1 20 39 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/13a3f6b41c31910812b583216545994a.pdf 669ffc000efd5ac51cbe1d8dcc741d45 PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 13. 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 September 1995 Last Revised January ‘96 �Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 13: 1400 — Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 1) Hubert and Jan van Eyck 1425-9, Adoration of the Lamb, from the Altarpiece of St. Baron, Ghent; first, video detail, center 1a) Same, detail, upper left V1b) Same, detail, upper right 1c) From the same altarpiece, Panels of Just Judges and of Knights of the Cross Music: Dunstable, Ave Regina Coelorum, close, Cape, ARC 3052 Twenty-five years after Chaucer’s death in 1400, and the Van Eyck Adoration of the Lamb heightens the features of his world: the force of robed leaders, commoners, churchmen — I saw his sleves purfled at the hand With fur ...he was a fair prelaat — in a landscape of precise spring — such human filling in of Gothic symbol as Dunstable, also by 1425, achieves in harmony. (end Dunstable) Yet what the proudest, earthiest, lustiest of those Chaucerian characters was headed toward 2) William the Englishman 1180-84, East Chapel (“Becket’s Crown”), Canterbury Cathedral English Norman, c. 1100, Crypt, Canterbury Cathedral William the Englishman, 1179-84, Trinity Chapel Ambulatory, Canterbury Cathedral 2a) 2b) was Canterbury, 12th century shrine of Becket — sacramental blue and gules burning in the vaulted gloom — from that time when even the popular burden was “Worldes blis ne last no throwe.” Music: 9/1995 English 13th cent., “Worldes blis ne last no throwe,” RCA V-LM6015 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 1 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History It is of the essence also of the Waning of the Middle Ages, that the ground of Contemptu Mundi still sounds under Chaucer: This world nys but a thurghfare ful of wo, And we been pilgrymes, passing to and fro. ("Knight’s Tale") (fade Worldes Blis) Meanwhile English architecture, by a kind of skeletal adaptation had reached from Canterbury toward the open clarity of a stately hall. 3 or V3) Early English, 1250-60, Five Sisters Window, York Cathedral (CGB ‘80) First was Early English, 1250, the lancet heightening of the Five Sisters Window in York — just as English thought in Bacon took its own more earthly-immediate way. 4) 4a) Decorated, 1286-1306, Octagonal Chapter House, Wells Cathedral Same, especially the fan vaulting (CGB ‘84) Second the Decorated, as in this 1300 Chapter House of Wells, generates out of Geometric the Curvilinear wreathings which would inspire French Flamboyant — while in thought Duns Scottus led Occam to the empirical outwardness and spiritual intuition aimed at Renaissance and Reformation. It is no clearer, on the surface, how Occam’s study of suppositio (one thing’s standing for another), with its hair-splitting — as of “mobile confused distributive suppositio” from “immobile confused distributive suppositio” — widens creed for a future Cartesian structure reared on causal reason, Va5) Same as 5, video detail of the lierne vaulting (CGB ‘84) 5) Perpendicular, 1337-57, Choir of Gloucester Cathedral with great East Window; Digital adds east window detail than how the marvelous involution of lierne vault, culminating, mid-14th century, in Gloucester Choir, can shape Renaissance out of Gothic; yet the passage from Canterbury apse to the wide-windowed fabric of Perpendicular, must emerge, like the chordhumanizing of music, as a shift from other-worldly severity, through sacramental purity and elaboration, toward earthly vigor in the now Nominal scholastic frame. a6) English Perpendicular, 1337-1412, Cloisters, Gloucester Cathedral June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 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 June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 3 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In poetry too, as in the arts, the mundane style had been ripening over the North since the late 13th century, as in Ruteboef (“Dieus m’a fait compagnon a Job”): God has companioned me with Job When he wiped me at a swab Clean of all I had. This right eye that was my best, Webbed and blind, has left me lost, To grope my road... And now my wife has borne a brat And my horse slipped on a slat And cracked his leg: The nurse is at me like a plague, Grabbing money by the bag, For baby’s pap and souse, Or he’ll be back to yell in the house. (CGB) A sentiment paired, after 1400, in the Second Shepherds Play: I have more cradles to rock than ever I had... A house full of young fat, The devil knock their skulls flat, Woe to him has much brat And little bread... (CGB) The lively details of sacred art. a9) Peter Parler aus Gmund, 1379-93, Self from the triforium, Cathedral, Prague Vb9) English Carving, c. 1380(?), Effigy of St. John the Baptist, detail, from old church of St. Nicholas, now in Hereford Cathedral (CGB ‘84) 9) C. Sluter, c. 1390, Philip the Bold of Burgundy, Chartreuse, Dijon (CGB ‘80) 9a) Same, upper detail; video pans on slide 9, while slide show works from an old photo (formerly V9); digital, like video, pans on 9 In the ground of self- and earth-denial we are watching the rise of a vital antithesis, of self and earth as modes of Western assurance and power. In the age of Chaucer they still claim the sacred embrace. Let us begin at the end with the Retractions the poet appended to the Parson’s Tale: I biseke yow mekely, for the mercy of God, that ye preye for me that Crist have mercy on me and foryeve me my giltes; and namely of my June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 4 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History translacions and enditynges of wordly vanitees, the whiche I revoke in my retracciouns... (a list follows of most of his works) and many a song and many a leccherous lay; that Crist for his grete mercy foryeve me the synne... that I may been oon of hem at the day of doom that shulle be saved... Music: French, early 15th cent, from Tuba Gallicalis, Nonesuch H-1010 In this proudest portrait of Chaucer’s time by the chief sculptor of full-robed human force, Claus Sluter’s 1390 Philip the Bold of Burgundy is on his knees. With Chaucer, what he repents of is not simply what we would call sin, but the earthly fabric to which his commitment is so strong: the art he cultivates, the music of the Tuba Gallicalis. (end Tuba Gallicalis) 10) 10a) E. Anglian (Norwich), c. 1330, Nativity from Life of Virgin, Cluny, Paris Same, detail (can be videoed from 10) Music: English, c. 1310, Agnus Dei, Seraphim, SIC-6052 (2,5) The backward-looking part of every Christian treasured an etherial thinness, where sacred and secular dream timelessly — islanded in contempt of the world, the sensuous poignance of the real (English, 1330): June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 5 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Nou skrinketh rose and lylie flour, That whilen ber that suete savour In somer, that suete tyde; Ne is no quene so stark ne stour, Ne no levedy so bryht in bour, That ded ne shal by glyde. Whoso wol fleyshlust forgon, And hevenè blis abyde, On Jesu be is thoht anon, That therlèd was ys side. 11) (fade Agnus Dei) Simone Martini, 1325-26, St. Clare, S. Francesco, Lower Church, Assisi; + V detail In Simone Martini’s Ars Nova Italy, that distance is refined like an aesthetic perfume, of which Chaucer’s 1370 Book of the Duchess distills a Northern essence, reaching back, past the Romance of the Rose, toward Chrestien’s “land from which no stranger returns.” It is there, deeper than dream psychology, that the Man in Black reveals what we have already learned: 12) 12a) Spanish, 14th cent., Queen Elisenda de Moncada tomb, Pedralbes Monastery, Barcelona S. Martini, 1333, Entombment of Christ, detail, Staatliche Museen, Berlin “I have lost more than thou weanest.” “Allas, sir, how? what may that be?” “She ys ded!” “Nay!” “Yis, be me trouthe!” “Is that youre los? Be God, hit ys routhe!” And with that word ryght anoon They gan to strake forth; al was doon For that tyme, the hert huntyng... We have a sudden insight that the modes of joy and pain, the very modes of feeling, of being, shift like styles of dress. Medieval grief is sharp, fragile, enigmatic. 13) 13a) Sebastiano del Piombo, c. 1517, Pieta, Museo Civico, Viterbo, Italy Same, upper detail Far from the voluminousness of a l6th century sorrow. June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 6 �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Willaert, pub. 1539, O Crux Splendidior, opening, Odyssey 32 16 0202 Its landscape of shadowed space (del Piombo) did not exist in Chaucer’s experience, any more than a solemn music of chordal grief (Willaert, 1539). These realms had no more been explored than Columbus’ America. (fade Willaert) 14) Visigoth to 14th cent. but esp. 13th cent., Porte de l’Aude, Wall of Carcasonne V14a) Same, another view Chaucer’s first period, before the Ars Nova impact of the Florence he visited in 1373, looks to the older Gothic and Chivalric. Let the fortifications of Carcasonne and two scenes of the chase, with “Au tens pascour,” as vigorous a secular motet as the late 13th century offers, revive that Ars Antiqua. Music: French, late 13th cent., Au tens pascour — Lautre jour, AS 71 1st 15) E. Anglian, c. 1300, lower detail of Beatus Page, Peterborough Psalter, Bibliotheque Royale, Brussels 1st 16) Upper-Rhine, c. 1320, Manessa (Minnesinger) MS, Walther von Thüfen, upper detail; University Library, Heidelberg (end Au Tens pascour) 2nd 15) Again, Peterborough Psalter,whole Beatus Page; video: lower half only To shift from the Peterborough Psalter, 2nd 16) Again, Walther von Thüfen, whole page (here video also repeats 14, of Carcasonne) or the Minnesinger delights of Walther von Thüfen — or from the fortifications of Carcasonne — 1st 17) 1st 18) June 1996 Italian Gothic, 1297-1310, Palazzo Publico, Siena (CGB ‘86, from the town heights); while video takes a detail from V1st 17, a wider view over town and countryside (CGB ‘86) Simone Martini, 1328, Guidoriccio da Fogliano, horseman, center of the fresco, Palazzo Publico, Siena (V1st 18: shows more background) 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 7 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History V1st 19) North Italian, 1329, Equestrian monument of Can Grande della Scala, with pedestal, Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona to the city halls of Italy, here Siena, is to feel the sudden stretching of Chaucer’s tetrameter in the House of Fame (c. 1375-80?) when the line straight out of the Divine Comedy breaks in: “O Thought, that wrot al that I mette...” Thus the Eagle lifts the poet to a vastness where he loses the poem. In later works he speaks the fulness of pentameter: To Troie is come this woful Troilus. Just so the Gherardellus Caccia against the older motet, or the new horseman, Guidoriccio (and then Can Grande), against the old: Music: 2nd 17) 2nd 18) 2nd 19) 1st 20) 21) Gherardellus de Florentia, c. 1360, Tosto che l’alba, Decca DL 79428 Closer view of the Palazzo Publico and tower from the square itself; while video takes a closer detail from the lower part of 1st 17 (CGB), adding from the same slide a detail of the upper part of the tower Detail, upper front, of the Guidoriccio, horse and rider, which video and slide show share Upper part of Equestrian Can Grande — of which video takes a closer detail (front) Pisan (Traini) c. 1348, Allegory of Death, detail of Hunt, from old Alinari print, Camp Santo, Pisa; + V closer detail Pisan (Traini), same, whole fresco (1938 Alinari colored photo) (end Gherardellus) 2nd 20) Left side of 21, with Hunt, etc.; with various video details, from 20, 21, and V2nd 20 For 2nd 21) Central part of 21: beggars, Death, corpses, etc., with various video details 1st 22) Lower right of 21: Death advancing toward the Garden of Delight; with video preview of the Alinari print of the Garden 3rd 21) Varied detail of 21: beggars, Death, corpses, and souls; with close video details from Va3rd 21 and V3rd 21a (soul tugged by angel and devil) 3rd 21b) Upper left detail of hermits June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 8 �C.G. Bell a2nd 22) June 1996 Symbolic History Detail of music in the Garden 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 9 �C.G. Bell 2nd 22) Symbolic History Same, whole Garden of Love from the fine old Alinari print (From the 9 slides of the show and 4 video extras, the video shapes 14 views of the fresco.) The mid-century Pisan Allegory of Death (a bad reproduction made before it was ruined in the last war) epitomizes late Gothic — a moral vision, yeasty with new life. Where the rock gulley of the fallen world sprouts ephemeral flowers, a troop of hunters encounter three corpses. They draw back; one holds his nose. Above the coffins, a hermit displays the scroll of our vanity. And the whole scene opens for us: right of center, a bat-winged Death swings her scythe over mounds of bodies. Beggars, the blind and halt, petition her to take them — “cumber-worlds” like forsaken Troilus: “Delyvere now the world.../ Of me, that am the wofulleste wyght...” Capricious as Fortune (“That holds but by a wire”) she advances into the orange grove of delight, where Cupids, already on the wing, lead long-fingered ladies (Langland: “And ye, lovely ladyes, with youre longe fyngres”) in music and courtly love. Death mows. And the moisture-laden souls breathe from the mouths, to be borne up and away by angels, or stuffed by demons in the flaming hill; or as twice in Dante, tugged, above and below. Better in this brunt to join the Dark Age hermits on the hill. So Petrarch brings his spent years to a pious close: Now I go grieving for the days on earth I passed in worship of a mortal thing... But regret cannot quench the flames of a lifetime: vegghio, penso, ardo, piango, e chi mi sface sempre m’è inanzi per mia dolce pena... I wake, I brood, I burn, I weep; she who wounds me Is with me always in my honied grief. (CGB) Chaucer too brings the Troilus to a poetic Retraction: June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 10 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History O yonge, fresshe folkes, he or she, In which that love up groweth with youre age, Repayreth hom fro wordly vanyte, And of youre herte up casteth the visage To thilke God that after his ymage Yow made, and thynketh al nys but a faire, This world, that passeth soone as floures faire. 23) Jan van Eyck, 1427-29, Eve, detail, altarpiece, St. Bavon, Ghent; + V closer detail (video closes with a double of Adam and Eve, from V23a) But that wise counsel melts in the burning touch Chaucer’s art was part of: Hire armes smale, hire streghte bak and softe, Hire sydes longe, flesshly, smothe, and white He gan to stroke, and good thrift bad ful ofte Hire snowisshe throte, hire brestes rounde and lite: Thus in this hevene he gan hym to delite, And therwithal a thousand tyme hire kiste, That what to don, for joie unnethe he wiste. In the deepening incarnation of late Gothic, Chaucer looks back to 1300 psalters and forward to the Van Eyck Eve, painted twenty seven years after his death. 24) Limbourg Brothers, 1413-16, Eden, detail, Tres Riches Heures, Chantilly Even the Limbourg Eve follows him by 13 years; yet in sensuous caress Chaucer may surpass the bubble Eden of the Tres Riches Heures: Wher is myn owene lady, lief and deere? Wher is hire white brest? Wher is it, where? The beauty and question of earth cuts the age of faith like a sword. 25) 25a) Lor. Maitani, 1310-30, Creation of Eve, Façade, Duomo, Orvieto (CGB ‘84) Same, detail (also CGB '84); while video uses V25 and V25a The antecedent refinements are in trecento Italy — Maitani, on the façade of Orvieto. In music it is Landini, blind organist of Florence who smoothes Ars Nova progressions almost to the limpid grace with which the 15th century begins. June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 11 �C.G. Bell Music: 26) Symbolic History Landini, c. 1370(?), Gram piant’ agli occhi, opening, (Cape) AS 63 Andrea Bonaiuti, 1365, girls dancing, detail from the Spanish Chapel, Florence; + V detail from V26a (cut Landini) A sweetness rivalled in Chaucer’s English: Now welcome, somer, with thy sonne softe, That hast this wintres wedres overshake, And driven away the longe nyghtes blake! 27) 27b) Same, whole fresco, Triumph of the Church, Spanish Chapel, Florence; + V details and a return to the whole (replacing slide 27a: same fresco, detail of dancing girls and adjacent allegory) Most of the same fresco from bottom up through the gate of heaven (CGB '59), from which the video selects the figures by the Church, below In Boccaccio’s Decameron a joy-loving company withdraw from the scythe of the Black Death in Florence; yet even the escape is planned in the church of Santa Maria Novella, to which the ladies return when their ten days of story telling are done. And if we ask the context of these Spanish Chapel dancing girls, we find them to the right, in an allegory of the Triumph of the Church (through the cloister of that same Santa Maria Novella); we see their child gaiety yield, just above, to music and thought, from which a man in green rises (Boccaccio, Chaucer) to kneel, nearer center, and prepare by confession for Christ’s judgment gate, over the Cathedral of Florence — the plan lately agreed on, 1366-8, though the dome would not be built for sixty years. From the triple portal spilled all phases of medieval life. Even Chaucer’s most ribald characters have their sacred tie. Like Troilus, “withinne the temple... pleyinge,” they play on pilgrimage. a28) b28) 28) English (Westminster), c 1265-70, Douce Apocalypse, Lamb opens the first seal, MS page 13, Bodleian, Oxford English Carving, c. 1380(?), St. John the Baptist, now Hereford Cathedral (CGB ‘84; cf. Vb9, above); + V detail Again, Douce Apocalypse, The Temple Opened in Heaven, page 41, Bodleian, Oxford June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 12 �C.G. Bell 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) June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 13 �C.G. Bell 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. June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 14 �C.G. Bell 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. June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 15 �C.G. Bell 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. June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 16 �C.G. Bell 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) 17 �C.G. Bell 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: June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 18 �C.G. Bell 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) June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 19 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In music a like suspension enriches four decades from Machault to Dunstable with dancing harmonies explored in a last loyalty to the bare fifth chord, as in this late 14thcentury “Contre le Temps”. If such vitality wells from the folk, it fills the arts of church and court: here an emperor; 2nd 42) Again, Connetable du Gueslin there the High Constable of France. 43) 43a) 43b) (fade Contre le Temps) Jacquemart de Hesdin, 1406-09, Grandes Heures, f42, det., Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris English late Gothic, late 14th cent., Grotesque: The Blue Man, Roof boss from the Gt. Cloister, Canterbury; here video returns (with the Lochaimer Lied) to a closer detail of 43 Célebre Angevin, 15th cent., Carving on Maison d’Adam, Angers It is in the sacred books of princes, the Duc de Berry’s Great Hours of the Virgin, that fabliaux grotesques swell toward Peter Brueghel, called Peasant. Is this the mock priest of whom the Wife of Bath said “Ther is noon oother incubus but he,” or Nicholas bared at the window? For that Chaucerian element take a German 1450 tupping song: a peasant goes to the woods with his axe; the nasty priest comes to his wife; rhythm tells the rest: Music: Lochaimer Liederbuch, 1452-60, Es fur ein pawr gen holcz, ARCHIV-3222 (fade Lochaimer) Against that cursed up-and-down — “He priketh harde and depe as he were mad” — 44) Franco-English, late 14th cent., Chaucer reads to the court, Troilus MS, Corpus Christi, Cambridge; + V detail June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 20 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Chaucer reads to the modish knights and ladies of Richard II’s court — one of the artcaterpillars of the garden. Why not the gilded dawn from the “Knight’s Tale,” dear to early Shakespeare, who would stage the fall of gracious Richard: The bisy larke, the messager of day, Salueth in hir song the morwe gray, And firy Phebus riseth up so bright That al the orient laugheth of the light, And with his stremes dryeth in the greves The silver dropes hangynge on the leves... 45) Franco-Flemish, c. 1465, Palamon and Arcite, René d’Anjou’s Livre du Cuer, Vienna; first, video detail Or the scene of the friends looking from the tower at Emily gathering flowers, as in this 15th-century illustration of the same Boccaccio story. What joins the Knight and Miller is the closing prayer — “God save al this faire compaigny!” and “The tale is doon, and God save al the rowte!” To balance in faith Romance-of-the-Rose idealism and peasant force. 46) Franco-Flemish 1320-30, Luxuria, Dahlem Museum, Berlin; + V detail What diversity that unreformed church could hold. Here is Absolon, parish clerk, “that jolif was and gay,” twenty years before Chaucer was born. It is a theme treated also in a 1400 poem: Jankin at the Agnus Bereth the pax-brede: He twinkled but said nowt, And on my fot he trede, Kyrieleyson. Benedicamus Domino, Christ from shame me shilde: Deo gracias, therto — Alas! I go with childe, Kyrieleyson. 47) Limbourg Brothers, c. 1413-16, February, detail, Tres Riches Heures, Chantilly; + V closer detail June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 21 �C.G. Bell 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. June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 22 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The tapes of hir white voluper Were of the same suyte of hir coler... A brooch she baar upon hir lowe coler, As brood as is the boos of a bokeler... (fade Alanus) In Lochner’s 1440 spelling out, that visual delight still grows, innocently resilient, on the church margin of the grave. V & D a50) Tomb: Eleanor of Castile, 1292 bronze, west minster Abbey 50) French, from Amiens, c. 1402, Cadaver tomb, Cardinal Jean de la Grange, Mus. Calvet, Avignon 50a) Beckington cadaver tomb, c. 1450, detail, Wells Cathedral (CGB ‘84) The grave too takes new force. Early Gothic tombs favored earthlessness. As body mounts on Fortune’s wheel, its wrongs and corruptions prepare, by a Dance of Death, for the tragic stage. Here is the memento mori of Cardinal de la Grange, died 1402. There cam a privee theef, men clepeth Deeth, That in this contree al the peple sleeth... The rioters in the Pardoner’s tale encounter him: An oold man and a povre with hem mette... “Why artow al forwrapped save thy face? Why lyvestow so longe in so greet age?”... “Lo how I vanysshe, flessh, and blood, and skyn! Allas! whan shul my bones been at reste? He points them to the wood where they find the treasure for which they stab and poison one another. Even Moral Gower touched on greatness when he told of the “Trump of Death.” 51) Claus Sluter, 1404-05, mourning monk, from the Dijon Monument to Philip the Bold, Cluny, Paris; + V detail June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 23 �C.G. Bell 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. June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 24 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History His wife, with her ten pounds of coverchiefs on her head — Boold was hir face, and fair, and reed of hewe. She was a worthy womman al hir lyve — might be contending with the Wife of Bath who knows best “the olde daunce.” While the study of the couple as such reminds us how many of the Tales deal not with chivalric romance, but with the chief problem of the middle class, marriage. 55) German, c. 1340, Knight and Bride, carving, Rottweil, Chapel Tower; + V detail German, 1340, love-troth, exchange of rings — Chaucer’s Knight invokes that domestic dream: And thus with alle blisse and melodye Hath Palamon ywedded Emelye. And God, that al this wyde world hath wroght, Sende hym his love that hath it deere aboght… And Emelye hym loveth so tendrely... That nevere was ther no word hem bitwene Of jalousie or any oother teene... 56) 56a) Bohemian, 1363-65, Charles IV and Anne, over the door of the Chapel, Karlstejn Castle, Prague Same: wider view of the Chapel door and decoration More apt, after problem tales of marriage, is the trusting solution of the Franklin’s Tale, which by trial and honour re-cements a union in such “soverereyn blisse” as Charles IV and Anne set Master Theodoric to paint above the chapel door of Karlstejn Castle. 57) 57a) 57b) 57c) 57d) French, c. 1390, Double: [A] Charles V of France; and [B] Jeanne Bourbon; upper details of standing sculptures, Louvre Same, detail of Jeanne Bourbon Same, detail of Charles V Same, full length double; while video returns to 57: busts Another detail of Charles V June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 25 �C.G. Bell 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: June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 26 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Fro spot my spyryt ther sprang in space, My body on balke ther bod in sweven; My goste is gon in Godes grace, In aventure ther mervayles meven. Taught by Dante, he sees across the stream, in the jewelled company of the Lamb, His precious perle wythouten spotte. The Wilton Diptych, also of the late century, shows Richard II introduced to such a band on such a shore. 1st 59) Franco-Flemish, c. 1390-1400, St. Christopher, van den Bergh Museum, Antwerp As for the clear stream down crystal cliffs, a late century St. Christopher wades in such bright water. We know, as we cross 1400, the perfection of that nominalist focus on particulars. 1st 60) Dirk Bouts the Younger, c. 1480(?), St. Christopher, Alte Pinakothek, Munich In Dirk Bouts the observation grows precise, without losing preternatural clarity. Style surfaces in art. 2nd 59) Again, Franco-Flemish, c. 1390-1400, St. Christopher, detail Through the abstraction of language, can we assign Chaucer or The Pearl a place in that spectrum? This is their century. 2nd 60) Again, Dirk Bouts, St. Christopher, detail Is this theirs, or Villon’s earth-emergence? 61) French MS, c. 1400(?), Lancelot du Lac, f.7, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris So with Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight: from the flatness of the Chivalric tradition (this Lancelot of the same time) — June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 27 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History This kyng lay at Camylot upon Krystmasse... With alle the wele of the worlde thay woned ther samen, The most kyd knyghtes under Krystes selven, And the lovelokkest ladies that ever lif haden — 62) Franco-Flemish, c. 1465, Love gives Desire the Heart of the King, Le Livre du Coeur d’Amour, National Library, Vienna; + V detail (V62a) it ripens toward the intimacies of the fifteenth century Book of the Heart of Love — as Love here at night, the lady seducer at dawn comes to Gawayn’s bed: And Gawayn the god mon in gay bed lyges... And as in slomeryng he slode, sleghly he herde A littel dyn at his dor... Hit wats the ladi, loflyest to beholde... And ho stepped stilly and stel to his bedde, Kest up the cortyn and creped withinne, And set hir ful softly on the bed-syde... a63) 63) Simone Martini c. 1340?, Virgin of the Annunciation, whole seated figure, Royal Museum, Antwerp; video: upper half only; digital: double, Angel & Virgin Same, half figure; while video shows a close detail For that filling in of the concordantly human, set one of Simone Martini’s haunting Virgins (her response to the “Ave” equivocal as Lorenzo of Florence’s 14th century “Hosannah") Music: 64) Lorenzo of Florence, c. 1350(?), close of Sanctus, Seraphim SIC6052 Jan van Eyck, 1432, Virgin of the Annunciation, upper half of the figure, Altar, St. Bavon, Ghent; + V detail: head of Virgin (V64a) against Jan van Eyck’s devout Handmaiden of the Lord — while Dufay, in his Alma Redemptoris Mater, gives the scene his tenderest 15th-century chords: Music: Dufay, c. 1433, Alma Redemptoris Mater, close, (Cape group) ARCHIV 3003 That span of eighty years Chaucer divides. June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 28 �C.G. Bell a65) 65) 65a) Symbolic History Gaston Phebus, c. 1405-10, Le Livre de la Chasse, Hunting and Killing the Fox, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; + V detail Same, Hunting deer Same, Coursing the Stag In music it is Ciconia, born before, died after — Flemish-Italian, like Chaucer a blend of North and South. His madrigal warning foxes against dogs seems early, though such 14th-century sharpness spills over the century in Gaston Phebus’ Book of the Chase. Music: Ciconia, c. 1380-90(?), I cani son fuori, beginning, MHS 899 Chaucer’s visionary hunt in “The Franklin’s Tale” is so stylized: Forestes, parkes ful of wilde deer; Ther saugh he hertes with hir hornes hye, The gretteste that evere were seyn with ye. He saugh of hem an hondred slayn with houndes And somme with arwes blede of bittre woundes... Or the Green Knight’s chase while Gawayn is sleeping: The does dryven with gret dyn to the depe slades... What! thay brayen, and bleden, bi bonkkes thay deyen... Hunteres with hyghe horne hasted hem after... 66) 66a) 66b) V66c) 66d) (fade Ciconia) Boucicault Master, c. 1405-08, Flight to Egypt, whole page with border, MS 2 f90v, Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris Same, upper spread Same, lower spread Same, detail: landscape only, with another video detail Same, the inner picture, without the flowered border That jewelled nature widens in the Canterbury Prologue, to a harmony of the vernal and peopled earth: Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licour Of which vertu engendred is the flour; June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 29 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth Inspired hath in every holt and heeth The tendre croppes, and the younge sonne Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne, And smale foweles maken melodye, That slepen al the nyght with open ye (So priketh hem nature in hir corages); Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages, And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes, To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes; And specially from every shires ende Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende, The hooly blisful martir for to seke, That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke. By 1400, the Amen of Ciconia’s Gloria, in sequential phrasing of voiced harmonic space, parallels this Boucicault Master’s 1405 conquest of the dimensional earth. Music: Ciconia, c. 1400(?), from Gloria (Amen), Telefunken SAWT-9544-A Here the essential truth of Renaissance is caught in works almost contemporary with Chaucer. 67) Limbourg Brothers, c. 1413-16, May, Tres Riches Heures, Chantilly One speaks of the International Style as preparing for 1425 — for the Van Eycks in Bruges, for Masaccio in Florence. So music moves toward Dunstable and Dufay. In Burgundy the Tres Riches Heures is the masterpiece of that transition. 68) Jacobo della Quercia, 1414-19, Rhea Silvia, from the Fonte Gaia, Palazzo Publico, Siena (CGB '86) In Tuscany the early work of Della Quercia as graciously points the way. With these comes Ciconia’s last and richest piece, the “O Rosa Bella”, which Dunstable also would set. a2nd 67) Again, May of the Tres Riches Heures, center spread 2nd 67) Again, Tres Riches Heures, close detail of the same May June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 30 �C.G. Bell 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, June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 31 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History An appil that he tok, As clerkès finden Wreten in here book. Ne haddè the appil takè ben, The appil taken ben, Ne haddè never our lady A ben hevenè quene. Blessèd be the time That appil takè was; Therefore we moun singen “Deo gracias!” 72) Limbourg Brothers, c. 1414-16, Eden, Tres Riches Heures, Chantilly; + V detail It is not just a modern insight that the bubble-Eden of the Limbourg Brothers is also a womb, from which the expelled are born into the wayfaring Pilgrimage of the world. What Wycliff and Hus had begun would culminate in Milton: “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised, and unbreathed... where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.” 73) 73a) Massaccio, c. 1426, Expulsion, Brancacci Chapel, Carmine, Florence Same, Expulsion, detail, waist up June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 32 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History By 1426 Masaccio had molded the body and passion of man’s explusion into a tragedy of regenerative nobility. What heightens the sorrow gives the clue. Adam and Eve are coming into light. As is said in Lear: “Out of heaven’s benediction to the warm sun.” In the cloud-cold of England, a symbolic claim. 1st 74) dei Grassi and Belbello, c. 1380-1420, Nativity Page, from Visconti Hours, National Library, Florence; while video takes a detail combining the stable scene with the angels and shepherds on the heath All over Europe now, from 1380 on, as the juggler in the old romance danced for Our Lady, humanized piety plays sacred games. How thin, after Giotto, the miniatures of dei Grassi and Belbello; yet how instinctively earthborn. 1st 75) English, 1410-20, Shepherds from the old Choir Stalls, Exeter (CGB ‘80) 1st 75a) Same, Shepherds, detail, upper right (CGB ‘80); + V closer details In 1400 England, rood-lofts and choir stalls later destroyed (this surviving fragment from Exeter) enact guild drama — The Second Shepherds’ Play: (each enters complaining) We silly shepherds that walk on the moor... No wonder, as it stands, if we be poor... As ye ken We are so lamed Hard taxed and maimed... By these gentry men. (CGB) The second, of marriage: These men that are wed have not all their will... In bedroom or bed they say not their fill... If I read e’er epistle, I have one for my dear As sharp as a thistle, as rough as a briar... (CGB) The third against floods and Fortune: Was never since Noah’s flood such floods seen... (CGB) a2nd 74) 2nd 74) June 1996 Again, Visconti Hours, from Nativity Page, shepherds, below Same, Shepherds and Nativity, center; first, video Nativity detail 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 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 36 �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 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 38 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer), Symbolic History, Part 13 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 13 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_13_1400--Pilgrims_All_Chaucer Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/1dd39c8b9963c09aa94bee47d9d1b58d.pdf 716674ebfeca62f797679c8b521a8c78 PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 15. 1500: Explosive Balance CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 September 1995 Last Revised January ‘96 �Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 15. 1500: Explosive Balance 1) Leonardo da Vinci, 1483 ff., Bombard with shrapnel, Ambrosiana, Milan Music: Isaac, c. 1485(?), Alla Battaglia, Decca DL 79424 1500 goes off like one of Leonardo's shrapnel shells, hurled from the foul bombard, shedding small shot, "causing," he writes, "great terror to the enemy, with great loss and confusion." The martial music of Isaac, 2) Rubens, 1615, copy of Leonardo, 1503, Battle of Anghiari, Louvre, Paris the unfinished frescoes of battle, in which Leonardo and Michelangelo vied on the walls of the Florentine Palazzo Vecchio, set the type of force for centuries — as Rubens made this copy, from a copy of the lost Leonardo. (fade Isaac) Va3) Leonardo, 1503-5, Mona Lisa, whole, Louvre, Paris 3) Same, Mona Lisa, detail Music: Mantuanus, c. 1495, Frottole, Un Sonar, NY Pro Musica, Decca 79435 How does Renaissance, a point of balance between old and new, cultivating in all arts the myth of calm — Leonardo; 4) Giorgione, 1505-10, Sleeping Venus, Gemäldegalerie , Dresden Giorgione; this Mantuan frottole of winds and waters, "Lirum, bililirum"; Sannazaro's Arcadian dream, "Alma beata e bella," "Blest and beautiful soul, who freed from bonds" — how does that promise admit of so fierce a cleavage? (fade Frottole) 9/1995 1500: Explosive Balance 1 �C.G. Bell 5) Symbolic History Pisanello, c. 1415(?), Luxuria, drawing, Albertina, Vienna Was it the turbulence of shooting in a hundred years the narrows of such a transformation as from Pisanello's 1415 Luxuria, lean Gothic lust burning its sinful allure? — Scotch Dunbar of 1500 still working in that vein: Sum kissis me; sum clappis me, sum kyndnes me proferis ... And a stif standand thing staiffis in my neiff... And Marlowe's Lechery flaunting it to the century's end: I am one that loves an inch of raw mutton better than an ell of fride stock-fish... 2nd 4) Giorgione, Sleeping Venus, detail; video, first a closer detail Was Renaissance everywhere islanded in a brimstone which syphilis would fire from the New World; so that Machiavelli's Mandragola-seduction might curl the fingers of Giorgione's acceptance: What your cunning, my husband's folly, a mother's venality and the wickedness of a confessor, has won me to for a night ... I wish to have forever. 2nd 5) Again, Pisanello, Luxuria, detail Not to mention the dialogues of Aretino, where of whores, nuns and wives, only whores ply an honest trade. 6) 6a) 6b) Riemenschneider, 1495, Eve from the Marienskapelle, half-length, Museum, Würzburg French MS, 1450(?), Vapor Bath, MS Franc. 289 Fol 414, Bibl, Nat., Paris Again, Riemenschneider, Eve (head and bust) Music: Glogauer Liederbuch, c. 1477-88, Ich bin erfreut, Archive 3033 On the other side, the purity of flesh lured the North too, as in the famous public baths and love-mystic heresy of Adamites. In the June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 2 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Germany where Luther was growing up, Riemenschneider and the Glogauer Songbook wreathe the voluptuous Garden: "not under the law but under grace" — "nicht unter dem Gesetz, sondern unter der Gnade." 7) 7a) H. Bosch, 1503-4, Garden of Delights, from center, Prado, Madrid Same, a closer detail (1996 video revision) (fade Glogauer) While in the art of Bosch, counterpole to the Italian, equally sought after in Spain, the landscape of venery is composed to such a Garden of Delights, that what stands in the triptych between eating forbidden fruit and choiring in musical hell, has been thought one of those Adamitic celebrations of Eros. As the upstaging of sex implies, the bombard of 1500 a8) 8) Verrocchio, 1479-88, The Colleoni, seen from the south, on its pedestal; Venice (CGB '48) Same, front view, nearer, from below; + V detail, V8a Music: Isaac, Alla Battaglia, as above, conclusion is not merely the intensification of war, of those Italian and European battles from which Machiavelli learned lessons as shrewdly real as the Colleoni by Leonardo's master, Verrocchio: Men must either be caressed or else annihilated ... War is not to be avoided, and can be deferred only to the advantage of the other side ... A prince should therefore have no other aim or thought but war ... the end justifies the means ... 9) 9a) Double: [A] Mantegna, 1449-54, Soldier from Martyrdom of Christopher, Eremitani, Padua; and [B] Leonardo, 1503, Study for the Battle of Anghiari, Budapest (slide show first takes these singly, then the double) Leonardo, C. 1488-90, Study for the Sforza Monument, silverpoint, etc., Royal Library, Windsor Castle (video then repeats the double, 9) It may be said of men in general that they are ungrateful, voluble, dissemblers, anxious to avoid danger and covetous of gain ... June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 3 �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. June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 4 �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) June 1996 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 1500: Explosive Balance 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 8 �C.G. Bell 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 9 �C.G. Bell 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 10 �C.G. Bell 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 11 �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. June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 12 �C.G. Bell 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 13 �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 14 �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 15 �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 16 �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 17 �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, June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 18 �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 1500: Explosive Balance 19 �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 1500: Explosive Balance 20 �C.G. Bell 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 21 �C.G. Bell 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 1500: Explosive Balance 22 �C.G. Bell 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 1500: Explosive Balance 23 �C.G. Bell 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. June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 24 �C.G. Bell 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: June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 25 �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 26 �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.) June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 27 �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: June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 28 �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 1500: Explosive Balance 29 �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 1500: Explosive Balance 30 �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 1500: Explosive Balance 31 �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 1500: Explosive Balance 32 �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 1500: Explosive Balance 33 �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 1500: Explosive Balance 34 �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. June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 35 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Leonardo: Force is of brief duration, because it desires perpetually to subdue its cause, and when this is subdued it kills itself ... One ought not to desire the impossible ... (close Mantuanus) June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 36 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 37 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1500 : Explosive Balance, Symbolic History, Part 15 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 15 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_15_1500--Explosive_Balance Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/16341f5be9aaa8097211adb056f7ea2f.pdf 3d5ea8c3e090cc00ac8da4d7b1f84d42 PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 14. 15th Century: Early Renaissance CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 July 1994 Last Revised January ‘96 �1 Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 14. 15th Century: Early Renaissance 1) Giovanni dei Grassi, c. 1398, Annunciation, Visconti Hours, National Library, Florence; + V detail Soon after 1400, Ciconia, Flemish-born Italian, closed his career with the ceremony motets, which initiate in music the spatial clarities of Early Renaissance. Music: Ciconia, 1400-10, O Virum — O Lux — O beate Nicholae, SAWT9505 At the same time art formed an horizon of humanizing sacred brightness — the International Style — from this 1398 Dei Grassi, in Italy, 2) Broederlam, 1393-99, Annunciation, from reredos, Museum, Dijon; first, video detail through Burgundy and France (this Dijon Broederlam), 3) English Alabaster relief, c. 1420?, Annunciation, Cathedral, Wells; + V detail across the Channel, to the winsome alabaster reliefs of England; 4) Cologne, c. 1410, Madonna, etc., Johnson Collection, Philadelphia (CGB '74); first, video detail back to Cologne, where the softest jewelling of all runs from this 1410 Madonna, 5) Lochner, c. 1435, Madonna in a Rose Arbor, Walraff-Richartz Museum, Cologne; + V detail to the ultimate child-wonder of Lochner, as late as 1440. So we might return by the Rhine and Danube, 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �2 C.G. Bell 6) Symbolic History Fra Angelico, 1434-35, Coronation of the Virgin, detail, Uffizi, Florence (CGB '59); + V closer details to the gold-leaf devotions of Fra Angelico, in Florence — 7) Ghiberti, 1404-09, Annunciation, North Door, Baptistry, Florence; first, video detail city of Classical recovery in Gothic grace. (End Ciconia) Here Ghiberti's early work on the Baptistery doors had opened the century. 8) Michelangelo, 1497-99, Pieta, whole, St. Peter's, Rome; + V detail By its close, art gathers its force in Michelangelo's first Pieta, music in the death-lament which Isaac, Fleming at the court of Florence, wrote for Lorenzo il Magnifico, died 1492: Music: 9) 10) 11) Isaac, 1492, "Quis dabit capiti meo aquam?" last section, Decca DL-79413 Same, detail: Mary's head; + V detail of 11 Same, detail: Christ's hand; + V detail of 8 Same, detail: Christ's body; + V return to 8, first a detail, then the whole (close Isaac) At such advance of consciousness in the science of incarnate sway, we heirs to its later pride feel a shudder of tragic awe. 12) Lascaux Cave 20,000 B.C., wall of main hall, detail, animals; video: close detail only As if the whole rational-realist thrust of civilization were an age-old mistake, some Luciferian fall from mythic immediacy. So it was at the Greeks that Charles Olson, in his Black Mountain lectures on history, pointed the finger of Nietzschean blame: "Man lost something just about 500 B.C., 13) 7/1994 Franz Marc 1913, Deer in the Forest, Phillips Gallery, Washington D.C.; + V details 15th Century: Early Renaissance �3 C.G. Bell Symbolic History and only got it back just about 1905 A.D." Music: Alban Berg 1920-6, from 3rd Mvt, Lyric Suite, V-LM-2531 (As in Marc's magic forest, Berg's Lyric Suite, Rilke's "Exposed on the peaks of the heart"?) Of uncleft consciousness indeed there moves Many about, many a qualmless hill-beast, Moves and delays. And the great inviolable bird Circles the summit's virgin refusal. But here, Unsheltered, here, on the peaks of the heart... (CGB) 14) (fade Berg) Double: {A} Michelangelo 1522, Fury, black chalk, Uffizi, Florence; and {B} Francois Rude 1833, Head of La Guerre, Arc de Triomphe, Paris Surely, if we pursue the revolution by which a Michelangelo hell-fury becomes the summons of a national Arc de Triomphe, arrogating its brazen Book of Law and iron Book of War over space, time and cause — who would not ask where history went wrong? 15) Double: {A} Aegean, c. 2000 BC, Head of Cycladic idol, Louvre, Paris; and {B} Greek (from Delos), c. 100 B.C., Bronze head, National Museum, Athens; and video detail (from V15B) And the modern appeal to the pre-Greek, Cycladic and abstract, is of a piece with Olson's oblique claim, that at the beginning of the Periclean century something happened, by which man was broken from the functionalities of nature and tribe; that it was philosophic scrutiny of self and world which stamped the brow-furrowing of consciousness on centuries to follow. Though if that palpable resolve to compose symbolic reality to the deliberate measure of man, was a mistake, 16) 7/1994 Egypt, Old Kingdom, Dynasty V, c. 2400 BC, Ranofer, Prophet of Ptah (head), Egyptian Museum, Cairo 15th Century: Early Renaissance �4 C.G. Bell Symbolic History it was not made once only, but before and after: 2400 BC, when Egypt became the cradle of civilization by great discoveries that way; 17) Greek (Attic), c. 490 B.C., Korê of Euthydicos, Acropolis Museum, Athens subsequently, by the Greeks, this Saphic Kore of 500 BC; and again (marking another 2000 years) as Christendom emerged from the trance of medieval seizure. And strange — if mistake — that it should produce, in each case, an expression of such vernal delight: the Archaic smile renewed 18) 18a) Baldovinetti, c. 1450(?), Madonna and Child, Louvre, Paris (CGB '80); + V details; with a digital return after 18a Baldovinetti, 1460-62, detail of Arno Valley, Nativity fresco, Vestibule, Santissima Annunziata, Florence [revised into video, ‘95] in this Baldovinetti Virgin, as pure as fetching, seated on some Florentine height over the discovered Val d'Arno. So the beauty of earth, an orphic voice through Dante's dead land — "La dov' esser de' giocondo" — "There, where one ought to be happy" — blooms in 15th-century Poliziano: To behold the valleys and hills and air pure, Grass and flowers, rivers cold and clear; To hear the birds sing and the waters sound And low wind murmuring among the fronds; See apples heap the earth and bend the trees, And the ripe wheat run in billows like the sea. (CGB) (E le biade ondeggiar come fa il mare.) As if a drunk who must end in murderous sick despair (our ravaged civilization of the "Bateau Ivre") could still look back to a morning age, when the first Promethean draughts had awakened to life and love, in what remains perhaps the most loveable of our centuries, the fifteenth. 19) Bernardo Daddi c. 1335?, Madonna etc., detail, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (CGB '75); + V details Trace the waking from the century before. In a Daddi Madonna, the burning mystery of Dante's praise: 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �5 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Vergine madre, figlia del tuo figlio: Maiden and mother and daughter of your son, Humble and exalted beyond every creature, Determined goal of eternal counsel — (CGB) termine fisso d'etterno consiglio — Music: Landini, c.1360(?), Va pure, amore; organ & harp, Zurich, Odys. 3216017 has lightened (like the music of Landini) through Boccaccio, O regina degli angioli, O Maria: Mary, Queen of the angels of heaven, Adornment of the sky, whose smiling features, Star of the sea, guide into their haven Wanderers from the way, your witless creatures... (CGB) (cut Landini) 20) V20a) Botticelli, c. 1485, Madonna of the Magnificat, detail, Uffizi, Florence; (video closer detail only); then Same, cropped whole from video file toward the 15th century ease of Belcari's sacred plays: Lily of May, flower of blessedness, With chastity and all the virtues else Adorned, of every kind and loveliness — We honor you above all saints and angels. (CGB) What Botticelli would culminate in this Magnificat Madonna — Europe refining from the Gothic past some Beulah wedding of earth and heaven: "You shall no more be called Desolate...for your land shall be married." 21) 22) 7/1994 Jan van Eyck, c. 1425, Madonna in a Church, Dahlem Museum, Berlin; + V detail Same, a closer central detail 15th Century: Early Renaissance �6 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Bruges, 1425: Jan van Eyck's church remains mystical; that sun shines from the north, as on Dante's Paradise; but it irradiates, like daily realities, the Gothic lines, the angels in the choir, the pageant Queen. Such the light in an English Advent poem: I sing of a maiden That is makeles, King of all kinges To her sone she ches. He cam also stille There his moder was, As dew in Aprille That falleth on the grass. He cam also stille To his moderes bour, As dew in Aprille, That falleth on the flour. He cam also stille There his moder lay, As dew in Aprille That falleth on the spray. Moder and maiden Was never non but sche; Well may swich a lady Godes moder be. Music, if nothing else, would make us treat 15th century Europe as a whole. To hear what those angels might be singing in the van Eyck choir, we turn to Dufay, 23) V23a) Hubert and Jan van Eyck 1427-29 (double), {A} Singing angels; and {B} Angels playing instruments, Altarpiece of the Lamb, Ghent Same, detail of A of 23, singing angels Music: Dufay, c.1430(?), Gloria ad modum tubae (Munich) AWT 9439 at the same time bringing the musicians nearer, as in the Ghent Altar of the Lamb. Yet Dufay's Gloria in the manner of trumpets, with canon above and ostinato below, 24) 7/1994 Luca della Robbia, 1431-38 (double), Choirboys from the Cantoria, Duomo Museum, Florence; for the double, video takes details, reversing the order: see A and B of V24 (CGB '86) in video file; digital adds to double one detail 15th Century: Early Renaissance �7 C.G. Bell Symbolic History is from about 1430, when Italianate-Flemish Dufay was with the Papal choir. So Luca della Robbia's Florentine choirboys would serve as well. 25) Benozzo Gozzoli, 1459, Angels and background detail, Medici Chapel, Florence; digital adds one detail (CGB '86) Or Gozzoli's angels, past mid-century, from the Medici Chapel; 26) Piero della Francesca, 1470, Angel musicians from the Nativity, National Gallery, London or Piero della Francesca's, from the London Nativity. 27) Luca della Robbia, Cantoria (double), Dancing, Duomo Museum, Florence; video replaces with details of singles V27 {A} (CGB) and V27 {B} in video file; digital adds to double, one detail (CGB '86) As worship turns to dance, it will be Luca della Robbia again; 28) Donatello, 1433-38, Cantoria of Dancing Genii, Duomo Museum, Florence; with V details or from Donatello's facing Gallery, the more bacchanalian abandon of dancing Genii. (end Dufay Gloria) This is new wine in the old faith bottles — 29) Fra Filippo Lippi, c. 1460(?), Madonna with Angels, Uffizi, Florence (CGB '59); + V details, cf. V29a and V29b (CGB '59) Browning's Brother Lippo stealing in from a night frolic to paint On Jerome knocking at his poor old breast With his great round stone to subdue the flesh. It is Vasari who tells how Lippi chose the novitiate Lucrezia as model for a Prato Madonna, finished nun, as it were, with the picture, took her off to be his mistress, 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �8 C.G. Bell Symbolic History thereafter portrayed as Mary, and their lively urchins as Christ and the angels — religion as sprightly as Charles of Orleans' Confession: My gostly fader, I me confesse, First to God and then to you, That at a window — wot ye how? — I stale a cosse of grete sweteness... 30) Fouquet, c. 1450, Agnes Sorel as Mary Enthroned, Louvre, Paris; + V detail But I restore it shall doutless... And that to God I make a vow... While French Fouquet turned Charles VII's Agnes Sorel to a Mary of pneumatic bliss — a levity naive as its embrace in faith: Chiamo il dolce Gesù e canto, canto — But to Mary mild and Jesu child, I sing, I sing... (CGB) 31) Fra Filippo Lippi c. 1441-47, Coronation of the Virgin (video alternates the whole with details from that and from 32) Some years before the meeting with Lucrezia, Lippi had painted the Uffizi Coronation of the Virgin, in which, by the startlingly personal St. Lucy below (with her children), the later affair seems prefigured. For Browning this is "the Prior's niece who comes/ To care about his asthma..." Oh that white smallish female with the breasts, She's just my niece — whom Lippi has chosen for this picture: "I shall paint/ God... Madonna.../ Ringed in a bowery flowery angel-brood / ...i' the front... a saint or two" — 32) Same, Lippi Coronation, detail front, right (old hand-colored Alinari photo) the artist himself then (as Browning thought), in his monk's robe come up, as from a dark stair, mazed, until that "sweet angelic slip of a thing" intercedes: "This man did the work" (as on the scroll) "iste perfecit opus". Such the Ave Regina Dufay troped for himself: "Miserere supplicanti Dufay"; 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �9 C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Dufay, 1464, from Antiphon, Ave regina caelorum, Miserere... Dufay (Planchard) MHS 4743A (fade) or the lighter greeting of his Month of May Rondeau, "Karissime Dufay vous en prye..." Music: Dufay, 1423-29, from Ce Moys de May, (Cape) EMS 206 (fade) 33) Double: {A} Lippi(?), c. 1435, Monks from a fresco, Carmine Cloister, Florence; and {B} Lippi, 1460-64, Girls at the Dance of Salome, Duomo, Prato; + V details from V33 {A} and V33 {B}) It is likely that in the fresco fragment in the Carmine Cloister (left) the young Lippi has represented his delight in whatever is perceived (Browning, from Vasari): First every sort of monk, the black and white, I drew them, fat and lean. . . 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �10 C.G. Bell Symbolic History While as late as the Prato frescoes, two girls whispering of Herodias' demand for John the Baptist's head, make such discovery unforgettable. 34) Fra Angelico & school, 1447-50, St. Laurence giving alms, detail, Capella Nicolina, Vatican, Rome (video: lower spread of whole V34, then closer detail) Was not Lippi's art-sire, the saintly Fra Angelico, entering Renaissance by the same observational road? — his mid-century St. Laurence distributing alms dominated by the blind beggar (right), where spirituality springs exactly from heightened sense. So Browning's Lippi, studying the watchmen, calls for "a bit of chalk". 35) French Gothic c. 1230, Faggots for Winter, West Front, Notre Dame, Paris; first, video detail Music: Perrin d'Angecourt, 13th cent., "Quant voi a la fin d'estey," AS-18 We have seen the secular hauntingly suspended in the synthesis of creed, sharp as this winter from Notre Dame. In a Goliard poem: "De ramis cadunt folia," the bleak time burns with love; so too with Perrin d'Angecourt, 13th century Troubador. (close d'Ancecourt) 36) Lorenzetti c. 1340, Winter, fresco border, Palazzo Publico, Siena; + V detail Music: Guillaume de Machault, c.1360(?), Rondeau, Puis qu'en oubli, (Cape) ARC 3032 In Lorenzetti's 14th-century Winter the mystery is distilled through a realism, strange as the "smoky rein" in Chaucer, which keeps Creseyde at Pandarus' house for the consummation required. So Dante in the Vita Nuova speaks with the ladies who pity him: And as sometimes we see water fall mingled with white snow, so it seemed their talk issued forth mingled with sighs. Guillaume de Machault's double-leading-tones, 37) 7/1994 Lorenzetti, c. 1340, detail from Good Government in the Country, Palazzo Publico, Siena; (video: first a closer detail, using Va37) 15th Century: Early Renaissance �11 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Lorenzetti's panorama of a well-governed countryside, have offered such exploratory translations of reality. Each detail of that vast spread — In Augoste in a hygh seysoun, Quen corne is corven wyth crokes kene — holds the dream of spacelessness. 38) (fade Machault) Pol de Limbourg, 1413-16, July, Tres Riches Heures, Chantilly (first, V details: reaping, then shearing) Music: Arnold de Lantins, c.1420?, Puis que je voy (Cape), AS-39 With the 1400's estrangement ebbs. The Calendar of the Tres Riches Heures, Burgundian Rondeaux (this Arnold de Lantins), breathe natural air. Even the plays of 1400 Flanders accomplish the human passage: Sandareen tells her new knight of her seduction by the baron who has cast her off; she speaks in the metaphor of a blossoming tree from which a falcon has robbed one flower; and he says one flower is nothing, to speak of it no more, it will not set him against the tree he loves. In English the greatest poetry of the seasons is from Gawayne and the Green Knight. We trim to summer and the coming on of fall: After, the sesoun of somer wyth the soft wyndes, Quen Zeferus syfles hymself on sedes and erbes; Wela wynne is the wort that waxes theroute, When the donkande dewe dropes of the leves, To bide a blysful blush of the bryght sunne. 39) Same, October, Tres Riches Heures; + V detail Bot then hyghes hervest, and hardenes hym sone, Warnes hym for the wynter to wax ful rype; He dryves wyth droght the dust for to ryse, Fro the face of the folde to flyghe ful hyghe; Wrothe wynde of the welkyn wrasteles with the sunne, The leves lancen fro the lynde and lyghten on the grounde, (those alliterations heightening every mood — as in the miniature, the face of the sower of winter wheat) 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �12 C.G. Bell 40) Symbolic History Same, December, Tres Riches Heures; (video has details only, below and above) And al grayes the gres that grene wats ere; Then al rypes and rotes that ros upon fyrst, And thus yirnes the yere in yisterdayes mony, And wynter wyndes again, as the worlde askes, no fage... (The 1400 castle rising behind, like the one Gawayne sees over the December woods: Towers set up between, pinnacled ful thick, Turrets with carved tops and chalkwhite chimneys.) 41) Same, April, Tres Riches Heures; with video details Gawayne must precede the Tres Riches Heures. But Charles d'Orleans, English captive, here writing in French, more than matches its period harmony: Le temps a laisié son manteau De vent, de froidure et de pluye, Et s'est vestu de brouderie, De soleil luyant, cler et beau... Riviere, fontaine et ruisseau Portent, en livrée jolie, Gouttes d'argent et d'orfaverie, Chascun s'abille de nouveau, Le temps a laissié son manteau. 42) (fade de Lantins) Grimani Breviary, c. 1510, April, Biblioteca Marciana, Venice; + V details. Music: Josquin des Pres, c.1500(?), from La Spagna, 5-voice basse danse, Seraphim SIC-6104 (3) With Lang's rendering — The year has changed his mantle cold Of wind, of rain, of bitter air; And he goes clad in cloth of gold, Of laughing suns and seasons fair... All founts, all rivers, seaward rolled, The pleasant summer livery wear, With silver studs on broidered vair; The world puts off its raiment old, 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �13 C.G. Bell Symbolic History The year lays down his mantle cold — we have moved from the Limbourg Calendar to its Grimani translation a century later (time of Josquin), in the robes and haze of bourgeois realism — such a filling-in as that of Arthurian romance over the three-hundred years from Chrestien to Malory. (end La Spagna) 43) Pol de Limbourg, January, Tres Riches Heures, Chantilly; + V details and return to the whole. Music: Ciconia, c. 1405-10, from O Rosa Bella, (Deller) RCA VLM-6016 Since the Tres Riches Heures — here January — like Ciconia's 1400 setting of "O Rosa Bella" — has still a trace of the old chivalric suspension of space, time and cause. When Chrestien's Lancelot, seeking Guenevere, has crossed the sword bridge into "the land from which no stranger returns," he is viewed from a tower window by King Bademagu, "very scrupulous and precise about honor and what was right," and by his son and opposite, the Queen's captor, Meleagant, "who never wearied of villainy, treason and felony." (end Ciconia) 44) Grimani Breviary, c. 1510, January, Biblioteca Marciana, Venice; + V details and return to whole; digital first gives a double of 43 and 44 In Malory, 1470, there is no good king Bademagu and no symbolic land. With an armed force Mellyagraunce surprises the Queen at Maying and takes her to his castle seven miles from Westminster. Launcelot gets word. Mellyagraunce's archers shoot his horse. He forces a driver to take him up in what for Chrestien was the mysterious cart. From a bay window, the Queen aspyed by his shelde that he was there hym self sir launcelot du lake; and thenne she was ware where came his hors ever after that charyot, and ever he trade his guttes and his paunche under his feet. Allas sayd the quene now I see well and preve that wel is hym that hath a trusty frend. As in the Grimani densening, the very knights and queens accept the probabilities of the middle class. 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �14 C.G. Bell 45) 45a) Symbolic History Jan (and/or Hubert) van Eyck, 1422-24 (or 1413-17?), Baptism, from the Tres Belles Heures de Notre Dame, Museo Civico, Turin; video has details only (cf. Va45), returning to a cropped whole after 45a (cf. V45b) Same, Voyaqe of St. Julian, from "Turin Hours", section of same MS burned in 1904 Music: Dunstable, c.1420(?), from O Rosa bella, (Cape) ARC-3052 If there are turning points in history, the van Eyck miniatures from the Turin Hours — by one or both brothers and surely from the 1420's or before — are the point of departure for all the realism (trees, water, atmosphere and distance) to follow. They succeed the Limbourg brothers as this Dunstable "O Rosa Bella" does the Ciconia (just heard) — not finer, not better, but polyphonically, sensuously, melodically advanced. As Martin le France wrote, Dufay and Binchois, against the early century of Carmen and Cesaris: Have assumed the English style And followed after Dunstable. (end Dunstable) That mutation of 1425 differentiates the New Europe 46) Rublev, Russian, 1422-27, Trinity, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow from everything that had gone before. The 1400 softening of International Style had cognates as far as the Byzantine — most tellingly in Russia. Though the gentlest art of the West seems physical beside the mystic accord of Rublev's weightless angels, forming (at their Abraham supper) the flower-frail round of a Trinity. 47) Claus Sluter, 1395-99, Head of Christ, Chartreuse de Champmol, Dijon; + V detail In Europe that horizon of grace becomes, as with Sluter, a Renaissance launching ground. Thus the incarnate Christ which crowns his Dijon Fountain. Music: 7/1994 Apt MS., late 14th cent., Jesu nostra redemptio, 1st stanza, SAWT9505 15th Century: Early Renaissance �15 C.G. Bell Symbolic History In the Apt "Redemptio" hymn, the revolution of immediacy takes the same center. The melody has risen from medieval tenor to descant; the bass settles down, seeking faux-bourdon chords; second progressions begin to yield to those of the fourth and fifth; that simple ordering of harmonic space founds the Renaissance Lauda: (cut Apt MS) 48) Belbello da Pavia, c. 1412-30(?), Creation of Eve, Visconti Hours, National Library, Florence (video: details only, cf V48) Music: Joh. Simon de Haspre, c.1400(?), "Ma doulce Amour," Odyssey 32-160178 History moves by the precipitation and inbreeding of opposites: Gothic flamboyance spills into the very years of humanist solemnity. Thus the miniatures of Belbello, completing the Visconti Hours, with the terminal dissonances of Ars Nova: de Haspre. (fade de Haspre) 49) Giovanni di Paolo, c. 1430(?), Entombment, Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore; first, video details Siena is the most startling art-bastion of a Gothic-Byzantine heightened by new experiment. In Giovanni di Paolo's Entombment, Peter does not interrupt, but casts a trans-real shadow on the gold light itself of the grave. Music: Cyprus, c.1420, Amen (close), from the Gloria, A.S. 126, B In music, the French court of Cyprus, until its 1426 sack by the Sultan, tops the isorythmic brilliance of the school of Machault — from the Amen of a Gloria. These pockets of fantastic continuance are not merely backward-looking. Their symbolic agitation, gathering material force, will break into the Renaissance again and again, as Savonarola would stir Medici Florence, or Mannerist distortion climax in El Greco. (end Amen) 50 7/1994 Lorenzo Monaco, 1413, Nativity, Predella of the Coronation, Uffizi, Florence (CGB '48); + V detail 15th Century: Early Renaissance �16 C.G. Bell Symbolic History In Florence the lingering transition works wonders of mystical sweetness, Monaco, Gentile, Fra Angelico. Brolo's hymn to the Virgin, "O Celestial Light", melodizes the starry blend. Music: 51) Va52) 52) Bart. Brolo, c. 1410-20(?), O Celestial Lume (close), AS-l, (#8 in US) Gentile de Fabriano, 1423, Shepherds from the Nativity, detail, Predella of Magi Altarpiece, Uffizi, Florence (CGB '48) Fra Angelico, c. 1425-30, Gate of Light, top left of Paradise Garden, from Last Judgment, San Marco, Florence Same, Paradise Garden, whole; and video details (from 52 or V52) (end Brolo) It is the celestial light of that chant which the saved enter in Fra Angelico's paradise, most childlike of those blessed gardens so much preferred to hell by Villon's mother: "La joye avoir me fay, haulte Deesse." What came from the Song of Songs, through the well-spring of Revelation and the smiling depth of Dante's shores "painted with spring's miraculous colors", has grown as artlessly innocent as the Mary of the Lauds — "Madre e Sposa,/ candida olente rosa" — herself that orchard enclosed, its fragrant herbs, its clear fountain of life: (Belcari) "viva fontana e chiara vena." 53) Claus Sluter 1394-1404, Well of Moses (David, Jeremiah & Zachariah), Champmol, Charterhouse, near Dijon The quantum leaps of history are not entirely localized. We cannot say when the limpid grace was penetrated by the humanist wedge. There had been Claus Sluter in Dijon, precocious as English Chaucer. Va54) Vb54) 54) Brunelleschi, esp. 1420-36, Dome of the Cathedral, Florence, detail Roman, esp. Hadrian, 120 AD, Pantheon (rear), Rome (detail of CGB '86) Again, Brunelleschi, Cathedral with Dome against a cloudy sky While, in Florence, Renaissance center, Brunelleschi's dome has not lost the bareness of the 1368 plan, that stamp of God's Gothic barn, which gives it a strength over all other domes. Vasari stresses Brunelleschi's 1403 sketching from Roman temples and measuring of the Pantheon. But Hadrian's brooding cement mass could hardly have suggested the levitational soar of Santa Maria del Fiore, its curve, as Vasari quotes 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �17 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 7/1994 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 7/1994 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 7/1994 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) 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �26 C.G. Bell 84) Symbolic History Jacobo della Quercia, 1425-38, "In the Sweat of thy Brow," bronze relief, doors of San Petronio, Bologna But Gothic had been stretched from the start between peace and frenzy, the peace enriching its texture, the frenzy more material in drive. By the 1430's, della Quercia's bronze doors in Bologna have passed the bequest of power to Michelangelo. 85) Double: [A] Masolino and [B] Masaccio, both c. 1425, Temptation and Expulsion, details, Brancacci Chapel, Carmine, Florence In the Brancacci chapel of the Carmine, we feel it like a Gospel command — that passage from the Gothic line and mystery of Masolino's innocent Temptation, to the tragic expulsion of Masaccio. Masolino had chosen this pupil and collaborator; yet how those quiet sinners of his Eden must have gazed across the chapel toward their nobler expulsion — "Paradise well lost!" 86) Pisanello, c. 1435, St. George and the Princess fresco, Sant' Anastasia, Verona; + V closer detail with gibbet So too in Pisanello's 1435 fresco of St. George and the Princess: with the housing of beatitude, force too knits its fabric. The attack is of realism itself, a keenness of seeing and being which arose out of Gothic (that gibbet here against the sky) — until all the Magdalens and beggar rogues of soul-levelling Christendom meet in Villon and Fat Margot: 87) Pisanello, same fresco, detail of gibbet only, two hanged men Come back, whenever you're in rut To this brothel where we hold our state. (CGB) Retournez cy, quant vous serez en ruit, En ce bordeau ou tenons nostre estat! Or, to match Pisanello's detail: I am Francois, I confess, Born in Paris, near Pontoise, 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �27 C.G. Bell Symbolic History And by six feet of hemp-grass, My neck will learn the weight of my ass. (CGB) 88) Andrea del Castagno, 1447, Last Supper, center, Convent Santa Apollonia, Florence (video shows first a closer detail from Va88, then draws a wider center from V88, of the whole) In Florence before mid century, the pastel calm of Veneziano is complemented by Castagno, here from a Last Supper. "Can you minister to a mind diseased?"; Castagno: "I will set its diseases visibly before you." Among the variegated marble panels of this room, that where Judas sits (across from Christ), traces the hell-whorls of his jealous thought. Va89) 89) Francesco Cossa (or del Cossa), c. 1470, Month of March, middle detail, Schifanoia Palace, Ferrara Same, detail of a peasant As the factual comes to parity with its faith containment, an expression is first possible (as in the Ferrara Months, by Cossa, about 1470), lean and hard as Gothic, yet already of Breughel's Renaissance earth. Dante had led the way, as in the metaphor of Inferno 24, where a peasant takes the frost for snow: ...when the hoarfrost on the ground copies the likeness of her white sister… and the peasant who needs fodder rises and looks out and sees the fields all whitened, and turning back to the house, smites his thigh... (CGB) 90) Same, March vineyard; + V detail By the time of these Cossa frescoes, such calendar observation (this March Vineyard) was the life of Mantuan (Turberville's translation, 1567): The man that earst did sowe And tillde his stonie soile, hath let a fielde his plowe And takes his ease: the wearie ground it selfe doth slumber nowe. The Shephierd having shutte his dores, and caught his cloake Keepes house: Neara eke doth sitte 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �28 C.G. Bell Symbolic History at home in smothering smoake At Chimnie nooke, and plies hir pottage Pot apace... 91) Rohan Hours, c. 1425(?), January, detail, National Library, Paris In the Rohan Hours, from about 1425, such realism had incised, within Gothic, the biting winter of Villon's Legacy: Sur le Noel, morte saison: (Kinnell) Near Christmas, the dead time When wolves live on the wind And men stick to their houses Against the frost, close by the blaze... 92) Fouquet, c. 1450, Medallion Self-Portrait, Louvre, Paris; + V detail In Fouquet's Medallion, self assumes that edged precision. No wonder the Testaments so worked on Pound and Eliot — Villon in the first (called Small) penning his bitter bequests until the ink is frozen and the candle blown out; in the second, called Great, Villon himself burnt-out: En 1'an de mon trentiesme aage — In the thirtieth year of my age, Having drunk my fill of shame... Written in the year 'sixty-one When the good king delivered me From the harsh prison of Meung... (CGB) 93) Pollaiuolo, c. 1470, Hercules and Antaeus, Uffizi, Florence I spit phlem as white as cotton, Gobs as big as tennis balls... Thanks to God and Jacques Thibault Who gave me cold water... underground... (CGB) In Florence that carborundum would hone Pollaiuolo's Hercules and Antaeus to a scalpel — 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �29 C.G. Bell 94) 94a) Symbolic History Pollaiuolo, c. 1460(?), Girl's profile, Poldi-Pezzoli, Milan; + V detail Pollaiuolo, c. 1475, Apollo and Daphne, National Gallery, London Music: Dufay, c.1440-50(?), Adieu m'amour, Cape, EMS-206 under which beauty thins to the wistful delight of the Poldi-Pezzoli girl, mostly attributed to that same anatomist Pollaiuolo. As if for all freshness and joy Dufay's "Adieu m'amour" were sounding. So the wailful brightness of Villon's best-known ballade, "des dames du temps jadis": Dictes moy ou, n'en quel pays, Est Flora la belle Rommaine... Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan? Of which Rossetti, for all his "yester-year", caught something; Where is Echo, beheld of no man, Only heard on river and mere — She whose beauty was more than human? But where are the snows of yester-year? 95) English, c. 1460, Sculptured corpse from Beckington Tomb, Cathedral, Wells (CGB '84) (fade Adieu m'amour) Villon's ballade is introduced by a description of death, sharp as those tombs where (sometimes) worms and mice crawl from the sculptured corpse — yet of strange beauty (Symons): No, I am not, as others are, Child of the angels, with a wreath Of planets or of any star. My father's dead, and lies beneath The churchyard stone: God rest his breath! Va96) 96) V96a) 7/1994 Donatello, 1455-58, Mary Magdalen, upper half, Duomo Museum, Florence (CGB '86) Same, head, another view Same, detail of hands 15th Century: Early Renaissance �30 C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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: 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �31 C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �32 C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �33 C.G. Bell Symbolic History (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, 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �34 C.G. Bell Symbolic History 107) Same, upper detail of Judith; video uses V107 (same, different framing) V107a) Same, another view, upper detail only has been spanned in a prophetic monument. But Josquin too worked over that divide: against the Grillo, and from the same Petrucci record, his Mass, Ave Maris Stella, raises the plea to the Lamb of God to a last strident cry. (close Josquin) Such Savonarolla's "Oimè": All Italy has asked the Judgment of war and plague... Return to Jesus Christ, his Mother and meek Spouse; Quit the inveterate vice of your godless ways. (CGB) 108) Botticelli, 1474, Adoration of the Magi, Uffizi, Florence (cf V108, CGB '59); + four video details (three from V108a and V108b) No one lived both myths, pagan and Christian, more poignantly than Botticelli. His 1475 Medicean Adoration of the Magi assumes the bel viver of his master, Lippi. Old Cosimo kneels to the child; in front, his son Piero (both dead by that time) faces the radiant Giuliano, soon to be murdered in the Pazzi conspiracy. Far right, looking out, we cannot miss the proud painter, Alessandro. Far left, Lorenzo, citizen-ruler holds court. Poliziano, prodigy of Renaissance poetry, fawns on him — a caress even Lorenzo's horse toothfully resents. (Digital adds 108c, Botticelli's Giuliano — see Face and Landscape 34 or 34a; then 108d, central detail of Venus from the Spring) Perhaps a year after this painting, Giuliano's love for Simonetta (Vespucci by marriage) would come to the climax of the January 1476 tournament, over which he, victor, would crown her queen. On April 26th of the same year, Simonetta's death of consumption ranked their love with Petrarch's and Dante's. On the second anniversary of her death, Giuliano's assassination turned it to myth. As Poliziano had written (for Giuliano): She seemed Minerva in act, Venus in face... a109) 7/1994 Botticelli, 1478, Primavera (Spring), whole, Uffizi, Florence; + V detail (using Va109 center) 15th Century: Early Renaissance �35 C.G. Bell 109) Symbolic History Same, Botticelli Primavera, upper left quadrant; + V detail: (to which add close-up of the little cloud, from V109a) or in La Giostra: Candida e ella, e candida la vesta, Ma pur di rose e fior dipinta e d'erba... In Botticelli's Primavera, realm of that Simonetta Venus, Mercury with his wand disperses gathering clouds. How Dante's simultaneous levels of literal, political, moral and anagogical meaning, might reconcile our critics: — If Simonetta comes to this grove through the dispersed cloud of death, it remains Tuscan elysium, from which Good Counsel would banish clouds to ensue. As Striggio would write for Monteverdi's Orfeo more than a century later: "Deh, sommi Dei,/ Non torcete da noi benigno il guardo." 110) Botticelli, c. 1842, Pallas and the Centaur, Uffizi, Florence (CGB '59; video shows upper half only So with Botticelli's Pallas and the Centaur: the contention of political or moral ignores the same Dante-to-Can-Grande. No doubt the delivery of Reason from man-beast is guided by Minerva; yet her dress, adorned with the Medici emblem, surely hints at Lorenzo and some feat of diplomatic control. 111) Botticelli, 1483(?), Venus and Mars, National Gallery, London; + V detail Is the control more threatened in this Mars and Venus of perhaps a year later? It is cheerful when Venus as Humanitas prevails over Mars as discord. So at Alexander's marriage (Lucian) cupids played with his armor. But this loved-out Giuliano-Florence is in jeopardy. He sleeps, while those lusty satyrs with the lance stir up a hornet's nest. That the pun on Vespe (wasp) suggests the patronage of Simonetta's Vespucci, can only complement the danger, which, as in Biblical prophecy, is both past and future. 112) 7/1994 Botticelli ,1490, Head of St. John from Madonna of San Barnabas, Uffizi, Florence 15th Century: Early Renaissance �36 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) 7/1994 Piero della Francesco, 1465(?), portraits of Federigo de Montefeltro and Battista Sforza, Duke and Duchess of Urbino, Uffizi, Florence 15th Century: Early Renaissance �37 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: 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �38 C.G. Bell 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: 7/1994 H. Isaac, pub. 1506, Missa la Spagna, Agnus Dei, Seraphim SIC 6104 15th Century: Early Renaissance �39 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 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �40 C.G. Bell Symbolic History 1500, muralled the Sienese Cathedral library — such tour-de-force panoramas (from the life of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, left, the a125) 125) Same, Aeneas Journey to Basel, fresco; + V detail of travellers (from Va125) Same, Pinturicchio, Journey, upper part, detail of storm Journey to Basel, with its background of harbor and storm) as if the "open road" of Isaac's songs — (fade Isbruck) Music: Isaac, before 1500(?), from Tmeiskin was jonck, I,5,B2b AS (33RPM) "Glück ist in allen Gassen"; with this refrain from his Flemish "Tmeiskin was jonck" — (refrain and fade) were spun quod libet to a glad Missa Carminum. Music: 126) Isaac, c. 1506(?), Missa Carminum, 2nd Hosannah, MHS 1777 (end Hosannah) Luca Signorelli, 1499-1504, Resurrection of the Dead etc., Duomo, Orvieto (CGB '84); + V detail Music: Josquin des Pres, pub.1519, from Miserere, AS 107(A) Yet here as earlier, the claim of earth advances an always more physical doom. So, with Pinturicchio, comes an Umbrian complement, Signorelli — his masterpiece the Apocalypse fresoces at Orvieto — this Resurrection of the Dead. It is a mood to which Josquin continually returns: "Miserere!" (fade Miserere) 127) Gutenburg Bible, c. 1454, Illuminated Page, Proverbs, New York Public Library (video shows first two details, inserting between them: V127a) 19th century color engraving of the 1450 event; so returns to 127, 2nd detail, then whole) Why is this manuscript so mechanical, its illuminations so dull? The question is unfair, since this landmark of progress is the Gutenberg Bible, printed in German Mainz about 1454. It is mechanical because it was set from moveable type and could be reproduced toward a limit which in our time pumps books on and off the cartel shelves 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �41 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 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �42 C.G. Bell Symbolic History earth from the slopes and mountains has raised the floors of the seas... and caused the plain to be uncovered... Cusanus "privative infinity" sheds privation, becoming almost the cosmos "Won from the void and formless infinite". (cut de la Rue after "Sabaoth") 131) 131a) Leonardo, 1513-16, John the Baptist as Smiling Precursor, Louvre, Paris; + V detail Leonardo, c. 1514, Self, red chalk, Library, Turin (video, detail only) As the wisdom of age had touched the boy, child-promise smiles on the old Leonardo — this Louvre St. John as Precursor — with Pico della Mirandola: Let a certain holy ambition invade the mind so that we may not be content with mean things but may aspire to the highest things and strive with all our force to attain them: for if we will to, we can...He who is a seraph, that is, a lover, is in God; and more God is in him, and God and he are one. Though the smile is ambiguous in Leonardo's Notebooks: Behold now the hope and desire of going back to one's own country or returning to primal chaos... of the man who looks forward to each new spring... and does not perceive he is longing for his dissolution... as elements... imprisoned...long for the source... What has the Precursor precursed? a132) Leonardo, c. 1483 ff., Great Crossbow on Carriage, Ambrosian Library, Milan 132) Leonardo, 1483 ff., Scythed car and armored tank, British Museum, London V132a) Leonardo, 1483 ff., Bombard with shrapnel, Ambrosian Lihrary, Milan It would be as in Shelley: Although a subtler sphinx renew Riddles of death Thebes never knew. Had not most of the 1482 letter to Sforza promised instruments of war: 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �43 C.G. Bell Symbolic History I have plans for destroying every fortress...not founded upon rock... for making cannon... engines for attack or defence... ships which can resist the fire of cannon... armoured cars... which will enter the serried ranks of the enemy with their artillery... and behind these the infantry will be able to follow without opposition... Talents applied, more than his art, in the service of Il Moro and Cesare Borgia — that Caesar, Machiavelli also would have enabled. In the floating Utopia of High Renaissance, the modern world, with its explosive potentialities, is born. 133) Dürer, "1500," Self as Christ, Alte Pinakothek, Munich; with V details So with person. In this Dürer, inscribed 1500, Cusanus' omnivoyant God-man becomes the deepest reflection of the mirrored self. As Eckhart had said in a passage that would stir Luther: "God has become man in order that I may become God." Was that not the call of the Luther Bible: "zu der herrlichen Freiheit der Kinder Gottes"? The first history of music on records (the Parlophone "2000 Years") paired, with the Dufay Trumpet Gloria already heard, Josquin's Et Incarnatus from the Missa Pange Lingua — "and was made man." Music: Josquin des Pres, c.1500-10(?), Et Incarnatus, close, Parl. R-1019 Thus — Berlin chorus and all — the Western Incarnation takes up the cross of the world. 134) Michelangelo, 1536-41, Last Judgment, detail of Trumpeting Angels, Sistine Chapel, Rome; first, video detail Music: Cabezon, c. 1540-50, opening, Tiento de 4 Tono, Videro, GSC52 A Michelangelo, in the storm to follow ("Tuba mirum spargens sonum"), felt also in the Tientos of Cabezon, must have dreamed sometimes of the Lorenzo de' Medici Florence of his youth. (fade Cabezon) 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �44 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Va135) Botticelli 1482, Birth of Venus, Uffizi, Florence (CGB '59); detail of Venus, upper half from slide 136 135) Same, whole picture (which video crops) Music: Isaac, c. 1485(?), Helas, 3-v, viols (Cape), AS-43 There Botticelli had brought Gothic line to an ultimate clarity of nostalgia in joy — leaves, waves, blown roses, the pure Platonic nude — as Poliziano had described in La Giostra, that unfinished romance which carries in germ the whole future of paganizing poetry and art: A woman born of the waves, lovesome and free In every act, in her face more than human, Wafted by lively zephyrs to the shore Upon a shell, while heaven smiles upon her... (CGB) 136) Same, figure of Venus (CGB '59); here video takes from 135 Venus and the figure to our right) You would have sworn the goddess came from the wave, Gathering with her right hand her golden hair, The other lifted, the sweet fruit to save From greedy spoil; and as she touched the shore With sacred feet, seen herbs and flowers pave The barren strand... (CGB) 137) 138) Same, detail of figure to the right (CGB '59) Same, detail of figures to the left (CGB '59); to which video adds Venus' face (again from 136), with a return to 135, the whole picture ...and marked with what light air Three nymphs accost her and her coming hail And close invest her in a starry veil. (CGB) Michelangelo could have remembered the music too, Isaac — not the brooding Lamentation but ballades sighed by the viols, as wistfully glad as the receding curves of Botticelli's shore. In that backward looking, even Michelangelo, or whoever, after him, has been most partisan in the embattled grandeur of Promethean consciousness, might drop, like 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �45 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Milton's Adam and Eve, "som natural tears." Isaac Helas) 139) (fade Flemish, c. 1460-70, Virgin and Child with Mary of Burgundy, detail, Hours of Charles the Bold, National Library, Vienna (Landsburg), (video ranges from whole over various details) Since part of every soul must yearn (like the imprisoned elements) for a naive anonymous grace — here from Mary of Burgundy's Book of Hours, the daily reading in that same book become an allegorical window. Such quiet pre-selfhood lightens an English wedding fragment from the time: The maidens came When I was in my mother's bower; I had all that I would. The bailey beareth the bell away; The lily, the rose, the rose I lay. 140) Same, Mary of Burgundy, whole (while video continues with details) The silver is white, red is the gold; The robes they lay in fold. The bailey beareth the bell away; The lily, the rose, the rose I lay. And through the glass window shines the sun. How should I love, and I so young? The bailey beareth the bell away; The lily, the lily, the rose I lay. — As frail, as bright, as the unmatched maiden of the other poem: ...As dew in Aprille That falleth on the spray. Moder and maiden Was never non but sche; Well may swich a lady Godes moder be. 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 46 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 15th Century : Early Renaissance, Symbolic History, Part 14 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 14 of the Symbolic History Series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_14_15th_Century--Early_Renaissance Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/fad610448a734f3bff5cd9a8d9fc85a5.pdf c11856417131273e34feb7d7871d423a PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 19. 1600: The Tragic Divide CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 May 1994 Last Revised June 1996 �Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 19. 1600: The Tragic Divide (Shakespeare) a1) Michelangelo 1536-41, The Last Judgment, detail, Sistine Chapel, Vatican, Rome For 1st 1) Cornelis van Haarlem, by 1588 (copy?), two followers of Cadmus devoured bv a dragon, Ovid Metamorphoses, III 1-151, National Gallery, London It is current to think of history as made by those who enact it; but enacted, it builds a landscape of the causal must-be: "there is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come." In that topology of spirit, there are watersheds and mountain divides — none more charged, "twixt...extremes of passion," than that through which the arts and thought, the very space and humanity of the West, passed around the century mark of 1600. That range, which is the apocalyptic inturning of Renaissance pride and power, For 1st 2) El Greco 1608-14, view and map of Toledo, detail, Museum, Toledo El Greco scaled in painting, Giordano Bruno in flaming act and word: "He who in himself sees all things, is all things." In poetry, the radical violence of Marino, Gongora, de Sponde and Donne finds its height and depth For 1st 3 and 2nd 2) El Greco c. 1610?, view of Toledo, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City (video: detail only) in the storm and madness of Shakespeare's King Lear: 5/1994 1600: The Tragic Divide 1 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Let the great gods That keep this dreadful pother o'er our heads Find out their enemies now. Tremble thou wretch, That hast within thee undivulged crimes, Unwhipped of justice. Hide thee, thou bloody hand; Thou perjured, and thou simular of virtue That art incestuous. Caitiff, to pieces shake, That under covert and convenient seeming Has practiced man's life. 2nd 1) 3rd 2) 2nd 3) Music: El Greco 1610-14, St. John's Vision: the Fifth Seal, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City (CGB '74); first, video detail Same, close detail of figures, center (CGB ‘74) Same, of figures to the right (CGB '74) Gesualdo 1611, Aestimatus sum, opening. (Craft) Col. Y 32886 Close pent-up guilts Rive your concealing continents, and cry These dreadful summoners grace. I am a man More sinned against, than sinning... In music. the chromatic venture is at its peak in Gesualdo da Venosa — here from the 1611 Responsories. (on "liber") Va4) Same, Vision (CGB '74; upper spread of 2nd 1) 4) El Greco, 1605, Adoration of the Shepherds, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City 4a) El Greco, 1612-14, Adoration of the Shepherds, Predo, Madrid; copy in Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City (fade Gesualdo) In El Greco after 1600, Apocalypse and Nativity stir the same frenzy. So in Lear the comic and tragic are fused and transcended. With Lear going mad: "Hast thou given all to thy two daughters? and art thou come to this?" Edgar pretending to be mad: "This is the foul fiend Flibertigibbet: he begins at curfew and walks till the first cock"; the Fool clowning like a madman: "Prithee nuncle. be contented; 'tis a naughty night to swim in" — we are caught in the delirium of a chromatic capriccio, where sorrows lighten with electrical play. June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 2 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 5) French, Tapestry, c. 1510, Sight, from The Lady and the Unicorn, Cluny, Paris; + V detail V5a) Same, from Lady and Unicorn Tapestries, Hearing (video: detail only) In that crucible of transformations the dreaming thin idealism of the Gothic past is consumed — the 1500 poignance of The Lady and the Unicorn, with de la Rue's "Incessantly my poor heart laments": Music: a6) 6) Pierre de la Rue, c. 1510(?), Incessament mon povre cueur lamente, (Cape) EMS 213 Poussin, c. 1628, Inspiration of the Poet, right detail, Louvre, Paris Same, whole (video takes these from a lighter slide, V6) and is reborn in the spatial earth and human confidence of the Baroque: Music: Louis Couperin 1650-60(?) from Chaconne, Suite in D, Leonhardt, VICS-1370 Louis Couperin's chordal celebration of our mastery — like Rubens, like this Poussin, pride made art, art ripened into pride. The deities praised in Cymbeline are temporally responsive, temporally benign: Laud we the gods, And let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils From our blessed altars. Publish we this peace To all our subjects... a7) b7) c7) 7) (fade Couperin) S. Vouet Tapestry, 1627, Finding of Moses, Louvre, Paris; + V detail Arras Tapestry, c. 1430, Offering of the Heart, Cluny, Paris Again a7, Vouet Moses (video: detail only) Double: [A] Arras Heart, b7; and [B] detail of Vouet Moses, a7 Music: Dowland, 1600-04, Lachrimae Antiquae pavan, viols and lute, VICS-1338 It is the contrast I experienced long ago at a tapestry exhibit in the Metropolitan, where, standing at the portal of two rooms — in one the dreaming flatness of late Gothic June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 3 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History (this most refined allegory of The Offering of the Heart), in the other the Cartesian vaunts of Baroque (this 1627 Finding of Moses, designed by Vouet and woven in the preGobelin factories of the Louvre) — I thought of Shakespeare (with the musical glory he invokes, this Dowland) a bridge over that style-gap, as between two separate civilizations, though indeed they were one; the grandchildren of the first manor could actually have been working in the second. (fade Dowland) 8) 8a) 8b) English, c. 1590(?), Elizabeth I, "Ditchley Portrait," National Portrait Gallery, London; + V detail Jacobean, 1607-11 ff., Robert Lyminge (for Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury), The Library, Hatfield House, Hertfordshire Again 8, Elizabeth I (video: detail only, from 8) So Elizabeth stands on her island between the Gothic flatness and the opulence to follow — This... demi-paradise... This precious stone set in the silver sea... Against the envy of less happier lands... The Armada cloud is at her back, before her the sunlit calm of Good Hope, which the late plays wrest from storm and ignorance, "these surges/ Which wash both heaven and hell." Thus Bacon in the New Atlantis: The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes... and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible. Though the pictorial flatness reminds us how far the Medieval stars still ruled over Shakespeare's nativity. 9) Elizabethan, late 16th cent., Sheldon Tapestry, rural pleasures (video: two details only, one from V9a) His early songs, Sheldon tapestries, the plaintive turns of lute and virginals (Farnaby's "Dreame," "His Rest") carry the inconsequent bright awakening through the century: Music: June 1996 Giles Farnaby, c. 1590(?), "His Dreame," (Dolmetsch) Col 5713 1600: The Tragic Divide 4 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History When daisies pied, and violets blue, And lady-smocks all silver-white, And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue, Do paint the meadows with delight, The cuckoo then on every tree Mocks married men, for thus sings he, Cuckoo. Cuckoo, cuckoo. O word of fear, Unpleasing to a married ear. a10) 10) 10a) (cut Farnaby) Rubens, c. 1608(?), Samson and Delilah, National Gallery, London (video: detail only) Rubens, c. 1608, Mulay Ahmad, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; first, V detail Tintoretto, 1579-81, Temptation of Christ, Sala Grande, Scuola di San Rocco, Venice Music: T. Tomkins, published 1622, from "When David Heard," Odyssey 32 16 0171 But Shakespeare died in the volitional grandeur he helped to form — as of Tomkins' Absalom or of this Mulay Ahmad painted by Rubens five years after Othello had dignified his own crime and self-punishment: (fade Tomkins) It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul — Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars — It is the cause... And say besides, that in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, I took by th' throat the circumcised dog, And smote him — thus. But such human power still walks the symbolic stage, as in old moralities, between a star-fretted heaven and the cellar traps of hell. The expanded Renaissance earth al1) Giselbertus, 1130-40, detail of Weighing of Souls from the Last Judgment, Cathedral of Autun, Saone-et-Loire June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 5 �C.G. Bell b11) 11) Symbolic History Hans Reichle, 1602-07, Lucifer detail, bronze St. Michaels' Group, façade of Zeughaus, Augsburg French Romanesque, c. 1075, Soul between Devil and Angel, St. Benoit sur Loire reels under the Dark Age battle. It is that demi-devil Iago, the negation of Jahwe's "I am that I am," who has so ensnared Othello, body and soul, that he cries for the lash of fire: Whip me ye devils From the possession of this heavenly sight... On the same "bank and shoal of time" where flights of angels are to sing the sweet Prince, Hamlet, to his rest, Lady Macbeth, summoning spirits to take her milk for gall, goads her tempted thane to "jump the life to come." Banquo: The instruments of darkness tell us truths, Win us with honest trifles, to betray 's In deepest consequence. From the earliest carvings of Romanesque, 12) 12a) Hieronymus Bosch, 1500-02, Good and Evil Angels, detail of the Haywain, Prado, Madrid; + V closer details Same, entire Triptych (video: center panel only, from V12a) to 1500 Bosch and beyond, the reappearing pair of Good Angel and Bad from the scaffold of God and the scaffolds of World, Flesh, and Belial attend Mankind in The Castle of Perseverance. Even Marlowe's Faustus sits in his study between the same prompters: Good: Faustus, repent, yet God wil pitty thee... and the Evill: Ay, but Faustus never shal repent. In Shakespeare the Medieval ground lies most exposed in the early Histories — Hastings: June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 6 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History O momentary grace of mortal men, Which we more hunt for than the grace of God! Who builds his hope in air of your good looks Lives like a drunken sailor on a mast. Ready, with every nod to tumble down Into the fatal bowels of the deep. 13) El Greco, 1578, Adoration of the Holy Name, The Escorial, Spain 13a) Same, detail lower right (while video shows from 13: first, upper half, then two lower details, then the whole); 13a is from El Grecol's Sketch, National Gal.lery, London. Music: Pomponio Nenna, c. 1610(?), Tenebrae, Responsoria, Nonesuch H-71277 In that ghostly forehall to the Day of Wrath (chromatic now with all Pomponio Nenna shared with Gesualdo), El Greco's Philip II (though cushioned) prays to the Holy Name, over the Leviathan mouth of hell. Mad Tom: Nero is an angler in the lake of darkness. Pray, innocent, and beware the foul fiend. For both Lear and Gloucester the turning point is prayer: Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are... ...I have ta'en Too little care of this! and: Heavens, deal so still, Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man ...feel your power quickly. So distribution should undo excess, And each man have enough. Charity itself become Utopian! 14) 14a) El Greco, c. 1610, Laocoön, National Gallery, Washington D.C. (CGB '75); + V upper left detail Same, Laocoön, center detail (CGB '75); video returns first to 14 June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 7 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Under a conscious pagan surface of plural gods and daemonic nature — (skip in Nenna to "Exclamans") As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport — and far transcending the opposite tragic truth, the wheel of retributive justice — The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices Make instruments to plague us — Lear more than any other play builds a Christian mystery of love out of humbled pride: Men must endure Their going hence, even as their coming hither; Ripeness is all. From the same time, El Greco's Laocoön turns the Homeric fable and recovered Hellenistic carving to a sacred involvement of the human family in the toils of the godsnake. 15) Same, closer detail of Laocoön (CGB '75); with video details (also from V15a and 14) Gloucester: Let me kiss that hand — Lear: Let me wipe it first, it smells of mortality. But can El Greco's fevered art rise with Lear through Christ and the woman taken in adultery: Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand; Why dost thou lash that whore? to the old king's waking in Cordelia's care?: (close Nenna) Do not laugh at me, For as I am a man, I think this lady To be my child Cordelia... Pray you now, Forget and forgive; I am old and foolish. June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 8 �C.G. Bell 16) 16a) Symbolic History Jacob de Gehyn II, 1603, Devil Sowing Tares, pen and ink, Staatl. Mus., Berlin Bertoia Parmese, 1570-72, Judgment of Paris, detail, National Gallery, Washington D.C. (CGB '75) On Shakespeare's stage, as in any perspective field by his contemporary Jacob de Gheyn, the devil may be sowing symbolic tares. Where is the cave in Macbeth called Acheron? is Hamlet mad or sane? how does the 24 hour action of Othello go with the time implied: "What keep a week away, a month"; "The deed of shame with him a thousand times committed" — in 24 hours? If these flights rest on Medieval earthlessness, they show such mastery of earth's dimensions as the spatial foreshortenings of Tintoretto and the Mannerists. Where the causal mingles with the symbolic, the dramatic why broods "yet hanging in the stars." 17) English late 13th cent., Harlech Castle, Wales; first, V detail Music: 13th cent., In Seculum Artifex, "Jolly Minstrels," VICS-10049 The history Shakespeare chronicles begins with King John, 1200, a time when even the secular held the chivalric distance of sacred surrender. If the crisis of tragedy in Shakespeare is a crisis in Christendom, what it requires (over the Judgment ground) is a world-affirming grandeur as far from Harlech Castle as is 13th-century song from chordal pomp or the mighty line. (fade In Seculum) Va18) Jacobean, 1607-11 (Robert Lyminge), Hatfield House, South Front (detail), near London (slide show substitutes a18, Hardwick Hall, 1590-94, South Front) Same, Hatfield, interior, The Long Gallery Again, a18, Hatfield exterior, wider view Vb18) 18) Music: William Byrd, c. 1600(?), In Nomine à 5, (viols, Jaye) Turnabout, TV 34017 Whereas in the history plays, everything from Constance Plantagenet — Here I and sorrows sit, Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it — June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 9 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History to the fall of Wolsey — I have ventured, Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders, This many summers in a sea of glory — might be enacted in the Jacobean courtyard of Hatfield House to the swelling harmonies of a Byrd In Nomine. (fade Byrd) 19) Limbourg Brothers, 1413-16, February, Tres Riches Heures, Chantilly; + V details Yet for all his vastness, Shakespeare is happy heir to the naive vitalities of Gothic: this Limbourg winter, the birds, the drifted road, the woman blowing her nails: When icicles hang by the wall, And Dick the shepherd blows his nail, And Tom bears logs into the hall, And milk comes frozen home in pail, When blood is nipped and ways be foul, Then nightly sings the staring owl, Tu-whit, tu-who, A merry note. While greasy Joan doth keel the pot. 20) Flemish MS, c. 1510, February, Grimani Breviary, St. Mark's Library, Venice; + V detail The Grimani variation moves a hundred years toward the fulness of Shakespeare's nature and clowns: When all aloud the wind doth blow, And coughing drowns the parson's saw, And birds sit brooding in the snow, And Marian's nose looks red and raw. When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl, Then nightly sings the staring owl, Tu-whit, tu-who, A merry note, While greasy Joan doth keel the pot. June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 10 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History By Shakespeare's birth that Gothic observation was opening 21) 21a) 21b) P. Brueghel, 1565, Hunters in the Snow, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna (CGB '59) Same, detail of bird and mountains, upper right Same, detail of hunters, lower left (CGB '59) to the recess of Brueghel, the foreground hill dropping to a valley under snow peaks and the bird's wing, a funnel of force into which we, like the hunters, are drawn. So the winter of Gawain and the Green Knight, 1390 — When clear cold water, shed from the clouds, Froze before it could fall to the fallow earth... And clattering from the crest the running stream Hung over his head in hard icy-ikkles — broadens through Douglas, 1510 (CGB): Over crags and dark brows of the broken rocks Hung long icicles like giant hoary locks... And the wild geese also were clacking and crying, In the dark night above the city flying; through Sackville's 1563 Induction, The naked twigs were shivering all for cold, And Spenser's Winter, Chattering his teeth… Whil'st on his hoary beard his breath did freeze, to Shakespeare's: ...the icy fang And churlish chiding of the winter's wind... 22) P. Brueghel, 1568, Peasant Dance, detail of piper, Kunsthistoriches, Museum, Wien; video: first, central detail from the whole, see Va22 June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 11 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History All over Europe, as the Renaissance deepens, the features of Shakespeare's world take form: folk life in Brueghel gaining in volume, as from mystery plays and farces, through Rabelais, toward Sancho Panza, Bottom, Dogberry: Come hither neighbor Seacoal… You are thought here to be the most senseless and fit man for the constable of the watch. Therefore bear you the lantern. This is your charge. You shall comprehend all vagrom men... 23) 23a) 23b) 23c) Elsheimer, 1609, Night Flight to Egypt, whole, Alte Pinakothek, München Same, Night Flight, detail of sky (cf. Giants 80; while V takes a detail from 23) Rubens, 1637-40, Landscape by Moonlight, Courtauld Institute; + V detail Again 23, Elsheimer, Night Flight, cropped (CGB '59) Music: Dowland 1612. From Silent Night, close, (Deller) SRV-306 SD On the Keplerian divide of 1600, German Elsheimer turns nature to an infinite starry dark, a Sidereal Messenger, as rich and Italianate as the chromatics of Dowland's "From Silent Night". Hard to realize, in the nocturnal glory of the Juliet balcony scene: But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? that the only scene-painting is in Romeo's vow: by yonder blessed moon... That tips with silver all these fruit tree tops. A description slightly extended in The Merchant of Venice: The moon shines bright. In such a night as this, When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees, And they did make no noise... and Look how the floor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold. June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide (end Dowland) 12 �C.G. Bell 24) Symbolic History Mantegna, 1474(?), Gonzaga Court, Ducal Palace, Mantua; first, V detail To nature must be added the Renaissance court, jester (here dwarf) and all. It begins, with Mantegna's 1474 fresco of the Gonzagas, to have the right Twelfth-Night look, the combined retinue, if Duke Orsino had married the Countess Olivia. a25) 25) Titian, 1532, Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici, Palazzo Pitti Moretto da Brescia, c. 1525(?), "Alas I desire too much," National Gallery, London V25a) Veronese (1553-4) Juno pours gold on Venice, Doge's Palace, Venice (CGB '59) The individual Claudios and Benedicks first perfect the airs in which even the 19th century conceived them, when the followers of Giorgione — Titian, Lotto, Moretto — painted such portraits as this inscribed: "Alas, I desire too much." Not only The Merchant of Venice, where Portia is the golden fleece and everything hinges on gold, not only Shakespeare, but the whole northern late Renaissance is artfully Venetian. 26) P. Pourbus, c. 1580(?), Court in a Park, Wallace Collection, London; with V details Music: Morley, 1595, Now is the month of Maying, Westminster XWN 18764 Like a Morley "fa-la-la," Pieter Pourbus blends north and south in this mannered banquet in a park, 1581, as if the jester Touchstone had lured all the "country copulatives" to an As You Like It hymen, by Jaques’ "ducdame" burden — an "invocation to call fools into a circle." (cut Morley) a27) 27) 27a) 27b) N. Hilliard, 1572, Man aged 24, Victoria and Albert Museum, London Hilliard, c. 1590(?), George Clifford, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich; + V detail Hilliard, 1588, "Shakespeare as Mercury," Victoria and Albert Museum, London Hilliard, c. 1585, Sir Walter Raleigh, miniature, National Portrait Gallery, London Music: June 1996 William Byrd, c. 1590(?), Wolsey's Wilde. Landowska, G-AD 1014 (78) 1600: The Tragic Divide 13 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In England the same blend produces the best match for the airier moods of Shakespeare. Hilliard expresses as finely as anyone the high Platonic idealism which lingers somehow from the Lady of the Unicorn and the Offering of the Heart: Romeo: I dreamt my lady came and found me dead — Strange dream that gives a dead man leave to think, And breathed such life with kisses in my lips, That I revived and was an emperor. (Romeo and Juliet, V, i) (fade Wolsey's Wilde) If only we could find (like a chest of old viols) actors so clean ("speak the speech... trippingly... beget a temperance that may give it smoothness"), perhaps even Hamlet could be restored to the veiled nuance of consort-tone, with which the revival of early instruments has blessed the harmonies of Byrd. 28) 28a) 28b) English, c. 1590, Tomb of The Good Earl of Warwick, St. Mary's, Warwick English Tomb Effigies, c. 1576, Monument to Alex Denton, d. 1576, and his first wife Anne, died in childbirth, 1566, Hereford Cathedral, South Transept (CGB '84) Again 28, Earl of Warwick tomb, detail Music: William Byrd, c. 1590(?), Earl of Salisbury Pavan, viols, G-DB 2416 (78) In death as in life a dignity, ultimate containment of the tragic storm: O here Will I set up my everlasting rest; And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars From this world-wearied flesh... The agony of Marlowe's Faustus returns to the choral ground: Cut is the branch that might have growne full straight, And burned is Apollowes Laurel bough... Even in Lear a moral order survives in which the gored state can be maintained. Like this effigy of Warwick, Wolsey carries nobility into the grave. June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 14 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History I feel within me A peace above all earthly dignities, A still and quiet conscience... 29) 29a) Hilliard, c. 1590(?), Man leaned against a tree, Victoria and Albert Museum, London; + V detail Spanish, 1486, Tomb of Don Martin Vasquez de Arce "el Doncel," Siguenze Cathedral; + V detail It is surely a gift of Shakespeare's "blessed plot, this realm, this England," that the dainty groupings of Rosalind and Orlando, Viola, Feste, Orsino — If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it... That strain again — it had a dying fall — could revive, after Lear, in the romance deepening of The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline: Fear no more the heat o' th' sun, Nor the furious winter's rages: Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone and ta'en thy wages: Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. 30) 30a) (close Salisbury Pavan) El Greco, 1594-1604, Female Portrait, Johnson Collection, Museum, Philadelphia Double: [A] Botticelli, 1482, Birth of Venus, detail of head, Uffizi, Florence; and [B] attributed to El Greco, now to Sofanisba Anguissola c. 1585, Woman with Ermine, Stirling, etc., Museum, Glasgow Yet also in that island the wormwood of El Greco's "La Desilusionada" had fallen. The lightly balanced joy of the early comedies slides into a vortex of evil; the clowns thicken to the bawd and pander Pompey Bum: "Does your worship mean to geld and splay all the youth of the city?" Troilus, "The argument of a cuckold and a whore," bequeaths us nothing but Pandarus' diseases. As if Botticelli's Venus had been infected with such a brand as takes off the rose From the fair forehead of an innocent love, June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 15 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History And sets a blister there... a31) Caravaggio, 1607-08, Beheading of St. John the Baptist, Malta (video: left group only) Same, detail, head of old woman Same, closer detail of left group Double: [A] Caravaggio, 1586-98, head of the Medusa, Uffizi, Florence; and [B] El Greco, 1590-1600, Crucifixion, detail, Angel and Magdalen, Prado, Madrid (1996: this has been replaced in the slide show and video by 31a, Double: [A] Caravaggio, 1600, Fleeing youth from Martyrdom of St. Matthew, S. Luigi dei Francese, Rome; and [B] El Greco, 1605-10, Stunned guards from Resurrection, Prado, Madrid) b31) 31) V31a) Yet we search in vain for a specific inception of what has been called the "Baroque disillusionment" — however the more than Othello rhetoric of dark — O heavy hour! Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse Of sun and moon, and that th'afrighted globe Did yawn at alteration — fan out from Caravaggio's 1600 Rome and Naples. Earth's betrayal is ubiquitous: it fell on Abelard, Petrarch, Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Spenser, as on Jonson and Donne: "all in fragments, all coherence gone." The pain of Fulke Greville's If nature did not take delight in blood, She would have found more easy ways to good, appears in Shakespeare's earliest tragedy — and the least resolved — Titus Andronicus: O why should nature build so foul a den, Unless the gods delight in tragedies? What changes, even with pain, is the style — Caravaggio's Tenebrist weight, against the space-dissolving whirls of El Greco. Is Shakespeare affined to both? 32) Michelangelo, 1492, Battle of Centaurs, Casa Buonorotti, Florence; + V detail June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 16 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The Florentine embodiment had set the terms for the crisis of 1600. In Michelangelo's beginnings, 1492, year of Lorenzo il Magnifico's death and Columbus' discovery, power wars on itself. heightened and consumed. The phases of cathartic pain — Hybris, Dikê, Soteria — swell toward an incarnate Trinity: Hegel's Fathering Idea, alienating Passion, synthesis as Comforter; for Blake the Innocence, dire Experience, Renewal of prophetic history. 33) Michelangelo, 1508-12, Adam Created, detail, Sistine ceiling, Vatican The dawn hope Michelangelo drew from that Florence: Pico's human wonder, man lifting himself on the wings of choice beyond the stars. While Shakespeare's early rapture is Platonic love, transplanted from the same humanist ground: Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. 34) Michelangelo, 1530-33(?), "Young Giant" (1st Captive), Accademia, Florence; + V detail But Michelangelo's liberation strikes on a rock of impossibility as hard as any in Shakespeare: Down, down I come, like glistering Phaeton, Wanting the manage of unruly jades... Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood With solemn reverence... He that hath suffered this disordered spring Hath now himself met with the fall of leaf... a35) 35) Michelangelo, 1542-50, Conversion of Paul, Pauline Chapel, Vatican Same, detail of Paul Pathos and glory fuse: Michelangelo's Paul thrown down and struck blind by the lightning of God. So Gloucester's reversal in Lear: "I stumbled when I saw... our mere defects/ Prove our commodities." His dying reunion with Edgar, "His flawed heart... burst smilingly," is the clue to Lear's immortal insight. as he dies, that Cordelia is coming to life: "Look on her, look, her lips,/ Look there, look there." "Upon such sacrifices... the gods themselves throw incense." June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 17 �C.G. Bell 36) 36a) Symbolic History Michelangelo, 1542-64, Rondanini Pieta, Castello Sforzesco, Milan; first, V detail of Mary's head from 36a Same, upper detail Music: Vicentino, 1567, Heu mihi, opening, Vanguard. HM - 34 SD Though it is in his last broken Pieta, from the time when Vicentino first rounded the chromatic sea, that Michelangelo went beyond what any other artist, in any other image, has ever made of tragedy: No, no, no, no; come let's away to prison: We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage. When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down, And ask of thee forgiveness... And we'll wear out In a walled prison, pacts and sects of great ones, That ebb and flow by th' moon... a37) 37) (fade Vicentino) Michelangelo, c. 1539, Brutus, whole bust, National Museum (Bargello), Florence (for this color whole, the video uses Va37, a black-and-white detail of the face) Same, Brutus, a black-and-white view of the shoulder and full face What broke the Rondanini Pieta, applied an infinite torque, even to revived antiquity. Like Michelangelo's Brutus, Shakespeare's Romans have a flawed grandeur unknown to the pagan past. North's Plutarch: Antonius spake... Of all them that had slain Caesar. there was none but Brutus only that was moved to do it, as thinking the act commendable of itself... the other conspirators... for some private... envy... against Shakespeare: This was the noblest Roman of them all. All the conspirators save only he Did that they did, in envy of great Caesar; He only, in a general honest thought, And common good to all, made one of them. June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 18 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History His life was gentle, and the elements So mixed in him, 38) Rembrandt, 1661, Conspiracy of Julius Civilis, National Museum, Stockholm; first, a video detail, from Va38 that Nature might stand up And say to all the world, this was a man. Only the great can parallel the great. The next depicted conspiracy of such magnitude comes from as far after Shakespeare as Michelangelo was before him — and in the deepened formal contrasts of Huyghens’ light and shade — it is Rembrandt's mutilated Oath of Julius Civilis (Batavians, in this case, against Rome). 39) Roman late Republican, c. 35 B.C., Bust of Mark Antony, Museum, Narbonne But Antony is the Roman whom Shakespeare most titanically reshapes. Set this Republican bust of him against Cleopatra's praise: His legs bestrid the ocean, his reared arm Crested the world... or Antony's going off: Sometime we see a cloud that's dragonish, A vapour sometime, like a bear or lion... They are black vesper's pageants... thy captain is Even such a body... 40) 40a) Double: [A] Roman c. 20-10 B.C., Livia(?) (or Octavia?), Copenhagen; and [B] Graeco Roman (Africa) c. 40 B.C.(?), head of Cleopatra, Cherchel, Algeria (video also shows 40A singly) Single 40B, again Cleopatra This matron on the left — Octavia, or her sister, Augustus' Livia — fits Enobarbus' description: "Octavia is of a holy, cold, and still conversation." (Menas) "Who would not have his wife so?" (Enobarbus) "Not he that himself is not so; which is Mark Antony... "He will to his Egyptian dish again..." Against the female policy of June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 19 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Rome, this Hellenized Cleopatra (right), as ideal as sensuous, might give a base for Shakespeare's soaring: "Age cannot wither her." But for the fatal extravagance of their love — "The crown o' th' earth doth melt... O withered is the garland of the war" — for images of the sensuous swoon and lethal rapture, "full-drawn, ascendant, like the word expire" a41) b41) 41) Michelangelo, 1520-34, Night, from the Medici Tombs, Florence (detail of face from front and below; while video shows profile detail of Va41) Same, Night, frontal view of head and torso; while video, Vb41, shows the stretched-out body Same, Night, profile, vertical of head, arm, breast; from which video takes a close up, then a frontal head and body from V41a, returning to a profile and breast of 41) (Wilbye's "Draw on Sweet Night") — Music: Wilbye, 1609, "Draw on Sweet Night," (Deller) Quintessence PMC7143 where can we turn but to Michelangelo — the sleeping Night for which he wrote: Caro m’ é ‘l sonno... Sleep is dear to me, and better to be stone... Therefore do not wake me; alas, speak low — (CGB) Pero non mi destar, deh: parla basso! — a carving we can seriously contemplate, even as we read of Cleopatra’s “dateless bargain to engrossing death”: (fade Wilbye) Give me my robe, put on my crown, I have Immortal longings in me. Now no more The juice of Egypt's grape shall moist this lip. Yare, yare, good Iras; quick. Methinks I hear Antony call... I am fire and air; my other elements I give to baser life... — (O eastern star!) June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 20 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Peace, peace. Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, That sucks the nurse asleep? — (O break! O break!) As sweet as balm. as soft as air, as gentle — O Antony! 42) Titian, 1538, Venus of Urbino Uffizi, Florence; + V detail (note alternates: CGB '59 slide, with gold frame, and without, V42) Titian, as different from Michelangelo as Venice from Florence, runs a similar threefold course, however richly its phases overlap. He begins with sensuous delight. Though Juliet, Portia, and the rest do not appear on stage in so frank a pose as this, Shakespeare shows as much in the double-play which constitutes his bawdry: What, with my tongue in your tail? Nay come again Good Kate... We shall ne'er win at that sport, and stake down. O that she were An open et cetera, thou a poperin pear. I would I were thy bird. — Sweet, so would I; Yet I should kill thee with much cherishing. 43) Titian, 1570-76, Tarquin and Lucrece, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna Titian's later life is a deepening involvement in that tragic century. By 1570 his Tarquin and Lucrezia, in shade and flaming impasto, has more of Othello than of Shakespeare's mannered Rape of Lucrece: Yield to my love; if not, enforced hate, Instead of love's coy touch shall rudely tear thee... 44) Titian, c. 1570 ff., Shepherd and Nymph, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna (CGB '59) June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 21 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History But a third phase is implicit in those post-tragic works where primordial and heroic forms loom through a brushwork like incandescent passionate flakes. In one of the last and greatest of his pictures, Titian returns to the Arcadia of his youth, as if to show, with Cervantes in Part II of Don Quixote, the cost of a profound well-being. This pastoral, 2nd 43) Tarquin and Lucrece, detail with the Lucrece of the same time, might form a Winter's-Tale pair: from jealous rigor: if powers divine Behold our human actions, as they do, I doubt not then, but innocence shall make False accusation blush, and tyranny Tremble at patience... Look down, And see what death is doing — 2nd 44) Shepherd and Nymph, detail (CGB '59) to the recreated Enna of a shearing feast: O Proserpina, For the flowers now, that frighted thou let'st fall From Dis's wagon: daffodils, That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty... You gods, look down, And from your sacred vials pour your graces Upon my daughter's head. 45) Pol de Limbourg, 1413-16, August, Tres Riches Heures, Chantilly (video: lower detail only) In the brittle poignance of Gothic there was no room for that shadowed epithalamium of the conscious heart. What Pericles calls "the shores of mortality" had not been widened for its "great sea of joys". Between the "naked villainy" and "holy writ" of Richard III, a thin soil, vernal with flowers, brightens the rock of our wretchedness. June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 22 �C.G. Bell a46) 46) Symbolic History Master of the Rohan Hours, c. 1418-20, Death and Judgment, Bibl. Nat., Paris, details of corpse, to which video adds detail of God and whole (Va46) Double: [A] again, a46, Rohan Master's Death and Judgment; and [B] Holbein (Hans the Younger), c. 1525, Dance of Death, woodcuts, The Old Woman #19 (video replaces the double with a detail of B, the Holbein) The happiness, which in early Shakespeare remains inconsequent — "Lord what fools these mortals be" — yields, in 1400 miniatures and poems, at the slightest erosion, to the old bleached skull: The lif of this world Is reuled with wynd, Wepinge, derknesse, And steriinge; With wind we blomen, With wind we lassun; With weopinge we comen, With weopinge we passun. With steriinge we begynnen, With steriinge we enden; With drede we dwellen, With drede we wenden. The whole age of faith had voiced that lean tragic ground, yet could not rise to the proud forms of tragedy. Although from first-Gothic to Chaucer, from this Rohan Hours page to Dürer and Holbein, the quickening life pulse sharpens a cadaver-dance and death's head contemplation — a47) 47) 47a) Durer, 1521, St. Jerome, Museum Nat. de Arte Antiga, Lisbon H. Golzius, 1614, "Quis evadit, nemo", drawing, Pierpont Morgan, New York City; + V details Giorgione, 1505-10, Sleeping Venus, detail, Gallery, Dresden Music: Gibbons, 1618, close "Behold thou hast made..." (Deller) VICS1551 it is only in the time of Shakespeare (of the verse anthems of Byrd or of this Gibbons), when the romance of late-Renaissance has gauded the doublet and plumed the cap, June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 23 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History plumped lip and cheek and brightened the eyes of mortality, that the sun of glory, as in this Golzius, lures the tragic tulip from the skull: Why so large cost, having so short a lease, Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend? Shall worms, inheritors of this excesse, Eat up thy charge? Only then that Hamlet — as the gravedigger singing In youth when I did love, did love, Methought it was very sweet, throws up the skull of Yorick, "a fellow of infinite Jest," at whose lips the child-prince had hung ("Where be your gibes now? Your gambols?") — can weigh loss against an As-You-Like-It dawn, when he had courted the fair Ophelia in ideal love, before the Ghost walked or flesh was so far sullied: But look, the morn in russet mantle clad, Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill. a48) 48) 48a) El Greco, 1584-1610(?), St. Gerome as Cardinal, Museum Bonnat, Bayonne Elizabethan, c. 1570(?), Pleated picture, Mary Stuart and a skull (two views), National Portrait Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh Jacob de Geyn II, c. 1600(?), Seated Gypsy(?), Prof. Altena, Amsterdam Of course tragedy is reared on the old pessimism of earth. But what exploits of power have wrought, from Dark Age Alcuin's "vermibus atque cibus", Hotspur's fall of pride: "For worms, brave Percy. Fare thee well, great heart." So in this pleated picture, its corrugations viewed from left and right: Mary Queen of Scots and a death's head — (Shakespeare) Like perspectives, which rightly gazed upon Show nothing but confusion; eyed awry, Distinguish form... Thus Macbeth meteors to the tragic ground: Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 24 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. 49) (end Gibbons) H. Eworth, English 1591 (copying from 1550), Sir John Lutrell, Dunster Castle, Somerset; first, a video detail (cf. V49) If contempt of the world is one pole of the tragic tension, man's belief in its worth is the other. An age of great tragedy takes its tone from that stretch. Sir John Lutrell strides the ocean under the laurel favor of the gods, one of those Elizabethans a contemporary described: "free, stout, haulte, prodigall of life and blood." 50) 50a) Tintoretto, c. 1550(?), Sebastiano Veniero, Prado, Madrid Tintoretto (attr.), c. 1560(?), Portrait of a Sculptor, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59) From Italy north runs a wave of self-validating pride: Tintoretto's Venetians; Marlowe's aspirers, robed in the mighty line — Tamburlaine: Nature that fram'd us of foure Elements, Warring within our breasts for regiment, Doth teach us all to have aspyring minds... Still climbing after knowledge infinite... a51) 51) Andrea del Sarto, 1527, St. Michael Weighing Souls, Predella panel, Four Saints' Altar, Uffizi, Florence; + V detail Titian, 1545, Portrait of Pietro Aretino, Pitti Palace, Florence; + V detail But the titan will — "Here, Faustus. try thy braines to gaine a deitie" — strikes on the Satanic compact: Adders and Serpents, let me breathe a while: Ugly hell gape not, come not Lucifer. Ile burne my bookes, ah Mephastophilis. (Exeunt with him.) Titian's Aretino, "poison-flower of the Renaissance," fits Jonson's Volpone, Shakespeare's fallen Angelo: June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 25 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History But man, proud man, Dressed in a little brief authority, Most ignorant of what he's most assured, His glassy essence, like an angry ape, Plays such fantastic tricks before High Heaven As make the angels weep. Va52) Hilliard, c. 1600(?), George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, Nelson Gallery, Atkins Museum, Kansas City Titian, c. 1570, Punishment of Marsyas, Mus. Naz, Kromeriz, Czech. Michelangelo, 1555-64, Rondanini Pieta, Milan (video takes a detail from 36, above) Tintoretto, 1587, Self-Portrait, Louvre, Paris; + V detail b52) c52) 52) There lies the crux of tragedy: man, on the old morality stage, blown to such "fantastical puff-paste": It will come. Humanity must perforce prey on itself, Like monsters of the deep. What such currents have washed over they reduce to scoured rock, bones of the once assertive. But there remains a shattered Pieta, gathering incredible tenderness in its ruin: "No cause, no cause"; or some last death mask, as of Gloucester or Lear, inalienably noble — Tintoretto's final self-portrait, pride divinely broken and affirmed, reaching beyond itself with matchless power: O sun, Burn the great sphere thou mov'st in. Darkling stand The varying shore o' the world... 53) English (Droeshout), pub. 1623, First Folio engraving of Shakespeare; + V detail Laughable, in the flash of Promethean genius and thunder of tragic words, to turn back the pages to the quiet impersonal mask of the folio engraving. Beyond the giants of the Continent forged in the furnace of spiritual war, could the sweet swan of Avon, in the easy success of his investments and art, opening trim lips to the curse and blessing of all that lives — Thou must be patient; we came crying hither. Thou know'st, the first time that we smell the air We wawl and cry... — June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 26 �C.G. Bell 54) 54a) 54b) 54c) Symbolic History Double: [A] Hilliard, c. 1590, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, National Portrait Gallery, London; and [B] Rembrandt, 1629, Self, Dean Cavat Collection, London Again, Hilliard's Dudley, the single A of 54 Again, Hilliard and Rembrandt, the Double 54 Again, Rembrandt, Self, the single B of 54 mediate the deepening of humanity and art, as from Hilliard about 1590 (left), with Morley — Music: Morley, 1600, "It was a lover and his lass, (Cuenod) Westminster WL5085 a realm of Puckish caprice and changing loyalties, And those things do best please me That befall preposterously, where moral questions hardly arise, and happy endings can grace the discomfiture of testy Egeus, Malvolio, even of Shylock's malice (fade Morley) — to Rembrandt, 1628 (right), with Schein — Music: J.H. Schein, 1623, from Die mit Tränen säen, near start, MHS 4288 over the moral divide, so causally aware, that reconciliation is hard to come by, must be paid for at a commensurate, almost at a tragic price: Methought the billows spoke, and told me of it; The winds did sing it to me; and the thunder That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounced The name of Prosper... (fade Schein) Only fifteen years separate that Tempest utterance, which basses the world's trespass, punishes, and rewards, 55) School of Parmagianino, c. 1560(?), Allegorical Landscape, detail, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. (CGB '75); + V detail and return to the whole from the tetrameter yearning of Oberon and Titania: June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 27 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Then my Queen, in silence sad, Trip we after the night's shade. We the globe can compass soon, Swifter than the wandering moon. — Come my lord, and in our flight, Tell me how it came this night, That I sleeping here was found, With these mortals on the ground. As if from Platonic withdrawal, all things earthly "Like far-off mountains turned into clouds" (this 16th-century transreal dance of spirits), weightless as the astronomy of angelically guided spheres, 56) 56a) 56b) Rubens, c. 1630, Feast of Venus, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna (CGB '59); + V detail English Tapestry, 1611, detail from Four Seasons, Hatfield House Again 56, Rubens' Feast of Venus we rode the voluminous and life-affirming masque of Rubens' Feast of Venus toward the astronomy of Newton's gravitating masses. So Shakespeare: You nymphs called Naiads of the windring brooks, With your sedged crowns and ever-harmless looks, Leave your crisp channels... You sunburnt sicklemen of August weary, Come hither from the furrow, and be merry... Though what we need is not simply a dance of nymphs and reapers, but the whole "majestic vision" of The Tempest. 57) Jacob de Gheyn II, c. 1600(?), Witches' Kitchen, Staatliches Museum, Berlin (video: three details only, from left to right) Between the two, lies the nightmare passage of De Gheyn and Macbeth, energized out of Bosch's demonic seizure: Fair is foul, and foul is fair; Hover through the fog and filthy air... Round about the caldron go; In the poisoned entrails throw. Toad, that under cold stone Days and nights has thirty-one Sweltered venom sleeping got, Boil thou first i' th' charmed pot... Finger of birthstrangled babe, Ditch-delivered by a drab... Double, double, toil and trouble; Fire burn and caldron bubble... 58) 58a) Jacob de Gheyn II, c. 1600(?), Sleeping Nude, A. Ulrich Mus., Brunswick Spranger, c. 1600(?), Venus and Adonis, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 28 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In De Gheyn that souring fell also on flesh, Titian's voluptuous ideal loaded with "the strong'st suggestion our worser Genius can": "It is not words that shakes me thus — pish! — noses, ears and lips." What wrenches love, from Donne ("Spermatique issue of ripe menstruous boils") to Swift ("Oh Celia, Celia, Celia shits!") rages in the tragedies: The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to't With a more riotous appetite... 59) Jacob de Gheyn II, c. 1600(?), Witch and Familiar on a Monster, Christ Church, Oxford; + V detail As in de Gheyn's witch visions, the pure offering of the heart, that "silly sooth" of the "old age," becomes the imposthume of Hamlet's fever: Nay, but to live In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed, Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love Over the nasty sty. The new fulness of flesh heightens the task, with the need of vindication. Donne's "dialogue of one" from the "Ecstasy" of his own love and marriage: "To our bodies turn we then," 60) Rembrandt, 1635, Joseph and Potiphar's Wife, etching, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; + V detail and return to the whole "Else a great prince in prison lies," will not answer for Milton's Fall or Rembrandt's wife of Potiphar: (Leontes) No barricado for a belly. Know't; It will let in and out the enemy With bag and baggage. (and Iago) Didst thou not see her paddle with the palm of his hand?... Lechery... 61) Rembrandt, 1668, Jewish Bride, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (CGB '59); + V detail June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 29 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History But it was not true of Hermione, nor of Desdemona. The muddy imputation falls off under the death-cadence of an old song: "sing, willow, willow, willow." Rembrandt, too, in one of his last works, as if looking back, "dallying with the innocence of love," reconstitutes, in embodied, earth-shadowed harmonies, that blessedness of the soul: As I hope For quiet days, fair issue, and long life, With such love as 'tis now... 62) Hilliard, 1572, Elizabeth I, National Portrait Gallery, London; + V detail Our pictures have ranged over Europe; yet even in Shakespeare's island, where art after the Reformation lagged, we might trace the threefold transformation. The ideal phase fares best. Hilliard's Elizabeth has the refinement of Spenser's: Tell me. have ye seene her angelick face, Like Phoebe fayre? Her heavenly haveour, her princely grace can you well compare? The Redde rose medled with the White yfere, In either cheeke depeincten lively chere. Her modest eye, Her Maiestie, Where have you seene the like, but there? 63) 63a) Isaac Oliver, c. 1600(?), Nymphs and Satyrs, drawing, Royal Collection, England Same, Nymphs, etc., center detail; while video takes two details from 63 The deepening comic bacchanal that runs from Titian to the compound mass of Rubens pairs English Oliver with a wicked Wylbie madrigal on satyrs: "Fain wouldst thou turn and yield them their delight." Music: 64) Wylbie, 1609, from "Fly not so swift", (Randoloh) Westminster L 5221 (fade) Lagneau, c. 1600-10, Young Man in a Fur Cap, Beaux Arts, Lille; first, video detail While the to-be" "pale cast work is a man... "gloire et rebut," June 1996 introspection which throws over many works of 1600 a "To-be-or-notof thought" (Lagneau's morbid youth) — Hamlet's "What a piece of paragon of animals... quintessence of dust," suggesting Pascal's later "Pride and garbage of the universe" — 1600: The Tragic Divide 30 �C.G. Bell 65) Symbolic History Hilliard, c. 1600(?), Man against Flames, Victoria and Albert Museum, London stretches the lightness of the English miniature in Hilliard's Man holding a Locket against a Background of Flame: The time is out of joint, O cursed spite, That ever I was born to put it right... Look here upon this picture, and on this, The counterfeit presentment of two brothers... 66) Tintoretto, 1591-92, Christ on the Sea of Galilee, National Gallery, Washington D.C. (the video omits this whole, going to 66a, detail) Same, detail: Sea and Ship; + V closer detail Preview close-up of 67, El Greco Landscape; then a video return to 66a 66a) V66b) Music: Giovanni Gabrielli, c. 1610(?), Quem Vidistis (near close), Eng. Decca SDD 363 (cf. London STS-15256) Even the masterly assault on the physical universe, that superscript of light on darkness, which Tintoretto passed (like a harpoon of St. Elmo's fire) to Cretan El Greco, who bore it to Spain — while music built to the vast chromatic chords of Giovanni Gabrielli, on which brasses blazon, voices leap and trill — 67) El Greco, c. 1610, Toledo Landscape, detail, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City El Greco, Laocöon, detail of background (taken from slide 14) V67a) such a storm as Lear was invoking: Blow winds, and crack your cheeks. Rage, blow... ...all germenes spill at once That makes ingrateful man — 68) 68a) 68b) (fade Gabrielli) Sir Nathaniel Bacon, c. 1600, Rocky Landscape, Ashmolean, Oxford Sir Nathaniel Bacon, c. 1620, Self, from Gorhambury Collection, Earl of Verulam Closer view of 68, Bacon Landscape; first, video detail June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 31 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History even that has a humble English cognate in a little landscape by the painter amateur, Nathaniel Bacon. So too the musical daring of Italy spills over the north, mostly in smaller forms — Weelkes, "O care": Music: a69) 69) Weelkes, 1600, "O Care, thou wilt despatch me, opening, Decca STS 15165 (fade) Claude Lorrain, 1630's, Tiber above Rome, detail, British Museum, London Same, Tiber, whole, watercolor Music: William Lawes, c. 1635(?), Sonata #8, opening, Arco ZRG 555 The storm has passed in the music of William Lawes. What went into the 1600 vortex was the thousand year old doom of the world, intensified by the new glory of that world condemned. What comes out is the causal order of human command, the landscape of harmony, most luminous in Claude Lorrain. 70) Inigo Jones, 1638, Scene for Luminalia, Chatsworth Estates And here too, in English art, Inigo Jones' night scene from Luminalia, an ink-wash randomly splashed, holds the chrysolite of the classical dream ("What seas, what shores...") The music of the spheres! List my Marina. 71) Rubens, c. 1615-17, Shepherd with flock in woods, National Gallery, London Such the volitional grandeur of the 17th century, in which Shakespeare died — Rubens' early pictures entering London about the time Prospero took his leave of it: Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves, And ye that on the sands with printless foot Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him When he comes back... by whose aid — Weak masters though ye be — 72) Rubens, c. 1620(?), Philemon and Baucis, storm detail, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Wien (video uses V72, an older detail; replace?) I have bedimmed The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds, And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 32 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Set roaring war. To the dread rattling thunder Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak With his own bolt... (Rubens in ten years to unleash his own tragic storm) But this rough magic I here abjure. a73) 73) Rubens, 1635-37, Landscape with Rainbow, Alte Pinakothek, Munich Rubens, c. 1638, Landscape with Shepherds and Flock, National Gallery, London; + V detail of sunset Music: William Lawes, Sonato #8, 2nd Movement, Air, Arco ZRG 555 and when I have required Some heavenly music — which even now I do — To work mine end upon their senses that This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff, Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, And deeper than did ever plummet sound I'll drown my book... Rubens too issuing, in age, to the light-streaming landscape of recovery and reconciliation. (cut Lawes) In The Winter's Tale the way to that sunlit pastoral is over the flap-dragoning sea: a74) 74) Rubens, c. 1624, The Storm, detail, Franz König Collection, Haarlem Rubens, c. 1624(?), Shipwreck of Aeneas, Berlin-Dahlem Museum; + V details I would you did but see how it chafes, how it rages, how it takes up the shore... And if the chromatic scale, as so many have said, is such a chaos and devouring gulf, it is exactly over that ocean of formlessness that the ordered tonalities of major and minor had to be sought. The defiance and victory of that voyage have ultimate expression in the Chromatic Fantasy by Sweelinck, Dutch organist, who died in 1621. It builds, with Rubens’ night storms, a peak of energy in all art. Music: Sweelinck, c. 1610-20(?), Chromatic Fantasy, opening and close, SVBX-5316 (1) June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 33 �C.G. Bell 75) 76) 76b) Symbolic History Rubens, c. 1620-25(?), Philemon and Baucis Landscape, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna (CGB '59); with video details (one from 72) Rubens, same, Philemon and Baucis, stream detail (CGB '59); + V details (as V76a) Same, Rubens' Philemon and Baucis, detail of drowned mother and child, lower left (CGB '59) (skip in music) a77) 77) 77a) Rubens, c. 1618, Battle of the Amazons, detail, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (copy of CGB '59, Larger Declaration 35) Rubens, c. 1628(?), Thunderstorm at night, Neuerburg Collection, Hamburg; + V detail Again, Rubens' Storm, whole (cf. a74) (end Sweelinck) The probability matrix we likened at the start to a folded landscape of spirit looms in its bewildering complex of dimensions. The vectors of all phases are at every moment alive and working. Shakespeare, El Greco. Gesualdo, then Sweelinck and Rubens, seem to have scaled the energy peak of the range. a78) b78) 78) 78a) Jos de Momper, 1600, Vista from a Grotto, National Gallery, Washington D.C. (CGB '75) de Momper, c. 1600-1610(?), Mountain Landscape, detail, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59) Same, Mountain Landscape, whole (CGB '59) N. Hilliard, c. 1595, an unknown poet, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge Music: Gibbons, c. 1610(?), Fantasia "In nomine" à 5, opening, ARC 3052 But there were easier passes through the same divide, into the silvery landscape Momper had brushed with Prospero's vision; as Gibbons filled the demi-paradise of English houses with strains of proud melting — Baroque substance still lightened by Gothic insubstantiality. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air! And like the baseless fabric of this vision The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 34 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep... (fade Gibbons) The brave new world is 1st 79) Michelangelo, 1556-64, Rondanini Pieta, Sforzesco, Milan; here video substitutes a detail from 3rd 79b (CGB '80) humanized and sustained only by what it won from tragedy. In that miraculous infolding of heart, by which Lear and Cordelia prepare for a restoration they do not live to enjoy, a beatitude of earth is born of its own denial. a80) Titian, c. 1570, Madonna and Child, National Gallery, London (or Va80, detail) 1st 80) Rembrandt, 1668, Jewish Bride, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (copy of 61, CGB ‘59); video: detail only So substantial an Innocence, won from the lair of Experience, could not have appeared in the earlier plays; it was an element unknown to the world, then being shaped by the titans of 1600. For the arts are no less exploratory than science, open realms of being, shoulder out time, forge truth. In the sacred tenderness of the old king's waking — Cordelia: O you kind gods, Cure this breach in his abused nature, Th' untuned and jarring senses, O wind up Of this child-changed father — an earthly love (Rembrandt's saving ground) 2nd 79) Again, Rondanini Pieta, detail: the faces, with Mary’s left shoulder; while video shows an upper detail of 2nd 79a 2nd 79a) Same, frontal full-length color (so too the video) is alchemized, as from the last pity of Michelangelo: Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears Do scald like molten lead. June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 35 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Let Monteverdi, at the close of his 5-voice "Zeffiro torna," sound that expansion of possibility. By a storm-crossing of the chromatic sea (Donne's "new Philosophy calls all in doubt"), we reach a harbor 2nd 80) Again, Jewish Bride, figures cropped (CGB ‘59); video: closer detail of the man only of utopian tones. Donne: "No man is an Island, intire of itself; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine." And Campanella: "The sun strives to burn up the earth, not to produce plants and men, but God guides the battle to great ends." Music: Monteverdi, 1614. close of "Zeffiro torna," Cambridge CRS 1708 3rd 79) Again, Rondanini Pieta, view from the right of the whole curving statue 3rd 79a) Same, detail of the two faces; video of Mary’s only 3rd 79b) Same, from right, upper detail (CGB ‘80); since video previewed this slide for its 1st 79, it returns here to a detail of that 1st 79 slide for its V3rd 79b 3rd 80) Again, Jewish Bride, detail of hands (close Monteverdi) As the Shepherd says in The Winter's Tale: Thou mettest with things dying, I with things new born." June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 36 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 37 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1600 : The Tragic Divide, Symbolic History, Part 19 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 19 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_19_1600--The_Tragic_Divide Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/df853bd1a45fba3632c1e6bafcbd87b1.pdf 95efce658052f2d88d8e3126a73bf996 PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 23. 1700: The Comic Divide CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 April 1994 Last Revised January ‘96 �1 Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 23. 1700: The Comic Divide 1) Double: [A] Rigaud, 1701, Louis XIV and [B] Watteau, 1717, L'Indifferent; both Louvre, Paris Double: details of 1, [A] and [B] 1a) The Divide of 1710, from the heroic and rational Baroque to the mock-heroic and wistful Rococo, is peculiarly the comic divide; since those opposites — assertive fulness and ironic play — suggest the blending poles of comedy itself: exuberance and mockery. Typical that grandeur and ridicule so meet in both styles that the change from Louis XIV to Regency (as from Cartesian command to Berkeleian subjectivity) seems merely a change of emphasis. What else informs historical contrasts but subtle shifts of stress between wedded contraries? 2) 2a) H. Rigaud, 1701, Louis XIV, Louvre, Paris; first, a video detail (Va2) Testelin, 1648, Portrait of Louis XIV as a Boy, Versailles (video returns to 2, upper body detail Same, detail of legs; + V return to the whole (see V2) 2b) Music: M.-R. Delalande, c. 1695, From lst Suite, Musiques Royales, Turnabout TV 34232 When Riguad's 1701 Sun King steps from his throne, as to the supper music of Delalande, the trailing vast fleur-de-lys robe raised on aging cork-heeled legs (already his vanity in Testalin's portrait fifty-three years before), that heroic proclamation — not throne, not crown, but self: "L'etat c'est moi" — bears the burlesque of Vanbruch's 1696 Lord Foppington: Mr Mend Legs, a word with you; the calves of my stockings are thicken'd a little too much. They make my legs look like a chairman's... let the next be the 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �2 C.G. Bell Symbolic History thickness of a crawnpiece less — (Aside) If the town takes notice my legs are fallen away, 'twill be attributed to the violence of some new intrigue. (fade Delalande) Yet the break at Louis XIV's death in 1715 — from pomp's overreach 3) 3a) 3b) Watteau, 1717, L'Indifferent, Louvre, Paris; + V detail Watteau, 1712, detail of Jupiter and Antiope, Louvre, Paris Return to 3, L'Indifferent, upper detail to the precise wit of Watteau — is one of the sharpest in history: in drama, the softening from Molière to the delicious sentiments of Marivaux, "A Game of Love and Chance"; in music from Lully and Delalande to Couperin's plaintive Concerts, the first in fact written to soothe the ailing king's last years. Music: Fr. Couperin le Grand, c. 1710(?), Echos, 2nd of Concerts Royaux, Vanguard Cardinal S-10029 Thus in England the fragile ironies of Pope's 1714 "Rape of the Lock": Belinda still her downy pillow press'd, Her guardian sylph prolong'd the balmy rest: 'Twas he had summon'd to her silent bed The morning-dream that hover'd o'er her head? A youth more glittering than a birth-night beau, (That ev'n in slumber caused her cheek to glow) Seem'd to her ear his winning lips to lay, And thus in whispers said, or seem'd to say: "Fairest of mortals, thou distinguish'd care Of thousand bright inhabitants of air! … For 2nd 2) V2nd 2a) Music: French Baroque, c. 1680, Louis XIV as Roman Emperor, MS Fr. 7892, Biblioteque Nationale, Paris Le Brun, 1663-75, Tapestry, Louis XIV at Dunkerque, detail, Versailles (CGB '59; cf slide 57) Again, Delalande, from lst Suite, close — that Pope succeeds Dryden's 1685 "Threnodia Augustalis": 4/1994 (fade Couperin) 1700: The Comic Divide �3 C.G. Bell Symbolic History A Warlike Prince ascends the Regal State, A Prince, long exercis'd by Fate… False Heroes made by Flattery so, Heav'n can strike out, like Sparkles, at a blow; But e're a Prince is to Perfection brought, He costs Omnipotence a second thought. (end Delalande) What can so swell the heroic tympanum For 2nd 3) Watteau, c. 1717(?), The Gamut of Love, National Gallery, London but the birth of precious ridicule — mutation of bouyancy and disenchantment? 4) N. de Largilliere, 1696, Ex Voto to St. Genevieve, with the Magistrates of Paris, Church of St. Etienne du Mont, Paris; first, video details (see V4 and cf. 24) By the end of Louis' reign, a France ruined by extravagance and war was in the hands of such tax-farmers as the forthright Lesage shows us in Turcaret: I marvel at the course of human life! We pluck a coquette; the coquette devours a man of affairs; the man of affairs pillages others: and all this makes the most diverting chain of knaveries imaginable — un ricochet de bourberies le plus plaisant du monde. Largilliere's 1696 devout magistrates of Paris cloak the travesty of that ricochet. a5) Vb5) 5) V5a) Watteau, 1720, Shop of Gersaint, whole; Charlottenburg, Berlin Same, detail: portrait being packed away Same, detail, left side Same, detail, right side (to which video adds closer details of 5 and V5a) No wonder, twenty-four years later, in Watteau's Shop of Gersaint, the wigged Virtu of the old Louis, painted by Lebrun and acclaimed by Molière at the close of Tartuffe: We live under a prince wise in the ways of the world, Whose great soul sees the truth through every mask, Whose steadfast reason admits of no excess — 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �4 C.G. Bell Symbolic History that pomp is stowed in straw in a packing case, from which the painter himself beckons a nostalgic beauty. Thus at the close of the school of manners Molière's France began, Sheridan's improvident auctions the stern portraits of his family past. As in Johnson's "Vanity of Human Wishes": From ev'ry room descends the painted face, That hung the bright palladium of the place... For now no more we trace in ev'ry line Heroic worth, benevolence divine; The form distorted, justifies the fall, And detestation rids th'indignant wall. But what if, with the picture, normative reason should be deposed, ushering in the passionate successor? Va6) Hans von Aachen, c. 1596(?), Joking Couple, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna b6) B. Strozzi, c. 1625(?), Vanity (old woman making up), Private Collection, Bologna Vc6) Velasquez, c. 1628(?), Los Borrachos (The Topers), or Triumph of Bacchus, detail, a peasant, Prado, Madrid 6) Same, whole High comedy is a type and mirror of purposive aim. In every act of purpose — as when we reach for something — the central thrust is trained on its goal by a feedback correction of misses. So in the comic antinomy, Dionysian release, breaking tame symmetry in a dance of the grotesque, takes the blaze of corrective mockery, by which its overflow is guided home — from Aristophanes to Twain and Chaplin, ironic mantle of generative force. 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �5 C.G. Bell Symbolic History In the Gargantuan Renaissance, the poles seem to fuse in Windmill assault or Falstaffian celebration; in the social comedy of Method, from Molière to Austen, reason separates a truth-core, etched round with the acid of vanity and hypocrisy scorned. Velasquez' 1628 praise of Bacchus and castigation of drunk peasants straddles the line, at once Quixotic and normative. a7) Van Dyck, 1622-27, Marchesa Balbi, National Gallery, Washington Vb7) Velasquez, 1635, Filippo IV of Spain on horseback (variant of the Prado painting), Pitti, Firenze 7) Bernini, 1650-1, Bust of Duke Francis I d'Este, Mus. Estense, Modena V7a) Jean-Louis Lemoyne, 1703-04, Bust of Jules H. Mansart, Louvre, Paris 7b) John Nost, c. 1698, Digby Memorial, S. Transept, Sherborne Abbey, Dorset (CGB '84) 7c) Again Bernini, Bust of Duke Francis I d'Este, closer view Music: Fr. Turini, 1624, Sonata in A, 2 vls & continuo, Telef. AWT 9461-C But when Bernini's 1650 Duke of Este had proclaimed over Europe the code and canon of reasoned grandeur, what were all those courtly aspirants with their art- and stage-reflections to do but assume the stance of that saltimbanque nobility (Dryden's Alexander: "None but the Brave deserves the Fair"): in France the Bourgeois Gentilhomme M. Jourdain preposterously apes; in England, the Dorimants and Bellairs, Harcourts, Mellefonts, Mirabells, who pace the Restoratian stage? Though of course the manly center will be rimmed (Grave to allegro) 8) Bernini, 1665, Caricature of a French Cavalier, Gab. Naz. Stampe, Rome; first, video detail with the misses and exaggerations of Sir Fopling Flutter, Sir Novelty Fashion, Sparkish, Lord Froth, Tattle, Witwoud, Petulant. Is it not thematic that the man who schemed the ultimate inflation, Bernini, also, and at the same time, invented its caricature — the very idol, in this French Cavalier, pricked and deflated by comic scorn? (fade Turini) 9) 4/1994 Egyptian, Dyn XIX, c. 1250 B.C., One of four colossal statues of Ramses II, on the Great Temple, Abu Simbel 1700: The Comic Divide �6 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Perhaps the heroic has always occasioned playful divisions on its ground. From Soser and Khafre to Tut and this Ramses II, the enthroned Pharoah was the image of power, as epic for Egypt as Homer's warriors for the Greeks. But when in tomb-paintings of the same XIXth Dynasty, the same judgment seat 10) Egyptian, Dyn. XIX, c. 1300 BC, Cat serves a throned mouse, Brooklyn Museum secures for a royal mouse the service of a cat, we recall those Iliad parodies once ascribed to Homer — the Battle of Frogs and Mice, in which Aristotle found the comic source, how mice, armed with beanpod greaves and peanut helmets, attack the frogs armed with rushes and snail-shells, until the Myrmidon crabs intervene. Va11) b11) 11) Breughel, c. 1557, St. Anthony Landscape, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. (CGB '60) Vincenzo de' Rossi, c. 1560(?), Hercules and Antæus, Palazzo Vecchio, Firenze Domenichino, c. 1620(?), Apollo and Cyclops, with the Aldobrandini dwarf, National Gallery, London Now, as the epic mode revives, the take-offs also stake a claim: Cervantes — Scarce had..Aurora... display'd her rosy graces to mortal eyes from the gates and balconies of the Manchegan Horizon, when the renowned Knight Don Quixote... forsook the voluptuous down; or under baroque hardening, Tassoni's 1622 Rape of a Bucket: a Bolognese assault on Modena, In which they make horrible war for a bucket And go back home in triumph and racket — (CGB) Fanno per una Secchia orribil guerra, E Tornan trionfanti a lor terra — model in Dryden's England for Hudibras, and then, as the title reveals, for Pope's "Rape of the Lock." Compare Pope's mock-heroics with this fresco Domenichino painted for the Aldobrandini: the negligence and punishment of their dwarf against a simulated tapestry of Apollo and the Cyclops: 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �7 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Not louder shrieks to pitying Heaven are cast, When husbands or when lap-dogs breathe their last; Or when rich China vessels, fall'n from high, In glitt'ring dust and painted fragments lie! 12) Longhena, 1631-56, Santa Maria della Salute, Venice (CGB '59); first, video details Music: Benevoli, 1628, 53-v. Festival Mass, Et Resurrexit, Epic LC 3035, near opening If earthly exultance is a ground of laughter, even the religious Baroque must surge that way, as in the formal leaps of Benevoli's Et Resurrexit, or the dome and volutes of La Salute, everywhere on the point of overplaying such magnificent powers — pious exhuberance denying mockery. (fade Benevoli) 13) V13a) 13b) Bernini, 1657-66, St. Athanasius, head, High Altar, St. Peter's, Rome Guarini, 1667, 36-arch Dome, East end, Duomo, Turin (CGB '84) Same, more central detail (CGB '84) Carissimi's "Deum de Deo" from the Mass for Five and Nine takes up the dance of Bernini's High Altar or Guarini's Turin Domes — Music: 14) Carissimi, c. 1660(?), Deum de Deo, Missa a quinque et a novem, MHS-lllO (fade) Pozzo, 1688-94, side of nave ceiling, St. Ignazio, Rome (CGB '48) which carries to the end of the century in Pozzo's Ignazio ceiling, or in the Christmas Concerto of Corelli: Music: Corelli, by 1699, lst Allegro close, Christmas Concerto, ARC-3147 15) V15a) Pozzo, 1688-94, Center, nave ceiling, St. Ignazio, Rome (CGB '48) Pozzo, 1685, left transept, Nave ceiling, St. Ignazio, Rome (CGB '48) 16) Churriguerra, 1693-96, High Altar, Esteban Church, Salamanca, Spain (video divides to below and above) 4/1994 (end Corelli) 1700: The Comic Divide �8 C.G. Bell Symbolic History It fills the Spain of the organist Cabanilles with Churriguera's altars; Music: Va17) 17) Cabanilles, c. 1700, from Tiento XVII, de Pangue Lingua, MHS 3069 (B,1) Mexican, 16th-17th cent., Dome at sunset, Santo Domingo, San Cristobal, Chiapas (CGB '78) Mexican, 1659-90, Ceiling, Rosary Chapel, Santo Domingo. Pueblo (CGB '74) (end Cabanilles) and crowns Indian Mexico with the gold of earth-conquest. Va18) 18) Prandtauer, 1702 ff, Monastery of Melk, Danube near Vienna (CGB '59; video takes a detail here from Bach 74, over the town) Same, West front from below (CGB '59); + V detail From Rome and Venice the power of High Baroque strikes north over the Danube, rearing, as to the festal pomp of Biber's St. Polycarp Sonata, the imperial monastery of Melk. Music: Va19) b19) Vc19) 19) H.I.F. Biber, c. 1690(?), St. Polycarp Sonata, near close, SAWT 9537-A Ex Same, 1702-26, interior of Melk, detail of Cloister Library (CGB '59) Same, a corner of the Library (CGB '59) Same, Cloister Hall, detail (CGB '59) Same, Chapel, Choir & High Altar, detail (CGB '59) (end Biber) Though German music, at this Melk turn of the century, peaks 400 miles to the north, in the fugal toccatas of Buxtehude. Music: Va20) 20) 4/1994 Buxtehude, c. 1690(?), Toccata in F Major, close, (Hansen) Nonesuch H 71188 E.Q. Asam, 1717-25(?), Assumption of Mary, Choir and Altar (from the Nave), Rohr, Bavaria (CGB '59; video first shows a detail of Mary and the Angels from Bach 49); digital varies this order Same, Assumption of Mary, Altar from side (video: detail only) 1700: The Comic Divide �9 C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History J.S. Bach, 1723, Magnificat, Instrumental opening, Bach Guild 555 — A sacred exuberance flooding over the century, through the lifetime of Bach: here Asam's boisterous ascent of Mary from tomb to angel-light: Magnificat. (fade Bach) What should the courts be where religion has become the bouyant opera of material praise? VA of 21) Sir Peter Lely, c. 1660(?), Self-Portrait, Collection of Mrs. H.N. Lely 21) Sir Peter Lely, Double: [A] c. 1660(?), Self-Portrait, Collection of Mrs. H.N. Lely; and [B] c. 1650(?), Portrait of a Woman, British Museum, London; + video detail of [B], from VB of 21 21a) S. Cooper, 1643, Viscountess Fauconberg (Cromwell's Daughter), Collection of E.M. Hodgkins 21b) W. Dobson, c. 1645, The Artist with Sir Charles Cotterell and Sir Balthazar Gerbler, Albury Park, Guilford 21c) Cooper, c. 1650(?), William Lenthall, National Portrait Gallery, London 21d) Le Brun, c. 1665(?) Portrait of Henri de la Tour d'Auvergne, Viscomte de Turenne, sketch for a tapestry, Versailles; where video has used: Sir Charles Lely, c. 1658, Robert, 2nd Earl of Sunderland, Knole, near London (see V21d) In Dutch Lely, fad of the English court after Van Dyck, Bernini's Duke of Este sires manly virtue thinning into mannered dress. Etheridge (1676): next to the coming to a good understanding with a new Mistress, I love a quarrel with an old one. Wycherley's Horner (1671) who has himself declared impotent (as from something caught in France) that his cuckolds may not suspect him. Lady Fidget: ...could you be so generous, so truly a man of honour, as for the sakes of us women of honour, to cause yourself to be reported no man? No man! and to suffer yourself the greatest shame that could fall upon a man, that none might fall upon us women by your conversation? but, indeed, sir, as perfectly, perfectly the same man as before your going into France, sir? as perfectly, perfectly, sir? 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �10 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Though the loving Country Wife almost explodes everything. Her jealous husband is being assured of Horner's impotence: Why, thou jealous fool, dost thou doubt it? he's an arrant French capon. Country Wife: Tis false, sir, you shall not disparage poor Mr. Horner, for to my certain knowledge… Others: — O, hold! — Stop her mouth! — Upon my honor, sir... The lie prevails: Cuckolds, like lovers, should themselves deceive. In that field, Molière's good is moderation: The rigid virtue of the ancient sages Is out of key with present usages… (Bishop) Like the "nature" Boileau says art should follow, it is style, groomed by wit. 22) 22a) N. de Largilliere, 1703, The Artist with his Wife and Daughter, Louvre (CGB '80); + V details Strozzi, c. 1625, Vanity, Private Collection, Bologna (detail of b6) And yet it overweens. Molière (with Largilliere): Men never will keep to the golden mean; They will spoil and pervert a noble aim, By exaggeration, carrying things too far. (CGB, after Bishop) The cosmetic arts of Pope's beautiful Belinda are those Congreve marvelously misapplies to the earthquaked old face of Lady Wishfort, that "antidote to desire," so "prone to the iteration of nuptials" — as Erasmus' Folly had said: "they pluck out hairs from the strangest places; they display their withered and foul breasts": Lady Wishfort: 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �11 C.G. Bell Symbolic History He has put me out of all patience. I shall never recompose my features to receive Sir Rowland with any economy of face. This wretch has fretted me that I am absolutely decayed. Look, Foible. Foible: Your ladyship has frowned a little too rashly indeed, madam. There are some cracks discernible in the white varnish. Lady Wishfort: Let me see the glass. — Cracks, sayest thou? — why, I am errantly flayed — I look like an old peeled wall. Thou must repair me, Foible, before Sir Rowland comes, or I shall never keep up to my picture. What Lady Wishfort is to the Belle, 23) V23a) 23b) V23c) 23d) Claudio Coello, c. 1690(?), Portrait of Charles II of Spain, Prado, Madrid Daniel Mytens, 1629, 1st Duke of Hamilton, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh Cooper, 1665, Portrait of Anthony Ashley, 2nd Earl of Shaftesbury, Victoria and Albert Museum, London Ghislandi, c. 1700(?), Portrait of a Gentleman in a Tri-Cornered Hat, Poldi Pezzoli Mus., Milan Coello, c. 1690(?), Charles II of Spain (detail of 23) the fop is to the Beau. We approach the type wherever Baroque might decks a puny center — as with poor sickly Charles II of Spain. On the English stage, it is as if Shakespeare's "waterfly" Osric (" 'A did comply with his dug before 'a sucked it") had absorbed, with the exiled Court of St. James, the preciosities of Molière's France, to become Etheridge's Sir Fopling Flutter — "He went to Paris a plain bashful English Blockhead, and is return'd a fine undertaking French Fopp." — He thinks himself the Pattern of modern Gallantry. — He is indeed the pattern of modern Foppery. He was Yesterday at the Play, with a pair of Gloves up to his Elbows, and a Periwig more exactly Curl'd than a Ladies head newly dress'd for a Ball. — What a pretty lisp he has! — Ho, that he affects in imitation of the people of Quality of France. — ...his looks are more languishing than a Ladys when she... leans her head carelessly against the side of a Box i'the Playhouse. 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �12 C.G. Bell a24) 24) V24a) Symbolic History N. de Largilliere, 1696, lower detail of Magistrates, St. Genevieve Ex-voto, St. Etienne-du-Mont, Paris (video: right half only) Same, right detail (video: closer details only) H. Rigaud, 1728, Count Phil. L.W. Sinzendorf, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna By the end of the century, Largilliere's Magistrates vie with Vanbrugh's Lord Foppington: Gad's curse! Mr. Foretop, you don't intend to put this upon me for a full perriwig? Foretop: ...Why, as God shall judge me, your Honor's side-face is reduc'd to the tip of your nose. Lord Foppington: My side-face may be in eclipse for aught I know; but I'm sure my fullface is like the full-moon. Foretop: Heaven bless my eye-sight... an't please your honor... the broadest place I see in your face does not seem to me to be two inches diameter. Lord Foppington: If it did, it would just be two inches too broad; for a perriwig to a man should be like a mask to a woman, nothing should be seen but his eyes — Foretop: My Lord, I have done; if you please to have more hair in your wig, I'll put it in. Lord Foppington: Passitively, yes. Foretop: Shall I take it back now, my lord? Lord Foppington: No; I'll wear it today, tho it shew such a manstrous pair of cheeks, stap my vitals, I shall be taken for a trumpeter. In Molière, vigor is less lost under the mannered wig. 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �13 C.G. Bell a25) 25) 25a) 25b) 25c) Symbolic History Jan Steen, c. 1650(?), The Village School, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin Jan Steen, c. 1660, "No medicine for love", Alte Pinak., Munich Le Nain Brothers, c. 1645(?), from Peasant Family, peasant, Louvre, Paris Again, Steen, "No Medicine for Love," detail (video takes other details from 25, the whole) J. Steen, 1660s(?). Sick Lady, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam He is closer to the mid-century realism of the North, the clean fugues of Pezel. Music: 4/1994 Pezel, pub. 1685, Intrade for Brasses, Anthologie Sonore 2 1700: The Comic Divide �14 C.G. Bell Symbolic History That comic play, as in Jan Steen's "No medicine for love," rides a grandeur of ordered space. Such Molière's absolute clarity of character and action, against which Restoration drama blurs its complexities of plot and person. Yet Molière transcends the realism of the Small Masters. As La Fontaine wrote: "Under this stone, where Molière lies alone, Plautus and Terence lie, three dead in one." So in Le Medecin Malgré Lui, Sganarelle, woodcutter, taken for a physician by the trickery of his wife, fumbles a girl who plays dumb for love: "Here is a pulse which denotes that your daughter is dumb"; and when father, lover, and all pay him, he finds doctoring a good trade: Maybe I'll stick to medicine the rest of my life... For whatever you do, good or bad, you get paid the same... If a cobbler spoils leather, he has to pay; but here you can spoil a man and it costs you nothing... It's always the fault of the one who dies. You don't hear the dead man complain of the doctor who killed him. In The Hypochondriac there is Purgon's curse at the refusal of his clyster: — That in four days' time you enter on an incurable state… that you fall into a dyspepsia. — Ah, M. Purgon! — From a dyspesia into a dissentery; from a dissentery into a dropsy. — Mercy, M. Purgon! — From a dropsy into the privation of life, where your folly will bring you... Or the closing chorus of mock-doctors in Pidgin Latin: Vivat, vivat, forever vivat, Novus doctor… et manget et bibat, Et bleedet et killat. (1739 translation) a26) b26) 26) 4/1994 (end Pezel) Cornelis Troost, c. 1737-41, Cuckold Scene, detail, Print Collection, BerlinDahlem Museum, Berlin J. Steen, c. 1665, Girl Eating Oysters, Mauritshuis, The Hague Again, Troost, Cuckold Scene, whole; first, video close detail 1700: The Comic Divide �15 C.G. Bell Symbolic History By the 18th century, French Classical has permeated Dutch realism with its comic themes. The mocking maid through the half-door, her fingers raised to her forehead like horns, tells after what discovery the magisterial husband hides his face, leaving his wife in tears. It is cuckoldry, on which Molière, with a girl-actress for sportive bride, tellingly dwells — Arnolphe in The School for Wives: I know all the tricks, all the devices That ladies use to victimize their husbands... And so I've taken adequate precautions. The girl I'll marry is an innocent, And her simplicity is my protection. . . (Bishop) While Chrysalde counsels proportion: Why should the actions of a wife determine whether a man is worthy, or not, of honor? … Does breach of trust make her, make him, a monster? A gentleman treats cuckoldry with reason. Though Troost's print is as mild as 18th-century Addison; 27) 27a) Charles LeBrun, 1661, Chancellor Sequier, Louvre, Paris (CGB '80) Same, upper center detail (while video takes five details from 27, whole) whereas Molière's blend of classical balance and rolicking farce is of the high baroque, never rococo, never Watteau-light. LeBrun's equestrian Chancellor hints at such a comic seriousness, where the formal is real, poetry has wit, state and grandeur wear a mocking, urbane smile. Such aims attend the heroic normalization of verse which advances in France from Malherbe (English Waller's model) to the swelling periods of Boileau, where "a just cadence has reduced the muse to obligatory rules" — "Une juste cadence" "réduisit la muse aux règles du dèvoir." The proof of the achievement is that it could contain Molière's verse plays, Racine's tragedies, and even in Boileau, not simply the reason of his Art poetique, but the Pascalian shadow of Les Folies Humaines: Often of all our evils reason is the worst — Souvent de tous nos maux la raison est le pire. 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �16 C.G. Bell Symbolic History And where was reason going in the guise of this chancellor with his mocking smile? The year of the picture is 1661. Va28) Le Vau, Le Brun, Le Notre, 1656-60, Chateau Vaux le Vicomte, side view, SE of Paris (CGB '80) Same, interior, Round Hall under Dome (CGB '80) Same, exterior, front view from distance (CGB '80); + V detail Vb28) 28) That August, Nicolas Fouquet, libertine Superintendent of Finance, invited Louis XIV and the court to a fête at his Chateau Vaux le Vicomte, just completed by the team of Le Vau, LeBrun, and Le Notre, later to create Versailles. Lully's violins played; there was a farce by Molière, followed by a tremendous firework (Artefice de Feu). La Fontaine wrote: Tout combattit a Vaux pour le plaisir du Roi, La musique, les eaux, les lustres, les étoiles — All contended at Vaux for the king's applause: The music, the waters, the lights, the stars. (CGB) But "heaven was jealous of it" — "Le ciel en fut jaloux." Nineteen days later the subject who had out-pomped a king was imprisoned — as it turned out, for life. For 2nd 27) Again, Chateau Vaux le Vicomte, interior, corner of Mirror Room (CGB '80) Chancellor Sequier could have agreed with Molière's Philinte: Perfect reason flees every extremity; Warns wisdom itself: be wise with sobriety. (CGB) The convergence of mannered Séquier, baroque Lully, cork-heeled Louis, La Fontaine of sage Fables and Molière of truth-telling farce, 2nd 28) Again, Vaux le Vicomte Chateau, nearer front view (CGB '80) in the showiest palace of pre-Versailles France, has import. Ages of formal pomp incline to the comedy of manners. 29) 4/1994 Indian (Islam), 1632-52, Taj Mahal, Agra, India; + V detail 1700: The Comic Divide �17 C.G. Bell Symbolic History And in one of those resonances the world gives hints of, our Renaissance and Baroque coincide, over Asia, with a noble opulence (soon to be imitated in the rococo), a Taj-Mahal grandeur, 30) Indian (Nepalese), 16th cent., Dancing divinities, Private Collection, Rome charged, in illumination and sculpture, with meticulous abandonment, refined out of the sacred energies of centuries before. It is the more and more courtly dance of divinity. 31) Japanese, 16th cent., mask of the "Ugly Woman" ("Oto"), Nat. Mus., Tokyo; + V detail Nowhere has civilization achieved higher life-style than in late Muromachi Japan. A mask designed for "Ugly Woman" roles seems to reach across land and ocean to the praised improvisations of the Commedia del Arte. But what speaks in it like a comic oracle is the blend of the vital and grotesque, the corrective energy of the art-laugh. 32) Upper Paleolithic, c. 23,000 B.C., Venus of Willendorf, Natural History, Madrid; + V detail We know nothing of the use or intent of Cro-Magnon fertility fetishes; yet here, in the earliest carvings we possess, generation revels in an all-time archetype. In burlesque New Orleans, it is "the biggest baby-doll of them all" who keeps her dancing mass continually in the air, a captive balloon in defiance of gravity. In Molière, it is the Mock Doctor's enthusiasm for the ample wet nurse: "Ah nurse of my heart... there is one, not far from here, who would be happy just to kiss" (as Bishop will translate "les petits bouts de vos petons") "to kiss the sweet utensils of your trade." Va33) 33) V33a) 33b) 4/1994 Hellenistic, 3rd-1st cent. B.C., Double Comic Mask, Mus. Barracco, Rome Hellenistic, 3rd-lst cent. B.C., terra cotta of comic actors in masks (Life, Feb. 8, 1963) Classical Greek, Peloponnesian from Palestrina, 2nd half of 4th cent. B.C., Aphrodite on a Goat (cover of a box mirror, detail), Louvre, Paris Greek (Macedon, tomb at Derveni), c. 330 B.C., Krater, Dionysus, etc., Mus., Thessalonikê 1700: The Comic Divide �18 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Like any polarity, the vital-and-ugly admits of infinite field solutions: How keen the satyr discovery of the Greeks — Aristotle's Ridiculous: "a mistake or deformity not productive of pain... the mask, for instance, that excites laughter." Though the rapturecloses of Aristophanes should have brought even the Stagirite nearer to mockery's ecstatic core. The Birds: …to the nuptial couch!… Take hold of me by my wings and let us dance... Oh joy! Io paean! Tralala! victory is thine, oh thou greatest of gods! Lysistrata: Appear dancers, and the Graces with you... Apollo... Dionysus... Aphrodite. Io Paean! dance, leap, as in honor of a victory won... and Artemis… a fillet binding thy tresses... strike thy divine hands to animate the dance; aid us to praise the valiant goddess of battles, Athene of the Brazen House! Va34) b34) 34) Attic cup by Makron, c. 470(?) B.C., Satyr and Maenad, Mus., Munich Greek, 6th cent. B.C., Phallic Monument, Sacred precinct, Delos Græco-Roman, 1st cent. A.D., Phallic Fountain, House of Vetii, Pompeii — The Lysistrata standing as near as any play to comic center: the deed of kind, with its life-giving clown. When the oath of the Athenian and Spartan women, "to refrain from the male part altogether," has brought their warring men, like stalking herms, to treat for peace and coition: Could any man's back and loins stand such a strain? — Ye gods in heaven, the pangs I suffer! — it is the phallus that leads to god-celebration. Even in the Neronian lust of the Satyricon, the Priapus of this Pompeian fountain holds some sacred claim: a land so infested with divinity, one might meet with a god more easily than with a man. 35) 4/1994 French Romesque-Gothic, 1145-50, Shepherds, right of West Portal, Chartres; + V detail 1700: The Comic Divide �19 C.G. Bell 35a) Symbolic History Rohan Hours, 1425(?), Shepherds’ Dance, f85 v, Bibl. Nat., Paris Like everything of the pagan earth, comedy went down in Christian faith. When it revives in the church close it is under the transformation of innocence — these sely shepherds of Chartres, naive as Chrestien's description of a bridge, which is the sharp blade of a sword: There was never such a bad bridge, nor one whose flooring was so bad… It is badly made and badly built, and the construction of it is bad. From this 1140 carving to the mystery plays of the 15th century (the shepherd to the Christ child: "Have here a ball/ And go to the tennis"), we sense how the Germanic word "selig," blessed, innocent, would change to the English "silly," stretching the salvation comedy of innocence, Music: Lochaimer Liederbuch, 1452-60, "Es fur ein pawr gen holcz," opening, Arc-3222 Va36) German late Gothic, 1352-61 (attributed to Heinrich Parler), Portal of Frauenkirche, Nuremberg, Bavaria Vb36) English (E. Anglian), early 14th cent., Psalter of the St. Omer family, detail of Beatus page, Add. MSS 39810, British Museum, London; + V detail Vc36) Grandes Heures of the Duc de Berry, 1406-09, pl. 64, detail, "Mock Priest"; Biblioteque Nationale, Paris d36) German, 1480 (Erasmus Grasser), A Moorish Dancer (standing), City Hist. Mus., Munich e36) Bellini, 1515, Lady at her Toilet, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (CGB '59) 1st 36) E. Grasser, c. 1480, Another Morisco Dancer (crouching), Stadtmuseum, Munich with the profane juggling and farce that boil up from folk Gothic, Corpus Christi interludes, between-sports, Grasser's 15th-century Morisco Dancers, this Lochaimer germ of Don Giovanni's demonic patter-song; (fade music) or the English ballad of the proud lady and the juggler: Here beside dwelleth A riche barons doughter; 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �20 C.G. Bell Symbolic History She wold have no man That for love had sought her, So nise she was. She wold have no man That was made of molde, But if he had a mouth of gold To kisse her whan she wold. So dangerus she was. There of hard a joly juggeler That laid was on the grene, And at this ladys wordès Iwis he had gret tene, An angred he was. He juggeled to him a well good stede Of an old horse bone, A sadill and a bridill both, And set himself thereon. A juggeler he was. 1st 37) V2nd d36) V2nd e36) 2nd 36) For 2nd 37) French Gothic, 1260-70, Smiling Angel, head, Rheims Detail of d36, above: Standing Moorish Dancer Detail of e36, above: Bellini, Lady at Her Toilet Detail of 36, above: Crouching Moorish Dancer [B] of double 38, below: Franco-German, c. 1280, Prince of this World, head, Cathedral Museum, Strassburg He priked and praunsed both Beffore that lady's gate; She wend he had ben an angell Was come for her sake. A prikker he was. He priked and praunsed Beffore that lady's bowr; She wend he had ben an angel Come from heven towre. A praunser he was… The day began to passe, The night began to come, To bed was brought 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �21 C.G. Bell Symbolic History The fair jentell woman, And the juggeler also. The night began to passe, The day began to springe, All the birdès of her bowr They began to singe, And the cokoo also. 'Where be ye, my mery maidens, That ye come not me to? The joly windows of my bowr Look that you undo, That I may see! For I have in mine armès A duke or elles an erle.' But whan she lookèd him upon, He was a blere-eyed chorle. 'Alas!' she said. She lade him to an hill, and hangèd shuld he be. He juggeled himself to a mele pok; The dust fell in her eye; Begilèd she was. God and our Lady And swetè Seint Johan Send every giglot of this town Such another leman Even as he was. 38) V38a) 38b) 39) 40) 4/1994 Double of 1st and 2nd 37, above: [A] French-Gothic, 1260-70, Smiling Angel, Rheims; and [B] Franco-German, c. 1280, Prince of this World, Strassburg; + V detail of each Basler Münster, c. 1290, The Deceiver and a Foolish Virgin, from a cast, Basel Museum Mantegna, c. 1468, Triumph of Silenus, detail, British Museum, London Salvator Rosa, c. 1650, Head of a Faun, Albertina, Vienna; + V detail Goya(?), c. 1824, Self in a Tall Hat, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; first, a video detail 1700: The Comic Divide �22 C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History French, c. 1250-60, Alle Psallite cum Luya, vocal, Seraphim SIC6052 In two smiles we read the radical Christian heightening of the poles of comic possibility (wide as from Shakespeare's Tempest to Jonson's Volpone; yet fused in one troped Alleluya) — the Rheims angel smile of Grace; and the Strassburg smile of the Tempter, the Prince of this World. (end Alle) That equivocal vitality reaches forward from the Gothic root; through Renaissance, 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �23 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Music: Mozart, 1787, Finch' han del vino, Don Giovanni, Angel 3605 D/L through the satyr espousal of Rosa's baroque, toward Storm and Stress, the rape aria of Don Giovanni, as revolutionary a seizure on the comedy of manners as Goethe's Faust; as this smile the old Goya painted or inspired, resurrected from the beast-base of the snarl. Such the humor of Kant's Critiques, where reason sharpens its weapons to depose itself and crown the intuitive successor. (end Mozart) a41) 41) V41a) 41b) J. Fouquet, 1453-55, Job on his Dung Heap, Hours of Etienne Chevalier, Musée Condé, Chantilly Florentine, c. 1525(?), Bust of Machiavelli, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence Giulio Romano, 1540(?), The Lovers, Hermitage, Leningrad Valerio Cioli, 1558-70(?), Morgante, Duke Cosimo's Dwarf, astride a turtle, Giardino di Boboli (video then returns to 41, Bust of Machiavelli) By the 15th century, medieval farce had begun the amplification which would lead to Molière: — Pathelin, shyster, out-cheated by the baaing shepherd with his "bump of villainy". But it is first with Machiavelli, who even in his bust smiles like a roguish Leonardo, that fabliaux realism is invested in the spatial harmonies of Renaissance, without loss of natural immediacy. In the Mandragola, the beautiful Lucrezia is to be seduced. Parasite Ligurio suggests a spa to the learned dolt her husband: — — — — Did you see the sea at Leghorn? What do you think? Of course I saw it. How much bigger is it than Arno? Than Arno? Why it's four times — no, more — six bigger — seven bigger — I tell you, you don't see anything but water, water, water. (CGB) — …e non si vede se non acqua, acqua, acqua. 42) 42a) After Q. Massys, 1510-20, Ugly Queen of Tunis, National Gallery, London School of G. Romano, 1530-32, Jove and Olympia, Palazzo Te, Sala di Psiche, Mantua (video returns to a detail of 42, the Ugly Queen of Tunis) We have seen that surge engender on gargoyle farce a progeny of giants strange as Massys' Queen of Tunis — Rabelais, with codpiece distending the monk's habit — as when Panurge, rejected by a lady, sprinkled her clothes, in church, with an extract made from a hot and salt bitch: 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �24 C.G. Bell Symbolic History All the dogs in church came running, big and little, laying out their yards and pissing all over her… A tall greyhound bepissed her head; some her sleeves and others her crupper; the little ones pissed on her pattens. Panurge laughed and said to a lord of the city: "I think that lady is in heat, or has been covered lately by a greyhound." Then he left... and wherever he saw dogs in the street, he would give them a kick and say: "Get along! Join your fellows, in the devil's name." 43) Bronzino, c. 1546, Exposure of Luxury, National Gallery, London; + V details The comic-tragic cleavage has mostly ruled the stage. Yet Bronzino's Allegory of Cupid, Venus, and Time, sometimes called the "Exposure of Luxury," is a comic picture, applying the heroic mythology of Raphael and Michelangelo in a Mannerism of fancy play — as in the court comedy of Lyly: Cupid and my Campaspe played At cards for kisses; Cupid paid. Though there was no such brilliance of Cupid-lust in English until heroic Dryden toyed with it: He showed her his arrow, and bid her not fear, For the pain was no more than a maiden may bear; When the balm was infused, she was not at a loss What they meant by their sighing and kissing so close; By their praying and whining, And clasping and twining, And panting and wishing And sighing and kissing, And sighing and kissing so close. a44) b44) 44) School of Leonardo, c. 1505, Leda and the Swan, Borghese Gal., Rome Titian, 1559, Rape of Europa, Isabella S. Gardner Museum, Boston Tintoretto, 1550, Vulcan, Venus, Mars, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59); + V details, then again the whole The revived mythologies of Poliziano, Ariosto, and the rest prompt the visual. Marlowe, of Venus' temple in Sestos: 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �25 C.G. Bell Symbolic History There might you see the gods in sundrie shapes, Committing headdie ryots, incest, rapes; For know, that underneath this radiant floure Was Danaes statue in a brazen tower, Jove slylie stealing from his sisters bed, To dallie with Idalian Ganimed, And for his love Europa bellowing loud, And tumbling with the rainbow in a cloud: Blood-quaffing Mars heaving the yron net, Which limping Vulcan and his Cyclops set… In the Venetians such scenes range from the tragic, through high romance, to this comic Tintoretto: Vulcan reflected in the mirror like an old woman, inspects the Venereal premises, while Cupid feigns sleep, and the phallic helmet of Mars pokes from under the bed. Music: a45) 45) V45a) Vicentino, c. 1571, close of Petrarch "Passa la nave," Bach, Guild HM 34 SD G. Arcimboldo, 1570(?), The Summer, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien Arcimboldo, 1560-70, Water (fishy-face), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien; + V detail Arcimboldo, 1563, Winter, (head of a gnarled tree), same museum In the deepening value crisis of the late century, even comedy and pastoral darken; while mocking experiments — Arcimboldo's heads formed of vegetables or of fish — accompany the chromatic upheaval of music: Vicentino. (end Vicentino) In Bruno, the hermetic fury of magic swells with modern science, a cauldron of the tragic and grotesque. Of all Renaissance plays, his Candellaio is the weirdest, fuzing the visionary 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �26 C.G. Bell 46) 46a) 46b) Symbolic History An. Carracci, c. 1585, The Bean Eater, Colonna Gal., Rome Rubens, 1612-15, Toilet of Venus, Vaduz-Lichtenstein Collection; + V detail Rubens, 1608(?), detail of Sampson and Dalilah, National Gallery, London (video repeats 46, The Bean Eater) with the brute physicality which in this early Carracci looks to the Baroque. Carubina is to meet with her old candlemaker, he taking her in the dark for the mistress he thinks he has charmed; she plots it all: I'll come on hot with kisses like a bear. When I gnaw his cheeks, you'll hear him yell in the next room. "My heart, my life," I'll say; "soft, or we'll be overheard..." I'll get his tongue between my teeth and bite until he screams some more. "O love, O sweetheart," I'll whisper, "passion drives me wild." I'll pretend to want him before we go to bed, get him ready, egg him on; but before the King of Glory can come in, 1'11 squeeze his root and cullions like wringing out a wash, and pant: "My own, to have you in my hands." When you hear him howl the third time — and I'll twist until he howls — then come into the room, all of you, with lights; and we'll see. (CGB) Against the diabolic grossening which would lead to Ben Jonson: Sirrah, I'll strip you — What to do? Lick figs out at my — 47) V47a) V47b) 47c) 47d) G. Lytens, c. 1617, Winter Scene, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien (CGB '59); + V details Same, Another winter scene, Aachen Gallery (CGB '74) Roeland Savery, 1610, Mountain Landscape with Woodcutters, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien (CGB '59); + V detail Jan Brueghel, 1599, Little Bouquet in a Clay Jar, close detail, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien Brueghel, 1609, Harbor City, Alte Pinak., Munich (CGB '59); + V detail angel make-believe enwreathes The Tempest and The Winter's Tale, fills art with naturelove (Lyten's Gypsy snow-pleasures, romantic as Huck Finn), spins the lute arabesques of Dowland's incomparable fantasies. 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �27 C.G. Bell Music: a48) b48) 48) V48a) V48b) Symbolic History Dowland, c. 1610(?), Fantasy, (Bream) beginning and end, RCA V LDS 2656 H. Goltzius, 1604, Venus, Bacchus, Ceres, etc., Hermitage, Leningrad J. de Gheyn, c. 1590(?), Mother and Child studying drawing book, Print Room, Staatliche Museen, Berlin H. Avercamp, c. 1615(?), Storm on the Coast, Berlin-Dahlem Mus., Berlin; first, a video detail Rubens, c. 1632(?), Homecoming from the Fields, Pitti, Firenze Frans Hals, c. 1622, A Couple in a Garden, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam In Bacon, Gilbert, Harvey, reasoned exuberance proliferates observational science. The later novel, Dickens and all, lurks in the melodrama of humors. In the neglected sketches of 1600, Golzius, de Gheyn, Velvet Brueghel, this Avercamp, man walks the animate stage of earth, winds, and waters. (end Dowland) 49) 49a) J. Jordeans, 1638, The King Drinks, Royal Museum, Brussels; first, a video detail J. Jordeans, c. 1640, The Feast of the Bean King, close detail, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien In Rubens and his school (this Jordeans' "The King Drinks") myth riots in the physical. So drunkenness on the English stage thickens from Iago's "Potations pottle deep" and Anthony's "Cup us till the world go round," to that Heywood carouse where revellers take the house for a ship tossed by storm: To cast their lading overboard... All fall to work, and hoist into the street... Stools, tables, trestles, trenchers, bedsteads, cups, Pots, plate and glasses; here a fellow whistles, They take him for the boatswain; one lies struggling Upon the floor, as if he swum for life; 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �28 C.G. Bell Symbolic History A third takes the bass-viol for the cockboat, Sits in the belly on't, labours and rows, His oar the stick with which the fiddler played... 50) 50a) V50b) 50c) G. Honthorst, c. 1625-30, Merry Flea-Hunt, Öffentliche Sammlung, Basel G. Honthorst, 1625, The Procuress, detail, Central Mus., Utrecht; + closer V detail Rembrandt, 1646, French Bed, Amsterdam Again 50, Merry Flea-Hunt, detail Jonsonian comedy points again and again to the northern Caravaggiesque. Honthorst's Merry Flea-Hunt reaches from the joking lust of Falstaff: "She's neither fish nor flesh, a man knows not where to have her," to Otway's Sir Jolly Jumble, old pimpvoyeur: My Ganymede!... She's thine, boy... plump, soft, smooth, wanton! Ah rogue!.. here's shoulders... here's a leg... I will kiss thee ; ha, ha, he, he... a toad... Odd, I love... to see a pretty wench and a young fellow touze and rouze and frouze and mouze... faith dearly!... I'll pimp for thee, dear heart; and shan't I hold the door? shan't 1 peep, ha?... if thou hadst her in thy arms now between a pair of sheets, and I under the bed to see fair play, boy... gemini!... there would be doings! O lawd, 1 under the bed! (Enter whores) .... Bubbies! Oh, law, there's bubbies — odd, I'll bite 'em... Tickle me a little Jenny — do! he he, he he! 51) Poussin, c. 1629-30, Nymph carried by satyr, Gallery, Cassel; + V details Even moral Spenser had played the wag with satyrs — when old Malbecco finds his wife among them: Nine times he heard him come aloft ere day, That all his hart with gealosie did swell. Even elegiac Poussin shows such a nymph as Beaumont sends into the woods in his play otherwise called The Faithful Shepherdess: From one danger I am free; No man on earth can ravish me — I am so willing. . . 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �29 C.G. Bell Symbolic History The haste of the fruit-bearer, the white flesh on brown, the turnabout play on riding, the drape between the satyr's legs, like a Shakespearean pun, the cupids, voyeurs surely, like Sir Jolly — yet beside the later erotica of Boucher or Fragonard, this holds the heroic vein. a52) b52) J. Steen, 1650-60(?), The Poultry Yard, detail, Mauritshuis, The Hague Le Nain Brothers, 1645(?), Peasant Family, whole, Louvre, Paris (this video whole yields in the slide show to peasant and wife; plus video: woman to the left, from Vb52; woman, far left, from V52a; and man, right of center, from V52b) In England realistic comedy is cut off by the Puritan closure of the stage; though the genre equivalent in painting flourished in Calvinist Holland through much of the century. In France the peasant realism of the Le Nain brothers parallels that liveliest ingredient of Molière — thus at the opening of The Mock Doctor, Sganarel's fight with his wife, and the backfiring intervention of a neighbor — she: "Why do you stick your nose in? Suppose I want to be beaten?" But to approximate the style condition of Molière, that wonderfully articulated folk stem must be engrafted with a noble scion — Va53) 53) French Renaissance, 1518-27, Chateau d'Azay-Le-Rideau, Indre et Loire French Renaissance, 1519 ff., Chateau de Chambord; first, video detail Music: Attaignant, 1529, Tant que vivray, lute, Turnabout TV- 34137S the courtly splendor growing in Royalist France since the Renaissance Chateau de Chambord, or the lute songs and dances of Attaignant. But the 150 years from this Francis' hunting lodge on the Loire, (fade Attaignant) 54) 54a) 4/1994 Le Vau and others, 1669-85, Garden Façade, Palace of Versailles Same, corner view; with video return to a detail of 54 1700: The Comic Divide �30 C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Le Sage de Richée, pub. 1695, Lute Ouverture, Turnabout TV34137S to Louis XIV's Versailles, swells airy Renaissance to the heroic assertions of Baroque. And even within the limits of the musing lute, as played by the same performer, the passage from 1529, to Le Sage de Richée, 1695, loads the chords with grandeur. (fade Le Sage de Richée) How much more when the orchestra of Lully took up the orgulous overture — Music: a55) 55) V55a) Lully, 1675, from Thesée Overture, (slow, fast) from Col. M-376 Same, interior, Ambassadors' Staircase, Versailles Le Vau, Mansart, Le Brun, 1668-79, ceiling of Salon de Venus, Versailles (CGB '59); + V detail Le Brun, c. 1650-61, detail of ceiling fresco, Galerie d'Hercule, Hotel Lambert, Paris as in those royal apartments by Le Vau, Mansart and LeBrun, where the whole life of the King, among heaped geometries, wreathed and stuffed with precedents of power, became a state display. But the very structure of the French Overture opposes to the majesty of the opening grave 56) Le Brun, 1663-75, Tapestry, Louis XIV visits the Gobelin factory, Versailles (CGB '59); + V details, return to whole, and a closer left detail a faster moving section of fugal play, as if we had gone from the embattled virtu of Corneille to Molière's ingenious toyings in the high costumed mode: THE STAGE OF THE ROYAL THEATRE AT VERSAILLES Molière (alone): Come along, ladies and gentlemen. Why don't you come out? The devil take your delay… You'll drive me mad. Actor: It's you who'll drive us mad. We don't know our parts, so what are we to do? Molière (Towards Louis XIV): 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �31 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Well, the king won't be here for two hours, let's rehearse and see if we can hit on something. (end Lully) Or among the tapestries glorifying the reign, turned to this one where Le Brun leads the Grand Monarch to see the Gobelin works. So Dryden passes from The Conquest of Granada to Marriage à la Mode — Why should a foolish marriage vow, Which long ago was made, Oblige us to each other now, When passion is decayed? — without abandoning the stance of the beau monde. 57) 57a) Le Brun, 1663-75, Tapestry, Louis XIV at Dunkerque, Versailles (CGB '59) Same, detail, left (from CGB ‘59 Larger Declaration 39) Music: Lully, 1675, Thesée, Marche des Sacrificateurs, Col. M. 376 And even when the king, mounted on Bernini's horse of Constantine, appears at the siege of Dunkerque — as in that Dryden heroic Conquest: Heaven has not destined you so soon to rest: Heroes must live to succour the distrest... Into the press of clashing swords we'll go, And, where the darts fly thickest, seek the foe — the royal claim so curls with irony, we might wonder if the last courtier to the left were not the admired original of Lord Foppington. 58) Le Brun, 1665-80, Tapestry, detail, Crowning of Louis XIV, Les Gobelins, Paris (here video adds a closer detail of 57a, above) How can the honnête homme in all his formal nobility, but walk the tight-rope of Molière's Misanthrope between unmannered bluntness and sauve hypocrisy? — an argument Wycherley would stuff with English life and color: Lord Plausible: If I did say or do an ill thing to anybody, it should be sure to be behind their backs, out of pure good manners... 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �32 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Manly: And if I would say or do ill to any, it should be to their faces... Why should a man be troubled with the flattery of knaves if he be not a fool or cully; or with the fondness of fools, if he be not a knave or cheat? Va59) 59) F.L. Juvarra, 1729-33, Stupinigi, through the gate, Palace near Turin French, c. 1690, Painted Fan, The Ball (Le Loir, Histoire du Costume) We are particularizing an axiom of historical change, that the polarity which sets Baroque grandeur against Rococo play must be structurally bedded in both styles; as this 1690 ball in the baroque salon thins toward the Mozartean ironies which would bring down the curtain on the Ancien Régime. In music the rift is bridged by the foremost composer, François, the great Couperin, whose Third Lesson of Tenebrae, amplified in its first festal recording, For Va60) Mansart, 1699-1710, Royal Chapel, Apse, from courtyard, Versailles (a detail previewed from 2nd a60, below) 60) Mansart, Coypel, etc., 1699-1710, interior of Chapel at Versailles culminates the French Baroque — such a "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, convertere ad Dominum Deum Tuum," as Bossuet preached in this Versailles Chapel, to the admiration of the court he served next to God: Behold! Columns that lift to the sky the boast of our nothingness… Voila... des colonnes qui semblent vouloir porter jusqu'au ciel le magnifique témoignage de nôtre néant... 2nd 59) Again, Painted Fan; + V detail Yet Couperin launches the closing great Jerusalem fugue from a skipping confession of weakness, as if some salon lady, waving such a fan as this, had fluttered "the liquefaction of her clothes". Music: Couperin le Grand. 1714, Third Tenebrae Service, V-1235-6, from "de qua non poter surgere" to close 2nd a60) Again, Royal Chapel, exterior, Apse (video: closer detail only) V2nd 60) Again, Interior of Chapel at Versailles (detail of 60, above) 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �33 C.G. Bell 61) 62) 63) Symbolic History Versailles Chapel, lower nave and choir (CGB '59); with V details Same, upper row of columns and apse (CGB '59); first V detail Same, vault, with Coypel painting (CGB '59); video: details only, below and above, then a return to the apse painting, detail of 62, above (end Tenebrae) From Coypel's heroic religiosity, 64) Watteau, 1716, Les Deux Cousines, Marquis de Ganay, Paris; + V detail to the frail dream of Watteau, seems to crowd into the fewest years a centennial demarcation. Music: Couperin le Grand, c.1715-20, from Les Folies Françaises, 2nd through 5th (Landowska), Couperin Society But Couperin found no difficulty in going from the Lamentations of Jeremiah to the most precious miniatures on the Follies of France — like Watteau's little canvases, plaintive diversions of the Regency. 65) Watteau, 1720-21, Judgment of Paris, Louvre, Paris; + V detail (Folies 3) In Watteau a Rubens Judgment of Paris turns to a parody in the vein of Pope: "To arms, to arms!" the fierce virago cries, And swift as lightning to the combat flies... (So when bold Homer sets the gods in arms, Towered Olympus rings with loud alarms). 66) Watteau, 1718(?), The Music Party, Wallace Collection, London (Folies 4) V66a) Same, detail of musician Yet whatever the loss and longing of these deft ironies, in space and person they cling to the noble norm; instruct us that the death of the Grand Monarch and waste of heroic war ("It was a famous victory") drove the thinnest wedge into the confidence of the West. For 1st 67) Watteau, 1717, Gathering under an Arcade, right section, Dulwich College, London, which video replaces with three details (Folies 5) 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �34 C.G. Bell Symbolic History In The Rape of the Lock — Hither the heroes and the nymphs resort, To taste a while the pleasures of a court; In various talk th' instructive hours they pass'd, Who gave the ball, or paid the visit last; One speaks the glory of the British Queen, And one describes a charming Indian screen; A third interprets motions, looks and eyes; At every word a reputation dies — that derision celebrates Augustan values. (Cut Folies) 1st 68) Watteau, c. 1718(?), Gilles, Louvre, Paris In the "Essay on Man", our Pascalian paradox — The glory, jest, and riddle of the world — meets Leibnitzian surety: And spite of pride, in erring reason's spite, One truth is clear, whatever is, is right. 2nd 67) Again, Gathering under an Arcade, whole; + V details 2nd 67a) Same, detail of dancing to the left Watteau's wigs, robes, poses, this Baroque arch and piers, still voice what we would hear if we could freeze the full chords of Couperin's music — as indeed we almost do in his Passacaille "Vanity of Human Wishes". Music: Couperin, c. 1717, Passacaille (from 1st into 3rd Refrain), (Landowska) Couperin Society Album It is hard to decide whether Congreve's last refinement of manners in his 1700 Way of the World, has crossed the Watteau divide: (1st Couplet) Mrs. Millamant: I won't be called names after I'm married; positively I won't be called names. 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �35 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Mirabell: Names! Ay, as wife, spouse, my dear, joy, jewel, love, sweetheart, and the rest of that nauseous cant, in which men and their wives are so fulsomely familiar... let us be very strange and well-bred; let us be as strange as if we had been married a great while; and as well bred as if we were not married at all... Va2nd 68) Watteau, Gilles, with frame (CGB '80); + V detail 2nd 68a) Same, closer detail (2nd Couplet) But when the dowager Duchess of Marlborough, after Congreve's death in 1728, had a wax effigy of him made to sit by her at table, and the better to suggest the gouty genius, let the feet be regularly blistered and annointed by his doctor, that was comedy in the new mode of Watteau's Gilles, of Marivaux and Sterne, an overplaying of le sentiment du coeur. (fade Passacaille) a69) 69) 69a) Wrenn, 1664-69, Sheldonian, detail, Oxford (CGB '59) Sir Peter Lely, c. 1650-55, Henry Sydney, Penshurst, England Giacomo del Po, c. 1690, Expulsion, detail of The Fall, Metropolitan Museum, NYC (CGB '74) Music: Henry Purcell, c. 1685, Canzona, Golden Sonata, Purcell Society Album In England as in France, the 17th-century Baroque, by its brisk facility of command, enacts the soul of comedy. Thus Lely's Henry Sidney, or the Canzona of Purcell's Golden Sonata. Is the delight of precise imitation a comic delight? (fade Purcell) The canon, anyway, was the form taken by Purcell and the Restoration for the lusty catch: "Adam caught Eve by the furbelow/ And that's the oldest catch we know." a70) b70) 70) 70a) V70b) English late Baroque (Sir John Vanbrugh) 1705-22, Blenheim Palace, SW view, Oxfordshire; + V detail Same, detail of North Court (CGB '84) Same, North Court through iron gate (CGB '84) Same, a darker detail (CGB '84) Same, a variant detail (CGB '84) Music: 4/1994 Lully, 1668, Overture to George Dandin (Le Grand Divertissement Royal de Versailles); Musical Heritage Society 704 1700: The Comic Divide �36 C.G. Bell Symbolic History From Versailles, the Lully Overture — Grave and Allegro — spread over Europe, like all the Sun-King assertions of architecture, dress, reason, statecraft, war. So when Vanbrugh, playwright and architect, came to design for the Duke of Marlborough the most heroic mansion in England, how could his genius not yoke those perennial steeds of comedy, fat and lean — ostentation and ironic wit? (allegro) With what repartee the north gate, with its iron curls and gilded sharp flower-flames, pricks the swelling vaunts of the wide-winged court. Was not Vanbrugh, maker of Lord Foppington and Tunbelly Clumsy, to break off his unfinished Journey to London (and his life) with the lurid awakening of Sir Francis Headpeice: — ...And why will you be in a passion, Sir Francis? — Because I came here to breakfast with my Lady (Arabella)... expecting to find my family set round a civil table with her, upon some plumb-cake, hot rolls, and a cup of strong beer; instead of which, I find these good women staying their stomachs with a box and dice, and that man there, with the strange periwig, making a hearty meal upon my wife and daughter. Va71) 71) 71a) V71b) 71c) V71d) 71e) J. Thornhill, c. 1710, etc., upper section of 71, used here for two close video details J. Thornhill, c. 1710, Painted Hall Ceiling, Former Naval Hospital, Greenwich (slide show: whole; video: upper half only) I. Jones, (Wrenn and others), 1616 ff. and 1694 ff., The Queen's House, Naval Hospital, etc., from the Thames, Greenwich, London (CGB from Milton Vb42) Ch. Le Brun 2nd half of the 17th cent., Gobelins Tapestry, The Elements: Water, as restored by Colbert, Gobelins Mus., Paris (here video first shows the whole of Thornhill's Painted Ceiling Hawker, c. 1680-85, Charles II, National Portrait Gallery, London (video: upper half only) Kneller, c. 1706, John Churchill, lst Duke of Marlborough, Nat. Port. Gal., London Again, Thornhill's Ceiling, lower detail Music: Purcell, 1689, Overture, Dido and Aeneas, l'Oiseau-Lyre, 50216 When Thornhill in the Great Hall ceiling at Blenheim, or in this of the Greenwich Naval Hospital, exalts the conquering England of William and Mary, who can 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �37 C.G. Bell Symbolic History unscramble Homeric epic from Battle of the Frogs? Does it match the Grave of Purcell's Dido Overture, with the Dryden "Year of Wonders" where Pope began? The time shall come, when free as seas or wind Unbounded Thames shall flow for all mankind, Whole nations enter with each swelling tide, And seas but join the regions they divide. (Music: Allegro) Or is it the rush and edged wit of the succeeding allegro — the Dryden Swift belittles in the "Battle of the Books"? the helmet nine times too large for the head, which appeared situate far in the hinder parts... like a shrivelled beau, from within the penthouse of a modern periwig. With the takeoff on War, in A Tale of a Tub? the true foundation of grandeur and heroism... necessary to establish subordination... as also to purge bodies politic of gross humours... 72) W. Hogarth, 1743, Marriage a la Mode II, Breakfast, National Gallery, London; + V details In England as in France the fugue fiercens as peanut virtue rattles in the great shell: — Hogarth's "Morning After the Party" in the spendthrift mansion of Marriage a la Mode, Swift's Modest Proposal for maintaining the destitute of Ireland: (fade Dido) I have been assured by a very knowing American... that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked or boiled... I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children... This would... increase the care and tenderness of mothers toward their children... Men would become as fond of their wives during the time of their pregnancy as they now are of their mares in foal... nor offer to beat or kick them (as is too frequent a practice) for fear of a miscarriage... 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �38 C.G. Bell 73) V73a) V73b) V73c) 73d) V73e) Symbolic History French Engraving, 17th cent., "Monkey-Shines," Abbé de Marolles Collection Huet, 1760(?), Mural from Salon des Singes, detail, Chantilly, France (here video returns to a detail of 73, "Monkey-Shines") Callot, 1631, Siege of La Rochelle, detail, British Museum, London Callot 1631, Siege of the Isle of Ré, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien Callot, c. 1633, from the Miseries of War: Plundering a Large Farmhouse, left detail Same, right detail (here video returns to another detail of 73, "MonkeyShines") The ironic masque of manners had inevitably hit on the court-mockery of monkey-shines, as in this French engraving, good-humored as Molière. There is a card game of Monkey belles at Chantilly, and Chardin did several versions of the Apeantiquary. But as the rift widened between the façade of divine right and the stink of world wrong, Swift, in "hatred, disgust and contempt," turned the whole "execrable crew" into dung-flinging Yahoos: I gave [my Houyhnhnm master] a description of cannons, culverins, muskets... pistols... battles, sieges... plundering, stripping, ravishing, burning and destroying... He said whoever understood the nature of the Yahoos might easily believe it possible for so vile an animal to be capable of every action I had named, if their strength and cunning equaled their malice. But... it gave him a disturbance in his mind, to which he was wholly a stranger before. It is this disturbance which tells us that corrective comedy has swung to something lacerative, an abhorrence destructive of the good it reached for. Va74) Vb74) c74) Vd74) 74) 4/1994 Magnasco, c. 1720-30, Storm Scene with Fleeing Monks, lower detail, Brera, Milan (note: videos before ‘94/5, use for Vb74 &c74 a CGB foreground of Vd74) Magnasco, c. 1730(?), Monks' Library, J. Brass Collection, Venice Same, 1730-40, Interrogation, Kunstinstitut, Frankfort am Main Magnasco, c. 1735(?), Landscape with Figures, upper detail, National Gallery, Dublin (CGB '74) Magnasco, 1712(?), Punchinello Playing the Guitar, Gatti-Casazza Collection, Venice; + V detail (cf. V74a) 1700: The Comic Divide �39 C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Domenico Scarlatti, c. 1730(?), Sonata in F Minor, (Landowska) Society Album We minimized the rift opened in France by the Baroque debacle. In Swift it strikes deeper, undermining the exuberance which still exalts the style. And in the weirdly lighted satires of Magnasco, (North Italian, early 18th century) forms are wrenched in a violence as darkly radical as the savage indignation of Swift. We have related it before to the chromatic fury of Domenico Scarlatti. No doubt these are comic arts (with the possible exception of Bach's Passions, tragedy was the lack and failure of the age), but it is a comedy of Storm and Stress, seeded with the bitterness of what would later be called "La Comedie humaine". (end Scarlatti) Va75) Vb75) 75) V75a) 75b) 75c) Piranesi, 1743-45, Le Carceri X, 1st State, Nat. Gal., Washington, D.C. Same, XI, 2nd State (pub. 1761) Same, XIV, 2nd State, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. Same, detail Piranesi, 1743-61, Carceri X, 2nd State, detail of Chained Captives, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. (cf. Va75) Blake, c. 1795, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Frontispiece Tate Gallery, London; + V detail Music: Alessandro Scarlatti, c. 1710(?), lst movement, close, Concerto Grosso in F Minor, Telefunken 89-80059 And what Pascalian vertigo of the young Piranesi would seize exactly on the vaultings of spatial command to exhibit, in his mid-century Prisons, the rational order of the phenomenal gone from Cartesian glory to nightmare bondage? — a doom here sprung upon us by a contradiction: that the two great piers to the left are joined by an arch which must hold the plane of the picture, though we see it reaching back in space. And already in Alessandro Scarlatti (Domenico's father), the fugue, Baroque structure of reason affirmed, flexes with menace, (fade Alessandro Scarlatti) Music: 4/1994 William Friedemann Bach, c. 1750(?), from Sinfonia for 2 Flutes and Strings, Fugue, MHS 3474 1700: The Comic Divide �40 C.G. Bell Symbolic History to become, in the moodiest of Bach's sons, Wilhelm Friedemann, almost the battleground late Mozart and Beethoven would make of it. Between the first state of this engraving and the second, Blake was born, to cry the skull caves of space and time — Blake, too, trained on satire — 1784: Ha ha ha said Inflammable Gass, [Voltaire] was the glory of France — I have got a bottle of air that would spread a plague... 76) V76a) Fr. Boucher, 1752, Reclining Girl, Alte Pinakothek, München; + V detail Rubens, 1636-40, Diana and Nymphs Surprised by Satyrs, Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin; + V detail In that ferment, for salon France to go on refining more sensuous provacations in the courtly mode, comedy sliding over into Casanovan Memoirs — this Luise Murphy on her belly, so disposed as to suggest the addition of a succubent king, a picture in which Boucher pimped for Louis XV, who took the bait, and the mistress — how that confrontation delayed fosters the explosion of '89, the terror of '93. (fade W.F. Bach) Sex has always seemed our funniest attribute. The Fontaine-Congreve fable of an impossible task for the devil, to straighten a ringlet curl, could not be so diverting if the hair in question were not "A tendril of the Ciprian vine/ Shade of the labyrinth of love." But sexuality itself does not make high comedy; it must be caught up in a godhead mocked and believed. 77) V77a) Double: [A] Gainsborough, c. 1760(?), Lady Innes, Frick Collection, NYC; and [B] Greuze, 1760(?), Broken Pitcher, Louvre, Paris (video uses only singles and details: see video file, A and B of V77) Blake, 1794 (copy of 1826), Songs of Experience, 39, “The Sick Rose,” Library of Congress In Gainsborough's England middle-class humanity assumes the formal robes. From Addison's Sir Roger to Fielding's loveable Fanny and Joseph, Sophie and Tom Jones, with Parson Adams and the rest (on the angel side of the Christian smile), a new nature softens toward the geniality of Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer. But in such complicity with the mocked Lady Boobies, Tow-wowses, cheats and hypocrits (heirs to 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �41 C.G. Bell Symbolic History the devil-strain of grinning possibility) that the Enlightened rose-garden knocks under, as in the Greuze Broken Pitcher, to the spouting Faustian lion. (Blake) O Rose thou art sick. The invisible worm That flies in the night In the howling storm: Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy… 78) Pietro Longhi, 1751, The Rhinoceros, Ca' Rezzonico, Venice; first, three video details In Venice from mid-century, the thinning masquerade of high style barely hints at the volcanic buildup of what Blake would have called "the Antediluvians who are our Energies." Though surely that master of symbol would have recognized Longhi's Rhinoceros, under the dividing barrier of consciousness, as the great suppressed Behemoth of Job, gawked at by the puppets of empty dress, while the managing barker brandishes the cut-off phallic horn, long famous as a drug of aphrodisiac power. Thus, over a Europe as international as ever before or after, the comedy of manners — Goldoni in this Venice, Beaumarchais in France, Lessing's Minna in Germany, in England Sheridan's brittle take-offs on the genteel — 79) 79a) 79b) Goya, 1791-92, La Boda, detail, Prado, Madrid (for which video substitutes Va79, La Boda, whole) Goya, c. 1798-1805, The Naked Maja and The Clothed Maja, Prado, Madrid (by video numbering b, c, and d79: first single details, then double. Here video inserts 79, Goya, La Boda, detail, as V79) Goya, 1777, Dance on the Banks of the River Manzanares, Prado, Madrid (by video numbering 79a) or in the art of Spain this Goya cartoon of mismarriage — everywhere that comedy yields, like the Bastile, to the revolution of nature and heart. In Blake's reversal of Heaven and Hell, it is from the burning infinite of creative desire that Reason's establishment has distrained its goods. Its "Messiah fell & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss." A rape the original sadist, Marquis de Sade, deviantly applied in his erotica, 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �42 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Justine 1791, Julliette 1792 — de Sade, called ''the freest spirit...in the most imprisoned body." While Mozart closes Don Giovanni, after the hero's demise, with a chorus of the "good little people" singing the customary sweet song. Music: Mozart, 1787, Don Giovanni, from the closing chorus, Angel 3605 (or London A4406) But how thin and posed the morality of reason has become. (fade Mozart) If, in this comedy of outbreak, exuberance and mockery have fused as in the Renaissance, it is under a reversal of sign. Molière's corrected good has dwindled to the trivial mask; Va80) b80) 80) 80a) Goya, 1788, St Francis of Borgia at the Deathbed of an Impenitent, version in the Cathedral of Valencia, whole Goya, 1788, same subject, in the fiercer oil sketch, Marquesa de Santa Cruz (slide show: whole; video: detail only) Goya, 1815-24, Disparate Desenfrenado, engraving (Proverbs 10), Prado, Madrid; + V details Picasso, 1934, The Minotaur, drawing, S.W. Labrot, Jr., Hobe Sound, Florida Music: Mozart, 1787, Don Giovanni, Close of the Hell-descent, Angel 3605 (or London A4406) while the excess once castigated, now in flaming reach and fall, flaunts a passionate banner. Even in Goya's Proverb of "Unbridled Folly," where lust reverts to the oldest centaur radical of the horse — as Lear said: "The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to it with a more riotous appetite" — the old irony swirls in the modern ambivalence. Thus in Don Giovanni, before the manikins usurp the stage, Dionysian eruption in the formal house of cards has affirmed the cry of Blake: Energy is the only life and is from the Body, and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of energy... What the outcome is to be, Faust and Nietzsche have left our time to discover. (end of Damnation) 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 43 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1700 : The Comic Divide, Symbolic History, Part 23 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 23 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_23_1700--The_Comic_Divide Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/e48a607917b6a927ba03d295125fb92f.pdf e911cc9801961398698e6091ce44307b PDF Text Text sc/m-bolic Througfi Sigfit and Sound 33. 1890: fluant-Garde Break CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 January 1994 Last Revised June 1996 La>*^ �Caiarles Greenteaf Ben, 1260 Canyon Boad, Sanfa Fe,J«vi87501 synfiOLxc KisTOJxy Through Sight and Sound 33. Med 189B - fluant-Garde Break '■='^'9®"“'’. Prelude (from Moser, CGB Greg. vnlo-f*"” “ >>efore the "mad flight" (Dante's "(olle with a P TT "Fonr q“":“ ® *^“'®kura Japan. Eliot's lines from the Only by the form, the pattern, Can words or music reach The stillness, as a Chinese jar still Moves, perpetually in its stillness. bevnnJ** Romantic, incarnate stretch beyond possibiltty had flawed the West with Symbolist rupture that sky-leap and crazing of the temporal fabric. V2a) ------------\ (Arrau) Against that ancient East, Delacroix's mid-19th century Jacob wresting with the angel, like stormy Liszt, fables the Faust champion, out of Judgment Hebrew by Promethean Greece. Yeats, in A Vision: June 1996 1890 Avant-Garde Break 1 �SSymboIic Histoiy C.G. BeU A civilization is a struggle to keep self-control, and in this it is like some great tragic person... (fade Liszt) The loss of control over thought comes towards the end: first a sinking in upon the moral being, a3) Qauguin, 1888, ^iHsion after tfie Sermon, (ktaiC, Scot. !J^t. QaC., T,dhifur0fi 3 ) Same, wfioCe then the last surrender, the irrational cry, revelation — the scream of Juno's peacock... Music: Satie 1890, First Gnossienne, close, Philips PHS 900-179 In Gauguin's 1888 Jacob and the Angel, Symbolist vision breaks so far with nature ("Art is an abstraction," Gauguin wrote) that the padre and his witnessing congregation could only laugh at the artist's wish to hang that picture in the church. And who took Satie's piano pieces of the strange names, the 1890 Gnossiennes, as musical compositions at all? (fade Satie) SFor Znd 2) (DeCacrovo 1852, OKe 5ea at (Dieppe, from CoUection ^eurdeCey, (Baris It is the abandon of Rimbaud's "Bateau Ivre," "Drunken Boat" of 1871,* once guided (like this Delacroix) by the ropes of its haulers, traficking in Flemish wheat or English cottons, under the stupid eye of lighthouses, "I'oeil niais des falots". for 2nd 3) Qaupuin, 1889, SeCf-Portrait, (J^tionaC QatUry, ^asfiwyton, (D.C. 2nd 3a) gtmyuin, 1892, fatata U (MiU, (HationaC galCery, Wasfiinyton (D.C. Gauguin has cut loose from that life-class, job and family, celebrates Rimbaud's take-over: (Wallace Fowlie) Comme je descendais des Fleuves impassibles... As I was going down impassive Rivers, I felt no longer guided by the haulers; Yelping redskins had taken them for targets. Having nailed them naked to colored stakes June1996 1890 — Avant-Garde Break 2 �C.G. BeU Sjymbc^ EBstoiy aux poteaux de couleurs. What if the "waves... eternal rollers of victims," which have washed him clean of wine stains and vomit, have also "scattered rudder and grappling hook"? — he is bathed "dans la Poeme/ De la Mer." 4) Ignaz ^untfier(F), c. 176S(?), fKeratd Singdj entrance, (Diessen am Simmersee (CQ‘B ’59); first, "U detaU Music: J.S. Bach(?), c. 1730, from Cantata No.53, "Schlage Doch," Westminster SL 5197 If the angels of "the Babylonian starlight" brought in on the Classical world "a fabulous formless darkness," their Western suc­ cessors of Rococo ceremony, here Bach and Gunther, have filled even the last call with sensuous promise: "Schlage doch Gewiinschte Stunde." Where is Yeats’ fierce incursion of the absolute, a glittering sword out of the East"; (fade "Schlage doch") aS) !l(pman 'Byzantine, 9tfi cent., SbigeCmosaic, S. ^assede, 9(pme 6S) 9doreau, 1897, 'Dead Lyres, iJdoreau Mus., Taris 5) DouBCe: [J4.J 9tfi cent., S^ngeC mosaic (aS); and [‘B] Dead Lyres (65) where Rilke’s "Every angel is terrible" — "Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich"? The 9th-century mosaic vault of Sf:~Praxecrs“in Rome'is'wfdeeyed with the Dark-Age revelation which dissolved earth’s assur­ ance. But that messenger was contained in creed. How frenzied now the Zarathustra cry to the rending infinite — Moreau’s last sketches (1897) for the unpainted "Dead Lyres": the great lyre of the soul... has just silenced... all... those voices that glorified nature; this superb lyre is raised, held by a dark, terrible angel armed with the cross of blood... So Rilke, 1912, as TEufope armed for war, would pace the bastions of Duino over a storm sea, and catcli, as if roared by wind: Juztel996 1890 — Avant-Garde Break 3 �C.G.BeU ^ymboluc BSstofy Wer, wenn ich schriee, horte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen? Who, if I cried, would hear me then among the angel orders? 6) 6 a) MuruA, 1893, iJie Cry, 9^twnaC QaUery, OsCo; + ^ cCose detaiC Vduncii, 1899-1900, dlanu ofLife, OdgHomU QaUery, OsCo *1^66) Same, Cry, intermediate detaiC Music: Mahler, 1909, 9th Symphony, 1st movement, dissonant passage, (Horenstein) Vox Box 116 Was Munch's 1893 "Cry" (after Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Romantic) a yet wilder charging of the personal and temporal, or its dissolving return to the transpersonal abstract? The poles define the art. Since the insufferable loading of romantic realism, as in earlier Munch, climaxes here in a stylization which becomes its mask. So Strindberg abstracted his ghastly marriages into more and more symbolic dramas. And does not the suspension of tonality in dis­ sonance — what Mahler (1860-1911) advanced in his symphonies like a throttle, to the culmination of this, the Ninth — deflect Liszt's blatant major to an estrangement of the cry it heightens? (fade Mahler on drum-roll) S^or 2nd S) 9doreau, 1876, SaCome (Dancing Before (Herod, (Sdoreau 9dus., (Paris Naturalist Manet deplored the influence of Symbolist Moreau: Moreau has chosen the wrong path... He leads us to the incomprehensible. While we want everything to be understandable. That realist-romantic rift had stamped the century. But the poles were always inbreeding: Rouault and Matisse would study with Moreau. 9^or 2nd 6) 9dundi, 1893, (PuBerty, (MuncB 9dus., OsCo (video uses MuncB, 1894, J4ju>(Uty, Munch Mus., OsCo, V2nd 6) June1996 1890 — Avant-Grarde Break 4 �C.G.BeU Symbolic History By report Expressionist Munch visited there. "The camera," he said, "cannot compete with painting so long as it is impossible to use it in heaven and hell." 1st 7) Cezanne, 1860, Louis-^uguste Cezanne (tfie painter's fatfier), ih(p.tionaC Qa(£ery, London Cezanne, whose revolution peaked as Munch's began, must have thought himself on the other side — from the violent Daumier realism of his youth (boyhood friend of Naturalist Zola); 1st 8) Cezanne, 1873-7S, Tanorama of lAitvers, Inst., Cfiicago (C^CB '74)) through his Pissarro awakening to landscape apprehended in light and air (this 1873 Panorama of Auvers): 9) Cezanne, 1890-92, Lhe Card iPCayers, CourtauCd gallery, London to the objective formalization of the actual, as in these Card Players of 1890 to '92 — he practiced Manet's science of the physical. 2nd 8) Cezanne, ^Panorama cfJ4upers, detail (CQ^ '74) Yet Cezanne throughout was overriding the real: sionism is already an abstract of brush work planes; his Impres­ 2nd 7) Cezanne, LLe (Painter's Ifatfier, detail-foideo-f^0tn4st-7)-------------------------his radical first caricatures leap from the prose journalism of Zola toward the visionary Baudelaire he memorized: "The Voyage", 0 Mort, vieux capitaine, il est temps!, levons I'ancre! the worm-kissed transcendence of "A Carrion"; the repeated specter of "The Seven Old Men" in their "ant-swarming city." IFor 3rd 8) Cezanne, 1894-98, IForest of Ifontau^Ceau, (Rpcds, 9det., (N)yc 3rd 8a) Cezanne, 1883-87, VdteSte. Victoire, (Pfiidips CoCCection, Wasft., (D.C. June 1996 1890 Avant-Garde Break 5 �C.G. BeU j^ymboHcHistQE^ From Baudelaire's "Correspondences" — (CGB) Nature is a temple where from living pillars Will come from time to time a confused phrase; One passes there through a forest of symbols, As under the scrutiny of familiar eyes... Vast as the night, or as the light of day, ' Perfumes, sounds and colors correspond... Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clart6, Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se repondent. __ Cezanne’s analysis points to Rimbaud: A, black, E, white, I, red, U, green, 0, blue: vowels, I will tell one day the latence of your birth. (CGB) 2n(£ 9) Cezanne, OTte Car(C TCayers, Stephen Claris O^C; + VcCetaiCs 2nd: 9a) Cezanne, 1900, La n/kiOe au ChapeCet, QaC., ^ndon; + ^detaiC These Card Players, Munch’s Cry — from the same years — grip though differently, Rimbaud’s Season in HpIII made every hope vanish from my mind. With the lunge of the beast I leaped on every joy to strangle it... Misfortune was my god... Spring brought me the idiot’s terrifying laughter... (CGB) Music: Bruckner, 1891^, 9th Symphony (original.version), forte before close (timpani), Deutsche Gram. Gesellschaft 29333 And in the 9th (unfinished) symphony by Mahler’s first master Bruckner, also from 1891 to ’94, the rip-saw of dissonance cleaves a Choral and fugal buildup of studied polyphonic form. (music pause) 10) Cezanne, 1896, The Lahe of Plnnecy, Summer, CourtauCd Inst., London: -first video detail ■' 10 a) Same, a central detail (from which video tahfs only two closer details) Music: June 1996 Same Bruckner, close cont., tranquil 1890 — Avant^arde Break 6 �^yxnbolic Ifistory C.G.BeU But the dissonance yields to a close as calm, as classically harmonious, as Cezanne's 1896 Lake of Annecy. ("I will arise and go now, and go to Annecy"...) Yet there is a puzzle in Cezanne's classicism, his admiration for Poussin and belief that he himself was reconstituting that noble order of planes. Since the cubist colors here emerging from tree and mountain, water and sky, effect a prismatic diffraction of Poussin’s Cartesian space, as new to the world as the wave equations of Max­ well. Did Bruckner so reconstitute the polyphony of Renaissance and Baroque — Wagnerian chromatics exploding Gabrielli? (fade Bruckner) 11) (BuzHs (U Chavanms, 1889-93, tti (study), 9dus., CUvedand; ivith-video detaiCs Music: Franck,1884, Fugue from Prelude, Chorale, etc, opening V-LM 1822 The 19th-century cult of Bach, as in Franck's Prelude, Chorale and (here) Fugue, is cognate with Cezanne's espousal of Poussin, as with Puvis de Chavannes, who in this sketch for a fresco of Summer also revived the dream of classical order — like the Parnassians in poetry, Heredias: Maternal earth, who to the gods would seem Yet gracious, with each spring, as for a tomb. Brings to the broken urn acanthus bloom... (CGB) Fait... Au chapiteau brise verdir une autre acanthe... But all that is somehow backward looking, aU) Cezanne, c. 1890-94, (Batfiers, Louvre, (Baris; + ^ detaiC 12) Same, 1900-0S, CZHe (Bathers, S4rt Institute, Chicago; + ^detail against Cezanne's always vibrant Bathers, or the pointillism of Seurat __ both esteemers of Puvis — however mired (with Franck s chromatics) in the. reeds of the 'SO's. Cade Franck) June 1906 1890 — Avant-Garde Break 7 �C.G. BeU Symbolic Histbay "Take eloquence, said Verlaine, "and wring its neck." Perhaps only Reger, especially in the Bach-based cello suites, projects formal Baroque beyond Wagner, toward the modern stripping — Music: Reger, c. 1910(?), from Fugue of Cello Suite 1 (Feuermann) Col. ML 4678 a leap as far as Mallarme made from the Parnassians: The Will The The (CGB) virginal, vigorous and beautiful today. it tear for us with a blow of its drunken wing hard, forgotten lake which haunts under frost transparent glacier of flights that have not flown! Le transparent glacier des vols qui n'ont pas fui! (fade Reger) Only by vivifying abstraction could the arts of that late century repossess 13) C.(D. ^riedTicIt, 1821, Mi(C(Cay, O^dersac/isiscfies Landestmiseum, iHunover; + (CetaiC the natural health of Goethe a hundred years before, which Friedrich and Beethoven would carry over into the Transcendental yearning of 1820. Music: Beethoven, 1825-7, A Minor Quartet, from Trio of 2nd Movement, Col. M5S 677 ____________. Goethe: "Happy only is the soul that loves" — "Gliicklich allein/ ist die Seele, die liebt." All those now used up "Laughing suns and pastures bright,/ And Maytime harvests of delight" — Mailied; Wie Mir Wie Wie herrlich leuchtet die Natur! gl^zt die Sonne! lacht die Flur! 14) HAiTtwr, c. 1826, iJ\{ortCal^ ^Terrace, 9^t. QaC., Wasfi., CD.C (CQCB '60) 14 a) Same, detaiC (C(j‘B '60), wfUch video may tal^from 14 (fade Beethoven Trio) June 1996 1890 — Avant-Garde Break 8 �C.G. BeU Symbolic IBstoiy In 1820-England that first immediacy ("0 blithe New-comer") yields to a moodier colouring, as of autumnal Keats: Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness... Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.’ While in Turner’s Mortlake Terrace, where the sun spills over, dis­ solving the wall, earth's diffraction into light and air has begun. ’ Van go£fi, 1887, WfUaifieU witd !jrCyin£ Lark, Van GoaH Museum, JimstercCam ISa) Same, detail (video tfien returns to the rvhoCe) 15; By the Avant-garde break, what vertigo of electric technique lifts Expressionist joy from its Gates of Hell base — the flight of Van Gogh's lark hair-triggered to an anguished opposite. So Rimbaud: I know skies split with lightning, waterspouts. The surf and currents; I have known the night. And dawn exalted like a flock of doves... I would have shown children those sunfish Of blue waves, the fish of gold, the singing fish. (CGB) ...ces dorades Du flot bleu, ces poissons d'or, ces poissons chantants. Music: Bartok, 1934, close of the 5th Quartet, Concert-Disc CS-501 t Bartok, fifty years later, closes his Fifth Quartet with such a "Drunken Boat" injection of the Beethoven trio. 16) Van Qosh, 1890, Crows over a ComfieCd, Van Qogh Mus., Slmstadam 16 a) Same, Crows, detail (to which video adds another, from 16) Rimbaud through the 70s, Van Gogh through the ’SOs. most in­ tense spirits of the time, both cracked up. Van Gogh’s rapture of wings over wheat closed in by 1890 to the last road, disappearing June 1996 1890 — Avant-Garde Break 9 �C.G.Ben l^ymbolic BSstory under a fatal flight of crows. Rimbaud's sabotage was of his poetry — by that tropical buming-out he had predicted in A Season in HellMy day is done. I am leaving Europe. Sea air will burn my lungs. Lost climates will tan me... I will have gold. I will be lazy and brutal... But now I am accursed... (cf. Delmore Schwartz and Wallace Fowlie) The poet-angel, the Gdnie, "0 fertility of the mind and vastness of the universe" (Illuminations^ goes under: "Je voudrais me taire." 17) ^riedricd, c. 1820, ^Evening, iSQedersacfisiscties Landesmuseum, ^Hanover; first, video detaU Music: Beethoven, 1825-7, A-Minor Quartet, Heilige Dankgesang, opening. Col. MSS 677 Or there is night, the quiet Friedrich and Beethoven distilled again from Goethe: Over all hills Is peace Through all trees You can trace Hardly a breath; The birds are asleep in the wood; Wait; soon, like these. You too will rest. (CGB) 18) y^riedricd, 1835, ^RiesengeSirge, l^landerer at Evening, 5dg.tional QaCCery, West EerCin; first, video detail liber alien Gipfeln 1st Ruh, In alien Wipfeln Spurest du Kaum einen Hauch; Die Vogelein schweigen im Walde. Warte nur, balde Ruhest du auch. (fade Beethoven) June1996 1890 — AvanM^arde Break 10 �Symbolic History C.G.BeU 19) ^an Qo^fi, 1890, witfi Cypresses, a Sit cropped., 9Qrd(hr-9du^ Museum, OUerCo 19 a) Same, an upper detaiC 19 S) Van QoyS, 1889, Starry 9^St, detaiC, Museum of Modem Pirt, O^C (ivSUe video ta(^ wSoCe and two details from VlSS) By 1890 even in England the "Winter Heavens" of Meredith hint at the form-twisting of Van Gogh: Lengths down our road each fir-tree seems a hive. In swarms outrushing from the golden comb... While Hopkin's evening — ...frightful a nightfall folded rueful a day... The times are nightfall and the light grows less; The times are winter and a world undone — that "Evening strains to be time's vast womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night." Though the Victorian island had hardly passed, with the Symbolist Continent, through the collapsing antinomies, the yea-and-nay fusion of Eternal recurrence: (Nietzsche) This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end... a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness... this Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally—self-xiestroying7.T — my "beyond good and evil"... This world is the will to power — and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power — and nothing besides! Yet Hopkins could almost have spoken for Van Gogh: ...This to hoard unheard. Heard unheeded, leaves me a lonely began. 1st 20) ConstaSCe, c. 1823(.F), Hsee Tsunf^s, 9{amstead ydeatfi, Victoria and MSert Museum, London (sCide show: wfioCe picture; video: cropped) June 1996 1890 — AvantGardeBreak 11 �Symbolic His&ny C.G. BeU Of course the break had shown at the peak of Transcendental and Romantic inebriation, most strikingly at the art surface with Turner, or this Constable; 21) J^riedricd, 1830~3S, ^ad to tfie Cemetery, ^Easter, (Baron *Tfiyssen (Bomemysza, London at the brooding core with Friedrich (this last Easter Road to the Cemetery). In poetry it was Holderlin above all, in whom nostalgia for the infinite began to crack the canons of utterance, compressing the two-fold time-symbol of the God's indwelling and soul's deserted winter into that almost fragment 2nd 20) ^ain, ConstaSCe, Tree 'Trun^ (sCide sfiow: detaiC; video: first, cCoser detaiC) called "The Half of Life" — "Halfte des Lebens": Wreathed with yellow pears And with wild roses, hangs The land in the lake, 0 blessed swans. And drunk with kisses You dip your heads In the holy sobering water. (CGB) Mit gelben Birnen hanget Und voll mit wilden Rosen Das Land in den See, Ihr holden Schwane, Und trunken von Kussen Tunkt ihr das Haupt Ins heilignuchterne Wasser. 2nd 21) l^ain, y^rUdricd, (I(pad to the Cemetery, detail 2nd 21a) y^riedrkh, 183S, Wood and Stvamp at Sunrise, Qoethe Vdus., S^ranhfurt Where alas shall I catch At blooms in winter, where At the light of sun And earthy shadows? June 1906 1890 — Avant-Garde Break 12 �C.G.BeU Symbolic History Speechless and cold Stand the walls; in wind The vanes clatter. (CGB) Weh mir, wo nehm' ich, wenn Es Winter ist, die Blumen, und wo Den Sonnenschein Und Schatten der Erde? Die Mauern stehn Sprachlos und kalt, im Winde Klirren die Fahnen. 22) V22a) 226) V22c) lumer, 1832, CfiUde 9{aroC(Cs Ti^rimage: Italy, ^aUery, London burner, 1823, “Bay ofBaiae, ^ate Qtdiery, London HAimer, 1833, QrandCanal, Venice, Ulyde.Codection, Qlen J^cdls, burner, c. 1829, J^lorence, British 9duseum, London Music: Mendelssohn, 1833, Italian Symphony, 2nd mvt, opening, RCA-VLSC-2221 A testimony to the rifted love of Romantic, that rapt Holderlin's god-claim abuts on the desired Italy of Childe Harold and Turner, of Mendelssohn's Symphony, or Shelley's "wild West Wind" — And saw in sleep old palaces and towers Quivering within the wave’s intenser day. All overgrown with azure moss and flowers So sweet the sense faints picturing them — the whole post-card dream on which generations were reared. (fade Mendelssohn) 23) burner, 1835-40, WatercoCoT, Boats at Sea, British Museum, London Yet in some watercolor sketches, unlike the canvases he dressed for show. Turner could cleave through all that, as in the performing art of music no composer perhaps did or could; so these boats at sea anticipate the negative capability of the minimal — Rimbaud: June 1996 1890 — Avant-Garde Break 13 �C.G.BeU Symbolic Histcny I wrote silences; I wrote nights. pressible, fixed vertigoes... I recorded the inex­ Elle est retrouvee! Quoi? I'etemite. C'est la mer melee Au soleil. iMxmetj 1872, Sunrise, 94ms. 94armottan, iParis (since stoCen) 24 a) Same, (ktaiC (video uses *1)24 and returns to tde zufioCe) 246) Monet, 1875, *Woman witd a ^ParasoC, Sdrtist's Wife and Son, 9(fltionaC gaPCery, Wasfiington, *D.C. (video: detail only) 24) It is found again! What? Eternity. It is the sea Mixed with the sun. (cf. Fowlie) Was Monet's Sunrise, from the same year as that Rimbaud, on the same track? Impressionist eternity pursued through a shimmer of light and air? — Emily Dickinson's I'll tell you how the sun rose, — A ribbon at a time... Or later, Wallace Stevens: The body dies; the body's beauty lives. So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing... V. No objects, but modes; relations, but of no substance; the wave motion of light, and no ether to be waved. Music; Saint-Saens, 1873, Cello Concerto, 2nd movement, cadenza, etc. Col. M 30113 In that France of the '70's, after the Franco-Prussian War, where first-impressionist lightening joined Symbolist estrangement, and Saint-Saens and his pupil Faure (played by Leonard Rose on one record) formed the Society for French Music, June 1996 1890.-—. Avant-GardeSreak 14 �C.G.BeU ^ymbofic History aZS) WfiistCer/c. 1867-68, ^ J^rtist in 6is Studio, SUrt Inst., CRicago; + Vdetail) 25) H/RistCer, 1875, O^ctume in ‘BCacR^and QoCd: ^ ^alCing 5(pcR^t, Institute of SLrts, (Detroit 25a) Same, (h^ctume, detail and began the etherialization of Wagnerian chromatics, distilling out its heavy Germanic tug toward resolution (fade Salnt-Saens) (as if the modal and Eastern already beckoned beyond tonality: Faur6) __ Music: Faure, 1883, Elegie, cello and orchestra, Op.24, close (from flute) Col. M 30113 in that Paris, an American, Whistler, as much as any, leavened Western realism with the Japanese print — this "Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket" — to provoke in England Ruskin's slander, with the Pyrrhic victory of Whistler’s suit: "Can you explain to the jury, Mr. Whistler, what constitutes a work of art?" The monocle scans them. "That is manifestly impossible." Was the root shift of the modern away from the spatiality of cause from Spinoza’s "God as an extended thing"? (close Faur6) 26) goCden (PsaCter (MS, c. 880, David xvitfi (Musicians and Dancers, St Gad+ *1^ detail ‘ ^ " In the representation of motion, this 9th-century David with Musicians and Dancers claims as bodiless a symbol-world as Carolingian astronomy, where Alcuin, to clear up for Charlemagne an assumed disappearance of Mars (they had lost sight of it for several years), contrived a muddle of solar glow, latitude and longitude, all aimed at the caprice and irregularity of the merely physical. 2 7) DoCCavuoUo, 1470, (Battle of (My.de Warriors, (Petit (PaCais, (Paris 2 7a) Same, detail; + two closer video details and a return to the xvfioCe Music: June 1996 M. Pesenti, c. 1480(?), Dal letto me levava (de Van) AS-77 1890 — Avant-Garde Break 15 �C.6. BeU Slymbolic H]st(»y With Pollaiuolo, 1470, motion and force take up the physical, as in the chordal Frottole, or the pulleys and levers by which Leonardo embodies the animate: Force with material movement and weight with per­ cussion are the four accidental powers in which all the works of mortals have their being and their end... where there are neither sinews nor bones there cannot be any force exerted in any movement made by imag­ inary spirits. (end PesentI) Yet that lean anatomy 28) HiiiBens and Studio, c. 1620, (Drun^n SiCenus and Crexv, 9dg-tionaC QaCCery, London; + VdttaiC Music: Scheldt, 1621, Canzone Gallicam, brass, opening, Candide 31004 was a century and a half from the billowing flesh and voluminous riot of the circle of Rubens, the ground-bass order of baroque (Scheldt), Galileo's demonstrations of the mechanics of mass: Since I assume matter to be unchangeable and always the same, we are no less able to treat it rigorously than if it belonged to mathematics. (fade Scheldt) 29) (BCaf^, 1804-18, SlCBion turns from fiis daugflters, ^Binder Jerusalem, p. 47 Blake assaults that formulation no less in thought than'* in the representation of body and motion. The Atoms of Democritus And Newton's Particles of Light Are sands upon the Red sea shore Where Israel's tents do shine so bright. 30) ^Bicasso, 1908, Dryad, Jlermitaye, Leningrad; xoitfi video details June 1996 1890 — Avant-Garde Break 16 �C.G. BeU History 30a) OCripCe: details from [Ji] Spanis/i 9dSj Cate lOtd cent., TscoriaC (Beatus, f18, T,ve; [(BJ fBjiBens, 1622, {Marie de {Medici at {MarseiCCes, douvre; [C] {Picasso, 1907, {DemoiseCCes dSlvi£non, {Museum of {Modem Art, {J^C If Cubism reverts to a dynamic of the abstract, it is not by Blake’s vision, but by a method like that of the sciences through the Cubist early century: Planck, 1900; Einstein’s 1905 paper merging the discrete physics of atoms and the continuous physics of waves, leading through the quantum ambivalence and indeterminacy of Bohr and Heisenberg, to Schrodinger's wave mechanics, its mathe­ matics a crushing, by reciprocal fiat, of the "least-action" velocities of mass-point and propagated wave. No one doubts in physics that something was revealed. And if not in the art, why should it have multiplied its value a thousand fold? That sequence, from abstraction, to mass in motion, and back to the formal and abstract, 31) graeco-iKpman ({Pompeii), 1st cent. A.'D., fresco, (fmit and game, {Mus. 3^., {^CfipCes reappears in the still life; though this Pompeian richness of fruit and game foreruns the phenomenal certainty of the West — heir to what Heidegger would call the Greek "tuning of wonder," its instinctive space to go down in the spiritual undertow of the Dark Ages. 32) ZurBaran, 1633, App[es(?) on a {Pewter {PCate, {Mus. Cat., (BarceCona; + detaiC (where sCide show has a32: ZurBaran, 1633, tripCe stUCUfe, Simon {J^rton, Los PlttgeCes, foCCowed By 32) Music: German, c. 1670, Viola d'Amore Sonata, from 2nd Grave AS 19-B When the still life resurfaces, through the vibrance of Renais­ sance to the weight of Baroque (this Zurbaran, with a tensile ground bass sonata), one feels the conscious science, not only of those fruits, but of the projective space in which they hold substantial being — summit for all time of that Galilean matter: "unchangeable and always the same." June 1996 1890 — Avant-Garde Break 17 �C.G.^U (Symbolic Bistory 3*3) Cfiardin, 1764-65, TCums, (Private CoCCection, (Baris; first, xndeo detaU 33 a) Same, detail (wfiUe video dratvs a closer detailfrom 33) Music: J.S. Bach, Chromatic Fantasy, opening, Edwin Fischer, Piano, V8680/1 One sentation Zurburan's surface of might say Chardin holds to the grandeur of the old repre­ as much as anyone after the Baroque debacle; but geometry of lighted recess wavers toward a brushwork color play. So in Bach's Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, tonal heroics is suspended in, accidental transtonality. (fade Fantasy, begin Fugue) 34) Liotard, 1782, (Pears, figs, pCums, Mus. dS4.rt et ddlistoire, Qeneva 34 a) Same, detail Liotard's last still life, 1782, in its spatial detachment, might almost be taken for a century later. While Bach’s Chromatic Fugue, even more than the Prelude, has that clean hypostasis of formal relations, which has launched it again and again into modernity (fade from Fugue beginning to close) 35) Cezanne, c. 1900(7), Still Life witfi Melon, watercoCor, (Private Collection; first, a vuko detail 35a) Cezanne, 1882-85, La Mer a L'^Estague, CoC. Pederin, Paris as when Fischer, thirty years into the century which this Cezanne began, reshaped it on the piano, for our between-war world. (close Bach) But to see Western history as a dimensional conquest returning to the abstract is to obscure what dimensionality contained — 36) Ingres, c. 1810, Portrait of tfU Sculptor Paul Lemoyne, (S(g,Cson QaCCery, d^nsas City, Missouri 36a) Ingres, 1810, OUe SLrcHitect Jean-Paptiste (DesdeBan, detail, Mus. of Dec. SLrts, Pesan^n 36B) J^ain, 36, Portrait ofLemoyne, detail June 1906 1890'— Avant-Garde Break 18 �C.G. BeU l^ymboKc IBstory the maturation, outbreak and crisis of conscious person: stamped on the classic form, of this portrait. Herder: what Ingres All beings have their centre In themselves, and each stands in proportioned relation to the rest; all depend on the equilibrium of opposed forces, held together by organizing power... i Novalis: "Nature is visible spirit; spirit invisible nature." feel yourself sprung from the highest God!" Robespierre: Goethe: "0 Kings, aristocrats, tyrants of every description, are slaves in revolt* against the sovereign of the earth, ■ which is the human race, and against the legislator of the universe, which is Nature. V * Yet the wine of the god-self was always changing to the other draught, Hdlderlin, Pindaric rhapsodist, at length desired: But let one reach me Brimmed with dark light The foaming beaker full. That I may rest; Since sweet Under shades would fall that sleep. (CGB) Es reiche aber, Des dunkeln Lichtes voll, Mir einer den duftenden Becher, Damit ich ruhen moge; denn siiss War unter Schatten der Schlummer. 3 7) ^ouBCe: [A] T^ypt CDynasty c. 2600 (B.C, (Bust ofTnnce S^l^-3{af, J^ine Arts, (Boston; ancC [(BJ (Dynasty X^III, *TeC Antama, xvoocCcn fieacC from a harp, Louvre (first, vuCeo (ktaiCs of A and ‘B) If a culture matures by individuation from mythic cult, and if individuation is always fraught with danger — a Pandora box of consciousness -—• we should find from culture to culture a recurrent ripening, as here in Egypt, from Fourth Dynasty prince to time-ofIkhnaton carving from a harp — a paradigm of early against late. June 1998 1890 — AvantTGarde Break 19 �C.G. BeU Symbolic IBstoxy 38) (DouBCc: [SI] Jitticj c. 550 iHfiittpin 5{e(id, Liouvre.) dtuC [*B]~^£eXpndH(tti(?) 2nd ctnt. (B.C, CaGmacfias (once ccdhdSeneca), Mus. V^pCes In, the Classical theater, such a leap takes us from the keen Archaic smile of the 6th-century B.C. Rampin rider, to the burdened Alexandrian bust, probably of the librarian Calimachus, though once called Seneca — baffled in either case. 39) (DouBCet [^] OCtnec, 800’400 ‘B.C; Qiant 5kadfront £ja ‘l^enta, (Mus., JaCapaj and [B] CCassicaC Maya, c. 700 ‘^.(D.l?), Stucco Bead from BaCenyue, Mus. SlntBropoCoyy, Mctqco City Even in Mexico and Central America, the oldest monuments, the giant Jaguar-man heads of the Olmec, simplify to a primitive force of monumental stone; while the refined Maya stuccoes, as this from Palenque 1500 years later, suggest the romantic brooding and sensuous complexity of a life-mask (though the nose-bridge pre­ cludes that). 40) (DouBCe: [Si] (Dirl^ Bouts, 1464-67, SeCf from Last Supper, St. Beter's, Louvain; and [B] Corot, c. 1835, SeCf zvitB BaCette, Uffizi, BCorence (video adds details from'sinyCes *l7405L and ‘1/40B) In the West, the realistic self-portrait arises out of the Medieval. Less than four hundred years separate this Dirk Bouts detail, from Corot’s The Artist with a Palette. That Corot, in simple modesty, has also taken the stance of a craftsman, heightens the build-up — from Dirk Bouts' assumed appearance in the creed-room of a Last Supper, to the 19th-century unfettered looming, as if seen from below — a measure, over that span, of the amplification of the earth-claim. a41) Laf^ Constance Master, c. 1480, CoupCe from Megory, detail of Covers, Qerman Mas., MuremBery B41) Same, detail of the lady (to wBicB video adds detail of tBe man) 41) Same, the ivBoCe scene of tBe Covers Music: Junel^e H.Fink, c. 1490(?), Ach Herzig Hertz, A.S. 51 1890 Avant-Garde Break 20 �C.6. BeU l^ymboEc Histoiy Consider Eros. In the Middle Ages it had kindled a Chivalric flame, but earthless, mystical. As the thickening plot of space, time, and cause foreclosed on chivalry, married love advanced its bour­ geois hopes — curiously enough, first in the book of a King, James of Scotland, whom Venus — "Worship my law... And I your confort here sail multiplye" — and Minerva — "Desire," quod sche, "I nyl it noght deny. So thou it ground and set in Cristin wise" bring to the guerdon of his "blisfull aventure": In youth, of lufe,- that now from day to day Flourith ay newe, and yit forthir, I say. So in Finck's love songs, or in this Lake Constance detail, we feel that validation, but modestly — these lovers form one scene in an Allegory on Life and Death. (cut Fink) 42) yosepd-Marie 1773, l^mpCe of tHyimn, ^^ecture. de CdamBiry, Savois; witfi video details Music: Mozart, 1791, The Maaic Fluto. "Tamino mein," Deutsche Gram 2709 017 Under what panoply of bliss marriage parades in this French Temple of Hymen, 1773, cognate (if only the artist had some of Mozart’s genius) with the trial and union of The Magic Flut^P^,tTiino... Tamino... mine... what happiness." Our grandmothers featured such engravings on their walls. (fade Maaic Fluted a43) ‘Bocffin, 1878, Weddiny Journey, upper section, 0dp.t. gaC., (BerCin; + V cCoser detail 643) Same, Wedding Journey, Cower section; + ^ detail of a43) 43) JLgain, Wedding Journey, wdoCe picture Music: June 1996 Brahms, 1878, vioiin Concerto in D major, slow movement RCAVICS 1028 1890 — Avant-GardeJBreak 21 �Symbolic Histoay C.G. l^U Though by that time what the world dreamed toward was no allegory of the old regime, but the Freudian enfleshment of Bocklin's "Wedding Journey," love's garlanded, flute-blowing descent down the shaded cleft into the honeymoon valleys of the South. It is the over­ loading of desire, which the concert repertory pushes like a drug; Brahms’ Violin Concerto; in poetry the addiction of romantic penta­ meter: "Far folded mists and gleaming halls of morn" — that Ten­ nyson vibrato fulness of loss and wish: The woods decay, the woods decay and fall... And after many a summer dies the swan. 44) iMonet, 1873, ^iJie ^Poppies, Louvre (Jeu cCe (Paume), (Paris 44 a) Same, dCetaiC (tufiUe video puts the zufioCe Between details) Such paradisical longing stretches the realistic hovel. It fills the Poppy Fields of Monet's light and air as with flesh memories of Meredith's "Modern Love": We saw the swallows gathering in the sky... Love that had robbed us of immortal things. This little moment mercifully gave. Where I have seen across the twilight wave The swan sail with her young beneath her wings. What Wallace Stevens so breathed At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink. Downward to darkness on extended wings — that he fought it the rest of his life. 45) (Rffdin, 1889, the LtemaC IdoC, (Ppdin Museum, (Paris; + 9/ detail The notion of Brahms as a reserved master of design, obscures the soar and sob. Through the Impressionist veils of that Paris, Ro­ din's "Eternal Idol" bends ideality to the flesh-loading of Baudelaire: jTxnel996 1890 — Avant-Garde Break 22 �C.G. BeU ^ymbofic History Evenings illyminated by the charcoal glow __ Les soirs illumines par I’ardeur du charbon. when: I thought I breathed the perfume of your blood __ Je croyais respirer le parfum de ton sang... And it is just that Eden bubble of promissory touch, (fade 2nd movement) 46) c. 1882, rEhe gates of 9{eCC, Hipdin 9vCus., {Paris (wfiicfi tHe video divides into detaiCs, aBove and BeCow) Music: Brahms Violin Concerto, continued, begin 3rd movment which involves Rodin, and the whole Romantic world, inner and outer, in the turbulent enormities of The Gates of Hell — as the slow movement of the Violin Concerto requires the finale's inflated battle to affirm. 3rd movement) 47) SamueC {PaCtner, c. 18S0(F), Slmos Simon CottCe, {\(fitionaC {Portrait GaCCeru, London; + 'l^detaiC 4 7a) J7E. {MiCCais, 1852, OpBeCia, {Cate QatCery, London How does estrangement enter that Faust-night of Care? Even in England and by 1850, the beauty of the ideal (Palmer's portrait of Cottle) seems withdrawn from the actual. Yet that refined estrangement keeps the old techniques of. ordered command __ Arnold's "Dover Beach", Tennyson's "idle tears": Break, break, break. On thy cold gray stones, 0 sea! the resolve of "In Memoriam": June1996 1890 — Avant-GaMe Break 23 �C.G.BeU BSstoiy I hold it true whate'er befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.. a48) 48) Cezanne, 1869, Tfie Temptatim ofSt. Slntfiony, ‘BuftrCe y^oundation, Zuricfi Cezanne, 1870-71, '9vCan in a Strata 9{at ('Boyer), Odet. 9/tus., 9>0yC; first, video detail 'U48a) Cezanne 1880, SeCf-Tortrait, detail, Louvre, Taris Music: Mussorgsky, 1874, Pictures at an Exhibition, opening. Turnabout TV 34258 As Yeats would write after the first World War: We had fed the heart on fantasies. The heart's grown brutal from the fare... And planned to bring the world under a rule. Who are but weasels fighting in a hole. When Mussorgsky and Cezanne charged the rtiusical hnd art salons with something of the same bull-violence (Man in a Straw Hat, 1871; Pictures at an Exhibition, 1874), a break was made with the romantic ideal and its vulnerability. How much nearer to Camus' Stranger than to those lost dreams of Palmer, Tennyson, Brahms. (fade Mussorgsky) 49) iBarmagianino, c. 1523, Self in a conveTcmirror, HQinstfiist. 9dus., Vienna V49a) iMaster of S4u7(erre, 1537, (Descent into the CeCCar, Stadtische (Kynstinstitut, y^raiihfurt 496) deCC SlBSate, 1555-60, Landscape zvith 9den Tlireshiny 'Wheat, 9dus., (fontaineSCeau Parmagianino's youthful self-portrait in a convex mirror is one of the wildest pictures of the 16th century. Yet its experiment is rationally grounded in the optics of the mirror. The stormiest adventures of Renaissance are landward; those voyagers do not, as Baudelaire's, "partent/ Pour partir". Thus with Du Bellay's Odyssean sonnet: (CGB) Jux»1996 1890 ^ Avant-Garde Break 2A �C.G. BeU Symbolic History Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage... Happy who like Ulysses after a fair voyage... Comes home to employ the experience of his age... Better my fathers' house than Roman palaces, Loire than Tiber, my hill than the Palatine; Better than ocean air, the sweetness of the Angevine. Et plus que I'air marin la douceur Angevine. SO) V\{anet, 1879, (Portrait cf^eor^e Moore, detaiC, Met. Mas., O^C ^SOa) Manet, 1876, (Before the Mirror, §uggenheim Museum, 9^C SOB) Manet, 1873, Sur Ca (Plage, Musie du Jeu de (Paume, (Paris Where the iiew art, even in observational quiet (this detail of Manet's George Moore), is suggestively adrift. Against Du Bellay's sonnet, take Mallarme's on the Sea Breeze, "Brise Marine". He sits at home, in Paris, with his wife and child, before him the unwritten blank of the page. He drowns in ennui: "The flesh is sad, alas! and I have read all the books" — "La chair est triste, h61as! et j'ai lu tons les livres"; he thinks to sail, inviting storms, towards "shipwrecks lost without masts, without masts or fertile islands... But O my heart, listen to the sailors' song!": ...les naufrages Perdus, sans mats, sans mSts, ni fertiles ilots... Mais, 6 mon coeur, entends le chant des matelots! SI) ^an Qogh, 1887, SeCf-(Portrait, V. Qogh Mas., Sbnsterdam *l7Sla) ^an Qogh, 1890, Self-(Portrait (Qreen), detail, Louvre, (Paris (video then returns to a close detaid of SI) Mallarme dreamed and wrote in the wifely embrace of that room. But Van Gogh (Self Portrait, 1887), embarked with Rimbaud in the Bateau Ivre, took the shoreless voyage all the way: (CGB after Fowlie) I sailed until across my fragile cords Drowned men spinning backward sank to sleep. June1996 1890 — Avant-^arde Break 25 �C.G. BeU ^ymbotic mstary Now I, a lost boat in the hair of caves. Hurled by tempests into the birdless air. Whose water-drunk carcass would not be fished up By Hansa sailing ships or armored Monitors... Who ran, spotted with electric crescent moons — Qui courais, tache de lunules 61ectriques... Lucifer-Ahab broken to what climax of pity? 52) *l^an Qogfij 1888, (Portrait of an Victor, 5(fdCCer-fM^uCCer (\{us., OtterCo; + (UtaiC 52 a) Cezanne, 1890-95, ^oy in a (Rg^cC Waistcoat, (BiirfiCe CoCCection, Zurich (video: detail only) I, who trembled, hearing at fifty leagues. The rut of Behemoths and heayy Maelstroms, Eternal spinner of blue immobilities, I regret Europe with its ancient parapets! But in truth, I have wept too much! Dawns are rending. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter. Acrid love has swollen me with intoxicating torpor^ 0 let my keel burst! Let me go down into the sea! Through that split century of revolt — self-pity, tender memories, backward longings arise: Impressionist domesticities, Renoir's girls, Degas' Dancers, the sigh under Seurat's pointillism, even Cezanne's Boy in a Red Waistcoat, resonate toward Yeats' Prayer for his Daughter: 53) (Picasso, 1906, (Portrait of Leo Stein, drarviny, (Museum of ^rt, (Baltimore: + detail (here video adds a detail of sCide 806, from the close of the shozv: (Picasso, 1924, (Paul in a Clozun Suit, .Artist's Collection) And may her bridegroom bring her to a house Where all's .accustomed, ceremonious... Though he himself, has paced storm-battlements June 1996 1890 — Avant-Grarde Break 26 �C.G. BeU SymboBn HiigtoTy Imagining... the future years... Dancing to a frenzied drum... So Picasso, at the onset of abstract rupture (1906) calls back photo­ realism for the romantic representation of Gertrude Stein’s brother Mais, vrai, j'ai trop pleure! and: Fileur eternel des immobilites bleues, Je regrette 1 Europe aux anciens parapets! I long for that Europe of the ancient parapets! 54) >2aire, ^rt^o bronze 94:ask, 5(pcl^fdCCer CoCCectum, MetropoCitan Museum cf m, 9^0 first, video detaiC But Picasso had already fixed his sights on an impersonal primi ive containment for all demonic possessions, the African mask, in which the terminal and personal shame of Rimbaud's "Drunken Boat might pronounce beyond personality, clean: Je ne puis plus, baigne de vos langueurs, 6 lames __ I can no longer, bathed in your languors, 0 waves. Follow in the long wake of cotton boats Nor traverse the fanfare of their flags and flames Nor swim under the horrible eyes of prison ships.’ — As m all satyr wisdom from Homer down, death-acceptance turned to life-force. first, vuCec dose S5a) mcasso, 1308, ‘Woman witfi a fan, hermitage, Uningrad V55c) (Picasso, 1908, ifriendsfivp (L'Sdmitie), (Hermitage, Leningrad June 1998 1890 Avant-Garde B^ak 27 �^ymbolieHistoiy C.G.BeU How would it operate in the post-individual and luxuriant West? An art fad? A Dionysian birth? Where Rilke, the same years as this 1908 Picasso, in the Malte Brigge "Other Self," saw the facds of Paris wear out... split and fold... be changed in succession... The last is worn through in a week, has holes in it... gradually the lining — the no face — comes through, and they go about with that... Or he sees the woman, sunk inward, her head in her hands: At his step... the emptiness clattered... she took fright, was torn too quickly out of herself... the face remained in the hands... to see a face from the inside... the flayed head without a face. The excitement of Cubist art is as clear as the record every­ where of broken content, what moved toward the World War and totalitarian seizure — Yeats (that "last romantic"): We, who seven years ago Talked of honour and of truth. Shriek with pleasure if we show The weasel's twist, the weasel's tooth. The marvel of the Negroid and Cubist is its changing devaluation, outrage and despair to abstract strength — the dance of Zarathustra: "zur Umwertung aller Werte." 1 56) y^ragonard, 1780, ^ete at !^m6ouU£et, QulBenJoan CpCCection, LisBon 56a) Same, detaiC of stream (into zofiidi video inserts a detail cf the sBip, from V56B) The first turning of royal France from court ease to the risk of wild nature is deliciously toyed with by Fragonard in his painting of a Fete at Rambouillet. So Johnson's Rasselas — "he whose real wants are supplied, must admit those of fancy" — searches the woods and June 1996 1890 — Avant-Grarde Break 28 �Symbolic Histoty C.G. Bell cliffs of the Happy Valley for an escape from those "soft vicissitudes of pleasure and repose": He examined the cavern through which the waters of the lake were discharged; and... discovered it to be full of broken rocks, which... would stop any body of solid bulk... 57) C.T>. g^Twiricfi, 1818, CftaOiCGffs of ‘KS£en, fKginfiart, Wintertfiur 57a) Same, CfiaCliCCiffs, centraC detail, from 'wfiicfi video draws two closer details (cf. V57al and a2) In Friedrich's "Chalk Cliffs of Riigen" that mannered grotto-play advances to the awed contemplation of cliffs and mountain torrents, which, from romantic poetry and the tales of Hoffmann, would seize on Poe ("A Descent into the Maelstrom", 1841): The "little cliff" upon whose edge he had so carelessly thrown himself... arose, a sheer unobstructed precipice of... rock, some fifteen or sixteen hundred feet from the world of crags beneath us... In truth, so deeply was I excited by the perilous position of my companion, that I fell at full length upon the ground, clung to the shrubs around me, and dared not even glance upward at the sky... "You must get over these fancies," said the guide. 58) (Bavarian (Romantic, 1869-86, (hlg.uscfiwannstein, S'H^ of (Municft (video uses ^58) But what Symbolist enactment of the European Weird, could lead from Friedrich's nature mystery to the actual Wagnerian extra­ vagance the mad king of Bavaria, Ludwig II, reared at Neuschwanstein in the chain of Valhalla-imaginings which let to his suicide? As if the whole Alpine landscape were haunted 59) giorgio de Cftirko, 1908, (Jlpsta^ia of the Infinite, (Museum of (Modem Strt, (Nirc ^59 a) g. de Chirico, 1913-14, Singuish cf (Departure, 5llBrigh.t gallery, Buffalo, (N!/ June1996 1890 — Avant-(5arde Break 29 �C.G. BeU Sjymbolic Histoxy by a ghost of the surreal, future, to be painted in 1908 by Giorgio de Chirico, in this "Nostalgia of the Infinite" — Neuschwanstein of the now consciously alienated mind, as immediate, and remote, as the Castle Kafka's Land Surveyor sees but never reaches, phones and is bureaucratically shunted from, evasive ultimate of religion turned on itself. Even when Kafka's surrealism had been confirmed by the Great War, the many had no notion how his Castle and Trial, his Meta­ morphosis into cockroach and the like, applied to their daily lives. Va60) n^ozuer detaiCfrom sCide 58, Odg'Usdvwannstein, 60) 5Lnierican QingerBreacC, 1886, LumBertnan's Bouse, ‘Eureka, CaCifomia; first, xHxCeo detaiCs How could Ludwig n have known what Masque of the Red Death his fairy castle was to accommodate? How much more purblind the new rich of Gilded America must have been to the ghostly estrangements which nightmared their gingerbread — as in the meeting on the stair of James' Turn of the Scre.w The apparition had reached the landing half way up... in the cold faint twilight, with a glimmer in the high glass and another on the polish of the ,oak stair below, we faced each other in our common intensity... Like that candy-manufacturing malaise and soul-closure from which at the turn of the century. Hart Crane would be born to the exile of the poetry nonsense that strained his nerves (Dante's prurient "mal protesi nervi"). 61) fFJC. (hCesserscBmidt, c. 1770, Carved SeCf, 9duseuin, TressBur£, Qermany; + V detaiC Music: Shostakovich, 1945, close of 9th Symphony, Col. M 31307 In the energized West, enlightened well-being has long over­ played its cheer. Extrapolate, from Messerschmidt's 1770 grinning self, to Shostakovich's 1945 "merry little piece" (the 9th Symphony), June 1996 1890 *— Avant-Garde Break 30 �C.G. BeU ^J^mbolic History its close carrying the comfort of Papa Haydn to an assertion the more urged for 200 years of irreversible trouble — an always toothier lie even to its jolliest participants. Shostakovich) ‘i'aezj Semini, c. 1619, (a. of imUc sOde 62) fbtma Dannata, ‘SaC. di Sp(ma, 62) (Bernini, c. 1619, (DouBCe: [H] (DatnnecC ancC f(B] BCessecC SouCs, (PaC. cCi Spagna, 9(pme V62a) Bemint, c. 1619, (B (rf 62) S^ima Beata, TcU. diSpagna, Bsmie Since already the twenty-year-old Bernini had stumbled on the disturbing truth, whether universal, or a curse of Faustian civiliza­ tion, that in the pairing of saved and damned, the creative energy of his own face had to operate ^ on the satanic ,side; while peace and blefssing would furnish a female of such wall-eyed mawkishness as must enforce angel-limitation from Blake's Milton to Nietzsche's creeping Christian, 63) Basttmn Joflnson, 1869,,for 1869 painting of tfie Boy LincoCn (I(^ing, So how would Eastman Johnson’s charcoal of the imagined boy Lincoln reading (sketched after the Civil War though still in the hope of pioneer humanity) _ how would it hold out against Baudelaire’s Au Lecteur, To the Reader," published twelve years before: "and we feed our pleasant remorse as beggars nourish their vermin"? 64) (Daumier, 1863, ^TBe !l(gader, Center, (Des Moines, Iowa; + V detail Daumiers Reader of 1863 more sustains that dedication to Satanic loves: "It is the Devil who holds the strings which move us " Johnson’s glowing Lincoln would know nothing of that worst vice of all, 1 Ennui, hookah-smoking boredom of Romantic decadence: Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre delicat. Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frere! June 1996 1890 — Avant-Garde Break 31 �C.G.BeU ^ymlx^ic H]stda:jr A close Eliot would take up in The Waste I.and. without even troubling to' translate. 65) Victorian, 1897, T>mtnon([ JuSiCu, (Progress since 1837, iCCustrated: London Odg.'WS', + V details 65a) Van Qo^fi, 1885, Lhe (Potato Xaters, (Rij^mus., ^Lmsterdam (video: detaiC only) 656) 9dundi, 1891, (Rite Lafayette, (NfitionaC QaCCery, Oslo No one can doubt progress. From Roger Bacon, to Francis Bacon, to Priestley, to this celebration of Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, 1897, with its sixty years of sail to steam, coach to train, lamp to electricity — the vision of technocracy builds a spread in time, from burning apex to the diffusion of common acceptance; while the counter-spark condenses in the mass — Hopkins: "And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil." The question is not of Progress, but of its Satanic bent — as simple as whether the Devil is real. The same split has attended the view of the city. though a journalist, framed the poles:* O’Henry, Far below and around lay the city like a ragged purple dream, the wonderful, cruel, enchanting, bewildering, fatal, great city. 6 6) 5ldCeT and SuCCivan, 1890-91, WainrvriyRt ‘Budding, St. Louis, (Missouri 66 a) Currier and Ives, 1862, Central (ParR, ‘Mater, Skating, detaiC, (Rpy. (Rj-ng CoL, (^ 666) SuCCivan, 1907, CkandeCier detaiC, farmers' and (Merchants' ‘BanCu Ckvatonna, (Minnesota 66c) (M. (Prendergast, 1901, Centred ParR^ ‘Mutney (Museum, (Mlf Whitman’s first focus in Democratic Vistas is on the surge of material possibility which, thrusting up the 1890 Wainwright Build­ ing in St. Louis (Adler's steel skeleton hung with Sullivan’s patterned brick), would put architecture at the vanguard of the modem: June 1996 1890 — Avant-Garde Break 32 �C.G. BeU Symbolic History Whitman After an absence, I am now again (September 1870) in New York City and Brooklyn... The splendor, pic­ turesqueness and oceanic amplitude and rush of these great cities, the unsurpassed situation, rivers and bay, sparkling sea-tides, costly and lofty new buildings, facades of marble and iron, of original grandeur and elegance of design... the flags flying, the endless ships, the tumultuous streets, Broadway, the heavy, low, musical roar, hardly ever intermitted, even at night... these I say... give me... a continuted exaltation and absolute fulfilment... A67) g. ‘BdCoivs, J9p9, 9Cfie Lone 'Tenement, 9^tionaC gallery, 'Washington, 'D.C.; + 'U (CetaiC 67) 9{. (Daumier, 1863, 'Washerwoman, (MetropoCitan 'Museum of Art, (S^C (video: detail onCy) t But we have already mentioned Baudelaire's antithesis; Fourmillante cite, cite pleine de reves. Ant-hill city, city full of dreams. Where the specter in plain day grips the passer-by. It is the "unreal city" Eliot, like that specter, seizes on in The Waste — where Baudelaire had encountered in self-multiplying repli­ cation his seven old men, bent and eternal as this Daumier Washer Woman (shoulders hunched again in the child) — at which his soul __ old dismasted hulk, danced, and danced/ Across a monstrous sea without a- shore." (CGB) Et mon ame dansait, dansait, vieille gabarre Son mats, sur une mer monstreuse et sans bords! IfreiKh (g. 'Eiffel), 1887-89, 'Ihe Eiffel 'Tozuer, night storm, (Paris (video: detail only) '17068) ']7an gogh, 1889, 'Uan gogh's 'Bedroom at Arles, 'l7incent van gogh (Mus., Amsterdam c68) 'l/an gogh, 1889) On the 'Threshold of Eternity, Hg-oller-lMuller Museum,. Otterlo, UTolland a68) June 1996 1^0 — Avaii1>€rarde Break 33 �C.G. BeU 68) ^ymboHd Histoxjr *Uan Q 1886, (Boots witfi Laces, f^ij^museum, l^bnsterdam In the modern break, what so drives us without bourne, is art’s tragic enactment of cloven value: the Eiffel-towered city, its victories of steel and dynamo, our cage and defeat; while the dejecta of that aim. Van Gogh's Room or Chairs, his face-clutching man "On the Edge of Eternity," become the crushed-out oil of Heidegger’s essential truth: a well-known painting by Van Gogh... a pair of peasant shoes and nothing more. And yet from the dark open­ ing of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth... Under the shoes slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls... The art work lets us know... what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, is in truth. This entity emerges into the unconcealedness (Greek: aXiiGeia) of its being. a69) Manet, 1863, Le ^Dejeuner sur CfierBe, oiC s^tcfi, CourtauQC Inst., London; + tcpo V details 69) Same, Le (Dejeuner sur CdeTSe, Louvre (jeu de (Paume), (Paris (first, a video detail) Music: Mussorgsky, 1866, "Why should Your eyes" Artia ALP 704 (3rd sect.) No wonder, whereas Renaissance art-advances were a civic delight, each phase of this avant-garde unveiling occasioned hue and cry. Whatever deft liberation of the urbane tickles our left-bank senses in Manet’s 1863 Luncheon on the Grass, the old moral and spatial connections are falling away. As in Mussorgsky’s 1866 "Why should your eyes," so rich in the bass of Kim Borg, those transmodulatiofts and short-cuts were creeping in which would leave the composer unplayed until Rimsky-Korsakoff had revised out the idiosyncracies. In Paris, at the Salon des Refuses, connoisseurs could always titter: "Where is the background?" "Why make a farce of Giorgione?" and "What are those girls up to?" (end Mussorgsky) Juik1996 1890 — Avant-Grarde Break 31 �Symbolic EBstoacy C.G.BeU 70) Japan, Cate 18tfi unt., Tea Ceremony; tobocCBCoc^ print; + V (CetaiC 70a) J{dl^ai 1827-30, Ono Waterfall, lUoodBCoc^prmt (video: detaiConly) 706) 9donet, 1872, IRdjatta d. Jlr^enteuil, Louvre (Jeu de iPaume), Paris Music: Gamelan Orchestra of Bali, Sekdar Gadung, close, BAM LD 096 M When the great causal rhetoric which Renaissance, Baroque, and Enlightenment had bequeathed as their noblest heritage, was to be thinned toward Verlaine's "rien que nuance" — the non-Western everywhere pointed the way. What the patterned flatness of the Japanese print, its casual composition and haunting remove, sug­ gested for the circle of Manet, the Gamelan music of Bali would effect for Debussy when he heard it at the Paris Exposition of 1889. How elegantly the shadows of tensile harmony might be withdrawn. (close Gamelan) Music: Debussy, 1910, Voiles (close). Preludes, Bk. I, (Gieseking) Col. Odyssey 3236- 0021 Frail as Debussy's own Prelude depiction of Sails. (end Voiles) 71) Monet, 1866-67, Women in idie Qarden, Louvre, Paris; + V details 71a) Monet, 1880, Woman Seated Under Widows, 9^tionaC QaUery, Was6., P>.Cs + V detaiC Under the sway of the Japanese, of Manet's figures and Boudin's color-lightening, Monet caught the ephemeral play of a garden. . Music: Faure, 1879, Trio, 2nd mvt. of 1st Piano Qrt, RCA ARL 1 -0761 But that was in 1866, when Debussy was a child, and thirteen years before Faure matured to the airy delight of this First Piano Quartet. Though Verlaine (at 22) had just published a book with such garden moments: We were alone and walking in a dream (Nous etions seul a seule et marchions en revant)... June1996 1890'^' Avant-Garde Break 85 �C.G. BeU Symbolic History How the first flowers have the sweetest scent (Ah! les premieres Hears qu'elles sent parfum&s!) Or the Autumn Song of violins sobbing in the heart, which, as much as any poem, refines pure sound: Les sanglots longs Des violons De I'automne Blessent mon coeur D'une langeur Monotone. So the chromatics of Faure moves toward an abstract repose. (fade Faur4) 72) (DauBigny, 18$8, Mominy, fortnerCy ^ermitaye, now Moscow; first, V detaUs Music: Liszt, 1863, Etude, Waldesrauschen, opening, Philips 6500 043 The musical antecendents are as complex as the Beethoven to Wagner scene. But a piano sequence might reach from the Nocturnes of Field, through those bolder .ones of Chopin (the D-Flat Major close) to Liszt, who in such studies as this Waldesrauschen went as far toward nuance as anyone around mid-century. In art, the freshening of landscape flowed from the Romantic English through Barbizon France, where Daubigny evoked light and air over earth and water. But to see how sharp a break was still to be made, set this oil-sketch of Morning (fade Liszt) 73) Monet, 1869, La grenouiCCere (froygery), MetropoCitan Museum of llrt, ■9frC; + ‘UdetaiC ^ 73 a) Monet, after 1920, Les (DeuT^ LtoiCes, Oranyerie, (Paris 'U73B) Monet, c. 1920(F), Water-CiGes, 9fationaC gatCery, London Music: June 1996 Debussy, 1888, En Bateau, opening. Petite Suite, 2 pianos. Turnabout TV 34234 1890 — Avant-Garde Break 96 �C.G. BeU ^mbcdic History against Monet's wave reflections not twelve years later (1869), where space and motion atomize into abstract impressions. Though the musical contrast leads us to 1888, Debussy's "En Bateau," from the Little Suite for two Pianos. (fade En Batteau) Music: Debussy, 1905, from Reflets dans I'eau Images. Bk.I, (Gieseking) Angel 35065 (arpeggios). Since that post-impressionist phenomenon called musical Impres­ sionism does not climax its suspension of tonal rhetoric in wave-play ("Reflets dans I'eau") until Debussy's Images of 1905, contemporary not with Monet’s rippling Froggery, but with the advancing abstrac­ tion of his Lily Ponds. (fade Images) a74) Van Qo^fi, 1888, Cafe atO^fit, !lQ;d(leT-Mu(hrMus., OtterCo 6 74) ‘Domenico Veneziano, c. 1480, St. Jofin in tfie Desert, 9\(fitionaC QaCCery, ‘Wasfiit^ton, D.C. (C^(B '60) c74) Van Qo^d, 1886-87,14tfi cfJuly, Jaggd-JdifvnCoseTCodection, iVintertfiuT 74) fRsnoir, 1879, Oarsmen at Cdatou, O^ational gcdlery, ‘Wasd., D.C. 74 a) iRgnoir, c. 1869, Luncdeon (ftde ‘Boatvny Tarty, Jlrt Inst., Cdicago Avant Garde having set the conditions for always more radical revolt against establishment, even, by their acceptance, the estab­ lishment of its own styles. Renaissance, in this sense, had not been avant garde. Its explorers could move with society toward the shared ordering of space, time, and cause. This new elite forms a cadre recruited within that now entrenched civilization, and, as the military term implies, at war with its traditional values. But the current can always eddy, Music: Faure, 1886, 2nd Piano Qrt, 1st mvt, 2nd theme, RCA V LSC 2735 Renoir harnessing to the art customs of the past (Titian, Rubens, Watteau) the^ revolt of free composition and broken color, for the more cheerful accommodation of elegant status quo. So in the musical salon, Faure and the rest tamed Wagner. No doubt art is June 1906 1890 — AvanlrGsorde Break 37 �Symbolic Histpiy C.G.B^U celebration; but what is to be celebrated? of bourgeois delight? 75) The fragile Gallic shimmer (fade Faur6) Moreau, c. 1880(?), Jlt^eCs of Sodom, Moreau Mus., (Paris; first, video detaiCs Or, through a surface of romantic dark, Moreau's assault of Symbolist angels, the holocaust overthrow of the physical by spirit? Music: C. Franck, 1883, Le Chasseur Maudit, close, Westminster WL 5311 As with Franck’s symphonic mysteries against the charm of Faur6, (end Franck) who can say which is more Avant Garde? a76) TautQau£uin, 1898, Hdie ^fiite (Horse, (Paris, Louvre 76) gau£um, 1897, ‘ZTte (Batfiers, Mg-tionaC QaiCery, Wasfiin£ton, (D.C.; + ^ detail Music: Debussy, 1893-4, Prelude a I'Apres midi d'un Faune (opening). Col. MS 6077 So it was attuned to that older Symbolist pain and Faustian attack that a post-impressionist corps, withdrawing from the already prosperous circle of Manet, turned Impressionist weapons against the ephemeral ease of Impressionist savoir-faire: — Gauguin, seeking realms as visionary as of Mallarme's Faun: Nymphs, I shall see the shadow you became. « Couple, adieu; je vais voir I'ombre que tu devins. — though salon-eased perhaps in the music Debussy wrote for the poem. (fade I'Apr^s midi d’un faune) 77) Van Qoyfi, 1888, LLe (SQgfit Cafe, Slit gadery, O^aCe University; + V detail Van Gogh, radical as Rimbaud: "I accustomed myself to plain hallu­ cination"; "At last I held sacred the disorder of my spirit" — "Je finis par trouver sacr6 le d6sordre de mon esprit." Consumptive Laforgue, praying that "whirlwinds and floods... sweep the leprosy of cities... June 1^6 1880 — Avant-Garde Break 38 �C.G. BeU l^ymbofic EBstoxy that nothing be known of this rotted, brain which was the earth, one day" — "De ce Cerveau pourri qui fut la Terre, un jour!" — Laforgue, for whom on all the peopled stars "a fraternal outcry will be raised against God" — "Ce sera centre Dieu la clameur fraternelle!" C^zditnC/ 1900/ ‘BeruC in tfic (^cu£/ T'l^dCtcv CBcirciss CoCCcction/ ycUc ^ftwini Sfiow (video cropped BeCow) 678). Cezanne, 1900-04, *Tfie (BCue Landscape, ^Hermitage, Leningrad; + ^17 details 78) Cezanne, 1898-1900, !I(pc^ at 'BiBemus, ^oCfcjvang Mus., Tssen ® Cezanne, most rooted in the past, most looming over the future, shaping from personal neurosis and ennui an art as Olympian in well-being as Whitman’s, yet as radically compulsive as Rimbaud's __ Cezanne, great beyond parallel, though with cognates everywhere; from Verlaine, "The sky above the roof/ Si bleu, si calme!/ A tree above the roof/ Sways its fronds./ The bell in the sky you see/ Softly sounds..."; through Mallarme, obsessed with "The Azure": "Je suis hante. LAzur! lAzur! I'Azur! rAzur!"; Rimbaud (closing the vowel poem we earlier began — Fowlie): O, supreme Clarion full of strange stridor. Silences crossed by worlds and angels: — O, the Omega, violet beam from His Eyes. — O rOmega, rayon violet de Ses Yeux! to Valery (1920): When, on the abyss, a sun takes repose, iPure works of an eternal cause. Dream is knowledge in a time that shines. Le Temps scintille et le Songe est savoir. *]/a79) Seurat, 1884-86, La Qrande Jatte, detaiC, J4rt Inst., CBicago B79) Odauriude VCamincki 1906, Landscape xvitB 9(^d OIrees, .d^tionaC Museum of Modem. Slrt, Baris Vc79} Bicasso, 1911-12, Clarinet Blayer, detail, B>. Cooper CoCCecthn, London June 1996 1890 — Avant-€rarde Break �Symbolic ffistory T9) T9 a) (Bo(xioni, 1911, forces of tfie Street, iBrivate Cofection, (BaseC, SwitzerCaiuC; + video detail f upper section Same, detail of Cower section When those post-impressionist assaults have been absorbed — with the others, Seurat, Ensor, Munch — in the chain-reacting iconoclasm of Avant-Garde, to kindle by 1905 the Fauves, "Wildmen," more fiercely improvising with color and form; and when that salvo has yielded in Paris to Analytical Cubism, and over Europe touched off Blaue Reiter, Suprematist, Futurist darers of the pure abstract, this 1911 Boccioni, "Forces of a Street" — as in the 1910 Manifesto, no less the forces of the coming World War: Music: Schdnberg, 1912, Pierrot Lunaire #13, Col. M2S 679 A roaring motor car that looks as though running on shrapnel, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace... We wish to glorify war, the only health giver of the world, militarism, patriotism, the destroying arm of the Anarchist, and the beautiful ideas that kill... — in the desperate ecstasy of that increasingly global enactment of The Drunken Boat (music too, in Schonberg, pursuing the Wehrmacht attach on tonality) (close Pierrot #13) 80) iK^noir, 18T6, QirCwitfi Watering Can, CMpdoncd gallery, ‘Washington, 2).C 80a) Bonnard, 1929-32, Little girl xuith Dog, (Private Collection, fontaineSleau, france 806) (Picasso, 1924, (Paul, the Slrtist's Son, Artist's Collection (video: detail only) 80 c) (Pissarro, 1881, (Peasant girl with a Stichi Louvre, (Paris (video: detail only) 80d) Again, from 80, (Renoir's girl, detail; + V closer detail efface Music: Chausson, 1880, "Les Papillons," RCA V LM-6153 — under successive revolts, how could there not be successive pinings back, as to Renoir's Girl in a Garden (with Chausson's Butterflies, "Les Papillons"), a tenderness already of the past, though Bonnard would enchant it forward — such a prayer as Yeats' for his Daughter, such a wish as Picasso's in his children. Had not the most infernal rebel of June 1996 1890 — Avant-Garde Break 40 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 41 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1890 : Avant-Garde Break, Symbolic History, Part 33 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 33 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_33_1890--Avant-Garde_Break https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/571180ebea2898d069bcd3cd94670c75.pdf 6337edba87fc9949c25c51958f39b6f7 PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 25. 18th Century: Voltaire's Smile CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 May 1994 Last Revised January ‘96 �2 Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 25. 18th Century: Voltaire's Smile 1) Pierre F. Lejeune, c. 1760, Bust of Voltaire (profile), detail, Landesmuseum, Stuttgart; + V, whole bust (from 2nd 1) 1a) Houdon, c. 1770(?), Voltaire (full face), National Gallery, Washington, D.C. V1b) Houdon, c. 1777(?), Voltaire in age, detail, Louvre, Paris 1c) Double: [A] whole Lejeune Bust of slide 1, and [B] Houdon, c. 1778, terra cotta Bust of Rousseau, Mus., Orleans; while video shows a detail only of B Music: Rameau, published 1741, 5th Piece de Clavecin en Concert, lst movement, A.S. 30 At the French heart of the 18th century lies Voltaire's smile, witty as the octave leap in Rameau's 5th Concert de Clavecin. Martin concluded on the whole that man was born to live in the convulsions of inquietude or the lethargy of boredom... "Let us work," he said, "for it is the only way to make life tolerable."...Their little land produced abundantly. Cunegonde was ugly indeed, but she became a fine pastry cook... Not one of their company was idle... As for Pangloss, he would say to Candide: "All events are linked in this best of all possible worlds: If you had not been kicked on the breach out of that beautiful castle because of your love for Lady Cunegonde; if you hadn't been seized by the Inquisition, traversed much of America on foot, run your sword through the baron, and lost those sheep you brought from Eldorado — you wouldn't be here eating citron comfits and pistachio nuts." "You have spoken well," said Candide; "but we ought to cultivate our garden." (fade Rameau) Is this the smile of scoffing or the smile of reason? (Locke): 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �3 C.G. Bell Symbolic History The candle that is set up in us shines bright enough for all our purposes — And yet the Enlightened smile, in the confidence game of 18th century, was somehow modulating from Locke's reason toward Rousseau's heart. 2) French Gothic, c. 1260, Smiling Angel, Portal, Rheims Cathedral; + V detail Music: French, c. 1280(?), Secular Motet: En mai, quant rosier sont flouri (with Robin and Marion duplum and tenor) Munrow, ARC 2723045 (#12) Contrast the smile of grace — a Rheims angel from another century of formal synthesis, the 13th — its art, its music a sprightly overflow of heaven onto earth — the motet, still vowed to the Church modes and bare-fifth chords, yet flowering in the melody, rhythm, words of the May morning, the loves of Robin and Marion — (fade En mai) Would the two smiles have told us 2nd 1) Again, Lejeune's bust of Voltaire (profile), whole that where the century of Voltaire was working toward the least action calculus of a mechanical universe of conserved energy (Maupertius, the Bernouillis, Euler, D'Alembert, Lagrange, La Place), 2nd 2) Again, Smiling Angel, detail of same or another Rheims Angel the chief scientist of the Thomistic century, Roger Bacon, even as he writes in his Opus Maius On Experimental Science — I now wish to unfold the principles of experimental science, since without experience nothing can be sufficiently known — seeks higher truth: a3) French Gothic, c. 1250-60, Dragons and Foliage, Rheims Cathedral Vb3) French Gothic, c. 1240(?), Capital of Choir, Joshua and Caleb fight over grapes, Rheims Cathedral 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �4 C.G. Bell 3) Symbolic History English Decorated Gothic, 1280-1300, Leaves (vine) on Capital in Chapter House of Minster, Southwell; + V detail But experience is of two kinds; one is gained through our external senses... This experience is both human and philosophical... but this does not suffice, because it does not give full attestation in regard to things corporeal owing to its difficulty, and does not touch at all on things spiritual... For the grace of faith illuminates greatly, as also do divine inspirations, not only in things spiritual, but in things corporeal and in the sciences of philosophy. So the realism of leaves which adorns the capitals of Gothic cathedrals (here of the vine at English Southwell) sprouts as ravishingly in the sacred, as Bacon's prophecy of lenses: from an incredible distance we might read the smallest letters... an army might appear close at hand... we might cause the sun, moon and stars in appearance to descend here below. 4) 4a) V4b) 4c) G. dei Grassi, c. 1380-90, antlered deer, sketch, Accad. Carrara, Bergamo A. Pisanello, c. 1440, The Vision of St. Eustace, National Gallery, London Same, The Vision of St. Eustace, right detail, National Gallery, London Again, G. dei Grassi's sketch of an antlered deer; first, video detail In this Giovanni dei Grassi, late 14th century, the art of nature comes from the sacred (here the Vision of Saint Eustacius) into the perfection of its own powers. Such Buridan's formulation (against Aristotle, and by appeal to experience) of the "impetus" by which mass retains an impressed motion. So 250 years before Descartes and Galileo, Nicholas of Oresme (French Bishop) graphs such intensities as velocity and acceleration, along such an extension as time: sometimes it happens that velocity is increasing while acceleration is decreasing... accelerations can take place uniformly or difformly in various ways... (What was he observing but pendulums, harmonic functions, falling bodies?) 5) Il Rosso, c. 1523, Moses and the Daughters of Jethro, Uffizi, Florence; + V detail V5a) Same, c. 1527, Dead Christ with Angels, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �5 C.G. Bell Symbolic History V5b) Dürer, 1511, Adoration of the Trinity, foreground detail, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien (CGB '60) 5c) Elsheimer, 1609, Night Flight to Egypt, right detail, Alte Pinakothek, München V5d) Rubens, c. 1624, Het Onwaer, The Storm, detail, Konig Collection, Haarlem That insular rebirth swells to the 16th century, this Il Rosso, where the physical and dynamic struggle within Biblical legend (Moses and the Daughters of Jethro). So, within the frame of the past — of Aristotelian motion, Ptolemaic geocentricity and Church dogma (no vast empty spaces in God's universe; no spots on the ethereal sun; no change in the sphere of stars; and "as Holy Writ declares, it was not the earth but the sun Joshua commanded to stand still") — the new astronomy of worlds in space struggles through Copernicus: ("Nothing stands in the way of the movability of the earth"), Tycho Brahe ("this new star is not some kind of comet or fiery meteor... it is a star shining in the firmament itself — one that has never previously been seen before our time, ...since the beginning of the world."), Gilbert's globes of earth, moon, sun, planets as gravitating loadstones: "the agent force abides in bodies themselves... not in the interspaces." 6) 6a) 6b) 6c) 6d) Rembrandt, 1632, Anatomy Lesson, Mauritshuis, The Hague C. Huygens, 1703, from De Motu Corporum, Picture of boat, etc.; + V detail Leibniz, c. 1700, Impact equations with Cartesian graph, drawn by CGB (video: details only, above, then below) Again Rembrandt, 1632, Anatomy Lesson, detail; first, video closer detail Rembrandt, 1656, another Anatomy Lesson (of Dr. J. Deyman), Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam In Rembrandt's Anatomy Lessons (this of 1632, or the fragment from 24 years later), the drama of mind invests a space-world of lighted mass, causal force — what Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, would formulate through the century: Huyghens, in Rembrandt's Amsterdam, solving the impact of two elastic spheres, viewed by his wonderful postulate, as on a moving frame of reference — a boat, seen from the shore; so that each case can be adjusted to one of symmetry, where, the center of gravity stilled, equal momenta are exchanged. But that visualization was not required. We had only to mathematize the common first principle that the motion of body is conserved, admitting the division by which any 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �6 C.G. Bell Symbolic History body can be both one and many, in this case the summed whole and a rebounding two. If in elastic impact, the momentum of the total mass and the relative velocities of its colliding parts must both be preserved, Leibniz' three equations automatically arise, for the conservation of inner velocity, for the momentum of the whole, and (the two compounded) for the energy of the masses times their velocities squared. But if all matter must follow these laws, every motion in the universe becomes a clockwork determined from beginning to end. The snare Leonardo, talking of the wonder of force, had implied, but failed to see ("Without force nothing moves" and "there cannot be any force exerted in any movement made by imaginary spirits"), that noose is being sprung upon us. Is not the lighted drama of either Anatomy Lesson the temporal appearance, in such a clockwork mill as this cadaver, of the paradox springs of life and motion? But had Rembrandt, or anyone else of that century (except perhaps Pascal) felt the foreclosure of Cartesian mechanization? 7) 7a) Rubens, 1618, Landscape with a Wagon, Hermitage, Leningrad; + V details Rubens, c. 1635(?), Evening Woods, Neuerburg Sammlung, Hamburg This 1618 Rubens Landscape is still mysteriously organized, as in exploratory polyphony, all over the canvas. To the left, is an Elsheimer memory of the reflected moon; on the right, day expatiates over open fields; center, above the wagon, which seems to be stuck, though lurching down hill, an incredible rock pocket glows like a Resurrection cave. In science we recall the speculative daring which leaps (before the formulation of method) from Gilbert: As for us, we deem the whole world animate, and all globes, all stars, and this glorious earth, too, we hold to be from the beginning by their own destinate souls governed and from them also to have the impulse of self-preservation — to Kepler: The celestial movements are the work... of soul acting in accordance with bodily powers... the ellipse bears witness to the natural bodily power and to the emanation and magnitude of its form. 8) 5/1994 Jacob v. Ruisdael, 1665, A Forest Marsh, Hermitage, Leningrad 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �7 C.G. Bell Symbolic History V8a) Same, Ruisdael's Forest Marsh, center detail V8b) Ruisdael, c. 1665-69 Landscape with Waterfall and Castle, National Gallery, London (video: upper detail only) 8c) Ruisdael, 1660-65(?), A Waterfall in a Rocky Landscape, National Gallery, London 8d) Salomon van Ruisdael, c. 1660, Estuary with Sailboats, Staatl. Kunstsammlungen, Kassel; + V detail V8e) J. v. Ruisdael, c. 1660(?), Sunlight through Clouds, Louvre, Paris On the other side (of Cartesian formulation). Ruisdael's Forest Marsh of 1665, has no such independent vitalities of scene. Meaningful details can be made only by closing in, as under increasing magnification, on the focal center of the reflecting pool and waterfowl. It is what was unfolding, through that mid-century, in Spinoza's philosophy and in propositional physics, from the logic and mathematics of axiomatic deduction. Descartes, 1644: That God is the first cause of motion, and that He always conserves an equal quantity of it in the universe. Newton, about 1690: Law I: Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a straight line, unless it is compelled to change that state by force impressed upon it. Law II: The change of motion is proportional to the motive force impressed; and is made in the direction of the right line in which that force is impressed. Law III: To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction: or, the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts. The mystery of action withdraws to the unstated dilemma: that impressed force can only live (and die) one with the change it is supposed to cause. 9) French late Gothic, 1517 Choir with late Renaissance (1600-05) Jubé or roodloft, detail to the right, St. Etienne du Mont, Paris (CGB '59) V9a) Same, detail to the left (CGB '59) 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �8 C.G. Bell 10) Symbolic History Same, 1517 Choir with the rood-loft and spiral stairs (CGB '59); from these the video shows four details and then the whole Music: Sweelinck, c. 1600(?), Echo fantasie (Videro), G-DB 5214 (78) Let architecture and music repeat the focal formulation from Mannerist (or late Renaissance). to Baroque: — here an Echo Fantasie by 1600 Sweelinck, with the fanciful rood-loft of the same date, in the Flamboyant choir of St. Etienne du Mont, Paris. (fade Sweelinck) Va11) Vb11) 11) Va12) 12) Roman Baroque, S. Maria in Vallicella, frescoed and decorated, 1647-56, Cortona and others, Rome Lanfranco, 1621 ff., ceiling detail, S. Andrea delle Valle, Rome Rainaldi, 1663-67, S. Maria in Campitelli, interior, Rome (CGB '86); + V detail Bernini, 1658-70, Main elliptical vaulting, S. Andrea Quirinale, Rome (CGB '86) Bernini, 1663-66, Scala Regia, Vatican Palace (to St. Peter's), Rome Music: Frescobaldi, 1635, Toccata per l'Elevatione, AS 4 Whereas in the 1660 church structures of Rainaldi and Bernini, as in the toccatas and canzone of Frescobaldi, methodic consciousness centralizes the weighty masses of the Roman Baroque. (fade Frescobaldi) Va13) 13) V13a) J. Prandtauer, begun 1702, Melk, Danube, Austria Same, Melk, part of Church and S. Tower (CGB '59) Same, Melk, interior, Library (CGB '59) With that heritage the German 18th century began: Melk on the Danube, 170226, and far to the north, the old Buxtehude, whose organ-playing Bach would walk 200 miles to attend. Music: Buxtehude, c. 1700(?), close, Toccata in D minor (Kraft) VBX-29 (end) Meanwhile, the Great-Chain-of-Being philosophy and science was carried across 1700 by Leibniz, born in Leipzig and variously active from Berlin and Hanover to Mainz, 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �9 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Holland, Paris, London. In that Europe it must have seemed that the stair of progress could mount without limit, each worker, by the method of experimental reason, adding, through publication in the academies of learning, verifiable truths to the achievement of the past, the promise of the future. a14) b14) 14) Same, Melk courtyard with S. Nepomuk (CGB '59): + V detail Same, Melk, interior, Church (CGB '59) Same, Melk, interior of the Dome (CGB '59) Music: Again, same Buxtehude, close, but starting earlier In regard to the question already raised: How is motion conserved through physical exchanges? — nothing could reach further than Leibniz' three equations, of which the last — for live-force, where velocity squared matches the height through which a weight falls (the work to lift it there) — led to a cosmic insight: that such absolute force (to be called energy) is the eternal ground of the world; that even when friction damps the momentum of a body, there is no loss, but a complex exchange between the motion of the whole and of its molecular parts. Leibniz: But this loss of total force, this failure of the third equation, does not detract from the inviolable truth of the law of the conservation of the same force in the world. For that which is absorbed by the minute parts (as heat) is not absolutely lost to the universe, though lost for...the concurrent bodies. (close Buxtehude) Va15) b15) Vc15) d15) Ve15) 15) 5/1994 Schlüter, 1698-1700, Chained Captive, from the Great Electors' Monument, Berlin; first, video detail Schlüter, 1698, One of 21 Masks of Dying Warriors, Zeughaus, Berlin (video, detail only) Again Schlüter, another Chained Captive, from Electors' Monument, Berlin Schlüter, 1705, Death, from the Sarcophagus of Queen Sophia Charlotte, Dom, Berlin Schlüter, 1700, Tomb: Death and Child, detail, Nikolaikirche, Berlin A. Schlüter, c. 1698, another one of 21 Masks of Dying Warriors, Zeughaus, Berlin 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �10 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Yet in Andreas Schlüter, chief architect and sculptor of that northern Germany, what Wagnerian premonition disposed his carving to chained captives, hooded figures of death, dying Warriors from Germanic myth? Music: Buxtehude, c. 1700(?), Passacaglia in D minor (close), Nonesuch H-71188 So in Buxtehude's B-Minor Passacaglia, the ground-bass celebration of order rounds on itself in a chromatic brooding, to evoke Bach's Passacaglia in C Minor. And even in a science throned over Baroque debacle and vagrant moods — in Leibniz' proclamation of active force as the substance of change, there lurks the Eleatic axiom of changelessness, Aristotle's: "surely the substratum cannot cause itself to move." The vital mystery once invoked to stir inert matter, becomes a reservoir, powerless to stir itself. The Deist clockwork yawns over an entropic void which the Romantic century would unveil — the contradiction that energy, though eternal, can only run down hill, to a stagnation in which it denies its name. a16) 16) 16a) Rigaud, 1701, Louis XIV, Louvre, Paris; + V details Double: [A] Again, a16, Rigaud, Louis XIV; and [B] David, 1810-12, Napoleon in his Study, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. Right side of Double, David's Napoleon; here, video shows six details only, then returns to 16, the double In France the century of Voltaire (the rational utopia of Eldorado at its core — though Candide had fretted there) begins with the formal assertion of this Louis XIV, 1701, who sustains the robe of Divine Right not by the old Judgment Throne, from which he has risen, but on his own high-heeled legs, pillars of the rational pomp that was pouring, in all the arts, from Versailles over Europe — "the agent force... in bodies themselves..." That century breaks into the 19th with the more pragmatic boast of Napoleon, Faustian self-maker — the painter David well aware of ringing the changes on Rigaud's Louis. This emperor also rises, his sheathed sword on the heraldic honey-bee chair, working throne of Rousseau's Lawgiver. Had not Rousseau's 1762 Social Contract voiced the world's most ironic prophecy? — 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �11 C.G. Bell Symbolic History There is still one country in Europe capable of receiving laws: it is Corsica… I have a presentiment this little island will some day astonish Europe. The candle has burnt to a nub; the clock stands at 4:13; under the Egyptian lion desk lies Plutarch's tome of the past, of the great Greeks and Romans; above, just signed, and the goose quill pen laid down, is the scroll of the Napoleonic Code. Between those great thrusts of Baroque and Revolution, the 18th century enacts its civilized play. 17) Wm. Hogarth, 1743-4, Marriage à la Mode #4, The Countess' Levée, National Gallery, London; + V details and a return to the whole (where slide show has only one detail, a17, left of center, and then the whole) Music: Boyce, pub. 1760, Symphony #1 in B flat, from closing Allegro, BG S-70668 — Thus in the England of Boyce and Hogarth: this fourth scene from Marriage à la Mode, the Levée of the Countess (that woman in the yellow dress having her hair curled), a rich alderman's daughter married to a sickly Earl (the fop who sips chocolate, his hair also in curlers, though the music, with the other lady's raptures, would seem enough to curl it) — the Countess's lover, a lawyer who will kill the Earl in a duel, lounges on a sofa; a black boy in front points to a statue of horns; on the wall Correggio's Io, cloudembraced, instructs the clandestine in their play. (end Boyce) Va18) 18) 18a) Fragonard, c. 1770(?), The Two Lovers, Leopold Rey Collection, Sion Fragonard, c. 1776, La Chemise enlevée, Louvre, Paris; first, video detail Fragonard, c. 1770(?) The Peeping Children, Louvre, Paris Music: Rameau, Impatience, Cantata, 2nd recitative, "Les Oiseaux," (78 Album) Technichord 2 In Fragonard's Paris, as to the sensuous seduction of Rameau, Cupid pulls off madam's nightgown — a curious art-focus in 1767, France already on the whirls sloping toward Revolution. (close Recitative) 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �12 C.G. Bell 19) V19a) 19b) V19c) Symbolic History Luis Paret, c. 1770(?), Charles III dining before his court, Prado, Madrid; first, video detail Tiepolo, 1764-66, "Apotheosis... Spanish Monarchy," detail, Royal Palace, Madrid Again, Paret, Charles III dining, detail, Prado, Madrid Watteau, 1717, Embarkation for Cythera, detail of a couple, Paris, Louvre Music: Soler, c. 1770(?), from Concerto No. 1 for two organs, opening, Col. MS 7174 In the Spain of Scarlatti's devotee Soler, and about the time of the American Revolt, Paret shows an Enlightened Charles III dining before his court. Above, Tiepolo's frescoes carry the glorification of the Spanish line from Baroque Italy into the apprenticeship of Goya. To the cost, the irreality, of keeping up the old-regime façade around the would-be royal liberals of the Age of Reason, summon Lord Chesterfield: It is an active, cheerful, officious, seducing good-breeding that must gain you the good will and first sentiments of the men and the affections of the women. You must carefully watch and attend to their passions, their tastes, their little humours and weaknesses, and aller... au devant. (fade Soler) Va20) b20) 20) Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1748, Self-Portrait, National Portrait Gallery, London (video: detail only) Ant. Ralph Mengs, c. 1775, Self-Portrait, Hermitage, Leningrad Pieter von Verschaffelt, c. 1760(?), Bust of Himself, Historisches Museum, Speyer; + V detail Music: Haydn, 1764, Symphony No.22 in E flat ("Der Philosoph"), HSLP 1009 But something else was coming to birth: an immediate declaration of human value, Burns: "A man's a man for a' that"; and "That man to man the world o'er/ Shall brithers be for a'that." We read it in this self-portrait by the sculptor Verschaffelt, active in Mannheim while the symphony was developing there, when Haydn, following the Mannheim lead, wrote his 22nd, called "The Philosopher". 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �13 C.G. Bell 21) V21a) V21b) V21c) 21d) Symbolic History Alan Ramsay, 1766, Portrait of J.J. Rousseau, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh Gainsborough, 1754, Self-Portrait, Marchioness of Cholmondeley's Collection, Norfolk Fragonard, 1773-76, The Donkey's Stable, Veil-Picard Collection, Paris Ramsay, 1754-55, The Painter's Wife, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh Liotard, c. 1765(?), Portrait of the Artist, Museum of Art and History, Geneva The man who gave his name to all that was Jean Jacques Rousseau. Does the portrait by the Scot, Ramsay, hint at the complexities under Rousseau's appeal to Nature? (On the Origin of Inequality) That men are bad; my sad experience proves. But man is naturally good, as I have shown... It is the spirit and inequality of society, that perverts our natural inclinations. (Emile) Respect childhood... Allow nature to act in her way... Is it nothing to be happy? To jump, play and run?… What would you think of a man who, in order to turn his whole life to profitable account, would never take time to sleep?... Reflect that childhood is the sleep of reason. (Confessions) How came it to pass that I, a man of naturally expansive soul, ...consumed by the desire of loving, without ever having been able to satisfy it completely, saw myself approaching the portals of old age, and dying without having lived. (fade "The Philosopher") 22) V22a) V22b) 22c) 5/1994 Fuseli 1799-1801, Silence, from the destroyed Melancholy, Kunsthaus, Zurich Anne Girodet, 1808, The Funeral of Atala, Louvre, Paris J. Vernet, 1777, The Storm, Calvert Mus., Avignon John Flaxman, c. 1780(?), Chatterton takes Poison from the Spirit of Despair, Private Collection, England 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �14 C.G. Bell 22d) 22e) Symbolic History Carstens, 1795, Night with her Children, Sleep and Death, Schlossmuseum, Weimar Canova, c. 1818-22, Lament for Abel, Gipsoteca, Possagno Impulse so trusted opens through Revolution to Romantic: to Fuseli's turn of the century Silence from his destroyed Melancholy. It leads in France to Chenier: Pleurez, doux alcyons!... la jeune Tarentine! Son beau corps a roulé sous la vague marine... In England Cowper compares his life of insanity and despair with that of another castaway: No voice divine the storm allay'd No light propitious shone; When, snatch'd from all effectual aid, We perish'd, each alone: But I beneath a rougher sea, And whelm'd in deeper gulphs than he. In Germany the brooding of Klopstock passes from Hölty Und die einsame Träne Bebt mir heisser die Wang' herab! — to Goethe: Wer nie sein Brot mit Tränen asz... Der kennt euch nicht, ihr himmlischen Mächte. In Italy, Alfieri's tragic preoccupation vaults over 1800 to Leopardi: Amaro e noia La vita, altro mai nulla; e fango è il mondo. 23) V23a) 23b) 5/1994 Telescopes, 1609 and 1897, Galileo's and Yerkes 40"x64', Splendour of the Heavens, p. 41 Harvey, 1619(?), Experiments on a bandaged arm, from Circulation of the Blood Air Pressure, 1654 (pub. 1672): Demonstration of Guericke's air pump against the pull of horses, detail of engraved plate 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �15 C.G. Bell V23c) 23d) V23e) V23f) 23g) Symbolic History Astronomy and Physics 1676 (pub. 1730): Roemer, Design for "The Finite Velocity of Light", from the moons of Jupiter as timed across Earth's orbit Newcomen, c. 1726(?), Early Pumping Steam Engine Galvani, 1792, Experiments with Animal Electricity Lavoisier, late 18th cent., Reconstruction of his Lab, Conservatoire Mus., Paris Herschel, 1789, 40-foot Telescope, Slough, England But science (from Galileo's telescopes to the Yerkes refractor, 40 inches by 64 feet) held to the course Pascal had long discounted: we burn... to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. 1609 and '18: Kepler's Laws; 1619: Harvey proves the Circulation of the Blood; 1637: Descartes' Analytical Geometry; 1654: Guericke's air pump against the pull of horses; thereafter, his electric machine; 1660: Boyle's Gas Laws; 1676: Roemer clocks light from the moons of Jupiter; 1678: Huyghens, the theory of light as waves; 1687: Newton's Principia; 1675-1717, his corpuscular optics; 18th century: Newcomen's steam engines with Watt's improvements; 1735 and after: Linneus, Systema Naturae; 1745 and after: Electricity pursued by Franklin, Galvani, Volta; 1749: Buffon, Newtonian synthesis of cosmic evolution; 1774: Priestley; 1777: Lavoisier — an oxygen-based chemistry of combustion; 1789: Herschel's great reflector; 1798: Cavendish measures the gravitational constant to weight the universe; end of the 18th century: La Place, probability, Celestial Mechanics: God? "No need for that hypothesis". 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �16 C.G. Bell 24) V24a) 24b) V24c) V24d) V24e) Symbolic History Starlight, prism and spectrum, from Book of Knowledge, Vol. 9 Astronomy: Full Moon as Photographed by Apollo VIII Rainbow, 1981, East, from 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe (CGB '81) Aurora Borealis, photo by Tarnjörn Lörgren Goya, 1788-89, Blind Man's Bluff, Prado, Madrid Photograph of Lightning bolt (cf. Nature, slide 59) A tower to the Infinite. (This imagined spectrum from the light of a star.) Yet the romantic close of the century was also to trigger in the science of thermodynamics which the older Carnot, strategist of the Revolution, would leave to his son, the dilemma foreseen in Leibniz, that indestructible energy may go slack. So for the theology of rational science, Pascal had the last word: "But our whole groundwork cracks and the earth opens to abysses." — the particle-wave ambivalence of light deeply bedded in 18th century (in England from Newton to Young); the ambivalence of matter as atom and field, working from Galvani toward the assumed stretched bands of Faraday's electric force, in void. The two stories we seem to be telling of 18th century — one an art vagary of reason's mockery and heart's search, the other a scientific dream of unlimited progress — begin to converge. Va25) 25) F.E. Juvarra, 1717-31, detail of Basilica di Superga, on a mountain near Turin Guatemalan Baroque, 1638, 1668, and 1728, Señora del Carmen, Antigua (CGB '74) Through the first quarter of the century, while Melk was raising High Baroque over the Danube, and the great vaunt was flowing out everywhere, from Bernini and Borromini of Rome, through Juvarra in Turin and the Churrigueresque in Spain, all the way to this earthquake-destroyed, 1728-rebuilt, and again destroyed Señora del Carmen in Guatemalan Antigua — through those same years, Va26) Vb26) Vc26) 5/1994 J.B. Pater, c. 1725, Fête Champêtre, Dublin (CGB '74) Lancret, 1720, Dance in Pavilion, Schloß Charlottenburg, Berlin Watteau, 1720, L'Enseigne de Gersaint, detail, from the left side, Louvre, Paris (all the above are replaced in the slide show by d26) 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �17 C.G. Bell d26) 26) V26a) Symbolic History Lancret c. 1720(?), Le Moulinet, detail of the lower half, Staatliche Gal., Berlin; from this, video shows a couple only, bottom right Same, the whole; here video shows only the lower half Rigaud, 1735, Pres. Gaspard de Gueidan playing bagpipe, Mus., Aix-enProvençe; digital variies this sequence, dropping some V slides Music: Fr. Couperin, 1722, 4th Concert Royal, beginning of last movement, Nonesuch 73014 ("Courts") Couperin in Paris, with Watteau and his followers, here Lancret, were refining the sentiment and fragile wit of Rocooco. In England Congreve marks the transition (Millamant's contemplation of marriage in The Way of the World, 1700): My dear liberty, shall I leave thee?...'tis more than impossible — positively, Mirabell, I'll lie abed in a morning as long as I please. Mirabell: Then I'll get up in a morning as early as I please. Millament: Ah! idle creature, get up when you will... Pope polished the verse — Snuff, or the fan, supply each pause of chat, With singing, laughing, ogling, and all that — which Gay would apply in "Trivia": The ladies gayly dres'd, the Mall adorn With various dyes, and paint the sunny morn... You'll sometimes meet a fop, of nicest tread, Whose mantling peruke veils his empty head... Him, like the miller, pass with caution by, Lest from his shoulder clouds of powder fly... a27) 27) 5/1994 (fade Couperin) Magnasco, 1731, Church Thieves attacked by skeletons, Chiesa di S. Maria Assunta, Campomorto (Pavia); + V detail Magnasco, 1720-30, Monks in a Landscape, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; video: upper detail only 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �18 C.G. Bell 27a) V27b) Symbolic History Magnasco, c. 1720-30, Storm scene with fleeing Monks, detail, Brera, Milan; video: closer detail (then video returns to a lower detail of 27) Hogarth, 1733-35, Debtors' Prison, Soane Museum, London Music: Tartini, c. 1745, from Siciliana, Sonata #2 for Violin and Cello SAWT-9592-B But the 18th-century break sharpened also within Rococo a fierce counterpole to the courtly; Magnasco's irony of monks in the old skull-caves of earth, the dissonances, here of Devil's-trill Tartini, speak what from darker Baroque (Dryden) — When I consider life, 'tis all a cheat... I'm tired of waiting for this chemic gold, Which fools us young, and beggars us when old — through Swift (as of religious sects, worshippers of wind, inspired — literally, blown into) — with every man a pair of bellows applied to his neighbors breech... after certain gripings, the wind and vapours issuing forth, having first, by their turbulence and convulsions within, caused an earthquake in man's little world, distorted the mouth, bloated the cheeks, and given the eyes a terrible kind of relievo. At which junctures all their belches were received for sacred, the sourer the better, and swallowed with infinite consolation by their meager devotees — clouds to Johnson's "Vanity of Human Wishes": That life protracted is protracted woe… 28) (fade Tartini) Diezenhofer, Hildebrandt, etc., 1711 ff., Pommersfelden, Stables (CGB '52); + V detail Music: Bach, 1721, 3rd Brandenburg Concerto, from close of lst movement, London LPS 226 In Bach's Germany, Rococo innovation, courtly or splenetic, is carried, like the Brandenburg Concerti, on the great surge of residual Baroque. Conceive the Palace of Pommersfelden from the pomp of these stables! 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �19 C.G. Bell Symbolic History 29) Same, Pommersfelden, main house across the grounds (CGB '52); + V detail of reflection (the two adagio chords) 30) Same, Pommersfelden, inner detail of the Banqueting Hall (CGB '52); + V closer detail of the ceiling (closing allegro) Though even in Bach, or in the decoration of Pommersfelden — within the might of Baroque — the style-lightening of Rococo is brilliantly advanced. (fade 3rd Brandenburg) a31) 31) Same, Pommersfelden, Stairhall (CGB '52); + V details G.R. Donner 1735, St. Martin and the Beggar, from High Altar, Dom, Pressburg; + V details Music: Bach, c. 1720(?), from 2nd movement, Concerto in D for 2 Violins and Orchestra, SAWT 9508-A Ex Yet through that extravagance and preciosity, the classical and pre-romantic was being explored — a melodious interfolding in which Bach's Largo of the Concerto for two violins seems to outdistance the works of his sons. In Viennese sculpture, Donner's St. Martin and the Beggar, cast in lead, so rounds its conscious contours. In poetry Klopstock's Messias (in classical hexameters, the first three cantos, published in 1748, the others thereafter) evokes out of Milton such neo-Attic Baroque: "Seraph, I will descend... Follow me, my chosen, in your beauty from afar." — (CGB) "Seraph, ich steig' hinunter... Folge mir, mein Erwählte, in deiner Schöne von fern nach." (Canto 5) 32) V32a) V32b&c) Donner, 1739, detail from Andromeda Fountain, Altes Rathaus, Vienna Donner, 1737-39, River Goddess, from Neuer Markt Fountain, Vienna (CGB '77) Same, a River God, Variant views (CGB '77) Donner's Andromeda is a fountainhead of that swelling idealism. "These the seraph freed, and robed their new aspiring forms in deathless radiance" — "Diese verklärte der Seraph und goß unsterbliche Strahlen/ Um den neuen, schwebenden Leib." 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �20 C.G. Bell 33) Symbolic History Zimmermann, 1755-57, Ceiling, Gods of Olympus, Great Hall, Nymphenburg, Munich; + V detail (CGB ‘59) Zimmermann's last ceilings melt Baroque and Rococo, Renaissance and Classical into a rainbow of academic romance. (Klopstock): On the other verge of the road of suns raised himself Upon his gleaming chariot, Eloa, against whose coming Through all heaven beat a thousand-voiced acclaim That rang about the golden axles. Behind him like clouds Billowed his robes and streaming hair... (CGB) 34) V34a) V34b) (fade Bach) French, 1762, Frontispiece of de Fontenelle's Sur la Pluralité des Mondes (video: center detail only) Composite photo of Milky Way Galaxy (cf. Now III, C of slide 154a) M83: Spiral Nebula in Centaurus (Malin photo); then video returns to the whole of 34, + another detail Even the new astronomy is whipped into Klopstock's God and Seraph journey from heaven to earth: The Almighty passed the star-field named the Milky Way, (A thousand stellar miles, the space from sun to sun His measure) as he neared a world where men also Were found, like us, but innocent, immortal forms... (CGB) Kant's 1755 Island Universes are nebular systems of suns, like our Milky Way; so this 1762 edition of de Fontenelle's Sur la Pluralité des Mondes floats the solar system in a cloud of angel-faced stars, each circled by planetary worlds. a35) 35) F.X. Schmaedl, c. 1760(?), Bavarian Baroque, Rottenbuch, Bavaria (CGB '59); video: horizontal detail only Same, Pulpit, Rottenbuch, Bavaria (CGB '59); while video shows three details: above, below, and below but closer Music: 5/1994 K.P.E. Bach, 1749, from Magnificat, "Fecit potentiam," Bach Guild552 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �21 C.G. Bell Symbolic History It was within Bach's lifetime that his own sons took up the gallant style of Italy, France, and Mannheim, parallelling (against the weight of the old Baroque) the passionate levity of Rottenbuch Pulpit. Let K.P.E. Bach's Magnificat, composed a year before Johann Sebastian's death, rear the expressive arch to Haydn and Mozart. (fade "Fecit Potentiam") For Va36) Schmaedl, Rottenbuch; video returns to a closer detail of a35 36) Same, Pulpit, detail of Luke (CGB '59); + V detail Music: K.P.E. Bach, Magnificat, continued, from "Deposuit", Bach Guild552 In the St. Luke of that pulpit, Baroque force, by the always more personal involvement of the advancing century, anticipates Storm and Stress. (fade "Deposuit") 37) 37a) Maulbertsch, c. 1755, Holy Family with Saints, Österreichische Galerie, Wien Same, horizontal detail (which video replaces with three details) Music: K.P.E. Bach, Magnificat, continued, Esurientes (2nd repeat, vocal) BG-552 In painting Maulbertsch is the master of that search, where the base of Italian chiaroscuro is stretched and whirled on the agitations of person. (close "Esurientes" vocal) 38) Joh. Mich. Fischer, 1732-39, Façade of Diessen, Bavaria (CGB '59); + V details Music: K.P.E. Bach, Magnificat, "Esurientes", BG-552 continued, Instrumental close of As emotion ebbs, Philip Emanuel's instrumental texture is as suave as Johann Michael Fischer's caressing of Diessen façade. (close "Esurientes" section) a39) Vb39) 5/1994 D. and J.B. Zimmermann, 1746-54, Die Wieskirche (among fields and snowy mountains; CGB '86) Same, Die Wieskirche, from the south-west (CGB '86) 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �22 C.G. Bell 39) Symbolic History Same, detail of West front, sun and shadows (CGB '86) Music: Haydn, 1766, "Great" Organ Mass No. 2 (E flat), opening, Deutsche Gram. LPM 18 756 The Meadow Church (Die Wieskirche, finished 1754), is Zimmermann's final gem of openness and delight. Haydn had written his first mass while it was building; the second, the "Great" Organ Mass (whence this Kyrie) followed the church by 12 years. Amazing, in a cult and tradition so ornately sectarian, heart's appeal to nature. (fade Haydn) Va40) Vb40) 40) Same, interior, detail: windows, columns, and fanciful arches Same, interior, stucco and fresco (CGB '59) Same, wide angle view upward toward choir (CGB '86) Music: Mozart, 1779, "Coronation" Mass (C Major), Benedictus to Hosanna, Nonesuch H-1041 To enter the Wieskirche, is to pursue Rococo almost to the Coronation extravagance and joyful immediacy of Mozart. (end Hosannah) Va41) 41) V41a) Cuvillies, 1734-39, Hall of Mirrors, Allegory of Water and Fishing, stucco detail, Amalienburg, Nymphenburg, München Same, wider view, mirrors and ornament, (CGB '59; cf. Bach a65) Same, through a door (CGB '59); to which video adds another detail of slide 41 Music: J.S. Bach, from Prelude, Fugue, and Allegro in E-flat (interlude in fugue), (Landowska) RCA-V-LM 1217 (1) (or VIC 1594) In the hunting lodge of the Nymphenburg, Cuvillies had brought Rococo lightening to its secular triumph — the silver frosting of a mirrored filigree. But did not the old Bach himself tend that way whenever he touched the harpsichord in the manner of Couperin? (fade Landowska) For the fused polarity of Baroque against Rococo, we go from this hall of the Amalienburg a few miles north, 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �23 C.G. Bell 42) V42a) V42b) Symbolic History Asam Brothers, 1717-35, detail of carved vault, Weltenburg Cloister, Bavaria (CGB '59); first, video closer details Same, whole ceiling, carved border and fresco (video cuts to half) Same, half of the ceiling fresco (CGB '59) Music: Bach, 1709(?), Toccata and Fugue in D minor, close, (Kraft) Vox PL 11-440 to a vault the Asam Brothers were constructing about the same time (1735) at Weltenburg on the Danube. Yet the same Bach whose harpsichord interlude matched the one, in his organ toccatas and fugues, gives the other its strongest cognate. But the stretch from this mighty Baroque (end Toccata and Fugue in D minor) 2nd 41) Again, 41, Amalienburg, wider view; while video shows a lower section of 41 to the weightlessness of Cuvillies, exhibits the 18th century already in Berkeleian flight 2nd 42) Detail of 42; while video pans to a closer detail from the solidarities of Leibniz, of assertive cadence, muscled gesture, intestinal clouds — the whole conscious rhetoric of the formulated earth. 43) French Flamboyant, c. 1510 (on 13th cent.), Frieze of the Sanctuary, St. Pierre, Caen (CGB '74) V43a) Same, Sanctuary, c. 1520 ff., St. Augustine, with a Flamboyant vault (CGB '74) Music: Paumann, c. 1455, "Des klaffers neyden" (Tablature), pos. organ, ARC 3222 It is a winging which might take us back, at least 200 years, to a prior vaulted filigree — the last defiance of space and mass in the lacework of Flamboyant stone (St. Pierre in Caen), with a setting by the 15th-century blind organist, Conrad Paumann, of Nuremberg. (fade Paumann) 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �24 C.G. Bell 44) Symbolic History English, 13th century, 1540, and 1753, Neo-Gothic, Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire (CGB '67); with video details Small wonder the wished revival of the style Congreve had called "rude as Gothic" was already under way. Music: Thomas Arne, 1738, from Comus, Dance of the Naiads, Largo, L'Oiseau-Lyre OLS 141 (side 3) It is always a happy surprise, traveling abroad, to move from the ostentations of the courtly Continent, to the special green of rural England. Is the charm of Lacock Abbey backward or forward looking? A 13th-century monastery was here, which became a Tudor House at the Reformation, yet it was tenderly Gothicized after 1750, and what estate near Bath would so perfectly fit the romance of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey? 45) English revived Gothic, 1740 (from 15th cent.), Blue Drawing Room, St. Michael's Mount, Cornwall; + V detail So Thomas Arne, enamoured of Elizabethan music, Shakespeare and Milton, was reviving and exploring, as in his 1738 Comus, a style of pre-romantic and ballad simplicity. About the same time, at St. Michael's Mount in Cornwall, the 15th-century Lady Chapel of another ancient priory became such a neo-Gothic parlor as any of Austen's heroines 60 years later might have visited in demure pursuit of eligible Knightleys, Bingleys, Brandons, Bartrams, Wentworths. (close Arne Dance) 46) French Romanesque Castle, 11th cent., Loches, Keep, Indre-et-Loire V46a, ‘95 Edit) R. Haldingham, c. 1290, Mappa Mundi, Hereford Cathedral V46b) English, 1066 ff., Scolland's Hall, Richmond, England To have come, from the 11th-century castle, to that house, is as clear a progress as in experimental science — however we reserve the right to prefer the castle (provided we are not required to live there); indeed, some have similarly chosen the God-synthesis of medieval thought (though Pound said "Aquinas map not valid now") over a technology which cannot deal with its atomic and industrial wastes. Maybe, with wall-hangings and the fire-logs of a forested land, they kept cheerful enough in those halls and towers (though we can hardly conceive it); 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �25 C.G. Bell 47) Symbolic History English Paladian (C. Campbell), 1722, Stourhead House, Wiltshire (CGB '59); + V detail but the Palladian delight of Stourhead, which Fielding would turn to Tudor brick, preserves from 1722 what our millionaires might still aspire to live in. (Though heating and plumbing, even since the Jamesian era, have advanced, again, at some cost to the globe — the question of science and progress being always the hidden cost.) Va48) 48) 48a) 48b) English Paladian (Roger Morris), 1736-37, Bridge, Wilton House, Wiltshire Thomas Gainsborough, c. 1751-2, The Painter, his Wife and Daughter, Marchioness of Cholmondeley, Houghton Same, detail Gainsborough, c. 1780(?), Margaret Gainsborough, National Gallery, London Music: Thomas Arne, Comus (continued), Ballad: "On every hill in ev'ry grove" Anyway, as the Palladian and Gothicizing scene of musical Arne and Fielding would remind us, the familiar mode of freehold humanity had been made lovable, from early in the century, by Addison's Sir Roger de Coverley — a country right-mindedness which reaches through novels and essays, the early paintings of Gainsborough (this about 1751, the artist with his young wife and daughter), to Goldsmith, who spreads it over Europe, and to Fanny Burney, whose Evelina prepares for the balanced good of Austen: (fade Arne) Persuasion: There they returned again into the past, more exquisitely happy, perhaps in their re-union, than when it had been first projected; more tender, more tried, more fixed in a knowledge of each other's character, truth, and attachment; more equal to act, more justified in acting. a49) 49) P. Longhi, 1740-45, Artist Painting a Lady's Portrait, whole, National Gallery, Dublin (CGB '74); first, video detail Same, Lady's Portrait, detail (CGB '74); video: closer detail only Music: 5/1994 Haydn, 1755, Trio of Quartet Op. 1, #6, Haydn Quartet Society 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �26 C.G. Bell Symbolic History It is a study in the dialectic of one-many, to compare Pietro Longhi's Venetian mid-century family scene (a lady escorted by her husband for her portrait). How little it shares in the English openness of manner, yet how unmistakably is embraced in a single horizon of enlightened emergence from the artifice of court. And could not Haydn's plucked-string trio from an Opus 1 Quartet have moved either way — to the Italy from which it was inspired, or to the England which would make Haydn's music a household entertainment? (fade Haydn trio) a50) 50) Fr. Boucher, 1759, Pan and Syrinx, National Gallery, London Boucher, 1748, The Triumph of Venus, National Museum, Stockholm; first, video detail Music: Rameau, c. 1740(?), from L'Impatience, Air gai, Technichord T-2 (78) Meanwhile, even in Paris, bastion of absentee noble play, of which Lord Chesterfield: I should have thought that Lord , at his age, with his parts and address, need not have been reduced to keep an opera whore in such a place as Paris, where so many women of fashion generously serve as volunteers — Boucher sweetening the opulence of Baroque for the Venus Triumph of all those highborn volunteers; Rameau seductively reclaiming the heroic cantata; 51) J. H. Fragonard, c. 1765, The Bathers, Louvre, Paris (CGB '80); first, video detail (fade Rameau) Fragonard (past Boucher) subliming into pure fluff the copulative drive of flesh, as if revolution and all could be staved off by nymphic sprees — 52) 52a) Boucher, 1750, Landscape with a Mill, Musée, Orleans; first, video detail Mill House by Mique and H. Robert 1783, Marie Antoinette's Hamlet, Park of the Petit Trianon, Versailles, France even in that Paris, must not romantic wish have been as deeply seated as Rousseau was read, repudiated, and admired? Boucher himself, between sports of sea-girls, brushes his 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �27 C.G. Bell Symbolic History 1750 Mill with the sighs that would lead Marie Antoinette to her cottage retreat in Versailles park. Let it box the compass that Rousseau in his operas (for he also wrote music) seems to outdo Fragonard; Va2nd 51) Vb2nd 51) Fragonard, 1780's, The Stolen Kiss, Hermitage, Leningrad Fragonard, c. 1770(?), The Two Lovers, close detail, Leopold Rey Collection, Sion (cf. Va18) For 2nd 51) Fragonard, c. 1785, The Fountain of Love, The Wallace Collection, London Music: J.J. Rousseau, 1752, Le Devin du Village, "Avec l'objet de mes Amours," AS 54 (fade) For 2nd 52) Boucher, 1755, Landscape with a Water Mill, National Gallery, London; first, video detail Music: Rameau, 1737, Minuet from Castor and Pollux, Decca CA 8153 (78) while witty Rameau, as in this minuet from Castor and Pollux, wakes the strain that would flow through Glück and Mozart into a century of longing. 53) Chardin, c. 1745 (or 1733?), Soap Bubbles, National Gallery, Washington D.C.; first, video detail Chardin, indeed, through two generations of court frolic, had quietly pursued the plastic composition of fables of the heart. (fade Rameau) 1st 54) Joseph Vernet, c. 1745, The Ponte Rotto (Rome), Louvre, Paris; first, video detail Before mid-century, the cult of the antique, of which Winkelmann would become spokesman, was drawing pre-romantics to Rome. Vernet sketched the Ponte Rotto in 1745. And it was he who, at the same time, 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �28 C.G. Bell Symbolic History For 1st 55) Richard Wilson, 1755(?), View of Rome from Villa Medici, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (cf. V1st 55) guided the deeper genius of Richard Wilson into landscape. The radiance of Cuyp is recovered, in inwardness — as in Kant, will secures what pure reason had forfeited. In music, the first fruit of that revival is Gluck's Orpheus, with the wistful dance of Elysian spirits. V2nd 54) Again, Vernet, Ponte Rotto, closer detail (while slide show goes at once to 2nd 55) Music: Gluck, 1762, Orfeo ed Euridice, Act II, Che puro ciel, London LL 924 (B) In English poetry, Gray's "Elegy" still breathes that solemn hush: (1750) 2nd 55) Richard Wilson, 1760(?), Oil sketch: River with Ruins, National Museum, Wales 2nd 55a) Same, central detail 2nd 55b) Christian G. Schütz, c. 1770, Valley of the Main with Thunderstorm, Neue Pinakothek, München (CGB '59); + V detail, from V2nd 55c (to which video adds from 2nd 55, R. Wilson, a detail, far left) The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea, The plowman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me. Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight And all the air a solemn stillness holds, Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight, And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds; Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tow'r The moping owl does to the moon complain Of such as wand'ring near her secret bow'r Molest her ancient solitary reign... Collins had caught it in the "Ode to Evening" (1746): Then lead, calm vot'ress, where some sheety lake 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �29 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Cheers the lone heath, or some time-hallow'd pile Or upland fallows grey Reflect its last cool gleam. (fade Orfeo and skip to chorus) a56) 56) Gainsborough, c. 1785, Landscape with a Bridge, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; + V detail Gainsborough, c. 1785, Landscape, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City (CGB '74); + V detail (One of Gainsborough's misty late landscapes here enacting the Ode): But when chill blust'ring winds, or driving rain, Forbid my willing feet, be mine the hut That from the mountain's side, Views wilds, and swelling floods, And hamlets brown, and dim-discover'd spires, And hears their simple bell, and marks o'er all Thy dewy fingers draw The gradual dusky veil. Winckelmann's Greek mode become the mode of nature, the people's mode of feeling and earth, the romantic classicism of Goethe's Herrmann und Dorothea, or of Wordsworth's appeal to rustic life and the language of men. (fade Gluck's Orfeo) Va57) b57) 57) George Stubbs, 1770, White Horse Frightened by a Lion, Walker Gallery, Liverpool; + V detail Stubbs, 1765, Lion Attacking a Horse, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven Stubbs, 1769, A Lion Devouring a Horse, Tate Gallery, London; + V detail Music: Haydn, 1772, from Fugue for 4 subjects, 4th movement of C Major Quartet, 0p. 20 #2, (Tartrai) Qualiton SL PX 11-332a (last twofifths) In the polar reversal by which Cartesian reason, turned to Deistic clockwork and courtly pose, unseats itself and points to the intuitive successor (an action opened by Berkeley and climaxed by Kant — Swift near the beginning, where reason drives the man mad; Paine toward the end, mad for an Age of Reason), in that scrimmage under the 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �30 C.G. Bell Symbolic History polite surface of the world, the roofed unconscious of Blake's creative Hell, where Haydn was revitalizing the fugue as a ground of struggle, and George Stubbs (1769 Lion Devouring a Horse) turned animal realism to savage symbol — there everything splits from itself and fights on both sides. (close Haydn Fugue) 58) 58a) Sir Joshua Reynolds, c. 1765(?), Portrait of Dr. Johnson, Tate Gallery, London; + V detail Reynolds, c. 1776, Dr. Samuel Johnson, Knole, Kent; + V detail Sam Johnson in mid-stream holds the fort of mind, in the knowledge of its own and the world's vanity, sustained by a promise which faith could only credit, reason not confirm. Of course he condemns all romantic and Rousseaunian innovators: "Truth sir, is a cow which will give such fellows no more milk; sir, they are gone to milk the bull." Yet his immortal letter to Chesterfield is, under its formal robes, the most independent outbreak in the language: Seven years, my Lord, have now passed, since I waited in your outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door; during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it, at last, to the verge of publication, without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favour... The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it... Having carried on my work thus far with so little obligation to any favourer of learning, I shall not be disappointed though I should conclude it, if less be possible. with less; for I have been long wakened from that dream of hope, in which I once boasted myself with so much exultation, MY LORD, Your lordship's most humble, most obedient servant, SAM. JOHNSON Va59) Vb59) 5/1994 Daniel Chodowiecki, 1771, engraving, the Artist's Family, National Print Gallery, Berlin Double: [A] Frans Hals, c. 1625, La Bohemienne, Louvre, Paris and [B] Hogarth, 1740(?), Shrimp Girl, National Gallery, London 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �31 C.G. Bell c59) 59) 59a) Symbolic History Jean-Baptiste Greuze, 1774, The Twelfth-Cake (detail), Musée Fabre, Montpelier (video takes detail from 59, whole) Same, Twelfth-Cake, whole Double: [A] Greuze, c. 1765, The Morning Prayer, Musée Fabre, Montpelier, and [B] Greuze, c. 1768, The Broken Pitcher, detail, Louvre, Paris (video takes these singly from V59a A and B) In Johnson's circle, Goldsmith published The Vicar of Wakefield in 1766, a novel which took Europe, most of all Goethe's Germany, by storm. Here the plot in the grand manner, where good, ensnared by hypocrisy and evil until the world seems such a vale of dark that only the old appeal beyond time will serve, is suddenly delivered to the vindication of this best of all possible worlds — that Baroque cadence is here stretched to the limit. Within its Leibnizian action, the Vicar and all his family (delivered from prison and oppression) become homespun models of truth and sensibility, calling mannered Europe to such values as Greuze, taking the pulse of his aristocratic clientelle, would enshrine, eight years later, in his picture of "The Twelfth Cake" — almost a pastiche of Goldsmith. In the attempt to recover simplicity in an age of social artifice and irony, only fierce genius can avoid the mawkishness of Greuze (those crouching babes at Morning Prayers, that Pitcher Broken on the spouting phallic lion). 60) V60a) 60b) Double: [A] George Morland c. 1790(?), Soldier's Return, Lady Lever Art Gallery, and [B] A. Brouwer, 1635-8(?), Interior with peasants, Alte Pinakothek, München (video takes these singly, substituting for the Brouwer his Card Players, from the same gallery, see VA and B of 60) Double: A of 60, Soldier's Return, with 60b, Guinea Pigs, both Morland Morland (same date and gallery?) Guinea Pigs (here video shows details only, below and above) So what could we expect of poor George Morland, who wrote his own epitaph "Here lies a drunken dog"? He was sold too short to give even his boozing scenes the Brouwer force of Burns: a merry core O' randie, gangrel bodies In Poosie-Nansie's held the splore To drink their orra duddies... 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �32 C.G. Bell Symbolic History What then when even Burns, in "The Cotter's Saturday Night," slips to the tearful verge: At length his lonely cot appears in view, Beneath the shelter of an aged tree; Th' expectant wee-things, toddlin, stacher through To meet their dad, wi' flichterin' noise and glee. His wee bit ingle, blinkin bonilie, His clean hearth-stane, his thrifty wifie's smile, The lisping infant prattling on his knee, Does a' his weary kiaugh and care beguile, And makes him quite forget his labor and his toil. 61) V61a) V61b) V61c) 61d) Gainsborough, 1777-78, The Honourable Frances Dunscombe, full-length, The Frick Collection, New York City Thomas Rowlandson, 1802, Blood Royal, detail, British Museum, London William Blake, 1794 (copy of 1818), Urizen plate 20, Burning Babe, Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress, Washington D.C. (here video adds a half-length detail of 61, Lady Dunscombe) Gainsborough, 1785-86, Lady Sophia Charlotte Sheffield, National Trust, Waddeson Manor, Bucks (standing figure, from which video draws a halflength detail) Same, Lady Sheffield, detail, head and shoulders, from which video takes a close-up of the face, then returns to a half-length of 61, Lady Dunscombe No social painter of England rose as Goya did, from courtly praise (this Gainsborough Lady Dunscombe), through such irony as Rowlandson's, to Revolutionary vision (as in Blake). If mockery lurks under these robes and studio props, it is not overt; nor would the sitter have claimed the resemblance to Lady Teasle in Sheridan's School for Scandal of the same year: The hypocrite Joseph Surface, seducing her: Ah, my dear madam... 'tis this very conscious innocence that is of the greatest prejudice to you... What makes you run into a thousand little imprudences? — Why, the consciousness of your own innocence... Lady Teasle: So... then I must sin in my own defence, and part with my virtue to secure my reputation? 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �33 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Though even in Sheridan, mockery yields to the Handel cadence of vice discomfited and virtue wed. 62) Thomas Lawrence, c.1810(?), Julia, Lady Peel, Frick Collection, New York City; + V details (cf. Panavue, V62) It would cost the next century a groaning to cast that heroic baggage. Yet in the Frick Gallery there is a room where one may take in, at a glance, Gainsborough's optimism of limitation, and on the other wall, the sensuous vulnerability of Lawrence's Julia, Lady Peel — ripe for Scott's Bride of Lammermoor, for the Brontes' Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, Hardy's Tess, or, in The Return of the Native, Eustacia Vye. The 18th century, by the lure of Voltaire's smile, prone to an infection of heart. 63) Guardi, 1784, Balloon Ascent over the Giudecca Canal, Staatliche Museen, Berlin-Dahlem (video: details only) In Venice the seventy-year-old Guardi shows us a gas balloon rising over the Giudecca Canal, while the beau-monde of what was already Revolutionary Europe, look on, though dressed still in the manner of court — like Goethe and Beethoven when they met the noble party and Goethe bowed and stepped down. Through the play of fashion some defiant giant release is stirring, as from deep in the mineral veins of earth. Proud Beethoven walked on; but it was Goethe's Mephisto who had said: "This puff of hydrogen will do it" — and they were lifted into the air. 64) V64a) 64b) Venetian Gothic, 1424 ff., Doge's Palace, West Façade, Venice (CGB '59) (video: detail only) Same, Doge's Palace, wider view Italian late Gothic, c. 1380-1452 ff., Apse of Milan Cathedral Music: Matteo da Perugia, c. 1400(?), Gloria in Excelsis, OL 1 (78) For the taste of progress go back 400 years, the Doge's Palace, trecento in style, though 1424 and after, with the Ars Nova Gloria of Matteo da Perugia — Italian lateGothic, a style like the Rococo, of cunning complexity — yet how stripped to line and structure, 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �34 C.G. Bell 65) V65a) Symbolic History Andrea (Bonaiuti) da Firenze, acc. 1343-77, Church Militant and Triumphant, detail, Spanish Chapel, Florence (CGB '59) Same, Spanish Chapel, closer detail (CGB '59) how clean of wishful personality; in the symbolic Florence of this Spanish Chapel Allegory of the Church, humanity, as in Chaucer, is keenly emergent: no pompous "all is best," no sentimental longing. 66) Florentine MS Illumination, late 14th cent., Annunciation (Initial R) Add. MS 35254C, British Museum, London; + V details The Annunciation, in this initial from a choirbook, is as reconciled (in all the flare of its decoration) to its creed-given spacelessness, as the faces to their vacancy, or music to its bare fifth intervals. (fade Gloria) 67) V67a) French Rococo, 18th century, Salon of the Chateau de Champs German Rococo, 1745-47, for Frederick the Great, Music Room, Sans-Souci, Potsdam Music: Philibert de Lavigne, c. 1740(?), from Sonata in C for Recorder and Continuo, "La Barssan," start of Rondeau, SAWT-9570-B In the French Rococo salon, the civilized recess is as ornately, as formulably filled as the time-space fabric of material causality, or (under the inventive floreation of recorder delight) the harmonic assertions of the enlightened ground. (fade Rondeau) 68) 68a) François Casanova, 1772, Beauvais Tapestry, Country Pastimes, detail, Mobilier National, Paris (video: closer details only, above and below) English Classical Baroque (James Gibbs), 1737-48, Radcliffe Camera, Oxford (CGB '84); first, for digital, V68a, wider view (Adams) Music: Same as above , but close of Tambourin, SAWT-9570-B In tapestries of "Country Pastimes," our very picnic clownings, our ironies of wit, affirm the plenum of the ordered universe: "All is best, best, best." (end Sonata) 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �35 C.G. Bell Symbolic History But that completion and closure of the phenomenal, that rounding of the wheel, summons the old antagonist. Against the dream of methodic science: that though men (even scientists) may fall in love, despair, kill themselves, or (like Pascal) get religion, still the great tree of knowledge grows — 69) 69a) V69b) 69c) Joseph Wright of Derby, c. 1774, The Old Man and Death, detail, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; first, video closer detail Istrian late Gothic (Vincent of Kostav), 1474, Dance of Death fresco, Guild Church, Beram, Yugoslavia Zurbaran, 1639, Fra Gonzalo de Illescas, detail, skull, etc., on table, Geronimite Monastery, Guadalupe, Spain Piranesi 1743-61, Carceri XIII, engraving, 2nd state Music: Again, Tartini, Siciliana, SAWT - 9592 B (as with slide 27 above) comes a hiss from that very tree: "The fruit of science is death." What is the Age of Reason giving birth to but its own antithesis? But when, with Wright of Derby, 1774, the skeleton appears in the crumbling garden, it is no backward motion. The old Dance of Death was painted on church walls: "Rest of their bones and soul's delivery." It is upon energy now, where all action has reared its eternal claim, that the withering of entropy will fall. Carnot's irreversibility of the physical. Blake: The same dull round, even of a universe, would soon become a mill with complicated wheels. (close Tartini, 2nd phrase) 70) Viennese, c. 1800-10, Astronomical clock, Uhrenmuseum der Stadt Wien; + V details; digital, central detail 1800: a final overflow of the post-Newtonian century — the famous passage from Laplace, with a Viennese Astronomical clock: If an intelligence, for one given instant, recognizes all the forces which animate Nature, and the respective positions of the things which compose it, and if that intelligence is also sufficiently vast to subject these data to analysis, it will comprehend in one formula the movements of the largest bodies of the universe as well as those of the 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �36 C.G. Bell Symbolic History minutest atom: nothing will be incertain to it, and the future as well as the past will be present to its vision. The human mind offers in the perfection which it has been able to give to astronomy, a modest example of such an intelligence. 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �37 C.G. Bell Symbolic History It is what Whitehead (after Faraday's fields had finally led to Indeterminacy) would call "misplaced concreteness." Against the tick of that astronomical clock, against motion's subsiding pool — a71) V71) 71a) V71b) 71c) 71d) 71e) Blake, 1795, color print from design of 1780 or earlier: Glad Day, British Museum, London (slide show, whole; video, detail) Double: [A] Blake, Glad Day (cf. a71); and [B] Blake 1794 (1818 copy), Urizen pl. 18, Los in Flames, Library of Congress, Washington D.C., cf. 71a) B of the double V71: Los in Flames (slide show, whole; video, detail) Blake, c. 1803-05, Ezekiel's Wheels, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Antonio Canova, 1795-1815, Hercules and Lichas, National Gallery of Modern Art, Rome Canova, 1787-93, Cupid and Psyche, Louvre, Paris Blake, 1825-27, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Pl. 1, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (video: two details only, above and below) Blake from the 1790's had raised the Son of Morning — from the only axiomatic source of life as unpredictable, creative paradox: Without contraries there is no progression. What the religious call... Evil... is the active springing from Energy... Energy is Eternal Delight. And when his arm-spread Day turns to Los at the forge of Imagination, sheathed in the battle-fires of energy's operation in the inertial world — however many thereafter might espouse (with conservative Burke) the propriety and balance of an old regime, Blake through Reign of Terror and the dragon-scaling of the Orc Cycle, would still affirm: Bring me my bow of burning gold! Bring me my arrows of desire! For Glück (as for Blake's repudiated Swedenborg), Hell's dissonant outbreak Music: 5/1994 Glück, 1762, Orfeo ed Euridice, from the Taming of the Spirits, Act II, Col-LL 924 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �38 C.G. Bell Symbolic History is to be calmed by successive applications of Orphic harmony. (fade Gluck) How radically Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell has broken with that mid-century. Is it in Mozart, or first with Beethoven that music espouses the Faust compact, Hegel's Passion, the Dionysiac cry of Hölderlin: The rescuer I hear then in the night, hear Him kill as he frees, and beneath, full Of fetid weeds, I see the earth, As by second sight, an enormous fire. (CGB) (Shau ich die Erd', ein gewaltig Feuer.) 72) 72a) J. L. David, 1787, Death of Socrates, cropped, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City (CGB '74); video uses V72, uncropped whole, + V detail David, 1784, The Oath of the Horatii, Louvre, Paris; + V detail In France the ferment had been rising since the 1762 publication of Rousseau's Social Contract: When each citizen is nothing and can do nothing without the rest… it may be said that legislation is at the highest possible point of perfection. An absolute moral law of the cloud-wrapped General Will. In the representations which from about 1783 David gave to Classical scenes of heroism or revolt (tight as if Cartesian formulation could be reèndowed by fiat), we feel the closing in of that "Republic of Virtue": Robespierre: If virtue be the spring of a popular government in times of peace, the spring of that government during a revolution is virtue combined with terror...without which virtue is impotent. Babeuf: a single man on the earth more rich, more powerful than his fellow men... destroys the equilibrium... Perish, if needs be, all the arts, provided real equality abides with us! 73) 5/1994 David, 1794, Self-Portrait in Prison, Louvre, Paris; with video details 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �39 C.G. Bell Symbolic History In 1794 David, briefly imprisoned, painted this baffled self-portrait. Perhaps he felt, with Chenier, in "La Jeune Captive": And even as she, those with her in that place Feared the closing of their earthly course. Though Chenier's death testament would not apply: A certain Andre Chenier was among those five or six whom neither the general frenzy, nor avidity, nor fear, could induce to bend the knee before crowned assassins, to touch hands stained by murders, and to sit down to a table where they drink human blood. ("s'asseoir a la table ou l'on boit le sang des hommes.") Since David came quickly to terms, and would again as Napoleon's court painter. 74) Goya, 1777, The Parasol, Prado, Madrid; + V detail Music: Mozart, 1787, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Romanza, Angel 35098 Only the genius of Goya could wear the richest robes of the artifice it was to revolutionize, making this parasol play of the '70's as poignant as the lighter Mozart: Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. (fade) 75) V75a) 75b) V75c) Goya, 1795-97, Self-portrait, drawing, Metropolitan Museum, New York City; + V detail H. Fuseli, c. 1780, Self-portrait with Chalk, detail, Victoria and Albert Museum, London Fuseli, c. 1785(?), Prometheus, drawing, Kunstmuseum, Basle Fuseli, c. 1800(?), Satan Fleeing from Athuriel's Spear, Cleveland Gallery (CGB '81) Music: Mozart, 1788, Symphony No. 40, from last movement, C-D3S691 By the mid-nineties Goya had loosed the furies we tie in music to Beethoven. Though Mozart, too, in some late works, this G Minor Symphony of 1788, rode the rising storm. 5/1994 (fade Symphony #40) 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �40 C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Beethoven, 1798, Sonata #8, Op. 13, Pathetique in C Minor, (Schnabel) 1st movement, Seraphim ID-6063 While Gauss, discovering Euclid's space of the parallel postulate no more demonstrable than a curved space of hyperbolic asymptotes, wrote the elder Bolyai: If it could be proved that there can be a rectilineal triangle greater than any area, I could demonstrate the whole of Euclid... But however far apart the vertices, the area might fall below a given bound... a76) 76) V76a) David, c. 1794, Death of Bara, detail, Musée Calvet, Avignon Canova, c. 1787, Death of Adonis, second terra cotta model, Gipsoteca Canoviana, Possagno near Treviso Same, first terra cotta model, Gipsoteca, Possagno — a Lobachevskian gulf from which that Bolyai would vainly warn his son: (Pathetique continued) I have traversed this bottomless night, which extinguished all light and joy of my life. I pray you, leave the science of parallels alone. By 1800 Beethoven had not only written the First Symphony, the First Concerto, the first string quartets and the Prometheus Overture, but the Grande Sonata Pathetique, which so overwhelmed his contemporaries. Canova, 1797, answering from Italy the muster of a revolutionary art in almost every country of Europe. (Pathetique continued) 77) 77a) 77b) J. A. Koch, 1796, Waterfall, whole, Kunsthalle, Hamburg; + V 77, Double: details, above and below Same, Waterfall, upper detail (CGB '86) Same, Waterfall, lower detail (CGB '86) 1796: the German Romantic landscape begins with this Koch: the human figure (right) reduced from the shepherd below to an insect-sized being above. (fade Pathetique) 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �41 C.G. Bell Symbolic History The Sublime had appeared in Edmund Burke as a transrational element, born in pain of the Great, Dark and Terrible, yet somehow stronger than its smooth contrary, the Beautiful, founded on pleasure, engendering "in the soul that feeling which is called love". It is the germ of Blake's Angelic and Satanic, of Nietzsche's Apollonian and Dionysian. And what the transition of 1800 would require is the leap from calm balance to the cascade of energy. In Kant, the Sublime almost, but never quite, becomes the pedalpoint of such a modulation: The mind feels itself set in motion in the representation of the sublime in nature; whereas in the aesthetic judgement upon what is beautiful therein it is in restful contemplation. This movement... may be compared... with a rapidly alternating repulsion and attraction produced by one and the same object. (Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, ch. 27) 78) 78a) Turner, 1797, Moonlight — A Study, Tate Gallery, London Same, a central detail; + V closer detail Music: Beethoven, 1798, Pathetique, Op.13, continued, Adagio, (Brendel) Murray Hill S 34564 With Beethoven's Pathetique Adagio and Turner's Moonlight — A Study (1797) — however few were aware, matter in motion was giving ground. What was emergent, from Galvani's electricity and muscle response, Goethe's Metamorphosis of Plants, or Evolution (from the older Darwin to volitional Lamarck) — requires what Whitehead would call "entwined... modal presences". Faraday (1854) My physico-hypothetical notion... accepting the magnet as a centre of power surrounded by lines of force... views these lines as physical lines of power... or as a state of tension... — Things dissolving to force-fields, as under Turner's moon. 1st 79) 79a) Runge, 1799, Self-Portrait (Crayon), Kunsthalle, Hamburg; V, detail only Triple: Portraits: [A] Hegel, c. 1820 [B] Hölderlin, 1792 and [C] Schelling, c. 1810; here V returns to 79, Runge, Self In 1799, the German painter Runge made this glowing crayon of himself. It is not that Baroque confidence has gone under. Wordsworth is at least as certain as Dryden; 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �42 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Beethoven as rapt as Buxtehude. The constructions of space and cause, art, harmony, plot, are retained. That trio of schoolmates, Hegel, Hölderlin, Schelling are no less fired with God in the world than Leibniz was. But there has been a shift of ground. (fade Beethoven Adagio) Hegel might frown if we said: "Voltaire and Rousseau have led you through the scoff of Reason to the trust of Heart. Since Hegel calls his history Reason's actualization in the world. If we protest: "But your reason makes war on itself, works by passion; you forge a dialectic of contradiction" 80) V80a) 80b) Double: [A] portrait of Leibniz, c. 1700, steel engraving; and [B] Solimena, c. 1710, Self Portrait, detail, Uffizi, Florence Detail of the same engraving of Leibniz Again, Solimena, whole self-portrait — how easy for him to remind us that Leibniz (complex as the Solimena of this 1710 self-portrait) had planted contradiction in the very Monad, making a multiplicity of change in that changeless One the primary fact of perception: The passing condition which involves and represents a multiplicity in the unity, or in the simple substance, is nothing else than what is called Perception. Both Liebniz and Hegel soar to giant syntheses. How could they, as men, but use what men have: reason, passion, intuition? Yet those seemingly constant words, man, reason, and the rest, also undergo style-changes. Solimena's formulated claim (undercut by protective irony) 2nd 79 and for 2nd 80) Runge, Self yields in Runge to the risk of romantic dream. Though even the dream takes up the program of the past. 80+1) 80+1a) V80+1b) 80+1c) 80+1d) 5/1994 Lejeune's Voltaire, again 1 Houdon's Rousseau, again B of 1c (cf. V1c) Canaletto, 1754, Rotunda at Ravelagh, National Gallery, London Brunel, 1836-64, Clifton Suspension Bridge, Avon Gorge, Bristol David, 1797-98, General Bonaparte, Louvre, Paris 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �43 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Was Voltaire's smile of mockery, progress, or revolution? At the center of The Wealth of Nations, published 1776, in which Adam Smith launched the science of economics — a book crammed with the ironies of exploitation and capitalist self-seeking, there lurks the "invisible hand," sure pilot of the murderous barque of history (the "agent force" gone beyond bodies themselves): As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it...he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. — As if Pangloss's providence had heaved up into Hegel's cunning war of Reason. "Let us cultivate" — but which garden? 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 43 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 18th Century : Voltaire's Smile, Symbolic History, Part 25 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 25 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_25_18th_Century--Voltaire's_Smile Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/97f8e30053aa4a46990f5c41c5e10065.pdf e1d27cb823ae359e83c996891b828197 PDF Text Text Chairl^s G. Bell, 1260 Canyon Road, or St. John's College Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY: THE HUMAN ARTS - THROUGH SIGHT AND SOUND XXXIV: 1) 1900 Bi Crisis of the Abstract Claude Monet 1882, The Cliff Walk, Art Institute, Chicago MUSIC: Faure 1879, Piano Quartet, 1st mvt close, RCA-ARI 1-0761 If desire is a lack, romantic desire (footnote: cf. the Meno paradox of learning) is loaded... In Monet, in Faur^, in Verlaine, wish is the sensuous inverse of fulfillment: "How blue the sky was, and how great our hope" — "Qui'l etait bleu, le ciel, et grand, I'espoir." This flowered headland cries to the wind the wistful beatitudes of light and air. (fade Faure) ✓ Such poignance Chausson would learn from Faure, though swayed already by the younger Debussy: MUSIC: Chausson 1891-2, soft passage half through 1st mvt. Concerto OP« 21 for Vn, Piano & Str.Qr; Orion 73134 (Mace MC S 9074) (fade) 2) Gustave Moreau 1896-, Jupiter and Semele, Moreau Museum, Paris MUSIC: same Chausson, 1st mvt, near the beginning, forte * Yet the Chausson concerto just paired with Monet, equally swells toward" the. Wagnerian counterpole of Symbolist Moreau — this 1896 Jupiter and Semele, of which the artist wrote: Semele, penetrated by the divine effluence...dies struck by lightning, and with her dies the genius of terrestrial love, the genius with the goat hooves... It is an ascension toward th,e upper spheres... Death on earth and apotheosis in immortality... How far from Renaissance this late revival of its tragic themes. 3) B. Cellini 1553, Perseus -with the Head of Medusa, Loggia della Sig­ nor la, Florence MUSIC: Mhdarra c. 15507, Fantasia (rtaniera de Ludovico, con falsas — ARC 2533-183 (B-5) ' Benvenuto Cellini, by his own account as overcharged a �1900 B - 2 C.G. Bell n revolutionary as any of the Avant Garde, poured the bronze Perseus in 1553, under trials set forth in the Autobiography. After a quarrel with the Duke of Florence ("My lord, you do not understand my art"), he fires the furnaces.' The house roof takes the blaze; a sudden fever drives him to his bed. When rain and _ wind have caked the bronze, a slacker twisted in the shape of an S appears: "You are attempting an enterprise which the laws of art do not sanction, and which cannot succeed." Cellini resurrects, piles on oak, hurls all his pewter in the melt, opens the sluices to an explosion and flash of flame. No man, they say, could have brought it off, only some powerful devil. 'Vulnerable, as Faust. Yet the achieved Perseus is a victory of light, for which Cellini's elation was prayer: "I fell on my knees: '0 God...who didst rise from the dead and ascend to heaven...'" Even the dissonant works of Renaissance, Mudarra's "falsas" . .. ,^ El Greco's Laocoon, have a containment like Lear: "The wheel has «• 4) come full circle, I am here." (end Mudarra) Paul Klee 1916, Stars above Evil Houses, Gustav Zumsteg col'n, Zurich MUSIC: Alban Berg 1926, Presto Delirando f-rom Lyric Suite, (begin --------- then skip) Deutsche Gram., from LPSt 2713066,- Rec.5-a But the new art tears containment in a life-and-death ecstasy, a rite of'passage, where the very record of loss, incapacity, negation, turns by paradox to a yea-frenzy of the absolute. From Rimbaud's "Bateau Ivre" to the first World War, that transformation prevails. And even when trench stalemate had betrayed its dominant Yes to the great recessive and the backlash of Dada was cracking the whip of the absurd — even then, how soon, in Klee's 1916 "Stars over Evil Houses", or the programatic despairs of Schonberg or Berg (this tenebrous Presto Delirando from the Lyric �1900 B 'Bell 3 Suite), how soon Spenglerian fall — "the dance of the dream-led % masses down the dark mountain" — phosphoresces, a self-affirming energy. 5) (fade Berg) Wm. Blake 1799-1800, Bathsheba at the Bath, Tate Gallery, London That going under of the physical and spatial, Blake's art had prophecied: "the world will be consumed in fire...displaying the infinite which was hid." In this 1800 Bathsheba seen by David, the Beulah garden is at once of the Fall ("Cruel sacri­ fices had brought Humanity into a Feminine Tabernacle in the loins of Abraham and David" J 27) and of love's redemption (Bathsheba, Hittite adulteress, on the line to Mary); "O Divine Humanity!__ If I were Pure I should never Have known Thee..." In his solitary precursing of Avant Garde, Blake made Christianity his point of' departure. 6) M.v.Marees 1885, Hesperi^es Triptych, Neue Pinakothek, Munich—(CGB 59) MUSIC: Wagner 1870, Siegfried Idyll (orig.) near close, London LL 525 By 1885, under the sway of Wagner (this Siegfried Idyll) and of Nietzsche — When the Dionysian powers rise with such strength as we are experiencing at present, there can be no doubt that, wrapped in a cloud, Apollo has already descended to us; whose fullest and most beautiful effects coming generation may perhaps behold , Hans von Marees, in this pagan triptych (unconsciously tied to Blake's abstraction), sets the serpent-guarded Eden of renewal in the Hesperides. Nietzsche: "Blessed race of Hellenes What must this people have suffered, that they might become thus beaiitiful! (fade Wagner) How was that stable of Faustian yearnings to be cleansed? 7) P.Cezanne 1900-05, Bathing Women, Mus. of Art, Philadelphia �C.G. Bell With Cezanne the disruption of the personal and formulable crystallizes past loss the dynastasis of that overthrow. perhaps Ives, in New England, of all places, pursued a like purging - as in the First Symphony, written while he was still a student at Yale. At the same time Mallarml's aesthetic of ..pure poetry" broke off (1898) with the picture pages of A Throw of Dice, the poem constellated by the annihilation, LE HAZARD, of its objects^ "collapsed/ by the indifferent neutrality of the - "neutrality identique du gouffre". (gnd I^) Manet 1869- olvmpia, Jen de Paume (LouvrenParis in the abstract stripping of romantic flesh, Manet s 1863 Olympia focussed the art breakthroagh and social outrage. This take-off on Titian.s Venus of Urbino (itself an adulteration of Giorgione.s idea - like Shakespeare's "If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head") short-circuited normal responses, amorous, moral, even practical. As Courbet complained: "flat... like the Queen of Spades coming out of a bath." If Baudelaire played such a role, his lushness of Spleen and Ideal is 'far from the Queen of Spades. 9) j.-A. Ingres 1814. Odalisque. Louvre> Paris (CGB-- 8^ T +- Tnrrnfao 1814» Where the tradition of the 19th In the coolest Ingres, lox'i, century harem Odalisque begins, the style of Fountaineble already swells with seductive touch. Prom Baudelaire the climactrc poem would be "The Jewels", "Les Bijoux" La tres chere etait nue . .. ses bijoux sonores �Bell 1900 B - 5 ...Passion's child, born where the sun Showers triple light, and scorches even the kiss Of his gazelle-eyed daughters. Though this voluptuous dream has hardly entered the bordel of erotic ennui and decadence, which made "The Jewels" be censored from the 1861 Fleurs du Mai: She was recumbent, and let herself be loved... File etait done couchee, et se laissait aimer... -- gP^^bet 1856, Girls by the Seine, Petit Palais, Paris Courbet's 1856 "Girls by the Seine", even more than his nudes, advances the passion-throttle commensurately with Baudelaire: A certain candour coupled with lasciviousness Gave a new charm to her metamorphoses... gysic: 12) Saint-Saens 1875, Samson et Dalila, oboe cadenza to Bacchanal —------- --- RCA Viet LM-184 8 Renoir 1870, Odalisque, Nat. Gal., Washington DC It is the risky coloration which runs in music from Berlioz through Bizet, this Saint-Saens Dalilah, to a whole Scheherazade horizon. (fade Bacchanal) And in this Renoir 1870 Odalisque, the langorous flesh of Courbet’, more exotically clothed, has — at the risk of calm — almost been wallowed in. Whereas Baudelaire even as ravished by Joanne Duval's flashing world of metal and stone...where sound is mingled with light" — ou le son se -mele a la lumiere — il)-- Cezanne 1873, A Modern Olympiar, Louvre. Paris �1900 B C.G. Bell 6 even as he lifts to the adored, couched at the height of the divan, a passion "deep and gentle as the sea, which mounts toward her as toward its cliff" must draw release from that poison. Cezanne would take up the scene in his extraordinary mockery of Manet's Olympia — as if the grotesque were one rescue from the Scylla vortex. BACK; again 12, Renoir 1870, Odalisque, Nat. Gal., Wash. DC. Since rescue was required. The new worship must rear on lubricity itself a paradox of equilibrium — what would drive Renoir from this lush indulgence toward nudes like Maillol's later bronzes, of statuesque repose. Again 13) Cezanne 1873, A Modern Olympia, Louvre, Paris But how — at the condemned erotic bound of "Les Bijoux": Her eyes fixed on me, like a tame tiger. With a vague air of trance she varied her poses -how is Baudelaire to refine the postures of a West Indian mulatto to a contemplative counterpart of the mystical? 14) Van Gogh 1887, Oval Nude, Barnes, Merion; or From Rear, Priv., Paris No artist pl\ambed that Flower of Evil maelstrom more reck­ lessly than Van Gogh after his 1886 arrival in Impressionist Paris. And her arms, her legs, her hips and her loins. Polished, smooth as oil, undulent as a swan. Passed before my eyes, clairvoyant and serene. And her belly and her breasts, clusters of my vine. Et son ventre et ses seins, Oes grappes de ma vigne. In that tactile seizure where, as with Dante's damned, "fear turns into desire", it is no longer the woman flesh-throned on the divan who looks down, but the poet "from crystal rock", at the "hips of antiope", "the torso of a boy" — those posture, which �-r Bell 1900 B 7 advance, as to dislodge his spirit from the.height. Ou calme et solitaire elle s'etait assise. 15) Gauguin 1897, "Nevermore", Courtauld Institute, London If Van Gogh's calm was in question, Gauguin variously assumed the Baudelaire mystique of contemplative Eros, as in this Tahitian "Nevermore" (another variation on Manet's Olympia), "to suggest", he said, "by means of a simple nude, a certain longlost barbarian luxury." But for Baudelaire, a romantic half-century before, the selftransendence of spleen asked a more excruciating stretch. As ' he wrote: into this atrocious book I put all my heart, all my tenderness, all my religion (travestied), all my hatred. On her savage brown complexion the rouge was superb — Sur ce teint fauve et brun le fard etait superbel By a sensuous art of sex, to bewitch pure flame from the devouring cleft itself — 16) H.Matisse 1905, The Gypsy, Mus.de 1'Annonciade, Saint Tropez MUSIC: Stravinsky 1909-10, Firebird, harp etc. 1/3 way. Col.MG 31202 (but orig. version better) what Joyce would do with Molly Bloom's "I will", what Agee with « the girl sleeping on the floor: "as if flame were breathed forth from it" — though these, like Matisse's 1905 Gypsy (or Stravinsky' Firebird), lend the attack of another century to the arcane glow of Baudelaire's last stanza: And the lamp at last being resigned to die. It was the fire alone which lighted the room; Which, every time it uttered a sigh of flame. Flooded with blood that amber-colored skin. Et la lampe s'eta'nt resignee a mourir, Comme le foyer seul illuminait la chambre. �1900 B C.G. Bell Cheque fois qu'il poussait un flamboyant soupir/II inondait de sang cette peau couleur d'ambre (fade Firebird) 17) Matisse 1906, Luxe Calme et Volupte, Col'n H. Matisse (Skira) —A Tantrie prolongatio of fire and blood. In the oil of verbal texture, Baudelaire might seem a romantic decadent; but in the ambiguity of crushed opposites — Spleen become Ideal: the "Harmonie du Soir" that so moved Joyce, where through an evening drowned in curdled blood, memory shines like a monstrance; or in the untranslatable refrain of that other poem Matisse mythologized in 1906, the "Luxury, calm and pleasure , "Luxe, calme et volupte" — in Baudelaire's unmediated elation by negation, we have crashed the gates of the Modern: (Yeats) I must lie down where all the ladders start. In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart. 18) I.K.Brunei 1857, Steamship Great Eastern under construction, photo: Institution of Mechanical Engineers^ London Even the Faust of mechanical power was cloven -- Priestley's technocratic hope already undercut in Franklin's 1780 letter: ' It is impossible to imagine the height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the power of man over matter...O that moral science were in as fair a way of improvement... Whatever euphoria drove Brunei to engineering marvels: j^ailroads, bridges, this 1857 iron ship, the Great Eastern, a wonder city to cut the night ocean in lighted luxury, broke in morbidity and suicide — the industrial call clotting round the soul like Baudelaire's evening, "le neant vaste et noir", where the "tender heart" enshrines its luminous past. In the Crystal Palace of Exposition Europe, ambivalent progress 19) Edw. Burne-Jones 1880, The Golden Stair, Tate Gallery, London brewed ambivalent dream: "the great four-leafed clover of modern �^Bell ^ 1900 B 9 idealism" (as they were praised): Bocklin, Moreau, Puvis de Chavannes, Pre-Raphaelite Burne-Jones of this "Golden Stair". 'And 'might not the Great Eastern, or any of her more practical successors of the Jamesian era, have adorned their steel salons with Botticelli-inspired visions of such secretly erotic beatitude — Rossetti'e "Blessed Damozel" who leaned "From the gold bar of Heaven", "And laid her face between her hands,/ And wept. (I heard her tears.)"? 20) Monet 1877, Gare Saint-Lazare, Art Inst., Chicago (or Louvre, or double) When Monet in 1877, frequenting the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris, painted the same scene through variations of cloud and hour — the steam blue against background sunlight, or white against an overcast gray he cut through those argiiments of nostalgic heaven and industrial hell. irradiation of the actual: But what is signified? Hardly Vermeer' (Traherne) Your enjoyment of the world is never right, till every morning you awake in Heaven__ look upon the skies, the earth and the air as Celestial Joys. Monet s naturalist delight is in the art changes of abstract percep­ tion — a "Sea Surface Full of Clouds". In the art detachment of any such station, Tolstoi's Anna KareAina (the novel finished that same year) might have gone under the wheels: A luggage train was coming in. The platform began to sway...she knew what she had to do...A feeling such as she had known when about to take the first plunge in bathing came upon her..."What am I doing? What for?"... 21) G.Eiffel 1887-9, The Eiffel Tower, Paris (CGB '80, or other, night?) Since the Paris Exposition of 1889, the Eiffel Tower has expressed for tourists everywhere the joy of the Impressionist with the excitement and utility of the sky-race of skeletal �1900 B C.G. Bell steel. Though not even the designer claimed a utility beyond the view -- that abstraction concretized (so Hugo's Hunchback or Michelet's Tableau. Barthes) out of But the great precursors are the tempted Christ, and in Goethe's Faust, Lynceus on the tower: Born for seeing. At watching skilled. Pledged to the tower, I delight in the world Zum Sehen geboren, Zum Shauen bestellt, Dem Turme geschworen, Gefallt mir die Welt. Thus he sees the ship at sunset enter the harbor, and that night thd burning of the house of the pious old couple. ’ When.scientific vision had girdered the 984 foot tower over the Seine, aviation was anticipated, and the vibrant geometry of Cezanne strangely parallelled. The delight, however, is of Rimbaud's "Drunken Boat", of Mallarme's "Sail past fertile islands": "But 0, my heart, hear the sailors' song entends le chant des matelots!" 22) Renoir 1881, Boating Party, Phillips Gallery, Washington, _DC MUSIC: Faure 1879, Piano Qrt Op-15, 2nd Mvt, No doubt (as in Faure) Avant Garde was always tempted to a compromise of genial cultivation. No doubt Renoir was as gifted as any foi; the color-glad depiction of life as pleasantly lived, perhaps that ease left him vulnerable to the form-crisis and sterility of 1883 — on the way to which even the lustiest group scenes, this Boating Party of mashers, top hats, flirts, puppy kissing girls, entrain surface realism in a sort of Joycean search for radical value. So the plucked-string Scherzo of early Faure (fade) reaches toward the remoter harmonies it drew from Debussy. �1900 B - 11 / Bell 23) Manet 1882, Bar at^the Folies-Bergere, Courtauld Inst./ London Nor was it merely a dictate of Puritan morality, that James, from The American (1877) to The Ambassadors (1903) should alienate the Impressionism he handled so well. As in late Monet, Cezanne, Seurat, there was an abstract imperative. Even Manet, oldest of them all, who had begun the revolution by a detached flattening of dark Spanish realism, who in the success of his forties had joined Monet in pure color and open air, arrived by 1882 (a year before his death) at the mysterious and formal illusions of A Bar at the Folies-Bergere, (end Debussy) where everything beyond the foreground bottles and the musing girl is reflected in a mirror: her back, the looming customer, theater and lights — Platonic images. 24) Pissarro 1877, The Red Roofs, Louvre, Paris Pissarro was at the center of the Impressionism, originator with Monet of its theory and practice. But he is also the radiant for Post-Impressionism to follow. From 1871 to '77 his teaching brought Cezanne to a threshold of light. One might think to ^see in this Pissarro landscape of Red Rooves how much Cezanne could have learned from him. But the painting, from the last year of the Cezanne association, dramatizes the teacher as learner. 25) Cezanne 1873, House of Pere Lacroix at Auvers, Nat. Gal., Wash., DC Without what Pissarro taught, Cezanne's early violence would hardly have lightened to this "House of Pere Lacroix". Yet Cezanne painted the picture in 1873, four years before Pissarro's "Red Rooves". In the interplay of that Avant Garde, effect con­ tinually circles and acts as cause. MUSIC: Satie 1888, Gymnopedie 1, Philips PHS-900-179 �1900 B C.G. Bell 26) Pissarro 1887, Woman in an Orchard, Louvre, Paris (Jeu de Paume) ^ Again Pissarro, from 1887, time of Satie's first radically neglected piano compositions (.this from the Gymnopedies, to be orchestrated by Debussy) — Pissarro, teacher of everyone, might seerii in this orchard to have gone as far as Impressionism could in preparing for Neo-Impressionist Seurat, with his consuming science of minute color spots. But here too the influence goes the other way -- the master swayed by a pupil's genius. 27) Seurat 1884-5?, .Morning Walk, study for The Seine at Courbevoie, Ittleson Col'n, N.Y. Since more than five years earlier, Seurat, studying with Pissarro, had begun those ravishing sketches in which color division works from observed nature toward a final harmony of abstract "color-luminist" control — scores of studies, in charcoal and oil, exploring and fixing the intellectual geometry of the great pointillist monuments, where Impressionism becomes its own antithesis — Baudelaire's passion- throned on cyrstal rock: — Valery: This tranquil roof where pigeons promonade Trembles between the pines, among the tombs; Noon, the just, composes there with fire The sea, the sea, forever rebegun 1 28) .t. Seurat 18B4-5, Afternoon on.the Grande Jatte, Art Institute, Chicago The Grande Jatte is as total a fulfillment of Seurat's method as any. What mappings of the scene, open-air studies and stage- set division of the players, remote from each other as the charac­ ters of a Chekov play, produced this life-size frieze, where all motion, all life is stilled — not merely as every carved .or painted object must be, but in doctrinal soul, proclaiming a metaphysics of changeless remove — as Valery would invoke the sun at the zenith ("midi le juste"), a Zeno paradox to immobilize �ell 1900 B - 13 that "Cemetery by the Sea": Zenon! Cruel Z^on! Z^on d'Elee! _Zeno! Cruel Zeno! Zeno of. Elea! Have you fixed me with that arrow winged That whirs and flies and cannot fly the place?... X) sun...What tortoise shadow for the soul, Achilles, with his great stride, motionless. 29) - (close Satie) Double: Van Gogh 1888; Van Gogh's Yellow Chair with Pipe, Tate, London; and Gauguin's Arm Chair with Candle, V.Gogh Mus., Amsterdam In a direction opposite to Seurat's, Van Gogh too ricochets from Pissarro, his Parisian catalyst of 1886-8. The concert- dependence of music must have stacked the odds against a Van Gogh as composer. But in poetry Rimbaud comes near enough — his Season in Hell, like Van Gogh's Chairs, record of a destruc­ tive friendship: letters of 1873, to Verlaine: Come back...everything will be forgotten...Yes, I was in the wrong...Be brave. Answer me quickly. I cannot stay here much longer...Yours, all my life. Rimbaud. So while waiting for your wife and your death, you are .going to struggle, wander about and bore people. . .But it is you who will be wrong in the end, because, even after I called you back, you persisted in your false sentiments... Think of what you were before knowing me... These Chairs, Van Gogh's with the pipe, Gauguin's with the candle, testify to that other love-hate, when an imagined accord broke under the nerve-frayed fact, and Van Gogh sliced his ear, sent a piece of it to, a prostitute, beginning the reductive con­ finements which would grind to his suicide — as if life had to hold to norms of outmoded pretence, or tear itself to pieces — the vulnerability of avant-garde. 30) A. Bocklin c. 1880?, Faun and Throstle, Neue Pinakothek, Munich MUSIC: Debussy 1892-4, Prelude a I'Apres-midi d'.un faune, .Col.f'iL 6077 • (last thirdT From the Bohemian modernity of Paris, it is strange to turn �1900 B C.G. Bell (0Y6n es we sound Debussy's Feune) to the jromantic lingeiring of Germany, Bocklin's pagan make-believe — to sense the Dionysiac affinity with Mallarme's Eclogue or this Prelude, and at the same time to note the demarcation; that in Bocklin (as in Brahms, say) romantic longing still accepts the old forms; its Symbolist quarrel with the space-time fabric of will and cause has not yet disabled the harmonic and representational modes — the reason and morality of bourgeois assurance. 31) That break drives us forward from Bocklin. Gauguin c. 1893, Indian Queen, Mme Desjardins, Paris to Debussy's Post-Impressionist contemporary (who also began with Pissarro), Gauguin, 1893, where space itself, like chordal harmony, invokes a dissolving magic. So Maetetlink, the same year, in Pelleas and Melisande (for which Faure, Debussy, Sch5nberg and others would compose music), suspends a mystery, beyond fathomable ground, vague as the forest pool where Melissande loses her wedding ring: — Golaud to Melisande in the wood: Come with me. The night will be very dark and cold... (She) Where are you going? (He) I do not know. I am lost also. % (The Avant-garde paradox of the lost guide): Venez avec moi. La nuit sera tres noire et tres froide... Ou allez-vous?...Je ne sais pas. Je suis perdu aussi... 32) H. Rousseau 1897, Sleeping Gypsy, Mus. of Modern Art, N.Y._C_^ Henri Rousseau, le Douanier, customs man, found his way, by a self-taught primitivism of naive vision and dream color, through the same barrier of *the objective and outward into a mystery more immedia-te than Gauguin's, 'some haunted realm of the Faun, where the Symbolist flows over into the Surreal this Sleeping Gypsy of 1897, gone, unanswerably, beyond the phenomenal veil. �< Bell 33) 1900 B 15 Odilon Redon c. 1905?, Le Cyclope, Kroller-Mviller Mas., Otterlo At the same time Redon completes the circle to a more abstract handling of Moreau — this one-eyed Cyclops rising like a phallus over the earth vaginal fold of the sleeping' Galatea — dream changes rung on Mallarme: 34) ripe pomegranates, purple, burst and murmur with bees, and our blood aflame for her who will possess it flows for the timeless swarm of all desire. At the hour when this wood is tinged with ash and gold A feast flares up amid the extinguished leaves, AEtna, on your slopes, by Venus visited... (end Debussy) Degas 1876, L'Absinthe, Jeu de Paume (Louvre), Paris In Degas, Impressionist realism broke through a first devotion to Ingres and an interest in Moreau. As with the naturalism of Zola or DeMaupassant, Hardy's Satires of Circumstance \ or Chekov's heartbreak comedy, the content of civilized despair is carried over into an objective lightening of technique. In this study called Absinthe, a laceration as in Dostoievsky or in Gorki's Lowest Depths, seems less the work of philosophic pessimism than of accident, as in the snapping of a camera. MUSICj Mussorgsky 1874, Pictures at an Exhibition (piano). Ballet of “ Chicks in their Shells, Turnabout TV, 34258 Where the world falls in on itself, with hardly a whimper, I the challenge of Mussorgsky's eerie Pictures (this "Ballet of Chicks in their Shells"), 35) (fade Mussorgsky) Degas 1890-95, Dancers in Blue, Jeu de Paume, Paris will bleed through the lightest 1880 Scherzo-Valse by Chabrier. MUSIC; Chabrier 1880, Scherzo Valse, Rubinstein, RCA LSC 2751 In that Absinthe context the radiant delights of theatre and ballet, which Degas painted from the early '70's until increasing blindness drove him in the 'nineties to cloud-rich pastelles �1900 B - r C.G. Bell .and finally to modelling ("Death", he would say, "is all I think of"), form a contrast so polar, one has to ask: Is this realism, or an escape into artful dream; or is realism itself the escape, the earth-claim luring as the Sleepsong in Faust. (fade Chabrier) 36) Toulouse-Lautrec 1896, Maxime DeThomas, (Dale) Nat. Gal., Wash.,DC Some nostalgia of the infinite was driving through Degas' Absinthe and beyond, seizing on maladies of body or soul (Avantgarde strategy of creative negation), turning vulnerabilities into powers: — so, with the high-born dwarf, Toulouse-Lautrec, in this portrait of Maxime DeThomas, Bohemian connoisseur, lifedeformity speaks oracular depression, biding the next thrust of the style-apocalypse. While Henry George, American economist, who died in 1897, wrote of other things, than art: As public spirit is lost...as reforms become hopeless, then in the festering masses will be generated volcanic forces... Strong unscrupulous men...will become the ex­ ponents of blind popular...passions, and dash aside forms that have lost their validity. 37) Toulouse-Lautrec 1894, The Bed, Louvre (Jeu de Paume), Paris If Toulouse-Lautrec ever inclined to genial affirmation — obverse of the DeThomas pathology — it is in this 1894 evoca­ tion called "The Bed"; though like any obverse it affords another view of the same coin. So Joyce's brothel of Circe would yield in Ulysses to the bed of Molly Bloom, she reclined semilaterally...left hand under head, right leg extended in a straight line and resting on left leg, flexed, in the attitude of Gea-Tellus, fulfilled, recumbent, big with seed... (thinking joyful adultery): he does it and doesnt talk I gave my eyes that look �Bell 1900 B - 17 with my hair a bit loose from the tumbling and my tongue between my lips up to him the savage brute Thursday Friday one Saturday two Sunday three O Lord I cant wait till Monday. The sword will again be mightier than the pen, and in carnivals of destruction brute forge and wild frenzy will alternate with the lethargy of a declining civilization. Ensor, Flemish contemporary of Dutch-French Van Gogh (though Ensor lived on and on), was possessed by symbols of destructive carnival, as in this detail from his huge 1888 Entry of Christ into Brussels. How the demons of Bosch and Breughel, in Ensor’s Ostend isolation, bear down, angels with the vials of wrath. They had staged a Romantic comeback in Hugo and windy Wieftz; now the Expressionist fin-de-siecle opens to them. 39) Cezanne 1888, Mardi Gras, Pushkin Museum, Moscow Yet the same year, 1888, Cezanne distilled Carnival into something quite different. Mere estrangement and transvaluation (since no one can explain what is humanly intended) have been lifted to a well-being as enigmatic as any in Don Quixote — though of the order, as we implied with Seurat, of Chekov's 1903 Cherry Orchard, that sublimation of pain into incongruous laughter. It seems the right genius could ride those a[lternate "carnivals of destruction" and "lethargy of a declining civilization", winning its art—image (cleansed in the abstract) 40) ^o-Americhn, Maya 7th-10th c.AD, Terra cotta Aristocr;,^. mus. ~^throp. , Mexico City back to the unfathomable vitalities of ages to which understanding and causal entry no longer apply — this Maya terracotta of about �1900 B C.G. Bell the 9th century, where representational refinement almost makes us one with its aristocratic herald: "0 Kin," - and we cannot go on, because time and the Spanish auto-da-fes have left us ignorant of whom he would address or what he might say; so we can only repeat, as with Cezanne’s wilful suspension, "Magrcair' ca.anne 186S. Sorrow (Mary Ma2dalen)x^g!Z£^r,^a£j:S But with Cezanne we have a context, life, a history in which .we share - the rebellion that spanned Europe from this 1866 tear-drop Magdalen called Sorrow (with Mussorgsky's "Catacombs" from the 1874 Pictures at an Exhibition) ii; Cezanne 1900. Old Woman in a Cape, Mat. Gal., London to this Cezanne Old Woman with a Eosary of 1900, rim of no man s land. Here the abstraction of Landscape, Bathers, of the mysteri­ ous Mardi Gras, assume a function the Pre-Columbian has lost: to shape, of romantic Angst, an Aquarian containment. over forty years Cezanne was forging that He^ of Darkness, 411 Cezanne 1866, Sorro«^.I£u:^ from some Tess of the d'Urbervilles pain. As if, m the poetizing of cyclidal fall, we had gone from Arnold's disenchantment: Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age. More fortunate, alas 1 than we... .for the world which seems TO lie befor^’ufe like a land of dreams... Hath really neither joy, nor love, no g Cezanne 1900, 01dJjoman^n_A,CaESxJgl!l^^gS^ to what Yeats distilled from Nietzsche and his own crazy Jane. aTf tfLoSf if thiroSe'^SoJd 'Pejoice! ' �1900 B - 19 Bell 43) Picasso 1901, The Poet Savartez, Mus. Modern Western Art, Moscow MUSIC: Stravinsky 1909-10, The Firebird, Lullaby close. Col MG 31202 . I I I.. .1. . . . . . . . . . . .. . l.l It was easier to inherit Cezanne's abstraction than his OlymEjian maturity. illusion. Picasso had to begin, 1901, again with dis­ So later with Joyce and Eliot; even Yeats had opened his 'poetry with "The woods of Arcady are dead", his plays with "the world's more full of weeping than you can understand." It was a blue mood the young Stravinsky (so time-tied to Picasso) would exploit in the Lullaby of The Firebird. (Lullaby into Victory finale) 44) Double: Cezanne 1887-9, large Bather, Mus. Mod. Art, NYC; S Picasso 1905-6, Nude Boy with Horse, Paley Coll'n, NY But as Stravinsky, out of nostalgic sleep, could always stage a Firebird victory, Picasso's Virile force had begun by 1906 to break the Blue spell. And what could better precipitate an energized opposite than the absolute magnitude (left) of Cezanne's Bathers, this standing youth — to receive a softer poignance in Picasso's Boy and Horse (led without rope, a manbrute meld). It was Rilke who would write in 1907 of "that development... in me which corresponds to the immense forward stride in the Cezanne paintings"; while his sonnet on an "Archaic Torso of Apollo" (how it "breaks out of all its contours/ like a star: no place/ that does not see you. for there is You must change your life") points as much to Cezanne and Picasso as to the early Greek. 45) Matisse 1905, Pastoral, Priv. Coll'n, Paris (fade Firebird) While Picasso was moving through Blue and Rose toward Negroid and Cubistic, an ecstatic complement appeared in pure color, those Dionysiac Fauves, led by Matisse, most versatile �1900 B C.G. Bell and life-loving of them. Though darker Mann (1911) would turn this pastoral dream, with Death in Venice Aschenbach (Brook-ofashes) to "the promiscuous orgy (grenzenlose Vermischung) of his own fall". narain 1906. L'Estaque, Three Trees, Ayala & Sam Zacks, Toronto AS for Derain — this 1906 L'Estaque — with Dufy, Vlaminck, Braque and the rest - who would have believed that such heirs of individual outbreak, joined in a group fervor, could become almost indistinguishablY charged? Yet how many composers of the time (from the older- Debussy -to the rising generation) might share in the designation "Fauves"? By 1907 the last movement of Schonberg's Second String Quartet advances from chromatic tonality to the atonal setting of George "Transport" - "Entruckung": "I breathe an air from another planet" _ "Ich fuhle luft von anderem planeten." I have seen sidereal archipelagoes! and islands Whose delirious skies open to the voyager: in these unfathomed nights do you sleep your exile. Millions of golden birds, 0 future Vigor. i �1900 B - 21 /Bell -*• Rilke of that .future, 1912, First Duino Elegyc ...Wirf aus den Armen die Leere... ...Fling the emptiness from your arms into the spaces we breathe — maybe that the birds should feel the expanded air in more intimate flight. (close Bartok) 48) Picasso 1908, Friendship (L'Amitie)-, Hermitage, Leningrad The crested wave still breaking. MUSIC: Stravinsky 1912-13, from Le Sacre du Printemps, Col. MG 3 1202 Thirty-seven years after Rimbaud's South Sea frenzy — I have watched the fermentation of enormous swamps Where giant serpents devoured by bedbugs Fall down from gnarled trees with black scent — Picasso (1908), as by a voodoo of jungle and Negroid, hammers Blue-period loss ("Hurl the emptiness from your arms!") into primitive and cubistic gain. Four years later Stravinsky would break into the fertility climax of the Rite of Spring. (fade Stravinsky) 49) Polynesian Easter Islands c. 1400?, Colossal monolithic heads What was in fact longing over into the new century — some dinosaur upheaval through the crust of civilized restraint, romantic idealism and ennui — was deeper than sense, beyond conscious control; as if suppressed demons and gods, these Easter Island huge volcanic monoliths, with prehistoric and African, all primitive rebelling loci in the Freudian and group unconscious (Rilke's "buried guilty river-god of the blood" — "verborgenen | schuldigen Fluss-Gott des Bluts") had heaved up to seize their [ day: Yeats to Florence- Farr, 1890: Has the magical armagedd'on begun at last? S^'O) Picasso 1910, Girl with a Mandolin, Penrose Collection, London �1900 B C.G. Bell MUSIC; Debussy 1910, Preludes Bk I, from ”Les Sons et les parfums ■---------------— tournent dans 1'air du soir", Philips PHC 5-012 ^ Though in the ambivalence of Picasso, what had begun as rape could always be methodized and refined to seduction. This 1910 "Girl with a Mandolin" suspends the langour and elegance of Blue and Rose in formal analysis. While Debussy, in the Preludes of the same year, has begun a systematization of the semitone mode of chords in fourths. 51) (fade Debussy) G.Braque 1910-11, Composition with Violin (Behind Appearance, p. 12) Which Schonberg, Berg and Webern continually advanced toward the technique of the twelve-tone row. Here Schonberg, of 1911: MUSIC: Schonberg 1911, Six Little Pieces for Piano (#5), Dover HCR 5285 Also by 1911 Braque, working as one with Picasso, had brought the abstraction of things to a threshold of corrugated space, a tensile geometry, beyond which in one sense art could not go. Yet to ring the changes on that non-objective claim would take half a century. 52')' (end Schonberg) Theophanes the Greek 1378, St. Macrobius, det. , Cath. of Transfig­ uration, Novgorod, Russia In 1378 Theophanes the Greek had fresqoed the Cathedral of the Transfiguration in Novgorod, Russia. MUSIC: Russian 10th-16th c.. Entombment chant (near close) Anth. —------------------ —------------- Sonore LP AS 10 (A-5) That the Eastern Slavs, in the time of Chaucer's humanity and lusty realism, 'should have held to the crypts of world-dissolving and "otherworldly power with which Dostoievsky's mystics still contend, dramatises, in the leap to the modern, what Trotsky calls "the messianism of backwardness." 53) (fade Troparion) V.Tropinin c. 1818, Portrait of Artist's Son, Tretyakov Gal., Moscow �'Bell 1900 B - 23 MUSIC: Glinka 1845, Symphony on Two Russian Themes (near opening) VJestminster XWN 184 57 In Tropinin's ideal portrait of his son about 1818, the old theophany yields (as with this Glinka, or the untranslatable Pushkin) to a radiant opposite, fruit of liberal England, Revo­ lutionary France and Romantic Germany — trust in the worth of man and world (though Pushkin complements that glow with Byronic irony). In Tropinin's picture, the give-away flush of sentiment takes us back to Rousseau: The Russians 'will never be perfectly civilized because their civilisation was attempted too hastily... takes us forward to Dostoevsky's depiction of The Possessed heirs of such enlightened dream. 54) (Glinka: forte and fade) Kandinsky 1909, Murnau with Rainbow, Stadtische Galerie, Munich MUSIC: Scriabin 1909-10, Prometheus: Poem of Fire (near close), London ------------------------------------------------------------- OES 6915 In the early century quickening toward war and revolution, Russia's avant-garde 'leap was extraordinary it would turn out, -mostly in exile-. though made, At the time of this 1909 Village Scene, Kandinsky was 43, had absorbecj Impressionism '‘twenty-five years before, was living near Munich at Murnau,. and was just entering the crucial phase of his art, when he would found (with Franz Marc) the Blaue Reiter — in touch with the musical iconoclasm of Stravinsky,. Schonberg, the Scriabin of this 1910 "Prometheus: Poem of Fire". Through Fauve mastery, Kandinsky was advancing 55) Kandinsky 1911, All Saints Day II, StSdtische Gal., Munich toward a mystical color music in which objects would disappear, this 1911 "All Saints Picture" (trumpeting angel above), of which �C.G. Bell 1900 B the artist wrote: ^ In many ways art is similar to religion...was the New Testament possible without the Old? Could our ..."third" revelation be thinkable without the second? That Superman Judgment clue, with subsequent abstractions — flood and cannon turned to vital ecstasy — lift us on the tide of New Apocalypse which also inspired 'Scriabin's Poem of Fire. (close of Scriabin) He wrote: I am desire, I am light...I am the boundary, i am the summit. I am nothing. I am God... I shall not die, I shall suffocate in ecstasy. Though he died not long after of blood poisoning, from a boil on the neck. 56) M.Chagall- 1911, I and the Village, Mus. of Modern Art, NYC From Jewish family life in a suburb of Vitebsk, Marc Chagall shaped such fantasies as "I and the Village", 1911; although he had lived in Paris for a year, absorbing Fauve color and the non-perspectival rythms of Cubist space. But what he poured into that crystal architecture was a new imagery of memory and symbolic ’>• dream. As Andr^ Breton, later spokesman of Surrealism, would write: I V^ in 1911, and through Chagall alone, metaphor ■made its triiimphal entry into modern painting. Yet those metaphors — "the cow who used .to talk to us", the magic spray of flowers, trance-green face of the artist inspired, are not, as with Dante,, or even Blake, systematic, but subliminal, associative mystery for its own sake. 57) G.Balia 1913, Velocita d'automobile + luci, M.G. Neumann Coll'n, Chicago Now various Italians, also in touch with Paris, spurred �ell 1900 B - 25 Cubism (with or without Fauve color) to the cinematic transcript of motion (this Ballo "Velocity of Automobile + Lights"), actualizing the dynamic of the 1910 Futurist Manifesto; We exto11 the love of danger... rebellion...the double quick step...the box on the ear, fisticuffs ^otor-car, its frame adorned ^ith greafpi;;s, libraries, shjant the canal^?; flood the museums; demolish, demolish the venerated ••• That utopian unrest would read itself through socialism, war. Fascism, industrialization, to a belated echo in Spender's "Express" (Internationale); Steaming through metal landscape on her lines She plunges new eras of wild happiness up strange shapes, broad curves And parallels clean like the steel of guns. AJelaunay 1912, Windows on the City (Ist Part. 2nd Replica), Kunsthalle, Hamburg By 1912 Parisian Delaunay opened, for Blaue Reiter contempo­ raries, the Orphism of his "Windows", described in passages of inspired delirium; Impressionism is the birth of Light in painting, Lignt in nature creates movement of colors Art in nature is rythmic__ to reach the limits of sublimity, it must approach our harmonic Vision; clarity. Clarity will be color, proportions; these proportions are composed of various simul­ taneous measures within an action. This .action must be representative harmony, the synchromatic movement (simultaneity) of light, which 'is the only reality... As Apollinaire would close his Delaunay poem; The window opens like an orange The beautiful fruit of light — Le beau fruit de la limi^re. Yet It is curious that in Mallarme's earlier "Les Fenetres", such openings of abstract radiance were an escape, as from the �1900 B C.G. Bell sad hospital of soul's confinement; ^ I flee and lean at all the casements... Blessed in the eternal dews of that glass Which the chaste morning of the infinite gilds. That escape become Delaunay's "only reality". 59) Franz Marc 1913, Tierschicksale, Kustmuseum, Basel MUSIC; Schonberg 1910-13, Die Gluckliche Hand (climax) Col.M2S 679 In Franz Marc, as in Schonberg's "Die Gluckliche Hand" (while the Great War neared), the tumult of elation crests in terror — as if the metaphorical vase of culture,- violin-bowed up the scale of natural and unnatural resonances towards a euphoria of self­ transcendence, should be stretched ahd shattered before our eyes. Mark's "Animal Fate" projects Leonardo's prophecy of a ravaged nature — Nothing on earth or under the earth or in the waters but shall be pursued, molested and destroyed — into the Symbolist subconscious Rilke also shared; ...throttling growths and bestial preying forms!...How he loved that interior world... ...seines Inneren Wildnis,/ diesen Urwald in ihm. When Mark, most searching German artist on the scene, fell % in 1914, who could follow the burning call of George?; "You who have, circled the flame, hold to the faith of the flame!" "Bleibe der flamme trabant!" 60) (fade Schonberg) Q.&O. Wright 1903, Flyer (with Langley's 1896 steam model), Smith-sonian. Wash., DC In 1896, year of Moreau's "Jupiter and Semele", with pictures we have seen by Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec, this Langley steampowered plane (above and small) brought the dream of flight almost home — though his model could not lift a man. In 1903, when �/ Bell 1900 B - 27 the old Cezanne was touching off the excitement of the Fauves, this larger Wright brothers biplane accomplished the first heavier-than-air powered and piloted flight. Like all adventures of Avant-garde, it would prove ambivalent. 61) R.de la Fresnaye 1913, Conquest of the Air, Mus. Modern Art, NYC Ten years later, when Fresnaye painted his Cubistic and Delaunay-inspired "Conquest of the Air", who could have told how far these cloud-hung airmen at the drafting table were plotting the sky-strategy of the war so soon to be loosed over Europe — theirs the only war-vision which would not appallingly bog down in trench mud-holes, where Nietzsche's expected trans­ valuation would concrete toward a mustached phoney of frenzied outwardness. 62) European Armour c. 1535, to Francis 1st from Ferd. of Tyrol?, Mus. de L'Armee, Paris If the paired offence and defence of -toothed Tyranosaurus and horned Triceratops ±ook them both under, it was with Duckbill and all the rest. So the" warning against armament, like all the lessons of history, remained equivocal. In the West (where evolution has not completed its proof) the mechanized type of force was conceived from the start — armored knight on aritfored horse charging peasant field or village like the precursive ultima-te of ironclad war. Although the horse-name of chivalry embraced a damsel-succoring code. 63) Photo World War I c. 1917, stalled Tank, U.S. Official Pictures After 1916 the true tanks caterpillared in, and some, like tar-poOl Dinosaurs*, were -stranded, swivel of what Nietzsche had hailed: I am delighted at the military development of Europe... the period of quietude and Chinese apathy is over... �1900 B - C * G • HgH Rilke's first war elation, George's account in his long poem Per Krieg of the first Demian hope for spirit out of material destruc' tion, Kastorp's leap from the Magic Mountain into sacrifice — such soul-surmises cloud to Owen's "Anthem": What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns... The shrill demented choirs of wailing shells And bugles calling for them from sad shires... 64) George Grosz 1918-22, from Ecce Homo: Twilight, watercolor, pub. 1923, repr. 1965 So to the embittered post-war of George Grosz's book of cartoon derelictions, Ecce Homo, Behold Man. Plunged into that "hell where youth and laughter go" (Sassoon), would not the crazed vessel at last be shivered in the Untergang Spengler imperatived: "Bare your necks to the blade 1" And what of America, whose vital delivery had s'prung the trench stalemate — America, barely emerged from pioneer assurance, how would she take to what war had hardened 65) Toulouse-Lautrec 1899, Private Room at Le Rat Mort, Courtauld, London from fin-de-siecle Toulouse-Lautrec, this "Private Room at Le Rat Mort"? Could the Jamesian traveler have missed, under Impressionist verve, the Vampire metamorphosis of Baudelaire? — The woman meanwhile from her strawberry mouth. Twisting her body like a snake... Let fall these words, charged with the odor of musk; Zola's 1880 Nana, dead of smallpox in a Paris seething with Franco-Prussian war? — The' pustules had invaded the whole of her face... The left eye had foundered among bubbling purulence; the other, half open, was a ruinous black hole...a reddish crust was peeling from one of the cheeks and invading the mouth, which it distorted into a horrible grin...And over this mask of death, the beautiful hair still flowed like sunlight downward in rippling gold. �Bell 1900 B - 29 Acade.., MUSIC: Scott Joplin c IRQ? r>v. • ■ ========g^^g=^i=^i^l^=gg^g4gal,^^ tape I. ^ George -Luks, through the Naturalist . . arisian tra-ining, saw in pre-war 1905 , . ^ his boisterous New York claim: glass of surh p> gj-ass Of such European and a -roai •-i^ reality proportioned to Who taught Shakespeare ter^hn-i rT,.^o ^ Or George Luks? Guts> f Rembrandt? ^—.That s my technique! Ana Drelsser, in studied pursuit of Deter^inist Zola, had Closed his first novel (1900, with sister Carrie rooming alone ,ret those who would answer Spengler with the plea of a New world culturally new, were Ignoring the continuity of culture Ashcan affirmation was a Whitmanesgue phase of an Avant-garde everywhere transvaluing the negative, hnd. what, in civilised content, comprised more negatibn than the worksongs, blues and lazz which, gathering head in the unlettered proletariat of Black America (New Orlpanc; °* "his joplln 1897 ragtime). The Circus. T.onvrs Kould.irresistably conquer the worlds ■ v.,.-- , (fade Joplin) Monde, Nonesi^^TTT^ And Within the sophistication and science of Pointillism, what stripping to Circus, music-hall f music hall and ^ive, occurs in the last patterned reductions of gfan-m-i. Seurat - an affinity that would open post-war orchestration ation to to thr^ the ki blue notes and rythmic firewater of Harlem's elemental "Yeah'" ^ean. du Monde". mhnc -fv-n Thus from Milhaud's "La Creation (fade Milhaud) 3rd whistle) C01.D3S 783 ! �C.G. B^eTT Ives was the composer who from his earliest works gave the disruptive triumph of modernism an American stomach for every­ thing from the great tradition, to hymns and pop tunes. . 68) Prenderqast 1901, Central Park, Whitney Museum, NYC_ After Homer, Eakins and Ryder, no American artist had such force; though various painters between realism and the all-out abstrac­ tions of the 1913 Armory Show, share a natural vigor with Ives. Here is Prendergast's patchwork "Central Park" of 1901. (fade Ives) with the slow movement from the Second Symphony: MUSIC: Ives 1897-1902, 2nd Symph., 3rd mvt, near close. Col. D3S She dreams a little, and she feels the dark Encroachment of that old catastrophe. As a calm darkens among water-lights... The day is like wide water, without sound. Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet Ove'r the seas, to silent Palestine... Why should she give her bounty to the dead... Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow... These are the measures destined for her soul... 70) Eilshemius 1909?, Contentment, Kleemann Gallery, NY Like Stevens' lady, Eilshemius quickens the Bacchic myth: Supple and turbulent, a ring of men Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn Their boisterous devotion to_the sun. Not as a god, but as a god might be. �. Bell 1900 B 31 Naked among them, like a savage source. Their chant shall be a chant of paradise-•. Out of their blood, returning to the sky; And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice. The windy lake wherein their lord delights. The trees, like serafim, and echoing hills... And whence they came and whither they shall go The dew upon their feet shall manifest. (end Ives Adagio) 71) Arthur Dove 1910, .Abstraction No. 2, Downtown Gallery, NYC As early as any of the Europeans, Dove, from upstate New York, who had known the Fauves in Paris, moyed to the delight of pure color forms (1910). Though if the scanning eye could have taken in thdse numbered abstractions as dwellingly as tjie time-art of tones forces upon, the ear MUSIC; Ives 1897-1902, 2nd Symph., close, last Mvt. Col. D3S 783 it would surely have experienced ^ shock, as from the fanfares and unresolved dissonance with which Ives concluded that Second Symphony*. 72) Macdonald-Wright c. 1915, Abstraction on Spectrum (Organization 5) Art Center, Des Moines, lA After the 1913 Armory show’, when European Modernism first struck America in force, the country was divided between mass realist reaction (last bars of_ Ives) Avant-garde handful of artists "(and even buyers) caught up in the European Fauve and abstract. Ma’cdonald-Wright, in this 1915 Abstraction on the Spectrum, rapturously pursued the color-circle Synchronism of Delaunay. 73) Double:/ Cezanne 1900-06, Bend in the Road, Walter Bareiss (cf. Munich) & Delaunay c. 1912-13, Window, Museum, DiSsseldorf, Germany In the juxtaposition of a Cezanne (left) from about 1900, and a Delaunay Window of 1912 to '13, we ride — ecstatic as Holderlin and Nietzsche, for the coming of the gods — the comber of an abstract surge peaking up the shoal as far back as the 1870's in Cezanne �1900 B - C.G.> Bell or in the "Drunken Boat" precosity of Rimbaud. Morton Schamberg c 74) 1917, Miter box and plumbing trap entitled God, Mus., Philadelphia What a break, when Dada, beginning in World War Zurich of 1916, had espoused the ridicule of a civilization gone wrong, and Morton Schamberg — 1917, Philadelphian, in the New York Circle of Duchamps, could give the title "God" to this found sculpture of a miter box and a cast iron plumbing trap — not a mockery alone, but like William Carlos Williams on the pretence of a hearse: 75) "Knock the glass out!/ My God — glass, my townspeople!"; Joseph Stella 1913, Battle of Light, Coney Island, Yale Univ. Gal. MUSIC: Ives 1910-16, 4th Symph., 2nd MVt, 4th of July close, Col.D3S 783 The Italian Futurist Stella, who would also settle in America, had brought the Armory show to its color-action peak with the glad riot of his Coney Island — as Ives, the same years, unleashed the Fourth of July scherzo of his Fourth Symphony. easier the art we can gawk at. How much No one would hear the Ives for fifty years; but Century Magazine gave Stella's "Battle for Light" a color reproduction: a daring interpretation...of the dazzling light, the noise and ceaseless motion...so evident in America... Had he merely represented the physicai...(the artist) believes that he could not have given the rythm of the scene, which transforms the chaos of the night, the lights, the strange buildings and the surging crowd into the order, the design and the color of art. (end Ives) 76) Stella 1922, The Bridge, 5th panel, Newark Museum The disillusion of the war did not undercut Stella's celebra­ tion of America as Futurist land. Though the early century ardor tightened, like Twelve-tone harmony, here to the bound geometries of the Bridge Panels. �. -Bell 1900 B 33 It was the theme under which Hart Crane, from 1924 to '30, hoped to affirm America: f How many dawns chill from his rippling rest The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him. Shedding white rings of tumult, building high Over the chained bay waters Liberty... —' Till elevators drop us from our day. Always Crane's vision lets him drop: A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets. Tilting there momently, shrill shirt balooning, A jest falls, from the speechless caravan. In the gulf of Munch's Cry, how could the "curveship" of the Bridge "lend a myth to God"? 77) Francisco Goya 1812-19, Bullfight in a Village, Royal Academy of San Fernando, Madrid In the old revolutionary world of Blake, Goethe, this Goya, there was a separation of light and dark; the brute seizure spoke its ritualistic containment — what in music gripped the magnification of dissonance from Mozart: MUSIC: Mozart 1788, near close of 1st Mvt, Jupiter Symph., Col. B3S 891 through Beethoven. MUSIC: Beethoven 1804, 3rd Symph, 1st Mvt before recapit., Deutsche ■“ ---------------- Gram. LPM 18 802 78) Pablo Picasso 1935, Minotauromachia, det. of Beast, etching Since Zarathustfa, we are one with the world beast. Picasso: If all the ways I have been along were worked on a map and joined up with a line, it might represent a Minotaur. BACK: again 77) Goya, Bullfight in a Village In the uncontained emancipation of dissonance as such — BACK: again 76) Stella 1922, The Bridge what Schonberg would take for his battle cry — BACK: again 75) Stella 1913, Battle of Light',.'Coney, island �1900 B C.G. Bell soul flames the antinomy of the unresolved, consuming in revelational delight the crucible of its tensile ground. 'After Rimbaud's "Drunken Boat" ("0 let my keel burst; 0 let me go down into the sea") .cain 74) Schamberg 1917, God_^Miter.A^lHBbiS^^£g£n-^jii^^^ Hart crane despaired of a reconciling Bridge (Letters of 1926): At times it seems demonstrable that Spengler is . ■ T-+frVici mone and more licks his r^;o“if!;inT^f£without^Sidge;'in?Sl2ctually judged the whole theme and project seems more and more absurd... ' ,ca)n-73) Double, ^^esaHia^fter,190^H)l^glaunay^^ ?iofw?irsefi^hfi?rSf/airti:fgreJt“iiiircrackers in Valhalla's parapets; Again 74) Schamberg 1917, God the sun has set theatrically while Lafdrge, Eliot and others of that kidn y have whimpered fastidiously... ..Mn 75) Stella 1913, Battle of Light, Coney Islajjd But Picasso could have said the same about working in the " wake of that disruptive fervor (from Cezanne down) which he himself, with Fauves, Cubists, Blaue Reiter, had inflamed, ;'cain 76) Stella 1922, The Bridge up to the break and restrictive deliberations of post-war. again 77) Gova 1812-19, Bullfight in a Village, Since all arts after that crisis had to grope gackward and for­ ward for a "Tower Beyond Tragedy". But where Hart Crane slipped from the stern of the Orizaba, Again 78) Picasso 1935, Minotauremachia det-. of Beast Bartok had mounted (1928) the fierce lunge of the Fourth Quartet. Bartok 1928, Fourth Quartet,_J,as^ivt^_g^gs^^^ �Bell 1900 B - 35 Picasso turned the beast outbreak (Yeats' "Violence upon the road; violence of horses") to the 1935 Minotauromachia, Hi-- Picasso 1935, Mintauromachia, det. of child, L, etching where a child poignant as the one who in Rimbaud ".launches a boat frail as a butterfly of May" — confronts with candle -and flowers (Yeats' "0 may she live like some green laurel") -- again 78) Picasso^ Minotauromachia, detail of Beast the shared dread of Crete (Yeats too "Imagining in excited reverie/ That the future years had come,/ Dancing to a frenzied drum__ "). Again 79) Picasso, Minotauromachi, detail of Child, L. Crane would ignore Yeats in that prophecy of no gr^at poet after adolescent Rimbaud; but it was just Crane's despair which Yeats had hammered into "The Second Coming" of 1920: the gyre of negation pierced by the Thirteenth Cone, God-sphere of tragic miracle. 80) Picasso, Minotauromachia, whole •V Turning and turning in the widening gyre ^ The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood—dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand.The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight; somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun. Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle. And what rough beast, its hour come round at last. Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? (end Bartok) � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data pdf Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 35 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1900 B : Crisis of the Abstract, Symbolic History, Part 34 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 34 of the symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_34_1900_B--Crisis_of_the_Abstract https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/5e0d2cd95f88211a36907c829156c9da.pdf 4707fd9e11c578d2217cad616cccdd1d PDF Text Text C.G. Bell Symbolic History SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 31. 19th Century: The Loaded Dream 1) Double: [A] Wilkie, 1804-05, Self-portrait, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, and [B] Toulouse-Lautrec, 1880, Self, aged 16, Toulouse-Lautrec Museum, Albi; + V details of A and B, with returns to the double Let an opening portrait-pair span our theme: the perilous reshaping of two worlds, inner and outer. In Wilkie's 1805 Self (left), God-affirmed inwardness and Rights-of-man outwardness arise together from the hopes of Enlightenment. In Toulouse-Lautrec's 1880 Self at 16 (right), the backlash of such promise fires, in both realms, the crisis of modernity. Where first shall we take the pulse of what was leading, in the arts, from transcendental assurance to Symbolist estrangement; in politics, from constitutional debate to Marx and the anarchists? a2) 2) 2a) A. Böcklin, 1865, Villa am Meer (2nd form), Schack Gallery, Munich (copy of CGB '59, Face and Landscape 68) Böcklin, 1857, Pan in Reeds, Alte Pinakothek, München; first, video, upperspread Same, Böcklin's Pan in the Reeds, lower detail 2b) Same, Böcklin's Pan, upper detail Music: Brahms, 1891, Clarinet Quintet, from 2nd Movement, Deutsche Grammophon, LPM 18278 If the century of Böcklin and Brahms is the Romantic century, Baudelaire's "cimetière abhorré de la lune," its stretch of Spleen and Ideal, "0 serments! ô parfums! ô baisers infinis," makes it an insurgent hatching ground: That corpse you planted last year in your garden, Has it begun to sprout? But if "Romantic," a recurrent pole in man and art, is to designate a time, it cannot be in mere opposition to "Classical": both Hölderlin and Nietzsche were prophet-lovers June 1996 19th Century 1 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History of Greece; the most daring pre-Symbolist of France, de Nerval, says the Muse has made him "l'un des fils de la Grèce" — and from where else did Böcklin get his "great God Pan, down in the reeds by the river"? Nor can Romantic simply oppose Realism: this swamp dappled with sun, with even its frogs and scarab could not more imitate the visual. It is that classical theme and realist body are possessed by some sensuous abandon of romantic soul. (fade Brahms) 3) 3a) 3b) H Daumier, c. 1860(?), The Uprising, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; + V detail Daumier, 1848-49, The Fugitives, Collection of Mrs. William van Horne, Montreal Daumier, 1854, On the Barricades, National Gallery, Prague; video: detail only Music: Chopin, 1841, Close of Ballade #3, A Flat Major, Op. 47,. (Casadesus ) Col .ML 4798 (or Rubinstein, RCA-V-LSC-2370) Shift to the Revolutionary strand of the century: Daumier's realism, inspired by the Socialist outbreak and brief Republic of 1848; Chopin, part of the musical build-up (with Berlioz, Liszt, early Wagner, the firebrand Verdi); in literature, George Sand, Lamartine and the rest, culminating in Victor Hugo, with his youthful definition of the Romantic as "nothing but Liberalism in literature" — even Stendahl and Baudelaire later amazed at their 1848 intoxication — all swept on a mounting wave of surge, reversal, more radical quest to affirm — as Shelley's first poetic championing of the proletariat after the massacre of "Peterloo," points down the century: Men of England, wherefore plough For the lords who lay ye low? Wherefore weave with toil and care The rich robes your tyrants wear? If we ask what Daumier's force shares with Böcklin's mood, it may give a clue to Romantic Soul: a tide of rising expectations, heightening touch and dream, wish, vulnerability, despair. (end Chopin) 1st 4) Böcklin, c. 1846 Idyll, Neue Pinakothek, München; + V detail V4a) Böcklin, c. 1860(?), Triton and Nereid, Schack Gallery, München (detail from copy of CGB '59, Nature 10) June 1996 19th Century 2 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History It is the time-loading of all physical and psychic bases. The romantic still carries that entire burden of articulated heart and world, as Keats bears the weight of Miltonic pentameter: from Endymion: One faint eternal eventide of gems; to Hyperion: Forest on forest hung about his head Like cloud on cloud. And Baudelaire, even as he moves toward the modern, luxuriates in such visceral fullness: Mère des souvenirs, maîtresse de maîtresses, O toi, tous mes plaisirs, ô toi, tous mes devoirs! 1st 5) Henri Rousseau, 1907, The Snake Charmer, Louvre, Paris; the video having first returned to 4, Böcklin's Idyll V5a) Same, detail Whereas Mallarmé draws the plug which drains that voluptuous "perfume of the blood," refines the forms to a hyaline shimmer — as Böcklin's explicit "Idyll" yields to the innuendo of "Douanier" Rousseau's Snake Charmer. Huxley casts such a spell in his free translation of "The Afternoon of a Faun": Between the reeds I saw their bodies gleam Who cool no mortal fever in the stream Crying to the woods the rage of their desire: And their bright hair went down in jeweled fire Where crystal broke and dazzled shudderingly... Et le splendide bain de cheveux disparaît Dans les clartés et les frissons, ô pierreries! 2nd 4) Again, Böcklin's Idyll, detail; + V return to a larger detail of V4a Romantic had preferred the bases loaded, that we open all stops of the earth-organ — thus the tonal sob-yearnings of Brahms, even in the encroaching estrangement of the Clarinet Quintet — June 1996 19th Century 3 �C.G. Bell Music: V2nd 5a) 2nd 5) Symbolic History Brahms, 1891, earlier in the 2nd movement, Clarinet Quintet (fade) Rousseau, 1910, Dream, Museum of Modern Art, NYC Again, Rousseau's Snake Charmer, central detail (video takes its detail from 1st 5, whole against the dissolving tonalities of Ravel's 1903 Quartet. Music: 6) Ravel, 1902-3, String Quartet in F Major, close 3rd movement, Nonesuch H-1007 Aelbert Cuyp, c. 1660, The Maas at Dordrecht, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; + V details Of course the rhetoric of fullness the 19th century had to shed was the heritage from Baroque, with its proclaimed grandeurs of space, time, and cause — Leibnitz: Therefore each individual substance expresses the resolves which God made in regard to the whole universe. We grasp it in the light-flooded distances of Cuyp, the ground-bass tensities of a Viola d'Amore sonata, German about 1670. Music: 7) German, c. 1670, Viola d'Amore Sonata, lst movement, opening, AS-19 (fade) Norbert Grund, c. 1670, Flat Sea Coast, National Gallery, Prague; + V detail Music: Haydn, 1772, from 3rd movement, opening, Quartet #1 of 0pus 20, Qualiton SL PX 11 332 a From that heroics much of the 18th century already lightens to the Berkeleian and subjective, as in the Sons of Bach and early Haydn (here from the first quartet of Opus 20), or in such landscapes of sensibility as Norbert Grund's. Though, like Rousseau and Gray ("Wanders the hoary Thames along/ His silver-winding way"), this pre-romantic respects the court manners of rococo. (fade Haydn) a8) b8) C.D. Friedrich, 1828, Ships in Harbor at Evening, Gallery, Dresden C.D. Friedrich, 1818, Woman on the Shore near Rügen, Winterthur June 1996 19th Century 4 �C.G. Bell 8) Symbolic History C.D. Friedrich, c. 1916-18, Setting Sail, Morning Landesmuseum, Hannover; + V detail (here video returns to a detail of b8, then of a8) Music: Beethoven, 1807, 2nd movement, Second Rasoumovsky Quartet, Col. ML 5596 (or Fine Arts Quartet, Everest SDBR 32) Certainly, as far as transcendental melting goes, the Baroque vapored to a veil, it attends the Kantian fruition of that idealism Berkeley had sowed, and to which this Friedrich, with Beethoven, Coleridge, a whole 19th-century horizon are legatees: Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea: No truth therefore is more certain... than that all that exists for knowledge, and therefore this whole world, is only object in relation to subject, perception of a perceiver, in a word, idea... The sea across which Friedrich's morning boats set sail is rayed through with the longing which Schelling's "eternal One feels to give birth to itself." Such the ocean of Nietzsche's rapture, in whose Seventh Loneliness the silver soul-fish swims from the bark; though that timeless love, for all the miscarriage of Enlightenment and Revo- June 1996 19th Century 5 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History lution, still clings to the tonal and spatial touch of earth — Romantic. (fade Beethoven) a9) 9) Rembrandt, 1647, Night Rest on the Flight, detail, National Gallery, Dublin, Ireland (CGB '74) Same, whole (CGB '74) From the same three centuries, fix on night: — 1647, Rembrandt's Rest on the Flight, with Paul Gerhardt's "Evening Hymn." How the poem gleams in darkness, a sure life-prayer: Nun ruhen alle Wälder... The woods are silent now... The stars, golden, glow In the blue halls of the sky... God give you quiet slumber; His gold-bright angels render Armed watch at your bedside. (CGB) Stell euch die güldnen Waffen Ums Bett und seiner Engel Schar. 10) Joseph Wright, 1780-89, Moonlight Landscape, Art Gallery, Brighton; + V detail Another consciousness of ruins, lake, and moonlight broods over Wright of the 1780's, as over Claudius, whose "Abendlied" works mood-variations on Gerhardt: Der Mond ist aufgegangen... The full moon has risen, Gold star-points glisten Over heaven clear and bright; The silent wood is shadowed; Breathing from the meadows, The mist comes strange and white. (CGB) Der weiße Nebel wunderbar... 11) 11a) C.D. Friedrich, c. 1836, Pines, Lake, and Moon, Dr. Schäfer, Obbach bei Schweinfurt; video: detail only Friedrich, 1820, Evening, Landesmuseum, Hannover June 1996 19th Century 6 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History With Friedrich, as with Eichendorf's romantic hermit, the love of nature feeds the love of death: Comfort of earth, come, silent night... I weary of the blind daylight; The still wide ocean darkens. Give rest, give ease of wish and want, Until the dawn's eternal font Through the dark wood sparkles. (CGB) Komm, Trost der Welt, du stille Nacht... Der Tag hat mich so müd' gemacht, Das weite Meer schon dunkelt; Lass ausruhn mich von Lust und Not, Bis daß das ew'ge Morgenrot Den stillen Wald durchfunkelt. Novalis had turned from day to the comforting death-mother leaned over the fevered child; as Poe would vulgarize it: "Quaff, 0 quaff this sweet nepenthe". Music: 12) 12a) Schubert, 1825, Nacht und Träume (Fischer-Dieskau and Moore) LHMV-1046 Friedrich, 1830, The Fallow Field, Kunsthalle, Hamburg (CGB '86); + V detail Friedrich, c. 1834-35, Rest at Hay Making, Gemäldegalerie, Dresden Hölderlin's "Evening Fantasy" (like Friedrich's twilight landscapes, or Schubert's Nacht und Träume) suffuses such earth-dusk with infinite longing: Here by his cottage quiet in the shadow sits The plowman, with the smoke of his hearth content. Near in the peaceful village the bell of Evening kindly calls to the wanderer. 13) V13a) 13b) June 1996 F. Schinkel, 1815, Gothic Church above a Cliff, Mod. Mus., Berlin Carl G. Carus, Wanderer at the City Gate at Evening, lower spread (Dr. Otto Frank, Munich, in 1933) [also, cf. 3rd 13] Friedrich, 1817, City at the Rise of the of the Full Moon, Reinhart, Winterthur 19th Century 7 �C.G. Bell 13c) Symbolic History Again, Schinkel, 1815, Gothic Church above a Cliff, upper detail, Mod. Mus., Berlin Back now the seaman turns to the harbor's home. In far off cities gently the market shrouds Its bustling noise, while the still arbor Gleams with the affable meal of neighbors. But I then, whither? Do not all mortals live In reward and labor, with change of toil and rest Finding their joy? Why for me only Then does the bitter thorn not slumber? (CGB) Wohin denn ich? Es leben die Sterblichen Von Lohn und Arbeit; wechselnd in Müh' und Ruh' Ist alles freudig; warum schläft denn Nimmer nur mir in der Brust der Stachel? (fade Schubert) Against the dream radiance of Schinkel's Gothic, 1st 14) French, Early Gothic, 1134-1150/1195-1210, W. Front center, Chartres Cathedral (CGB '59: video has used V14, wider variant (copy of CGB '59, Gothic II 41) V14a) Delacroix, 1822, Dante and Virgil in Hell, Louvre, Paris V14b) Chartres Cathedral, West Front, with Towers how stripped, how severe, the old Gothic of faith, which has plumed such emulation. Music: Franconian, c. 1250(?), Ave Virgo — Ave Gloriosa, (Tinayre) Lumen 32018 Heine, having been called "a dismembered man... a divided soul, a Byron," wrote in 1829: ... complain rather that the world itself is split in the middle. For since the heart of the poet is the center of the world, it must at the present time be lamentably torn apart... Once the world was whole, in antiquity and in the Middle Ages; in spite of superficial struggles there was always an inner unity and there were integrated poets. We honor these poets and we rejoice in them, but every imitation of their unity is a lie that every sound eye penetrates. (fade Ave) June 1996 19th Century 8 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History For 2nd 13) Friedrich, 1809-10, Abbey ruin in an oak grove, Schloß Charlottenburg, Berlin So Arnold, at the monastery of the Grande Chartreuse, "Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born," implores: "Take me, cowl'd forms, and fence me round, Till I possess my soul again." 2nd 12) Friedrich, 1825, Lonely House by a Forest of Pines, Walraff-Richartz Museum, Cologne; to which video adds the whole of 11, Friedrich's Pines, Lake, and Moon, and then a detail of 12, Friedrich's Fallow Field But since Arnold's "strange disease of modern life" is in fact the fruit of Hegelian consciousness, why not celebrate its ripe introspection — what Coleridge most shares with the Germans: No cloud, no relique of the sunken day Distinguishes the West, no long thin slip Of sullen light, no obscure trembling hues. Come, we will rest on this old mossy bridge... — which Victor Hugo distills in his early plays: Hernani: Regarde: plus de feux, plus de bruit. Tout se tait. La lune tout à l'heure a l'horizon montait; Tandis que tu parlais... Je me sentais joyeuse et calme, 0 mon amant! Et j'aurais bien voulu mourir en ce moment. June 1996 19th Century 9 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History For 3rd 13) Carl G. Carus c. 1825, Wanderer at the City Gate at Evening, whole, which video separates to upper half and lower half, and then returns to 13c, upper detail of 13, Schinkel's Gothic Church Les Burgraves: True, the sun is beautiful. Its rays — The last — now set a crown on Taunus' brow. The river gleams, the forests take the fire... All nature is a flood of life and light! (CGB) La nature est un flot de vie et de lumière. Music: Schumann, 1850, Feierlich, from Symphony No.3, Rhenish Though the cult Gothic of Coleridge's "Christabel," Keats' "Eve of St. Agnes," Schumann's Cathedral in the Rhine Symphony, in Romantic fullness and repletion, For 2nd 14) French Gothic, esp. 1210-30, S. Portal and S.W. Tower, Chartres (CGB '59); video: lower detail only V2nd 14a) Again, Chartres, c. 1210-20, detail of N. Portal (CGB '74) is far from what it hungers after. Music: 15) 15a) (fade Schumann) Same, c. 1250, from "Ave Virgo — Ave Gloriosa," Lumen 32018 (close) P.O. Runge, 1806-07, Christ walks on the Sea, Kunsthalle, Hamburg; + V details Blechen, before 1828, Stürmische See mit Leuchtturm, Kunsthalle, Hamburg Renaissance, Baroque, Transcendental have intervened. Runge's 1806 Christ on the Sea of Galilee shapes the world from subjectivity, no less than Goethe's Faust or "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner": And the coming wind did roar more loud, And the sails did sigh like sedge; And the rain poured down from one black cloud; The Moon was at its edge... The harbour-bay was clear as glass, So smoothly it was strewn! June 1996 19th Century 10 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History And on the bay the moonlight lay, And the shadow of the Moon. What is reached for is Schelling's Primordial Will: The primal longing moves... like a surging billowing sea... But there is born in God himself an inward imaginative response... the first stirring of Divine Being in its still dark depths... Schelling's "birth out of darkness into light" is no less of good from evil: The living Word enters as a firm and enduring center in battle against chaos, and a declared state of war between good and evil continues to the present time, when God reveals himself as Spirit, that is as concrete actuality. 16) Correggio, c. 1532, Jupiter and Ganymede, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien; + V upper detail That revelation is not purely a life-motion. When Goethe made a poem of this Correggio Rape of Ganymede, he gave it the dithyrambs of dissolving: I come. But where? Upward, upward... Clouds of the sky Bend to me, Me; I am here, Seizing, seized — All-loving Father — Upward on your breast. (CGB) Mir! Mir!... Umfangend umfangen! Aufwärts an deinen Busen, All liebender Vater! June 1996 19th Century 11 �C.G. Bell 17) Symbolic History P.P. Prud'hon, 1808, Psyche, Louvre, Paris (CGB '80); + V details With such heart's wish Prud'hon stretches the Græco-Roman Psyche and the style of Correggio. The surface is classical; but neither the vagabond soul of Chenier's loving Neare, nor Keats' Endymion glimpsing his Goddess in dream, cave, or by plashing pool, has wagered more desperately on "a thing of beauty is a joy forever." Against the Satanic mills of actual flesh — ...a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue — those "leaf-fringed legends" of "a Grecian Urn" ("Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness"), that "draught of vintage" of "a Nightingale" ("Thou wast not born for death immortal bird"), beat urgent wings. 18) J.M.W. Turner, 1829, Ulysses deriding Polyphemus, National Gallery, London; + V details Music: John Field, c.1825(?), from Nocturne in A flat major, near close, MHS 4512 When Turner adds to Classical subject (here Ulysses deriding Polyphemus) not only Romantic heart but a color-play that turns whatever could be touched and seen to Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn — then, as in those Field Nocturnes, which inspired those of Chopin, (fade Field) Music: Chopin, c.1830(?), from near close of Nocturne in E-flat Major, 0p. 9, #2, (J. Bolet) Everest LPBR 6079 such life and hunger for life initiate a dissolving (as Turner's blind giant melts into cloud over rocks and sunset sea) which would run in art to Monet and Redon, in music to Debussy and Scriabin. (fade Chopin Nocturne) June 1996 19th Century 12 �C.G. Bell 19) 19a) 19b) 19c) 19d) 19e) Symbolic History L. Richter, 1837, Rhine-crossing at Schrekenstein, Staatsgalerie, Dresden Same, detail of boat Joh. G. v. Dillis, 1817-1831, Quirinal, Neue Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59) Friedrich, 1810, Greifswald Harbor, Staatliche Museen, Berlin Again, 19, Rhine-crossing, somewhat nearer; video: detail only M. von Schwind, 1804, Waldkapelle, Schack Galerie, Munich Music: Schumann, 1850, from slow movement of Symphony #3, the "Rhenish," Angel S.36689 What is the aim, on Richter's Rhine-crossing (or Schumann's Rhine) but to take as one the riches of earth and spirit, to foster both nostalgias, of the finite and infinite — as with Mignon and the harper in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister: Do you know the land where lemon trees bloom? — Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn...? ...Dahin, dahin, Möcht ich mit dir, o mein Geliebter ziehn — (fade Schumann) a point of departure for Eichendorf's posthorn, and wanderers singing of the South, of statues and fountains, by moonlight, in summer gardens. Always the orchestrations of "Todeslust": Die Sonne, Funken sprühend im Versinken Gibt noch einmal der Erde Glut zu trinken... Always the soul-flight of "Mondnacht": And my soul spread her pinions Wide in the kindred gloom, Flew through the silent regions, As if she flew toward home — (CGB) Als flöge sie nach Haus. Lamartine would suspend time's flight by returning alone to the lake where the two, boating in silence, had heard, far off, oars and the harmonious waves: Un soir, t'en souvient-il? nous voguions en silence; On n'entendait au loin, sur l'onde et sous les cieux, June 1996 19th Century 13 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Que le bruit des rameurs qui frappaient en cadence Tes flots harmonieux. In Italy Leopardi rears such earth loves over "the infinite vanity of all" — "E l'infinita vanità del tutto." 20) M. von Schwind, c. 1860(?), Midday, Schack Galerie, Munich (CGB '59); + V details Never in history had soul and the ideal so seized on world and flesh. As Jung said, when Freud took off the psychic lid of Europe, he found the whole landscape flooded with sex — Moritz von Schwind's rock-pooled mystery of Midday, queer as Anderson's fairy tales: The Red Slippers, The Snow Queen. Those fish (like a Shakespearean pun: "The bawdy hand of the dial... upon the very prick of noon") around the hair-curtained form and reflection, dream-overcharge the pubic mandala. So in Schumann's "Frauenliebe und Leben." Music: 21) Schumann, 1840, from Süsser Freund, Frauenliebe und Leben, Decca CL 9971 Adolph von Menzel, 1847, Artist's Sister, Neue Pinakothek, Munich; first, video detail (fade Schumann) Though what Adler would find was Will to Power; Jung, will to myth. As in Menzel's 1847 study of his sister (like "Fräulein von Kulp/ Who turned in the hall," "Madame de Tornquist.../ Shifting the candles"), all the bases of desire are loaded. 22) 22a) 22b) Julia Margaret Cameron, 1869, Double: [A] Sir J.F.W. Herschel, and [B] Mae Prinseps as Beatrice Right half of double, Mae Prinseps as Beatrice Left half of double, Sir J.F.W. Herschel, detail; video adds closer details of 22a and 22b Even the photographs — Julia Margaret Cameron's old Faust men and tender Gretchen girls — voice it no less than the sonnet Victor Hugo, past eighty, wrote to Judith Gautier: "La mort et la beauté sont deux choses profondes": Death and beauty are too somber loves, As deep in blue and shade as if to say: June 1996 19th Century 14 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Two sisters, alike fecund and destructive, Bearing the burden of one mystery. Loves, voices, looks, tresses dark and fair, Be radiant; for I die. Hold light, warmth, solace — You pearls the sea rolls in waves up the shore, You birds that nestle, luminous, in the forest. Judith, our destinies are nearer kin Than one might think to see your face and mine. The abyss of all opens in your eyes — The same starred gulf I harbor in my soul. We are neighbors of the sky, and for this cause, That you are beautiful and I am old. (CGB) Judith, nos deux destins sont plus près l'un de l'autre Qu'on ne croirait, à voir mon visage et le vôtre; Tout le divin abîme apparait dans vos yeux, Et moi, je sens le gouffre étoilé dans mon âme; Nous sommes tous les deux voisins du ciel, madame, Puisque vous êtes belle et puisque je suis vieux. 23) Egypt, New Kingdom XVIII Dynasty, c. 1370 B.C., Blind Harper, from Mortuary Chapel of Patenemheb, Mus. Ant., Leyden Has such romantic soul appeared before? No doubt in all ripe civilizations, there is some filling in of conscious touch and longing — the blind harper from an Egyptian tomb of the time of Ikhnaton. 24) Graeco-Roman. lst cent. A.D. (from 3rd cent. B.C. original?), Spring, from Stabiae, Nat. Mus., Naples Or there are those frescoes, 1500 years later, from the Bay of Naples, a pleasure seat of Imperial Rome, its Euripidean and Hellenistic refinements already centuries old. 25) Chinese (Ming), 1470, Shen Chou reading in Autumn, Peking Museum; + V detail and return to whole What civilization could be riper than Ming Chinese? — 1470, Shen Chou reading out of doors — the poem: June 1996 19th Century 15 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The big trees exposed to the west wind are losing their leaves; To be comfortable I've unfastened the collar of my robe; Sitting here, I'm letting the time go by. Doing nothing, I've turned my back on encroaching autumn. I've not finished my book. My spirit has gone wandering in the sky... Who can fathom it? Yet personality, in these anticipations, seems contained in ancient traditions of philosophic and religious lore. 26) Franz von Lenbach, 1860, Shepherd Boy, Schack Galerie, Munich; + V detail Music: Smetana, 1874-9, from Ma Vlast 4, Col. ML 4785, A, band 2 It had hardly ventured on the blossom-and-tear-bearing branch of Lenbach's 1860 Shepherd Boy, or Smetana's Bohemian Fields and Groves — all those Intimations of Immortality from Wordsworth's: ...all the earth is gay; Land and sea Give themselves up to jollity... Thou Child of Joy, Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy Shepherd-boy! to Longfellow's: A boy's will is the wind's will And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts. 27) (fade Smetana) French, 1316, Roman de Fauvel, Charivari sports, Bibliotheque Nationale, fr. 146 f. 34r, Paris; + V detail Music: French, early 14th century, from Fauvel, Motet, Quant je le voi, ARCHIV 2723045 (2 b) Startling, that a civilization which would go so far in temporal deification, should, in its Gothic phase, have reduced earthly delights to the mumming foibles of religious feasts, under cowled disapprobation; while in that music the major and minor chords essential to romantic joy and grief are passing tones; they melt with the dissonances of June 1996 19th Century 16 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History earth into bare fifths and octaves, beyond the vanity of our moods. (fade Fauvel) 28) Petrus Christus, 1446-47(?), Portrait of a Girl, Staatliche Museen, Berlin; + V detail Music: Dufay, c. 1429(?), La belle se siet, opening, (Munrow) Seraphim SIC-6092 How often we have traced, in that faith-ground, the ripening of what would become romantic personality — how archly tempting here, in Dufay and Petrus Christus, to the time-tree of consciousness. (fade Dufay) 29) Vermeer, 1660-65, Head of a Girl, Mauritshuis, The Hague; first, video detail Music: Bach, c. 1725, Bist du bei mir, close, (Schwartzkopf) Angel 35023 A fruit Vermeer's Girl with the Pearl Earring has gloriously eaten, and what is it but wholesome and good to the taste, sustaining the earth-loves, to which Bach, for Anna Magdalena, gave pre-romantic voice. (end Bach) 30) V30a) V30b) 30c) 30d) Geo. F. Watts, c. 1863, Ellen Terry (his wife), Kerrison Preston, Esq.; + V detail H. Marees, 1863, Bath of Diana, detail only, Neue Staatsgalerie, Munich (CGB '59) Marees, c. 1870(?), Horse Leader and Nymph, Neue Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59) Moreau, c. 1865(?), Leda, detail, Moreau Museum, Paris Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1864-70, Beata Beatrix, Tate Gallery, London; video: close detail only Music: Duparc, c. 1870, L'Invitation au Voyage, 2nd stage, (Simoneau) Westminster W 9604 In the 46 year old Watts' painting of his 16 year old wife, the actress Ellen Terry (to leave him in a year), love, fevered as voluptuous, pants for the specter of a rose, Petronius' "harbor for a stilled desire," "Luxe, calme et volupte," as in Baudelaire's June 1996 19th Century 17 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History "Invitation to the Voyage" — supremely, as set, about 1870, by Duparc. But here we should read a sheaf of Baudelaire, closing perhaps with the condemned "Jet d'eau," erotic fountain: "Tes beaux yeux sont las, pauvre amante" — "Your beautiful eyes are tired... Let them close" — You, whom night so beautifies That it is sweet, bent to your breast, To hear the sad eternal cries Weep to the bowl from the water's crest. Moon, sounding drops, night serene, The melancholy of your mien, Is the mirror of my love. The fountain fills the night With flower-spheres, That in the pale light Of the moon's spears, Fall from the height Like a burst of tears. (CGB) Tombe comme une averse De larges pleurs. 31) (end Duparc) Japan, Kamakura, late 13th cent. Burning of the Sanjo Palace (1160), detail of paper scroll, Fine Arts Museum, Boston Have West and East converged toward modern consciousness? The burning of the Sanjo Palace, as painted (a hundred years after) in thirteenth century Japan, is, like Gothic, mytho-symbolic. 32) Japan, Edo later 17th C., Gay Quarters of Kyoto, detail, Fine Arts, Boston But this Edo screen of the pleasure quarters of Kyoto has the social irony and wit of Molière and the English Restoration, with which it is contemporary. 33) Japan, Hiroshige, 1857, Sudden Rain at Ohashi, Woodblock print; video: detail only June 1996 19th Century 18 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History While the Hiroshige woodblock of 1857 — A Sudden Rain at Ohashi — is abreast with the realism and mood-drama of 19th-century Europe. If the world-community attests such concurrence, 34) Franco-Flemish, Tapestry, c. 1385, detail of Arthur, Nine Worthies, Cloisters, NYC; first, video closeer detail what has arisen in the West, to revolutionize everything, is the assertive consciousness of person. Here it just shows itself, in the time of Wyclif and the first people's wars. As this Arthur takes up the banner, under the angular asperities of creed-invalidation, Gawain, flower of chivalry, returns from the Green Knight bearing about his neck the snaky belt of his temptation and fall, symbolic frailty "of this crabbed flesh." 35) 35a) 35b) V35c) 35d) 35e) V35f) Dürer, 1526, Joh. Klehberger, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien (CGB '59) G. Romano, 1532-34, Cupola with Olympus, Palazzo Te, Mantova Cranach, 1546, The Fountain of Youth, Berlin-Dahlem Museen, Berlin; video: detail only Giorgione, c. 1506, The Three Philosophers (section to the right), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien Same, close detail of the bearded old Philosopher Dürer, 1508, Martyrdom of 10,000, detail, upper left, Kunsthisthistorisches Museum, Wien Huber, 1522, Portrait of a Man in a Cap, Staatliche Museen, Berlin In Dürer's 1526 portrait of that dubious operator Kleberger, ego seems to express once and for all its earth-mastery. The same years, Vives, riding the wave that spread with Pico's "Dignity of Man," describes a feast of the gods: The universe was the amphitheater, in the skies the divine spectators; the earth was a stage for the actors. ...They saw man, the mime of Jupiter, take the mask of a plant, of a thousand wild beasts, then his own: prudent, just, friendly, a political and social being. The gods were not expecting to see him in more shapes, when behold, he appeared as one of their own race. He had transcended man and the lower gods, and was piercing into that inaccessible light-indark where Jupiter dwells, king of kings and of gods... While Fugger launched modern capitalism, and Geismayr, leader of the Peasant's Revolt, wrote his bill of reform: June 1996 19th Century 19 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History All privileges shall be done away with, as they are contrary to the word of God... All city walls, castles, fortresses shall be demolished... No profit is to be made, as all things are to be sold at cost... 36) Rembrandt, c. 1655, The Polish Rider, Frick Collection, NYC; first, video detail We have witnessed over Europe and America (that pioneer soil for Protestant and free humanist dreams) how the complex of thrust and counterthrust builds a transformational current, whose eddies and regressive whirls gather head and jet again into the main stream, altering and darkening its course — as under the shades of Rembrandt's Polish Rider, the deepened reality of Leonardo's Horseman strides into the century of brooding Baroque and Milton's Commonwealth. 37) Andreas Schlüter, 1698-1700, The Great Elector (Equestrian), Berlin; + V detail Music: J.K.F.Fischer, 1695, Fugato of Overture, Suite from Le Journal du Printemps, AS 52 How even when that confidence hardens to a wigged pomp of state, (Schlüter's Prussian Elector, Fischer's Overture in the style of Lully) such blatant mutants of the humanist claim, hung as it were between Newton's synthesis and a Dryden heroic play, carry the force that would drive through the ironic whirls of Rococo, to break out in the inalienable Rights of Man — and what right, if not to Vives' enactment of the gods? (end Overture) 38) J.E. Liotard, 1765-70, in his garden near Geneva, Reichsmuseum, Amsterdam; with video details And already in the 1760's of Rousseau's éclat, Liotard had pastelled himself in his own garden. in the mountain canton of Geneva, a way-mark to every Connecticut Yankee in those dogmatic courts. So, on the Easter morning of Goethe's Faust, the people crowd from stone gateways, mills, and vaulted churches, to the natural Resurrection of the Lord ("Sind sie alle ans Licht gebracht"). Had not even Pope said "An honest man's the noblest work of God" — to be taken up by Burns: "A man's a man for a' that"? 39) J.L. David, 1793, Marat Dead, Musée des Beaux Arts, Brussels June 1996 19th Century 20 �C.G. Bell 39a) Symbolic History Same, detail And the world of inertia, oversurge, and backlash being what it is, what could come of that plea but that Marat, champion of the people, murdered first by the intemperance of his aims, should be stabbed by Charlotte Corday in the bath? Were the dying words as she reported, "they shall all be guillotined"? David painted him, his truest picture, art climax of Revolution turning on itself. Let it be stressed again that the Romantic century — Schelling, Friedrich, Hölderlin, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Austen, Beethoven, Schubert, Byron, Keats, Lamartine. Hugo — all varieties of Transcendental immersion and socialist attack, work in the known shadow of that populist tailspin into terror. a40) 40) J.L. David 1805-07, Coronation of Napoleon, Louvre, Paris (CGB '80); video: detail only of Napoleon (cf. Va40) J.L. David, 1824, Mars Disarmed by Venus and the Graces, Beaux-Arts, Brussels; + V detail As for David, he slid through the Coronations of Napoleon and of Josephine to the slickness (in Brussels exile) of this Mars disarmed by Venus, with her aids. The 19th century had to face that degradation too — Revolution gone as vapid as in Von Weber's Freischütz. Music: 41) 41a) C.M. von Weber, 1820, Der Freischütz, Overture, close, (Toscanini) old RCA Victor 11-9172 Austrian Rococo, c. 1750(?), Millionenzimmer, Schloss Schönbrunn, Vienna G. Tiepolo, 1725-26, Angel appears to old Sara, detail, Archiepiscopal Palace, Undine Music: Telemann, c. 1737(?), Concerto for 3 trumpets, etc., from 2nd movement, Nonesuch H-1017 (oboe) So it was the 18th-century rococo, Telemann, and the Millionenzimmer at Schönbrunn, which the royalist regimes of post-revolution would espouse. And why not? Had not rococo shared in Enlightenment, its melodies everywhere beckoning to the heart, its chords loaded with supposititious good? (fade Telemann) June 1996 19th Century 21 �C.G. Bell 42) 42a) Symbolic History French (Vautier), c. 1855, Queen Victoria and Albert greeted by Napoleon III, Windsor Castle; video: details only Friedrich, c. 1818, Woman at Sunset, Essen Museum; video: detail only Music: Berlioz, 1830, Symphonie Fantastique, from 2nd movement, dance, London CM 9227 And what good could be greater than Napoleon III's entertainment of Queen Victoria and Albert in a Paris showy as Berlioz' waltz in the Fantastique — but a show gone hectic, like all the Vanity Fairs of Stendahl, Balzac, Flaubert, de Maupassant, driven to a drugged frenzy — those death-wish Kuragins of War and Peace. Anatole, Ippolit, white-armed Ellen, and through them "The Harlot's House" of Wilde: The dead are dancing with the dead, The dust is whirling with the dust — into which from time to time yearning Emmas and Natashas are drawn. (Berlioz cont., tender phrase, skip to fast) a43) 43) Viollet-le-Duc, 1858, Napoleon III and the Empress, owned by Madame Viollet-le Duc Thomas Lawrence, 1819, Portrait of George IV, Vatican, Rome; first, video detail; cf. V43 "My dearest Clough," Arnold would write: these are damned times — everything is against one — the height to which knowledge is come, the spread of luxury, our physical enervation, the absence of great natures, the unavoidable contact with millions of small ones, newspapers, cities, light profligate friends, moral desperadoes like Carlyle, our own selves, and the sickening consciousness of our difficulties... Great qualities are trodden down And littleness united is become invincible... (end Berlioz) In a depiction of the century, put Sir Thomas Lawrence's 1819 George IV, nine and a half feet high (and in the Vatican), on Byron's sinister side, counter-revolutionary background of whatever he wrote and did. June 1996 19th Century 22 �C.G. Bell 44) Symbolic History William Blake, 1804-18, Rinder Jerusalem, p. 51, Vala's Lifeless Court (with Hyde and Scofeld); + V details June 1996 19th Century 23 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History And on his creative right the continuing fierce vision of William Blake, an eternal doctrine of revolution against any crowned Vala's court of Submission and Death, whether of Rights of Man or Socialist Manifesto — a radical Judgment, for which the musical likeness seems always and only Beethoven's Great Fugue. Music: Beethoven, 1825, Grosse Fuge, from mid-section, Columbia M 5 S 677 Between those embattled extremes, a45) b45) 45) G.F. Kersting, c. 1815(?), Lady Making Wreaths, National Gallery, Berlin G.F. Kersting, 1827, Girl at a Mirror, Kunsthalle, Kiel; + V detail G.F. Kersting, 1817, A Couple at a Window, G. Schäfer, Obbach; + V detail Music: Schubert, 1815, 2nd Symphony, 2nd movement, opening, Nonesuch H-71230 the neo-classic, all over Europe, crossing into the new century, took the quiet glow of Transcendental and early Romantic, as in Kersting of the Friedrich circle, or the delight of Schubert's early symphonies. Here the Faust and fire forms leave a space of calm for the balancing of the leaf. Thus through all nature water counters fire, plant animal, grazer hunter; and if there is truth in Goethe's extending the ratio to woman against man — Women consider more how things are linked in life... since their fate and the fate of their families depends on this continuity — then it is fit that the ultimate perfection in art of the vegetable weft should be in the novels of a woman, Jane Austen. (fade Schubert) Thus the Baronet, in Mansfield Park, of his son and the poor cousin Fanny: Sick of ambitious and mercenary connections, prizing more and more the sterling good of principle and temper... he had pondered with genuine satisfaction on the more than possibility of the two young friends finding their mutual consolation in each other for all that had occurred of disappointment to either... Fanny was indeed the daughter that he wanted... With so much true merit and true love, and no want of fortune and friends, the happiness of the married cousins must appear as secure as earthly happiness can be. 46) J.A.D. Ingres, double: [A] 1806, Mlle. Rivière, Louvre, Paris; and [B] 1851, Madame Inès Moitessier, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. June 1996 19th Century 24 �C.G. Bell 46a) 46b) Symbolic History Ingres, 1806, Mlle, Rivière, Louvre, Paris (CGB '80); video: detail only Ingres, 1851, Madame Inès Moitessier, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; video: details only Music: Chopin, c. 1845(?), Waltz in C-Sharp Minor, 0p. 64, No.2 (Lipatti) Odyssey St. 32 16 0058 Ingres had begun in that vein (left), this 1806 Mlle. Rivière, in the studied dress and pose of the cult of nature. But if one leaps forty-five years, to a portrait from Ingres' age (right), it is not just that the sitter is heavier and older, or the dress changed from naive white to black Carmen and Cleopatra; what speaks through that is social — the stuffy hardening of the Third Empire. Against the dreams of Emma Rouault's youth — her futile wish for romance in marriage: Ah! if in the freshness of her beauty, before the soiling of marriage and the disillusions of adultery, she could have anchored her life upon some great strong heart... she would never have fallen from so high a happiness — comes the fate (as in a Chopin waltz) to which Emma Bovary is bound: that town circle of hideous trade, the draper tempting her with money, the eternal monotony even of clandestine passion, down to the blind man's song mocking her as she dies: Maids in the warmth of a summer day Dream of love and of love alway... 47) Attributed to T. Gericault, c. 1818, Portrait of Delacroix, Musée des Beaux Arts, Rouen; first, video detail (cf. V47) Music: Berlioz, 1834, Harold in Italy, 4th movement, beginning RCA Victor LSC-2228 The focus on self as affirming center (Gericault's likeness) of his young friend Delacroix) bares, under the flesh-claim, those "fallings from us" and "blank misgivings" of Wordsworth's "Intimations"; Coleridge "Plucking the poisons of self-harm"; Berlioz' Childe Harold. Since behind the romantic as Promethean, 48) T. Gericault, c. 1818, Guillotined Heads, National Museum, Stockholm; first, video detail June 1996 19th Century 25 �C.G. Bell 48a) Symbolic History T. Gericault, 1824, Mad Woman, Musée des Beaux Arts, Lyons lie Gericault's later studies of corpses, guillotined heads, the criminally insane — waveof-terror reminders of Poe's macabre obsession, to be turned to sex by Baudelaire ("Une Charogne"): (viola) Remember, my love... by the roadway, a hideous carrion... With legs flexed in the air like a courtesan... The flies swarmed on that putrid vulva... maggots... Over those rags that lived and seemed to breathe, As if the romantic self were haunted — like Emma Bovary by the blind beggar: She saw the hideous face of the poor wretch standing out against the eternal night like a menace... She fell back upon the mattress in a convulsion. They all drew near. She was dead. (forte) As Dostoievsky's egoists would be haunted by dreams of horses beat down and children tortured. 49) John Martin, 1812, Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion, Art Gallery, Southampton; first, three video details What flowed from "Kubla Khan" — A savage place, as holy and enchanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon lover -- to Poe's "Ulalume" — Well I know, now, this dim lake of Auber — This misty mid region of Weir — Well I know, now, this dank tarn of Auber, This ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir — is reflected in the English painter Martin, with whom Heine compared Berlioz — here the wanderings of Sadak in search of the Waters of Oblivion. (fade Berlioz) Yet Martin's slick art of nightmare stems from the same years 50) Constable, 1816 ff., Weymouth Bay, National Gallery, London; + V details June 1996 19th Century 26 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History as Constable's daytime celebration of the actual earth, which, like Jane Austen's peopled scene, smiled through wars and rumors of wars. The radiant is Transcendental, as in early Wordsworth: …the sky Never before so beautiful, sank down Into my heart, and held me like a dream — an almost German mystic presence: …laid asleep In body, and become a living soul; but it gathers a fabric of descriptive color and feel ("Give me a Constable," they used to say, "with the dew on it") — a vibrance later Wordsworth could bring off now and then: There was a roaring in the wind all night; The rain came heavily and fell in floods; But now the sun is rising calm and bright; a51) 51) Constable, 1830-36, River Scene, with a farmhouse near the water's edge, Victoria and Albert Museum, London Constable, c. 1830(?), On the River Stour, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; first, video detail, to the right The birds are singing in the distant woods; Over his own sweet voice the Stock-dove broods; The Jay makes answer as the Magpie chatters; And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters. But Constable too had his polarity of peace and storm. What woke up the French at the Paris show of 1824 (so that Delacroix took his Massacre at Chios from the Salon wall to give it the brushwork of broken color), was late Constable's clare-obscure and fury of palette, rooted in the Baroque crisis of Magnasco and reaching for the crisis of Expressionism. As the painter said after the death of his wife: "Tempest on tempest rolls. Still the darkness is majestic." Some would limit "Romantic" to such Storm and Stress of body; but its core is deeper: man and nature one incarnate godhead. "Malgré moi," de Musset protested, "l'infini me tourmente." June 1996 19th Century 27 �C.G. Bell 52) 52a) Symbolic History Diaz de la Peña, 1871, The Storm, National Gallery, London; + V details Theo. Rousseau, c. 1850(?), Sunset at Arbonne, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City Where soul becomes world-flesh, art-violence is a measure of spirit's war on itself. So with the earth and clouds Diaz de la Peña learned from Constable and fomented for half a century (here from 1871). But through calm or fury runs the pantheist thread of de Nerval's "Vers dorés" (Duncan): Man, free thinker! do you believe yourself the one alone thinking. In this world where life bursts forth in everything?... — Un mystère d'amour dans le métal repose — A mystery of love lies concealed in the metal... Beware in the blind wall a gaze that watches you... Often in the obscure being dwells a hidden God; And like a nascent eye covered by its lids A pure spirit grows beneath the skin of stones. How Victor Hugo would spill that earth-soul through his early poems: "Tonight the sun has set in a sky of clouds" — "Le soleil s'est couché ce soir dans les nuées..." a53) 53) Corot, c. 1826-28, Roman Campagna with Claudian Aqueduct, National Gallery, London Corot, 1855-60, Bathing Nymphs and a Child, Art Institute, Chicago In such a field each artist shapes his own path, under relational probabilities. Corot, beginning about 1826 with luminous scenes of Rome, both classic and early romantic, would blur the dark of mid-century to a kind of salon Arcadia — a Greek cult to metastasize in Bougereau, Puvis de Chavanne, Swiss Böcklin, as in academic sculpture everywhere — reaching in poetry through Tennyson, Arnold, Swinburne, to the last gentleman of the columned American south, William Alexander Percy, dreaming of Sappho on the levee over the Mississippi. a54) 54) Hans Thoma, 1875, Valley of the Main, Neue Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59) Delacroix, c. 1849(?), Sunset Sky, Pastel, Louvre, Paris; first, video detail Music: June 1996 Chopin, 1839, Sonata in B-Flat Minor, Op.35, from 3rd movement (Funeral March), tender mid-section, with trill (Horowitz) V-LM-1235 19th Century 28 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Men still thought of themselves as fleeting and nature as eternal — "the immense and radiant world": "Je m'en irai… Sans que rien ne manque au monde immense et radieux." Yet as man's power mounts iron, coal, and steam, the infinite drowning has the feel of mutual death: — with Chopin's Funeral March Sonata, Delacroix and Leopardi ("Sempre caro mi fu quest' ermo colle"): This lonely hill was always dear to me, And this hedgerow, that from so wide a part Of the ultimate horizon shuts the view. But as I look beyond it, I conceive A space which has no measure, a quiet not Of man, a hush and void that draw the heart Almost to the brink of fear. And as the wind Noises in the leaves, I set that voice Against the silence of the infinite, And call to mind the eternal, and lost time, And this that lives and sounds; and so it comes In that immensity my thought is drowned, And sweet to me is shipwreck in that sea. (CGB) (heavy tolling of Funeral March) E il naufragar m'è dolce in questo mare. 55) G. Courbet, 1865, Stormy Sea, Louvre, Paris; + V details To Delacroix's pastel Courbet adds mass and volume — a cloud-gathering reached for in Tennyson: There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail: There gloom the dark broad seas... That mood-space stretches out in Arnold's "Dover Beach": ...on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. In some Meredith "the largeness of the evening earth" clots round us like the blood of Modern Love — Moves dark as yonder midnight ocean's force... To throw that faint thin line upon the shore. June 1996 19th Century 29 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History But it is Victor Hugo who most summons the storm — sailors gone down in "Oceano Nox," Dans une mere sans fond, par une nuit sans lune — until the creation he entered as a realm of light rounds to "A great wheel,/ Which cannot move without crushing someone": June 1996 19th Century 30 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Que la creátion est une grande roue Qui ne peut se mouvoir sans écraser quelqu'un. 56) 56a) Victor Hugo, 1858, Fantastic Landscape, Bibl. Nat., Paris Hugo, 1859, The Hanged Man, drawing, Maison de Victor Hugo, Paris (here video returns to 56) Though when Hugo took to ink-wash and watercolor in the late 1850's, he cut through space as Blake had done, reaching back to Bosch and ahead to the surreal — a road he would parallel, with more knowing defiance of the forms, in his last poems: so "The Trumpet of Judgment": I saw a monstrous trumpet in the clouds... Forged out of justice condensed into brass... It lay on a mist that trembled, unfathomable, Out of the world... Oh, what night; nothing there has contour nor age, And the cloud is specter and the specter cloud. Et le nuage est spectre, et le spectre est nuage. Revealing sea-mark for the youth who had declared: "Romanticism... is nothing but liberalism in literature." 57) V57a) 57b) V57c) 57d,e,f) Turner, c, 1843, Eve of the Deluge, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. Same, detail, Sky with Birds (from V57a & c) Same, detail with Alligator Same, closer view of Flocking Birds (also from V57a & c) Triple: [d] Constable, 1820-23, Pond in Branchhill, Hamstead, Evening, Victoria and Albert Museum, London; [e] Pissaro, 1887, Woman in Field, Louvre, Paris; and [f] Cezanne, 1900-06, Trees and Rocks, Museum of Modern Art, NYC (slide show combines three vertical cuts from these pictures; while the video shows them separately, substituting for the second: Monet, 1888, Antibes, detail, Courtauld Institute, London (see V57e) Music: Same Chopin Sonata, to last movement The continuing optimism of the century seemed to be science. How the old Turner's theory and practice of light gives his most pessimistic "apocalypse of heaven" June 1996 19th Century 31 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History (this Eve of the Deluge) the élan of an electrical discovery by Faraday or Maxwell. Or pain-racked Darwin's Origin of Species: to contemplate a tangled bank...plants of many kinds... birds singing... insects flitting... worms crawling... and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms have all been produced by...Variability... the Struggle for Life...Natural Selection...Thus from the war of nature... the production of the higher animals directly follows. There is grandeur in this view... Was the art-cognate of science not the realism of the century, but the search beyond realism? What gave Constable such headway against his moods but the pursuit of painting as "scientific and mechanical"? Later the technique of pure color would rescue Impressionists from the bogs of Baudelaire; while that, combined with geometric analysis, would turn the splenetic solitudes of Cezanne to clarity. As he would say: "I have only painted all my life to escape the ennui." (final forte and close of Chopin) a58) 58) 58a) Anselm Feuerbach, 1870, Medea, formerly: National Gallery, Berlin Feuerbach, c. 1865, Medea, Neue Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59); + V detail Same, Munich Medea, detail of beach and waves (CGB '59); here video adds another detail of 58 Music: Wagner, 1857-9, Tristan and Isolde, from Overture, Stokowsky, Victor LM 1174 Though the ambiguity which stretches the Wagnerian ocean of Feuerbach's Medea broodings, also had its center in science. As late as 1847 Helmholtz could celebrate the First Law of Thermodynamics: The universe possesses, once for all, a store of energy which is not altered by any change of phenomena, can neither be increased nor diminished, and which maintains any change which takes place on it. Yet Carnot had already proved the motive power of heat fixed solely by the always equalizing temperature gradient — an insight clinched in Clausius' 1850 formulation of the spent energy in any system: "The entropy of the universe tends toward a maximum" — which Kelvin's Second Law would give apocalyptic irreversibility: Within a finite period of time past, the earth must have been, and within a finite period of time to come the earth must again be, unfit for June 1996 19th Century 32 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History the habitation of man as at present constituted, unless operations have been, or are to be performed, which are impossible under the laws to which the known operations going on at present in the material world are subject. 59) George Stubbs, 1770, White Horse Frightened by a Lion, Walker Gal., Liverpool; + V detail Music: Haydn, 1772, from 4th movement, A Major Quartet, 0pus 20, #6, fugue, near close, Qualiton SLPX 11 332-b Since Rubens, art-power had seized on the beast — horse, pitted sometimes against lion or tiger, in Blake's Bible of Revolution: "the tigers of wrath... wiser than the horses of instruction." So Stubbs had painted them in that England (time of Haydn's Opus 20 Quartets), island cognate for the Storm and Stress of the Continent — bold as mad Christopher Smart's "Jubilate Agno": "For a Lion roars himself compleat from head to tail" — (close of Haydn) and so freshly painted, 60) Gericault, 1817, Horses Held by Slaves, Musée des Beaux Arts, Rouen; first, video detail they changed the art of Gericault when he came to England. Music: Beethoven, 1812, opening of 4th movement, 7th Symphony, Columbia ML 5405 Though Gericault had already ventured on the horses, at the Corso in Rome, and with an elevation of Classic and Romantic like Beethoven's in the Seventh Symphony. (fade Beethoven) 61) 61a) Delacroix, 1860, Horses Coming from the Sea, Phillips Gallery, Washington, D.C. Delacroix, c. 1843, Head of Lion Roaring, Cabinet des Dessins, Louvre, Paris Music: Wagner, 1869-74, Close of the Götterdämmerung (forte) 6-London 1604 By the event of Delacroix' 1860 Horses Emerging from the Sea, Wagner had written Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Tristan. and much of The Ring. The cult of exotic savagery (Delacroix' splendid tigers, as Clark says, his best self-portraits) was crudening June 1996 19th Century 33 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History toward Lesconte de Lisle's 1869 primeval earth of beast-death and volcanic blood, where "the Creator panted in his creation" — a62) 62) Böcklin, 1878, Battle of the Centaurs, 2nd version, central detail, Meiner Collection, Leipzig Same, Centaurs, whole setting for his sinister superman, Cain: But beyond the lava heights of Gelboë-hor, Charged with a boiling mist of savage smells, Which bears and roaring lions spewed and fumed, Sounded, like seas outraged by cyclone winds, Death-rattles rising from those livid shades. By 1874, Wagner had completed the Götterdämmerung, and Böcklin was midway in his series of battling Centaurs. But what — in the fire-fall of Valhalla, when flames and Rhine flood close the Twilight of the Gods — (music to melting) what is the import of that rippling death-by-water, coming in like a tide of sensuous good? For 63) Monet, 1873, Autumn at Argenteuil, Courtauld Institute, London; first, video detail What the relation of Impressionism's poignant and shimmering dream to the contemporary deep-rooted and wide-spread tree of Romantic and Symbolist pain? — Count Axel's death persuasion: 2nd 62) Again 62, Centaurs, lower detail "Our existence is full, and its cup is running over." Is it, as in the nether abyss of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, when, from the cataract of fire and serpent-folds, the tiger-striped head of Leviathan rears, tinging the black deep with beams of blood, advancing toward us with all the fury of a spiritual existence — and the frightened cherub flees, June 1996 19th Century 34 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 2nd 63) Monet, 1868, Along the Seine, Art Institute, Chicago; + V detail (for which the slide show substitutes 63a: Monet, 1866-67, Women in a Garden, Jeu de Paume, Paris) and Blake finds himself sitting on a pleasant bank beside a river by moonlight hearing a harper who sung to the harp... (close of Wagner) Are Monet's bright visions outward or within? In any case, it was at the heart of Wagner's Zarathustran and chromatic longing that the tonal dissolutions of musical "Impressionism" (beginning with Saint-Saens) would appear. Music: 64) Saint-Saens, 1868, Concerto No. 2 in G Minor, 0p. 22, from 1st Movement, (Rubinstein and Ormandy) RCA-LSC 3165 J.B. Carpeaux, 1869, The Dance, façade of the Opera, Paris; + V details Sculpture, denied the levitating science of color, hardly got the dance of delight off the ground. Carpeaux' Opera nymphs may hint at a flaw in Romantic joy, even in the greatest — those inadequate allegros, finales of works too searching to be rondo-resolved — from Mozart's G Minor Quintet: Music: June 1996 Mozart, 1787, a phrase, last movement, G Minor Quintet, Columbia ML 5192 (now Columbia D3S 747) 19th Century 35 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History through the dry-leaf whirl after Beethoven's A Minor Adagio: Music: Beethoven, 1825, from closing Allegro, A Minor Quartet, Columbia M5S 677 to the hectic flush closing Schubert's great string Quintet: Music: Schubert, 1828, from last movement, near close, C Major Quintet, Columbia MS 6536 No wonder Beethoven tried radical finales: the choral of the Ninth, the visionary variations of the last Piano Sonato, the Quartet Grosse Fuge. For 1st 65) Rodin, 1882, from the Gates of Hell, lower left, Ugolino Group, Rodin Museum, Paris V1st 65a) Rodin, 1882, separate Ugolino group, bronze, detail, Rodin Museum, Paris (or video can work from 2nd 65) Melville: "The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows." Let Rodin's Ugolino from the Gates of Hell, against Carpeaux's Dance, twist the intolerable theme of Ibsen's Ghosts. As Oswald tells his mother of the inherited syphilis eating at his brain, he contrasts the old view of life, "a state of wretchedness" under "punishment for sin," For 2nd 64) Rodin, 1886, The Kiss, Tate Gallery, London 2nd 64a) Rodin, 1877, The Age of Bronze, detail, Louvre, Paris with the awakening of Impressionist Paris (Goethe's Easter again, the souls come up from vaults and cellars): Oswald: the mere fact of being alive is thought to be a matter for exultant happiness. Mother, have you noticed that everything I have painted has turned upon the joy of life? And it is just this beaming happiness and presumptive good which is denied when, as the mother pulling the curtains on the sunrise, com- June 1996 19th Century 36 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History forts her son, "Look, Oswald, what a lovely day we are going to have," the attack falls. 2nd 65) Again, Rodin, separate Ugolino group, whole; first, video detail of Ugolino only Oswald: (who has been sitting motionless in the armchair, with his back to the scene outside, suddenly says): Mother, give me the sun... (Oswald seems to shrink up in the chair; all his muscles relax; his face loses its expression, and his eyes stare stupidly. Mrs. Alving is trembling with terror) Mrs. Alving: What is it? (Screams) Oswald! What is the matter with you? (Throws herself on her knees beside him and shakes him) Oswald, Oswald! Look at me! Don't you know me? Oswald: (in an expressionless voice...): The sun — the sun. a66) 66) 66a) Double: [A] P.O. Runge, c. 1802, Self-Portrait, Hamburg, and [B] Cezanne, c. 1875, Portrait of M. Choquet, Cambridge, England Delacroix, c. 1824, Self-Portrait as Ravenswood, Louvre, Paris; video: upper half only Moritz von Schwind, c. 1850, Knight and Water Siren, Staatsgemälde Galerie, Munich Around the middle of the century Gerard de Nerval wrote the transforming symbolist poem, "El Desdichado," from which Eliot quotes one line in The Waste Land and paraphrases another in "Prufrock". But from Poe through Baudelaire to Mallarmé and Rimbaud, Symbolism was abstracting itself from Romantic by a motion of estrangement. In Delacroix' early portrait of himself as Ravenswood, hero-suicide of Scott's Bride of Lamermoor, we grope toward de Nerval's "Disinherited": (CGB) Music: Wagner, 1857-9, Tristan, Act III, shepherd's pipe, RCA-Victor 6700 (5) Je suis le ténébreux — le veuf, — l'inconsolé, Le prince d'Aquitaine a la tour abolie... I am the darkness, widowed, unconsoled, The Prince of Aquitaine of the ruined tower; June 1996 19th Century 37 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History My one star is dead; my lute, star-scrolled, Burns with the black sun of an old despair. 67) Böcklin, 1875, Triton and Nereid, 3rd form, old National Gallery, Berlin; + V details Böcklin, 1875, still holds the intolerable Wagnerian longing, "Empty and waste the sea," which in de Nerval (and even in Wagner's lonely pipe) begins to escape from the causal fabric: You who healed me in the night of the tomb, Give me Posilipo and the Gulf again; Rends-moi le Pausilippe et la mer d'Italie You who fed my life with your bloom, Give me the trellis of the rose and the vine. ...la treille où le pampre à la rose s'allie. For 2nd 66) Delacroix, 1826, Study for Baron Schwiter, detail, Springfield, Mass. Am I Phoebus or Love, Byron or Lusignan? My forehead is red with the kiss of the Queen. Mon front est rouge encor du baiser de la reine; V2nd 67) Böcklin, detail from Sport of the Waves (CGB '59) 2nd 67) Again, Böcklin, Triton and Nereid, detail of Nereid, Berlin I have dreamed in caves where sea-sirens rise. J'ai rêvé dans la grotte où nage la sirène... a68) Vb68) 68) 68a) V68b) G. Courbet, 1845-46, Self with a Pipe, detail, Musée, Montpellier (or Va68) M. von Schwind, c. 1845(?), Luring Wood-fay, Schack Galerie, München Cezanne, 1866-68, Achille Emperaire, Private Collection; + V detail Cezanne, c. 1670, Self-Portrait, Tate Gallery, London Cezanne, 1866, Sorrow (Mary Magdalene), Louvre, Paris Music: June 1996 (fade Wagner) Mussorgsky, 1868 and '71, Boris Godounov, from Prologue, Angel S-3633 19th Century 38 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Conqueror twice, I have crossed the Acheron, Singing by turns to the Orphic lyre, the moans Of the saint, the fay Melusina's cries. (CGB) Les soupirs de la sainte et les cris de la fée. With the 1860's, as in Cezanne's portrait of the painter Achille Emperaire, the monstrous egg of longing begins to crack to the radical and elemental — Mussorgsky and Dostoievsky also beginning what would culminate in Boris and The Brothers. But in that revolt of "The Disinherited," who can tell whether the attack is religious, social, aesthetic? Estranged from what Flaubert called society's "brutal course", Cezanne and Marx meet in Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith, who knows that it is glorious to belong to the universal... but that higher than this there winds a solitary path; he knows that it is terrible to be born outside the universal, to walk without meeting a single traveller... Humanly speaking, he is crazy and cannot make himself intelligible to anyone. (cut Mussorgsky on dissonance) Va69) Goya, 1810-20 (published 1863), Los Desastres de la Guerra, first etching: sad presentiments… Goya, 1813-16, The Forge, Frick Collection, NYC; video: central portion only 69) The poles of day and night, outward and inward, had shadowed Rousseau's Enlightenment with his melancholy. And as Storm and Stress struck through Revolution toward Romantic, the schemes of head, the dreams of heart, meet in repeated transformations, but hardening, from the liberal bourgeois to socialist labor; darkening, from Transcendental to Symbolist. In the first decades of the century, Goya's message of The Forge is contemporary with his black mythologies, Saturn Devouring his Children, a Dog Buried in the Sand. At the storm-center of the French Revolution, Babeuf knowing the rich had let them down, gave his life in conspiracy for a "Society of Equals". His followers were the link between Robespierre and the Manifesto. a70) M. van Raymerswaele, c. 1540, Two Tax Gatherers, National Gallery, London June 1996 19th Century 39 �C.G. Bell 70) 70a) Symbolic History P. Brueghel Jr., 1620, Commodity Finance, Museum, Bruges Same, Commodity Finance, detail The sin which in Dante sets the Usurers clutching their pouches on the hot sand and under flames at the edge of lower hell, had sprinkled the arts of Renaissance and rising capital with satanic extortioners, as in this Peter Breughel the Younger, or about the same time, Sir Giles Overreach in Massinger's Play: [His agent Marrall speaks] The... justice did his part, returning... the certificate, Against his conscience, and his knowledge, too... to the utter ruin Of the poor farmer. Overreach: Twas for these good ends I made him justice... So he serve My purposes, let him hang or damn, I care not; Friendship is but a word. 71) 71a) Daumier, 1834, The Legislative Belly, Lithograph; + V detail Same, The Legislative Belly, another detail; + V closer detail With Daumier, as everywhere in the 19th century, the attack is no longer religious but social. And where the abuse had seemed exceptional, what is caricatured here is the monthly assembly of ruling property, as Daumier titles it, "The Legislative Belly." So Lesconte de Lisle, "To the Moderns": (Neff) Murderers of Gods! the time is near When, sprawled on a great heap of hoarded gold, Having gnawed down to bare rock the nourishing soil, Not knowing what to do with the days and the nights, Drowned in the nothingness of utter boredom. You will die stupidly, cramming your pockets. This is the ubiquitous "Money-Bags" of Marx's Labour Process, who tries to justify his existence: "Have I myself not worked... not performed the labour of superintendence?" — While "His overlooker and his manager try to hide their smiles." [p.215, Modern Library Giant] 72) English Gothic Revival (Barry and Pugin), 1840-52, Houses of Parliament, London; + V details June 1996 19th Century 40 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The hard-fought sin of Usury has become the baptized fabric of Christian society — Marx: The sphere within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labor goes on, is in fact the very Eden of the innate rights of man. [p. 195] The English Houses of Parliament, built after the fire Turner painted, are a windowed shell before the operations of imperial banking, manufacture and trade. Ironic inversion — "the religious world is but the reflex of the real world" — that such a shell should take the ancient sacred form of Perpendicular Gothic. But Marx's irony yielded to such a rage — The Pharisee of a capitalist denounces this brutality which he himself creates, perpetuates, and exploits — [p. 432] that he perhaps undervalued the reform Christianity of those "fish-blooded" bourgeoisie. 73) 73a) 73b) 73c) 73d) Photograph, 1870, Steam Hammer of 1861 in the Krupp Works, Germany; + V detail John F. Weir, 1886, The Gun Foundry, from sketches made near West Point, Civil War, Putnam County Historical Society, NY (here the video returns to 73, the Krupp steam hammer) U.S. Industry c. 1880, Rails in a Steel Works, National Archives, Washington, D.C. T. Anschutz, 1880's, Steelworks, left detail, Kennedy Galleries, Inc. Great Witley (ruined mansion), c. 1860, near Stourport Works, Worcester (CGB '66) Not so their Faustian power. That capitalist drone, who did not seem to labor or even superintend, becomes the driving force of a process as staggering as the Krupp steam hammer of 1861, apparent model in Chaplin's Modern Times: In Industry [Marx writes] man succeeded for the first time in making the product of his past labour work on a large scale gratuitously, like the forces of nature. [p.424] June 1996 19th Century 41 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Now "the work of directing, superintending, and adjusting" [p. 363], required by "all combined labour on a large scale," "becomes one of the functions of Capital". The result is an industrialization labor could never have achieved on its own: a mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories, and whose demon power, at first veiled under the slow and measured motions of his giant limbs, at length breaks out into the fast and furious whirl of his countless working organs. [p.416] Here the Capitalist steps forth in giant boots — such a Faust of accumulations as dwarfs Dickens' Hard Times Bounderby: he ruthlessly forces the human race to produce... those material conditions, which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual is the ruling principle. [p. 649] Self-indulgent Money-bags is almost lost in this devotee. Yet "Two souls, alas, dwell in his breast" — A Faustian conflict between the passion for accumulation and the desire for enjoyment. [p. 651] 74) 74a) Blake, 1789-94 (1826 copy), The Chimney Sweeper, Songs of Innocence and Experience, Rosenwald, Library of Congress; + V details Blake, 1794, Europe: A Prophecy, title page, detail, with Serpent of Materialism, Privately owned (Dover) The predictable fall of that Faust-ambivalence distinguishes dialectic materialism from the poetic cry against the same abuses: Blake's "Chimney Sweeper" — A little black thing among the snow, Crying "weep! weep!" in notes of woe! "Where are thy father and mother, say?" "They are both gone up to the Church to pray." Compare Marx: Previously the workman sold his own labour power... Now he sells his wife and child. He has become a slave dealer... In spite of legislation the number of boys sold in Great Britain by their parents to act as live chimney sweeping machines... exceeds 2000... [p. 432-3] June 1996 19th Century 42 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History But to forge that outrage, on the model of Newton's causality (which Darwin also stretched by metaphor), to an equational science of value — Marx, in the face of an organic unfolding of power-riches self-created, reverting to the old a priori "nothing can come of nothing" a75) b75) 75) Blake, 1793-94 (copy 1799 ff), America: A Prophecy, detail of Plate 5: Flame erupts unde the snake-spiral of materialism Again, Blake, 1794, Europe, detail of Plate 2: Social and racial oppression H. Daumier, c. 1850(?), Third Class Carriage, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC; + V details (the last video detail overflows into the a76 section) and so deriving from the quantified ground of labor all productive machinery and accumulations; where the organizing capitalist supplies nothing, nature costs nothing, cooperation nothing, past labor, congealed in machines, works gratuitiously, and that "live monster that is fruitful and multiplies" must be distrained from the only postulated source: The ownership of past unpaid labour is therefore the sole condition for the appropriation of living unpaid labour on a constantly increasing scale (p.638) — to hammer outrage into the axiomatic net of Das Kapital, Blake might have thought a Urizenic task. Though the rhetoric glows like Luvah — like the dark oils of Daumier's Third Class Carriage: all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange him from the intellectual potentialities of the labour-process...turn his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital. [p. 708] a76) 76) van Gogh, 1885, The Potato Eaters, whole, V.V.G. Foundation, Amsterdam (video places the whole after the 76 details) Same, The Potato Eaters, detail; + V closer detail, then the whole June 1996 19th Century 43 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History But all methods for the production of surplus value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. [p. 708-9] (So Van Gogh's Potato Eaters have sunk from Daumier's Third Class to The Lowest Depths.) Marx: Capital is dead labour, that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more the more labour it can suck. [p. 257] In Van Gogh, who had preached in the mining region of Mons, evangelical Christianity, socialist sympathy, and Symbolist art all meet in an Expressionist break and "transvaluation of value". 77) 77a) 77b) Russian Traditional, 1714, Domes, Church of the Transfiguration, Lake Onega (or V77 horizontal variant) F. Alexeyev, 1794, St. Petersburg, view of the Palace Embankment from Peter and Paul Fortress, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow Russian (Renaissance-Byzantine), 1555-60, Cathedral of St. Basil, Moscow Russia, battleground of Christian, Symbolist, and Socialist extremes, was a land so bedded in the past that folk building of the 18th century combines the domes of Byzantine and Tartar with the timbering of the Viking north — a land which now at the style-surface telescopes French Rococo, English Liberalism and German Romantic, surging toward the 1900's like Gogol's troika in Dead Souls: And Russia, art thou not too flying onward like a spirited troika that nothing can overtake... What terrifying onrush... What mysterious force... never seen before. Ah, horses — what horses! Is the wind hidden under your manes?... Russia, whither?... She gives no answer. The ringing of the bells melts into music... everything on earth is flying by, and the other states and nations, with looks askance, make way and draw aside. a78) A. Ivanov, c. 1850, Boys Basking in the Sun, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow June 1996 19th Century 44 �C.G. Bell 78) Symbolic History A. Ivanov, c. 1850, Head of St. John the Baptist, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (video returns to a detail of Boys Basking in the Sun and thereafter to a detail of John the Baptist The troika is our clue to Gogol's plan, that Dead Souls, study of Russia in social decay, should be the first of a regenerative trilogy. He is said to have written the second, a Purgatory of Transition, but burned it dissatisfied, and again, after painful rewriting, by mistake. The third, the Paradiso, was not attempted. This painter Ivanov spent the same thirty years working toward a religious masterpiece, The Appearance of Christ before the Multitudes, of which yearning sketches remain the best fruit. Dostoievsky too, who shifted Crime and Punishment from suicide-course to salvation, intended a trilogy, of which the present Brothers, centered in Ivan, would be the Inferno of a Pan-Slavic ascent of Russia tried and saved. As Father Paissy says: The Church is not to be transformed into the State. That is Rome and its dream... On the contrary, the State is transformed into the Church, will ascend and become a Church over the whole world — which is the opposite of... Rome... and is only the glorious destiny ordained for the Orthodox Church. This star will arise in the east! 79) 79a) I.E. Repin, 1901, Portrait of Tolstoy, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg; + V details Serov, 1937, Lenin's arrival in Petrograd in 1917, USSR (video adds, from 79, a detail of Tolstoy's head) That destiny was spiritual, but it has come to pass by material–ism, anathema to the great men of the '40's — this Tolstoi, painted in age by Repin — a hint at the reversals of the organizing play. Thus Le Maistre, Tolstoi's Napoleonic source, Catholic and Royalist counterpole to the Liberal ferment, had become a feature of the court of the Czars. In absorbing that skeptic absolutism, Tolstoi turns it to an intuitive surrender to the divinity of the peasant mass, the prompting of Russian soul. So his Platon Karataev ("The Plato who cannot speak well") mediates Pierre's life-acceptance — with the barefoot search in which Tolstoi would close his life. But for Kutuzov's enactment of the Slavic will, already wrenched from Le Maistre's Machiavellian power-politics, to incorporate itself by a further antinomy, the proletarian iconoclasm of Marx, for an actualization the converse of Father Paissy's dream — is a dialectic the aristocrats of Russian soul could hardly have anticipated. June 1996 19th Century 45 �C.G. Bell 80) Symbolic History M. Vrubel, 1890., Sitting Demon, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; + V details Music: Scriabin, 1903, Etude, 0pus 42, No. 5, close, (Horowitz) Columbia M 31620 Vrubel's 1890 brooding Demon or Genie, its Symbolist forms breaking into the abstract, closes the century. Let it stand with Scriabin, who made his life a medley of visions extolling three things, the new Art, the new Gospel, the new Left: "There must be no more money and no more poor." All his music was in preparation for a great tone poem Mystery, for which he had invented a language of cries and ejaculations; it was to be performed in a hemispherical temple in a lake in India (the reflection completing the perfect sphere), and at its climax Nietzsche's leap to the Superman would occur, and revolution be fulfilled in an ecstasy of Spirit. Though he had bought a cork helmet to explore the site, the World War (as with Thomas Mann, Hesse, and so many) intervened, turning The Poem of Fire to a baptism grosser than those post-Romantics had conceived. (end Scriabin) June 1996 19th Century 46 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 46 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 19th Century : The Loaded Dream, Symbolic History, Part 31 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 31 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_31_19th_Century--The_Loaded_Dream Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a25477633f40c38b686dd675793dda8d.pdf eeeeec4f7760b9c5798c685284b8d1e8 PDF Text Text Charles G. Bell, 1260 Canyon Road, or St. John's College, Santa Fe, New Mexico SYMBOLIC HISTORY: 37: !•) , Japan (Heian) 87501 THROUGH SIGHT AND SOUND 20th Cent. C: VJorld Melt 11th c. silk painting, Dai-itoku Myo-o, Fine Arts, Boston MUSIC: Peking c. 1850 opera. Beheading a Son, opening, RCA-V LM 6057 How can an entropic universe be other than a tragic universe, its glory reared on the leap of flame? Our task is to celebrate the dangerous radiance of the later West, without the soul-abandon of. Jeffers' dance around the funeral pyre: passed me, saying, "I am Tamar Caldwell, "Someone flamelike I have my desire." Not by an image of fire itself, or any of the burnings of history, but by a silk painting from 11th century Japan, Dai-itoku Myo-o, fire-guardian of the Buddhist Pantheon (with Peking opera) we grip the pathos of the West in the life-death abstraction ) of energy. . 2) (fade music) Fr. Gothic 13th-16th cent., N.Porch and N.Tower, Cathedral of Chartres (CGB '59) Had not the choice been made with Gothic - its last phase, as in the North Tower of Chartres, called Flamboyant, after flame? In music, the old descent of the Greek tetrachord, settling through its Semitone to the Dorian tonic E - a recollection retained in Gregorian: MUSIC: Gregorian, Easter Mass, dote of Terra treauit, MHS 915 — that downward scale inverts with early organum, climbs through the leading tone to a forbidden tonic C: MUSIC: School of St. Martial at Limoges, Melismat'ic Organum from -------------------------- the Benidicamus Domino, Haydn Soc. L-2071 — Dante's Paradise of flame already fulfilled in Perotin: ‘ �20th Cent. Melt - 2 C.G. Bell MUSIC: Perotin c. 1200, Quadruplum close of Sederunt, Cape, ARC-14068 3) Phillipe de Loutherbourg c. 1800, Coalbrookdale at Night, Science Mus., London With the blast furnaces of the 1800 Midlands, how earth-involved the flames have become, Faust's sky-hunger conflagrant with the hell compact — the combustion and flood of Wagner's Valhalla — soaring to an always higher diapason. Nietzsche: "Above all a living thing wants to discharge its energy." ‘ MUSIC: Wagner 1874, Gotterdammerung, close, Seraphim, 4) 1st Atomic Bomb-, July 16, '45, N.M. 60003 ("Trinity") (Al .Cooke, America, 334) (close Wagner) 5) G. Coustou c. 1730, Portrait of his Brother, Louvre, Paris MUSIC: Bach c. 1715?, Little Fugue in G Minor, opening, Biggs, ----- ----- ' -... ----- Col. MS6261 If dissolving is in question, what energized human greatness (as in the character of a lost father) was to be treasured in that Western assertive command of the incarhate field. in the Age of Enlightenment, how Coustou's Yet even here, portrait of a brother, reasonable as MontesquieuSpirit of the Laws, flames toward excess; how even the most cheerful of Bach's fugues breaks in storm-tossed inwardness, beyond measure. 6) Canova 1803-22 -i (fade Bach) (a copy?), Bust of Napoleon,Gal.d'arte Moderna, Pitti, Florence MUSIC: Beethoven 1804-8, toward close 1st myt, 5th Symphonie, --------. _ . --. ... Deutsche Gram. LPM-188 04 In Canova's Napoleonic transformation, "makes war on itself". (as Hegel says) Revolutionary hope (Wordsworth's "A Blackbird's whistle in a vernal grove") with ardent eyes". spirit turns to "hissing factionists Yet superimposed on that yielding up moral �C.G. Bell 20th Cent. Melt - 3 questions in despair, the now existential will has seized the grim hammer to forge something. minimal or the maximal state? Was Rousseau's Contract for the Thus the motion of liberation which had prevailed since Renaissance becomes the motion of constriction, 7) Arno Breker c. 1938, Nazi Carving, Preparedness which has Hitlerized the later West. (Kunst *81) (fade Beethoven 5th) We will not sift the recorded sounds of National Socialist rallies "With Songs and Cheers", for a music of the reign of Professor Doctor Peter Raabe, blatant as Arno Breker's 1938 "Preparedness" — as if totalitarian "Renaissance" could turn back the clock of Spenglerian time, renewing the civic power of Michelangelo's David against Eliot's "Gerontion" warning: "Unnatural vices are fathered by our heroism." Hitler: ) We must be ruthless... Terror is the most effective political instrument...A violently active, dominating intrepid, brutal youth — that is what I am after... 8) Paul Klee 1940, Death and Fire, MUSIC: A.Berg 1935, Klee Foundation, Bern, Switzerland from Violin Concerto, death passage Against the Nazi head set what its call to strength had exiled. Paul Klee, most insistently subconscious of the great moderns, was purged frpm the Dusseldorf academy in 1933. He settled in Bern, where he died in 1940, the year of this picture, "Death and Fire", a wry handling of his own and the world's dissolution. Mein Kampf quell the fires by which it was forged? But could Berg's Violin Concerto on Manon Gropius' death of polio-myelitis; Rilke's surreal landscape of laments in the Tenth Duino Elegy, — with everything from Einstein's relativity, Heisenberg's indeterminacy, Godel' s anti-proof, back to Marx'* Manifesto and Rimbaud's "drunken gnat at the inn's urinal, in love with the barage and dissolved �20th Cent, Melt C.G. Bell in a sunbeam"? 4 (fade music) Did these, as so many assumed, portend the decay of Western power? 9) Rom'q-Gothic Castle 1228, Chateau-de-Mer, Sidon, Lebanon By 1228 the crusading drive of Medieval chivalry had left this Chateau-de-Mer at Sidon, on the Lebanese coast of Asia Minor. 10) Moorish in Spain 14th cent., Torre del Damas & garden, Granada In Granada, this 14th century Torre del Damas, with its garden, pool and Asian lion, marks the last Moorish foothold on the contested sub-continent of Spain. 11) Turkish in Europe 16th cent.. Old Bridge, Minarets etc., Mostar, Yugoslavia As late as the Renaissance the Ottoman Turk was pressing the bounds of Vienna, holding Bosnia and Herzegovina, building this Mostar bridge, minarets and towers in what would later be Austria Hungary, and then Yugoslavia. 12) V.Dyck c. 1633, Wm. Fielding, Yet by the next century 1st Earl of Denbigh, Nat.Gal., London (33 years after Queen Elizabeth had licensed the East India Company), Van Dyck hugely captured what was to become the whole Pukka-Sahib imperial westernizing of the globe; 13) John Nash & others 1815-21, The Royal Pavilion, Brighton, England • With Brighton Pavilion, fashioned for George, Prince Regent, from 1815 to '21, like an Eastern Pleasure-dome (though with the structural lightening of cast-iron), the counter-current of empire draws the styles of exotic lands to the novelty-seeking core. On the tide of post-romantic desire, who is fo be conquered by whom? 14) German Renaissance c. 1500, Dinkelsbuhl, center (CGB *59) No doubt the energy that would revolutionize every phase of �M C.G. Bell 20th Cent. Melt - 5 Western and human life had already, in the Renaissance German town (here Dinkelsbiihl) , given Gothic testimony of its soaring dialectic, the free individual empowered in the civic frame. Yet even as the « traffic of another world explodes those towns, how remote they seem 15) Empire State Building, looking up from the street, NYC from the Empire State culmination of that Faustian alchemy. In a community of nations preparing again to tear itself to pieces. New York was skyscraping center, that slogan-capitalist worldhive, with the stock-market of its troubled art soul: — 16) Salvator Dali 1936, Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonitions of Civil War), Arenburg Col'n, Philadelphia Mus. Dali's 1936 "Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonitions of Civil War)" dished up what was hatching from post-romantic, depression and Fascism (as birds crack the shell). In that turning of liberalism on itself, transvaluing polarities were everywhere dividing and inbreeding. Left fought right, socialist communist, Trotskyite Stalinist; yet ultimate right and ultimate left converged in totalitarian seizure. In art, realism rose against avant-garde, avant-garde split abstract from surreal; isms splintered and cross-multiplied; while through them all cut the psychic cleavage of backward regret or forward euphoria -whether the manic-depressive should affirm or deny. 17) CanoVa 1804-19, Theseus Battles the Centaur, Kunsthist. Mus., Vienna In the Napoleonic upheaval, Canova thought to battle down centaur violence, summoning the heroic image of Theseus (though already strength swells too much toward a Mussolini pugilist). While in Schubert's last symphony, classical form still masters the rebellious dissonance of Beethoven. MUSIC: Schubert 1826, 7th Symphony, 2nd mvt, nearing close, ------ ——---------------------------------- — Col.ML 5619 (fade) �C.G. Bell 20th Cent. Melt 6 18) j,ipschitz 193B, Rape ol' Europa. .bronze, Musee d*Arte Moderne, Pai is Since Nietzsche's transvaluation of value, that brute seizure Picasso's IS our own-- Lipsckitz' Europa, like/ bull and minotaur. assumpticns of conquering So Schonberg's espousal of emanicipated dissonance. MUSIC: Schonberg 1936, Vln Concerto,- 2nd mvt, brief forte, h through. Col. M2S 679 (fade) Yeats, for all his concern with "traditional sanctity and loveliness", must side with the "roof-levelling wind", the irrational cry of Juno's Peacock, the "old man's frenzy" of his own epitaph: Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by. 19) Raeburn c. 1810?, Rev. Robert Walker Skating, Nat. Gal., Edinburgh Has the complicity of alienation removed us forevear from the human image as Romantic inherited it from Enlightenment — Raeburn's Preacher Walker skating, from the time of Wordsworth's Prelude: ("Fair seed-time had my soul") We hiss'd along the polish'd ice...while the stars Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west The orange sky of evening died away. Have we now the option of that Vicar of Wakefield wholeness? 20) H.Matisse 1905, Joy of Life, study, Haas Coll'n, S.Francisco MUSIC: Ravel 1909, Daphnis & Chloe Suite II, opening. Col. MS 5397 When Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Seurat meet in the Fauves, those "Wild Beasts" (this Matisse 1905 Joy of Life), Symbolist rupture and escape soar to mythic elation — as in Ravel's 1909 Daphnis and Chloe. And although the Bacchic dream of Mann's Aschenbach attends Death-in-Venice, it was still with the rapture of Molly Bloom that Joyce would close the Dublin wanderings of �M M C.G. Bell 20th Cent. Melt - 7 Ulysses, June 16, 1904: and Gibralter as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair... and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. 21) Picasso 1903, Life, Mus. of Art, Cleveland, Ohio And though Picasso had begun in the Symbolist Blue vein of early Yeats: "The wind blows over the lonely of heart/ And the lonely of heart is withered away/" — what Debussy had poured into the last phrase of Maeterlink's Pelleas and Mellisande, "It's the turn of the poor little child" MUSIC: Debussy 1892-1902, close of Pelleas & Mellisande, Col. M3 30119 (whatever Spectre of a Rose would be enacted in the new Ballet of Diaghilev or in the Diaghilev-haunted fate of Nijinsky) — (fade Pelleas & Mellisande) 22) Picasso 1907, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Mus. of Mod. Art, NYC Picasso by 1907 would have broken through that "Hollow Man" anemia, MUSIC: Stravinsky 1912-13, from Le Sacre du Printemps, Col. MG3 1202 striking d’eep into the mother-lode of Faust, Nietzsche and Rimbaud, bulldozing for Joyce the abstract violence of Ulysses' Circebrothel, and for Stravinsky this 1912 Rite of Spring. As Picasso revealed, the crapping pose on the right is as much the earthmother crouch of delivery. Was it not known from the start that when stressed forms are broken, energy flames? 23) (fade Stravinsky) Franz Marc 1914, Heitere Formen (A Schardt, F. Marc p. 160) Perhaps the visual ecstasy peaks (Fauve, Cubist, Futurist) A i �C.G.'^ Bell 20th Cent. Melt - 8 Franz Marc's 1914 "Happy Forms" — such an overflow as Rilke gave words in the Second Duino Elegy, the perilous Archangel t. having advanced one step from behind the stars (Leishman & Spender) ranges, summits, dawn-red ridges of all beginning, — pollen of blossoming godhead (Pollen der bllihenden Gottheit, Gelenke des Lichtes, Gange, Treppen, Throne...) hinges of light, corridors, stairways, thrones, spaces of being, shields of felicity, tumults of stormily-rapturous feeling, and suddenly, separate, mirrors, drawing up their own outstreamed beauty into their faces again. — "the eternal torrent" roaring its way through all realms, inward, outward — until creative ecstasy climaxes in terror. 24) Franz Marc 1914, Kampfende Formen, Neue Pinakothek, Munich (CGB *59) It is the break implied in this "Battling Forms", Marc's other masterpiece of 1914, that year of the Great War, when man appeared the Faustian bungler off migratory course (Rilke): ...outstript and late, we thrust up suddenly into the wind, to fall upon inhospitable ponds — Und fallen ein auf teilnahmlosen Teich. In 1911 the young poet Heym imagined the catastrophe he did not live to see: A great city sank down in yellow smoke. Sucked without a sound into the ground; Vast above the ruins War heaves his' brand... 25) Geo. Davis 1916?, "Putting out his eyes". Imperial War Mus., London Only above the sodden trenches and barbed v/ire could that First World action hold the Fauve adventure of Homeric war — Yeats, "An Irish Airman Foresees his Death": A lonely impulse of delight Drove to this tumult in the clouds; �20th Cent. Melt C.G. Bell 9 I balanced all, brought all to mind. The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind In balance with this life, this death. 26) Nevinson c. 1918, Bearing the Wounded Over No Man's Land (Studio: Mod. Engl. Art) Below, Rilke's first flame elation at the "hearsaid, remote, incredible War God", with George's, and Hesse's, mired in the this of doomed Hyperion landscape of/Nevinson and/Owen: It seemed that out of battle I escaped Down sortie profound dull tunnel, long since scooped Through granites which titanic wars had groined. Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned. Too fast in thought or death to be be.stirred. Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared... By.his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell... "I am the enemy you killed, my friend... 27) George Gross 1917-18, To Oskar Panizza, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart George Gross's 1917-18 Kermess of Death whirls us from Owen beyond embittered Sassoon -Does it matter? — losing your legs?... For people will always be kind... And no one will worry a bit — to the armistice debunking of All Quiet on the Western Front and No More Parad.es. Under the Dada compact to mock, the surreal to estrange. Pound hones Hysterias, trench confessions. Laughter out of dead bellies... There died a myriad. And of the best among them. For an old bitch gone in the teeth,' For a botched civilization... 28) 0.Kokoschka 1909-10, the Marquis & Marquise de Rohan-Montesquieu, Nat.Mus., Stockholm, & P.E. Geier Coll'n, Rome But the war shift from euphoria to bitterness was a change of stress. By 1910 Eliot's Prufrock seems indecision of "entre deux guerres" to have entered the ("I am no prophet — and �C 20th Cent. Melt • B011 here's no great matter"). 10 At the same time Kokoschka, in Vienna and Svvitzerland had uncovered the more blasted international neurotics of Eliot's post-war "Gerontion": Mr. Silvero With caressing hands, at Limoges Who walked all night in the next room... Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room Shifting the candles... so the Waste Land also about 1919: Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair Spread out in fiery points Glowed into words, then would be- savagely still. "My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me... I never know what you are thinking. Think." 29) Brancusi 1919, Mile Pogany (bronze) (Life, Dec. 5, '55) MUSIC: Stravinsky 1922, Octet for Wind Instruments, from First . Mvt. --- ---------------------------------- ^---------------------- Col. SM 30579 In Brancusi's 1919 Mile Pogany, as in the jazz polyphonies of post-war Stravinsky, abstract sophistication leaves no clue to the mutilations style has plowed under. In that civilization of Chaplinesque extremes, what crack-ups were waiting under the brilliance of League of Nations, boom and bust, flapper dress and skeletal steel? 30) (fade Stravinsky) M.Duchamp 1912, Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, Mus. of Art, . Philadelphia Before the war Duchamp had painted for the Armory Show of 1912 this Cubist and Futurist analysis of motion, charged somehow with the excitement of the atomic physics of those years — however the American public mocked it as "Nude Falling Down Stairs", or "Explosion in a Shingle Factory". 31) Duchamp 1915-23, The Large Glass: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even, Mus. of Art, Philadelphia But the war made Duchamp too a mocker. New York leader of �C.G. Bell 20th Cent. Melt 11 International Dada, with its nihilist debunking of civilized values. Such this "Large Glass: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even" philosophy) (as bare as Wittgenstein would strip —, this love-burlesque of scrap metal and pseudo­ dynamo, to which Duchamp gave ten years of assembling and laissez-faire destruct. tion by negation, Yet how soon in the Avant-garde affirma­ its junk and nose-thumbing would point the path of higher abandon (William Carlos Williams' "No ideas but in things"), to become the dynamic of a New Frontier. 32) Mondrian 1936-42, Rythm of Straight Lines, H.Clifford, Philadelphia, (now D^lsseldorf) MUSIC: Varese 1931, Ionization, Col. MS 6146 (about 2/3 in^after siren) In the tightening of the '20's, Mondrian, who had begun by abstracting from nature, stripped the canvas to ruled rectangles of white and primary colors. Was Varese on such a course in the percussions and sirens of his 1931 Ionization? Or Gertrude Stein in her most arid reductions: Red Roses. A cool red rose and a pink cut pink, a collapse and a sold hole, a little less hot... Custard. Custard is this. It has aches, aches when. Not to be. Not to be narrowly. This makes a whole little hill. Better'her dying question: answer came): 33) "What's the answer?" (and when no "In that case, what's the question?" (end Varese) Japanese (Early Edo) 17th c., Jodan-no-ma, room in Shin Shoin Katsura, Imperial Villa, Kyoto, Japan MUSIC: Japanese Koto(Izumi Kai), Rokudan: close, Everest 3206 How much of the modern has its cognates in Medieval, Eastern, Primitive. Such rectangular grids as Mondrian contrived for panel painting Imperial Villa. unfold to articulated wonder in the Kyoto The conscious inventive novelty of the modern -- �20th Cent. Melt C.G. Bell "Well then, what’s the question?" recedes before the spatial ceremony of this life-room. 34) 12 (end Koto music) Le Corbusier & others 1937-43-, Ministry of Education, Rio de Janeiro In architecture what had seemed the rectangular quirk of painting gathers the powers of reinforced concrete, steel and glass for the functional enclosure of space (so Le Corbusier's Rio de Janeiro Ministry of Education). The art struggle which • c ruled lines had bypassed (Cezanne's life-fight for geometry in nature) resurrects in the tensile strategy of rearing against gravity (as Buckminster Fuller used to ask at architectural meetings: 35) "What does yctr building weigh?") . Frank Lloyd Wright 1909-10, Robie House, Woodlawn Ave., Chicago, IL (CGB *60) The most extraordinary genius of architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright, was also herald of a new America: a new ideal of civilization...based on the freedom of man's mind guided by his conscience... Those wonderful houses, where nature flows in and out: (Wright) We have no longer an outside as outside. Now the outside may come inside, and the inside may and does go outside. They are of each other... There can be no separation between our architecture and our culture. Nor any separation of either from our happiness. — from the Prairie Houses of the early century, the great one built for Coonley, or this for Robie in Chicago; 36) F.L. Wright 1952, Mrs. Clinton Walker House, Carmel, CA through the Pasadena houses of the '20's, or Pennsylvania "Falling Water" from the '30's, to this on the Carmel coast, 1952 — democratic vision, empowered by wealth and daring, went on affirming itself, through war. Lost Generation, Depression, Nazi �C.G. Bell 20th Cent. Melt 13 war, the advance of Communism, New Frontier, down to Silent Spring and the napalm bombing of Vietnam. Wright: There is a new integrity in America, alive and working with new means...for freedom and beauty — yours and mine and our children's — in the realm of the new architecture. 37) Same, interior looking out to the ocean What did that private ocean-pavilion of steel and glass affirm? The splurge of America, the huge canvases of the N.Y. School, oil slicks, the looming energy crisis? Did it affirm its own negation? -- not far away along the same beach, the hand-built tower of stone from which Spenglerian Jeffers had written in the 1920's: "meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic", and "This coast crying out for tragedy like all beautiful places"..."Burn as before with bitter wonders, land and ocean and the Carmel water." The very year of the house the vision of Adlai Stevenson would go down before Eisenhower and Nixon: 38) O land, 0 cities; and down to tbe salt sea again. Grant Wood 1932, Daughters of the American Revolution, Art. Mus., Cincinatti Both Wright's avant-garde and his dream of America having been opposed, since the eddies and cross-currents of between-wars, by Philistine tradition — against which Grant Wood and Sinclair Lewis had thought to wield an ironic scalpel: There is a character in spectacles. '. .Babbitt' s spectacles had huge circular frameless lenses of the very best glass; the ear pieces were thin bars of gold. In them he was the modern business man; one who gave orders to clerks and drove a car and played occasional golf and was scholarly in regard to Salesmanship...With respect you beheld him put on the rest of his uniform as Solid Citizen. Yet what is such an art mocking but its own limitations, consanguinities? its �20th Cent. Melt C.G. Bell 39) 14 Picasso 1930, Seated Bather, Museum of Modern Art, NYC Copland 1930, from the Eiano Variations (close) Dover HCR MUSIC: ------------ - ----------- ------- bT-7014A'~ Picasso's mandibled Bather voiced the same desiccation more radically. It was just the translation of worn-out content into the elemental charge of distilled abstraction that gave inter­ national modernism its hard vitality. So Copland (with less acclaim) in the hermetic experiment of the 1930 Piano Variations. 40) J.S. Curry 1929, Tornado over Kansas, Hadley Art Gal., Muskegan, MI or RCA LSC 31^4 MUSIC: Copland -1938, from Billie the Kid, 1st scene. Col. MS 6175 Meanwhile the counterdrive (this 1929 Curry) pushed sanity in art and reattachment to nature and man — to avoid what Marsh called "fantastic nonsense" and Benton of Missouri "sickly rationalizations, psychic inversions and God-awful cultivations". Life magazine and the WPA helped, Copland too, as if to show that a clever man can change styles like dress, led music on the tabloid tack. (fade Copland) Typical of the aesthetic war, that when Barnett Newman, in 1942, attacked "Isolationist painting, which they named the American Renaissance... not an art but an expanded Currier and Ives revival", he identified it with Hitlerism: Art in America today stands at a point where anything that cannot fit into the American scene label is doomed to be completely ignored...an ever expanding school of genre painters... telling the story of America's life of humdrum...instead of the old oaken bucket, it based its appeal on the hurricane cellar. 41) Barnett Newman 1949, Concord, Met. Museum, NYC from MUSIC: ■ Subotnick (b. 19'33), Electronic Synthesizer/"Silver Apples of —---------------------------- :------ the Moon", Nonesuch 47174 (Sf. Jno) (hear close of Pt. Ill �20th Cent. Melt C.G. Bell 15 --here Subotnick-Though in a short time (while the synthesizei/ gained in music), the work of Newman himself, this two-lined color-ground called Concord, based on the European abstract, but rapturously, almost (strange as the word seems) organically new, the mystic color pools of Rothko, action swirls of De Kooning and Pollock,^ with numberless variants of other experimenters — all that had pushed the, representational in turn almost to the wall. 42) (fade Subotnick) Max Ernst 1943, The Eye of Silence, Washington Univ., Mus. of Art Had reattachment been an eddy in the always remoter flight from things of the earth; or is it a recurrent calling? Dylan Thomas at any rat:e, began (1934) with estrangement, surreal as this Max Ernst, The Eye of Silence; ■ Light breaks where no sun shines; Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart Push in their tides; And, broken ghosts with glowworms in their heads. The things of light File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones... 43) Jack B. Yeats 1952, The Morning Sea, J.D. Rockefeller, NY But by 1946, the rapture of "Fern Hill" ("Down rivers of the windfall light") or of "Poem in October", suggests an art as immediate in earth-praise as the Irish landscapes of Jack Yeats, painter-brother of William Butler Yeats, the poet: t It was my thirtieth year to heaven Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood And the mussel pooled and heron Priested shore The morning beckon... And I rose In rainy autumn And walked abroad in a shower of all my days... 44) P.Mondrian 1942-3, Broadway Boogie V'Joogie, Mus. Modern Art, NYC MUSIC: Boogie Woogie (1936) Count Basie, etc. Did even Mondrian, in wartime New York, follow the trend of �V 9 C.G. Bell 20th Cent. Melt - 16 earth-yea to the jazzing of his squares in what he called "Broadway Boogie Woogie"— catchy as Cuininings' take-off on first love as driving a car" she being Brand -new; and you know consequently a little stiff i was careful of her and (having thoroughly oiled the universal joint tasted my gas felt of her radiator made sure her springs were O. K.) i went right to it flooded-the-carburetor cranked her up, slipped the clutch... just as we turned the corner of Divinity avenue i touched the accelerator and give her the juice, good (it was the first ride and .believe i we was happy to see how nice she acted right up to the last minute coming back down by the Public Gardens i slammed on the internalexpanding & externalcontracting brakes Bothatonce and brought allofher tremB -ling to a-:dead. stand;Still) (end Boogie Woogie) 45) Diego Rivera 1932, Man and Machinery, Detroit Inst, of Arts MUSIC: Honegger 1924, Pacific 231, (close). Vanguard SRV-274 SD; -——— cf. Mussolov c. 1928, Steel Foundry or Symph. of Machines, -------------------------------------------- old 78 PAT-X96300 The Left had begun Avant-garde, politics. iconoclastic in art as in (MOssolov's 1928 Machine music communizes this 1924 �20th Cent. Melt C.G. Bell Honegger "Pacific 231".) 17 But the populist rallying, even as it absorbed the radical, veered in counter-revolt against it. In a Mexico which called itself Marxist, Diego Rivera (with others) forged abstract into realism, satire into proletarian acclaim.Meanwhile Left and Right enforced totalitarian conformity. One was tempted to divide Western Civilization into three overlapping spans: 1st, the mystico-ascetic or Medieval; 2nd, the free-humanlst, rising from that ground to Renaissance vigor, 17th century formulation, 18th and 19th century climax, with orgies of lacerative individualism extending into this century; 3rd, the ordered-materialist, growing from the industrial revolution to the state assertions of pur time. (end Pacific 231) From the pragmatic perspective of this third, what was the whole surreal and abstract wave but a bourgeois pathology? As from the flight of Symbolist vision, the mass hardening was a reactionary pathos of between-wars. 46) 0.Kokoschka 1913, Dolomite Landscape: Tre Croci, Horstmann Coll'n, Hamburg Against its blatancy, stands the wonder of the ultimate modern: -- Rilke's last Duino Elegy, the Tenth, gleaming as far as its "stars of the Land of Pain" — "Die Sterne des Leidlands" over the art scene. MUSIC: Alb.Berg 1935, Vln Concerto, Philips ST 802-785 LY (opening) What can we do but invoke it again, and with it, also the music its death molting claims — Berg's Violin Concerto, which brings the sensory renewal of the 'thirties to a like transcendence? It was before the First War, and in the vein of rapt wonder Kokoschka approached in that Austria, that Rilke received the first fifteen lines, ending: �20th Cent. Melt C.G. Bell 18 We wasters of sorrows — wir, Vergeuder der Schmerzen -...though they are nothing else Than our winter foliage, our somber evergreen... Place and settlement, camp, soil and dwelling. When the poet, in the trough of between-wars, found his way back to these Elegies begun at Duino, 47) Paul Klee 1915, Der Niesen, Hermann Rupf, Bern the tenth had become a surreal pilgrimage: How strange alas are the streets of the city of pain... Franz Marc having fallen in the great blood-letting, who could advance with Rilke out through the "wide landscape of laments" — "die weite Landschaft der Klagen"? plumbed the subconscious. Klee, as much as anyone, But can Klee's clever miniatures, here Mount Niesen, behind the Lake of Thun, match Berg's requiem for Manon Gropius, much less Rilke's ascent with the Early Dead? (Leishman & Spender) ...in silence the elder Lament brings him as far as the gorge where it gleams in the moonlight, — there, the source of joy — 48) Kandinsky 1913, Improvisation (The Flood), Stadtische Gal., Munich MUSIC: still Berg, Vln Concerto, skip to stormy death It was Klee's miraculous inventions which had mediated the 1 1920 change in Kandinsky. Surely, there is a proportionality between the pre-war and post-war styles in Kandinsky and Rilke. The Apocalyptic storm by which Kandinsky turns his 1913 Flood disaster to a color vortex of earth-swallowing spirit, matches the 1912 stratum of the Tenth Elegy: "that secret weeping may blossom" -- "dass das unscheinbare Weinen bluhe", heart's looser night-surrender to the inconsolable sisters' loosened hair. 49) Kandinsky 1926, Several Circles, detail, Guggenheim Museum, NYC �20th Cent. Melt - 19 C.G. Bell MUSIC; Berg continued into the Choral While when Kandinsky comes, through Dada, Klee and Bauhaus, to the ethereal geometry of this 1926 "Several Circles", it is as if Berg had brought Bach's "Es ist genug" out of a 12 tone agony, or Rilke, under pain ranges had found the "well of joy", ...with awe she names it, says "Among men it's a carrying stream" —"Bei den Menschen/ ist sie ein tragender Strom"— (fade Berg Vln Concerto & skip to the close) So the close of the Berg, like the Rilke — up heights seeded with catkins and the spring rain — climbs the vanishing diapason, to the emotion that almost startles when happiness falls. die uns beinah besturzt, wenn ein Gluckliches fallt. (close of the Berg, without speech) 50) Russian Byzantine 1508, Fresco of Last Judgment, Cathedral of the Annunciation, Kremlin, Moscow MUSIC: Russian 16th c(?), Christmas Hymn, Anthol. Sonore LP-10, A, 1 It is of crucial significance that the materialist nation of the future, Rhssia, should have remained so long immersed .in the lavic appropriation of Byzantine, (this 1508 Kremlin chapel), an orthodoxy 19th century Slavophils must turn into an earth-might — even to the passionate harmonization of all ancient chant, Against so national a mystique, how could Marx say: (fade chant) "The working­ men have no country"? 51) Kiprensky 1827, Portrait of Pushkin, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow In the romantic westernization of that Russia, this portrayed Pushkin, sad singer of autumn — "Sweet mournful days, lure of �C.G. Bell 20th Cent. Melt 20 leave-taking eyes" — is .also the prophet a six-winged seraph gave in the waste, eagle eyes, ears to hear the spheres "And the green vine in the valley climbing", for his own lying tongue that of the wise serpent, and for his human heart a coal of fire. So he wakes to the voice of God: Wander the gray seas and earth roads And burn men's hearts with this, my Word! Was it then that he called to the mine prisoners of Siberia?: The walls will crumble at a word... And brothers give you back the sword. 52) Malevich 1911, Taking in Harvest, Stedelijk Mus., Amsterdam In the Avant-garde revolt of the first quarter of this century, Russians leapt to the fore. and Stravinsky, lived abroad. representation kept pace, Paris. Though most, like Kandinsky Not Malevich, whose break with from year to year, with Munich and With the exception of a brief stay in France, 1912, and in Germany, 1926, he stuck it out, through war and revolution, in Moscow. In this 1911 Harvest Scene, the observed puts on the barrels of cylindrical abstraction. 53) Malevich 1913, Head of a Peasant Girl, Stedelijk Mus., Amsterdam In this 1913 "Head of a Peasant Girl" Malevich moves, under the impact of Picasso's cubism, toward what he would formulate as "a feeling for the absence of the object." By 1916 this compl of curved foldings had also yielded to a Constructivism of plane geometry, culminating in the nuclear ultimate of "Suprematism". As Malevich wrote: 54) Malevich c. 1915, Black Square, Russian Museum, Leningrad Suprematism compresses all of painting into a black square on a white canvas. I did not have to invent anything. It was the absolute night I felt in me; in that,- I perceived the creation, and I called it Suprematism. It expresses itself in the black plane in the form of a square. �s 20th Cent. Melt - 21 C.G. Bell Though Diaghilev had observed in the cresting of 1905; We are witnesses of...a new and unknown culture which will be created by us, and which will also sweep us away. While the Revolution thought itself avant-garde, Malevich had art power in Russia. From Trotsky ("The mind of the artist will limp after the reality the politicians are creating") to Stalin, reaction hardened (was it the outrage of that Internationale where ground and trees were painted in loud geometries?)- When Malevich died in 1935, it was in poverty and neglect, his once Bolshevik attempt called "Bourgeois formalism". 55) Boris Johanson 1933, Interrogation of two Communists, USSR At what flaming acts and inertia of art that overthrow and changing of the tinctures connived. Here a 1933 Interrogation of two Communists, with Shostakovich and Sholokov: . , < (Kouseva tsky; MUSIC: Shostakovich 1937, Fifth Symphony, 1st Mvt, before climax, / =: .. ■ -- Col ML 47 39 Bravely, proudly lifting his head, Podtielkov mounted the stool beneath the noose, unbuttoned the collar around his stout sv/arthy neck, and without the tremor of a muscle, himself set the soapy rope... "See -how few* are left to look on at our death... You have been deceived. The revolutionary government will come, and you will see where the truth was. The finest sons of the gentle Don you have laid in that hole." (fade Fifth Symphony) Let this picture from the year Hitler came to power exemplify the state realism Stalin also enforced. 56) Pavlo Filonov c. 1935?, Fragment of Faces ("Hidden Soviet Art", Life Mar.28, 1960) MUSIC: Shostakovich 1936, close of Symph. 4, Melodiya-Angel SR-40177 And only long after, with the literary underground we know of, paintings would appear of an Avant-garde suppressed under Soviet �20th Cent. Melt C.G,. Bell conformity: 22 this mosaic of distrubed faces by Filonov, Leningrad painter who died in 1941. Suddenly one would realize what one must have known before, that consciousness is like a gene-pool; post-romantic civilizations may demand, resolve; but they cannot obliterate what has been experienced by the soul. It is a tribute to Shostakovich that in his experimental works, condemned or quietly withdrawn, we are hypnotized toward that other focus — as with the mysterious -close of the disapproved Fourth Symphony. 57) (close Shostakovich 4th) Peter Blume 1934-7, The Eternal City, Mus. of Modern Art, NYC When Mussolini in 1923 popped out of the Pandora box, among battered books and broken statues of the Eternal City, he did not 'look so green-faced as Peter Blume would make him more than twelve years later. Lincoln Steffens in fact had thought him God's clc.rifying thunderbolt. asked. "You're a correspondent?" "You saw the war? Revolution in Russia? anything... Listen. Yes. Yes. And the peace? Well," he sneered, Mussolini had Yes. And the "did you learn Do you think now any of the things you thought before you saw the war, the peace and the revolution?" But if that was God's thunderbolt, Steffens obscured the ■h' turning of God on himself — how Futurist ecstatic rant and d'Annunzio's foaming poems, leagued with Mussolini and castor oil to make the trains run on time, might overshoot. no more of the brotherhood, "Let us hear sisterhood and other bastard relations of nations; all relations of nations are those of power"... 58) Hitler c. 1920?, early painting of a dream castle, Life 10/30/39 — So darkening Europe under Flying Fortresses. Since meanwhile a most inadequate representational painter. �20th Cent. Melt C.G. Bell 23 the Austrian, Adolf Hitler, had concretized, and, in the bitterness of German defeat and inflation, was deflecting his art from such paintings as this castle (dream madhouse he might have escaped from) to a Mein Kampf veering of Socialist Workers to the turgid Right. As Dante had said of the wrathful: "Portando dentro accidioso fummo." With the Dachau smoke of that strange incinerator, the pathos of moral rearmament and soul-hardening would spread over Europe the fiercest realism of all. 59) Adolf- Wamper c. 1938, Genius of Victory, Kunst Vol 81, 1933-40 In the "Genius of Victory" by Wamper (another Adolf), everything from abstract and Expressionist, D^da and Surreal is forcibly reversed in the Charles Atlas imperative of totalitarian renewal — caricature of Nietzsche's call to higher living: A ruling race can only grow from terrible and violent beginnings. Where are the barbarians of the twentieth century? (If only the Germans could have claimed a monopoly of theml) 60) Double: Saint-Sever Apocalypse c. 1050, Flood, Bibl.Nat., Paris; and Picasso 1937, Guernica, det. of Left portion, Barcelona? "The tiger springs in the new year . ' Us he devours." T.S. Elio,t in "Gerontion" had voiced that cyclical Coming — so "the innumerable clanging wings" and "Sailing to Byzantium" of Yeats' War, Civil War and post-war Tower. Even Picasso, though more Socialist than Christian, has visibly rested his 1937 bombing of Guernica on a Flood destruction from the Saint Severs Apocalypse of 1050. So the Wasteland had shaped for its age a mythology of earth-sabotage: What is the city over mountains Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air Falling towers Jerusalem Athens Vienna London Unreal... Alexandria �C.G. Bell 20th Cent. Melt - 24 (To which the Second War would add Warsaw, Rotterdam, Dresden, and all the rest.) Double: Picasso 1937, Guernica 1st State; and Final State Against the Communist realism of Russia, Picasso's Partisan testimony fragments space and abstracts emotion. From the first state of the Guernica (below) to the last (above), human content (the redemptive pain of the warrior stretched out as if crucified) is calcined and suppressed. Yet in a pictography where perspective, foreshortening, chiaroscuro go under, force flames some Heraclitean inverse of negation. While the claimants of world order cranked up their rhetoric, Picasso locked horns with god in the whirlwind. •_Picasso 1937, Guernica 2nd State det. Warrior's raised fist rays & corn; and Final State det., sword hand with flowers Even so, programmatic message — Rilke's hazel catkins from the dead land, rooted far back in the Revolutionary and Romantic, s Weary the winters, at the last comes corn" — has shaped in the photographed second state of the painting (above), such a sun-rayed promise of grain from the warrior's raised fist. And although the symbolic arm was to disappear under the writhing horse, it is in the final state (below) hand of a dead woman, spray of flowers; that what had been the long since painted out, would resurrect as a Dante's "so long as hope puts up a blade of green"; Rilke's "Heilkraut" of the Fifth Elegy, his "Singing plant" on the peaks of the heart". hand, Leafing up from the clenched sword it counters annihilation. ^_War II photo 1945, Demolition on Iwo Jima, Eastman House, Rochester So where the First War had ended in capitalist debunking, the Second swelled through Partisan alliance to a crusade of the �20th Cent. Melt - 25 C.G. Bell "Peace-loving Peoples", while Churchills's rhetoric of "blood, sweat and tears" and "Fight them on the beaches, fight them at sea, fight them in the air", revived the myth of heroic action. -- How fragile, in the wa^ of Eliot's West: I was neither at the hot gates Nor fought in the warm rain... My house is a decayed house... I an old man A dull head among windy spaces. and: Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still -- how vulnerable to My Lai. 64) Joan Miro 1942, Woman & Bird in front of the Sun Yet through the war and the decade after, down to the overflow of Hippie wish, something extraordinary happened; the partisan crusade incredibly veered through the reversal of Cold War into New Frontiers and the dream of free enterprise opulence. At the same time those arts which had begun in Dada mockery expand the same techniques (this 1942 Miro) to visionary wonder. In Finnegan's Wake of 1939, Joyce led all artificers of transverbal myth: We who live under heaven, we of the clovery kingdom, we middlesins people have often watched the sky overreaching the land. We suddenly have... A kind of a thinglike all trayloggedthen pubably it resymbles a pelvic or some kvind then props an acutebacked quadrangle with aslant off ohahnthenth a wenchyou may cuddler, lying with �20th Cent. Melt - 26 C.G. Bell her royal Irish uppershoes among the theeckleaves. Signs are on of a mere by token that wills still to be becoming upon this there once a here was world. As the dayeleyves unfolden them. In the wake of the blackshape... 65) Arshile Gorky, 1944, "How mv Mother's Embroidered Apron Unfolds in my Life", Coll'n Bagiev Wright, Seattle MUbiC: Carter 1959. Str.Qrt 2, near close. Col RJi272l At the same time the Turkish Armenian immigr^Kt Gorki (up to his accident and suicide) had seized on and was melting down the abstract and the surreal extremes of Avant-garde, crashing through about 1941 to a subconscious plasticity of paint-fused canvas, drips and all, as it has been called, "a ' phenomenology of the invisibile". �20th Cent. Melt - 27 C • G. Bel 1 Was the musical tie back to Ives, or to his followers, here Carter? (fade Carter) It was Gorki's flag which bannered the pfncer attack (action painting and color field) of the New York School, of which Motherwell would write: The present vitality of American Art is connected with the unparallelled depth of our democracy. 66) 0. Pollock 1943, Pasiphae, Coll'n Lee K. Pollock (or a later one?) Pollock's liberation is like that of a Cage happening. MUSIC: John Cage c. 1954?, from Variations IV, a live performance. Everest 3132 In poetry it was the old Pound (though hardly democratic) whose Canto's stirred such unleashing. The stench of wet coal, politicians ............... e and ...........in, their wrists bound to their ankles Standing bare bum Faces smeared on their rumps, wide eye on flat buttock. Bush hanging for beard, Addressing crowds through their arse-holes. Addressing the multitudes in the ooze, newts, water-slugs, water-maggots... howling, as of a hen-yard in a printing house, the clatter of presses... foetor, sweat, the stench of stale oranges, dung, last cess-pool of the universe... the great arse-hole, broken with piles, hanging stalactites, greasy as sky over Westminster... chewed cigar-butts, without dignity, without tragedy, ........m Episcopus, waving a condom full of black-beetles, monopolists, obstructors of knowledge, obstructors of distribution. (end Cage) 67) Franz Kline 1959, Initial. Robt. S. Scull. Gt. Neck, N.Y. In that booming growth market of elemental art, when the international Black Mountain voice of Franz Kline lets loose, in one of those huge free-brush signatures (this of 1959, called Initial), what is that 100 inch vehemence of Chinese caligraphy turned to muscular release telling us of? If of Jung's "superhuman world of contrasting light and darkness"-- �20th Cent. Melt - 28 C.G. Bell the primordial experience rends from top to bottom the curtain upon which is painted the picture Of an ordered cosmos, and allows a glimpse into the unfathomed abyss of what has not yet become -What of Jung's warning: "to which one is therefore in danger of suc­ cumbing"? 68) Jim Gilbert 1949?, Chicago River, detail. CGB & D^B, Santa Fe And when that last old master, Jim Gilbert, about 1949, so aware of post-war experiment, yet pursuing on his own the Cezanne problem of color shapes through the visible (the darks of this detail not unlike those of Kline's ink-writing), when Gilbert gloomed the Chicago River, what does that melancholy bum see in the clouded water but hints of Asian war and ecological catastrophe — Pollock's open-throttle democracy, slinging oil, ready to sling a rod? RocKefexler, Ketropoli ta.n 69) N. Amer. Indian, Mississippi Stage, Duck River, Stone Man, Mus. Prim. Art NYC How much, all over the world, has been melted down into the restless improbability of that chain-reaction. With what timeless sufficiency the stone man of the Tennessee Moundbuilders looks back at the museum lookers of New York. To tell those upstarts how long that forest crouch could have been maintained. 70) Oscar Howe 1962, Medicine Man, US Dept, of the Interior MUSIC: Native American Church, tape of chant with drums Today, even in the Peyote-cult chant of the Native American church (Christian), the irreversible trend is of the melting pot. In this 1962 Medicine Man by Oscar Howe (a Sioux trained in Santa Fe), Indian life gives theme and local color to a panal of which the consciousness and cubistic techniques are world-modern. 711 Clas^sical Mava c. 700, Hill temple stripped of trees, Yaxchilan. Chig,pas —^^-----------------------(Gertrude^om) In 500 years Classical Maya culture had exhausted its habitat �20th Cent. Melt - 29 C.G. Bell (no doubt by cropping the jungle around such populations centers as this Yaxchilan, sacred city in a great bend of the Usumacinta. Abandoned about 1300, it is only now that the temples have been cleared of whelming forest. As when facing the monuments of the Near-East, of India, China, or the Cambodian ruins of the Kingdom of the Khmers, we are staggered by the contrasting glories of pre-Western man, each isolated fastness flowering in its own life and style. 72) Maya c. 800, Jaina Style, painted pottery (whistle). Lovers, Bliss Coll_l£ ---- ----Nat. Gal., wash. DC —'■ '' .So in the late Classical Maya, the Gulf Coast island of Jaina produced wonderfully refined painted pottery figurines, in which ari­ stocratic life is depicted with a finesse and verve as of the Orient, though with a fusion of beauty and the mocking grotesque elsewhere un­ paralleled -- a tragi-comic individuation on its own human terms, to which we have lost the clue. 73) M. Ocoranza C. 1870?, The Withered Flower, Bellas Artes, Mexico DF How weird, after the conquest, to see the whole expanse, from Toltec through Aztec to Maya, take up the leavings of Europe — Ocoranza, sentimentalist of the Federal District, receiving from Greuze of The Broken Pitcher this erotic double-talk of lechery and morality the poor debauched girl tearfully contemplating her snapped lily. 74) Orozco 1937, Hidalgo, fresco det., stairhall. Pal de Govierno, Guadalajara No wonder the mawkish mummery broke to Orozco's frescoes of the Revolution, where the Meschittf firebrand Hidalgo frees the enslaved masses. Though that would-be socialist upheaval empowered another exploitation by the few. 75) Orozco 1939, Man of Flame, fresco, Hospicio Cabanas, Guadalajara Prophetic, that the national series of between-war Orozcos should A, �20th Cent. Melt - 30 C.G, Bell culminate in the cupola of the Hospicio Cabanas in Guadalajara, the dilemma of the man of flames -- as with Kazantzakis' Odysseus -- that to live is to be consumed, the ascent of man inevitably his conflagration. 76) L. Garcia Guerreo 1961, Pintura 99, Priv. Coll'n, Mexico, DF Meanwhile art-Mexico settled from the '30's peak of Expressionist propaganda realism to the undifferentiated internationalism -- whether weak or strong -- of Guerrero's flame and black abstraction, entitled, after Kandinsky and the rest. Picture 99, 1961. Nok Sculpture of Nigeria c. 600 BC, 77) MUSIC: ------- Terra Cotta Head, Inst, of Arts, Detroit Malinke (14th c. Mali of E. African), Percussion Dance (calabash water drums tuned in 4ths) 01ympic:Atlas 6110 The African Black enters art in the Nok terra cottas of Nigeria about 600 BC, these heads as charged with force as the drum rythms which, from that continental base (here the 14th century Mali of East Africa) and with unparallelled dispatch, would ravish the entire world. 78) Hellenistic c. 1st cent.BS, Young Negro Musician, bronze, det. Chalons-sur-Saone A measure of that power (with which Faulkner, who calls it indomitable, has energized his fiction), that when it fans out 500 years later from the Nile into Graeco-Rome, the most sophistic Hellenistic bronzes suddenly sway with the pulse of black body and the throb of black soul. 79) Eakins 1878, Negro Boy Dancing, watercolor, Metro. Mus, NYC A measure — that when in Eakins' Emancipated Philadelphia (after the Civil War) the lithe banjoist strikes up, it is recognizably in the same beat; and when the boy responds for his father with a dance, it is with the unaltered suppleness of abandoned ligatures. No doubt, through all vicissitudes, the Negro, as unmistakably as any group in history, will have held his own. (fade Malinke drums) 80) Abu Salley (US Black) 1977, acquatint & etching; "And they tried to kill all our Buffalo"; C.G. Bell Coll'n �20.th Cent. Melt - 31 C.6. Bel 1 Yet when today's American Black rouses the Irish blood of his ancient servitude, and under the Mohammedan name of Abu Salley, takes over, in post-Gdya etching (with the hanged Christ), the dismembered totems of our Indian tragedy -- "They tried to kill all our Buffalo" -- he is as catastrophically world-modern as the French, or English poems of the New Africa • this Parkes, of Ghana, "Apocalypse"; In the last days'. Strange sights shall visit the earth. Sights that may turn to blood the moon. This sun to midnight -- in the last days. But now, when swords are not yet ploughshares. And spears still spears... Remember, my little ones... If in this strange sub-human realm Your eyes fall on a stone, a hard black stone. Lifeless and muddy, that has grown a beard. Pray children...ask no questions... If perchance you see a hare that roars Or an ape perched in a palanquin. Look on in silence. Quickly pass by. Quickly. 81) Double: Attic c. 285 BC (replica). Head of Epicurus, Met. Mus., NYC; and Hadda (Gandhara) c. 4th cent. AD, Stucco bust of an Ascetic, Mus., Kabul MUSIC: ______ Bismillah Khan (Benares) Shehnai (cf. oboe) & acc't, Raga-Lalat, Odeon V..::::: ------------MOAE 113 The excavations of the Indus Valley reach back to the earliest civilizations of the third millennium; but the India we think of as primordial, has elaborated its arts since contact with Alexander. As Dion Chrysostom records (c. 80 AD) : "even among the Indians, they say, Homer's poetry is sung, having been translated by them into their own dialect." If the epics so implied .claim -- like the Vedas — the second millennium of Aryan conquest, the earliest Sanscrit inscription remains of 150 AD; and who can rear a history of thought, poetry and music over the flux of oral tradition? In art, on the contrary, we perceive at a glance the Indianization of the Greek philosopher �•$ C.G. Bell 20th Cent. Melt - 32 image, from this urbane Epicurus (left) stemming from the 3rd century BC; to the Gandharan ascetic of Hadda (right), in what is now Afganistan. 82) Indian (Madya Pradesh) c. 1000 AD, Kandarya-Makadeo (Siva) Temple, Kajuraho, N. India When Bismillah Khan of Benares performs on the Shehnai (a kind of oboe) this Raga-Lalat, a melody of morning pathos, to the tablat 16 beat Teental rythm, that improvisation of today issues like robed Brahmins from the por­ tal of the living past -- this lOOOAD Shiva temple in Madya Pradesh. Here no revolution has occurred; in art, in music, in the recitation of Sanscrit hymns, it might seem timeless India was flowering still. (jump to close of ■ Ra^ 83) Indian scene, on the banks of the Ganges in Benares (Hurlimann,) Though the whole life of India, through British occupation, Ghandi and the achievement of independence, cries out (as here on the Benares banks of the Ganges) how desperately that soul-stretched land is caught in the aTl-melting whirl of modern necessity ; good nighti" "Do not go gentle into that It is the Third World of Galway Kinnell's "To a Child in Calcutta"; In Calcutta, I thought. Every pimp, taxi driver, whore and begger. Dowsed for me through the alleys day and night -In Bandook Gulli I came upon you, I On a street crossed by fading songs I held you in my arms Until you slept, in these arms. In rags, in the pain of a little flesh. 84) Affandi (Indonesian Expressionist) c. 1940?, The Barber, Museo d'Arte Orientale, Rome And when Buddhist India spilled over into the Cambodian Kingdom of the Khmers, how remote that jungle majesty from what the Wes tern-trained Expressionist, Affandi, has recorded in his "Barber" -- not to speak of the Manifesto now invading the Indonesian poverty- vacuum of coca-cola exploitation �ts 20th Cent. Melt - 33 C.G. Bell and napalm-war. 85) China (end Raga) (Sung) c. 12th cent., Kuan-yin (Bodhisattva), Fine Arts, Boston MUSIC: Ancient Chinese, Tzuey Ueng Charn, played on the chyn (zither), RCA-V-LM ---■ —----------------------------------------------------^--------------- 6057, Side 1, Band 1 Erom the imperial China of this 12th century polychromed wood; Kuan-yin Compassionate Bodhisattva in the posture of Royal relaxatioi^a figure of meditational command, with a zither tune of refined intoxication, 86) (end zither) Hua T'ien-yu (Chinese Sculptor) c. 1940?, Air Raid, Priv. Coll'n, Paris the same time-vortex whirls us (about 1940?) into the "Air Raid" of Paris trained Hua t'ien-yu; where Oriental mother and children, stretched on the. wish and danger of romantic self and mechanized war, seek, like a bomb shelter, the containment of abstraction. Though again what would intervene would be the Communist absorption of individual desire in a realism no lessTfestern than propaganda gladness -87) No. Korean 1975, "The Fatherly Leader Marshal Kim.II Sung with our Compatriots, from Japan", Commun. Publication here from the-Democratic People's Republic of North Korea, "The Fatherly Leader Marshal. Kim II Sung with our Compatriots from Japan" -- which, though it purports to be most militantly of the East, has scarcely a trace of anything Less Euro-American than pie in the sky. Is not the touted "Immortal Juche Idea" of the fatherly leader himself a plural rehandling of the most blatant Victorian poem, Henley's "Invictus": "I am the master of my fate...the captain of my soul"? At the same time that the East has materialized that promise -88) India (N.W. Deccan) MUSIC: 5th Cent., Gautama, the Buddha, Cave 10, Ajanta Tibet, Lamaist Chanting, RCA-V-LM 6067, Side II, Band 1,b the flower-child West, alienated from those goods, reverts to a quietism the Orient has abandoned — this haloed Gautama Buddha of 5th century Ajanta, with �20th Cent. Melt - 34 C.G. Bell Tibetan drums and chant. That an ancient cave religion, however, stemming from the earth-denial and search of soul it shared with early Christianity, could now, uprooted from its habitat, answer for mechanized man, seems as in­ congruous as when a Buddhist monk rides a motor bike to his protest immolation, 89) (fade Lamaist chant) Blue glow of Neutrons in a high flux reactor. Oak Ridge, Tenn. and uses the gasoline to set himself on fire. Here art images knock under; since that blue grotto of neutrons in the water of a high flux reactor at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, says things no painting, statue or building will ever say about the Promethean overweening of our three­ fold world, its fission and fusion building to a threshold, whether of advance or catastrophe is not yet decipherable in the cards. 90) Double: Paul Klee l903. Portrait of the Artist's Sister, and 1918, "Einst dem Grau der Nacht enttaucht", both Klee Foundation, Bern Is the spaceflight from connection the only art-vivifier, where syn­ thesizing responsibility has gone stale? Thus Klee from 1903 (left) to 1918 (right); and surely if realism offers so little in the treatment of a loved sister, it must be time to dissolve those constructs of the physical, into cryptographs of lettered color-squares: "Einst den] Grau der Nacht enttaucht" — "Once from the gray of nighd; emerged/ The heavy and dear/ and strong from fire" -- with the rest of the fathomless message, penned above and painted below. 91) Mexico, Mahogany Logs on a pon. , near Lacanha, Chiapas (C6B '78) Was there a tie, when the abstract chessboard took over, in the break­ down of realistic cultivation — a link always stronger from war through between-war and second war, to now (mahogany logs floating on a lake in the vanishing Lacandon rain-forest, Chiapas)-- a tie between the miscarriage of earth and of art-representation -- �20th Cent. Melt - 35 C.G. Bell 92) Skylab nears reentry 1979, NASA (Smithsonian May 79) as between the desperate gamble of other worlds (Skylab 1979, nearing reentry), and the assault of abstract art on the secrets of the void? 93) Geo. Catlin 1836, Sioux Indians pursuing a stag in a- canoe, Smithsonian ------------- ----------- —-----------------Wash. DC Wherever-polarities, (Empedocles'^Eros and Eris, Love and Hate) are to be drawn, like light and dark, from the mottlings of the actual -- all phenomena, all experienced states, though we give them polar names (as bound and free), can no more coincide with their limits than a hyperbola can touch its asymptotes. Fire and water treated as symbolic opposites are other than their haunting appearances in nature and history. As far back as Catlin's first studies of fhe American West, this water-rich concord of man and nature sets firestick killer against grazer. 94) Catlin 1830, Prarie meadows burning, upper Missouri, Smithsonian, Wash.__DC As here the same upper-Missouri sets, against the slow uprearing of plant, fire -- both Heraclitean, all-consuming limit, and a seasonal process, destruction contained in the form-building balances of nature. Already Catlin's America is stretched over straining absolutes of leaf and flam^. 95) Japan (Heian Period) MUSIC: lOth-llth cent., Dai-itoku Myo-o, Fine Arts, Boston, Peking c. 1850,opera. Beheading a Son, close, RCA-V-LM—6057 (1 ,6.) So if they were indeed gods, those worshipped ambivalencies (this Daiitoku Myo-o, fire guardian of the Esoteric Buddhist Pantheon, with whom our World Melt began — here too with Peking opera), they must have stared through it all before, like Yeats' "Old Rocky Face" — laughing "in tragic joy". (end Peking Opera) Foreseeing that at the end of romantic reversal and abstract splurge. �20th Cent. Melt - 36 C.G. Bell from between wars and after, to the Hippie disburdening of all restraint, ■96) M. Rothko 1936, Self Portrait, estate of Mary A. Rothko ther^ would come a man named Rothko, American, born in Russia 1902, his 1936 Self Portrait the burnt-out malaise of old Europe landed in Melting Pot New York, — that pathos of the '30's crying for the ab­ stract conversion of the '50's, compared by some with Paul's cataclysm by blinding light — though William Carlos Williams' "I gave up" had explored the way -- based everywhere, from fceat defiance to drugged hope, on the same desperate evidence, to boost ultimate negation into transration orbit; -97V Rothko 1938, Subway Scene, Rothko Estate (Guggenheim Rothko show). Foreseeable, he would try New Deal realism, still groping at age 36 — this Subway, he would try, and fail, rather inconspicuously; until surreal and abstract, Kandinsky, Miro, Gorky came to the rescue 98) Rothko 1945, Primeval Landscape, Estate of the Artist (Guggenheim Show) (this primeval Landscape of 1945) — as he would later theorize: The progression of a painter's work as it travels in time from point to point, will be toward clarity; toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer. As examples of such obstacles, I give (among others) memory, history or geometry, which are swamps of generalization from’which one might pull out parodies of ideas (which are ghosts) but never an idea in itself. To achieve this clarity is, inevitably, to be understood -ignoring Jung's devouring abyss, where Idea, stripped of world-content converges the limits of infinte and void -- what Sylvia Plath longed toward in her "Poppies in July": Little poppies, little hell flames, Do you do no harm?... A mouth just bloodied. Little bloody skirts 1... If I could bleed, or sleepl -- �■ » 45 20th Cent. Melt - 37 C..G. Bell If my mouth could marry a hurt like thatl... But colourless. Colourless. He on the verge of that, talking of myth and the collective un­ conscious, yet drawing from the abstract surreal no such archetype as Picasso's GLsrrrica, still searching, through dream roots, swirl and vegetation, a 43 year old genius, not yet sure -- the private life also in upheaval... 99) Rothko 1961, Number 118, Nordrhein-Westfalen Coll'n, Dusseldorf MUSIC: Messiaen 1940, Quatour pour la Fin du Temps, Beginning of last mvt, ----------------------------------- —---------------------------------- Deutsche Gram. 2531 093 When suddenly, 1949, almost ten years after Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, Rothko, in touch with Barnett Newman, who had like­ wise probed the surreal, and then struck deep into color pools crossed by one or two (more vital than geometric) bands -- now Rothko, nearing 50, took up the rapturous drowning -- those soul absorbing color glows, melting at the edges like cloud: -- such a breakthrough as the poet Roethke's, though his led, outwardly, to classical measure: In a dark time, the eye begins to see, I meet my shadow in the deepening shade... I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I learn by going where I have to go. How slowly dark comes down on what we do. 100) (fade Messiaen) Rothko 1970, Black on Gray, Acrylic, Anon, owner (Guggenheim show) MUSIC: same Messiaen, close of last movement Although the soul-solitude of those paradox voids plagued Rothko with continual self-doubt, for 20 years he pursued the logic and mystery of that inmersion, culminating in the '60's in contemplative rooms of such hypnotic panels. Though of those for the Chapel of Religious �20th Cent. Melt - 38 C.6. Bel 1 Meditation in Houston, arranged like ikons by singles and triptychs (in suggested accord with the Passion of Christ) he said in disappoint­ ment, shortly before his suicide; "I was always looking for something new more." He was 67, in poor health and with/family troubles; yet the release of the primordial, to draw an always expected more from an always attenuated less, until the infinite hangs on the zero, gives that death symbolic dimension. At the end, he thinned to acrylic in this horizoned Black on Gray, whose Dark Light, draws us on, as to a landing on a formless planet, to grope the alien atmosphere for whatever we once called our own. ... Is this the way The world melts, on the wind suffers a cloud change? (close Messiaen) � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 38 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 20th Cent. C: World Melt, Symbolic History, Part 37 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 37 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_37_20th_Cent_C--World_Melt https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/97ffcb53537aa508ce7e7dd395a20093.pdf 543a5bc6c2cc4a1799b3bb72ddc40e10 PDF Text Text 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 1 �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 2 �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, 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 9 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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: 9/2/95 Giovanni da Cascia, c. 1320, from Per larghi prati, Phil 802904 Ars Nova: 14 Century (fade) 10 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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) 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 11 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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: 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 12 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 13 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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), 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 14 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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) 9/2/95 Giotto, 1304-08, Noli me tangere, from Resurrection, Arena Chapel, Padua Ars Nova: 14 Century 15 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 16 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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) 9/2/95 Simone Martini, 1325-26, Musicians from Knighting of St. Martin, Lower Church of St. Francis, Assisi Same, detail of heads Ars Nova: 14 Century 17 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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. 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 18 �C.G. Bell 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." 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 19 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 20 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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. 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 21 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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. 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 22 �C.G. Bell 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) 9/2/95 A. Lorenzetti, same, detail of party leaving the city gate A. Lorenzetti, c 1345(?), view of Castle and Lake, Museum, Siena Ars Nova: 14 Century 23 �C.G. Bell 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... 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 24 �C.G. Bell 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 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 25 �C.G. Bell 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. 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 26 �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." 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 27 �C.G. Bell 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 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 28 �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 — 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 29 �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) 9/2/95 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. 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 32 �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"? 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 34 �C.G. Bell Music: 9/2/95 Symbolic History Italian, mid-14th cent., Benedicamus domino, beginning and end, SIC-6052 Ars Nova: 14 Century 35 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 36 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Ars Nova : 14th Century, Symbolic History, Part 12 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 12 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_12_Ars_Nova--14th_Century Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/fdf76224d7534fb924b715c96430b3df.pdf 16dafb5633b3d3c11de8d5f717310c44 PDF Text Text Symbolic' C.G. Bell synfiOLiC' ^t^sTOJly TFi’rougFw SigFvt ancC SouncC 36. 1) Htomic Rge: [istow '-fH' / Frontiers Neio and Lost Tfioto of1946, ^Picasso ivitfi J^rjcmfoise QiCot, Cote (CS^zurjgprVpSetmCs- la)' ^S^Hit/-dtLai( Music: -j Charlie Parker (1920-55, Saxophonist & Composer), Bird Nest, from Jazztone LP ^ I'2,1^ Our search is infd the strange euphoria of the post-war world. With what release of spirit Picasso, after the immurement of oc­ cupied France (and as the saxophone harmonics of Charlie Parker, miraculous bird, sounded the rebirth of jazz), with what release Picasso moved to the Cote d'Azur with Frangoise Gilot, new mistress, then wife, for his storm-happiest years (until she broke off, with their two children in 1952). Though the tensions under all that liberation were to seize on one such sun-bathing day, when former model-love’ Dora Maar, also walking the beach, would drive a crucifying heel into the sleeping Fran9oise's outstretched hand. 2) (Picasso, 1946, La Hole (Ce Vivre, QritnaCdi Museum, LLntiBes;^ ^ cCetaU Had not jazz put off the old chord-norms of the hunjanist claim (music) for an energy as stripped to the radical as in nuclear* fire — all particles accelerated? So with Picasso's abstractioiis: whether of satyr delight, this Joie de Vivre, also of 1946; or the converse its bacchanal held in retrospection (music skip toward cicse) 3) (Picas0, 1944-43, Lhe CdarneC (House (Museum of Modem S4.rt (ETcfiiBition); + 1? detaU this oil and charcoal summary of world outrage. The Charnel House, from a year earlier — "painting," as Picasso said, "an instru­ ment of war," and, "In former times... a painting was the result of additions. For me, the painting is the result of destructions." (music) 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 1 �. Bell Symbolic History So by the acid bath of jazz, ghetto squaloigy^, and Parker's addiction turn to rhythmic drive-, keen for the abandon of either Picasso extreme. It is the flame leap from "No" to "Yes," Existentialist Sartre: "Man is condemned to be free." (end Bird Nest) 4) Joseph Wright of T>er6y, 1775, J^ireworhs for the eUction of Tope Tins (Menen, (Cetait Trace that Chain-reaction of the West: as the 18th century veered toward Storm and Stress, Wright of Derby revelled in this papal firework. So Goethe, in the Elective Affinities would seal with a firework festival the fate of his balanced couple, Edward and Charlotte, now drawn like chemicals to Ottilie and the Captain: Rockets roared skyward, bombs thundered, fireballs traced the night, squibs coiled and crackled; there were spouting wheels of sparks...crossing and weaving together. Edward, whose heart was afire, fed eager eyes on the spectacle of flame. But to Ottilie's gentle and volatile spirit, this roaring and blinding birth and decay gave less pleasure than pain. 5) ‘Turner, 1834, ‘Bumin£ of the JCouses of TarCiament, Museum, of JLrt, ThiCacCeCphia; A,^detaiC Music: Liszf 1853, Sonata in B Minor, Allegro, near close, (Arrau) Philips 6500 043 ^ And when Turner, learning that the Houses of Parliament were ablaze (1834), passed the night in ecstatic sketching of that cata­ strophe, did not the storm-topographer of an England veering from Austen to the Brontes, also seal the fire-compact, as of Liszt's B Minor Sonata? 6) 6 a) ‘lurmr, 1834, (Burning of tfo SHouses of TarCiament, waurcoCor, 'Brittsfi Museum, on view at the Tate, London; +31^ detaiC Turner, 1835, The ‘Burning of the Jhouses cf TarCiament, CCeveCancC Museum of 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 2 �.G. Bell Symbolic History But Listz s heavy chords, the spatial rhetoric of even the Turner sketches, bare the Promethean complicity, the half-god struggle of consciousness which J.H. Miller's Poets of Reality would make a postromantic syndrome, from Faust and Melville, through Conrad's Heart of Darkness: How many powers of darkness claimed him for their own... Never before did this land... river... jungle, the very arch, of the blazing sky, appear so impenetrable to human thought, so pitiless to human reason... through Yeats ^ of man. Ravening, raging and uprooting that he may come Into the desolation of reality... down to Eliot: . . . De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear In fractured atoms... T) Currier ancC Ives, 186S, J^aCC of ^Hicfimond, ‘llir£inia, fired By Confederate rioters; + detail Such Currier and Ives' attempt at the Civil War burning of Richmond — reaching in Faulkner's Absalom to the combustion of Sutpen's Hundred: The entire staircase was on fire. Yet they had to hold her... (Miss Coldfield)... clawing and biting at the two men who dragged her back and down the steps as the draft created by the open door seemed to explode like powder among the flames, as the whole lower hall vanished... Clyde... in that window from whi5h she must have been watching... for three months — the tragic gnome's face... against a... background of fire. -ut/kA (/ From such exsufflicate and blown surmises (that war of romantic values) 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 3 �Symbolic .G. Bell 8) Japanese. (BuMfdstj !Heian, Znd ficUf of the 10th cent., iTii 86) Same, History J^ire-£uard.ian, William Carlos Williams seemed to have taken a direction as dia­ metrically opposed as, in art, that of the ancient Buddhist Fireguardians — this 10th century silk-painting from Kyoto. So William's "Burning the Christmas Greens" from about 1945, a time as serious as any for fire-death poems, yet when all that unmistakably symbolic Christmas foliage — "Green is a solace/ a promise of peace.../ those sure abutments" — roars into "a landscape of flame," "a world! Black/ mountains, black and red.../ ...and ash white/" — "in/ that instant," we break (as Williams, in the college crisis of which long after he would write Marianne Moore, must have broken, from programmatic morality and swelling utterance into the "inner security" of "despair... I resigned, I gave up") so in the poem, by a leap of sheer immediacy, we break: breathless to be witnesses, - as if we stood ourselves refreshed among the shining fauna of that fire. How do the arts of our century attest that transformation? 9) Miro^ 1917, The 9dan in pyjamas, CoTection of Mr. and Mrs. SanrneC Mono Chicago, IL; + V detail Music: Bartok, 1917, from 1st Movement, 2nd Quartet (2nd forte passage) Concert Disk CS-501, Rec. I, Side 2 Consider — with three excerpts from the quartets of Bartok — Miro"^ early, middle, late. 1917, Man in Pajamas, a First-War attack in the mood of Kafka and with the weapons of Van Gogh, Expressionist, Fauve. From the same year, Bartok's Second Quartet twists com­ parable dissonances. (fade Bartok 2nd Quartet) 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 4 �Symbolic 10) History / Miro, 1924, iHaumity, CoCUction of ^CamC(Penrose, Lon(Con<^V<U^ ".hoS^rtefcS-So", Rec"?re"‘ By 1924 Dada and the Surreal have led Miro into a shorthand of ironic play: Maternity - left and above, the mother’s haired head; right and below, a skirt-pelvis with a displaced hole; two children, as m Charity, a bald male below at a profile breast; above, a girl with hair, at a breast full-view — these elements tied with Calligraphic wire, the vertical, crossing a pluck like a floating worm. In Bartok of the 1920's, the Pizzicato from the 4th Quartet seems to distill such cleverness. 11) (Mtro, 1960, r[Ee!P^(C (Disl^ CoCCection of Mr. and Mrs. Victor (KCam, Off 11a) Same, (P^d'Dis!^ detail; witH various video details Music: Bartok 1939, from the last Movement of the 6th String Quartet, Bartok barely lived into the Post war; but his Sixth String Quartet of 1939 (here from the closa) has already found in avantgarde the mythopoetic renewal of transcendental. And in this Mir(< Red Disk of 1960, Dada Rorschach is launched into an orbit of cosmic excitement, as of the death-birth explosion of a star. Here is the flame-tie to William Carlos Williams' effortless acceptance: as if we stood ourselves refreshed among the shining fauna of that fire. 12) ^laPe,182S-27, 'Dante drawings, Purgatory 27, Dante Before ententuj the fire, Mg-tionaC gallery of Victoria, MelBoume ; mZjL 12a) Same, Purgatory 27, detail; VUm More than a century before, Blake had hymned Regeneration y such blaze. Would he have found it strange that the Second World War, under deepening materialism and after the disillusions of the First, should grow so yeasty with the now mass ferment — as if 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 5 �Symbolic G. Bell History this Tharmas-Dante, entering at the summit of Purgatory the liberating fire ("poi s'ascose nel foco che li affina"), were also for our charnel house a passage through the threefold sleep of vegetative Beulah into the fourfold kindling of creative desire? So N.O. Browns Ap.^n.t Death is furiously impelled, from its Resurrection close, toward the chapter sequences of what would become almost a Hippie Bible — T.nve's Bodv: beyond "Boundary," through "Fire" and Free­ dom" to the "Nothing" of Cage’s Silence. al3) Samie-C TaCrmr, c. 1829, In a Sfiorefiam garden, detail, 9/ietoria and MBert 9d.usenm, London 13) Same, Shoreham garden, rohoCe Music: Schubert, 1818, from Litaney auf das Fest aller Seelen, (Schwarzkopf) Angel 35023 And when in Palmer (before 1830) Blakean vision touches a Shoreham garden - as Schubert's "Ruhn in Frieden alle Seelen" loads the litany for the Feast of All Souls with sensuous promise: The kingdom of Love is within you — (^^de Schubert) 14) ‘Bonnard, 1946-47, SUmond Lree in Blossom, Odg-tionaC Oduseum of (Modem J4.rt, Baris 5 14 a) Same, Mmond Lree, detail; + various video details Music- Benjamin Britten, 1962, from War Rpquiam, near close, Decca MET 252-3 Again, it is strange, in the pure flame of Bonnard’s 1946 flowering Almond Tree, to open the curtains of war and Dachau searing to such a renewal, in the shimmering now of modernity. So the close of Britten’s War Requiem. Of 1962; so from St.-John Perse, the Seamarks (Amers) finished 1957, its austerity swayed to the groundswell of Blake and Whitman. ...We who perhaps one day shall die, proclaim man as immortal at the flaming heart of the instant. 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 6 �Symbolic History .G. Bell - Vhomme immortel au foyer de Vinstant. Bu. in music we are confronted not only by an uP^-val m *e classical tradition, IS) SolCock. 1947, ^ Joslyn 14n Mu^euv, OmU 9(s6r<^ka, detail but by the fertile anomaly of jarz. where ^ Pnmitivi^m attested from Negroid to Pop received G!laxy, absorbing had moved into transcendental rapture, t Tobey’s white-writing in the cosmic unleashing of y Nature'" I am Nam ai.n in American poetry the visionary claim opens to t _2 Ginsburg’s 1955 banana dock and rusted locomotive, with the smogdried Sunflower of that child-affirming Sutra; Ig) Tun,' (mtH tfo ^ bollock 1949, r^otosrav^d taftiU palntwg Below) Lm, (KsmemBer 9, 19S9^^^^f‘tt _ We're not our skin of grime, bleak dusty imageless locomotive, were all beautiiu uolfen sunflowers inside, we're blessed by our own feed & golden hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing imo mad black formal stmflowers in the so^ fef soied on by our eyes under the shadow of the mad mcoXte rYverbank' sunset Frisko hilly .mean evening sitdown vision. Yet who could forget that behind Pollock's star-cloud drips, 1933, Tainms, sam; and [Cj 1943, v j, Slpw CTort Cim;tvsasleaofl4.and'B,-rl-<~^ 17c) 4^ C of 17, ‘iollocfu SBe-'Wolf lay a violence abstracted (early 1930's, top) from his «^"‘To 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 7 �Symbolic ^.G. Bell History totems) to the fury of the wartime She-Wolf (below, 1943)? Could the dance of galactic action sublimate such an explosion of self and __ (end Dancing in the Dark) 61 18) ^ — (DouSCe, ‘Ifwmas ^ Benton: [Si] 1917, StUC Life, 7ine SLrts, CoCumBus, and tB] 1938-39, Tersepfwne, Bita Benton, tKjinsas City^ ^ 18 a) Lfwtnas Benton, 1938, SusannaH and tfu BCders, BaCaee of tHe Legion of S{onoT, San Brancisco CSL Benton, of Pollock at art school; "not an exceptional student... incapable of drawing logical sequences. He couldn't be taught any­ thing" (Life. Nov.9, 1959) — Benton, who had begun in Paris, 1917 (left), with awkward abstraction, and then come round, as in this 1938-9 Persephone endangered by Gloomy Dis as farmer, to Amer­ ican scene (avant garde and reaction buffeting each other through the century like Dante's misers and spenders in the Fourth Circle of Hell: "Tieni!" and "BurlH") — Benton, staggered in age by the Ab­ stract Expressionist outbreak: "The art of today is the art of the 1920's, which we repudiated" (had not the 1940 jLife collection of American Painting pronounced: "The wave of French modernism had spent its force by late 1929"?) — Benton had voiced the pioneer myth where Pollock began: A windmill, a junkheap... a Rotarian in their American setting have more meaning to me than Notre Dame, the Parthenon, or the heroes of the ages. 19) BericCean (Ictynos, Bfiidias, etc), 447-32, Bartfienon from the BropyCaea, In ^his Preface and Essays (1853 and '65) Mathew Arnold blamed our poetry, from Shakespeare down, for sacrificing architec­ tonic order to a brilliance of impression, image, effect. It was the Greeks, he says, who understood "the poetical character of the action in itself... They regarded the whole; we regard the parts." So it was not our "poor, starved, fragmentary, inadequate creation," but criti7/19 94 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 8 �Symbolic .G. Bell History cism, that "disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world," which must point to such epochs of affirming wholeness — though "we shall die in the wilderness." 20J ^fiidias, 477-32 ‘S.C, Parthenon, ‘East Eed-iment, H&ad of SeCene's 3{orse, ‘Britisd Masmm, London (CQ‘B '77) ‘1720a) Same, Eartfienon, ^rtd frieze, detaiC, foutfis witd sacrificiaC o?o SLcropoCis Museum. Mdens (C(fB '77) Selene's horse from the Parthenon keeps Olympian repose, even as he sinks, restive, with the moon-chariot, into the sea. It is easy to project Arnold backward to the Greeks — the 4th Ode of Sophocles’ Antigone (Fitts and Fitzgerald): She raced with young colts on the glittering hills And walked untrammeled in the open light: But in her marriage deathless Fate found means To build a tomb like yours for all her joy. Hard to apply him forward. allowed? What would he have condemned; what • If spirit builds against entropy, it is by complicity with flame, whether in Greek tragedy or the atomic West. a21) 621) c21) 21) EoCCocI^ 1948, Mfmder 1, Museum of Modem Sirt, 9^zu ‘ford^City Irisd MS., c. 800, ‘Bood^of f 34, detaiC, ‘Trinity CoCCe^e LiBrary, London Leonarda (^f^nci, 1498, SaCa deCCa S4sse, Sforza CastCe, MiCan ‘Dou6C^'^^Tdcd^l93S, Seared, Sydney Janis CoCCection, fordi and a21 Eodoedj MymSer 1 (UvV \d»A> 21a) Tlyain, 21J4, Eodoedf Seared And what if abstraction, fragmenting the wholeness Arnold desired, might purge the sickness he deplored — that private loss, become a laughter to the gods? What Arnold invoked is the oldest polarity of thought and perception — from Heraclitus to Plato, one and many, form and flux. 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 9 �Symbolic History It was the field in which Pollock came to the breakthrough of his drips _ as if the interweaving line of the Book of Kells, of Leonar os branchings in the Sforzescb ceiling, had been seized on to compose a personal agony. Yet how could the triumphal abandon of ftat apo­ calyptic wallpaper, in euphoric balance from 1947 to 50 this significantly entitled "Number One," above), exorcise the frustratio it rooted in? Inaction would recur, with works of fiercer strugg e this "Search" (below), his last, before he challenged death on a dark road. Was the consuming passion of the New York school the simul taneous overthrow and mastery of form in flux? zz> Cezanm, c. 1860, muraC btubcape found under ■aaOfuper, Jos do ‘Bouff^ near SHTijen-Trovenu) Music: (CetaiC Mendelssohn, 1843 (Overture 1826), Midsummer Night’s Dream Cezanne, archetypal modern, began before 1860 with a classic^ commitment like Arnold's. This oil-mnral found under the wa paper in the las de Boufffev then being built by Cezanne s father, l«ans to the style the Carr^and Claude received from late Renais­ sance It was a love whic^ would affect music from Mendelssohn s Midsummer Night’s Dream Nocturne to our time. Zi) (lade Nocturne) Ceainm, 1867-70, Die Jdurda, TPoferilrt Qotkry, Uvtrooob + "l^dcUiU Music- Borodin, 1876, close of 1st Movement„2nd Symphony, MHS 4013 But Cezanne, through the ’sixties, countered the classical with as lurid a violence as any of the Russians — here from the First Movement of Borodin's Second Symphony. Would Arnold have heightened the condemnation he made of his own Empedocles, against a morbid distress, without catharsis, of which the representation is painful, not tragic? (®nd A eg 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 10 �Symbolic 'G. Bell 24) History Cezanne, 1885-86, OvCont Sainte-Victdre, O^etropoCitan O^luseutn of Art, O^tv O^orli City; Music: Borodin^ 1876, Opening of Third Movement., 2nd Symphony, MHS 4013 Marvellous, how Impressionism, absorbed into Cezanne s ground of primitive force, houses the Poussin dream, but in a fabric of always more daring modernity. Surely the great calm paintings of the ’80's, this Mont Sainte-Victoire, confront Arnold with radical re­ covery of classical dignity. In music the third movement of the Borodin Second is at least comparably aimed; while the abstract imperative in fiction must have pushed Tolstoi to War and Peace, Melville to Mohv Dick and Billy BuddAndante) 25) Cezanne, 1904-06, 9^ont Sainte-Victoire, 9Qin^tmuseum, 'BaseC; A V fetaiC — Music: --------- Borodin, 1876, close of Fourth Movement, 2nd Symphony, MHS 4013 But Cezanne continued, up to the year of his death in 1906, the more shimmeringly cubistic analysis of Mont Samte-Victoire. In this rendition, perhaps his last, the dissolution of forms in a quilt of color binds flux itself into compositional patterns, startling as the new mathematics from Lobachevsky through Riemann, Dedekind, Cantor, Hilbert, to Russell and Whitehead. While the same Borodin Symphony moves^ in the last move­ ment toward a comparable suspension of tonality. aerobatics stirs euphoria. Already such Borodin) 26) BouBCe: Bicasso [A] 1895-96, first Covmunion, OvCtiseum Bi and [B] 1969, Largeffeads, QaC. Hipsenyart, Lucerne (zHde^^ 26a) Again, !g ^ u r of 26:Larye Heads Meanwhile, the 14-year-old Picasso had begun (1895) with this First Communion (left), against which we set from 73 years later (four years before the artist's death) an oil sketch called Large 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lo 5 �Symbolic .G. Bell History Heads". Here the demolitions of world and art have come, in Nietzsche's phrase, "as ia cleansing wind" to the Romantic charnel house, blasting its sentimental verisimilitudes. After two wars, with totalitarianism, earth-rape and nuclear juggling paradox and indignity fuse in the death-life of energy. Would that tragic return have pleased or troubled the author of "Dover Beach ? / 2 7) J^ranz von Stuck c. 1900(?), Mcndsum, oU Suimiw. 27 a) same, ^ I Mahler, 1883-5, Lieder eines fahrendenden Gesellen (from the last: "Ich bin ausgegangen...") VOX PL9100 Music: For the clinging heart's miasma that wind had to clear away, let Franz von Stuck's "Evening Star," with Mahler's early Songs of a Wanderer," join the clandestine brew of Browning s Porphyria s Lover": And made her smooth white shoulder bare. And all her yellow hair displaced. And, stooping, made my cheek lie there — to curdle in Meredith's Modern Love: Ah what a dusty answer gets the soul When sick for certainties in this our life! Von Stuck's lighted house on the horizon (left) among trees, the stream albng which a wife (surely) and lover have walked to kiss in the glow of Venus — such visceral fullness as Mahler drew from Brahms and Bruckner — fills a bog of romantic identification, where (fa^® Mahler) tragedy drowns in wish and waste. 28) T>ou6U: [A] TicMsso, 1900, Lovers in the Street, ^^eum, (Mru^na; and f^B] ‘Brancusi, 1912, Lhe 9Qss, 9duseum, iPhiCadeCphia; + detam^ ^ ^ Music: 7/1994 Webern, 1913 (Pub.1924), Bagatelles 1 and 2, Opus 9, V-LM 2531 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 12 ^ ^ �Symbolic 'G. BeU History By 1900, in Picasso (left), the embrace shifts to a public street, shedding romantic resonances; nature, morality, poetic ideals — a detachment which, with Brancusi's 1912 Kiss, achieves physiochemical crystalization. Is this minimaiiy altered block of stone (right) carved in earnest, irony, or play? Snch indulgences have been erased So in Webern's 1913 Bagatelles, attenuation of melody and chord precludes the moods of Mahler. (end Bagatelles) / 2mCZ7) Z^mn, von StudiMemlstem, dctaif erj -fCc€<rue,>, Even O'Neil thought in Mourning Becomes Elegm "to see the transfiguring nobility of tragedy in as near the Greek sense as one can grasp it." Though his lacerations wind the gut out on a spoo . "staring into the sunlight with frozen eyes. 2nd: 28) S^ain of 28, 'Brancusi's !Kjss Here before the first World War, that feedback howl was damped. Though Arnold's Greek baby may have gone out with the bath. 29) 9kkn7r<mf^tlu^'iSS7,'Eden,Co(k^ofthcS^t 29a) Same, •EtUn. /etaiffWfcl tfaiu Music: '^-‘1 ^ Morton Feldman, 1968, from False Relationships and the Extended Ending, Composer Rec. Inc. SD 276 In the Post-war indeterminacies of graphic music — Morton Feldman's "False Relationships and the Extended Ending huge stained-canvas improvisations of Helen Frankenthaler, we find ourselves spaced out from the old human condition. If this 1957 Eden, by its love-garden title and playful "hundred-hundred calli­ graphy (is that God caught above, red-handed?), plays at passion passion's involvement has melted away — albeit in a world of cold war. Silent Spring, Korea, Viemam. (•b''® Feldman 30) Limoges 'EncrneC, c. 1200, fuUkr and Vancing Woman, from a CRat, •Sntish 9A.usamt, London 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 13 �Symbolic 'G. Bell History 30 a) Same, S^iddter and ivonmn, detail Music: English, 13th cent., from Bryd one brere (at words), Sawt Q C n /I >rA FY In early Gothic, iconographic distance had been as automatic as the suspension of earthly loves in ascetic creed. Yet passion, (m this Limoges enamel of fiddling and dancing, or the English love song "Bird on the briar") burns through that denial with a flame sharper for its cowl of modality, bare intervals, the vacancy of yearning faces. Who could conceive at that remove the danger of romantic abandon. (fade Bryd one brere) 31) Tintoretto, 1SS7, Susanna and SCders, detaiC, 0<iinstfiistonscfies Oduseum, Music- Giovanni Gabrielli, c.1585(?), Canzona a 5 (New Ybrk Brass) In the Renaissance (here Tintoretto expansive celebration of flesh is held allegory, drama, myth, where the fires of raised and sublimated. The boundary with Giovanni Gabrielli) the in the transpersonalities of life and love can be at once condition for Shakespearean tragedy — Romeo and Juliet. Thou art not conquered; beauty's ensign yet Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks... Antony and Cleopatra: Your crown's awry, ni mend it, and then play (fade Gabrielli) is that cleanness of combustion. fma-ecuA, 1S64, Taolo ami J^ramesca, ScfiMtgaCCay,^Cu^ (C§^ S9) 32) 32 a) Sam, francesaa, 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 14 �Symbolic \G. Bell History Brahms, 1855-75, Piano Quartet in C Minor, Op.60, from 3rd Movement, Andante (Festival Quartet), RCA VLSC 233U Music: Past 1860, time of Brahms, even myth and legend—Dante s Paolo and Francesca: But tell me, at the time of the sweet sighs (al tempo de dolci sospiri) By what and how did love bring it about That you should know the dubious desires (i dubiosi desiri)? — even Dante's creed-suspended flame becomes, in this Feuerbach, a (fade Brahms) lure to adulterous loves. As that seduction sighs and writhes with Munch toward fin-desiecle — this love-death Madonna of orgasm, sheathed in a mantle of mummy-embryo and sperm — w^ are whelmed in Expressionistic paradox, that the abandoned cliniax of pain-passion is also its turn to symbolic alienation. Strindberg: (Playing with Fire) Daughter-in-law I will run away too! We shall die together! Friend (takes her in his arms...) Now we are lost!... Fire of hell that burns and parches all that was green and flowered! Ah! (They part and sit down again in their former chairs.) a34) (Picasso, 1932, Qirt at the (Mirror, detaiC, Museum of Modem Art, (hQCC 34) Same, §irC at the Mirror, whoCe In Picasso's 1932 Girl at a Mirror, those morbid loves are caught in a crystalline change, "pearls that were his eyes." What we are looking at must be model-mistress Marie Therese. How her belly swells with wish and pregnancy (though daughter Maia was not yet 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 15 �Symbolic :G. Bell History conceived); but the old vulnerabilities are distilled into color-forms. The curtain has been drawn on the loading of the post-romantic bed. 3S) ‘WesseCtttann, 1967, Qreat Simerican 4198, WaCCTaf-^Kicfiartz Museum, After the Second War, in the always rising market for novelties, however corn-porny the pop-art titillation of Wesselmann's Great American Nude, number 98, mouth and tit disclaim the hunger of the femme fatale. Euphoric euthanasia! a36) 36) ford MaddoTC •Brown, 1837, 'Ta^ •four Son, Sir,' detaiC, fate qaUery, London Same, fakg^ four Son, Sir," wHoCe; i\^^l7cCose detail What had been intolerable in romantic pain, its arrogation to so much, when, on the scale of Oedipus or LeM.> it deserved so little. Ford Maddox Brown's 1857 protest "Take Your Son, Sir (womb-cloth, crass father reflected in the mother-haloing mirror) brings home. So Charles Bovary's bungling operation on the clubfoot (of the same years). He has cut the tendon and strapped the foot for straightening in his famous machine. The strethopode was writhing in hideous convulsions... the box was removed. ...the livid tumefaction spread over the leg, with blisters... whence there oozed a black liquid. a3 7) •EdvardMuncfi, 1883-86, fhe SietChM, detail, Motional gallery, Oslo 3 7) Same, •Tfie Siet Child, whole Gangrene, in fact, was spreading more and more. Hyppolyte looked at Bovary with eyes full of terror, sobbing: "When shall I get well?... How unfortunate I am!" The amputation follows: A heart-rending cry rose on the air. Bovary turned white to fainting... he listened to. the last cries of the 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 16 �Symbolic fG. Bell History sufferer... like the far-off howling of some beast being slaughtered. Thirty years after that Flaubert, Munch, in The Sick Child, began with the lacerative heritage. 38) 'Edvard Oduncfi, 1940, 'Betzueen tde CCocf^ and tfie Bed, SeCf-Bortrait, OduncH Oduseum, Oslo; + V detaiC By Munch's 1940 Self Portrait, "Between the Clock and the Bed," a pain no less, goes almost funny-paper grotesque. So in Faulkner's As I Lav Dying, where Cash has broken his leg and the father has poured cement on it "to ease hit some," the scene, through the eyes, of a boy (Vardaman), turns to idiot laughter: Cash's leg and foot turned black. We held the lamp and looked at Cash's foot and leg where it was black. "Your foot Iboks like a nigger's foot. Cash," I said. a39) Francis Bacon, 1964, HlenTietta Moraes, detail, Ian Stoutz^r, London; + V^^^detail 39) !francis Bacon, 1964, (DouBCe Bortrait of Lucien Ifread and IfranliSiuerBacfi (artist's collection?); + detail "I reckon we'll have to bust it off," Pa said... They got the flatiron and the hammer. Dewey Dell held the lamp. They had to hit it hard. And then Cash went to sleep. "He's asleep now," I said. "It can't hurt him while he's sleep." Music; Stockhausen, 1961-65, from Momente, voices, instruments, etc.. Nonesuch H-71157/^nto 2nd record face) Though for Francis Bacon — this so-called double Portrait of Lucien Freud and Frank Auerbach (1964) — we should advance in literature (perhaps with Stockhausen's Noise Momente) to the most mutilated post-war extension of Faulkner's picaresque — Molloy. 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 17 �:G. Bell Symbolic History Beckett's fiction of a crippled anti-hero — as germane as the new mathematics of fractals bridging, order and chaos, to the mauled flesh 40) CDouBCe: [Si] Ticasso, 1939, (Portrait of SaBartes as SpanisB. Qrandee, Jirtist's Collection; and.1(3] Ifrancis (Bacon, 1972, Sdf-(Portrait, (Jdar^orougB QaCCery, (Kszo forSi 40a) Single \r\.<LLX> (Bacon, Sdf Bacon singled out from the infinitely varied brilliance of Picasso (this 1939 Sabartes as Spanish grandee, left) — Bacon struggling through a lifetime, doggedly (as in his 1972 self-portrait, right), to hang the old carcass between abstraction and the pathos of touch — like Socrates, asked in the Parmenides if dung has an eternal form. 41) fronds (Bacon, 1964, (Cfiree figures in a (Ppom, fonds (dgtionaC d'Sirt Contemporain, (Paris; + f detail 41a) (Bacon, 19S4, fwo figures in Qrass, (Private ColCn, (Paris 4lB) (Bacon, 19S3, frvo figutes, (Private Collection, So from Beckett's Molloy. with one of Bacon's life-of-a-salesman triptychs: So you get up and go to your jnother, who thinks she is alive... But could I crawl, with my legs in such a state, and my trunk? And my head... Flat on my belly, using my crutches like grapnels, I plunged them ahead of me into the undergrowth, and when I felt they had a hold, I pulled myself forward by the wrists... And from time to time I said. Mother, to encourage me, I sup­ pose... The forest ended in a ditch...and it was in this ditch that I became aware of what had happened to me... I lapsed down to the bottom of the ditch... Molloy could stay where he happened to be. 42) (DouBle: [Si] (Picasso, 1940, Woman ‘Drejtng (Ker (Hair, (Museum of (Modem Sirt, (NfC; and [(B] fronds (Bacon, 1964, left detail of 41 (,cj 42a) (Bacon, 1973, friptydi, Sirtist's Collection (video: left detaUonly) 42B) (Bacon, 1946, (Painting, Museum of (Modem drt, (MfC 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 18 �Symbolic ZG. Bell History For body too, it is on the bitterest malformations of Picasso (left: this 1940 Woman Dressing her Hair) that Bacon (right: detail) has seized. How far down both he and Beckett root the Existential claim: rMollov^ "deep down is my dwelling... somewhere between the mud and the scum." Even Beckett, Bacon, Stockhausen — in their agony — are post­ war equilibrists. (fade Stockhausen) 43) gentiCe cCa ifManoj 1423, O^tivity, Tr&cCeCCa, Uffizi, (A (Cg^B '48)vP^ d^&taiC ) ‘V43a) Same, detail of SHepHerds fmm^U'ffity Music: Brasart, c. AS 27-a 1420-30(?), from 0 Flos Fragrans, 2 ' near close, (Cape) How many centuries the arts of the West have been wooing and now breaking with Vala, Blake's luring goddess of Nature. After that action, what can reattachment signify? Consider Night. In Gentile da Fabriano and Brasart of the 1420's, how poignantly the Burgundian loves of earth harmonize Gothic mystery. (end Brasart) 44) Gossaert (9daBme), c. 1S12, S{yony in the garden, StaatCiehe 9dmeen, BerCin; detaiCs Music: Senfl, c. 1520(7), Asperges me, Domine, opening, MHS 1390 By the 16th century the wonders of the moonlit world, the enfleshed passions of man, have filled almost to plenum the old mysti­ cal realm. In what Mabuse drew from Leonardo, Senfl from Josquin (Asperges me — Cleanse me!), we approach a divide of spatial and humanist transformation. (fa^® Senfl) 43) ‘Fan di c. 163C Londonf^^detaiCs t Music: 7/1994 Buxtehude, c.1680(7), Viola da Gamba interlude from Solo Cantata, Jubilate, Lumen 32030, Side B Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 19 �'.G. Bell Symbolic History With the 17th century (this Dutch Van der Near), with the cor­ poreal harmony of Buxtehude (a viola da gamba phrase from the antata Jubilate"), one cannot say the mystery has been annulled, hough miracle seems almost resolved; wonder has taken its seat in he moonlit expanse of nature itself, formulated, as by an experimen­ tal science — Milton: "And o're the dark her silver mantle threw." ^ c. lS20,^mats in the. Sjishes, freks ‘Deutsches Xochstift ^Franl^urt-am-Main; + ‘VcCetaiCs -nocnstijt, Music: Beethoven, 1826, Quartet 14, C-Sharp Minor op. 131 movement, midway, 2v etc., Columbia M5L 277 ' ’ is. Friedrich s night scene of swans in the rushes (about 1820) of which he said. "The divine is everywhere, even in a grain of sand’ Here depicted it for once in the rnshes" _ representation both maintains and etherealizes the phenomenal. Nothing in the music of tha time so disembodies harmony as the passage in the opening anasy of the C Sharp Minor Quartet, where Beethoven thins the fabric to a Renaissance-inspired polyphony of two and three. (fade Beethoven) 4 7) lBauCj(Cee, 193S, ‘WaCpurgis t%ht, ‘Tau QcUlery, London!^ cCetaik Music: Alban Berg 192^ from Lyric Suite, close of 4th movement agio, Deutsche Grammophon 5 LP Stereo 2713066, Rec. 5a ’ has fi^,!“* U content as flattened to the visionary, as in this "Walpurgis Night" - Baroque d Classical given over for inspired child-doodling. Marvellms w at related magic Alban Berg has brought from the 12-tone rows of the Lyric Suite, though with the twist of Between Wars. (fade Berg) of tH.-Hpthh.ot Music: 7/1994 Messiaen 1940, from Quartet for the End of Time 5 Louannc A lEternite de Jesus, Deutsche Grammophon St. 2531 093 ^ Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 20 �Symbolic LG. Bell History Messiaen, in a 1940 prison camp, had already entered (under the designation "Quartet for the End of Time," here from the Move­ ment "Louange d VEterniti de Jesus") into the orbit of weightlessness — what, in Rothko a few years later, subsumes night and fire in colorfield voids — this Brown, Black, on Maroon — like Roethke's dark come-through: "Ye littles, lie more close"; and, "The right thing happens to the happy man." 49) 1793, "I toant, I zoant,’ gates ofTaracCise 9, ‘BritisH UvCusetim, London; ^details Take a theme — as central as any to the world action from the Age of Revolution through our Wars — let it be Blake's from The Gates of Paradise, 1793, a little engraving labeled "I want, I want" — a ladder through the night sky reaching to the moon. For all Blake's revolt from logic, this symbol of fallen desire is literal — the temporal folly of. an eternal delight. SO) Miro, 1926, ‘Do£ ^ar^ng at the OvCoon, Sduseum of Art, ThiCadeCphia; In Mir(^s 1926 Dog Barking at the Moon (though one thinks of course of the nursery rhyme about the cow and "The little dog laughed"), the surreal has cut loose from daytin^e moorings. Yet the rift between dream and waking still flexes consciousness to weird defiance, as symbolist-loaded as when atonality warred on tonality in the music of those years. Si) Qeorgia 0'J(g,^e,19S8, Ladder to the Moon, Artist's CoCCection;^^!^^e4!ai£^ Sla) Same, Ladde^^^mtaiC ^ has Of her "Ladder to the Moon," 1958, Georgia O'Keefe writes: At the Ranch house there is a strong handmade ladder to the roof and when I first lived there I climbed it several times a day to look at the world all 'round... One evening I was waiting for a friend and stood leaning against the ladder looking at the long dark line 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 21 �Symbolic .G. Bell History of the Pedernal. The sky was a pale greenish blue, the high moon looking white in the evening sky. Painting the ladder had been in my mind for a long time and there it was — with the dark Pedernal and tlm high white moon all ready to be put down ■XU'v^Tc^ , Though she must have known the Blake and the Miro, her picture is as free of symbol or surreal tension, of any directive gravi­ tation, as if it existed in interstellar space. Of an abstraction so auto­ matic, what account can be given but hers of the visible; "I was leaning against the ladder... and saw it so"? More detached than William Carlos Williams "so much depends/ upon// a red wheel/ barrow// glazed with rain/ water// beside the white/ chickens.// Was that letting go enough? SZ) Soviet SLrt, Serov, 1937, Lenin's SLrrivaCin Tetrqgrad 1917, USS%^ Enough? even in Russia, that a society which had lived, for better or worse, through the embattled polemic of the thirties — in art, this Serov, of Lenin's 1917 arrival in Petrogrnd S3) Tiotr Ifomine, 196S, S{orses on the Coast, 'Le Mnsee 9(iisse, L7(hi6itwn should settle for Fomine’s 1965 contented horse realism of a coastal scene — happy days are here again? 54) Chinese Communist, c. 1947, Li Shva Woodcut, ^fCood of zvrath. Or' in China, that the Marxist "Flood of Wrath" Li Hwa climaxed in this 1947 woodcut, and which Malraux had seen in Man's Fate as drowning backward dreams 55) Worl^r Qouaches from SCuhsien County (Li Xf-ht-min), 19S8 ff,, TFe/ifTfigging, Snowy i%h.t,' (fine Sirts iPuS, fPehim; + should yield to the peasant gouaches from Huhsien County Well Digging on a Snowy Night — every personal concern put off for the cartoon smile of achieved togetherness? 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 22 �Symbolic .G. Bell 56) History 'DouBU: [Rj ^andinskn, 1910, Mstract iMatercotor, Mrs. %fl.ndinski}, ^arisj aiuCtB] RrsfiiCe Qork^, 1945, OTte UnattainaBCe, Museum of 5lrt, (BaCtimore, MCD; + VcCetaiCs V ^ A' ^ One did not have to be a died-in-the-wool reactionary to wonder — when Archile ^orky, New York Armenian, in his 1945 "Unattainable," (right) restaged Kandinsky's first total abstraction of 1910 (left) — how the global search, shooting the rapids of two great wars, had come full circle to the glad frenzy of plucking the feathers off outwardness. Let fly! 57) (DouBCe: [51] Scfizvitters, 1920, iHair-naveC'Bicture, Lords QaCCery, London; and [CB] 5ig.usclienBer£, 1964, ^ftaCe, JosepH 5C. HCirs^m 57 a) giotto, 1297-99, (Detail offresco: Devils driven out of 5irezzo By St. francis. Upper CBurcfi, Ussisi 57B) J4£ainScfizvitter^5{air-naveC^(video: details only) 57c) Ayain, (BytiscBenBery 94lliale (video: detail only) Or when Rauschenberg's 1964 Whale Composition (right), with its ocean-bobbing space capsule, met Schwittei<^Hair-navel Picture v' from forty years before — to question such Dada stacking of the cards for the mass let-go of American Pop — "warmed over Schwitters.' Compare poetic nonsense. Dante had used it for the fury of Minos, hell guardian: "Papa Satan Aleppe," and again for Nimrod over lowest Hell: "Raphel may amech zabi £mi." But we have made more of Babel, from Morgenstern's early century "Laleu, lalou, laloo," through the same between-wars Schwitters — bee bill/ bii bell/ baa ball/ bimm bimm// bii bill/ bei bell/ baa ball/ bumm bumm// bemm bemm/ bumm bumm/ bimm bimm/ bemm bemm/// — to international claques of such, who, adding belches, smacks, and whistles, cluck the Art of Body-sounds. 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 23 �•G. Bell 58) Symbolic History 5)ouBCe: [51] M. l^oBey, 1958, 5{awest, Marian W. jofinson, ^ ^ r , .. .. ------------- ---- ancC . + And when, in (1958, with no indication of directional influence, these granite mottlings would appear — left, an amber Harvest by Mark Tobey, child of Wisconsin and the Pacific; and right, French Dubuffet's gray Marmalade-Matter-Light — both as far as quantum mechanics from the emergent shapes of nature — what could one surmise, but that art-prophecy, in the globe-rounding of modern vision, had somehow closed on itself? Nietzsche: "Who stares into the void long enough, the void will stare back at him.'* 59) l^laCdmuCCer, c. 18^0, Spring in tfie Vienna Woods f!Kunst, voCume 75) 59 a) Same, Spring, detaiC; + V closer detaifs Music: Copland, 1944, Appalachian Spring (Ormandy) RCA LSC-3184, near close Yet who could believe that the romantic delights of bourgeois and Biedermeyer (this 1830 Waldmuller Spring in the Vienna Woods) could be revived -again in Between-and Post-War Americ^ ^ however the New Deal leaned that way; while Copland, who had begun with tough experiments, by the 1940's was harmonizing Appalachian Spring for those "soft ears" Ives had cried down. Could romantic cultivation be called valid, as long as endangered wood-lots remained for picnics and love-meetings? (fade Copland) a60) Qeorg 9(pCBe, c. 1936-38, 9{gjei ScuCptor, (Dancer, formerCy (Kronprinzen(PaCais, (BerCin; + V detaiC B60) l^xCoCf Wamper, c. 1938, VdCozvsfiip, from (Kunst, VoCume 81 60) Qeorg Scfirimpf, c. 1933F, Osterseen, from (Kunst, VoCume 69 V60a) (jrant Wood, 1930, Stone City, -lozua, JosCyn 5irt (Museum, OmaBa, Vfg-BrasBci (video returns to a detaiC of 60, Scfirimpf and then of B60, Wamper 60B) MitCer, Qoervng, etc. admiring 'fwnest Qerman art,' LITT., Oct 2, 1939 60 c) MitCer and MussoCini, 1938, In (fCorence Music: 7/1994 Richard Strauss, 1940-41, Capriccio, Overture, Angel 3580 C/L Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 24 �Symbolic rG. Bell History Could one build on those cinder-cones of reaction — every­ where romantic nostalgias to be whipped by King Fish rant, "Share the wealth" (and share the women), into will and power: to prop up the big-top of the West? From Germany in the early 1930's, George Schrirhpfs hundred-year-landscape-flashback, curiously tied to Grant Wood — and why not to Strauss's wartime Capriccio (music) — harmless, as the name Schrimpf — /fSound: From "I can hear it now," Columbia MM 800 ) \__ (Narrator;)____ _______________ ________—------1933 was dark all over the world... Japan was already in Manchuria, and the League of Nations was dying in Geneva... (cannon) until one sees Hitler, pinning the swastikas on all such echt-deutsch confirmations. inuecL^^Jy 61) In Germany the Reichstag fire was history; so was the Weimar Republic... In Italy Benito Mussolini had txanslaterLa. people's search for security into savage conquest.4 (cries: "Duce")^ (DouSCe: [Pi] Pimo ‘Brel^rj 1930/ nucCe., from Zt,ICP{J^G^^ and [(B] fosepfi dhoralQ c. 1938, dhe Muse, piaster, from OCunst, VoCume ^1 ^ ^6la) PLmo ‘Brek?-r, 1940-43, dhe PCerald, piaster for Bronze, (Die 9Cunst im (Deutsehen iReicB, PfpvemBer '43 ejy , 6IB) Pigain, d'fioral^ Muse, (B of 61 (z^uijnde^retumfif^^61, ^ douBie) Arno Breker (left), three years before Hitler came to power, crayonned the life-urge that would shoulder his climactic sculptures, "Preparedness" and "Hero," to the cliff of Nazi acclaim. While sensu­ ous nudes hardened (right) to this astonishing Muse by Thorak. If only the benighted Chancellor, bestowing the accolade, could have divined, that it was for the Allied occupation they were stripping those girls down. a6Z) 7/1994 ^£inai(C Marsft, 1936, Monday Migfit at tHe Met., Pirizona Museum, ducson Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 25 �':G. Bell Symbolic History !R^£inaC(C Marsfij 1940, T,t[in£e !foCCies, Mr. ancC Mrs. Menry Luce III, (video puts tf-is Setzveen 62 and a detail of 62) ^BsyinciCd MarsH, 1945, Strip ^ease in 9{g.zu Jersey, Senator ^iUiam 99enton, 62) Mpiv Xorl^ f Sound: From "I can hear it now," continuiJ^j (Narrator:) ________-—^ in ilcFTfertile America, fear and uncertainty lay heavy upon the land... (Roosevelt): "For first of all, let me assert my firm belief, that the only thing we have to fear is — fear itself." From Hart Crane's "Winter Garden": Her eyes exist in swivellings of her teats... We wait that writhing pool, her pearls collapsed, — All but her belly buried in the floor... through Reginald Marsh's paintings of Burlesque — down to Parrel's masturbating Studs: ^ leaned forward in his seat... he watched... four beefy women... legs spread, orgiastically shaking their wob­ bly bellies. Washed out, painted whores. But they sure could shake that thing... what cataleptic will conjures exhuberance out of waste of life: "nothing to fear but fear itself a63) 663) c63) I2d63) e63) Myzi O^Ht ^(dy, 1938^^rty (Day, MyremSery CfiamBerCain in Munic^^938 nXVlI, (BCitzIqi^, Sept 1,1939, Qerman tan^s invade ToCand TiWiI, ^rd 1940, Qerman troops on a Mprweyian Mountain (RyiCroad WWII,\^m^uergu^^ay~194^(Painter: Charles CundaCC, detail, ImperiaC li^ar Museum, London Germans in Paris, throuyh Sire de rPriomphe I2f63) (Photo, June 1940, 63) Photo, WorCd War IlpY940, JdtCer's ‘Dance’ in the forest of Compieyne (after the surrender of)france) Sound: "I ran heanitnow," continued VlHitler's rabia over the Sudeten Germans, then cheers) 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 26 \ �r r Symbolic G. Bell History But who would have chosen a dream recovery, hunting "Peace in our time," through Rhineland, Austria, Chekoslovakia, Poland, through the Phony War behind the Maginot Line (imaginaire), then Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Holland Belgium, France — Sound: From "I can hear it now," (German radio announcement of the French-surrender) (fade) to Hitler's dance in the Forest of Compiegne for the French Surrender — if photo-faked, no wonder it has the look of Tolstoi's child in the carriage, pulling the strap and thinking he is guiding the team. Since the Chaplinesque drollery of The Great Dictator a64) ‘Botn6m^o^^^auCs^940-41^^ L G4) (PHoto, WWlIj 1940, ‘BaitCe. of (Britain: TCanes aBove,, antiaircraft BeCorv 64 a) (Pfioto, WWII, c. 194Z, US. sfieCCin^ O^rtfi S4frica , rode a physical and psychic release, which neither the arch-bungler nor anyone else, once it was revved up, could steer, much less stay. Like the rise and fall of dinosaurs, that roar of planes warping in over the meager air-defenses of England was what we would live through — in fact and in the rhetoric of Churchill: their darkest and "their finest hour." Music: Wartime song, Liiy Mariene, (Mariene Dietrich) MCA-60137 ■ 7" 45 RPM Then the counter-rallying — 65) (Bfioto, 1943, (Divc-BomBer asscmBCy Cine (Mistair Cool^'s S4M‘E‘RICil) 65 a) (Beauvais, 5)estroyecC SLrea SlrouncC tfie CathedraC irresistable thunderhead of war production, backing the myth of the free and peace-loving peoples — this California assembly line of dive 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 27 �Symbolic ro. Bell History bombers, 1943; with the Europe I would travel to under occupation ("Fire-scarred gaunt cathedrals out of ruins"): I had seen you before, now after, when the last storm Romantic recklessness involved you in Broke over you, and your Atlantic children Backlashed on the wind clouds of detonation... a66) (Bfioto, 1945(?),S[ave LaBorers, 9{grdliatism 66) Tfioto, 1345j ‘Bmen, 55 men made, to Bury Jezuisft victim-^ Hitler's talk of realpolitik, his masterminding, fomented a Europe more visionary than actual: "Vengeance is mine," saith the Lord; "I will repay." These SS guards at Belsen Concentration Camp, set to sort and bury the rotting corpses of Jews (fade Lily Marlene) — surreal as the art the Fuhrer had condemned — what a slide, to this, a6T) Moritz von5cfi%oind, 1850-60, HQmBen Wunderfiom, 5cJiacligaC., Munich B67) 5pitzzue£, c. 1850, ‘Boof^orm, 5cmmCwi£5cltatzer, 5cfizveinfiirt 67) 'DouBte: ,[5l] von 5cfimnd, WuTuBerfiorTtJa67^and [B]5pitzzve£, Booksaorm ^B6^ j / 6*7^ Music: Mendelssohn, 1826, Fairies from Midsummer Night's Dream Overture, Philips (Festive) 6570 021 from the Germany of a century before: Mendelssohn's Dream Over­ ture of Bottom and the fairies, Moritz von Schwind's woodland rap­ ture of a Bo)?s Wonderhorn (left), (right) Spitzweg's playful irony of the Bookworm tottering on his ladder with more books than he can manage. Does all history attest a change so swift — and terrible? (fade Mendelssohn) ^8) (BoscB, 1500-04, hlscent to Meaven, (Doges' (PaCace, Venice (4 4 '^68) (Photo, 545WII, London5uBtvay as BomB sfteCter ^8) (DouBCe: [51] 14gain, Bosch, S4scent (tf8); and [B] Slgain, London 5uBzvay (if8); +. V various singCes and detaiis 68 B) Menry Moore, 1940-41, 9\5WII, London LuBes, Bh-axviug of5Ceepers 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 28 �..-r----(or Henry Moore's drawing) the tubes Bosch’s tunnel to Paradise. Spenders J fire-bombea Lonuuu ...cv. . I think continually of those who were truly great... Sorn of the sun they travelled a short while toward And left the vivid ait signed with their honour iov " "And death shall have was reaching out for Dylan rrv, Thomas'r,s "rrv Cryjoy, A rdominion" the paean of "A Refusal to Mourn... . Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter. Robed in the long friends, The grains beyond age, the dark veins or n Secret by the unmourning water After Ve'*fit*st^death, there fm is mother. no other. M ^ Svanis^ e96) music: ^ George Crumb 1970, from Black Angels, Electric String Quadet, SVBX 5306 (3) . a.d...i H..., ~ socialisl. haves ""f,''*r^'’'ne!loii.flux of follow.lraveling oppoaiKB, that of Kurtz m Africa with all iconoclasms of new art, music, poetry, down The Ant’s a centaur in Learn of the green world what can Pull down thy vanity, I say pu Y Fascist Pound: place... Ho these marvellous utterances subscribe? Atomic Age; 7/1994 Frontiers New and Lost 29 �Symbolic History fuartet? Or Motherwell's giant sixty or so variations on an Elegy for the Spanish Republic — belated insistence that avant garde (even as it rode a growth market of art-investment) remained loyal to the left? Though one could have asked the Weathermen about that. Or Diane Broughton hoisted by her own bombs, who had seen through the light in Peace Corps Guatemala? Would her ghost have answered, "Energy is the only life"? (fade Crumb) 70) (DouBCe: [J^j JosepB ComeCC 1940-5S, HBree Trivate Collections] and [B] 9(j l^rean Communist, Before 1977, CBoCCima, Do-cfie symBoC, Cdangyongdac 70a) Sigain, ComeCCs BoTces (5L-of 70); + V various details 70B) lAgain, Xprean CfwCdma (B,of 70) 70c) Slide sBozv and video repeat the douBle 70 Over all convergences a rift was widening between West and East. Had the two exchahged art roles? — the arcane, refined opium dream of the Chinese sage in Malraux's La Condition Humain^ is somehow paralleled by Joseph Cornell's 1940 to '55 haunted souvenir boxes (above): Portrait, then Egypt (with bugs and red sand glazed in under the bottles); and below, a Swan Lake for Tamara Toumanova; while our old assertive outwardness now pylons up the sky in this ^ollima, symbol of Communist Korea, over the city where Kim II Sung was born. Was it, for the West, "not with a bang but a whimper"? a71) SUfredBinstein, 1947, photo Bhilippe Slalsman, Slastin^s (gallery Collection B71) i^Bemont-(Dessoigne (Bada), 1920, Qrand Odusicien, I4.ndri Breton Collection, Baris (same as 5L of 71); video: detail only 71) (DouBle: Sixain, [51] BiBemont-Dessoi^ne's Qrand Odusicien (B71); and [B] H^ols (Wolfyan0 Schulze), 1945, Bateau Ivre, 9Qinsthaus, Zurich V 71a) Wols', Bateau Ivre Here, off the shoreless harbor of Now, perhaps it is time for a confessional Gesture. After the \Apocalypse of the war, I was in Princeton, drawn to those exiled \ great Europeans who hoped, in thought and act, to redeem the atomic age. 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 30 �Symbolic G. Bell Music: History Satie, 1913 (produced 1921), from Le Piege de Meduse (#6), Mhs 1475/6 (3) I scrupled that the Dada Cynicism of the First War (this RibemontDessoigne, Grand Musicien, left) — which Satie had anticipated in Le Piege de Meduse — dances for a stuffed monkey — should stage a wilder comeback, (fade Satie) Music: Hiiler (and Parman), from Avalanche, section St 2549 006 as in Wol's Bateau Ivre (right), or Hiller's Avalanche. bedevilling his Cantos with political nonsense. 1, Heliodor Like Pound's a7Z) ITindrew WyetH, 1947, ‘Wind from tfk Sea, (Professor and (Mrs. CfiarCes tf{. Morgan 72) 72 a) 726). 72 c) 72d) S4ndre'W ‘Wyeth, 1949, ‘The (^x^enant. Museum cf American Art, (N^zo (Britain Andrexu ‘i^eth, 1965, MonoCoyue, ‘WUCiam Weiss 5.1. QiCBert, 1949 (or Before?), detaiCfrom Chicayo (River, C.Q. (BeCC CoCCection Again 72, ‘WyethfR^venant, detail Andretu Wyeth, 1956, ChamBered (S(fiutiCus, Mr and Mrs (RpBert Montgomery; + V detail Music: Douglas Allanbrook, c.1954, from slow Movement of 1st String Quartet, tape I had stared at the Decline of the West too long to require opti­ mism, nor in art the ghostly revival of realism by which Andrew Wyeth pqrceived himself through the dusty mirror of a Maine farm­ house; or in music even the rich overlappings of Allanbrook's First String Quartet. What I was fixed on could have grown out of Arnold, or of what Faulkner (from my native state) would espouse in his Nobel acceptance: "No room in his workshop for anything but the old verities..." — verities for me no less of head than heart — a philo­ sophic reconstitution of tragedy, transcending the art-poles of New York modern and romantic person. 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 31 �Symbolic :G. Bell History Yet when a student, Galway Kinnell, appeared, not unlike this Revenant, in my Princeton study with his first poems — "all willing worlds at once," "Darkness swept the earth in my dreams," and "We were not misers in our misery" — it was as if a Vesuvius fountain had gone off in the room; or to use his own Yeatsian words; It seemed a star went burning down the sky. (fade Allanbrook) SiTC scuCptecC heads: ^rerud: Qothic 1200; TarCer c. 1383; ‘l^ischer, c. 1313; (Bu0et, c. 1670(F); (Danneche-Tj 1803-10 (SchiCCer); Ti^Udt 1909 73 a) lAgain, 31 of 73, (french gothic 736) fl^ain, C of 73, Vischer head 73 c) Sixain, T, of 73, (Dannechffs SchiCkr 73 d) 3{gain, (f of 73, diHldt head 73e) 9^FdheCm LehtnBnicfu 1918, Seated fouth, (KatnBurg (Cg'B '87); + V detail 73f) Lehm6rucl^@18, 3{eads of Lovers, (DuisBur^ Museum / That was soon after Kinnell had chanced on a poem of mine, dark with the cyclical burden for which I was photographing slides: here (above): 1200, Gothic mystery; 14th century, Chaucerian pilgrimage; 1515, a Christian saint in humanist pride; (then below), 1670 France, Baroque cradle of irony; 1810 bust of Schiller, ego as defiant hope; early 20th century, Wildt, pain, on the road to abstraction. 73 ) That consciousness speaks in the poem: I, Flame of God, took flesh in the flame Of earth's delight — pride, glory, fame. With earth unsatisfied, the bleeding heart Spent itself in romantic passion's part. Worse-fevered now, passion be^ts at the gate Ghiberti sealed, lost paradise of faith — Last delirium, where self-pitying soul Licks its own secretions, ooze of wounds. Into the wished immortal gho^y balm. And soiled with lust, leaps th^nviolable One. 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 32 (3 �Symbolic ^G. Bell History So all paths lead me to myself and home; And but for some faint whispering from the caves, Some half-spelled message of the Sibyl's leaves, I would quit hope. One promise holds hope green: "In the rank of its own bubbling filth grows clean." a74) 74) “ 74a) 746) J.I. QiCBert, 19S0, iMarcfi (Dunes, Indiana, cropped, C Q. (Bed CoCIectum 3.1. giCSert, 1930, (Portrait of C.g. (Bed at tfie (Dunes, (Bed Codection; detail dstronomy, (Planetary (Hs^BuCa 'CraS' in (Taurus, 9{aCe Observatories dlBetan danka, 16t6 cent., (Mabal^Ca, (Terror-god of (Kprthern (Buddhist (Pantheon, detail, (British Library (Sddd. 8893), London (Cg(B 84) 74 c) (Polar Star dracll^s. Southern (Hemisphere But the Spenglerian war was over. With Wyeth and Rothko, I had staked out a new life — mine in Hutchins' Chicago. That winter at the Dunes, in the cottage over Lake Michigan, Jim Gilbert, who tied art affirmation and denial to the deepest realities of man and world, painted this picture of me — Galway Kinnell in the same room, sketching his "First Song" ("Then it was dusk in Illinois"), while I wrote, undismayed — though New Deal, Stalinists, even Nazis had hawked such programmatic goods: Armageddon has always waited around the corner. Whether for the individual or culture, the bombed earth or sun-exploded solar system, or the assumed world of matter crouched before Judgment — what dif­ ference... The film over the meaningless and void is no thinner than ever, the spectacle of life on that film grander than before. The spiritual malady of our time is mostly of faint heart — a kind of green-sickness in girlsI yiAi 73) Slndrezv H^eth, 1946, Winter, w^ate^dection 73a) (Again, Wyeth winter, detad^S^^Cf^^^i^^ 73b) Samuel (Mason, 1939, Susquehanna diiver SHCls, from giCtnan (Paul's 'Land of (Promise,' *Bed Codection, Santa (fe 73c) Samuel (Mason,M^ods, Little (Pines (farm, (Bed Codection, Santa fe 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 33 �.G. Bell Symbolic History If Wyeth had been in Chicago, teaching and painting, as Jim Gilbert was, I would have shared in the release of his "Winter" — this depicted recovery from his father's death: "A neighbor boy all topsy-turvy like a rolling stone," running downhill. "The boy," Wyeth tells us. "is really, me, at a loss... That hand drifting in the air... my free soul, groping. Just over the hill was where my father was killed. For the first time I was painting with real reason to do it." For me, too, some such recovery had led from Spenglerian war to the Susquehanna River Hills, Little Pines Farm, Sam Mason ("He dips the water from his own spring"), his daughter (Sub Regno Dianae Bonae) — This fall is my spring; down lost forest ways Your frank eyes guide, the daughters Of laughter run ... that promise of a Married Land. But Wyeth was by the Brandywinei3 a76) 576) c76) 76) 76 a) 765) 76c) QiCSert, C. 19/i4. Splf ^’nrtrait. f^aura f^iCdert rnCCit‘t giCBert, 1350-5 QiCBert, 1943, Tlie 5B[ueStream, HvCartHa's ^^ineyarcC, 1 QitSert, c. 1962(F), OUe iR^cCStream, Laura QiCBert Co QiCBert, c. 1938, ^l^^dCist^ vioCa MamUrfeCt CoCCeeti QiCB'ert, 1950(^^^^mia^nes ‘Bluff, BelCCodeetion Strain. 76, IRg'dStream^^'^^kk^ J.I. And there was Gilbert, fighting the post-war like a battle of his own, from such dark Spanish realism as Manet had begun with a century before, through Impressionist lightening, to Cezanne's more and more radical search for color form: Gilbert's rock streams, grayin-green, blue-m-brown, this (a few years after) red as Dante's Bulicame, her^y/was representation, abstraction, symbol, all in one, so^ incredibly right, yet so cloaked in verisimilitude, that when, in the 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 34 3 �Symbolic History painter's absence. I lugged canvasses to Ld said "too academic for us." And what did diey have on their walls? imitationSof Dufy, little Klee's, little Albers'. The oo s i n know where theVademy was. Could b ue or was it perennial? The market answered unreliably. cheese is good, tomorrow yellow". As for the Go s t ey i answer at aU. 'What could oue do but trust inner convicuon. For me. A this Red Stream became Nature itself. ‘UmirLnti 1950, TT) frr] 7ri, Vermottt Landscape,‘BeU. CoiUctkin ~utiu„ i/tlie 19% t. im ^osai. m Wif ' /^B7 Lhc Law,^emp(e Beth Bt, Qary, Indiana;/^ detaiH^ Also in Hutchins' College was Hal Haydon, exploratory spirit aware of what has slowly come to light, that our age is _ liked a landscape, he gave it the pallette-knife. His lighted cit reeled with white-writing, his close-ups with his own bifo“^ ** bling Perhaps a block print will catch him as well as anything, gki® so doubled, dreams of flight - Icarus over the sea. How many 'j ' FT*''"' ' ~~l I u'v-J ’ '■7 ’ ! _________________ - _ -------------- *— Like Picasso taking to the beach after the war, li e t e breakthrough of the New York School, like Adlai's speeches - we were all lured from dark to light. But my response was in the context of teaching Thucydides and Greek tragedy, those Chicago years. 78) ■BucHminster fuCkr, 1967, ^coitsk Dcm, iHontred-Eitpo!^ Vi&.uM ■rsi) ‘Victorian, 7alhn amtmy: + VM 786) Supemwa 1987A, Cover of Wtifk AmncM, August 1989 “ ? ■; •- 1933 Chicago Century of Progress Fair, I then at the height of my LTntific rapture, he exhibiting the streamlined Dy-a-on c. under his energy-saving Dymaxion house, building seems alrea y 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 35 �Symbolic ;G. Bell History \ into the colonizing orbit of other worlds. Though this wonderful geodesic dome, erected for the Montreal Expo of 1967, surely left its prophet-designer with doubts about the use of his vision, even on planet earth, much less on the moon or wandering stars. f^xr fed) ' '—II Of course, Arnold's program of disciplined responsibility for the balanced whole made sense, both for art and world. Though his Empedocles proved rebellious to that aim, and his "Dover Beach" found another close: "Where ignorant armies clash by night." Coleridge too, for Christabel, had aimed at a reconciling marriage; but what opium-inspired possibility gave him was a fragment of demonic possession: In the touch of this bosom there worketh a spell Whis is lord of they utterance, Christabel ... By the hard lesson of Machiavelli, history has a gradient of its own — for us of the post-war, earth as exploding star, our supernova of spangled dysecology; and what is the art-gradient of that, but a supermarket of widening the sphincter to the flux: "Look, Ma, no hands!" ............. .. 79) Ll^^, (DecemBer 28jJ9S9j (DouBCe Cover 79 a) Same, Li^t: cov&r^^miEiC y e issue; + V (Cetai^ A Music: The Beatles, 1967-70, from "All You need is love," Capital SEBx 11843 At the turning point between the Fifties and Sixties, the society of opulence and joyful leisure stuffed the Xmas issue of Life Magazine with nothing but THE GOOD LIFE; and already the Beatles were warming up for the Magical Mystery Tour, where "It's easy... All you need is love" (though love seemed often the thing most wistfully and wishfully lacking). (fade "All You need Is love") Music: 7/1994 The Beatles, from same record, "Strawberry Fields" Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 36 �Symbolic History Would not those same Beatles' invitation to "Strawberry Fields" be made on condition that "nothing is real"? Surely the dream ship of past and future — New Deal, New (fade "with eyes closed") Frontier, Great Society — 80) (DouBU: [SI] SleriaC Spraying of Tepper, Smithsonian, January, 1979; and [(B] Utan InUrcontinentaCBaCistic OdissiCe, QCenn Jdartin Co., c. 19S9 80 a) Sixain, SLeriaC Spraying of (Bepper, Si of 80 806) Sixain JXtan, B of 80 was heading full speed for the simultaneous rocks of Silent_Spring and Dr. Strangelove — eternal boom as ecology crisis, free-enterprise as missile race and Vietnam War. What speculative vacuum! A world crying to be steered from exploding star into steady-state; yet no mind in politics or the media could rethink any priorities. Against the life-and-death need of an organic theory of economics, one party pushed an overstretched Keynsian debit welfare; the other flopped like a headless chicken all the way back to what they called Adam Smith; while communists insisted on the blind-bridle of Marx's axiomatic materialism. Where were the visions the crusade of war had kindled — or damped? Music: 81) Ll'fi ouC; Conlon Nancarrow, c.1950 ff., Study No. 3a for Player Piano 1750, Arch Records S-1786 (1) 17, 1963, 'Birmingham, Mahama: "TJieyfijht afire that won't go UaiC Yet the photographed news, that global nerve-net still not at­ tached to any brain, went on, in wild fibrilatiori, atomically, thrillingly active (Birmingham, 1963, the Black protest-marches, against Bull Connor's hoses 82) Same, LldT., ‘BCaehs versus (Potice and dogs and dogs). 7/19 94 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 37 �Symbolic History While the composer Nancarrow, laboriously cutting into playerpiano rolls criss-crossed jazz-based rhythms, with time ratios beyond the commensurate — of root-2, tu , or e — a year maybe of cutting. 83) ^eU^rapd Sivcnue, (Berl^fCey, CciCifornia, 1969, ‘Brozun pHoto, (Rsg to produce a three minute bomb-burst of body-compelling yet bodydefying dance — as wierdly on target for the hippie wave of impos­ sibility (Telegraph Avenue, 1969), as if Chaplin and the Marx Brothers had been lashed together haywire, cyclotron accelerated. 84) (PeopCe's Tarfu 1969 (S4pri£ ZOtfi and after), ‘Berl^eCey CaCifomia; ‘BaCCantine Bool^ People's Park, that Berkeley 1969 junk lot confiscated from the University of California for the free-work, free-speech, free-love flowering. My daughter Charlotte, called Frankie on the Street, was there, in euphoria. 83) 9{ationaC guard tal^ BeopCe's BarlQ 1969 (May 13-20), BaCCantine Bool^ Until the cowboy governor sent the troops with guns and teargas — as the man said in the Woodstock film: "It never should have happened." But it did. 86) Barrier fence around BeopCe's BarCg 1969 (May 20 ff.), Berks-Cey, 'B.aCCCantineBool^j^^ V86a) Trooper Uproom^Cants, 1969, BemCe's BarCu Ber((eCey, BaCCantine 3ooKs 1969^(^^l<§tei^,^BaCCantine 865) Tear Qcissiny^ And all around the forbidden paradise the high chain-link fence was set up, like hymen-— Cherubim versatilem... gladium. Woodstock. (fade Nancarrow) Sound: From Woodstock, August 1969, Cotillion SD 3-500: voice: "draft resisters... Raygun." then song: with Joan Baez, etc. (fade) 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 38 /y �Symbolic Bell History 7) Vietnam War, c. 1968, ‘ETcecution of a Viet Cong Prisoner < 587) \/ Vietnam War, VvCardi 1968, ViCCage Burning after the 9\^assacre, 0\{y Lai, Vietnam U% photo 1972, ^HgpaCm Strihe, Vietnam, Lung Eang VUCage Vietnam, March 1968, Slaughtered peasant and Boy, My Lai, Vietnam 87) 87a) Music: Woodstock, August 1969, Country Joe and the Fish, Vietnam Song, (Fixin' to Die Rag), Cotiiiion SD 3-500 Here the famous picture of a Napalm Strike on Tung Bang Village (friendlies, it turned out); and Galway Kinnell, in The Book of Nightmares: Lieutenant! This corpse will not stop burning! (fade Woodstock) d)ouB[e:.Char.Com^ ‘BdC. ffranhie) MJ^uring and [E] after Miter Te(wBe!s / iL oj m With a wave, one formulates at least the physics which makes a crest yield to a trough. In society the Hippie climax of People's Park (Charlotte, left, in Blakean delight playing and singing: "I was as clean," she said, "as a new-born child.") — the yielding of that crest to a long^rough of reaction (Charlotte, right, fallen back to the closure and heroin of the Street, where I sat with her for three days and wrote "The Prodigal Father": Christ later, by her testimony, to Jead her ^way) — such social breaking takes wav^^iders by surprise. 'arler c. 1385, 'bust. ............................. King Wenzel, Dom, ible: Pari niga, 1966, "Solitude", detail, Mexico ^ty (?; ^^Tho^h SYMBOLIC HISTORY might have foretold the odds of that now mass eruption of romantic wish, against the gas and guns of the beast with heads and horns. As if the d^bvn dream and lifedisillusion of th& Wes^had gathered itself into two images: (left) the 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 39 ^ i/ �Symbolic ^C.G. Bell History <51/4 young King Wenzel of Prague, from the time when Chaucer wrote of May: I leave my books and walk to the mead To see those flowers, white and red, Which men call daisies Come from that spring of liberatio^to Zuniga's Solitude (right) — or to Borges, who returns blind to the books (from In Praise of DarknessV. (El hombre que esta ciego/ sabe,..) The man who is blind knows he will not decipher... the books he ranks on the shelves, parchment, leather. cloth.../\ g) From south and east, west and north the roads have led me to a secret center... My wish is to die wholly; to die with this companion, my body — Quiero morir con este companero, mi cuerpo — where was the courage to go 90) ^rencfi, from Liege, 1200-IS, SrCiraeCe of tfie fCozoering Catices, from Cfuisse of CdarCemagne, CcitfiecCraC, SiacLen; + V cCetaiCs (Spin the roulette of courage in ten slides.) Like the Roland, this 1200 Miracle of the flowering lances raises battle death to sainthood. Certain knights of Charlemagne wake to find their lances rooted and flowered, a sign they will be holy martyrs that day. Roland's father, Milon, smiling, plucks his lance frohi the earth, is embraced b^ Charles (in the tent), and rides joyfully to battle. 91) (Biero deCCa francesca, 14S2-60, victory of Constantine over 9rCa7(mtms, (CetaU, SBoCy Cross frescoes, San francesco, SLrezzo; + V detail Cv^t 7/19 94 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 40 �'C.G. Bell Symbolic History The victories Piero della Francesca frescoed in his Legend of the True Cross, after 1450, have expanded sacred myth to Renais­ sance drama. One would be tempted to stage Shakespearean war with this Homeric clarity, a dignity beyond the here and now. Shakespeare, although a century and a half after Piero 9Z) ^eCasquez, 1634-35, SurrmcCer of‘Breda, Brado, Madrid; + ‘]/ detail < and only a generation before Velasquez' Surrender of Breda — ties Piero's mirage of early Renaissance to the weight and swelling con­ sciousness of this Baroque. Though such willed heroics of earth admits now a satiric converse — 93) B)ou6Ce: Jacques CaCCot 1633, Les Misires et Ces MaCheurs de Ixi (Juerre, large format, [JL] etcfiing 5 and [B] etcfiing 11; + ‘U details Callot's bitter etchings of the 30 Years War: below, an attack on a farmhouse where a man is being roasted in the great fireplace, horrors Moscherosch and Grimmelshausen would describe and Vol­ taire parody in the Candide. Yet Callot's captions still vindicate heroic morality. Could our disillusion voice what is inscribed under his famous oak of corpses? — these ignoble thieves, hanging from this tree like evil fruit, show that... vicious men sooner or later experi­ ence the justice of Heaven. 94) Qoya, 1810-20 {pu6. 1863), Los (Desastros de la Querra, #7 ((Dover) % As Goya approaches the existential stripping, a revolutionary heroism, this "Que Valor!" "What Courage!" remains possible. Yet how lonely such war-matyrs of heart. Chenier, of Chaflotte Corday: "You thought by your death to revive France... Brave girl... One reptile the less crawls in this slime." 95) (KstetHe (Kpllwitz, 1903, OutBrealu LiBrary of Co^r^h'^asBington D.C.; + ‘U detail 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 41 �r.G. Bell 90) Symbolic History 9^rencfi, from Liege, 1200-15, Mirade of tfie fCowering tances, from Chasse of CdarCemagne, CatfiedraC, Siadien} + ^details (Spin the roulette of courage in ten slides.) Like the Roland, this 1200 Miracle of the flowering lances raises battle death to sainthood. Certain knights of Charlemagne wake to find their lances rooted and flowered, a sign they will be holy martyrs that day. Roland's father, Milon, smiling, plucks his lance from the earth, is embraced by Charles (in the tent), and rides joyfully to battle. 91) (Piero deCCa CFrancesca, 1452-60, zHctory of Constantine over (Maj(entvus, detail, (Holy Cross frescoes, San francesco, SLrezzo; + ^detail (V91a) The victories Piero della Francesca frescoed in his Legend of the True Cross, after 1450, have expanded sacred myth to Renais­ sance drama. One would be tempted to stage Shakespearean war with this Homeric clarity, a dignity beyond the here and now. Shakespeare, although a century and a half after Piero 92) Velasquez, 1634-35, Surrender of (Breda, (Prado, (Madrid; + V detail (V92a) and only a generation before Velasquez’ Surrender of Breda — ties Piero's mirage of early Renaissance to the weight and swelling con­ sciousness of this Baroque. Though such willed heroics of earth admits now a satiric converse — 93) (DouBCe: Sacques Callot 1633, Les Mislres et les MaCBeurs de la Querre, large format, [51] etching 5 and ^B] etching 11; + V details Callot's bitter etchings of the 30 Years War: below, an attack on a farmhouse where a man is being roasted in the great fireplace, horrors Moscherosch and Grimmelshausen would describe and Vol­ taire parody in the Candide. Yet Callot's captions still vindicate heroic morality. Could our disillusion voice what is inscribed under his famous oak of corpses? — 6/1995 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 41 �Symbolic €.G. Bell History these ignoble thieves, hanging from this tree like evil fruit, show that... vicious men sooner or later experi­ ence the justice of Heaven. 94) goya, 1810-20 (pu6.1863), Los (Desastros de (a guerra, #7 (Dover) As Goya approaches the existential stripping, a revolutionary heroism, this "Que Valor!" "What Courage!" remains possible. Yet how lonely such war-matyrs of heart. Chenier, of Charlotte Corday: You thought by your death to revive France... Brave girl... One reptile the less crawls in this slime." 9$) UQietfie ^(Czvitz, 1903, OutBreafu LiBrary of Congress, WasBington D.C.; + V detaiC We think of the Great War as a breaking point; but when Kaethe Kollwitz in 1903 cut her print of blind "Outbreak," no more battle-strength remained than in Yeats' 1922 "Phantoms of Hatred : The rage-driven, rage-tormented, and rage-hungry troop. Trooper belabouring trooper, biting at arm or at face Plunges towards nothing, arms and fingers spreading wide For the embrace of nothing... But those terrors were metaphorical. 96) iK^rcfiner, 1915, MuUCatedSdf as SoCdkr, S^Oen 9duseum, OBerCin, OBio; first, video detail Trench warfare enforced a break-down reality. Kirschner, on garrison duty at Halle prefigured his later suicide in the imagined mutilation of this self-portrait with a nude model and lopped-off right hand. Not even the English war poets, piercing "the old lie: Dulce et decorum est...," seem as faith-blasted as this German. 97) Soviet War Toster, 1941, ’^e Lnemy sBalC never escape our tvratB'; witB video details 6/1995 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 42 �Symbolic Music; History Prokofiev, 1944-45, close of Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible In a people's reversal of that, the Russian defence of the Second War, revived, with all the blatancy of conviction, the old heroism of righteous will: "The Enemy shall never escape our wrath." While Prokoviev and Eisenstein (under invasion) could make a warhorse film of Ivan the Terrible voice that resistance — its closing chorus: "At the scene of the great fire unified -Russia/ Gathers upon the bones of the enemy!" (end Prokofiev) Though it is hard to distinguish patriotism from 98) Jfoe fSs>sentfiaC (J^sociatecC iBress), 1945, fHouse, fRpdiester, 9^; + VdetaiC 98 a) ‘WWII, c. 1943, CBougainvUh (Beacfifiead propaganda. CKgisiti£ on Ixvo Jima, ‘Eastman The most rallying American image of that war, first in photo­ graph and then in bronze, was the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima, said to have been staged after the event. While the American radio was advertising candy bars: "What are those boys on the atolls fight­ ing for? For peace and the American Way — with Butterfinger!" All that time I was writing "Studies in the Future," to feel out the "rising and falling motions of a culture" — the rising, like the Greek, where individuality empowers a colonizing free expansion; until (in the disillusion and strife of that enterprise, the need changing from release to an ordering) ZncC 97) 5i£ain, Soviet War (Poster, detail 2nd 97a) Cfilnese Communist, 1958, Student parade in ‘Iten-an-men square, (Bering comes (as with Rome) the falling or constrictive motion, where revo­ lution itself takes on the character of regimen. Power shifts from the liberators and developers to a new nation, born in discipline, which can slowly loose itself as it binds the world. S^or 2nd 98) 6/1995 Space SfiuttCe Laundung, 1981 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 43 �Bell r Symbolic History So I wrote. But how did the assumed crisis of free confidence in the West, the predictable malaise and self-question, go with that euphoria of art and life which remains the subject of this study? a99) James I. QiCBert, c. 1951, Staamp, Indiana (Dunes, near Cfticxigo, (BeCC Coition 99} Izapa (Cfuapas), c. 300 (B.C., SteCa SO, Sf^CetaC (Bartfi (Motfier, (h(g.tionaC (Museum of Sbithropotogy, (Me?cico City; + V details 99 a) Same, Stela, detail; + V return to the whole i As when Galway Kinnell, after the glowing pioneer projections of his Chicago years — "the cries of the prairie and moan/ Of wind through the roots of its clinging flowers" — went abroad, plumbed the avant-garde and came up with the prophetic nightmare of "The Supper after the Last," for which comparisons might range from this Pre^Maya Stela — a skeletal Earth Mother of death and birth, placenta and foetus floating above her on an umbilical cord — through the Beatus Commentaries of 11th-century Spain, to who knows what in Picasso or Mird. In token of which range, let 1912 Schonberg launch the musical invasion. Music; Schonberg, 1909-12, from 1st of Five Pieces for Orchestra, Col. MS 6103 In our world such demonic seizure has recurrent reality — Kinnell: that company eating chicken on a Dali shore, where the of I ...bearded Wild man guzzling overhead... who has not yet smiled... Devours all but the cat and the dog, to whom he slips scraps. The red-backed accomplice busy grinding gristle, ’You are the flesh; I am the resurrection, because I am the light. I cut. to your measure the creeping piece of darkness That haunts you in the dirt. Step into light — I make you over. I breed the shape of your grave in the dirt. 6/1995 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 44 �Symbolic aioo) Stuart'Boyi,13r9,C0a^psi«s Systems, c . j;u(eo trims to a (UtaU . ^ ^BlOO) iPedersen, Warttc lOOu) HlSXOi y <3 nftfie cCouBCe 100; uffUcfi tfU of schOnberg) ^ ^ loO, Bdow) ^ •CoCCapsins Systems, Lost Odessage, a X^u,^«Cersm,-MuuicS<tulu<y,^ufiOO ---------- . .Ug century over-extended, as if to With the New 0“®*=“°“ , nature and man always inore call us back to nature “ ^ ^constructive return? Wa er ominous, what was the substan characters whose Percy's novels, for all *®“ .'a ’catastrophe. That tore_ world seems already to have perceptive and boding has been shared Here Ufe powerful, though hardly known^ ^oijing the civilized fabric; but as psychologist and teacher to i^hol g ^ when he puts brush to ^when a flash a white what Klunell has lately burned into a P msh sparkled": - this glare of r^ehng^^^ ^ entitled "Collapsing Systems, 1^^ Light." While Doug Ped«s aftermath of that when ^c^’hLfthe sick, they shall aU end sicker. alOl) /• Suscyh ^ 1CIC9 a? SiasemraB, ‘Beuys sBoto f Jeftmny 1SS3,tovsr %!m) ■Infiltrutiun,-Cmtrt georys VdlOl) Beuys, 1966, 9^eit covi^risf. . . „„ ^ ”” “ * ^ has received more attention attention No European of the tothest teach of avantihan the ^^aLt society and finally art. Shot down garde becomes a protest agai 6/1995 A Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 4i �Symbolic History • ♦or of 1943 he was saved by the the Eastern front m the win regenerate warmth, ^rtars who covere^/^^X the — iZ” So fat and felt have and wrapped it m felt... t dominated hia P Pack, of 1969, Gugrenhdm show. A Volhs- sS:d "sil, each cattving a ilashUght, Mt and elephants called to world rescue. r. • „ the European post-war modern In style, and even in ‘"rting to that backing when Beuys has owed much to America. down a pile of dirt for the climaxed his political de^^ ^ announcing disgust Berlin Zeitgeist Show of 1982, at t with all pretences of the art scene. Kunstler". aioz) CMsto, 1369, wL) 9a) nea Sy 9 (Msto,Savu,y^t«^^ Cfinsto, • \ 1QR'^ from KoynsriisQUtsi Ss?^'zSiSTAtSh?grn'gofP..'3,"Cioudsoape» , ___ and f .h, art-frontiers of« opulence and In a final overflow o of landscape-and-earth euphoria, come the ataggenns P almost ateration. Christo's ‘‘'at auch w canvas to lOnuug r— In music such packaging P^“;"omTot^^^^^ in the program scores of Phihp ,omp i- Williams' Williams "Ii l®f A'''- 8°o— 6/1995 a Atomic Age; Prnntiers New and Lost Frontiers 46 �Symbolic History A year after Christo's Coast, Robert Smithson, reverting (as "^others were doing) to the mystery of prehistoric earthworks, piled this rock jetty, spiraling into Great Salt Lake. Here permanence was no doubt intended, though it is rumored that the sidereal anchorage is already covered by the rising water. 104) SpiraC QalaTQ) M 81 in Ursa Major, Tfioto, 9^vaC OBseroatory 104 a) SpiraC Qaicnqf M 83, ^Rjce University! or. Better, M§C 2997, SiustraCian H^eCescope 93oari£ MaCin, And above, our own milky way, with countless such galactic systems (here M-81 in the Great Bear), put off their nebular sun-condensing whorls — as in my Delta Return I saw the Mississippi from the air, in curves and reverses, fling off ox-bow lakes on either side — the whole flood-plain (fade Glass) ...patterned still — On the spiral shapes of melting, infinite seal Of home-returning time on the transient floor. Under star-cloud night, first matrix of that swirl. alOS) PlstronomicaC distances yiven as train-times, c. 1911, detaiC, (BooB of ^CnowCedpe, VoCume /; + Vdoser detaiC 10S) Same, zuBoCe 105a) (Pierre-iPauC (Prudfum, c. 1804, 9{ead of 'l7en£eanu, S4rt Institute cfCBicago 105B) Orozco, 1936, ‘EC^Ion^re, detail. University of QtuidaCajara Music: Glass, same, late in Part IV, "Pruit Igoe" No wonder as a boy I pored over this illustration in The Book of Knowledge — astronomical distances conveyed by the travel times of trains arcing from the earth-globe to moon, sun, planets, the nearest star — imagining such star-wars as the great space-powers would gravitate toward. In Chicago, 1950, I waked from a dream not unlike the present show, and wrote: 6/19 95 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost ^*‘*''*» rrew—anu—cnST 47 T �Symbolic History To perceive in the scope of its profligacy the history — that is the self-destruction — of the West, is to glimpse no mere human folly, but one of those terrifying open­ ings out of the organically wild and wasteful, the more dire for its satanic sense of 4irection. To see a group of living Christian nations, fostering within their' contradictory self-seeking and Machiavel­ lian policy a cradled bourgeoisie of idealistic hope and criticism, bringing to bear on the faith that sustained them the acids of the liberated mind — to see those nations, as birds crack the shell, break through the medium of protective tradition, the inheritance of paradox unrecognized, into the vast of a valueless freedom; to see that well-born folly change its nature in the face of all it confronted and meeting became, to the temporizing waste of violence — 106a) 9izUc, iStd-lGtfi cent., goddess nXazoCteotC in cdiCdBirtli, detaiC of dead, (DumSarton Oads, Wasdin^ton, (DC 106) Same, HazoCteotC, wdoCe statue the technically giant and spiritually withering nation­ alities, as pettily suspicious as each business and freeenterprise man (though all were culturally one), un­ dermining the other and debilitating the other, as if by mutual murder to clear a space for the alien regimen that would feed upon their ruin: this is the phenomen­ on we have observed and lived through and been part of, the whirl in which all values have changed; it is the turning of liberation upon itself. The compelling ques­ tion remains, was this our avoidable, even now cor­ rectable folly, or is it the jealous law of every timebirth? In The. Rook of Nightmares Galway Kinnell grows reconciled to birth: ...Sancho Fergus, my boy child, had such great shoulders, when he was born his head came out, the rest of him stuck... 5/19 95 Atomic Age: 48 Frontiers New and Lost 'MTTcry and Lost 1 �S'^^'i^'k-cL (^LLL. S' - /v-j—^ y4v^c/ S ■/ ^ (^ska^<^£., Led (^lid <^JL>^K-^f^ dd, SkJl/\S (^jyir\Jj^^ ^ (^'XA-ijJAcL S^n\/?d djldltJSds'K^ d\^\iX ^Ajt- df^ yt^'^ dL-uf^ [cA^Welr^yd^ Jj^^oji r^CiL jJ7> 7^ o � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 50 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost, Symbolic History, Part 36 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 36 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_36_Atomic_Age--Frontiers_New_and_Lost https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/38a398914e88973a92900a24142ea90f.pdf d740118c9d212c6cbaf931e2899fbb5c PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 24. Bach: Fort of Post-Baroque CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 May 1994 Last Revised January ‘96 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 24. Bach: Fort of Post-Baroque Music: Bach, 1723-50, Cantata 34, O ewiges Feuer, opening, MHS 1574 1) J.B. Neumann, 1743 ff., Vierzehnheiligen over fields, near Bamberg (slide copy, nearer, from slide 80+1, CGB ‘52); then a video preview of 8a, below 2) Same, still nearer, from the entrance path (CGB '52); video: detail only 3) Same, interior (CGB '52) 4) Same, central space with High Altar (CGB '52) V4a) Same, High Altar in center (CGB '52) 4b) Same, ceiling fresco (CGB '52) 5) G.A. Viscardi, Asam Brothers, and others, 1718-41, Fürstenfeld, Nave through ironwork (CGB '59) a6) Fr. X. Schmädl, c. 1740, Chancel detail, Rottenbuch, Bavaria (CGB '59) Vb6) Same, from Choirscreen, detail of David and angels, from the side (CGB '59) 6) Same, David detail, against the vault (CGB '59) a7) J. Dietrich, 1738, Top of High Altar, Diessen am Ammersee (CGB '59) b7) Marx Kriner, 1739, View of Nave ceiling through gate of ironwork, Diessen am Ammersee (CGB '59) 7) J. Dietrich, 1738, Augustine, etc., High Altar, Diessen am Ammersee (CGB '59) 8) Asam Brothers, 1732-36, Archangel Michael, fresco detail, Maria-Viktoria Hall, Ingolstadt (CGB '59) (cut "O Ewiges Feuer") 8a) Another view of Vierzehnheiligen, entrance path (CGB '52) 8b) Again 8, Michael, a wider view (CGB '59) With the opening of Bach's Cantata 34, "O ewiges Feuer" — "Eternal fire, fountain of love" — we have gone from the pilgrimage church of Vierzehnheiligen, through Fürstenfeld, Rottenbuch, and Diessen, to an Asam fresco detail of Michael's old victory over the dark, but endowed, like the Bach brook of love with all the timpani of concerted power. a9) b9) French Gothic, 1190-1220, Apse exterior, Chartres Cathedral (CGB '59) Same, Choir interior, Chartres Cathedral (CGB '59)Vc9) �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Vc9) Same, Clerestory of Apse, Chartres Cathedral (CGB '59) The West has many summits, from the flame-leap of Gothic, the thrilling century around 1200 (in music the bare-fifth mystery of Perotin, yet a mystery so severely organized that this triplum on two syllables, "Virgo," builds entirely over tenor F, but for one rise to G, a heaven-smile at climax, with the return, under B-flat tension, again to F, the chord of the fifth, then unison — a "modulation" in which the whole claim of time beckons through timelessness) — Music: 9) a1O) b10) 10) 11) 12) 13) 14) V14a) Perotin le Grand, c. 1200, Organum Virgo, (Cape) EMS 201 Same, Pier of the Crossing, Chartres Cathedral (CGB '59) Same, Ambulatory, Chartres Cathedral (copy of CGB '59, Gothic I, 68) Same, 1200-25, Glass, Madonna and St. James, Chartres Again, Chartres, windows of Ambulatory Chapel (CGB '59), which video replaces with V10, French Gothic, 1160-1212, Nave and Choir, Soissons (CGB '59) French Gothic, 12th-13th cent., St. Pierre, Chartres, interior (CGB '59) Same, St. Pierre, Chartres, buttressed Apse (CGB '59) Swiss French Gothic 1160-1250, Death of the Virgin, detail, South Portal, Lausanne Cathedral Mosan, c. 1200, oak and polychrome Madonna (Sedes Sapientiae), Diocesan Museum, Liège French Gothic, c. 1200, Head of Mary from Virgin and Child, polychrome and gilt oak, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (close Perotin) from that skyward yielding, the Lady of the soul's romance, 15) a16) 16) 16a) 17) Kandinsky, 1914, Composition, Guggenheim Museum, New York City; + V detail Kandinsky, 1913, sketch for "Orient," detail, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam Kandinsky, 1913, Composition: Storm, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Kandinsky, 1914, Picture with 3 Spots, Guggenheim Museum, New York City. Kandinsky, 1912, Autumn, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; first, V detail �C.G. Bell Symbolic History to the parabolic outbreak of force in our century (a venture of spirit too costly ever to be paralleled: Rilke's "Überzäliges Dasein entspringt mir im Herzen" — "Existence past number wells up in my heart" — Kandinsky and Bartok) — Music: Bartok, 1927, close of the 3rd String Quartet, Concert CS 501 (close Bartok) against that beginning or that end, the spire of Gothic descent or storm of Symbolist return, 18) 18a) 19) Asam Brothers, 1732-36, Maria-Viktoria, Altar Wall, Ingolstadt (CGB '59) Same, High Altar (CGB '59); + V details Same, Maria-Viktoria, Altar with ceiling fresco (CGB '59); first, video lower detail 19a) Same, expanse of ceiling fresco (repeated for V24, below) 20) Same, the group of Mary and Angels; + V details 20a) Same, God the Father group; first, V detail 21) Same, Christ, Dove and Angels (video: details only, left and right) a22) Same, Abraham and Isaac 22) Same, David, Pegasus, Europe, etc. (video: details only, above and below) 22a) Same, Africa, elephant, snakes, etc. 23) Same, Fountain of Grace, hunting pearls; + V detail V24) Same, again 19a, Mary group with Fountain below 25) Same, widest view, altar with Fountain, Mary, etc. how rooted in the harmony of God's best of all possible worlds are the grandeurs between — from the 1730's, Asam's Maria-Viktoria, with a patchwork from the Gloria of the B Minor Mass. Music: Bach, c. 1733, B Minor Mass: Gloria opening; Domine Deus, opening; Cum Sancto Spiritu, close; (Scherchen) Mus. Guild S630 (close Gloria) From such Leibnizian pomp of heaven and earth, the four Continents, arts and collegiate learning imbued with humanizing grace, 26) Roman Mosaic, 9th cent., Madonna, St. Zeno's Chapel, St. Praxed's, Rome; + V detail �C.G. Bell 26a) Symbolic History French Gothic, 13th cent., Interior, Nave looking west, Rheims Cathedral (CGB '74) Music: Gregorian (Solesmes), Spiritus Domini replevit, Pentecost, French Decca 7543 how strange, how secret, the descent into the crypt that underlies the West, the Dark Age Mary of St. Praxed's in Rome, where symbol has almost shed the assertions of earth, even while the Gregorian text acclaims: "The Spirit of the Lord fills the orb of the world". (fade Gregorian) — A retreat as far prior to the anagogical upsurge of Gothic as its vaulting of soul-force had been a27) 27) 27a) Roman early Baroque, 1591-1628 ff., Maderna with frescoes by Domenichino, Sant' Andrea della Valle, Rome (CGB '86) Baciccia, 1674-9, Ceiling of Il Gesu, Rome (video: three details only) Same, detail (CGB '86); video: lower section only from the proclaimed opulence of Baroque. It is the stretching of that incarnate antithesis, as in Baciccia's Victory of the Holy Name and Satanic overspill, which would knock the props from great church art; and it had seemed, as 1700 approached, that the crisis neared — the mummery of sacrificial aggrandizement, as when Monteverdi whoops it up in the anchoritic words: "Fugge, fugge," "Flee, my soul, from the world" — Music: Monteverdi, 1620, Fugge anima mea 10022 (close), Vanguard VCS- a strange parade of withdrawal. a28) b28) 28) Raitenhaslach, Bavarian Romanesque, then 17th cent., painted and stuccoed under Zick, Zimmermann, et al., 1735-43, view from entrance (CGB '59) Same, organ loft (CGB '59) Zick, et al., c. 1739, St. Bernard ceiling, Raitenhaslach, Bavaria (CGB '59); with video details Bach is full of such swellings, where the depraved singer today squeals like a pig under a gate: "the chains of Hell and Jesus' Blood" �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Bach, 1723-50, Cantata #74, Alto aria, a phrase, MHS 1574 and "throw yourself in his arms". Music: Bach 1723-50, Cantata #155, Soprano aria, opening, MHS 1388 (fade) Does not the flesh-loading of the old mystical content produce such curiosities as this Raitenhaslach Visions of St. Bernard — the saint on his knees (right) to lap Christ's fountain of blood, and again (left) for the milk stream from Mary's breast — South German, six style-centuries from Bernard's ascetic dreams? a29) 29) Bernini, 1657-66, Cathedra Petri, or High Altar, St. Peter's, Rome; + V detail Double: [A] Bernini 1657-66, St. Augustine, High Altar, St. Peter's Rome; and [B] E.Q. Asam c. 1735, Augustine, Weltenburg Yet who can deny, over the paradox of assertive abnegation, the seriousness of high Baroque, even in the grandiloquence Bernini lends Peter's Chair, or the young poet Pope, Virgil's "Messiah" (1712): The seas shall waste, the skies in smoke decay, Rocks fall to dust. and mountains melt away; But fix'd his word, his saving power remains: Thy realm for ever lasts, thy own MESSIAH reigns! And it is just the gift of the Germans to extend the art of sacred heroics beyond the mocking debacle of French Regency and English Pope, which is our theme and inquiry — the gift of E.Q. Asam to carry Bernini into the 18th century on his own ground, and with more worship; 30) Again, Asam, Augustine, B of 29 (video: detail only) Bach's related genius, but beyond the Asams, beyond all his contemporaries, writers, artists, other composers, Vivaldi, Telemann, Handel, to make that stronghold of belated Baroque an eternal Passion center of Christian and human truth. a31) Zurbaran, 1635-40, detail of Christ, from Crucifixion, with the painter, Prado, Madrid �C.G. Bell Vb31) 31) Symbolic History Rembrandt, 1632, Descent from the Cross, Alte Pinakothek, Munich The whole of a31, Zurbaran, Crucifixion with the painter Music: J.S. Bach, 1729, St. Matthew Passion, "Und um die neunte Stunde" etc., ARC-2712001 The deeply pietistic sharing in the Passion, which would culminate in Bach's settings, as in these last words according to St. Matthew, with the following Chorale, was not merely Protestant, but Counter-Reformation as well: so with Zurbaran's 17th-century Crucifixion and the Painter; a32) 32) Rembrandt, 1633, Raising Christ on the Cross, centerspread with self-portrait of the artist, Alte Pinakothek, Munich Same, detail of artist (with video detail of Christ from whole and a closer detail of the artist; then, video returns to Vb31, Rembrandt, Descent, upper detail; while slide show introduces 32a, Rembrandt, c. 1637-41, Deposition, National Gallery, London) Music: Same, opening of Chorale, Wenn ich einmal soll scheiden (fade) though the example which most anticipates Bach is perhaps that Munich raising of the Cross, into which Rembrandt has introduced his own sorrowing face. As so often, it is as if Bach had endowed the soul of Rembrandt with the musical emotions of the last and richest Baroque. Thus the closing modulations to which he subjects the Passion Chorale, "Wenn ich einmal soll scheiden" (close of Chorale) — building on the intensity and tenderness of the German past: Albert, nephew of Schütz: Music: 33) 33a) H. Albert, c. 1640, from Kirchenkantate: Bekehrung zum Herren "Kommst du"; (Tinayre) Col. M-431 (fade) M.B. Braun, 1712, St. Jude the Apostle, upper detail, National Gallery, Prague Same, detail of face By the time of Bach, the more-than-Racine rhetoric of passion, like all the energies of earth, has been magnified; this Apostle Jude by Braun in Bohemia, might be Bach's St. Peter, or the tenor soul of man, at the cockcrow of denial. �C.G. Bell Music: 34) Symbolic History Bach, 1723-7, St. John Passion, from #18: "und ging hinaus und weinete bitterlich," Odeon ST E 80668-70 M.B. Braun, 1726, St. Jerome before his Cave, near Kuks, Bohemia; first, V detail Music: Bach, same, cont., close of #19, "Meine Missetat" (end) Braun's 1726 Jerome before his cave so crying the penitence of his "Missetat" has almost the terror of Blake's Nebuchadnezzar, imbruted specter of man. To entrain in sacred participation all divisive powers of post-Renaissance self and world, without being daunted by the gulf between, 35) Rembrandt, 1668, Return of the Prodigal, Hermitage, Leningrad; + V details is the victory of the religious Baroque — as certain in Bach's Passions as in this ultimate Prodigal by Rembrandt. How the Matthew-Passion pours on Peter's denial not the rancor of the St. John "Misdeed" but the balm of a comfort aria: "Erbarme dich." Music: Bach, 1729, St. Matthew Passion, from 46-7, "weinete" and "erbarme" ARC-2712001 (fade) 2nd 34) Again, St. Jerome, another detail 2nd 34a) Maulbertsch, c. 1760(?), Raising of the Cross, place unspecified Though both Passions are formed in the Baroque antinomy of actual wrong and reasoned vindication, that of John heightens the negative, as in the fierce Bass aria and chorus: "Eilt!" — Hasten! — Where? — To Golgotha": Music: 2nd 35) Bach, St. John, from 48, "Nach Golgotha" Od. ST E 80668-70 (fade) Again, Rembrandt, Prodigal's Return, detail Which the Matthew Passion as determinedly parallels with assuagement: "Come ! Stay! — Where? — In Jesus' arms." Music: St. Matthew Passion, continued, from 70: "Sehet, kommt," (Scherchen) West. Gold WGM 8318-4, side 7 (fade) �C.G. Bell Symbolic History But must we always go back before Bach's birth for an art suggestion of his deep and shadowed containment? 36) 36a) E.Q. Asam, 1733-35, Resurrection of Sinners, St.-Johann-Nepomuk Kirche, Munich; + V details Same, Resurrection of the Just The earthquake resurrection of the dead from the Matthew Passion — Music: Bach, St. Matthew Passion, cont. (73) Earthquake, ARC-2712001 (fade) that cry which stretches creed — has startling parallels in this E.Q Asam. 37) 37a) Rembrandt, 1638, The Risen Christ appearing to the Magdalen, Buckingham Palace, London; + V detail Rembrandt, c. 1650-55, Landscape with Ruins, Gemäldegalerie, Cassel But for the evening peace and nature-love which follows (though the German soul has always leaned that way) we are pressed again to Rembrandt — Christ as gardener to the Magdalen. Music: 38) Bach, Matthew Passion, cont. (74), Bass, "Am Abend" 2712001 ARC- C.D. Friedrich, 1817, In Memory of John E. Brewer, Charlottenburg; + V detail (fade "Am Abend") Or forward to Friedrich's landscape symbols, this memorial to a lost friend, the Gothic city through the gate of death, beyond estranging water. a39) Zimmermann, 1746-54, Die Wieskirche, against snowy mountains, Southern Bavaria (CGB '86; copy of 18th Century a39) Vb39) Same, detail of West front, sun and shadows (CGB '86; copy of 18th Century 39) 39) German Baroque, 1746-58, Birnau am Bodensee, in landscape (CGB '66) 39a) Abbey of Our Lady, 18th cent., Zwiefalten, Germany �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Yet the German Baroque, above all styles, breathes harmony with the flowering earth, as in the poems of Bach's contemporary, Brockes (his lyrics included in the St. John Passion), a poet at his best in nature: on The Nightingale: Die aus so enger Brust und mit so kleiner Kehlen Die grössten Wälder füllt durch ihren Wunderschall — that song-wonder Blake would compare with the scent of flowers: "how from so small a center comes such sweets,/ Forgetting that within... Eternity expands/ Its ever-during doors." The title of Brockes book is the very key to Baroque: Earthly Delight in God — Irdisches Vergnügen im Gott: In the cool of night, in pensive mood, I walked, and saw of late where a cherry stood, Blossoming in the light of the moon, That nothing whiter could be seen or known. It was as if a great snowfall Had heaped the branches and each bough Down to the smallest twigs with snow Clustered in rounds of pure white balls. Surely — I said — it would be sought in vain, Over all the earth, to find a whiter thing. But as I shifted here and there, My sight still lifted to the tree, I caught by chance, in a space of sky, A single clear and shining star, Far brighter than the blossoms were. I thought: how the beauty of earth, all God has given, Dwindles in the brightness of his heaven. (CGB) a40) 40) 40a) E.Q. Asam, 1731-32, St. Anne, Joseph and the infant Mary, Osterhofen, near the Danube (CGB '59); video: detail only: angels with a huge crown E.Q. Asam, 1733-35, Trinity, detail, from St.-Johann-Nepomuk Kirche, München E.Q. Asam, Same, wider view, from which video takes only a close detail, then previews 46: pan-detail of Apse and Trinity �C.G. Bell Symbolic History It is not canvases that hold the German art of Bach's time, but churches and palaces, entire. The greatest artist, E.Q. Asam, like his brothers, is architect, sculptor, painter. It is significant that our search for a Passion parallel of the right depth and humanity led us back to Protestant Holland and Rembrandt. Music: Bach, Johannes-Passion continued (58), "Es ist vollbracht" But against even Bach's greatest moments — that lonely "consummatum est" ("Es ist vollbracht") from the Passion according to John — E.Q. Asam, Catholic Bavarian, marvellously holds nis own — most of all in the brooding Nepomuk Church he and his brothers designed and built at their own cost beside their house in Munich, with an apselighted Trinity which gives the florid Baroque its darkest glory. To have preserved that solemnity into the generation after Watteau and Couperin, Swift and Pope, is not Bach's triumph only, since Asam shared in it too. 41) Dürer, 1511, The Trinity, Woodcut; + V detail As the resemblance (less in form than spirit) to Dürer's 1511 Throne of Grace might suggest, it is the heritage which made Machiavelli praise Republican Germany above all Europe for probity and religion; though of course what we are in search of is deeper than morality, a God-immediacy by which that rapt people so miscarried in our century. 42) South German, c. 1340, Christ and St. John, Staatliche Museen, Berlin; + V detail (cf. V42) Back and back in time the intimacy sustains itself — South German, early 14th century, and the loving union of Christ and John, both wrapped in the blood-lined robe of flesh, has a spirit parallelled nowhere else, tied to the soul-soaring of Meister Eckhardt: God is all things; all things are God. The Father begets me, his son, without cessation. I say more: he begets in me himself and in himself me. The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me. My eye and God's eye are one eye. 43) Master of Naumburg, c. 1270, Head of Christ on the Cross, Dom, Naumburg �C.G. Bell Symbolic History And it is in Naumburg, from a century earlier — the 13th — that the dying saviour first receives the human reality of each and all. How is Bach thinkable without that consummation? 44) German, 10th or 11th cent., Head of St. Metronus, Abbey, Gernrode We pursue it further, into the Dark Ages. This battered Metronus head from Gernrode, illuminates the 10th or 11th century with a testimonial inwardness unique in that Europe — the sacred accomplishing itself in subjectivity: "Es ist vollbracht." (close) 45) Roman Christian, 3rd cent., Orant, detail, Catacombs of Priscilla, Rome; video having picked up more of the figure from Va45 No doubt the deepest origin is in the Christ-man himself, incarnate mediator for the West; but if we trace that Logos to its third century art-beginnings, we feel, as in Gregorian, the passions of flesh dissolve in mystery; we can hardly distinguish the hollow hush of "Crucifixus" from a "Resurrexit" attested as by the empty tomb.. Music: 46) 46a) Gregorian, Crucifixus and Resurrexit, Credo I 4th mode, Solesmes, London 5632 (fade) E.Q. Asam, 1733-35, St.-Johann-Nepomuk Kirche, interior from entrance, München (CGB '59) Same, Apse with Trinity; first, video detail of Christ By the time of Asam and Bach, Incarnation has mounted creed in other body and robes on quite another stage. The outraged cry of "Let him be crucified" Music: Bach, St. Mathew Passion, continued (from 54) "Lass ihn kreuzigen" (cut) demands a Leibnitzian calculus of containment: "O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden": Music: Bach, St. Mathew Passion, continued (63) from "O Haupt voll Blut..." (cut) 1st 47) Same, Apse and Trinity (detail taken from Mozart 53, CGB '59); while video pans to an angel, upper left �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The great organ fugues — as for the Passacaglia — go as far as assertion can in empowering the dissonant antithesis: Music: Bach, 1708-17, Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor, close, (Biggs) Col-MS 6261 1st 48) E.Q. Asam, 1723, Assumption of Mary, High Altar (from church aisle), Rohr, Bavaria (CGB '59) Thus in the B Minor Mass, where the Gregorian Creed is to be set, the tympanic Resurrexit seems to pile the Asam altar at Rohr, of Mary's Assumption from the grave, For 2nd 47 and 2nd 46) Again, Asam Nepomuk Trinity: slide show has a wider view of 46a; while video returns to the frontal view of slide 40 (plus a Christ detail) For 3rd 47) Here the slide show repeats the frontal view of 40; while the video details Mary's tomb from the Assumption (see V3rd 47 in the video file) on the chromatic grief of the Nepomuk "Cruxifixus." Music: Bach, close of Crucifixus, B Minor Mass, from Angel 3500 C (end Crucifixus) 2nd 48) Again, Asam, Assumption of Mary, from nearer (CGB '59); first, video previews 49, Mary and Angels ascending 49) Same, Assumption of Mary, nearer and above (CGB '59); video: details only: Mary, then angels; also from 2nd 48, tomb with apostles 50) Same, below, closer: tomb with Apostles (CGB '59) 51) Same, nearer, Apostles to the left (CGB '59) 52) Same, above, Heaven, with Mary rising (CGB '59) 52a) Same, Mary, a side view (slide copy of 1700 #20, CGB '59); then video returns to detail from 52, Heaven Music: Bach, opening of Resurrexit, B Minor Mass, Angel 3500 C (fade Resurrexit) In the Baroque engrossment of Gothic heaven, mystical rapture lifts a weight of Cartesian bulk, which, as in Leibnitz, it has entrained in its cosmic surge: �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Souls act in accordance with the laws of final causes through their desires, ends and means. Bodies act in accordance with the laws of efficient causes or of motion. The two realms, that of efficient causes and that of final causes, are in harmony, each with the other... According to this system, bodies act as if (to suppose the impossible) there were no souls at all, 53) V53a) Asam Brothers, c. 1735, Assumption above High Altar, Kloster Weltenburg, Bavaria (CGB '59) Same, a nearer view of figures against the vault (CGB '59) and souls act as if there were no bodies; yet both body and soul act as if the one were influencing the other... The totality of spirits must compose the city of God... a moral world within the natural world... Another harmony between the physical realm of nature and the moral realm of grace... brings it about that things progress of themselves toward grace along natural lines... Under this perfect government... everything must turn out for the well-being of the good... not only for all in general, but also for each one of us in particular... As Leibnitz kindles formal Descartes, a54) 54) French-German, 1st half of the 14th cent., Stained Glass windows, Strasbourg Cathedral (CGB '59) German, 14th cent., Gothic, Stained Glass window, Cathedral, Augsburg (CGB '59); + V detail (cf. V54a) Medieval German mystics had enflamed the Scholasticism of Paris. From Suso on his cross studded with nails, 1350, the "Sursum Corda" — "Lift up your hearts" — rises like the burning windows of Augsburg: I set before my inner eyes myself in all my being, with body, soul, and all my faculties, and placed around me all the creatures God has created, in heaven, on earth, and in all the elements, birds of the air, beasts of the forests, fishes of the sea, and thereto all the little dustmotes which shine in the rays of the sun, and all the little waterdrops which ever fell or fall from dew, snow, or rain — and wished that each and all of these things had a sweetly swelling sound of harps, well prepared from the innermost essence of my heart, �C.G. Bell 55) 55a) Symbolic History Grünewald, c. 1511-15, Vision of God, upper detail from Madonna and Angels panel, Isenheim Altarpiece, Colmar Same, larger context, Heavenly Glory so that there would rise up from them a new and jubilant hymn of praise to the beloved, gentle God from evermore to evermore. And then the longing arms of my soul spread out toward the countless beings of all creation, exhorting and inciting them even as a zealous precentor incites his fellow-singers to sing joyfully and to offer up their hearts to God: Sursum corda. So Grünewald incites the Renaissance to a fire-vision of glory spilling from and returning to the Father. Now that German continuity 1st 56) E.Q. Asam, 1731-32, Glorification of the Lamb, Osterhofen (detail of CGB '59); first, video closer detail haloes the vaults of Asam with lighted angels, at Osterhofen, on wings around the Lamb. Again Leibnitz gives a clue to the German genius which could hold the mighty style of Christian Baroque into the Salon century, raising the rational and phenomenal to mythic ecstasy. 1st 57) Bernini, 1657-66, Angel window (over Peter's Chair), St. Peter's, Rome (video: wider variant, V1st 57) Against the Asam, set Bernini's 1660 paradigm. This tangle of rays and angels is as calculatedly cool as the forces of a Newtonian wheel. And the World System, which in Newton, despite his ardent wish, becomes a clockwork of vectorial force, 2nd 56) Again, Asam, Glorification of the Lamb (whole of 1st 56, CGB '59) is glowingly sustained in Leibniz by the vital antinomies of Energy. Indeed, the shift from a physics of force and momentum to one of energy (from MV to MV2) fills the universe with the ubiquitous ground of nature as fluctuant substance. 2nd 57) Again, wider: Angel Window and Peter's Chair; while video narrows to a Window detail, V2nd 57 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The poles always mingle. Leibniz is rational too, but not with so Galilean a command of heaven as matter in motion. And how remote from outward Bernini, 58) 58a) V58b) Münstermann, 1631, Head of Moses, Altar detail, Parish Church, Tossens, N. Germany Münstermann, 1637, Evangelist Matthew, upper detail, pulpit of the church in Holle Münstermann, 1631, from Head of John the Baptist, Altar, Parish Church, Tossens (CGB '57); video narrows to a close detail is this 1638 Moses by his North German contemporary Münstermann, steeped in the Hermetic mysticism then voicing itself in Jacob Böhme: When the will resigns and surrenders to God's Ground, it sinks beyond itself, beyond all grounds and points of view, into the only place where God is revealed, where He works and wills. It has become a no-thing to its own ego-self... God lives within it... as fire reddens iron: so that it loses its darkness... and glows with the Love-will that rules and works in all. (CGB) — Böhme, of whom Silesius would write later in the century: As fish in water, as in earth the plant, Bird in the air, sun to the firmament, Or salamander to his fiery haunt, God's heart is Jacob Böhme's element. (CGB) — Silesius, to write the same of his own eternal I: I also am God's son: I share his company. His Spirit, Flesh and Blood are known to him in me. (CGB) Ich auch bin Gottes Sohn, ich sitz' an seiner Hand: Sein Geist, sein Fleisch und Blut ist ihm an mir bekannt. a59) 59) Martin and Michael Zürn, 1634, The Rose Garland Altar, Münster, Überlingen; + V detail Justus Glesker, c. 1650(?), John the Baptist, detail, National Gallery, Munich; + V detail Music: Buxtehude, 1680-87, from Ich bin eine Blume zu Saron, ARC-3096 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Before Bach's birth, the art of German Baroque (this Glesker John) shares in Silesius' rapture: The rose is without purpose, asks neither how nor why; It blooms because it blooms, selfless as earth and sky. (CGB) Such the leaven Buxtehude caught up from Schütz, Albert, Hammerschmidt. And it was Buxtehude's evening concerts ("I am the rose of Sharon") which Bach, in 1705, walked 200 miles to hear. (fade Buxtehude) 60) 60a) Glesker, 1648-53, Grieving Mary from a Crucifixion, Dom, Bamberg Same, another lighting (video: upper detail only) Where immediate person pours into the sacred, the romantic is foreshadowed. So with Glesker's grieving Mary, or the haunting oboe unison as watchman's horn in Buxtehude's "I sought by night... him whom my soul loves": Music: 61) 61a) 61b) 62) Buxtehude, 1680-87, from "Ich suchte des Nachts," ARC 3096 (fade) M. Willmann, 1666, Miracle of St. Bernard, Museum der Bildenden Künste, Breslau Same, detail of carriage, with a video return to the whole Same, detail of landscape Same, another detail of landscape And in this rare German landscape of the time, by Willmann — the devil charmed into piecing out, with his own body, St. Bernard's broken coach wheel — we are startled by an earth and sky webbed with the lightning of Grünewald, as energized as the viola da gamba line from Buxtehude's "Jubilate": Music: 63) Buxtehude, 1680-7, Gamba introduction from Cantata II, Lumen 32050 (end viola da gamba) E.Q. Asam, c. 1735, High Altar with St. George, Weltenburg Cloister Church, Bavaria (CGB '59); video uses wider variant, V63 �C.G. Bell 63a) V63b) 63c) 63d) 63e) Symbolic History Same, from the oval Nave (CGB '59); video starts with a wider variant, V63a, then goes to a detail from 63a C.D. and E.Q. Asam, 1717-35, View across the Danube of the same Cloister Late Roman Baroque, 1685, Andrea Pozzo, detail of ceiling fresco, San Ignazio, Rome (CGB '86) Again, Asam Brothers, Weltenburg Cloister Church, detail of ceiling stucco (copy of CGB '59, see 18th Century, 42) Again, the St. George Altar (horizontal detail of 63, CGB '59); video: closer details only Music: Bach, c. 1735(?), Cantata #50, Nun ist das Heil, BG 555 Both Bach and Asam cling to that chain of life-marvel, which reaches from Gothic and Altdorfer all the way to Wagner and beyond. The charged adventure of George, the Lady, and Dragon, flanked by Bernini columns and saints, with every feature of the cloister church of Weltenburg, wrought by the Asam brothers as if from one precious stone, is full of such pictorial exuberance as Schweitzer has stressed in Bach. (skip in Cantata to near close) Incredible, that 1735 continuance and heightening of expressive powers, the Great-Chain-of-Being faith of the century before, from Galileo and Descartes to Newton, Leibnitz, the vast contructions of Bernini and Boromini, Pozzo and Baciccia, or of the France of Louis XIV, brought to a grandeur unmatched before. and at a time when Baroque assertion might seem to have spent itself, (end Nun ist das Heil) 64) V64a) 64b) Fr. Mansart, 1643-50, Hall of Mirrors, Chateau Maisons-Lafitte Mansart, Le Brun, Coysevox, 1678 ff., Salon de la Guerre, Versailles Le Vau and Le Brun, 1671 ff, Escalier des Ambassadeurs, Versailles In France we have seen the rational heroics of the Sun-King, this first Mansart hall of mirrors in the Maisons-Lafitte, swell to the methodic sublimity of Versailles, the overreach of Lully's Overtures: Music: Lully, 1686, Overture to Armide, opening, HSL-2072 (fade) �C.G. Bell a65) Vb65) 65) Symbolic History Fr. de Cuvillies, 1734-39, from Hall of Mirrors, Allegory of Water and Fishing, Amalienburg, Nymphenburg, Munich (copy of CGB '59, see 18th Century 41) Same, whole wall (then video details from a65) Same, another stucco detail (cf. 18th Century, Va41) Music: J.S.Bach, c. 1627, Partita #2, Courant, close, Landowska, VIC 1594 (fade in) We have seen, we have heard it break, with the 18th century, to the playful arabesques of rococo asymmetry, which spread over Europe and in all the arts: we pick it up here from Munich, 1735, the hall of mirrors in the Amalienburg. Bach absorbed it as he did every style, grafting the fragilities of Couperin and Rameau onto the earlier base. (close Courant) Most of all it frills the chamber-play of Telemann Music: 66) V66a) 66b) 66c) Telemann, Mus. de Table, from E Minor Ouverture, ARC 73234-35 (fade) J.B. Zimmermann, 1727-36, Steinhausen, piers and ceiling (CGB '59) (with video detail of Eve, etc.) Same, another portion of the ceiling (CGB '59) Same, Die Wieskirche, upper detail of Choir (CGB '86); while V66b copies 18th Century Vb40: same, wider spread (CGB '59) Same, Die Wieskirche, columned height of the Choir Music: Telemann, c. 1640(?), Magnificat in C, close, PHM 500-104 And against the Roman weight of the Asams, the Zimmermanns lace and embroider Steinhausen (as here) and finally Die Wies’ with a Tiepolo and Louis Quinze brilliance as of porcelain, though with an Eden simplicity of the pastoral. The result is an ecclesiastical delight unparallelled, unless in those always more operatic masses and Magnificats — as from Telemann (close Magnificat) to Mozart almost at the century's end: Music: Mozart, 1779, "Coronation" Mass in C, Gloria, Amen, Nonesuch H1041 (close) �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Religious display in Bavaria has not struck so desperately 67) H. Rigaud, c. 1700, Cardinal de Bouillon, Musée des Beaux Arts, Perpignan on the clarity which had etched the final pomps of 1700 France, high Church and high state, Versailles, tax-farming, the Wars of the Spanish Succession, with mockery. The skeptic wit of Voltaire, Holbach, the Encyclopediasts, already peeps through the playacting of Rigaud's Cardinal de Bouillon, angel kiddies and all — as if to voice a68) Vb68) 68) 68a) Watteau, 1708-09, Decorative panel, with monkeys, Private Collection Zimmermann, 1746-54, Die Wieskirche, video pan on detail of slide 66b, above (CGB '86); video then returns to a68, decorative panel Watteau, 1717, Gathering Under an Arcade, Dulwich College, London (cf. 1700 67); + V detail Same, detail of dancers and fountain what Watteau might share with Congreve: "No more of that nauseous cant." Watteau's training under Audran as a painter of arabesques — those wave, shell, and flower forms with which Zimmermann would pendulate whole churches — must have shielded him from the heavy hangover of Le Brun. But he goes beyond decorative buoyancy. Music: Fr. Couperin, 1713, from La Favorite, Landowska, Soc. Album The break with the heroic uncovers a frail poignance of ennui and lonely heart, which Verlaine had only to romanticize: (Symonds) Your soul is a sealed garden, and there go With masque and bergamasque fair companies Playing on lutes and dancing and as though Sad under their fantastic fripperies... As in Couperin, so in the tearful light of the Dulwich College "Gathering" (detail), the very fountains seem to sob: Au calme clair de lune triste et beau, Qui fait rever les oiseaux dans les arbres Et sangloter d'extase les jets d'eau, Les grands jets d'eau sveltes parmi les marbres. (fade Couperin) �C.G. Bell Va69) 69) Symbolic History Magnasco, c. 1740(?), Gathering in a Garden, Palazzo Bianco, Genoa Magnasco, detail from the far right of the same picture Music: Domenico Scarlatti, c. 1740(?), Sonata in F Minor, K 184 (L. 189) close, Nonesuch H-1094 By 1735 — Bach and Asam then at their height — French languor and precious ridicule show in Italy through the dark and chromatic passions of Magnasco and Domenico Scarlatti. (end Scarlatti) 70) Norbert Grund, c. 1760, Minuet in a Park, National Gallery, Prague (video: details only) In that Germany, where Norbert Grund was already prettying his teacup gardens with minuets in the plaintive mode, the old Bach held the great fugal fortress almost alone. What had happened in France forty years before. now stretched the generation-gap of his own musical family. Those brilliant sons, from Wilhelm Friedemann through Philipp Emanuel to Christian, all courted the modish amours of the style galant: Music: Johann Christian Bach, c. 1770(?), Sinfonia in B flat Major, 0p.18, #2, plucked string section from the Andante, Chamber Music Society, CM-6 (fade) 1st 71) G.L. Bernini, 1658-70, Glory-dome over altar, Sant' Andrea al Quirinale, Rome (CGB '86); + V detail While the outmoded father, Johann Sebastian, brought his last enormous powers to bear on the fugue. Nothing but the Newtonian and Leibnizian synthesis of the world had expressed Baroque command as completely as formulated fugal polyphony. As the daring cupola of the last Bernini Va1st 72) C.D. and E.Q. Asam, 1717-35, whole ceiling, stucco and fresco, Weltenburg Kloster/Danube (video: central spread only) 1st 72) Same, the lower half of the fresco (CGB '59); + V detail: Asam leaning in (from V1st 72a) �C.G. Bell Symbolic History reads itself over into the light-hung ceiling of that George-and-the-Dragon church of Weltenburg, where clouds and carved angels, with an ecstatic Asam (top right) overflow the rim — so Bach, for the final work of a God-affirming lifetime. 1st 73) Bernini, 1655-67, Piazza of St. Peter's (from the Colonnade roof), Rome set himself to systematize, in constructions of every complexity, simple, augmented, diminished, mirrored, and with added subjects, the whole Art of the Fugue, culminating what had swept from 17th century Italy — the spatial conquest of Bernini's Piazza of St. Peter's 1st 74) J. Prandtauer, 1702-18 ff., Kloster Melk, Austria (detail of 3rd 74, CGB 59) — north over the Danube: in music Fux' Gradus ad Parnassum, in architecture the supreme Monastery of Melk, after 1702 — as if synthesizing power would proclaim itself to the world. 1st 75) English landscape gardening, 1741 ff., Stourhead Park, Wiltshire (CGB '59) Almost no work of Genius is harder to parallel than the Art of Fugue. It seems the apotheosis of the great organizing will of Europe's most formal centuries — what in England by 1740 had shaped whole countrysides of forest, lake and park: Stourhead, where nature receives the idyllic touch of art. 1st 76) N. Poussin, c. 1644-45, Landscape with St. John on Patmus, Art Institute, Chicago A perfection devised a hundred years before, when Poussin accorded heroic landscape to the geometry of planes, a fugal abstraction to inspire Cezanne. 1st 77) Rembrandt, 1653, Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City All the greatest art of the 17th century has that canonic eternity, working through the richest matter of sense and world — Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer. �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 1st 78) Zuccali, 1701-04, and Effner, 1720-26, Lower Hall, Neues Schloss Schleissheim (CGB '59) In Bach's Germany such panel painting seems to disappear; the Parnassian nobility shifts to architecture, bearer of the ritual dream. For 1st 79) Double: J.S. Chardin, [A] left, 1734, Philosopher Reading, Louvre, Paris; and, [B] right, 1733, The Water Urn, Museum, Stockholm Of course the whole rococo is imbued with formal design; but in France only Chardin holds the seriousness of the old Baroque, its sense of space as metaphysical — what composes this Philosopher to a still-life. or a still-life to philosophy. For 1st 80) Double: [A] Rembrandt, 1669, Last Self-Portrait, Mauritzhuis, the Hague; and [B] Goya 1815, Self-Portrait, Prado, Madrid Finally it is in Goya that the grand manner of the Western centuries of confidence breaks through Revolution to an ultimatum of Baroque self in fugal plasticity. For 2nd 79 and 2nd 78) Jan Vermeer, c. 1660, The Girl with a Red Hat, Mellon Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (CGB '62) We have no choice, for Art of the Fugue cognates, but to invoke so extended a span. Since it is to the outpost of the century before that Bach mounts, For 2nd 77) H. Matisse, 1905, Portrait with the Green Stripe, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Copenhacen most of all at the end of his life, and to such solitary eminence, that he belongs simultaneously to the past, and to the abstract search of the future, even down to today. For 2nd 76) Asam Brothers, 1717-35, Stucco from Forehall, Kloster Weltenburg, N. Bavaria (CGB '59) The Art of Fugue is another of those life-studies we have to hint at in the closing minutes of a show. Best to focus on For 2nd 75 and 2nd 74) �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Borromini, 1650-59, St. Ivo, upper part, Rome (copy of Blake, 43, CGB '86) the last great quadruple fugue, intended for three new invertible subjects combined with the leading theme; though unfinished, it is still the longest fugue Bach wrote; 2nd 73) F. von Erlach, 1717 ff., Church of San Carlo, Vienna so even with this fragment of a vast work, we must start part way through with the second and faster theme, hear it combine with the first. Then yield to the four-note grandeur of the chromatic For 2nd 72) E.G. Haussmann, 1746, Portrait of J.S. Bach, place unspecified; + V detail signature, Bach: B - A - C - H (H the designation of B natural), with the beginning of its unbelievable measuring against the other themes. So the fugue breaks off, in a trailing voice, as if Bach had dropped it on his death-bed. Music: a2nd 71) 2nd 71) 3rd 72) For 3rd 73) 3rd 73a) 3rd 74) V3rd 74a) 3rd 75) 3rd 76) 3rd 77) For 3rd 78) 3rd 79) a2nd 80) 2nd 80) Bach, 1750, Art of Fugue, close of the last, (Münchinger), London CSA 2215 Another CGB '86 variant of Bernini, Sant' Andrea al Quirinale [at present, slide show only, but to be revised into the video] Again, Bernini, Sant' Andrea al Quirinale, spread opening of Heavenly Glory (video: details only, right, then left) Again, Weltenburg, ceiling fresco (CGB '59); video returns, for details only, to 1st 72 [add to video Va3rd 72, whole fresco] Again, St. Peter's Piazza, the sweep of the curved colonnade Same, the triple colonnade, from within Again, Melk, at evening (here, original slide CGB '59) Same, another view, from the Danube Stourhead, another view, twilight (CGB '84); video: two details only Poussin, 1643, St. Matthew and the Angel, Staatliche Museen, Berlin Again, Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, detail Schleissheim Hall, another angle (CGB '59) Again, Chardin, Philosopher Reading Again, Rembrandt, last Self Portrait, detail Again, Goya, 1815 Self Portrait, detail �C.G. Bell Symbolic History (here Art of Fugue trails off) 2nd 80a) Francisco Goya, 1820, Goya and his Doctor, Minneapolis Institute of Art (video: detail only) Yet Bach, like the 70-year-old Goya, did not die then and there. Though it was not long after, as he lay in a darkened room, too blind to write, that he dictated a fugal prelude for the Chorale "Wenn wir in Höchsten Nöten sein" — a pilgrim, in his death need, calling on God. 80+1) Again, Vierzehnheiligen over fields; with video detail and return to whole (CGB '52, original of slide 1) Like Vierzehnheiligen over fields and woods, that last polyphony of faith, printed with The Art of Fugue, has the serenity of an Eden-earth recovered by love. Music: Bach, 1750, Wenn wir in Höchsten Nöten sein, close, (Münchinger) London CSA 2215 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 25 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Bach : Fort of Post-Baroque, Symbolic History, Part 24 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 24 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_24_Bach--Fort_of_Post-Baroque Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/8400052347b22e63ce9ca1843dc0a0b4.pdf 9e47334dcb1ceffbb9bd6e9724228aeb PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 20. Baroque Formulation CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 January 1993 Last Revised January ‘96 �Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 20. Baroque Formulation 1) Guercino, 1621, Aurora ceiling fresco, vertical section, Casino Ludovisi, Rome (video, center-spread only) Same, horizontal view of whole (video, horses only) Same, detail of 1 (video then returns to the horizontal whole of 1a) 1a) 1b) MUSIC: Monteverdi, 1607, Orfeo, Toccata into Prologue, ARC-3035 If Baroque is to signify a period style (that, more or less, of the 17th century), its character cannot be the faulted irregularity of the word's origin, whether from a strained syllogism or a lopsided pearl; we must deepen our search for its quality, at the same time allowing that no element, neither abandon nor control, tactile realism or ideal grandeur, space, radiance, chiaroscuro, or in music monody, homophony, chromatics, can specify a style, but only the ethos-bearing configurations in which such moments are combined. (Music) It is by idea that we recognize, date, and name: as Guercino's Aurora, 1621, Monteverdi's Orfeo, 1607. Not only the space-crowding and shadowed passion of this Guercino render it Baroque; (Fade music) since what it rivals, 2) Guido Reni, 1610 ff., Aurora, Rospigliosi Palace, Rome; + V details the 1610 Guido Reni, MUSIC: Monteverdi, Orfeo, cont., Lasciati i monti, ARC-3035 is of the same style-horizon, and yet two centuries would extoll its classical ordering — as richly formal, as voluptuously academic as the Parnassus Milton evokes at the close of Comus, 1634: 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 1 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History To the Ocean now I fly, And those happy climes that ly Where day never shuts his eye, Up in the broad fields of the sky: There I suck the liquid ayr All amidst the Gardens fair Of Hesperus, and his daughters three That sing about the golden tree: Along the crisped shades and bowres Revels the spruce and jocund Spring, The Graces, and the rosie-boosom'd Howres, Thither all their bounties bring, That there eternal Summer dwels, a3) Poussin, 1631, Realm of Flora, Gallery, Dresden: detail of group center-left (first, a video detail of Flora, standing) Same, whole picture 3) And West winds with musky wing About the cedar'n alleys fling Nard and Cassia's balmy smels. Iris there with humid bow, Waters the odorous banks that blow Flowers of more mingled hew Than her purfl'd scarf can shew, And drenches with Elysian dew (List mortals, if your ears be true) Beds of Hyacinth, and roses Where young Adonis oft reposes, Waxing well of his deep wound In slumber soft, and on the ground Sadly sits th' Assyrian Queen … MUSIC: Orfeo, continued: Mira deh Mira, and Ahi Caso acerbo, opening A classic joy, complicit, as in the Orfeo or in Poussin's Realm of Flora, 4) 4a) 1/1993 Same, detail to the right, with Hyacinthus and others Slide: closer detail of Hyacinthus alone; or video pan detail of 3: far left, the suicide of Ajax Baroque Formulation 2 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History with the ripe sob of grief. What these works share — in light and calm, in shade and pathos — is the swell of heroic formulation, what stretches the Orfeo between flown recitative and figured bass. (Fade Orfeo.) Va5) Annibale Carracci, c. 1603, Flight to Egypt, Doria, Rome, with frame arch entire (CGB '86) 5) Same, with part of frame arch (CGB '86) 5a) Same, detail of barge (CGB '86) 5b) Poussin, 1648-51, Landscape with a Snake, National Gallery, London MUSIC: Orfeo, Act III, Sinfonia III and Possente spirto, opening, ARC-3036 Indeed, a polar tension of the age we call Baroque — like every such, spectrumblended in artists who seem opposed — sets on one side the balance taught by the Eclectics: this 1603 Carracci Holy Family come to Egypt, like Monteverdi's Orpheus, by Charon's barque. ("Possente spirto") All his life Poussin would seek that dignity of landscape planes; a6) Claude Lorrain, 1645-6, The Judgment of Paris, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; + V detail of landscape to the right Claude Lorrain, c. 1655(?), Cephalus and Procris, National Gallery, London; + V detail 6) Claude would suffuse its rural fact with Arcadian vision; while music from Monteverdi (Fade violins) to the French Chambonnieres, MUSIC: Chambonnieres, c. 1660(?), Chaconne (Landowska) V. 15180 wakes such strains as Virtue does in Comus: At last a soft and solemn breathing sound Rose like a steam of rich distill'd Perfumes, And stole upon the Air, that even Silence Was took ere she was ware, and wish't she might Deny her nature, and be never more, Still to be so displac't. I was all eare, 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 3 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History And took in strains that might create a soul Under the ribs of Death … (Fade Chambonnieres.) Va7 Caravaggio, 1605-06, Death of the Virgin, Louvre, Paris (video: center detail only) b7) Same, closer detail of Mary (video: horizontal spread) 7) Caravaggio, 1602-04, Entombment of Christ, detail, Vatican 7a) Caravaggio, 1600-01, Conversion of St. Paul, detail of Paul struck down; Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome (cf. V7a) V7b) Caravaggio, 1598-1600, Martyrdom of St. Matthew, S. Luigi dei Francesi, Rome (video: center only) Against that measured tread, Caravaggio, by 1600, had forged the counterpole of Tenebrist passion. But the same Orfeo which gave us classical parallels, darkens to chromatic pain. MUSIC: Orfeo, from Act II, I languidi lumi and chorus, ARC-3035 The same Comus which twined Hesperian gardens, initiates the brooding vindication of Paradise Lost: (Chorus: Ahi caso acerbo) But evil on it self shall back recoyl, And mix no more with goodness, when at last, Gather'd like scum, and setl'd to it self It shall be in eternal restless change Self-fed, and self-consum'd, if this fail, The pillar'd firmament is rott'nness, And earths base built on stubble. a8) Same, Martyrdom of St. Matthew, detail of killer Vb8) Caravaggio, 1609, Raising of Lazarus, detail, Mus., Messina 8) Rembrandt(?), 1651(?), Descent from the Cross, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. 8a) Rembrandt, 1648, Supper at Emmaus, detail, Louvre, Paris (cf. V8b) V8c) Rembrandt(?), 1657, Crucifixion, Clark Museum, Williamston, MA (video returns to a detail of 8, Rembrandt, Descent from the Cross) 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 4 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Already the prophet scourging "The dark Idolatries/ Of alienated Judah," and "Moloch, horrid King besmear'd with blood/ Of human sacrifice …" The deepening of that naturalism of light and shade as it spreads from Caravaggio to the solemn pity of Rembrandt, does not alter whatever conscious formulation flexed the bow of the Great Baroque. Pagan and Christian, south to north, runs one groundswell of mighty style, as when Monteverdi's operatic song sires the Pietistic German of Heinrich Schütz: "For you are my Helper, my Helper and my Saviour, my God …" MUSIC: Schütz, 1636, close of Cantata "Eile Gott" (Psalm 40), (Meili) AS-28 (end) 9) German, c. 1030, MS 1640, f 117v, Christ on the Sea of Galilee, Hessische Bibliothek, Darmstadt; + V detail V9a) Regensburg or Salzburg, c. 1040, Christ on the Sea of Galilee, Staatsbibliothek, Munich (with video return to 9) In six centuries we have come from the symbolic calligraph of this storm on the Sea of Galilee, the boat of the world on the fallow waves (fealu wegas) of Germanic wandering — Cynnewulf: "anxious the struggle/ To bring our barks to land over the dire sea surges/ The Son of God our rescue." Here he sleeps in the presaged Leviathan of death and hell. MUSIC: Catalan, 11th cent., from "In eadem quippe," Gerona MS, Musical Heritage, OR-433 While the sequences and tropes of 1000 contract all things to the Dark Age center of Gregorian voice and parallel melisma. (Fade Catalan.) 10) V10a) V10b) V10c) V10d) Rembrandt, 1633, Storm on the Sea of Galilee, Gardner, Boston Schönfeld, c. 1640, The Flood, Mus. Kassel: two details only v.d. Neer, River Town Ablaze, National Gallery, Dublin (CGB '74) Details of 10: Rembrandt's Storm on the Sea of Galilee Rembrandt (and Flinck), 1636, Sacrifice of Isaac, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59) (video: detail only) MUSIC: 1/1993 Schütz, 1636, same Cantata, “Eile mich”, opening, AS-28 Baroque Formulation 5 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The same scene in Rembrandt confronts the new physics with the life-imperative of Protestant will: Schütz, Eile Mich, Gott zu erreten. Fleming has such a storm poem ("Des Donners wilder Plitz schlug von sich manchen Stoss"): The lightning from its cloud struck endless blows; Mortal men stood wan; the torn sky trembled Resounding to the crash; earth under crumbled, Sank below my feet; the cracked ground uprose To meet my fall, yawned tomb-wide, to enclose My pilgrim days. I took to the sea: tumbled In rage it swelled cliff-high; my carrack, humbled, Broke mast and split and settled to its close. (Skip to "immer sagen") Before, behind, on all sides round was fear; Above destruction and beneath the grave; There was no mother's son to help or save; And yet I was unbowed, thought life as dear, Nor fled impending death or when or where, Safe in the arms of my Redeemer's care. (CGB) (Close organ phrase.) 11) Cologne, c. 1400, St. Veronica's Veil, Alte Pinakothek, Munich; + V detail Within the shorter span, set Veronica's nakpin, Rhenish early 15th century — and the Christe Eleison from Dufay's first mass — MUSIC: 12) Dufay, c. 1420, 3rd Christe Eleison, Missa sine Nomine, Lyrichord LLST7234 (Fade Dufay.) Fetti, c. 1620, Veil of Veronica, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; + V details against Fetti's handling, about 1620 — with the Crucifixus from Carissimi's Mass for Five and Nine. MUSIC: Carissimi, c. 1650(?), from Crucifixus, Missa a Quinque et a Novem, MHS-1110 So Marino's Adone asserts the primacy of the tactile: 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 6 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Every other sense can be deluded by false objects; this one only is true, faithful minister and father of delights; the others possess parts of the body; touch extends its power through the whole, and in universal act, seizes on all things. (CGB) (Fade Carissimi.) 13) Michelangelo, 1513-16, Moses, detail, S. Pietro in Vincoli, Rome No wonder the turn to Baroque was once assigned to Michelangelo. But the transpersonal might of his Renaissance ingathering is far 14) Rubens, 1603-4, Judas Thaddaus, Prado, Madrid (video: detail only) from the conscious rhetoric of the century of Rubens, or of Milton's blind touch: In darkness, and with dangers compast round, And solitude; yet not alone, while thou Vist'st my slumbers Nightly, or when Morn Purples the East … (Paradise Lost, VII) 15) V15a) Persian, c. 1400(?), Jonah and the Whale, Metroplitan Museum, NYC Double: [A] Japan, 607 A.D., Bronze Buddha, Horgu-ji, Nara; and [B] Kamakura, 1328, Shinto deity as Bodhisattva, Fine Arts, Boston (video returns to 15, Jonah and the Whale The spatial filling-in of the symbolic is not confined to the art-history of the West. The whole current of the later world may have run that way, as in the Japanese garden refinements of the Buddha. To pass from this 1425 Persian representation of Jonah, as flat as Gothic, 16) Iran (for Shah Tamasp), 1527-28, Rustrum Cleaves a Witch, Book of Kings, Metropolitan Museum, New York City (video shows detail only) to the adventures of the Book of Kings a hundred years later, is to parallel the Italian Renaissance — as Gentile Bellini's sketch of a Turkish artist might remind us — in touch with the Moslem East. 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 7 �C.G. Bell 17) Symbolic History Simone Martini, 1315-21, Madonna from the Maestas, Palazzo Publico, Siena Same, wider section V17a) But only Europe goes from thinness and ideality MUSIC: Jacobo da Bologna, c. 1340, Fenice fu, close, ARC-3003, or AS-59 (already in 14th century Ars Nova and Simone Martini exploring later modalities), (Close Fenice fu.) Va18) 18) El Greco, 1577-79, The Trinity, upper detail, Prado, Madrid Same, closer detail of Father and Son through a dynamic crisis, both symbolic and physical — so Victoria and El Greco — MUSIC: Victoria, pub. 1605, from Kyrie of Missa Pro Defunctis, Vox DL-690 (Close) 19) Francesco del Cairo, 1630-35, Herodias, detail, Metropolitan Museum, New York City (CGB '74) V19a) Same, whole, including frame (CGB '74) 19b) Bernini, 1668-70, Angel with Scroll and Crown of Thorns, S. Andrea delle Fratte, Rome MUSIC: Frescobaldi, 1630, from Voi Partite mio sole, (Meili) AS-79 to an art of volitional command, as causally flexed as the moments of a Newtonian force array. So the tragedies of Corneille turn on heroic obligation — family against king, love against honor; as when the Cid discovers in the insulter of his father the father of his love: Miserable vengeur d'une juste querelle — Whichever way, fierce anguish follows me … I draw the sword of pain, To seek, alas, the father of Chimene. (CGB) Frescobaldi's recitative plucks the reflective chords of the viscera. (Close Frescobaldi.) 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 8 �C.G. Bell 20) 20a) V20b) For V20c) Symbolic History Rembrandt, 1629, Self Portrait, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '53) Rembrandt, c. 1634, Self Portrait, Uffizi, Florence Rembrandt, c. 1628, Self Portrait, Stattl. Kunstsammlungen, Kassel Video goes here to a21 (see below) At the center of the change lies the validating subjectivity of the infinite self, as much a point of departure for Rembrandt, 1629, as for Descartes' "wonderful science" — its 1619 discovery, in the famous "room with a stove", described in the Method, of 1637: As for the opinions I had received up to that time, I thought it better to make a clean sweep and throw them all away. … Thus, seeing that our senses sometimes deceive us, I was ready to suppose that there was no such reality as they give us images of; and because reason can err, even in geometry, I rejected what before had seemed the surest proofs; moreover, since such thoughts as come to us waking can also visit our sleep, I resolved to treat all that had entered my mind as no more real than the figments of my dreams. But in the act of thinking all was false, it came to me as necessary that I, who did that thinking, must be real. Thus observing that the truth: I think; therefore, I am, was so certain that no extravagance of the skeptics could ever shake it, I took it boldly for the first principle of the philosophy I was in search of … [Discourse on Method] a21) 21) Rembrandt, 1630, Self Portrait, bareheaded, Aerdenhout, Holland (video returns to a close detail of 20, 1629 Self Portrait, Munich) Rembrandt, 1628, Man in a Window-lighted Room, National Gallery, London; + V detail By an axiomatic leap the self Descartes discovers is not merely the doubter, dreamer, nightmarer (from whom little in the way of certainty could be deduced), but an eternal thinking substance, clear and sufficient assurance of God and causality, with its mathematical plotting of world, perception, and all, along equational abscissas of space and time: All points of those curves … which admit of precise measurement must bear some rapport to all points of a straight line, a relation which can be expressed by means of a single equation… If then we should take successively an infinite number of values for the line y, we should obtain an infinite number of values for the line x, and therefore an infinity of different points, such as C, by means of which the required curve could be drawn… 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 9 �C.G. Bell 22) 22a) V22b) 22c) Symbolic History Rubens, c. 1638(?), Sunset with Cattle, Louvre, Paris Ruisdael, 1660-70(?), Sunset in a Wood, Wallace Collection, London Claude Lorrain, 1660, Juno, Io, and Argus, National Gallery, Dublin (CGB '74) Rembrandt, 1643, Etching: The Three Trees, Rijksmuseum In ordered infinitude the landscape from this late Rubens through Claude, Rembrandt, and Ruisdael matches the science from Galileo to Huygens, Leibniz, and Newton. Descartes' System of the World must have been one of the proudest of these constructions. He burned it when Galileo was condemned; but a guarded summary appears in Book V of the Methode: I showed how the greatest part of the matter in the original chaos must, in accordance with natural laws, dispose and arrange itself in such a way as to present the appearance of heavens; how in the meantime some of its parts must compose an earth and some planets and comets and others a sun and fixed stars… I next came to speak of the earth and to show how … mountains, seas, fountains, and rivers might naturally be formed in it, the metals produced in the mines and plants grow in the fields; and in general, how … things purely material might, in the course of time, become such as we at present observe them … How far that looming space of thought takes us 23) Jan van Eyck, 1435, Landscape detail from Madonna with Chancellor Rolin, Louvre, Paris For V23a - a24) Video repeats 22c, Rembrandt's Three Trees 1st 24) Zurbaran, 1633(?), Cup and Three Vases, Prado, Madrid from the naive delight observation had opened for Jan van Eyck, through a sacred loggia beyond the Virgin and a donor's praying hands; or what giant intrepid will exchanged this magic kingdom for that weighty republic of cause? 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 10 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Galileo best states the axiom of material validity which dignifies the new world, and which lifts the still life to an apotheosis of the actual — Spinoza's "Reality and Perfection … one and the same." 1st 25) Hugo van der Goes, 1476-78, Portinari Altar, detail of wheat and flowers, Uffizi, Florence (CGB '59) Sagredo, Galileo's priest of establishment, has expressed the old weightless geometry "where mere size cuts no figure." But it does not explain the physical, leaves it to Reason's antagonist, "the irrational imperfections of the material." For Va2nd 24) Zurbaran, detail of 24, Cup and two of the vases 2nd 24) Same, detail of the cup (to the left, with saucer) Salviati saves us by incorporating the mathematical logos in the motions and forces of things, converting bondage into glory. But he can only redeem the physical by its idealization: "Since I assume matter to be unchangeable and always the same." It is that incarnate axiom which haloes the tactility of a Zurburan goblet and bowl. 2nd 25) Memling, c. 1480, Chalice of St. John the Evangelist, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; + V detail Where a 1480 Memling Chalice of St. John, as perfect in observation, abides in the mystery of symbol, the cup of that snake-fallen body Christ drank as Second Adam — the same snake Moses raised on the rod, to become the Rood. For 1st 26) Tintoretto, 1548, St. Mark rescues a Saracen, detail, Accademia, Venice (CGB '59) At the climax of the whirl which led from spaceless hovering to material formulation, Bruno, burned in 1600, as Inquisition sapped the terminal freedom of Venice, acclaims himself Hermetic seer of a God-irradiated universe, For 1st 27) Tintoretto, 1550-3, Creation of Animals, Accademia, Venice (CGB '59) daring as Tintoretto's charged effluvia of light: 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 11 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Behold now, the man who has pierced the air and penetrated the sky … who has broken down those imaginary divisions between spheres … and thrown wide the doors of truth … stripping the veils and coverings from the face of nature… For 1st 28) Same: Expulsion detail of The Fall (CGB '59) All those creatures who may not gaze upon the lights of heaven, but are destined to dwell in the infernal circles of Pluto's dark prisonhouse, when they hear the dread summons of Alecton's furious horn, spread wide their wings and veer away in rapid flight toward their abodes. For 1st 29) Tintoretto, 1577, Moses Strikes the Rock, ceiling, Scuola San Rocco, Venice (CGB '48) But those who were born to see the sun, full of thanksgiving at the end of the loathsome night, dispose themselves to receive in the very center of their eyes' crystal globe the long expected rays, and with unaccustomed gladness in their hearts, lift up hands and voices to adore the East … For 2nd 28-27) Tintoretto, c. 1562, Removing St. Mark's Body from Alexandria, Accademia, Venice (CGB '59) [V2nd 28 only, since V2nd 27 shows a view of the Sala del Collegio, other than the CGB of 2nd 26, below.] Such the confidence of Vieta's algebra, 1591: "This Universal Mathematics enables us to attack the proud problem of problems … For there is no problem which cannot be solved.” In music that climax of late-Renaissance, everywhere exploring polychoral and instrumental masses, chromatics, even recitative — what Monteverdi would establish as conscious Baroque — attends Giovanni Gabrielli, Venetian teacher of 1600 Europe. With the old Harvard performance of his "In Ecclesiîs," our slides advance through Tintoretto to the final explosion of El Greco: MUSIC: 1/1993 Giovanni Gabrielli (pub. 1615), In Ecclesiîs, Cambridge CRS 201 (accompanied by all of the following slides) Baroque Formulation 12 �C.G. Bell 2nd 26) V2nd 26a) Va3rd 27) b3rd 27) 3rd 27) 3rd 28) Va2nd 29) Vb2nd 29) 2nd 29) For 1st 30) For 1st 31) V1st 31a) For 1st 32) 1st 32a) 1st 33) Symbolic History Venetian (da Ponte, Veronese, etc.), c. 1575, Sala del Collegio, Doge's Palace, Venice (CGB '48) Same, Sala dello Scrutinio, Ceiling, 1580 ff. (CGB '48) Tintoretto, 1566, The Finding of the Body of St. Mark From the same, detail: the Saint appears; Brera, Milan Tintoretto, 1588-89, Sleep of St. Mark ("Pax tibi Marce"), Accademia, Venice (CGB '59); + V detail: angel above Same, detail of the lighted figures below (CGB '59) Tintoretto, 1565, two pans from a crucifixion detail of the vast Scuolo di San Rocco canvas, Venice (CGB '59) Tintoretto, 1562-6, two pans from St. Mark Rescues a Saracen at Sea, Accademia, Venice (CGB '59, of the whole; CGB detail of an oarsman used above as 1st 26) Tintoretto, 1581-84, Venice Queen of the Sea, Sala del Senato, Doge's Palace, Venice (CGB '48); video: two details only Tintoretto, 1592-4, The Last Supper, Church of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice El Greco, 1570-75, Annunciation, Prado, Madrid El Greco, 1579-84, Disrobing Christ, Munich (CGB '59) El Greco, 1610-14, Opening of the Fifth Seal, detail, upper half, Metropolitan Museum, New York City Same, detail, center right (CGB '74, from 1600, 2nd 3) El Greco, 1613-14, Betrothal of the Virgin, Museum Bucharest (preceded by a video detail of the upper half) (End Gabrielli) This Betrothal of the Virgin is one of El Greco's last pictures. Here humanity has been purged, as by Shakespeare's wheel of fire. 2nd 32 and 2nd 31) El Greco, 1608-14, View and Plan of Toledo, upper detail, Museo del Greco, Toledo But the tragic alchemy of 1600 was accompanied, in the Spain of El Greco's adoption, by an ultimate transcendence of the comic — Cervantes there writing the strangest and wisest book of the Western world. Like every ultimate, Don Quixote defies art-cognates; yet it is tied to the late Renaissance vast and mysterious expansion of the value world. 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 13 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 2nd 30) Tintoretto, c. 1590(?), Crucifixion, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59); + V detail, left Tintoretto's play of electric powers in a still symbolic space of dark portends the Don's descent into the Cave of Montesinos, with his other dream adventures: A vast lake of boiling pitch, in which an infinite multitude of fierce and terrible serpents are swimming, from which a doleful voice is heard: O Knight, who gazest on the dreadful Lake … make known thy valour by casting thyself into the midst of these black burning surges … or thou art not worthy to behold the wonder of the seven castles seated under these gloomy waves. 2nd 30a) Tintoretto, 1592-94, from the Last Supper, detail, upper left, Flambeau and Angels, San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice — wonders actualized in the masquerades of Part II: Now the night grew darker and darker, and several shooting lights were seen glancing up and down the wood, like meteors or glaring exhalations from the earth. Then was heard an horrid noise … 3rd 31) 3rd 32) 2nd 33) El Greco, 1584-86, Burial of Count Orgaz, detail of the dead body, Santo Tome, Toledo Same, wider detail of the Burial Group and Mourners Same, the whole: Burial below, Heaven-Arch above (Note: from these three slide-show images, plus six others in the video file — a3rd 31, 3rd 31a, 3rd 31b, 3rd 31c, 2nd 33a, and 2nd 33b — the video draws a sequence of twelve Orgaz visuals.) Staggering, the transcendence by which a ground of resigned dying sustains the vital fulfillment of Erasmus' High Folly, where Quixote's madness — to offer my arm and person against whatever danger fate presents … in this Age of Iron to restore the Age of Gold en esta nuestra edad de hierro para resucitar en ella la del oro … becomes, for all its uncertainty ("subject to the discipline of blows, hunger and thirst … rags, want, and misery," and "I do not know what success I may have in this depraved 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 14 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History time"), the soul's calling: "the religious soldier to be preferred before the religious monk"; so killing sheep as if they were armies, Quixote's grinders knocked out by the slung stone, Sancho peering in when the Balm of Fierabras brings up the knight's gorge and drowns them both in vomit, are raised to the loveable courage of the adventure of the Lions — humanity past fiction, spirit above sainthood. Yet, as in El Greco's Burial of Count Orgaz, nobility is swirled in another judgment, so in Quixote the imperative of self-dedication breaks to a death-humbling — the very sky-aspiring transvalued by return to the common ground of Christian (and tragic) faith. Such human grandeur under dissolution of form peaks the Renaissance watershed to the great Baroque. 34) V34b) 34c) Veronese, 1573, Feast in the House of Levi, Accademia, Venice; + V detail (made from slide V34a) Veronese, 1562-64, Wedding at Cana, detail of center: musicians, Louvre, Paris Same, Wedding at Cana, detail to the left Conceive the expansive opulence of late Titian, Tintoretto, this Veronese, caught up in the action, description, language of Don Quixote, most of all when Part II swells incalculably beyond Part I — Camacho's feast a mere sign: The first thing that blessed Sancho's sight there was a whole steer spitted before a fire that seemed a flaming mountain; round it six capacious pots or ample coppers, in which entire sheep seethed as conveniently as pigeons … 35) 36) V36a) 1/1993 Rubens, 1636-38, The Great Kermess, whole, Louvre, Paris (video draws two details from this slide: right and left above) And for drink Sancho told above threescore great skins of wine … The scent of the fried meat put him in such a commotion he could hold out no longer, but accosting one of the cooks, he begged leave to sop a luncheon of bread in one of the pans … "Take a ladle, man, and skim out a pullet or two." … "I see no ladle, sir," said Sancho. "Blood and suet," cried the cook, "what a helpless fellow …" Same, detail to the left; video: left-below (cf. CGB '80: V35-36) Again, Veronese, Wedding at Cana, detail of far right (video here repeats 35, The Great Kermess, whole) Baroque Formulation 15 �C.G. Bell 36b) Symbolic History Again, The Great Kermess, detail of dancing figures He soused into a pot with a kettle, fishing up three hens and a couple of geese at a heave: "Here, friend, take this, and make shift to stay your stomach with this scum until the time to eat …" — conceive that abundance (called Mannerism, but to what a manor born) never again to be paralleled in wealth of imagination, spilling over into the coagulations of Rubens' Kermess; but the whole humorous outpouring 37) El Greco, c. 1600, Portrait of a Bearded Man, Prado, Madrid as if taking place in Inquisition and Colonial Spain, and through the dream-gate of El Greco's dynamic idealism — in that image we almost feel the fitness of Cervantes, stretched from the Venetians, through El Greco, 38) V38a) Rubens, 1603, Duke of Lerma, sketch, Louvre, Paris; + v detail El Greco, 1603-07, Adoration of the Shepherds, detail, Prado, Madrid toward the youthful proud consciousness of Rubens. And it was in the chivalric and ecstatic Spain of 1603 that the painter-diplomat sketched this armed and mounted Duke of Lerma — one of those nobles who by Cervantes' supreme invention of his fiction's coming to life as read, might have entertained the actual Knight of the Woeful Figure. Though Lerma and Rubens seem of the new age, across the formulating divide, where Don Quixote, like English Shakespeare, had clung to the dream transitions of the Platonic past. 39) Carlo Maderno, 1607-14, Façade of St. Peter's, Rome Rubens was traveling from Rome, center of the histrionic concretion of Baroque: the 1612 façade of St. Peter's, which like all conscious gestures may protest too much. MUSIC: 40) 1/1993 Anerio, c. 1600(?), from Introit, Requiem Mass, G-DB 1572 ("et tibi") Bernini, 1624-33, Baldachin, looking up to Michelangelo's 1546-64 Dome, St. Peter's, Rome (Video inserts upper part of 2nd 40, Baldachin and Choir, and from slide 41, detail of a Baldachin bronze angel, Bernini, 1624-33) Baroque Formulation 16 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History But in the complementarity between the Baroque force of Bernini's Baldachin and the solemn Renaissance of Michelangelo's dome — which was the Sistine Choir invoking, 50 years ago, when they stretched the motets of Palestrina and his school, here Anerio? (Fade Anerio.) 2nd 39) Again, St. Peter's Façade: a Papal Blessing (CGB '48) Surely the forging of Baroque (as of Cartesian thought, or of tonality from the church modes) must reduce, under billowing might, complexities of nuance. So Benevoli's 53-part Festive Mass of 1628, for six contrasting choirs with instruments and basso continuo — against the dynamic weft of Gabrielli — heaps up merely harmonic voices in columnar masses of sound. MUSIC: Benevoli, 1628, Mass for Saltzburg Cathedral, from the Qui tollis, Epic LC-3035 2nd 40) Again, Bernini's Baldachin: from the Nave, to the Choir 41) Slide: Bernini, 1624-33, Bronze angel from the Baldachin. Video: detail of 1st 40: Column of Baldachin, looking up to Dome; and just before it, a detail of V1st 40, variant of the same (CGB '86) 42) Pietro da Cortona, 1633-39, Glorification of Urban VIII, whole ceiling, Barberini Palace, Rome; (CGb '86) + V detail 42a) (Fade Benevoli.) Same, closer detail, with Barberini heraldic bees (CGB '86) In painting, the deployment of Renaissance techniques for cumulous assertion crowns the stair hall of the Barberini Palace with Pietro da Cortona's praise of its Urban VIII — flattery not the least conspicuous brilliance of the Baroque. Cortona's model a43 and Vb43) From Correggio, 1526-30, Assumption of the Virgin, angel details, Cathedral, Parma 43) Same, detail, including the Virgin (video divides into two details.) 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 17 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History was Correggio. But the Correggio ceiling breathes the fresh discovery of 1530. So the polyphonic swirls from Fevin and Gombert to Victoria's "O Magnum Mysterium" etherealize the pomp they mediate. MUSIC: Victoria, pub. 1572, from O Magnum Mysterium (Allelluya), HMV-L1017 (Close) What of Palestrina? 44) Raphael, 1513-14, Sistine Madonna, Gallery, Dresden Is his tie to the Sistine perfection of Raphael, from eleven years before he was born? 45) Titian, 1516-18, Assumption of the Virgin, I Frari, Venice Or does his taking up the rhetoric of the century, from Titian's 1518 Assumption, 46) El Greco, 1577, Assumption (with frame), Art Institute, Chicago to the always more swelling ascents of his own time (Baroccio, this 1577 El Greco), anticipate the Baroque? For 1st 47) Guido Reni, 1616-17, Assumption of the Virgin, Vatican (In slide show, this goes to 2nd 47; 1st 47 becomes Guido Reni, c. 1607, Coronation of the Virgin, National Gallery, London) Yet not even these have the conscious mass and assertion, which first appear after Palestrina's death, as in Guido Reni. For 2nd 46) Choir of I Frari, 1330-1417, with Titian's Assumption of the Virgin Altarpiece, Venice (in slide show, also 2nd 45) With such proclamation altars, spread over a hundred years, V for 2nd 45) Baroccio, Night Nativity, Ambrosiana, Milan we seek the affinities of the Sanctus of Palestrina's most famous mass, mythically associated with the Council of Trent and the vindication of polyphony. 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 18 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 2nd 44) Again, Raphael, Sistine Madonna; video: two details only MUSIC: 3rd 45) V3rd 45a) Palestrina, by 1555, Sanctus, Missa Papae Marcelli, ARC-3182 Again, Titian, Assumption; video: center of picture Correggio, 1523-28, Madonna called "Il Giorno," detail, Galleria, Parma Correggio, 1530, Nativity called "La Notte," detail, Gallery, Dresden Again, Baroccio, Night Nativity, detail of V for 2nd 45 Again, El Greco's Assumption of the Virgin (from nearer) Detail of Reni's Coronation of the Virgin (slide: 1st 47) Reni's Assumption of the Virgin [cf. V1st 47] (video shows two details) Michelangelo and others, 16th cent., St. Peter's from the Janicula (south side), Rome (CGB '86) Michelangelo, 16th cent., Dome-vaultings, St. Peter's, Rome V3rd 45b) Va3rd 46) 3rd 46) Va2nd 47) 2nd 47) 1st 48) V48a) (Close Palestrina Sanctus) For 3rd 47) Guido Reni, c. 1627, Immaculate Conception, Metropolitan Museum, NYC (CGB '74); video: detail only That hosanna, even in formal triumph, less suggests Guido Reni's Miltonics — So maist thou be translated to the skies, And give resounding grace to all Heav'ns Harmonies — Va2nd 48) Vignola and della Porta, 1568-84, Façade of Il Gesu, Rome (CGB '86) 2nd 48) Same, interior (variant views for video and slide show) than the Counter-Reformation solemnity Michelangelo passed to Vignola and della Porta. The barrel vaults and dome of Il Gesù, reared 1568-84, in the lifetime of Palestrina, draw late-Renaissance to a gravitating center of the Baroque, and a shrine of its 17th century art — 1st 49) Palladio, c. 1550, Villa Rotonda, Vicenza, Italy, (CGB '59) 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 19 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History models of the future fulfilling the style of the past. So with Palladio's mid-century villas or Tasso's heroic Conquest of Jerusalem: Floods clap their hands, on mountaines dance the pines, And Sions towres and sacred temples smile, For their deliv'rance from that bondage vile. (Fairfax) 1st 50) Palladio and Veronese, 1561-62, Villa Barbaro (called Maser), Fresco, Lady and Nurse, as on a Balcony, Northern Italy So too with Veronese's 1561 decoration of Palladio's Villa Maser. Later Baroque imitation cannot obscure the free dynamic of its Venetian Renaissance. 1st 51) Raphael, 1511, Galatea, Farnesina, Rome; video: detail only MUSIC: Seb. Festa, pub. 1526, Se'l pensier, close, Nonesuch H-71097 Set the pagan recovery of Raphael, with the Frottole emergence of the Festas, 1st 52) Pietro da Cortona, 1637, The Age of Gold, Pal. Pitti, Florence V1st 52) Fresco with frame (CGB '48); + V details (52 & V52 are used alternately here and below, for video and digital) MUSIC: Monteverdi, 1632, Zeffiro torna, opening, Boulanger, VM-496 (or LP) against Pietro da Cortona's Age of Gold, more than a century later. The history of the madrigal is encompassed between them, from clear dawn, to the proclaimed wreathing of earth-moods, as Monteverdi turns the form to operatic duet and chaconne. (Fade Zeffiro.) 2nd 51 and for 2nd 50 slide) Again, Raphael, Galatea, whole Yet the 1590 madrigals from Monteverdi's inspired youth — this to the words of Tasso, "Ecco mormorar l'onde," and in the always unsurpassed Boulanger performance, recall the pure ease of high Renaissance. V for 2nd 50) Again, a detail of V1st 52: Cortona, The Age of Gold 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 20 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History With which style, which century, do they compare? Va2nd 49) Palladio, c. 1558, Villa Foscari, called "Malcontenta," Italy 2nd 49) Palladio, c. 1550, Villa Rotonda, down entrance lane (CGB ‘59); video also repeats, from 1st 49, that view of the Rotonda (CGB '59) MUSIC: 3rd 50) V3rd 50a) V3rd 50b) 3rd 51) 2nd 52) 53) 54) Monteverdi, pub. 1590, Ecco mormorar l'onde, MV-496, or Ser. 60125 Veronese, 1561-62, Salon, a frescoed corner, Villa Maser, Asolo Same, Maser, frescoes, Sala di Bacco, landscape detail Same, fresco from a side room, Hunter at a door Again, Raphael, Galatea, detail (video: above and below) Again, Cortona, Age of Gold, detail (video takes two details, above and below from V1st 52) Domenichino, c. 1610(?), The Chase of Diana, detail of the hunt, Borghese Gallery, Rome Same, foreground detail of bathing nymphs (CGB '48) (Close Ecco mormorar l'onde) For 2nd 53-54) Again, Domenichino, Diana's Hunt, whole; + V detail: bathing nymphs If Palestrina looked back, Monteverdi's sequence over a descending bass swells toward Domenichino's heightened Baroque: Diana's nymphs of the chase, and of the pool. 55) V55a) Tintoretto, 1578, Ariadne, Bacchus and Venus, Anticollegio, Doge's Palace, Venice Titian, 1556-59, Diana and Acteon, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh We have said no element defines a style. The change in music might seem to be from free polyphony to the harmonic binding of figured bass. When the inwrought play of Tintoretto's 1578 Ariadne, rich as the Tasso that flowed into Spenser's Bower of Bliss: Two naked Damzelles (in the fount he spied) … As that faire Starre, the messenger of morne, 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 21 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History His deawy face out of the sea doth reare: Or as the Cyprian goddesse, newly borne Of th' Oceans fruitful froth, did first appeare: Such seemed they… — Va56) 56) Caravaggio, c. 1600, Amor Victorious, detail, Staatliche Museen, Berlin Caravaggio, c. 1596, Lute Player, Hermitage, St. Petersburg shifts to Caravaggio's light-centered seduction of touch, is it like the tightening into recitative? And does Ben Jonson's ripest lyric parallel that conscious moulding? Slow, slow fresh fount, keep time with my salt teares; Yet slower yet, O faintly, gentle springs; List to the heavy part the musick beares, Woe weeps out her division, when she sings… Where the debt to Tasso is already through the baroque of Marini. Va2nd 55) 2nd 55) MUSIC: Titian, 1560, Diana and Callisto, Kunsthist. Mus., Vienna (CGB ‘59) Again, Tintoretto, Ariadne, Bacchus and Venus, detail Luzzaschi, c. 1580(?) (pub. 1601), O Dolcezze, SAWT-9466-B But what do we mean by a shift from the polyphonic? There had been lute songs throughout the Renaissance. The accompanied madrigals of Luzzaschi, performed at Ferrara in the '70s and '80s, push toward the Dowland style-verge of the century to follow. (Fade Luzzaschi.) Va2nd 56) Caravaggio, 1591, Sick Bacchus, detail, Borghese Gallery, Rome Vb2nd 56) Caravaggio, 1591-94 (?), Musicians, detail, Met. Mus., New York City 2nd 56) Again, Caravaggio, The Lute Player, detail, Hermitage Yet the Florentine continuo experiments of 1600 had still to forge a reductive concentration, stretched on the rack of heroic recitative. Caccini: MUSIC: Caccini, pub. 1601, Amarilli (close) MIA 1 (End) Peri: MUSIC: 1/1993 Peri performed 1601, Gioite al canto mio, (refrain) from Euridice, MIA 1 (Fade.) Baroque Formulation 22 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Like everything in the Baroque, Caravaggio's shadowing Va57) 57) Leonardo da Vinci, 1503-06, Madonna of the Rocks, detail to the right, with the Angel, National Gallery, London Same, Madonna of the Rocks, detail of the Angel's head has Renaissance parentage. But how far the inner-glow of Leonardo's twilight is from Caravaggio's logic of the physical. As far as Caccini from his lute-song origins — Cara: MUSIC: a58) b58) Vc58) Vd58) 58) M. Cara, c. 1500, from S'io siedo a l'ombra, Candide CE-31017 (Fade) Double: [A] El Greco, 1603-05, Madonna, detail, Hospital de la Caridad, Illescas; and [B] Caravaggio, 1605, Madonna of the Serpent, detail, Borghese Gallery, Rome Double: [A] El Greco, 1608-14, Angels from Baptism, Hospital de S. Juan, Toledo; and [B] Procaccini, c. 1610, Magdalen, Brera, Milan El Greco, 1608-14, Assumption over Toledo, detail, El Greco Museum, Toledo El Greco, 1603-05, Coronation of the Virgin, detail, Hospital de la Caridad, Illescas El Greco, 1608-14, Baptism of Christ, detail of Angels, Hospital de San Juan Bautista, Toledo (cf. [A] of a58) Even with the chromatics of 1600, as revolutionary as El Greco's astigmatism or Caravaggio's chiaroscuro, it is not half-tone progression which differentiates (any more than it was monodic song), but rather the formal method of its handling — how changed from late Mannerist to Baroque (both about 1610) — from Gesualdo, with El Greco — MUSIC: Gesualdo da Venosa, 1600-10(?), Ora pro nobis close of Ave, dulcissima Maria, (Deller), VICS 1364 (End) from that frenzy of spirit, 59) V59a) 1/1993 Procaccini, c. 1610(?), Magdalen, Brera, Milan; video: detail only Gentilleschi, c. 1610, Saint Cecilia and the Angel, National Gallery, Washington, DC (CGB '75) Baroque Formulation 23 �C.G. Bell V59b) Symbolic History Guercino, c. 1620-25, Angels Weeping over Christ, detail, National Gallery, London (detail of duplicate from Mozart 51) to the swooning flesh of Procaccini, with a phrase from Viadana, also to "dulcissima Maria": MUSIC: L.G. Viadana, pub. 1615, O dulcissima Maria, opening, ARC 3217 (Fade) As that Italy radiates to the North, 1st 60) Elsheimer, c. 1598-1600, Baptism of Christ, National Gallery, London (Video uses whole, then detail, of angels above; slide show, for 1st 60, substitutes Elsheimer, c. 1599, Rest on the Flight, Berlin-Dahlem Museum — a detail of which becomes V60a.) or northerners are drawn to the peninsula, artists like Elsheimer create transitional Baroque from Gothic line and Renaissance ideal. So Kepler's Epitome of Astronomy blends mathematical induction with speculative overreach … If Earth was to move like a planet, what was required (against Aristotle's ethereal bodies perfecting their circles by angelic intelligence) was a physics of the heavenly built on the inertia of earthly mass. Such an earth-physics would first be published by Galileo in 1638. By that time, Kepler had based his astronomy on God-given wheels, invoking Gilbert's magnetism only to squeeze them to the ellipses his calculations had revealed. For 1st 61) Rubens, c. 1610(?), Annunciation, Dublin Gallery (CGB '74) (Video adds the original 61, now 2nd 61 in the slide-show: Rubens 1609-10, Annunciation, Kunsthist. Mus., Vienna (CGB '59) A wild Rubens blend of the ideal and empirical, Kepler staggeringly reckoned from Brahe's observations the three enduring laws, meanwhile juggling the ratios, roots, and powers of planetary size, mass, intercept, motor virtue (of which he could know nothing) trying to bring the orbits and archetypal reason into line: "stamped with the adornment of harmonic proportions." 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 24 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In music, Praetorius effects such a vast synthesis of Gothic and Venetian, polyphony and recitative. We take a phrase from his setting of Luther's "Vom Himmel hoch": 2nd 60) Slide show has the original 60: Elsheimer, Baptism, from which the video makes a closer detail of the angels above MUSIC: M. Praetorius, pub. 1619, from the Polychoral Vom Himmel hoch, Nonesuch H 71242 2nd 61) Rubens, 1608-09, Annunciation, Vienna, (CGB '59); video: detail only 62) Same, Rubens, Annunciation, detail of Angel (CGB '59) (Close "sagen will") Rubens rapt angel of 1609 marks the divide to inertial mass. 63) V63a) 63b) El Greco, 1570-75, Boy Lighting a Candle, Capodimonte Museum, Naples Same, detail El Greco, 1612-14, Adoration of the Shepherds, detail: Head of a shepherd, Prado, Madrid (closer detail of V38a) Up to that point, the material search itself had swirled with trans-reality: — El Greco's 1570 boy lighting a candle, the night climax of Bruno's Candelaio, or even the porter in Macbeth: If a man were porter of hell-gate, he should have old turning the key. Knock, knock, knock. Who's there in the name of Beelzebub… Drink, sir, is a great provoker of three things … Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep, and urine … So Bruno's compatriot, Nola, choir-master at Naples, limns three blind beggars singing for alms: MUSIC: 64) V64a) 1/1993 Giov. Domenico da Nola, c. 1560(?), Tre Ciechi siamo, close, Everest 3179 Caravaggio, c. 1594, The Fortune Teller, Louvre, Paris Same, detail of hands Baroque Formulation 25 �C.G. Bell V64b) 64c) 64d) Symbolic History Le Valentin, 1620(?), The Cheat, Dresden Gallery, detail (first videod backward: revised ‘94 — preceded by 64c below, + V detail — and followed by 64d) Caravaggio, 1594-95, Cardsharps, Kimbell Museum, Fort Worth Georges de la Tour, The Cheat, Kimbell Museum, Fort Worth By the turn of the century, Caravaggio has put such realism on the shore where Ben Jonson's Fox and Alchemist make it lawful prey — Volpone's clever Mosca to the doddering deaf Corbaccio: Mosca: Corb: M: C: M: C: M: C: Volp: M: C: M: C: M: C: 65) Georges de la Tour, c. 1620(?), Fortune Teller, Met. Museum, New York City (The slide of the whole, CGB '79, with details, four in the slide show, two more in the video file, provide nine video images, varying the a65, b65, 65, 65a and 65b order of the slide show.) M: C: 1/1993 You're very welcome, sir. How does your patron? Troth, as he did, sir; no amends. What! mends he? No sir, he is rather worse. That's well. Where is he? Upon his couch, sir, newly fall'n asleep. … I have brought him an opiate here, from mine own doctor, 'tis but to make him sleep. [Playing sick] Ay, his last sleep, if he would take it. He has no faith in physic … I often have Heard him protest that your physician Should never be his heir. — Not I his heir? Not your physician, sir. — O no, no, no. I do not mean it … How does his apoplex? Is that strong on him still? — Most violent. His speech is broken and his eyes are set, His face drawn longer than 'twas wont. — How? how? Stronger than he was wont? Drawn longer than 'twas wont. Baroque Formulation — No sir; his face — O, good! 26 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History M: C: M: C: MUSIC: Is ever gaping, and his eyelids hang. — His mouth — Good. A freezing numbness stiffens all his joints And makes the colour of his flesh like lead … Good symptoms still … sure I shall outlast him! Orl. Gibbons, Fantasy on the Street Cries, "New Mussels," ARC-3053 Marvellous, the comic vigor, as that delight in the actual and its castigation strikes root in the North: Fantasies on Street Cries, Weelkes, Deering, this Gibbons; the overflow of the Jacobean stage up to the Puritan closure: A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, A trick to Catch the Old One, the boiling Kermess of Jonson's Bartholomew Fair (1615) — though with vignettes as sharply focussed as this La Tour Fortune Teller, locket cutter, Gypsy thieves. "I would fain see that cutpurse you talk of," says Jonson's silly Cokes in the play; while Nightingale the Ballad Singer draws the crowd — Trash ("Will your worship buy any gingerbread"), Leatherhead the toy-man, fat Ursula, Mooncalf, and all — so that Edgworth, his accomplice, can pluck the dandy clean. As in the picture: "A man might cut out his kidneys and he never feel 'em." (Fade Gibbons.) 66) El Greco, c. 1610-14, View and Plan of Toledo, detail, Greco Museum, Toledo (Video begins with Va66, a wider detail) Again the 1610 transition: from El Greco's giddy perspectives, or in Shakespeare, "the dread summit of the chalky bourn" imagined from the flat stage of Lear: Gloucester: There is a cliff whose high and bending head Looks fearfully in the confined deep; Bring me but to the very brim of it … Edgar How fearful And dizzy 'tis, to cast one's eyes so low … I'll look no more Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight Topple down headlong … 67) 1/1993 François de Nome, called "Monsu Desiderio," 1623, Ruins with St. Augustine legend, Private Collection, London Baroque Formulation 27 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History — through the visions of the so-called Monsu (eddies of nightmare formed under the jets of Baroque reality; yet reality takes the lead) 68) V68a) Rubens, 1618-20, Landscape: Ruins of the Palatine, Louvre Poussin, c. 1629-30, Narcissus and Echo, Louvre; + V detail — to Rubens' ruins of the Palatine. So Webster's Duchess congeals the electric malice of Lear to a brooding earth-presence — summoning the echo with which Monteverdi had answered Orfeo's "ahi, pianto" and "guai." MUSIC: Monteverdi, 1607, from Orfeo, Act V, two echoes, ARC 3036 (Fade.) For 2nd 67) Variant, Monsu, Ruins, National Gallery, London; + V detail Webster: — 2nd 68) Yond's the cardinal's window. This fortification Grew from the ruins of an ancient abbey; And to yond side o' the river lies a wall, Piece of a cloister, which in my opinion Gives the best echo that you ever heard, So hollow and so dismal, and withal So plain in the distinction of our words, That many have supposed it is a spirit That answers. Detail of Rubens, Palatine; + closer V detail — I do love these ancient ruins. We never tread upon them but we set Our foot upon some reverend history: … but all things have their end: Churches and cities, which have diseases like to men, Must have like death that we have. — "Like death that we have." — Now the echo hath caught you. — It groaned, methought, and gave 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 28 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History A very deadly accent. 1st 69) Caravaggio, 1607-08, Beheading of St. John the Baptist, whole, Cathedral, Valletta, Malta V69a) Same, detail to the right, men behind bars — "Deadly accent." — I told you, 'twas a pretty one: you may make it A huntsman, or a falconer, a musician, Or a thing of sorrow. — "A thing of sorrow." — Ay, sure, that suits it best. — "That suits it best." Va70 Left of same picture: video details, above and below 70) Same, detail of the face of the old woman — 'Tis very like my wife's voice. — "Ay, wife's voice." — … I would not have you go to the cardinal's tonight: Do not. — "Do not." … — Echo, I will not talk with thee, For thou art a dead thing. — "Thou art a dead thing." — My duchess is asleep now, And her little ones, I hope sweetly: O Heaven, Shall I never see her more? — "Never see her more." — I marked not one repetition of the echo But that; and on the sudden a clear light Presented me a face folded in sorrow … 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 29 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History This Caravaggio face 2nd 69 and 2nd 70) Same: Beheading group (of which video shows also a detail); while V for 2nd 70 returns to the whole picture (from 1st 69) is from his 1608 Beheading of John, where the villainy which had fascinated the Renaissance assumes the weight of body. So the tragedy of revenge, from Kyd — "O life! no life, but lively form of death" — to Webster — "My soul, like to a ship in a black storm,/ Is driven, I know not whither." Let the content and structure of the sonnet attest that upheaval of values: 71) 71a) Parmagianino, 1535-37, Portrait called Antea, Capodimonte Museum, Naples Same, upper detail; + V: two more details Nothing was ever simple, but one pole of Mannerism was the balance treasured from Renaissance, the fitting of matter to form, perfect in this Parmagianino as in Surrey, Spenser, early Shakespeare — the end-stopped claspings of sonnet rhyme: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date: Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm'd; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance, or nature's changing course untrimm'd; But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st, Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st; So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. 72) 72a) 72b) 72c) 1/1993 Beccafumi, c. 1524, Fall of the Rebel Angels, Pinacoteca, Siena Same, detail below Same, middle detail (video makes two: right and left) Same, upper detail (digital then repeats the whole) Baroque Formulation 30 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The other Manneristic pole is the outbreak of wild alchemical force, Beccafumi's 1524 Fall of the Rebel Angels, Renaissance-Gothic aimed through El Greco at Blake. While Shakespeare's crisis wrenches the syntax of the sonnet almost to the sprung stress of Hopkins: The expense of spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action; and till action, lust Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame, Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust; Enjoy'd no sooner, but despised straight; Past reason hunted; and no sooner had, Past reason hated, as a swallow'd bait, On purpose laid to make the taker mad: Mad in pursuit, and in possession so; Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme; A bliss in proof, and prov'd, a very woe; Before, a joy propos'd; behind, a dream. All this the world well knows, yet none knows well To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell. 1st 73) Rubens, c. 1620, Small Last Judgment, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59; of which the slide show uses a middle detail) In Rubens, the fire-frenzy conglomerates, a saturation point, as earthly engrossment heightens the violence of salvation. Va2nd 72) Michelangelo, 1536-41, Last Judgment, struggling figures from the lower right, Sistine Chapel, Vatican For 2nd 72) Same, Saved souls; video: detail only Michelangelo had felt it: "Rend the veil, break down the wall" — Squarcia'l vel tu Signior, rompi quel muro"; even Ariosto had toyed with the fallen need of force: 2nd 73) 1/1993 To render pity to hearts penitent Is ours below, to draw them up with love, Maugre their own will, is God's, above. (CGB) Again, Rubens, Small Last Judgment (CGB '59); slide show now presents it whole, video in three spreads: upper, middle, and below Baroque Formulation 31 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Now as world-nature thickens toward Descartes, the impossible stretch for a God whelmed in bulk — "As though heav'n suffered earthquakes, peace or war" (Donne) — curdles in Judgment paradox: At the round earths imagin'd corners, blow Your trumpets, Angells, and arise, arise From death, you numberlesse infinities Of soules, and to your scattred bodies goe; All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow, All whom warre, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies, Despaire, law, chance, hath slaine … (conscious rhetoric, buckling the pentameter) 74) 74a) Rubens (or copy), 1619-1620, Crucifixion sketch (for the Church of the Recollets, Antwerp), Aachen Gallery (CGB '74); + three video details Procaccini, 1618-20, Raising of the Cross, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh (video: detail only) As at the forge of Rubens, Donne violates the sonnet for a salvation conceived as rape: Batter my heart, three person'd God; for, you As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend; That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow mee, 'and bend Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new. I, like an usurpt towne, to 'another due, Labour to 'admit you, but Oh, to no end, Reason, your viceroy in mee, mee should defend, But is captiv'd, and proves weake or untrue, Yet dearely 'I love you, 'and would be loved faine, But am betroth'd unto your enemie, Divorce mee, 'untie, or breake that knot againe, Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I Except you 'enthrall mee, never shall be free, Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee. 1st 75) Rembrandt, c. 1660, Self-portrait with palette, Kenwood House, London; video: large detail and face detail only 75a) Rembrandt, 1661, Homer Dictating, Mauritshuis, The Hague; + v detail 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 32 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History MUSIC: Mathew Locke, c. 1665, Fantasy 5, G Minor, chromatic opening, Westminster WGS 8242 By mid-century the chromatic, in Mathew Locke, moves under brooding control. While with blind Milton the sonnet has passed its crisis; Renaissance articulation convolves into the vaulted reach of consciousness: (Skip to chromatic rise.) When I consider how my light is spent, E're half my days in this dark world and wide, And that one talent which is death to hide, Lodg'd with me useless, though my soul more bent To serve therewith my Maker, and present My true account, lest he returning chide; Doth God exact day-labour, light deny'd I fondly ask. But patience to prevent That murmur, soon replies, 1st 76) Rembrandt, c. 1656, The Artist's Son Titus reading, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (CGB '59); video: detail only God doth not need Either man's work or his own gifts; who best Bear his milde yoak, they serve him best, his state Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed And post o're land and ocean without rest: They also serve who only stand and waite. (Fade Locke.) V2nd 75) Again, 1660, Self-portrait with palette (here, whole, from 1st 75) 2nd 75a) Rembrandt, 1669, detail of the last Self-portrait, Mauritshuis, The Hague — as darkened as Rembrandt, neglected in gathering age; yet as deeply sure of self, ordered earth, and causal God — Descartes' lonely doubter, who closes his meditations: "qu'il y a un Dieu … et qu'il n'est point trompeur" — And I ought not to doubt the truth of these presentations … for since God is no deceiver, it follows necessarily that I am not herein deceived … Under the great assertive thrust 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 33 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 2nd 76) Again, Titus reading, a closer detail by which the faith postulates have moved into time, making their peace with thinking self and causal world, an entire realm of human and earthly good is as quietly assured as the lights on Rembrandt's Titus, reading. 1st 77) Elsheimer, c. 1609(?), Tobias and Raphael, National Gallery, London Perhaps Elsheimer, in Caravaggio's Rome, first took the glow of that transcendental paradise, where Tobias is guided by the angel — a promise Gibbons harmonizes in a 1623 Song of the Church: "Oh, my love, how comely now": MUSIC: O. Gibbons, 1629, Oh, My Love (a phrase) ARC-3053 a78) Elsheimer, c. 1610(?), Two Childhood Guardians (from a set of six), Petworth House; with V details 1st 78) Poelenburg, c. 1620(?) (after Elsheimer), the same Guardian Saints, Pitti, Florence (CGB '48) How humbly Poelenburg takes it up — twin guardians of natural childhood, angel and saint. While Herbert, from his rural parish, sounds the quietest benediction. V2nd 77) Two video details from slide 77: Elsheimer, Tobias and Raphael V2nd 78) Poelenburg, two other Guardian Saints from the Pitti set of six (these, CGB '86); + V detail ; digital, double only; after Domenichino (While the slide show, for 2nd 77 and 2nd 78, uses Domenichino, c. 1612, Tobias Landscape, National Gallery, London; see Va1st 80, below) Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, The bridal of the earth and sky; The dew shall weep thy fall to-night For thou must die. Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye; Thy root is ever in its grave, And thou must die. Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses, A box where sweets compacted lie; 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 34 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History My music shows ye have your closes, And all must die. Only a sweet and virtuous soul, Like a seasoned timber, never gives; But though the whole world turn to coal, Then chiefly lives. 79) Bernini, 1657-66, Cathedra Petri or High Altar, St. Peter's, Rome (video: lower detail only) The Baroque arose out of Renaissance and humanism. However the grand manner vaunt the inflations of creed and court, its chordal and spatial loyalties were to the temporal good. Beyond the mammoth holies Bernini applied to St. Peter's, lay the Rome Va1st 80) Domenichino, c. 1612, Tobias Landscape, National Gallery, London (detail of slide 2nd 77-78, above) For 1st 80) Claude Lorrain, 1631, Flight to Egypt, Belvoir Castle, Leics. (better the whole of 2nd 80) where the landscape of recovery spread from Elsheimer and Carracci to Domenichino, Poelenburg, this early Claude. So the fortissimo of Monteverdi's Exultent caeli cradles his tenderest "O Maria," in an epiphany of power and heart. a2nd 79) Again, Bernini, Cathedra Petri, upper detail, St. Peter's, Rome; video uses the top of 1st 79 2nd 79) Same, Cathedra Petri, detail of the Dove window and Angel Glory; video details the center of this slide MUSIC: 2nd 80) Monteverdi, 1629, from Exultent Caeli, Decca SDD 363 Claude Lorrain, c. 1631, Rest on the Flight, Clark Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts; video and digital detail (with "O Maria" — fade.) 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 35 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 36 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Baroque Formulation, Symbolic History, Part 20 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 20 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_20_Baroque_Formulation Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a0ed02521508c52d97293d18e87bc0ab.pdf 785f8d18dbe5bee66ee4ba56357894a5 PDF Text Text Charles G. Bell, 126b'''Caii3y3n Road, or St. John's College Santa Fe, Ne^r Mexico 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY — Through Sight and Sound 35t Betveen Wars — 20th Century, Art and Politics 1) Rembrandt 1656, Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph, State Gallery, Kassel (video begins vith detail) la) Same, detail (vith video lb and other details) MUSICt Albert 1640, from Recitative, Kirchenkantata, "Bist du nicht . --- mit deinen Gaben", (Tinavre) Col.7073 D, Side 7 Begin vith the style-plateau of Europe, Rembrandt, 1656, Jacob blessing the sons of Joseph, in the century of Descartes and Newton (in music this Albert), when rational science, chordal harmony, representational art, seemed to constitute a divine order — Henry Moore: That spiritual object, which we call space... represents for us... the true and universal nature of the continuous divine presence... (end Recitativ^^ ' Bos?Sn (upplr Daughters of E.D. Boit, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Stewart Gardner, Kus. of Fine Arts 2b) Again 2, Daughters of Boit, detail Ill ^ ”»e, John Hay ^SIC: Hugo Wolf 1896^^0var dein Haus (Rita~ Streich) D.Gram. 138641 From this 1882 group portrait, through the First World f War, Sargent kept up the grand manner of figures lighted in space. But against Rembrandt or Velasquez, these daughters of Boit in their Paris drawing room (with the music of Hugo wold) seem as spaced out as the children of Henry James. When a reality which once affirmed God and world has become BO spectral, (fade Wolf) how is it to be maintained? a3) Gino Seyerini 1915, The Armored Train, detail, R. Zeisler, NYC [video only] b3) Andre Derain 1905, Le Faubourg, Collioure, priv. coll'n, Paris 3) Double: Again a3, Severini's Train, whole; and Picasso 1938, Girl with Cock, Museum of Art, Baltimore 3a) Again 3B, Picasso, Girl with Cock j �C.G. Bell Between Kars - 2 MUSIC; Varese 1922# frorn-Americnie (Utah)# Vanguard SRV~274 SD All during Sargent's lifetime and in all arts (Varese's doubleedged clang of Amerioue# 1922)# the converse vave had been moxinting# through Cezanne# Post-Impfessionist# Fauve# to the dissolving ecstasy of Ltuninism# Blaue Reiter# Futurism — this 1915 Severini (left)# where an armored train elides into rapture. % And when Picasso (right)# in the throes of a Europe bungling through Fascism to Second War# struck back# it was not by realism, but by the cleaver of post-Dada attack — this Girl with a Cock of 1938. [video only) a4) G. Kolbe (Nazi) c. 1935, Great Fighter [video only] b4) Boccione 1913, Unique Form of Continuity in Space, bronze, Civic Gallery of Modern Art, Milan 4) Double: b4, Boccione's Continuity; & a4, Kolbe's Fighter 4a) Reginald Marsh 1932, Tattoo & Haircut, Art Institute, Chicago [video only] 4b) Marsh 1934, Negroes on Rockavay Beach, Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC 4c) Again 4, Double, Conti^iuiiy & Fighter, upper detail [video only] 4d) Again a4. Fighter, detail [video only] 4e) Again b4. Continuity, detail Though Establishment# even into nightmare times# resisted modernism (whether of Yea or Nay)# as if it sabotaged old claims _ V this 1913 Boccione (left)# "Unique Form of Continuity in Space." (fade Varese) No wonder# as the Free Enterprise flivver went into Depressionshimmies and mass cults took over (Mussolini# Stalin# Hitler# the milder New Deal)# they backed art-reaffirmation of nature and man. This 1935 Kolbe "Great Fighter" (right) damns the whole Boccione experiment. Yet how like# in that wilful assertion which pushed with Futurists toward the First# with Fascists toward the Second World War. Must not both wear like a shadow some Hollow Man suppressed anaemia: "Here we go round the prickly pear/. ..At five o'clock in the morning"? �. Bell Between Wars - 3^ a5) Maurice Utrillo C.1910, Rue des Abesses, Paris, Whitney Collection, NYC [slide only] b5) Derain 1906, Charing Cross Bridge, Private Colection, New York City 5 [video only] c5) Picasso 19b8, Standing Figure, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 5) Utrillo 1910-12, Rue du Chevalier de. la Barre, Coll'n. of Richard Seewald (with video detail) For there was a euphoria (from Revolutibn through romantic, symbolist, modern, which it was always possible, by, temperament, drink, or Pascalian vertigo, to slip off of ~ Hindemith, from 1922. So alcoholic Utrillo's pre-war Paris clouds the Fauve-bright scene -- like the Boston of Eliot's "Prufrock": Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question... O, do not ask, "What is it?" Let us go and make our visit. 6) c. 1919?, Woman in a Large Hat, R. Lehman Collection, NYC (with video detail) Modigliani too, by addiction and consumption, fell beyond Picasso's Blue and Rose into the enervations of that Lady whose Portrait Pound — "your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea", and "she is dying piecemeal/ of a sort of emotional anaemia" — would turn over to Eliot* "Eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase", and "I shall sit here, serving tea to friends". (end Hindemith, sehr lanasam) [slide only] a7) Kandinsky 1913, Improvisation 30 (Cannon), Art Institute •*'“ of Chicago [video only] a*?) Kandinsky 1914, Picture with 3 Spots, Guggenheim Museum, NYC 7) Double: Again a7, Kandinsky, Improvisation 30; & 1927, Points of an Arc, private collection (with video details) 7a) Again 7B, Kandinsky Arc Points _______ ^________ ____________________ MUSIC* Hindemith 1922-3, Same sonato, 4th Mvt, "Rasendes", Mace ------------------------------------------------------ MCS 9075 Kandinsky's early elation (left) had turned foreseen destruction to a Symbolist Sieg Heil: this 1913 Improvisation with firing cannon and toppling materialist towers. But Kandinsky himself after Versailles (all those little doomed democracies carved �C.G. Bell Between Wars for exploitation out of defeated empires) Kandinsky (right) tightened inebriation to a geometric aftermathi while the climax movement of the same 1922 Hindemith, strait-jackets pre-war iconoclasm. F.A. Breuhaus, Bonn Such the foreboding drumbeat Hofer, in 1920 Berlin, would bring from Cubism and the blood-depletion of war. AgaiVi Eliot had penetrated to that skeletal mood in 1911 Paris; "Rhapsody on a windy Night": Every steet lamp that I pass Beats like a fatalistic drum. The last twist of the knife. (end Hindemith, "Rasendes") a9) Salvator Dali 1935, Nostalgic Echo, coll'n L.M. Maitland, close detail b9) Clovis Trouille c. 1940?, Mon Tombeau, detail, artist's coll'n (with video detail of bats) 9) Again a9, Dali's Echo, whole (with closer video detail) In The Waste Land Eliot seems to have foreshadowed also the Dali smart Surreal, this 1935 Nostalgic Echo, with its bell-clap^^ woman and skip-roping inversion; A woman drew her long black hair out tight And fiddled whisper music on those strings And bats with baby faces in the violet light Whistled, and beat their wings And crawled head downward down a blackened wall And upside down in air were towers Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells. 10) Mack Senne’tt c. 1917, Bathing Beauties, Mus. Mod. Art, NYC (with video detail) As for Dali, after*Spain and Paris,, he was now sharing in the continental fruitcake of America, everything from Rock of Gibralter East to the Zaniest shenanigans of Hollywood — this Mack Sennet 1917 Bathing Beauties; give those girls anyway? and what is Santa going to a bag of diapers? �9 Between Wars C.G. Bell 5 11) John Marin 1922, Lower Manhattan, watercolor. Museum of Modern Art, NYC ____ (with video detail)_____________ __________ ____________________________ Yet the Ea^t too was pulsing with the vibrance of capital expanding as never before toward boom and bust — staid insurance companies housing JveS and Wallace Stevens, while John Marin caught this 1922 Lower Manhattan, the sun going off Like an atonic bomb at the heart of it. Such affirmation as William Carlos Williams risked in his 1917 "El Hombre": It's a strange courage you give me ancient star: “ shine alone in the sunrise toward which you lend no p^rt! al2) 20th cent.. Swimming pool at the Hearst Castle, San Simeon, CA 12) Double: Inigo Jones Etc. 1647-52, Double Cube Room, Wilton House, England; & Assembly room, Hearst**s San Simeon (1919) 12*a) Single of 12B, Hearst *s Assembly room________________ _______________ While incalculable fortunes rose and deployed themselves, not yet for the modern, but in the acquisition and pastiche-display of Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque. Beside the ornate refinement of Inigo,Jones' mid-17th century Double-Cube Room, Wilton House near Salisbury (left), how ecclectic the ostentation of the Assembly Room at ;5an Simeon, where William Randolph Hearst sat at the hub of a tabloid ,empire to receive his guests. Did the infinitely varied surge and intemperance of that America admit of any limits jt; at ali? al3) Nigerian (Olowe of Ise) 1895, Reception of first British Administrator to visit Ekiti, carved doors from Palace of Ogoda, British Museum, London, detail 13) Same, Carved doors, whole (video various details)---------- ---------MUSIC, central Africa, Burundi chant avec clthare (vhlsper-so^ By will or fate we had subsumed everything the conquering West had dreamed or brought of against what was not yet called the Third world:— this Reception of the first British administra tor in Ekiti, Nigeria — Captain Ambrose like a sick bird, with �C.G. Bell V. - Between Kars 6 his shackled bearers, confronting the Uoruba chief with his wives and elders. (fade Burundi> Jttterbugglng In a Jake Joint, Clarksdale, MUSICt Duke Ellington Orchestra 1938. from Battle of Swing ' ' ' - jjazz II tape, A.475) But would not Kurtz meteoring down to the Heart of Darkness symbolize the reverse conquest of beat rythm seeding New World and Old with reckless revitalization — these indomitable Blacks to a Juke Box in Clarksdale, Mississippi, 1939 .A' (why not to Duke Ellington's "Battle of Swing", lately the rage of Paris?) (end Ellinoton) 15) Photoi Margaret Bourke-White 1937, -At the Tine of the Louisville ---- Flooa-, Eastman House, Rochester. NY (with video A.t.Hsi _Blues, Odetta (from Blind Lemon Jefferson#) I just can't kfeep from cryln' sometimes. RCA LPM 2573 all post*>Nretzschean modern, that wild release transvalues the caustic betrayal of enlightened and romantic hope. This 1937 photograph is entitled "At the Time of the Louisville Flood", but the seeking blacks against that slogan-sale of the American Way, might project from any Depression city the job or soup lines of a crazed economy, everywhere veering toward violence. 16) Photo 1938, Mussolini & Hitler parading on Hitler's visit to Italy, Florence (with video details) (cf» Atomic Age a76)* I wa’s in Florence during Hitler's 1938 visit. The Italians hated the Germans, but Welcome signs plastered the walls. From windows, not to be raised above five centimeters, we saw the great car pass between banks of soldiers, the Duce and FUhrer side by side, one acting for the crowd, the other for his own romantic heart. On every lamp-post loud-speakers had been hung, form which (to offset Italians shouting for Mussolini) volleyed a raucous "Heil Hitler, Heil Hitler?" The corporal waved acceptance. passed, the real cry eased, while the record-rehearsing As the car ^ �Bell Between Wars - 7 ■legaphones boomed "Hile Hitler, Heil Hitler" ad absurdum. Italian cleverness! 17J^Hans^Hofmann wSSo S2an) Of ArtV New But who was being deceived? Mfe's Picture History of World War ii ' Fantasia, University Art Museum, Berkeley, CA (with ?95fGallery, Nev YorX ^ Square: "Ascending", Whi tney Museum MUSIC: Schonberq 1936, Fourth Quartet, opening. Vox SVBX 590. sidP> s From that vortex beyond the human, of which Chaplin would make fun and history destruction, the arts, the races banned as degenerate: this Hofman color Fantasia of 1943, with its stressed discoveries of pure "push and pull...force and counterforce"; SchOnberg'E 1936 twelve-tone Fourth Quartet: the very sciences of relativity and indeterminacy, also accused of decadence _ these regrouped in America for a love-feast of modernity — euphoric transvaluation of earth-upheaval. Had what was exiled constituted a kind of "Drunken Boat" danger: or search through danger for radical renewal: or was it the protraction of a now fashionable mode? Could it be all in one? (fade_SchSnber£) 18) Provencal Rom'q c. 1160, Bearded Apostle (head), Gilles-du-Garde, near Arles (with video detail)_______________ _____ MUSIC: Leonin c.llSO, from Alleluva, at "In Azimus "(Oberlin etc.) -- • ■ ■■ ... .. — MHS 676 (Band 2) "Eternity," said Bernard of Tours, called Silvestris, "is I that from which time must be bom and into which it must be resolved." But not all our art-stripping could revive the force with which spirit first buttressed (over the bare-fifth voids of Romanesque) the almost demonic stare of body overmastered by God’s word. (fade Leonin) 19) J. Dietrich 1738, St. Augustine (head), Diessen am Ammersee, Bavaria (with video detail) �C•G• 6g1X Between Kars - 8 MUSIC: Bach 1733-8# from Quoniani, B Minor Mass (Karayan etc.) ■ ------ -------------------------- Angel '3500 C Nor our sensuous cultivation# our fulness of techniques and knowledge# restore the sanctifying order of earth and man, which the 1700's rhetoric of Baroque (here Dietrich and Bach) tirelessly proclaims. (fade Quoniam) 20) Rouault 1925, The Apprentice (self portrait). Museum of Modern Art, Paris (with video detail) 20a) Rouault 1932, Christ Mocked, Museum of Modern Art, Paris (with video detail)____ ______________________ MUSIC: Satie 1918, close of Socrate, Angel S-36846 In conscious disclaimer of that plenitude# Rouault's simulation of stained glass# or this close of Satie's Socrate does not resume the clean force of the pre-personal, romantic# Eliot's 1911-12 "Prufrock": its soil is broken "I am no prophet _ and here's no great matter" (close Satie) — a debility perfected by 1925 in "The Hollow Men": "...We are the stuffed men/ Leaning together/ Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!" ... "Waking alone/ At the hour when we are/Trembling with tenderness/ Lips that would kiss/ Form prayers to broken stone." Between "This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms" and faith "Falls the Shadow/ Life is very Ipnq... For Thine is/ Life is/ For thine is the/ This is ^he way the world ends...Not with ^ bang but a whimper." Had the spirit and exhuberance of the past worn down to Eliot's neo-skeptic return to high church and state? of"Moal: irtf'NYC** Dancer Accompanies Herself vlth her Shaaowe, Mus. Hashlnston, Art Musenm, Portlana, & American Gothic, Art Institute, Chicago 21a) Again 21B, Wood's Gothic (with video details) Again 21A, Maurer's Washington 2l£j John Stuart Curry 1937. The Mississippi, eitv Mnsenm. st. Louis By 1916 cliques of Americans had turned (with Gertrude Stein) to clever or pained debunking, if Man Ray and Schamberg carried �o » r Between Wars - 9 it with the wit of Dada» poor Maurer (left)» who scarificed Impressionist success to the Cubism of Paris, gave that reduction a melancholy of his own: this George Washington of 1932, year of the artist's suicide. Appropriate to a time of Crash and Depression, that such anaemia on the abstract side should be countered on the realist by Grant Wood's 1930 American Gothic (right), its make-believe of pitch-fork father and spinster daughter (ironically aproned in circles and dots) prime for Eliot's slide through The Waste Landt I think we are in rat's alley Where the dead men lost their bones — to the dry conversion of Ash-Wednesday (also of 1930) — Although I do not hope to turn again Although I do not hope..i Wavering between the profit and the loss... Yet in the realistic fiction of that horizon, Mississippi Faulkner could sweep the impenetrable gloom of The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Wild Palms on an affirming thunderhead of hallucinated prose: ___ 22) Marie Hull 1936, An American Citizen (John Wesley Washington), Artist's collection (with video detail) ^ w c*. 22a) John McCrady c. 1936?, Swing Low Sweet Chariot, City Art Museum, St. _____Louis, MO------------------ --------- —--------------------- ----—----, . . Because if memory exists outside of the flesh it wont be memory because it wont know what it remembers so when she became not then half of memory became not and if I become then all of remembering will cease to Yes, he thought, between grief and nothing I will take grie . Marie Hull, Mississippi painter to be caught up later in the excitement of the New York School, is no art-equivalent. Though this portrait, from the Depression, of "An American Citizen" (another Washington), has the stamp of Faulkner's indomitable Blacks— in Dilsey's church, the monkey-like preacher with the great voice: �Between Wars - 10 C.6. Bell 0 breddred! I sees de doom crack an hears de golden horns shoutin down de glory# en de arisen dead vhut got de blood en*de ricklickshun of de Lamb. a23) Robinson Jeffers 1958# Photo by Edward Weston [video only] b23) Photo Sept. 26, 1918, Mobile Railroad Gun at Baleycourt, U.S. Official War Pictures , . n ^ ^ , c23) Photo May 3, 1939, World War II, Chungking (China) bombed by Japan, Life»e Picture History d23) Photo: Crab Nebula in Taurus, remnant of Super-nova observed by Chinese in 1054 AD ^ e23) Robinson Jeffers' Stone Tower, Carmel, CA (CGB 83) f23) Yeats' Ballylee Tower with bridge (CGB '80) 23) Morris Graves 1940. Blind Bird. Museum of Modern Art, New York C_i^-West of the Black sway, Jeffers attempted a Dionysiac crucible of terror* He brays h\imanity in a mortar to bring the savor From the bruised root... I have seen these ways of God... Unmeasured power, incredible passion, enormous craft: ... a certain measure in phenomena: The fountains of the boiling stars, the flowers on the foreland, the ever-returning roses of dawn. As if three pockets of the English speaking world had approached tragic resonance* Jeffers' Carmel coast, Faulkner's Mississippi, and (above the rest) the Ireland of William Butler Yeats. Yet these were word-kindlings, loosely linked to any art-stirrings from the same or other soil ~ as from Seatle, Graves' 1940 V Blind Bird. 24) Frank Lloyd Wright 1936, Falling Water, Bear Run, PA 24a) F.L. Wright 1936, Falling Water, South elevation. Night 24b) Photo: Windsor ruins near Port Gibson, MI (CGB '80)--------------Who is greater than Frank Lloyd Wright? tragic. Yet he defies the Can even his masterpiece, this 1936 house cantilevered over Falling Water, lift the ruins of time to an eternal sphere, all presences abide? It is what Yeats does in poems of those years ~ "The Curse of Cromwell"* I came on a great house in middle of the night,^ Its open lighted doorway and its windows all alight. And all my friends were there and made me welcome too; But I woke in an old ruin that the winds howled through; And when I pay attention I must out and walk Among the dogs and horses that xinderstand my talk. O what of that, O what of that. What is there left ^ say? �’CVG'.«Bell Between Kars - 11 25) Mondrian 1902, Trees on tKe R*»in detail)______________ on the Gein, Gemeentemuseum, The Hague (vith video Begin again. MUSIC. ------- , Can ve typefy the style-current of the first third of the" century? Mondrian would »,ove in twenty years from this 1902 I«>tch landscape to a ruled abstraction of white and primary color equares. In the comparable break with tonal harmony, Pebussy, up to 1890 was refining French Romantic ?vlth^vtdeo Farmhouse, Gemeentemuseum, The Hague towards musical Impressionism, while art sought an abstract color-music. Yet what Of the ratios on which music had relied? The ear knows them by wave-overlay. but seeing blurs proportion, whether Of space or color frequency. stretched representation. No wonder visual harmony has mostly In this 1906 Mondrian (from four years later than the first), landscape feels its way toward geometry. (end Nocturne) Mondrian c. 1911-1?, Horizontal Tree, Sidney .T.nis Gallery, w.w v„,. ^SlCi^bussv loot. PaooHe.. unin^, ^t. PHC t ,n., si* ">ore years Mondrian climaxes that search for the form underlay of nature, indeed the background of this Horizontal Tree already admits the cubism of Paris. With pebussy, a oomparable span might take us to the gamelan inspired Pagodas of 1903. detfu)^ detail Composition, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (vith video Almost within a year Mondrian had dissolved the espalliered tree (with other natural objects) into a complex of straight and curved lines forming planes of blue and tan - for which the title �C.G* Bell Between Kars - 12'- now can only be "Composition". t It is the pre-war climax of abstract experiment. (fade Pagodes) [slide only] a29) Mondrian Double: 1921 Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue, The Hague; & 1922 Composition 2, Guggenheim Museum, New York City 29) Single a29A, Mondrian Red, Yellow Si.Blue (with video details)__________ MUSIC: Debussy 1915, from Etudes, Pour les notes repetees Debussy did not live into the reductive tightening of the post war twenties, in which, from 1921 to 1933, Mondrian’held to a canon of perpendicular black lines, ruled on white and edged with primary-color rectangles — though Debussy's last studies, the Etudes of 1915, move that way. Is Mondrian's abstract stripping the main stream of the time? And what is its content? Before I knew Wil.liam Carlos Williams, I cited his "Between Walls" for such indirection: Between Walls the black wings of the hospital where nothing a30) Mondrian 1942-3, Broadway Boogie Woogie, Museum of Modern Art, NYC 30) Mondrian 1943-44 (unfinished). Victory Boogie Woogie, Coll’n Tremaine, Meriden, Conn.____________________ __________________ _________________ will grbw lie cinders... in- %diich shine the broken pieces of a green bottle Though when I asked him afterwards if that shattered glass spoke mere fragmentation, or the outcrop of beauty even from the sterile — he, who hated to explain poetry, groaned: "I meant the latter." So Mondrian in New York, 1943, brought the vibrance \ of what he now called Boogie-Woogie, to this final unfinished diamond entitled "Victory Boogie-Woogie". (fade Etudes) �C’ .G. Bell Between Wars - 13 31) Duncan Grant 1910, Portrait of James Strachey, Tate Gallery, London (with video detail MUSIC; Vaughan Williams 1914, from London Symphony, into the 2nd mvt., " -------------------------------- London LL 569 We cannot deny the trend of reattachment. Duncan Grant, born in India, trained in Paris, painter of the Bloomsbury group, might seer, at first drawn to the abstract. Into the Edwardian realism of this 1910 portrait of James Strachey, secure in its heritage from Pre-Raphaelite and Degas — 32j._D_.._Grant 1912, Still Life, Courtauld Institute, London________ _______ he has absorbed, in this Still Life of 1912, Cezanne. Perhaps the early work of Vaughan Williiuns, as from the London Symphony, finished in 1914, has some such blend of romantic and modern, expressed in a richly |>ersonal idiom. 33} D. Grant 1913, The Tub, Tate Gallery, London (with video detail)_______ But Grant, by the next year, under the tutelage especially of Matisse, ventured further into the modern experiment than Vaughan Williams, perhaps, ever would. Surely the painter's admirers must have thought him launched into the proper orbit of the century, (fade London Symphony) After the First War, however, he made an about face and gave the rest of his life 34) D. Grant 1940, Haystack before trees, Tate Gallery, London 34a) Nolde c. 1945?, Surf, Kunsthalle, Hamburg to a modern reconstitution of the realistic English landscape. It was the sort of affirmation Vaughan, Williams aimed at in the Fifth Symphony shift to E major. MUSIC; Vaughan Williams 1943, Symphony No. 5. 1st Mvt, major theme * ^ ------------ - Angel 35952 How crucial xs that earth—rallying to the decades of Between—war? (fade Vaughan Williams) �i ^ C.G. Bell Between Kars - 14 35) Double: Wyndham Levis 1913, Composition, drawing, Tate Gallery, London; and 1937, Red Portrait (oil), Grosvenor Gallery, London (with video detail)__________________________ __ _____________________ _ Even Wyndham Levis, Blast and Tyro of English avant-garde, would move from the Vorticist iconoclasm of his 1912-14 Compositions, to the representational i>ortraits of the •30's, this in red, a haunted recording of the very aesthetic anaemia, the very people his pen vas satyrizing in The Apes of God. 36) Picasso 1901, Harlequin Leaning on his Elbow, Met. Mus., NYC (with video detail) [slide only] 36a) Picasso 1905, Acrobat's Family with a Monkey, Goeteberg Museum, Sweden What of Picasso, style-maker of the century, — with the only musician who rivalled his art-surprises? As Hugo Leichtentritt wrote, "There is not one Stravinsky) there are ten." MUSIC: Stravinsky 1907 & ff, from Pastorale, Col M 30579 Picasso leads the way. This Harlequin anticipation of Blue and Rose is from 1901} whereas the earliest Stravinsky cognate seems the 1907 Pastorale (here in a later setting for violin and wind quartet). (end Pastorale) a37) Picasso 1907, Buste de Femme ou de Marin, Picasso Museum, Paris 37) Picasso .1907/ Head (sketch for Les Demaiselles d'Avignon), priv. coll 'n. MUSIC: Stravinsky 1912-13, from Sacre du Printemps, Col.MG ST 31202 Picasso's eruption of force advances from 1906-09, through the t Negroid to the violent beginnings of Cubism. Stravinsky peaks his upheaval a few years later in the Rite of Spring, (fade) 38) Picasso 1921, Three Musicians, Museum of Modern Art, NYC (with video detail) ___________________ ___________________________________________ IfflSIC: Stravinsky 1922-23, Octet for Wind Instrumf^nts. from 2nd Mvt, “ --------------------- ---------- !— Close, Col M-30579 The post-war cleverness of cubism pervaded by the irony of Dada and-Jazz, ties Picasso's 1921 "Three Musicians" to Stravinsky's Octet for Wind Instrxaments, a year or so after, (fade Octet) �cVg. Bell Betveen Kars 15 a39) Picasso 1932, The Dream, Ganz Coll'n., Nev York, upper detail 39) Same, Picasso’s Dream, vhole (vith video detail) MUSIC» Stravinsky 1939-40, Symphony in C, 2nd mvt, nr.opening, —-- ---------- --- -------------- ' Deutsche Gram. 2530 267For the correlations of Picaisso's Classical delight and of his Guernica terror, the Stravinsky time-sequence appears crossed. This Dream of 1932 (what would fetch daughter Maia from the vibrant new model Maria-Therese) looks toward Stravinsky's most pellucid re­ shaping of the Classical, the 1940 Symphony in C. (fade 'C* Symph.) 40) Picasso 1934, Bullfight, Ganz Collection, NY (with video detail) MUSIC; Stravinsky 1927, Oedipus Rex, from Epilogue. Col M 31129 By 1934, Picasso's Bullfight series was prophetically warming up (with Fascist Europe) for the Guernica. But Stravinsky's tragic blast had come earlier, as in this Oedipus Epilogue, of 1927 — before his classical lightening, (fade Oedipus Rex) [video only] a41) Picasso 1924, Paul in a Clown's Suit, Coll'n of the artist 41) Double; Picasso 19^23-4, Bird Cage, V.M. Ganz, NY; and a41, Paul in a Clown's Suit ^ Clearly, in the dialogue of abstract flight and earth-return, Picasso plays an ambiguous role — Picasso, who within a year (1923-4), had always the style-choice of putting space together, as in this clown portrait o£ his son Paul (right); or of wrenching it apart, as in this post-cubistic "Bird Cage" (left) ~ without any implied polemic of world loss or recapture. 42) Conrad Witz 1444, Miraculous Draught of Fishes, Museum of Art, Geneva (with video details) In Western history, however, the representational conquest has been no matter of indifference, but a reality of power. ' Let five boating scenes plot that odyssey. In Conrad Witz* 1444 Miraculous Draught of Fishes (cf. Luke 5), with Christ's Walking on the Waves and Peter's sinking (cf. Mathew 14; blended in John 21), Renaissance observation has taken its �C.G. Bell Between Wars - I’B stand in sacred legend, which opens to the delight of the Lake, shpre an4 mountains near the city of Geneva — a birth of nature in the miraculous, real by timeless suspension (everything mirrored in the water but the risen Christ). 43a)^Same^“qfor» Malta, Nat. Gal., London Same, Storm detail (video, another detail In our second the ship is going to pieces on the rocks. It is Paul's shipwreck on Malta, closing the Classical world, as the shipwreck of Odysseus had opened it. Acts; There arose a tempestuous wind, Euroclydon... and falling into a place where two seas met they ran the ship aground...but the hinder part was beaten with the violence of the waves...and some on boards, some on broken pieces of the ship...they escaped all safe to land. But what fills Elsheimer's Shakespearean scene is the night violence of ocean: (Othello) What from the cape can you discern at sea... (Winter s Tale) The ship...swallowed with yeast and froth, as you'd thrust a cork into a hogshead... A world real by Cartesian and Apocalyptic ambivalence. Hunting in the Estuary, Gallery Quirini----Stampalla, Venice (with video detail) In Longhi's 1760 Duck Hunting in the Venetian Estuary, the sacred sanction has receded. Secular pleasure stands on its own. Even the shadowed, heroic might it received from spatial formula­ tion under religious war (as in Rembrandt) has lightened to the wit of the salon century. Though that comic ease holds the great claims of nature and man in the moderation of aristocratic propriety. 45) W.S. Mount 1845, Eel Spearing at Setauket, NY State Historical Association, Cooperstown, NY (with video detail) Worth^^”^^*” a River, Amon Carter Museum, Fort With Mount's Eel Spearing, the earthly hope has staked out romantic holdings in the New World. How quietly radiant the �Between Kars C.CJ. Bell Transcendental pervasion: 17 (Thoreau) "The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted." If Longhi's four servants have been replaced by a black woman, she is the Queegueg who handles the gig, while the white boy paddles — type for Buck and Jim, proto­ Only a throb of sentiment hints how near we are to the breaking of earth's over-extended claim. What child of the Mississippi (or Brandywine) could rekindle such radiance today? Has not history itself imposed another search by making (most of all in the New World) that vulnerable ecology of individual wish and joy a laughter to the gods? 46) Paul Klee 1923, Scene from a Comic Operatic Fantasy "The Seafarer", Frau Trix Durst-Haas, BasJLe, Switzerland 46a) Same, Comic Opera, detail (with closer video detail) It is by no mere caprice that when Paul Klee (1923) took up the boating and spearing, day becomes such dream-night as in Joyce's Anna Livia Plurabelle (pub. 1928 — to be comprised in Finnegans Wake) Can't hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of. Flittering bats, fieldmice, bawk talk...Can't hear with bawk of bats, all the liffeying waters of...My foos won't moos...My ho head halls...Tell me tale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night! Klee's quarry has gone surreal -- sea-abstracts in a spaceless monitor of raised and lighted water, which the hunting whimsy stabs. The war of representation has been fought in the probabilityfield of the mind-invested globe. "Wonder ye then at the fiery chase?" a47) Jan Vermeer 1667, The Guitar Player, Kenwood House, Hampstead, London 47) Vermeer 1665, The Studio, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (with video detail) MUSIC: Buxtehude pub. 1695, Largo from Sonata Op. 1 no. 3, ~ ~ " •" -- Music Guild 121 Who can specify when the reasoned affirmation of world order reached its eurt-peak? Contradictory dimensionalities blur the �Between Kars - *18. ^ ' C.G. Bell question. Yet we would not be far off, if we should choose, from the century of Milton and Leibnitz, Vermeer's masterpiece. The Studio — with the instrumental sonata then forming out of chromatic polyphony in Rosenmuller, or this Buxtehude(end Buxtehude! a48) Joseph Beuys 1962-67, Hasengrab, (see Shirmer, Munich: Beuys) 48) Dan Flavin 1968, Daylight, Pink & Yellow Flourescent Tubes, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York MUSIC: Cage 1958, from Fontana Mix, magnetic tape. Turnabout TV 34046S ■I I II II I I .1.1 nil I 111 iM ■■■■■■ III ■■■ I ■■■!■ ■ A — — -I Nor can the limit of the modern break with that humanly proportioned cosmos be defined — whether in the Expressionist or Futurist attack, in Dada or the Surreal, or the extensions of the post-war abstract — here one of Flavin's con­ structions with flourescent tubes, ^o too with music: on what scale can we weight the indeterminate abandon of Cage's Electronic sound against his Silence? (fade Cage) 49) Albrecht Durer 1495, Trees in a Mountain Landscape, watercolor, Kupf Kab., Berlin To confirm, around the 17th century, that upland of spirit in form, take thr^e landscapes, as like in airy freedom as their time-span admits of: — this 1495 Durer watercolor: 50) Claude Lorrain,1638-9, Landscape watercolor, British Museum, London this Claude Lorrain drawing about 1639, with the conscious pervasion of Saint-Amant, "Mon Oieul gue mes yeux sont contents/ De voir ces bois..." 51) Monet 1880, Woman Seated Under the Willows, National Gallery, Wash. DC this sunlit Monet of 1880. Though chosen for some similitude of instinctive lightness, each remains a compendium of its period style. 2nd 49) Again Durer, Trees in a Mountain Landscape 2nd 49a) Same, Durer Landscape, detail MUSIC: Brumel c. 1500, Du tout plongiet - Fors seulement, close ~ ...... • ...—Seraphim SIC-6104 , �/e.l. Bell Between Kars - 19 Dtlrer's observational discovery is suspended in the trans­ personal gift of the creed-world, as sensuous a mystery as in the rondeavDc of Josguin, or this Brumel. (end Brumel) 2nd 50) Again Lorrain, Landscape watercolor 2nd 50a) Lorrain c. 1640?, Herdsman^ Resting under a Tree, British Museum, ________ London______________________________________ _____ __ ______ MUSIC; Cavalli 1654, Beato chi puo, Musiche Italiane Antiche 4 Even in so light a wash, Claude asserts the noble_ formulation of the phenomena^(as in the mathematics of chordal harmony, Cavalli's Blessed Solitude, "Beato chi puo"), its mood tion by Descartes' universal knpwer; think, therefore I am." penetra­ "I ( fade Cavalli) 2nd 51) Again Monet, Woman Seated Under the Willows 2nd 51a) Same. Monet's Woman & Willows, detail of woman----------------MUSIC; Faurg 1887, Les Presents (song). Hist. Mus. Sound, In Monet (as in Faure), all that inherited spatial grandeur wimples toward the new evanescence ; the great Miltonic moods thin to the personal poignance of an almost sobbing delight. (fade Faure) 52) Spanish (Silos) 1109, Commentary on the Apocalypse, MS Add 11695 folio 240, British Museum, London (with video detailsj------------ ------ ---» MUSIC; Iraq. Roval Mode. His Image, voice, viol t lute; RCA V-LM-60_57 Before and after (or geographically around) the plateau of Europe from the 15th through the 19th century, lies a world more stripped to the timeless and spaceless; the primitive force of this 1100 Beatus commentary on the Apocalypse,from Silos, in a Spain permeated by the Dark Age and Moorish (does the Royal Mode of old Persian song preserve something of that faith-frenzy?) (fade Roval Mode) �C.6. Bell Between Wars - -20 53) Boccioni 1912, Materia (his nother), G. Mattioli Coll'n, Milan (with video detail)^ MUSIC; Schonberq 1912, Pierrot Lunaire, last stanza of 1st song; ■ ■ - ---Col. M 25679 Such force erupts again after eight centuries in the faithhungry surfeit of self, to Expressionist and Futurist thrillspasms: Boccioni's 1912 study of his mother, or from the same vear Schonberc's Pierrot Lunaire — Nietzschean nilomanias. (fade SchSnbero) ---------- a54) Goya 1788, The Meadow of San Isidoro, Pradd, Madrid, detail 54) Same, San Isidore, whole (and another video detail) MUSIC; Mozart 1786, from Concerto 24 in C Minor, 1st mvt, nr close, • — ..... — - Murray Hill S-3906 Yet where could human fulfillment have affirmed "So far and no further"? Since already Goya's last possession of an 18th century enlightened order was reaching from its lace and powdered wigs to the liberation that would turn this festive meadow to a Napoleonic battlefield <— a summons of which even Mozart felt the dissonart call. (Mozart forte, then fade) 55), Mark Pothko 1944, Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea, Mary Pothko (with video details) 55a) Pothko 1949, Violet, Black, Orange, Yellow on White and Ped, Guggenheim, New York (video detail only) MUSIC: Messiaen 1940, Quatour pour la Fin du Temps 3 opening, Abime — des Oiseaux, D. Gram. 2531 093 There was no stopping place, from that, to the soul-risk of the wartime forties, Messiaen's Abyss of Birds from the Quartet for the End of Time, with Rothko's Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea, closing his Surreal apprenticeship, just before he melted landscape to 'drowning color pools, (fade Messiaen on low note) 2nd 54) Again 54, Gova's San Isidoro, another detail Let six stations — from the Goya picnic, 2nd 55) Again 55, Pothko’s Slow Swirl, detail to the Rothko swirl, trace the abstraction of the outward, the surrealization of the within. �Between Kars C'.G. Bell 21 56) Constable 1825, Jumping Horse (center detail), Victoria & Albert Museum, London_________ ______________________________________________ In Constable's Leaping Horse of 1825, how visionary eye's vision has become. But there is also the inner eye, and from 1800 to now, it is as if those polar pairs of sight and dream 57) John Martin c. 1825?, Fallen Angels Entering Pandemonium, Tate Gallery, London 57a) Same, Martin's Pandemonium, detail had advanced together in revelational estrangement.' Since time-linked with Constable's observation, and from the seune quarter of England, John Martin was continually transforming appearance into fantasy: Milton's Pandemonium like Poe's "Dreamland" — "I have reached these lands but newly/ From an ultimate dim Thule —/ From a wild weird clime that lieth sublime,/ Out of Space ~ out of Time." 58) Montecelli c. 1880?, Under the trees by water's edge. Collection Alfred Lambert (with video detail) After 1870, whatever dislocation of the outward was peaking to Van Gogh, cropped out here and there — in Marseilles with the late works of Monticelli ~ this color impasto "Under trees by water's edge". — as "earthworld, airworld, waterworld thorough hurled" as the "bushybowered wood" and "marbled river" of Hopkins "Epithalamion": "What is water? Spousal love." 59) Victor Hugo c. 1866, The Snake, Hugo Museum, Paris While subjectivity itself, in Victor Hugo's "The Snake", about 1866, draws from Symbolist encroachment (Baudelaire's "Litanies of Satan", or Meredith's "On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose") its alienating core. 60) Cezanne 1900->05, The Bathing Women, Nat. Gal., London With the turn to this century, Cezanne's studies of landscape and of human forms converge in those monumental still-lifes called "Bathers" — this almost final one in London, whose solid �C.G. Bell Between Wars -* 2? * geometry is no more Euclidian than that of Lobachevsky or Riemann, of Abbott's Flatland or Duhamel's Mount Analogue♦ 61) Edward Munch 1895» Jealousy, Rasmus Meyers coll*n> Bergen Over the same years Munch, moving oppositely, from inside out, nightmared the canvas to a symbolic confession: his jealous friend Przybyssewski, whose Eve-wife Dagny plucks for the artist the forbidden fruit. [video only] a62) Picasso 1913, La Bouteille de Suze, Washington University Collection, St. Louis, MO 62) Double: Braque c. 1914, Composition, Papier colle, Priv. Coll'n, Basel, & Giorgio di Chirico 1913-14, Anguish of Departure, Albright, Buffalo 62a) Again 62B, Chirico»s Anguish (video detail) I As a wave mounts up a shoal, the motions of abstract and surreal climb the slopes of the Great War, both cresting, 1913 and one in the paper collages with which Picasso and here Braque (left) completed their cubistic analysis —— a reduction of the physical beyond which, in a sense, art could not push on. At the same time, with Giorgio de Chirico (right), the depths of the sub-conscious poured out as in Freudian dream. Could the disillusions and Kafka—neuroses of war and post-war plumb a more haunted surreal? Without and within, we could almost affirm 1914 as •the climax of experiment. a63) Robert Rauschenberg 1955, Rebus,. Coll'n V. Ganz 63) Hans Arp c. 1920, Bird in an Aquarium, painted wood, Museum of Modern Art, NYC (with video detail)____________________________________ Though if put to it, we could surely—in the tide of Dada, non-objective, op and pop, which has seemed ever since to rise without limit all over the Western wrld -- extend the dual sequence through Second World War to now. So one who had thought Chekov, Shaw and Chaplin had pushed heartbreak comedy all ■the way, might yet be startled, in Becket and Ionesco, by the fuzed schizophrenia of that laugh-agony. But have not the poles also fuzed in this Arp cut-out, about 1920, Bird in an Aquarium? 4 Can we call it abstract. ,>. S' �C.G Bell Between Wars - 23 64J Joan.Miro 1924-25, Harlequin's Carneval. Albright Gal., Buffalo and set against it as* surreal the diverting flea-circus of Miro's Carnival, one of countless marvels in a field too complex to be ordered, much less clarified ~ ^ough the professional analysts, every year or so, would attempt just that, in ism-searching too tomes on "New Directions in Art"? 65) Mark Tobev 1941, Forms Follov Man, Seattle Art Museum \ While all directions went on cross-breeding: 1941, West Coast Tobey's "linear multiplicity", this "Forms Follow Man", abstraction loosened to a "White writing" which mystically absorbs the surreal. Yet the same fusion can everywhere exhibit the other leaning, 66) Darrel Austin c. 1940?, Europa and the Bull (cf. Life, 1940's) (with video detail) 2^ • as (for a West Coast complement to Tobey) in Darrel Austin — this palette-knife swamp of Europa, lambent as the sphynxhaunted pools of Raintree County: ^ "He could see her pale form turning over and over in a slow spiral floating away on green waters..." > 67) Double: de Kooning 1950-52, Woman I, Museum of Modern Art, NYC; and Barnett Newman 1951, The Way I, Annalee Newman, NY 67a) Again 67A, de Kooning's Woman 67b) Again 67B, Newman's Wav Finally, with the post-war Fifties, the New York School brought to simultaneous culmination (on those huge canvases, pushed by the vast resources of art-speculation), opposites transcending the former poles, a color-action of violent gesture (here de Kooning, Woman I), and a passive mystery of spaceless colorspace (Newman's The Way I) right). In the cross-section we have thus made, from Goya to Abstract- Expressionism, it might seem that the whole drift of the modern, formal or romantic# was univocal — to dissolve all rational �C.G. Bell Between Wars - 24 programs of man and world in an inebriation of the depths, non­ objective or subliminal. If crisis was the cause, our misrule of the mind-invested globe, how could the trend be opposed? 68) Albright 1927-30, Into the World There Came a Soul Named Ida, Art Institute, Chicago (with video details) Though it cannot be denied that the period of between-wars also witnessed a realism of material reattachment. What then,, if that \ attachments soils its own material nest? /\ Albright's 1927-30 "Into the World There Came a Soul Named Ida" was as sure as Miss I^nelyhearts to outrage all who thought such realism should be life-affirming. risk the distortion of a simplifying schema. 69) Quadruple: Top L: Delauney 1912-13, Suri #1, Stedeliik Amsterdam; Lower L: Picabia 1917, Amorous Display, ^i^coll'n Paris; Lower F: Cropper 1935, The Senate, detail^ Mus MoS ^r? "nyc e9a,lL^ie 69b 69c) 69d) 69e) irill: Single of Single of Agian 69, Single of 69B, Picabia's Amorous... 69C, Cropper's Senate Quadruple slide 69D. Zvefvez's Divide the field into four: by an X-axis running left to right, as from abstract and surreal to real and representational, across it raise a Y, as from negation (below) to affirmation (above). On this Cartesian plot, counterclockwise rotation will compass the art and politics from War to War. The fire-rush of avant-garde stands Heft and above, Delaunay's 1913 delight of sheer Sun-circle energy. Below it (also abstract, but negative), Picabia's 1917 Amorous Display toys with the machine mockery war and Dada had already made of modern vision. Below and to the right, .Cropper revives earth-seated realism, although for‘mockery ~ this Depression swipe at a senate of sleep and rant -- of which it might be asked: as well? if the intent is negation, why not negate objects Any answering claim of social message must sweep us right and above where programmatic realism asserts the imperative �“ C.6. Bell Between Wars - 25 of its earth-yea — this 1934 Russian Communist portrait of Kirov. • In this quadrant/ right and above/ art comes into danger. 70) Doubles Michelangelo 1513-16/ Moses/ detail/ Pietro in Vincoli, Rome; and Curry c. 1930?/ John Brown of Kansas/ Study for Fresco, Kansas State Capital I So in Curry's John Brown of Kansas/ post-romantic indulgence of t the vill-to-power manifestly suggests (beside its Michelangelo Moses-model) that heroism which/ as Eliot said in "Gerontion", fathers "unnatural vices". 71) Doubles Michelangelo 1501-04/ Head of David/ Accadcmia, Florence; S. Arno Breker c. 1938, Preparedness, Kunst, Vol 81 How ominously that could be the case, when at storm-center Nazi rallying would require of every level — religion, politics, science and art — the cheer of Mass-acclaim for the militance of reaction, nothing more grimly enforces than Arno Broker's "Preparedness" (right), its overweening also measured against (i’ Michelangelo — the civic call of the David. a72) Ernst Barlach 1914, The Avenger, 1956 D.S. Show 72) Barlach Double, again a72. Avenger; and 1927, Floating Angel, Cologne Protestant Church 72a) Single 72B, Barlach's Angel, detail_____ ___________________________ Let Ernst Barlach, North German sculptor, friend of Kaethe Kollwitz, attest the danger of that rocky narrows in the stream. In response to the First War, which Nietzscheans, even Rilke, hailed, Barlach's 1914 Avenger (left) bradished the blade of Biblical warning: Bword." "Who take the sword shall perish with the When such art-exhortation (with Barlach's cult of peasant humanity, especially Russian) had thrown him into the solitude of Hitler's condemnation, this 1927 floating angel (to be destroyed by the Nazis and reconstituted after the war from a hidden cast), became his dying prophecy, God's messenger hung in sightless gloom over the hvunan shore. �C.G. Bell Between Kars 26 * a73) Diego Fivera 1914, Las Figuras, Arkansas Arts Center Foundation b73) Same, Fivera's Figuras, left detail c73) Fivera 1914, Marine Fusilier, Nat. Inst. Fine Arts, Mexico City 73) Double: Deigo Fivera 1914, (c73) Marine Fusilier; and 1915, Zapata Landscape, Nat. Inst. Fine Arts, Mexico City ^ 73a) Again 73B, Zapata, detail (and closer detail)________________ ________ ^ Back to 1914. As the long-awaited. First World War came to Europe, the also expecteci revolution was. under way in Mexico. IVhile Rivera was with Picasso in Paris. When the abstraction which had affirmed by dislocation# took both impacts# who could say whether it stood now above or below# in the quadrant of Yea or of Nay# or if those Opposites had merged? MUSIC: Carillo 1913 & after, from Cristobal Colon ik etc, tones) ' * — Old 78; Col 7357 M (close of side A) Of his 1914 Marine Fusilier (Sailor at lunch)# though Rivera would later assert: "l believe my Cubist paintings are my most .Mexican"; or of the 1915 Zapata Landscape (Guerilla Fighter), "It is probably the most faithful expression of the Mexican mood that I have ever achieved" — his revolutionary compatriots might have judged (as of the micro-tone experiments of Mexican Carillo): "Elitist imitations of international avantgarde. " (fade Carillo) a74) D. Fivera 1927, El Hombre ante los Elementos, fresco, Escuela Nac. de Agriculture, Chapingo, Mexico b74) Same, Fivera fresco, lower detail (with further video detail) 74) Same, Fivera fresco, wide angle (video various details) MUSIC: Carlos Chavez c. 1930?, from Los Cuatro Soles (of water, air, ~ fire, earth) Ballet, Col. MQ 32685 (middle, soft-loud) Whereas# when Rivera took up twelve years later the painting of political and social frescoes for the post-revolutionary govern­ ment — this School of Agriculture myth of man facing the elements Earth# Air# (left) Water# (right) Volcanic Fire# with the machines of their mastery (the very child sparking an electric arc) — he had obeyed the other imperative# of monumental# patriotic representation. As if we had gone from Carillo's fractional tones to Chavez folkloristic Ballet on the Mahuatl sun-cycles of the same Four Elements. �C.G. Bell Between Wars - 27 [video only] a75) Jose Orozco 1939, Hernan Cortez Fresco, detail, ceiling of auditorium, Hospicio Cabanas, Guadalajara 75) Same fresco, detail of Cortez At the same time Orozco — though with more Expressionistic attack began his fresco celebration of national culture, which would climax, 1939, in the vaulted auditorium of the Guadalajara orphanage — this Marxist vision of Cortes as armored machine, advancing in flames over mutilated Indians. 76) Sigueiros 1943, Self-portrait, Inst. N3C. de Bellas Art’es, Mexico City (with video details) Finally Sigueiros, third of the great moralists, makes of his 1943 fist-advancing self a personal assertion of the whole Mexican revolutionary claim — the pathos of between-war realism raided to the partisan demand of the Second War crusade. (fade Chavez) 77) Russian Byzantine 1065 and after. Church of the Intercession of the Virgin, near Vladimir (with video detail) MUSIC; Traditional Russian Chant, Liturgy for Lent, Psalm 141, solo; — ...."....... " --- ----- - "" ' Anth. Son. LP-10 A-2 In Russia avant-garde came as a late flowering from a more primitive soil. With what vis inertia the snowy wonder of the Byzantine north held its own: witness this 1065 Church near Vladimir, altered through centuries, just such as Tolstoy's Godfolk would still have pilgrimaged to, with the old chant they itfould have sung. [video only] a78) Russian 15th-17th cent.. Walls and Tower, Kremlin of Novgorod 78) Same, Novgorod Kremlin, another view with bells (with video detail) (same music. Chorus) And like the Renaissance impassioned harmonization of that chant, the force of European revival spills into the ancient city of Novgorod — in this 1490 wall and 1600 bell tower, announcing Peter the Great. (fade Liturgy) �f C.G. Bell Between Wars - 28 79) Alexander Ivanov c. 1850/ Boys Basking in the Sun, unused study for State Museum/ Leningrad (with video Christ's Appearance/r Russian db«««« wwwsi AJdAAAiUA.au \«AWii V A U tT ^ (Sof a4 1 1 detail) 79a) I.E. Repin (Russian) c. 1881/ Cossacks Writing a Letter to the Turkisl® Sultan/ Tretyakov Gallery. Moscow (with video detail) MUSIC: Tchaikovsky 1866/ 1st Symph (Winter Dreams)/ 2nd mvt close, ------ ——--------------------- ------------------ -—--- SUM 5053 Curious, that even as the Russian soul tpok the full dose of Romantic sickness (the consumptive refinement of Ivanov's midI century studies for Christ's Appearance to the Multitude/ with Tchaikovsky's First Symphony, called Winter Dreams), the infection showed itself in the egoism of Slavophil world-calling: Prince Odoyevsky -Weston Europe is on the highroad to ruin. We Russians, on the contrary, are young and fresh and have taken no crimes of Europe. We have a great mission to fulfill. Our name is already inscribed on the tablets of victory; the vicories of science, art and faith await us on the ruins of tottering Europe. (close Tchaikovsky) Co-ll-n Of the Artist, Prom that Romantic longing, the arts of Russia vper to modernism with the rest of Europe. In the sudden absorption of Fauve, Cubist, Futurist, leading to Constructivism, came Natalia Goucharovna, whose "Green and Yellow Forest" of 1912 (climax year also for Stravinsky and Scriabin) lives the ecstatic explo­ sion — knife-edge already designated on our Cartesian plot as the quadrant convergence of left above and left below, it is the ambivalent violence and fragmentation Blok carried over into his 1918 revolutionary poem. The Twelve. 81) M. Saryan 1937, Industry in the Mountains, State museums, USSR (with video detail) The Stalinist 'thirties saw the enforcement of proletarian reaction. The older painters adjusted as best they could; the younger came fresh to the mass jubilee. While the rebuke of �f ^ ’''C.G. Bell Betveen Kars - 29 Shostakovich for musical experiments, mounted him on the warhorse of the Fifth Symphony (1937). MUSIC: Shostakovich 1937, Fifth Symphony, 1st mvt, clima?^ (Kousevitsky) -------------------- ------------------------------------ Col. ML47 39 82) Seraphina Ryangina 1934, Higher and Higher, State museums, USSR (with video detail) 83) Toitze 1935, Stalin at the Rvon Dam, USSR state museum (fade Shostakovich) 2nd 82) Again Rvanoina’s Higher, detail ~ The modern apocalypse gone as sentimentally heartfelt as the outpourings of Sholokov's Anna: You know. Ilia, I perceive the future like a distant magically beautiful music. Just as one sometimes hears it in sleep...Kon't life be beautiful under Socialism! No more war, no more poverty or oppression or national barriers... 2nd 83) Again Toitze*s Stalin, detail Though against the Nazi overstretching, this believed propaganda might almost have tipped the heavenly scales to a prophecy of Leningrad. a84) F.C. Hassam 1918, Flag Day, Hirshhorn Coll'n 84) Paul Cadmus 1934, Coney Island, J.R. Stark Coll'n 84a) Same, Cadmus' Coney Island, detail , oa\ 84b) KW II Photo 1943’, Dive Bomber Assembly Line (cf Atomic Age 80J-------MUSIC: Ives c. 1905?, Central Park in the Dark, climax. Col MS-6843 Ives* "Central Park in the Dark" from early in the century shouts' the affirming vigor of American realism. Cadmus' Coney Island from 1934 wallows in negation — like the anti-life of Farrell's Studs Loniaan: (fade Ives) click of the cue balls from where Stan Simonsky was practicing. An elevated train rumbled. An auto­ mobile whizzed by. A heavy-footed, well-formed girl passed. "How you like it?" "Push-Push!" mumbled Mike. In the confusion of data Spengler made the assessment which disasterously misled Hitler — that the United States was too decadent to be a cause for concern. �♦ C.G. Bell * A Between Kars - 3t>’ 85) Stuart Davis 1924, Odol, Coll'n Mrs. S. Davis 85a) Grant Wood 1932, Daughters of the Revolution, Coll'n E.G. Robinson 85b) Double: Norman Rockwell 1927, Sears Catalog Cover; and Kayne Thiebaud 1963, Girl with an Ice Cream Cone, Private Coll'n 85c) Double: Again 85, Davis' Odol; & Andy Warhol 1965, 4 Campbell's Soup Cans, private coll'n Ten years before Cadmus' cartoon-realism, Stuart Davis had given negation the acid-bath of the abstract, joining Dada in lower-left-quadrant debunking. Cvunmings at the same time hatched "Poem, Or Beauty Hurts Mr. Vinal"i take it from me kiddo... from every B.V.D. let freedom ring... Amer i ca, I love. You. And there*re a hun-dred-mil-lion-oth-ers, like all of you successfully if delicately gelded (or spaded) gentlemen (and ladies) — pretty 1ittleliverpi11hearted-Nujolneeding-There's-A-Reason americans (who tensetendoned and with upward vacant eyes, painfully perpetually crouched, quivering, upon the sternly allotted sandpile —how silently emit a tiny violetflavoured nuisance: Odor? ono. cqmes out like a ribbon lies flat on the brush a86) Saint-Gaudens 1891, "Grief", monument for Henry Adams' Wife, Rock Creek Cemetary, ‘Washington DC b86) Same, "Grief", detail of face c86) Frank Lloyd Wright 1907, Avery Coonley House, Riversdale, IL 86) F.L. Wright, Living Room, Coonley House 86a) Arthur B. Davies before 1909, Dream, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City (with video detail) MUSIC: Ives 1908, The Unanswered Question, opening Col MS 6843 Where was the rapture with which America had faced the century? For Frank Lloyd Wright, the 1907 Coonley House opened fifty years of radiance; and surely this living room accords with the myster- �Bell Between Wars - 31 ious web of Ives 1S08 Unanswered Question — though for Ives, the power to compose would wane after the 1916 war. And Pound, before the embitterments and crippling misjudgments of the later century — how he glows with Sappho and Troubadour and early Yeats: Aupia Be in me as the eternal moods of the bleak wind, and not As transient things are — gaiety of flowers. Have me in the strong loneliness of sunless cliffs And of grey waters. Let the gods speak softly of us In days hereafter. The shadowy flowers of Orcus Remember thee. (fade Ives after dissonance) a87) John Marin 1919, Sunset, Maine Coast, Museum of Fine Arts, Columbus Ohio 87) Marin 1923, Ship, Sea and Sky Forms, an Impression, vatercolor, Mus. Fine Arts, Columbus, Ohio___________________________________________ Before the war, through it and after, John Marin held to the vital claim of his Maine and New York yatOrcolorsj but what that thrill affirms, William Carlos Williams' 1935 poem "Yachts" may clarify: the whole sea become an entanglement of watery bodies ...reaching from the dead to be taken up they cry out, failing, failing! their cries rising in waves still as the skillful yachts pass over. 88) Hartley Double: 1914, Portrait of a German Officer; and 1937, Smelt Brook Falls, City Art Museum, St.Louis (with video singles)__________ We can set up polarities of yea and nay, objective, non­ objective; but how is time dramatized if the current rxans both ways? That Marsden Hartley, in Germany, 1914, called this insignia-abstracted mockery (left) "Portrait of a German Officer"; while by the 'thirties, in Maine, his Constructivist schooling would serve the representation -of natural scenes — is that part of a trend, as from Gertrude Stein to Hemingway? �Between Wars - 32 C.G. Bell a89) Arthur Dove 1911/ Nature 89) A. Dove 1937/ Rise of the 89a) A. Dove 1913/ Ferry Boat detail) [video only] again 89/ Dove’s Symbolized/ Art Institute of Chicago Full Moon/ Phillips Coll'n/ Washington DC Wreck/ Whitney Museum/ Nl’C (with video Moon, detail Early in the century American avant-garde had fortified a position around Stieglitz in New York. Yet as Hartley did/ Dove too from 1910 pure abstraction, tended, between wars, toward representational recommitment. Though his 1937 "Rise of the Full I Moon" admits only such depiction as Expressionist magic requires. So Wallace Stevens describes the sunrise in "The Fed Fern": The large-leaved day grows rapidly, TUid opens in this familiar spot Its unfamiliar, difficult fern. Pushing and pushing red after red... Infant, it is enough in life To speak of what you see. But wait Until sight wakens the sleepy eye And pierces the physical fix of things. 90) Double: Georgia O'Keefe 1917, Light Coming on the Plains II, Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, TX; jand 1929, Black Cross, NM, Art Inst., Chicago 90a) Single of 90A/ Again O'Keefe Light 90b) O'Keefe 1928, Wave, Night, Maine Coast, light, etc, Phillips Academy, Andover, Maes. 90c) Single of 90B, Again O'Keefe Black Cross Also Georgia O'Keeffe seems most abstract at the start. though the 1917 watercolor (left) is called "Light Coming on the Plains". distance One feels, no less than with Dove, such preternatural as Wallace Stevens casts in the circling spell of "The Snow Man", — "One must have a mind of winter/ To regard the frost and the boughs" — a syntax that wanders, as over •the land/ Pull of the same wind/ That is blowing in the same bare place" (and returns) For the listener, who listens in the snow. And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. By the 1929 "Black Cross, New Mexico", the artist has taken on the landscape of the Southwest; yet the earth sought remains �■f Bell Between Wars - 33 archetypal, — Wallace Stevens' "Cliffs of Moher rising out of the mist,/ Above the real..." a91) Bonnard 1916-20, Pastoral, Bernheim-Jeune Collection, detail b91) Bonnard c. 1900, Woman with Black Stockings, Lord Fosslyn, Grt. Britain 91) Again a91, Bonnard's Pastoral, whole MUSICt Ravel 1909, Daphnis and Chloe Suite No. 2, Col MS 6077 (near ■' .. beqinninqT In Europe, in France, in Paris, the abstract current was also \ countered, though not by the nature-awe of the New World, Bonnard, who at the sardonic turn of the century had exchanged Nabis prophecy for post-impressionist delight, here, at the close of the First War, and against the acid of Dada, greets the armistice as with a memory of Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe — before the shells had torn pastoral Arden. (fade Ravel) [video only] a92) Georges Braque 1913, La Table du Musicien, Kunstmuseum, Basle 92) Braaue 1929. Still Life; Le Jour, National Gallery, Wash. DC And when Braque, drafted from Cubist experiment to be wounded and trepanned, returned convalescent to more than 40 years of Btill-life synthesizing — were those color-muted geometries fixations of the drier '20'8, or already, after pre-war collage analysis, insistencies on a reliable realm: Rilke's "custom", "Treusein einer Gewohnheit"; his saying "House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Jug"? 93) Matisse 1907, Music, Museum of Modern Art, NYC (with video detail) 93a) Matisse 1909-10, Dance, Hermitage, Leningrad______________________ ^ For sensuous affirmation within the current of avant-garde itself, Matisse asserts a presence as continuous as the lovers / and dancers of Yeats: "1 am of Ireland,/ And the Holy Land of Ireland,/ Come out of charity,/ Come dance with me in Ireland." So Matisse, from hie radical Fauve beginnings, left no more doubt how strong that life-line was, than the Yeats of 1899: �C.G. Bell ocbween wars fiddler of Dooneyl* And dance like a wave of the sea. detaf?) T!hre& Sisters, Coll*n Mme Paul Guillaume (with video Yet Matisse did not escape, in this 1915 "Three Sisters", the waste-of-life tightening which, with the death pf brothers and lovers, fell on so many. j^en Yeats took a darker turn that year: The holy centaurs of the hills are vanished* I have nothing but the embittered sun... As for Bartok, it vas throuah the lean •twenties that he would pare and spare. (fade Barfnw' 95)’MatlMrc!®j922!'’|tifr”ife-‘ADnf Bash. DC Ivldeo ““ video detail) o" PlhK Tablecloth, Nat. Gal., collection Matisse, however, in this still Life of 1922, has already recharged the sensuous. •thirties. That turn in music typefies the Thus Bartok^s Violin Concerto. It is what renews Yeats' youth — And pluck till time and times are done The-silver apples of the moon. The golden apples of the sun ~ more passionately in his age: I carry the sun in a golden cup. The moon in a silver bag. 96a)**Photo%fter”l940^°M?J?^®*^^< gouache on paper cutouts, prlv. coll'n j If 96b Aoaln wheelchair, making cutouts 2S°i Again B6, Matisse's Dancers, upper deta-ti_________ As he approached 70 Matisse achieved an ultimate physicality in a form of radical reduction, that of the paper cut-out. Yeats had expressed it as the dilemma of age ~ body become �1 ^ ' C.G. Bell Between Wars - 35 "a sort of battered kettle at the heel", while mind lived more and more in "an old man's frenzy"; ...Never had I more Excited, passionate, fantastical Imagination, nor an ear and eye That more expected the impossible... (fade Bartok) Yet twenty years before this Matisse, 97) Chagall 1917-18, The Promenade, Russian State Museum, Leningrad (with video detail) as the First War had closed, Chagall, on vacation from Paris to his native Vitebsk, painted such a picture of himself on "Promenade with his wife Bella, joy lifting her high as a kite. While the Revolution, from which Chagall would go into exile, advanced toward Theirmidor. Was there an alienation and reattachment? what? Attachment to what? Alienation from If mystery is the attachment, it comprises alienation. 98) Chagall 1933 S. 1945, The Wedding Candles, detail, private collection (with further video detail) Yet Chagall too was most abstract in those early works, whereas in his later, as in this picture of the same Bella, begun in the thirties, and transformed in 1945, after her death, when she became the mystical Jewish Bride — mythic sentiment and the luxury of paint are heightened together. Chagall was in Connecticut when he reworked this canvas; 99) Max Weber Double: 1917, Two Musicians, Museum of Modern Art, NYC; and 1944, The Wayfarers, Gallery of Fine Arts; Columbus, Ohio 99a) Again Musicians, detail 99b) Again Wayfarers, detail [video various details)________________________________________________ but the Avant-garde response to the human plight was international. The years that led Max Weber from Cubist detachment in the Paris of 1917 (left; Two Musicians), to the vortex of 1944 (these Holocaust refugees called Wayfarers — right), also took Wallace Stevens from "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird": �Between Wars C.G. Bell 36 A man and a woman Are one. A man and a %raman and a blackbird Are one ~ 4 to his wartime "Martian Cadenza": What had this star to do with the world it lit. With the blank skies over England, over France And above the German camps? It looked apart. Yet it is this that shall maintain... Mot the symbol but that for which the symbol stands. The vivid thing in the air that never changes. Though the air change... 100) S. Dali 1931, Persistence of Memory, Museum of Modern Art, NYC 100a) Dali c. 1936?, Face and Fruit Dish on Beach, Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Conn. In Wales, the bardic rapture of Dylan Thomas drove him from early poems (1934) surreal as Dali's Persistence of Memory, with its voodoo of limp watches — Dawn breaks behind the eyes; From poles of skull and toe the windy blood Slides like a sea; Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky Spout to the rod Divining in a smile the oil of tears — 101) Jack B. Yeats 1948, We Left Our Name on the Road...of Fame, Lord Movne, Dublin (with video detail) to such a yea-frenzy as Jack Ifeats, also in the 'forties, blazoned abroad: "We left Our Name On the Road...Of Fame". Thus from Dylan's "Vision and Prayer": I turn the corner of prayer and burn In a blessing of the sudden Sun. In the name of the damned I would turn back and run To the hidden land But the loud sun Christens down The Sky. I Am found. The slump of Between-Wars had become a launching pad: 102) Photo: New York City with Empire State Building, from RCA Observatory^ roof (with video detail) �t ©.G. Bell Between Kars - 37 Depression crucible of Europe» Russia, America, Japan, hatching social euphorias: Manhattan, as much as any art sign, chain-reaction pile of transvalued negation, thrusting through crisis and war to the Atomic Age, growth stocks, the space-flight spiral of a new Avant-garde. On the verge of that blast-off, let us recompose the currents of the century — daring and reaction, with ,the risk, pathos, transcendence of their infolded destiny — the outward terror, the inward vision. al03) Nijinsky in "L*Apres-midi d'un Faune", (recumbent), 1912 103) Nijinsky dancing "Afternoon of a Faun", London, 1912 103a) Nijinsky in "Le Spectre de la Rose", 1911 (with video detail) 103b) Again 103, Naiinsky dancing, upper detail Perhaps the Fauve ecstasy of the early century peaked in the Russian Ballet. Even the stills of Nijinsky dancing the "After­ noon of a Faun" in London, 1912, suggest the art rapture from Matisse to Delaunay, Marc, Kandinsky — what Joyce made Irish in the girl-on-the-strand epiphany of the Portrait (1904-14): A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed to the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird...Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot... —Heavenly GodI cried Stephen's soul, in an outburst of profane joy... ...on and on he strode, far out over the sands, sihging wildly to the sea, crying to greet the advent of the life that had cried to him... al04) Nijinsky 1919, arc drawing (female persona). Museum of Modern Art, New York City? 104) Nijinsky Double: again al04. Arc Drawing; & 1922, Demon, watercolor, Museum of Modern Art, New York City? 104a) Single of 104B, again Nijinsky's Demon WozzgIc f MUSIC: Be^ 1914-21,/from III,ii, murder of Marie, Col.Odyssey 33126 Slde^ Though beneath the projected joy of Nijinsky was the fleeing feminine persona he recorded in the child limitation of his �C.6. Bell Between Wars<j- '38«- arc'drawings; and# as he approached the break of dementia, the mask of his demon pursuer Diaghilev. That turn to terror is implicit in the final dance Nijinsky talked of performing: "Le Mariage avec Dieu"; Rilke had bared it in the destructive angel, Berg in Wozzek's murder and suicide by the haunted pond. [slide only] al05) Franz Marc 1913-14, Tyrol, detail Neue Pinakothek, Munich (CGB *59) 105) Otto Dix 1914, War (Arms), Kunstmuseum, Duesseldorf (vith video _____details) _______________ ______ ______________________ MUSIC: Richard Strauss 1889, from Tod und VerklSrung, death climax. ~ ~ Angel S 35976 In Nietzsche, by an ambivalence typically modern, force leaps to the quantum state of its own celebration — will to Power c. 1887: "Dionysian wisdom: joy in the destruction of... existing things, however good...We have to be destroyers." So the sequences of Expressionism mount a transport of fragmentation (this Otto Dix, Arms, of 1914), symptomatic of the Great War itself. How the youthful Richard Strauss lashed his 1889 Death and Transjfjguration toward that high frenzy — (fade Tod u.VerklSrung) to become the twelve-tone pact of Thomas Mann's Faustus. 106) Kaethe Kollwitz, 1907, Schlachtfeld, etching. National Gallery, Wash. DC (with video detail) 106a) Same, Kollwitz.etching, lover detail________________ _________ MUSIC: Richard Strauss 1943, Metamorphosen, opening, Angel S 35976 It took a woman, Kaethe Kollwitz, to foreshadow the human reality of that night trudge over No Man's Land: -- her Battle­ field of 1907 pointing down the century, borough the Kaiser miscarriage arid then the Nazi, to the bombed out Munich of 1943, with the same Richard Strauss, in octogenarian gloom, composing his last Metamorphoses. (fade ) al07) Kaethe Kollwitz 1921, Lithograph, Gefallen bl07) Kollwitz 1924, Lithograph, Nie wieder Krieg 107) Double of the Kollwitz lithographs [video various details and order) �^ f C.G. Bell ^ Between Wars - 39 MUSIC: Metamorphosen cont., forte (3/4" into record) And when the first trench slaughter had eased, it was Kaethe Kollwitz whose lithographs would show the Weimar racking of the soul — 1921,the despair of "Killed in Action", beside the 1924 wish-spasm of "No More War", a cleavage romantic realism heightens toward schyzophrenia. It is still Hegel's paradoxical rise out of a fruit turned to poison; still the Western cycle as convergence of G&tterdammerung and paradisical hope. (fade Metamorphosen) al08) George Grosz 1915-22, "Dawn", vatercolor XV, from Ecco Homo bl08) Grosz 1915-22, "Man is Good", vatercolor XII, from Ecce Homo 108) Schwitters 1919, Construction for a Noble Lady, Los Angeles County _____Museum (with video detail) ________________________ ____________ MUSIC: Metamorphosen cont., piu forte (just before middle) If the stock market searches economic futures, how the depth-confessions Hitler would trample xinder, had foretold the death of bourgeois values: like the 1919 invective of Pound: home to old lies and new infamy usury age-old and age—thick, and liars in public places; this Dada Schwitters, "Construction for a Noble Lady" — her imc lost in the jvink assemblage of "a botched civilization" — Schwitimers own poems of nonsense soxind: "rakete rinnzekete/ rakete rinnzekete/ rakete rinnzekete/ Beeeee/ bO." those Nazi art-banishers. They knew, Yet how pig-headedly wrong, to think they could shore — against world hurricane Adolf^w Hitler c. 1925?, Corinthian Ruins, Life, Oct. 30, 1939--whatever right they ranted to save. Where Hitler's early paintings glean the nostalgia of ruins. Staggering that the wielder of so timid a brush, veered into �C.G. Bell * _ Between Kars^- *40^ politics to stave off Spenglerian decay, should have loosed such Apocalypse on Europe. (fade Metamorphosen) liPl Paul Klee 1939, Aspiring Angel, private coll'n (with video dPfa.’i) MUSICI Metamorphosen, cont. (slow, 1 * from end) Geman Bodernism Went Into exile. The year of Hitler's rise, Klee, dirolesea from the oSsseldorf Academy, withdrew to his home in Switzerland, with what sad self-mockery this 1939, Aspiring Angel comment, on the arti.f . approaching death and the disaster Of the earth-scene. (fade) ^ideo^mldrift^^detail) H®^^ald, plaster. Die Kunst, 1943 (with 11.1a) Same, Herald, upper detail MUSIC; Metamorphosen, cont. (after pause. Against that poignant foreclosure, official German art (like a Wehrmacht invasion), stormed the northeast quadrant of our style chart — the yea-cry of realist reaction. Arno Bfecker, most favoured eculptor of the Third Reich, modelled for all the totalitarian sanity and strength that must prop up the sagging West. (fade) Gross 1938, A Piece of my World, Gallery, Newark NJ Ijjaj Same, gross- My Vend, d.tsll f.ts.h MUSIC; Metamorphosen, concl. (last bars) Irom that upheaval, what could the old avant-garde of embittered excoriation.do but record, from the stations of their exile (with Mann and Hindemith in an already crusading America; or with Strauss indeed, immured in wartime Munich), the confirmation of their worst fears; these mouldy scarecrow veterans of George Gross's "A Piece of my World", (end Strauss, Metamorphosen) What we have followed to the pathos of this terminus, might be called the outward motion. �■ -I - - ..... ..—— =- ^;g. Bell — Between Kars - 41 .all3) Picasso 1937, Guernica, Final state, Picasso Museum, Barcelona 113) Picasso Double^ 1937, Studies for Horse and Woman with dead child (video also singles) A year earlier Picasso, painting for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris Exposition the great political picture of between-wars (the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by Nazi planes in Franco's hire), Picasso advanced from graphic sketches — this anguished horse, still in touch with ^ * % Delacroix; this mother and dead child, charged withg the residuum of romantic outrage — 114) Detail of Guernica, left, with woman and horse (final state) to an apocalyptic abstraction, in which modern vision (by paradox) vaults the falls of its outwardness. It is what SchCJnberg stretched over a lifetime, 2nd 113A) Again Study for Horse 2nd 113B) Again Study for Woman and Child 2nd 113a) Guernica, Study for Sun's rays & Corn from Warrior's MUSIC; SchMnberq 1899, climax & epiohanv from the Transfjqnr«:>H ' ---- - Night, Turnabout TV 4032 S from the climax and Epiphany of the Transfigured Night, (skip to Epiphany and fade) 2nd 114A) Again Picasso Guernica, right detail, horse 2nd 114B) Again Picasso Guernica, left detail, woman and child ■£Pg.. 114a) Same, Guernica, detail of Flowers from Warrior's Sword Hand______ MUSIC; SchCfriberg 1936, from Violin Concerto, near opening. Col. M2S 679 to the,12-tone transemotionality of the 1935 Violin Concerto — such a calcining as Camus would bring to the agonies of La Peste (1947); This hioman form,. .lacerated by the spear-thrusts of the plague, consumed by searing superhuman fires, buffeted by all the raging winds of heaven, was foundering under his eyes in the dark flood of the pestilence, and l^e could do nothing to avert the wreck. (fade SchUnbera) Without that Nietzschean crucible of dangerous conversion, how could Rilke's Duino Elegies have brought (in the last) hazel katkins from the land of pain? �Between C.G« Bell \ ^ alls) Franz Marc 1913, The Bewitched Mill, Art Institute, Chicago (with video detail) 115) Double: again allS, Marc's Mill; and Paul Klee 1922, Twittering Machine, Museum of Modern Art, NYC 115a) Single 115B, again Klee's Twittering Machine [video only] 115b) Klee 1924, Dance of the Red Shirts, private coll'n, Bern, Switzerland ^ i MUSIC: Webern 1909, first of Five Pieces, Opus 5, V-LM/LSC 2531 On the brink of the First War, when the Elegies were begun, Franz Marc's Enchanted Mill had explored such transreal discovery as would lead Rilke, guided by a youthful sorrow, "from the streets of the grief-city", far out ("Weit, wir wohnen dort draussen") — Lightly she leads him on through the wide landscape of Laments — to the rock source of joy, "a carrying stream." But Marc was Jcilled at Verdun; and it was Klee, who in ironic miniatures, whimsied by Dada and the Surreal, this 192*2 Twittering Machine (right) , would pursue the Blaue Reiter search, even to the Second War. ^ In music, Schonberg's pupil Webern — subtle and terse as Klee — had been working since 1909, (here the first of his Opus 9 pieces), toward an ultimate suspension of modernity. But could either Klee or Webern take up the starred secrets of Rilke's Symbolist journey? (fade Webern) 116) Lehmbruck 1911, Kneeling Woman, Municipal Museum, Duisburg (with video detail) 116a) Same, Woman, detail of Head MUSIC: Berg 1935, from Vln Concerto, Pt.II, before Death Agony, ---------------------------------- ;------ Philips ST 802 785 LY For that transcendence of Romantic, "we, wasters of sorrow", turn in music to Berg's 1935 Violin Concerto on the death of Manon Gropius; and in art, why not to Lehmbruck, prodigy of the mining Ruhr, who modelled this Kneeling Woman in 1911, about when the roar of the Adriatic ^ave Rilke the opening of the First Elegy, "Who, if I cried out, would hear me, among the angelic �p ^^,G. Bell Between Kars - 43 orders?", and soon after, of the Tenth: "That I, issuing at last from destroying visions/ May break into jubillant praise for assenting angels." }^2\1913, Ascendant Youth, detail, Mun. Mus., Duisburg 117a} Same, Youth, whole Lslides opposite order} With Lehmbruck's Ascendant Youth of 1913, sorrow stretches like Rilke's "tall teartrees", his "fields of blossoming', sadness", up toward the stars of "the Land of Pain:..." (fade and skin tn _____ ____ ___ ~ death agonv) Varrlor, cement. Museum, Puleburg The Great War whelmed Lehmbruck in the 1916 Fallen Warrior. Such in Berg's Concerto, is the last agony of Manon Gropius. But when the Berg, from that 12 tone struggle, feels its way toward Bach's hymn to death, "Es ist genug", m 119) Lehmbruck 1918, Praying Woman, cement, Duisburg _119a) Same, Praying woman, detail of head_______________________________ it is as if Lehmbruck had brought from war itself his 1918 Praying Girl) or Rilke, in bhat rock gorge, discovered the spring of joy: **die Quelle der Freude:* They stand at the foot of the range. And there she embraces him weeping. Alone he climbs to the mountains of primal pain. And never once does his step resound from the soundless fate. (fade Bero) 120) Lehmbruck 1918, Heads of Lovers, cement, Duisburg 120a) Variant of 119, Praying Woman, Kunsthalle, Hamburg (CGB '86) (with video detail) 120b) Again 120, Heads of Lovers, detail MUSIC: same Bero, close i*' Lehmbruck's final Heads of Loves, already breathing the Orphism of his suicide, that we scale (with the close of the m Berg, and of the Rilke), the height of Between Wars — a mystery we claim — earth wrinkling behind us like a pricked balloon. �C.G. Bell Between Kars 3gs And yet, were they waking a likeness yithin us, the endlessly look, they'd be pointing, perhaps, to the catkins, hanging from empty hazels, or else they'd be meaning the rain that falls on the dark earth in the early Spring. — der fallt auf dunkles Erdreich im friiVijahr — And we, who have always thought of happiness climbing, would feel the emotion that almost startles when happiness falls. I Und wir, die an steiaendes Gluck denken, empfanden die Rtihrung, die iins beinah destfirzt, wenn ein GlAckliches fSllt. (close of Berg) ^ � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 44 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Between Wars -- 20th Century, Art and Politics, Symbolic History, Part 35 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 35 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_35_Between_Wars--20th_Cantury_Art_and_Politics https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/3442acd392591761ba3f62b62561ee8d.pdf 4609f28c8a20d729613b2f498485e92d PDF Text Text C.G. Bell Symbolic History SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 28. Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 1) Blake, c. 1790 (inscribed 1780), "Glad Day" engraving, British Museum, London Blake's Albion as rebel Orc (dated 1780, but engraved ten years later) announces a threefold prophecy: One: Innocence: In the "Glad Day" of free desire "everything that lives is holy": (America 6) Let the slave grinding at the mill run out into the field: Let him look up into the heavens & laugh in the bright air; ...his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open... For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease. 2) Blake, 1794 (1818), Urizen, pl. 17, The Fall, Library of Congress (Rosenwald) Two: Experience: In the material world that proclamation of hope enters an Orccycle, an eternal Fall, as from Lucifer to Satan: "serpent form'd... Lover of wild rebellion, and transgressor of God's Law" (America 7). Where ''Rintrah roars and shakes his fires," Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood can only shade into terror: "The Winepress of Los is call'd War on Earth." 3) Blake, 1804-20, Jerusalem, pl. 76, Albion Worshipping Christ, Mellon Three: Regeneration: In this plate from Blake's last prophetic book, Jerusalem, the Orc-Albion of his rebel youth turns the cruciform joy toward Christ self-sacrificed on the tree of prohibition. June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 1 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History These are not (and that is the crux of Blake's prophecy) Hegelian sequences of time, but simultaneous states of every clarified vision. For 2nd 2) Detail of The Fall Thus the arm-spread gesture is preserved through the snake-wrapped fall into our cramped Ulro of imbruted sense and mind's repression — a complicity of Blake-Orc, Satan and Christ — "Luvah, King of Love, thou art the King of Rage and Death" (Four Zoas, v, 42); and "The Lamb of God clothed in Luvah's Robes" (Four Zoas viii, 62) — For 2nd 1) Glad Day, detail, worm, moth, etc.; video then shows the whole 2nd 1a) Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1492, Canon of Proportions, Academy of Fine Arts, Venice 2nd 1b) Glad Day, center detail; + V detail of head already shown in the "Glad Day," under which Blake would write (after 1800): "Albion arose from where he labour'd at the Mill with slaves. Giving himself for the Nations he danced the dance of Eternal Death." In his break with the Venetian oil shadowing of his own time — "Go send your Children to the Slobbering School" — Blake claimed the clarity and defining line of Renaissance, Michelangelo and Raphael, the canons of intellectual form: "A tear is an intellectual thing." Here he turns the proportions of anatomy as formulated by Vitruvius and drawn by Leonardo and Dürer, into a leap of freedom. Music: Joseph Haydn, 1772, 4th movement (middle), F Minor Quartet, Op.20, #5, Qualiton SLFX 1133a Similarly in the Revolutionary fugue, baroque discipline heightens the defiance of release. First Haydn's Opus 20 makes the old order spirit's battleground. (fade Haydn) 3rd 2) Again, detail of The Fall; first, video close detail Sixteen years later, Mozart took off in his fiercest fugue, the C Minor of 1788: June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 2 �C.G. Bell Music: 2nd 3) Symbolic History Mozart, 1788, close, fugue of Adagio and Fugue K. 546, G DB 3391 (end) Again, Albion Worshipping Christ, detail of Christ; first, video detail of Albion Beethoven climaxed the sequence in the Grosse Fuge of 1825. Music: 4) 5) Beethoven, 1825, from the Grosse Fuge, through) Col. M5L-277 (c. l/3 Blake, 1823-4, Job, (watercolor) pl. 14, upper detail, Angels as "The Morning Stars," New Zealand Same, pl. 15, above, God and Job, below, Behemoth and Leviathan, New Zealand (video: lower detail only) (fade Grosse Fuge) That fugal energy presupposes the inwrought joy of conflict. a2nd 4) 2nd 4) 2nd 4a) Again, Job, pl. 14, central and lower sections: God, with Job group beneath Same, whole; + V closer detail of angel-stars Blake, 1825, Same, lower section, from the Engraved Design, Leviathan beneath, British Museum, London At the height of the illustrations for Job, the outcast of Uz, with whom Blake increasingly identified — that I cannot live without doing my duty to lay up treasures in heaven... I have long made up my mind, & why this should be made an objection to Me, while Drunkenness, Lewdness, Gluttony & even Idleness itself, does not hurt other men, let Satan himself Explain — Job sees his cloud-cave of misery and false friends, embraced in the cruciform likeness of his Divine Imagination, with sun-reason and passion-moon, and above, the eternal singing of the morning stars. Such the vision of which Blake wrote to Butts, the patron who, as Palmer would testify, ''for years stood between the geatest designer in England and the workhouse": Till the Jewels of Light, June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 3 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Heavenly Men beaming bright, Appear'd as One Man. Who complacent began My limbs to infold In his beams of bright gold... In the engraved plate, Leviathan coils in the margin below; 2nd 5) Again, Job, (watercolor) pl. 15, whole, God shows Job Behemoth, and Leviathan while the next design shifts the threefold scheme downward. Job's God, above, points through this cloud-hollow, to the depths of our subconscious Egypt, the time-and-space sea of war and repression: "Behold now Behemoth" (and Leviathan) "which I made with thee." 6) Blake, 1808, Last Judgment, watercolor, Petworth House, Sussex (video: a sequence of details only: cf. V6a, b, and c) For Blake Judgment is the ecstasy which subsumes all that. It is not, as with the orthodox (even Michelangelo), a post-temporal reward or punishment. whenever any Individual Rejects Error and Embraces Truth a Last Judgment passes upon that Individual… His whole rejection of materialism and jealous condemnation, of "Bad Art and Science" and the emergence of energy as Eternal Delight, swirls, as within a symbolic skull, around the forgiveness of the redeemed Humanity: Mental things alone are Real... Error, or Creation, will be Burned up & then & not till then Truth or Eternity will appear. It is Burnt up the Moment men cease to behold it... Those thrown down on Christ's left are not vicious persons, ''but States Signified by those Names" — stations, through which individuals pass. 7) 7a) Last Judgment (1808) superimposed on life-mask of Blake (by J. S. Deville, 1823); with video details of forehead and features) Life-Mask, 1823, (J. S. Deville), profile, National Portrait Gallery, London June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 4 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History V7b) Blake, c. 1805, watercolor, God Writing Upon the Tables of the Covenant, National Gallery, Edinburgh V7c) Again, Deville Life-Mask, full face 7d) Blake, Double: [A] Songs of Innocence, 1789, pl. 25; and [B] Songs of Experience, 1794, pl. 39; both (Rosenwald) copy of 1825-26, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.; + V details The whirling of that Judgment within that deep-browed head set Blake further from the life (for him the death) of his time than any other creator has ever been. I am laid by in a corner as if I did not Exist... Profit never ventures upon my Threshold, tho' every other man's doorstone is worn down into the very Earth by the footsteps of the fiends of commerce. There elation — I have Conquer'd, and shall Go on Conquering. Nothing can withstand the fury of my Course among the Stars of God & in the Abysses of the Accuser — and loss — Tuesday, Janry. 20, 1807, between Two & Seven in the Evening — Despair — with cheerful work — in Palmer's words "practically sane, steady, frugal and industrious''; and in Blake's letters: I go on Merrily with my Greek & Latin... am now learning my Hebrew... I read Greek as fluently as an Oxford scholar... I live by Miracle. I am Painting small Pictures from the Bible... The Ruins of Time builds Mansions in Eternity — sustained those "enjoyments of Genius'' which, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, look "like torment and insanity." So Leigh Hunt of the 1809 Exhibition: William Blake, an unfortunate lunatic, whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement... fancies himself a great master, and has painted a few wretched pictures... unintelligible allegory... very badly drawn... of which he has published a Catalogue... the wild effusions of a distempered brain... June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 5 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History So Wordsworth (shown the Songs of Innocence and of Experience thirty-five years after their appearance — Blake still producing in always more divine obscurity): There is no doubt this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott! a8) 8) Blake, 1804-18, Jerusalem (Rinder copy), pl. 76, Christ on the Cross, detail (video: closer detail only) Bernini, 1669, Terra-Cotta model, Equestrian Louis XIV, Gallery Borghese, Rome; + V details The price, in that Augustan extension of Baroque and Enlightenment, of Blake's personal reshaping of radical Christianity. Music: Händel, 1742, Messiah, Overture, allegro (close), Philips C 71 AX 300 (side 1) Since what had come to dominance in Christendom was the secular antithesis: the rational, realist and assertive pomp of Bernini's Louis XIV: in thought "this Newtonian Phantasm/ This Voltaire & Rousseau: this Hume & Gibbon & Bolingbroke/ This Natural Religion," "Covering Cherubs... of the... Tabernacle of Bacon, Newton & Locke." We cannot know if Blake, who sang his lyrics to his own tunes, would have specified also the music which Europe was vaulting to the keystone of Händel's Messiah, though he implies as much: "Music as it exists in old tunes or melodies... is Inspiration"; "Demonstration, Similitude & Harmony are Objects of Reasoning..." (fading the Overture) 9) 9a) John Closterman, c. 1711, Duke of Marlborough, Royal Hospital, Chelsea (video detail only, then whole after Blenheim Palace) Sir John Vanbrugh, 1705-22, Blenheim Palace, North Court over Ha-ha (CGB '84) A grandeur the great Duke of Marlborough turned on its origins in the Battle of Blenheim — as, in the monstrous palace so named, he outflanked the vaunts of Louis. (having skipped to the close of the Overture) 10) David, 1800, Napoleon on Horseback, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna; + V detail June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 6 �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Cherubini, 1815, Symphony in D (close), RCA-LSC 3048 In the hundred year shift from Baroque through Neo-classic to Revolutionary, what David's mounted Napoleon charges with romantic impulse is the old assertion — still for Blake, Urizen's conquest of the space-plotted material earth: "Let each choose one habitation/...One curse, one weight, one measure/ One King, one God, one Law." In Cherubini, whom Napoleon asked why his music was so Germanic, complex, and noisy, the crescendo of Haydn and Mozart swells toward Beethoven. (end Cherubini) Yet the very fugues we earlier compared with Blake coil in that plot we have called his antithesis. As he himself wrote: "I must invent a system or be enslaved by another man's". How roundly our Western equestrians converge in formulable consciousness, 11) 11a) South Indian Hindu, late 16th cent., Mounted Warrior, Horse Court, Spirangam Blake, 1793 (1825 copy), Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pl. 27, detail of leaping horses, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge a contrast will reveal: this mounted warrior from South India about fifty years before the Bernini Louis XIV. Its huge energies are mythopoetic. Of course it exists in space and time, but not as determined there. Its battle is of another realm than Marlborough's at Blenheim or Napoleon's crossing the Alps. With Blake, Western temporality seeks such a realm. Music: 12) V12a) Beethoven, 1807-8, 3rd Rasumovsky Quartet, last movement, fugue, Col. ML 5587 Blake, 1809, The Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan, Tate Gallery, London (here, video details only) Blake, 1805(?), The Spiritual Form of Pitt Guiding Behemoth, Tate Gallery, London (video then returns to Nelson Guiding Leviathan, detail and whole) Though leaping eternal horses illuminate his pages, it is hard to think Blake could have mounted monumental Pegasus — even had he been commissioned, as he proposed, June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 7 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History to fresco the halls of England (Beethoven commissioned by Count Rasumovsky). (fade Quartet) Blake's most public designs were this Nelson guiding Leviathan and Pitt guiding Behemoth, inspired, the Descriptive Catalogue tells us, by Asiatic and Biblical originals seen in vision — source of all Greece and Rome owed to the Muse of Memory. Here, as in "those wonderful originals'', ''more is meant than meets the eye." Nelson is Hero in the ambivalent mode of Urizen, sterile delimiter: ''Father of Jealousy, be thou accursed from the earth." He stands on the serpent of rational and material power, which Job would see in the abyss; it wreathes and swallows the nations, reined by the haloed British angel of Establishment: (Europe 10) June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 8 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Then was the serpent temple form'd, image of infinite Shut up in finite revolutions, and man became an Angel, Heaven a mighty circle turning; God a tyrant crown'd. a13) b13) 13) 13b) Blake, 1827, Dante Engravings, Whirlwind of Lovers, detail, lower left, Brit. Mus., London; with video details (cf. Va13 and views of the whole) Blake, 1793, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pl. 20, Snake-Leviathan, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge Again, Whirlwind of Lovers, whole (video adds details of Paolo and Francesca, Dante and Virgil, cf. V13a) Same, detail of the englobed kiss The French have submitted to paradox only in their broken, Pascalian phase. English empiricists and Newtonians eschew it, Berkeley as rationally as any: ''Impossible even for an infinite mind to reconcile contradictions." But the Italo-Germans, from Bruno through Leibniz to Schelling, burn in the flame of mating opposites. Where they systematize paradox, Blake intuitively rides it: "Without Contraries is no progression". In his moony Beulah "Contrarieties are equally true" — far more in "the great Wars of Eternity, in fury of Poetic Inspiration." At the Judgment close of Jerusalem, with the eternal forms of nature and life (even Bacon, Newton, Locke, fourfold clarified) awaking to immortality, Blake sees ''the all wondrous Serpent clothed in gems & rich array Humanize." So in the Dante engraving of Paolo and Francesca (at the end of Blake's life), it is as the coiled suppressed snake of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell ("advancing toward us with all the fury of a spiritual existence'') that the whirlwind sucks up lovers from stormy Ulro, a fugal flame of bondage tilted skyward like a vine. Music: Beethoven, 1807-8. 3rd Rasumovsky Quartet, last movement, close, Col. ML 5587 While Dante swoons under the radiant kiss to the ground of repressive thorns. 14) Blake, 1793 (1825 copy), Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pl. 3, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (now two slides, A: detail above, and B: detail below; to which the video adds the whole, V14, and closer details) (end Beethoven) June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 9 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Blake was 33 when he began The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: "As a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its advent: the Eternal Hell revives," taking his own birth for the fulfillment of a Swedenborgian prophecy — Blake stretched at the top of the page in the delight of creative fire; and below: "Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to human existence." The page epitomizes Blake, both accepting and at war with the poised antinomies, Innocence and Experience, the kiss of joy, the birth in pain. Music: 15) Again, Mozart, 1788, Fugue from the Adagio and Fugue in C Minor, opening, G DB 3391 Blake, 1794 (copy of 1818), Urizen, pl. 24, The Four Elements, Rosenwald, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.; first, video details From his earliest years Blake was compelled to frame existence in recurrent wheels of two, three and four; and yet to give himself in impassioned identification to a freedom that defies them. Of these elements: Water, Earth, Air, Fire, prototypes of his later Life-powers the Zoas, it is Blake's destiny to be Fire, yet linked with the others in vital strife — (as in Mozart's C Minor Fugue) a frenzy almost intolerable to Hegelian programmers. Such in Urizen is the petrifaction of Body through seven ages of dismal woe: A roof, shaggy, wild inclos'd In an orb his fountain of thought; or in ''The Mental Traveller'' the reciprocating historical gyres, from burning Babe and Woman Old, through freezing Age and Female Babe, back to frowning Babe and Woman Old: She nails him down upon the Rock And all is done as I have told. June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight (fade Mozart Fugue) 10 �C.G. Bell 16) Symbolic History Blake, 1824-27, Dante Drawings, #4, Hell Gate, Tate Gallery, London; + V detail This is the material world created in one sense by demonic Elohim, but more deeply by Los and Jesus as an act of Mercy, to stay the fall toward Eternal Death, weaving for the fallen a protective garment of generation. It is the hell to which Dante in Luvah's red robe must be led by Virgil in the blue of Los. Its four continents appear through flame, and under the sea of Time and Space the lost Atlantis of our unity, "infinite mountains of light now barr'd out by the atlantic sea'' (Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 25:8), ''when the five senses whelm'd in deluge o'er the earth-born man." (Europe 10:10) 17) V17a) 17b) 17c) Same, Dante Drawings, #60, Primeval Giants Blake, 1793 (1799 copy), America, plate 14, detail, Snake from woman's loins, Mellon Same, America, plate 17, detail, Blake as Los-Orc, Mellon Blake, 1793 (1825 copy), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 16, Ugolino and his Sons, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge Dante's Giants deep in hell become for Blake those five earth-sunk senses, ''giant beauty and perfection fallen into dust" (Jerusalem 19:8), when man …closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern'' (Marriage of Heaven and Hell 14). Only touch (hardly differentiated here) opening through the entire body into the ecstasy of sex (''The lust of the goat is the bounty of God"), yet smitten, like Job, with boils (Tiriel's fifth daughter, left alive, but with her hair turned to snakes) — only touch affords a model for cleansing the rest: the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy whereas it now appears finite & corrupt. This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment. (Marriage of Heaven and Hell 14) Yet the giants brood, whelmed in hell, like pot-bellied Hume, Concerning Human Understanding: "there appears not, throughout all nature, any one instance of connection which is conceivable by us." And Blake: "Doubt, doubt, & don't believe without experiment." June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 11 �C.G. Bell 18) Symbolic History P. G. Batoni, 1776, Marshal Cyril G. Razumowski, Razumowski Collection, Vienna (with various video details) Blake's Hell was just the Enlightenment court painters of the 18th century were celebrating; as Battoni did this earlier Razumowski, with his classics and copies of classics — (Blake) the silly Greek & Latin slaves of the sword... We do not want either Greek or Roman models if we are but just & true to our own imaginations — the displayed medals for royal intrigue — (Lord Chesterfield to his son) I reccmmended to you in my last an innocent piece of art, that of flattering people behind their backs, in presence of those who... will not fail to repeat, and even amplify, the praise to the party concerned — Chesterfield, who as Johnson observed, taught the morals of a whore in the style of a dancing master: your dancing-master (he wrote that son) is at this time the most useful and necessary of all the masters you have or can have. While the Earl of Shaftesbury extended the decorum of dress to literature: I hold it very indecent that a man should publish his meditations or solitary thoughts. These are the froth & scum of writing which should be unburdened in private and consigned to oblivion, before the writer come before the world as good company. 19) J. Reynolds, 1787, Lord Heathfield, Governor of Gibralter, National Gallery, London; + V details June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 12 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Against that Old Regime of Form, this Reynolds 1787 defender of Gibralter seems to herald the new republic of Humanity — as if Lord Heathfield were George Washington, roused by the strains of Lallan Burns: ''Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled": Lay the proud usurper low! Tyrants fall in every foe! Liberty's in every blow! Let us do or die! Yet Reynolds was Blake's despised priest of establishment: This man was Hired to Depress Art... A Pretence of Art: To Destroy Art. Reynolds or Chesterfield, Whig or Tory, all shared the Enlightened fabric Blake had pursued from childhood with "contempt and abhorrence" — Montesquieu: of the necessary tie between laws and the constitution of each government, of its manners, climate, religion, commerce... 20) Blake, 1794 (copy of 1818), Urizen, plate 3, Los striding in flames, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.; + V detail While Blake, Los-Orc striding in flame, cries what his cry almost makes true: ''Ages are All Equal, But Genius is Always Above the Age." Music: a21) 21) 21a) Beethoven, 1807, Fugal bit from lst movement, lst Rasumovsky Quartet, HS Q-41, or other (Quartet fades for Hammerklavier) Blake, 1794 (1815 copy), Urizen, plate 18, Los in Flames, Rosenwald, Library of Congress, Washington D.C. (video: detail only) Blake, 1804-18, Jerusalem (Rinder), plate 26, Hand and Jerusalem, Rinder Collection Blake, 1793, "Fire," from the Gates of Paradise (3rd State), Miss Carthew Collection June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 13 �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Beethoven, 1818-19, Sonata in B Flat (Hammerklavier), opening of fugue, Seraphim IC/ 6066 Yet in what sense above the age, where the cruciform gesture of delight hardens to the vulture oppression of Hand — Jerusalem's news of freedom script for a Reign of Terror: Rebellion struck the tyrant dead, Became a tyrant in his stead. Thus the fugal play of the lst Rasumovsky turns to the time-tangle of the Hammerklavier — of all late Beethoven fugues: as when Schindler visited in l819 and heard from the next room the hammerings and howlings of the Missa Solemnis Creed, ''the door opened & Beethoven stood before us with distorted features... as if he had been in mortal combat with the whole host of contrapuntists, his everlasting enemies." 22) Goya, 1815-24, Proverbs 7, Matrimonial Folly, etching (Dover); + V detail (fade Hammerklavier) The rational mode of that crisis had been satire, the acid of Swift, which spills into the new century most fiercely in Goya — this Matrimonial Folly from the Proverbs. Blake too had begun with satire, in An Island in the Moon: Hail Matrimony made of Love To thy wide gates how great a drove On purpose to be yok'd do come; Widows & maids & Youths also That lightly trip on beauty's toe Or sit on beauty's bum. For 2nd 21) Blake, 1795, "Good" and "Evil" Angels struggling for a Child, Tate Gallery, London (video: detail of "Evil" only) No doubt all Blake's Ulro pictures have that cutting edge; and in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the seven church houses of brick in which ''monkeys, baboons, & all of that species" June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 14 �C.G. Bell 2nd 22) Symbolic History Again, Goya, Matrimonial Folly, detail are ''grinning and snatching at one another... the weak... caught by the strong, and with a grinning aspect, first coupled with, & then devour'd," as recklessly envenoms Swift, 23) Chardin, c. 1736(?), Monkey Antiquary, Chartres (other versions, Louvre, etc., are variously dated) as Swift's lacerated heart had soured the prevailing monkey-play — this pensive antiquary by Chardin. With Storm and Stress, such irony is everywhere possessed by alienating furies, personal, demonic, political. So Blake to the Reverend Trusler, who had contemned his pictures: I really am sorry that you are fallen out with the Spiritual World... you ought to know that what is Grand is necessarily obscure to weak men... 24) Rowlandson, c. 1802, Blood Royal: the detested Duke of Cumberland, British Museum, London; + V detail Blake, 1825-27, Dante, plate 27, Hell 14, Capaneus the Blasphemer (as rebel hero), British Museum, London Blake, c. 1826, The body of Abel found by Adam and Eve, Tate Gallery, London V24a) a25) I perceive that your Eye is perverted by Caricature Prints, which ought not to abound so much as they do... The caricaturist was Rowlandson, whose caustic pen had etched every phase of Georgian excess, as in this 1802 depiction of the hated Duke of Cumberland. But to Blake (though republican friend of Tom Paine) the satiric, stripped of prophecy, seemed trivial. Again to Trusler: I know that This World is a World of Imagination & vision. I see Every thing I paint in This World but Every body does not see alike. To the Eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun... Music: b25) Beethoven, 1818-9, Hammerklavier, closing fugue, conclusion, Seraphim IC 6066 Caspar David Friedrich, c. 1810, Landscape with Rainbow, formerly Staatliche Kunstsammlung, Weimar, now lost June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 15 �C.G. Bell c25) 25) Symbolic History Goya, 1825-28, Milkmaid, Prado, Madrid (video: detail only) Blake, 1804-18 (printed 1820), Jerusalem, plate 37, Albion sustained by Christ etc., Mellon Collection, Washington D.C.; + V details, as V25a If the giants of 1800 share a prophetic reforging of the Enlightened and sophistic heritage, Blake has this Pascalian distinction: In the others, when, as in Beethoven's Hammerklavier, the demonic battle eases, (Hammerklavier, sempre dolce cantabile) it is into the irradiated "calm that nature breathes among the hills and groves" (even Goya's last Milkmaid takes that gleam); whereas in Blake, any such respite hangs between Ulro and the flaming wars of Eternity, a sleep of dreams in moony Beulah: It is not nature but Christ who sustains this fainting Albion ("between the Palm tree and the Oak of weeping"), Albion's left foot planted on the winged red sun of chaos, his knee as in false prayer to that Druid oak of sacrifice, while below Urizen's starry sky, his Emanation, Jerusalem, vegetates on an arc-bier in the sea of time and space, ravened over by the vulture specter of possessive jealousy (caricature indeed, but far from Rowlandson). As the Reverend Dibdin said: "The sublime and grotesque seemed...forever amalgamated in his imagination." (fade Hammerklavier) 26) 26a) 26b) Blake, 1804-1818 (printed 1820), Jerusalem (Census copy E, "Stirling"), plate 99, Reunion of Soul and God, Mellon Collection, Washington D.C. (video: details only) Same, Jerusalem, Title page August Klöber, c. 1812(?), portrait of Beethoven (video returns to a detail of 26a, Spectre of Jerusalem) At the close of Jerusalem, in the union of soul and God, it is ambiguous (because complementary) whether the dark-haloed brooding God is drawn down by the "eternal womanly" into hell flames of generation, or she upward into the ecstasy where those "furnaces of affliction" are the fountains of life. The text reads: June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 16 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History All Human Forms identified even Tree Metal Earth & Stone, all Human Forms identified, living going forth & returning wearied Into the Planetary lives of Years Months Days & Hours reposing And then Awaking into his Bosom in the Life of Immortality. And I heard the Name of their Emanations they are named Jerusalem. No wonder vegetated Southey fled from that visit when Blake showed him "a perfectly mad poem called Jerusalem": his madness was too evident, too fearful. It gave his eyes an expression such as you would expect to see in one who was possessed. What fear, in Christian England, of divine possession! Beethoven had it better in Faustian Germany. (here the Hammerklavier comes in again for the closing bars) 27) Hogarth, 1758, The Bench, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; + V detail The curse of satire, the blessing of heart, embrace the comic reality Fielding admired in Hogarth. These 1758 judges on the bench are just such as bear the brunt in Amelia, Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews: (the bribed justice of Joseph and Fanny) ''I have only ordered them to Bridewell for a month." — ''But what is their crime?"..."A kind of felonious larcenous thing. I believe I must order them a little correction too, a little stripping and whipping"...''Still,'' said the squire, "I am ignorant of the crime — the fact I mean." "Why, there it is in peaper,'' answered the justice... (showing the deposition about the breaking of a twig) ''Jesu!" said the squire, ''would you commit two persons to Bridewell for a twig?" — "Yes," said the lawyer, ''and with great lenity too; for if we had called it a young tree, they would have been both hanged." 28) Hogarth, 1757, Garrick and his Wife, Royal Collection, Windsor; + V detail At the same, time, Hogarth painted this portrait of Garrick working late, his wife teasing him to bed. Here is the impulsive humanity which — limbed round with the scalpel of wit — makes Fielding promise his heroes and heroines a lifetime of actual good: June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 17 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Mr. Jones appears to be the happiest of all humankind; for what happiness this world affords equal to the possession of such a woman as Sophia, I sincerely own I have never yet discovered. a29) 29) Blake, 1800, The Infant Jesus riding on a Lamb, formerly Stirling Collection; + V detail Hogarth, c. 1735-40, Satan, Sin, and Death, Tate Gallery, London Fielding had still to wrestle with the Christian calling, from Parson Adams to Amelia's benefactor: "If one of my cloth should begin a discourse of heaven in the scenes of business or pleasure... would he not... be thought by all men worthy of Bedlam?" Even Hogarth, beyond the enlightened field where Voltaire and Rousseau traffic in reason's irony and heart's worth, felt a weird stirring (through Milton, Dante, and the Bible: as in this Satan, Sin, and Death at the gate of hell) toward the evidence of things not seen — yet so whelmed in the Cartesian bulk of operatic Baroque, as almost to have lost the revelation it gropes for; though even this picture became for Blake a point of departure. 30) V30a) June 1996 Double: [A] Bosch, 1506-8, Fragment of a Judgment, detail, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59); and [B] Rubens, c. 1620 (copy), Fall of the Damned, detail, Aachen Gallery (CGB '74) Titian, c. 1550-60(?), Martyrdom of St. Lawrence, lower detail, Jesuit Church, Venice (video returns to the double, 30, and then shows a detail of the Bosch, from V30A, CGB '59) Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 18 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History If spirit cannot speak without body, there remains a graded stair from stripped symbol to spatial representation. Blake's continual rage against the post-Venetian — labouring to destroy Imaginative power, by means of that infernal machine, called Chiaro Oscuro... The spirit of Titian was particularly active in raising doubts... Rubens is a most outrageous Demon — springs from an absolute clarity: that in all the 17th- and 18th-century schools, the life of Gothic invention (as in this Bosch detail) had been buried under the brown-shadowing earth-laws of codified matter. As Bosch had fleshed out Medieval symbol with Renaissance techniques, 31) Blake, 1823-24, Job, plate 11, Thou affrightest me with Dreams, New Zealand Blake had to shear Newtonian fulness into prophetic reality, though like his radical contemporaries, he sweeps the world heritage with him — in storm. Job in the 11th design, "Thou affrightest me with visions," lies on the mat of penitence under the cloven-hoofed and snake-wrapped God of his own jealous making: And is there not eternal fire and eternal chains To bind the phantoms of existence from eternal life? a32) 32) Joseph Vernet, 1773, Seaport by Moonlight, Louvre, Paris Winchester, end of the 10th cent., Pentecost, Pontifical of Archbishop Robert, Municipal Library, Rouen In the Leviathan depths of reason's limitation, of which Eliot in our time would write — Because I know that time is always time And place is always and only place — what hungers must have mounted to break through again into the realm of vision (this Winchester miniature from before 1000, where the Holy Ghost spills like molten metal to a spaceless and selfless whirl of Apostles flattened on the rainbow arch of that upper June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 19 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History room). What was Blake's madness but to heed some apostolic cry of modern consciousness? Va33) b33) 33) Blake, 1794 (copy of 1818), Urizen, plate 11, Urizen fettered weeps, Rosenwald, Library of Congress, Washington D.C. Blake, c. 1804, Milton (Census copy D), plate 16, Milton advancing disrobed, Rosenwald, Library of Congress, Washington D.C. Blake, 1804-20, Jerusalem, plate 53, detail, Vala Throned on a Sunflower, British Museum, London At Felpham false-friend Hayley (in Byron's quip, "For ever feeble and for ever tame'') tried to wean Blake from such "Abstract folly," to chain his ''feet to the world of Duty and Reality." And as Blake wrote Butts, his own return to London was that I may converse with my friends in Eternity. See Visions, Dream Dreams, & prophecy & speak Parables unobserv'd & at liberty from the Doubts of other Mortals... — to see this Vala, beauty of nature, materialize into the Female Will, throned on the sunflower of sexual desire (an ellipse of projective geometry): (Ah, Sunflower! weary of time): They took their Mother Vala & they crown'd her with gold; They named her Rahab & gave her power over the Earth, ...to destroy the Lamb & Usurp the Throne of God Drawing their Ulro Voidness round the Four-fold Humanity. (Jerusalem 78: 15-20) June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 20 �C.G. Bell 34) Symbolic History Roman Baroque, 1595 ff., Santa Trinita de' Monti with the Spanish Stair, 1723-26 (CGB '47) Music: Händel, 1742, Messiah #9, chorus: "0 thou that tellest" Philips C71 AX300 In the assertive rationalization of Christianity, Händel's Messiah, warhorse of oratorios, stands at a Urizenic limit of opacity, culmination of a century and a half of Baroque: — Rome: Santa Trinita de' Monti over the Spanish Stair; 35) Piazza Navona, Rome: Bernini, 1647-52, Fountain; Rainaldi & Borromini 1652-57, St. Agnese, etc. [slide show CGB '48; video CGB '86 with detail from CGB '48] or the Piazza Navona with Bernini's Fountain and Borromini's Church, from which, they used to say, the statue of the Nile veils his face. (close Messiah #9) 36) Claudio Coello, c. 1690, Charles II adoring the relics, Sacristy, Escorial (video: details only, above and below) Music: Messiah #12. close of chorus: "unto us a Child". Philips C71 AX300 By 1690 in Spain, Coello had opened within a frame of florid marble and bronze this extraordinary pomp of space. 37) Mexican Baroque, early 18th cent.(?), Façade and Towers, Cathedral Taxco (CGB '70) (video: upper detail only) Mexican Baroque, finished 1752, façade detail, Cathedral, Zacatecas (CGB '70) V37a) A grandeur which by the time of Handel had gathered native workmen and the remains of Indian style, as at Taxco, into the sacred conquests of the New.World. (close Messiah #12) 38) Mansart, Coypel, etc., 1661-1722, interior, columned apse, Chapel at Versailles (CGB '59); + V detail of painting Music: June 1996 Messiah #18, opening "He shall feed his flock" Philips C71 AX300 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 21 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Nor had the style-restraint of France held the Corinthian chapel of Versailles from as flagrant a proclamation of Cartesian victory. 39) Straub (with Günther?), c. 1767, Gabriel, High Altar, Berg-am-Laim, München (CGB '59); + V detail In Bavaria the currents from Italy and France fructify, as at Berg-am-Laim, in the richest outpouring of all Baroque; yet its sensuous passions but complement the underlay of heroic formulation and proud rationality. (fade Messiah #18) 40) Sabastiani Ricci, c. 1712-16, Resurrection, sketch for Chelsea Hospital, Dulwich College, London; + V detail Music: Messiah, #42. Halleluja, opening, Philips C71 AX300 About the time of Händel's coming to London, Ricci imported the festive Venetian Baroque. (fade Halleluja) 41) 41a) 41b) V41c) Thomas Archer, 1725, West Tower, Cathedral of Birmingham (CGB '74) Borromini, 1650-59, Sant' Ivo, from the Courtyard, Rome (CGB '86) Sir Christopher Wren, 1673-1711, St. Paul's Cathedral, London (CGB '77) Same, another view of the dome (CGB '77) Music: Händel, Messiah, #52, Amen, close, Philips 671 AX300 While Thomas Archer, trained in Rome, gave the tower of Birmingham a wonderful sweep of counterpointed curves. If the grandiose display of earthly religion is a Blakean antithesis, it is an antithesis which contains the fugue, already in creative struggle (like the 3-body problem in Newton) stretching the rationale it exemplifies. (close Messiah) 42) Double: [A] Bramante, 1499-1502, Tempietto, and [B] Borromini, 1642-60, Sant' Ivo; both, Rome (CGB '86); + V single of St. Ivo (from 41a) 42a) Double: [A] Raphael, 1510-11, detail of Homer, Parnassus, Vatican, and [B] Rembrandt, 1662-63, Homer dictating, fragment, Mauritzhuis, The Hague June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 22 �C.G. Bell 42b) Symbolic History Double: [A] Bramente, Tempietto, Trastevere, Rome; and [B] Raphael, 1504, Temple in La Sposalizio, Brera, Milan In Rome two courtyard chapels oppose Bramante's High-Renaissance island of calm, 1500 (left), to the Miltonic and Pascalian implosion of Borromini (right) 1650, that wagered marriage of passion and method. From its first tactile declaration, the Baroque was revolutionary, fantastically overpushing its always heroic might — to contain Blake's heaven in the laws of earth. Through what maze of paradox genius searhes its style-affinities — Blake extolling Renaissance Raphael against Baroque Rembrandt, while Milton's dark Baroque remained his creative center. "Grecian," he said, "is Mathematical Form: Gothic is Living Form." What is implied for Bramante's Temple, so linked to Raphael's in the Sposalizio? 43) Double: [A] Borromini, 1650-59, Lantern of Sant' Ivo, Rome; and [B] Borromini, 1649-52, sketch for the same, Albertina, Vienna (video uses Berlin sketch for A; see V43) What revealed of Borromini's spire-tribute to the heraldic Barberini bee? Surely its Baroque incorporates, beyond Renaissance, the soul-leap of Gothic — how transparently if, as in one of Borromini's drawings, we might experience at once its outward flaming gyre and (right) the lanterned vault within. 44) Double: [A] English Gothic, 1286-1325, Wells, Chapter House (CGB '84); and [B] Borromini, 1650-59, St. Ivo Dome, within, Rome; + V singles Here the teaching of Greece and Rome is caught up in a soaring as radical, as (three centuries before) in the Gothic groining (left) of Wells Chapter House. The music which most designedly challenges the possible is of the string tradition Bach climaxed, where an essentially one-voiced instrument delivers itself of the polyphonic and fugal. Thus Casals chose Bach's Sixth Cello Suite as the vehicle of ultimate modern reach. Music: June 1996 Bach, c. 1720, Prelude, Cello Suite No. 6 in D Major, last part, (Casals) Angel COLH 18 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 23 �C.G. Bell a45) b45) Vc45) Vd45) 45) Symbolic History Borromini, 1666-76, Façade detail, San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, Rome Same, Façade, another view (CGB '86) Same, Façade, detail over the main door (CGB '86) Same, Interior, vault with organ (CGB '86); video: detail only Same, Interior, vault (CGB '86); video: detail only Again Borromini: San Carlo of the Four Fountains. V45a) a46) Guarini, 1667, Sidona Chapel dome, Duomo, Turin (CGB '84) Narcisco Tomé, 1721-32, The Transparente Altar, in the Apse of Toledo Cathedral. Where the slide sequence opens with the central tower of carved figures only, the video draws first from the lower spread of slide 46 the same structure against clerestory windows of the choir. Middle-height of the same carved tower: a gold-rayed marble whirl of Mary and Angels From the base of the same structure, an altar with Mary and the infant Christ Vertical slide of the same: the altar tower in the window-lighted cathedral, from a glory-dome opened in the vault, down the pillar of saints and angels, to the Madonna below; here the video shows a middle-spread of the whole, and last a detail of the radiant heaven above. Vb46) Vc46) 46) (end Casals Bach) In Spain, Baroque daring peaks in the Transparente, where Tomé lifted the apse of Toledo Cathedral for a carved and painted spill of angels from Heaven's vault above, to an altar of the Virgin below. Here, as at the same time in Bach, what would seem the Blakean opposite of pyrotechnic display, swells with conscious prophecy. So Blake, to Butts, from Felpham: I have written this Poem from immediate Dictation twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines without Premeditation and even against my will… & an immense Poem exists which seems to be the labour of a long life… My heart is full of futurity. 47) Double: [A] Roman Christian, c. 420, Crucifixion, from Ivory Pyxis, British Museum, London; and [B] Irish, late 7th cent., Bronze, Crucifixion Plaque, National Museum, Dublin (with video details of singles, A before, B after) June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 24 �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Gregorian, Libera me (Burial Service), closing chorus, MHS OP 349 In Blake's merger of flesh and spirit, time and eternity, self and Christ ("Mine has a snub nose like to mine") the pendulum of Incarnation has swung all the way from ritual abstraction of God's humanity — these Crucifixions from 5th-century Rome to 700 Ireland: the spaceless distance of Gregorian Chant (with its Celtic and other irrecoverable offshoots) — to all of which Blake, in the arm-flung immediacy of Albion-Christ might say, "thou readst black where I read white." (fade with "saeculum") 48) 48a) 48b) Grünewald, c. 1512-15, Crucifixion from Isenheim Altar, Museum, Colmar; + V details of John the Baptist and Christ Same, closer detail of Christ Same, detail of the group on the left Music: Morales, published 1543, Lamentabatur Jacob, (Turner) ARC ST2533 321 From the anguished Plague Crucifixes of 14th-century Germany, to this Grünewald ordeal of sacred body, painted about 1515 for the abbey church and hospital of the Anthonites in Alsatian Isenheim, we feel the build-up of Incarnate identification — in music, the harmonic pain Morales learned from Josquin. (fade Morales, after "Heume") 49) Feichtmayr and Christian, 1747-58, Christ on the Cross, Pulpit, Zwiefalten (video details only: above, below, and Christ's head) June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 25 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Such passion, grappled into form, mediates the Baroque. In Bach's great Chaconne from the Second Partita, the Caesarian extraction of so much glory from scraped gut, adumbrates, in divine cat-fight, spirit's war on itself — as if Feichtmayr's God had "pitched his mansion in the place of excrement." Music: Bach, 1717-23(?), from Chaconne, Partita #2, Odnoposov (or better: H. Szeryng, DGG 2709-028) By the end of Bach's life, Baroque was the matrix of pre-romantic, like that Arcana Cœlestia, in which Swedenborg pours Divine Love and Wisdom through a universe of nebular astronomy, fashioning salvation, as soul fashions body. 50) 50a) Blake, c. 1799-1800, Agony in the Garden, Tate Gallery, London; + V detail Blake, 1807-08, First Temptation, watercolor, from Paradise Regained, T.H. Riches, Esq. (video: detail only) The Blake of this Agony in the Garden was reared in the Swedenborg circle of London. And though he left the prophet behind like the linen clothes folded at the tomb: Any man of mechanical talents may from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen, produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborg's, and from those of Dante or Shakespear, an infinite number — he and his art consummate the personal transcendence of Northern Baroque — in his case, of Milton. (fade Chaconne) How would Jane Austen's clergyman Pharisee — nothing to do but be slovenly and selfish… his curate does all the work, and the business of his life is to dine — have seen this mystic heir to embodiment as anything but mad?: Now the sneaking serpent walks In mild humility And the just man rages in the wilds Where lions roam. June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 26 �C.G. Bell a51) Symbolic History Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1776-77, Lady Caroline Scott as "Winter," Duke of Buccleugh, Bowhill, Selkirk Reynolds, 1788-89, Master Hare, Louvre, Paris Reynolds, 1777-80, Lady Elizabeth Delme and her Children, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; + V detail Blake, 1793 (copy of 1799), America (Census copy M), plate 11, below, Nude Children Riding a Snake, Mellon Same, upper detail, Boy riding a Swan Blake, 1794 (copy of 1818), Urizen (Census copy G), plate 21, Chain of Jealousy (Los, Enitharmon, Orc), Rosenwald, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (video: detail only) Vb51) 51) 51a) V51b) V51c) Music: Thomas Arne, c. 1751, Andante from Overture #1, Argo 2RG-577 "Active Evil, " said Blake, "is better than Passive Good." He must have shared more with the great Baroque, as with Milton, than with the social sweetness of his time: — easy Thomas Arne (through Christian Bach a likely influence on Mozart); this Sir Joshua Reynolds — no contrary, but a negation. "Reynolds & Gainsborough" (Blake wrote) "Blotted & Blurred one against the other & Divided all the English World between them. Fuseli indignant almost hid himself — I am hid." It was not just that the youthful Blake had shown Reynolds some designs and been told to correct his drawing. Nor was it envy of what was beyond him. Blake could have been successful. In his most productive period, he had taught the children of the wealthy, and, as Tatham tells, so pleased patrons of rank that he had been offered the post of tutor to the Royal family. Aghast, he surrendered his pupils, preferring want and his own art to betrayal of principle. As Southey allowed in his caustic 1809 review: "Nothing but madness had prevented him from being the sublimest painter of this or any other country. (close Arne) 52) 52a) Gainsborough, c. 1759, Painter's Daughters Chasing a Butterfly, National Gallery, London Gainsborough, c. 1762, The Painter's Daughters, Victoria and Albert Museum, London (video returns to details from Painter's Daughters Chasing a Butterfly, then to left detail from Painter's Daughters) June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 27 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Like every admired artist of the time, Gainsborough was on the social rack — as between the lacy brilliance of Lady So-and-so and the unfeed sensibility of his own daughters chasing a butterfly, or tousling each other. It was more and more the century of youth: Rousseau's Emile, Pestalozzi's invention of progressive education, leading toward Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality": Thou little child, yet glorious in the might Of heaven-born freedom on thy Being's height… Mozart was freer than Gainsborough, and paid the price; but even in him there is a spread between social performance and, as in the Romanza from the D Minor Concerto, its inspired surpassing. Music: 53) Mozart, 1785, from Piano Concerto #20, K 466, Romanza, Piano entrance ff., (Fisher) V. LCT 6013 (or Richter, Murray Hill S2957) J.A. Houdon, c. 1777, Bust of Alexandre Brogniart as a child, Louvre, Paris (cf. his Daughter Sabine, Huntington, San Marino, California); first, V detail (fade Mozart Romanza) Houdon, too, most delights in his salon skills when he models children, especially his sylphid daughter Sabine. a54) 54) 54a) 54b) George Romney, c. 1780(?), Lady Arabella Ward, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Romney, c. 1781-83, Miss Willoughby, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Blake, 1805, "The Dog" (for Hayley's Ballad), British Museum, London Jean Baptiste Isabey, 1812, Fürsten Katharina Bagration Skawronska, collection Fürst Franz Auersperg (video returns to a detail of Romney's Miss Willoughby, from 54) And Romney, who had wanted to paint Allegory and History, seems happiest when his bombast ladies freshen in the fountain of youth toward Burns' Highland Mary, or Wordsworth's Lucy, of whom Nature would say: This Child I to myself will take; She shall be mine, and I will make A lady of my own… June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 28 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Blake, after refusing the Royal Children Copley had lately painted, was saved from destitution by Hayley, given a cottage in Felpham, and, of course, set to pick-thank tasks, engraving after minor artists, decorating Hayley's Library, portraying the gentry in miniature. Miniature [he writes] is become a Goddess in my Eyes, & my Friends in Sussex say that I Excel in the pursuit. I have a great many orders, & they multiply. Until the break his poem Milton treats in symbols, with the return to poverty in London: Hayley… thinks to turn me into a Portrait Painter as he did poor Romney, but this he nor all the devils in hell will never do… 55) Blake, 1793 (copy of 1799), America, plate 7, Children Sleeping with a Ram, Paul Mellon; + V lower detail Perhaps Blake too is at his happiest with children, but his are of the Imagination, out of Georgian context altogether: Piping down the valleys wild Piping songs of pleasant glee, On a cloud I saw a child, And he laughing said to me: "Pipe a song about a lamb!" So I piped with merry cheer, "Piper, pipe that song again"; So I piped: he wept to hear. Or: Little Lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee?… He is meek, & he is mild; He became a little child… 56) English MS, early 14th cent., Angel leads St. John to Heaven, MS Roy. 19B, XII, 5v., British Museum, London; + V detail Music: June 1996 French, c. 1260(?), Codex Bamberg, Hoquetus VII, d'Amiens longum/ In seculum (4th phrase); from (Munrow) Archiv 2723 045 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 29 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Blake's pastoral Beulah reaches far back to the living innocence of the Gothic, which he copied as a boy in Westminster Abbey — this 1300 John, led up the symbolic ladder, above what Blake would have recognized as the Vegetative world. But the prepersonal suspension in creed attested by the formal faces or the bare-fifths of the music, could not have been the element of revolutionary Blake. (close Hoquetus) 57) 57a) Albrecht Dürer, 1496-98, Apocalypse Woodcuts, #14, Angel Locks Dragon in Abyss (with a view of New Jerusalem); video: details only Dürer, 1522, Self as Man of Sorrows, Kunsthalle, Bremen; first, video detail Music: Mouton, 1515, 8-voice motet, "Exsultet," 1st half, SAWT 9561-B That City, which the Angel showed John from a spirit mountain, has come to earth in Dürer, 1498, to spread over the plain by a river, like any of the Renaissance towns of Germany — as the 8-voice "Exsultet" of Mouton incorporates soul's victory. So where was Blake to look for renewal but in man's incarnate imagination: "Energy is the only life, and is from the Body"; or as he said to Robinson: "Yes, Jesus is the only God… and so am I, and so are you." His appeal was not to the Middle Ages, but to the corporeal powers of Renaissance: Dürer, Raphael, June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 30 �C.G. Bell 58) 58a) Symbolic History Double, Two Expulsions: [A] Jacobo della Quercia, 1425-38, door panel, San Petronio, Bologna; and [B] Michelangelo, 1508-18, Sistine Ceiling, Vatican; + V singles John Flaxman, 1778, Plaque from Vase of the Apotheosis of Homer, British Museum, London Michelangelo (right), with a prototype Blake could hardly have known, this 1430 della Quercia. Yet surely the physical conglobing of symbol, exhibited in this sequence, was what Blake had to reverse; as he says: "Thus is the heaven a vortex pass'd already, and the earth a vortex not yet pass'd by the traveller thro' Eternity." (end Mouton, 1st half) Though Michelangelo's fresco line, against the fog Blake scorned in Titian and Correggio, is such a carrier of force as that process of relief-etching brother Robert, dead, showed William in vision: melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid. If Blake had known Florentine art before Michelangelo, could he have called Flaxman "Dear Sculptor of Eternity"? 59) Blake, 1795, Elohim Creating Adam, Tate Gallery, London; + V details Yet he caught enough from doubtful prints (the 10-year-old boy at art auctions, Langford's "little connoisseur": "from my earliest childhood… I knew the difference between Raffaele and Rubens") to rival the ceilings of Catholic Rome — though shrunk to the illuminated privacy of a page: this 1795 Creation and Fall crushed into one. In Albion's "Chaotic State of Sleep, Satan & Adam & the whole World was Created by the Elohim" (third of the seven eyes of God, creator and judge) "a very Cruel Being." Such the dæmon who shapes, under cloud and by setting sun, this Adam stretched on the thorn bank over the Sea of Time and Space, already wrapped in the snake-spire of sin and doubt. How was Christian art to regain its ancient might but by such appropriation of heretical power? a60) 60) Blake, 1825, Job, plate 13, God Appearing in a Whirlwind, British Museum, London English, late 13th cent., St. Peter from a Retable, Westminster Abbey, London; + V detail June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 31 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History For all Blake's "Gothic is living form," his art had no backward road. With the personal fury of Goya and Beethoven, he had to launch Pascal into Revolutionary transcendence. There is none of the anonymous refinement of cloister mysticism — Westminster 1300 — with Richard Rolle of Hampole: But fleschly lufe sal fare as dose the flowre in May, And lastand be na mare than ane houre of a day, And sythen syghe ful sare thar lust, thar pryde, thar play, When thai er casten in kare til pyne that lastes ay… Jesu es lufe that lastes ay, til Hym es owre langing; Jesu the nyght turnes to the day, the dawying intil spryng. Jesu, thynk on us now and ay, for The we halde our keyng; Jesu, gyf us grace, as Thou wel may, to luf The withowten endyng. 61) 61a) Raphael and School, 1518-19, Jacob's Dream, Loggia, Vatican Blake, 1800-03, Jacob's Ladder, British Museum, London (video returns to the Jacob's Dream of 61) We can even understand Blake's admitting Giulio Romano, Raphael's chief helper in the scenes of the Loggia, as his fourth art hero. These forms are still incised; the famous capture of nature looks symbolic now; and what the scene shows is what Blake was sure of: that the sleeper in moony Beulah is offered visions of the eternal stair. We say "if Blake could have seen Giotto, Angelico, Botticelli"; but this Jacob's Dream gave him what he required. Raphael chanced on symbols, painting the Bible; 62) Blake, 1827, Queen Katharine's Dream, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; + V details Blake searched all literature for images of his own symbolic themes. Here Shakespeare's Queen Katharine, dying in detention, sees a blessed Troupe Invite me to a Banquet, whose bright faces Cast a thousand beams upon me, like the sun… It is not with but through the eye, as Los in Jerusalem June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 32 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History …beheld the Divine Vision among the flames of the Furnaces; Therefore he lived and breathed in hope… (Jerusalem 62: 35-6) So Blake, when his brother Robert died, saw the spirit rise from the body "clapping his hands for joy." And thus his own death was described by Richmond: Just before he died His countenance became fair — His eyes Brighten'd and He burst out in singing of the things he saw in Heaven. In truth He Died like a Saint. 63) 63a) Fuseli, 1786-89, Titania and Bottom, Tate Gallery, London Fuseli, 1793-94, Titania and Bottom, Kunsthaus, Zurich; first, video detail Fuseli treats Shakespeare in another mode. His are illustrations, picturesque or dramatic. It is a measure of Blake's isolation that in his life-search for co-workers he found none nearer than this Swiss-English explorer of the grotesque and fanciful: The only Man that e'er I knew Who did not make me almost spew Was Fuseli, he was both Turk and Jew. And so, dear Christian friends, how do you do? The artist who could say "Blake is damned good to steal from" had perception and humor; and there is that story of the old Blake's joining the students at the Royal Academy to sketch from the cast of the Laocoön, and Fuseli's saying: "What! you here, Meesther Blake? We ought to come and learn of you, not you from us!" But what could that irony have made of the Prophetic Books? 64) 64a) 64b) Fuseli, 1780, Thetis Mourning over Achylles, Art Institute, Chicago; + V detail George Romney, c. 1792, Witches Cave, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge Blake, c. 1808, Satan Calling his Legions, detail, formerly Lord Leaconsfield If we go back to a Fuseli drawing, Achilles mourned by Thetis, of 1780, the date Blake engraved on his "Glad Day" (though ten years after), there is no doubt that the older Swiss immigrant, already the stir of London and to influence David and Goya, helped Blake to a whole vocabulary of Mannerist gestures. But such Storm-and-Stress abstractions (with the related ink washes by Romney) end where Blake begins — their theater, his Halls of Los in Golgonooza. June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 33 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History It is hard to credit the obscurity of England's greatest living poet and artist. There is the evening at Lady Caroline Lamb's, 1820, when Blake was invited 65) 65a) 65b) 65c) Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1810, Viscount Castlereagh, National Portrait Gallery, London Blake, 1794, separate print from Urizen, plate 2, Enitharmon Floating at Dawn with Infant Orc, British Museum, London; + video return to 62, Blake, Queen Katharine's Dream, detail of Katharine Again, Viscount Castlereagh, detail Lawrence, 1819, Portrait of George IV, detail, Vatican Museum, Rome with the courtly Sir Thomas Lawrence, who painted this portrait of Viscount Castlereagh, English Foreign Secretary. Lady Charlotte Bury records: Blake… an eccentric little artist… not a regular professional painter… full of beautiful imaginations… one of those whose feelings are far superior to his situation in life… I could not help contrasting this humble artist with the great and powerful Sir Thomas Lawrence… [Lawrence] looked at me several times whilst I was talking with Mr. B., and I saw his lips curl with a sneer, as if he despised me for conversing with so insignificant a person… Later, at Linnell's urging, Lawrence bought and apparently treasured, among other Blake, Queen Katharine's Dream. Who was truly powerful? The man who lived for his vision, or the portrait flatterer of Castlereagh, of whom Byron had just written: The intellectual eunuch Castlereagh Cold-blooded, smooth-faced, placid miscreant! Dabbling its sleek young hands in Erin's gore, And thus for wider carnage taught to pant, Transferr'd to gorge upon a sister shore, The vulgarest tool that Tyranny could want… Cobbling at manacles for all mankind… As Blake had commented on Sir Joshua: The Enquiry in England is not whether a man has Talents & Genius? But whether he is Passive & Polite & a Virtuous Ass: & Obedient to Noblemens Opinions in Art & Science. If he is; he is a Good Man: If Not he must be Starved. June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 34 �C.G. Bell 66) V66a) 66b) 66c) 66d) Symbolic History Samuel Palmer, c. 1826, A Hilly Scene, Tate Gallery, London Palmer, 1830, Coming from Evening Church, detail, Tate Gallery, London Palmer, c. 1826, Self-Portrait, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford Palmer, 1835, A Pastoral Scene, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford Blake, c. 1790-93, Marriage of Heaven and Hell (copy of 1794-5), Title Page, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (video: detail only) Blake, c. 1794 (copy c. 1818), Urizen, Title Page, detail, Book of Laws, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. V66e) In Blake's age, a group of young artists gathered around him. Palmer was the genius among them, and the most possessed by Blake's vision. The little pictures he painted at Shoreham before Blake's death change the phenomenal into imagination. As Palmer quoted Blake on the vastness of space: "It is false, I walked the other evening to the end of the earth, and touched the sky with my fingers." But Palmer, too, had to suffer neglect, and he was not as strong as Blake, nor was his wife Blake's selfless Kate. His career is a pathos of compromise. Perhaps the God-tie gives the clue. Palmer's modernism is of art; Blake's of soul. It is typical that Palmer, who, seeing Blake in his plain black suit among the swells at the Royal Academy, thought "How little you know who is among you!" — that even Palmer prefaces his praise of Blake's sanity, genius, and industry, with the proviso: "Without alluding to his writings, which are here not in question." Palmer could not face the prophetic books without quaking at Blake's heresies: "Misled by erroneous spirits… he suffered fancy to trespass within sacred precincts." And Linnell, who commissioned Blake for the Dante drawings and engravings, wrote: "With all admiration… it must be confessed that he said many things tending to the corruption of Christian morals…" a67) 67) 67a) Blake, 1820, Woodcut # 11 for Virgil's First Eclogue (Thornton), British Museum, London Blake, 1820, Same, #3, proof of 1st state, British Museum Constable, 1813-14, Page from a sketch book, #1, Victoria and Albert Museum, London Among Blake's works, those that most inspired Palmer (or Linnell and Calvert, for that matter) were the 1820 woodcuts for Thornton's Virgil, (another commercial disaster), June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 35 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History and surely, their alchemizing of nature is more than magical. For Palmer, they were pictures only, freed of the apostolic; though old Thenot, glad under the boughs of fruitfulness against young Colinet, mournful under the oak of error, is, like all Blake, mystically personal. Yet how romantically full, the nature through which his threefold vision looks — like a Constable, of which he said: "Why this is not drawing, but inspiration." To which Constable: "I meant it for drawing." 68) Giovanni di Paolo, 1455-60, St. Nicholas of Tolentino Saving a Ship, Museum of Art (Johnson Collection), Philadelphia; first, video detail When Blake rebelled from the visual as model — "Natural objects always did and do weaken, deaded, and obliterate imagination in me" — he quoted Milton, preferring "devout prayer for the hallowed fire" to "Memory and her Siren Daughters." The historical shift Vasari had praised, from Gothic sharpness, as in this Giovanni di Paolo storm at sea, 69) 69a) Giorgione, Palma Vecchio, etc., c. 1510, Storm Miracle, Scuola di San Marco, Venice (video: detail only) Blake, c. 1824-26, Dante, plate 2 (Hell ii, 140), Dante and Virgil enter an oak forest, Tate Gallery, London to the cloudy bondage of the phenomenal net Blake ascribed to the malice of the Venetians — and indeed this miracle of Venice saved from a ship of demons on a stormy night, which Giorgione left for Palma and others to finish, is the first of its kind — Blake saw that shift as tied to the deceits which, from the infernal trinity of Bacon, Newton, and Locke, had spread oak groves and Druid temples over the Earth, mocking God [he writes] & Eternal Life, & in Public Collusion calling themselves Deists, Worshipping the Maternal Humanity, calling it Nature and Natural Religion… 70) Blake, 1804-05 (1815 copy), Milton, plate 42, Albion and Jerusalem on the Rock of Ages, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; with video details Music: Haydn, 1796-98, The Creation, opening, Vanguard VRS 471/2 Yet we are struck again how awesomely Blake carries natural bodies, rock, sea, and sky, across into symbol; what earth-life fills this eagle of prey transformed to the June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 36 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Eagle of Genius ("lift up thy head!") as he wakes Albion and Jerusalem from their sleep on the Rock of Ages (the actual sleep of History); and how the long slip of light on the Sea of Time and Space unfolds space itself, with all its mood and longing: — 71) Schinkel, 1803, View of Trieste, formerly Kronprinzenpalais, Berlin; + V detail almost as in this Schinkel, or later in Courbet and Böcklin — or in the musical chaos shot through with searching rays which Haydn's Creation bequeathed to Beethoven and Wagner. (fade Creation) Once Cartesian reason had precipitated Pascalian paradox, there seemed two directions mind could take: One: to forge a dialectic which, like calculus, might embrace the exhibited antinomies in organic reaffirmation (Leibniz, Hegel, Whitehead). It was for being of this camp that Wordsworth, Blake's "only poet of the age," was also called by him "a landscape painter": "I see in Wordsworth the Natural Man rising up against the Spiritual Man." a2nd 70) Blake, 1794, Europe, A Prophecy, Frontispiece, The Ancient of Days (with compasses), Sir Geoffrey Keynes For 2nd 70) Blake, c. 1804, Milton (Rinder uncolored), plate 38, detail of Albion and Jerusalem on the Rock of Ages The second, the Pascalian way — reverting to our disproportion and incapacity — must strip the temporal for saving miracle: Kierkegaard's Christ in the moment now. Yet no sooner are the possibilities formulated than they prove inadequate — any polar field admitting of infinite life-solutions. Thus Blake, who abandons nature and Cartesian reason, fires personal Christianity with more than Transcendental daring. In this, he leaps at once backward and forward from the landscape men: …in your own Bosom you bear your Heaven And Earth, & all you behold, though it appears Without it is Within In your Imagination of which this World of Mortality is but a Shadow. For 2nd 71) Schinkel, 1815, Gothic Church on a Rock by the Sea, National Gallery, Berlin; video: detail only June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 37 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 2nd 71a) Blake, 1804-20, Jerusalem (copy E), plate 28, detail, Vala and Jerusalem in the Lily, Mellon Collection, Yale Center No doubt the Faustian Germany of Hegel, Beethoven, Hölderlin and the rest became the center of the landscape rapture — of the romantic irradiation of time. Even Goethe's break with Newton was to rear a science of organic interplay, salvaging what Blake would discard. As with Spinoza and Leibniz against Pascal, we cannot tell which was the forward motion. At least Germany for a while seemed kinder to the creative. It is curious that the strongest recognition of the old Blake came from a traveling German, Götzenberger. He had seen many men of talent in England, he said, "but only three of Genius, Coleridge, Flaxman, and Blake, and of these Blake was the greatest." Va72) 72) 72a) V72b) Thomas Girtin, c. 1797, The Rocking Stone, Tate, London; video: detail only Girtin, c. 1802, Fells Near Bolton, watercolor, T. Girtin, Esq. John Varley, c. 1810(?), Mountain Lake: Afterglow, watercolor, Victoria and Albert Museum, London Blake, 1797-1807, Vala (later, The Four Zoas), MS., plate 86, pencil and crayon of Vala as a nude, British Museum, London Of English painters, perhaps Girtin, in his early watercolors, best suggests the solemn affinity of soul with a nature of "huge and mighty forms" which Wordsworth enshrined in The Prelude and in "Tintern Abbey": Until the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things… And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 38 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things… Blake would not have overlooked that both passages close with the word "things"; both seat godhead in nature; Va73) John Constable, c. 1825, Clouds over Branch Hill Pond, Hampstead Heath, with a boy sitting on a bank, Tate Gallery, London Constable, 1821-22, Streaming sun over Branch Hill Pond, Hampstead Heath, Victoria and Albert Museum, London Blake, 1821, from Taylor's De Antro Nympherum, Odysseus Throwing the Girdle, National Trust, Arlington Court Detail of 73, Sunlit Branch Hill Pond Blake, c. 1805, God Blessing the Day, Private Collection, Great Britain; video: was detail, now revised to whole Blake, 1804-18, Rinder Jerusalem, plate 25: Dominion of Vala, Rahab, and Tirzah over the fallen Man; video first returns to 33, detail of Vala Throned on a Sunflower [so revised. 1995] Again, Branch Hill Pond, the sun-rayed central section; which video prefaces with a cloud-detail and closer cloud-detail of Va73) 73) 73a) 73b) 73c) 73d) 73e) as Whitehead would say of The Prelude (and it is true of this Constable as well), show nature "as exhibiting entwined prehensive unities, each suffused with modal presences of others…" Thus Coleridge: Ah! slowly sink Behind the western ridge, thou glorious sun! Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb Ye purple heath-flowers! richlier burn, ye clouds! Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves! And kindle, thou blue Ocean! But when Blake sees "the real and eternal World of which this Vegetable Universe is but a faint shadow," he sees all objects as human forms. Where Constable shows the sun "as a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea," Blake cries: O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty. June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 39 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History To paint landscape as real is Deism for Blake, enthrones Vala, emanation of Emotion (Luvah) — A creation that groans, living on Death, Where Fish & Bird & Beast & Man & Tree & Metal & Stone Live by Devouring — Wordsworth: "Knowing that Nature never did betray/ The heart that loved her"; and Coleridge: "I shall know/ That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure." As if Chaos itself, in Haydn's Creation, has summoned from its depths the musical ecstasy of Light: Music: a74) b74) Vc74) 74) Haydn's Creation, continued, the phrase: "Und es war Licht" (fade) C.D. Friedrich, 1808, Morning Mist in the Mountains, Museum, Rudolstadt; where videos have previewed 74: Mist in the Riesengebirge [revised 1995] Constable, 1821, Cloud Study, Horizon of Trees, London, Royal Academy; where video has previewed b76, Cirrus Clouds, Victoria and Albert Museum, London [revised 1995] Friedrich, 1823, Lone Tree, Staatliche Museen, Berlin Friedrich, Mist in the Riesengebirge, Neue Pinakothek, München The paradox of the Romantic landscape is that where the old dimensional absolute becomes in one sense merely a veil, it is a veil of working power — the huge sea of mist Wordsworth saw from Snowdon, The perfect image of a mighty Mind, Of one that feeds upon infinity, June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 40 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Which Wordsworth, in orthodox revisions, would later tone down. misread The Recluse — Blake had not All strength, all terror, single or in bands. That ever was put forth in personal Form — Jehovah — with his thunder & the choir Of shouting Angels & the empyreal thrones — I pass them unalarm'd — to cry out: "Does Mr. Wordsworth think his mind can surpass Jehovah?" For the depiction of nature as living spirit, Caspar David Friedrich, north German contemporary of Beethoven, looms over the century. So at the close of Beethoven's last sonata, the solid soars into light and air. Music: 75) Beethoven, 1822, Sonata #32, Opus 111, near close, Seraphim IC6066 C.D. Friedrich, c. 1823, Drifting Clouds and Pool, Kunsthalle, Hamburg — Friedrich's Pool under rising mist, such a reminder as Wordsworth's in The Prelude, where "the hiding-places of [our] power seem open." V75a) Va76) b76) 76) Friedrich, 1825-30, Bohemian Landscape, Gemäldegalerie, Stuttgart Friedrich, c. 1835, Twilight, Riesengebirge, National Gallery, Berlin Constable, c. 1821-22, Study of Cirrus Clouds, Victoria and Albert Museum, London [originally other Friedrichs; revised, as here, 1996] Friedrich, 1824, Evening Sky, Kunsthalle, Mannheim Constable and Turner painted views of nothing but sky; but their clouds are actual, those of Friedrich, God-signs. As his wife said: "On the day he is painting air, he may not be spoken to." (close of Beethoven) 77) V77a) June 1996 Blake, 1795, Newton, Tate Gallery, London Blake, 1825-27, Dante, plate 96, Paradise XXV: Saints Peter, James, and John the Evangelist with Dante and Beatrice, British Museum, London Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 41 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History As Plotinus said: "Cut away everything." And Christ: "If thy right hand offend against thee, cut it off." In conceiving Newton as sterile Urizen seated by the vegetative polyp under the Sea of Time and Space to compass the abstract ratio of the five senses, Blake turned from the art of irradiated Space. The synthesis most of the 19th century aspired to became for him a delusion. "The natural world must be consumed" — one of Blake's convictions which Crabb Robinson (as if he had never heard of the Bible) called "unintelligible." a78) Blake, 1825-27, Dante, plate 1, Inferno I: Dante, Virgil, Beasts, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Blake, 1825-27, Dante, plate 9, Inferno V: Minos and the Lustful, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Blake, 1825-27, Dante, plate 35, Inferno XIX: The Simoniac Pope, Tate Gallery, London (video: upper detail only) Vb78) 78) Blake's universe was more perilous. As he had written Butts in 1802: Temptations are on the right hand & left; behind, the sea of time and space roars & follows swiftly; he who keeps not right onward is lost, & if our footsteps slide in clay how can we do otherwise than fear and tremble. That Ulro was ever present — not the orthodox Hell of a punitive Nobodaddy he reclaimed from Dante the last two years of his life. Who knows, if Mozart had lived, he might have paralleled that realm. As for Beethoven, only in the Grosse Fuge did he pierce radiant nature to the fission of such a flaming core. Music: 79) Beethoven, 1825, Grosse Fuge, fierce theme in coda, Columbia M5L-277 (with softer succession to slide 79) Blake, 1825-27, Dante, plate 77, Purgatory ix: Lucia Carries Dante in his Sleep, Fogg Museum, Harvard; + V detail June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 42 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Gleaming through Purgatory, Blake sees Beulah: a soft Moony Universe, feminine, lovely, Pure, mild & Gentle, given in mercy to those who sleep… 80) (Four Zoas I) Blake, 1825-27, Dante, plate 90, Paradise xiv: Dante Adores the Flaming Christ, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; first, video details, below and above In Paradise, the fire image of Christ becomes for Blake the ecstatic sacrifice in every moment of simultaneous vision: Soon all around the Heavens burnt with flaming fires, And Urizen and Luvah and Tharmas and Urthona arose into Albion's Bosom. Then Albion stood before Jesus in the Clouds Of Heaven, Fourfold among the Visions of God in Eternity. 80+1) Blake, c. 1795, Glad Day, color print, British Museum, London Shakespeare: Night candles are burnt out, and Jocund Day Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops. Blake: For… Rivers & Mountains Are also Men; every thing is Human, mighty! sublime! In every bosom a Universe expands, as wings Let down at will around, and call'd the Universal Tent. (Jerusalem 38) Christian history telescoped to that eternal coming: And suddenly there was with the angels a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying: Arise and drink your bliss, for every thing that lives is holy! June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 43 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 43 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Blake : Fire-Fugue of Delight, Symbolic History, Part 28 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 28 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_28_Blake--Fire-Fugue_of_Delight Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/49c247870aadcaadae2b046af7369729.pdf 38b9e96ccff1883716c1ffcaae0b6674 PDF Text Text 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 October 1992 Cycles 8 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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 October 1992 Cycles 9 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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 October 1992 Cycles 10 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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 October 1992 Cycles 11 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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 October 1992 Cycles 12 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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. October 1992 Cycles 13 �C.G. Bell 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 October 1992 Cycles 14 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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 October 1992 Cycles 15 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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. October 1992 Cycles 16 �C.G. Bell 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? October 1992 Cycles 17 �C.G. Bell 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) Cycles 18 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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) October 1992 Cycles 19 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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 October 1992 Cycles 20 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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? October 1992 Cycles 21 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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 Cycles 22 �C.G. Bell 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 Cycles 23 �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 Cycles 24 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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 Cycles 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 Cycles 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 Cycles 28 �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 Cycles 29 �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 Cycles 30 �C.G. Bell 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 Cycles 31 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 32 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Cycles, Symbolic History, Part 2 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 2 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_02_Cycles Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/8f351f398a97711d984cc349cf747630.pdf ae6cda809a8568043f2bb01838f367d8 PDF Text Text 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 June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 2 �C.G. Bell 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) Dante: Threshold of 1300 3 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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) — June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 4 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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. June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 5 �C.G. Bell 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 June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 6 �C.G. Bell 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 Dante: Threshold of 1300 7 �C.G. Bell 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 8 �C.G. Bell 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: June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 9 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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. June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 10 �C.G. Bell 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": June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 11 �C.G. Bell 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." June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 12 �C.G. Bell 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 June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 13 �C.G. Bell 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 Dante: Threshold of 1300 14 �C.G. Bell 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 June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 15 �C.G. Bell 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... June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 16 �C.G. Bell 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 June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 17 �C.G. Bell 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) June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 18 �C.G. Bell 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 June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 19 �C.G. Bell 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. June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 20 �C.G. Bell 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. June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 21 �C.G. Bell 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) Dante: Threshold of 1300 22 �C.G. Bell 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. June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 23 �C.G. Bell 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 June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 24 �C.G. Bell 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 June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 25 �C.G. Bell 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 Dante: Threshold of 1300 26 �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, June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 27 �C.G. Bell 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) June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 28 �C.G. Bell 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." ) June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 29 �C.G. Bell 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 Dante: Threshold of 1300 30 �C.G. Bell 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) June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 31 �C.G. Bell 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 Dante: Threshold of 1300 32 �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 33 �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 Dante: Threshold of 1300 34 �C.G. Bell 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 Dante: Threshold of 1300 35 �C.G. Bell 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 37 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History I crown and miter you lord of your own. June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 38 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 39 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Dante : Threshold of 1300, Symbolic History, Part 11 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 11 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_11_Dante--Threshold_of_1300 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/00c49d5996ae1871ba1afa7095ed0a2f.pdf 5570781d8ddbdc52b999e158fb580351 PDF Text Text 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 June 1996 Early Christianity 1 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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.) June 1996 Early Christianity 2 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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) June 1996 Early Christianity 3 �C.G. Bell 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, June 1996 Early Christianity 4 �C.G. Bell 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. June 1996 Early Christianity 5 �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 June 1996 Early Christianity 6 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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 June 1996 Early Christianity 7 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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 June 1996 Early Christianity 8 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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 June 1996 Early Christianity 9 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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... June 1996 Early Christianity 10 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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) June 1996 Early Christianity 11 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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. June 1996 Early Christianity 12 �C.G. Bell 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 June 1996 Early Christianity 13 �C.G. Bell 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: June 1996 Early Christianity 14 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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. June 1996 Early Christianity 15 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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 June 1996 Early Christianity 16 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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. June 1996 Early Christianity 17 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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... June 1996 Early Christianity 18 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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 June 1996 Early Christianity 19 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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 June 1996 Early Christianity 20 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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. June 1996 Early Christianity 21 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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. June 1996 Early Christianity 22 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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 June 1996 Early Christianity 23 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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 June 1996 Early Christianity 24 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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) June 1996 Early Christianity 25 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 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 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 29 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Early Christianity, Symbolic History, Part 6 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 6 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_06_Early_Christianity Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/db3b0a15d18be5a0a23abe5b7c4d9e7a.pdf f41be0e62438fa22d1ee7554881029cc PDF Text Text (3^t liA.^'hu.p SO^^OLIC 9<ISi:o^ ^rougH Sigfit ancC Sound 32. Face and Landscape (R6sum6 of Man and UJorld) CHARLES G. BELL ST. JQHNfS COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO /or 1260 CANYON ROAD S^TA FE, NEW MEXICO S7^0l July 1993 Last revised June 1996 �Cajaries Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501 \ \ ^ HisTOny Thrbuqb Sight ntnt Sounii 32. al) Face and Landscape (ROsumb of Man and UJorld) gmrwtoaU, 1528, iktaUcfSt. Imt, 5{ermt, ma Landscape, IsenAeim Mtar, CoCmar The arts should be experienced first in their own right But they ate also the language of symbolic history, the history Novalis recognized in poems and fables. » ^ V [Wenn] man in Marchen und Gedichten Erkennt die wahren Weltgesqhichten. To trace man's view of himself and his world, two sequences suggest themselves, of face and landscape. 2) LascauK, c. 20,000 ‘B.C, Cam (Paitititi£, (CetaiC, Man and •Buffalo 2 a) Same, detaiC In cave art neither appears. But in Lascaux (as in Trois Freres) there is a related pair: inner and outer, man and beast It is hard U> know what that bird-totem, phaliic man, is doing under the disembowelled buffalo. Music; African (Dattomeyl, Speech rhythms, Contrepoint MC 20.093 Do the gored, like the hanged, suffer erection; or is this magic, like (fade speech rhythms) African speech rhythms? One thing we note, Music- Central African Republic, Medicine Man's Chant, UNESCO; BM 30 L 2310 what is outward, the animals, could not be more real; what is human wears the disguise of mask. June 1996 Face and Landscape 1 �C.G. Bell 3) Symbolic History Congo, *Bantu-(Ba[ega, Manyema region, recent, OvCasf^ 9^us. !I(pyaC de C^frique, ^erxnieren Mask, voodoo counterpole of the individuation, we are calling Face — the human image usurped by demonic expiations — a primi­ tive ground of unquestioning obedience to inherited tabus. (fade Chant) a4) 4) Tgypt, (Dynasty II/, c. 2540 *B.C., ^I5ie Qreat Spfdwi in its pyramid setting (xvfiUe video sfiozus Sp/tin?c alone) Same, tHe SpHin^ aCone (rvfiUe video sfiozvs tfie head only) Out of ritual surrender, face appears. Music: From Tibetan Buddhist Ritual for attaining the quality of spiritual adepts, Barenreiter BM 30 L 2009 looms like Tibetan music (Egyptian music lost), this Cheops of the Sphinx, proudly and joyfully lifted above the impersonal fates. No accident these first Pharoah statues are records of immortal soul, of Ka, in the eternal serenity of a temporal command, (fade Tibetan Ritual) 5) ‘^yp^j Dynasty XVlII, c. 1370 (B.C., Qyeen Vdgfertiti, (Berlin (3/4 face) No sooner is face present than, like any embodied vitality, it is caught in process, the cultural phases we need not repeat. Only, with Nefertiti, to recall that what emerged in the Old Kingdom from the trans-personal cult which gave it strength, has ripened by the Late Empire into a mirror-haunted consciousness of ennui and quest. 6) 6 a) DouBCe: [S4.] ^ttic, c. 540 (B.C., (PepCos (Kpri (Vdg.679) head, Sithens, SLcropoCis (Museum; and [(B] (Rpman, c. 100 5L.D., (fCavian) Coiffured Cady, CapitoCine (Museum, (Rpme Coiffured Cady, (B of 6 So too in the sequence of Greece and Rome face emerges from the primitive like a fresh discovery (left), clean of introspective brooding. For all the sensuous delight of painted marble, it is a phe- June 1996 Face and Landscape 2 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History nomenon of vital energy, beyond the personal — a wierdly smiling immortal visitant. Set it against a Roman patrician (right), where the civilized preoccupation has become again the self-caressing search and satis­ faction of the private — in this case, no doubt — rather hard and vul­ gar soul. Roman satires run the gamut of her kind. So much for the briefest hint at the art-vicissitudes of face over twenty-seven hundred years. 7) (DouBCe: [SI] T,£ypt, 'Dynasty XVlII,. 1580-1314 'B.C, 'TomB fresco from 'TdeBes, garden witB fisB (Bond, 'BritMus., London; and [B] (Paul (Kfee, 1930, Sid 9dar£inem, Jijinstmuseum, 'BaseC, SpitzerCand; ffien 7S4. and 7'Bfo(Cow separateCy The art of landscape unfolds between convergences of begin­ ning and end. This garden of New Kingdom Egypt (left), its trees flat­ tened in ranks around a pool; Paul Klee's 1930 primeval memory, "Ad Marginem" (right) bridge a spatial conquest of more than three thousand years. The Theban fresco heralds a representation not yet available; sophistic Klee dissolves all perspectival claims in the haunted sun-tarn of psychic mystery. 8) (l(pman, earCy 1st cent. S4..(D., fantasy Candscape from tBe SKouse of S4^rippa (BostBumous, Mas. 9dyz., (JdgpCes; + '17 detait (wBiCe sUde show goes to 8a, anotfier Candscape from tBe same viUa) In Greece, we know landscape developed through phases of exploration and mastery. Music: Greek, 1st cent A.D., from Hymn to Kalliopeia, J.E. Butt, priv. rec. But the examples that remain are Graeco-Roman backdrops for an imperial age of luxury and exotic longing — dream evocations, with­ drawing from the spatial conquest in which earlier artists took pride, (end Kalliopeia) Even in the time of Augustus, this illusionistic melting and search for gnosis hints at the abandonment of the earthly king­ dom, with its cultivation of Phidian ivories and golden bees. June 1996 Face and Landscape 3 �C.G. Bell 9} e ^ Symbolic CRmese, StA-StA cent. (attr. History Wei) WautfaCC, Trw. ColC., Ma It would seem a counsel of despair to turn from the already superfluous challenge of Western history. Yet no treatment of landsea^ can quite Ignore the subtlest tradition of that art. Let this 8thor 9th-century Chinese waterfail, attributed to Wang Wei, remind us what a Tao of Power was opened there into the deepest forms and moods of nature, at a time when the West had suffered Barbarian overthrow. 10} CaroCingum, c. SZO, St. Lufy, -EAAo GaspeC, ‘Epemmi 10a) Same, (ktaiC ^ n the Europe of those years, in the art of Charlemagne’s reviva It IS as if a great wind had blown through — Vico's barbaric re­ newal — reducing landscape refinements to calligraphs of rock, strip­ ping the person also of cultured nostalgias, down to the skeletal energies of ascetic faith — Music: Gregoriart, before 1000, Adjuvabit (G. deVan), A.S. 34 side A impersonal, though within the abstract personality of man-to-God Lukes upward inner glance determinative. (,ade Adjuvabit) This IS the Dark Age creed-containment, within which the new temporal forces develop and articulate themselves. 11) Qerman, 1Z50-60, face of Uta, CatfiedraC of 9^umBura 11a) Same, detaiC And first, to hint, in three faces, at the whole Western systole and diastole: 1250, Uta of Naumburg, from the century of the Ger­ man romances, Instan and Isolt. The later unfolding of self and love IS nascent in the Medieval ground, a longing heightened by timeiess suspen^on Uta at once a legendary queen on a cathedral facade and a Cressid of secret love as sensuous as the fold of the robe on the c ee . As with Dante's Paolo and Francesca, all that would inform June 1996 Face and Landscape 4 �Symbolic C.G. Bell History the romantic novel is prefigured, the more hauntingly for the enigma of its loyalties. Music: Neidhart von Reuenthal, c. 1220, Mayenzeit, EMS 201 (fade) From Minnesong al2) ^Bens, c. 1629(F), *Ilfiomas tHbivari, ‘EarC cf JlruTuCeC, detaiB; Gardner i\Cus., (Boston 12) Same, xoBoCe to Frescobaldi: Music: Frescobaldi, c. 1620(7), Canzona 7 "La Superba", Decca DL 79425 a jump of almost 400 years, and the personal and individual claims which vivified the Middle Ages under the paradox of denial, have stepped from the Thomistic frame, to issue their culminant procla­ mation of secular command — Rubens' Earl of Arundel, in the confi­ dence of late Renaissance and Baroque, the will to power magnifying self and world. (fade & skip, closing Canzona) al3) Qaii£uin, 1889, SeCf-(Portrait, detaiC; (h(g.tion(U QdUry, Wasfwi£ton (D.C. 13) Same, zofioCe Music: Brahms, 1891, from slow mov.. Clarinet Quintet, D. Gram. LPM18278 Another 250 years ends in world-weariness and withdrawal. The self has looked into the self, and behold, vacua et inana sedes; or as Rimbaud wrote, "I took Beauty on my knees — and I found her bitter." (fade Brahms) Here is Gauguin as the old Adam toying with the vine-snake; but by the halo he is New Adam too, and how ambiguous a martyr ("my head, grown slightly bald, brought in upon a platter") — Stavrogin, the horned saviour. Thus post-romantic ego Baudelaires its ennui, prepares to go under; to clear the world stage for whatever is to follow. June 1996 Face and Landscape 5 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 14) y^ranco-Qerman, earCy 13tfi cent., Camtina CBurana 9/CS, Summer, scenes (iBove and BeCow; StaatsBiBCiothe^ MunicB 14 a) Same, upper sune only In its similar course of emergence, conquest and withdrawal, landscape suggests the phases of natural science. This 13th-century Carmina Burana scene of summer represents a sort of alchemical phase, where the powers of material nature are to be apprehended immaterially, by allegorical rites and signs, as if things themselves were symbols through and through. 15) ^m6. Lorenzetti, 1337-9, Qood government in the Country, ^PaCazzo fPuBCico, Siena; right side offresco 15 a) Same, centred detaiC By the 14th century the landscape opens out, with a transi­ tional creak of hinges, to the panoramic expanse of Lorenzetti. As in Petrarch's ascent of Mont Ventoux, we hang between prophetic space and spaceless symbpl: Today I climbed the highest mountain in this region, Ventoso ... There is a summit higher than all the oth­ ers... I looked around me: clouds were gathering below my feet... the Rhone river was directly under our eyes... But he dissolves the vastness in allegory, opening his Augustine to read the countertext: And men go to admire high mountains... ocean, stars — and lose their own souls. It is the residual non-dimensionality of Gothic. 16) Leonardo da ‘Uinci, 1499, Storm over an SUpine VaCCey, Windsor CastCe 16 a) Same, upper detaiC (video having Begun xvith a centraC detaiQ As we approach 1500, in the notebooks and drawings of Leonardo, scientific thought and the landscape are simultaneously June 1996 Face and Landscape 6 �Symbolic C.G. Bell History transformed. The new mode of apprehension is spatial and causal. With an exploratory rush of delight, thought enters the world fabric, participating in its rational order as tested and confirmed by the senses: "although nature begins with the cause and ends with the experience, we must follow the opposite course ... begin with the ex­ perience, and by means of it investigate the cause" Universal law is reached for, though not yet captured in equations. IT) (Beminij c. 1650(?), Sunrise over the Sea, dratving, HQrpferstich^Bmett, (BerCin That conquest is the achievement of high Baroque. In science, causality is pursued tb the Newtonian synthesis of the world. In this Bernini sketch, what for Blake would become the mere ratio of the senses, the sea of time and space and bondage of nature, is cele­ brated exactly for its formulable nobility, the spatial recess tri­ umphant with the rayed determinism of light. 18) C(D. ^Friedrich, 1834-35, %ist after ^Harvest, gemaCcCe£akrie, (DrescCen 18 a) Same, center (white video Coohs to the horizon and shy) With Friedrich after 1810, the same methodic space, still glori­ ous, has become the phenomenal veil, to be penetrated (as in Faust's rapture of following the sinking sun) by infinite longing: the world, says Coleridge, "of such hues/ As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes/ Spirits perceive his presence." Since the hunger for the infinite is also a death wish, the pictures become hymns to death, as in Holderlin's "Abendphantasie": "And there in light and air, let grief and love flow from me" — "und moge droben/ In Licht und Luft zerrinnen mir Lieb und Leid!" Though no one had observed it yet, the turning point to the "mysterious universe" had occurred also in elec­ tro-physics. 19) Cezanne, 1904-06, gardens, Les Loaves, (PhiCCips Cot, Washington CD.C. (to which stide show adds 19a, a centred detaU) No scientist sought the paradoxes that lurk already under Fara­ day and Maxwell; the artists did not say they were going to stop June 1996 Face and Landscape 7 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History representing nature. With the Impressionists it was to represent it more precisely: the reflection of light at such a place and such a time; with Cezanne (as in these gardens from his last years) to ex­ hibit the geometries that underlie the visible — "to treat nature," he shid "by the sphere, cone and cylinder." Yet the net result (as in the increasingly refined abstractions of electric field, probability, wave theory, relativity and quantum mechanics) was the dissolution of the spatial and causal scene. 2 0) (DouBie of20SI amCzm ff. 20SI) german, c. 1000, goUCen Madonna, head, ‘Essen; video, detaiConCy 20(B) S. JFrench (Landes), c. 1050, (Beams (f LieBanus on the 5lpocaCypse, J^Cood, (BiBL (Hgi., (Paris; video, detaiC onCy The sequence now again in more detail: portrait-like face and represented nature. We begin, about the year 1000, with the virtual negation of what we seek. Music: Organum, Musica Enchyridion, Sit gloria, MHS- In the Golden Madonna of Essen, person giography of cult and faith. Hammered form, encrusting jewels and great agate esque dark these are not of the human, tude: Ev ap%ri ev o Aoyoq. bows to the transreal ha­ gold on the stiff wooden eyes gleaming in Roman­ but revealed signs of beati­ From fifty years later, a flood destruction from the Saint Severs Apocalypse:' the flattened formal landscape, the figures of arbitrary sizes and projections, all pressed to a symbolic dread. The earth of which even Dark Age chronicles tell us is not the Europe we travel to see, but a ghostly battleground of demonic and angelic powers. As Paul had said: "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world." 21) french gothic, c, 1210, (HeCchisidehu (H, (PortaC, CathedraC, Chartres 21a) Same, detaiC June 1996 Face and Landscape 8 �Symbolic C.G. Bell History A hundred and fifty years: who could have foreseen the vigor to which the Christ-paradox of incarnation and earth-denial would lead __ how much body the heaven-vector would entrain, lifting over burgeoning towns three-hundred foot towers of stone? Under the vaulting porches of Chartres the great prophets loom into time. Yet all that human force assumes the eternal severities of the sa,cred frame, canonical, hierarchical; it is the Gothic incorporation of the mortal into the City of God. Perotin: Music: Perotin, c. 1210, close of Viderunt quadruplum, Ducretet, Thomson 320 C 107 22) 5. ^yroC, earCy 13tfi cent., Mrahant & Isaac, S. 3(ico(>o, Qrissiano 22 a) Same, detaiC What would become the Renaissance garden grows in that church close. The artist here is of South Tyrol, early 13th century. Where the text of Abraham and Isaac requires mountains, he fills the background with snow-capped ice-cream cones of Dolomites, ar­ chaically stylized, half spaceless; yet a shrewd thrust toward natural observation. 23) StrasBourj, 1290-1300, O^ouny 23 a) Same, detaiC from West CPortaC, Cathedral. 1300. The Kings of the Cathedral of Strasbourg have put off the sacred severity of Chartres. Music: , From Fauvel, 1316, Je voi douleur—Fauvel nous, etc. AS 91 We are already on the late-Gothic road to Chaucer's Squire: "A lover and a lusty bachelor." In the loosening faith-world of this "Fauvel," Occam and Meister Ekhardt, the individual and secular surge with vitality. Though strength has still the lean bare-fifth enigma of floating in the mystery it serves. 24) Srviss-Qerman, c. 1320, Manessa 9dS, Mnnesittyer Von Sune££e, University LiSrary, ^{cidMas June 1996 Face and Landscape 9 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The hierarchic proportions — the boy small, though near, the heraldic devices hung spacelessly - these are of the past. But the Minne­ singer's leap up the mountain is real; and in so small a touch as the projection of the horse's tail and hoof over the border, the drive has been set up which in the Baroque would spill fallen angels over the ceiling frame of II Gesu. 2SJ giotto, c. 1303j JoacMm returns to His fCocHs, ^ena CdapeC, Tadua 25a) Same, detail figures But that late-Gothic turn in the North remains thin and imper­ sonal against the sudden expansion of space and consciousness in Florentine Dante and Giotto. True, these celery trees are still halfByzantine, and the background hills of stripped rock remind us of Cennini's advice late in the century: "if you want to paint a moun­ tain, set up a rock in the studio and paint it large; for what is a mountain but a big rock?" But that alchemy of the nominal swells with delivery. The great robed figures seem to shoulder out a space of their own, as the Florentine heroqs stretch the theology of Dante's Hell, or chromatic inflection strains the modes in da Cascia. Music: 2 6) Giovanni da Cascia. c. 1320(7), lo son un peliegrin, AS-I Orcxgna, 1359, SeCf, from dleatH of Mary, Or San MicHeCe, !FCorence The landscape here would be the Lorenzetti panorama, which we have already seen. While Orcagna's self-portrait in his 1359 Death of M^y speaks the rise of secular person in the time of Boccaccio the kind of person no doubt who at the end of his life will repent and make his Retractions, with Petrarch and Boccaccio and Chaucer; yet so life-oriented that it is only , the lingering quaint enigma of faith-suspension which distinguishes this late-Medieval from early-Renaissance. ^3 2 7) LotseCandiBnve, 1397, ConnitaBCe du guescGn, St. (Denis; + Vdetail Having mentioned Chaucer, we should follow late-Gothic north to St. Denis, 1397, time of The Cantp.rhiirv June 1996 Face and Landscape 10 �Symbolic C.G. Bell Music: History French, late 14th cent., Centre le Temps, Seraphim SIC-6052 The aesthetic refinement of Italy livens to realistic vigor. But the suspension we have spoken of, that all temporal and secular values are emergent, gives this character the cleanly observed force and moral ambiguity of Chaucer's warty-nosed Miller, wanton Friar, or hunting Monk with his eyes rolling in his head — a gusto which would hardly survive post-Renaissance responsibility. (fade Centre le Temps) 28) ^oC de Lim6ouT0,1413-16, Tres Niches 3Uures, June, 9dus. Condi, CdantUCy 28 a) Same, detaiC (video fiaviny shoxvn jirst a zvider detaiQ Music: Ciconia, c. 1405-10, 0 Rosa Bella, RCA V-LM 6016 By the 15th century the way of seeing has quietly changed from the symbolic to the representational — gracious as the first chordal space of Ciconia. A page of the Tres Riches Heures is a win­ dow into a lovingly delineated spatial scene. Strange that so revolu­ tionary a work could be so unobtrusively and thinly naive. There is none of Lorenzetti's vastness of assault on the world; it is as if from that great spread, details had been trimmed and perfected in the early-Renaissance mode. Where the sign of the 14th century was a residual bare ambivalence, here it is the last innocence of Gothic, which makes no proclamation of the ultimate value of the new way. (fade Ciconia) 29) SCuter, 1393-99, Moses (fountain, detail of Moses, Cfiartreuse de CfiampmoC, (Dijon; + ^ closer detail Though just before 1400 some such humanist proclamation — in religious terms, paralleling the preaching of Gerson in France and of Huss in Bohemia — had been made by Claus Sluter, a Fleming ac­ tive in Burgundy: this Moses, in the spirit of Chaucer's last invoca­ tion to the soul: "Forth, pilgrim, forth! Forth, beast out of thy stall!" While faux-bourdon filled the triad. June 1996 Face and Landscape 11 �Symbolic Music. History Apt MS, 0.1390, Jesu, nostra redemptio, a phrase, SAWT 9505-A (fade) 030) (DonateCb, 1423-36, Jermiaf^, iktcaC affimtC, CatIUdrat Museum, 7Carence 30) Same, atwtHer and mder detaU (video Having panned its 30a from this 30} By 1425 the cutting edge of Renaissance was being honed in many parts of Europe. Against the reform humanity of the North the philosophic humanism of Fiorence centers in the recovery of Roman antiquity by an act of the will. Yet the dynamic which cleaves Donatello's Jeremiah from the Qassical is also Gothic bom. So Dante's landless Ulysses, against the home-seeking oid Odysseus. As for music, the star of that Florence was Flemish Dufay. Music: 3X) Dufay, c. 1425, from Le jour s'endort (at "da quelque mai") AS-3 Same, Candscape detaiC (video sfiows onCy tfiis 31) (end "Le Jour s'endort") The vastness of the Lorehzetti panorama reappears in Masac­ cio, 1426. Granted the precise landscape refinements of the Limbourg brothers are lacking here. This Trasimene expanse of the folded Apennines, lake and blasted trees, has the inherited bareness o Giotto; but there is a theoretical consciousness of space itself — of laws by which to command it. a32) Men arUjan Van ‘Eyci, c. 1425-32, MoratUm oftHe Lam6, Ghent 32) Same, upper lyht (shde show goes from a32 to 32; video hegins and ends With 32, tnterposiii£ a cCosct detail) The background of the Van Eyck Adoration of the Lamb, from the same years, is the Northern complement; Florentine reason traiis thm Flemish miracle of eye and hand. Its heavenly Jerusalem is bright with every technique of foliage, light and air which High Re­ naissance would require. No wonder it was said in Italy that Van Eyck panels were worth their weight in gold. -While Dufay and the other Italiante Flemings work in either style: June 1996 Face and Landscape 12 �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Dufay, c. 1450(?), close of Kyrie, Mass "Se la face ay pale", AS-25 (end) 33) ^rmcH, c. 1465, Livre (Cu Cueur (CJ4mours ‘Espris, Cueur waf^, Vienna The boldest explorations of 15 th century retain the sharp focus of insularity. Here a French chivalric miniature of about 1465. Representational naivet6 and daring meet in the gold-leaf sun, cast­ ing long shadows toward us from the trees. We approach the humanist perfection of what is still the middle-earth, transitional, Cusanus' privative infinity of space and time. 34) ^ouiceCCi, c. 1478, giuCiano de'^ecCici, QaC., Was/iinffton (D.C 34 a) ^Berpanto variant (rf same, detaU of fiead (zokUe video detaiCs 34) So there is a 200-year sequence from Dante to Machiavelli, the proud emergence of heroes in hell. Music: Ockeghem, c. 1475(7), Puzzle Canon: Prenez sur moi, Mus. Guild, MS-134 With the Medici (here Giuliano, painted by Botticelli about 1478) we stand on the verge of the battle of values — to throw down or dynamically transform the old. The assertion could not be more forceful, but with the hard ambiguity of being still a deadly sin. If you want to rule, says Machiavelli, this is the method; to follow it is not Christian or even human, and of course one should be a Christian; but this is what power requires. Against such lean grandeur the Baroque would claim philosophic sufficiency. (end Ockeghem) 35) Leonardo, c. 1512, SeCf, cftaC^drawin^, Liirin, 5(pyaCLiSrary 35a) Same, detaU Music: Josquin des Pres, 1506, Requiescat close of Absolve, SAWT 9561-B With Leonardo (1510-12), as with Josquin after Ockeghem’s Puzzle Canon, we seem to have arrived at that god-like condition, (end Josquin) Yet the battle of the 16th century has not quite been June 1996 Face and Landscape 13 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History joined. The humanist island has grown to a continent, where man expauates in universal potentiality, for the last time in the tacit grace of the old dispensation, rich in the illusion that the new world can ounsh in the lap of the old. Beyond that high-Renaissance noble calm, humanization has no direct road. What lies ahead is a whirl of transformation under trial. 3€) Durer, c. 1494, Vuw ‘Toward: Trent, waurcohr, stolen, from ‘Bremen QaC. Landscape too, in Dtirer's watercolor of Trent, from the glowing years before 1500 (the youthful genius on his way to Venice), reached a point beyond which reahsm — as the harmonious filling in o Gothic perception — could go no further. Here, too, what the future held was struggle, space buckling into vortices, through a century of religious wars, persecutions and incursions of tragic darkness. 37) H. ‘Bosch, c. isio-ie, ‘lemptatwn ofSt. Jdatthony, landscape detaU; Lishon And already the new mastery was enforcing the eschatology of udgment.. That is the dialectic of Reformation and Counter-reforma­ tion — individuality and reason in Luther stirring the eddy of Pente­ costal identification. Strange that the strongest reality of 1500 should be the flaming recesses of Hieronymus Bosch’s hell-pockets. 38) ‘Direr, 1S26, Tortrait cfK. Mteschuher, ‘Bet{in-‘DaMem 38 a) Same, detaU Now the liberation of the human and secular musters militant powers under the great seal of righteousness. Gone forever the ohve-eyed Gothic distance. From the Catholic Humanist Diirer of 1500 to this Protestant Diirer of 1526, there is a buildup of assertive volume — as if (as in the polyphonies of Stoltzer) whole new registers nad been added to consciousness. Music: June 1996 Stoltzer, c. 1525(7), Goto Tonorum Melodiae, #1 close. Nonesuch Face and Landscape 14 �Symbolic C.G. Bell 39) History Mtdojfer, 1529, ^ (BattCe of 5Ue?cander, 5lCte (Bimkptfie^ Municfi (sCide sfiozo adds first a39, a detail to the ri£ht) 39 a) Same, a Bach^round detail (®nd Stoltzer) No less, in Altdorfer's 1529 Battle of Alexander: the Magellanic rondure of the curved earth, wheeling under the sun and moon, as the empire of Persia falls. Even the sign, against the heraldry of the Minnesinger MS, hangs with fluttering drapes in real space from the picture frame. In fact, Copernicus had already revolutionized that astronomical space, and been encouraged by two popes, in the clarion decades of discovery, before the Counter Reformation put the jinx on his delayed Revolutions. 40) 9dkheCaii£elo, c. 1543, 'Brutus, head, Bar^eCCo, S^Corence; + detail (while slide show Be£ins xvith a40, another close-up, and closes with 40a, whole Bust in color) Stretched in the field of titanic humanism and penitential re­ form, the Renaissance rises to its first great tensile infolding; and as always the mightiest spirit most kindles to the fervor, makes it most his own. In the radiance that Florence spread over Italy and to Rome, no spirit was as firecely strung to resonance as Michelangelo. It is he who most deepens human possibility. In the face of his Brutus (1543) Shakespearean tragedy first becomes conceivable — the infinite pathos and transcendence of the flawed will. Music: G. Gabrielli, pub. 1597, Sonata pian’ e forte, AS 25 [through slide 45] 41) fP. 'Breughel, c. 1568-69, Seascape, f}(unsthistorisches ^Museum, 'i/ienna 41a) Sume, detail Past the midpoint of a century of tragic storm, artist after artist runs the course from early works harmoniously auspicious, to deeper immersion in the enchafed flood. Here Breughel's last picture, on the proverb of the barrel and the hell-mouth whale: a desperately weathered sea-sorrow, to become a prevalent theme in Shakespeare. June 1996 Face and Landscape IS �C.Cj. Bell 42) Symbolic History ^ntoretto, 1550, {Procurator Jac. Soranzo, 5Lcca(Ccinia, Venice (CQ^ 59); first, VdetaiC In Italy after 1550, there is a shift from the tensile, as in Michelangelo, to the kinetic — its musical crest in Giovanni Gabrielli. With this early Tintoretto, the always increasing pride of person ex­ hibits itself as an opulence of electric fire flashing in the also increas­ ing and pervading world-dark. 43) Tintoretto, 1591-92, Christ on the Sea of QaCiCee, {h(g.tionaC (^aCCery, Washington (D.C. Tintoretto's later works, from the time of Giordano Bruno's in­ finite universe, push toward its climax the explosive vision, which by 1610 would stretch the frame and logos of every art almost to breaking nature a discharge of phosphorescence, the wind-heaped water under a sky of rage. 44) TC Qreco, c. 1600-10, Viezo of ToCecCo, MetropoCitan {KCuseum, + VfetaiC; white sCiKe show suSstitutes another, 44a (CG93 74) ’ I j'{ ^ i It is in El Greco that the doomsday seizure of the magnified Re­ naissance earth reaches a crux of visionary inturning. In the Toledo Landscape, as in King Lear (1605-6), you cannot thrust a bodkin point between the real and symbolic universe: You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks! 45) T,C Qreco, 1613-14, head of priest from {\Carria£e of the Virgin, {l(p.mania; + V detaiC At the same time form and face undergo a tragic dissolution, as if all human glory and nothingness had met. In the face of the priest in El Greco's "Marriage of the Virgin", Lear's pride — "Of all these bounds even from this line to this ... we make thee lady" — and crushed humility — "Pray you now, forget and forgive. I am old and June 1996 Face and Landscape 16 �Symbolic C.G. Bell History foolish" — merge in a stateliness pieced out of shreds and tatters, a brushwork like straw tossed on a cyclonic wind. (end Gabrielli) 46) Caravaggio, 1602-04, IhCead of 0\laTy, T,n.tom6imnt of Cfirist, Vatican; first, VcCoser detail Music: Sweelinck, 1610-20(?), Chromatic Fantasy, opening, SVBX-5316 Yet the kinetic spirals of Mannerism were exactly the crucible in which the tactile and volitional formulations of Baroque were be­ ing explored. No sooner is 1600 past than from Italy northward (here Caravaggio) the expanding whirl (as in the chromatics of Swee­ linck) coagulates into the rhetoric and histrionics of reasoned com­ mand — though a reason (like Galileo's) schooled by brute fact and tenebrist pain. 4 7) diiiBens, c. 1624, 9{et Onwaer (THe Storm), Ifranz ^nig Collection, iKaarlen^ + V detail So too in Rubens, 1625, when the limitless storm spills over, it is into a century of Cartesian Method. A critical point has been passed, like that between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson: in the dyna­ mism of release the energies, rational or emotional, have precipi­ tated: from the realized Apocalypse to the Apocalyptic real. (fade Sweelinck) 48) iRsmtSrandt, 1629, Self-portrait, Isabella S. Qardner iMuseum, (Boston; + V detail From the equivocal might and exploratory transhumanity which make Lear unfathomable, person, by early Rembrandt (1629), gathers itself into a philosophically validated, space-investing will. Music: Pachelbel, c. 1690(?), from Canon in D Major, MHS 1060 [to slide 52] a power like Spinoza's divinity: "Extension is an attribute of God, or God is an extended thing." And it is by the formulable soul of light that this Miltonic introspection presents itself, in the glory of spatial June 1996 Face and Landscape 17 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History bondage, a reasoned justification of the ways of God to men — destinate as Pachelbel's Canon-passacaglia. 49) ^Rg,mBran(Ct, c. 1638, Landscape witfi Sridge and Boatmen, Slmsterdam (Cg^'59) 49 a) Same, detaiC So too with the Rembrandt landscape of chiaroscuro realism. By the heroics of sun through cloud, nature is subsumed under a di­ vine syntax, as tensely fought for as the somber affirmations of Milton; while the realism affirms of all that ordering light: it is here and now, these fields, that bridge with the boatman passing under. As Spinoza says: "Particular things are nothing else than modifica­ tions of attributes of God"; and "Reality and Perfection I understand to be one and the same." 30) n/eCasquez, 1656, ScCf-portrait from Las Odeninas, Trado, Madrid The most impassioned Baroque assertion has an aspect of reasoned mastery (even in Pascal, where, Car-tesian reason undercuts itself). But in the great souls of the mid-century, here Velasquez, it is just some Pascalian affinity which saves the art-assertion from flagrant pride — a continuing antinomy of the poignance of space and the pathos of reason. 51) CCaude Lorraine, 1657, QaCatea Landscape, ^Dresden The classical landscape peaks in Claude: here Acis and Galatea of 1657, with Polyphemus on the promontory beyond the bay. Yet that heroic world, like Prospero’s "cloud-capped towers" is visibly melting into light: "Hail holy Light, offspring of heaven firstborn." 5Z) ‘Bernini, 1665, Bust ofLouis XlV, q/ersaiCCes That which is overpushed recoils. It is in the French court of Louis XIV that the Baroque assertion swells to a point from which it could only break to the ridiculous. And it was only Rome that could offer in Bernini the virtuoso brilliance to boost the king-image to an June 1996 Face and Landscape 18 �Symbolic C.G. Bell History all-time sublime without letting it slip, (cut Pachelbel) Though we measure the risk by the secular arrogation of the old religious ground: "L'etat c'est moi." aS3) Qodfrey 1700, VvCatfmo (Prior, detail; Trinity CoCC^e, CamBrid£e 53) Same, tfie xufioCe (wfiidi video puts B^ore and after tfie detaiQ By 1700 that heroic inflation — Dryden's "Aloft in awful state/ The God-like hero sate/ On his imperial throne" — is about to yield to Pope's: "Here thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey,/ Dost sometimes counsel take — and sometimes tea." lyiusic: F. Couperin, 1714-15, Concert Royal No.4, 1st Mov., Nonesuch H 73014 Thus the Baroque yields to Couperin; thus Kneller's Mathew Prior, even in the robes and pose of the vaunt, turns the flourishes of ex­ pression and light into Swiftian mockery. 54) Watteau ,1717, CTndarquement pour CytBere, Louvre, (Paris 54 a) Same, detail (video pans a detailfrom 54) The bubble of virtu breaks in a witty play of artifice. The ironies of reason hide a growing sentiment of nature. It is the 18thcentury polarity: mocking mind, searching heart. In Watteau's Island of Love those landscape depths of the Baroque become a pre­ cious filigree, stage-set for the masque of manners, which is at once a courtly game and a sigh for joy. Pope: But now secure the painted vessel glides. The sun-beams trembling on the floating tides; While melting music steals upon the sky. And softened sounds along the waters die; Smooth flow the waves, the zephyrs gently play, Belinda smiled, and all the world was gay. a55) *BouclieT, 1746, fisfiin^ Landscape, ivfiole; 5l£rmita£e, Leningrad 55) Same, detail June 1996 Face and Landscape 19 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The artifice of landscape espaliered into park seems fulfilled in Boucher's 1746 fishing scene — an arabesque of trees, clouds and stream. Yet through that china veil, the cult of Rousseau begins to touch everything with dream. (Couperin from 1st mvt to 2nd) So Marie Antoinette played at shepherdess in her village in the Petit Trianon. 56) WUson, 1774, Ccider Idris, ^ate Qcdlery, London 56 a) Same, detaU (wfiicfi video can draw from 56) The drive to forthright nature spurns that: (cut Couperin) England, Richard Wilson, most of all his revolutionary "Cader Idris" of 1774. But it is not the dimensional world reaffirmed. Light­ streaming space is stripped to the stark phenomenal. Man seems dwarfed, an exile. What begins to be verified is the Wordsworthean relation to the "souls of lonely places" — Haydn's muted horns. Music: 57) Haydn, 1794-5, from Adagio of Symphony 102, Vanguard SRV211SD [to slide 60] jG. *Xocque, c. 1750-60, ^alz£rafv. ZwdBruckpt, ‘Bir^nfeCd 59) The mid-century rift between genteel convention and the natu­ ral man of heart is nowhere stronger than in Germany. The foppery of Renaissance humanitas, undercut by two centuries of aristocratic appropriation, could hardly show a prissier mask than in the Munich Duke of Zweibriicken. 58) ^nton 5(g.pfiaeC 9den£s, c. 1750, SeCf-portrait (sUverpoint), SUBertina, Vienna While the young artist Mengs, sketching himself about 1750, reminds us that Rousseau's intuition held the seeds both of Revolu­ tion and Romantic. The Social Contract: "Man is bom free, and is ev­ erywhere in chains." And the Confessions: "the austere Jean Jacques, serious citizen of Geneva ... became again the love-sick shepherd ... and seeing nothing in existence worthy of my enthusiasm, I sought nourishment for it in an ideal world ..." 59) (B.O. !Kiin£e, c. 1803, SeCf-portrait, 9^nstfial[e, 9{am6ur£) + V detail June 1996 Face and Landscape 20 �Symbolic C.G. Bell History Like the same person reborn stronger, Runge steps from the 18th-century drawing room onto the Goethean world-stage of 1803: "Gefiihl ist alles" — "Feeling is everything." Man's proclamation of grandeur had crested once in the rational hybris of the Baroque. After a century of irony and enlightenment, it rallies under revolu­ tionary command — the Faust-claim in Beethoven, Hegel, Holderlin, that world-spirit is realizing itself through the shaping passions of the heart and will. It is the final liberation of the Ego as a pheno­ menon of hope. 60) HosepH S^ton ^cfi, 1811, ScfmadriSacfi 60 a) Same, upper cCetaiC Leipzig Museum The central urge of the Christian West had been to bring the Kingdom of God from the timeless and spaceless to the here and now. The free and transcendental self requires a free and pantheistic na­ ture, untamed, "shoreless as God." Koch tried what romantics would pursue in the mountain fastnesses of the world. While Wordsworth, climbing Snowdon at night, saw, in a sea of mist under the moon: ... a blue chasm; a fracture in the vapour, A deep and gloomy breathing-place through which Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams ... ... in that breach Through which the homeless voice of waters rose. That dark deep thoroughfare had Nature lodg'd The Soul, the Imagination of the whole. (end Haydn) 61) C.(D. S^riedrich, 1810, SeCf-portrait (drawing), Mgtionad Q(dCery, ^erCitt 61a) Same, detaiC (sG.de onty) Music: Beethoven, 1824, Quartet #12 in E flat, Opus 127, opening. Col. M 5 S 677 [through slide 63] Nothing takes us deeper into the night-brooding of earlyromantic than the face of Caspar David Friedrich, German landscape mystic of 1810. Thrown back (like Beethoven in the late Quartets) from revolutionary hope, soul turns its introspective retreat into a June 1996 Face and Landscape 21 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History triumph of inwardness. As Friedrich wrote under increasing neglect: "And so I spin myself into a cocoon and shall let time decide what will emerge therefrom." So Schelling's process of creation: the revelation of light in what was originally the prin­ ciple of darkness ... That principle which rises up from the depths of nature and by which man is divided from God, is the selfhood in him; but by reason of its unity with the ideal, this becomes spirit. 62) ^riedryi, 1819, (DrescCen men oBserving the mom (or annuCar ecRpse of the sun?) Against the landscape of ordered harmony (the 18th-century lord of the manor secure in the Lockean propriety of fruitful ground), Friedrich abandons ownership altogether. Earth and all begin to eclipse, like the moon, into figments. As in Goethe's Walpurgis Night, we have gone into the spheres of dream and magic: "In die Traumund Zaubersphare/ Sind wir, scheint es, eingegangen." 63) (joya, 1820, 'J^modea' or fantgstu; *l?i^ion (front the Qyinta deCSordo), now in the (Brado, Odadrid; + ^ detaiC How variously landscape now veers back to the visionary, ab­ stract, revelational. In Spain, Goya's 1820 Fantastic Vision from the Quinta del Sordo, launches the older techniques of crisis — 1600, El Greco; 1700, Magnasco — toward the modern. (fade Beethoven) 64) SamueCfBaCmer, c. 1826-30, ComfieCd By mootdight, 9(^nneth CCarf^ In the England of this Samuel Palmer, Blake was the total revo­ lutionary, for whom the outward universe is the vegetative husk of symbolic reality. Music: Schubert, 1828, slow opening, C Maj. Quintet, Col MS 6536 But landscape as such was more cultivated by the disciple, in those Shoreham pictures of 1826-30 (time of Schubert), when Palmer's youth was marvellously possessed by Blakean imagination. June 1996 Face and Landscape 22 �Symbolic C.G. Bell 65) burner, e7(fii6itecC 1843, 65a) Same, a cCoser unter spread History -after the 2)e%e; CTate, London While Turner, starting in the traditional manner of the Dutch and Claude, threw all his academic skills into a program not unre­ lated to Blake's (though their techniques were opposite) — an ecstatic transformation of matter into light. Thus one of his last pictures, "Light and Color, Goethe's Theory, the Morning after the Deluge, Moses writing the book of Genesis," exhibited in 1843. (fade Schubert) a66) DeCacroiTQ 1826, Study for‘Baron Schwiter, detaiC; SpringfieCd, 9dass. 66) Same, luhoCe Music: Berlioz, 1830, Funeral March, opening, Symphonie Fantastique, CM-9227 Not that Napoleonic assertion was a thing of the past. The 19th century is dominated by the sort of titanism we have called the lib­ eration of the ego, but shifting from its 1790 Enlightened base ("a phenomenon of hope") to a Berlioz Gallows March ("a phenomenon of despair"). This 1826 Delacroix portrait has absorbed Faust's satanic compact, with Byron's "pageant of the bleeding heart". Rousseaus pain has eroded his natural good. One begins to wonder how far the human boast is suicidal. (fade Berlioz) 67) Courhet, 1845-46, Man vH-th a Tipe (SeCf), Museum, MontpeCCier 67a) Same, detaiC Music: . Wagner, 1857-59, Tristan & Isolde, from Prelude (Stokowsky "Synthesis"), V-LM-1174 Twenty years more and we come to a face inescapable in such a survey, the Courbet Self, paired in "Cycles" with Flaubert on world­ sickness and a coming Dark Age. But the ennui and spleen of Baude­ laire equally apply: "When with eyes closed as in an opium dream" and "I am a burial ground the moon abhors" — "Je suis un cimetiire abhorri de la lune." It is the mood Dowson brought to England: June 1996 Face and Landscape 23 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History "Desolate and sick of an old passion," and for which Arnold, in his purer way, had written a Fall-of-theWest program: The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full ... But now I only hear Its melancholy, long withdrawing roar. Retreating, to the breath Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world. 68) (Bocl^in, 1865j Vida am 9v[eer, Zndform, Scfiacf^^aC., 9dunidi (CQ^ '59) 68a) Same,.(CetaiC Landscape takes up the "Dover Beach" burden. Bocklin suffuses each rock, wave and cypress with Tristan and Isolde lushness of Sehnsucht — as in the phrase Eliot culls for The Wasteland: "oed' und leer das Meer;" or elsewhere from Nerval: . "J'ai rev^ dans la grotte oH nage la sir^ne." Here the art problem of the century becomes in­ escapable. Bl^e, and even Goya, had challenged the outward order. With bourgeois consolidation, re^alism also regrouped itself, as if to affirm our place in the dimensional. But its message is the reverse, is Rilke's "that we're not very much at home in the interpreted world." So how long can the techniques caress that world with the oily touch of Baudelaire, Wagner and Bocklin? 69) fHans von 9darees, 1863, Marees and LenSacfi, 9^ue (Pina^, 9dunicfi (CQ^B '59); first, video detail The soul is almost at cleavage, raised (as Yeats saw Nietzsche) from the romantic gyre toward another, where Rocky Face laughs in tragic joy. (fade Tristan Prelude) Music: Wagner, 1857-9, Tristan, climax and interruption of Love Night, London 5938 (fade) And in Hans von Marees' portrait of himself and Lenbach, 1863, Nietzschean violence turns to idiot laughter: June 1996 Face and Landscape 24 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History To offer up God to the void, that is the last mystery, the sacrament of terror reserved for the generation at hand. We have already felt it working in ourselves ... 70) Monet, 1888, J^ntiSes, (Duran(C-!^ueC, (Paris 70 a) Same, detaiC (wfUch video draws from 70) '' From that bituminous immersion. Impressionism, by a shift of attention from the. self to the science of light and air, drew Monet and the rest from the visceral wake of Wagner and Zarathustra into the plein-air of Argenteuil and Provence, the rainbow of broken color — like a Faure scherzo — an art of delight. Music: Faure, 1879, Scherzo from 1st Piano Quartet, RCA-V-ARL1-0761 Of which, however, two things must be said: that the strains of yearning distill through the brightness; and that (as we have implied with modern science) reality itself, the landscape, begins to dissolve under the analytical shimmer. 71) (Rgnoir, 1876, (Portrait ofPd. Chocquet, ^ntertfmr} + V detaU (fade Faur6) Thus Renoir's 1876 portrait of Monsieur Chocquet slips quietly beyond Marees' Confidence Man smile. What the palette clothes in wistful gaiety is man's withdrawal from the temporal field. As in Verlaine: Ils n'ont pas I'air de croire a leur bonheur Et leur chanson se mele au clair de lune ... they have the air of not believing in their own happi­ ness and their song is mingled with the light of the moon. While Faure yields to Debussy: Music: Debussy, 1893, from last Movl, Quartet, Nonesuch H-1007 72) Van Qo£fi, 1889, Sdf, S. (Rpny, H^itney (Museum, (N^C June 1996 Face and Landscape 25 �Symbolic History 7Za) Van Qo^fi, 1885, ^Potato ‘Eaters, Van Qo^H Museum, Zlinsterdam 726) Van §036, 1887, Larl^over Wfieat ^ieti. Van gogh Museum, Slmsterdam 72c) Van QogR, 1889, SeCf, detail, Jeu de Paume, Taris (w6Ue V details 72) Anyone who thought the spiritual hunger solved by picnic outings along the Impressionist Seine, would be troubled by the case of Van Gogh, which is not a private case, though all lives have that dimension. From the den of the "Potato Eaters" he took the release of broken color and went south, risking the manic "Lark from the Corn," to plunge with as bright a plumage into despair. As Hopkins, the same years, shreds the canons of utterance for urgency: I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree Bitter would have me taste; my taste was me; Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse. 73) Van Qogh, 1889, Starry 9^6t, Museum of Modem Sirt, 9dg.w ^orf^ 73 a) Same, detail (slide only) Ecstasy and anguish have broken realistic depiction. Again Hopkins: "Our evening is over us; our night whelms, whelms and will end us ... ware of a world ... where selfwrung, selfstrung, sheatheand shelterless, thoughts against thoughts in groans grind." The Trump of Doom sounds again, in the frenzy of private vision. (Debussy, com.) 74) Ticasso, 1909, Seated woman, Penrose Collection, London 74 a) Same, detail I In the first decade of this century, Cezanne’s abstraction of the visible world into geometry was carried all the way in Analytical (^ubism partly, as in this Picasso, taught by what was most primi­ tive, the African mask. This demolition and discovery still rides the Nietzschean soothsaying wave. So the Futurists ("and like young li­ ons we go pursuing death"), with Rilke, George, Hesse’s Demian, Irish Revolutionaries, and world-socialists too — hailed the superman call to the shrapnel liberation of war. (,3^3 Debussy) June 1996 Face and Landscape 26 �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Schonberg, 1912, from Pierrot Lunaire, 8: Nacht, Col. M 2S 679 75j ^ranz Marc, 1915-16, TyroC, 9^tte Tina^ Municfi (CQ(B '59) 75a) Same, detail (cf. glazed 59 in video fide) Though we are closer to that mood in Franz Marc's Tyrolean landscape from 1915, a year before he was killed in action. Seven centuries had labored at the rationally ordered realm of space, time, and cause. It was a release now, a Yea-saying, to sacrifice it on Pierrot Lunaire's altar of Heraclitean Fire. "Every angel is terrible," wrote Rilke; "yet woe is me, I sing you down, almost death-dealing birds of the soul, knowing what you are" — "Jeder Engel ist schrecklich. Und dennoch, weh mir, ansing ich euch, fast todliche Vogel der Seele, wissend um euch." (fade SchOnberg) 76) dluTand, 1849, HQndredSpirits, ^or^^BudCic Library In these images of face and landscape, the whole pride and catastrophe of Western man beckons. How could democracy in America (1849) have done otherwise than reaffirm with the clarity of everyday enlightenment that landscape meeting ground of visionary and real, the irradiated space of a wild continent, ordained Eden for a new race of reason and heart? 77) (Ryder, 1870-90, MoonCiyfit Marine, MetropoCitan Museum, 9^rv Odor(<i And how it would strike at those daylight Emersonian hopes, that Ryder, after Melville and the Civil War and the Gilded Age, would shut himself in a New York apartment, painting in solitude a night nature of symbolic menace. El Greco's Toledo and Goethe's Walpurgis Night win back in an American haunted by the sea. 78) (PoCCocRi 1952, Converyence, SldSriydt-dQioTQ ‘Buffalo 78a) Same, detail Ridiculous, in three terminal slides to deal with a global cen­ tury, as labyrinthine in warring ways as a Pollock "Bateau ivre" soulscape of drips and muscular movements, jerked off in peristaltic deJune 1996 Face and Landscape 27 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History fiance of the old arrogation to order self and world. As if, possessed from between the stars, we were breathing great gulps of Pythagorean void. Music: Earle Brown, 1964, from Four systems for 4 amplified cymbals. Col. MS-7139 If this is the space we operate in, we must search (with Earle Browne in music) for other modes of operation. (fade E. Brown) In the lunge from willed depiction to a swirl where face and landscape drown, 9(p[kvitz, 1934, Sdf-ToTtrait, Litfiograpfi, TftUaddpdia Museum T9) was it only the socialists who would uphold the blatancy of the old claim, of man's responsibility for space and time? And even that programmatic hope, in the between-war throes of the liberal West, assumed in Kathe Kollwitz the age-old Roman shadowings of despair. What does it mean for face to choose between this and the abstract void? Are real leaders to be expected where the affirming image is no longer real? 80) Mard^9(pt/idp, 1958, ‘Brown on TCum, franz Meyer CoCC., Zurix^i (wdere tde video pans in and out on tdis intake, tde sCide sfiow £oes to two otder tRs>tfidp's: 80a, 1961, untitCed, Baca QaCCery; and 806,1961, iS/um6er 118, (DusseCdoif Most modern art has taken another aim, to push to the thresh­ old of sense what drove Wallace Stevens to slough off the images of "Sunday Morning" on the Dump: ... to eject, to pull The day to pieces and cry stanza my stone? Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the. But what else besides the artist himself, Rothko, must go down in the transcendental reduction of that purple pool? June 1996 Face and Landscape 28 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History We do not like to hear what the history of the images makes commonplace: that art, as real, comes at a cost. "When the modes of music change," Plato says in The Republic, "the fundamental laws of the state always change with them." In the Roman empire, when spirit turned from mastered outwardness to the abstract call beyond that wavering veil, those anchorites, St. Anthony and the rest, knew what they aimed at was the end of the world. As Yeats, in a time he considered parallel: Ah what a sweetness strayed Through barren Thebaid And by the Mareotic sea When that exultant Anthony And twice a thousand more Starved upon the shore And withered to a bag of bones. What had the Caesars but their thrones? June 1996 Face and Landscape 29 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 30 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Face and Landscape (Résumé of Man and World), Symbolic History, Part 32 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 32 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_32_Face_and_Landscape_Resume_of_Man_and_World