B.C., Charon, detail, Villa
Albani, Rome
From a95A, Triklinius' Grave, detail
Etruscan, c. 475 B.C., Music and Dance Fresco, Tomb of the Leopards,
Tarquinia
Also in Etruscan tomb painting, deeply impregnated by the Greek, 400 B.C.
divides the old Dionysiac rapture of common myth from its sophistic cultivation — an
urbane surface troubled by soul-search. The dancers and musicians of 5th-century
Tarquinia (here from the grave of Triklinius, about 470) keep the rapture of Pindar, clear
as the "Water is best" with which he opens the first Olympian Ode:
Αριστον µεν ‘υδωρ; or the lyring and dancing of the First Pythian Ode (Lattimore):
"Golden lyre, held of Apollo… the singers obey your measures."
96)
Same as B of a95, Charon
As the Dionysiac in Euripides' Bacchae, so the Underworld is revolutionized in
Aristophanes' Frogs (about 405 B.C.). So too this later Etruscan Charon caricatures
legend. (Aristophanes):
you will reach the edge of the vast deep mere of Acheron… There is an
ancient ferryman, Charon by name, who will pass you over in his little
boat for a diobolus… you will see snakes and all sorts of fearful
monsters… then a great slough with an eternal stench …
97)
Etruscan, c. 4th cent. B.C. (?), Satyr from funerary urn, Orvieto; + V detail,
shown first; dig. detail after
What Aristophanes wrote is called "Old Comedy," but already the old Satyr
grotesque grows sophistic — like this 4th-century Etruscan satyr. Thus, when Dionysus,
in hell, beshat with fear, requires a sponge; (Xanthias) "O you most cowardly of gods
and men!" (Dionysus) Cowardly? … I got up, and moreover I wiped myself clean."
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New Comedy applies that personalized grotesque to commoner situations, as
when the Curmudgeon in the Menander play discovered not so long ago, drives in the
servant:
Look out! watch it! clear out, everybody! make way! A lunatic is
chasing me, he's mad!… Showers of rocks and flying clods! Help,
murder!
98)
Attic, early 3rd cent., Assumed portrait of Menander, Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston
Yet the urbane gaze of Menander, through and beyond the phallic faun, sets the
new comedy off from the old. Even the grotesque drops scurrility, leaves political
lampoon; like classical Homer, it assumes propriety; most of all, where the comic issue in
Aristophanes had been a civic god-paean and bacchanal, it takes up now what comedy
has clung to ever since, the private assuagement of romantic love — such an idealization
as Plato's of the Forms, Alexander's of world polis, or as this portrayed face of Menander.
99)
Hellenistic, c. 325-300 B.C., Aphrodite, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
And what could compensate in Epicurean cosmopolis for the ebb of instinctive force, but
the heightening (as also with our world) of conscious dream? So in Menander's play the
Curmudgeon is reformed: "I recognize how wrong I was"; the true lover — "I mean to
take her in marriage, with no dowry and to love her forever" — persuades the girl and
even his own father; the closing song and dance is of civilized victory.
In joy or grief, some romantic loading has occurred —
100)
Greek (Cyprus), 4th cent. B.C., Veiled woman, head (Demeter?), Louvre,
Paris; + V close detail, which the slide show replaces with 100a, Hellenistic
(Pergamum), 2nd cent. B.C., Sleeping Fury, National Museum, Rome, and
100b, 1st half of 2nd cent. B.C. female head, Græco-Roman Museum,
Alexandria (cf. Cycles 39); dig. follows slides show: 100a & 100b
this 4th-century veiled woman from Cyprus, with Meleager, translated by Herrick:
That morn which saw me made a bride,
The evening witnessed that I died.
Those holy lights, wherewith they guide
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Symbolic History
Unto the bed the bashful bride,
Served but as tapers, for to burn,.
And light my relics to their urn.
This epitaph, which here you see,
Supplied the epithalamy.
The mythic Pheonix Herodotus had doubted and Tacitus would almost acclaim —
aspires, a soul-search, from the sensuous itself:
I rose up to open to my beloved; and my hands dropped with myrrh…
upon the handles of the lock … I sought him, but I could not find
him… I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if ye find my beloved,
that ye tell him that I am sick with love.
101)
Hellenistic (from Patras), c. 200 B.C., Bronze Aphrodite, British Museum,
London; + V detail; not dig. detail
But Jerusalem was still a suppressed pocket, Hellenism a vague malaise of refined
delights: Aphrodite, like any dancing girl, bathing or coming from the sea (had Degas
seen this 200-B.C. bronze?). In poetry, what had begun with 6th-century Anacreon,
spread through the Hellenistic, to bog down in rhymed translation:
Depicted thus, in semblance warm,
The Queen of Love's voluptuous form
Floats along the silvery sea
In beauty's naked majesty …
Around her pomp the Nereids play,
And gleam along the watery way.
102)
Greek (Tanagra), c. 280 B.C., Girl with a dulcimer, Louvre, Paris; + V detail,
shown first; so dig.
102a) Greek (Tanagra), c. 250 B.C., Woman in outdoor dress, British Museum,
London (video shows detail only); not so dig.
Such mood-shadowed pleasure is nowhere more exquisite than in the late 4th and
early 3rd century BC figurines from Tanagra.
Music:
June 1996
Hellenistic, 1st cent. A.D., Seikilos Epitaph, History of Music in
Sound, RCA-V-LM-6057, Side IV, Bd.3
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Symbolic History
Their persuasion to joy is elegiac, as in Seikilos' musical epitaph: "Be happy!" (end
Seikilos) Or in the germ of Marvel's "To his Coy Mistress" — Asclepiades, 3rd century
B.C. (Fitts):
You deny me: and to what end?
There are no lovers, dear, in the under world,
No love but here: only the living know
The sweetness of Aphrodite —
a103) Hellenistic (Delos), c. 100 B.C., Aphrodite, Eros and Pan, upper detail,
National Museum, Athens (CGB '77)
103) Same, Aphrodite, Eros and Pan, whole
but below,
But in Acheron, careful virgin, dust and ashes
Will be our only lying down together.
The fetching Delos Aphrodite, who threatens Pan with her slipper as she smiles on
him, is in that vein Catullus also would mine: "My sweetest Lesbia, let us live and love" —
"Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus". But when Marvel takes it up, the dynamic of
Puritan service and secret love (perhaps for his pupil, Lord Fairfax' daughter) gives the
argument of "dust and ashes" a reach unmatched by pagan Eros:
Deserts of vast eternity ...
then worms shall try
That long preserv'd virginity ...
104) Hellenistic, 2nd cent. B.C.(?), Pastoral relief, Antikensammlungen, Munich
104a) Same, Pastoral relief, detail
Amid all this mingling of sensuous play and soul-search, the eclogue appears with
Theocritus, 3rd century BC Sicilian Greek, mewed perhaps in Alexandria, cultivating (like
this Munich relief) the loved nostalgia of the pastoral:
Sweet are the whispers of yon pine that makes
Low music o'er the spring, and, Goatherd, sweet
Thy piping...
A genre which would become Roman (Virgil's "Formosam resonare doces Amaryllida
silvas") then Christian and Renaissance ("A shepheards boye (no better doe him call") until
the sixteen-year-old Pope would manner it:
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Symbolic History
Thyrsis, the music of that murmuring spring
Is not so mournful as the strains you sing.
Nor rivers winding through the vales below,
So sweetly warble, or so smoothly flow...
105)
Chinese (Ming), 15th cent. (?), Scene cut in jade, detail (J.H. Crawford, Jr.); +
V detail (replaced in slide show by 105a: Chinese, Ma Lin, 1246, Listening
to the Wind in the Pines, Hanging scroll (cropped), Palace Museum
Collection, Taichung); also dig. 105 & 105a
Perhaps the richest heirs to Theocritan nature were the Chinese, ages after, as in this
Ming landscape cut in jade. Also in Chinese poetry, the pastoral refuge has been
spontaneous: Li Po:
When you ask why I dwell here docile
Among the far green hills, I laugh
In my heart, my heart is happy.
The peach blossom watches the river running
But remains content. There is a better
Heaven and earth than in the busy world of men.
a106) Hellensitic (Alexandrian, terra cotta), 3rd cent. B.C.(?), The Dwarf, Louvre,
Paris
106) Hellenistic, 2nd cent. B.C., Boy pulling a thorn from his foot, Antiquarium,
Berlin; + V & dig. detail
"Multiply variety in a wilderness of mirrors". In the Alexandrian search, with Eros
and Pastoral Pan came the picturesque, novelaceous, ugly — this 2nd century B.C. boy
drawing a thorn from his foot, those pre-modern poems composed to make shapes on the
page, or Meleager, lst century B.C., "On Mosquitoes": (Fitts)
Squealshrilling Mosquitoes, fraternity lost to shame,
Obscene vampires, chittering riders of the night:
Let her sleep, I beg you! and come
(If you must come) feed on this flesh of mine.
(O useless prayer! Must not her body charm
The wildest, most heartless, most insensate beasts?)
You hear me, devils, I have warned you:
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Symbolic History
No more of your daring,
Or you shall smart from the strength of my jealous
107)
107A)
107B)
hands!
Double: [A] Egyptian, c. 375 B.C., Elderly Man, Fine Arts Museum,
Boston; and [B] Hellenistic, early 2nd cent. B.C., Portrait (Flamininus?),
Musuem, Delphi
Again, Elderly Man
Again, Portrait
No wonder the Israel counterpole darkened by 200 B.C. to
Ecclesiastes. But as this Egyptian portrait, somewhat before, and the Greek, somewhat
after, imply, the rebellion from mosquito-poem cleverness was everywhere a possibility.
The Ecclesiast himself must have heard of Cynic, Stoic, Epicurean.
Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher... all is vanity... The thing that
hath been, it is that which shall be... and there is no new thing under the
sun... in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge
increaseth sorrow. I said in mine heart, Go to now, I will prove thee
with mirth... and behold, this also is vanity...
108)
Roman (end of Republic), c. 30 B.C., Aristius Sarcuto, from a monument to
him and his wife, British Museum, London (CGB '77)
108a) Roman Portrait, c. 50 B.C., bust, Immolator of the Republic, Vatican Gallery,
Rome (copy of Rome 44: CGB '86)
From the perspective of Alexandria, the Rome of this late Republican portrait was
another Hellenistic city, though it spoke Latin and was infused with a stronger will to
power and a deeper stoical struggle than the rest. So where Athens had been the counter
pole to Jerusalem, Rome now becomes the absorptive complement. Ecclesiastes:
I made me great works...I gathered me also silver and gold... So I was
great...Then I looked on all the works that my hands hadwrought, and
on all the labour that I had laboured to do: and behold, all was vanity
and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun...
109)
Roman Egypt, 2nd cent. A.D., Mummy encaustic portrait from Hawara,
British Museum, London; + V detail; not dig.
June 1996
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Symbolic History
How that deepening obverse of vanity (this encaustic from Roman Egypt) cries for
faith:
Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth... or ever the silver
cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken...
— to separate Nirvana soul from Gnostic body writhing on its cross.
Euripides' Phaedra poignance and Racine's primal curse:
Between
Le ciel mit dans mon sein une flamme funeste,
Seneca hardens that action to a blind Roman storm —
a110) Hagesander, Polydorus and Athenodorus of Rhodes, later 2nd cent. B.C.(?),
The Laocoon, head detail, Vatican, Rome
110) Same, Laocoon, whole
110a) Same, upper detail (video takes detail from 110)
Theseus piecing together the torn disjecta of his son, as he commands of the self-murdered
queen (Studley):
Stop hir up hurlde into a Pit, let heavy clodds of ground
Lie hard upon hir cursed hed.
The Laocoon has lost ground since Lessing. Yet the combat of soul which had
informed tragedy, and was peaking, in the Dead Sea Scrolls, to a War of Light on Dark,
forged this last pain of the human family battling the Olympian snake.
When Seneca's Tudor translator Studley, for one word, "Flammae" in the Latin, raps
out a Peter Quince line:
"The flashing flames and furious force of fiery fervent heate",
he stretches a bombast which was there — such over-wrought pathos as, from Scopas
through Pergamum to Rhodes and Rome, has tempted art critics to the term "Hellenistic
baroque".
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111)
Symbolic History
Græco-Roman (Herculaneum), c. 70 A.D. (after Timomachus c. 50 B.C.?),
Medea, National Museum, Naples; + V detail, shown first; no dig. detail
Euripides' Medea may have moved that way, far more this 1st-century A.D.
painting; yet Jason's cry for his slaughtered children is lyrical:
If only I had not begotten them,
To see them thus destroyed by you!
The chorus rounds out the close:
Zeus sends many fates from Heaven;
What was past hope, god fulfills;
The thing looked for, does not happen;
The thing not thought, is what god wills.
Such the outcome of this matter. (CGB)
112)
Roman, 1st cent. A.D., Portrait bust in the Republican manner, Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York City
112a) Roman, c. 50 B.C., Bronze portrait, "Caesar," detail of face; National
Museum, Rome
In Seneca, a rhetoric weighty as Tacitus' Rome twists the Gordian knot of pain to
stark cleavage:
Through the vast spaces of high aether go:
Bear witness, where you ride, there are no gods.
per alta vade spatia sublimi aethere;
testare nullos esse, qua veheris, deos.
To seed the blood revenge of Kid:
And there live, dying still in endless flames,
Blaspheming gods and all their holy names.
113)
Detail of 111, Medea; + V closer detail; no closer dig.
Music:
June 1996
Greek 2nd cent. B.C., 1st Delphic Hymn, Chromatic parts, LM LSC
6057
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Symbolic History
If only we could trace the same pathos, in the lost wealth of accompanied song,
from the Euripides fragment, through these chromatic phrases of the First Delphic Hymn,
to the music Nero would have played and sung, while Rome burned.
(fade
Delphic Hymn)
114)
Græco-Roman (Villa Boscoreale), c. 40 B.C., A Philosopher, National
Museum, Naples; + V detail; so dig.
Could the frescoed philosopher from the Villa Boscoreale, with his Cynic staff and
cloak, sustain that darker surf on the headland of rock? If Epictetus managed:
Look at me, without city, house, possesions, without a slave; I sleep on
the ground; I have no wife, no children...only the earth and heavens,
and one poor cloak. And what do I want?...Who, when he sees me
does not think that he sees his king and master?
Seneca, for all his Stoic books, became a byword for graft and indulgence — until he
rallied at last to the death Nero demanded.
115)
Roman (Pompeii), 70-79 A.D., House of the Vetii, Atrium (CGB '80)
V115a) Same, wall paintings
115b) Same, Phallic Fountain
Through the ease of the Pompeiian House of the Vetii, who could trace the chthonic
swell, rooted in Greek mind and Dionysiac reversibility? Would the paintings, in the style
of Nero's Golden House, suggest that intemperance, or the phallic fountain those omnisexual bouts and banquets Petronius Arbiter's Satyricon enacts near here?
116)
Græco-Roman (Pompeii), 1st cent. A.D., Pastoral scene, National Museum,
Naples; + V details; dig. lower detail
Even the Pompeiian landscape teems with illusion, hungry for Seneca's godpresences in nature:
When you enter a grove peopled with ancient trees, ...does not the
stillness and gloom strike you as with the presence of a deity? Or
when you see a cave in the rock of an over-hanging mountain, is not
your soul suffused with a religious awe? We worship the sources of
great rivers, erect altars where a rush of water bursts from the earth,
and certain pools we hold sacred for their still and somber depths.
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a117) Japanese (Muromachi), c. 1344, Pool Garden of Hojo (Abbot's Quarters),
Tenryu-Ji Temple, Kyoto
117) Japanese (Muromachi), c. 1543, Guest Hall, Monastery of Myoshin-Ji, Kyoto
Was it more than the chance of barbarian invasion which threw down in the West
that sacred hedonism of gardens and villas, while beyond the stretch of Alexandrian dream,
such idolized blessing of dwelling and nature could sustain itself a thousand years — this
Buddhist guest hall and garden in Kyoto, Japan?
a118)
118)
118a)
118b)
Roman, 118-34 A.D., Hadrian's Villa, vaultings, Tivoli (CGB '86)
Same, Hadrian's Villa, Canopus, or pool (CGB '86)
Same, another view
Roman bust of Hadrian, 117-118 A.D., Ostia Museum
Roman Hellenization reached its 8-mile opulence in Hadrian's Tivoli Villa. If the
articulation of vaults and domes, like the Pantheon, looks forward, the arcades, pools and
statues respire Greek nostalgia. Here Hadrian, under whom the drawing back and walling
in of the Empire had begun, wrote his dying poem: "Anima vagula, blandula ..."
Fleeting and caressing soul,
Body's guest and companion
Where are you off to?
What place, stripped and ghastly,
Will house you, not, as once, jocund?
(CGB)
Yet when could Hadrian have been called "jocos"?
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a119) Græco-Roman, 130-38 A.D., Statue of Antinoüs, Museum, Naples; + V detail
119) Another statue of the same Antinoüs, Museum, Delphi (CGB '77)
119a) Same, Antinoüs, Delphi, detail of head; dig. no a119 detail; detail of 119
Was it when he first met the beautiful Bithynian youth, Antinoüs, his love; or in
Athens finishing the Olympeion; or on the administrative travels they made over the
empire? Hardly that superstitious one up the Nile when Antinoüs drowned himself in the
river, and Hadrian stricken, built temples and set up statues as to a god — Theocritus,
Lament for Hylas:
the voice came faint from the water, and near as he was, he seemed far
off.
Bion for Adonis: "He is lost to us, lovely Adonis ..." Moschus for Bion: "Begin, Sicilian
Muses, begin the dirge" — the sequence from which Milton would form "Lycidas," and
Shelley "Adonais": "I weep for Adonais — he is dead."
120) Roman (Africa), Augustan 9-8 B.C., Ruins of Leptis Magna, Tripolitania
120a) Same, Leptis Magna, another view, dark against the light
How often in the market pomp of the imperial cities, Palmyra, Antioch,
Alexandria, this Leptis Magna on the coast of Africa, soul, from a morning of human
possibility, must have looked, by the mere breath of evening, into the vacuity that would
send a shudder through Augustine:
and I became to myself a land of want —
et factus sum mihi regio egestatis.
Slowly the empire of this Augustan city would ripen to that confession.
a121)
Double, which the video separates into A121, Augustan love-vase, terra
cotta from Arezzo, now Archaeological Museum, Barcelona; and B121,
Græco-Roman, Boscoreale skeleton cup, Louvre, Paris. Slide show, video
and dig. repeat these as 121 and 122.
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Two vessels, probably Augustan, the Arezzo terra cotta bowl, now in Barcelona,
with its tender love-making, and the Boscoreale silver cup with piping and dancing
skeletons and a mask of Euripides, reminder of the Infernal contest in The Frogs. The
Virgilian "Copa Surisca" brings them together. Here the beginning and end (Waddell):
Dancing girl of Syria, her hair caught up with a fillet;
Very subtle in swaying those quivering flanks of hers
...half-drunk in the smoky tavern...
And what's the use, if you're tired, of being out in the
dust and heat,
When you might as well lie still and get drunk on your settle?...
Set down the wine and the dice, and perish who thinks of tomorrow!
Here's Death twitching my ear, "Live", says he, "for I'm coming."
123)
Græco-Roman (Pompeii), late 1st cent. B.C., copy of Hellensitic painting,
Satyr and Nymph, National Museum, Naples; + V detail; no dig. detail
Yet that Græco-Rome can mount, with this Pompeian Faun and nymph to the symbolic sky
— as in the adventures of The Golden Ass the legend of Cupid and Psyche appears:
Thus poor Psyches being left alone ... was blowne by ... Zephyrus ...
and brought downe into a deepe valley ... of fragrant flowers ...
— a last pagan cognate for the meeting of the Song of Songs:
A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse... a fountain of gardens, a
well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon.
124)
Raphael and School, 1517, Loggia of Psyche, Farnesina, Rome
What Raphael, in the neo-Platonic Renaissance, would begin in the Farnesina Gallery —
the
labours
of
the
soul
(Psyche)
for
immortality.
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Surely if Raphael had completed the earthly scenes below — that night when her lamp
wakes the winged god — this hall might be the wonder work of Renaissance;
125)
Claude Lorrain, 1664, Psyche before the Castle of Cupid, National Gallery,
London
Or there is Claude's dream-glory of Psyche before the Castle of Cupid:
Shee espied likewise a running river as cleare as crystall: in the midst
of the wood well nigh at the fall of the river was a princely Edifice,
wrought and builded not by the art or hand of man, but by the mighty
power of God...
Renaissance and Baroque bowing to the imperative of Apuleius' vision.
126)
Roman, 270-275 A.D., a stretch of the Aurelian Wall, Rome (CGB '86)
For hundreds of years Rome had required no walls but the limes of the worldempire. But the incursions of the Marcomanni and Alamanni proved the city vulnerable.
When the Emperor Aurelian, from 270 to 275, pressed the construction of the twelve mile
buttressed circuit with towers every hundred feet and huge fortified gates, what were those
Hellenized Romans walling in and what walling out?
127)
Roman (Gaul), 1st cent. A.D., restored statue of Augustus, Roman Theatre,
Orange, France
This lst-century Augustus in the arched stonework of the Theater, not in Rome at
all, but Orange, in that Province to be named for the barbarous Franks, may symbolize what
was hopefully walled in — what Caesar had inherited from Alexander, and the Legions
from the Macedonian phalanx: the claim of an armored might which would pacify and
civilize, spreading the arts of Greece. Yet how graceless that power has become.
128)
Epigonus of Pergamum(?), 220-210 B.C., Roman copy, Ludovisi Death of a
Gaul and his Wife, Thermae Museum, Rome; + V details; no dig. details
If what was to be walled out were the savage tribes of the North, they had also
changed since the funeral wagon bronzes of the wild 7th century. In this Roman copy of
a 3rd century B.C. ex-voto, celebrating Attalus I of Pergamum's victory over the already
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invading Galatians, the wife stabbed and self-stabbing Gaul bear witness that the courage
walled out was admired within.
129)
Roman (Antonine), 180-92, Miracle of the Rains, Marcus Aurelius' Column,
detail, Piazza Colonna, Rome
129a) Same, a closer detail
With the Antonines, Stoic reason, that stronghold of Rome, opens to a hunger for
God's aid. This Miracle of the Rains, with Jupiter Pluvius and the flood-destroyed foe
(carved on Marcus Aurelius' own column) speaks what was bringing in the Testaments,
Old and New.
And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat
upon him was called Faithful and True … And out of his mouth goeth
a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations …
a130) Roman, 136-8, The Deification of the Empress Sabina before Hadrian,
Conservatori, Rome
130) Roman, 160-161, Apotheosis of Antoninus Pius and Faustina, Vatican, Rome
(CGB '86); + V detail; no dig. detail
What mystery scenes of Imperial Apotheosis now assume — Hadrian witnessing
his negelected Sabina lifted from the pyre, or this relief, where the great winged angel of
death and rebirth bears Antoninus Pius and Faustina skyward. All it lacks is faith, the
substance of things unseen:
For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass.
The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away; but the word
of the Lord endureth forever. And this is the word which by the gospel
is preached unto you.
a131) The Sea of Galilee, Boats by the shore (Video shows here slide 131, Caves of
the Dead Sea Scrolls)
b131) Roman (Jewish), 4th cent. A.D., Gold Glass: symbols of Temple and Torah
131) 1st cent. A.D., Caves of the Dead Sea Scrolls (V uses a detail.)
131a) Khibbet Qumran before 68 A.D., Isaiah Scroll
There are discoveries of spirit so germinal as to effect the entire sequent history of
the world and all its arts, yet so inward as to give at the surface hardly a sign of the
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incandescence in which they are conceived. Such the Hebrew ferment leading from the
prophets through the Essenes to John the Baptist, Christ with his disciples, and Paul.
Blake, who required visual arts, had to derive the whole Greek fruit of the Muses of
Memory from the inspired lost originals of the Temple of Jerusalem. It seems more
telling that the visual clue should be only these cliffs and caves of the Dead Sea Scrolls,
occupied perhaps by the Khirbet Qumran from the 1st century B.C. into the1st A.D. —
the desert, some think, to which Jesus withdrew — earth polarized, in the Commentary
on Habakkuk, between "the wicked priest" and that "teacher of righteousness" put to
death, it seems, between 65 and 63 B.C.; or in The War of the Sons of Light with the
Sons of Darkness, to the phrasing Jesus invokes in John: "Walk while you have the light,
lest the darkness overtake you … become sons of the light."
132)
Roman-Syrian, 1st cent., A.D., Trinity of Palmyra (Agli-Bal, Baal-shamin,
Malak-bel), Louvre, Paris; + slide & dig. detail 132a
How peripheral to that center is the carved Trinity of Palmyra, Syria, 1st century
A.D., though its frontal hardening from Classical toward Byzantine implies the widening
of the old tragic gulf toward a doomsday separation — what was turning the cultured
luxury of the Alexandrian to the matrix of search the Nag Hammadi Gnostic Papyri have
unconvered, where Jewish and Neo-platonic, Hindu and Buddhist (those Indian
missionaries reported in Alexandria from at least the 1st century A.D.), with cults from
Egypt and Persia, astrology, magic, pneumatic, and apostolic Christianity — all strove for
what the name implied, for hidden truth, for Gnosis.
133)
Syrian-Jewish, 3rd cent. A.D., Ezekiel frescoes, detail, Synagogue, Dura
Eurotus; + V & dig. details (cf. slide detail, 133a)
By the time of the Gospels, even Judaea, for all its stiff-necked recalcitrance, was
Hellenized, writing in Greek, and, in the Dura Eurotus Synagogue frescoes two centuries
later, transforming Ezekiel's Valley of Dry Bones ("Son of Man, can these bones live?")
into a Greek mystery, with Psyche and her Iris-winged souls. And yet that Jerusalem
pocket, fertilized by the Alexandrian, had given birth to what was conquering, from
within, its Græco-Roman conqueror. As Nietzsche says in Beyond Good and Evil
(Aphorism 121):
There is a subtlety in the fact that God learned Greek when he wanted
to be an author, and that he didn't learn it any better.
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As radical Tertullian would ask: "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" To
which history had more radically answered: "Everything!"
a134) Roman, c. 200 A.D., Persephone's Return to Hades, House on the Caelian Hill
(later dedicated to SS. John and Paul), Rome
b134) Same, Persephone, upper detail
134) Same, Persephone, close detail (video & dig. show various details)
Music:
Stravinsky, Sacre du Printemps, I, Col MG 31202 (opening for four
slides, and close for last three)
What could be closer to us than the great civilized melting pots, late-cycle
crucibles of outward skill and inner search? Yet we do not always love most what is
nearest. To catch in New Kingdom Egypt, or in the Rome of this 200-A.D. detail from
the Persephone myth, an image of our own condition — that moody pride and sensate
soulfulness of which orthodox Irenaeus accused Valentine's Gnostics: that they called the
Biblical Creator a demi-urge and his church a whited sepulchre, themselves led by
intuition into vagaries of pagan thought and sexual license — to glimpse that in a
frescoed face, at once lures and repels: Stravinsky's Rite of Spring; Eliot's "April is the
cruellest month."
135)
135a)
Roman Christian, mid-3rd cent., Orant, "La Donna Velata," head, Catacomb
of Priscilla, Rome
Same, whole figure; + V detail
Is it easier when pagan "proud dejection" assumes the saved upward glance of this
third century Christian orant? —
We know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in wickedness.
(I John)
When Pico, at the Renaissance height of Florence, would voice the radiant heresy
of divine man (by his own will, beast, angel, or God), he had only to free the incarnate
identification of Augustine: (Meditations XV, 3)
Thou didst assume a human rather than an angelic nature and didst
glorify it with the robe of immortality, raising it above all the heavens,
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above all choirs of angels, above the Cherubim, above the Seraphim, to
the right hand of the Father.
136)
136a)
Boedas of Byzantium, c. 300 B.C., bronze Orant, Staatl. Mus., Berlin
Same, Orant, detail; + V closer detail; dig. half, then whole, then close detail
And as the Christian Orant rests on the Greek tradition of gleaming and sensuous
prayer — this 300-B.C. bronze by Boedas of Byzantium, with Socrates under the plane
tree:
Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me
beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and the inward man be
at one —
so that Augustine rests on the Psalter, a collection forming through the Greek centuries:
What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that
thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the
angels and hast crowned him with glory and honour … . O Lord, our
Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth!
137)
Asian Greek, 1st cent. A.D.(?), Fertility Artemis, streets of Ephesus
When Paul spoke in the Græco-Roman city of Ephesus (on Homer's Ionic coast)
and the silversmiths cried for two hours "Great is Diana of the Ephesians," the apostle of
faith opposed, not by Olympian power (the outward and the inward at one) but by a fertility
idol with tits down her belly, "in Sion also not unsung" — whoever could have opened his
eyes there, would have seen in both poles of the confrontation, the quake and subsidence of
the Greek island of temporal and human command.
(fade
Sacre du Printemps)
a138)
138)
Greek (Epidaurus) C. 380: marble, Aesclepius, National Museum, Athens
Coptic, 5th cent. A.D., Angel contending with a demoniac Leda and the
Swan, Coptic Museum, Cairo, Egypt; plus video (and digital) details
Who could have dreamed, in the liberality of Plato's Athens, and looking back to the
Periclean Banquet with Socrates, that the Doctrine of Ideas, nature's changeless
substratum and essential truth (with even in music the condemnation of the sensuous
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major and minor modes, to be banned from Gregorian) — would boil down, after nine
centuries, to this Coptic war on the Greek Genetrix, Leda mounted by the Swan.
Music:
Again, Rite of Spring, toward close of Part I, Col. MG 31202
Though as always in the psyche of repression, one wonders how far the paranoiac angel
(Leda's foot on his genitals) is battling; how far, like Boccacio's Alibech in the same
ascetic desert, rushing to put his own devil in hell.
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No wonder the Gnostic heresies of God feminine and copulative: "I am
androgynous… the womb… the glory of the Mother"; "I am first and last… the whore
and holy one… wife and virgin… mother, daughter" — were suppressed until the
Egyptian papyri discovered in our time.
139)
Double: [A] Again, 138, Angel and Leda; and [B] Greek vase (Attic?), later
6th cent. B.C., Ritual Phallic Dance, Louvre, Paris (video repeats 138, or
139A, then returns through the double to the close); dig. holds double
What like force in opposites: the Coptic 5th-century A.D. denial, against this
ritual phallic dance, Attic, 6th century B.C. In our time, too, the drive to the primitive
and abstract sweeps the sensuous arts in its sway.
Would it be, as with Eliot, some Hollow Man return to the deserts of the Thebaid:
"Concentration/ without elimination… Desiccation of the world of sense/ Evacuation of
the world of fancy"? Or would Yeats 2000-year changing of the tinctures send it in
reverse — his history the beat of great alternating wings, our Christian sun cycle of the
abstract One to yield again to the myth-moon,
140)
Again, 139B, ritual phallic dance; + V & dig. details
the multiform Dionysian influx, for which the old Yeats made himself an incarnate priest,
undergoing the Steinach grafting of ape gonads, for the rejuvenation of his last poems. 1
"News for the Delphic Oracle" — after rejection of Platonic and Christian
paradises — has this close:
Down the mountain walls
From where Pan's cavern is
Intolerable music falls.
Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear,
Belly, shoulder, bum,
Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrs
Copulate in the foam.
1Since the above — medical testimony has turned the rumored Steinach to a vasectomy, physically
ineffectual, though it seems to have heightened the poet’s erotic symbology.
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It is said that in Yeats' manuscript, "Copulate" is a four-letter word. Indeed, the
early Greeks had only those common words: Aristophanes: βινειν βουλοµαι.
(end Rite of Spring, Part I)
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�
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SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
5. The Search for Rome
CHARLES G. BELL
ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
or
1260 CANYON ROAD
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501
August 1995
Last Revised June 1996
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
5. The Search for Rome
a1)
1)
Piranesi, c. 1748, "Vedute di Roma," The Forum, engraving; + video detail
Piranesi, c. 1765, same, Baths of Caracalla, engravinq; + video detail
Music:
Monteverdi 1642, L'Incoronazione di Poppea, Finale, Vox SVBX
5212
Thou stranger, which for Rome in Rome here seekest, And nought of
Rome in Rome perceiv'st at all,
These same old walls, old arches, which thou seest,
Old Palaces, is that which Rome men call.
Behold what wreck, what ruin, and what waste,
And how that she, which with her mighty power
Tamed all the world, hath tamed herself at last,
The prey of time which all things doth devour...
Va2) Piranesi, c. 1759, "Vedute di Roma," Temple of Venus, engraving = dig. 1b
2)
Piranesi, c. 1774, "Vedute di Roma," Temple of Saturn, engraving; first, video
detail; for dig. Va2 stands as b1 above; while 2 has no dig. detail
The English poet Spenser, about 1590—lines echoed from Spain, 1610, Quevedo:
Buscas en Roma a Roma, O peregrino!
Y en Roma misma a Roma no la hallas...
Both translating the French of Du Bellay, from forty years before Spenser:
Nouveau venu, qui cherches Rome en Rome,
Et rien de Rome en Rome n'apperçois...
Rome de Rome est le seul monument,
Et Rome Rome a vaincu seulement...
3)
Piranesi, c. 1775, "Vedute di Roma", Branch of the Aqua Claudia, engraving; + video detail (not dig.)
Du Bellay, varying the Italian of Castiglione, forty years earlier still:
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Superbi colli, e voi sacre ruine,
Che'l nome sol di Roma ancor tenete...
Colossi, archi, teatri, opre divine...
Arches, theatres, divine works of that Rome, which Goethe, two hundred years later
would seek:
a4)
4)
Piranesi c. 1770, "Vedute di Roma", Baths at Hadrian's Villa, engraving
Piranesi c. 1760, "Vedute di Roma", Arch of Constantine and The Colosseum,
engraving; first, video detail (not dig.)
Saget, Steine, mir an, o sprecht ihr hohen Paläste
Ewige Roma...
Speak, you stones, and you high palaces; speak
Eternal Rome!
(music up, then fade)
Though what speaks again and again is not, as with Greece, the primary
phenomenon, but the historical reverberations: Piranesi, Monteverdi's court of Nero and
Poppea, the regal pomp and arcane luxury (while we range the Empire:
5)
5a)
Roman (African) Sabratha c. 200 AD ff., Baths of Oceanus and Temple of Isis
Roman (African) 1st-2nd cent. AD, Lepcis Magna, Auditorium of the theatre
Sabratha, Palmyra—
Music: Monteverdi, Poppea, cont., end of the March
a6)
6)
6a)
Roman (Asia) Baalbek c. 210-217, Temple of Jupiter
Roman (Asia) Palmyra 2nd - 3rd cent. AD, Temple Gate and Colonnade (video
uses horizontal variant, V6; dig. vertical )
Roman (Asia) Palmyra 1st - 3rd cent. A.D., "Street of Columns"
7)
7a)
Graeco-Roman, 1st cent. AD?, Aldobrandini Wedding, Vatican
Same, detail of couple; + closer V detail (not dig.)
(begin Duet)
returning to the Roman Hellenism Nero loved).
8)
The Roman Forum (CGB '48)
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When Rome spoke to Gibbon he was looking out over the Forum from the steps
of what was once the Capitol. This view, with sheep grazing then, was before him;
Va9) Roman Christian 5th cent. ff., Front stairs, Santa Maria in Ara Coeli
(CGB '86); called 8za on dig.; but in fact dig. 9a
9)
Again Santa Maria, Interior, Nave, (left) Columns and aisle (CGB '86)
and at his back, from the church of Ara Coeli, a basilica raised, like so many, on Classical
columns, came the chanting of the barefoot friars—why not a hymn by Fortunatus?
Music:
Fortunatus c.606, Salve Festa dies, Solesmes, Decca 7542A
That anomaly moved him to write The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
For 2nd 8) Roman Forum and Palatine, seen from Arch of Septimius Severus
For it is always over the Dark Age gulf that Rome looms most compellingly—"giants in
the earth in those days"—as the Anglo-Saxon Wanderer broods:
This world, through the wisdom of God, has wasted,
So the pleasure of the proud has utterly perished,
And the wonder-work of giants crumbles worthless.
V2nd 9) Again Santa Maria, Interior, Nave into Choir, (CGB '86) = dig. 9zb
10)
(music)
Roman Christian c. 470, Mosaic bust of St. Victor, Sant'Ambrogio, Milan
Classical arts and lore first came to the West encapsuled in monastic
Christianity—this mosaic bust of St. Victor, in Milan.
11)
Roman Christian c. 330, Christ's Entry into Jerusalem, from Sarcophagus of
Adelphia, National Museum, Syracuse
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Yet even in that rendition to the timeless and spaceless, inherited suavities attest a
vanished earthly command.
(fade Fortunatus)
a12)
12)
Roman 1st c. AD, glass cameo, The Portland vase, British Museum, London;
+ V detail (so dig. = 12b)
Pompeii 1st c. AD, Dionysiac scene (glass), House of Fabius, Naples Museum;
first, V detail (dig. adds detail = 12za)
In the words of Yeats: "a more gracious time has gone." Though of the music that
ravished Greece and Rome, we have only snatches: an Epitaph of Seikilos: "As long as
you live, be cheerful."
Music: Seikilos Song, 1st c. AD, J.E. Butt, private recording
— A time when wine and love and poetry and every spring and grove were sacred to a
god. Horace:
gratia cum Nymphas geminisque sororibus audet
ducere nuda choros—
which Johnson rhymes:
The spritely Nymph and naked Grace
The mazy dance together trace.
But the search for Rome cannot bog down (though Rome almost did) in vain regret
for the soft arts of the Hellenistic twilight. How to summon from the shades the might of
Rome itself?
13) Athenian 447-432 BC, Parthenon, NE corner, Acropolis, Athens (CGB '77)
13a) Same, Parthenon, Head of Selene's Horse from the East Pediment (CGB '77)
The art-road was easier when the search was for Greece. There, a sheer vitality
declares and celebrates itself. Not the Acropolis only, but drama, philosophy, even
history, as the Greeks lived and told it, take the voice of Pericles:
We are the school of Hellas...Wonder unending of after ages shall be
ours. We have made sea and land the highway of our daring, and
everywhere—for evil or good—left deathless monuments … .
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14)
V14a)
Symbolic History
Roman AD 72-90, Flavian Arena (Colosseum), interior, Rome (CGB '86)
Same, Flavian Arena, interior, another view
Where Rome escapes from its monuments, its historians, even from its poet
Virgil, leaves us burdened with the gloom of its own shadow, struggling in a world
which, like Lucretius' universe, wears out and breaks down [II, 1148 ff.]:
In this way the walls too of the great world
Around us shall wear out and come to ruin,
Stormed by successive years and time's decay.
15)
V15a)
Same, outside view (video shows details only, above, then below)
Same, Colosseum, outside (old photo); dig. 15 = 15z, this = 15za
Tacitus, Rome's greatest historian, records:
I have to present in succession the merciless biddings of a tyrant,
incessant prosecutions, faithless friendships, the ruin of innocence, the
same causes issuing in the same results, and I am everywhere
confronted by a wearisome monotony in my subject matter...
(Tacitus, Annals IV, 33, tr., Church & Dodribb)
Music:
a16)
Monteverdi, 1642, again Poppea, close of Prologue, Goehr, Zurich
Opera Society, MMS-2028
Roman 306 AD, Basilica of Maxentius or Constantine, from Capitoline Hill
(CGB '86)
Another view of Basilica, with vestal statues
Same, another view of statues (CGB '86); dig. omits
16)
V16a)
How shall we fasten on the form that vaulted over that failure, not just "the wide
arch of the ranged empire", but the morale that held it—in the words of Pliny, "the
boundless majesty of the Roman peace: Immensa Romanae Pacis maiestas"?
If there was a music of Roman power, it is lost; we have had to let Monteverdi
restore it. And of course he has restored, within outward pomp,
17)
Roman (Flavian) c. 50-100 AD, Male Portrait Bust, Palazzo Capitolino,
Rome; first, video detail (not dig.)
(close of Prologue)
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the imperial decay.
(music to Ottone's opening words: "E puro io")
When Romans of that time thought to recover the truth about themselves—the
strength which despotism and luxury had plainly compromised (Fade Monteverdi)—they
took a clue from Livy, that moralizing historian (or from Virgil, for that matter):
18)
Roman 4th-3rd cent. BC, Warriors, Bronze handle of a Cista, Villa Giulia,
Rome; + V detail (dig. waits for 2nd 18)
they looked to their stern beginnings in military virtue, a time of legendary Horatios at the
bridge, or of ""Troius Aeneas, pietate insignis et armis"; though these beginnings are not so
early as Troy, or even as Sparta and Athens. It is crucial that these disciplined, almost primitive foot-soldiers are of the 4th or 3rd century BC, when the Greek cities are already in
political decay.
19)
Attlc (Kleitias) c. 570 BC, Landing of Theseus' Companions, from François
vase, Museo Archaeologico, Florence; + V detail (here dig. waits)
If we go back two or three hundred more years (here a scene from the tale of
Theseus), we find the Greeks, too, keen for Ares, but with a spirit as different, as Homer
is from Virgil. This preconscious vibrance can only loosen, as individuation ripens, into
Plato's "fair and spangled" state, where "everything is ready to burst with liberty."
2nd 18)
Detail of 18, Roman 4th-3rd c. Warriors; for dig. = 19za
But the Roman discipline seems to take up where the Greek left off; it is postconscious, post-individual. Against the Macedonian phalanx, the Latin soldier with his
shield, spear and short sword, was a fighting independence, self-bound into the moral
collective. As if the Classical world had two phases, the Roman ordering and constrictive,
2nd 19)
Detail of 19, Landing of Theseus' Companions [video then briefly returns
to Roman Warriors]; dig. here doubles details of 18 & 19
against the exploratory and liberating Greek. So Hegel contrasts "the multiform variety
of Greece" to "the crushing Destiny" of Roman power.
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20)
Symbolic History
Ionian (Magna Graecia) c. 460 BC, Birth of Aphrodite, Ludovisi Throne,
Thermae, Rome
Under the weighty vaults of the Roman Thermae, Greek originals smile out (this
Ludovisi Birth of Aphrodite), like Persephone ravished to the underworld, sojourners in
the darker shade.
21)
V21a)
Roman c. 10 AD, Ludovisi Juno, National Museum. (Thermae), Rome
Same, another view, detail; not dig.
Here even the gods are stern, Juno, constrained, like her sober Romans (thus Jove in the
Aeneid): (I, 279-283)
Harsh Juno too,
Who now with terror tires earth, sea and sky,
Will turn to kinder counsels, and with me
Cherish the Romans, masters of the world,
The togaed nation. So it is decreed.
(CGB using Rhoades)
a22)
b22)
22)
Graeco-Roman 1st c. BC?, Musing Woman ("Domina"), from Dionysiac
Frieze, det., Villa dei Misteri, Pompeii
Cyprian late 4th c. BC, Female head, terra cotta, Cyprus Museum, Nicosia
Graeco-Roman late 1st c. BC?, Terror-Stricken Woman, detail, Great Frieze,
Villa dei Misteri, Pompeii
Music:
Euripides 408 BC, Orestes fragment, Therriault & Lynch, St.
John's, Santa Fe
The cyclical modification of human development seems here to confront us. It is
a question of introspective personality, with the somber weight it lays on the soul. The
distinction is less of Greek and Roman than of early and late; though what the Greeks
matured —the subjectivity which was their "principle of decay" (Hegel) and which the
chromatic fragment from Euripides wonderfully expresses (close Euripides)—the
Romans had to contend with, had to order. Almost any head from the 4th century BC
down, would present us (as does this Pompeiian one from the Villa dei Misteri, 1st
century BC) with self-awareness like a palpable thing.
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23)
Symbolic History
Kleophrades Painter c. 500 BC, (found Vulci), Maenad in Ecstasy, Antique
Collections, Munich
And the leap back to almost any before 500 BC gives the effect of having opened a drain,
from which that shadowing selfhood pours, to leave the crystal clarities of the tribal and
pre-personal—of myth. (If only a comparable music could be picked up from the groves
and columns of Olympia.)
Va24)
24)
Etruscan 2nd half of 6th c., Reclining Couple, Villa Giulia, Rome
Etruscan 509 BC, Apollo from Veii (terracotta), head, Villa Giulia, Rome
In fact, the two phases had been run through on Italian soil by those puzzling
Etruscans, whose non-Indo-European language and mysterious origin (more Thucydides'
Tyrhennians than Herodotus' Lydians), did not prevent their paralleling, almost from year
to year, the Greek maturation of consciousness; so that this smiling head, or the
contemporary tomb paintings from Tarquinia, wear a kind of Greek stamp of 500 BC, and
of archaic impersonality.
25)
Etruscan 4th c. BC (or after?), Head from a sarcophagus, Carlsberg,
Copenhagen
Whereas this sarcophagus portrait, though Italian in realism, is 4th century in
awareness—like the latest paintings, near the present graveyard, under the hummocked
wheatfields of Tarquinia. This is the private responsibility with which Rome began, and
for which it had to frame a universal law and moral discipline.
26)
Spanish (Punic?) 3rd c. BC?, Lady of Elche, Prado, Madrid
We yield to the temptation of beauty (though there is disagreement about the Lady
of Elche's date) to hint that the conscious and sensuous ripening was Mediterranean, and
that after 400 BC (or for a guess, 3rd century) it was felt also in Graeco-Punic Spain.
27)
Double: [A] Hellenistic 3rd c. BC, Head of Alexander, British Museum,
London, and [B] Etrusco-Roman, 3rd. c. BC?, called Junius Brutus,
Conservatori, Rome; + singles [slide V & dig. order: 27A; 27; 27B]
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Though to sense how Rome could enlist that inwardness which had become the
liability of Greece, a direct contrast will be most instructive—and from the very time that
Polybius undertook to account for the Greek decline and Roman rise. Set the idealized
rapture and refined yearning of the Praxitilean and Alexandrian—its worlds to conquer
turning into dream (as Alcibiades' did, and even Alexander's)—against the equal selfawareness of the so-called elder Brutus (who expelled the kings and left his example like
an injunction to his namesake)—but an awareness energized and disciplined by will. For
the wistful impulse of the Greek, the reality of control—there lies the secret of the
plodding, slow, inexorable march of Rome. Thus Hegel, in one of his most powerful
distinctions:
The Roman state is not a repetition of such a state of individuals as the
Athenian Polis was. The geniality and joy of soul that existed there
have given place to harsh and rigorous toil.
28)
Roman c. 70 AD, Male Portrait, Museo Capitolino, Rome;+ V det. (not dig.)
Everywhere in the art record of that responsibility we read "the crushing destiny"
for which the world, as Hegel also says, was "sunk in melancholy"; so that even today we
cannot walk the portrait halls of a Roman museum without being bowed by that burden of
loss and heaviness, as if we too had to pay for the formative struggle which lay like a pall
upon the human spirit.
a29)
b29)
29)
V29a)
Roman 1st c. AD, Arch of Titus, among trees, Rome
Same, Triumphal chariot, detail, Arch of Titus, Relief
Same, Jews led Captive (70 AD), detail, Arch of Titus
Same, The Arch of Titus, (upper portion) (dig. omits)
Music:
Monteverdi, 1642, Poppea, again the pomp of the Finale, Vox
SVBX 5212 (through slide a34)
Under that brooding, the question becomes imperative: "rigorous toil" for what
end? The search for origins gave us brazen warriors. Titus' triumphal arch on the Forum
celebrates the sack of Jerusalem, the Jews led in chains, the seven-branched candelabra
among the spoils. Does the guidance of Jove (Aeneas, "Jovis monitis") reduce to a
doggedness of military conquest, of which the facade is Ara Pacis, the altar of peace—
heavy virtues extolled without the vibrance or intellect of Greece?
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a30)
30)
Symbolic History
Etrusco-Roman 5th c. BC, She-wolf of Rome, Palazzo dei Conservatori
Same, detail of head, with fangs
From the wolf origins praised from Livy down—hidebound severity, and outward
fierceness: killjoy Marcus Cato, censor, whose morals did not preclude avarice, crying
for the destruction of Carthage at every meeting of the Senate: "Delenda est Carthago";
murderous Marius, boasting of ignorance:
I never studied Greek; I never wanted to. What I learned was more for
my country's good: to strike the enemy, stand close guard, bear
hunger, heat and cold, sleep on the ground, fear nothing but a coward's
fame.
(Sallust, Jugurtha LXXV, 33)
31)
Roman 3rd c. AD, Battle with Barbarians, Ludovisi Sarcophagus, Museo
Nazionale, Rome
Same, detail of barbarian dying (not dig.)
V31a)
—even to this 3rd century AD Ludovisi Sarcophagus with the battle between Romans and
Barbarians—the central theme of the "togaed race", in life and art, is war. Of course peace
is intended, peace and law, all the virtues which Caesar, in Shaw, calls Rome's gifts to the
world in exchange for a few ornaments:
a32)
32)
32a)
Roman 114 AD, Trajan's Column, Piazza Del Foro Traiano, Rome
Same, detail of the Frieze
Same, closer detail (video shows various details; dig. one)
there is the good emperor Trajan, of the adoptive line, whose happy rule Gibbon so
praised; but observe his most conspicuous monument, the column with its 650-foot-long
coiled frieze of the Dacian campaigns, how it falls together, over a gap of a century and a
half, with Caesar's account of the Gallic Wars: (from II, 23-28)
...the 9th and l0th legions drove the Atrebates from the high ground to
the river, and when they attempted to cross, pressed after them sword
in hand, and killed a great many… crossing… and pushing on, though
the slope was against them… .
But the enemy, even in their despair, displayed such heroic courage
that, when their foremost ranks had fallen, the next mounted upon their
prostrate comrades and fought standing on their bodies...
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33)
33a)
33b)
Symbolic History
Roman, late 2nd c., Column of Marcus Aurelius, detail, execution and
burning, Rome; + video detail (not dig.)
Same, detail, massacre of barbarian prisoners
Same, detail, rape of barbarian women
The battle was over; and the Nervian people, nay their very name, was
brought to the verge of extinction...
Even Marcus Aurelius, philosopher, is commemorated by such a column, to a
detail of which we have shifted while reading Caesar. That was most of his life, laboring
and fighting in a last Roman effort to extend, hold and consolidate. Without those notes
in his book of somber meditations: "This among the Quadi on the Danube"—the
soldiers, while he wrote, executing prisoners perhaps, or burning villages—who would
have tied the scenes of the Column to those Greek expressions of the Stoic ideal: "to
keep the divine Genius within pure and unwronged, lord of all pleasures and pains."
a34)
Roman c. 166-180, Equestrian Marcus Aurelius, the Capitol, Rome
(whole from below)
(fade Poppea Pomp)
b34)
34)
34a)
Same, Equestrian bronze, detail of Marcus
Same, Head of Marcus
Same, closer detail of head [so dig.; V to detail with horse, from a34]
Though the face of the equestrian Marcus speaks more—that bronze work
preserved through the Dark Ages because the Christians thought it Constantine, and on
their side.
Music:
Monteverdi, 1642, Poppea, Lullaby, "Oblivion," Opera Soc., MMS2028
Those lonely Aurelian eyes are not at all like Constantine's eyes of staring dogma, yet
they are barometric signs of something that was working in the Christians' favor:
Wilt thou then, O my soul, ever at last be good and simple and single
and naked, showing thyself more visible than the body that overlies
thee?... Ever be fulfilled and self-sufficing, longing for nothing?
As if there were two persons representing two Romes, the outward of public
power (itself a wedded pair of war and law), and the inner of these shadowy musings.
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35)
35a)
Symbolic History
Roman, c. 176-9, Marcus Aurelius Sacrificing, Capitoline Museum, Rome;
+ video details (dig. one detail)
Græco-Roman (Athens) 160 AD, Portrait of Annius Verus, son of Marcus
Aurelius, Louvre; + V detail (not dig.)
That separation of outward and inward, body and spirit, is the melancholy which
pervades the late classical; and buttressed against it, never denying it, the Roman and
Stoic command:
Be like a headland of rock, on which the waves break incessantly, but
it stands fast, and around it the seething of the waters sinks to rest.
Under the titanic vaults of Rome, such depths were forming. For Virgil, the
romantic transformation of the Odyssey yields to the god-given task of rule. For Hegel,
the compulsion of rule foments inwardness:
...the world is sunk in melancholy, and it is all over with the natural
side of Spirit; yet only from this could arise the supersensuous, the free
Spirit in Christianity...
(fade Lullaby)
Va36)
36)
Etrusco-Roman 1st c. BC, Terracotta Portrait, profile, Villa Giulia, Rome
Same, frontal view (dig. shows frontal view only)
Early Rome was a force in the world, but it was not yet world-historical. It
deepens to that when the rather plain humanity of the Latin citizen of the Republic, a now
legally defined private person, becomes, in the accession of empire and of Alexandrian
consciousness, the focus of a double crisis, the class and power struggle of the Civil
Wars, and the temptation of luxury and the softening arts.
a37)
37)
Graeco-Roman 1st c. BC?, Villa dei Misteri Frieze, Pompeii
Same, closer view (CGB '80); + video detail (not dig.)
Marvelous arts at their best, and it would seem quite above politics—though the
strictures would apply to sybaritic Pompeii, as to Aeneas lapped in Dido's arms:
"Heedless of empire, by base love enthralled." Yet the Villa of Mysteries is as startling a
height of Greek art on Italian soil as Lucretius' Epicurean poem. The parallel is
instructive, though they seem opposite at first: Lucretius denying these gods, these
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Symbolic History
mysteries; while he celebrates a super-mystery of atomic nature ruled by Love, the alma
genetrix invoked as "Te, dea."
38)
Same freeze, detail of Ordeal and Bacchante; + V detail (not dig.)
...we are all sprung from heavenly seed; all have the same father, by
whom mother earth...conceives and bears goodly crops and joyous
trees and the race of men...
A thing therefore never returns to nothing... rains die, when father
ether has tumbled them into the lap of mother earth; but then goodly
crops spring up...and trees laden with fruit...and the leafy forests ring
on all sides with the song of new birds... (Lucretius, De Rerum Natura,
II, 991 ff; & I, 248 ff., Munro, tr.)
a39)
39)
39a)
Again frieze, Reading the Ritual, detail
Same, close detail of face (Initiatrix)
Same, another portion of the frieze (for which video has two details, from
VA&B of 39a); dig. whole 39a
Music:
Again Euripides 408 BC, Orestes fragment, Therriault & Lynch
Though like all expressions of post-Euripidean soul, the Villa of Mysteries and the De
Rerum Natura betray the loneliness and torment at the heart of things, as when Lucretius
writes of the frenzy of love:
...they pine away by a hidden wound, at a loss to know what they really
desire...feasts are set out, perfumes, crowns and garlands..all in vain,
since from the very fountain of delight, a bitter drop wells up, to pain
amid the flowers. (Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, IV, 1117-34 adapted
from Munro)
(end Euripides)
Fitting, St. Jerome should record of Lucretius (how factually no one knows):
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...driven mad by a love-potion, after he had written, in the intervals of
his insanity, a number of books… he killed himself by his own hand in
his forty-fourth year.
The despair of reason might almost have been potion enough.
40)
40a)
40b)
Roman terracotta head c. 50 BC, Man of the Republic, Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston; + V detail (not dig.)
Hellenistic, 1st half of 2nd cent. BC, Head of Flamininus (?), Delphi
Museum, Greece; first, video detail (not dig.)
Roman 1st c. BC, Unknown Man, Glyptothek, Munich
If the Boston museum bust is of 50 BC as claimed, it shows us an aesthetic
patrician who has lived through the troubles of Lucretius' time (III, 70 ff) : "while men …
amass wealth by civil bloodshed and greedily double their riches, piling up murder on
murder." Those eyes could have seen the Forum massacre of ten thousand men gathered
to protest Sulla's corn laws; Spartacus' Slave War, put down after two years (71 BC) with
like violence: five thousand fugitives killed by Pompey, six thousand slaves crucified
along the road from Rome to Capua. Perhaps, like Cicero's refined friend Atticus, he
took the philosophic way of withdrawal from the state, regretted by Plato and praised by
Lucretius, in the image of looking from land to a navy distressed at sea (De Rerum
Natura, Book II, opening):
...to hold the lofty and serene positions well fortified by the learning of
the wise, from which you may look down on others wandering abroad
and going astray...the rivalry of birth, the struggle night and day to
reach the summit of power and be masters of the world. (De Rerum
Natura, II, 7-13, Munro, tr.)
Va41)
41)
Dioscorides of Samos 1st c. BC, Street Musicians, mosaic, from Villa Cicero,
Pompeii, National Museum, Naples
Hellenistic late 3rd c. BC, Old Woman Drunk, Capitoline Musuem, Rome;
+ V detail (not dig.)
It was only in that Rome, glutting itself on the spoils of the Hellenic East—not
wealth only, but the doubts and sophistications, the sensational vulgarities and refinements of art—the city, as Sallust said, "become a sink into which there poured all who
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Symbolic History
were in any place notorious for crime or vice"—it was then, in war and successive purges,
in the corruption and breakdown of republican institutions—
a42)
Vb42)
42)
42a)
Graeco-Roman c. 50 BC, Pompey the Great, Glyptothek, Copenhagen
Roman 1st c. BC, Republican Bust, Antique Collections, Munich; not dig.
Roman c. 60 BC, Portrait of a Patrician, Museo Torlonia, Rome; + V detail
Roman c. 40 BC, Cato of Utica, Rabat Museum, Volubilis, Morocco
that great personalities arise—Cato, Pompey, Cicero, Caesar, Agrippa—called forth by
the imperatives of a threatened world. Now the portrait bust, Rome's chief contribution
to Classical art, becomes a record, not merely of the warts and wrinkles, but through that
surface, of momentous needs and changes in the soul. Let this type of eroded and
embattled Roman rigor stand for Cato, inflexible as he. But it must reach beyond itself to
catch those last hours as told by Plutarch. I do not mean (against the sweetness of
Socrates' talking and falling asleep in the shade of his hemlock) Cato's bungling suicide,
so that he had to drag his guts out and tear them with his hands; but rather what won him
a place in Dante's theology: that he advised his son to withdraw from politics, and so
passed his last evening reading Plato on immortality.
a43) Roman c. 50 BC?, Marble bust of Cicero, Uffizi, Florence; + V detail; not dig.
43) Roman c. 50 BC, Cicero, Capitoline Museum, Rome; first, video detail ; not dig.
That was in 46 BC. Caesar had just prevailed over Pompey. Cicero's letters are our best
window into Roman failure. Where the official portrait shows his other side, the public
front of success devoted to the higher aim—as his rhetoric sounds the obligation of
Plato's Republic, to which his translation gave that Latin name: Res publica, the
commonweal. His advice to his brother on provincial rule rings with the key words:
peace, clemency, mildness, humanity, justice (pax, clementia, mansuetudo, virtus,
humanitas, justitia), to be taken up in chorus by responsible Rome. In his highmindedness, Cicero had actually believed he could save the Constitution by a "concord of
orders."
a44)
44)
Roman, c. 50 BC, Immolator of the Republic, Vatican, Rome (CGB '86);
+ V detail (not dig.)
Same, another view; + V detail (also dig. detail)
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The breaking of that hope spotlights his wry and self-searching grandeur—an
introspection paralleled in this bust of an Immolator. Cicero writes Atticus in 49 BC
(Feb. 27):
Caesar and Pompey have not aimed at the honor and happiness of the
state, but at absolute power... Both want to be kings... Maybe you have
been looking for a little consolation. I cannot see any. We could not
possibly be worse off than we are, more wretched, ruined, disgraced.
And to Paetus after Caesar's triumph (46 BC)
I think I know well enough what will happen: those who are in power
will have their way, and power now will always go by the sword...
Whoever could not put up with this, was in duty bound to die.
(It is the braver example of Cato which haunts him here.)
But since I, hero and philosopher in one, took life to be the best thing
after all—why, I cannot but love a man whose kindness has let me
have it. Though even if he were really eager for a free constitution, he
has no power of action, so deeply has he entangled himself... We are
slaves to Caesar and Caesar slave to the times... Prepare for the worst,
and bear what is to happen.
45)
V45a)
V45b)
45c)
V45d)
Roman c. 50 BC, bronze head, called Caesar, Museo Nazionale, Rome
Cleomenes of Athens, c. 50 BC, Roman Orator, Louvre, Paris
Roman 1st c. BC, Nymph & Satyr, Archeological Museum, Venice
Detail of 45, so-called Caesar
Roman 1st c. AD, Portrait of an Elderlv Man, Vatican
With the bronze called "Caesar" in the National Museum in Rome, the bitterness
of tyranny and proscription comes to a focus of grim involvement. As in Catullus' poem
scourging Caesar, Pompey, most of all the parasite Mamurra, depravity and blame whirl
in self-wounding fury:
The man who can face this, the man who can take it,
Is whored himself, a drunk, a swindler. Mamurra
Laps the fat of crested Gaul and farthest Britain.
Pansied Romulus, you see this thing, you take it?
How he struts his way through everybody's bedroom,
Like a white pigeon, a soft-skinned white Adonis —
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Pansied little Roman, you take it in, you bear it?
You are like him then, as drunk, as whored a swindler.
And was it for this, Rome's only great general,
You conquered the remotest island of the West,
To feed this screwed-out tool of yours, Mamurra?
See him spend, twenty or thirty million? First were
His own estates, then the loot of Pontus, then of Spain
Hear Tagus, gold-bearing river. They say the Gauls
And Britains fear him? And you love the mongrel? Both
Of you, Caesar, Pompey? While he swills oil of patrimony?
For this, like in-laws, father and son,
You have sluiced wealth and all of the world-city. (CGB)
46)
46a)
Double: [A] Greek (Phidian?) c. 440 BC, Older Riace Warrior, detail, Reggio
Calabria; and [B] Roman c. 45 BC (copy?), bust called Julius Caesar, Vatican
Double: [A] Again, Riace Warrior; [B] Again, bronze called Caesar, cf. 45
Let this Greek 5th century BC Riace Warrior (left), beside the Vatican bust
probably of Julius Caesar (right), raise the question another 2000 years of debate will not
end: how far Caesar's private ambition bodied forth an Alexandrian awareness of his
world-calling, by one-man rule to reconstitute a vitiated Rome? In 60 BC, when he gave
up the triumph won in Spain, to become Triumvirate Consul and so form an army by the
conquest of Gaul—did he launch Lycurgus and Alcibiades upon a time always more
darkened to cynical excess? And eleven years later, threatened by Pompey and the Senate
with prosecution, when he took his army across the Rubicon ("Alea jacta est"), what die
was cast? Did a last Greek flagrance of mind venture itself on the great-souled
spendthrift and demogogue—already doomed by senatorial conspiracy to subserve the
cautious weight of Augustan rule?
47)
Roman c. 40 BC, The young Octavian, Museo Barracco, Rome; + V detail
"His virtues be execrated, for they have ruined my country," said Cato. That was
of Caesar. But there was a tide, which Machiavelli defined for all who came after him.
Cicero too blamed individuals, accidents, had painfully to discover that the new
Triumvirs would not relinquish power. His last letter to Brutus (43 BC) is of
disappointment in this Octavian, by whom he was to fall in the purges of that year, victim
of the man he had hoped to guide:
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But what grieves me most even now, as I write, is that where the
Republic has accepted me as a surety for that youth—almost, indeed,
that boy—it hardly seems that I can make my promise good.
48)
48a)
Roman, c. 30 BC?, Head of Augustus (Octavian), marble, British Museum,
London; first, video detail (not dig.)
Hellenistic Roman c. 20-10 BC, Bronze head of Augustus as Idealized Greek
hero, British Museum, London; + V detail (not dig.)
Here is Plutarch's account of the calculating schemer, not quite suppressed in the official
portraits:
And now, more than at any other time, Cicero let himself be carried
away and deceived, though an old man by the persuasions of a boy.
He joined Octavius in soliciting votes and procured the good-will of
the senate, not without blame at the time on the part of his friends; and
he too, soon enough after, saw that he had ruined himself and betrayed
the liberty of his country. For the young man, once established, and
possessed of the office of consul, bade Cicero farewell; and,
reconciling himself to Antony and Lepidus, joined his power with
theirs, and divided the government, like a piece of property, with them.
Thus united they made a schedule of above two hundred persons who
were to be put to death...
(It is the scene Shakespeare shows us in Julius Caesar.)
49)
Roman, c. 20 BC, Augustus, Capitoline Museum, Rome; + V detail (not dig.)
How quickly the August image smoothes and idealizes itself, enacts in life and art the
poetry of Virgil:
We have reached the ultimate age foretold by the Sibyl's song;
Again the great cycle begins; the first time returns.
The virgin Justice descends; Saturn's reign is restored:
From heaven to earth he comes, of the new world the firstborn.
(CGB using the Loeb)
In a Rome harrying itself by civil war, others shared in the myth of an age of gold.
Horace invites us to sail to the Blessed Isles. (Epode, XVI)
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50)
50a)
50b)
Symbolic History
Roman 13-9 BC, Ara Pacis, east relief, Tellus Italia, with Air and Water,
Rome (CGB '86)
Same, Ara Pacis, whole altar as reconstructed
Same, Tellus relief, central figure (black and white); dig. pans on 50
"Where Ceres year by year crowns all the untilled earth with sheaves." But Virgil turned
his entire creative output to making that vision history. And with such sway, that the cold
genius of Octavian, and the artists of his chief work, the Ara Pacis, or Altar of Peace,
convert the dream façade into the truth of Rome:
Behold how the great world threatened under its cloudy dome,
The land and far-spread seas and the sky's fathomless home,
How all created things rejoice in the time to come.
(CGB)
The Eclogues so begin it, leaping from actual abuse and decline (the land-grab of
41 BC in Eclogues I and IX), to prophetic paradise. In the Georgics we go from "tot bella
per orbem"—"the globe all war, the fields rot in neglect" (in I), to the praise of Italy and
rustic happiness (in II):
51)
V51a)
51b)
Same, detail of Tellus-Italia (CGB '86)
Roman c. 100 BC, Relief from the altar of Domicius Ahenobarbus, Louvre,
Paris (dig. omits)
Again Ara Pacis, whole Tellus relief (as in 50)
Here blooms perpetual spring... twice teem the flocks... Hail! land of
Saturn, mighty mother thou
Of fruits and heroes... still the year o'erflows
With young of kine, still Ceres' wheaten sheaf
Loads with crops the furrow, bursts the barns...
Such life the Sabines led...Etruria thus
To greatness grew, and Rome with circling walls
Clasped to her single breast the sevenfold hills.
The Aeneid too, though its theme is war, rests on that recovered Arcady.
Evadner's Latium (Book VIII) was Saturn's refuge from Jove: he gave it laws; "Under his
scepter were the fabled golden years." But we have heard in the prophecies of Book VI:
"Caesar Augustus, a god's son, shall rebuild the golden age through Latian fields once
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ruled by Saturn." So of course Italy, as bountiful Tellus-Gaia, is central to the Altar of
Peace.
a52)
b52)
52)
Same, Ara Pacis, west side, Aeneas at the Sanctuary of the Penates (black &
white)
Triple: [A] Greece c. 600 B.C., Colossal head of Hera, Museum, Olympia;
[B] Roman 1st c. AD, head of Juno, Thermae, Rome; and [C] early Christian,
3rd cent., detail of seated Christ, Thermae, Rome
Again Aeneas' sacrifice from Ara Pacis (CGB '86) (video reverses 52 and a52;
not so dig.)
The Great Wheel is a destiny involving gods, nature and man. We have
considered nature. As for the gods, Polybius had been puzzled to note that superstition,
for the late Greeks a vice, was the moral strength of Rome (religion changing roles with
cultural need: for the Homeric Greeks, life-force; for the Romans, discipline; for the
Christians, mystical hope). But by the time of Virgil, Roman faith was as undermined as
Roman agriculture. So pious Aeneas' dependence on the gods, whose agent he becomes
("jussa divum exsequitur" — IV, 396), was also a creative leap, by which the reliefs of
the Ara Pacis begin with this (damaged) Sacrifice of Aeneas;
53)
53a)
53b)
Same, Ara Pacis, south side, Sacrifice by the Family of Augustus (CGB ‘86)
Same, detail of Augustus leading the procession (CGB ‘86)
Same, detail of family and friends of Augustus (CGB ‘86); + V det.; not dig.
and end with Augustus, as Pontifex Maximus, leading his family and friends (the family
of state) in an offering for peace. The repeated prophecies of the Aeneid are fulfilled:
Jove to Venus in Book I: "The togaed nation, masters of the world...Then wars shall
cease, the rugged time grow mild"; Jove to Aeneas, in Book IV, of the mission of his line:
"to rule over Italy...and to law's bidding make the whole world bow." And of course the
prophecy of the Underworld, and the future carved on the shield.
Gibbon remarks on Augustus' skill in playing Roman citizen and leader of the
Senate. And perhaps the most touching thing about the Ara Pacis is that so pompous a
fulfillment of divine and world destiny remains a simple gathering of wives and children,
relatives and friends—
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54)
54a)
54b)
Symbolic History
Same, Ara Pacis, detail of above, Head of Maecenas between other heads
(CGB ‘86)
Same, closer detail
Double: [A] Greece, 590-80 B.C., Cleobis detail, Delphi; and [B] Augustan,
13-9 B.C., Aeneas sacrificing, detail, Ara Pacis. [Earlier V54b — doubling
Peplos Korê and Antonia Minor from Ara Pacis — revised ('96) to this 54b.]
old Maecenas, Virgil's loved patron, touched with lachrimae rerum, as when Augustus
and Octavia, reading in the underworld canto those predictions of their Golden Age, came
to the lines on the death of Marcellus: "Manibus date lilia plenis"—"give hands full of
lilies"—and broke into tears.
Strange how Homer is reversed. The instinctive life which was affirmative there,
has turned to weakness, to the romantic longing which made Virgil's voice falter at Dido's
line ("since this name only, of guest, survives that of husband"); while what was negative
in Homer, Destiny, against which Greek life smilingly pitted itself, has become with
Rome the heavy hope.
55)
55a)
56)
56a)
56b)
Roman c. 20 BC, Prima Porta Augustus, whole statue, Vatican, Rome
(CGB '86)
Same, another view; + V detail (not dig.)
Same, Prima Porta Augustus, waist up (CGB '86); + V det. of 55a (not dig.)
Same, detail of armor only (CGB '86, color; or black & white); copy of Faust
14
Same, detail of head and shoulders
That is the pronouncement which stands in Book VI, at the center of the epic: (after
Humphries)
...Rome, that glorious city,
Will bound her power by earth, her pride by heaven...
...These are Iulus' children...
Caesar Augustus, son of a god, founder of
An age of gold...he will extend his empire
Beyond the Indies, beyond the normal measure
Of years and constellations, where high Atlas
Turns on his shoulder the star-studded world...
Others, no doubt, will better mould the bronze
To the semblance of soft breathing, draw from marble
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The living countenance; and others plead
With greater eloquence, or learn to measure,
Better than we, the pathways of the heaven,
The rising of the stars: remember, Roman,
These are your fine arts: to rule the people
Under law, to impose the way of peace,
To spare the humble, and war down the proud.
It is as if the Prima Porta Augustus had been made to fulfill that command.
And as Aeneas takes up the shield carved with the future of Italy from Romulus
and Remus to the defeat of Marc Antony—Antony, unlike high-souled Aeneas, captive to
his African Dido: "with horrors, an Egyptian wife"—as Aeneas, uncomprehending but
"proud and happy, lifts to his shoulder all that fortune, the fame and glory of his children's
children"—Augustus here assumes his symbolic armor: under the gods of the sky, the
conquered earth reconciled by Rome.
How fitly the stone mouth might sound Augustus' account of his own reign, the
Res Gestae, inscribed late in his life on monuments over the empire --
57)
Roman 312 BC and after, Via Appia, Queen of Roads
that realm of ordered power: provinces, arches, aqueducts, law, radiating like Roman
roads from the Principate center.
58)
Roman, 5 BC, Tropaea Augusti, La Turbie, Monaco (restored 1934)
When I was nineteen I collected an army on my own account and at my
own expense, by the help of which I restored the Republic to liberty...I
had to undertake wars by land and sea, civil and foreign, all over the
world, and when victorious I spared surviving citizens...
59)
Roman, completed 13 AD, Theatre of Marcellus, Rome
I built the Curia and the Chalcidicum which adjoins it, the temple of
Apollo, the temple of the Divine Julius, the Lupercal... I constructed
the Flaminian Road... with all the bridges except the Mulvian and
Minucian... I built a theatre to bear the name of my son-in-law,
Marcellus...
60)
Roman (Spain), c. 100 AD, (Trajan) Aqueduct, Segovia (CGB '66)
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I cleared the sea of pirates...I extended the frontiers of all the provinces of the Roman
people...
61)
Augustan wooden arch, rebuilt in stone under Tiberius, Orange, S. France
Twice I triumphed with an ovation; in my triumphs were led captive
before my chariot nine kings or children of kings...
62)
62a)
62b)
Roman c. 10 BC, Augustus as Pontifex Maximus, Thermae Museum, Rome
Same, upper detail
Roman I5-37 AD, The Gemma Augustea, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna;
+ V detail ( not dig.)
I transferred the republic from my power to the will of the Senate and
people of Rome. For which good service I was by decree of the Senate
called by the name of Augustus... in recognition of valour, clemency,
justice, piety...
The old Republican watchwords invoked to close down the Republic. Characteristic that
he never mentions the command of the Praetorian Guard. As Cicero said: "Power now
will always go by the sword." A reliance which would shrink later emperors to puppets of
their own arms.
The whole achievement of Virgil and Augustus being, in one sense, a romantic
dream.
a63)
63)
Roman c. 10-20 AD, Bucolic Landscape, detail, from Villa of Agrippa
Posthumus, Museo Nazionale, Naples
Roman (Augustan) c 10 AD?, Fresco, Ulysses among the Laestrygonians,
Vatican Library, Rome; + V detail (to the right; so dig.)
Resolution could not shore up the psyche. Again the fragment from Euripides.
Music: Euripides 408 BC, Orestes fragment, last part
The Hellenistic illusionism of escape — "Could I take me to some cavern for my hiding,"
(end Euripides) bred of the civil wars: Horace's Blessed Isles, Virgil's Mincian Arcadia —
flows through the ivory gate of the Aeneid, appears in the haunted Odysseus landscapes,
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where the facts of Homer take the shades of Virgil: like Polyphemus glimpsed through
mist as he wades into the sea, groans, and laves the gored socket of his eye (Aeneid III).
64)
64a)
Roman late 1st cent. BC, Portrait of a girl (terracotta), Staatliche Museen,
Berlin ; + V detail (so dig.)
Graeco-Roman Africa c. 40-50 BC, Cleopatra, Cherel, Algeria; + V & dig.
detail
Under the tender modeling of this Augustan girl, ideal as the Ara Pacis, romantic
person ripens toward imperial (ultimately Christian) longing.
Why else would Milton have chosen the Fifth Ode of Horace for translation (and
made it the only Latin poem native to English), but for some renouncing hunger that
rocks the smooth surface of its Hellenism?—
What slender Youth bedew'd with liquid odours
Courts thee on Roses in some pleasant Cave,
Pyrrha, for whom bindst thou
In wreaths thy golden Hair,
Plain in thy neatness; O how oft shall he
On Faith and changed Gods complain: and Seas
Rough with black winds and storms
Unwonted shall admire;
Who now enjoyes thee credulous, all Gold,
Who always vacant, alwayes amiable
Hopes thee; of flattering gales
Unmindfull? Hapless they
To whom thou untry'd seem'st fair. Me in my vow'd Picture the sacred
wall declares t' have hung
My dank and dropping weeds
To the stern God of Sea.
a65)
65)
65a)
Roman (Pompeii) 70-79 AD, Atrium, House of the Vetii (rebuilt) (CGB '89)
Roman (Pompeii) 1st cent. AD, Portrait of a Girl, Nat. Mus., Naples
Graeco-Roman 1st cent. AD, House of the Vetii Frescoed wall
What had made one-man rule inevitable but the corruption of the Republic? And where
was its deepest seat but in the sensuous flagrance and softening nostalgias, to which the
houses of Pompeii more richly attest than the stripped fragments of Graeco-Roman song:
"Calliopeia".
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Music: Græco-Roman 1st cent. AD, Calliopeia Hymn, J.E. Butt
(close)
In that cleavage between private wish and public facade, we look under every rich
carpet (or in this case, wall painting) to find cockroaches.
66)
Roman, c. 38 BC (or later?), Mural of a garden from the Villa of Livia,
Thermae, Rome
Roman 1st c. AD, Livia Drusilla, Augustus' wife, Vatican Museum, Rome;
+ V detail ( so dig.)
Another detail from the Villa Livia mural
Same, another detail
66a)
V66b)
66c)
This garden scene is from the Prima Porta Villa of Livia, in the spirit of Virgil's
fruitful Italy. It was probably painted about 38 BC, when Augustus dumped his first wife
Scribonia (mother of their notorious Julia), and had Livia divorced from her husband
(father of Tiberius), to espouse her imperious charms. Suspected of various crimes—the
premature death of Marcellus and other near heirs, and even of the death of Augustus—
she inherited a third of his property, and became joint-ruler with her son, until her
dominance drove him to the queer retreat of Capri. It is the beginning of the fevered
conversion of sex into power, so disturbing in imperial Rome. And poor old Agrippa,
Augustus' loyal "architect of Empire", had to divorce the wife he loved and marry that
now widowed and lusting Julia. Such the nobly robed family of the Altar of Peace.
67)
67a)
67b)
Roman (Flavian), late 1st cent. AD, Portrait of a youth, British Museum,
London
Egyptian (Amarna), c. 1370-60 BC, Head from a harp, Louvre, Paris
Again 67, Flavian Youth, detail; + closer V detail ( not dig.)
It is worth jumping forward here, a few generations, to pick up a face that, of all faces,
gives a probable insight into Julia—this Flavian youth, for whom the Principate splendor
has not solved the inner why. Not since the old thousand year culture of the Nile had
anything of such rich satiety appeared. Petronius Arbiter might have put him in the
Satyricon; but he bridges time; for Lucretius had already given the description of his
ennui:
The man who is sick of home issues from his mansion, and is no better
off abroad. He races to his country house... yawns as he reaches it and
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sinks into heavy sleep, seeks forgetfulness, or in haste goes back to
town... In this way each flies from himself, hates himself, because he is
sick and does not know the cause. (Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, III,
1060 ff., adapted from Munro's translation)
Va68)
Roman copy of Greek, 3rd cent., Hermaphrodite (from the rear), Louvre,
Paris (Mattress by Bernini)
Same, another view, (CGB '80)
Same, frontal view (CGB '80)
b68)
68)
That malady now, with all its symptomatic excess, seized on the heart of empire. In the
hypocritical position of trying to reform and stiffen the moral codes, "the divine
Augustus", Seneca tells us, "was forced to exile his own daughter, Julia, who had
surpassed in lust every infamous meaning of the word, and had covered the imperial
home with scandal."
Ten years later it would be the granddaughter—Julia's Julia. Since Ovid, having
written The Art of Love, was banished at the same time, there were hints of a supervised
experiment in postures. ("Would you, the supervisor, grossly gape on?")
69)
69a)
View from Posillippo, over Nisida & Baia's Bay to Cape Miseno etc. (Beny)
Lake of Avernus, near Cumae, north of Naples (CGB '84)
Works of art, however, will not guide us to the cruel and jaded sensualities of
which we read in the satirists or the gossiping historian Suetonius. Imagination can only
grope backward from the present scene of Baia on the Bay of Naples, to the luxurious
Roman spa, senators lolling in litters and gilded boats, or with women in the warm pools
of Avernus, under showers of roses thrown by lascivious dancers. (So Seneca.)
70)
70a)
View of Capri from the Villa of Augustus towards Tiberius' Villa (CGB '80)
Ruins of Tiberius' Villa, Capri (CGB '80)
Across the bay lies Capri, where Tiberius fled embittered, covered with sores,
scabs and pustules. Suetonius:
He had assembled from all quarters girls and perverts... who invented
monstrous feats of lubricity... to inflame his feeble appetite.
(Not to mention those unweaned children he called his little fishes.)
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They still point out the scene of his executions, from which he used to
order that those who had been condemned, after long and exquisite
tortures, be cast headlong into the sea before his eyes, while a band of
marines waited below for the bodies and broke their bones with
boathooks and oars, to prevent any breath of life from remaining in
them.
71)
71a)
V71b)
71c)
View through mist across the Forum to the Palatine
Roman, 28 AD, Bust of Caligula, The Louvre, Paris
Rome from Forum to Palatine (CGB '86, underexposed; dig. omits.)
Rome, The Palatine from across the Circo Massimo
Flee, like the sick patrician, back to Rome, past the Palatine, then tiers on tiers of
colonnades, where Tiberius' successor, mad Caligula, walked. Suetonius:
For this man, who so utterly despised the Gods, was wont at the
slightest thunder and lightning to shut his eyes, muffle up his head, and
if they increased to leap from his bed and hide under it... He was
terrified also by strange apparitions... Therefore weary of lying in bed
awake during the greater part of the night, he would now sit upon his
couch and now wander through the long colonnades, crying out from
time to time for daylight, and longing for its coming.
72)
72a)
72b)
V72c)
72d)
View of Vatican gardens, with St. Peter's dome
Terraced fields outside Jerusalem
Model of Rome 1st - 4th cent., (Gismondi), Museum of Roman Civilization,
Rome
Byzantine, c. 1000, Martyrdom of St. Ignatius (c. 107), Menologium of
Basil II, Vatican Library
Vatican Gardens (CGB '84)
What can we do but flee again, across the Tiber, into Nero's gardens. We find ourselves
at the heart of Christendom. For Peter—in fact or faith—was martyred here, and the
Church rose over his blood. How remote this Vatican garden from the place of
persecution Tacitus describes:
Christus, the founder of that name, was put to death as a criminal by
Pontius Pilate... but the pernicious superstition, repressed for a time,
broke out again, not only through Judaea, where the mischief
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originated, but through the city of Rome also, whither all things
horrible and disgraceful flow...
In their deaths they were made the subjects of sport, for they were
covered with the hides of wild beasts and worried to death by dogs, or
nailed to crosses, or set fire to, and when day declined burnt to serve
for nocturnal lights. Nero offered his own gardens for that spectacle...
mingling with the common people in the habit of a charioteer...
(Tacitus, Annals, XV, 44, tr. Church & Brodribb)
73)
Roman 72-90 & 312-316, Colosseum seen through the Arch of Constantine;
+ V detail ( not dig.)
Again Colosseum, arches from within
V73a)
The Rome we have been in search of lies like the city itself, range upon range and
vault opening under vault. Through the first layer of military force we have come into the
arch of responsible rule. Deeper in that pile of enslavement and law, we enter the
treasure chamber of privacy. The first impression is almost to drive us back appalled.
74)
V74a)
74b)
Roman Bust, c. 66-68 AD, Nero, Museo Capitolino, Rome; or V74
Roman, 14-37 AD, Grimani Relief, Lioness with her Cubs, Museum, Vienna
Pompeii, c 70 A.D., Erotic wall painting, National Museum, Naples
We seem to be witnessing one of those movies of the life of Christ, where the debauchery
of Rome suggests a new Babylon. Tacitus:
Nero (who polluted himself by every lawful or lawless
indulgence)...had a raft constructed on Agrippa's lake... the crews
arranged according to age and experience in vice. Birds and beasts had
been procured from remote countries, and sea monsters from the
ocean. On the margin of the lake were set up brothels crowded with
noble ladies, and on the opposite bank were seen naked prostitutes
with obscene gestures and movements... (Tacitus, Annals XV, 37; tr.
Church & Brodribb)
a75)
75)
Roman, 1st cent. AD, Patrician carrying busts of his ancestors, Capitoline
Museum, Rome
Roman, c. 150 AD, Young Marcus Aurelius, Capitoline Museum, Rome;
+ V detail (also dig.)
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But Nero and Paul were not the only contenders in the Roman vault of
personality. The pagan moral force rallied again and again. Perhaps never before or
since was such a battle waged in the psyche. And with each recovery the outward empire
was reordered, but against longer odds, and the soul under deeper shadow. With Marcus
Aurelius the beauty of classical form masks an inwardness where solitude and dark have
become habitual. So his Meditations
Of the life of man the duration is but a point, its substance streaming
away, its perceptions dim, the fabric of the entire body prone to decay,
and the soul a vortex, and fortune incalculable, and fame uncertain. In
a word, all the things of the body are as a river, and the things of the
soul as a dream and a vapour; and life is a warfare and a pilgrim's
sojourn, and fame after death is only forgetfulness. What then is it that
can help us on our way? One thing and one alone—Philosophy. (tr.,
C.R. Haines)
Va76)
76)
76a)
Roman (Hadrian) 120 AD, Pantheon, from the Piazza, Rome; not dig.
Same, closer view (CGB '86): V, detail only
Pantheon, interior (CGB '86, horizontal slide, copy of E. Xian V53)
We have relied on the portrait bust to voice the inner struggle. But architecture,
too, that monumental enclosure of space, conveys, in its very language of thrusts, tensile
nobilities. Rome's greatest building, the Pantheon, combines a columned porch, perhaps
of the time of Augustus, with a dome built under Hadrian, the first huge dome ever
constructed, forming the most impressive and best preserved Roman interior. As Hegel
says:
under the pain inflicted by Despotism, spirit, driven back into its
inmost depths...seeks for a harmony in itself, and begins now an inner
life.
a77)
77)
77a)
77b)
Pantheon, from the West side (CGB '86)
Pantheon, interior (CGB '86, vertical slide); V takes details only, above then
below; dig. whole, then upper detail
Byzantine (Justinian) 502-537 & 558-62, Hagia Sophia, Dome (interior),
Constantinople (CGB '77; copy of E.Xian 55)
Michelangelo, c. 1550-90, Dome (interior), St. Peter's, Rome
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At the center of all that arching of aqueducts and bridges, amphitheatres and mammoth
baths, enclosed in the bend of the Tiber and the utilitarian plainness of huge rubble walls,
opens this round-shelled, eye-lighted sphere, first massive solution of the symbolic inner
room. To enter it is to share a space pregnant with the moral deepening of Rome. As the
private person glimpsed in brooding portraits fills the frame of universal law, so this
luminous closure invests the cement walls of its outwardness. And as the subjective
morality of the West was first explored in the conscious responsibilities of Rome, so this
dome generates a long line, through the spatial withdrawal of Byzantine, to the proud
assertions of the Renaissance and later West.
78)
78a)
78b)
Roman Christian, 2nd-4th cent., Catacombs of St. Calixtus, Rome
Roman Heads, Double: [A] 1st c. AD, from Ostia; and [B] 4th c. AD, from
Via Appia, both National Museum (Thermae), Rome (CGB '86)
Again, Catacombs of St. Calixtus, another view
Music: Gregorian Easter Service Alleluia Mode 7, Angel 35116
From Aeneas down that struggle under stoical command: "Be like a headland of
rock," had shaped the deepest reality of Rome. But after Marcus Aurelius, it required
more than those heavy-eyed searchers for gnosis could supply. Obligation and destiny
shifted from Aeneas Jovis monitis to Augustine's "a broken and a contrite heart, the
Spouse, the Cup of our Redemption."
But when the soul-sick Roman went down into the Catacombs, it was into a crypt
that had long been forming under the imperial walls, a brooding place of consciousness,
which Christianity would hail, with solemn hallelujas, as the birthplace of light.
a79)
b79)
79)
Roman-Christian mid-3rd cent., fresco detail, Shepherd with scroll, and flock,
Hypogeum of the Aurelii, Rome
Same, another detail, Head of the Apostle Paul
Roman-Christian 4th c., Bust of Christ fresco, Cemetery of Comodilla, Rome
Between the opposites of an age there is a kind of creative play. The surrender of
Christianity, the pride of Rome, these form the axis on which Western history is strung.
Here, the promise of the City of God (I Cor. 15, 19-20):
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Symbolic History
If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most
miserable. But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the
firstfruits of them that slept...
(End Gregorian)
80)
80a)
Roman end of 1st c. BC, Agrippa, Uffizi, Florence
Same, close detail of face
There, the military might behind the Prima Porta Augustus, Augustus' soldier,
who engineered his rise, honest Agrippa—yoked opposites of our world:
...Remember, Roman...to rule the people
Under law, to impose the way of peace,
To spare the humble, and war down the proud.
How the 17th century, from Monteverdi, through the court of Louis XIV, to
Augustan England, swells with that trumpet voluntary.
Music:
June 1996
Jeremiah Clarke (once thought Purcell), 1700, March, called "Trumpet
Voluntary" (close), Bach Guild HM-31 SD
The Search for Rome
32
�
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SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
6. Early Christianity
CHARLES G. BELL
ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
or
1260 CANYON ROAD
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501
August 1995
Last Revised January ‘96
�Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
6. Early Christianity
1)
1a)
Attic, 520-510 BC, Korê 682, detail, Acropolis Museum, Athens
Attic, Temple c. 440 B.C., Hephaisteion called Theseion, Agora, Athens
(CGB '77)
From Greece — "whence the famous song of praise" (Pindar) — from the time of
Homer to the Peloponnesian War, the fullness of choric celebration betrays no flaw, no
hollow, for alien cults and immortality religions.
a2)
b2)
2)
Greek, Round Temple or Tholos 370-360 BC, Delphi by twilight (CGB '77)
Cyprus, 4th c. BC, Terra Cotta head of a man, National Museum, Athens
Hellenistic, 2nd c. BC, Maid of Anzio (upper part), Thermae, Rome
But when the art-softened cities fell to Macedon and Rome, leaving vacancies of
private refinement, then philosophy, born of wonder, became with the Stoics a medicine
for sick souls; and Epicurus, validating free will by atomic swerve, balmed it into a beatitude like that of his own gods: "freedom from all that produces fear … from the prison of
affairs and politics … from pain in the body and trouble in the mind."
3)
Augustan, end of 1st cent. BC, Lady Minatia Polla, National Museum, Rome
Subjectivity deepens in Rome. In the Lady Minatia Polla of the late Republic, we
plumb a desire like that of Virgil's Messianic Eclogue, having two components, the
earthly and spiritual, corresponding to two historical solutions, the City of Caesar and the
City of God.
a4)
4)
Roman, c. 20 BC, Prima Porta Augustus (special lighting), Vatican, Rome
Roman, c. 217 AD, Apotheosis of Caracalla, Cameo, Nancy, Museum
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The first component — the Augustan — springs naturally from a century of civil war, and
was soon to be met by the Principate of Octavian. Though after 200 years of varying
despotism, the heaven-sent hero (here the deified Caracalla) may seem a shabby answer
to the Messianic cry.
a5)
b5)
5)
Roman Christian, 2nd-4th cent., Catacomb of St. Calixtus, Rome
Early Christian, 3rd cent., Christ-Orpheus, Cemetery of Domitilla, Rome
Roman Christian, mid 3rd cent., Good Shepherd, Aurelii tomb, Rome; first,
video details, above and below (also dig.)
Music:
Gregorian, old Solemes Album, Agnus Dei, V-M-87 (1-b)
For there was always the other component. It made Virgil's eclogue seem a
Christian prophecy of a time "when our wickedness will cease, the earth be freed from
fear, when the serpent will die, and nature pour forth her plenty, under the rule of a prince
of peace." As Isaiah had said less ambiguously, to be rendered into the Vulgate by
Jerome: "Sicut pastor gregem suum pascet: in brachio suo congregabit agnos" — "He
shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arm."
(end Agnus Dei)
a6)
6)
Greek, bronze Krater c. 330 B.C., from a Macedonian tomb at Derveni,
Revelries of Dionysus and Ariadne, detail, Museum, Thessalonike
Roman, copy from Skopas, 350-340 B.C., Orgiastic Maenad, Dresden
Music:
Greek, 2nd cent. B.C., First Delphic Hymn, J.E. Butt (chromatic
section)
But the lady Polla lived in the luxury of Hellenized Rome — the music Nero
would love, the art-copies spread over the Mediterranean, and by trade as far as Britain
and Asia — this from Skopas, most Dionysiac of post-Euripideans.
That was the sensuous part;
(fade Delphic Hymn)
7)
Roman Egyptian, Encaustic, 2nd cent. A.D., Man with Dark Skin,
Alexandria; + V detail (also dig.)
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and against it, cohabitant in all lives, but more and more withdrawn, the longing beyond
death (here 2nd century, from Roman Egypt). There was no such cleavage in the early
Greek. Its outwardness was spirit. Even in Plato the word for Idea is the visible shape of
a thing. Now the beautiful body becomes a husk in which the soul waits wide-eyed.
How to fuse the polarity, to give the Greek way a new life?
8)
Neo-Attic, 1st c. B.C., Archaistic Athena, National Museum, Naples
The fad of archaizing showed the need (as in late Egypt and the modern West),
but also the irreversibility of cultural protoplasm. Those neo-Attic essays in stiff drapes
and frontality — bright-eyed Athena lured by Hollywood fakeries — prove by reductio
that to archaic renewal there is no direct road.
a9)
b9)
9)
Indian Buddhist, 1st cent. B.C., East Gateway of Stupa #1, Sanchi, India
Gandharan 2nd cent. A.D., Birth of Buddha, Freer Gallery, Washington,
D.C.
Græco-Buddhist, 2nd-3rd cent. A.D., Smiling stucco head, Magari-Sharif,
Afghanistan
Music: Indian Raga, Pandit Ramnarain on Sarangi with tabla ODEON-MOAE 174
Only a road beyond the Classical: palingenesis as avatar. A study of the Western
arts can at least hint that Asia managed to extend what in Europe had to fall into the earth
and die. Since Gautama Siddhartha (c. 500 BC), Buddhism had been redirecting the
larger search for peace of soul. But Buddhist art first appears after contact with
Alexander, and it is not until the age of the Antonines that the loving Bodhisatvas
transcend Epicurean detachment in the mystical compassion of the Nirvana smile.
(Tabla drum begins)
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a10)
Vb10)
10)
Symbolic History
Again a9, Gate of Stupa, detail (lower right) of Yakshi as bracket
Indian (Uttar Pradesh), c. 2nd cent., Yakshi with parrot and cage, from
Bhuteshar, Indian Museum, Calcutta
Indian (Sanchi), c. 25 B.C., Yakshi, Fine Arts Museum, Boston
With that smile, Greek sensuousness was also reborn — in India. The treasuretrove of Begram shows how far the arts of East and West met in the trading places of the
silk route. (Raga, toward close) But the museums had long attested the passion of Skopas
sprung to livelier dehanchement — as a feature of Asian beatitude. Whereas in the West,
the split widens to Paul's bitter quarrel with the flesh, Origen's dire enactment of
scripture: "If thy right hand" — in his case the sexual root — "offend against thee, cut it
off."
(Close Raga)
a11)
b11)
11)
Northumbrian, 7th cent., Ruthwell Cross, Christ and the Magdalen, Parish
Church, Ruthwell, Scotland
French (Vezelay), c. 1120-50, Head of Christ, Tympanum, Vezelay
Saxon, c. 1000, Christ on the Cross, detail of head, from Hildesheim
Music:
Leonin, c. 1160, Organum Duplum, Crucifixum, from "In Carne
Laudate" phrase; old Col. M-431 (1)
Perhaps the dayadhvam of princely Buddha more suits our mood than the bowstretching violence of the crucified carpenter's son. But it could not have so plowed
history with incarnate paradox, mammocking time in the violence of Gothic and
Reformation, colonial conquest, science, democracy, even Marxism. If a wise (or
scheming) god had asked what, in a thousand years, would stir the tribes of Europe to
incalculable energy-release, he could hardly have hit on more formative tensions than
were knit into Christianity — though we turn for their exhibition to this Saxon Crucifix
of 1000, and in music to the 1160 Organum of Leonin. Such was the apocalytic love and
reprobate godhead which staggered the pagan world.
a12)
12)
Roman, 251 AD, Ludovisi Sarcophagus, detail of Romans fighting
Barbarians, National Museum, Rome (cf Va12, whole); dig. whole, then det.
Same, Ludovisi Sarcophagus, closer detail of Barbarian; also dig.
The Roman Empire stood apalled;
It dropped the reins of peace and war,
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Symbolic History
When that fierce Virgin and her star
Out of the formless darkness called.
That is Yeats, but scripture is wilder:
Resist not evil, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, take no
thought of the morrow; deny mother and father, sell all you have and
follow me. [And if not], Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees. There
will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.
(fade Leonin)
13)
13a)
Græco-Syrian, 1st cent. A.D., Chief Ministrant, detail of head, frescoes,
Fortress of Dura Eurotus, Euphrates
Same, Dura Fortress,three standing figures; + V detail; so dig.
Music:
Yemenite Jews, Paraphrase of Psalm 137, History of Music in
Sound I, V-LSC 6057, side 4
What Semitic intensity stared through and put to shame those mythic satyrs and
sarcophagus barbarians of the pagan world? We feel it in the lst-century frescoes from
the fortress of Dura on the Euphrates, in the Synagogue chant of the Yemenite Jews, the
Essene searchings of the Dead Sea Scrolls, John the Baptist's preparing in the wilderness
for another Teacher of Righteousness, in the mass suicide of the besieged on Masada.
But where is the doctrine of love in that hypnotic zeal? Neither the Qumran sect of the
scrolls, nor the cult of Dura, nor the fierce intensity of Hebrew chant, can do more than
hint at the ferment from which Christianity arose.
(End Psalm)
14)
14a)
Roman, 1st cent. A.D., Glorification of Tiberius, Great Cameo of France,
National Library, Paris
Roman, 54-68 A.D., head of Nero, National Museum, Rome
As with Buddhism earlier, the birth occurs behind a veil of mystery, and in a silence of
art. Augustus brought in the Age of Gold when Christ was born; Tiberius (whom
Augustus here glorifies), sulked at Capri when Christ was crucified. Persecution of the
spreading sect began with Nero. As the state hardened against them, the faithful fortified
themselves in the episcopate orthodoxy of the Word: by 100 the four Gospels were
probably complete.
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�C.G. Bell
15)
Symbolic History
Roman Christian, late 2nd cent., Eucharistic meal, "Greek Chapel", Catacombs
of Priscilla, Rome
But another hundred years would pass, the fortunate Adoptive reign fall to the frenzy of
Commodus and Caracalla — the canon of the New Testament be almost fixed, and the
preaching of the Fathers tipping the scales to the Church — before the first Christian art
would appear — this Eucharist, or love-feast, from the Catacombs of Priscilla.
1st 16) Roman Christian, mid 3rd cent., Apostle, Aurelii tomb, Rome
So we must suspend chronology to image the ambivalence of faith. For the kernel
of wisdom, humanity, and Christ-like love, we choose an Apostle from the tomb of the
Aurelii about 240, and against it
17)
Roman Christian, c. 360, Constantius II, Pal. dei Conservatori, Rome
for the shell of dogma in which Christian love rides, the son of Constantine, bigot
Constantius II, a hundred years later, when the crown of faith was no longer martyrdom,
but tax-exempt holdings in the Roman slave-state. Though the contrast we are making is
not only of time. As long as God witnessed is the pride of the witnesser, religious
humility will wear a mask of intolerant zeal.
For 2nd 16 and 2nd 17)
Double: 16 and 17, Aurelii Apostle and Constantius II; dig. 17za
The opposition is in Christ himself:
Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give
you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me; for I am meek and
lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls …
But that Jesus of Matthew goes Byzantine in John:
Ye worship ye know not what: we know what we worship: for
salvation is of the Jews... the testimony of two men is true. I am one
that bear witness of myself, and the Father that sent me beareth witness
of me... Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye
will do. He was a murderer from the beginning...
3rd 16) Again, Aurelii Apostle
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Paul, who closes the letter to Galatians:
Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself... If a man be overtaken in any
trespass... restore such a one in a spirit of meekness... Let us work that
which is good toward all men... Far be it from me to glory save in the
cross of our lord Jesus Christ —
3rd 17) Again, Constantius II, another view
Paul opens it with a curse on all divergence from his gospel:
But though we, or an angel from heaven, should preach unto you any
gospel other than that which we preached unto you, let him be
anathema.
4th 16) Again, Aurelii Apostle, detail
The deepest beauty in Augustine —
Two cities have been founded by two loves: the earthly by the love of
self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God,
even to the contempt of self... The one lifts up its head in its own
glory; the other says to its God: "Thou art my glory and the lifter-up of
my head." [If the earthly kingdom shall fail, what then?] for the
Kingdom of God shall be eternal, and we shall be assured of its eternity; and thus the peace of this blessedness and the blessedness of this
peace shall be the supreme good —
4th 17) Again, Constantius II, detail
that Augustine shades into spiteful rant:
I fell upon a sect of men proudly doting, too carnal and prating, in
whose mouth were the snares of the devil, a very bird-lime composed
of the mixture of the syllables of thy Name... they cried out Truth, and
Truth... yet was the Truth itself nowhere to be found amongst them.
(Confessions, III, vi)
Had Plato and Aristotle so identified with God, each would have seen the other as the
Prince of Lies.
1st18)Roman, c. 117, Trajan in old age (bronze), Archeol. Museum, Ankara
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From Augustine, chronology takes us back three hundred years, to Trajan. How could
that civilized blunt soldier be anything but blind, deaf and dumb to Christian complexity?
Could he share what was within:
1st19)Roman Christian, 3rd cent., Good Shepherd from the tomb of Livia Primativa,
Vatican; + V details (one dig. detail)
doubt swallowed in disciplined surety: "O death, where is thy sting, O grave?" — the
sarcophagus of Livia Primativa — the Good Shepherd amidst the waves of immortal life,
filling the gnostic dark?
No pagan observer saw beyond the stiffnecked madness and doomsday zeal. As
Festus cried in Acts: "Paul, thou art mad, thy much learning doth turn thee to madness."
Even the "much learning" betrays a Christian text, and where else do we hear Paul's
answer: "I am not mad, but speak the words of truth and soberness."
2nd 18) Again, Trajan bronze, detail
So when Pliny the Younger writes Trajan from Bithynia: "The infection of this
superstition has spread through not only cities but also villages and the country, though it
seems possible to check and remedy it" — the emperor tries to be fair: One must not
punish on the word of informers, that would be against the urbanity of his reign; but if
any will not deny Christ and bow to the gods ...
For 2nd 19)
Roman Christian, 2nd half of the 4th cent., Bust of Christ fresco, Cemetery of
Commodilla, Rome
(There Revelation takes it up): "As many as would not worship the image of the
beast should be killed." But "blessed are the dead which die in the Lord," for "the
kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ, and he
shall reign for ever and ever."
a20)
20)
Christian from Antioch, 6th cent., Vienna Genesis. The Flood, detail,
National Library, Austria
Same, whole
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As Lucian says: "Those unlucky people have brought themselves to where they
think they shall live forever ... They therefore despise all things alike." That was at the
core of the mad reversal of pagan values, the odium generis humani, "hatred of all
humanity", of which the sect of love was accused; and indeed, as in the Flood of the
Vienna Genesis, they did urge catastrophes, past and to come.
21)
21a)
Roman, c. 147, Marcus Aurelius as a youth, Antiquarium di Foro, Rome
Roman, c. 166-180, Equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, detail of head,
Piazza del Campidoglio, Rome
Even Marcus Aurelius, in earthly gloom and the doubts of reason —
If indeed there are no Gods, or if they do not concern themselves with
the affairs of men... Things are so wrapped in mystery that even the
Stoics find them hard to comprehend... And the poor soul itself is an
exhalation of the blood. —
shunned that self-surrender. He admired Christian courage, but not at the price of frenzy:
a22)
22)
Roman (Athens), 2nd cent. A.D., Annius Verus, son of Marcus Aurelius,
Louvre, Paris
Byzantine, c. 1000, Martyrdom of St. Ignatius (c. 107), Menologium of
Basil II, Vatican
Let the preparation of the mind [for death] arise from its own
judgment, and not from obstinacy (like the Christians), but deliberately
and reverentially and undramatically, that it may persuade others.
Strange, that Marcus' reason persuaded nobody, where the death of Ignatius in the
Colosseum (in 107) — "I am God's wheat... ground by the teeth of wild beasts... to
become pure bread of Christ" — was depicted 900 years later, in the persuasion it had
helped to form.
23)
Roman, c. 135 A.D., Marble copy of Greek c. 330 B.C. bronze, Apollo
Belvedere, Vatican (CGB '86); + V detail (not dig.)
That coldly academic embodiment of Greek reason, the Apollo Belvedere, may
suggest the sort of argument Marcus Aurelius had in mind. Thus when Socrates is in
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prison, and Crito wants to get him away, there is a debate with the abstract laws, proving
by logic that he should stay and die.
24)
Roman Christian, late 3rd cent., Orant from Catacomb of Priscilla, Rome
Ambrose offers the counter-example of Christian argument. Peter has escaped
from prison and is fleeing from Rome. At the gate of the city he meets Christ bearing a
cross. "Domine, quo vadis?" — "Where are you going, Lord?" "To be crucified once
more." Peter returns to martyrdom. It is persuasion by contagion.
25)
Palatine graffito, from Page-boys' school, 3rd cent.?, "Alexemenus worships
his god," National Museum, Thermae, Rome; + V detail (not dig.)
Hardly surprising that the Christians were rumored to worship a crucified ass, as
in the charcoal scratch from the Palatine school: "Alexemenus worships his God." Both
Christ and Paul had made it clear that we must become like children and fools:
For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness... I will
destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the
understanding of the prudent... we preach Christ crucified, unto the
Jews a stumblingblock, and to the Greeks foolishness.
(I Corinthians 1, 18-23)
26)
26a)
26b)
Roman, c. 190, Commodus as Hercules, Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome
Coptic, 3rd cent. A.D., Isis suckling Harpocrates, Karganis, Egypt
Roman Christian, 3rd cent., Christ, from a fresco, Catacomb of Domatilla,
Rome
But Classical reason was eroded everywhere. Marcus' own son, Commodus,
plunged the empire into a new orgy of misrule. His playing Hercules against beasts in the
Amphitheater is matched in Christian credulity by the spiteful excesses of the apocryphal
infant Christ:
The son of Anna scattered the waters which Jesus had gathered into
lakes. The boy Jesus became angry... "Behold, thou shalt wither as a
tree." Immediately he became withered all over... At the request of all,
Jesus healed him, leaving only some small member withered, that they
might take warning. Another time Jesus went forth into the street, and
a boy running by, rushed upon his shoulder; at which Jesus, angry,
said: "Thou shalt go no farther." And he instantly fell down dead...
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Then the parents going to Joseph complained... "he kills our
children..." And immediately they who accused him became blind.
Music:
a27)
b27)
27)
Gregorian, Requiem 6th mode (Solesmes), French Decca 7532 (to
slide 30)
Roman (Herculaneum), c. 50 A.D., Egyptian cult scene, detail, Museum,
Naples
Paschal II, 12th cent., San Clemente Church, with Apse Mosaic, Rome
Roman fresco, late 11th cent., Miracle of San Clemente, Lower Church, San
Clemente, Rome
In that ground, as in a forest, fattened by decay, Christ was not the only saviour
stirring. Under the Dark Age church of San Clemente, with its 12th-century mosaic apse,
excavations lead back in time. Through these frescoed remains of the lower church,
down a trench past a prehistoric Cyclopean wall, where a lost Roman water descends as
in Dante's Hell,
28)
28a)
Mithraic chapel and altar, 3rd cent., under San Clemente, Rome
Græco-Roman, 3rd cent. A.D., the God Mithras, British Museum, London
(video returns to 28)
one comes to a vaulted room. The windows for seasonal light are twenty feet
underground. On the carved altar the Persian god Mithras drives a knife into the dogharried, scrotum-pinched bull. A jag for the world-weary? And did the chapel later go
Christian? It seems the carved shepherd, found there, is carrying not a lamb, but a goat.
29)
Roman, 222-35, Alexander Severus, Capitoline Museum, Rome; + V & dig.
detail
The face of Alexander Severus is like a barometer of the groping soulfulness that
brought faith down. In his private chapel were busts of Orpheus, Abraham, Apollo and
Jesus. (Why not of Mithras?) One recalls Augustine's phrase of his own later search
through the stews of personality: "with proud dejection and untired weariness" — "superba deiectione et inquieta lassitudine." Even the techniques respond to the spatial
abandonment, the plasticities of face and hair thinning around the gloaming eyes.
30)
Double of 29) Severus & 16) Aurelii Apostle (V, Apostle only)
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Against that slippery sweetness, set its near contemporary (already seen), the
Apostle from the Aurelii tomb. (end Requiem) For Alexander the dark of earth and reason
is negative, for the Apostle, a way of salvation. But there is something more surprising
than the mystical and moral lightening:
31)
Post-Phidian from Mylasa, c. 340 B.C., Head of Zeus, Museum of Fine Arts.
Boston
it is that the noblest Greek past — the Zeus-type of Phidias, the 4th-century type of
Platonic meditation
For 2nd 30) Triple: 31, Head of Zeus , 29, of Severus, and 30, Aurelii Apostle (V
dpible of 29 & 30)
— is more preserved in the Christian head than in the pagan. Faith is becoming an ark to
float the classical over the German flood.
Yet the difference between the Christian head and the post-Periclean tells as much
as the likeness.
2nd 30a)
Roman Christian, c. 400 A.D., Ivory panel, The Crucifixion, British
Museum, London
Nietzsche called Christianity Platonism for the masses. But in the incarnate Being
which gave it its name, in Christ, it broke not only with Platonism, but with all classical
thought — fusing in faith the poles speculation had precipitated.
a2nd 31)
Double: [A] Roman, c. 300 A.D., Male Portrait,. Capitoline, Rome,
and [B] Roman Christian, 307-37, Head of a Boy, detail of sarcophagus,
Lateran Christian Museum, Rome
For 2nd 31) Attic from Aegeira (Euclides of Athens?) 2nd cent. B.C. (or later?),
Head of Zeus, National Museum, Athens (CGB '77)
The art sign of this suspension of disbelief is liberation from the pathos of personality, as
its sign in thought is the embracing of paradox. From Socrates down the logic of noncontradiction had become the limit of reason, the everpresent shipwreck of deep inquiry.
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32)
Symbolic History
Græco-Roman, 150-170, Herodes Atticus(?), Louvre, Paris
As conscious hungers increase, the frustration of mere mind more and more
shows itself in the earnest brow and troubled gaze of private, searching awareness.
33)
Roman Christian, c. 359, Head of Christ as Lawgiver, Junius Bassus
Sarcophagus, Grottoes, Vatican
And the gift of the Christian faith-leap is just the sudden lifting of all that brooding
weight — since the denominator of the change, visual and logical, is absorption in the
larger, in this case the luminous impossibility of the Eternal born and crucified.
Consider Augustine's handling of the old contradiction between God's
foreknowledge and man's free will.
2nd 32 & 2nd 33)
Double: [32] Herodes Atticus, and [33] Christ as Lawgiver
Cicero, he says, guided by reason, could not accept both. "Like a truly great and
wise man," he chose what man most required, free-dom; but that drove him to deny God's
foreknowing. Thus to make men free, he made them sacrilegious. "But the religious
mind," says Augustine, "against the impious darings of reason, chooses both, confesses
both, and maintains both by the faith of piety."
34)
34a)
Græco-Roman, c. 260 A.D., Portrait of Plotinus(?), Museum, Ostia
Same, Plotinus, detail of expression
So Plotinus, of whom this is probably a portrait, c. 260 A.D., almost desperately
follows the logic of the One: "We must provide for knowledge and truth; we must secure
reality... The only way is to leave nothing outside the veritable intellectual-Principle...
Only thus is mind dispensed... from acts of faith." At once he is in the old Eleatic bind:
no way to account for matter and becoming. "The mind is still in trouble over the
problem endlessly debated: from such a unity as we have declared the One to be, how
does anything at all come into substantial existence, any multiplicity, dyad, or number?"
He can only dream his way out, by metaphor: "The vision has been of God in travail."
35)
Italian Byzantine, c. 495, mosaic, Angel detail, San Apollinare Nuovo.
Ravenna
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35a)
Symbolic History
Same, Angel, upper detail
Plotinus' metaphor becomes Christian truth. Reason strikes shuddering on the
rocks, and a cry goes up of "Glory, glory, halleluia." So Augustine's Confessions:
What therefore is my God? What I ask but the Lord God... most
merciful and most just, most secret, and most present... constant and
incomprehensible; immutable, yet changing all things… ever active
and ever quiet… still seeking, although thou standest in need of
nothing... what can any man say when he speaks of thee? And woe to
them that speak nothing... seeing those that speak most are dumb.
The robe of doubt is reversed and it is all gold.
36)
Roman, 267-70, Claudius Gothicus relief, detail, National Museum, Rome;
+ V closer detaill (not dig.)
There are degrees, even in the leap of faith. In the lack of Christian art, let those
human softenings on the Imperial side — Claudius Gothicus sacrificing in the pensive
shades — remind us of the liberal fathers: Justin: "Christ is the Logos of whom the
whole human race partakes, and those who live according to reason are Christians... Such
were Socrates and Heraclitus among the Greeks"; Clement of Alexandria: "Philosophy
was a schoolmaster to bring the Greek mind to Christ, as the Law brought the Hebrews."
37)
Roman, 238-44, Emperor Gordianus III. National Museum, Rome;
+ V detail, shown first (so dig.)
While to the cruel hardenings of imperial face (Gordianus III, 238-44) we liken
the holy arrogance of Tertullian: "kill us, torture us, condemn us, grind us to dust... the
blood of Christians is seed"; his scorn for pagan thought:
What has Athens to do with Jerusalem, the Academy with the Church?
Away with all Stoic, Platonic, and dialectic Christianity! After
knowing Jesus Christ, we need no investigation, after the tidings of the
Gospels, we need no searching.
38)
Roman, c. 192, Mosaic of beast slaughter, detail, Borghese, Rome
Even the beast-slaughter and sacrifice of Christians in the Flavian Amphitheater
finds an inverse frenzy in Tertullian:
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How shall I admire, how laugh, how rejoice, how exult, when I behold
so many proud monarchs and fancied gods groaning in the lowest
abyss of darkness... so many sage philosophers blushing in red-hot
flames with their deluded scholars... so many celebrated poets...
39)
Roman (from Egypt), c. 300 A.D., Four Emperors Group, San Marco, Venice;
+ V detail, shown first (so dig.)
The 3rd century breakdown of traditional sanctities had enforced the need of some
new divinity to hedge the throne. The Four Emperors group of Diocletian and his regents
reflects in its gestures the menace of the time, as by its techniques the Eastern and Barbarian reversion. So Diocletian's reforms turn the Roman state to an oriental monarchy, to
which the conversion of Constantine gives supreme sanction. Faith becomes the key to
power, and history takes the form of a spaceless encounter between spiritual legions.
a40)
b40)
40)
Roman Christian, 5th cent., Egyptians in the Red Sea, lower detail, Santa
Maria Maggiore, Rome
Same, Egyptians in the Sea, upper detail
Same, Egyptians in the Sea, whole
In Eusebius' Life of Constantine, Greek and Roman causality dissolves; we are in
the miraculous realm of the "Salutary Sign." Constantine's armies march under the banner
of the cross. Maxentius puts forth all his sorcery: "sometimes for magic purposes ripping
up women with child, searching into the bowels of new-born infants... practicing horrid
arts for evoking demons." But the Biblical prototype suggests the issue: as Pharaoh and
his chariots here go down into the sea, Maxentius and his guards are drowned in Tiber.
41)
V41a)
Roman, 312-15, head of a colossal statue of Constantine, Palazzo dei
Conservatori, Rome
Same, Constantine, another view
Constantine erects in Rome a triumphal statue (fragments now) bearing a spear in
the shape of a cross:
By virtue of this Salutary Sign, which is the true test of valor, I have
preserved and liberated your city from the yoke of tyranny. I have also
set at liberty the Roman senate and people, and restored them to their
ancient distinction and splendor.
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As in the Holy Roman Empire, Christendom espouses the lost glory of Rome.
a42)
42)
Byzantine, 532-47, Empress Theodora and retinue, South wall of Choir, San
Vitale, Ravenna (V uses detail only; dig. whole mosaic)
Same, north wall of choir, mosaic detail, Head of Justinian
In Book III, on the Council of Nicaea, Eusebius climaxes the sanctification of
force. It is the imperial heaven which glistens two centuries later in the gold mosaics of
Justinian's Ravenna. Here too humility toward God — "With regard to his mind,"
Eusebius says of Constantine, "it was evident that he was distinguished by piety and
godly fear" — parades in an exterior of regal pomp:
And now, all rising at a signal which indicated the emperor's entrance,
43)
Same, Justinian with two flanking figures
at last he himself proceeded through the midst of the assembly, like
some heavenly messenger of God, Clothed in raiment which glittered
as it were with rays of light, reflecting the glowing radiance of a purple
robe, and adorned with the brilliant splendor of gold and precious
stones.
But the final reversal, in Christ's name, of Christ's values, follows in the fifteenth chapter:
a44)
44)
Same, mosaic, left half: Justinian, attendants, and soldiers (dig. far left)
Same, whole mosaic; + V detail, right, shown first (dig. whole only)
Detachments of the bodyguard and other troops surrounded the
entrance of the palace with drawn swords, and through the midst of
those, the men of God proceeded without fear into the innermost of the
imperial apartments, in which some were the emperor's own
companions at table, while others reclined on couches arranged on
either side. One might have thought that a picture of Christ's kingdom
was thus shadowed forth, more visionary than actual.
45)
45a)
Again, 17, Constantius II
Same, Constantius II, a nearer view
The son of Constantine brings us back from Justinian to the time of Eusebius. We
displayed this bronze before, as a sinister portal of Dark Age religion: the mortal
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arrogation of divine will. In abstract asperity it epitomizes a state defended and
threatened by barbarians, hardening socially to feudalism, spiritually to a dogma stripped
of humanistic shading. Yet even here the germ of advance — the visionary force of self
and world — like a crab retrogresses forward.
46)
Vergilius Romanus, 400-50, Book III, Georgics, Vatican Library; + V detail,
shown first
It was this Constantius who made the terror of Christian piety so clear that his
successor, Julian the Apostate (361-63), tried to reinstate the old liberal gods. But the
Vergilius Romanus in the Vatican, from a few generations later, shows the remoteness of
the values to be revived.
47)
Roman, c. 400, Consul with cloth, Palazzo dei Conservatori. Rome
So this stately, yet somehow frozen, attempt to refurbish the full-togaed dignity of
a consul — like the ineffectual efforts of Symmachus, cousin-opponent of St. Ambrose
— all testify to the shallowness of Julian's hope, that a relativism, unable to maintain
itself when alive, could be resuscitated against faith by an act of will.
48)
48a)
Byzantine, c. 370 (or after?), Bronze statue of an Emperor (Valentinian I?),
Barletta, frontal view
Same, another view, detail
Though anyone facing the rigors of Constantine and his like successors, might
have thought the Lord's prayer buried forever under the official basilica; or assumed from
the hardening of style that the Dark Ages had already fallen, all classical good thrown
down by "A shape with a lion body and the head of a man,/ A gaze blank and pitiless as
the sun." (Yeats)
a49)
49)
Holy Shroud, claimed imprint of crucified Christ, Cathedral, Turin
Same, detail of head
Both fears would have been premature. In the demon lover of scripture (whose
stamp of hypnotic power some find in the Holy Shroud), Christianity bore its own
refining fire. With monasticism and the apostolic earnestness of the Latin fathers, spirit
drew to a fellowship of saints, challenging the militant body by which it was maintained.
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Thus Ambrose to Theodosius, c. 390, after the punitive massacre in Thessalonica: "I
prefer God to my sovereign ... if you purpose being present, I dare not offer the Sacrifice."
The emperor was readmitted to communion only as a penitent sinner.
50)
50a)
50b)
Roman Christian, end of 4th cent., Christ with Apostles, apse mosaic, Santa
Prudenziana, Rome (CGB '86)
Same, detail of Christ (video uses detail from CGB V50a)
Same apse mosaic, central portion (CGB '86)
Premature also the Dark Age surmise. Since it was just under the Dominate
restoration of order that the Christian arts enjoy a last Græco-Roman harvest, clothing the
fall of earth and faith beyond time in a lingering ripeness of earthly form — an outward
ease of style, a shadowed inwardness of person. So Jerome Romanizes scripture:
Lamentations:
O Vos omnes, qui transitis per viam, attendite, et videte si est dolor
sicut dolor meus;
and Matthew:
Venite ad me omnes, qui laboratis, et onerati estis, et ego reficiam vos.
So Augustine (epitomizing Roman Christianity) retires for meditation to the villa of a
patrician friend.
a51)
51)
Roman Christian, late 3rd cent., Christ healing a woman with an issue of
blood, Catacomb of Saints Pietro and Marcelino, Rome
Same, Christ Healing, detail (video returns to whole; not dig.)
The gentle nostalgia of this classical autumn, coupled with mystical faith, its
twilight transcendence of Virgil's lachrimae rerum, is magically evoked by the passage
from the Confessions (IX, 10) where, shortly before his mother's death, Augustine speaks
with her of the Kingdom of Heaven:
it fell out... that she and I should stand alone leaning in a certain
window, which looked into the garden within the house where we now
lay, at Ostia by Tiber, where ...we were recruiting ourselves for a sea
voyage. There conferred we hand to hand very sweetly...
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The impressionistic touch — "we two ... leaning in a certain window" — at one time
focuses the personal poignance
52)
Italian Byzantine, 5th cent., Starry Vault mosaic, Mausoleum of Galla
Placida, Ravenna
and carries it over into symbol; the wayfaring sequestration become a window (as earthly
life is) where "forgetting those things which are behind, we reached forth unto those
things which are to come." "Earth conquered," said Boethius, "gives the stars." —
"Superata tellus sidera donat."
a53)
b53)
53)
Roman, c. 120 A.D. (orig. 27 B.C.?), interior with skylight, Pantheon, Rome
(CGB '86)
Same, Pantheon, exterior from rear (CGB '86)
Same, Pantheon, interior; video uses V53 (CGB ‘86); not dig.
What lay behind was the somber nobility of Platonic Greece and Ciceronian
Rome. The meditation we are to read recalls in thought Plotinus' paean to the One
(Ennead V), as in its vaulting periods Republican rhetoric. The change we have seen in
statuary, from weighted pagan consciousness to the Christian lightening into
transpersonality, is parallelled by the miracle which lifted this brooding dome of the
Pantheon
a54)
Roman, early 3rd cent., Baths of Caracalla, Rome (video and digital: CGB
Va54)
b54) Hagia Sophia, 502-37 and 558-62, from the park to the south, Constantinople
(CGB '77);+ V & dig. detail
54) Same, Hagia Sophia, interior with a shaft of sunlight
54a and 54b)
Other views of Hagia Sophia interior (CGB '77) (video uses upper detail from
a57 instead of 54b); dig. all (CGB '77)
onto a centralized basilica like that of the Baths of Caracalla, windowing the whole into
the apocalyptic vision of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. It is the ultimate achievement
in art of imperial Christianity, as Augustine's Confessions and The City of God are in
writing; these, with the body of chant, loom over the Dark Ages with comparable
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magnitude. How the powers of earth plead earthless devotion —Augustine with the
Ambrosian he loved:
Music:
Ambrosian Chant, "Ubi sunt", (Milan), ARC 2533 284 (A,8)
We said therefore: if to any man the tumults of the flesh be silenced, if
fancies of the earth and waters and air be silenced also: if the poles of
heaven be silent also: if the very soul be silent to herself, and by not
thinking upon self surmount self: if all dreams and imaginary
revelations be silenced, every tongue and every sign, if whatsoever is
transient be silent to any one — since if any man could hearken unto
them. all these say unto him,
a55, 55, and, slide only, 55a) Same, more interior views (all CGB '77)
We created not ourselves, but he that remains to all eternity: if then,
having uttered this. they also be then silent (as having raised our ear
unto him that made them) and if he speak alone; not by them but by
himself, that we may hear his own words; not pronounced by any
tongue of flesh, nor by the voice of the angels, nor by sound of
thunder, nor in the dark riddle of a resemblance; but that we may hear
him whom we love in these creatures, himself without these
a56, 56, 56a) More views of Hagia Sophia interior
(like as we two now strained ourselves unto it), and in swift thought
arrived unto a touch of that eternal wisdom which is over all — could
this exaltation of spirit ever have continued, and all other visions of a
far other kind been quite taken away, and this one exaltation should
ravish us, and swallow us up, and so wrap up their beholder among
these more inward joys, as that his life might be for ever like to this
very moment of understanding which we now sighed after: were not
this as much as Enter into thy Master's joy? But when shall that be?
Shall it be when we shall all rise again, though all shall not be
changed?
(end Ambrosian)
a57)
57)
Long exposure of Hagia Sophia, ribs of dome (CGB '77) (video shows lower
detail from 56 instead); not so dig.
Italian Byzantine, 526-47, Mosaic of Abraham and Angels with pillars in the
foreground, San Vitale, Ravenna (CGB '48); + V & dig. detail
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We have brought sound and image to a thought which denied them. But what else
were Augustine's words? So, for his theory of allegory and his theory of history we
cannot avoid art-parallels.
Christian architecture treats the material building as the City of God; Christian
history makes all space and time the sacrament of God's will. Both these transformations
rest on the mode of symbol —the mystical identity of likeness. At the close of The City
of God, by incorporating the classical myth of the Four Ages and of eternal recurrence
into the Biblical progress from Creation to Judgment, Augustine shows the later West
how to make an unfolding revelation of the temporal.
58)
Same, San Vitale, Chancel
So the church of San Vitale, irradiated by alabaster panes, gold mosaics and precious
stones, shapes a glorified body both literal and symbolic: "And I, John, saw the holy city,
New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for
her husband."
a59)
59)
Same, San Vitale: mosaic, Moses and the Burning Bush, whole
Same, detail (video puts the wholelbetween details); not so dig.
Such is the anagogical method which descends from Augustine to the Middle
Ages and to Dante, transforming literature into a field of resonances. The City of God
rests on the sort of symbolic projections which Paul made of Abraham's children by the
flesh and by the spirit, and which would later lead Joachim de Floris to the germinal heresy of the Third Kingdom. As God to Moses from the bush already of pentecostal fire:
"Take off your shoes, for this is holy ground."
60)
60a)
Roman Christian, 432-440, Santa Maria Maggiore, Nave, Rome (CGB '86)
(video takes two details from V60); dig. one detail from 60 for 60a
Same, Santa Maria Maggiore, view with altar and ceiling (slide show)
All this while the chant of the early church (to be codified by Gregory in the 6th
century) had also been remaking its heritage — though the transience of music has left
almost nothing of the wealth of Greek and Eastern song. Gregorian, too, by the same
transience was finally harmonized and debased. So the solid basilicas of Rome have
taken on an ornate veneer: the altar and coffered ceiling of Santa Maria Maggiore.
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Though one has only to look at the mosaics on the triumphal arch
61)
61a)
Same, mosaics to the left of the triumphal arch (dig. 61a)
Same mosaics, detail, center, from Christ and the Magi (dig. 61z)
to be in touch with the original. Not so in music. Plainsong as we hear it had to be
recaptured in theory and performance by the monks of Solesmes Abbey. There are style
problems, as with any restored art. But the practice they aimed at was not of the Dark
Ages — not the Gauls and Germans crushing the melodies in their throats — but of
Roman Christianity.
a62)
62)
62a)
Italian Byzantine, 5th cent., Two Stags at the Fountain of Life, Mosaic.
Mausoleum of Galla Placida, Ravenna [slide and dig.]
Same, detail of left stag
Same, Galla Placida, Doves at the Water of Life [video order: 62a, 62]
There is none of the rhythmic beat and drive of later Romanesque and Gothic.
The subtly modulated pulse, or ictus, does not initiate the note but crowns its center.
Thus liberated from stress (and by their modalities from tension and release) Gregorian
melodies float or soar in a series of arches within arches, melismas into phrases, chants,
responses, an entire service, as effortlessly soul-enfolding as the vine and fountain of life:
"Sicut cervus desiderat ad fontes aquarum." (Jerome's church-softened Latin one with that
art and chant.)
63)
63a)
View from the Aventine, the park by Santa Sabina, morning (CGB '86)
Roman Christian, 422-32, Santa Sabina Apse, from the park (CGB '86)
After the second World War had silenced the traffic of Rome, one could climb the
Aventine, in the spring, say, the morning of Palm Sunday, and at sunrise from the little
park over the Tiber look out on Rome under the pouring song of the nightingales; then
enter the Church of Santa Sabina, which, of all in Rome, best preserves the fifth century.
To hear Gregorian there is to stand
64)
Same, interior, left colonnade of Nave (CGB '86)
at an Augustinian window.
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Subdued light filters through alabaster, down the antiphonal of columns, the
undulation of arches, along the shadowy retreat of aisles; it lies like a liquid on the marble
floor.
a65)
Italian Byzantine, 5th cent., Mausoleum of Galla Placida, interior from the
entrance, with tombs, Ravenna
for 1st 65, copy of 2nd 65) Same, toward the entrance, arches and Shepherd Mosaic
(video first shows detail of arches; so dig.)
Or there is the transmutation of the grave in the Ravenna Mausoleum of Galla
Placida: Against the ego-display and drama of later music, consider the greatest contrast
Gregorian admits of, the "Christus factus est pro nobis" — a veiled modulation, the tragic
opening mitigated by the suavities of prayer, the exultant close restrained by resignation.
It begins "Christ was made obedient for us unto death, even the death of the cross." The
phrase hangs in the silence, a pain that is not pain but soothed to acceptance.
1st 66)
Same, Ravenna, The Orphic or Shepherd Christ, whole mosaic
A pause, and then: "For which God has exalted him and given him a name above all
names." It is the Resurrection, the leap from dark — but listen for it: the simple change
of range, a faint shift of figuration, for the solemn drop on "crucis," the insistent pulse and
soar of "exaltavit illum",
2nd 65)
Again, 65, Mausoleum toward the entrance, with Shepherd Christ
form a contrast as subtly mysterious as the emergence of the Orphic Christ — there — in
the recess of the Galla Placida tomb.
2nd 64)
Music:
Again, 64, Santa Sabina Nave (CGB '48)
Gregorian, "Christus factus est," old Solesmes album (five
phrases), V-M 87, I, 5
For 3rd 65) Again, a65, Tomb chamber from entrance (video uses detail of arch from
65); not so dig.
2nd 66) Again, 66, Orphic or Shepherd Christ (video crops to center)
67)
Same, Shepherd Christ mosaic, detail of the Christ
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68) Italian Byzantine 521-47, ceiling mosaic, lamb with vine, San
Vitale,Ravenna
(CGB ‘48); + V detail (so dig.)
(fade Gregorian)
The symbolic vine, angels, and lamb — in the amber suffusion of this San Vitale
ceiling, sacrifice and triumph soothe the Ausonian dusk of that age.
a69)
b69)
69)
Upper right detail of 69
Lower left detail of 69
Roman, 1st cent. A.D., Sacred Landscape, from Pompeii, Museum, Naples
(video: whole, left detail, and again whole); dig. a, b, then whole
Ausonius — Waddell says — in his fields of Sorrowful Lovers (Silva Myrtea)
from a phrase or two of Virgil's, has created the twilight world of Western Europe:
They wander in deep woods, in mournful light
Amid long reeds and drowsy headed poppies,
And lakes where no wave laps, and voiceless streams,
Upon whose banks in the dim light grow old
Flowers that were once bewailed names of kings.
Errantes silva in magna et sub luce maligna
Inter harundineasque comas gravidumque papaver
Et tacitos sine labe lacus, sine murmure rivos,
Quorum per ripas nebuloso lumine marcent
Fleti, olim regum et puerorum nomina, flores.
How far that twilight retains its pagan glow, the search for a parallel teaches: we have
had to go back 300 years to the first illusionism of Pompeii.
70)
70a)
70b)
Roman, 3rd cent., Moselle wine-ship, detail of cheerful sailor, Trier
Imperial Baths, view from north, Trier, Germany
Double: Roman heads [A] lst cent., from Ostia, and [B] 4th cent., from Via
Appia [slide only, while video returns to cheerful sailor]
Though the Mosel wine-ship of the third century may serve for Ausonius' poem
on that river, its grapes and wine. Rolfe Humphries has translated the opening:
What color are the shallows, now that evening
Moves the late shadows forward, and the river
Is dyed with the green mountain? All the ridges
Swim in the ripple of motion, and the vine
Trembles, and is not there, and under water
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Its cluster, seen through glass, is magnified.
There was Ausonius, luke-warm convert to Christianity, writing into leisured old
age of the warmth and wine of Gaul. And what art will suggest his loved pupil Paulinus,
called from that earthly affection by the Christian siren of eternity?
71)
71a)
71b)
Late Roman-African, 5th-6th cent.(?), Statue from Dejemila Museum, Algeria
Same, detail of the head
Roman Christian, 6th cent. & ff, interior, from aisle into nave, Santa Maria
in Cosmedin, Rome (CGB '86)
Perhaps one of those precursive statues from Augustine's Africa.
Not that they beggared be in mind, nor brutes,
That they have chosen solitudes and deserts
For their dwelling: but their eyes are turned
To the high stars, the very deep of Truth ...
And whatsoever wars on the divine,
At Christ's command and for his love, they hate...
So wrote Paulinus (translated by Waddell) and then, with a last great but impersonal
protest of love, "Ego te per omne quod datum mortalibus et destinatum saeculum est" ("I
shall hold thee through all chances and fates"), he withdraws into the silence, the service
of St. Felix at Nola: "Spring wakens the birds' voices, but for me/ My Saint's day is my
spring." It is the retreat into spacelessness, the current of the time.
a72)
72)
Italian Byzantine, early 5th cent. A.D., interior, detail of windows and
cupola, Baptistry of the Orthodox, Ravenna
Same, mosaics of cupola (c. 450 A.D.); + V detail (so dig.)
In the mosaics of Rome and Ravenna it has been brought visibly before us.
Startling to see a representational art with a long tradition in the life of this world, even
while retaining its realistic surface, become possessed by an entirely non-representational
and symbolic spirit: the bodies stiffen and remove themselves from the flux of things; the
eyes widen and grow unfathomable (they were sublunar orbs before; now they gaze down
from the Empyrean); the colors are spectral, gold and blue veils; the symmetry is final,
stylized;
73)
Italian Byzantine, 534-39, San Apollinari in Classe, Apse, Ravenna: + V &
dig. detail (both from Sam Adams' slide)
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nothing is valid in its own right, but as it speaks the known and unknowable divine: the
monogram, the lamb, the dove, the cross, the throne, the living font and well. Not Christ
nor any of his disciples continues as a man; they are caught in the timeless aspect of their
being, neither acting nor suffering, yet suffering in a victorious and eternal act — Eliot's
"at the still point of the turning world."
a74)
74)
74a)
Italian Byzantine, 6th cent., Head of a Prophet, San Apollinari Nuovo
Ravenna
Italian Byzantine, 6th cent., Head of Archbishop Maximillian, detail of
Justinian Mosaic, San Vitale, Ravenna
From same mosaic, Justinian's attendant (Bellisarius?)
Yet all the residual frames of representation remain; and it is a sensation which takes us
to that world's heart to see these haunting sixth century eyes, longing as the late
Romantic, yet dogmatically resolved, indifferent, cold, implacable, a trifle cruel, and yet
none of these precisely, since none of these applies at that remoteness of vision — "an
image out of Spiritus Mundi" — to see these eyes, of which the soulfulness is vacancy,
gazing from the still lush trappings of imperial technique — this is the unforgettable
impact of the developing Byzantine.
75)
Christian Gaul, 5th-6th cent., mosaic vault, Baptistery, Albenga, Italian
Riviera
It is as if we saw the Christian spirit divesting itself of classical consciousness,
preparing for the Dark Age agony, the fallen world and unquestioning faith beyond, the
stripped intensity and paradox of blessing.
76)
Gallic, 1st-2nd cent. A.D.(?), Man-eating monster, Avignon; + V detail (not
dig.)
While the Grendel of the North pressed at the ramparts. Since before Caesar,
barbarians had been coming into the empire and being tamed; but as the pressure gained
on the power to absorb, the ruptures came: 410, Alaric's sack of Rome; 455, the Vandals;
and then, pushed by the Huns, the Goths and Ostragoths, and all the others.
a77)
Constantinople, c. 400 A.D., "Rubens Vase," carved agate, Walter's Art
Gallery, Baltimore
June 1996
Early Christianity
26
�C.G. Bell
77)
Symbolic History
Same, close-up of the satyr's head
Salvian, a Roman Gaul of the early 5th century — age of this agate vase Rubens
once owned — marvels how the broken successor realms cling to the bacchic insouciance
of carefree times: "peace and security have vanished from the whole Roman Empire ...
Where is the man who fears death and yet laughs? ... You might say the whole Roman
people is saturated with sardonic herbs. It is dying and yet it laughs ..." Even Augustine
had enjoyed the retrospective villas of that past.
78)
Merovingian (Lombard), 7th cent., bronze plaque of a horseman, from a
shield, Historical Museum, Bern
With Gregory, a hundred years later, we have crossed the divide:
Soon afterwards the wild nation of the Lombards jumped at our throat
and mowed down the inhabitants of that country. The cities have been
laid waste, the fortresses destroyed, the churches burned, the monasteries torn down; the fields are abandoned by human beings and
without cultivation ...
a79)
79)
German Barbarian, 7th cent., Warrior's Gravestone, from Niederdollendorf,
Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Bonn
Merovingian Tombstone, 7th c., Priest with book, Museum, Bonn
June 1996
Early Christianity
27
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Wild animals have taken possession of places where multitudes of men
lived before. I do not know what is happening in other parts of the
world, but in this country where we live, the world not only foretells its
end but manifestly displays it to our eyes ...
Since all temporal possessions have fallen away from us, we must strive with
greater eagerness for things that are eternal.
(Dialogues VIII, tr. C. Mackauer)
This is the rock gorge that lies between Christian antiquity and the Christian West.
80)
Italian Byzantine, 521-47, San Vitale (dusk, lighted), Ravenna
Music:
Gregorian, from the Kyrie, (Solesmes) V-M 87, I, 1
But from that, or any other, time of troubles, how soul would look back to those refuges
of Christian love and art, quietly sheltered in the last corruption of imperial power. So
after the Second World War, I wrote in this Ravenna, of this San Vitale:
From the crushing of Rome this peace flowed like honey;
But what ripens on our tree of pains past or to come?
June 1996
Early Christianity
(close Kyrie)
28
�
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SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
7. The Dark Ages
CHARLES G. BELL
ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
or
1260 CANYON ROAD
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501
August 1995
Last Revised January ‘96
�1
Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
7. The Dark Ages
1)
1a)
German (Ottonian), c. 950, St. Luke in Ecstasy, Gospel of Otto III; Staatsbibliothek, Munich; + V details
Same, upper half (video varies the order of whole and details)
Music:
Plainsong Sequence, attr. to Wipo, c. 1000-50, Victimae Paschali
(Mass for Easter) Haydn Soc. HSL 2071
To call the birth-phase of Western Culture the Dark Ages — those Gregorian
centuries from the fall of Rome to the sequences of 1000 and after (this Victimae
Paschali) — is to invoke a mystery like the cloud of the tabernacle from which God
speaks. Since the arts of vision (here St. Luke in Ecstasy, German, c. 950), attain heights
of mandala. In such a blaze, where is the dark? Does it lie within or beyond those staring
eyes?
2)
Spanish Bible, 920, Sign of St. Luke, Cod. 6, f 211, Leon Cathedral, Spain; +
V details
Certainly beyond — on the world abandoned: the earthly fabric of space, time
and causality. But the reduction of the phvsical has its inner concomitant, the
mortification of humanity, so tied to space, time and cause. Stranger than the eyes' stare
is that their God-centered inwardness (as in this Spanish 920 Angel-sign of Luke) may
wear the deformity of being crossed.
(End Victimae Paschali)
3)
3a)
3b)
French Gothic, c. 1250, Angel of the Annunciation, detail of central Portal,
Rheims (video shows the angel of 3b or V3)
Maitani and school, 1310-30, detail from Inferno, west façade, Orvieto
Cathedral (video upper detail only)
Again, Rheims Portal, Angel guardian of St. Denis, detail of face
Music:
August 5, 1995
French Motet, c. 1230, Ave Maria (close), Seraphim SIC 6052 Side
1, #5
The Dark Ages
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Whereas, in the Gothic (Rheims, about 1250), mystical love has entered our
realm, and smiles. Thus in Dante, it is the sinner who twists his eyes, "Biechi" (Inferno
VI, 91), and falls into the mud of hell; while Revelation comes as Beatrice: "Dolce amor,
che di riso t'ammante" — "Sweet love, mantled in smiling."
(End Ave Maria)
4)
Roman Christian, 4th cent., Christ to Jerusalem, from Junius Bassus
Sarcophagus, Vatican (video: detail only)
4a) Double: Naumburg Master c. 1329, Saved and Damned, Choir Screen,
Cathedral, Mainz
V4b) Giselbertus, 1125-1135, Christ in Judgment, detail of Tympanum over main
door, Cathedral, Autun
4c)
Again, 4th-century Christ to Jerusalem, wider view
Music:
Gregorian (Solesmes), Lux Aeterna (close), Mass for the Dead,
Decca 7532 A
Though there is a source of confusion here, something hard to clarify, since
Græco-Roman Christianity had favored a gentle kind of nirvana smile. It is just that
change from valedictory lightening to the Gothic surge of energy and delight, which the
centuries of invasion, the stripping off of outward things and the fierce charging of spirit
had to accomplish — to transform (by paradox) a motion of withdrawal into a dynamic of
attack. Where this 4th-century Christ, even as he enters Jerusalem, seems soothed into a
neo-Platonic, almost Buddhist, child-teacher and immortal guide.
(end Lux Aeterna)
5)
5a)
French Romanesque, Gothic 12th cent., Corpus Christi, Bronze gilt,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City (first, video detail, Va5)
Same, detail of head and shoulders
Music:
Leonin, c. 1160, Crucifixum (duplum) opening (Tinayre) Col
M 431 (1)
But that proud and terrible agonist would not be tamed; and the smiling Gothic
grace is coterminous with a twisted Gothic pain (Leonin and Chartres, 12th century) —
both of which, mediated by the Dark Ages, have become bearers of incalculable force.
So the darkness is doubly creative; its arts of vision attest the birth of a culture.
(Fade Leonin)
August 5, 1995
The Dark Ages
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Symbolic History
a6)
Apulian Romanesque, 1078-1197, toward High Altar, S. Nicola, Bari
(CGB '84)
Vb6) Carolingian, c. 796-804, Karlschrein, relief, Charlemagne dedicates chapel,
Royal Chapel, Aachen, Germany
6) Northumbrian before 716, from an Italian 6th-cent. MS, Ezra copying the
records, Biblioteca Laurenziana, Florence; + V detail
6a) Milan (or Reichenau?) 11th cent., Christ from Healing of the Possessed, Ivory,
Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt
Music:
Gregorian (Solesmes), 8th-9th cent., Gallican(?), Media Vita
opening, Vict. M-87
If that darkness were not windowed, it would preclude our study. By the monastic
continuation of art and learning, we enter a gestation which, with other civilizations, was
obscure. So in this Northumbrian 700 copy of an Italian 6th-century manuscript, showing
Ezra — by the resonance of symbol, such a monk in such a study — himself copying the
Temple records. Here history presents us with the first luminous Dark Age, the only
documented Time of Troubles. Let us consider it in three aspects: its oneness, its multiplicity, its directional transformation.
(Fade Media Vita)
7)
Græco-Roman, from Pompeii, 1st cent. A.D., fresco, Perseus and Andromeda,
National Museum, Naples' + V detail
Music:
Greek, 2nd cent. B.C., 1st Delphic Hymn (opening), RCA-V-LM6057 (IV, 2)
When seen in the larger sequence: from the temporal and humanist command of
Greece and Rome (the Delphic Hymn, with Perseus and Andromeda from Pompeii),
(fade Delphic Hymn)
8)
Northumbrian, c. 710, Echternach Gospels, St. Matthew, National Library,
Paris; + V detail
through the 710 Gospel of Echternach, also Northumbrian, where everything spatial and
human flattens to the hieratic — as in Gregorian reduced to the tread of parallel organum;
Music:
August 5, 1995
Scholia enchiriadis, c. 850, Organum of the fifth, Nos qui vivimus
(HAM 25, a, 2), Orpheus 349
(end phrase)
The Dark Ages
�4
C.G. Bell
9)
Symbolic History
E.Q. Asam, 1721, St. George and the Dragon, High Altar, Weltenburg
church, Bavaria (from CGB '59)
and so to the gradiloquence and whelming drama of the Baroque (Asam, 1721) — in such
a context, the whole span
For 2nd 8) Asturian Romanesque, before 848, Santa Maria del Naranco, near
Oviedo, Spain
from the Fall of Rome to the 11th century rise of Europe, seems a concave of primitive
withdrawal, between two vast waves of civilized, assertive force.
2nd 7)
a2nd 7)
Again, Perseus and Andromeda, upper detail
Græco-Roman, 1st cent. A.D., Polyphemus and Galatea (detail of
Galatea), Villa Imperiale, Pompeii
Let Virgil supply the Classical cognate — when Aeneas sees the fall of Troy
already depicted at Carthage:
Here is Priam: even here, worth has regard,
And there are tears for things, and human hearts
Touched by the chances of mortality
(CGB) —
...sunt hic etiam sua praemia laudi;
sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.
Or the line which for Augustine epitomized the tempting pathos and glory of pagan art:
the farewell of Creusa's ghost:
Infelix simulacrum atque ipsius umbra Creusae —
3rd 8) Again, Echternach Gospels, detail (video wider view, then detail)
Set it against the first hymn Caedmon (c. 670) is said to have sung, dreaminspired. The shades Augustine loved and feared have been shed from the soul.
Nu we sceolon herian heofonrices Weard,
Metodes mihte and his modgethonc —
Now let praise the Prince of Heaven,
August 5, 1995
The Dark Ages
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Might of the Maker manifold of plan,
Work of the Father all the wonders he wrought,
The Lord everlasting when he laid out the world. (CGB)
a2nd 9)
2nd 9)
Again, St. George and the Dragon, detail (from CGB '59)
Again, St. George and the Dragon (CGB '59) [video, using 1st 9, a2nd9,
2nd 9, and one V9 variant, makes a sequence of five views]
For the Baroque, music will voice it more richly — a phrase from Bach's "A
Mighty Fortress is our God."
Music:
Ein Feste Burg ist Unser Gott, Cantata 80, opening; Vanguard BG
508
(fade)
This victory spills over in earthly pomp and power.
Whereas in Gregorian chant, the entire phenomenal world
a10)
b10)
10)
Palace School, early 9th cent., Evangelist, detail of Xanten Gospel, Bibliotheque Royal, Brussels
Carolingian Palace School, end of 8th cent., St. Mark, Coronation Gospel, f.
76v., State Library, Munich
Again, Xanten Evangelist, closer detail
dissolves in self-effacement at the dilating spaceless center of the one melodic line:
O flying world! that we, sick-hearted, love thee!
Music:
August 5, 1995
Gregorian (Solesmes), 8th-9th cent., Media Vita, cont.; V-M-87
The Dark Ages
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
The body of Celtic chant is lost; "poor music", says Leonardo, "which dies in the moment
of its birth." Solesmes performance assimilates even the Media Vita, probably of
Carolingian and Gallic origin, to the suavity of Roman practice — a thing Charlemagne
could never quite school his monks to. So our parallel has taken us from the Celtic
flatness of Echternach to the Roman-Christian revivals of the Palace School. Though for
all its softness of robe and shadowed mood, this Evangelist is no less timeless, spaceless,
selfless. (fade Media Vita) In the Dark Age invariance of earthly fall and total faith, it
rears a polarity of technique: the Graeco-Roman lingering against
Va11)
11)
Irish, c. 800, Four Symbols of the Evangelists, Book of Kells, f.290v.,
Trinity College, Dublin
Again, Book of Kells, detail from Nativitas Christi page
the exactly contemporary (c. 800, Book of Kells) linear abstraction in which the Celtic
(and even Germanic) conspires with the Syrian and Armenian East. To call such
labyrinthine sophistication primitive is strange; yet both soul and the world soul inhabits
share here in a primitive reduction, to a criss-cross of saintly miracle and Mabinogian
wonder.
For 2nd 10) Again, b1O, St. Mark, detail
To see the Dark Ages as a mystical and ascetic trough between the breaking crests
of Græco-Rome and the West is to emphasize its oneness of Augustinian shadow and
Christian affirmation. While to juxtapose the meditative humanism of 800 Aix-laChapelle
For 2nd 11) Again, Book of Kells, Symbol of St. Mark, f.130r., detail
2nd 11a)
Again, Book of Kells, Virgin and Child with Angels, f.202v.
against the Irish calligraphs, is to see that trough as a manifold over which run random
sallies of intersecting waves — a hint at the bottomless complexity of tribal wanderings
and successor kingdoms, local arts and classical revivals — a variety, however, stretched
in the same polar field, as if these were all translations in contrasting languages, copies in
different hands, but of a single sacred text.
While above that ascetic one and fluctuating many, points the historical arrow,
such a pregnancy of change that a single image —
August 5, 1995
The Dark Ages
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C.G. Bell
1st 12)
Symbolic History
Irish, 7th cent., Bronze head on an enamel base, from a ship burial at
Miklebostad, Bergen Museum, Norway; video uses V12, + a detail
here an Irish 7th century bronze — opens under the sacrifice of civilized nuance that
passionate identification voiced again and again in Celtic and Germanic poetry: thus the
Anglo Saxon lament of Satan sometimes attributed to Caedmon —
O might of the Maker ... mirth-dream of God ...
That my hands hereafter may not reach heaven,
My eyes never again be raised to that upland,
Nor my ears hear forever and forever
The hallowed bright peal of angel clarions ... (CGB)
Eala drihtenes thrym! ... Eala dream godes! ...
thaet ic mid handum ne maeg heofon geraecan,
ne mid eagum ne mot up locian,
ne huru mid earum ne sceal aefre geheran
thaere byrhtestan beman stefne!
a13)
b13)
13)
Roman Christian, 312-15, Constantine, Head from Colossal statue, Palazzo
dei Conservatori, Rome
German (Reichenau), c. 998, Otto III Enthroned, upper detail, State Library,
Munich
Byzantine, c. 370(?), Barletta Emperor, Barletta (video: upper part only)
As in any living complex, we cannot exhibit the constant but as it shows
alteration. What dominates Christendom from Constantine at least to Otto III is the lionbodied paradox of faith, with the world-abandonment that so appalled Hegel:
But the highest purity of soul defiled by the most horrible barbarity;
the truth, of which a knowledge has been acquired, degraded to a mere
tool by falsehood and self-seeking; that which is most irrational,
coarse, and vile, established and strengthened by the religious
sentiment — this is the most disgusting and revolting spectacle that
was ever witnessed, and which only philosophy can comprehend and
so justify.
2nd 12)
Again, Irish Bronze Head (cf. V1st 12)
V2nd 12a) Irish, late 7th cent., The St. John's Crucifixion Plaque, upper part;
National Museum, Ireland
August 5, 1995
The Dark Ages
�8
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
One could answer Hegel as the devil did Faust: "Willst fliegen und bist vorm
Schwindel nicht sicher?" — "You want to fly, and get dizzy?" Since, when Spirit
withdraws (as he says) into itself, it waives the cost. Hegel's enlightened wish is for the
Christ-kernel without the hard shell. But without that shell, how could it have seeded
itself over the Dark Ages, converting even by combat?
For 2nd 13) Roman Christian, c. 360, Constantius II (sometimes called Constantine I), colossal bronze head, Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome
2nd 13a)
Same, another view
Hegel will not see that what depressed him in Byzantine Christianity, "a millenial
series of uninterrupted crimes," was the other face of Yeats' "artifice of eternity" — of
that self-scourging piety of anchorites in the desert of the Thebaid. And perhaps a saintly
cognate for the schismatic Constantius would be Simeon the Stylite, anchored to his
column, the rope rotting his flesh, he replacing the maggots as they fell from the sores:
"Eat what God has given you"; yet from that pillar preaching sacred politics to hordes of
followers in a church where ascetic soul was power.
14)
Again, b13, Otto III Enthroned, whole view; + V detail
Indeed that mask of religious force is treasured and revived from Constantine to
the Ottos and beyond. Eusebius' miraculous history of Constantine's conquest by the
"salutary sign" of the cross, remains the model for Fulker of Chartres' Chronicle of the
First Crusade (end of the 11th century), as in this Otto III, the old arrogant humility
proclaims Christ militant. Yet something has changed. The willed conversion of late
Rome has become the automatic condition of the North. The impersonal flattening is
complete; dimensionality itself is allegorical.
1st 15)
V15a)
Byzantine, 6th cent., Hagia Sophia (exterior), Istanbul (CGB '77)
Same, another view, from the south (CGB '77) (cf. slide show 2nd 15)
Music:
Byzantine Chant, 8th cent. ff. (St.John of Damascus), Ode,
Anastaseos Imera, RCA-V-LM-6015 (I, 1)
Another sequence of descent leads from the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (and
no doubt from Byzantine Chant, if against the flux of oral tradition we had something
August 5, 1995
The Dark Ages
�9
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
stronger than this Brompton Oratory attempt at the 8th century "Golden Canon");
(fade)
1st 16) Carolingian, 796-804, Octagon or Chapel of Charlemagne (CGB '74);
+ V detail from 2nd 16)
across Europe and 300 years, to the Chapel of Charlemagne in Aachen, or Aix, with the
parallel organizing on octave, fifth, or fourth.
Music:
Scholia enchiriadis, c. 850, Nos qui vivimus, Organum of the
octave, HAM 25 a, 1 Orpheus 349
Here too what is continued reverts to the primitive; yet that dark and heavy
narrowing bears the potential thrust of Gothic, a beginning, where Hagia Sophia,
2nd 15)
Again, Hagia Sophia, same view as V15a (CGB ‘77); here video gives
detail only, then inserts detail of buttressing from 1st 15
2nd 15a) Again, Hagia Sophia, another angle (emphasizing layering) (CGB '77)
2nd 15b) Italian Byzantine, 532-47, Mosaic detail. Head of Justinian, San Vitale,
Ravenna [video uses V2nd 15b, then returns to yet another detail from 2nd
15)
2nd 15c) Again, Hagia Sophia, interior view with streaming sunlight [slide only]
like its age, is terminal — however strange the word may seem of what, in so many ways,
begets the West: the shift to accentual rhythms in Byzantine poetry; in chant (we are
told) to passionate imploration over a bass drone; in building to the enormous buttressing
of vaulted stress. All springs from Classical foreclosure, like the Code of Justinian, that
final consolidation of Roman law, but with the hardening caste rigor, each worker frozen
in his father's trade. In that vitiated Empire, defended by barbarian troops ("the Emperor's
drunken soldiery"), torn by dogmatic schisms (as Gregory of Nissa says: "you ask the
price of bread and learn the Son is inferior to the Father; you inquire of the bath and are
told the son was made of nothing"), this church rose from the ashes of the Nika revolt, the
slaughter of 30,000 spectators in the hippodrome; and after a comparable sacrifice of
beasts, Justinian stood under the dome: "Glory to God who has deemed me worthy ... O
Solomon, I have surpassed thee." Twenty years later, its structure of prophetic transcendence fell and had to be rebuilt, but lighter, more windowed.
August 5, 1995
The Dark Ages
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Symbolic History
2nd 16)
Again, Charlemange's Chapel, another view [slide here (CGB ‘74) also
used as V1st 16a, above]
V2nd 16a) Same, wider view (CGB ‘74), from which V takes a detail, returning to
another detail of 1st 16
Music:
Again, Scholia enchiriadis, Nos qui vivimus, Organum of the
Fourth, HAM 25 a3, Orpheus 349
Against it Charlemagne's harsh little chapel in the German forest, bound in on
itself, assumes the vertical cast of what it moves toward, the jewelled dark enclosures of
Romanesque and Gothic. Charlemagne's empire hardly outlived him, and the century that
follows is in a way the darkest of all.
1st 17)
Byzantine Ivory, c. 950, Christ crowns Romanos and Eudoxia, detail of
upper portion, Cabinet des Medailles, Paris
But by 950 revival is underway, in Byzantium as in the West. In Byzantium,
preserved sanctuary of the past, soon to be thrown down by the Crusaders, schooled in its
arts, no mutation of force has occurred. The most peerless ivories — this Christ,
compared by some with Phidian marbles — in impersonal, gentle glory, dream their
early-Christian life away.
August 5, 1995
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18)
Symbolic History
German, c. 969-76, Gerokreuz, Cathedral of Cologne; + V detail
Where the Gerokreuz of the 1Oth century Rhine — from a Roman colony
(Cologne) torn to pieces and savagely rebuilt — like Charlemagne's chapel, is precursive,
with a drive strengthened now by a hundred and fifty years. Of the five centuries of
turmoil and near stagnation, such works, against the Roman Christian and Byzantine,
make us say with the Shepherd in The Winter's Tale (even of the dead Christ), "Thou
mettest with things dying, I with things new-born."
2nd 17) Again, Byzantine Ivory, whole; + V detail, shown first
The heresies of the early church tend to neo-Platonic shocked withdrawal from the
Crucified body of the God-man — as in the discovered Gnostic Gospels: "It was another
... who drank the gall and vinegar ... but I was rejoicing in the height." So Justinian died
in a Byzantine heterodoxy — to remove the divine in formal frontality: that the body of
Christ was incorruptible, had never experienced the wants and limits of flesh.
2nd 18) Again, Gerokreuz, black and white, detail of head
But the heresies of the West go the other way, toward a personal self-merger with
God as man. In this the Gero Christ has crossed the watershed, as of the Alps, into
European immediacy,
19)
Dürer, 1522, Self as the Man of Sorrows (drawing), Kunsthalle, Bremen;
+ V detail (after '98: Double: heads of Gero-Christ and Dürer)
where the torment and ecstasy of God and his Kingdom are read over into the I, the here,
and the now. Toward the image that lies at the heart of that incarnate dynamic — Dürer's
Self as the Man of Sorrows, 1522 — the Crucifixion of Gero is already aimed.
Va20)
20)
Gallic from Entremont, c. 200 B.C., Four Mask-heads as trophies, lower
detail only
Same, the group of four
August 5, 1995
The Dark Ages
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Symbolic History
Back now, having sketched the field, to the art-appearance of the Gallic tribes,
end of the 3rd century B.C., the Heads from Entremont, just past the limits of Greece and
Rome. The techniques already learned have sunk into the unrelenting rigors of barbarian
spirit, sullen with potentiality. Against these future-haunted beasts, ranked at the
rampart's pale,
21)
Hellenistic (Alexandrian), c. 290 B.C., Ptolemy I of Egypt, Copenhagen
how undercut by self-questioning, the civilized Hellenistic face (here Ptolemy I of
Alexandria, c. 290 B.C.), which gazed northward, from age-old refinements, toward that
stirring in the forests.
22)
V22a)
Roman, 1st cent. B.C.(?), Garden fresco, detail, Villa Livia, Thermae, Rome
(video draws from V22, a wider view)
Same, a closer detail of fronds and birds
By the first century it was Rome; the frontiers were pushed back; but what the
watchers at the stretched limes were looking into must have seemed a fabled garden
(frescoes from the Villa Livia); and what they were waiting for, was surely a sign of
weakness in the ordered realms.
23)
Egypto-Roman, 2nd c. A.D., Funeral portrait from Faiyum. Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York City
Where, in fact, the whole orchard-empire was rife with soul-sickness, already
flowing over (2nd century A.D.) into a valedictory Christian denial of the world.
Striking, the affinity of longing between this hollow ripeness of late Egypt,
Greece, and Rome
24)
Belgic, 1st cent. B.C., (found, Kent) Head from a cremation bucket, British
Museum, London
and the primitive, implacable, but no less yawning question of the pagan North (here a
Belgic cremation-bucket detail, lst century BC), subject to the dark enigmas of Wyrd.
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25)
Symbolic History
Roman Gaul (Mosel), 3rd cent.(?), Portrait from the Mausoleum of
Neumagen, Trier; + V detail
By the 3rd century, when the Gauls and Rhine Germans express the softening of
Empire, their mausoleum portraits (here from Trier) share exactly in the heavy-eyed
hunger of the Roman-Egyptian encaustics 2000 miles away. Bede, in his most famous
passage, of the year 627, voices that somber clue to conversion: the missionary Paulinus
has told the Northumbrian thanes of the faith, and an old man compares life to a sparrow's
flight through the mead hall in winter.
2nd 24) Again, Belgic head from a bucket
It is the emptiness centuries of art had recorded:
He flies in at one door and out at another, stays a moment in the
warmth of the fire, and vanishes into the rain and dark from which he
came ... So the life of man: but of what was before or of what comes
after, we know nothing.
2nd 25) Again, Neumagen head portrait
If this new teaching can tell us anything more certain, it ought to be
followed.
Could this Gallo-Roman stoic of Neumagen have said more?
26)
V26a)
Roman Gallic, early 4th cent., Porta Nigra, Trier (Treves)
Same, another view with gate (CGB '74)
Or the nearby Porta Nigra guarding Trier? The somberest face of gloom could hardly
convey more of the burden of carrying Rome to the Germans than this gate, to be taken so
soon, and in turn, by Vandals, Huns and Franks.
27)
Gallo-Roman (Neumagen), 3rd cent., Toilet scene on a tomb, Museum, Trier;
+ V detail
So the question is academic whether a successor offshoot of the Classical might
have emerged in Gaul. Certain carvings, like this family scene of the deceased, also from
Neumagen, tempt us toward Gandharan parallels. Though the question, no doubt,
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becomes one already raised: could Christianity have been tamed to a gentle continuance
of its earthly-endowed and Classical phase?
28)
Hellenistic Indian (from Hadda), 3rd-5th cent., Genius with flowers, Musée
Guimet, Paris; + V detail, shown first
— Religion central to the birth of cultures.
That the Hellenistic, which in the West had to fall into the earth and die, could in
the East be grafted directly to a living stem (as in this Genius from Hadda, 3rd-5th
century), must have depended on the millenial growth of Buddhism from the even older
Vedic ground.
29)
Roman Celtic, 2nd-3rd cent. AD, "La Melancolie," from near Auxerre, Yonne
In Roman Gaul the Celts promised most. This head from Auxerre, "La
Melancolie," seems almost to have found a way of succession to the Greek. But
barbarian wanderings, which in India were prehistoric, now flooded the whole Western
world.
30)
Visigoth, c. 400, Seal ring of King Alaric, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna;
+ V detail
In 406 the Vandals struck through Gaul. The Visigoths at the same time moved
through Italy toward the sack of Rome. It is not just its small size that gives the seal of
their Arian-Christian leader Alaric its Dark Age stare. Jerome's lament, from his
hermitage in Bethlehem —
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My tongue cleaves to the roof of my mouth and sobs choke my
utterance when I think that the city that led captive the world is now
led captive —
might have served for the Western Empire.
1st 31) Gallo-Roman, 2nd-3rd cent., Dancer from Arlon, Belgium
The Gallo-Roman arts were plowed under. Though most of what has been dug up
damps our speculation of a living transplant from the Greek. Compare one of the dancing
girls of Arlon (in Belgium)
1st 32)
Indian, from Mathura, 1st-3rd cent.(?), Tree Goddess, Victoria and
Albert Museum, London
For 2nd 31) Double: details of pelvic regions from [A] Arlon Dancer (31); and
[B] Tree Goddess (32)
V2nd 31a) England (Yorkshire), Rock of Ages (video returns to 32, Tree Goddess,
then to 31, Arlon Dancer; while slide holds to the double of Dancer
and Tree Goddess)
with an Indian tree goddess of the same time (3rd century?). The Greek influence here
has come through Iran, there through Rome; but in both, the classical Aphrodite has been
sexualized — the Mound of Venus (like the Yorkshire Rock of Ages, where preacher
Toplady would write his hymn) is cleft. But in Mathura the erotic nude has become a
divine being, joyful, fresh, keen.
That the dancing girls of Arlon have female parts does not make them less
colonial and drab — heavy-hearted pre-Protestant whores.
For 2nd 32) Indian (late Orissan), c. 1200 A.D., Female figure (Apsara) from tower
of Rafarani Temple, Bhubaneswar
The West is our center, but in touch with the world: so it must be noted again that
during our Dark Age of ascetic severity, India went on blossoming, century after century,
in a sacred culture of sensuous humanity and personal grace —
Va33)
33)
Indian, 6th-7th cent., Mithuna figures from Cave 1, Ajunta
Same, scene from "The Prince Will Renounce the Throne"
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what made D. H. Lawrence say of the 6th-7th century Ajanta frescoes: "Pure
fulfillment... Botticelli is vulgar beside them... I love them beyond everything pictorial...
perfect intimate relation between the men and women." And though Indian music has an
improvised bearing on any past, traditional Ragas refine modalities ultimately and
hauntingly Greek to hymn the sanctities of love and life.
3rd 32)
Again, Tree Goddess, upper detail
Music:
From Raga-Dadra (Uttar Pradesh), Basmillah Kahn on Shenai,
Odeon MOAE 163
2nd 33) Again 33, central detail
2nd 33a) Same, detail, upper left
34)
(fade raga)
Honan (China) Lung-Men 6th c. AD, Siddhartha in Meditation, Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston
Chinese (Wei) 386-534, Seated Bodhisattva, Art Museum, Portland, (CGB
'83) [slide only]
Again 34, Honan Siddhartha, another (color) view; + various video details
34a)
34b)
Whether in India or China (this 6th-century Siddhartha from Honan), what would
seem meditational parallels for the Medieval inhabit another realm of human ease and
nirvana peace. Though Buddhism has declined in India, something of what smiled over
Tibet, to the Hwang Ho and Yellow Sea still sounds in Sanskrit hymns.
Music:
a35)
35)
V35a)
From Sanskrit Hymn to Shiva by Dikshitar, sung Sriniva UNESCO
BM 30 L2021)
Greek (Athens), 520-10 B.C., Piraeus Apollo, detail of Head, National
Museum, Athens
Chinese, Shang Dynasty, 14th-1lth cent. B.C., Bronze funerary vessel,
Musée Cernuschi, Paris
Again, Piraeus Apollo, another view, upper body (video returns to 35,
funerary vessel)
Are civilizations parallel or radiative? Both in one. The Chinese sages Lao Tzu
and Confucius are more or less contemporary with Buddha, with the rise of Greek
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wisdom and the climax of Hebrew prophecy. Yet however native Chinese culture, the
Hellenistic and Roman trade of the silk route, with the eastward spread of Buddhism,
fostered, as far as Korea and Japan, a vital mutant of something once Greek; as the leap
from Shang funerary urns (2nd Millenium B.C., and remote as Stone Age Mayan)
36)
V36a)
Chinese (Ku K'ai-Chih), c. 344-405, Silk scroll, Lady at her Toilet, detail,
British Museum, London
From same scroll, "Admonitions to Court Ladies,"
Music:
Chinese, 4th cent.(?) (printed 1425), Plum Blossom (chyn setting)
RCA-V-LM-6057 (I: 2, b)
to the caressing line and personal mood of 4th century A.D. silk painting (with a chynzither setting of a tune, "Plum Blossom" traced to the same time) persuasively suggests.
Va37)
37)
Greek, Tanagra (Bœotia), 4th cent. B.C., Woman with Fan, Louvre
Greek (Tanagra?), 4th - 3rd cent. B.C., Statuette of a Woman, Painted Terra
Cotta, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City (video upper detail
only)
Where had such play of sophistic elegance been explored but in the likeliest
export product of Greece, those Tanagra figurines, where life is trimmed to the precious
turns and poses of New Comedy?
38)
Chinese, T'ang, 7th-1Oth cent., Lady at her Toilet, Signora P. Varzi Galliate
Collection; first, V detail
In China, as in India, the cultured flowering went on and on; this T'ang lady at her
toilet, from the darkest centuries of Europe, comes a thousand years and more after the
wares of Tanagra. Direct influence is not in question; rather the transmission from
dynasty to dynasty (without the cyclical upheavals of the West) of an incredibly civilized,
post-Hellenic stance —
39)
Japanese (Nara), 645-793, Kichijoten (Mahasri), Nara, Yakushiji; + V details
an ultimate refinement, which by the 7th centurv had spread also to Japan.
Music:
August 5, 1995
From 16th cent. "Lion of Eight Thousand Generations," Kota
interlude, Kimio Eto: Art of the Kota, Elektra EK S 7234
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Symbolic History
(Fade)
40)
40a)
Sassanian Iran, mid 6th cent., Palace of Khusro I, Ctesiphon, near Baghdad;
+ V detail
Mohammedan (Abbasid), 848-52, Minaret of the Great Mosque of Samarra,
Iraq (cf. Ars Nova 9)
While the Buddhist related arts spread East, and the dwindling empire of
Byzantium encapsuled post-classical Christianity, the old Sumerian and Persian centers
produced successor kingdoms which, though they seemed to menace Christendom,
preserved and sometimes advanced, for European revival, Greek knowledge and skills.
Let the ruined palace of Khusro I (mid-6th century) near Bagdad, with its elliptical vault
of a hundred foot span, summon from the Parthian wars against Rome, the Persian coup
and revival, the subsequent complex of interplays east and west, that brief splendor of
Sassanid Iran.
Music:
a41)
41)
Islam, 9th cent., traditional, Muezzin's call to prayer, close, RCA-VLM 6057 (IV, 4)
Moorish African, 862-3, Kairouan, Sanctuary of the Great Mosque, Tunisia
Islam (Ommiad), 705-11, Mosaic detail, west portico, Great Mosque,
Damascus; + V detail
(end Call to Prayer)
Music:
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Islam (Turkish), Taqsim Bayati, flute, RCA-V-LM 6057 (IV, 5)
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Let this mosaic detail from the Great Mosque in Damascus crown the Arabian and
Moslem adventure, the religious power structure of Islam, which in its phenomenal
spread, became host to Sassanian, Jewish, and Alexandrian commerce and lore — a fit
image (landscape, the human form excluded), since here, as in philosophy and
mathematics, the Hellenistic has been essentially caught and, with something of the
abstraction of algebra, launched toward the future.
(fade Turkish flute)
42)
Germanic, 7th cent., four Bronze Bracts from Torslunda, Historical Museum,
Stockholm; + slide and video singles of Bract C (42a) and Bract D (42b), to
which video adds Bract B (V42c) and a detail of Bract D (from 42b)
Meanwhile Europe had gone under. Beowulf looks back into the Norse and
German myth-world of the 7th century and before — heroes struggling in mist-hung
monster-lairs. To catch mood and action in a patchwork of phrases:
This foe of God was ghastly Grendel,
Stalker of moors grim haunter of marshes;
Out of fens and oak forests he fastened on Hartshearth,
The king's bright meadhall, with each murk of nightfall...
Seized a thane sleeping, slashed him to pieces,
Bit through the bone-joints, sucked at the blood-stream,
Gorged flesh in gobbets ... Beowulf's death-grip
Wrenched arm and shoulder; sinews sprang asunder;
The axle-hinge opened; under the towering hall roof,
That hero flung down the clawed limb of Grendel.
Waes se grimma gaest Grendel haten,
maere mearcstapa, se the moras heold,
fen ond faesten ... Heorot eardode,
sincfage sel, sweartum nihtum...
(feng) slaepende rinc, slat unwearnum,
bat banlocan, blod edrum dranc,
synsnaedum swealh; sona ... he (him) onfeng
inwitthancum ... seonowe onsprongon,
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burston banlocan. Beowulfe ... alegde
Grendles grap(e) under geapne hrof.
a43)
43)
Irish carving, 9th cent.(?), Caryatid, with Crozier and Bell, White Island,
Fermanagh
Roman-Christian, c. 300, Christ-Helios Mosaic, Tomb of the Julii, vault,
Vatican; + V detail
To sense the crisis of life-giving reduction as that force sweeps over Europe,
amalgamates with Rome, becomes itself fiercely Christian, set down first a 4th-century
Christian burial hymn by Prudentius (with this Apollo-Christ from a tomb under St.
Peter’s):
Nos tecta fovebimus ossa
violis et fronde frequenti
titulumque et frigida saxa
liquido spargemus odore;
that is the close — or as translated by Waddell:
But for us, heap earth about him,
Earth with leaves and violets strewn,
Grave his name, and pour the fragrant
Balm upon the icy stone.
44)
Merovingian, 8th cent., Reliquary Casket, Virgin and Child with Peter and
Paul, Musée de Cluny, Paris; + V details
So leap north and over 400 years to this Merovingian casket and to the
Wessobrunner Gebet, in the gutteral giant-talk of old German:
Dat gafregin ih mit firahim firiuuizzo meista
dat ero ni uuas noh ufhimil
noh paum nohheinig noh pereg ni uuas
noh sunna ni scein
noh mano ni liuhta noh der mareo seo.
Do dar niuuiht ni uuas enteo ni wenteo
enti do uuas der eino almahtico cot.
Va45)
Carolingian (Rheims), c. 820(?), MS 1, f. 90v, Gospel Book of Ebbo,
St. Luke; Municipal Library, Epernay
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45)
Symbolic History
Same, f. 60v., St. Mark (first, video detail)
Which we may translate (after Anglo-Saxon):
Among mortal men I have heard with main marvel
How earth of old was not, nor arched-up heaven,
Nor tree-bole was none, nor marsh-wone, nor mountain,
Nor sun did not shine
Nor moon not lighten; nor the merging mere-world.
But though nought was not there, beginning nor ending —
One there and alone was, the all-bending God. (CGB)
Having shifted in art to the Book of Ebbo, Rheims, about 820... Already German
intuitive wonder wakens in "mareo seo," the fabled sea, with all related possibilities of
mare, marah, mere.
46)
Northumbrian, c. 710, Lion of St. Mark, Echternach Gospel, National
Library, Paris (first, video detail)
Where in the cyclical descent did the barbaric reversion and stripping become
regenerative? We cannot say. By the 6th century the Franks had begun the political
regrouping which led to Charlemagne; while the monasteries of Ireland and Northumbria
gathered the first fruits of letters and art. Though the Echternach lion-sign of St. Mark
(Northumbria, c. 710) does not suffer from being overtamed.
Va47)
47)
Northumbrian, c. 720-40, , Lindisfarne Gospel, St. Matthew, detail; British
Museum
Same, St. Luke (video: detail only)
Yet the Lindisfarne Gospel, from twenty years later, suffuses its still metallic lines
with the growing humanism of that island of learning. As Ambrose had said at the
beginning of the Time of Troubles — and every Dark Age monastery tried to enact his
words:
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Amid the agitations of the world the Church remains unmoved; the
waves cannot shake her. While around her everything is in horrible
chaos, she offers to all the shipwrecked a tranquil port where they will
find safety.
48)
48a)
Northumbrian, Viking-Age relief, 8th-9th cent.(?), Marauders, Lindisfarne
Viking, 7th. cent., Iron Helmet, State Historical Museum, Stockholm
Not, however, from the Vikings, who seem to be represented in this Lindisfarne
relief. As the Anglo Saxon Chronicle records, January 8, 793: "The harrying of the
heathen miserably destroyed God's church in Lindisfarne by rapine and slaughter." Or as
Alcuin, from the court of Charlemagne: "Never before has such a terror appeared in
Britain." It was the opening of 250 years of culminant darkness.
49)
Irish MS, c. 800, Book of Kells, St. John; Trinity College, Dublin (video
reduces the page to four successive details)
Iona was ravaged soon after. St. Columba's monks fled to Kells north of Dublin,
probably taking with them the unfinished Book which bears the name of the new
monastery. "While the sea spewed forth the foreigners over Erin." (Annals of Ulster,
820.) Living in the world of symbol must have prepared the soul for such raiders. Each
Christian, sat like this St. John, holding the Gospel, at the center of a calligraphic Gospel,
which shows by the cloudy head at the top, the hands at the sides and the pierced feet
below, that it is the crucified Christ.
a50)
b50)
c50)
d50)
50)
Carolingian (Palace School), beginning 9th cent., double page, St. John the
Evangelist and text, from Reichsevangelair, Munich (video: first, the page of
text)
Same, the page of John (video: detail only)
Carolingian, 799-818, Ark of the Covenant, mosaic, Oratory of Theodulf,
Germigny-des-Pres
Again, Reichsevangelair, Matthew (first, video detail)
Again, John from the Reichsevangelair; + V detail
On the continent, Charlemagne welcomed scholars from the islands to the shelter
of his Palace School; and it was an island too, hard-held, between the earlier unrest of
Germans, Huns, and Moors, and the onslaught of Vikings and Magyars to follow — post-
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Classical, pre-Western, an arctic solstice where the twilight meets the dawn. Its central
poem is the Lament for Alcuin (on his leaving Aachen), either by the master himself, or
by his pupil Fredugis. The Augustinian memory of his "little house" (with Waddell) —
O mea cella, mihi habitatio dulcis, amata ...
pomiferis redolent ramis tua claustra per hortos —
and all thy cloisters smell of apple orchards —
yields to the starker burden of loss and faith:
So passes all the beauty of the earth ...
O flying world! that we, sick-hearted love thee!
Still thou escapest, here, there, everywhere,
Slipping down from us. Fly, then, if thou wilt,
Our hearts are set in the strong love of God.
nos miseri, cur te fugitivum, mundus, amamus? ...
tu fugiens fugias, Christum nos semper amemus.
Such is the ground of the Dark Ages.
Perhaps the St. John's page from the Reichsevangelair is the somberest art-revival
of Roman mellowness in that German-Christian winter. The gathered toga, the bearded
meditation, the sad little garden of shrubs — as in the Lament: "undique te cingit ramis
resonantibus arbos" — repeat: "Oh flying world! that we, sick-hearted, love thee!" and
"Our hearts are set in the strong love of God."
Here on the threshold of the West, the Western antinomies appear: against the
shadowed piety of the Palace School,
1st 51) Rheims, c. 820-30, Utrecht Psalter, Psalm XI detail, University Library,
Utrecht
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51a)
V51b)
51c)
Symbolic History
Again, Utrecht Psalter, Psalm XLIII, battle detail
Same, from Psalm CII, Messiah and angels
Again, Utrecht Psalter, from Psalm XI [these are Vulgate numberings]
the reckless vital line of the Utrecht Psalter. And in thought, Hrabanus Maurus, pious
churchman, at his best in monastic greetings, as to Grimold, Abbot of St. Gall (Waddell):
"And God, who brought us on this earth together, bring us together in his house of
heaven" — comes into history linked in furious opposition, jailor and inquisitor of his
fiery ward Gottschalk, the first whom logic led toward Calvin's heresy of predestination.
Everything about him speaks passion, from his recusant stand to the first personal rhymed
lyrics he wrote in prison: "O quid iubes, pusiole ... Carmen dulce me cantare ..."
Even more prophetically strange was that John Scotus, that wise Erigena (Erinborn), Irish translator of the mystic Aereopagite, called in to answer Gottschalk, should
dissolve predestination only in a pantheistic Christian Platonism of the universe as God in
processu, drawn toward a deificatio, or resumption of all nature, evil and good, even
Satan himself, into the Divine:
2nd 50)
Again, Matthew from Reichsevangelair (cf. d50; while video repeats John,
as in slide 50)
Evil will have its consummation and will not remain in any nature,
since the divine nature will work and be manifest in all...
In his knowing revival of pagan and Christian antiquity, Erigena shares the robed
richness of the Palace School.
2nd 51)
Again, Utrecht Psalter, Psalm CVIII (video: upper detail only)
In the freedom with which he absorbs the world into God, who "subsists," he said, "as the
essence of all," he rather suggests the racing sketchwork of the Utrecht Psalter, where
objects are fused in sacred energies.
52)
Irish, c. 800, Incarnation page, fol 34,. from the Book of Kells, Trinity
College, Dublin; + V details
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While the Irish tradition from which he stems, least like him in classical surface, may be
nearest to his visionary ecstasy. As in this Book of Kells page of the Birth of Christ,
where the monograms Chi, Rho and the rest, threaded through with live geometries, less
illustrate than form the divine substance of Matthew I, 18: "Christi ... generatio."
53)
School of Rheims, early 9th cent., St. John, Gospel Book of Ebbo, Municipal
Library, Epernay; first V detail, then V53, wider variant
The aim is not to match this with that, but to perceive in the Carolingian ferment
how the later Western forms of art, of thought, of personality itself are being explored —
nowhere more masterfully than in the Rheims Gospel Book of Ebbo, which alchemizes
into one the togaed weight of the Palace School and the expressive frenzy of the Utrecht
line. Giant precursors, these miniatures.
a54)
54)
N. Italian, 9th cent.(?), Castelseprio frescoes, head of a priest, detail,
Castelseprio (CGB '80)
Same, detail, Presentation in the Temple (CGB '80) [video reverses 54 and a54,
then returns to V54a, a wider view of 54]
Claudius, 9th century bishop of Turin, tried and condemned but never crushed,
gives the new force an Italian voice:
He is not the apostle who sits in the seat of the apostle, but who fulfills
the life and office ... Why bend your body to worship vain images?
God made you erect ... Let no man trust in saints, but as he holds the
faith and truth and justice of the saints.
So the Castelseprio frescoes, probably of the 9th century, startle us with the prophetic
eruption of spatial and humanistic power, hung like the Carolingian, between past and
future.
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55) Viking, 9th cent., head from a cart, Oseberg Ship Burial, University, Oslo
55a) Viking, 9th cent., Ship from Oseberg Burial Mound, Oslo
55b) Germanic, 8th cent., Engraved Tombstone to a warrior: Viking Vallhalla
ship, Klinte, Gotland (video, details only)
The death of Charlemagne (814), the wars of succession, the battle of Fontenoy
(841) "Maledicta dies illa" (Angilbert), which drained the blood of France, left Europe
exposed as the islands had been. The long boats with the carved prows moved up the
rivers. The chant went up in the churches: "A furore Normanorum libera nos Domine."
The Sibyl's prophecy for 1000 seemed fulfilled: "A sword age, a wind age, a wolf age."
Utrecht burned; Charlemagne's palace sacked; the cities of France mowed down:
Perigeux, Limoges, Angouleme, Toulouse, Angers, Orleans, Rouen; and then the
Mediterranean.
a56)
56)
V56a)
Gerona Beatus, 975, Warrior spearing a snake, Cathedral, Gerona
Carolingian, 781-85, St. John from the Gospels of Godescalc, National
Library, Paris; video: upper part only
Carolingian, 781-3, Godesalc Gospels, Beardless Christ, National Library,
Paris; video: upper part only
While Saracens fixed mountain aeries in Italy and Provence, and the Turkish
Magyars terrorized the east, raiding yearly, often as far as the Rhine. Even the sacred
shrines of refuge — Tours, Corbie, Reichenau, Fulda — whence had echoed the greetings
of Colman, Alcuin, Maurus — were not secure.
And may God give thee in thy hands the green unwithering palm of
everlasting life —
this by Strabo, also to Grimold of St. Gall — St. Gall, at the Swiss heart of Europe, to be
plundered in 926 by the Hungarians.
57)
Carolingian, 870, Codex Aureus of St. Emmeram, Adoration of the Lamb,
Staatsbibliothek, Munich (video divides to upper and lower details)
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The beloved Bishop Radbob of Utrecht, later visited in his illness by the blessed
Virgin with Agnes and Thekla, wrote of the time: (Waddell)
In the year of the Incarnation of our Lord 900 there appeared a
marvellous sign in heaven. For the stars were seen to flow from the
very height of the heaven to the lowest horizon ... woeful calamities
followed ... untowardness of the seasons and frequent tempests, rivers
overflowing their banks...and ominous upheavals of men boasting
themselves against God ...
a58)
b58)
58)
V58a)
Fulda Lectionary, c. 975-80, Adoration of the Lamb, Hofbibliothek,
Aschaffenburg (video: lower detail only)
Carolingian from St. Gall, first half of the 1Oth cent., Mounted Warriors,
Book of Maccabees, Codex Perizoni 17, f. 46r, University Library,
Leyden, Holland
German (Cologne), c. 1OOO, Luke, from City Archive, MS 312, Cologne
Reichenau, 1010, The Woes of Jerusalem, Gospel Book of Otto III, f.
188v, State Library, Munich (video takes first 58 upper part, then V 58a;
then returns to 58, whole)
The epitaph which follows the record closes:
Long hunger wasted the world wanderer
With sight of Thee may he be satisfied.
The tenth century moves in the forehall of the doom the millennium was supposed to
bring. The synod at Trosle, 909, echoes Gregory on the Lombards: "The cities are
depopulated, the monasteries ruined ... Men devour one another like fishes in the sea." Of
the end of the century Glaber chronicles:
Perilous times were at hand for men's souls... about the thousandth
year after the birth of our Lord... almost all the cities of Italy and Gaul
were ravaged by flames of fire... At this same time a horrible plague
raged among men...
By 1000 the art of the Rhine has the bare force of sainted bones rising at the last day.
59)
N. German (Saxon), c. 700, Hornhausen Equestrian relief, Landesmuseum,
Halle
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Symbolic History
We would wish, but there is no way, to resume the sequence in music: to hear the
barbarian chanting voices spill down over Rome; the transformation of Gregorian as
missionaries spread it north;
a60)
60)
V60a)
Court School of Charles the Bald, 870, Incipit page, Gospel of St. Matthew,
Christ as Lion, Codex Aureus of St. Emmeram f. 16v., State Library,
Munich
Irish, c. 910, Cross of Muiredach, det., Arrest of Christ, Monsterboice
Same, view of whole cross
the varying liturgies, Mozárabic, Celtic, Frankish; to experience as Charlemagne did in
the churches of his kingdom (so the Monk of St. Gall) distinctions of rhythm, intonation,
even melody and perhaps harmony — Gottschalk's accuser, Maurus of Mainz declaiming
against the theatrical style of his singers — innovations no doubt as startling as the visual
leaps of the Utrecht psalter, or the first monumental carving of the West, the Irish Crosses
from the "forty year recess" (early lOth century) in the Viking raids.
A of 61) Roman-Christian, 432-40, center detail of The Annunciation, Triumphal
Arch mosaics, Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome
B of 61) Mozárabic, 1091-1109, from Beatus on the Apocalypse (upper detail),
British Museum, London
61)
Double: [A] Roman-Christian, and [B] Mozárabic
61a)
Again, B of 61, Beatus on the Apocalypse (slide: whole; video: a larger
detail)
Music:
Mozárabic, from c. 1100(?), Aleph from Lamentations of Jeremiah,
Archive 198-459
Where are the musical parallels for the loss and stripping, the heightening of force
so clear in the imprints of art — from the ease of Christian Rome (about 440, Santa Maria
Maggiore, left), through the absorption of Eastern and Barbarian (Coptic, Syrian,
Moslem, with Celtic and German), to the final cutting edge (right) of the Beatus
Commentary from 1100 Spain? If only we could exhibit that vital stiffening in the
rhythms of song. Ephemeral poor music: it is all lost. Where the notes survive (as with
the reconstructed liturgy of the same Spain), today's monks, trained in the would-be 5th
century practice of Solesmes, melt all styles into one —
August 5, 1995
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C.G. Bell
a62)
62)
Symbolic History
Lower right detail of 62
Carolingian (Rheims), early 9th cent., Four Evangelists, Codex Aureus, f. 13r.,
Cathedral Treasury, Aachen; + V detail
this Mozárabic Lamentation indistinguishable from Ambrosian.
For the complex of barbarian, Byzantine and classical, hardening as to encapsule
the radiant of rhymed sequence and polyphony — all we get in effect is the attempt at
Roman-Christian revival — moody as this page of Evangelists from the Aachen Gospels,
or as Alcuin's Latin Lament:
nos miseri, cur te fugitivum, mundus, amamus?
(fade Mozárabic)
An art which looks, over a solemn gulf
63)
63a)
Byzantine, 6th-7th cent., Peter from an Icon, Monastery of St. Catherine,
Sinai
German (Werden), 1064-80, Bronze Crucifix, detail, Werden a.d. Ruhr (video
returns to 63, Peter from an Icon, detail
to the Roman Christian, whether of East or West (this of the 6th century, from Sinai).
Against it stands in music a single recorded interpretation of a more strident
Gregorian, which Guillaume de Van and his group made for Anthologie Sonore — Billy
Van from Texas, who founded the frenetic style of Gothic, and set himself here, like the
Gauls (as the Romans complained) "with their barbaric voices crushing the melodies in
their throats", to recover a Byzantine-affined Gregorian of about 1000. It lacks the suave
beauty of Solesmes, but it will in fact
Va64)
64)
Again 14, Otto III enthroned, here upper detail
Reichenau School, 1Oth cent., Ascension, Laurentian Library, Florence
accompany the Reichenauer MSS of the lOth century — the lean style of the Ottos —
which no Solesmes version will do.
Music:
August 5, 1995
Gregorian, before 1000, from "Adjiuvabit eam Deus...", de Van
group, on AS 34
The Dark Ages
�30
C.G. Bell
Va65)
Symbolic History
Ottonian, c. 1010, Mary anointing and wiping Christ's feet, Perikopenbuch,
Staatsbibliothek, Munich
Same, the Angel to the Shepherds
65)
(Fade de Van)
Meanwhile, under those now irrecoverable variants of plainsong,
1st 66) Carolingian, 796-804, Interior of Charlemagne's Chapel, Aachen; video:
detail only
the practice of organizing in chords was turning, without wish or knowledge, from the
surrender of Gregorian to what would become the musical command of space. Here we
should extend to music the contrast already made, between Charlemagne's Chapel
1st 67) Byzantine 502-37 & 558-62, Hagia Sophia, interior, Constantinople
(CGB '77) (video also uses detail from 2nd 67)
Music:
Byzantine (John of Damascus, d. 754), from Easter Canon, ARC 2533
413, side A, in band 4
and the irradiation of the Hagia Sophia. To which Byzantine chant. as practiced on
Mount Athos, old refuge of the Virgin from the dragon, exhibits, still over 1400 years of
changing style and notation, some strangely related hypnotic strength.
(fade
Mount Athos chant)
2nd 66)
Again, Charlemange's Chapel, another view (video divides to upper and
lower details and adds a detail from 1st 66)
while with the cramped and struggling height of Charlemagne's chapel, though we cannot
hear the harmony Erigena speaks of, we can manage a demonstration attempt at a brief
phrase, Rex coeli, from the Musica Enchiriadis, a treatise of 850-910 — mostly in parallel organum with some contrary motion:
Music:
2nd 67)
Scholia enchiriadis, c. 850, Rex coeli, Organum from Musica
Enchiriadis, Haydn Society L-2071
(Close)
Again, interior of Hagia Sophia, another view (CGB '77) (video instead
picks up 2nd 15c, interior with streaming sunlight)
August 5, 1995
The Dark Ages
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Christendom inherited from Rome two structural modes for churches:
centralized dome we think of as Byzantine,
68)
the
Early Christian 549, St. Apollinare in Classe, interior, Ravenna; + V detail
and the columned hall we associate with Rome, though this is Ravenna. Here, the change
from the classical, with Gregorian —
Music:
69)
69a)
Gregorian (Solesmes), from Gloria IV (Domine Deus … Christis) VM-87
(fade)
French Romanesque, 1007 and after, Nave of St. Philbert, Tournus;
+ V details
Fortified Church, 9th-12th cent., Les Saintes Maries de la Mer, Provençe
to the first Romanesque at the turn of 1000, St. Philbert, Tournus, scores the end result of
Dark Age stripping, church like soul narrowed into strength, fortified against calamity;
yet in that dark, stone-walled weight, appear the new principles of rib-support which
would empower Gothic heights — as in the hollow organum on the 1020 or so "Veni
Sancte Spiritus," music too has found in its winter descent a ground of regeneration.
Music:
Va70)
70)
Plainsong with parallel organum, c. 1020, Veni Sancte Spiritus,
(beginning and end) Col. 5710
German (Rhine), c. 969-76, Gerokreuz, most of the carving, Cologne
Cathedral
Detail of Gerokreuz, head and shoulders
(close Veni Sancte Spiritus)
At the heart of the change lay the fact of Incarnation: et homo factus est — of
which God's pain and death was the literal crux. In the tragic Gerokreuz, of Cologne, we
are already launched toward the Gothic humanity which is the source of Western power.
Early Christian art, in its Orphic gentleness, had avoided the Crucifixion.
For 1st 71) Roman Christian, c. 420, Crucifixion, British Museum, London (video
reverses order of 1st and 2nd 71)
August 5, 1995
The Dark Ages
�32
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
The first representations known are five centuries after Christ's death, and they show the
eternal surrender only in the aspect of its calm.
72)
German Gothic, 1304, Gabel Crucifix or Pestkreuz, S. Maria im Kapitol,
Cologne
If one pursues the identification of God and process too far, one reaches the
Gothic (Eckhardt) and romantic (Hegelian) heresy where Christendom ends;
2nd 71)
Roman Christian, 422-34, Crucifixion, door of Santa Sabina, Rome (video:
detail only, after beginning with the whole of 1st 71)
if one draws back too strongly from that, one comes into the Neoplatonic heresies with
which Christendom began — the Arian: Christ as incarnate cannot be of one substance
with the Father; the Nestorian: the Logos is in Christ, but not joined with the human
person as one individual — these with others mark the startled retreat of Classical reason
from the contradiction of the Man-God.
2nd 72) Again, Pestkreuz, upper detail; + V closer detail)
2nd 72a) Romanesque, early 11th cent., Sedes Sapientie of Walcourt, Church of St.
Maternus, Walcourt
But the tendency of later heresy, from Meister Eckhardt down (just contemporary
with this Pestkreuz, also of Cologne, 1304) is the opposite: the identification of Christ
and everyman, of God and world-soul, of eternity and time, whether history or the
moment Now...
Toward that, as toward every essential archetype of the West, the 10th century has
somehow crossed the line.
a73)
b73)
73)
Roman Christian ivory, end 3rd cent., Good Shepherd, Louvre, Paris
Roman Christian mosaic, c. 325 and ff, Cherubs at Grape Harvest, S.
Constanza. Rome
Byzantine, c. 400, S. Porfirio, mosaic, Church of St. George, Salonika
Take what had been central to the Christian break with Hellenism, the surrender
of reason to faith — Paul's "folly" and Christ's "except as a little child." The most
August 5, 1995
The Dark Ages
�33
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
moderate could not avoid the leap of God's paradox — Ambrose: "I do not require reason
from Christ; if I am convinced by reason, I reject faith."
74)
Byzantine (Ephesus), 5th cent., Bust of Eutropius, Kunsthistoriches Museum,
Vienna; + V detail
Tertulian's "quia absurdum" is always quoted, not merely for its violence, but as a
radical pole of all Christian speculation:
The Son of God was crucified; I am not ashamed, because one must be
ashamed of it. The Son of God died — this is credible just because it
is folly. He has been buried and resurrected — this is certain because
it is impossible.
We match it with the Byzantine 5th-century Bust of Eutropius, a carving which breaks, as
much as any, with classical form.
75)
French Gothic, c. 1210, John the Baptist, detail, N. Portal, Chartres
That incarnate enigma became, through the Dark Ages, the automatic Christian
home. By 1200, five centuries of transrational acceptance have so reoriented the mind,
that thought, from Fredugis to Anselm, can support in the mode of reason (new-born) —
can prove — the necessity of the very God and Incarnation
2nd 74)
Again, Eutropius, another view
which Tertullian acclaimed divine impossibility. Reason, with the whole fabric of secular
humanity and world, to which early Christianity had said farewell, has been transplanted,
a2nd 75) Again, Chartres: Simeon, John the Baptist, and Peter, from the North
Portal
b2nd 75) Again, John the Baptist, another view (also video variant; Vb2nd 75)
2nd 75) Again, John the Baptist, detail
and is growing again in the walled close of Creed.
So the Chartres ascetic Baptist turns the twist of Byzantine conscious otherworldliness to a Troubador gesture of love, as tender, as lyrical, as the duplum purum of
Leonin.
August 5, 1995
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Music:
76)
76a)
Leonin, c. 1160, Crucifixum (duplum) close (Tinayre) Col. M-431 (1)
(end)
French Romanesque, c. 1120-50, Christ detail, Portal, Vezelay
Detail of 4b, Ghiselbertus, Christ in Judgment, Autun; + V closer detail
Here is Anselm, with the Christ of Vezelay:
One can convince oneself of these truths ... by the force of reason
alone. (Of God): If that, than which nothing greater can be conceived,
exist in the understanding alone, the very being, than which nothing
greater can be conceived, is one, than whom a greater can be conceived. But this is a paradox. Hence ... he exists both in
understanding and in reality ...
(Of Incarnation): God became man by necessity... the satisfaction
being such as none but God can make and none but man ought to
make, it is necessary for the God-man to make it.
(To which the monkish interlocutor):
Blessed be God! We have made a great discovery ... Go on ... I hope
God will assist you.
77)
French before 1020, Church of St. Martin, Chapaise, Burgundy; + V detail
Thus in all the arts, (here, before 1020, the church of Chapaise in Burgundy), the
forms which the 12th and 13th centuries would perfect, have their origin before or just
around the millenium: the groined and ribbed vault to focus thrust, the regional schools
of painting and stained glass, the chivalric state, the monastic reform of Cluny, sacred
drama, a passionate poetry of assonance and rhyme, Guido's solmization of the major
hexachord, and central to all, a philosophy of reason justifying faith.
78)
German (Rhine), 1030 to 12th cent., esp. 1080, Kaiserdom, Speyer (video:
details only)
How evident the surge must have been for that chronicler of doom, Ralph Glaber,
to have written, about 1040 — while this Speyer and the other great Rhine cathedrals
rose:
August 5, 1995
The Dark Ages
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
But every nation of Christendom rivalled with the other which should
worship in the seemliest buildings. So it was as though the very world
had shaken herself and cast off her old age, and were clothing herself
everywhere in a white garment of churches.
Music:
79)
Perotin le Grand, c. 1210, 4-voice. Sedêrunt, close, Cape, Archive
14068.
French Romanesque, 1039-65, Transept Crossing, Ste. Foy, Conques, Aveyron;
first, V detail
The transept crossing of Sainte Foy in Conques, 1039 to 1065, looks to the
miracle of Gothic, as the first polyphony we have heard is trained on Perotin.
80)
French Gothic (Normandy), later 13th cent., lantern of Crossing, Coutance
(CGB '74); + V detail
Looking back to Sainte Foy from this crossing of Coutances (13th century) we
realize that around the year 1000 we passed one of those nodes the poet Yeats liked to
symbolize by the construction of a cone within a cone, and that all things, to use his
words:
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
August 5, 1995
The Dark Ages
(end Perotin)
�
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SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
8. Gothic Prelude: Lux Nova
CHARLES G. BELL
ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
or
1260 CANYON ROAD
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501
August 1995
Last Revised January ‘96
�Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
8. Gothic Prelude: Lux Nova
a1)
1)
French Ivory, 13th cent., Madonna and Child, Louvre, Paris; + V detail
(CGB '80)
French Gothic, 1228, Cloister, Mont Saint-Michel (CGB '74)
The waking of a culture shares with spring and dawn this mystery: first buds
seem most jewelled, brightest songs greet the earliest rays:
Lenten is come with love to toune,
With blosmen and with briddes roune,
That al this blisse bringeth ...
Almost incredible, the New Light with which Gothic love opens in the ascetic dusk,
gracing the beauty of earth with sacred sanction.
So the lilting poignance of a 1235 motet, "Ave Maria," with this detail and
another from Mont-Saint-Michel, and three from Rheims.
Music:
French, c. 1235?, Ave Maria, Syntagma Musicum, SIC-6052
2)
French Gothic, c. 1210, Kitchen, Mont-Saint-Michel (CGB '74)
Va3) French Gothic, c. 1220-30, Head of Mary from a Visitation (full face), West
Portal, Rheims Cathedral
3)
Same (profile), Rheims Cathedral
4)
French Gothic, 1211-90, Clerestory of Nave, detail, Rheims Cathedral
Va5) Closer detail of 5 (from Gothic Wave, 9)
5)
French Gothic, c. 1260, West Front, detail with Coronation, Rheims
Cathedral (CGB '74)
(fade “Ave Maria”)
But the waking had begun by the year 1000, two and a half crucial centuries
before Rheims portal. From its Gothic height, this prelude must look back —
August 6, 1995
Gothic Prelude
Lux Nova
1
�C.G. Bell
6)
6a)
6b)
Symbolic History
Mont-Saint-Michel Chapel, 11th cent. Nave and late 15th cent. Choir
(CGB '74); video: detail only
Mont-Saint-Michel Chapel, 11th cent. Nave (CGB'74); video: details only,
below and above
Mont-Saint-Michel Chapel, 15th cent. Choir (CGB '74); again, video to
details, below and above
where Romanesque vaults toward Gothic out of the Dark Age ground. As the cathedrals
soar from earlier crypts as dark as holy, or the rhymed tropes embellish scripture, as the
organa and motets of Ars Antiqua flow from plainsong —
Music:
Free Organum, 12th cent., Agnus Dei, opening, HSL-2071 (7)
(fade)
so the 11th-century nave of Mont-Saint-Michel lightens to a late-Gothic choir (time of
Ockeghem)
Music:
Ockeghem, c. 1480?, from Missa pro defunctis: "ad fontes
aquarum," Archiv 2533 145 (B)
— a favored blend, as at Aachen, Tournai, Le Mans.
7)
(fade Ockeghem)
Italian Byzantine, 5th cent., Mausoleum of Galla Placida, interior with
Tombs, Ravenna; video to details, below and above
Music:
Gregorian (Solesmes) Da pacem, lst mode, V-M-87, side 18
We have seen Christianity, in the crumbling of pagan power, rear in the grave,
antinomies of eternal faith and world abandonment. At first the poles were draped in the
dissolving arts of classical leisure.
(fade Gregorian)
8)
Carolingian, c. 800, First cover of the Lindau Gospels, J.P. Morgan;
+ V detail
Music:
Liturgical Chant, lOth cent., from "dextera tua, domine'', close of
Offertory, Nonesuch H-71348 (A-4)
But as they move north, a symbolic cross to the German tribes, while these pour
southward over Rome, the residual suavities of space and consciousness are stripped
August 6, 1995
Gothic Prelude
Lux Nova
2
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
away, leaving the poles burning as in void, with the abstract inconsequence of timeless
vision.
(fade l0th cent. chant)
9)
North Italian, c. 1100-35, Christ Enthroned, Bronze doors, S. Zeno, Verona
(CGB '59); + V detail
Music:
Santiago de Compostela, MS, 12th cent., Conductus — Annua
guadia (close) Decca DL 79416 (B-1)
And the first strands of the Western temporal fabric stretch over the rift, a preGothic sharpness of joy and pain, concentrating into spirit the apocalyptic enigma where
they are born.
(end Annua Gaudia)
a1O) French Gothic, c. 1163 into 13th cent., Notre Dame from S.E., Paris (CGB
'80)
10) Same, c. 1163-77, Ambulatory of Notre Dame, Paris (CGB '59)
10a) Same, c. 1270, Rose and lancets of South Transept, Notre Dame, Paris (CGB
'80); video: detail only
Or the metaphor of poles may be extended to the historical weaving. Then the
cross of stripped faith and earthly negation becomes a temporal base for the western
curve, the Gothic birth a many-phased unfolding from that somber ground. Such the
rearing of Notre Dame and Perotin.
Music:
11)
Perotin, c. 1200, Sedêrunt principes, separate quadruplum (close),
Archiv 2723045 (1b)
Byzantine, 6th cent., Virgin, detail of Icon, Monastery of St. Catherine,
Sinai; video: detail only
But the ground is ideal, an assumed limit of the actual field. What is its art locus?
Not the early Christian and Byzantine — not this 6th-century Madonna from Sinai, with
its troubled Greek shadowings of sensuous personality.
12)
Armenian, 915-21, Virgin and Child with Gabriel, King Gakik's Church,
Aght-'Amar; video: detail only
August 6, 1995
Gothic Prelude
Lux Nova
3
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
The negation had begun there, but it had not run its course. The stripping to the
bare abstract was the Dark Age drift of Christendom everywhere. Here we pick it up
from 1Oth-century Armenia, still in precursive contact with the West, though soon to fall
to the Sultan.
13)
Irish, late 8th cent., Virgin and Child, Book of Kells, Trinity College, Dublin;
+ V detail
The Book of Kells exhibits the general affinity and even specific features derived
from earlier Coptic and Armenian contacts. Through that old-world ascetic hardening,
Celtic wonder looks out, a child's eyes through a mask of age. How near is the Kells
flowering to the Dark Age ground?
a14)
14)
Irish MS, c. 1000, David and the Lion, Southampton Psalter; V: detail only
Irish MS, c. 1000, David and Goliath, Southampton Psalter (V14, wider)
The Irish were faithful, anyway, to linear abstraction — the Book of Kells a
summit among such manuscripts produced over more than three hundred years. By 1000,
after the Viking raids and the exodus of scholars, representation (as in this Southampton
Psalter David and Goliath) seems flattened to the barest outlines of penmanship — what
Klee and the 20th century would revive in post-Freudian psyche-art. But is that inverted
Goliath lying on the Dark Age ground?
15)
Carolingian (Rheims), early 9th cent., Luke, from Four Evangelists Page,
Codex Aureus, Cathedral Treasury, Aachen
Carolingian manuscripts, struggling for space in spacelessness, hardly admit of so
comical a grounding. Nor the poems of mondo-pessimism and God-hope: Alcuin's
epitaph: ''Yearning I followed the delights of the world —/ Ashes and dust now...'' —
''delicias mundi... nunc cinis et pulvis…'' Nor the Anglo-Saxon Wanderer's vanity of
vanities: "All is labor and loss in this lower world.''
16)
Rheims, c. 820, St. Matthew, Gospel Book of Ebbo, Epernay; first, V detail
Nor from Cynewulf's Christ, late 8th century: "swa we on laguflode ... windge holmas/
Ofer deop gelad …
A waste of surges we sail across
August 6, 1995
Gothic Prelude
Lux Nova
4
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
In this wavering world, over wind-swept tracts
Of open sea … The Son of God guides us. (after Spaeth)
17)
Anglo-Saxon (Ely), 1006-23, Nativity from Sacramentary, f. 32 v. MS Y 6,
Bibl. Mun., Rouen; video: details only, below and above
As the dialectic of poles implies, the clearest expressions of that winter ground do
not come from the broken trough, but as the forces rally that would lift off from it — as in
the pre-Conquest schools of Winchester and Ely, a vitality alien as something from China
opens in the calligraphic symbol-world.
18)
German, 9th cent., pre-Romanesque Church at Oberzell, Reichenau
Music:
Notker Balbulus, d. 912, Christus hunc diem, 1-5 (HAM) MHS
OR 349
The final outpost of a transition where lean backward-looking presages the birth
to follow is the Germany of the Ottos. There Notker and Wipo were writing the
sequences our historical discs leave historical. There the Saxon nun, Hrowswitha, about
980, created out of faith and stark Latin a sacred drama, blending comic and tragic —
though the mystery plays it anticipates would grow not from such learned imitation, but
from the life of the Mass.
a19)
19)
19a)
German (Ottonian) Reichenau, c. 1020, Woman and the Beast, Bibl.,
Bamberg; first, V detail
Same, ''Fount of Living Waters"; + V detail
German, 1015, Bronze door, Cathedral, Hildesheim; video: two details only
Consider a plot: Callimachus has to wife the saintly Drusiana; to avoid his
legitimate caress (that monastic chastity Hegel would despise) she receives death by
prayer, is protected by a divine serpent, revived by the Apostle John, converts old
Callimachus, and banishes a vulgar servant to hell. As in Ottonian illumination, mind,
action, and world begin and end in miracle; nothing stoops to the physical; every cause
reverts to First Cause.
(fade Notker after "apostolos")
That the pagan vanity of drama can be revived in piety is one of the life-giving
reversals by which the profane and temporal spring in the timeless enclosure of creed. So
at the end of the Dark Ages, we have seen outlawed reason ("Professing themselves to be
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Symbolic History
wise, they became fools'') prove in Anselm the Tertullian impossibility of God's
Incarnation.
20)
20a)
20b)
20c)
Late 10th cent. German, Lothair Cross, with 1st cent. Augustus; Palace
Treasury, Aachen
Same, detail (which V takes from 20)
Same, closer detail of center — Augustus cameo
Carolingian, 9th cent (or 16th cent.?), equestrian statuette of Charlemagne;
Louvre, Paris
Music:
Carmina Burana 52, Conquest of Jerusalem, 1099:
Solemnibus, MHS 3793
Nomen a
For the deified Augustus (lst-century cameo) to win the center of the 10th-century
Cross of Lothair reflects in its most dramatic form the same about-face, by which
Christian withdrawal changes to Christian attack. It began with Constantine, but the Dark
Age life of paradox, from Charlemagne's Saracen struggle to the First Crusade, made it
the automatic stance of Warrior Christianity. Thus Fulcher of Chartres describes the
1099 fall of Jerusalem, also hailed in music:
The Franks entered the city magnificently at the noonday hour on
Friday, the day of the week when Christ redeemed the whole world on
the cross... Nowhere was there a place where the Saracens could
escape the swordsmen...Within Solomon's Temple about ten thousand
were beheaded. If you had been there, your feet would have been
stained up to the ankles with the blood of the slain... They did not
spare the women and children.
Within a faith once of radical peace and estranged from Empire, what Vico calls the holy
wars of heroic peoples have been reinstated.
(fade Nomen a Solemnibus)
The mode of this accomplishment is the medieval mode of faith-symbol.
Augustus here is both the Prince of Peace and his secular image. So Arthur and the Peers
of France are baptized; the Celtic Graal becomes the Cup of Redemption, the horn of
Bran (cors), by a Frankish pun, the wafer of Corpus Christi — even as bread and wine are
body and blood. So the eagle-shaped M in Dante [Paradiso XVIII and cf. VI] raises
Roman Monarchy to the stars.
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21)
21a)
21b)
21c)
Symbolic History
French (Norman), 1020 and after, Mont-Saint-Michel from the causeway
(CGB '74)
German Romanesque (Köln), 10th cent. and after, Gross St. Martin, apse and
tower, from the S.E.
French Romanesque (Burgundy), 1088-97, Remains of Abbey Church, Cluny,
France
French Romanesque (from the Meuse), 11th cent., Tancremont Crucifix,
Tancremont Abbey, France; + V detail
Music:
Marcabru, 1137, from Pax in Nomine Domini (Munrow: Crusades)
Argo ZRG 673 A 2
Under the cult of the timeless and spaceless, what has occurred? Europe was
rising like Mont-Saint-Michel out of the mist. The warhorse had been bred for chivalry,
the mouldboard plow invented for the forest soil; the "three-field" crop system was
boosting food production. For the destroyed life-trade of the Mediterranean, the road and
river trade of Europe had seeded the medieval towns. The very principle of disruption —
empire into warlike fiefs — shapes the feudal ties of modern kingdoms. The Dark Age
terrors of war and passion — Brünhilde, Deirdre, Hallgarda — turn to chivalric devotion;
while the Church, vitiated and corrupted through the Time of Troubles, begins with
Cluny, 910, its passionate regeneration. Even in statements of the ascetic ground — Peter
Damiati, 11th century: "Nothing remains but the love of God and mortification of
yourselves" — we forget that the key words, "love" and "self" are subtly changing. "My
wretched heart," (his Yeatsian cry) "which will not lose the memory of a form seen but
once." So Marcabru's 1137 lament becomes a chivalric call.
(end Marcabru)
a22)
22)
German Tapestry, 11th-13th cent., Knight, fragment of "The Twelve Months,"
Kunstindustri Mus., Oslo; + V detail
German Romanesque, 1040-50, West Facade, Cathedral of Trier (CGB'74);
video to details, above and below
Music:
Carmina Burana 11th-12th cent., #22, Homo quo vigeas (Binkley)
SAWT 9522-A
Everywhere the earthly is entrained in the heavenly quest: Pope Urban prompts to
the First Crusade not merely for the glory of God and his kingdom: "This land is too
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narrow for your population ... Jerusalem is a land fruitful above all others." To which the
cry of acceptance was "Dieu li volt."
From that crusading century, the symptom of new life which still dominates the
landscape is a wave of first-Romanesque churches in those rising centers of trade and
prosperity. If the Kaiserdoms of the Ottonian Rhine and Mosel (here the west front of the
Roman Basilica of Trier, with a Golliard chant) initiate the surge — in a form as
weightily archaic as the organization of the Empire — it is at once caught up, or
independently advanced, in northern Italy and France.
(end Carmina Burana 22)
23)
24)
24a)
N. Italian Romanesque, 1063-1118, Cathedral of Pisa, from S.W. (CGB '48)
Same, view of the Apse (CGB '48)
N. Italian Romanesque, 1063-1350, Pisa Group: Cathedral, with Baptistry
and tower (CGB '48)
1063: and the free commune of Pisa begins an arcaded marble basilica of protoRenaissance harmony. Though if vault had been grappled with as in the driven North,
this first benign beauty of our culture could hardly have afforded such purity and ease. In
the paucity of early organa and plainness of their reconstruction, it is of interest that the
first Italian polyphony ("Regi Regum Gloriosa", 11th century Lucca MS) blends smooth
plainsong melodies in perfect intervals — against the more dissonant risks of French
organum:
Music:
25)
11th c. Ital. (Lucca 603), Regi Regum Glorioso, RCA-V-LM 6015
(cut, end stanza)
Venetian Byzantine, 1069-74, Cathedral of St. Mark's
Music:
Byzantine, Mt Athos, Easter chant, 9th Ode, ARC-2533 413, end of
side 1, ARC 2533 413
At the same time in Venice, queen of the Adriatic and Eastern trade, the art lingering of
Constantinople found hospitable soil and leafed out in the breath-taking domes of St.
Mark's (1069-74). Though beneath the outward exhalation,
26)
St. Mark's interior, Crossing of nave and transept, Cupola of the Resurrection,
with 13th-cent. mosaics; video: details only, above and below
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26a)
Symbolic History
Same, another (lighter) view; video: detail only (for digital, a26)
brood gold mosaic vaults, decorated through centuries, but still symbolic enclosures of
jewels burning in the Dark Age gloom. Was the chant as Byzantine as the art? (fade
Athos) Or had the diaphony of French-Italian Guido already reared the poles of
Organum? — Parallel (Music), and Contrary (Music).
Music:
a27)
27)
Guido of Arezzo, c.1025, Parallel & Contrary Diaphony, examples 9
& 18 from Micrologus, sung by K.Williamson et al.
S. Italian, c. 1090, Christ in Glory, S. Angelo in Formis, near Capua
S. Italian, c. 1080, interior of S. Angelo in Formis (video order: 27, detail;
then a27, detail; and again, detail of 27)
To the south, the impoverished heart of what had been imperial Rome showed no
such progress.
Music:
Gregorian, Psalm 116, Laudate, 8th mode, History of Italian Music,
VLM 40000, I, 1
It must have seemed strange to the independent north, that the Papal tail should so
determinedly wag the dog. Especially when the Tuscan Hildebrand, elected pope in
1073, pushed ahead with church reform in the spirit of Cluny, outlawing the imperial
practice of lay investiture. Against the archaic Roman manner of this little Capua church,
(fade Laudate Dominum omnes gentes)
28)
28a)
German, 11th-13th cent. (and later), Cathedral of Mainz; + V28, detail
German, 11th cent., from the bronze doors of Augsburg Cathedral, Creation of
Eve, Fall, etc. (copy of Faust, 15 — CGB '59); V and digital: Adam only
V28b) German Romanesque, 1080-1160, Cathedral of Speyer, Rhenish Kaiserdom
28c) German Romanesque, 1000-1181, Apse and Towers, Worms
Music:
Carmina Burana, 11th-12th cent., #19 Fas et nefas (Binkley)
SAWT 9455A
how vastly the Mainzer Dom, 11th century at core (though a conglomerate from the 1Oth
to the 19th) sprawls over the Rhine. With such gangling pride Henry the Fourth must
have gathered his appointed bishops to answer Gregory VII's claim that the Roman
Church had never erred, nor would err to all eternity, that it was in the apostolic power to
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Symbolic History
depose emperors, and that Henry should "Obey the mandate of God".
(fade Carmina Burana)
Henry, king ... by the holy ordination of God, to Hildebrand, not pope
but false monk ... By wiles ... thou hast achieved money; by money,
favor; by the sword, the throne of peace. And from the throne of peace
thou hast disturbed peace ... Thou, therefore, damned by this curse ...
relinquish the apostolic chair which thou hast usurped ... I, Henry, king
by the grace of God, together with all our bishops, say thus unto thee:
Descend, descend, and be damned throughout the ages.
29)
French Norman, 1062 and after, St. Etienne (Abbaye-aux-Hommes) Caen;
first, video detail
Music:
Santiago MS (Magister Albertus of Paris) c. 1135, Congaudeant,
opening, Argo ZRG 900
But Hildebrand was linked all over Europe with the rising tide of Catholic power
— from Santiago. through Magister Albertus' Paris, as far as Normandy, where Duke
William and his churchmen were then creating the most pregnant of Romanesque styles,
which, in the superimposed heights of his own monastery at Caen, already looks to
Gothic. (fade Congaudeant) The papal ban was no negligible weapon. Henry's
submission at Canossa in the snowy winter of 1077, Gregory himself describes:
30)
30a)
30b)
N. Italian, 940, rebuilt 13th cent., Castle of Canossa ruins, Emilia; + V close
detail (as in slide 30b)
Roman Mosaic, 1128, Crucifix with Vine, S. Clemente, Rome
Again, Canossa ruins, slide: close detail; video: a wider detail (from 30)
Music:
Carmina Burana, 11th-12th cent. Dulce solum, (Binkley) SAWT
9455-A
And there, having laid aside all the belongings of royalty, wretchedly,
with bare feet and clad in wool, he continued for three days to stand
before the gate of the castle. Nor did he desist from imploring with
many tears the aid and consolation of the apostolic mercy, until he had
moved all those who were present there ... to pity and depth of
compassion.
Today the Apennine castle of Canossa is a ruin as abandoned as the Papal dream
of Europe under spiritual sway.
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Symbolic History
(fade Carmina Burana)
31)
French Norman, 1020 and after, Mont-Saint-Michel, upper portion (CGB '74)
Though the feud went on, even to Henry's taking Rome in 1084 and the NormanSicilian Guiscard's recovering it for the Pope, but with such rape and misconduct that
Gregory was driven into exile by the outraged Romans. As in all deep conflicts of
history, progress banked on both sides: the emerging national states, and the Catholic
synthesis of Europe. While in thought and the arts, France confirmed itself as the
ordering center.
32)
V32a)
V32b)
32c)
V32d)
Norman French, soon after 1066, from the Bayeux tapestry; video: detail of
ships only
Same, detail: King Edward
Same, detail: Guy takes Harold
Same, detail of battle
Same, detail: Norman archers
The Chanson de Roland, against the looser German epics, reveals the formative
discipline of the Norman French. The Bayeux tapestry, record of the conquest of England,
has such clean force and drama within the iconographic stripping of all figures — as
description in the Roland is cut to a functional core: "Rollant est proz e Oliver est sage"
— "Roland is brave, and Oliver is wise." And are we not told by Malmesbury and Wace
how the Duke's jongleur Taillefer (or Toliver) joined battle at Hastings chanting the
"Cantilena Rollandi"?
a33)
b33)
33)
Norman Romanesque, 1059-66, La Trinité or Abbey-aux-Dames, outside at
dusk, Caen (CGB '74); video: details only, below and above
French Romanesque, c. 1080, The Archangel Michael, Church of St. Savin
Norman Romanesque, 1059-66, La Trinité or Abbaye-aux-Dames, Nave, Caen
(CGB '74)
Music:
Magister Albertus, c.1235(?), Congaudeant, conclusion, st. 3 & 4,
Argo ZRG 900
Emotion, pathos, everything personal, is held here in the severity of automatic faith,
which dominates and transforms, until the horn of Roland sounds through the Pyrenees
like the trumpet of doom: "Roland feels that his time is no more." He is on a steep hill
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that looks toward Spain ... He has held up his right glove to God: the angels of heaven
come down to him. AOI" — "Angles del ciel i descendent a lui. AOI."
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With the Norman Conquest, and even just before, that mighty style (here Matilde's
church of the Trinity in Caen)
a34)
1st 34)
Norman, 1089-1100, and 15th cent., Gloucester Cathedral over the town
English Norman, 1079-93, remade Perpendicular, 1366-1404, Nave of
Winchester (CGB '74)
spreads over England, so that most of the Cathedrals of the island are built round or
carved out of a great Norman core, often begun within ten years of the conquest. (fade
Congaudeant) Thus at Winchester, longest cathedral in Europe, the solemn proportions
of the 1079-93 nave must be felt through a Gothic surface of the time of Chaucer.
Music:
Worcester Fragments, c. 1325, Hocketed trope from "Epiphaniam
Domino," Nonesuch H-71308, A, bd.4, middle
The verticals, the lierne vault,
35)
Winchester, exterior, Nave from the south (CGB '74)
stretch the low solidity of structure, lightened by modest buttresses and the pointing of
windows once round-arched.
V2nd 34) Winchester, nave: video returns briefly to an upper detail of 1st 34
Yet all that richness speaks
2nd 33)
(fade hocketed trope)
La Trinité, nave; video: details only, above and below; digital: above
what it came from and must have been —
Music:
French, 12th cent.(?), Verbum bonum et suave (first 2 st.), SAWT
9531 A
again the Abbey of Matilde, wife of the Conqueror. There are always attempts to
differentiate Romanesque from Gothic, as Frankl's additif against divisif: still, this
vaulted stone already contains the other future, as centuries of polyphony would unfold
from this early organum.
(fade
Verbum bonum)
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3rd 34)
Symbolic History
Winchester, nave, through the choir screen (CGB '90); video: first detail
of 1st 34, then of V3rd 34 (CGB ‘74)
(Music: Continue hocketed trope, as above)
And what could more beautifully show the sweep of Romanesque-Gothic than to
move from Matilde's Caen to the nave of Winchester — melodized and harmonised
hockets on that ground?
(end Trope)
2nd 35)
Again, Winchester, exterior (CGB ‘74)
Here, where the poise of Norman, to be continued through the quieter Gothic of
England, awaits the filling-in of Rennaissance, we are struck by the continuity of the
Western rebirth, the speed with which it found its expressive forms.
36)
French Romanesque (Vienne) c. 1080, St. Savin s. Gartempe (interior)
Another of those early polyphonies, this from Chartres before 1100, an Alleluia,
Organum joined with plainsong, will let us move from the pre-Romanesque of Southern
France (1080, St. Savin)
37)
French Norman, 1063 ff., Abbaye-aux-Hommes (St. Etienne) interior; Caen
(CGB '74)
through William the Conqueror's own church in Caen, begun in 1063 — piers (as
alternately through Romanesque and early Gothic) replacing columns, the dialectic of
vertical and lateral, like the Scholastic vaulting of "Yes and No," grandly anticipated —
38 and for 2nd 37)
English Norman, early 12th cent., aisle, with nave columns, Tewkesbury
Abbey (copy of 2nd 38 — CGB '66)
to English Norman, columned again in Tewkesbury, early 12th century, later windows
glimpsed through the dusk; though we would need more music than we have, records
recovered from the still vibrating molecules of those church walls,
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2nd 36)
Symbolic History
St. Savin s. Gartempe; video: details only, below and above
to distinguish the musical stages of Romanesque.
Music:
2nd 37)
2nd 38)
Chartres MS, c. 1100, from Alleluia: Angelus Domine, V-LM 6015
Again, Abbaye-aux-Hommes, Caen; video: detail only
Again, Tewkesbury Abbey (CGB ‘66); video: details only
(cut plainsong close)
Tewkesbury, with the aisled solemnity of Egyptian Karnak.
39)
Tewkesbury Abbey, from the south, c. 1110-50 and after (CGB '66)
And outside, the long nave roof and tremendous tower of Norman. How much French
history was enacted north of the Channel: the Anglo-Norman scribe of the Roland,
Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, Marie de France also of England, the play of Adam,
chief relic of 12th-century drama.
a40)
b40)
c40)
French (Burgundy), 1120-40 ff., Vezelay exterior; video: detail only
Same, Vezelay interior; video has detail of c40
Same, Vezelay portal, lighted
Back to France, Vezelay (1120-40); and now, available music admits of a style
distinction. At the very time when the upward reach of Gothic begins in art and soul —
that angel clarity of fierce mystic love, in which so many great men join: theologianlover Abelard, builder-politician Suger, mystic Hugh of St. Victor, and even their
puritanical censor Bernard of Clairvaux — Gregorian stretches out to a tenor (Latin:
tenere, "to hold") over which new melodies slide in melismatic organum.
40)
V40a)
Burgundian, 1132-40, Nave viewed through portal, Vezelay; + V detail
French (Burgundy), Vezelay interior (from slide b40)
With the Vezelay portal and Gislebertus' Christ and the Magdalene, hear the brief
recorded
section
of
a
Benedicamus
Domino,
of
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the St. Martial school at Limoges — the first beautiful performance of polyphony.
Music:
41)
41a)
St. Martial School, mid-12th cent., Benedicamus Domino, Haydn
Society, L2071
(close during slide 41)
Burgundian, c. 1120-40, Gislebertus, Christ & the Magdalene, St. Lazarus,
Autun (CGB '80); + V details (while slide goes to Gislebertus, 1120-40, Flight
to Egypt, detail, St. Lazarus, Autun)
Again, Gislebertus, Christ and the Magdalene, detail (CGB '80)
Here is Hugo of St. Victor, early 12th century, in praise of Love — De Laude
Caritatis:
You have great power, O love; you alone could draw God down from
heaven to earth. How strong is your bond with which even God could
be bound... You brought him bound with your bonds, you brought him
wounded with your arrows... you wounded him who was invulnerable,
you bound him who was invincible, you drew him who was
immovable; the Eternal you made mortal... O love, how great is your
victory.
Set that celebration of love's paradox against its ultimate source,
42)
Hellenistic, 3rd-2nd cent. B.C., Socrates, Diotima, and Eros, Mus. Naz.,
Naples
Socrates taught by Diotima in the Symposium, of which this Hellenistic relief survives,
where Plato invokes Eros, just to avoid the paradox of the divine and earthly:
What then is love?...He is a great spirit... the mediator who spans the
chasm which divides the divine and the mortal... For God mingles not
with man; but through Love all the intercourse and converse of God
with man, whether awake or asleep, is carried on.
2nd 41 and 2nd 42)
French glass, c 1150, Notre Dame de la Belle Verriere, 1st window, south
aisle of Choir, Cathedral, Chartres; but video inserts a detail of Socrates from
Alexandrian Melt, a90 (see V2nd 42)
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"The Eternal you made mortal ... O love, how great is your victory" — what lucent
contradictions have opened stained glass windows in the dark, since the Socratic search
for rationality.
Va43)
b43)
43)
French, 1145-50, Two Queens of Judah, detail, Royal Portal, Cathedral,
Chartres
Same, One of the Queens of Judah, closer detail
Southern France, c. 1130, Prophet holding a Scroll, Moissac (Tarn et
Garonne); + V detail
In Southern France,. and soon after in the north, the love of woman, its poetry and
music, are caught up in the same mystical fervor. Perhaps the best known Troubadour
song is that high chivalric one by Bernard de Ventadorn of the 12th century: the lover's
envy when he sees the lark:
As she beats her wings with delight against the sun,
Loose herself and fall, in the sweetness that goes to her heart —
Can vei la lauzeta mover/ de joi sas alas contral rai
Que s'oblid' e's laissa chazer/ per la doussor c'al cor li vai...
In the dearth of secular art, we hear it with the Moissac Prophet Holding a Scroll — both
pierced by timeless ecstasy. The improvised accompaniments are lost, and efforts by later
groups (Binkley, etc.) to supply them, make us treasure the solo refinements of Max
Meili, or (here) Mertens, of the Brussels Pro Musica Antiqua.
Music:
Bernard de Ventadorn, 12th cent., "Can vei la lauzeta" EMS 201
In troubador love,
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a44)
Vb44)
44)
44a)
44b)
44c)
44d)
Symbolic History
Gislebertus, c. 1120-40, Flight into Egypt, Mary and Jesus, detail; St.
Lazarus, Autun
French early Gothic, c. 1200, detail from Coronation of the Virgin; St. Yved,
Braisne
Gislebertus, Burgundian, c. 1120-40, Recumbent Eve; St. Lazarus, Autun
German Gothic, end 12th cent., Fall of Man, Ceiling Painting; St. Michael's
Church, Hildesheim
Again, Gislebertus, Eve, detail of upper body
G. Pisano, 1302-11, Nativity, detail, from the Pulpit, Cathedral, Pisa
Closer detail of Eve's upper body; video then returns to 44
in the burning love of Mary, second Eve, a new species of joy possesses Europe; (end
Ventadorn) as if mutation had produced a flower of unknown grace and fragrance, we see
as recognizably as snowdrops spread through a forest, the lyric fire (Gislebertus' Eve in
the snake-vines) lighten from Provence over Burgundy and France, to England, Germany,
and to the Italy of "the Sweet New Style." For early 12th-century France, Abelard and
Eloise draw both loves to a flaming core. That the man, condemned by St. Bernard for
logic and rationality ("This man has no mind to believe what his reason has not previously argued") would later stand for medieval passion sacred and profane, hints at the sheer
ambivalence of that intellectual fire.
A likely conjecture, that the supreme Latin love poem of the time, the "Dum
Diane Vitrea," in its richness and freedom, may be one Abelard sang for Eloise, and heard
sung after him by admiring scholars. From it we cull three phrases:
When the gleaming lamp of Diana is kindled
Late at the rosy light of her brother,
And west winds bearing fragrance
Wander the ether-ways of heaven... (CGB)
Dum Diane Vitrea/ sero lampas oritur,
et a fratris rosea/ luce dum succenditur,
dulcis aura zephyri/ spirans omnes etheri ...
The sounds of water on pure sand
And of a mill wheel turning round
Steal oblivious eyes from the light... (CGB)
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murmura rivorum/ per arenas puras,
circulares ambitus/ molendinorum,
qui furantur somno/ lumen oculorum ...
Sweet is the passage from love into sleep,
But sweeter the waking from sleep to love... (CGB)
Hei quam felix transitus/ amoris ad soporem,
sed suavior regressus/ soporis ad amorem...
a45)
45)
Ottonian, c. 975, Gero Crucifix, detail, Cathedral, Cologne
French Romanesque (Haute Loire), c. 1135, Lavaudieu Head of Christ,
Louvre, Paris; + V detail
From the Gerokreuz at the close of The Dark Ages, identification with the human
Savior matures to this Lavaudieu Head of 1135; and again it is Abelard who, in his
epochal poem on Good Friday, at the condemned close of his own life, voiced the
personal theory of atonement, which, as Waddell says: "His century branded as heresy,
and which is the beginning of modern theology":
46)
46a)
Spanish Romanesque, 1st half of the 12th cent., Doubting Thomas, Santa
Domingo de Silos, near Burgos
Same, Doubting Thomas, detail
"Alone to sacrifice thou goest, Lord" — "Solus ad victimam procedis, Domine."
From northern Spain at the same time (which shares with France the passions of
pre-Gothic), such human participation melts with tenderness the archaic figures of the
Silos reliefs. As with Abelard, the sin which required Christ's sacrifice is taken up,
deeply and personally ours: "Nostra sunt, Domine, nostra sunt crimina."
47)
French, 12th cent., Crucifixion and Ascension window from Poitiers;
+ V details, below and above (V47 and V47a)
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That spirit is confirmed in the 12th-century Passion windows of Le Mans, this
Poitiers, then Chartres. "Why must thou suffer torture for our sin?" Abelard's answer is
to fast as with Christ in the grave:
Heavy with weeping may the three days pass,
To win the laughter of Thine Easter Day.
So Dante would himself descend on Good Friday and rise the third day.
a48)
48)
Again 41, Burgundian, c. 1120-40, Gislebertus, Christ and the Magdalene; St.
Lazarus, Autun
Spanish, lst half of 12th cent., Deposition – Resurrection, S. Domingo de
Silos, near Burgos; first, video details
We stand here at the source, not only of Protestant theology, but of the realistic
incarnations of Christian art, the impersonation of the Easter trope which engendered
Western drama:
"Quem queritis in sepulcro, O Christicolae? —
Whom do you seek in the sepulcher, O women of Christ?"
"Jesum Nazarenum, crucifixum — Jesus of Nazareth, crucified."
"Non est hic, surrexit. Ite, nuntiate. —
He is not here ... Go, and announce that the Lord has risen."
That earliest (St. Gall) example is of the time of the Gerokreuz; but by the twelfth
century, the sacred play has developed as startlingly as, in this other 1140 relief from
Silos, the burial of Christ
indicates its entire realistic bent and pre-Rennaissance soul. As in Abelard, the inward
change has been made. It would take centuries to elaborate the techniques of the earthly;
but this martyred Jesus, the mourning Marys, the sleeping guards below, stand on the
threshold
49)
49a)
49b)
49c)
English, c. 1380-1400, Resurrection from retable, Norwich Cathedral
Rembrandt, 1639, The Resurrection of Christ, Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Burgundian, 12th cent., Descent from the Cross, Louvre, Paris
Catalan Romanesque, early 12th cent., Lazarus the Beggar, fresco, from San
Clemente de Tahull
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Symbolic History
of the 1400 humanization which heralds the Renaissance, the Norwich-school
Resurrection, say, toward which the arrow of Romanesque awareness is drawn. How
many strands of the Western soul are already spun into the fabric of the time of Abelard.
In that fabric, indeed, forces opposed become the warp and woof of one
awakening. Even Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), faith-centered watchdog against
progress, was so borne on the individual and passionate tide, that he seems a source of
Reformation, with the Christ-imitating piety of its arts.
Small wonder he was already at odds with Abelard, most daring precursor of
Renaissance — Reformation and Renaissance a warring identity, joined in the larger
empowering of man and world; though Reformation's drive toward renewed Christianity
would counter the classical claims of reason and taste.
a50)
b50)
c50)
50)
50a)
French (Burgundy), c. 1110-15, South portal of Saint-Pierre, Moissac
French Romanesque, 1120-50, Conversion of St. Eustace, from a Vezelay
capital
Gislebertus (Burgundian), c. 1120-40, Body of St. Vincent guarded by ravens,
capital, Cathedral of Autun (CGB '80)
French (Burgundy), c. 1120-30, Main portal of St. Lazare Cathedral, Autun
Romanesque-Gothic, 1134-50, Triple West Portal, Chartres (CGB '59; copy of
Gothic II, 42); video uses lower spread of a51
St. Bernard not only hunts down what he calls heresy (Abelard, Arnold of Brescia,
William of Conches, and the rest); he attacks the now wealthy monasteries of Cluny for
the size and extravagance of their churches — then as richly colored and jewelled as they
are still recognizably carved —
What profit is there in those ridiculous monsters... that deformed
comeliness, that comely deformity... those half-men... and fighting
knights, those hunters winding their horns?...
Doth not the root of all this lie in covetousness, which is idolatry...
At the sight of these marvellous vanities men are more kindled to offer
gifts than to pray. Thus wealth is drawn up by ropes of wealth, thus
money bringeth money... (Coulton)
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Symbolic History
Yet as from Abelard not only the heretical but the church-sustaining energies of
the next generations were to spring, so in the great series of portals beginning about 1100
to 1120 with Moissac and (here) Autun and culminating after 1140 in the Royal Portal of
Chartres, we experience a logos powerful in ordering the divine — an achievement
impossible without a daring that continually walked the knife-edge of heresy — heresy
being in Abelard's case an advance too rapid or too proud along the road his followers
would make orthodox.
a51)
b51)
51)
52)
52a)
French Gothic, 1134-50, West front up to Tower, Chartres Cathedral (copy of
CGB '59); here video takes the upper spread of this slide
French Gothic, 1145 ff., view of Chartres from hotel
French Romanesque-Gothic, 1145 ff. and 1194 ff., the western façade of
Chartres Cathedral, with the 15th-cent. taller spire
Lesser's Geometrical Analysis of the same west front, Chartres
Double of 51 and 52 — actual church and scale analysis 1
Right, that Geoffrey, Bishop of Chartres and of its Platonic school (just before the
1130 fire occasioned much of the present West front), should defend Abelard at Soisson
(1121), since in this divine geometry, heaven-scaling reason speaks "with most oracular
organ".
It was in the brilliance of his youth that Abelard opened dialectic theology with
the Sic et Non — Yes and No: for 157 questions crucial to the faith, a columned array of
quotations from the Bible, the Fathers, the pagan classics, affirming and denying — a
handbook of contradictions. The prologue states what is almost Heidegger's basic tuning
(Stimmung) of Western thought, Cartesian certainty mediated by question: "For by
doubt," says Abelard, "we come to inquiry, and by inquiry we arrive at the truth." This
was the book which Peter Lombard later called his "breviary," and from which Aquinas
would draw his method of Objection and Reply.
Though Abelard was even more blamed for his lectures and tract (c. 1120) On the
Divine Unity and Trinity.
1
After b51, held longer in the slide show than in the video, these are the basic slides — yet
differently applied. In the video, the double not only closes the sequence, but opens it, as
if it were c51, as well as 52a. Between, the video runs a series of separate details — photo
followed by Analysis — first of the façade up to the towers; then of the towers; then a lower
central detail (Analysis only). Here the video returns to the slide double.
August 6, 1995
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Symbolic History
In "The Story of my Calamities" he tells of writing it for his scholars, who wanted
to know "rather what could be understood than what could be stated ... nor could anything
be believed unless it could first be understood." Bernard could hardly ignore such a
reversal of Augustine's "believe that you may understand — crede ut intelligas." He
bestirred himself before the second trial, at Sens, 1140:
Peter Abelard is trying to make void the merit of Christian faith when
he deems himself able by human reason to comprehend God
altogether. He ascends to the heavens and descends even to the abyss;
nothing may hide from him! Not content to see things through a glass
darkly, he must behold all things face to face...
(Taylor, The Medieval Mind)
The church builders had it better. They were not tried for heresy, despite their
daring or Bernard's disapproval. Though the geometric analysis of the West Front of
Chartres, revealing the three superimposed modules and harmonies of the 1145 and 1194
constructions, with the 15th-century taller spire, leaves no doubt how far those architects
trusted Whitehead's "unbridled reason of the Middle Ages" in proclaiming the divine.
53)
53a)
Same, Chartres, Royal portal (1145-50), central door (video crops first from
50a, triple portal, CGB '59); + V detail
Same, Christ of Tympanum; video: detail only of 53
That formulation of the Trinity which Bernard called heretical ("He savors of
Arius when he speaks of the Trinity ... The faith of the righteous believes, it does not
dispute.") is most briefly and beautifully expressed in the close of Abelard's hymn for
Saturday Vespers ("O quanta qualia/ sunt illa sabbata"). With what measured glory the
logic of God becomes the flesh of the poem, in the untranslatable mastery of Latin syntax:
To the Lord of forever,
Praise evermore,
From whom all, by whom all,
In whom all, are.
From-whom-are, Father is;
By-whom-are, Son;
In-whom-are, Spirit,
Of Father, Son, one. (CGB)
Perenni Domino
perpes sit gloria,
ex quo sunt, per quem sunt,
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
in quo sunt omnia.
ex quo sunt, pater est,
per quem sunt, Filius,
in quo sunt, Patris et
filii Spiritus.
To that intellectual precision, apparent even in translation,
a54)
b54)
54)
54a)
French (Auvergne), 12th cent., Christ head, Louvre, Paris (another view of the
Lavaudieu head of slide 45, above)
French, 12th cent., bronze Crucified Christ, Metropolitan Museum, NYC
French (Auvergne), 2nd half of 12th cent., Virgin and Child, Metropolitan
Museum, NYC; + V details
Auvergne, 2nd half of 12th cent., detail of Virgin, Louvre, Paris
Bernard's hymn, "Jesu dulcis memoria" — within the same style-horizon — is
diametrically opposed.
Music:
Bernard of Clairvaux, c. 1145(?), "Jesu dulcis memoria," St. John's
group under Frank Flinn
In this puzzling saint the old dilemma of faith crops out: selfless humility and dogmatic
pride. Arnold of Brescia, whom Bernard had thrown out of France, accused him (John of
Salisbury reports) "of being a pursuer of vain glory, one who envied all who were not of
his own school." Yet the hymn shows simple piety and childlike faith — so childlike
indeed that it evaporates in translation, leaving the obvious sentiments of later religion. It
begins:
Jesu dulcis memoria
dans vera cordis gaudia,
sed super mel et omnia
eius dulcis praesentia.
Jesus sweet to recall,
The heart's joy in essence;
More than honey and all,
The sweetness of your presence. (CGB)
Bernard's key word "faith" is also crucially changing — like some 12th century
Madonnas, filled with the sensuous actualizations of person. As if his Christ were to be
apprehended by taste. While the melody, against modal Gregorian, moves like a
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Symbolic History
Protestant hymn, by harmonic chords.
(close "Jesu dulcis memoria")
55)
55a)
55b)
French Gothic (Suger), 1140-44, Ambulatory, St.Denis, (CGB '84); video
divides to a central spread and detail of the vault
Again, St. Denis, but the upper church, rebuilt about 1230
Again, the Ambulatory of St. Denis, Chapel of St. Peregrin, two windows
(before which video has returned to the central spread of 55)
Music:
August 6, 1995
French, mid-12th cent, Benedicamus Domino, 2-voice (Cape) EMS
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Symbolic History
The great Suger, regent of France and abbot of Saint-Denis, north of Paris,
provides a link between Abelard, whom he defended, and Bernard, by whom he was
stirred. In 1140 to '44, about the time melismatic organum joined with discant, he had his
church enlarged, windowed and triple portalled — an act which, as much as any, turned
Romanesque into Gothic. Though most of that Saint Denis has been rebuilt or defaced,
this ambulatory with Suger's account of the building (edited and translated by Panofsky),
heralds a new mysticism of Gothic Incorporation, an anagogical ascent, by which the
earthly is symbolically elevated to the spiritual and becomes a kind of sacrament.
(fade Benedicamus)
56)
Catalan, mid-12th cent., Porch of Santa Maria at Ripoli
It is hard in any period to call one man of the past and another of the future;
Bernard's backward looking inspires another future, of penitential reform. "The church is
resplendent in her walls, beggarly in her poor. She clothes her stones in gold, and leaves
her sons naked ... "
57)
French, 11th-12th cent., Basilica (St. Remi), Rheims (CGB '76); video takes
this in three cuts: below, middle, and above
But we who, for the sake of Christ, have deemed as dung whatever
shines with beauty, enchants the ear, delights through fragrance,
flatters the taste, pleases the touch — whose devotion, I ask, do we
intend to incite by means of these very things?
Indeed, the monumental pre-Gothic bareness of Bernard's own church at Clairvaux seems
to have exerted the sort of revolutionary impact Bernard himself did. That church is
mostly destroyed, but the shadowy vast Basilica of Rheims (not the cathedral, but this
older church, 11th-12th centuries) may suggest the type.
58)
58a)
Again, Suger's Ambulatory, 1140-44, another view (CGB '84); video takes
only an upper detail; then a lower detail of 55, with tomb; then a detail of the
vault from slide 63b to follow)
Closer view of 58: column between windows (CGB '84); from which video
gives only an upper detail of the right window
Music:
August 6, 1995
Leonin, c.1160, from Haec Dies, near close (Tinayre) Lumen 32011
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Symbolic History
It was Bernard's passionate rephrasing of the Dark Age question which Suger's
church (here a chapel of the ambulatory) was made to answer. And not only his church,
but a theology derived by way of Irish-born John Scotus from the Pseudo-Areopagite
(Syrian, ca. 500), viewing all process as an ascent, in which the material and sensory is
drawn up and receives the radiance of the divine: so the lilt of troubador love in the
sacred organum of Leonin. (resume speaking on the last held note of the Haec Dies)
Here is a passage from Suger which becomes a jewelled window, itself lighting a hundred
and more years of the mystical fabric of Gothic —
a59)
59)
French Gothic, 1212-41 and after, Rheims, interior, nave and west windows
Same, west windows, nearer (CGB '59); video: rose window only
up to the height of Rheims, the height of Perotin.
Music:
Perotin, c. 1200, from an Alleluia, last section, Seraphim SIC 6052
When... in the beauty of the house of God the loveliness of the manycolored gems has called me away from external cares… I see myself
dwelling, as it were, in some strange region of the universe which
neither exists entirely in the slime of earth, nor entirely in the purity of
Heaven; and that, by the grace of God, I can be transported from this
inferior to that higher world in an anagogical manner...
(end Alleluia)
60)
Jan van Eyck, 1425, Madonna in a Church, Berlin-Dahlem Museum; first,
V detail
Music:
Dufay c.1440(?), from Flos Florum (at "Regina"), (Cape) ARC 3003
There is the insight behind centuries of Gothic incorporation, from Chartres
through The Divine Comedy, to the 15th-century symbolic sanctities of here and now —
this Dufay, with Van Eyck's Madonna in a Church, where as Panofsky has noted, the light
that seems so actual falls from the North, as on Dante's Earthly Paradise.
(fade Dufay, after "dolorum")
Va61)
61)
Again, Chartres, Royal Portal, center cropped from 50a, above
French Romanesque-Gothic, 1145-50, Central Tympanum, Royal Portal,
Chartres (CGB '59); + V detail (replaced in the slide show by 61a, again
Suger's Ambulatory, two windows; CGB '84)
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Symbolic History
On the gilded doors which by his analogy open (like this portal of Chartres) to
heaven, Suger inscribed a Latin poem, in which repetition takes the place of rhyme:
For the splendor of the church that has fostered and exalted him,
Suger has laboured for the splendor of the church.
… Bright is the noble work; but being nobly bright, the work
Should brighten the minds, that they may travel through the true lights
To the True Light where Christ is the true door.
In what manner it inhere in this world the golden door defines:
The dull mind rises to truth through that which is material
Raised from prior submersion by the sight of this light.
Mens hebes ad verum per materialia surgit
Et demersa prius hac visa luce resurgit.
62)
Suger's Ambulatory; variant: column between windows (CGB '84)
On the windowed enlargement of the upper Choir, a model for Notre Dame and so
many to follow (though it is the ambulatory that remains), another poem was inscribed:
Bright is that which is brightly coupled with the bright,
And bright the noble edifice pervaded by the new light.
Such is Suger's Lux Nova, the sacramental light of Gothic.
63)
63a)
63b)
V63c)
French early Gothic, begun c. 1170, Buttressed Apse, Mantes (CGB '74)
French Romanesque, 1039-65, Transept Crossing, Ste. Foy, Conques,
Aveyron
Again, Suger, 1140-44, Ambulatory, St. Denis (slide overexposed to show
Gothic vaulting, used by video earlier, as detail, see 58, above; while here
video shows a detail of Mantes, from 63)
Cathedral of Laon, 1160-1205, buttressing, north side of nave, detail from a
vertical slide (CGB '74); digital: add v63d, Canterbury Choir
What ingenuities of structure that light required, any early Gothic apse (here
Mantes, near Paris, 2nd half of the 12th century) will remind us of. From the first
groining and ribbing of vaults (the aisles of Bernay Abbey, Norman, 1017; the crossing of
Ste. Foy, Conques, 1039 ff. — as in music from the principle of simultaneously moving
voices — a chain leads as by necessity to the dialectic triumph of Gothic. To open his
August 6, 1995
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
windows, Suger reduced the walls to buttresses, though he did not make them fly. But
within ten years at Noyon that step was taken — to be followed at once in the churches
being built at Sens, Laon, and not long after, in England, at Canterbury.
64)
64a)
French Gothic, 1162-82, (rebuttressed 13th cent.?) Choir Apse, Notre Dame,
Paris, from far-off (CGB '59); + V detail
Same, buttressing of Choir, from the south (copy of CGB '59; see Gothic II,
55); first, two video details, the second now video-revised to the Madonna of
the North Portal, also Notre Dame, Paris (CGB '80 — V64b)
Music:
Leonin, c. 1180(?), Deum timê. Organum duplum, Lumen 32011
The boldest early application was at Notre Dame in Paris, 1162-82.
In music it was Leonin, master there through that time, who perfected the
sustained-tone style, combining it with powerfully driven rythmic passages of note
against note — or of tenor note against a triple in the organal voice — here his Deum
timê, sung by Tinayre. The prerequisite for those soaring polyphonies was what we take
for granted, though it had then to be painfully evolved, a system of time notation that
would blend independent voices. It is the crisscrossing of Perfect, or triple, rhythm that
gives the music its stripped energy; it is the sustained-tone melting of melody over a held
ground which complements that force with a shifting devotional tenderness of
incomparable poignance; while the mystical turning from the vanity of earth to the eternal
is attested by the bare-fifth harmony.
65)
Double: [A] Gainsborough, c. 1783, Mrs. Sheridan, detail, head; National
Gallery, Washington, D.C.; and [B] French Gothic, c. 1210, N. Portal, Head
of Sainte Modeste, Chartres Cathedral; + singles. 2
In the world of Enlightened hope, of Gainsborough (right), Haydn, Jane Austen,
dissonance is a passing trial, which resolves into the triadic chord of homecoming to the
valid earth. (Music: harpsichord cadence, Richard Stark) But in Gothic, those triads of
the heart are passing tones, dissonances of wish; and what they resolve into is the
transhumanity of perfect intervals.
2
Where the slide show goes from 65, through B, then A, and back to the double, the video
enriches to 65, then B, again 65, then A, again 65, and finally A once more.
August 6, 1995
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Music:
Symbolic History
French, c. 1240, Anima–Descendi–Alma, close, AS 91)
So in Sainte Modeste at Chartres (left) the loves and moods affirmed by our major and
minor hang unvalidated, as over an eternity of pure fifth, octave, unison. Such formal
exclusion of the chords of joy and tears, in which Gainsborough's Mrs. Sheridan (right)
has her being, might seem of the Dark Age Ground; but their actual appearance, floating
in the mystery of denial, tokens the shadowy first smile with which Gothic love lightens
the ascetic pre-dawn. No piece so voices that suspension as
66)
Score of Leonin's Organum Duplum, Judea et Jerusalem, transcribed by
Richard Stark from Cape performance (video follows through the text and
performance in a series of 17 details)
Leonin's organum on "Judea et Jerusalem". This opening Duplum, in the lower or tenor
voice, stretches out those three words, with their notes, as heard in the plainsong. (Music:
Solesmes opening of Judea et Jerusalem, French Decca 7.452A.) We are in the fourth
mode, whose tonic is the closing E. The dominant is A, to which the tenor rises once at
the climax of the discant section. Discant denotes the bar-by-bar treatment marked in
yellow. (Music: Stark, on harpsichord.) Sustained tone, or vel purum, bespeaks the
melismatic melting over held tones, into which the discant also returns at the close.
(Music: Stark, on harpsichord.)
The tension between the life of earth, which was to shape tonal harmony, and the
earthless center is enacted between the Gregorian tonic E and the F with which the chant
opens. For no sooner does the organizing voice move from F above, than the entire claim
of sensuous F Major appears, dreamed over the mystic void — as in four haunting
variations of the B-flat phrase marked in red — the desired smile of Guinevere. (Music:
CGB, recorder #1 and #4.) In that emergence of romance, the repeated rise to thc sacred
tonic E (marked in blue), a seventh over the earth ground, F, sharpens a spirit-cry. Which
way do we move? The "Judea" close affirms temporal F. With the "Jerusalem" phrase,
the flat is withdrawn. The penultimate search (over F) avoids B. Still hungry for F we
are led toward dissonant E ("our sister the death of the body"). But the plainsong tenor
drops to its E close. How strangely earth's climb completes itself in the modal octave of
mystery, the timeless center of creed.
Let us hear, first with the score, the tender Cape performance.
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�C.G. Bell
Music:
67)
Symbolic History
Leonin, c.1160, Judea et Jerusalem, lst Duplum, ARCHIV 14068
(close)
French Gothic, c. 1160, S. Transept, Soissons Cathedral, (CGB '59)
And now once more, with details from Soissons and Chartres — the perfection of
the New Light:
Music:
68)
69)
69a)
The same, repeated
French Gothic 1194-1225, North Ambulatory, columns and windows,
Chartres (CGB '59)
French Gothic, 1194-1225, South Aisle of Choir, Chartres (CGB '74)
French Glass, c. 1150, West Lancets and Rose, Chartres (video divides to
lancets first, then rose)
(close Leonin)
Such keenness of discovery, within the veneration of sacred authority,
Va70)
70)
Mont-Saint-Michel, Chapel, 11th-cent. Nave and late 15th-cent. Choir
(returning to slide 6 of this show, CGB '74)
French Romanesque, 11th-12th cent., and Gothic, 13th cent., from Nave
into Choir, Le Mans Cathedral (CGB '74); + V details
is visibly attested by those dual constructions (as Mont-Saint-Michel earlier, and here Le
Mans) where a Gothic choir launches itself from the round-archings of a Romanesque
nave. And in music too, the Leonin two-part, the huge Perotin three- and four-part
organa, expand their resources in the ritual embrace of plainsong. No correlation of one
living polarity with another presents a true match. Romanesque is not (as popularly
conceived) quite cognate with plainsong, nor polyphony with Gothic — since the new
Romanesque already embodies, with note-for-note organum, the principles from which
Gothic would spring. But to the extent that Christendom with its patristic reverence
continually shapes contrasts of new and old, a Perotin Quadruplum (here from the Deller
"Vidêrunt Omnes")
71)
Le Mans, outside, from the Northwest, Romanesque nave and Gothic transept
(CGB '74)
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Symbolic History
may accompany the Gothic east-end of Le Mans as it springs from the lower containment
of the nave.
Music:
Perotin, c. 1220(?), from "Vidêrunt Omnes" (2nd sect. plainsong,
and 4-voice, from "Jubilate") BG-S 5045
72)
Same, Le Mans, 11th-12th cent. N. aisle of Nave (CGB '74)
1st 73)
Same, 13th cent., Choir, buttressing, from the NE (CGB '74)
1st 74)
Same, Choir, interior, N side, with columns (CGB '74); video makes two
views of the vertical slide, above, then below
(with plainsong close)
(with Quadruplum)
(fade Perotin)
Here, even in the Gothic choir, the supporting columns preserve the stability of
Romanesque — as the quadruplum not only follows, but itself rests on plainsong.
Va2nd 73)
Lower section of slide 76 ff., detail of Apse arches and windows (CGB '74)
2nd 73 and 74)
A closer copy of 1st 73, above (CGB '74)
Though with the tour-de-force of Le Mans choir, we should play the liveliest
recorded Quadruplum (attributed to Perotin), a motet of victory over death — Mors —
sung after de Van's death by his masterly syncopators.
Music:
Attributed to Perotin, c. 1220(?), 4-voice Motet, "Mors," from
OL 232
V2nd 74)
Same, interior, S. side of Choir from N. Transept (CGB '74); lower detail
75) Le Mans Choir, S side, from N Aisle: arches and clerestory (CGB '74)
76) Same, Apse: arches, windows, and vault, (CGB '74; lower spread has been
videoed as Va2nd 73; here, video uses only the upper spread)
77) Same, from S. Aisle: rhythm of arch and piers (CGB '74; after which, video
reverts to upper detail of slide 74)
(end Mors)
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Symbolic History
In this return to high-Gothic, the style we compared at the beginning to dawn, it
may seem that we have misapplied the metaphor, since in the display of Le Mans choir,
we are already in the blaze of Gothic sun. From which soul may well long back to the
mystical glimmer of true dawn, as from these canny rhythms to the shifting "Duplum vel
Purum" of Leonin.
Va78)
78)
78a)
78b)
V78c)
Chartres, 1145: a wider view, right of the main portal
Same, Kings and Queens of Judah: the four figures to the right of the Main
Portal; first, a video detail of the central two
Same, detail of the King second from the left; video uses V78a, another King
Same, detail of another of the Queens
Same, detail of still another King of Judah
Back where the Kings and Queens of Judah smile from the columnar distance of
Chartres. The road there is of Grail romance, Chretien's Knight of the Cart, where
Lancelot crosses the bridge of a single sword to rescue Guinevere (always such sacred
resonances) from "the Land from which no Stranger returns". Those Arthurian knights
inhabit the anagogical dream, before the codification of space, time and cause ("Why,
when, and where?") sapped the life of chivalry. There men swim in telepathic mystery:
Lancelot rides to the queen's rescue before he could have learned of her capture; he
mounts the shameful cart on the blind promise of news — a disgrace of which everyone
thereafter is aware, even the Queen in the other country, who blames him, not for
mounting, but for the converse love-fault of a moment's hesitation. With how spectral a
smile the lover in that realm gazes from a castle window at the glimpsed procession of the
Queen, her captor and the wounded Kay:
a79)
79)
79a)
Still Chartres, c. 1150, Angel of the Sundial; + V detail
Same, but the plaster cast, Musée des Monuments, Paris (CGB '80); video
shows details only
Back to a detail of the Chartres original (a79); video: head only
And early at the dawning hour
The gentle lady of the tower
Called for the sacrament of mass,
And waked the knights and bid them dress;
And when the mass was sung and said,
The one knight sat with pensive head
(He who had ridden in the cart)
August 6, 1995
Gothic Prelude
Lux Nova
33
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
At a little window just apart,
And looked into the open land.
To the other window near at hand
The maiden came, and as she stood,
My lord Gawain with her abode
And spoke with her a word or two,
But what they spoke I do not know;
Their private words I cannot tell,
But as they leaned on the window sill,
Along the fields by a river clear
They saw one carried in a bier.
It was a wounded knight who was borne,
And by his side to weep and mourn
Three maidens walked in sorrow strong.
After the bier there followed along
A company, and at their head
A proud knight rode in arms, and led
A lady by the bridle rein.
And that knight saw it was the Queen.
At the high window still he stood
And followed her as long as he could
With eager eyes and with delight
Until she had passed out of his sight.
And when he saw that she was gone,
He thought at once to throw him down
And break his body on the stones. (CGB)
As in the enigmatic smile of the Chartres Angel of the Sundial, childish simplicity
here is of a piece with magic skill.
Va80)
b80)
c80)
Vd80)
Ve80)
Vf80)
Again, Chartres, 1145-50, (from b43, above) A Queen of Judah; detail of
face only
Return to upper half of 79, Angel of the Sundial, plaster cast, Musée des
Monuments, Paris (CGB '80); video shows face only
Provence, c. 1169, Beardless Prophet (or St. Michael?) from the façade of St.
Gilles du Garde, near Arles (waist up); + V detail
Return to Christ detail of 41, above: Gislebertus, Christ and the Magdalene,
S. Lazare, Autun (CGB '80)
Return to face of Moissac, C. 1130, Prophet holding a scroll, detail of 43,
above
Return to head of Angel of the Sundial, Chartres, from 79a, above
August 6, 1995
Gothic Prelude
Lux Nova
34
�C.G. Bell
80)
Symbolic History
Again, head of St. Gilles du Garde, c. 1160, Beardless Prophet, detail of c80,
above
Such the sustained-tone melting through love's discords into the octave or fifth. Such the
recovered paradise in the Easter sequence by Abelard's succesor Adam de Saint Victor —
the "paradisi gaudium" which is also the springtime of earth:
Coelum fit serenius,
Et Mare tranquillius,
Spirat aura levius,
Vallis nostra floruit.
The heavens quiet be
And tranquil is the sea,
The winds blow tenderly,
The vales of our land flower. (CGB)
The Gilles-du-Garde beardless prophet is a paradigm of that lyrical self-giving.
How the face blends with emasculated Abelard's Easter hymn, another paradise
recovered:
Vera Jerusalem
est illa civitas ...
Jerusalem is the city
Of everlasting peace...
There finds the dreamer waking
Truth beyond dreaming far,
Nor is the heart's possessing
Less than the heart's desire. (Waddell)
So too the promise of Leonin's "Judea and Jerusalem," twice heard, and now, triune:
Music:
August 6, 1995
Again Leonin, Judea et Jerusalem, lst duplum, from ARC 14068
Gothic Prelude
Lux Nova
35
�
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SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
9. Gothic Ground and Vault
CHARLES G. BELL
ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
or
1260 CANYON ROAD
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501
September 1995
Last Revised January ‘96
�Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
9. Gothic Ground and Vault
a1)
Early Christian (Antioch) 6th century, Vienna Genesis, Flood, detail, left side,
National Library, Vienna
English Gothic, 13th cent., Grapes from the Promised Land, from a window
in the Corona of Canterbury Cathedral
Whole of a1; + V: detail of right side
b1)
1)
Music:
Ambrosian Chant 5th cent. ff., Tenebrae factae sunt, ARC 2533 284
"The Old Testament," Augustine says in The City of God, "is nothing but the New
covered by a veil, and the New Testament is the unveiling of the Old… What Scripture
tells of Abraham really happened, but it was at the same time a prophetic image of things
to come." From Paul through the Dark Ages (Isidore of Seville, Bede, Irish Crosses) that
Doctrine of Correspondence sounds Biblical resonances — in the rise to Gothic, pointing
prediction to some heretical today or tomorrow. So from Suger's St.-Denis, Joachim de
Floris points his Eternal Gospel.
This Flood of the 6th century Vienna Genesis must unveil the always expected
coming. Yet here, as with Augustine (or the chant named for Ambrose), the Classical
heritage still clothes timeless symbol in the suavities of earth.
(Fade Ambrosian)
2)
2a)
2b)
9/2/95
Double. [A] North African(?) 7th cent., Ashburnham Pentateuch, Flood,
Nouv. Acq. Lat. 2234 f.9, Bibl. Nat., Paris; and [B] Franco-Spanish (Landes)
c. 1050, Flood, St.-Severs Apocalypse, MS Lat. 8878 f.85, Bibl. Nat., Paris
A of 2; V: detail only
B of 2; V: two details only
Gothic Ground and Vault
1
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Music:
Gregorian (de Van) from AS 34 B, last "a" of Alleluia, then "Pascha," etc.
With the Ashburnham Pentateuch a century later (left) the temporal veil is being
stripped away, preparing for the ultimate destruction of the St-Severs Apocalypse (right)
about 1050 — that dimensionless vision to which medieval Realism would reduce the
sensory itself. In Dark Age chronicles such fabulous Judgment walks over Europe.
Flodoard, 944:
Balls of fire were seen rushing through the air, which in their flight set
houses ablaze, but when faced by the cross and holy water they were
driven away… It is said that demons in the shape of horsemen
destroyed a church, then used its timbers to beat down the walls of a
building of strong cement that had long stood on Montmartre.
Yet at the heart of that ghostly world of hardening chant (Fade Gregorian) and of
Guido's Diaphony (Music: Guido, brief example of contrary motion; then close) a colossal
energy has been released, which points to another future:
3)
Paulo Uccello 1447-48, The Flood, detail., Santa Maria Novella, Florence
(CGB ‘86); + V detail
Closer detail of 3, Uccello's Flood
3a)
Music: Binchois, c. 1430(?), Inter natos mulierum, L'Oiseau Lyre 128 (78)
the Christian reconquest, in the faith frame, of dimensional actuality. From the first
awakening, the Romanesque had set unconscious sights on what by the 15th century and
Uccello would be clear, the perspectival endowment of the sacred with the incarnate
power of Renaissance — in music, Binchois.
(Fade Binchois.)
4)
Mosaic copy c. 50 BC of Greek painting c. 300 B.C. Battle of Alexander,
detail (Darius group), Museo Nazionale, Naples
V4a) V detail of Alexander not shown in slide 4
Music:
Greek 2nd cent. BC, First Delphic Hymn, close, J.E. Butt, private
recording
Was not the world loss foreshadowed in the chromatics of the Delphic Ode, the
moody drama of the Hellenistic Battle of Alexander, where marvelous techniques enforce
the heaped outwardness of the Platonic cave?
(End Delphic Ode)
9/2/95
Gothic Ground and Vault
2
�C.G. Bell
5)
5a)
Symbolic History
Norman French 1066 ff, Bayeux Tapestry, cavalry detail, Bayeux
Another tapestry detail; + V return to a detail of 5
Music:
Peire Vidal 12th c., Baron de mon dan covit (near close)
SAWT 9567-B
But by 1066 the battle-joy of Homer is renewed in the fierce Norman (then
Troubador) exhilaration of mythic encounter — the Bayeux Tapestry, with Peire Vidal.
As in the Song of Roland, stripped zeal precipitates the lines of action:
"Where is your sword, which is called Halteclere,
With its hilt of gold, with its jewelled gear?"
"I had no time to draw," cried Oliver,
As he pierced mail with the trunk of a spear. (CGB)
"U est vostre espee, ki Halteclere ad num?
D'or est li helz e de cristal li punz."
"Ne la poi traire," Oliver respunt,
Kar de ferir oi jo si grant bosoign."
6)
(Fade Vidal)
Paolo Uccello, c. 1445, Battle of San Romano, Uffizi, Florence (CGB '59);
+ V detail
Music:
Isaac c. 1485(?), A la bataglia, near close, (Munrow) Seraphim SIC-6104
(4)
And again that clean renewal bears in linear potentiality the exploratory dynamic
of Uccello, the battle music of Isaac. (Fade Isaac.)
a2nd 5) French Romanesque, c. 1080. Fresco of St. Michael, Church of St.-Savinsur-Gartempe
2nd 5)
Again, Bayeux Tapestry, Surrender of Dinan;
V2nd 5a) Bayeux Tapestry, Edward the Confessor
As we would know from the Song of Roland —
God sent his angel Cherubin, and Saint
Michael of the Peril, and Gabriel with them,
To bear the Count's soul into Paradise
9/2/95
Gothic Ground and Vault
3
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
(or in history from the sanctification of William's conquest of England) — it is hard to
distinguish between the secular eruption and its transforming embrace in a church which
(as the priest says in Faust) can digest every ill-gotten gain: "kann ungerechtes Gut
verdauen."
2nd 6)
Uccello, c. 1446, another Battle of San Romano, National Gallery,
London; V first pans to a detail
By the Italy of Machiavelli's birth, the profane stood on the point of declaring
itself as an independent realm having its own values, of which the visual sign is exactly
that filling in (like the chordal progressions of music) of its spatial and human weft.
Music:
a7)
7)
Again, Isaac, Battle, close
German Romanesque, 11th-12th cent., Michaelskirche, exterior, Hildesheim
French Romanesque, 1st half of 12th cent., St.-Pierre, Angouleme, exterior;
+ V detail
Whereas what has seemed most Medieval is the transcending entrainment of earthly
power in the sacred synthesis: the 11th- and 12th-century arching and vaulting of the new
Romanesque; in theology the reasoned proofs of Anselm; in music the horizon of noteagainst-note polyphony, spread from England to northern Italy and from Spain probably
to the Rhine, though German examples are lacking. To experience again that massive
forehall to Gothic, hear the first known three-part piece (c. 1130?), a "Congaudeant
catholici" from the Compostela MS in Spain, though there ascribed to Magister Albertus
of Paris; and with it, this Angouleme, the interior of Le Mans, and — fountainhead of
Romanesque in England — the cathedral of Durham.
Music:
8)
9)
a10)
10)
9/2/95
Campostela MS c. 1130(?), Congaudeant catholici, 1st and last stanzas:
RCA-V-LM 6015
French Romanesque 11th-12th cent., Le Mans, Nave from Aisle (CGB '74)
English Norman 11th-12th cent., Durham from below (CGB '80); V details
only, first from V9, then from 9
Same, interior, a bay of the south aisle (CGB ‘80)
Same, 1104, nave with rib vault (CGB '80); + V detail
(End Music)
Gothic Ground and Vault
4
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Durham, first cathedral completely ribbed and vaulted in stone, 1104, the
transverse arches raised to points, to achieve one height with the semicircular diagonal
crossings of the bays.
11) French Romanesque c. 1110-15, South Portal, St.-Pierre, Moissac
11a) French Romanesque, Vezelay Capital, 1120-50, Conversion of St. Eustace
11b) Detail of 11, South Portal, Moissac
No doubt these religious structures, by the organizing risk that raised them
(agrarian monasteries shading into urban cathedrals), were products of the new economy
and temporal sway — that investment bank Saint Bernard accused: "Thus money is
drawn up with ropes of money." As if Moissac portal, 1110-15, opened to the Exchange
and to Wall Street. Though surely, the abstract ubiquity of greed (cupiditas) differs with
every style-complex. Whatever earth awakening — Bernard's "knights… and hunters
winding their horns" — this Judgment Gate required, converts to a more than earthly service. Such sacred ingestion fuels the Gothic dialectic of Sic et Non, ground and vault.
12) Irish c. 910, Cross of Muiredach, east side,
a video detail
Monasterboice, Louth; first,
How much more bluntly and somberly of that creed ground was the first
monumental stone carving in the West — from the Irish crosses of the early 900's, this of
Muiredach at Monasterboice, also a Judgment, flanked, from the sin of Adam and Eve
upward by correlated scenes. Without comparison of art value, what this Dark Age
precursor lacks is just the melting flash and flow.
13) Same, a panel of Adam & Eve and Cain & Abel
Place any detail — this Adam and Eve and the Murder of Abel, in its paleolithic
and primitive pre-humanity, heavy pathos and dark vacancy, Abel like a trepanned frog
— against a 12th-century cognate:
14) Gislebertus, French c. 1120-40, Flight to Egypt, St.-Lazare, Autun
here Gislebertus' Flight to Egypt at Autun; is it not clear that what was to vault from that
ground was the fresh humanity of Gothic love?
9/2/95
Gothic Ground and Vault
5
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
2nd 13) Muiredach's Cross, west side, panel of Christ giving the Keys and the Book
(video first shows a slide of the whole as V2nd a13, then a detail)
The motion of Roman Christianity was the repudiation and denial of the material.
As long as that downward eddy prevails, we conceive ourselves as in the Dark Ages. But
in the tenth century of this Celtic Cross, by paradox and anomaly, the vortex changes
sign; the birth force, though of the same creed and timeless loyalty,
a2nd 14) Gislebertus 1120-40, Flight to Egypt; V: two details only
2nd 14) Same, Flight to Egypt (CGB '80); + V detail
creates (as in Suger) an upward whirl of incorporation, by which the passions of earth are
more and more lifted to affirm spirituality. To know how far and how suddenly this
nascent tenderness has found (as with Abelard's theory of atonement) the Western road of
sensuous devotion, we have only, from Gislebertus (with the close of a 12th century
Benedicâmus, as beautiful as by Leonin),
Music:
Time of Leonin, Benedicâmus Domino, close, (Cape) EMS 201
(End Benedicâmus)
15)
15a)
Gentile da Fabriano, 1423, Flight into Egypt, Magi predella, Uffizi, Florence
(CGB '48); + V details
Landscape detail of 15, to the left
to leap three centuries, to the soft Italian mingling of Gothic and early Renaissance in
Gentile da Fabriano's handling of the same Gospel scene, smoothing the brushwork of
nature and the human caress — while we shift in music to a passage from Dunstable's
"Quam pulchra es," sung by the same Brussel's Pro Musica Antiqua.
MUSIC:
a16)
b16)
16)
9/2/95
Dunstable c 1425(?), from Quam pulchra es, near close, ARC 3052
(Fade Dunstable.)
Italian, (Castelseprio) 8th-9th cent.(?), Presentation in the Temple, Santa
Maria foris Portas; + V details, drawing first from Va16
Same, detail from the Flight into Egypt
Same, detail of an angel from the Nativity
Gothic Ground and Vault
6
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
There must have been Dark Age arts which stood outside the church,
unincorporated, even in defiance; but what was then rare is now irrecoverable. If the
secular paintings of Charlemagne's palace showed precursive talent, our nearest approach
is in the startling humanity of the sacred frescoes found at Castelseprio. So too with
Charlemagne's collection of German songs destroyed by his son Louis the Pious for their
pagan license.
Music:
Verona 10th-11th c., O admirabile Veneris ydolum, RCA-V-LM 6015 (2)
Only with the 10th and 11th centuries and in Latin, do manuscripts begin to record the
passionate songs that boil up from the cauldron of student loves — this to a boy, "Veneris
ydolum." (End O admirabile) Others are known only as poems:
Iam, dulcis amica, venito
Come, dear as my heart to me, come
sweetheart, into my chamber …
17)
17a)
17b)
Spanish Romanesque 12th cent., Shepherd, fresco detail from San Isidoro
vault, Leon
North Italian 940 and 13th cent., ruins of Castle of Canossa
Spanish Romanesque mid-12th cent., whole vault of 17: Annunciation to the
Shepherds; V has only details
A poem touched with nature and romantic anticipation:
Alone in the wood
I have loved hidden places
Ego fui sola in silva
et dilexi loca secreta.
So too the 11th century Catalan "Veri dulcis."
Music:
Barcelona 11th cent., Carmina: Veri dulcis, MHS OR433
Where are the visual parallels? The castle ruins have lost their tapestries.
Theocritan delights in Spanish Romanesque are Biblical, details of Christ's birth
announced to the shepherds. Are these stiff pastorals reminders of vernal precursors,
where northern stock had flowed out into the Graeco-Roman and Byzantine-Moorish
9/2/95
Gothic Ground and Vault
7
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
challenge of former cultures — as if in cultural combustion that heavy German fuel
kindled first in thinnest attenuations?
(Fade Veri dulcis)
18)
Byzantine, 10th cent., David playing the harp, with Melody & Echo; Bibl.
Nat., Paris; first a video detail
In Byzantium there was no such admixture. In that unviolated sanctum of
Classical lore, it had been easy, in the awakening which began there also in the 10th
century, to revive ancient forms (though this River God, Melody, and Echo attend David
playing his harp); but the facility was a measure of the unfertilized and retrospective thinness of the achievement.
a19)
19)
19a)
Sicilian Byzantine (Norman and Moorish), 1174, Ceiling of the Crossing,
Monreale Cathedral
Sicilian, later 12th cent., Hunting mosaic, Sala Normana, Pal. Reale,
Palermo; + V detail
French, Mosan (Verdun), 12th cent. (Attributed to Godefroi de Claire), Centaur, enamel, Louvre, Paris
Music:
12th cent.(?) from Carmina Burana, Tempus transit gelidum, SAWT 9455
A
And it seems almost a law of nature that the prodigy of Norman germination in
the Sicilian soil of life-styles, Graeco-Byzantine and Persian-Moslem, which made 12th
century Palermo the rich and enlightened wonder-city of Europe, should fulfill the
proverb, "tost allumes, tost estaintes" — "Soon kindled, soon burnt out" — though the
flare touched off a succession of Holy Empire darings, always more anti-clerical and preNietzchean — from the Carmina Burana to Frederick the Second.
(Fade Tempus transit)
In Romance France, a like fusion of strains and ideas produced (after the Eastern
stimulus of the First Crusade) a wider break with the gaunt creed-ground (this enamel
from the Meuse).
a20)
b20)
9/2/95
France, early 12th cent., Initials from Citeaux MSS: Fighting a dragon, and
Monk cutting grain; Dijon, Bibl. Municipale; video takes them singly.
Romanesque Languedoc c. 1130, Prophet holding a scroll, Portal. St.-Pierre,
Moissac
Gothic Ground and Vault
8
�C.G. Bell
20)
20a)
20b)
Symbolic History
French Romanesque c. 1120, St. Michael from a capital of Priory Church,
Perrecy-les-Forges
Abraham Smith c. 1593, Venus chastising Cupid, plaster relief, Hardwick
Hall, Derbyshire
Gislebertus (Burgundian) c. 1120-40, Eve, detail of upper body. St.-Lazare,
Autun
At the center of the whole Troubador (and Trouvere) motion of knighthood,
courtly love, music and decorative art, verse itself may stand as a proto-Renaissance
indicator. Against the heavy tread or the short-lined brittle sharpness of Church Latin, the
rhythms, the stanza forms of Provence expatiate in the veiled aesthetics of pentameter
yearning — which would spread to Italy and from Petrarch back over Europe, slowly
ripening from the mystery of Romanesque devotion, to the swelling harmonies of
Renaissance. There is no clear road from the stridence of the Gothic sequence —
When for spite and malediction
Wretches feel the flames' affliction
Render me thy benediction — (CGB)
to Spenser's measure:
One day I wrote her name upon the strand.
But the 12th century pentameters of Blondel:
A l'entrant d'esté, que li tans comence —
At the start of summer when the dance begins —
are on the way to that — or to Shakespeare:
From you I have been absent in the spring …
21)
V21a)
21b)
21c)
Provence late 12th cent., Cloister, Saint-Trophime, Arles
Limoges, early 13th cent., Violist and Dancing Girl, Nat. Mus., Copenhagen
Limoges c. 1200, Fiddler and Dancing Woman, British Museum, London
Variant of St.-Trophime Cloister; + V detail of 21
As the melody points to Ars Nova, Dowland, recitative.
9/2/95
Gothic Ground and Vault
9
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Let Max Meili's Anthologie Sonore recording sound (in the dearth of secular art)
where the love and warmth of Provence linger, in the cloister of Saint-Trophime at Arles:
Music:
Blondel de Nestles 12th cent., A l'entrant d'este (Meili) AS 18
(End)
That the Troubador thrust was also violent,
a22)
b22)
22)
V22a)
22b)
St.-Trophime, Arles, C. 1180, John and Peter from West Portal
Same, East Cloister, Capitals, Monster (Samuel Adams' slide)
Provence, c. 1160-70, Main Portal, St.-Gilles-du-Garde, detail of Paul and
James; with V22 variant
Same, detail: archangels in a niche
French, c. 1260(?), MS Initial R, fighting figures; Bible from Monastery of
St.-André-au-Bois, Boulogne, Bibl. Mun.
Bertrand de Born makes unforgettable as he stalks with the Sowers of Discord through
Dante's Hell, a passage Pound (who also "dug him up" in a Sestina: "May God damn
forever all who cry 'Peace'!") has paraphrased:
Surely I saw, and still before my eyes
Goes on that headless trunk, that bears for light
Its own head swinging, gripped by the dead hair,
And like a swinging lamp that says, "Ah me!
I severed men, my head and heart
Ye see here severed, my life's counterpart."
Not even the volcanic Roman revivals of St.-Gilles-du-Garde, near Arles, stage such
tragic outbreak. Only the history itself — as always with a prophetic art, love and song,
commerce, religious reform and personal mysticism simultaneously asserting themselves,
the heretical movement of the Cathari, or Pure Ones, rising to a genuine revolt against the
Roman Church, until it was suppressed (early 13th century) in the crusade which
devastated the most flourishing region of France.
23) Gilles-du-Garde, c. 1170, Young Apostle [detail of next slide]
That the carvings of St.-Gilles-du-Garde should range from the gentle humanity of
this youthful apostle
9/2/95
Gothic Ground and Vault
10
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
2nd 22) Gilles-du-Garde, four Apostles from an Ascension panel; video uses two
bearded heads on the left, then whole
to the almost daemonic stare of these Reform precursors, evokes the recurrent
ambivalence of 12th century — the arts a continual bridge over the temporal cleavage, a
symbolic containment of the historical tragedy.
2nd 23)
From Gilles-du-Garde porch, The Good Shepherd, relief
V2nd 23a) Same, base of columns, Lion (Samuel Adams' slide)
V2nd 23b) Video returns to detail of 2nd 23, The Good Shepherd
It was the beauty and exposure of Troubador love that it enjoyed an aristocratic
island of proto-Renaissance refinement, a sort of detachment from "the fierce dispute/
Betwixt damnation and impassioned clay" — though it turned out hardly island enough
— a brief chance for romance pentameters of love's idolatry.
24) Burgundy, 1120-50, Vezelay, Capital in the Nave, Seduction by Profane Music;
+ V details
Music:
Carmina Burana 12th cent., from 16: Michi confer venditor, MHS 3793
Not so with the Goliards or Wandering Scholars, fired in the crucible of church
and state. The 12th century amplification of passion they share with this Vezelay capital
of the Devil and Profane Music (as with the Carmina Burana Magdalen tempted by
unguents), was both in and out of the church, a ferment where the Dark Age ground
sprouts sexual vegetation, to seed over centuries the love gardens of Bosch. For the
Creed-ground (to repeat) is ideal. There is no historical winter when Christendom merely
sheltered in the ascetic fold. Even in the 9th century there had been Gottschalk, 300-year
precursor of the Archpoet, who comes now: "seething inwardly with fierce indignation,"
— "Estuans instrinsecus/ ira vehementi" — that Archipoeta, most eruptive peak of 12thcentury genius —
(End Michi confer venditor)
25) Another Vezelay capital, Lewdness and Despair; + V details
Music:
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Carmina Burana 12th(?) cent., 88a: Jove cum Mercurio (Binkley) SAWT
9455-A
Gothic Ground and Vault
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Symbolic History
a Rhenish Villon who flames an obscure course over Europe in the train of the
Archbishop of Cologne and the Italian court of Barbarossa — a man who saves us from
easy generalizations about the Age of Faith: (Waddell)
Seething over inwardly
With fierce indignation,
In my bitterness of soul,
Hear my declaration.
I am of one element,
Levity my matter,
Like another withered leaf
For the winds to scatter.
Yet the mould-breaker is also of the age, betraying in self-twisted intensity the marks of
the faith-grip he opposed. Like the Despair and tit-tugging Lust on another Vezelay
capital, his energy flames against its own.
Greedier for all delight/ Than heaven to enter in:
Since the soul in me is dead,/ Better save the skin.
Voluptatis avidus/ magis quam salutis,
mortuus in anima/ curam gero cutis.
26) Winchester, mid-12th cent., Angel locking Hell, Psalter of Henry of Blois,
British Museum, London; + V details (also using V26)
How could earthly blessing unfold, held in a timeless creed which turns its wishes
into deadly sins, its peace to sloth, its love to lust, appetite to gluttony, nobility to pride,
commerce and politics to covetous envy and wrath? No wonder there are kingly crowns
in this Leviathan mouth of Hell. Had not Gregory VII declared (1081)
Who does not know that kings and leaders are sprung from those who
— ignorant of God — by pride, plunder, perfidy, murders — in a word
by almost every crime, the devil, who is the prince of this world,
urging them on — have striven with blind cupidity and intolerable
presumption to dominate over their equals: namely over men?
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27)
Symbolic History
Moissac, c. 1125-30, Gluttony and Lust, Portal of St.-Pierre, Mus. des
Monuments (CGB '80); + V details
When Greek δαιµων, or spirit, became "demon," no temporal power was left
without its damning name — the Seven Deadly Sins. Let them dance. Staggering, within
the medieval energizing of earth and counterforce intensification of hell, the vitality of
that dance.
(Fade Jove cum Mercurio)
The liveliest thing in the 12th century English "Rule for Nuns" (Awncren Rule)
are those condemned sins, grinning at their late-Gothic followers in Langland, Dunbar,
the mystery plays:
The Greedy Glutton's heart is in the dishes;
his thought is in the cup; his life is in the barrel;
his soul is in the crock. He comes with a dish
in one hand and a bowl in the other; he slobbers
his words and holds his great belly, and the
fiend laughs as if he would burst.
(CGB)
28)
Gislebertus, c. 1120-40, Fall of Simon Magus, St.-Lazare, Autun; + V details
The Archpoet's freedom becomes satanic mockery, even, it seems, of communion:
Sweeter tastes the wine to me
In a tavern tankard
Than the watered stuff my Lord
Bishop hath decanted.
His taking Christ's claim for the adulterous woman as his own plays (like this Gislebertus
Simon Magus) with defiant mockery: "Let him who has no knowledge of sin hurl at me
the stone." There is no art parallel for the climax of that Goliard confession; yet it hovers
between the grotesques of damnation,
29)
South Tyrol, late 12th century, Fighting Monsters fresco, S. Jacobo, Termeno;
+ V detail
and their Tyrolean transformation into fighting monsters, anticipating both Renaissance
and again Hieronymus Bosch.
(Music: pick up close of Jove cum Mercurio)
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Symbolic History
Meum est propositum/ in taberna mori
For on this my heart is set:/ When the hour is nigh me,
Let me in the tavern die,/ With a tankard by me,
While the angels looking down/ Joyously sing o'er me,
Deus sit propitius/ Huic potatori.
Grant grace and favor, Lord, to this drunken toper.
(End Jove cum Mercurio)
For 2nd 28 and 27)
Again 24, Seduction by Profane Music (Video begins with Lust detail of 27)
Even Troubador love could catch the sharpening frenzy, as in the rhyme-saturated
"Kalenda Maia" (The first of May), which Raimbaut de Vaqueiras wrote for his lady
(about 1200) at the court of Monferrat in Piedmont — of five versions the wildest.
Music:
Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, c. 1200, from Kalenda Maia, Everest 3270, last
stanza
Curious to read in the Troubador Vida that the Estampida, or stamp-dance on which it is
based, had just been played by two wandering fiddlers from Northern France.
For 2nd 26 and 2nd 25)
Again 25, Lewdness and Despair (with video tit-tugging detail)
The pounding tune and rhythm pierce Troubador devotion like a Gothic invasion: sinners
locked in hell; the despair of lust: "How can I have lost what I never had … I never held
you naked in my arms … I have pledged and desired without return:"
Con er perduda/ ni m'er renduda …/
qe nuda/ tenguda/ no-us ai/ ni d'als vencuda/
volguda,/ cresuda/ vos ai,/ ses autr' ajuda.
(End Kalenda Maia)
For 2nd 24)
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Symbolic History
French Romanesque c. 1100, Wives Restraining Brawlers, from capital at St.Hilaire, Poitiers, Mus. des Monuments Français, Paris (CGB '80); + V detail
(Slide 2nd 24a repeats 27, Moissac.)
But the Paris of Abelard's love, mutilation, and earth-denial was the focus of that
vitality, inseparable from its fever — 12th century music suspended between melting
organum purum and the strident rhythmic modes of stress scansion:
Dic Christi Veritas/ dic cara raritas,
dic rara Caritas,/ ubi nunc habitas?
Where is the dear rarity,/ Where the rare Charity
Truth of Christ,/ sooth, where placed?
(CGB)
John of Salisbury, about 1175, in thought a liberal, could not countenance that lashing of
Gregorian: "Music," he said, "defiles the service of religion." Here an instrumental
Benedicâmus, like the church carvings Bernard blamed, monsters and brawling devils:
Music:
French, late 12th(?) cent., Benedicâmus Domino, Instr., opening and close,
O.L. AUT-231
For 3rd 25 and 3rd 26)
Gislebertus, 1120-40 Judgment: detail of sinner grasped by the head; Autun
(Video adds detail from 28, Simon Magus)
For 3rd 27)
Southern French, Moissac c. 1125-30, Death of a Miser, Portal of St.-Pierre,
Museum des Monuments Français (CGB ‘80)
V 3rd 27a)
English Romanesque, c 1130, Adam and Eve Fresco, west wall of Chancel, St.
Botolph's, Hardham, Sussex
For 3rd 28)
Gislebertus c. 1120-40, Devil detail from capital of Judas Hanged, St.-Lazare,
Autun
2nd 29) Detail of 29, Fighting Monsters fresco, South Tyrol
(End Benedicâmus)
The 12th-century heightening of person and passion stretches the Romanesque
everywhere, from Italy or Tyrol (as here),
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30)
30a)
Symbolic History
English Norman & Celtic, c. 1145, Kilpeck Portal (CGB '65)
Spanish Romanesque-Gothic, 1188, Central Arch, Portico de la Gloria,
Santiago de Campostela
to the British marches of Wales — Kilpeck, where the wreathing blend of Norman,
Celtic, Viking bears motifs from the pilgrimage route south, as far as Santiago de
Campostela in Spain. To the institutions of the Church, what fantastic power, and what
risk, that ferment of worship, as popular as zealous, boiling toward its peak.
Va31)
b31)
Vc31)
31)
French Romanesque, Moissac c. 1120, St. Peter, left jamb of south portal,
Tarn-et-Garonne, SW France
Gislebertus (Burgundian) 1120-40, Temptation of Christ, Capital, St.Lazare, Autun (CGB '80; Museum des Monuments Français)
French Pyrenees 11th cent., The Black Virgin, Church of Dorres
English Romanesque carving, 12th cent., Raising of Lazarus, detail,
Chichester Cathedral
Faith as never before; heresies as never before; and the heretics, as Shaw's
inquisitor says, "to all appearances better than their neighbors." In that Christendom of
strange fervors — the blessed French Father Abraham (of all names), on whose pure lips,
in vision, the Mother of God pressed the chaste kiss of her mouth, so graced with spirit
that when he came in the presence of Jews he reeled from the hell-smell of sulphur and
brimstone; pious Bernard quoting pious Jerome, "Be cruel for Christ's sake," lashing
Europe (1146) to the Crusading mood which by 1212 would lure an army of children into
slavery — how tense the participation in Biblical drama and pain. The Chichester
Lazarus carvings, 1125-50, through the crudeness of local craft, voice such a cry as
Abelard's of David, a death-lament for himself and Heloise: "If the stilled harp could still
my tears …"
…raucis planctu vocibus/ deficit et spiritus.
a32)
Vb32)
c32)
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Irish, especially 12th-13th cent., The Rock of Cashel, Tipperary
English Romanesque c. 1180, Apostles with Angel above, relief, east wall of
south porch, Malmesbury Abbey, Wiltshire
Provence, Romanesque, 1110-20, God throned and crowned, detail of
Tympanum, Moissac
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32)
Symbolic History
French Romanesque-Gothic, c. 1200, St. Etienne, Portal Statue, Church of
Valcabrere, Haute Garonne
The intenser the drive, the more the perimeter flames with heresy, and the faithcenter hardens to a stripped decretal of zeal: Hegel's "antithesis unharmonized." Yet in
that warfare the birth and human ripening, the temporal incorporation, goes on. Over
what gulfs of canonized and unaccommodated selfhood. Thus Coulton's case of
"heretical puritanism" from about 1160:
Master Gervase of Tilbury, seeing a maiden alone in a vineyard,
and impelled by the wanton curiosity of youth (as we have heard from
his own mouth in later years when he was a canon) asked her what she
did there alone, and observing her comeliness, prayed her of love par
amours.
"Nay," replied she, with a simple gesture and a certain gravity in
her words; "God forbid… for if I were defiled and lost my virginity, I
should suffer eternal damnation beyond all help."
Hearing which, Master Gervase forthwith knew her for one of the
impious sect of Publicans (or Cathari), who in those days were sought
out on every hand and destroyed…
33)
V33a)
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French Illumination, 2nd half of 12th cent., St. Gregory, MS Lat. 2287 fol.
1, verso, Bibl. Nat., Paris
English (Winchester) mid-12th cent., Christ's Passion, MS Cotton Nero
C.IV, sheet 21r, British Museum, London
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Symbolic History
So the girl is arraigned and, in the end, by "righteous cruelty," burned to death, "to the
admiration of many, who marked how she uttered no sighs… as the martyrs of Christ (yet
for how different a cause!)." While the good old Canon could tell it in age as a Catholic
act of care. Such channeling and containment of the holy madness which might
otherwise have torn the Middle Ages apart is an organizing subtlety of the Scholastic and
Gothic buttressing.
34)
V34a)
French Gothic c. 1145-1225, Cathedral of Chartres, rising over the wheat
fields of Beauce
Same, 1145-50, part of West Front (CGB '59; cf. 41ff)
The most quoted document from Coulton's Medieval Garner is Abbot Haimon's
description of church-building by miraculous crusade. Though he writes of his own
church of St.-Pierre-sur-Dives in Normandy, and only mentions the like case of Chartres,
it is generally to the Chartres construction of 1145 (and sometimes even, by confusion of
fires, of 1194) that selections, sweetened and sentimentalized, are made to apply. Though
the devotions Haimon narrates are as remarkable for rapt ruthlessness as for piety.
a35)
b35)
35)
Chartres, from the Royal Portal: Kings and Queens of Judah,
French Romanesque, c. 1150, Christ and Apostles, Loaves and Fishes, a
capital from St.-Nectaire (Puy-de-Dôme) (CGB '80; Mus. Mon.)
Chartres, Royal Portal, A King of Judah
Whoever saw, whoever heard, in generations past that kings and
princes, the mighty of this world, men and women puffed up with
honor and riches, should bind bridles on their proud necks and submit
themselves to wagons which, like brute beasts, they dragged, loaded
with corn, wine, oil, lime, stones, beams — all things needed to sustain
life or build churches — even to Christ's abode. And though a
thousand are bound in the traces (so vast the mass, so great the engine)
this miracle is seen, they go forward in such silence that no murmur is
heard… When, again, they pause on the way, there is no voice but
confession of guilt, supplication, and prayer to God for pardon.
36)
36a)
Limoges enamel, c. 1180, Christ in Majesty, Museum de Cluny, Paris
French stained glass, c. 1150, from the Ascension, 2nd window, south aisle,
Cathedral of Le Mans; video chooses two details
If any, however, is so sunk in sin that he will not obey the pious
admonition of the priests to confess and forgive, his offering is cast
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Symbolic History
down from the wagon as unclean, and he, with shame and ignominy,
is separated from the unity of the sacred people…
There the sick rise from wagons where they were laid; the faithful
fall to the ground and kiss the earth again and again, old men and
young, and children, crying upon the Mother of God. For this work
is especially known to be hers, next to her gentle Son; she first
adorned the Cathedral of Chartres, and then our church dedicated to
her with so many signs and wonders…
Va37)
37)
Cathedral of Laon, 1190-1205, Statues from the West Portal (CGB ‘59)
French Romanesque, c. 1130, Isaiah, portal, Abbey of Souillac, Perigord (for
slide 37 from Skira, video uses CGB, Museum des Monuments Français —
so too digital)
When they had come to the church, the wagons were arrayed around
it like a spiritual camp; all night the army of the Lord kept watch
with psalms and hymns. Wax tapers were lighted, the infirm were
set apart, relics of the saints were brought to their relief… If,
however, the healing was somewhat delayed, then all might have
been seen putting off their clothes — men and women alike, naked
from the loins upward, casting away confusion and lying upon the
earth.
38)
V38a)
Senlis Cathedral, 1154, Death of the Virgin (cf. slide 38 from Enc. Ital.,
with CGB '80 from Museum des Monuments Français, Paris)
French, c. 1150, Eagle of Suger, from St.-Denis Treasury, Louvre, Paris
Their example was followed even more devoutly by children and
infants, who dragged themselves flat on their bellies first to the high
altar and then to all others, calling upon the Mother of Mercy in this
new fashion of prayer. Who would not be moved as he watched the
innocent children scour their naked ribs on the bare ground, in pious
humility stretching their tender arms to be beaten with rods? For it
did not suffice them to cry out with the voice of weeping, but they
must add bodily affliction also, to obtain healing for those sick.
39) French Romanesque c. 1130, Destruction of the World, door pillar, Souillac,
Perigord (digital: first, upper detail)
The priests stood over them, shedding tears while they beat with
scourges on the tender limbs; and the children begged them not to
withhold their hand. All voices echoed the same cry, "Smite, scourge,
lash, and spare not." There might be seen more than a thousand hands
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Symbolic History
outstretched to the scourge; nay, they exposed their very ears and eyes
and tongues, saying "Let these hands be smitten which have wrought
iniquity, these ears lashed which have heard vanity, these eyes which
have seen it, this tongue and these lips which have uttered idle and
lying words!"
a40)
40)
Gislebertus 1120-40, The Adoration of the Magi, Capital of St.-Lazare,
Autun
French Romanesque c. 1160, Apostle, S. Gilles-du-Garde, near Arles; + V
detail
Truly the Mother of Mercy is moved to compassion on those who
afflict themselves before her; for soon the sick and infirm leap forth
healed from wagon after wagon, hastening without support to give
thanks at her altar…
This is the manner of their vigils, these their night-watches; this is
the order of the Lord's camp; these the forms of the new religion, the
heaven-taught rites and mystical processions. Here nothing carnal is
seen, nothing earthly, all is divine, as in Heaven; heavenly altogether
are such vigils, wherein is heard nothing but hymns, thanks, and
praise!
From this creative vortex, fulminating with heresy and holy wars, yet quickening
the earth as with rain,
a41)
b41)
Vc41)
d41)
Ve41)
41)
Chartres, 1145-1513, Cathedral over the town (CGB '74)
Nantes Cathedral, c. 1170 ff., Nave, looking west (CGB '74)
Suger, St.-Denis, 1140-44, Ambulatory, (copy of CGB ‘74, Gothic I ‘62)
Chartres, 1145-1225, buttresses of the Apse (CGB ‘74)
Soisson Choir, 1160-1212, arches and glass (CGB '59)
Chartres, West Front, 1145-65 (CGB '59); video picks two details
the Cathedral of Chartres was reared. While in schismatic Constantinople, 1204 (the
present Chartres rebuilding after the final fire) Christian zeal pillaged the city, burning the
great body of Greek literature — all the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, preserved until then. Gothic glows with sweetness and light, but it was not made of
sweetness and light. In the performances of Leonin and Perotin, two trends were shown
from the start: Cape's Pro Musica, of Brussels, refined a lilting tenderness (duplum
purum) in which they have never been matched.
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Music:
Symbolic History
From Leonin's Judea et Jerusalem, from 2nd Duplum, ARC 14068
(Fade)
While the Van group (Paris), with the sopraniste Archimbaud, to be followed by Oberlin
in New York and others, beat the structural frenzy of rhythm:
Music: From the 2nd Quadruplum of Perotin's Vidêrunt, OL, Alb. 78
(Fade)
Early Gothic requires the blending of these poles. But the only performances to
do it are older still, by Yves Tinayre, on Lumen. No one else has poured the mystical
tenderness into the stern severities of structure. Though projections of a modern search,
they are as moving as anything in the musical repertory.
Music:
42)
43)
Va44)
Vb44)
44)
Va45)
45)
46)
46a)
47)
Va48)
48)
49)
50)
V50a)
Leonin c. 1180(?), Deum Timê, Org. Duplum, Lumen 32011
Chartres, Royal Portal, 1145-75, rebuilt 1194-1225 (CGB '59)
Chartres, Interior, 1194-1225, Nave from South Transept (CGB '59);
video, two details only, below and above
Whole of slide 46, to be detailed below, Chartres, bay of north Nave, with
Triforium and Clerestory (CGB '59)
Variant of 44, but a copy of Gothic I, 68 (CGB '59)
Chartres, interior, Ambulatory and Lady Chapel (CGB '74)
Chartres, Lancet window, Adam & Eve and Good Samaritan (CGB '74)
Chartres, South Ambulatory Bay, Zodiac window, etc. (CGB '59)
Chartres, Bay of Nave, north side: (Video has shown the whole as Va44;
here it details: first, Triforium, then Clerestory)
Chartres, Clerestory of Apse (CGB '59; video details from V46a, CGB '78)
Chartres, mid-12th cent., Glass, Madonna de la Belle Verriere (Video details
from V47, a wider view, and adds a closer detail)
Chartres, early 13th cent., North window, lancets and rose (CGB '59;
cf. Milton, 26); + V detail
Chartres, from North Transept into the Nave (CGB '59)
Chartres, c. 1150 (and 1200), West Lancets and Rose (cf. CGB '59)
Chartres c. 1150, Royal Portal, Tympanum Christ, from the side
Chartres, same subject as 50, from the front (detail of 42)
(The above hae been revised for video and digital)
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(End Deum Timê)
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Symbolic History
A certain awe for the experienced oneness of Chartres has let us stretch the Deum
Timê of Leonin from the Royal Portal of his youth, to the interior, occasioned (probably
after his death) by the 1194 fire.
51)
Chartres Cathedral 1194-1220, study from Lesser, Sacred Geometry;
+ V details
That Sacred Geometry, as Lesser's study of the ground plan will imply, rides the
spring tide of High Gothic, a formal perfection only Dante, in literature, a hundred years
later, achieved. The cult of symbolic number which organizes the Divine Comedy, from
its terza rima to its 100 cantos, and through all levels of punishment and reward, has
shaped here a trinity of interlinked squares, proportioned as circumscribed and inscribed
on the formative circle, under the recurrent factor of the root of 2. From Leonin's
"Duplum Purum" we have reached the triune divisions of the metric modes, the melodic
and rhythmic repetitions in which Perotin's Clausulae explore the mathematics of the
isorhythmic motet.
a52) Chartres, 1194-1225, Apse (CGB '59, copy of Bach, a9)
52) French Gothic 1160-1205, Laon, West Front through narrow street (CGB '74);
+ Video detail
Here it is the group formed around Van which intensifies the frenetics of
structure. The opening section from the four-voice Vidêrunt might seem a modern
excess, if it were not so matched by darings of tower, buttress, and vault — this Laon,
then Chartres, Paris, Bourges, Amiens, Le Mans, Rheims:
Music:
53)
V53a)
54)
55)
Va56)
56)
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Perotin act. c. 1190-1230, Alleluia Vidêrunt, opening, Ducretet Thompson
320 C 107
Chartres 1194-1225, Apse Buttressing (CGB '74); video uses detail
Chartres, flying buttresses of the choir; video uses detail
Chartres interior, starkly lighted pier, arch, and vault
Paris, 1163-13th cent., Notre Dame, Choir from the south, with Buttressing
(CGB '59); video pans to a detail
Bourges, 1195-1266, Choir from southeast, buttressing (copy of CGB '84; see
Michelangelo, 36)
Bourges, pier rising to vault (CGB '84)
Gothic Ground and Vault
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�C.G. Bell
57)
58)
V58a)
59)
60)
61)
Symbolic History
Amiens, mostly 1220-1236, black & white detail of buttressing
Le Mans Choir, Apse buttressing (CGB '74)
Same, from the north (copy of CGB '74; Gothic I, 73)
Le Mans Choir, begun 1217, wide-angle black & white of vault
Rheims, 1211-41 ff., from Ambulatory through Nave; video uses detail
Rheims 13th cent. and after, air view; + V detail
The aerial view of Rheims turns history to symbol: at the core of the time-bomb
which is the modern West, towers the prior release of energy in the formal grip of faith,
seed of that infinite out-reach which now engulfs it, and for which the Incarnation of God
in flesh was the kindling archetype.
a62)
62)
62a)
Nicolas of Verdun, 1181, Klosterneuburg Altar, near Vienna, the triple spread
(Video having prefaced with a detail of 62, Sampson)
Same: enamel of Sampson and the Lion
From the same Altar: Resurrection of Christ, Klosterneuburg; + V detail
Music:
Perotin, c. 1200, Vidêrunt, close of last Quadruplum (Munrow) ARC 2565050 B
(End)
The "Style of 1200" has become a by-word for that great opening tug at the throttle of
transforming force. Its most extraordinary representations are the enamel scenes from the
Klosterneuburg Altar by Nicholas of Verdun. Here the physical and spatial are so
entrained in the surge of spirit that two hundred years of painting — with Giotto at their
center — seem anticipated. Yet this Sampson grappling with the lion is more than a
pioneer depiction. Like a Perotin dynamic cadence, it means Rebirth, the Harrowing of
Hell and wrestling with death — "Surrexit Dominus de sepulcro." And it somehow
means it Now.
(Close
Perotin)
63)
63a)
63b)
63c)
V63d)
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Nicolas of Verdun, 1181, Klosterneuburg Altar, right side of central panel,
15 scenes (video intersperses various details as named)
Same, enamel of Jonah into the whale
Same, The Harrowing of Hell (video uses only a detail)
Same: from a closer view of twelve scenes, video details four: Passover,
Jacob's Promise, Resurrection, Sampson with the Gates of Gaza
Same: "The Brazen Sea" on Twelve Oxen, from Solomon's Temple
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�C.G. Bell
V63e)
V63f)
63g)
Symbolic History
Same: Moses leading the Israelites from Egypt (video uses detail)
Same: Last Supper
Same: two scenes: Descent of the Holy Spirit and Judgment Angels
Nothing is more at the heart of that 12th- and 13th-century revolution than the
extension of the Biblical analogues of Augustine, where we began. Here we see half of
the altar frontal. The scene of Sampson and the lion is in the bottom row, next to last on
the right. The Crucifixion, central to the triple array, appears at the left. It is flanked by
events from Christ's life. Above each is a cognate from Genesis or Exodus, and below,
another from later Israel. Thus in the column before that of Sampson, we read from top
to bottom: Joseph into the well, Christ into the grave, Jonah into the death-and-hell
whale. What would that be in history but the corruption and crisis of any age? Next
right, (above Sampson and the lion) Christ looses the Patriarchs from hell, while from the
life of Moses, the Passover speaks the sparing of the chosen. At the far right, above, is
Jacob's promise ("out of Judah a great lion" — the lion transformed); between, is Christ's
Resurrection; and below, Sampson carrying off the Gates of hostile Gaza.
The prophetic now of any such sequence has only to be pushed, for the orthodox
daring of art to suggest the mystical heresy of Joachim de Floris, from the same years. In
his three resonant levels, the Old Testament Age of the Father and the priestly Age of the
Son are about to yield to the mystical Age of the Holy Spirit, a kingdom of God's
indwelling, where Church and State withered away, each man, as Dante would put it, will
be "crowned and mitered" over himself.
Va64)
64)
French Gothic, 1195-1260, Bourges Cathedral, Nave
French Romanesque-Gothic, 1157, Noyon, Apse with buttresses (CGB '74);
+ V detail
Panovsky has written a small book documenting the tie between scholastic
theology and Gothic, the reconciliation of Sic et Non, beside that of upward thrust and
lateral ordering — a particular of the soaring dialectic which from year to year releases
and contains more daringly. In a sequence of cathedrals, mid-12th to mid-13th century,
the height of ceiling vault becomes a visible index of the launching-forces, economic,
civic, speculative, with the synthesizing marvel of their incorporation.
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Symbolic History
Noyon, the apse, a first use of flying buttresses, 1157, modestly lifting and
lightening the Romanesque.
65) Same, Noyon, interior, Choir 1157, Nave 1170 (CGB '74); first, a video detail
Imagine the interior before the clear windows and 18th century ironwork gave an
enlightenment the opposite of Suger's New Light. All these quiet transitions from
Norman — St.-Denis, Laon, the English cathedrals — in stable three-storied harmony,
vault at no more than 75 or 80 feet.
66) French Gothic, Notre Dame, Apse from east (CGB '59)
Music:
Perotin, c. 1200, Sedêrunt, 1st Quadruplum (Munrow) ARC 256 5050 B
The extravagance begins in Paris, with Notre Dame, where Perotin launched his
vast Quadrupla. Already by 1163-77, when the choir-apse was raised, it was vaulted at
115 feet.
67) Notre Dame, within, 12th-13th cent., Transept Crossing (CGB '48)
Within, mostly new glass restores the closure of once jewelled dark. The Argus in
1948 recorded its inadequacy of angular view: to find the lift of the vaulting it lost the
floor.
68) Rheims Cathedral, 1211-41, Apse from northwest (CGB '59)
Paris touched off a chain of Notre Dames, a civic and devotional rivalry, where
dates and heights correlate with evolutionary fitness. Skipping Chartres and Bourges,
about 1200, at 120 feet, we come to Rheims, 1211 and after, at 125.
69) Rheims, Interior, Triforium and Clerestory of the Nave (CGB '74)
Inside, without a wide-angle lens (or the miraculous eye), one is lost. The old
triple harmony reels under lines that go up and up — the triforium dwindled to a band
between the reach of arches below and the soar of clerestory above.
70) Amiens Cathedral, Apse, 1220 and after (CGB '74: vertical slide; video substitutes details, below & above)
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Symbolic History
Yet Rheims holds a lateral harmony beside the two that follow: Amiens, from
1220 and after, the pinnacled apse leaping like a range of cliffs, to sustain the 139 foot
vault;
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�C.G. Bell
71)
V71a)
Symbolic History
Same, Amiens, Arches of the Nave (CGB '74)
Same, Amiens, Nave and Vault, up to West Rose (S. Adams’ slide; cf.
Gothic III, 24)
the camera, within, hardly encompasses the aisle-arches of the nave, much less the
windowed range above.
72) Beauvais Cathedral, 1247 ff., Apse and North Transept (CGB '74); + V detail
of the Apse
In Beauvais, 1247 and after, the reach for the infinite goes beyond possibility,
bringing to an end that high Gothic race. Only the choir and transepts were built; the
choir fell soon after completion, had to be more densely arched and buttressed; the 500
foot open tower over the crossing, unstayed by a nave, fell in 1573.
1st73, 1994 edition) Same, vertical of the interior; + V detail
V73a) Same, whole of vertical south wall (CGB '74; see 2nd 73 below)
Yet this Promethean trunk, vaulted at 158 feet (in Ruskin's quaint phrase, "There
are few rocks, even among the Alps, that have a clear fall as high as the choir of
Beauvais"), this end-product, has the inebriating lure of Dante's Ulysses, sailing toward
the sunset ("diretro al sol") in the "folle volo" (the mad flight) which took him beyond
tragedy. (End Perotin.) Where is the comparable daring in Gothic thought?
For 2nd 72) Nicolas of Verdun, Klosterneuburg Altar 1181, Nativity
The Incarnation implies the heresy of God's self-realization in time. From
theology through Hegel to evolution, this has made the problem of change, of temporally
conditioned spirit (of which calculus is a quantitative and equational specter) the rootproblem of the West.
a 2nd 71)
Greek 370-360 BC, Round Temple ruins, Delphi (CGB '77)
For 2nd 71) Again, Verdun Altar, Crucifixion (video uses detail only)
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Symbolic History
Against Greek harmony, with its temporal recurrence, its Euclidean containment,
the post-and-lintel temple, the musical scale going not up but down — against the pathos
of recollective Platonism — Christianity had no choice but to make the moment
creatively decisive; though that is to venture the paradox of a world becoming God, or a
God so world-immersed as almost to contradict his name.
a 3rd 72)
V3rd 72a)
Same, Ascension of Christ (video uses detail only)
Beauvais exterior (video uses whole of 72, CGB '74)
Inevitably, the Hegelian germ lay under the resonances of the Coming; it declared
itself with visionary force in those three Kingdoms of Joachim de Floris, anticipating
Dante's De Monarchia, the Protestant Fifth Monarchy men, Condorcet's Tenth Age, and
even the classless brotherhood of Marx. It is hard to recognize heresy in architecture; but
like Joachim and the spiritual Franciscans, Beauvais has the glory of soaring excess.
a 2nd 73)
2nd 73)
V2nd 73a)
V2nd 73b)
Beauvais, flamboyant window of the North Transept (CGB '74)
Beauvais, interior, south wall (CGB '74; video: center-spread)
Beauvais, 13th cent. glass of the Lady Chapel (CGB '74)
A closer view of Beauvais Apse (from 72 above)
As in a dialectic of the Trinity, Gothic had to reconcile mystical oneness and the
hunger of the heights with the earth-aligned horizontals, the weight of stone, columned
piers, capitals, the tripartite divisions. The theology which culminated in Thomas had to
hold in equilibrium every speculative wildness and heretical risk. From the formal
balancings of the Summa Theologica, we seize on the central issue of Joachim's selfrealization of the Divine, Articles 3 and 4 of Question 106.
Va74) French Gothic, Rheims Cathedral, Apse, 1211-41 (from 68, above; CGB '59)
74) Rheims, 1211-90, interior, looking west
74a) Rheims Choir Clerestory
While the stabilized soaring of Rheims signs a like perfection.
"Whether the New Law should have been given from the beginning of the world?"
Though God disposed otherwise, Thomas, as always, reasons first for what is wrong —
argues the unanswerable injustice to those who could not know Christ, though Scripture
says God is no respecter of persons and will have all men saved.
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
"On the contrary, the Apostle says: That was not first which is spiritual, but that
which is natural." [Emphasis added.] In support of which Thomas accepts organic
process as the way of God in the world: "Because a thing is not brought to perfection at
once from the outset, but through an orderly succession of time" — a principle which
could lead as far as we like, to Hegel's history or Darwin's paleontology.
a75)
b75)
Vc75)
Vd75)
75)
Rheims, 1211-41, Apse (Editions Gaud)
Same, wilder close-up of Apse buttressing (CGB '74)
Le Mans, begun 1217, from the east, Apse, etc. (CGB '74)
French Gothic, c. 1250-60, Rheims Nave, Buttressing of Clerestory (slide by
Sam Mason III)
Rheims, Apse with buttressing ( best CGB of 1974)
As in the countered stress of Rheims apse, the truth, which, overextended, would
lead to Joachim's error, must be stated, then opposed and buttressed into strength. Thus
Article 4:
It would seem that the New Law will not last till the end of the
world… Just as the Father is distinct from the Son and the Son from
the Father, so is the Holy Ghost distinct from the Father and the Son.
But there was a state corresponding to the Person of the Father,
namely the state of the Old Law, and there is a state corresponding to
the Son, wherein the clergy… hold a prominent place. Therefore,
there will be a third state corresponding to the Holy Ghost, wherein
spiritual men will hold the first place.
Against that free indulgence in Christ's promise, comes the stern contrary: how can we
have more of the Spirit than "the Apostles who received the firstfruits"? And as
Dionysius says, "The third kingdom will take place not in this life, but in heaven." "This
puts out of court the senseless idea that the Holy Ghost is to be expected at some future
time." [Emphasis added.]
a76)
76)
V76a)
Chartres, 1200-1240, North Portal, left of center (CGB '59, sunset)
Same Portal, right side: John the Baptist, etc. (CGB '74; video uses detail)
Detail from another slide of North Portal, left of center (CGB ‘74)
Whatever the hope or danger of prophetic history, in the vaulting of Gothic the
incarnate thrust was held in mystical surrender over an eternal ground. Thus the
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Gothic Ground and Vault
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
culminant sequence of Medieval Latin, the Dies Irae, perhaps about 1235, perhaps by
Thomas of Celano (CGB translation):
Day of anger, that the day,
When time burns itself away,
As David and the Sibyls say.
Dies irae, dies illa
solvet saeclum in favilla
teste David cum Sibylla.
Quantus tremor est futurus.
quando judex est venturus
cuncta stricte discussurus.
What the trembling and what terror
When a judge of past and future
Searches every secret error.
77) French Gothic, Bourges, c. 1225(?), Central Portal, with Judgment Tympanum
77a) Same: from Last Judgment, detail of lower two bands
The great horn thundering doom
Through the shires of the tomb
Gathers all before the throne.
Tuba mirum spargens sonum
per sepulcra regionum
coget omnes ante thronum.
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Symbolic History
Mors stupebit et natura,
cum resurget creatura
judicanti responsura …
Death struck and nature stunned
Loose the bonds of flesh and bone
Judgment-summoned, the dead respond.
78) Chartres, c. 1210-20, South Portal, right side of central bay; + V detail
78a) Same: North Portal, detail Melchizedek (video, head only)
V78b) Same, St. Peter, North Portal, center, right jamb (video, head only)
To whom shall I — wretch — complain
At that bar, what patron fain,
Where even the just have no claim?
Quid sum miser tunc dicturus,
quem patronum rogaturus,
dum vix justus sit securus?
Rex tremendae majestatis,
qui salvandos salvas gratis,
salva me, fons pietatis.
King of fearful majesty,
Swayed to save, salvation free,
Fount of pity, be saviour to me.
79)
V79a)
79b)
Same, Chartres, North Portal, head of Moses
Same, head of Samuel, north side of Center Portal
Same, detail of devil from the Last Judgment, South Portal
Take pity, Jesus, to your heart;
Pity was your cause of birth,
Lose me not that day with earth.
Recordare, Jesu pie,
quod sum causa tuae viae,
ne me perdas illa die …
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Symbolic History
When for spite and malediction
Recreants feel the flame's affliction,
Render me your benediction.
Confutatis, maledictis,
flammis acribus addictis,
voca me cum benedictis …
a80)
b80)
c80)
Chartres, detail of Simeon and John, North Portal
Same, detail of Judith, from right of North Portal
Double: [A] French late 9th cent., Ste. Foi, Conques; and [B] French c. 1210,
St. John the Baptist, North Portal, Chartres
d80) Double: [A] French Romanesque 1160, Beardless Prophet, Gilles-du-Garde;
and [B] French Gothic c. 1210, St. John the Baptist, Chartres
Ve80) Chartres, c. 1210, North Portal, the same St. John Chartres (postcard)
f80) Giotto, 1297-99, St. Francis Preaching to the Birds, Upper Church of St
Francis, Assisi (cf. Dante, 50)
Vg80) Again, St. John the Baptist, Chartres (Houvet Monograph)
80) Detail of Ve80, St. John the Baptist (from Chartres card)
80a) Detail of V80, St. John (from Houvet Monograph)
When, on that day of tears,
Man, resurgent out of fires,
Waits the justice of your rod,
Spare us then, Father and God.
Jesus, full of sympathy,
Grant us peace eternally.
Lacrimosa dies illa,
Qua resurget ex favilla
Judicandus homo reus:
Huic ergo parce Deus.
Pie Jesu Domine,
Dona eis requiem. Amen
Against the Dark Age sternness this melting Chartres St. John; against the
mystical Gilles-du-Garde head, where we ended our 12th-century Prelude, this, where
mysticism takes flesh and person. Or against plainsong and all earlier melody, a onevoice praise of the Lamb: "Agniauz Douz," which Tinayre called "School of Perotin."
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
All are contemporary with St. Francis, whose mother (from Provence) taught him
Troubador songs and chivalric romance. In all, the new passion burns — with joy —
over a Judgment Ground.
Music:
9/2/95
French early 13th cent., Agniauz Douz, (Yves Tinayre) Lumen 32017 (first
stanza only)
(End)
Gothic Ground and Vault
33
�
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Gothic Ground and Vault, Symbolic History, Part 9
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SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
10. The Gothic Wave
CHARLES G. BELL
ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
or
1260 CANYON ROAD
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501
August 1995
Last Revised January ‘96
�Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
10. The Gothic Wave
1)
German, 873, Corvey, W. Front (video: details only, below then above)
Music:
Tuotilo, c. 900, from Kyrie-Trope: Omnipotens, MHS Or 349
To preserve, under an always growing wealth of detail, the great shapes of cultural
change...
As in a chart of evolution, we have seen the Dark Age fortress of old Romanesque
(Corvey — with the solemn tread of later plainsong — c. 900, Tuotilo of St. Gall)
(end Tuotilo)
2)
French Burgundy, 1120-1140 and ff., Vezelay, interior; + V detail
lift itself, over Europe, to the varieties of new Romanesque (and in music to the first
horizon of Organum: the close of "Mira Lege", early 12th century — with Vezelay):
Music:
French, c. 1120, Mira Lege, refrain, from Columbia (78), 5710
(end)
3)
French, 1145-60, from Nave into Choir, Cathedral of Sens (CGB '59)
V3a) Same, Nave from the aisle, Sens (CGB '59)
3b) Same, north aisle of Choir, two windows: Life of St. Thomas of Canterbury
(CGB '59)
V3c) Same, close-up of another of these windows (CGB '59)
In one of these Romanesque branches — surrounding Paris — occurs the dynamic
mutation of Gothic (here Sens mid-12th century, contemporary with Suger's St. Denis)
and in music the driving force and mystical tenderness of Leonin.
Music:
2/16/96
Leonin, c. 1160-90, Deum Timê (close, from "quie") AS 65
The Gothic Wave
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
From that 1160 unfolding
4)
French Norman, 13th cent., Coutances, W. Towers (CGB '74)
a complex of forms springs to 13th-century Rayonnance. We choose, from many, the
delight of Coutances and with it a mid-century motet: "Salve virgo virginum":
Music:
French mid-13th cent.(?), Salve Virgo Virginum, SAWT-(9530-1)
5)
6)
7)
Same, Coutances, from rear (CGB '74)
Same, Coutances, Central tower (lantern) (CGB '74)
Same, Coutances, Nave, Crossing and Choir from entrance (CGB '74); video
takes in two sections, below and above
V7a) French Gothic, later 13th cent., Lantern over the Crossing, Coutances, France
(from CGB '74, Dark Ages 80)
(end Salve)
From the Ile de France the Gothic wave spreads over Europe...
Va8) Roman Christian, 2nd-4th cent., Catacomb of S. Calixtus, detail
8)
Same, another view
8a) Christian, c. 470, Mosaic of St. Ambrose, Capello San Vittore, Sant'
Ambrogio, Milan (digital: detail only)
A total transformation since Christianity went down into the catacombs of
troubled late-Rome, putting off temporality, with all assertions of pagan reason and skill,
seeking the solemn birth in the cave.
Music:
Solesmes Gregorian, Absolve, Funeral Mass, opening, VM-87-3
As Augustine said of the old philosopher, Victorinus:
he blushed not to become the child of thy Christ and an infant at thy
font, submitting his neck to the yoke of humility, and subduing his
forehead to the ignominy of the Cross.
(fade Gregorian)
9)
2/16/96
French Gothic, c. 1260, Coronation from West Façade, Cathedral, Rheims;
(copy of CGB ‘74, Gothic I 5); + V detail, see V9
The Gothic Wave
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�C.G. Bell
9a)
Symbolic History
French, c. 1230, Head of an Angel, broken from west Portal of the Coronation
of the Virgin, Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris
Music:
Secular Motet, c. 1250, Dieus! je suis jà près de joir, ARC 14608
Whereas Gothic, from the ascetic grave, wakes to the life of the world. Beside
anything earlier, even of the 12th century, what shimmers over Rheims is a smile where
the loves of heaven and earth are marvellously mingled. The turning point had been in
Paris. But since the 1225 Madonna from the northwest portal of Notre Dame was spoiled
in the Revolution,
10)
10a)
V10b)
10c)
V10d)
French Gothic, c. 1250, N. transept portal, Virgin and lintel above, Notre
Dame, Paris (CGB '80; cf. Gothic I V64b)
French (Amiens), 2nd half of the 13th cent., The Golden Virgin, S. transept
portal, Amiens Cathedral
A closer view of 10, Virgin of the Column, N. Portal, Notre Dame, Paris
French Gothic, 1339, Virgin and Child, gilded silver, Louvre, Paris
French Gothic (Rheims), c. 1290, Head from a wooden statue of an Angel,
Louvre, Paris
we turn to her mid-century successor from the doorway of the north transept. These
Marys, with those of Rheims, or La Vierge Dorée of Amiens, gave fresh embodiment to
the womanly as a spring garden of grace.
(end Dieus!)
At about the same time (1230), Guillaume de Lorris crosses a like frontier, from
the 12th-century distance of Chrestien, into the dream vitality of The Romance of the
Rose — such personality and sparkle as engendered everywhere, and through two
centuries, imitations and rehandlings of that rich and fragile joy.
En icelui tens deliteus,
Que toute rien d'amer s'esfroie,
Sonjai une nuit que j'estoie...
a11)
b11)
2/16/96
English, 14th cent. MS. illumination, King Hunting
Boucicault Master, c. 1405-08, Flight to Egypt, landscape detail, Mus.
Jaquemart-André, Paris; video then returns to 10, detail: Notre Dame Virgin
of the Column
The Gothic Wave
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�C.G. Bell
c11)
11)
Symbolic History
From Cesky Krumlov, Bohemia, c. 1400, "Beautiful Madonna,"
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; video: detail only
English (or French), c. 1395, Richard II presented to the Madonna and
Angels, Wilton Diptych, National Gallery, London
In the delicious time of spring,
When love enkindles everything,
I dreamed I waked, and as it seemed,
It was May morning in my dream. (CGB)
The dream of waking to foliage, birdsong, the clear river flowing from the hills, would be
echoed from Dante and Boccaccio to Machault and Chaucer — as the Notre Dame Lady
of the Pillar is followed by a whole school of loving hip-shot virgins, softening by the end
of the 14th century to those the Germans called "schöne" — or in England to the Wilton
Diptych Mary in a bower of angel wings — among blossoms too;
12)
Middle Rhine Master, c. 1420, Garden of Paradise, Städlisches Inst.,
Frankfurt am Main; with three video details
for the painted landscape picks it up, as if the angel smile had renewed on earth the
paradise garden: this 1400 Rhenish one, the serpent keeled up on the ground, lower right:
such a brightness as Chaucer would describe in his Parlement of Foules:
A gardyn saw I ful of blosmy bowes
Upon a ryver, in a grene mede,
There as swetnesse evermore inow is,
With floures white, blewe, yelwe, and rede,
And colde welle-stremes, nothyng dede,
That swymmen ful of smale fishes lighte,
With fynnes rede and skales sylver bryghte.
Of instruments of strenges in acord
Herde I so pleye a ravyshyng swetnesse,
That God, that makere is of al and lord,
Ne herde nevere beter, as I gesse.
Therwith a wynd, unnethe it myghte be lesse,
Made in the leves grene a noyse softe
Acordaunt to the foules song alofte.
a2nd 11)
2/16/96
French illumination end of the 15th cent., Dance in the Garden,
Roman de la Rose, Harley MS 4425 14b, British Museum, London
The Gothic Wave
4
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
For 2nd 11) English, c. 1370(?), Perpendicular east window of the Choir, Exeter
Cathedral (CGB '80)
Appropriate that the room where Chaucer wakes in that early poem, The Book of the
Duchess, was painted with the Romance of the Rose.
Me thoghte thus: that hyt was May,
And in the dawenynge I lay...
My wyndowes were shette echon,
And throgh the glas the sonne shon
Upon my bed with bryghte bemes,
With many glade gilde stremes...
Ne in al the welken was no clowde.
a2nd 10)
French Gothic (Rheims), c. 1240, Clerestory of Nave, Rheims
Cathedral, France
b2nd10)
Same, 1250-60, Dragons and Foliage, Rheims
For 2nd 10) German Gothic, c. 1235 ff, Well House, N. Walk of Gothic Cloister,
Kloster Maulbronn
So Guillaume de Lorris wakes in the original Romance, "Jolis, gais, et pleins de
leesce":
So I rose and walked from town,
To hear the birds sing their rune,
Among the blossoms on the boughs,
Where a cold clear river flows;
And in that water filled with light,
I washed my face; the bed was bright
With pebble stones; the meadows green. (CGB)
e 1'eau clere et relusant
Le fonz de 1'eaue de gravele...
3rd 11)
Again, Wilton Diptych, c. 1395, Mary and Angels; video: detail only
The Pearl-poet would pick it up a hundred and fifty years later in one of the most
luminous of all Gothic visions, that supernatural stream down crystal rocks:
2nd 12)
2/16/96
Fra Angelico, c. 1431 ff., Paradise Garden from Last Judgment,
S. Marco, Florence
The Gothic Wave
5
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
V2nd 12a) Jan van Eyck, 1422-24, Baptism from foot of page of Birth of St. John,
Mus. Civico, Turin
The dubbemente of the derworth depe
Wern bonkes bene of beryl bryght.
Swangeande swete the water con swepe,
With a rownande rourde raykande aryght.
In the founce there stonden stones stepe,
As glente thurgh glas that glowed and glyght,
As stremande sternes, quen strothe-men slepe,
Staren in welkyn in wynter nyght.
For uche a pobbel in pole there pyght
Was emerad, saffer, other gemme gente,
That all the loghe lemed of lyght,
So dere was hit adubbement.
Va13)
English Gothic, 1220-60, Salisbury Cathedral from the southwest; whole,
with Tower and 1334 spire (copy of CGB '86; see Ars Nova b54)
13)
English, c. 1260, Salisbury, Tower, framed by Cloister arch (CGB '66)
V13a) Same, Tower over Cloister cedar (copy CGB ‘66, Ars Nova ‘54)
Such a wave of lilting Gothic goes out from France, in music, as in the other arts:
Salisbury, where the quieter Early English soars to a peak of virginal geometry; with it an
isorhythmic "O Maria," sung by the Deller Group.
Music:
14)
V14a)
15)
V15a)
16)
16a)
English 13th cent., O Maria Virgo, Deller Group, BGS 70680
Same, Salisbury, across the Cloister to the Chapter House (CGB '66)
Across Cloister to Nave; video: detail only of upper windows
Same, Salisbury, Tower glimpsed through Cloister tracery (CGB '66)
Detail of Va13, Salisbury West Front (CGB '86)
Same, Salisbury, Interior, Nave from the Choir (CGB '66); video: details
only, above and below
(end O Maria Virgo)
English Gothic, after 1263, Chapter House of Salisbury Cathedral, detail of
vault
It was in the 13th century of Salisbury that the first sparkling poems in what
would become the language of Chaucer (mingled sometimes with Latin), took up the
pulse of pointed arch
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17)
17a)
V17b)
Symbolic History
English, c. 1255, Censing Angel, Westminster Abbey, North Transept
triforium
English, 1275-80, Angel Playing a Viola da braccia, Angel Choir, Lincoln
Cathedral
English, 1275-1300, West Front, Exeter Cathedral (CGB '80); video:
window tracery only
and smiling angel — those of Lincoln Choir or this from Westminster Abbey, fresher and
more naive than the French:
Of one that is so fair and bright,
Velud maris stella,
Brighter than the day is light,
Parens et puella;
I cry to thee, look thou to me,
Lady, pray thy son for me,
Tam pia,
That I may come at last to thee,
Maria!
1st 18) German Gothic, 1248-1322, Apse buttressing, Kölner Dom (copy of
CGB '74, wider view; see slide 65 ff.); video: center-spread only
The German Gothic road is remote from the hawthorne lanes of English grace.
The choir of Cologne took up the Faustian hunger of the heights, to be retraced in time,
1st 19) French Gothic, 1220-60, Amiens, West Front and Towers (Sam Adams'
slide); while video previews Amiens Apse, 3rd 19 (CGB '74, wider view)
through Amiens,
1st 20) French Gothic, 13th cent., Rheims Cathedral, whole view; while video
previews 2nd 20: Rheims Nave buttressing (CGB '74)
through Rheims,
1st 21) French Gothic, 12th-13th cent., Notre Dame, Paris, South side, Nave
Buttressing, Transept, etc. (CGB '59)
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to Notre Dame in Paris. That there were musical parallels the name of Franco of Cologne
attests. Although we read of a three-part work of his performed in Paris, what remains is
his treatise Ars Cantus Mensurabilis, from the second half of the century, when Master
Gerard, inspired from this France, was building the Kölner Dom.
2nd 20) Rheims, Nave buttressing, 1211 ff. (CGB '74); here video narrows to a detail
Music:
Tournai Mass, late 13th cent., stratum; Kyrie, Seraphim SIC-6052
It codified the notation of the rhythmic modes so that before 1300 Franconian polyphony
had arched its unities of triple conflict over Europe (like Aquinas' God — Questions 28
and 30 — a "transcendental multitude" of "real opposition").
2nd 19) Amiens, Apse buttressing, 1220-60 (copy of CGB '74, narrow view; from
Gothic II 70); video: upper spread only
Where, after Perotin, does Ars Antiqua loom like the French cathedral or the
Scholastic Summa? Not in most recordings; though such settings of the Mass as this
Tournai Kyrie shape the musical future.
(close Tournai Kyrie)
2nd 18) Köln Apse buttressing, 1248-1322 (CGB '74, narrow view); video: first,
center-spread of 2nd 18; then upper-spread of 1st 18, wider view)
Only one 3-voice Ave Gloriosa Mater, which Coussemaker thought by Franco himself,
and for which Tinayre lowered the triplum to a choral insistence under his own motetus,
catches something of those churches — once more from Cologne to Paris and back by
interiors, through Rheins and Amiens again to Cologne.
Music:
Franconian, mid-13th century, Ave Gloriosa — Ave Virgo,
Lumen 32018
3rd 19) Amiens, 1220-60, Apse buttressing (CGB '74, wider view)
3rd 20) Rheims, 1212-41, Apse buttressing (copy of CGB '59, from Gothic II 68)
2nd 21) Notre Dame, Paris, 1163-13th cent., Choir with buttressing, seen from the
south (copy of CGB '59, from Gothic II 55)
22)
Notre Dame, Paris, interior, c. 1270, South Transept Rose (CGB 59)
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23)
24)
25)
25a)
26)
Symbolic History
Rheims, interior, mid-13th cent., Clerestory windows of the Choir (CGB '59);
while video views from the Choir the Nave and West Windows (upperspread only of V23)
Amiens, 1220-70, the soaring Nave, looking up to the West Rose (Sam
Adams' slide); while video has shown the arching of an Aisle (from CGB '74)
[revised ‘94]
Again, Köln Cathedral, 1248-1322, interior, Choir (CGB '74); + V lower
detail [‘94 video revision]
Same, apse, nearer (CGB '74); video shows upper windows only
Same, looking from the Aisle into the Nave (CGB '74); from which video
takes only the upper spread; + V clerestory detail (from V26a)
(end Motet)
So from the Ile-de-France transplant of this German Cologne, we might have
followed the Gothic wave to Italy,
27)
Lombard Romanesque, 1120-38 ff., San Zeno Maggiore, Verona (CGB '66)
where from the start of the 12th century (here San Zeno, Verona) the Renaissance
foreshadowings of Romanesque had only to receive the flame-shapes of Gothic passion to
cross the threshold of a new age:
28)
V28a)
Italian Gothic, 1228-53, frescoed c. 1320, two vaulted bays of the Upper
Church of St. Francis, Assisi (CGB '84); cf. V28, earlier variant
Same, interior, looking east (copy of CGB '84, from Dante 64)
Dante's Dolce Stil Nouva, the Ars Nova of music, the sculpture and painting of the time
of Giotto.
Already that sweeping survey has betrayed the living complex. If Gothic fire had
awaited its 13th-century height to spread over Europe, we would not have St. Francis'
church in Assisi (1228 and after), much less the saint it was reared to.
Va29)
29)
29a)
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Same as 29, but a wider view [‘94 video revision]; digital uses this for 29
Sicilian Romanesque, end of 12th cent., Cathedral Cloister, Monreale
Bonaventura Berlingheri, 1235, St. Francis, with Scenes from his Life,
S. Francesco, Pescia; video: detail only
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As Norman Sicily and the empire of the Fredericks witness (this 1200 fanciful
cloister at Monreale), the Northern and pre-Gothic had been working from the first with
Byzantine and Moorish to the boot of Italy and beyond. And St. Francis, a crucial link in
the Italian awakening which leads through Dante and the Giottesque toward Renaissance,
is a testimony as well to the earlier radiation of mystical love from the fervor of France:
Troubador, Abelard, Bernard of Clairvaux.
a30)
b30)
30)
German, St. Michael's, Hildesheim, 1001-33; and painted ceiling, c. 1220;
video: detail only (cf. Vb30, below)
Same, whole ceiling (CGB '86); while video draws from Vb30 (CGB ‘86) a
closer detail, as of a30: arch plus ceiling panels of Adam and Eve, and Jesse
German Romanesque, 12th into 13th cent., Abbey Church of Maria Lach, N.
Germany
Music:
Hildegard von Bingen, c.1150(?), from O presul vere civitatis,
(Gothic Voices) Hyperion A66039
The 12th-century awakening, which witnessed in France the rise to Gothic, and in
England William of Sens' reshaping of Canterbury, stirred Germany as well. Though
construction there (as at Bamberg, Mainz, this Maria Lach) retained past 1200 the round
arches of Romanesque.
31)
31a)
31b)
German Romanesque-Gothic, c. 1225, Refectory, Maulbronn Cloister,
Würtemberg
German Romanesque-Gothic, c. 1190-1200, Mary and Child,
Leibefrauenkirche, Halberstadt; + V detail
Detail of b30, Hildesheim ceiling, Adam and Eve
So late as 1220, this columned refectory of the Cistercian Kloster Maulbronn, stands on
that transitional threshold.
In German music too the new rapture speaks not through the polyphony of Leonin
and Perotin, but by the plainsong tradition of solo chant. Thus the melismatic soaring of
the Hymns of Hildegard von Bingen, contemporary with the buttressing of Notre Dame,
as with early organum there.
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So too with German literature: the Minnesingers carry Troubador devotion into
the 13th century; Parzival and Tristan body forth the chivalric romances of Chrestien;
while the Nibelungenlied refines the passions of Dark Age German myth:
With eyes of covert longing that knight and lady too
Looked upon each other as worth made them do. (CGB)
mit lieben ougen blicken ein ander sahen an
der here und ouch diu fruwe: daz wart vil tougenlich getan.
(end Hildegard v. Bingen)
1st 32) Spanish, late 12th cent., Portal of Santa Maria la Real (Cluniac) Sanguesa,
Navarra
Let this 12th-century portal from Navarre lead us back to that radiation from the
France of Cluny and Citeaux (or Cister), of Chartres and Notre Dame, or in music of
Leonin and Perotin.
1st 33) Gislebertus, c. 1120-40, Adoration of the Magi, St. Lazare, Autun
In the perspective of time, the contenders of an age clasp hands. That Cluny in its
wealth was richly adorning its churches stirred the ire of St. Bernard. Though
Gislebertus' Magi, carved for Cluniac Saint Lazare in Autun, had epiphanied Bernard's
call to Christian love.
1st 34) Spanish, 12th cent., David from Puerta de las Platerias, Santiago de
Compostella
It was the Romanesque and Cluniac wave which first went out from France, reaching
south to Santiago de Compostella in Spain,
1st 35) Anglo-Norman, c. 1145, Carving inside door, Kilpeck, Herefordshire
(CGB '65); here slide show has only a detail, while video previews the whole
of 3rd 35
and north to Kilpeck on the border of Wales. But Bernard had stripped off that Cluniac
ornament in his own purifying reform,
1st 36) Cistercian, 1146 ff., Cloister, Abbey of Le Thoronet, Provence
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which seized from the first on the clean vaulting of transitional Gothic. By his death in
1153 his Cistercian order comprised 343 monastaries, a number to be doubled by soon
after 1200 — here the cloister of Le Thoronet in Provence.
1st 37) Cistercian, 1179-1208, Fossanova, interior, S. of Rome, Italy
How quietly those late 12th-century churches, spread over Europe (this
Fossanova, south of Rome), suit the mystical soaring of Leonin's organum —
1st 38) Cistercian, 2nd half of 12th cent., Refectory of Santa Maria de Poblet,
Tarragona, Spain
thus the Cistercian refectory of Santa Maria de Poblet in Tarragona, with Tinayre's old
performance of the Haec Dies, for two voices, and entirely in the sustained-tone style.
For 2nd 37) Fossanova exterior, while video previews, as for 2nd 36, Le Thoronet
Apse (see for 3rd 36)
The lower note (cello here) protracts itself under the increasing tension of the upper,
holding, to a point of incalculable yearning; so rises or falls to concord, from which
passing notes in inwrought sequences of rhythm and tone lead to another peak of the
spiritual cry —
For 2nd 35 and 2nd 34)
English Norman, 1154-89, Parish Church, façade, Iffley, near Oxford
(CGB '84); video divides, below and above
as in Dante from spaceless sphere to sphere by
"The Love that moves the sun and the other stars" —
"L'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle."
Not in the ear, but in some deeper recess, the delayed lingering accumulates, the falls of
melody are distilled.
For 2nd 33) Same, Iffley, detail of main Portal (CGB '84)
Music:
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Leonin, c. 1175, Haec Dies, Tinayre, Lumen 32011
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2nd 32)
3rd 33)
3rd 34)
3rd 35)
3rd 36)
For 3rd 37)
3rd 37a )
2nd 38)
a39)
39)
Symbolic History
Again, Portal of Santa Maria la Real, detail
Again, Adoration of the Magi, detail
Again, David, detail
Again, Kilpeck carving; from the slide whole, video takes only a detail
Again, Le Thoronet, interior, Apse; while video shows first a detail of
the Cloister (from 1st 36), then of the Apse
Cistercian, 1147 ff., Nave of Abbey, Church of Silvacane, near
Marseilles; to which video adds a detail of 1st 37, interior of
Fossanova
Cistercian (Portugal), 1158-1223, Church of Monastery of Alcobaca
Again, Refectory of Santa Maria de Poblet
French Romanesque-Gothic (Chartres) c. 1150, plaster cast of Angel of
the Sundial, Mus. des Monuments Français; + V detail (copy of
CGB '80, from Gothic I, 79)
Chartres, 1150-55, Angel of the Sundial, face
(end Haec Dies)
In Chartres, Bernard seems answered. As the mild angel smile lights purlieus of
grace, Romanesque and Gothic meet in carving and structure.
But if we walk from the cathedral's 1150 layer
a40)
40)
Double: Chartres, [A] 1145, Queen of Judah, head, Royal Portal; and
[B] c. 1250, God Meditates Creation, detail, North Porch
Chartres, same detail as B of a40, God Meditates Creation
to the last sculptures of the Transept Porches nearly a century later, we measure the
Gothic assumption of body and person, earth and time — from columnar removal, to this
God Meditating Creation, brooding over the world and his involvement in it; so that it is
sometimes called (and the doubt is expressive) the human author of the book of Genesis.
If one would ask where such implied heresy of personal emergence was most
startling, the answer might well be, less in the stylized power of this France than in the
precursive outbreaks of the chartered German towns.
1st 41) German, c. 1200, St. Andrew, stucco, screen of Liebfrauenkirche,
Halberstadt; first, video detail
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In the Romanesque which we have traced there past this 1200 St. Andrew of Halberstadt,
the general awakening looks out with the directness of pre-reformation humanity. So too
in the religious and political protest poems of Walther von der Vogelweide (c. 11701230). In that Europe of a hundred years before Dante, perhaps only St. Francis and
Frederick II advance so.
a2nd 40)
Double: [A] Chartres, c. 1250, God Meditates Creation; and
[B] Walther v.d. Vogelweide, from the Manessa MS., c. 1320,
Heidelburg Library; video shows first B alone
Vb2nd 40) Rodin, 1880-1917, from The Gate of Hell, The Thinker, Rodin
Museum, Paris
For 2nd 40) Again, Walther, from the Manessa MS. (B of a2nd 40); video: detail
only
I sat down on a stone,
Left on the right leg-bone,
Elbow piled on the knee,
Chin and half my cheek
Caught in the palm's grip... (CGB)
It is the pose of the Chartres God-author, the same Walther would
assume in the Vanessa MS, and centuries after, Rodin's thinker:
Ich saz ûf eime steine,
und dahte bein mit beine...
So I pondered deep,
In this world how to live;
But found no clue I could give
How a man might gain three things,
Each of which the other shames:
Honor, and worldly goods —
Two already at odds —
Va2nd 41) Again, St. Andrew, video detail of 1st 41
2nd 41)
German, c. 1190, Apostle, detail, Church of Unsere Liebe Frau,
Halberstadt
A third outweighing both,
God's blessing on our faith.
Hard as I tried to bind
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The three in one, it would not stand,
That wealth and earthly pride,
And God's grace beside,
In one heart should dwell.
That worldly honor and wealth cannot be reconciled with Christ's blessing is the
Medieval and doctrinal ground. But the poem does not stop there. It seizes on corruption
as the cause of this imperfection:
42)
Upper or Middle Rhine, c. 1200, Alexander in single fight, Hanover;
+ V detail
Steps and ways are withheld,
Wrong lurks in wait,
Violence is loosed on the street,
Peace and right thrown down. (CGB)
As a Middle Rhine illuminator endows a Romance encounter of Alexander the Great with
the violence of the chivalric broils sweeping the Holy Roman Empire.
Untriuwe ist in der sâze,
gewalt vert ûf der strâze.
The poem ends:
diu driu enhabent geleites niht,
diu zwei enwerden ê gesunt.
a43)
43)
German (Bamberg), c. 1240, Prophets Jonah and Hosea, Bamberg Cathedral;
video: details only
From the same group, Head of Jonah, Choir Screen, Cathedral, Bamberg
Literally: "The three will never have safe conduct until the two are restored." Whether
"the two" are "peace and right" just above, or "honor and earthly good" earlier called "die
zwei," does not alter the meaning: that if the kingdom of man could be ordered, God's
grace might dwell in it, as in whatever Reform Utopia Joachim's Third Kingdom, Dante's
De Monarchia, or this Bamberg Jonah characterfully foresee. Against the dark exile of
the opening, we glimpse the dawn of God's self-realization in the world:
The three will never be atoned
Until the two are sound. (CGB)
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44)
V44a)
Symbolic History
German-Italian (Apulia), c. 1240, Bust of Frederick II, Mus. Civico,
Barletta; + V detail
German (Bamberg), c. 1235, Kaiser Heinrich II, Adamspforte, Dom,
Bamberg
Ironic that the German (Sicilianized half-Norman Hohenstaufen) who pressed
furthest with the ordering of the secular (this bust a battered relic of his Apulian Rome),
Frederick II, "stupor mundi et immutator mirabilis" (Mathew Paris: "wonder of the
world and miraculous transformer"), should have been hounded by the papacy, for all his
genius and worth, down into Dante's Hell — a risk prefigured in the carving. For the
question was always ticklish, as with Abelard and even Aquinas (or in Frederick's
crusading youth), whether the vitality would be embraced or damned.
1st 45) French MS, late 13th cent., Book of Health, Bathing Scene, British
Museum, London
It was love most of all, Dante's "seed of every virtue and punishable crime," which
had to walk that sword bridge of church denial or sublimated service. How critical the
span, from the irrepressible fabliaux vanity which would grow to Chaucer's clowning lust;
1st 46) Limoges, enamel early 13th cent., Violist and Dancing Girl, Copenhagen
through troubador idolization, glowingly heretical: Tristan and Isolde, Paola and
Francesca;
1st 47) French, c. 1250-60, Angel-guardian of St. Niçaise, West Portal, L, Rheims
to the sacred incorporation in which the smiling Gothic angels led the way for Beatrice.
2nd 46)
Again, Limoges, Violist and Dancing Girl, detail
V2nd 46a) Limoges enamel, c. 1200-10, Fiddler and Dancing Woman, British
Museum, London
This Limoges enamel, as much as any work of the 1200 time, endows sensuous
love with almost religious grace, though its symbolic flower forms, its longing faces float
as wistfully in the timeless as Aucassin's preference for Hell: "En paradis qu'ai je a
faire?" It is, as he says, the old priests, the crippled and maimed whom creed saves;
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Symbolic History
while the knights and loving ladies — Dante's "Le donne antiche e cavalieri" — proceed
into hell: "Let me go with these, if only I have my love, Nicolette."
2nd 45) Again, Book of Health
That church norm of ascetics praying in holy cripts can make love almost as thin a
levity as the 13th-century foibles of the bath house.
For 3rd 46)
Again, Fiddler and Dancing Woman (detail of V2nd 46a); video
having first returned to a detail of 1st 46, Violist and Dancing Girl
Yet the vernal delight declares itself, as in a lai set for minstrel's harp: "En Mai
la Rousee":
Music:
French, c. 1240(?), En Mai la Rousee (realized for harp) EMS-201
2nd 47) Rheims Smiling Angel; video: two details only
(end En Mai)
In a time of the anagogical, one can hardly tell how far that dream of a May
morning serves the sacred smile;
48)
V48a)
V48b)
French Gothic, 1228, Cloister, detail, bushes behind, Mont-Saint-Michel
(copy of CGB '74, from Gothic I, 1)
Video here previews the whole of 49 to follow: the Ivory Coronation of the
Virgin in the Louvre
French Gothic, 1228, Cloister of Mont-Saint-Michel, another view
(CGB '74)
or how much of earth's spring is enfolded in Mont-Saint-Michel cloister. Such the
mingling of a French motet to the Virgin: "A la clarté qui tout enlumina nostre grand
tenebror":
To the brightness that lightens the land of our shadow,
To the lady whose grace is a medicine for our sorrow...
Maiden and mother of healthful savor,
Rose of the dawn and of women flower. (CGB)
Music:
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French, c. 1260, A la Clarté, 2-voice motet, Cape Group, AS-71
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49)
Symbolic History
French polychrome Ivory, c. 1265, Coronation of the Virgin, Louvre, Paris;
video here shows details only
(end A la Clarté)
This Louvre Coronation in painted ivory, an ultimate of courtly love in heaven.
a50)
c50)
50)
Franco-German, c. 1230, Synagogue from South Transept, Strasbourg;
+ V detail, cf. Vb50 (both from CGB ‘59, Mozart 7)
Double: [A] Franco-German 1230, Head of Synagogue, Strasbourg; and [B]
Ecclesia, Musée de l'Oeuvre de Notre Dame
Same as a50, again Synagogue, head and shoulders; + V closer detail
Heavenly, too, the seduction, when that more formal French grace penetrates and
lightens the moods of German heart: the 1230 Shulamite Synagogue at Strasbourg — for
"negra sum sed formosa," "blind but beautiful." In this work, mythically ascribed to a
woman, what Augustine most feared, the pathos and glory of sense, brings into the church
itself the passion of Eloise, the mystery of Isolde.
At the same time, in the German singers of Minne (love sacred and profane), most
in Walter von der Vogelweide, the troubador strain enters the forests of Taunus and Tirol,
absorbing a fragrance of woods and meadows — Lindenduft: "Nemmt froue diesen kranz"
—
Take this wreath from me, lady — the flowers I have;
But I know where all colors blow and birds sing;
Come, let us gather flowers. Blushing she came.
Until dawn took me from my laughing dream.
And now all summer long I search the dance for eyes;
If I could find her under some garland spray. (CGB)
Always the sweetness of love under medieval acceptance of dream.
Va51)
51)
51a)
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A side view of 51, head and shoulders, with a closer video return after 51
Master of Naumberg, 1250-60, Queen Regelindis, head, Westchor, Dom,
Naumburg
German (Erminold master), 1280, Angel Head, detail, Choir, Regensburg
Cathedral
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Walther's most quoted poem is also his most smiling; we are tempted a generation
forward, to the Queens of Naumburg, by the winsome wreathing of that smile:
Under the lime-tree
On the moor,
Where we made our bed together,
You will find there
Grass and flowers
Broken, which for love were gathered.
Before the forest in a vale
Tandaradei
Sweetly sang the nightingale. (CGB)
Under der linden
an der heide,
dâ unser zweier bette was,
dâ muget ir vinden
schône beide
gebrochen bluomen unde gras.
Vor dem walde in einem tal
tandaradei!
schône sanc diu nahtegal.
In the analogies of Gothic this revived Eden, the phallic bird Boccaccio would also set
singing there, and even the pregnant beatitude of the high lady in the next stanza, "daz ich
bin saelic iemer mê," hint at another love meeting, of Gabriel and the Jungfrau.
52)
V52a)
German, c. 1240, Der Reiter (vertical): horse, from right side and front;
rider, full-face; Bamberger Dom; + V detail
Same, rider and body of the horse, with V return to rider from 52 (full-face)
As a Minnesinger, Walther was as much musician as poet. Though he only
longed for the Holy Land, his Crusader's hymn puts him there: "Nu alerst lebe ich mir
werde" — "Today my better life began… I have come to the very land,/ Where the one
God walked as man" — "Ich bin kommen an die stat,/da got mennischlichen trat."
With the old Max Meili performance we return in art to Bamberg, to this German
Rider. Like Walther himself, like utopian Frederick II before Papal calumny sealed his
Satanic compact, this knight of the new faith seeks an Incarnate City, where God walks as
man.
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Music:
53)
V53a)
Va54)
54)
Symbolic History
Walther von der Vogelweide, 1228, Nu alerst lebe ich,
AS 18
(Meili)
Same, Bamberger Reiter, head and shoulders, as looking three-quarters
forward
Same, head only, full-face
(end Walther with lst stanza)
French Gothic, mid 13th cent., Simeon det., Central Portal, W. Front,
Rheims Cathedral
German, c. 1260, Ekkehard, Head, Founder's Choir, Naumburg
In age, with a pension from Frederick II, Walther went home to find his playmates
old, the fields burned off, and the woods cut down. In his last elegy contempt of the
world becomes the vortex in which Renaissance tragedy was to form: "The years of my
life have vanished like a dream:"
O wê war sint verswunden
Ist mir mîn leben getroumet
alliu mîniu jâr?
oder ist ez wâr?
With such precursive immediacy, the 1260 Kings and Queens of Naumburg
prepare for the realistic donors in the paintings of the Van Eycks.
55)
55a)
Same, Ekkehard and Uta, Naumburg; video: detail only
Double: [A] Franco-German, c. 1230, Synagogue from South Transept,
Strasbourg; and [B] German, 1260, Uta, Founder's Choir, Naumburg
Surely the pair of Ekkehard and his love-haunted wife, Uta, is the most oracular
visualization of romance. If any Western poetry before Dante shares its sensuous
intensity, it is the German courtly epics at the start of the 13th century. Gottfried of
Strassburg's lines on Isolde's dress have been compared with the Synagogue figure in his
own city, but they would as well serve here:
The gown was formed as a part of her
And held her body like a lover;
There was no place where it jutted out,
But everywhere clipped her about,
Falling smooth from top to floor,
With clinging folds behind and before,
That gathered close between her feet,
As much as you would wish to see it. (CGB)
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�C.G. Bell
56)
56a)
56b)
Symbolic History
German, 1260, Uta, head and upper figure, Founder's Choir, Naumburg; first,
video detail of face
German (Master of Naumburg), c. 1260, Hermann and Regelindis, statues in
West Choir, Naumburg Cathedral; video: upper detail only
German, c. 1230, Angel of the Last Judgment, tympanum of North Portal,
Bamberger Dom
But it is the face and fold of the ermine which match the evocation of Paolo and
Francesca as they read of Launcelot and Guenevere: "how the desired smile was kissed
by such a lover" —"quando leggemmo il disiato riso/ esser baciato da cotanto amante."
To which Wolfram von Eschenbach comes as near, in his crazy way, as any of those
Germans: the God-made lady, Jeschûte, asleep naked in her tent, all love's weapons on
her: flesh of ivory, a red mouth slightly parted, breathing heat of minne —
Diu frowe was entslâfen,
si truoc der minne wâfen,
einen munt durchliuhtic rôt...
der truoc der minne hitze fiur.
The forest-grown bumpkin Parzival, who falls on her snow-white body, only to take some
symbolic ring — at which Wolfram's Eros flames to the wild and strange:
...Who has dishonored me?
It is insupportable, youth:
You might have taken a better aim.
Va57)
1st 57)
Again, Kilpeck (cf. slide 35), Anglo-Norman and Celtic, c. 1145, Corbelcarving: the Maw of Sex
French Romanesque, 12th cent., Portal detail, Oloron-Sainte-Marie,
Basses-Pyrénées
Reminder of the comic odds against which Dante would deify his love; how far human
passion hung, with the six other sins of all that is earthly, over a doomsday void, one of
the gargoyles grinning down from the fabric of creed — as in the old church of St.
Nicholas at Blois, beasts and sinner-mouthing devils stare from the columns of the choir
at the very mass where God is eaten and drunk.
2nd 56) Again, Uta, detail, Naumburg
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Symbolic History
It is this suspension that wraps the richest Gothic love in poignance and paradox:
O lasso,
Quanti dolci pensier, quanto disio
Menò costoro al doloroso passo...
How many tender thoughts, what hearts' desire
Has led them down into this place of sorrow.
2nd 57) French, mid 13th cent., Gargoyles, Rheims; + V details
2nd 57a) English Norman, 12th cent., Sanctuary Knocker, Durham Cathedral
That is the vacancy of the bare fifth chord which yawns under the liveliest music
of the jongleurs; how the skirtling and warbling and plucking trail out into the wail of noclaim.
Music:
French, c. 1260, In saeculum viellatoris, instrumental, Cape, AS 71
(cut)
58)
French, 1225-50, Villard de Honnecourt (Sketchbook, 143), Bibl. Nat., Paris;
+ V detail
V58a) Same, Unrelated figures and plans (Sketchbook, 123), Bibl. Nat., Paris
Attempts at the humanistic and forceful speak the same condition — the
sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt, would-be Leonardo of the thirteenth century, its
exploratory studies of the nude far from acclaiming the glory of body. Or the sequence of
motets from Perotin's last years and after, in honor of Louis, King and Saint:
Music:
Attr. to Perotin, 1226, from Gaudia Felix Francia (Bars 45-58),
Ducretet-Thomson, 320c10
(fade)
It is in rhythmic drive and heterophonic clash that Gothic levity whirls its dance,
59)
French, early 13th cent.(?), Adenez, King of Minstrels at the bedside of
Blanche of Castile, Arsenal Library, Paris; video: first, three details
as in the quaint miniature of the King of Minstrels at the levee of Blanche of Castile. The
playing card faces gaze through a diapered mirth of color, spaceless reminders under the
brightest play.
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Music:
Symbolic History
In saeculum viellatoris, as above, but 2nd half
(end)
One can hardly credit the leap to the panoply of Baroque joy:
60)
Pietro da Cortona, 1637, Age of Silver, detail, Pitti, Florence (CGB '47); video
breaks into smaller details
Music:
Monteverdi, 1607, Orfeo, from "Lasciate i monti" ARC-3035
Cortona's "Age of Silver", the celebrations of Monteverdi's Orfeo, where every chord
asserts temporal validity in the pomp of musical space.
Yet even here, the mortal enigma, now a conscious theme, brings out of gaiety an
averse of tears, (music) as if the complicity of major and minor were the ineradicable
trace of the old timelessness.
(fade Orfeo)
Since Bacchus too is celebrated in this Cortona fresco,
61)
French, late 13th cent. MS, Drinking, from Book of Health, British Museum,
London; + V detail
let us glance at the Bacchic cult of 1300 — a monkish branch of the sin of Gluttony,
conceived in the pleasure-mode Gothic allows, of gargoyle-grotesque. Though from this
monastic sprout comic courage would burgeon, through Langland ("There was laughing
and louring and 'Let go the cuppe!'") and Skelton ("She drank so of the dregs/ A dropsy
was in her legs"), to the almost Rubens affirmation of Brueghel and Rabelais:
62)
Peter Brueghel, 1568, Peasant Dance, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien;
video: two details only
...the flagons began to go, the hams to trot, the goblets to fly, the big
bowls to jingle... "I drink for the thirst to come. I drink everlastingly."
"Gulp it down; it's medicine!"... While... Gargantua, as soon as he was
born, did not cry "Mie, mie," like other children, but in a loud voice
bawled "Give me drink, drink, drink!"
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Symbolic History
From the Thomistic synthesis all aspects of man and world would enlarge and
ripen separate realms of substantial temporality.
a63)
63)
English Gothic, c. 1250, W. Front of Lincoln Cathedral from far off
Same, from nearer; video breaking it into a lower front and upper towered
spread
The strength of medieval unity (as in the West Front of Lincoln, combining
Romanesque and Gothic from the 11th century through the 13th) is its transrationality —
that it can suspend disparities of heaven, earth, and hell in a faith structure where
relationships are abstract and allegorical. What Tawney said of the economy applies to
politics, theology, the arts: "Medieval religious thought strains every interest and activity,
by however arbitrary a compression, into the service of a single idea."
How could it be otherwise where the life of the age was a continual centrifugal
release within creed containment, a continual absorption and canonizing of secular
vitalities, bound to rend the mould in which they were formed, or replace it with another
1st 64)
Inigo Jones, Christopher Wrenn, et. al, 17th and 18th cents., Queen's
House, Greenwich Hospital, etc. (CGB '74)
1st 64a) Gislebertus, 1130-40, Tympanum, from the Last Judgment, Autun
Cathedral
1st 64b) Guido Reni, c. 1624-27, St. Michael over Satan, Altar piece, Capuchin
Church, Rome; video then returns to a detail of 64, Greenwich Hospital
ultimately of rational and volitional ordering? It seems in that sense the historical task of
the Western arts to give measured accord to what, in the Gothic synthesis, had been
hauntingly juxtaposed. The gaunt contention of angel and fiend, buttressing the sanctum
even of Dante's energized acceptance, had in Milton and Leibnitz and Hegel to be
reconciled by the arrogations of dialectic, coherently justifying the ways of God to men.
In music it is consonance and dissonance which must be nobly harmonized.
1st 65)
German Gothic, 1248-1322, Cologne Cathedral, Apse buttressing
(CGB '74); cf. 1st 18, earlier
2nd 64) Again, Greenwich Hospital, central perspective (CGB '74)
2nd 64a) Same subject, new angle (CGB '74)
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Symbolic History
Their keen opposition and formal containment are the flung gage of Gothic;
Music:
French, c. 1248, from Conductus for St. Louis, (de Van) AS-99
the later history of harmony is their substantial reconciliation in spacious structures of
tension and release — Purcell, with this Wrenn.
Music:
Henry Purcell, 1695, Queen Mary's funeral music, Canzona, close,
Seraphim 60001
For 2nd 65) French Gothic, esp. 1240-80, Façade of Bourges Cathedral, France
V2nd 65a) Same, Michael, etc., detail of the Last Judgment, great West Portal
2nd 65b)
German (Rhine), 1329, (detail of the Damned from West Choir screen),
Mainz Cathedral
2nd 65c)
Chartres Glass 13th cent., Knights Jousting, Chartres Cathedral
V2nd 65d) Chartres Glass, 13th cent., Window of St. Lubin, N. Aisle of Nave,
Chartres Cathedral (CGB '74)
2nd 65e)
Chartres Glass, 13th cent., detail of St. Mark mounted on the Prophet
Daniel, Chartres Cathedral
2nd 65f)
French Gothic, c. 1200, Saint's Head, Vitry: Sculpture Française,
12th-16th cent.
The principle of medieval polyphony is feudal. In Franco of Cologne's treatise,
the loyalty of each part is not to a regulated whole, but to another part, either the tenor or
the last part written. Varying melodies, words, languages will be crushed together: over
a church Kyrie the triplum may warble in French of the month of May, while the middle
voice, in Goliard Latin discusses bigamy.
Music:
Cod. Bamberg, French, c.1260, 3-voice motet, El moi de mai...bigami -Kyrie [start with words], (Munrow) ARC-2723 045 #14
Everywhere is the battering of stresses into structure; everywhere a nominal
oneness lays its sanction on radical contingency — the "nihil est praeter individuum" of
scholastic thought, the fortune and accident of medieval romance.
Such the Thomistic tercets of Credo-reasoning, by which Aristotle's world fabric
is wrenched into Trinitarian transcendence of good and evil, with syllogistic
demonstration that just such the Philosopher had in mind. As John of Salisbury said:
"they work to reconcile dead men who contradicted each other all their lives." (end motet)
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Symbolic History
While formulas of humble respect buttress magisterial wilfulness: "reverenter exponere,"
to explain with respect, "pium dare intellectum," to give a dutiful meaning (De Wulf).
a66)
66)
66a)
66b)
French, c. 1270, Old Testament King, N. Rose Glass, Notre Dame, Paris
French Gothic mid-13th C., Science from N. Portal, Chartres
English Gothic (Decorated), 1322-42, Ely, View of the Octagon and Lantern
(from CGB '77; see Period Styles V47a)
Same, Octagon and Lantern, interior (CGB '77); video: brighter Lantern only,
from V66b (CGB '77)
Thus Thomas argues Gregory out of the repudiation of reason he shared with the
early Church:
When Gregory says there is no merit in believing where human reason
furnishes proof, he refers to a man who has no will to believe... but
where he has the will... his faith is not diminished, though he have apodeictic proof.
So Gothic compromise shoulders out a handmaidenly space for earthly science
itself, that lady who appears smiling on the North Portal of Chartres. With such
clairvoyance Roger Bacon opens the vision of technocracy in the catechistic cloister:
It is possible that great ships and sea-going vessels shall be made
which can be guided by one man and will move with greater swiftness
than if they were full of oarsmen.
It is possible that a car shall be made which will move with
inestimable speed, and the motion will be without the help of any
living creature...
It is possible that a device for flying shall be made such that a man
sitting in the middle of it and turning a crank shall cause wings to beat
the air after the manner of a bird's flight...
Va67)
b67)
67)
67a)
2/16/96
Same: Octagon and Lantern, cf. slide 66b, but taken from Period Styles 52
(CGB '77)
English, 14th cent., Flying Ribs at the Crossing, Gloucester Cathedral
`Honnecourt, c. 1240, Perpetual Motion Machine, Sketchbook CIX, Bibl.
Nat., Paris
Engraved after Peter Brueghel, 1558, The Alchemist; video: details only,
right and left
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Symbolic History
It is possible also easily to make an instrument by which a single
man may violently pull a thousand men toward him in spite of
opposition...
It is possible also that devices can be made whereby, without
bodily danger, a man may walk on the bottom of the sea or of a river...
Infinite other things can be made, as bridges over rivers without
columns or supports, and machines and unheard-of engines.
While Honnecourt, whose sketchbook we have compared with Leonardo's gives a
page to a perpetual-motion machine, using an odd number of mallets and quicksilver.
Alchemists pondered the Emerald Tablet attributed to Hermes Trismegistos, seeking
talismanic keys "not so much to make Gold and Silver," Ashmole would write centuries
after, "as to see the Heavens open, the Angells of God Ascending and Descending." A
sacred Hermetic text, a body of chemical operations, stinks and all, a heavenly vision of
God — if such is the anagogical synthesis of Ars Antiqua, small wonder the myth of
Faust has been called a Western archetype.
68)
68a)
68b)
68c)
English Gothic, c. 1180-1360, Cathedral of Wells from the southeast;
+ V detail
Same, Wells, 13th-14th cent., Nave looking towards Crossing (CGB '84)
French Gothic, 1195-1260, Bourges Cathedral, Chevet from SE
Again, Wells, esp. c. 1325, Cathedral from Bishop's Garden (SE); while video
draws from Dante 35 (CGB '66) the Cathedral and Chapter House from the
east and north
What Renaissance requires, as much as anything else, is the filling in, between
disjunct poles, of the daily fabric of mundane good. Here English Gothic, by the modesty
with which it clings to Romanesque proportion, quietly prepares for Renaissance. In the
articulation of Wells there is none of that high-Gothic extravagance which, in France and
Cologne, made the apse a displayed scaffold of support. Some social and pastoral wellbeing is reflected here, as in the early developments of English law. At the same time
English polyphony humanizes the gentler "peripheral style" of note-against-note
Romanesque by a decisive filling in of triadic chords. The sharp brilliance of passing
tones in the French Salve Virgo, already heard, shifts in an English motet, also of the
13th century, on the same words, and sung by the same Munich group, to a firm reliance
on major chords. Here are the two openings:
Music:
2/16/96
Repeat opening of French 13th-cent. Salve Virgo Virginum,
SAWT-9530/31-B (side 3)
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�C.G. Bell
Music:
69)
Symbolic History
Opening of English 13th-cent., Salve Virgo Virginum,
9530/31-B (side 4)
SAWT-
English Wall Painting, 13th cent., E.W. Tristram copy, Virgin and Child
from Bishop's Palace, Chichester; first, video detail
Music:
English, 13th cent. (Worcester), 2-voice: O Maria Virgo Pia (lst,
last and lst), sung by Michael and Pamela Sloper, 1978
The purest gem of Worcester 13th-century harmony, "O Maria Virgo Pia," seems
unrecorded; Michael and Pamela Sloper sing it for me. While the Madonna Tristram
copied from the wall of the Bishop's Palace in Chichester suggests the human sweetening
in English manuscripts (or in the paintings that survive) from late Romanesque and early
Gothic.
(end O Maria)
70)
English, early 14th cent., Ivory Diptych, Victoria and Albert Museum,
London; + V details (digital: one detail)
By 1300 English ivories have the line and smile of the French, but with more
directness of love. In music the Worcester "Alleluia psallat," about the same time, gives
natural intimacy to Gothic joy — a joy especially in the old Cape performance.
Music:
71)
English, c. 1300 (Worcester), Alleluya psallat, AS-71
(end)
English, early 14th cent., Queen Mary Psalter, f. 151 r, British Museum,
London; + V details moving to the falconing below
English manuscripts also take the quickening lead. With the new century, sacred
pages open to a springtime of love and the chase. A first harvest of poems voices the
mood:
Bytuenè Mersh ant Averil,
When spray beginneth to springe,
The lutel foul hath hirè wyl
On hyrè lud to synge.
Ich libbe in love-longinge
For semlokest of allè thinge;
He may me blissè bringe;
Icham in hire bandoun.
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
An hendy hap ichabbe yhent;
Ichot from hevene it is me sent;
From allè wymmen mi love is lent
Ant lyht on Alysoun.
72)
V72a)
72b)
Same, detail of hawking; first, video: Christ in the Temple, above
Luttrell Psalter, 1335-40, detail of sowing, British Library, London
Same, f 181v, Ladies' Travelling Coach, old British Museum print
Most famous is the Reading Rota, "Sumer is Icumen in," with alternate words in
pious Latin — the first piece of six-part writing, the first developed canon, the first clear
example of the major mode. If only the London Madrigalists had known how to
pronounce the words.
Music:
English, c. 1310 (once called 13th cent.), Sumer is icumen in, Col.
5715 (78)
(end)
English genius was already operating in a context of temporal correlatives, which
would produce in Austen the familial weaving and balancing Nietzsche had in mind when
he said (with some incomprehension of the phenomenon) that the British were a nation of
shopkeepers.
73)
English, c. 1280, Expulsion, from Triforium of Angel Choir, Lincoln;
+ V detail
Though the visionary wildness which would complement Austen with Blake was
always there (Lincoln Choir). So the first Middle English poem on the coming of winter
sounds the Biblical Expulsion:
Mirie it is while sumer ilast
With fughelès song;
Oc nu necheth windès blast
And weder strong.
Ei, ei, what this nicht is long!
And ich with wel michel wrong
Soregh and murne and fast.
Against such precursive reach within the severities of faith, can we bear the shock
of what has claimed Gothic affinities —
2/16/96
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�C.G. Bell
74)
V74a)
V74b)
Symbolic History
Gustave Courbet, 1844, Happy Lovers, Museum of Fine Arts, Lyons;
+ V detail
Courbet, 1842, Self with a black dog, Petit Palais, Paris; video: detail only
Courbet, 1856, Girls by the Seine, Petit Palais, Paris; V: detail only
the sensuous flagrance of 19th century, where every modern soul has fledged its lifedreams?
Music:
Meyerbeer, 1836, from "Tu l'as dit",
VLM 6153
Les Hueguenots, RCA
Courbet with his love, the Opera of Paris, Meyerbeer's "Tu l'as dit... l'amour..."
(skip in music and then fade)
Yet it is no accident that the word for all that — Romantic —
75)
S. German, c. 1240, Head of the Statue of Synagogue, profile detail, Main
Portal, Bamberg Cathedral
V75a, cf. 2nd 75) Same head, full-face; with video return to details of 75 and V75a
springs from Medieval romance — the cult of nature and heart felt through the veilings of
this other Synagogue at Bamberg, as through the forest childhood of Parzival, after his
father's battle-death:
Day's sun to the Queen became a mist;
She fled the world and all its bliss,
Wandered deep in her forest land
(Not to pick flowers from its ground).
There she reared Gahmuret's child
Far from the knighthood of the world.
Deprived of his heritage of prowess,
He carved himself a bow and arrows;
Shot at the birds he came upon;
But when he saw them stop their song
And flutter downward, he would weep
And tear his hair in childish grief.
Then mornings, when he bathed at the river,
And the birds sang, such a sweetness
Pierced his heart, he ran to his mother
In tears, and could not tell his sorrow. (CGB)
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
We have followed the cropping out of Gothic energies in the formal frame. To
close the 13th century, let us line up, from the Continent, four moments in which Ars
Antiqua approaches the riper fruition the age of Dante would bring in. This Synagogue
may stand for the German characterizations of Bamberg and Naumburg, including the Uta
we have already seen.
76)
French Gothic 1260-80, Head of Christ, Rheims Cathedral; video then
previews, as named in the text, 77 (Princess Violante) and 78 (Queen Emma)
A Rheims Christ after 1260 goes as far the other way, toward outward drama.
From the late century then: Princess Violante from Burgos, and from Regensburg a
mythic queen. While the music is a love motet from the end of the century, "Dieu,
comment peut," with haunting tritones and a climax moment when the voice soars —
though not in a romantic soaring.
Music:
French, late 13th cent., style of Jehannot de l'Escurel, Dieu comment peut, OL 232, Rokseth Memorial Album
2nd 75) Bamberg, c. 1240, Head of Synagogue; before which video has interposed
Uta of Naumburg, head and shoulders, from slide 56
2nd 76) 1260-80, Head of Christ from Rheims; video: close detail
77)
Spanish Gothic later 13th cent., Princess Violante, Burgos, Cloister; first,
video detail
78)
Bavarian, c. 1290, Queen Emma, St. Emmeramskirche, Regensburg
(CGB '59); + V detail (see V78a, CGB '59)
(close Dieu comment peu)
Bavaria, 1290, Queen Emma: and the mysticism of chivalric love refines to a
threshold of consciousness: "Dicendo a 1'anima, sospira." — "Speaking to the soul,
sigh!" It is the threshold of Beatrice and of Petrarch's Laura.
Va79)
79)
a80)
80)
2/16/96
Giovanni Pisano, 1301, Double: Annunciation details from the Cathedral
Pulpit, Pistoia
Same, detail of the Annunciation Angel
Giotto, 1304-06, Angel of the Annunciation, detail, Scrovegni Chapel,
Padua
Simone Martini, c. 1333, Angel of the Annunciation, National Gallery,
Washington D.C.
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
And we have only to cross the Alps, at that charged turn of the century, to find
another world. In this Giovanni Pisano, in Dante, Giotto, Simone Martini, as in the music
of da Cascia, the mystery of Gothic kindles to an aesthetic passion which the sensuous
soul can see and hear and touch.
Music:
2/16/96
Giovanni da Cascia, c. 1325, Nascoso el viso, close, (Cape) ARC3003
(end da Cascia)
The Gothic Wave
32
�
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SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
11. Dante: Threshold of 1300
CHARLES G. BELL
ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
or
1260 CANYON ROAD
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501
June 1993
Last Revised June ‘96
�Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM
87501
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
11. Dante: Threshold of 1300
a1)
1)
Double: [A] Chartres, 1210-20, North Portal, Simeon (head); and
[B] Giovanni Pisano, c. 1290, Simeon (head), Cathedral Museum, Siena
Pisano, Simeon, head and shoulders (CGB '86); + V detail
Over the 13th-century horizon of France, England, Germany, Spain — Italy brings
a dawn of human possibility: "It was the start of morning and the sun was rising up" —
"Temp'era dal principio del mattino,/ e'l sol montava 'n su..." Giovanni Pisano's Simeon,
about 1290, hails the temporal incarnation: "For mine eyes have seen... the glory of thy
people." Thus Virgil to Dante at the summit of Purgatory [Dante translations in this
program are by CGB]:
Your will is upright, free and whole;
It would be a fault not to do its bidding;
Therefore I crown and mitre you lord of your own
Libero, dritto e sano è tuo arbitrio...
Per ch'io te sovra te corono e mitrio.
How far the spatial attack has moved toward Michelangelo,
2)
2a)
Simeon, Chartres
French Gothic, 1200-40, North Portal, Prophets, Chartres (CGB '59)
we measure against the Chartres Simeon of about 1220, looming into time but not
temporal, transforming time, flesh, stone, to the substance of things unseen:
Not in casque nor yet in cowl,
Not in battle nor in Bull,
But on the road from Jericho
I come with a wounded man. (Waddell)
June 1996
Dante: Threshold of 1300
1
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
That Northern waking held the leanness of sacred surrender —
nec in bysso nec in cuculla,
nec in bello nec in bulla;
de Jericho sum veniens...--
For 2nd 1) Pisano 1301, The Pulpit of Pistoia, Jeremiah, head
V2nd 1a) Double: [A] Chartres c. 1210, North Portal, S. Modeste (head); and
[B] Pisano ,1297, Miriam or a Sibyl, Cathedral Museum, Siena
V2nd 1b) Double: [A] Chartres, c. 1210-20, South Portal, S. Theodore (head); and
[B] Pisano, c. 1290, Habakkuk (head), Cathedral Museum, Siena
beside the pentameter weight of Dante:
Libero, dritto e sano è tuo arbitrio.
If the Divine Comedy is the Gothic cathedral of literature, it is a signed cathedral
of prophetic self-awareness. Beatrice calls its author by name, "Dante"; while he says of
his book: "the sacred poem, to which both heaven and earth have set their hand, so that
for many years it has made me lean."
For 2nd 2)
Double: [A] Chartres c. 1210, North Portal, Melchisedech (head); and
[B] Pisano 1297 ff., Moses, Pisa, Baptistery
The powers this Gothic synthesis incorporates have crossed a threshold of personality
a3)
3)
3a)
View over Florence from Piazzale Michelangelo (CGB '59)
Arnolfo di Cambio & Brunelleschi 1300 ff. & 1420 ff., Pal. Vecchio &
Duomo, Florence; first, video detail
Giotto and after 1337-87, Campanile, Florence (CGB '48)
toward the free claim of life, love, and self-rule.
Music:
Gherardellus c. 1350, Caccia, AS-59, music up, then faint
Florence, 1300: Jubilee year of Dante's passage through an eternal place, "per luogo eterno" — to be told thereafter in the exile which taught him "how much the bread of
others tastes of salt, and how hard is the going up and down of another's stairs." He
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Symbolic History
begins: "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita" — "In the middle of the journey of our
life, I found myself in a dark wood, where the true way was lost."
What dispensation does this prophet bring, to pair him, as he says, with Aeneas
founder of Rome and Paul founder of the Church, to whom it was also granted to descend
and return — if not the poesis of blessing, fulfillment of Joachim de Floris' indwelling
spirit: "Liberta va cercando" — "he goes searching liberty.”
(music up)
That age a portal also in music, though this Gherardellus "Caccia", like much of
what survives, is of the next generation.
(end 1st canon)
Va4) French Gothic 12th & 13th cents., View of Apse, Notre Dame, Paris
(CGB '59)
4)
French Gothic 1200-40, West Front, Notre Dame, Paris (CGB '80); video: detail only
4a) French Gothic 1163, Ambulatory, Notre Dame, Paris (CGB '59); video: detail
only
Music:
Perotin c. 1220?, 4v. Conductus, Deus Misertus, de Van, AS-99
There was as much force, as much ambition, in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, but
a force differently disposed to the individual and secular. (music up) Such the frame of
the Thomistic Summa, in which Dante's poem shapes new heaven and earth. Or the barer
solemnities of Perotin's Ars Antiqua (fade Perotin) —
a5)
5)
5a)
Arnolfo di Cambio 14th cent. & Brunelleschi 1420-36, Apse and Dome of the
Cathedral, Florence (CGB '84); + V detail
Florence 14th-15th cents., Nave of the Cathedral (CGB '86)
Same, choir (CGB '86)
whereas, in the Ars Nova Caccia, spaced canonic entries fill, over a trombone ground,
fifths and triads of massive chords.
Music:
June 1996
Again, Gherardellus, Caccia, closing Ritornello (end)
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In 1296, when Arnolfo di Cambio took on the construction of the Cathedral,
whose magnified arcades would not be domed for more than a century, the city fathers
proclaimed:
The Florentine Republic, soaring ever above the conception of the
most competent judges, desires that an edifice should be constructed so
magnificent... that it shall surpass anything of the kind produced in the
time of their greatest power by the Greeks and Romans.
So Dante's Ulysses stirs his followers to sail the globe:
"O brothers," I told them, "who through all chances,
A thousand perils have come to the west,
For this small remnant of the senses' vigil
Our fate allows us, let us here resolve
Not to deny the experience of knowledge,
Beyond the sunset to the unpeopled world.
Consider your race, the seed of your generation:
You were not made to pass your time as beasts,
But to hold the way of courage and of wisdom...
a6)
French Gothic, c. 1270, North Rose Window, Notre Dame, Paris; first,
video detail
6 or V6) French Gothic, c. 1270, South Rose Window, Notre Dame, Paris (slide
show, detail; video, whole rose)
It is in mystical transparency that the old Gothic most fulfills its abstract vision,
Music:
French, c. 1260, Descendi-Gaude-Alma, Lum. 32027, close
a geometry of light Dante applies in his last canto to the Trinity:
O luce etterna che sola in te sidi —
Eternal light that always self-abiding.
Self-understanding and self-understood,
Alone and three-in-one burns love and smiling
(te ami e arridi) —
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That circle which as light in light appeared,
As a reflected light of light begotten,
Under the circumspection of my stare,
Within itself and of its own pure color,
Assumed the human likeness which we bear,
So that my eyes were wholly fixed upon it...
For that symbolic kaleidoscope,
a7)
Arnolfo di Cambio, 1294 ff., & Giotto, 1320-25, Santa Croce, Peruzzi &
Bardi Chapels with frescoes, Florence
Vb7) Giotto 1325?, Death of St. Francis, Santa Croce, Florence (pre-war, whole)
7)
Same, Death of St. Francis (post-war, fragment); + V return to Vb7
V7a) Pisano 1302-11, Pulpit, Pisa Cathedral, Judgment: whole relief
7b) Same, Judgment, relief, detail
the church of Dante's Florence keeps the frescoed walls of Romanesque; but what Giotto
paints there summons to impassioned drama. So in Dante all rungs of the eternal ladder
flex with life and dying — del Cassero stabbed:
I ran to the marsh and the reeds and mire
So tangled me that I fell, and there I saw
A lake form on the earth from my own veins.
The fate of Pia in a single line, which Eliot cribbed:
Siena mi fe; disfecemi Maremma.
So too the descriptive caccias of Giovanni da Cascia, Florentine composer born five years
after Dante.
Music:
Giovanni da Cascia, c. 1325? from Con bracchi assai, 2nd stanza,
(Munrow) Argo ZRG 642
But the intensity of the Italian awakening, its life, loves and hates, is preserved as
nowhere else in the Divine Comedy. Here, tightened in the Catholic structure, is the
ferment of Guelf and Ghibelline, nobles, merchants — boldness as always straitened in
rigor.
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a8)
b8)
8)
8a)
Symbolic History
Pisano, 1301, Atlas, Pistoia, S. Andrea, Pulpit (video: Va8)
Pisano, 1284-96, Habakkuk (detail), Cathedral Museum, Siena
Attr. Arnolfo di Cambio, 1298 ff., Palazzo Vecchio, Florence (CGB '48); + V
return to a3, View over Florence
Dante Death Mask, c. 1321?, profile, Palazzo Vecchio
Into those timeless realms the great Florentines surge with a defiance which is their
grandeur and their sin. So Farinata rises from his burning tomb: "Vedi 1à Farinata che
s'è dritto" —
Look there, Farinata, who has raised himself up;
From the girdle to the crown you see him clearly.
Already I had fixed my eyes upon him;
He heightened his chest and lifted up his forehead,
Like one who had the whole of hell in scorn,
And asked me proudly: "Who were your ancestors?"
As Dante meditated these words, over the Tuscan town from which he was exiled,
bore up the sunlit height of the Signoria's tower, breaking the inner silence like a clarion
at dawn — the chivalric strength of the French castle in a new and assertively civic form.
At this turn of the century, Florence, of all Italian cities most vigorous in
economic and public life, becomes the center of advance for all Europe. The leadership
of Paris is broken; we are swept forward, as by an eager crowd, into the forehall of
Renaissance:
"O mente che scrivesti ciò ch'io vidi" —
O Thought that wrote all that I saw,
Here let your nobility be shown.
(end Giovanni da Cascia)
What are the elements of that alchemy?
Va9) Pietro Cavallini 1293, Last Judgment, Three Figures, Santa Cecilia, Rome
9)
Same, Single Figure (video: detail only, from V9)
A time x-ray might read them like layers of paint from the robed figures of
Cavallini's Judgment, 1293 — Cavallini, a Roman who seems to have influenced Giotto
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Symbolic History
and been swayed in turn by the younger genius; they are Classical, Early Christian,
Byzantine, Northern Gothic, Italian Rebirth. First, Classical:
10)
Roman (Augustan), 13-9 BC, Ara Pacis from north, Frieze, Magistrates and
Priests, Rome (CGB '86); + V detail
Trying to climb the mountain "which is the beginning and end of joy," Dante
meets the shade of Virgil, who "lived at Rome under the good Augustus, in the time of
false and lying gods" — "al tempo degli dei falsi e bugiardi". That meeting, that
guidance, herald a new art. Aquinas' scholastic use and subordination of his classical
master, Aristotle, turns to a drama of love, in which Dante weeps at the very coming of
Beatrice —
11)
Roman Christian (Carthage?), c. 400, Sarcophagus of Orantes, Tarragona,
Spain
of Revelation — since it is then that Virgil, "sweet father," must return to the noble castle
of bondage — pagan virtues being only magnificent vices — Augustine: "a happiness in
this life based on a virtue as deceitful as it is proud." And what the angels chant is the
saddest phrase from the Aeneid, on the death of Marcellus, at which it is said Octavia and
Augustus broke into passionate weeping:
12)
V12a)
Giotto 1306-10, Madonna and Angels, detail of an angel, Uffizi, Florence
(CGB '59)
Giotto 1306-10, Madonna Enthroned, Uffizi, Florence; first, video detail
[for copy of CGB '59 original, Ars Nova 32, see 2nd 12, below]
"Manibus date lilia plenis" —
"Give us lilies with full hands" —
a lament lifted in Dante by an exclamatory "O" into a mystery beyond grief or joy:
"Manibus O date lilia plenis." Again with Giovanni da Cascia.
Music:
V2nd 11)
June 1996
Giovanni da Cascia c. 1325, from Nel mezzo a sei paon, verse 4 a,
(Cape) RCA VLM-6016
(fade)
Sarcophagus of Orantes, detail
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Symbolic History
We have been lured by Dante's synthesis through Early Christianity,
For 2nd 10) Roman (Augustan), 13-9 BC, Augustus leads sacrificial procession,
detail, south side, Ara Pacis
again to the Roman Peace, under which the institutions of his world, Empire and Church,
took form. And as he was driven by those beasts of sin down through hell-center before
he could climb again, history was forced from Augustus' Virgilian altar and its human
claim to virtue,
3rd 11)Again Sarcophagus of Orantes, detail
down the spiral of denial (this Christian sarcophagus sent from Augustine's Carthage to
Spain) to the ground Virgil himself must voice in Dante (Purgtorio. III): "State contenti,
umana gente, al quia" —
Let man rest content with how, not why;
Could he have seen the whole, there was no need
For Mary to give birth; and you have witnessed
Such whose longing is their grief. I speak
Of Plato, Aristotle, many more..."
At this he bowed his head, dispirited.
2nd 12)
Again, Giotto Madonna of V12a [of which the video shows only the angels below]
Yet for three centuries before Dante, before this Giotto, speculative soul had been
pushing up, bold as the Faustian vine described in Paradise IV, while Beatrice smiles:
And therefore questioning at the root of truth
Always puts up a living sprout,
Whose nature drives us on from height to height.
This sprouting (with the Divine Comedy, as with Giotto), gives Gothic an
enfleshment so ideal and sensuous,
13)
Fra Angelico 1434, Death and Assumption of the Virgin, Gardner Museum,
Boston; + four video details
Music:
June 1996
Dufay, 1426?, from Vergine Bella (Petrarch), (Cape), ARC 3003
Dante: Threshold of 1300
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Symbolic History
that the Florentine refinements of the next century, here Fra Angelico, seem kindled.
Thus the early work of Dufay (this setting of Petrarch's "Vergine Bella") ripens from
Italian Ars Nova. In Angelico's symbolic Death and Assumption, the Apostles (below)
close the post-and-lintel space of Mary's dying. But Christ in the center receives her
infant soul — "figlia del tuo figlio"; while to the right, the raised palm of eternal life
points through horizontal closure to the spire of such a Flamboyance as everywhere turns
the Paradiso into living flame.
14)
14a)
V14b)
14c)
Botticelli, c. 1492-7, Divine Comedy drawings, Paradiso I, Kupferstichkabinet, East Berlin
Same, Inferno XV, The Violent Against Nature, Vatican Library
Same, Paradiso VI; again, Berlin
Same, Paradiso XXXII; again, Berlin
Botticelli would treasure that aesthetic mysticism to the end of the Quattrocento
— nowhere more poignantly than in the drawings for the Commedia — witness the
ascent with Beatrice from the garden that crowns Purgatory. In the context of the other
designs, this initiates a leap from the busy crowding of the circles of punishment, toward
the unfinished blankness which would more and more attest the empyrean. Had not
Dante scaled those heights by the extrapolation of inadequacy? — "My sight greater than
our speech"; "So snow in the sun dissolves the imprint; so with wind on the light leaves,
the Sibyl's oracle was lost":
Così la neve al sol si disigilla;
così al vento nelle foglie levi
si perdea la sentenza di Sibilla.
Va15)
15)
V15a)
(close Dufay)
German Romanesque & Transitional, 1004-1185 ff., Bamberg Cathedral
Same, a closer view (CGB '86), from which video takes a detail
S. German (Bavaria), 12th-14th cents., Michaelsberg, Bamberg (CGB '86)
In the Gothic charge skyward, we have distinguished, around the French center,
two layers. With the 12th century, that burgeoning stretches the Romanesque, as the
Ottonian Kaiserdom is stretched at Bamberg — or the archaic empire by Barbarossa,
Henry VI, Frederick II, who loom still in Dante:
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This is the light of the great Constance,
Who from the second blast of Swabia
Conceived the third and ultimate energy. (Par. III)
16)
German Gothic 13th-19th cents., Spires of Köln in mist (CGB '74); which
video turns to details, below and above; digital adds to 16 a detail of 14
While in the 13th century, which at Cologne spills into the 19th, the high Gothic
wave from the Ile de France points trellises of stone — such defiance of gravity as when
Dante fixes his eyes on Beatrice (hers on the spheres) and his live body, lighter than air
and fire, targets upward toward its happy mark: "Have you not known that each of us is a
worm/ Born to form the angelic butterfly" — "a formar 1'angelica farfalla?"
17)
17a)
V17b)
French Gothic, 1243-48 (Pierre de Montreuil), Sainte-Chapelle, Paris (video
takes horizontals, below and above)
Same, apse windows; video, above, from vertical slide (CGB '59)
Same, window detail from another vertical (CGB '48)
What had intervened was mid-century Paris, an ultimate Lux Nova, earth, in the
May morning and Gothic smile, transparent with heavenly sheen. Did Dante recall the
Sainte-Chapelle (still fresh, still unrestored) when he saw paradise, first in its shadowy
presages — "son di lor vero umbriferi prefazii" — a stream of sparks flowing between
flowers?
And I saw light in the form of a river,
A river of fire between two shores
Painted with spring's miraculous colors;
And from that river fountained living sparks
And poured across the banks, and in those flowers
Immersed themselves, like rubies set in gold.
He dips his eyes. That flow of God through time gathers to a timeless round:
Nel giallo della rosa sempiterna,
Che si dilata ed ingrata e redole
Odor di lode al sol che sempre verna
Into the yellow of the eternal rose
That dilates and breathes the gracious odor
Of praise, in waves, to the sun that always makes
It spring, hushed and full of speech, I was drawn.
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Va18)
18)
Symbolic History
Sainte-Chapelle, cont. Chancel and Apse-glass; video first shows detail,
below
Sainte-Chapelle, cont. Statue with window behind (CGB '59); + V detail
As in all Gothic, the relation to earth is ambiguous. Judgment goes on sounding,
from Helinant's "Vers de la Mort" to the English "Earth out of earth is wonderfully
wrought." Yet earth and heaven brighten together. Sacred motets dance like virelais;
virelais smile angel innocence; in both, triple runs melt with piercing delight into perfect
chords. Here from Adam de la Halle's "Li dous regars de ma Dame":
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Music:
19)
Symbolic History
Adam de la Halle (1230-88), Li dous regars, Cape etc. EMS-201
(end)
Sainte-Chapelle, cont., Chancel Canopy with Angels (CGB '59)
Compare an Alleluya where the Alle and the luya are pulled apart and stuffed
with psallite cum: "Alle psallite cum luya":
Music:
French (or English?), mid 13th cent., Alle psallite cum luya, Lumen
32027
20)
21)
22)
Sainte-Chapelle, cont. right window-wall and apse (CGB '59)
Sainte-Chapelle, cont. detail from glass, one scene (CGB '48)
Sainte-Chapelle, cont. window-wall, looking up (CGB '48)
23)
French Gothic late 12th - 16th cent., Chartres, West rose and towers
(CGB '59)
Same, whole West front, with the towers
V23a)
(end Alle)
Before the infection of high-rise, the town-dwarfing French cathedrals — a
Flamboyant tower perhaps, Renaissance angel or cupola, crowning Romanesque and
Gothic — spoke how small a post-Columbian age fulfilled the living Medieval. No
wonder building slacked off at the center, physical and spiritual space preempted.
24)
French Gothic 1220-80, Cathedral of Amiens, Apse airview
V24a) Same, Apse (CGB '74); video shows upper spread only
24b) Same, whole West front
Yet the rational buttressing of faith which had reared Amiens and the Summa could not
rest there. Reason, in Siger and the Averroists, must stake out its own realm: "The world
is eternal; the will acts from necessity; happiness is in this life, and only philosophers are
wise" — theses twice condemned at Paris. Yet Dante, Thomistic synthesizer, is so
attuned to birth, that he places Siger, condemned by the Inquisition in 1277, among the
brightnesses of Paradise; it is even St. Thomas, his bitterest accuser, who is made to
introduce him: "This is the eternal light of Siger, who lecturing in the street of straw,
demonstrated enviable truths."
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a25)
25)
25a)
25b)
Symbolic History
Naumburger Master, c. 1260, Adelhied, Wife of Otto I, detail, Meissen
Naumburger Master, c. 1260, St. John the Evangelist, detail, Meissen
German Romanesque-Gothic, c. 1190-1208, Mother & Child from Liebfrauenkirche, Halberstadt
Again, St. John, detail; + V return to 25a, detail of Mary
Music:
Hildegard of Bingen, c. 1150, from O Jerusalem, Hyperion A66039
Also Joachim de Floris; Dante could hardly omit so arch-especial a spirit —
though his Everlasting Gospel had been variously charged. It had inspired century of
radical mysticism, unorthodox as Siger's radical reason. Its richest art sign is the
prophecy of the smile: the Master of Naumburg's Evangelist wreathes the Coming in the
warmth of now. So the German deepening of God-with-us, from the hymns of Joachim's
contemporary, 12th-century Hildegard of Bingen, through Berthold of Regensburg, to
Meister Eckhardt in the time of Dante:
...there is an agent in the soul, untouched by time and flesh, which
proceeds out of the Spirit and which remains forever in the spirit and is
completely spiritual. In this agent, God is perpetually verdant and
flowering with all the joy and glory that is in him ... For the Nowmoment in which God made the first man and the Now-moment in
which I speak, are in God the one and only Now …
(close Hildegard)
V25c)
Giotto, 1304-6, Angel of the Annunciation, detail, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua;
Digital: Giotto 1325-30, St. John's ascension, detail, S. Croce, Florence
A fusion Dante gives the aesthetic clarity of Florence.
26)
26a)
26b)
German, c. 1300, "Self Portrait", West Towers, Cathedral, Freiburg
Giovanni Pisano, 1312-14, Madonna della Cintola, Prato Cathedral
German (Rhine), 1329, Head from Rood Judgment, Cathedral, Mainz (while
video details 26, Freiburg "Self")
Duns Scotus taught at Oxford, Paris, and Cologne around the time of this 1300
Freiburg "Self-portrait". In him the Scholastic instrument sharpens to a pre-Kantian
critique: the God Anselm found in reason is only cause of causes. His other attributes, as
Trinity, mercy, goodness, stand in contradiction and rest on faith alone: "We cannot
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Symbolic History
know God, but we can love Him, and that is better than knowing." Only against the
remembered conscious might of Giovanni Pisano and Dante do these northern harbingers
pipe thin:
Long is ay and long is ho,
Long is wy and long is wo...
The late century shift in poetry
a27)
27)
V27a)
27b)
Rheims, c 1240, Statues from West Front (copy of CGB ‘74, Cycles ‘56); + V
detail
Same, head of Maidservant, West Front, Rheims
Rheims, 1245, Smiling Angel, Guardian of St. Denis
Rheims, Interior, West Rose and Carvings (CGB '74)
is always exemplified by the Romance of the Rose.
Music:
French c. 1230? Chanson de toile, Bele Doette, Cape etc., EMS
201
Guillaume de Lorris' 1235 opening has the chivalric mystery which smiles even on the
face of this Rheims maidservant, or in the songs of the loom, Bele Doette:
And now the wicket of that entry
A maid of grace unlatched for me —
Roses enwreathed her gold tiara;
In her hand she bore a gay mirror.
"My name," she said, "is Idleness;
I have no care but to live in bliss,
To gather garlands, and comb and dress."
She made me welcome to that place
Which was an earthly paradise. (CGB)
Va28 and Vb28)
June 1996
(fade Bele Doette)
Angel and Mary of the Giotto Annunciation, from 28
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28)
28a)
28b)
Symbolic History
Double: Giotto 1306, Annunciation, [A] Angel and [B] Mary; Scrovegni
Chapel, Padua,
Giotto, 1304-6, Resurrection, detail, Noli me tangere, Scrovegni Chapel,
Padua
Correggio, 1518, Noli me tangere, Prado, Madrid
Music:
Giovanni da Cascia (?) c. 1230, Io son un pellegrin, Meili, AS-l
With what sensuous immediacy French romance ripens to Dante, Giotto, the
music of da Cascia: "I am a pilgrim who goes crying for alms." Loris' Idleness becomes
the Leah of whom Dante dreams, gathering flowers to adorn herself at the mirror of
contemplation. And then he sees her in Earthly Paradise, Matilda, across the stream:
"You make me remember where and what Proserpina was, that time her mother lost her
and she lost the spring" —
(music)
Tu mi fai rimembrar dove e qual era
Proserpina nel tempo che perdette
la madre lei, ed ella primavera.
A Gothic yearning in delight which Milton could only wonder at, and be raised above
himself:
Not that faire field
Of Enna where Proserpin gathring flours
Her self a fairer Floure by gloomie Dis
Was gatherd ...
(end lo son un pellegrin)
29)
29a)
29b)
Jean
Strasbourg Master, c. 1300, St. Louis and his Wife, Dahlem Museum, Berlin;
+ V detail
French Gothic, mid 14th cent., Personification of Lust, South Transept,
Auxerre Cathedral
Orcagna c. 1360, The Blind and Halt appeal to Death, Santa Croce Museo,
Florence
In the Romance of the Rose two generations lead from that aristocratic source to
de
Meun's
bourgeois
continuation
—
such
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Symbolic History
a compendium of realism and sense as feeds two centuries of late-Gothic — as in art, this
Strasbourg St. Louis and his wife:
The praise of my beauty was everywhere;
There were night knockings at my door.
Brawls, when I ditched one for another,
Lopped off limbs and lives together...
My body was so strong and supple,
It could have minted coins in double;
But I was foolish, young, and chary
And had no schooling in love's theory.
Experience has made me sage,
In which I have spent the flower of my age.
Wise too late; the day has waned;
The door that swung cleaves to the jamb.
Unvisited I wait alone,
No loving touch from any one.
Youths untiring of me once
Pass me by without a glance;
Or if they see what they adored,
"Wrinkled hag" is their best word. (CGB)
30)
30a)
30b)
French, c. 1390, Charles V and Jeanne Bourbon as St. Louis and his wife;
Louvre
Same, detail of Jeanne Bourbon
Arnolfo di Cambio c. 1281, Thirsty Old Woman, from a fountain, Perugia
Realism a century later reflects that 1280 shift: Charles the Wise of France (as St.
Louis) with his wife — or Chaucer's Wife of Bath, enfleshed out of Jean de Meun:
Experience, though noon auctoritee
Were in this world, is right ynogh for me
To speke of wo that is in mariage...
Of which I am expert in al myn age...
But age, allas! that al wole envenyme,
Hath me biraft my beautee and my pith...
The human miracle, mediated by the age of Dante.
But Lord Crist! whan that it remembreth me
Upon my yowthe, and on my jolitee,
It tikleth me aboute myn herte roote...
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Symbolic History
That I have had my world as in my tyme.
a31)
31)
Pol de Limbourg & Brothers, 1413-16, The Astrological Man, Tres Riches
Heures of Jean Duc de Berry, Mus. Condé, Chantilly
Donatello, c. 1455, Mary Magdalen, waist up, Duomo Mus., Florence
Even Villon's phallic helmeter, who sees her mirror image young and old, is of the
same mine, though the Renaissance of body ("Petiz tetins, hanches charnues" — "round
little breasts, fleshy haunches") intensifies, as in Donatello's Magdalen, a dance of death:
The shoulders humped and ruinous,
Breasts, alas, quite fallen in;
Haunches like the breasts gone lean... (CGB)
Les espaulles toutes bossues,
Mamelles, quoy? toutes retraites,
Telles les hanches que les tetes...
32)
32a)
Franco-German c. 1300, Tempter & Virgins, West Portal, Strasbourg
(CGB '59); + V detail
Original Strasbourg Tempter, Cathedral Museum, detail (CGB '59)
Music:
Pierre de la Croix, end of 13th cent. S'amours — Au renouveller,
Secular Motet, Blanchard, Duc.Tom. 320c107
The realism of Strasbourg is a century and a half before Villon's claim and cry of
flesh — an eruptive vitality on a cathedral door, where the Prince of this World offers the
foolish gay virgins an apple in which he grins at the worm, Dante's "vermo reo che il
mondo fora". Though this humor of damnation is closer to Aucassin's "I want to go to
hell with the fine ladies and noble lords"; or to Chaucer's nest of friars under the devil's
tail: "Sathanas... Shewe forth thyn ers, and let the frere see/ Wher is the nest of freres in
this place!"
33)
33a)
Strasbourg Portal, cont., A Virtue
Strasbourg Portal, cont., A Young King
The 1300 shift is from sacred incorporation to the release of individual and
secular energies in the loosening faith-frame. At Strasbourg, Virtues sharp-browed as
holy virgin satyrs, kings keen as falcons, explore a drama of capricious force. While
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17
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Symbolic History
music, in the more complex time divisions of Pierre de la Croix, seems another such
heraldic lion, reared against residual bonds.
It is the northern transition to Ars Nova, the new art.
(cut de la Croix)
34)
Pisano c. 1295, Miriam (or a Sibyl?) detail, Duomo Mus., Siena (CGB '86); +
V detail [video and digital use V34, a wider horizontal — plus a detail]
Facing which, Giovanni Pisano reminds us again of the full dynamic of love in
Dante — seed of virtue and vice:
Amor, sementa in voi d'ogni virtute
e d'ogni operazion che merta pene.
So Paolo and Francesca, borne on the dark wind, like doves to the sweet nest: "O living
creature, gracious and benign,"
che visitando vai per l'aere perso
noi che tignemmo il mondo di sanguigno...
"Love took him... love took me... love brought us to one death." "Amor... amor... amor...
That day we read in it no further."
35)
35a)
English Gothic, 1180-1330, Wells, view from the northeast (CGB '66)
English (Wells), c. 1293-1306, Decorated Chapter House, especially Vault
(CGB '84)
Music:
English c. 1310, Rosa fragrans, roundelay, from V-LM 6015
In England a quieter harmony, in the Lady Chapel and Chapter House of Wells,
1300 and after, balances, within Gothic, an enlightenment of ease. So with the "Rosa
Fragrans", a roundelay to Mary.
(music continuing)
36)
English Norman to Decorated esp. 14th c., Chaddsley Corbett Church
(CGB '65)
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Symbolic History
Typical, the perfection of the small, wooden-roofed church, the comfort of every parish,
where in France small churches mostly ape the large. Chaddsley Corbett already implies
the well-being and liberal autonomy of the middle which made Shakespeare's island "this
blessed plot, this realm, this England".
37)
English c. 1300-20?, Queen Margaret, half length, Lincoln Cathedral [video
starts with a half-length from V37b, of the whole]
Same, detail of the face
Same, whole statue in its niche
V37a)
V37b)
The Lincoln Queen Margaret is perhaps of the early 1300's. Its human naturalness
suggests the music of the third and sixth, intervals which the English theorist Odington,
of the same time, first justifies, and on grounds of appeal: "Voices lead them forth into a
Rosa
sweet mixture."
(end
fragrans)
Yet this filling in of the human context accepts the old containment. What it
would take to break that limitation
a38)
Giovanni Pisano, 1302-11, The Theological Virtues, (Faith?), detail; Pisa
Cathedral Pulpit
G. Pisano, c. 1312, Margaret of Luxembourg Tomb, whole
G. Pisano 1301, detail of a Sibyl, Pistoia Pulpit
38)
V38a)
was a Promethean thrust.
Music:
Lorenzo da Firenze, c. 1340?, Sanctus, Syntagma, Seraphim 6052
Giovanni Pisano's last work, the now fragmentary tomb of Margaret of
Luxembourg (c. 1312), shapes the flesh and person of some soul rising on the slopes of
Purgatory. It is there that the composer Casella sings Dante's Canzona, "Amor, che nella
mente mi ragiona," which, if it survived, might complete a cognate trio. Having nothing
of Casella's, we settle for a "Second Generation" Sanctus by Lorenzo of Florence. It
claims, for all the chordal advance of the English, another realm of consciousness.
a39)
39)
G. Pisano, 1301, detail of another Sibyl, Pistoia Pulpit
G. Pisano, c. 1312, head of Margaret of Luxembourg
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Symbolic History
In the Vita Nuova, or New Life of 1294, Dante tells of his first meeting at the age
of nine with the eight year old Beatrice:
She appeared clothed in a most noble color, the humble and becoming
crimson of the blood, cinctured and adorned in a style suited to her
youthful age. At that instant I say truly that the spirit of life which
dwells in the most secret chambers of the heart began to tremble with
such violence that it appeared fearfully in the remotest pulses, and
trembling spoke these words: "Ecce deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur mihi." ("Here is a god stronger than I, who coming shall rule
over me.")
(end Sanctus, skipping 1st Hosanna)
40)
French, early 12th cent., Lust and Despair, Church of Tavant (Indre-et-Loire)
Go back a century and a half to Abelard's no less personal History of my
Calamity:
And now, my friend, I am going to expose to you all my weakness...
There was in Paris a young creature... formed in the prodigality of
nature... Heloise... I saw her... I loved her... We were united first in the
dwelling that sheltered our love and then in the hearts that burned
within us.
That earlier love was broken on the rack and wheel of medieval contempt of the world,
appearing as profane, self-condeming fire.
2nd 39)
Again Margaret of Luxembourg Tomb, detail of Margaret
Whereas in Dante, personal love is sacredly affirmed. As he promised in the Vita
Nuova, Beatrice is glorified as no other woman: both Holy Wisdom and the smiling
actuality of a remembered love:
Garlanded with olive over a white veil,
My lady appeared to me, a brightness clothed,
Under a green mantle, in the color of living flame;
And my spirit which for a long time now
Had not been overcome with such an awe,
Trembling and speechless as before in her presence...
Of its first love again felt all the power.
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2nd 40)
Symbolic History
Again, Tavant, Lust and Despair, detail
Where Abelard (if the letters are his) wrote to Heloise:
I satisfied my wretched desires in thee... Weep for thy Saviour, not for
thy seducer; for thy Redeemer, not for thy defiler...
41)
Spanish Romanesque, c. 1125?, Annunciation, San Vicente, Avila; + V detail
Of course, the incorporation of earthly beauty had already begun in the 12th
century and would be the flame of Gothic. It is Peter the Venerable who, taking Abelard's
body to Heloise, opens paradise to their love:
Thus, dear and venerable sister in God, him to whom you were united,
after your tie in the flesh, by the better and stronger bond of divine
love... the Lord now takes in your stead, or as another you, and warms
in his bosom, for the day of His coming... to restore him to you by His
grace.
42)
Upper Rhine, c. 1320, Konrad v. Altstetten, Manessa Minnesinger MS,
Heidelberg; first, V detail
Music:
Jehannot de l'Escurel, d. 1303: A vous, douce debonaire; Cape, VLM-6016
How the brief delight of flesh has flowered since then: Upper-Rhine, time of
Dante, with the "Douce debonaire" of Escurel, executed in Paris, 1303.
(cut Music)
a43)
43)
Duccio, 1308-11, The Annunciation, National Gallery, London
Duccio, 1308-11, Maesta, Christ and Magdalen, Duomo Mus., Siena
Most of all in Italy, beauty was sanctified — as by Guido Guinicelli, who, in the
Canzone Dante echoes, "Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore", when demanded of the old
God, "by what idolatry did you take vain love for Me?" answers: "No fault of mine if you
gave love your semblance."
What had prepared for that tender enactment? In this "Noli me tangere" by
Duccio (1308-11) the flame of Gothic line penetrates the Byzantine.
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44)
Symbolic History
Byzantine, 12th cent., St. John from Deesis Mosaic, Hagia Sophia,
Constantinople; first, V detail
That Byzantine which — spread from its Eastern revival over Italy — gives the
New Art an immediate Dark Age ground, an unleavened weight two centuries in France
had almost smiled away, ascetic base for the "high seriousness" Arnold praised in Dante:
I saw this threshing-floor that frets our hearts
Stretched from the high hills to the river's mouth...
a45)
Vb45)
45)
June 1996
Tuscan, 12th Cent., Badia Fiesolana, Florence
Baptistery, 11th cent., whole; Florence (CGB '84)
Same, closer detail (CGB '84)
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Symbolic History
While from the 11th century down, the Romanesque birth in Pisa and Florence
had reached for the proportions of Renaissance, as if to arrive there without Gothic
intervention. So the Badia of Fiesole, or San Miniato al Monte, or the Baptistery where
Dante says he broke a font to save one drowning, "nel mio bel San Giovanni" — from the
Florence of his great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, when the wealthy (Paradiso XV) "were
content with bare leather, and their womenfolk with spindle and thread."
a46)
46)
Cimabue, 1278-80, St. Francis, detail of Fresco, Madonna and Angels, Lower
Church, Assisi
Giotto, 1297-99, St. Francis frescoes, Dream of Innocent III, Assisi
But the French tutelage had already begun. It was from Abelard that Arnold of
Brescia took the passion which roused Rome; and St. Francis had, as it were, St. Bernard
for stern father and for romance mother, troubador song. That so individual a love should
have been chartered by the church rather than being pushed, like his followers, into
heresy, was a miracle requiring the explanation of Innocent III's dream — as Giotto
would paint it a century later — of Francis holding up the tottering Church.
47)
Antelami, 1204-11, David among the Blessed, Baptistery, Parma
In the art of St. Francis' own time, Antelami, also swayed from Provence, shows
such worship of the natural as Francis in his far-reaching free-verse hymn:
Altissimu, omnipotente, bon Signore...
Be praised, O Lord, with all of these thy creatures:
48)
Antelami, cont., Reaper (June from the Seasons), Parma
First of all for our noble brother the sun,
Who lightens the day here about us;
He is fair and bright with rare splendor
And stands for a sign — Most High — of thy dominion.
Be praised, O Lord, for sister moon and the stars...
...for our brother the cool wind,
And airs moist and serene and all weathers,
The sustenance and nurture of thy creatures.
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49)
Symbolic History
Antelami circle(?), c. 1210, Grape Harvest, Month of September, Ferrara,
Cathedral; + V detail
Be praised, O Lord, in gentle sister water,
Who is helpful and kind and very clean and comely.
Be praised, O Lord, in swift brother fire,
By whom the night is beautified and brightened,
And he is lusty and red and strong and jocund.
Be praised, O Lord, in our sister mother earth,
Who bears nourishing fruits and colored flowers and simples...
1st 50) Giotto, 1297-99, St. Francis Preaching to the Birds, Assisi, detail
Be praised, O Lord, for our sister the death of the body...
And may we serve Thee in the bonds of meekness. (CGB)
a51)
Apulian, mid-13th cent., Bust of Emperor Frederick II, detail, Civic Mus.,
Barletta (video details from 2nd 51a, the whole)
1st 51) Apulian, 1239, Head of Pier delle Vigne, from Arch of Frederick II, Capua
The rebirth counterpole was Frederick II's revival of Rome, which founded the
modern state. Here is his answer to Papal calumny:
Let those who shrink from my support have the shame as well as the
galling burden of slavery. Before this generation and the generations
to come, I will have the glory of resisting this tyranny.
This bust from his destroyed Triumphal Arch is probably of Piero delle Vigne, who
appears among the suicides in Dante's Hell: "I... held both keys of Frederick's heart." But
the whole attempt was hounded into hell by the winds of a bleak season, such as blow
even in the statuary — no direct road to antique recovery.
2nd 50)
Again, Giotto, St. Francis Preaching to the Birds, whole
The Mirror of Perfection tells us that Francis wished to supplicate Frederick
for the love of God and me, to make a special law that no man should
take or kill our sisters the larks, nor do them any harm; likewise that all
the podestas or mayors of towns and the lords of castles and villages
should require men every year on Christmas Day to throw grain
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Symbolic History
outside the cities and castles, that our sisters the larks and other birds
may have something to eat.
Va2nd 51) Frederick II bust, whole, preview of 2nd 51a
For 2nd 51) Bonaventura Berlinghieri 1235, Stigmatization, from St. Francis
Panel, Church of S. Francesco, Pescia
2nd 51a)
Again, Frederick II bust, whole
Curious if the supplicant had come a few years later when Frederick was lopping
the hands and feet off certain papal messengers. In the faith-grip gentle Francis,
emaciated with fever and fasting, is stigmatized on the rock hill by the seraph of fire;
while enlightened Frederick, accused antichrist, rages at the clergy: "slaves to the world,
drunk with self-indulgence."
52 or V52)
Nicola Pisano, 1260, Pulpit, Baptistery, Pisa; + V detail
Yet it was from Frederick's court in Apulia that poetic currents flowed to Tuscany,
and that Nicola Pisano brought the massive Roman sarcophagus style of the 1260 Pisa
pulpit — another premature and perhaps abortive lunge at Renaissance. RomanesqueByzantine and revived Classic are here; the missing element
53)
Master of Naumburg, c. 1260, Last Supper, West Choir Screen, Naumburg
Cathedral
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Symbolic History
is Gothic. All over northern Europe that quest was finding its way: in the Master of
Naumburg about the same year, by the German genius for observation.
54)
Nicola Pisano, 1260, Nativity, from the Pisa Pulpit
While the marble forms of Nicola Pisano reach for the stateliness of an unknown
future, to fall back in mannered grandeur to the unthawed weight of Dark Age Rome —
nobly still-born.
55)
French Gothic, mid-13th Cent., Nativity, old Choir Screen, Chartres (CGB '81)
France burned with the art that could thaw, the love that could give them life. In
the immediate grace of this melting, the smile runs through cheek, arms, hand, every fold
of the robe.
2nd 54) Again, Nicola Pisano, Nativity, detail
Imagine a chemistry by which that spark could be poured through the hollow
fullness of the father, Nicola;
2nd 55) Again, Chartres Nativity, variant photo (V details the CGB 1st 55)
see it slide, gleaming, into solution there; the shapes stretch themselves, swirl,
56)
56a)
56b)
Giovanni Pisano, 1302-11, Nativity, det. Pulpit, Cathedral, Pisa
Giovanni Pisano, 1312-14, Madonna della Cintola, detail, Altar of Chapel of
Holy Girdle, Prato, Cathedral
Giovanni Pisano, c. 1312, Head of Temperance, fragment, Margaret of
Luxemburg Tomb, private collection, Switzerland
and become those of the son, Giovanni, in the other pulpit, of 1302-11, where the smile
wreathes the body in sensuous flame. It is the smile which runs through all grades of
Dante's Heaven: "il riso del universo" — "the smile of the universe"; "lo splendor degli
occhi suoi ridenti" — "the splendor of her laughing eyes", a smile that can make paradise
itself: "For in her eyes burned such a smile, I thought I plumbed with mine the depth of
my grace and paradise." It crowns Purgatory with the coming of Beatrice; it hovers with
yearning tenderness, "the desired smile" of romance, over the shadows of hell. By some
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
inexplicable transmutation, that Dark-Age "flying world", for all its violence and the
brunt of timeless rewards, grows benign and glad: "nell' aere dolce che dal sol s'allegra."
57 or wider V57)
Nicola Pisano, 1260, Sampson, from the Pulpit, Baptistery, Pisa
In both pulpits Sampson is the heroic nude. In Dante it is Ulysses who turns the
classical to infinite search. Nicola's Sampson has the frame but lacks the force —
the will and desire that drove
Me on, to discover the ultimate secrets
Of man, both of the evil and the good.
So I put out upon the high sea's peril...
58)
58a)
58b)
58c)
Giovanni Pisano, 1302-11, Sampson, from Pulpit, Cathedral, Pisa; + V detail
Andrea da Firenze, c. 1365, Sailboat, from Peter Walking the Waves, ceiling
of Spanish Chapel, Florence
Again, G. Pisano, Sampson, detail (video: closer detail, with return to whole)
Ambrogio Lorenzetti, 1337-9, Good Government in the Country, detail;
Palazzo Publico, Siena
We set our vessel's stern against the morning
And of our oars made wings for the mad flight,
Always a little on the left hand gaining.
Already night saw all the stars that circle
The other pole, and our own dropped so low
It did not rise above the ocean floor.
Five times the light that waxes under the moon
Was kindled and was quenched since first we entered
The ocean guarded by the pillared pass,
When there appeared before our eyes a mountain,
Brown with the distance, and it seemed so high
That I had never witnessed such another.
And we were glad, but gladness turned to grief;
For out of the new land came a great whirlwind
And on the fore part of the vessel beat.
Three times it made it whirl with all the water;
The fourth, the poop went up, the prow went down;
And the sea closed over us as it pleased Another.
Hemmed in the allegory where that mountain is Purgatory, not open but to Grace,
what sweeps through the passage like wind in the sails is a paean to the reckless voyage,
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Symbolic History
"il folle volo". And Giovanni's Sampson-Hercules, for all his Gothic rib-cage, has the
torque Michelangelo was to learn from. Though what art can loom like the "nova terra"
over the round of water: "Una montagna, bruna per la distanza ..."?
59)
V59a)
Giunta Pisano, c. 1250, Crucifix, detail S. Domenico, Bologna,
Cimabue, 1277-80, Crucifixion fresco, S. Francesco, Assisi (video returns to
a closer detail of 59)
As Byzantine broke to Gothic passion, there arose in Umbria, 1259, a frenzy of
penitential flagellants, a mania of atonement, in which Jacopone da Todi, a lawyer whose
wife had been crushed under a scaffold, went smeared with tar and feathers, like a beast
on all fours, lived to compose the "Stabat mater dolorosa/ juxta crucem lacrimosa," "The
Mother of Sorrows stood under the cross in tears," and, in Italian, the angular, savage
tenderness of "The Crucifixion":
Now the Mother and John
One grief has thrown down;
Arm in arm they are found
At the cross of the Son. (CGB)
Or his cry for the lash of disease, his punishment for God's death:
Che me creasti en tua diletta
Ed io t'ho morto a villania.
60)
S. Italian Miniature, c. 1280-90, Chivalric Scene, Petrarch's Livy, Bibl. Nat.,
Paris
Against which the lighter fancies of Gallic illumination enter with the play of
Folgore di San Giminiano's sonnets on the seasons:
Horses are galloping, coursers of Spain;
And men, clothed all in the fashion of France,
Sing and dance in the manner of Provence... (CGB)
61)
Coppo di Marcovaldo, c. 1266-8, Madonna and Child, S. Martino ai Servi,
Orvieto (video: upper part only)
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Symbolic History
The Italian feat is to blend in two generations those three style currents:
Romanesque-Byzantine, the Gothic wave, classical revival; and the resulting leap, as by
Trotsky's law of combined development, is from Coppo di Marcovaldo (c. 1266),
62)
Cimabue, c. 1280(?), Madonna Enthroned, fresco, Lower Church, Assisi
(video: upper part only)
to his pupil, Cimabue (c. 1280) who, as Dante says, bore the cry, until he was displaced in
turn by his own pupil,
a63)
b63)
63)
63a)
Giotto, 1304-6, Adoration of the Magi, Scrovegni Chapel, Padova (detail);
+ V closer detail
Giotto, 1304-6, Flight to Egypt, Padova
Giotto, 1304-6, Nativity, Padova (video shows 63a first)
Same, upper detail, angels (V after 63a shows 63, center; cf. V63)
Giotto (after 1300) in whose style of epic observation the three currents meet. As in
Giovanni Pisano, but with more calm, the very fabric of longing smiles: "lassu di sopra
in la vita serena" — "up there in the serene life". In Dante, it is the skipping four-stress
line which, varying the pentameter, as much as anything suspends joy in mystery:
Beatrice's voys of aungel, "Con angelica voce in sua favella" — like dawn in Purgatory,
earth brightening through its veil: "Dolce color d'oriental zaffiro" —
The sweet color of oriental sapphire
That gathered in the serene face of the skies
Pure from the center even to the first circle,
Restored forgotten gladness to my eyes,
As soon as I had come from the dead vapor
That had afflicted both my sight and heart.
The beautiful planet that gives love comfort,
Veiling the Fishes that came in her train,
Was shimmering all the east with laughter...
I looked where dawn was vanquishing the gray
Breath of morning, and as it fled before her,
I took far off the trembling of the sea...
(Though art again hardly parallels that mystic reach of nature: "si che di lontano/ conobbi
il tremolar della marina." )
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Symbolic History
In music that Italian half century offers (before Giovanni da Cascia) two
collections of monodic "Laude Spirituale", songs of the Penitentes.
2nd 61)
Music:
Coppo di Marcovaldo, Madonna, detail (video:
V2nd 61)
closer detail from
Italian, 13th cent., Laud to San Lorenzo, Tinayre, Lumen 32018
Curious that the earliest recorded, called 13th century, "Saint Laurence, martyr of love,"
is rendered by Tinayre,
2nd 62)
Cimabue, Madonna, detail (video: closer detail)
as with Byzantine and early Gothic affinities.
2nd 63)
2nd 63a)
Music:
(fade Music)
Giotto, Nativity, Padova (close detail)
Giotto, 1304-6, Head of Christ, from Noli me tangere, Padua
Italian, c. 1300, Lauda, Gloria in cielo (close), Meili, AS-l
While to the "Gloria in Cielo" called about 1300, Max Meili gives a Troubador richness
affined to the clarified passion of Giotto.
(end Music)
a64)
64)
Italian Gothic, 1228-53, View of the Upper Church of S. Francesco, Assisi
(CGB '84)
Italian Gothic, 1228-53 (frescoes c.1280-1300), Upper Church, interior, Assisi
(CGB '84)
Assisi was the crucible of the Giotto elixer. This upper church, vaulted by the
mid-13th century, witnessed one of the great creative
ferments of history. Cimabue was in charge. Artists came from all over Italy.
Attributions remain in doubt.
65)
Circle of Cimabue, c. 1280-90, Abraham and Isaac, Upper Church, Assisi
This Abraham and Isaac has been called Cimabue, Roman, Sienese. But no one could
dispute the force with which Gothic penetrates the symbol-world of Byzantine, wrenching
it from the timeless to the enormous drama of time.
June 1996
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66)
Symbolic History
Early Duccio(?), under Cimabue, c. 1280-90, Abraham and Angels, detail,
Upper Church, Assisi
In that circle of Cimabue, the painters of the rising generation were formed. It is
likely that Duccio was there, and this Abraham and the Angels (detail) has been called his
earliest work. As in his last, he stresses two elements of the alchemy, refining Gothic line
in a solemnity of Byzantine.
67)
Cavallini, 1291, Birth of the Virgin Mosaic, S. Maria in Trastevere, Rome
The third, Classical revival, Cavallini may have brought from Rome. How
consciously his Birth of the Virgin there has absorbed the quiet space of the antique.
Unfortunately, his earlier works are lost, and nobody knows how this Trastevere mosaic
of 1291
68)
Giotto(?) or School of Cavallini(?), 1291-2, Esau and Isaac, Upper Church,
Assisi
relates to the Assisi Esau and Isaac of the same time. This has been called Cavallini, or
school, and taken as a point of departure for Giotto. Others have been as certain that here
the youthful Giotto opened the space Cavallini took back to Rome.
2nd 67) Again, Cavallini mosaic (detail)
Whatever the dates, such Roman geometry, where a servant-girl as river goddess
harmoniously pours into a classical urn, must have helped a Tuscan prodigy to what he
required. Though retrospective Cavallini
2nd 68) Again, Easu and Isaac (detail)
at once yields, robe, space and gesture, to what is surely here the genius of Giotto. In the
melt of Byzantine, French and classical, the magister forms — as much or more than
Giovanni Pisano, a cognate for Dante — cognate for the Ars Nova that would peak in
Landini.
Music:
69)
Landini c. 1360(?), Nessun ponga sperança (Cape), ARC 3003
Detail of 68, head of Isaac (so video; slide show uses a black & white photo)
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Symbolic History
In this face of the blind Isaac, the trans-realities of earth and spirit corruscate like
that dawn on the shore of Purgatory for which we had no parallel. In such light Cato had
just appeared:
Long his beard and streaked with white and his hair
The same... And the rays of the four holy stars
Glowed on his face, as if the sun were before him.
At Cato's direction Dante goes to bathe his face, "where dawn stills the morning breeze",
and he knows, "far off, the trembling of the sea."
(end Landini after 1st stanza)
70)
Giotto, 1303-6, view from chancel, Arena Chapel (degli Scrovegni), Padova;
+ V details (using V70a, b, & c)
Giotto's masterpiece is the Arena Chapel in Padua, from the time of Dante's first
banished wanderings. Like the Divine Comedy, it is a numbered Gothic synthesis, three
within three: above, an empyrean of stars, with gold-medallion saints and Mary; below in
monochrome, Virtues and Vices, allegorical powers of this world; between, three rows of
the Coming: Christ's ancestry; his Incarnation and life to the Betrayal; his Passion and
Resurrection, to the Descent of the Holy Spirit. On the end wall, opposite the altar,
Judgment turns time to eternity.
71)
71a)
Giotto, c. 1306, Justice and Injustice, Scrovegni Chapel, Padova
Same, detail, scene of injustice
Small scenes under Justice and Injustice carve their actuality in the life of man,
the bad as always stronger, that raped Italy of Dante's Sordello — "hostel of sorrows" —
Ahi serva Italia, di dolore ostello...
72)
From same, Marriage at Cana, and Pieta, with four Correspondences;
+ V details
In such a plan, the life of Christ requires its Old Testament Correspondences.
They occupy small windows between the large. Upper left, Moses strikes water from the
rock, prototype of Cana, where Christ turns water into wine. While the creation of Adam
looks to the next scene (not shown) of Lazarus raised from the dead. Below, Jonah into
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
the whale, marks Christ's death; the Lion of Judah breathing life into the cubs, his
harrowing of Hell.
As in Dante, tragic energies are gripped in the theological frame.
a73)
73)
Carolingian, c. 880, Second cover of Lindau Gospels, Crucifixion, J. Pierpont
Morgan Lib, NY
Post-Carolingian, later 9th cent., Crucifixion, Gospel of Francis II, Bibl.
Nat., Paris; + V detail
Music:
Abbot Columban, 814, Planctus Caroli (Deller), Everest 3452
The 9th century stripped field of the blind world and faith in God did not give
earth the dignity for tragic pain — even in the lament for Charlemange. When Dante's
Fortune, "beyond the intervention of human intelligence... turns her wheel and rejoices in
bliss," we do not question; we accept. As Beatrice says: "For our justice to appear
injustice to mortal eyes is an argument of faith and not of heresy." But against that Dark
Age resignation comes the surge of giant characters, whose pride and pain are no longer
to be chanted over with the rest of a universe of fallen vanity.
(fade Planctus)
74)
Giovanni Pisano, 1301, Slaughter of the Innocents, detail, Pulpit, Cathedral,
Pistoia
Music:
Guillaume de Machault, c.1377, from Ploures Dames, Columbia
M. 413(3)
This is the vortex in which Western tragedy is born; and it is born in Giovanni
Pisano's Pulpits (here from Pistoia), as in Dante,
75)
V75a)
Giotto, 1304-6, Deposition (Pieta), Scrovegni Chapel, Padova
Same, detail of John
or in Giotto; it is born in Ars Nova — Guillaume de Machault — though in germ,
suspended in the bare fifths of resolving creed. (fade Machault) Yet by that very
suspension, the stripped pocket-tragedies of Dante burn with fiercer outrage than
Shakespeare, reaching for human containment, could afford.
a2nd 74) Giovanni Pisano, c. 1297, Haggai detail of head; Victoria and Albert
Museum, London
June 1996
Dante: Threshold of 1300
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�C.G. Bell
2nd 74)
Symbolic History
Again, G. Pisano, Pistoia Innocents, another detail
In the thirty-third canto of Hell, Count Ugolino, gnawing the skull of Ruggiero,
who had imprisoned him with his children, speaks:
There is a narrow opening in the tower
Called since we were there by hunger's name,
In which it seems that other men must suffer;
Through that crevice I had seen wax and wane
More moons than few, before the veil of the future
Was rifted for me in a terrible dream ...
When I awoke in the dark before the dawn,
I heard those of my sons who were with me there
Crying out in their sleep, calling for bread.
You are hard indeed if you do not shudder
Seeing what I foresaw; if you cannot weep
At this, how will you ever weep for another?
2nd 75) Again, Giotto, from Pieta, central group, Padova
2nd 75a) Giovanni Pisano, 1301, detail of Crucifixion, Pulpit, Pistoia
We were all awake now, and the hour drew near
At which our food was brought us by the jailor;
And by his dream each was inclined to fear.
And then I heard them nailing up the issue
Of the horrible tower, and without a word
I sat and looked into my children's faces.
I did not weep; no, I had turned to stone;
They wept, and little Anselm said: "Father,
Why do you look so, what is it they have done?"
76)
76a)
76b)
Again, Giotto, Pieta, close detail of Mary and Christ, Padova
Same, another detail, mourning women
Same, another detail, grieving angels above
And still that day and all the night following
I did not weep nor answer them at all,
Until the sun brought earth another dawning.
Now when the first dull rays entered the gloom
Of that lamentable prison, and I beholding
Saw four faces the image of my own —
I gnawed my hands for grief. And they believing
June 1996
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Symbolic History
From this that I was driven by the wish
Of eating, suddenly raised themselves, speaking:
"Father, believe our suffering would be less
If you fed here; what you have put upon us
You may strip off, this miserable flesh."
I calmed myself, not to give them more sadness.
Through that day and another we sat mute —
Earth, hard-hearted, why did you not open?
a77)
77)
Again, Padua Frescoes, from Kiss of Judas, lower spread (or Va77, whole)
Same, detail of Christ and Judas; + V closer detail (V77a)
June 1996
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Symbolic History
When we had come to the fourth day, Gaddo spoke,
And crying: "Father, why do you not help me?"
He threw himself face downward at my feet.
And there he died; and even as you see me
I saw them one by one fall down all three,
The fifth day and the sixth; and over them I
Already blind, confirming what I knew
Groped two days calling the dead. Then finally
Fasting did what anguish could not do.
He turned his eyes in when this speech was done
And fastened his teeth again on the torn skull
That were strong as a dog's, ravening at the bone.
Giotto's Gaze of Christ, enfolded in the jealous robe, against that of Judas, a peak of
concentration in all art: "Would you betray the son of man with a kiss?"
(pause)
78)
Erwin von Steinbach, d. 1318, West Front, Strasbourg
One can no more neglect in Dante the grip of the faith-frame than the vast
humanity released there. By that humanity indeed, the frame itself is daringly
transformed.
Two facades, two late-Gothic containments, both centered about 1300. In the
north, Strasbourg, the energized ascent of Erwin von Steinbach.
79)
Italian, esp. 1290-1380, Giovanni Pisano and school, upper Façade, with
Dome and Tower, Siena (CGB '86; or V variants, CGB ‘48)
Here, Siena, where Gothic went down into the sun-wreathed slopes
of the South to elaborate, as a conscious work of art, its temporal relations.
From those facade-designs, contrasting heads:
a80)
Vb80)
80)
June 1996
Franco-German, end of the 13th cent., Prophet with a scroll, waist up; West
Portal, Strasbourg
Same, a different view of the Prophet's head
From the same Portal, another prophet
Dante: Threshold of 1300
36
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
A Strasbourg prophet, as if the Medieval had gathered its new life for some preLutheran warning — about 1300, the Strawberry Song: "Hie vor dô wir kinder wâren ...
Picking berries on that ground
We were marred with stains like wounds ...
A child walked deep in the grass;
In fear we heard his cry of loss:
Children, beware, the snake is here;
He has bit our own playfere;
That wound they say will never heal;
He is accursed and will be still ...
Did you know five virgins delayed
So long in the meadow where they played
That the bridegroom closed the hall?
For all their plaint and call,
The bailiff stripped them of their bright gowns,
And left them naked to their wounds. (CGB)
80+1)
80+1a)
80+1b)
Again, G. Pisano, Simeon (CGB '86)
Variant of 2nd 75a) G. Pisano, Christ's head, Crucifixion, Pistoia
G. Pisano, Simeon, closer detail
From Siena, the Giovanni Pisano Simeon, where we began. So Dante humanized
the way of salvation. It is from the great Image of Man in Crete that the stream of hellsuffering flows, which — Felix Culpa, the snake reared in the desert, the new Adam from
the old — becomes the pilgrim's road to the highest good, in the flesh to see God, that
ring of light which bears the image of a Man. As Langland follows Dante: "I never saw
Christ in truth but as myself in a mirror."
There is the incarnate mystery. To be God and Man is not to be half and half but
absolutely both, each validated by its opposite. So with the Dante of faith and reason,
humility and daring. The venture of indwelling spirit, by which Virgil commands (with
Joachim de Floris) "Be your own pope and king!" — is not impaired by the purging
discipline at the summit of which it stands:
Libero, dritto e sano è tuo arbitrio ...
Per ch' io te sovra te corono e mitrio.
Your will now is upright, free and whole —
June 1996
Dante: Threshold of 1300
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
I crown and miter you lord of your own.
June 1996
Dante: Threshold of 1300
38
�
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SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
12. Ars Nova: 14th Century
CHARLES G. BELL
ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
or
1260 CANYON ROAD
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501
September 1995
Last Revised January ‘96
�Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
12. Ars Nova: 14th Century
1)
1a)
Chinese, attributed to Li ch'eng 10th cent., but probably 11th cent., Buddhist
Temple in the Mountains, detail of hanging scroll, Kansas City
Same, closer detail of the Temple
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
Coleridge's Road to Xanadu led from Purchas' Pilgrimage through the "green and
fountainous wilderness" of Bartram's Florida; but the actual journey to the Khan's
summer palace at Shandu, north of Peking, was described by Marco Polo, with other
marvels of the opulent East — tales for which the Venetians of 1300 called him "Marco
Millione," fable-monger.
The architecture of that China has largely perished, but pictures, from the 9th
century down, display a space and atmosphere unparallelled in Dark Age Europe.
2)
Spanish (Asturian), c. 845, exterior, Church of S. Miguel de Lillo
Europe, shortly to transform the world, juts from the landmass of Asia and Africa
(linked by racial migrations even to America) like the eye of a potato. And through the
Dark Ages — as in this forest outpost of the Byzantine, a small 9th-century church near
Oviedo, in the rim of Spain not quite conquered by the Moors — the geographical
disproportion might equally have applied to the culture.
3)
9/2/95
Mexican, Totonac, before 9th cent., El Tajin (CGB '75)
Ars Nova: 14 Century
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Over how much of the globe were those the centuries of great temple-building
civilizations: in Mexico the forest and upland cities whose offshoots would astonish
Spanish conquerors, even after 600 years, when Europe had peaked to the Renaissance —
here one of many pyramids at El Tajin, north of Vera Cruz.
4)
Japanese, c. 749-60 (rebuilt c. 1700), Buddha Hall of Todai-Ji
And all over Asia, religious houses, monasteries and abbeys, with gilded idols, as
Marco Polo says, "in masterly style" — this from 8th-century Japan (rebuilt about 1700,
after a fire), the Great Buddha Hall of Todai-Ji — a transplant from Tang China, like the
silk painting and poetry, or the music of the bamboo flute.
Music:
5)
Shakuhachi played by Goro Yamaguchi, from "A Bell Ringing in the
Empty Sky," Nonesuch 72025 (1/2 through)
Chinese, c. 9th cent. (Tun-Huang), Kuan-yin leading a soul toward Paradise,
British Museum, London
From China, about the 9th century, Kuan-yin leading a soul toward paradise;
6)
6a)
Japanese (Kamakura), 13th cent., The Descent of Amida, Kyoto, Zenrin Ji
Same, detail ['95 video addition]
from Japan, 13th, the mystical descent of Amida.
(fade Shakuhachi, on low note)
7)
Indian (Orissa), c 975 A.D., Mukteswara temple at Bhubaneswar
Music:
"Ritual for Attaining the Quality of Spiritual Adepts" (close), Mus. Anthol.
of Orient, Tibet I (BM 30 L 2009)
In the then Buddhist center of India, the Mukteswara temple at Bhubaneswar —
with ritual music preserved in Tibet.
8)
8a)
Cambodia, early 12th cent., Angkor Wat, Temple to Vishnu (or V8)
Same, c. 1200, Buddha figures in former Vishnu shrine ['95 video addition]
From the jungles of Cambodia, where the Kingdom of the Khmers rose toward the
12th century climax of Angkor...
9/2/95
Ars Nova: 14 Century
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
(fade Buddhist Ritual)
9)
Mohammedan (Abbasid), 842-52, Minaret of the Great Mosque of Samarra;
video uses V9, a wider view
Or the power of Islam, spread at its height from the Indus through Spain, with its
centuries of Moslem and Jewish lore: Avicenna on geology, precursing Leonardo by 500
years:
Mountains may be due to two different causes. Either they result from
upheavals of the earth's crust, such as might occur in violent
earthquake; or they are the effect of water, which cutting for itself a
new route, has denuded the valleys...
(An argument still pursued in Goethe's Faust.)
How these world glories overshadow
10)
Asturian Spain, c. 845, interior, Santa Cristina de Lena, near Oviedo
all Christian Europe could vault in its time of troubles —
Music:
Mozarabic, 9th cent., lst Lamentation, MHS 1584
the followers of Charlemagne barely holding out against Moors, Vikings, Magyars. Here
an interior of another 9th-century church of Asturian Spain, with the Mozarabic chant
which, as revived, can hardly be distinguished from Gregorian.
(fade
Lamentation)
Who could have guessed the germinal force of that backward landmass, that
potato's eye?
11)
11a)
Norman French, c. 1151, Geoffrey Plantagenet tomb-plaque, Le Mans
Cathedral; first, video detail of face, Va11 ['95 video addition]
Same, upper half of the figure
Yet from the first Crusade, the earliest reaching of Romanesque toward Gothic,
the scale is tipped.
9/2/95
Ars Nova: 14 Century
3
�C.G. Bell
Music:
Symbolic History
Richard Coeur-de-Lion, 1193, "Je nuns hons pris," AS 18
Through the enamel flattening of a tomb-plaque in Le Mans, Geoffrey Plantagenet draws
the sword of redeemed heraldic self, the fleur-de-lys, the rampant lion — keen as the
Trouvère cry of his grandson Richard Coeur-de-Lion from his Dürenstein captivity.
a12 & 12)
Arnolfo di Cambio, 1277, Statue of Charles I of Anjou, King of Sicily,
Capitoline Museum, Rome; three-fourths and full-face views, with video
detail of a12 [so 1995 video]
(cut Richard Coeur-de-Lion)
The earth-assertion is bolder by the Italy of Dante's youth: here, from his Valley
of Princes, "colui dal maschio naso", Charles of Anjou, carved, 1277, by Arnolfo di
Cambio, architect of the Cathedral of Florence. Thus from the close of Dante's De
Monarchia:
Twofold are the ends which unerring Providence has ordained for man:
the bliss of this life, typified by the earthly Paradise, and the bliss of
life eternal... And since none, or very few, can reach temporal
happiness unless mankind enjoys the tranquility of peace... this must
be the constant aim of him who guides the globe and whom we call the
Roman Prince, in order that, on this threshing floor, mortals may exist
free and in peace.
As if the travels of Marco Polo had set the half-barbaric but exploratory West,
already individual, outward, utopian,
Va13)
13)
13a)
V13b)
13c)
Li Ti, c. 1150, Hunter Retuning in the Snow, whole (Iris) ['95 video
revision]
Same, a central detail
Chinese, Yen Hui (Yuan), 13th cent., Taoist Immortal, in crippled beggar's
body, sees himself taking the Sky Road, Kyoto, Japan ['95 video revision]
Same, detail
Chinese (Sung), 11th-12th cent., A goddess carried away on a Phoenix,
Museum, Peking
Music:
9/2/95
Shakuhachi, again "A Bell Ringing in the Empty Sky," near close,
Nonesuch 72025
Ars Nova: 14 Century
4
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
against the continuance of an Eastern passive, meditational way, its roots coeval with the
soul-search of the Greek and Alexandrian — the Tao Te Ching (CGB, from Waley):
The way that can be told of is not an Unvarying Way...
All things, however they flourish, return to the root from which they
grew;
This return to the root is called Quietness.
Quietness is called submission to Fate...
Only one who rids himself of desire sees the Essences...
The ten thousand things are born of Being, but Being itself is born of
Not-being...
Therefore the sage arrives without going,
Sees all without looking,
Does nothing, yet achieves everything...
(close Shakuhachi)
The West as if created to revolutionize that Oriental transmission of quietist dream —
14)
Dante Death Mask, 1321, one of three supposed copies, Palazzo Vecchio,
Florence [or V14, wider view]
down to the Victorian blatancy of Tennyson's claim: "Better fifty years of Europe than a
cycle of Cathay."
In all history two cities stand out as transformational, Athens and Florence; and
while no maker can be isolated in such an interplay, Florentine Dante (of this alleged
death mask) comes as close as any to world-center.
15)
Michelino, 1465, Dante and his Book, Cathedral, Florence
Thus the next century saw him, by the domed and towered town, guide to the
eternal realms, Hell, Purgatory, the starry spheres, which his art has humanized,
mediating the incarnate birth everywhere nascent in Gothic Christianity — a birth which
reached at once toward Reformation and Renaissance.
16)
German Gothic, 1290-98, Head of a Prophet, Strasbourg, W. Front
The North was no less roused: Roger Bacon, 1271 — like the prophets of
Strasbourg:
9/2/95
Ars Nova: 14 Century
5
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
More sins reign in these days than in any past age... The Holy See is
torn by deceit and fraud... The new Orders, horribly decayed, follow
lechery, gluttony, pride... Princes, barons, knights, oppress one another
and the people with wars and exactions — the people more debased
than tongue can tell... The ancient philosophers, though without
quickening grace, lived incomparably better than we... Among the wise
there is no doubt but that the church must be purged.
Yet that lean monastic reproof
a17)
17)
17a)
Giovanni Pisano, 1302-10, Prophet from the Pulpit, Pisa (A of 17)
Double: [A] Pisano, Prophet from the Pulpit, and [B] Bernini, 1620, Head of
Neptune, detail, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Bernini: B of 17; while video has shown the Double, then A; again, Double,
then B, detail
swells in the Divine Comedy to such deliberate might as Giovanni Pisano gave the
prophets of the Pisa pulpit (left) or the Pistoia inscription:
Giovanni carved it, who does no empty works — born of Nicola but
blessed with greater science — him Pisa bred and gave knowledge
over things of sight.
While Dante's Peter flames against his Church:
Rapacious wolves dressed in the robes of shepherds
Are seen from here in all the Christian pastures — Avenging wrath of
God, how long, how long? (CGB)
(Paradiso XXVII)
No wonder the opening prophecy of a saving greyhound, VELTRO (V and U
interchangeable) would seem a Lutheran anagram: LUTERO.
And as Pisano's gesture of assertion points over 300 years to Bernini's conscious
Baroque (right); so Dante's St. Peter has only to widen the bellows and open the stops of
Milton's cloudier organ, to become in "Lycidas" that "Pilot of the Galilean Lake":
He shook his Miter'd locks, and stern bespake,
How well could I have spar'd for thee, young swain,
Enow of such as for their bellies sake,
Creep and intrude, and climb into the fold...
9/2/95
Ars Nova: 14 Century
6
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Blind Mouthes!
18)
Double: [A] Hellenistic, 1st cent. B.C., Medici Venus, Uffizi; and [B] G.
Pisano 1302-10, Temperance, Pulpit, Pisa; + V detail of Double
In Dante's Ulysses, recovery of the antique seeds the future: "And of our oars
made wings for the mad flight." So Giovanni Pisano's Temperance (right) remakes the
Classical Venus de Medici (left). "Instead of looking in the same direction as her body
and thus affirming her existence in the present," Kenneth Clark writes in his book on The
Nude, "she turns and looks upward over her shoulder toward the promised world of the
future." Clark does not pursue how that sowing of negation raises a body of actual flesh
and blood, energized by the unfolding of Christian paradox — as, in Weber and Tawney,
Christendom hosts the Capitalism it condemns.
a19 and 19)
G. Pisano, c.1284-96, Sibyl (contrasting details of the head), Cathedral
Museum, Siena
It is somehow the hallmark of the Divine Comedy to give life-glory to what is
theologically disclaimed: Paolo and Francesca, lashed on the dark wind — (compelling
as Giovanni Pisano's Sibyl):
When we read how the desired smile was kissed by such a lover,
(Quando leggemmo il disiato riso/ esser baciato da cotanto amante),
this one, who will never be parted from me, kissed my mouth all
trembling (la bocca mi baciò tutto tremante.) The book became our gobetween; that day we read in it no further (quel giorno più non vi
leggemmo avante).
1st 20) Norman French, 1195-99, Richard Coeur-de-Lion's Chateau Gaillard on the
lower Seine
Music:
French, 13th cent., Dance, (Cape) AS 16 (A,2)
When the blood of the North, northern poetry and dance, the chivalric castle —
here Richard Coeur-de-Lion's Chateau Gaillard over the Seine — (fade French Dance)
respond to the stimulus of Italy, Roman, Byzantine, Moorish —
9/2/95
Ars Nova: 14 Century
7
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
a21)
Italian, c. 1240, Frederick II's Castel del Monte, Apulia, from a distance,
over pine trees (CGB '84)
1st 21) Same, Castel del Monte, from closer (CGB,'84)
Music:
Italian, 14th cent., Lament of Tristan, AS-16 (B,2)
they take the heightened torque of conscious mind and person: — the Castel del Monte,
built for Frederick II fifty years later in Apulia — a pride like that to which Dante
compares the giants who rim the pit of lowest hell and whom Jove still threatens when he
thunders.
Even the musical dance, in the Italian Lament of Tristan, 14th century, draws its
passions to the formal contrast of supertonic against tonic phrase.
(fade Lament of Tristan)
2nd 20)
Music:
9/2/95
Chateau Gaillard, nearer view of 20,
Again French, 13th cent., Dance
Ars Nova: 14 Century
8
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
The French 13th-century dance has not a shadow of that consciousness.
So too with plot. In the old French romance of "The Palfrey," the timeless is
hardly stretched by human will. The knight does not scheme to get the rich vavasour's
daughter, nor she to avoid the knight's uncle, her father's choice. It is the vavasour who
requests the knight's horse to bear his daughter. In self-sacrifice the knight accedes.
Moonrise misleads the bridal party; the horse, "with the will and guidance of God," brings
the girl through dreamlike forests to the castle of her love. In that plot nothing is plotted.
(close Estampie)
2nd 21) Again Castel del Monte, view of portal (CGB '84)
A century later, in Boccaccio's "Falcon", also of a wealthy woman and a poor
man, stellar chance admits the tug of will: Frederigo wills to sacrifice his falcon to his
love; Madam Giovanna wills to marry him for his act.
(close Lament
of Tristan)
22)
22A)
22B)
22c)
Double: [A] French Gothic, mid-13th cent., Shepherd from the Old Jubé,
Chartres (CGB '80); and [B] G. Pisano, 1302-11, Musica, from the Pulpit,
Cathedral of Pisa
A of 22: Shepherd, Chartres; video: detail only
B of 22: Musica, Pisa; video: detail only
G. Pisano, c. 1312, Head of Temperance, from Margaret of Luxenbourg's
Tomb, Priv. Collection (here video repeats the Double, 22)
Such aesthetic form-shaping assimilates the Pastourelle of 13th-century France to
the Italy of the "sweet new style." The French poem has the naive charm of the shepherd
of the old Choir Screen at Chartres (left):
Riding out the other day
From Saint Quentin to Cambrai,
I saw a shepherdess who stood,
In a wood,
Her color like the rose in May,
Who sang: I have a true love
Deft and gay,
Though I am dark of hue. (CGB)
En non Deu, J'ai bel ami,
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Cointe et joli,
Tant soie je brunete.
When Dante's friend Cavalcanti seized on the form, "In un boschetto trovai
pastorella" ("In a small wood I found a shepherdess"), its passion sets a torch to the earthdenials where it burns: [Pound]
She drew me on to a cool leafy place,
Where I gat sight of every coloured blossom,
And there I drank in so much summer sweetness
It seemed Love's god connived at its completeness.
Menommi sotto una freschetta foglia,
La dov' io vidi fior d'ogni colore;
E tanto vi sentio gioi' e dolzore,
Che Dio d'Amor mi parve ivi vedere.
Such arts of the profane have not survived, though flesh makes a related plea (right) in the
smiling translucence of Giovanni Pisano.
23)
23a)
Arnolfo di Cambio, c. 1281, Thirsty Old Woman, Perugia
Giotto, 1306, Injustice, detail, Arena Chapel, Padua; + V closer detail
Wherever the Gothic flame strikes, it kindles, in the timeless, a revelational
realism — thus Arnolfo di Cambio's Old Woman from a fountain, unforgettable as
Dante's swollen counterfeiter in the fever of dropsical thirst:
You who pass by, pity the grief of Master
Adam. I had what I desired in life;
Now I crave a single drop of water.
Always with me are the little streams
That down their cool rills murmur to the Arno
From the green summits of the Casentine,
And parch me worse in memory than this fever. (CGB)
In the polytonal modulations of Giovanni da Cascia, music, about 1320, explores
such descriptive intensities: here the setting of a single word for gloomy thickets, "cupi"
— thick as Dante's wood of suicides in the Inferno: "Non fronde verde, ma di color
fosco;/ non rami schietti, ma nodosi e 'nvolti;/ non pomi v'eran, ma stecchi con tosco..."
Music:
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Giovanni da Cascia, c. 1320, from Per larghi prati, Phil 802904
Ars Nova: 14 Century
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As these chords stretch a residually bare-fifth structure,
a24)
24)
Giotto, 1297-1300, St. Francis' Miraculous Spring, Upper Church, Assisi,
especially the mountain background [cf. Va24 video revision, '95]
Double: [A] Roman, c. 10 A.D.(?), Temple of Minerva, portico, Assisi; and
[B] Giotto, 1300, Homage to St. Francis, Upper Church, Assisi
the art of Giotto and his followers reaches for the basis of its earthly claim. Cennini's
advice almost a century after this Giotto St. Francis — how to paint a mountain: set up a
jagged rock in the studio and paint it large — reminds us that the very seeing of objects
was suspended in the nominal (mountain is rock). Could Giotto's eyes have shown him
the Augustan temple in the square of Assisi as slim and weightless as he has painted it,
though he could walk every day under its actual brooding mass? How great, then, the
recovery which Renaissance required.
a25)
25)
Giotto, 1297-1300, Christmas at Greccio, whole, Assisi; + V detail
Same, Christmas at Greccio, closer detail of Cross
Music:
Again, Giovanni da Cascia, same passage, but starting earlier at
"entrando"
So with Dante's explanation of spots on the moon, where he invokes the strangest
experiment with mirrors, to dismiss material cause in favor of an immediate and occult
operation of God's virtue. Or Giotto's startling naturalism: the Greccio cross suspended
against the sky, made surreal by the tensionless ring placed not where it should be, but
where it will show, on the back side of the pole.
a26)
26)
26a)
Giotto, 1304-06, Marriage Feast at Cana, Scrovegni (Arena) Chapel, Padua; +
V detail
Double: details of a26 and 26a (video takes these singly, as shown)
Giotto, 1304-26, Meeting at the Golden Gate, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua;
+ V detail
Everywhere causal imagination lays hold of a world shrouded in faith acceptance.
Why did they run out of wine at the Feast of Cana? Giotto's glutton answer (right) is as
naively comic as Dante's Ciacco in Hell, or Belacqua dawdling and joking on the slopes
of Purgatory.
(close da Cascia)
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On the other hand, at the joyful meeting of Joachim and Anna before the Golden
Gate of Jerusalem, it is from symbolic transreality that the hooded dark figure of Sibylline
prophecy interrupts a delight from which Mary, with the sword that pierced her heart,
would spring.
27)
Giotto, 1304-06, Three Heads of Christ, from Scrovegni Chapel, Padua
27a, b, c) Same, right, left, and center details, separately
Here, as in the pocket tragedies of Dante, a realism of Gothic suspension — what
we can only call symbolic realism — drives a temporal wedge into the eternal kingdoms.
The projection of person into creed, which marks these Christ-heads from Giotto's Padua
Chapel — (left) from the hypnotic raising of Lazarus; (far right) lashing the moneychangers out of the temple; (center) the mystic removal from accusing Caiaphas: "Thou
hast said" — no less attends Dante's passage "through an eternal place": his fury on the
wrathful Styx: "I saw him so fanged by the muddy people, that still I thank and praise
God for it." — his pity for the noble damned: "Are you here... Siete voi qui, ser
Brunetto?" — up to the smiling peace of Piccarda, lost and found: "E'n la sua volontade è
nostra pace."
28)
28a)
Double: [A] Roman Christian, mid-3rd cent.(?), Resurrection of Lazarus,
Catacombs of St. Callixtus, Rome; and [B] Giotto, 1304-06, Lazarus fresco,
cropped, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua; + V single of A
B of 28: Giotto, Lazarus fresco; + V detail
In two treatments of the Raising of Lazarus, that heightening of drama looms (as
in recorded masses our Solesmes-droned incipits break to polyphony — here the Tournai
Creed).
Music:
Missa Tournai, c.1300-30, Credo, opening, SAWT 9517-A Ex
(fade)
On the left, the scene from the Catacombs of St. Calixtus (3rd century) dissolves
classical outwardness in Gospel mystery: "If it were not so, I would have told you."
But Giotto's Padua fresco, from which we have just detailed Christ's summoning
face, in its bold grappling with the scripture ("Lord, by this time he stinks"), matches
Dante's most startling encounters — Buonconte da Montefeltro, in Purgatory:
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1'angel di Dio mi prese. . .
God's angel took me; and a spirit of hell
Cried: "You of heaven, with right do you rob me?
You take this shadow to eternal weal
For one small tear that defends him from me;
But on his hulk I will work otherwise. (CGB)
(So the charged sky, loosing floods, sweeps the corpse down the Arno.)
29)
Double: [A] Irish, c. 800, Temptation of Christ, Book of Kells, Trinity College,
Dublin, + V detail of single; and [B] Duccio, 1303-11, Temptation, from the
Predella of the Maesta, Frick Collection, New York City; + V single
In this pair, the Kells' Temptation of Christ, about 800 (left) offers a first
emergence of drama from the Dark-Age symbolic and caligraphic; yet how could this
cockroach
Satan,
this
bodiless
Lord
of
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Flies, stage a real temptation? If we leap from that over 500 years, the Temptation from
Duccio's Maesta (right) penetrates Sienese Byzantine (about 1305) with the already
advancing spearhead of Giotto. Here the allegorical kingdoms of this world begin to
spread themselves before the dramatic precursor of Milton's conscious Messiah.
30)
Double: [A] S. Italian, c. 1260, Mosaic detail, Apse, Salerno Cathedral; and
[B] Giotto, 1304-06, Wedding Procession, detail, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua;
first double, then 30A and 30B, singles
How truly Vasari saw Giotto as the turning point from Byzantine to the new
nature and humanity. From the apse mosaic of Salerno Cathedral (left), we sample what
he calls "that gross and incompetent age," inherited from the Greek and Roman fall:
the great artists having died out... the few Greeks who survived,
belonging to the old but not the Ancient world, could only trace
outlines on a ground of color... Over and over again they produced
figures in the same style... standing on tiptoe and staring as if
possessed... as can be seen in every old church in all the cities of Italy.
While, Giotto's Bridal Procession of the Virgin, in its melodious dignity of space, renews
the wonder of Vasari's praise:
And it was indeed miraculous that in those days Giotto could paint
with such sublime grace, especially when we consider that he learned
his art, so to speak, without any instructor.
Though there is a liability in separating Gothic observation from the old Godpossession of supernatural forms. Giotto's miracle is his harmonization of the sacred —
his deification of earth's beauty.
31)
31a)
Triple: [A] S. German, c 1290, Queen Emma, Emmeramskirche, Regensburg
(CGB '59); [B] Duccio, 1308-11, St. Catherine, from the Maesta, Museo del
Duomo, Siena; and [C] Botticelli, 1483-85, Madonna of the Magnificat,
detail, Uffizi, Florence
Duccio, St Catherine, B of the triple 31
By 1300 the saintly queens of transalpine Gothic (this Emma of Regensburg, left)
had brought the chivalric to such refinement as would sweeten through Duccio (center),
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the St. Catherine of his Maesta, about 1310 — as in poetry through Dante's Beatrice and
Petrarch's Laura — toward the Simonetta Virgins of Botticelli (right).
Thus Petrarch of Laura in Paradise:
God's chosen angels and his spirits blest,
Tenants of heaven, when my lady died,
Came in sacred wonder to her side:
"What light is this, what glory manifest?" (CGB)
Like Dante, Petrarch makes his lost love an intercessor:
Lady in bliss, pray that I may join you.
32)
32a)
Giotto, 1306-10, Madonna Enthroned, Uffizi, Florence (CGB '59)
From the same, Angel to the right (from CGB '59, Dante 32a; digital: both
angels)
Such, in Giotto's enthroned Madonna, is the rapturous fusion of earth and heaven,
in a glorified art-body.
Petrarch, at the last, would turn from love's idolatry to Christ alone ("no hope in
any other" — "tu sai ben che 'n altrui non ò speranza"); but what would move Wyatt
("The long love that in my thought I harbor") and Surrey ("Swete is his death that takes
his end by love") was that "worship of a mortal thing," which gives the Laura sonnets
their incarnate sheen, as of Giotto's flower-bearing angels.
1st 33)
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Giotto, 1304-08, Noli me tangere, from Resurrection, Arena Chapel, Padua
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It was an evocation everywhere latent in the analogies of Gothic love. Chaucer's
early elegy, The Book of the Duchess, draws its bowers of Zephyrus and Flora from the
French Romance of the Rose:
As thogh the erthe envye wolde
To be gayer than the heven.
By that suspension (as in Giotto's Christ and the Magdalen) precision floats in a mystery
of suggetive mood — Chaucer's hound through the forest to the man in black,
That sat and had yturned his bak
To an ook, an huge tree.
1st 34) Simone Martini, c. 1340, Frontispiece of Petrarch's "Virgil," Ambrosiana,
Milan; + V detail
34a)
Giotto, 1304-06, Annunciation, double: half-figures of [A] Angel and
[B] Virgin, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua (cf. whole-figure double, Dante 28)
2nd 33) Detail of 33, Giotto's "Noli me tangere" [video dwells on the above slide and
this]
2nd 34) Detail of 34, Simone's Virgil (video skips this detail, used with 1st 34)
35)
Ambrogio Lorenzetti, c 1340, St. Dorothy, Pinacoteca, Siena
35a)
Same, close-up of face (cf. Mozart 8)
[Note: video somewhat varies the placement of the above slides, 34-35a]
Such veiled artistry reaches its height when Petrarch by the stream hears the voice
of Laura. Perhaps Simone Martini, painting in Avignon this frontispiece for a Virgil
commentary owned by Petrarch, his friend, best catches its illumination of nature [CGB]:
If birds' lament, green leaves' or tendrils' stir
To the soft sighing of the air of summer,
Or through the wave-wash at the petalled shore
Of a clear stream, crystal's liquid murmur
Sound, where I sit bowed to the forest floor —
Her, whom heaven showed and earth now covers,
I see and hear and know, as if the power
Of her live voice responded from afar:
"Why do you spend yourslf before your years?"
She asks in pity. "Or wherefore and for whom
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Pour the wasting river of your tears?
You must not weep for me. My life became,
Dying, eternal; and to eternal skies,
The dark that seemed to close them cleared my eyes."
Se lamentar augelli, o verdi fronde
mover soavemente a l'aura estiva,
o roco mormorar di lucide onde
s'ode d'una fiorita e fresca riva,
là v'io seggia d'amor pensoso e scriva;
lei che '1 ciel ne mostrò, terra n'asconde,
veggio et odo et intendo, ch'ancor viva
di sì lontano a' sospir miei risponde:
"Deh perché innanzi '1 tempo ti consume?"
mi dice con pietate: "a che pur versi
degli occhi tristi un doloroso fiume?
Di me non pianger tu, che' miei dì fersi
morendo eterni, e nell' eterno lume,
quando mostrai de chiuder, gli occhi apersi."
That dawn-in-Purgatory shimmer, as in Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Dorothy, music,
too, marvellously parallels in the spectral equivocations Dante's friend Casella may have
taught the "First Generation" of Petrarch's time.
36)
Score: Jacobo da Bologna, c. 1340, "Lux purpurata radiis," last page (video:
details only)
The last page of Jacobo da Bologna's Lux exhibits the techniques. Next to last
bar: the "double-leading-tone" chord: G#, C#, E, the sharped G leading to A, the sharped
C to D, a bi-tonal suspension before the bare fifth close. (Music: last bars of the "Lux...")
Such enigmatic minors, under rhythmic runs, with the syncopated pulses called hocquetus
or "hiccough" (bar 55 and faster in 61 and 63) stamp the whole piece with the compelling
search of Ars Nova; all are illustrated in the performance of this last page.
(Music: same piece, last page - end)
37)
37a)
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Simone Martini, 1325-26, Musicians from Knighting of St. Martin, Lower
Church of St. Francis, Assisi
Same, detail of heads
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The piece, the rendition we require, could not be better exhibited than in the
musicians Simone Martini paints in the Knighting of St. Martin — an expectance of
gaiety in sadness, both dissolved in the bare-fifth distance of the eyes — as if de Van,
Archimbaud, and Bonté had studied the fresco before they recorded in 1937 for L'Oisseau
Lyre.
Chaucer, too, had come, by Italian mediation, from the timeless immersion of The
Book of the Duchess to the ambivalence of Pandarus: "I have a lusty wo, a joly sorrow";
the dramatic poignance of Troilus' speech to the moon: "Iwis, whan thow art horned
newe,/ I shall be glad, if all the world be trewe".
Let us hear the whole Jacobo da Bologna motet, moving from these musicians
1st 38) Simone Martini, 1333, Annunciation, double detail: [A] Angel and [B]
Mary; Uffizi, Florence
to Simone Martini's Annunciation, where the intended moods, as of Mary, may never be
fathomed, yet imperatively advance the question.
2nd 37) Again, Simone Martini, Musicians, St. Martin Chapel, Assisi, top half
Music:
2nd 38)
39)
39a)
40)
40a)
41)
41a)
Jacobo da Bolgna, c. 1340, "Lux purpurata radiis," OL-2
Again, Simone Martini, Annunciation, central panel (CGB '59)
Same, Angel, upper half, with lilies (CGB '59)
Same, Virgin, upper half (vertical Alinari detail)
Same, Angel, horizontal upper detail
Same, Virgin, similar detail; for which the video uses V40a: Same, Virgin,
vertical of the whole figure
Same, Angel, vertical of the whole kneeling figure
Same, the whole Altar, showing the frame
[Note: in the above sequence, the video varies the order of slide images]
(end Lux)
European culture has evolved by circulation. When Sienese Simone went to
Avignon, the current of Gothic that had quickened the Italian new art, flowed back to
quicken the North, as Chaucer would learn from Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio.
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42)
42a)
42b)
42c)
V42d)
Symbolic History
Double: [A] Taddeo Gaddi, 1332-38, Presentation of the Virgin, S. Croce,
Florence; and [B] Pol de Limbourg, c.1416, Purification of the Virgin, Tres
Riches Heures, Musée Condé, Chantilly
Taddeo Gaddi, Presentation, A of 42
Pol de Limbourg, Purification, B of 42
Double ['95 insert]: [A] T. Gaddi, Drawing (after 42), Louvre, Paris; and
[B] Pol de Limbourg, Purification, repeat of 42b
Lorenzo Monoco, 1413, Adoration of the Magi, Predella of the Coronation
of the Virgin, Uffizi, Florence ['95 insert]
How far that Italy inspired the Burgundian, a comparison of Taddeo Gaddi's
Presentation of the Virgin fresco, about 1335 (left). with Pol de Limbourg's miniature,
about 1415, will imply. After Giotto's massive advance, his school seems almost to lose
ground. Yet the imitative and softening continuance quietly confirms an observational
base by which the style of 1400, all over Europe, would prepare for the next great natural
thrust of Masaccio and the Van Eycks. So from Gaddi (perhaps through the drawing now
in the Louvre ) the Giottesque livens to the Duc de Berry's Tres Riches Heures. From this
International crest, the style-tide (as in music) was already returning to the Italy of
Lorenzo Monaco, Gentile da Fabriano, Fra Angelico.
a43)
b43)
43)
Taddeo Gaddi, 1332-38, Vault of Baroncelli Chapel, Santa Croce, Florence
Romanesque, early 13th cent., Fresco of battle, simulating tapestry, Cathedral
of Aquileia, near Trieste
Taddeo Gaddi, 1332-38, Annunciation to the Shepherds, Santa Croce,
Florence; + V detail
Music:
Solage, c. 1370(?), (Avignon), from Fumeux Fume, Seraphim SIC6092 (face 3)
Two conquests seem related: in music, of expressive modulation (here 14thcentury Solage); in painting, of light through darkness. By the deceptive ease of words,
12th-century Chrestien had told how a thousand men in search of Erec rode toward
Limors "in the moonlight shining clear"; as Dante later had touched the glowing mosques
of Dis with prophetic chiaroscuro: "red as if come from fire... as you see in this low hell."
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But the first known art depiction is by Giotto's pupil, Taddeo Gaddi, a fresco of
shepherds on the night ground lighted by an angel glowing in the sky to which
Boccaccio's Latin Eclogue "Olympia" offers a radiant parallel: when the poet's lost
daughter appears as a spirit, lighting the shepherds' cottage and refulgent wood: "Look,
the beeches are untouched, the leaves luxuriant and hazels verdant in the flaming light."
(end Solage)
a44)
44)
Piero della Francesca, 1452-59, Constantine's Vision, lower spread, San
Francesco, Arezzo
Same, whole; first, V detail of angel, from v44a ['95 video addition]
Music:
Ockeghem, 1475(?), Intemerata Dei Mater, close of lst section,
(Munrow) Seraphim SIC 6104 (face 6)
It was a magic the Renaissance would perfect (as Ockehgem the noble deepening
of tessitura). Skipping Pol de Limbourg's Burgundian Gethsemene, with torches and a
starry sky, we reach the Italian middle term, Piero della Francesca's 1455 Dream of
Constantine. Vasari:
Above every other consideration of skill and art is Piero's
representation of Night, where he depicts an angel in flight,
foreshortened with his head downwards, bringing the signs of victory
to Constantine, who sleeps in his tent... as revealed in darkness by the
angel's light.
Through such imitation of nature (Vasari says) artists have reached "the perfection we see
today."
a45)
45)
45a)
Raphael, 1513-14, St. Peter's Escape from Prison, Vatican, Rome; center &
left of fresco; + V detail: angel, center
Same: slide shows the whole; video returns to the left side (cf. V45)
Same, left section, guards, moon on armor; + V lower detail
Music:
Josquin Des Prez, c. 1415(?), Huc me sydereo, opening, ARC
2533-360
Thus (contemporary with Josquin's motet of Christ's descent from the stars)
Raphael, in the Vatican fresco of St. Peter's escape from prison, kindles on armor the
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gleam of torches and moon — a magic to which literature also would aspire: Spenser,
when the Red Cross Knight goes into Errour's "darksome hole":
his glistring armor made
A little glooming light, much like a shade...
a46)
46)
(fade Josquin)
Simone Martini, 1328, Guidoriccio, detail, Palazzo Publico, Siena
Same fresco, whole (video gives the whole, then the detail)
In the cities of Italy, freed by the decline of the Empire and the 1305 withdrawal
of the Papacy to Avignon, we seek the terms of that first clear Western rush of spirit into
time. At its core is the tension of new humanism and old faith.
The same Simone Martini who curtained beauty in ritual gold, painted in the
public hall of Siena the pride of Guidoriccio, an oriflamme of force, against the
unvalidated bare expanse of Middle-earth.
The same Petrarch who gave mystery to love, revived the heroic in his Latin poem
Africa, was crowned Laureate in Rome, wrote the first patriotic ode of the modern West,
a call to Cola di Rienzo to restore the empire to honor:
a47)
b47)
47)
Simone Martini, 1325-26, St. Martin before Emperor Julian, Chapel of St.
Martin, Lower Church, Assisi
Same frescoes, detail of Emperor and Saint, from the Knighting of St. Martin
Bonino da Campione, c. 1363-70, Tomb of Bernabò Visconti, Castello Sforzesco, Milan; + V detail
For you, as for no other, fate unfurls
The banner of its good, immortal fame:
I say you have the power to redeem
The noblest state that ever ruled the world. (CGB)
In life as in art, this eruption of tonal vigor in the modal void prompts Petrarch's
ambivalent cry (Phisicke against Fortune, Twyne translation, 1579):
There is no warre woorse then this, no not civile warre: For that is
between factions of citizens in the streetes of the cities, but this is
fought within the minde, betweene the partes of the soule.
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Boccaccio also lived that strife, in which the claims of heaven and earth stood
almost at parity. Even his De Casibus, written as a penance for the Decamerone, and to
teach the vanity of earth, precurses Renaissance tragedy in its fall of the great (see
Farnham): "The human mind has a fiery vigor, a celestial origin, an insatiable desire for
glory." In Milan, the Visconti tomb mounts the mailed fist of power on the grave.
1st 48) Ambrogio Lorenzetti, 1337-40, Good Government in the Country, section to
the left; Palazzo Publico, Siena
In Petrarch's 1336 letter on the ascent of Mont Ventoux, the romance of man and
nature — Leonardo, Goethe, Thoreau — pierces the Medieval. So in the vast panorama
of Good Government in the Country by that Sienese painter-humanist, Ambrogio
Lorenzetti, the Dimensional table unfolds, contending against spacelessness.
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49)
Symbolic History
Chinese Buddhist, 8th cent., landscape from Queen Vaidehi's meditation at
sunrise; Cave 172, Tun-huang, W. China
Of course, from the silk route in the Asian highlands of West China, Buddhist
frescoes from 600 years before might have staggered the Dark Age traveler with a
preview of that space the West must search for. Though if Marco Polo had passed the
cave-city of Tun Huang, he would surely have felt the quiet of all the East had refined
from the Classical —
2nd 48) Again, Lorenzetti, Good Government in the Country, right (or V2nd 48)
2nd 48a) Same, Good Government, detail of wheat harvest; digital: left, moutains
against the lunge of the embryonic West .
So the often quoted yet still amazing passages of Petrarch's mountain climb:
Nothing but the desire to see so conspicuous a height drew me on...
There is a summit higher than all the others... I stood there almost
benumbed, overwhelmed by a gale of wind and the wide and open
view... Clouds were gathering below my feet... the Alps were frozen
stiff and covered with snow... One could see the sea and the waves that
break against Aigues Mortes... The Rhone River was directly under our
eyes...
But these are excerpts, wrenched from a frame of moral and Christian symbol: on the
vanity of life, the waste of years; finally, as Augustine opened the Bible in the garden,
Petrarch opens his Augustine to a page which admonishes against the climb itself: "And
men go to admire high mountains, oceans, stars, and do not heed themselves."
2nd 49) Tun-huang, Landscape, whole, with Queen seated below
Where Queen Vaidehi, imprisoned by her son, sits in meditation before a vision of
the (now oxidized) rising sun — the whole outward realm mild inwardness.
50)
50a)
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A. Lorenzetti, same, detail of party leaving the city gate
A. Lorenzetti, c 1345(?), view of Castle and Lake, Museum, Siena
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50b)
Symbolic History
A.Lorenzetti, 1331, detail from St. Louis of Toulouse admitted to the
Franciscans; frescoes in San Francesco, Siena
In the foreground party leaving Lorenzetti's 1340 town, it is the actual which is
contended for — to order the phenomenal by a rule of hand and mind. So in the search
that would bring mathematical science out of theology and alchemy, Nicholas of Oresme,
about the same time, was examining the Breadths of Forms, how rates of change can be
graphed as curvatures:
...no two changes whereof one is uniform or uniformly non-uniform,
while the other is uniformly non-uniformly non-uniform, are to one
another in a rational proportion, since one is pictured by a rectilinear
and the other by a curvilinear figure.
Analytical geometry and calculus lurk in that insight of the backward West.
It is the "Human Comedy" of Boccaccio, the Decameron, which exemplifies Ars
Nova realism. In its plots of will and wit, reality sharpens the modes of the transreal:
51)
51a)
51b)
Lorenzetti, 1337-40, Good Government in the City, whole, Palazzo Publico,
Siena (video may vary the following details)
Same, detail of a street, a Lady on a white horse
Same, detail of buildings and meeting streets
so too in Lorenzetti's Well-governed City. Boccaccio:
under guise of confession and pure conscience, a lady makes a solemn
friar her go-between, he ignorant of the matter...
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Symbolic History
We must not ask how an attractive wife, left on her own when her husband is out
of town, can need such a stratagem. From her balcony she admires, desires. Hardly a
plot of wit if she could drop the man a note. She goes to a friar, his observed companion:
"Father, tell your tall acquaintance, whatever his name, to let me alone. I scorn his
solicitations." The friar summons his friend: "I have it from the lady, the rich merchant's
wife: she can hardly stand on her balcony without your pestering her." The roused youth
seeks the balcony, smiles.
52)
52a)
Same, closer detail of the Lady on a horse
Same, foreground center, detail of dancing ladies
Back goes the lady, hot-foot, to the friar: "He has sent me this purse and girdle. Return
it; I am not as he thinks." Her gift conveyed, a last move remains: "Holy father, I know
not how he has learned that my husband is out of town, but last night he stole into my
garden, climbed the tree to my bedroom window, so that I had to shut the casement.
Either you stop him, or I tell my kinsmen." Once more the priest's rebuke: "Rake-hell!
Because her husband's out of town, you climb the tree to her window." Night has only to
fall for the puzzle-plot to be solved.
53)
53a & b)
Anglo-French, c 1425, page of the Flood and Drunkeness of Noah,
Bedford Book of Hours, British Museum, London
Same, vintage and drinking below; Ark detail above
As that ingenuity spreads north, it generates a fabliaux realism of nature under
stylized devices (this Noah page from the Bedford Hours). In Chaucer's "Miller's Tale,"
the clerk, Nicholas, who sings to the psalter ("and Angelus ad Virginem he sang"),
Music:
English, c. 1300(?), Angelus ad virginem, RCA V LM-6016 (I,4)
boards in the very house with Alisoun, and the carpenter-husband is so much at Osenay
the two can frisk it as they please, Queynt-catching, holding by the haunch-bones: (fade 1voice opening) "Lover, love me all at once." (to 3-voice close) Why then that incredible
device of Noah's flood, the great tubs hung in the attic for the night they all sleep there,
until Nicholas and Alisoun descend for their pleasure; why the counter-plot of Absalon,
jolly clerk pleading at the window: "Speak, sweet bird", until the hot coulter scalds
Nicholas' tout — why, but that his screaming "Water!" may wake the cuckold as to the
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Symbolic History
Biblical flood, to cut loose the tub and break his leg as he crashes through the floors?
(end Angelus ad Virginem)
a54)
b54)
54)
English Carving, c 1380(?), St.John the Baptist, Hereford Cathedral, from old
Church of St. Nicholas, (CGB '84)
English Gothic, 1220-60 (spire 1334), Cathedral, Salisbury (CGB '86)
Same, the tower and spire (CGB '66)
But in those last works of Chaucer, northern Gothic, having absorbed the Italian,
stands on the threshold of 15th-century humanization. Two phases precede that fulness,
the perfection of high Gothic, and the impact of Ars Nova. For High Gothic — with the
close of a 1300 Motet to St. Thomas of Canterbury — we range Salisbury tower,
Worcester nave, and a scene from the Douce Apocalypse.
Music:
55)
56)
English, c. 1300, from "Thomas gemma Canturiae," (Deller)
Nonesuch H-71292
English, 12th-14th cent., Worcester Nave and Choir (CGB '74)
English MS, c. 1265-70, Douce Apocalypse, p.58, Mystical Vintage, Bodleian
Library, Oxford; + V detail
(close Thomas motet)
Into the lilting and linear sweetness of that Ars Antiqua,
57)
French-Italian, c. 1343-47, Fish Pool, fresco, Papal Palace, Avignon
Italian late-Gothic unmistakably drives. We pick it up from mid-14th century in an
Avignon fresco (surely the Pope, like Chaucer's Franklin, "had many a bream and many a
pike in stuwe"); while the Amen of an English Gloria asserts the new rhythms and
double-leading-tones.
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�C.G. Bell
Music:
58)
Symbolic History
English, c. 1370, Gloria, Amen, (Deller) from BGS 70680
Bohemian, c. 1350, Nativity from Vyssi Brod Altarpiece, National Gallery,
Prague; video: detail only
(close Gloria)
(Here a Nativity from Prague.)
As such vitality spreads over Europe,
1st 59) Master of the Rohan Hours, 1420(?), Portrait of Louis II of Anjou,
Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris
two trends appear, complementing the 1400 expansion of consciousness. One, of the
court, points (like the works of Chaucer) to Renaissance;
1st 60) Master Bertram, 1379-83, Creation of Animals, Panel from the Grabow (or
St. Peter’s) Altarpiece, Kunsthalle, Hamburg; video: detail only
the other, of the people, points (like Langland's Piers Plowman) toward Reformation.
Both feature in Froissart's History.
2nd 59) French, c 1360, Portrait of John the Good, Louvre, Paris
This 1360 portrait of John the Good of France suggests, in Froissart, the preRenaissance ruler, Count Gaston de Foix, who combines Frederick II's political boldness
with the devotions of a faithful son of the Church. "More gallant deeds of arms," he says,
"have been performed within these last forty years, and more wonderful things have
happened, than for three hundred years before."
2nd 60) Master Bertram, same alterpiece, Rest on the Flight to Egypt, Kunsthalle,
Hamburg; + V detail
While all over northern Europe, the humbler religious arts (here Meister Bertram,
1379) draw from Gothic itself the simple humanity and active piety which spoke in the
Peasants' Revolt in England, 1381. "The mischief," says Froissart, "was all through the
too great comfort of the commonality."
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Symbolic History
A crazy priest of Kent, John Ball, excited crowds in the market place:
"My good friends, matters cannot go well in England until all things
shall be in common. Are we not all descended from Adam and Eve?
Yet by our labor they support themselves in pomp... We must
ourselves seek to amend our condition.
a61)
61)
a62)
Le Mans, 14th-15th cent., South Transept with window (CGB '74)
French Gothic, early 14th cent., Rose and Lancets of North Transept, Amiens
Amiens, 14th-15th cent., South Transept, with window (CGB '76)
Music:
Ars Nova (French?), c. 1320, Opening of Gloria, Messe de Tournai,
SAWT-9517
The change to the 14th century is least felt in architecture — that high Gothic
soaring over town-center hard to supercede. Though construction went on, and transepts
especially, at Beauvais, Le Mans, this north window at Amiens, display a lighter openness
a bolder filigree. In music, the Gloria of the Tournai Mass about 1320, initiates that
brilliance.
(fade Tournai Gloria)
But the masterpiece of French Ars Nova is the Mass Guillaume de Machault
wrote late in life (some like to think for the 1364 Coronation of Charles V —
62)
a63)
63)
Albi, Southern France, 1282-1365, Cathedral interior (painted 1500-10)
Hannequin de Bruges and Nicholas Battaille, c. 1373-81, Apocalypse Tapestries, 41st scene, Chateau d'Angers, France
Same, detail of the 7-headed beast
about when this vaulting of Albi was carried through in Italian Gothic — its polychrome
completed after 1500). Machault too had learned from Italy, as from the French Ars
Nova of de Vitry. His Mass thews the organa of Notre Dame with the rhythm of quavers
against wholes, and with that double-leading-tone chord, by which the entire Credo is
fiercely punctuated — its cadences, as in Jacobo da Bologna, a bi-tonal homing-in on
both tonic and dominant (here Deller).
Music:
Machault, c. 1364(?), Mass, from Credo "Et in unum... saecula",
(Deller) BG-LM 1 SD
(fade Deller)
Stirring, with the isorythmic acerbities so stressed in De Van's older recording, to
associate the Apocalypse tapestries of Angers, late-Gothic at its most forceful, hung
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
between two realities — medieval symbol blazoning the art-force of concrete Rebirth.
Thus the tremendous Amen which closes the Creed.
a64)
64)
64a)
a65)
65)
Same Angers school, Angel from an Apocalypse, Palace of the Legion of
Honor, San Francisco, California
Again Hannequin and Battaille, Fall of Jericho, Angers
Angers Tapestries continued, Fall of Fire
Same, St.John and beast, left detail of 65 to follow
Same, St. John, Beast and Woman, whole
Music:
Va66)
66)
Guillaume de Machault, Messe de Notre Dame, close of Credo, (De Van)
AS-3
(end De Van)
Video pans first to the Woman, from right side of 65
Double: [A] Angers Tapestries, from 65, closer detail of the Woman; and
[B] Franco Flemish, c. 1400, Crescent Madonna, from Philip the Bold's
Prayer Book, Brussels; + video 66B, and slide, 66A)
Yet the designer Bondol, who so far sacrificed softness to Apocalyptic strength,
was, like Machault, in touch with that other advance of late Gothic. So his Virgin seated
on the moon and crowned with stars (left) slightly yields to the Flamboyant grace which
by 1400 would perfect a flower-ultimate: this Crescent Madonna (right) from the Prayer
Book of Philip the Bold. Thus even Machault's driving Creed relents for the "Ex Maria
Virgine."
Music:
Machault, Mass, cont., Ex Maria, from Credo, AS-3
(fade)
Indeed, this Gothic Mass, in a contrasting performance by the lyrical Cape group,
lures to that other pole —
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�C.G. Bell
67)
Symbolic History
Giottino(?), c. 1360, Pieta Uffizi (CGB '59); video: close detail only
the rich humanization of mood flowing from 1360 Florence
68)
French late-Gothic, c. 1375, from Altar Frontal of Narbonne, Pieta and
Harrowing of Hell, Louvre, Paris
and generating in many northern centers (here the altar frontal of Narbonne), a passionate
harmony of God in the world. Such is the homely wonder by which, in Langland's
Vision, Piers the Plowman becomes Christ,
Come with a cross before the common people.
And right like in all limbs to our Lord Jesu.
2nd 67) Again, Giottino, Pieta, central section (CGB '59); first, video of the whole,
from 1st 67
So the softer Machault:
Music:
Machault, Mass, lst Agnus, (Cape, etc.) ARC-3032
2nd 68) Again from Narbonne Frontal, detail of Pieta; video adds V66B
2nd 68a) Again, B of 66, Crescent Madonna ('95 insert)
a69)
Vb69)
c69)
69)
69a)
(end 1st Agnus)
Bohemian, 1348 (completed in the 19th cent.), Karlstejn Castle, SW of
Prague
Same, interior, Chapel of the Holy Cross
Master Theodoric, c. 1364, Church Father, Karlstejn Chapel
Master Theodoric, c. 1363-65, Magi, detail of Mary and Child
Same, closer detail of the face of Mary, Karlstejn Chapel
In the visual arts, the center of that ripe Incarnation was probably the Prague into
which the reformer Hus was born. The works Master Theodoric painted in the Holy
Cross Chapel there just before 1365 seem, by their shadowing and touch of flesh, of a
later date.
Music:
9/2/95
Jan of Jenstejn, c. 1385, Decet huius cunctis horis, with Bourdon,
(Deller) BG-680 (last 2 stanzas with Amen)
(close)
Ars Nova: 14 Century
30
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Yet what they attest was happening all over Christian Europe: the timeless mystery was
being reenacted in the immediacy of here and now. Thus, from the late century, this
melodious sequence on the Visitation by Jan of Jenstejn, Archbishop of Prague, with
improvised Bourdon, filling out the progressions of triadic chords.
70)
70a)
Bohemian, c 1395, Limestone of St. Peter of Slivica, detail, National Gallery,
Prague
Same, detail of the face
In this Bohemian Peter about 1395, by a nameless master, we have quietly turned
— within faith itself — from the hierarchic severity where Gothic began, to a kind of
Brotherhood of the Common Life — that lay-community and school founded in the Low
Countries about 1380, where Thomas à Kempis and Cusanus and Erasmus would be
trained — a Christ Imitation as heartfelt as the words of John Hus from Constance:
I entreat you, as touching the truth of God, which I did preach and
write from the utterances of the saints, that ye cleave fast to it... I
entreat the lords to show mercy unto the poor, and be righteous
towards them. I entreat citizens to conduct their trade righteously... I
entreat teachers that, leading godly lives, they may instruct their.pupils
faithfully... I entreat you to love one another, to suffer not the good to
be oppressed by violence, and to grant truth unto all...
I have written this letter to you in prison in chains, awaiting on the
morrow to be condemned to death, having full hope in God, that I may
not swerve from the truth of God... In what gracious manner the Lord
God is with me amid sore temptations, ye shall know when we meet in
His presence in joy...
We have come midway in the journey of the West. To sense the import of this
threshold, we frame it in a sequence of heads —
71)
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Carolingian (Swiss), 9th cent., Apostle from Johanneskirche, Müstair, Grisons
Ars Nova: 14 Century
31
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
with musical closes, where the tonal dynamic mounts toward the assertion by which the
West would revolutionize the world.
And first, in seeming denial of what is to follow, the Gregorian cadence (Kyrie,
4th mode) avoids the tensile quest of tone-center, as this 9th-century apostle of Müstair
dissolves all claims of earth and self in an aether of God-hope.
Music:
72)
Close of Kyrie III (Pentecost Mass), Solesmes, Decca 7543
French Gothic, c. 1260, Phillipe II (August) detail, Rheims
Later Romanesque and Gothic launch the arrow of creative act: Thomas Aquinas:
"This is the earthly goal of man... that upon the tablet of the soul the order of the universe
and all its parts may be enrolled." In King Philippe II of Rheims, (13th century), as in
Perotin's rhythmic organizing over stretched-out Gregorian, already, within the tightening
of creed — its first viable road — the Western gold rush is on.
Music:
73)
Perotin, c. 1220(?), "Viderunt," close, lst Quadruplum, Rokseth
Memorial Album, O.L. 230-31
Bonino da Campione, Barnabò visconti Tomb Milan, bust of 47 above
So much so that sequent modifications seem mere changes of style — the 14thcentury defiance of Dante's heroes stretching the bounds of hell. Thus the doubleleading-tone cadences of Ars Nova, with this detail from the equestrian already seen, the
armored Visconte of Milan.
Music:
74)
Gherardellus, c. 1350, Caccia, close (Cape etc.) ARC 3003
Donatello, 1447-53, Gattamelata, detail, Padua; video: head only
By the 15th century of Donatello and of Dufay's Mass L'homme armé, the Armed
Man, the fullness of incarnate self operates in a last Machiavellian cleavage — temporal
giants emergent in the old creed.
Music:
Dufay, c. 1460(?), close of Hosannah, Messe "L'Homme armé,"
Ducretet-Thomson 320 c 108
That first assurance was insular.
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�C.G. Bell
75)
Symbolic History
Alesandro Vittoria, 1586, Bust of Doge Niccolo da Ponte, Seminario, Venice
The Venetian, closing a tragic century of philosophic struggle and religious war,
deploys its somber powers more vastly in the music of Gabrielli, the universal realism of
the art of 1600.
Music:
76)
Giovanni Gabrielli, 1615, In Ecclesiis, close, Angel S-36443
Andreas Schlüter, 1704, Bust of Frederick II of Hesse, Schloss, Bad
Homburg; video: detail only
And still the proclamation would be, if not heightened, fleshed and inflated to the
1700 breaking point of heroic virtú: Schlüter's Elector of Hesse, with a tympanic
ultimatum from Lully's Te Deum.
Music:
77)
Lully, c. 1670, Te Deum, close, London, DTL 93043
David D'Angers, 1838, Bonaparte, bronze, Angers Museum
Even there the compulsive ardor did not peak, but rose, after the trough of 18thcentury manners and mockery, to the breaking wave on which the art, thought, and music
of the time of Napoleon
was borne —
Music:
78)
Beethoven, 1817-24, Ninth Symphony, Finale, close, (Weingartner)
Col. SL-165
N. Korean, 1974, Opera photo: "Fate of a Self-defense Corps Member"; video:
detail only
a frenzy of expectation, of utopian demand, which would exorcise, by the export zeal of
Marx, all over the East and rising Third World, the vestiges of ancient adherance — as in
Malraux's La Condition humaine — the last opium dream of quietist refinement.
79)
79a)
9/2/95
Italian, 13th-14th cent., Towers of San Giminiano, through Fall trees,
Tuscany; + V detail
Another view of the same towered town
Ars Nova: 14 Century
33
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
How the future kindles in the 1300 departures of Italy: — When the horn sounds,
like Roland's, in Dante's Inferno —
...io senti' sonare un alto corno —
and through the dusk the giants who stormed heaven seem, over the rim of lower hell,
such towers as bristled all Italy then in the rivalry of pride (preserved in the fossilized city
of San Giminiano, here through autumn leaves)
as error fled, fear grew upon me...
Like Montereggion of the twelve towers,
rose, half-sunk in earth, the terrible Giants,
whom Jupiter still threatens when he thunders — (CGB)
torregiavan di mezzo la persona
li orribili giganti cui minaccia
Giove del cielo ancora quando tuona —
San Giminiano, where Dante went as ambassador before he was banished — how it casts
a time-shadow:
Here and higher we have set our stamp
All over the rock island of Manhattan.
Prophetic as Petrarch's invoking God for his Italy:
Saviour, hear my plea:
By the pity that brought you down,
Give this earth your care,
Our blessed human shore;
And may your truth here sound —
Such as I am — through me. (CGB)
80)
80a)
Bonino da Campione, mailed fist of Bernabò Visconte, close detail of the
horseman of 46
Same statue, detail of horse and rider (after an intermediary video detail)
It is less the mailed fist (the German word Faust) of the Visconti twice seen, than
the spirit, energized over the polarity of the embodied Kingdom, the Word working in the
world ("In the beginning was the Deed"). If that is the war of which Petrarch said there is
no worse, what can we do but sing — Ars Nova — "Benedicamus Domino"?
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Ars Nova: 14 Century
34
�C.G. Bell
Music:
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Symbolic History
Italian, mid-14th cent., Benedicamus domino, beginning and end,
SIC-6052
Ars Nova: 14 Century
35
�
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Ars Nova : 14th Century, Symbolic History, Part 12
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SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
13. 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer)
CHARLES G. BELL
ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
or
1260 CANYON ROAD
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501
September 1995
Last Revised January ‘96
�Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM
87501
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
13: 1400 — Pilgrims All (Chaucer)
1)
Hubert and Jan van Eyck 1425-9, Adoration of the Lamb, from the Altarpiece of St. Baron, Ghent; first, video detail, center
1a) Same, detail, upper left
V1b) Same, detail, upper right
1c)
From the same altarpiece, Panels of Just Judges and of Knights of the Cross
Music:
Dunstable, Ave Regina Coelorum, close, Cape, ARC 3052
Twenty-five years after Chaucer’s death in 1400, and the Van Eyck Adoration of
the Lamb heightens the features of his world: the force of robed leaders, commoners,
churchmen —
I saw his sleves purfled at the hand
With fur ...he was a fair prelaat —
in a landscape of precise spring — such human filling in of Gothic symbol as Dunstable,
also by 1425, achieves in harmony.
(end Dunstable)
Yet what the proudest, earthiest, lustiest of those Chaucerian characters was
headed toward
2)
William the Englishman 1180-84, East Chapel (“Becket’s Crown”), Canterbury Cathedral
English Norman, c. 1100, Crypt, Canterbury Cathedral
William the Englishman, 1179-84, Trinity Chapel Ambulatory, Canterbury
Cathedral
2a)
2b)
was Canterbury, 12th century shrine of Becket — sacramental blue and gules burning in
the vaulted gloom — from that time when even the popular burden was “Worldes blis ne
last no throwe.”
Music:
9/1995
English 13th cent., “Worldes blis ne last no throwe,” RCA V-LM6015
1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer)
1
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
It is of the essence also of the Waning of the Middle Ages, that the ground of
Contemptu Mundi still sounds under Chaucer:
This world nys but a thurghfare ful of wo,
And we been pilgrymes, passing to and fro.
("Knight’s Tale")
(fade Worldes Blis)
Meanwhile English architecture, by a kind of skeletal adaptation had reached from
Canterbury toward the open clarity of a stately hall.
3 or V3) Early English, 1250-60, Five Sisters Window, York Cathedral (CGB ‘80)
First was Early English, 1250, the lancet heightening of the Five Sisters Window
in York — just as English thought in Bacon took its own more earthly-immediate way.
4)
4a)
Decorated, 1286-1306, Octagonal Chapter House, Wells Cathedral
Same, especially the fan vaulting (CGB ‘84)
Second the Decorated, as in this 1300 Chapter House of Wells, generates out of
Geometric the Curvilinear wreathings which would inspire French Flamboyant — while
in thought Duns Scottus led Occam to the empirical outwardness and spiritual intuition
aimed at Renaissance and Reformation. It is no clearer, on the surface, how Occam’s
study of suppositio (one thing’s standing for another), with its hair-splitting — as of
“mobile confused distributive suppositio” from “immobile confused distributive
suppositio” — widens creed for a future Cartesian structure reared on causal reason,
Va5) Same as 5, video detail of the lierne vaulting (CGB ‘84)
5)
Perpendicular, 1337-57, Choir of Gloucester Cathedral with great East Window; Digital adds east window detail
than how the marvelous involution of lierne vault, culminating, mid-14th century, in
Gloucester Choir, can shape Renaissance out of Gothic; yet the passage from Canterbury
apse to the wide-windowed fabric of Perpendicular, must emerge, like the chordhumanizing of music, as a shift from other-worldly severity, through sacramental purity
and elaboration, toward earthly vigor in the now Nominal scholastic frame.
a6)
English Perpendicular, 1337-1412, Cloisters, Gloucester Cathedral
June 1996
1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer)
2
�C.G. Bell
6)
6a)
Symbolic History
Late Perpendicular, 1426-80, Divinity School, Oxford (CGB ‘80)
Same, 1445-88, Duke Humphrey Library, above the Divinity School,
Bodleian, Oxford
From which the road is open to the 15th-century perfection of a ceremonial space
(as music from its Gothic resources brought the polyphonies of Dunstable), here the
Oxford Divinity School, smaller than the great Perpendicular cage carved out of the
Romanesque choir of Gloucester. Thus followers polish gems from Chaucer’s great mine
— the Scot Henryson that bright windy night after hail, when he made The Testament of
Cresseid:
I mend the fyre and beikit [baked] me about,
Than tuik ane drink my spreitis to comfort,
And armit me well fra the cauld thairout;
To cut the winter night and mak it short,
I tuik ane Quair [Book] and left all uther sport,
Writtin be worthie Chaucer glorious,
Of fair Creisseid, and worthie Troylus.
7)
7a)
Flemish Civic Gothic, 13th cent. (rebuilt after World War I), Cloth Hall and
Belfrey, Ypres
Again, Hubert and Jan van Eyck 1425-9, Adoration of the Lamb, Patriarchs
and Prophets to the left, Ghent
From Siena and Florence to London (as here in Flemish Ypres), guild and trading
life had reared civic halls, thronged by Chaucer’s time with all his faculties: the
Merchant with his forked beard, determined to keep the sea open between Orwell and
Middleburg; the Seargeant of the Law, quoting the statutes and cases since King William,
and for whom all was fee simple in effect; those guildmen clothed in one livery; and
churchmen in so many — bustling the belfried square.
Va8) Jean Pucelle, 1343, whole of f. 25, Belleville Breviary, Bibliotheque
Nationale, Paris; first, video detail, upper left
8)
Same, lower left, Cain and Abel, etc.
8a) Luttrell Psalter, 1335-40, Harvest Cart Going Uphill, British Library, London
8b) Misericord Carving, c. 1400, Sow and Piglets, Worcester Cathedral
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Symbolic History
In poetry too, as in the arts, the mundane style had been ripening over the North
since the late 13th century, as in Ruteboef (“Dieus m’a fait compagnon a Job”):
God has companioned me with Job
When he wiped me at a swab
Clean of all I had.
This right eye that was my best,
Webbed and blind, has left me lost,
To grope my road...
And now my wife has borne a brat
And my horse slipped on a slat
And cracked his leg:
The nurse is at me like a plague,
Grabbing money by the bag,
For baby’s pap and souse,
Or he’ll be back to yell in the house. (CGB)
A sentiment paired, after 1400, in the Second Shepherds Play:
I have more cradles to rock than ever I had...
A house full of young fat,
The devil knock their skulls flat,
Woe to him has much brat
And little bread... (CGB)
The lively details of sacred art.
a9) Peter Parler aus Gmund, 1379-93, Self from the triforium, Cathedral, Prague
Vb9) English Carving, c. 1380(?), Effigy of St. John the Baptist, detail, from old
church of St. Nicholas, now in Hereford Cathedral (CGB ‘84)
9)
C. Sluter, c. 1390, Philip the Bold of Burgundy, Chartreuse, Dijon (CGB ‘80)
9a) Same, upper detail; video pans on slide 9, while slide show works from an old
photo (formerly V9); digital, like video, pans on 9
In the ground of self- and earth-denial we are watching the rise of a vital
antithesis, of self and earth as modes of Western assurance and power. In the age of
Chaucer they still claim the sacred embrace. Let us begin at the end with the Retractions
the poet appended to the Parson’s Tale:
I biseke yow mekely, for the mercy of God, that ye preye for me that
Crist have mercy on me and foryeve me my giltes; and namely of my
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Symbolic History
translacions and enditynges of wordly vanitees, the whiche I revoke in
my retracciouns...
(a list follows of most of his works)
and many a song and many a leccherous lay; that Crist for his grete
mercy foryeve me the synne... that I may been oon of hem at the day of
doom that shulle be saved...
Music:
French, early 15th cent, from Tuba Gallicalis, Nonesuch H-1010
In this proudest portrait of Chaucer’s time by the chief sculptor of full-robed
human force, Claus Sluter’s 1390 Philip the Bold of Burgundy is on his knees. With
Chaucer, what he repents of is not simply what we would call sin, but the earthly fabric to
which his commitment is so strong: the art he cultivates, the music of the Tuba
Gallicalis.
(end Tuba Gallicalis)
10)
10a)
E. Anglian (Norwich), c. 1330, Nativity from Life of Virgin, Cluny, Paris
Same, detail (can be videoed from 10)
Music:
English, c. 1310, Agnus Dei, Seraphim, SIC-6052 (2,5)
The backward-looking part of every Christian treasured an etherial thinness,
where sacred and secular dream timelessly — islanded in contempt of the world, the
sensuous poignance of the real (English, 1330):
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Symbolic History
Nou skrinketh rose and lylie flour,
That whilen ber that suete savour
In somer, that suete tyde;
Ne is no quene so stark ne stour,
Ne no levedy so bryht in bour,
That ded ne shal by glyde.
Whoso wol fleyshlust forgon,
And hevenè blis abyde,
On Jesu be is thoht anon,
That therlèd was ys side.
11)
(fade Agnus Dei)
Simone Martini, 1325-26, St. Clare, S. Francesco, Lower Church, Assisi;
+ V detail
In Simone Martini’s Ars Nova Italy, that distance is refined like an aesthetic
perfume, of which Chaucer’s 1370 Book of the Duchess distills a Northern essence,
reaching back, past the Romance of the Rose, toward Chrestien’s “land from which no
stranger returns.” It is there, deeper than dream psychology, that the Man in Black
reveals what we have already learned:
12)
12a)
Spanish, 14th cent., Queen Elisenda de Moncada tomb, Pedralbes Monastery,
Barcelona
S. Martini, 1333, Entombment of Christ, detail, Staatliche Museen, Berlin
“I have lost more than thou weanest.”
“Allas, sir, how? what may that be?”
“She ys ded!” “Nay!” “Yis, be me trouthe!”
“Is that youre los? Be God, hit ys routhe!”
And with that word ryght anoon
They gan to strake forth; al was doon
For that tyme, the hert huntyng...
We have a sudden insight that the modes of joy and pain, the very modes of
feeling, of being, shift like styles of dress. Medieval grief is sharp, fragile, enigmatic.
13)
13a)
Sebastiano del Piombo, c. 1517, Pieta, Museo Civico, Viterbo, Italy
Same, upper detail
Far from the voluminousness of a l6th century sorrow.
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Music:
Symbolic History
Willaert, pub. 1539, O Crux Splendidior, opening, Odyssey 32 16
0202
Its landscape of shadowed space (del Piombo) did not exist in Chaucer’s experience, any
more than a solemn music of chordal grief (Willaert, 1539). These realms had no more
been explored than Columbus’ America.
(fade Willaert)
14)
Visigoth to 14th cent. but esp. 13th cent., Porte de l’Aude, Wall of
Carcasonne
V14a) Same, another view
Chaucer’s first period, before the Ars Nova impact of the Florence he visited in
1373, looks to the older Gothic and Chivalric. Let the fortifications of Carcasonne and
two scenes of the chase, with “Au tens pascour,” as vigorous a secular motet as the late
13th century offers, revive that Ars Antiqua.
Music:
French, late 13th cent., Au tens pascour — Lautre jour, AS 71
1st 15) E. Anglian, c. 1300, lower detail of Beatus Page, Peterborough Psalter,
Bibliotheque Royale, Brussels
1st 16) Upper-Rhine, c. 1320, Manessa (Minnesinger) MS, Walther von Thüfen,
upper detail; University Library, Heidelberg
(end Au Tens pascour)
2nd 15) Again, Peterborough Psalter,whole Beatus Page; video: lower half only
To shift from the Peterborough Psalter,
2nd 16) Again, Walther von Thüfen, whole page (here video also repeats 14, of
Carcasonne)
or the Minnesinger delights of Walther von Thüfen — or from the fortifications of
Carcasonne —
1st 17)
1st 18)
June 1996
Italian Gothic, 1297-1310, Palazzo Publico, Siena (CGB ‘86, from the
town heights); while video takes a detail from V1st 17, a wider view over
town and countryside (CGB ‘86)
Simone Martini, 1328, Guidoriccio da Fogliano, horseman, center of the
fresco, Palazzo Publico, Siena (V1st 18: shows more background)
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V1st 19) North Italian, 1329, Equestrian monument of Can Grande della Scala,
with pedestal, Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona
to the city halls of Italy, here Siena, is to feel the sudden stretching of Chaucer’s
tetrameter in the House of Fame (c. 1375-80?) when the line straight out of the Divine
Comedy breaks in: “O Thought, that wrot al that I mette...” Thus the Eagle lifts the poet
to a vastness where he loses the poem. In later works he speaks the fulness of
pentameter:
To Troie is come this woful Troilus.
Just so the Gherardellus Caccia against the older motet, or the new horseman,
Guidoriccio (and then Can Grande), against the old:
Music:
2nd 17)
2nd 18)
2nd 19)
1st 20)
21)
Gherardellus de Florentia, c. 1360, Tosto che l’alba, Decca DL
79428
Closer view of the Palazzo Publico and tower from the square itself;
while video takes a closer detail from the lower part of 1st 17 (CGB),
adding from the same slide a detail of the upper part of the tower
Detail, upper front, of the Guidoriccio, horse and rider, which video
and slide show share
Upper part of Equestrian Can Grande — of which video takes a closer
detail (front)
Pisan (Traini) c. 1348, Allegory of Death, detail of Hunt, from old
Alinari print, Camp Santo, Pisa; + V closer detail
Pisan (Traini), same, whole fresco (1938 Alinari colored photo)
(end Gherardellus)
2nd 20)
Left side of 21, with Hunt, etc.; with various video details, from 20,
21, and V2nd 20
For 2nd 21) Central part of 21: beggars, Death, corpses, etc., with various video
details
1st 22)
Lower right of 21: Death advancing toward the Garden of Delight;
with video preview of the Alinari print of the Garden
3rd 21)
Varied detail of 21: beggars, Death, corpses, and souls; with close
video details from Va3rd 21 and V3rd 21a (soul tugged by angel and
devil)
3rd 21b)
Upper left detail of hermits
June 1996
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a2nd 22)
June 1996
Symbolic History
Detail of music in the Garden
1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer)
9
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2nd 22)
Symbolic History
Same, whole Garden of Love from the fine old Alinari print (From the
9 slides of the show and 4 video extras, the video shapes 14 views of
the fresco.)
The mid-century Pisan Allegory of Death (a bad reproduction made before it was
ruined in the last war) epitomizes late Gothic — a moral vision, yeasty with new life.
Where the rock gulley of the fallen world sprouts ephemeral flowers, a troop of
hunters encounter three corpses. They draw back; one holds his nose. Above the coffins,
a hermit displays the scroll of our vanity.
And the whole scene opens for us: right of center, a bat-winged Death swings her
scythe over mounds of bodies. Beggars, the blind and halt, petition her to take them —
“cumber-worlds” like forsaken Troilus: “Delyvere now the world.../ Of me, that am the
wofulleste wyght...” Capricious as Fortune (“That holds but by a wire”) she advances
into the orange grove of delight, where Cupids, already on the wing, lead long-fingered
ladies (Langland: “And ye, lovely ladyes, with youre longe fyngres”) in music and
courtly love.
Death mows. And the moisture-laden souls breathe from the mouths, to be borne
up and away by angels, or stuffed by demons in the flaming hill; or as twice in Dante,
tugged, above and below. Better in this brunt to join the Dark Age hermits on the hill.
So Petrarch brings his spent years to a pious close:
Now I go grieving for the days on earth
I passed in worship of a mortal thing...
But regret cannot quench the flames of a lifetime:
vegghio, penso, ardo, piango, e chi mi sface
sempre m’è inanzi per mia dolce pena...
I wake, I brood, I burn, I weep; she who wounds me
Is with me always in my honied grief. (CGB)
Chaucer too brings the Troilus to a poetic Retraction:
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Symbolic History
O yonge, fresshe folkes, he or she,
In which that love up groweth with youre age,
Repayreth hom fro wordly vanyte,
And of youre herte up casteth the visage
To thilke God that after his ymage
Yow made, and thynketh al nys but a faire,
This world, that passeth soone as floures faire.
23)
Jan van Eyck, 1427-29, Eve, detail, altarpiece, St. Bavon, Ghent; + V closer
detail (video closes with a double of Adam and Eve, from V23a)
But that wise counsel melts in the burning touch Chaucer’s art was part of:
Hire armes smale, hire streghte bak and softe,
Hire sydes longe, flesshly, smothe, and white
He gan to stroke, and good thrift bad ful ofte
Hire snowisshe throte, hire brestes rounde and lite:
Thus in this hevene he gan hym to delite,
And therwithal a thousand tyme hire kiste,
That what to don, for joie unnethe he wiste.
In the deepening incarnation of late Gothic, Chaucer looks back to 1300 psalters and
forward to the Van Eyck Eve, painted twenty seven years after his death.
24)
Limbourg Brothers, 1413-16, Eden, detail, Tres Riches Heures, Chantilly
Even the Limbourg Eve follows him by 13 years; yet in sensuous caress Chaucer may
surpass the bubble Eden of the Tres Riches Heures:
Wher is myn owene lady, lief and deere?
Wher is hire white brest? Wher is it, where?
The beauty and question of earth cuts the age of faith like a sword.
25)
25a)
Lor. Maitani, 1310-30, Creation of Eve, Façade, Duomo, Orvieto (CGB ‘84)
Same, detail (also CGB '84); while video uses V25 and V25a
The antecedent refinements are in trecento Italy — Maitani, on the façade of
Orvieto. In music it is Landini, blind organist of Florence who smoothes Ars Nova
progressions almost to the limpid grace with which the 15th century begins.
June 1996
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Music:
26)
Symbolic History
Landini, c. 1370(?), Gram piant’ agli occhi, opening, (Cape) AS 63
Andrea Bonaiuti, 1365, girls dancing, detail from the Spanish Chapel, Florence; + V detail from V26a
(cut Landini)
A sweetness rivalled in Chaucer’s English:
Now welcome, somer, with thy sonne softe,
That hast this wintres wedres overshake,
And driven away the longe nyghtes blake!
27)
27b)
Same, whole fresco, Triumph of the Church, Spanish Chapel, Florence;
+ V details and a return to the whole (replacing slide 27a: same fresco, detail
of dancing girls and adjacent allegory)
Most of the same fresco from bottom up through the gate of heaven (CGB '59),
from which the video selects the figures by the Church, below
In Boccaccio’s Decameron a joy-loving company withdraw from the scythe of the
Black Death in Florence; yet even the escape is planned in the church of Santa Maria
Novella, to which the ladies return when their ten days of story telling are done. And if
we ask the context of these Spanish Chapel dancing girls, we find them to the right, in an
allegory of the Triumph of the Church (through the cloister of that same Santa Maria
Novella); we see their child gaiety yield, just above, to music and thought, from which a
man in green rises (Boccaccio, Chaucer) to kneel, nearer center, and prepare by confession for Christ’s judgment gate, over the Cathedral of Florence — the plan lately agreed
on, 1366-8, though the dome would not be built for sixty years.
From the triple portal spilled all phases of medieval life. Even Chaucer’s most
ribald characters have their sacred tie. Like Troilus, “withinne the temple... pleyinge,”
they play on pilgrimage.
a28)
b28)
28)
English (Westminster), c 1265-70, Douce Apocalypse, Lamb opens the first
seal, MS page 13, Bodleian, Oxford
English Carving, c. 1380(?), St. John the Baptist, now Hereford Cathedral
(CGB ‘84; cf. Vb9, above); + V detail
Again, Douce Apocalypse, The Temple Opened in Heaven, page 41, Bodleian,
Oxford
June 1996
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Symbolic History
When the visionary soul of England, revealed in the Douce Apocalypse about
1270, expands to the new century, Judgment finds in Langland a witness solider than this
St. John:
In a somer seson whan soft was the sonne,
I shope me in shroudes as I a shepe were,
In habite as an heremite unholy of workes,
Went wyde in this world wondres to here.
Ac on a May mornynge on Malverne hulles
Me byfel a ferly of fairy me thoughte;
I was wery forwandred and went me to reste
Under a brode banke bi a bornes side,
And as I lay and lened and loked in the wateres,
I slombred in a slepyng it sweyved so merye.
Thanne gan I to meten a merveilouse swevene,
That I was in a wildernesse wist I never where,
As I bihelde in-to the est an hiegh to the sonne,
I seigh a toure on a toft trielich ymaked;
Va29)
Vb29)
29)
Italian MS, later 14th cent., Picture of Dante’s Hell; video: detail only
English, c. 1400, MS of Marco Polo, scene of Venice, Bodleian, Oxford
Jean de Bandol and Nic. Bataille, 1379-81, Four Horsemen, Apocalypse
Tapestries, Angers; + V detail
A depe dale binethe a dongeon there-inne,
With depe dyches and derke and dredful of sight.
A faire felde ful of folke fonde I there bytwene,
Of alle maner of men the mene and the riche,
Worchyng and wandryng as the worlde asketh.
Music:
Guillaume de Machault, c. 1370(?), 4v Motet, Christe qui lux es —
Veni creator spiritus, close (Munrow) ARCHIV 2723045 (3-b)
Like Piers the Plowman, like Guillaume de Machault’s four-voice cry for Christ
the Light and Creator Spirit, the Angers tapestries body forth Apocalypse. What bore on
Rome and the early Church, Nero and the Legions, seats itself in the corruption and crisis,
the expected radical reform of the estates of Europe and France: it is the good —
Langland’s Piers, Chaucer’s Farmer and Poor Parson — who face the Horsemen, or the
Dragon.
(close Machault)
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a30)
Symbolic History
Same, Four Apocalypse scenes, with one of the seven Bishops of Asia,
Angers Tapestries
Detail of such a group (underexposed; CGB ‘89) from which the video hints
dimly at the symbolic borders, above and below; digital omits this
Again, from the Angers Tapestries, same Bishop of Asia; video: detail only
Vb30)
30)
The clustered fours of scenes, with the canopied Bishops of Asia, are framed, like
Giotto’s frescoes at Padua, in a symbolic space, a top border of angels, stars, clouds; a
base of flowered earth; between, the anagogical Coming is of here and now. The very
spirit butterflies of the seven churches display the married wings of Anjou lillies and
Bretagne ermine.
1st 31) Chartres Cathedral, c. 1210, Devil and Sinner, from the South Portal
Gothic from the first had symbolic immediacy. Take Hell and the Deadly Sins.
What happens over four hundred years from Chartres
1st 32) Rubens, c. 1620, Fall of the Damned, Alte Pinakothek, Munich; whereas
video draws from the Aachen copy a group of Gluttons (CGB '74)
to Rubens is the fleshly engrossment of a spiritual dread, an orgy of amplification, which
the time of Chaucer and Langland focuses.
2nd 31) Again, Chartres, another Devil and Sinner
The Ancren Riwle, like Chartres, is of about 1210:
The sluggard lies asleep in the devil’s lap, his dear drab, his minion.
The fiend lays his muzzle close to his ear, and prompts him just as he
pleases.
2nd 32) From the Aachen Gallery copy of Rubens' Fall of the Damned, a group of
gluttons (CGB '74); here video shows only closer details
Spenser’s 1590 procession of the Sins is squeamish of its flesh:
...loathsome Gluttony... on a filthie swyne;
His belly was up-blowne with luxury...
And all the way, most like a brutish beast,
He spued up his gorge, that all did him deteast.
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Symbolic History
(Faerie Queen I, iii, 21)
It is Ben Jonson’s pig-woman, fat Ursula (Bartholomew Fair), who plays the Rubens’
role:
Is she your quagmire, Daniel Knockem? is this your bog...
Twere like falling into a whole shire of butter...
Ursula:
Hang ‘em, rotten roguy cheaters, I hope to see ‘em plagued one day —
poxed they are already, I am sure — with lean playhouse poultry, that
has the bony rump sticking out like the ace of spades or the point of a
partizan, that every rib of ‘em is like the tooth of a saw; and will so
grate ‘em with their hips and shoulders as — take ‘em altogether —
they were as good lie with a hurdle...
(Ursula falls with the pan)
Curse of Hell, that ever I saw these fiends! Oh! I ha’ scalded my leg,
my leg, my leg, my leg! I ha’ lost a limb in the service!... Are you
under-peering you baboon! Rip off my hose, an you be men, men,
men!
33)
Freiburg Master, c. 1300, Lust, West Porch, Freiburg Minster; with a video
detail
If we move in by a century from either side, we come, around 1300, to the
Freiburg Lust, her suggestive hand rutted by the hoof of a goat; or in Manning, Handling
Sinne, the couple who lived by the church:
One night there he knew his wife,
In fleshly deed, such was their life;
But God was displeased; he willed it nought,
So near the church, such deed were wrought:
They might no more be pulled asunder
Than dog and bitch — at which men wonder... (CGB)
34)
Grünewald, 1515, Temptation of St. Anthony, detail, Isenheim Altar, Colmar;
video splits to details, below and above
On the 1500 side, it is Grünewald, with Dunbar’s Dance of the Sevin Deidly Synnes:
Priests came in with bare shaven necks,
Then all the fiends laughed and made gecks,
Black Belly and Bawsy Brown.
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Symbolic History
Lechery, that loathly corse,
Came snorting like a big-bagged horse —
With him, an ugly crew...
They led each other by the terses;
If they fouled with their erses,
There was nothing you could do. (CGB)
35)
Taddeo di Bartolo 1393, Lust, from Sadistic Hell, Collegiata, San Giminiano;
+ V detail
Midway, are the earthy Sins of Langland: Lechery —
Each maid I met with, I made her a sign
Seeming to sinward; some I would taste
About the mouth, grope some beneath,
Till our wills were one, and to work we go...
I lay by the loveliest and loved them never after...
(CGB after Coghill)
In Italy the grotesquerie mounts from Dante’s brawls around the boiling pitch and
the fart of Malacoda (Bad-tail), “del cul fatto trombetta,” to the 1393 San Giminiano
sadistic hell, where the devils handle their bad-tails “in swich manere it may nat been
expressed.”
36)
Same, detail of the dung-glutton Usurer, San Giminiano
Or where the squatting fiend dungs gold into the pursed-out Usurer.
As Langland says:
For a whore of her arse-winnings may better tythe
Than an arrant usurer, so help me God.
But it is the drunkenness of Glutton for which Langland is best known.
1st 37) Genoa MS, late 14th cent., Tavern, from De Septem Vitiis, Ad. MS 27695,
14r, British Museum, London
Under school-of-Giotto fertilization, as in this manuscript also of the Sins, a surge
of late-Gothic realism parallels Chaucer’s third style.
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Symbolic History
1st 38) Beauvais, late 15th cent., Misericord, Wife wheelbarrows a drunk husband,
from Abbey of St. Lucien; now Musée Cluny, Paris (CGB ‘80)
Turn up the choir seats in the churches. From about 1380 on, the misericords the priests
had carved there were of the foibles of flesh — a drunk husband trundled home in a
wheelbarrow.
2nd 37) Same, Tavern scene, detail
Here is Langland’s Gluttony:
There was laughyng and louring and ‘let go the cuppe,’
And seten so til evensonge and songen umwhile,
Tyl Glotoun had y-globbed a galoun an a jille.
2nd 38) Drunk in a Wheelbarrow detail (video draws from 1st 38)
His guttis gunne to gothely as two gredy sowes;
He pissed a potel in a pater-noster-while,
And blew his rounde ruwet at his rigge-bon ende,
That alle that herde that horne held her nose after,
And wusched it had be wiped with a wispe of firses...
39)
V39a)
H. Bosch, 1475-80, Gula, from Seven Deadly Sins, Prado, Madrid
Same, but a wider view of the table of Sins
He stumbled on the thresshewolde and threwe to the erthe.
Clement the cobelere caughte hym bi the myddel,
For to lifte hym alofte and leyde him on his knowes;
Ac Glotoun was a gret cherle and grym in the liftynge,
And coughed up a caudel in Clementis lappe;
Is non so hungri hounde in Hertford schire
Durst lape of the levynges so unlovely thei smaughte.
Bosch begins his work, around 1475, with the Seven Deadly Sins, still in the spirit
of Langland. In English literature the 15th century is called Chaucerian; and indeed, the
crucial turn was taken, in all the arts, by 1400.
a40)
June 1996
Peter Parler aus Gmund, 1380-85, St. Cyril, St. Vitus’ Cathedral, Prague
1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer)
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Symbolic History
1st 40) Bohemian, Peter Parler and circle, c. 1385, Portrait Bust of Wenzel von
Radecz, Triforium carvings, Prague Cathedral
The late-century realism of the Parlers in Prague speaks the independence running
from Wyclif, translator of the Bible, 1383 —
Lord! What cursed spirit of lying stirreth priests to close them in stones
or walls for all their life, since Christ commandeth to all his apostles to
go into the world and preach the Gospel —
to Huss, whom the Council of Constance seeded by fire. Langland of false priests:
Thow myghtest better mete the myste on Malverne hulles,
Than gete a momme of here mouthe but money were shewed.
And “I will become a pilgrim, and wander as wide as the world lasts/ To seek Piers the
Plowman, who can put down Pride.” Even courtly Chaucer upholds the Lollard Parson:
But riche he was of hooly thoght and werk...
…Cristes loore and his apostles twelve
He taughte, but first he folwed it hymselve.
1st 41) Parler Circle, 1375-78, Emperor Charles IV, Triforium, Prague Cathedral
Though another of the Prague heads, this of the smiling Emperor Charles IV, goes
as far toward Renaissance, reminds us how deeply and humanly one are Renaissance and
Reformation, a wave with divided crests.
2nd 40) Again Wenzel von Radecz, closer view
Thus triadic fauxbourdon
Music:
2nd 41)
2nd41a)
V2nd 41b)
3rd 41)
Apt MS, later 14th cent., Jesu, nostra redemptio, close SAWT 9505
A Ex
Again, P. Parler, Charles IV bust, closer view
Peter Parler, 1380-85, Prince Wenceslas profile, Prague Cathedral
Same, Prince Wenceslas, full face
Again, Charles IV, another of the whole bust
and filligree Ars Nova:
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Music:
Symbolic History
English, late 14th cent., Johannes Alanus, last phrase from “Sub
Arcturo,” Phil. SAL 3722
meet in Dunstable; the bluntness of Piers Plowman and early refinement of Chaucer meet
in The Canterbury Tales. What had separated out of Occam and Dante would rejoin again
and again, as the Medici and Savonarola fuse in Michelangelo.
“Here is God’s plenty,” Dryden said of Chaucer. And Kahler:
A new alertness of sense — all senses for the first time flung wide —
an untramelled life-delight, give him a power to see and record, far in
advance of his age.
Though to be born in advance means, as with Thoreau, “in the very nick of time.” How
else could Prague Cathedral (1375) endow an emperor with so Chaucerian a smile? What
is the source of that canny well-being?
Bifil that in that seson on a day,
In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay
Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage
To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,
At nyght was come into that hostelrye
Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye,
Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle
In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle...
1st 42) Loisel and Privé, 1397, Connetable du Gueslin, St. Denis; + V detail
That observed reality hangs in the oblique blessing of faith, permits a transmoral
keenness, as with Pandarus, or when Chaucer’s Miller insists on his tale of bawdry:
The Millere, that for dronken was al pale,
So that unnethe upon his hors he sat,
He nolde avalen no man for his curteisie,
But in Pilates voys he gan to crie,
And swoor, “By armes, and by blood and bones,
I kan a noble tale for the nones...
Bothe of a carpenter and of his wyf...”
4th 41) Again, Emperor Charles IV in his niche, with coat of arms
Music: French, late 14th cent., “Contre le Temps,” Seraphim SIC-6052 (2-9)
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In music a like suspension enriches four decades from Machault to Dunstable with
dancing harmonies explored in a last loyalty to the bare fifth chord, as in this late 14thcentury “Contre le Temps”.
If such vitality wells from the folk, it fills the arts of church and court: here an
emperor;
2nd 42) Again, Connetable du Gueslin
there the High Constable of France.
43)
43a)
43b)
(fade Contre le Temps)
Jacquemart de Hesdin, 1406-09, Grandes Heures, f42, det., Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris
English late Gothic, late 14th cent., Grotesque: The Blue Man, Roof boss
from the Gt. Cloister, Canterbury; here video returns (with the Lochaimer
Lied) to a closer detail of 43
Célebre Angevin, 15th cent., Carving on Maison d’Adam, Angers
It is in the sacred books of princes, the Duc de Berry’s Great Hours of the Virgin,
that fabliaux grotesques swell toward Peter Brueghel, called Peasant. Is this the mock
priest of whom the Wife of Bath said “Ther is noon oother incubus but he,” or Nicholas
bared at the window?
For that Chaucerian element take a German 1450 tupping song: a peasant goes to
the woods with his axe; the nasty priest comes to his wife; rhythm tells the rest:
Music:
Lochaimer Liederbuch, 1452-60, Es fur ein pawr gen holcz,
ARCHIV-3222
(fade Lochaimer)
Against that cursed up-and-down — “He priketh harde and depe as he were mad”
—
44)
Franco-English, late 14th cent., Chaucer reads to the court, Troilus MS, Corpus Christi, Cambridge; + V detail
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Symbolic History
Chaucer reads to the modish knights and ladies of Richard II’s court — one of the artcaterpillars of the garden. Why not the gilded dawn from the “Knight’s Tale,” dear to
early Shakespeare, who would stage the fall of gracious Richard:
The bisy larke, the messager of day,
Salueth in hir song the morwe gray,
And firy Phebus riseth up so bright
That al the orient laugheth of the light,
And with his stremes dryeth in the greves
The silver dropes hangynge on the leves...
45)
Franco-Flemish, c. 1465, Palamon and Arcite, René d’Anjou’s Livre du Cuer,
Vienna; first, video detail
Or the scene of the friends looking from the tower at Emily gathering flowers, as in this
15th-century illustration of the same Boccaccio story. What joins the Knight and Miller
is the closing prayer — “God save al this faire compaigny!” and “The tale is doon, and
God save al the rowte!” To balance in faith Romance-of-the-Rose idealism and peasant
force.
46)
Franco-Flemish 1320-30, Luxuria, Dahlem Museum, Berlin; + V detail
What diversity that unreformed church could hold. Here is Absolon, parish clerk,
“that jolif was and gay,” twenty years before Chaucer was born. It is a theme treated also
in a 1400 poem:
Jankin at the Agnus
Bereth the pax-brede:
He twinkled but said nowt,
And on my fot he trede,
Kyrieleyson.
Benedicamus Domino,
Christ from shame me shilde:
Deo gracias, therto —
Alas! I go with childe,
Kyrieleyson.
47)
Limbourg Brothers, c. 1413-16, February, detail, Tres Riches Heures, Chantilly; + V closer detail
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Symbolic History
Where two peasants warm themselves in the February cottage of the Tres Riches
Heures, we pick up the quaint connection — the Wife of Bath’s unflagging interest in
“oure bothe thynges smale” — which are not just to tell a female from a male, nor for
purging of urine, but to give us as many a merry fit as Solomon was refreshed withal:
I will bestow the flower of all my age
In the acts and in the fruit of marriage.
48)
48a)
Parler Circle, 1375-78, Anne of Swidnica, Triforium, Cathedral, Prague
Same, a different view and lighting; + V detail
Music:
Alanus, late 14th cent., Sub Arcturo (opening), Phil. SAL 3722
This motet by John Alan (Alanus), Chaucer’s English contemporary, the Prague
bust of Anne, wife of the smiling emperor (pilgrims all), share the naive joy of Chaucer, a
delight aware — in the legacy of faith and resignation — of facts which would darken
later joy. The sensuous awakening is nowhere fresher than in mismatched Alisoun:
Fair was this yonge wyf, and therwithal,
As any wezele hir body gent and smal...
Hir filet brood of silk, and set ful hye.
And sikerly she hadde a likerous ye.
Ful smale ypulled were hire browes two,
And tho were bent and blake as any sloo...
Hir mouth was sweete as bragot or the meeth,
Or hoord of apples leyd in hey or heeth.
Wynsynge she was, as is a joly colt,
Long as a mast, and upright as a bolt.
49)
Lochner, 1447, Lady, detail, Presentation in the Temple, Hessische Landesmuseum, Darmstadt
V49a&b)
Same, wider details: of the Lady's group, and of the Presentation
Whit was hir smok, and bryden al bifore
And eek bihynde, on hir coler aboute,
Of col-blak silk, withinne and eek withoute.
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Symbolic History
The tapes of hir white voluper
Were of the same suyte of hir coler...
A brooch she baar upon hir lowe coler,
As brood as is the boos of a bokeler...
(fade Alanus)
In Lochner’s 1440 spelling out, that visual delight still grows, innocently resilient, on the
church margin of the grave.
V & D a50) Tomb: Eleanor of Castile, 1292 bronze, west minster Abbey
50)
French, from Amiens, c. 1402, Cadaver tomb, Cardinal Jean de la Grange,
Mus. Calvet, Avignon
50a)
Beckington cadaver tomb, c. 1450, detail, Wells Cathedral (CGB ‘84)
The grave too takes new force. Early Gothic tombs favored earthlessness. As
body mounts on Fortune’s wheel, its wrongs and corruptions prepare, by a Dance of
Death, for the tragic stage. Here is the memento mori of Cardinal de la Grange, died
1402.
There cam a privee theef, men clepeth Deeth,
That in this contree al the peple sleeth...
The rioters in the Pardoner’s tale encounter him:
An oold man and a povre with hem mette...
“Why artow al forwrapped save thy face?
Why lyvestow so longe in so greet age?”...
“Lo how I vanysshe, flessh, and blood, and skyn!
Allas! whan shul my bones been at reste?
He points them to the wood where they find the treasure for which they stab and poison
one another.
Even Moral Gower touched on greatness when he told of the “Trump of Death.”
51)
Claus Sluter, 1404-05, mourning monk, from the Dijon Monument to Philip
the Bold, Cluny, Paris; + V detail
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Symbolic History
The fleshing-out marks every institution. Sluter, Fleming active in Dijon, is the
greatest art contemporary. His mourning monk from the Tomb of Philip the Bold has just
the cut of Chaucer’s churchmen:
This ilke monk leet olde thynges pace
And heeld after the newe world the space.
A realism which as before finds its Gothic limit in Van Eyck:
52)
Jan van Eyck, 1436, Canon van der Peale, from Madonna, Musée Communal,
Bruges
His heed was balled, that shoon as any glas,
And eek his face, as he hadde been enoynt.
He was a lord ful fat and in good point;
His eyen stepe, and rollyinge in his heed,
That stemed as the forneys of a leed...
A fat swan loved he best of any roost.
53)
English, 1348, Tomb of Hugh, Lord Dispenser, detail, Tewkesbury Abbey
With chivalry Chaucer may cling to the idealism of the past. Though a child when
this Tewkesbury tomb was carved for Hugh, Lord Dispenser, he presents a Knight of such
high calling (though some have scrupled at his battles):
he loved chivalrie,
Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisie...
He was a verray, parfit, gentil knyght.
a54)
b54)
54)
Probably Flemish in Paris, 1412-13, Effigy of Pierre d’Evreux-Navarre, detail, Louvre
Same, Pierre’s Wife, Catherine d’Alençon, detail, Louvre
Same, Pierre d’Evreux-Navarre and his Wife, full figures, Louvre (but half
figures videoed from V54)
Where this 1412 Pierre d’Evreux-Navarre seems a schemer of the new century —
more a Man of Law than a Knight, meek as a maid, who never spoke villany to anyone.
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Symbolic History
His wife, with her ten pounds of coverchiefs on her head —
Boold was hir face, and fair, and reed of hewe.
She was a worthy womman al hir lyve —
might be contending with the Wife of Bath who knows best “the olde daunce.”
While the study of the couple as such reminds us how many of the Tales deal not
with chivalric romance, but with the chief problem of the middle class, marriage.
55)
German, c. 1340, Knight and Bride, carving, Rottweil, Chapel Tower;
+ V detail
German, 1340, love-troth, exchange of rings — Chaucer’s Knight invokes that
domestic dream:
And thus with alle blisse and melodye
Hath Palamon ywedded Emelye.
And God, that al this wyde world hath wroght,
Sende hym his love that hath it deere aboght…
And Emelye hym loveth so tendrely...
That nevere was ther no word hem bitwene
Of jalousie or any oother teene...
56)
56a)
Bohemian, 1363-65, Charles IV and Anne, over the door of the Chapel, Karlstejn Castle, Prague
Same: wider view of the Chapel door and decoration
More apt, after problem tales of marriage, is the trusting solution of the Franklin’s
Tale, which by trial and honour re-cements a union in such “soverereyn blisse” as Charles
IV and Anne set Master Theodoric to paint above the chapel door of Karlstejn Castle.
57)
57a)
57b)
57c)
57d)
French, c. 1390, Double: [A] Charles V of France; and [B] Jeanne Bourbon;
upper details of standing sculptures, Louvre
Same, detail of Jeanne Bourbon
Same, detail of Charles V
Same, full length double; while video returns to 57: busts
Another detail of Charles V
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Symbolic History
From Paris, 1390, comes a sadder couple. We have quoted the Wife of Bath
before with this Jeanne Bourbon:
Unto this day it dooth myn herte boote
That I have had my world as in my tyme...
The flour is goon, there is namoore to telle;
The bren, as I best kan, now moste I selle...
While the confessional smile of her husband, Charles the Wise, explores such
psychological depths as Chaucer’s “gentil Pardoner” with his yellow hair and gelding
voice:
For though myself be a ful vicious man,
A moral tale yet I you telle kan,
Which I am wont to preche for to wynne...
Like the corrupt church which channeled such art, the Pardoner gives his fabulous
sermon, concluding — as he brings out variants of Boccaccio’s “feather of Gabriel” (or
Heywood’s “buttock bone of the Pentecost”) —
lo, sires, thus I preche.
And Jhesu Crist, that is oure soules leche,
So graunte yow his pardoun to receyve,
For that is best; I wol yow nat deceyve.
a58)
58)
English or French, c. 1395, Wilton Diptych, National Gallery, London; right
panel: Virgin and Child, with Angels; while video first shows (from V58) the
whole Diptych, then a central spread of a58 (using either slide)
Same, the whole Diptych: Richard II introduced to the Heavenly Host; of
this, the video narrows to a detail of Richard and Mary, then returns to the
whole (frames are too bright in 58; video uses V58)
We have still to mention the sacred gem of Chaucer’s time, The Pearl. Both it and
the Gawain are by a poet of Western dialect, difficult, but as beautiful as the music the
dreamer heard on the flowered grave of his daughter:
Yet thoght me never so swete a sange
As stylle stounde let to me stele.
There his body falls:
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Fro spot my spyryt ther sprang in space,
My body on balke ther bod in sweven;
My goste is gon in Godes grace,
In aventure ther mervayles meven.
Taught by Dante, he sees across the stream, in the jewelled company of the Lamb,
His precious perle wythouten spotte.
The Wilton Diptych, also of the late century, shows Richard II introduced to such
a band on such a shore.
1st 59) Franco-Flemish, c. 1390-1400, St. Christopher, van den Bergh Museum,
Antwerp
As for the clear stream down crystal cliffs, a late century St. Christopher wades in
such bright water. We know, as we cross 1400, the perfection of that nominalist focus on
particulars.
1st 60) Dirk Bouts the Younger, c. 1480(?), St. Christopher, Alte Pinakothek, Munich
In Dirk Bouts the observation grows precise, without losing preternatural clarity.
Style surfaces in art.
2nd 59) Again, Franco-Flemish, c. 1390-1400, St. Christopher, detail
Through the abstraction of language, can we assign Chaucer or The Pearl a place in that
spectrum? This is their century.
2nd 60) Again, Dirk Bouts, St. Christopher, detail
Is this theirs, or Villon’s earth-emergence?
61)
French MS, c. 1400(?), Lancelot du Lac, f.7, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris
So with Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight: from the flatness of the Chivalric
tradition (this Lancelot of the same time) —
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This kyng lay at Camylot upon Krystmasse...
With alle the wele of the worlde thay woned ther samen,
The most kyd knyghtes under Krystes selven,
And the lovelokkest ladies that ever lif haden —
62)
Franco-Flemish, c. 1465, Love gives Desire the Heart of the King, Le Livre
du Coeur d’Amour, National Library, Vienna; + V detail (V62a)
it ripens toward the intimacies of the fifteenth century Book of the Heart of Love — as
Love here at night, the lady seducer at dawn comes to Gawayn’s bed:
And Gawayn the god mon in gay bed lyges...
And as in slomeryng he slode, sleghly he herde
A littel dyn at his dor...
Hit wats the ladi, loflyest to beholde...
And ho stepped stilly and stel to his bedde,
Kest up the cortyn and creped withinne,
And set hir ful softly on the bed-syde...
a63)
63)
Simone Martini c. 1340?, Virgin of the Annunciation, whole seated figure,
Royal Museum, Antwerp; video: upper half only; digital: double, Angel &
Virgin
Same, half figure; while video shows a close detail
For that filling in of the concordantly human, set one of Simone Martini’s
haunting Virgins (her response to the “Ave” equivocal as Lorenzo of Florence’s 14th
century “Hosannah")
Music:
64)
Lorenzo of Florence, c. 1350(?), close of Sanctus, Seraphim SIC6052
Jan van Eyck, 1432, Virgin of the Annunciation, upper half of the figure, Altar, St. Bavon, Ghent; + V detail: head of Virgin (V64a)
against Jan van Eyck’s devout Handmaiden of the Lord — while Dufay, in his Alma
Redemptoris Mater, gives the scene his tenderest 15th-century chords:
Music:
Dufay, c. 1433, Alma Redemptoris Mater, close, (Cape group)
ARCHIV 3003
That span of eighty years Chaucer divides.
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a65)
65)
65a)
Symbolic History
Gaston Phebus, c. 1405-10, Le Livre de la Chasse, Hunting and Killing the
Fox, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; + V detail
Same, Hunting deer
Same, Coursing the Stag
In music it is Ciconia, born before, died after — Flemish-Italian, like Chaucer a
blend of North and South. His madrigal warning foxes against dogs seems early, though
such 14th-century sharpness spills over the century in Gaston Phebus’ Book of the Chase.
Music:
Ciconia, c. 1380-90(?), I cani son fuori, beginning, MHS 899
Chaucer’s visionary hunt in “The Franklin’s Tale” is so stylized:
Forestes, parkes ful of wilde deer;
Ther saugh he hertes with hir hornes hye,
The gretteste that evere were seyn with ye.
He saugh of hem an hondred slayn with houndes
And somme with arwes blede of bittre woundes...
Or the Green Knight’s chase while Gawayn is sleeping:
The does dryven with gret dyn to the depe slades...
What! thay brayen, and bleden, bi bonkkes thay deyen...
Hunteres with hyghe horne hasted hem after...
66)
66a)
66b)
V66c)
66d)
(fade Ciconia)
Boucicault Master, c. 1405-08, Flight to Egypt, whole page with border,
MS 2 f90v, Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris
Same, upper spread
Same, lower spread
Same, detail: landscape only, with another video detail
Same, the inner picture, without the flowered border
That jewelled nature widens in the Canterbury Prologue, to a harmony of the
vernal and peopled earth:
Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
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Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the younge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.
By 1400, the Amen of Ciconia’s Gloria, in sequential phrasing of voiced
harmonic space, parallels this Boucicault Master’s 1405 conquest of the dimensional
earth.
Music:
Ciconia, c. 1400(?), from Gloria (Amen), Telefunken SAWT-9544-A
Here the essential truth of Renaissance is caught in works almost contemporary with
Chaucer.
67)
Limbourg Brothers, c. 1413-16, May, Tres Riches Heures, Chantilly
One speaks of the International Style as preparing for 1425 — for the Van Eycks
in Bruges, for Masaccio in Florence. So music moves toward Dunstable and Dufay. In
Burgundy the Tres Riches Heures is the masterpiece of that transition.
68)
Jacobo della Quercia, 1414-19, Rhea Silvia, from the Fonte Gaia, Palazzo
Publico, Siena (CGB '86)
In Tuscany the early work of Della Quercia as graciously points the way.
With these comes Ciconia’s last and richest piece, the “O Rosa Bella”, which
Dunstable also would set.
a2nd 67) Again, May of the Tres Riches Heures, center spread
2nd 67) Again, Tres Riches Heures, close detail of the same May
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Music:
Symbolic History
Ciconia, c. 1405-10, O Rosa Bella, first half, Deller, RCA Victor LM6016
2nd 68) Again, Rhea Silvia, upper half of slide 68
a69)
Jacobo della Quercia, 1406, Tomb of Ilaria del Caretto, viewed from her
right, detail, Duomo, Lucca (CGB ‘80)
69)
Same, whole Tomb, viewed from her left
69a)
Same, upper half of the figure, viewed from above
(fade O Rosa Bella)
Della Quercia’s 1406 tomb of Ilaria del Caretto initiates a type as much of the
Renaissance as Shakespeare’s Juliet. Does Chaucer’s Prioress, with her love-brooch (of
which no Roman apologist should rob her) live at all in that new world?
On which ther was first write a crowned A,
And after Amor vincit omnia.
Va70)
Ghiberti, 1401, Abraham and Issac, model, center spread of whole, Bargello,
Florence
Same, detail of Abraham and Isaac
70)
The tide did not wait for 1425. It was in the first year of the century that the
contest for the Baptistery doors brought this winning model from the 20 year old
Ghiberti. England was not so far but that Sir John Hawkwood had lately led the forces of
the Florentine Republic. Had not the Pardoner come all hot from Rome, the veil of Our
Lady and the sail of St. Peter in his wallet? If the Island he came to was backward in
antique recovery;
71)
71a)
English Misericord, c. 1360(?), Smiling Expulsion, Worcester Cathedral
Same, upper detail
its humblest arts (from Occam down) could reshape Christianity to affirm the life of the
world. In this Worcester Misericord, Adam and Eve and the angel who drives them from
the garden smile — Felix Culpa:
Adam lay ibounden,
Bounden in a bond;
Four thousand winter
Thought he not too long;
And all was for an appil,
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An appil that he tok,
As clerkès finden
Wreten in here book.
Ne haddè the appil takè ben,
The appil taken ben,
Ne haddè never our lady
A ben hevenè quene.
Blessèd be the time
That appil takè was;
Therefore we moun singen
“Deo gracias!”
72)
Limbourg Brothers, c. 1414-16, Eden, Tres Riches Heures, Chantilly;
+ V detail
It is not just a modern insight that the bubble-Eden of the Limbourg Brothers is
also a womb, from which the expelled are born into the wayfaring Pilgrimage of the
world. What Wycliff and Hus had begun would culminate in Milton: “I cannot praise a
fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised, and unbreathed... where that immortal garland
is to be run for, not without dust and heat.”
73)
73a)
Massaccio, c. 1426, Expulsion, Brancacci Chapel, Carmine, Florence
Same, Expulsion, detail, waist up
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By 1426 Masaccio had molded the body and passion of man’s explusion into a
tragedy of regenerative nobility. What heightens the sorrow gives the clue. Adam and
Eve are coming into light. As is said in Lear: “Out of heaven’s benediction to the warm
sun.” In the cloud-cold of England, a symbolic claim.
1st 74) dei Grassi and Belbello, c. 1380-1420, Nativity Page, from Visconti Hours,
National Library, Florence; while video takes a detail combining the stable
scene with the angels and shepherds on the heath
All over Europe now, from 1380 on, as the juggler in the old romance danced for
Our Lady, humanized piety plays sacred games. How thin, after Giotto, the miniatures of
dei Grassi and Belbello; yet how instinctively earthborn.
1st 75) English, 1410-20, Shepherds from the old Choir Stalls, Exeter (CGB ‘80)
1st 75a) Same, Shepherds, detail, upper right (CGB ‘80); + V closer details
In 1400 England, rood-lofts and choir stalls later destroyed (this surviving
fragment from Exeter) enact guild drama — The Second Shepherds’ Play: (each enters
complaining)
We silly shepherds that walk on the moor...
No wonder, as it stands, if we be poor...
As ye ken
We are so lamed
Hard taxed and maimed...
By these gentry men. (CGB)
The second, of marriage:
These men that are wed have not all their will...
In bedroom or bed they say not their fill...
If I read e’er epistle, I have one for my dear
As sharp as a thistle, as rough as a briar... (CGB)
The third against floods and Fortune:
Was never since Noah’s flood such floods seen... (CGB)
a2nd 74)
2nd 74)
June 1996
Again, Visconti Hours, from Nativity Page, shepherds, below
Same, Shepherds and Nativity, center; first, video Nativity detail
1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer)
33
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
So Mak appears, and as they are napping, steals a sheep, which he and his wife
wrap in swaddling, as if she had borne a child. Across the guild-stage Christ lies in the
manger, while here Gill croons over “a horned lad in cradle.” After a vain search, the
shepherds try to kiss Mak’s child, and the cheat is discovered (“He has a long snout”).
On the heath once more, they are sent to Bethlehem by the angel.
2nd 75) Same as 1st 75, Exeter Shepherds; + V details of faces
Hail, comely and clean! Hail, young child!
Hail, Maker, as I mean, of a maiden so mild...
Have a bob of cherries!
The second:
A bird I have brought to my bairn.
Hail, little tynemop,
Of our creed thou art crop!
I would drink on thy cup,
Little day starn.
And the third:
I bring thee but a ball:
Have and play withal
And go to the tennis. (CGB)
76)
English, c. 1400, Flagellation, Retable, Norwich Cathedral; + V detail
The acuteness that shapes that delight caricatures Christ’s torturers. It is again
Bosch who would culminate what is here begun:
lst Torturer:
2nd Torturer:
3rd Torturer:
4th Torturer:
Lift up this tree among us all.
Yea, and let it into the mortice fall,
And it will burst his chest.
Yea, and tear him limb from limb!
And it will crack each joint in him,
Let see now who does best. (CGB)
a1st 77) German, c. 1400, Crucifixion with Saints, Pähl Altar, Bavarian National
Museum, Munich; + V detail
June 1996
1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer)
34
�C.G. Bell
1st 77)
Symbolic History
Master of St. Veronica, c. 1400, Large Crucifixion, detail, WallrafRichartz Museum, Köln (CGB '74); digital uses whole
At the core of these 1400 Passions, whether Flemish, English, German, most of
all, of the soft-eyed broodings from Cologne, simple pity redeems Gothic pain, as when
Mary speaks in the Wakefield (or Townley) play:
Such sorrow for to see,
My dear child in thee,
Is more mourning to me,
Than any tongue can tell.
The terminal complexities of Ars Nova lose touch with this human breadth
developing in the North:
Music:
Matteo da Perugia, c. 1390(?), “Amen” from the Gloria, O.L. 1
(close)
Its voice is the plain fauxbourdon of England:
For 2nd 76) German or English, early 15th cent., Crucifixion, Courtauld Inst. of
Art
Music:
England, c. 1400, Old Hall Credo, “Patrem,” Col. DX 582 (78)
(fade)
Or as polished and disseminated from Avignon:
2nd 77) From 1st 77, Veronica Master, Crucifixion, upper detail; where video then
picks up the Saints on Christ's right (John, Mary, Peter), the slide show returns to the Crucifixion panel of a77, Pähl Altar
Music:
English, late 14th cent., Kyrie de Angelis, opening, SAWT 9505 AEx
(fade)
It was not only the leaders and the great who turned Europe from earthless
devotion; it was the Gothic folk, working in common piety, to ground the Christian
legend in the time, space, and cause of mortal possibility.
June 1996
1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer)
35
�C.G. Bell
a78)
b78)
78)
Symbolic History
Claus Sluter, 1395-99, Moses and David, from the Moses Fountain,
Chartreuse de Champmol, Dijon
Same, from Moses Fountain: David, Jeremiah and Zachariah
Same, Moses detail
If we return, within that ground, to the strongest artist of Chaucer’s time, to Sluter,
whose Moses fountain in Dijon mediates whatever is monumental from Donatello to the
Baroque, fulfilling the manhood promised from Occam —
The pope may not deprive men of liberties conferred on them by God
or by nature —
to the praying Lollards —
When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman? —
we may seem to have left Chaucer behind, a jesting courtier. Though in fact the poem it
was said he wrote on his deathbed, the “Ballad of Good Counsel,” is the greatest
expression of the new self-reliance. He speaks to his pilgrim soul:
Forth, pilgrim, forth! Forth, beast, out of thy stall!
Know thy country, look up, thank God of all;
Hold the high way, and let thy spirit lead;
And truth thee shall deliver, it is no dread.
a79)
79)
Franco-German, c. 1300, Head of a Prophet, Main Portal, Strasbourg
Same, another head from a prophet holding a scroll
To mark how far we have come from the lean, fierce abasement of a century before, set
Strasbourg against Sluter, and with it an English poem, also of 1300, on the vanity of the
world:
Were beth they biforen us weren,
Hundès ladden and hauekès beren
And hadden feld and wode?
The richè levedies in hoerè bour
That wereden gold in hoerè tressour
With hoerè brightè rode;
Eten and drounken and maden hem glad;
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Hoerè lif was al with gamen i-lad,
Men kneleden hem biforen,
They beren hem wel swithè heyè
And in a twincling of an eyè
Hoerè soulès weren forloren.
Va80)
80)
Again, Moses Fountain, side view of Zacharias
Same, Head of Zacharias from the Moses Fountain, Dijon
From that, to the amplitude of Sluter’s Zacharias, or Chaucer’s self-rule — as if
Dante had come from mountain hierarchy to this plain of the forthright man:
Forth, pilgrim, forth! Forth, beste out of thy stal!
Know thy contree, look up, thank God of al;
Hold the heye way, and lat thy gost thee lede;
And trouthe thee shal delivere, it is no drede.
June 1996
1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer)
37
�
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1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer), Symbolic History, Part 13
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SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
14. 15th Century: Early Renaissance
CHARLES G. BELL
ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
or
1260 CANYON ROAD
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501
July 1994
Last Revised January ‘96
�1
Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
14. 15th Century: Early Renaissance
1)
Giovanni dei Grassi, c. 1398, Annunciation, Visconti Hours, National
Library, Florence; + V detail
Soon after 1400, Ciconia, Flemish-born Italian, closed his career with the
ceremony motets, which initiate in music the spatial clarities of Early Renaissance.
Music:
Ciconia, 1400-10, O Virum — O Lux — O beate Nicholae, SAWT9505
At the same time art formed an horizon of humanizing sacred brightness — the
International Style — from this 1398 Dei Grassi, in Italy,
2)
Broederlam, 1393-99, Annunciation, from reredos, Museum, Dijon; first,
video detail
through Burgundy and France (this Dijon Broederlam),
3)
English Alabaster relief, c. 1420?, Annunciation, Cathedral, Wells; + V detail
across the Channel, to the winsome alabaster reliefs of England;
4)
Cologne, c. 1410, Madonna, etc., Johnson Collection, Philadelphia (CGB '74);
first, video detail
back to Cologne, where the softest jewelling of all runs from this 1410 Madonna,
5)
Lochner, c. 1435, Madonna in a Rose Arbor, Walraff-Richartz Museum,
Cologne; + V detail
to the ultimate child-wonder of Lochner, as late as 1440. So we
might return by the Rhine and Danube,
7/1994
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�2
C.G. Bell
6)
Symbolic History
Fra Angelico, 1434-35, Coronation of the Virgin, detail, Uffizi, Florence
(CGB '59); + V closer details
to the gold-leaf devotions of Fra Angelico, in Florence —
7)
Ghiberti, 1404-09, Annunciation, North Door, Baptistry, Florence; first,
video detail
city of Classical recovery in Gothic grace.
(End Ciconia)
Here Ghiberti's early work on the Baptistery doors had opened the century.
8)
Michelangelo, 1497-99, Pieta, whole, St. Peter's, Rome; + V detail
By its close, art gathers its force in Michelangelo's first Pieta, music in the death-lament
which Isaac, Fleming at the court of Florence, wrote for Lorenzo il Magnifico, died 1492:
Music:
9)
10)
11)
Isaac, 1492, "Quis dabit capiti meo aquam?" last section, Decca
DL-79413
Same, detail: Mary's head; + V detail of 11
Same, detail: Christ's hand; + V detail of 8
Same, detail: Christ's body; + V return to 8, first a detail, then the whole
(close Isaac)
At such advance of consciousness in the science of incarnate sway, we heirs to its
later pride feel a shudder of tragic awe.
12)
Lascaux Cave 20,000 B.C., wall of main hall, detail, animals; video: close
detail only
As if the whole rational-realist thrust of civilization were an age-old mistake,
some Luciferian fall from mythic immediacy. So it was at the Greeks that Charles Olson,
in his Black Mountain lectures on history, pointed the finger of Nietzschean blame:
"Man lost something just about 500 B.C.,
13)
7/1994
Franz Marc 1913, Deer in the Forest, Phillips Gallery, Washington D.C.;
+ V details
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�3
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
and only got it back just about 1905 A.D."
Music:
Alban Berg 1920-6, from 3rd Mvt, Lyric Suite, V-LM-2531
(As in Marc's magic forest, Berg's Lyric Suite, Rilke's "Exposed on the peaks of the
heart"?)
Of uncleft consciousness indeed there moves
Many about, many a qualmless hill-beast,
Moves and delays. And the great inviolable bird
Circles the summit's virgin refusal. But here,
Unsheltered, here, on the peaks of the heart... (CGB)
14)
(fade Berg)
Double: {A} Michelangelo 1522, Fury, black chalk, Uffizi, Florence; and
{B} Francois Rude 1833, Head of La Guerre, Arc de Triomphe, Paris
Surely, if we pursue the revolution by which a Michelangelo hell-fury becomes
the summons of a national Arc de Triomphe, arrogating its brazen Book of Law and iron
Book of War over space, time and cause — who would not ask where history went
wrong?
15)
Double: {A} Aegean, c. 2000 BC, Head of Cycladic idol, Louvre, Paris; and
{B} Greek (from Delos), c. 100 B.C., Bronze head, National Museum, Athens;
and video detail (from V15B)
And the modern appeal to the pre-Greek, Cycladic and abstract, is of a piece with
Olson's oblique claim, that at the beginning of the Periclean century something happened,
by which man was broken from the functionalities of nature and tribe; that it was
philosophic scrutiny of self and world which stamped the brow-furrowing of
consciousness on centuries to follow.
Though if that palpable resolve to compose symbolic reality to the deliberate
measure of man, was a mistake,
16)
7/1994
Egypt, Old Kingdom, Dynasty V, c. 2400 BC, Ranofer, Prophet of Ptah
(head), Egyptian Museum, Cairo
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�4
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
it was not made once only, but before and after: 2400 BC, when Egypt became the cradle
of civilization by great discoveries that way;
17)
Greek (Attic), c. 490 B.C., Korê of Euthydicos, Acropolis Museum, Athens
subsequently, by the Greeks, this Saphic Kore of 500 BC; and again (marking another
2000 years) as Christendom emerged from the trance of medieval seizure. And strange
— if mistake — that it should produce, in each case, an expression of such vernal delight:
the Archaic smile renewed
18)
18a)
Baldovinetti, c. 1450(?), Madonna and Child, Louvre, Paris (CGB '80);
+ V details; with a digital return after 18a
Baldovinetti, 1460-62, detail of Arno Valley, Nativity fresco, Vestibule,
Santissima Annunziata, Florence [revised into video, ‘95]
in this Baldovinetti Virgin, as pure as fetching, seated on some Florentine height over the
discovered Val d'Arno. So the beauty of earth, an orphic voice through Dante's dead land
— "La dov' esser de' giocondo" — "There, where one ought to be happy" — blooms in
15th-century Poliziano:
To behold the valleys and hills and air pure,
Grass and flowers, rivers cold and clear;
To hear the birds sing and the waters sound
And low wind murmuring among the fronds;
See apples heap the earth and bend the trees,
And the ripe wheat run in billows like the sea. (CGB)
(E le biade ondeggiar come fa il mare.)
As if a drunk who must end in murderous sick despair (our ravaged civilization of
the "Bateau Ivre") could still look back to a morning age, when the first Promethean
draughts had awakened to life and love, in what remains perhaps the most loveable of our
centuries, the fifteenth.
19)
Bernardo Daddi c. 1335?, Madonna etc., detail, National Gallery of Art,
Washington D.C. (CGB '75); + V details
Trace the waking from the century before. In a Daddi Madonna, the burning
mystery of Dante's praise:
7/1994
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�5
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Vergine madre, figlia del tuo figlio:
Maiden and mother and daughter of your son,
Humble and exalted beyond every creature,
Determined goal of eternal counsel — (CGB)
termine fisso d'etterno consiglio —
Music:
Landini, c.1360(?), Va pure, amore; organ & harp, Zurich, Odys.
3216017
has lightened (like the music of Landini) through Boccaccio,
O regina degli angioli, O Maria:
Mary, Queen of the angels of heaven,
Adornment of the sky, whose smiling features,
Star of the sea, guide into their haven
Wanderers from the way, your witless creatures... (CGB)
(cut Landini)
20)
V20a)
Botticelli, c. 1485, Madonna of the Magnificat, detail, Uffizi, Florence;
(video closer detail only); then
Same, cropped whole from video file
toward the 15th century ease of Belcari's sacred plays:
Lily of May, flower of blessedness,
With chastity and all the virtues else
Adorned, of every kind and loveliness —
We honor you above all saints and angels. (CGB)
What Botticelli would culminate in this Magnificat Madonna — Europe refining
from the Gothic past some Beulah wedding of earth and heaven: "You shall no more be
called Desolate...for your land shall be married."
21)
22)
7/1994
Jan van Eyck, c. 1425, Madonna in a Church, Dahlem Museum, Berlin;
+ V detail
Same, a closer central detail
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�6
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Bruges, 1425: Jan van Eyck's church remains mystical; that sun shines from the north, as
on Dante's Paradise; but it irradiates, like daily realities, the Gothic lines, the angels in the
choir, the pageant Queen. Such the light in an English Advent poem:
I sing of a maiden
That is makeles,
King of all kinges
To her sone she ches.
He cam also stille
There his moder was,
As dew in Aprille
That falleth on the grass.
He cam also stille
To his moderes bour,
As dew in Aprille,
That falleth on the flour.
He cam also stille
There his moder lay,
As dew in Aprille
That falleth on the spray.
Moder and maiden
Was never non but sche;
Well may swich a lady
Godes moder be.
Music, if nothing else, would make us treat 15th century Europe as a whole. To
hear what those angels might be singing in the van Eyck choir, we turn to Dufay,
23)
V23a)
Hubert and Jan van Eyck 1427-29 (double), {A} Singing angels; and
{B} Angels playing instruments, Altarpiece of the Lamb, Ghent
Same, detail of A of 23, singing angels
Music:
Dufay, c.1430(?), Gloria ad modum tubae (Munich) AWT 9439
at the same time bringing the musicians nearer, as in the Ghent Altar of the Lamb. Yet
Dufay's Gloria in the manner of trumpets, with canon above and ostinato below,
24)
7/1994
Luca della Robbia, 1431-38 (double), Choirboys from the Cantoria, Duomo
Museum, Florence; for the double, video takes details, reversing the order: see
A and B of V24 (CGB '86) in video file; digital adds to double one detail
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�7
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
is from about 1430, when Italianate-Flemish Dufay was with the Papal choir. So Luca
della Robbia's Florentine choirboys would serve as well.
25)
Benozzo Gozzoli, 1459, Angels and background detail, Medici Chapel,
Florence; digital adds one detail (CGB '86)
Or Gozzoli's angels, past mid-century, from the Medici Chapel;
26)
Piero della Francesca, 1470, Angel musicians from the Nativity, National
Gallery, London
or Piero della Francesca's, from the London Nativity.
27)
Luca della Robbia, Cantoria (double), Dancing, Duomo Museum, Florence;
video replaces with details of singles V27 {A} (CGB) and V27 {B} in video file;
digital adds to double, one detail (CGB '86)
As worship turns to dance, it will be Luca della Robbia again;
28)
Donatello, 1433-38, Cantoria of Dancing Genii, Duomo Museum, Florence;
with V details
or from Donatello's facing Gallery, the more bacchanalian abandon of dancing Genii.
(end Dufay Gloria)
This is new wine in the old faith bottles —
29)
Fra Filippo Lippi, c. 1460(?), Madonna with Angels, Uffizi, Florence
(CGB '59); + V details, cf. V29a and V29b (CGB '59)
Browning's Brother Lippo stealing in from a night frolic to paint
On Jerome knocking at his poor old breast
With his great round stone to subdue the flesh.
It is Vasari who tells how Lippi chose the novitiate Lucrezia as model for a Prato
Madonna, finished nun, as it were, with the picture, took her off to be his mistress,
7/1994
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�8
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
thereafter portrayed as Mary, and their lively urchins as Christ and the angels — religion
as sprightly as Charles of Orleans' Confession:
My gostly fader, I me confesse,
First to God and then to you,
That at a window — wot ye how? —
I stale a cosse of grete sweteness...
30)
Fouquet, c. 1450, Agnes Sorel as Mary Enthroned, Louvre, Paris; + V detail
But I restore it shall doutless...
And that to God I make a vow...
While French Fouquet turned Charles VII's Agnes Sorel to a Mary of pneumatic bliss — a
levity naive as its embrace in faith:
Chiamo il dolce Gesù e canto, canto —
But to Mary mild and Jesu child, I sing, I sing... (CGB)
31)
Fra Filippo Lippi c. 1441-47, Coronation of the Virgin (video alternates the
whole with details from that and from 32)
Some years before the meeting with Lucrezia, Lippi had painted the Uffizi
Coronation of the Virgin, in which, by the startlingly personal St. Lucy below (with her
children), the later affair seems prefigured. For Browning this is "the Prior's niece who
comes/ To care about his asthma..."
Oh that white smallish female with the breasts,
She's just my niece —
whom Lippi has chosen for this picture: "I shall paint/ God... Madonna.../ Ringed in a
bowery flowery angel-brood / ...i' the front... a saint or two" —
32)
Same, Lippi Coronation, detail front, right (old hand-colored Alinari photo)
the artist himself then (as Browning thought), in his monk's robe come up, as from a dark
stair, mazed, until that "sweet angelic slip of a thing" intercedes: "This man did the
work" (as on the scroll) "iste perfecit opus".
Such the Ave Regina Dufay troped for himself: "Miserere supplicanti Dufay";
7/1994
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�9
C.G. Bell
Music:
Symbolic History
Dufay, 1464, from Antiphon, Ave regina caelorum, Miserere...
Dufay (Planchard) MHS 4743A
(fade)
or the lighter greeting of his Month of May Rondeau, "Karissime Dufay vous en prye..."
Music:
Dufay, 1423-29, from Ce Moys de May, (Cape) EMS 206
(fade)
33)
Double: {A} Lippi(?), c. 1435, Monks from a fresco, Carmine Cloister,
Florence; and {B} Lippi, 1460-64, Girls at the Dance of Salome, Duomo,
Prato; + V details from V33 {A} and V33 {B})
It is likely that in the fresco fragment in the Carmine Cloister (left) the young
Lippi has represented his delight in whatever is perceived (Browning, from Vasari):
First every sort of monk, the black and white,
I drew them, fat and lean. . .
7/1994
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�10
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
While as late as the Prato frescoes, two girls whispering of Herodias' demand for John the
Baptist's head, make such discovery unforgettable.
34)
Fra Angelico & school, 1447-50, St. Laurence giving alms, detail, Capella
Nicolina, Vatican, Rome (video: lower spread of whole V34, then closer
detail)
Was not Lippi's art-sire, the saintly Fra Angelico, entering Renaissance by the
same observational road? — his mid-century St. Laurence distributing alms dominated by
the blind beggar (right), where spirituality springs exactly from heightened sense. So
Browning's Lippi, studying the watchmen, calls for "a bit of chalk".
35)
French Gothic c. 1230, Faggots for Winter, West Front, Notre Dame, Paris;
first, video detail
Music:
Perrin d'Angecourt, 13th cent., "Quant voi a la fin d'estey," AS-18
We have seen the secular hauntingly suspended in the synthesis of creed, sharp as
this winter from Notre Dame. In a Goliard poem: "De ramis cadunt folia," the bleak
time burns with love; so too with Perrin d'Angecourt, 13th century Troubador. (close
d'Ancecourt)
36)
Lorenzetti c. 1340, Winter, fresco border, Palazzo Publico, Siena; + V detail
Music:
Guillaume de Machault, c.1360(?), Rondeau, Puis qu'en oubli,
(Cape) ARC 3032
In Lorenzetti's 14th-century Winter the mystery is distilled through a realism,
strange as the "smoky rein" in Chaucer, which keeps Creseyde at Pandarus' house for the
consummation required. So Dante in the Vita Nuova speaks with the ladies who pity
him:
And as sometimes we see water fall mingled with white snow, so it
seemed their talk issued forth mingled with sighs.
Guillaume de Machault's double-leading-tones,
37)
7/1994
Lorenzetti, c. 1340, detail from Good Government in the Country, Palazzo
Publico, Siena; (video: first a closer detail, using Va37)
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�11
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Lorenzetti's panorama of a well-governed countryside, have offered such exploratory
translations of reality. Each detail of that vast spread —
In Augoste in a hygh seysoun,
Quen corne is corven wyth crokes kene —
holds the dream of spacelessness.
38)
(fade Machault)
Pol de Limbourg, 1413-16, July, Tres Riches Heures, Chantilly (first,
V details: reaping, then shearing)
Music:
Arnold de Lantins, c.1420?, Puis que je voy (Cape), AS-39
With the 1400's estrangement ebbs. The Calendar of the Tres Riches Heures,
Burgundian Rondeaux (this Arnold de Lantins), breathe natural air. Even the plays of
1400 Flanders accomplish the human passage: Sandareen tells her new knight of her
seduction by the baron who has cast her off; she speaks in the metaphor of a blossoming
tree from which a falcon has robbed one flower; and he says one flower is nothing, to
speak of it no more, it will not set him against the tree he loves.
In English the greatest poetry of the seasons is from Gawayne and the Green
Knight. We trim to summer and the coming on of fall:
After, the sesoun of somer wyth the soft wyndes,
Quen Zeferus syfles hymself on sedes and erbes;
Wela wynne is the wort that waxes theroute,
When the donkande dewe dropes of the leves,
To bide a blysful blush of the bryght sunne.
39)
Same, October, Tres Riches Heures; + V detail
Bot then hyghes hervest, and hardenes hym sone,
Warnes hym for the wynter to wax ful rype;
He dryves wyth droght the dust for to ryse,
Fro the face of the folde to flyghe ful hyghe;
Wrothe wynde of the welkyn wrasteles with the sunne,
The leves lancen fro the lynde and lyghten on the grounde,
(those alliterations heightening every mood — as in the miniature, the face of the sower
of winter wheat)
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15th Century: Early Renaissance
�12
C.G. Bell
40)
Symbolic History
Same, December, Tres Riches Heures; (video has details only, below and above)
And al grayes the gres that grene wats ere;
Then al rypes and rotes that ros upon fyrst,
And thus yirnes the yere in yisterdayes mony,
And wynter wyndes again, as the worlde askes, no fage...
(The 1400 castle rising behind, like the one Gawayne sees over the December woods:
Towers set up between, pinnacled ful thick,
Turrets with carved tops and chalkwhite chimneys.)
41)
Same, April, Tres Riches Heures; with video details
Gawayne must precede the Tres Riches Heures. But Charles d'Orleans, English captive,
here writing in French, more than matches its period harmony:
Le temps a laisié son manteau
De vent, de froidure et de pluye,
Et s'est vestu de brouderie,
De soleil luyant, cler et beau...
Riviere, fontaine et ruisseau
Portent, en livrée jolie,
Gouttes d'argent et d'orfaverie,
Chascun s'abille de nouveau,
Le temps a laissié son manteau.
42)
(fade de Lantins)
Grimani Breviary, c. 1510, April, Biblioteca Marciana, Venice; + V details.
Music:
Josquin des Pres, c.1500(?), from La Spagna, 5-voice basse
danse, Seraphim SIC-6104 (3)
With Lang's rendering —
The year has changed his mantle cold
Of wind, of rain, of bitter air;
And he goes clad in cloth of gold,
Of laughing suns and seasons fair...
All founts, all rivers, seaward rolled,
The pleasant summer livery wear,
With silver studs on broidered vair;
The world puts off its raiment old,
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15th Century: Early Renaissance
�13
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
The year lays down his mantle cold —
we have moved from the Limbourg Calendar to its Grimani translation a century later
(time of Josquin), in the robes and haze of bourgeois realism — such a filling-in as that of
Arthurian romance over the three-hundred years from Chrestien to Malory.
(end La Spagna)
43)
Pol de Limbourg, January, Tres Riches Heures, Chantilly; + V details and
return to the whole.
Music:
Ciconia, c. 1405-10, from O Rosa Bella, (Deller) RCA VLM-6016
Since the Tres Riches Heures — here January — like Ciconia's 1400 setting of "O Rosa
Bella" — has still a trace of the old chivalric suspension of space, time and cause. When
Chrestien's Lancelot, seeking Guenevere, has crossed the sword bridge into "the land
from which no stranger returns," he is viewed from a tower window by King Bademagu,
"very scrupulous and precise about honor and what was right," and by his son and
opposite, the Queen's captor, Meleagant, "who never wearied of villainy, treason and
felony."
(end Ciconia)
44)
Grimani Breviary, c. 1510, January, Biblioteca Marciana, Venice; + V details
and return to whole; digital first gives a double of 43 and 44
In Malory, 1470, there is no good king Bademagu and no symbolic land. With an
armed force Mellyagraunce surprises the Queen at Maying and takes her to his castle
seven miles from Westminster. Launcelot gets word. Mellyagraunce's archers shoot his
horse. He forces a driver to take him up in what for Chrestien was the mysterious cart.
From a bay window, the Queen
aspyed by his shelde that he was there hym self sir launcelot du lake;
and thenne she was ware where came his hors ever after that charyot,
and ever he trade his guttes and his paunche under his feet. Allas sayd
the quene now I see well and preve that wel is hym that hath a trusty
frend.
As in the Grimani densening, the very knights and queens accept the probabilities of the
middle class.
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15th Century: Early Renaissance
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C.G. Bell
45)
45a)
Symbolic History
Jan (and/or Hubert) van Eyck, 1422-24 (or 1413-17?), Baptism, from the Tres
Belles Heures de Notre Dame, Museo Civico, Turin; video has details only (cf.
Va45), returning to a cropped whole after 45a (cf. V45b)
Same, Voyaqe of St. Julian, from "Turin Hours", section of same MS burned in
1904
Music:
Dunstable, c.1420(?), from O Rosa bella, (Cape) ARC-3052
If there are turning points in history, the van Eyck miniatures from the Turin
Hours — by one or both brothers and surely from the 1420's or before — are the point of
departure for all the realism (trees, water, atmosphere and distance) to follow. They
succeed the Limbourg brothers as this Dunstable "O Rosa Bella" does the Ciconia (just
heard) — not finer, not better, but polyphonically, sensuously, melodically advanced. As
Martin le France wrote, Dufay and Binchois, against the early century of Carmen and
Cesaris:
Have assumed the English style
And followed after Dunstable.
(end Dunstable)
That mutation of 1425 differentiates the New Europe
46)
Rublev, Russian, 1422-27, Trinity, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
from everything that had gone before. The 1400 softening of International Style had
cognates as far as the Byzantine — most tellingly in Russia. Though the gentlest art of
the West seems physical beside the mystic accord of Rublev's weightless angels, forming
(at their Abraham supper) the flower-frail round of a Trinity.
47)
Claus Sluter, 1395-99, Head of Christ, Chartreuse de Champmol, Dijon;
+ V detail
In Europe that horizon of grace becomes, as with Sluter, a Renaissance launching
ground. Thus the incarnate Christ which crowns his Dijon Fountain.
Music:
7/1994
Apt MS., late 14th cent., Jesu nostra redemptio, 1st stanza, SAWT9505
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�15
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
In the Apt "Redemptio" hymn, the revolution of immediacy takes the same center.
The melody has risen from medieval tenor to descant; the bass settles down, seeking
faux-bourdon chords; second progressions begin to yield to those of the fourth and fifth;
that simple ordering of harmonic space founds the Renaissance Lauda:
(cut Apt MS)
48)
Belbello da Pavia, c. 1412-30(?), Creation of Eve, Visconti Hours, National
Library, Florence (video: details only, cf V48)
Music:
Joh. Simon de Haspre, c.1400(?), "Ma doulce Amour," Odyssey
32-160178
History moves by the precipitation and inbreeding of opposites: Gothic
flamboyance spills into the very years of humanist solemnity. Thus the miniatures of
Belbello, completing the Visconti Hours, with the terminal dissonances of Ars Nova: de
Haspre.
(fade de Haspre)
49)
Giovanni di Paolo, c. 1430(?), Entombment, Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore;
first, video details
Siena is the most startling art-bastion of a Gothic-Byzantine heightened by new
experiment. In Giovanni di Paolo's Entombment, Peter does not interrupt, but casts a
trans-real shadow on the gold light itself of the grave.
Music:
Cyprus, c.1420, Amen (close), from the Gloria, A.S. 126, B
In music, the French court of Cyprus, until its 1426 sack by the Sultan, tops the
isorythmic brilliance of the school of Machault — from the Amen of a Gloria.
These pockets of fantastic continuance are not merely backward-looking. Their
symbolic agitation, gathering material force, will break into the Renaissance again and
again, as Savonarola would stir Medici Florence, or Mannerist distortion climax in El
Greco.
(end Amen)
50
7/1994
Lorenzo Monaco, 1413, Nativity, Predella of the Coronation, Uffizi,
Florence (CGB '48); + V detail
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�16
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
In Florence the lingering transition works wonders of mystical sweetness,
Monaco, Gentile, Fra Angelico. Brolo's hymn to the Virgin, "O Celestial Light",
melodizes the starry blend.
Music:
51)
Va52)
52)
Bart. Brolo, c. 1410-20(?), O Celestial Lume (close), AS-l,
(#8 in US)
Gentile de Fabriano, 1423, Shepherds from the Nativity, detail, Predella of
Magi Altarpiece, Uffizi, Florence (CGB '48)
Fra Angelico, c. 1425-30, Gate of Light, top left of Paradise Garden, from
Last Judgment, San Marco, Florence
Same, Paradise Garden, whole; and video details (from 52 or V52)
(end Brolo)
It is the celestial light of that chant which the saved enter in Fra Angelico's
paradise, most childlike of those blessed gardens so much preferred to hell by Villon's
mother: "La joye avoir me fay, haulte Deesse." What came from the Song of Songs,
through the well-spring of Revelation and the smiling depth of Dante's shores "painted
with spring's miraculous colors", has grown as artlessly innocent as the Mary of the Lauds
— "Madre e Sposa,/ candida olente rosa" — herself that orchard enclosed, its fragrant
herbs, its clear fountain of life: (Belcari) "viva fontana e chiara vena."
53)
Claus Sluter 1394-1404, Well of Moses (David, Jeremiah & Zachariah),
Champmol, Charterhouse, near Dijon
The quantum leaps of history are not entirely localized. We cannot say when the
limpid grace was penetrated by the humanist wedge. There had been Claus Sluter in
Dijon, precocious as English Chaucer.
Va54)
Vb54)
54)
Brunelleschi, esp. 1420-36, Dome of the Cathedral, Florence, detail
Roman, esp. Hadrian, 120 AD, Pantheon (rear), Rome (detail of CGB '86)
Again, Brunelleschi, Cathedral with Dome against a cloudy sky
While, in Florence, Renaissance center, Brunelleschi's dome has not lost the
bareness of the 1368 plan, that stamp of God's Gothic barn, which gives it a strength over
all other domes. Vasari stresses Brunelleschi's 1403 sketching from Roman temples and
measuring of the Pantheon. But Hadrian's brooding cement mass could hardly have
suggested the levitational soar of Santa Maria del Fiore, its curve, as Vasari quotes
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15th Century: Early Renaissance
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Brunelleschi, that of a pointed arch. Whatever Rome inspired, the double shell of this
ribbed and self-buttressed vault looked for its engineering to the Gothic North.
1st 55) Masaccio 1425-26,
+ V closer detail
Tribute
Money,
detail,
Carmine,
Florence;
And Masaccio's noble art — by whatever blend of Giotto, nature, the Classic —
fulfills Medieval incorporation: to sanctify these sensuous presences. Had not Paul and
John promised a glorified body, in which we shall be sons of God and like him? Had not
Thomas Aquinas (II of II, 23, 1) made Charity Friendship, under the daring of cohumanity
with God — quoting Christ: "No longer will I call you servants, but my friends"?
As for music, there was nothing antique to recover. Renaissance had to shape its
forms from the polyphony of the Middle Ages.
Va2nd 54) Again, Brunelleschi's Dome, nearer view (from 1st 54)
For 2nd 54) Same, Cathedral of Florence, interior, nave (CGB '86)
It was Dufay who wrote the motets for the 1436 consecration of this cathedral. Their
swelling four-voice canons share in its grandeur. Yet a witness to that pomp paraphrases
12th-century Suger on the anagogical gift of the New Light:
During these moments I enjoyed so much delight that it
partaking on earth of the life of the blessed.
Music:
seemed to me I was
Dufay, 1436, Nuper Rosarum Flores (last 4-voice section)
BASF 30249
2nd 55) Again, Tribute Money, detail, head of John
56)
Uccello 1436, Equestrian painting of Sir John Hawkwood, Duomo,
Florence; first, video detail
(with Dufay "Amen" close)
Humanist assertion, Roman recovery, civic pride meet in sacred containment.
Uccello had just painted the equestrian Hawkwood in the Cathedral where Dufay's music
was performed. And in the "Amen" of that praise of Florence, the condottiere vaunt
seems made in chords.
57)
7/1994
Donatello, 1443-53, Gattamelata (from below), Piazzetta, Padua
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�18
C.G. Bell
V57a)
V57b)
Symbolic History
Same, detail: profile from the left (cf. 14th Century 74)
Same, another view, upper spread
Literature, after the 14th century, ebbs, weighed down by too much Latin revival.
Yet Alberti, humanist architect, breaks Gothic continuance with the first sonnet of
Renaissance rhetoric and universalizing consciousness. Petrarch's residual bareness:
Solo e pensoso i piu deserti campi —
Vo misurando a passi tardi e lenti —
Alone and sad I measure empty fields —
yields to a motion almost that of Shakespeare: "Consum'd with that which it was
nourish'd by." (Alberti, with Donatello's Gattamelata):
Io vidi gia seder nell'arme irato
Uom furioso, e pallido tremare...
I saw of late an armed and furious man
That for his anger trembled and was pale,
Va58)
58)
Same, detail, profile, from the right
Same, detail of the horseman
And eyes I saw whereof tears trenchant ran
For too great heat that did the heart assail;
And I beheld a lover so long brood
That he for sorrow could not weep or wail,
Nor rarely saw those that could touch no food
Because of hunger that had made them frail;
I saw a vessel float and veer with wind
Which wind too great did founder in the flood,
And watched the greyhound as he coursed the hind
For too great swiftness lose her in the wood.
Thus I beheld how nature doth dispense
To most of wishing, least of consequence. (CGB)
1st 59) Masaccio, 1423-27, The Trinity, Santa Maria Novella, Florence (video:
CGB '59 glazed slide, V59)
Perspective typefies the new ordering, art-precursor of natural science. Here
Masaccio applies Brunelleschi's conception. How the vault looms, viewed, like the great
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15th Century: Early Renaissance
�19
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
robed figures, from below; while the cross, breaking that system, meets us head on. This
theoretic space, this space of mind, will make as clear as possible the divergent modes of
Florence
60)
Jan van Eyck, 1434, Arnolfini Marriage, National Gallery, London;
+ V details.
and (against it) of Flanders — Jan van Eyck's contemporary space of eye. In this
Arnolfini betrothal the capture of reality proceeds by awakened sense and skilled hand —
in textures, shadowing and touch, beyond anything Italy would produce for generations.
Though if the recessive lines of floor, ceiling, window, bed, are in fact plotted, they form,
as in the school of Giotto, separate convergences. Of course, an interior scanned by an
actual viewer will have as many meeting points as the fixes of the scanning eye. What is
in question is not reality itself, whatever that may mean,
2nd 59) Again, Masaccio Trinity, upper detail (video pans this from 1st 59 or V59)
but space heroically formulated by the mathematics of Florentine mind. It is that
universal grasp which lifts the Masaccio to the verge of awe. Meanwhile, in both
pictures, the new techniques become sacramental; they reconstitute devotion. This frontal
Father, the kind of image Cusanus would call "omnivoyant", viewing all viewers, brings
the sacred into spatial grandeur.
2nd 60) Again, van Eyck, Marriage (video: details only, from 1st 60 and V2nd 60)
Yet even the van Eyck records a sacrament of marriage (Panovsky): the clogs
("put off your shoes, for this is holy ground"); the single candle for the Eye of God; the
painter as witness, seen in the mirror ("Jan van Eyck was here"). If what revolutionizes
faith in Masaccio is the theoretical and classical, here it is the pietistic pervasion of the
Brothers of the Common Life.
61)
Double: {A} Venetian, finished 1434, Ca d'Oro, Grand Canal; and {B} Alberti,
1446, Palazzo Rucellai, Florence, + V single of {B}
Such counter-thrusts compose the time-wave. Within the bounds of Italy, Venice
and Florence present a complementarity. In Venice the Gothic tracery of the Ca d'Oro
finished 1434 (left); from Florence twelve years later, the Rucellai Palace by Alberti, with
7/1994
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�20
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
its classical pilasters and rustic masonry — share in the individual and worldly
emergence.
62)
Flemish Civic Architecture, 1402-54, Hotel de Ville, Brussels
From the same years, the town hall of Brussels — extending the European axis
from Tuscany to Flanders — speaks the North in no way backward, its Flamboyant stone
spired to a search as boldly Faustian.
Va63)
63)
Fra Angelico, 1430-34, Descent from the Cross, detail of Christ, San Marco
Museum, Florence
Same, whole; + V central detail (from V63a)
Music:
Dufay, 1452, Qui tollis, Missa "Se la face ay pale,"
Seraphim S-60267
(Munrow)
Art and music convey the embryonic interworking of that web of commerce and
skills, letters and science. Let this Descent from the Cross, begun by Lorenzo Monaco
before 1425 and finished by Fra Angelico, be the Florentine harbinger. For music we
choose, from Dufay's 1450 return to Italy, the Qui Tollis from his first tenor Mass, "Se la
face ay pale" (brilliantly sung by Munrow's Consort).
We cannot tell if Angelico's expressive composition, with even the central rise of
the foliated frame,
(fade "Se la face ay pale" Mass)
64)
Roger van der Weyden, 1435-40, Descent from the Cross, Prado, Madrid;
with video details (video using V64, of greener coloring)
Music:
Dufay, 1472, Qui tollis, from Missa "Ave regina caelorum"
MHS 4743A
suggested (perhaps through a woodcut?) Roger van der Weyden's Prado Descent, with its
central rise and framing filigree. Here, although the shallow space and gold ground look
backward, the fleshed and robed passion of these sufferers surges ahead. So in Dufay, the
fabric of sound deepens over twenty years to the Qui tollis of his last mass, "Ave regina
caelorum," sung at the dedication of the Cathedral of Cambrai.
(fade "Ave regina caelorum")
65)
7/1994
Ghiberti, 1425-52, East Doors, detail of Eve, Baptistry, Florence
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�21
C.G. Bell
V65a)
V65b)
Symbolic History
Same, Creation & Expulsion of Adam and Eve
Same, Upper four reliefs (with video return to 65, closer detail of Eve)
Music:
Italian, 15th cent., Perla Mia, Nonesuch 71071
In music, the aesthetic balance of Italy — as influential, as in the other arts — works
through the humbler forms of Laude and Frottole. One piece, "Perla mia", may stake out
the hidden claim (the words, and perhaps the tune, by Giustiniani from the early century,
the setting, it seems, somewhat later) — such smooth harmonies as Ghiberti wrought into
the final doors, those Michelangelo thought worthy to be the gates of Paradise.
Throughout the century the great Northern composers are in continual touch with this
melodious soul of Italy.
(fade Perla Mia)
Va66)
Vb66)
66)
Bourges, 1195-1260, Cathedral, from south-east
Same, Piers and Vaults (Sam Adams' slide); also digital
Same, interior, Nave and Choir (CGB '84)
Music:
School of Paris, c. 1240, 2-voice Melisma, Ille, last section,
(Tinayre) Lumen 32,013
Over 200 years, the Gothic architecture of the North had unfolded from the
structural severity and mystical distance of 13th-century Bourges, — this theology of
triune lights (with a school of Perotin melisma) —
(close Ille)
Va67)
67)
Norman to Perpendicular, 1094-1500, spire 15th cent., Norwich (CGB '84)
Same, interior, 14th cent., apse and windows, 15th cent. vault; + V detail
Music:
Worcester Harmony, c. 1310, from Puellare Gremium, History of
Music in Sound II, RCA-V LM 6015
to foliate, through the next century, the traceried wealth of England — so Norwich choir
— music sweetening from the Worcester Fragments, around 1300, (fade Puellare) to
Benet, on the eve of Dunstable.
Music:
68)
7/1994
John Benet(?), early 15th cent., from Sanctus "Jacet granum"
Nonesuch H-71292
(fade)
German, esp. 15th cent., Nave and aisle of Ulm (CGB '59)
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�22
C.G. Bell
V68a)
V68b)
Symbolic History
Jorg Syrlin the Elder, 1469-74, Double: [A] Pythagoras; and [B] the
Cimmerian Sibyl, from the stalls of Ulm Cathedral
German 15th cent., nave to aisles, St. Georgskirche, Nördlingen, West
Germany (CGB '59)
Music:
Paumann, c. 1450, end of Benedicite, (Tinayre) Lumen 32012
By 1450 those Gothic branchings had ripened, as here at Ulm, a columned and
lighted pre-reformation hall. While the blind organist Paumann wreathed the Benedicite
in triadic harmonies.
(close Paumann)
By the paired Rebirth of North and South, this last Gothic shares in the spatial
ease of early Renaissance —
69)
Apulian, c. 1160, aisle to nave, Bari Cathedral (CGB '84); + V return to Ulm
interior (detail of columns and vault from 68)
more than all the round-arched precursors of Italian Romanesque, from Lucca and
Florence to this 12th century Cathedral of Bari in Apulia. What if they are called Protorenaissance? That proto goes centuries back, as to a solemn crypt — as far from the
lightening of Ulm,
70)
V70a)
Brunelleschi, 1436 ff., aisle and nave of Santa Spirito, Florence (CGB '59);
video: upper detail only
Same, another view (CGB '84); then video returns to 70, lower detail, Aisle
and Nave
as from Brunelleschi's lofty liberation of the Roman Basilica from the weight of Rome.
In music, Dunstable, who worked on the Continent, influenced from Italy and
known there, spearheaded such 1425 changes. His "Veni Sancte Spiritus", "Come Holy
Spirit", esteemed and sung through the century, gives mystical love the breath and
hypnotic weaving of sensuous sound. Of the sustained Cape recording we hear only the
closing section.
Music:
7/1994
Dunstable, c. 1425(?), Veni Sancte Spiritus (bar 121 ff.)
VLM 6016 (2)
15th Century: Early Renaissance
�23
C.G. Bell
71)
V71a)
Symbolic History
Donatello, 1411-13, St. Mark, Or San Michele, Florence
Same, detail of head, new angle
When Michelangelo praised Donatello's 1412 St. Mark, it was not for Roman
face, nor for Gothic robe, but for sacred humanization: "It would have been impossible to
have rejected the gospel if preached by such a straightforward man as this."
72)
Masaccio, c. 1426, Peter and John heal the sick, Carmine, Florence (video
divides to details, above and below)
Masaccio's concern with earth, to show common men in the commonest alley of
Florence, does not preclude but empowers a deeply religious art. Peter and John walk
forward, wrapped in thought; Peter's shadow heals the sick and lame.
73)
V73a)
Same, detail of Peter and cripples (video works from V73)
Same, face of the cripple huddled on the ground
One, risen, prays; another rises; a third huddles, the uplifted face lighted around caves of
mouth and eye.
74)
Hubert and Jan Van Eyck, 1426-27, Mary detail, Altar of the Lamb, Ghent;
first, video detail of face
(close Dunstable)
Over the contrast already made, of medium and style, the brothers van Eyck serve
the same transformation. Everything of the world, stuff, jewels, hair, lends light and
touch to the heavenly.
75)
Same, God, detail, Altar of the Lamb; + V detail
Here, also from the Ghent altar, is another of Cusanus' omnivoyants:
If I strive in human fashion to transport you to things divine, I have
found nothing better than an image which is omnivoyant... such... I call
the icon of God. This picture, brethren, ye shall set up in some place...
and each of you shall find, from whatsoever quarter observed, that it
looks at him as if it looked at no other...
1st 76) Roger Van der Weyden, 1450-60, Deposition, Uffizi, Florence
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15th Century: Early Renaissance
�24
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
In the Flemish succession of mid-century, and in creative exchange with Italy, the
humanization of the gospel proceeds — here Van der Weyden, from during or after his
Florentine stay.
1st 77)
Fra Angelico, 1439-45, Noli me Tangere, San Marco, Florence
V1st 77a) Fra Angelico, c. 1440, Annunciation, San Marco, Florence
In Italy too; as the powers of Masaccio fill out the forms of Gothic tenderness, the
'forties and 'fifties fruit in saintly celebration, as present as Angelico's garden where
Christ greets the Magdalen.
In music Ockeghem, Dufay's successor, holds an all-time summit of heavenly
polyphonic weaving, the serene stretching and enhancement of Dunstable's fabric.
The works of the Florentine organist Squarcialupi are lost. The Italian pieces that
remain, from Romanus of 1416 to Gaffurio toward the end of the century, are not
recorded.
Va2nd 76) Roger Van der Weyden, c. 1430-35, Annunciation, Left Wing of the
Magi Altar, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59)
2nd 76)
Again, Van der Weyden, Deposition, detail (video works from 1st 76)
In any case, the Flemings were dominant; and there is no one, before or after, who
could suspend such a web of besouled breathing as Ockeghem. Here the "Qui tollis"
from the Mass: "Ecce Ancilla Dei".
Music:
Ockeghem, c.1470(?), Qui tollis, Mass: Ecce Ancilla Dei,
21512-1
BAS-
2nd 77)
Fra Angelico, Noli me Tangere, detail, San Marco, Florence
V2nd 77a) Beato Angelico, 1439-45, fresco, Coronation of the Virgin, upper detail,
San Marco, Florence
78)
Domenico Veneziano, c. 1450, Madonna and Saints, Uffizi, Florence
(CGB '59)
In Veneziano the old triptych turns to a colonnaded space, in which a calm of
form and pastel color
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15th Century: Early Renaissance
�25
C.G. Bell
79)
Symbolic History
Piero della Francesca, 1463-65, Resurrection, cropped, Borgo San Sepulcro;
+ V detail
looks to Piero della Francesca: this Resurrection of God in Olympian flesh and Robe.
(Music: Quoniam) Here, with as rapt an omnivoyant as art offers, we conclude Cusanus'
vision:
As in a mirror, an icon, a riddle,
80)
Same, Piero, head of Christ
I see life eternal, which is nothing else but that blessed regard, that
gaze of love which never ceases to behold.me, even the most secret
places of my soul.
81)
Fouquet, 1453-55, Trinity in Glory, Hours of Etienne Chevalier, Chantilly,
+ V detail
In mid-century France, Fouquet has shown forth the rose-courts of blessing. And
Cusanus:
For with Thee to behold is to give life, to inflame by love's imparting,
and in imparted flame, to let me drink the dew of gladness, drink and
be infused with the fountain of life, copartner with Thee and thy Son in
immortal bliss,
82)
Memling, 1479, Baptism detail, Left Wing, St. Catharine Altar, Bruges
the source of all delights, the maximum, undeprived, of every rational
desire, than which a greater cannot be conceived.
By 1480, in Bruges, Memling clothes the simple Coming in a fruitful ease of earth
and waters.
83)
V83a)
Botticelli, 1481-82, Adoration of the Magi, center detail, National Gallery,
Washington D.C. (CGB '60); cf. V83, same, wider view (CGB '60)
Same, closer detail of Madonna and landscape (from CGB '75)
At the same time in Florence, Botticelli refines the mystical to an aesthetic of
starred fabrics and translucent veils. (end Ockeghem)
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84)
Symbolic History
Jacobo della Quercia, 1425-38, "In the Sweat of thy Brow," bronze relief,
doors of San Petronio, Bologna
But Gothic had been stretched from the start between peace and frenzy, the peace
enriching its texture, the frenzy more material in drive. By the 1430's, della Quercia's
bronze doors in Bologna have passed the bequest of power to Michelangelo.
85)
Double: [A] Masolino and [B] Masaccio, both c. 1425, Temptation and
Expulsion, details, Brancacci Chapel, Carmine, Florence
In the Brancacci chapel of the Carmine, we feel it like a Gospel command — that
passage from the Gothic line and mystery of Masolino's innocent Temptation, to the
tragic expulsion of Masaccio. Masolino had chosen this pupil and collaborator; yet how
those quiet sinners of his Eden must have gazed across the chapel toward their nobler
expulsion — "Paradise well lost!"
86)
Pisanello, c. 1435, St. George and the Princess fresco, Sant' Anastasia,
Verona; + V closer detail with gibbet
So too in Pisanello's 1435 fresco of St. George and the Princess: with the housing
of beatitude, force too knits its fabric. The attack is of realism itself, a keenness of seeing
and being which arose out of Gothic (that gibbet here against the sky) —
until all the Magdalens and beggar rogues of soul-levelling Christendom meet in Villon
and Fat Margot:
87)
Pisanello, same fresco, detail of gibbet only, two hanged men
Come back, whenever you're in rut
To this brothel where we hold our state. (CGB)
Retournez cy, quant vous serez en ruit,
En ce bordeau ou tenons nostre estat!
Or, to match Pisanello's detail:
I am Francois, I confess,
Born in Paris, near Pontoise,
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And by six feet of hemp-grass,
My neck will learn the weight of my ass. (CGB)
88)
Andrea del Castagno, 1447, Last Supper, center, Convent Santa Apollonia,
Florence (video shows first a closer detail from Va88, then draws a wider
center from V88, of the whole)
In Florence before mid century, the pastel calm of Veneziano is complemented by
Castagno, here from a Last Supper. "Can you minister to a mind diseased?"; Castagno:
"I will set its diseases visibly before you." Among the variegated marble panels of this
room, that where Judas sits (across from Christ), traces the hell-whorls of his jealous
thought.
Va89)
89)
Francesco Cossa (or del Cossa), c. 1470, Month of March, middle detail,
Schifanoia Palace, Ferrara
Same, detail of a peasant
As the factual comes to parity with its faith containment, an expression is first
possible (as in the Ferrara Months, by Cossa, about 1470), lean and hard as Gothic, yet
already of Breughel's Renaissance earth. Dante had led the way, as in the metaphor of
Inferno 24, where a peasant takes the frost for snow:
...when the hoarfrost on the ground
copies the likeness of her white sister…
and the peasant who needs fodder rises
and looks out and sees the fields all whitened,
and turning back to the house, smites his thigh... (CGB)
90)
Same, March vineyard; + V detail
By the time of these Cossa frescoes, such calendar observation (this March
Vineyard) was the life of Mantuan (Turberville's translation, 1567):
The man that earst did sowe
And tillde his stonie soile,
hath let a fielde his plowe
And takes his ease: the wearie ground
it selfe doth slumber nowe.
The Shephierd having shutte
his dores, and caught his cloake
Keepes house: Neara eke doth sitte
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Symbolic History
at home in smothering smoake
At Chimnie nooke, and plies
hir pottage Pot apace...
91)
Rohan Hours, c. 1425(?), January, detail, National Library, Paris
In the Rohan Hours, from about 1425, such realism had incised, within Gothic,
the biting winter of Villon's Legacy:
Sur le Noel, morte saison: (Kinnell)
Near Christmas, the dead time
When wolves live on the wind
And men stick to their houses
Against the frost, close by the blaze...
92)
Fouquet, c. 1450, Medallion Self-Portrait, Louvre, Paris; + V detail
In Fouquet's Medallion, self assumes that edged precision. No wonder the
Testaments so worked on Pound and Eliot — Villon in the first (called Small) penning
his bitter bequests until the ink is frozen and the candle blown out; in the second, called
Great, Villon himself burnt-out:
En 1'an de mon trentiesme aage —
In the thirtieth year of my age,
Having drunk my fill of shame...
Written in the year 'sixty-one
When the good king delivered me
From the harsh prison of Meung... (CGB)
93)
Pollaiuolo, c. 1470, Hercules and Antaeus, Uffizi, Florence
I spit phlem as white as cotton,
Gobs as big as tennis balls...
Thanks to God and Jacques Thibault
Who gave me cold water... underground... (CGB)
In Florence that carborundum would hone Pollaiuolo's Hercules and Antaeus to a
scalpel —
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94)
94a)
Symbolic History
Pollaiuolo, c. 1460(?), Girl's profile, Poldi-Pezzoli, Milan; + V detail
Pollaiuolo, c. 1475, Apollo and Daphne, National Gallery, London
Music:
Dufay, c.1440-50(?), Adieu m'amour, Cape, EMS-206
under which beauty thins to the wistful delight of the Poldi-Pezzoli girl, mostly attributed
to that same anatomist Pollaiuolo. As if for all freshness and joy Dufay's "Adieu
m'amour" were sounding. So the wailful brightness of Villon's best-known ballade, "des
dames du temps jadis":
Dictes moy ou, n'en quel pays,
Est Flora la belle Rommaine...
Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?
Of which Rossetti, for all his "yester-year", caught something;
Where is Echo, beheld of no man,
Only heard on river and mere —
She whose beauty was more than human?
But where are the snows of yester-year?
95)
English, c. 1460, Sculptured corpse from Beckington Tomb, Cathedral, Wells
(CGB '84)
(fade Adieu m'amour)
Villon's ballade is introduced by a description of death, sharp as those tombs
where (sometimes) worms and mice crawl from the sculptured corpse — yet of strange
beauty (Symons):
No, I am not, as others are,
Child of the angels, with a wreath
Of planets or of any star.
My father's dead, and lies beneath
The churchyard stone: God rest his breath!
Va96)
96)
V96a)
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Donatello, 1455-58, Mary Magdalen, upper half, Duomo Museum, Florence
(CGB '86)
Same, head, another view
Same, detail of hands
15th Century: Early Renaissance
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I know that my poor old mother
(And she too knows) must come to death,
And that her son must follow her...
After comes the old Helmet-maker, with
Peaked chin, and cheeks all waste and dead,
And lips that are two skinny rags — (Swinburne)
elsewhere compared with this Donatello Magdalen. Though the Magdalen might stand as
well for Villon's mother in her "Prayer to our Lady":
I am a woman, very old and poor;
I know nothing; I cannot read at all.
a97)
97)
V97a)
Stef. Lochner, 1440-45, Last Judgment, upper detail of saved, WallrafRichartz Museum, Köln (CGB '74)
Same, detail of damned and gorilla-devil (CGB '74); while V97 uses a central
detail of saved and damned (panned on the video from 98, the whole)
Same, lower detail of saved soul and angel, panned from a97
Music:
Dufay, c. 1450, Mass "Se la face ay pale"
sancto Spiritu, (Munrow) Seraphim S-60267
from Gloria, "Cum
But when I go to church, I see on the wall
A painted heaven where harps and lutes are,
A hell also, where damned spirits boil.
One gives me happiness, the other fear.
Give me the happiness, Goddess of the sky,
To whom all sinners should render, without guile,
Theirs and themselves in love and humble prayer —
And in this faith I mean to live and die. (CGB)
Va98)
Vb98)
98)
Same, Lechery detail from Usury and Lechery slide (CGB '74)
English perpendicular Gothic 15th c., Doom Painting, c. 1475, St. Thomas
Church, Salisbury (CGB '86)
Lochner Last Judgment, whole (CGB '74)
— Lochner's Judgment reviving for us, with the vigor of a Dufay Gloria, what was
painted in all the churches of Christendom, the timeless drop, without which the action of
Renaissance loses its stretch and tuning. As the Helmetress says of earth's joy:
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Que m'en reste il? Honte et pechié.
(close Gloria)
For 1st 99) Donatello, 1445-48, Pieta, bronze relief, Sant' Antonio, Padua; which
video prefaces with 2nd 99, Donatello, Padova Crucifix, upper half
In Donatello's Christ, in Villon's Everyman-self, the rising tragic twist is of the
enobled, but mortal frame (Symonds):
Whoever dies, dies with much pain;
For when his wind and breath are sped,
His gall breaks on his heart, and then
He sweats, God knows that sweat of men!
(No need to ask how God knows.)
Son fiel se creve sur son cuer,
Puis sue, Dieu scet quelle sueur!
Significant for the whole Pascalian reversal of Promethean Renaissance, that
Donatello, spearhead of pagan recovery and sensuous enfleshment, should also have led
in the break to penitential force. From his Padua altar,
1st 100) Mantegna, c. 1490-95, foreshortened Dead Christ, Brera, Milan
the Passion whirl spreads and mounts through Mantegna, from the early frescoes to this
foreshortened Dead Christ. And in music too the stress of the humanist wedge driven
into Gothic swells toward the late century and Reformation. Curious, that where we
invoked Ockeghem, supposed canon-tormenter, for floating ease, we call on Obrecht,
supposed softener, for the fevered counter-pole.
2nd 99)
Music:
Donatello, 1444, bronze Crucifix, upper half, Sant'Antonio, Padova; while
video takes a closer detail
Obrecht, c.1480-90(?), 3rd Kyrie, Missa Fortuna Desperata, Decca
DL 79413
2nd 100) Again, Mantegna, Dead Christ, cropped
101)
Botticelli, 1495, Deposition, Poldi-Pezzoli Museum, Milan; + V details
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Such the cry of contrition which shook Botticelli and burned Savonarolla.
102)
Cosimo Tura, 1474, Pieta from the Roverella Polyptych, Louvre, Paris;
+ V detail
(close Kyrie)
And already by the '70's, in the Ferrara from which Savonarolla would move to
Florence, Cosimo Tura had forged, from Gothic and Donatello, an anticipation of
Mannerist and Baroque, strange, as in later literature, Gongora and Donne.
103)
Antonella da Messina, 1475, Crucifixion, Beaux Arts, Brussels; with video
details (cf. V103a)
Music:
Obrecht, c.1480-90(?), 2nd Agnus, Missa Fortuna Desperata,
Decca DL 79413
Yet through the same years, Antonella da Messina, absorbing into Sicilian postGothic the space of Florence, with the nature and oil techniques of Flanders, was
preparing (even in this Crucifixion) for the rich calm of Venetian high Renaissance.
While Northern composers (here from the Agnus of the same Obrecht Mass) have steeped
their counterpoint (fade Obrecht) in the chordal expressiveness of Italy:
Music:
Italian Frottola, c. 1490(?), from Rusticus, ut asinum..., AS 77
here a peasant's lament for his dead donkey (and had those humanists heard that early
Christians vere rumored to have worshipped a crucified ass?)
(fade Rusticus)
104)
104A)
104B)
Quadruple: used in old 80 slide show, and now in digital; it combines 104A
and 104B as listed below. From these, the video opens with singles of the
Donatello (Va104), and of the Angelico (from Vc104)
Double: {A} Donatello 1415-16, St. George, head, Bargello, Florence; and
{B} Michelangelo 1501-04, David, head, Accademia, Florence
Double: {A} Fra Angelico 1434?, Angel of Annunciation, Magi Panel, San
Marco, Florence; and {B} Botticelli 1501, Mary from Mystical Nativity,
National Gallery, London
If the style-work of the 15th century is the articulation of humanist islands within
the eddying continuance of Medieval faith, it is in Florence that the unconscious change
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(drop added to drop until crystallization nears) most dramatically presses toward
conscious reordering. There the precursive souls, from Donatello (St. George, 1415) to
Michelangelo (David, 1501-4), magnify the reasoned assertion of power. While others,
from Angelico (1430) to Botticelli (1500) refine the spirit and line of Gothic, but with
such ripening of the sensuous and aesthetic, as involves them in the same vortex.
105)
Double: [A] Mantegna (above), c. 1468, Triumph of Silenus, British Museum,
London (Engraving); and [B] Donatello (below), 1455-57, Bacchic Revel, base
of Judith, Piazza della Signoria, Florence; first, video singles
Music:
Josquin, before 1500(?), from El Grillo, New York Pro Musica,
Decca DL 79435
The polarity, working to climax, had shown itself in Donatello. On the pagan side
— with Josquin's frottole, "El Grillo" — come Lorenzo de Medici's satyrs and nymphs in
Bacchic dance:
Or da Bacco riscaldati,
Ballon, saltan tuttavia —
taking up the levity of Donatello's sportive relief (below) — no doubt seen by Mantegna
on his 1466 Florentine visit (compare his Triumph of Silenus, above).
(fade El Grillo)
106)
Donatello, 1455-57, Judith and Holofernes, bronze, Piazza del Signoria,
Florence; with video details (first, below; then of Holofernes)
Yet Donatello's carousing amorini
Music:
Josquin des Pres, close of Mass, Ave Maris Stella, Decca DL
79435
adorn the base of his most puzzling late bronze, Judith hacking off the head of
Holofernes. That harrier of Israel dies drunk. The cushions beneath him seem spouting
wine skins. So the Bacchantes in Poliziano's pioneer Opera (Isaac's music lost) display
the head of deviant Orpheus: "Evoé Bacco, Bacco". Over all sex-death puzzles of this
bronze pillar of flesh, one thing is clear, that the tension of the century and of Donatello
himself, between pagan delight and penitential seizure,
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Symbolic History
107)
Same, upper detail of Judith; video uses V107 (same, different framing)
V107a) Same, another view, upper detail only
has been spanned in a prophetic monument.
But Josquin too worked over that divide: against the Grillo, and from the same
Petrucci record, his Mass, Ave Maris Stella, raises the plea to the Lamb of God to a last
strident cry. (close Josquin) Such Savonarolla's "Oimè":
All Italy has asked the Judgment of war and plague...
Return to Jesus Christ, his Mother and meek Spouse;
Quit the inveterate vice of your godless ways. (CGB)
108)
Botticelli, 1474, Adoration of the Magi, Uffizi, Florence (cf V108, CGB '59);
+ four video details (three from V108a and V108b)
No one lived both myths, pagan and Christian, more poignantly than Botticelli.
His 1475 Medicean Adoration of the Magi assumes the bel viver of his master, Lippi.
Old Cosimo kneels to the child; in front, his son Piero (both dead by that time) faces the
radiant Giuliano, soon to be murdered in the Pazzi conspiracy. Far right, looking out, we
cannot miss the proud painter, Alessandro. Far left, Lorenzo, citizen-ruler holds court.
Poliziano, prodigy of Renaissance poetry, fawns on him — a caress even Lorenzo's horse
toothfully resents.
(Digital adds 108c, Botticelli's Giuliano — see Face and Landscape 34 or 34a; then
108d, central detail of Venus from the Spring)
Perhaps a year after this painting, Giuliano's love for Simonetta (Vespucci by
marriage) would come to the climax of the January 1476 tournament, over which he,
victor, would crown her queen.
On April 26th of the same year, Simonetta's death of consumption ranked their
love with Petrarch's and Dante's. On the second anniversary of her death, Giuliano's
assassination turned it to myth. As Poliziano had written (for Giuliano):
She seemed Minerva in act, Venus in face...
a109)
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Botticelli, 1478, Primavera (Spring), whole, Uffizi, Florence; + V detail
(using Va109 center)
15th Century: Early Renaissance
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C.G. Bell
109)
Symbolic History
Same, Botticelli Primavera, upper left quadrant; + V detail: (to which add
close-up of the little cloud, from V109a)
or in La Giostra:
Candida e ella, e candida la vesta,
Ma pur di rose e fior dipinta e d'erba...
In Botticelli's Primavera, realm of that Simonetta Venus, Mercury with his wand
disperses gathering clouds. How Dante's simultaneous levels of literal, political, moral
and anagogical meaning, might reconcile our critics: —
If Simonetta comes to this grove through the dispersed cloud of death, it remains
Tuscan elysium, from which Good Counsel would banish clouds to ensue. As Striggio
would write for Monteverdi's Orfeo more than a century later: "Deh, sommi Dei,/ Non
torcete da noi benigno il guardo."
110)
Botticelli, c. 1842, Pallas and the Centaur, Uffizi, Florence (CGB '59; video
shows upper half only
So with Botticelli's Pallas and the Centaur: the contention of political or moral
ignores the same Dante-to-Can-Grande. No doubt the delivery of Reason from man-beast
is guided by Minerva; yet her dress, adorned with the Medici emblem, surely hints at
Lorenzo and some feat of diplomatic control.
111)
Botticelli, 1483(?), Venus and Mars, National Gallery, London; + V detail
Is the control more threatened in this Mars and Venus of perhaps a year later? It
is cheerful when Venus as Humanitas prevails over Mars as discord. So at Alexander's
marriage (Lucian) cupids played with his armor. But this loved-out Giuliano-Florence is
in jeopardy. He sleeps, while those lusty satyrs with the lance stir up a hornet's nest.
That the pun on Vespe (wasp) suggests the patronage of Simonetta's Vespucci, can only
complement the danger, which, as in Biblical prophecy, is both past and future.
112)
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Botticelli ,1490, Head of St. John from Madonna of San Barnabas, Uffizi,
Florence
15th Century: Early Renaissance
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
By 1490, in the head of St. John from the Barnabas altar, Botticelli wakes to the
fullness-of-time being announced by Savonarolla in his San Marco sermons of that year:
The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare the way of the
Lord."
113)
Botticelli, c. 1494-95, Calumny of Apelles, Uffizi, Florence; + V details
(using V113, Uffizi slide?)
By the old view, Botticelli's reconstitution (c.1495) of Apelles' Calumny,
described by Lucian — an innocent man slandered before a Midas-eared king and
dragged to judgment, with the blackrobed penitence to follow, and the final pure
revelation of naked truth — was aimed, on the political level, at the papal censure of
Savonarolla: Botticelli (here his late works confirm Vasari) shaken by those Apocalyptic
sermons. A strange caution, to discredit that, while making an issue of this hall, carved
with pagan and Christian subjects — as if the painter had not devoted those years to
reading and illustrating Dante, whose Purgatory reliefs enforce, by just such polarity, the
cleansing of politics and spirit.
114)
Double: Botticelli 1492-97, Dante drawings, {A} Inferno 18 and {B} Paradiso 6, E. & W. Berlin (video singles only; see file)
Perhaps Botticelli bore his share of Calumny as well: as in Vasari's story:
"Without any education, and scarce knowing how to read, he writes a commentary on
Dante!" But who else pursued almost to the point of starving, soul's ascent from the rank
grovelling of the Bad Ditches, to the flame-geometry of Beatrice's Empyrean? In soul as
in paint, where was the link, but in Botticelli, to Leonardo and Michelangelo?
115)
Piero della Francesca, c. 1455, Bearing the Sacred Wood, Frescoes of the
Legend of the Cross, San Francesco, Arezzo (video: detail only)
From mid-century (as under the pastel calm of Piero della Francesca — here one
of the Arezzo frescoes, where a laborer carrying the timber destined, centuries after, for
the true cross, becomes a mystic prototype of Christ)
116)
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Piero della Francesco, 1465(?), portraits of Federigo de Montefeltro and
Battista Sforza, Duke and Duchess of Urbino, Uffizi, Florence
15th Century: Early Renaissance
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
what was heightening force and counterforce was the emergence of the new man (new
woman) — the harmonious space of Piero's religious art complemented by the
transforming boldness of his portrayed patron, Federigo de Montefeltro of Urbino, here
with his Sforza wife.
117)
Double: {A} Hugo v.d. Goes, c. 1471(?), head from Magi Adoration, BerlinDahlem; and {B} Mantegna, 1480, head of archer from St. Sebastian, Louvre,
Paris
As the century advances, such assertion swells under the visible interpenetration
of Flemish realism and the revived antiquity of Italy — (left) one of the Magi from a
Hugo van der Goes altar, about 1470, in the tradition of van Eyck and van der Weyden,
though already humanized from the South; and (right) ten years later, absorbing and
Romanizing that Flemish skill, this archer from Mantegna's St. Sebastian.
118)
Double: {A} Fr. Laurano, c. 1470, Battista Sforza, Bargello, Florence; and
{B} Pollaiuolo, c. 1475, Giuliano da Medici, Bargello, Florence (with video
singles: B, then A)
In Florence, two portraits, from 1470 and '75, by Laurano and Pollaiuolo, of a
Sforza daughter and a Medici son, juxtaposed, enact Renaissance drama. But what
Machiavelli would concentrate in the 1518 Mandragola, had been voiced before 1500 and
in Spain, in the tragi-comedy of the high-born Melibea and her seduction by the
somewhat lower Calisto, with the help of the old bawd Celestina. Calisto's passion:
If God would give me, for the sight of you, a seat among his saints in
heaven, I would not take it;
his idolatry when asked "Are you a Christian?"
I am a Melibean. I acknowledge no other deity in heaven while she
remains on earth;
Melibea's proud purity:
Vete, vete de ahí, torpe — Go, wretch; I cannot tolerate one who
would plant in me the delights of illicit love;
her vulnerability to Celestina, that hag "who could move stones to lechery by her art" —
shape tragedy:
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119)
Symbolic History
Double: French Renaissance, c. 1455, Figures from the House of Jacques
Coeur, Bourges; first, V details of the singles: Va119 and Vb119 (CGB '81)
"My daughter, why have you left me to despair, weeping and lonely in this vale of
tears?" — "¿Por qué me dejaste triste y solo in hac lachrymarum valle?"
In France, with Jacques Coeur, merchant-prince of Bourges — his motto "A
vaillans coeurs, riens impossible" — Renaissance assertion, battling Medieval Fortune
and the brittle world, had sowed that tragic field. Founder of French trade with the
Levant, rescuer of the national currency, who financed Charles VII's wars and fought at
his side to oust the English from Normandy, who built chapels and established colleges
— Coeur, betrayed by the King and accused without pretext of plotting and poisoning,
was tried by his enemies, fined what might now be a hundred million dollars, and thrown
into prison, his goods divided among the king's favorites. After five years he escaped, but
died of sickness as he led a fleet against the Turk for the relief of Rhodes.
At the windows of his Bourges house, these carved servants, man and maid, look
out for their master's return.
120)
Double: {A} G. da Milano, 1365, Birth of the Virgin, Santa Croce, Florence;
and {B} Ghirlandaio, 1486-90, Birth of St. John the Baptist, Santa Maria
Novella, Florence; alternating with video singles, or details (V120A and
V120B)
Music:
Osw. v. Wolkenstein, from 14th-cent. Italian, Ave Maria (instr.)
ARC-3033
Measure in Florence that advance of earthly assurance — here two sacred births:
(below) of the Virgin, by Giovanni da Milano, later 14th century — with von
Wolkenstein's transcription of Italian Ars Nova;
(fade v. Wolkenstein)
Music:
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H. Isaac, pub. 1506, Missa la Spagna, Agnus Dei, Seraphim
SIC 6104
15th Century: Early Renaissance
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
(above) Ghirlandaio's 149O Birth of St. John the Baptist — with Isaac's Mass formed of
Spanish dances — attuned to this coffered room, festive with robed ladies, where a fruitbearing girl billowing in, seems almost to have arrived from Magna Graecia.
121)
121a)
Ghirlandaio, 1486-90, Visitation fresco, central section, Santa Maria
Novella, Florence
Same, upper detail
It is what this outdoor scene from Ghirlandaio's same Santa Maria Novella
frescoes perfects: this meeting of Elizabeth and Mary by a walled piazzale across the
Arno — those heady youths leaning over, where something like the Old Palace towers
from below.
122)
Memling, 1489, Reliquary of St. Ursula, view of one side, St. John's Hospital,
Bruges; + V detail
In Bruges that late-century enrichment peaks to the gold-housed and jewel-bright
miniatures of Memling's Reliquary of St. Ursula — Christian life and martyrdom (as in
Isaac's dancing Agnus Dei) aglow with delight.
(end lst Agnus)
123)
Memling, 1489, Same, 1st scene, Arrival in Cologne (video: details only, below
and above)
Music:
Isaac, 1484, reset c.1500(?), Isbruck, ich muss dich lassen,
Syntagma SIC-6052
Memling's individual scenes, this Arrival in Cologne (with the death-annunciation
in the upper chamber) are as feelingly suspended between the poignance of the story and
the gladness of earth, as Isaac's homophonic farewell to Innsbruck: "Isbruck, ich muss
dich lassen".
124)
Pinturicchio, 1503-08, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini frescoes, East Wall
Library, Duomo, Siena (CGB '86)
In Italian magnification of Flemish precision, Memling's reliquary sequence
expands to the architectural and perspectival vistas with which Pinturicchio, soon after
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1500, muralled the Sienese Cathedral library — such tour-de-force panoramas (from the
life of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, left, the
a125)
125)
Same, Aeneas Journey to Basel, fresco; + V detail of travellers (from Va125)
Same, Pinturicchio, Journey, upper part, detail of storm
Journey to Basel, with its background of harbor and storm) as if the "open road" of Isaac's
songs —
(fade Isbruck)
Music:
Isaac, before 1500(?), from Tmeiskin was jonck,
I,5,B2b
AS (33RPM)
"Glück ist in allen Gassen"; with this refrain from his Flemish "Tmeiskin was jonck" —
(refrain and fade) were spun quod libet to a glad Missa Carminum.
Music:
126)
Isaac, c. 1506(?), Missa Carminum, 2nd Hosannah, MHS 1777
(end Hosannah)
Luca Signorelli, 1499-1504, Resurrection of the Dead etc., Duomo, Orvieto
(CGB '84); + V detail
Music:
Josquin des Pres, pub.1519, from Miserere, AS 107(A)
Yet here as earlier, the claim of earth advances an always more physical doom.
So, with Pinturicchio, comes an Umbrian complement, Signorelli — his masterpiece the
Apocalypse fresoces at Orvieto — this Resurrection of the Dead. It is a mood to which
Josquin continually returns: "Miserere!"
(fade Miserere)
127)
Gutenburg Bible, c. 1454, Illuminated Page, Proverbs, New York Public
Library (video shows first two details, inserting between them: V127a) 19th
century color engraving of the 1450 event; so returns to 127, 2nd detail, then
whole)
Why is this manuscript so mechanical, its illuminations so dull? The question is
unfair, since this landmark of progress is the Gutenberg Bible, printed in German Mainz
about 1454. It is mechanical because it was set from moveable type and could be
reproduced toward a limit which in our time pumps books on and off the cartel shelves
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
like the tasteless apples of a supermarket. Dull in illumination because it no doubt
employed what Adam Smith would acclaim as the time-saving principle of division of
labor. The multiplied power of Renaissance was to rest on the output of the press; but it
will remind us how history dismantles one wall to build another that (as in Greece, bardic
memory disappeared with the written word) the sacred and aristocratic glory of the
parchment manuscript could only go under in Europe's forward rush.
a128)
Verrochio and Leonardo, 1472-75, Annunciation, Uffizi, Florence
(CGB '59); + V detail
Vb128) Verrochio and Leonardo, c. 1473, Baptism of Christ, Uffizi, Florence; close
detail: head of the Leonardo angel to the left
128)
Same: Baptism of Christ, whole, (video shows center spread only)
Music:
Pierre de la Rue c.1500?, Sanctus from the Missa Ave sanctissima
Maria, (Munrow) Seraphim SIC 6104
Meanwhile, a genius was growing up in Medici Florence who would bring
Renaissance thought, science and art to such a harmony as in the spacings of de la Rue's
six voice Sanctus. The old account of Leonardo as Verrocchio's apprentice painting a
beautiful angel (left) in the master's Baptism (c. 1473?) has been confirmed by Bode's
study of the oil glazes —
129)
Same, Baptism, detail of Angels and Landscape (which video draws from 128)
which, with X-ray analysis, has also given the landscape above to Leonardo. In this
luminous spread of water under rocks, the boy seems to have envisaged what would
become the geology of his notebooks:
130)
Same, Landscape detail (or V130)
130a) Leonardo, c. 1505, Mona Lisa, detail, Louvre, Paris
V130b) Leonardo, 1508-10, from Virgin and Child with St. Anne, detail with
background, Louvre, Paris
I perceive that the surface of the earth was from of old entirely filled
up and covered over in its level plains by the salt waters, and that the
mountains, the bones of the earth, with their wide bases, penetrated
and towered up amid the air, covered over with much high-lying soil.
Subsequently incessant rains have... stripped bare part of the lofty
summits... so that the rock finds itself exposed to the air... And the
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
earth from the slopes and mountains has raised the floors of the seas...
and caused the plain to be uncovered...
Cusanus "privative infinity" sheds privation, becoming almost the cosmos "Won from the
void and formless infinite".
(cut de la Rue after "Sabaoth")
131)
131a)
Leonardo, 1513-16, John the Baptist as Smiling Precursor, Louvre, Paris;
+ V detail
Leonardo, c. 1514, Self, red chalk, Library, Turin (video, detail only)
As the wisdom of age had touched the boy, child-promise smiles on the old
Leonardo — this Louvre St. John as Precursor — with Pico della Mirandola:
Let a certain holy ambition invade the mind so that we may not be
content with mean things but may aspire to the highest things and
strive with all our force to attain them: for if we will to, we can...He
who is a seraph, that is, a lover, is in God; and more God is in him, and
God and he are one.
Though the smile is ambiguous in Leonardo's Notebooks:
Behold now the hope and desire of going back to one's own country or
returning to primal chaos... of the man who looks forward to each new
spring... and does not perceive he is longing for his dissolution... as
elements... imprisoned...long for the source...
What has the Precursor precursed?
a132)
Leonardo, c. 1483 ff., Great Crossbow on Carriage, Ambrosian Library,
Milan
132)
Leonardo, 1483 ff., Scythed car and armored tank, British Museum, London
V132a) Leonardo, 1483 ff., Bombard with shrapnel, Ambrosian Lihrary, Milan
It would be as in Shelley:
Although a subtler sphinx renew
Riddles of death Thebes never knew.
Had not most of the 1482 letter to Sforza promised instruments of war:
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I have plans for destroying every fortress...not founded upon rock... for
making cannon... engines for attack or defence... ships which can resist
the fire of cannon... armoured cars... which will enter the serried ranks
of the enemy with their artillery... and behind these the infantry will be
able to follow without opposition...
Talents applied, more than his art, in the service of Il Moro and Cesare Borgia — that
Caesar, Machiavelli also would have enabled.
In the floating Utopia of High Renaissance, the modern world, with its explosive
potentialities, is born.
133)
Dürer, "1500," Self as Christ, Alte Pinakothek, Munich; with V details
So with person. In this Dürer, inscribed 1500, Cusanus' omnivoyant God-man
becomes the deepest reflection of the mirrored self. As Eckhart had said in a passage that
would stir Luther: "God has become man in order that I may become God." Was that not
the call of the Luther Bible: "zu der herrlichen Freiheit der Kinder Gottes"?
The first history of music on records (the Parlophone "2000 Years") paired, with
the Dufay Trumpet Gloria already heard, Josquin's Et Incarnatus from the Missa Pange
Lingua — "and was made man."
Music:
Josquin des Pres, c.1500-10(?), Et Incarnatus, close, Parl. R-1019
Thus — Berlin chorus and all — the Western Incarnation takes up the cross of the world.
134)
Michelangelo, 1536-41, Last Judgment, detail of Trumpeting Angels, Sistine
Chapel, Rome; first, video detail
Music:
Cabezon, c. 1540-50, opening, Tiento de 4 Tono, Videro, GSC52 A
Michelangelo, in the storm to follow ("Tuba mirum spargens sonum"), felt also in
the Tientos of Cabezon, must have dreamed sometimes of the Lorenzo de' Medici
Florence of his youth.
(fade Cabezon)
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Symbolic History
Va135) Botticelli 1482, Birth of Venus, Uffizi, Florence (CGB '59); detail of Venus,
upper half from slide 136
135)
Same, whole picture (which video crops)
Music:
Isaac, c. 1485(?), Helas, 3-v, viols (Cape), AS-43
There Botticelli had brought Gothic line to an ultimate clarity of nostalgia in joy
— leaves, waves, blown roses, the pure Platonic nude — as Poliziano had described in La
Giostra, that unfinished romance which carries in germ the whole future of paganizing
poetry and art:
A woman born of the waves, lovesome and free
In every act, in her face more than human,
Wafted by lively zephyrs to the shore
Upon a shell, while heaven smiles upon her... (CGB)
136)
Same, figure of Venus (CGB '59); here video takes from 135 Venus and the
figure to our right)
You would have sworn the goddess came from the wave,
Gathering with her right hand her golden hair,
The other lifted, the sweet fruit to save
From greedy spoil; and as she touched the shore
With sacred feet, seen herbs and flowers pave
The barren strand...
(CGB)
137)
138)
Same, detail of figure to the right (CGB '59)
Same, detail of figures to the left (CGB '59); to which video adds Venus' face
(again from 136), with a return to 135, the whole picture
...and marked with what light air
Three nymphs accost her and her coming hail
And close invest her in a starry veil. (CGB)
Michelangelo could have remembered the music too, Isaac — not the brooding
Lamentation but ballades sighed by the viols, as wistfully glad as the receding curves of
Botticelli's shore.
In that backward looking, even Michelangelo, or whoever, after him, has been
most partisan in the embattled grandeur of Promethean consciousness, might drop, like
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Symbolic History
Milton's Adam and Eve, "som natural tears."
Isaac Helas)
139)
(fade
Flemish, c. 1460-70, Virgin and Child with Mary of Burgundy, detail, Hours
of Charles the Bold, National Library, Vienna (Landsburg), (video ranges
from whole over various details)
Since part of every soul must yearn (like the imprisoned elements) for a naive
anonymous grace — here from Mary of Burgundy's Book of Hours, the daily reading in
that same book become an allegorical window. Such quiet pre-selfhood lightens an
English wedding fragment from the time:
The maidens came
When I was in my mother's bower;
I had all that I would.
The bailey beareth the bell away;
The lily, the rose, the rose I lay.
140)
Same, Mary of Burgundy, whole (while video continues with details)
The silver is white, red is the gold;
The robes they lay in fold.
The bailey beareth the bell away;
The lily, the rose, the rose I lay.
And through the glass window shines the sun.
How should I love, and I so young?
The bailey beareth the bell away;
The lily, the lily, the rose I lay.
— As frail, as bright, as the unmatched maiden of the other poem:
...As dew in Aprille
That falleth on the spray.
Moder and maiden
Was never non but sche;
Well may swich a lady
Godes moder be.
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15th Century: Early Renaissance
�
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SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
15. 1500: Explosive Balance
CHARLES G. BELL
ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
or
1260 CANYON ROAD
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501
September 1995
Last Revised January ‘96
�Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
15. 1500: Explosive Balance
1)
Leonardo da Vinci, 1483 ff., Bombard with shrapnel, Ambrosiana, Milan
Music: Isaac, c. 1485(?), Alla Battaglia, Decca DL 79424
1500 goes off like one of Leonardo's shrapnel shells, hurled from the foul
bombard, shedding small shot, "causing," he writes, "great terror to the enemy, with great
loss and confusion."
The martial music of Isaac,
2)
Rubens, 1615, copy of Leonardo, 1503, Battle of Anghiari, Louvre, Paris
the unfinished frescoes of battle, in which Leonardo and Michelangelo vied on the walls
of the Florentine Palazzo Vecchio, set the type of force for centuries — as Rubens made
this copy, from a copy of the lost Leonardo.
(fade Isaac)
Va3) Leonardo, 1503-5, Mona Lisa, whole, Louvre, Paris
3)
Same, Mona Lisa, detail
Music:
Mantuanus, c. 1495, Frottole, Un Sonar, NY Pro Musica, Decca
79435
How does Renaissance, a point of balance between old and new, cultivating in all
arts the myth of calm — Leonardo;
4)
Giorgione, 1505-10, Sleeping Venus, Gemäldegalerie , Dresden
Giorgione; this Mantuan frottole of winds and waters, "Lirum, bililirum"; Sannazaro's
Arcadian dream, "Alma beata e bella," "Blest and beautiful soul, who freed from bonds"
— how does that promise admit of so fierce a cleavage?
(fade
Frottole)
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1500: Explosive Balance
1
�C.G. Bell
5)
Symbolic History
Pisanello, c. 1415(?), Luxuria, drawing, Albertina, Vienna
Was it the turbulence of shooting in a hundred years the narrows of such a
transformation as from Pisanello's 1415 Luxuria, lean Gothic lust burning its sinful
allure? — Scotch Dunbar of 1500 still working in that vein:
Sum kissis me; sum clappis me, sum kyndnes me proferis ...
And a stif standand thing staiffis in my neiff...
And Marlowe's Lechery flaunting it to the century's end:
I am one that loves an inch of raw mutton better than an ell of fride
stock-fish...
2nd 4) Giorgione, Sleeping Venus, detail; video, first a closer detail
Was Renaissance everywhere islanded in a brimstone which syphilis would fire
from the New World; so that Machiavelli's Mandragola-seduction might curl the fingers
of Giorgione's acceptance:
What your cunning, my husband's folly, a mother's venality and the
wickedness of a confessor, has won me to for a night ... I wish to have
forever.
2nd 5) Again, Pisanello, Luxuria, detail
Not to mention the dialogues of Aretino, where of whores, nuns and wives, only whores
ply an honest trade.
6)
6a)
6b)
Riemenschneider, 1495, Eve from the Marienskapelle, half-length, Museum,
Würzburg
French MS, 1450(?), Vapor Bath, MS Franc. 289 Fol 414, Bibl, Nat., Paris
Again, Riemenschneider, Eve (head and bust)
Music:
Glogauer Liederbuch, c. 1477-88, Ich bin erfreut, Archive 3033
On the other side, the purity of flesh lured the North too, as in the famous public
baths
and
love-mystic
heresy
of
Adamites.
In
the
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1500: Explosive Balance
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Germany where Luther was growing up, Riemenschneider and the Glogauer Songbook
wreathe the voluptuous Garden: "not under the law but under grace" — "nicht unter dem
Gesetz, sondern unter der Gnade."
7)
7a)
H. Bosch, 1503-4, Garden of Delights, from center, Prado, Madrid
Same, a closer detail (1996 video revision)
(fade Glogauer)
While in the art of Bosch, counterpole to the Italian, equally sought after in Spain,
the landscape of venery is composed to such a Garden of Delights, that what stands in the
triptych between eating forbidden fruit and choiring in musical hell, has been thought one
of those Adamitic celebrations of Eros.
As the upstaging of sex implies, the bombard of 1500
a8)
8)
Verrocchio, 1479-88, The Colleoni, seen from the south, on its pedestal; Venice
(CGB '48)
Same, front view, nearer, from below; + V detail, V8a
Music:
Isaac, Alla Battaglia, as above, conclusion
is not merely the intensification of war, of those Italian and European battles from which
Machiavelli learned lessons as shrewdly real as the Colleoni by Leonardo's master,
Verrocchio:
Men must either be caressed or else annihilated ... War is not to be
avoided, and can be deferred only to the advantage of the other side ...
A prince should therefore have no other aim or thought but war ... the
end justifies the means ...
9)
9a)
Double: [A] Mantegna, 1449-54, Soldier from Martyrdom of Christopher,
Eremitani, Padua; and [B] Leonardo, 1503, Study for the Battle of Anghiari,
Budapest (slide show first takes these singly, then the double)
Leonardo, C. 1488-90, Study for the Sforza Monument, silverpoint, etc.,
Royal Library, Windsor Castle (video then repeats the double, 9)
It may be said of men in general that they are ungrateful, voluble,
dissemblers, anxious to avoid danger and covetous of gain ...
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
So-called virtues may lead to ruin, so-called vices to security; Caesar
Borgia's cruelty united the Romagna.
It is not merely that such satanic realism, passed down in the faith-world, as from
Mantegna's soldiers to Leonardo's Anghiari sketches, marks the deepening war, until the
French sack of Milan destroys Leonardo's Equestrian Sforza, and Boiardo in Florence
breaks off the make-believe of his Orlando:
Yet even as I sing, O saving God,
I see all Italy in flame and fire
From these bold Gauls, come down again rough-shod
Across our country, wasting everywhere... (CGB)
10)
(end Isaac Battle)
Double: [A] Honnecourt, 1225-50, Diagrammatic figures, Sketchbook XXXV,
Bibl. Nat., Paris; and [B] Leonardo, c. 1492, Vitruvian Man, Accademia,
Venice; + singles [slide show takes A before the double, B after; video presents
double, detail of A, repeat of double, then B]
Less crucial the literal war than the symbolic, that reason, long dutiful to creed,
even in Roger Bacon, empiricist:
We perceive by the first proposition of Euclid that if the Person of God
the Father be granted, a Trinity of equal persons presents itself —
as unchecked by brute fact as Honnecourt's 13th-century geometries (left) — reason now
seated in the earth-fabric, takes the lead from revealed archetypes: Leonardo, as in the
Proportions of Vitruvian man, making that natural bondage the object of our love.
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
So the battle to be joined is not of Florence against Pisa, or of Milan against
France; it is the battle of values.
11)
Roman (Etruscan), 2nd cent. B.C., Scipio Africanus(?), Louvre, Paris
"In ancient times," Machiavelli writes in the Discourses, "men were stronger ...
which I believe founded upon the difference of their religion and ours ... The Pagan
religion deified only men who had achieved great glory, such as commanders of armies
and chiefs of republics ... placing the supreme good in grandeur of soul, strength of body,
and all such qualities as render men formidable." (Though this 2nd-century B.C. bust
called Scipio Africanus is not as strong as Michelangelo would have made it.)
12)
Roman Christian, later 3rd cent., Good Shepherd statue, Cleveland; + V detail
(as in slide V12a); digital puts detail first
"While our religion glorifies more the humble and contemplative than men of action,
placing the supreme happiness in humility, lowliness, and a contempt for worldly objects
... These principles seem to have made men feeble."
Yet even Nietzsche, who followed that line, admits a working paradox, by which
denial has stretched the bow of spirit.
13)
Norman-French, c. 1320, Dragon and Beast cast into Hell, Apocalypse MS,
Cloisters, NY
Music:
G. de Machault, Hocquetus David (from bar 105), OL-3
Like the hocket dissonance of Guillaume de Machault, the dragon and beast of the
Cloister Apocalypse inflame their Leviathan depths with a force unparalleled in the
ancient world, a vulcanism that flung up towers of church and state.
(end Machault)
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1500: Explosive Balance
5
�C.G. Bell
Va14)
Symbolic History
Nardo di Cione (with Orcagna?), c. 1355, Hell detail, Lake of Blood; S.
Maria Novella, Florence (CGB '59)
Orcagna, 1360, The Damned in Hell, fragment; Santa Croce, Florence
14)
"Where are all the great Florentines," Dante asks of Ciacco in the mud of the third
Circle, and hears: "Deeper, among the darker souls, weighed down by sundry crimes."
And we see them, "magnanimous" Farinata, Tegghiaio, Brunetto Latini: "You taught me
how man makes himself immortal" — great-souled heroes, in hell. Thus Machiavelli:
Doubtless these means are cruel and destructive... neither Christian nor
human ... and to be avoided... The life of a private citizen would be
preferable to that of such a king...
15)
15a)
15b)
15c)
15d)
Florentine, 1492, Death-mask of Lorenzo il Magnifico, Medici Palace,
Florence
Mantegna, c. 1470(?), Engraving: Bacchanalia, with Silenus; + V detail
Michelangelo, 1535-41, Double: details from the Last Judgment, [A] Death
Mask, and [B] a Devil's head in Hell; Sistine Chapel, Vatican (digital: only
Death's head)
Botticelli, c. 1485, Madonna of the Pomegranate, detail, Uffizi, Florence
(video: detail of head only from V15c)
Verrocchio, c. 1480, Lorenzo dei Medici, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.
(while video repeats [A] of 15, the Death Mask ; not digital
Nevertheless, if one wishes to maintain power, it is this that is
required.
As much as any work of art, the death-mask of Lorenzo il Magnifico records that
value-cloven pride: mind reaching out to Copernicus in Poland and Columbus in
America; the carnival passion of Lorenzo's own songs (CGB):
Music:
Isaac, c. 1490(?), Donna di dentro, New York Pro Musica, Decca
DL-79413
Here we are now, old and young,
Glad and lusty, female, male;
Hail to Bacchus, Venus, hail;
Join in pleasure, dance and song;
(music down)
the vanity he faces through it all:
June 1996
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6
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Sola sta ferma e sempre dura Morte —
Nothing holds, nothing endures, but Death;
the alternate words for tunes of delight:
(again up)
How great your beauty and your goodness,
Virgin, merciful and holy —
Lorenzo himself being patron of doom-preaching Savonarolla.
16)
A. Pollaiuolo, c. 1470, Hercules and the Hydra; Uffizi, Florence
How brief and undercut that keenness Florence and the Medici had fostered:
Pollaiuolo's Hercules, like Botticelli's Spring and Leonardo's science — courage, beauty,
intelligence — on the whirls of corruption Machiavelli saw and succumbed to, putting
Borgia's treacherous henchman, Michelotto, in command of the Florentine militia, for a
sellout with hardly a battle.
(end Donna di dentro)
a17)
17)
17a)
Donatello, 1445-48, Entombment of Christ, stone relief, Sant' Antonio,
Padova
Niccolo dell' Arca, c. 1485(?), Pieta, detail, S. Maria della Vita, Bologna;
+ V closer detail
Prato Master, c. 1430-40, Unbelievers, detail, Cathedral, Prato (video briefly
returns to the detail of 17)
Music:
Compere, pub. 1503, Crucifige, de Van, etc., AS-80
Crucifige! Donatello pierced the Renaissance in Padua. Penitence veers back
from the North, as Savonarolla is called to San Marco from Ferrara. But in this dell' Arca
Pieta and the Passion motets, reform rides humanist liberation. So the trumpet that
roused Savonarolla was Virgil's warning from the severed roots:
Heu! Fuge crudelis terras, fuge litus avarum —
Fly, fly the ruthless land, the shore of greed.
June 1996
1500: Explosive Balance
(fade Crucifige)
7
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
No medieval voice rages in those sermons against pagan Florence and the Church of
Rome:
they have not only destroyed the Church of God, but built up another
... of sticks, Christians dry as tinder for the fires of hell ... The only
hope that now remains to us, is that the sword of God may soon smite
the earth.
As the dying Lorenzo turned his back on that holy arrogance, lightning struck the
cathedral dome, a comet flared, the Florentine lions fought and the most beautiful was
killed.
18)
Florentine, early 16th cent., Death of Savonarolla (1498), S. Marco, Florence
"Give the people of Florence their freedom," said Savonarolla — already risking mobrule, opening private houses to the search for vanities. Well, he would learn at his own
trial how much his populace cared for justice and truth. While Machiavelli, observing the
fires from the Palazzo Vecchio, would write: "all unarmed prophets fail."
19)
Botticelli, 1500-5, Mystic Crucifixion, Fogg, Cambridge, Massachusetts;
+ V detail
Savonarolla:
In my imagination I saw a black cross over the Babylon of Rome, and
on it was written Ira Domini, and above it rained every weapon and
hailstones and stones, with thunder and lightning ... and dark and
abysmal weather. And I saw another cross, a golden one, that came
from the sky to earth over Jerusalem, and on it was written
Misericordia Dei, and there the weather was serene, clear, and very
bright ... And I saw angels arrive with the red cross ...
Botticelli's break with the Medici past reflects those doomsday sermons.
June 1996
1500: Explosive Balance
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20)
20b)
Symbolic History
Italian, 1450-55 and 1492-5, Room of the Liberal Arts, Borgia Apartments,
Vatican; + V detail (which the slide show replaces with 20a, Pinturicchio,
1492-1503, fresco from the same apartments — also added to video in '96)
Raphael, 1517-18, Portrait of Pope Leo X with Cardinals; Uffizi, Florence;
first, video detail
Music:
Tromboncino, c. 1500, Ostinato vo seguire, Nonesuch 71071
Savonarolla's attack was on the Borgia Pope Alexander VI. It is hard, from the
restraint of his Vatican apartments, or of the Tromboncino that might have been played
there, to picture the Nero of whom we read: he vying with his bastard Caesar for the
favors of daughter-sister Lucrezia; of their famous poisonings; or how that Cesare with
the bow of Apollo shot prisoners as they dodged in the courtyard, while the golden-haired
Lucrezia and the Pope looked on.
Then Pius, and the warring Julius II, Michelangelo's patron, and in 1513 the
banqueting Medici, Leo X: "Since we have been given the Papacy by God, for God's
sake let us enjoy it." — whom Luther would address in 1520, between rage and naive
hope: (end Tromboncino)
Leo, most blessed father...I have never thought ill of you personally ...
I have called you a Daniel in Babylon ... but I have truly despised your
see, which neither you nor anyone else can deny is more corrupt than
any Babylon or Sodom ... the most shameless of all brothels, the
kingdom of sin, death and hell.
a21)
21)
Signorelli, 1499-1500, The Damned, Cathedral, Orvieto; plus V lower detail
Same, vertical near center (from these and a closer slide, V21a, the video
draws two details, one above and one below)
Music:
June 1996
Josquin des Prez, c. 1500(?) (pub. 1519), from Miserere, AS-107/8
1500: Explosive Balance
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Symbolic History
It is not that Gothic energies, from Savonarolla to Counter-Reformation, cease or
slack off, but that they clothe themselves in carnal fabrics. Sodomite Signorelli flexes the
Medicean arts in a foreshadowing of Michelangelo's darker Judgment.
At a time as complex as any in world history, Europe becomes a voltaic pile,
stretched over electric fields of north-south, Gothic-classic, Christian-humanist,
medieval-modern — blending hues in every heart and work; while power explodes to the
New World and implodes in Protestantism — how is such a folded convolution to be
exhibited at all?
The amplest ingathering is in the music of Josquin des Prez.
22)
22a)
Dürer, 1498, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Woodcut, Berlin
Same, detail [video takes its detail from 22]
His Miserere-forging of angular rythm and massive chord, impels Dürer's Four
Horsemen, that Gothic apocalypse — the Angers tapestries lashed to physical storm —
down over the Italy of Signorelli and of Michelangelo, where Dürer made art pilgrimages,
and Josquin passed most of his productive life.
(end Miserere)
a23)
23)
Dürer, 1514, Melancholy,
Washington, D.C.
Same, whole engraving
Music:
engraving,
detail,
National
Gallery,
Josquin des Pres, c. 1498(?), from Dulces exuviae, DL 9410
But there is another Josquin and another Dürer: this laurel-crowned Melancholy
heaped round with attributes of thought, idleness, suicide; Josquin's handling of Dido's
last love lament, "Dulces exuviae" — as if, in classical renewal, Lucretius' ennui must
deepen (under the rays of light over ocean) to the brooding flaw of Hamlet.
(fade Dulces Exuviae)
June 1996
1500: Explosive Balance
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a24)
24)
24a)
Symbolic History
Bramante, 1502, Tempietto di S. Pietro in Montorio, Rome
Bramante, 1480-90, S. Maria presso S. Satiro, interior, Milan
Same, another view
It is most of all in architecture that 1500 Europe is cloven by the Alps. The
classical orders, coffered vault and dome dominate Bramante's Italy. But if we seek in
music, where no classical orders survived, a comparable cleavage, what is most Italian —
those chordal lauds and frottole that point to operatic song — were written not only by
Tromboncino and the rest, but by Flemish Josquin.
Music:
a25)
25)
25a)
Josquin des Prez, c. 1490(?), In Te Domine Speravi, (opening
phrase), Angel S-36926
(fade)
French Flamboyant, 1500 ff., N Transept of Beauvais, central portion, color
French Flamboyant, 1500 ff., N. Transept of Beauvais, night-lighted;
+ V detail
French, 15th cent., Flamboyant Rose Window, Sainte Chapelle, Paris (CGB
'59)
While in the North, Gothic spills over 1500 in a lacy network of stone, often (as
here at Beauvais) completing 13th-century structures. While late Gothic verse ties knots
of rhyme: (Henryson) "Superne/ Lucerne,/ Guberne this pestilens;/ Preserve/ and serve/
That we not sterve thairin;" (or Dunbar) "Haile yhyng, benyng, fresche flurising!/ Haile
Alphais habitakle!/ Thy dyng ofspring maid us to syng/ Before his tabernakle."
For a musical parallel, it is again Josquin who twines the contrapuntal as well as
anyone. Thus the six-voice canonic close of the motet Benedicta:
Music:
a26)
26)
Josquin des Prez, c. 1510(?), Benedicta es caelorum regina, close
ARC-2533 110
Late Gothic, 1387 ff., Milan Cathedral, section of Façade and South side
(CGB '80)
Italian Gothic, 1386-1887, Pinnacles over the crossing, Cathedral, Milan
June 1996
(end Benedicta)
1500: Explosive Balance
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Even in architecture, the geographical divide is deceptive. Through the whole
Renaissance and into the centuries after, Milan Cathedral was sprouting minarets over a
city given to the smooth accords of Bramante and Leonardo.
27)
27a)
Tudor Ceiling, 1478 ff., on Norman 1141-80, Christ Church Choir, Oxford
(CGB '86)
Same, another view (while video and digital detail slide 27)
While the tendrilled fans applied now to churches of the North, build a
ceremonious earthly bower within the inherited sternness of the Medieval. So the
plainsong floreations of Wolsey's choirmaster, Taverner, enwreathed the Tudor
transformation of Christ Church Norman Choir.
Music:
28)
V28a)
28b)
Taverner, c. 1525(?), "Aromata" from Dum transisset sabbatum,
Argo RG-316
Jörg Syrlin the Elder, 1469-74, Pythagoras in the Church of Ulm; + V detail
(cf. V28)
Same, double: [A] Cimmerian Sibyl and [B] slide 28, Syrlin's Pythagoras
Same, Cimmerian Sibyl from the Ulm Choir stalls
In the stained glass soaring of Ulm, Syrlin's minstrel Pythagoras sings as with
personal passion. (So many songs caught up in sacred masses):
Western wind, when wilt thou blow,
That small rain down can rain?
Christ, if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!
Like the German, "Es ist ein Schnee gefallen":
A deep snow has fallen
Before the snows are due,
Boys pelt me with snowballs,
My path is lost in snow.
My house yawns at the gable,
Our years have made it old,
The doorbolts are broken,
My little room is cold.
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1500: Explosive Balance
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Symbolic History
Sweet love, in loving pity,
Shield me from my woe;
Fold me to your body,
And let the winter go. (CGB)
Ach Lieb, lass dich's erbarmen,
Daß ich so elend bin,
Und schliess mich in dein Arme!
So fährt der Winter hin.
29)
29a)
29b)
29c)
Double: [A] Hugo v. d. Goes, 1476-8, Portinari Altar, detail, Uffizi,
Florence; and [B] Ghirlandaio, 1485, Adoration of the Shepherds, detail,
Santa Trinita, Florence
Detail similar to A of 29, from Hugo v.d. Goes Altar (CGB '59)
Again, 29, Double
A closer detail from the Ghirlandaio Adoration (cf. B of 29)
About 1478, the Portinari Altar by Hugo van der Goes of Bruges was set up in
Florence. The realism which delighted the town climaxed in the shepherds (left),
pressing in, as from carols and mystery plays:
When Wat to Bedlem cum was,
He swet, he had gone faster than a pace;
He found Jesu in a simpell place,
Betwen an ox and an asse.
(He was a gud herdès boy)
Ut hoy!
For in his pipe he made so much joy.
Seven years later Ghirlandaio, to whom Michelangelo was apprenticed, painted
his harmonious response. These familiar shepherds enter into a stable thatched over a
classical ruin, where the feed-trough is an inscribed sarcophagus. No wonder they have
the conscious measure of Poliziano's pastoral vignettes:
June 1996
1500: Explosive Balance
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
To see the rustic as he tends his sheep
Unbar the gate for the passing of his flock.
Or delle pecorelle il rozo mastro
Si vede alla sua torma aprir la sbarra...
30)
30a)
M. Schongauer, c. 1485(?), Adoration of Shepherds, Gallery, Berlin-Dahlem
Same, detail (video makes two details from slide 30)
In the homespun ripening of this Schongauer, which Dürer would make Lutheran,
we have a German version of what Renaissance Christendom, with Erasmus as its ablest
spokesman, everywhere hoped for, a kind of Biblical humanization by quiet reform:
The sun itself is not as common and accessible to all as is Christ's
teaching ... I would that even the lowliest women read the Gospels and
the Pauline Epistles. And I would that they were translated into all
languages ... that the farmer might sing some portion of them at the
plow, the weaver hum them to the movement of his shuttle, the
traveller lighten the weariness of his journey with such stories as these.
31)
Maitre de Moulins, c. 1498, Madonna in Glory, central panel of triptych,
Moulins Cathedral
That heritage of faith freed and naturalized is a 1500 starting point. Let the threevoice canon from Josquin's Ave verum corpus, in its first Dijon recording, with the Maitre
de Moulins' Virgin in Glory, express what was shared from Memling to Metsys and from
Perugino to Raphael:
Music:
32)
32a)
33)
Josquin des Prez, late 15th cent., (pub. 1503), 2nd phrase of Ave
Verum Corpus, old VM-212 (1)
Same, detail, top left: angel
Same, detail, lower right: angels
Same, detail, center: Madonna and Child (here video returns to the whole
panel; not so digital)
(end Josquin)
The formative genius of the 1500 enrichment was Leonardo,
June 1996
1500: Explosive Balance
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�C.G. Bell
34)
34a)
Symbolic History
Leonardo da Vinci, 1483-86, Virgin of the Rocks, Louvre, Paris; + V detail
Same, detail, Madonna and angel; + V detail of angel (V34a)
and he had entered the promised land (Vasari's "terza maniera") twenty years before.
Music:
Fr. Bossinensis, c. 1495(?), Lauda, New York Pro Musica, Decca
79437
In music the shift was from the medieval
painting: to render "a proportioned and
indeed, who came to the service of Sforza
lyre, applies (with Aron and Gafori) the
adding of parts to what Leonardo stressed in
harmonious view of the whole." Leonardo
as a musician playing a fantastic skull-shaped
same spatial sense to music: "the union of
proportional parts sounded simultaneously." In the 1500 Laude, how like the sfumato,
which shadows Leonardo's space, is the melting of tonal fullness in complicities of minor.
(fade Bossinensis)
Can we draw from Leonardo's Notebooks the heart of that mystery?
a35)
35)
Same, upper section of the whole
Same, detail of rocks
Shadow partakes of the nature of universal things, which are all more
powerful at their beginning and grow weaker toward the end ... And
drawn on by my eager desire, having wandered for some distance
among the overhanging rocks, I came to the mouth of a huge cavern
before which for a time I remained stupefied ... my back bent to an
arch, my left hand clutching my knee, while with the right I made a
shade for my lowered and contracted eyebrows; and as I leaned one
way and then the other to see if I could discern anything ... suddenly I
was aware of two contrary states, fear and desire, fear of the
threatening dark cavern, desire to see what marvels it might contain ...
Longing for the source ... like that of the moth for the light ...
a36)
36)
36a)
Leonardo 1481-2, Adoration of the Magi, central group, Uffizi, Florence
Same, detail of Leonardo self and two heads (cf. also V36a)
Same, closer detail of the two heads
In the god-like expansion of nature and man, something has replaced the demon
adversary of Christian good. What Leonardo saw from his summit of thought was not
June 1996
1500: Explosive Balance
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
only the fury of war ("Della crudelta dell' Omo") but deeper, the smiling enigma of force
— as in Carnot's Second Law — that energy quickens by its own decay:
Force I define as an incorporeal agency, an invisible power ... It is born
in violence and dies in liberty; and the greater it is the more quickly it
is consumed ... It desires to conquer and slay the cause of opposition,
and in conquering it destroys itself ...Without force nothing moves.
(Axiomatic, that in the 1500 dream of calm, where Satan slacks off, entropy appears.)
For the strongest contrast of that South and North, against Leonardo, 1452-1519,
a37) H. Bosch, c. 1490, Death of a Miser, Nat. Gal., Washington, DC (CGB '60)
37 Same, Central portion (CGB '60) [video takes this first, then a detail from a37]
set Bosch, c. 1450-1516, deep in transreal Gothic, what spoke at the same time in
Everyman, English morality play from the Dutch:
Here shall you se how Felawshyp and Jolyte,
Bothe Strengthe, Pleasure, and Beaute,
June 1996
1500: Explosive Balance
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Wyll fade from the as the floure in Maye;
For ye shall here how our Heven Kynge
Calleth Everyman to a general rekenynge.
Give audyence, and here what he doth saye...
[God] Where are thou Deth, thou myghty messengere?
… Go thou to Everyman,
And shewe hym in my name,
A pylgrimage ...
The structures are medieval. But as in a process of mineralization, every grain has been
replaced; in the cast of art and drama Bosch meets with Leonardo.
38)
Dutch(?), c. 1440, Mouth of Hell, 99 from Cath. of Cleves Hours, P. Morgan
Library, NY; + V detail
For centuries his forbears had been filling in and individualizing Gothic (this 1440
Hell-gate as mouth and arse), fitting Christian vision to the feel of man and matter. The
moral fact boiling from the church close to the square in all those guild towns may be
measured by the stage direction in The Castle of Perseveraunce: "Loke that the Devil
have gunne-powder brennynge in pypys in his handis and in his eris and in his erse whan
he gothe to battayle."
39)
H. Bosch, 1503-4, Triptych of Delights, closed, Creation, Prado, Madrid;
+ V detail; not digital
So the created earth painted on the closed wings of Bosch's Garden of Delights
may be medieval in conception — an egg of land and water, cloud and sky, closed in a
crystalline shell — but its space reaches into the future, wonderful as the iconography
with which Bosch peoples it. Revolution floats in amniotic calm, before the battle of
values begins — visionary as Ockeghem's Mass for the Dead.
Music:
June 1996
Ockeghem, c. 1480(?), from Missa pro defunctis, Ubi est Deus
tuus, ff., ARC 2533-145
1500: Explosive Balance
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�C.G. Bell
40)
40a)
Symbolic History
Bosch, same, central panel, plus detail: procession around a pool
Same, closer detail (revised into video in 1996)
(fade Ockeghem)
1500 Dunbar's grosser sins:
Then Idleness at the second call
Came like a sow from a mud hole;
He had a sleepy snout.
Many a swag-bellied sluggish glutton,
Many a lazy slut and sloven
Were servants in his rout... (CGB)
41)
41a)
41b)
41c)
Same Bosch, whole triptych open
Same, left panel, lower detail
Same, central panel, detail
Same, right panel, upper half of Hell
The spread altar reaches from Adam and Eve through the pursuit of happiness, to
a hell landscape of Satanic mills. Obrecht's Marian Mass for 3 to 7 voices, and tied by a
cabala of number symbols, has that spectral vastness.
Music:
42)
42a)
Obrecht, c. 1500(?), Marian Mass, from 2nd Agnus, ARC 198-406
(fade)
Same, top of Hell
Detail of same, blood-red stream (here video takes two details from 42)
But it is the older Ockeghem who rides the hell-energy cresting under halcyon
calm: "save the soul from fiends and from the lake of hell" — "de manu inferni et de
profundo lacu."
Music:
Ockeghem, again Requiem Mass, "de manu inferni", etc.
(fade)
A window into the soul of Europe on the verge of colonial conquest and Protestant war.
And with Bosch — as if sprouted from the aspri sterpi of Dante's wood of suicides —
compare Gawain Douglas, 1501:
My ravished spirit in that desert wasteful
Drew to the margin of a river hateful,
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
That like Cocytus, the ugly stream infernal,
With its vile water made a hideous trouble,
Spilling overhead, blood red, and impossible
It should have been a river natural ...
43)
Bosch, 1505-6, St. Anthony Triptych, center detail, Lisbon, Portugal
This loathly flood like rumbling thunder routed,
Wherein the demon fish so elvish shouted
Their wild yelps deafened and benumbed my hearing;
At those grim monsters my weak spirit doubted.
None through the soil but spunky trees there sprouted,
Combust, barren, bloomless, no leaf bearing,
Old rotten runts wherein no sap was working,
The most part waste, with withered branches moulded;
It was a den well fit for murderers' lurking.
44)
44a)
Bosch, 1510 ff., detail (lower right), Temptation of Anthony, Prado, Madrid
Again, Bosch, Triptych of Delights, from central panel, Lovers in a bubble
Wherefore I was myself right sore aghast ...
The whistling wind blew many a bitter blast;
The bare limbs rattled; I could scarcely stand.
Out through the wood I crept on foot and hand.
The river stank, the trees they clattered fast.
That soil was nought but marsh and slime and sand.
(CGB)
Small wonder if earthly joy, stemming such a demonism as would haunt
succeeding centuries, should be ensphered by Bosch in vegetable bubbles.
45)
45a)
Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1506-7, Youth in masquerade dress, Windsor Castle
Giorgione, c. 1504, Madonna enthroned, with St. Liberale and St. Francis,
Castelfranco, Veneto
Was not the humanist hope of Leonardo and his time so islanded? — the 1507
symposium Castiglione celebrates in The Courtier, a discourse opened by della Rovere,
who would kill his sister's lover next year, a cardinal then for smiling at him, and
connive, it was said, at the sack of Rome; while Bembo, poet-climber and libertine,
afterwards Papal secretary and Cardinal, closes it with a paean to Platonic love:
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
let us climbe up the staires, which at the lowermost steppe have the
shadow of sensuall beautie, to the high mansion place where the
heavenly, amiable and right beautie dwelleth, which lyeth hidden in the
innermost secretes of God ...
a46)
46)
Same, detail of Madonna and landscape
Same, detail of landscape only
Meanwhile the dawn has come, nature espousing the flight of the soul:
When the windowes then were opened on the side of the Pallaice that
hath his prospect towarde the high top of Mount Catri, they saw
already in the East a faire morning like unto the colour of roses, and all
starres voyded, saving only the sweete Governesse of heaven, Venus,
which keepeth the boundes of the night and day ...
Though the gleaming nature of this Giorgione background was dawning everywhere —
even in English poetry:
Tyll at the laste I came to a dale
Beholdyinge Phebus declynynge lowe and pale,
With my greyhoundes in the fayre twy lyght
I sate me downe for to rest me all nyght.
47)
47a)
Flemish, end 15th cent., Romance of the Rose, Garden entrance, MS Harley
4425 f. 12b, Brit. Mus., London; + V detail (V47), ‘96 revision
Giorgione, c. 1504, detail of St. Liberale from Castelfranco Madonna, Veneto
That is from Hawes' Pastime of Pleasure, Graunde Amoure's quest for love and virtue —
still, like this Flemish miniature (also of 1500), cultivating the Garden of The Romance
of the Rose: (Hawes)
Amyddes the garden ... there was resplendysshaunt
A dulcet sprynge and mervaylous fountayne ...
Besyde whiche fountayne the most fayre lady
La bell pucell was gayly syttynge...
In the interfusion of Gothic and Rebirth, the airy transparency of the miniature ripens, as
the myth of chivalry swells toward Ariosto.
June 1996
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a48)
48)
Symbolic History
Dürer, 1489-90, St. John's Cemetery, Nuremberg, stolen from Bremen
Kunsthalle
Dürer, 1494(?), The Wire-drawing Mill, Berlin-Dahlem
From 1490 on Dürer had applied those skills to a landscape liberation of the
forest-cleared and fruitful Germany, before the outbreak of religious wars — against Hell
Bosch, a faith as natural as Cornish would voice in Tudor English:
Pleasure it is
To hear, iwis,
The birdès sing,
The deer in the dale,
The sheep in the vale,
The corn springing;
God's purveyance
For sustenance
It is for man.
Then we always
To give him praise,
And thank him than,
And thank him than.
49)
49a)
Leonardo da Vinci, 1494-7, Last Supper, S. Maria d. Grazie, Milan
Same, center section (video draws this detail from 49)
The easy polarities of century and geography blur; 1495 finds both Bosch and
Dürer in the North, in Italy the Piagnoni beside Leonardo. Though what was uppermost
was humanist — the Christian myth composed to classical drama. In Josquin's deep
Lament for Ockeghem, nymphs of the woods and streams join in the Requiem Aeternam:
Music:
a50)
50)
50a)
51)
52)
53)
Josquin des Prez, 1495, Deploration sur la mort d'Ockeghem, pt. 1,
ARC 2533 145
Same, group on Christ's right
Same, group on Christ's left
Same, the figure of Christ
Leonardo, c. 1495, Study for Head of Christ, Brera, Milan
French, c. 1500, Entombment, L'Epines, near Rheims (CGB '59)
Same, detail (CGB '59)
June 1996
(end Part I, Deploration)
1500: Explosive Balance
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Symbolic History
a2nd 52) Again, Leonardo, Last Supper, Christ detail (while video holds to 53,
Entombment detail)
2nd 52) Again, L'Epines Entombment
With Josquin's lament, written in Italy to a French poem, for a Flemish master, we
have ranged Leonardo's Last Supper, most famous picture in the world, with this
anonymous Entombment carved in a pilgrimage church near Rheims. How Christian
Platonism has quieted Gothic pain. Erasmus:
He is the true theologian who teaches ... that all good men should be
loved and cherished equally as members of the same body, that evil
men should be tolerated if they cannot be corrected ... that those who
mourn are blessed and should not be deplored, and that death should
even be desired by the devout, since it is nothing other than a passage
to immortality ...
2nd 51)
Leonardo, Study for the Head of Christ
From the same essay:
What else is the philosophy of Christ, which he himself calls a rebirth,
than the restoration of human nature originally well-formed.
June 1996
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Symbolic History
In the Christ study, as in most of his works, Leonardo proclaims that restoration.
V3rd 52) Again, L'Epines Entombment, whole (while slide show goes directly to
3rd 53, below)
The new tomb grows shadowed and calm — as in Stephen Hawes:
After the day there cometh the derke nyght,
For though the day be never so longe
At last the belles ryngeth to euensonge ...
3rd 53)
Again, L'Epines Entombment, detail (slide show uses 3rd 53 here and for
the preceding entry)
The transforming death poem had been written in Italy in the 1480's by the
imprisoned politician and humanist Collenuccio. Though the close turns to Christ, who
in dying made death sweet and beautiful ("Dolce e bella morendo fe' la Morte"), the body
of the ode invokes Platonic release
54)
Tullio Lombardo, after 1501, head, Guidarello Guidarelli Tomb, Accademia,
Ravenna; plus digital detail
as "sacra", "splendida", "generosa", "inclita," the comfort of the soul come pure from
heaven, weary of a world of tumultuous and elemental war. This hymn to death — for
every shipwrecked soul the port of healing:
O porto salutar, che sol conforte
D'ogni naufragio il mal, splendida Morte
swells with the personal pity and anodyne which caused the statue of Guidorello, warrior,
who died in 1501, to be kissed and prayed to as to a romantic saint.
a55)
55)
Raphael, 1509-10, Leonardo as Plato, School of Athens, Vatican, Rome
Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1512, Self Portrait (red chalk), Royal Library, Turin
In the general amplification, not only Pico della Mirandola acclaimed man as
unlimited self-maker:
June 1996
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Symbolic History
Thou, restrained by no narrow bounds, according to thy own free will,
in whose power I have placed thee, shalt define thy nature for thyself ...
Ficino had extended the Platonic flight to a temporal progress toward Godhead:
the soul desires, endeavours and begins to become God, and makes
progress every day...Hence our soul will sometime be able to become
in a sense all things; and even to become a god.
How could Machiavelli, facing the 1512 Leonardo, think Christianity had sapped will and
drive; where the inner dynamic, against the Classical, was so recklessly advanced?
56)
Peter Vischer, 1509-19, St. Paul from the Sebaldus Tomb, Nürnberg
Whatever wrought the change was active also in the northern towns. Peter
Vischer cast this St. Paul in Nuremberg about the time Leonardo sketched his own image
and Raphael chose it for Plato's in The School of Athens — conscious nobility seeding
itself over Europe.
Yet in that augmentation a deeper cleavage, as between reason and heart, was to
rack the century. It is the separation of enlightened conforming humanism
1st 57)
Dürer, c. 1510(?), Self as Christ at the Column, drawing, Schloss, Weimar
from militant conscience as categorical guide. "I laid a hen's egg," said Erasmus; "Luther
hatched a bird of another kind." Dürer's possession by the nude self as the Man of
Sorrows, recalls Luther's insistence as he tore up the Bull: "so hilf' mir Gott, ich kann
nicht anders."
For 2nd 56) Again, Vischer, from the Sebaldus Tomb, St. James the Younger
suppose [Erasmus had answered Luther on Free Will] that in a certain
sense it is true ... that God works both good and evil in us, and rewards
His own works in us and punishes His evil ones. What a door to
impiety this pronouncement would open ... if spread abroad in the
world.
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Symbolic History
a2nd 57) Dürer, 1522, Self as the Man of Sorrows, drawing, Kunsthalle, Bremen
2nd 57) Again, Dürer Self as Christ at the Column, detail
Against that dialectic prudence, Luther flames in Christ-seizure:
God foresees, purposes, and does all things according to his
immutable, eternal and infallible will. By this thunderbolt free will is
utterly dashed to pieces ... Peace and tranquility of flesh are, with you,
of greater consideration than the Word of God ... Let me tell you this ...
I am seeking an object so great it ought to be maintained and defended
through death itself, even if the whole world should be hurled into
chaos and reduced to nothing.
And yet Erasmus, in his strangest work, In Praise of Folly, reaches, like Dürer's
Christ-man, toward the revelation of comic paradox — Lear's fool, Cervantes' mocked
knight as saving clown.
58)
Bosch, 1515-16, Christ Bearing the Cross, Beaux Arts, Ghent; + V detail
(from b59)
Since in praising folly "in a way not wholly foolish," Erasmus juxtaposes three masks:
the laughable (as of "old women in heat") which opens to the life-giving illusion of
Sisyphus: "all things are presented by shadows, yet this play is put on no other way"; the
mask of depravity, which he castigates; and third, in the last reversing chamber of the
Silenus, the noble follies of Platonic thought and Christian charity, where a taste of future
happiness drowns our knowledge of the world.
Bosch's 1515 Bearing of the Cross has no weirder transition.
Va59)
b59)
59)
Same, close detail of Bad Thief and Mockers
Same, wider central detail
Same, close detail of St. Veronica and a mocker
In taking up the weight of the new century and of Leonardo's grotesques, late
Bosch prepares for the Protestant agony: earth and soul so fallen that man is mere
stercus, a pile of dung, which only the snow of Christ can cover, so that God looking
down may see the purity of his own salvation. Luther:
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
The human will is a beast between. If God sit thereon, it wills and
goes where God will ... If Satan sit thereon, it wills and goes as Satan
will.
Yet how satanically ambiguous God's Lutheran sitting: "When I fart in Wittenberg, they
smell it in Rome."
a60)
60)
Altdorfer, 1520-25, The Nativity, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna;
+ V detail
Altdorfer, 1510, Rest on the Flight, Staatl. Mus., Berlin-Dahlem; + V detail
From 1500 to 1520, before the North became a battleground, the life that would
polarize and harden, swirls in the temporal wake of art-loving and indulgence-peddling
Rome. Is there a richer delight than in the fairy-tale Christianity Altdorfer shares with
folk song:
Es ist ein' Ros' entsprungen
Aus einer Wurzel zart ...
Luther too joins that dance in his Gabriel hymn:
Vom Himmel hoch da kom ich her,
Ich bring euch gute newe mehr ...
Not to mention the Rose of Sharon wonder of his Bible: "Ich bin eine Blume zu Saron
und eine Rose im Thal." Luther's favorite musician was Senfl, whose most fetching piece
is a Christmas Bell Song. This Catholic joy smiles the immediacy of Protestant birth.
Music:
June 1996
Senfl, c. 1525(?), Bell Song (Das Glaut zu Speyer), AS 51
1500: Explosive Balance
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�C.G. Bell
61)
Symbolic History
Altdorfer c. 1525, Madonna in Glory, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59);
+ V details [V61a, a detail, Madonna and Child (CGB '59) not yet used
Same, detail of Angel musicians to the left, revised into video ‘96, (CGB '59)
Same, detail of Angel musicians to the right (CGB '59); video: smaller
details only, above and below
Grünewald, 1511-15, Isenheim Altar, center, detail of Angel Concert,
Colmar
Same, whole center panel, Angel concert and Madonna and Child
Same, another Angel musician
Same panel, detail of Madonna under the Baldachin
a62)
62)
a63)
63)
V63a)
63b)
(end Senfl)
In Grünewald, joy sharpens with the prick of pain. So the great Faust-cry of
Hutten: "The spirits awake, there is love and joy in living" — "Die Geister erwachen; es
ist eine Lust zu leben" — sounds from the breaking wave.
History is powered by tragic excess — Reformation only to be pushed by a
temperament capable in its prime of Luther's imperative of Freedom:
I declare that neither pope, nor bishop, nor anyone else, has the right to
impose so much as a single syllable of obligation upon a Christian man
without his own consent ...
Why were Christ and all the martyrs put to death? ... because, without
consulting the preservers of old knowledge, they brought forth a new
thing ...
64)
64a)
Grünewald, c. 1506-8(?), Small Crucifixion, Nat. Gal., Washington, D.C.
(CGB '60); + V detail
Same, right detail (CGB '60)
and after, of lashing out at the poor who had taken his freedoms to heart:
Against the thieving and murdering Hordes of the Peasants: Who so
can, strike, smite, strangle or stab, secretly or publicly ... such
wonderful times are these that a prince can better merit Heaven with
bloodshed than another with prayer ...
(The poor thereafter to call him not Luther but Lügner — Liar.)
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
The Grünewald legend has this core of truth, that Mathis Der Maler did go
Lutheran, against his church, his patron and his daring art.
Music:
Taverner, c. 1525(?), Magnificant (opening), AS 91`
And in England, the fiercest genius of music, Taverner, repented, after 1528, of
"Popish Ditties," destroyed what he could, and closed his life breaking church windows
and despoiling altars.
(fade Taverner)
a65)
b65)
65)
Hans Holbein the Younger, 1519, Portrait of B. Amerbach, Kunstmuseum,
Basel
L. Cranach the Elder, c. 1502, Portrait of Dr. Johannes Cuspinian, detail,
Reinhart Collection, Winterthur
Same, whole picture
What survives that visionary adventure? — the humanist North roused to
Erasmus' (1509) "Age of Gold":
Reason is as great as a king ... a divine counsellor, presiding in its high
citadel, remembering its origin, it thinks of nothing sordid, of nothing
base ...
Hutten, a precursive Tom Paine, summoning German youth:
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Come hither all ye who want to be free. Here the tyrants shall be
smitten, here the bondage shall be broken. Where are you, freemen?
Where are you nobles? Men of great names, where are you?
Luther:
Every Christian is anointed and sanctified in body and soul with the oil
of the Holy Spirit —
an early portrait by Cranach, 1502, fresh with that morning — what remains, when genius
is consumed in polemic? As Erasmus (1521) would complain:
And the more I loved the inborn ability of Hutten, the more I grieve
that it was snatched away from us by these disorders ... For what did it
avail to have Reuchlin, burdened enough thus far, weighed down with
heavier ill will? ... Luther could have taught the evangelical philosophy
with great profit to the Christian flock ... if he had refrained from those
things which could only end in disturbance ...
66)
66a)
L. Cranach the Elder, 1550, Self Portrait, Uffizi, Florence; video: first a
close detail
Same, detail of head and shoulders
The last portrait of Cranach, half a century later, gives a solemn answer: in the
deeper hardening of Europe, of which Erasmus grieves in his last letters:
The Anabaptists, a race of men frenzied and devoted to death, have
inundated lower Germany ... Vives writes that John Vergara, together
with Brother Tovar and several other learned men, is in prison. You
know, I imagine, that the three most learned men in all England are in
jail: the bishop of Rochester, the bishop of London, and Thomas
More, a dearer friend than any other I have ever had —
man withdraws into a stronghold of consciousness: "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott"; "Aus
tiefer Not schrei ich zu Dir" — "From the depths of need I cry to thee".
67)
Spanish, B.C. to modern, Barcelona, View of Barrio Gotico; video: first
details, below and above
Old Barcelona summarizes 2000 years in the history of Spain. What is visible
ranges from Roman at the heavy-walled base, through Gothic and Flamboyant, to a
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
filigree of rococo at the crown; though buried below are cyclopean walls of the preGreek, Greek shards and marble, traces of Carthage; while the city spreads beyond to the
Art Nouveau fantasies of Gaudi.
The Spain of Colonial conquest rested on that base, with all the levels of period
style.
68)
68a)
Spanish Romanesque-Gothic, 1188 ff., Portico de la Gloria, Santiago de
Campostello; + V detail
Same, closer detail
Music:
Ripoli MS, c. 1200, Credit Frigus, 2-voice Easter Conductus (vocal
entrance), MHS-OR-433
At the end of the 12th Century at Compostello, Romanesque is shading into Gothic, as in
France, but with an archaic wild excess. And in the contemporary conducti from Ripoli,
note-against-note chords dance Isle-de-France rhythms.
(fade
Credit
Frigus)
69)
69a)
69b)
Spanish MS, 1415, Rafael Destornes, Judgment page, Barcelona Missal,
Cathedral Library, Barcelona (video: upper half only)
Same, lower detail, Hell
Same, upper detail, Saints (here video shows the whole)
Music:
Barcelona, end of 14th cent., Agnus Dei, close, Candide CE-31068
By 1400, French, Italian, and Flemish have fused as everywhere into an
International Gothic, which in Destornes sets up one of many signs on the way to Bosch.
In Catalan music also, the Hocket of Machault and the Italians softens toward familiar
style.
(close Agnus Dei)
70)
Bartolomé Bermejo, 1490, Pietà of Archdeacon Desplà, Cathedral, Barcelona;
+ V detail
During that century the most impassioned realism was absorbed from Avignon,
Flanders and the north Italian, to toughen in Bermejo, 1490 — as in the music of de la
Torre — to a Cid militance of carnal faith: "Adoramos Te Senor".
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
Music:
71)
71a)
Symbolic History
Ferdinand de la Torre, c. 1490, Adoramos, Tinayre (refrain), Lumen
32020 (fade)
Alejo Fernandez, c. 1520, Virgin of the Navigators, Alcazar, Seville; first,
video detail: ships below
Spanish, 15th cent., Castle Valencia de Don Juan, Leon
Music:
Juan del Encina, c. 1515(?), Una Sañosa Porfia, Cape, EMS-219
At this point the daring of a Genoese navigator opened the New World to a
crusading energy which had barely consolidated a sub-continent broken by Dark Age
invasions, Moors, and chivalry. All the nations of Europe have been mad, and so
variously no one could name the maddest, but the Spanish must rank high. What went
over the sea in German imperial dress and with all the financing and skill of Flemish
bottoms, under the protection of course of the Papal Virgin, had the outward style and
softness of high-renaissance Italian; but it bore from the windy uplands where Gothic
Moorish castles were still being built and ballad laments of the fall of Granada sung a
chivalric mysticism that would lash Conquistadores from Mexico clear to Panama and
Colorado.
(fade Encina)
72)
Classic Teotihuacan, 1st cent. B.C. to 3rd cent. A.D., view of Teotihuacan
For ships from the engineering West to encounter the stone age was not so
remarkable. What must have staggered the moral being was to confront a civilization in
some way higher than their own, though evolved in isolation from a primitive base and
without even the use of the wheel: cities larger and richer than theirs, an astronomical
calendar, libraries of religion and law, and an art that left Dürer speechless when he saw
its spoils in Antwerp: a civilization with an already mythic past, Teotihuacan, deserted a
thousand years before, its Pyramids of the Sun and Moon and Street of the Dead called by
the living Aztecs work of the Gods;
73)
Classic Maya, c. 800, Temple of the Cross, Palenque (Jean Coureau)
a New World of wonders, spread out in time and space — six-hundred miles south and
east the Maya ruins, Upland, Lowland, Peninsula, lost in forest — Palenque, sun-lit,
under a leafy sea, a life, music, and poetry fabulous then, irrecoverable now.
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
74)
Symbolic History
Classic Maya, c. 800, Sacred Cigar Smoking, Temple of the Cross, Palenque
(CGB '78); + V detail; not digital
Though the carved plinths and stele, as this from the Temple of the Cross at
Palenque, some death-god or panther-priest smoking a ritual cigar — cult scenes alive
with what Christendom had long since banished into hell — recover one thing for us
instantly: the crusading Christian jolt in the presence of a tradition so refined and so
idolatrously savage, alien as the Popol-vu sequence this relief suggests, when Hunter and
Seven Hunter (and later Hunter and Jaguar Deer), gone to the Underworld House of
Darkness where the gods hot-seat them and laugh like a swarm of flies, are given cigars
they must smoke all night and return in the morning unconsumed.
75)
Aztec, 15th cent., Coatlicue of the Serpent Skirt, Arch. Mus., Mexico;
+ V detail
And as if to raise the strain beyond psychic endurance, the antithesis had grown in
the Aztec empire to such sublimity and terror as this colossal Goddess of the serpent skirt,
found later under the charred ruins of what had been the greatest city in the world, drives
home — a more than Moloch, more than Bhagavad Gita divinity of vulture and snake, a
monolyth of rattle, talon and fang, which all the human sacrifices of Montezuma's rule of
art, justice, and wisdom could not appease.
76)
76a)
French Romanesque, early 12th cent., Knight spears a demon, Tavant, Indreet-Loire
Gerona Beatus, 975, f 134 v, Christian warrior spears a snake
What could Christian chivalry do, pledged since Roland to archangelic war — this
knight spearing a devil in the 12th cent. frescoes of Tavant — Columbus too having told
the Cuban chief (where no Caribs would survive) that "the first cause of his coming was
to instruct them in godly knowledge and true religion" (though he was then amassing
gold) "and especially to punish the cannibals and such mischievous evildoers" — what
could that conquering Inquisition do with a mystery as beyond its ken as the plumed
serpent, but melt into bullion its ornaments and idols, and gathering from cities and
libraries all codices, pictographs and writings, to the priestly censing and sprinkling,
eradicate, in one giant auto-da-fe, the entire civilized evidence of a world they would
occupy — as a virus takes over the genetic mechanism of the host.
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
While Luther at the same time threw his inkwell at the devil, to exorcise what
blasted him within.
77)
Post-classic Maya, 15th cent., Tulum, evening, coast of Yucatan (Enrique
Franco)
By 1518 Juan de Grijalva was exploring westward from the island of Cozumel.
His chaplain describes towns on the coast of Yucatan, and to the south a walled city, the
ruins now of Tulum:
next day a little before sunset, we perceived far in the distance a town
or village so big that the city of Seville could not appear larger or
better; and a huge tower was seen in it.
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
It was the beginning of the thrust that would take Cortez to the throne of Mexico.
78)
78a)
H. Bosch, 1503-4, Delights Triptych, Hell, detail, Prado, Madrid; + V detail
Bosch, c. 1504, Last Judgment, Hell detail, Kunsthistorisches Museum,
Vienna
At the heart of that conquest lies an exploit, weird as the Satanic invention of
cannon in Paradise Lost. When the assault hinged on gunpowder, the cavalier Montaño,
with four other Spaniards, climbed to the three mile high crater of Popocatépetl, and was
lowered in a basket, repeatedly, four hundred feet into a deeper hell-hole of smoke and
flame, to scrape off sulphur from the lava walls. That fiery brimstone fed the final
massacring charge on Mexico City. Palpable, that the damned eruption Bosch divined in
panels fondly acquired by the Spanish crown, powered the reduction of new worlds.
In Irving's Columbus, as signs of land multiply and no land appears, the sailors
think them signs of the devil, "delusions beguiling them on to destruction";
a79)
b79)
Leonardo, 1513, Girl pointing in a landscape, Windsor Castle; first, V detail
Double: Leonardo [A] 1513-16, John, Louvre; and [B] 1483-86, Angel from
Madonna of the Rocks, Louvre [here video repeats a79, Girl pointing]
while Columbus praises "the goodness of God in thus conducting them by soft breezes
across a tranquil ocean ... with fresh signs guiding them to a promised land." Against
jealous temptation, the kindly Rewarder of the temporal quest. And the proof was at
hand, the land, though it, too, might seduce with power.
But whatever the backward urge or forward danger, the die was cast; Leonardo's
angel and John were smiling, his girl pointing across the stream, his bearded face was
wise with futurity.
79)
79a)
Giorgione, 1504-10, La Tempesta, Accademia, Venice [somewhat cropped in
the video]
Same, detail, with both figures (while video shows separate details, woman,
then man)
June 1996
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�C.G. Bell
79b)
Symbolic History
Same, double: closer details of the man and woman (while video returns,
through a lower spread with both figures, to the whole)
Music:
Again, Mantuanus, c. 1495, Lirum bililirum, Decca DL 79435
Giorgione learned it from Leonardo, the accord of nature and man, this Gypsy and
Soldier (his own birth illegitimate), like a Rest on the Flight with a nude Mary and
profane Joseph. Was that enchantment as merely ideal as the Pastoral Elegy Sannazaro
now wreathed in the harmonies Milton would love and pursue? —
Thee shepherd, thee the woods and desert caves,
With wilde thyme and the gadding vine o'regrown,
And all their echoes mourn.
— I fiumi il sanno e le spelunch' e i faggi ...
And like "Lycidas", Sannazaro's lament leads to an Arcadian paradise ("Where, other
groves and other streams along,"):
Altri monti, altri piani,
Altri boschetti e rivi
Vedi nel cielo, e più novelli fiori ...
Till all that heaven rejoices
To hear their new and unaccustomed voices ...
If any spirit of love among you dwell,
Oaks of shade and gloom,
Cast here a shadow for this quiet tomb. (CGB)
Se spirto alcun d'amor vive fra voi,
Quercie frondose e folte,
Fate ombra alla quiete ossa sepolte.
80)
80a)
Giorgione, "La Tempesta", background, with lightning
Same, closer detail of lightning
What is the gift of art if not to make dream real? But the symbolic dream, of total,
ambiguous reality. Giorgione's Gypsy Family, the richest strain of Venetian HighRenaissance, takes its usual title — La Tempesta — from its cloud and lightning sky, a
demon flash in the beckoning of calm.
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Leonardo:
Force is of brief duration, because it desires perpetually to subdue its
cause, and when this is subdued it kills itself ... One ought not to desire
the impossible ...
(close Mantuanus)
June 1996
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�
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1500 : Explosive Balance, Symbolic History, Part 15
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SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
16. Giants in the Earth (16th Century)
CHARLES G. BELL
ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
or
1260 CANYON ROAD
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501
September 1995
Last Revised January ‘96
�1
Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
16. Giants in the Earth (16th Century)
1)
Giulio Romano, 1530-32, Fall of the Giants, frescoed room, corner and two
walls, Palazzo del Te, Mantua (CGB '86)
Same, detail, stream and Giant under rocks, (CGB '86); video brings in another
detail from the last slide of the show, 80+1.
1a)
Music:
Ant .de Cabezon, c. 1540, Tiento de Primer Tono, Videro on HMV
DA 5207
In The Winter's Tale, the living Hermione is presented as a statue "by that rare
Italian master Julio Romano, who, had he himself eternity, and could put breath into his
work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly is he her ape." In this 1530
Mantuan vault, his heaven-storming giants fall under the rocks of Pelion and Ossa.
(music)
In the tientos of Cabezon, we feel what turned the loves and thought of that
century toward Prometheus, Icarus, Phaeton and Faust.
2)
Titian, 1543-44, David and Goliath, Santa Maria della Salute, Venice;
+ V detail)
(music continued)
There were giants in the earth in those days...when the sons of God
came in unto the daughters of men.
And when the spiritual force stored in medieval creed-condensers struck through
the physical, it stirred Gargantuan prodigies: the arts of space and mass, Hermetic and
Lucretian science, Reformation, Utopias, world conquest, Platonic love, the Age of Gold.
In the dark gathering of the fugue, or the late works of Michelangelo, in this Titian, the
very crushing of pride evokes powers unknown before — giants most of all giants in
their overthrow. (close Cabezon)
9/1995
Giants in the Earth
�2
C.G. Bell
3)
3a)
Symbolic History
Double: Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1496, Drawings: [A] Helicopter and [B]
Lifting Power of a Wing, Inst. of France, Paris (video takes A and B singly)
Francisco Goya, 1815-24, Modo de Volar, Proverbs 13
Call Leonardo the first of the titans — one who, with mirror-writing and smiling
secrecy, left us in doubt how far he enacted the myth of Icarus:
if well made ... and turned swiftly, the said screw will make its spiral
in the air and it will rise high.
On another page, a man's descent measures the lift of a starched linen wing:
when he has great wings attached to him, by exerting his strength
against the resistance of the air, man is enabled to subdue it and to
raise himself upon it.
Tomorrow morning on the second day of January 1496
I will make the thong and the attempt.
(The vision would haunt Goya after three hundred years.)
While in Tansillo's mid-century sonnet — "Poi che spiegat' ho l'ale al bel desio"
— Icarus becomes the symbol Bruno would appropriate for his Heroic Furies.
4)
Michelangelo, 1533, Fall of Phaeton, drawing, Windsor Castle
V4a) Same, detail
(Paralleled by the Phaeton of Michelangelo's 1533 drawing):
Since first my soul beat wings to the high desire,
The vaster sense of air beneath my tread,
The swifter pinions to the air I spread,
Till spurning earth, toward heaven I aspire.
Not Daedal's son warns with example dire
That I descend or bow my threatened head;
For though with him I plummet earthward dead,
What is life's candle to this funeral pyre?
I hear my heart's voice through the dusky air:
Whither, O fearless darer, would you dare?
Not without wreck this giant temerity.
Fear not, I answer, what the ruin may be.
9/1995
Giants in the Earth
�3
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Hold secure to the clouds and calmly die,
Content if heaven allow a death so high. (CGB)
It was the aspiration that raised Bruno toward his 1600 blaze.
5)
Leonardo da Vinci, 1473, Tuscan landscape, drawing, Uffizi, Florence;
+ V detail
On August 2nd, 1473, the twenty-one-year-old Leonardo walked out of Florence
and sketched what he saw. What opened was the organic fabric of the world — in the
Notebooks, an animism defiant as the space toward the right of the picture:
The body of the earth like the bodies of animals is interwoven with a
network of veins which are all joined together, and are formed for the
nutrition and vivifying of this earth and its creatures ... Have you seen
how the water that drips from the severed branches of the vine and
falls back upon the roots ... enters into the power of its mover and rises
up anew? ... So the sea ... through passages of the earth, returns
upward.
6)
6a)
Leonardo da Vinci, 1512-16, Deluge: Water and Rocks, drawing, Windsor
Castle; + V detail
Leonardo da Vinci, 1508-10, from Virgin and Child with St. Anne: detail of
mountains to the left; Louvre, Paris
Forty years later, the bearded old man, in abstract sketches and notes, endows
Deluge with the cataclysmic necessity of science:
Let the fragments of a mountain have fallen into the depths of one of
the valleys and there form a barrier ... the swollen waters coursing
round the pool which confines them and striking against various
obstacles with whirling eddies, leap into the air in turbid foam and
then, falling back, cause the waters where they strike to be dashed
up...so that the angle of reflection will be equal to the angle of
incidence ... waves of the sea at Piompino all of foaming water.
Such dark recurrence Agricola framed in a geology I once turned to blank verse:
So water working down the block plateau
Cuts deep in shale and leaves the granite whole,
Rearing the mountains, which upreared, the rain
That cut vales cuts in turn, and levels all to plain.
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Thus I perceive the universal sway:
By the same power that builds, all things decay. (CGB)
7)
7a)
Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1490, Grotesque Heads, drawing, Windsor Castle
Leonardo da Vinci, 1483-99(?), Drawing of a cannon foundry, Windsor
Castle
V7b) Rubens, 1615, copy of Leonardo da Vinci's 1503 destroyed Battle of Anghiari;
Louvre, Paris
7c)
Same, detail of a warrior's head
Leonardo's grotesques share in the Gargantuan future of his Notebook fable: "I
will create a fiction which shall express great things." (So Rabelais, paraphrasing
Erasmus' Folly: "Jests ... not so foolish as would appear ... stuffed with high conceptions
... allegorical.") Leonardo:
In the month of June there appeared a giant who came from the
Libyan desert ... When he fell ... the people, believing he had been
killed by some thunderbolt, began scurrying over his huge limbs and
piercing them with wounds.
He, being roused ... set his hands on the ground and lifting up his
awful countenance, placed a hand on his head. Perceiving it to be
covered with men sticking to the hairs ... he shook himself and sent the
men flying through the air like hail ... Then he stood erect, trampling
them with his feet ...
The black visage terrifying ... swollen bloodshot eyes under
lowering brows ... a snout-nose widenostrilled, stuck with bristles ...
between huge lips, a mouth like a cave...
That energy would run from the affirming laughter of Rabelais to the grieved
negations of Swift — the Brobdingnagian breast.
8)
Michelangelo, 1509, Delphic Sibyl, Sistine Ceiling, Vatican; (video uses
instead a wider whole, Va8, and a close detail, V8a)
Music:
H. Isaac, 1507, close of Sancti Spiritus — Imperii proceres, SAWT
9561
The rival Florentine giant was Michelangelo. It was above the entrance wall that
he began the Sistine Ceiling. This Delphic Sibyl, about 1509, has the proportioned
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containment of his earlier Madonna's, though already, as in a ceremony motet by Isaac,
everything flexes with grandeur.
(end Isaac)
a9)
Michelangelo, c. 1511, Creation of Light, with Jonah below; Sistine Ceiling,
Vatican
Same, detail of Jonah and the Whale
9)
MUSIC: A.Brumel, c. 1512(?), 12-voice Missa "Et ecce terrae motus", from
Gloria (Munrow) Seraphim SIC-6104, side 4
In a Brumel Gloria, Isaac's four voices have been magnified to twelve. And when
Michelangelo, after two years of painting the always expanding vision of Creation,
conceived the last of the Prophets, Jonah, under the tortional twist of the creating God,
himself in ecstatic tortion, overflowing his vaulted space, foreshortening it into depth —
an expansion which dwarfs the flabby damnation whale — that anagogical theophany of
soul-from-hell as light-from-darkness, empowered an exuberant might of body.
(close Brumel)
10)
Roman-Christian, later 3rd cent., Jonah and the Whale; Museum, Cleveland;
+ V detail
Music:
Ambrosian, 4th cent. ff., from Alleluia...venêrunt, ARC 2533 284
Against which, from the earliest Christian centuries, Jonah's mystical delivery, as
by Christ's descent, from the Limbo-leviathan of eternal death, melts (with the Roman
heritage of Attic skills) in melismas of Ambrosian "alleluya" — those "Jubilus" melismas
which stirred and troubled Augustine.
(fade Ambrosian)
a11)
11)
Apollonius of Rhodes, c. 50 B.C., Belvedere Torso, back, Vatican Gallery,
Rome (CGB '86)
Double: [A] Belvedere Torso, and [B] Michelangelo, 1513-16, Heroic Captive,
Louvre, Paris; video also shows A singly
There had been giants before that melting. When the Apollonius Torso was
brought to the Belvedere by the Medici Pope Clement VII, Michelangelo found in it the
type and inspiration of his own pathos of body. So the Promethean poem of Lucretius, recovered by Poggio Bracciolini, pointed beyond god-fearing habits and tabus:
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When human life lay prostrate on the earth...a man of Greece ... against
the lowering gods ... dared traverse in mind the immeasurable universe
... beyond the flaming walls of the world.
(Like the ripple of muscles in the torso, that "flammantia moenia mundi.")
Yet when Lucretius was replanted in the infinite search of the Christian West, it
reached — in Tansillo's Icarian flight: "Amor m'impenna l'ale," "Love plumes my
wings," and "Eternal the honor if mortal the leap," or in the infinite worlds of Bruno's
thought — as far beyond itself, as Michelangelo's struggling giants exceed the might and
longing of Græco-Rome.
a12)
12)
12a)
M. Grunewald, c. 1512-15, Resurrection, detail, from Isenheim Altar, Colmar
Same, Resurrection, whole panel; + three V details
Double: two details from the same Grünewald altar: [A] from the
Crucifixion, and [B] again from the Resurrection, as in a12 (video takes these
separately)
Music:
Taverner, c.1525, 6-voice Gloria tibi Mass, irom Benedictus, V-LM
6016
Out of the religious immediacy of the Gothic North, Grünewald, Michelangelo's
contemporary, shapes as radical a claim of death and nature raised to spirit, as any in the
hermetic doctrine of signatures by the Swiss Paracelsus, self-styled "Prince of Philosophy
and Medicine." The winding sheet that enfolds Christ shifts in an unparallelled
symbolism of color from the gray-blues and browns of earth, death and the grave, up
through incarnate blood, to become the received and transmitted glow of pure sol,
alchemical gold, poured from the face and hair of the man-god. From Grünewald's
Crucifixions to this, is from Scotch Dunbar's "Timor mortis conturbat me," to the aureate
leap of his dawns:
Up sprang the golden candle matutine
And spread his beams out pure and crystalline ...
13)
13a)
A. Altdorfer, 1518, Resurrection, St. Florian Altar, Kunsthistoriches
Museum, Vienna
Same, center detail (from these, video makes a succession of three details)
Music:
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(end Benedictus)
Taverner, same mass, Hosannah
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The skies rang with shouting of the larks,
The ruddy heaven, overspread with silver bands,
Gilded every tree, leaf, branch and bark.
As in the besouled world of German Altdorfer, Dunbar's dawns are the Resurrection, his
Resurrection, dayspring: "Done is a battell on the dragon blak" —
He for our saik that sufferit to be slane
And lyk a lamb in sacrifice was dicht,
Is lyk a lyone rissin up againe,
And as a gyane raxit him on hicht;
Sprungin is Aurora radius and bricht,
On loft is gone the glorius Appollo,
The blissfull day depairtit fro the nycht:
Surrexit Dominus de sepulchro...
How greatly music after Josquin hosannahs that auroral Lion and Giant. So
Taverner.
(end Hosannah)
14)
14a)
14b)
V14c)
A. Dürer, 1511, Adoration of the Trinity (All Saints Altar),
Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna; + V details
Same, detail of lower right, with Dürer (CGB '59)
Same, upper detail, Trinity
Same, whole altarpiece, with its carved frame
The heaven stormer was Europe, and at its heart the cosmic humanization of God.
About the time of Michelangelo's Jonah and tortional Light from Dark — Dürer, here
standing on the curved earth (lower right) shows the causal measure of the sacred
universe.
Copernicus, born two years after Dürer, was writing his Commentary through the
same years, though its publication was delayed. We cannot say his observations were
better than Ptolemy's — certainly not his mathematics. His science takes its strength
from what would culminate in Leibnitz: the world-marriage of causal Reason and Faith.
Copernicus' God prefers the simplicity and beauty of sun-centered circles: "How
exceedingly fine is the godlike work of the best and greatest artist." Still, the unknown
elipses required corrective epicycles: "thus thirty-four circles suffice to explain the entire
structure of the universe and ballet of the planets." How much God would have preferred
his circles to be seven.
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15)
Triple (right to left): [A] Dürer, 1519, Maximilian; [B] Clouet, c. 1520,
Francis I; and [C] (Rubens, from a lost) Titian, c. 1525?, Charles V
15a) Hans Holbein the Younger, 1536, King Henry VIII, Thyssen Col., Lugano
15b & c) Singles: B of 15, Fancis I; A of 15, Maximilian
Music:
Luis Milan, Pavana III from El Maestro, 1535, Candide CI 31068
To what pavan of pomp, humanist light and reason seemed now to enter the lists
of state: Maximilian, Francis I, Charles V. We should add Henry VIII of course, whose
meeting with Francis at the 1520 Field of the Cloth of Gold Shakespeare would recount:
...when
Those suns of glory, those two lights of men,
Met in the vale of Andren ... Men might say
Till this time pomp was single, but now married
To one above itself ... all in gold ...
...every man that stood
Showed like a mine ...
Though as the play allows, the glittering. chivalries ministered "communication of a most
poor issue" — statecraft reenacting the fiasco of Faust.
Those cultured kings (against our television hacks): Maximilian with his six
languages, art, music — friend and patron of the skilled and wise — for all their great
aims, what a hash they made of Europe. (cut Milan) Under the knightly mask, the
opportunism of Machiavelli: — Kaiser Maximilian, 1511:
nothing would better become us than to receive the papal office ... we
have decided to raise up to three hundred thousand ducats ... through
the Fugger Bank in Rome ... our crown jewels as security ...
16)
16a)
Dürer, 1520, Portrait of Jakob Fugger, Alte Pinakothek, Munich; + V detail
Grünewald, after 1520, Satiric Trinity, drawing, Staatliche Museen, Berlin
If Fugger...
(here Dürer's portrait of Jacob, shrewd capitalist prototype)
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wishes to know how we will redeem those treasures ... the estates of
the Empire ... hereditary principalities and lands ... a third of all our
income from the papacy until it is paid.
What Fugger money in fact secured was the election of Charles V; nor did this
Jacob's 1523 demand for payment help the continuing indulgence scandal:
It is...clear as day that your Imperial Majesty could not have acquired
the Roman Crown without my help ... I humbly petition ... that the sum
of money due me together with the interest should be discharged and
paid to me without further delay ...
With Capital, why not the counter-giant of socialism? Geismayr, leader of the
Peasants' Rebellion in Tyrol, thought to dissolve clergy, privilege, cities, and business, in
a classless purity of faith:
All smelting houses and mines ... which belong to nobles or foreign
merchants, such as the Fuggers ... shall be confiscated and given over
to public ownership ...
This is Geismayr's constitution when he dreams in his chimney corner
and imagines himself a prince.
17)
17a)
Hans Holbein, 1527, Sir Thomas More, Frick Gallery, New York City;
+ V detail
Jean Clouet, c. 1535, Guillaume Budé, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York City
Music:
Brumel, c. 1510(?), O Domine (Requiem & Elegy), SAWT 9471
A ex
No wonder Thomas More, painted by realist Holbein, lets his Utopian narrator
despair of counselling princes:
If I should propose to any king wholesome decrees ... how deaf
hearers, think you, should I have?
Rather, he dreams like Geismayr of a communism both early Christian and modern:
where possessions be private, where money beareth all the stroke, it is
hard and almost impossible that there the weal public may justly be
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governed and prosperously flourish ... For who knoweth not that fraud,
theft, brawling, strife, murder, treason ... die when money dieth?
And though More wears velvet and fur with a great chain of gold, he clothes his sober
citizens like Huguenots or Puritans, and sets them, after six hours of common work, to
wholesome exercise, then to lectures and solemn music in their public halls.
(fade Brumel)
Everywhere the drive for heaven turns to the world.
a18)
18)
Dürer, 1521, The Four Apostles, Alte Pinak., Munich; + V detail
Same, detail of John the Evangelist and Peter (video: detail of John only,
from V18a)
As Luther comments on Galatians (and Dürer shows it in his Apostles):
When I have this righteousness ruling in my heart, I descend from
heaven as the rain making fruitful the earth: that is to say, I come forth
into another kingdom, and I do good works ... If I be a householder, I
govern my house ...
Yet Luther's zeal stiffens to self-righteousness:
I teach those things only which are commanded me from above ...
therefore my doctrine is true, sincere, certain and of God ... Therefore
whatever doctrine teaches not as mine does, must needs be false, devilish, accursed.
Calvin most clearly phrased how the new faith should raise the will by its very
denial:
that man ... in miserable necessity ... should aspire to the good of
which he is destitute, and to the liberty of which he is deprived; and
should be roused from indolence with even more earnestness, than if
he were supposed to be possessed of the greatest strength.
Were not the energies of Christendom sprung from the start of Incarnate paradox?
19)
19a)
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Moslem architect Sinan 1550-57, Mosque of Sultan Suleyman, interior,
Istanbul (CGB '77); + V detail
"Blue Mosque" of Sultan Ahmet I, 1609-16, Istanbul, Turkey (CGB '77)
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Music:
Symbolic History
Turkish "Whirling Dervish", ney and tambur phrase, with chant
opening, Nonesuch H-72067
What are we calling giant? The Soliman Mosque erected in Constantinople from
1550 to '57 points the question. Are not those vast and airier rivals of Hagia Sophia more
gigantic in impact than anything from Renaissance Europe, though St. Peter's was then
building, and is larger? Yet surely there are clues here to the dynamic imbalance by
which Istanbul would fall behind, with the rest of the Orient, and be Westernized. The
city had been taken by the Ottomans in 1453. Turkish conquest would go on for a
century, reaching almost to Vienna, while Europe pursued its Machiavellian broils. But
at the Byzantine heart, the late 15th-century arcades of the Topkapi Palace look to
Tuscany and Venice. What was mighty in the West was a ferment of ideals and hopes,
Christian free humanism, transforming self and world. Though against sultanic display
—
(fade Turkish chant)
20)
Giovanni Bellini, 1514-15, Orpheus, Circe, Pan and Luna, National Gallery,
Wash. DC (CGB '60; video uses whole, from Va20, CGB '60); + V detail
Music:
Cara, c. 1500, from Occhi Miei, "O dolce passion," Nonesuch
71701
the quieter harmonies of Italian Renaissance seem hardly overweening. 1500 witnesses,
in all the arts, a style of articulated repose, into which older painters (here Giovanni
Bellini) move, or where the younger (as Raphael) begin. It affines Sannazaro's Arcadia to
the chordal music of the Frottole and Lauds — this Cara.
(end Occhi Miei)
But that calm throbs with pastoral and neo-Platonic dream — stirring the
perfection Quixote was bound to espouse next to chivalry, the Age of Gold. So Corteccia
for the Medici: "O begl' anni dell' oro, O saecol divo, vedrovv' io mai?"
21)
Giorgione (finished by Titian?), c. 1510, Fête Champêtre, Louvre, Paris;
+ V detail from V21a
Music:
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Arcadelt, pub. 1537, Il bianco e dolce cigno, Deller, BGS-5051
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Symbolic History
Meanwhile, as in art from Bellini to Giorgione and Titian, the frottole repose
advances, with the mingling of North and South, to the swelling dynamic of the madrigal.
Arcadelt is transitional: "Il bianco e dolce cigno."
22)
Raphael and school, 1519(?), Isaac, Rebecca & Abimelech, cropped, Loggia,
Vatican;+ V detail
To learn what is Promethean here, listen to the chords: these full triads of the
heart sound music's utopian claim.
23)
Correggio, c. 1525, Jupiter and Antiope, Louvre, Paris (video goes from a
detail to the whole)
Here, an erotic swan excess: "I would die a thousand times a day."
(end Arcadelt)
With the same pictures: this Correggio,
2nd 22) Again, Raphael, Isaac, Rebecca, and Abimelech, whole
the romantic Raphael's most romantic scene, when Abimelech saw Isaac with Rebecca,
2nd 21) Giorgione, Fête Champêtre (slide show details the figure to the left; video
repeats the whole, adding the upper body of the left figure)
and the Giorgione — let us savor a sonnet by Molza (CGB):
Now spring returns to clothe the native hill
And in the valley spreads her finery,
And odors such as breathe from Araby
Her garland tresses on the wind distill;
3rd 22) Raphael, Isaac, Rebecca and Abimelech, detail
At this dear season to my window sill
Chloris comes with the sun...
Vestiva i colli e le campagne intorno
La primavera di novelli onori,
E spirava soavi arabi odori
Cinta d'erbe e di fiori il crine adorno;
Quando Licori a l'apparir del giorno...
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2nd 23) Correggio, Jupiter and Antiope, detail
2nd 23a) Titian, c. 1515, Sacred and Profane Love, Borghese Gallery, Rome
Gathering purple flowers with her hand —
"In guiderdon di tanti ardori" ... —
"In recompense for so much love," she murmurs
"These I have culled, and with them here adorn you."
Typical, the rift between that love-sweetness and the fact of Molza's Roman court
life (his Modena home and family deserted)
down to his death by the new plague of syphilis, and a last dreaming elegy in pure
humanist Latin.
24)
Lor. Lotto, c. 1498, A Maiden's Dream, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.;
+ V details below and above: Va24 and V24a
As the Gothic landscape ripens in Lotto to Renaissance mood, Della Casa turns
Petrarch's mystery to sensuous caress:
O sonno, o della queta, umida, ombrosa
Notte placido figlio.
Not even in Sydney — "Come sleep! O sleep, the certain knot of peace!" — had English
quite refined such sounds: "oblio dolce de mali/ Si gravi." Though Wyatt and Surrey,
too, steep Petrarch in Renaissance shadow:
Alas! so all things now do hold their peace!
Heaven and earth disturbèd in no thing ...
The nightès car the stars about doth bring.
Calm is the sea; the waves work less and less ...
25)
Double: Raphael [A] 1504, Madonna dell' Granduca, Pitti, Florence; and
[B] 1507, Madonna of the Goldfinch, Uffizi, Florence; + video singles and a
detail
Music:
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Giacomo Fogliano, c. 1510, from Ave Maria, Vanguard BG-680
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From 1504 to '7, Raphael was blending Umbrian, Flemish, and Leonardo in what
would hold its own for centuries as the ideal Madonna — a form of womanly grace, of
which later artists might say (as Galeazzo di Tarsia did of Italy) "Membrando la fatal
vostra beltate" — "Remembering your fatal beauty."
At the same time the homophonic lauda melodized, as in Fogliano, a timeless
"Ave Maria".
(fade Fogliano)
26)
26a)
Raphael, 1514-15, Portrait of Castiglione, Louvre, Paris
Florentine, 16th cent., Machiavelli, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence
Humanism from the first had invoked eternal presences. A hundred years before
this Raphael portrait of Castiglione, Platonic Courtier, Bruni had written of his chance to
study with the Greek Chrysoloras:
Thou mayst gaze on Homer, Plato and Demosthenes ... converse with
them and receive their admirable doctrine.
So Machiavelli, exiled to his farm, writes (1513) to Vettori, how, after a day of
snaring thrushes, doing chores, reading by a spring, gabbling with rustics at the inn:
When evening comes, I return home and go into my study. On the
threshold I strip off my muddy, sweaty workday clothes, and put on the
robes of court and palace,
Va27)
27)
V27a)
27b)
Raphael, 1510-11, Parnassus, from right side, Segnatura, Vatican
Same, left side; video: detail only (V27)
Raphael, 1509-10, School of Athens, center and right side; Vatican, Rome
Same, detail of central figures
and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of ancient men of old,
where I am welcomed kindly and taste the food which is mine alone,
and for which I was born. I make bold to speak to them and ask the
motives of their actions, and they, in their humanity, reply to me. And
for the space of four hours I forget the world and my cares, the troubles
of poverty, and the fear of death; I live again in their company ... From
their conversation ... I have composed a small book on Principalities
...
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Raphael's Parnassus and his School of Athens are the art- actualizations of those
immortals first seen by Dante in the Noble Castle of Limbo, their light conquering the
hemisphere of darkness. And it was from later residence there that Rabelais' Gargantua
(1534) must have conceived the Abbey and order of Theleme, its one clause and rule:
"DO WHAT THOU WILT" -Since men that are free, well-born, well-bred ... have naturally an
instinct and spur that prompteth to virtuous actions, and withdraws
them from vice; and it is called honour.
28)
V28a)
Michelangelo, 1508-12, detail from the Flood, Sistine Ceiling, Vatican
Same, another detail
Music:
Josquin des Prez, c. 1494(?), Hosannah, Ave Maris Stella Mass,
DL 79435
Upon the already elevated repose of the early century, and especially of Raphael,
Michelangelo's mighty forms broke, at the Sistine unveiling, with undeflected challenge.
Similarly, the ease of Italian harmony was entrained in the canonic rush of Josquin.
(fade Josquin)
29) Raphael, 1514, Fire in the Borgo, detail; Vatican, Rome
V29a) Same, whole, from which video also takes its 29 detail
The result in Raphael fills the later Stanzas of the Vatican with muscled nudes: an
Aeneas carrying Anchises, with other anomalies of a Papal miracle when the old Vatican
loggia burned.
Music:
Constanzo Festa, c. 1527(?), from Deus, venêrunt gentes, DL79428
It was Festa in music who absorbed Josquin into the 1500 Italian, creating the
high Roman style, for which Palestrina has been disproportionately praised.
30)
Raphael, 1518, The Vision of Ezekiel, Pitti Palace, Florence; + V detail
(music)
In his last great works, whether the huge Transfiguration or this small cloud-borne
Ezekiel, the soft genius of Raphael ventures like Tansillo-Icarus in the sonnet: "Scorning
earth, I beat wings to the sky" — "E spregio il mondo, e verso '1 ciel m'invio."
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Flaminio:
Who would have thought it possible, after such centuries of darkness,
that so many lights should have arisen in a single time?
(fade Festa)
Va31)
31)
V31a)
Piero di Cosimo, c. 1510(?), Perseus and Andromeda, whole; Uffizi, Florence
Same, center of scene (CGB '59)
Same, a wider variant (CGB '59)
The consciousness of Renaissance seizes even on the outmoded matter of
Chivalry, whether of Perseus or St. George, the Crusades, or the Peers of France, working
it up in literature to the Romantic Epic.
Pulci's Morgante was a giant (as Don Quixote would say, "though
disproportionate, affable and well-bred"); the Roland of Boiardo and Ariosto is a man, yet
his love-mad actions in the Orlando Furioso are Quixote's giant model in the Morena,
when those naked sommersaults give Sancho more than he might report to Dulcinea.
In England it is Spenser — Ariosto through a Protestant filter: The Red Cross
Knight in the den of Errour:
(She) wrapping up her wrethed sterne arownd,
Lept fierce upon his shield, and her huge traine
All suddenly about his body wound
That hand or foot to stirre he strove in vaine:
God helpe the man so wrapt in Errours endlesse chaine.
32)
32a)
Tintoretto, 1558, St. George and the Dragon, National Gallery, London; first,
V detail of the princess, below
Same, detail of St. George and the Dragon
Music:
V. Galilei, c. 1580(?), Il vostro gran valore (Gerwig) VICS-1408
If Spenser had looked for a picture to illustrate his Faerie Queene, he could hardly
have found a better than Tintoretto's St. George, where the romance wonder of Ariosto
becomes a moral allegory: like the defence of Una (or truth) from the fiend.
And pointing forth, lo yonder is (said she)
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The brasen towre in which my parents deare
For dread of that huge feend emprison'd be,
Whom I from far see on the walles appeare...
With that they heard a roaring hideous sound...
Three passion days the Red Cross Knight fights, wounds the brass-plated monster with
his steel, but is thrown down, to rise recovered, first from the Well of Life and then from
the Tree, on the third day transfixing the dragon through his hollow maw:
So downe he fell, and like an heaped mountaine lay.
From this billowing groundswell (as from Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, or the lute
monodies of Galilei),
(end Galilei)
a33)
33)
33a)
Mantegna, 1497, Parnassus; Louvre, Paris (CGB '80)
Mantegna, 1504, Triumph of Virtue over Vice, Louvre Paris (CGB '80)
Same, detail of Vices (CGB '80); with video details from 33a and 33
Music:
V. Capirola, c. 1517, Ricercar Il (Ragossnig) Archiv 2533 173
to return to Ariosto, is to enter a thaumaturgy of Gothic poignance in High Renaissance:
the lute ricercare of the early l5OO's (Capirola): Mantegna's last painting of Virtue and
the Pool of Vice; Orlando's dream of Angelica upon the Dante-Petrarch flowered strand:
(CGB)
He took such present pleasure in his dream
As lovers feel, possessing their desire —
A moment only — then a tempest came
And bore the flowers and leaves down heavy air ...
His love was lost there, and the bordered stream,
Whelmed in dark and cloud, and without reason;
While he went up and down sounding her name
Demanding of the echoing fields and forests:
"Who has changed my sweetness into poison?"
34)
Same, detail (left) of Mater Virtutum imprisoned in an olive tree (the warning
cry); digital having first added two Vices: Va34
And then he heard his lady, and she too cried,
9/1995
Giants in the Earth
�18
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Weeping, she called upon him for his aid.
He hurried to the sound; it shifted place.
He turned again, still seeking, back and forth,
In bitter sorrow for his vanished solace;
And then another voice came from the North:
"Abandon hope of happiness on earth."
At this appalling cry he wakes, he stirs,
And finds himself, as in his dream, in tears. (CGB)
(fade Capirola)
How could such magic fail to seed wonders over Europe?
35)
35a)
V35b)
Master of the Vyssi Brod Cycle (Bohemian) c. 1350, Birds, from Christ in the
Garden, National Gallery, Prague
Master of the Middle Rhine, c. 1410, Paradise Garden, detail, right side,
Städelsches Inst. Frankfurt
Same, whole
The natural life that had vollied from Gothic North to Ars Nova South and come
back North enriched toward Renaissance — as with Chaucer, or the first bird Virelais of
late 14th-century France
Music:
Jean Vaillant, c. 1390, Par maintes fois, Nightingale phrase
SAWT 9466B
that vigor ripening, as in Oswald von Wolkenstein, to the tenderness of Tyrolean heart —
Music:
Oswald v.Wolkenstein, c. 1410(?), from Der Mai, ARC 3033
(fade)
dips south once more,
a36)
Vb36)
36)
V36a)
French Tapestry, c. 1510, Lady and the Unicorn Tapestry #6, Musée de
Cluny
Same, detail of falcon
French Tapestries, c. 1510, Noble Pastorals, Preparing Wool; Louvre, Paris
From another Noble Pastorals tapestry, a courtly pair, detail
and so returns to France in the space and robes of 1500, the frottole chords and rythms, to
take, in Jannequin's 1528 Song of the Birds, the gusto of Francis and Rabelais. Here is
9/1995
Giants in the Earth
�19
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
the Nightingale couplet, with an entrance of the refrain. While tapestry details hold the
screen, from the Noble Pastorals and the Chase of the Unicorn.
Music:
a37)
Vb37)
37)
38)
V38a)
Jannequin, 1528, from Chant des Oiseaux (Boulanger), Decca DL
9629
Franco-Flemish, early 16th cent., Tapestry III, Hunt of the Unicorn, detail:
pair of partridges, Cloisters, Metropolitan, NYC
Same, detail of waterfowl
Same, Tapestry IV, det. Woodcock and Duck
Same, Tapestry III, detail of Hunter sounding Horn
French (Touraine), c.1505(?), Tapestry, The Garden of Love, from Chateau
of Le Verger, Musee des Gobelins, Paris
Grangousier's friends could not have warbled better over their cups.
39)
39a)
English Tudor, 1523, Compton Wynyates, Warwickshire, England (CGB '63);
+ V detail
Cornwall, 1485-1539, Cotehele House, kitchen
In the new kingdoms feudal castles shed their walls, looking to the villas and
gardened palaces of Italy. Compton Wynyates sets the mode in Henry VIII's England:
the mullioned-windowed hall in a wooded land, with church, farm, village — the great
house built in the brick and half-timbering of the rural cot. A description of evening in
Nevill's "Castell of Pleasure," 1518, restores that nature and mood:
The nyght drew nye the day was at a syde
My herte was heuy I moche desyréd rest
Whan without comfort alone I dyd abyde
Seynge the shadowes fall from the hylles in the west
Eche byrde under boughe drewe nye to theyr nest
The chymneys from ferre began to smoke
Eche housholder went about to lodge his gest
The storke fering stormes toke the chymney for a cloke...
Curfew was ronge; lyghtes were set up in haste ...
Which were playne precedentes that day was clerely paste.
Va40)
40)
9/1995
Chateau de Chenonceau, over the Cher
French Renaissance, 1518-27, Azay-le-Rideau Chateau, Indre-et-Loire
Giants in the Earth
�20
C.G. Bell
40a)
40b)
Symbolic History
Niccolo dell' Abbate, c. 1558-60, Euridice and Aristaeus, detail, National
Gallery, London
Leeds Castle, 13th c. and 1512, Maidstone, view from the South East
France was more formal, and from Leonardo down more open to Italy. But the
Chateaux of the Loire were as close to forest and chase, fields and harvest, as the court
poet Marot in his 1539 Eclogue to the King, where he tells of his youth in that still
wooded land (Villon's old cry of vanity, "de ma jeunesse folle," here Renaissanceaffirmed):
Sur le printemps de ma jeunesse folle,
Je ressemblois l'arondelle qui volle
Puis ça, puis 1à ...
Such the European blend of nature and custom, that Spenser can describe his
English boyhood by varying Marot (as Marot had learned from Florentine Poliziano:
Nel vago tempo di sua verde etate ...
Viveassi lieto in pace e in libertate.)
Spenser:
Whilome in youth, when flowrd my joyfull spring,
a41)
Vb41)
41)
41a)
V41b)
dell' Abbate, c. 1550-55, Galerie Henri II, Chimney wall with hunting
scenes, Fontainebleau (CGB '59)
French-Italian, c. 1513-40, Galerie Francois I, Rosso Fiorentino,
Mythological scene, Fontainebleau (CGB '59)
Same, another bay, with Education of Achilles (CGB '59)
Jean Coulombe, 1485, Tres Riches Heures, November, Acorn Harvest, Mus.
Conde, Chantilly
Galerie Francois I, Fontainebleau, general view (CGB '59)
Like Swallow swift I wandred here and there ...
I went the wastefull woodes and forest wyde,
Withoutèn dreade of Wolves to bene espyed.
Even in the gilt and panelled galleries of Fontainebleau, the legends painted by
Rosso Fiorentino, Primaticcio, dell' Abbate, have absorbed, as from stream and forest, the
freshness Spenser translated from Marot:
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Giants in the Earth
�21
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
O quantefoys aux arbres grimpé j'ay ...
How often have I scaled the craggie Oke,
All to dislodge the Raven of her neste:
How have I wearied with many a stroke
The stately Walnut tree, the whils the rest
Under the tree fell all for nuts at strife:
For ylike to me was liberty and lyfe.
(Though the last line is Spenser's alone.)
42)
42a)
School of Fontainebleau (Niccolo dell' Abbate?), c. 1560, Wheat-Threshing,
Mus. de Fontainebleau; first, V detail
P. Brueghel the Elder, 1565, Wheat Harvest, Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York City
And it is also at Fontainebleau that art-cultivation of nature is expressed in a
harvest landscape as real as Du Bellay's "Song of the Wheat-Winnower to the Winds":
A vous troppe legere ...
J'offre ces violettes ...
(as Lang closes it):
Ah, winnow with sweet breath,
Winnow the holt and heath
Round this retreat;
Where all the golden morn
We fan the gold o' the corn,
In the sun's heat.
The New World did not simply offer itself; it was opened by the swelling
Prothalamion of that love:
Against the Brydale day, which is not long:
Sweete Themmes runne softly, till I end my Song.
43)
9/1995
French MS, c. 1260(?), Saul smites the Ammonites, MS 638 f. 23v, Pierpont
Morgan Library; + V detail
Giants in the Earth
�22
C.G. Bell
Music:
Symbolic History
French, 13th cent., La Quinte Estampie Real (Munrow),"Crusades"
Argo ZRG 673
In crusading chivalry, the battle-joy of the North had refined itself into art.
Isrealites and Ammonites take the arms of Franks and Moors. Bertran de Born had
voiced that keenness in the poems Pound flung at an age weary of war: "it pleaseth me to
the heart when I see strong castles besieged,/ And barriers broken and riven." As revived
in a sestina:
Hell grant soon we hear again the swords clash!
And the shrill neighs of destriers in battle rejoicing,
Spiked breast to spiked breast opposing ...
Va44)
44)
(fade Estampie)
Altdorfer, 1529, Battle of Alexander, whole, Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Same, vertical expanse right of center, from which video takes horizontal
spread
With what physical depths the tide of Renaissance endows that fabled stour:
Altdorfer's Alexander, Jannequin's Battle of Marignan, both of 1529.
Music:
a45)
45)
45a)
V45b)
46)
Jannequin, 1529, from the Battle of Marignan (5th voice, Verdelot,
1549) Angel S37025
Same, detail of mounted lancer (CGB '59)
Same, Chariot of Darius in flight (CGB '59)
Same, Alexander in pursuit (video repeats, from 45 and 45a, closer details
of Darius and Alexander, and again, Darius and Alexander)
Same, upper right, camp and city, landscape and sky
Titian, 1548, Equestrian Charles V, whole, Prado (video takes two details
only)
(end Jannequin)
The battles of Bible and myth yield to Titian's Charles V, at the actual victory of
Mühlberg; yet he holds the mythic stance, Othello's "Pride, pomp and circumstance of
glorious war," which Baroque and even Napoleonic heroes would cling to. It is almost
the lusty make-believe of Pantagruel against the Dipsodes: "How Panurge" and three
others "vanquished and discomfited six-hundred and three score horsemen very
cunningly" — winding them in with ships' cables to a trap of gunpowder.
For 2nd 45) Battle of Alexander, detail: sun over sea and land (variant of V45b)
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
What buoys up the make-believe is the expanding giant reality of man and world.
Magellan had just rounded that globe; Copernicus had set it revolving in planetary space.
2nd 46)
Music:
Titian, Charles V, mounted, detail (video: 46 whole and detail of head
from V2nd 46a)
Willaert, c. 1635(?), Ricercare (3-voice Schott #6), Musical Heritage
Society 913
To an always mounting blazon of art and music (this Willaert ricercare), even
those inadequate kings who stride the curved horizon play Shakespearean hero-roles:
...methinks it were an easy leap
To pluck bright honour from the pale-faced moon.
47)
Patinir, c. 1515(?), Landscape with Charon's boat, Prado, Madrid
In Patinir, the rounded Magellanic margin first stretches a Bosch dream — Charon
ferrying a soul toward a fiery shore. The boldest pre-Columbian prophecy, in Pulci's
Morgante, 1482, is communicated by a fiend, Astarotte:
Hung among the stars by god's mystery,
The world has everywhere the form of a wheel,
And as it draws all things to its center,
You can sail beyond the gates of Hercules,
And come at last to the other hemisphere,
With castles and kingdoms unknown to us here. (CGB)
48)
48a)
P. Brueghel, 1558(?), Fall of Icarus, Royal Gallery, Brussels (CGB '59)
Same, detail to the right: Icarus (video returns to 48)
So the Altdorfer we have seen, and, by 1558, Brueghel's Fall of Icarus, where the
widening earth, the galleon-traffic of the sea, leaves the old myth only a few plumes, a
drowning flash of legs, "White feathers...the Gulf claims." Though if Icarus is so
discounted, the global flight goes on.
49)
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Double: World Maps, [A] Germanus, 1487, and [B] Desceliers, 1550, British
Museum, London (video separates V49 A and B, then takes a detail of B)
Giants in the Earth
�24
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Thus two printed maps, Germanus from 1487, the Eurasian landmass, with Africa
to the Cape of Good Hope filled in with the names Dias had just given, the hemisphere of
water unknown; and from 1550, Desceliers, the Mercator projection, but for Australia and
parts of Asia, almost as we would draw it today.
(end Willaert)
50)
Japanese, c. 733, Vajrapani, Todai-ji Temple, Nara, Japan
And where for centuries Buddhist guardian dæmons had warned venturing aliens
from sacred shrines — as this Vajrapani in the Todai-ji Temple of Nara, Japan —
51)
Japanese-Western, c. 1600, Enamel screen, Music by a Harbor; + V detail
suddenly mission schools were teaching Christianity and the Western arts. Did lute
romances even there sound the new grandeur of man — Milan's "Durandarte"?
Music:
52)
52a)
Luis Milan, 1536, Durandarte, opening (Meili) Vict. M-495 (3) (fade)
Russian, 1505-09, Cathedral of Archangel Michael, Kremlin, Moscow
Brunelleschi, 1432, shell decoration on Lantern of Cathedral, Florence
(CGB ‘48); video returns to the Cathedral of Archangel Michael
At the heart of the unyielding fastness of Russia, the Kremlin, this 1509 Cathedral
of Michael, on an otherwise Byzantine mass, displays the scallop shells of Italy (as from
Brunelleschi's lantern on the dome of Florence); at the same time Russian chant took the
passion for Roman harmony which would end with the Cossacks' swelling the Psalms of
David for the audiences of America.
53)
Russian, mid-16th cent., Church Militant Icon, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
Music:
Russian traditional, from First Psalm of David, old Col. DBX 12
Though in the Church Militant ikon of the time of Ivan, the force already flowing
from Venice just stirs the surface, or perhaps the depths, of what Henry Adams would
still call that Eastern vis inertia.
(fade Russian Chant)
54)
54a)
9/1995
Peter Brueghel, 1565, The Dark Day (Feb-March), Kunsthistoriches, Vienna;
+ V detail
Same, another detail
Giants in the Earth
�25
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
In Spanish-Inquisition Flanders, Brueghel had advanced from the early Icarus to
the stupendous landscapes of the months, this "Gloomy Day", from which the ultimate
storm-scapes of Rubens would take their cue. In English the mightiest poem from the
same time is Sackville's "Induction":
The wrathful winter, 'proaching on apace,
With blustering blasts had all ybared the treen
And old Saturnus, with his frosty face,
With chilling cold had pierced the tender green;
The mantles rent, wherein enwrapped been
The gladsome groves that now lay overthrown,
The tapets torn, and every bloom down blown.
...small fowls flocking, in their song did rue
The winter's wrath, wherewith each thing defaced
In woeful wise bewailed the summer past. .
When lo, the night with misty mantles spread,
Gan dark the day and dim the azure skies...
It taught me well all earthly things be born
To die the death, for nought long time may last;
The summer's beauty yields to winter's blast.
Va55)
55)
55a)
Peter Brueghel, 1568, Peasant Dance, detail to left; Kunsthistoriches,
Vienna
Same, closer detail
Same, whole
On the cresting life-wave comic and tragic blend.
If the dishe be pleasaunt, eyther fleshe or fishe,
Ten handes at once swarme in the dishe.
And if it be flesh, ten knives shalt thou see,
Mangling the flesh and in the platter flee.
To put there thy handes is perill without fayle,
Without a gauntlet or els a glove of mayle.
Ofte in such dishes in court is it seene,
Some leave their fingers, eche knife is so kene.
On a finger gnaweth some hasty glutton,
Supposing it a piece of biefe or mutton.
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Giants in the Earth
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C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Whatever Barclay's Eclogues, about 1510, owe to the humanist pope Piccolomini, they
stand on the huge slope of farce that leads from the Middle Ages through Rabelais and
Brueghel to Cervantes and Shakespeare.
56)
Peter Brueghel, 1568, Peasant Wedding Feast, Kunsthistoriches, Vienna;
+ V detail (cf. V56)
With Rabelais that farce takes the prodigious flesh it can only have where the sons
of God have gone in to the daughters of men:
L'occasion & maniere comment Gargamelle enfanta fut telle. Et si ne
le croyez, le fondement vous escappe...
The occasion and manner how Gargamelle gave birth was this; and if
you do not believe me, may your bum-gut fall out. Her bum-gut
indeed did fall out ... from eating too many tripes ... Grangousier bade
his wife eat
sparingly, because she was near her time ... Notwithstanding, she did
eat sixteen quarters, two bushels, three pecks and a pipkin full. What a
filthy deal of loblolly was this, to swell and wamble in her guts ...
While they were drinking, she began to be a little unwell in her lower
parts...
a57)
57)
Rubens, c. 1618, Silenus drunk, detail of mother giving suck, Alte Pinak.,
Munich (CGB '59)
Same, whole (video details Silenus)
The midwives, groping her below, found some peloderies of a very bad
savour, which they thought had been the child, but it was her
fundement which had escaped from eating too many tripes.
Whereupon an ugly old trot made her a medicine so binding that all her
arse-pipes were so oppilated, stopped and obstructed you could
scarcely have opened them with your teeth, which is a terrible thing to
think on...
Rubens crests the monstrous vindication of body — a Gargantuan tie especially in
the riotous baroque (though we have trimmed it) of Motteux and Urquhart's Rabelais.
After the thin Gothic nudes, Titian and Rubens. Falstaff also poses the question
how bulk serves exuberance. Apt we call it humor. And Renaissance languages, most of
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Giants in the Earth
�27
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
all English, with "Latinate verbocination," ("To such exsufflicate and blown surmises,/
Matching thy inference"), laid on enormous weight, yet trained it on home truths.
58)
58a)
58b)
58c)
Triple: [A] Giovanni da Bologna, 1569-81, Allegory of the Apennines, Villa
Demidoff, Florence; [B] Momper, c. 1580(?), L'Eté (mountain as head),
Collection R. Lebel, Paris; and [C] Roman, 1592, carved doormouth of Casa
Zuccari (CGB '86)
Roman, Door-mouth (58C shown singly)
da Bologna, Allegory (58A shown singly)
Momper, Mountain as head (58B shown singly)
From garden giants (Giambologna's "Apennines" through Momper's manmountain called summer, to the door-mouth of the Casa Zuccari in Rome — we search
the portentous overflow of symbol into body, the coincidence of humanist learning with
huge codpieces; of Pantagruel's Tartarean guts — the time he was sick and swallowed
seventeen workers in copper balls, who opening springtraps came out with lanterns and
spades, and groping and falling through a horrid infectious gulph smelled their way to the
fecal blockage, dug it up, cleaned it out with baskets, and so reentering their copper
spheres were vomited forth — the link between that and the great-souled letter Pantagruel
receives from his father, exhorting to unbounded knowledge and virtue, to study all
history, languages, manners and chivalry, law, mathematics, science:
For knowledge of the works of nature, let there be no sea, river, or
fountain of which you do not know the fishes, all fowls of the air, trees
and shrubs of the forest, plants of the earth, all metals hid in its depths
... let me see thee a bottomless pit of knowledge ...
As in the thought of Paracelsus, no limits here, no abstract denial or separation of soul
from earth and practice.
a59)
b59)
59)
59a)
9/1995
Venetian Byzantine, c. 1225(?), Creation Mosaic, Vestibule, San Marco,
Venice (CGB '66)
Same, another detail (CGB '66)
Double: [A] detail of b59; and [B] Raphael 1508, Adam and Eve, Ceiling,
Segnatura, Vatican, Rome
Raphael, Adam & Eve (59B shown singly)
Giants in the Earth
�28
C.G. Bell
Music:
Symbolic History
Byzantine Chant (Athos), Easter Eve, from a Lauds psalm, Archiv
2533 413 B
The revelational order, like the starry spheres, has broken. In the mosaic domes of
Byzantine Venice, where the creation of earth and Biblical life of man circles its Godcenter, the quest of delight reduces to an Eden episode and banishment of those angular
breast-fallen, flesh-denying nudes — all poignance of wish and loss gathered in rings of
eternal gold.
Where is the cry Ausonius distilled from the long earth-love of Greece and Rome
(fade Mount Athos chant) — to fill out Raphael's Papal ceiling — "collige, virgo, rosas,"
"Maiden, pluck the rose,"
Music:
Costeley, pub 1570, from Mignonne, allons (at "las, las")
Boulanger, Decca DL 9629
which Poliziano would revive with Quattrocento tenderness, "Cogliam' la bella rosa del'
giardino," and the Rebirth send abroad from Florence: Ronsard's "Mignonne, allons voir
si la rose"; Spenser's translation from Tasso: "Gather the rose of love, whilest yet is
time"; down to Marvel's cormorant defiance: "And tear our pleasures with rough strife,/
Thorough the iron gates of life"?
(fade Mignonne)
60)
60a)
60b)
Primaticcio in Fontainebleau, c. 1560, Ulysses and Penelope, Wildenstein;
+ V detail
Primaticcio, c. 1550(?), fresco from the bedroom of Mme. d'Etampes, at
Fontainebleau
Jean Goujon, 1548-49?, "Nymphe de la Seine," relief from a fountain, Louvre,
Paris
Against the ascetic leap beyond death, the cry of time and flesh takes new
imperative, as in the gaze of Primaticcio's Ulysses; however late it is to tell Penelope:
"Gather ye rose-buds while ye may." In that field of passionate impossibility, no poem
has more beauty than the Ronsard sonnet Yeats would redo:
When you are old and gray and full of sleep ...
Though we have still to translate it:
When you are old, at evening, carding wool,
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Giants in the Earth
�29
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Bent to the glow of fire and candlelight,
You will say, marveling at this verse I write,
"Ronsard sang of me when I was beautiful."
There will not be a servant of them all,
However spent with labor and the night,
But starting at my name will praise your fate —
As one whom fame acclaims and ever shall.
My bones will be under ground; my ghost above
Rest in the twilight of the myrtle grove;
You will be hunched at the fire, old and gray,
Regretting my love and your proud disdain.
The time that passes will not come again;
Believe me: pluck the rose of life today. (CGB)
61)
Jean Cousin, c. 1560(?), Eva Prima Pandora, Louvre, Paris; + V detail
That imperative is hurled against the recorded fate: "You old and gray":
Regrettant mon amour et vostre fier desdain.
So Cousin's snake-wreathed, skull-propped Eve as first Pandora:
Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, à la chandellè
Assise auprès du feu, dévidant et filant,
Direz chantant mes vers, en vous esmerveillant:
Ronsard me célebroit du temps que j'estois bellè.
Lors vous n'aurez servante oyant tellè nouvellè,
Desja sous le labeur à demy sommeillant,
Qui au bruit de mon nom ne s'aillè resveillant,
Bénissant vostre nom de louange immortellè.
Je seray sous la terre, et fantosme sans os,
Par les ombres myrteux je prendray mon repos:
Vous serez au fouyer unè vieille accroupi
62)
62a)
Titian, 1540-60(?), Venus of Pardo, Louvre, Paris
Same, detail; + V closer detail
Regrettant mon amour et vostre fier desdain.
Vivez, si m'en croyez, n'attendez à demain:
Cueillez des aujourd'huy les rosès de la vie.
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Giants in the Earth
�30
C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
No doubt the poem exceeds French art of the time, requires the tragic radiance of
Correggio's Antiope, or this Titian Venus of Pardo — the crux of Age of Gold — as in
Tasso's Aminta. "S'ei piace, ei lice," "If it pleases, it is allowed" — against a world which
grows old and sad — "Il mondo invecchia, e invecchiando intrisce." What power of the
Rebirth makes that desired Arcadia so real? "Amiam" —
Let us love, for the sun dies and is born,
But for us its brief light
Fades, and sleep brings on eternal night:— (CGB)
"e'l sonno eterna notte adduce."
63)
Double: [A] French, c. 1320, Vierge de la Celle, detail, Louvre, Paris, and
[B] Michelangelo, 1521-34, Medici Madonna, detail, San Lorenzo, Florence
No doubt the magnified embodiment we are calling giant was implicit in the mangod reach of the Middle Ages. Already this Mary of painted limestone (left; French c.
1320) smiles the sensuous poignance of Gothic humanization, though the archaic smile of
the Greek Korê is not more mysteriously suspended. To set, against its wistful
ethereality, the mood and brooding weight of Michelangelo's 1530 Medicean Madonna,
is to touch the very pulse of prophetic enfleshment.
64)
English Gothic, 1320-25, Lady Chapel windows and vault, Cathedral, Wells
(CGB '84)
Music:
English, early 14th cent., 3-voice Jacet granum, Nonesuch H 71292
As in dialectic theology, so in Medieval discant (here English early l4th century),
or in the always more ingenious vaulting of cathedral stone (this Lady Chapel of Wells),
we feel the stretching of that bow of spirit. In music, indeed, all later styles had to shape
their being from the Gothic store.
(fade Jacet Granum)
65)
Spanish Renaissance Gothic, c. 1500, Condestable Chapel, Vault, Burgos;
+ V details
Music:
Alonso de Alva, c. 1500, Ut queant laxis, Angel S-36926
That architecture could have done likewise Spain makes startlingly clear. In the
1500 Condestable chapel of Burgos, as in this Spanish polyphony, articulate Renaissance
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has been achieved without the intervention of the classical.
Alonso de Alva)
66)
(fade
Spanish, 1568, Gothic Dome of Burgos Cathedral, crossing, Spain; + V details
Music:
Josquin des Prez(?), c. 1520, from Inviolata ... Maria, Seraphim
SIC-6104
While the Crossing of Burgos, 1568, within the same Gothic (and
Moorish) idiom, has solemnized a wreathing as grand as the many-voiced summits of
polyphony — from this 12-part Inviolata attributed to Josquin, (close Inviolata) through
Gombert, Willaert, Morales, to the mightiest of all, Tallis' Spem in Alium whose 40voices fuse in a chordal enormity of passionate lowing, as of the brazen cow in which the
tyrant of Syracuse burned his victims.
Music:
a67)
67)
Tallis, c. 1570(?), from Spem in Alium (toward close), (78) HMVDA 1921-22
P. Brueghel, 1563, Tower of Babel, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna
Double: [A] Anglo-French (Paris), c. 1425, Tower of Babel, Add. MS 18850,
British Museum, London; and [B] Brueghel, Tower of Babel, a67; + V detail
of [B]
The concept of a 40-voice fabric is as far from the century before, as folk plays
from Rabelais, or this illuminated Tower of Babel quaintly harried by the angels from the
1563 Brueghel, where the claim of the mighty ones in the earth is spatially enacted.
a68)
English late Perpendicular (Tudor), 1446-1515, King's College Chapel,
exterior from the southwest (CGB); cropped from wide-angle Va68
b68)
Same, interior, looking up: windows and vault (Sam Adams' slide)
Vc68)
Same, wide-angle interior, looking west (CGB '77)
Vd68 and e68)
Same, west window, and closer: video shows upper part (CGB '77)
68)
Same, whole interior with organ loft, black and white (cf. V68, color)
(end Spem in Alium)
Though perhaps Tallis' greatest music is in the 5-voice Lamentations of Jeremiah
(here in the epoch-making Deller recording).
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Music:
Symbolic History
Tallis, c. 1575(?), First Lamentation of Jeremiah, opening and
close, (Deller) Bach Guild 551
These passionate implorations might span the Continent of that tragic century, from the
1500 Gothic spatiality of King's College Chapel, Cambridge,
For 1st 69)
Double: [A] Michelangelo, 1536-41, from Last Judgment, Upper part, and
[B] Beaufort Chapel, Warwick, variant (video shows singles and detail of
69A)
V69a) Fountains Abbey, view from the East, North Yorkshire
69b)
Same, Presbytery, looking East
to the thunderhead of Michelangelo's Judgment in Counter Reformation Rome (of which
a crude variant clouds a wall of the also late Gothic Beaufort Chapel in Warwick). (skip
to "Jerusalem") Tallis, like Byrd, was a Catholic, writing in an England where despoiled
monasteries enforced Shakespeare's metaphor of age: "Bare ruined choirs where late the
sweet birds sang."
1st 70) Michelangelo, 1550-56, Pieta, upper half, Duomo Museum, Florence;
+ V detail of Nicodemus
How could the titan calmly revealed in the Renaissance island of 1500 knit
incarnate thews but in Judgment tragedy and the war of values, which darkening to the
Lear storm would found, confound, and fortify the airy earth-freedoms first dreamed? As
Milton would say: "What purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary."
(end Tallis Lamentation)
Va2nd 69) Michelangelo, detail of Judgment, the damned beat down
2nd 69)
Same, a Soul weighed down
It is in Christian denial of his Promethean self and art that Michelangelo made the
syntax of the sonnet a poetic battleground of hope and fear:
Giunto è già '1 corso della vita mia
Con tempestoso mar, per fragil barca,
Al comun porto, ov' a render si varca
Conto e ragion d'ogni opra trista e pia.
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Already now across tempestuous seas'
Uncharted course my brittle bark has blown
To the common port, where all come to own
Account and cause of goods and trespasses.
Wherefore the loving fancy's subtleties,
That made of art an idol and a throne,
Break in deception — snares, too late known
Such bitter sweets as to damnation please.
Amorous thoughts, long since proved vanities,
What are you now, if double death incline,
One sure, one doubted, both foretasted harms?
a2nd 70) Michelangelo, 1555-64, Rondanini Pieta, Sforzesca, Milan
Vb2nd 70) Same, profile detail (copy of CGB '80)
2nd 70)
Again, Nicodemus head
Not any mastery of paint or stone
Can ease the heart that sees how love divine
Spreads on the cross — to gather us — his arms. (CGB)
Nè pinger nè scolpir fie più che quieti
L'anima volta a quell' amor divino
Ch'aperse a prender noi 'n croce le braccia.
How far this last Michelangelo self, Nicodemus as lamenting world-father, has
come from that youthful morning with Leonardo, Pico and the rest, in Medici Florence;
how tragically pushed self's prophetic claim.
a71)
71)
Raphael, 1511-12, detail of Madonna of Foligno, Vatican
Titian, c. 1510, Gypsy Madonna, Kunsthistorisches, Vienna (CGB '59);
+ V detail
Music:
Josquin des Prez, pub.1504, Coment peult (instr.) Archive 3223
What High Renaissance had reached for, in neo-Platonism, Josquin's Musica
Reservata, in Raphael, or as here, in the first works of Titian, was the earthly eternity of
divine beauty and good — what Sydney would give Sapphic measure in his remaking of
Sannazaro's 1500 Arcadia:
If the sencelesse spheares doo yet hold a musique,
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If the Swanne's sweet voice be not heard, but at death,
If the mute timber when it hath the life lost,
Yeldeth a lute's tune,
Are then humane mindes priviledg'd so meanly,
As that hatefull death can abridge them of powre,
With the voyce of truth to recorde to all worldes,
That we be her spoiles?
a72)
72)
(fade Josquin)
Titian, 1565, Self Portrait, Prado, Madrid
Titian, 1565, Self, in an Allegory of Prudence and the Ages of Man, National
Gallery, London; first, V detail
Music:
Lassus, c.1560, Penitential psalms: Domine, ne in furore, ARC2533 290 (B)
The embodiment of that Promethean claim would lead those devotees through
fields of lowering actuality (as Don Quixote would exclaim: "I do not even know how
chivalry can work in so depraved a time.") In the sonnet, the crisis would run from
Michelangelo to Campanella, to Gongora in Spain; in England to Shakespeare, and
thereafter to Donne. The raptures of idea and form —
Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come,
Can yet the lease of my true love control,
Suppos'd as forfeit to a confined doom
buckle under the assault of fact:
Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,
As, to behold desert a beggar born ...
... maiden virtue rudely strumpeted ...
... captive good attending captain ill...
Thus Titian, nearing 80, self-portrayed, in an allegory of Prudence and the Ages of
Man —
73)
V73a)
Titian, c. 1570, Crowning with Thorns, Alte Pinak., Munich (CGB '59)
Same, detail (CGB '59)
Titian, climaxing a productive life which reached from the laude and frottole repose of
1500 to the star-crossed pathos of the last Passion pictures — a darkening so widely
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Symbolic History
shared, we seize almost at random, from a generation of music, on Lassus' Penitential
Psalms.
74)
Veronese, 1578, Battle of Lepanto (of 1571) detail, Accademia, Venice
The age-long threat of Moorish invasion broke in Lepanto, where Cervantes was
maimed and then taken into slavery. But there was a symbolic Lepanto of new against
old, and Cervantes was not the only giant of the spirit who fought there. In some such
engagement Bruno went up in flames, Galileo went captive behind inquisition walls.
(fade Lassus)
1st 75) El Greco, 1590-95, St. John, detail from Crucifixion, Prado, Madrid
It is hard for products of Enlightenment to realize that the religious heightening is
no less titanic than the worldly, no less fraught with earth-transforming danger. Bruno
was a churchman; and who knows if the mystic frenzy of El Greco had been translated
into thought and word, how heretical it might have been? Was not John of the Cross
accused for those amorous meetings with Christ where the loved into Lover was
changed?
1st 76) Tintoretto, 1583-87, Night landscape with St. Mary of Egypt, Scuolo San
Rocco, Venice (or V1st 76, lighter)
76a)
Same, detail of Mary
V76b) Tintoretto, 1583-87, Night landscape with St. Mary Magdalen, Scuolo San
Rocco, Venice
In Tintoretto it is Mary of Egypt who shares a night as God-tinctured as when
Juan de la Cruz ascended Mount Carmel:
En una noche escura,
con ansias en amores inflamada ...
It is the night Tasso pooled with moonlight, silence and love:
What dewdrops, what tears ...
Quai lagrime eran quelle...?
The woods and streams are quiet
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Symbolic History
and without wave the sea...
Sien muti i baci e muti i miei sospiri...
Or in his Jerusalem, the Erminia brooding which Fairfax has gleamingly rendered:
Invested in her starrie vaile, the night
In her kinde armes embraced all this round,
The silver moone from sea uprising bright
Spred frostie pearle on the canded ground:
And Cinthia like for beauties glorious light,
The love-sicke Nymph threw glistering beames around,
And counsellors of her old love, she made
Those vallies dumbe, that silence, and that shade.
E secretarii del suo amore antico
Fea i muti campi e quel silenzio amico.
Va2nd 75) El Greco, 1597-1600, The Annunciation, detail, Collection of Thyssen,
Lugano
2nd 75)
Greco, 1603-05, The Nativity, detail, Illescas, Hospital de la Caridad
Since the mid-century chromatic experiments of Vicentino and Lassus, music had
explored the mode of dramatic emotion and crepuscular melting. In Marenzio's setting of
Petrarch's night sonnet, "Solo e pensoso i piu deserti campi," what vast glimmerings of
the plasmic world have been explored since Petrarch. The upper voice runs a half-tone
scale from G to high G and back to C, setting all the other voices nocturnally awash.
Music:
2nd 76)
2nd 76a)
2nd 76b)
77)
77a)
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Marenzio, 1599, Solo e pensoso, chromatic opening, BGS 5051
Double: [Tintoretto, [A] St. Mary of Egypt, (76), and [B] St. Mary
Magdalen (V76b)
Tintoretto, detail of V76b, Mary Magdalen, background (or V2nd 76a)
Tintoretto, detail of 76, St. Mary of Egypt, background
(cut Marenzio)
Pierre Dumonstein, c. 1580, Portrait of a man, Mus. Jacquemart André
French School, late 16th cent., Portrait of Montaigne, Musée Condé,
Chantilly; video then returns to detail of 77, Dumonstein
Giants in the Earth
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C.G. Bell
77b&c)
77d)
77e)
77f)
77g)
Music:
Symbolic History
Double: Jacques Callot, etchings, [A] 1622, A Duel, and [B] 1617,
Couple Promenading; both from Capricci di Varie Figure, British
Museum, London (video takes them singly)
Francois Clouet, 1560-70, Diane de Poitiers, detail, National Gallery,
Washington, D.C. (CGB '75)
Nicholas Beaugrais, c. 1560-80, Apocalypse Window, Royal Chapel,
Vincennes Castle, Near Paris
Callot, 1617-22, Capricci #62, Old Shepherd Piping, etching
Dumonstein, detail of head (see 77)
Claude le Jeune, before 1600, Revecy venir du printans
(Boulanger) Decca DL 9629
Let this unknown Frenchman of the late century (with Claude le Jeune's measured
Spring song) remind us of that modest giant, Montaigne. In his essay on Presumption, he
asks, with regard to a self-portrait Renate of Sicily has sent Francis II:
Why is it not as lawful for every man else to pourtray himself with his
pen, as it were for him to do with a pensell?
How can Montaigne in that portrayal neglect the scar he calls his "cicatrice" — in
Hamlet's words — that "the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of
thought."
At a time when the resolve of the Protestant Bourbon was beseiging and starving
Catholic Paris, that flaw becomes the virtue of a civilized man:
Le peuple se trompe ... Grandeur of soul consists not so much in
mounting and pressing forward, as in knowing how to govern and
circumscribe itself. There is no science so arduous as to know how to
play the man, to live this life.
For my part I love life, and cultivate it, such as it has pleased God
to bestow it on us ... I accept with gratitude what nature has done for
me ... the great omnipotent Giver ... all goodness himself, has made
everything good...
Transcendental humors affright me...Who would escape being
men, do not transform themselves into angels but into beasts...
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Yet how Transcendental in the later sense is this perfection of being ourselves
"without miracle, without extravagance ... gay and sociable ... nor let music be wanting
..." (end Claude le jeune)
78)
Agostino Carracci(?), c. 1590, Portrait, Self(?), Alte Pinakothek Munich; first,
V detail
No less the product of a giant century than the radical powers being then
suppressed in Italy. Pomponazzi, early in the century, had expressed the fate to follow:
The philosopher is a very Prometheus. Seeking to penetrate the secrets
of God, he is consumed with ceaseless cares, forgets to eat and sleep,
is derided of all men, held for a fool and unbeliever; harried by
inquisitors, he becomes the gaping stock of the common crowd...
A prophecy fulfilled in Bruno:
And so I spread wide pinions to the air,
Nor fear the impasse of glass or crystal sphere,
Piercing the heavens to the infinite.
And as I leave this globe and mount the vast,
Beating my way across the ethereal waste,
I lose the care of every common sight. (CGB)
79)
Limbourg Brothers, 1413-16, Night arrest of Christ in the Garden, Musée
Conde, Chantilly; + V detail
The last Promethean work of Renaissance was the grappling with the starry
universe. The first representation of that fathomless night nature had been in the Tres
Riches Heures at the start of the 15th century. By 1440 Cusanus was formulating it:
and although our universe is not infinite, nevertheless, one cannot
conceive of it as finite; it is not enclosed in boundaries, nor is the earth
its center nor any sphere of the stars its circumference ... It has its
center everywhere, its circumference nowhere, because God is its
circumference and center, He who is everywhere and nowhere ... Plato,
in fact, said the world is animate; and if one conceives God as its soul
— without immersion — much of what we have said will be clear.
80)
80a)
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Elsheimer, 1609, Flight to Egypt by night, Alte Pinakothek, Munich; video
also takes a detail from V80 (CGB '59) and a starry one from 80; so digital, as
z a &b
Moon Surface from Apollo 15 Command Module; digital has Io here
Giants in the Earth
�39
C.G. Bell
80b)
80c)
Symbolic History
1930s print, Jupiter as seen from one of its moons; here luna surface
Volcanoes on Io, moon of Jupiter, radio photographed by Voyager I, here
Jupiter
As Elsheimer (1609) stretches out that starry sky, Bruno's soaring expands the
cosmos of Cusanus:
For us consists the Universal sphere as a single all over-spreading,
infinite, immovable continuum, in which numberless spheres or
particular worlds exist. There is but one sky, one immeasurable worldspace, one matrix, one universal connective, one ether region through
which the whole moves. In this become visible innumerable stars,
constellations, world bodies and suns ... Of these our earth is one, yet
not a single one is the center, for the universe is in all directions
equally immeasurable ... The earth and all other constellations have
their own soul, which again is but a part of the World Soul.
By 1610 Galileo's Sidereal Messenger communicates the shattering news of
telescopic sights. He had begun the true exploration of worlds in space.
other stars in myriads ... never seen before ... the body of the moon ...
thirty times larger ... like the face of the earth itself ... everywhere full
of vast protruberances, deep chasms, and sinuosities ... four planets,
neither known nor observed before my time, which have their orbits
round a certain bright star ...
(The moons of Jupiter.)
Va80+1) G. Romano, 1530-32, Fall of the Giants (here video takes a detail from
slide 1, see opening); digital veries the order of these
80+1)
From the same frescoed room, another scene; + a closer V detail
Of the enterprise of the century, as of the later West, two things had been clear
from the start, that it was giant and that it was perilous. They knew of old, those myths of
titans in the world. As once I applied the symbol of this picture:
And all whom superstitions of the dark
Had thundered down for daring — Icarus
Sun-melted, Phaeton Jove-destroyed, Prometheus
Of the fire and Lucifer of morning,
Niobe made tears and Semele love-burning —
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Rose divinely, winging west with the dawn...
We feel the fatal angels strike the tower,
Or through the slant rifts of the rock-hurled hail,
Glimpse dreads of distance where our running kind
Shot with his lightnings fall, and the mountains drown.
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Giants in the Earth
�
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SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
17. Michelangelo: Storm Center
CHARLES G. BELL
ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
or
1260 CANYON ROAD
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501
August 1995
Last Revised January ‘96
�1
Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
17. Michelangelo: Storm Center
1)
1a)
Michelangelo, 1513-16, Moses, San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome
Same, Michelangelo Moses, detail
If history appears as an evolving field of force, its most charged sequence has
been in the culture of the Christian West, and insofar as that power records itself in the
arts, Michelangelo stands at its peak, an incarnation of dynamic will.
Any of his works, here the Moses, of 1513 to '16, is not simply an art-object, but
an energy-organizer at all levels of the creative stair. It is in some way a self-portrait,
personal to its maker; as specific to its generation, it exemplifies also a period style, say
Florentine Renaissance; third, it is an image of Western man, protagonist of our culture
from its Medieval beginnings to today; last, an embodiment of world force, it actualizes
something divine — the shaping thrust of nature, as Michelangelo put it, of God.
Music:
2)
2a)
Josquin des Pres, 1515-20, close of Absalon, Nonesuch H 71216
Sistine Chapel, 1475, with Michelangelo ceiling (1508-12), and Judgment
(1536-41), Vatican, Rome
Same, detail of Michelangelo ceiling
(Josquin des Pres — compared by their contemporaries with Michelangelo —
David's lament for Absalon.) (end Josquin) So history sounds the resonances of art as
symbolic form: person, period style, culture, world soul.
If we ask of the person, Michelangelo, it is the Sistine Chapel which gives most
immediate answer. Under the vault of the Creation (1508 to '12) all tales of this
daemonically
driven
man
become
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Symbolic History
credible: the titanic bent of his person, his pride in dealing with Pope Julius, himself a
violent man; it no longer surprises us that he could shut himself up in the chapel and paint
for years, hardly admitting his patron, the Vicar of Christ.
3)
3a)
Michelangelo, 1508-12, Sistine Ceiling, The Prophet Jeremiah, whole,
Vatican, Rome; + V detail
Same, Jeremiah, detail of head
These tensile forces build with Michelangelo's own words and the things reported of him
to a single surge. To feel it we may focus on any of the represented Prophets, Jeremiah
say, and at the same time rehearse one of Vasari's typical stories:
Late in Michelangelo's life the consuls responsible for rebuilding St.
Peter's wrote: "As regards the progress and designs and prospects of
the new basilica, the deputies know nothing whatever, Michelangelo
despising them worse than if they were outsiders." When he was
brought before the Cardinals he revealed that three windows of
travertine were to light the vault. "You never told us anything about
that," said the cardinal. "I am not obliged to tell your lordships or anyone else what I intend to do," replied Michelangelo; "your business is
to take charge of the expenses and to see that no one steals. The
building is my affair."
Va4) Sistine Ceiling, 1st bay, two Nude figures
4)
Same, left figure [Note video variant, V4]
Or we may consider the Dialogues of Francisco de Hollanda, where Michelangelo says of
his mission (and he is the first to speak in these terms):
A man cannot attain to excellence... if he be not singular or distant, or
whatever you like to call him. As for those other meek and
commonplace spirits, they may be found without the need of a candle
in all the highways of the world...
5)
Same figure, detail of head [Note video variant, V5]
In the same dialogue he says of his art:
Good art is nothing but a replica of the perfections of God and a
reflection of His art; it is a harmony and a melody which only the
intellect can understand, and that with great difficulty...
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6)
Symbolic History
Sistine Ceiling, whole 1st Bay, Light from Dark
If these were Michelangelo's sentiments, is it any wonder that this Messiah of Art,
in the first scene of the Sistine Creation, the Separation of Light from Darkness, hit on a
new and implicitly heretical conception?
7)
French, mid-13th cent. MS, Cod 2554, f50v, God Creating, National Library,
Vienna
In contrast to a 13th-century God, who creates with the effortless calm of spirit,
2nd 6) Again, Sistine Ceiling, Light from Dark, detall of Jehovah; + V detail
the Sistine Jehovah initiates the world in the brute involvement of body. In Goethe's
words: "In the beginning was the deed." Curious that another Renaissance revolutionary,
toward the end of the century, the Englishman Marlowe, should describe Hero's first
experience of physical love by a simile of creation, conceived in the spirit of
Michelangelo:
...She strove;
This strife of hers, like that which made the world,
Another world begot of unknown joys...
For 2nd 7) French Illumination, c. 1250(?), God Creating, Genesis, title page, St.
Louis Bible, Cathedral, Toledo
How far from the 13th-century Genesis is the divine strife by which the Sistine
vault proclaims dynamic primacy.
Va8) Sistine Ceiling, whole (though the video crops to about five scenes)
8)
Same, detail of three central scenes
Its very space is folded in perspectival battle. Look how any of the alternating small
scenes (as here at the center), with its border figures seated as on sculptural supports —
how each shapes, above and below, its own recess, of which the mouldings define a fit
meeting point. But the adjacent large scenes are spilled over from each side by those
cornices, so that they exist in a sort of negative space.
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C.G. Bell
9)
Symbolic History
Whole of Sistine Ceiling, seen from the entrance
Against the Baroque formulation of an entire ceiling from one point of view,
Michelangelo's summoning of space from the old spacelessness, buckles the vault in
corrugations of generative strain.
10)
10a)
Sistine Ceiling, Head of God Creating the Sun and Moon
Same, the arm-spread figure of God
The head of God making the sun and moon is one of the most concentratedly
violent. Like the Moses, it fuses something of Pope Julius and of Michelangelo himself
in a fury of the embodied divine. We may relate it to a letter the artist wrote his brother
about the same time, displeased with some mishandling of family affairs:
I wish to tell you that for the last twelve years I have wandered
miserably through Italy; I have supported every shame, suffered every
hardship, worn out my body with every toil, and risked my life itself a
thousand times for the single purpose of advancing my family. Now
that I have begun to raise it up a little, it is you, and you alone, who
desire in a single hour to destroy and pull down all I have spent so
many years and such labour building up. By the Body of Christ, but
this shall not be! I am ready to wipe away ten thousand such men as
you are whenever it is necessary. And now, be wise, and do not vex to
wrath one who has other causes for anxiety.
a11)
11)
Sistine Ceiling, Nude figures from Separation of Land from Waters, 3rd bay
Same, of these, the agitated nude to the right; video: detail only
Michelangelo was renowned for that "terribilità." It permeates not only his art but
his life. His first biographer, Condivi, writes of his daily habits:
He has always been extremely temperate in living, using food more
because it was necessary than for any pleasure he took in it; especially
when he was engaged upon some great work; for then he usually
confined himself to a piece of bread, which he ate in the middle of his
labour...
While he was in full vigour, he generally went to bed with his
clothes on, even to the tall boots, which he has always worn, because
of a chronic tendency to cramp… At certain seasons he has kept these
boots on for such a length of time, that when he drew them off the skin
came away together with the leather, like that of a sloughing snake...
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a12)
12)
Symbolic History
Sistine Ceiling, Deluge, detail, right
Same, detail, left
Turning away all the artists summoned from Florence to assist him in the
technique of fresco, packing them off home, Michelangelo tackled the ceiling alone, with
only a boy to help him mix paint. Vasari tells how he got so used to looking up that if he
was given anything to read he would automatically raise it and hold it over his head. And
Michelangelo says as much in a satiric poem (Symonds):
My beard turns up to heaven; my nape falls in,
Fixed on my spine: my breast-bone visibly
Grows like a harp; a rich embroidery
Bedews my face from brush-drops thick and thin...
So foul I fare, and painting is my shame.
For he never forgot that he was a sculptor driven to painting as to an art he despised.
13)
13a)
Sistine Ceiling, Adam from the Creation
Same, Adam, upper detail
Such is the man of violence and sorrows who saw himself and was already seen
by his contemporaries, as in some way justifying his archangelic name, a type of the
creating divine. Vasari gives it the theistic expression of the time: "The great Ruler of
Heaven... resolved... to send to earth a genius universal in each art... that the world should
marvel at the singular eminence of his life and works and all his actions, seeming rather
divine than earthly."
Music:
14)
Ganassi, pub. 1543, Ricercare for Viol, Seraphim SIC 6052
From the same fresco, the hands of God and Adam
He was the symbolic life-giver, born in an age already aware of itself as a time of
rebirth, aware too that the generative energy it felt centered somehow in the visual arts, in
the representational conquest of bodies in space, artistic herald of the Western science of
power — music too first reaching toward instrumental and fugal pomp (Ganassi).
(close Ganassi)
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15)
15a)
Symbolic History
Michelangelo, 1501-03, David, whole, from his left, Accademia, Florence
(CGB '86)
Same, David, whole, from his right (CGB '86)
Music:
Cabezon, c. 1540(?), Diferencias on El Cavallero AS-40
It was this Michelangelo who in his youth (forty years before Spanish Cabezon's
variations on El Caballero) could take the great block of flawed marble hacked and
spoiled by his predecessors and liberate the David (1501-3). Again it is Vasari who says:
"This revival of a dead thing was a veritable miracle" (end Cabezon) a theme Pater would
treat more pantheistically, in relating the Sistine Creation of Adam to the David
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16)
Symbolic History
Michelangelo, 1530-33, Fourth Captive, for Julius' Tomb, "Young Giant
Awakening," Accademia, Florence (CGB '86); + V detail (while the slide show
substitutes a double, 16a: two views of the same captive; so digital
and the unfinished Slaves:
This creation of life — life coming always as relief or recovery, and
always in strong contrast with the rough hewn mass in which it is
kindled, is in various ways the motive of all his work... And as his
persons have something of the unwrought stone about them, so... with
him the very rocks seem to have life.
Surely, in the organ Ricercare, from the first Cavazzoni, through Cabezon, to the
Gabrielli, giant forms struggle for release. Cavazzoni:
Music:
Marco Antonio Cavazzoni, 1527, Ricercada, SVBX 5322: 1-2
Thus, long before Pater and the 19th century, Michelangelo's own metaphor of the
creative artist informing stone suggests a more than Platonic mystery,
17)
Same, Captive III (Bearded Giant), upper portion, Accademia, Florence
by which both artist and stone become agents and collaborators, realizing the impulsion
of a deeper will. This is the Michelangelo Emerson would make part of the universal
striving of spirit to realized form:
The passive master lent his hand
To the vast soul that o'er him planned.
a18)
18)
(fade Cavazzoni)
Same, Captive III, detail of head
Same, Captive II (Atlas), Accademia, Florence (CGB '86)
Andrea Gabrielli:
Music:
Andrea Gabrielli, c. 1550(?), Canzona, near close, Period TE 1133,
Side 5
He builded better than he knew;
The conscious stone to beauty grew.
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Symbolic History
And we should not forget that this last line is suggested by the technique
Michelangelo followed in his carving, and which he has touched on in various sonnets:
Non ha l'ottimo artista alcun concetto
Ch' un marmo solo in sè non circonscriva:
Where is the shape of the best artist's dream?
It is sleeping somewhere in the uncut stone;
And the task of the hand that serves the brain
Is to strike off the excess and free the form. (CGB)
(end Gabrielli)
The attempt to reveal, in the first of our modes, Michelangelo as person has
veered to the fourth, Michelangelo as agent of world-spirit —
19)
Michelangelo, c. 1524-26, Vestibule of Biblioteca Laurenziana, Florence
what even in architecture buckled the articulations of Renaissance, turning this vestibule
of the Laurentian Library — its curved and balustraded stairs spilling into a vertical space
of thrustback columns, pilasters, blind windows, and broken pediments ("the limbs of
architecture," Michelangelo wrote, "are derived from the limbs of man") — into as radical
a point of departure,
20)
Michelangelo, 1526-33, Double: Tombs of [A] right: Lorenzo and [B] left:
Giuliano, Medici Chapel, S. Lorenzo, Florence
as in sculpture the archetypal polarity of the Medici Tombs: Lorenzo, pensive thinker
(right), with twilight Morning and Evening; against active Giuliano (left), with the
extremes of Night and Day.
In recorded music, the first fruit of such tensile ingathering is in Ortiz's Ricercada
Quinta, published in Rome, 1553, as performed on Anthologie Sonore by Boomkamp and
Bodky.
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Music:
Symbolic History
Ortiz, pub.1553, Ricercada Quinta, Anthologie Sonore 40
20a)
Same, Tomb of Lorenzo, A of 20
20b)
Same, Tomb of Giuliano, B of 20
For 2nd 19) Michelangelo, Double: [A] Lorenzo and [B] Giuliano dei Medici
(video doubles full-length figures; slide show, half-length)
2nd 19a)
Same, Double: details of heads (order reversed)
a2nd 20)
Same, Dawn, from Lorenzo Tomb (slide show, colored; video, B&W)
For 2nd 20) Same, Double: Twilght and Dawn, from Lorenzo Tomb
21)
Same, Night, from Giuliano Tomb
22)
Same, Day from Giuliano Tomb
23)
Same, detail, shoulder and head of Day
(end Ortiz)
Though even in this tortional Day, the conjuring of Michelangelo as world-spirit
must assume historical modes for its operation: the tragic embodiment of Renaissance,
within the God-projective daring of the Christian West.
That the West has a character is as easy to feel as it is hard to formulate.
24)
Triple: [A] Greek (Ægina), 480 B.C., Bronze warrior's head, Acropolis
Museum, Athens; [B] Greek, c. 350 B.C., the so-called Mausolus from Halicarnasus, detail, British Museum, London; and [C] Roman 1st cent. A.D.,
Male Portrait, Palazzo Capitolino, Rome
When we look at the human image as it records itself in art, it is clear that Greek
sculpture in its early phases (left) was essentially free of introspective personality; and
that when, in the Alexandrian period, introspection appears (center, c. 350 B.C.
"Mausolus") it is as a weakness, a sensuous yearning and nostalgia — darkening, after the
crisis of Republican Rome (right) to a weighty obligation, a stoical cause of gloom.
25)
Double: [A] Attic, c. 600 B.C., Dipylon Head, National Museum, Athens;
and [B] German, c. 1060, Bronze Crucifix, Head of Christ, Abbey Church,
Essen-Werden
In Western civilization on the other hand (right), some kind of subjective personality is
present from the first, and manifests itself throughout as a phenomenon of power
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Symbolic History
(Werden Christ, 11th century). Whereas an Archaic Greek Kouros (left), similar in
stylized abstraction, is clean of any such inwardness.
26)
French Gothic, c. 1210, Head of Samuel, from N. Portal, Chartres; + V detail
This sense of the private soul as a creative energy, as something positive and
divine, runs from the Romanesque origins to our own day. Every style-study must unite
and differentiate. Within the West as a whole, we move from the sacerdotal Gothic
(Chartres about 1210, Samuel — in music, Perotin);
Music:
27)
Perotin, c. 1200, from Beata Viscera, "O mira novitas," (Tinayre) Lumen
32011
(fade)
Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1512, Self-Portrait, red chalk, Biblioteca Reale, Turin;
+ V detail
through the humanistic Renaissance (1512, Leonardo, Self — in music, Festa);
Music:
28)
C. Festa, 1514, from Lament for Anne of Britanny (adapted for Maximillian, 1519, by Senfl) ARCHIV 3223
(close)
Rembrandt, 1660, Self at Easel, Louvre, Paris; + V detail
the darker introspection of the Great Baroque (c. 1660, Rembrandt, Self — in music,
Schütz);
Music:
29)
H. Schütz, c. 1645, from the Symphonia, from the Seven Words ARCHIV
198408
(close)
P.O. Runge, 1804-05, Crayon Self Portrait, Kunsthalle, Hamburg; + V detail
the Romantic liberation of intuitive ego (1804, Runge, Self — in music, Beethoven);
Music:
30)
Beethoven, 1808, Pastoral Symphony, opening of 2nd Movement,
(Walter) Odyssey Y33924
(fade)
Van Gogh, 1888, Self, Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts; + V detail
to the Modern immolation of that ego in an act of triumphant despair (about 1890, Van
Gogh — with Debussy in music).
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Music:
31)
Symbolic History
Debussy, 1893, String Quartet, from the 2nd Movement, Nonesuch M1007
(fade)
Attic, c. 480 B.C., The Blond Boy, Acropolis Museum, Athens
Yet beside the Greek idealized art-man (Athens, about 480 BC), so far from celebrating
the confessions of soul-in-flesh, these shadings grow indistinct —
32)
32a)
Albrecht Dürer, c. 1500, Self in fur-collared robe, Alte Pinakothek, München;
+ V detail
Dürer, c. 1510, Nude. Self as study for Christ at the Column, Schloss
Museum, Weimar
the Western man blends into one dynamic image: focus of the human paradox — from
Abelard and Dante through Villon, Quixote, and Hamlet to Faust — of the tragic waste
and glory of personality. This image (Dürer, Self) is in some suggestive way also a
Christ-image and, painful as the recognition may be, an image of Lucifer as well. It has
the stamp of the incarnate god upon it, of a god who has immersed himself in body and
time, and not so much to his Platonic loss as to his dæmonic gain. For that seems to be
the archetype to which it is related, and without which it could hardly have converted the
pagan weakness, Augustine's "abyss of conscious personality," into such a well of selfaffirming power.
33)
33a)
33b)
33c)
Michelangelo, c. 1513, The Dying Captive, Louvre, Paris (CGB '80)
Same, from his right (CGB '80)
Same, upper detail
Same, detail of face
Music:
Juan Vasquez, pub. 1560, Lagrimas de mi consuelo, lst version,
MMG-1103
For Michelangelo, he portrays such secret depths by every curve of shaped stone
— here from the Julius tomb, one of the two captives actually finished, about 1513. So
too the music of expressive passion, which Josquin called Musica reservata, spread from
his Absalon, through the always more chromatic daring of Willaert and de Rore, to all
parts of Europe — as, around midcentury, to the Spain of this Vasquez "Lagrimas."
Here sound and image voice what Santayana has translated from Michelangelo — in four
lines the romantic flaw and glory of the Incarnate West:
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Symbolic History
Ravished by all that to the eyes is fair,
Yet hungry for the joys that truly bless,
My soul can find no stair
To mount to heaven, save earth's loveliness.
Gli occhi mie', vaghi delle cose belle,
E l'alma insieme della suo salute
Non anno altra virtute
C'ascende al ciel che mirar tutte quelle...
34)
(close Vasquez)
Roman Christian, c. 325 ff., Rotunda of Santa Costanza, Rome (CGB '86
variant, so far not used)
Music:
Gregorian (Apostolic?), Mass XII, close of Gloria, (Solesmes)
London 5633
In architecture, the round-arched Roman-Christian temple (here Santa Costanza,
325 and after), which retained — with Gregorian — a certain classical measure and
harmonious ease,
(end Gloria)
35)
French Gothic, 1212-41, South Aisle of Rheims (CGB '59)
Music:
Perotin, c. 1210, from 3-voice Diffusa est gratia: "benedixit te Deus,"
(Cape) AS 65 b (78)
gives way to the skyward reachings of Gothic (Aisle of Rheims) — the bare chords,
driving triple rhythm, and, lilting through that sternness, the mystery of Perotin's
organum. So Aristotle's ethic of the mean opens to an ethic of charity, which does not
aim at the reasonable, but at the infinite extreme.
36)
French Gothic, 1195-1218 ff., Choir buttressing of Bourges Cathedral (CGB
'84); so video, from V36; while slide show uses a wider Sam Adams' view
Already in the Medieval town and under the tutelage of self- and-world-denial, the
Western giant is stirring. Yet how lean and stripped the timeless aspiration of Gothic
buttressing, this Bourges — severe as the Dies Irae:
Tuba mirum spargens sonum...
The great horn thundering doom
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Symbolic History
Through the shires of the tomb
Gathers all before the throne. (CGB)
37)
Same, Bourges, interior, windows (CGB '84)
How spaceless the vision of liturgical lights in dark, inner silence in the functional shell
— mystical as the Dies Irae:
Fount of pity, be saviour to me...
Salva me, fons pietatis.
38)
(close Perotin)
Michelangelo and others, 1550-64 ff., St. Peter's, from the Janicula, Rome
(CGB '86)
Music:
Victoria, c. 1590(?), Salve Regina, close, (2 choirs, etc.) Tel. AWT
6 3537
In contrast, the apse of St. Peter's, which Michelangelo finished late in life, with the
crossing and projected dome, encloses, in a nobly reasoned display of outward mass,
39)
Same, St. Peter's interior, Nave to Choir, especially vault, Rome
a tragic solemnity of space — let the mind strip off the incrustations of Bernini's Baroque.
From Gothic to this, from Perotin to Papal polyphony (here Victoria), advances —
as from Dante to Milton — Michelangelo's Donation to the sacred, the physics of
volitional power.
(close Victoria)
So as Gothic ripens to Renaissance and Renaissance flexes to Baroque,
40)
40a)
40b)
Double: [A] Græco-Roman (Pompeii) 1st cent. A.D., Idyllic Landscape, National Museum, Naples; and [B] Rubens, c. 1624, Het Onwaer (The Storm),
Franz Konig, Haarlem
Again, Pompeiian Landscape, A of 40
Again, Rubens' Storm, B of 40
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Symbolic History
that surf breaks always more wildly on the shore of the world. Even mathematics begins
its progress from the Apollonian forms of Euclid to the Dionysiac frenzy of the infinite
and infinitesimal, the calculus of motion.
For all this, the landscape (though Michelangelo neglected it), gives a visual sign,
densening through centuries of withdrawal and return from the Pompeiian soft
dreamworld — Virgilian and Ausonian realm of the shades, "sola sub nocte per
umbram... et... silva in magna" — to Ruben's vortex (which is equally that of the burned
heretic Bruno) of god-irradiated matter in illimitable space. From the first heaving up of
the spires in the 12th-century towns, to the blasting off of moon rockets today, a perilous
chemistry unfolds in the crucible of the Western world.
41)
N.E. France, early 10th cent., St Matthew, from MS 4, Walters Gallery,
Baltimore
It is kindled in Celtic and Germanic Christendom. In this Saint Matthew from the
darkest century, the 10th, mystical force, denying the earth fabric it would increasingly
transform, burns in the hieratic containment of creed.
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Symbolic History
But with every tick of the style-clock,
42)
Rhine-German, end of 13th cent., Prophet left of Main Portal, Strassburger
Minster
that power, entering the world, assumes more spatial and human validity. Consider the
type of bearded and prophetic age: 1300, Strasbourg — a lean Gothic energy, bearing
still the enigmatic stamp of timelessness;
43)
Double: [A] Donatello, 1412-15, St. John the Evangelist, detail of head,
Duomo Museo, Florence; and [B] Michelangelo, 1513-16, Moses, detail of
head, St. Pietro in Vlncoli, Rome
1412 (left): Donatello's Evangelist: a calm filling-out of human command; 1515 (right):
Michelangelo's Moses: giant assertion controlled by incredible will.
In this pair, the maturation of Western spirit peaks in the harmonious assertion of
Renaissance and Florence.
a44)
44)
Benci di Cione, etc., 1376-82, Loggia dei Signori (dei Lanzi), Florence
Same, Loggia dei Lanzi, another view (CGB '86)
Music:
Gherardello, c.1340(?), from a Gloria (from 3rd Qui Tollis, without
Amen) MHS 3634
Let this 14th-century Loggia, later named for Cosimo's Lancers, guide us, in that
peerless city, to the Piazza of the Signoria, where Michelangelo's David would take its
place. Exiled from the Tuscan center, Dante (whom Michelangelo would memorize) had
brought Aquinas' Medieval synthesis to a Gothic peak, at the same time seeding it with
the radical individuality of Renaissance — thereby initiating the bold transitions of
Petrarch and Boccaccio, of Ars Nova music (here Gherardellus), as of this columned hall.
45)
Double: [A] Michelangelo, 1489, sketch, after Giotto's Assumption of St.
John, Louvre, Paris; and [B] Giotto, 1325-30, same detail from that
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45a)
Symbolic History
Assumption, Santa Croce, Florence [video then separates the sketch and a
larger section of the Giotto fresco]
Giotto, Assumption of St. John, whole of B of 45
In Florence art had been spearheaded for two hundred years, through Vasari's
three periods: the first, "a new beginning." Among Michelangelo's earliest sketches is a
copy of the great-robed figures on the left in this Ascent of John the Evangelist, from
Giotto's last phase, 1325 to '30, that Dante-time, when music also advanced from the Old
art to the New.
(end Gherardello)
46)
46a)
Double: [A] Masaccio, 1425-26, The Tribute Money, detail, Brancacci Chapel,
Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence; and [B] Michelangelo, c. 1493. sketch
from same, Graph. Samml., München
Again, Masaccio, The Tribute Money, whole
Music:
Dufay, 1453-4, Lament for Constantinople, last third, (Munrow)
Seraphim SIC 6092
In another sketch the 15-year-old Michelangelo studies this fresco by Masaccio,
formative genius of Vasari's second period — his massive 1425 figures accompanied by
the full humanity of Dufay's triadic chords.
47)
47a)
Masaccio, 1426, Crucifixion, Museo di Capodimonte, Naples
Simone Martini, 1340-50, Double: two Magdalens [A] from Deposition, Museum, Antwerp; and [B] from Entombment, Berlin-Dahlem Galerie, Berlin
Yet Masaccio himself reveals why Vasari, tracing the techniques of
representation, would call the 15th century transitional. His Crucifixion projects on the
gold ground of Byzantine an exploratory Renaissance nude, a voluminous mourning
Mary, and a leaner Fra Angelico John, with a Magdalen whose red-robed Gothic cry roots
in the symbolic space of Simone Martini, Duccio, and beyond.
(close Dufay)
48)
Caravaggio, 1602-04, Deposition, Vatican, Rome
Music:
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P.F. Cavalli, 1656, Messa Concertata, from Crucifixus, SAWT
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Symbolic History
If the 1600 goal was the formulated rhetoric and muscled volition of embodied
Baroque (Caravaggio and Cavalli),
(close Cavalli)
a49)
49)
49a)
Michelangelo, 1504, Tondo, Holy Family, Ufizzi, Florence (CGB '59)
Same, Holy Family, upper half only (CGB '59)
Same, Holy Family, closer detail
we recognize, as by touch, the importance of Michelangelo's 1504 fulfillment of Vasari's
Third Style: "art has achieved everything possible in the imitation of nature." In this
Florentine tondo, the Patriarchs who wait behind the time-wall of Redemption become
nude athletic Greeks. Here the creative energies of the West, sacred or profane,
determinedly shift their locus from the timeless into time. So Josquin des Pres' "Et
Incarnatus est" — "and was made flesh."
Music:
50)
50a)
50b)
Josquin des Pres, 1515-20(?), Missa Pange Lingua, from the Credo: "Et
Incarnatus est," Decca DL 9410
(close Josquin)
Strasbourg, c. 1300, Prince of this World and Foolish Virgin, full length,
W. Portal of Cathedral; + V half length
Same, detail of Prince
Same, double: faces of [A] Prince and [B] Foolish Virgin
Music:
English, 13th cent., from Estampie, (Binkley) SAWT 9432
No doubt the joy of earth is ubiquitous, but in medieval dance, as in the
Strassburg portal, where the Tempter Prince offers the smiling foolish Virgins a wormeaten apple, joy floats, an irresponsible vanity, in the ascetic containment of creed. So
Aucassin in the 13th-century romance, when the priest tells him to give up Nicolette and
be saved, says it is only the old priests and the poor and crippled who grovel at the altars
and in the old crypts, who go into Paradise.
But into hell will I go, for into Hell go the fair clerks and knights killed
in the tourneys and in the great wars... and the gentle ladies who have
two or three lovers along with their noble lords. And there go the gold
and silver, the furs and cloth of vair, and the harpers and rulers of this
world. With these let me go, if only I have Nicolette, my sweet friend
whom I love so well.
(end Estampie)
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a51)
51)
51a)
Symbolic History
Botticelli, 1478, Spring, detail of three Graces, Ufizzi, Florence; video, upper
detail only
Same, Spring, whole
Same, Spring, right detail
Music:
Isaac, c. 1485(?), Fortuna Desperata, 3 viols, opening, Allegro 14
If the early Renaissance, under classical example, witnesses a blossoming of such
joy in life, it remains — as in the Ballades of Isaac — suspended in the old faith, where
the loves of earth hardly claim validity. Botticelli's poignant realm of The Spring (1478)
lures from that Gothic tapestry of line, as ideal, as frail, as Poliziano:
Love to the kingdom of his mother came,
Where light battalions of his brothers wing,
There the smiling Graces hold their reign,
And beauty weaves flower-garlands for her crown;
There lusty Zephyrus, pursuing Flora,
Wheels and sets green fronds and herbs aflower.
(La Giostra, 67):
52)
52a)
(CGB)
(fade Isaac)
Michelangelo, 1497, Bacchus, full length, Bargello, Florence (video works
from variant V52); + V detail, half length
Same, Bacchus, detail of Faun
Music:
Dalza, c. 1500, from Piva, lute duet, (Rooley and Tyler),
L'Oiseau-Lyre SOL 325
even Michelangelo's Bacchus (1497), the paganly drunken work of his youth (like all the
clear acumen of Machiavelli's politics or the voluptuous diversions of the Papal or other
courts — Dalza's lute dances), exists under a cleavage of values, as the great heroes and
lovers burn in Dante's Hell.
This ambivalence has its purest expres-
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Symbolic History
sion in the circle of Lorenzo de' Medici (died 1492), where Michelangelo was trained.
One pole is asserted by Lorenzo's carnival poems:
The beauty of youth is a brief flower
That is always fading away;
Love and be happy while you may,
For tomorrow is not sure. (CGB)
Chi vuol esser lieto sia:
Di doman non c'è certezza.
53)
53a)
(end Dalza)
Botticelli, 1500-10, Pieta, Pinakothek, München (CGB '59); + V detail
Same, Pieta, lower right detail (CGB '59)
Music:
Josquin des Pres, c. 1490(?), from the Stabat Mater: "Eia mater," AS 73
The counter-pole is announced by the reformer, Savonarola. It was his call to
penitence (sharp as Josquin's Stabat Mater) that broke Botticelli, wrenching him from the
orange groves of Venus to the anguish of the late Pietas and then, it appears, out of art
altogether. For already in the Florence of Michelangelo's youth, the opposition that
would dominate the following centuries — Renaissance and Reformation; Cavalier,
Puritan — had come to its sharpest focus. Inflamed by the carnival processions and
songs, Savonarola invented a sacred inversion of that frenzy, a religious carnival with
bonfires of pagan art and vanities and the chanting of popular tunes transformed to pious
hymns. It was a movement of heretical reform, anticipating the Calvinist reversal of
Renaissance and, like the Calvinist,
54)
Same, Pieta, lower left detail, feet (copy of CGB '59; see Pascal 28)
inevitably democratic: it is in the rough measures of the common crowd that
Savonarola's exhortations come to us:
0 anima cecata — che non trovi riposo,
tu se' da Dio odiata — pel tuo viver vitioso:
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Blind soul of man — you have lost your peace,
Under curse and ban — for your godless ways;
From Christ your spouse — your soul has strayed,
55)
55a)
H. Bosch, 1504, Hell fragment detail, Pinakothek, München (CGB '59)
Schongauer, c. 1480-90, engraving, The Temptation of St. Anthony, Public
Library, New York City
Not asked his aid — let mercy go.
Woe, woe, woe,
God's fear you do not know. (CGB)
There are parallel stirrings all over Europe, as in the hell-fury of the visions of Bosch.
As for Michelangelo, he was twenty-three when Savonarola was burned; his first
painting, Vasari says, had been a copy of Schongauer's Gothic Temptation of St.
Anthony; and he was so possessed by the penitential voice, that it echoed through his later
life, sounding again and again in his art and poetry.
(end Stabat Mater)
56)
56a)
Michelangelo, 1536-41, Charon, detail, Last Judgment, Sistine Chapel,
Vatican; + V detail
Same, Double: [A] Death and [B] Hell details
It was the basic polarity, not only of the sixteenth century, but of the Christian West, each
pole, as always, penetrating and empowering the other — Promethean energy and pride,
and the self-abasing surrender to holy love and fear. Certainly it was the cross of Michelangelo; his personality and works are strung in that tension.
Music:
Morales, c. 1540(?), from Emendemus in melius: "Attende,"
(Turner) ARCHIV S-2533 321
So in his age and the dark beginning of the Counter Reformation, (when the
implorations of Josquin had densened to Morales), Michelangelo returned to the Sistine
Chapel to paint his Last Judgment, reviving with more personal violence the old powers
of Death and Hell. The ambivalence under which this painting
57)
57a)
57b)
Same, Judgment, whole
Same, The Saved, rising, far left
Same, upper spread of the whole Judgment; + V detail of nude figures
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was conceived is illustrated by the problem of the nude figures. Aretino, inventor of the
newspaper and a writer of malign sway, sometimes called "the scourge of princes" and
later "the poison flower of the Renaissance," had written Michelangelo an open letter of
fawning praise (1537, telling him how to paint the picture, and asking for a sketch.
Michelangelo never replied. After a series of such affronts, Aretino began a campaign
against the painting (letter of November 1545) as lewd and heretical, belonging in a
bagnio or stew rather than in the Papal Chapel. This from a man who boasted of living
in a Venetian stew which his own sister managed, and whose bawdy dialogues satirize the
stews of the Renaissance Church. For Aretino exhibited the worst Catholic cleavage of
the time, an opportunistic hovering between pagan voluptuousness and hypocritic
religiosity. It was as if he had formed himself in the Borgia image.
58)
Same, detail of Christ and Mary; first, video return to upper spread
While Michelangelo, like the Protestant he was accused of being, followed the more
dangerous path, determinedly unifying the poles of Renaissance and Medieval, body and
spirit.
(end Morales)
59)
59a)
Same, Judgment, details of britches, front and back
Same, closer detail, front (video adds the lower section of 59)
The result of Aretino's campaign was that Michelangelo's painting was saved from
destruction only by being "purified". A painter thereafter called the "britches tailor" was
hired to daub in robes here and there, concealing certain portions of the figures, one might
say in the nick of time. But the conflict which led to this result was not initiated by
Aretino. It had begun before in Michelangelo himself; it had its roots in his art and soul.
He had been in his youth an admirer both of Lorenzo il Magnifico and of Savonarola.
60)
Same, Hell, detail with Minos; + V detail of V60a
When he first came to Rome he had written an attack on papal corruption under Julius II
— as he would paint, in the Judgment, Pope Paul III's master of ceremonies as Minos,
Hell-Guardian, wrapped in his own snake-tail.
Here helms and swords are made of chalices:
The blood of Christ is sold so much a quart:
His cross and thorns are spears and shields; and short
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Will be the time before his patience cease...
Who wears the robe is my Medusa still...
The holy banner only leads to ill. (after Symonds)
61)
61a)
Michelangelo, 1530 (copy), Leda and the Swan, National Gallery, London
Daniele da Voltera, 1565, Bronze bust of Michelangelo, detail, Bargello,
Florence
Music:
Willaert, pub. 1545, from Dulces Exuviae: Dido's Lament, Odyssey
32 16 0202
At that time Michelangelo was celebrating Pope Julius in the projected Tomb, as
he was to celebrate the Medici in Florence. The very man moved to the religious passion
of the late poems, painted the destroyed Leda and the Swan (1530), preserved in copies
— one of the most erotic works of the age; though all his works (with Willaert's setting of
Dido's love-death), hymn the Eros of touch (end Willaert): "No stair to heaven but earth's
loveliness".
So Michelangelo had known the moral cleavage, had subsumed it and laboured to
unite the severed realms. When hypocrisy in the guise of virtue accused him of Lutheran
obscenities, he was impelled forward,
62)
Michelangelo, Judgment, Flayed skin, detail, Sistine Chapel, Vatican
as if leaping the centuries, toward some Blakean reversal of values. On the skin which is
held by the flayed Saint Bartholomew, Michelangelo has painted what is evidently a
weirdly tormented portrait of himself.
63)
63a)
63b)
Same, detail of St. Bartholomew holding flayed skin (with video variant, V63)
Titian, 1545, Portrait of Aretino, detail, Pitti Palace, Florence
Again 62, Flayed Skin
At the same time the gross and somehow sinister figure of the saint, crouched on the hell
side of Christ, vindictively raising the knife — like one who has stolen into these circles
of religion and judgment, or, more terribly, belongs there — has been given the sensual
and violent features, the gross lips and beard (recognizable from Titian's portrait), of
Michelangelo's own metaphorical flayer, Aretino. As an early critic of the painting said:
(M. Pitti, 1545) "There are a thousand heresies, signally St. Bartholomew's beardless
skin."
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Thus the artist breaks with the embodied institutions of the faith on which, in his
old age, he increasingly depends.
a64)
Donatello, double: [A] 1427-35, Jeremiah, detail, (CGB '86); and
[B] 1455, Magdalen, detail (CGB 86); both: Duomo Museo, Florence
(video uses two single slides)
For 1st 64) Michelangelo, c. 1550-56, Pieta, Duomo Museo, Firenze; (CGB '86; or
V64, old black & white)
The sequence of pride and humility not only characterizes the historical movement of
Renaissance and Counter-reformation. It had been the central experience of the Middle
Ages: the lusty defiance of Aucassin, who would no doubt before his death come
grovelling in rags to those very crypts he had despised. That was the life-cycle of the
Archpoet, Abelard, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Donatello, Botticelli, perhaps even of
Leonardo. But in Michelangelo it becomes increasingly evident that the old return to
faith is in fact a new departure, springing from the titanic will. In him it is not so much a
change of direction as a fulfillment of the individual and creative quest. He had always
been dissatisfied with the realized. Now he presses beyond the embodiments of art
(Florentine Pieta, 1550-56) —
a65)
Double: [A] G. Pisano, 1301, Mystical Christ, from Pulpit, Pistoia; and
[B] Giotto, 1325-30, St. John's Ascension, detail, Santa Croce, Florence
1st 65) Michelangelo, c. 1550-56, Florentine Pieta, upper half: Nicodemus, Christ,
and Mary (CGB '86) [the slide show having inserted b65, another view of
the whole]
embodiments advanced about 1300 by Giovanni Pisano and Giotto, when Dante, looking
down from the sphere of stars, had seen the earth "such that he smiled at its vile
semblance."
e vidi questo globo
Tal, ch'io sorrisi del suo vil sembiante...
Chaucer had followed in the death of Troilus:
And down from thennes faste he gan avyse
This litel spot of erthe, that with the se
Embraced is, and fully gan despise
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This wrecched world, and held al vanite
To respect of the pleyn felicite
That is in hevene above.
Such is the Gothic ground of acceptance. But when Michelangelo makes it the theme of
his last poems: "Teach me to hate this world so little worth," the pulse has changed.
Some Renaissance imperative of conscious person and ennobled flesh has deepened the
struggle. Like the fall to humility of Lear, so mighty, so passionately arched against its
own surrender, Michelangelo's Christian yielding becomes the immolation of heightened
pride. This is written in the late poems, as in the last self-portrait, Michelangelo as
Nicodemus, brooding over the dead Christ.
For 1st 66) Same, Nicodemus, detail of face, as Self-portrait (CGB '86)
Io parto, a mano a mano
Crescemi ognor più l'ombra, e'l sol vien manco,
En son presso al cadere, infermo e stanco.
I pass now, day to day,
Each day augment to dark, and the sun grows cold;
I hover on to the fall, infirm and old. (CGB)
For 2nd 65) Florentine Pieta, looking up, from the statue's left side (CGB '84)
In this tensile darkening so personally his own, Michelangelo was the profoundest
resonator of Counter-Reformation experience — his the shade and burden of that tragic
mid-century.
For 2nd 64) Same, upper two thirds, black & white
Music:
Gombert, pub. 1539, from Confitemini Domino, (Tinayre) Lumen
32021
Did God born and crucified point into the world or out of it? Would our mortal
flesh, by that Incarnate archetype for the West, be consumed or glorified? Was the
Kingdom of God within us or beyond? If that was always the stretch of Christianity —
how heightened after 1200 by Joachim's Coming of the Spirit in time; how magnified
after 1500 by a groundswell of world and body, at once affirmed and denied.
3rd 65) Same, heads of Christ and Nicodemus, black & white
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In Michelangelo, against the sensuous mastery of represented passion, comes a
violence of soul breaking with all representations of sense. In recorded music, nothing so
affirms the tensile mastery as Tinayre's rendition of the Confitemini by Gombert, most
exalted of post-Josquin polyphonists.
2nd 66) Same, Nicodemus as Michelangelo, black & white detail (video: V2nd 66)
(end Gombert)
But is Gombert's weaving too smooth for the old Michelangelo?
a67)
67)
67a)
67b)
Michelangelo, c. 1556, Palestrina Pieta, whole; video, see Va67 (CGB '48)
Same, upper half (CGB '48)
Michelangelo c. 1499, Pieta, St. Peter's, Vatican (or V67a), whole
Michelangelo, 1526-33, Tomb of Lorenzo dei Medici, head of Evening, San
Lorenzo, Florence (or V67b, horizontal)
Music:
Vincentino, 1567(?), from Heu mihi: "Miserere," Bach Guild
HM 34 SD
On the other side is the tonal defiance of the Chromaticists, of whom Vicentino by 1555
had composed motets and Lamentations entirely in the half-tone scale (not to mention his
theoretical quarter tones). Here the expressive element itself becomes a gulf where the
old Modes go down, while the major and minor keys "remain, despairing of the port."
Who but Michelangelo could so have fused the antinomies?
(end Vicentino)
For him it was the time of the late unfinished Pietas: this, about 1556, formerly
from Palestrina. As Vasari says:
his judgment was so exacting that nothing satisfied him. He finished
few statues in his manhood, the completed ones having been done in
his youth.
Of course Michelangelo's reasons for leaving works unfinished varied from case
to case. But the larger significance remains — as with all vital drifts, emergent from the
particular and accidental.
68)
Michelangelo, 1545-50, Crucifixion drawing, British Museum, London
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68a)
68b)
Symbolic History
Same, 1550-55, another Crucifixion drawing, with Mary and John, Louvre,
Paris; while video takes an upper detail of 68
Again, Florentine Pieta, detail of Nicodemus, Christ, and Mary (B&W)
The late drawings, perhaps, give the clearest sign of his break with the determinate. Here
is no question of a recalcitrant material, forced abandonment, lack of funds. The artist
might have rendered his vision with whatever finish it required. Yet even in so swift a
medium, he preferred to hint by cloudy blurrings, at solemnities beyond expression.
Through the account of a French traveler, Blaise de Vigenere, we can visualize the
old sculptor in the penurious drabness of his room, standing sleepless nights before the
marble, a cardboard hat with a candle in it for light, using no models, measurements, or
pointings, but breaking into the stone
69)
69a)
Michelangelo, c. 1556, Palestrina Pieta, whole (CGB '86)
Michelangelo, 1550-56, Florentine Pieta, another view (CGB '84); while video
repeats Palestrina Pieta, upper half (CGB '48) from slide 67
from the front and sides, as if to reach for the enshrouded form. De Vigenere wrote:
I saw Michelangelo at work. He had passed his sixtieth year [he was
actually seventy-five] and although he was not very strong, yet in a
quarter of an hour he caused more splinters to fall from a very hard
block of marble than three young masons in three or four times as
long. No one can believe it who has not seen it with his own eyes.
And he attacked the work with such energy and fire that I thought it
would fly into pieces. With one blow he brought down fragments
three or four fingers in breadth, and so exactly at the point, that if only
a little more marble had fallen, he would have risked spoiling the
whole.
And spoil it he frequently did, at least to his own judgment, chipping too deep or
striking a flaw; then the work would be abandoned, one of many pregnant becomings,
stone ruins testifying to a search for the ungraspable, more poignantly expressive than all
the completed works others were so facile in.
a70)
b70)
Michelangelo, 1550-56, close detail of Florentine Pieta, with chipped arm;
while video shows such a detail from b70
Same, upper half, with same cracked arm (CGB '86); while video varies 68b
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70)
Symbolic History
Same, Florentine Pieta, whole, 1900 photograph
Sometimes, more terribly, the sculptor would become the enraged Saturn
devouring his children, as with the Florentine Pieta on which De Vigenere had probably
seen him working, and which Michelangelo intended for his own tomb. It is Vasari who
lets us reconstruct the scene of the violent old man, having come to hate this ripest but
imperfectible work of his hand, raging over it in the dark room, breaking it with the
mallet — the brooding face of Nicodemus sorrowing over the Christ, the artist's image of
himself and his sorrow — yet stranger still, hinting at God the Father suffering over his
world ("for it repenteth me that I have made them"), or as Lear would take it from
Jehovah: "crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once that makes ingrateful man" —
so the sculptor stands, the work in fragments before him, and as Vasari says, "would have
smashed it to atoms, had not Antonio his servant asked for it." Thus it was turned over to
a clever botcher, Tiberio Calcagni, who as a price for cementing it together tried to
"finish" it, spoiled the figure of the Magdalen with polishing, and would have ruined it all
except by good luck he caught the plague and died.
a71)
b71)
71)
71a)
V71b)
71c)
Again, Florentine Pieta, horizontal detail of a70, showing the damaged arm
Same, Head of Nicodemus, side view
Michelangelo, 1555-64, Rondanini Pieta, Sforzesca, Milan; while video uses
V71, from a B&W photograph
Same, upper half of the statue, seen from the side; while video details the
upper half of V71, just above
Same, side view, upper part, from whole side view (CGB '80; cf. NOW: The
Rooted Future 128)
Same, Rondanini Pieta, front view of the two heads
Indeed, the universal process, of which we have made Michelangelo and his art
paradigms, is not merely a building, but a destroying; the Promethean daring goes hand in
hand with the Phætonian fall. And this returns us to the Western history of which
Michelangelo was a part. For the concept of artist as protagonist of creative spirit is a
product of the way of thought Michelangelo and his age initiated, of the Renaissance
assertion of human power in an articulated world of time, space, and causality, and this
assertion was to run its course through sundry debacles and somber spiritual returns, of
which none is more deeply moving than the tragedy and transcendence of the late
Michelangelo, in whom the youthful pride of the Renaissance David grows to the
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Symbolic History
brooding but noble mask of Nicodemus, and then abandons outward form in the
dimensionless grief of the Rondanini Pieta (1550-64), this unfinished marble sabotaged
and remade six days before the artist's death.
Against that twice-quoted line: "soul can only mount by the beauty of earth,"
comes the break of a final sonnet:
Not any mastery of paint or stone
Can ease the heart that sees how love divine
Spreads on the cross to gather us his arms. (CGB)
Nè pinger nè scolpir fia più che quieti
L' anima volta a quell' amor divino
Ch'aperse, a prender noi, 'n croce le braccia.
In music the chromatic shorelessness of Vicentino would climax in Gesualdo's
Responsories, 1611.
Music:
72)
Gesualdo, 1611, "Tristis est anima," opening, (Craft) Columbia ML 5234
El Greco, c. 1575-77, Pieta, Johnson Collection, Museum of Art,
Philadelphia; + V detail
(fade Gesualdo)
For 2nd 71) Double: [A] Michelangelo, 1555-64, Rondanini Pieta, Milan; and
[B] Cimabue, c. 1283, Crucifixion, Refectory, Santa Croce, Florence
Here pride is so broken on the wheel of fate, that we are simultaneously thrown
back to the Byzantine and Medieval spaceless image and forward to the post-Renaissance
surrender
For 2nd 72) Double: [A] Again 72, El Greco Pieta; and [B] Rembrandt or school,
c. 1644, Christ at the Column, Walraf-Richartz Museum, Köln; slide
show adds 2nd 72a, single of this B, Rembrandt's Christ at the Column
and return — to this El Greco, or philosophically to Pascal — that whole current which,
down to our own day, penetrates humanism and comes out on the other side. For the
world's proudest civilization has perpetually humbled itself before the lean figure of selfsacrifice and earthly negation, the stripped Christ at the Column, for whom Rembrandt
too would fall out with form and color.
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73)
Symbolic History
Michelangelo and others, c. 1550-90, St. Peter's Dome, interior
And yet it is strange, the work to which Michelangelo turned with most intensity
at the close of his life was most assertive — the construction of the dome of St. Peter's.
Despite the opposition of enemies (or perhaps on that account) he would not give it up.
As he said: "many people believe, as I do myself, that I have been placed at this post by
God. I will not leave it..." Did the impersonality of the dome, which needed for its
realization only to be engineered, lead the artist beyond that frustrating involvement in the
image of man?
74)
Roman (Hadrian), 118-128 A.D., Pantheon, interior, Rome (CGB '86)
He was obviously aware of the series of mystically directed domes, from the Pantheon,
formed as Christianity opened its inner space in the soul of Rome,
75)
Byzantine (Justinian), 502-62, Hagia Sophia, interior with dome, Constantinople (CGB '77)
through Hagia Sophia in 6th-century Constantinople,
76)
Brunelleschi, especially 1420-36, Santa Maria del Fiore, Dome and Chapels,
Florence (CGB '84); slide show uses another view, showing the whole Dome
to the proud Brunelleschi dome of the Florence of his youth. It is as if he sensed the
symbolic values Yeats has expressed in his poem "Byzantium":
77)
Michelangelo, etc., c. 1550-90, St. Peter's Dome, as by moonlight, Vatican
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.
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Was the demand of spirit which drew him to the dome, that ultimate vaunt and
abstract music to the divine,
a78)
Vb78)
c78)
78)
Michelangelo, 1555-64, Rondanini Pieta, Sforza Castle, Milan (CGB '80)
Same, from the side, upper half (CGB '80; detail of NOW: The Rooted
Future 128)
Same, another view of the two faces; while video details from Vc78, an
underexposed slide of the two figures (CGB '80)
Same, side view, detail of heads (CGB '80)
also fulfilled in the last broken carving of his age? The Rondanini Pieta leaps past art,
sending up an incredible flash in its surrender. Here is the denial that reverses itself in
human value, as when Lear's pride is crushed: "Come, let's away to prison. We two
alone will sing like birds in the cage." This pity and transcendence has gone beyond the
Medieval breaking of pride and its somber return to faith, just as Shakespeare was to go
beyond that and beyond Renaissance tragedy. Did Michelangelo also win through into a
new realm of reconciling tenderness? It is hard to know. Certainly he did not live in
quite the time or place to make of that emergence a utopian romance. Shakespeare was
the first to come far enough out of the Renaissance vortex to sing the brave new world of
human love, wisdom, and power beyond. But Michelangelo has hinted at something in
these fragments shored against his ruin.
For 1st 79) Michelangelo, 1501-04, David, from his left, Accademia, Florence
(CGB '86)
Conversely, in the youthful David, from the time of his own pride and the last free
pride of his city, Florence, he inevitably suggested the tension and debacle to follow,
which was already laboring in his soul. That is what makes the David more than a wellwrought image of civic power. The whole Michelangelo is there, in that tour de force of
his youth, just as the whole man is in the last fragmented work of his age.
1st 80) Same, David, head, full face
It is the strangely troubled face of the David that foreshadows the future, as the poignance
of Botticelli invited Savonarola. If this is the Promethean giant, he bears with him the old
Augustinian flaw and ground of reversal: "Even this testimony, that God humbles the
proud."
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2nd 79) Same, David, front, knees to head (CGB '86)
Humbles, and yet, to add heresy to Augustine — by that humbling translates them
into gods. "Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, the gods themselves throw incense." Yet
why call it heresy? Had not Paul said: "Because the creature itself shall also be delivered
from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God"? And
was not this the fire through which the classical Prometheus walked, and emerged:
Dante, Michelangelo, Beethoven, Blake — avatars of Messianic flesh.
2nd 80)
Same, David, head and shoulders (CGB '86); to which slide show adds a
closer detail of 1st 80, the David, full face; also digital
Or, from the time of the David itself, Josquin's Hercules Mass:
Music:
August 2, 1995
Josquin des Pres, c. 1499(?), close of Kyrie, Hercules Mass, AS 73
Michelangelo: Storm Center
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SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
18. Period Styles: A Review of the Incarnate West
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
�Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501
SYMBOLIC HISTORY
Through Sight and Sound
18. Period Styles:
A Review of the Incarnate West
a1)
Double: [A] Ugarit (Syria), c. 2000 B.C., Archaic idol, silver and gold, Aleppo
Museum; and [B] Delphi, c. 475 B.C., Charioteer, Mus., Delphi; + video
detail of the double (see Va1), and a closer detail of the head of A (from A of
Va1)
b1) Greek bronze, c. 475 B.C., Charioteer, almost profile, head and shoulders,
Mus., Delphi
Vc1) Greek, Attic (Phidias, etc.), 447-432 BC, detail of maidens, E. Parthenon
frieze, British Museum, London
1)
Attic, 430-20 B.C., Eleusinian Votive Relief, National Gallery, Athens
(CGB '77 lacks contrast; video uses V1, detail only)
Western culture is bred of yoked opposites: Græco-Rome and Yahwe-East.
The Greek word for beautiful is καλοσ, which is also the word for good; and it
becomes, for Socratic reason, identical with knowing — ugliness and evil reduced to
deceptive masks of ignorance. So in the Republic:
Then the just is like the wise and good, and the unjust like the evil and
the ignorant... Then virtue is the health and beauty and well-being of
the soul, and vice the disease and weakness and deformity of the
same...
or the Protagoras:
since all virtues are knowledge, including justice and temperance and
courage...
Music: Mesomedes, c. 130 A.D. (or Byzantine?), Hymn to the Sun (close), Decca 20156
A (78)
6/1995
Period Styles
1
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Against the Attic celebration of that harmony (where the Goddess Demeter gives the king
of Eleusis the sacred grain, while Kore crowns him) —
2)
Roman 78-81 A.D., Vespasian invests Domitian, Cancelleria Reliefs, Vatican;
video: detail only
Double: [A] Parthenon, 447-38, Bearded Horseman, West frieze in situ; and
Etrusco-Roman, 1st cent. B.C., Head of a man, Vatican
2a)
the Roman will to apply Greek knowledge and beauty for the legal ordering of self and
world, seems a leap, as from Homer to Virgil, from vibrance to discipline, as weighted as
Mesomedes' Hymn to the Sun, or Vespasian's choice of Domitian for his heir. (close
Hymn to the Sun) Yet what are these contraries but lobes of the twofold Classical
command, for which Plutarch paralleled the lives of Greeks and Romans:
it becomes a man's duty to pursue and make after the best and choicest
of everything... virtue creating at once admiration of the things done
and desire to imitate the doer... so we have thought fit to spend time
and pains in writing the lives of famous persons —
a3)
Sumerian, c. 2600 B.C., Naked Orant, from Khafaje, Temple of Nintu,
Baghdad Museum
Vb3) Syrian from Megiddo (Palestine), c. 1350-1200 B.C., Statuette, probably a
ruler of Megiddo, Oriental Institute, Chicago
3)
Phoenecian, c. 1200 B.C., bronze Divinity (from Beirut?), Louvre, Paris; +
video detail
Music:
Jewish Music, traditional, Kaddish for Passover, etc., Decca 20156 B (78)
Are they not equally opposed to the earth-searing zeal which had been building up
for two millenia in the Semitic crescent — beauty and good as far apart as yaphey and
pov, as far as Egyptian bondage from the Beautiful in his cloak of many hues — all that
pride thrown down and exalted by the Unnamable:
The earth saw and trembled. The hills melted like wax at the presence
of the Lord. [Psalm 97] Arise, shine, for thy light is come, and the
glory of the Lord is risen upon thee. [Isaiah 60]
Va4) Wider view of the frescoes of slide 4
4)
Graeco-Syrian (Iran) lst cent. A.D., Sacrifice to the Palmyrene Gods, from
Dura Eurotus fresco, Nat. Mus., Damascus
6/1995
Period Styles
2
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
V4a) Same, head of a priest (cf. Early Christianity, 13)
Let that build through the ferment witnessed in art by the lst-century frescoes from
Dura on the Euphrates, through the Teacher of Righteousness of the Dead Sea Scrolls,
through Christ, John, and Paul to a symbolic flame in which this realm, Rome and all,
fuse in revelation:
Behold, I shew you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be
changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for
the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and
we shall be changed.
(I
Corinthians)
(fade Kaddish)
5)
Roman, c. 180, Bust of the young Commodus, Vatican Mus., Rome; + video
detail
So bring it to bear on the soul-hunger and itch of flesh which the Græco-Roman
overreach and inward erosion had become: — Longinus of the third century, with a statue
of Commodus:
As some children always remain pigmies...our tender minds, fettered
by a just servitude, are unable to expand...
And Paul:
Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools... Wherefore God
also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own
hearts...
6)
6a)
Early Christian, later 5th cent. (Africa or Spain), Mosaic to Optimus, Museo
Paleocristiano, Tarragona, Spain
Roman Christian (Milan), 5th cent., mosaic detail, an Ancestor of Christ,
Capella Sant' Aquilino, San Lorenzo, Milan
Seed that moody decay with the faith-paradox of Augustine's City of God:
It is incredible that Christ should rise again in the flesh and carry it up
to heaven with Him. It is incredible that the world should believe this;
and it is incredible that this belief should have been effected by a small
sort of poor, simple, unlearned men... The proofs, the persuasions, lay
6/1995
Period Styles
3
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
not in words, but in wonders... If all the world believed without
miracles, that remains a miracle as great as the rest. (XVIII, vi)
a7)
7)
German, 6th cent., Horseman Ornament, Landesmuseum, Karlsruhe
Lombard, later 6th cent., King Agilulf and warriors, gilded copper, Mus.
Naz., Florence
While the barbarian overthrow of the outward fulfills the Judgment-turn of spirit.
Jerome:
By their speed they outstripped rumor, and they took pity neither upon
religion, nor rank, nor age, nor wailing childhood... but filled the
whole earth with slaughter and panic.
But already this 6th century Lombard King Agilulf was baptised, throned and sworded
like Judgment God in the anomaly of warrior Christianity — as if the trumpet of radical
texts, deflected in the Dark-Age gyre of force, summoned through doom toward earthrenewal.
8)
Roman Christian, 3rd cent., statuette of the beardless Christ, Thermae, Rome;
+ video detail
Music:
Gregorian, Tenebrae factae sunt, opening, Solesmes, V-M 87
That would be the first task for the West, to convert the twilight farewell of late-classical
Christianity — as in the Gregorian Tenebrae, or this 3rd century beardless Christ in the
Roman Thermae —
(fade Gregorian)
9)
Double: [A] Northumbrian end of 7th cent., Ruthwell Cross, detail; and
[B] French Romanesque-Gothic, c. 1120-50, Tympanum Christ, detail,
Vezelay
V9a) Ruthwell Cross, whole carving: Mary drying Christ's feet
9b) Again B of 9: Vezelay, Christ detail; first, video closer detail of the head
through the upsurge rooted in the Dark Ages, this 700 Ruthwell Cross (left) with the
runes carved on it: "syllicre trêow/ on lyft laeden leohte bewunden,/ beama beorhtost" —
to the intensity of the 12th-century dawn: the Judgment Christ of Vezelay (right) with
Perotin.
6/1995
Period Styles
4
�C.G. Bell
Music:
Symbolic History
Perotin, c. 1200, from Beata Viscera, Tinayre, Lumen 32011B
Here memories of the sweet and sour of Hellenism, its refinement and question,
do not arise, as with Tertullian and Julian the Apostate, either as an evil to be shunned or
good to be pursued. That is all drowned. Surrender is as automatic as the stark reserve of
primitive style, the mounting of stripped earth, self and desire, on affirming creed. So
within the single-voice line of Perotin's Beata Viscera, we have come as far from
Gregorian as from pole to pole. (fade Perotin) If the Period Styles of the West find their
archetype in God's assumption of flesh and world, how fiercely that first coming stares
through space and time.
a10)
Vb10)
10)
10b)
V10c)
10d)
Amiens, c. 1230, Quatrefoil (Lust?) from socles of Portal of the Virgin,
Amiens
English MS, early 14th cent., Creation of the Animals, detail, Illuminated
French Bible of Holkam Hall, MS Ad. 47682 f. 2v., British Museum,
London
Franco-Spanish, late 13th cent., Blessed in Paradise, Main Door
Tympanum, Cathedral, Leon; + V details (thus V10a)
Same, lower detail
Exeter Cathedral, c. 1360, Façade, detail (CGB '80)
Gothic, 1391-95 and ff, Square and Drapers' Hall, Cracow
Music:
Pierre de la Croix, c. 1290(?), S'Amours-Au Renouveler, close Ducretet
Thomson 320 C 107
The second task was to widen the faith grip, to diversify the life it contains. In
that Gothic ambivalence of joy and denial, the springtime of earth smiles creedacceptance. So Ars Nova music reaches from this Pierre de la Croix, through de Vitry, to
the century's end.
By 1300, this Paradise Tympanum of Leon Cathedral teems with the life Juan
Ruiz, Archpriest of Hito, would pour, about 1330, into his Book of Good Love —
(end Pierre de la Croix)
Music:
6/1995
Philippe de Vitry, c.1330, Garrit gallus, Norton Hist., Volume I
Period Styles
5
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
such lusty matter as Snubnose the Tough, mountain cowgirl, who lugs the priest to her
hut and feeds him for a bout:
Comamos deste pan duro;
Después faremos la lucha —
narratives gemmed with festal poems (CGB):
Día era muy santo de la pascua mayor —
It was the holy day of Easter;
The sun came golden from the grove
And men and birds and flower-clusters
Welcomed him, chanting to love — cantando al amor.
Had not Jean de Meung's continuation of the Romance of the Rose called forth the
orders and ranks which Chaucer, a hundred years later, would set on Pilgrimage? —
(fade de Vitry)
Music:
Grimace, c. 1390, Alarme, alarme (Deller) Everyman 298 SD
Knight, Squire, Yeoman, Prioress, Nun, Monk, Friar, Merchant, Clerk, Man of Law,
Franklin, Shipman, Doctor, Wife of Bath, Parson, Plowman, Miller, Reeve, Summoner,
Pardoner, Host, Alchemist, and more.
(fade Grimace)
11) Giotto, 1297-1300, Miraculous Spring, detail of a boy drinking, St. Francis
frescoes, Assisi [video draws detail from the whole, Va11]
Next was to craft and shape those suspended vitalities, to give them the modes
and proportions of the dimensional — a task which, as Vasari stresses, dominates Italian
painting from early Giotto (this detail of a boy drinking at St. Francis' miraculous spring),
12)
Giov. Bellini, c. 1500-05, The Barque of Love Allegory, Accademia, Venice;
first, video detail
Music:
Dalza, pub. 1508, from Tastar de Corde, lute, L'Oiseau Lyre, SOL 325
to the Leonardo-tide of 1500 — this Giambellini Barque of Love. While music in its
passage from Ars Nova toward the temporal modes of major and minor, fills the chords
of Dalza's lute preludes.
(end Dalza)
6/1995
Period Styles
6
�C.G. Bell
a13)
13)
Symbolic History
H. Bosch, 1503-04, Garden of Delights, a central detail; Prado, Madrid
Bosch, 1503-4, Love-bubble detail, Garden of Delights, Prado, Madrid; + V
closer detail (video draws from V13, a wider detail)
Music:
Josquin des Pres 1500-10(?), from Allegez moy (6v) Seraphim SIC-6104
(1)
Nor was the translation of symbol into the sensuous language of earth confined to
Italy; it equally possessed the 1500 North. The globe of Bellini's watery Venus is
curiously matched, the same years, by the bubble calm of Bosch's secret lovers. So, like
Josquin's "Allegez moy" ("dessoubz la boudinette — under the belly button") (music), an
English lyric weaves its moony Beulah:
In arms he hent
That lady gent,
In voiding care and moan;
That day they spent
To their intent
In wilderness alone.
14)
14a)
(fade Allegez moy)
S.German, c. 1515, Talheim Altar, angel detail, Landesmuseum, Stuttgart;
+ V detail
Mathias Grünewald, Madonna in the Garden, upper detail, Church of
Stuppach, Würtemberg
In the happy convergence of sacred and secular, the Talheim Altar angel smiles
ravishingly, the "In dulci jubilo" receives Sicher's organ setting, while Skelton applies
the poetry of Mary to a fetching girl:
Music:
Fridolin Sicher, c.1500, In dulci Jubilo, Weinrich; Musicraft GM 127 A
Star of the morrow gray,
The blossom on the spray,
The freshest flower of May...
It were an heavenly health,
It were an endless wealth,
A life for God himself,
6/1995
Period Styles
7
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
To hear this nightingale
Among the birdes small
Warbling in the vale,
"Dug, dug, jug, jug!
Good year and good luck!"
With "Chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck!"
15)
(close Sicher)
French, c. 1340-45, Three living and three dead, Prayerbook of Bonne de Luxembourg, Cloisters, Metropolitan Museum, N.Y.C.; + V details
But that Incarnation heightens also the woes of flesh. Death, in the Dark Ages,
had been the hope of devotion. As life aspires from that ground, 14th-century Pucelle —
or a follower — illuminates the living and the dead: three proud horsemen, confronted by
three corpses — as Chaucer, a few years later, would take it up, in the clean irony of the
Pardoner's Tale:
"Now sires," quoth he, "if that ye be so lief
To find out Death, turn up this crooked way...
See ye that oak? Right there ye shall him find..."
16)
16a)
N.M. Deutsch 1517, Death & the Maiden, grisaille, Kunstmuseum, Basle;
+ V detail
Bosch, c. 1504, The Last Judgment, upper part of central panel of tryptych,
Gemäldegalerie, Vienna
After 1500, the eruption in Holbein, Baldung Grien, this Deutsch, of life's claim and
Dance of Death seizure, heightens toward the vortex of the tragic stage. The same
Skelton who had warbled for Isabel, keens "Upon a Dead Man's Skull":
Our days be dated
To be check-mated
With draughtes of death
Stopping our breath:
Our eyen sinking
Our bodies stinking,
Our gummes grinning,
Our soules brinning...
O goodly Child
Of Mary mild,
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Period Styles
8
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Then be our shield!
That we be not exiled
To the dun dale
Of bootless bale,
Nor to the lake
Of fiendes blake.
Va17)
17)
17a)
17b)
17c)
Memling, 1479, St. John in Patmos, with the Horsemen of the Apoclaypse,
from right wing of Baptistry, Catherine Altar, Hospital, Bruges
Varying detail of same, from which video shows head of John and three
Horsemen
Same, from The Vision of John: Fourth Horseman, Death, with Hell
following after
H. Bosch, 1510, Prodigal Son, Boymans Museum, Rotterdam
H. Bosch, 1480-85, Crucifixion, Royal Museum, Brussels (CGB '74); video:
upper section only
The central wonder is the meeting of two modes of reality: Medieval and
Renaissance. Nature, never better rendered (as in Memling's Vision of John), fulfills
itself in Revelation: here the Horsemen of War, Famine and Death, with Hell following
after. So an English poem of 1500 lifts a romance wandering to the anagogical:
He bare him up, he bare him down,
He bare him into an orchard brown.
In that orchard there was an halle
That was hanged with purpill and pall.
And in that hall there was a bede,
It was hanged with gold so rede.
And in that bed there lithe a knight,
His woundes bleding day and night.
18)
Q. Metsys, c. 1500 (Replica), Salvator Mundi, Gallery, Aachen (CGB '74)
By that bede side kneleth a may,
And she wepeth both night and day.
And by that bede side there stondeth a stone,
Corpus Christi wreten there on.
6/1995
Period Styles
9
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
— That wounded Knight the Body of Christ. So, in this Metsys variant of a lost Jan van
Eyck, we see the mirrored "omnivoyant" of God as man become the Western archetype.
If our culture has a focus it must be there, in the threefold Coming, Passion, and expected
Resurrection of a divine, self-enmeshed in flesh and world.
For 1st 19)
Indian, 12th-14th cent. A.D., Dancing Shiva, "Lord of the Dance,"
Museum, Portland, Oregon
Or is it always impossible to fix the oneness of a culture — as of the namebearing families and species of nature, which we still may recognize, through all their
variety, like the known face of a friend? Spengler and Toynbee thought to line up
cultures as you would the repetitive life-cycles of a plant.
For 1st 20) Chinese (Sui), 581-618, Standing Bodhisattva, Art Museum, Atami
But plants reenact what evolution has staked out for them. Whereas history is at the
exploratory tip of evolution itself, that tree which elaborates the new. Its recurrences
waver through a growth-web of branchings.
For 2nd 19) Hindu (Gupta), 5th cent.(?), Idealized Buddha, detail, British
Museum, London; + V detail
In this basalt Buddha, we have simultaneously to experience a neo-Platonic and
early-Christian parallel, in soul's withdrawal from the vale of Maya, and a difference in
the sensuous langour here, of soul's ecstasy; to observe a oneness with the whole family
of Buddhist cultures spread over Asia and through a thousand years, and the signature, in
this caressed volcanic rock, of the 5th-century Gupta school of North India.
2nd 20)
Chinese (Tang), 672-5, Seated limestone Buddha, Feng-hsien-ssu Temple,
Lung-men, Honan
How richly other and same is this colossal limestone from a century or so later
and 2500 miles away. With what triumph the mystic avatar is here seated on the
ceremonious refinements of Tang and Confucian Honan.
21)
6/1995
Japan, Kamakura Period, 1328, Shinto deity as Buddhist priest, Fine Arts,
Boston; with video details (cf. V21)
Period Styles
10
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Again, after six centuries and more, in Kamakura Japan, with how immediate a
life-grace this Shinto deity assumes (in painted wood and with crystal eyes) the guise of
Buddhist priest. A whole civilization emanates from him: rock gardens and perfect
houses, silks and flowered screens, the poetic courtliness that gives the loves of Genji the
art of a calligraphic scroll. We remember in the West the gradual assimilation of the
Dark Age fierce Christ to the suavities of every day, and we ask: Was the entire, related
earth ripening toward the temporalities it now militantly demands?
1st 22) Mosan-French 11th cent.(?), Head of Christ, Museum of the Basilica of
Notre Dame, Tongres
For the West, if its essential motion is the reading over of the eternal kingdom
into the actual, its incarnate one should exhibit two phases: as its modes are still
mysterious and earthless (this 11th century crucified Christ from the region of the Meuse,
in Belgium),
1st 23) Rembrandt 1661, detail of half-length Risen Christ,Alte Pinakothek,
Munich (CGB from a2nd 23, from which video draws its detail)
or as even its mysteries take flesh in the here and now. It is in the many-dimensioned
continuum which leads from the Romanesque-Gothic beginnings through the deep
personalization of Rembrandt's 1661 Risen Christ, that we must define a spectrum of
period styles.
2nd 22) Mosan, 11th cent., Head of Christ, detail; + V closer details
Music:
Catalan 1162, 1 v., Conductus for Count Berenguer IV, MHS OR
433 (close of instr. & voice)
Where each pole of that suspended one-many must be seeded with its opposite —
Carolingian already called a Renaissance; that human penetration of the sacred, shaping
(before 1100) the haunting pity of the Tongres Christ; or in music soon after, this planctus
for the death of Berenguer.
(close Conductus)
a2nd 23) Rembrandt, 1661, Risen Christ, half figure, München (copy of CGB '59;
see Pascal 56)
2nd 23) Again, Risen Christ, Head detail, with robe on the chest (CGB '59); from
which video makes closer details
6/1995
Period Styles
11
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
While late Rembrandt magnifies light, space, drama, by their seeming sacrifice to
the Christ mystery. So the Passions of the old Schütz, about 1664, strip the polychoral to
a single voice, as of chant: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
Music:
Schütz, c. 1664, from St. Matthew Passion, "Mein Gott," ARC-3172
(fade)
but charged with the tensile will of Baroque. Like yin-yang, the plot from Romanesque to
this.
24)
Mozarabic, 975 (Leon), Hell from a Beatus Apocalypse, Cathedral, Gerona;
+ V detail
Music:
Mozárabic, 10th(?) cent., close of Creed, from "unam sanctam,"
ARC-ST 2533 163
If the primary cleavage is of the timeless against time, ring first the changes of last
and changeless things — Apocalypse; yet even Apocalypse would rear in time a spatial
throne.
At Dark Age ground, before 1000, the Hell of a Mozárabic Beatus Commentary
presents in symbolic depiction (with this Silos Creed) the literal nothingness of the earth
to be dissolved. (end Creed)
25)
Bandol and Battaille, c. 1373-81, Destruction of Babylon, detail, Angers;
video: details only, below and above
Music:
School of Machault, c. 1380, Degentis vita, opening, (Munrow)
ARC-2565 052
Leap 400 years of Romanesque and Gothic to the Angers Apocalypse, and in
music to the school of Machault. Here expression, always more earth-embodied, still
serves the non-dimensional. How gradual at first, how hyperbolic at last, the empowering
which by 1600 would break all stabilities of the geocentric but God-centered world.
(fade Degentis Vita)
26)
6/1995
Dürer, 1496-98, Apocalypse, The First Four Trumpets Sound, Berlin, etc.;
from this whole the video takes details only, ranging from God to trumpeters
Period Styles
12
�C.G. Bell
26a)
26b)
Symbolic History
Same, First Four Trumpets, lower section, from which video takes two details
Dürer, 1496-98, Apocalypse, The Whore of Babylon, detail, upper right
Music:
Obrecht, c. 1490(?), Hosannah, Missa Fortuna Desperata, Decca
DL 79413
Dürer, 1496, time of the Masses of Josquin, or of this Obrecht, holds the symbolic
line of Gothic. But when the first four trumpets sound, the sky shattering like glass, the
cloudy firmament rolled up as a scroll, the things of nature blown like withered leaves, it
is the created real which takes the cyclone of spiritual doom, the dimensional earth on
which the fires fall — as the Christian struggle, then assuming passionate body, swept the
new men and nations, economies, science, in the whirl of its religious wars.
(end Obrecht)
a27)
27)
El Greco, 1610-14, The Vision of St. John, Opening of the Fifth Seal, Metropolitan Museum of Art, N.Y.; + two V details
Same, close detail of figures to the right (copy from CGB '74, 1600 2nd 3); to
which video adds a similar group detailed from a27
Music:
Giov. Gabrielli, pub.1615, from Timor et tremor (close) Angel 36443
Though the climax delays another hundred years (the great style-divides
suspiciously hugging the centuries); it flames in the last works of El Greco and of
Giovanni Gabrielli — as if what Renaissance art and thought had dared — Bruno's
infinite universe of besouled material worlds: this earth, sun and moon, planets and
innumerable stars — were swept in the Muskostrom of now physical doom.
(end Gabrielli)
It is the dynamic divide between the explosive Mannerism of late-Renaissance
28)
V28a)
28b)
6/1995
Rubens, c. 1620, Fall of the Damned, Aachen Gallery replica (CGB '74) of
the Alte Pinakothek original, Munich
Rubens, c. 1620, Small Last Judgment, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (here
upper half, but videoed from the whole (CGB '59; see Baroque 2nd 73)
Again, Fall of the Damned, lower section (video, panning on 28, goes from a
close detail to a wider spread; slide show uses a CGB '74 detail: a wheel of
bloated sinners
Period Styles
13
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
and another country with more gravitational laws.
Music:
T. Merula, c. 1640, Capriccio cromatico, close, Mus. Guild 129
In Rubens, 1620, the Last Judgment itself is a pagaent of corporeal triumph and display.
For more than a hundred years the pomp of Baroque churches, the might of fugal music,
the causal order of the universe, would assert the timeless and spaceless by a phenomenal
opera (how majestic its scenery, how reasoned its chords) staged exactly to the converse
values.
(end Merula)
29)
Limbourg Brothers, c. 1416, Hell, Tres Riches Heures, p. 91, Chantilly; with
video details
Music:
Dufay, c. 1420, Creed (close) Missa Sine Nomine, "et in spiritum"
Lyrichord LLST 7234
Perhaps the half-way mark from Dark Age symbol to Rubens' blubber Hell (and
curiously, like that Fall, a fountaining blast and fiery tongue of the damned; though in the
clarity of Gothic wit, its counter-pole) is this Pol de Limbourg about 1416.
While in Dufay's earliest Mass (Dufay, who would later bring Renaissance almost
to the embodied force of Josquin) we hear the 1420 continuance of such angular thinness
and mood-suspension — those double leading-tones and bare fifths of Ars Nova. Let
both stand midway in that first phase of the twofold West — the enfleshment of
eschatology.
(end Dufay)
30)
French Ivory carving, 13th cent., Castle of Love, Victoria and Albert
Museum, London; with video details
Against which, the arts of earthly joy had been springing from the judgment
ground, preparing for the Western incarnation's second phase.
Music:
13th c. motet on Adam de la Halle's tune "Robins m'aime"
Seraphim SIC-6052
Though in this 13th-cenutry mirror case of the Castle of Love, as in the music of triple
runs hung over bare-fifth loyalty — this motet based on Adam de la Halle's "Robin loves
me, Robin has me" — in these, as in the a-causalities of dream-romance, delight is as
brittle, as thin, as its spatial rendering.
(end Adam de la Halle)
6/1995
Period Styles
14
�C.G. Bell
31)
Symbolic History
Pol de Limbourg, c. 1415, May, Tres Riches Heures, Musée Condé, Chantilly;
with video details
Music:
Binchois, c. 1425-30, De plus en plus, close (Cape) Anthologie
Sonore 39
In the museum- (and concert-hall-) without-walls, moments — the dawn birth of
1400 — are always ours; as the dream lovers, in May of the Tres Riches Heures (and to
Binchois' "De plus en plus") issue from the castle through a little wood, into a hawthorneflowered space, which first gives them ground to think their pleasures real. Charles
d'Orleans:
Summer's harbingers have come —
Les fouriers d'Esté sont venus
Pour appareillier son logis,
Et ont fait tendre ses tappis
De fleurs et de verdure tissus.
32)
(end Binchois)
Titian, c. 1519, The Bacchanal of Andros, Prado, Madrid; video: details only
(cf. V32a, b, c)
Music:
Willaert, c. 1535(?), Ricercare, 3-v. #7 Schott, (close), MHS 913
A hundred years, and even myth, Titian's Bachanal of Andros, stakes out a
summer shore for the rapt enfleshment of the dance of wine and love. That dynamic of
sense — as in the Ricercares of Willaert, is a battle call, which turns the 16th-century to a
field of moral war.
(end Willaert)
33)
33a)
33b)
Rubens, c. 1632(?), Castle Park with Figures, detail, Kunsthistorisches
Museum, Wien (CGB '59); with video details, as Va33
Rubens, 1631, Rubens' Garden, Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Return to 33, Castle Park, right section (which video divides to above and
below)
Music:
6/1995
Wm. Lawes, c. 1635, from Pavan (l & 3), Consort no.8 in G, violin,
theorbo, etc. Argo ZRG 555
Period Styles
15
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Symbolic History
By the Cartesian 17th, Rubens complements enfleshed Apocalypse with a liferapture, where chivalric dream and pagan myth lift this moated castle, the artist, his wife
and guests, on a validating wave of present good. (music skip) Like Royalist England,
William Lawes, Jonson's "Penshurst":
Thou hast thy walks, for health as well as sport;
Thy mount, to which the dryads do resort,
Where Pan and Bacchus their high feasts have made
Beneath the broad beech, and the chestnut shade...
Herrick's "Come, my Corinna, come, let's goe a Maying":
See how Aurora throwes her faire
Fresh-quilted colours through the aire:
Get up, sweet slug-a-bed, and see
The dew bespangling herbe and tree...
(fade Lawes)
That may have been the prime of the European fruitful earth.
34)
Gainsborough, 1748-50, Robert Andrews and his Wife, National Gallery,
London; + V details
Music
Thos. Arne, c. 1740(?), "Oh, the transport of possessing”, from
"Suleiman and Zaide," Technichord-2 No. l0
Since by the 18th century of Gainsborough, Fielding, this Arne "Transport of possessing"
— though the Glorious Revolution, Locke and Common Law have laid a firmer base,
both in philosophy and custom, for the freehold pride of cornucopian ground — the
skeptic edge of Enlightenment already undercuts the Lord and Lady Booby of the sunlit
heritage.
(fade Arne)
35)
Moritz von Schwind, 1858, Morgenstunde, Schack Gal., Munich (CGB '59);
first, video details
Music:
Brahms, 1869, from Alto Rhapsody (major melting, voice and
Chorus) RCA VLM 1146
With Moritz von Schwind's mid 19th century Waking — as in those tearful
meltings into the major which Schubert taught Schumann, Liszt, this Brahms — the
6/1995
Period Styles
16
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
wedding of expected joy has been over-extended. So parents used to say, when children
could not stop giggling: "Your tickling string is hanging out, and it's going to get stepped
on."
(fade Brahms)
36)
36a)
36b)
Toulouse-Lautrec, 1900, Messaline, Bührle Foundation, Zürich; with video
details
Same, detail, the upper half of the figure (only in the slide show)
Joan Miró, 1938, Self-portrait (as cosmo-chaos), J.T. Soby, New Canaan, CT
(replacing the 36b of earlier videos: Toulouse-Lautrec, 1891, "A la Mie," Fine
Arts Museum, Boston
Music:
Mahler, 1888, from lst Symph., 3rd Movement, VOX VBX 116, face
2
By the end of the century the overstretching breaks in Nietzschean scorn. Thus
from Brahms to Mahler. Is Toulouse-Lautrec's "Messaline" named for the silk, or for
Emperor Claudius' cruel profligate? Or is it exactly the silken opulence centuries had
been in search of which stirs this consciously late-Roman surfeit of flesh and venom of
soul? As in Pound's Blast:
They howl. They complain...
That the twitching of three abdominal nerves
Is incapable of producing a lasting Nirvana.
If the earth-titan for whom Mahler named the First Symphony is the alienation of
that God who took on time and flesh, what Resurrection (his title for the Second) was at
hand? (fade Mahler)
37)
French, 942-84, Sainte Foy Reliquary, Conques, Auvergne; + V detail
So far, we have felt out the dual incarnation of the whole. In that continuum we
have now to trace and name the century-by-century changes of the style moon. First we
lay it down, as if it were true — though birth was stirring even there — the stripped
negation of the Dark Age ground. Dogmatic reduction (we say) has become with the
Christianized tribes of the North the automatic home: this jewelled reliquary of Sainte
Foy throned over the mortal shroud.
6/1995
Period Styles
17
�C.G. Bell
38)
Symbolic History
Nicholas of Verdun, 1181-83, Enamel Resurrection, Klosterneuburg, Austria;
first, video details
As shoots of Romanesque-Gothic spring from that ground, they work in creative
tension with its otherworldy creed. Year by year the bare field of damnation and prayer
gathers more of earth's compromising life. Nicholas of Verdun's 1180 Resurrection raises
God into time. So scholasticism reshapes the faith it acclaims, planting reason in
Tertullian's paradox: "Incarnation sure because impossible."
Reason, like digestion, can dissolve its own frame. So with the speculation of the
Greeks. But medieval question begins and ends in dogma. (Digital varies the following
Laos slide-sequences.)
39)
V39a)
39b)
French Gothic, 1160-1205, Laon Cathedral from the S.E., Nave and West
Towers (CGB '59); video, detail only
Same, W. Front, street view: Rose and Portal (detail from CGB '74, Gothic
II, 52)
Same, West Front, South side of South Portal: Joseph, Mary with Christ,
and Simeon (CGB '59); while video shows, from the same tympanum, Mary,
Angels, and Dove (from slide 40a)
It is the protection of the transrational fabric from the energy to be released there
which makes possible the giant constructions of Gothic and Renaissance — a dialectical
buttressing of which the Cathedral is an outward sign. Consider Laon, with Thomas
Aquinas' triple vaultings over the insoluble One as Father, Word and Spirit, both changeless and active in the world:
It would seem there cannot be any procession in God... For procession
signifies outward movement. But in God there is nothing subject to
motion...no diversity...
On the contrary, Christ says, from God I proceeded...
I answer... as outward procession to external matter... inward
procession to the intelligible word... one with the source whence He
proceeds...
40)
6/1995
Same, from Central Portal and bay, detail of Mary and Christ with Saints
(CGB '59); while video shows lower detail from the South Tympanum,
Period Styles
18
�C.G. Bell
40a)
Symbolic History
Annunciation, etc. (again from slide 40a), then picks up the statues of 39b,
from the same portal, with a detail of Simeon, Mary, and Christ
Same, Tympanum of the West Front, South Portal (CGB '59), already
featured by the video, which here details the Mary and Child of the Central
Portal (from 40), returning to the whole S.W. Tympanum, and so to a flash of
the West Towers
It would seem that procession cannot be called generation...
On the contrary, it is said: This day have I begotten thee...
I answer: …not generation from non-being to being... but the origin of
a living being from a conjoined living principle... as a man proceeds
from a man...
(But procession does not end with the Word; there is another, of the Spirit, called the
procession of Love. Lest we slide to a pantheism of infinite processions:)
I answer: Divine processions can be derived only from actions which
remain in the agent, one with his essence... relations to creatures are
not real in Him...
(Creation thus withering like a pricked baloon. What then of God's body?)
A divine person signifies a relation as subsisting... Numerical terms
denote in God... a transcendental multitude...
(Sursum Corda! The Greek one-many has been seated in spirit!)
In such fiats of daring the Organum of Perotin vaults over modal Gregorian,
pillared on the transhuman perfection of bare chords.
41)
V41a)
V41b)
41c)
Same, Laon, interior, Choir and Nave, looking SE (CGB '59)
Same, section of the south side of the Nave (CGB '74)
Same, looking due east, from Nave into Choir (CGB '74)
Same, Choir only, with Rose and Lancets (CGB '74); of which the video
shows only the Rose Window
Music:
42)
6/1995
Perotin, c. 1200, from Organum Triplum, Alleluia, SAWT 9530a
(end Alleluia)
French Gothic, c. 1260, Crusaders receive Host, inside portal, Cathedral of
Rheims; video, detail only
Period Styles
19
�C.G. Bell
42a)
Symbolic History
Roman de Fauvel, 1316, Carnival sports, MS fr. 146, f. 34r, Bibliotheque
Nationale, Paris
Everywhere temporality is trained on the mystical. The civic and national work in
the hierarchies of chivalry and church, as these Rheims Crusaders receive the symbolic
host of earthly vanity and divine reward. Even the pre-science of Bacon takes the cover
of scholastic authority. Goliard poetry flowers in the monastic garden. "Sumer is icumen
in," lively and cunning canon, has alternate words of pious Latin. How sprightly, to lute,
pipe and viol, the Worcester "Alleluia psallat."
a43)
43)
East Anglian, early 14th cent., whole Beatus Page, Psalter of the St. Omer
family, British Museum, London
Same, upper right detail; from these and three other slides (Vb43, Vc43, V43a)
the video pursues a sequence of four details only
Music:
English, c. 1300 (Worcester) Alleluya psallat (instr.) EMS201
Sacred manuscripts, the cathedrals themselves, break into marginalia of fighting,
drinking and love; while the secularized drama, issuing from the church doors, fills the
holy ground with juggling and profane farce.
That these sports can be embraced on a Psalter's Beatus page, as the Tumbler in
the French miracle devotes his dance to our Lady, allows them a freedom from
responsibility which after the Renaissance they could never claim; while their doubtful
charter (comments here on the Fall, and the Drunkenness of Noah) sharpens their joy,
heightening everywhere the plangent clash of Gothic.
(end Alleluya psallat)
44)
44a)
French Gothic, c. 1300, St. Jacques, detail, Musée, Beauvais; first, video
detail
French, 13th cent., painted ivory, Angel, Louvre, Paris (CGB '80)
Music:
Fauvel MS, 1316 (but music earlier), Motet, Zelus familie, ARC
2723045 (2 b)
Meanwhile, below all, remains the other center, suffusing primitive functionality
with a haunting and unresolved enigma, neither happy nor sad, but beyond and above
6/1995
Period Styles
20
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
both, the mystery of the May morning, of bare chords, the archaic smile, Lancelot's night
with Guenevere in the country from which no stranger returns.
(fade Zelus familie)
45)
Hans Holbein the Younger, 1533, The Ambassadors, National
London; with video details, including one of the skull
Music:
Gallery,
Susato 1551, Pavane La Bataille (Munrow) Angel S36851
Of course this liberated energy ultimately dissolves the frames in which it is born,
or formulates others of conscious responsibility, replacing the supermundane and nontemporal with the pride of man and earth. Though the dark sonorities of Susato's Battle
Pavan, like the distorted skull in the foreground of Holbein's Ambassadors, would
summon Renaissance grandeur to the enobling brunt of tragedy. This humanist shift
occurs in a four hundred year complex, of which we have now to define the stages.
(fade Susato)
46)
46a)
46b)
Double: [A] French, c. 1220, plaster copy of lost St. Peter head from Notre
Dame, Paris; and [B] Andrea Bonaiuti da Firenze, c. 1365, "Boccaccio" head,
Spanish Chapel, Florence; + V singles
Double: [A] 13th cent., Chartres; and [B] 14th cent. Siena Pal. Pub. (video
then returns to 46: St. Peter and "Boccaccio" head)
G. Pisano, 1302-10, detail of Prophet, from upper zone of the Pulpit,
Cathedral, Pisa
Consider the divide between 13th-century Gothic (in music, Ars Antiqua) and the
late-Gothic of the 14th century. In the cast (left) from the original Notre-Dame St. Peter,
about 1220, the released force, the personality, is hierarchical, one with the transrational
synthesis of faith. Even troubador song and chivalric romance seem born outside time:
their logic is of selfless devotion, and it is to the crypt of silence that they return.
Whereas, in the so-called Boccaccio head from the Spanish Chapel in Florence
(mid-14th century), secular force and person stretch an already loosening ascetic creed.
So town-dwarfing cathedrals yield to the civic claims of towered Italy and the trading
North, Thomas Aquinas to the agitations of Wyclif; literature expands to Petrarch,
Machault and Chaucer, music to the exploratory modulations of Ars Nova. Yet all this
vigor retains from the Medieval some half-spaceless enigma of the earth-pilgrimage.
6/1995
Period Styles
21
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Between these style-faces towers their 1300 boundary, the Divine Comedy, both
Gothic synthesis, and the liberating revolt of the new man.
47)
V47a)
Erwin v. Steinbach c. 1300, façade design, detail, Strasbourg Cathedral;
video: lower part only
English (Ely) early Decorated esp. 1322-42, Choir, Octagon, and Lantern,
Crossing seen from the south, Cathedral, Ely (CGB '77); with video return to
47, upper part
For Ars Antiqua we have heard Perotin with the Cathedral of Laon. Now with the
Ars Nova "Amen" of the Tournai Gloria, let us range later Gothic, from Erwin von
Steinbach's 1300 Strasbourg façade design, through Italy and France, and back to Ely
crossing with its octagon. This art quickens with ingenuity; while the pure chord fabric
of music widens for the progressive inventions of hocket.
Music:
Ars Nova, c. 1320, Tournai Mass, Gloria, Amen, SAWT 9517-A Ex
47b)
47c)
48)
V48a)
Va49)
49)
Va50)
Siena Cathedral, upper façade, completed 1380 (CGB '48)
Same, Nave, interior, esp 1229-64
Orvieto Cathedral, 14th cent., upper façade, (CGB '84)
Same, Choir, interior (CGB '84)
Giotto, 1303-06, Scrovegni Chapel, interior, Padua
Giotto, 1304-06, Adoration of the Magi, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua
Andrea (Bonaiuti) da Firenze, 1343-77, fresco: Triumph of St. Thomas
Aquinas with Arts and Sciences, Spanish Chapel, Florence (CGB '59)
50)
Again, Spanish Chapel frescos: Harrowing of Hell (CGB '59)
V50a) Same, Church Militant and Triumphant, lower detail (copy of CGB '59, see
18th Century 65)
51)
French, 14th cent., carving, Madonna, Senlis Cathedral (CGB '59)
a52)
English Decorated (Ely), 1322-42, exterior, Ely (CGB '77; cf. V47a, above)
52)
Same, interior, Crossing with Octagon, Ely (CGB '77)
V52a) Same, a more flood-lighted view of the Crossing (1994 video insert)
Like that Gloria, the Gothic dome of Ely is twenty-five years past what we have
called the 1300 divide.
For 1st 53)
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Period Styles
22
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Symbolic History
Florence, esp. 13th-15th cent., General view of the city ( detail from CGB '59,
Milton 29); here video also previews Giotto's Campanile, Florence (CGB '48;
see 2nd 53)
But since, in the continuous rebirth within Gothic, the same question will be
posed by 1400: how to distinguish the 14th century from the 15th, which for all its
medieval heritage, we call Early Renaissance — let us stake out the farthest advance of
Italian Ars Nova and School of Giotto toward the natural harmonies to follow. Art offers
an array of softening grace, from Giotto's tower, finished fifty years after his death,
1st 54) Nino Pisano, c. 1365-68, Madonna del Latte (lighter version), Museum of
San Matteo, Pisa
through the observation of Andrea and Nino Pisano — this Madonna del Latte, tender as
Dante's Stream-of-Grace metaphor: "No infant so quickly turns its face to the milk...as I
to dip eyes in that water..." —
55)
Altichiero, 1390-95, fresco: Saints present members of the Cavalli family to
Madonna and Angels, central section, St. Anastasia, Verona; video draws
from Va55, the whole fresco
in fresco, the increasing immediacy ties this Altichiero to the 1390 miniatures of dei
Grassi.
For 2nd 54)
Giovanni dei Grassi, c. 1385-95, The Visconti Hours, BR 90, Marriage of the
Virgin, Bibl. Naz., Florence; video: lower section only
While of recorded music, Landini's "Gram piant' agli occhi" most ripens toward the
suavities of Dufay.
Music:
2nd 53)
3rd 54)
2nd 55)
6/1995
Landini, c. 1370(?), Gram piant' agli occhi, ARC 3003
Giotto and after, 1337-87, Campanile, Florence (CGB '47, from the dome
of the Cathedral)
Madonna del Latte (darker version); video shows a detail of each slide,
the light and the dark
Again, Altichiero's Virgin and Saints; video shows only closer details
Period Styles
23
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
V2nd 55a) Again, from The Visconti Hours: Marriage of the Virgin, closer detail
a56)
Again, Giovanni dei Grassi, c. 1385-95, The Visconti Hours; BR 48,
Birth of the Virgin, det., Bibl. Naz., Florence
56)
Double: [A] Giovanni dei Grassi, c. 1385-95, The Visconti Hours, Vol. I
B.R. 48, Birth of the Virgin, det., Bibl. Naz., Florence; and [B] Jan van
Eyck, c. 1422(?), Birth of John the Baptist, Mus. Civ., Turin
56a)
B of 56; video: details only
Dei Grassi died a year after Landini. In his Visconti Hours (left), the intimate
International Style makes its furthest Italian and 14th-century advance. But here we have
coupled it with a comparable birth from the Turin Miniatures (right), probably by Jan van
Eyck and some thirty years later — over the threshold of Chaucer's pilgrims, when music
too has ripened from the fifth-based poignance of Landini (fade Gram piant' aqli occhi), to
Dufay's triadic counterpoint.
Music:
Dufay, c. 1433, from Alma Redemptoris Mater (Cape) AS 35
In each art, Early Renaissance defines itself: within the old context of sacred myth
and authority, the harmonious and observational, by quiet infiltration, have possessed the
body of an ostensibly Medieval universe. The revealed assumes the fabric of physicality;
while the moods and details of earth find the consistency of their own ordering — though
that order remains insular, not yet proclaimed of the whole.
57)
57a)
57b)
Double: Brancacci Chapel frescoes, c. 1425: [A] Masolino, Sin of Adam and
Eve, and [B] Masaccio, Expulsion of Adam and Eve; Chiesa del Carmine,
Florence; + V detail of double (from V57)
Masolino, Sin of Adam and Eve
Masaccio, Expulsion of Adam and Eve, detail
(fade Dufay's Alma)
Yet in the Rebirth ferment of the Florence of that time, the revolution of human
power grows more absolute, in theory and practice. As we face the frescoes on either side
of the entrance to the Brancacci Chapel in the church of the Carmine, across the Arno —
the linear thin continuance of Masolino's Sin of Adam and Eve (left), against the tragic
might of the young Masaccio's Explusion (right) — the conscious divide of 1425 piles
itself on the style-shift of 1400, quietly attested (in Masolino) by the soft space and
personality of International Gothic. But where the actual and embodied has made (in
6/1995
Period Styles
24
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Masaccio) the breakthrough Alberti's Treatise on Painting ties to flesh: "as long as breath
remained to it, whoever spurned the flesh would spurn life itself" — how can we call
such an awakening "insular"?
58)
V58a)
58b)
Donatello, c. 1430, Portrait of Niccolo da Uzzano, Bargello, Florence
Donatello (with Rosso, and Ciuffagni), 1415-22, Prophet with a Scroll,
detail of head, Mus. dell' Opera del Duomo, Florence
Donatello, c. 1455, Youthful St. John the Baptist, Bargello, Florence
At its boldest — here Donatello's Bust of Uzzano, about 1430 — it must seem
that the humanist transformation is complete. We have to remind ourselves that this force
is cultivated in the shelter of an unchallenged faith-frame, its daring permitted by
ambiguity of values. So in Valla's "Dialogue of Free Will", which Calvin and Leibnitz
would praise, reason heretically denies freedom, but within a fable of Tarquin and the
Oracle, and over a return to Patristic surrender: "How is the pot to question the Potter?"
We remain in the immediacy of rebirth — the secular as unvalidated antithesis in
Catholic creed. Only by what would seem a backward step, the zeal of Reformation
against that double talk, would we enter the late Renaissance phase of struggle.
Whereas the century of Donatello
a59)
59)
59a)
Gentile da Fabriano, 1422-23, Adoration of the Magi, altar, detail, Uffizi,
Florence (CGB '59)
Gentile da Fabriano, 1422-23, Adoration of the Magi with Predella (on
video, Predella is cut), whole, Uffizi, Florence (CGB '59)
Same, Procession detail, above, to which video adds a return to much of the
central panel
runs a sequence of naive delights —
Music:
N. Grenon, c. 1420(?), "Noe" close of "Nova vobis gaudia," SAWT
9505A
earth and man not yet bound to self-responsibility for thought and act. In Gentile da
Fabriano, in an isorythmic Noel by Grenon (both about 1420), we wake to child-renewal
of the Garden. The Kings who kneel below have come through Tuscan hills above, like
hunters, mounted, with leopards and falcons, with hound and horn.
6/1995
Period Styles
25
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
(end Grenon)
a60)
Vb60)
Benozzo Gozzoli, 1459, Procession of the Magi, Medici Palace, Florence
(slide shows vertical left section, with Cosimo and Piero de' Medici below;
video shows only that detail, using Va60)
Same, detail with John VII, Emperor of Byzantium
That century heightens the realism without restating the aim. The walls of the
Medici Chapel, under Gozzoli's legend of the same Epiphany, celebrate the "bel viver
fiorentino." But that life is wider than Florence. Let us range Europe again, with Dufay's
"Se la face ay pale" Kyrie (c. 1450) — from Ghiberti's doors to van der Weyden's
Bruges, and back to the Tuscan complement.
Music:
Vc60)
60)
V60a)
a61)
61)
Va62)
62)
62a)
63)
63a)
Dufay, c. 1450, "Se la face ay pale," from Kyrie, AS-25
Same, Magi frescoes, right: from wide vertical section, video shows upper
part, Procession winding into the hills
Same, detail with Lorenzo de' Medici
Same, detail of mounted youth with a leopard
Again, Medici Chapel frescoes, from the Chancel, detail of an Angel
Ghiberti, 1425-52, Shepherds from Abraham and Isaac, East Doors,
Baptistry, Florence (CGB '48)
Roger v. d. Weyden, 1455-60, Annunciation, from the Magi Altar, Alte
Pinakothek, München (CGB '59)
Same, detail of Mary (CGB '59)
Roger v. d. Weyden, 1440, St. Luke Painting the Virgin, Fine Arts Mus.,
Boston [or CGB '59, whole and (unused) details of the Munich replica, see
video file V62a, b, c, d]
Baldovinetti, 1460-62, Nativity, SS. Annunziata, Florence
Same, detail, left, landscape [or V63 (unused) alternates, CGB '86]
Perhaps the most loveable picture of all for innocence and observation is
Baldovinetti's fresco of the Birth by a ruin on a limestone ledge over the Val d'Arno,
which by such mixed techniques as Leonardo would pursue, has almost faded off the
wall. In this, as in everything, it speaks that Florence:
Quant'è bella giovinezza
Che si fugge tuttavia!
6/1995
Period Styles
26
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
64)
Hugo van der Goes c. 1480(?), Death of the Virgin, Gröningemuseum, Bruges;
with video details
64a) Same, a more balanced detail
Music:
Tinctoris, c. 1475(?), from Kyrie, Christe Eleison, Missa 3 vocum,
Seraphim SIC-6104
In late 15th-century Flanders, two painters press (in opposite directions) toward
the human consciousness of 1500. Van der Goes' Death of the Virgin, painted not long
before his own death of melancholia, invokes the darkening tessitura of Ockeghem, or of
this Tinctoris three-voice Kyrie. Even an anonymous English poem projects such
imploration:
Sodenly afraid,
Halfe waking halfe sleping,
And gretly dismayd,
A woman sate weping,
With favour in her face far passinge my reson
And of her sore weping this was the encheson.
Her sone in her lappe lay, sche seid, slein by treson,
If weping might ripe be, hit semed then in seson...
65)
65a)
(end Christe eleison)
Memling, 1489, Martyrdom of St. Ursula, St. John Hospital, Bruges; video:
details only — central, above, below
Memling, 1489, Reliquary of St. Ursula, St. John Hospital, Bruges
Music:
Pierre de la Rue, c. 1500(?), Sanctus, Missa Ave sanctissima Maria
(6v) Seraphim, SIC 6104
Against the passionate realism of van der Goes, Memling quietly enriches
temporal celebration. So with the wreathing of sacred polyphony over the Europe of
Josquin des Pres. As if, in this Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, the glow of figures, fabrics,
reflecting armor, and background space, continually voiced the overlapping delight of
Pierre de la Rue's six-part "Holy, Holy, Holy." (music) Yet all that earth-praise flowers in
the reliquary shrine of church containment.
Va66)
6/1995
Leonardo da Vinci, 1498, Cartoon of the Virgin and Child, with Anne,
National Gallery, London
Period Styles
27
�C.G. Bell
66)
66a)
Symbolic History
Leonardo da Vinci, 1508-10, Virgin and Child with St. Anne, Louvre,
Paris; + V detail and closer detail
Same, detail of Mary and Anne; from which video takes only the head of
Anne, with a mountain background
So the island harvest matures to High Renaissance, that 1500 point of balance
where a now-conscious humanism serves the old absolute which still embraces it. In this
Leonardo, Mary draws Christ back from the lamb of his Sacrifice; Anne, the lap of
prophecy on which she rests, smiles acceptance — and before a landscape, which, as so
often with Leonardo, exhibits the whole of earth-history: mountains reared by the erosion
that wears them down. Where else does tragic knowledge clothe itself in such shadowed
smiles?
(cut Sanctus)
For which the unrecorded Italian music would be Tromboncino's Lamentations.
a67)
67)
67a)
Botticelli, c. 1478, Head of Flora, Primavera, Uffizi, Florence
Double: [A] Botticelli, c. 1478, Head of Flora, Primavera, Uffizi, Florence;
and [B] Leonardo, 1510, Head of Anne, from Virgin and Child, Louvre, Paris
(video adds a closer detail of Flora)
Leonardo, 1510, Head of Anne, from Virgin and Child, Louvre, Paris;
+ V return to a detail of Mary and Anne
Music:
Isaac, c. 1485(?), from Fortuna Desperata, Vielle trio, Allegro 14
Botticelli was born only seven years before Leonardo, grew up in the same
Florence; his Spring, with the equivocal thin smile of this Flora (left), Roman goddess of
flowers and of prostitution, was painted about 1478, when Leonardo was already
exploring what would ripen to the 1510 Anne (right). And yet a single composer, Isaac,
at the Florentine court, exhibits both modes: in his ballades the poignant grace of Gothic:
(close Fortuna Desperata)
Music:
Isaac, 1492, "Quis dabit capit meo aquam," Pt. I, bars 15-32,
Decca DL 79413
in his great Laurentian elegy, the converse mystery of fullness. (fade)
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28
�C.G. Bell
a68)
b68)
c68)
68)
68a)
Symbolic History
Carpaccio, Ursula's Dream, head of the sleeping saint (detail of 68); video
adds entire left side of 68
Gerard David, c. 1506, Virgin of the Annunciation, Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York; first, a video detail
Giovanni Bellini, c. 1490, from Madonna with Saints Katherine and Mary
Magdalen, detail of the Magdalen, Accademia, Venice (CGB '59)
Vittore Carpaccio, 1495, Ursula's Dream, whole, Accademia, Venice
(CGB '59); + V detail of the Angel (from V68)
Same, detail of the sleeping St. Ursula (CGB '59)
Music:
L. Compere, pub. 1519, from O bone Jesu, Seraphim SIC 6104
(side 5)
The achievement of 1500 is the cultivation of Renaissance rich repose, over a
creed of Judgment "and the life of the world to come." Such the Praise-of-Folly urbanity
by which Erasmus outraged Luther. In music there is the Frottola and Lauda harmony of
chord progression reared on the heritage of the church modes — a homophony also
cultivated by the Flemings, as here by Compere. With painting that calm horizon extends
from the North (Memling and David) to the Italy of Leonardo, Perugino, Luini, Giovanni
Bellini, early Raphael, Giorgione. This Carpaccio Dream of Saint Ursula, enshrines its
Venetian style-center.
(end Compere)
But the mutant of Gothic force Savonarola had sowed in Medici Florence, would
rise through Ursula's sleep of dreams.
Va69)
Michelangelo, c. 1525-30, Tomb of Giuliano de' Medici, Medici Chapel, S.
Lorenzo, Florence
b69)
Michelangelo, 1520-34, Tomb of Lorenzo de' Medici, Medici Chapel, S.
Lorenzo, Florence
1st 69) Same, detail of Lorenzo's head
V69a) Detail of a69, head of Guiliano de' Medici
Music:
Pere A. Vila, pub. 1557, Fantasia, viols, 2nd half, Candide
CE31068
By 1530 that fruitful island of suspended values is yielding to an expansive
struggle of new against old, the old enfleshed by the new, a tragic birth, where the
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Symbolic History
physical and human modes of the modern are stretched in the whirl of Medieval contempt
of earth and timeless faith.
In the flexing of Michelangelo (this pensive Lorenzo from the Medici Tombs), in
the always more conscious control of musical space (a swelling Tiento by the Catalan
Vila), we enter the Tensile phase of late Renaissance. a style which, with its Dynamic
sequel, strains under the name of Mannerism.
(end
Vila)
Va70)
Double: [A] Pontormo, c. 1527, Angel and Mary heads, details of
Annunciation, S. Felicita, Capponi Chapel, Florence
Vb70) Pontormo, c. 1527-28, Madonna and Child with Infant St. John, Uffizi,
Florence
1st 70) Pontormo, c. 1525-30, St. Jerome, Niedersachssisches Landesmuseum,
Hannover
V70a) Same, detail of upper body and head
70b)
Pontormo, 1525-28, Deposition, Church of S. Felicita, Florence; video:
center spread only with a closer detail (cf V70c)
Music:
Cipriano de Rore, pub. 1550, from Madrigal: Ancor che c'ol Partire,
(Deller) Bach Guild S-5051
Of Florentine early Mannerists, Pontormo most sensationally breaks with High
Renaissance, twisting the nude penitence of Jerome smiting his breast with the stone, into
a manic war with its framed space and barren landscape ground. In music, the degree
inflection by which Josquin for expressive grief had wrenched the modes, advances
(about 1540) through Willaert to the passionate chromaticism of Vicentino, or of this de
Rore.
(end de Rore)
For 2nd 69) Titian, 1545-46, Pope Paul III and his nephews, detail, Capodimonte
Mus., Naples
For 2nd 70) Tintoretto, 1548, Miracle of St. Mark, Accademia, Venice
Reformation disrupting the North, counter-Reformation tightening the South;
under both, a confident and now aroused humanism struggling in science, politics,
philosophy, for freedom and the power to build — in this turmoil, every stress
communicating itself through the cultural ambience to each point of expression —
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Symbolic History
Europe rises to a might of creativity, as giant men are pressed up from the whirling mass,
flesh of that hypostasis of spirit.
71)
Titian, 1559, Rape of Europa, Isabella S. Gardner Museum, Boston;
+ V details
Venice heads the 1560 shift from the Tensile bow of Michelangelo toward El
Greco's Kinetic arrow. With Titian's great myths, with the Ricercare of Andrea, first of
the Gabrielli, the tethered is unleashed.
Music:
72)
A .Gabrielli, c. 1560(?), from Ricercare del 12 tono, [old] Columbia
60366
Titian, 1559, Diana and Actaeon (Bridgewater), National Gallery, London;
+ V detail
(end Gabrielli)
Though the unleashing brings on the dark of tragic storm.
To tie this passion to its archetype,
73)
73a)
Early Christian, late 3rd cent., detail of an Orant between Shepherds, Major
Cemetery, Rome (video: upper part only)
Early Christian, mid-3rd cent., Orant from the Crypt [miscalled] of "La
Velata," fresco in the Catacomb of Priscilla, Rome
oppose, from its Christ beginnings, one of those mild Crucifixion allusions in Catacomb
art, with the Gregorian Tenebrae, of which we have heard the opening — how quiet even
the voice-leap of the dying cry, "My God, my God!", the drop through diabolic tritone to
acceptance: "Et inclinato capite" —
Music:
74)
74a)
Gregorian, 5th cent. and after, Tenebrae, cont., Solesmes, VM-87
(fade)
Titian, 1573-76, Last Pieta, whole, Academy, Venice
Same, left detail; with V74a, variant, and V74b, detail of vault
place that against the embodied agony, the last Pieta by Titian, from his nineties, with
Ingegneri's mighty rhetoric of the Tenebrae:
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31
�C.G. Bell
Music:
75)
75a)
75b)
Symbolic History
Ingegneri, c. 1575(?), Tenebrae, old Strasbourg Choir, Col. FRX 56
Same, Last Pieta, lower spread of the whole (CGB '59)
Same, upper left section of 75
Same, central group from 75 [using the five basic slides, with two video
variants, a sequence of twelve video images has been framed]
(end Ingegneri)
Those vast forces (over the 1600 divide of Bruno, El Greco, King Lear).
a76)
76)
Bernini, 1674, Monument to the Blessed Ludovica Albertoni, S. Francesco a
Ripa, Rome
Same, detail of upper body and head; with video details from a76 and 76,
+ V76a
have only to set, as in Cartesian formulable array, to precipitate another style-century, the
17th, billowed up on the conscious assertions of Baroque. "To try to render figures
expressive," said Bernini, "I... put myself in the same attitude that I want to give the
figure..." In him, in Grandi's "O vos omnes", causal reason and vindicating will dramatize
the incarnate passion.
Music:
77)
V77a)
77b)
Alessandro Grandi, 1621, O Vos Omnes (instrumental opening),
Nonesuch H-71329
G.G. Bernini, c. 1622, Self-portrait, Galleria Borghese, Rome
Bernini, 1655, Self-portrait, Galleria Borghese, Rome
Bernini, c. 1668, Gabriele Fonseca, Fonseca Chapel, S. Lorenzo in Lucina,
Rome
But no sooner has that world-shaping introspection appeared in Cartesian
confidence than it casts the shadow of Pascalian doubt. Its cloud-capped towers and
solipsistic self are vulnerable; the reason that exalted them may let them down. In the
heroic axioms, as at the wings of a temporal stage, the future of rococo mockery and romantic pain wait their cue. As Eliot says in "Gerontion":
History has many cunning passages...
Gives too late
What's not believed in, or if still believed,
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32
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
In memory only, reconsidered passion.
Va78) Gregorio de' Ferrari, 1684, Summer (center det.), ceiling fresco, Pal. Rosso,
Genoa
b78) Sebastiano Ricci, 1707-8, Medici Escutcheon, fresco, Pitti Palace, Florence
78) Double: [A] Magnasco, c. 1720, Punchinello and Son, Gatti-Casazza
Collection, Venice; and [B] Gregorio de' Ferarri, 1684, Autumn, detail of
Bacchus, Palazzo Grapallo, Genoa (revised video holds B after the double,
V78B, while the first videos, instead of the double, used another Magnasco:
1710-20, Girl and Musician before a fire, Italico Brass Collection, Venice)
78a) Italian late Baroque (Juvarra, Turin), 1718, Great Stairway of the Palazzo
Madama, Turin (CGB '84)
Music:
Alessandro Scarlatti, c. 1700-10(?), Affetuoso, close, 6th Concerto
Grosso, in E major, ARCHIV 198 442
Again around the century mark (now of 1700) the ever-present change of history
sharpens toward another quantum break. The massive Baroque vindication of divine
order yields, in Ricci of Florence, to Rococo wit, sentiment, Enlightened play; art darkens
in Magnasco, as in the satires of Swift; it lightens, in the frescoes of de Ferrari in Genoa,
this Autumn, to the airy artifice of Tiepolo and the France of Louis Quinze. And already
the Concerti Grossi of Alessandro Scarlatti, Domenico's father — this "Affetuoso" close
of the last — enter the courtly salon where rational disillusion and heart's revolutionary
hope would both be entertained.
(close A. Scarlatti)
79)
79a)
V79b)
L. Carrogis, c. 1760, David Hume, Scottish National Portrait Gallery,
Edinburgh; + V detail
Piranesi, 1750, Self at the age of 30, engraving
Piranesi, 1745 and 1761, Le Carcere XIV, 2nd state, detail, National
Gallery, Washington D.C.
What has so nonplussed the 1760 empiricist David Hume? Is it the ruffled
repletion of some Johnsonian meal? Or is this the moment recorded in the Appendix of
his Treatise on Human Nature when, having pursued through years and volumes a system
based on simple, atomistic perception (though one might have guessed perceptions are
ingatherings already tinged with self and world), he discovered (true to the logic he had
played) that he stood in contradiction (what Kant would call antinomy), no way (having
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33
�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
started with the disconnected) to account for any composition, self, or substance, even to
the power to think or say "I am":
If perceptions are distinct existences... no connections are... discoverable... all my hopes vanish when I come to explain .the principles
that unite our successive perceptions in our thought or consciousness...
For my part, I must plead the privilege of a sceptic, and confess that
this difficulty is too hard for my understanding.
a80)
80)
V80a)
80b)
80c)
Phil. Otto Runge, 1805-06, Rest on the Flight to Egypt, right side (which
video narrows to a detail of an Angel in a Tree, Kunsthalle, Hamburg
Same, whole; video: first a detail of Joseph, then the whole, then a
narrowing to the central group
Frank Kupka, 1911-12, Discs, Museum of Modern Art, Paris
Franz Marc, 1913-14, Deer in the Forest, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlruhe
Again, Rest on the Flight to Egypt, central group (CGB '86); video takes
from this a detail only, of Mary and the Christ child
Music
Beethoven, 1826, close lst movement, Quartet No.14 in C-Sharp
Minor, Op. 131, Col. M5L 277
So the transcendental imperative would become what the spirits demand of Faust,
to reconstitute the lost world within:
Baue sie wieder,
In deinen Busen baue sie auf!
Thus Runge renews Incarnation from imagination, nature and romantic heart;
Beethoven sublimes sacred polyphony in the C Sharp Minor Quartet. It is the aspiration
which (through all 19th-century thickening of the bourgeois and material — and even in
Nietzschean complementarity with that) spirals from 1800 Beethoven to 1900 Schönberg,
from Runge and Friedrich to the Cubistic, Orphic, and Blaue Reiter dissolution of spatial
things — as Goethe's cry of spirits: "Build it in inwardness!" would take, in our century,
the voice of Rilke:
Is it not this you wished for, earth, to be reborn in us invisible?
Erde, ist es nicht dies, was du willst: unsichtbar in uns erstehn?
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�C.G. Bell
Symbolic History
Was it the Resurrection of the god who had entered time and flesh? Or could the
Incarnate himself foretell the countdown of that Resurrection? As Yeats asks of Leda,
"so mastered by the brute blood of the air":
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
6/1995
Period Styles
(End Beethoven)
35
�
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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36 pages
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Period Styles : A Review of the Incarnate West, Symbolic History, Part 18
Description
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Script of Part 18 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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text
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pdf
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English
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SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_18_Period_Styles--A_Review_of_the_Incarnate_West
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