13 20 5655 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/41ca83e7d4697ba19586b96932869f9c.pdf efe5b8a09f4cad31825ceb03a9208413 PDF Text Text SPRING 1993 . �ENERGEIA: The activity in which anything is fully itself. fl ... vou £Vepyeia srofl ... (Aristotle's Metaphysics, 1072b) Staff Laudelyn Asinas Amy Flack Aimee Lalone Kristen Riddlespurger Senior Editor Rachel Blistein Junior Editor Yvonne Belanger Faculty Advisor Abe Schoener Special Thanks To the St. John's College Print Shop: Chris Colby Tina Davidson Andy Long Don Smith Energeia is a non-profit, student magazine which is published once a year and distributed among students, faculty, alumni and staff of St. John's College, Annapolis. The Energeia staff welcomes submissions from all members of the community - essays, poems, stories, original math proofs, lab projects, drawings, and the like. �Table of Contents Kristen Riddlespurger Untitled [Photo] .. 2 Elliott Callahan Attacking the Image . 3 Panayiotis Pappas Salome and John 11 Eugenia E. Skarstrom Window [Photo] 12 D. Jennings Descartes' Interpretation of the World as Arising from his Method . . 13 Stacie Slotnick Orion outside my window . . . . . . . 18 Nancy Marcus An Investigation of Key Characters (and Character's Keys) In Mozait's Don Giovanni . 19 Sara Valentine Untitled [Sketch] . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Kathleen Wilson The Reeve's Tale by Geoffry Chaucer 29 Jean Holman Untitled [Poem, Photo] 33 Rachel Blistein Greek Urn . . . . . . . 34 Laurence Berns An Introduction to Kant . 35 Burton Blistein The Visual Arts and the Liberal Arts 39 Eugenia E. Skarstrom Ancient Ones [Photo] . . . . . . 53 Francie Roberts Her Hair by Charles Baudelaire 54 Susanna Beiser Choosing to Believe: Free Choice and the Knowledge of God in St. Thomas . . . . . 57 Eva T. H. Brann Cover Art-Eugenia E. Skarstrom, GI '94 Front: "Euclid and Stella" Back: "Journey" On the Relation of the Speech of Alcibiades to the Other Speeches of the Platonic Symposium ......... 61 Nedalina Dineva Hope in Sophocles' Antigone 63 Jean Holman Untitled [Photo] ...... 66 Janice Thompson Human Nature and War in Thucydides' by Nietzche History of the Peloponnesian War 67 Kristen Riddlespurger Untitled [Photo] 73 J. H. Beall Two swans .. 74 J. H. Beall Morning-for Mary Ruth Clance . 75 �Attacking the Image U Elliott Callahan '92 Where are you going, Don Quixote? What demons have you in your heart that incite you to assault our Catholic faith? Devil take me! Look, it's a procession of penitents, and that lady they're carrying upon the bier is the most blessed image of the spotless Virgin. Look out, sir, what you're doing, for this time you've made a real mistake. (p. 453) Loving and reading are acts of faith. In order to be seduced by the beloved, or enchanted by the book, we must place our faith in the imagination, and believe what it, and no other, can tell us. It is important then, from time to time, to have our faith tested and our beliefs questioned. The imagination, it appears, needs to be roused from its slothfulness, exerted, and provoked. For it realizes its potential when it unexpectedly finds itself towering over reason-when it is twisted and contorted until it discovers itself creeping up on its own shadow-and surprising us, its not very attentive keeper. Then we can revel in the imagination, for clearly it is most delightful when we discover that, unbeknownst to us, it had been busily working away, seducing our more reasonable halves. Reveling in the imagination fortifies our faith in it, and hence, our capacity to love, read, and believe. Don Quixote, "mirror of knight errantry," is the champion of the imagination. He reads with the same amount of passion with which he loves, and vice versa; a degree which is clearly beyond our grasp. Don Quixote's superior imagination and unwave1ing faith, display labors of love rivaled only by the labors of Hercules. It is possible that Don Quixote is the greatest lover the world has ever known. For unlike most of us, for whom it is true that "love is not loving," Quixote is capable of loving love and Dulcinea del Tobosa at once, and yet somehow remains conscious of both without contradiction. He is able to allow the image to enchant him and, at the same time, to recognize it as an image. Quixote is the embodiment of the paradox that we spend our lives trying to resolve. In the author's prologue, Cervantes says: Don Quixote's final adventure represents the culmination of his exploits. Throughout the course of his enterprise, the Knight of the Sad Countenance has attacked the objects of what the reader considers the "real world," mistaking, or understanding them to be images of his imaginary world. Now, instead of attacking reality, he attacks images. The consequences of Quixote's attack upon an image, and especially an image of the Virgin, are essential to understanding our relationship with this "lean, shriveled, whimsical child" (p. 25). The final episode is a crucial point in the story where Don Quixote's character begins to emerge in a new light. This new perspective is the result of the transformation that occurs in the relationship between Quixote and the reader. The events in the last adventure force the reader to reexamine his notions of reality and imagination, upon which are based his dual relationship with Quixote-both as a character and as a book. In his earlier adventures, Don Quixote attacks windmills and various innocent travelers whom he meets on the highway. He mistakes squalid inns for castles, whores for ladies, and a barber's basin for a helmet. In those adventures, Don Quixote's imagination overpowers his perception and transfonns everyday ordinary objects-"real" things-into the cast and props of knight errantry. In the final episode, Quixote is no longer the only one to recognize and incorporate images into reality. He is joined by his companions, and although they disagree on the basis for admitting this image in to the real world, they all perform the same act. In the eyes of the other characters-Sancho, the barber, the priest, and especially the penitents who scourge themselves-Don Quixote does not merely attack their wooden statue, but also attacks the Virgin herself. This adventme is the pinnacle of Quixote's movement from the real world, that is the real world of the characters as seen by the reader, to the imaginary. Although his comrades obstinately resist being seduced by the realm of the imagination, Quixote has forced them, albeit unwittingly, into a battle in which they cannot resort to the experimentally verifiable world. For the first time, the battle in which Quixote is engaged is no longer between the real and the imaginary, but takes place solely within the bounds of the imagination. The battle is a contest of faith, and Quixote has dragged his companions down into the murky cave where he can But I, though in appearance Don Quixote's father, am really his step-father, and so will not drift with the current of custom, nor implore you, almost with tears in my eyes, as others do, dearest reader, to pardon or ignore the faults of this child of mine. For you are no relation or friend of his. Your soul is in your own body, and you have free will with the best of them, and are as much a lord in your own house as the King is over his taxes. So who is the bigger liar, Cervantes or Benengeli? For Quixote is our fiiend and brother, and we love him dearly: he is the great mirror of our imaginations, and his adventures are the reflection of our faith. * * * In Book I, Chapter LII, in which is related Don Quixote's last adventure, the enchanted knight leaps on his steed and gallops off to offer combat to a band of kidnappers abducting a noble lady. Sancho says: 3 2 �challenge their beliefs just as they have challenged his. For Quixote's companions, attacking the image of the Virgin is tantamount to attacking the real, flesh-and-blood Mother of God. For Quixote, the statue is also equivalent or parallel to a living, breathing maiden, but not to the Holy Virgin. Both Quixote and his companions have granted the image, through their faith in it, the certainty and significance reserved for the "real" object it represents. In their minds the image is no longer an image, but a living woman. Thus their disagreement is only in terms of the particulars of the imagination, and the battlefield has shifted from one between the two separate worlds to the imaginary world alone. By attacking the image of the Virgin, Quixote also attacks the Catholic faith. Thus by denying or misperceiving a single idea, Don Quixote inadvertently attacks the foundations of his comrades' beliefs. In one fell swoop Quixote deals a decisive retaliatory blow to his comrades' beliefs. He suddenly shoves their world into the same perilous position into which they have forced his throughout the novel. The tables are turned when Quixote, who is continually forced to defend his system of beliefs throughout the course of his adventures, requires his persecutors to defend their own beliefs. The same questions with which his comrades have challenged his beliefs, he now unwittingly forces them to ask themselves about their own beliefs, namely their faith in Christianity. How sacred is their image? Can it be any more sacred that the image of Dulcinea del Toboso? Quixote's actions force us to compare the sanctity of the Virgin with the sanctity of Dulcinea. It seems that in the minds of their respective champions they are equal. How then can we assert our faith in one image over another? And how can we be certain that the faith we put in any system of beliefs is anything other than quixotic madness? Don Quixote's last adventure is crucial in exposing the absence of reason and the dependence upon the imagination that is integral to all our beliefs. When Don Quixote attacks the image of the Virgin, he not only challenges his companions, but, as we will see, he challenges the reader as well. We are too drawn into battle with Don Quixote-and this battle is important in the determination of our relationship with him. Like Quixote's companions, we have insisted that Quixote is a madman. But when his image (Dulcinea) is compared with theirs (the Virgin), and they appear equally legitimate, we are compelled to consider the validity of our own. First, we must address our relationship with Don Quixote up to this point. Then we can examine how the last adventure draws us into battle with him, and finally, how the results of that conflict change our relationship with Quixote. It appears that before this pivotal adventure, our relationship with Don Quixote is a fairly simple, almost superficial one. We love and admire Don Quixote because he has an unshakable faith in his principles. Moreover, they are principles that Quixote easily convinces us are noble and true. Like the priest, the barber, and the others, we are surprised by the sound reason Quixote displays when discoursing on the virtue of his profession. In these moments of lucidity, when Don Quixote does not endanger the lives of innocent people as well as his own, it is difficult for us to deny the logic which underlies laws of chivalry. But because it is universally agreed that the profession of knight errantry is half fiction, half nonsense, Don Quixote is considered a madman. Even though his arguments are sound and persuasive, the laws of chivalry are incongruent with our system of beliefs: His hearers were moved once more to pity at seeing a man, apparently of such sound intelligence and with such understanding of everything he spoke of, lose it so entirely on the subject of his foul and accursed chivalry. The priest said that there was much justice in what he said in favor of arms, and that he was of the very same opinion himself, although a scholar and graduate. (Ch. XXXVIII, p. 345) Both Quixote's companions and the reader perceive Quixote as a madman because the focus and foundation of his apparently sound reason and judgement is chivalry. We do not consider chivalry in any serious fashion, so any man who treats it so rationally and with such conviction must be insane, despite his seeming intelligence. But this apparently raving lunatic is a charm and delight in part because he is no threat to us. Many others have good reason to bear some animosity towards the "mirror of chivalry": Andrew, who is doubly beaten by his master for Don Quixote's interference; the innkeepers in whose inns Don Quixote wreaks havoc; and all the various travelers and shepherds, who fall victim to Don Quixote's outlandish escapades. But the knight's ardent conviction, his physical vulnerability, and his tender heart, soften our judgement of the damage that he does. We are in no danger and can thoroughly enjoy (from a comfortable distance) the spectacle of the havoc that he wreaks upon the innocent. Despite his imperviousness to the destructive effects of his actions, Quixote is also a tender, caring man. He offers the same courtesy to whores at an inn, as he does to the Duchess; every woman he meets is a damsel in distress to whom he extends his unconditional service. ... the first man of our times, of these calamitous times of ours, to devote himself to the toils arid exercise of knight errantry; to redress wrongs, aid widows and protect maidens, such as roam up-hill and down-dale with their whips and palfreys and their whole virginities about them. (Ch. IX, p. 76) Don Quixote is also a faithful lover and friend-a lover who must be admired and ranked amongst the best. His faith and devotion to Dulcinea del Toboso, whose honor he places above his own life, are flawless. And despite his sometimes harsh treatment of Sancho's drolleries, Don Quixote's unfaltering resolution to find his squire an island and the paternal tenderness with which he attempts to instruct him on the laws 4 of chivalry, testify to Don Quixote's noble intentions and tender heart. It seems important that Quixote be a character whom we neither fear nor dislike. On the contraiy, as our relationship with the Knight of the Sad Countenance begins to change, it becomes essential that we love him. This relationship with Don Quixote, that we establish early on in the novel, changes in the last adventure. It changes not because of any alteration in Quixote's character, but indirectly with the reversal in the status of his companions' beliefs. Tluoughout d1e adventures, we have been more or less in agreement with Sancho, the barber, and the priest. They, like us, love the knight, but consider him a lunatic whom they are obligated to restore to his senses, his family, and proper way of life. This diagnosis, namely that Quixote is insane, excludes us from his world (the imaginaiy) and includes us in the world shared by the otl1er characters (the real). We have shared with Quixote's companions a common system of beliefs loosely based on the description of our experiences primarily through inductive reasoning. Quixote, on the other hand, describes his experiences deductively from the fictional "laws of chivalry." But when Quixote attacks the image of the Virgin and we see our allies ascend into the imaginary world where the image is tantamount to the living Virgin, they too begin to paiticipate in Quixote 's deductive reasoning. Regardless of whether or not we are Catholic, or even Christian, we are forced to realize that the beliefs of our cohorts, which we were certain were just as rationally grounded as our own, are now indistinguishable in kind from Quixote's. The world of Quixote's companions, which we supposed was entirely rational, and wid1in which we included ourselves , suddenly manifests this quixotic ai10maly, thus undermining its rationality and certainty. Hence we must doubt the original certainty which we have placed in our own world. This world in which we ai·e left in becomes even less certain with the disintegration of the alliance we had formed with Don Quixote's companions. As they ai·e drawn into the imaginaiy world through their belief in the image of the Virgin, we are left alone in the world that only recognizes the image as a wooden statue. Hence what was once the imaginary world in the view we shared with Sancho, d1e barber, and the priest, and the penitents, is now their real world, and we are left suspecting that they, including Don Quixote, imagine our world, which recognizes the image as a mere image, as imaginary. Because we do not participate in the belief that the image of the Virgin has any special significance, we are immediately excluded from the world of the bai·ber, the priest, and the penitents, in which we originally included ourselves. But it is the awareness of exclusion that allows us to realize that we had believed in a different image-the image presented by the book- but we were completely unaware of the belief. In a single moment we are excluded from the world of the characters because we have not embraced the image of the Virgin, and at the same time brought back into the world with a whole new insight. We sudden Iy become aware of our belief in literary images. We are able to be enchanted by the book, and thus to have that spell broken by our exclusion from the characters' beliefs, only because we were initially able to transcend the literary images of the characters through the imagination and to allow them to become as real to us as the image of the Virgin is to them. Our relationship with Don Quixote is dramatically changed. For we are now unable to approach Quixote with the same objective rationality as before. Ouroriginal analysis that Don Quixote is insane, is no longer valid. We see that we ai·e like Quixote in many ways we never suspect until the certainty of our own world begins to deteriorate. It is Quixote then who demonstrates to us the uncertainty of our world, or that the certainty we put in our beliefs can only be as absolute as the certainty Quixote puts in his own . This revelation has the potential to be a frightening one. If Don Quixote were evil, if the enactment of his beliefs required murder and robbery, the discovery that we are unable to condemn his beliefs with any legitimate judgement would be teffifying. But we love Quixote, and now that he has led us to this self-discovery, we love him more. Don Quixote, the "mirror of chivalry," is also the mirror of ourselves. For without Don Quixote, we have no means of examining the certainty of our own beliefs. Without Don Quixote we are stuck in the so-called "real world," forever peering into the imaginary world, ai1d separated from it by an insurmountable distance. An analysis of tl1e last adventure, in which Don Quixote attacks the image of the Virgin, reveals to the reader the almost imperceptible barriers that separate the imaginary world of the book from the so-called "real world" of the reader. The bar1iers only become apparent after Quixote, albeit unknowingly, indirectly trespasses into the reader's world by questioning our unexamined beliefs. His attack upon the image allows us to recognize our own participation and faith in certain images by highlighting our lack of faith in a particular one (the Virgin). Our distance from the image of the Virgin reveals our intimacy with the characters, which can only be achieved through faith in d1eir literary images. But "The Last Adventure" represents a simple, isolated case of a more complex and thorough subordination of our unconscious faith in the literary images. For in the discussion of the authorship of Don Quixote, another, more effective, and more disturbing, attempt is made to subvert our faith in the image. At the beginning of the book, in the author's prologue, Cervantes claims the title of authorship for himself, declaring in the opening line: "Idle reader, you can believe without any oath of mine that I wish this book, as the child of my brain, to be the most beautiful, the liveliest and the cleverest imaginable" (p. 27). The perfectly rational assertion that Don Quixote is Cervailtes' brain-child, which any reader would easily grant, turns out not to be so cut and dry. A few sentences later, Cervantes tells us that though he appears to be Don 5 �the author and the character may confront one another, and second, that the author may confront the reader. The author's presence in the story is a constant reminder to the reader that he is reading-that the reader's involvement with the characters is an act of faith. The author is the craftsman who has created this image. His presence within the form of his own creation undermines our faith in the story and accentuates our willingness to let this creator of images seduce us, the believers. The remainder of Book I is taken from the work of Benengeli and the discussion of authorship is dropped. But the origin of Don quixote's history has been thoroughly convoluted and demands some explanation. There is some evidence to indicate that Quixote himself is at the bottom of this endless chain of narrators. Don Quixote is aware of the necessity of a knight errant to have a personal sage who will direct and record his adventures, and states this a number of times. When Sancho dubs him Knight of the Sad Countenance · he says: Quixote's father, he is really only his step-father (p. 27). Already, before the story has even begun, the identity of the author is cast into doubt. This is a strange way to write a story, but as this subtle departure from our expectations lies somewhat inconspicuously in the prologue, the importance of this subtle departure from our assumption of authorship is easily overlooked. The question of authorship becomes unavoidable in Chapters VIII to IX, which relate the stupendous battle between Don Quixote and the Basque. At the height of their combat, Cervantes abruptly interrupts the narrative: "the unfortunate thing is that the author of this history left the battle in suspense at this critical point, with the excuse that he could find no more records of Don Quixote's exploits than those related here" (p. 74). We are forced from this statement to conclude that Cervantes is not the original author of this history. Rather, he is narrating the work of a previous author, who based his version of Don Quixote's history on certain documents and records whose origin is a complete mystery. Cervantes goes on to describe his search for the conclusion to Don Quixote's battle with the Basque, and how by chance he found it amongst a heap of old parchments in a silk merchant's shop. A tattered old book which catches his eye miraculously turns out to be the "history of Don Quixote de la Mancha, written by Cide Hamete Benengeli, Arabic historian" (p. 77). Cervantes relates how he had the book translated for him by a Spanish-speaking Moor. The conclusion of the story is Cervantes' account of the translation of Benengeli' s work. Unfortunately, there are two points which further complicate the origin and veracity of Cervantes' Don quixote. The first difficulty is Cervantes' own doubt as to the veracity of the original which he expresses immediately after relating his discovery of Cide Hamete Benengeli' s history: ... the sage whose task it is to write the history of my deeds must have thought it right for me to take some title, as all knights did in olden days ... the sage I mentioned has put it into your thoughts and into your mouth to call me now The Knight of the Sad Countenance . .. (Ch. XIX, p. 147) If Don Quixote is the original author, then it is he who has put these words into Sancho Panza's mouth. Despite Sancho's wit, "Knight of the Sad Countenance" does not sound like a title that the squire we are familiar with would contrive. But, the explanation Sancho gives for the title, namely Quixote's shriveled up, pathetic appearance, does. It is not unreasonable, then, to suppose that Don Quixote might have given himself the title for another reason: his eternal longing for Dulcinea del Toboso. Don Quixote knows that, according to the books of chivalry, which form the foundation of his beliefs, his adventures should be carefully guided and recorded. Since the laws of chivalry demand it, so does Quixote's system of beliefs. It is possible to cite that Cide Hamete Benengeli is this omniscient, omnipresent sage, and he is actually referred to as "the sage Cide Hamete Benengeli" at the very beginning of Chapter XV (p. 111). But it is more likely that Quixote himself is his own sage-and that Benengeli, a liar, distorted the famous deeds of the Knight of the Sad Countenance. If this is the case, then in the original account of Don Quixote's adventures, written by Don Quixote, though Sancho may actually dub Quixote "Knight of the Sad Countenance," he is inspired to do so by Quixote's appearance rather than his love for Dulcinea. In the original work, we speculate, Sancho is perhaps slightly more informed of the laws and customs of knight errantry. But this, of course, could only be a figment of Don Quixote's imagination, which the Arabic historian Benengeli uncovers, and reveals in his own account of Don Quixote's adventures. The disastrous ramifications of this Now, if any objection can be made against the truth of the history, it can only be that its narrator was an Arab-men of that nation being ready liars, though as they are so much our enemies he might be thought rather to have fallen short of the truth rather than to have exaggerated. (Ch. IX, p. 78) The second difficulty arises in Chapter VI, but is only manifest in light of the entire discussion concerning the authorship. During the inquisition that the priest and the barber hold in Don Quixote's library, Cervantes describes how a copy of one of his own works, Galatea, is spared from the flames by the priest, who says: ''That Cervantes has been a great friend of mine for many years" (p. 62). Suddenly Cervantes and Don Quixote become contemporaries. The notion that Cervantes is the original source, the metaphorical biological origin of the hero begins to collapse. Time and priority become confused. the author finds himself in the mind of the character that was supposedly his brain-child. The reader is forced to consider two disturbing possibilities: first, the possibility that 6 hypothesis lead us to conclude that Benengeli is less of a liar than we had initially supposed. Don Quixote is well-read, and apparently not without some literary talent of his own. According to Chapter I, "often the desire seized him to take up the pen himself' (p. 32). On more than one occasion he displays the ability and inclination to write. His sonnets are found carved in trees in the Sierra Morena and he has a propensity for literary criticism. Furthermore, Don Quixote knows that, according to the laws of chivalry, as a knight errant, he is obliged to be a poet: " . .. for I would inform you Sancho, that all or most knights errant in the olden times were great troubadours and great musicians as well" (Ch. XIII, p. 185). If Don Quixote is the original author of his history, he could not have begun recording his adventures until the time of his penance in the wilderness, when he first comes into possession of Cardenio' s notebook. But it is possible that he had already begun composing his personal history in his mind. Quixote spends many of the nights awake, while the other characters, especially Sancho, are asleep: "Sleep yourself, for you were born to sleep, or do what you will. I will do what best suits my profession" (Ch XX, p.152). One of the essential requirements of Don quixote's profession as "knight errant" is chastity, which, in this story, is the equivalent of being a poet. Throughout Book I of Don Quixote, Cervantes devotes special attention to distinguishing the literate characters from the illiterate. But this peculiar detail is discussed only in connection with certain characters---characters that must be recognized as lovers, or distinguished as non-lovers. The first time this distinction is made is in Chapter X, when Don Quixote and Sancho Panza discuss the laws of chivalry. This discussion exemplifies the author's treatment of lovers and non-lovers, literate and non-literate. Don Quixote, as we already know, is the most well read character in the book. On the other hand, we might asswne that Sancho, as a peasant, is illiterate. At first this distinction between the knight and his squire hardly seems to matter. In fact, however, it does. For in their conversation in Chapter X, Quixote repeatedly insists that if Sancho had read the "histories" he would know the practices of knights errant. Sancho insists that he can neither read nor write. The emphasis put on the respective literacy of knight and squire gains added significance from the interpretation of the pair as lover and non-lover. Quixote is clearly the most ardent of all the lovers in the book because he alone is capable of passionate faith in the image of Dulcinea del Toboso, a woman whose noble qualities he invents despite all appearances to the contrary. Dulcinea is nothing more than an image of the ideal maiden who holds a knight errant's heart captive. None of the other characters can claim such zealous, unceasing love in such a distant, ungrounded idea. Quixote's passion for Dulcinea finds expression in poetry, a highly developed form of literacy. By contrast, Sancho, an illiterate laborer, though he loves his wife, daughter, and ass, is not capable of the faith, devotion, and complete selflessness that is required of a lover. Sancho is capable of loving only what is physically real. It is impossible for him to place his faith in Dulcinea, giants, or any other characters which people the world of knight errantry. It is evident from their many conversations that Sancho, because he is utterly ignorant of the laws of chivalry, has no concept of being a lover. 111is connection is made clear in Don Quixote's tirade on him in Chapter XXX: ... excommunicate rogue! For that you certainly are, for defaming the peerless Dulcinea. Do not you know , you clod, you ignominious vagabond, that but for the power she infuses in my arm I should not have the strength to kill a flea? Tell me you viper-tongued villain, who do you think has conquered this kingdom and cut this giant's head off-if it is not the might of Dulcinea, employing my arm as the instrument of her exploits? She fights and conquers through me, and I live and breathe and have my life and being in her. (p. 264) The connection between love and literacy is not accidental. Immediately following Chapter X, Don Quixote and Sancho meet a group of shepherds, with whom they spend the night. One of the shepherds entertains them that evening with a song which he sings for them; naturally, it is a love song. This shepherd, according to his comrades "is a very clever lad and very much in love; and, what is more, he can read and write, and plays the fiddle as beautifully as can be" (Ch. XI, p. 87). Again, love and literacy appear in relation to one another. Shepherds seem to attract love-sick literates, for no sooner has this shepherd finished his song than another arrives to tell them of the death of Chrysostom, whose funeral Don Quixote and Sancho attend the next day along with the other shepherds. Chrysostom is yet another shepherd-student whose fierce love of Marcela, the beautiful shepherdess, has consumed his very life. Chrysostom is a poet as well as a fervent lover, he "was a great one for making verses , and was so good at them that he used to write carols for Christmas Eve and the plays for Corpus Christi" (Ch. XII, p. 92). The story of Chrysostom provides us with the beginnings of an explanation to the apparently invariable little between lovers and poets. At the shepherd's funeral, one of his comrades reads aloud one of Chrysostom's poems, in which he complains "of jealousy, suspicions, and neglect" (Ch. XIV, p. 107). But one of his fellow shepherds claims that Chrysostom "was tormented by imaginary jealousies and suspicions, as fearful as if they were real" (Ch. XIV, p. 107). It appears that imagination is somehow necessary to the experience of becoming a lover. Returning to our paradigm of lover and non-lover, we find in Don Quixote an unnaturally powerful imagination and hardly any at all in Sancho. Imagination seems to depend on literacy, because reading and being seduced or enchanted by a literary image require imagination. 7 �In order for the reader to give life to the dormant ideas and lifeless words that fill the page, he must exercise his imagination. He must transform the static images of the words and sentences into living motion. Don Quixote, the most voracious reader in the novel, has exercised his imagination to the point where it no longer depends upon the literary image. His imagination is no longer constrained to roam the pages of books and corridors of the mind, but has broken its fetters and lives independently of the books. But his imagination remembers its origins, and occasionally frequents its old haunts for renewed inspiration. When Don Quixote serves his penance in the Sierra Morena, he debates with himself over what route his penance should take, and which knight errant's example he should follow . Quixote's debate over whether "to imitate Roland's downright madness or Amadis' melancholy moods" (Ch. XXVI, p. 214) depends on how Dulcinea has injured him. But it is uncertain if Quixote has ever seen Dulcinea del Toboso, and it is certain that she is totally unaware of his existence, so that Don Quixote's injury, and thus his extravagant penance, like Chrysostom's, are completely dependent upon his imagination. Furthermore, since the entire notion of retiring to the wilderness to serve this penance is inspired by the fictitious histories of the knights of old, it is also dependent upon literature. Sancho, on the other hand, has no imagination at all. while his master gallivants around the meadows, carving poems into the trees, the dutiful squire sets off to Toboso with a letter for Dulcinea that describes the knight's afflicted heart. Sancho, of course, never gets to Toboso because he is intercepted by the barber and the priest. The three men set about concocting a plan to retrieve Don Quixote from the mountains, and return him to his home, where his madness might be cured. Later in the story, when Don Quixote asks his squire about his mission to Toboso, Sancho is unable to describe Dulcinea, whom he can only imagine as Aldonza Lorenzo, in terms of ordinary, peasant activities. Sancho describes Dulcinea, winnowing wheat, smelling "rather mannish," and, moreover, unable to read Don Quixote's letter because she is illiterate (Ch. XXXI, p. 268). The imagination and literacy are inextricably connected. Sancho, an illiterate, has an utterly weak imagination. The ability to become a lover also depends on the imagination. As Quixote says: Dulcinea, an image, is very real. Quixote's love for Dulcinea follows from the rules of chivalry: Quixote is a lover because he must be; his profession demands it. As Cervantes relates: Now that his armor was clean, his helmet made into a complete head-piece, a name found for his horse, and he confirmed in his new title, it struck him that there was only one more thing to do: to find a lady to be enamored of. For a knight errant without a lady is like a tree without leaves or fruit and a body without a soul. (Ch. I, p. 34) Dulcinea del Toboso is part of the larger scheme of his faith in a system of beliefs which he finds irresistible. Since being enamored is such an integral aspect of knight errantry, one can make the claim that Dulcinea is not merely incidental; rather, that Don Quixote's priorities really lie in becoming a lover. Whatever the relation between lover and knight errant (perhaps they are ultimately equivalent), as a lover, Don Quixote is in love with love, and not Dulcinea. In this sense, the relationship between love and imagination essentially signifies faith in a system of beliefs. Don Quixote's system, like Chrysostom's, requires that he be injured by his lover (inadvertently or intentionally). And like the beliefs held by Cardenio, another great lover-poet, Quixote's love requires a temporary suspension of reason. When we speak of Don Quixote as a lover, we mean a lover of ideas: " ... and so, carried away by the strange pleasure he derived from these agreeable thoughts, he hastened to translate his desires into action" (Ch. I, p. 33). The two stories that are told in the inn confirm the connection between lovers and their imaginations. "The Tale of Foolish Curiosity" illustrates the disastrous effects of unhealthy imagination, and a general lack of faith in the imagination when combined with passionate love. "The Captive's Tale" exemplifies a healthy imagination, and the faith that is rightly placed in it. Accordingly, its characters find love, happiness, and good fortune. In "The Tale of Foolish Curiosity," the characters demonstrate the dependence of love on faith in imagination, and the tragedy that results from warped imaginations in would-be lovers. Anselmo wants to prove that Camilla's faith is that than which no greater can be conceived. It is not enough to believe that his wife is the most faithful, circumspect, and modest woman in the world; he must prove it empirically. His fanatical insistence upon a demonstration of Camilla's virtue and dedication renders Anselmo incapable of being a real lover. His friend, Lothario.tries to persuade him against his foolish enterprise: Most of [the poets' mistresses] were invented to serve as subjects for verses, and so that the poets might be taken for lovers, or men capable of being so... I imagine all I say to be true; neither more nor less, and in my imagination I draw her as I would have her be, both her beauty and her rank... (Ch. XXV, p. 210) You seem to me, Anselmo, to be in the position of Moors, who cannot be convinced in the error of their sect by quotations from the Holy Scripture, nor by arguments drawn from intellectual speculation or based on the canons of faith, but have to have examples, Don Quixote's love of Dulcinea is possible only because of his faith in his imagination. But although her "beauty and her rank" may be subject to Quixote's imagination, his love of 8 palpable, simple, intelligible, demonstrable, and indubitable, with irrefutable mathematical proof like: If equals be taken from equals ... (Ch. XXXID, p. 287) taken place at the inn, the captive's story is not only incredible, but continues in the audiences' own lives, leaking out of the past into the present; from the world of the story into their own. The captive, Ruiz de Viedma, and his Moorish bride, Zoraida, both have faith in their imaginations. Ruiz's imagination contrives that attached to a beautiful white hand is a beautiful woman who will be his deliverance and his bride. He also imagines the renegade to be an honest man who does not double-cross him. Zoraida imagines that the captive is a gentleman who will take her to Christian soil, have her baptized and marry her. But all of Zoraida's imaginings depend upon her faith in her visions: Anselmo's lack of faith in his imagination render him incapable of loving, just as the Moors' disbelief in the scriptures render them incapable of Christian love. Love, as we have witnessed in Don Quixote, requires the lover to imagine and truly believe in the beloved. Since Anselmo has become obsessed with obtaining proof of his beloved's fidelity, Camilla is incapable of being truly beloved. She no longer moves Anselmo to believe what can only be accepted as a matter of faith. Just as Anselmo is incapable of loving, he is incapable of friendship. For, like his supposed love for Camilla, the great friendship he once shared with Lothaiio depends upon trust and faith. Anselmo refuses to take sincerely honest and solli1d advice his friend offers him, because it would require him to believe in "intellectual speculation." Even when Lothario finally yields to Anselmo's pleading and promises to attempt to seduce Camilla, Anselmo does not even believe his friend's word, but spies on him through the keyhole. But Anselmo is not entirely without imagination; he is merely incapable of placing ai1y faith in it. Unfortunately, the imagination he does possess is unhealthy. The fact that Anselmo derives so much pleasure from pushing his scheme as far as it will go, suggests that he needs to live vicariously through his f1i end. Even when Anselmo claims to be satisfied with Lothario's attempts to seduce Camilla, he has him write love sonnets to an imaginary lover, and then read them in front of her. It seems Anselmo's perverse imagination has already decided that Camilla is unfaithful and will allow herself to be seduced by Lot11ario. But Anselmo's lack of faith in his imagination is so weak that he must convince his friend to enact it for him under the pretense of demonstrating Camilla's modesty. Eventually Lothario and Camilla use Anselmo's weakness to their own advantage and enact the tragic scene with the dagger in order to hide their affair. Undoubtedly, within the context of the novel, a character like Anselmo would be despised, and destined for ruin. It is important to observe the reactions of the characters who listen to "The Tale of Foolish Curiosity" When I was a girl my father had a woman slave, who taught me the Christian prayers in my own tongue, and spoke to me often about Lela Marien. This Christian died, and I know that she did not go to the fire but to Allah. For I saw her twice afterwards, and she told me to go to Christian lands and see Lela Marien, who loved me very much. I do not know how to go. I have seen many Christians out of this window, but none of them except you has seemed a gentleman. (Ch. XL, p. 358) The story of the captive and Zoraida is received quite differently than "The Tale of Foolish Curiosity,'' which is almost completely rejected by its audience. The only comment is the priest's brief critique of the latter tale concerning its plausibility. There is no further discussion because there is no sympathy or love for the chai·acters. Zoraida and the captive, however, are exalted by t11e audience: ... Cardenio and all the others offered him their utmost services, in such warm and sincere language that the captain was thoroughly convinced of their goodwill. Don Ferdinand, in particular, offered to make his brother the Marquis stand godfather at Zoraida's baptism if he would return with him, and himself to provide enough money to appear in his country with suitable dignity and decency. (Ch. XLII, p. 381) Their story is marveled over and the women in the group delight in Zoraida's beauty. this scene is entirely charming, while "The Tale of Foolish Cwiosity" evokes nothing but disdain. The fact that two stories whose treatment of the imagination is the same, but whose endings are almost exactly opposite, are told before the very same audience and elicit opposite reactions, demands that we consider the relation of the reader as part of the audience to the story. This question returns us to the discussion of the aut110rship and the consequences of the attack upon the image. The mysterious treatment of the authorship of Don Quixote confuses the relation of the chai·acters to authors. Cervantes, Benengeli, and Quixote all act both as authors of the story and characters within it. Don Quixote is a narration of a narration of Don Quixote's own writings. Since Cervantes is trapped I like the tale, said the priest, but there is something unconvincing about it. If the author invented it he did it badly, for it is impossible to believe that there could be a husband so stupid as to want to make the costly experiment Anselmo did. If it were the case of the lover and his mistress it might pass; but between husband and wife there is something impossible about it. Though for the manner of its telling, that does not displease me at all. (Ch. XXXV, p. 324) But "The Captive's Tale," which is equally fai1tastic, is received by the same audience with enthusiasm and belief in its credibility. On top of the already astonishing events that have 9 �n Salome and John within the consciousness of the very character he claims to have created, we are lost in a circular history that has neither beginning nor end; neither author nor characters. This labyrinth of characters and authors forces us to think about where the story really begins. In whose imagination does the story begin? Perhaps it begins in our own. Until we actually engage ourselves in the process of reading the story, it is nothing but a collection of dormant ideas. Reading those ideas activates them and our imagination breathes life into the characters, bringing motion into their movements, depth and meaning to their thoughts and feelings. When we exercise our imagination we become a little like Quixote.Just as he invests his faith in the image of Dulcinea, we put our faith in literary images. We bring the images to life in the real world of action and consequence. When we believe in the image, we translate it in our mind into this real world of action. It is possible, however, and even probable, that we will not recognize such a translation unless someone, or something, forces us to. Don Quixote, which has one, three, or no authors, demands that we attack the image of the story and thus realize our own participation in its creation. The same thing happens when authors become characters. They step into the imaginary world of the novel and thereby at once blur and clarify the boundaries between the imaginary and the real world. Faith in the imagination is the essential element to reading a story. This faith, as we have seen, is also essential to loving. Reading, then, becomes an act of love. When we read a book, we cannot be like the priest, who, by failing to observe his own reflection in Anselmo, is doomed to read as the characters love in ''The Tale of Foolish Curiosity." Instead, we must turn to the captive and Zoraida as our models of faith. When the literary images of the book fall under attack, our faith in the imagination is questioned; our love of the characters and our willingness to believe in them is challenged. Such an experience is disturbing because we are forced to declare our loyalty to the imagination. When we read, the imaginary and real worlds blend together, but when that delicate balance is disturbed, the reader must make a choice between the two. Unless we close the book, we choose to put our faith in the world of the imagination. The aversion that we experience when the images are attacked lasts only as long as we allow ourselves to doubt our belief in them. When we read Don Quixote, however, we are required to rise to a higher, more complex model of faith. We must imitate Quixote himself. In addition, our faith in its images (like any other story), Don Quixote constantly challenges them and makes us conscious of our faith. As we become aware of our faith, we become aware of our kinship with Quixote: we are bound together by our faith in imagination, and our belief in images. by Panayotis Pappas '93 A dragon lifts his misty head out of the cumbersome clouds of rapture and scatters them across the dusty halls. Dance now, dance here. Sway like a swallow, with wings woven of silk, sweep through the royal chambers alight before king Herod's feet. Unfold, bend back and rise again a woman. SuITound the fires and veil their radiance; the night grows deeper in your gown's tint. And dance. Move slowly, lightly graze his hair, flow like a soul-thieving fiery breeze. What is your fee ethereal meander? John of fire loudly poking the silent ashes of Jerusalem; bring forth your charcoal eyes, restful upon this silver platter, as you soak in, and scorch, these your last visions. Leaping, twirling, crouching, writhing, within a divinely orchestrated se1mon, you rattled your tambourine of words; a fire lasting against all desert winds, tlu·ough water spreading your spirit-consuming Lord. Waiting you were for the serpent to rise out of the cumbersome clouds of rapture, and scatter your embers across the Heavens. 10 11 �Descartes' Interpretation of the World as Arising from his Method D. Jennings '93 methodological doubt. This doubt, the subject of the first The world problem is, stated simply, the consideration of how we are to interpret the world as a whole. Our answer to this problem entails an explanation of the phenomena of consciousness. For experience to be possible there must be a "coming together" of entities both in the world and in the "I." Accordingly, this coming together is conditioned by both the nature of the entities and the nature of the " I." In an analysis of philosophical works, one is rarely in the position of exposing blatant illogic or even sophistry. The ultimate point of interest in such an analysis is rather how the thinkers see the world. The presence of the world problem and the attempt to resolve it form the core of human thinking, even "everyday" thinking. The world problem according to Descartes arises in the context of his method. The essence of Descartes' philosophy is method. As early as 1620 (Descartes was only 24 years old at the time) Descartes observes that the use of "definite rules" is a fundamental part of solving mechanical problems. In the Regulae, composed eight years later, he posits method as the sine qua non of scientific and philosophical investigation. He writes in rule four, "By a 'method' I mean reliable rules that are easy to apply and such that if one follows them exactly, one will never take what is false to be true... but will gradually and constantly increase one' s knowledge (scientia) till one arrives at a true understanding of everything within one's capacity." The aim of philosophy is scientia, a systematic body of indubitable knowledge. The possibility of such a system is grounded upon method. The purpose of critiquing Descartes' method is to find the guiding principle which serves as its foundation. This foundation itself acts to reinterpret the world. The text most conducive to analysis regarding the world-problem, then, will be the one that is closest to being a "world-text,'' a text that presents the world as a problem. It is the Meditations that serves this purpose both inlrn- and extra- textually. The Meditations is not about method or physics, but rather it is an application of the method to the world problem intent upon finding what is true and un true in experience. Through the Meditations the resolution of the world problem is presented extra-textually to the world. Thus Descartes sees fi t to dedicate his book to the " doctors of the Sorbonne" as judges. The Cartesian resolution of the world problem, one that is to a certain exten t our own, arises within the course of the Meditations. This resolution is itself at the core of the method. The first step in the method is the implementation of 12 Meditation, is the radical leveling of past opinions. The purpose is to destroy what came before in the guise of scientia and to startover"from the foundation s" to build a true scientia that is "stable and likely to last." The leveling is not conducted in regard to the viability of independent acts of thinking, but rather it throws out old opinions on the force of the doubtfulness of their common foundations as a scientia. Cognitions ("cagnitianes") as Descartes names acts of thinking, are themselves internally unaffected, meaning Descartes does not question what a thought is or what value it has independently of its place in the overall scheme of the scientia. Descartes lays the ground for truthfulness-"is this indeed the case?"in principle distinct from considerations of the qualities internal to the cognition in question. As a result, Descartes asks two questions concerning entities that the mind takes under consideration. He asks what an entity is (quid) and whether it is (quad). These two questions are always distinct. The quid question concerns the internal aspects of the cognitions formed with respect to entities under consideration. The quad question, on the other hand, concerns whether or not the cognitions concerning an entity fall within the larger scientia. If they do then we can admit that (quad) the entity truly exists. Descartes' application of the method not only reveals the quid/quad distinction, but it also shows that the quid precedes the quod in the proper methodological order of inquiry. In the methodological exercise with a piece of wax in the second Meditation, Descartes takes up the wax and investigates its quid while its quod is still under the effect of leveling doubt. This procedure consists in the suspension of belief in the existence of some thing under consideration. In other words, a cognition formed concerning something is investigated before that cognition is given a place in the scientia and its existence granted as true. The precedence of the quid over the quad is expressed in the Discourse on Method as the division of "difficulties" into "as many parts as possible .. . in order to resolve them better." Here the "difficulty" is the thing under consideration. The division of the difficulty into parts is an approach to the quid question. The resolution of the difficulty, a resolution that takes place after division, is the resolution of the quad question. The quid question is fundamentally an ontological one, meaning one that proposes "what the thing is" as a problem. (The quod question, on the other hand, is a factual one. Whether or not some thing exists is a matter of determining 13 �whether or not that thing can be encountered in the world.) Descartes, in the investigation of the piece of wax, present this investigation as a process of reduction to "what the wax is really made of." Already, we see that Descartes in posing the question allows the thinking subject an intimate knowledge or ontological access to the thing. This access, i.e., this ability to approach and know the thing, is extra-experiential in principle. Descartes does not even know whether or not the wax exists, but he nonetheless endeavors to find "what it is really made of." (There is a question as to how much "what a thing is really made of' provides an ontological account of the thing. The confounding of "what a thing is" with the logically distinct question of "what a thing is made of' may indeed be at the heart of Descartes' understanding of the world problem.) The thing's presence in the world is temporarily passed over to allow for a reduction of an item of experience to its real make-up. The mind reviews all the stages of appearance of the wax as it is heated by a candle. At first the wax tastes of honey, smells of flowers, is hard and cold to the touch, and so on. When this same piece of wax is put to the flame, however, the taste of honey disappears, the wax becomes soft and warm, and all of the other sensible qualities of the wax change into others. That which remains of the wax is the ontological characteristic of things in the world, namely extension. This extension, because it assumes an infinite number of manifestations, cannot be comprehended by the imagination. What Descartes calls "pure mental scrutiny" reveals the knowable aspects of the wax. The "pure mental scrutiny" provides the ontological access to the wax. The act of this "mental scrutiny" is "knowing" itself. Descartes' interpretation of knowing follows directly from the precedence of the quid question in the method. ff we do not know that a thing is then our interpretation of what it is will necessarily take on an extra-experiential character. The quod question, because it concerns matters of fact, carries with it considerations of context. Facts, because they appear in the world, occur within the context of experience. For example, if one said that there are clouds in the west today, then that person has made a statement concerning clouds within a specific temporal and spatial context. Without this context the statement makes no sense. The quid question, however, lacks any experiential context. The quid question is, in effect, a reduction of experiential data to "what things are really made of." The ontological make-up of a thing stands independently of any context. In following the method, we raise the question of what a thing is as if its quod were not apparent, even when it appears in an "everyday" manner. The smell, taste, etc. of the piece of wax suggests its quod to the everyday consciousness. Descartes' method, however, rules that this consciousness has no bearing upon any real knowledge of the wax. The richness of experience is reduced to a knowledge of extension. Because the quid of extended things has priority over the quod in the order of analysis, we will not prove that some thing in the world that is cold and has the smell of flowers as its ontological make-up exists. Instead, we will prove that what we can know, i.e., extension, exists. What we can know to exist determines what we do know to exist. This statement is a truism adopted by Descartes. What is important, however, is not the truism itself, but Descartes' sense of the word "know." Since the scope of knowledge is confined to extension, so are entities in the world. For instance, we can no longer say that there is a true, ontological foundation for, e.g., smell when smell is no longer an item of know ledge (scientia.) The precedence of the quid question over the quod question, then, entails that the entities met with in the world be of a determinate kind. Experience is predetermined by the understanding of the quid. The experience that goes beyond the bounds of the quid is seen merely as an accident of subjectivity. The resolution of the quid question regarding a thing is in effect the judgement of what holds true of the thing. The conditions of true judgement are in turn the determinate factors in the quid analysis of a thing. At the beginning of the third Meditation Descartes states the condition under which judgement is valid. He writes, "So now I seem to be able to lay it down as a general rule that whatever I perceive very clearly and distinctly is true." A true judgement is made when the object of that judgement is seen "clearly and distinctly." But in the fourth Meditation that deals with truth and error specifically, the judgement and the will are taken as one faculty while the faculty of producing ideas provides for know ledge. The judgement will' s sole function is to recognize that something is true. This recognition is merely the recognition of a correspondence between idea and object. The faculty of judgement, then, adds no know ledge not already provided by the mind's production of ideas. Judgement itself is given the material for judgement, i.e., the idea and the object to which the idea corresponds, and simply pronounces "yes" or "no." The result of the dominion of ideas over both the quid and the quod is that the existence of an object becomes interpreted in light of the idea which corresponds to it. An object to which an unclear idea corresponds cannot be said to exist; hence, an unclear idea cannot be said to correspond to an actual given thing. A smell, for example, does not indicate a real object. The greater part of experience becomes in some sense unreal. A question remains, however, of what is meant by "clear and distinct." Descartes shows his meaning in the course of the Meditations by trying to discover an item of knowledge that is "clear and distinct" on its own. In the second Meditation he turns to the "I" as the first object of this self-evident certainty and the only object whose quod can be resolved before its quid. He achieves the certainty of the "I" by formulating a series of questions regarding what he can know with 14 certainty: "Can I know God? my body? myself?" His only the last question that Descartes can, indeed must, answer affirmatively. It is the pure subject, the "I," that is unavoidable regardless of the validity of what the "I" thinks. An "evil genius" cannot deceive the "I" as to its own existence so long as the "I" thinks. From this point Descartes turns to the quid of the "I," asking likewise what cannot be denied of it. The answer is that thinking cannot be denied the "I" regardless of whether what is thought is ever true. "I feel," "I doubt," "I think" all indicate that feeling, doubting, and thinking cannot be denied the subject and are thus of the quid of the "I." Undeniability is itself what constitutes certainty. Clarity and distinctness are to be found in the certainty of the existence of the " I" and in the certainty of the different types of thinking as constituting the quid of that "I." In the course of the rigorous subjection of the world problem to Descartes' method, the idea of the "I" is the first clear idea to arise. The argument of the existence and characteristics of the "I" show that clarity and distinctness are to be found in undeniability. What this means is that whatever is clear and distinct cannot be self-consistently denied. But hitherto we have dealt only with the metaphysical "I." Extension, on the other hand, can only be undeniably attributed to a thing under investigation if we assume beforehand that the thing is extended. We must assume that "thing" means "extended thing" if the denial of"this thing has extension" is self-contradictory. Descartes, therefore, bases his judgement of what is true of the wax upon a pre-existent notion of the true make-up of entities in the world. Descartes, in investigating the quid of the wax, rejects its mutable characteristics, those that change when the wax is heated. It is the permanent aspect of the wax for which Descartes searches. It is assumed beforehand that intelligible in order to conform to a "form of instruction." The presence of the wax is the condition of its know ability. And because knowing a thing is equivalent to knowing what a thing is, the condition that allows a thing to be known must also be a condition of its being. In other words, the presence of an entity is an ontological as well as epistemic presence. How, then, are entities present to our analysis? How are entities present in their being? Ideas under mental scrutiny must fulfill certain criteria implicit in the task of analysis. Only then can they be considered clear and distinct, considered to correspond to actual entities. The work of analysis is to start with some given entity and from there to discover its underlying principle, its ontological make-up. "To start with an entity" means to isolate the items under scrutiny as entities. Isolation is a tactic central to the method. An entity is present, in isolation, and its ontological make-up is such that it is utterly transparent before "mental scrutiny." Such transparency itself entails that an entity is answerable to the quid question. Descartes calls the special sort of entity in the world that is thus isolated and transparent a "body." According to the sixth Meditation, any body that is "intimately present" to the mind "therefore exists." For an entity in the world to qualify as existent it must be "intimately present," meaning that it must be a body in Descartes' sense. The question ofbodies-"how are we to account for these bodies in their isolation and materiality?"-is a new ontological problem, the body problem. The body problem acts as Descartes' principle of judgement concerning entities in the world. When he asks "what is true of entities in the world?" Descartes in essence asks what is true of them insofar as they are bodies, i.e., insofar as their knowable and real constitution is accounted for by the sort of "presence" that bodies have. The question of the existence of entities in the world, and of the manner in which they exist, becomes more specifically a question of bodies. According to Descartes, the world presents itself in bodies to the subject, and the subject unveils the world, finds out the truth about the world, in terms of those bodies. The world is extension, and the phenomena of things-the totality of which make up our intimate experience of the world-are phenomena of extension. The world problem is reduced to a body problem. All entities in the world are taken to be bodies, and thus all entities are required to assume the conditions of body, viz. permanence and presence. All problems of experience are thought of in terms of extension. Hence the smell of wax is ultimately explained by the motion of extended substance, while the fundamental question of that experience"what is it about my being that underlies this experience called smell?"-is left unanswered. Under the dominion of the body problem, we account for the experience of smell completely in terms of extension, the object of experience, and not in terms of the subject. The Cartesian explanation of a pleasant smell, for instance, would read as follows: "I smell something this permanent aspect indicates what the wax is "really made of" Descartes' notion of permanence as that which characterizes the ontological make-up of a thing determines his judgement of what is "clear and distinct." This determination in turn determines what is true, and thus what things really are. In judging specifically of things in the world, Descartes combines with the notion of permanence a notion of space. The result of this combination is the notion of permanence in space. This permanence in space, this "materiality," is assumed as the condition underlying the existence of things in the world. Permanence in space, or "materiality," is precisely what Descartes "discovers" in the piece of wax that allows him to ascribe extension to it as its ontological condition. The piece of wax presents another condition of its knowability, another principle of judgement. This condition is that which first presents the wax to investigation. The form of investigation, as prescribed by the second plank of Descartes' doctrine of method, is analytic. According to Descartes' second set of Replies, analysis is "the best and ttuest form of instruction." The wax must present itself in such a way that it can be analyzed. This "presence" must in turn be 15 �nature. The investigation of this relation culminates in the "real distinction between mind and body" found in the sixth Meditation. the resulting picture is the anthropology of experience. This anthropology interprets the place of the "I" in the world according to the scientia commanded by the quid of bodies. The body problem determines the interpretation of all things, including the "I," insofar as it exists in the world. According to Cartesian analysis, the "essence of material things" is shown in the illustration with the piece of wax. The existence of material things follows easily: if I perceive the existence clearly and distinctly then they do, in fact, exist. Also, I perceive clearly and distinctly that I have a body, and I perceive clearly and distinctly that this body is distinct from my mind. Hence man's position in the world, his anthropology, comes to light. The physiological body supplies the subjective constitution that allows for the "intimate presence" of bodies before the consciousness of these bodies. Hence, the body is temporally prior to the mind in the order of the apprehension of objects. The mind, however, is necessarily prior to the body in the principles of knowledge, i.e., in the foundation of a scientia. It is in the mind that the possibility of an object as knowable is established. We have already seen how the true character of a·piece of wax is revealed not through sensation or imagination but through "mental scrutiny." This scrutiny also surveys the physiological body in terms of the body problem. The fact of the body's existence only enters a survey of the world through the scientia. The physiological body is, like the wax, an "intimately present" object, even though the physiological body obviously has a special attachment to the mind that the wax does not have. The physiological body, then, is itself seen in terms of the body problem. Experience is, in tum, seen in terms of the physiological body. Descartes, the physician who in his Discourse posits medicine as the end of the scientia, clears the way for an explication of the experience of phenomena in terms of the body problem. The practice of medicine must be raised to a scientia. This transition is made possible by the method. The unclear ideas surrounding the body, and the subjective experience of the body, give way in accordance with the method to the clear ideas, and in particular, to the overreaching idea of extension. A body's "presence" becomes the startingpointforthestudy of the body. Wedonotaskwhat a smell means, nor even what a smell indicates, but rather we ask what conditions, i.e., what bodies in extension, give rise to the physiological impression called "smell." Through an investigation of imagination Descartes offers an anthropological account of the "intimate presence" of bodies. Descartes in the sixth Meditation defines the imagination as "nothing else but the application of the cognitive faculty to a body that is intimately present to [the mind.]" This "presence" is the condition that makes imagination possible. "When [the mind] imagines," writes Descartes, "it turns to- pleasing when bodies in extension emanate from one body and affect my body in such a way that it benefits." The "I" that is not a body or my body or my brain but "me," is passed over in this account. The condition of entities that gives rise to analysis is made plain, but the condition of entities, including the "I," that gives rise to the phenomenon of consciousness is passed over. The world problem, which amounts to the fundamental question behind experience, is raised from the level of consciousness to the special question of God's existence, beyond the level of consciousness. The "I" and God are both discovered through the analysis of ideas, and these ideas are assumed to stand in relation to the world from a vantage point outside of the world. God is radically separated from the world and the understanding of God is cast in terms of verification. "Is God a deceiver?" becomes Descartes' most radical formulation of the world problem. The question, however, refers directly back to the body problem-"does my assessment of bodies reveal the truth of entities in the world?" The question of whether God is a deceiver does not stem from the usurpation of the world problem by the body problem. On the contrary, it is the body problem that initially determines the formulation of the question of whether God is a deceiver. The effect is that the world is thought of in terms of body, while the "I" and God are radically separate from the world. When the world problem is resolved into the body problem, the deeper question of what kind of being underlies the consciousness of entities is left unanswered, and indeed unquestioned. It may be argued, however, that extension does serve as an account of consciousness. Consciousness, it is said, originates in the brain. The passions, for instance, are specifically accounted for by the action of the pineal gland. This account is in one sense correct, but it is not complete. The theory behind the functioning of the pineal gland may admirably account for the appearances, but it cannot account for the "I." I am not a pineal gland or a brain or any bit of extension, no matter how important they are to how I carry on in the world. Following Descartes we regress into a labyrinth of extension looking for the point at which the "I" itself enters the world, but we never find it. Only in a world ontology that includes the fundamental "I'' are the real phenomena of the world capable of explication. Indeed, the possibility of these phenomena is itself inconceivable until the "I" is fully explained. Because Descartes passes over the question of the "I" in the world, any account of experience can only be made in terms of the body problem that is in terms of action and reaction in the world of extension. The quid of bodies as determined by ideas is now the universal quid of the essential and true being of bodies. In other words, the world is extension. The result of this assertion is that the question of experience is necessarily referred to a notion of extension. Man's relation to the world becomes fundamentally physiological in 16 ward the body and looks at something in the body that confo1ms to an idea understood by the mind or perceived by the senses." It is the "something" that is "present" which the imagination surveys, and this "something" in turn "conforms" to some idea. This something, then, must be a body that conforms to some idea. Such a body, insofar as it is imagined, must in tum be in contact at some point with the physiological body. In Descartes' anthropology "a body" (corpus) and "the body" (corpus) are such closely connected terms that in some passages of the sixth Meditation it is unclear which one is intended. The physiological body seen in this light is a sort of tabulation of information about bodies that is yielded up to the imagination (as tabulator) and the pure "I" (as judge) to build the scientia. The process of tabulation is easily explained: hard bodies are impressed upon soft membranes; nerves are pulled and severed; extension affects extension. Ultimately, ideas determine the whole view. To say that bodies are intimately present can mean nothing more "anthropologically" than that their essence is accessible to the mind via the body. An intimately present body can be unclear, but it cannot escape some sort of place on the tabulation. The imagination itself is a corporeal or semi-corporeal faculty. It is conspicuously absent from Descartes' roster of purely mental faculties featured in the third Meditation. Furthermore, it is of no avail in those metaphysical matters concerning God and the "I." The imagination is strictly "an application ... to a body." According to Descartes, any body is first accessible through the imagination. When Descartes turns to the wax, he pictures it in his mind and then reduces that picture to the underlying extension. This act of picturing is imagination. Hence, we see the significance of the imagination in the quid question. This significance is especially apparent when we remember that questions about the world are ultimately questions about bodies. The concerns with God and the "I," though central to the plan of the Meditations, are themselves not part of scientia proper. Problems beyond the scope of the imagination, i.e., metaphysical problems, are special ones relating to the foundation of the scientia while the problems of the imagination, i.e., physical ones, constitute the body proper of the scientia. Although mention of the imagination appears late in the Meditations, and is not considered explicitly until the fiftl1 Meditation, this faetµty is all important in the quid analysis of physical things. The imagination is of no avail, however, in the realm of the metaphysical, and the realm of the metaphysical is itself entirely out of the world. Thus tl1e imagination determines the boundary of the material world by indicating where the physical (imaginable) ends and the metaphysical (unimaginable) begins. Descartes' anthropology of method is therefore clear: the physiological body is referred to the body problem, and the "I" is refeffed through its physiological connection to the world. Man in physicality is interpreted according to his role in the resolution of the body problem. The pure "I," the one that accords most closely not with "my body" but with what I mean by "me," is not a concern of the anthropology, but rather, is a metaphysical concern, i.e., one outside of the world. In Descartes' method, the world problem becomes the body problem while the "I" and God are radically separate from the world. The consequence of these distinctions is that Descartes passes over the fundamental questions of the ontological basis for a coming together of the "I'' and entities in the world. Descartes replaces this question with a physical interpretation of worldly phenomena and a physiological interpretation of subjective experience. The ontology of consciousness, meanwhile, is neglected and relegated to an other-worldly sphere. Descartes depicts the "l" peering from a distance upon a world of bodies, explaining the phenomena of the objects in terms of bodies. his "I" does not, however, attempt to explain its own consciousness in terms of world ontology. This description is itself implied in the method insofar as the method assumes the body problem as a principle. Do we, then, reject Cartesian methodology? A defender of Descartes would say that such a rejection would be foolish. One does not, he says, dismiss the method and its body problem on the force of a vague desire for the resolution of some world problem that may not even be expressible, useful, or even existent. The Cartesian revolution of thinking consists largely in what Descartes (in the Discourses) proposes as the replacement of the "theoretical philosophy of the schools" with "practical philosophy." In common language, we say that the Cartesian revolution is motivated by the desire to disregard the world-problem thinking of the Scholastics and replace it with the body-problem thinking of the Method. Further, says the defender, any attempt to reject Descartes' method and its conditions seems to oppose rational thought. Our response to this would-be defender is that the critique of Descartes' rationalism is not one of the contents of that enterprise, but rather is an investigation of how that rationalism directs us in an interpretation of the world. If a rejection of Cartesian methodology carries with it a rejection of the findings of that methodology applied to the world, i.e. , the findings of natural science, then such a rejection would be unwarranted. Keeping our science, however, does not necessarily entail a compete dismantling of the world problem. Instead, the meaning of our science is called into question, as is our understanding of the world. It is that understanding that is here of interest. Our ability to formulate the world problem is enough to make that problem of importance. Our inability to conclusively resolve this problem may not be of any real significance. The question in its very open-endedness, in its very lack of resolution, carries with it meaning not provided by the body problem. To raise such a question is indeed within our rights, and is, perhaps, even our duty. 17 �~ Orion outside my window U Stacie Slotnick '94 And tonight I met my guardian angel. It is not enough to be kindone must be armed (at all times). It is not enough to pleadto plead for any reason beyond the stars. Plead to them. They see you, they know you, and they may answer. Now I know this. Now I understand. He is no Beatirice. He cannot save me. But he told me to stay on guard (at all times), to aim carefully when I shoot, and to stand up very straight when Ido. ("One must never slouch," he said.) Tonight I woke up and saw Orion outside my window. He smiled at me. He straightened his belt and inquired: "How are you?" And I asked him: "You know me?" He laughed. So I asked him to show me how to shoot straight. So, I have no guardian with white wings and a gauze gown. So he does not play a harp and gaze benevolently. But he's betterbecause his arrows move quickly and his eyes gleam with cunning held in check. An Investigation of Key Characters . (and Character's Keys) in Mozart's Don Giovanni Nancy Marcus '93 Opera is a creative combination of two expressive mediums, a happy union between literature and music. When an artist has a sufficient understanding of both realms, the dramatic and the musical, he can enhance one with the other, uniting music and drama into a single unified and aesthetic whole. Such a successful marriage of mediums is made in Mozart's opera, Don Giovanni. Don Giovanni, because of its operatic form, has advantages over both non-textual music and non-musical drama, in that it can use music to expand the drama and character development of an already powerful story. Mozart's music, by itself, can easily affect the moods and emotions of those who listen to it, without providing any literal ideas to accompany its effects. The drama provided by the plot of the opera, on the other hand, contributes an abundant supply of ideas and literary themes which correspond to Mozart's musical themes. While the theme and plot of Don Giovanni's story are complemented by Mozart's music, the opera's music is most crucial to dramatic progress in the area of character development and the portrayal of the characters' emotions and personalities. In the arias and vocal ensembles of Don Giovanni, the characters express their sentiments as much though their music as through their words. Music is able to suspend and expand their emotions, resulting in a deeper empathy in the outside audience toward the characters within the drama. Even when the characters are physically absent from the stage, their presence can be sensed through the music. This transposition first occurs in the overture of Don Giovanni. In Don Giovanni's overture, the music foreshadows future conflict between the characters of the Commandant and Don Giovanni. The opening chord of the opera, a powerful, tremulous D minor chord, embodies both the characters and their conflict: The conflict between the Commandant and the Don can be felt in this solid declaration of the key of D minor, which is to become their "key of conflict" throughout the course of the opera. The Commandant's foreboding presence can also be felt in this opening chord through the oscillating octaves in the lower voice of the orchestra. The same descending D octave heard here is later heard again with added significance, and will play an important role in the finale, when the two characters are reunited for their final, most horrific scene together. The first thirty measures of the overture continue to foreshadow the future conflict between the two characters, as several key themes are played: These motifs will not be heard again until the climactic scene in the finale. Direct parallels can be found between the first eighteen measures of the overture and the first eighteen measures of the Commandant's appearance in the finale. The overture's ominous beginning loses its grim tone after thirty measures: as the mode changes to major, the tempo picks up, and the strings and woodwinds engage in a frantically playful game of tag. One such game of tag occurs with the frequently appearing phrase: Lower Voices I" 19 18 �but they are also revealed to be deceptively final by their immediate succession by the aforementioned "stalker" phrase: Whenever this phrase occurs, it is either split between two different voices that chase one another with the same musical figure or conflicts with another musical phrase. Wind s St rin gs 1 - if f1ff~1 1 fn 1 r1 1F f1 2$#F n:r, 1 4~# F which resumes the musical chase each time. These unresolved dominants might suggest that the conflict between Don Giovanni and the Commandant is not easily resolvable. The overture itself is never quite resolved. Such a lack of resolution rarely appears in the overture of an opera. The overture starts in D minor, but ends on a C major chord, not the predominant key of the overture. Instead it segues directly into the F major key of the scene immediately following the overture. The modulation from D minor to D major to C major to F major (which is the relative major, and thus an extension of D minor) is incomplete until the eventual return to D minor. This completion of the modulation culminates at the moment of the Commandant's entrance in the first scene. With the Commandant's entrance, the cycle of modulations begun in the overture is completed, the "key of conflict" (D minor) returns, and the conflict between the Commandant and Don Giovanni becomes a musical reality. In this first scene of the opera, Leporello's entrance begins the action with a bit of comic relief, called for by brooding intensity of the overture. Leporello is portrayed, both literally and musically, as a shallow character, capable of only the simplest melodies. In this first scene he seems to hopscotch around with basic intervals, revealing no ("No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No!") dramatic or melodic substance. As is seen in his character throughout the opera, his simplicity shines through most brilliantly in the "Catalog Aria," a humorous depiction of Don Giovanni's amorous exploits, and also a revelation of Leporello's pathetic lack of melodic capability. But Leporello's character is not the focus of this first scene; his character is too weak to do anything more than introduce a scene. Leporello' s arietta, and the transitory key of F major with which he enters the scene, lasts only seventy measures. Don Giovanni and Dona Anna then enter the scene, bringing with them a key change to B flat major, the penultimate step of the series of modulations begun in the overture. The passionate but brief exchange between Donna Anna and Don Giovanni is the first glimpse we receive of the Don's romantic habits, and the only time we see him before his fatal confrontation with the Commandant. In this scene, we see a man and a woman engaged in a violent battle of wills: Donna Anna snuggles to unmask the man who has "attacked" her, and Don Giovanni to quiet the furious woman. Yet one hears something more than this battle in the music between the two, which may as well be a duet l e t c . 1 ~ndJ1333 I f tt U(!rrrtrrr nt t 1 This second musical conflict, one between the stem, condemning stalking motion of the descending octaves and the flightier, carefree tease of eighth notes again exemplifies the musically metaphoric representation of the Commandant (in the first phrase) and Don Giovanni (in the second). The overture is filled with images of a similar nature such as the unsettling occurrence of unresolved dominants, which may suggest another unresolved conflict that lies ahead. The first two of these unresolved dominants are especially striking, for not only do they sound like convincingly final cadences: 20 between lovers. The music here reveals a bond between Don Giovanni and Donna Anna which the libretto alone cannot elucidate, a bond which is revealed by Don Giovanni and Donna Anna' s musical distance from Leporello, the only other character present. Though all three characters sing simultaneously, Leporello is musically detached from Don Giovanni and Dona Anna. The latter two characters, oblivious to Leporello's eighth note ramblings beneath them, alternate between echoing one another's melodic phrases and singing together, rather romantically, in parallel thirds. IJonna IJon As the scene continues the two men duel and Don Giovanni mortally wounds the Commandant. An andante trio between the Commandant , Don Giovanni, and Leporello accompanies the Commandant's death. This trio further reveals the nature of the bizarre bond between Don Giovanni and the Commandant. Just as Leporello was musically detached from Donna Anna and Don Giovanni in this scene's earlier trio, he is similarly separated, musically and lyrically, from the Commandant and Don Giovanni in this later trio. A. G. Leporello's signing is typically hasty, rushing along with dotted eighth note-sixteenth note combinations beneath the slower rhythms of the Commandant and Don Giovanni, sun together at a mournful, pensive pace: Having thus introduced Don Giovanni's character to us through the characters of Donna Anna and Leporello, Mozart finally brings the Commandant onto the stage. With the Commandant's first physical entrance the D minor "key of conflict," anticipated since the overture, reappears. The fatal struggle between the Commandant and Don Giovanni that occurs in this opening scene results in the old man's death and eventually, in the Don's damnation. By killing the Commandant, Don Giovanni precipitates his own downfall; all the action in the remainder of the opera evolves from this fateful scene and brings Don Giovanni closer to his second fateful encounter with the Commandant. The first musical suggestion of this strange bond between them occms at the beginning of the battle scene, on "Misero !", the word sung by Don Giovanni to commence the duel. On " Misero" (miserable or wretched one) , aimed by Don Giovanni at the Commandant, Don Giovanni sings a descending octave on D. That musical figure, first heard in the overture, becomes the trademark address of the Commandant to Don Giovanni in the final scene between them. It is through descending octaves that the Commandant condemns Don Giovanni in the finale and it is upon the same descending D octave that Don Giovanni eventually falls to his damnation. lt is ironic, therefore, that the first time this descending D octave is heard, it is sung by Don Giovanni, and not by the Commandant. When Don Giovanni curses the Commandant with the falling D octave, he in effect curses himself, hastening his own descent into hell. The Commandant's later curse upon Don Giovanni with the same descending octave suggest that the two enemies have, like a pair of lovers , become as one. I Do n G. .. :; - I ;:: :.. ;:: r Com. l ep. ~ :.. :; -fft-· ..- 1 ~ ... - ,.. ~ ~ )" - . . ~ ~ ;;; r r == The libretto further separates Leporello from the other two characters. Don Giovanni and the Commandant's words in this scene are nearly the same. While the Commandant is singing, "I feel my life ebbing away from my throbbing breast," Don Giovanni is singing, "I see his life ebbing away from his throbbing breast." Leporello, however, is far removed from the sentiments of the other two men; he sings, "I can feel my heart pound with terror in my breast." The contrast between Leporello' s isolation from the other characters, and the intertwining of Don Giovanni ' s character and with the Commandant's is most vividly portrayed by the music in the last few measures preceding the Commandant' s 21 �aria is a fast-paced whirlwind of sensual indulgence, as Don Giovanni excitedly anticipates the party eh is to throw that evening, and all the new girls he will soon add to his list. The frenetic rhythm of this aria mirrors the restlessness in Don Giovanni's soul. While other characters, when given an aria, reflect upon themselves in a somewhat leisurely tempo, Don Giovanni is incapable of the inner stillness required for such reflection. The cause of his perpetual motion may be his unquenchable desire for pleasure. But, as Pascal might observe, it may also be seen as a desperate pursuit of distractions which might forestall the approach of any quiet moments during which he would be forced to confront the darkness within himself. Whatever the cause of Don Giovanni's restless presto pace, it contrasts greatly with the slow, deliberate pace of the Commandant, the ghost of whom, though not yet materialized, may well haunt the Don in all his actions, as the audience is haunted, unable to forget the dark, foreboding music of the overture and the first scene, despite all Giovanni's attempts at distraction. Don Giovanni's second aria, "Meta di voi qua vadano," is sung to deceive MaBetto and the other armed villagers set upon the Don's death that he is Leporello. This is an aria of deception in two respects: Don Giovanni lies to his pursuers by pretending to be Leporello, but he also lies to himself on a deeper level. Just as he sees everything else as a game, even his own destruction becomes a mater of humor to Don Giovanni, as he sings in this aria, "If you hear a man with a maid... making love beneath a window, then strike out hard." The fact that Don Giovanni takes nothing seriously, even his own life, becomes a matter of fatal consequence later in the opera. Both of these arias sung by Don Giovanni are devoid of the serious emotion which can be found in the arias of the other characters in the opera. Don Giovanni's arias, although musically adroit, are comparatively shallow in content. Don Ottavio' s "Dalla Sua Pace" is a slow, heartfelt song which concerns his love for Donna Anna. The aria's music, which wavers between major and minor, reflects Ottavio's love, a mixture of joy and suffering. Though Don Giovanni frequently sings about love, with seeming passion, he feels nothing but momentary flirtation and conquest, nothing nearly as substantial and pennanent as Don Ottavio' s love for Donna Anna. Donna Elvira's aria, "Mi tradi quell'alma ingrata," reveals not only Donna Anna's conflicting feelings for Don Giovanni, but also a profound understanding of the dangers of which he seems completely oblivious. The aria is preceded by a prayer-like recitative, in which Donna Anna accurately prophesies, "The wrath of Heaven must be at hand; its justice will not tarry. I see the deadly thunderbolt raised above his head! I see the fatal abyss open before him." Of her own feelings for the Don, she sings in the recitative, "Unhappy Elvira, what conflicting emotions strive in thy heart! Why death. Leporello is tonally static, maintaining one pitch per measure, but ascending slowly from one measure to the next: Meanwhile, Don Giovanni and the Commandant are both dying musically, singing descending chromatics: I :J= &'F D 11p I&~ ~ 1 ~ IF ' ~ F ' DIF F Veg-go l'a-ni-ma par-tir (Comm. )C ~ ~ I IC:J:&F nal l'F1le1 ~1 IE sen-------tola---n1-----ar-----t1r Di es) omm. This musical death shared by both characters emphasizes the transfonnation of Don Giovanni's curse on the Commandant to a fatal curse upon himself. Her it appears, at least musically, that by killing the Commandant, Don Giovanni kills some part of himself. Don Giovanni's tonal descent, or metaphorical "death" actually begins several measures before the Commandant's, and on the final note, Don Giovanni falls to an F, while the Commandant rises up to the same note. Though the Commandant physically dies on this note, he is not completely destroyed. His spiritual (or musical) presence lingers on through the course of the opera, and his physical presence is also resurrected at the end of the opera. The music relays the shadowy inconclusiveness of the Commandant's death in the four measures after he sings his final note. In these measures, the orchestral music continues its chromatic descent, which ends on a G major chord in its first inversion, results in a lack of resolution. In the dialogue that follows, Leporello' s comic question, "Who's dead? You or the old man?" echoes the musical confusion which characterizes the previous tragic scene. This crucial step adds an element of imbalance to the basic conflict between Don Giovanni and the Commandant, which proceeds from the questionable pennanence of the Commandant's death, and the foreshadowing of Don Giovanni's own self-propelled destruction, which has yet to be actualized. Don Giovanni's self-destructive nature is variously shown throughout the rest of the opera. Although Don Giovanni is the central figure in this opera, present in almost every scene, he is rarely seen alone with his thoughts. He has only two arias, both of which he sings for the entertainment or mockery of those around him; in both he reveals neither serious emotion nor introspection. The first one of his arias is the presto "Finch 'han dal vino calda la testa," better known as the "Champagne Aria." The 22 these sighs? Why this distress?" Her emotions, wavering between selfish hurt at his injustice toward her and selfless pity for his soul, are echoed in the music, which alternates between her sighs of pity- Even the threat from the apparition of his mortal enemy fails lo shake Don Giovanni's casual attitude; the statue's warning is to him just one more challenge in the game of life. As this scene concludes with Leporello' s aria, which Don Giovanni forces him to sing, in order to invite the statue to dinner, Don Giovanni's path to his inevitable damnation in the finale approaches its fatal end. Undaunted, Don Giovanni opens the finale in a spritely D major key, feasting and drinking in preparation for a dinner guest from Hell. Don Giovanni's humor is contagious; even Mozart cannot resist making fun of himself with a musical pun. and her angry cries to God about the wretchedness Don Giovanni has brought upon her. 1 Leporello That's a song ,.,~rchestr:a 0 Dio! mi fa, (theme from Moz11r~'s Figaro) , infelice I r o· r r r r 1 0 Dio! 1 etc. The sighs outweigh the angry outbursts in this aria, and Donna Elvira remains the one character, apart from the Commandant, concerned for the salvation of Don Giovanni's soul. It is appropriate that this aria is immediately followed by the "statue scene." The "statue scene" (Act II, Scene XII) again displays Don Giovanni's flippant attitude towards death. In this scene, his extreme tendency to laugh at everything, coupled with his inability to fear his soul (as Donna Elvira does for him in her aria), leads him to literally invite the form of his own damnation to dinner. This scene begins with Don Giovanni's laughter, which resounds throughout his duet withLeporello, as he recounts the trouble he's made, and the girls he's recently encountered. Leporello,w ho in earlier scenes occasionally expresses mild disapproval of his master's lifestyle, becomes truly offended in this scene, when Don Giovanni relates an amorous exploit he had with one of Leporello's own love interests. Under the shadow of the Commandant's moonlit statue, Leporello demands of Don Giovanni, "Supposing she had been my wife?" and then Don Giovanni callously laughs in response, "Better still!" At this moment, the statue of the Commandant comes to life, supported by the forceful harmony of a brass ensemble, and sings a warning to Don Giovanni: "Your jest will turn to woe ere it is morning!" The playful mood of the scene's opening is broken as Donna Elvira rushes in with one last attempt to convince Don Giovanni to change his ways. Don Giovanni's response is typically mocking, and Donna Elvira finally surrenders her hope for him, singing, "Monster! Then remain a horrible example in the stinking pit of your iniquity!" She sings this denunciation on a descending octave, the same musical figure (though in a different key) with which Don Giovanni curses the Commandant in the first scene, and which the Commandant repeats as he enters in the final scene. 23 �The orchestra ushers the Commandant's ghost to the stage with two dissonant chords of thunder, which the Commandant resolves into D minor in his address to Don Giovanni: Lepore/lo ~I Ort i w Ah! I 2: ~ uJ ron! ) With his entrance, the Commandant brings about a complete key change to D minor, the "key of conflict," sobering the tone from the relative F major that preceded his entrance. This entrance, as foreshadowed in the overture, begins the culmination of the conflict between the Commandant and Don Giovanni. The struggle between the characters in these first eighteen measures of the Commandant's entrance, which parallel the first eighteen measures of the overture, is depicted in their music more forcefully than in their words. The Commandant's forceful, regular rhythms and condemning descending octaves are engaged in a musical battle against the more agitated, syncopated rhythms shared by Don Giovanni and Leporello, which are confined to a span of five pitches , as if to escape the fearful octaves sung by the Commandant. The orchestra supports the Commandant with the rhythmic phrase, 1 @~ Ah! Padron! Pad- 'Ah! ~Padron! ~ Siam tutti ~~ ~ ~ q;§rn§mdn The source of the agitation which the two display musically differs in each of the two men. Don Giovanni is not (at least externally) afraid; he is rather beside himself with the excitement of playing host to such a tremendous dinner guest, singing in response to the Commandant's appearance, "Truly, I did not believe it, but I'll do what I can. Leporello, serve the table for my guest-bring another platter!" The source of LeporeHo's agitation, however, is his understandably extreme fear, which separates him from his master, and reveals him to be the wiser of the two. Voicing the fear which Don Giovanni mocks, Leporello exclaims, "Ah, master. ..we are all dead men!" Don Giovanni, having no patience for the cowardice of his servant, rebukes Leporello, singing, "Go, I say!" Vanne d1co in his address to Don Giovanni, and throughout the scene. The dotted rhythms beneath the Commandant emphasize the downbeats of his phrases, and further reinforce the adamance of his weighty half notes. The orchestral music which accompanies Don Giovanni andLeporello, is, in contrast, rhythmically syncopated, stressing the agitated response to the Commandant's appearance: Ferma un po' T (stay) In this brief moment of rebuke, Don Giovanni loses control, taking on that same musical phrase with which the Commandant addresses him upon his arrival. The Commandant does not miss the irony of Don Giovanni's unintentional musical slip; he repeats the descending D octave back to Don Giovanni, reclaiming his authority, and reversing Don Giovanni's order to Leporello: /Jon Giovanni 12=~ , p· ~ Vanne, 24 t This demanding invitation results in a musical struggle between the ghost's octaves and Don Giovanni's rising fornths, which, in conjunction, add up to the musical figure, The final musical battle of wills between the Commandant and Don Giovanni having now commenced, the ghost of the Commandant begins to explain his purpose in coming to dinner: "Earthly food he no longer desireth, who of heavenly food hath partaken! Another purpose more grave than this, another mission, brought me here." The orchestra's music accompanying this ominous statement is a powerful succession of chromatically rising scales, each one bringing increasing tension to the scene, while the Commandant's voice, unmoved by the turbulence he creates beneath him, remains stolid in his slow, deliberate composure of constant half notes and minimal tonal movement. I affectionately dub this the "tragic hero motif," for contained within it is the triumphant fourth representing the hero, and the falling octave which symbolizes his downfall. It is with this musical figure that the Commandant addresses Don Giovanni upon entering the finale, and with the same musical motif Don Giovanni finally falls to his damnation. In the musical struggle here presented, the motif is split between the descending octaves just heard in the Commandant's invitation and the rising fourths in Don Giovanni's proud, heroic-sounding response: m r 1r r ~ ) 14tj'gpl ~ QIJj J@1@j~!ij I Commandant Al-tre gra- pi~ cu-re, vi di que- . , ii 111J mpd I th n filste pD Dlq! rn p Irln p I A torto di viltate tacciato mai sa- The musical battle continues as the Commandant's deliberate rhythms and monotonic speech oppose the other two characters' agitated inte1Tuptions. WhileLeporello's interruptions fear, Don Giovanni's become bursts of increasing impatience with the presumption of his dinner guest. Don Giovanni's impatience soon begins to mirror the Commandant's own impatience; the speech of the two characters becomes increasingly similar, leaving poor Leporello behind in his trembling triplets. Don Giovanni continually repeats, "Parla, parla, ascoltando ti sto," ("Speak then, I am listening.") and the Commandant similarly repeats, "parlo, ascolta, piu tempo non ho,"(" speak, listen, my time is short.") The climactic moment of the finale begins when the Commandant sings his most forceful speech, a speech abundant with descending octaves, as he demands that Don Giovanni accept a reciprocal dinner invitation to Hell. The commandant responds to Don Giovanni's rising fourths with minor tenths, which suggest an even more demanding imperative than does the octave. In response to the Commandant's last question ("You'll come?"), Don Giovanni attempts a final musical moment of triumph, grandly singing, "My heart is firm within me, I have no fear, I'll come," before he takes the Commandant's hand. This moment of glory is short-lived; as soon as he takes the hand of the Commandant, he cries out in horror: him~! p I His fourth, no longer heroic, has become diminished! 111is is the first sign of a strange musical transition that begins to occur between Don Giovanni and the Commandant as they stand, bonded together by a deadly handshake. The di co 25 �by singing the pitch a mere halfstep below the tonic, a C#. In response to this near realization of the tonic, the Commandant sings, "Si! Si!" on an A and an F, which forms the top part of a D minor triad. Don Giovanni's completion of this triad is almost inevitable. Don Giovanni cannot, indeed, avoid singing the Don his next "No!", but he does so with a horrible scream an octave above the expected D, and without any verbal repentance. Though he tries to escape the D he is forced to sing by succeeding it immediately with an A, it is too late. He has sealed his doom by singing the tonic, as the Commandant makes clear, singing, "Ahl Your time has now come!" The Commandant ends this damning proclamation with a clear return to D minor, accompanied by the fires of hell and a chorus of demons, who sing, "No doom is too great for your sins! Worse torments await you below!" After bringing the hellfire and demons to the stage, and reintroducing the key of D minor, the Commandant departs the action of the opera. His purpose fulfilled, he leaves Don Giovanni surrounded by infernal wrath, the fires of Hell lapping hungrily at his soul. Don Giovanni finally confronts the darkness which surrounds him as he sings, "My soul is torn in agony, my body is in torture! What torment! What madness! Ah! What hell! What terror!" Just before the flames engulf Don Giovanni, bringing a most horrifying end to his earthly existence, he sings: Commandant, no longer accompanied by the dotted rhythms of the orchestra, loses the rhythmic regularity he possessed up until this point, and instead sings with the same rhythmic figures as Don Giovanni. The effect of this musical change is the Commandant is that he seems to take on some of Don Giovanni's agitation, losing his statuesque composure. The orchestra's tremulous forte music is also agitated in this incredible moment which embodies the musical suggestion made earlier in the opera of a bond between Don Giovanni and the Commandant. For the first time, Don Giovanni grows fearful, losing his ability to control the moment at hand, capable only of singing "No!" to each "Yes" sung by the Commandant.; the struggle between them becomes more fierce even as they become more unified musically. In this struggle for Don Giovanni's soul, during which the Commandant actually tries to save Don Giovanni by allowing him a last chance for repentance, the music metaphorically illustrates the conflict between them and the conflict between the characters' cries and the tonic D of the D minor key, the "key of conflict." Each of the Commandant's cries "Si" points diatonically to a resolution on D, the tonic, but each of Don Giovanni's "No" sidesteps the admittance of the resolving D. But each time he refuses to sing the D that the Commandant demands of him, he does so by an increasingly narrow margin. ....0... Ah! l -n~! This solid cadence concludes the saga of Don Giovanni in D major, not minor. This big change in no way mitigates the finality of his demise, but rather restores to the world the joy that Don Giovanni's existence detracted from it. The happy ending is further celebrated in the scene that follows Don Giovanni's fall. In the last scene of the opera, all the remaining essential characters come together to sing about living (more or less) happily ever after. While this opera might appear to some to be primarily about Don Giovanni's romantic adventures, I would argue that it is instead an opera about the conflict within a man who has no conscience. The conflict that occurs within Giovanni's soul may be metaphorically represented by his conflict with the Commandant. As the music reveals, in killing the Commandant, Don Giovanni kills a part of himself. It may well be that in the battle between them, Giovanni murders his own conscience. In some obscure part of his soul, Don Giovanni's conscience lingers on throughout the action of the opera, though as embodied by the Commandant, it is not physically present. Eventually, Don Giovanni is compelled to confront this part of himself one last time, hoping to destroy it completely (or, at least, to get it drunk). But the Commandant, the embodiment of his conscience, can never be destroyed, for he (it) is as much a part of Don Giovanni as the music he makes. Unwilling to part with his libertine lifestyle and unable to completely destroy his conscience, Don Giovanni can only destroy himself, and join his conscience-the Commandant-in Hell. It is highly significant that Don Giovanni's character falls to its damnation on this musical figure, the earlier mentioned "tragic hero motif;" this is the only time Don Giovanni embraces this phrase in reference to himself. There can hardly be any doubt that in this moment, when Don Giovanni sings the damning D octave, surrounded by the fires of Hell, his end is conclusive. Unlike the inconclusiveness of the music that follows the Commandant's death, the orchestra's cadence at the end of Don Giovanni's scene is deliberate and final. The first "Si" that the Commandant sings in on a C, in response to the B natural of Don Giovanni's "No" that precedes it. The natural response to this progression from B to C is the next successive pitch, the tonic D, but Don Giovanni avoids that resolution; his next "No" is on an F#. This F# is, however, closer to the impending tonic that the B natural of his earlier "No." The Commandant then proceeds to edge Don Giovanni even closer to D with his next "Si" which falls on a G, but again Don Giovanni sidesteps an easy resolution on D Music typesetting by John Allanbrook. 26 27 �~ The Reeve' s Tale by Geoffry Chaucer Lines 321-375 translated from Middle English and paraphrased in Native Rural Texan Kathleen Wilson GI '93 Up at Ingram, up the road from Kerrville at the Quinlan Creek crossing there's a low-water bridge. Back from the road a piece, right where the bridge runs by a thick cedar brake, there's a saw mill for cedar choppers, still work.in'. Now this is the truth of it. There was a ole chopper operatin' it years ago. May still be there. He was a big old boy, prouder of hisself than any chopper around those paits. Strutted like a fanned-out peacock, could bring down a deer with a bow and arrow on a foggy morning after a beer bust. Never got too drunk to fish , either, and wrastled for the joy of it. He was always decked out with knives. He'd stick one in his belt, one in a scabbard on the belt, and a ole Sheffield knife down in his sock. Them knives was honed sharp e,1ery day, ready for him to use. Didn't nobody mess with this chopper who didn't want to die. His face was big ai·ound as a big moon pie, with his nose flat in the middle of it. He was bald as a gorilla besides, and brought hisself into town pretty regular, swaggering and blustery. Didn't nobody want a thing to do with him, what with his being such a nuisance and mean to boot. People pretty much stayed clear of him, as they didn't want him toting a grudge against them. The truth of it is, he was nothing but a slick thief, and could cheat a rancher in a cedar deal by just looking and acting as dumb as any other old chopper. He was a sly one, all tight. He was used to turning a living that way. He was called Scornful Simon, and didn' t tolerate any foolishness about his name. Which everybody knowed, so Simon it was. When Simon got hisself a wife, it was a girl in the town. Her momma considered her fine , and she thought so herself. Even the preacher from the Holiness Church, who was the best preacher that Holiness crowd had seen in a coon's age, took an interest in helping the girl, sending her to the Holiness school on scholarship and such, and the family was proud about it., The fact of it was that the girl took her looks from the Holiness preacher. Which everybody knowed. Simon was a fine one for her. He had high aspirations that way; ai1d since it was time for her to get mai-ried and he was there and willing, the Holiness Church had a shower at the preacher's urging, and loaded her up with pot-, and pans and whatall, as a little enticement to get the wedding done. So Simon got hisself a suitable wife for a third-generation chopper, and a virgin to boot, what with the Holiness crowd watching out after her all that time. That girl was a cheeky thing, brazen as a jaybird, and she detennined to have a show of it. At the Holiness Church revivals, of which there was a few more than would suit most 28 folk, Simon marched right down to the front row of folding chairs under the tent, wearing a custom-creased Stetson. She was right behind, decked out in polyester chiffon, red of some kind as it was her color, al ways matched to the feather trim in Simon's hatband. Which everybody knowed was show, as snakeskin is enough for a hatband and a feather is painting the lily. It was "Yes, sir" and "yes, ma'am" to the two of them when they got with that Holiness crowd. The men of the church was a cautious lot around that pair. Nobody looked twice, passed the hymn book special, or talked over the goings-on with Miz Simon for her chopper was a jealous man, and he come prepared to exact a price from any who got out of line, what with his knives tucked around him. He was a dangerous man when his jealousy was roused. And even if he wasn't everybody thought he was. Which Miz Simon knowed, and was careful about it. She kept her nose in the air anyway. She was a stink with pride, bad as water in a ditch. She knowed who she was, special and all, with her special looks and special education. So she scorned 'most everybody in the town and in the Holiness Church. She was superior-like. That pair got themselves a daughter, and when she was about 20 there came another one, a fine looking boy laying in its cradle. the girl was a chubby one, with glass-grey eyes, fine pretty hair, but Simon's same flat nose parked in the middle of her face. She was a big-boned girl, and had a behind any quarter horse would take pride in, and a bodacious set of ta-ta's. As some people say. And that was the family. The Holiness preacher, who put much stock in family values, took a constant interest in Simon's girl, though he did it quiet-like. He intended to leave her all his worldly possessions since he had no offspring of a legitimate nature, and since he was interested in matching her up with someone of a like ancestry he wanted her undefiled. After all, his worldly possessions come from the Holiness Church, whether direct from salary or from more round-about ways, and he intended for his own blood (which would be considered holy if the Holiness Church ever inclined to think that way, which they wasn't as it was idolatrous) to be rewarded no matter how bad he had to bleed his congregation. Getting back to Simon and his business sense, he was shrewd about taking in juniper logs for fence posts, or sweet cedar for milling. He charged a heavy toll per load, but what was brought in at one end of the mill for preparing and selling was not always what come out at the other. Now one of his best customers was the college in town, which owned considerable land and which also was devoted to the education and 29 �where Simon strips the cedar logs. I don't know one thing about the lumber business. I believe I'll just st.and here and watch." Alan allowed as how that was such a good idea that he'd just stand at the foot of the mill and watch the sweet cedar come through as Simon sawed it into fine two by fours. Simon just smiled, and his brain was a-spinnin'. "So they want a honest deal," he thought to hisself. "I guess they got it all worked out in their college-educated brains. Well, I ain't the learned sort, but my mama didn't raise no fool. Let 'em try to keep a eye on me. Those two are going to haul h?me twisted-up juniper that wouldn't make a fence post and milled wood that ain't fit for nothin' but to fuel a fire. Simon was out the door fast as a hog on ice. He headed straight for the horse and wagon. He sidled up to that horse friendly-like, unhitched it, and eased off the bridle. He give it a little slap on the behind for encouragement, and off it run. Didn't take long for that horse to figger out they was. a herd of wild mares nearby. Bein' the horse of preachers, he had the appetites of preachers, and headed right toward 'em a mile a minute. The chopper headed back inside to his sawmill and did his jobs as good as he'd ever done, with Alan and John awatchin'. When the posts was bound together,and the lumber stacked John headed out to get the wagon, and he was pretty pleased with hisself. That is, until he saw he'd lost his horse and was well nigh stranded in the cedar brake. It was not a desirable place to be stranded, which everybody knowed. "Lord help us, Alan," he hollered. "We've gone and lost the horse! Get out here quick! We're done for!" "What? Lost? We got to find him! Which way was he headed?" Alan yelled. He ran outside and didn't think no more about the sorry enterprises of old Simon and how he was going to prevent 'em from occurring. "Where's our horse?" he wailed. Those fine ways of talkin' went out the window, and they both commenced to hopping up and down, they was so distressed. Out come Simon's fine wife, looking mournful and holding the bridle and reins. "Your horse has done gone past the cedar break and into the clearing. He's found the wild mares, and there's no getting him back now. What sorry soul tied him up so sloppy?" She stared at 'em accusing-like. Alan looked at John and John looked at Alan. Finally John spoke up. "Throw that knife down outen your belt, Alan. We look like regular fools here. I'm fast as a roadrunner and soareyou. We'regettin' ourhorseback." Andtheybothflung down their knives and headed into the cedar brake. Simon commenced to talking to hisself even as he waved goodbye to 'em. "They may be smart and scholarly enough to handle the High Church crowd, but they aint learned enough to trick the likes of me yet. Them two will be hauling home some cedar post not fit to wrap a wire around." and he swapped out their cedar for a pile he'd got thatnobody'd buy, what with it being so gnarled and twisted. training of future preachers of the Protestant persuasion. They was viewed as a High Church bunch to the Holiness crowd, and proved to be easy pickings for Simon's particular business practices. Especially the building and grounds man, who was on the simple side. He hauled in cleared cedar on a regular basis, bringing it by horse-drawn wagon since the roads was too rough for much else, transportation-wise. Which everybody knowed. When the building and grounds man took sick Simon was like a hog at the trough. His profits from the college doubled and doubled again. Where he once had held back a little, as one who believed in honor among thieves, now he turned hisselfloose. The director of the college made a fuss, writing letters and all, but that was nothing to Simon, who even took to bragging about his business sense, and allowed as how anybody who had serious complaints could settle them the Holiness way, with knives and such. Which nobody from the Protestant bunch much wanted to do. Two of them Protestant college boys, figuring theirselves to be pretty smart and being restless for a little adventure, got the school to send them out to the saw mill so as they could keep an eye on that cedar chopper when he took their fence posts in to the mill to get the bark stripped. They figured they'd easy catch him trying to cheat them by swapping their good straight posts and sweet cedar for old bent and wormy wood. They was named Alan and John, and they had charming High Church ways. They had a way of talking that was much admired, especially in a pulpit man. It also weighed a good bit as part of their skill for persuasion. They was allowed to go. Alan and John hitched the horse to the wagon and loaded it up with cedar for posts and cedar for sawing. They even stuck knives in their belts, figuring they was to have more advantage if they looked like they was used to dealing with all kinds. John took the reins and headed for that creek like a bee to honey, for he knew the way from secretly admiring those Holiness girls any chance he got. When they got there Alan took to hollering. "Hey, Simon, how y'all? How's the wife? Where's that girl of yours?" "Well, my Lord!" Simon was at his sociable best. "If it ain't Alan and John! What're y'all doin' here?" He lounged at the door to his mill grinnin' a big 'possum grin. "Our building and grounds man has took sick and we think he's ready to give up the ghost. That's how bad it is. So we can either do this job ourselves or get took for fools. We've got the finest straight cedar logs for you to peel for fence posts, and sweet cedar to go through the mill. You fix it and we'll carry it home again, as we can use it at the college. What we don't use we' ll sell in the town. Quick as you can get it done, we '11 be out of your hair," J oho spoke up. "You want it, you got it!" Simon crowed, for he had spotted a business opportunity for hisself. "What you boys want to do while I'm workin' fer you?" "Look here," said John, a'starin' into the mill. "Here's 30 Meanwhile, John and Alan was galloping after their horse, yelling "Whoa up!" and "Halt!" but they never caught him till nightfall, when they'd run him all the way back to the road and chased him into a borrow ditch. They was all three spent and had sweated a right lot besides. "I wish I'd never been homed," yelled John. "Look at the fix we're in. That old fool has for sure swapped out our good cedar posts, and the whole town will know soon enough we 're fools, not to think of the laugh the Holiness crowd will have on us." He dragged the horse by the reins, Alan bringing up the tail, till they got back to the cedar mill. There was old Simon, asitting by his fire and looking serene as a saint at the gate. Seein' as it was night, they appealed to Simon's Holiness trainin' to take 'em in. And with some cash thrown in to seal the deal, he did. "My house ain't much," Simon opined, "and you are educated folk, but you are welcome to a spot in it. Talk it bigger if it ain't grand enough." Alan andJ ohn began to soothe their host, taking his invitation as a great and clever joke, and saying that, after all, a man can have one of two things- such as he finds or such as he brings. They was willin' to settle for what they found. Hoping as they were for some meat, some home brew, and a bed, the two of 'em was happy to cough over a little cash money in return. Simon set to roasting a goose, and charged his daughter with rounding up the bread and brew, and the whole family saw to it that the horse was tied and hobbled so as not to get loose agai11 . That chopper made up a bed with sheets and quilts for the town boys, not twelve feet from his own bed. The daughter slept nearby, all of ' em light in the same room. They ate and talked, and took in all the ale they could hold and then some, what with needing to cheer themselves up. Around midnight the lot of them headed for bed. The miller had done oiled hisself up, and was white as a sheet from drinkin', havin' passed the red stage altogether. He belched a good bit, then pulled his wife over to the bed to lie beside him . She was stirred up as a cat stalking a jay, the ale having a opposite effect upon her, but settled in after tuckin' the wee one into his cradle at the foot of the bed. She needed to keep him handy, in case he needed rockin' or suckin' in the night. The daughter also headed to bed, but not until she'd used the last drop in the jug, and Alan and John went down also. A dead quiet fell over the room, for nobody needed a sleeping draught after all they'd pulled from the jug. Simon had done took in so much ale that he begun to snort and whinny in his sleep, workin' both ends as if they was musical instruments. The wife soon joined in with a powerful bass snore, and it was a blessing there were no near neighbors, for the sound would have kept the countryside awake. Alan poked John. "Are you asleep? Have you ever heard the like? They're singin' Wednesday night prayer service among 'em. It's a fire in their lungs. Well, that redneck may have our good logs, but they'll all have the worst of it in the end, for I'll not rest my eyes this long night; but no matter, for I'll have justice done us. For, John," he said," I intend to have that chopper's daughter. I'll swivel her proper before this night is done. It's the law, ain't it?" For he was forgettin' that fine coatin' of high church ways. "For the law says it clear that if a man's grieved on one point he's to be relieved on another, and by God I'm gettin' into that gold mine tonight." "Aw, hell, Alan!" hissed John in Alan's ear. "That chopper is a dangerous man. If you git that girl, he's like to wake up and then we're both done for." "He don't scare me," Alan hissed back. 'Tm as scared of him as I am of a house fly." And up he rose, and crept in like a coachwhip snake in the hen house, close beside her. By the time she woke up, it was too late to c1y out, and she soon found that she didn't want to give a warnin ', for he was artful as clergy are wont to be, and they was soon the same as one. And while Alan played, John lay still, thinking dark thoughts. "This is tumin' out to be a bad joke," he brooded, "with the laugh on me. I'm left over here lookin' like a regular ape, but Alan has got repayment for the harm done him. He's got that chopper's girl to lay with. He took the chance, but I lay like a log in my bed. When this joke gets spread 'round town I'll sound like the sissy and the fool. Well Iain 't havin' it. I can take a risk, too. They say a coward has no luck. Well, I'm beginnin' to feel lucky." And up he rose, got hold of the cradle, and carried it back to the foot of his own bed. Not long after, that wife left off snoring and woke up, for she needed to take a piss. She headed outside to the outhouse, and soon come back in, groping for the cradle in the dark and not finding it. "Lord God," she whispered to herself, "I like to got in bed with those two boys. Wouldn't that have ripped Simon's britches!" She felt around some more in the dark and finally took hold of the end of the cradle. She crawled up into the bed and laid herself down close beside young John, where she would have gone back to snoring but for John's sudden activity. He rolled right on top of her and took to showin' her a good time such as she hadn't had in many years (for that chopper carried his manhood more in his blades than in his trnusers, as tl1e size of his family attested to. Which nobody knowed but the wife, and she was wise not to mention it). John rogered her like a madman, and in fact those two young cocksmen kept at it till the cocks crowed at dawn. Alan was raw and weary by this time, for he had met his match on the mattress and had been at it all the night. "Farewell, Molly my sweet," he said. "Here comes the sun, and I'll be leaving. But wherever I go, remember that I am your own true man, and I do hope for your happiness." "Goodbye, sweetheart," she cried. "But before you go, know this one thing. As you head out, stop by the right of the sawmill. You'll find a pile of fine straight cedar post, peeled and ready, that is your very own load of cedar which I helped my daddy steal. Take it back, and God save you, my big fine man." And she commenced to weeping. 31 �n [Untitled] Alan rose up and headed back to the bed where he knew his friend was layin." But he put his hand on the cradle at the foot of the bed and thought, "Oh, Lord, my head is still spinnin' for I outdid myself this night. I've nearly got in the bed with Simon and his wife." So he crept 'round, with the devil's own luck, and got into bed with the chopper when he thought he was in with John. He grabbed that chopper by the neck and began to whisper soft to him. "Wake up, John, you hog's head, for the love of Christ, and hear a brave game. I swear on a stack of Bibles that I have three times this night had the chopper's daughter, and in ways that didn't occur to no missionaries. I'm a man and not afraid to prove it, while you lay abed scared." Up rose Simon, eyes buggin' out, screamin'. "You sorry bastard! Is that what you've done? You ain't fit to be a preacher, dishonoring my fine daughter and defiling her fine family tree!" And the cords bulged out on his neck as he screamed. He grabbed Alan by the throat, and Alan grabbed him right back and socked him on his flat nose. The blood flowed down like a river on Simon's chest. Down they rolled onto the floor, rollin' around like two hogs in a waller. Up they got, down they went, till finally Simon fell back onto the bed where his wife slept, exhausted from her own night-long workout with John. Jolted wide awake, she began to bray like an ass. "Lord, take me home! I'm ready to give up the ghost! Help, Simon! Wake up! These preacher fiends has started a fight and one has fallen on me!" John rose up quick and groped along the walls hoping to find a walking stick. She rose up at the same time, and knowing the walls better than the young preacher, latched right on to a stick. Seein' a little shimmer of light, she picked out the fighters. She honed in on what appeared to be a scrap of white cloth, which she took for the young preacher's nightcap, and took aim and smashed down with that stick. Down fell Simon, clutching his bald head and hollerin', "I'm done for!" Alan and John jumped on him as quick as they'd jumped on his women, and beat him soundly, and left him layin' there on the floor. They quick got their horse, hitched their wagon load of cedar post to him, and headed back to civilization as they knew it. And thus was the proud chopper well beaten, and poorer by one load of cedar post and enough groceries to feed a crowd at a church supper. His wife had been rogered, and his daughter too, and that is what happens to a dishonest chopper. He should have expected it, for he who does evil is repaid with good in the Bible but in the world it is a different story. The truth is, the lot of 'em - Holiness and High Church- was common as pig tracks. Which everybody had suspected and now everybody knows. by Jean Holman There in the half-light in the shadow of her brain they drank straight vodka from paper cups By candle light And he noticed that her eyes were more than blue "And what is in that head of yours," he said As the candle flickered across the starkness of her cheek Like a searchlight passing on an asylum wall "Constellations saclificed across the sky Virgins crucified in starlight," She said, "You will go to heaven when you 're dead But I shall live forever here in dim light With my stany lovers." 32 33 �An Introduction to Kant D Laurence Berns Most introductions to Kant begin with his modifications of the doctrines inherited from Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Hume and others whose philosophies can be associated with modem mathematical physics. This procedure is certainly correct, but is it sufficient? We suggest that it is not, because it tends to obscure a part of the whole, if not the, fundamental stratum of Kant's thought. By emphasizing those modifications, the premises which those thinkers all share, in particular those premises formed in opposition to the classical PlatonicAristotelian approach, tend to be taken for granted, to be insufficiently questioned, and thereby to be insufficiently clarified. 1 Itis, nevertheless, generally acknowledged that the issues between the "modems" and the "ancients" were fundamental issues for Kant. The following inb·oduction was designed to approach the study of Kant in such a way as to clarify these issues and to see how dealing with them shaped his philosophy as a whole. The key to this approach is the articulation of the very close connection of Kant's thought with the thinking of Thomas Hobbes, for Hobbes seems to be unrivalled for the lucidity with which he stated his oppostion to classical thought while working out what have come to be called the foundations of modem thought. " ... whatsoever accidents or qualities our senses make us think there be in the world, they be not there, but are seeming and apparitions only." What we think are the characterisitics of things in themselves are rather the effects upon, or appearances in, ourselves of causes or things which are in themselves utterly unknown to us. As for intelligibles, the realm of ideas, Hobbes tells us that universals are not in rerum natura (Elements . .. , 5.6); "there being nothing in the world Universal but Names; for the things named, are every one of them Individual and Singular" (Leviathan, ch. 4 ). In his logical and methodological chapters he frequently criticizes Aristotelian philosophy for taking logical distinctions for metaphysical distinctions, for mistaking discourse about our thoughts and the ordering of our thoughts for discourse about things in themselves. Traditional metaphysics from this point of view is absorbed by logic, if not by psychology. Kant continued and developed this critique. According to him we can have no knowledge of things in themselves; science, the study of nature, is concerned only with what appears to us, with what lies in our experience and as far as we can know, lies only in our experience. We may be forced to think, but we have no way of knowing, that what lies in our experience exists outside of or beyond our experience. We can know only "phenomena," the Greek word for appearances. Sense intuition, furthermore, is the only intuition available to us, there is no such thing as intellectual intuition for man. To bring this point home Kant contrasts phenomena, which we can know, with "noumena," the Greek word which he knew meant objects of nous, objects of intellectual intuition. In his Critique of Pure Reason he defines noumena negatively, as a word to refer to that which we can in no way know, an unknowable "x," the unknowable thing in itself. Yet Kant differed from most of the earlier modems; he seemed to aim at restoring certain aspects of classical thought. He is often regarded as the man who reinstated thinking as the most authoritative element of experience. He insisted that to identify the source of our thoughts with the source of our sensations is "intolerable." He claims to have demonstrated that although we can know only phenomena, we can have objective, universal and necessary judgements about them. His famous phrase is "Concepts without intuitions are empty and intuitions without concepts are blind." Thought, the "concept," is what forms and makes meaningful the unorganized material of sense data. There is something like a "realm of ideas" in Kant, but it in no way exists outside of the human mind. Kant's substitute for "ideas," "concepts," have no special purely intellectual objects of their own; they are valid and meaningful theoretically only in application to human I On the supposition that genuine knowledge is attainable for human beings Plato, Aristotle and their followers argue that human beings are endowed by nature with two kinds of intuition or insight, two intuitive faculties, sensation, or sense intuition, and intellectual intuition, or intelligence (nous). These faculties when used correctly, according to Alistotle, enable us to understand and to know the sensible and intelligible characteristics of the things to which they are applied, that is to say, the characterisitics of the things themselves. While both faculties are indispensable for humans, the intelligence is most athoritative; to be in the fullest sense for Plato and Aristotle is to be intelligible, and, perhaps, intelligent. The ideas , intelligible forms, the universals, are the most stable elements in the world and in the most fundamental Vfay, shape the character of the world. The intelligibles come to be the primary objects of the highest kind of inquiry, tl1e study which came to be called metaphysics. The great modern opponents of the classical tradition, Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke seemed to regard this presupposition of harmony between the mind of man and the nature of things as a kind of naive optimism. Nature is not a kind mother, she deceives us; the cognitive equipment she has endowed us with conceals rather than reveals the true character of things. In Hobbes' Elements of the Law, 2 2.10, we read, 35 34 �experience, meaning sense experience. Reason, the ultimate source of understanding, and its concepts, is not intuitve, but legislative; it provides rules for the meaningful organization of sense experience, these rules we call concepts. Thus Kant can say paradoxically that "Reason prescribes to nature its laws." Kant was probably thinking of how in Newton's Principia . .. mathematical reason prescribes to nature its laws. A consideration of Hobbes might help make this connection more clear. According to Hobbes, geometry, the model for all science and philosophy, is the ony well grounded body of knowledge we have recieved from the ancients. Geometry is, or mathematical hypotheses are, the demonstrable core of physics. He defines it broadly: "Geometry is the science of determining the quantity of anything, not measured, by comparing it with some other quantity or quantities measured" think scientifically we must think that the succession of appearances in our experience is connected necessarily, that is, that the prior is cause, the latter necessary effect. In other words, our scientific understanding imposes the law of cause and effect, the concept of the relation of necessary connection, upon the succession of appearances in experience. Kant spoke of his "critical philosophy" as part of the Copernican revolution of modem science. To take the most important example: we see the sun rise, move across the heavens and set each day. The Copernican hypothesis accounts for the apparent movement of the sun by the activity or the movement of the observer, by the rotation of the earth. Kant accounts for the meaningfulness of sense experience in terms of its conformity to the rules set by our own conceptual activity, just as physicists try to make sense out of physical phenomena by seeing whether they conform to the laws they have deduced about them from their mathematical representations. Hitherto, Kant says, it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects, but Kant reverses the priority by asking whether it is not rather that we attain knowledge of objects when those objects, sense objects, conform to the conditions that our concepts and understanding set for all objects of experience. The principle common to Kant and Hobbes might be said to be that we can know fully only what we make. 4 Sense intuition itself takes on a new meaning in the context of Kant's argument. Generally speaking, for Aristotelians intuition means an essentially passive reception by the soul, more or less adequately, of the things intuited. To maintain oneself in the proper state of openness for the reception of adequate intuition may be arduous, but the actual process of intuition itself is essentially passive. Intuition for Kant too is, in part, receptive, but for him that is the least interesting part of the process. The receptivity is merely the capacity of the subject to be affected, to be impressed, by objects. Mere sense impressions must be worked up into meaningful objects of sensible intuition by the synthesizing activity of the imagination and the understanding, the faculty of judgement, that is, in sum, by the synthesizing or composing activity of the thinking subject. Locke's words towards the end of his chapter on property come to mind, where, in discussing the value of property, he tells us that nature furnishes only "the almost worthless materials." We are indebted for the meaning we find in the world, not to a beneficient nature, according to Kant, but to our own cognitive activity. (Six Letters to the Professors of the Mathematics . . . , Molesworth ed., English Works, vii, p. 191). It includes the study of the quantity of time, of swiftness of motion, and weight, as well as the usual subjects. As it was for Newton and Kant, it is very important for Hobbes that the geometric entities be defined operationally, for "of true and evident definitions the best are those which declare the cause or generation of that subject, whereof the proper passions are to be demonstrated" 3 (Ibid. , p. 212). Emphasis supplied. Consider the beginning of Newton's article on "Quadrature of Curves" and Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B740ff). Why should geometry, or mathematics, have this privileged status for Hobbes? Of arts, some are demonstrable, others indemonstrable; and demonstrable are those the construction of the subject whereof is in the power of the artist himself, who, in his demonstration, does no more but deduce the consequences of his own operation. The reason whereof is this, that the science of every subject is derived from a precognition of the causes, generation and construction of the same; and consequently where the causes are known, there is place for demonstration, but not where the causes are to seek for. Geometry therefore is demonstrable, for the lines and figures from which we reason are drawn and described by ourselves; and civil philosophy is demonstrable, because we make the commonwealth ourselves. But because of natural bodies we know not the construction, but seek it from the effects, there lies no demonstration of what the causes be we seek for, but only of that what they may be. (Op. cit., pp. 183-184). II Morality, as such, was hardly recognizable in most modem philosophy before Kant. The virtues appeared as passions in Hobbes and Descartes, as emotions in Spinoza, and as sentiments in smith and Hume. Once again, Kant seems to be restoring something that had been lost with ancient philosophy. But agian the differences are more striking than the similarities. The watchword of classical morality is virtue, the What geometry, or mathematics, does for the science of physics is very much like what, according to Kant, human reason in general does for our experience of the natural world. Let us take the concept of cause and effect as example. It is meaningless, according to Kant, to talk of things in themselves causing and being effected by each other. Yet when we 36 watchword of modem, or Kantian, morality is freedom, freedom understood as self-legislation. The older notion implies that we can discern a natural hierarchy of human desires, culminating in the desire for the highest happiness. This, in turn, presupposes a natural hierarchy of human achievements, or ends, correlated to a natural hierarchy of human faculties, or pwers. The modem notion, with one eye to non-teleological mathematical physics,5 presupposes no such fixed order of ends, ends that might allow for one man, who understands them, to decide what was better for another, who does not understand them. Human beings are subject to rules, but, as far as morality is concerned, only to those rules they impose upon themselves. Morality is self-determination, autonomy (the Greek word for self-legislation); it cannot, for Kant, be based on any form of heteronomy (the Greek word for legislation by another), whether that other be nature, God, or some other man, no matter how wise. Human beings, as moral beings, are subject to nothing, or to no one but themselves, or to the practical reason themselves. The first man to explicitly formulate the new defintion of freedom was Rousseau, and Kant has acknowledged his great debt to Rousseau, occasionally speaking of him as the Newton of the moral world. Once again, however, it would be best to begin with Hobbes. Why should we obey the sovereign, according to Hobbes? Because through the social contract we have covenanted to allow his will to represent our wills, to take his will for our wills; his legislation, through social contract, is legally considered, our own self-legislation. In obeying him, we are really obeying ourselves. This construction is necessitated by a more fundamental principle: as Hobbes says in the Leviathan, "there being no Obligation on any man which arise th not from some Act of his own; for all men equally, are by Nature Free" (ch. 21). All genuine legislation then becomes a form of self-legislation, and injUiy, or injustice, is like a self-contradiciton, willing to do that which one has already willed tlu·ough contract not to do. In the Social Contract (bk. I, ch. 6) Rousseau puts it as follows: will, having to express one's will in such form that it coincides with the wills of all others, moralizes the will, frees it from the irrationality and immorality of selfish desire. For example, I selfishly decide that I do not want to pay taxes. Then I generalize that desire and put it in the form of a law: No one ought to pay taxes. But then I consider that the police, public schools, etc. would disappear, and I become aware of the iffationality of my original inclinaiton. The form of general or universal law not only guarantees the freedom of the subjects, but guarantees that the will itself will be rational and moral. 6 The moral law sets down one fundamental imperative for Kant, the categmical imperative: so act that you can will that the maxim of your action can become a universal law. Another example: A man is hard pressed. Kant has him ask, May I not make a promise with the intention of not keeping it? But under the categorical imperative he asks again, Should I be content that my maxim of getting out of a difficulty by making a false promise should hold as a universal law? Should everyone make false promises when they can extricate theselves from difficulties in no other way? Kant goes on: I then become aware that I can indeed will to lie, but can in no way will a universal law of lying, for by such a law there could properly be no promises at all. No one would trust in any promises and my maxim, as soon as universalized, would contradict and annul itself. When seen in contrast to the naturalistic ethics of Plato and Aristotle, the legalism, egalitarianism, logical formalism and the emphasis on will common to the moral docttines of Hobbes and Kant can be understood as rooted in their common depreciation or rejection of purposive nature as the ultimate source of ethical standards. In Hobbes the goals and character of moral and political life are still determined by reference to naaaature, especially human nature, but in a way very different from the way of the classical n·adition. The "state of nature," according to Hobbes, is a state of war, a war of all against all; its only relieving feature is the possibility it holds out for leaving, and by means of the social contract, entering into the state of civil society. Instead of serving as a direct guide to human goodness, the idea fo the state of nature is meant to clarify what in human nature is to be overcome. It becomes a source of negative standards, part of a plan leading to the more general conquest of nature. For Kant, the student of Newton, nature is, or must be understood as, a mechanism. If morality is to be saved, it must be traced to a source, or sources, altogether independent of nature. This source Kant calls practical reason. Only as a moral being, acting in accord with practical reason, when one is, and can know oneself to be, the cause of what one does, can one see oneself (and therefore others) as a noumenon, as a thing in itslef, as outside the chain of mechanical causation, as free. Kant claims to have proved that practical or moral reason and theoretical reason, which sees everything, including human beings under the aegis of the concept of mehanical The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, meanwhile uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before. This .is the fundamental problem for which the social contract provides the solution. The solution is a society in which all are subject to the general will, to the law, and in which each contributes to the making of that law. All are subject to laws which each has in part imposed upon himself. Thus Rousseau could conclude that direct democracy is the only perfectly legitimate form of government. For Rosseau and for Kant this generalizing process of the 37 �nThe Visual Arts and the Liberal Arts Notes: cause and effect, do not contradict one another; they simply do not meet. This carefully elaborated solution, we can only note, leads in turn to one of the greatest difficulties with which Kant's philosophy as a whole is beset: the realm ofnature and the realm of freedom having been separated, how is one to understand how natural man and moral man come together. How do the realm of freedom and the realm of nature come together in one and the same world? These problems are among the chief concerns of his philosophy of religion and his reflections on history. However close the main argument of Kant's moral philosophy is to that of Hobbes, the moral earnestness that permeates this writings on morals and politics is far from the "impish" spirit we find in Hobbes. Though both seeme~ to share in the hope of the Enlightenment, that populanzed philosophy would supercede biblical religion, Kant's incorpration of Christian elements into his moral philosophy seems to do much less violence to the spirit of his sources. Yet however much he may have believed that philosophy can learn something from Christianity, it is clear that for him Christianity can never be more than a hand maid for practical reason. That the good will, or moral law, or practical reason exists in all men can be seen by considering what men say and do when others behave badly, or unjustly, toward themselves: the rules then spring easily to mind. The problem is, according to Kant, that under the pressure of their inclinations and desires men exempt themselves from those rules which they can so easily discover and apply to others. Acting on the basis of natural inclination, under the heteronomy of nature, has nothing to do with morality for Kant. Thus happiness, the goal of our natural inclinations, according to Kant, has nothing to do with morality. In fact, one can never be sure that one's motive is moral unless one acts contrary to inclination. An action may be moral and coincide with one's inclinaitons, but if that is the case one can never know whether one was acting on the basis of pure respect for the moral law itself, which would be moral, or on the basis of inclination, which would not be. The only subjective determinant, or feeling, that has anything to do with morality, according to Kant, is respect, or reverence, for the law itself. Duty is defined by Kant as the necessity to act out of respect, or reverence, for the law. Respect, however, is a very special feeling.7 For Kant, respect is the basis of all true love. Respect differs from all other feelings: it is not recieved from outside influences, but is · self-produced, he says, by a rational concept. Our respect for the moral law is complex: in so far as we are subject to it we have a feeling towards it analogous to fear; in so far as we produce it ourselves we have a feeling towards analogous to love. This combination of fear and love is not altogether unfamiliar. It is the combiantion of feelings that pious believers associate with the God of the Bible. 8 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 38 For example, the question, why did Kant reject intellectual intuition? Reprinted without epistle dedicatory in Thomas Hobbes, Body, Man, and Citizen, ed. Richard S. Peters, Collier Books, 1962. "Operation" here is meant to include mental operation: for example, Hobbes does not define line, like Euclid, as breadthless length, but as the way of a body moved, in which the magnitude, the dimensions of the body, are not considered. He emphasised the "considered," "not considered" means "not put to account in demonstration." Cf. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1953) pp. 169-177; Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and The Origin of Algebra, (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1968); and David Lachterman, The Ethics of Geometry: A Genealogy of Modernity, (New York and London: Routledge, 1989): The other eye looks to the "ego cogito": cf. Swift's Laputans. Leo Strauss, "The Three Waves of Modernity," in An Introduction to Political Philosophy. Cf. H.J. Paton, The Categorical/mperative, ch. v. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, ch. 1, note 2. lJ Burt Blistein signified both the craftsman and the student of the liberal arts. The Renaissance inherited this view. Hence the numerous artists who were also mathematicians and scientists--Piero della Francesca, Leonardo, Alberti. They too assumed that the "work of art" was a work made by art, that is, in accord with rational principles. Our doctrine of "art for art's sake" would have been unintelligible to them. The fine art of painting and liberal art of poetry were long regarded as "sister" arts, sharing the same subject matter and objectives. 2 Their association can be traced, in Western civilization, at least as far back as Homer. It is suggested by the language. Grapho in Greek means "to draw" and "to write." Poetry in this tradition is characterized by clear and precise visual imagery, painting by narrative, didactic or symbolic subject matter (as a rule the three occur together) each of the arts in that respect borrowing from the other. Visual images serve the same function as poetic narrative. Poetic accounts of pictured events-such as Homer's description of the shield of Achilles-stress the imitation of continuing action, and explication of motive that we associate with poetry or drama. The visual image is made to move and speak. Carved or painted figures think and feel: I. History The arts designated as "liberal" by the ancient Greeks and Romans differed at different times. They included disciplines that we now number among the fine arts (drawing, painting, architecture) and disciplines that we now consider neither fine arts nor liberal arts (medicine). For long the classification was ambiguous and even when finally codified continued to be disputed. During the Renaissance many humanists and critics argued for the inclusion of the visual arts-excluded from the liberal arts in the Middle Ages-and it was at length generally acknowledged that the visual arts were liberal arts. We now study in colleges of the liberal arts disciplines that would have been excluded earlier-experimental science, for example. Many liberal disciplines-such as music-have been so transformed that, as presently studied, they would probably have been rejected by those who first proposed including them among the liberal arts. We find, moreover, that the liberally educated were often exceedingly well-versed in, and in fact practitioners of, the arts classified as "illiberal." The medieval clerics actively participated in the design of churches and cathedrals and determined the "program" or meaning of the sculptures and paintings which they contained. This history should make us wary of applying the current classification arbitrarily, and in particular of excluding certain disciplines, such as the visual arts, from liberal education simply because they once were excluded. We tend to think of the fine arts as the products of intuition, and the liberal arts and sciences as the products of reason. That distinction is often used to justify the exclusion of visual art from the liberal arts curriculum. It is argued that visual art lacks a logos, or rational component. The Greeks and Romans thought otherwise. Techne and ars-their nearest equivalents to our term "art"-signify" 'organized knowledge and procedure applied for the purpose of producing a specific preconceived result,' or simply 'rational production."' 1 Aristotle observes that "Art is identical with a state of capacity to make, involving a true course of reasoning" (Eth. Nie. 1140a 10). Such "reasoning" could be reduced to first principles and communicated. It was eminently "teachable," differing from other forms of knowledge only in that it was ordered to a practical or productive end. All art-not excepting the visual arts-was then a rational means to a predetermined end, (as in "the art of bricklaying"), not an end in itself; and that end could be a product, an activity, or a change of state. Poetry and music (our liberal arts), painting, sculpture, engineering, architecture, shoemaking and carpentry, horsetraining, dance and medicine were all equally arts; the sophists proposed to teach the art of virtue or excellence. Medieval man also assumed that ars sine scientia nihil: "without science art would be nothing." The term artista then They were leading the brides along the city from their maiden chambers Under the flaring of torches, and the loud bride song was arising. The young men followed the circle of the dance, and among them The flutes and lyres kept up their clamor as in the meantime The women standing each at the door of her court admired them. Iliad 18. 492-496 Rhetoric and the visual arts were once closely linked. Greek and Roman rhetoricians-notably Cicero and Quintilian-use the same terms to describe stylistic and formal characteristics of the visual arts and rhetoric, and emphasize parallels in their historical development. 3 Liberally educated citizens of Byzantium delighted in ekphrasis-elaborate descriptions of paintings and sculptures employing all the tricks of rhetoric. The results closely resemble our example from Homer. 4 Paintings and mosaics quicken with life; painted figures speculate, act and react. In Medieval Europe, the injunction to follow Christ or identify with Him, led to equally vivid verbal recreations of painted or sculpted images of biblical events. Such exercises assumed thorough familiarity with one's subject matter; the liberally educated rhetorician was of necessity a student of the visual arts. Not to be outdone, 39 �cated, skilful with the pencil, instructed in geometry, know much history, have followed the philosophers with attention, understand music, have some knowledge of medicine, know the opinions of the jurists, and be acquainted with astronomy and theory of the heavens" (De architectura I, 1.3). Such criteria reflect the belief-common not only in antiquity, but, as we shall observe, during the Middle Ages and Renaissance-that a building must image the mathematical relationships responsible for the beauty and stability of the cosmos if it is to be beautiful and enduring. The Greek architect did not supply the builders .197'with a plan and elevation (that did not become commonplace until the Hellenistic period) but with a mathematical schema8 incorporating the proportions thought to mirror macrocosmic relationships. The temple thus became a "model" of the cosmos. For similar reasons classical sculptors and painter-potters sought canons of proportion which would embody "the beautiful."9 The visual arts were then in effect the realization or embodiment of truths derived from the liberal arts. And the liberal arts borrowed from the visual arts, or from the same sources that visual artists exploited. Aeneid and Republic incorporate in the numerical division and grouping of words and lines the very proportions that determine the dimensions of certain temples. 10 The medieval belief in the unity of the visual arts and the liberal arts is exemplified by the cathedral which derived its form from the quadrivium-in particuJr,rlJ .,,,,;, lar mathematics and music which supplied the essential ratios that determined the proportions of the building-its expressive content from the trivium and from scripture. 11 For there is a "rhetoric" of architectural form just as there is of words. I la The Renaissance inherited and perpetuated belief in this unity. During the Renaissance, the painters enriched their works by incorporating gestures drawn from the repertoire of the rhetmicians.5 Belief in the unity of the arts was as durable as it was pervasive. Caesare Ripa (c. 1561-1623), writing nearly three thousand years after Homer, emphasizes the same unity:[ see illustration] The woman with the gag, who represents painting, rests her arm upon a symbolic portrait of poetry which she is in the process of completing. In the words of Ripa's editor, "the cloth bound over her mouth indicates that painting is a silent art, conveying its mess age by other means than CXCVll. words-it is mute poetry." 6 Painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, drama, and rhetoric were then all thought to share the common end of rectifying or perfecting human character. Beauty of ornament and of form, whether visual or verbal, could awaken and nourish one's desire for the Good. IL is valued--0r, we are told repeatedly, ought to be valued-as a means to that end, not as an end in itself. This conviction deeply influenced medieval and Renaissance thought about the arts and indeed, persisted well into the eighteenth century. Such a system excluded in theory both "abstract" beauty or a rhetoric without content, and art that appealed primarily to the senses. These did not become completely respectable until the divorce of the visual arts from the liberal arts, and the isolation of the former from theology and philosophy. (Much early art that seems to us erotic is religious in intent; early "abstractions" frequently symbolize religious or philosoph- xi.rlthr. Jtl ical concepts.) We know that there were many classical texts dealing with sculpture and architecture regarded as "liberal" or mathematical arts. Vitrivius (first centwy B.C) lists twenty in his De architectura, twelve concerned specifically with "symmeteria" or proportion. (Unfortunately, none save the writings of Vitruvius have survived.) These treatises suggest that Greek architects were by and large liberally educated men. The fourth-century Greek architect Pytheos proposed that architects "should be all- round experts who beat the specialists in every field."7 Vitruvius requires that the architect be "edu- theorizing on literature and on arl coincided in many ways and on many levels ... the aesthetic problems which may be traced to antiquity and which interested the poet and painter alike were the same for each-art 40 vs. nature, instruction vs. delight, form vs. content, ancient vs. modern, imitation vs. invention. Such problems were debated in much the same terms in the literary academy and in the artistic atelier. Petrarchism and Neo-Platonism affected the imagery of the poet exactly as they did the iconography of the artist. Michelangelo as artist "imitated" Dante, Villani, and the Dies /me-whereas writers "imitated" plastic sources. Witness how Sadoletus strove to imitate the classic craftsmanship of the newly unearthed Laocoon in "elegant verse," even though, as Lessing pointed out, the marble group was already an imitation of a Virgilian passage. And Giovanbattista Zappi "translated" Michelangelo's Mose into a sonnet ... Unusual as it may seem, both poets and artists drew upon the same treatises of antiquity for their theoretical ideas about their crafts. The Poetics of Aristotle and theArs poetica of Horace, which were the archsources of Renaissance literary thinking, were also the primary influences upon the artistic thinking of the day... If in our time the bridge between belletristic and bellartistic aesthetics is not quite so easily crossed, the crossing was a much simpler matter in the sixteenth century. Not only were the issues similar, but even a single vocabulary served both types. 12 human figure, and would need to be familiar with the primary religious and historical texts for subject matter and iconography. (Pheidias remarked that his Zeus was suggested by Homer's description in the /Iliad. Quintillian observes that this figure "added something to traditional religion; to such an extent [was] the majesty of the work equal to the majesty of the god.") The complex systems of proportional relationships that Greek arhitects, painters, sculptors, and potters incorporated in their works derived from the study of what one might characterize as a mathematical physics. Unlike our physics, however, theirs comprehended the good and the beautiful, the organic as well as the inorganic. The physician Galen, who considered medicine a liberal art, is able to include discussion of the Canon of the Greek sculptor Polyclitus-a system of proportional relationships which reputedly enabled one to attain "the beautiful"-in a passage devoted to bodily health because he thought both sculptural beauty and health instances of symmetria, a certain harmony, equilibrium or proportionate relationship of contituent elements. Pliny the Elder (first century A.D.) tells in his Natural History of the painter Pamphilos (teacher of Apelles, the most famous of Greek painters), erudite in all branches of knowledge, especially arithmetic and geometry, without which, he held, an art could not be perfected .. . As a result of his prestige, it came about that, first in Sikyon and then in all Greece, free-born boys were given lessons in drawing on wooden tablets... and thus painting was received into the front rank of the liberal arts. And indeed it has always been an honorable feature of it, that it was practiced by free-born men, and subsequently by distinguished people, while there has been a standing prohibition against slaves being instructed in it. Hence neither in this art nor in the sculptural arts ... are there any renowned works done by someone who was a slave. 14 The artists of classical antiquity, of the Middle Ages, and of the Renaissance were either liberally educated or were directed by others who were. As the body serves the soul, and the hand obeys the mind, so the artist's activity was free or "liberal" to the extent that he was responsible for the idea of his work, and servile to the extent that he was responsible for its execution. Thus the artist could be both freeman and slave in the one person, or he could be merely an artisan who realized the ideas of others. In either case his art expressed or embodied the liberal arts. Hephaestus, artificer of the Shield of Achilleus which depicts the cosmos, Daedalus (whose statues were reputed to move of their own volition), and Odysseus are early examples of the first type, the liberal artist who is also a maker. They obviously reflect a tradition in which craft or skill in making, craft in the sense of "craftiness" or cunning, and craft as knowledge of the principles which order the cosmos are held to be one and the same. Diodorus Siculus (first century B.C.) observes that "because of his genius [Daedalus] was honored with great fame, and, after having made many discoveries, he attained honors equal to the gods. For on one of the islands of Memphis there exits even today a sanctuary of Daedalus, which is honored by the local inhabitants." 13 A master such as Pheidias, in charge of complex building programs requiring a multitude of skills ( v. Plutarch, "Life of Pericles") must have had what we would today call a liberal education. He would need knowledge of geometry and physics to insure that his structures would fit, would stand, and would embody the essential proportions responsible for the beauty of temple and cosmos. He would need knowledge of anatomy to render the The artifacts that survive from antiquity, despite all hazards, testify by their number to the profound interest of the liberally educated in the visual arts, and by their quality to the informed taste of those who commissioned them. The collaboration of Pericles-student of the philosopher Anaxagoras and paradigm of the liberally educated-with the sculptor Pheidias, to whom Pericles assigned the task of overseeing the rebuilding of the Acropolis-exemplifies what was probably a commonplace relationship of patron to artist. The Romans had what amounted to factories for the copy of Greek originals, produced outstanding visual art themselves, and wrote voluminously about the visual arts. In this connection it is noteworthy that architecture was included among the liberal arts by the Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro (c. 116 B.C.) and by Vitruvius, painting by Pliny and Galen, and drawing by Aristotle, who recommends it as a way to gain knowledge of "the beautiful" (Politics VIII. iii. l, 10, iv. 9; in 41 �Those "geometrical laws" had been decreed by God who had "ordered all things in measure and number and weight." They were manifest in His creation, and had been revealed to the Pythagoreans, to Plato, and to Augustine. All good artwhether visual, verbal, or audible-incorporated them: fact, drawing was for a long time part of the school curriculum in ancient Greece 14a): [F]irst the painter, then the sculptor. . . was recognized more and more as a privileged and blessed individual. Painting .. .. was expressly received into the liberal arts (i.e. art worthy of a freeborn person) , art connisseurship and art criticism began to flourish, the collector's instinct was aroused, and the favor of princes and the rich did more to raise the prestige of the arts .. . . Philostratus [3rd century A.D.] says in the introduction to his Eikones, ... "He who does not love painting, does an injustice to truth and does an injustice to wisdom." This statement shows that the higher valuation of the arts in all outward appearances was connected with a greater esteem for the internal values of art-that ever more general recognition was accorded to what Plato was inclined either to deny completely or to consider attainable only by a sacrifice of artistic freedom and originality: the autonomy of art in relation to deceptive and imperfect reality. 15 Boethius points out that the proportions of double and half, triple and third-those, in other words, that yield the perfect consonances on the monochord-are as readily perceived visually as they are acoustically, for, he continues, echoing Plato, "the ear is affected by sounds in quite the same way as the eye is by optical impressions." Boethius does not confine this doctrine of synesthesia only to proportions of line or surface; he discovers "geometrical harmony" in the cube, since the number of its surfaces, angles, and edges, 6:8: 12, contains the ratios of the octave, fifth, and fourth. But the Platonists of Chartres expounded not only the aesthetic excellence of these proportional relationships but their technical importance as well. . . they maintained, with the Timaeus, that the indissoluble stability of the cosmos is grounded in perfect proportion ... . Since art is an image of nature "Must not the ideal church be constructed according to the laws of the universe?" In other words, application of the "perfect proportions," determined by rigid geometrical means, became a technical necessity as well as an aesthetic postulate if the building was to be stable as well as beautiful. 17 The design of the medieval cathedral and the programs of sculpture, painting and stained-glass which it housed were often conceived by the clerics-who had of course studied the liberal arts preparatory to the study of philosphy and theology-in collaboration with the architect. The execution of that design was the responsibility of masons, sculptors, glaziers and the like. The artist was thus a composite creature. In his head reposed the liberal arts, in his hands the practical, the first directing the second: The liberally educated man of the thirteenth century could reduce the visual arts to first principles, relate the use of the builder's square and sculptor's compass to the constitution of the cosmos. Can that be said of his counterpart today? As then conceived, the liberal arts constituted a remark ably flexible system capable of unifying the most disparate expe1ience. Such a system had many points of contact with the visual arts. Music, for example, was not, as it is for us, the study of musical composition or compositions, but of "those 'numbers' which govern the temporal and spatial intervals of creation and reflect, ultimately, the supreme Equality." Such numbers could be expressed visually as well as audibly, and the use of the monochord, which represents intervals as lengths, encouraged this. Hugh of St. Victor (c. 1100) defined music as a "concord of dissimilar things reduced to one." Wherever he perceived the Divine Hamony he perceived music. Hence for Hugh music existed in the four elements, in the planets; in periods of tin1e; in weight, number, and measure; in the alternation of day and night; in the waxing and waning of the moon; in the changing seasons; in the humors of the body; in the spiritual virtues of justice, piety and temperance. "In short, the study of music was the study of those aesthetic principles which govern the universe and the activities of man": Quite apart from the writings of Vitruvius, kn own and respected since Carolingian times, it was Au gustine who kept alive the classical definition of the architect. His distinction betw een the mere practicioner and the true architect who deliberately applies scientific principles occurs in at least three differe nt treatises, all studied and admired throu ghout the Middle Ages. While this definition permitted the medieval application of the term "architect" to even the mere craftsman, it left no doubt that only the "scientist" who had mastered the liberal arts was truly entitled to it. Boethius, moreover, had illustrated the intellectu al dis tinction by a metaphor that was bound to have its effect upon the social status of the medieval artist. He had compared the practical execution of a work of art to a slave, the science th at should guide such work lo a ruler. This meant, of course, that what counted in a work of ar t was not the humble knowledge of the craft but the theoretical science that laid dow n the laws to which the craft had to conform. It is no wonder, therefore, that we find so many "architects" among medieval ecclesiastics: the "science" of architecture was a purely theoretical one-the development of a plan in accordance with geometrical laws-and the knowledge of the quadrivium that it required was for a long time and with relatively few exceptions the privilege of clerics. 16 A few illustrations may make the pervasive relevance of musical theory clear. The ratio 1:2, or the octave, is said by St. Au gustine to represent the concord 42 made possible by Christ between Himself and the inferior nature of man (On the Trinity, 4.3). Christ died once and was resurrected once. But we die two deaths: a death of the spirit and a death of the flesh. In the same way we undergo two resurrections: a resurrection at baptism and a final resurrection. Thus there is, in both instances, a ratio of 1:2 or an octave between Christ and man. So far as times are concerned, Sunday is not only the first day of the week, but, counting musically, it is also the octave, and here the octave again recalls the Resurrection, which took place on the Lord's Day. And this meaning is said to have been foreshadowed in the Old Law by the Circumcision, which took place on the eighth day. A numerical calculation also makes an octave of Pentecost. If we project our calculations on a larger scale, the eighth age of the world, following a seventh, which is sometimes made to stand for the age of purification in Purgatory, is eternity; and in general, seven, which represents temporal things, is followed by an eternal eight. Hence the inscription on the eighth tone as it is carved on a captal of the abbey church of Cluny reads, appropriately, "Octavos sanctos omnes docet esse beatos." Throughout the terza rima of Dante's Commedia, the ratio 1:2 keeps the underlying lesson of the poem always before our eyes. But the octave had more striking visual results. Octagonal baptismal fonts, symbolizing the harmony which they established between the faithful and Christ, stood in churches and cathedrals throughout Christian Europe during the Middle Ages . . . . Whether the eight sides of these fonts, or, for that matter, the eight sides of towers and lanterns which had a similar significance, were more appealing to the eye than five sides would have been a matter of small importance. It was important that a number be suggested which led the mind to contemplate a harmony established by an Artisan whose handiwork in the human heart transcends anything man may do in stone. 18 The close collaboration of the artist and of the liberally educa,ted theologian, philosopher, or patron is also characteristic of the Italian Renaissance. Consider, for example, the association of prominent artists with the Platonic Academy of Florence established by the philosopher Marsilio Ficino. The profound influence of Platonism and Neoplatonism upon visual art of the period has been amply documented and is indisputable.20 Widespread interest in the impresa or device-an enigmatic visual metaphor, combining image with text-reflects the same intimate association of fine and liberal arts. As this example suggests, the liberal artist frequently detennined subject matter and symbolism to which the fine artist or artisan gave concrete form. 21 However,itwasnotlong before the artist himself-perhaps as a result of the spread of secular institutions of learning-acquired a liberal education. Then, as in the case of Leonardo and Alberti, head and hand belonged to the same individual. Visual artists insisted upon, and received, recognition that their profession was a liberal art. Leonardo, paradigm of the learned artist, is not in that respect unique, but typical. He is the perfect embodiment of a tradition that has its roots in classical antiquity: What characterizes the period is not only the quality of the works of art but also the close links that were established between the visual arts, the sciences, and literature. The appearance of a distinguished artist who also was a humanist and writer of merit, such as Alberti, was no coincidence in a period in which literary and classical learning began, in addition to religion, to provide the subject matter for painters and sculptors. When a knowledge of perspective, anatomy, and geometrical proportions was considered necessary for the painter and sculptor, it was no wonder that several artists should have made important contributions to the various sciences. On the other hand, ever since Filippo Villani, the humanists, and their journalist successors in the sixteenth century, looked with favor upon the work of contemporary artists and would lend their pen to its praise. From the end of the fourteenth century through the sixteenth the writings of the artists and of authors sympathetic to the visual arts repeat the claim that painting should be considered as one of the liberal, not of the mechanical arts. 22 The system of seven liberal arts, first proposed by the African barrister Martianus Capella in the fifth century A.D. (whose heliocentric theory, described in the same work, may have inspired Copernicus), was accepted by the Church (whence it was transmitted to us) in part because there were seven arts. "[T]he Seven Arts recalled the Seven Petitions of theLord'sPrayer, the Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost, the Seven Sacraments, the Seven Virtues, etc. The Seven Words· on the Cross, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom [Prov. ix, 1], the Seven Heavens might also suggest particular branches of learning." 19 Clearly neither mathematics nor music then meant quite what they mean to us; nor, for that matter did astronomy or the other liberal arts. It is also evident that the use of certain numbers and ratios in the dimensions of a building, altar, sculpture, or painting could convey profound meaning, and in fact be regarded as manifes tations and confinnations of the truths of the liberal arts, and of the disciplines which they served, philosophy and theology. Finally we should note that belief in a sacred mathematics constituted an essential link between the the liberal arts and the visual arts during the Renaissance, just as it did in classical antiquity and in the Middle Ages, The visual arts were thought to embody or give physical fonn to the proportional relationships that, according to the liberal arts, were responsible for the harmony and stability of the cosmos: The conviction that architecture is a science, and that each part of a building, inside as well as outside, has to be integrated into one and the same system of mathematical ratios, may be called the basic axiom of Renaissance architects . . . . the architect is by no means free 43 �depdved-in theory at least-of any function save that of giving pleasure. Lessing assumes this in his Laocoon (1776): to apply to a building a system of ratios of his own choosing, ... the ratios have to comply with conceptions of a higher order ... [the demand that] a building should mirror the proportions of the human body ... became universally accepted on Vitruvius' authority. As man is the image of God and the proportions of the body are produced by divine will, so the proportions in architecture have to embrace and express the cosmic order. But what are the laws of this cosmic order, what are the mathematical ratios that determine the harmony in macrocosm and microcosm? They had been revealed by Pythagoras and Plato ... 2 3 We laugh when we hear that with the ancients even the arts were subject to municipal laws. But we are not always right when we laugh. Unquestionably the laws must not usurp power over the sciences, for the ultimate purpose of the sciences is truth. Truth is a necessity of the soul; and it is nothing but tyranny to offer her the slightest violence in satisfying this essential need. The ultimate purpose of the arts, on the other hand, is pleasure, and pleasure can be dispensed with. So, of course, it may depend on the law-giver what kind of pleasure, and in what measure any kind of it, he will permit. Painting too was ordered mathematically, not only through application of the laws of linear perspective, but, like architecture, according to the ratios of the musical intervals. The transformation of audible into visual relations was "the great achievement of 15th century artists .... A familiarity with musical theory became a sine qua non of artistic education." This "was no mere theoretical speculation; it testifies to the solemn belief in the harmonic mathematical structure of all creation. "24 We can perceive from the foregoing how it was in the past possible for the liberally educated to have a profound interest in the visual arts, indeed to participate in their creation, yet to renounce the activity which we regard as essential, namely the manipulation of material substance, as not befitting a free man. All evidence suggests that during the periods W1der consideration knowledge of the visual arts by the liberally educated was assumed, whether or not training in those arts was required. The beautiful, the true, the intelligible, and the good were not neatly separated, but seen as one or as emanations of the One. Familiarity with the liberal arts necessadly implied familiarity with the visual arts. A science of aesthetics or sensation was not needed and so did not exist. The manner of representation or style, of which we make so much, was less important to artist and patron than what was represented, what was represented less important than meaning, and meaning less important than the connection that it established between becoming and Being. Not until the eighteenth century do we encounter the term "aestl1etic" (coined by the German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten) in its modem signification. "It is also generally agreed that such dominating concepts of modem aesthetics as taste and sentiment, genius, originality and creative imagination did not assume their definite modem meaning before the eighteen th century." Then too, in all probability, originated "the term 'Art,' with a capital A and in its modern sense the related term 'Fine Arts' (Beaux Arts)."25 This development was coupled with the separation and isolation of the beautiful, the true, and the good. The beautiful became the domain of the new science of aesthetics, truth became the possession of science, and the good became the responsibility of moral philosophy. To each realm was assigned a separate faculty of the soul. Art was thereby Lessing eliminates from the realm of visual art the spiritual and "significant" as well, on the grounds that doctrinal requirements inhibit the artist and prevent the fulfillment of what should be his chief and highest aim, to give pleasure: If in individual cases we wish to compare the painter and the poet with one another, the first and most important point is to observe whether both of them have complete freedom, whether they have, in the absence of any outward compulsion, been able to aim at the highest effect of their art. Religion was often an outward compulsion of this kind for the ancient artist. His work, designed for reverence and worship, would not always be as perfect as if he had a single eye to the pleasure of the be holder. Superstition overloaded the gods with symbols, and the most beautiful of them were not everywhere worshipped for their beauty .... I should like the name of "works of art" to be reserved for those alone in which the artist could show himself actually as an artist, in which beauty has been his first and last object. All the rest in which too evident traces of religious ritual app~ar, are unworthy of the name, because Art here has not wrought on her own account, but has been an auxiliary of religion, looking in the material representations which she made of it more to the significant than to the beautiful. ... The extraordimnily rich and complex art of classical antiquity, of the Middle Ages, and of the Renaissance originated when there was no science of aesthetics as we understand that term, or a category known as the fine arts. When, in the eighteenth century, the "aesthetic" became of pdmary concern to artists, philosophers, and patrons, the quality of visual art-as measured by the profW1dity and scope of its subject-matter-began to decline. We can attribute this in large measure to the separation of the fine arts from the context that gave them meaning and substance, the liberal arts, philosophy and theology. The new categories were both symptom and cause of the movement of visual art from the center to the periphery of 44 human concerns.26 That movement did not cease until art became in the twentieth century "a thing of of no consequence," an entertainment or diversion merely. 27 Conditions were ripe for a visual art that aspired chiefly to please the senses, and that is what, in the main, visual art became. fixed and stable cosmos. He argues that we probably derive our notion of unchanging Being from vision. The belief that we receive visual impressions as soft wax receives a stamp has been proved false. Vision is not passive but active and inherently rational. We now know that the eyes, in conjunction with the mind, make of sensory input an orderly, coherent whole. The appearance of even a simple object metamorphoses continuously as our vantage point changes. Yet we see a relatively fixed, characteristic shape. Eye and brain simplify, abstract, and geometricize visual experience. We perceive discontinuity as unity, imposing upon fragmentary experience the visual form that is the simplest and the most regular. In the illustration below we see not three unrelated dots, but a triangle. Yet there is no triangle: II. Theory We have seen that in the past the liberal arts and the visual arts were closely allied-were in fact virtually one thing, as nearly W1ited as body and soul, the visual arts being the concrete embodiment and expression of the liberal arts. We have noted that the liberally educated were then thoroughly familiar with the visual arts and that study of the visual arts often formed a part of liberal education. The magnificent artifacts which survive confirm the educated sensibilities of those who commissioned them; for the artist was then not nearly as free as he is today. He was required to gratify the wishes of his patron, and elaborate contracts were drawn up to insure this. We have observed that the ancient unity of the visual and liberal arts was in our own time obscured by those who applied the cdteria of the present to the past, thinking the visual artist one person as he is now (and thereby confusing him with the artisan who may well have lacked a liberal education), whereas he was then often two or more beings-a liberal artist and a mechanical artist-acting in concert. But even allowing the traditional alliance of the visual and liberal arts, ought the visual arts be part of contemporary liberal education? Let us review a few of the arguments for and against this option. Visual art is frequently compared to music, whose status as a liberal art was never questioned. It is argued that music is more closely related to the other liberal arts than the visual arts and that consequently music should be the fine art included in liberal education. We will begin with consideration of the relative merits of the visual arts and music. I have put the arguments against in italics; my reponses follow: • • • All of the senses, share with intellect the task of ordering experience. They do not merely transmit experience, but, like the eyes, make it intelligible. Two phrases that we often use, but rarely appreciate, come to mind in this connection. We speak of "making sense of' something when we understand it, and say "I see" to signify that we understand. When the senses discover the order that they always seek we experience pleasure. When they fail to discover such order we experience discomfort, dissatisfaction, even pain. Certain objects possess in the highest degree the order that the senses always seek and thus are, potentially, capable of producing the greatest pleasure. We call such objects works of art. The ear takes pleasure in ordered, mathematically related sounds; the kinesthetic sense that tells us the position of our limbs in space takes pleasure in measured or rhythmic movement- tapping, swaying, and so on. Music satisfies both senses. Touch takes pleasure in surfaces that possess a certain order and intelligibilty, whether by nature or by design. The ability of the senses to order experience and the pleasure that they take in such order is deeply rooted in our evolutionary past. For survival depends upon the organism's ability to "make sense of' its environment. In the work of art sensual order is divorced from such urgent practical considerations. There is an element of freedom, of play, of pure pleasure. We experience simultaneously the order that implies limitation (for without constraint any order is impossible) and liberation or release from constraint. To constitute or perceive order eye and mind must be capable of numbering and measuring. And in fact we can immediately distinguish two objects from three, four from five; we can judge whether one line is twice or three times the length of another. We derive our concept of the fundamental constitutents of mathematics-number and mea- a. The ear is more intimately connected with intellect than the eye. The ear perceives number directly (it senses, for example, the frequency doubling that indicates the octave and the ratios of the musical intervals). The eye cannot perceive numerical relationships. The ancients regarded sight, not hearing, as "the most excellent of the senses. The noblest activity of the mind, theoria, is descdbed in metaphors mostly taken from the visual sphere. Plato, and Western philosophy after him, speaks of the 'eye of the soul' and the 'light of reason.' Aristotle, in the first line of the Metaphysics, relates the desire for knowledge inherent in the nature of all men to the common delight in perception, most of all in vision."28 The author of these lines attributes the Greek belief in the primacy of vision partly to the fact that all other senses convey the external world to us as process or flux. Only vision conveys a relatively 45 �sure-primarily from vision, not from audition. The Greeks quite logically identified the mathematical with the visual. They thought of numbers as points or lengths. Mathematics was for them in large measure the study of geometric or visual shapes. There was of course then no knowledge of the wavelike character of sound. The study of music was the study of quantity manifest as the visual ratios of the lengths of tensioned strings. Vision too conveys knowledge, but immediately rather than sequentially or discursively as words do. The ancients were well aware of this. Vision becomes for them a metaphor for the highest knowledge, surpassing and indeed of a different order than discursive reason, knowledge that must be grasped immediately in its entirety or not at all: Finally, we should note that vision not only orders and connects the information transmitted by our other senses but typically takes precedence over them. In moments of crisis sight usually guides us. If there is a conflict, that is, if different sensory inputs appear to require contradictory responses, we defer to sight. Vision is not only responsible for our conviction that we inhabit a (relatively) unified, orderly cosmos (compare the world as it seems to you with your eyes open and shut) but in large measure for our sense of our own wholeness. If you close your eyes and rub thumb and forefinger together, you will note that your fingers feel oddly detached, almost as if they belonged to someone else. Open your eyes and that sensation vanishes. Stopping our ears isolates us to a degree from the world, but not from our own bodies. b. Musical structures are mathematically ordered and therefore inherently rational; with the exception of linear perspective, the structure ofvisual art is neither mathematical nor rational. This image [of cave and upper world] we must apply as a whole to all that has been said, likening the region revealed through sight to the habitation of the prison, and the light of the fire in it to the power of the sun. And if you assume that the ascent and the contemplation of the things above is the soul's ascension to the intelligible region, you will not miss my surmise ... But God knows whether it is true. Republic 517a-b The ancient belief in the identity of the visual, the mathematical, the beautiful and the true led, as we have seen, to many attempts to embody in visual art the quintessential mathematical relationships. Hence the widespread interest of Greek artists in the Golden Section and other canons of proportion. Medieval and Renaissance visual artists, engaged upon essentially the same quest, also frequently had recourse to mathematical schema- indeed to the mathematics of music. The proportions of medieval and Renaissance churches were frequently based upon the ratios of the musical intervals. 29 The spatial organization of Leonardo's Last Supper is determined by the same intervals. 30 Linear perspective is but a special case of proportionately ordered space (space in linear perspective is in continued proportion). We can attribute its discovery largely to earlier interest in the mathematics of visual art. Our own century affords numerous examples of artists who incorporate mathematically determined relationships in their painting, sculpture and architecture. (Many were influenced by Jay Hambidge [1867-1924], who claimed-perhaps rightly-to have rediscovered the geometric schema employed by Greek polters and architects .31 ) Although we derive pleasure from such art, we are not in the habit of applying calipers and rule to it, and are therefore unaware of the source of much of that pleasure. 32 We are in that respect rather like the Greeks who lived before Pythagoras had discovered the roots of music in number: they enjoyed music but knew not why. The Western listener brings to music an innate sense of the periodic diatonic scale and the ability to locate tones on that scale. The spectator of visual art brings to painting, sculpture, and architecture an innate sense of the absolute vertical and horizontal, and the ability to locate forms with respect to these axes. In practice, this fixed frame of reference is bounded by the limits of the visual artifact, permitting For each manifestation of knowledge and wisdom is a distinct image, an object in itself, an immediate unity, not an aggregate of discursive reasoning and detailed willing. Later from this wisdom in unity there appears, in another form of being, a copy already less compact, which announces the original terms of discourse and unravels the causes by which things are such that the wonderrises how a generated world can be so excellent. (Plotinus, "On the Intellectual Beauty") I think from the keeness I endured of the living ray, that I should have been dazzled if my eyes had been turned from it; and I remember that for this cause I was the bolder to sustain it until I reached with my gaze the infinite Goodness. 0 abounding grace, by which I dared to fix my look on the Eternal Light so long that I spent all my sight upon it! In its depth I saw that it contained, bound by love in one volume, that which is scattered in leaves through the universe, substances and accidents and their relations as it were fused together in such a way that what I tell of is a simple light. Paradiso XXXIII. 76 ff. Compare a modern poet: I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence. The Waste Land 11. 38 ff. precise distinctions of higher/lower, left/right, diagonal/vertical, centered, displaced and so on. The center of such structures corresponds to the musical tonic. It is the point of rest or equilibrium. We must wonder at the eye's ability to perceive this center. For it must measure a multitude of distances simultaneously, or instantaneously distinguish symmetric from asymmetric fields: Visual structures can be ordered hierarchically, much as words are in the topical outline. Primary structures control, limit, and define secondary; secondary structures control tertiary, and so on. The Gothic cathedral is perhaps the outstanding example of this, but all good visual art exhibits hierarchical organization. It is another source of unity.33 DD This is but the simplest case of a more complex phenomenon: any visible change at any point in the visual field immediately affects our perception of the all parts of that field: Gradations of value, or of degrees of light and dark, permit effects analagous to scaled musical tones. We can construct a scale of visual tones in which the intervals between values are equal or increase or decrease systematically and which is therefore apprehended by eye and brain as intelligible. We can then use either the entire scale, a portion of the scale, or values widely separate on the scale (e.g. the darkest and the lightest) to render values in the visual work.33a The possible effects of systematically applied color are exceedingly complex; we can only suggests a few. 34 The color wheel provides us with precisely related primary colors, secondary colors (constituted of primaries), and tertiary colors (constituted of secondaries). We can select from that wheel a palette of colors that are immediately adjacent, separated by one or more intervening colors, or on the same diameter. The last are the so-called complementary colors that intensify each other when juxtaposed. Complementarity is another instance of what we have termed field relationships. In actuality, we cannot change any color anywhere in the work without affecting all colors everywhere. We can divide the visual field in accord with any number of mathematical or geometric schema. The eye does not necessarily require certain schema-although it appears to prefer those that are mathematically ordered, such as the Golden Rectangle-but it does demand that the schema selected be internally consistent and to that extent intelligible. Inconsistency is read as disorder, imperfection. It prohibits many of the operations that give the work unity (motif and variation, hierarchical organization, scaled tonality, etc.). The introduction of a new color, line, or texture into an established design can be compared to the introduction of a metallic body into a magnetic field. The entire field is immediately distorted. Field relationships (which may have their own complex mathematics) are characteristic only of art that always confronts us in its totality, that is only of visual art. Sculpture and architecture, which have multiple views and introduce the element of temporal and spatial progression, will exhibit field relationships from any given view. Within such fields we can creat effects analagous to acceleration, retardation, tripartite ABA form, and so on: 0 0 0 0 Eye and mind perceive similar shapes as parts of a larger whole. This permits visual effects analagous to motµ and variation in music. We can combine two or more distinct visual motifs to produce a third possessing features of both yet identical to neither. The process can be continued indefinitely, resulting in a structure in which all parts are in some way related yet in which all are distinct and different. Unity and diversity develop simultaneously: 7 c. Visual art not only lacks a logos or rational schema comparable to the mathematical schema of music, but also lacks clearly defined "elements" such as we find in music. It 46 47 �practical representation. We rely upon vision to convey information too complex for words. Sound is much less useful in this respect. Surely these facts cast doubt upon the thesis that music is more nearly related to thought than is visual art. If classroom discussion were limited to the written word we would have to forgo discussion of the natural world. For it is inarticulate. But we do not find that an insuperable difficulty. We discuss what we observe when we dissect, perform experiments in the laboratory, and so on. Hence, even if visual art were altogether inarticulate it should still be possible to discuss it. But it is not inarticulate. Most visual artifacts embody meanings intended by the artist. Many depict figures from mythology or sacred text that convey specific meanings, and employ a symbolic visual language that is equally specific. The meaning of such visual art is clearly more accessible than the meaning of purely instrumental music. My own experience, and that of many other teachers, is that visual art is eminently discussable, given the right choice of subject-matter and an adequate curriculum. Those institutions that have seriously attempted discussion of visual art have found this to be the case and have successfully incorporated such discussions into their programs. is therefore nwre difficult to develop a program of instruction in the visual arts. Because music is inherently nwre rational it is inherently nwre teachable. We can see from b) that visual art is capable of formal elaboration possibly as complex as that of music. Elementry instruction in visual art traditionally emphasizes the elements that permit this: line, plane, shape, color, value, spatial organization, and so on. First exercises stress the development of visual structures using one or several of those elements. The study of visual art closely resembles the study of music in that respect. d. Music has a natural relation to the words that convey rational thought, whereas visual art, lacking a logos, or intelligible schema, excludes words. For that reason it is difficult or impossible to discuss visual artifacts as we discuss a written text. Those silent entities cannot contribute to the Great Conversation. They have little to say about the primary questions of interest to the liberal artist. It is not true that visual art excludes words, and thus the meanings that words convey, or that there is naturally a more intimate connection between music and the word than between word and image. Writing began with visual images. Chinese and Japanese calligraphy, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Islamic script, medieval illuminated manuscripts are all instances of the perfect fusion of the visual with the verbal. Early Chinese landscape paintings are frequently overwritten with poems that have become part of the painting and deepen the meaning. In these examples ikon and logos are as closely allied as music and word are in the opera, Passion or lied. Many visual works-the prints of Daumier, for example-are unintelligible without their titles. There is much evidence that the thinking mind utilizes images as well as words. Indeed, images may be primary. The organization of the brain's neural networks appears to resemble the interactive visual field more nearly than it does linearly ordered speech. Those points aside, there is no basis for assuming that music and thought are more closely related than visual art and thought. As the art historian Edgar Wind points out a chief purpose of visual art was, until quite recently, to convey thought. 35 Raphael's School of Athens is not exceptional in that respect, but typical. Painting and sculpture are of course quite capable of incorporating written words and often do. When we add to those words the meanings conveyed by symbolic images (as in Jan van Eyck's Annunciation, which contains symbolic images and painted words) the possible meanings become complex indeed. To be sure the meaning of a painting cannot be entirely expressed in words, but then neither can the meaning of a musical composition. Consider also the charts, graphs, and other visualizations that contemporary science cannot do without. The visual representation of significant relationships is often the only e. Visual art is mimetic, and,nwreover, imitates only the trwst superficial aspects of the sensible. For that reason it of limited significance. Why study a deceptive copy when one can study the original? Music is not mimetic; it is naturally related to the supra-sensible or to Being. This objection is best considered in the context of Socrates'arguments in The Republic, often used to justify the exclusion of the visual arts from the liberal arts curriculum, Socrates asserts that the painter's couch is but an imitation of the cabinetmakers, which is itself but an imitation of the Idea of Couch. He argues that the painter's couch is at a second remove from the Real, an imitation of an imitation, as it were. Visual art is held to be essentially re-presentative. These arguments obscure a crucial distinction: the cabinet maker's couch is made to be slept in, while the painter's is made to be looked at. The latter is not an imitation of an imitation, but a unique entity, whose final, formal, and material causes are very different from those that qualify the cabinetmaker's couch. So inadequate is Socrates' definition that it does not permit us to distinguish between the greatest painting and images that are clearly not visual art at all, such as a mediocre snapshot or a mere reflection (Republic X 596e). The latter could well exceed the painting as accurate representations of the visible, and hence would have to be regarded as more successful examples of visual art. In fact the excellences of painting qua painting have little or nothing to do with conformity to the visible. They are the result of formal and expressive qualities-some of which we have considered-not 48 tripartite being that represents the human soul (Republic 588b) and "moulds the model of a happy state" (Republic 420c); the new Homer who tells of the dangers that confront that City-for the embodied soul is besieged as surely as Troy was-and of the Odyssey that is the soul's thousand-year return from exile in this world to its true Homeland (Republic 621d). But much visual art also satisfies the Platonic criterion, and therefore cannot be rejected on that basis. To loosen the ties that bind soul to body was the chief purpose of the art of Byzantium and of medieval Europe. Those who should know tell us this. Consider the poem which the Abbot Suger (10811151) composed in praise of the golden portals of his church, St. Denis: found in nature, but made or brought into being by the artist. Space, for example, does not preexist in or on the canvas to be "filled" by the painter. The painter creates space. Spatial relations in a painting are analagous to the silences between musical tones. They are shaped, structured, to define and express certain relationships. The complexity of those relationships depends upon the skill and vision of the artist, not upon the intrinsic attributes of the space which we occupy and in which we move. It is more correct to say that the visual artist strives to make visible the invisible than it is to say that he imitates the visible. The artifacts actually produced verify this: the "abstract" art of so-called primitive peoples, such as the African tribes; the symbolically distorted art of our own Middle Ages; the deliberately elongated figures of Byzantine art which occupy a space that intentionally violates the rules of linear perspective; Chinese landscape painting which is "realistic" only in the sense that it expresses Reality; the geometric art of Islam; twentieth-century Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism and the like; architecture, which is intrinsically abstract. While these art forms may imitate the principles or relations that order the cosmos, they clearly do not imitate visible appearances. If, notwithstanding, we accept Plato's criterion we must fault the philosopher equally. The painter has at least the material couch to imitate. Plato did not have the living Socrates before him, but merely the memory of Socrates-itself an image or imitation of the man. Hence the Socrates of The Republic is also an imitation of an imitation. As Plato himself insists, so are the personae of the dramatist and poet (Republic X 598e-599). Philosopher, dramatist, poet, and visual artist are all on an equal footing, in this respect. Plato's criticisms of the arts in Book X stem from his conviction that the images of the poet, dramatist, painter and sculptor corrupt and degrade the soul, strengthening and confirming its bondage to the body. He would have us forsake such images for others that can exhault, purify, and ultimately liberate the soul. The Socrates of The Republic is obviously such an image. It is likely therefore, that Plato's rejection of poetry, drama, and the visual arts in Book X, coming as it does at the conclusion of his own artistic masterpiece, is-notwithstanding its author's keen awareness of the limitations of any text that incorporates images- in fact an appeal to the reader to accept the art of which Plato has just given him an example-the art of The Republic composed of images that encourage ascent from becoming to Being-in place of the images of the Greek poets, sculptors and painters which, in Plato's opinion, lead to the abyss. This is also suggested by Plato's many allusions in The Republic to Illiad and Odyssey, and by his comparisons of Socrates to Odysseus, Heracles, Daedalus and the like. He would replace the ancient myths with his own, the ancient artists and heroes with his Socrates. Socrates becomes in The Republic the new Daedalus who sculpts the Bright is the noble work; but being nobly bright the work Should brighten the minds, so that they may travel, through the true lights, To the True Light where Christ is the true door. In what manner it be inherent in this world the golden door defines: The dull mind rises to truth through that which is material And, in seeing this light, is resurrected from its former submersion. There is much great visual art that even a confirmed Platonist might be hard put to reject. To be sure, in Plato's day Greek art was becoming increasingly concerned with appearances. He was certainly right to protest this through Socrates. But it makes no sense to apply his criticism to visual art as a whole, or to use it as a justification for denying the visual arts a place in the liberal arts curriculum. Finally we must note that if we accept the arguments of Book X we must exclude from the liberal arts not only visual art, but all imaginative literature (save the Platonic Dialogues) . Homer and the tragidians-whom Socrates specifically condemns- must of course go, but also, obviously, Shakespeare and Rabelais and Cervantes, and Dostoevski, and all of their kind. Moreover, it is by no means certain that Plato's criteria would admit much of the music currently studied by students of the liberal arts. Would Wagner survive, I wonder? f. Music affects the soul nwre directly and immediately than visual art and therefore can form character nwre effectively than visual art. The visual "impresses" our souls no less than the audible. Indeed, visual images evoke compassion, sexual desire, anger, fear and so on nwre readily than music. Witness the power of cinema and television to move us, to involve us, to appropriate thought and feeling. The traditional view (the view that prevailed through the eighteenth century) is that all 49 �i. The visual arts were excluded from the trivium and quadrivium during the Middle Ages when the seven liberal arts became the educational norm, whereas music was included and even emphasized. arts, not simply music, shape character. (Had Plato not thought so he would not have excluded the poets, the tragic dramatists, and the visual artists from his Republic.) In the case of visual art that was accomplished directly through depiction of exemplars such as Hercules or Christ, with whom the spectator was expected to identify and whom he was expected to emulate as best as he could, or indirectly through exposure to certain visual relationships that were thought to induce kindred relationships in the soul. It was long assumed that the parts of the "healthy" soul were symmetrically disposed, or in equilibrium, or related by a certain proportion. The symmetrical architecture of classical antiquity was expected to induce such inner symmetry or proportionality. The moralizing art of painters such as Hogarth and Goya is a late expression of that ancient tradition. Its purpose is, in part, to make us admire what we should admire and despise what we should despise. Seeing injustices can sometimes make us betterpersons--can, in fact, move an entire society to benevolant action. Would anyone seriously argue that music could have induced us to aid the starving thousands in Somalia? This objection, too, has been answered under "History." j. There simply is not room in a four-year curriculum/or the liberal arts and the visual arts. To include the visual arts would compell us to sacrifice something more essential. The traditional seven liberal arts provide a rational schema for a compact yet rich and comprehensive program. If we depart from that schema we abandon meaningful criteria for including or excluding subject-matter. Will we next be asked to add the social sciences? Or horticulture? As noted above, colleges that profess to offer a liberal education no longer adhere strictly to the traditional schema of the seven liberal arts. Hence one cannot argue again~t adding the visual arts on grounds that it would violate that schema. Among the criteria actually used to determine the disciplines included we frequently find the following : a) that the discipline promote the good of the individual by perfecting those faculties which distinguish man; b) that the discipline promote the good of society as a whole; c) that it be a primary discipline, that is one which cannot be reduced to more elementary disciplines (as engineering can be reduced to mathematics or medicine to biology); d) that it relate as nearly as possible to other parts of the liberal arts curriculum. Let us apply these criteria to the study of the visual arts. a)While vision per se does not distinguish man from other sentient beings, the kind of vision which he possesses does. His is a "thinking eye." That potential becomes manifest almost as soon as we gain some control of our bodies. All children delight in drawing. Their drawings are schematic or symbolic: a circle represents the head, two dots the eyes, a line the mouth and so on. Children 2-4 years of age "apparently make no attempt to translate their visual images into plastic equivalents (imitative or naturalistic representations), but are fully satisfied with certain graphic signs which they identify with their images." 36 Our ability to draw and to make three-dimensonal shapes is as fundamental and as universal as our ability to form intelligible sounds. It implies that we possess by virtue of our nature as rational beings not two major symbolic languagesspeech and mathematics-but at least three. If one of the purposes ofliberal education is to develop those faculties that distinguish mankind we should study all three languages. Our appreciation of visual beauty is also unique. As noted it possesses a rational component-we admire consistency, regularity, conformity to a schema which we think of as "ideal" and so on. It would appear then that if we are to promote the good of the individual, we should, as Aristotle recommends, seek to "develop an observant eye for beauty of g. Liberal education rightly emphasizes the use oforiginal texts. To study visual art we must employ reproductions. These are inherently innacurate and deceptive. Good reproductions of two-dimensional visual art can be quite accurate. Some are so precise that the naked eye is barely able to distinguish originals from copies (this is especially true of copies of prints). We can make exact copies of sculpture using moulds. Such reproductions are certainly preferable to the translations (which are after all interpretations) through which most students of the liberal arts gain access to the majority of the Great Books. Music always reaches us translated or interpreted-unless the performer is also the composer. And since few students of the liberal arts can reconstitute music by simply reading the written score, and live performances are few and far between, most use recordings or reproductions of performances, further increasing the distance between creator and auditor. Students can of course discuss original works of visual art in local museums and galleries. Unlike music and poetry, which reach us via symbolic notation, such works bear the mark of the maker's hand. They constitute permanently accessible "performances" by the artist. One might compare the experience they afford to hearing Beethoven play his Appassionata or Homer read his /Iliad. To be sure, one must look closely to appreciate this-at the brushstrokes that constitute forms and colors, at the scratchings and rubbings that constitute line and tone. h. The Greeks, who knew a great deal about the visual arts wisely excluded them from the liberal arts. We should follow their example. This objection has been answered under "History." 50 they constitute, alas, lacks a head; or perhaps we should say that it has, like Cerberus, fabled guardian of Hades, too many heads. For the liberal arts are now proposed as preparation for virtually any activity. Moreover, with the passage of time the intersecting ways have tended to become parallel, or even divergent. We note that as we move from study of the ancient texts to study of the modem. Even allowing this, the liberal arts constitute the nearest thing we have to a synoptic, unified educational program that has withstood the test of time. For that reason they have appealed and continue to appeal to educators troubled by the fragmentation of knowledge, the centrifugal forces loose in the modem world especially those who hoped and those who still hope that we might learn through immersion in the works and thoughts of a more coherent past ways to restore or at least to encourage coherence in our own culture. Any addition to, or modification of such a program of study should certainly take into account its original intent and the motives of those who sought to revive it. The visual arts satisfy those conditions. They naturally constitute a point of intersection for other disciplines traditionally among the liberal arts, or closely allied with those arts: mathematics (the form of the visual work, perspective, the golden section and other proportional schema); biology (theories of perception, the contribution of eye and brain, conditions that permit the illusion of reality on a two-dimensional surface, optical illusions); philosophy and theology (symbolic content of the visual work); music (formal analogies and structural parallels between the visual arts and music); mythology, sacred and secular history, and literature (narrative content of the visual work). A proper program of study would not be confined to portable easel painting (the earliest surviving examples of this art-form are relatively late; itisratherlike beginning the study of the Great Books with the Renaissance) but would include fresco and mosaic, architecture and sculpture. There would thus be opportunity to examine artifacts, such as the medieval cathedrals and Renaissance churches that were in their time foci for a multitude of disciplines, and in particular for the disciplines of the liberal arts. Mathematics, philosophy, theology, rhetoric, music, architecture, sculpture, painting all come together here to make one thing. Study of the the Greek temple and of its sculptures (supported by selections from Vitruvius, supplemented by study of the images and proportions of Greek pottery) would have similar advantages. To add such a program to the existing curriculum might require the . elimination or abridgement of certain texts. But that will be outweighed by the more complex and comprehensive whole that results. All of this becomes possible if to books and balances we add calipers and rule, thereby restoring the ancient unity of the visual arts and the liberal arts. form and figure." b) It is abundantly clear that the visual environment influences our moods, dispositions, and thoughts. The colorscheme of any dentist's office testifies to this. Deny people all view of the landscape and most will eventually cease to think about the relation of man to nature. Cage them up in drab high-rises constructed of indistinguishable cells and they will become mean-spirited. The ancients were right to assume that visual art shapes character. Lessing was wrong to assert that the pleasure which we derive from visual beauty "can be dispensed with"; it cannot. A responsible citizenry will promote the creation of a suitable visual environment by commissioning, by advising, by criticizing. We cannot depend upon our artists and architects to do that for us. As we have observed the visual arts and the liberal arts parted company some two-hundred years ago. With few exceptions, artists and architects are now specialists educated in specialized schools of art or architecture that for the most part exclude meaningful study of the liberal arts as rigorously as some liberal arts colleges exclude the visual arts. Architect, painter, and sculptor are not expected to have a liberal education, and are not usually directed by those who have such an education. We need only look about us to see the consequences. For the good of society the liberally educated should resume their historic role as knowledgable patrons of the visual arts. To do so they must be familiar with the visual arts. Liberal education can and should facilitate this. c) Visual art is the mature expression of a unique faculty that all men possess by nature and that distinguishes man from other sentient beings. It presents the perfect object of perception to the most complex of our senses and thereby perfectly exercises that sense. It satisfies the eye in the same way that music satisfies the ear. The field-like organization of the visual artifact is unique. For no other art-form confronts us immediately in its totality. The paleolithic sculptures and cave paintings indicate that mankind possessed from the beginning an impulse to make beautiful and expressive images. For all of these reasons I would argue that the study of visual art is a primary discipline, quite different in that respect from the social sciences, medicine, or any number of worthy studies. d) Trivium and quadrivium, meaning "the place where three (or four) ways meet" are tenns that originally described what we would call highway intersections. The terms emphasize that the disciplines each grouping includes all lead to the same destination. They interrelate, inform each other, and constitute a larger whole. During the Middle Ages, when the trivium and quadrivium first became the educational norm, the seven liberal arts were parts of a still more comprehensive unity. Study of the liberal arts prepared one for the study of philosophy. Philosophy was not then the independent discipline that it is today, but the handmaiden of theology. The seven "ways" crossed in God. We cannot say that of our liberal arts. The body which 51 �18. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. J.J. Pollitt, The Ancient View of Greek Ari (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 32. See Rensselaer W . Lee, Ut Pictura Poe sis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York: W.W. Norton, 1967); Mario Praz, Mnemosyne: The Parallel Between Literature and the Visual Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974); Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Pollitt, Ancient View, pp. 60-61 and ch. 7. See Henry Maguire, Art and Eloquence in Byzantium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). See M. Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators (Oxford, 1971). 14. The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Encyclopedia Press, 1914), vol. 1 p . 726. See Erwin Panofsky, Idea; "The Neoplatonic Movement in Florence and North Italy"; "The Neoplatonic Movement and Michelangelo" in Studies in Iconology (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). See E. H. Gombrich, Symbolic Images (Oxford: Phaidon, 1978), pp. 7-11. Paul Oskar Kris teller, "The Modem System of the Arts" in Renaissance Thought and the Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 181-182. Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Hurnanism (New York: Random House, 1965), pp. 101-102. Ibid. p. 117. Kristeller, pp. 163-164. Edgar Wind, Art and Anarchy (New York: Vintage, 1969). See esp. ch. IV, "The Fear of Knowledge." Jose Ortega Y Gasset, "The Dehumanization of Art" in The Dehumanization of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), p . 49. Hans Jonas, "The Nobility of Sight: A Study in the Phenomenology of the Senses" in The Phenomenon of Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), p. 135. von Simson, pp. 22-41; Wittkower, IV, "The Problem of Hannonic Proportion in Architecture," pp. 101-154. Thomas Brachert, "A Musical Canon of Proportion in Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper," The Art Bulletin, Dec. 1971. Hambidge, Elements. See "Rectangles and Ratios: Proportion in Art and Architecture," unpublished essay by Frank Carr, 529 Powell Drive, Annapolis, Maryland 21401. See Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholastic ism, (Cleveland: Meridian 1963). John F. Taylor, Design and Expression in the Visual Arts (New York: Dover, 1964), pp. 199-2 12. Ibid. pp. 159-192. Wind, pp. 56-59, 62-67. Herbert Read, Education Through Art (New York: Random House, 1956), p. 121. 20. 21. 22. 23. See Caesare Ripa, Jconologia in Baroque and Rococo Pictorial Imagery, ed. Edward A. Maser (New York: Dover, 1971), p. 197. J.J. Coulton, Greek Architects at Work (London: Elek, 1977), p . 25. Coulton, p. 53. See Vitruvius, The Ten Books of Architecture (New York: Dover, 1960), Book III . Jay Hambidge, The ElemenJs of Dynamic Symmetry (New York: Dover, 1967); Dynamic Symmetry: The Greek Vase (New Haven: Yale University Press,?); The Parthenon and Other Greek Temples: Their Dynamic Synunetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1924). Rhys Carpenter, The Esthetic Basis of Greek Art (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1959), pp. 120-130. P.H. Scholfield, The Theory of Proportion in Architecture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958). Pollitt, Ancient View, pp. 14-22, 160-168. Howard Fisher, "Dynamic Symmetry, A Theory of Art and Nature," The St. John's Review, Winter 1985. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. See George Duckworth, Structural Patterns and Proportions In Vergil's Aeneid (Anne Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962). On Plato's Polity, a lecture by John A. Bremer given at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, February 17, 1984 (tape no. 770). 33. 33a. See Otto von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 3-58. 34. l la. See for example John Onians, Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). 12. R. J. Clements, Michelangelo' s Theory of Art (New York: New York University Press, 1961), pp. xxix-xxxi. 13. D. W. Robertson, Jr., A Preface to Chaucer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), pp. 122-124. 19. Notes 35. 36. J.J. Pollitt, The Art of Greece 1400-31 B .C.: Sources and Documents (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1965), p. 7. Ibid. pp. 162-163. 14a. Thomas Davidson, Aristotle and the Ancient Educalional Ideals (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1899), p. 240. 15. Erwin Panofsky, ldea, A Concept in Art Theory (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), pp. 13-14. 16. von Simson, pp. 30-31. 17. Ibid. p. 33 . 52 53 �I Her Hair [] by Charles Baudelaire Roberts '93 translated by Francie La Chevelure by Charles Baudelaire Oh tresses, curling down upon her neckline; Oh ringlets; Oh perfume thick and overflowing with nonchalance; Ecstacy ! This night how I desire, in order to populate this solemn alcove with the memories sleeping in her hair, to shake it in the air like a handkerchief! I will plunge my head so desirous of intoxication, into the black ocean where she is imprisoned, and my penetrating spirit caressed by rolling waves will rediscover you, oh abunant laziness; endless rockings of my perfumed leisure! Blue-black hair, lodging of taut night, you restore to me the azure of an immense, round sky; upon the soft borders of your tangled curls I become passionately intoxicated by the mingled scents of coconut oil, of musk and of tar. Listless Asia and burning Africa, all of a distant world, away from home, nearly lost, lives within your depths, aromatic forest! As other souls go sailing upon music, so does my soul, oh my love, swim upon your perfume. For a long while; Forever! my hand in your thick, heavy hair will scatter rubies, pearls, sapphires, that you may never be deaf to my desire! For, are you not the oasis where I dream, and the wineskin from whence I swallow in great gulps the wine of memory? I will go far away where tree and man, both full of sap, swoon for long stretches of time under the ardor of the climates; long tresses, be the oceanic surge which carries me off! You contain, sea of ebony, a shining dream of sails, of oarsmen, of flames and of masts: 0 toison, moutonnant jusque sur l'encolure! 0 boucles! 0 parfum charge de nonchaloir! Extase! Pour peupler ce soir l'alc6ve obscure Des souvenirs dormant dans cette chevelure, Je la veux agiter dans l'air comme un mouchoir! Je plongerai ma tete amoureuse d'i vresse Dans ce noir ocean ou l'autre est enferme; Et mon esprit subtil que le roulis caresse La langoureuse Asie et la bn1lante Afrique, Cheveux bleus, pavilion de tenebres rencluc s, Tout un monde lointain, absent, presque defunt, Yous me rendez l'azur du ciel immense Yit dans tes profondeurs, foret aromatique! Comme d 'autres esprits voguent sur la musique, Surles bords duvetes de VOS meches tordues Je m'enivre ardemment des senteurs con fondue Le mien, 6 mon amour! nage sur ton parfum. De l'huile de coco, du muse et du goudron. J'irai la-bas OU l'arbre et l'homme, pleins de seve, Longtemps! toujours! ma main dans ta criniere lourde Semera le rubis, la perle et la saphir, Se pament longuement sous l 'ardeur des climats; Fortes tresses, soyez la houle qui m'enleve! An echoing harbor where my soul can drink, in great waves, the perfume, the sound and the color; where ships, gliding through gold and through watered silk, open their vast arms to embrace the glory of a pure sky where shudders the eternal passion. Tu contiens, mer d'ebene, un eblouissant reve De voiles, de rameurs, de flammes et de mats: Saura vous retrnuver, 6 feconde paresse ! Infinis bercements du loisir embaume! t:l rumL Afin qu'a mon desir tune sois jamais sourde ! N'es-tu pas !'oasis OU je reve, et Ia gourde Ou je hume a longs traits le vin du souvenir? u n port retentissant OU mon ame peut boire A grands flats le parfum, le son et la couleur; OL1 les vaisseaux, glissant dans I'or et dans la moire, Ouvre nt le urs vastes bras pour embrasser la gloire D'un ciel pur ou fremit l'etemelle chaleur. 54 55 I �Choosing to Believe: . ree Choice and F the Know ledge of God in St. Thomas by Susanna Beiser '94 It is the intention of St. Thomas to exalt the intellect above every other human power. In this way he is like Aristotle and other ancient philosophers who believed that the acuity of reason would serve to explain every phenomena and solve any problem. Such philosophy preserves and celebrates the nobility of human reason. Aristotle, however, answered to himself alone in regard to the proper pursuit of his science. He answered to no God. Thomas' approach is different because he believes in a God who is a loving creator.a super-intelligent being with absolute governance of the world. We have responsibilities to this God, among which are love and humility. We are not meant to rejoice in our natural abilities while remaining oblivious to their origin and constant source of inspiration. On the contrary, to best love God and conform our actions to His will, we must try, to the best of our abilities, to understand Him and His effects. Thomas' sacred doctrine is established to serve this purpose. As a science, sacred doctrine has as its subject-matter both God and His creation. In the realm of human endeavor, practical guidelines are sought so that we might fulfill our duty to ourselves and to God on both thought and deed. This duty goes beyond belief in God's existence, beyond faith, to require of us our continuous attention to increasing our knowledge of God. This is not a burden, however, on the individual. For when a man has a will ready to believe, teaching based on natural reason (II-II, Q.1 A.7)." These are the premises on which the best human knowledge of God is founded, and only by reasoning from them can we gain, in any measure, knowledge that is beyond our reach. Thomas believes that man's reason is a participation in the perfect intellect that is God. God created man with reason as an essential part of his soul and in this sense the intellect is a natural, rather than accidental, part of us. Our reason is inferior to the divine intellect and comparatively incomplete, but it is the divinity in us. We are created in the image of God insofar as we can have knowledge. Since the human intellect resembles God's, what God knows perfectly through His infinite knowledge should not be inconsistent with the determinations of our own natural reason. In this way man was originally created with the ability to know truth. The fall of Adam altered the functioning of the human intellect. Since the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, man has been in a state of corrupted nature. With Adam's assertion of his free will came disease, so that "since man' s reason is not entirely subject to God, the consequence is that many disorders occur in the acts itself of the reason (II-I, Q.109 A.8)." No longer is the human intellect infallible, even in reference to objects well within the bounds of the visible and the comprehensible. Lesser still is our ability to know anything about God through the natural process of reasoning. How, then, can we pursue this knowledge? Is it in our power to choose to increase our knowledge of God? What is the nature of this science which seems to grasp at know ledge beyond our reach, yet claims to reveal the sw-est truths? In order to answer these questions we must examine in detail the process described by Thomas as the path to knowledge. In explanation of the necessity of sacred doctrine, Thomas writes that "man is directed to God as to an end that surpasses the grasp of his reason ... (I, Q.1 A.1 )." From this description we are meant to understand the end of man to be a final cause, a result for the sake of which the means to this end are deliberately ordered. According to Christianity, man's true end is life after death in perfect happiness: beatitude. Since happiness is . man's experience of the good, it easily follows that perfect happiness must result from contact with God, who is perfectly good. The exact nature of this contact, however, must be further explored. The best part of man is necessarily what is created to be most like God, his most divine aspect. For Thomas, this is certainly the intellect, both because it resembles the power by which God governs the world and because it is a part of man he loves the truth he believes, he thinks out and takes to heart whatever reasons he can find in support thereof.... (Summa Theologica, II-II, Q.2 A.10) * * * The practice of scared doctrine, although it makes use of reason, does not entail thinking out reasonable explanations for the truths which are believed by faith. The articles of faith are truths about God that are unreachable by means of the reason with which man is naturally endowed. These are the basis of Christianity and include the existence of the Trinity and the mystery of Christ. Such truths are neither self-evident nor demonstrable and therefore require belief without the sure know ledge that arises from the practice of any other science. This does not mean, however, that articles of faith are absurd or inconsistent with reason. They are beyond reason but possess the nature of first principles in the practice of sacred doctrine. "The articles of faith stand in the same relation to the doctrine of faith, as self-evident principles to 56 57 �into different kinds according to its various effects: that seems to be incorporeal. The excellence of the intellect remains essentially unchanged, despite the corrupted state into which we have fallen. If, then, man is to attain the condition of the greatest possible happiness, the condition of experiencing the greatest good, he must do so by means of his most perfect faculty. It follows that "the ultimate beatitude of man consists in the use of his highest function, which is the operation of the intellect (I, Q.12 A.I)." Thomas makes a distinction between two aspects of the operation of the intellect. On the one hand there is the actuality of the faculty. Simply stated, this is the activity of thinking. On the other is the determination of the thinking to a particular object. In order tocontiibute to beatitude, man's intellect must be both active and focused on the greatest good. Beatitude, therefore, consists in thinking about God. Furthermore, perfect happiness requires the perfect operation of the intellect. For this reason a merely general or confused knowledge of God is insufficient. Man must know God as He truly is. Thomas describes the connection established by this contemplation as "the divine essence itself united to their intellect (I, Q.12 A.9) and the effect of this connection as 'deiformity' (I, Q.12 A.6)." The intellect is detennined to its proper object and so takes on, to some finite extent, the infinite goodness that is God. In this way man attains beatitude. This kind of knowledge, a vision of God in His essence, is possible only in the afterlife, for it is not granted that man, still encumbered with his body, may 1ise above his nature to comprehend the incorporeal Being. The human intellect is accustomed to understanding immaterial objects by abstracting from composites, combinations of matter and form. This is impossible when thinking about God because He is infinite and utterly immaterial. The best knowledge of God is beyond the reach of natural reason, for the human intellect cannot change its mode of operation. Therefore man needs assistance if he is ever to know the essence of God. Here enters the crucial factor in the pursuit of the divine science: the grace of God. Grace is the gift of God's assistance, bestowed on man to enable him to rise above his own nature, gain knowledge of God, and thereby attain beatitude. This blessing springs from the love that God, the creator, has for His creation. It is to be distinguished from the care that accompanied the original fashioning of man, whereby he was given the power of reason as a natural part of the soul. So it is said that grace indicates "a special love, whereby He draws the rational creature above the condition of its nature to a participation of the divine good... (I-II, Q.110 A.I)." Grace is in operation throughout man's journey toward knowledge of God, both before and after bodily death. Thomas often calls this power a light: "this increase of the intellectual powers is called the illumination of the intellect" and "By this light the blessed are made' deiform '-that is, like to God... (both from I, Q.12 A.5)." All grace stems from God's love and is essentially the same, but it can be divided Now there are five effects of grace in us. Of these, the first is, to heal the soul; the second, to desire good; the third, to carry into effect the good proposed; the fourth, to persevere in good; the fifth, to reach glory. (II-I, Q.111 A.3) The first four of these are needed to compensate for our corrupted nature. In the state of integral nature man's intellect functioned perfectly. It was originally a natural characteristic of man to tend toward apparent good in both his will and his actions. This aspect of human nature remains. What man has lost, however, is the unening ability to determine this tendency to an actual good, to enact the good, and to continue to do good works of his own inspiration. It is God' s grace, operating throughout his life, that is responsible for moving man to will or enact good. The fifth kind encompasses all the effects of grace that_ specifically pertain to man' s beatitude. In regard to knowl" edge of God that is beyond the reach of reason, grace bridges the gap between the relatively confused and general knowledge of God that man can gain by natural reason and the essential knowledge necessary for beatitude. It is only by faith that man can have this essential knowledge. Thomas describes the aspects of grace that allow a man to attain Christian faith and then to continue in the contemplation of God. The knowledge gained by faith is unlike knowledge that results from natural reason. Faith is a kind of knowledge, inasmuch as the intellect is determined by faith to some knowable object. But this determination to one object does not proceed from the vision of the believer, but from the vision of Him Who is believed. Thus, as far as faith falls short of vision, it falls short of the nature which knowledge has when it is science .... (I, Q.12 A.13) Faith does not permit man to reasonably understand its objects; rather it "signifies the assent of the intellect to that which is believed (II-I, Q.l A.4)."In the normal course of intellectual activity, a proposition that is believed is assented to by a process of reasoning. When a proposition cannot be reasonably understood, it cannot be believed in the usual manner. The propositions about God which constitute the articles of faith surpass human reason, and so cannot be believed without an assent being made possible by grace. God, therefore, grants that man may come to believe the truths of faith that are essential to beatitude. After grace initially acts to establish faith, its continuing presence allows man to increase his knowledge of God. We reason from the articles of faith, our natural intellectual power enhanced by the light of grace. Beatitude is insured by faith and the degree of happiness obtained is heightened as the share of grace increases. The question that now arises pertains not to these operations of grace, but to what precedes them. Grace appears to be the only addition to the soul's natural powers that is necessary for attaining faith. Not every man, however, is a Christian. Hence, it is apparent that some do not receive this grace. Considering that God intends man's happiness, what prior condition in the individual allows him to receive the grace that leads to faith and beatitude? It is reasonable to suspect that the absence of faith in an individual is due to some failing of his own rather than to the will of God. A lack of the proper preparation to receive grace accounts for man's failure to attain beatitude and absolves God of any responsibility for withholding it. The likely source of man's error is his reason because it is functionally corrupt and not necessarily attuned to the will of God. Man's fallible reason is also responsible for the misdirection of his free will. If reason is to have a decisive role in preparing for grace, the course of intellectual progress towards beatitude should include a point at which a free choice is made. This choice would allow each man to take responsibility for the condition of his soul and, by choosing correctly, to prepare himself to receive God's grace. An extension of the grace/light analogy is helpful in determining what must occur in man prior to having faith. Q.109 A.6)." Perhaps these men have a greater desire for God and therefore are more receptive to the initial gift of grace. This explanation, however, is insufficient. According to human nature, every man tends towards good as it appears to his mind. All men also tend toward God, although in a confused and indeterminate way. But no man, his nature corrupt and unaided by grace, can know the truths that would allow his reason, and thereby his desire, to rise above lesser goods to the greatest good, to direct him to God. Thus it is clear that man does not specifically desire or look to God before he first receives grace; "man cannot prepare himself to receive the light of grace except by the gratuitous help of God moving him inwardly (II-I, Q. I09 A.6)." All men, then, appear to be moved in the same way toward knowledge of God. By nature their minds tend to the good; by grace they are focused on God, enlightened, and raised above their natural abilities to assent to the articles of faith. None of these movements, however, appears to involve a choice on the part of the individual. Yet Thomas states that there is a form of cooperation between God and man concerning the gift of grace and that man's part consists in free choice: It is the part of man to prepare his soul, since he does this by his free choice. And yet he does not do this without the help of God moving him, and drawing him to Himself. ... (II-I, Q.109 A.6) Now to prepare oneself for grace is. as it were, to be turned to God; just as whoever has his eyes turned away from the light of the sun prepares himself to receive the sun's light, by turning his eyes towards the sun. (II-I, Q.109 A.6) Man's turning to God is by free choice, and thus man is bidden to turn himself only to God. But free choice can be turned to God only when God turns it. ... (II-I, Q.109 A.6) In one sense, man' s eyes are never turned completely away from God because of his natural tendency toward the good. The problem is that this general leaning is not specifically to God, but toward whatever object the intellect believes to be good. Due to the corruption of the intellect, this determination is often incmrect. This inability to positively identify God as the object of desire was not a part of the first man. In the state of integral nature the human intellect recognized its cause and creator, but "in the state of corrupted nature man falls short of this in the appetite of his rational, which, unless it be cured by God's grace, follows its private good... (II-I, Q.109 A.3)." Because true intellectual vision depends on sure belief and God desires man's beatitude, grace determines the mind to God; it turns man to Him so that he is prepared to receive the light of further grace that will lead him to faith. Since not all men receive grace, it remains to be said what kind of man is moved in this way. Again, we would like to understand how free choice plays a role in obtaining grace. Perhaps the solution is a sirnple form of cooperation: he who wishes to find God will be turned to Him by God. In this vein Thomas writes, "He directs just men to Himself as to a special end, which they seek and to which they wish to cling ... (II-I, In making this choice man has neither alternative objects from which to choose, nor the ability to actively direct his mind to the object of choice. In what sense, then, is the choice free? The solution to this problem is contained in Thomas' understanding of choice as an act of the will. As a power of the intellect, will is characterized by the two aspects mentioned earlier: the activity of the power and the determination of the power to an object. Thomas explains this division: Now the reason why it is possible not to choose, or to choose, may be gathered from a twofold power in man. For man can will and not will, act and not act; and again, he can will this or that, and do this or that. The reason for this is to be found in the very power of the reason. For the will can tend to whatever the reason can apprehend as good. (II-I, Q.13 A.6) These distinctions can be understood by examining our outward actions. For example, a man might read a book of his own choosing. In this case he is the active principle in two senses; he reads rather than not reading, and he determines the object of his action, this book rather than that one. A different 58 59 �case is illustrated by the man who obeys a particular law. It is by his own power that he acts in obeying the law, but the law itself is not of his determination. It has been framed by someone else and presented to him so that the range of his action is limited. Turning to God is an action of the second type. There is no need to determine the object of the action; God is a given. The only options, then, are to turn or not to turn. There appears to be a problem, however, because we know that man does not have the ability to tum to God on his own. he must be turned by God's grace. In the absence of the power to act there appears to be no place for choice. It seems impossible for man to choose to tum to God when, in fact, his role is passive. At this point we must remember that choice pertains not only to action, but also to willing or desiring. Because most of our actions are both willed and enacted by our own power, this distinction might seem unnecessary. It is essential, however, in the context of receiving grace, a situation in which we appear to have no active role. In this case man can choose neither the object of his desire, nor the means of attaining his end, for both are dependent on God. The only choice that remains to be made is to will or not to will. If a man cannot choose God as the object to which he is turned, and he cannot choose to turn himself, his choice consists in willing or not willing the turn. Why, though, would anyone choose not to be turned to God? As Thomas mentions, the explanation for this lies in the condition of man's reason. The will naturally tends toward good, even in our corrupted state. It must rely, however, on reason's frequently incorrect determinations of what is good. Although anyone with clear knowledge of God could not mistake his goodness, any less perfect vision is subject to this error. It is possible for a man who ·is without faith, not yet enlightened by grace, and lacking any clear intellectual vision of God to be blind to the goodness of grace and so to choose not to receive it. The first step towards enlightenment, then, is desire, not for God specifically, because His essence is unseen, but for what is greatest. It is the willful, and therefore intellectual, yearning for the highest knowledge, the first principle sought by the philosophers. Accompanying this desire is the understanding that what is highest is truly beyond our grasp if we attempt the search alone. We must rely on God to enhance our reason and raise our sights to a vision of the truth we seek. The source of our hope for divine assistance is reason itself. Thomas believes that some knowledge of God, known through the images of His effects, is within the reach of our natural faculties. Included is the knowledge that there is a creator and an intelligent being "by whom all natural things are directed to their end (I, Q.2 A.3)." The conect consideration of these truths compels the thinking man to submit his will to that of the creator and to look to the greater intelligence for guidance in his search for knowledge. In this way the lover of knowledge may prepare his soul for the assistance he needs to transcend his limited abilities and gain a vision of his true end. On the Relation of the Speech of Alcibiades to the Other Speeches of the Platonic Symposium by Friedrich Nietzsche (1864) Translated by Eva T. H. Brann [Nietzsche wrote this essay when he was twenty years old. I came on it while helping a senior with his essay on the Symposium. It seemed to me that I should translate it to serve as an encouragement to our students. The German text appears in Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke und Briefe: Historischkritische Gesammtausgabe, Vol. 2, Jugendschriften (18611864), edited by Hans Joachim Mette, Munich: C.H. Beck (1934).] All passages are quoted from Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Anton C. Pegis, ed., Random House, New York, 1945. 60 ladder to the highest eros that he erects I notice this peculiarity, that the different points of view of the speakers recur. Phaedrus is, to be sure, as elsewhere, only the "midwife" of the following speeches. But Pausanias, in whose speech one must never lose sight of his love for Agathon, shows the standpoint of a human being as long as he still loves one beautiful object, be it physical or spiritual. Eryximachus is a lover of all that is beatiful, as it is revealed in the whole of nature. Aristophanes has already advanced to the higher rung oflove for art and science, just as has Agathon, who, as a tragic poet, seems to me to have been awarded by Plato a higher place, above Aristophanes - a judgment with which we would not nowadays concur. The spiritually greater human being by far is Aristophanes. Finally Socrates himself reaches the rung that Diotima has designated as the highest, the love of the Arch-beautiful; we do not doubt that he has reached it, but Socrates himself does not and may not tell us this, true to his own character. What he does describe is how he was once caught in the same error as Agathon is now; that is the great insight he has gained. But how far it has carried over into life, whether it is even capable of being actualized - that has to remain uncertain for the reader of the dialogue. That is why Alcibiades appears, to represent the love for the Arch-beautiful in its effect on the practical life of human beings, that is, the effect of this love in a particular human being such as Socrates, and the countereffect a human being filled with such a love has on others, such as Socrates has on Alcibiades. Here is the reason why Plato chose precisely Alcibiades in order to depict this effect. If any disciple of Socrates had come on the scene to glorify Socrates, the effect would have been incomparably weaker. Alcibiades, on the other hand, is a youth completely apostate from Socrates and wholly alienated from philosophy. The influence of Socrates on such a one, a human being of such genius, is the most wonderful that Plato could have cited in proof of the above-mentioned countereffect. Furthermore, Alcibiades knows nothing of the preceding conversation. To the surprise of the audience he depicts the practical side of the human being consecrated to the Archbeautiful, while Socrates had drawn the theoretical side. Plato represents him as intoxicated in order to let him express himself more freely about things which had to be avoided in serious, measured conversation; their mention was, however, necessary, especially since they were historical facts. Then too the contrast between the speeches of Socrates and Alcidiades is worthy of notice, as is the contrast between their natures, while both are expressing their deepest feelings, the To come right out with how I conceive of the relation of the first five speeches to that of Socrates: It seems to me to be a completely erroneous claim that in those five speeches Plato collected only mistaken opinions about Eros in order to confront them with the only correct one, that of Socrates. Socrates himself does not deny them his applause; he comes back to all of them, assigning to each opinion its appropriate place. I rather believe that from the first to the last speech a definite progress takes place, insofar as each successive opinion substantially increases and broadens that of its predecessor; each speaker sees the concept of eros appear before him with growing clarity, until Socrates, far from overthrowing it, finally rounds off into a dome the edifice they have gradually erected. This holds of course only with respect to the basic opinions of each speaker. What the others add to their exegeses by way of ornament is often rejected by Socrates as unjustified. The speech of Phaedrus only sketches out the area within which the question is moved. He depicts Eros as the oldest god and the cause of the greatest goods. Of course, I here pass over the significance of each individual speech for characterizing the persons and emphasize only the basic thought. Pausanias explains the eros of the heavenly gods as love with the purpose of the active or passive ennobling of humankind. Eryximachus widens the meaning of eros to extend over the all-encompassing life of nature, while the two first speakers represent love only in its operation within the human being. Aristophanes says that eros is based on a necessity of nature, the law of elective affinity. Agathon, finally, calls eros the love of the beautiful, which begets everything good and great, in nature, in art, everywhere. In summary, the concept of eros according to these speeches would be: Eros is love for beauty as natural law, directed to the procreation of the good. Socrates' definition does not sound substantially different: Eros is love directed to the begetting and bearing on the beautiful, which he then characterizes as the instinct for immortality innate in spiritual and physical nature. In the 61 �Hope in Sophocles' Antigone D one through the mouth of the divinely inspired prophetess, the other under the inpiration of wine - their deepest and yet similar feelings for the Arch-beautiful, the one in the Idea, the other in a reference to reality: Socrates is the lover of the Arch-beautiful, but Alcibiades is also the lover of the Archbeautiful. And yet, what a difference of natures - the one as morally elevated as the other is morally fallen, the one as physically beautiful as the other is ugly, the one as sober and self-controlled as the other is intoxicated and excited. It is clear that these points of view are relevant as much to the philosophy as to the artistic conception of the dialogue. Here we should notice that with the entrance of Alcibiades a transformation of tone takes place; it is the most daring of artistic uicks that at the moment when the speech of Socrates has led the auditors as it were onto the high seas of the beautiful, the band of inebriates and revellers breaks in and yet does not undo the speech of Socrates but rather enhances it. The speech of Alcibiades is the work of eros, just as is the speech of Socrates. But the speech of Alcibiades works through facts, as that of Socrates does through ideas. And the facts work more forcefully and more compellingly than the articulated ideas. The speeches of Socrates and Alcibiades are related similarly to those of Agathon and Aristophanes, to those of Eryximachus and Pausanias, only in a higher sphere. Socrates, Agathon, E1yximachus are the greater thinkers; Alcibiades, Aristophanes, Pausanias work through facts and myths - in Pausanias especially we must note that he always keeps his own love for Agathon in view. The three thinkers elevate Eros to the widest circle of the arts and sciences peculiar to them: Eryximachus regards Eros as a physician, Agathon as a poet, Socrates as a philosopher. Through the contrast between Socrates and Alcibiades that demonic double nature of Eros himself finally comes before the imagination, that being-betwixt-and-between the divine and the human, the spiritual and the sensual; just so on the other side, the dialogue itself obtains through the appearance of Alcibiades that wonderful coloration, that oscillation between opposing tints that can be traced into the separate parts of the dialogue and that extends even to the language. Even the wondrous union of philosophical speeches with the enjoyment of wine reminds us of it. Thus the appearance of Alcibiades seems to be the turning point of the artful drama, and at the same time of philosophy, toward the side of actuality. And if I may be permitted to draw an analogy: Plato has pulled all the parts of the dialooue together in this nodal point, just as Zeus twisted 0 . . together the different sides and skins of the human bemg m the umbilibal cord and unified them in a knot. Nedalina Dineva '95 a 'YflP 01'\ 7tOAU7tAfl')'!CtOCT eAmcr n:oUotcr µev characters' actions or an omniscient power able to give a voiced expression of the characters' innermost thoughts and motives? Although this last version is a traditional interpretation of the role of the Greek chorus, it may oversimplify the way in which the play strives to render its meaning. I would much rather view the chorus as someone just like myself, uncertain and puzzled, struggling to unravel the mysteries of human life. The chorus may be seen as a group of aged men whom long experience has made wise but, perhaps, slightly senile. They proclaim truths striking in both the scope and depth of their perception. But a comprehension of eternal truths is not enough for the exercise of right judgment. One must also practically apply these truths to particular situations. The chorus lacks the ability to do so. The reader who would gain a true understanding of the play must bridge the gap between the universal and the particular. In this respect, the play is similar to a puzzle, all the parts of which are present but scattered and obscured so well that their assembly presents a problem, surmountable, we hope, with reason. Though not explicitly discussed, Hope is a constant thread woven throughout the texture of the play. An exposition of its role may provide considerable insight into the characters' development. While hope is a power that no human being can avoid, the volatility inherent in its nature is unsettling. According to the chorus Hope exhibits two contrary effects: ovacno avopcov 7tOAAota an:ma Kou<j>ovorov epCtYtmv et&>n o oou&v ep7ret, nptv 7tUpt Sepµro nooa ncr 7tp00'fl'\)0'1'\. (1.616-20) For indeed, wide-roaming hope is a benefit to many among men, but to many-a deceit for empty-minded passions; to one who knows nothing it creeps, until he bums his foot in the hot fire. As the opening stanza of one of the turning points (a'tpo<j>rt) in a chorus' speech, this passage typifies the generally sententious, truth-pondering character of the chorus' entrances. It appeares in a succession of generalizing statements which obviously bear upon the particular events in the tragedy-the far-reaching and contaminating power of evil and man's helplessness before Zeus' will (fate). Against this background, the appearance of the word "hope" and the optimism which it connotes seem quite striking and unfathomable. This is the first time that the concept of hope is treated as a potentially central concern in the play, and nowhere else does it receive so full a development. Haem on' s appearance on stage immediately after the chorus has finished speaking might lead one to believe that the reference to hope reflects his state of mind. Such an interpretation is emphasized by the connection between passion and hope in the passage quoted above. Hope is presented in an obscure causal relationship with Eros whose primary translation as physical love recalls Haemon's character. At this point the reader could easily understand the chorus' words as foreshadowing Haemon' s hope to save the Iife of his beloved. But this view is too limited in comparison with the broad scope of the other concepts articulated by the chorus. Besides, according to their own words, neither Haemon nor Antigone feels any passionate love for the other. Haemon himself, upon Creon's accusation of serving as "the woman's champion", claims in a guilessly passionate tone that his concern is more for his father than for his betrothed: "If thou art a woman; indeed, my care is for thee (1. 741 ;Jebb)." Such inconsistencies suggest that in the passage on hope the chorus addresses another, broader issue. In order to explore the significance of the chorus' treatment of hope we must first consider the chorus as we would any major character in the play. Is the chorus merely a group of bystanders offering their own subjective judgements on the 62 wide-roaming hope is a benefit to many among men, but to many-a deceit for empty-minded passions; In our experience we can distinguish between a general hope which manifests itself as an optimistic outlook towards the future, and a particular one which deals with the specifics of present situations. General optimism brings "benefit" to man, giving breadth to his horizon and vigour to his actions. The more restricted type of hope, however, is painfully insubstantial and unrealistic. It causes the person in whom it dwells to . forsake reason in his actions and to seek support from something outside of himself that he expects to emerge from the nebulous beyond at the moment of his greatest need. Such hope brings a "deceit for empty-minded passions", and, as it must by definition remain in the realm of the unfulfilled, it inevitably entails disaster. Ironically, the existence of this kind of hope in a person's mind is most clearly manifest by an abrupt change in his behaviour at the point when all hope is forsaken. 63 �We observe radical transformations in the views and actions of all the characters in the play. Antigone and Creon, the two central and mutually opposing figures, best illustrate this transformative process. Antigone, as she appears by the end of the play, is quite different from the strong-minded, resolute woman that we encounter in the beginning. In an earlier conversation with her sister she sees death as a beautiful end, an opportunity to "res t, a loved one with him whom I have loved (1.72-73; Jebb)." Even when confronted with Creon's threats she maintains a defiant attitude and presents death as an escape from her miserable existence: jus tice according to his rigid standards and heedless of any stance which opposes his own. His personality exemplifies yet another collapse of a man 's character after hope, his unsubstantial ally that was supposed to strengthen the belief in the correctness of his deeds, has stealthily departed. Upon the death of his son Creon is subject to the constrictions of a situation in which his hope can no longer thrive and support him. Without the internal instigation of hope he is suddenly humbled. A state of abjection is highly unexpected in a man who in his obstinacy is ready to rave even against the gods. He must doubt the beliefs which inspired his actions and realize the emptiness of his motives. Further evidence that Antigone and Creon are led to their tragic ends by Hope is the fact that they themselves realize, to a certain extent, the faultiness of their resolutions long before disaster strikes. Both characters admit that their decisions are not perfectly justified. Antigone indulgently calls this imperfection "her folly," Creon proudly names it "the power of the ruler." How can one admit the falsity of one's course of action and still follow it? Is the self-destructiveness which such willful blindness entails an intrinsic trait of human nature? It is unbelievable that a sane man could intentionally go towards his own doom. The only other impulse, besides madness, that can explain such behaviour is Hope. It baffles man with empty promises and inflates his pride and courage until the final moment when terror fills the hollow form that Hope has just forsaken. It is this attraction to self-destruction that leads people to great exploits and is often admired by outside observers. Is approval of such behaviour justified if it is not based on one's innate capacities but rather on something external? And should we not deem blind sacrifice a weakness and insecurity rather than strength, when it relies on empty hopes instead of reason? With regard to these questions it is helpful to consider the immediate context in which the "Hope" passage stands. It acts as the counter-movement, the avncnpoqn1, of another passage that treats of fate, represented by the inexorable might of Zeus, and ends with a proclamatory statement, "Nothing that is vast enters into the life of mortals without a curse (l.614615; Jebb)." At first sight, this line seems to refer directly to the extraordinary personalities of the two main characters in the play, condemned to disaster by their own respective natures. If, however, we are to take the following antistrophe as an answer to the vague universality of this statement, the "vast thing"-naµnoA'l)-that comes into life with a curse is in fact "wide-roaming hope"-noA.unA.a:)'K'tOO' £Amcr. A special emphasis needs to be put on the fact that naµnoA.u denotes a thing and not a person, an observation which lessens the immediacy of the application of the word to either Creon or Antigone. It is significant that the adjectives modifying "the thing" and "the hope" have similar connotations and even share a composite part, namely 7tOA1J. Moreover, the manner in which they enter, creeping into life and man respectively, But if I am to die before my time, I count that a gain: for if anyone lives, as I do, compassed about with evils, can such a one find aught but gain in death? (1.463-466;Jebb) At the very last moment, however, when directly faced with the prospect of dying, she mourns her fate and attempts to invoke pity for herself in others. We realize that her previous resignation to the inevitability of death was not securely grounded. Strong beliefs, based on rational thought, would not yield so readily to feelings; but passions, emerging from powerful impulses and obstinate self-righteousness, are easily overcome by like passions. Antigone, as she first appears, is moved by a violent, almost blind, determination to act. This determination is a likely manifestation of OL epffi't£CJ or "loves," "passions." Just as physical love is irrational and uncontrollable, so is any other inexplicably powerful attraction or drive. Antigone is resolved to bury her brother but refuses to consider the destructive consequences of her actions. Hope is what fosters such an attitude-hope in the correctness of one's decision, in the possibility of achieving one's goal, and in the relief which will ensue from its accomplishment. When this hope is not realized (the corpse is still unburied; no approval, divine or human, is granted her), Antigone behaves like a child irritated that events do not accord to her desires. She bewails her fate, the same fate which not long before she eulogized as leading to a most beautiful end in life. She stands uncertain, groundless; her hope is gone and with it, all the principles that have hitherto driven her actions: And what law of heaven have I transgressed? Why, hapless one, should I look to the gods any morewhat ally should I invokewhen by piety I have earned the name of impious? (1. 921-24, Jebb) Creon is also led by a "passion" that is stined by a deceitful hope. He hopes to establish justice in his city, but 64 is expressed by the same verb---epnffi. These two stanzas in ~h~~ juxtaposition, suggest much broader implications than imtially apparent. Vastness and its concomitant curse are at work not only in single, exceptional cases. They are intrinsic elements of the realm of hope of which we all partake. If our firs t impulse is to separate ourselves from the characters and ~he events in the tragedy, deeming them too extraordinary to m any way bear upon our own experience, we must now face the realization that the cause and driving force behind them is something common to all men, by whose disastrous effects we are all endangered. The application of Hope to human existence does not end here but is taken to an even higher level. Its central role within the pl.a~ is further enforced by its presence in the proverbially defm1tive passage, the "noAAcx 'ta Bf:iva" chorus. Once again we ar~ faced ~y an obscure expression and a passing mention of an ~<lea which, when fully explored, might yield important meanmgs: Wonders are many, but nothing is more wondrous than man. Having an ingenuity of art, and wisdom beyond hope, he creeps, now towards evil and now towards good. (1.332,362-363) He~e ~~ is p~esented as wise "beyond hope" (1J7tep ~A.mo) m his mgemous arts. This expression, mysterious in itself, stands in a peculiar relation to wisdom and arts Moreover, it is man this time, as opposed to hope, who. creeps (epmo~, now t~wards evil and now towards good. The commonality of t!ris action to both man and hope suggests a fundamen~ link between them. In the core of their relation stands vastn.ess, which they both share. Man, vastness, and ~ope mer~e mto one and spread over all the instances of tragic ~mpa~se m the play. Once understood, their inseparability illummates the tragedy in the context of human existence as a whole. Note: Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine. 65 �Human Nature and War in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War by Janice Thompson '95 Individuals can oppose individuals, parties can oppose parties, states can oppose states, with impunity. But these levels are interdependent and the hostility in one cannot always be contained in the stratum in which it originated. When enough individuals form an alliance they become a city which can oppose other cities; likewise cities allied together become a state and can oppose other states, while states allied together become an empire. Thucydides begins his History at the end of the greatest state of possible unity in the Grecian world, when all people, cities, and states were united against Persia. He then describes the degeneration of that cohesion through all the strata of human society. Thucydides' views on human nature and the breakdown of law and order are most evident in his analysis of civil war and disunity, particularly in his presentation of the Athenian plague and the civil war in Corcyra. The plague in Athens was a natural disaster that so overwhelmed men that they came to ignore the old structures that had unified them as a city and governed their behavior. Such a removal of the accepted order seems to be the first step into lawlessness. In the new situation created by the plague there was no apparent evidence that the moral ties of virtue and honor that had once guided men's actions still had relevance to the suffering they then encountered. For example, those honorable enough to care for the sick received no reward; instead they usually became sick themselves. The disease struck randomly and relentlessly, inflicting suffering upon both the virtuous and the corrupt. Many of the living stopped caring for the sick or observing burial rites out of fear for their own health. Thus Thucydides describes men as becoming "indifferent" (II, 52) to rules of law and religion when they are no longer able to see the relevance of such rules to their present situation. Thucydides then describes how the state of "indifference" develops into one of fearlessness. He writes: "No fear of god or law of man had a restraining influence." (II, 53) As the disease continued to spread wildly, people lost hope and concern for the future. All were weak in the face of the plague, and no one expected to live long enough to be respected for virtuous acts or punished for crime. For similar reasons the laws of the state quickly followed the laws of morality into disrepair. The greatest value became the pleasure of the moment as they could be certain of nothing else. (II, 53) The citizens acted on this new value by becoming openly self-indulgent and unrestrained. The despair and fear felt by the Athenians when threatened by the plague, an enemy they Human nature is presented as inextricably entwined with history in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides writes in the introduction that: It will be enough for me, however, if these words of mine are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future. Thucydides presents the human motivation that directs the course of history. Throughout time human nature shows its effects in all the different strata of human interaction. Insight into the human spirit is, thus, integral to understanding of the past, and of the relations between nations and individuals. Thucydides' history concerns a time of war. In order to understand the state of war we must understand the human nature that causes it, the human nature that develops under its threat, and the effects of human nature in the political situation. War permeates all aspects and levels of human society, from the social to the moral, from the international to the individual. Human society is unified through "social" ties and "moral" ties. The social ties, necessitated by common interest and self-preservation, are a balancing of strength against strength in order to set up a system in which a society can function. They consist of agreements and rules designed to make aggression unprofitable. Examples of the social structures are such things as laws and alliances. Less obviously motivated by self-interest are the moral ties. These are not based on a position of strength but are a precaution against times of weakness. The benefit for the weak is immediately obvious: security in times of distress, when strength can not save them. The benefits for the strong are less apparent: a good reputation for their virtuous behavior, and the hope of receiving similar treatment in times of trouble. Justice, ethics, 'and friendship are examples of such ties. A state of war depends on the creation and maintenance of a fine balance of unity and disunity, understanding and blindness. A state must be internally unified in order to have the strength and stability with which to direct itself against another state. Such internal or domestic unity allows a state to take an opposing position to another, setting up a disunity on the external, or international, scale. Unity and disunity can develop in all levels of human relations, and their effects on one level spread to others. 66 67 �could not fight, undermined their respect for law. This led to a reckless disregard of their social structure of values. In the absence of such structures they came to observe new values of individual self-preservation and indulgence, values which threatened their ability to act as a society. The societal effects of the destruction and replacement of previously established systems of values are evide?t i.n Thucydides' description of the civil war in Corcyra and m his generalization of the nature of revolutions. The structures of society, in the case of revolutions, are purposely attacked by rival political factions, rather than deteriorating from neglect, as they were in Athens, during the plague. In Corcyra, both the democrats and the oligarchs were supposedly trying to save the city, but through opposite means. They were not interested in compromise and they soon came to act as enemies towards each other. Internal fighting destroyed Corcyra's ability to put forth an organized self-defense against outside forces. Even worse, it released internal forces that destroyed civil unity. At this point in his chronicles, Thucydides departs from his simple presentation of fact and analyzes the aspects of human nature that direct the course of revolution. He begins by describing how the change from attitudes of peace to attitudes of conflict and war come to permeate the whole structure of understanding: "To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings." (III, 82) Along with the logos of speech, the existing logos, or order, of human values was displaced. Aggression was now seen as courage, moderation as unmanliness, consideration prior to action as cowardly inaction, villainy as cleverness, and honesty as simple-mindedness. Thucydides further comments: "The simple way oflooking at things, which is so much the mark of a noble nature was regarded as a ridiculous quality and soon ceased to exist." (III, 83) In language, law, and national character the concepts of virtue were changed from those which benefitted the weak to those which benefitted the individual. It is necessary to understand why this change occurred and its influence in the generation of the resulting situation. The existing structures of understanding are purposely destroyed in times of revolution to allow for structures of hostility and conflict to be established. During the plague in Athens, a time of civil disunity but not revolution, the moral ties of law and religion were disregarded; human nature took advantage of such lawlessness. But in Corcyra and other revolutions, these laws were attacked and replaced in order to destroy the existing social order. A certain type of human behavior was encouraged rather than simply left unrestrained. Revolutions create hostilities and enemies while at the same time they remove the systems of justice that once mediated and restiicted such behavior. Thucydides explains that "Society had been divided into two ideologically hostile camps .. ." (II, 83), thus providing a structure in which indi- victual desires conflicted with another party or individual. People could no longer depend on any common standard or belief or behavior. There could be no confidence in others and so all energy was devoted to individual strength and quickness for self-preservation. Potential enemies were everywhere, and simple survival was so tenuous that to strike first became the best way to be secure. Vengeance and profit became the ideals governing man's behavior. Thucydides asserts that the emergence of the structures of conflict and revenge propel a state further into its own destruction for two reasons. First, the loss of unity permits the emergence of a dangerous form of human behavior: Then, with the ordinary conventions of civilized life thrown into confusion, human nature, always ready to offend even where laws exist, showed itself proudly in its true colors, as something incapable of controlling passion, insubordinate to the idea of justice, the enemy to anything superior to itself; for, if it had not been for the pernicious power of envy, men would not so have exalted vengeance above innocence and profit above justice. (ill, 84) And second, the lawlessness and hostility established by such behavior destroys the means of salvation from the disorder and suffering. Indeed, it is true that in these acts of revenge on others men take it upon themselves to begin the process of repealing those general laws of humanity which a.:e there to give a hope of salvation to all who are m distress, instead of leaving those laws in existence, remembering that there may come a time when they, too, will be in danger and will need their protection. (ill,84) In the revolutions, the "structures" of hostility that encouraged self-interest and revenge in order to dismantle the original unity ultimately could not be contained within an ordered system. The competition for power to further party interests that had corrupted the strata of national unity, eventually spread to individual competition for power, corrupting all strata of the once cohesive city. Thucydides claimed: "Love of power, operating through greed and through personal ambition, was the cause of all these evils." (III, 83) Party programs seemed admirable, but they appealed to public concerns only to gain the support necessary to empower those competing for leadership. Party attacked party and individual attacked individual. Public spirit became a guise for personal ambition; nothing was as it seemed. Hence violence erupted throughout the society. The only way to achieve one' s ends was quickly and forcefully. Other means, such as agreements and unions, could not be trusted as they were assumed to be motivated by aggression. The disorder, fear, and hostility that spread through all levels of organization caused terrible suffering, which could not be prevented as the structures of from weakness she thought she did not need to act with concern for the weak. Thus the other states came to realize that Athens' "justice" could be depended on only when it benefitted her self-interest. Athens also suspected such selfinterest in the actions of others states. Since true justice is difficult (ifnot impossible) to separate from bias, the appearance of justice can easily be used to veil self-interest. By upholding and displaying such attitudes Athens presented herself as superior to other states and to any rules governing dealings between states, such as justice, which could restrict her power. Similar to the early stages of rebellion within a city, initial disunity and a lack of a common structure had been established, this time on the international stratum. Policy had to be based on self-interest, acted out of strength, or avoided through fear. Power now ruled justice and law. Athens had thus begun to dismantle the moral order from the system in which she and other states has to interact. The Athenian speech is followed by King Archidamus' speech to the Spartans advising them on how to respond to the Athenian situation. Thucydides cites fear of the growth of Athenian power as the reason that motivated Sparta to finally declare war (I, 23). King Archidamus viewed the Athenians ' pride as excessive and dangerous. But, most significantly, he feared the effects of such an attitude on the internal unity of the state. He was concerned that the overriding self-interest set up by Athens on the international level might permeate the state level and destroy national unity. King Archidamus cautioned the Spartans against such behavior with the same arguments used by Thucydides in his analysis of human nature at the destruction of Corcyra. To maintain a powerful and unified state he called on them to uphold the social order: to be self-controlled and unified through honor and regard for law and custom. He also warned them not to remove the moral order; they must never become too confident in their own strength; they must realize that success is subject to chance and change. Athenian policy did not address such concerns. Athens saw her strength as the principle of her foundation that enabled her to act according to self-interest. The perpetuation of such strength required that she be unified. Pericles realized this and labored to encourage her confidence and solidarity. In his speech to the Athenian assembly after the Spartan ultimatum, he attempted to show that Athens truly was the stronger. He also argued the necessity that she demonstrate her power by refusing to make concessions to such trifling rewards as included in the Spartan ultimatum. Athens' refusal to concede to the conditions of the treaty was a display of strength to the world. Pericles, in his funeral oration, labored to ensure that Athens truly was strong by being internally unified. Pericles spent a great deal of time praising the special character of Athens as good and noble. In doing so he presented them with the ideal character for Athens and encouraged them, out of salvation had been removed. Civil war in Corcyra destroyed the society. Specific unities (under party lines) were set up to achieve certain ends through the creation of disunities in the city. The structures of justice were removed. But eventually the once directed hostility and disunity between parties grew beyond the control of its creators. Without the structures of justice to stop it, this destructive form of human behavior spread until the whole society collapsed. Such human behavior consists of a mixture of greed, power, hostility, and self-preservation; a combination that seems to be very similar to the attitudes of states on the international level. Athens attempted to avoid a declaration of war with Sparta by presenting Sparta with a justification for her actions. Thucydides first presents evidence of Athens' attitude of hostility in her statement of character to Sparta. Athens described herself as obtaining and maintaining her empire according to three powerful motives, namely "security, honor, and self-interest." (I, 76) Security upheld her social ties, honor her moral ties, but self-interest encouraged her to set up disunities that weakened such ties. Without the external threat of Persian aggression, Athens believed she was strong enough to rule others and no longer needed their cooperation and trust. She also claimed that "it has always been a rule that the weak should be subject to the strong" and that she was worthy of her power. All of these beliefs established specific "disunities." Security and self-interest imply that one state has personal interests that may conflict with those of other states. Each state recognizes the potential for enemies and, fearing for its own safety, acknowledges the need to protect itself. If alliances are made, they cannot be fully trusted, because any state may choose to break the terms of the agreement as soon as it seems more advantageous for them to do so. Thus Athens was forced to depend on her allies' fear of her power. Potential disunity was ever-present due to conflicting interests of states, but a specific enemy had not yet been recognized and an uneasy international unity remained. The formal structures of alliance and Grecian unity established as a result of the Persian conflict had not yet been dissolved. But since the original cause for unity, the Persian empire, was gone, the adherence of states to the alliance was much more tenuous as the faith in such a social order was dismantled. Athenians talked of paying" ... more attention to justice than they are compelled to do so by their situation." (I, 76) This attitude seems to undermine the importance of justice, as justice is presented not as something to which Athens was subject, but as something she chose to respect. honor was still cited as a controlling value in the Athenian character, as it was for the sake of honor that they continue to recognize justice insofar as it didn't compromise their strength. Athens was prepared to undermine the social order existing between states because she believed that she herself was not subject to any moral order. Because she was so strong and protected 69 68 �love for the state and all that is good, to emulate this ideal. He thus gave the citizens a sense of unity based in their own belief. He reinforced this sense of unity by praising and encouraging their respect for the laws. Internal moral structures were upheld, but so as to encourage the Athenian sense of national unity, Pe1icles was careful at the same time to depict Athens as having a very specific and superior charact~r. For example, Pericles claimed of Athens: "In her case, and m her case alone, no invading enemy is ashamed at being defeated, and no subject can complain of being governe? by people unfit for their responsibilities." (II, 41) Penc~es worked to unify Athens, and to give her a distinct and supenor self-image. In this way he tried to mold public attitude into the conditions he needed in order to maintain a strong state capable of successfully waging war. . As Thucydides and the Spartan King warned, strenglh is not infallible: it can be overturned by chance. The Athenian plague is the first illustration of the effects of c~anc~ in the History. Suffeiing from the hopelessness of the situation and desperate for an end to their suffering, the Athenian people began to lose confidence in the leadership, valu~s, and l~ws they had hitherto upheld. Pericles attempted to give meanmg to their suffeiing for them, prevailing upon them to recollect the ultimate benefits to be confeiTed upon all of Athens, for which they had all promised to fight. A hope for the fu~ure was necessary to make the people see beyond present difficulties and to deter them from exploiting the opportunity for lawlessness. Pericles was able to convince the Athenians to continue to follow his policy of war, though they still suffered and were angry because of it. Through such descriptions Thucydides shows how desperate people become to find an end to their suffering. Pericles was able to unify the Athenians despite their suffering because he was such an intelligent and well respected leader, dedicated to the glory of the state. Not all leaders, however, possess such qualities. Even worse, some leaders go so far as to exploit the volatility of human suffering for their own selfish ends. Disorder threatened to destroy civil society during the time of the plague, but strong leadership was ultimate~y able to maintain order. The stability of such order was agam threatened when disunity emerged in Athenian national leadership. Competition for leadership and support is strikingly evident in the debate between Cleon and Diodotus about whether to destroy the population of Mytilene, an ally that failed in its attempt to revolt. Cleon spoke first. He claimed t?at fear ~d conspiracy were permeating the empire, potential enemies were everywhere, and that the harsh treatment proposed for Mytilene would render the other subjects obedient by instilling them with fear. Cleon greatly expanded upon the sense. of superiority that Pericles had initially inspired in the Atheman citizenry. Unlike Pericles, he did so, not for the good of Athens, but for his own quest for power. He tried to frighten the Athenians by the dangers he described so that they would empower him with their trust to protect them through whatever means he claimed necessary. Cleon encouraged fear within the state and violent action against its adversaries. He was not interested in maintaining any" general laws of humanity," structures of justice, or any restrictions on conduct in adversarial relations with other states: As for compassion, it is proper to feel it in the case of people who are like ourselves and who will pity us in their tum, not in the case of those who, so far from having the same feelings towards us, must always and inevitably be our enemies. (Ill, 40) Cleon advocated an extreme structure of hostility, fear, and self-interest from which he removed any consideration for moral law. Both his opinions and his motivations seemed dangerous to the preservation of unity. Diodotu~ prese~ted an outlook in opposition to Cleon's recommendation. D~odo~us was opposed to putting the Mytilenians to death. As did King Archidamus at the debate at Sparta, Diodotus warned the people against acting out of haste and anger. But he also warned them of a new danger, namely that speakers and leaders could no longer be trusted or believed. Not only were moral acts rendered void of purpose and influence on the international level, but basic values such as honesty and oust ceased to function as a means to preserve order within the state. For now that self-interest had spread so far as to corrupt the balance of political power within the state, the citiz~ns h~d to suspect the motivations of every leader. This state of ~faus is strikingly reminiscent of the situation that resulted m the destruction of Corcyra. Good leadership dming the plague maintained among the people a hope of salvation fro°! t~e disorder. In Athens, however, there was no longer the fruth m leadership that might empower it to restore unity to the nation should it fall prey to disorder. Diodotus argued only according to the self-interest of the state, as this was the principle governing Athens' foreign and domestic affairs, but he argued insightfully as to the nature of such a system. He provided evidence that even the death penalty could not prevent men from b eaking laws. Fear of death is not enough to prevent crime if men are truly determined to break the law. Diodotus cited factors of human nature as the cause of this behavior: Hope and desire persist throughout and cause the gr~at­ est calamities-one leading and the other followmg, one conceiving the enterprise, and the other suggesting that it will be successful-invisible factors, but more powerful than the te1Tors that are obvious to our eyes. (Ill, 45) If Mytilenians are given nothing but hopelessness and a well defined enemy to blame, then shouldn't they do everything in their power to destroy their enemy since, at the very 70 were apparently intended to protect the weak, Athens would ultimately hurt herself, regardless of her present strength. The Melians warned Athens: "And this is a principle which affects you as much as anybody, since your own fall would be visited by the most terrible vengeance and would be an example to the world." They suggested to Athens that her attitude was needlessly creating enemies, but Athens was unconvinced. Athens remained confident of her own strength and security, and of the accuracy of her understanding of world affairs. Her attitudes were so ingrained that more dialogue could never convince her that her international relationships would bring about the eventual downfall of the Athenian empire. Despite Athens' assurance of her strength and justness in her international relations, her internal order had been dismantled and could no longer support her interests. Athens' allies came to trust Sparta more than Athens, her leaders manipulated state affairs for their own private interests, and the citizens followed whomever promised the easiest solution to their present difficulties. At the end of her empire Athens was too disorganized to fight her enemy, the Sicilians. Her internal disunity made her externally weak. The ultimate blow to the glory of her state was that she was finally betrayed to Sparta by one of her own leaders. Social ties were in sham bles throughout all levels of society. During the time of Pericles, Athens followed the same principles of strength and self-interest, but her ability to wield such weapons against other states was securely rooted in the internal strength and the unity of her state. Previously, when civil difficulties threatened moral order and national unity, good leadership could contain their spread and redirect the people toward law and unity. When self-interest, revenge, and the exercise of brute force replaced the moral structures which previously protected the weak, the principles of disunity eventually brought about the ruin of the entire society. Thucydides presents war as an establishment of specific unities and disunities in an otherwise stable system so that one state, party, or individual can put forth a unified attack against another. In order to do so, some of the moral and social ties of human interaction must be removed without destroying the whole delicate web of human affairs. Since these ties connect and guide society in all respects and on all levels, the effect of breaking one law, or of setting up hostility on one level of interacting, soon resounds throughout the entire sphere of human affairs. The human motivations of self-interest, power and revenge create and spread the disunity of war because they change the understanding of what is good or most beneficial. Such intentions thereby change the rules that govern all levels of human interaction. The good of the whole, the "common good," is no longer understood to be the good of every individual; individual "goods" are therefore bound to conflict. By removing the order determined by the common good that restricts individual goods, two things happen: hostilities are introduced, and the structures that guide and protect least, their fate could be no worse than if they had never tried at all? This seems to be a good explanation as to why the social conditions generated by suffering are so volatile. Diodotus claimed that once on a certain course human nature cannot be controlled through intimidation (III, 45); physical strength is unreliable as such a control. This comment is significant as it was through Athens' strength and the fear which she inspired that she maintained her empire. Diodotus suggested that Athens' security must not be based on force but on "good administration" (III, 46): maintaining friendships not yet based on fear and keeping a very close wat.ch on those which are based on fear. Diodotus cautioned Athens not to depend solely on her military might. In calling for strength in administration, he also advocated maintaining structure and unity in the empire. Diodotus did not ask Athens to be compassionate. He realized that there was no longer any place for moral considerations in Athenian policy. Athens set out to act according to her self-interests; she could not maintain such interests if she were to recognize the damaging effects of her actions upon others. Although the motion ofDiodotus was passed, the vote was close, indicating that a division was growing among the Athenian population. The national and civil interactions between Athenians began to reflect the disunity of Athenian aggression on international affairs. The Athenian attitude of unchecked self-interest is starkly apparent in the Melian Dialogue. This passage concerns the fate of Melos, an island state that wanted to remain neutral to the Athenian empire. The Athenians refused to recognize this neutrality, as they perceived other states only as enemies or subjugates. The Athenians claimed that justice is based on the distribution of power and that it is the "general and necessary law of nature to rule whatever one can." (V, 105) Moral justice was rendered valueless, weakness was ignored; opportunity and strength governed all. The Melians were told outright that the only arguments the Athenians would understand had to reflect the concerns of Athenian self-interest. Since their hostility was already assumed, it was useless to argue their neutrality or innocence. The Melians had to accept these limitations. They did, however, raise some important observations on human nature and self-interest. They tried to suggest to the Athenians that it would be useful to Athens not to destroy a principle that is to the "general good of all men": " ... in the case of all who fall into danger there should be such a thing as fair play and just dealing, and that such people should be allowed to use and to profit by arguments that fall short of a mathematical accuracy." (V, 90) The Melian speech is strikingly similar to the general laws of humanity which Thucydides himself describes earlier. The Melians further said that by repealing these laws, which 71 �an individual person or state are removed. The individual must face hostility with his own strnngth and intelligence without hope of protection. But Thucydides shows that strength cannot be relied on as the only bulwark against destrnction; chance and decay can undermine its protective value. Virtue, however, seems to guard against the extremes of fortune and time by directing men to the notions of common good and societal unity. In creating partial disunity, a state of war risks total disunity. Should suffering or destruction result-should the individual need help or protection, the structures of society can no longer assist him. The society has been destroyed; even the "general laws of humanity which are there to give a hope of salvation to all ... "(III, 84) are lost. 73 72 �Two swans D Morning at Midnight- for Mary Ruth Clance · D by J.H. Beall by J.H. Beall A pale blue seen wan across the pale water cries its swan song as the placid pair curve their white necks into the rush weeds near shore, near a tumble of rocks as the long shadows come, long toothed with winter, the occasional, ochre sedge of sea grass a line against the fm1her . burgundy ridge of trees. The other pair A midnight's fancy in its tones resolves a deeper chord and hues the shades would fit on evening lay like cats upon a purry clime. All resonate and thrust upon the tautest edge, would stop and trust to make the evening so. Thus violate, the sleeping lover lies, and in the carnal bed so troubled with repose, tranquility of ages in a breath of sighs eye not the pale blue jumble of the rocks but the darker ebb and current the wind asks where the yielding water sloughs up and is thrown back. Without comment, each wave awash demarking dreams all-literate, "Suppose." Yet here upon the dark incontinence of sleep, mass continents of thoughts the mind itself would not have dreamed, where toppling, high meridians with its own desire, draws weakly up. "Perhaps a will there," they say. Perhaps the pawn of spent breath the way is given to, words being that they are cold comfort under coming winter star. alone in keening silence fall, as should a great tree fall in dark and soundless wood. 74 75 �Non-Prof it Org. BULK RATE U.S. POSTAGE St. John's College Annapolis, Maryland 21404 PAID PERMIT No. 120 ANNAPOLIS, MD. � 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 <em>Energeia</em> Description An account of the resource <em>Energeia</em> is a non-profit, student magazine, which is published once a year and distributed among students, faculty, alumni, and staff of St. John's College, Annapolis.  Staff welcome submissions from all members of the community -- essays, poems, stories, original math proofs, lab projects, drawings, and the like. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context energeia Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper (bound book) Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 75 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 Energeia, Spring 1993 Description An account of the resource Issue of the Energeia, published in Spring 1993. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 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 Energeia Spring 1993 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Blistein, Rachel (Senior Editor) Belanger, Yvonne (Junior Editor) Student publication https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/df9347175e0d5ab88f39b68288dc6a93.pdf b174c44e3c7914bcfeba2c29b402a2bf PDF Text Text �( ENERGEIA: The activity in which anything is fully itself. 11 ... vou eVEp"y'Eta ~coll ... (Aristotle's Metaphysics, 1072b) Staff Hillary Fields Jennifer Swaim Nick Colton Senior Editor Yvonne Belanger Junior Editor Amy Thurston Faculty Advisor Abe Schoener Special Thanks To the St. John's College Print Shop: Marcia Baldwin Chris Colby Vernon Magee Don Smith Energeia is a non-profit, student magazine which is published once a year and distributed among students, faculty, alumni and staff of St. John's College, Annapolis. The Energeia staff welcomes submissions from all members of the community - essays, poems, stories, original math proofs, lab projects, drawings, and the like. �r Table of Contents Judy Seeger Pastoral . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Julie Meadows Maxwell's Field: An Examination of the Role of Method in Science . 12 Dominic Crapuchettes Untitled [Photo] 18 Dominic Crapuchettes The Anger of Achillies [Poem] 19 Matthew Braithwaite Desire and Learning in the Symposium 20 Erin Martell Untitled [Photo] . . . . . . . . . 32 Heidi Francie Roberts In Our Fear We Make an Image . 33 Nathan James Humphrey "Cross" No. 3 [Photo] . . . . . 48 Carrie L. Sager The Beauty of Francesca da Rimini-Dante' s Divine Comedy 49 David F. Simpson Untitled [Photo] . . 53 Stacie Slotnick Insomniac [Poem] 54 Nathan James Humphrey Clytemnestra, A Sonnet [Poem] . 56 Cover Art Front: Craig Sirkin Back: David F. Simpson �Pastoral Judy Seeger Domingo HeITero was 80 years old, twice my age, when I met him in northern Spain in February 1985. He was a retired shepherd. I had left my husband to care for our two daughters and had come to Spain on a post-doctoral grant to collect oral traditional ballads. Although a less likely pair could scarcely have been imagined, Domingo and I later agreed that we both knew the day we met that we were going to get along just fine. The miracle was that we had met at all. I recall our first encounter very clearly. That morning when I opened the shutters of my hotel room in the small town of Almanza brilliant sunlight greeted me for the first time since my arrival in the province of Le6n. Colleagues in Madrid had suggested I search for traditional ballads in Almanza, but now, an endless week after I had arrived, my world seemed to have shrunk to that tiny, sparsely-furnished room. Chill, relentless, late winter rain had been falling since the first day. From my window I could see huddled shapes across the rain-slick highway, shepherds in dark slickers, keeping lonely company with their grazing sheep. I would turn from the window, turn on the light, and climb into bed with a Spanish novel. Knowing I would never find oral traditional ballads in a hotel, I forced myself to go out once a day, to knock on doors, to hear that the old times were gone. Then, having done what I regarded as my duty, I would retreat to my room. Not many people seemed to live in Almanza, and of those who did, few opened their doors to me. Why should they? What was I to them except an importunate stranger? With little else to guide me, I had begun seeking auguries in the weather, in faces, in the intricate linkage of words. It was by feeling my way along what I envisioned as a tenuous chain of signs that I had reached Almanza. But the burnished afternoon that had welcomed me there had proven false. I knew I would have to move on, and at last, that sunny Saturday morning, I had another lead. The local priest had assured me that he knew of no one in his depopulated parishes who could help me find what I was seeking. But if I went north into the mountains, he suggested, to a town called Prioro, I might find someone. The people of the mountains were srud to be more open than those of the plains, and to retain traditions longer. The priest in Prioro, he added, was a young man interested in old ways. He might be able to assist me. Here was another link for my fragile chain. So I put my tape recorder into the trunk of the small white car I had rented in Madrid and turned toward the glittering snowy peaks I could see for only the second time since my arrival. The crystalline sunshine faded as I entered the valley of the Cea River. The moist earth seemed to breathe, its misty exhalations 1ising from the river first in wisps then in billows, brimming over the banks of the road. Through gaps in the swirling white curtains I could see leafless poplars reaching for the sky, yellow fields, and, on the hillsides, oaks whose dry brown leaves clung thickly to their branches. As I drove, the valley narrowed. I passed towns that looked nearly deserted. Smoke rising from chimneys denounced occupants in a few whitewashed stone houses. Tightly closed shutters sealed the windows of most. Some, long since abandoned when their dwellers had died or moved to the cities to seek work, had tumbled into heaps of brownish stones. The mountains loomed rockier and steeper. I began to wonder if the priest had directed me to the end of the world. Then, after winding my way between nearly vertical green rock walls crowding so close that they hardly left room for both the river and the road, I suddenly was no longer in the narrow valley. It seemed to have widened into a bowl, though I had no more than an impression of light and openness, for the fog was so thick I could barely see the roadway. One of the small black-lettered signs that announce every Spanish town informed me, as I inched past it, that I had arrived in Prioro. Narrow muddy roads departed the highway on both sides, but I was afraid to follow them. They looked better suited to the cow-drawn carts so common in the region than to cars. As the highway climbed out of the valley, I saw on my right, half hidden in a cloud of mist, the bell tower of ' a stone church. I pulled into the square in front of the church, stopped, and pondered what to do next. The church doors were tightly closed. There was no one in sight. I left the car, sought out someone to ask directions, and was directed to the only inn in town - it looked like nothing more than an unusually large house- where I was told the priest, Don Francisco, was a boarder. "No, no," Don Francisco protested when I tried to show him the documents I had brought from the granting agency in Madrid, official indication that I was who I said I was. "That's all right. It's not necessary. Listen, I can'tdo anything for you myself. I have four parishes and I just don't have time. But if you would like to come with me I will take you to someone who can help you." He inserted his slippered feet into a pair of the three-pronged wooden shoes I had seen people wearing in the fields surrounding Almanza. The shoes were not worn near the capital of the province where he had been born, Don Francisco explained, but he had learned to appreciate them in the muddy roads of Prioro. Worn outdoors over felt slippers, they kept one's feet warm and dry, and, left at the door, they kept the mud outside where it belonged. Later, I, too, would learn to walk in that clumsy-looking but eminently sensible footgear. That day, though, tiptoeing into Prioro in my leather 1 �city boots, I hugged the flaking walls of old houses and tried to keep pace with Don Francisco, who strode with a speed and grace I would not have believed possible down the rutted and hoof-marked middle of the muddy street. Twisting and turning, following the narrow street and narrower alleys, cutting between houses attached to their stone barns, scattering hens and roosters, shooing curious goats and suspicious dogs, we made our tortuous way down the steep western side of the hill the church surveyed. In traveling I had cultivated the custom of looking closely at new surroundings so as not to get hopelessly lost. Yet I knew I never could have found my way into the town of Prioro without a guide, and I was not looking forward to having to retrace my steps alone. "I'm taking you to the house of the oldest woman born in Prioro," Don Francisco explained over his shoulder. "She's 93 years old, and she's blind, but she remembers a lot about life as it used to be here. She and her husband don't keep animals anymore, so they aren't busy with chores. They'll be able to help you find what you're looking for." He veered off the street into a muddy yard whose narrow boundaries were defined in the back and on the left by a stone wall and on our right by a small house which looked even older than those we had passed on our way. A few bedraggled flowers grew in a tiny flower bed beneath a blue-framed window, imprisoned behind a wire mesh fence whose purpose, I later learned, was to preserve the plants from the depredations of passing chickens, goats, and sheep. Across the yard from the house, beside another small fenced garden, stood a tile-roofed shelter which protected a stack of firewood and an aged two-wheeled cait from the worst of the elements. Leaving his wooden shoes on the flagstone at the entrance, the pliest pushed open the weathered wooden door of the house and entered the dark hallway calling, "Aunt Sabina! Aunt Sabina! Where are you?" He turned to me: "You may come in. She's a little deaf, but I'm sure she's here. She almost never goes out, not even to mass anymore, and she hasn't been well recently." There was a wide wooden staircase at the end of the hall, and an entryway on the left into a narrower and dai·ker hallway. Don Francisco without hesitating turned right, put his shoulder to a light blue door, and led me into the room called the kitchen, which, in the old dwellings of northern Leon, serves as living room and dining room as well. Uncomfortably awai·e of my muddy boots on the worn wooden floor, I saw to our left a closed door and an aged light blue breakfront which held plates and cups. Straight ahead under a window looking onto the street was a small sink with a single dripping faucet. The hearth, to the right of the sink, dominated the room. Something was boiling in two tall reddish pots pushed nearly into the flames of a brightly burning fire. On the white tile counter over the hearth stood a large, ornate, glass-encased figure of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and a television set. Wooden benches upholstered with tattered cushions ran along both the wall that met the hearth and the wall to the right of the doorway. Dark links of smoke-dried sausage and curls of dried orange peel hung from nails hammered into a beam. The priest approached a stooping figure dressed in black from her head.kerchief to her slippers. She was watering potted plants which stood on a tile shelf where the thick wall became a window overlooking the flower garden outside. Concentrating on feeling for the plants, she was oblivious to our arrival. "Aunt Sabina!" Don Francisco touched her shoulder and she turned. Her hair was white and her eyes a clear and striking blue. "I see two shapes," she said. "Who are you?" "It's Don Francisco, Aunt Sabina. I've brought you an American." "A what?" He repeated more slowly, and louder, "an American. A lady from the United States. She wants you to tell her some stories." "A lady from America in my house? Mother, Mother." "Yes. She's collecting songs and stories. I told her you were the oldest person born in Prioro and that you know a lot. She's looking for the old stories and verses, like the ones you told Fidel when he was recording last fall." "Does she have a tape recorder?" The priest looked at me and I nodded. "Yes." "Mother, Mother ... I never knew many songs, though I once knew a lot of stories. Everyone used to say 'nobody can keep up with Sabina.' Now I have no memory anymore. The years are many, and, as you know, I haven't been well. I didn't leave this house all January." "She' ll record you here, Aunt Sabina. You don'thave to go out. You'll remember the stories. All you need to do is think a little." Creaking noisily, the kitchen door opened. Don Francisco turned. "Uncle Domingo," he said, ''I've brought you an American." Domingo was a slight man, about half a head shorter thai1 I, with thick white hair and eyes of faded blue. He was wearing old clothes: a maroon turtleneck sweater, dark gray pants that bagged at the knees, a black beret of the sort worn by most Spanish men of his generation. Domingo's smile was broad, and as warm as the fire that burned in the hearth, yet he smiled with his mouth closed. I later discovered that he had no more teeth than Don Quixote after his unfortunate encounter with the shepherds. "Well, I leave you in their care." The priest shook my hand and left. Sabina and Domingo told me that morning that they had no children. Thell: only child, a boy who would have been fifty-two years old in 1985, had been stillborn after a long and 2 difficult labor. Another had "begun," as they said, but had miscarried, and then there had been no more. Resigned to God's will and yet longing for a child, Sabina and Domingo had taken in other people's offspring. They had reared a nephew whose mother had died two days after he was born. They had kept for four years (until his unmarried mother decided she wanted him back) a little boy who had come to their house one day wearing only underclothes and begging for food. They took the priest's injunction to care for me most seriously. He had brought me, like an orphan, to their door. They were determined to treat me well. Sabina offered that, given a little time to think, she could probably recall and recite a long story in verse. Domingo and I left to fetch the tape recorder from the trunk of the car. "Do you like things of the church?" he asked as we climbed the hill. And me a lapsed Lutheran who had first set foot in a Catholic church the week before ... My "yes," sounded faint and forced to me, but it was the best I could do. "Come in, then. I'll show you our church." He removed his beret at the doorway, and pushed open the heavy door. I vaguely remembered heruing that women should cover their heads in a Catholic church, so I pulled my scarf over my hair. Domingo crossed himself; I didn't. The old church was large and and airy in the lifting mist, the altar spare, the empty pews vanishing into the darkness at the rear of the nave. I looked around, and Domingo looked at me. "Shall we go?" he asked. "Yes." We emerged into the mist, through which patches of blue sky now shone with the hard brilliance of lacquer. "Is this your car?" "Yes. Well, it's not mine. I rented it in Madrid." I moved toward the trunk to get the recorder. Domingo contemplated the little car. "Wouldn't you like to go up to the pass? There is a beautiful view." The last thing I wanted to do was more driving. "Is it far?" "No. It's very close." "All right, then. Let's go." We rode as if alone in the world that misty morning, following the naffow road in ever tighter curves up the steep slope of the mountain. The sky cleared as we broke through the mist, and the view from the pass was indeed beautiful. Looking south toward Prioro we could see pasture land whose pale grass was still winter dry, then fenced greener fields (hayfields, Domingo told me) inigated by trickles diverted from streams. Below the fields clustered the red tile roofs of Prioro, still half hidden in mist. North of us lay another, deeper, valley, beyond which rose the Cai1tabriai1 Mountains, the distant glistening peaks I had seen from Almanza. On the forested northern side of the pass, dwindling patches of snow lingered in the shadows of trees and rocks. Domingo said, "If you continue on this road you get to a town called Riafio. We could go there to have coffee, but I didn't bring any money." Where is this old fellow talcing me, I wondered, and said, "I have enough money to pay for coffee. But your wife, won ' t she be worried? She's waiting for us to return with the tape recorder." "She won't worry." That seemed unlikely, but he was older than I and should know his own wife. So we followed the even more precipitous curves of the twisting road down the shaded side of the mountain and into Riafio. Once a regional capital, Riafio was destined to be submerged in a reservoir which would provide water for irrigating the fields of dry Castile. The dam across the Esla River, Domingo told me, had been in place for nearly twenty years, but the gates that would block the river's course and flood the valley could not be closed until the town of New Riafio, being constructed above the future water level, was complete. Work was proceeding slowly. "I won't see this reservoir," Domingo said. "But another day, if you would like, we could go to see the dam." Old Riafio, under sentence of death by drowning, had not succumbed quite yet. Though the narrow streets were lined with crumbling buildings abandoned to their fate, Riafio still supported a town hall, a school, a post office, a gas station, several stores, and plenty of the small bars typical of Spanish towns. We had coffee in one of them, and in high spirits and happy companionship returned to Prioro, where the sun was shining brightly and Sabina was as concerned as I had expected and as forgiving as Domingo had known she would be. That was the first of many trips Domingo and I took together. He had a vocation for traveling. Domingo had been a shepherd, a transhumant, who traveled with the Merino sheep. The delicate merinas, cherished for their fine wool, had for centuries spent the summers grazing in the high, cool mountain passes north of Prioro and had wintered in the warm western province of Extremadura, where their owners, most of them titled, owned vast expanses of pasture. Hired shepherds, almost all of them from northern Spain, accompanied the sheep throughout the year. Domingo told me that before the Spanish Civil War a friend and he had counted over one hundred shepherds from the town of Prioro alone. In 1985 there were only two. "No one wants to be a shepherd anymore. A shepherd today earns a very good wage, but these days no one wants to work as hard as we did then," he said. When Domingo was a boy, the men of the mountain towns - with the exception of a few tavern keepers, makers of wooden shoes, tailors, millers, and masters of other trades - chose from two professions. Boys inclined toward studies began attending boarding school in preparation for entering the priesthood. The others, future shepherds, fulfilled their apprenticeships by assisting the adult shepherds in the summer pastures. Domingo had begun spending his summers in the mountains when he was seven. In 1919, the year he turned fifteen, he left school and his family for the first time to make 3 �the trek to Extremadura. Beginning in September the shepherds would prepare their baggage. Into linen sacks, woven at home from homespun thread, they put their clothing, the hooks and needles they needed to dam the bags and socks they made themeslves, leather punches and beeswax to wax the heavy thread with which they sewed loose soles back onto their shoes. They filled other sacks with homemade sausages, hams, and cheese to eat on their journey, as well as knives, and spoons they had carved from ram's horn with which they cooked and ate. Onto pack horses, in addition to the rest of their belongings, they loaded the large iron pots in which one of the six or seven who · traveled together would prepare their communal meals over an open fire. By October the shepherds would be ready to begin the long walk from Leon, through the province of Castile, over the Guadarrama Mountains to grazing lands near Caceres, Badajoz, or smaller Extremaduran towns along the Guadiana River. "From here to Extremadura is about 700 kilometers," Domingo told me. "It would take us nearly a month to walk each way. And don't think we walked in a straight line. We had to walk back and forth taking care of the sheep, so really we walked much farther than that. I remember very well the first time I went to Extremadura. My father bought me a new pair of shoes. When I took them off that first night, pieces of skin came with them. There were little huts in the mountain passes and in Extremadura where we could eat and sleep when we weren 't in charge of watching thy sheep during the night, but on the way we ate and slept outside. I remember waking up more than once and realizing it was raining and I was sleeping in a puddle. How cold those nights were! I don't know how we did it. We were as hard as hailstones." Domingo had worked as a shepherd, except dUiing the Civil War, until he was forty years old: leaving home in October, retUining in June, taking only one year off, when he turned 21, for obligatory military service. His father managed through a friend in the army to have Domingo, who knew how to read and write, assigned as an orderly. His job was to clean offices. With a friend who was also a shepherd he would type letters on the officers' typewriters. "We wanted to show them we knew how to type," Domingo told me. "Of course, we didn't know anything about it. We would hunt all over the keyboard for the letter we wanted, then 'PLAS!' hit it and start looking for the next one." That day Domingo and I were on our way to a town north of Riafio, snacking on unconsecrated communion wafers I had swiped from the warm kitchen counter where Don Francisco had spread them to dry out before taking them to the church. I asked him to tell me about his Extremaduran girlfriend. "Who told you I had a girlfriend in Extremadura?" "No one told me. I just thought you might have had one." "Well, I did. She was very beautiful. I think I still have a picture of her. Her name was Jeroma. Her mother was very funny. When she saw me she would call, 'Jeroma, doggone it! Get out here! Here comes Domingo!' On the weekends some of the shepherds would come into town from the pastures to dance. We had good times together." "Why didn't you marry Jeroma?" "I thought about marrying her, but there was no way to make a living in Extremadura. A few people owned all the land, and the rest didn't have even the smallest plot. In Prioro we may not be rich, but everyone has a garden or two for planting potatoes and cabbage and garlic. Here we have orchards of fruit trees - apples, cherries, plums - and we have fields to plant hay and grain for the animals during the winter. The town owns all the land you can see looking south from the pass, and more, enough spring and summer grazing land for everyone's cattle and sheep and goats, and the burros we used to keep. In Extremadura there was nothing. "When the young women saw us coming in the fall they would shout, 'Here come the mountain men!' To make money they would sell us water when we were passing through long dry stretches, and wash our clothes in the river when we stopped. The shepherds ate little meat, only the sausage and ham we took with us, and lamb on Christmas and Easter, and sometimes when a lamb died and our employers would let us have it. In Extremadura I ate garlic soup with bread until I never wanted to see it again. But many of those from Extremadura never ate meat at all, just gazpacho. I didn't spend many years in school, but most of them had never studied anything. Only a few could read or write. When they saw us writing letters home they accused us of showing off the little learning we had. There was so much poverty. "My father visited me in Extremadura once. He told Jeroma' smother that if her daughter married me he would buy us a pasture there. That wasn't true. He wasn't going to buy us any pasture. He just said that to see what they would say. My father was a bit of a pfcaro, a rascal, like all of us from the north." "You, too?" Domingo shrugged. "When I went into the service, Jeroma sent me a letter. She asked me if I didn't love her anymore, and why I didn't write to he . But I didn't answer, and after my military service I worked for someone else, so I didn't go back there. Later they told me that she married well, to a man who owned a store, I think. Probably she did better by marrying him than she would have if she had married me. Shepherds' wives in those days led terrible lives, plowing the fields by themselves. Some of the fields, as you have seen, are very steep, so steep the carts would overturn. No wonder they prayed so much. They worked the animals, without a husband, eight months a year. Even when we were home, we spent only every other week with our families. It would be one week in the passes with the sheep and one week at home to help b1ing in the hay, then back to the sheep again, all summer. As Sabina says, that life was slavery." 4 Sabina dedicated her few moments of leisure to fine embroidery and crochet work, fashioning flowers and religious ornaments of cloth and paper, and constructing an elaborate and lovingly detailed Nativity scene which permanently occupied a small room of their home. To judge from her conversation, Sabina was uncommonly blessed with both intellect and wit. Yet, despite her viltues and talents, she had remained single long past the age at which women usually wed. Sabina was known for speaking her mind; perhaps her plain-spoken intelligence had deterred potential suitors. Her poverty certainly had. Sabina and her younger sister, Petra, had been orphaned while in their teens. Their father, like Domingo's, had kept a tavern in his house. Drafted during the Spanish-American war, he returned from Cuba stricken with a mysterious malady from which he never recovered. When he died, the girls were left with the house in which Sabina and Domingo were living when I met them, a few fields, and little else. They had been struggling for years to make a meager living when Domingo's older brother, Miguel, came courting. Sabina and Miguel had loved each other very much, she told me, but his parents refused to allow him to marry her. Sabina would bring nothing to tne family, they said. Miguel, like Domingo, was a shepherd anc( until he married, his income would go to his parents. "They didn't want to lose Miguel's money," Domingo said, "but they ended up losing him." Miguel, disgusted at being forbidden to marry at the age of 31, had moved to Barcelona, where he set up a photography business and married a woman Sabina and Domingo called Fat Mary. "I used to visit Sabina with Miguel," Domingo told me, "and when he left for Barcelona, we decided to get married. My parents didn't want me to marry her either, but they were afraid I would leave, as Miguel had, so there was nothing they could do." Domingo proposed in July. They were matTied the next month, and spent their week-long honeymoon in a mountain pass where Domingo was watching sheep. "We had to walk, of course. When I showed Sabina where we were going, way up there," Domingo told me, gesturing toward the rocky peaks that towered over Riafio, "she didn't believe me. Every day we left the sheep in the care of the boy who was helping me, and walked down to the towns to look around and to buy things." After their honeymoon, Domingo moved into the house Sabina shared with her sister. Petra, who never married, lived with them until her death in 1980, and helped Sabina work the fields while Domingo was away. The two women had little luck with their cows. "The animals never thrived until I came back to take care of them," Domingo said. "Sabina and Petra were so used to having nothing that they didn't feed them enough. Every grain in their house was counted, so of course the cows died." Domingo was working as a shepherd when the Civil War broke out. One year too old for military service, he was not drafted into General Franco's army. Nor did he join the Since most of the marriageable bachelors in Prioro were shepherds, the young women of the town had little say about the profession of their future husbands. Surely, though, they must have been at least ambivalent about marrying men who spent so much time away from home, and not only because their own lives were so hard. Shepherds lived most of their lives in the company of each other and of animals, at the margin of society. In songs, poems, plays, and stories they are occasionally portrayed as romantic figures, but more often (unless they are young noblemen in pastoral disguise), their role is that of ignorant rustic or bestial boor. Even in Prioro, some people who had more schooling looked down on the shepherds. Yet the women of Prioro defended their men, even as they lamented their own lot. One of the best-loved traditional songs in town included the verse, sung with much feeling: They say that shepherds smell of tallow; This little shepherd of mine smells of rosemary. Yet, tradition and necessity aside, I asked Domingo why any woman, knowing the difficult and lonely life in store for her, would really want to man-y a shepherd. "Why? Because in those days marrying a shepherd was like man-ying a king. We were the only ones who had any money." In the mountain towns, cows gave enough milk for the family that owned them, chickens provided eggs until they went into the stew pot, and pigs were raised to be slaughtered and eaten at home. A farmer might sell a calf to make enough money to buy a piglet or two, or a couple of pigs to buy a calf. Women, who worked in the fields most of the year ("so many hours we didn't have time to wash our clothes until after the harvest, and we would fall asleep in church ," Sabina told me), would spend the long winter evenings spinning flax and yarn or weaving their thread into cloth while men carved wooden shoes to be sold in the "land of fields," as they call the treeless plateau to the south. With the money earned from selling cloth and wooden shoes they would buy wheat and wine made from the grapes that cannot thrive in Prioro's chilly climate. Only the cash brought home by the shepherds was not destined for the plll·chase of basic needs. Domingo and Sabina were married in August of 1930. He had just turned 26; she would be 39 years old in October. When people wondered, as they had ever since the wedding, why a young man would choose to marry a woman so much . older, Domingo replied simply that he had grown to know and like Sabina when his older brother was courting her, and that when his brother did not m'my her, Domingo had decided he would. Sabina, when she married Domingo, was a poor and pious woman. She was also a capable weaver, an exceptionally gifted needleworker, and an artist. Until she lost her sight, 5 �Republicans. The fratticidal passions that fueled the war flared as high in Prioro as anywhere else in Spain; but Domingo, who claimed to understand nothing but the care and feeding of animals, remained aloof. He did not, however, remain unaffected. Domingo was captured one summer by the ..Reds," as the Republicans were called in Prioro. His captors were miners from the neighboring province of Asturias who invaded the mountain passes where the shepherds were guarding their employers' sheep. They killed the thousands of sheep that belonged to the titled owners, but spared those the shepherds were allowed to keep as part of their pay. "The Reds weren't so bad," Domingo told me one snowy afternoon as I sat in a chair drawn up to the kitchen hearth while he and Sabina sat on the bench, "but what a waste! They ate some of the sheep, but most of them they just killed. If they had sent them to people who could have eaten them, it would have been better. There was a lot of hunger in those days. They let all the shepherds leave except me. I was a good cook, and they wanted me to cook for them. There was one, a woman, who liked my hair. It was black then, of course. She would run her fingers through my hair and say, 'what a cute little Castilian.' I never knew whether she was serious or just teasing me. "I wasn't afraid of the Reds. What I was afraid of was the Nationalists. The Reds drank a lot, then they fell asleep right where they were, out in the open. We all slept outside on the ground without even a guard. I was afraid the Nationalists would come and kill us all. It would have been so easy. One day the Reds' leader took me into town in his car to buy supplies. As we were driving down the mountain, my knees began to shake. He said, 'Shepherd,' - they always called me 'Shepherd,' - 'what's happening to you? Why are you shaking like that?' I told him I couldn't help it, that I was frightened. They had let everyone go home but me. My family didn 'tknow where I was and would be worried. He was a good man. He said I could leave the next day, and he kept his word. The next morning he told the others, 'The shepherd wants to go home, so we're letting him go.' They wanted to know who was going to cook their meat for them. Since they had hardly ever eaten meat, they didn't know how to cook it. The leader told them they would have to learn to cook it for themselves. I had a bmm then. He let me take it, and I came home. I don't know what happened to them after that. I didn't return to the passes until the war was over." Domingo spent the remaining years of the Civil War at home, caring for his animals and fields. He and Sabina and Petra lived relatively well on the money he had saved. While men with large families struggled to feed their children, Domingo had plenty of milk for his calves, which grew sleek and fat. When the war ended, he returned to the sheep, working for a countess who had managed to rebuild her flocks. The modernization that swept Spain after the war had changed the shepherds' lives. They now traveled with the sheep in trains between the summer and winter pastures, instead of walking the old route. In Extremadura in 1944 Domingo suffered an attack of colic so severe that he was sent home. When a doctor warned him the pain might return at any time, he decided to retire. Since he and Sabina had no children to inherit, there was no reason to work hard to make money. Domingo said that without children there was no ilusion, a word which to him meant both hope and joy. He asked a friend to care for the mares and Merino sheep he had acquired over the years, and went home to stay. Two weeks after I met Sabina and Domingo I moved to the inn in Prioro, run by Basilia, whose husband, a tailor by trade, worked in a tire factory in the Netherlands. The inn filled with vacationers every August, but business during the winter months was slow, so Basilia had taken as long-term boarders all the single professionals in Prioro. The priest, who was about my age, had lived in the inn for two years. A paramedic, a woman in her twenties, had lived there for six, and a forest ranger, probably in his late thirties, for nine. We ate together at the long table in the kitchen, which, with its hearth, was the only room suitable for habitation in the unheated building. At night we would often play cards or watch television before retiring to our icy beds. My day now began with breakfast of bread and a bowl of coffee with milk, followed by mass at 9:30. After mass I would return to the inn to handwash and hang out a few clothes. Then, sitting at the kitchen table, since my room was unbearably cold, I would work at transc1ibing tapes and writing the letters home that also served as my journal. On week days after our 2 o'clock lunch I would leave the inn to record people who lived in Prioro or simply to visit those in the households where I was welcome. People told me I should have come in August, when the town was filled with young people, when tourists from the south fled to the mountains to escape the summer heat, and those born in Prioro who had left to find work returned with their children for a few weeks in their home town. Prioro's winter population was little more than three hundred, but during August, they claimed, it swelled to ten times that. All the shuttered houses were open. The town was alive. You could hardly walk in the streets for all the cars. Every night the young people would hold dances and parties, and in the daytime they would sunbathe and picnic in the mountains, feasting on what I was assured was the best food in the world: roast lamb eaten in the shade beside a cold spring. Many were openly astonished that someone had come from so far away to huddle by the fire while water dripped from the eaves or great moist snowflakes drifted like ragged bits of lace onto the mud. For me, though, the forbidding weather was a boon. People were bored, imprisoned in their kitchens. Those who on warmer, drier days would have been 6 leveled with a single stroke both social and generational barriers. Domingo actually related more than once, and nearly straight-faced, the scarcely credible story of the meeting of two cousins from different worlds who for so many years had not known of each other's existence. Listening impassively, or perhaps nodding in complicity, I began to wonder if I was discovering a hitherto untapped picaresque vein of my own. If his listeners didn't believe his tale (and many, of course, knew or at least strongly suspected that there was not a word of truth in it), we didn't really care. The fun, at first, was in the telling. Then we enjoyed telling how the story had arisen. And as we told it over and over, the magic of the tale almost transformed us into what we claimed to be. Even alone, we often called each other cousin. Domingo said, "Cousin, let them say what they want. If they complain that we spend too much time together it's because they're jealous." Spring came late to northern Spain that year. The "little shoes," yellow flowers of the ubiquitous broom plants, which should have gilded the hills in April, were slow in opening. As if availing themselves of this chance to display their splendor, thousands of other wildflowers bloomed, splashing the fields with demure white, pink, lavender, pale and gaudy yellow, showy purple. It was a good year for wild mushrooms. I learned to recognize the dark green crescents where they grew, and, parting the soft grass with my fingers, delighted in discovering a few of the light brown caps to be carried back to the inn and fried in butter. Domingo and I returned from our recording trips laden with armloads of delicately fragrant daffodils we gathered in the fields and forests, or drooping branches of sweet-scented lilacs we robbed from untended bushes, or bouquets of bright red poppies picked from the roadsides: flowers with which we decked Sabina's Sacred Heart, the Virgin Mary who stood prominent in the church throughout the month of May, the kitchen of the inn, and the bar newly opened by one of Basilia's sons. My husband and daughters were coming to Spain in early June. I was to meet them in Madrid and drive them to Prioro. My friends and acquaintances were delighted. They were eager to meet the girls and frankly curious about the man who was willing to assume responsibility for two small children so his wife could go so far away for so long. Domingo, when I told him my family was coming, appeared as pleased as anyone. "You must be glad your family is almost here," he said many times as we drnve through the mountains. "Of course," I would answer, wondering why he kept saying that. His insistence was revealing to me the uncomfortable truth that my delight in the prospect of seeing my family again was dimmed by the knowledge that our strange shared happiness was coming to an end. "When they come you won't have room for me in your car. You should take them to all the places we have been, so out working in the fields were delighted to have someone new with whom to sit at the hearth singing and discussing matters so well known that they aroused no one's interest but mine. Whatever else I did, I never let a day pass without visiting Sabina and Domingo. I knew that Sabina, whose health had improved enough for her to visit her niece up the street, did not leave the house during the hours she expected me to come, but I did not go out of a sense of obligation. I went because I felt at home there. Everything about the old house, from its well-worn furnishings to its odors of woodsmoke and age, was becoming dear to me. I brought Sabina news of the inn, the latest stories of the priest's doings, conversations and gossip from the other houses I visited. On Saturday and Sunday afternoons, Domingo and I would head for one of the nearby towns where he had friends whom he would convince - after an hour or so of reminiscences and a snack of homemade sausage, cheese, home-cured ham, bread, and wine or coffee - to sing and talk about old songs. Sabina, who suffered from carsickness, never went with us, but Domingo on his return would tell her of all we had seen and done. Occasionally the two of us would go to a weekly market in another town, and he would bring back the long soft loaves of bread Sabina preferred to the round rougher loaves available in Prioro, as well as oranges for his breakfast, fish and lamb for their midday meals, and the apples he baked every night in the ashes to accompany their supper of garlic soup with bread. It soon became clear to everyone in Prioro that Domingo and I prefetTed each other's company to that of anyone else, and as the town was small, people talked. They teased us about invented exploits, they asked Domingo if I wasn't paying him for his help, and they asked me if he wasn't buying the gasoline consumed on our trips. "Pilar asked me who was that foreign woman I have been spending so much time with," Domingo laughed one afternoon as we shared small sweet cakes around the hearth. "I told her you were a long-lost relative from California." I objected, but more from surprise than dismay, for the notion did have a certain appeal. Creating a kinship would enable us to avoid having to justify our improbable affection for each other. If we were to be relatives, though, I wondered how I should address him. As uncle? Great-uncle? "No," he said after a moment. "Let's be cousins. You already told me that you have no first cousins, right? Well, if I am your cousin, then you '11 have one: a Spanish cousin! And now, since we're cousins, you can call me tu." Sabina had been calling me by that familiar term since shortly after meeting me, pointing out that she was a lot older than I was. Domingo also had been calling me tu since I had asked him to do so, feeling, as I explained to him, that we had shared too many adventures for him to continue being so formal. As they were so much older, however, that I could not address them as anything but the formal Usted until Domingo's fiction that my mother was his mother's youngest sister gone to America 7 �they can see them." Domingo knew the girls were small and that all five of us would fit in the car. He was being polite, I assumed,formal, as he called it, offering to remove himself from my life to spare me the awkwardness of removing him. Instead of appreciating his gesture I found myself resenting it. I answered shortly that we wouldjusthave to see how much traveling they wanted to do. As the time approached for me to leave P1ioro to meet my family, Domingo, always proper and dignified, became stiff and distant. I suppose I reacted in kind. Conversation came easily, as it always had between us, but instead of making plans for future trips, which were, of course, not to be, we talked about the past. The day before I was to depart for Madrid we joined a pilgrimage Don Francisco's paiishes were making: four busloads to visit the ancient basilica of San Isidro in the city of Leon. Domingo and I sat together on the bus. On the way we all joked and sang (even Domingo, who, everyone assured me, had never sung a note in his life), but on the way back the two of us sat nearly silent, smiling only when we shared a pack of chocolate cigarettes I had brought because I knew he loved chocolate and hated cigarettes. We sat isolated in the pervasive gloom of that rainy evening. "It's as if everyone on the bus were sad," Domingo remarked. The next morning I went to bid Sabina and Domingo good-bye. I embraced Sabina, who promised to pray to the Sacred Heait for me and my family on our journey. Then I turned to Domingo, who was squatting, shepherd-fashion, to prepare their meal as he had done ever since Sabina had lost her sight, in a heavy iron pot over the fire. He was paying no attention to me. "Domingo," I said, "I'm leaving," and when he stood up, his eyes suddenly brimmed over with tears. "Leave me. This is nothing," he said, blowing his nose in one of the handkerchiefs he always carried. "I cry whenever anyone goes away. I'm ashamed, but I can't help it. All those years I was a shepherd I c1ied every time I left home." Sra Dfta Yudi Dear Cousin, This very day I received your post card, which filled us with happiness to know that you arrived well with your husband and your dear daughters. Well, we are fine, always remembering Yudi. Sabina asked the Heait of Jesus to help you arrive safely and to find your parents well. Everyone asks if you haven't written to me. Nothing more. A firm greeting from your cousins, Sabina and Domingo Herrero I had some pictures developed and sent copies to Domingo, some for him to keep, others to give to those in the pictures. He wrote: Prioro 5-8-85 Sra Dfta Judith Seegr; Esteemed cousin, You can't imagine the joy I felt when I received the photos, and the happiness with which everyone has received them. All tell me to thailk you; and, I don 't know, a million thanks ... I haven't forgotten the days and afternoons we spent in Valde6n, in Cain, Lario, Argovejo, Villacorta, Caminayo, Tejerina. I will never forget Leon. Everyone asks me about the American woman. It makes me sad to remember those times we spent. Well, Sabina is very content because everyone says she is the one who came out best in the pictures. I don't know what else to tell you. A million kisses for your daughters, and for your parents and parents-in-law a very firm greeting.You receive what you most want from your cousins, Domingo did accompany us on the few trips my family and I took around Prioro. Whether traveling with us or welcoming us into his house, he radiated joy. He loved listening to the girls talk, though he understood not a word they said. The gentlest of men, Domingo was one of the few in town who respected my nine-year-old's reluctai1ce to be grabbed and kissed by strangers. The more approachable six-year-old he courted most carefully, and was finally rewarded with a kiss on the cheek the day we left. When that day came, Domingo asked me not to forget to write and tell him and Sabina we had ai·rived safely. I sent him a post card from New York, and shortly afterwards received the following letter: Sabina and Domingo Send me pictures of your parents and parents-in-law, and tell them if they have a lot of money to come to Spain. I discovered that thanks to my frugal living and a strong dollar I could afford to return to Spain. My husband and I agreed that Christmas would be a good time. I would see Prioro during the season when the women and the few men who were not away used to gather nightly. There in the kitchen, while the women spun and the men carved wooden shoes, they would pass the long dark evenings singing, dancing, playing cai·ds and practical jokes, and telling tales. Those gatherings are gone, but the winter months are still the time Prioro 27-6-85 8 for slaughte1ing the pigs, another occasion for people to get together and celebrate with lavish meals as they have for centuries. I left New Yark on December 22nd, and arrived in Leon, by train, in the rainy dai·kness of the 23rd. The train had been packed with people going home to visit their families for the holidays. Cursing the weather and my heavy luggage, I made my slow and painful way ai·ound clusters of people hugging, kissing, effusively greeting one another. The streets of Le6n, strung with huge snowflakes crafted of small white lights, were thronged with Chlistmas shoppers. When the taxi driver I finally found to take me to the car rental agency wondered aloud why a lone woman from across the "pond" was aiTiving in n011hern Spain two days before Christmas, I replied with an ease that would have surprised me had I not already discovered that fiction and even certain truths flowed more fluently in a language that was not my own. The foreign language hung between me and my words like a fine veil, and, safely shielded behind it, without a second thought I told the taxi dtiver I was going to spend the holidays with some cousins who lived in the mountains. "They are quite elderly," I told him," and I am very much afraid that if I don't see them now I won't see them again." That last part was true, and the rest was close enough. The bone-chilling cold of that time stays with me now. Heavy snow fell almost every day of my three-week stay in Prioro, nearly isolating us from the rest of the world. The streets were deeply rutted and pitted with dirty and treacherous ice. The temperature of my bedroom hovered around freezing, and every morning I would awaken enveloped in the moist cloud of my own breath. I attended pig-killings and the feasts that accompany them, helped stuff blood sausages, went to masses in the unheated church so cold that my legs were numb to the knees when they were over, celebrated Christmas, the New Year and Epiphany in a town I remember as dark and chill, so different from the long, glowing, flowerfragrant days of May. I spent at least part of every afternoon with Domingo and Sabina in their kitchen by the fire, ai1d on the few fine days of my stay Domingo and I went as we had before to visit his friends in the small mountain towns. It was neai·ly the last day of my stay before we were able to drive over the snow-choked mountain pass to Riafto as we had the day we met. Our plan was to anive in a town called Laiio at lunchtime, where Domingo hoped that some of his old friends would offer us lunch. We had always been fortunate with impromptu invitations to meals, but we had never schemed to be invited, and that day our luck ran out. Leaving his friends' house we agreed that the sherry and homemade sugared cakes they had offered us had been very good. "But when she brought out the tray, I didn't like it at all," Domingo said, "because I knew they weren't going to ask us to lunch." Knowing he felt insulted, I defended his friends. There had, after all, been only one small pot on the stove for the three of them. "Maybe," he shrugged it off. Domingo believed that if unexpected guests showed up for lunch, all you had to do, if you could do no more, was add water to the soup. "But they were wrong. The food isn't important. The important thing is the company. Anything tastes good in good company." We began to look for a restaurant. "Listen, don't tell Sabina about this," Domingo warned. "Even though we have plenty of money, she will scold us if we tell her we ate in a restaurant instead of eating at home." Lario had no restaurant, so we drove north to the next town, Azevedo. There we found an inn, but it was serving nothing but fried eggs and sausage, which Domingo couldn't digest. It was nearly 4 o'clock, late for lunch even in Spain. Hungry and downcast, we were wandering the narrow snowpacked streets, when Domingo was suddenly inspired to look up the daughter of a woman he had known many years ago when he was summer apprentice to the shepherds in the mountains that rose in a solid wall west of Azevedo. "I haven't seen the daughter since she was a little girl," he said, "but her mother was very beautiful, and very cheerful. Since there weren't many young men in this town the young women used to come up into the mountains to visit the shepherds when we were here in the summer. They would come up to the passes and hide and watch us. What good times we had!" That particular young woman had given birth to three sons by unknown fathers (not the shepherds, Domingo assured me, and, seeing my skepticism, added that in any case he had been no more than a boy at the time) before marrying a shepherd from Prioro and having as the fruit of their long and happy union her fourth child and only girl. She and her husband had died, and her sons had gone to Mexico, but the daughter, Domingo felt sure, was still in her home town. We found Petra's house just as she was putting lunch on the table for her husband. Clearly, she had inherited her mother's good humor, for she invited us to join them in the warm kitchen, though she did not remember Domingo and of course had no idea who I was. The only problem, she told us, was that lunch that day was turnip stew. I couldn't help recalling the single time Basilia had tried to serve us turnips at the inn. Normally used for fodder, they had been stringy and tasteless, and all of us, like naughty children, had followed the priest's shocking example, balancing little pieces of turnip around the edges of our plates so we could enjoy the cabbage and bacon in which Basilia had tried to disguise them. "Well?" asked Domingo. He wasn't used to eating turnips either, but the day was waning and we were not likely to receive another invitation to lunch. The sky was still bright when we reluctantly turned south on the highway, but Azevedo already lay deep in the blue velvet shadow of the mountains. "You know, Domingo ... " I began. "What?" 9 �them, a potholder woven by the younger one, and a chocolate bar wrapped in a piece of paper she decorated with a picture of violets and the poem "Roses are red, violets are blue," which I translated. Domingo wrote and thanked us. But he did not reply to my next letter. Instead, I received a letter from a friend who wrote that he had suffered a stroke and was hospitalized in Le6n. Domingo and Sabina had no telephone, .so twice I called some friends only to be told he was still in the hospital. The third time I called he was waiting in their house, and told me he was feeling better but very bored, since he was too weak to go out. I began sending letters and small packages so he and Sabina would have something to look forward to each day, and in May I received a short letter from Domingo: "Those turnips were good. Really. I never ate such tasty tw·nips." "I liked them, too," he agreed. "You see, I was right. In good company even turnips taste good." By the time we reached the valley of Riafio the only trace of daylight was the glowing pink snow on the same lone faraway peak that had glistened like diamonds on my first day in Prioro. My little red Citroen was chilly, for if its heater was capable of doing any more than taking the edge off the cold, I had not figured out how to convince it to do so. We rode warmed by the shared euphoria of having eaten such wonderful turnips, and arrived in Plioro late that star-strewn night. As soon as I retumed home I wrote to Domingo, but more than a month passed and I heard nothing from him. He had told me that writing, which he used to enjoy, had become more difficult for him as he grew older; and since I knew by now that he expressed himself obliquely, I supposed he had been warning me not to expect many letters. Still, I couldn't help becoming concerned. My daughters had written thanking him and Sabina for gifts they had sent: scarves and an umbrella. Even if he did not feel like writing to me, surely he would have written to them. Finally a letter anived: Prioro 5-5-86 Sra Judith cousin: You will have to pardon me because every day the postman comes with your packages. Today I received two and already I have I don't know how many without answering. It is not that I don't remember, but I am very weary and don 't feel like eating, and Sabina is not very well. In the end it will be as God wills, but I have little hope. In another letter we will see if I can tell you anything. Have a good time with your parents-in-law. Kisses for the girls and for you a greeting from Plioro 14-2 year 86 Dear cousins: I have received the post card and the letter from the girls, which made me very happy, and also yours, Judith. Since it is time for me to write to you I will tell you that we had a very heavy snow storm and it has been very cold. I hardly see anyone. I go to mass, but few others do. Juana and her father don't leave the hearth. I will tell you that I had news from Azevedo and Lario, and they told me they had so much snow that the doors were blocked, so that in the morning they had to climb out by the balconies to open them. It has snowed a lot. For the girls I have already thought what I want to say. Elisa and yow- little sister: tell your daddy something, but he will tell you we didn't send him anything. Sabina said to me "and you didn't send anything to Antonio." Another time ... Elisa, your father who makes a lot of dollars, tell him to give you some so you can send me a little present which I would like to have from some American girls in Indiana, a small present from that dear land. Nothing more, girls. I await your answer. A firm greeting for all and thank you, have to come before mass," Domingo told me the night before. "I want to be sure to go to church tomorrow, so I can pray for your safe journey." The day dawned gray and dismal. I knew before opening my shutter that the temperature was below freezing, for I could not hear the icicles dripping outside my window. Quickly finishing my breakfast, I loaded the car with my suitcase and duffle, as heavy with gifts for the return as they had been coming, and drove slowly down the rutted road to Domingo and Sabina's house. The heavy door was barred against the night, but I knew how to unlatch its little window, then reach in and slide the bar back so I could open it. Domingo had seen me coming; I heard the "pasa" with which he always invited me into the kitchen. There was no time to chat. The air smelled of snow, and I feared being caught in a stonn. "So you're leaving." "Yes, I have to go." "One who has to depart must not be restrained. We will pray for you. Give our greetings to your family and wdte to us when you are safely at home." "I will." "Go, then." And, as he would have written it, "A Dias." Sabina and Domingo Herrero For Antonio a firm greeting Domingo I received only one more letter from Domingo, toward the end of June, in which he seemed to have recovered his health and spirits, asking me to come visit again. But my next letter from Spain came in August, from a friend who wrote that Domingo had returned to the hospital. An operation had revealed advanced cancer, and on the day she wrote they were sending him back to Prioro to die. I wrote to Domingo once more; but a second letter from a friend, which I received in September, told me he had died at home on August 13th, nine days after his eighty-second birthday. Sabina and Domingo Herrero My last day in Prioro, the previous January, I was faced with a long and daunting journey: by car to Leon then by train to Madrid, where I would catch a plane for New York the following morning. "If you want to say good-bye, you will The girls and I put together a package with a picture of 10 11 �Maxwell's Field: An Examination of the Role of Method in Science Julie Meadows James Clerk Maxwell's Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism was a milestone in the history of physics. His contri- the objects from which they proceed, nevertheless I see no reasoning that assures us that this is the case. (M, 13) butions were both mathematical and conceptual. He derived twelve equations which later made possible the connection of electromagnetic phenomena to the wave equations of light. He successfully placed a theory of the whole, the field theory, in opposition to the reigning conception of nature as composed of discrete parts. What kind of "whole" is this? Is the field a material whole, a body of matter with discrete boundaries? Does it necessitate the postulation of an ether? Is it an Aristotelian whole, a united product of matter and form? Is it, to the contrary, merely a whole for the purpose of investigation, its boundaries drawn arbitrarily to separate what will be examined from what will be disregarded? Is the wholeness of the field the end of Maxwell's inquiry, or is the field a whole in order to be a means to his true ends? I believe the nature of the field is a consequence of Maxwell's method. The method by which an investigator examines a problem shapes the meaning of the results. Before he can even begin a methodical study, he ~ust already possess an idea of Nature, and of the consequences of this relation for inquiry. The method determines the criteria for evidence, the role of expe1iment, and the direction toward which the research is aimed. I must admit to the hope that Maxwell's interest in electricity and magnetism extends beyond the mastery of them. I desire to know where electricity and magnetism fit into the larger scheme of things, where there place is in nature. To investigate this question I will compare Maxwell's method to one aimed directly at the mastery of nature. I will take the method of Descartes as a paradigm of inquiry for the sake of application, as set forth in the Rules for the Direction of the He extends the difficulty to touch and hearing, making it clear that no sensation is reliable evidence of the nature of any object. There is no reason to suppose that the qualities we perceive in objects have any actual connection to the objects. Descartes creates an "imaginary" world, but matter and nature as he describes them there are as much as he believes we can know of matter and nature here, in the world of our own expe1ience. Matter, then, is homogeneous and fills all space. Its primary characteristic is extension - "I conceive of its extension, or the property it has of occupying space, not as an accident, but as its true form and essence."(M,21) Bodies are not the result of matter assuming any distinguishing qualities or distinct boundaries. All matter is alike, arbitrarily distinguished into parts by being given diverse motions. Descartes seems to think that any true sep&ration of bodies would require space and void between them. But space or extension is the essential characteristic of matter, and does not exist separate from it. Weight is an effect of motion, not a quality of matter. In the difficult eleventh chapter of "Le Monde", Descartes says that the force that keeps the earth together consists in something like centrifugal force. The earth has weight because it and its atmosphere are in motion in a plenum. Nature is defined as the orderly alteration of matter. Alteration is local motion. Descartes specifically excludes "the Philosophers' motions" that they think can be accomplished without a body 's changing place, such as those they call motus ad formam, motus ad calorem, motus ad quantitatem... and myriad others." Nature, as Descartes understands it, is entirely knowable, meaning that it is subject to mathematical laws. The laws of nature that will enable us to use nature for our own ends are laws of motion. Though for Descartes nature is entirely knowable, our senses deceive us. They lead us to attribute qualities to matter of which they might be the creators. We must find a way to circumvent the deceptions of the senses and focus all of the mind's powers upon the problem at hand. These are the two purposes of method . It is difficult to see the application of Descartes' Rules to physical inquiries, for they are stated in general terms in order Mind. The need for a method is felt before the method is developed. While Descartes claims that his method is the starting point for investigation, he founds it upon his view of science and nature. Descartes believes that we are not capable of direct knowledge of objects which sunound us. In "Le Monde", he says that sight is interposed between the object and the mind, and .. even though everyone is commonly persuaded that the ideas that are the objects of our thought are wholly like 12 ... even if all that our senses have ever experienced in the true world seemed manifestly contrary to what is contained in these two laws [of motion], the reasoning that has taught them to me seems to me so strong that I would not cease to believe myself obliged to suppose them in the new world I am describing to you. (M, 25) to be applicable to any sort of problem. Descartes' understanding of nature must be taken into account. I will attempt to present the method in the form most immediately useful as a succession of steps. Recall that for Descartes a body is discrete only insofar as it has a different motion from those around it. Physical problems, consequently, do not have self-evident boundaries to which their qualities can attest. They must be circumscribed before they can be examined, a process Descartes describes in Rule XII: "But in order that the problem be perfectly understood, we with it to be completely determinate."(PE, 203) Again, in Rule XIII: The "new world" is the world of physics. It is the world as we can know it as distinguished from the exterior world made up of objects. It is a world where cause and effect can be known with certainty, unlike the world we walk in, where we cannot say what it is about a body that triggers our perception of certain qualities in it. To a remarkable extent, Maxwell's ideas regarding science, nature, and method correspond to Descartes. Maxwell ' s ideas are not as explicitly stated; we will hold pieces of his system up to Descartes ' for comparison. We will then have built up a context within which to examine the field. Like Descartes, Maxwell believes that we are separated from the physical world. Influenced by Kant, Maxwell believes this chasm to be far greater than Descartes did. If bodies possess unity, we cannot perceive it. To examine any particular thing, we must abstract it from its surroundings and give it unity by an act of the intellect. The mind separates out objects from the world of experience. Actually, although something must be unknown in every problem... nevertheless this unknown ought to be designated by conditions so certain that we are directed to the investigation of this one thing rather than any other. (PE,208) Here method begins to focus the powers of the mind. Descartes cautions that we must be careful to draw the bounds correctly, neither encompassing too little nor too much. He can guide us no further than to make careful use of our own judgment. Once the problem is clear, we must become familiar with its components. The person who wishes to understand magnetism" ... will first diligently collect all the information he can obtain about this stone ... "(PE,201) The problem is divided into the smallest possible parts, and the parts scrutinized. This analysis forms the basis for establishing some order in which the investigation which follows will be carried out. Before we can count any number of things we must pick them out of the universe, and give each of them a fictitious unity by definition. (SF, 241) What we call unity will depend on our vantage point; from different distances we will make different designations of things. In order to have any idea of the state of things, we must examine them from as many levels as possible. ... the order in which things are to be investigated frequently adm.its of variation, and depends upon the decision of each person. (PE, 172) The dimmed outlines of phenomenal things all merge into one another unless we put on the focusing glass of theory, and screw it up sometimes to one pitch of definition, and sometimes to another, so as to see down into different depths through the great millstone of the world (SF, 242) Once dissected, the problem is reformulated. To fully use our power of investigation, we must represent the problem to all of the mind's faculties. In addition to intellect, which will actually solve the problem, these are imagination, sensation, and memory. The third and final step is deduction. It is here that we build chains of simple reasonings which connect the unknown to the fully known, the tirings we perceive clearly and distinctly. The student of the magnet, at this stage, will "deduce the combination of simple truth that could produce these effects."(PE,201) The simple truths will be laws of nature, and the researcher's solution will relate the phenomena to laws of motion. These laws can be expressed mathematically. Once he understands the hidden order of things, the scientist will be able to use nature. The laws of nature discovered in this way will be true even when they contradict our senses. In "Le Monde", Descartes asserts that We cannot uncover know ledge of individual things. We must seek to know the relations between them, which will be relations of number. We will understand these relations by analogy to the order of thought. In "Are there Real Analogies in Nature?" Maxwell asks whether this analogy is actually drawn to nature, or whether we see nature as we do because the intellect orders our perceptions in the same manner as our thoughts. Maxwell gives one example of a "real analogy" in the essay. Space is a condition of thought; the question is whether there is a correspondence between the three dimensions it has in thought and the three dimensions we perceive in the physical universe. 13 �F enables us to see it morally as an act, and not merely physically as an event.( SF, 245) Now it appears to me that when we say that space has three dimensions, we not only express the impossibility of conceiving of a fourth dimension, co-ordinate with the tlu·ee known ones, but assert the objective truth t11at points may differ in position by tlu·ee independent variation of tlu·ee vaiiables. Here, therefore, we have a real analogy between the constitution of the intellect and that of the external world. (SF, 242) We have a moral idea of justice, of necessary retribution as the legitimate consequence of all moral action. Maxwell suggests a possible analogy between this idea in the realm of morality and one in the physical realm of cause and effect. I take this to be a reference to Newton's third law. As in morality every action has its approp1iate consequences, so in physics for every event (action) there is an equal and opposite event (reaction). The domain of physics is the relation between things. The whole enterprise "supposes that although pairs of things may differ widely from each other, the relation in the one pair may be the same as in the other."(SF,245) This is a supposition that Maxwell is willing to make; relation not only stays the same but can be perceived in mathematical terms. Thus there are real analogies in nature; we discover regularities there by analogy to our own thought. This is only possible, and only analogy, because the relations of thoughts to each other may be the same as the relations of objects or events to each other. The quantity of matter is its ability to preserve its state of motion or rest. Maxwell's Kantian views of space and time lead him to criticize specifically Descartes' definition of matter. It is absurd, he says, to think that if you remove the matter from a place the space it occupied will collapse, as if matter and space were inseparable. "The fundamental dynamical idea of matter" is of something that is "capable by its motion of becoming the recipient of momentum. "(TR2, 196) Maxwell rewrites Descartes' principle of order, and seems to admit differences in matter into physical science. The idea of cause in nature is an analogy. It comes from a relation between the workings of the mind and the order of nature, not solely from the observation of invariable sequences of events. Each of our thoughts is based upon reasons. By analogy, we consider physical events to depend upon reasons, and we name these reasons causes. In consequence, a cause can be no more in nature than a reason is in pure logic. Since "there can be no conflict of reasons"(SF, 243), it is only by misdefinition that we see any conflict of causes in nature. "Cause is a metaphysical word implying something unchangeable and always producing its effect."(SF, 243) Force is cause in the realm of physics. A force has a certain strength, in proportion to which it produces a certain effect. Unlike cause, a force is never seen in isolation. There are always opposing forces. Force, on the other hand, is a scientific word, something which always meets with opposition, and often with successful opposition, but yet never fails to do what it can in its own favor."(SF, 243) Maxwell asks whether there are real analogies in nature in order to test opposing theories. The first is that all the problems of nature, including human thought, are complex problems of motion. In this case, "the resemblances between the laws of phenomena should hardly be called analogies, as they are only transformed identities."(SF, 244) That is, both the laws of thought and the laws of nature would be laws of motion. The other option is that we impose the order of thought upon nature, without any necessary basis in the phenomena. This is not an analogy either, for there is no relationship in nature to correspond to the relationship in thought. Maxwell finds both alternatives unsatisfactory. He believes the laws of thought "which are found among the relations of necessary truths"(SF, 244) to be different in kind from the laws of motion. The rule of physical forces is that might makes right. Thought is supreme not by virtue of its strength "but in being right and true. "(SF, 244) Maxwell suggests that the interactions of physical bodies are only part of the picture. He seems to say that physical events do have some kind of meaning. The difference between one event and another does no l depend on the mere difference of the tin1es or the places at which they occur, but only ·on differences in the nature, configuration, or motion of t11e bodies concerned(MM, 13) While I have found no place where nature and configuration as qualities of matter are explained, Maxwell distinguishes two kinds. Gravitation depends upon the masses of bodies exclusively, "whatever be the nature of the material of which the masses consist."(MM,120) He distinguished matter that behaves this way, gross matter, from ether. The undulations of ether, rather than gross, transmit light and heat, even through spaces empty of gross matter (vacuums). Ether does not appear to have the property of gravitation, but there is no doubt that it is a second true form of matter. It is "capable of being set in motion; and of transmitting motion from one part to another ... ".(DT,35) It has density and mass and it is "certainly material."(MM,120) We will return to the ether later on, to examine how Maxwell employs these conceptions of it. · Motion is a change of the configuration of a system. The positions of bodies that comprise the system depend on our All that bystanders see, is the physical act, and some of i~s immediate consequences, but as a partial pencil of light, even when not adapted for distinct vision, may enable us to see an object, and not merely light, so the partial view we have of any act, though far from perfect, M~~well ' s vantage point, on the way that we focus the "dim outlines of phenomenal things". Once we have designated a system, motion is a change of the relative positions of the bodies within the system. In some cases, as when water freezes, we will know that motion has taken place, without having been able to discern it. The changes in configuration of a system are considered changes in quantity. When we assume that the changes are caused by matter in motion, rather than action at a distance, our theory will be a dynamical one. mathematical mind was sparked by Faraday's wnt:mgs. Faraday provided him with the concept upon which to found a new mathematical theory . Maxwell saw in Faraday's "lines of force" the means to understand the phenomena in a dynamical way. ...Faraday, in his mind's eye, saw lines of force traversing all space where the mathematicians saw centres of force attracting at a distance: Faraday saw a medium where they saw nothing but distance: Faraday sought the seat of the phenomena in real actions going on in the medium, they were satisfied that they had found it in a power of action at a distance impressed on the electric fluids.(TRl,ix) When the mutual action between bodies is taken into account, the science of motion is called Kinetics and when special attention is paid to force as the cau~e of motion, it is called Dynainics.(MM,26) Maxwell believes this conception to be essentially mathematical. Once Maxwell has adopted Faraday's conceptions of the phenomena, his task is to translate these conceptions into a new mathematics. · Maxwell sees mathematics as a language, one in which the terms which are manipulated are as important as the choice of words in a sentence. The mathematics that had already been developed expressed a view of the phenomena. Its variables were distance and charge or pole strength. At the very basis of this mathematical view of things is the abstraction of "material particles" from nature. Integral calculus sums up these parts to describe the properties of the whole. The field is abstracted from nature in the same way that material particles are. Maxwell usually refers to it as the finite field. He defines it as "that part of space which contains and surrounds bodies in electric or magnetic conditions."(DT,34) The great difference is that once we carve out the area to be called a field, we treat that area as a whole. We consider the phenomena as produced by imperceptible alterations of the configuration of the Configuration of the system . We do not abstract material particles within the field and observe their relative alterations. The mathematics attached to this system is the differential calculus. The equations are written in terms of potential and charge density, quantities measured in the field as a whole. We wish to understand the field in terms of quantities such as stress, to understand the condition of the spaces. Maxwell uses a methodical approach which is very like Descartes ' . As could be expected, some of the operations are more extreme, but in some ways there is more freedom. There is a place left to scientific vision that no method can guarantee. ~n ~axwe~l's theory of electricity and magnetism , this place 1s filled by Faraday. I will trace Maxwell' s method as applied to the problem of electricity and magnetism, as followed in the Treatise. The first step in exploring the phenomena is to amass as much data as possible and to translate this data into mathematical language. Maxwell revises rather than discard the work of earlier researchers that was based upon the theory of action at a distance: their work was necessary to his undertaking. He presents this first phase of research to the reader in careful descriptions of experiments and mathematical theory. Experiments are carefully selected to bring certain aspects of magnetic and electrical phenomena to mind; Maxwell refers to them as "illustrations". Their purpose is to make the key phenomena clearly present to the mind.(TRl ,vi) Surveying the mass of accumulated data, Maxwell sees that the mathematics is based upon a theory of action at a distance. While the theory was useful, it does not seem to lead to further discovery. ...the idea of lines of force throws great light on the results, and seems to afford the means of rising by a ~ontinuous process from the somewhat rigid conceptions of the old theory to notions which may be capable of greater expansion, so as to provide room for the increase of our knowledge by furth~r researches.(TR,182) It appears, therefore, that what we want is a knowledge of the forms of equipotential surfaces and lines of induction* in as many different cases as we can remember.(TRl, 178) Furthermore, action at a distance involves a process of abstraction by which the poles or charges are located within the system. This abstraction is contrary to nature, which is a whole first, and has parts only when the intellect imposes them. That is, nature is a whole for us "since all our perceptions are related to extended bodies, so that the idea of the all is in our consciousness at a given instant is perhaps as primitive an idea as that of any individual thing".(TR2,176) Searching for a more natural way to redefine the problem, The applications of this theory are less apparent than those of its predecessor. There we could locate charges and make measurements. Here we have to consider the condition of an invisible medium. One exciting product of the differential equations is Maxwell's ability to diagram fields, using a precisely calculated version of Faraday's lines. We have a visual representation of the configuration of the field. From fields whose 15 14 �diagrams we can calculate, we can learn to sketch approximate fields. Such sketches lead to mathematical solutions. The key equation is Laplace's equation: 82 v The results of this are astounding. Maxwell's hypothesis of the field led away from what was visible and quantifiable. It has now led to a visual representation of the stresses of the field. This representation adds enormously to the scientists' ability to control and utilize electric fields; it allows them to visualize and determine the distribution of electric force any· where on the surface of many shapes of conductors. 82 v 8 2 v -+-+-=0 8x2 8y 2 8z2 To generate equipotential lines, we begin with an arbitrary charge e. We substitute in values for the potential, V, and find the radii of the equipotential circles r, since r = eN. Potentials are additive, so we may also generate equipotential lines for groups of charges. Using a similar process, Faraday's lines of force may be precisely drawn for a particular field. We begin with a variable which describes the whole: field intensity. By assigning a series of values to this intensity as we did with potential, we can find the angles necessary to draw in lines of force at appropriate intervals. In both operations, we begin with a characteristic of the field as a whole. If the surface of a conductor is of the foim of the outer lobe, a roundish body having, like an apple, a conical dimple at one end of its axis, then, if this conductor be elecb.ified, we shall be able to determine the surfacedensity at any point. That at the bottom of the dimple will be zero.(TRl,180) I I :.-..i --- -------- -- - -- - - --- --- '~ r' I, A :\ ,, ' i ' ' I What I propose now to do is to examine the consequences of the assumption that the phenomena of the electric cmrnnt m·e those of a moving system, the motion being communicated from one part to another by forces, the nature and laws of which we do not yet even attempt to define, because we can eliminate these forces from the equations of motion by the methods given by Lagrange for any connected system.(TR2,198) \ I : T r . i I • ' ' . r '- \ I '\ iI \\ ' __.r-- The surface-density is represented in the diagram by the distances between the equipotential lines and corresponds to the distribution of the charge. How are we to understand this diagram of a field? I · believe that Maxwell would call this an analogy. The lines are not a representation of matter we are unable to see. They are not a picture of physical (material) reality, either. The relations of the lines in the diagram correspond to the relations of some unknown matter which comprises the field. Despite his earlier talk about ether, in the Treatise Maxwell is more interested in the stress between the particles than the nature or form of the particles themselves. It is possible to found a mathematical theory on the assumption that the phenomena can be explained through dynamics. It is not necessary to actually attempt a dynamical explanation. In Book Two, Maxwell comments on the role of supposing the field in developing a mathematics for the phenomena of current. --.,...__ by matter.(TR2,493) I believe that the medium is important only because it is necessary in supposing that a dynamical explanation is possible. It is the action of the matter, described by such terms as stress, which concern the investigator. The unimportance of matter is irrefutable evidence that the field is not an Aristotelian whole. Maxwell has not discovered a new body in nature. The identity of a whole for Aristotle is bound up with its form, which we observe and do not impose, and the nature of its matter. We could not be said to understand a body while ignoring one of these components. In the tradition of Descartes, however, we can learn to use nature without any understanding of her in the Aristotelian sense. For Descartes and Maxwell, such understanding is impossible, as their views of nature reveal. The field is a whole insofar as we abstract it from nature, and treat it as one body. That is, we do not further abstract parts of it, in order to explain it. To explain the phenomena, we say that there must be changes in the configuration of the system, but we do not seek to know what is in motion. We describe the state of the medium as one of tension or stress. Maxwell's emphasis on mathematics and the correspondence of his method to Descartes' give further evidence that his aim is utilitarian. The concept of the fields is not the end of an investigation, but a means to begin it anew. Its importance lies in its use rather than its identity. Maxwell's thoughts on morality suggest that his restriction of what nature and cause are may be a conscious one. He admits the possibility of another kind of reason for the phenomena, but moral reasons will not lead to mathematical equations and practical applications. His progress in physics depends on his being completely restricted to that realm. Though I have reservations about the exclusion of all causes except mechanistic ones, this method does indeed produce useful results. Maxwell's aim is to make nature useful to man, and his achievement is a great one. We cannot define the forces partly because we know so little about matter. In a later discussion of magnetic action on light, Maxwell says that our knowledge of matter is so slight even in the visible realm that hypotheses about the fields would be premature. The electromagnetic theory is all the more scientifically rigorous because it does not speculate on the nature of matter. Maxwell contrasts this with his own hypothesis of molecular vortices to explain certain phenomena of light. He cautions that this is a "merely provisional" (TR2,461) explanation. In the conclusion of the Treatise, however, Maxwell once more stresses the importance of the medium. Energy, as far as Maxwell understands it, must be contained and transmitted 16 17 �AngerSing now the anger, smoldering within the proud spirit of Peleus' son, Achilles, burning deep and bursting unexpected like wild fire . Sing the violence which shakes thousands of sturdy souls and hurls them to the hazy underworld, but leaves their lifeless bodies lying, a feast for half-starved scavengers. Sing that we may feel the burning ember trapped within our own spirit, that we may feel the conflict swelling within our hearts until it bursts forth into the bitter clash of bronze on fighting fields . How like raging fire it sweeps through the enemy, pouring forth its contagious black smoke until even the wielder is blinded, until everything is consumed, and all that remains, is ash. Untitled - Dominic Crapuchettes 18 19 �nDesire and Leaming in the Symposium lJ Matthew Braithwaite sition of virtue and happiness by human beings ...," (180b6) and though this statement is agreed upon by the speakers who follow him, each understands the reasons for its truth differently from the others. How, then, does Phaedrus mean that eras leads to happiness? When he discusses eros as a cause of good, we assume that happiness comes to men through good, as Socrates later says, (204e6) and good through virtue. But whatever sort of virtue comes of the shame and right ambition caused by eros is surely a transitory and inferior one, so the sort of happiness which comes from it must have a similar nature. This sort of happiness that results from affection, and from things done rightly through affection, is the happiness of the political friendship, the happiness brought about by honor; a somewhat immature conception and thus quite in keeping with Phaedrus' ideas of virtue. A substantially more sophisticated idea of how eros is a cause of happiness in men is not found until the speeches of Aristophanes and Socrates. ence he seems not to recognize: ... there is not one so bad that, once the god Eros had entered him, he would not be directed toward virtue-to the point where he is like one who is best by nature. (179a7) Preface I . Phaedrus This essay is in two parts, is about a number of related subjects, and has two major themes. It has no thesis as such; what points of view it presents come about as the result of the author's search for meaning in Plato's Symposium. The first part of the paper is investigatory, consisting of an attempt to determine what Plato might be saying through the work's various speakers, and terminating in an examination of Socrates' linkage of eros and wisdom. The second part is more speculative. It examines the Symposium's implications for learning and teaching, with reference to its dramatic context, and with reference to the nature of Socrates' speech and Plato's wiiting. One of the first points made by Phaedrus, the first eulogist and "Founder of the Feast," is that Eros is among the oldest of the gods, suggesting the later discussion by Socrates of the parentage of .Eros. Phaedrus' citation of Hesiod describes Chaos, Earth, and Eros as having been created in that order. Eros is the first of these which is proper to a living being, though not to a reasoning one (but Socrates later shows that there is an eras proper to man as well). And thus the first thing said about Eros is that he is prior to all life. In this case, as in Socrates' genealogy, we are meant to take Eros' position among gods as his place in the scheme of things, and so Eros' · priority to all life suggests that he represents one of the things which characterizes it. Socrates later agrees with this in saying that "the mortal nature seeks as far as possible to be forever and immortal," (207 dl) for to him that seeking after immortality is mortal eras. Phaedrus' next point also prefigures an aspect of Socrates' speech, though again in a limited and narrow sense. But the observation, that eras can impel men to do good (and also evil, which Phaedrus does not mention), is undeniable: Part One: Desiring Learning If it is true that nobody is ever entirely wrong about anything, it would be right to assume that each of the speakers at Agathon ' s drinking party has something to say about eros; that they are not there merely to make Socrates look good. Socrates' explanation, of course the most satisfactory and comprehensive, is also remarkable in that it is synthetic of those given before it. The speakers preceding Socrates lack complete understanding; they mistake their experience of eras for its entirety. Eros, like virtue in the Meno, is not given to us "whole and unbroken," (79c) but as its many facets, and it falls to Socrates to reveal the single gem to which they all belong. But Socrates does more than synthesize: his definition of eras both defines and ennobles the philosopher, and man as well, insofar as he is philosophical. Like Eros, men are between two worlds, and like him, we are creatures of desire. Socrates' genius is to link eros to our peculiarly human status as seekers after wisdom. As Plato speaks not only through Socrates, but through each character in the dialogue, it seems wise to view the speeches preceding Socrates' as also expressing parts of the dialogue's meaning. Plato had a unique dramatic opportunity in this dialogue, for its format permits all its characters to develop Plato's point of view while still allowing each to develop at length complete ideas of his own. One defining aspect of Socrates' speech is that he is always willing to begin with the thoughts of his companions; his is great speech because it is conversational, not lecturing. And so, as readers of the Symposium, we will profit from first examining Socrates' speech through an examination of those which precede it, and only then examining his speech on its own merits. ... we have [Eros] as the cause of the greatest goods, for I can hardly point to a greater good for someone to have from youth onward than a lover, and for a lover, a beloved For that which should guide human beings who are going to live fairly throughout their lives can be implanted by neither blood ties, nor honors, nor wealth, nor anything else as beautifully as by love. (178c2) Although Socrates would probably agree that as a motivation love surpasses wealth, he would do so for a reason other than the one Phaedrus gives. To Phaedrus, Eros is a cause of doing good because he induces "shame in the face of shameful things and honorable ambition in the face of beautiful things." (l 78dl) This is, of course, an excellent description of Alcibiades, for it is exactly (and unfortunately exclusively) his love for Socrates that causes him to feel shame, as he later says. (216b2) But Alcibiades' example makes the poverty of this conception of morality immediately obvious, for the implication of his feeling shame before Socrates alone is that he feels none before himself. Phaedrus' notion seems to be that right shame and right ambition are noble even when they come from without. Although he is right to say that to act rightly for love is nobler than to do so for money or honor, this is damning with faint praise, for right action by reason of any external motivation is manifestly inferior to right action through internal motivation, the magnitude of which differ- 20 Though the depth of Phaedrus' mistake is striking, his conttibution is a useful one because of how well it describes Alcibiades. What Phaedrus has done is to remind the reader that many things short of solid character (itself short of a reasoned morality) can impel men to right action, and that among these love incurs perhaps the least opprobrium in doing so because it seems to be inherently noble, whereas such impulsions to right action as love of honor or of wealth do not. This is the quality of love that makes it not only a guide to better action, as Phaedrus says, but also to bette1ment, an idea first brought up by Pausanias. Of all the wrong reasons for right action, it is only the shame and ambition brought about by love that can ever give rise to the right reason. The possibility of this is the great contribution of Phaedrus' speech, and the dashing of the reader's hopes that this might happen to Alcibiades is particularly painful because it so clearly exposes the limits of Socrates' power. Phaedrus next says that "lovers are the only ones who are willing to die for the sake of another," (179b4) which makes clear the important difference between acting rightly because of the shame or ambition caused by love, and acting nobly through the self-sacrifice which love inspires. Phaedrus seems to think that all right actions motivated by eros are generically equivalent, but in fact the noble action which love can inspire is generically different from the sort of right action that, say, Alcibiades may perform for his love of Socrates. Love is a powerful force for betterment, but where the latter sort of action is not noble because it is not nobly done (a distinction made by Pausanias), the former sort is not only noble, but divine, as Phaedrus says. The difference is between temporary "virtue" brought about by love, in the latter case, and virtue augmented and made divine by love, in the former. When Antigone bmies her brother in defiance of Creon' s order, or when Achilles girds himself to avenge Pat:roclus, these are actions of virtuous men impelled by love to greatness of spirit, and the magnificence and divinity of such actions has inspired wonder and admiration throughout the ages. Though Achilles and Alcibiades both perform admirable actions out of love, this is a di vine thing in the former and pitiable (even contemptible) in the latter, for in his case it is not nobly done. But why is such an action as Achilles ' divine? Socrates will later furnish the answer to this question suggested by Phaedrus's speech: such actions secure "an immortal remembering of [the actor's] virtue," (208d5) and insofar as an action makes someone immortal, it makes him divine. Phaedrus ends his speech with the statement that "Eros is the ... most competent of the gods with regard to the acqui- II. P ausanias As said above, Pausanias' speech corrects a flaw in Phaedrus' thought. He introduces the idea that the character of an action is in the manner in which it is done: Every action is of the following sort: When being done in terms of itself, it is neither noble nor base. For example, what we are now doing, either drinking, singing, or conversing, none of these things is in itself a noble thing, only in terms of how it is done in the doing of it does it tum out to be the sort of thing that it is. For if it is done nobly and correctly, it proves to be noble, and if incorrectly, base. (180e4) This distinction suggests the one above noted between the two ways thatlove can promote right action. So Pausanias' first great contribution is that eros can promote action both noble and base. Although Pausanias and Socrates both introduce a differentiation of the objects of eros, Pausanias' differentiation is far more confined than Socrates' , which expands the range of eros' objects beyond the human. Interestingly, it is Agathon's speech, vapid though it is, that makes the first small step in this direction by introducing an Eros of the beautiful, which is the jumping-off point from which Socrates proceeds to the intellectual eros. Having made this distinction, Pausanias makes the first try at identifying the noble and base eros. In saying that some "are in love with [others'] bodies rather than their souls," (181b3) Pausanias starts the consideration of eros' objects, which Socrates will resume and complete. But Pausanias' thought that proper love is of souls is not elaborated upon, and so one hearing Pausanias' speech has no idea what love of a soul would constitute; it is Socrates who will make this clear. Pausanias refers continually to the lover being "gratified" by the beloved, and to the beloved "granting favors", which makes his talk about loving souls, not bodies, amount to very 21 �one, asking nothing in return. As Alcibiades suggests, there is little one can offer Socrates, whose apparent attraction to beautiful young men is a ruse. In light of Socrates' love, Pausanias' conclusion that "for the sake of virtue alone it is noble to grant one's favors" (185b4) sounds like a self-deceiving attempt to ennoble an ignoble custom. Even so, his idea that one may become virtuous by devotion to a virtuous man is the diamond in this setting of brass. little; if anything, his message seems to be that a lover should seek sexual gratification only from good beloveds, which is a funny sort of "love of souls", and a far cry from the more mutual and intellectual relationship that Socrates describes. Pausanias' speech, which sounds like a defense of established custom, desc1ibes a relationship where an older man confers the benefits of his age upon a younger in exchange for sexual favors. This is the sort of relationship into which Alcibiades tried to ensnare Socrates: Really, my dear Alcibiades, you're no sucker if what you say about me is really true and there is some power in me through which you could become better. You must see, you know, an impossible beauty in me, a beauty very different from the fairness of form in yomself. So if, in observing my beauty, you are trying to get a share in it and to exchange beauty for beauty, you are intending to get far the better deal. For you are trying to acquire the truth of beautiful things in exchange for the seeming and opinion of beautiful things; and you really have in mind to exchange "gold for bronze." (218d7) III. Eryximachus Although Eryximachus' speech is somewhat silly in characterizing the world in te1ms of erotic duels, his description provides a powerful metaphor for the education of the soul, or the generation of virtue. He describes a possibility Pausanias missed: that good and bad eros can both exist in the same person. Eryximachus, the doctor, paints his profession as that having expertise in the "erotes" of the body: Now, there is one love that presides over the healthy state, and another over the sickly. Just as Pausanias was saying, it is a fine thing to gratify those who are good among human beings and disgraceful to gratify the intemperate, so too, in the case of men's bodies taken by themselves is it a fine and needful thing to gratify the good and healthy things of each body (this is what has the name 'the medical') ... (186b7) Socrates here describes what is wrong with Pausanias' love: it is absurdly unequal, and even somewhat crude. One wonders what sort of virtue a beloved would wish to acquire, or would in fact acquire, from such a lover as Pausanias describes. Socrates isn't saying that love is a business exchange, of course, but simply that there is something base about the exchange of real wisdom for gratification. The two parties in such a relationship would be making a sordid exchange on the basis of reciprocal need, not love, a fact reflected in the political character of Pausanias' speech. Nevertheless, Pausanias, in nrurnwing our discussion to noble ems of noble objects (that is, souls), develops a notion of eras as a means for betterment (as distinguished from merely better action) by introducing the idea of enslavement to virtue: If we were to transplant one metaphor into another, replacing the body with the soul in the above description, sickness and health would turn into virtue and the lack of it. The love presiding over the sickly state is the love of honor, money, and power, and that presiding over the healthy state is the love of knowledge, wisdom, and learning. The gratification of the right desires of the soul is the turning toward the philosophical, as Socrates will suggest, and so one skilled in the erotes of the soul, such as he, is a sort of doctor, or guide. By this extension,Eryximachus' speech also suggests another way of seeing Alcibiades: a man unhealthy in his soul, which is a description few would disagree with. So extended, the speech also names the reason for that illness: warring desires within his soul. "I have succumbed to the honor I get from the many," (216b5) says Alcibiades, and that sickly desire fights his healthy desire of what Socrates offers. History relates the unfortunate outcome of this conflict. Socrates' abilities as a doctor of the soul include prescription, but not surgery. He can give Alcibiades a healthy desire to oppose the unhealthy, but it is up to Alcibiades whether or "not his desire for change is equal to his need of it. Eryximachus' concept of the healthy state is revealed by his frequent use of the idea of harmony. Extending this idea of health to the soul furnishes us with a description of another aspect of Socrates' nature. What would it mean to achieve harmony among all the soul's desires--be they for learning, for wisdom, for honor, for money? Following Eryximachus, ...for it is customarily held by us that if anyone is willing to devote his care to someone in the belief that he will be better because of him, either in regard to some kind of wisdom or any other part of virtue whatsoever, this willing enslavement is not disgraceful nor is it flattery ... the [lover], in serving a beloved who has granted his favors, would justly serve in anything, and the [beloved], in assisting him who is making him wise and good, wouldjustly assist. (184c3) And here we have another description of Alcibiades' actions, or rather nearly so, for Socrates refused to allow him to "enslave himself." The reason for the difference in action bet ween Socrates and the lover Pausanias describes is that Pausanias has no concept of loving for really noble and selfless reasons , but only out of need. His lover betters the beloved in exchange for favors, but a really virtuous man would require nothing at all. Socrates, more virtuous than Pausanias' lover, confers his lover's gift of wisdom on every- 22 such harmony would be the right proportion of all these desires, such that they all agree in the pursuit of a happy and healthy life, under the direction of reason. Alcibiades' report of Socrates' conduct in the Potidaean campaign could hardly furnish a better description of how such a harmony would appear. In addition to ascribing to Socrates all the martial virtues, Alcibiades makes it clear that Socrates is supremely temperate (but not an ascetic!), never gets drunk, is calm under pressure, humble, uncomplaining in hardship, and so forth, all of which suggests a man who is at peace with himself, enjoys the benefits of every kind of virtue, and whose desires are well-trained and focused on the happy life. The Symposium is certainly shot through with a "Socrates-as-exemplar" motif, and it here becomes clear that one reason for his being such is that he is a virtuous man who understands his "erotes" and has completely mastered them. awesome in their strength and robustness, and they had great and proud thoughts ... " (190b5) Aristophanes, in looking backwards through time, looks not at men's surroundings as being then better, as one might expect, but at man himself. Man, that is to say, has fallen from a state of greatness, of which the seeking to regain is eros. This idea, not that of being separated from one's half, is Aristophanes' contribution to the evolving definition of eras, and it is an idea that Socrates does not directly touch on: to interpret Socrates in Aristophanes' terms, our search for beauty, by means of contemplation, is perceived by us as a search to regain. We recognize our need for wisdom (or we would not seek it, as Socrates says (204a3)), but in addition, the idea that its attainment is possible persists in us, driving our quest, despite the haunting thought that we may never succeed. This drive toward the attainment of what we constantly fall short of is, I think, an indication that on some level we have a potentiality for it. ls Aristophanes really saying that we seek perfect happiness in union with our other half? Of course not; Aristophanes' story is a myth, certainly a format to which Plato was no stranger, and a counterpoint to the more directly philosophical speech of the rest of the dialogue-but he is saying that belief in that potentiality is what moves us. In the same vein, Socrates will suggest that it is our potentiality to attain immortality, god-hood, and true know ledge (or at least our belief in that potentiality) that spurs us to strive for these impossible ends--and in this similarity we find that Aristophanes and Socrates both have hit directly on one of eras' most important aspects: the human potentiality to achieve a divine state. Because of the manner of his speech, it would be fruitless to try to pin Socrates down on whether he really believes that this potentiality may be actual in life; at worst, this belief is a "functional myth" or "noble lie". Plato has paid Aristophanes the very high compliment of allowing his character to introduce one of the major themes of the dialogue, for Aristophanes has presented the first argument for eras as a seeking after happiness that resists disproof and does not ring hollow. But Aristophanes' straightf01wardness and sincerity, even passion, should not encourage us to miss the inadequacy, according to Socrates' ideal, of what he says. Aristophanes and Socrates say similar things about the utility of eras (a guide to happiness), the means by which this happiness is sought (impetus to strive toward a state of greatness) , the human potential for that greatness, and ems having genuinely noble ends (as opposed to those discussed by Phaedrus and Pausanias). But Socrates has in mind an ems of intellectual things, not of human things, and describes a desire to be united with the former rather than the latter, and in this there is all the difference between these two speakers. Aristophanes comes across as a defender both staunch and eloquent of a humanistic idea of eros and of human purpose. By the time of the symposium, Aristophanes has written The Clouds, so the reader is expected to know where Aristophanes and Socrates IV. Aristophanes Aristophanes' is the first of the speeches which has any brilliance. It is genuinely funny, it is well-crafted, and it does not immediately strike the reader with its inadequacy. Although like the others, his speech does not attain the same level of depth and comprehensiveness as Socrates', unlike them it is a complete description of eros in and of itself, as . opposed to a right-thinking but frustratingly short-sighted account, as was, for example, Phaedrus'. Aristophanes proposes a reasonable idea of eros' object, and Socrates' criticism of his account seems to attack it rather superficially, apparently taking what Aristophanes says for what he means: ' 'And there is a certain account,'' she said, ''according to which those who seek their own halves are lovers. But my speech denies that eros is of a half or of a whole-unless, comrade, that half or whole can be presumed to be really good; for human beings are willing to have their own feet and hands cut off, if their opinion is that their own are no good." (205d10) Aristophanes_is also the first to develop a plausible idea of eros as a means to happiness, an idea which Socrates will later take up and advance: For Eros is the most philanthropic of gods, a helper of human beings as well as a physician dealing with an illness the healing of which would result in the greatest happiness for the human race. (189c8) The illness to which he refers is the ancient separation of men from their other halves, but the search for the one who can undo this damage resembles the seeking after the good which Socrates will describe. This is most obvious in that both accounts desctibe a seeking, but in addition, each also suggests happiness as the reward for attainment of the goal, and each intimates that this attainment may not be possible. The men of the past, according to Aristophanes, "were 23 �skmd in respect to each other: the argument implicit in their very similar but importantly different accounts of human desire is the great important debate of the dialogue, and it is over how one should seek happiness. Socrates defends the pursuit of happiness through pursuit of know ledge, a position of which the reader of The Clouds knows Aristophanes to be mistrustful at best, just as Socrates mistrusts the passions. With all the depth of feeling in his poetic soul, Aristophanes, it seems, warns Socrates not to renounce too much of the human in his taxonomy of desire. The close correspondence of many elements of their speeches suggests deeply held feelings over the essential point of difference: whether the pursuit of knowledge is a key to happiness. Aristophanes surely believes that there is meaning in such things as drama: human, earthy, passionate creations; and that a happiness founded only on pure intellectual contemplation would be hollow and cold. But Socrates' speech, if seen with care, does not advocate this; uncharacteristically, it is quite sympathetic to the poets, granting them their place in the sun; and Plato weaves themes of drama into this conversation set in the house of a playwright. Despite his sympathy to what Aristophanes is saying, however, Socrates does mistrust it-and Agathon's speech shows the reader why he does so. The significance of Agathon's speech is a counter-argument made by Plato, a warning against the dangers of an eros that stops at the human. Plato wishes to point out that Aristophanes, though right as far as he goes, does not go far enough. Agathon's speech, beautiful but devoid of content, reminds us why Socrates seeks humanity's purpose in the reahn of the intellect: there is less chance that reason will go awry than will passion. But Aristophanes is convincing despite the obvious danger posed by such as Agathon or Gorgias-and the debate between these two points of view is one which, we may see here, Plato was never able to resolve comfortably. Poetry is Plato's vice, the addiction he tiies to break: in this and other dialogues he alternately disparages it and flirts with it, never finding it within himself to advocate unreservedly pure, transcendent contemplation. In the Republic, Poetry is dismissed as mere imitation, but the Socrates who quotes Homer so freely must feel uneasy about denying it all claim to wisdom: Like much of Plato's work (which is itself dramatic), poetry can teach through metaphor and indirection; perhaps this is what Socrates meant. In view of this sympathy, it is hardly surprising that in the Symposium we find a treatment of the role of the poet which is, so far as I am aware, uncharacteristic in its lack of overt criticism, sympathetic, and perhaps even praising. Aristophanes says that he "shall try to initiate you into [Eros'] power; and you will be the teachers of everyone else," (189d3) mirroring the words with which Socrates closes, and highlighting the debate between these two conflicting teachings. The Symposium's presentation raises the question of whether, in theRepublic,Socrates exiled poetry more because it is dangerous than because it is intrinsically bad. V. Agathon Socrates' remark that he is afraid of Agathon's speech thus emerges in a double light, because Socrates knows that this minor contest for the better speech is paradigmatic of the greater battle for the hearts of men he sees between philosophy and rhetoric. So we must see Agathon' s speech as a parable about the dangerous power of the merely beautiful. The brief conversation with Socrates which precedes Agathon's speech serves to illustrate Plato's view of this danger: "What's this, Socrates?" Agathon said "You really do not believe that I am so wrapped up in the theater as not to know that to a man of sense a few who are sensible are more terrifying than many fools? (194b6) So Agathon knows his transgression: although he calls his audience ignorant, he does not walk the harsher path of trying to guide them to the truth, but displays instead the facile beauty that will bring him honor from fools--a defect of character similar to Alcibiades'. Socrates' charge against Agathon, subtly put but nonetheless an accusation of wronging the ignorant, is this: ... for I know very well that were you to meet any you believed wise, you would think more of them than of the many. But I suspect that we shall not prove to be of the wise, for we too were present there and were part of the many; but if you were to meet others who were indeed wise, then you might be ashamed before them-if you were perhaps to believe that you were doing something that is disgraceful. (194c2) "It must be told," I said. "And yet, a certain friendship for Homer, and shame before him, which has possessed me since childhood prevents me from speaking. For he seems to have been the first teacher and leader of all these fine tragic things. Still and all, a man must not be honored before the truth, but, as I say, it must be told." (595b) Though Agathon fears Socrates' scrutiny, and thinks his present audience more fearful than the previous day's, he nevertheless employs his beautiful rhetoric at the cost of thought. With the sole exception of Socrates, this new audience does not justify his trepidation, and his easy seduction of them with the beautiful but untrue wholly justifies the fear Socrates feels. He fears the outcome of what Aristophanes 24 described in The Clouds: the conflict between LiL Kmos A6yos and .A8LKos Aoyos for the souls of men.Just before show Agathon's speech for what it is: an arid desert of adjectives. But Socrates is not just using sophistical nicks to discredit Agathon; as in all his sophistical tricks there is a point, and here it is that truth and beauty are things sought (and, he here implies, not achieved). Agathon has suggested thatEros makes those he is with like himself. Though Socrates would agree with this, he looks on Eros more as a metaphor for man than as man's muse, and for this reason it is crucial for him that Eros be like what man already is, rather than like what man strives toward (as Diotima says to Socrates, "You believed ... that the beloved is Eros, and is not that which loves." (204cl)) As Agathon reveals when he says that "[Eros] is a poet of such wisdom that he can make poets of others too," (196el) he sees the relation between beauty and truth far differently than Socrates, for to Socrates a wise poet is a contradiction in terms. A wise poet would have true knowledge; and this recalls Socrates' critique of poetry in the Republic: Agathon begins his speech, Socrates asks him, "But you would not be ashamed before the many if you believed you were doing something disgraceful?" (194c9) But Phaedrus intervenes before Agathon can answer, leaving the reader to ponder the terrible implications of a negative answer. One need look no further than Alcibiades to see the effects of such a case . Agathon is not, however, unscrupulous, but simply young and foolish. He venerates the beautiful, but as he does not truly know what he venerates, he cannot do so properly. - In this he is like Phaedrus, for as Phaedrus does not recognize that the love he speaks of can impel men to the bad as well as the good, so too does Agathon fail to recognize that (in Socrates' terms) eras with an eye fixed on such an idea of beauty as his own can lead men astray from the truth as well as to it. Phaedrus' human eras and Agathon's eros of the beautiful take their power from the passions, and Socrates must leaven these powers with reason, that such erotes may lead to eras of truth. But all this is yet to come. In its content, Agathon's speech furthers the ongoing distancing of eras from the concrete and human in saying that "all good things have resulted for gods as well as for human beings from loving the beautiful things." (197b8) Agathon, as Socrates will do later, connects the good and the beautiful, and though this takes eros somewhat in Socrates' direction, Agathon proceeds without understanding. As Socrates admonishes him, "you leave no argument unturned and dedicate each and every argument to Eros." (198e4) Socrates, like Agathon, will give eras a role in wisdom, in the arts, in beauty, and so on down the list, but he does so in a reasoned way; his sophistical refutation of Agathon's sophistical argument is intended mostly to show that Agathon was speaking fluff, and not contemplating the object of his speech. Ag ath on' s speech suggests the similarities between the various descriptions of eros, the one describing, and the manner of description, and nowhere is funnier than in the contrast between the speeches of Agathon and Socrates: Agathon, young, and beautiful, beautifully describes a tender and beautiful Eros; while Socrates--older, crusty, shoeless, and unbeautiful, in a comic point-by-point opposition to Agathon describes an eros who is like himself in a manner that, also like himself, is beautiful in its content apart from its fmm. The fact that Alcibiades, who has every conceivable charm of youth, makes fun of Socrates' looks but despite them calls Socrates "the only deserving lover of [his]," (218c7) is a strong indication that content can render form unimportant. For it is necessary that the good poet, if he is going to make fair poems about the things his poetry concerns, be in possession of knowledge when he makes his poems or not be able to make them ... and do the good poets really know about the things that, in the opinion of the many, they say well? (598e3) This speech, in turn, points to a similar passage in the Symposium itself: 'Or don't you realize,' she said, 'that only here, in seeing in the way the beautiful is seeable, will he get to engender not phantom images of virtue-because he does not lay hold of a phantom-but true, because he lays hold of the tiue ... ? (212a2) These passages, in combination with what has already happened, make clearest of anything Socrates' belief about truth: only the true is both really beautiful and really virtuous (or excellent), but what appears to be virtuous or beautiful often seems to be true. Socrates' skill at dialectic is the skill of knowing the difference between these, and its guiding principle is a kind of suspicion, a systematic doubt of and searching for substance in attractive and seductive MyOL. The refutation of Agathon concludes with a clear idea of the object of eros, in the course of the argument changed by Socrates from "beautiful things" to "beauty". With the idea of the non-beautiful desiring the beautiful the stage is set for Socrates' speech. It is my hope that as a result of the preceding discussion , we aiTive with an understanding of how what he says is both a logical and literary continuation of what has come before. Although the dialogue seems to be a debate between points of view, it is also the evolution of a single one, the logical and dramatic culmination of which we are now prepared to examine. VI. Agathon and Socrates Once Agathon has been praised for his beautiful but empty speech, Socrates undoes the damage done to our evolving understanding. First, as mentioned above, he wishes to 25 �that makes the lack of understanding so difficult-that if a man is not beautiful and good, nor intelligent, he has the opinion that that is sufficient for him. Consequently, he who does not believe thathe is in need does not desire that which he does not believe he needs. (204a3) VII. Socrates When Socrates resumes his argument with Agathon by taking up Agathon's role and placing Diotima in his own, the example he chooses to illustrate the middle ground between ugliness and beauty sets the tone for the rest of his speech: " Don' t you know," she said, "that to opine correctly without being able to give an account is neither to know expertly (for how could expert know ledge be an unaccounted for matter?) nor lack ofunderstanding (for how could lack of understanding be that which has hit upon what is)? But surely con-ect opinion is like that, somewhere between intelligence and lack of understanding.'' So the metaphor of Eros for humanity is in actuality limited, but in potentiality, one would hope, limitless. That is to say, not everyone recognizes his need for wisdom, so not all are seekers after it, but, it seems, all may be made to see their need, so that all are seekers potentially. To philosophize is to actualize the inheritance of these two parents, to fully recognize our need for wisdom and to hone the resources needed for hunting it--to train the mind in thinking (and particularly in dialectic, though this is implied only by the nature of the conversation itself). To philosophize, in one way of looking at it, is to become fully human by recognizing what the nature of humanity is. Men are in the situation of Oedipus: inadequate self-knowledge condemns us to unhappiness. We cannot achieve our "erotic potential" (which is the same as our human potential, unless our resources should ever prove adequate to our needs) as seekers after wisdom unless we know ourselves for what we are: the sons of Resource and Need, born under Aphrodite's star. With that realization, we must become philosophers; lovers of wisdom, which "is one of the most beautiful things." (204b2) Socrates ' discussion of generation illustrates another aspect of our betweenness. "The mortal nature seeks as far as possible to be forever and immortal," (207dl) as he says, and it is thus another defining characteristic of man that we seek perpetuation through our "children," our creations. Everything made by man, intellectual or physical, is a means of his perpetuity. Although Socrates perhaps does not literally mean that all human creation has immortality as its aim, there can be no doubt that bringing forth out of ourselves is among the most necessary and definitive of human actions. As born ourselves, and as changing beings, ours is the realm of the born and the becoming. But our bringing forth takes place only in the presence of what partakes of the beautiful, and thus giving birth is best, and best achieves immortality, when it is performed under the beautiful itself. Behold the importance of seeking wisdom to the creator: knowledge of beauty is his muse, required for his "child" to be truly divine and immortal. And as Plato seems to say, (599a4) the one who has true know ledge of anything would not choose poetry as his child. His children are true virtue, brought about through " beautiful and magnificent speeches and thoughts." (210d4) Once eras is established as "engendering and bringing to birth in the beautiful," (206e5) Socrates shows how we, as humans, ascend the ladder of eros (which is the ladder of comprehension of our need) in order to attain the beautiful, that we may bring to birth in its presence that which will make us divine and immortal. But is Plato saying that we seek (202a5) It is part of what we know about knowledge that truth about human things is elusive. In the case of such things as justice or the beautiful, not just right opinion, but pretty much all human thought ranks somewhere below expert knowledge of what is. The first metaphor of Socrates' speech, then, is a ladder of belief, whose steps c01Tespond roughly with the ladder of eros discussed later. Perhaps the rungs of this ladder might tentatively be identified as ignorance, thought, right opinion, and expert know ledge; that is, true know ledge of the thing itself. It is om human quest to ascend this ladder, as Socrates later makes clear. It is only during a part of Socrates' speech that Eros is personified, and Socrates does this that he might better show what traits characterize the seeker: Eros is between the world of gods and the world of men, and the things he strives for are the things that belong to gods. The objects of our own lives are of course the same; and since Eros and man alike seek the things that belong to god-hood, Socrates presents the genealogy of Eros to show our composition through his. Our metaphorical father is T6pos, or "Resource", which also connotes "a means of doing" , or "a device"; and man has well deserved the name of the the Great Artificer. Supremely inventive in thought and action, the human race is, as Socrates describes Eros, always seeking knowledge and trying to trap lruth with every device available to its creative intellect. Resource himself is the son of M~ns, a word similar in meaning, but with more connotation of planning, advising, and even scheming, which lends additional shades to our existence as hunters. Our "mother", l1Evl,a (or "Poverty), could be seen as tarnishing and limiting the skill and cunning given us by Resource; but IT Ev la also means "Need" , and this brings her coupling with Resource out in a different light: IT6pos gave us the means of seeking, and 11Evla the desire to do so. Without her heritage, our nature would be different indeed, for we would have the machinery to seek wisdom, but it would lie idle in our ignorance of our want thereof. Socrates furnishes an accurate description of what this would be like: Nor, in tum, do those who lack understanding philosophize and desire to become wise; for it is precisely this 26 "speeches as will make the young better; in order that [the lover], on his part, may be compelled to behold the beautiful in pursuits and laws." (210cl) knowledge for the sake of creation? This hardly seems like him; rather, once one' s eros is in the presence of true know ledge, or pretty nearly, the means of pursuit and the thing engendered are one and the same. That is to say, when seeking wisdom, the MyoL engendered are the means of the seeking. This clarifies the nature of Socrates ' endless conversation. The idea of the ladder of love contributes the notion that there is a certain kind of virtue brought forth corresponding to each gradation of eros. Ho w close one is able to come to bringing forth tiue excellence depends on how far one has advanced one's idea of the beautiful. According to Socrates, the greatest thing to which one can give birth is moderation and justice, and by this he can only mean some Myos thereof. But here we have to be careful with equating creation to giving birth, for Socrates uses the language of "being pregnant" with virtue, which leaves open the question of who does the impregnating. Let it for now suffice to point out that Plato 's language does indeed leave open the possibility that the things given birth to, for which I have used the word "created," have an ambiguous point of genesis. This suggests the idea of learning as recollection in the Meno: that the things given birth to are within the creator potentially, and brought forth by him, rather than given their genesis within and by him. The ladder of eras is a curiously mixed metaphor. It is described in two separate passages; the first explains the natw·e of pregnancy in so ul, and the second describes the path one must walk to "be initiated into [the perfect revelations]." (209e5) In the firs t, someone pregnant with viltue is described as going to a beautiful person, and Or, to put it another way, one must investigate the causes and the nature of virtue in men through investigating the political (perhaps Pausanias' emphasis on laws places him at this point in Socrates' scheme), and this draws one further away from the superficial understanding of beauty which Agathon has. From there, the lover and beloved journey on to "the sciences" and give birth to speeches and thoughts, for (if one sees the political rightly) this naturally evolves from trying to understand virtue through the political. This investigation eventually leads one to seek the form of beauty, in which the engendering of true virtue is possible. And so we have Socrates' sketch of the human purpose. As humans, we are aware of our intermediate status, between gods and animals. We are aware of a better state, one of immortality and wisdom and perfection, but may be unable to achieve it. Caught between, we strive to give birth to something out of ourselves which seems to partake of the world above ourselves, so that we may partake of the di vine through procreation. When this striving for and not achieving immortality seems frustrating, we should remember that Plato's vision is really an affirmative one. This seeking is what is proper to us as mortal beings: since we are creatures of change, our joys come in part from mortal things, and in part from the divine. If we can make something which partakes of our nature and of the divine nature, such as the children Socrates describes, we have truly done the best thing possible for a man, and will move closer to happiness. This bringing to birth is the action which reveals our limits, certainly, but it also defines our potential for greatness . This is, I think, the significance of the process Socrates describes. But there is still much to be said about the process itself, for the ascent of this ladder cannot be made without help. ... to this human being he is at once fluent in speeches about virtue-of what sor t the good man must be and what he must practice. (209b7) And, as he goes on to say, one who sees the beautiful in a beautiful person gives biJ.·th to such children as did Homer or Lycurgus. This is appropriate, for one whose beauty is found in other men will create such children as are approp1iate to men: poetry or laws. But Socrates wishes to go further: he wishes to create children approp1iate to men not as they are, but to men he aspires to be. He wants children created under the beauty of true knowledge, and here describes how they too might be got. The first rung on the ladder to procreation in the true beautiful is to "love one beautiful body and there generate beautiful speeches." (210a7) This, in one interpretation, can be seen as desc1 ibing Agathon, for he is young and blinded . by beauty, and with his limited and superficial conception of beauty he creates what is appropriate to his character: merely beautiful speeches: one who loves with the passions creates what is appropriate to them. But as one climbs, and the attraction to bodies fades, ems turns toward the beauty of souls and the creation of the things appropriate to that beauty; that is , Part Two: L earning D esire The existence of Plato's dialogues , their content, and their structure all attest to his belief in the learnability of matters important to the virtuous life. Diotima ' s description of the ladder of eros makes it clear that the path to this knowledge is not trod alone. And so, much more immediate and real than the Symposium' s implications about our nature are its implications about the interactions between men by which knowledge is sought. As we know from the Meno, virtue cannot be taught, for nobody knows what it is, and this problem renders unteachable all other similarly noble objects of investigation. The distinctions between these objects are somewhat blurred, in fact, as Socrates suggests that virtue, knowledge of the beautiful, and knowledge of the good all progress in tandem . Where the Meno might leave the reader 27 �Training someone in desiring clearly means a number of related things. As is plain from the vaiious speakers, eros can be of many things. Clearly, the pedagogical role has as its first intent to help the one led (the lover) to climb the ladder. From what Diotima has said, it is clear that all men are lovers of some sort, but vary in the their ideas of what beauty is. From this it follows that the pedagogical role is not particular as to its subjects, and that it also accomplishes its aim by helping the lover see a higher form of beauty with reference to eros' objects. Few men know what the truly beautiful is; the role of the guide is to move the lover's eyes toward the successively greater sorts of beauty; that is, the guide must help the lover to see his need of a beauty beyond his limited conception of it. The guide must of necessity be a philosopher, and his role is to make philosophers out of others, as a sophist makes sophists of others. What, then, are the characteristics of a "guiding philosopher"? From the many things that Alcibiades says of S aerates, one inference is particularly relevant: it helps for the guide to be a virtuous man. Because Socrates is a virtuous _ man, Alcibiades is shamed by him (for he is a lover after Phaedrus' description), and whatever power for good Socrates has over Alcibiades comes from this. But it is clear that Socrates is unable to do much with Alcibiades, for he knows not how to teach virtue, but only the desire of it. In the Meno , Socrates says of virtuous men that despairing of ever coming to know virtue, the beautiful, or the good, the Symposium is not only more optimistic, but even prescribes a formula! However, Diotima's speech contains only the vaguest outline of the progression toward these things; it is full of ambiguous terms and incomplete descriptions. Fortunately, it is possible to fill in many of these gaps by interpolating from what Socrates does and how Plato writes. The ladder that Diotima describes is general in its scope. Although "the ladder of love" is a tempting name for it, it is a ladder of at least six things. When she switches from "the beautiful things" to "the good things'', (204el) Socrates can say that men seek the good things in order to become happy. The eros which has the name of the whole, which is a specific kind of aiming at happiness (that is, "engendering and bringing to birth in the beautiful" (206e5)), must aim also at understanding the beautiful. So since Socrates has said that the good things are beautiful, the reader is strongly inclined to suspect that the converse is true also, or at least that the distinction matters little. The understanding of the beautiful is for the sake of the begetting of virtue, and it would seem this requires being virtuous. And so the ladder of eros seems to be also a ladder of wisdom, of knowledge of the beautiful, of virtue, of knowledge of the good, of happiness, and possibly of age, though this is only hinted at. The ladder is thus nothing less than Plato's formula for living the good life, and a complete desc1iption of the philosopher's journey. Diotirna's desc1iption of the ladder of eros seems to describe both how one becomes a philosopher, and how one makes a philosopher of others. We are fortunate enough to have the examples of Socrates and Plato to refer to for explication of this passage, for though suggestive, Diotima's language is obscure. In the sense that she speaks of a lover and a beloved, her story vaguely resembles ordinary Greek pederasty, as described by Pausanias. But she also adds a third character, 6 ilyouµEvos-, "the one guiding," (210a7) whose role she does not elaborate on. So we are left to question what role the one guiding has in the ascension of the ladder. The beginning of Diotima's speech suggests one answer: This was the reason why they were unable to make others like themselves-because their virtue was not grounded on knowledge. (99b) Which echoes Agathon's words in the Symposium: ... for what one does not have and does not know, one could neither give to another nor teach to another. (196e5) Inarticulate virtue, that is, cannot perpetuate itself. From this, it seems that the one who reaches the top of the ladder of eros is the ultimate teacher, for ... [he will] get to engender not phantom images of virtue-because he does not lay hold of a phantom-but true, because he lays hold of the true ... (212a3) "Now perhaps, Socrates, you too might be initiated into these erotics; but as for the perfect revelations-for which the others are means, if one were to proceed correctly on the way- I do not know if you would be able to be initiated into them. Now I shall speak," she said. "I shall not falter in my zeal; do try to follow, if you are able." (209e5) That is-he is capable of teaching true virtue to others, not just the desire of it, and this is what every true philosopher strives for: to be a sophist worthy of the name. The philosopher, however, must be satisfied with helping others see their need of wisdom. His role is one of exposing ignorance, which raises a further question: how does he do this? One who has know ledge of his ignorance, in accordance with Agathon' s words, can certainly teach it to others, but by what means? Socrates' conversation with Meno will not tell one who hears it what virtue is, but one can hardly hear it without knowing more about virtue. The ignorance of the subject That is to say, she is "the one guiding" Socrates, and Socrates is the lover. From the occasional reference she makes to Socrates' sluggishness of thought and improper desires, we can infer the nature of her contribution. As Socrates said at the very beginning of the speech, Diotima taught him erotics, and it is clear now what this means: she trained him in desiring, along the path that she describes. 28 which Socrates proclaims is not feigned, but neither is it the sort of ignorance which Meno has at the start of the dialogue. Meno has a number of false ideas about virtue which lead him astray, and which Socrates removes . He has given Meno the "torpedo's touch", (84c) and when he does the same for Meno' s slave, Meno thinks the slave the better for it. Perplexity, that is, is better than false opinion (though both are called "ignorance"), most particularly because it sets one to desire knowledge where one did not before. Perplexity is prerequisite to the desire and pursuit of wisdom, and so the guiding philosopher must have the "torpedo's touch." Socrates' method of producing this perplexity is dialectic, and one would be hard-pressed to suggest a better or even another method of doing so. However, Socrates' arguments are seldom logically air-tight, nor are their aims frequently obvious. Socrates, thinker that he was, cannot have been unawai·e of the spuriosity of his arguments, and if he knew his conclusions not to follow logically, he must at least have thought them good. He must have thought that the conclusions drawn by his often spurious arguments would be useful if believed. It is not without reason that he describes Eros as a sophist. The failings in the logic ai·e an invitation to look deeper, to ask what may be underneath the argument and why Socrates thinks the conclusion useful. A reader of the Meno may ask why it is important that virtue be one, not many; or a reader of the Republic why Socrates argues that justice is a certain kind of "minding one's own business." This is a surprising (though inevitable) conclusion, for it implies that Socrates' professed ignorance is not as blank as that which he succeeds in producing in Meno; that he has some ideas under it. Socrates' many myths furnish a more obvious example of the same phenomenon: something he says is not strictly "true," but is somehow useful. It is wrong to call these things "p1inciples" or "beliefs," since Socrates seems in earnest about his ignorance. Rather, they are heuristics, and only as such, if at all, that Socrates can be said to "believe." The trouble about these heuristics is that they are never exposed to question; they are insulated by poor interlocutors who ai·e snowed by Socrates ' illogic. Neither are they ever stated explicitly, so inevitably one who would argue with Socrates must, in producing a "definitive" interpretation of him, impose his own ideas on what Socrates means. From these things it is clear that a Socratic conversation is only secondarily a subject of proof or disproof, and primarily something about which one should seek understanding. The hidden and indefinite "meaning" of a Socratic argument, coupled with its complexity and spurious logic have this as their intent: that Socrates is trying to avoid a presentation which encourages argument without understanding, and opts rather for one which encourages the hearer to question and investigate the subject himself, using his conversation as a guide. Socratic conversation is hence mai-velously capable of teaching from afar, as Alcibiades says: But whenever any one of us hears you [Socrates] or another speaking your speeches, even if the speaker is very poor, regardless of whether a woman, man, or lad hears them, we are thunderstruck and possessed ... When I heard Pericles and other good speakers, I thought they spoke well, but they could not affect me in any way like that, nor did my soul grow troubled and become distressed at my slavish condition. (215d3) Because it is open to interpretation and invites the reader to seek meaning by means of it, Socrates' conversation has the power to make men question. This is the hallmark of an ignorance which desires: it asks questions, and Socrates gives us a framework from which to begin to do so well, for his conversations suggest questions of the first importance. Even at two thousand years distance Socrates can make philosophers of others. Plato's contribution to this should not be underestimated. The manner in which Alcibiades describes Socrates' speeches applies equally well to Plato's presentation of them: For were one willing to hear Socrates' speeches, they would at first look altogether laughable. The words and phrases that they wrap around themselves on the outside are like that, the very hide of a hybristic satyr. For he talks of pack-asses, blacksmiths, shoemakers, and tanners, and it looks as if he is always saying the same things about the same things; and hence every inexperienced and foolish human being would laugh at his speeches. But if one sees them opened up and gets oneself inside them, one will find, first, that they alone of speeches have sense inside; and second, that they are the most divine and have ilie largest number of images of virtue in them; and that they apply to the largest area, indeed to the whole area that it is proper to examine for one who is going to become beautiful and good. (221el) Plato's literary genius allows him to present philosophical ideas in an uncommonly rich manner, augmenting the powers of Socrates' speech with those particular to his own unique format. The Symposium's very structure reinforces the idea that certain speeches have power. Socrates' words come to us as Plato's account of Apollodorus' rendition of Aristodemus' retelling of Socrates ' recollection of Diotima 's speech, and it should be noted that Apollodorus has an audience of more than one. (l 73e5) And though the speech has passed from Diotima through many retellings (the unreliability of which Plato seems to have made a point) it has always had an effect. When Apollodorus says As for me, whenever I make any speeches on my own about philosophy or listen to others--apart from my belief that I am benefitted--how I enjoy it! (173c2) it is strong testimony for the power such speeches can have if 29 �one simply hears them. In addition, where most of Plato's dialogues make one feel close to the action, the many veils over Diotima's speech emphasize the fact that the Symposium is a dialogue of listeners, not speakers. The role of the lover is spoken of by Diotima; that of the guide mostly implied. The Meno, too, ends in Socrates' exhortation to Meno to teach Anytus the same ignorance he himself has come to. It is hard indeed to see how a philosopher could fail to be a guide also. One who knows his ignorance wants to share it with the world. Gorgias' speeches (to which Socrates compares Agathon's), in being persuasive, may seem akin to Socrates', but Alcibiades' speech reveals the crucial difference between the two: the speeches of an orator depend on his oratorical proficiency for their power, but those of Socrates do not; the former derive power from their words, the latter from what their words represent. This suggests the differing mechanisms though which persuasion by Myo:; and persuasion by conviction operate: where conviction succeeds through a kind of flattery (as Socrates suggests in the Gorgias) and by inflaming the passions, persuasion in the manner of Socrates succeeds through different methods. Gorgias' persuasion and Socrates' aim at a different sort of object: Gorgias' at (incidentally false) opinion, or conviction, and Socrates' at producing ignorance. Where the argument of a sophist can be pulled apart by an acute observer, a Socratic "argument'' cannot be pulled apart so easily, for there is nothing definite to lay hold of and refute. As objects of investigation rather than logic, it is hard to meaningfully predicate "true" or "false" of anything Socrates says, unless, mistaking Socrates' logic for his meaning, one engages in the somewhat trivial exercise of trying to poke holes in it. Though this slippery speech here sounds ethereal, it proves solid enough in its effects, as in the case of provoking shame in Alcibiades, and in provoking thought and perplexity in its hearers. This is the genius of Socrates' dialogue: it is designed to withstand and promote sustained examination of its content, but is presented in such a way that it is difficult to argue the content away unless one knows precisely what is being said-and the confidence that one does is unwarranted. Socrates never goes so far as to present something that passes for true knowledge; rather his discourse has the aim of setting one on the path to thinking rightly about an object by clearing away false presuppositions about it.We must assume, though, that Socrates, knowing the false logic in many of his arguments, had in mind a hypothetical character for his heuristics. Socrates did not merely clear away false presupposition; his act of setting an interlocutor on the path also consists of a starting-point. This starting-point may have something of the character of the "noble lie" discussed in the Republic. In his arguments, Socrates's ideas come across with a logical certainty that he knows does not to belong to them, though perhaps they have another kind of certainty. Is he presenting what he does not know to be true in the guise of truth? This is an ugly light to put matters in; it would perhaps be better to say that his interlocutors have opinions which are manifestly wrong (or even harmful), and whatever Socrates replaces these notions with has not the same character. Socrates does not replace one incorrect certainty with another, but with uncertainty; the worse sort of ignorance with the better. The one is ignorance which pretends to know; the other is ignorance which knows it does not know and what it does not know. The first is the ignorance of the satisfied, the second of the seeking. And so if Socrates .does tell a "noble lie," if he does instill some hypothesis as a starting-point, it is for the sake of creating that ignorance which knows itself. Socrates does not put into anyone's head something pretending to be the truth of a thing, but only some hypotheses as to the thing's nature. The nature of putting someone on the path requires this; one cannot search for something without some such ideas to start with (Need must have some Resource), and it is best that these ideas have a hypothetical, not a dogmatic character: Socrates is no sophist, though he uses some of the tricks of that trade. This action is also validated by Socrates' virtue, for a man who is manifestly virtuous and knows he doesn't know what that means is likely to suggest the best possible hypotheses for beginning an investigation of virtue. If Socrates' state is as above described (self-aware ignorance with some hypotheses), one has to ask how this ignorance resembles knowledge so closely. It may be that what is possible in this sort of ignorance, namely, having some idea of the nature of a thing, is as close as earthly knowledge can come to truth. Socrates' hypotheses (for example, his definition of justice in the Republic) are like metaphors. True knowledge is not imaginable, but only thinkable. We don't know what kind of eyes one would have to have to avoid being blinded by the light. Socrates can speculate about what it would be like to have such knowledge, but the effects of having it would be so huge that one who knows only right opinion and perplexity cannot conceive what communion with the truth would be like, so much so that it may only be attainable when one is freed from earthly trappings. The truth illuminates this world, and perhaps we may know an approximation of truth from the physical approximations that surround us. Socrates' heuristics describe what the truth of a matter is like; they are similes for truth. Is simile like right opinion? Perhaps it is, for it seems that to try to describe the truth in similes is to acknowledge that one does not know it, but can only make a likeness of it. It may also be the case that, if true knowledge is inaccessible to the earth-bound, similes are a kind of "earthly truth", the closest one can come to truth before death-we cannot look at the light of the truth, but by observing the shadows it casts we can discern something of its nature. Socrates is therefore something between the virtuous man who cannot make others like himself, and the mythical 30 teacher of virtue (the virtuous man who can do so). The first sort of man has the ignorance of Meno or Glaucon, the ignorance which is satisfied with itself; and the second sort of man has the knowledge which is satisfied with itself. As Diotima says, neither those ignorant nor those wise desire to become wise. (204al) As a complacently ignorant man may impart his complacent ignorance to others, and as a wise man can impart his wisdom to others, so does Socrates impart what is appropriate to his non-complacent ignorance: perplexity and a starting-point from which to seek. Complacent ignorance is approp1iate to the sophist, and is perpetuated by dogmatism; desiring and questioning and dissatisfied ignorance to the philosopher, whose method is dialectic. At the base of all this, of course, is the fact that the philosopher is a lover not just of wisdom, but also of others, for climbing toward the top of the ladder does not preclude having one foot a rung down. The roles of lover and guide unavoidably mingle; the process of making someone better (which is the role of the lover) cannot help but turn into making that person into a philosopher (which is the role of the guide). The relationship between Socrates and Alcibiades, for example, is an erotic one, but each perceives it differently. Alcibiades wants to ensnare Socrates into a relationship such as Pausanias describes, but Socrates is willing to confer all the benefits of his wisdom for none of the benefits of Alcibiades' youth and beauty. Socrates is the greatest kind of lover of man there can be, precisely because he also loves something higher. Translations Benjamin Jowett, Meno (New York: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1949). Seth Bernardete, "Symposium" in The Dialogues of Plato, (New York: Bantam, 1986). (This edition does not contain line numbers; those that appear herein have been interpolated and so some may be incorrect.) Allan Bloom, The Republic of Plato, (New York: Basic Books Inc., 1968). 31 �created the film. I have put much effort into selecting, from the myriad of images in Bergman's film, those which are most crucial to the few themes that I have chosen to dwell upon in the essay. I have tried to order and describe these images to best facilitate a discussion of these topics and to encourage further thought and questioning by the reader. Without allowing the reader to sever any emotional ties to the film, I wish to help him see some of the subtleties, both visual and thematic, that he may have missed upon first, second, or even third viewing. It is a great desire of mine that the reader will finish this essay wishing to watch "The Seventh Seal" again and again. I hope to be able to bring out the richness of the movie's content, how impossible it would be to ever absorb all the meanings, and how rewarding it can be simply to attempt to do so. Preface Untitled - 32 Erin Martell After having spent four weeks watching and concentrating on Bergman's "The Seventh Seal," I have become continually haunted by the film's images. I close my eyes and see the quiet, pain-ridden face of the knight as he leans against a rock pondering his chess game with Death, or I awakep in the morning with the image of self-flagellating people unshakably clear in my mind. Bergman's moving images of mankind have become part of me, in such a way that I cannot escape them. I have become obsessed by a creation that is both enlightening and tormenting. In my essay I want to capture the humanity and intensity of emotion in this film. My ardor and belief in the film's importance are such that I have often felt unworthy to do so, but the need to convey the movie's beauty and meaning has also been rendered so great by my love and admiration for the film that it overwhelms these other feelings. My goal in this essay is to show that the artist and his image fulfill a unique and essential role in the quest for self-knowledge, which I believe to be the responsibility of all mankind. In order to achieve such a goal I must both explain and justify the emotion, intuition, and understanding of humanity that are present in all aspects of the film. For this reason I have gone out of my way to do much more scene description than I would normally allow myself. The reader will doubtless note that I quote large portions of dialogue. There is a script of "The Seventh Seal" published in book form, but this book is taken from the original script that often differs greatly from the dialogue and action in the film's final cut. Therefore I have tried to ignore the script as much as possible and have attempted to recreate a sense of only the final, completely edited film; and this often involves quoting large portions of dialogue. There is a wealth of emotional experience within me that is tied to this film. I want the reader to see what I see in order to love what I love, in order to understand what I have come to understand about this most magnificent of films. In order for this understanding to happen, there needs to be a bit of translation done. The visual images and the music must be put into words so that their significance can be understood without their more immediate emotional impact being lost. These sounds and images must also be explained in terms of the dialogue. Then, and only then, the camera of the mind must pull itself back for a long shot, in order to analyze the significance of all these images in terms of larger themes, some of which even Bergman may not have been aware of when he The Unique Beauty and Usefulness of the Image "In our fear we make an image," says the knight. "And that image we call God." Indeed, mankind has always been drawn toward the making of images, often in fear and often he knows not why. In Achilles, Homer created an image of man's stubborn pride, and Plato used the charioteer image to describe the human soul. I claim that the images we mak;e are not themselves gods, but that they reveal something of the nature of the one true God, of our innate knowledge of Him , and of ourselves. Furthermore, I claim that the making and interpreting of images is one of the greatest pursuits of all mankind. Bergman gives his viewer images of a very troubled and philosophic knight, an atheistic squire, and an acrobat who sees visions of the Virgin Mary, all living in the midst of plague-ridden Europe during an age of great faith and great despair, when the existence of Satan and the mercilessness of God are taken for granted by the masses, but where people believe that the devil can be warded off by "a mixture of blood and the bile of a big black dog." Each of these characters reflects a piece of every person so that taken together, all the characters form a sort of personification of the soul of man. From the minds and souls of his characters, from their interplay with one another, and from their reactions to the surroundings and circumstances with which they are presented, Bergman's images offer a profound commentary on the nature of mankind and what its true salvation might be. As something inside the knight forces him to ask and seek answers to the 33 �- most difficult questions, so does Bergman force his viewer to do the same, offeling insight into these questions through the words and actions of all his characters. An interviewer once commented to Ingmar Bergman that it seemed as if Max Von Sydow , who plays the knight in "The Seventh Seal," often seemed to play the character who speaks Bergman's own ideas and opinions in Bergman's movies. "Not really," replied Bergman; "all the characters are me." Bergman is one person creating a story with many characters, and because the story is born from his own imagination each character contains a piece of himself. Each is made of some fragment of Bergman' s personality and all are taken from his own mind. Therefore, an examination of all the characters together offers insight into the whole man, the whole mind and soul of Bergman. Furthermore, just as each character can be seen as a fragment of Bergman , so can each character be taken as a fragment of humanity in general, Bergman himself being one small example of the general state of mankind. Considered in this fashion, each character is a sort of snapshot of the human condition and all the charac ters taken together form a flipbook, a moving image, albeit a primitive one, of the human soul. They therefore prompt one to search one' s own soul. Within the film, Bergman offers a short commentary on the act of image-making which includes a partial explanation of why he chose to create this film, why he chose to use this particular medium as an o utlet for his soul-searching. In this scene the squire Jons enters a small stone room where an artist is painting a mural depicting tales of the plague. The painter stands on a scaffold as he paints, his brushes and other matelials strewn about on the scaffold. For a moment, Jons quietly surveys the artist's work. "Why do you paint such nonsense?", Jons asks the painter, suddenly and bluntly. "I thought it would serve to remind people that they must die," says he. The painter encourages thought. "Well, it's not going to make them feel any happier," replies Jons. "Why should one always make people happy? It might not be a bad idea to scare them a little once in a while," answers the painter, meaning that from painful thought real benefit often arises. Beyond this blief insight, it is unlikely that even Bergman, if he were asked, could explain why he feels compelled to create this film. There is present in man a deep-seated need to create images of himself, of God, of death, and of every other thing that is at all in the realm of experience or imagination. Man's own ineptitude to explain or even define the soul is overshadowed by a deep-seated longing to obtain some sort of self-understanding. If man is indeed the rational animal, as Aristotle defines him, then it is a torment greater than any other that the one special trait, this rationality, allows him to gain nothing, not even an understanding of himself. No real know ledge can be grasped through rational thought. Instead, one reaches only the dead end encountered by Hume, who found himself doubting the existence of absolutely everything. Even Hume acknowledged that he could notlive in such a way; he might sit all day philosophizing and doubting the existence of everything, but at night he sat and played backgammon with his friends, assuming the existence of his friends, the backgammon board, and the so-called tangible world in general. Bergman would have each viewer revel in his humanity, not deny his own existence. Emotion, passion, and intuition must not be overwhelmed by the purely rational. If one is ever to discover anything about oneself, no facet of human existence can afford to have its significance denied. With logic alone one becomes as unfortunate as Hume, the rational self admitting to a complete lack of knowledge, but the very soul crying out just the opposite and yearning for something completely different. Bergman offers an image of the way that he believes things are and leaves the interpretation up to the viewer. He does not deny contradictions but blings them to the forefront so that each audience member is forced to face them individually, just like the painter who, by painting the mural of the plague, forces his viewers to think about death. The painter is not a philosopher; but based on what he perceives of the world, he creates an image that forces his viewers to ponder difficult questions, questioning being the first necessary step toward to acquisition of self-knowledge. The painter paints an image of what he perceives both in the world that surrounds him and within his own mind. The viewer is then led to ponder the image. Questioning the perceptions of the painter may eventually lead the viewer to question his own perceptions, which, in turn, may lead him to seek after truth. " I only paint things as they are. Others can do as they like," the painter says. Others may come and read into his work, but he merely records what he fi nds within his own soul. Similarly, Bergman ' s fil m making is both a record of the state of his own soul, and a quest to understand this soul and the universe which surrounds him via the act of working out the image. The knight's confessional scene affords an excellent example of Bergman' s soul-searching through the film; it is furthermore an excellent illustration of how successful this method of soul-searching can be. Interestingly enough, the confessional scene is framed by the two scenes with Jons and the painter, blinging the issue of imaging to the forefront in this scene of beautiful images. The confessional scene is one of only four scenes where the knight reveals himself to another character and the one scene in which he most articulates his inner tmment. It is also the one scene where all the main theological and philosophical questions of the film are raised. The images of this scene are not themselves answers, but they are a road that leads to further questioning and possibly, eventually, to some answers. 34 pleasure that most people seek. For the knight his own pleasure is definitely secondary to truth. He kneels down in front of the confessional. The shadows from the bai·s make an odd blackness on either side of him; the corner that he faces as he kneels is completely blackened by shadow so that his blonde hair stands out by contrast, not altogether unlike a halo. The dark emptiness seems about to swallow him . Again the cainera focuses upon the face of Christ. His face is a straight diagonal across the screen; his mouth is agape, but he is only an image and can give no direct answers. "What is going to happen to those of us who want to believe but aren't able? And what is to become of those who neither want to nor ai·e capable of believing? Why can' t I kill God within me?", exclaims the knight, his voice louder, more vehement, tormented, almost angry. As he speaks, he stares straight ahead, his eyes expressionless, in the manner of one who has so much deep-seated pain that he cannot even bear to feel his own emotions. Why does the knight want to kill God? The Christ-filled cross is ever present in torment, and even so the knight desires to commit again the greatest sin of all mankind. To deny the existence of God is to take up the whip with those who denied the possibility of truth in the claims that Chlist made about his oligins. If it is true that God' s presence is made manifest within this world, as is claimed by Paul in the first chapter of Romans , then to deny God's existence, which he himself has made manifest, is to call God himself a blasphemer and to attempt to murder his existence by a sheer arrogant act of human will. Paul says this in Romans 1: 18-20, "The wrath of God is everywhere upon man, for since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities - his eternal power and divine nature - have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse." Yet if what Paul writes is true, then how can the knight's questions have validity? Bergman certainly portrays the knight's questions and torments as if they ai·e meant to be taken seliously. Why then, if God has made himself manifest since the beginning of time, does the knight speak of those "who want to believe but aren 't able?" and those " who neither want to nor are capable of believing?" What are the barriers that so prohibit faith? To acknowledge the existence of God is to acknowledge the existence of a power higher than oneself, a power higher than hwnan intellect, human passions, and human will. It is to accept one's own inability to achieve perfection, because it is to assert a power more perfect than ai1y human power. The knight is a man who wants to attain knowledge. Paradoxically, to assert the existence of God is to assert that there exists a power capable of granting or denying knowledge to man; in other words, asserting that man himself cannot attain knowledge, which only God can give knowledge to man. For the knight acquiring faith would mean completely altering his method of searching for truth and the value he places on that The knight enters a small, square, dai·k room .·The walls and floors ai·e empty and grey, but beyond the feeling of emptiness there is something haunting about the room . It looks like a face. We see the knight's back as he walks toward the altar. Two small windows on either side of the far wall, the only light sources in the darkness , stare out of the screen, like two eyes. The nose is a giant crucifix hanging between the two windows; the arch of the doorway both forms the hairline and frames the face . The altar is the mouth. One cannot be sure whose face it is that is mirrored upon the screen. It might very well be Death's. The knight walks straight up to the mouth. The only noise is of the bells tinging somewhere outside. Outside seems that much farther away; the room seems all the more silent. The crucifix is an image of God, but it is also an image of Death. The camera closes in on the form of Christ, his arm stretched out unnaturally and his face tilted diagonally across the screen. (The diagonal is the most disturbing compositional line in painting, often used in paintings that depict some great torment.) The crown of thorns is pushed down upon the figure ' s head, a dark line of blood stains the forehead , the eyes and eyebrows are slanted down with a look of sorrow and pain. In the crucifix, we see the mairiage of God and death. There is no greater sin or torment in all the history of man than the killing of God Himself. The knight walks up to the confessional, and the bars that separate him from his confessor are like a black prison that separates him from God. They cast a dark shadow and forbid easy sight. The knight does not realize that he confesses to no priest a t all but to Death himself. Only the viewer sees Death' s face: its pale, distinctive shape, cleft chin, and round, dark eyes. The knight stands before the confessional, the palm of his hand curved against the edge of the wall as if he were trying to use his sense of touch to keep some contact with the tangible world. The dai·k.ness mirrors his despair; the emptiness in the room mirrors his sense of emptiness and unfulfillment. The agonized face of Chlist stares down at him but says nothing as he wrenches open the doubts of his soul not to God, not to any member of humanity, but to Death. He says, "I want to confess as openly as I can, but my heait is empty. The emptiness is a minor turned toward my own face. I see myself in it and am filled with fear and disgust." Death asks the knight what he is seeking, why he is not ready to die, and the knight replies that he wants knowledge. "You want guarantees," replies Death, as the camera again dwells upon the sad effigy of Christ. This Chlist seems to be · in such severe pain of his own that he could certainly not guarantee anything. "Call it whatever you like," replies the knight, a stern look of recognition upon his face. He will not be brought down by what is, in some ways, a base interpretation of his motivations. He wai.1ts truth, not pleasure, at least not the sort of immediate 35 �me do W( it: Se Bt "l' Bi ar d fr O' tc al b t~ b c 0 f, t c them. Instead he has only felt more thoroughly his lack_ of fulfillment. All these external things amount to only Pascalian diversion. He has also seen Death face to face and is therefore less able to deny the existence of death than those w~o hav~ not encountered him on such an intimate level. Obvm~sly it would be difficult to play chess with Death and not think of one's own mortality and relationship to the su~ernatural. "In our fear we make an image and that image we call God" laments the knight. Again we are confronted with the word "image." The emptiness is a mirror~ which one sees one's own face and is filled with fear and disgust. In fear he makes an image and calls that image God. Through Bergman's genius the fear, the disgust, and the images are all miITored back to us via the images made by the camera. In other words, Bergman, who suffers the same fear and disgust as the knight, creates an image and throws it onto the screen to be watched by an audience of people who also fear and also create images. But Bergman's image of God is not complete. His image does not assert the existence of_God, but me~ely raises fundamental questions just as the kmght never clauns the existence of God but merely questions. The assertion of God's existence or nonexistence is left up to the interpreter of the film. . If Bergman were creating an image in his fear and calling that image God, then why would he bother questioning Go~' s existence? Perhaps Bergman and the knight are both unlike the general population in that they val~e ~ogic .and kno~ledge over happiness and are therefore unsat1sfI.ed w~th ~ere imagemaking. Instead, they question their own unagmat10ns and ~e filled not with an ignorant and false contentment bu~ with torment and agonized shame at the awareness o~ th~ madequate nature of their own minds. Berg~an does. give m to the intuitive by allowing himself to create images 111 the f01m of this film, but he goes on to question the image he has c~·eated. Because Bergman questions the validity of the imagemaking process, as opposed to merely making ~ image and calling it God, his imagination does not make him h~ppy. If anything he is in even greater torment, because h_e realizes that due to his restless and questioning nature, no image that he creates can ever fulfill him. Like the knight, he wants knowledge, not false happiness, not guarantees. And yet ~e does create an image. One might do well to ask why. Like the painter he perceives some sort of truth in the images that he creates; he paints things as he believes that they ar~. In one sense these are false images, idols of the human mmd, only fanciful creations born from an inadequate mind; in another they are embodiments of the most verifiable sort of truth that mankind has. They are an expression of one man's perceptions of the world played out in a way that, when viewed. from a distance, helps both the creator of the image and the viewer to consider life in a slightly different light. In other words, from meditating upon the image itself some sort of ~wareness can be derived. Furtheimore, if any truth can be obtamed from can never have real knowledge of God's existence, in the sense of having logical certainty, and he is too proud to give in. In some ways it seems that God reaching out his hand would be breaking the rules of the game, but the chess player always moves pieces with his own hand. "I call out to Him in the dark but no one seems to be there," says the knight. "Perhaps no one is there." Not even Death has proof of the existence of God. "Then life is an outrageous horror. No one can live in the face of Death knowing that all is nothingness." Here is the cry of a man who gazes into the abyss of which Pascal speaks but who doubts even the existence of the abyss. He feels so deeply a God whom he can neither touch nor comprehend and is filled with the sense of his own inadequacy and life's bitter futility; hut he does not know whether the God whom he feels even exists, much less whether he can obtain any sort of salvation or discover any sort of meaning during his brief time upon the Earth. And so he sees his emptiness as a mirror and is filled with "fear and disgust." What is it that the knight sees when he gazes into the darkness? Is it his own face, is it "emptiness under the moon" as his squire will later claim? Is it God, or death, or nothingness? .Even he does not know, and yet the -image of the face remains. The mirror reflects emptiness, the room looks like a face, Christ's face hangs on the wall, and Death's whitened face is half-hidden but present. These are four faces staring out at the knight. Is any of these God, or are they all only images of Death and/or nothingness? Do we see through a glass darkly, or do we only gaze through an empty world into a mirror that reflects nothing but our own emptiness? When his rationality can only lead him to a dead end, what is the great use of all the greatness of man without some other meaning beyond what little he finds in himself? Man's greatness is drowned in his own inadequacy and his life is mere futility amounting to nothing but dust and ashes, an outrageous horror. "Most people never reflect about either death or the futility of life," notes Death, a truth that is reflected in the behavior of most of Bergman's characters. Pascal, in Pensees 166 and 168 observed the following: "Death is easier to bear without thinking of it than is the thought of death without peril," and "As men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of it all." And yet the knight is an exception to this rule. Something forces him to think about both God and his own mortality. There are several possible reasons as to why this is so. One is that he has seen much death and has not been satisfied. Another is that he is an educated man, a chess player, who has just returned from the Crusades. He is a nobleman, not poverty-stricken but rather well-off. He has seen many things that most people think of as bringing glory, honor, happiness, and fame, and has not felt at all fulfilled by method, as well as completely rearranging all his perceptions as to what the very nature of truth might be. It is not a task of which he is technically incapable, but it is one of which he currently believes himself to be incapable, so weak is his will, so strong is his pride. Thus, he longs to "kill God within" himself, being tormented on the one hand by a great desire to know God coupled with the awareness of his manifest presence and on the other hand by his stubborn unwillingness to forsake his own power, logic, and will in the pursuit of the know ledge of God. The camera shifts so that we see Death standing behind the bars to the left of the knight. Death gazes wordlessly at the knight. He too is unable to give any answers. Even he does not know how to reply to such questions. "Why does he live on in this painful and humiliating way even though I curse him and want to tear him out of my heart? Why in spite of all is he a baffling reality that I cannot shake off?" Again there is the reminder of God's presence in his creation. Later in the film this will become crucial, as the knight comes to experience this presence of God in the lives of other people, being moved to action by their childlike faith and manifest love. The camera focuses in on Death, who gazes down at the knight. There is a light source behind him, and the crisscross of the bars, like a mask, shields his whitened face from full view. The expression in Death's eyes makes it seem as if he were vaguely troubled, but his mouth is expressionless and resolute. Behind him on the left there hangs a crucifix. Is this an insinuation that God is. also watching Death, or is it a reinforcement that they are actually the sa~e thing? As the knight pulls himself up to the bars, Death turns himself so that we see only his profile. The camera is now inside the bars, and it is Death whose face we see without bars. He seems to be quietly calculating, as if he were checking all his pieces to plan his next move in a game of chess. Are men only chess pieces from his point of view? Is life no more serious than a game? Chess is the most serious and rational of games, but it is a game nonetheless. The pieces are images of people trapped by their places on the board that is their world, unable to move any differently than they were made to move. Their movements are limited to a certain type, and they are constantly in danger of being taken. Only the chess player could save them, and even he is not omnipotent, unless he breaks the rules of the game. The knight's blonde-crowned face is shielded by bars. Christ does not answer. Death does not answer. The knight has closed himself off to all types of belief except pure rationality, logical certainty. Therefore, he has reached the same dead end that Hume reached. He doubts absolutely everything, including his own most basic intuitions. And yet he cannot shake off these intuitions. He feels the presence of God everywhere, tugging away at his heart in a way that he cannot deny, and yet he will not give in to belief, because he watching Bergman's film, then it has been proven that th~re is some important use of the intuition and the image-creatmg faculty. . . As for the knight, either in fear his mmd has created an image so deep-seated that he cannot dispel it, or there really is a God that he is simply too afraid to reach out and accept, being neither willing nor capable of d.eserting his p~oud, willful and deep-seated belief that certam knowledge is t~e one true God. In this latter case, the image that he creates m his fear and calls God is the god of logic, and the other ~od is the God who really exists. There is, indeed, somethmg comforting about relying on logic for those who hav.e been long used to doing so. It is hard to give up ~hat the mm.d has long exalted in favor of an untried uncertamty, but logic too can become an idol. And yet, even in the midst of this crisis of lo~ic, the knight's real goal does not cent~r ~n t?e rational. In this se?se he is like Hume, forced to live his life ma way thatcontradic~s his greatest understanding of what that life 1!1e.ans, wh~t IS important in it. He says,"My life has been a fu_ile pursmt, a t wandering, a great deal of talk without meanmg. I feel no bitterness or self-reproach, because the lives of most people are very much like this. But I will use t~s resp~te ~or one meaningful deed." Despite the depths of his questiomng ~d his need to find God, he portrays his goal as more practical than one might think. He does not merely want answers f~r the sake of answers, or guarantees for the sake of comfort. His goal is far more noble. He wants to do good. . Yet what are the knight's motivations for domg_ the~e good deeds? He wants to do one meaningful deed with his own human knowledge and power. In some sense th~ search for logical certainty is a ruse. What he really wants is to be worthy of respect, self-respect. Perhaps he believ~s that by accomplishing one good deed he will earn for hi~sel~ the ability to look into the mirror of his soul without ~mg filled with fear and disgust. Perhaps, in some part of himself, he believes that in this manner he can save himself from the torment that he feels, without the aid of God. Again the knight is guilty of the sin of pride. . No real answers have been given, and yet all the agomzed questions of the knight's tormented soul have been _voiced to a treacherous Death; all of Bergman's gut-wrenching questions have been voiced to the blank stare of the camera as well as to the audience that is to come later. Death di~appears_ from sight, leaving this scene uncomfortably cradled m the mmd of the viewer. The Image Played Out Bergman has made the viewer feel the knight's emptiness from the very opening of the film, and he play_s o~t t_hese questions and images to the end of the film, offenng msights 37 36 D:n �getting up and getting ready to leave. In this action lies an illustration of two things. The first is the squire' s comic disrespect of his master, which is later shown to be the attitude he maintains toward humanity in general; the second is the lack of conversation between the knight and his squire. That is to say, the knight neither asks the squire to get up nor speaks to him when he does; he just kicks the squire with his foot and then turns his back on him. The two understand one another's actions well enough: the knight does not seem to doubt that the squire will get up and prepare the horses when he is kicked, and indeed the squire does do what the knight wanted. Essentially their relationship seems almost to be a business relationship. They travel together but are really not much more than two individuals traveling alone. Their conversation is generally limited to a practical discussion of what needs to be done; yet there does seem to be a real affection between them. They are like an old married couple who do not need to talk much. The relationship between the two is largely a result of the knight's personality, but it is as much a result of the squire's. The knight is a tormented man in search of higher know ledge, the Pascalian aspect of the human soul. The squire, on the other hand, represents the denying, unbelieving element. He does not believe in God or truth. The image that he creates in fear is an image of himself as a man who does not fear, a blunt and coarse singer of bawdy songs of revels in the tangible world and expects nothing after death, who laughs at everything including himself, because he expects no good from anyone, including himself, and therefore assumes that amusement is his best hope. Perhaps the best example of the squire's denial is found in the first of the two scenes with the painter. In this scene, Jons refuses to admit thathe is scared by a description of what the plague does to its victims. When asked if this description scares him, he replies, "Scare? Me? You don't know me," and avoids the subject by pointing at a section of the mural and asking,"What are those horrors you've painted over there?" , as if to say , "I'm not frightened at all; I can take even more of this." The painter describes that section of the mural as the camera focuses on the simply drawn yet horrifying figures that are painted upon the wall, a processional of hunched bleeding people, some wearing crowns of thorns, some whipping others, others simply being whipped. He tells Jons, "Mobs of people, who call themselves Slaves of Sin, are swarming over the country, flagellating themselves and others, all for the glory of God." The camera gives a full frontal view of the squire from the chest up. He looks absolutely horrified, and he swallows hard and uncomfortably, but he still refuses to admit his fear. He refuses to admit that he really does care about humanity and that he is both terrified and horrified by man's inhumanity to man, to himself. Instead he asks for some brandy. Later, when the camera comes back to Jons and the and possible answers through images. He purposefully sets a tone of uneasy desperation to pull us into the torments of the knight, making us feel as he feels and question as he questions. The film ' s opening shot is of an uncomfortably black sky. A burst of light smacks into the upper left comer of the screen accompanied by a short and almost violent outburst of choral music. Suddenly, a bird soars up against the darkness. All this has the effect of being quite disturbing and dismal. Neither the light nor the music nor the flying of the bird are in themselves unpleasant; it is the immediacy and violence with which they are all thrown onto the screen that achieves the effect of making one start, almost jump or shudder, when one watches the film for the first time. After the vaguely too still, too dark screen, the feeling achieved by the sudden and unexpected light-burst combined with the music is somewhat equivalent to standing alone in a completely dark room when, without any prior warning, someone simultaneously turns the lights on and slaps you across the cheek. The effect is followed again by a profound stillness. A soothing, rather captivating voice reads from the book of Revelation. The surroundings remind one of the stillness in Heaven of which the voice reads. The camera changes to a shot of a rocky beach under a desolate sky underscored by the solemn and repetitive, almost calming and mesmerizing sound of the waves. There are neither trees nor life-forms anywhere in sight, nothing moves but the ocean. A short distance from the shore the ruins of a castle are repeatedly washed over by the waves. The camera then closes in on the sleeping form of the knight. His jaw square, his face and hair a sharp contrast against the dark and craggy rocks upon which he lies, he appears to be dead and not merely sleeping. One has to concentrate just to be sure that he is breathing. One is reminded that the stillness in Heaven mentioned in Revelation is a stillness that directly precedes Armageddon. With these eerily gloomy images the film begins, as Bergman creates an impression of quiet desperation to introduce his audience to the unfolding of his tale. Bergman brings his viewer straight to the edge of the abyss and forces him to stare down into it, his eyes glued to the screen. The knight' s character is most developed through his relationship to other characters, and it is in these relationships that answers to many of the most difficult questions of the film are found. The relationship between the squire and the knight is particularly interesting, because it is the squire with whom the knight spends the most time. They have been together since before they left for the Crusades some ten years earlier, and they have endured everything together since that time. Considering this fact, their relationship seems incredibly distant and silent. They are never openly hostile to one another, but they are not particularly friendly either. The first human interaction in the film takes place when the knight puts his foot on the squire's back to wake him up. The squire rolls over and hisses at the knight's back before 38 muralist, they are quite tipsy, and Jons is telling the painter that he and his master have just returned from the Crusades. He paints a figure on a small, rectangular stone slab. This image is meant to represent himself. He holds up the slab so that both the painter and the camera have a good view of the comically painted figure, its head jutting forward, shoulders hunched. He says, "This is squire Jons. He grins at Death, mocks the Lord, laughs at himself, and leers at the girls. His world is a Jons-world, believable only to himself, ridiculous to all including himself, meaningless in Heaven, indifferent in Hell." Here is the essential illustration of the fact that Jons has no real faith in anything; he does not feel certain of anything, not even himself. Therefore, he mocks everything, shielding all his passions within the guise of a joke. The knight walks in as Jons is speaking. For a moment he stands and listens, then he walks up, grabs the slab from Jons' hands, looks at it, throws it down, and pushes Jons' shoulder with this hand, signifying for him to get up so they can leave. He walks out of the room. The squire puts down his paintbrush and once more hisses at his master's back before rising, grabs his bag, gestures goodbye to the painter, and follows the knight out the door. It is no wonder that these two so very different personalities do not talk more openly. That part of the soul that seeks knowledge and yearns incessantly for God is diametrically opposed to that part that believes nothing and mocks everytlting. In action the knight and squire get along fine; in fact, they al ways seem to agree about what ought to be done in any given situation, without any discussion. A good example of this is found in the scene with the girl who is about to be burned in the forest. They do not stop to discuss her situation, but both desire to free her, although doing so goes completely against what their society deems acceptable. Yet their perspectives are so opposed that they have difficulty relating on a truly intimate, personal level. The one person to whom the knight does reveal himself is Mia, the juggler' s wife. She and her family are the only characters who help the knight forget his torments even for a moment, the only ones who help him find any solace. Just as the lack of interaction between knight and squire is due to their individual personalities and ways of perceiving the world, so is the ease with which the knight opens up to Mia due to both his personality and to hers and her husband's, as well as to the presence of their son, Mikael. We are introduced to Jof and Mia relatively early in the film; in fact, they are the third and fourth living human beings introduced. Like the introduction of the knight and squire, the first shot of Mia and Jof is of them sleeping. Unlike the knight and squire, they certainly do not seem to be dead. They lie sa.-etched out inside a wagon with a third person, Skat, the leader of their little acting troupe. All three lie straight out with their heads touching at the center of the wagon, Skat's snoring making it completely unmistakable that they are sleeping and .. not dead. Jof awakens and smacks a fly that lands on his forehead. It leaves a mark there. He bears a happy, even goofy, grin upon his face. He crawls out of the wagon carefully so as not to wake the others. With the rest of his body outside the wagon, he stretches out a leg and shakes it. Once outside the wagon he does a forward somersault, jumps to his feet, and executes a few more gymnastic moves. All the while the silly, joyous smile remains on his face. It is hard to watch this scene without smiling yourself. The sun shines full in the sky, and the leaves of the trees make shadows on the ground; in the air light sparkles between the leaves, creating an alm ost magical effect. It is as if nature were mirroring the beautiful simplicity of this man. Jof walks over to where a flask of water hangs from a low tree branch. He talks a large swig of water, gargles, spits, then scratches himself on the head. He steps over to his horse and pats its neck and flank. In a cheery conversational tone, with the same smile still on his face, he says, "Good morning. Have you had your breakfast yet? It's a pity you can't teach me to eat grass. Can't you show me how? We're a little hard up. People aren't very interested in juggling in this part of the country." He says this not with anger at his condition, or sorrow, or self-pity. He speaks matter-of-factly, even contentedly. He sits on a fallen tree branch and begins to j uggle, the camera watching his profile. It is as if this man were in a completely differently world from the one that contains both the dismal sky and the rocky seashore of the first scene and the soul tormented by death. He is like a child playing with his toys, who reminds us not of death but of the joy and newness of life. The sky is full of light, dancing between the trees. Jof seems startled by something, but not frightened so much as pleasantly surprised. He stops juggling and turns very slowly toward the camera, his whole body bathed in light. Upon his face there is a look of bliss that is warming and just short of being comical. He gazes out at something. There is beautiful music, like woodwinds an d chimes, reminiscent of birds singing. The light, the music, and Jof's facial expression convey a feeling of spiritual bliss, especially when compared to the scenes of death that both precede and follow this moment. The camera shifts its view to show us exactly what Jof is watching. Off in the distance, between two patches of trees, is a woman dressed as a noblewoman of late medieval times. In her hands she holds the hands of a small, naked male child, helping him to walk along his toes . The can1era reverts to a shot of Jof sitting upon the fallen tree branch, the light playing gently against his face. He raises his palms and slowly rnbs his eyes. Suddenly, the music stops. After looking up once more, Jof turns and runs over to the wagon, jumps inside, and attempts to shake his sleeping wife awake. Jof tells Mia of his vision, and her entire face erupts into a smile. She sits up next to her already seated husband. 39 �Jof has obviously been waiting for her to ask to hear the stmy. As he talks animately, Mia leans forward, smiling and listening lo his words. He says, "She was so close to me that I could have touched her. She had a gold crown and a blue robe with flowers." As Jof speaks, Mia gazes at him with a look of obvious love and devotion. Meanwhile, Jof is completely absorbed in the rapture of both his story and the act of telling it. He continues, caught up in a feeling of awe that transforms his face. "She was teaching the child to walk by holding him with a small brown hand. She saw me watching her. .. and she smiled at me. My eyes filled with tears ... and when I wiped them away, she was gone. And everything was so still in the sky and on the earth. Do you understand?" Jof speaks of a stillness just as Revelation 5 does, but unlike the earlier stillness on the beach, this stillness is joyful. "You don't believe me," says Jof, turning his head and beginning to put on his shoes. "But it was real, I tell you, not the kind of reality you see everyday but a different kind." Jof is like a small child who has just been told that Santa Claus is not real, but who believes no matter what he is told since he once sat on Santa's lap at the mall. Unlike a small child, however, Jof knows that what he believes goes directly against what others call "reality." As a character, Jof, with his visions, goes against everything logical and every form of normal human experience. He has neither the.knowledge that the knight searches for nor the sarcastic and witty sense of humor of the squire. Somehow, he seems better off than either of these two, despite having what modem psychologists might call psychotic hallucinations. Why is this? Jof, with his daydreaming and childlike nature, is willing to accept ideas that other people would not be open to. This openness is the nature that Christ refers to in Mark 10:14-15 when he tells his disciples, "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it." Here is a complete contrast to the torment of the knight; here is the sort of belief that the knight claims he cannot have. Jof is not a man who feels that God is "hiding himself in a mist of half-spoken promises and unseen miracles"; he is a man who sees miracles with his own two eyes. What the knight cannot grasp with his intellect, the juggler achieves through a simple, childlike faith. The knight worries, but the juggler spends his days bathing in the light of the sun. The first always strives to be rational but laments that he is "imprisoned in [his] dreams and fantasies." The second has visions of the Virgin Mary but calls them "reality" and is content. Mia smooths over her long, blonde hair with the palm of her hand. "Perhaps it was the kind of reality you told us about when you saw the Devil paint the wagon wheels red, using his tail as a brush." Jof turns his head and mumbles, "Why must you always bring that up?" whom he sees is the Child; the song that he sings 1s joy. At this point the camera show us Skat crawling out of the wagon wearing a Death mask, which looks remarkably like a cross between Death's face and the face of the dead peasant whom Jons and the knight encountered along the road. There are two eye socket holes and a pale, expressionless face. As Skat jumps out of the wagon he complains, "Is this supposed to be a mask for an actor? If the priests didn't pay us so well, I'd say, 'No thanks.'" Skat is that part of man's soul that, even in the face of the most gruesome death, thinks only of material and sensual gratification. He is definitely not the contemplative man. While the knight is tormented by a conflicting sense of logic and yearning for God, the squire chooses to deny that truth exists in anything and yet places value on life, and Mia and Jof share in a simple domestic faith, Skat seeks only sensual gratification and considers neither philosophy, logic, nor faith. His face is scruffy, and he wears an earring. Skat puts on the Death mask and dramatically recites a monologue in an overly dramatic voice that is meant to be the voice of death. After he has finished reciting, he raises the mask onto his forehead using both hands, turns toward Mia and Jof, and says in his usual voice, "Will the women love me in this get-up? Will I make a hit?" Jof shrugs. Again the image of Death is tied to the most basic sensual aspect of life. Through Skat's offhand comment, the image of Death is rendered comic by the actor. The image that Skat makes is one of Death, but Death as a comic, sensual, even ridiculous figure. Skat slumps back over to the wagon. On his way inside he hangs the mask upon a tree branch, so that a stick pokes straight through one of the eye sockets, and the comic is again transcended by the gruesome. Mia and J oflook at each other and laugh good-naturedly. They turn around smiling and Jof begins to juggle again. Mia stands behindJof, leaning against the fallen branch and watching her husband juggle. "Jof! " she says suddenly, a look of profound contentment resting upon her face. "What is it?" "Sit still ... don't move." "What do you mean?" asks Jof, still juggling. Mia leans forward and says softly, "I love you." In the background is playing the same music as when Jof saw the vision of Mary, making this moment out to be just as spiritual, blissful, and important as the first. God's love for humanity is mirrored in the love that Mia and J of have for each other. A profound smile crosses J of' s face; he stops juggling and turns to gaze at his wife. The scene fades away, and the music is gone. In this moment we are given the first major insight into the nature of man's salvation. Happiness and spiritual bliss are embodied in the simplicity of love. Mia and Jof's love is not a complicated love tormented by jealousy or guilt, or a love wrenched apart by a bizarre need to articulate and define its nature. It is an emotion that fills and then overflows into a smile of admiration, of devotion, of joy. Mia and Jof have a "And then you discovered that you had red paint under your nails." "Well, perhaps that time I did make it up, but that was just so you would believe my other visions. The real ones, the ones I didn't make up." The irony here is that Jof, with his simple faith, is not exempt from human folly. He is no prim and proper saint, but is given to lying about the most saintly thing about himself, his visions. Furthermore, he not only lies, but he also does it poorly enough that he is discovered. He is more like a child than what most would consider a saint to be. Mia and Jof go outside the wagon. Mia sets Mikael down on the grass, and the camera focuses on him until he crawls out of its view. They talk of Mikael's future. One of the greatest differences between Mia and Jof and the other characters in the film is that they have a child. To have a son is to have both a legacy and hope for the future. Furthermore, to raise a child one has to be other-centered to a large degree. The members of a family must consider, in everything they do, what is best for the entire family; therefore, they have less time to worry about themselves, to be self-indulgent or self-pitying. In addition, a husband and a wife can discuss their problems with each other. One of the knight's greatest torments is that he is withdrawn into himself and has no one to bring him out of his miserable and agonized state. One of the squire's greatest problems is that he thinks about himself too much and has no one to chastise him or point out the inconsistencies in his behavior. The man who spends his life within his own mind winds up with a warped view of reality; the man who lives life for his family may not be wise in a philosophical sense, but he is certainly more in touch with the world than the first man. Mia lays her head against his chest, places her hand against his left shoulder, and closes her eyes. There is something splendid in a way that seems even enchanted about Mia's personality, which allows her to accept and even admire (despite her chastising) Jof's faithful nature. Although she claims not to believe Jof's visions, she listens to them quite eagerly, even with a certain amount of obvious joy and admiration. She too is in some ways like a child who lets another person's joy become her own; she lets his ardor overwhelm her. Jof gently begins to sing a song that is similar in mood and tone, but not identical to, the music that played when he saw his vision of the Virgin. The melody conveys the same spiritual joy, although to a lesser degree. The similarity of the music ties the beauty of the vision to the beauty of Jof's created image: his song to God is tied to the vision which is God's song to him. The words to Jof's song are, "On a lily branch a dove is perched/ Against the Summer Sky/ She sings a wondrous song of Christ/ And there's great joy on high." Jof's Christ is very different from the tormented crucifix of the confessional scene; Jof' s is a joyous God. The Christ love that is unconditional in nature, in the sense that one loves the other despite their actions. The unconditional love that they share is reminiscent of agape, God's love for man. They have a childlike faith in each other. They are a living metaphor, a God-created image of His love for man. Whereas God's love is mirrored in the unconditional marital love of Mia and Jof, the most selfish, unloving character presented in the film is the one most closely associated with the Church. This is perhaps an illustration that the search for faith must happen on an individual level; no help can be expected from society or the Church as an organization. Although there is no hope given that the knight, or the viewer, may be capable of obtaining the faithful simplicity that Mia and Jof personify, there is an indication - in the play of light, the choice of music, the camera angles - that Mia and Jof ought to be admired and thought of as blessed. Quite different is the introduction tq Raval. Jons steps into a barn in a seemingly dese1ted little village to refill his water flask. A peasant woman lies dead, face down upon the floor, her arms outstretched. There is a noise from up in the loft and Jons hides behind the door as a man holding a large satchel backs down the stepladder. The man walks into the front room, bends down before the corpse, slides an armlet off her right wrist, and places it in his bag. He is startled by a noise and looks to see a young woman who has , at just that moment, stepped into the doorway. The girl says nothing and makes no noise. He walks over to her and, standing so close to her that their noses nearly touch, tells her not to scream. He pushes her away from the doorway as Jons steps out from behind the door and stands facing Raval. "I recognize you," says Jons. "Your name is Raval, from the theological college at Roskilde. You are Dr. Mirabilis, Coelestis et Diabilis. Am I not right? You were the one who, ten years ago , convinced my master of the necessity to join a better-class crusade to the Holy Land." Jons slams the barn door shot as Raval looks away. "You look uncomfortable," says the squire to Raval. "Do you have a stomachache?" Here is a man who steals from the dead, who would kill an innocent young woman to ensure not getting caught, and is also a doctor at a seminary. It is especially significant that this is the man who convinced the knight to go on the Crusades. People like Mia and Jof, who feel real love and experience love daily, would not likely advise anyone to go to war. A man who steals from the dead could easily condone killing. He is the complete hypocrite, who says that he is the messenger of God, but who really is only the messenger of hypocrisy, deceit, and Death. Raval represents the most evil and corrupt aspects of the human soul, the inclination to lie, steal, and cheat for the sake of one's own greedy ulterior motives present in all men, although more evidently in some than others. Jons pulls Raval around by his clothes and throws him up against a chopping block for wood. He pulls out a knife and 41 40 • �face of Death, which allows humanity to survive without going insane; that is the ability to have fun, to be entertained. The ability to play, to daydream, and to make up stories is beautiful: it makes us artists; it makes us human beings. It is certainly not surprising that the two people who are happiest and together partake in a sort of salvation are jugglers and actors. Their whole life centers around entertainment and play. Even their portrayals of Death are playful. puts it to Raval's throat. The girl in the doorway raises her hands to her face and screams. Jons looks up at her and then back down at Raval. "By all means. I'm not bloodthirsty," he says glancing at the girl, and lets Raval go. The young woman is quite the opposite of Raval. This man, who was stealing jewelry from a dead woman who she had most likely known, was about to kill her, and yet she screamed when he was about to die a few moments later. This scream is particularly significant because it is one of only two occasions in the entire movie when she makes any sound at all. Later in the film, she attempts to give water to Raval as he is about to die, although she knows that by doing so she risks catching the plague from him. The girl represents the inarticulate instinct that man has to help his fellow creatures. Unfortunately, this trait, like Raval's hypocdsy, is more regularly seen in some people than in others. In some, like Raval, it seems totally crushed, forgotten, or ignored. Raval is part of the Church as an institution, and he is a personification of a part of the soul, but he is also an individual. For Bergman, the individual is more important than the situation or the institution. The primary illustration of this is that he makes plot secondary to character; the plot is dependant on character and not vice versa. Even the camera is obsessed with close-ups of faces, the face being the signature of individuality. Bergman is not against individual faith so much as he is against the institutional aspects of the church, especially its tendency toward encouraging self-persecution. Into Mia's mouth he puts the statement, "I don't see why people have to torture themselves as often as they can." And he makes the most obviously gruesome scene in the film one that involves both the church and self-persecution, causing it to appear even more macabre by following what is probably the funniest scene in the whole film. In a village, Mia, Jof, and Skat have set up their wagon, folding the back area out into a small, makeshift stage. Mia and Jof begin to sing a song, with Mia accompanying on drum and J of on the lyre. The melody is an upbeat one, but the words are all about death and are reminiscent of the book of Revelation. The first verse is "The horse is up the tree crowing. The road is wide but the gate is narrow. The Black One lands on the shore." Each time an animal noise is mentioned, Mia and Jof make that noise. At the end of the verse Mia bangs the drum twice. The bawdy and comical behavior of people is natural; juxtaposed with the macabre and unnatural act of self-flagellation, it is seen as a positive and important part of man's existence. Bergman focuses heavily on laughter and portrays it as a good. Self-persecution, on the other hand, is unnatural, even evil. A similar juxtaposition of the bawdy and comical with the horrific and macabre was seen earlier in the songs of the squire and the scene with Skat and the Death mask. Again it is seen in the songs of Mia and Jof. There is something in man that perseveres even in the Perhaps the difference between Mia and Jof and others (Skat or Jons, for example) is that although Mia and Jof are given to frivolity, they do not deny the existence of God or Death, but accept them. Part of what is so beautiful about Jof is that he has the ability to daydream well and is not ashamed of it. The reason we are so compelled by his vision is that he is so drawn into it and his recounting of it. His description of his vision is very beautiful and poetic. In contrast, much of the knight's agony is derived from his inability to accept his own imaginations and intuitions . Mia and Jof, smiling, finish their song with the words, "The sow lays eggs and the cat grunts. The night is soot and the dark remains. The Black One stays and stays upon the shore." The last few words fade into the deep Latin chants of an approaching processional. It is the people who call themselves the Slaves of Sin, the horrific figures of which the painter spoke, the image come to life. They are even more horrid, more macabre, than the painter hinted. Mia and Jof stand close together upon the stage with looks of great shock upon their faces. This self-persecution is beyond their comprehension. The processional of people includes men and women in rags, children, a man missing one leg, a monk carrying a cross upon his back, the sound of wailing, crowns of thorns upon bleeding heads, and a man who whips his own forearm. Some of the people are whipped by others. Some can hardly walk any longer. All the people who had just been watching the performance now stand or kneel before this spectacle. Some have expressions of disbelief upon their faces, others of shock, sadness, fear, and some register no emotion at all. There are nothing but faces, so many close-ups of faces. Soldiers kneel, the crosses of their swords pressed closely before them; a woman falls on the ground weeping, her hands clutched desperately in prayer. The sound of moaning, weeping, and wailing rises into the air like the smells of smoke and rotting refuse rising into the air above a burning trash heap. The very same crucifix seen during the confessional scene rests diagonally against the stage. A flat-nosed monk begins to speak. It is none other than Raval, the seminarist. He shouts at the crowd, pointing accusing fingers at various people, proclaiming that they are all doomed and that their deaths may come at any moment. The presence of the crucifix 42 from the knight's confessional scene links together the knight's mental torture and the people's unholy self-mutilation. The diagonal composition once more echoes the pain. And in the mouth of the only truly evil character in the film Bergman puts the words, "Do you know, you ins(m'Sible fools, that you shall die today or tommrnw, or the next, because you have all been doomed? Do you hear what I say? Do you hear the word? You have been doomed, doomed, doomed!" In the background, behind the crucifix and still standing upon the stage are Mia and Jof, still standing very close together with looks of shock upon their faces . The fact that Bergman places these words in Rava.l's mouth illustrates that he thinks it an evil of mankind that a man is prone to torture himself over the prospect of his own impending damnation, worse yet to torture other members of his species with the threat of it. The crucifix behind Raval is symbolic of two things: a wordless God and the spiritual torment and seeking of the knight, being symbolic of the knight because it is associated with the scene where his character is most directly revealed. Both the silence of God in his wounded state and the desperate searching of a man such as the knight are steeped in pain and are linked to the horrible evils of self-flagellation in which these wretched people engage themselves. And yet the crucifixion forms a path, albeit a pain-filled one, to the two people who are closest to any sort of real salvation. As Mia and Jof stand upon the stage, the cross forms a path at their feet. It is a visual image that takes the search for self-knowledge and the eyes of a wordless God and makes itself a link between pointless self-flagellation and unconditional love. After praying loudly with much crying while lying or kneeling upon the ground, the "Slaves of Sin" rise slowly, turn, and begin to walk away. The camera watches them as they exit the screen from the lower left to the upper right-hand comer. Soon only a few are left, then none. The camera lingers uncomfortably for a moment, focusing on nothing but the dry, sunbaked grass upon which these people so recently stumbled. Bergman wants us to be uncomfortable; he does not want us to forget this scene easily. He therefore gives us a moment to reflect before he continues on with the story, a moment to rest. There are so many scenes of torment within the film that one is likely to consider the whole world a bleak arid desolate place if he forgets the few scenes of hope. Indeed, upon a first viewing, the scenes of the processional and of the deaths of the characters are the most memorable. Upon the third or fourth viewing these scenes are equally memorable, but other scenes begin to take on even greater significance. Although it is a quiet, peaceful, subtle, and even easily forgotten scene, the scene in which Mia, Jof, the knight, the squire, and the young woman share a humble meal of wild strawberries and fresh milk is quite possibly one of the most important scenes in the film. Mia, Jof, and Skat's wagon sit on a flat spot of a long, sharply-sloping hill. Mia sits alone playing with Mikael. A short distance away the knight sits leaning against a rock, apparently lost in thought until he looks up and sees Mia and the baby. As he watches these two a smile crosses his face for the first time in the entire film. The knight is moved to speak, and asks Mia her son's age. They chat pleasantly, Mia smiling and displaying a modest but obvious pride in her son. It is the presence of the child which begins to draw the knight out of his revery. The presence of a child reminds him of simplicity, innocence, and familial love. In this boy there is a reminder of the future, the fact that mankind survives, in spite of the plague. If all of Bergman's characters represent fragments of the soul, then Mikael represents the youth, innocence, and hope for the future that are important to the lives of all men. The knight is especially drawn to this, because he has lost touch with his hope, his innocence, his faith in the future. His struggles with God stem largely from his inability to assume a childlike state, and yet it is the power of the presence of children that makes one's own sorrows seem trivial. Jof returns, and upon his suggestion, Mia goes into the wagon and comes back with two shallow wooden bowls, one filled with wild strawberries, the other with fresh milk. These she places before her husband and the knight who are already seated on the ground; she spreads a light colored sheet in lieu of a table. Jons and the young woman approach on a horse and Mia invites them to join them . The sun is bright but somewhat low in the evening sky. Mia lays down upon the ground and smiles her warm, enchanted smile. Her hair is pulled back except for one small strand which curls a bit at the end. The camera, close-up, sighs and smiles down upon her. She articulates her beautiful and simple view of life, saying, "One day is like another. There is nothing strange about that. The Summer, of course, is better than the Winter, because in Summer you don't have to be cold. But Sp1ing is best of all." As she says these last words she moves her head from side to side with pleasure. A short while later J of retrieves his lyre. He plays the song of Spring and of Christ that he sang earlier to Mia, musically transferring the spiritual beauty of that scene to this scene. Once again music is used to reveal the interconnectedness between the two scenes. Behind J of, the Death mask hangs from a pole stuck in the ground. And yet, next to Jof' s face, the mask does not look so gruesome. There is such a comic look of bliss upon his face as he plays that the death mask looks quite harmless. As he plays, Mia chats with the knight. She asks him if he has a "beloved." A pensive look and far-off sort of smile come over the knight's face. He begins to tell Mia of his wife, whom he has not seen since he left for the Crusades. In his eyes there is a look of love but also of loneliness, sorrow that this period of his life has past. For once his words are not logical or tormented by lyrical. Although his speech is usually limited and 43 �"Of course," replies Death, and then bows his head down to look at the board, his chin resting against his hand. A few moments later he looks up and then back down at the board again as he makes his move. "I take your knight," he tells his opponent. "As you were meant to," comes the reply. "Have you tricked me?" "Of course." The knight, with his new sense of purpose, has perhaps begun to win the chess game. He has tricked Death, proving that even Death is far from omniscient. This knowledge will be important very soon. "Are you going to escort the juggler and his wife through the forest? " asks Death. "Those whose names are Jof and Mia and who have a small son." The knight's smile disappears. "Why do you ask?" he says suspiciously, accusingly. "Oh no reason at all," replies Death, once more looking down at the chess board. There is a burst of foreboding music and the scene fades away into the next. The little band of characters forms a processional through the forest. The knight rides first, then the squire with the young woman sitting behind him on his horse. Mia and Jof follow behind in the wagon with their baby. Plog, the husband of the woman who ran off with Jonas Skat, also comes along, having told Jons that he is lonely and doesn't want to go home because everyone will make fun of him . He is quite drunk and carries a sledgehammer. A smith by trade, he is neither particularly handsome nor intelligent, but he is as well-meaning as possible. He represents the well-intentioned but foolish part of the soul, easily deceived and easily appeased. In the eerie night there is a sense of foreboding . Jof and Mia lean up against a tree somewhat away from the others, Mia with Mikael in her arms. Nearby the knight sits, staring down at his chessboard. Death approaches him to finish their game. Jof looks up and sees them playing. He awakens his wife and tells her what he has seen. Despite the fact that her own eyes show her only the knight, Mia believes that Jof sees something more, and that what he sees is real. She believes in her husband even though she sees nothing at all. She has faith in this faith even after the incident with the painted wagon wheels. Her good trusting nature and love for her husband allow her to have faith in him. Furthermore, her long association with Jof has taught her that despite his eccentricities, he is well-meaning and always acts for what he believes to be her own good. Faith must come through love and through the trust which develops over time as the object of faith proves to be constant and worthy of trust. In this sense, faith in God is no different from faith in one's spouse. This is another way in which Mia and Jof, as a couple, are an image of God's love for man. Jof tells Mia that they must attempt an escape, and she agrees to try. He rises and tiptoes toward the wagon. Mia reveals little about himself, to Mia he tells a story complete with poetic details. Her loving nature brings him back to the love which he had himself forgotten. "We were newly married," he muses. "And we played together. We laughed a great deal. I wrote songs to her eyes, to her nose, to her beautiful little ears. We went hunting together and at night we danced." With love comes joy, laughter, play. This one little paragraph reveals nearly as much about the knight as does the confessional scene. He too is capable of happiness, of laughter, and of image-making in writing poetry. Perhaps it is the pain which he felt after leaving his love which caused him to shut out this aspect of his personality. To love is to risk pain. The act of sun-ende1ing to emotion, intuition, or childlike faith requires the ability and willingness to risk pain. "Faith is a torment," he tells Mia. "It is like loving someone who is out there in the darkness but never appears, no matter how loudly you call." Mia does not understand but looks honestly concerned. The knight looks down at her, the first person in the film who really seems to be listening to him, and he shakes his head as if shaking away a mirage, then smiles. "Everything I've said seems meaningless and unreal while I sit here with you and your husband. How unimportant it all becomes suddenly," he says. He takes the strawberries from Mia's extended hand and eats them, as if he were finally accepting the gift of love which she is offering. It is not unlike the Christian symbol of Communion. Perhaps this moment is the closest we see the knight come to achieving salvation. He does not believe that he could ever achieve the childlike faith and unconditional love which Mia and Jof display, but he is willing to try and content himself with the knowledge that this kind of faith does exist. Mia and Jof are a sign that there is divinity among men, an image of the love of God. The knight cannot make himself become like Mia and Jof, but he can enjoy and protect what they are. As a knight in the Crusades, as a nobleman and as an intellectual, he found no real nobility or fulfillment. Finally, in the presence of a family, he discovers a purpose for his chivalry, a reason for being a knight. He picks up the bowl of milk carefully in both hands so as not to spill a drop. His voice is soft and calm as he speaks. The camera focuses on him quietly, as the sun sets behind him with a soft burst of color against the horizon. His words are soothing. " I shall remember this moment. The silence, the twilight, the bowl of strawberries and milk, your faces in the evening light. Mikael sleeping, Jof with his lyre. I'll try to remember what we have talked about. I'll carry this memory between my hands as carefully as if it were a bowl of fresh milk. And it will be an adequate sign - it will be enough for me." He rises, turns, and goes to keep his chess appointment with Death. "Why do you look so satisfied?" asks Death, as they sit over the chess board. "That's my secret," replies the knight. 44 stands staring at the knight for a moment, then turns and humes over to Jof, cradling the sleeping child in her arms. At just that moment the knight looks up from the chessboard and sees Mia and Jof sneaking away. He turns and knocks over several pieces with his cloak, pretending that he wants Death to think it was an accident. He looks down at the board and then up at Death again. "I've forgotten how the pieces stood," he tells Death. "But I have not," replies Death with a little laugh. "You can't get off that easily." As Death sets the pieces back up on the board, the knight continues to watch Mia and Jof over Death's shoulder. Their wagon begins to pull away, slowly and quietly. Death, absorbed in fixing the pieces, takes no notice whatsoever. He sets the last figure upright, glances at the board for a moment, and then looks up at the knight. "Now I see something interesting," he says. "What do you see?" stammers the knight quickly, obviously worried that Death has seen Mia andJofattempting their escape. "You are mated on the next move," replies Death. ''That's true," says the knight softly, his voice filled with relief that the juggler and his wife and son have not been caught and hindered in their escape. He may die, but Mia and Jof will get away. Yet the significance of the knight's noble deed does not lie in the deed itself. Rather it lies in the motivation behind it. The knight's association with the unconditional love and simple domestic faith of Mia, J of, and their son, has filled him with love and remembrance that beauty does exist in people, in God' s creatures on Earth. The light of Mia and her family has seeped into his life and has given him the proper motivation for completing his "one meaningful deed." However, helping Mia and Jof escape is a truly great act not because it was done and done successfully , but because it was done from selfless love. Soon it is morning. The knight, the squire, the young woman, the smith, and the smith's wife all walk slowly up a rocky incline toward the knight's castle in single file. The sun shines in the sky, and the waves of the sea ebb and flow far below at their backs. The film has come full circle. Despite all the changes and developments which have occurred, the viewer finds himself once more upon a rocky, somewhat desolate seashore. Of course, there are several differences. The film began with ruins of a castle in the sea and the knight and Jons riding through the ruins of a castle. The castle here is nearly as empty, nearly as dreary, but it is not nearly so inhospitable; the walls still stand firmly and it looks well-kept. This is meant to be the opposite shore, but one cannot really tell that from the looks of the ten-ain. The sea is constant and looks the same no matter where one goes. In time the water will wash away this castle as well. It is a symbol of the constancy of nature and how fleeting the life of man is in comparison. All the characters go inside and are greeted by the knight's wife. Only she has stayed behind to welcome the knight home; everyone else has fled from the plague. She prepares a small meal and reads from th'e book of Revelation as they eat. "And when the Lamb broke the seventh seal, there was silence in Heaven for about the space of half an hour. And I saw seven angels which stood before God, and to them were given seven trumpets." All are completely silent as she reads, eating or gazing down at the table; all reflect this silence. Only the silent young woman looks up and out the window, where a ray shines into the darkness. She alone sees the light that is symbolic of God's presence, Jesus often being referred to as the "light of the world" in the New Testament. Again there is a sense of coming full circle, because the words that the knight's wife reads are the same words read by the voice at the beginning. It is reminiscent of, "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust." What began with a quote from Revelation and the mesmerizing waves of the sea goes back to the sea, quoting exactly the same passage. Three booming knocks sound downstairs at the door. Jons lights a torch and goes out into the corridor and downstairs to see who it is. Meanwhile the knight's wife continues to read. Jons returns alone and throws his torch into the fire before sitting down again, a very severe look upon his face. The earlier chess scene when the knight sacrificed his knight in order to put Death's king in check has proven to be prophetic. The knight has sacrificed himself in order to trick Death and aid Mia and Jof in their escape; he has finally accomplished a deed which is worthy of the title "knight." In those who are of faith he has found a purpose, which allows him to defeat Death, although in a different way than he may have originally intended. The decision to help Mia, Jof, and Mikael escape is not a logical one but an emotional and intuitive one; however, the escape is aided by logic. In knocking over the pieces, the knight has broken the logical rules of the game, but in so doing he has made the best use of his intellect and has really won the game. His life will soon end, but his goal has been accomplished; he has found some fulfillment in a decision made through love and executed through the intellect. He has finally utilized the capacity of his whole soul. "Did you enjoy your reprieve?" asks Death. "Yes, I did" replies theknight in a resolute tone. Although he is still tormented by the question of God's existence and the awareness of his own wretchedness, he is satisfied in having achieved his one important goal. With the escape of Mia and Jof, and especially Mikael, comes the guarantee of the survival of the best sort of humanity. Despite spiritual turbulence and plague, the personification of love, fidelity, childlike fmth, youth, and hope for the future will always survive, for they are beautiful, enchanted, and will always be protected by those who truly seek to do good. 45 �A melancholy music is added to the silence. The young woman turns in her chair to face a figure who approaches from out of the corridor. It is Death. All the characters rise to face him. The knight stands behind the others, praying feverishly, his hands covering his face in sorrow. Even now, despite the sense of purpose and achievement he found with Mia and Jof and his noble deed, he is tormented, lacks a sense of completeness, and feels his own wretchedness. Yet, in his final prayer, he uses the words "us" and "we", showing that Mia and Jof have taught him something of love. Perhaps the expe1ience of unconditional love combined with the sense of his own confused wretchedness has placed him , at the moment of his death, closer to God than at any other moment in his life. As a young married man he experienced love; as a world-weary knight he felt his own wretchedness, but only at the end of life does he experience both simultaneously. This places him at last in a position to begin to comprehend the unique marriage of unconditional love and intense suffering that is found in Christ on the cross. It is this which allows him, finally, to pray in utter humility. Does he achieve salvation? Whether he does or not, he is certainly closer to God at the moment of his death than he was the day before. The squire stares straight ahead and tells the knight not to worry about eternity, in denial even to the end. Plog and his wife stand together; she curtsies. The knight's wife looks determined and keeps a brave face. The young woman kneels, a look of thankful bliss upon her face. The camera lingers on her face. "It is the end," she says, quoting the crucifixion scene from Matthew. Of all the characters left after Mia and Jofs escape, she is the one who is most in tune with the instinct to help others, and she is the one who most welcomes Death. In the morning, the sun is shining brightly, glistening off the sea. On the beach there is a wagon from which Jof and Mia, with Mikael in her anns, have emerged. Jof gazes into the distance and sees the knight, Skat, Plog, Jons, and the others dancing off in the distance, led away by Death as they shed bitter tears. The viewer sees them as well, upon a hilltop, following Death in a line. Are they really dancing or only being led away like a prison gang? We cannot see their faces in order to look for tears. It is a beautiful but uncertain image. Mia chides Jof gently and they both gaze at their son briefly, before turning and leading the wagon away, walking toward the sunlight - Mia and Jof, like Mary and Joseph escaping to Egypt with the Light of the World. With this image the film ends. Our humanity, and its most important aspects, are revealed in the images we create. Furthermore, there is something of God's nature that comes across in the images we make. Just as people can be seen as images of God, so can the images people create mirror God's image. Reflecting upon the images, we gain much insight into our own natures and a tiny glimpse into God's. We add ow· perceptions to those of others and are encourages to ponder the topics that most concern us, to consider the nature of God and our relationship to him, to wonder how we might best come to achieve salvation. The consideration of Bergman's film involves all aspects of our nature. The emotional and intuitive react to the images of the film and are then analyzed by the rational. The tormented seeker, the mocking doubter, the loving, childlike faith, hope for the future, instinct to help others and do good, the materialist and the sensualist, the evil hypocrite, and dumb well-meaningness - all parts of the soul are confronted and engaged by the film. "In our fear we make an image," says the knight, and this is what Bergman himself has done. Bergman, involved in the search for his own sense of purpose, has created an image which makes its viewer ask the same questions and seek answers to them. In bringing my own perceptions and experiences to the understanding and interpretation of Bergman' s, I have found answers to many questions and more questions to the answers which I already had. The question of Goo's existence is never answered by the film; the knight dies filled with spiritual uncertainty. Even his one meaningful deed does not absolve him from his sense of wretchedness, or allow him to subdue God within himself. The glimpses of God which are seen in the film are veiled with doubt Mia and Jof are a pale image of God's love, but they are an image nonetheless and one in which the knight finds some fulfillment. Perhaps he never achieves real salvation; yet he finds purpose in the love and protection of them, of their faith, and their future. Bergman offers no insight into how one achieves such faith; in fact he seems to believe that it may be impossible, but his portrayal of Mia and Jof reveals and exalts their spirituality and the spiritual aspect of their love. In the church as an organization there is no salvation. In self-persecution and man's inhumanity to man are found the greatest, basest and most macabre evils. In the bawdy and comic there is joy but not a lasting salvation. To help another human being in a selfless act of love is the greatest act of which man is capable. In this there lies a pale image of God's selfless sacrifice for the sake of mankind. Ingmar Bergman, in making "The Seventh Seal" has created a series of images which encourage questioning, which leads to the self-examination, and possibly to a new understanding of God and man.By encouraging this questioning, Bergman is benefitting mankind in a very different way from the knight, but in an equally important and powerful one. With each viewing of the film, the questioning is renewed, more answers are found, and more questions are discovered. With "The Seventh Seal" Bergman has created a legacy of timeless questions embedded in a legacy of timeless imagery. He has created a film to be adored and meditated upon by the entire soul, and to be watched again and again. 46 Bibliography The Holy Bible, New International Version. Colorado Springs, CO: International Bible Society, 1984. Bergman, Ingmar. Four Screenplays oflngma.r Bergman. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1960. Bergman, Ingmar. The Magic Lantern. New York: Penguin Books, 1988. Bergman, Ingmar. "The Seventh Seal". Svenskfilmindustri/Janus Films, Inc. , 1956. Pascal, Blaise. Pensees. London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1943. 47 �nThe Beauty of Francesca da Rimini-Dante' s Divine Comedy LJ Carrie L. Sager Dante's l nferno is the home of eternal sin.Inside its walls the "people who have lost the good of the intellect," and all hope, endure forever.Their unrepentant lives on earth have earned them eternal damnation.Dante takes great care in making their punishment fitting for their sin - the punishment is the sin.Sometimes the appearance of these sinners is enough to portray the essence of their sin.At other times, the cmrnption of these souls lies deeper than the mere distortion of their flesh.For Dante to experience the true nature of their sin, he must speak with these damned souls. Dante gives special recognition to every sin:each sinner has a specific place in the Inferno.He divides sin into three categories: Incontinence, Violence, and Fraud.Furthermore, there is a hierarchy of sin.While all sin dooms the soul, in the Divine Comedy there is a gradation.The Inferno is structured by this ranking of sin.Fraud - the deliberate misuse of the intellect - is the worst sin for Dante.Consequently, the Fraudulent are sunk into the nethermost depths of Hell.Violence finds its place in a region above Fraud, and Incontinence, the least damnable of these three sins, is punished in the uppermost regions of Hell. In Inferno V, Dante begins his descent into Hell proper.He is immediately thrown into a confrontation with Minos, the maitre d' of Hell.As if through the eyes of an unrepentant sinner, Dante sees Minos as the malicious, bestial, relentless judgment of Hell itself.But Dante is a repentant sinner, and by the grace of God he passes unscathed beyond Minos to the second circle.Once inside, he receives his first impression of Hell: the circle of the Lustful. Before Dante beholds this spectacle, however, he is at first overwhelmed by "the notes of pain."This music gives rise to a scene in his mind's eye: "Cross" No.3 - Nathan James Humphrey peaceful, but Dante's meeting with Francesca is particularly perplexing.Before Dante sees Francesca, he sees a band of illustrious shades.He describes them as the "knights and ladies of old times," and is disturbed to find them here in Hell.Upon seeing them, he stands bewildered and overcome with pity .Instead of choosing to speak to one of those great shades, of whom there are more than a thousand, Dante is instead drawn to Francesca.None of the most renowned lovers of antiquity can wrest Dante's attention for more than a brief momentnot Dido, Semiramis, Achilles, Helen, Paris, Tristan, nor Cleopatra.Yet Francesca, whose name is buried in anonymity by the collage of illustrious sinners, captures Dante's attention and freezes the pilgrim in his tracks.While Dante compares all of the famous shades to a flock of cranes, Francesca alone is described as a dove.In the midst of the darkness that consumes the other sinners, Francesca strangely emerges as the sole ray of light. Dante has not stopped merely to admire the dove-like image of Francesca.He "would gladly speak to the two that go together and seem so light upon the wind." And when he wants to speak to Francesca, he must call her "by the love that leads" her.Although Francesca is a carnal sinner in the circle of the Lustful, she has an air of nobility about her.She will not answer to a beastly mating call; she will only respond to the "loving" call of Dante.Finally, when she is called, the wind does not restrain her: she comes "with wings poised and motionless" to the nest of Dante. This description of Francesca as seeming "so light upon the wind" adds to her unexpected magnetism.While the malignant air "scourges" the illustrious shads, Francesca is neither beaten nor driven by the wind, but floats peacefully.Yet this hardly appears to be the "eternal pain" promised at the gate of Hell.Whey is it that Francesca appears to avoid the punishment meted to her fellow sinners?This discrepancy becomes increasingly visible when the punishment afforded to the Lustful is considered.This requires an examination of the metaphor that Dante employs to describe the condition of the Lustful: birds and the wind. At first, the comparison between the birds and the Lustful seems oddly inappropriate.After all, what other animal seems as innocent and carefree in its natural habitat as does the bird that gracefully floats upon the winds and expresses its freedom with each beat of its wings? How is it possible that these lofty creatures are the analogues of the Lustful who languish in eternal punishment? Dante provides an answer. The wind, nominally the bird's ally in lifting it above all earthy constraints, is the source of The hellish stom1, never resting, seizes and drives the spirits before it; smiting and whirling them about, it torments them.When they come before its fw-y there are shrieks, weeping and lamentation ... (31-35) Dante compares these carnal sinners "who subject reason to desire" to birds receiving eternal punishment from the wind.In a violent whirlwind of fury, the storm feeds upon the spirits in the circle of the Lustful.But there are two birds who are presented as floating above this furious whirlwind: Paolo and Francesca da Rimini, two lovers who are bound together for all eternity.While the other sinners are driven by the whirlwind of restlessness, this pair appears to float peacefully on the wind. When Dante meets the lovers, he focuses almost exclu- eternal punishment for the Lustful.Consider how Dante de- sively on Francesca.Not only is her punishment unexpectedly scribes these birds as thrown into eternal submission: 49 48 �presents love as a grand, undeniable passion that conquers both her and Paolo.Francesca's interpretation is this:great lovers become great through being conquered by love, the most magnificent of passions.For Francesca, Lancelot and Guinevere embodied this greatness.She believes that themark of their greatness was captured in their kiss.Here then is the root of Francesca's submission: she emulated that" great" kiss in order to be immortalized as a great lover. As an unrepentant sinner, what Francesca desired in her earthy life-immortal greatness-she continues to lust after, though she is in Hell.Francesca assumes that Dante, the pilgrim, has "pity for her evil plight (93)."She therefore designs her speeches to glorify herself in the pilgrim's pitying eyes.She models her story from the story of Lancelot and Guinevere: she enshrouds her submission in the poetic depiction of a love story.At the same time, Francesca's carefully contrived rhetoric unmasks her sinful character: Francesca's selfish pride is betrayed by her own words. For instance, when Francesca shamelessly claims "love. .. absolves no one beloved from loving (104)," she is clearly wrapped in vanity .Not only does she honestly envision herself as a glorious victim of love, she even names her own lover, Paolo, as love's accomplice.When Paolo was "seized" by love, she was forced into the role of the beloved, in which she was committed to reciprocating his love.Thus she pridefully, albeit naively, denies all responsibility for her actions.In fact, Francesca's conclusion that "Caina waits for him who quenched our life (107)" is her final exclamation of pride.She assumes that their death for the most noble cause, namely love, will receive its due vengeance. While her pride pervades her words, it is also at the heart of her actions.In her lust for greatness, Francesca claims she submitted herself wholly to love: not as an erotic, carnal desire, but the most magnificent of passions.Dante, moreover, must call her by this love "that leads her," for Francesca only hears the call of love.Yet Dante is not the only person who must bow to Francesca's pride: her own lover Paolo must bow also.While both Francesca and Dante allude to his presence, not once in the entire canto is Paolo actually named.Without formal acknowledgment, Paolo is simply the eternal lover of Francesca.More to the point, as Francesca attempts to glorify herself, Paolo can only stand by her side pitifully and weep. While Francesca assumes that she has earned both greatness of soul and justification for her actions, all that she has trnly earned is a place in Dante's Inferno.For her selfish pride and naive submission, Francesca is eternally punished in the circle of the Lustful.As the Lustful submitted themselves to sexual wantonness, they are eternally punished by lust's fmious whirlwind.Similarly, Francesca's punishment fits her submission and is equally as severe. Francesca is enslaved, like the other shades, by the wind.For instance, Dante could only call Francesca and Paolo after "the wind bent their course" toward him.Although Fran- Enshrouded in this mesmerizing speech is Francesca's testimony to her submission.Yet her speech remarkably does not betray even the slightest hint of resentment.Although the wind in the circle of the Lustful personifies lust as a formidable, malicious force that seemingly drives the spirits into eternal submission, there is a great discrepancy in Francesca' s account: she is most unlike the defenseless bird whose only words are the agonizing "notes of pain. ''Rather than ignore her submission, Francesca recalls it fondly .Francesca presents love as a great, unconquerable passion that nestled itself in her "fair form" with "his charm" gripped both the lovers in a forceful embrace.While she claims that both she and her lover were indeed "seized" by love, they were not stricken with fear.In this embrace, theirs was one life and "one death." Although they languish in Hell, this unconquerable love continues to bind the two lovers together for all eternity. The root of this union is made clear in Francesca's second speech: Hither, thither, downward, upward, it drives them; no hope ever comforts them, not to say of rest, but of less pain (40-45). Thus, in Dante's analogy, these birds are forever beaten by the unending, merciless winds.The "notes of pain" that Dante first heard are sung by these birds as they are continually brutalized by the fury of the wind.And while the wind is their punishment, its fury never rests.In the circle of the Lustful, Dante presents the carnal sinners as these birds who are eternal slaves to the wind.Now the analogy is less cryptic: for Dante, the birds represent the Lustful, and lust is the wind that torments them.In Dante's Hell, Lust is a violent, bestial desire that provides an eternity of relentless agony.The submission to lust imprisons the carnal sinner as does the relentless wind that tortures the birds. Dante describes this submission with a single word: Incontinence.The Incontinents thatDante finds in the second circle of Hell, moreover, have committed the particular sin of lasciviousness.However, the Lustful are not "seized" by the fury of their desires like defenseless birds.On the contrary, theirs is a willing submission as they "subject reason to desire."The eternal punishment of the Lustful is self-imposed damnation.They willingly abandon their humanity and surrender themselves as eternal slaves to their desires. Hence in the Inferno these sinners are punished with their sin- an eternity of submission.The names of Dante's lustful - sinners speak for themselves: incestuous Semiramis, unfaithful Dido, and wanton Cleopatra.For their unjust actions, spurred by their lustfulness, they receive their just punishment.Francesca, however, presents an unexpected irony:a beautiful sinner.How can an eternity of floating peacefully with her lover be an eternal nightmare for Francesca?Why does Dante depict this wanton soul with such tender language, and more to the point, what role does Francesca's beauty play in Dante's pilgrimage? Despite the confusion engendered by her seeming beauty, Francesca is undeniably a sinner.She fits Dante's description perfectly, for Francesca submitted herself wholly to her desires.But while Francesca is guilty of a willful submission, as are her illustrious companions, her sinfulness is not readily discernible.For instance, Semiramis was "so corrupted by licentious vice that she made lust lawful" to restore her virtue.In contrast, Francesca's actions do not appear to have been driven by such sexual wantonness.This is evident in her two speeches.Francesca's first speech is an exposition of her views on the nature of love: We read one day for pastime of Lancelot, how love constrained him.We were alone and had no misgiving.Many times that reading drew our eyes together and changed the color in our faces, but one point alone it was that mastered us; when we read that the longed-for smile was kissed by so great a lover, he who shall never be parted from me, all trembling, kissed my mouth.A Galeotto was the book and he that wrote it; that day we read in it no farther. (127-138) This speech is not the story of two lovers driven by sexual wantonness into mad, furious love.In declaring that "we read one day for pastime," Francesca brings a casual air to her ill-fated meeting with her lover.While theirs was an adulterous affair, the meeting was not the result of elaborate schemes designed to satisfy their sexual desires.Francesca is more concerned with their reading - for pastime - the story of Lancelot and Guinevere and their fated kiss than her own story.In fact, the love story of Paolo and Francesca bears a striking resemblance to the story they read that afternoon. Their union was supposedly inspired by the union of Lancelot and Guinevere.What Francesca saw in these two lovers was their greatness.As great lovers, they received poetic immortality; through their story, they would not only live forever, but also be revered for their greatness. Francesca envied them for their greatness.As she read their story, she was impassioned by it: "that reading drew our eyes together and changed the color in our faces."In other words, Francesca was spurred by this magnificence, as Lancelot was "constrained" by love.This constraint reached its culmination " when the longed-for smile was kissed by so great a lover. "This moment captured, for Francesca, the greatness of Lancelot and Guinevere.She was inspired to emulate this "great" kiss: she wanted to capture this greatness for herself. In her first speech, Francesca defines this greatness.She Love, which is quickly kindled in the gentle heart, seized this man for the fair form that was taken from me, and the manner that afflicts me still.Love, which absolves no one beloved from loving, seized me so strongly with his chann that, as thou seest, it does not leave me yet.Love brought us to one death (100-106). cesca was willing to speak, she was not free to linger.She tells Dante that as "the wind is quiet, as here it is" may she speak with him.As a bird, she is a prisoner to the wind. Her floating itself is eternal punishment for Francesca.Since the wind never rests, Francesca, a prisoner to this unending wind, has no respite from floating.U nlike the river Po, which "descends to rest" at the shores of her city Ravenna, Francesca can never rest. Moreover, as Dante's sinners determine their own punishment, consider one last time Francesca's submission. While some of the Lustful are characterized by their fwious sexual desires, like Semiramis, Francesca's motivation did not arise from an uncontrollable desire for sex.Francesca believed that love was the vessel that would carry her to greatness.For this reason, and not for carnal indulgence, she submitted herself to love. Francesca also believed that she could a cc omplish this by emulating the kiss of Lancelot and Guinevere.As the culmination of their greatness, she envisioned the kiss as the ultimate joining of their two souls: two great lovers made into one great soul by love.As Francesca believed this to be love's final victory, she imagined love lifting them from mere mortality to greatness, as the wind lifts a bird from all earthly restraints. Yet what Francesca saw as a great consummation - the kiss-is, for Dante, a grotesque injustice against God.Again, recall Dante's analogy of the birds in the circle of the Lustful: When they come before its fury there are sln·ieks, weeping, and lamentation, and there they blaspheme the power of God (34-36). As a carnal sinner, Francesca willingly submitted herself to love's power rather than humbling herself before God.When she abandoned the power of God's grace, she abandoned any hope she might have had of greatness.As Dante knows, without God's grace, Francesca will never achieve the ultimate greatness of Divine Love. Hence, as Francesca condemned herself to eternal damnation, she also determined her own punishment.Though she assumed that falling in love meant being conquered by love, she is now an eternal prisoner to love.As love is personified by the wind, she is imprisoned like a bird.In face, as she imagined love lifting her as a bird, she has received just that: as the wind carries her, she will float, helplessly, forever.As she envisioned the kiss as joining their two souls, Francesca is physically bound to Paolo- for eternity.This is clearly an eternal nightmare for Francesca:she will never be at rest from her "affliction," whether it be her desire for greatness, Paolo, or love. While Francesca's lust for greatness explains her sinfulness, much is still left unanswered.For instance, why is Francesca, a sinner, compared to a dove?Why is her sinful submission enshrouded in the poetic depiction of a love 51 50 • �story?Why is her eternal punishment described with such gentle language?ln sum, why does Dante take such care to preserve the beauty of Francesca, and what role does her beauty play in his pilgrimage? The pilgrimage is, above all else, Dante's quest for salvation.As Dante "came to himself in a dark wood," he began his journey .Although he stood at the food of "the delectable mountain which is the beginning and cause of all happiness," Dante could not make the ascent.Three fearful beasts blocked his path.Unable to conquer his fear, Dante was forced to take "another road" - the descent into Hell. Dante's inspiration for his pilgrimage is Beatrice, "the Sun of his eyes (Paradiso, XXX)."She is also the cause of Dante's salvation:she descended into Hell to summon Virgil to be his guide and deliver him from his fears ~The thought of her love restored, in Dante, his courage and freed him from all his doubts and fears (Inferno II, 131-137).Without Beatrice, there would be no pilgrimage. Beatrice is the embodiment of God's grace.As the light of Divine Love shines through her, she is beauty in its purest form.Through her eyes, "which shine brighter than the stars," and her smile, "the second beauty," Beatrice reflects the grace of God.Moreover, her beautiful features serve to captivate Dante as he is raised through all of the heavenly spheres to the Empyrean.In this way, Beatrice uplifts Dante from "servitude to liberty," and makes his soul whole (Paradiso, XXXI).At the same time, she prepares Dante for his final vision, the vision of God, through which his desire and will are united in perfect harmony.In short, Beatrice is Dante's way to salvation. The beauty of Francesca da Rimini mirrors the beauty of Beatrice.As Francesca is compared to a dove, she is both an image of pwity and a messenger of peace.Her courteous words to Dante, Purgatory, she chides Dante for his weakness: So soon as I was on the threshold of my second age, and had changed life, he took himself from me, and gave himself to others. When I had risen from flesh to spirit, and beauty and virtue were increased in me, I was less dear and less pleasing to him, and he turned his steps along a way not true, following false images of good which pay no promise in full (Purgatory XXX, 124-132) This rebuke makes clear the difference between Francesca and Beatrice.Francesca is a false image of Beatrice, just as she offers a false image of paradise.Whereas Beatrice is Dante's way to salvation, Francesca is his way to eternal damnation.Francesca will lead Dante from liberty to servitude: as the carnal sinner "subjects reason to desire," he abandons his will and his freedom.Hence Dante will only be free when his will is preserved and united with his desire. Dante overcomes the temptation of Francesca; he is not deceived by the beauty that enshrouds her sinfulness.In so doing, Dante is able to complete his journey and thus reunite himself with Beatrice.With her, he finds the greatness of Divine Love and the ultimate fulfilment of his desire. Meanwhile, although Francesca's desire only earns her a place in Hell, ironically, she receives the greatness for which she longed.Before Dante journeyed into Hell, Francesca's name was buried in anonymity.However, her meeting with Dante is her initiation into poetic immortality.By telling her story to Dante, she is no longer an anonymous shade: she is Francesca da Rimini, one of the most unforgettable sinners in Dante's Inferno. 0 living creature gracious and friendly ... if the King of the universe were our friend we would pray to him for thy peace ... (880-92) are spoken with the sweetness of Beatrice's angelic voice.And the dove image of Francesca, lightly "floating upon the wind," intrigues Dante and draws him away from all of the illustrious souls. The source of Francesca's beauty, however, is not the Divine Light.As a sinner, she is the product of her sinful desires.In other words, she is the incarnation of ·Sin.More to the point, Francesca is the temptress of Hell.Her beauty does not at all reflect the fearful spirit of the leopard.On the contrary, as a temptress she appeals to Dante's greatest desire, love.She presents an everlasting love that uplifts the soul and allows it to fly like a bird.By submitting himself wholly to her desire, Dante can achieve what Francesca considers to be the highest good - immortal greatness. Hence Francesca makes submission look beautiful.And Beatrice is witness to this deception.At the top of mount Untitled - 52 David F. Simpson 53 �nInsomniac lJ I don't have the time for this time for myself. I'm not interested in the quiet, In the damned solitude of silence, In this perfect atmosphere for rumination. I'm not looking for enlightenmentAll that I want Is the map that will lead me out of these interstices between night and day. Stacie Slotnick '94 Not being awake is different from being asleep. Mind glowing emptily, Numb but wide awake, Wide awake. There is a twelve-tone symphony of night that no one hears. It has a recuni.ng theme of car doors, creaking floorboards, and his breath whistling shrilly. The bass note of night: a continuo of engines and airplanes. The intermittent ripieno choir of drunk, cackling women. The flapping awnings applaud: Congratulations, congratulations. In London they're waking, In California they' re going to sleep right now but not you, not you. You've done it again, gotten yourself stuck in the place with no time, with no place, where there's no one, nothing, but the disemboclied numbers ofthe bloodshot red clockfaceBloody streetsign leading nowhere. Congratulations, congratulations. Earlier, I'd had five minutes of being tired but didn't catch them. Untitled - Dominic Crapuchettes They flashed by like an idea I couldn't grasp: What is sleep? 55 54 �Clytemnestra, A Sonnet Nathan James Humphrey "KAYTAl MHITP A: OL yw TEK01JO"U TOV8 o¢w E8pfljJaµT}V. OPE:z:;THZ:: T} KUpTa µavns ouc OVELpUTUlV cpo~OS' . 11 -928-9, Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers Suckle the serpent, give him restLet him exchange venom for milk. 0 what a fire lies near thy breast What pang of tooth on fleshly silk. Suffer the serpent to slowly slither Over thy sacred, supple feature; His bite dothy cause thy breast to whither For evil is ever in that creature. Like Clytemnestra live and do-Who drempt a death wrought by her son, And not allowing the dream to woo, The serpent with her letting slyly won. The fangs by moonlight now are glistening; When then dost thou despise, not listening? 56 �Non-Profit Org . BULK RATE U.S. POSTAGE St. John's College Annapolis, Maryland 21404 PAID PERMIT No. 120 ANNAPOLIS, MD. � 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 <em>Energeia</em> Description An account of the resource <em>Energeia</em> is a non-profit, student magazine, which is published once a year and distributed among students, faculty, alumni, and staff of St. John's College, Annapolis.  Staff welcome submissions from all members of the community -- essays, poems, stories, original math proofs, lab projects, drawings, and the like. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context energeia Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper (bound book) Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 56 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 Energeia, Winter 1994 Description An account of the resource Issue of the Energeia, published in Winter 1994. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Belanger, Yvonne (Senior Editor) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 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 Energeia Winter 1994 Student publication https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/ae9a46b154338df3252909758589a082.pdf 1f889c62c20bc4cf9adaed30d2fedd40 PDF Text Text C.G. Bell Symbolic History SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 1. Nature: The Perceptive Field Part I 1) Sunrise on the Lacanha River, Chiapas, Mexico (CGB) Sound: Various frogs, superimposed; Sounds of the Night, Houghton Mifflin Where to begin with what rounds on itself, a skein of endless complex — as if Heraclitus' metaballon anapauetai, "hurled about it draws to rest," were crisscrossed, augmented and diminished, within and without, interfused, like water glints, like the cries of frogs. But that is to have begun already, with uncertainty, the amorphous swim of a tropic stream — Thales, "all things come from water." (end frog cries) 2) Human Embryo, 6.5 weeks, Photographed by L. Nilsson, Time-Life Reproduction, from April 30, 1965 Sound: Heartbeat of CGB — stand-in for embryonic pulse Goethe's homunculus in the wide sea. And what other source do we find, if we grope systematic thought to its pre-child or pre-historic origins; organic body to Harvey's embryonic pulse (fade heart); 3) Orion Nebula, U.S. Naval Observatory suns and worlds to the turbulence of galactic foam — that chaos which seems in Genesis either God's first work, or the primal dark on which his spirit moves. 4) Monet, 1914-18, Water Lilies, Sunset, detail; Orangerie, Paris Music: Debussy, 1903-5, La Mer, near end of second movement, Columbia MS 6077 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 1 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In art, that all-beginning may have waited for the end: the dream-erotic meltings of Mallarmé's "Faun," "on the air drowsy with tufted slumbers," Rimbaud's "le Poème/ De la Mer, infusé d'astres, et lactescent," that "sea, infused with stars, and lactescent," to which Debussy gave tone-color; in painting what swirls through this post-Impressionist Monet, symbolist Redon, the Fauves, to the whirlpool abstracts of Kandinsky's Jugendstil. (Fade Debussy) 5) Jean Goujon, 1548-9, Nymph, Fontaine des Innocents, Paris Music: Francesco da Milano, 1536, Fantasia, Lute, Archiv 2533 73 (#6) The commitment of early art (as of early music and thought) had been to the crystalline; as if what it took to rear a culture out of nature — Egyptian, Classical, this Renaissance nymph from a fountain by Goujon, or the lute fantasies of Francesco da Milano — were the eternal clarity of reason, to set a temple of Parian marble over the Hydra flux. 6) Attic c. 500 B.C., Head of Korê #674, Acropolis Museum, Athens The Greeks had expressed it forever, the sheer wonder of form's discovery. For that shared logos of the intelligible, we would almost risk all. But we can no more rest our thought on that Acropolis than in the reed bed of the faun. All history exists, and we carry it in our cells. (Fade Milano) a7) b7) 7) Very Large Array, from southeast, New Mexico (CGB '87) Circumpolar star-tracks over Anglo-Australian Reflector Parabolas of Very Large Array, at sunset, San Augustin plains, New Mexico, Smithsonian, July 1978 We are not our own embryo sculpting instinctive walls. The senses fell or were channeled before we were men, mammals, reptiles, while we were still awash in the Cambrian seas. Nor is it with the bare senses that we perceive. There is the lidless eye of Palomar. The radio parabolas of mile-long arrays, of which computers are the sorting nerves, scan the sky for quasars and black holes of cosmic death and origin. 8) 7/1995 Micro-organic decomposers in a pond, Smithsonian, January 1978 Nature: The Perceptive Field 2 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Even the tropic pool opens to the recess that terrified Pascal and delighted Leibniz with the suspension of structure within structure forever — the microscopic stair of live automatons. Surely the first (though almost mind-dissolving) task of every fresh art and thought is to yield to the breathing of that organically transformed Pythagorean void: 9) 9a) Giant spring near Pujiltique, Chiapas, reflections (CGB '78) Same, detail with ripples (CGB '78) Void enters into the heaven itself from the infinite air, as though the heavens were breathing; and this void defines the natures of things … Then, on the liquid interface, one sees circles, geometric waves that spread in the very flux of universal water. A calculable curve has arisen from the amorphous itself, its propagated sinusoids the cancellate of whatever countless indeterminacies give the molecular slide of fluidity. Clear as the cut of an archaic Apollo, Euclid smiles over the surface of the Heisenberg pool. a10) 10) Colonies of Volvox (CGB scrapbook of clippings) Volvox, large globular green algal colony, with daughter colonies, Natural History, April 1975 Focus down, like Leeuwenhoek. Somewhere in the water you find Volvox, at the divide between proto- and metazoan. (Whip your reason like the black horse; tell it, "nameable divisions are not lost because they fuse.") You behold the root antinomy of one and many over which mind and nature have been stretched from the start: the sphere of cohesive oneness, yet visibly many, a colony of flagellate eye-spot cells. Such the granules you see glistening, while the entelechy, barely taking up seat in and over them, reproduces itself: those dark seedlings of other colonies, that swell until they break the mother sphere — so death came into the world — another polarity thrust upon us before its time — in one sense real, in another merely the abstracted limits of the life-death field. 11) 11a) Globular Cluster in Hercules, M.13, Hale Observatory Same, detail of the center We have looked into the pond for a globe smaller than Pascal's smallest mite. Now into space, if not for the largest, large enough, the globular cluster in Hercules, part 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 3 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History of our galactic system, only 40,000 light years away, with several hundred thousand stars, the brighter, giants like Betelgeuse; even the faintest seen, larger and brighter than our sun. Consider the tug in and out of a configured thing. Contrary desires in a one are insoluble; tension in substance is transrational. Thought must resolve that paradox in the one-many (no other road), and for the senses, world-structure everywhere concurs. As one matter the whole is drawn in; as many stars accelerated by that entropic fall together, it fights entropy, thrusts out; the resultant is a pulsing boundary in space. a12) 12) Vasopressin molecule, hormone and neurotransmitter; image: Tripos Association of St. Louis, Scientific American, October 1985 Rhenish MS c. 1400, "Aurora consurgens," Zentralbibliothek, Zurich; + V detail The same with an atom, molecule, elastic billiard ball. Lucretius' indissoluble atoms could never have been validated for force-interplay. If he had known the axiomatic field, he could have proved his atoms mystical. So as our search deepens, what were called atoms, then primary particles, sign their dissolving, an interplay of parts, the whole from bottom to top workingly aswim — the many and one even of the soul, which Plato suspends over the whole of the Republic. 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 4 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Thus the alchemists, melting ancient and Eastern experience in the alembic of mythic science, visualized the fusion of androgynous opposites, as fixed and volatile, in the clutch of the blue eagle, rising over the heap of its own dead: "Aurora consurgens." 13) 13a) 13b) Overtone nodes of a sounding metal plate, traced by salt grains (CGB '78) Another example, but more dissonant and chaotic (CGB '78) El Greco c. 1575-77, Pieta, Museum of Art, Philadelphia: V, detail only Sound: From the vibrating plate So music rises from the tensile one-many of vibrating ratios — that art which more than all others imitates the universe itself; as if from this bowed and sounding metal plate, where salt grains have danced into the still nodes between overtone waves (those damped chords you hear above the fundamental), the whole interplay of harmony were stretching acoustic space, from the tugs of dissonance, ratios forever jagged and incommensurate, toward the proportioned accords of Pythagorean one and two, two and three (End sound) — but so sensuously embodied that in a Gesualdo cadence our very guts are entrained in the raging desire and fulfillment of Schopenhauer's "primordial being." Music: a14) b14) c14) 14) Gesualdo da Venosa, 1611, "Dolcissima" close (Deller) VICS-1364 (Close) Circular array of fern fronds, Chiapas (CGB '78) "Self-squared Fractal Dragon," Mandelbrot, Fractal Geometry of Nature Newton's Principia, Lemma XI, with "horned angle" in red Red and green leaves of the madron, Chiapas (CGB '78) The departure of modern from classical (that is, post-Socratic) intelligence is clear. For the ancients, paradox is reason's shipwreck; for a modern, the polar delineation of its natural field. Whatever clarity we draw from the amorphous becomes the pole of an antinomy. If that, for the claimants of cosmos-order, puts the mind in a bind (like the "horned angle" Euclid set up as a pillared mark beyond which human daring should not seek), for us of the infinite and infinitesimal it is not an end but a beginning, not a tie-up but a calling. Through all seasons the red and green leaves of the madron flaunt those metabolic opposites, photosynthesis and digestion, which every plant to some degree combines. We 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 5 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History might assault the tree: "Do you build up or tear down? You can't have it both ways. Why don't you decide?" It grows in the vast abrupt between. 15) 15a) Double rainbow over Cerro Gordo, Santa Fe, NM (CGB '68) Rainbow, looking east from 1260 Canyon Road, Santa Fe, NM (CGB '81) Indeed Aristotle was warm when he wrote, of the Meno paradox of learning: "The soul is so constituted as to be capable of this process." But Nature, too, is constituted for high process; if not, soul would not be here. The rainbow-covenant of no total flood is written in water; it reads: "Forms are emergent" — though between "form" and "emerge" the copula is contradiction. Here the nameable states, distinct to our very senses: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet (which we round on the color wheel like the musical octave; whereas in the continuum the extremes disappear into ultraviolet and infrared), these colors, the Pythagorean tones, the God-given numbers, all resonant responses, crown the relative with absolute emergence from degree. And that spectrum is mathemable. Who would not wonder at such beauty's formulable slide? 16) 16a) Stream flowing through vegetation, Chiapas (CGB '78) Joseph Cornell 1950s(?) "Dovecote" construction, artist's studio, Flushing, New York 16b) Mandelbrot, "Gaussian Hills that Never Were," Brown Function, from Fractal Geometry of Nature 16c) Detail of 16: the flow of water Pascal says, "There are no limits in things; laws would put them there and the mind cannot suffer it." But both nature and mind would limit, and both can and cannot allow it to themselves. Born to flux, can thought only solidify? Aristotle's Analytics: Matter and Form, Nature and Art; Kant's "Experience consists of intuitions which belong to the sensibility, and of Judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding" — one pretends to think that way, makes a brave show; but is it not dried up from the start? As Nietzsche laughed at poor old Kant: "How are synthetic a priori judgments possible? And what was actually his answer? By virtue of a virtue — but unfortunately not in five words …" 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 6 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History If Thinking with a capital T turns out impossible, Pascalian despair is not the only answer. Water-skaters skate on water. They use, indeed, the plasticity and surface tension which make those ripples models for the equational physics of electricity and magnetism. 17) 17a) Quartz crystal against ivy leaves (CGB '78) Crystal cluster among ivy leaves, Santa Fe, NM (CGB '78) But if water and solid are not the polarity of free and bound, what is? Does the antinomy of determinism against sponte sua equally characterize all things? How could it? Billiard ball physics is real; living choice is real. There is a gradient of predictability, as between crystals and leaves. Just so in nature the undergirding of number comes to the surface, crops out as from the amorphous mottling of vines. We say by statistical cancellation; but it was here the ancients seated gods and angelic intelligences — in the regularity of the stars. Here, too, Galilean physics contrived those equations which have lured all knowledge in their wake. While the universe of flow and growth laps those rocks like water, weaves over them like fronds. a18) 18) Columnar basalt: Devil's Post Pile, Bishop, Colorado (Anders Bro '81) Igneous rocks: obsidian, basalt, granite, pegmatite, gneiss (CGB '78) "God forbid," said Blake, "that knowledge should be limited to mathematical demonstration." 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 7 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Within rock only, and not all rock, but the rock element made by fire, of like mineral composition and from the same region, runs the pentad from glassy obsidian, center, blown from a volcano, cooled so fast it has no time to find the lattices of solid; lower left, basalt, the same lava flowing out, cooled in mass, amorphous; left and above, intrusive granite, its quartz, feldspar, and mica, under slower earth-cooling, sorted out, like salt and pepper; diagonally below, pegmatite, that granite under long heat and pressure enlarging its separate crystals; then upper right, gneiss, just such a granite buried and remelted deep under, pulled and stressed like taffy, showing in igneous rock the fluid lines of water. 19) 19a) 19b) Sedimentary rocks, with concentric markings (CGB '78) New Mexico marble, from a panel in the State House, Santa Fe (CGB '88) Judge Percy Bell's 10-carat fire-opal (CGB '81) Pascalian despair? Among the fathomless inventions of nature? Those fire-rocks come to the surface; rains and streams wash them down; out of clay and sand and the lime-gathering seas, new rocks are made, sedimentary. But now, like an alluvial stream ox-bow-bending in the figure-of-eight infinite curves, whatever water has shaped bears the print of water; even when mottled limestone, touched again by intrusive fire, crystallizes in the branching tongues of marble. Wherever polarities are set up, by us or by Nature, they have continually to be swallowed in one, mirrored, reversed, transcended; or polarity itself falls into a stasis — like Pascal's "skeptic Archesilaus, who" (by holding to his skepticism) "became a dogmatist." 20) 20a) Pacific Ocean, calm, low swell, Mazatlan coast, Mexico (CGB, morning, April 24, 1978) Another view of same But mind and nature have deep inescapable axioms. As Waller said of age: "The seas are calm when the winds give o'er;" and Aristotle: "Surely the substratum cannot cause itself to move." 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 8 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History That axiom, which physics calls the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or entropy, is Eleatic. At Elea, they gave it unconditioned, the logic of identity, that Being remains what it is. Applied to process, it became impractical: since no Being can come from non-Being or go into another Being, change cannot exist. We hedge and fudge, but never escape the hydra of the axiom, as that no substance, conceived as one, can stir itself. The ocean needs the wind. And if the wind should die, as here on the Pacific, the waves work less and less. 21) Yen Hui, 14th cent., China, Wave and Moon, private collection Ah, but the contrary axiom enters (for the mind is stretched over more antinomies than Kant troubled himself with): that disparates cannot interact; the contrary is validated for interplay only as subsumed under the one: if wind and water were not matter in motion, neither could affect the other. Now they are one again, and "the substratum cannot cause itself to move"; the closed system comes to rest. Sunlight must be brought in to touch it off, the vector of impingement. But if light and matter are not kindred energies, both electromagnetic, there is no means of contact. The blend dies again, that heat-death which rational physics extrapolates from closed systems and from half the axiom to the unformulable whole. Better the Chinese 14th century Yen Hui, who painted waves as spirit, mystical self-movers, at once the matter and impinging power. a22) 22) Turbulent galaxy, M 82, Ursa Major (changed ‘96 to Centaurus Α) Sierra Club, Galaxies Detailed negative image of M 82 (changed ‘96 to new color image of M 82, Sci. American, Feb. '96) But what else has the physicist done, unwittingly, with that all-pervading and vitalizing flow of energy, both substratum and élan vital? He may repudiate the words; but how to characterize a cosmos of infinite energy transformations under paradox, each parcel in its descent thrusting up another, or returning in its own gyre, where total mass release attends the relativity sink of a black hole. In this exploding galaxy, M. 82, in the Big Bear, where hydrogen filaments spread 14,000 light years above and below the galaxy from some collapse and mass conversion of innumerable suns a million and a half years ago — will the habit of living in a gravitational field instruct us which transfers of energy, in that curved space, are up and which down? 23) 7/1995 Image reversals in facing mirrors, relief plaque of Christ and athlete (CGB '78) Nature: The Perceptive Field 9 �C.G. Bell 23a) Symbolic History Gorilla Diorama, Museum of Natural History, New York City (CGB '79) Since our whole experience is like the image-reversals in confronting mirrors, here a two-sided plaque my Mexican albanil gave me, Christ and athlete, Christ and athlete, alternate forever. Pascal pursues such dipoles, but not far enough: "They do not know that it is the chase, and not the quarry, which they seek." Reflect it again: the quarry validates the chase — as Erasmus had said: "Thus all things are presented by shadows; yet this play is put on in no other way." And what of a world evolved by such play? Suppose Kant's antinomies are reflected back on his prior reasoning. His certainty that "the order of the appearances we entitle nature we ourselves introduce" becomes one of Maxwell's asymptotes: the only laws of matter are those which our minds must fabricate; and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter. — asymptotes abstracted from the temporal curve. a24) 24) James I. Gilbert, c. 1950, Dunes Wanderer, Ann Binyon, Chicago (CGB '81) Detail of same (CGB '52) Music: Beethoven, 1822, Coda of Sonata 32, Op. 111 (Schnabel) V-LCT 1109 The first division might seem of self and other, though until Descartes went into that room with a stove, no one had done much with it. It has come easy since; but not every subjective doubt pulls from the Eleatic axiom self as eternal thinking substance, world as formulable and extended substance, both secured by God as infinite substance and eternal rational cause. And all with the unanswerability of Euclid, so long as the equations are not held to the sliding ambiguities of any actual self, doubt, or world. Of course, the Eleatic principle is true; causal reasoning rests on it. But in Pascal's quaint phrase, the conclusions are false because the opposite principles are also true. If only Pascal had leapt from there to the "Eureka" that, in baring the irreducible polarities of soul and body, essence and relationship, one and many, particle and field, he had made a first move toward showing existence as creatively adaptive within the antinomies of the perceptive ground. 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 10 �C.G. Bell 25) Symbolic History Long-nosed gar in the Chicago Aquarium (CGB '60) [Slide show and Dig. use alligator gar (CGB '60)] For, against the Eleatic axiom (in causal form Descartes' proof that his own reason must come from a reasoning God: "since what is cannot be produced by what is not"), we cannot deny that the whole reasoning content of the world has evolved through Silurian seas where the highest and brainiest were lungfish and ganoids, primitive as the belching armor-plated prehistoric gar — though to watch him gorge, dumped in a minnow bucket upside down, is to grant his life urge. 26) L. Nilsson: Human Fetus, about 8 months, Life, April 1965 We need not ask the fetus to know, in every consciousness, the change of state and flux of form for which Leibniz defined perception as the passing and manifold in the one and simple. It was that coming-to-be of what-was-not that drove Kierkegaard, desperate Eleatic, to mediate the creative by the one allowed ex nihilo, the birth of the eternal in time. But that moment is everywhere, and everywhere decisive, if everywhere causally prepared. The cosmic breath and emergence is the death-birth of God. 27) Human sperm swimming, as toward egg, Life, April 1965 Thus reason stretches over the field of fact. Hegel, all out for generation in time, keeps one dialectic foot, like the old oyster in Alice, firmly in the oyster bed. Spirit is immortal, an essential now… The grades it seems to have left behind, it still possesses in the depths of its present. When sperm, which mill about until the egg is sensed and then ("our soul is restless until it rest in Thee") turn heads all one way, up the long stream, like salmon, are they purposive? "It would be foolish," says Aristotle, "to deny purpose because we do not see the agents deliberating." Where then does purpose stop? Do stripped homunculi bear the organic future? Which one, of each 200 million? We can only answer: "Yes, and then again, no." V2nd 26) Detail of 26 [Slide variant: fetus at 28 weeks] 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 11 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Demonstrable purpose proves almost purposeless: "I'm going to move that book;" and I do. But creative purpose is the knowledge groped for in the Meno: "Unknown, my own." As embryology repeats phylogeny, Beethoven's Opus 111 coda relives his sketchbook gropings for the revealed. Second 27) Closer view of 27), sperm swimming; + V detail Second 27a) Fertilization, sperm penetrating human ovum, Life (Fade Beethoven on first tonic note) How can purpose repeat? How modulate the currents of predictive mass? 28) 28a) Eucalyptus tree, Casa Pellizi, east of San Cristobel, Chiapas (CGB '74); + V detail Sunlight through redwood forest, Smithsonian, July 1978 Forty years ago in a valley by a stream, I watched a flight of grackles from a tree. I saw stream, clouds, winds, and light swept down in the formulable currents of Carnot's law. But the tree rose, building with light into leaves; birds fountained up the air, Ventadorn's "lauzeta," heightening desire into song. Was it the old Emersonian rapture? And striving to be man, the worm Mounts through all the spires of form. I needed a base in physics. And there it was, at the heart of Newton's laws, as simple as inertia: motion self-opposed. I wrote: All matter, systems, worlds, and living things express the need of energy to buttress against its own decay; in this sense cosmic history is a heightening and unfolding of the perceptive ambivalence of energy, that its activity is the fall by which it dies, its life in time a transcendence using and used by the destructive urge. 29) Male antelopes lock horns, Africa, Reader's Digest Publications Music: Beethoven, 1826, from 2nd movement, F major quartet, Op. 135, Columbia M5S 677 When the buck antelope, Uganda Kob, lunges forward, spurning the ground, Earth's rotation is proportionately changed; when he leaps up, Earth's lesser leap down 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 12 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History rocks the universe on minute gravitational waves. If two come together, the system is balanced in the dynamics of elastic rebound. Then they lock horns, slightly splaying the ground in static strain. They ride a mathemable clockwork — not only those creatures, but the muscles cunningly flexed on the hinged and levered bones. (Fade Beethoven, Op. 135) No wonder, as Bacon said, knowledge becomes power. 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 13 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Here the polarity of sex is organized over the primal one of the force laws: "Equal and opposite," 30) Bell girls pushing a car (CGB '78); + V detail and "Force equals mass times acceleration." Leonardo had stressed the mystery of force: "in conquering, it destroys itself." Newton computes, as if the enigma were not there. Music: Again, Beethoven, Op. 135, 2nd movement But it is, as in Beethoven's last quartet the most dynamic effect is of one voice leaping through static chords. (Fade Beethoven) In the motion of a body, the force we think of as cause cannot be applied until mass times acceleration, its assumed result, meets it in counterforce. Hegel's root antinomy of gravity and spirit lurks in this paradox of inertia, that mass resists motion only by moving. 31) 31a) Sockeye salmon up a fall on Alaska's Russian River, Audobon, November 1975 Salmon migrating up river, from The Mating Game When the sockeye salmon, after a life in the ocean, seeks the high streams of his birth and reproduction, he renounces his life of growth with its desires, gives up feeding, turns from silver to red, and grows the great hooked jaw useful only for his quixotic chivalries. Where streams rush down, he plunges up, fighting and leaping to the pools, not of his own, but of the kind's continuance — a symbol, against that falling water, of anti-entropy. But when Yeats wrote "Sailing to Byzantium," he treated that upward sacrifice (as in Aristotle the form of one rank becomes the matter of the next) as the abandoned call of flesh: Music: Again, Beethoven, Op. 135 The salmon falls, the mackerel crowded seas … Whatever is begotten, born and dies … 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field (Fade Beethoven) 14 �C.G. Bell 32) 32a) Symbolic History Byzantine mosaic, 10th cent., Justinian presents his church, Constantine his city, to the Virgin; Church of Hagia Sophia, Constantinople German, c. 1060, Werden Crucifix, detail, Werden a.d. Ruhr Music: Leonin, 1260-90, Deum Timê, Cape version, As 65 Against which — as we turn from Beethoven to Leonin at the spirit-center of Byzantine, Romanesque, and Gothic — Yeats invokes the mosaics of Hagia Sophia ("Sages standing in God's holy fire") for "the artifice of eternity": Consume my heart away, sick with desire, And fastened to a dying animal, It knows not what it is … 33) Tibetan Tanka, 17th-18th cent., Museo d'Arte Oriental, Rome East becomes such a school of sublimation: that the serpent power coiled at the base of the spine in the Muladhara Chakra be released to rise through the other chakras to the thousand-petalled lotus of the brain, which opens into transcendental consciousness, Samadhi. 34) English Romanesque and Perpendicular, 1079-93 and 1366-1404, Nave and Vault, Winchester Cathedral (CGB '74) For the West, that terraced ascent is incarnate in the vaultings of Gothic, an upward raising of stone by downward gravity, of which Hegel makes a symbol: "Thus the passions … fortify a position for right and order against themselves." (Fade Leonin) 35) Sand and coral debris, beach near Cozumel (J.P. Coureau) Between gravity and spirit, inert and vital, determinism and freedom, is there a natural stair? The fragments of a coral beach define a base, nature morte, unorganized as Lucretius' atoms, those shards of ships he pretended would come together. "On Margate sands I can connect nothing with nothing." Against that mere aggregate, 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 15 �C.G. Bell 36) Symbolic History Etch pits in cadmium sulphide, Scientific American, September 1967 the crystals of true atoms, where inner structure reaches up through electron bonds to the lattice shown in these cadmium sulfide etch pits, are already workingly alive. But the ties have found too soon the perfect order of the hexagon; between atoms and macro-crystal there are no thresholds, no subdivisions of the vital chain. If entropy is disorder, this is a specter of the contrary required. 37) Model of a molecule of myoglobin, Scientific American, December 1961 In this three-dimensional model, the protein myoglobin seems to have bridged the field between disorder and form, a polymer both unique and periodic, a structured complexity of 2600 atoms, in coils of amino acid and other links around a molecule of iron, ready to play a living part in storing oxygen in the muscles. How much we could learn of structure (as of thought and society) from this product of a search which polymerized the primal seas. 38) Alexander Calder, c. 1940, "Little Spider," K. Perls, New York "In 1932," said Calder, "a wooden globe gave me the idea of making a universe, something like the solar system. That's where the whole thing came from." He calls this mobile "Little Spider." But whether centipede, tree, galaxy, or macromolecule is left unclear, provided it catch the swing of life in what must remain a machine — the parts, by Leibniz' criterion, not machines ad infinitum. a39) 39) High speed photo: a fanned flame, Smithsonian, July 1979 Curves found in nature (drawn and photographed by CGB, 1978) Compare it with the curves we trace in nature, as Pythagoras found the outcrop of tone-ratios and made number the first principle of things. It is not such a Kantian wonder; our equations describe what occurs: conics, here dark blue, how bodies move in force-fields; sinusoids, here red, how motions spread in the elastic; the green of growth and decay, change proportional to size, as wrapped on itself, a spiral; and the bell curve — orange and black (Bell born on Halloween) — the distribution formed in a one-many, tending to center and tending to spread. 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 16 �C.G. Bell 40) Symbolic History Spider web, morning, Huitepec, Chiapas (photographed by Doug Hall) If each globe of dew outlining this spider's web were of elastic ether, it would draw to a point and spread to all; let that Gaussian curve oscillate: it becomes a damped wave — the electron, set at the base of nature like a mystic one. Every force-play hints at that: this orbed mesh hung in the catenaries of triangular tension. Such the adaptive geometries of soul and world. 41) 41a) 41b) Double: Chambered nautilus, with fossil Eutrephoceras, Natural History, February 1975 Sundial shell, Architectonica granulata (CGB '81) Monolithic calendar stone, 16th cent., Aztec; Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City So the spiral nautilus, with a fossil forebear from ninety million years ago. If cells divide at a rate, he will grow like compound interest; curl him round a point, his shell is a logarithmic spiral. But it is not pure; he began as a finite creature, and his growth must end. Einstein's: math not certain as referred to reality, or if certain, it does not refer. But what do we mean by refer, but that? — the congruence of metaphor — though of course on the spectrum that leads from science to myth, the knowledge of things unseen. 42) Sunset from Bahia Kino with Alcatraz Island, Sonora (photographed by Enrique Franco, Mexico City) The early Greek mind caught it all in one, like a god in marble. Empedocles: Hear first the four roots of all things: bright Zeus (fire), life-giving Hera (air), Aidoneus (earth), and Nestis (water) who moistens the springs of men with her tears. Those elements are archetypal in thought and world. Our science found ninety two (now more), but the Greek four remained, cutting across ours as "change of state": earth as solid, water liquid, vapor air; we tried to stop there, but could not avoid, as the sun-fire came to Earth, an ionized fourth, plasma. And still they go round in the wheel of transformations: 43) Grass burning before setting sun, Chiapas (CGB, May '78) Heraclitus: 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 17 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Fire lives the death of earth, air the death of fire, water the death of air, and earth of water. But when one sees in Chiapas at the end of rainless winter and the burning season, how the sun sets through a haze where everything goes to flame, the four yield to the first: "The greatest of these is fire" — from which things come and to which they will return (already the whirl where the supreme itself is a pole: Ormazd and Ahriman, entropic up and down, fire through the fabric of leaves, the tiger stalking herds). What structures underlie the polar states? Plato stressed number: the triangular pyramid of fire, 44) Fountain with five-petalled flowers, Chiapas (CGB '78) the twenty-sided icosahedron of water. Bernal at the University of London spent his life searching that way. Against the regular coherence of crystals built on space-filling lattices of three, four, six, he found the clue to the liquid state, irregular, but coherent, incompressible, but shifting, in the number five, pentagonoids, which could never fill space without sliding one on another. So the old myth of water as life-source would bring from those always failing and slipping fives, these floating petalled forms — 45) Double: [A] Computer-graphic image of DNA, and [B] a section through the flower-body of Crespis, or Hawksbeard with radiolaria and starfish — alien to the inert perfection of the mineral. In the ten-fold star of this computer-graphic image of DNA, left: oxygen red, carbon green, nitrogen blue, phosphorus yellow; and beside it a section through the composite bud of Hawksbeard — it is as if we saw, from chromosome to flower, the upwelling of the pentagonal. As Thoreau says of the leaf-forms in thawing clay: No wonder that the Earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labours with the idea inwardly. a46) 46) 7/1995 Protozoans: Paramecia dividing, Smithsonian, January 1978 Pre-Cambrian: Tribrachidium heraldicum, Scientific American, March 1961 Nature: The Perceptive Field 18 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History So nature labors with number. Every one by in and out becomes a dyad: oblate dividing star, head and tail of paramecium, worm, fish. Where Pythagoras' female two opens, it must leave a birth-gulf between: three. The flower trillium. Or in this PreCambrian fossil, unlike anything we know, an attempted animal pin-wheel of three tentacled arms. 47) 47a) Rectangular crystals of Barite, Natural History, February 1978 Dwarf cornel, Dogwood family, Flowering Plants of the World Four is everywhere, the Timaeus cube for earth, Plato's most solid form; this barite crystal, bonded like the post-and-lintel temple, or stable quadrate Rome. There are fours in flowers too, cornel, with its four white bracts, though it may leaf and fruit in fives. 48) Snowflakes in colored light, Natural History, January 1972 Then the tyranny of frost. "There they lie," writes Thoreau, "like the wrecks of chariot wheels after a battle in the skies … these glorious spangles, the sweepings of heaven's floor, and they sing, melting as they sing, of the mystery of the number six, six, six … " But suppose they change their tune as they thaw, from the rigor of six, 49) Melting icicle, National Wildlife, February-March 1973 to a deeper mystery, the fluctuant, all-mothering five? — this icicle lapsing down to a drop pulsing as it falls. Over that change of state, Earth's life and climate hang: the great specific heat, the heat of fusion, the saving wonder that water grows denser as it cools, sinking in convection, until four degrees centigrade, then rises, expanding to the insulating shell of ice. Not only ice-skaters bank on that film. To avoid the Germanic dialectic of opposites, William James seized on plasticity, as with water slowed to a jell, hung between flux and form. a50) b50) 50) 7/1995 Bumblebee on thistle flower, Reader's Digest, Amazing World of Nature Carpenter ants milk aphid "cows;" same reference Horseshoe crabs on a beach, Natural History, February 1975 Nature: The Perceptive Field 19 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The laws of nature he saw, with Peirce, as the fixed habits of matter. And we were fixing ours, under the infinitesimals of will. "Organic matter," he writes, "seems endowed with a very extraordinary degree of plasticity." Those spiraling chains of polymers culminating in the genetic molecule of DNA have brought the paradox of inertia to a creative threshold: they move by resisting; they continually change and hold. At one limit the horseshoe crab has settled in for three hundred million years. 51) 7/1995 Lion-tailed macaque, India, International Wildlife, 1973 Nature: The Perceptive Field 20 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History At the other, some strange unrest has pushed toward new orders before the last have spent themselves — from sea to land, to lurching dog-toothed reptile, to mammals biding their time through the expansion of dinosaurs. Then, as Teilhard de Chardin says (and we read it in the expression of this Indian lion-tailed macaque) "in the case of the primates… evolution went straight to work on the brain." 52) Cells, onion root tip (X 1,500), Scientific American, September 1961 Can the whole transcend without reduction of the parts? Even the growing tip of an onion root rests on cell alignments which seem almost crystalline; until we note the cell nuclei in all stages of mitosis and chromosome replication, the one-many raised from abstract to a vital mix of generation in the tensile one. 53) 53a) Weaver ants folding a leaf, Scientific American, December 1977 Same: using their web-secreting larvae Evolution walks a knife-edge where each collective tends to harden like coral reef, hive, or swarm. So weaver ants, in a triumph of caste breeding and cooperation by chemical and tactile signals, turn themselves into a chain to fold a leaf, which they will use their own web-secreting larvae to sew. Each myrmidon has paid the price of togetherness, as like, you would say, 54) Oak leaves, with variants of duck oak, Quercus nigra (CGB) as the leaves of a tree. Yet these to the right come from one water oak growing in the Mississippi yard of my childhood — visibly stretched between Spanish and willow oak; while various oaks are sampled on the left. When scientists who refuse to think say molecules of a kind are all alike, they mean we do not yet distinguish them. But as Leibniz knew, no formed thing or moment can have the configuration of any other. 55) Honeycomb of wild bees, Natural History, June-July 1976 From those generic dogma-words, "table" and "chair," to species and period styles, it is a question of abstracting the forms which crown the relative. The honeycomb, even of wild bees, suggests the repetitive mechanization of the hive, the whole insect freezing, as into hexagons. But what of the moral and individual bee, 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 21 �C.G. Bell 56) 56a) Symbolic History Bee flying between stalks of grass, Natural History, October 1966 Bee hive, von Frisch Dance, Encyclopædia Americana navigating by solar coordinates, with his spatial sense and interior clock externally corrected; or when he returns to the hive to report his flower-find by the von Frisch dance, in which distance is given by the number of dance loops, direction by the angle at which he cuts across, quantity of nectar by body waggles as he cuts? "Instinct" — we mouth it as a dog a dry bone. But inwardness is there, with memory and choice, Blake's "Vast world of delight, closed to your senses five." Though our senses give us the clue. 57) 57a) From airplane window, flying over the Caribbean (CGB '56) Double helix of DNA, O=red, N=blue, C=green, P=yellow; computer generated, Scientific American, October 1985 Think of Quincy Wright's metal masses rising against gravity and coming down across the ocean. The physicist traces air pressure under the wing against downward weight, the laws are in order; the chemist the energy of fuel against propulsion, all determined, no purpose there; nothing unexplained but some minute forces applied to levers in the pilot's cabin. Here the physiologist takes over, tracing energies through the body, carbon cycle, triphosphate; as in Leibniz' mill everything is accounted for but for some negligible nerve signals as the muscles contract. Now the neurologist; and he finds entropy and conservation everywhere preserved, except perhaps for third-order infinitesimals at the synapses of the nerves. The flight of the plane has been mechanically accounted for, Wright says, "except for something like an infinite regress of infinitesimals. Yet the whole was according to plan." Soul, a hazardous inference from patterns of energy (where each "energy" is in turn such an inference from such configuration) has been hunted down layer after layer of the organic stair. But it is just the feedback organization of that stair which triggers soul's choice. a58) 58) Pedestrians from above, 48th and 5th Avenue, NYC, Scientific American New York City, c. 1928, Lower Manhattan from the air, Encyclopædia Britannica As we approach the unorganized, statistical cancellation yields predictive law. 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 22 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Look down, in the noon rush, at a New York intersection. Count the numbers going in each direction, each on his own, sponte sua. You cannot predict for the individual any more than for electrons in a wire; but you can write a current equation which from day to day will hold rather well. Until an army comes, marching behind a leader; he turns, they follow; the statistical laws are broken. Organization has loosened determinacy. We seem almost in touch with a complementarity shared by nature and mind. 59) 59a) Long bolt of lightning, Natural History, June-July 1977 Bolts of forked lightning, Reader's Digest, Amazing World of Nature Music: Bach, 1749, Art of Fugue, close of last unfinished fugue, Rogg (Organ), Angel SB-3-766 Yet even physical lightning, like a Bach fugue, cuts the creative path of history, an indeterminate solution in the determinizing field. The friction-belts of rain build up the potential to its breaking point of 100 to 1000 million volts. But the precise when and where rest on the particular of some Napoleon ion, building its chance momentum to a surge that creates more, starting the bolt down, though it zigzags at every unpredictable crisis of pressure and the velocity of another leader ion. It delivers the charge, which overshoots and in microseconds strikes back up and down the now blazed path (embryology repeats phylogeny), though even there sometimes breaking away — no absolute congruencies in space or time. So Bach's last fugue forges the inevitable, but so uniquely that what he left unfinished must remain that way. (end Art of Fugue) a60) 60) Detail of chick embryo, 5 days (CGB '87) Whole of same (CGB '81) Thought abstracts to the stripped antinomies; while nature elaborates its nets between — rete mirabile: the beating pulse of a chick embryo furrowing the yolk with vessels, bringing back nutrients to build the form. In the enigmatic marriage of essence and relationship, we see, in a richer whole, what Leibniz saw when he wrote: According to this system, bodies act as if (to suppose the impossible) there were no souls, and souls act as if there were no bodies, and yet both body and soul act as if each were influencing the other. 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 23 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The last clause feeds science, such an organism as the embryo itself: to map the complex of thresholds and feedback relays, of enzymes and organizers, by which both whole and part evolve. 61) Hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, from Apollo VIII, Weltraumbilder But the cosmos is the embryo, and every grouping in it swung in a great catenary from the limit of inert aggregate toward self-determining transcendence. For in every grouping, to some degree, the organized whole passes what could have been predicted from the parts. Even this Caribbean hurricane, photographed from Apollo VIII, is a form through which material swirls; if it did not hold a kind of self-shaping life of its own, it would not even be real. a62) 62) Moscow, Cathedral of St. Basil and Red Square Hitler at the Nuremberg rally, 1938, Life: Second World War History is full of those vortices. When chemicals were linking toward polymers, cells toward the metazoan, or now, when society swells with the supra-individual and collective, evolution could not occur if, through each grouping, incipient soul did not set up its circuits, altering the probability nexus of the parts. Nineteen-thirty-nine Germany was so organized that when Hitler screamed on the air those puny decibels threw huge masses of men, tanks, and planes into motion. It is not Kant's separate aspects, phenomena determined and spirit free; the nerve nets of actuation spell out Leibniz' "as if each were influencing the other." Each does, though each is inferred from the field. Part II 63) 63a) 7/1995 Cluster of galaxies in Virgo, 4-meter telescope, Chile, Scientific American, November 1978 Galaxies: core of Coma Berenice supercluster, Schmidt telescope, Scientific American, March 1982 Nature: The Perceptive Field 24 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In the depths of space, a cluster of galaxies, each comparable to our entire Milky Way with its billions of suns. At these distances, ten million light years and beyond, the red shift attests the always swifter expansion of space itself. By the Einstein curvature of that space, the antinomy Kant proved from reason itself, that space must be both finite and infinite, has been fused, a curved return of closed infinity. By the suspension between the bang fifteen billion years ago and Hoyle's steady state (or perhaps a pulsing oscillation), the polarity of time, too, stands unresolved — that is, bridged. 64) Ion-glints from atoms in the tip of a tungsten crystal, Scientific American, June 1957 If we drop with Pascal into the infinitesimal which he could only imagine, we arrive, beyond microscope and electron microscope, at this scattering of an ion beam from atomic shells in the tip of a tungsten crystal, where everything we have said of crystal alignment comes again to the fore. But these are glints, not atoms. Do they prove that atoms "are?" We cannot tie down that "are." Like everything else, atoms well from situations, in this case rather abstract ones. Newton thought matter could not be hard unless formed of harder atoms; for where else, to the causal Eleatic, could hardness come from? We must conjure it up, an ingression, from inter-atomic vacuities by which these ion glints seem crowded. 65) 65a) Sub-atomic tracks in hydrogen bubble chamber, Scientific American, 2/64 Tracks of meson, muon, et al., Scientific American, 7/83 But it is not as Eddington thought that the particles are real and the table appearance. Appearance and reality are asymptotes of our experience. So in a cloud or hydrogen bubble chamber we catch traces of the smaller particles from which those assumed atoms come into and go out of being like jellyfish, like all the groupings entelechy rides on: these streakers from bottom to top, negative K mesons of three billion electron volts from the Bevatron, barely bent to the positive right; to the left one knocks up a proton; center, an electron dislodged from a hydrogen atom spirals in the field. In other cloud tracks, these two, once called primary, yield to whole families of wave-particle evanescencies. As Pascal and Leibniz saw, no bottom anywhere. How else, where the axioms are contradictory? 66) 7/1995 Star spectra from objective prism, Random House, Astronomy Nature: The Perceptive Field 25 �C.G. Bell 66a) Symbolic History Nebulae: Orion and Horsehead, Sierra Club, Galaxies Put a spectroscope to the sky. The stars refract in color. Those rainbows, magnified, bear dark absorption lines, signatures of elements in the stellar atmospheres They vary with stellar types and temperatures; but the elements turn out the same as ours. Over a cosmos of a billion light years and trillions of suns, the building from subparticles to the chemical elements is akin. One form-urge everywhere. 67) Organic matter from Orgueil Meteorite of 1864, Lamp, 1962 In the clouds of dust and gas called nebulae, the spectroscope picks up now the bands of organic radicals, hydroxyl, methane, cyanogen, ammonia, root structures of life. As soon as atoms cool and fill their electron shells, they take up chemistry. You can say no God is needed, or say God is there — suit your temperament; but the Orgueil meteorite, which fell in 1864, has carbonaceous chondrules with what some have called "microfossils" suggestive of pre-life. 68) Spiral galaxy M. 31 in Andromeda, Sierra Club, Galaxies So the same work of building seems to spring everywhere from the nature of things: the divine theater Bruno saw when he broke the crystalline, geocentric spheres. Here, descending from the space-curved whole, we graze our near neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy, older red giants in the center and in the elliptical companions, newer stars forming in the spiral arms. a69) 69) Star formation: Bok globules (dark) in the Lagoon Nebula, Sagittarius, Scientific American, June 1977 Same, Eta Carina Nebula, Sierra Club, Galaxies In our own similar galaxy we see what must be suns in the making, here in the Lagoon Nebula in Sagittarius, where the gas and carbon dust collapses to small Bok globules, dark against the background glow. In other hydrogen-rich regions, huge shock waves plow through, as in a mackerel sky, sowing the cloud lumps from which giant stars fall into glowing. a70) 70) 7/1995 Sun during a major solar eruption, from Skylab orbiting space station in 1973, Sierra Club, Galaxies Plasma jets over sun surface, NASA, Natural History, November 1975 Nature: The Perceptive Field 26 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Hydrogen fusion kindled at the compressed and heated core transforms mass into radiation (as Newton had speculated, "Nature a perpetual circulatory worker"); it heaves up through the vast mass, setting the surface (as here of the sun) cycloning in promontories of plasma — the radiant from which Earth, sheltered and beleed in space, receives the energy for its terraced life. a71) 71) Professor Barnard, 1911, Jupiter, as from one of its moons, Splendour of the Heavens Saturn, Catalina Observatory, Scientific American, Solar System As for the solar system, ejected from the sun or condensed with it from the same cloud, where the old collision theory made it an incredible accident, we, maximizing its likelihood, observe minute perturbations in the motions of nearer stars. And how to have thought it rare where the great planets, too, have their systems, Galileo's Jovian satellites, or the moons and planetesimal rings of Saturn. Though we do not know what chemistry has evolved beneath those frozen ammonia and carbon dioxide clouds. 72) Imaginary landscape on Mars, Splendour of the Heavens No doubt something remote from the life we look for. The hope for planets commensurate with ours has so far let us down. Here is an imaginary landscape of Mars from The Splendour of the Heavens of the '30's, when Schiaparelli and Lowell had drawn the elusive canals, and Edgar Rice Boroughs made the dying planet a seat of romance. 73) Martian landscape radioed by Viking, Newsweek, July 1976 Though the cratered waste seen from our space probes had more the look of the moon (no green fields, no canals); and this landscape Viking radioed home, July 1976, has the reality and wonder of desolation. It is not even clear what the search for microorganisms in the soil has revealed. One can still call soul ubiquitous; but the lurching Mars man is not there. 74) 7/1995 Craters on Mercury, photographed March 1974, by Mariner 10, Scientific American, The Solar System Nature: The Perceptive Field 27 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History What the Moon, Mars, here Mercury share are the overlaid impact craters, where, from the start of the solar system, meteors of all sizes have gashed down, melting the rock and throwing up mountain walls. a75) 75) Meteor Crater, 40 miles east of Flagstaff, Arizona Impact crater in northeast Quebec, The Solar System Even the Earth, cushioned and eroded by air, has the not too ancient one in Arizona, and from 200 million years ago this forty-mile-wide depression still to be traced in the Canadian Shield. 76) Earth-rise on the Moon, NASA, Random House, Astronomy But our Earth, viewed from the airless and waterless Moon, has the look of a paradise, so far as we can tell (though we are prejudiced) the only paradise in this vicinity: ocean and forested land gleaming through its cloud. 77) Aurora Borealis, photographed by T. Lorgren, Anthroposophic Press True, it has natural deserts and its polar north. There the bending in of the magnetic field displays in the colors of the Aurora Borealis how almost exposed we are to the bombardments of space, the solar wind, a flux of charged particles, ionizing and fluorescing the air. 78) San Andreas Fault, California, Natural History, January 1972 Exposed, too, to volcanic violence — those great tectonic plates that make up the Earth-crust shifting and drifting, crunching one into the other, cracking in flaws, heaving up mountains and lava — this San Andreas Fault, which the young rely on, at any moment, to sink California under the sea. 79) Angel Falls, Venezuela, Reader's Digest, Amazing World of Nature Music: Beethoven, 1807-8, Symphony #6, "Pastoral," opening, Vox PL 6960 It means something about the balance some call "dynamic homeostasy" that from the bath of space rays, the violence of colliding continents and eruptive orogeny, Earth is so soothed and contained that the age of Goethe and Beethoven could think its mountains 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 28 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History the peaceful work of water, slowly carved, as in this more than half-mile leap to the Great Plain of Venezuela. What an Eden for the self-search — from organic chemistry to social man — of the whole infolding Biosphere. (fade Pastoral) 80) Birth of volcanic island off Iceland, Natural History, March 1967 Earth, air, fire, and water. When the volcanic island of Surtsey rose from the ocean south of Iceland, those elements were again proclaimed. And now one remembered Oparin's coacervates, the colloidal droplets he explored as the origins of life. Let the primal seas receive from the reducing pre-oxygen atmosphere of water-vapor, methane, ammonia, nitrogen, and the carbon oxides, the various amino acids which Miller and Urey brought from them by electric spark. Let that soup thicken to a jell in the pools of hot volcanic rock; 81) 81a) 81b) Pre-life, self-organized microspheres, Natural History, 1968 Pre-Cambrian: assumed stromatolite beds, North West Australia, Scientific American, October 1981 Same formation, wider view then rains wash it back into the polymerizing seas. That protenoid rounds, as here, into microscopic, double-membraned, osmotic spheres, which absorb amino acids, can grow, can bud. Give them a billion years in the warm seas, their working molecules trying all the links and ties of carbon synthesis. Enzymes produce starch and maltose by the energy of the glucose-phosphate bond. So came the master invention, the earliest photo-synthesis, hydrogen sulfide splitting carbon dioxide, releasing oxygen by the energy of light, transforming the globe from that reducing matrix of polymers to another of green and purple sulfur bacteria oxygenating ocean and air. Thus to photosynthesis directly from water, as in blue-green algae, fossilized in sediments more than three billion years old. 82) Giant amœba, Chaos chaos, swallows a paramecium, Natural History, October 1967 The buttressing of particles from the antinomies of energy, of atoms into molecules, molecules into adaptive polymers, polymers into cells, — stromatolite banks 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 29 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History of oxygen releasers — culminates in nucleated cells, eukaryotes, passing genetic variation by sexual mating, each cell a kaleidoscope of rudimentary search, perception, choice, of self-determining act — though this giant amœba, hunting and ingesting a paramecium, bears the generic name of "Chaos chaos." 83) Spore stalks of slime mold, Dictyostelium discoideum, Scientific American, December 1959 In existing slime molds, the amœba goes social, reaches toward the metazoan. A spore in a moist place emerges, feeds, divides: a colony of free-moving protozoans; they exhaust the habitat; in a cluster one secretes acrasin; as the signal touches others they converge, secreting more; like iron filings drawn to a magnet, eddies of cells swirl in: a slug that creeps, then sends a stalk into the air; some dry into a stem for the common good; others turn to a fruiting body, others to spores; the head breaks; each seed-amœba bears the pre-fungoid whole. 84) Moon coral, Favia pallida, Audubon, September 1976 The social polyp proliferates into coral — advance that falls back, as to sessile plant, almost to mineral, an undifferentiated one-many; yet they build a skeleton of limestone which makes them, as in the Great Barrier Reef, the most ponderous of living things. 85) The Cambrian Sea, Spring Books, Prehistoric Animals With the Cambrian seas the fossil record known to Darwin begins, invertebrates of all families, sponges, coral, jellyfish, worms, sea lilies, brachiopods, trilobites, (ancestral in the great crustacean, scorpion, spider line); and among them, overshadowed, chordates, evolving to first fish. 86) Upper Carboniferous, with Meganeura, etc., Spring Books Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, then the Carboniferous — over much of the Earth, these swamps of great club mosses and tree ferns, our source of coal; spiders and insects, huge cockroaches and dragonflies, and again, just emergent, from lungfish who had crept to land and become amphibians (stegocephalian hardheads), 87) 7/1995 Upper Carboniferous and Lower Permian, Edaphosaurus, Spring Books Nature: The Perceptive Field 30 �C.G. Bell 87a) Symbolic History Double: [A] South African, Permian, Moschops (Archaic pre-mammalian reptile), Spring Books; and [B] Same, Triassic, Cynognathus, Wiley & Sons the first true reptiles, waiting their turn. And hardly have those sprawling reptiles (this herbivorous sail-fin) appeared, when theriodonts, in the Permian, hoist up on four legs and differentiate dog-like teeth, giving rise, by the Triassic, to mammals. 88) Jurassic and Cretaceous, Brontosaurus, American Museum of Natural History, New York City But as if each had to be tested by the tyranny of the past, mammals waited, through the Jurassic and Cretaceous, the surge of reptiles into every habitat. In the swamps, brontosaurus, seventy feet long and weighing, say, thirty tons. While the ancestral possum cowered in the trees, though Brontosaurus was a plant eater. 89) Mounted skeletons: Allosaurus over Brontosaurus, American Museum of Natural History, New York City (CGB '79) And would allosaurus have had time for anything as small as those mammals? When one stands in the New York museum where the one hundred million year old skeleton still ravens over brontosaurus, those Berkeleian questions of external reality — whether science has invented a world from its own cognizance — no more arise than if the brute should take out after us. 90) Upper Cretaceous, Sea of Kansas, Pteranodon and Tylosaurus, Spring Books Never was more adaptive radiation: up into the air, back to the ocean. The inland seas of the last Cretaceous, 60 million years ago, swarmed with short- and long-necked plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, while pteranodons glided above and swooped down for fish. 91) Fossil Archæopteryx, Humboldt University, Berlin, National Geographic, August 1978 Perhaps the active dinosaurs had already developed warm blood and a more efficient heart. By the Jurassic, the most beautiful of fossil forms had appeared, that toothed and feathered dinosaur-bird link called archæopteryx, found in the Bavarian limestone in 1861. 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 31 �C.G. Bell 92) Symbolic History Archæopteryx and small dinosaur, Spring Books Here, too, a step toward a later style was taken before the former had run its course — over the final Earth-grab of dinosaurs, these birds (with primates) just held their own. Sound: Birdsong Had they already begun to practice song? 93) Birds: Rufous fantail by its nest, Australia, International Wildlife, 5-6/73 Though in soul, the toothed lizard bird must still be a long way from what nesting with its sacrifice brought to the eyes and musical throats, not to mention the migratory intelligence, of our birds — here the Rufous fantail of Australia, caring for her young. (cut birdsong) 94) Reptile: Alligator, National Wildlife, February-March 1973 The reptiles that survived the startling general extinction at the end of the Cretaceous are cold-blooded, sluggish, and primitive, relics of a state of being before that of the dinosaurs. Of course, we should preserve them in the swamps and bayous; but to go from this Permian reminder 95) 95a) Jan "Flower" Brueghel c. 1610(?), Paradise, Berlin-Dahlem Grey wolves howling, R. Fiennes, The Order of Wolves Sound: Wolf cries, American Museum of Natural History to the golden age of ancestral grazers, of cats and dogs, mild Miocene, is like coming to that Paradise where painters (here Velvet Brueghel) have brought together the birds and mammals nourished in familial care. And already they cooperate in perceptive packs and herds — wolves, almost as Kipling made them, with the roots of law and justice and their stirring language of cries. Though surely they did not lie down with the lamb. (fade wolves) a96) 96) 7/1995 Porpoises, open-mouthed pair, Reader's Digest, Marvels of the Animal World Same, pair rubbing noses, Chromolux Nature: The Perceptive Field 32 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History And, against the marine reptiles, how much the mammals returned to the sea fit the Greek myth of Arion, whom a dolphin carried to the shore. Who knows what that intelligence (a brain larger than man's and with more neuron connections, though free of manipular use and control) may hold in contemplation of ocean depths and soul's contours; how much express in a language as liquidly mysterious as the music of the hump-backed whale? 97) Army ant queen groomed by workers, Natural History, December 1975 While army ant workers groom the swollen queen, her body all fat and eggs, of which she can lay a hundred thousand, for workers specialized in size and task. Have they weirdly anticipated how our mammalian "propinquity and property of blood" must socialize? 98) Megalithic building c. 1910, Africa, Roder, Paideuma, 1944 As late as 1910 Schröder photographed these megalithic builders in Africa, the whole tribe, with sled and roller logs, dragging a stone dolmen to the village for a monument. What self-renouncing frenzy of togetherness 99) Bronze age, especially c. 1650 B.C., Stonehenge, photographed by Ant. Miles set up the monuments of prehistoric Europe, Stonehenge, effected, as in the Nias photograph by a population yoked into one by overmastering spirit — what we read of in Romanesque church-building, nobles and all with yokes on their proud necks, in orgies of penitential zeal: "The Lord thy God is a consuming fire." 100) Moslems at Mount of Mercy, Saudi Arabia, Natural History, 1973 In the Moslem world, penitents of all nations and tongues still convene at the Mount of Mercy, near Mecca, reminder of the tornadic faith that roared through history, sweeping horsemen over Asia and North Africa and into Spain. Are these powers real? With the god-visions and prophet texts that entrain them? As real as tornado, or the gene, on which somatic building rides. Augustine and Pascal thought only Christianity had miracles; 101) 7/1995 African tribesmen practicing image magic; Dial Press, Encyclopædia of Witchcraft and Magic Nature: The Perceptive Field 33 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History but miracle is the inner truth of every generating myth. Faith, like soul, is caught in the paradox of all energy, a configuration-riding formaloid, which can always be analyzed away. These African tribesmen with their image magic know as well as Rotarians at the business of the day that what they have in hand is real. And what else, against entropy and natural decay, microbes and tropical parasites, holds those breathing dark bodies together but cascades of mythic power? — the very laws of nature, habits of matter. a102) Gislebertus, 1130-40, Last Judgment, Autun Cathedral 102) Great Serpent Mound of American Indian Adena-Hopewell Culture, Newsweek, Sculpture Thus Jung on the god and devil loci in the group unconscious: There is nothing for it but to recognize the irrational as an everpresent psychological function … its contents … psychic realities, real because they work. To combine Cartesian outwardness with Blake's creative imagination where all deities reside, is a task for the Superman, that means, for each and all. Yet to see once, clearly and distinctly, the Earth heaving into the thirteen-hundred foot ambivalent snake shrine of the Adena-Hopewell culture in 1000 B.C. Ohio (Christ, too, the snake Moses lifted on the rod), is to know that we have outlived that dry single vision a patient of Jung's once expressed: Doctor, last night I disinfected the whole heavens with bichloride of mercury, but I found no God. a103) Golden orb spider with grasshopper; Reader's Digest, Amazing World of Nature 103) Female black widow spinning web, Natural History, February 1973. [In video, 103 both precedes and follows a103. ] If history is mythic and the Word its catalyst, "sweet science" must embrace myth and word. When Blake thinks gins and poison, he sees spider, real as a black widow sliding on its web: 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 34 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History We beheld the infinite Abyss… the sun, black but shining; round it were fiery tracks on which revolv'd vast spiders, crawling after their prey… Though like all, the spider is dual: Swift's caricature of the soul-spinning modern, which Whitman affirms: "A noiseless patient spider … Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul." 104) Kali ordeal by fire, Orissa, India, Natural History, January 1974 104a) Strip-mining Appalachians, East Ohio, Natural History, November 1974 Has the complementarity of good and evil begun with us? To avoid the anthropomorphic is to avoid philosophy, since anthropos, too, came up the stair where his art and knowledge, love and morality got their natures and their names. This Orissa devotee of Kali, swung through fire seven times each way, is on the sublime sacrificial tree that leads from the lock-jawed salmon, the bird feeding her young, through Greek tragedy and the Paschal victim, to whatever mystery we enact in our crucifixion of the world. O for a dialectic like Archimedes' lever. 105) Conjugating bacteria, supermale colon bacillus and round female, Scientific American, June 1961 Sex has been the deepest cleavage in the creative one, well of ideal and gross, delight and pain. Here colon bacilli, electron-magnified a hundred-thousand times, erect from phallic supermale to round female a comic kissing-bridge for chromosomes. Now wherewith sholde he mak his paiement, If he ne used his sely instrument? So the Wife of Bath; but Chaucer's Creseyde says "Who yaf me drynke?" (Over the corpse-littered fields of Troy.) Music: 106) 7/1995 Wagner, 1857-9, Tristan, Potion & ff. (through slide 110), from RCA-V 6700 Conjugation of snails, Helix pomatia, Natural History, 8-9/77 Nature: The Perceptive Field 35 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Who has brought off that loved war like snails? — where both are male and female, equal, hermaphroditic. They fuse, each shooting into the other wounding and sperm-bearing calcareous darts. So they retire to gestate and lay eggs. A balance in the Amazonamachia which has reduced males sometimes to parasitic captives, females to sessile breeding sacks. 107) Crickets mating, female on male, Natural History, June 1979 Or the tension can become Heraclitus' lyre. The male cricket, after fighting off others, rubs his wing covers, stridulating violins — vulnerable, since mate or predator may hear. He sings until she covers him, feeding on juices secreted by those musical wings. 108) Hellenistic mirror case, love scene; Fine Arts, Boston Human love was never more natural than in the Eros Kalos tradition of the Greeks, where sex, with all its dark roots in birth and death ("To die, with thee again, in sweetest sympathy"), mirrors the open gladness of Aphrodite. As with everything Greek, one wonders if civilization reached its acme in that prime. How much, for later gains, we risk and pay. 109) Indian, c. 11th cent., Mithuna couple, Khajnraho Temple, Madhya Pradesh, India True, the East has raised the Hellenistic pleasure to a Nirvana rite; but the carved ecstasy leaves their multiplying billion in the lurch. 110) Boecklin, Triton and Nereid, Schack Gallery, Munich (CGB '59) And whatever dislocation has torn the Christian West has wrenched natural desire to the Wagnerian and perverse. As post-Romantic Boecklin's Triton blows his brooding conch over the waves, this nereid fondles the sea-beast supermale. Such the Europe Freud found flooded with neurotic sex. (Fade Tristan) 111) 7/1995 A fallen spruce in the forest, Sangre de Cristo, near Santa Fe (CGB '78) Nature: The Perceptive Field 36 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History What of the other of the love-death pair? Death in nature withers away, that flowing in and out the Stoics would make it — the fall and decomposition of a tree. As with force and counterforce, death needs its opposite — life-consciousness. 112) Hans Baldung Grien, c. 1517, Death and the Lady, Museum, Basel; + V pan detail Against the Renaissance inflaming of the will to live, the converse outrage sharpens a dance of death. But the most macabre Holbein, or this Baldung Grien, is Leibniz' perception, a breaking wave in what abides. Skelton: No man may him hide From Death hollow-eyed … With his worm-eaten maw And his ghastly jaw … To whom then shall we sue? 113) Italian-American, c. 1890(?), Angel through leaves, Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York The death arts of Egypt still gaze through the change. And even this 19th-century girl in Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn, wreathes the sadness of forever in a transience of leaves. Death comes to be in conscious Being, its ground the I AM, by which it is contained: "Sail out, eidolon yacht of me." 114) Ben Ortega, 1967, Christ with spread arms, (CGB & DMB) In the West, Love-Death took incarnate seat in the God-Man — mediation of the yoked antinomies. When Ortega takes from an arroyo a branch where lignin striations record the stress and twist of cleavage (so that, as Heraclitus says, struggle becomes father of all things) and, using these zygote swirls, shapes a Christ, he works the tension of nature to the symbolic sacrifice — racked from rock to sky for the song of men and angels: Who would praise the peace eternal Must tune his harp in the war of its fibers. 115) 7/1995 Botticelli, 1500, Mystical Nativity, National Gallery, London; + V details Nature: The Perceptive Field 37 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Such the archetype of our dynamic. A balanced antinomy is sterile, whether in thought or act. The One that holds antinomy becomes the arrow. So in Botticelli's Mystical Nativity of 1500, the foreground devils retreat, trampled, stabbed to the ground; angels embrace mortals in imminent revelation. The good-evil rift is suspended in God, whose coming is past, future, and now. The spiral of time was never so implemented. 116) Donatello, c. 1460, Christ before Pilate, with two-faced attendant, Bronze Pulpit, San Lorenzo, Florence; + V detail The contradictions of Socratic reason were fused in the man-god. By the Renaissance, that faith-containment is shifting to existence; life itself begins to gather the polar fields. In Donatello's Christ before Pilate, the Janus-faced servant looks both ways, as to Jerusalem and Rome. Is not the word "double-mindedness" quoted twice from James in the Mass of Donato's patron saint? Already the horns of dilemma are the strength and tragic flaw of the Christian mind. 117) Raphael (and Giulio Romano), 1518, Michael vs. Satan, Louvre, Paris; + V detail Music: Beethoven, 1805-8, Symphony #5, close, (Karajan) Deutsche Grammophon LPM 18804 The myth of Lucifer applies to every spirit which can say "I am." Being, displaced from the center, can only act from its own center, initiating creative history. God had no way to operate but by granting freedom — which in evolution means the miscarriage of adaptive quest. The civilization which moved from Raphael's Overthrow of Satan to Milton's near glorification; 118) Goya, 1815-24 (published 1864), Modo de Voler, from Los Disparates and then to the Promethean reversals of the Age of Revolution: Beethoven, Goethe's Faust, Blake, this Goya dream of flying — that civilization, more than any other, had risked the experiment of the new, leaping from progress by chromosomes to progress by the coup of law, equation, word. (end Beethoven Fifth) The wheel turned to an arrow 119) Fountain from yard sprinkler (CGB '78) must turn again with the wheel. 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 38 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Perhaps in cosmic extension entropy rounds on itself. But the fountain we see is a form, the rise and apex of drops always curving to fall. To stop the gravity down would stop the universe. Anti-entropy must weave over that, using particular decay, until the entraining transcendence is itself entrained and used. Where the fountain becomes a drop, curved in the greater rise — to which Pascal's knot will always apply: "seeing too much to doubt and too little to be sure." We of the modern West have felt the whole Earth swerve. 120) Webs of Zilla x-Notata, normal and drugged, Scientific American, 12/54 Music: Bartok, 1919, from The Miraculous Mandarin, near close, side A, Bartok Rec. 301 Spiders on psychedelic drugs weave strange romantic webs. No doubt they will catch fewer flies (carmina non dant panem); but weavers of the creative abstract might prefer this bold, free venture to the standstill of the old symmetry. Has not the Nietzschean West made a drug of the god-self? 121) Schizophrenic drawing, 1922, Heidelberg Clinic, Prinzhorn Which Rimbaud literally applied: "The poet makes himself a visionary through a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses." Startling, how close to our center those 1920 drawings by Prinzhorn's schizophrenic patients strike — like the atonal break of Mad Peter, Wozzeck, this Bartok Miraculous Mandarin. We have read it in the nightmare fictions that have seemed most expressive of our age: 122) Chaim Soutine, 1918, Self Portrait, H. Pearlman, New York Kafka's Metamorphosis of man to huge cockroach, the Penal Colony, with its religious torture machine. In art there are the Expressionists, this 1918 self-portrait by Soutine, tenth son of a Jewish tailor, painting in the exile of Paris — precursors of some world disease. (end Bartok) 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 39 �C.G. Bell 123) Symbolic History Firefighter in aluminum and asbestos suit, National Geographic, August 1978 But crisis and disease inseparable from the triumph of technocracy: man mastering the elements to whose wheel he was bound — here in a suit of aluminum and asbestos become the salamander of fire, fighting a jet-fuel inferno at 2000 degrees Fahrenheit. 124) Undersea habitat, Oceanographics, Inc., International Wildlife, July-August 1974 Here — beyond what Roger Bacon dreamed of: It is possible that devices can be made whereby … a man may walk on the bottom of the sea or of a river — he sets up his Ondine hydrolab in the ocean depths. 125) Hydrogen bomb explosion over Bikini atoll, 1946, Life: Second World War How to contain the ambivalence of such a Lucifer? Since never have the sunbright scales of armored supremacy more sonorously clanged on the logos of number than in the science where racked-out nature flames the certification of "Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared" — 126) Botticelli, 1490, Augustine's Dream (predella), Uffizi, Florence (CGB '59) That a civilization mediated by God crucified, and preaching the humbled penitence of man — Augustine's dream of the boy dipping the sea into a pool on the shore; and when the saint said, "You can never hold the ocean in that hole," the boy gave the recurrent, pride-abasing answer: "Nor you the eternal in your finite mind" — 127) Model of DNA molecule, with comparative skeletons, fish to man (CGB '78) that a civilization beginning there should come out at the other pole of the incarnate field, where the Jesuit father, Teilhard de Chardin should write of science (while we contemplate what he implies, the double helix of DNA, with the plasticities of the vertebrate skeleton): 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 40 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The dream upon which human research obscurely feeds is fundamentally that of mastering, beyond all atomic or molecular affinities, the ultimate energy of which all other energies are merely servants; and thus, by grasping the very mainspring of evolution, seizing the tiller of the world. 128) Carrier attacked by kamikaze plane, Life: Second World War That assumption of the Light-bearer was put to the test by the Second World War. It was soon clear how far evolution had shifted to organisms reared above man. An aircraft carrier in the electronic navy had a brain-room distinct from the brain of anyone in command; there radar sensings converge, thence guidance goes to the members — guns and planes. But it was not clear how that higher organism related to Teilhard's Omega dream. As he closed The Phenomenon of Man, Apocalypse was still there, from which only a spiritual remnant would be saved. 129) Launch Control Room 2, for Apollo expedition, NASA In the automation since, the individual is more and more superseded, an eye, a brain, a hand, woven in the network of sensors, computers, and adaptive relays. The control chamber for the Apollo moon-launch visibly confronts us with the nerve-net of something hyperzoan. 130) First Moon landing, 1969, Apollo XI module with astronauts on lunar surface, NASA At the other end of which, the messenger molecules of a new genetic and evolutionary leap put the first Earth footprints on the lava-dust of the moon. Where such an organized success is possible, how is it 131) Destruction of forest, near Lacanha, Chiapas (CGB '78) that here, most of humanity creeps like slime mold over the globe — no, lower, like unorganized bacteria on an agar plate, poisoning themselves in their own wastes; whole populations seized by the oldest cancerous self-service, to breed and burn: as in the forests of Chiapas we reel from the foretaste of what is occurring in all the great jungle basins, once the lungs of the Earth. 132) 7/1995 Leaf-cutting ants, McGraw Hill: Life of the Jungle Nature: The Perceptive Field 41 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History They say leaf-cutting ants are adapted to the balance of nature. One could have said the same, before the hygiene bomb, of the rotational agriculture of jungle-burning man. Those balances are lack of size or power. These leaf-cutters, millions per nest, can rip up a plot of jungle, lugging the pieces on defoliated runways for their underground fungus beds. It is Eden again, God risking Earth-fall, by the freedom of quest. 133) Tornado from thundercloud, Kansas, Reader's Digest: Amazing World of Nature We see nature everywhere hung over violence. Out of the warming of air and convection of clouds, the nourishing descent of water in the discrete drops of rain, we hardly know yet how it comes that those cyclonic 300 mile-an-hour winds form and hold their own over farmland, towns, and all. 134) Planetary nebula, Crab in Taurus, Hale, Random House: Astronomy The nuclear burning of the stars, which lights whatever planets have life, is poised on instabilities. We do not have to explode the world. Nature can make bombs without us. This enormous eruption of gas, the Crab Nebula in Taurus, remains from a flaming supernova, observed by the Chinese in 1054 A.D. Through days of total release they can give out more light than a whole galaxy of a billion stars. Though again birth pairs with dying: the chemistry of life may have required such events. 135) Raphael (with Giulio Romano), 1518-20, Transfiguration, Vatican; + V details In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche makes Raphael's Transfiguration a symbol of the Dionysian and Apollonian: below, the shadowed Earth-strife of the boy possessed by demons; above, the visionary unity of the radiant and floating divine — an eternal contention. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud opposes Eros and Death, like Empedocles' Love and Strife; though unlike the stern Greek, he finds temporal hope: "that eternal Eros will put forth his strength so as to maintain himself alongside of his equally immortal adversary." a136) Una Handbury, c. 1980, The Phoenix, Albuquerque Zoo 136) Rodin, 1905, The Oceanides, derived from the Gates of Hell, Rodin Museum, Paris 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 42 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Not surprising if in our century we have auguries of imperative convergence, the sciences (Whitehead, Jung, Teilhard de Chardin) gaping with the philosophic and mythopoetic; while poetry and fiction hunger for a world-epos — an obligation which rests upon us, drawing us on. Yeats: The half-read wisdom of dæmonic images Suffice the aging man as once the growing boy. But what are the images by which art or vision can gather its world? Two works, from 1904, oppositely aimed: Rodin's still voluptuous Oceanides, derived from the romantic synthesis of his Gates of Hell; 137) Cezanne, 1904, Mont Sainte-Victoire, Philadelphia Museum of Art Cezanne's last study of Mont Sainte-Victoire rising over Arles — the sensuous transformed to the abstract triangles, planes, and squares of analysis. If those were poles, the task might lie between; 138) Mondrian, 1921, Composition in yellow, red, blue, and black, Gementemuseum, The Hague as between the most reductive abstraction the thrust of the modern has brought us to — how incommensurate with what we seek — the plain or colored rectangles of so many of the avant garde, here of Mondrian, 1921; 139) Sunset from 1260 Canyon Road, Santa Fe, NM (CGB '78) and that nature eye and camera record in the amorphous play of its formulable radiances: "Clouds, winds, and waves of light, senselessly beautiful." Curious: we have talked as if the task were of mind, poetry, and art, though surely what should be uppermost is saving the planet left in our care. a140) b140) c140) 140) Enrique Franco Torrijos, photo of a Lacandon girl Carola Bell, at Elbow Branch, Maryland (CGB '60) Earth from space (Mexico, etc.) Y se Formaron Caminos Calla lily with morning dew, Chiapas (CGB '78) Music: 7/1995 Josquin des Prez, 1500-20(?), Agnus Dei, Seraphim SIC-6052 Nature: The Perceptive Field 43 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Nothing more crucial for that, than if the ambivalence of Love-Strife should kindle everywhere the poem of tragic Earth as the sacrament of God — an infolding of consciousness complex as the perceptive field, and as simple as a two-voice Josquin, or the calla's rounding of its synergy of cells: "They toil not, neither do they spin; yet Solomon in all his glory is not arrayed like one of these." (close of Josquin) 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 44 � 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 Nature : the perceptive field, Symbolic History, Part 1 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 1 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_01_Nature--The_Perceptive_Field 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/177a5cd2324e38d6fb42351bf0c49645.pdf 82f9693bbf5fb99e364278cebfa89342 PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 3. Greece: The Tragic Myth and Deed CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 December 1995 Last Revised June 1996 �Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 3. Greece: The Tragic Myth and Deed 1) Attic, c. 460 B.C., Zeus or Poseidon, bronze, Nat. Mus., Athens; video pans to V1a, head and shoulders, then to 1b, waist up (both CGB '77) Our aim is to see the fourfold pattern of god-given power, superhuman act, fall, and inner ripening, fulfilled in the myth and arts, the history and thought of Greece. If Greek culture excels them all, it is because it risked most of all. Its assault on darkness had no cover but the morale of its own phalanx. It countenanced none of the priestly protections of Egypt or the theological double-talk that has buttressed the Christian West. In act and mind these men ventured on freedom — a city, as Pericles said, open to the world; they ventured in the open, man against fate. No wonder the fire so quickly burned its containment. As Heraclitus said: "What are men but Gods dying, what the Gods but deathless men?" 2) Græco-Roman (Pompeii) 1st cent. A.D., Icarus, Mus. Nat. Naples Their mythology in this anticipates their history. Nowhere are there more legends of the fall of daring, and no people enacted it as nobly as they. For three Biblical examples — Satan, Adam and Eve, the Tower of Babel — Greece affords dozens. Three come to mind in the category of flight: Phaeton and the sun-chariot, Bellerophon thrown from Pegasus, this Icarus, from Roman Pompeii, twilight of the culture Homer began. 2nd 1) Again, Zeus or Poseidon, detail, head and upper body (CGB '77) June 1996 Greece 1 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History A pathos of history that the Periclean Zeus-Poseidon holds the silence from which it rose from the sea. Since music, that art the Pythagorean brotherhood made a cosmic measure, of which witnesses attest the ecstatic power, only survives, unaccompanied, in fragments of Hellenistic mood: 2nd 2) Detail of 2: Fall of Icarus Music: Hellenistic, 1st cent. A.D., Epitaph of Seikilos, Decca 20156 this epitaph of Seikilos, like the Pompeian Icarus, reminder of a mythic fall. (end music) a3) 3) Double: [A] Dorian, Magna Graecia, c. 430 B.C., Wounded Niobe, Thermae, Rome; and [B] Pergamene, 210-200 B.C., Marsyas, Louvre, Paris Greek, c. 550 B.C., The Naxos Sphinx, Museum, Delphi (CGB '77) The fate of hybris: Semele embraced Zeus in his divinity and was consumed; Niobe boasted against Leto and became a stone weeping for her destroyed children; Marsyas was flayed for vying with Apollo, Laocoon was killed with his sons by the serpents of Poseidon. Even the fate of Oedipus, as Nietzsche stresses, falls on one who had answered the riddle of the Sphinx. And among a variety of Giants and Titans who fought Zeus or tried to storm heaven, comes the greatest, Prometheus, who has given his name to all such attempts — the thief of fire, bound to the rock, a vulture's prey. a4) Attic, c. 520 B.C., Athena vs. the Giant Enceladus, Hecatompedon Pediment, Acropolis Museum, Athens (as of 1938) 4) Same, double (from two CGB slides; as of 1977) V4a) Same, detail of Athena (CGB '77) 4b) Same, detail of Enceladus (CGB '77) These Greek accounts are not just more numerous than the Biblical; they are different in kind. The Jews bet on Jehovah; the Greeks (520 B.C., Athena and the Giant Enceladus) play both sides: defiant will against avenging power. In that tension tragedy is born — of the greatness which enobles as it destroys. With Satan, only the name, "Light-bearer," and the line "O Lucifer, brightest of the sons of morning, how are thou fallen," give the scapegoat and serpent of evil a trace of ambivalence (Babylonian?). Where the Greek archetype is Prometheus. June 1996 Greece 2 �C.G. Bell a5) b5) 5) Symbolic History Attic, c. 570 B.C., Calf Bearer, detail, Acropolis Museum, Athens Ionian, c. 477 B.C., Charioteer, detail, Museum, Delphi (CBG '77) Same, head and shoulders, profile What, then, of classical measure? Is this an art of excess? Nietzsche's Dionysian "joy even in destroying"? Surely, Greek daring arises in a cult of limitation, with all its tribal warnings against hybris. Even the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus is nominally on the side of Oceanos: Know yourself and reform your ways to new ways… You are not yet humble, still you do not yield to your misfortunes. The chorus, as always, speaks the mean: It is a sweet thing to draw out a long life in cheerful hopes, and feed the spirit in the bright benignity of happiness: but I shiver when I see you wasted with ten thousand pains, all because you did not tremble at the name of Zeus; your mind was yours, not his, and at its bidding you regarded mortal men too high, Prometheus. (Grene) 6) 6a) Greek, c. 470-56 B.C., Falling Lapith, from Zeus Temple, Olympia Attic (Phidias?), 447-32 B.C., Pediment fragment from the Parthenon, torso, Acropolis Museum, Athens (CGB '77) But before the play ends, both chorus and audience join in the pathos of the halfgod's cry: Bright light of the sky, and you, with swift Wings, winds: springs of rivers; numberless Laughter of the waves of ocean; earth, mother Of all, and all-seeing eye of the sun — Look and behold, what I from the Gods Here suffer, I, who am born of the Gods. (CGB) June 1996 Greece 3 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History ω διος αιθηρ και ταχυπτεροι πνοαι, ποταµων τε πηγαι, ποντιων τε κυµατων ανηριθµον γελασµα, παµµητορ τε γη, και τον πανοπτην κυκλον ηλιου καλω ιδεσθε µ' οια προς θεων πασχω θεος. 7) Greek, c. 470-56 B.C., Head of a Seer (profile), from the East Pediment of the Zeus Temple (now in the Museum), Olympia In that tragic involvement lies what Hegel called the deepest intuition of the human mind, that from suffering and destruction comes spirit: Oedipus as saving seer; Prometheus Unbound; from the burning body of Semele, Dionysus, god of the vine and tragic art, in the end of immortality. 8) 8a) Greek, c. 470 B.C., Zeus and Ganymede, terra cotta, Museum, Olympia Same, detail (upper half) There is a profound trust here in vital seizure, human or divine — as in this rape of Ganymede. So in the last chorus of Antigone, Dionysus, "Son of the Thunderer, born of Iachos, God of many names," is invoked for the cleansing of Thebes, though the purification that immediately falls is the death of Antigone, of Haimon, and Creon's queen: "Come with clement feet down the long slopes… Thou Son of God, blaze for us." A chorus of breathing fire: ω πυρ πνειοντων χοραγ αστρων, to the manic Lord: τον ταµιαν Ιακχον. 9) Greek plate, c. 490 B.C., Brygos painter, mænad, Munich Even Plato, unwilling celebrant of the irrational, praises, in the Phaedrus, madnesses which are divine gifts: Again, where plagues and mightiest woes have bred in certain families, owing to some ancient blood-guiltiness, there madness has entered with holy prayers and rites, and by inspired utterances found a way of deliverance for those who are in need… June 1996 Greece 4 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Thus the Bacchae, sacred destroyers, an ultimate mystery for Euripides. 10) 10a) Græco-Roman, 2nd cent. A.D., Hercules leads Alcestis from Hades, Celeia Museum, Yugoslavia Double: [A] Christian, end of 3rd cent., Adam and Eve, Catacombs of SS Peter and Marcellinus, Rome; and [B] later 3rd cent., marble: Jonah from the Whale, Museum of Art, Cleveland Music: Mesomedes of Crete, c. 130 A.D.(?), Hymn to the Sun, old Decca 20156 (A) And it is in the language and image of those mysteries (this 2nd-century A.D. Alcestis harrowed from the dead by Hercules, as no doubt the chant of the Synagogue absorbing the classical hymn, as here to the Sun by Mesomedes, Hadrian's favorite, rounded toward Gregorian) that the Bible tragically regenerated itself, completing the Old Adam with the New, the tree of Redemption from the tree of the Fall, Moses lifting the snake on the cross to heal the sickly Hebrews, Jonah jubilant from the death and hell whale. Had not Tacitus weirdly recorded, of the year 34 A.D., how the phoenix had been born of its ashes in the east? (fade Mesomedes) 11) Attic, 447-32 B.C., Parthenon from Philopappos Hill, Athens (CGB '77) But before the regenerative daring, which appears at the beginning of Greek culture and ripens like a natural fruit, could mediate for the New Testament, it had to run its Hellenic course. There we follow it, in art and history — the tragic myth completed by the tragic deed. As Plato says in the Laws, "We will not need tragedy in our city, because we live in tragedy." Va12 or b12) - b12) used Mycenae, c. 1500 B.C., Palace ruins, two views (CGB '77) 12) Cretan, c. 1450-1400 B.C., Throne Room, Palace, Knossos Telemachus is amazed at the palace of Menelaus: See what a blaze of polished copper and gold and electrum and silver and ivory goes through this echoing hall. Surely the mansions of Olympian Zeus must be like this, one great glory within… (Odyssey, tr. T.E. Shaw, Book IV) June 1996 Greece 5 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The fateful sequence began before Homer with the fruiting of Greek myth out of the Cretan and Mycenean fall. It is that past, going back even to Knossos and the East, that is treasured in epic memory. In the Odyssey the bards already sing of Ilium. a13) Cretan or Mycenean, c. 1500 B.C., from the Vaphio Gold Bull Beakers, Nat. Mus., Athens: the Tame Bull cup; 13 or V13) Both cups, of Bulls Tame and Wild 13a) Details, Tame and Wild, from the same Menelaus' gift — "a wrought mixing bowl of solid silver doubled with gold about the rim. Work of Hephaestus" — or the cup of wrought gold Alcinous gives Odysseus (Book VIII), might have been found in the Vaphio tombs (Sparta) with the golden Beakers of Bulls, Tame and Wild, work of Hephaestus indeed. These were also objects of trade or pillage, probably Minoan, about 1500 B.C. But for Homer, fine things come from Syria. The King of Sidon, says Menelaus, gave it to him. The Dorian invasion has erased the possibility of such workmanship in Greece. 14) Cretan, c. 1300 B.C., Bull sacrifice from Hagia Triada Sarcophagus, Heraklion, Crete We can never know what details from the Homeric poems are storied antebellum splendors. Ritualistic dependence on the gods seems essential for tribal Achaians of a time of troubles — how the Iliad from beginning to end reeks with the smoke of sacrificial hecatombs. But for an illustration, we must go to Crete from the time of the Trojan War itself (Hagia Triada), observing, however, that the male-oriented Greek would take over what is here the priestess' role. 15 ) 15a) Cretan, c. 1600 B.C. (or a forgery?), Ivory Snake Goddess, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: whole Same: detail from the hips up Curious that the names of the goddesses Athena and Hera (called, as if she were ivory, "of the white arms"), like the wonderful Greek word for the sea, "thalassa," are not Greek at all, nor Indo-European. Hera's wedding to Zeus must fable some blending; Athena's owl and Apollo's snake suggest a mystery root beneath the Olympian; and the first Greek art ties to this Cretan past, to which Homer seems to richly near. June 1996 Greece 6 �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Schubert, 1824-26, String Quartet No. 14 in D Minor, Death and the Maiden, near close, 2nd movement, West L. 5052 (And if the Boston ivory must prove a marvelous fake, is it not — as Alexandrian editors smoothed Homer to their taste — that we later romantics hail our own Schubertian refinements as pre-Homeric Greek?) a16) b16) 16) Reconstruction of 13th cent. B.C., Nestor's Throne Room, Pylos Egypt, Dynasty XVIII, c. 1360 B.C., Nefertiti, Museum, Cairo Double: details of [A] Thera, 16th cent. B.C., full-breasted woman, fresco; and [B] Greek Geometric, c. 700 B.C., Warrior, bronze: both, National Museum, Athens (detail of Cycles, 3rd 31) For there was a refinement to which Homer was heir — the frescoed palaces of Pylos, Tiryns, Thera. Could the poet's own time have supplied him with that Helen who in the Odyssey comes from "her high-coffered, incense-laden room" and, after alluding to her Trojan vagary, mixes in the wine a pleasure-drug of subtle potency which she had from Egypt? Yet for Homer, all that waned luxury is caught up in another view of life, another bareness and another drive. 17) 17a) Attic Geometric, c. 740 B.C., Krater from Dipylon Gate, National Museum, Athens (CGB '77) Same, detail of Funeral Procession (CGB '77) What is in fact contemporary with Homer focuses the question: which age does he reflect? Sunset or dawn? Dawn came earlier to his Asian Miletus than to mainland Greece. Against the human fullness of the Iliad, the Attic funeral vases of 800 B.C. seem strangely abstract. Yet the geometric patterns shared with the Hallstatt culture of the Danube may remind us of the primitive in Homer, those repeated epithets, "swift-footed Achilles" and the like — all the great formalities of saga-craft which led Coleridge to say: "There is no personality at all in Homeric poetry," and, "Of course there was a Homer, and twenty besides." 18) 18a) Sardinian, 8th-6th cent. B.C., bronze chief, Cagliari; + V detail Argive or Etruscan, early 7th cent. B.C., Krater, Naval Battle, Conservatori, Rome June 1996 Greece 7 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History For between Helen and her bard had come the Iron Age of stern reversion. This 8th century Sardinian god-chief might step from any Pelasgian island to voice what Nietzsche called the "satyr wisdom": Condemned to sorrows and to toil we live, Rest to our labors death alone can give. Hesiod, from barren Attica. Or the proverb echoed by Theognis and Herodotus and Sophocles: "Best of all things not to be born… next best to pass as soon as possible the gates of Hades." That pessimistic ground sounds under Olympian Homer: …We to whom Zeus Has assigned suffering from youth to old age, Suffering in grievous wars, till we perish to the last man. (Iliad, XIV, 85-7, tr. McCarthy, from Weil's French, ) Since among all creatures that breathe on earth and crawl on it, There is not anywhere a thing more dismal than man is. (Iliad, Lattimore, XVII, 446-7) 19) 19a) Greek, c. 750 B.C., small bronze warrior, National Museum, Athens Athenian jar, mid-7th cent. B.C., Polyphemus blinded by Odysseus, Eleusis Museum, Greece Something lifts the Greeks from that ground, sends them, even as they chant its burden, smiling into battle over the wine-dark sea. The heroes to be broken by the gods in that "Poem of Force" fight the gods themselves. Apollo cries in the voice of alarm: …give back, son of Tydeus, and strive no longer to make yourself like the gods in mind, since never the same is the breed of gods, who are immortal, and men who walk groundling. (Iliad, Lattimore, V, 440-2) What makes Homer a revelation for Greece is less the old luxury than the new force. It is the tremendous knotting of the primitive paradox by which pessimism and resignation are swept forward in a rush of vital faith. Like a magnet or electric charge, that flexed field of spirit carries the incalculable energies of the Greek way. 20) 20a) Greek Geometric, c. 725 B.C., Oinochoe, Shipwreck, Ant. Sam., Munich Chalcidian (Inscription Painter), c. 540 B.C., Greeks vs. Trojans, National Museum, Melbourne June 1996 Greece 8 �C.G. Bell 20b) Symbolic History Gift of Naxos to Delos, 7th cent. B.C., Terrace of Lions (CGB '77) It is the gift of this vitality that terrors are seized and affirmed as fierce delights. An 8th-century shipwreck against the battle-deaths of the Iliad: Idomeneus stabbed Erymas in the mouth with the pitiless bronze, so that the brazen spearhead smashed its way clean through below the brain in an upward stroke, and the white bones splintered, and the teeth were shaken out with the stroke and both eyes filled up with blood, and gaping he blew a spray of blood through the nostrils and through his mouth, and death in a dark mist closed in about him. (Iliad, Lattimore, XVI, 245-50) Homer makes us like Zeus: …rejoicing in the pride of his strength… looking out over the city of Troy and the ships of the Achaians, watching the flash of bronze, and men killing and men killed. But the earliest Greek art has little to match Homer's richest descriptions: As when in the sky the stars about the moon's shining are seen in all their glory, when the air has fallen to stillness 21) From Hagia Triada, Crete, c. 1500 B.C., Harvest Vase, Herakleion and all the high places of the hills are clear and the shoulders outjutting, and the deep ravines, as endless bright air spills from heaven and all the stars are seen, to make glad the heart of the shepherd; such in their number blazed the watchfires the Trojans were burning there in the plain… a thousand fires, and beside each one sat fifty men in the flare of the blazing firelight. (Iliad, Lattimore, VIII, 555-63) For anything of comparable evocation we have gone back, centuries before the Trojan War, to that Cretan miracle of "The Harvest Vase." Va22) 22) 22a) 22b) June 1996 Corinthian, c. 650 B.C., Chigi Vase, Villa Giulia, Rome Same, detail of horsemen and hunt Attic, c. 570 B.C., "François Vase," Mus. of Archeology, Florence Rhodian, later 2nd cent. B.C., The Laocoon, Vatican, Rome (CGB '86) Greece 9 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History But could we not have gone forward? Into the 7th century, when Corinth brings the Minoan to a Greek rebirth — the Homeric wonder of beauty and elan: And standing each beside his chariot, champing white barley and oats, the horses waited for the dawn to mount to her high places. (Iliad, Lattimore, VIII, 564-5) For Homer's art relates three ways: to the Aegean past, the Geometric present, the Archaic and Classical future. We can never know how far the softer harmonies of the eighth century poem reflect its sixth century Panathenean shaping from the oral body of epic song; thus Cicero: "Peisistratus is said to have arranged in their present order the books of Homer, until then in confusion" — not to mention the second century redaction by which Aristarchus produced the final Homeric canon. 23) 23a) 23b) Attic vase, end of 7th cent. B.C., Hercules and Nessus, Nat. Mus., Athens Rhodian plate, c. 600 B.C., Menelaus and Hector fight over the body of Euphorbus, British Museum, London Corinthian, c. 640-30 B.C., Chigi Vase, top detail: Battle of hoplites, Villa Giulia, Rome As the seventh century advances, vase scenes (our clue to lost painting) coin the epic and tragic myths — here Alcides killing Nessus, Alcides himself to die by the curse of the centaur's blood — one of those fatal justices to be praised, an Iliad blending of terror and delight: …and the iron tumult went up into the brazen sky through the barren bright air (Iliad, Lattimore, XVII, 424-5) — Achilles with his choice of life or fame, where the very word for excellence, αρετη, points to Ares, War: And now battle became sweeter to them than to go back in their hollow ships to the beloved land of their fathers. Lattimore, II, 453-4 and XI, 13-14) (Iliad, τοισι δ' αφαρ πολεµος γλυκιων γενετ', ηε νεεσθαι εν νηυσι γλαφυρησι φιλην ες πατριδα γαιαν. June 1996 Greece 10 �C.G. Bell 24) Symbolic History Attic, c. 600 B.C., kouros, Metropolitan Museum, NYC (CGB '79); + V detail In Homer, the antinomies stand clean and immediate. There is no rationale to vindicate the Gods or to validate suffering: no ripe Sopohoclean "No cause for tears." In the paradox of energy, the gods vindicate themselves. This youth, about 600 B.C. — type of the Archaic Apollo, python-slayer, Marsyas-flayer, god of light and justice and of the darts of pestilence, the sharp smile not of the lips only but of the whole sinewed and triangularly jointed form, shoulders, belly, knees — has the unaccountability of myth — aflame, like his sister when she caught Peleus' son by the hair; he turned about and straightway knew Pallas Athene and the terrible eyes shining." (Iliad, I, 197-200) a25) 25) 25a) 25b) Corinthian, 6th cent. B.C., Temple of Apollo over fields, Corinth Same, near, facing the corner (CGB '77) Same, less near, corner from within, against mountains (CGB '77) Hera-Temple, Olympia, c. 600 B.C. (oldest preserved) (CGB '77) Though already in Homer fierce vitality receives classical design, as in the twogabled temple, perfected by 600 B.C. — at Corinth, or among the groves of Olympia. So in the blind bard Herodotus placed four centuries before his own time, the force that built the city state, that sowed the Mediterranean with colonies, and in Thales and Anaximander raised the "Why" of natual philosophy, seeks its own harmony — between tragic antinomies, the temple of justification. Such in the Iliad is the resonance of pathos that arches from the parting of Hector and Andromache: For I know this thing well in my heart, and my mind knows it: there will come a day when sacred Ilion shall perish… (Iliad, Lattimore, VI, 447-8) to Priam's begging Hector's body of Achilles: I have gone through what no other mortal on earth has gone through; I put my lips to the hands of the man who has killed my children. (Iliad, Lattimore, XXIV, 505-6) Which Achilles grants in companionable sorrow: Such is the way the gods spun life for unfortunate mortals… (525) But bear up, old man, nor mourn endlessly in your heart… (549) June 1996 Greece 11 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History It is said, old man, you too were happy once (543) — Και σε, γερον, το πριν µεν ακουοµεν ολβιον ειναι. Since already, in the death of his friend and foreknowledge of his own fate, Achilles has risen to the kind of insight which would become the catharsis of Attic drama: "Why I wish that strife would vanish away from among gods and mortals." (XVIII, 104-5) a26) 26) 26a) Polymedes of Argos, c. 590 B.C., from Cleobis and Biton, Delphi, Museum: Cleobis(?) Same, the pair; + V detail Same, Cleobis(?), detail (all, CGB '77) The Greek myth, in all its vibrance of paradox, one could call the gift of the gods; but its human containment and use becomes the Promethean work of man. Both polis and tragedy ask moral reconstruction of the divine. Solon: "The works of hybris do not endure for man." By "the will of the blessed immortals… justice is certain to come in time." That warning he applied to the rich of sixth century Athens, channeling private daring into a proud republic of freedom under law. And when asked by Croesus who was happiest, he mentioned the Cleobis and Biton still seen at Delphi, who pulled their mother in a chariot to the shrine in Argos, and received the gift of death in their prime of youth and filial service. How could Solon foresee that the communal deflection of heroic energy might make the city state itself the new Prometheus? a27) Attic, c. 570 B.C., Triton, Pediment of Hecatompedon, Acropolis Museum, Athens 27) Same, nearer, facing the heads (CGB '77) The incorporation of the ancient curse would lead in drama to the Eumenides and Oedipus Colonus. So the snake, brute and terror figures of mythology are enshrined in the Olympian Acropolis. Socratic reason has not yet excluded them. Nor in thought the shaping daemon of contradiction. Pythagoras: Void… enters into the heaven itself from the infinite air, as though the heavens were breathing; and this void defines the natures of things… In Heraclitus most of all the sphinx-triton of the fire-sea is smiling: June 1996 Greece 12 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The way up and the way down is the same… In the same rivers you can and cannot step… All things take place by strife… Changing, the all finds rest — µεταβαλλον αναπαυεται. 28) Cretan, c. 1600 B.C., Smaller Snake Goddess, Knossos Museum (light against dark) 28a) Same, detail (light background) But that grappling with the dark centers in tragedy. The dire enigma of the divine, come down from the Snake Goddesses of Crete and the East, the terrible tales of heroes hounded by arbitrary fates, have now to be tamed, as Apollo takes over "the hallowed huge cave" (Choepheroe) of the Python. It is under that Apollo that Orestes becomes a snake to cleanse his house: Clytaemnestra "dreamed she gave birth to a snake… gave it her breast to suck… the creature drew in blood along with the milk." Orestes: "I turn snake to kill her." 29) Attic, late 8th cent. B.C., terra cotta Snake Goddess or Fury, found in the Agora From eighth century Athens comes this terra cotta Snake Goddess turned into a Fury: "Women like gorgons… wreathed in a tangle of snakes." The Libation Bearers invoke them in Aeschylus: The death act calls out on Fury To bring out of those who were slain before new ruin on ruin accomplished. (Choephoroe, 402 ff.) a30) 30) 31) Greek, c. 590 B.C., Gorgon Pediment, Corfu; detail: Gorgon's head Same, center and right, Gorgon, with the hero, Chrysaor Same, pediment cropped: Gorgon, Chrysaor and panthers The task is, as in the sixth century pediment of the Artemis temple at Corfu, how these Gorgon powers of night and the underworld ("we have chosen overthrow of houses, where the Battlegod grown within strikes near and dear") are to be instituted in the state: Let the old murder in the house breed no more. June 1996 Greece 13 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History (Choephoroe, 805) It is from the old divine order to the new — under Promethean reconciliation — as this hero Chrysaor springs from the Gorgon's blood. So Athena wins the Furies to their own sacred cave: I promise you a place of your own, deep hidden under ground… where you shall sit on shining chairs… to accept devotions offered by your citizens… (Eumenides, 804 ff.) We have begun to quote Aeschylus with the art of the centuries before him. a32) 32) 32a) Attic, c. 550 B.C., Korê wearing the Peplos #679, Acropolis Museum, Athens Attic, c. 520 B.C., Korê #670, detail, Acropolis Museum, Athens Attic, c. 500 B.C., Korê #674, detail, Acropolis Museum, Athens Meanwhile, the marvelously preserved series of Athenian Korai shows in the glory of marble the softening and humanizing of myth. Before 500 B.C. — the lyric sharpness of Sappho: ∆εδυκε µεν α σελαννα και Πληιαδες, µεσαι δε νυκτες, παρα δ' ερχετ' ωρα, εγω δε µονα κατευδω. (The moon has set and the Pleiades; it is the middle of the night; time passes, and I lie alone.) — flows like an oriental hybris, into Pindar's matured celebration of pan-hellenic triumph. a33) Vb33) 33) 33a) Double: [A] Archer, Darius I, 532-486, Frieze, Louvre, Paris; and [B] Attic (Kritios?), c. 485 B.C., Youth, Acropolis Museum (details) Attic, c. 480 B.C., Kouros, Acropolis Museum, Athens (CGB '77) not dig. Attic (Kritios?), c. 485 B.C., Youth, Acropolis Museum (CGB '77) Double: as in a33, but three Archers and the whole Kritios For triumph intervenes. 480 B.C.: after Xerxes had lashed the Hellespont, rebuilt his bridge and crossed with his hundreds of thousands — when the Persian spy, looking down on the pass of Thermopylae, saw the Spartan youth combing their long hair, and June 1996 Greece 14 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History foretold a pushover — he did not know that, for the time at least, there was power in that beauty, an order of reason in that freedom. Simonides: Stranger, bear this message to the Spartans: We lie here, to their bidding, self-persuaded. (CGB) Ω ξειν αγγελλειν Λακεδαιµονιοις οτι τηδε κειµεθα, τοις κεινων ρηµασι πειθοµενοι. And perhaps this Ephebe attributed to Kritios could have told a profound observer that the world-empire of Persia stood no more chance than the Chthonic gods against Olympian light. 34) Greek, Aegina, c. 490 B.C., Head of Athena from the Temple of Aphaia, Glyptotheque, Munich Herodotus' proud account is of the victory of an ideal: "Free they are, O King, yet not wholly free; for law is their master… What their law bids them, that they do." For the tragic stage, Aeschylus viewed the event from Susa, 1200 miles away. Strange, to make the chorus of Persian calamity a praise of Greece: "Hellas own no mortal master, and her sons are ever free." 35 35a) Same, Archer, Glyptotheque, Munich Same, detail Or the narrated catastrophe of Salamis (where Aeschylus fought), when the Athenian ships at dawn attacked the Persians in the straits, reverse itself in the "proud paean of Hellenic might." No play more bristles with warnings against hybris. But what of Greek hybris? Athens had just converted the Delian League into an empire, secured the Bosphorus for the import of grain and export of wine and oil, and was embarked against Egypt, oldest kingdom of the world. Does Aeschylus blame the vaunt in which he shares — the civic overweening which would run its course 36) Attic, 460-50 B.C., bronze Zeus or Poseidon, detail, head and shoulders, National Museum, Athens (CGB '77) through the life and death of Pericles, to shipwreck on Sicily? June 1996 Greece 15 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Or was it more than one could expect of a people, to see that the achievement of measure and clarity and reason, of joyfully ordered freedom, of drama and philosophy, of civilization, was itself the boast of Prometheus: "I caused mortals to cease fearing doom… I placed them in blind hopes… besides this, I gave them fire" — their greatness and their flaw? 37) Greek, 470-456 B.C., West Pediment of the Zeus Temple (cropped); + V detail The Orestes trilogy is from the same years as the Zeus Temple in Olympia. In the west pediment, centered in Apollo, the attempted bride-rape by the drunken centaurs, against the Lapith defense aided by Theseus, sets brute nature and barbarism against the Hellenic and rational. Yet once violence is loosed, the pediment becomes such a net of destruction as weaves through the Agamemnon and Choephoroe: (Lattimore) The struggling masses… knees grinding in dust, the end will be destiny… (Agamemnon, 64 ff.) a38) 38) Same, West Pediment, Old Lapith Woman Same, East Pediment, River God Alpheios or Kladeos Since the old Lapith women who held the corners, a lamenting chorus to the tragedy, have been renewed at a later date, we draw from the other pediment this river god who might almost be the watchman "crouched like a dog on the roof of the Atreidae," under the destiny of the wheeling stars, looking for the beacon that should herald joy: Now let there be redemption from distress, the flare burning from the blackness in good augury. (Agamemnon, 19-20) Though what it heralds is the death of Agamemnon. 39) Same, West Pediment, broken centaur head; following Va39, that head, with surrounding fragments (Va39, not dig.) The habitual warning ignored — "Let no lust seize on these men to violate what they must not" (Agamemnon, 341-2) — as we move inward: "The curse… wrings atonement from those high hearts that drive to evil" (Agamemnon, 374 ff.). And where is June 1996 Greece 16 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History the outlet from this "spider's web," this "web of death" — "fenced in these fatal nets," "the nets of ruin fence-high beyond overleaping." (Agamemnon, 1048, 1375, 1492) 40) Same, left: Girl, and Centaur stabbed by Lapith; + V detail (dig. det. first) Good and bad are caught in the same destiny: "Who shall claim he was born clear of the dark angel?" (Agamemnon, 1341-2) "I struck him twice. In two great cries of agony/ he buckled at the knees and fell." (Agamemnon, 1384-5) And the chorus: "The bitter glory of a doom that shall never be done with; and all through Zeus… what here is without God's blessing?" 41) Same, Kneeling girl caught by the hair; video uses Va41 and V41a Though "grace comes somehow violent" (Agamemnon, 183): Cassandra — "she who swanlike cried aloud her lyric mortal lamentation out": "Alas for the wretchedness of my ill-starred life… pain flooding the song of sorrow." (Agamemnon, 1444-5 and 1136-7) a42) 42) Same, right: Biting group Same, right: Biting group, another view Violence in the pediment climaxes in the biting group to the right, the boy-murder to the left. And in Aeschylus: "A house… God hates… the shambles for men's butchery, the dripping floor." (Agamemnon, 1090-92) "The drops come thicker, still fate grinds on yet more stones the blade for more acts of terror." (Agamemnon, 1534-6) "The ghastly food whose curse works now before your eyes." (Agamemnon, 1598) "Who shall tear the curse from their blood? The seed is stiffened to ruin." (Agamemnon, 1565-6) 43) V43a) Same, left: Centaur nearest to Apollo, head Same, left: Centaur nearest to Apollo, body Yet as we move toward center, the figures and faces of struggle and revenge take on choral dignity: "Yet from such as this the God, if he will, can work out strains that are fairer" (Choephoroe, 340-1), — even the centaurs, as if they too were justified: "War strength shall collide with war strength, right with right" (Choephoroe, 461); "the cure" begins to show "through the fierce wreck and bloodshed." (Choephoroe, 475) 44) Same, right: Perithoos' Bride Deiadameia, and Centaur Euritian June 1996 Greece 17 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In that middle play (The Libation Bearers), Orestes and Electra — "Hear me Earth, hear me, grandeurs of Darkness" (Choephoroe, 399) — assume the beast to serve the oracle: "For we are bloody like the wolf" (Apollo also called Lycian, the wolf-god) "and savage born from the savage mother" (Choephoroe, 421-2) 45) Same, Deiadameia, detail, head and shoulders The ultimate outrage, the mother-murder, becomes for the chorus "temperate things done in the house" (Choephoroe, 786): "with a great cry of Father, when she cries Child, go on through with the innocent murder." (Choephoroe, 828-30) 46) Same, Apollo, with Centaur to his right; V46) Same, Apollo, detail only (dig. omits) Already we are under another sway — though for Orestes pain must flower: "I grieve for the thing done, the death, and all our race… My victory is soiled and has no pride." (Choephoroe, 1016-7) As the Furies come: "On this house… the third storm has broken… Where shall the fury of fate be stilled to sleep, be done with?" (Choephoroe, 1065-67) 47) Same, Apollo, head and shoulders Only the divine can rule the Furies: "Do good, receive good, and be honored as the good are honored." (Eumenides, 868-9) "Put to sleep the bitter strength in the black wave/ and live with me and share my pride of worship." (Eumenides, 832-3) Thus in the temple, as in the trilogy: "The power that holds the sky's majesty wins our veneration." (Choephoroe, 960) 48) 48a) Still from the temple of Zeus, Olympia, c. 460 B.C., Metope: Athena, Heracles, and Atlas, Olympia Museum Same, detail So far the Promethean daring of Athens and Greece seems to have operated within the containment of tradition and under the guidance of a god — as Athena here helps Hercules hold up the sky, while Atlas brings the apples of the Hesperides. June 1996 Greece 18 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Even Empedocles, though Arnold thought he began "the dialogue of the mind with itself," seems in his fragments still carried on the sacred wave: Twofold is the coming into being, twofold the passing away of perishable things: for combining both begets and destroys, and what was combined is itself scattered, being now united by Love into one, now each borne apart by the hatred engendered of Strife… 49) Myron, c. 450 B.C. (Roman copy): Discobolus, Thermae Museum, Rome But when thought in Protagoras had made "man the measure of all things," and in Democritus had left only atoms and the void; when Gorgias turned Sophism into doubt: "the criterion of truth is destroyed; there is no criterion, either of Being, or of the possibility of its being known or communicated to others" — the method of Greek inquiry (as in Aristophanes' Clouds) has undercut the divine sanctions on which the laws of the state and their veneration rested. a50) 50) Parthenon, 447-32, B.C., from the Propylaean, Athens (CGB '77) Same, Southwest corner with Metope, Athens (CGB '77) When does Sophistic question strike at the confidence of Aeschylus and Olympia? I remember a lecture by Blanckenhagen on the Parthenon, supreme achievement of Pericles and Phidias, finished a few years before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. He treated it, as some do Oedipus, as a jibe at cruel gods. The metopes, seen here at the top, were of battle on all sides: 51) Same, Metope 1, Lapith and Centaur, Athens Lapiths against Amazons, Trojans against Greeks, giants against gods. After the pediment of Olympia, these conflicts seem as stripped as the brunt of Democritus' atoms. 1st 52) Same, East Pediment, south side: Helios' Horses, Dionysus, Demeter, Korê, Iris; British Museum, London (CGB '77) The great East Pediment, with its richly robed figures (where the horse-drawn chariot of Selene sinks to the north, and that of Apollo rises to the south) must present the central theme of Aeschylus, the coming of the new order of Athena and Apollo. Is it, as in Aeschylus, a theodicy? June 1996 Greece 19 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 1st 53) Same, part of the Frieze seen between columns, Athens The frieze, which runs around the whole temple under the porch of columns, shows the preparations for the pan-Athenian procession, with the procession itself to the sacrifice. It ends on the East a54) 54) 54a) Same, East Frieze, Hera and Zeus, British Museum (CGB '77) Same Frieze, Sacred Peplos, Athena and Hephaestos (CGB '77) Second century copy of Phidias, 447-438 B.C., gold and ivory Parthenon Athena, National Museum, Athens with the gods, who talk among themselves, unconcerned, in the detachment Protagoras had confessed of them, and been banished by the Athenians, though a friend of Pericles: As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or that they do not exist. For many are the obstacles that impede knowledge, both the obscurity of the question and the shortness of human life… Especially Athena (she had no altar in the Parthenon) turns her back to the offering. The gold and ivory Athena from the sanctuary is known only in tawdry copies, but she was shown in her aspect of terror — on her shield the battle with the Amazons, on her shoes with the Centaurs, while on the pedestal the story of Pandora replaced the other battles — the cruelty of the gods in preparing evil for man. 2nd 53) Metope from the Parthenon, Centaur and Lapith, British Museum, London (CGB '77) Is the usual view of the temple merely the vulgar view? Was the secret message of Pericles and Phidias the indifference of the gods and the futility of sacrifice? (So far, Blanckenhagen, as sophistic advocate.) a2nd 52) Parthenon, West front, looking north, Athens (CGB '77) 2nd 52) Same, East Pediment: Leto, Diane, Aphrodite, British Museum, London (CGB '77) 2nd 52a) Same, closer detail (CGB '77) June 1996 Greece 20 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Of whom the work asks the question: if in futility, why so harmonious, so rapturous a celebration? We have forgotten the paradox of tragedy itself. Hesiod told the story of Pandora as a case of divine malice — Hesiod, from the Greek age of belief: "I will give men an evil thing, in which they may… embrace their own destruction." The force of irresponsible gods, who have still to be worshipped, is the dark wisdom of ritual. Of course, as reason penetrates that matter, there will come a breaking point when the Gordian knot of stark faith cleaves and one is left with 3rd 53)Same, North Frieze, detail: youth leading a horse Sophoclean vindication: "His destiny has found a perfect end"; or Euripidean doubt: "The gods intended nothing but my woes and hate to Troy." Both stand, with the Parthenon, at a peak of perfection; a kind of pathos and backward looking attends any such cadence, where instinctive action melts into the ripeness of thought. For 2nd 54) Same, Robed horseman, looking back, British Museum (CGB '77) On such a knife edge of tragic and sceptical possibility, it is not easy to say which has been chosen. Not even the contrast of Sophocles and Euripides is as clear as stylehistory makes it. But what speaks in the Parthenon is less hidden message than manifest art. And in that, as in Oedipus Rex and Coloneus, the sacred has been made human; 55) 55a) Same, East Pediment, Dionysus, British Museum, London (CGB '77); + V detail Same, East Pediment, Horse of Selene, British Museum, London (CGB '77) in the beauty of ritual, the paradox of God and man rises to a Dionysiac crest. With the Peloponnesian War, the sequence of aspiration, hybris, fate, and ruin spreads from myth and drama into history. No author has seen the tragedy he lived through with such devastating clarity as Thucydides. In Pericles' Funeral Oration, from the first year of the war, we take the wings of Man in his Pride: We are the school of Hellas… the wonder of present and future shall be ours… we have forced sea and land to be the highway of our daring… realize the power of Athens, feed your eyes upon her, till love of her fills your hearts; and when all this greatness shall break upon you… remember… honor in action… June 1996 Greece 21 �C.G. Bell 56) 56a) Symbolic History Double: Riace Bronzes, c. 440 B.C.: [A] Younger, side; [B] Older, back; Reggio Calabria Mus.; (For Riace slides, V has variants.) (dig. adds Older, side; Younger front) Same, another view of the Younger, head to hips (V. varies these) The Riace Bronzes, keen as the reported Phidian warriors, Delphic commemorators of Marathon, are the greatest Greek discovery since the Athenian ZeusPoseidon came from the sea. How they hold the divide between that Funeral Paean and the Disaster Oration, in which (after the defeats of the second year of the war and the outbreak of the Plague, B.C. 430) Pericles bared the expediency of the vision: What you hold is, to speak somewhat plainly, a tyranny; to take it perhaps was wrong, but to let it go is unsafe. In the daring of Athenian mind, the fall is foreseen and celebrated: even if now, in obedience to the general law of decay, we should ever be forced to yield, still it will be remembered… a city unrivalled by any other. 57) Attic, c. 435 B.C., Grave relief, battle scene, Villa Albani, Rome "War the rough master" having carried off Pericles and left self-seeking factions, the followers of Phidias, exploiting the techniques of the Parthenon, move through this Albani Battle relief 58) Attic, 430-25 B.C., Greeks vs. Amazons, Phygaleia (or Bassae) Frieze, British Museum, London toward whatever style of crisis the late century Phigalian freize exhibits. The ideal falls away from such moral and political turmoil as Thucydides describes, 427 B.C., the Revolution in Corcyra (and perhaps here we are closer to the frenzy of some Euripides): For 2nd 57) Head and shoulders of Older Riace Warrior (dig. shifts order) 2nd 57a) Again, Riace Warriors: Older, front; Younger, back Words had to change their ordinary meaning and take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice… Frantic June 1996 Greece 22 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting, a justifiable means of self-defense. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected… For 2nd 56) Attic, 394-3 B.C., Dexileos Stele, Keramikos Museum, Athens Meanwhile the moderate part of the citizens perished… The ancient simplicity into which honor so largely entered was laughed down and disappeared; and society became divided into camps in which no man trusted his fellow. For 3rd 57) Same, lower right detail It was the license Sophism had already bred, "making the worse appear the better cause" — Thrasymachus' "justice is the interest of the stronger," which in 416, a time of truce, infects Athenian policy in the outrage against Melos: 2nd 58) Another detail: Phygaleia (or Bassae) Frieze We shall not trouble you with specious pretenses… since you know as well as we do that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must… That was the hybris which led the next year to the madness of the Sicilian campaign. 59) 59a) Scopas and others, c. 350 B.C., Amazon Frieze from the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, detail, British Museum, London Same, another detail How great the ambition which overreached itself, Alcibiades, most brilliant and corrupt of Socrates' admirers, betrayed to the Spartans: We sailed to Sicily, first to conquer, if possible, the Siceliots, and after them the Italiots also, and finally to assail the empire and city of Carthage. [Then] we were to attack Peloponnese… and so rule the whole of the Hellenic name. We have leapt from the Phigalian frieze to that of Halicarnassus, its 350 consequent, in the orgiastic manner of Scopas; but Alcibiades, too, had leapt ahead, launching — as from Darius (Herodotus VII, 9) "We shall bring all mankind under our yoke" — the dream which Alexander would make less visionary, but which would only be actualized by the disciplined advance of Rome. June 1996 Greece 23 �C.G. Bell a60) 60) Symbolic History Ionian, c. 400 B.C., Stele of Crito and Timarista, Mus. Rhodes; + dig. detail Attic, c. 400 B.C., Funeral Stele of Hegeso, Nat. Museum, Athens; as above In pride and sorrow, Thucydides records the Sicilian disaster: This was the greatest Hellenic achievement… at once most glorious to the victors and most calamitous to the conquered. They were beaten at all points and altogether; all that they suffered was great; they were destroyed, as the saying is, with a total destruction, their fleet, their army — everything was destroyed, and few out of many returned home. What could follow that wreck of the outward polis, its laws and values, but an inward, tragic fruit, as in the myth of Phaëthon's fall, in the garden of Euripides, where Phaëthon's sad sisters by his grave Weep into the river, and each tear Gleams a drop of amber in the wave… We feel it in the one fragment of music left from Euripides — as performed at St. John's by Therriault and Lynch: Music: a61) 61) 61a) Euripides, 408 B.C., fragment from Orestes, 1st Chorus, Theriault and Lynch, St. John's College, Santa Fe Attic (Ionian), c. 420-15 B.C., Erechtheum, N. Porch from the East, Athens Same, N. Porch from the West (CGB '77) Erechtheum from the Southwest, with the Porch of Caryatids (end Euripides) Or in Hecuba's poignant almost-justification: Had He not turned us in His hand, and thrust Our high things low and shook our hills as dust, We had not been this splendour, and our wrong As everlasting music for the song Of earth and heaven! (Gilbert Murray’s Trojan Women) In the Euripidean close of the century, the Erechtheum had caught in architecture the lyrical Ionic yearning of the Hippolytus chorus of escape, which Gilbert Murray made a masterpiece of nostalgia: June 1996 Greece 24 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Could I take me to some cavern for my hiding In the hill tops where the sun scarce hath trod… a62) 62) Same, Erechtheum, detail of a Caryatid Parthenon, 447-38 B.C., Frieze, Profile of a boy, Acropolis Museum To the strand of the daughters of the sunset The apple tree, the singing, and the gold… Where a voice of living waters never ceaseth In God's quiet garden by the sea. But the frieze of the Parthenon, in the reverie of all ripeness, of all acme, had already reflected such moods, and it was with that outward betrayal and inward deepening that Socrates ended and Plato began. a63) b63) 63) Peloponnesian, c. 400 B.C., (from Benevento), Bronze head of an Athlete, Louvre, Paris Double: Ancient replicas of 4th cent. B.C. portrait busts: [A] Socrates, Thermae, Rome; and [B] Plato, Holkham Hall, Norfolk, England Another view of a63 The seeds of the fourth century and of the Hellenistic, and even of Hellenized Rome, lurk in that 400 B.C. crisis, the gilded youth of Athens gathered (as in the Symposium) around the questioning Silenus-Socrates (whose cloud-house Aristophanes would burn) — Silenus-Socrates, to open, as votive statues did, to the Platonic doctrine of ideas. Let that team of Plato-Socrates describe, in the eighth book of the Republic, what had happened in that Athens, and would happen (as Thucydides says) "as long as the nature of man remains the same": When a democracy has drunk too deeply of the strong wine of freedom, anarchy ends by infecting everything. The father descends to the level of his sons; the master fears and flatters his scholars; old and young are alike; and all things are ready to burst with liberty. Such is the fair and glorious beginning out of which tyranny springs. 64) 64a) Hellenistic, 162-50 B.C., Demetrius I of Syria(?), Thermae, Rome Same, detail of head The people have always some protector whom they set over them and nurse into greatness. Some he kills and others he banishes, always stirring up war that the state may require a leader. Who is valiant, June 1996 Greece 25 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History high-minded, wise, is the enemy. So freedom, getting out of all order, passes over into the bitterest form of slavery. Here a Hellenistic king, perhaps Demetrius I, complements the gilded youth, Alcibiades, say, at the banquet of love. 65) From Zeus Temple, Olympia, 470-56 B.C., West Pediment, Theseus head Let Demosthenes, trying to rouse the Athenians against the menace of Macedon, make the contrast of old and new. (Here the old in art: Theseus, from Olympia) 66) 66a) There must be some cause… why the Greeks were so eager for liberty then and now are eager for servitude. There was something… which overcame the wealth of Persia and maintained the freedom of Greece… Lysippus, 336-2 B.C., Marble replica of bronze Agias, detail, head, Delphi Same, statue from the hips up (CGB '77) Something, the loss of which has ruined all… What was this? Simply that whoever took money from the corrupters of Greece was universally detested… But now all such principles have been sold as in the open market, and those imported by which Greece is ruined and diseased… envy where a man gets a bribe; laughter if he confesses it… the usual signs of corruption. Art courting that new private world — a fourth-century marble after Lysippus. 67) 67a) Attic, c. 380 B.C., Stele of Ktesileos and Theano, Nat. Museum, Athens Same, detail of Ktesileos, upper left Conceive the pity of this degradation. Platonic cave: Greek outwardness has become the Behold! Human beings in an underground cave, chained, facing away from the fire and from the light. Figures bearing images pass behind them, and before them is a wall where shadows are thrown. They have lived there since childhood, prisoners, as we all are. For them the truth will be nothing but the shadows of images cast on the wall of a cave. So the late-classical search is on: how to rise from the cave of matter to the light. Though as long as power operates in pagan forms, there will be the stern duty of return to the cave — the paradox and pathos of the human lot. June 1996 Greece 26 �C.G. Bell 68) 68a) 68b) Symbolic History Sicilian (Selinunt), c. 460 B.C.(?), detail of Hera, Museum Palermo Magna Graecia, c. 460 B.C., detail from the Birth of Aphrodite, Ludovisi Throne, Thermae, Rome Attic, c. 500 B.C.(?), Athena in gilded bronze from a vessel, Acropolis Museum, Athens But it is not the tragic paradox, which enfleshed and worshipped dangerous divinity — this fifth-century Hera unveiling herself on her wedding night, mysterious as the destroying Aphrodite of Sophocles' Antigone (Yeats): Overcome — O bitter sweetness, Inhabitant of the soft cheek of a girl — The rich man and his affairs, The fat flocks and the field's fatness, Mariners, rough harvesters; Overcome Gods upon Parnassus; Overcome the Empyrean; hurl Heaven and Earth out of their places, That in the same calamity Brother and brother, friend and friend, Family and family, City and city may contend, By that great glory driven wild. Pray I will and sing I must, And yet I weep — Oedipus' child Descends into the loveless dust. 69) Roman, 1st cent. A.D., from Praxiteles' Aphrodite of Cnidus, Cloister of the Thermae, Rome (CGB '86) It was exactly that ambiguous divinity that Socratic and Platonic reason objected to — no paradox, no cruelty in the divine; so the world cleaves into tawdry outwardness, the itch of passion, against the soul's search, that leaning of the alone to the Alone. 70) Video double; slide & dig. singly: [A] Corinthian, mid-7th cent., Hunt from Chigi Vase, Villa Giulia, Rome; and [B] Hellenistic, c. 330 B.C., Alexander Sarcophagus, Lion Hunt, Istanbul Museum June 1996 Greece 27 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History What was charged with spirit becomes counterfeit. The Homeric hunt of the Corinthian seventh-century jug: Odysseus telling of "the boar's gleaming tusk that ripped his leg while he hunted Parnassus with the sons of Autolycus," turns in the Hellenistic "Alexander Sarcophagus" — for all Aristotle's validation of imitated sense and passion — to one of the vigorous exertions of the Cave, the skilled mimesis of a slaughter yard, a shambles. Va71) From mosaic, c. 200 B.C. after late 4th cent., Battle of Alexander and Darius: Double: details of the two; but videoed singly Same, the whole mosaic, National Museum, Naples Double: [A] Apollonius of Athens, mid-1st cent, B.C., Bronze Boxer, Thermae; and [B] Hellenistic, late 3rd cent. B.C., Drunk Woman, Capitoline 71) 71a) The glow of Alexander has filled Hegel and all with raptures; but in the mosaic copy of the fourth-century painting of his Battle with Darius, we are again thrown into the cave-realm Arnold would write of: "And we are here as on a darkling plain, swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night." How much more with the Hellenistic cult of the ugly: Apollonius' Boxer, the Louvre Dwarf, the Capitoline Old Woman. 72) 72a) Attic, c. 320 B.C., Figure from Stele 2574, Nat. Museum, Athens Closer detail: face of same figure What does the just soul do in such a state? One would like to legislate, of course, "to save the country as well as oneself." That was what sent Plato on those bootless missions to Sicily. But Socrates had already given the pensive description (and example) of what was to come (Republic VII), comparing the philosopher in an evil time to one fallen among beasts: who seeing the madness of the many, and that no politician can be honest and no champion will defend justice, is like a man who, in a driving storm of dust and sleet, retires under the shelter of a wall, content if he can live his own life pure and depart in peace, and with fair hopes. 1st 73) Attic, 410-09 B.C., Nikê loosening a sandal, Acropolis Museum June 1996 Greece 28 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In the Euripides fragment, what is transcribed as chromatic was perhaps in the enharmonic or quarter-tone mode. The haunting phrase (with two indicated instrumental entrances, unison to fifth) conveys a style of passion, expressive as the robe of this 410 post-Phidian Nikê. Music: Repeat from Euripides, Orestes fragment, closing phrase 74) Rhodian, c. 190 B.C., Victory of Samothrace, Louvre, Paris (end music) As that agitation dominates the Hellenistic, it often reappears — thus the 180 B.C. Victory of Samothrace. 75) Gilded bronze krater, c. 330 B.C., Museum, Thessalonikê It relates to the Dionysiac art of Scopas, suggested in this fourth-century cinerary krater from Macedon, For 1st 76) Late copy of 300 B.C. Portrait of Alexander, Museum, Pella as also in Hellenistic portraits of Alexander, this, pursuing the ardour of Leochares. 2nd 75) Center-spread of 75: Krater (from Derveni tomb, Macedon) The most ambitious piece of Greek music that survives is the First Delphic Hymn of the second century, which with its original accompaniments must have been a rich display piece, 2nd 74) Again, Victory of Samothrace, another view with chromatics in the last section like those of the Euripides chorus. Nothing will revive the wealth of Greek music, not even a private 1930's recording of the melody by Mr. Butt; 2nd 73) Again, the Acropolis Nikê relief (CGB '77) but with such images as we have seen, it may be our best hint at one of the great emotional delights of the Platonic cave. (The words are post-Pindaric, of the shrines of Greece.) June 1996 Greece 29 �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Greek, 2nd cent. B.C., First Delphic Hymn, sung by Mr. Butt 3rd 74) Side view of the Winged Victory of Samothrace 3rd 75) A Dionysiac detail of the same Derveni Krater 2nd 76) Pergamum, c. 270 B.C., Portrait of Alexander, Istanbul Of course with this School of Pergamum Alexander we are again in the cave which outwardness had become — "swept with confused alarms." Plato had sketched (Republic IX) the fate of the tyrant (the man Thrasymachus had called happy): he is, in his waking state, what others are in their worst nightmares, enslaved, friendless, afraid, and mad. 77) Leochares, 340-30 B.C., Demeter from Knidos, British Museum (CGB '77) Against it we project, from the lifetime of Plato, the Demeter of Knidos, to keep up the oscillation — over the gulf of wider cleavage — from the more futile frenzy of action, to the searching pathos of thought, seeking by recollection: beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting, which without diminution and without increase, is imparted to the ever-growing and perishing beauties of other things. (Symposium) 78) Roman, 211-17 A.D., the Emperor Caracalla, Conservatori, Rome It was only under the universal empire of Rome, and five hundred years after Plato, that the deepening and darkening of the cave reached its limit in the soulless burden of the outward law; a79) 79) Statuette of the Young Christ, 3rd cent., upper half, Thermae, Rome Same, closer detail (head) Music: Pre-Gregorian, 3rd-5th cent.(?), Sanctus, Mass for the Dead (Solesmes) Decca 7532 A only then that the wing-sprouting soul made a final break with pagan outwardness. When it did, although its creed was of Christ's passion, it shunned the Classical style of passion as far as it could (until the Renaissance for profound theological reasons would tie onto it again); it leaned to neo-Platonism, even to the heresy of denying God's pain. And in art, the tenderest early-Christian moments June 1996 Greece 30 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History (close Sanctus) 80) From Tegea, c. 360 B.C., Head of Hygeia, National Museum, Athens are in loving relation to that soft style of the ideal, which the followers of Phidias, most of all Praxiteles (in touch with Plato), ripened as a tragic fruit from the rise and fall of Promethean Greece. So Socrates in the Phaedrus: There was a time when… we beheld the beatific vision… shining in pure light, pure ourselves, not yet enshrined in that living tomb which we carry about… prisoned like an oyster in his shell. Let me linger over the memory of scenes which have passed away. June 1996 Greece 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 Greece : The Tragic Myth and Deed, Symbolic History, Part 3 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 3 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_03_Greece--The_Tragic_Myth_and_Deed 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/6ec9e50d138dcd6c02b8f9819a4e61ce.pdf cb959b19a3172760105b584379b43098 PDF Text Text C.G. Bell Symbolic History SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 4. The Alexandrian Melt CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 July 1995 Last Revised June 1996 June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 1 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 4. The Alexandrian Melt a1) 1) Hellenistic from Rhodes, c. 190 B.C., Victory of Samothrace, from a distance, side view, Louvre, Paris (CGB '80); + dig. horizantal detail Same, Victory, nearer from the other side (CGB '80); V returns to detail of a1 (this slide lost; dig.uses other images) Music: Greek, 2nd cent. B.C., 1st Delphic Hymn V-LM/LSC 6057 From the wind-blown transport of the 190 B.C. Victory of Samothrace, a flight as of the Cloud Chorus in Aristophanes' bitterest comedy: (423 B.C.) Eternal Clouds, let us appear, let us arise from the roaring depths of Ocean, our father; let us fly towards the lofty mountains, spread our damp wings over their forest-laden summits, whence we will dominate the distant valleys, the harvest fed by the sacred earth, the murmur of the divine streams and the resounding waves of the sea, which the unwearying orb lights up with its glittering beams… 2) Same, Victory, front view (and detail); video shows two details instead — to be versed by Oscar Wilde, "Cloud-maidens that float on forever,/ Dew-sprinkled," and re-sung by Shelley: I am the daughter of Earth and Water And the nursling of the Sky… — the carved rapture no doubt paralleled in Greek music as well, before it had weathered to neumes on Delphic stone. (fade Hymn) From that, 3) Coptic (from Bauit), 6th cent., St. Menas and Christ, encaustic, Louvre, Paris Music: June 1996 Yemenite Jewish, Hymn for Hasha'na Rabba, close, History of Music in Sound, V-LM/LSC 6057 The Alexandrian Melt 1 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History to the Coptic flattening of anchorites in the Egyptian desert; as if Plotinus' "cut away everything" and "we rub the eye and it sees the light it contains — truest seeing," had joined the cry of Synagogue chant. (close of Jewish Hymn) The break to such earth-denial, 4) Victory of Samothrace, night-lighted, from the side; + V details from such earth-claim, is as startling as any in history. And yet the West, in less than a century, has turned in music from Franck's romantic wingings (Les Eolides): Music: 5) Cesar Franck, 1876, Les Eolides (climax), London CS 6540 (fade) Coptic, Christ and Abu Menas, detail, Louvre to the encaustic reduction of Varese. Music: 6) 6a) Edgar Varese, 1936, Density, solo flute (to 1st pause), Col. MS 6146 (fade) Attic, c. 560-50 B.C., Marble Sphinx, Acropolis Museum, Athens (CGB '77); + V detail Greek (Naxos), c. 550 B.C., Sphinx, detail, Museum, Delphi [Slide only] Could the very Sphinx, who smiles from the Archaic Acropolis the Persians would sack, have answered how far that transformation was latent in Dionysian and Socratic Greece, how far an outcome of Alexander's fusing East and West (those earthdespising sages, Calanus and others, he sought beyond the Indus; Hebrew scriptures seeded from Eleusis, reaching from Egyptian bondage and Ikhnaton's one-god zeal toward Hölderlin's second Dionysus, sacrificial Syrian of "Bread and Wine")? Could the Sphinx herself have told, or was it her wisdom only to propose the question? Since where in history has such an antinomy been proposed without requiring for its answer: Both in one! 7) Greek, Lindos Acropolis with 4th cent. Temple of Athena June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 2 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Face two ways, toward the sheer Acropolis of Lindos on Rhodes: the island Pindar praised in a golden ode, where in Hellenistic times the Victory of Samothrace was carved — the columns of the 4th century B.C., though the rock had been a sanctuary of Lindian Athena from its seizure by the Dorians, "descended," as Pindar says, "of old from … the widely ruling race of Heracles." 8) 8a) Paul's Harbor from Lindos Acropolis, Island of Rhodes (Simpson) Greek, c. 460 B.C., Ruins of Zeus Temple, Olympia (CGB '77) But if we turn — the temple now to the right, asserting columned Greece — it was into the harbor below that Paul sailed on his way to Jerusalem. His great encounters, Euroclydon and the Shipwreck, when the viper warmed by fire fastened on his hand and he felt no harm, occurred in Crete and Malta on the final voyage to Rome. Yet here, by the ruined temple over his storied Harbor, the second letter to the Corinthians sounds that overthrow: Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. 9) Cyprus, Neolithic, 6th millenium B.C., andesite idol, National Museum, Athens Take a stand nearer the center of that world-polis where Alexander thought to embrace in Macedonian vigor and Athenian enlightenment everything Persia had ruled, from age-old Egypt to hither India — a stand, say, on the island of Cyprus — and from there, as in a partial derivative, scan the time manifold: first, this 6th millenium gray volcanic idol: what cropped out, with tribal agriculture, from the whole family of man. 10) Cyprus, 3000-2500 B.C., seated figure in stealite, Cyprus Museum, Nicosia How varied the time scale of history. Almost 3000 years were required for the transition to the symbolic sophistication and polish of this soapstone seated idol, on the threshold of the Bronze Age, contemporary with early Sumer and Egypt and suggestively with Cycladic pre-Greece. June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 3 �C.G. Bell 11) Symbolic History Mycenæan, 13th cent. B.C. Rhyton from Kition, Cyprus Museum, Nicosia By the 13th century B.C., the Cycladic had focused to the Minoan; the Minoan, spreading over the Aegean islands, had sowed Greece with the Homeric citadels of the Mycenæan, then embroiled in the Trojan War. Even in Cyprus, this faience Rhyton testifies to that culture, though the island was also in contact with mainland Syria, and was ruled from New Kingdom Egypt, then at its Rameses Second peak of imperial power and style. 12) 12a) Cyprus, Iron I 12th cent. B.C., Horned God, bronze, Cyprus Museum, Nicosia; + V detail Egypt, Dynasty XIX, 13th cent. B.C., Osiris, Tomb #1, Dier el Medineh, Thebes By the next century this horned deity of bronze hints at the hardening of a time of troubles, the folk-wanderings which brought in the Iron Age, and with Mycenæan decline, the dominance of Asia. Yet the first Greek is nascent here, and who is this with head (or helmet) horned? Dionysus, born by the myth in Bœotian Thebes, to Cadmus' daughter Semele, is also called "Horned Bromius," god of earthquake and violence. But Cadmus was a Phœnician, bringer of the alphabet; Dionysus, too, in Euripides, has returned to Thebes, a new god, from triumphs in Asia. While his origin, for Herodotus, is that older Thebes of Egypt; he is Osiris, its lord of rebirth from the grave. The cradle of Greece already resembles the Alexandrian melt — though in Yeats' double-cone, under a change of sign. 13) Cypro-Archaic, early 5th cent. B.C., Bearded head with laurel leaves, Cyprus Museum, Nicosia; + V detail The folk-wandering brought in the Greeks — the Cyprian hero Cinyras, from the time of the Trojan War. By the beginning of the fifth century, this laurelled head carries the archaic smile over into what has suddenly become the Olympian pride of all Greece. 14) 14a) Cypro-Hellenistic, end of 4th cent. B.C., Female head, Cyprus Museum, Nicosia; + V detail [Slide only] Cyprus, 4th cent. B.C., terra cotta head of a man, on loan to the National Museum, Athens June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 4 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Against it, the fourth century of Macedonian rule and Academic philosophy, witnesses, in Cyprus as elsewhere, a soft ripening of art and soul. In Aristophanes' Frogs, the ghost of Aeschylus blames Euripides. As if those choruses of pain and escape — the chromatic fragment from Orestes, Music: Euripides, 408 B.C., fragment from Orestes, 1st Chorus, Theriault and Lynch, St. John's, Santa Fe or what Gilbert Murray gleaned, as from the Bacchae: Where is the home for me? O Cyprus, set in the sea, Aphrodite's home in the soft sea-foam, Would I could wend to thee; Where the wings of the Loves are furled, And faint the heart of the world! — had seduced all of the Hellenic name. 15) (end Euripides) Cypro-Roman, 3rd cent. A.D, Mosaic pavement, Triumph of Dionysus, detail, Villa Paphos, Cyprus A Classical continuance of over six centuries, though the power-center has shifted to Rome. How heavy now, in this 3rd century A.D. mosaic pavement from a Cyprian villa, the mystery of Dionysus has become. As Yeats writes: "In pity for man's darkening thought/ He walked that room and issued thence/ In Galilean turbulence …" 16) Roman Christian, 1st half of 4th cent. A.D., Daniel in the Lion's Den, mosaic detail, Mausoleum of Centcelles, near Tarragona, Spain No wonder if in the same century, or the early fourth — though our example is from Tarragon, across the Mediterranean — mosaics would shift from villa leopards of the wine god to mausoleum lions of Daniel's Bible victory. 17) Danubian, c. 5500 B.C., Fish-mouth man, Iron Gate, Yugoslavia If we range now, expanding the cut explored in Cyprus, what lies at the base, from China and India to Europe, is the neolithic idol — 6th millenium B.C., from the Iron June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 5 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Gates of the Danube, whence the Indo-Europeans would flood the South, this so-called "Fish-mouth man," weightiest of all. 18) Peloponnesian, 6th millenium B.C., female idol, National Museum, Athens Beside it at the same time, but from Greece, the Peloponnese, a female form is a miracle of grace; as if dawn clarity was already welling from what would become Classic soil. Without the implied world community, and kindling within it, an Aegean light, there could have been no Alexandrian dream — much less the astonishing fact. 19) Mesopotamia (Susa), end of 4th millenium B.C., Vase with saluki hounds, Louvre, Paris Three pots will display at a glance both the wide-spread common ground. and the lyrical birth of the proto-Greek: here, end of the fourth millenium, from Mesopotamia, a vase with stylized natural forms, at the top, cranes, then saluki hounds, below, the ibex, huge-horned; 20) Chinese, 3rd millenium, B.C., Jar with spiral design, Museum of Eastern Art, Oxford, England Chinese, third millenium, the abstract spiral of sea and growth already hinting, in this infolding, at Yin-Yang; 21) Minoan, c. 1800 B.C., Spouted Pithos from the old Palace of Phaistos from Crete, early second millenium, this Minoan refinement and delight, sprung from the world base, like Aphrodite, ocean-born. 22) Egypt, Dynasty III, c. 2660-50 B.C., Statue of King Zoser, detail, Egyptian Museum, Cairo But a thousand years before Minos' Palace, with the beginning of Aegean traffic in the bronze of the new age, and in complementarity with the stupendous rise of Old Kingdom Egypt (here King Zoser, Third Dynasty — time also of that idol from Cyprus, the seated figure we saw in the shape of a cross), June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 6 �C.G. Bell 23) Symbolic History Cycladic, 2800-2200 B.C., from Keros, Harp Player, National Musuem, Athens (CGB '77); + V detail (also dig.) Cycladic carvings in crystalline marble (this luminous Harp Player in the Athens Museum), refine something so free and fresh, so Apollonian, we almost hear the Bard singing of Ilium, or Alcaeus and Sappho hymning wine and love: Deathless Aphrodite, throned in flowers, Daughter of Zeus, guileful enchantress… Fight by my shoulder. (CGB) Yet as always, cross-fertilization was required. The Hellenic could not have arisen from the Cycladic alone. 24) Egypt, Dynasty V, c. 1500 B.C., Cattle fording a canal, detail, Mastaba of Ti, Sakkara As Herodotus would discover, Egypt was for the Greeks the deepest source of gods and arts, of civilization. Fifth Dynasty tomb reliefs from 2500 B.C. already pursue the joyful representation of natural forms — this painted relief of cattle fording a stream, from Sakkara, where the zig-zag overlay at the base marvellously suggests the flow of water. 25) 25a) Hellenistic (Attic), c. 150 B.C., Horse found off Artemisium, National Museum, Athens Same, front detail (CGB '77) Though the leap from that to the Hellenistic animal, effects (as in the Alexandrian mathematics and science which culminated in Archimedes) a hyperbolic approach toward modernity. What startles in this Attic horse dredged from the sea is not simply the mastery of life-sized free-standing bronze, but that two centuries before Christ we sense the restless search and psychic liability of the later West — the calculus tug of Eudoxus' method of exhaustion. 1st 26) Sumerian, c. 1650 B.C., Face of Peace, whole, Standard of Ur, British Museum [Note: 26-29 reflect the '93 revision of the slide show; in the video, the same material is not yet so well ordered — digital now bettered] June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 7 �C.G. Bell 27) Symbolic History Sumerian, c. 1650 B.C., Face of War, Standard of Ur, British Museum, London Same, close detail 27a) Meanwhile, from the start, the whole civilized theatre was preparing, by a multiple first thrust, for the empires Alexander would assume. There the Greek would not be the only rebel scion of Egypt: how many of the prohibitions and purifications Herodotus noted in Thebes, surface also in Leviticus? And where are we headed, as early as the Pyramids, in the art of Mesopotamia? — this inlaid "Standard of Ur." That the two faces are paired, this a scene of battle, 2nd 26) 2nd 26a) 2nd 26b) 2nd 26c) Peace, close detail Mycenæan, 15th cent. B.C., Gold cups, National Museum, Athens Aegean (Thera), 16th cent. B.C., fresco, from Akrotiri on Thera or Santorin Michelangelo, c. 1525-34, Medici Tombs, San Lorenzo, Florence the other a victory feast, might point to the Vaphio cups, Cretan or Mycenæan, opposed reliefs of bulls wild and tame; or the discovered Theran fresco of an expedition, where some see a contrast of Peace and War. In Homer, there is the Shield of Achilles, with its alternate cities of law and marriage, of siege and death; or, in the classically inspired West, Michelangelo's Medici Tombs, with the "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" of Milton. a2nd 27) 2nd 27) 28) 29) Double: Standard of Ur, details of Peace and War Same, wider detail from War Same, wider detail from Peace Same, Double: more embracing sections of Peace and War Music: Hurrian Cult Song, c. 1400 B.C., Ugarit Cuneiform Tablet, University of California But what the "Standard of Ur" brings to mind is not that Greek tradition, but the faithchronicles of the Chosen People — their songs of war and victory, as Miriam's "Sing ye to the Lord, for he hath truimphed gloriously; the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea." Yet the oldest Biblical texts, like this Ugarit hymn, hopefuly reconstructed from cuneiform, are dated a thousand years after that Ur of the Chaldees from which Abraham, father of Israel, is said to have migrated. June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 8 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The Creation in Genesis stands in some relation to that of the Babylonian fragments, with its first stirring on the waters, its confusion and conflict of gods, revolt of Darkness, viper, and dragon. a30) 30) 30a) Mesopotamian, c. 2100 B.C., from Girsu (or Lagash?), terra cotta head of a divinity, Louvre, Paris Ur, Dynasty III, c. 2500 B.C., Ram caught in a thicket, British Museum, London Same, detail June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 9 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The Biblical Flood, with Noah's Ark, owes more to the account preserved in the British Museum tablets from 3000 or so B.C. But what the Hebrew successors of old Sumer have effected, after Egyptian exile, in scriptures actually contemporary, from Achaian epoi down, with Greece, is the transformation of a capricious polytheism to the postIkhnaton unity, moral justice, ultimately the mercy of Jahwe. So the Ram caught in the flowering thicket, of gilded wood and polychrome, also from Ur about 2500 B.C., might be waiting, vicarious averter of the sacrifice of Isaac, when God tempted Abraham: (Genesis 22) And Abraham stretched forth his hand and took the knife to slay his son. And the angel of the Lord called … "Lay not thine hand upon the Lad … And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son. 31) Indus Valley, c. 3rd millenium B.C., Priest-God-King from Mohenjo-Daro; + V detail; also dig. Music: Hurrian cult song, continued, lyre That ancestor civilization of the third millenium had also its Indus Valley cognate, at the limit of the vast area Alexander would march over and his Seleucid successors would Hellenize. And here too the cult affinities (as in this Priest-God-King from Mohenjo-Daro) are with what, later, in the god-seeking Semitic east, would both absorb and be polarized against the philosophy and art of the Greeks. Disheartening that for all that pre-Hellenic fabric, stretching from Egypt and the Aegean, around the Fertile Crescent to Persia, Bactria, India — and over the thousand years from these beginnings, a32) 32) Egyptian New Kingdom, Dynasty XVIII, 1422-11 B.C., Tuthmosis IV, Tomb of Djeser-ka-re-seneb, Woman at her toilet, #38, Necropolis, Thebes Same, Tomb of Nakht, Women Musicians, #52, Necropolis, Thebes 32a) 32b) Same, Tomb of Menna, #69, Necropolis, Thebes Detail of slide 32 June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 10 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History through the tomb-paintings of New Kingdom Thebes — we have only one cult song from Canaanite Ugarit on the coast of Syria, time of Ikhnaton, a conjectural harmony for voice and lyre. What different music these houris of the Nile would have sounded. (close Hurrian song) Amid such luxuries the Israelites were slaves. We think of the oriental love poems associated in the Bible with the amorous yoke of Solomon: "ships of Tarshish bringing gold and silver, ivory, apes, and peacocks": Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine … I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon. … A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me; he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts… Yet Solomon lived five-hundred years after the scribe of this 18th Dynasty tomb; 33) Græco-Roman from Pompeii, c. 30 B.C., Satyr and Maenad, Mus. Naz., Naples; first, video detail; so dig. and the canticles named for him are commonly assigned to the third century B.C., when the theocratic pocket of old Judah was invaded from all sides by the Hellenism of Alexandria, the new sensuality of carving and fresco, of which a final luminous flourish would be preserved in Pompeii. What Greek bloom has touched the interpreted God-love of the Song of Songs? Thy lips, O my spouse, drop as the honeycomb; honey and milk are under thy tongue. … Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies. Until day break, and the shadows flee away, I will get me to the mountain of myrrh, and to the hill of frankincense. 34) 34a) Aegean (Thera), 16th cent. B.C., Youth with Mackerel, National Museum, Athens Minoan from Knossos, c. 1500 B.C., Fresco of bull-jumping acrobatics, Herakleion Museum, Crete Meanwhile the culture which would conquer Israel and be conquered by it from within had come to its first Aegean birth — a keenness to which the second, and Homeric, would return. The frescoes of maritime Thera, buried under volcanic ash about 1500 B.C., the bullfights and natural forms of Crete (from the time of New Kingdom June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 11 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Egypt) open, in cyclical history of soul, the glad possibility of a late-period cultivation of sensuous yet airy delight — like Impressionist verve in a Europe of Symbolist pain. 35) Egyptian, Dynasty XVIII, c. 1480 B.C., Temple for Queen Hatschepsut, near Thebes That whole horizon of Aegean pleasure, with the luxury of musical houris, in her Nile temple the Amon-begetting of Queen Hatshepsut, Ahmes awoke at the perfume of the god and laughed in the face of his majesty — whatever Herodotus tallies in the Greek debt to Egypt, 36) Egypt, New Emp. Dynasty XVIII, c. 1370 B.C., Ikhnaton, Colossal Head, Egyptian Museum, Cairo pales under the one-god stare of Ikhnaton (about two centuries before the Trojan War). What that enforces is the other debt, of Hebrew prophecy: Amos, by 750: Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning … The Lord is his name … Isaiah was not much later, though the writing continued over centuries — preparing for a saviour child: "Behold a virgin shall conceive" … "unto us a son is given" … "a man of sorrows … wounded for our transgressions …" 37) Egypt, Dynasty XIX, 1304-1237 B.C., War relief of Rameses II, Rock Temple, Abu Simbel; + V detail (not dig.) But the New Kingdom extravagances of soul and flesh rested on imperial war, and here too Rameses II smiting his enemies in the rock temple of Abu Simbel is more tied to the oldest "Wars of the Lord" stratum of the Bible — the Ark Song of Moses: Rise up, Lord, and let thine enemies be scattered; and let them that hate thee flee before thee; Deborah's Song in Judges: June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 12 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at her feet he bowed, he fell: where he bowed, there he fell down dead — a38) Egypt, Dynasty XIX, 1301-1235, Columned Hall, Great Temple of Amon, Karnak 38) Another view of the same Since ancient times the forest of carved columns in the Great Hall of Karnak near Thebes has been called one of the Wonders of the World. It was built over dynasties, but centrally during, and to commemorate Rameses II's wars with the Hittites, who were fanning out from the highlands of Turkey. Yet this pillared hall marks the crisis of Egyptian conquest and temple construction. The "eternal treaty" of 1820, here inscribed, set Egypt on the long decline before Assyria. What else would have permitted the Exodus of the Jews or their settlement in the Promised Land? 39) Hittite, 14th cent. B.C., Lion Gate, detail, wall of Hattusas, central Turkey For the Hittites, too, it was the turning-point toward the 1200 B.C. overthrow. Though even at their prime (this 14th century Lion Gate in the four-mile wall of Hattusas) they exhibit, after the civilizing Old Kingdoms, the primitive force of imperial legatees, fortified against troubles to ensue. a40) b40) 40) Mycenae, c. 1500 B.C., The Lion Gate Mycenæan, c. 1200 B.C., Warrior Krater, National Museum, Athens Same, slide detail of Warriors (video takes detail from b40) The 1500 B.C. explosion had wrecked Santorin. The accompanying quake and tidal wave must have shaken naval Crete. Mainland Mycenae — with its own Lion Gate and Cyclopean ramparts, or this Krater of marching Warriors — also suggests the heavier fate of the Successor Power, a power soon to spend itself in the Trojan Wars and homecoming disasters which would feed tragic myth. From these rowed myrmidons of 1200 B.C., 41) 41a) 41b) Anatolia, c. 800 B.C., Terra cotta relief of Phrygian soldiers, Ankara Hittite, c. 1250 B.C., Frieze of Warrior Gods, Yazilikaya, Anatolia Phrygian soldier, detail of 41 June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 13 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History to these of Asia Minor four centuries later, the power collapse and folk-wanderings invite a range of ephemeral shifting kingdoms. Between the Hittite and Egyptian retreat and the more savage reversion of Assyrian rise (about 900), Phoenicians and Philistines, Ammonites and Moabites strove; even Israel established the archetypal Kingdom of David, with Solomon's palace and temple, as if to imitate on their own the monuments they had slaved to build under Rameses II. While to the north, Ionians, Lydians, Phrygians jockeyed with more barbaric Scythians in the shiftings Herodotus resumes. a42) 42) 42a) 42b) Assyrian (Nimrud), 883-859 B.C., Statue of Assurnasirpal II, British Museum, London Assyrian relief, 7th cent. B.C., Sacking a city, British Museum, London Assyrian, 668-630 B.C., Sennacherib's Palace (Assurbanipal), Conquest of Elam, detail, British Museum, London Same, another detail, Defeated Elamites prostrate themselves "The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold" … "I slaughtered them," said Ashur-nasir-pal (ninth century), "With their blood I dyed the mountains red like wool … Their young men and their maidens I burned in the fire" And (as in this 7th century Assyrian relief) "I carried off their spoil and their possessions. The heads of their warriors I cut off, and I formed them into a pillar over against their city." In 854 B.C. his son Shalmaneser III smote the Aramæans of Damascus and of Hamath, allied with Ahab of Israel, who took the field (Assyrian record says) with 2,000 chariots and 10,000 men. The already divided Jewish kingdoms of North and South were bled, subdued, dismembered. 43) 43a) Assyrian relief, c. 700 B.C.(?), Elamites taken into captivity, Louvre, Paris Babylon, early 6th cent. B.C., Reconstruction of Ishtar Gate, detail, Museum, Berlin When Sennacherib assaulted Judah about 700 B.C. (time of this relief of Elamites led into slavery), he boasted of taking 200,000 prisoners. Though the great symbolic bondage for the Jews, that punishment of which Isaiah warns, did not stem from Assyria, but from the brief Chaldean empire of Neo-Babylon, its great city called the most glorious of the ancient world. (Psalm 137): June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 14 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion … a44) 44) Persian, 5th cent., Ruins of Persepolis, column, and Staircase of Apadana Persian, 522 B.C., Darius I as Gilgamesh, Great Palace, Persepolis Then the Persians captured Babylon, 539 B.C. and Cyrus freed the Jews and restored the temple of Jerusalem. "Jahweh's annointed" Isaiah calls him. While Herodotus, from the other side, heard Greek tidings: that Cyrus had been exposed as a child, like Oedipus, for an oracle; and that Haparchus, his champion, had been fed his own children, like Thyestes. Here, in the ruins Alexander would make of Persepolis, Darius I, who also favored the Hebrews and attacked the Greeks, fights a lion monster as Gilgamesh, Asian Hercules and harrower of hell — cover for the horse-trickery that bungled to Marathon. 45) Celtic (Halstatt), 7th cent. B.C., Grave cult wagon from Strettweg; Landesmuseum, Graz The Persians, in passing, had subdued Thrace and Macedon. But north and west lay the Indo-European pool of past and future invasions — this Celtic cult wagon, of the 7th century B.C., a bronze death goddess and her retinue. Had not Indics, Hittites, Persians, Lydians, Lycians, Phrygians, Greeks, Umbrians, Latins, poured down from that death-and-life source? But between that Austria 46) 46a) 46b) 46c) Ionic, 7th cent. B.C., Gift of Naxos to the Sanctuary of Delos, Terrace of Lions (CGB '79) Same, detail of a lion (CGB '79) Attic, c. 600 B.C., Kouros, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City (CGB '79) Post Cycladic, 625-20 B.C., Melian or Parian(?), Amphora found in Delos, Apollo drawn by winged horses, National Museum, Athens and its Aegean radiant, the day-spring had occurred, which the island of Delos would commemorate, as in this 7th century B.C. Terrace of Lions, facing the sacred lake and the June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 15 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History palm tree where the golden-haired Apollo, with Artemis, was born, as in the Homeric Hymn: Blessed Leto, rejoice, for you bore glorious children — Apollo who shoots from afar and Artemis who loves arrows — Even in rocky Delos under the Cynthian Hill, Near to a palm-tree that stood beside the waters of Inopus. In the Iliad, no calm Apollonian: (Lattimore) Lord of the silver bow who set your power about Chryse and Killa the sacrosanct, who are lord in strength over Tenedos … . Terrible was the clash that rose from the bow of silver. 47) 47a) 47b) Attic, about 530 B.C., Black-figured chalice of Exekias, Dionysus' Sea Voyage, Munich Same, upper detail Same, lower detail As charged as the later child of the Thunderer — this 6th century bowl of Exekias, with the "Homeric" hymn: I bring to mind Dionysos, son of burning Semele, On a jutting headland by the shore of the fruitless sea, A stripling with dark eyes, long hair and purple robe. Tyrsenian pirates seized him, hurried to their doom. Wind filled the sail, the crew hauled tight on either side. Strange sights came upon them: sweet and fragrant wine Filled the ship's black hull; ivy twined the mast; A vine with clustered grapes spread out along the yard; The god from the bow scowled and roared as a lion; The sailors leapt as one into the foam-bright sea, Changed to dolphins … (CGB, using Loeb) As Ovid, six centuries later (?) details: All — back arched and body blackened, flippered Hands, legs gone to torso, crescent tailed — Dove and leapt in spray, spouting water. (CGB) 48) Egypt, 2510 B.C., King Mycerinus and his Queen, Fine Arts, Boston June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 16 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Historically, it was from late Egypt that Greece must have learned; but what it reenacts is the spirit of the beginning. One would be hard-pressed to answer where art has scaled such an Olympus as the Homeric poems — whether in the dawn-power of 4th Dynasty Egypt (Mycerinus with his Queen, 1200 years before the Trojan War), 49) 49a) 49b) 49c) Attic "Kroisos," c. 525 B.C., Funerary Kouros, National Museum, Athens (CGB '77) Michelangelo, 1501-03, David, mid-front, Accademia, Florence (CGB '86) Another view of 49, "Kroisos" (CGB '77) Attic, 510-500 B.C., Hermes, the Cecropides, and boy Erichthonius, Acropolis Museum, Athens or in those god-souled and muscled Kouroi of the 6th century Attic, at least two centuries after Homer, though about the time the Athenian text of his poems was prepared. If what we seek is the Homeric cognate, it must appear where the man-god, however inspired from Egypt and Asia, strips to the canons of human excellence, of Aretê. At about the same time David, whom the Renaissance would remake after the Greek model, was humanized by the Deuteronomist, how differently: "a youth, ruddy, and of fair countenance," facing Goliath: Thou comest to me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a shield: but I come to thee in the name of the Lord of Hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom thou hast defied… — To be met thereafter by the women dancing like Bacchantes to tabrets and song: "Saul has slain his thousands, but David his ten thousands." a50) 50) Ionian relief, c. 525 B.C., North Frieze, Siphnian Treas., Mus. Delphi (CGB '77); + dig. detail: lion Ionian, c. 525 B.C., Siphnian Treasury Frieze, Gigantomachy, another detail, Museum, Delphi (v + dig. first, closer detail) As when a lion, murderous, springs among the cattle … And their flanks heave with terror; even so the Achaians Scattered in panic before Hector and Zeus, the great father. (Iliad, XV, 630 ff, Lattimore) As when a ravening fire breaks out deep in a bushy wood… June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 17 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History So Atreus' son, Agamemnon, roared through the ranks Of the Trojans in flight… (Iliad, XI, 155 ff, Lattimore) How high Homeric metaphor, like this Archaic freize (of the Syphnian Treasury at Delphi) lifts the earth-misery of town-destroying man: Godlike Achilles, lamented by his immortal mother: To a bad destiny I bore you in my chambers … your life must be brief and bitter beyond all men's. (Lattimore) Joshua's attack on Jericho, events also of around 1200 told centuries after, shuns that tragic detachment of the Olympian: at the seventh time, when the priests blew with the trumpets, Joshua said unto the people, Shout; for the Lord hath given you the city. And the city shall be accursed … and all that are therein … only Rahab the harlot shall live … Because she hid the messengers that we sent … So the people shouted when the priests blew with the trumpets, and … the wall fell down flat… 51) Greek, 6th cent. B.C., Odysseus and the Cyclops' Ram (gilded bronze), Museum, Delphi; + V detail From the other, the homecoming myth of Odysseus, this escape from the cave, tied to the Cyclops' ram — how remote the holiness of Israel: Joseph, with his cloak of many colors, his bondage, fortune, and delivery, a chronicled exemplum of the Chosen: be not grieved, nor angry with yourselves that ye sold me hither: for God did send me before you to preserve life… As God reveals to Jacob: fear not to go down into Egypt: for I will there make of thee a great nation… Yet those radical opposites, to blend in the Alexandrian melt, must have precipitated together from one Egyptian, near-Eastern and Aegean matrix — the daughter Agamemnon sacrificed for war, Iphigenia, "strong born," of the same name with that Yepthe-genia sacrificed in Judges, the Daughter of Jeptha, "mighty man of valour." June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 18 �C.G. Bell 52) 52a) 52b) Symbolic History Attic, c. 520 B.C., Athena vs. the Giants, from Hecatompedon, old Acropolis, Athens (CGB '77) Same, detail of Athena (CGB '77) Same, detail of Giant (CGB '77) Out of Greek myth comes also tragedy, that Dionysian-Apollonian knot of divine terror and reconciliation which Greek art suggests in its Gigantomachias — this from the sacred Pediment of the Hecatomb temple on the Pisistratid Acropolis — the Battle of Athena with the giants — on the line that leads to the cry of Oedipus, which we, no more than Yeats, can translate: ιου, ιου; τα παντ' αν εξηκοι σαφη… Ω φως, τελευταιον σε προσβλεπσαιµι νυν O! O! All brought to pass! All truth! … Light, I look my last upon you, Found in bloodshed, birth and marriage all accursed. (CGB) How much more faith has given in the translation of Hebrew pain: Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived… a53) 53) 53a) Parthenon, 447-32 B.C., (from the Propylean) Athens (CGB '77) Modern realization of the interior of Phidias' 447-432 B.C. Parthenon Greek (post-Phidian), c. 340 B.C., Head of Zeus, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston A clue to some synoptic harmony of the ancient world that the Book of Job, dramatizing Jeremiah's debate with God's justice: "wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper?" (a legend coming into the Bible perhaps from Babylon), seems to share the 5th century with the Athenian climax of the same tragic inquiry — its cognate in art the temple celebration of dangerous yet healing divinity: this reconstructed Parthenon Athena, shielded and shod with myths of battle, and on the pedestal, Pandora tempted to the God-given box of grief for man. June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 19 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Then answered the Lord unto Job out of the whirlwind and said: Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee… Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? … He is a king over all the children of pride. But "the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning"; and the same blind Oedipus of whom the chorus had said: ιω γενεαι βροτων… O generations of men, how I count you equal with those who live not at all! walked at Colonus, into immortal Light. 54) 54a) Hellenistic (Pergamum), 180-160 B.C., Battle of Athena and the Giant Alcyoneus, with Gê and Nikê, Staat. Mus., Berlin Same, detail left That Typhœan wrestling darkens from the 6th century through the Periclean 5th to the Hellenistic pride of this Pergamum. What if Attic enlightenment idealizes its Olympians against the Apollyon-winged and serpent-wreathed pathos of nature's giants? Are not all whelmed in weightier struggle — as when Lucretius espouses Promethean Epicurus against these very gods? When human life lay, crushed by religion, grovelling on the ground… a man of Greece first dared… unbar the gates of nature… for each thing define its deep-set boundary mark. …Religion trampled in turn, we, by his victory are exalted to the stars. a55) b55) 55) Selinunt, 7th-5th cent. B.C., Ruins of Temples E, F, &G, Sicily Sicilian Greek, c. 480 B.C., Giant Atlas from Zeus-Temple, Agrigente, Sicily Same, another view (video also adds a detail of b55) Greek measure, with its warnings against hybris, cannot hide the risk of Greek daring. When we stand among the ruins of the mightiest temples at Selinunt, or here at Agrigento, where Atlas, one of the Giants who supported the great entablature, was thrown by earthquake, we gauge, through Olympian worship, the deeper than Oriental excess — as Telemon Ajax, in The Iliad, contends with the gods. June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 20 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Nor can the Jehovah submission of Jerusalem obscure at the other center the prophetic assumption of what, through the visions of Isaiah (28:1) — "The Lord … shall punish … leviathan, that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea" — through Daniel's great Image of Man, Ezekiel's Beasts and the Valley of Dry Bones, was working toward Christian Revelation — a56) 56) Greek, 6th cent. B.C. to 132 A.D., Temple of Olympian Zeus, Athens (CGB '77); video: upper detail only Same, another view (CGB '77); video: lower detail only as when the “Dies Irae” and the City of God first loom in Zephaniah (626 B.C. and after): The great day of the Lord is near … a day of wrath … a day of waste and desolation … of clouds and thick darkness. … Sing, O daughter of Zion; shout, O Israel; be glad and rejoice … O daughter of Jerusalem … In Athens the gigantism overweens in the Olympieion under the Acropolis (here its southwest corner, with a human figure). We tend to blame this disproportion on Rome, since the temple was restored and finished by Hadrian. But the Seleucid Antiochus had poured vast sums into a Hellenistic reconstruction, following the ground plan (though not the Ionic order) of a temple begun by Pisistratus, 6th century B.C. tyrant of Athens, under whom the Homeric poems were also said to have been ordered. a57) 57) Greek, 447-32 B.C., Parthenon, Acropolis, Athens Attic (Phidias, etc.), 447-32 B.C., Horsemen, Frieze, Parthenon (CGB '77); + V detail (shown first) The Parthenon, of half the size, is both the peak of affirming dignity, and (like the Periclean Funeral Oration and the Disaster Oration) the turning point to an almost sighing caress. In the most beautiful of the Horsemen, as he looks behind him, archaic and early classical dream toward the elegiac sweetness of Praxitiles — as if this ripeness of face, this perfect fall of robe, enacted at once both Sophocles and Euripides. The book of Ruth is of the time: Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 21 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History people shall be my people, and thy God my God. … The Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me. But where the acme of the prophetic arrow? a58) 58) 59) Double of the two slides to follow Attic, c. 500 B.C., Korê 674, Acropolis Museum, Athens Praxitilean, c. 300 B.C., Head of a Girl, from Chios, Fine Arts Museum, Boston What the Parthenon straddled was the watershed between Archaic and Hellenistic personality — that outward and inward softening, which no words need describe. But if words were required, the maturation of consciousness would take us from Sappho's sharp mystery (though blurred in Leonard's translation): Death shall be death forever unto thee, Lady, with no remembrance of thy name Then or thereafter; for thou gatherest not The roses of Pieria, loving gold Above the Muses. Even in Hades' House Wander thou shalt unmarked, flitting forlorn Among the shadowy, averted dead. to Poseidippus' moody 2nd century B.C. poem about Sappho, and her brother Charaxus' passion for Doricha, in Egypt (here Lucas' Tennysonian shades not inappropriate): Long since your bones have mouldered; long Doricha, the binding Of your curls, long all the fragrance from your robe has passed away, That you flung round fair Charaxus and caught him in its winding And breast to breast lay drinking, until the dawn was grey. But the white page of Sappho lives on and lives for ever, Proclaiming your name also, your name thrice-blest, the while That Naucratis shall remember, while ships shall breast her river, Standing in from seaward to the long lagoons of Nile. 60) Attic (after Calamis?), c. 400 B.C., Head of Apollo, Louvre, Paris; + V detail, shown first; also dig. Music: June 1996 Euripides fragment again, 7th phrase to close The Alexandrian Melt 22 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In the Louvre Apollo, that 400 post-Phidian and Euripidean hunger invites not only the rise of Macedon, but, in the polarization of the ancient world, the seed of another assurance. For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea. But for the flooding in of Habakkuk's tide, the human — here as in the Platonic dialogue still rich with sensuous person and residual delight — must be hollowed by centuries of Alexandrian ease and Roman rule. 61) Attic, early 4th cent., B.C., Grave stele, National Museum, Athens (CGB '77) Yet the soulful turn had been taken. Fourth-century Attic tombs assume the mood which in the Greek Anthology pervades the late Classical. Plato voiced it in the epitaph Shelley would translate as "Morning and Evening Star": Thou wert the morning star among the living, Ere thy fair light had fled; Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus, giving New splendor to the dead. 62) Greek, c. 335 B.C., Fresco of a woman, Vergina Tombs, Macedon (dig. + detail) We pick it up from the Macedonian graves supposedly of Philip and his family, this lately discovered fresco of Ceres (or, of the woman mourned), the earliest preserved example of Greek painting. It was also in Macedon that Euripides died, having written Iphigenia in Aulis — this chorus translated by H.D.: But still we lament our state, The desert of our wide courts, Even if there is no truth In the legends cut on ivory Nor in the poets Nor the songs. Thus every fresh vigor as it takes up Greek rule, must take up the brooding of late Greek consciousness. June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 23 �C.G. Bell 63) Symbolic History Græco-Scythian, early 4th cent. B.C., Warriors from a gold comb, Hermitage, Leningrad; + V. detail (also dig.) There will be flashes of life-renewal, as Greek skills pour to the barbarian tribes (here the craft of the goldsmith adapted to the Scythian north of Thrace); but like the early art of Rome, it is postconscious. Whereas the Celts of the 7th century funeral car had not entered Zechariah's Judgment ground of sophistic soul: In that day, saith the Lord, I will smite every horse with astonishment, and his rider with madness … . 64) Attic, 320-310, Grave stele of Aristonautes, Warrior, National Museum, Athens (CGB '77); + V detail (also dig.) As the pre-Roman force of this Attic soldier's tomb (c. 320 B.C.) may remind us, Greek arms were never more distinguished. The century opened with the Anabasis of Xenophon and his 12,000 stranded mercenaries, on the march through the whole of Persia to the sea — "Thalassa!" — "to show the Hellenes they could bring their paupers over here and make them rich." By 370 Epaminondas of Thebes had invented the phalanx of fifty shields deep which Philip II of Macedon and Alexander would apply. The Greek polis, however, had lost the helm; and without knowing it, all those warring souls were swept in the vortex of Daniel's four kingdoms yielding to the vision of the ram thrown down by the goat: The ram which thou sawest having two horns are the kings of Media and Persia. And the rough he-goat is the king of Graecia, and the great horn that is between his eyes is the first king (Alexander). 65) Greek (Macedon), c. 335 B.C., Ivory head (Philip II?) from Vergina Tombs, Macedon; + V detail; not dig. In this ivory head, presumably of Philip with his blinded eye, we read the halfcynical spread of shrewd Attic enlightenment among the northern Greeks. Philip had been born the year the Spartans took the citadel of Thebes by treachery; as a Theban hostage he had watched the tricky bickering of Hellas. His kingship saw the Phocians mint the treasures of Delphi for their war. His death would touch off the sort of motherplotting so rife in later Rome (his son by Cleopatra murdered in her lap and she forced to hang herself). June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 24 �C.G. Bell 66) Symbolic History Later replica of Greek (Cresilas), 440-430 B.C., Bust of Pericles, British Museum, London Far from the Athenian ideal of Pericles, the high truth of his words: Our constitution … favors the many instead of the few; this is why it is called a democracy … the laws … afford equal justice to all … in our enterprises we present the singular spectacle of daring and deliberation … although usually decision is the fruit of ignorance, hesitation of reflexion … 67) Attic (Leochares), c. 340-330 B.C., Portrait of the young Alexander, Acropolis Museum, Athens (CGB '77); + V detail, shown first; so dig. Before this Leochares Alexander we might ask if Olympia had yielded herself indeed to Homeric Zeus as serpent. Hegel: The Greek life is a truly youthful achievement. Achilles, the ideal youth of poetry, commenced it; Alexander the Great, the ideal youth of reality, concluded it… the freest and finest individuality that the real world has ever produced… Both appear in contest with Asia … But that absorbed Greek rapture goes flat in the apocryphal First Book of Maccabees: Alexander… went through to the ends of the earth and took spoils of many nations… whereupon he was exalted, and his heart was lifted up… And after these things he fell sick… and parted his kingdom… and then died… and evils were multiplied in the earth… 68) 68a) Roman copy from Lysippos, 330-325 B.C., Azara Herm of Alexander, Louvre, Paris Same, detail This portrait after Lysippos of Alexander, older and sadder, may admit more of the mission Plutarch was to summarize: ("Fortunes of Alexander," Loeb) He believed he came as a heaven-sent governor… for the whole world… he brought together into one body all men everywhere, uniting and mixing in one great loving-cup, as it were, men's lives, their characters, their marriages, their very habits of life. He bade them consider as their fatherland the whole inhabited earth… June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 25 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History How desperately Hegelian the self-willed means. Barr: Part of the myth he had… created before this year of 323 was that of blood and agonizing death, of depopulation, of drunken orgy and barbarous vandalism, of an insane striving for world conquest, and above all of the paranoiac… hybris of a man determined to be God. Though the last irony is of a self-mocking Achilles — that he foresaw, on his death, a great funeral contest. 69) Muslim (Shiraz), 1410-11, Iskander and the Water Nymphs, MS Addit. 27261 f 286, British Museum, London; + V & dig. detail One would think the facts of Alexander marvel enough: his leaping into an Indian city and fighting on, almost mortally wounded; his pouring out a helmet of water in the Gedrosian desert, unwilling to drink before his thirsting men. Yet by the 2nd century A.D., history, forgery, and folk myths had fused in the Romance of Alexander, to spread through twelve centuries and from India to the Atlantic. Here (above) as Iskander, crowned Muslim, he has crossed the Eastern Sea and come to a lake on an island, where with a companion he spies on the water nymphs at play. It was a conquest beyond his dreams. 70) Chinese (from Chin-tsun), Lo-yang, Honan, 4th-3rd cent. B.C., Mirror with gold and silver inlay of a hunting scene History is the myth of the actual. What East-West links are implied by hunts, in bronze enchased with gold and silver, from Chinese Honan, about the time of Alexander, when Grecian goldsmiths were bringing realism to such Scythian scenes, we can only guess. 71) Chinese (or Alexandrian) 2nd c. B.C. - 1st cent. A.D. (?), Painted glass cup from Begram, Musée. Guimet, Paris; + V & dig. detail But in two centuries the refined arts of Alexandria had spread and seeded their like along the silk route, through Bactria and Kabul to China — witness this vase of Greek God-rapes, Europa, this Leda, found in Begram, Afghanistan, and published as both Hellenistic and Oriental. June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 26 �C.G. Bell 72) Symbolic History Lucanian Greek, S. Italy, c. 380 B.C., Dolon Painter, Calyx Crater, detail, Dolon ambushed by Odysseus and Diomedes, British Museum, London Greek sculpture seems mostly epic or tragic. But vase painting, from the 5th century on (here about 380, Dolon ambushed by Odysseus and Diomedes) can marvellously catch the grotesque — as from Aristophanes: Dionysus and his servant in the Underworld: Slave! take up your load again!/ (Servant): Before having laid it down?… Hire one of the dead, who is going to Hades… /(Dionysus): Hi… you dead fellow there! Will you carry a package to Pluto for me?/ Is it very heavy? — You will pay me two drachmae./ Two dear!… Here are nine obols./ (Dead Man): I'd sooner go back to earth… a73) 73) China, Sung; Chou Chi-ch'ang, 1184, Arhats bestowing alms on beggars, Fine Arts Museum, Boston Same, closer detail Where is that vase-finesse of caricature line most pursued? It would be ridiculous to look for Greek influence in a Chinese silk painting more than a thousand years later; indeed the advance of international time, style, consciousness, tells in every wrinkle and tatter of this Sung calligraph. But what lies definitively between the older Chinese and this 74) Japanese, late Jomon, 4th cent. B.C. (?), Clay figurine from Iwatsuki, Nakazawa Collection, Tokyo is the penetration of the Orient by the Hellenistic seated on Buddhism. What else effected the upheaval between the clay figurines of B.C. Japan 75) Asuka, 552-645 A.D., Bodhisattva, National Museum, Tokyo; + V. detail and the 6th-century arrival (here in bronze) of the blessing Boddhisattvas? Even Alexander might have been startled by the magnitude of that oblique conquest. But the Japanese refinement June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 27 �C.G. Bell 76) Symbolic History China, Northern Wei Dynasty, 465-75 A.D., Sandstone Buddha, Shansi, China came from China — this smiling Buddha of warm rose sandstone at least a century earlier; the Chinese 77) Indian, Gandhara, 2nd-3rd cent. A.D., Gray schist Buddha, British Museum, London came from India — this Gandharan Buddha from the 2nd or 3rd century, the trading peak of the Antonine Empire, and it testifies in the curves of lip and hair, the plane of forehead continued to the nose, to the Alexandrian heritage; while these heavy eyes have translated into nirvana the moody search of late Græco-Rome. 78) Alexandrian Bronze, c. 1st cent. B.C., Perfume vase, head of Negro youth, British Museum, London Although Alexander was concerned about the source of the Nile, he pursued it only in thought. Yet here, too, the civilization which bore his name reached out through centuries to set up realms of thought of which he was hardly aware. It seems pure accident when Hellenistic bronzes of Negro youths (this head as perfume jar) 79) African, Benin, S. Nigeria, 15th-16th cent., Head of a queen mother, bronze, British Museum, London find Nigerian cognates, up to 15 centuries after, in Ife and (here) Benin. But surely the metallurgic mystery had spread from Egypt and the upper Nile through Meroe and the Berber North, to Ghana, Mali, and the lower Niger. The Yoruba are migrants from the north and east, ultimately from the outreach of Alexandria. 80) Acropolis of Athens, 5th cent. B.C. and ff., from Philopapou Hill (CGB '77); + V detail Every family tree has its own center, from which it expands back in geometric progression to the roots of all ancestors, and forward to the limbs and branches of all heirs. Until Paul preached in the Areopagus, Athens was Hellenistic center. Behind lie the springs of Celtic North, Crete, Asia, Egypt; before, the vast acculturations under Macedon and Rome. Even here, below the Parthenon, those tiered arcades — of the June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 28 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Theater of Herodes Atticus and the Stoa of Eumenes — hem the Periclean with GræcoRoman mass. 81) Attic, 5th and 4th cent. B.C., Theatre of Dionysos, south of Acropolis, Athens (CGB '77); + V detail, shown first; no dig. detail In that same complex under the Acropolis the theater of Dionysus, its wooden benches replaced (in Alexander's time) with stone, housed for that "School of Hellas" the heart of ritual drama revealed in Aeschylus' Suppliants: O Land of Hills, of all-just veneration, What must we suffer? ιω γα βουνι, πανδικον σεβας, τι πεισοµεσθα; A veneration which, from this small center, still spreads over the world. 82) V82a) Roman, Istrian, 1st-2nd cent. A.D., Vespasian's Arena, detail, Pula (CGB '77) Same, a wider view (CGB '77) [video file]; not for dig. And when Rome flung its arches and vaults around the Mediterranean (here in Dalmatian Istria — like the Colosseum itself, and built under the same Vespasian), everywhere in that pomp 83) 83a) Roman, 484 B.C., 117 B.C., rebuilt by Tiberius 6 A.D., Temple of Castor, Rome Roman Forum, B.C. to 4th cent. A.D. (CGB '48; copy of Rome 8) rose the temple reminders of what was deeply bedded in Greece — as these Corinthian columns of the Temple of Castor in Rome, reach back, from Tiberius' 6 A.D. rebuilding — through the 117 B.C. construction, to the original, 484 B.C., in the great century of Hellas. It was that community which prepared, through the Alexandrian, for New Jerusalem. 84) Egyptian Obelish, set up 10 B.C. by Augustus, Circus Maximus, now in the Piazza del Popolo, Rome (CGB '86); + V detail, shown first June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 29 �C.G. Bell 84a) Symbolic History Same, another view, evening silhouette (CGB '86) And as Alexander in the conscious wedding of Greece, Africa, and Asia had gone to the Oasis of Siwah in the Sahara and become the child of Ammon, whom the Greeks called Zeus — so it was in the cards that Augustus should fetch from Egypt this obelisk to be erected in the Circus Maximus (whence Sixtus V would move it to the Piazza del Populo) — symbol of the incorporation of civilized history into the world-city of Rome. 85) Alexandrian, 1st cent. B.C.-1st cent. A.D., Head of Homer, Fine Arts Museum, Boston; V: detail only For its poetic source that whole culture looked to the blind bard who sang of Ilium. Yet Homer's poems — like this imagined portrait, like all those smooth Apollos and Venuses the Renaissance would praise as Greek — must have been somehow ripened and softened by Athenian and Alexandrian editing, culminating in Aristarchus about 150 B.C. (where earlier papyri vary among themselves and from our text). 86) Greek, c. 640 B.C., Ivory "Daughters of King Proitios"(?), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; + V detail, shown first; not dig. Art, even a century after Homer (this ivory, thought of King Proitios' daughters, who boasted of their beauty and, maddened by Hera, roamed ten years lusting for men), would hardly have stirred such academic praise as The Iliad did in Joseph Andrews: agreement of action to subject… manners… diction… propriety… This is sublime! This is poetry! If for Homer, Fielding could have been offered epoi of the Geometric Age, would "propriety" have been his word? 87) Greek, perhaps 1st cent. A.D., style of 500 B.C., bronze, Apollo of Piombino, Louvre, Paris; + V detail, shown first; not dig. In the bronze Apollo of Piombino, such clean archaizing, with imperial sensuousness, had led to datings from about 500 to the 1st century B.C. Now coins discovered in the core seem to prove it later still (despite the Dorian inscription on the foot), a pastiche from the 1st century after Christ. Was Homer somehow refined for his civilized role? June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 30 �C.G. Bell 88) Symbolic History Double: Hellenistic, 3rd cent. in Roman copies: [A] Sophocles, Lateran, and [B] Demosthenes (from Polyeuctus bronze), Vatican, Rome; + V detail of the pair; so dig., no singles In the columned agorae of the Hellenistic cities, from Athens to Pergamum, Alexandria to Rome, the cultural heroes took their places with the gods: here Sophocles and Demosthenes, now in the Lateran and Vatican — the Periclean poet (two centuries later) asserting Athens proud and free; Demosthenes, his Philippic struggle for a freedom past. Though both, for Rome, enforced the civic claim: Virgil to shape a poem of such command; Cicero to sound high-minded rhetoric against a foregone loss. 89) Hellenistic copy, 1st cent. B.C.(?) from 4th cent. original, Bust of Euripides, National Museum, Athens Among these defenders of the old, the new men of 400 B.C. appeared: Thucydides, realist historian; Democritus, Atomic inquirer; old Oligarch Aristophanes, mocking his own values; this tragedian of disillusion, Euripides, to ride the tide of a more broken age. a90) 90) Hellenistic, 3rd-2nd cent. B.C.(?), Portrait of Socrates, British Museum, London [red background]; video: detail only Same, another view (black and white); dig. to detail of a90 Though the man who cut the deepest swath of search ("wisest and justest and best") was the one most driven to internalize the laws: "Men of Athens, I honor and love you; but I shall obey God before you." Symptomatic, that in so seemingly Apollonian a reasoner as Socrates, the Dionysiac strain of God-rapture should reveal itself, even to the Silenus appearance and the aulus of Marsyas — as Alcibiades says in the Symposium: My heart leaps within me more than that of any Corybantian reveller, and my eyes rain tears when I hear (his words). If the new Socratic love moults the wings of the soul toward the immortal possession of the good — a91) Egypt, Dynasty XIX, c. 1250 B.C., Rameses II as Osiris, Rock Temple of Gerf Housein, Nubia; + dig. detail June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 31 �C.G. Bell 91) Symbolic History Egypt, Dynasty XIX, c. 1250 B.C., Death Temple of Rameses II, Thebes had not Dionysus implied such things in his mysteries? It is Herodo–tus who traces him and his rites to the Egyptian god of the dead, Osiris: for the Egyptians do not all worship the same gods, excepting Isis and Osiris, the latter of whom they say is the Grecian Bacchus … I maintain that Melampus… having become acquainted with the worship of Bacchus through knowledge derived from Egypt (I believe from Cadmus, the Tyrean) introduced it into Greece. Here Rameses II, as Osiris, stands by the piers of his funerary temple, arms folded in the mummy cross with which he dies and wakes from the grave. The temple is in upper Egypt, near Homer's Thebes of the hundred gates, where through each gate two hundred fighting men come forth to war with horses and chariots — surely the name-city of Boeotian Thebes, where by the Greek myth Dionysus was born of the thunderer and burning Semele. a92) b92) 92) Leonardo da Vinci, 1511-15, Bacchus, Louvre, Paris Attic (Vulci), c. 500 B.C., Kleophrades, red fig. Amphora, Dionysus, Munich Pakistan, 3rd-2nd millenium B.C., Nude male, stone, from Harappa, National Museum, New Delhi In Euripides' Bacchae (c. 406 B.C.), the god is soft, plump, effeminate (as doomed Pentheus mocks him — or Aristophanes' Charon: "Will you have the goodness to place yourself there, pot-belly?"). But he is also the bull-horned Bromius of earthquake and violence. He has returned to Thebes from Asia, like Alexander, having planted the vine of his worship to the shores of the Indus. This fleshy nude from the Punjab might hint at that — the first art work (2000 B.C., before the Vedic entry) where incarnate stone speaks itself Indian. What tie to the Greek mysteries of tragic rebirth, the claim that Lycurgus, Sparta's first lawgiver, had gone (like Alexander later) as far as India, to talk with the naked wise men there? 93) Greek Mosaic (Macedon) c. 300 B.C., Dionysus on a panther, from Palace, Pella; + dig. upper detail June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 32 �C.G. Bell 93a) Symbolic History Hellenistic Mosaic, second half of 2nd century B.C., Dionysus riding a panther, house of the Masks, Island of Delos (video uses detail of 93) In this mosaic floor from Pella, the ecstatic god, with thyrsus, and grapegarlanded, rides the Persian Panther. So Pentheus: I am also told a foreigner has come to Thebes from Lydia, one of those charlatan magicians, with long yellow curls … flushed cheeks … the spells of Aphrodite in his eyes. Strange prototype for the other Syrian of grapes and grain. Yet the tie, in Euripides, to Christian wonder is such, that resistant Arrowsmith, in the first Chorus, for one "blessed" ("makar" in the Greek) has produced a rhythmic Beatitude of nine: Blessed are those who know the mysteries of god. Blessed… who hallows his life… Blessed… who wield … the holy wand of god… Blessed, blessed are they: Dionysus is their god! Immortal child of woman and Zeus, who also mingles West with East. a94) b94) 94) Raphael, 1513-14, Liberation of St. Peter, central prison scene, fresco, Stanza d'Eliodoro, Vatican [Slide & dig.] Same, center with left side, guards by moonlight Same, detail of center with right side, Peter's escape When his Asian Bacchantes are captured and bound, the ropes fall off and they are free; so the chains would fall from St. Peter when (as Raphael shows it in the Vatican) "a light shined in the prison … the angel raised him up … And his chains fell off from his hands." Or when Bacchus himself is imprisoned in Pentheus' stables, such earthquake and lightning tear the fabric: Dionysus: Let the earthquake come! Shatter the floor of the world. Chorus: Look, the palace is collapsing! — Dionysus is within. Adore him! as at the Gospel death of Christ, or when Paul was deliverd in Macedonia: June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 33 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History And at midnight Paul and Silas prayed, and sang … And suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken … all the doors were opened, and everyone's bands were loosed. a95) 95) 95a) Double of 95 and 96: [A] Etruscan, c. 470 B.C., fresco detail, Triklinius' Grave, Tarquinia; and [B] Etruscan, 3rd-1st cent., B.C., Charon, detail, Villa Albani, Rome From a95A, Triklinius' Grave, detail Etruscan, c. 475 B.C., Music and Dance Fresco, Tomb of the Leopards, Tarquinia Also in Etruscan tomb painting, deeply impregnated by the Greek, 400 B.C. divides the old Dionysiac rapture of common myth from its sophistic cultivation — an urbane surface troubled by soul-search. The dancers and musicians of 5th-century Tarquinia (here from the grave of Triklinius, about 470) keep the rapture of Pindar, clear as the "Water is best" with which he opens the first Olympian Ode: Αριστον µεν ‘υδωρ; or the lyring and dancing of the First Pythian Ode (Lattimore): "Golden lyre, held of Apollo… the singers obey your measures." 96) Same as B of a95, Charon As the Dionysiac in Euripides' Bacchae, so the Underworld is revolutionized in Aristophanes' Frogs (about 405 B.C.). So too this later Etruscan Charon caricatures legend. (Aristophanes): you will reach the edge of the vast deep mere of Acheron… There is an ancient ferryman, Charon by name, who will pass you over in his little boat for a diobolus… you will see snakes and all sorts of fearful monsters… then a great slough with an eternal stench … 97) Etruscan, c. 4th cent. B.C. (?), Satyr from funerary urn, Orvieto; + V detail, shown first; dig. detail after What Aristophanes wrote is called "Old Comedy," but already the old Satyr grotesque grows sophistic — like this 4th-century Etruscan satyr. Thus, when Dionysus, in hell, beshat with fear, requires a sponge; (Xanthias) "O you most cowardly of gods and men!" (Dionysus) Cowardly? … I got up, and moreover I wiped myself clean." June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 34 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History New Comedy applies that personalized grotesque to commoner situations, as when the Curmudgeon in the Menander play discovered not so long ago, drives in the servant: Look out! watch it! clear out, everybody! make way! A lunatic is chasing me, he's mad!… Showers of rocks and flying clods! Help, murder! 98) Attic, early 3rd cent., Assumed portrait of Menander, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Yet the urbane gaze of Menander, through and beyond the phallic faun, sets the new comedy off from the old. Even the grotesque drops scurrility, leaves political lampoon; like classical Homer, it assumes propriety; most of all, where the comic issue in Aristophanes had been a civic god-paean and bacchanal, it takes up now what comedy has clung to ever since, the private assuagement of romantic love — such an idealization as Plato's of the Forms, Alexander's of world polis, or as this portrayed face of Menander. 99) Hellenistic, c. 325-300 B.C., Aphrodite, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston And what could compensate in Epicurean cosmopolis for the ebb of instinctive force, but the heightening (as also with our world) of conscious dream? So in Menander's play the Curmudgeon is reformed: "I recognize how wrong I was"; the true lover — "I mean to take her in marriage, with no dowry and to love her forever" — persuades the girl and even his own father; the closing song and dance is of civilized victory. In joy or grief, some romantic loading has occurred — 100) Greek (Cyprus), 4th cent. B.C., Veiled woman, head (Demeter?), Louvre, Paris; + V close detail, which the slide show replaces with 100a, Hellenistic (Pergamum), 2nd cent. B.C., Sleeping Fury, National Museum, Rome, and 100b, 1st half of 2nd cent. B.C. female head, Græco-Roman Museum, Alexandria (cf. Cycles 39); dig. follows slides show: 100a & 100b this 4th-century veiled woman from Cyprus, with Meleager, translated by Herrick: That morn which saw me made a bride, The evening witnessed that I died. Those holy lights, wherewith they guide June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 35 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Unto the bed the bashful bride, Served but as tapers, for to burn,. And light my relics to their urn. This epitaph, which here you see, Supplied the epithalamy. The mythic Pheonix Herodotus had doubted and Tacitus would almost acclaim — aspires, a soul-search, from the sensuous itself: I rose up to open to my beloved; and my hands dropped with myrrh… upon the handles of the lock … I sought him, but I could not find him… I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if ye find my beloved, that ye tell him that I am sick with love. 101) Hellenistic (from Patras), c. 200 B.C., Bronze Aphrodite, British Museum, London; + V detail; not dig. detail But Jerusalem was still a suppressed pocket, Hellenism a vague malaise of refined delights: Aphrodite, like any dancing girl, bathing or coming from the sea (had Degas seen this 200-B.C. bronze?). In poetry, what had begun with 6th-century Anacreon, spread through the Hellenistic, to bog down in rhymed translation: Depicted thus, in semblance warm, The Queen of Love's voluptuous form Floats along the silvery sea In beauty's naked majesty … Around her pomp the Nereids play, And gleam along the watery way. 102) Greek (Tanagra), c. 280 B.C., Girl with a dulcimer, Louvre, Paris; + V detail, shown first; so dig. 102a) Greek (Tanagra), c. 250 B.C., Woman in outdoor dress, British Museum, London (video shows detail only); not so dig. Such mood-shadowed pleasure is nowhere more exquisite than in the late 4th and early 3rd century BC figurines from Tanagra. Music: June 1996 Hellenistic, 1st cent. A.D., Seikilos Epitaph, History of Music in Sound, RCA-V-LM-6057, Side IV, Bd.3 The Alexandrian Melt 36 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Their persuasion to joy is elegiac, as in Seikilos' musical epitaph: "Be happy!" (end Seikilos) Or in the germ of Marvel's "To his Coy Mistress" — Asclepiades, 3rd century B.C. (Fitts): You deny me: and to what end? There are no lovers, dear, in the under world, No love but here: only the living know The sweetness of Aphrodite — a103) Hellenistic (Delos), c. 100 B.C., Aphrodite, Eros and Pan, upper detail, National Museum, Athens (CGB '77) 103) Same, Aphrodite, Eros and Pan, whole but below, But in Acheron, careful virgin, dust and ashes Will be our only lying down together. The fetching Delos Aphrodite, who threatens Pan with her slipper as she smiles on him, is in that vein Catullus also would mine: "My sweetest Lesbia, let us live and love" — "Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus". But when Marvel takes it up, the dynamic of Puritan service and secret love (perhaps for his pupil, Lord Fairfax' daughter) gives the argument of "dust and ashes" a reach unmatched by pagan Eros: Deserts of vast eternity ... then worms shall try That long preserv'd virginity ... 104) Hellenistic, 2nd cent. B.C.(?), Pastoral relief, Antikensammlungen, Munich 104a) Same, Pastoral relief, detail Amid all this mingling of sensuous play and soul-search, the eclogue appears with Theocritus, 3rd century BC Sicilian Greek, mewed perhaps in Alexandria, cultivating (like this Munich relief) the loved nostalgia of the pastoral: Sweet are the whispers of yon pine that makes Low music o'er the spring, and, Goatherd, sweet Thy piping... A genre which would become Roman (Virgil's "Formosam resonare doces Amaryllida silvas") then Christian and Renaissance ("A shepheards boye (no better doe him call") until the sixteen-year-old Pope would manner it: June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 37 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Thyrsis, the music of that murmuring spring Is not so mournful as the strains you sing. Nor rivers winding through the vales below, So sweetly warble, or so smoothly flow... 105) Chinese (Ming), 15th cent. (?), Scene cut in jade, detail (J.H. Crawford, Jr.); + V detail (replaced in slide show by 105a: Chinese, Ma Lin, 1246, Listening to the Wind in the Pines, Hanging scroll (cropped), Palace Museum Collection, Taichung); also dig. 105 & 105a Perhaps the richest heirs to Theocritan nature were the Chinese, ages after, as in this Ming landscape cut in jade. Also in Chinese poetry, the pastoral refuge has been spontaneous: Li Po: When you ask why I dwell here docile Among the far green hills, I laugh In my heart, my heart is happy. The peach blossom watches the river running But remains content. There is a better Heaven and earth than in the busy world of men. a106) Hellensitic (Alexandrian, terra cotta), 3rd cent. B.C.(?), The Dwarf, Louvre, Paris 106) Hellenistic, 2nd cent. B.C., Boy pulling a thorn from his foot, Antiquarium, Berlin; + V & dig. detail "Multiply variety in a wilderness of mirrors". In the Alexandrian search, with Eros and Pastoral Pan came the picturesque, novelaceous, ugly — this 2nd century B.C. boy drawing a thorn from his foot, those pre-modern poems composed to make shapes on the page, or Meleager, lst century B.C., "On Mosquitoes": (Fitts) Squealshrilling Mosquitoes, fraternity lost to shame, Obscene vampires, chittering riders of the night: Let her sleep, I beg you! and come (If you must come) feed on this flesh of mine. (O useless prayer! Must not her body charm The wildest, most heartless, most insensate beasts?) You hear me, devils, I have warned you: June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 38 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History No more of your daring, Or you shall smart from the strength of my jealous 107) 107A) 107B) hands! Double: [A] Egyptian, c. 375 B.C., Elderly Man, Fine Arts Museum, Boston; and [B] Hellenistic, early 2nd cent. B.C., Portrait (Flamininus?), Musuem, Delphi Again, Elderly Man Again, Portrait No wonder the Israel counterpole darkened by 200 B.C. to Ecclesiastes. But as this Egyptian portrait, somewhat before, and the Greek, somewhat after, imply, the rebellion from mosquito-poem cleverness was everywhere a possibility. The Ecclesiast himself must have heard of Cynic, Stoic, Epicurean. Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher... all is vanity... The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be... and there is no new thing under the sun... in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. I said in mine heart, Go to now, I will prove thee with mirth... and behold, this also is vanity... 108) Roman (end of Republic), c. 30 B.C., Aristius Sarcuto, from a monument to him and his wife, British Museum, London (CGB '77) 108a) Roman Portrait, c. 50 B.C., bust, Immolator of the Republic, Vatican Gallery, Rome (copy of Rome 44: CGB '86) From the perspective of Alexandria, the Rome of this late Republican portrait was another Hellenistic city, though it spoke Latin and was infused with a stronger will to power and a deeper stoical struggle than the rest. So where Athens had been the counter pole to Jerusalem, Rome now becomes the absorptive complement. Ecclesiastes: I made me great works...I gathered me also silver and gold... So I was great...Then I looked on all the works that my hands hadwrought, and on all the labour that I had laboured to do: and behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun... 109) Roman Egypt, 2nd cent. A.D., Mummy encaustic portrait from Hawara, British Museum, London; + V detail; not dig. June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 39 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History How that deepening obverse of vanity (this encaustic from Roman Egypt) cries for faith: Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth... or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken... — to separate Nirvana soul from Gnostic body writhing on its cross. Euripides' Phaedra poignance and Racine's primal curse: Between Le ciel mit dans mon sein une flamme funeste, Seneca hardens that action to a blind Roman storm — a110) Hagesander, Polydorus and Athenodorus of Rhodes, later 2nd cent. B.C.(?), The Laocoon, head detail, Vatican, Rome 110) Same, Laocoon, whole 110a) Same, upper detail (video takes detail from 110) Theseus piecing together the torn disjecta of his son, as he commands of the self-murdered queen (Studley): Stop hir up hurlde into a Pit, let heavy clodds of ground Lie hard upon hir cursed hed. The Laocoon has lost ground since Lessing. Yet the combat of soul which had informed tragedy, and was peaking, in the Dead Sea Scrolls, to a War of Light on Dark, forged this last pain of the human family battling the Olympian snake. When Seneca's Tudor translator Studley, for one word, "Flammae" in the Latin, raps out a Peter Quince line: "The flashing flames and furious force of fiery fervent heate", he stretches a bombast which was there — such over-wrought pathos as, from Scopas through Pergamum to Rhodes and Rome, has tempted art critics to the term "Hellenistic baroque". June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 40 �C.G. Bell 111) Symbolic History Græco-Roman (Herculaneum), c. 70 A.D. (after Timomachus c. 50 B.C.?), Medea, National Museum, Naples; + V detail, shown first; no dig. detail Euripides' Medea may have moved that way, far more this 1st-century A.D. painting; yet Jason's cry for his slaughtered children is lyrical: If only I had not begotten them, To see them thus destroyed by you! The chorus rounds out the close: Zeus sends many fates from Heaven; What was past hope, god fulfills; The thing looked for, does not happen; The thing not thought, is what god wills. Such the outcome of this matter. (CGB) 112) Roman, 1st cent. A.D., Portrait bust in the Republican manner, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City 112a) Roman, c. 50 B.C., Bronze portrait, "Caesar," detail of face; National Museum, Rome In Seneca, a rhetoric weighty as Tacitus' Rome twists the Gordian knot of pain to stark cleavage: Through the vast spaces of high aether go: Bear witness, where you ride, there are no gods. per alta vade spatia sublimi aethere; testare nullos esse, qua veheris, deos. To seed the blood revenge of Kid: And there live, dying still in endless flames, Blaspheming gods and all their holy names. 113) Detail of 111, Medea; + V closer detail; no closer dig. Music: June 1996 Greek 2nd cent. B.C., 1st Delphic Hymn, Chromatic parts, LM LSC 6057 The Alexandrian Melt 41 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History If only we could trace the same pathos, in the lost wealth of accompanied song, from the Euripides fragment, through these chromatic phrases of the First Delphic Hymn, to the music Nero would have played and sung, while Rome burned. (fade Delphic Hymn) 114) Græco-Roman (Villa Boscoreale), c. 40 B.C., A Philosopher, National Museum, Naples; + V detail; so dig. Could the frescoed philosopher from the Villa Boscoreale, with his Cynic staff and cloak, sustain that darker surf on the headland of rock? If Epictetus managed: Look at me, without city, house, possesions, without a slave; I sleep on the ground; I have no wife, no children...only the earth and heavens, and one poor cloak. And what do I want?...Who, when he sees me does not think that he sees his king and master? Seneca, for all his Stoic books, became a byword for graft and indulgence — until he rallied at last to the death Nero demanded. 115) Roman (Pompeii), 70-79 A.D., House of the Vetii, Atrium (CGB '80) V115a) Same, wall paintings 115b) Same, Phallic Fountain Through the ease of the Pompeiian House of the Vetii, who could trace the chthonic swell, rooted in Greek mind and Dionysiac reversibility? Would the paintings, in the style of Nero's Golden House, suggest that intemperance, or the phallic fountain those omnisexual bouts and banquets Petronius Arbiter's Satyricon enacts near here? 116) Græco-Roman (Pompeii), 1st cent. A.D., Pastoral scene, National Museum, Naples; + V details; dig. lower detail Even the Pompeiian landscape teems with illusion, hungry for Seneca's godpresences in nature: When you enter a grove peopled with ancient trees, ...does not the stillness and gloom strike you as with the presence of a deity? Or when you see a cave in the rock of an over-hanging mountain, is not your soul suffused with a religious awe? We worship the sources of great rivers, erect altars where a rush of water bursts from the earth, and certain pools we hold sacred for their still and somber depths. June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 42 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History a117) Japanese (Muromachi), c. 1344, Pool Garden of Hojo (Abbot's Quarters), Tenryu-Ji Temple, Kyoto 117) Japanese (Muromachi), c. 1543, Guest Hall, Monastery of Myoshin-Ji, Kyoto Was it more than the chance of barbarian invasion which threw down in the West that sacred hedonism of gardens and villas, while beyond the stretch of Alexandrian dream, such idolized blessing of dwelling and nature could sustain itself a thousand years — this Buddhist guest hall and garden in Kyoto, Japan? a118) 118) 118a) 118b) Roman, 118-34 A.D., Hadrian's Villa, vaultings, Tivoli (CGB '86) Same, Hadrian's Villa, Canopus, or pool (CGB '86) Same, another view Roman bust of Hadrian, 117-118 A.D., Ostia Museum Roman Hellenization reached its 8-mile opulence in Hadrian's Tivoli Villa. If the articulation of vaults and domes, like the Pantheon, looks forward, the arcades, pools and statues respire Greek nostalgia. Here Hadrian, under whom the drawing back and walling in of the Empire had begun, wrote his dying poem: "Anima vagula, blandula ..." Fleeting and caressing soul, Body's guest and companion Where are you off to? What place, stripped and ghastly, Will house you, not, as once, jocund? (CGB) Yet when could Hadrian have been called "jocos"? June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 43 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History a119) Græco-Roman, 130-38 A.D., Statue of Antinoüs, Museum, Naples; + V detail 119) Another statue of the same Antinoüs, Museum, Delphi (CGB '77) 119a) Same, Antinoüs, Delphi, detail of head; dig. no a119 detail; detail of 119 Was it when he first met the beautiful Bithynian youth, Antinoüs, his love; or in Athens finishing the Olympeion; or on the administrative travels they made over the empire? Hardly that superstitious one up the Nile when Antinoüs drowned himself in the river, and Hadrian stricken, built temples and set up statues as to a god — Theocritus, Lament for Hylas: the voice came faint from the water, and near as he was, he seemed far off. Bion for Adonis: "He is lost to us, lovely Adonis ..." Moschus for Bion: "Begin, Sicilian Muses, begin the dirge" — the sequence from which Milton would form "Lycidas," and Shelley "Adonais": "I weep for Adonais — he is dead." 120) Roman (Africa), Augustan 9-8 B.C., Ruins of Leptis Magna, Tripolitania 120a) Same, Leptis Magna, another view, dark against the light How often in the market pomp of the imperial cities, Palmyra, Antioch, Alexandria, this Leptis Magna on the coast of Africa, soul, from a morning of human possibility, must have looked, by the mere breath of evening, into the vacuity that would send a shudder through Augustine: and I became to myself a land of want — et factus sum mihi regio egestatis. Slowly the empire of this Augustan city would ripen to that confession. a121) Double, which the video separates into A121, Augustan love-vase, terra cotta from Arezzo, now Archaeological Museum, Barcelona; and B121, Græco-Roman, Boscoreale skeleton cup, Louvre, Paris. Slide show, video and dig. repeat these as 121 and 122. June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 44 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Two vessels, probably Augustan, the Arezzo terra cotta bowl, now in Barcelona, with its tender love-making, and the Boscoreale silver cup with piping and dancing skeletons and a mask of Euripides, reminder of the Infernal contest in The Frogs. The Virgilian "Copa Surisca" brings them together. Here the beginning and end (Waddell): Dancing girl of Syria, her hair caught up with a fillet; Very subtle in swaying those quivering flanks of hers ...half-drunk in the smoky tavern... And what's the use, if you're tired, of being out in the dust and heat, When you might as well lie still and get drunk on your settle?... Set down the wine and the dice, and perish who thinks of tomorrow! Here's Death twitching my ear, "Live", says he, "for I'm coming." 123) Græco-Roman (Pompeii), late 1st cent. B.C., copy of Hellensitic painting, Satyr and Nymph, National Museum, Naples; + V detail; no dig. detail Yet that Græco-Rome can mount, with this Pompeian Faun and nymph to the symbolic sky — as in the adventures of The Golden Ass the legend of Cupid and Psyche appears: Thus poor Psyches being left alone ... was blowne by ... Zephyrus ... and brought downe into a deepe valley ... of fragrant flowers ... — a last pagan cognate for the meeting of the Song of Songs: A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse... a fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon. 124) Raphael and School, 1517, Loggia of Psyche, Farnesina, Rome What Raphael, in the neo-Platonic Renaissance, would begin in the Farnesina Gallery — the labours of the soul (Psyche) for immortality. June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 45 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Surely if Raphael had completed the earthly scenes below — that night when her lamp wakes the winged god — this hall might be the wonder work of Renaissance; 125) Claude Lorrain, 1664, Psyche before the Castle of Cupid, National Gallery, London Or there is Claude's dream-glory of Psyche before the Castle of Cupid: Shee espied likewise a running river as cleare as crystall: in the midst of the wood well nigh at the fall of the river was a princely Edifice, wrought and builded not by the art or hand of man, but by the mighty power of God... Renaissance and Baroque bowing to the imperative of Apuleius' vision. 126) Roman, 270-275 A.D., a stretch of the Aurelian Wall, Rome (CGB '86) For hundreds of years Rome had required no walls but the limes of the worldempire. But the incursions of the Marcomanni and Alamanni proved the city vulnerable. When the Emperor Aurelian, from 270 to 275, pressed the construction of the twelve mile buttressed circuit with towers every hundred feet and huge fortified gates, what were those Hellenized Romans walling in and what walling out? 127) Roman (Gaul), 1st cent. A.D., restored statue of Augustus, Roman Theatre, Orange, France This lst-century Augustus in the arched stonework of the Theater, not in Rome at all, but Orange, in that Province to be named for the barbarous Franks, may symbolize what was hopefully walled in — what Caesar had inherited from Alexander, and the Legions from the Macedonian phalanx: the claim of an armored might which would pacify and civilize, spreading the arts of Greece. Yet how graceless that power has become. 128) Epigonus of Pergamum(?), 220-210 B.C., Roman copy, Ludovisi Death of a Gaul and his Wife, Thermae Museum, Rome; + V details; no dig. details If what was to be walled out were the savage tribes of the North, they had also changed since the funeral wagon bronzes of the wild 7th century. In this Roman copy of a 3rd century B.C. ex-voto, celebrating Attalus I of Pergamum's victory over the already June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 46 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History invading Galatians, the wife stabbed and self-stabbing Gaul bear witness that the courage walled out was admired within. 129) Roman (Antonine), 180-92, Miracle of the Rains, Marcus Aurelius' Column, detail, Piazza Colonna, Rome 129a) Same, a closer detail With the Antonines, Stoic reason, that stronghold of Rome, opens to a hunger for God's aid. This Miracle of the Rains, with Jupiter Pluvius and the flood-destroyed foe (carved on Marcus Aurelius' own column) speaks what was bringing in the Testaments, Old and New. And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True … And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations … a130) Roman, 136-8, The Deification of the Empress Sabina before Hadrian, Conservatori, Rome 130) Roman, 160-161, Apotheosis of Antoninus Pius and Faustina, Vatican, Rome (CGB '86); + V detail; no dig. detail What mystery scenes of Imperial Apotheosis now assume — Hadrian witnessing his negelected Sabina lifted from the pyre, or this relief, where the great winged angel of death and rebirth bears Antoninus Pius and Faustina skyward. All it lacks is faith, the substance of things unseen: For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away; but the word of the Lord endureth forever. And this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you. a131) The Sea of Galilee, Boats by the shore (Video shows here slide 131, Caves of the Dead Sea Scrolls) b131) Roman (Jewish), 4th cent. A.D., Gold Glass: symbols of Temple and Torah 131) 1st cent. A.D., Caves of the Dead Sea Scrolls (V uses a detail.) 131a) Khibbet Qumran before 68 A.D., Isaiah Scroll There are discoveries of spirit so germinal as to effect the entire sequent history of the world and all its arts, yet so inward as to give at the surface hardly a sign of the June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 47 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History incandescence in which they are conceived. Such the Hebrew ferment leading from the prophets through the Essenes to John the Baptist, Christ with his disciples, and Paul. Blake, who required visual arts, had to derive the whole Greek fruit of the Muses of Memory from the inspired lost originals of the Temple of Jerusalem. It seems more telling that the visual clue should be only these cliffs and caves of the Dead Sea Scrolls, occupied perhaps by the Khirbet Qumran from the 1st century B.C. into the1st A.D. — the desert, some think, to which Jesus withdrew — earth polarized, in the Commentary on Habakkuk, between "the wicked priest" and that "teacher of righteousness" put to death, it seems, between 65 and 63 B.C.; or in The War of the Sons of Light with the Sons of Darkness, to the phrasing Jesus invokes in John: "Walk while you have the light, lest the darkness overtake you … become sons of the light." 132) Roman-Syrian, 1st cent., A.D., Trinity of Palmyra (Agli-Bal, Baal-shamin, Malak-bel), Louvre, Paris; + slide & dig. detail 132a How peripheral to that center is the carved Trinity of Palmyra, Syria, 1st century A.D., though its frontal hardening from Classical toward Byzantine implies the widening of the old tragic gulf toward a doomsday separation — what was turning the cultured luxury of the Alexandrian to the matrix of search the Nag Hammadi Gnostic Papyri have unconvered, where Jewish and Neo-platonic, Hindu and Buddhist (those Indian missionaries reported in Alexandria from at least the 1st century A.D.), with cults from Egypt and Persia, astrology, magic, pneumatic, and apostolic Christianity — all strove for what the name implied, for hidden truth, for Gnosis. 133) Syrian-Jewish, 3rd cent. A.D., Ezekiel frescoes, detail, Synagogue, Dura Eurotus; + V & dig. details (cf. slide detail, 133a) By the time of the Gospels, even Judaea, for all its stiff-necked recalcitrance, was Hellenized, writing in Greek, and, in the Dura Eurotus Synagogue frescoes two centuries later, transforming Ezekiel's Valley of Dry Bones ("Son of Man, can these bones live?") into a Greek mystery, with Psyche and her Iris-winged souls. And yet that Jerusalem pocket, fertilized by the Alexandrian, had given birth to what was conquering, from within, its Græco-Roman conqueror. As Nietzsche says in Beyond Good and Evil (Aphorism 121): There is a subtlety in the fact that God learned Greek when he wanted to be an author, and that he didn't learn it any better. June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 48 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History As radical Tertullian would ask: "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" To which history had more radically answered: "Everything!" a134) Roman, c. 200 A.D., Persephone's Return to Hades, House on the Caelian Hill (later dedicated to SS. John and Paul), Rome b134) Same, Persephone, upper detail 134) Same, Persephone, close detail (video & dig. show various details) Music: Stravinsky, Sacre du Printemps, I, Col MG 31202 (opening for four slides, and close for last three) What could be closer to us than the great civilized melting pots, late-cycle crucibles of outward skill and inner search? Yet we do not always love most what is nearest. To catch in New Kingdom Egypt, or in the Rome of this 200-A.D. detail from the Persephone myth, an image of our own condition — that moody pride and sensate soulfulness of which orthodox Irenaeus accused Valentine's Gnostics: that they called the Biblical Creator a demi-urge and his church a whited sepulchre, themselves led by intuition into vagaries of pagan thought and sexual license — to glimpse that in a frescoed face, at once lures and repels: Stravinsky's Rite of Spring; Eliot's "April is the cruellest month." 135) 135a) Roman Christian, mid-3rd cent., Orant, "La Donna Velata," head, Catacomb of Priscilla, Rome Same, whole figure; + V detail Is it easier when pagan "proud dejection" assumes the saved upward glance of this third century Christian orant? — We know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in wickedness. (I John) When Pico, at the Renaissance height of Florence, would voice the radiant heresy of divine man (by his own will, beast, angel, or God), he had only to free the incarnate identification of Augustine: (Meditations XV, 3) Thou didst assume a human rather than an angelic nature and didst glorify it with the robe of immortality, raising it above all the heavens, June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 49 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History above all choirs of angels, above the Cherubim, above the Seraphim, to the right hand of the Father. 136) 136a) Boedas of Byzantium, c. 300 B.C., bronze Orant, Staatl. Mus., Berlin Same, Orant, detail; + V closer detail; dig. half, then whole, then close detail And as the Christian Orant rests on the Greek tradition of gleaming and sensuous prayer — this 300-B.C. bronze by Boedas of Byzantium, with Socrates under the plane tree: Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and the inward man be at one — so that Augustine rests on the Psalter, a collection forming through the Greek centuries: What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels and hast crowned him with glory and honour … . O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! 137) Asian Greek, 1st cent. A.D.(?), Fertility Artemis, streets of Ephesus When Paul spoke in the Græco-Roman city of Ephesus (on Homer's Ionic coast) and the silversmiths cried for two hours "Great is Diana of the Ephesians," the apostle of faith opposed, not by Olympian power (the outward and the inward at one) but by a fertility idol with tits down her belly, "in Sion also not unsung" — whoever could have opened his eyes there, would have seen in both poles of the confrontation, the quake and subsidence of the Greek island of temporal and human command. (fade Sacre du Printemps) a138) 138) Greek (Epidaurus) C. 380: marble, Aesclepius, National Museum, Athens Coptic, 5th cent. A.D., Angel contending with a demoniac Leda and the Swan, Coptic Museum, Cairo, Egypt; plus video (and digital) details Who could have dreamed, in the liberality of Plato's Athens, and looking back to the Periclean Banquet with Socrates, that the Doctrine of Ideas, nature's changeless substratum and essential truth (with even in music the condemnation of the sensuous June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 50 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History major and minor modes, to be banned from Gregorian) — would boil down, after nine centuries, to this Coptic war on the Greek Genetrix, Leda mounted by the Swan. Music: Again, Rite of Spring, toward close of Part I, Col. MG 31202 Though as always in the psyche of repression, one wonders how far the paranoiac angel (Leda's foot on his genitals) is battling; how far, like Boccacio's Alibech in the same ascetic desert, rushing to put his own devil in hell. June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 51 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History No wonder the Gnostic heresies of God feminine and copulative: "I am androgynous… the womb… the glory of the Mother"; "I am first and last… the whore and holy one… wife and virgin… mother, daughter" — were suppressed until the Egyptian papyri discovered in our time. 139) Double: [A] Again, 138, Angel and Leda; and [B] Greek vase (Attic?), later 6th cent. B.C., Ritual Phallic Dance, Louvre, Paris (video repeats 138, or 139A, then returns through the double to the close); dig. holds double What like force in opposites: the Coptic 5th-century A.D. denial, against this ritual phallic dance, Attic, 6th century B.C. In our time, too, the drive to the primitive and abstract sweeps the sensuous arts in its sway. Would it be, as with Eliot, some Hollow Man return to the deserts of the Thebaid: "Concentration/ without elimination… Desiccation of the world of sense/ Evacuation of the world of fancy"? Or would Yeats 2000-year changing of the tinctures send it in reverse — his history the beat of great alternating wings, our Christian sun cycle of the abstract One to yield again to the myth-moon, 140) Again, 139B, ritual phallic dance; + V & dig. details the multiform Dionysian influx, for which the old Yeats made himself an incarnate priest, undergoing the Steinach grafting of ape gonads, for the rejuvenation of his last poems. 1 "News for the Delphic Oracle" — after rejection of Platonic and Christian paradises — has this close: Down the mountain walls From where Pan's cavern is Intolerable music falls. Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear, Belly, shoulder, bum, Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrs Copulate in the foam. 1Since the above — medical testimony has turned the rumored Steinach to a vasectomy, physically ineffectual, though it seems to have heightened the poet’s erotic symbology. June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 52 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History It is said that in Yeats' manuscript, "Copulate" is a four-letter word. Indeed, the early Greeks had only those common words: Aristophanes: βινειν βουλοµαι. (end Rite of Spring, Part I) June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 53 � 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. 54 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 The Alexandrian Melt, Symbolic History, Part 4 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 4 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_04_The_Alexandrian_Melt 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/402dd66e701475e471e3da3ee2611b66.pdf 78c2b4166bf5eef919de4333b5e60660 PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 5. The Search for Rome CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 August 1995 Last Revised June 1996 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 5. The Search for Rome a1) 1) Piranesi, c. 1748, "Vedute di Roma," The Forum, engraving; + video detail Piranesi, c. 1765, same, Baths of Caracalla, engravinq; + video detail Music: Monteverdi 1642, L'Incoronazione di Poppea, Finale, Vox SVBX 5212 Thou stranger, which for Rome in Rome here seekest, And nought of Rome in Rome perceiv'st at all, These same old walls, old arches, which thou seest, Old Palaces, is that which Rome men call. Behold what wreck, what ruin, and what waste, And how that she, which with her mighty power Tamed all the world, hath tamed herself at last, The prey of time which all things doth devour... Va2) Piranesi, c. 1759, "Vedute di Roma," Temple of Venus, engraving = dig. 1b 2) Piranesi, c. 1774, "Vedute di Roma," Temple of Saturn, engraving; first, video detail; for dig. Va2 stands as b1 above; while 2 has no dig. detail The English poet Spenser, about 1590—lines echoed from Spain, 1610, Quevedo: Buscas en Roma a Roma, O peregrino! Y en Roma misma a Roma no la hallas... Both translating the French of Du Bellay, from forty years before Spenser: Nouveau venu, qui cherches Rome en Rome, Et rien de Rome en Rome n'apperçois... Rome de Rome est le seul monument, Et Rome Rome a vaincu seulement... 3) Piranesi, c. 1775, "Vedute di Roma", Branch of the Aqua Claudia, engraving; + video detail (not dig.) Du Bellay, varying the Italian of Castiglione, forty years earlier still: June 1996 The Search for Rome 2 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Superbi colli, e voi sacre ruine, Che'l nome sol di Roma ancor tenete... Colossi, archi, teatri, opre divine... Arches, theatres, divine works of that Rome, which Goethe, two hundred years later would seek: a4) 4) Piranesi c. 1770, "Vedute di Roma", Baths at Hadrian's Villa, engraving Piranesi c. 1760, "Vedute di Roma", Arch of Constantine and The Colosseum, engraving; first, video detail (not dig.) Saget, Steine, mir an, o sprecht ihr hohen Paläste Ewige Roma... Speak, you stones, and you high palaces; speak Eternal Rome! (music up, then fade) Though what speaks again and again is not, as with Greece, the primary phenomenon, but the historical reverberations: Piranesi, Monteverdi's court of Nero and Poppea, the regal pomp and arcane luxury (while we range the Empire: 5) 5a) Roman (African) Sabratha c. 200 AD ff., Baths of Oceanus and Temple of Isis Roman (African) 1st-2nd cent. AD, Lepcis Magna, Auditorium of the theatre Sabratha, Palmyra— Music: Monteverdi, Poppea, cont., end of the March a6) 6) 6a) Roman (Asia) Baalbek c. 210-217, Temple of Jupiter Roman (Asia) Palmyra 2nd - 3rd cent. AD, Temple Gate and Colonnade (video uses horizontal variant, V6; dig. vertical ) Roman (Asia) Palmyra 1st - 3rd cent. A.D., "Street of Columns" 7) 7a) Graeco-Roman, 1st cent. AD?, Aldobrandini Wedding, Vatican Same, detail of couple; + closer V detail (not dig.) (begin Duet) returning to the Roman Hellenism Nero loved). 8) The Roman Forum (CGB '48) June 1996 The Search for Rome 3 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History When Rome spoke to Gibbon he was looking out over the Forum from the steps of what was once the Capitol. This view, with sheep grazing then, was before him; Va9) Roman Christian 5th cent. ff., Front stairs, Santa Maria in Ara Coeli (CGB '86); called 8za on dig.; but in fact dig. 9a 9) Again Santa Maria, Interior, Nave, (left) Columns and aisle (CGB '86) and at his back, from the church of Ara Coeli, a basilica raised, like so many, on Classical columns, came the chanting of the barefoot friars—why not a hymn by Fortunatus? Music: Fortunatus c.606, Salve Festa dies, Solesmes, Decca 7542A That anomaly moved him to write The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. For 2nd 8) Roman Forum and Palatine, seen from Arch of Septimius Severus For it is always over the Dark Age gulf that Rome looms most compellingly—"giants in the earth in those days"—as the Anglo-Saxon Wanderer broods: This world, through the wisdom of God, has wasted, So the pleasure of the proud has utterly perished, And the wonder-work of giants crumbles worthless. V2nd 9) Again Santa Maria, Interior, Nave into Choir, (CGB '86) = dig. 9zb 10) (music) Roman Christian c. 470, Mosaic bust of St. Victor, Sant'Ambrogio, Milan Classical arts and lore first came to the West encapsuled in monastic Christianity—this mosaic bust of St. Victor, in Milan. 11) Roman Christian c. 330, Christ's Entry into Jerusalem, from Sarcophagus of Adelphia, National Museum, Syracuse June 1996 The Search for Rome 4 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Yet even in that rendition to the timeless and spaceless, inherited suavities attest a vanished earthly command. (fade Fortunatus) a12) 12) Roman 1st c. AD, glass cameo, The Portland vase, British Museum, London; + V detail (so dig. = 12b) Pompeii 1st c. AD, Dionysiac scene (glass), House of Fabius, Naples Museum; first, V detail (dig. adds detail = 12za) In the words of Yeats: "a more gracious time has gone." Though of the music that ravished Greece and Rome, we have only snatches: an Epitaph of Seikilos: "As long as you live, be cheerful." Music: Seikilos Song, 1st c. AD, J.E. Butt, private recording — A time when wine and love and poetry and every spring and grove were sacred to a god. Horace: gratia cum Nymphas geminisque sororibus audet ducere nuda choros— which Johnson rhymes: The spritely Nymph and naked Grace The mazy dance together trace. But the search for Rome cannot bog down (though Rome almost did) in vain regret for the soft arts of the Hellenistic twilight. How to summon from the shades the might of Rome itself? 13) Athenian 447-432 BC, Parthenon, NE corner, Acropolis, Athens (CGB '77) 13a) Same, Parthenon, Head of Selene's Horse from the East Pediment (CGB '77) The art-road was easier when the search was for Greece. There, a sheer vitality declares and celebrates itself. Not the Acropolis only, but drama, philosophy, even history, as the Greeks lived and told it, take the voice of Pericles: We are the school of Hellas...Wonder unending of after ages shall be ours. We have made sea and land the highway of our daring, and everywhere—for evil or good—left deathless monuments … . June 1996 The Search for Rome 5 �C.G. Bell 14) V14a) Symbolic History Roman AD 72-90, Flavian Arena (Colosseum), interior, Rome (CGB '86) Same, Flavian Arena, interior, another view Where Rome escapes from its monuments, its historians, even from its poet Virgil, leaves us burdened with the gloom of its own shadow, struggling in a world which, like Lucretius' universe, wears out and breaks down [II, 1148 ff.]: In this way the walls too of the great world Around us shall wear out and come to ruin, Stormed by successive years and time's decay. 15) V15a) Same, outside view (video shows details only, above, then below) Same, Colosseum, outside (old photo); dig. 15 = 15z, this = 15za Tacitus, Rome's greatest historian, records: I have to present in succession the merciless biddings of a tyrant, incessant prosecutions, faithless friendships, the ruin of innocence, the same causes issuing in the same results, and I am everywhere confronted by a wearisome monotony in my subject matter... (Tacitus, Annals IV, 33, tr., Church & Dodribb) Music: a16) Monteverdi, 1642, again Poppea, close of Prologue, Goehr, Zurich Opera Society, MMS-2028 Roman 306 AD, Basilica of Maxentius or Constantine, from Capitoline Hill (CGB '86) Another view of Basilica, with vestal statues Same, another view of statues (CGB '86); dig. omits 16) V16a) How shall we fasten on the form that vaulted over that failure, not just "the wide arch of the ranged empire", but the morale that held it—in the words of Pliny, "the boundless majesty of the Roman peace: Immensa Romanae Pacis maiestas"? If there was a music of Roman power, it is lost; we have had to let Monteverdi restore it. And of course he has restored, within outward pomp, 17) Roman (Flavian) c. 50-100 AD, Male Portrait Bust, Palazzo Capitolino, Rome; first, video detail (not dig.) (close of Prologue) June 1996 The Search for Rome 6 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History the imperial decay. (music to Ottone's opening words: "E puro io") When Romans of that time thought to recover the truth about themselves—the strength which despotism and luxury had plainly compromised (Fade Monteverdi)—they took a clue from Livy, that moralizing historian (or from Virgil, for that matter): 18) Roman 4th-3rd cent. BC, Warriors, Bronze handle of a Cista, Villa Giulia, Rome; + V detail (dig. waits for 2nd 18) they looked to their stern beginnings in military virtue, a time of legendary Horatios at the bridge, or of ""Troius Aeneas, pietate insignis et armis"; though these beginnings are not so early as Troy, or even as Sparta and Athens. It is crucial that these disciplined, almost primitive foot-soldiers are of the 4th or 3rd century BC, when the Greek cities are already in political decay. 19) Attlc (Kleitias) c. 570 BC, Landing of Theseus' Companions, from François vase, Museo Archaeologico, Florence; + V detail (here dig. waits) If we go back two or three hundred more years (here a scene from the tale of Theseus), we find the Greeks, too, keen for Ares, but with a spirit as different, as Homer is from Virgil. This preconscious vibrance can only loosen, as individuation ripens, into Plato's "fair and spangled" state, where "everything is ready to burst with liberty." 2nd 18) Detail of 18, Roman 4th-3rd c. Warriors; for dig. = 19za But the Roman discipline seems to take up where the Greek left off; it is postconscious, post-individual. Against the Macedonian phalanx, the Latin soldier with his shield, spear and short sword, was a fighting independence, self-bound into the moral collective. As if the Classical world had two phases, the Roman ordering and constrictive, 2nd 19) Detail of 19, Landing of Theseus' Companions [video then briefly returns to Roman Warriors]; dig. here doubles details of 18 & 19 against the exploratory and liberating Greek. So Hegel contrasts "the multiform variety of Greece" to "the crushing Destiny" of Roman power. June 1996 The Search for Rome 7 �C.G. Bell 20) Symbolic History Ionian (Magna Graecia) c. 460 BC, Birth of Aphrodite, Ludovisi Throne, Thermae, Rome Under the weighty vaults of the Roman Thermae, Greek originals smile out (this Ludovisi Birth of Aphrodite), like Persephone ravished to the underworld, sojourners in the darker shade. 21) V21a) Roman c. 10 AD, Ludovisi Juno, National Museum. (Thermae), Rome Same, another view, detail; not dig. Here even the gods are stern, Juno, constrained, like her sober Romans (thus Jove in the Aeneid): (I, 279-283) Harsh Juno too, Who now with terror tires earth, sea and sky, Will turn to kinder counsels, and with me Cherish the Romans, masters of the world, The togaed nation. So it is decreed. (CGB using Rhoades) a22) b22) 22) Graeco-Roman 1st c. BC?, Musing Woman ("Domina"), from Dionysiac Frieze, det., Villa dei Misteri, Pompeii Cyprian late 4th c. BC, Female head, terra cotta, Cyprus Museum, Nicosia Graeco-Roman late 1st c. BC?, Terror-Stricken Woman, detail, Great Frieze, Villa dei Misteri, Pompeii Music: Euripides 408 BC, Orestes fragment, Therriault & Lynch, St. John's, Santa Fe The cyclical modification of human development seems here to confront us. It is a question of introspective personality, with the somber weight it lays on the soul. The distinction is less of Greek and Roman than of early and late; though what the Greeks matured —the subjectivity which was their "principle of decay" (Hegel) and which the chromatic fragment from Euripides wonderfully expresses (close Euripides)—the Romans had to contend with, had to order. Almost any head from the 4th century BC down, would present us (as does this Pompeiian one from the Villa dei Misteri, 1st century BC) with self-awareness like a palpable thing. June 1996 The Search for Rome 8 �C.G. Bell 23) Symbolic History Kleophrades Painter c. 500 BC, (found Vulci), Maenad in Ecstasy, Antique Collections, Munich And the leap back to almost any before 500 BC gives the effect of having opened a drain, from which that shadowing selfhood pours, to leave the crystal clarities of the tribal and pre-personal—of myth. (If only a comparable music could be picked up from the groves and columns of Olympia.) Va24) 24) Etruscan 2nd half of 6th c., Reclining Couple, Villa Giulia, Rome Etruscan 509 BC, Apollo from Veii (terracotta), head, Villa Giulia, Rome In fact, the two phases had been run through on Italian soil by those puzzling Etruscans, whose non-Indo-European language and mysterious origin (more Thucydides' Tyrhennians than Herodotus' Lydians), did not prevent their paralleling, almost from year to year, the Greek maturation of consciousness; so that this smiling head, or the contemporary tomb paintings from Tarquinia, wear a kind of Greek stamp of 500 BC, and of archaic impersonality. 25) Etruscan 4th c. BC (or after?), Head from a sarcophagus, Carlsberg, Copenhagen Whereas this sarcophagus portrait, though Italian in realism, is 4th century in awareness—like the latest paintings, near the present graveyard, under the hummocked wheatfields of Tarquinia. This is the private responsibility with which Rome began, and for which it had to frame a universal law and moral discipline. 26) Spanish (Punic?) 3rd c. BC?, Lady of Elche, Prado, Madrid We yield to the temptation of beauty (though there is disagreement about the Lady of Elche's date) to hint that the conscious and sensuous ripening was Mediterranean, and that after 400 BC (or for a guess, 3rd century) it was felt also in Graeco-Punic Spain. 27) Double: [A] Hellenistic 3rd c. BC, Head of Alexander, British Museum, London, and [B] Etrusco-Roman, 3rd. c. BC?, called Junius Brutus, Conservatori, Rome; + singles [slide V & dig. order: 27A; 27; 27B] June 1996 The Search for Rome 9 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Though to sense how Rome could enlist that inwardness which had become the liability of Greece, a direct contrast will be most instructive—and from the very time that Polybius undertook to account for the Greek decline and Roman rise. Set the idealized rapture and refined yearning of the Praxitilean and Alexandrian—its worlds to conquer turning into dream (as Alcibiades' did, and even Alexander's)—against the equal selfawareness of the so-called elder Brutus (who expelled the kings and left his example like an injunction to his namesake)—but an awareness energized and disciplined by will. For the wistful impulse of the Greek, the reality of control—there lies the secret of the plodding, slow, inexorable march of Rome. Thus Hegel, in one of his most powerful distinctions: The Roman state is not a repetition of such a state of individuals as the Athenian Polis was. The geniality and joy of soul that existed there have given place to harsh and rigorous toil. 28) Roman c. 70 AD, Male Portrait, Museo Capitolino, Rome;+ V det. (not dig.) Everywhere in the art record of that responsibility we read "the crushing destiny" for which the world, as Hegel also says, was "sunk in melancholy"; so that even today we cannot walk the portrait halls of a Roman museum without being bowed by that burden of loss and heaviness, as if we too had to pay for the formative struggle which lay like a pall upon the human spirit. a29) b29) 29) V29a) Roman 1st c. AD, Arch of Titus, among trees, Rome Same, Triumphal chariot, detail, Arch of Titus, Relief Same, Jews led Captive (70 AD), detail, Arch of Titus Same, The Arch of Titus, (upper portion) (dig. omits) Music: Monteverdi, 1642, Poppea, again the pomp of the Finale, Vox SVBX 5212 (through slide a34) Under that brooding, the question becomes imperative: "rigorous toil" for what end? The search for origins gave us brazen warriors. Titus' triumphal arch on the Forum celebrates the sack of Jerusalem, the Jews led in chains, the seven-branched candelabra among the spoils. Does the guidance of Jove (Aeneas, "Jovis monitis") reduce to a doggedness of military conquest, of which the facade is Ara Pacis, the altar of peace— heavy virtues extolled without the vibrance or intellect of Greece? June 1996 The Search for Rome 10 �C.G. Bell a30) 30) Symbolic History Etrusco-Roman 5th c. BC, She-wolf of Rome, Palazzo dei Conservatori Same, detail of head, with fangs From the wolf origins praised from Livy down—hidebound severity, and outward fierceness: killjoy Marcus Cato, censor, whose morals did not preclude avarice, crying for the destruction of Carthage at every meeting of the Senate: "Delenda est Carthago"; murderous Marius, boasting of ignorance: I never studied Greek; I never wanted to. What I learned was more for my country's good: to strike the enemy, stand close guard, bear hunger, heat and cold, sleep on the ground, fear nothing but a coward's fame. (Sallust, Jugurtha LXXV, 33) 31) Roman 3rd c. AD, Battle with Barbarians, Ludovisi Sarcophagus, Museo Nazionale, Rome Same, detail of barbarian dying (not dig.) V31a) —even to this 3rd century AD Ludovisi Sarcophagus with the battle between Romans and Barbarians—the central theme of the "togaed race", in life and art, is war. Of course peace is intended, peace and law, all the virtues which Caesar, in Shaw, calls Rome's gifts to the world in exchange for a few ornaments: a32) 32) 32a) Roman 114 AD, Trajan's Column, Piazza Del Foro Traiano, Rome Same, detail of the Frieze Same, closer detail (video shows various details; dig. one) there is the good emperor Trajan, of the adoptive line, whose happy rule Gibbon so praised; but observe his most conspicuous monument, the column with its 650-foot-long coiled frieze of the Dacian campaigns, how it falls together, over a gap of a century and a half, with Caesar's account of the Gallic Wars: (from II, 23-28) ...the 9th and l0th legions drove the Atrebates from the high ground to the river, and when they attempted to cross, pressed after them sword in hand, and killed a great many… crossing… and pushing on, though the slope was against them… . But the enemy, even in their despair, displayed such heroic courage that, when their foremost ranks had fallen, the next mounted upon their prostrate comrades and fought standing on their bodies... June 1996 The Search for Rome 11 �C.G. Bell 33) 33a) 33b) Symbolic History Roman, late 2nd c., Column of Marcus Aurelius, detail, execution and burning, Rome; + video detail (not dig.) Same, detail, massacre of barbarian prisoners Same, detail, rape of barbarian women The battle was over; and the Nervian people, nay their very name, was brought to the verge of extinction... Even Marcus Aurelius, philosopher, is commemorated by such a column, to a detail of which we have shifted while reading Caesar. That was most of his life, laboring and fighting in a last Roman effort to extend, hold and consolidate. Without those notes in his book of somber meditations: "This among the Quadi on the Danube"—the soldiers, while he wrote, executing prisoners perhaps, or burning villages—who would have tied the scenes of the Column to those Greek expressions of the Stoic ideal: "to keep the divine Genius within pure and unwronged, lord of all pleasures and pains." a34) Roman c. 166-180, Equestrian Marcus Aurelius, the Capitol, Rome (whole from below) (fade Poppea Pomp) b34) 34) 34a) Same, Equestrian bronze, detail of Marcus Same, Head of Marcus Same, closer detail of head [so dig.; V to detail with horse, from a34] Though the face of the equestrian Marcus speaks more—that bronze work preserved through the Dark Ages because the Christians thought it Constantine, and on their side. Music: Monteverdi, 1642, Poppea, Lullaby, "Oblivion," Opera Soc., MMS2028 Those lonely Aurelian eyes are not at all like Constantine's eyes of staring dogma, yet they are barometric signs of something that was working in the Christians' favor: Wilt thou then, O my soul, ever at last be good and simple and single and naked, showing thyself more visible than the body that overlies thee?... Ever be fulfilled and self-sufficing, longing for nothing? As if there were two persons representing two Romes, the outward of public power (itself a wedded pair of war and law), and the inner of these shadowy musings. June 1996 The Search for Rome 12 �C.G. Bell 35) 35a) Symbolic History Roman, c. 176-9, Marcus Aurelius Sacrificing, Capitoline Museum, Rome; + video details (dig. one detail) Græco-Roman (Athens) 160 AD, Portrait of Annius Verus, son of Marcus Aurelius, Louvre; + V detail (not dig.) That separation of outward and inward, body and spirit, is the melancholy which pervades the late classical; and buttressed against it, never denying it, the Roman and Stoic command: Be like a headland of rock, on which the waves break incessantly, but it stands fast, and around it the seething of the waters sinks to rest. Under the titanic vaults of Rome, such depths were forming. For Virgil, the romantic transformation of the Odyssey yields to the god-given task of rule. For Hegel, the compulsion of rule foments inwardness: ...the world is sunk in melancholy, and it is all over with the natural side of Spirit; yet only from this could arise the supersensuous, the free Spirit in Christianity... (fade Lullaby) Va36) 36) Etrusco-Roman 1st c. BC, Terracotta Portrait, profile, Villa Giulia, Rome Same, frontal view (dig. shows frontal view only) Early Rome was a force in the world, but it was not yet world-historical. It deepens to that when the rather plain humanity of the Latin citizen of the Republic, a now legally defined private person, becomes, in the accession of empire and of Alexandrian consciousness, the focus of a double crisis, the class and power struggle of the Civil Wars, and the temptation of luxury and the softening arts. a37) 37) Graeco-Roman 1st c. BC?, Villa dei Misteri Frieze, Pompeii Same, closer view (CGB '80); + video detail (not dig.) Marvelous arts at their best, and it would seem quite above politics—though the strictures would apply to sybaritic Pompeii, as to Aeneas lapped in Dido's arms: "Heedless of empire, by base love enthralled." Yet the Villa of Mysteries is as startling a height of Greek art on Italian soil as Lucretius' Epicurean poem. The parallel is instructive, though they seem opposite at first: Lucretius denying these gods, these June 1996 The Search for Rome 13 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History mysteries; while he celebrates a super-mystery of atomic nature ruled by Love, the alma genetrix invoked as "Te, dea." 38) Same freeze, detail of Ordeal and Bacchante; + V detail (not dig.) ...we are all sprung from heavenly seed; all have the same father, by whom mother earth...conceives and bears goodly crops and joyous trees and the race of men... A thing therefore never returns to nothing... rains die, when father ether has tumbled them into the lap of mother earth; but then goodly crops spring up...and trees laden with fruit...and the leafy forests ring on all sides with the song of new birds... (Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, II, 991 ff; & I, 248 ff., Munro, tr.) a39) 39) 39a) Again frieze, Reading the Ritual, detail Same, close detail of face (Initiatrix) Same, another portion of the frieze (for which video has two details, from VA&B of 39a); dig. whole 39a Music: Again Euripides 408 BC, Orestes fragment, Therriault & Lynch Though like all expressions of post-Euripidean soul, the Villa of Mysteries and the De Rerum Natura betray the loneliness and torment at the heart of things, as when Lucretius writes of the frenzy of love: ...they pine away by a hidden wound, at a loss to know what they really desire...feasts are set out, perfumes, crowns and garlands..all in vain, since from the very fountain of delight, a bitter drop wells up, to pain amid the flowers. (Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, IV, 1117-34 adapted from Munro) (end Euripides) Fitting, St. Jerome should record of Lucretius (how factually no one knows): June 1996 The Search for Rome 14 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History ...driven mad by a love-potion, after he had written, in the intervals of his insanity, a number of books… he killed himself by his own hand in his forty-fourth year. The despair of reason might almost have been potion enough. 40) 40a) 40b) Roman terracotta head c. 50 BC, Man of the Republic, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; + V detail (not dig.) Hellenistic, 1st half of 2nd cent. BC, Head of Flamininus (?), Delphi Museum, Greece; first, video detail (not dig.) Roman 1st c. BC, Unknown Man, Glyptothek, Munich If the Boston museum bust is of 50 BC as claimed, it shows us an aesthetic patrician who has lived through the troubles of Lucretius' time (III, 70 ff) : "while men … amass wealth by civil bloodshed and greedily double their riches, piling up murder on murder." Those eyes could have seen the Forum massacre of ten thousand men gathered to protest Sulla's corn laws; Spartacus' Slave War, put down after two years (71 BC) with like violence: five thousand fugitives killed by Pompey, six thousand slaves crucified along the road from Rome to Capua. Perhaps, like Cicero's refined friend Atticus, he took the philosophic way of withdrawal from the state, regretted by Plato and praised by Lucretius, in the image of looking from land to a navy distressed at sea (De Rerum Natura, Book II, opening): ...to hold the lofty and serene positions well fortified by the learning of the wise, from which you may look down on others wandering abroad and going astray...the rivalry of birth, the struggle night and day to reach the summit of power and be masters of the world. (De Rerum Natura, II, 7-13, Munro, tr.) Va41) 41) Dioscorides of Samos 1st c. BC, Street Musicians, mosaic, from Villa Cicero, Pompeii, National Museum, Naples Hellenistic late 3rd c. BC, Old Woman Drunk, Capitoline Musuem, Rome; + V detail (not dig.) It was only in that Rome, glutting itself on the spoils of the Hellenic East—not wealth only, but the doubts and sophistications, the sensational vulgarities and refinements of art—the city, as Sallust said, "become a sink into which there poured all who June 1996 The Search for Rome 15 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History were in any place notorious for crime or vice"—it was then, in war and successive purges, in the corruption and breakdown of republican institutions— a42) Vb42) 42) 42a) Graeco-Roman c. 50 BC, Pompey the Great, Glyptothek, Copenhagen Roman 1st c. BC, Republican Bust, Antique Collections, Munich; not dig. Roman c. 60 BC, Portrait of a Patrician, Museo Torlonia, Rome; + V detail Roman c. 40 BC, Cato of Utica, Rabat Museum, Volubilis, Morocco that great personalities arise—Cato, Pompey, Cicero, Caesar, Agrippa—called forth by the imperatives of a threatened world. Now the portrait bust, Rome's chief contribution to Classical art, becomes a record, not merely of the warts and wrinkles, but through that surface, of momentous needs and changes in the soul. Let this type of eroded and embattled Roman rigor stand for Cato, inflexible as he. But it must reach beyond itself to catch those last hours as told by Plutarch. I do not mean (against the sweetness of Socrates' talking and falling asleep in the shade of his hemlock) Cato's bungling suicide, so that he had to drag his guts out and tear them with his hands; but rather what won him a place in Dante's theology: that he advised his son to withdraw from politics, and so passed his last evening reading Plato on immortality. a43) Roman c. 50 BC?, Marble bust of Cicero, Uffizi, Florence; + V detail; not dig. 43) Roman c. 50 BC, Cicero, Capitoline Museum, Rome; first, video detail ; not dig. That was in 46 BC. Caesar had just prevailed over Pompey. Cicero's letters are our best window into Roman failure. Where the official portrait shows his other side, the public front of success devoted to the higher aim—as his rhetoric sounds the obligation of Plato's Republic, to which his translation gave that Latin name: Res publica, the commonweal. His advice to his brother on provincial rule rings with the key words: peace, clemency, mildness, humanity, justice (pax, clementia, mansuetudo, virtus, humanitas, justitia), to be taken up in chorus by responsible Rome. In his highmindedness, Cicero had actually believed he could save the Constitution by a "concord of orders." a44) 44) Roman, c. 50 BC, Immolator of the Republic, Vatican, Rome (CGB '86); + V detail (not dig.) Same, another view; + V detail (also dig. detail) June 1996 The Search for Rome 16 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The breaking of that hope spotlights his wry and self-searching grandeur—an introspection paralleled in this bust of an Immolator. Cicero writes Atticus in 49 BC (Feb. 27): Caesar and Pompey have not aimed at the honor and happiness of the state, but at absolute power... Both want to be kings... Maybe you have been looking for a little consolation. I cannot see any. We could not possibly be worse off than we are, more wretched, ruined, disgraced. And to Paetus after Caesar's triumph (46 BC) I think I know well enough what will happen: those who are in power will have their way, and power now will always go by the sword... Whoever could not put up with this, was in duty bound to die. (It is the braver example of Cato which haunts him here.) But since I, hero and philosopher in one, took life to be the best thing after all—why, I cannot but love a man whose kindness has let me have it. Though even if he were really eager for a free constitution, he has no power of action, so deeply has he entangled himself... We are slaves to Caesar and Caesar slave to the times... Prepare for the worst, and bear what is to happen. 45) V45a) V45b) 45c) V45d) Roman c. 50 BC, bronze head, called Caesar, Museo Nazionale, Rome Cleomenes of Athens, c. 50 BC, Roman Orator, Louvre, Paris Roman 1st c. BC, Nymph & Satyr, Archeological Museum, Venice Detail of 45, so-called Caesar Roman 1st c. AD, Portrait of an Elderlv Man, Vatican With the bronze called "Caesar" in the National Museum in Rome, the bitterness of tyranny and proscription comes to a focus of grim involvement. As in Catullus' poem scourging Caesar, Pompey, most of all the parasite Mamurra, depravity and blame whirl in self-wounding fury: The man who can face this, the man who can take it, Is whored himself, a drunk, a swindler. Mamurra Laps the fat of crested Gaul and farthest Britain. Pansied Romulus, you see this thing, you take it? How he struts his way through everybody's bedroom, Like a white pigeon, a soft-skinned white Adonis — June 1996 The Search for Rome 17 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Pansied little Roman, you take it in, you bear it? You are like him then, as drunk, as whored a swindler. And was it for this, Rome's only great general, You conquered the remotest island of the West, To feed this screwed-out tool of yours, Mamurra? See him spend, twenty or thirty million? First were His own estates, then the loot of Pontus, then of Spain Hear Tagus, gold-bearing river. They say the Gauls And Britains fear him? And you love the mongrel? Both Of you, Caesar, Pompey? While he swills oil of patrimony? For this, like in-laws, father and son, You have sluiced wealth and all of the world-city. (CGB) 46) 46a) Double: [A] Greek (Phidian?) c. 440 BC, Older Riace Warrior, detail, Reggio Calabria; and [B] Roman c. 45 BC (copy?), bust called Julius Caesar, Vatican Double: [A] Again, Riace Warrior; [B] Again, bronze called Caesar, cf. 45 Let this Greek 5th century BC Riace Warrior (left), beside the Vatican bust probably of Julius Caesar (right), raise the question another 2000 years of debate will not end: how far Caesar's private ambition bodied forth an Alexandrian awareness of his world-calling, by one-man rule to reconstitute a vitiated Rome? In 60 BC, when he gave up the triumph won in Spain, to become Triumvirate Consul and so form an army by the conquest of Gaul—did he launch Lycurgus and Alcibiades upon a time always more darkened to cynical excess? And eleven years later, threatened by Pompey and the Senate with prosecution, when he took his army across the Rubicon ("Alea jacta est"), what die was cast? Did a last Greek flagrance of mind venture itself on the great-souled spendthrift and demogogue—already doomed by senatorial conspiracy to subserve the cautious weight of Augustan rule? 47) Roman c. 40 BC, The young Octavian, Museo Barracco, Rome; + V detail "His virtues be execrated, for they have ruined my country," said Cato. That was of Caesar. But there was a tide, which Machiavelli defined for all who came after him. Cicero too blamed individuals, accidents, had painfully to discover that the new Triumvirs would not relinquish power. His last letter to Brutus (43 BC) is of disappointment in this Octavian, by whom he was to fall in the purges of that year, victim of the man he had hoped to guide: June 1996 The Search for Rome 18 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History But what grieves me most even now, as I write, is that where the Republic has accepted me as a surety for that youth—almost, indeed, that boy—it hardly seems that I can make my promise good. 48) 48a) Roman, c. 30 BC?, Head of Augustus (Octavian), marble, British Museum, London; first, video detail (not dig.) Hellenistic Roman c. 20-10 BC, Bronze head of Augustus as Idealized Greek hero, British Museum, London; + V detail (not dig.) Here is Plutarch's account of the calculating schemer, not quite suppressed in the official portraits: And now, more than at any other time, Cicero let himself be carried away and deceived, though an old man by the persuasions of a boy. He joined Octavius in soliciting votes and procured the good-will of the senate, not without blame at the time on the part of his friends; and he too, soon enough after, saw that he had ruined himself and betrayed the liberty of his country. For the young man, once established, and possessed of the office of consul, bade Cicero farewell; and, reconciling himself to Antony and Lepidus, joined his power with theirs, and divided the government, like a piece of property, with them. Thus united they made a schedule of above two hundred persons who were to be put to death... (It is the scene Shakespeare shows us in Julius Caesar.) 49) Roman, c. 20 BC, Augustus, Capitoline Museum, Rome; + V detail (not dig.) How quickly the August image smoothes and idealizes itself, enacts in life and art the poetry of Virgil: We have reached the ultimate age foretold by the Sibyl's song; Again the great cycle begins; the first time returns. The virgin Justice descends; Saturn's reign is restored: From heaven to earth he comes, of the new world the firstborn. (CGB using the Loeb) In a Rome harrying itself by civil war, others shared in the myth of an age of gold. Horace invites us to sail to the Blessed Isles. (Epode, XVI) June 1996 The Search for Rome 19 �C.G. Bell 50) 50a) 50b) Symbolic History Roman 13-9 BC, Ara Pacis, east relief, Tellus Italia, with Air and Water, Rome (CGB '86) Same, Ara Pacis, whole altar as reconstructed Same, Tellus relief, central figure (black and white); dig. pans on 50 "Where Ceres year by year crowns all the untilled earth with sheaves." But Virgil turned his entire creative output to making that vision history. And with such sway, that the cold genius of Octavian, and the artists of his chief work, the Ara Pacis, or Altar of Peace, convert the dream façade into the truth of Rome: Behold how the great world threatened under its cloudy dome, The land and far-spread seas and the sky's fathomless home, How all created things rejoice in the time to come. (CGB) The Eclogues so begin it, leaping from actual abuse and decline (the land-grab of 41 BC in Eclogues I and IX), to prophetic paradise. In the Georgics we go from "tot bella per orbem"—"the globe all war, the fields rot in neglect" (in I), to the praise of Italy and rustic happiness (in II): 51) V51a) 51b) Same, detail of Tellus-Italia (CGB '86) Roman c. 100 BC, Relief from the altar of Domicius Ahenobarbus, Louvre, Paris (dig. omits) Again Ara Pacis, whole Tellus relief (as in 50) Here blooms perpetual spring... twice teem the flocks... Hail! land of Saturn, mighty mother thou Of fruits and heroes... still the year o'erflows With young of kine, still Ceres' wheaten sheaf Loads with crops the furrow, bursts the barns... Such life the Sabines led...Etruria thus To greatness grew, and Rome with circling walls Clasped to her single breast the sevenfold hills. The Aeneid too, though its theme is war, rests on that recovered Arcady. Evadner's Latium (Book VIII) was Saturn's refuge from Jove: he gave it laws; "Under his scepter were the fabled golden years." But we have heard in the prophecies of Book VI: "Caesar Augustus, a god's son, shall rebuild the golden age through Latian fields once June 1996 The Search for Rome 20 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History ruled by Saturn." So of course Italy, as bountiful Tellus-Gaia, is central to the Altar of Peace. a52) b52) 52) Same, Ara Pacis, west side, Aeneas at the Sanctuary of the Penates (black & white) Triple: [A] Greece c. 600 B.C., Colossal head of Hera, Museum, Olympia; [B] Roman 1st c. AD, head of Juno, Thermae, Rome; and [C] early Christian, 3rd cent., detail of seated Christ, Thermae, Rome Again Aeneas' sacrifice from Ara Pacis (CGB '86) (video reverses 52 and a52; not so dig.) The Great Wheel is a destiny involving gods, nature and man. We have considered nature. As for the gods, Polybius had been puzzled to note that superstition, for the late Greeks a vice, was the moral strength of Rome (religion changing roles with cultural need: for the Homeric Greeks, life-force; for the Romans, discipline; for the Christians, mystical hope). But by the time of Virgil, Roman faith was as undermined as Roman agriculture. So pious Aeneas' dependence on the gods, whose agent he becomes ("jussa divum exsequitur" — IV, 396), was also a creative leap, by which the reliefs of the Ara Pacis begin with this (damaged) Sacrifice of Aeneas; 53) 53a) 53b) Same, Ara Pacis, south side, Sacrifice by the Family of Augustus (CGB ‘86) Same, detail of Augustus leading the procession (CGB ‘86) Same, detail of family and friends of Augustus (CGB ‘86); + V det.; not dig. and end with Augustus, as Pontifex Maximus, leading his family and friends (the family of state) in an offering for peace. The repeated prophecies of the Aeneid are fulfilled: Jove to Venus in Book I: "The togaed nation, masters of the world...Then wars shall cease, the rugged time grow mild"; Jove to Aeneas, in Book IV, of the mission of his line: "to rule over Italy...and to law's bidding make the whole world bow." And of course the prophecy of the Underworld, and the future carved on the shield. Gibbon remarks on Augustus' skill in playing Roman citizen and leader of the Senate. And perhaps the most touching thing about the Ara Pacis is that so pompous a fulfillment of divine and world destiny remains a simple gathering of wives and children, relatives and friends— June 1996 The Search for Rome 21 �C.G. Bell 54) 54a) 54b) Symbolic History Same, Ara Pacis, detail of above, Head of Maecenas between other heads (CGB ‘86) Same, closer detail Double: [A] Greece, 590-80 B.C., Cleobis detail, Delphi; and [B] Augustan, 13-9 B.C., Aeneas sacrificing, detail, Ara Pacis. [Earlier V54b — doubling Peplos Korê and Antonia Minor from Ara Pacis — revised ('96) to this 54b.] old Maecenas, Virgil's loved patron, touched with lachrimae rerum, as when Augustus and Octavia, reading in the underworld canto those predictions of their Golden Age, came to the lines on the death of Marcellus: "Manibus date lilia plenis"—"give hands full of lilies"—and broke into tears. Strange how Homer is reversed. The instinctive life which was affirmative there, has turned to weakness, to the romantic longing which made Virgil's voice falter at Dido's line ("since this name only, of guest, survives that of husband"); while what was negative in Homer, Destiny, against which Greek life smilingly pitted itself, has become with Rome the heavy hope. 55) 55a) 56) 56a) 56b) Roman c. 20 BC, Prima Porta Augustus, whole statue, Vatican, Rome (CGB '86) Same, another view; + V detail (not dig.) Same, Prima Porta Augustus, waist up (CGB '86); + V det. of 55a (not dig.) Same, detail of armor only (CGB '86, color; or black & white); copy of Faust 14 Same, detail of head and shoulders That is the pronouncement which stands in Book VI, at the center of the epic: (after Humphries) ...Rome, that glorious city, Will bound her power by earth, her pride by heaven... ...These are Iulus' children... Caesar Augustus, son of a god, founder of An age of gold...he will extend his empire Beyond the Indies, beyond the normal measure Of years and constellations, where high Atlas Turns on his shoulder the star-studded world... Others, no doubt, will better mould the bronze To the semblance of soft breathing, draw from marble June 1996 The Search for Rome 22 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The living countenance; and others plead With greater eloquence, or learn to measure, Better than we, the pathways of the heaven, The rising of the stars: remember, Roman, These are your fine arts: to rule the people Under law, to impose the way of peace, To spare the humble, and war down the proud. It is as if the Prima Porta Augustus had been made to fulfill that command. And as Aeneas takes up the shield carved with the future of Italy from Romulus and Remus to the defeat of Marc Antony—Antony, unlike high-souled Aeneas, captive to his African Dido: "with horrors, an Egyptian wife"—as Aeneas, uncomprehending but "proud and happy, lifts to his shoulder all that fortune, the fame and glory of his children's children"—Augustus here assumes his symbolic armor: under the gods of the sky, the conquered earth reconciled by Rome. How fitly the stone mouth might sound Augustus' account of his own reign, the Res Gestae, inscribed late in his life on monuments over the empire -- 57) Roman 312 BC and after, Via Appia, Queen of Roads that realm of ordered power: provinces, arches, aqueducts, law, radiating like Roman roads from the Principate center. 58) Roman, 5 BC, Tropaea Augusti, La Turbie, Monaco (restored 1934) When I was nineteen I collected an army on my own account and at my own expense, by the help of which I restored the Republic to liberty...I had to undertake wars by land and sea, civil and foreign, all over the world, and when victorious I spared surviving citizens... 59) Roman, completed 13 AD, Theatre of Marcellus, Rome I built the Curia and the Chalcidicum which adjoins it, the temple of Apollo, the temple of the Divine Julius, the Lupercal... I constructed the Flaminian Road... with all the bridges except the Mulvian and Minucian... I built a theatre to bear the name of my son-in-law, Marcellus... 60) Roman (Spain), c. 100 AD, (Trajan) Aqueduct, Segovia (CGB '66) June 1996 The Search for Rome 23 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History I cleared the sea of pirates...I extended the frontiers of all the provinces of the Roman people... 61) Augustan wooden arch, rebuilt in stone under Tiberius, Orange, S. France Twice I triumphed with an ovation; in my triumphs were led captive before my chariot nine kings or children of kings... 62) 62a) 62b) Roman c. 10 BC, Augustus as Pontifex Maximus, Thermae Museum, Rome Same, upper detail Roman I5-37 AD, The Gemma Augustea, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; + V detail ( not dig.) I transferred the republic from my power to the will of the Senate and people of Rome. For which good service I was by decree of the Senate called by the name of Augustus... in recognition of valour, clemency, justice, piety... The old Republican watchwords invoked to close down the Republic. Characteristic that he never mentions the command of the Praetorian Guard. As Cicero said: "Power now will always go by the sword." A reliance which would shrink later emperors to puppets of their own arms. The whole achievement of Virgil and Augustus being, in one sense, a romantic dream. a63) 63) Roman c. 10-20 AD, Bucolic Landscape, detail, from Villa of Agrippa Posthumus, Museo Nazionale, Naples Roman (Augustan) c 10 AD?, Fresco, Ulysses among the Laestrygonians, Vatican Library, Rome; + V detail (to the right; so dig.) Resolution could not shore up the psyche. Again the fragment from Euripides. Music: Euripides 408 BC, Orestes fragment, last part The Hellenistic illusionism of escape — "Could I take me to some cavern for my hiding," (end Euripides) bred of the civil wars: Horace's Blessed Isles, Virgil's Mincian Arcadia — flows through the ivory gate of the Aeneid, appears in the haunted Odysseus landscapes, June 1996 The Search for Rome 24 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History where the facts of Homer take the shades of Virgil: like Polyphemus glimpsed through mist as he wades into the sea, groans, and laves the gored socket of his eye (Aeneid III). 64) 64a) Roman late 1st cent. BC, Portrait of a girl (terracotta), Staatliche Museen, Berlin ; + V detail (so dig.) Graeco-Roman Africa c. 40-50 BC, Cleopatra, Cherel, Algeria; + V & dig. detail Under the tender modeling of this Augustan girl, ideal as the Ara Pacis, romantic person ripens toward imperial (ultimately Christian) longing. Why else would Milton have chosen the Fifth Ode of Horace for translation (and made it the only Latin poem native to English), but for some renouncing hunger that rocks the smooth surface of its Hellenism?— What slender Youth bedew'd with liquid odours Courts thee on Roses in some pleasant Cave, Pyrrha, for whom bindst thou In wreaths thy golden Hair, Plain in thy neatness; O how oft shall he On Faith and changed Gods complain: and Seas Rough with black winds and storms Unwonted shall admire; Who now enjoyes thee credulous, all Gold, Who always vacant, alwayes amiable Hopes thee; of flattering gales Unmindfull? Hapless they To whom thou untry'd seem'st fair. Me in my vow'd Picture the sacred wall declares t' have hung My dank and dropping weeds To the stern God of Sea. a65) 65) 65a) Roman (Pompeii) 70-79 AD, Atrium, House of the Vetii (rebuilt) (CGB '89) Roman (Pompeii) 1st cent. AD, Portrait of a Girl, Nat. Mus., Naples Graeco-Roman 1st cent. AD, House of the Vetii Frescoed wall What had made one-man rule inevitable but the corruption of the Republic? And where was its deepest seat but in the sensuous flagrance and softening nostalgias, to which the houses of Pompeii more richly attest than the stripped fragments of Graeco-Roman song: "Calliopeia". June 1996 The Search for Rome 25 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Music: Græco-Roman 1st cent. AD, Calliopeia Hymn, J.E. Butt (close) In that cleavage between private wish and public facade, we look under every rich carpet (or in this case, wall painting) to find cockroaches. 66) Roman, c. 38 BC (or later?), Mural of a garden from the Villa of Livia, Thermae, Rome Roman 1st c. AD, Livia Drusilla, Augustus' wife, Vatican Museum, Rome; + V detail ( so dig.) Another detail from the Villa Livia mural Same, another detail 66a) V66b) 66c) This garden scene is from the Prima Porta Villa of Livia, in the spirit of Virgil's fruitful Italy. It was probably painted about 38 BC, when Augustus dumped his first wife Scribonia (mother of their notorious Julia), and had Livia divorced from her husband (father of Tiberius), to espouse her imperious charms. Suspected of various crimes—the premature death of Marcellus and other near heirs, and even of the death of Augustus— she inherited a third of his property, and became joint-ruler with her son, until her dominance drove him to the queer retreat of Capri. It is the beginning of the fevered conversion of sex into power, so disturbing in imperial Rome. And poor old Agrippa, Augustus' loyal "architect of Empire", had to divorce the wife he loved and marry that now widowed and lusting Julia. Such the nobly robed family of the Altar of Peace. 67) 67a) 67b) Roman (Flavian), late 1st cent. AD, Portrait of a youth, British Museum, London Egyptian (Amarna), c. 1370-60 BC, Head from a harp, Louvre, Paris Again 67, Flavian Youth, detail; + closer V detail ( not dig.) It is worth jumping forward here, a few generations, to pick up a face that, of all faces, gives a probable insight into Julia—this Flavian youth, for whom the Principate splendor has not solved the inner why. Not since the old thousand year culture of the Nile had anything of such rich satiety appeared. Petronius Arbiter might have put him in the Satyricon; but he bridges time; for Lucretius had already given the description of his ennui: The man who is sick of home issues from his mansion, and is no better off abroad. He races to his country house... yawns as he reaches it and June 1996 The Search for Rome 26 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History sinks into heavy sleep, seeks forgetfulness, or in haste goes back to town... In this way each flies from himself, hates himself, because he is sick and does not know the cause. (Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, III, 1060 ff., adapted from Munro's translation) Va68) Roman copy of Greek, 3rd cent., Hermaphrodite (from the rear), Louvre, Paris (Mattress by Bernini) Same, another view, (CGB '80) Same, frontal view (CGB '80) b68) 68) That malady now, with all its symptomatic excess, seized on the heart of empire. In the hypocritical position of trying to reform and stiffen the moral codes, "the divine Augustus", Seneca tells us, "was forced to exile his own daughter, Julia, who had surpassed in lust every infamous meaning of the word, and had covered the imperial home with scandal." Ten years later it would be the granddaughter—Julia's Julia. Since Ovid, having written The Art of Love, was banished at the same time, there were hints of a supervised experiment in postures. ("Would you, the supervisor, grossly gape on?") 69) 69a) View from Posillippo, over Nisida & Baia's Bay to Cape Miseno etc. (Beny) Lake of Avernus, near Cumae, north of Naples (CGB '84) Works of art, however, will not guide us to the cruel and jaded sensualities of which we read in the satirists or the gossiping historian Suetonius. Imagination can only grope backward from the present scene of Baia on the Bay of Naples, to the luxurious Roman spa, senators lolling in litters and gilded boats, or with women in the warm pools of Avernus, under showers of roses thrown by lascivious dancers. (So Seneca.) 70) 70a) View of Capri from the Villa of Augustus towards Tiberius' Villa (CGB '80) Ruins of Tiberius' Villa, Capri (CGB '80) Across the bay lies Capri, where Tiberius fled embittered, covered with sores, scabs and pustules. Suetonius: He had assembled from all quarters girls and perverts... who invented monstrous feats of lubricity... to inflame his feeble appetite. (Not to mention those unweaned children he called his little fishes.) June 1996 The Search for Rome 27 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History They still point out the scene of his executions, from which he used to order that those who had been condemned, after long and exquisite tortures, be cast headlong into the sea before his eyes, while a band of marines waited below for the bodies and broke their bones with boathooks and oars, to prevent any breath of life from remaining in them. 71) 71a) V71b) 71c) View through mist across the Forum to the Palatine Roman, 28 AD, Bust of Caligula, The Louvre, Paris Rome from Forum to Palatine (CGB '86, underexposed; dig. omits.) Rome, The Palatine from across the Circo Massimo Flee, like the sick patrician, back to Rome, past the Palatine, then tiers on tiers of colonnades, where Tiberius' successor, mad Caligula, walked. Suetonius: For this man, who so utterly despised the Gods, was wont at the slightest thunder and lightning to shut his eyes, muffle up his head, and if they increased to leap from his bed and hide under it... He was terrified also by strange apparitions... Therefore weary of lying in bed awake during the greater part of the night, he would now sit upon his couch and now wander through the long colonnades, crying out from time to time for daylight, and longing for its coming. 72) 72a) 72b) V72c) 72d) View of Vatican gardens, with St. Peter's dome Terraced fields outside Jerusalem Model of Rome 1st - 4th cent., (Gismondi), Museum of Roman Civilization, Rome Byzantine, c. 1000, Martyrdom of St. Ignatius (c. 107), Menologium of Basil II, Vatican Library Vatican Gardens (CGB '84) What can we do but flee again, across the Tiber, into Nero's gardens. We find ourselves at the heart of Christendom. For Peter—in fact or faith—was martyred here, and the Church rose over his blood. How remote this Vatican garden from the place of persecution Tacitus describes: Christus, the founder of that name, was put to death as a criminal by Pontius Pilate... but the pernicious superstition, repressed for a time, broke out again, not only through Judaea, where the mischief June 1996 The Search for Rome 28 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History originated, but through the city of Rome also, whither all things horrible and disgraceful flow... In their deaths they were made the subjects of sport, for they were covered with the hides of wild beasts and worried to death by dogs, or nailed to crosses, or set fire to, and when day declined burnt to serve for nocturnal lights. Nero offered his own gardens for that spectacle... mingling with the common people in the habit of a charioteer... (Tacitus, Annals, XV, 44, tr. Church & Brodribb) 73) Roman 72-90 & 312-316, Colosseum seen through the Arch of Constantine; + V detail ( not dig.) Again Colosseum, arches from within V73a) The Rome we have been in search of lies like the city itself, range upon range and vault opening under vault. Through the first layer of military force we have come into the arch of responsible rule. Deeper in that pile of enslavement and law, we enter the treasure chamber of privacy. The first impression is almost to drive us back appalled. 74) V74a) 74b) Roman Bust, c. 66-68 AD, Nero, Museo Capitolino, Rome; or V74 Roman, 14-37 AD, Grimani Relief, Lioness with her Cubs, Museum, Vienna Pompeii, c 70 A.D., Erotic wall painting, National Museum, Naples We seem to be witnessing one of those movies of the life of Christ, where the debauchery of Rome suggests a new Babylon. Tacitus: Nero (who polluted himself by every lawful or lawless indulgence)...had a raft constructed on Agrippa's lake... the crews arranged according to age and experience in vice. Birds and beasts had been procured from remote countries, and sea monsters from the ocean. On the margin of the lake were set up brothels crowded with noble ladies, and on the opposite bank were seen naked prostitutes with obscene gestures and movements... (Tacitus, Annals XV, 37; tr. Church & Brodribb) a75) 75) Roman, 1st cent. AD, Patrician carrying busts of his ancestors, Capitoline Museum, Rome Roman, c. 150 AD, Young Marcus Aurelius, Capitoline Museum, Rome; + V detail (also dig.) June 1996 The Search for Rome 29 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History But Nero and Paul were not the only contenders in the Roman vault of personality. The pagan moral force rallied again and again. Perhaps never before or since was such a battle waged in the psyche. And with each recovery the outward empire was reordered, but against longer odds, and the soul under deeper shadow. With Marcus Aurelius the beauty of classical form masks an inwardness where solitude and dark have become habitual. So his Meditations Of the life of man the duration is but a point, its substance streaming away, its perceptions dim, the fabric of the entire body prone to decay, and the soul a vortex, and fortune incalculable, and fame uncertain. In a word, all the things of the body are as a river, and the things of the soul as a dream and a vapour; and life is a warfare and a pilgrim's sojourn, and fame after death is only forgetfulness. What then is it that can help us on our way? One thing and one alone—Philosophy. (tr., C.R. Haines) Va76) 76) 76a) Roman (Hadrian) 120 AD, Pantheon, from the Piazza, Rome; not dig. Same, closer view (CGB '86): V, detail only Pantheon, interior (CGB '86, horizontal slide, copy of E. Xian V53) We have relied on the portrait bust to voice the inner struggle. But architecture, too, that monumental enclosure of space, conveys, in its very language of thrusts, tensile nobilities. Rome's greatest building, the Pantheon, combines a columned porch, perhaps of the time of Augustus, with a dome built under Hadrian, the first huge dome ever constructed, forming the most impressive and best preserved Roman interior. As Hegel says: under the pain inflicted by Despotism, spirit, driven back into its inmost depths...seeks for a harmony in itself, and begins now an inner life. a77) 77) 77a) 77b) Pantheon, from the West side (CGB '86) Pantheon, interior (CGB '86, vertical slide); V takes details only, above then below; dig. whole, then upper detail Byzantine (Justinian) 502-537 & 558-62, Hagia Sophia, Dome (interior), Constantinople (CGB '77; copy of E.Xian 55) Michelangelo, c. 1550-90, Dome (interior), St. Peter's, Rome June 1996 The Search for Rome 30 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History At the center of all that arching of aqueducts and bridges, amphitheatres and mammoth baths, enclosed in the bend of the Tiber and the utilitarian plainness of huge rubble walls, opens this round-shelled, eye-lighted sphere, first massive solution of the symbolic inner room. To enter it is to share a space pregnant with the moral deepening of Rome. As the private person glimpsed in brooding portraits fills the frame of universal law, so this luminous closure invests the cement walls of its outwardness. And as the subjective morality of the West was first explored in the conscious responsibilities of Rome, so this dome generates a long line, through the spatial withdrawal of Byzantine, to the proud assertions of the Renaissance and later West. 78) 78a) 78b) Roman Christian, 2nd-4th cent., Catacombs of St. Calixtus, Rome Roman Heads, Double: [A] 1st c. AD, from Ostia; and [B] 4th c. AD, from Via Appia, both National Museum (Thermae), Rome (CGB '86) Again, Catacombs of St. Calixtus, another view Music: Gregorian Easter Service Alleluia Mode 7, Angel 35116 From Aeneas down that struggle under stoical command: "Be like a headland of rock," had shaped the deepest reality of Rome. But after Marcus Aurelius, it required more than those heavy-eyed searchers for gnosis could supply. Obligation and destiny shifted from Aeneas Jovis monitis to Augustine's "a broken and a contrite heart, the Spouse, the Cup of our Redemption." But when the soul-sick Roman went down into the Catacombs, it was into a crypt that had long been forming under the imperial walls, a brooding place of consciousness, which Christianity would hail, with solemn hallelujas, as the birthplace of light. a79) b79) 79) Roman-Christian mid-3rd cent., fresco detail, Shepherd with scroll, and flock, Hypogeum of the Aurelii, Rome Same, another detail, Head of the Apostle Paul Roman-Christian 4th c., Bust of Christ fresco, Cemetery of Comodilla, Rome Between the opposites of an age there is a kind of creative play. The surrender of Christianity, the pride of Rome, these form the axis on which Western history is strung. Here, the promise of the City of God (I Cor. 15, 19-20): June 1996 The Search for Rome 31 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable. But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept... (End Gregorian) 80) 80a) Roman end of 1st c. BC, Agrippa, Uffizi, Florence Same, close detail of face There, the military might behind the Prima Porta Augustus, Augustus' soldier, who engineered his rise, honest Agrippa—yoked opposites of our world: ...Remember, Roman...to rule the people Under law, to impose the way of peace, To spare the humble, and war down the proud. How the 17th century, from Monteverdi, through the court of Louis XIV, to Augustan England, swells with that trumpet voluntary. Music: June 1996 Jeremiah Clarke (once thought Purcell), 1700, March, called "Trumpet Voluntary" (close), Bach Guild HM-31 SD The Search for Rome 32 � 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 The Search for Rome, Symbolic History, Part 5 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 5 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_05_The_Search_for_Rome 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/7f6c5ed5313f63cc49178b1325f81fa6.pdf 1512ae22ac66f820b2e96daf6da58875 PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 7. The Dark Ages CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 August 1995 Last Revised January ‘96 �1 Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 7. The Dark Ages 1) 1a) German (Ottonian), c. 950, St. Luke in Ecstasy, Gospel of Otto III; Staatsbibliothek, Munich; + V details Same, upper half (video varies the order of whole and details) Music: Plainsong Sequence, attr. to Wipo, c. 1000-50, Victimae Paschali (Mass for Easter) Haydn Soc. HSL 2071 To call the birth-phase of Western Culture the Dark Ages — those Gregorian centuries from the fall of Rome to the sequences of 1000 and after (this Victimae Paschali) — is to invoke a mystery like the cloud of the tabernacle from which God speaks. Since the arts of vision (here St. Luke in Ecstasy, German, c. 950), attain heights of mandala. In such a blaze, where is the dark? Does it lie within or beyond those staring eyes? 2) Spanish Bible, 920, Sign of St. Luke, Cod. 6, f 211, Leon Cathedral, Spain; + V details Certainly beyond — on the world abandoned: the earthly fabric of space, time and causality. But the reduction of the phvsical has its inner concomitant, the mortification of humanity, so tied to space, time and cause. Stranger than the eyes' stare is that their God-centered inwardness (as in this Spanish 920 Angel-sign of Luke) may wear the deformity of being crossed. (End Victimae Paschali) 3) 3a) 3b) French Gothic, c. 1250, Angel of the Annunciation, detail of central Portal, Rheims (video shows the angel of 3b or V3) Maitani and school, 1310-30, detail from Inferno, west façade, Orvieto Cathedral (video upper detail only) Again, Rheims Portal, Angel guardian of St. Denis, detail of face Music: August 5, 1995 French Motet, c. 1230, Ave Maria (close), Seraphim SIC 6052 Side 1, #5 The Dark Ages �2 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Whereas, in the Gothic (Rheims, about 1250), mystical love has entered our realm, and smiles. Thus in Dante, it is the sinner who twists his eyes, "Biechi" (Inferno VI, 91), and falls into the mud of hell; while Revelation comes as Beatrice: "Dolce amor, che di riso t'ammante" — "Sweet love, mantled in smiling." (End Ave Maria) 4) Roman Christian, 4th cent., Christ to Jerusalem, from Junius Bassus Sarcophagus, Vatican (video: detail only) 4a) Double: Naumburg Master c. 1329, Saved and Damned, Choir Screen, Cathedral, Mainz V4b) Giselbertus, 1125-1135, Christ in Judgment, detail of Tympanum over main door, Cathedral, Autun 4c) Again, 4th-century Christ to Jerusalem, wider view Music: Gregorian (Solesmes), Lux Aeterna (close), Mass for the Dead, Decca 7532 A Though there is a source of confusion here, something hard to clarify, since Græco-Roman Christianity had favored a gentle kind of nirvana smile. It is just that change from valedictory lightening to the Gothic surge of energy and delight, which the centuries of invasion, the stripping off of outward things and the fierce charging of spirit had to accomplish — to transform (by paradox) a motion of withdrawal into a dynamic of attack. Where this 4th-century Christ, even as he enters Jerusalem, seems soothed into a neo-Platonic, almost Buddhist, child-teacher and immortal guide. (end Lux Aeterna) 5) 5a) French Romanesque, Gothic 12th cent., Corpus Christi, Bronze gilt, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City (first, video detail, Va5) Same, detail of head and shoulders Music: Leonin, c. 1160, Crucifixum (duplum) opening (Tinayre) Col M 431 (1) But that proud and terrible agonist would not be tamed; and the smiling Gothic grace is coterminous with a twisted Gothic pain (Leonin and Chartres, 12th century) — both of which, mediated by the Dark Ages, have become bearers of incalculable force. So the darkness is doubly creative; its arts of vision attest the birth of a culture. (Fade Leonin) August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �3 C.G. Bell Symbolic History a6) Apulian Romanesque, 1078-1197, toward High Altar, S. Nicola, Bari (CGB '84) Vb6) Carolingian, c. 796-804, Karlschrein, relief, Charlemagne dedicates chapel, Royal Chapel, Aachen, Germany 6) Northumbrian before 716, from an Italian 6th-cent. MS, Ezra copying the records, Biblioteca Laurenziana, Florence; + V detail 6a) Milan (or Reichenau?) 11th cent., Christ from Healing of the Possessed, Ivory, Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt Music: Gregorian (Solesmes), 8th-9th cent., Gallican(?), Media Vita opening, Vict. M-87 If that darkness were not windowed, it would preclude our study. By the monastic continuation of art and learning, we enter a gestation which, with other civilizations, was obscure. So in this Northumbrian 700 copy of an Italian 6th-century manuscript, showing Ezra — by the resonance of symbol, such a monk in such a study — himself copying the Temple records. Here history presents us with the first luminous Dark Age, the only documented Time of Troubles. Let us consider it in three aspects: its oneness, its multiplicity, its directional transformation. (Fade Media Vita) 7) Græco-Roman, from Pompeii, 1st cent. A.D., fresco, Perseus and Andromeda, National Museum, Naples' + V detail Music: Greek, 2nd cent. B.C., 1st Delphic Hymn (opening), RCA-V-LM6057 (IV, 2) When seen in the larger sequence: from the temporal and humanist command of Greece and Rome (the Delphic Hymn, with Perseus and Andromeda from Pompeii), (fade Delphic Hymn) 8) Northumbrian, c. 710, Echternach Gospels, St. Matthew, National Library, Paris; + V detail through the 710 Gospel of Echternach, also Northumbrian, where everything spatial and human flattens to the hieratic — as in Gregorian reduced to the tread of parallel organum; Music: August 5, 1995 Scholia enchiriadis, c. 850, Organum of the fifth, Nos qui vivimus (HAM 25, a, 2), Orpheus 349 (end phrase) The Dark Ages �4 C.G. Bell 9) Symbolic History E.Q. Asam, 1721, St. George and the Dragon, High Altar, Weltenburg church, Bavaria (from CGB '59) and so to the gradiloquence and whelming drama of the Baroque (Asam, 1721) — in such a context, the whole span For 2nd 8) Asturian Romanesque, before 848, Santa Maria del Naranco, near Oviedo, Spain from the Fall of Rome to the 11th century rise of Europe, seems a concave of primitive withdrawal, between two vast waves of civilized, assertive force. 2nd 7) a2nd 7) Again, Perseus and Andromeda, upper detail Græco-Roman, 1st cent. A.D., Polyphemus and Galatea (detail of Galatea), Villa Imperiale, Pompeii Let Virgil supply the Classical cognate — when Aeneas sees the fall of Troy already depicted at Carthage: Here is Priam: even here, worth has regard, And there are tears for things, and human hearts Touched by the chances of mortality (CGB) — ...sunt hic etiam sua praemia laudi; sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. Or the line which for Augustine epitomized the tempting pathos and glory of pagan art: the farewell of Creusa's ghost: Infelix simulacrum atque ipsius umbra Creusae — 3rd 8) Again, Echternach Gospels, detail (video wider view, then detail) Set it against the first hymn Caedmon (c. 670) is said to have sung, dreaminspired. The shades Augustine loved and feared have been shed from the soul. Nu we sceolon herian heofonrices Weard, Metodes mihte and his modgethonc — Now let praise the Prince of Heaven, August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �5 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Might of the Maker manifold of plan, Work of the Father all the wonders he wrought, The Lord everlasting when he laid out the world. (CGB) a2nd 9) 2nd 9) Again, St. George and the Dragon, detail (from CGB '59) Again, St. George and the Dragon (CGB '59) [video, using 1st 9, a2nd9, 2nd 9, and one V9 variant, makes a sequence of five views] For the Baroque, music will voice it more richly — a phrase from Bach's "A Mighty Fortress is our God." Music: Ein Feste Burg ist Unser Gott, Cantata 80, opening; Vanguard BG 508 (fade) This victory spills over in earthly pomp and power. Whereas in Gregorian chant, the entire phenomenal world a10) b10) 10) Palace School, early 9th cent., Evangelist, detail of Xanten Gospel, Bibliotheque Royal, Brussels Carolingian Palace School, end of 8th cent., St. Mark, Coronation Gospel, f. 76v., State Library, Munich Again, Xanten Evangelist, closer detail dissolves in self-effacement at the dilating spaceless center of the one melodic line: O flying world! that we, sick-hearted, love thee! Music: August 5, 1995 Gregorian (Solesmes), 8th-9th cent., Media Vita, cont.; V-M-87 The Dark Ages �6 C.G. Bell Symbolic History The body of Celtic chant is lost; "poor music", says Leonardo, "which dies in the moment of its birth." Solesmes performance assimilates even the Media Vita, probably of Carolingian and Gallic origin, to the suavity of Roman practice — a thing Charlemagne could never quite school his monks to. So our parallel has taken us from the Celtic flatness of Echternach to the Roman-Christian revivals of the Palace School. Though for all its softness of robe and shadowed mood, this Evangelist is no less timeless, spaceless, selfless. (fade Media Vita) In the Dark Age invariance of earthly fall and total faith, it rears a polarity of technique: the Graeco-Roman lingering against Va11) 11) Irish, c. 800, Four Symbols of the Evangelists, Book of Kells, f.290v., Trinity College, Dublin Again, Book of Kells, detail from Nativitas Christi page the exactly contemporary (c. 800, Book of Kells) linear abstraction in which the Celtic (and even Germanic) conspires with the Syrian and Armenian East. To call such labyrinthine sophistication primitive is strange; yet both soul and the world soul inhabits share here in a primitive reduction, to a criss-cross of saintly miracle and Mabinogian wonder. For 2nd 10) Again, b1O, St. Mark, detail To see the Dark Ages as a mystical and ascetic trough between the breaking crests of Græco-Rome and the West is to emphasize its oneness of Augustinian shadow and Christian affirmation. While to juxtapose the meditative humanism of 800 Aix-laChapelle For 2nd 11) Again, Book of Kells, Symbol of St. Mark, f.130r., detail 2nd 11a) Again, Book of Kells, Virgin and Child with Angels, f.202v. against the Irish calligraphs, is to see that trough as a manifold over which run random sallies of intersecting waves — a hint at the bottomless complexity of tribal wanderings and successor kingdoms, local arts and classical revivals — a variety, however, stretched in the same polar field, as if these were all translations in contrasting languages, copies in different hands, but of a single sacred text. While above that ascetic one and fluctuating many, points the historical arrow, such a pregnancy of change that a single image — August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �7 C.G. Bell 1st 12) Symbolic History Irish, 7th cent., Bronze head on an enamel base, from a ship burial at Miklebostad, Bergen Museum, Norway; video uses V12, + a detail here an Irish 7th century bronze — opens under the sacrifice of civilized nuance that passionate identification voiced again and again in Celtic and Germanic poetry: thus the Anglo Saxon lament of Satan sometimes attributed to Caedmon — O might of the Maker ... mirth-dream of God ... That my hands hereafter may not reach heaven, My eyes never again be raised to that upland, Nor my ears hear forever and forever The hallowed bright peal of angel clarions ... (CGB) Eala drihtenes thrym! ... Eala dream godes! ... thaet ic mid handum ne maeg heofon geraecan, ne mid eagum ne mot up locian, ne huru mid earum ne sceal aefre geheran thaere byrhtestan beman stefne! a13) b13) 13) Roman Christian, 312-15, Constantine, Head from Colossal statue, Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome German (Reichenau), c. 998, Otto III Enthroned, upper detail, State Library, Munich Byzantine, c. 370(?), Barletta Emperor, Barletta (video: upper part only) As in any living complex, we cannot exhibit the constant but as it shows alteration. What dominates Christendom from Constantine at least to Otto III is the lionbodied paradox of faith, with the world-abandonment that so appalled Hegel: But the highest purity of soul defiled by the most horrible barbarity; the truth, of which a knowledge has been acquired, degraded to a mere tool by falsehood and self-seeking; that which is most irrational, coarse, and vile, established and strengthened by the religious sentiment — this is the most disgusting and revolting spectacle that was ever witnessed, and which only philosophy can comprehend and so justify. 2nd 12) Again, Irish Bronze Head (cf. V1st 12) V2nd 12a) Irish, late 7th cent., The St. John's Crucifixion Plaque, upper part; National Museum, Ireland August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �8 C.G. Bell Symbolic History One could answer Hegel as the devil did Faust: "Willst fliegen und bist vorm Schwindel nicht sicher?" — "You want to fly, and get dizzy?" Since, when Spirit withdraws (as he says) into itself, it waives the cost. Hegel's enlightened wish is for the Christ-kernel without the hard shell. But without that shell, how could it have seeded itself over the Dark Ages, converting even by combat? For 2nd 13) Roman Christian, c. 360, Constantius II (sometimes called Constantine I), colossal bronze head, Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome 2nd 13a) Same, another view Hegel will not see that what depressed him in Byzantine Christianity, "a millenial series of uninterrupted crimes," was the other face of Yeats' "artifice of eternity" — of that self-scourging piety of anchorites in the desert of the Thebaid. And perhaps a saintly cognate for the schismatic Constantius would be Simeon the Stylite, anchored to his column, the rope rotting his flesh, he replacing the maggots as they fell from the sores: "Eat what God has given you"; yet from that pillar preaching sacred politics to hordes of followers in a church where ascetic soul was power. 14) Again, b13, Otto III Enthroned, whole view; + V detail Indeed that mask of religious force is treasured and revived from Constantine to the Ottos and beyond. Eusebius' miraculous history of Constantine's conquest by the "salutary sign" of the cross, remains the model for Fulker of Chartres' Chronicle of the First Crusade (end of the 11th century), as in this Otto III, the old arrogant humility proclaims Christ militant. Yet something has changed. The willed conversion of late Rome has become the automatic condition of the North. The impersonal flattening is complete; dimensionality itself is allegorical. 1st 15) V15a) Byzantine, 6th cent., Hagia Sophia (exterior), Istanbul (CGB '77) Same, another view, from the south (CGB '77) (cf. slide show 2nd 15) Music: Byzantine Chant, 8th cent. ff. (St.John of Damascus), Ode, Anastaseos Imera, RCA-V-LM-6015 (I, 1) Another sequence of descent leads from the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (and no doubt from Byzantine Chant, if against the flux of oral tradition we had something August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �9 C.G. Bell Symbolic History stronger than this Brompton Oratory attempt at the 8th century "Golden Canon"); (fade) 1st 16) Carolingian, 796-804, Octagon or Chapel of Charlemagne (CGB '74); + V detail from 2nd 16) across Europe and 300 years, to the Chapel of Charlemagne in Aachen, or Aix, with the parallel organizing on octave, fifth, or fourth. Music: Scholia enchiriadis, c. 850, Nos qui vivimus, Organum of the octave, HAM 25 a, 1 Orpheus 349 Here too what is continued reverts to the primitive; yet that dark and heavy narrowing bears the potential thrust of Gothic, a beginning, where Hagia Sophia, 2nd 15) Again, Hagia Sophia, same view as V15a (CGB ‘77); here video gives detail only, then inserts detail of buttressing from 1st 15 2nd 15a) Again, Hagia Sophia, another angle (emphasizing layering) (CGB '77) 2nd 15b) Italian Byzantine, 532-47, Mosaic detail. Head of Justinian, San Vitale, Ravenna [video uses V2nd 15b, then returns to yet another detail from 2nd 15) 2nd 15c) Again, Hagia Sophia, interior view with streaming sunlight [slide only] like its age, is terminal — however strange the word may seem of what, in so many ways, begets the West: the shift to accentual rhythms in Byzantine poetry; in chant (we are told) to passionate imploration over a bass drone; in building to the enormous buttressing of vaulted stress. All springs from Classical foreclosure, like the Code of Justinian, that final consolidation of Roman law, but with the hardening caste rigor, each worker frozen in his father's trade. In that vitiated Empire, defended by barbarian troops ("the Emperor's drunken soldiery"), torn by dogmatic schisms (as Gregory of Nissa says: "you ask the price of bread and learn the Son is inferior to the Father; you inquire of the bath and are told the son was made of nothing"), this church rose from the ashes of the Nika revolt, the slaughter of 30,000 spectators in the hippodrome; and after a comparable sacrifice of beasts, Justinian stood under the dome: "Glory to God who has deemed me worthy ... O Solomon, I have surpassed thee." Twenty years later, its structure of prophetic transcendence fell and had to be rebuilt, but lighter, more windowed. August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �10 C.G. Bell Symbolic History 2nd 16) Again, Charlemange's Chapel, another view [slide here (CGB ‘74) also used as V1st 16a, above] V2nd 16a) Same, wider view (CGB ‘74), from which V takes a detail, returning to another detail of 1st 16 Music: Again, Scholia enchiriadis, Nos qui vivimus, Organum of the Fourth, HAM 25 a3, Orpheus 349 Against it Charlemagne's harsh little chapel in the German forest, bound in on itself, assumes the vertical cast of what it moves toward, the jewelled dark enclosures of Romanesque and Gothic. Charlemagne's empire hardly outlived him, and the century that follows is in a way the darkest of all. 1st 17) Byzantine Ivory, c. 950, Christ crowns Romanos and Eudoxia, detail of upper portion, Cabinet des Medailles, Paris But by 950 revival is underway, in Byzantium as in the West. In Byzantium, preserved sanctuary of the past, soon to be thrown down by the Crusaders, schooled in its arts, no mutation of force has occurred. The most peerless ivories — this Christ, compared by some with Phidian marbles — in impersonal, gentle glory, dream their early-Christian life away. August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �11 C.G. Bell 18) Symbolic History German, c. 969-76, Gerokreuz, Cathedral of Cologne; + V detail Where the Gerokreuz of the 1Oth century Rhine — from a Roman colony (Cologne) torn to pieces and savagely rebuilt — like Charlemagne's chapel, is precursive, with a drive strengthened now by a hundred and fifty years. Of the five centuries of turmoil and near stagnation, such works, against the Roman Christian and Byzantine, make us say with the Shepherd in The Winter's Tale (even of the dead Christ), "Thou mettest with things dying, I with things new-born." 2nd 17) Again, Byzantine Ivory, whole; + V detail, shown first The heresies of the early church tend to neo-Platonic shocked withdrawal from the Crucified body of the God-man — as in the discovered Gnostic Gospels: "It was another ... who drank the gall and vinegar ... but I was rejoicing in the height." So Justinian died in a Byzantine heterodoxy — to remove the divine in formal frontality: that the body of Christ was incorruptible, had never experienced the wants and limits of flesh. 2nd 18) Again, Gerokreuz, black and white, detail of head But the heresies of the West go the other way, toward a personal self-merger with God as man. In this the Gero Christ has crossed the watershed, as of the Alps, into European immediacy, 19) Dürer, 1522, Self as the Man of Sorrows (drawing), Kunsthalle, Bremen; + V detail (after '98: Double: heads of Gero-Christ and Dürer) where the torment and ecstasy of God and his Kingdom are read over into the I, the here, and the now. Toward the image that lies at the heart of that incarnate dynamic — Dürer's Self as the Man of Sorrows, 1522 — the Crucifixion of Gero is already aimed. Va20) 20) Gallic from Entremont, c. 200 B.C., Four Mask-heads as trophies, lower detail only Same, the group of four August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �12 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Back now, having sketched the field, to the art-appearance of the Gallic tribes, end of the 3rd century B.C., the Heads from Entremont, just past the limits of Greece and Rome. The techniques already learned have sunk into the unrelenting rigors of barbarian spirit, sullen with potentiality. Against these future-haunted beasts, ranked at the rampart's pale, 21) Hellenistic (Alexandrian), c. 290 B.C., Ptolemy I of Egypt, Copenhagen how undercut by self-questioning, the civilized Hellenistic face (here Ptolemy I of Alexandria, c. 290 B.C.), which gazed northward, from age-old refinements, toward that stirring in the forests. 22) V22a) Roman, 1st cent. B.C.(?), Garden fresco, detail, Villa Livia, Thermae, Rome (video draws from V22, a wider view) Same, a closer detail of fronds and birds By the first century it was Rome; the frontiers were pushed back; but what the watchers at the stretched limes were looking into must have seemed a fabled garden (frescoes from the Villa Livia); and what they were waiting for, was surely a sign of weakness in the ordered realms. 23) Egypto-Roman, 2nd c. A.D., Funeral portrait from Faiyum. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City Where, in fact, the whole orchard-empire was rife with soul-sickness, already flowing over (2nd century A.D.) into a valedictory Christian denial of the world. Striking, the affinity of longing between this hollow ripeness of late Egypt, Greece, and Rome 24) Belgic, 1st cent. B.C., (found, Kent) Head from a cremation bucket, British Museum, London and the primitive, implacable, but no less yawning question of the pagan North (here a Belgic cremation-bucket detail, lst century BC), subject to the dark enigmas of Wyrd. August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �13 C.G. Bell 25) Symbolic History Roman Gaul (Mosel), 3rd cent.(?), Portrait from the Mausoleum of Neumagen, Trier; + V detail By the 3rd century, when the Gauls and Rhine Germans express the softening of Empire, their mausoleum portraits (here from Trier) share exactly in the heavy-eyed hunger of the Roman-Egyptian encaustics 2000 miles away. Bede, in his most famous passage, of the year 627, voices that somber clue to conversion: the missionary Paulinus has told the Northumbrian thanes of the faith, and an old man compares life to a sparrow's flight through the mead hall in winter. 2nd 24) Again, Belgic head from a bucket It is the emptiness centuries of art had recorded: He flies in at one door and out at another, stays a moment in the warmth of the fire, and vanishes into the rain and dark from which he came ... So the life of man: but of what was before or of what comes after, we know nothing. 2nd 25) Again, Neumagen head portrait If this new teaching can tell us anything more certain, it ought to be followed. Could this Gallo-Roman stoic of Neumagen have said more? 26) V26a) Roman Gallic, early 4th cent., Porta Nigra, Trier (Treves) Same, another view with gate (CGB '74) Or the nearby Porta Nigra guarding Trier? The somberest face of gloom could hardly convey more of the burden of carrying Rome to the Germans than this gate, to be taken so soon, and in turn, by Vandals, Huns and Franks. 27) Gallo-Roman (Neumagen), 3rd cent., Toilet scene on a tomb, Museum, Trier; + V detail So the question is academic whether a successor offshoot of the Classical might have emerged in Gaul. Certain carvings, like this family scene of the deceased, also from Neumagen, tempt us toward Gandharan parallels. Though the question, no doubt, August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �14 C.G. Bell Symbolic History becomes one already raised: could Christianity have been tamed to a gentle continuance of its earthly-endowed and Classical phase? 28) Hellenistic Indian (from Hadda), 3rd-5th cent., Genius with flowers, Musée Guimet, Paris; + V detail, shown first — Religion central to the birth of cultures. That the Hellenistic, which in the West had to fall into the earth and die, could in the East be grafted directly to a living stem (as in this Genius from Hadda, 3rd-5th century), must have depended on the millenial growth of Buddhism from the even older Vedic ground. 29) Roman Celtic, 2nd-3rd cent. AD, "La Melancolie," from near Auxerre, Yonne In Roman Gaul the Celts promised most. This head from Auxerre, "La Melancolie," seems almost to have found a way of succession to the Greek. But barbarian wanderings, which in India were prehistoric, now flooded the whole Western world. 30) Visigoth, c. 400, Seal ring of King Alaric, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna; + V detail In 406 the Vandals struck through Gaul. The Visigoths at the same time moved through Italy toward the sack of Rome. It is not just its small size that gives the seal of their Arian-Christian leader Alaric its Dark Age stare. Jerome's lament, from his hermitage in Bethlehem — August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �15 C.G. Bell Symbolic History My tongue cleaves to the roof of my mouth and sobs choke my utterance when I think that the city that led captive the world is now led captive — might have served for the Western Empire. 1st 31) Gallo-Roman, 2nd-3rd cent., Dancer from Arlon, Belgium The Gallo-Roman arts were plowed under. Though most of what has been dug up damps our speculation of a living transplant from the Greek. Compare one of the dancing girls of Arlon (in Belgium) 1st 32) Indian, from Mathura, 1st-3rd cent.(?), Tree Goddess, Victoria and Albert Museum, London For 2nd 31) Double: details of pelvic regions from [A] Arlon Dancer (31); and [B] Tree Goddess (32) V2nd 31a) England (Yorkshire), Rock of Ages (video returns to 32, Tree Goddess, then to 31, Arlon Dancer; while slide holds to the double of Dancer and Tree Goddess) with an Indian tree goddess of the same time (3rd century?). The Greek influence here has come through Iran, there through Rome; but in both, the classical Aphrodite has been sexualized — the Mound of Venus (like the Yorkshire Rock of Ages, where preacher Toplady would write his hymn) is cleft. But in Mathura the erotic nude has become a divine being, joyful, fresh, keen. That the dancing girls of Arlon have female parts does not make them less colonial and drab — heavy-hearted pre-Protestant whores. For 2nd 32) Indian (late Orissan), c. 1200 A.D., Female figure (Apsara) from tower of Rafarani Temple, Bhubaneswar The West is our center, but in touch with the world: so it must be noted again that during our Dark Age of ascetic severity, India went on blossoming, century after century, in a sacred culture of sensuous humanity and personal grace — Va33) 33) Indian, 6th-7th cent., Mithuna figures from Cave 1, Ajunta Same, scene from "The Prince Will Renounce the Throne" August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �16 C.G. Bell Symbolic History what made D. H. Lawrence say of the 6th-7th century Ajanta frescoes: "Pure fulfillment... Botticelli is vulgar beside them... I love them beyond everything pictorial... perfect intimate relation between the men and women." And though Indian music has an improvised bearing on any past, traditional Ragas refine modalities ultimately and hauntingly Greek to hymn the sanctities of love and life. 3rd 32) Again, Tree Goddess, upper detail Music: From Raga-Dadra (Uttar Pradesh), Basmillah Kahn on Shenai, Odeon MOAE 163 2nd 33) Again 33, central detail 2nd 33a) Same, detail, upper left 34) (fade raga) Honan (China) Lung-Men 6th c. AD, Siddhartha in Meditation, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Chinese (Wei) 386-534, Seated Bodhisattva, Art Museum, Portland, (CGB '83) [slide only] Again 34, Honan Siddhartha, another (color) view; + various video details 34a) 34b) Whether in India or China (this 6th-century Siddhartha from Honan), what would seem meditational parallels for the Medieval inhabit another realm of human ease and nirvana peace. Though Buddhism has declined in India, something of what smiled over Tibet, to the Hwang Ho and Yellow Sea still sounds in Sanskrit hymns. Music: a35) 35) V35a) From Sanskrit Hymn to Shiva by Dikshitar, sung Sriniva UNESCO BM 30 L2021) Greek (Athens), 520-10 B.C., Piraeus Apollo, detail of Head, National Museum, Athens Chinese, Shang Dynasty, 14th-1lth cent. B.C., Bronze funerary vessel, Musée Cernuschi, Paris Again, Piraeus Apollo, another view, upper body (video returns to 35, funerary vessel) Are civilizations parallel or radiative? Both in one. The Chinese sages Lao Tzu and Confucius are more or less contemporary with Buddha, with the rise of Greek August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �17 C.G. Bell Symbolic History wisdom and the climax of Hebrew prophecy. Yet however native Chinese culture, the Hellenistic and Roman trade of the silk route, with the eastward spread of Buddhism, fostered, as far as Korea and Japan, a vital mutant of something once Greek; as the leap from Shang funerary urns (2nd Millenium B.C., and remote as Stone Age Mayan) 36) V36a) Chinese (Ku K'ai-Chih), c. 344-405, Silk scroll, Lady at her Toilet, detail, British Museum, London From same scroll, "Admonitions to Court Ladies," Music: Chinese, 4th cent.(?) (printed 1425), Plum Blossom (chyn setting) RCA-V-LM-6057 (I: 2, b) to the caressing line and personal mood of 4th century A.D. silk painting (with a chynzither setting of a tune, "Plum Blossom" traced to the same time) persuasively suggests. Va37) 37) Greek, Tanagra (Bœotia), 4th cent. B.C., Woman with Fan, Louvre Greek (Tanagra?), 4th - 3rd cent. B.C., Statuette of a Woman, Painted Terra Cotta, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City (video upper detail only) Where had such play of sophistic elegance been explored but in the likeliest export product of Greece, those Tanagra figurines, where life is trimmed to the precious turns and poses of New Comedy? 38) Chinese, T'ang, 7th-1Oth cent., Lady at her Toilet, Signora P. Varzi Galliate Collection; first, V detail In China, as in India, the cultured flowering went on and on; this T'ang lady at her toilet, from the darkest centuries of Europe, comes a thousand years and more after the wares of Tanagra. Direct influence is not in question; rather the transmission from dynasty to dynasty (without the cyclical upheavals of the West) of an incredibly civilized, post-Hellenic stance — 39) Japanese (Nara), 645-793, Kichijoten (Mahasri), Nara, Yakushiji; + V details an ultimate refinement, which by the 7th centurv had spread also to Japan. Music: August 5, 1995 From 16th cent. "Lion of Eight Thousand Generations," Kota interlude, Kimio Eto: Art of the Kota, Elektra EK S 7234 The Dark Ages �18 C.G. Bell Symbolic History (Fade) 40) 40a) Sassanian Iran, mid 6th cent., Palace of Khusro I, Ctesiphon, near Baghdad; + V detail Mohammedan (Abbasid), 848-52, Minaret of the Great Mosque of Samarra, Iraq (cf. Ars Nova 9) While the Buddhist related arts spread East, and the dwindling empire of Byzantium encapsuled post-classical Christianity, the old Sumerian and Persian centers produced successor kingdoms which, though they seemed to menace Christendom, preserved and sometimes advanced, for European revival, Greek knowledge and skills. Let the ruined palace of Khusro I (mid-6th century) near Bagdad, with its elliptical vault of a hundred foot span, summon from the Parthian wars against Rome, the Persian coup and revival, the subsequent complex of interplays east and west, that brief splendor of Sassanid Iran. Music: a41) 41) Islam, 9th cent., traditional, Muezzin's call to prayer, close, RCA-VLM 6057 (IV, 4) Moorish African, 862-3, Kairouan, Sanctuary of the Great Mosque, Tunisia Islam (Ommiad), 705-11, Mosaic detail, west portico, Great Mosque, Damascus; + V detail (end Call to Prayer) Music: August 5, 1995 Islam (Turkish), Taqsim Bayati, flute, RCA-V-LM 6057 (IV, 5) The Dark Ages �19 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Let this mosaic detail from the Great Mosque in Damascus crown the Arabian and Moslem adventure, the religious power structure of Islam, which in its phenomenal spread, became host to Sassanian, Jewish, and Alexandrian commerce and lore — a fit image (landscape, the human form excluded), since here, as in philosophy and mathematics, the Hellenistic has been essentially caught and, with something of the abstraction of algebra, launched toward the future. (fade Turkish flute) 42) Germanic, 7th cent., four Bronze Bracts from Torslunda, Historical Museum, Stockholm; + slide and video singles of Bract C (42a) and Bract D (42b), to which video adds Bract B (V42c) and a detail of Bract D (from 42b) Meanwhile Europe had gone under. Beowulf looks back into the Norse and German myth-world of the 7th century and before — heroes struggling in mist-hung monster-lairs. To catch mood and action in a patchwork of phrases: This foe of God was ghastly Grendel, Stalker of moors grim haunter of marshes; Out of fens and oak forests he fastened on Hartshearth, The king's bright meadhall, with each murk of nightfall... Seized a thane sleeping, slashed him to pieces, Bit through the bone-joints, sucked at the blood-stream, Gorged flesh in gobbets ... Beowulf's death-grip Wrenched arm and shoulder; sinews sprang asunder; The axle-hinge opened; under the towering hall roof, That hero flung down the clawed limb of Grendel. Waes se grimma gaest Grendel haten, maere mearcstapa, se the moras heold, fen ond faesten ... Heorot eardode, sincfage sel, sweartum nihtum... (feng) slaepende rinc, slat unwearnum, bat banlocan, blod edrum dranc, synsnaedum swealh; sona ... he (him) onfeng inwitthancum ... seonowe onsprongon, August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages (CGB) �20 C.G. Bell Symbolic History burston banlocan. Beowulfe ... alegde Grendles grap(e) under geapne hrof. a43) 43) Irish carving, 9th cent.(?), Caryatid, with Crozier and Bell, White Island, Fermanagh Roman-Christian, c. 300, Christ-Helios Mosaic, Tomb of the Julii, vault, Vatican; + V detail To sense the crisis of life-giving reduction as that force sweeps over Europe, amalgamates with Rome, becomes itself fiercely Christian, set down first a 4th-century Christian burial hymn by Prudentius (with this Apollo-Christ from a tomb under St. Peter’s): Nos tecta fovebimus ossa violis et fronde frequenti titulumque et frigida saxa liquido spargemus odore; that is the close — or as translated by Waddell: But for us, heap earth about him, Earth with leaves and violets strewn, Grave his name, and pour the fragrant Balm upon the icy stone. 44) Merovingian, 8th cent., Reliquary Casket, Virgin and Child with Peter and Paul, Musée de Cluny, Paris; + V details So leap north and over 400 years to this Merovingian casket and to the Wessobrunner Gebet, in the gutteral giant-talk of old German: Dat gafregin ih mit firahim firiuuizzo meista dat ero ni uuas noh ufhimil noh paum nohheinig noh pereg ni uuas noh sunna ni scein noh mano ni liuhta noh der mareo seo. Do dar niuuiht ni uuas enteo ni wenteo enti do uuas der eino almahtico cot. Va45) Carolingian (Rheims), c. 820(?), MS 1, f. 90v, Gospel Book of Ebbo, St. Luke; Municipal Library, Epernay August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �21 C.G. Bell 45) Symbolic History Same, f. 60v., St. Mark (first, video detail) Which we may translate (after Anglo-Saxon): Among mortal men I have heard with main marvel How earth of old was not, nor arched-up heaven, Nor tree-bole was none, nor marsh-wone, nor mountain, Nor sun did not shine Nor moon not lighten; nor the merging mere-world. But though nought was not there, beginning nor ending — One there and alone was, the all-bending God. (CGB) Having shifted in art to the Book of Ebbo, Rheims, about 820... Already German intuitive wonder wakens in "mareo seo," the fabled sea, with all related possibilities of mare, marah, mere. 46) Northumbrian, c. 710, Lion of St. Mark, Echternach Gospel, National Library, Paris (first, video detail) Where in the cyclical descent did the barbaric reversion and stripping become regenerative? We cannot say. By the 6th century the Franks had begun the political regrouping which led to Charlemagne; while the monasteries of Ireland and Northumbria gathered the first fruits of letters and art. Though the Echternach lion-sign of St. Mark (Northumbria, c. 710) does not suffer from being overtamed. Va47) 47) Northumbrian, c. 720-40, , Lindisfarne Gospel, St. Matthew, detail; British Museum Same, St. Luke (video: detail only) Yet the Lindisfarne Gospel, from twenty years later, suffuses its still metallic lines with the growing humanism of that island of learning. As Ambrose had said at the beginning of the Time of Troubles — and every Dark Age monastery tried to enact his words: August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �22 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Amid the agitations of the world the Church remains unmoved; the waves cannot shake her. While around her everything is in horrible chaos, she offers to all the shipwrecked a tranquil port where they will find safety. 48) 48a) Northumbrian, Viking-Age relief, 8th-9th cent.(?), Marauders, Lindisfarne Viking, 7th. cent., Iron Helmet, State Historical Museum, Stockholm Not, however, from the Vikings, who seem to be represented in this Lindisfarne relief. As the Anglo Saxon Chronicle records, January 8, 793: "The harrying of the heathen miserably destroyed God's church in Lindisfarne by rapine and slaughter." Or as Alcuin, from the court of Charlemagne: "Never before has such a terror appeared in Britain." It was the opening of 250 years of culminant darkness. 49) Irish MS, c. 800, Book of Kells, St. John; Trinity College, Dublin (video reduces the page to four successive details) Iona was ravaged soon after. St. Columba's monks fled to Kells north of Dublin, probably taking with them the unfinished Book which bears the name of the new monastery. "While the sea spewed forth the foreigners over Erin." (Annals of Ulster, 820.) Living in the world of symbol must have prepared the soul for such raiders. Each Christian, sat like this St. John, holding the Gospel, at the center of a calligraphic Gospel, which shows by the cloudy head at the top, the hands at the sides and the pierced feet below, that it is the crucified Christ. a50) b50) c50) d50) 50) Carolingian (Palace School), beginning 9th cent., double page, St. John the Evangelist and text, from Reichsevangelair, Munich (video: first, the page of text) Same, the page of John (video: detail only) Carolingian, 799-818, Ark of the Covenant, mosaic, Oratory of Theodulf, Germigny-des-Pres Again, Reichsevangelair, Matthew (first, video detail) Again, John from the Reichsevangelair; + V detail On the continent, Charlemagne welcomed scholars from the islands to the shelter of his Palace School; and it was an island too, hard-held, between the earlier unrest of Germans, Huns, and Moors, and the onslaught of Vikings and Magyars to follow — post- August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �23 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Classical, pre-Western, an arctic solstice where the twilight meets the dawn. Its central poem is the Lament for Alcuin (on his leaving Aachen), either by the master himself, or by his pupil Fredugis. The Augustinian memory of his "little house" (with Waddell) — O mea cella, mihi habitatio dulcis, amata ... pomiferis redolent ramis tua claustra per hortos — and all thy cloisters smell of apple orchards — yields to the starker burden of loss and faith: So passes all the beauty of the earth ... O flying world! that we, sick-hearted love thee! Still thou escapest, here, there, everywhere, Slipping down from us. Fly, then, if thou wilt, Our hearts are set in the strong love of God. nos miseri, cur te fugitivum, mundus, amamus? ... tu fugiens fugias, Christum nos semper amemus. Such is the ground of the Dark Ages. Perhaps the St. John's page from the Reichsevangelair is the somberest art-revival of Roman mellowness in that German-Christian winter. The gathered toga, the bearded meditation, the sad little garden of shrubs — as in the Lament: "undique te cingit ramis resonantibus arbos" — repeat: "Oh flying world! that we, sick-hearted, love thee!" and "Our hearts are set in the strong love of God." Here on the threshold of the West, the Western antinomies appear: against the shadowed piety of the Palace School, 1st 51) Rheims, c. 820-30, Utrecht Psalter, Psalm XI detail, University Library, Utrecht August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �24 C.G. Bell 51a) V51b) 51c) Symbolic History Again, Utrecht Psalter, Psalm XLIII, battle detail Same, from Psalm CII, Messiah and angels Again, Utrecht Psalter, from Psalm XI [these are Vulgate numberings] the reckless vital line of the Utrecht Psalter. And in thought, Hrabanus Maurus, pious churchman, at his best in monastic greetings, as to Grimold, Abbot of St. Gall (Waddell): "And God, who brought us on this earth together, bring us together in his house of heaven" — comes into history linked in furious opposition, jailor and inquisitor of his fiery ward Gottschalk, the first whom logic led toward Calvin's heresy of predestination. Everything about him speaks passion, from his recusant stand to the first personal rhymed lyrics he wrote in prison: "O quid iubes, pusiole ... Carmen dulce me cantare ..." Even more prophetically strange was that John Scotus, that wise Erigena (Erinborn), Irish translator of the mystic Aereopagite, called in to answer Gottschalk, should dissolve predestination only in a pantheistic Christian Platonism of the universe as God in processu, drawn toward a deificatio, or resumption of all nature, evil and good, even Satan himself, into the Divine: 2nd 50) Again, Matthew from Reichsevangelair (cf. d50; while video repeats John, as in slide 50) Evil will have its consummation and will not remain in any nature, since the divine nature will work and be manifest in all... In his knowing revival of pagan and Christian antiquity, Erigena shares the robed richness of the Palace School. 2nd 51) Again, Utrecht Psalter, Psalm CVIII (video: upper detail only) In the freedom with which he absorbs the world into God, who "subsists," he said, "as the essence of all," he rather suggests the racing sketchwork of the Utrecht Psalter, where objects are fused in sacred energies. 52) Irish, c. 800, Incarnation page, fol 34,. from the Book of Kells, Trinity College, Dublin; + V details August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �25 C.G. Bell Symbolic History While the Irish tradition from which he stems, least like him in classical surface, may be nearest to his visionary ecstasy. As in this Book of Kells page of the Birth of Christ, where the monograms Chi, Rho and the rest, threaded through with live geometries, less illustrate than form the divine substance of Matthew I, 18: "Christi ... generatio." 53) School of Rheims, early 9th cent., St. John, Gospel Book of Ebbo, Municipal Library, Epernay; first V detail, then V53, wider variant The aim is not to match this with that, but to perceive in the Carolingian ferment how the later Western forms of art, of thought, of personality itself are being explored — nowhere more masterfully than in the Rheims Gospel Book of Ebbo, which alchemizes into one the togaed weight of the Palace School and the expressive frenzy of the Utrecht line. Giant precursors, these miniatures. a54) 54) N. Italian, 9th cent.(?), Castelseprio frescoes, head of a priest, detail, Castelseprio (CGB '80) Same, detail, Presentation in the Temple (CGB '80) [video reverses 54 and a54, then returns to V54a, a wider view of 54] Claudius, 9th century bishop of Turin, tried and condemned but never crushed, gives the new force an Italian voice: He is not the apostle who sits in the seat of the apostle, but who fulfills the life and office ... Why bend your body to worship vain images? God made you erect ... Let no man trust in saints, but as he holds the faith and truth and justice of the saints. So the Castelseprio frescoes, probably of the 9th century, startle us with the prophetic eruption of spatial and humanistic power, hung like the Carolingian, between past and future. August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �26 C.G. Bell Symbolic History 55) Viking, 9th cent., head from a cart, Oseberg Ship Burial, University, Oslo 55a) Viking, 9th cent., Ship from Oseberg Burial Mound, Oslo 55b) Germanic, 8th cent., Engraved Tombstone to a warrior: Viking Vallhalla ship, Klinte, Gotland (video, details only) The death of Charlemagne (814), the wars of succession, the battle of Fontenoy (841) "Maledicta dies illa" (Angilbert), which drained the blood of France, left Europe exposed as the islands had been. The long boats with the carved prows moved up the rivers. The chant went up in the churches: "A furore Normanorum libera nos Domine." The Sibyl's prophecy for 1000 seemed fulfilled: "A sword age, a wind age, a wolf age." Utrecht burned; Charlemagne's palace sacked; the cities of France mowed down: Perigeux, Limoges, Angouleme, Toulouse, Angers, Orleans, Rouen; and then the Mediterranean. a56) 56) V56a) Gerona Beatus, 975, Warrior spearing a snake, Cathedral, Gerona Carolingian, 781-85, St. John from the Gospels of Godescalc, National Library, Paris; video: upper part only Carolingian, 781-3, Godesalc Gospels, Beardless Christ, National Library, Paris; video: upper part only While Saracens fixed mountain aeries in Italy and Provence, and the Turkish Magyars terrorized the east, raiding yearly, often as far as the Rhine. Even the sacred shrines of refuge — Tours, Corbie, Reichenau, Fulda — whence had echoed the greetings of Colman, Alcuin, Maurus — were not secure. And may God give thee in thy hands the green unwithering palm of everlasting life — this by Strabo, also to Grimold of St. Gall — St. Gall, at the Swiss heart of Europe, to be plundered in 926 by the Hungarians. 57) Carolingian, 870, Codex Aureus of St. Emmeram, Adoration of the Lamb, Staatsbibliothek, Munich (video divides to upper and lower details) August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �27 C.G. Bell Symbolic History The beloved Bishop Radbob of Utrecht, later visited in his illness by the blessed Virgin with Agnes and Thekla, wrote of the time: (Waddell) In the year of the Incarnation of our Lord 900 there appeared a marvellous sign in heaven. For the stars were seen to flow from the very height of the heaven to the lowest horizon ... woeful calamities followed ... untowardness of the seasons and frequent tempests, rivers overflowing their banks...and ominous upheavals of men boasting themselves against God ... a58) b58) 58) V58a) Fulda Lectionary, c. 975-80, Adoration of the Lamb, Hofbibliothek, Aschaffenburg (video: lower detail only) Carolingian from St. Gall, first half of the 1Oth cent., Mounted Warriors, Book of Maccabees, Codex Perizoni 17, f. 46r, University Library, Leyden, Holland German (Cologne), c. 1OOO, Luke, from City Archive, MS 312, Cologne Reichenau, 1010, The Woes of Jerusalem, Gospel Book of Otto III, f. 188v, State Library, Munich (video takes first 58 upper part, then V 58a; then returns to 58, whole) The epitaph which follows the record closes: Long hunger wasted the world wanderer With sight of Thee may he be satisfied. The tenth century moves in the forehall of the doom the millennium was supposed to bring. The synod at Trosle, 909, echoes Gregory on the Lombards: "The cities are depopulated, the monasteries ruined ... Men devour one another like fishes in the sea." Of the end of the century Glaber chronicles: Perilous times were at hand for men's souls... about the thousandth year after the birth of our Lord... almost all the cities of Italy and Gaul were ravaged by flames of fire... At this same time a horrible plague raged among men... By 1000 the art of the Rhine has the bare force of sainted bones rising at the last day. 59) N. German (Saxon), c. 700, Hornhausen Equestrian relief, Landesmuseum, Halle August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �28 C.G. Bell Symbolic History We would wish, but there is no way, to resume the sequence in music: to hear the barbarian chanting voices spill down over Rome; the transformation of Gregorian as missionaries spread it north; a60) 60) V60a) Court School of Charles the Bald, 870, Incipit page, Gospel of St. Matthew, Christ as Lion, Codex Aureus of St. Emmeram f. 16v., State Library, Munich Irish, c. 910, Cross of Muiredach, det., Arrest of Christ, Monsterboice Same, view of whole cross the varying liturgies, Mozárabic, Celtic, Frankish; to experience as Charlemagne did in the churches of his kingdom (so the Monk of St. Gall) distinctions of rhythm, intonation, even melody and perhaps harmony — Gottschalk's accuser, Maurus of Mainz declaiming against the theatrical style of his singers — innovations no doubt as startling as the visual leaps of the Utrecht psalter, or the first monumental carving of the West, the Irish Crosses from the "forty year recess" (early lOth century) in the Viking raids. A of 61) Roman-Christian, 432-40, center detail of The Annunciation, Triumphal Arch mosaics, Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome B of 61) Mozárabic, 1091-1109, from Beatus on the Apocalypse (upper detail), British Museum, London 61) Double: [A] Roman-Christian, and [B] Mozárabic 61a) Again, B of 61, Beatus on the Apocalypse (slide: whole; video: a larger detail) Music: Mozárabic, from c. 1100(?), Aleph from Lamentations of Jeremiah, Archive 198-459 Where are the musical parallels for the loss and stripping, the heightening of force so clear in the imprints of art — from the ease of Christian Rome (about 440, Santa Maria Maggiore, left), through the absorption of Eastern and Barbarian (Coptic, Syrian, Moslem, with Celtic and German), to the final cutting edge (right) of the Beatus Commentary from 1100 Spain? If only we could exhibit that vital stiffening in the rhythms of song. Ephemeral poor music: it is all lost. Where the notes survive (as with the reconstructed liturgy of the same Spain), today's monks, trained in the would-be 5th century practice of Solesmes, melt all styles into one — August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �29 C.G. Bell a62) 62) Symbolic History Lower right detail of 62 Carolingian (Rheims), early 9th cent., Four Evangelists, Codex Aureus, f. 13r., Cathedral Treasury, Aachen; + V detail this Mozárabic Lamentation indistinguishable from Ambrosian. For the complex of barbarian, Byzantine and classical, hardening as to encapsule the radiant of rhymed sequence and polyphony — all we get in effect is the attempt at Roman-Christian revival — moody as this page of Evangelists from the Aachen Gospels, or as Alcuin's Latin Lament: nos miseri, cur te fugitivum, mundus, amamus? (fade Mozárabic) An art which looks, over a solemn gulf 63) 63a) Byzantine, 6th-7th cent., Peter from an Icon, Monastery of St. Catherine, Sinai German (Werden), 1064-80, Bronze Crucifix, detail, Werden a.d. Ruhr (video returns to 63, Peter from an Icon, detail to the Roman Christian, whether of East or West (this of the 6th century, from Sinai). Against it stands in music a single recorded interpretation of a more strident Gregorian, which Guillaume de Van and his group made for Anthologie Sonore — Billy Van from Texas, who founded the frenetic style of Gothic, and set himself here, like the Gauls (as the Romans complained) "with their barbaric voices crushing the melodies in their throats", to recover a Byzantine-affined Gregorian of about 1000. It lacks the suave beauty of Solesmes, but it will in fact Va64) 64) Again 14, Otto III enthroned, here upper detail Reichenau School, 1Oth cent., Ascension, Laurentian Library, Florence accompany the Reichenauer MSS of the lOth century — the lean style of the Ottos — which no Solesmes version will do. Music: August 5, 1995 Gregorian, before 1000, from "Adjiuvabit eam Deus...", de Van group, on AS 34 The Dark Ages �30 C.G. Bell Va65) Symbolic History Ottonian, c. 1010, Mary anointing and wiping Christ's feet, Perikopenbuch, Staatsbibliothek, Munich Same, the Angel to the Shepherds 65) (Fade de Van) Meanwhile, under those now irrecoverable variants of plainsong, 1st 66) Carolingian, 796-804, Interior of Charlemagne's Chapel, Aachen; video: detail only the practice of organizing in chords was turning, without wish or knowledge, from the surrender of Gregorian to what would become the musical command of space. Here we should extend to music the contrast already made, between Charlemagne's Chapel 1st 67) Byzantine 502-37 & 558-62, Hagia Sophia, interior, Constantinople (CGB '77) (video also uses detail from 2nd 67) Music: Byzantine (John of Damascus, d. 754), from Easter Canon, ARC 2533 413, side A, in band 4 and the irradiation of the Hagia Sophia. To which Byzantine chant. as practiced on Mount Athos, old refuge of the Virgin from the dragon, exhibits, still over 1400 years of changing style and notation, some strangely related hypnotic strength. (fade Mount Athos chant) 2nd 66) Again, Charlemange's Chapel, another view (video divides to upper and lower details and adds a detail from 1st 66) while with the cramped and struggling height of Charlemagne's chapel, though we cannot hear the harmony Erigena speaks of, we can manage a demonstration attempt at a brief phrase, Rex coeli, from the Musica Enchiriadis, a treatise of 850-910 — mostly in parallel organum with some contrary motion: Music: 2nd 67) Scholia enchiriadis, c. 850, Rex coeli, Organum from Musica Enchiriadis, Haydn Society L-2071 (Close) Again, interior of Hagia Sophia, another view (CGB '77) (video instead picks up 2nd 15c, interior with streaming sunlight) August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �31 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Christendom inherited from Rome two structural modes for churches: centralized dome we think of as Byzantine, 68) the Early Christian 549, St. Apollinare in Classe, interior, Ravenna; + V detail and the columned hall we associate with Rome, though this is Ravenna. Here, the change from the classical, with Gregorian — Music: 69) 69a) Gregorian (Solesmes), from Gloria IV (Domine Deus … Christis) VM-87 (fade) French Romanesque, 1007 and after, Nave of St. Philbert, Tournus; + V details Fortified Church, 9th-12th cent., Les Saintes Maries de la Mer, Provençe to the first Romanesque at the turn of 1000, St. Philbert, Tournus, scores the end result of Dark Age stripping, church like soul narrowed into strength, fortified against calamity; yet in that dark, stone-walled weight, appear the new principles of rib-support which would empower Gothic heights — as in the hollow organum on the 1020 or so "Veni Sancte Spiritus," music too has found in its winter descent a ground of regeneration. Music: Va70) 70) Plainsong with parallel organum, c. 1020, Veni Sancte Spiritus, (beginning and end) Col. 5710 German (Rhine), c. 969-76, Gerokreuz, most of the carving, Cologne Cathedral Detail of Gerokreuz, head and shoulders (close Veni Sancte Spiritus) At the heart of the change lay the fact of Incarnation: et homo factus est — of which God's pain and death was the literal crux. In the tragic Gerokreuz, of Cologne, we are already launched toward the Gothic humanity which is the source of Western power. Early Christian art, in its Orphic gentleness, had avoided the Crucifixion. For 1st 71) Roman Christian, c. 420, Crucifixion, British Museum, London (video reverses order of 1st and 2nd 71) August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �32 C.G. Bell Symbolic History The first representations known are five centuries after Christ's death, and they show the eternal surrender only in the aspect of its calm. 72) German Gothic, 1304, Gabel Crucifix or Pestkreuz, S. Maria im Kapitol, Cologne If one pursues the identification of God and process too far, one reaches the Gothic (Eckhardt) and romantic (Hegelian) heresy where Christendom ends; 2nd 71) Roman Christian, 422-34, Crucifixion, door of Santa Sabina, Rome (video: detail only, after beginning with the whole of 1st 71) if one draws back too strongly from that, one comes into the Neoplatonic heresies with which Christendom began — the Arian: Christ as incarnate cannot be of one substance with the Father; the Nestorian: the Logos is in Christ, but not joined with the human person as one individual — these with others mark the startled retreat of Classical reason from the contradiction of the Man-God. 2nd 72) Again, Pestkreuz, upper detail; + V closer detail) 2nd 72a) Romanesque, early 11th cent., Sedes Sapientie of Walcourt, Church of St. Maternus, Walcourt But the tendency of later heresy, from Meister Eckhardt down (just contemporary with this Pestkreuz, also of Cologne, 1304) is the opposite: the identification of Christ and everyman, of God and world-soul, of eternity and time, whether history or the moment Now... Toward that, as toward every essential archetype of the West, the 10th century has somehow crossed the line. a73) b73) 73) Roman Christian ivory, end 3rd cent., Good Shepherd, Louvre, Paris Roman Christian mosaic, c. 325 and ff, Cherubs at Grape Harvest, S. Constanza. Rome Byzantine, c. 400, S. Porfirio, mosaic, Church of St. George, Salonika Take what had been central to the Christian break with Hellenism, the surrender of reason to faith — Paul's "folly" and Christ's "except as a little child." The most August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �33 C.G. Bell Symbolic History moderate could not avoid the leap of God's paradox — Ambrose: "I do not require reason from Christ; if I am convinced by reason, I reject faith." 74) Byzantine (Ephesus), 5th cent., Bust of Eutropius, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna; + V detail Tertulian's "quia absurdum" is always quoted, not merely for its violence, but as a radical pole of all Christian speculation: The Son of God was crucified; I am not ashamed, because one must be ashamed of it. The Son of God died — this is credible just because it is folly. He has been buried and resurrected — this is certain because it is impossible. We match it with the Byzantine 5th-century Bust of Eutropius, a carving which breaks, as much as any, with classical form. 75) French Gothic, c. 1210, John the Baptist, detail, N. Portal, Chartres That incarnate enigma became, through the Dark Ages, the automatic Christian home. By 1200, five centuries of transrational acceptance have so reoriented the mind, that thought, from Fredugis to Anselm, can support in the mode of reason (new-born) — can prove — the necessity of the very God and Incarnation 2nd 74) Again, Eutropius, another view which Tertullian acclaimed divine impossibility. Reason, with the whole fabric of secular humanity and world, to which early Christianity had said farewell, has been transplanted, a2nd 75) Again, Chartres: Simeon, John the Baptist, and Peter, from the North Portal b2nd 75) Again, John the Baptist, another view (also video variant; Vb2nd 75) 2nd 75) Again, John the Baptist, detail and is growing again in the walled close of Creed. So the Chartres ascetic Baptist turns the twist of Byzantine conscious otherworldliness to a Troubador gesture of love, as tender, as lyrical, as the duplum purum of Leonin. August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �34 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Music: 76) 76a) Leonin, c. 1160, Crucifixum (duplum) close (Tinayre) Col. M-431 (1) (end) French Romanesque, c. 1120-50, Christ detail, Portal, Vezelay Detail of 4b, Ghiselbertus, Christ in Judgment, Autun; + V closer detail Here is Anselm, with the Christ of Vezelay: One can convince oneself of these truths ... by the force of reason alone. (Of God): If that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, exist in the understanding alone, the very being, than which nothing greater can be conceived, is one, than whom a greater can be conceived. But this is a paradox. Hence ... he exists both in understanding and in reality ... (Of Incarnation): God became man by necessity... the satisfaction being such as none but God can make and none but man ought to make, it is necessary for the God-man to make it. (To which the monkish interlocutor): Blessed be God! We have made a great discovery ... Go on ... I hope God will assist you. 77) French before 1020, Church of St. Martin, Chapaise, Burgundy; + V detail Thus in all the arts, (here, before 1020, the church of Chapaise in Burgundy), the forms which the 12th and 13th centuries would perfect, have their origin before or just around the millenium: the groined and ribbed vault to focus thrust, the regional schools of painting and stained glass, the chivalric state, the monastic reform of Cluny, sacred drama, a passionate poetry of assonance and rhyme, Guido's solmization of the major hexachord, and central to all, a philosophy of reason justifying faith. 78) German (Rhine), 1030 to 12th cent., esp. 1080, Kaiserdom, Speyer (video: details only) How evident the surge must have been for that chronicler of doom, Ralph Glaber, to have written, about 1040 — while this Speyer and the other great Rhine cathedrals rose: August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �35 C.G. Bell Symbolic History But every nation of Christendom rivalled with the other which should worship in the seemliest buildings. So it was as though the very world had shaken herself and cast off her old age, and were clothing herself everywhere in a white garment of churches. Music: 79) Perotin le Grand, c. 1210, 4-voice. Sedêrunt, close, Cape, Archive 14068. French Romanesque, 1039-65, Transept Crossing, Ste. Foy, Conques, Aveyron; first, V detail The transept crossing of Sainte Foy in Conques, 1039 to 1065, looks to the miracle of Gothic, as the first polyphony we have heard is trained on Perotin. 80) French Gothic (Normandy), later 13th cent., lantern of Crossing, Coutance (CGB '74); + V detail Looking back to Sainte Foy from this crossing of Coutances (13th century) we realize that around the year 1000 we passed one of those nodes the poet Yeats liked to symbolize by the construction of a cone within a cone, and that all things, to use his words: Are changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages (end Perotin) � 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 The Dark Ages, Symbolic History, Part 7 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 7 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_07_The_Dark_Ages 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/fec9b38e35f21bc3ece11d3f39af762c.pdf abf1d4a6859153bcf3d5b59c96bc77eb PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 8. Gothic Prelude: Lux Nova CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 August 1995 Last Revised January ‘96 �Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 8. Gothic Prelude: Lux Nova a1) 1) French Ivory, 13th cent., Madonna and Child, Louvre, Paris; + V detail (CGB '80) French Gothic, 1228, Cloister, Mont Saint-Michel (CGB '74) The waking of a culture shares with spring and dawn this mystery: first buds seem most jewelled, brightest songs greet the earliest rays: Lenten is come with love to toune, With blosmen and with briddes roune, That al this blisse bringeth ... Almost incredible, the New Light with which Gothic love opens in the ascetic dusk, gracing the beauty of earth with sacred sanction. So the lilting poignance of a 1235 motet, "Ave Maria," with this detail and another from Mont-Saint-Michel, and three from Rheims. Music: French, c. 1235?, Ave Maria, Syntagma Musicum, SIC-6052 2) French Gothic, c. 1210, Kitchen, Mont-Saint-Michel (CGB '74) Va3) French Gothic, c. 1220-30, Head of Mary from a Visitation (full face), West Portal, Rheims Cathedral 3) Same (profile), Rheims Cathedral 4) French Gothic, 1211-90, Clerestory of Nave, detail, Rheims Cathedral Va5) Closer detail of 5 (from Gothic Wave, 9) 5) French Gothic, c. 1260, West Front, detail with Coronation, Rheims Cathedral (CGB '74) (fade “Ave Maria”) But the waking had begun by the year 1000, two and a half crucial centuries before Rheims portal. From its Gothic height, this prelude must look back — August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 1 �C.G. Bell 6) 6a) 6b) Symbolic History Mont-Saint-Michel Chapel, 11th cent. Nave and late 15th cent. Choir (CGB '74); video: detail only Mont-Saint-Michel Chapel, 11th cent. Nave (CGB'74); video: details only, below and above Mont-Saint-Michel Chapel, 15th cent. Choir (CGB '74); again, video to details, below and above where Romanesque vaults toward Gothic out of the Dark Age ground. As the cathedrals soar from earlier crypts as dark as holy, or the rhymed tropes embellish scripture, as the organa and motets of Ars Antiqua flow from plainsong — Music: Free Organum, 12th cent., Agnus Dei, opening, HSL-2071 (7) (fade) so the 11th-century nave of Mont-Saint-Michel lightens to a late-Gothic choir (time of Ockeghem) Music: Ockeghem, c. 1480?, from Missa pro defunctis: "ad fontes aquarum," Archiv 2533 145 (B) — a favored blend, as at Aachen, Tournai, Le Mans. 7) (fade Ockeghem) Italian Byzantine, 5th cent., Mausoleum of Galla Placida, interior with Tombs, Ravenna; video to details, below and above Music: Gregorian (Solesmes) Da pacem, lst mode, V-M-87, side 18 We have seen Christianity, in the crumbling of pagan power, rear in the grave, antinomies of eternal faith and world abandonment. At first the poles were draped in the dissolving arts of classical leisure. (fade Gregorian) 8) Carolingian, c. 800, First cover of the Lindau Gospels, J.P. Morgan; + V detail Music: Liturgical Chant, lOth cent., from "dextera tua, domine'', close of Offertory, Nonesuch H-71348 (A-4) But as they move north, a symbolic cross to the German tribes, while these pour southward over Rome, the residual suavities of space and consciousness are stripped August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 2 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History away, leaving the poles burning as in void, with the abstract inconsequence of timeless vision. (fade l0th cent. chant) 9) North Italian, c. 1100-35, Christ Enthroned, Bronze doors, S. Zeno, Verona (CGB '59); + V detail Music: Santiago de Compostela, MS, 12th cent., Conductus — Annua guadia (close) Decca DL 79416 (B-1) And the first strands of the Western temporal fabric stretch over the rift, a preGothic sharpness of joy and pain, concentrating into spirit the apocalyptic enigma where they are born. (end Annua Gaudia) a1O) French Gothic, c. 1163 into 13th cent., Notre Dame from S.E., Paris (CGB '80) 10) Same, c. 1163-77, Ambulatory of Notre Dame, Paris (CGB '59) 10a) Same, c. 1270, Rose and lancets of South Transept, Notre Dame, Paris (CGB '80); video: detail only Or the metaphor of poles may be extended to the historical weaving. Then the cross of stripped faith and earthly negation becomes a temporal base for the western curve, the Gothic birth a many-phased unfolding from that somber ground. Such the rearing of Notre Dame and Perotin. Music: 11) Perotin, c. 1200, Sedêrunt principes, separate quadruplum (close), Archiv 2723045 (1b) Byzantine, 6th cent., Virgin, detail of Icon, Monastery of St. Catherine, Sinai; video: detail only But the ground is ideal, an assumed limit of the actual field. What is its art locus? Not the early Christian and Byzantine — not this 6th-century Madonna from Sinai, with its troubled Greek shadowings of sensuous personality. 12) Armenian, 915-21, Virgin and Child with Gabriel, King Gakik's Church, Aght-'Amar; video: detail only August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 3 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The negation had begun there, but it had not run its course. The stripping to the bare abstract was the Dark Age drift of Christendom everywhere. Here we pick it up from 1Oth-century Armenia, still in precursive contact with the West, though soon to fall to the Sultan. 13) Irish, late 8th cent., Virgin and Child, Book of Kells, Trinity College, Dublin; + V detail The Book of Kells exhibits the general affinity and even specific features derived from earlier Coptic and Armenian contacts. Through that old-world ascetic hardening, Celtic wonder looks out, a child's eyes through a mask of age. How near is the Kells flowering to the Dark Age ground? a14) 14) Irish MS, c. 1000, David and the Lion, Southampton Psalter; V: detail only Irish MS, c. 1000, David and Goliath, Southampton Psalter (V14, wider) The Irish were faithful, anyway, to linear abstraction — the Book of Kells a summit among such manuscripts produced over more than three hundred years. By 1000, after the Viking raids and the exodus of scholars, representation (as in this Southampton Psalter David and Goliath) seems flattened to the barest outlines of penmanship — what Klee and the 20th century would revive in post-Freudian psyche-art. But is that inverted Goliath lying on the Dark Age ground? 15) Carolingian (Rheims), early 9th cent., Luke, from Four Evangelists Page, Codex Aureus, Cathedral Treasury, Aachen Carolingian manuscripts, struggling for space in spacelessness, hardly admit of so comical a grounding. Nor the poems of mondo-pessimism and God-hope: Alcuin's epitaph: ''Yearning I followed the delights of the world —/ Ashes and dust now...'' — ''delicias mundi... nunc cinis et pulvis…'' Nor the Anglo-Saxon Wanderer's vanity of vanities: "All is labor and loss in this lower world.'' 16) Rheims, c. 820, St. Matthew, Gospel Book of Ebbo, Epernay; first, V detail Nor from Cynewulf's Christ, late 8th century: "swa we on laguflode ... windge holmas/ Ofer deop gelad … A waste of surges we sail across August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 4 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In this wavering world, over wind-swept tracts Of open sea … The Son of God guides us. (after Spaeth) 17) Anglo-Saxon (Ely), 1006-23, Nativity from Sacramentary, f. 32 v. MS Y 6, Bibl. Mun., Rouen; video: details only, below and above As the dialectic of poles implies, the clearest expressions of that winter ground do not come from the broken trough, but as the forces rally that would lift off from it — as in the pre-Conquest schools of Winchester and Ely, a vitality alien as something from China opens in the calligraphic symbol-world. 18) German, 9th cent., pre-Romanesque Church at Oberzell, Reichenau Music: Notker Balbulus, d. 912, Christus hunc diem, 1-5 (HAM) MHS OR 349 The final outpost of a transition where lean backward-looking presages the birth to follow is the Germany of the Ottos. There Notker and Wipo were writing the sequences our historical discs leave historical. There the Saxon nun, Hrowswitha, about 980, created out of faith and stark Latin a sacred drama, blending comic and tragic — though the mystery plays it anticipates would grow not from such learned imitation, but from the life of the Mass. a19) 19) 19a) German (Ottonian) Reichenau, c. 1020, Woman and the Beast, Bibl., Bamberg; first, V detail Same, ''Fount of Living Waters"; + V detail German, 1015, Bronze door, Cathedral, Hildesheim; video: two details only Consider a plot: Callimachus has to wife the saintly Drusiana; to avoid his legitimate caress (that monastic chastity Hegel would despise) she receives death by prayer, is protected by a divine serpent, revived by the Apostle John, converts old Callimachus, and banishes a vulgar servant to hell. As in Ottonian illumination, mind, action, and world begin and end in miracle; nothing stoops to the physical; every cause reverts to First Cause. (fade Notker after "apostolos") That the pagan vanity of drama can be revived in piety is one of the life-giving reversals by which the profane and temporal spring in the timeless enclosure of creed. So at the end of the Dark Ages, we have seen outlawed reason ("Professing themselves to be August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 5 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History wise, they became fools'') prove in Anselm the Tertullian impossibility of God's Incarnation. 20) 20a) 20b) 20c) Late 10th cent. German, Lothair Cross, with 1st cent. Augustus; Palace Treasury, Aachen Same, detail (which V takes from 20) Same, closer detail of center — Augustus cameo Carolingian, 9th cent (or 16th cent.?), equestrian statuette of Charlemagne; Louvre, Paris Music: Carmina Burana 52, Conquest of Jerusalem, 1099: Solemnibus, MHS 3793 Nomen a For the deified Augustus (lst-century cameo) to win the center of the 10th-century Cross of Lothair reflects in its most dramatic form the same about-face, by which Christian withdrawal changes to Christian attack. It began with Constantine, but the Dark Age life of paradox, from Charlemagne's Saracen struggle to the First Crusade, made it the automatic stance of Warrior Christianity. Thus Fulcher of Chartres describes the 1099 fall of Jerusalem, also hailed in music: The Franks entered the city magnificently at the noonday hour on Friday, the day of the week when Christ redeemed the whole world on the cross... Nowhere was there a place where the Saracens could escape the swordsmen...Within Solomon's Temple about ten thousand were beheaded. If you had been there, your feet would have been stained up to the ankles with the blood of the slain... They did not spare the women and children. Within a faith once of radical peace and estranged from Empire, what Vico calls the holy wars of heroic peoples have been reinstated. (fade Nomen a Solemnibus) The mode of this accomplishment is the medieval mode of faith-symbol. Augustus here is both the Prince of Peace and his secular image. So Arthur and the Peers of France are baptized; the Celtic Graal becomes the Cup of Redemption, the horn of Bran (cors), by a Frankish pun, the wafer of Corpus Christi — even as bread and wine are body and blood. So the eagle-shaped M in Dante [Paradiso XVIII and cf. VI] raises Roman Monarchy to the stars. August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 6 �C.G. Bell 21) 21a) 21b) 21c) Symbolic History French (Norman), 1020 and after, Mont-Saint-Michel from the causeway (CGB '74) German Romanesque (Köln), 10th cent. and after, Gross St. Martin, apse and tower, from the S.E. French Romanesque (Burgundy), 1088-97, Remains of Abbey Church, Cluny, France French Romanesque (from the Meuse), 11th cent., Tancremont Crucifix, Tancremont Abbey, France; + V detail Music: Marcabru, 1137, from Pax in Nomine Domini (Munrow: Crusades) Argo ZRG 673 A 2 Under the cult of the timeless and spaceless, what has occurred? Europe was rising like Mont-Saint-Michel out of the mist. The warhorse had been bred for chivalry, the mouldboard plow invented for the forest soil; the "three-field" crop system was boosting food production. For the destroyed life-trade of the Mediterranean, the road and river trade of Europe had seeded the medieval towns. The very principle of disruption — empire into warlike fiefs — shapes the feudal ties of modern kingdoms. The Dark Age terrors of war and passion — Brünhilde, Deirdre, Hallgarda — turn to chivalric devotion; while the Church, vitiated and corrupted through the Time of Troubles, begins with Cluny, 910, its passionate regeneration. Even in statements of the ascetic ground — Peter Damiati, 11th century: "Nothing remains but the love of God and mortification of yourselves" — we forget that the key words, "love" and "self" are subtly changing. "My wretched heart," (his Yeatsian cry) "which will not lose the memory of a form seen but once." So Marcabru's 1137 lament becomes a chivalric call. (end Marcabru) a22) 22) German Tapestry, 11th-13th cent., Knight, fragment of "The Twelve Months," Kunstindustri Mus., Oslo; + V detail German Romanesque, 1040-50, West Facade, Cathedral of Trier (CGB'74); video to details, above and below Music: Carmina Burana 11th-12th cent., #22, Homo quo vigeas (Binkley) SAWT 9522-A Everywhere the earthly is entrained in the heavenly quest: Pope Urban prompts to the First Crusade not merely for the glory of God and his kingdom: "This land is too August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 7 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History narrow for your population ... Jerusalem is a land fruitful above all others." To which the cry of acceptance was "Dieu li volt." From that crusading century, the symptom of new life which still dominates the landscape is a wave of first-Romanesque churches in those rising centers of trade and prosperity. If the Kaiserdoms of the Ottonian Rhine and Mosel (here the west front of the Roman Basilica of Trier, with a Golliard chant) initiate the surge — in a form as weightily archaic as the organization of the Empire — it is at once caught up, or independently advanced, in northern Italy and France. (end Carmina Burana 22) 23) 24) 24a) N. Italian Romanesque, 1063-1118, Cathedral of Pisa, from S.W. (CGB '48) Same, view of the Apse (CGB '48) N. Italian Romanesque, 1063-1350, Pisa Group: Cathedral, with Baptistry and tower (CGB '48) 1063: and the free commune of Pisa begins an arcaded marble basilica of protoRenaissance harmony. Though if vault had been grappled with as in the driven North, this first benign beauty of our culture could hardly have afforded such purity and ease. In the paucity of early organa and plainness of their reconstruction, it is of interest that the first Italian polyphony ("Regi Regum Gloriosa", 11th century Lucca MS) blends smooth plainsong melodies in perfect intervals — against the more dissonant risks of French organum: Music: 25) 11th c. Ital. (Lucca 603), Regi Regum Glorioso, RCA-V-LM 6015 (cut, end stanza) Venetian Byzantine, 1069-74, Cathedral of St. Mark's Music: Byzantine, Mt Athos, Easter chant, 9th Ode, ARC-2533 413, end of side 1, ARC 2533 413 At the same time in Venice, queen of the Adriatic and Eastern trade, the art lingering of Constantinople found hospitable soil and leafed out in the breath-taking domes of St. Mark's (1069-74). Though beneath the outward exhalation, 26) St. Mark's interior, Crossing of nave and transept, Cupola of the Resurrection, with 13th-cent. mosaics; video: details only, above and below August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 8 �C.G. Bell 26a) Symbolic History Same, another (lighter) view; video: detail only (for digital, a26) brood gold mosaic vaults, decorated through centuries, but still symbolic enclosures of jewels burning in the Dark Age gloom. Was the chant as Byzantine as the art? (fade Athos) Or had the diaphony of French-Italian Guido already reared the poles of Organum? — Parallel (Music), and Contrary (Music). Music: a27) 27) Guido of Arezzo, c.1025, Parallel & Contrary Diaphony, examples 9 & 18 from Micrologus, sung by K.Williamson et al. S. Italian, c. 1090, Christ in Glory, S. Angelo in Formis, near Capua S. Italian, c. 1080, interior of S. Angelo in Formis (video order: 27, detail; then a27, detail; and again, detail of 27) To the south, the impoverished heart of what had been imperial Rome showed no such progress. Music: Gregorian, Psalm 116, Laudate, 8th mode, History of Italian Music, VLM 40000, I, 1 It must have seemed strange to the independent north, that the Papal tail should so determinedly wag the dog. Especially when the Tuscan Hildebrand, elected pope in 1073, pushed ahead with church reform in the spirit of Cluny, outlawing the imperial practice of lay investiture. Against the archaic Roman manner of this little Capua church, (fade Laudate Dominum omnes gentes) 28) 28a) German, 11th-13th cent. (and later), Cathedral of Mainz; + V28, detail German, 11th cent., from the bronze doors of Augsburg Cathedral, Creation of Eve, Fall, etc. (copy of Faust, 15 — CGB '59); V and digital: Adam only V28b) German Romanesque, 1080-1160, Cathedral of Speyer, Rhenish Kaiserdom 28c) German Romanesque, 1000-1181, Apse and Towers, Worms Music: Carmina Burana, 11th-12th cent., #19 Fas et nefas (Binkley) SAWT 9455A how vastly the Mainzer Dom, 11th century at core (though a conglomerate from the 1Oth to the 19th) sprawls over the Rhine. With such gangling pride Henry the Fourth must have gathered his appointed bishops to answer Gregory VII's claim that the Roman Church had never erred, nor would err to all eternity, that it was in the apostolic power to August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 9 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History depose emperors, and that Henry should "Obey the mandate of God". (fade Carmina Burana) Henry, king ... by the holy ordination of God, to Hildebrand, not pope but false monk ... By wiles ... thou hast achieved money; by money, favor; by the sword, the throne of peace. And from the throne of peace thou hast disturbed peace ... Thou, therefore, damned by this curse ... relinquish the apostolic chair which thou hast usurped ... I, Henry, king by the grace of God, together with all our bishops, say thus unto thee: Descend, descend, and be damned throughout the ages. 29) French Norman, 1062 and after, St. Etienne (Abbaye-aux-Hommes) Caen; first, video detail Music: Santiago MS (Magister Albertus of Paris) c. 1135, Congaudeant, opening, Argo ZRG 900 But Hildebrand was linked all over Europe with the rising tide of Catholic power — from Santiago. through Magister Albertus' Paris, as far as Normandy, where Duke William and his churchmen were then creating the most pregnant of Romanesque styles, which, in the superimposed heights of his own monastery at Caen, already looks to Gothic. (fade Congaudeant) The papal ban was no negligible weapon. Henry's submission at Canossa in the snowy winter of 1077, Gregory himself describes: 30) 30a) 30b) N. Italian, 940, rebuilt 13th cent., Castle of Canossa ruins, Emilia; + V close detail (as in slide 30b) Roman Mosaic, 1128, Crucifix with Vine, S. Clemente, Rome Again, Canossa ruins, slide: close detail; video: a wider detail (from 30) Music: Carmina Burana, 11th-12th cent. Dulce solum, (Binkley) SAWT 9455-A And there, having laid aside all the belongings of royalty, wretchedly, with bare feet and clad in wool, he continued for three days to stand before the gate of the castle. Nor did he desist from imploring with many tears the aid and consolation of the apostolic mercy, until he had moved all those who were present there ... to pity and depth of compassion. Today the Apennine castle of Canossa is a ruin as abandoned as the Papal dream of Europe under spiritual sway. August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 10 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History (fade Carmina Burana) 31) French Norman, 1020 and after, Mont-Saint-Michel, upper portion (CGB '74) Though the feud went on, even to Henry's taking Rome in 1084 and the NormanSicilian Guiscard's recovering it for the Pope, but with such rape and misconduct that Gregory was driven into exile by the outraged Romans. As in all deep conflicts of history, progress banked on both sides: the emerging national states, and the Catholic synthesis of Europe. While in thought and the arts, France confirmed itself as the ordering center. 32) V32a) V32b) 32c) V32d) Norman French, soon after 1066, from the Bayeux tapestry; video: detail of ships only Same, detail: King Edward Same, detail: Guy takes Harold Same, detail of battle Same, detail: Norman archers The Chanson de Roland, against the looser German epics, reveals the formative discipline of the Norman French. The Bayeux tapestry, record of the conquest of England, has such clean force and drama within the iconographic stripping of all figures — as description in the Roland is cut to a functional core: "Rollant est proz e Oliver est sage" — "Roland is brave, and Oliver is wise." And are we not told by Malmesbury and Wace how the Duke's jongleur Taillefer (or Toliver) joined battle at Hastings chanting the "Cantilena Rollandi"? a33) b33) 33) Norman Romanesque, 1059-66, La Trinité or Abbey-aux-Dames, outside at dusk, Caen (CGB '74); video: details only, below and above French Romanesque, c. 1080, The Archangel Michael, Church of St. Savin Norman Romanesque, 1059-66, La Trinité or Abbaye-aux-Dames, Nave, Caen (CGB '74) Music: Magister Albertus, c.1235(?), Congaudeant, conclusion, st. 3 & 4, Argo ZRG 900 Emotion, pathos, everything personal, is held here in the severity of automatic faith, which dominates and transforms, until the horn of Roland sounds through the Pyrenees like the trumpet of doom: "Roland feels that his time is no more." He is on a steep hill August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 11 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History that looks toward Spain ... He has held up his right glove to God: the angels of heaven come down to him. AOI" — "Angles del ciel i descendent a lui. AOI." August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 12 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History With the Norman Conquest, and even just before, that mighty style (here Matilde's church of the Trinity in Caen) a34) 1st 34) Norman, 1089-1100, and 15th cent., Gloucester Cathedral over the town English Norman, 1079-93, remade Perpendicular, 1366-1404, Nave of Winchester (CGB '74) spreads over England, so that most of the Cathedrals of the island are built round or carved out of a great Norman core, often begun within ten years of the conquest. (fade Congaudeant) Thus at Winchester, longest cathedral in Europe, the solemn proportions of the 1079-93 nave must be felt through a Gothic surface of the time of Chaucer. Music: Worcester Fragments, c. 1325, Hocketed trope from "Epiphaniam Domino," Nonesuch H-71308, A, bd.4, middle The verticals, the lierne vault, 35) Winchester, exterior, Nave from the south (CGB '74) stretch the low solidity of structure, lightened by modest buttresses and the pointing of windows once round-arched. V2nd 34) Winchester, nave: video returns briefly to an upper detail of 1st 34 Yet all that richness speaks 2nd 33) (fade hocketed trope) La Trinité, nave; video: details only, above and below; digital: above what it came from and must have been — Music: French, 12th cent.(?), Verbum bonum et suave (first 2 st.), SAWT 9531 A again the Abbey of Matilde, wife of the Conqueror. There are always attempts to differentiate Romanesque from Gothic, as Frankl's additif against divisif: still, this vaulted stone already contains the other future, as centuries of polyphony would unfold from this early organum. (fade Verbum bonum) August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 13 �C.G. Bell 3rd 34) Symbolic History Winchester, nave, through the choir screen (CGB '90); video: first detail of 1st 34, then of V3rd 34 (CGB ‘74) (Music: Continue hocketed trope, as above) And what could more beautifully show the sweep of Romanesque-Gothic than to move from Matilde's Caen to the nave of Winchester — melodized and harmonised hockets on that ground? (end Trope) 2nd 35) Again, Winchester, exterior (CGB ‘74) Here, where the poise of Norman, to be continued through the quieter Gothic of England, awaits the filling-in of Rennaissance, we are struck by the continuity of the Western rebirth, the speed with which it found its expressive forms. 36) French Romanesque (Vienne) c. 1080, St. Savin s. Gartempe (interior) Another of those early polyphonies, this from Chartres before 1100, an Alleluia, Organum joined with plainsong, will let us move from the pre-Romanesque of Southern France (1080, St. Savin) 37) French Norman, 1063 ff., Abbaye-aux-Hommes (St. Etienne) interior; Caen (CGB '74) through William the Conqueror's own church in Caen, begun in 1063 — piers (as alternately through Romanesque and early Gothic) replacing columns, the dialectic of vertical and lateral, like the Scholastic vaulting of "Yes and No," grandly anticipated — 38 and for 2nd 37) English Norman, early 12th cent., aisle, with nave columns, Tewkesbury Abbey (copy of 2nd 38 — CGB '66) to English Norman, columned again in Tewkesbury, early 12th century, later windows glimpsed through the dusk; though we would need more music than we have, records recovered from the still vibrating molecules of those church walls, August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 14 �C.G. Bell 2nd 36) Symbolic History St. Savin s. Gartempe; video: details only, below and above to distinguish the musical stages of Romanesque. Music: 2nd 37) 2nd 38) Chartres MS, c. 1100, from Alleluia: Angelus Domine, V-LM 6015 Again, Abbaye-aux-Hommes, Caen; video: detail only Again, Tewkesbury Abbey (CGB ‘66); video: details only (cut plainsong close) Tewkesbury, with the aisled solemnity of Egyptian Karnak. 39) Tewkesbury Abbey, from the south, c. 1110-50 and after (CGB '66) And outside, the long nave roof and tremendous tower of Norman. How much French history was enacted north of the Channel: the Anglo-Norman scribe of the Roland, Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, Marie de France also of England, the play of Adam, chief relic of 12th-century drama. a40) b40) c40) French (Burgundy), 1120-40 ff., Vezelay exterior; video: detail only Same, Vezelay interior; video has detail of c40 Same, Vezelay portal, lighted Back to France, Vezelay (1120-40); and now, available music admits of a style distinction. At the very time when the upward reach of Gothic begins in art and soul — that angel clarity of fierce mystic love, in which so many great men join: theologianlover Abelard, builder-politician Suger, mystic Hugh of St. Victor, and even their puritanical censor Bernard of Clairvaux — Gregorian stretches out to a tenor (Latin: tenere, "to hold") over which new melodies slide in melismatic organum. 40) V40a) Burgundian, 1132-40, Nave viewed through portal, Vezelay; + V detail French (Burgundy), Vezelay interior (from slide b40) With the Vezelay portal and Gislebertus' Christ and the Magdalene, hear the brief recorded section of a Benedicamus Domino, of August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 15 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History the St. Martial school at Limoges — the first beautiful performance of polyphony. Music: 41) 41a) St. Martial School, mid-12th cent., Benedicamus Domino, Haydn Society, L2071 (close during slide 41) Burgundian, c. 1120-40, Gislebertus, Christ & the Magdalene, St. Lazarus, Autun (CGB '80); + V details (while slide goes to Gislebertus, 1120-40, Flight to Egypt, detail, St. Lazarus, Autun) Again, Gislebertus, Christ and the Magdalene, detail (CGB '80) Here is Hugo of St. Victor, early 12th century, in praise of Love — De Laude Caritatis: You have great power, O love; you alone could draw God down from heaven to earth. How strong is your bond with which even God could be bound... You brought him bound with your bonds, you brought him wounded with your arrows... you wounded him who was invulnerable, you bound him who was invincible, you drew him who was immovable; the Eternal you made mortal... O love, how great is your victory. Set that celebration of love's paradox against its ultimate source, 42) Hellenistic, 3rd-2nd cent. B.C., Socrates, Diotima, and Eros, Mus. Naz., Naples Socrates taught by Diotima in the Symposium, of which this Hellenistic relief survives, where Plato invokes Eros, just to avoid the paradox of the divine and earthly: What then is love?...He is a great spirit... the mediator who spans the chasm which divides the divine and the mortal... For God mingles not with man; but through Love all the intercourse and converse of God with man, whether awake or asleep, is carried on. 2nd 41 and 2nd 42) French glass, c 1150, Notre Dame de la Belle Verriere, 1st window, south aisle of Choir, Cathedral, Chartres; but video inserts a detail of Socrates from Alexandrian Melt, a90 (see V2nd 42) August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 16 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History "The Eternal you made mortal ... O love, how great is your victory" — what lucent contradictions have opened stained glass windows in the dark, since the Socratic search for rationality. Va43) b43) 43) French, 1145-50, Two Queens of Judah, detail, Royal Portal, Cathedral, Chartres Same, One of the Queens of Judah, closer detail Southern France, c. 1130, Prophet holding a Scroll, Moissac (Tarn et Garonne); + V detail In Southern France,. and soon after in the north, the love of woman, its poetry and music, are caught up in the same mystical fervor. Perhaps the best known Troubadour song is that high chivalric one by Bernard de Ventadorn of the 12th century: the lover's envy when he sees the lark: As she beats her wings with delight against the sun, Loose herself and fall, in the sweetness that goes to her heart — Can vei la lauzeta mover/ de joi sas alas contral rai Que s'oblid' e's laissa chazer/ per la doussor c'al cor li vai... In the dearth of secular art, we hear it with the Moissac Prophet Holding a Scroll — both pierced by timeless ecstasy. The improvised accompaniments are lost, and efforts by later groups (Binkley, etc.) to supply them, make us treasure the solo refinements of Max Meili, or (here) Mertens, of the Brussels Pro Musica Antiqua. Music: Bernard de Ventadorn, 12th cent., "Can vei la lauzeta" EMS 201 In troubador love, August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 17 �C.G. Bell a44) Vb44) 44) 44a) 44b) 44c) 44d) Symbolic History Gislebertus, c. 1120-40, Flight into Egypt, Mary and Jesus, detail; St. Lazarus, Autun French early Gothic, c. 1200, detail from Coronation of the Virgin; St. Yved, Braisne Gislebertus, Burgundian, c. 1120-40, Recumbent Eve; St. Lazarus, Autun German Gothic, end 12th cent., Fall of Man, Ceiling Painting; St. Michael's Church, Hildesheim Again, Gislebertus, Eve, detail of upper body G. Pisano, 1302-11, Nativity, detail, from the Pulpit, Cathedral, Pisa Closer detail of Eve's upper body; video then returns to 44 in the burning love of Mary, second Eve, a new species of joy possesses Europe; (end Ventadorn) as if mutation had produced a flower of unknown grace and fragrance, we see as recognizably as snowdrops spread through a forest, the lyric fire (Gislebertus' Eve in the snake-vines) lighten from Provence over Burgundy and France, to England, Germany, and to the Italy of "the Sweet New Style." For early 12th-century France, Abelard and Eloise draw both loves to a flaming core. That the man, condemned by St. Bernard for logic and rationality ("This man has no mind to believe what his reason has not previously argued") would later stand for medieval passion sacred and profane, hints at the sheer ambivalence of that intellectual fire. A likely conjecture, that the supreme Latin love poem of the time, the "Dum Diane Vitrea," in its richness and freedom, may be one Abelard sang for Eloise, and heard sung after him by admiring scholars. From it we cull three phrases: When the gleaming lamp of Diana is kindled Late at the rosy light of her brother, And west winds bearing fragrance Wander the ether-ways of heaven... (CGB) Dum Diane Vitrea/ sero lampas oritur, et a fratris rosea/ luce dum succenditur, dulcis aura zephyri/ spirans omnes etheri ... The sounds of water on pure sand And of a mill wheel turning round Steal oblivious eyes from the light... (CGB) August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 18 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History murmura rivorum/ per arenas puras, circulares ambitus/ molendinorum, qui furantur somno/ lumen oculorum ... Sweet is the passage from love into sleep, But sweeter the waking from sleep to love... (CGB) Hei quam felix transitus/ amoris ad soporem, sed suavior regressus/ soporis ad amorem... a45) 45) Ottonian, c. 975, Gero Crucifix, detail, Cathedral, Cologne French Romanesque (Haute Loire), c. 1135, Lavaudieu Head of Christ, Louvre, Paris; + V detail From the Gerokreuz at the close of The Dark Ages, identification with the human Savior matures to this Lavaudieu Head of 1135; and again it is Abelard who, in his epochal poem on Good Friday, at the condemned close of his own life, voiced the personal theory of atonement, which, as Waddell says: "His century branded as heresy, and which is the beginning of modern theology": 46) 46a) Spanish Romanesque, 1st half of the 12th cent., Doubting Thomas, Santa Domingo de Silos, near Burgos Same, Doubting Thomas, detail "Alone to sacrifice thou goest, Lord" — "Solus ad victimam procedis, Domine." From northern Spain at the same time (which shares with France the passions of pre-Gothic), such human participation melts with tenderness the archaic figures of the Silos reliefs. As with Abelard, the sin which required Christ's sacrifice is taken up, deeply and personally ours: "Nostra sunt, Domine, nostra sunt crimina." 47) French, 12th cent., Crucifixion and Ascension window from Poitiers; + V details, below and above (V47 and V47a) August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 19 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History That spirit is confirmed in the 12th-century Passion windows of Le Mans, this Poitiers, then Chartres. "Why must thou suffer torture for our sin?" Abelard's answer is to fast as with Christ in the grave: Heavy with weeping may the three days pass, To win the laughter of Thine Easter Day. So Dante would himself descend on Good Friday and rise the third day. a48) 48) Again 41, Burgundian, c. 1120-40, Gislebertus, Christ and the Magdalene; St. Lazarus, Autun Spanish, lst half of 12th cent., Deposition – Resurrection, S. Domingo de Silos, near Burgos; first, video details We stand here at the source, not only of Protestant theology, but of the realistic incarnations of Christian art, the impersonation of the Easter trope which engendered Western drama: "Quem queritis in sepulcro, O Christicolae? — Whom do you seek in the sepulcher, O women of Christ?" "Jesum Nazarenum, crucifixum — Jesus of Nazareth, crucified." "Non est hic, surrexit. Ite, nuntiate. — He is not here ... Go, and announce that the Lord has risen." That earliest (St. Gall) example is of the time of the Gerokreuz; but by the twelfth century, the sacred play has developed as startlingly as, in this other 1140 relief from Silos, the burial of Christ indicates its entire realistic bent and pre-Rennaissance soul. As in Abelard, the inward change has been made. It would take centuries to elaborate the techniques of the earthly; but this martyred Jesus, the mourning Marys, the sleeping guards below, stand on the threshold 49) 49a) 49b) 49c) English, c. 1380-1400, Resurrection from retable, Norwich Cathedral Rembrandt, 1639, The Resurrection of Christ, Alte Pinakothek, Munich Burgundian, 12th cent., Descent from the Cross, Louvre, Paris Catalan Romanesque, early 12th cent., Lazarus the Beggar, fresco, from San Clemente de Tahull August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 20 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History of the 1400 humanization which heralds the Renaissance, the Norwich-school Resurrection, say, toward which the arrow of Romanesque awareness is drawn. How many strands of the Western soul are already spun into the fabric of the time of Abelard. In that fabric, indeed, forces opposed become the warp and woof of one awakening. Even Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), faith-centered watchdog against progress, was so borne on the individual and passionate tide, that he seems a source of Reformation, with the Christ-imitating piety of its arts. Small wonder he was already at odds with Abelard, most daring precursor of Renaissance — Reformation and Renaissance a warring identity, joined in the larger empowering of man and world; though Reformation's drive toward renewed Christianity would counter the classical claims of reason and taste. a50) b50) c50) 50) 50a) French (Burgundy), c. 1110-15, South portal of Saint-Pierre, Moissac French Romanesque, 1120-50, Conversion of St. Eustace, from a Vezelay capital Gislebertus (Burgundian), c. 1120-40, Body of St. Vincent guarded by ravens, capital, Cathedral of Autun (CGB '80) French (Burgundy), c. 1120-30, Main portal of St. Lazare Cathedral, Autun Romanesque-Gothic, 1134-50, Triple West Portal, Chartres (CGB '59; copy of Gothic II, 42); video uses lower spread of a51 St. Bernard not only hunts down what he calls heresy (Abelard, Arnold of Brescia, William of Conches, and the rest); he attacks the now wealthy monasteries of Cluny for the size and extravagance of their churches — then as richly colored and jewelled as they are still recognizably carved — What profit is there in those ridiculous monsters... that deformed comeliness, that comely deformity... those half-men... and fighting knights, those hunters winding their horns?... Doth not the root of all this lie in covetousness, which is idolatry... At the sight of these marvellous vanities men are more kindled to offer gifts than to pray. Thus wealth is drawn up by ropes of wealth, thus money bringeth money... (Coulton) August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 21 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Yet as from Abelard not only the heretical but the church-sustaining energies of the next generations were to spring, so in the great series of portals beginning about 1100 to 1120 with Moissac and (here) Autun and culminating after 1140 in the Royal Portal of Chartres, we experience a logos powerful in ordering the divine — an achievement impossible without a daring that continually walked the knife-edge of heresy — heresy being in Abelard's case an advance too rapid or too proud along the road his followers would make orthodox. a51) b51) 51) 52) 52a) French Gothic, 1134-50, West front up to Tower, Chartres Cathedral (copy of CGB '59); here video takes the upper spread of this slide French Gothic, 1145 ff., view of Chartres from hotel French Romanesque-Gothic, 1145 ff. and 1194 ff., the western façade of Chartres Cathedral, with the 15th-cent. taller spire Lesser's Geometrical Analysis of the same west front, Chartres Double of 51 and 52 — actual church and scale analysis 1 Right, that Geoffrey, Bishop of Chartres and of its Platonic school (just before the 1130 fire occasioned much of the present West front), should defend Abelard at Soisson (1121), since in this divine geometry, heaven-scaling reason speaks "with most oracular organ". It was in the brilliance of his youth that Abelard opened dialectic theology with the Sic et Non — Yes and No: for 157 questions crucial to the faith, a columned array of quotations from the Bible, the Fathers, the pagan classics, affirming and denying — a handbook of contradictions. The prologue states what is almost Heidegger's basic tuning (Stimmung) of Western thought, Cartesian certainty mediated by question: "For by doubt," says Abelard, "we come to inquiry, and by inquiry we arrive at the truth." This was the book which Peter Lombard later called his "breviary," and from which Aquinas would draw his method of Objection and Reply. Though Abelard was even more blamed for his lectures and tract (c. 1120) On the Divine Unity and Trinity. 1 After b51, held longer in the slide show than in the video, these are the basic slides — yet differently applied. In the video, the double not only closes the sequence, but opens it, as if it were c51, as well as 52a. Between, the video runs a series of separate details — photo followed by Analysis — first of the façade up to the towers; then of the towers; then a lower central detail (Analysis only). Here the video returns to the slide double. August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 22 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In "The Story of my Calamities" he tells of writing it for his scholars, who wanted to know "rather what could be understood than what could be stated ... nor could anything be believed unless it could first be understood." Bernard could hardly ignore such a reversal of Augustine's "believe that you may understand — crede ut intelligas." He bestirred himself before the second trial, at Sens, 1140: Peter Abelard is trying to make void the merit of Christian faith when he deems himself able by human reason to comprehend God altogether. He ascends to the heavens and descends even to the abyss; nothing may hide from him! Not content to see things through a glass darkly, he must behold all things face to face... (Taylor, The Medieval Mind) The church builders had it better. They were not tried for heresy, despite their daring or Bernard's disapproval. Though the geometric analysis of the West Front of Chartres, revealing the three superimposed modules and harmonies of the 1145 and 1194 constructions, with the 15th-century taller spire, leaves no doubt how far those architects trusted Whitehead's "unbridled reason of the Middle Ages" in proclaiming the divine. 53) 53a) Same, Chartres, Royal portal (1145-50), central door (video crops first from 50a, triple portal, CGB '59); + V detail Same, Christ of Tympanum; video: detail only of 53 That formulation of the Trinity which Bernard called heretical ("He savors of Arius when he speaks of the Trinity ... The faith of the righteous believes, it does not dispute.") is most briefly and beautifully expressed in the close of Abelard's hymn for Saturday Vespers ("O quanta qualia/ sunt illa sabbata"). With what measured glory the logic of God becomes the flesh of the poem, in the untranslatable mastery of Latin syntax: To the Lord of forever, Praise evermore, From whom all, by whom all, In whom all, are. From-whom-are, Father is; By-whom-are, Son; In-whom-are, Spirit, Of Father, Son, one. (CGB) Perenni Domino perpes sit gloria, ex quo sunt, per quem sunt, August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 23 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History in quo sunt omnia. ex quo sunt, pater est, per quem sunt, Filius, in quo sunt, Patris et filii Spiritus. To that intellectual precision, apparent even in translation, a54) b54) 54) 54a) French (Auvergne), 12th cent., Christ head, Louvre, Paris (another view of the Lavaudieu head of slide 45, above) French, 12th cent., bronze Crucified Christ, Metropolitan Museum, NYC French (Auvergne), 2nd half of 12th cent., Virgin and Child, Metropolitan Museum, NYC; + V details Auvergne, 2nd half of 12th cent., detail of Virgin, Louvre, Paris Bernard's hymn, "Jesu dulcis memoria" — within the same style-horizon — is diametrically opposed. Music: Bernard of Clairvaux, c. 1145(?), "Jesu dulcis memoria," St. John's group under Frank Flinn In this puzzling saint the old dilemma of faith crops out: selfless humility and dogmatic pride. Arnold of Brescia, whom Bernard had thrown out of France, accused him (John of Salisbury reports) "of being a pursuer of vain glory, one who envied all who were not of his own school." Yet the hymn shows simple piety and childlike faith — so childlike indeed that it evaporates in translation, leaving the obvious sentiments of later religion. It begins: Jesu dulcis memoria dans vera cordis gaudia, sed super mel et omnia eius dulcis praesentia. Jesus sweet to recall, The heart's joy in essence; More than honey and all, The sweetness of your presence. (CGB) Bernard's key word "faith" is also crucially changing — like some 12th century Madonnas, filled with the sensuous actualizations of person. As if his Christ were to be apprehended by taste. While the melody, against modal Gregorian, moves like a August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 24 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Protestant hymn, by harmonic chords. (close "Jesu dulcis memoria") 55) 55a) 55b) French Gothic (Suger), 1140-44, Ambulatory, St.Denis, (CGB '84); video divides to a central spread and detail of the vault Again, St. Denis, but the upper church, rebuilt about 1230 Again, the Ambulatory of St. Denis, Chapel of St. Peregrin, two windows (before which video has returned to the central spread of 55) Music: August 6, 1995 French, mid-12th cent, Benedicamus Domino, 2-voice (Cape) EMS 201 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 25 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The great Suger, regent of France and abbot of Saint-Denis, north of Paris, provides a link between Abelard, whom he defended, and Bernard, by whom he was stirred. In 1140 to '44, about the time melismatic organum joined with discant, he had his church enlarged, windowed and triple portalled — an act which, as much as any, turned Romanesque into Gothic. Though most of that Saint Denis has been rebuilt or defaced, this ambulatory with Suger's account of the building (edited and translated by Panofsky), heralds a new mysticism of Gothic Incorporation, an anagogical ascent, by which the earthly is symbolically elevated to the spiritual and becomes a kind of sacrament. (fade Benedicamus) 56) Catalan, mid-12th cent., Porch of Santa Maria at Ripoli It is hard in any period to call one man of the past and another of the future; Bernard's backward looking inspires another future, of penitential reform. "The church is resplendent in her walls, beggarly in her poor. She clothes her stones in gold, and leaves her sons naked ... " 57) French, 11th-12th cent., Basilica (St. Remi), Rheims (CGB '76); video takes this in three cuts: below, middle, and above But we who, for the sake of Christ, have deemed as dung whatever shines with beauty, enchants the ear, delights through fragrance, flatters the taste, pleases the touch — whose devotion, I ask, do we intend to incite by means of these very things? Indeed, the monumental pre-Gothic bareness of Bernard's own church at Clairvaux seems to have exerted the sort of revolutionary impact Bernard himself did. That church is mostly destroyed, but the shadowy vast Basilica of Rheims (not the cathedral, but this older church, 11th-12th centuries) may suggest the type. 58) 58a) Again, Suger's Ambulatory, 1140-44, another view (CGB '84); video takes only an upper detail; then a lower detail of 55, with tomb; then a detail of the vault from slide 63b to follow) Closer view of 58: column between windows (CGB '84); from which video gives only an upper detail of the right window Music: August 6, 1995 Leonin, c.1160, from Haec Dies, near close (Tinayre) Lumen 32011 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 26 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History It was Bernard's passionate rephrasing of the Dark Age question which Suger's church (here a chapel of the ambulatory) was made to answer. And not only his church, but a theology derived by way of Irish-born John Scotus from the Pseudo-Areopagite (Syrian, ca. 500), viewing all process as an ascent, in which the material and sensory is drawn up and receives the radiance of the divine: so the lilt of troubador love in the sacred organum of Leonin. (resume speaking on the last held note of the Haec Dies) Here is a passage from Suger which becomes a jewelled window, itself lighting a hundred and more years of the mystical fabric of Gothic — a59) 59) French Gothic, 1212-41 and after, Rheims, interior, nave and west windows Same, west windows, nearer (CGB '59); video: rose window only up to the height of Rheims, the height of Perotin. Music: Perotin, c. 1200, from an Alleluia, last section, Seraphim SIC 6052 When... in the beauty of the house of God the loveliness of the manycolored gems has called me away from external cares… I see myself dwelling, as it were, in some strange region of the universe which neither exists entirely in the slime of earth, nor entirely in the purity of Heaven; and that, by the grace of God, I can be transported from this inferior to that higher world in an anagogical manner... (end Alleluia) 60) Jan van Eyck, 1425, Madonna in a Church, Berlin-Dahlem Museum; first, V detail Music: Dufay c.1440(?), from Flos Florum (at "Regina"), (Cape) ARC 3003 There is the insight behind centuries of Gothic incorporation, from Chartres through The Divine Comedy, to the 15th-century symbolic sanctities of here and now — this Dufay, with Van Eyck's Madonna in a Church, where as Panofsky has noted, the light that seems so actual falls from the North, as on Dante's Earthly Paradise. (fade Dufay, after "dolorum") Va61) 61) Again, Chartres, Royal Portal, center cropped from 50a, above French Romanesque-Gothic, 1145-50, Central Tympanum, Royal Portal, Chartres (CGB '59); + V detail (replaced in the slide show by 61a, again Suger's Ambulatory, two windows; CGB '84) August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 27 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History On the gilded doors which by his analogy open (like this portal of Chartres) to heaven, Suger inscribed a Latin poem, in which repetition takes the place of rhyme: For the splendor of the church that has fostered and exalted him, Suger has laboured for the splendor of the church. … Bright is the noble work; but being nobly bright, the work Should brighten the minds, that they may travel through the true lights To the True Light where Christ is the true door. In what manner it inhere in this world the golden door defines: The dull mind rises to truth through that which is material Raised from prior submersion by the sight of this light. Mens hebes ad verum per materialia surgit Et demersa prius hac visa luce resurgit. 62) Suger's Ambulatory; variant: column between windows (CGB '84) On the windowed enlargement of the upper Choir, a model for Notre Dame and so many to follow (though it is the ambulatory that remains), another poem was inscribed: Bright is that which is brightly coupled with the bright, And bright the noble edifice pervaded by the new light. Such is Suger's Lux Nova, the sacramental light of Gothic. 63) 63a) 63b) V63c) French early Gothic, begun c. 1170, Buttressed Apse, Mantes (CGB '74) French Romanesque, 1039-65, Transept Crossing, Ste. Foy, Conques, Aveyron Again, Suger, 1140-44, Ambulatory, St. Denis (slide overexposed to show Gothic vaulting, used by video earlier, as detail, see 58, above; while here video shows a detail of Mantes, from 63) Cathedral of Laon, 1160-1205, buttressing, north side of nave, detail from a vertical slide (CGB '74); digital: add v63d, Canterbury Choir What ingenuities of structure that light required, any early Gothic apse (here Mantes, near Paris, 2nd half of the 12th century) will remind us of. From the first groining and ribbing of vaults (the aisles of Bernay Abbey, Norman, 1017; the crossing of Ste. Foy, Conques, 1039 ff. — as in music from the principle of simultaneously moving voices — a chain leads as by necessity to the dialectic triumph of Gothic. To open his August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 28 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History windows, Suger reduced the walls to buttresses, though he did not make them fly. But within ten years at Noyon that step was taken — to be followed at once in the churches being built at Sens, Laon, and not long after, in England, at Canterbury. 64) 64a) French Gothic, 1162-82, (rebuttressed 13th cent.?) Choir Apse, Notre Dame, Paris, from far-off (CGB '59); + V detail Same, buttressing of Choir, from the south (copy of CGB '59; see Gothic II, 55); first, two video details, the second now video-revised to the Madonna of the North Portal, also Notre Dame, Paris (CGB '80 — V64b) Music: Leonin, c. 1180(?), Deum timê. Organum duplum, Lumen 32011 The boldest early application was at Notre Dame in Paris, 1162-82. In music it was Leonin, master there through that time, who perfected the sustained-tone style, combining it with powerfully driven rythmic passages of note against note — or of tenor note against a triple in the organal voice — here his Deum timê, sung by Tinayre. The prerequisite for those soaring polyphonies was what we take for granted, though it had then to be painfully evolved, a system of time notation that would blend independent voices. It is the crisscrossing of Perfect, or triple, rhythm that gives the music its stripped energy; it is the sustained-tone melting of melody over a held ground which complements that force with a shifting devotional tenderness of incomparable poignance; while the mystical turning from the vanity of earth to the eternal is attested by the bare-fifth harmony. 65) Double: [A] Gainsborough, c. 1783, Mrs. Sheridan, detail, head; National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; and [B] French Gothic, c. 1210, N. Portal, Head of Sainte Modeste, Chartres Cathedral; + singles. 2 In the world of Enlightened hope, of Gainsborough (right), Haydn, Jane Austen, dissonance is a passing trial, which resolves into the triadic chord of homecoming to the valid earth. (Music: harpsichord cadence, Richard Stark) But in Gothic, those triads of the heart are passing tones, dissonances of wish; and what they resolve into is the transhumanity of perfect intervals. 2 Where the slide show goes from 65, through B, then A, and back to the double, the video enriches to 65, then B, again 65, then A, again 65, and finally A once more. August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 29 �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History French, c. 1240, Anima–Descendi–Alma, close, AS 91) So in Sainte Modeste at Chartres (left) the loves and moods affirmed by our major and minor hang unvalidated, as over an eternity of pure fifth, octave, unison. Such formal exclusion of the chords of joy and tears, in which Gainsborough's Mrs. Sheridan (right) has her being, might seem of the Dark Age Ground; but their actual appearance, floating in the mystery of denial, tokens the shadowy first smile with which Gothic love lightens the ascetic pre-dawn. No piece so voices that suspension as 66) Score of Leonin's Organum Duplum, Judea et Jerusalem, transcribed by Richard Stark from Cape performance (video follows through the text and performance in a series of 17 details) Leonin's organum on "Judea et Jerusalem". This opening Duplum, in the lower or tenor voice, stretches out those three words, with their notes, as heard in the plainsong. (Music: Solesmes opening of Judea et Jerusalem, French Decca 7.452A.) We are in the fourth mode, whose tonic is the closing E. The dominant is A, to which the tenor rises once at the climax of the discant section. Discant denotes the bar-by-bar treatment marked in yellow. (Music: Stark, on harpsichord.) Sustained tone, or vel purum, bespeaks the melismatic melting over held tones, into which the discant also returns at the close. (Music: Stark, on harpsichord.) The tension between the life of earth, which was to shape tonal harmony, and the earthless center is enacted between the Gregorian tonic E and the F with which the chant opens. For no sooner does the organizing voice move from F above, than the entire claim of sensuous F Major appears, dreamed over the mystic void — as in four haunting variations of the B-flat phrase marked in red — the desired smile of Guinevere. (Music: CGB, recorder #1 and #4.) In that emergence of romance, the repeated rise to thc sacred tonic E (marked in blue), a seventh over the earth ground, F, sharpens a spirit-cry. Which way do we move? The "Judea" close affirms temporal F. With the "Jerusalem" phrase, the flat is withdrawn. The penultimate search (over F) avoids B. Still hungry for F we are led toward dissonant E ("our sister the death of the body"). But the plainsong tenor drops to its E close. How strangely earth's climb completes itself in the modal octave of mystery, the timeless center of creed. Let us hear, first with the score, the tender Cape performance. August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 30 �C.G. Bell Music: 67) Symbolic History Leonin, c.1160, Judea et Jerusalem, lst Duplum, ARCHIV 14068 (close) French Gothic, c. 1160, S. Transept, Soissons Cathedral, (CGB '59) And now once more, with details from Soissons and Chartres — the perfection of the New Light: Music: 68) 69) 69a) The same, repeated French Gothic 1194-1225, North Ambulatory, columns and windows, Chartres (CGB '59) French Gothic, 1194-1225, South Aisle of Choir, Chartres (CGB '74) French Glass, c. 1150, West Lancets and Rose, Chartres (video divides to lancets first, then rose) (close Leonin) Such keenness of discovery, within the veneration of sacred authority, Va70) 70) Mont-Saint-Michel, Chapel, 11th-cent. Nave and late 15th-cent. Choir (returning to slide 6 of this show, CGB '74) French Romanesque, 11th-12th cent., and Gothic, 13th cent., from Nave into Choir, Le Mans Cathedral (CGB '74); + V details is visibly attested by those dual constructions (as Mont-Saint-Michel earlier, and here Le Mans) where a Gothic choir launches itself from the round-archings of a Romanesque nave. And in music too, the Leonin two-part, the huge Perotin three- and four-part organa, expand their resources in the ritual embrace of plainsong. No correlation of one living polarity with another presents a true match. Romanesque is not (as popularly conceived) quite cognate with plainsong, nor polyphony with Gothic — since the new Romanesque already embodies, with note-for-note organum, the principles from which Gothic would spring. But to the extent that Christendom with its patristic reverence continually shapes contrasts of new and old, a Perotin Quadruplum (here from the Deller "Vidêrunt Omnes") 71) Le Mans, outside, from the Northwest, Romanesque nave and Gothic transept (CGB '74) August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 31 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History may accompany the Gothic east-end of Le Mans as it springs from the lower containment of the nave. Music: Perotin, c. 1220(?), from "Vidêrunt Omnes" (2nd sect. plainsong, and 4-voice, from "Jubilate") BG-S 5045 72) Same, Le Mans, 11th-12th cent. N. aisle of Nave (CGB '74) 1st 73) Same, 13th cent., Choir, buttressing, from the NE (CGB '74) 1st 74) Same, Choir, interior, N side, with columns (CGB '74); video makes two views of the vertical slide, above, then below (with plainsong close) (with Quadruplum) (fade Perotin) Here, even in the Gothic choir, the supporting columns preserve the stability of Romanesque — as the quadruplum not only follows, but itself rests on plainsong. Va2nd 73) Lower section of slide 76 ff., detail of Apse arches and windows (CGB '74) 2nd 73 and 74) A closer copy of 1st 73, above (CGB '74) Though with the tour-de-force of Le Mans choir, we should play the liveliest recorded Quadruplum (attributed to Perotin), a motet of victory over death — Mors — sung after de Van's death by his masterly syncopators. Music: Attributed to Perotin, c. 1220(?), 4-voice Motet, "Mors," from OL 232 V2nd 74) Same, interior, S. side of Choir from N. Transept (CGB '74); lower detail 75) Le Mans Choir, S side, from N Aisle: arches and clerestory (CGB '74) 76) Same, Apse: arches, windows, and vault, (CGB '74; lower spread has been videoed as Va2nd 73; here, video uses only the upper spread) 77) Same, from S. Aisle: rhythm of arch and piers (CGB '74; after which, video reverts to upper detail of slide 74) (end Mors) August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 32 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In this return to high-Gothic, the style we compared at the beginning to dawn, it may seem that we have misapplied the metaphor, since in the display of Le Mans choir, we are already in the blaze of Gothic sun. From which soul may well long back to the mystical glimmer of true dawn, as from these canny rhythms to the shifting "Duplum vel Purum" of Leonin. Va78) 78) 78a) 78b) V78c) Chartres, 1145: a wider view, right of the main portal Same, Kings and Queens of Judah: the four figures to the right of the Main Portal; first, a video detail of the central two Same, detail of the King second from the left; video uses V78a, another King Same, detail of another of the Queens Same, detail of still another King of Judah Back where the Kings and Queens of Judah smile from the columnar distance of Chartres. The road there is of Grail romance, Chretien's Knight of the Cart, where Lancelot crosses the bridge of a single sword to rescue Guinevere (always such sacred resonances) from "the Land from which no Stranger returns". Those Arthurian knights inhabit the anagogical dream, before the codification of space, time and cause ("Why, when, and where?") sapped the life of chivalry. There men swim in telepathic mystery: Lancelot rides to the queen's rescue before he could have learned of her capture; he mounts the shameful cart on the blind promise of news — a disgrace of which everyone thereafter is aware, even the Queen in the other country, who blames him, not for mounting, but for the converse love-fault of a moment's hesitation. With how spectral a smile the lover in that realm gazes from a castle window at the glimpsed procession of the Queen, her captor and the wounded Kay: a79) 79) 79a) Still Chartres, c. 1150, Angel of the Sundial; + V detail Same, but the plaster cast, Musée des Monuments, Paris (CGB '80); video shows details only Back to a detail of the Chartres original (a79); video: head only And early at the dawning hour The gentle lady of the tower Called for the sacrament of mass, And waked the knights and bid them dress; And when the mass was sung and said, The one knight sat with pensive head (He who had ridden in the cart) August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 33 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History At a little window just apart, And looked into the open land. To the other window near at hand The maiden came, and as she stood, My lord Gawain with her abode And spoke with her a word or two, But what they spoke I do not know; Their private words I cannot tell, But as they leaned on the window sill, Along the fields by a river clear They saw one carried in a bier. It was a wounded knight who was borne, And by his side to weep and mourn Three maidens walked in sorrow strong. After the bier there followed along A company, and at their head A proud knight rode in arms, and led A lady by the bridle rein. And that knight saw it was the Queen. At the high window still he stood And followed her as long as he could With eager eyes and with delight Until she had passed out of his sight. And when he saw that she was gone, He thought at once to throw him down And break his body on the stones. (CGB) As in the enigmatic smile of the Chartres Angel of the Sundial, childish simplicity here is of a piece with magic skill. Va80) b80) c80) Vd80) Ve80) Vf80) Again, Chartres, 1145-50, (from b43, above) A Queen of Judah; detail of face only Return to upper half of 79, Angel of the Sundial, plaster cast, Musée des Monuments, Paris (CGB '80); video shows face only Provence, c. 1169, Beardless Prophet (or St. Michael?) from the façade of St. Gilles du Garde, near Arles (waist up); + V detail Return to Christ detail of 41, above: Gislebertus, Christ and the Magdalene, S. Lazare, Autun (CGB '80) Return to face of Moissac, C. 1130, Prophet holding a scroll, detail of 43, above Return to head of Angel of the Sundial, Chartres, from 79a, above August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 34 �C.G. Bell 80) Symbolic History Again, head of St. Gilles du Garde, c. 1160, Beardless Prophet, detail of c80, above Such the sustained-tone melting through love's discords into the octave or fifth. Such the recovered paradise in the Easter sequence by Abelard's succesor Adam de Saint Victor — the "paradisi gaudium" which is also the springtime of earth: Coelum fit serenius, Et Mare tranquillius, Spirat aura levius, Vallis nostra floruit. The heavens quiet be And tranquil is the sea, The winds blow tenderly, The vales of our land flower. (CGB) The Gilles-du-Garde beardless prophet is a paradigm of that lyrical self-giving. How the face blends with emasculated Abelard's Easter hymn, another paradise recovered: Vera Jerusalem est illa civitas ... Jerusalem is the city Of everlasting peace... There finds the dreamer waking Truth beyond dreaming far, Nor is the heart's possessing Less than the heart's desire. (Waddell) So too the promise of Leonin's "Judea and Jerusalem," twice heard, and now, triune: Music: August 6, 1995 Again Leonin, Judea et Jerusalem, lst duplum, from ARC 14068 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 35 � 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 Gothic Prelude : Lux Nova, Symbolic History, Part 8 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 8 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_08_Gothic_Prelude--Lux_Nova 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/28d0df56f8bc8510021493cf3e33b1e7.pdf c1cc00dee656e89e1c1bd7eff23b09e1 PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 9. Gothic Ground and Vault CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 September 1995 Last Revised January ‘96 �Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 9. Gothic Ground and Vault a1) Early Christian (Antioch) 6th century, Vienna Genesis, Flood, detail, left side, National Library, Vienna English Gothic, 13th cent., Grapes from the Promised Land, from a window in the Corona of Canterbury Cathedral Whole of a1; + V: detail of right side b1) 1) Music: Ambrosian Chant 5th cent. ff., Tenebrae factae sunt, ARC 2533 284 "The Old Testament," Augustine says in The City of God, "is nothing but the New covered by a veil, and the New Testament is the unveiling of the Old… What Scripture tells of Abraham really happened, but it was at the same time a prophetic image of things to come." From Paul through the Dark Ages (Isidore of Seville, Bede, Irish Crosses) that Doctrine of Correspondence sounds Biblical resonances — in the rise to Gothic, pointing prediction to some heretical today or tomorrow. So from Suger's St.-Denis, Joachim de Floris points his Eternal Gospel. This Flood of the 6th century Vienna Genesis must unveil the always expected coming. Yet here, as with Augustine (or the chant named for Ambrose), the Classical heritage still clothes timeless symbol in the suavities of earth. (Fade Ambrosian) 2) 2a) 2b) 9/2/95 Double. [A] North African(?) 7th cent., Ashburnham Pentateuch, Flood, Nouv. Acq. Lat. 2234 f.9, Bibl. Nat., Paris; and [B] Franco-Spanish (Landes) c. 1050, Flood, St.-Severs Apocalypse, MS Lat. 8878 f.85, Bibl. Nat., Paris A of 2; V: detail only B of 2; V: two details only Gothic Ground and Vault 1 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Music: Gregorian (de Van) from AS 34 B, last "a" of Alleluia, then "Pascha," etc. With the Ashburnham Pentateuch a century later (left) the temporal veil is being stripped away, preparing for the ultimate destruction of the St-Severs Apocalypse (right) about 1050 — that dimensionless vision to which medieval Realism would reduce the sensory itself. In Dark Age chronicles such fabulous Judgment walks over Europe. Flodoard, 944: Balls of fire were seen rushing through the air, which in their flight set houses ablaze, but when faced by the cross and holy water they were driven away… It is said that demons in the shape of horsemen destroyed a church, then used its timbers to beat down the walls of a building of strong cement that had long stood on Montmartre. Yet at the heart of that ghostly world of hardening chant (Fade Gregorian) and of Guido's Diaphony (Music: Guido, brief example of contrary motion; then close) a colossal energy has been released, which points to another future: 3) Paulo Uccello 1447-48, The Flood, detail., Santa Maria Novella, Florence (CGB ‘86); + V detail Closer detail of 3, Uccello's Flood 3a) Music: Binchois, c. 1430(?), Inter natos mulierum, L'Oiseau Lyre 128 (78) the Christian reconquest, in the faith frame, of dimensional actuality. From the first awakening, the Romanesque had set unconscious sights on what by the 15th century and Uccello would be clear, the perspectival endowment of the sacred with the incarnate power of Renaissance — in music, Binchois. (Fade Binchois.) 4) Mosaic copy c. 50 BC of Greek painting c. 300 B.C. Battle of Alexander, detail (Darius group), Museo Nazionale, Naples V4a) V detail of Alexander not shown in slide 4 Music: Greek 2nd cent. BC, First Delphic Hymn, close, J.E. Butt, private recording Was not the world loss foreshadowed in the chromatics of the Delphic Ode, the moody drama of the Hellenistic Battle of Alexander, where marvelous techniques enforce the heaped outwardness of the Platonic cave? (End Delphic Ode) 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 2 �C.G. Bell 5) 5a) Symbolic History Norman French 1066 ff, Bayeux Tapestry, cavalry detail, Bayeux Another tapestry detail; + V return to a detail of 5 Music: Peire Vidal 12th c., Baron de mon dan covit (near close) SAWT 9567-B But by 1066 the battle-joy of Homer is renewed in the fierce Norman (then Troubador) exhilaration of mythic encounter — the Bayeux Tapestry, with Peire Vidal. As in the Song of Roland, stripped zeal precipitates the lines of action: "Where is your sword, which is called Halteclere, With its hilt of gold, with its jewelled gear?" "I had no time to draw," cried Oliver, As he pierced mail with the trunk of a spear. (CGB) "U est vostre espee, ki Halteclere ad num? D'or est li helz e de cristal li punz." "Ne la poi traire," Oliver respunt, Kar de ferir oi jo si grant bosoign." 6) (Fade Vidal) Paolo Uccello, c. 1445, Battle of San Romano, Uffizi, Florence (CGB '59); + V detail Music: Isaac c. 1485(?), A la bataglia, near close, (Munrow) Seraphim SIC-6104 (4) And again that clean renewal bears in linear potentiality the exploratory dynamic of Uccello, the battle music of Isaac. (Fade Isaac.) a2nd 5) French Romanesque, c. 1080. Fresco of St. Michael, Church of St.-Savinsur-Gartempe 2nd 5) Again, Bayeux Tapestry, Surrender of Dinan; V2nd 5a) Bayeux Tapestry, Edward the Confessor As we would know from the Song of Roland — God sent his angel Cherubin, and Saint Michael of the Peril, and Gabriel with them, To bear the Count's soul into Paradise 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 3 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History (or in history from the sanctification of William's conquest of England) — it is hard to distinguish between the secular eruption and its transforming embrace in a church which (as the priest says in Faust) can digest every ill-gotten gain: "kann ungerechtes Gut verdauen." 2nd 6) Uccello, c. 1446, another Battle of San Romano, National Gallery, London; V first pans to a detail By the Italy of Machiavelli's birth, the profane stood on the point of declaring itself as an independent realm having its own values, of which the visual sign is exactly that filling in (like the chordal progressions of music) of its spatial and human weft. Music: a7) 7) Again, Isaac, Battle, close German Romanesque, 11th-12th cent., Michaelskirche, exterior, Hildesheim French Romanesque, 1st half of 12th cent., St.-Pierre, Angouleme, exterior; + V detail Whereas what has seemed most Medieval is the transcending entrainment of earthly power in the sacred synthesis: the 11th- and 12th-century arching and vaulting of the new Romanesque; in theology the reasoned proofs of Anselm; in music the horizon of noteagainst-note polyphony, spread from England to northern Italy and from Spain probably to the Rhine, though German examples are lacking. To experience again that massive forehall to Gothic, hear the first known three-part piece (c. 1130?), a "Congaudeant catholici" from the Compostela MS in Spain, though there ascribed to Magister Albertus of Paris; and with it, this Angouleme, the interior of Le Mans, and — fountainhead of Romanesque in England — the cathedral of Durham. Music: 8) 9) a10) 10) 9/2/95 Campostela MS c. 1130(?), Congaudeant catholici, 1st and last stanzas: RCA-V-LM 6015 French Romanesque 11th-12th cent., Le Mans, Nave from Aisle (CGB '74) English Norman 11th-12th cent., Durham from below (CGB '80); V details only, first from V9, then from 9 Same, interior, a bay of the south aisle (CGB ‘80) Same, 1104, nave with rib vault (CGB '80); + V detail (End Music) Gothic Ground and Vault 4 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Durham, first cathedral completely ribbed and vaulted in stone, 1104, the transverse arches raised to points, to achieve one height with the semicircular diagonal crossings of the bays. 11) French Romanesque c. 1110-15, South Portal, St.-Pierre, Moissac 11a) French Romanesque, Vezelay Capital, 1120-50, Conversion of St. Eustace 11b) Detail of 11, South Portal, Moissac No doubt these religious structures, by the organizing risk that raised them (agrarian monasteries shading into urban cathedrals), were products of the new economy and temporal sway — that investment bank Saint Bernard accused: "Thus money is drawn up with ropes of money." As if Moissac portal, 1110-15, opened to the Exchange and to Wall Street. Though surely, the abstract ubiquity of greed (cupiditas) differs with every style-complex. Whatever earth awakening — Bernard's "knights… and hunters winding their horns" — this Judgment Gate required, converts to a more than earthly service. Such sacred ingestion fuels the Gothic dialectic of Sic et Non, ground and vault. 12) Irish c. 910, Cross of Muiredach, east side, a video detail Monasterboice, Louth; first, How much more bluntly and somberly of that creed ground was the first monumental stone carving in the West — from the Irish crosses of the early 900's, this of Muiredach at Monasterboice, also a Judgment, flanked, from the sin of Adam and Eve upward by correlated scenes. Without comparison of art value, what this Dark Age precursor lacks is just the melting flash and flow. 13) Same, a panel of Adam & Eve and Cain & Abel Place any detail — this Adam and Eve and the Murder of Abel, in its paleolithic and primitive pre-humanity, heavy pathos and dark vacancy, Abel like a trepanned frog — against a 12th-century cognate: 14) Gislebertus, French c. 1120-40, Flight to Egypt, St.-Lazare, Autun here Gislebertus' Flight to Egypt at Autun; is it not clear that what was to vault from that ground was the fresh humanity of Gothic love? 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 5 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 2nd 13) Muiredach's Cross, west side, panel of Christ giving the Keys and the Book (video first shows a slide of the whole as V2nd a13, then a detail) The motion of Roman Christianity was the repudiation and denial of the material. As long as that downward eddy prevails, we conceive ourselves as in the Dark Ages. But in the tenth century of this Celtic Cross, by paradox and anomaly, the vortex changes sign; the birth force, though of the same creed and timeless loyalty, a2nd 14) Gislebertus 1120-40, Flight to Egypt; V: two details only 2nd 14) Same, Flight to Egypt (CGB '80); + V detail creates (as in Suger) an upward whirl of incorporation, by which the passions of earth are more and more lifted to affirm spirituality. To know how far and how suddenly this nascent tenderness has found (as with Abelard's theory of atonement) the Western road of sensuous devotion, we have only, from Gislebertus (with the close of a 12th century Benedicâmus, as beautiful as by Leonin), Music: Time of Leonin, Benedicâmus Domino, close, (Cape) EMS 201 (End Benedicâmus) 15) 15a) Gentile da Fabriano, 1423, Flight into Egypt, Magi predella, Uffizi, Florence (CGB '48); + V details Landscape detail of 15, to the left to leap three centuries, to the soft Italian mingling of Gothic and early Renaissance in Gentile da Fabriano's handling of the same Gospel scene, smoothing the brushwork of nature and the human caress — while we shift in music to a passage from Dunstable's "Quam pulchra es," sung by the same Brussel's Pro Musica Antiqua. MUSIC: a16) b16) 16) 9/2/95 Dunstable c 1425(?), from Quam pulchra es, near close, ARC 3052 (Fade Dunstable.) Italian, (Castelseprio) 8th-9th cent.(?), Presentation in the Temple, Santa Maria foris Portas; + V details, drawing first from Va16 Same, detail from the Flight into Egypt Same, detail of an angel from the Nativity Gothic Ground and Vault 6 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History There must have been Dark Age arts which stood outside the church, unincorporated, even in defiance; but what was then rare is now irrecoverable. If the secular paintings of Charlemagne's palace showed precursive talent, our nearest approach is in the startling humanity of the sacred frescoes found at Castelseprio. So too with Charlemagne's collection of German songs destroyed by his son Louis the Pious for their pagan license. Music: Verona 10th-11th c., O admirabile Veneris ydolum, RCA-V-LM 6015 (2) Only with the 10th and 11th centuries and in Latin, do manuscripts begin to record the passionate songs that boil up from the cauldron of student loves — this to a boy, "Veneris ydolum." (End O admirabile) Others are known only as poems: Iam, dulcis amica, venito Come, dear as my heart to me, come sweetheart, into my chamber … 17) 17a) 17b) Spanish Romanesque 12th cent., Shepherd, fresco detail from San Isidoro vault, Leon North Italian 940 and 13th cent., ruins of Castle of Canossa Spanish Romanesque mid-12th cent., whole vault of 17: Annunciation to the Shepherds; V has only details A poem touched with nature and romantic anticipation: Alone in the wood I have loved hidden places Ego fui sola in silva et dilexi loca secreta. So too the 11th century Catalan "Veri dulcis." Music: Barcelona 11th cent., Carmina: Veri dulcis, MHS OR433 Where are the visual parallels? The castle ruins have lost their tapestries. Theocritan delights in Spanish Romanesque are Biblical, details of Christ's birth announced to the shepherds. Are these stiff pastorals reminders of vernal precursors, where northern stock had flowed out into the Graeco-Roman and Byzantine-Moorish 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 7 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History challenge of former cultures — as if in cultural combustion that heavy German fuel kindled first in thinnest attenuations? (Fade Veri dulcis) 18) Byzantine, 10th cent., David playing the harp, with Melody & Echo; Bibl. Nat., Paris; first a video detail In Byzantium there was no such admixture. In that unviolated sanctum of Classical lore, it had been easy, in the awakening which began there also in the 10th century, to revive ancient forms (though this River God, Melody, and Echo attend David playing his harp); but the facility was a measure of the unfertilized and retrospective thinness of the achievement. a19) 19) 19a) Sicilian Byzantine (Norman and Moorish), 1174, Ceiling of the Crossing, Monreale Cathedral Sicilian, later 12th cent., Hunting mosaic, Sala Normana, Pal. Reale, Palermo; + V detail French, Mosan (Verdun), 12th cent. (Attributed to Godefroi de Claire), Centaur, enamel, Louvre, Paris Music: 12th cent.(?) from Carmina Burana, Tempus transit gelidum, SAWT 9455 A And it seems almost a law of nature that the prodigy of Norman germination in the Sicilian soil of life-styles, Graeco-Byzantine and Persian-Moslem, which made 12th century Palermo the rich and enlightened wonder-city of Europe, should fulfill the proverb, "tost allumes, tost estaintes" — "Soon kindled, soon burnt out" — though the flare touched off a succession of Holy Empire darings, always more anti-clerical and preNietzchean — from the Carmina Burana to Frederick the Second. (Fade Tempus transit) In Romance France, a like fusion of strains and ideas produced (after the Eastern stimulus of the First Crusade) a wider break with the gaunt creed-ground (this enamel from the Meuse). a20) b20) 9/2/95 France, early 12th cent., Initials from Citeaux MSS: Fighting a dragon, and Monk cutting grain; Dijon, Bibl. Municipale; video takes them singly. Romanesque Languedoc c. 1130, Prophet holding a scroll, Portal. St.-Pierre, Moissac Gothic Ground and Vault 8 �C.G. Bell 20) 20a) 20b) Symbolic History French Romanesque c. 1120, St. Michael from a capital of Priory Church, Perrecy-les-Forges Abraham Smith c. 1593, Venus chastising Cupid, plaster relief, Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire Gislebertus (Burgundian) c. 1120-40, Eve, detail of upper body. St.-Lazare, Autun At the center of the whole Troubador (and Trouvere) motion of knighthood, courtly love, music and decorative art, verse itself may stand as a proto-Renaissance indicator. Against the heavy tread or the short-lined brittle sharpness of Church Latin, the rhythms, the stanza forms of Provence expatiate in the veiled aesthetics of pentameter yearning — which would spread to Italy and from Petrarch back over Europe, slowly ripening from the mystery of Romanesque devotion, to the swelling harmonies of Renaissance. There is no clear road from the stridence of the Gothic sequence — When for spite and malediction Wretches feel the flames' affliction Render me thy benediction — (CGB) to Spenser's measure: One day I wrote her name upon the strand. But the 12th century pentameters of Blondel: A l'entrant d'esté, que li tans comence — At the start of summer when the dance begins — are on the way to that — or to Shakespeare: From you I have been absent in the spring … 21) V21a) 21b) 21c) Provence late 12th cent., Cloister, Saint-Trophime, Arles Limoges, early 13th cent., Violist and Dancing Girl, Nat. Mus., Copenhagen Limoges c. 1200, Fiddler and Dancing Woman, British Museum, London Variant of St.-Trophime Cloister; + V detail of 21 As the melody points to Ars Nova, Dowland, recitative. 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 9 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Let Max Meili's Anthologie Sonore recording sound (in the dearth of secular art) where the love and warmth of Provence linger, in the cloister of Saint-Trophime at Arles: Music: Blondel de Nestles 12th cent., A l'entrant d'este (Meili) AS 18 (End) That the Troubador thrust was also violent, a22) b22) 22) V22a) 22b) St.-Trophime, Arles, C. 1180, John and Peter from West Portal Same, East Cloister, Capitals, Monster (Samuel Adams' slide) Provence, c. 1160-70, Main Portal, St.-Gilles-du-Garde, detail of Paul and James; with V22 variant Same, detail: archangels in a niche French, c. 1260(?), MS Initial R, fighting figures; Bible from Monastery of St.-André-au-Bois, Boulogne, Bibl. Mun. Bertrand de Born makes unforgettable as he stalks with the Sowers of Discord through Dante's Hell, a passage Pound (who also "dug him up" in a Sestina: "May God damn forever all who cry 'Peace'!") has paraphrased: Surely I saw, and still before my eyes Goes on that headless trunk, that bears for light Its own head swinging, gripped by the dead hair, And like a swinging lamp that says, "Ah me! I severed men, my head and heart Ye see here severed, my life's counterpart." Not even the volcanic Roman revivals of St.-Gilles-du-Garde, near Arles, stage such tragic outbreak. Only the history itself — as always with a prophetic art, love and song, commerce, religious reform and personal mysticism simultaneously asserting themselves, the heretical movement of the Cathari, or Pure Ones, rising to a genuine revolt against the Roman Church, until it was suppressed (early 13th century) in the crusade which devastated the most flourishing region of France. 23) Gilles-du-Garde, c. 1170, Young Apostle [detail of next slide] That the carvings of St.-Gilles-du-Garde should range from the gentle humanity of this youthful apostle 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 10 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 2nd 22) Gilles-du-Garde, four Apostles from an Ascension panel; video uses two bearded heads on the left, then whole to the almost daemonic stare of these Reform precursors, evokes the recurrent ambivalence of 12th century — the arts a continual bridge over the temporal cleavage, a symbolic containment of the historical tragedy. 2nd 23) From Gilles-du-Garde porch, The Good Shepherd, relief V2nd 23a) Same, base of columns, Lion (Samuel Adams' slide) V2nd 23b) Video returns to detail of 2nd 23, The Good Shepherd It was the beauty and exposure of Troubador love that it enjoyed an aristocratic island of proto-Renaissance refinement, a sort of detachment from "the fierce dispute/ Betwixt damnation and impassioned clay" — though it turned out hardly island enough — a brief chance for romance pentameters of love's idolatry. 24) Burgundy, 1120-50, Vezelay, Capital in the Nave, Seduction by Profane Music; + V details Music: Carmina Burana 12th cent., from 16: Michi confer venditor, MHS 3793 Not so with the Goliards or Wandering Scholars, fired in the crucible of church and state. The 12th century amplification of passion they share with this Vezelay capital of the Devil and Profane Music (as with the Carmina Burana Magdalen tempted by unguents), was both in and out of the church, a ferment where the Dark Age ground sprouts sexual vegetation, to seed over centuries the love gardens of Bosch. For the Creed-ground (to repeat) is ideal. There is no historical winter when Christendom merely sheltered in the ascetic fold. Even in the 9th century there had been Gottschalk, 300-year precursor of the Archpoet, who comes now: "seething inwardly with fierce indignation," — "Estuans instrinsecus/ ira vehementi" — that Archipoeta, most eruptive peak of 12thcentury genius — (End Michi confer venditor) 25) Another Vezelay capital, Lewdness and Despair; + V details Music: 9/2/95 Carmina Burana 12th(?) cent., 88a: Jove cum Mercurio (Binkley) SAWT 9455-A Gothic Ground and Vault 11 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History a Rhenish Villon who flames an obscure course over Europe in the train of the Archbishop of Cologne and the Italian court of Barbarossa — a man who saves us from easy generalizations about the Age of Faith: (Waddell) Seething over inwardly With fierce indignation, In my bitterness of soul, Hear my declaration. I am of one element, Levity my matter, Like another withered leaf For the winds to scatter. Yet the mould-breaker is also of the age, betraying in self-twisted intensity the marks of the faith-grip he opposed. Like the Despair and tit-tugging Lust on another Vezelay capital, his energy flames against its own. Greedier for all delight/ Than heaven to enter in: Since the soul in me is dead,/ Better save the skin. Voluptatis avidus/ magis quam salutis, mortuus in anima/ curam gero cutis. 26) Winchester, mid-12th cent., Angel locking Hell, Psalter of Henry of Blois, British Museum, London; + V details (also using V26) How could earthly blessing unfold, held in a timeless creed which turns its wishes into deadly sins, its peace to sloth, its love to lust, appetite to gluttony, nobility to pride, commerce and politics to covetous envy and wrath? No wonder there are kingly crowns in this Leviathan mouth of Hell. Had not Gregory VII declared (1081) Who does not know that kings and leaders are sprung from those who — ignorant of God — by pride, plunder, perfidy, murders — in a word by almost every crime, the devil, who is the prince of this world, urging them on — have striven with blind cupidity and intolerable presumption to dominate over their equals: namely over men? 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 12 �C.G. Bell 27) Symbolic History Moissac, c. 1125-30, Gluttony and Lust, Portal of St.-Pierre, Mus. des Monuments (CGB '80); + V details When Greek δαιµων, or spirit, became "demon," no temporal power was left without its damning name — the Seven Deadly Sins. Let them dance. Staggering, within the medieval energizing of earth and counterforce intensification of hell, the vitality of that dance. (Fade Jove cum Mercurio) The liveliest thing in the 12th century English "Rule for Nuns" (Awncren Rule) are those condemned sins, grinning at their late-Gothic followers in Langland, Dunbar, the mystery plays: The Greedy Glutton's heart is in the dishes; his thought is in the cup; his life is in the barrel; his soul is in the crock. He comes with a dish in one hand and a bowl in the other; he slobbers his words and holds his great belly, and the fiend laughs as if he would burst. (CGB) 28) Gislebertus, c. 1120-40, Fall of Simon Magus, St.-Lazare, Autun; + V details The Archpoet's freedom becomes satanic mockery, even, it seems, of communion: Sweeter tastes the wine to me In a tavern tankard Than the watered stuff my Lord Bishop hath decanted. His taking Christ's claim for the adulterous woman as his own plays (like this Gislebertus Simon Magus) with defiant mockery: "Let him who has no knowledge of sin hurl at me the stone." There is no art parallel for the climax of that Goliard confession; yet it hovers between the grotesques of damnation, 29) South Tyrol, late 12th century, Fighting Monsters fresco, S. Jacobo, Termeno; + V detail and their Tyrolean transformation into fighting monsters, anticipating both Renaissance and again Hieronymus Bosch. (Music: pick up close of Jove cum Mercurio) 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 13 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Meum est propositum/ in taberna mori For on this my heart is set:/ When the hour is nigh me, Let me in the tavern die,/ With a tankard by me, While the angels looking down/ Joyously sing o'er me, Deus sit propitius/ Huic potatori. Grant grace and favor, Lord, to this drunken toper. (End Jove cum Mercurio) For 2nd 28 and 27) Again 24, Seduction by Profane Music (Video begins with Lust detail of 27) Even Troubador love could catch the sharpening frenzy, as in the rhyme-saturated "Kalenda Maia" (The first of May), which Raimbaut de Vaqueiras wrote for his lady (about 1200) at the court of Monferrat in Piedmont — of five versions the wildest. Music: Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, c. 1200, from Kalenda Maia, Everest 3270, last stanza Curious to read in the Troubador Vida that the Estampida, or stamp-dance on which it is based, had just been played by two wandering fiddlers from Northern France. For 2nd 26 and 2nd 25) Again 25, Lewdness and Despair (with video tit-tugging detail) The pounding tune and rhythm pierce Troubador devotion like a Gothic invasion: sinners locked in hell; the despair of lust: "How can I have lost what I never had … I never held you naked in my arms … I have pledged and desired without return:" Con er perduda/ ni m'er renduda …/ qe nuda/ tenguda/ no-us ai/ ni d'als vencuda/ volguda,/ cresuda/ vos ai,/ ses autr' ajuda. (End Kalenda Maia) For 2nd 24) 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 14 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History French Romanesque c. 1100, Wives Restraining Brawlers, from capital at St.Hilaire, Poitiers, Mus. des Monuments Français, Paris (CGB '80); + V detail (Slide 2nd 24a repeats 27, Moissac.) But the Paris of Abelard's love, mutilation, and earth-denial was the focus of that vitality, inseparable from its fever — 12th century music suspended between melting organum purum and the strident rhythmic modes of stress scansion: Dic Christi Veritas/ dic cara raritas, dic rara Caritas,/ ubi nunc habitas? Where is the dear rarity,/ Where the rare Charity Truth of Christ,/ sooth, where placed? (CGB) John of Salisbury, about 1175, in thought a liberal, could not countenance that lashing of Gregorian: "Music," he said, "defiles the service of religion." Here an instrumental Benedicâmus, like the church carvings Bernard blamed, monsters and brawling devils: Music: French, late 12th(?) cent., Benedicâmus Domino, Instr., opening and close, O.L. AUT-231 For 3rd 25 and 3rd 26) Gislebertus, 1120-40 Judgment: detail of sinner grasped by the head; Autun (Video adds detail from 28, Simon Magus) For 3rd 27) Southern French, Moissac c. 1125-30, Death of a Miser, Portal of St.-Pierre, Museum des Monuments Français (CGB ‘80) V 3rd 27a) English Romanesque, c 1130, Adam and Eve Fresco, west wall of Chancel, St. Botolph's, Hardham, Sussex For 3rd 28) Gislebertus c. 1120-40, Devil detail from capital of Judas Hanged, St.-Lazare, Autun 2nd 29) Detail of 29, Fighting Monsters fresco, South Tyrol (End Benedicâmus) The 12th-century heightening of person and passion stretches the Romanesque everywhere, from Italy or Tyrol (as here), 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 15 �C.G. Bell 30) 30a) Symbolic History English Norman & Celtic, c. 1145, Kilpeck Portal (CGB '65) Spanish Romanesque-Gothic, 1188, Central Arch, Portico de la Gloria, Santiago de Campostela to the British marches of Wales — Kilpeck, where the wreathing blend of Norman, Celtic, Viking bears motifs from the pilgrimage route south, as far as Santiago de Campostela in Spain. To the institutions of the Church, what fantastic power, and what risk, that ferment of worship, as popular as zealous, boiling toward its peak. Va31) b31) Vc31) 31) French Romanesque, Moissac c. 1120, St. Peter, left jamb of south portal, Tarn-et-Garonne, SW France Gislebertus (Burgundian) 1120-40, Temptation of Christ, Capital, St.Lazare, Autun (CGB '80; Museum des Monuments Français) French Pyrenees 11th cent., The Black Virgin, Church of Dorres English Romanesque carving, 12th cent., Raising of Lazarus, detail, Chichester Cathedral Faith as never before; heresies as never before; and the heretics, as Shaw's inquisitor says, "to all appearances better than their neighbors." In that Christendom of strange fervors — the blessed French Father Abraham (of all names), on whose pure lips, in vision, the Mother of God pressed the chaste kiss of her mouth, so graced with spirit that when he came in the presence of Jews he reeled from the hell-smell of sulphur and brimstone; pious Bernard quoting pious Jerome, "Be cruel for Christ's sake," lashing Europe (1146) to the Crusading mood which by 1212 would lure an army of children into slavery — how tense the participation in Biblical drama and pain. The Chichester Lazarus carvings, 1125-50, through the crudeness of local craft, voice such a cry as Abelard's of David, a death-lament for himself and Heloise: "If the stilled harp could still my tears …" …raucis planctu vocibus/ deficit et spiritus. a32) Vb32) c32) 9/2/95 Irish, especially 12th-13th cent., The Rock of Cashel, Tipperary English Romanesque c. 1180, Apostles with Angel above, relief, east wall of south porch, Malmesbury Abbey, Wiltshire Provence, Romanesque, 1110-20, God throned and crowned, detail of Tympanum, Moissac Gothic Ground and Vault 16 �C.G. Bell 32) Symbolic History French Romanesque-Gothic, c. 1200, St. Etienne, Portal Statue, Church of Valcabrere, Haute Garonne The intenser the drive, the more the perimeter flames with heresy, and the faithcenter hardens to a stripped decretal of zeal: Hegel's "antithesis unharmonized." Yet in that warfare the birth and human ripening, the temporal incorporation, goes on. Over what gulfs of canonized and unaccommodated selfhood. Thus Coulton's case of "heretical puritanism" from about 1160: Master Gervase of Tilbury, seeing a maiden alone in a vineyard, and impelled by the wanton curiosity of youth (as we have heard from his own mouth in later years when he was a canon) asked her what she did there alone, and observing her comeliness, prayed her of love par amours. "Nay," replied she, with a simple gesture and a certain gravity in her words; "God forbid… for if I were defiled and lost my virginity, I should suffer eternal damnation beyond all help." Hearing which, Master Gervase forthwith knew her for one of the impious sect of Publicans (or Cathari), who in those days were sought out on every hand and destroyed… 33) V33a) 9/2/95 French Illumination, 2nd half of 12th cent., St. Gregory, MS Lat. 2287 fol. 1, verso, Bibl. Nat., Paris English (Winchester) mid-12th cent., Christ's Passion, MS Cotton Nero C.IV, sheet 21r, British Museum, London Gothic Ground and Vault 17 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History So the girl is arraigned and, in the end, by "righteous cruelty," burned to death, "to the admiration of many, who marked how she uttered no sighs… as the martyrs of Christ (yet for how different a cause!)." While the good old Canon could tell it in age as a Catholic act of care. Such channeling and containment of the holy madness which might otherwise have torn the Middle Ages apart is an organizing subtlety of the Scholastic and Gothic buttressing. 34) V34a) French Gothic c. 1145-1225, Cathedral of Chartres, rising over the wheat fields of Beauce Same, 1145-50, part of West Front (CGB '59; cf. 41ff) The most quoted document from Coulton's Medieval Garner is Abbot Haimon's description of church-building by miraculous crusade. Though he writes of his own church of St.-Pierre-sur-Dives in Normandy, and only mentions the like case of Chartres, it is generally to the Chartres construction of 1145 (and sometimes even, by confusion of fires, of 1194) that selections, sweetened and sentimentalized, are made to apply. Though the devotions Haimon narrates are as remarkable for rapt ruthlessness as for piety. a35) b35) 35) Chartres, from the Royal Portal: Kings and Queens of Judah, French Romanesque, c. 1150, Christ and Apostles, Loaves and Fishes, a capital from St.-Nectaire (Puy-de-Dôme) (CGB '80; Mus. Mon.) Chartres, Royal Portal, A King of Judah Whoever saw, whoever heard, in generations past that kings and princes, the mighty of this world, men and women puffed up with honor and riches, should bind bridles on their proud necks and submit themselves to wagons which, like brute beasts, they dragged, loaded with corn, wine, oil, lime, stones, beams — all things needed to sustain life or build churches — even to Christ's abode. And though a thousand are bound in the traces (so vast the mass, so great the engine) this miracle is seen, they go forward in such silence that no murmur is heard… When, again, they pause on the way, there is no voice but confession of guilt, supplication, and prayer to God for pardon. 36) 36a) Limoges enamel, c. 1180, Christ in Majesty, Museum de Cluny, Paris French stained glass, c. 1150, from the Ascension, 2nd window, south aisle, Cathedral of Le Mans; video chooses two details If any, however, is so sunk in sin that he will not obey the pious admonition of the priests to confess and forgive, his offering is cast 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 18 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History down from the wagon as unclean, and he, with shame and ignominy, is separated from the unity of the sacred people… There the sick rise from wagons where they were laid; the faithful fall to the ground and kiss the earth again and again, old men and young, and children, crying upon the Mother of God. For this work is especially known to be hers, next to her gentle Son; she first adorned the Cathedral of Chartres, and then our church dedicated to her with so many signs and wonders… Va37) 37) Cathedral of Laon, 1190-1205, Statues from the West Portal (CGB ‘59) French Romanesque, c. 1130, Isaiah, portal, Abbey of Souillac, Perigord (for slide 37 from Skira, video uses CGB, Museum des Monuments Français — so too digital) When they had come to the church, the wagons were arrayed around it like a spiritual camp; all night the army of the Lord kept watch with psalms and hymns. Wax tapers were lighted, the infirm were set apart, relics of the saints were brought to their relief… If, however, the healing was somewhat delayed, then all might have been seen putting off their clothes — men and women alike, naked from the loins upward, casting away confusion and lying upon the earth. 38) V38a) Senlis Cathedral, 1154, Death of the Virgin (cf. slide 38 from Enc. Ital., with CGB '80 from Museum des Monuments Français, Paris) French, c. 1150, Eagle of Suger, from St.-Denis Treasury, Louvre, Paris Their example was followed even more devoutly by children and infants, who dragged themselves flat on their bellies first to the high altar and then to all others, calling upon the Mother of Mercy in this new fashion of prayer. Who would not be moved as he watched the innocent children scour their naked ribs on the bare ground, in pious humility stretching their tender arms to be beaten with rods? For it did not suffice them to cry out with the voice of weeping, but they must add bodily affliction also, to obtain healing for those sick. 39) French Romanesque c. 1130, Destruction of the World, door pillar, Souillac, Perigord (digital: first, upper detail) The priests stood over them, shedding tears while they beat with scourges on the tender limbs; and the children begged them not to withhold their hand. All voices echoed the same cry, "Smite, scourge, lash, and spare not." There might be seen more than a thousand hands 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 19 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History outstretched to the scourge; nay, they exposed their very ears and eyes and tongues, saying "Let these hands be smitten which have wrought iniquity, these ears lashed which have heard vanity, these eyes which have seen it, this tongue and these lips which have uttered idle and lying words!" a40) 40) Gislebertus 1120-40, The Adoration of the Magi, Capital of St.-Lazare, Autun French Romanesque c. 1160, Apostle, S. Gilles-du-Garde, near Arles; + V detail Truly the Mother of Mercy is moved to compassion on those who afflict themselves before her; for soon the sick and infirm leap forth healed from wagon after wagon, hastening without support to give thanks at her altar… This is the manner of their vigils, these their night-watches; this is the order of the Lord's camp; these the forms of the new religion, the heaven-taught rites and mystical processions. Here nothing carnal is seen, nothing earthly, all is divine, as in Heaven; heavenly altogether are such vigils, wherein is heard nothing but hymns, thanks, and praise! From this creative vortex, fulminating with heresy and holy wars, yet quickening the earth as with rain, a41) b41) Vc41) d41) Ve41) 41) Chartres, 1145-1513, Cathedral over the town (CGB '74) Nantes Cathedral, c. 1170 ff., Nave, looking west (CGB '74) Suger, St.-Denis, 1140-44, Ambulatory, (copy of CGB ‘74, Gothic I ‘62) Chartres, 1145-1225, buttresses of the Apse (CGB ‘74) Soisson Choir, 1160-1212, arches and glass (CGB '59) Chartres, West Front, 1145-65 (CGB '59); video picks two details the Cathedral of Chartres was reared. While in schismatic Constantinople, 1204 (the present Chartres rebuilding after the final fire) Christian zeal pillaged the city, burning the great body of Greek literature — all the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, preserved until then. Gothic glows with sweetness and light, but it was not made of sweetness and light. In the performances of Leonin and Perotin, two trends were shown from the start: Cape's Pro Musica, of Brussels, refined a lilting tenderness (duplum purum) in which they have never been matched. 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 20 �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History From Leonin's Judea et Jerusalem, from 2nd Duplum, ARC 14068 (Fade) While the Van group (Paris), with the sopraniste Archimbaud, to be followed by Oberlin in New York and others, beat the structural frenzy of rhythm: Music: From the 2nd Quadruplum of Perotin's Vidêrunt, OL, Alb. 78 (Fade) Early Gothic requires the blending of these poles. But the only performances to do it are older still, by Yves Tinayre, on Lumen. No one else has poured the mystical tenderness into the stern severities of structure. Though projections of a modern search, they are as moving as anything in the musical repertory. Music: 42) 43) Va44) Vb44) 44) Va45) 45) 46) 46a) 47) Va48) 48) 49) 50) V50a) Leonin c. 1180(?), Deum Timê, Org. Duplum, Lumen 32011 Chartres, Royal Portal, 1145-75, rebuilt 1194-1225 (CGB '59) Chartres, Interior, 1194-1225, Nave from South Transept (CGB '59); video, two details only, below and above Whole of slide 46, to be detailed below, Chartres, bay of north Nave, with Triforium and Clerestory (CGB '59) Variant of 44, but a copy of Gothic I, 68 (CGB '59) Chartres, interior, Ambulatory and Lady Chapel (CGB '74) Chartres, Lancet window, Adam & Eve and Good Samaritan (CGB '74) Chartres, South Ambulatory Bay, Zodiac window, etc. (CGB '59) Chartres, Bay of Nave, north side: (Video has shown the whole as Va44; here it details: first, Triforium, then Clerestory) Chartres, Clerestory of Apse (CGB '59; video details from V46a, CGB '78) Chartres, mid-12th cent., Glass, Madonna de la Belle Verriere (Video details from V47, a wider view, and adds a closer detail) Chartres, early 13th cent., North window, lancets and rose (CGB '59; cf. Milton, 26); + V detail Chartres, from North Transept into the Nave (CGB '59) Chartres, c. 1150 (and 1200), West Lancets and Rose (cf. CGB '59) Chartres c. 1150, Royal Portal, Tympanum Christ, from the side Chartres, same subject as 50, from the front (detail of 42) (The above hae been revised for video and digital) 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault (End Deum Timê) 21 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History A certain awe for the experienced oneness of Chartres has let us stretch the Deum Timê of Leonin from the Royal Portal of his youth, to the interior, occasioned (probably after his death) by the 1194 fire. 51) Chartres Cathedral 1194-1220, study from Lesser, Sacred Geometry; + V details That Sacred Geometry, as Lesser's study of the ground plan will imply, rides the spring tide of High Gothic, a formal perfection only Dante, in literature, a hundred years later, achieved. The cult of symbolic number which organizes the Divine Comedy, from its terza rima to its 100 cantos, and through all levels of punishment and reward, has shaped here a trinity of interlinked squares, proportioned as circumscribed and inscribed on the formative circle, under the recurrent factor of the root of 2. From Leonin's "Duplum Purum" we have reached the triune divisions of the metric modes, the melodic and rhythmic repetitions in which Perotin's Clausulae explore the mathematics of the isorhythmic motet. a52) Chartres, 1194-1225, Apse (CGB '59, copy of Bach, a9) 52) French Gothic 1160-1205, Laon, West Front through narrow street (CGB '74); + Video detail Here it is the group formed around Van which intensifies the frenetics of structure. The opening section from the four-voice Vidêrunt might seem a modern excess, if it were not so matched by darings of tower, buttress, and vault — this Laon, then Chartres, Paris, Bourges, Amiens, Le Mans, Rheims: Music: 53) V53a) 54) 55) Va56) 56) 9/2/95 Perotin act. c. 1190-1230, Alleluia Vidêrunt, opening, Ducretet Thompson 320 C 107 Chartres 1194-1225, Apse Buttressing (CGB '74); video uses detail Chartres, flying buttresses of the choir; video uses detail Chartres interior, starkly lighted pier, arch, and vault Paris, 1163-13th cent., Notre Dame, Choir from the south, with Buttressing (CGB '59); video pans to a detail Bourges, 1195-1266, Choir from southeast, buttressing (copy of CGB '84; see Michelangelo, 36) Bourges, pier rising to vault (CGB '84) Gothic Ground and Vault 22 �C.G. Bell 57) 58) V58a) 59) 60) 61) Symbolic History Amiens, mostly 1220-1236, black & white detail of buttressing Le Mans Choir, Apse buttressing (CGB '74) Same, from the north (copy of CGB '74; Gothic I, 73) Le Mans Choir, begun 1217, wide-angle black & white of vault Rheims, 1211-41 ff., from Ambulatory through Nave; video uses detail Rheims 13th cent. and after, air view; + V detail The aerial view of Rheims turns history to symbol: at the core of the time-bomb which is the modern West, towers the prior release of energy in the formal grip of faith, seed of that infinite out-reach which now engulfs it, and for which the Incarnation of God in flesh was the kindling archetype. a62) 62) 62a) Nicolas of Verdun, 1181, Klosterneuburg Altar, near Vienna, the triple spread (Video having prefaced with a detail of 62, Sampson) Same: enamel of Sampson and the Lion From the same Altar: Resurrection of Christ, Klosterneuburg; + V detail Music: Perotin, c. 1200, Vidêrunt, close of last Quadruplum (Munrow) ARC 2565050 B (End) The "Style of 1200" has become a by-word for that great opening tug at the throttle of transforming force. Its most extraordinary representations are the enamel scenes from the Klosterneuburg Altar by Nicholas of Verdun. Here the physical and spatial are so entrained in the surge of spirit that two hundred years of painting — with Giotto at their center — seem anticipated. Yet this Sampson grappling with the lion is more than a pioneer depiction. Like a Perotin dynamic cadence, it means Rebirth, the Harrowing of Hell and wrestling with death — "Surrexit Dominus de sepulcro." And it somehow means it Now. (Close Perotin) 63) 63a) 63b) 63c) V63d) 9/2/95 Nicolas of Verdun, 1181, Klosterneuburg Altar, right side of central panel, 15 scenes (video intersperses various details as named) Same, enamel of Jonah into the whale Same, The Harrowing of Hell (video uses only a detail) Same: from a closer view of twelve scenes, video details four: Passover, Jacob's Promise, Resurrection, Sampson with the Gates of Gaza Same: "The Brazen Sea" on Twelve Oxen, from Solomon's Temple Gothic Ground and Vault 23 �C.G. Bell V63e) V63f) 63g) Symbolic History Same: Moses leading the Israelites from Egypt (video uses detail) Same: Last Supper Same: two scenes: Descent of the Holy Spirit and Judgment Angels Nothing is more at the heart of that 12th- and 13th-century revolution than the extension of the Biblical analogues of Augustine, where we began. Here we see half of the altar frontal. The scene of Sampson and the lion is in the bottom row, next to last on the right. The Crucifixion, central to the triple array, appears at the left. It is flanked by events from Christ's life. Above each is a cognate from Genesis or Exodus, and below, another from later Israel. Thus in the column before that of Sampson, we read from top to bottom: Joseph into the well, Christ into the grave, Jonah into the death-and-hell whale. What would that be in history but the corruption and crisis of any age? Next right, (above Sampson and the lion) Christ looses the Patriarchs from hell, while from the life of Moses, the Passover speaks the sparing of the chosen. At the far right, above, is Jacob's promise ("out of Judah a great lion" — the lion transformed); between, is Christ's Resurrection; and below, Sampson carrying off the Gates of hostile Gaza. The prophetic now of any such sequence has only to be pushed, for the orthodox daring of art to suggest the mystical heresy of Joachim de Floris, from the same years. In his three resonant levels, the Old Testament Age of the Father and the priestly Age of the Son are about to yield to the mystical Age of the Holy Spirit, a kingdom of God's indwelling, where Church and State withered away, each man, as Dante would put it, will be "crowned and mitered" over himself. Va64) 64) French Gothic, 1195-1260, Bourges Cathedral, Nave French Romanesque-Gothic, 1157, Noyon, Apse with buttresses (CGB '74); + V detail Panovsky has written a small book documenting the tie between scholastic theology and Gothic, the reconciliation of Sic et Non, beside that of upward thrust and lateral ordering — a particular of the soaring dialectic which from year to year releases and contains more daringly. In a sequence of cathedrals, mid-12th to mid-13th century, the height of ceiling vault becomes a visible index of the launching-forces, economic, civic, speculative, with the synthesizing marvel of their incorporation. 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 24 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Noyon, the apse, a first use of flying buttresses, 1157, modestly lifting and lightening the Romanesque. 65) Same, Noyon, interior, Choir 1157, Nave 1170 (CGB '74); first, a video detail Imagine the interior before the clear windows and 18th century ironwork gave an enlightenment the opposite of Suger's New Light. All these quiet transitions from Norman — St.-Denis, Laon, the English cathedrals — in stable three-storied harmony, vault at no more than 75 or 80 feet. 66) French Gothic, Notre Dame, Apse from east (CGB '59) Music: Perotin, c. 1200, Sedêrunt, 1st Quadruplum (Munrow) ARC 256 5050 B The extravagance begins in Paris, with Notre Dame, where Perotin launched his vast Quadrupla. Already by 1163-77, when the choir-apse was raised, it was vaulted at 115 feet. 67) Notre Dame, within, 12th-13th cent., Transept Crossing (CGB '48) Within, mostly new glass restores the closure of once jewelled dark. The Argus in 1948 recorded its inadequacy of angular view: to find the lift of the vaulting it lost the floor. 68) Rheims Cathedral, 1211-41, Apse from northwest (CGB '59) Paris touched off a chain of Notre Dames, a civic and devotional rivalry, where dates and heights correlate with evolutionary fitness. Skipping Chartres and Bourges, about 1200, at 120 feet, we come to Rheims, 1211 and after, at 125. 69) Rheims, Interior, Triforium and Clerestory of the Nave (CGB '74) Inside, without a wide-angle lens (or the miraculous eye), one is lost. The old triple harmony reels under lines that go up and up — the triforium dwindled to a band between the reach of arches below and the soar of clerestory above. 70) Amiens Cathedral, Apse, 1220 and after (CGB '74: vertical slide; video substitutes details, below & above) 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 25 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Yet Rheims holds a lateral harmony beside the two that follow: Amiens, from 1220 and after, the pinnacled apse leaping like a range of cliffs, to sustain the 139 foot vault; 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 26 �C.G. Bell 71) V71a) Symbolic History Same, Amiens, Arches of the Nave (CGB '74) Same, Amiens, Nave and Vault, up to West Rose (S. Adams’ slide; cf. Gothic III, 24) the camera, within, hardly encompasses the aisle-arches of the nave, much less the windowed range above. 72) Beauvais Cathedral, 1247 ff., Apse and North Transept (CGB '74); + V detail of the Apse In Beauvais, 1247 and after, the reach for the infinite goes beyond possibility, bringing to an end that high Gothic race. Only the choir and transepts were built; the choir fell soon after completion, had to be more densely arched and buttressed; the 500 foot open tower over the crossing, unstayed by a nave, fell in 1573. 1st73, 1994 edition) Same, vertical of the interior; + V detail V73a) Same, whole of vertical south wall (CGB '74; see 2nd 73 below) Yet this Promethean trunk, vaulted at 158 feet (in Ruskin's quaint phrase, "There are few rocks, even among the Alps, that have a clear fall as high as the choir of Beauvais"), this end-product, has the inebriating lure of Dante's Ulysses, sailing toward the sunset ("diretro al sol") in the "folle volo" (the mad flight) which took him beyond tragedy. (End Perotin.) Where is the comparable daring in Gothic thought? For 2nd 72) Nicolas of Verdun, Klosterneuburg Altar 1181, Nativity The Incarnation implies the heresy of God's self-realization in time. From theology through Hegel to evolution, this has made the problem of change, of temporally conditioned spirit (of which calculus is a quantitative and equational specter) the rootproblem of the West. a 2nd 71) Greek 370-360 BC, Round Temple ruins, Delphi (CGB '77) For 2nd 71) Again, Verdun Altar, Crucifixion (video uses detail only) 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 27 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Against Greek harmony, with its temporal recurrence, its Euclidean containment, the post-and-lintel temple, the musical scale going not up but down — against the pathos of recollective Platonism — Christianity had no choice but to make the moment creatively decisive; though that is to venture the paradox of a world becoming God, or a God so world-immersed as almost to contradict his name. a 3rd 72) V3rd 72a) Same, Ascension of Christ (video uses detail only) Beauvais exterior (video uses whole of 72, CGB '74) Inevitably, the Hegelian germ lay under the resonances of the Coming; it declared itself with visionary force in those three Kingdoms of Joachim de Floris, anticipating Dante's De Monarchia, the Protestant Fifth Monarchy men, Condorcet's Tenth Age, and even the classless brotherhood of Marx. It is hard to recognize heresy in architecture; but like Joachim and the spiritual Franciscans, Beauvais has the glory of soaring excess. a 2nd 73) 2nd 73) V2nd 73a) V2nd 73b) Beauvais, flamboyant window of the North Transept (CGB '74) Beauvais, interior, south wall (CGB '74; video: center-spread) Beauvais, 13th cent. glass of the Lady Chapel (CGB '74) A closer view of Beauvais Apse (from 72 above) As in a dialectic of the Trinity, Gothic had to reconcile mystical oneness and the hunger of the heights with the earth-aligned horizontals, the weight of stone, columned piers, capitals, the tripartite divisions. The theology which culminated in Thomas had to hold in equilibrium every speculative wildness and heretical risk. From the formal balancings of the Summa Theologica, we seize on the central issue of Joachim's selfrealization of the Divine, Articles 3 and 4 of Question 106. Va74) French Gothic, Rheims Cathedral, Apse, 1211-41 (from 68, above; CGB '59) 74) Rheims, 1211-90, interior, looking west 74a) Rheims Choir Clerestory While the stabilized soaring of Rheims signs a like perfection. "Whether the New Law should have been given from the beginning of the world?" Though God disposed otherwise, Thomas, as always, reasons first for what is wrong — argues the unanswerable injustice to those who could not know Christ, though Scripture says God is no respecter of persons and will have all men saved. 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 28 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History "On the contrary, the Apostle says: That was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural." [Emphasis added.] In support of which Thomas accepts organic process as the way of God in the world: "Because a thing is not brought to perfection at once from the outset, but through an orderly succession of time" — a principle which could lead as far as we like, to Hegel's history or Darwin's paleontology. a75) b75) Vc75) Vd75) 75) Rheims, 1211-41, Apse (Editions Gaud) Same, wilder close-up of Apse buttressing (CGB '74) Le Mans, begun 1217, from the east, Apse, etc. (CGB '74) French Gothic, c. 1250-60, Rheims Nave, Buttressing of Clerestory (slide by Sam Mason III) Rheims, Apse with buttressing ( best CGB of 1974) As in the countered stress of Rheims apse, the truth, which, overextended, would lead to Joachim's error, must be stated, then opposed and buttressed into strength. Thus Article 4: It would seem that the New Law will not last till the end of the world… Just as the Father is distinct from the Son and the Son from the Father, so is the Holy Ghost distinct from the Father and the Son. But there was a state corresponding to the Person of the Father, namely the state of the Old Law, and there is a state corresponding to the Son, wherein the clergy… hold a prominent place. Therefore, there will be a third state corresponding to the Holy Ghost, wherein spiritual men will hold the first place. Against that free indulgence in Christ's promise, comes the stern contrary: how can we have more of the Spirit than "the Apostles who received the firstfruits"? And as Dionysius says, "The third kingdom will take place not in this life, but in heaven." "This puts out of court the senseless idea that the Holy Ghost is to be expected at some future time." [Emphasis added.] a76) 76) V76a) Chartres, 1200-1240, North Portal, left of center (CGB '59, sunset) Same Portal, right side: John the Baptist, etc. (CGB '74; video uses detail) Detail from another slide of North Portal, left of center (CGB ‘74) Whatever the hope or danger of prophetic history, in the vaulting of Gothic the incarnate thrust was held in mystical surrender over an eternal ground. Thus the 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 29 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History culminant sequence of Medieval Latin, the Dies Irae, perhaps about 1235, perhaps by Thomas of Celano (CGB translation): Day of anger, that the day, When time burns itself away, As David and the Sibyls say. Dies irae, dies illa solvet saeclum in favilla teste David cum Sibylla. Quantus tremor est futurus. quando judex est venturus cuncta stricte discussurus. What the trembling and what terror When a judge of past and future Searches every secret error. 77) French Gothic, Bourges, c. 1225(?), Central Portal, with Judgment Tympanum 77a) Same: from Last Judgment, detail of lower two bands The great horn thundering doom Through the shires of the tomb Gathers all before the throne. Tuba mirum spargens sonum per sepulcra regionum coget omnes ante thronum. 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 30 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Mors stupebit et natura, cum resurget creatura judicanti responsura … Death struck and nature stunned Loose the bonds of flesh and bone Judgment-summoned, the dead respond. 78) Chartres, c. 1210-20, South Portal, right side of central bay; + V detail 78a) Same: North Portal, detail Melchizedek (video, head only) V78b) Same, St. Peter, North Portal, center, right jamb (video, head only) To whom shall I — wretch — complain At that bar, what patron fain, Where even the just have no claim? Quid sum miser tunc dicturus, quem patronum rogaturus, dum vix justus sit securus? Rex tremendae majestatis, qui salvandos salvas gratis, salva me, fons pietatis. King of fearful majesty, Swayed to save, salvation free, Fount of pity, be saviour to me. 79) V79a) 79b) Same, Chartres, North Portal, head of Moses Same, head of Samuel, north side of Center Portal Same, detail of devil from the Last Judgment, South Portal Take pity, Jesus, to your heart; Pity was your cause of birth, Lose me not that day with earth. Recordare, Jesu pie, quod sum causa tuae viae, ne me perdas illa die … 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 31 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History When for spite and malediction Recreants feel the flame's affliction, Render me your benediction. Confutatis, maledictis, flammis acribus addictis, voca me cum benedictis … a80) b80) c80) Chartres, detail of Simeon and John, North Portal Same, detail of Judith, from right of North Portal Double: [A] French late 9th cent., Ste. Foi, Conques; and [B] French c. 1210, St. John the Baptist, North Portal, Chartres d80) Double: [A] French Romanesque 1160, Beardless Prophet, Gilles-du-Garde; and [B] French Gothic c. 1210, St. John the Baptist, Chartres Ve80) Chartres, c. 1210, North Portal, the same St. John Chartres (postcard) f80) Giotto, 1297-99, St. Francis Preaching to the Birds, Upper Church of St Francis, Assisi (cf. Dante, 50) Vg80) Again, St. John the Baptist, Chartres (Houvet Monograph) 80) Detail of Ve80, St. John the Baptist (from Chartres card) 80a) Detail of V80, St. John (from Houvet Monograph) When, on that day of tears, Man, resurgent out of fires, Waits the justice of your rod, Spare us then, Father and God. Jesus, full of sympathy, Grant us peace eternally. Lacrimosa dies illa, Qua resurget ex favilla Judicandus homo reus: Huic ergo parce Deus. Pie Jesu Domine, Dona eis requiem. Amen Against the Dark Age sternness this melting Chartres St. John; against the mystical Gilles-du-Garde head, where we ended our 12th-century Prelude, this, where mysticism takes flesh and person. Or against plainsong and all earlier melody, a onevoice praise of the Lamb: "Agniauz Douz," which Tinayre called "School of Perotin." 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 32 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History All are contemporary with St. Francis, whose mother (from Provence) taught him Troubador songs and chivalric romance. In all, the new passion burns — with joy — over a Judgment Ground. Music: 9/2/95 French early 13th cent., Agniauz Douz, (Yves Tinayre) Lumen 32017 (first stanza only) (End) Gothic Ground and Vault 33 � 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. 34 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 Gothic Ground and Vault, Symbolic History, Part 9 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 9 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_09_Gothic_Ground_and_Vault 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/a09f6dd9fdfacf9ad496233a9ca15527.pdf 5d842646c3d76911260042e8adb256f9 PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 10. The Gothic Wave CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 August 1995 Last Revised January ‘96 �Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 10. The Gothic Wave 1) German, 873, Corvey, W. Front (video: details only, below then above) Music: Tuotilo, c. 900, from Kyrie-Trope: Omnipotens, MHS Or 349 To preserve, under an always growing wealth of detail, the great shapes of cultural change... As in a chart of evolution, we have seen the Dark Age fortress of old Romanesque (Corvey — with the solemn tread of later plainsong — c. 900, Tuotilo of St. Gall) (end Tuotilo) 2) French Burgundy, 1120-1140 and ff., Vezelay, interior; + V detail lift itself, over Europe, to the varieties of new Romanesque (and in music to the first horizon of Organum: the close of "Mira Lege", early 12th century — with Vezelay): Music: French, c. 1120, Mira Lege, refrain, from Columbia (78), 5710 (end) 3) French, 1145-60, from Nave into Choir, Cathedral of Sens (CGB '59) V3a) Same, Nave from the aisle, Sens (CGB '59) 3b) Same, north aisle of Choir, two windows: Life of St. Thomas of Canterbury (CGB '59) V3c) Same, close-up of another of these windows (CGB '59) In one of these Romanesque branches — surrounding Paris — occurs the dynamic mutation of Gothic (here Sens mid-12th century, contemporary with Suger's St. Denis) and in music the driving force and mystical tenderness of Leonin. Music: 2/16/96 Leonin, c. 1160-90, Deum Timê (close, from "quie") AS 65 The Gothic Wave 1 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History From that 1160 unfolding 4) French Norman, 13th cent., Coutances, W. Towers (CGB '74) a complex of forms springs to 13th-century Rayonnance. We choose, from many, the delight of Coutances and with it a mid-century motet: "Salve virgo virginum": Music: French mid-13th cent.(?), Salve Virgo Virginum, SAWT-(9530-1) 5) 6) 7) Same, Coutances, from rear (CGB '74) Same, Coutances, Central tower (lantern) (CGB '74) Same, Coutances, Nave, Crossing and Choir from entrance (CGB '74); video takes in two sections, below and above V7a) French Gothic, later 13th cent., Lantern over the Crossing, Coutances, France (from CGB '74, Dark Ages 80) (end Salve) From the Ile de France the Gothic wave spreads over Europe... Va8) Roman Christian, 2nd-4th cent., Catacomb of S. Calixtus, detail 8) Same, another view 8a) Christian, c. 470, Mosaic of St. Ambrose, Capello San Vittore, Sant' Ambrogio, Milan (digital: detail only) A total transformation since Christianity went down into the catacombs of troubled late-Rome, putting off temporality, with all assertions of pagan reason and skill, seeking the solemn birth in the cave. Music: Solesmes Gregorian, Absolve, Funeral Mass, opening, VM-87-3 As Augustine said of the old philosopher, Victorinus: he blushed not to become the child of thy Christ and an infant at thy font, submitting his neck to the yoke of humility, and subduing his forehead to the ignominy of the Cross. (fade Gregorian) 9) 2/16/96 French Gothic, c. 1260, Coronation from West Façade, Cathedral, Rheims; (copy of CGB ‘74, Gothic I 5); + V detail, see V9 The Gothic Wave 2 �C.G. Bell 9a) Symbolic History French, c. 1230, Head of an Angel, broken from west Portal of the Coronation of the Virgin, Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris Music: Secular Motet, c. 1250, Dieus! je suis jà près de joir, ARC 14608 Whereas Gothic, from the ascetic grave, wakes to the life of the world. Beside anything earlier, even of the 12th century, what shimmers over Rheims is a smile where the loves of heaven and earth are marvellously mingled. The turning point had been in Paris. But since the 1225 Madonna from the northwest portal of Notre Dame was spoiled in the Revolution, 10) 10a) V10b) 10c) V10d) French Gothic, c. 1250, N. transept portal, Virgin and lintel above, Notre Dame, Paris (CGB '80; cf. Gothic I V64b) French (Amiens), 2nd half of the 13th cent., The Golden Virgin, S. transept portal, Amiens Cathedral A closer view of 10, Virgin of the Column, N. Portal, Notre Dame, Paris French Gothic, 1339, Virgin and Child, gilded silver, Louvre, Paris French Gothic (Rheims), c. 1290, Head from a wooden statue of an Angel, Louvre, Paris we turn to her mid-century successor from the doorway of the north transept. These Marys, with those of Rheims, or La Vierge Dorée of Amiens, gave fresh embodiment to the womanly as a spring garden of grace. (end Dieus!) At about the same time (1230), Guillaume de Lorris crosses a like frontier, from the 12th-century distance of Chrestien, into the dream vitality of The Romance of the Rose — such personality and sparkle as engendered everywhere, and through two centuries, imitations and rehandlings of that rich and fragile joy. En icelui tens deliteus, Que toute rien d'amer s'esfroie, Sonjai une nuit que j'estoie... a11) b11) 2/16/96 English, 14th cent. MS. illumination, King Hunting Boucicault Master, c. 1405-08, Flight to Egypt, landscape detail, Mus. Jaquemart-André, Paris; video then returns to 10, detail: Notre Dame Virgin of the Column The Gothic Wave 3 �C.G. Bell c11) 11) Symbolic History From Cesky Krumlov, Bohemia, c. 1400, "Beautiful Madonna," Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; video: detail only English (or French), c. 1395, Richard II presented to the Madonna and Angels, Wilton Diptych, National Gallery, London In the delicious time of spring, When love enkindles everything, I dreamed I waked, and as it seemed, It was May morning in my dream. (CGB) The dream of waking to foliage, birdsong, the clear river flowing from the hills, would be echoed from Dante and Boccaccio to Machault and Chaucer — as the Notre Dame Lady of the Pillar is followed by a whole school of loving hip-shot virgins, softening by the end of the 14th century to those the Germans called "schöne" — or in England to the Wilton Diptych Mary in a bower of angel wings — among blossoms too; 12) Middle Rhine Master, c. 1420, Garden of Paradise, Städlisches Inst., Frankfurt am Main; with three video details for the painted landscape picks it up, as if the angel smile had renewed on earth the paradise garden: this 1400 Rhenish one, the serpent keeled up on the ground, lower right: such a brightness as Chaucer would describe in his Parlement of Foules: A gardyn saw I ful of blosmy bowes Upon a ryver, in a grene mede, There as swetnesse evermore inow is, With floures white, blewe, yelwe, and rede, And colde welle-stremes, nothyng dede, That swymmen ful of smale fishes lighte, With fynnes rede and skales sylver bryghte. Of instruments of strenges in acord Herde I so pleye a ravyshyng swetnesse, That God, that makere is of al and lord, Ne herde nevere beter, as I gesse. Therwith a wynd, unnethe it myghte be lesse, Made in the leves grene a noyse softe Acordaunt to the foules song alofte. a2nd 11) 2/16/96 French illumination end of the 15th cent., Dance in the Garden, Roman de la Rose, Harley MS 4425 14b, British Museum, London The Gothic Wave 4 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History For 2nd 11) English, c. 1370(?), Perpendicular east window of the Choir, Exeter Cathedral (CGB '80) Appropriate that the room where Chaucer wakes in that early poem, The Book of the Duchess, was painted with the Romance of the Rose. Me thoghte thus: that hyt was May, And in the dawenynge I lay... My wyndowes were shette echon, And throgh the glas the sonne shon Upon my bed with bryghte bemes, With many glade gilde stremes... Ne in al the welken was no clowde. a2nd 10) French Gothic (Rheims), c. 1240, Clerestory of Nave, Rheims Cathedral, France b2nd10) Same, 1250-60, Dragons and Foliage, Rheims For 2nd 10) German Gothic, c. 1235 ff, Well House, N. Walk of Gothic Cloister, Kloster Maulbronn So Guillaume de Lorris wakes in the original Romance, "Jolis, gais, et pleins de leesce": So I rose and walked from town, To hear the birds sing their rune, Among the blossoms on the boughs, Where a cold clear river flows; And in that water filled with light, I washed my face; the bed was bright With pebble stones; the meadows green. (CGB) e 1'eau clere et relusant Le fonz de 1'eaue de gravele... 3rd 11) Again, Wilton Diptych, c. 1395, Mary and Angels; video: detail only The Pearl-poet would pick it up a hundred and fifty years later in one of the most luminous of all Gothic visions, that supernatural stream down crystal rocks: 2nd 12) 2/16/96 Fra Angelico, c. 1431 ff., Paradise Garden from Last Judgment, S. Marco, Florence The Gothic Wave 5 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History V2nd 12a) Jan van Eyck, 1422-24, Baptism from foot of page of Birth of St. John, Mus. Civico, Turin The dubbemente of the derworth depe Wern bonkes bene of beryl bryght. Swangeande swete the water con swepe, With a rownande rourde raykande aryght. In the founce there stonden stones stepe, As glente thurgh glas that glowed and glyght, As stremande sternes, quen strothe-men slepe, Staren in welkyn in wynter nyght. For uche a pobbel in pole there pyght Was emerad, saffer, other gemme gente, That all the loghe lemed of lyght, So dere was hit adubbement. Va13) English Gothic, 1220-60, Salisbury Cathedral from the southwest; whole, with Tower and 1334 spire (copy of CGB '86; see Ars Nova b54) 13) English, c. 1260, Salisbury, Tower, framed by Cloister arch (CGB '66) V13a) Same, Tower over Cloister cedar (copy CGB ‘66, Ars Nova ‘54) Such a wave of lilting Gothic goes out from France, in music, as in the other arts: Salisbury, where the quieter Early English soars to a peak of virginal geometry; with it an isorhythmic "O Maria," sung by the Deller Group. Music: 14) V14a) 15) V15a) 16) 16a) English 13th cent., O Maria Virgo, Deller Group, BGS 70680 Same, Salisbury, across the Cloister to the Chapter House (CGB '66) Across Cloister to Nave; video: detail only of upper windows Same, Salisbury, Tower glimpsed through Cloister tracery (CGB '66) Detail of Va13, Salisbury West Front (CGB '86) Same, Salisbury, Interior, Nave from the Choir (CGB '66); video: details only, above and below (end O Maria Virgo) English Gothic, after 1263, Chapter House of Salisbury Cathedral, detail of vault It was in the 13th century of Salisbury that the first sparkling poems in what would become the language of Chaucer (mingled sometimes with Latin), took up the pulse of pointed arch 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 6 �C.G. Bell 17) 17a) V17b) Symbolic History English, c. 1255, Censing Angel, Westminster Abbey, North Transept triforium English, 1275-80, Angel Playing a Viola da braccia, Angel Choir, Lincoln Cathedral English, 1275-1300, West Front, Exeter Cathedral (CGB '80); video: window tracery only and smiling angel — those of Lincoln Choir or this from Westminster Abbey, fresher and more naive than the French: Of one that is so fair and bright, Velud maris stella, Brighter than the day is light, Parens et puella; I cry to thee, look thou to me, Lady, pray thy son for me, Tam pia, That I may come at last to thee, Maria! 1st 18) German Gothic, 1248-1322, Apse buttressing, Kölner Dom (copy of CGB '74, wider view; see slide 65 ff.); video: center-spread only The German Gothic road is remote from the hawthorne lanes of English grace. The choir of Cologne took up the Faustian hunger of the heights, to be retraced in time, 1st 19) French Gothic, 1220-60, Amiens, West Front and Towers (Sam Adams' slide); while video previews Amiens Apse, 3rd 19 (CGB '74, wider view) through Amiens, 1st 20) French Gothic, 13th cent., Rheims Cathedral, whole view; while video previews 2nd 20: Rheims Nave buttressing (CGB '74) through Rheims, 1st 21) French Gothic, 12th-13th cent., Notre Dame, Paris, South side, Nave Buttressing, Transept, etc. (CGB '59) 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 7 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History to Notre Dame in Paris. That there were musical parallels the name of Franco of Cologne attests. Although we read of a three-part work of his performed in Paris, what remains is his treatise Ars Cantus Mensurabilis, from the second half of the century, when Master Gerard, inspired from this France, was building the Kölner Dom. 2nd 20) Rheims, Nave buttressing, 1211 ff. (CGB '74); here video narrows to a detail Music: Tournai Mass, late 13th cent., stratum; Kyrie, Seraphim SIC-6052 It codified the notation of the rhythmic modes so that before 1300 Franconian polyphony had arched its unities of triple conflict over Europe (like Aquinas' God — Questions 28 and 30 — a "transcendental multitude" of "real opposition"). 2nd 19) Amiens, Apse buttressing, 1220-60 (copy of CGB '74, narrow view; from Gothic II 70); video: upper spread only Where, after Perotin, does Ars Antiqua loom like the French cathedral or the Scholastic Summa? Not in most recordings; though such settings of the Mass as this Tournai Kyrie shape the musical future. (close Tournai Kyrie) 2nd 18) Köln Apse buttressing, 1248-1322 (CGB '74, narrow view); video: first, center-spread of 2nd 18; then upper-spread of 1st 18, wider view) Only one 3-voice Ave Gloriosa Mater, which Coussemaker thought by Franco himself, and for which Tinayre lowered the triplum to a choral insistence under his own motetus, catches something of those churches — once more from Cologne to Paris and back by interiors, through Rheins and Amiens again to Cologne. Music: Franconian, mid-13th century, Ave Gloriosa — Ave Virgo, Lumen 32018 3rd 19) Amiens, 1220-60, Apse buttressing (CGB '74, wider view) 3rd 20) Rheims, 1212-41, Apse buttressing (copy of CGB '59, from Gothic II 68) 2nd 21) Notre Dame, Paris, 1163-13th cent., Choir with buttressing, seen from the south (copy of CGB '59, from Gothic II 55) 22) Notre Dame, Paris, interior, c. 1270, South Transept Rose (CGB 59) 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 8 �C.G. Bell 23) 24) 25) 25a) 26) Symbolic History Rheims, interior, mid-13th cent., Clerestory windows of the Choir (CGB '59); while video views from the Choir the Nave and West Windows (upperspread only of V23) Amiens, 1220-70, the soaring Nave, looking up to the West Rose (Sam Adams' slide); while video has shown the arching of an Aisle (from CGB '74) [revised ‘94] Again, Köln Cathedral, 1248-1322, interior, Choir (CGB '74); + V lower detail [‘94 video revision] Same, apse, nearer (CGB '74); video shows upper windows only Same, looking from the Aisle into the Nave (CGB '74); from which video takes only the upper spread; + V clerestory detail (from V26a) (end Motet) So from the Ile-de-France transplant of this German Cologne, we might have followed the Gothic wave to Italy, 27) Lombard Romanesque, 1120-38 ff., San Zeno Maggiore, Verona (CGB '66) where from the start of the 12th century (here San Zeno, Verona) the Renaissance foreshadowings of Romanesque had only to receive the flame-shapes of Gothic passion to cross the threshold of a new age: 28) V28a) Italian Gothic, 1228-53, frescoed c. 1320, two vaulted bays of the Upper Church of St. Francis, Assisi (CGB '84); cf. V28, earlier variant Same, interior, looking east (copy of CGB '84, from Dante 64) Dante's Dolce Stil Nouva, the Ars Nova of music, the sculpture and painting of the time of Giotto. Already that sweeping survey has betrayed the living complex. If Gothic fire had awaited its 13th-century height to spread over Europe, we would not have St. Francis' church in Assisi (1228 and after), much less the saint it was reared to. Va29) 29) 29a) 2/16/96 Same as 29, but a wider view [‘94 video revision]; digital uses this for 29 Sicilian Romanesque, end of 12th cent., Cathedral Cloister, Monreale Bonaventura Berlingheri, 1235, St. Francis, with Scenes from his Life, S. Francesco, Pescia; video: detail only The Gothic Wave 9 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History As Norman Sicily and the empire of the Fredericks witness (this 1200 fanciful cloister at Monreale), the Northern and pre-Gothic had been working from the first with Byzantine and Moorish to the boot of Italy and beyond. And St. Francis, a crucial link in the Italian awakening which leads through Dante and the Giottesque toward Renaissance, is a testimony as well to the earlier radiation of mystical love from the fervor of France: Troubador, Abelard, Bernard of Clairvaux. a30) b30) 30) German, St. Michael's, Hildesheim, 1001-33; and painted ceiling, c. 1220; video: detail only (cf. Vb30, below) Same, whole ceiling (CGB '86); while video draws from Vb30 (CGB ‘86) a closer detail, as of a30: arch plus ceiling panels of Adam and Eve, and Jesse German Romanesque, 12th into 13th cent., Abbey Church of Maria Lach, N. Germany Music: Hildegard von Bingen, c.1150(?), from O presul vere civitatis, (Gothic Voices) Hyperion A66039 The 12th-century awakening, which witnessed in France the rise to Gothic, and in England William of Sens' reshaping of Canterbury, stirred Germany as well. Though construction there (as at Bamberg, Mainz, this Maria Lach) retained past 1200 the round arches of Romanesque. 31) 31a) 31b) German Romanesque-Gothic, c. 1225, Refectory, Maulbronn Cloister, Würtemberg German Romanesque-Gothic, c. 1190-1200, Mary and Child, Leibefrauenkirche, Halberstadt; + V detail Detail of b30, Hildesheim ceiling, Adam and Eve So late as 1220, this columned refectory of the Cistercian Kloster Maulbronn, stands on that transitional threshold. In German music too the new rapture speaks not through the polyphony of Leonin and Perotin, but by the plainsong tradition of solo chant. Thus the melismatic soaring of the Hymns of Hildegard von Bingen, contemporary with the buttressing of Notre Dame, as with early organum there. 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 10 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History So too with German literature: the Minnesingers carry Troubador devotion into the 13th century; Parzival and Tristan body forth the chivalric romances of Chrestien; while the Nibelungenlied refines the passions of Dark Age German myth: With eyes of covert longing that knight and lady too Looked upon each other as worth made them do. (CGB) mit lieben ougen blicken ein ander sahen an der here und ouch diu fruwe: daz wart vil tougenlich getan. (end Hildegard v. Bingen) 1st 32) Spanish, late 12th cent., Portal of Santa Maria la Real (Cluniac) Sanguesa, Navarra Let this 12th-century portal from Navarre lead us back to that radiation from the France of Cluny and Citeaux (or Cister), of Chartres and Notre Dame, or in music of Leonin and Perotin. 1st 33) Gislebertus, c. 1120-40, Adoration of the Magi, St. Lazare, Autun In the perspective of time, the contenders of an age clasp hands. That Cluny in its wealth was richly adorning its churches stirred the ire of St. Bernard. Though Gislebertus' Magi, carved for Cluniac Saint Lazare in Autun, had epiphanied Bernard's call to Christian love. 1st 34) Spanish, 12th cent., David from Puerta de las Platerias, Santiago de Compostella It was the Romanesque and Cluniac wave which first went out from France, reaching south to Santiago de Compostella in Spain, 1st 35) Anglo-Norman, c. 1145, Carving inside door, Kilpeck, Herefordshire (CGB '65); here slide show has only a detail, while video previews the whole of 3rd 35 and north to Kilpeck on the border of Wales. But Bernard had stripped off that Cluniac ornament in his own purifying reform, 1st 36) Cistercian, 1146 ff., Cloister, Abbey of Le Thoronet, Provence 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 11 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History which seized from the first on the clean vaulting of transitional Gothic. By his death in 1153 his Cistercian order comprised 343 monastaries, a number to be doubled by soon after 1200 — here the cloister of Le Thoronet in Provence. 1st 37) Cistercian, 1179-1208, Fossanova, interior, S. of Rome, Italy How quietly those late 12th-century churches, spread over Europe (this Fossanova, south of Rome), suit the mystical soaring of Leonin's organum — 1st 38) Cistercian, 2nd half of 12th cent., Refectory of Santa Maria de Poblet, Tarragona, Spain thus the Cistercian refectory of Santa Maria de Poblet in Tarragona, with Tinayre's old performance of the Haec Dies, for two voices, and entirely in the sustained-tone style. For 2nd 37) Fossanova exterior, while video previews, as for 2nd 36, Le Thoronet Apse (see for 3rd 36) The lower note (cello here) protracts itself under the increasing tension of the upper, holding, to a point of incalculable yearning; so rises or falls to concord, from which passing notes in inwrought sequences of rhythm and tone lead to another peak of the spiritual cry — For 2nd 35 and 2nd 34) English Norman, 1154-89, Parish Church, façade, Iffley, near Oxford (CGB '84); video divides, below and above as in Dante from spaceless sphere to sphere by "The Love that moves the sun and the other stars" — "L'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle." Not in the ear, but in some deeper recess, the delayed lingering accumulates, the falls of melody are distilled. For 2nd 33) Same, Iffley, detail of main Portal (CGB '84) Music: 2/16/96 Leonin, c. 1175, Haec Dies, Tinayre, Lumen 32011 The Gothic Wave 12 �C.G. Bell 2nd 32) 3rd 33) 3rd 34) 3rd 35) 3rd 36) For 3rd 37) 3rd 37a ) 2nd 38) a39) 39) Symbolic History Again, Portal of Santa Maria la Real, detail Again, Adoration of the Magi, detail Again, David, detail Again, Kilpeck carving; from the slide whole, video takes only a detail Again, Le Thoronet, interior, Apse; while video shows first a detail of the Cloister (from 1st 36), then of the Apse Cistercian, 1147 ff., Nave of Abbey, Church of Silvacane, near Marseilles; to which video adds a detail of 1st 37, interior of Fossanova Cistercian (Portugal), 1158-1223, Church of Monastery of Alcobaca Again, Refectory of Santa Maria de Poblet French Romanesque-Gothic (Chartres) c. 1150, plaster cast of Angel of the Sundial, Mus. des Monuments Français; + V detail (copy of CGB '80, from Gothic I, 79) Chartres, 1150-55, Angel of the Sundial, face (end Haec Dies) In Chartres, Bernard seems answered. As the mild angel smile lights purlieus of grace, Romanesque and Gothic meet in carving and structure. But if we walk from the cathedral's 1150 layer a40) 40) Double: Chartres, [A] 1145, Queen of Judah, head, Royal Portal; and [B] c. 1250, God Meditates Creation, detail, North Porch Chartres, same detail as B of a40, God Meditates Creation to the last sculptures of the Transept Porches nearly a century later, we measure the Gothic assumption of body and person, earth and time — from columnar removal, to this God Meditating Creation, brooding over the world and his involvement in it; so that it is sometimes called (and the doubt is expressive) the human author of the book of Genesis. If one would ask where such implied heresy of personal emergence was most startling, the answer might well be, less in the stylized power of this France than in the precursive outbreaks of the chartered German towns. 1st 41) German, c. 1200, St. Andrew, stucco, screen of Liebfrauenkirche, Halberstadt; first, video detail 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 13 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In the Romanesque which we have traced there past this 1200 St. Andrew of Halberstadt, the general awakening looks out with the directness of pre-reformation humanity. So too in the religious and political protest poems of Walther von der Vogelweide (c. 11701230). In that Europe of a hundred years before Dante, perhaps only St. Francis and Frederick II advance so. a2nd 40) Double: [A] Chartres, c. 1250, God Meditates Creation; and [B] Walther v.d. Vogelweide, from the Manessa MS., c. 1320, Heidelburg Library; video shows first B alone Vb2nd 40) Rodin, 1880-1917, from The Gate of Hell, The Thinker, Rodin Museum, Paris For 2nd 40) Again, Walther, from the Manessa MS. (B of a2nd 40); video: detail only I sat down on a stone, Left on the right leg-bone, Elbow piled on the knee, Chin and half my cheek Caught in the palm's grip... (CGB) It is the pose of the Chartres God-author, the same Walther would assume in the Vanessa MS, and centuries after, Rodin's thinker: Ich saz ûf eime steine, und dahte bein mit beine... So I pondered deep, In this world how to live; But found no clue I could give How a man might gain three things, Each of which the other shames: Honor, and worldly goods — Two already at odds — Va2nd 41) Again, St. Andrew, video detail of 1st 41 2nd 41) German, c. 1190, Apostle, detail, Church of Unsere Liebe Frau, Halberstadt A third outweighing both, God's blessing on our faith. Hard as I tried to bind 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 14 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The three in one, it would not stand, That wealth and earthly pride, And God's grace beside, In one heart should dwell. That worldly honor and wealth cannot be reconciled with Christ's blessing is the Medieval and doctrinal ground. But the poem does not stop there. It seizes on corruption as the cause of this imperfection: 42) Upper or Middle Rhine, c. 1200, Alexander in single fight, Hanover; + V detail Steps and ways are withheld, Wrong lurks in wait, Violence is loosed on the street, Peace and right thrown down. (CGB) As a Middle Rhine illuminator endows a Romance encounter of Alexander the Great with the violence of the chivalric broils sweeping the Holy Roman Empire. Untriuwe ist in der sâze, gewalt vert ûf der strâze. The poem ends: diu driu enhabent geleites niht, diu zwei enwerden ê gesunt. a43) 43) German (Bamberg), c. 1240, Prophets Jonah and Hosea, Bamberg Cathedral; video: details only From the same group, Head of Jonah, Choir Screen, Cathedral, Bamberg Literally: "The three will never have safe conduct until the two are restored." Whether "the two" are "peace and right" just above, or "honor and earthly good" earlier called "die zwei," does not alter the meaning: that if the kingdom of man could be ordered, God's grace might dwell in it, as in whatever Reform Utopia Joachim's Third Kingdom, Dante's De Monarchia, or this Bamberg Jonah characterfully foresee. Against the dark exile of the opening, we glimpse the dawn of God's self-realization in the world: The three will never be atoned Until the two are sound. (CGB) 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 15 �C.G. Bell 44) V44a) Symbolic History German-Italian (Apulia), c. 1240, Bust of Frederick II, Mus. Civico, Barletta; + V detail German (Bamberg), c. 1235, Kaiser Heinrich II, Adamspforte, Dom, Bamberg Ironic that the German (Sicilianized half-Norman Hohenstaufen) who pressed furthest with the ordering of the secular (this bust a battered relic of his Apulian Rome), Frederick II, "stupor mundi et immutator mirabilis" (Mathew Paris: "wonder of the world and miraculous transformer"), should have been hounded by the papacy, for all his genius and worth, down into Dante's Hell — a risk prefigured in the carving. For the question was always ticklish, as with Abelard and even Aquinas (or in Frederick's crusading youth), whether the vitality would be embraced or damned. 1st 45) French MS, late 13th cent., Book of Health, Bathing Scene, British Museum, London It was love most of all, Dante's "seed of every virtue and punishable crime," which had to walk that sword bridge of church denial or sublimated service. How critical the span, from the irrepressible fabliaux vanity which would grow to Chaucer's clowning lust; 1st 46) Limoges, enamel early 13th cent., Violist and Dancing Girl, Copenhagen through troubador idolization, glowingly heretical: Tristan and Isolde, Paola and Francesca; 1st 47) French, c. 1250-60, Angel-guardian of St. Niçaise, West Portal, L, Rheims to the sacred incorporation in which the smiling Gothic angels led the way for Beatrice. 2nd 46) Again, Limoges, Violist and Dancing Girl, detail V2nd 46a) Limoges enamel, c. 1200-10, Fiddler and Dancing Woman, British Museum, London This Limoges enamel, as much as any work of the 1200 time, endows sensuous love with almost religious grace, though its symbolic flower forms, its longing faces float as wistfully in the timeless as Aucassin's preference for Hell: "En paradis qu'ai je a faire?" It is, as he says, the old priests, the crippled and maimed whom creed saves; 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 16 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History while the knights and loving ladies — Dante's "Le donne antiche e cavalieri" — proceed into hell: "Let me go with these, if only I have my love, Nicolette." 2nd 45) Again, Book of Health That church norm of ascetics praying in holy cripts can make love almost as thin a levity as the 13th-century foibles of the bath house. For 3rd 46) Again, Fiddler and Dancing Woman (detail of V2nd 46a); video having first returned to a detail of 1st 46, Violist and Dancing Girl Yet the vernal delight declares itself, as in a lai set for minstrel's harp: "En Mai la Rousee": Music: French, c. 1240(?), En Mai la Rousee (realized for harp) EMS-201 2nd 47) Rheims Smiling Angel; video: two details only (end En Mai) In a time of the anagogical, one can hardly tell how far that dream of a May morning serves the sacred smile; 48) V48a) V48b) French Gothic, 1228, Cloister, detail, bushes behind, Mont-Saint-Michel (copy of CGB '74, from Gothic I, 1) Video here previews the whole of 49 to follow: the Ivory Coronation of the Virgin in the Louvre French Gothic, 1228, Cloister of Mont-Saint-Michel, another view (CGB '74) or how much of earth's spring is enfolded in Mont-Saint-Michel cloister. Such the mingling of a French motet to the Virgin: "A la clarté qui tout enlumina nostre grand tenebror": To the brightness that lightens the land of our shadow, To the lady whose grace is a medicine for our sorrow... Maiden and mother of healthful savor, Rose of the dawn and of women flower. (CGB) Music: 2/16/96 French, c. 1260, A la Clarté, 2-voice motet, Cape Group, AS-71 The Gothic Wave 17 �C.G. Bell 49) Symbolic History French polychrome Ivory, c. 1265, Coronation of the Virgin, Louvre, Paris; video here shows details only (end A la Clarté) This Louvre Coronation in painted ivory, an ultimate of courtly love in heaven. a50) c50) 50) Franco-German, c. 1230, Synagogue from South Transept, Strasbourg; + V detail, cf. Vb50 (both from CGB ‘59, Mozart 7) Double: [A] Franco-German 1230, Head of Synagogue, Strasbourg; and [B] Ecclesia, Musée de l'Oeuvre de Notre Dame Same as a50, again Synagogue, head and shoulders; + V closer detail Heavenly, too, the seduction, when that more formal French grace penetrates and lightens the moods of German heart: the 1230 Shulamite Synagogue at Strasbourg — for "negra sum sed formosa," "blind but beautiful." In this work, mythically ascribed to a woman, what Augustine most feared, the pathos and glory of sense, brings into the church itself the passion of Eloise, the mystery of Isolde. At the same time, in the German singers of Minne (love sacred and profane), most in Walter von der Vogelweide, the troubador strain enters the forests of Taunus and Tirol, absorbing a fragrance of woods and meadows — Lindenduft: "Nemmt froue diesen kranz" — Take this wreath from me, lady — the flowers I have; But I know where all colors blow and birds sing; Come, let us gather flowers. Blushing she came. Until dawn took me from my laughing dream. And now all summer long I search the dance for eyes; If I could find her under some garland spray. (CGB) Always the sweetness of love under medieval acceptance of dream. Va51) 51) 51a) 2/16/96 A side view of 51, head and shoulders, with a closer video return after 51 Master of Naumberg, 1250-60, Queen Regelindis, head, Westchor, Dom, Naumburg German (Erminold master), 1280, Angel Head, detail, Choir, Regensburg Cathedral The Gothic Wave 18 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Walther's most quoted poem is also his most smiling; we are tempted a generation forward, to the Queens of Naumburg, by the winsome wreathing of that smile: Under the lime-tree On the moor, Where we made our bed together, You will find there Grass and flowers Broken, which for love were gathered. Before the forest in a vale Tandaradei Sweetly sang the nightingale. (CGB) Under der linden an der heide, dâ unser zweier bette was, dâ muget ir vinden schône beide gebrochen bluomen unde gras. Vor dem walde in einem tal tandaradei! schône sanc diu nahtegal. In the analogies of Gothic this revived Eden, the phallic bird Boccaccio would also set singing there, and even the pregnant beatitude of the high lady in the next stanza, "daz ich bin saelic iemer mê," hint at another love meeting, of Gabriel and the Jungfrau. 52) V52a) German, c. 1240, Der Reiter (vertical): horse, from right side and front; rider, full-face; Bamberger Dom; + V detail Same, rider and body of the horse, with V return to rider from 52 (full-face) As a Minnesinger, Walther was as much musician as poet. Though he only longed for the Holy Land, his Crusader's hymn puts him there: "Nu alerst lebe ich mir werde" — "Today my better life began… I have come to the very land,/ Where the one God walked as man" — "Ich bin kommen an die stat,/da got mennischlichen trat." With the old Max Meili performance we return in art to Bamberg, to this German Rider. Like Walther himself, like utopian Frederick II before Papal calumny sealed his Satanic compact, this knight of the new faith seeks an Incarnate City, where God walks as man. 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 19 �C.G. Bell Music: 53) V53a) Va54) 54) Symbolic History Walther von der Vogelweide, 1228, Nu alerst lebe ich, AS 18 (Meili) Same, Bamberger Reiter, head and shoulders, as looking three-quarters forward Same, head only, full-face (end Walther with lst stanza) French Gothic, mid 13th cent., Simeon det., Central Portal, W. Front, Rheims Cathedral German, c. 1260, Ekkehard, Head, Founder's Choir, Naumburg In age, with a pension from Frederick II, Walther went home to find his playmates old, the fields burned off, and the woods cut down. In his last elegy contempt of the world becomes the vortex in which Renaissance tragedy was to form: "The years of my life have vanished like a dream:" O wê war sint verswunden Ist mir mîn leben getroumet alliu mîniu jâr? oder ist ez wâr? With such precursive immediacy, the 1260 Kings and Queens of Naumburg prepare for the realistic donors in the paintings of the Van Eycks. 55) 55a) Same, Ekkehard and Uta, Naumburg; video: detail only Double: [A] Franco-German, c. 1230, Synagogue from South Transept, Strasbourg; and [B] German, 1260, Uta, Founder's Choir, Naumburg Surely the pair of Ekkehard and his love-haunted wife, Uta, is the most oracular visualization of romance. If any Western poetry before Dante shares its sensuous intensity, it is the German courtly epics at the start of the 13th century. Gottfried of Strassburg's lines on Isolde's dress have been compared with the Synagogue figure in his own city, but they would as well serve here: The gown was formed as a part of her And held her body like a lover; There was no place where it jutted out, But everywhere clipped her about, Falling smooth from top to floor, With clinging folds behind and before, That gathered close between her feet, As much as you would wish to see it. (CGB) 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 20 �C.G. Bell 56) 56a) 56b) Symbolic History German, 1260, Uta, head and upper figure, Founder's Choir, Naumburg; first, video detail of face German (Master of Naumburg), c. 1260, Hermann and Regelindis, statues in West Choir, Naumburg Cathedral; video: upper detail only German, c. 1230, Angel of the Last Judgment, tympanum of North Portal, Bamberger Dom But it is the face and fold of the ermine which match the evocation of Paolo and Francesca as they read of Launcelot and Guenevere: "how the desired smile was kissed by such a lover" —"quando leggemmo il disiato riso/ esser baciato da cotanto amante." To which Wolfram von Eschenbach comes as near, in his crazy way, as any of those Germans: the God-made lady, Jeschûte, asleep naked in her tent, all love's weapons on her: flesh of ivory, a red mouth slightly parted, breathing heat of minne — Diu frowe was entslâfen, si truoc der minne wâfen, einen munt durchliuhtic rôt... der truoc der minne hitze fiur. The forest-grown bumpkin Parzival, who falls on her snow-white body, only to take some symbolic ring — at which Wolfram's Eros flames to the wild and strange: ...Who has dishonored me? It is insupportable, youth: You might have taken a better aim. Va57) 1st 57) Again, Kilpeck (cf. slide 35), Anglo-Norman and Celtic, c. 1145, Corbelcarving: the Maw of Sex French Romanesque, 12th cent., Portal detail, Oloron-Sainte-Marie, Basses-Pyrénées Reminder of the comic odds against which Dante would deify his love; how far human passion hung, with the six other sins of all that is earthly, over a doomsday void, one of the gargoyles grinning down from the fabric of creed — as in the old church of St. Nicholas at Blois, beasts and sinner-mouthing devils stare from the columns of the choir at the very mass where God is eaten and drunk. 2nd 56) Again, Uta, detail, Naumburg 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 21 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History It is this suspension that wraps the richest Gothic love in poignance and paradox: O lasso, Quanti dolci pensier, quanto disio Menò costoro al doloroso passo... How many tender thoughts, what hearts' desire Has led them down into this place of sorrow. 2nd 57) French, mid 13th cent., Gargoyles, Rheims; + V details 2nd 57a) English Norman, 12th cent., Sanctuary Knocker, Durham Cathedral That is the vacancy of the bare fifth chord which yawns under the liveliest music of the jongleurs; how the skirtling and warbling and plucking trail out into the wail of noclaim. Music: French, c. 1260, In saeculum viellatoris, instrumental, Cape, AS 71 (cut) 58) French, 1225-50, Villard de Honnecourt (Sketchbook, 143), Bibl. Nat., Paris; + V detail V58a) Same, Unrelated figures and plans (Sketchbook, 123), Bibl. Nat., Paris Attempts at the humanistic and forceful speak the same condition — the sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt, would-be Leonardo of the thirteenth century, its exploratory studies of the nude far from acclaiming the glory of body. Or the sequence of motets from Perotin's last years and after, in honor of Louis, King and Saint: Music: Attr. to Perotin, 1226, from Gaudia Felix Francia (Bars 45-58), Ducretet-Thomson, 320c10 (fade) It is in rhythmic drive and heterophonic clash that Gothic levity whirls its dance, 59) French, early 13th cent.(?), Adenez, King of Minstrels at the bedside of Blanche of Castile, Arsenal Library, Paris; video: first, three details as in the quaint miniature of the King of Minstrels at the levee of Blanche of Castile. The playing card faces gaze through a diapered mirth of color, spaceless reminders under the brightest play. 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 22 �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History In saeculum viellatoris, as above, but 2nd half (end) One can hardly credit the leap to the panoply of Baroque joy: 60) Pietro da Cortona, 1637, Age of Silver, detail, Pitti, Florence (CGB '47); video breaks into smaller details Music: Monteverdi, 1607, Orfeo, from "Lasciate i monti" ARC-3035 Cortona's "Age of Silver", the celebrations of Monteverdi's Orfeo, where every chord asserts temporal validity in the pomp of musical space. Yet even here, the mortal enigma, now a conscious theme, brings out of gaiety an averse of tears, (music) as if the complicity of major and minor were the ineradicable trace of the old timelessness. (fade Orfeo) Since Bacchus too is celebrated in this Cortona fresco, 61) French, late 13th cent. MS, Drinking, from Book of Health, British Museum, London; + V detail let us glance at the Bacchic cult of 1300 — a monkish branch of the sin of Gluttony, conceived in the pleasure-mode Gothic allows, of gargoyle-grotesque. Though from this monastic sprout comic courage would burgeon, through Langland ("There was laughing and louring and 'Let go the cuppe!'") and Skelton ("She drank so of the dregs/ A dropsy was in her legs"), to the almost Rubens affirmation of Brueghel and Rabelais: 62) Peter Brueghel, 1568, Peasant Dance, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien; video: two details only ...the flagons began to go, the hams to trot, the goblets to fly, the big bowls to jingle... "I drink for the thirst to come. I drink everlastingly." "Gulp it down; it's medicine!"... While... Gargantua, as soon as he was born, did not cry "Mie, mie," like other children, but in a loud voice bawled "Give me drink, drink, drink!" 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 23 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History From the Thomistic synthesis all aspects of man and world would enlarge and ripen separate realms of substantial temporality. a63) 63) English Gothic, c. 1250, W. Front of Lincoln Cathedral from far off Same, from nearer; video breaking it into a lower front and upper towered spread The strength of medieval unity (as in the West Front of Lincoln, combining Romanesque and Gothic from the 11th century through the 13th) is its transrationality — that it can suspend disparities of heaven, earth, and hell in a faith structure where relationships are abstract and allegorical. What Tawney said of the economy applies to politics, theology, the arts: "Medieval religious thought strains every interest and activity, by however arbitrary a compression, into the service of a single idea." How could it be otherwise where the life of the age was a continual centrifugal release within creed containment, a continual absorption and canonizing of secular vitalities, bound to rend the mould in which they were formed, or replace it with another 1st 64) Inigo Jones, Christopher Wrenn, et. al, 17th and 18th cents., Queen's House, Greenwich Hospital, etc. (CGB '74) 1st 64a) Gislebertus, 1130-40, Tympanum, from the Last Judgment, Autun Cathedral 1st 64b) Guido Reni, c. 1624-27, St. Michael over Satan, Altar piece, Capuchin Church, Rome; video then returns to a detail of 64, Greenwich Hospital ultimately of rational and volitional ordering? It seems in that sense the historical task of the Western arts to give measured accord to what, in the Gothic synthesis, had been hauntingly juxtaposed. The gaunt contention of angel and fiend, buttressing the sanctum even of Dante's energized acceptance, had in Milton and Leibnitz and Hegel to be reconciled by the arrogations of dialectic, coherently justifying the ways of God to men. In music it is consonance and dissonance which must be nobly harmonized. 1st 65) German Gothic, 1248-1322, Cologne Cathedral, Apse buttressing (CGB '74); cf. 1st 18, earlier 2nd 64) Again, Greenwich Hospital, central perspective (CGB '74) 2nd 64a) Same subject, new angle (CGB '74) 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 24 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Their keen opposition and formal containment are the flung gage of Gothic; Music: French, c. 1248, from Conductus for St. Louis, (de Van) AS-99 the later history of harmony is their substantial reconciliation in spacious structures of tension and release — Purcell, with this Wrenn. Music: Henry Purcell, 1695, Queen Mary's funeral music, Canzona, close, Seraphim 60001 For 2nd 65) French Gothic, esp. 1240-80, Façade of Bourges Cathedral, France V2nd 65a) Same, Michael, etc., detail of the Last Judgment, great West Portal 2nd 65b) German (Rhine), 1329, (detail of the Damned from West Choir screen), Mainz Cathedral 2nd 65c) Chartres Glass 13th cent., Knights Jousting, Chartres Cathedral V2nd 65d) Chartres Glass, 13th cent., Window of St. Lubin, N. Aisle of Nave, Chartres Cathedral (CGB '74) 2nd 65e) Chartres Glass, 13th cent., detail of St. Mark mounted on the Prophet Daniel, Chartres Cathedral 2nd 65f) French Gothic, c. 1200, Saint's Head, Vitry: Sculpture Française, 12th-16th cent. The principle of medieval polyphony is feudal. In Franco of Cologne's treatise, the loyalty of each part is not to a regulated whole, but to another part, either the tenor or the last part written. Varying melodies, words, languages will be crushed together: over a church Kyrie the triplum may warble in French of the month of May, while the middle voice, in Goliard Latin discusses bigamy. Music: Cod. Bamberg, French, c.1260, 3-voice motet, El moi de mai...bigami -Kyrie [start with words], (Munrow) ARC-2723 045 #14 Everywhere is the battering of stresses into structure; everywhere a nominal oneness lays its sanction on radical contingency — the "nihil est praeter individuum" of scholastic thought, the fortune and accident of medieval romance. Such the Thomistic tercets of Credo-reasoning, by which Aristotle's world fabric is wrenched into Trinitarian transcendence of good and evil, with syllogistic demonstration that just such the Philosopher had in mind. As John of Salisbury said: "they work to reconcile dead men who contradicted each other all their lives." (end motet) 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 25 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History While formulas of humble respect buttress magisterial wilfulness: "reverenter exponere," to explain with respect, "pium dare intellectum," to give a dutiful meaning (De Wulf). a66) 66) 66a) 66b) French, c. 1270, Old Testament King, N. Rose Glass, Notre Dame, Paris French Gothic mid-13th C., Science from N. Portal, Chartres English Gothic (Decorated), 1322-42, Ely, View of the Octagon and Lantern (from CGB '77; see Period Styles V47a) Same, Octagon and Lantern, interior (CGB '77); video: brighter Lantern only, from V66b (CGB '77) Thus Thomas argues Gregory out of the repudiation of reason he shared with the early Church: When Gregory says there is no merit in believing where human reason furnishes proof, he refers to a man who has no will to believe... but where he has the will... his faith is not diminished, though he have apodeictic proof. So Gothic compromise shoulders out a handmaidenly space for earthly science itself, that lady who appears smiling on the North Portal of Chartres. With such clairvoyance Roger Bacon opens the vision of technocracy in the catechistic cloister: It is possible that great ships and sea-going vessels shall be made which can be guided by one man and will move with greater swiftness than if they were full of oarsmen. It is possible that a car shall be made which will move with inestimable speed, and the motion will be without the help of any living creature... It is possible that a device for flying shall be made such that a man sitting in the middle of it and turning a crank shall cause wings to beat the air after the manner of a bird's flight... Va67) b67) 67) 67a) 2/16/96 Same: Octagon and Lantern, cf. slide 66b, but taken from Period Styles 52 (CGB '77) English, 14th cent., Flying Ribs at the Crossing, Gloucester Cathedral `Honnecourt, c. 1240, Perpetual Motion Machine, Sketchbook CIX, Bibl. Nat., Paris Engraved after Peter Brueghel, 1558, The Alchemist; video: details only, right and left The Gothic Wave 26 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History It is possible also easily to make an instrument by which a single man may violently pull a thousand men toward him in spite of opposition... It is possible also that devices can be made whereby, without bodily danger, a man may walk on the bottom of the sea or of a river... Infinite other things can be made, as bridges over rivers without columns or supports, and machines and unheard-of engines. While Honnecourt, whose sketchbook we have compared with Leonardo's gives a page to a perpetual-motion machine, using an odd number of mallets and quicksilver. Alchemists pondered the Emerald Tablet attributed to Hermes Trismegistos, seeking talismanic keys "not so much to make Gold and Silver," Ashmole would write centuries after, "as to see the Heavens open, the Angells of God Ascending and Descending." A sacred Hermetic text, a body of chemical operations, stinks and all, a heavenly vision of God — if such is the anagogical synthesis of Ars Antiqua, small wonder the myth of Faust has been called a Western archetype. 68) 68a) 68b) 68c) English Gothic, c. 1180-1360, Cathedral of Wells from the southeast; + V detail Same, Wells, 13th-14th cent., Nave looking towards Crossing (CGB '84) French Gothic, 1195-1260, Bourges Cathedral, Chevet from SE Again, Wells, esp. c. 1325, Cathedral from Bishop's Garden (SE); while video draws from Dante 35 (CGB '66) the Cathedral and Chapter House from the east and north What Renaissance requires, as much as anything else, is the filling in, between disjunct poles, of the daily fabric of mundane good. Here English Gothic, by the modesty with which it clings to Romanesque proportion, quietly prepares for Renaissance. In the articulation of Wells there is none of that high-Gothic extravagance which, in France and Cologne, made the apse a displayed scaffold of support. Some social and pastoral wellbeing is reflected here, as in the early developments of English law. At the same time English polyphony humanizes the gentler "peripheral style" of note-against-note Romanesque by a decisive filling in of triadic chords. The sharp brilliance of passing tones in the French Salve Virgo, already heard, shifts in an English motet, also of the 13th century, on the same words, and sung by the same Munich group, to a firm reliance on major chords. Here are the two openings: Music: 2/16/96 Repeat opening of French 13th-cent. Salve Virgo Virginum, SAWT-9530/31-B (side 3) The Gothic Wave 27 �C.G. Bell Music: 69) Symbolic History Opening of English 13th-cent., Salve Virgo Virginum, 9530/31-B (side 4) SAWT- English Wall Painting, 13th cent., E.W. Tristram copy, Virgin and Child from Bishop's Palace, Chichester; first, video detail Music: English, 13th cent. (Worcester), 2-voice: O Maria Virgo Pia (lst, last and lst), sung by Michael and Pamela Sloper, 1978 The purest gem of Worcester 13th-century harmony, "O Maria Virgo Pia," seems unrecorded; Michael and Pamela Sloper sing it for me. While the Madonna Tristram copied from the wall of the Bishop's Palace in Chichester suggests the human sweetening in English manuscripts (or in the paintings that survive) from late Romanesque and early Gothic. (end O Maria) 70) English, early 14th cent., Ivory Diptych, Victoria and Albert Museum, London; + V details (digital: one detail) By 1300 English ivories have the line and smile of the French, but with more directness of love. In music the Worcester "Alleluia psallat," about the same time, gives natural intimacy to Gothic joy — a joy especially in the old Cape performance. Music: 71) English, c. 1300 (Worcester), Alleluya psallat, AS-71 (end) English, early 14th cent., Queen Mary Psalter, f. 151 r, British Museum, London; + V details moving to the falconing below English manuscripts also take the quickening lead. With the new century, sacred pages open to a springtime of love and the chase. A first harvest of poems voices the mood: Bytuenè Mersh ant Averil, When spray beginneth to springe, The lutel foul hath hirè wyl On hyrè lud to synge. Ich libbe in love-longinge For semlokest of allè thinge; He may me blissè bringe; Icham in hire bandoun. 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 28 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History An hendy hap ichabbe yhent; Ichot from hevene it is me sent; From allè wymmen mi love is lent Ant lyht on Alysoun. 72) V72a) 72b) Same, detail of hawking; first, video: Christ in the Temple, above Luttrell Psalter, 1335-40, detail of sowing, British Library, London Same, f 181v, Ladies' Travelling Coach, old British Museum print Most famous is the Reading Rota, "Sumer is Icumen in," with alternate words in pious Latin — the first piece of six-part writing, the first developed canon, the first clear example of the major mode. If only the London Madrigalists had known how to pronounce the words. Music: English, c. 1310 (once called 13th cent.), Sumer is icumen in, Col. 5715 (78) (end) English genius was already operating in a context of temporal correlatives, which would produce in Austen the familial weaving and balancing Nietzsche had in mind when he said (with some incomprehension of the phenomenon) that the British were a nation of shopkeepers. 73) English, c. 1280, Expulsion, from Triforium of Angel Choir, Lincoln; + V detail Though the visionary wildness which would complement Austen with Blake was always there (Lincoln Choir). So the first Middle English poem on the coming of winter sounds the Biblical Expulsion: Mirie it is while sumer ilast With fughelès song; Oc nu necheth windès blast And weder strong. Ei, ei, what this nicht is long! And ich with wel michel wrong Soregh and murne and fast. Against such precursive reach within the severities of faith, can we bear the shock of what has claimed Gothic affinities — 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 29 �C.G. Bell 74) V74a) V74b) Symbolic History Gustave Courbet, 1844, Happy Lovers, Museum of Fine Arts, Lyons; + V detail Courbet, 1842, Self with a black dog, Petit Palais, Paris; video: detail only Courbet, 1856, Girls by the Seine, Petit Palais, Paris; V: detail only the sensuous flagrance of 19th century, where every modern soul has fledged its lifedreams? Music: Meyerbeer, 1836, from "Tu l'as dit", VLM 6153 Les Hueguenots, RCA Courbet with his love, the Opera of Paris, Meyerbeer's "Tu l'as dit... l'amour..." (skip in music and then fade) Yet it is no accident that the word for all that — Romantic — 75) S. German, c. 1240, Head of the Statue of Synagogue, profile detail, Main Portal, Bamberg Cathedral V75a, cf. 2nd 75) Same head, full-face; with video return to details of 75 and V75a springs from Medieval romance — the cult of nature and heart felt through the veilings of this other Synagogue at Bamberg, as through the forest childhood of Parzival, after his father's battle-death: Day's sun to the Queen became a mist; She fled the world and all its bliss, Wandered deep in her forest land (Not to pick flowers from its ground). There she reared Gahmuret's child Far from the knighthood of the world. Deprived of his heritage of prowess, He carved himself a bow and arrows; Shot at the birds he came upon; But when he saw them stop their song And flutter downward, he would weep And tear his hair in childish grief. Then mornings, when he bathed at the river, And the birds sang, such a sweetness Pierced his heart, he ran to his mother In tears, and could not tell his sorrow. (CGB) 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 30 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History We have followed the cropping out of Gothic energies in the formal frame. To close the 13th century, let us line up, from the Continent, four moments in which Ars Antiqua approaches the riper fruition the age of Dante would bring in. This Synagogue may stand for the German characterizations of Bamberg and Naumburg, including the Uta we have already seen. 76) French Gothic 1260-80, Head of Christ, Rheims Cathedral; video then previews, as named in the text, 77 (Princess Violante) and 78 (Queen Emma) A Rheims Christ after 1260 goes as far the other way, toward outward drama. From the late century then: Princess Violante from Burgos, and from Regensburg a mythic queen. While the music is a love motet from the end of the century, "Dieu, comment peut," with haunting tritones and a climax moment when the voice soars — though not in a romantic soaring. Music: French, late 13th cent., style of Jehannot de l'Escurel, Dieu comment peut, OL 232, Rokseth Memorial Album 2nd 75) Bamberg, c. 1240, Head of Synagogue; before which video has interposed Uta of Naumburg, head and shoulders, from slide 56 2nd 76) 1260-80, Head of Christ from Rheims; video: close detail 77) Spanish Gothic later 13th cent., Princess Violante, Burgos, Cloister; first, video detail 78) Bavarian, c. 1290, Queen Emma, St. Emmeramskirche, Regensburg (CGB '59); + V detail (see V78a, CGB '59) (close Dieu comment peu) Bavaria, 1290, Queen Emma: and the mysticism of chivalric love refines to a threshold of consciousness: "Dicendo a 1'anima, sospira." — "Speaking to the soul, sigh!" It is the threshold of Beatrice and of Petrarch's Laura. Va79) 79) a80) 80) 2/16/96 Giovanni Pisano, 1301, Double: Annunciation details from the Cathedral Pulpit, Pistoia Same, detail of the Annunciation Angel Giotto, 1304-06, Angel of the Annunciation, detail, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua Simone Martini, c. 1333, Angel of the Annunciation, National Gallery, Washington D.C. The Gothic Wave 31 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History And we have only to cross the Alps, at that charged turn of the century, to find another world. In this Giovanni Pisano, in Dante, Giotto, Simone Martini, as in the music of da Cascia, the mystery of Gothic kindles to an aesthetic passion which the sensuous soul can see and hear and touch. Music: 2/16/96 Giovanni da Cascia, c. 1325, Nascoso el viso, close, (Cape) ARC3003 (end da Cascia) The Gothic Wave 32 � 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. 33 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 The Gothic Wave, Symbolic History, Part 10 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 10 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_10_The_Gothic_Wave 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/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/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/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/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/659d7c1d1f448e3c704dfe8102a36834.pdf 0b79d71dad8b5f17514ba1cf20321d3b PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 16. Giants in the Earth (16th Century) CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 September 1995 Last Revised January ‘96 �1 Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 16. Giants in the Earth (16th Century) 1) Giulio Romano, 1530-32, Fall of the Giants, frescoed room, corner and two walls, Palazzo del Te, Mantua (CGB '86) Same, detail, stream and Giant under rocks, (CGB '86); video brings in another detail from the last slide of the show, 80+1. 1a) Music: Ant .de Cabezon, c. 1540, Tiento de Primer Tono, Videro on HMV DA 5207 In The Winter's Tale, the living Hermione is presented as a statue "by that rare Italian master Julio Romano, who, had he himself eternity, and could put breath into his work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly is he her ape." In this 1530 Mantuan vault, his heaven-storming giants fall under the rocks of Pelion and Ossa. (music) In the tientos of Cabezon, we feel what turned the loves and thought of that century toward Prometheus, Icarus, Phaeton and Faust. 2) Titian, 1543-44, David and Goliath, Santa Maria della Salute, Venice; + V detail) (music continued) There were giants in the earth in those days...when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men. And when the spiritual force stored in medieval creed-condensers struck through the physical, it stirred Gargantuan prodigies: the arts of space and mass, Hermetic and Lucretian science, Reformation, Utopias, world conquest, Platonic love, the Age of Gold. In the dark gathering of the fugue, or the late works of Michelangelo, in this Titian, the very crushing of pride evokes powers unknown before — giants most of all giants in their overthrow. (close Cabezon) 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �2 C.G. Bell 3) 3a) Symbolic History Double: Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1496, Drawings: [A] Helicopter and [B] Lifting Power of a Wing, Inst. of France, Paris (video takes A and B singly) Francisco Goya, 1815-24, Modo de Volar, Proverbs 13 Call Leonardo the first of the titans — one who, with mirror-writing and smiling secrecy, left us in doubt how far he enacted the myth of Icarus: if well made ... and turned swiftly, the said screw will make its spiral in the air and it will rise high. On another page, a man's descent measures the lift of a starched linen wing: when he has great wings attached to him, by exerting his strength against the resistance of the air, man is enabled to subdue it and to raise himself upon it. Tomorrow morning on the second day of January 1496 I will make the thong and the attempt. (The vision would haunt Goya after three hundred years.) While in Tansillo's mid-century sonnet — "Poi che spiegat' ho l'ale al bel desio" — Icarus becomes the symbol Bruno would appropriate for his Heroic Furies. 4) Michelangelo, 1533, Fall of Phaeton, drawing, Windsor Castle V4a) Same, detail (Paralleled by the Phaeton of Michelangelo's 1533 drawing): Since first my soul beat wings to the high desire, The vaster sense of air beneath my tread, The swifter pinions to the air I spread, Till spurning earth, toward heaven I aspire. Not Daedal's son warns with example dire That I descend or bow my threatened head; For though with him I plummet earthward dead, What is life's candle to this funeral pyre? I hear my heart's voice through the dusky air: Whither, O fearless darer, would you dare? Not without wreck this giant temerity. Fear not, I answer, what the ruin may be. 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �3 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Hold secure to the clouds and calmly die, Content if heaven allow a death so high. (CGB) It was the aspiration that raised Bruno toward his 1600 blaze. 5) Leonardo da Vinci, 1473, Tuscan landscape, drawing, Uffizi, Florence; + V detail On August 2nd, 1473, the twenty-one-year-old Leonardo walked out of Florence and sketched what he saw. What opened was the organic fabric of the world — in the Notebooks, an animism defiant as the space toward the right of the picture: The body of the earth like the bodies of animals is interwoven with a network of veins which are all joined together, and are formed for the nutrition and vivifying of this earth and its creatures ... Have you seen how the water that drips from the severed branches of the vine and falls back upon the roots ... enters into the power of its mover and rises up anew? ... So the sea ... through passages of the earth, returns upward. 6) 6a) Leonardo da Vinci, 1512-16, Deluge: Water and Rocks, drawing, Windsor Castle; + V detail Leonardo da Vinci, 1508-10, from Virgin and Child with St. Anne: detail of mountains to the left; Louvre, Paris Forty years later, the bearded old man, in abstract sketches and notes, endows Deluge with the cataclysmic necessity of science: Let the fragments of a mountain have fallen into the depths of one of the valleys and there form a barrier ... the swollen waters coursing round the pool which confines them and striking against various obstacles with whirling eddies, leap into the air in turbid foam and then, falling back, cause the waters where they strike to be dashed up...so that the angle of reflection will be equal to the angle of incidence ... waves of the sea at Piompino all of foaming water. Such dark recurrence Agricola framed in a geology I once turned to blank verse: So water working down the block plateau Cuts deep in shale and leaves the granite whole, Rearing the mountains, which upreared, the rain That cut vales cuts in turn, and levels all to plain. 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �4 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Thus I perceive the universal sway: By the same power that builds, all things decay. (CGB) 7) 7a) Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1490, Grotesque Heads, drawing, Windsor Castle Leonardo da Vinci, 1483-99(?), Drawing of a cannon foundry, Windsor Castle V7b) Rubens, 1615, copy of Leonardo da Vinci's 1503 destroyed Battle of Anghiari; Louvre, Paris 7c) Same, detail of a warrior's head Leonardo's grotesques share in the Gargantuan future of his Notebook fable: "I will create a fiction which shall express great things." (So Rabelais, paraphrasing Erasmus' Folly: "Jests ... not so foolish as would appear ... stuffed with high conceptions ... allegorical.") Leonardo: In the month of June there appeared a giant who came from the Libyan desert ... When he fell ... the people, believing he had been killed by some thunderbolt, began scurrying over his huge limbs and piercing them with wounds. He, being roused ... set his hands on the ground and lifting up his awful countenance, placed a hand on his head. Perceiving it to be covered with men sticking to the hairs ... he shook himself and sent the men flying through the air like hail ... Then he stood erect, trampling them with his feet ... The black visage terrifying ... swollen bloodshot eyes under lowering brows ... a snout-nose widenostrilled, stuck with bristles ... between huge lips, a mouth like a cave... That energy would run from the affirming laughter of Rabelais to the grieved negations of Swift — the Brobdingnagian breast. 8) Michelangelo, 1509, Delphic Sibyl, Sistine Ceiling, Vatican; (video uses instead a wider whole, Va8, and a close detail, V8a) Music: H. Isaac, 1507, close of Sancti Spiritus — Imperii proceres, SAWT 9561 The rival Florentine giant was Michelangelo. It was above the entrance wall that he began the Sistine Ceiling. This Delphic Sibyl, about 1509, has the proportioned 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �5 C.G. Bell Symbolic History containment of his earlier Madonna's, though already, as in a ceremony motet by Isaac, everything flexes with grandeur. (end Isaac) a9) Michelangelo, c. 1511, Creation of Light, with Jonah below; Sistine Ceiling, Vatican Same, detail of Jonah and the Whale 9) MUSIC: A.Brumel, c. 1512(?), 12-voice Missa "Et ecce terrae motus", from Gloria (Munrow) Seraphim SIC-6104, side 4 In a Brumel Gloria, Isaac's four voices have been magnified to twelve. And when Michelangelo, after two years of painting the always expanding vision of Creation, conceived the last of the Prophets, Jonah, under the tortional twist of the creating God, himself in ecstatic tortion, overflowing his vaulted space, foreshortening it into depth — an expansion which dwarfs the flabby damnation whale — that anagogical theophany of soul-from-hell as light-from-darkness, empowered an exuberant might of body. (close Brumel) 10) Roman-Christian, later 3rd cent., Jonah and the Whale; Museum, Cleveland; + V detail Music: Ambrosian, 4th cent. ff., from Alleluia...venêrunt, ARC 2533 284 Against which, from the earliest Christian centuries, Jonah's mystical delivery, as by Christ's descent, from the Limbo-leviathan of eternal death, melts (with the Roman heritage of Attic skills) in melismas of Ambrosian "alleluya" — those "Jubilus" melismas which stirred and troubled Augustine. (fade Ambrosian) a11) 11) Apollonius of Rhodes, c. 50 B.C., Belvedere Torso, back, Vatican Gallery, Rome (CGB '86) Double: [A] Belvedere Torso, and [B] Michelangelo, 1513-16, Heroic Captive, Louvre, Paris; video also shows A singly There had been giants before that melting. When the Apollonius Torso was brought to the Belvedere by the Medici Pope Clement VII, Michelangelo found in it the type and inspiration of his own pathos of body. So the Promethean poem of Lucretius, recovered by Poggio Bracciolini, pointed beyond god-fearing habits and tabus: 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �6 C.G. Bell Symbolic History When human life lay prostrate on the earth...a man of Greece ... against the lowering gods ... dared traverse in mind the immeasurable universe ... beyond the flaming walls of the world. (Like the ripple of muscles in the torso, that "flammantia moenia mundi.") Yet when Lucretius was replanted in the infinite search of the Christian West, it reached — in Tansillo's Icarian flight: "Amor m'impenna l'ale," "Love plumes my wings," and "Eternal the honor if mortal the leap," or in the infinite worlds of Bruno's thought — as far beyond itself, as Michelangelo's struggling giants exceed the might and longing of Græco-Rome. a12) 12) 12a) M. Grunewald, c. 1512-15, Resurrection, detail, from Isenheim Altar, Colmar Same, Resurrection, whole panel; + three V details Double: two details from the same Grünewald altar: [A] from the Crucifixion, and [B] again from the Resurrection, as in a12 (video takes these separately) Music: Taverner, c.1525, 6-voice Gloria tibi Mass, irom Benedictus, V-LM 6016 Out of the religious immediacy of the Gothic North, Grünewald, Michelangelo's contemporary, shapes as radical a claim of death and nature raised to spirit, as any in the hermetic doctrine of signatures by the Swiss Paracelsus, self-styled "Prince of Philosophy and Medicine." The winding sheet that enfolds Christ shifts in an unparallelled symbolism of color from the gray-blues and browns of earth, death and the grave, up through incarnate blood, to become the received and transmitted glow of pure sol, alchemical gold, poured from the face and hair of the man-god. From Grünewald's Crucifixions to this, is from Scotch Dunbar's "Timor mortis conturbat me," to the aureate leap of his dawns: Up sprang the golden candle matutine And spread his beams out pure and crystalline ... 13) 13a) A. Altdorfer, 1518, Resurrection, St. Florian Altar, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna Same, center detail (from these, video makes a succession of three details) Music: 9/1995 (end Benedictus) Taverner, same mass, Hosannah Giants in the Earth �7 C.G. Bell Symbolic History The skies rang with shouting of the larks, The ruddy heaven, overspread with silver bands, Gilded every tree, leaf, branch and bark. As in the besouled world of German Altdorfer, Dunbar's dawns are the Resurrection, his Resurrection, dayspring: "Done is a battell on the dragon blak" — He for our saik that sufferit to be slane And lyk a lamb in sacrifice was dicht, Is lyk a lyone rissin up againe, And as a gyane raxit him on hicht; Sprungin is Aurora radius and bricht, On loft is gone the glorius Appollo, The blissfull day depairtit fro the nycht: Surrexit Dominus de sepulchro... How greatly music after Josquin hosannahs that auroral Lion and Giant. So Taverner. (end Hosannah) 14) 14a) 14b) V14c) A. Dürer, 1511, Adoration of the Trinity (All Saints Altar), Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna; + V details Same, detail of lower right, with Dürer (CGB '59) Same, upper detail, Trinity Same, whole altarpiece, with its carved frame The heaven stormer was Europe, and at its heart the cosmic humanization of God. About the time of Michelangelo's Jonah and tortional Light from Dark — Dürer, here standing on the curved earth (lower right) shows the causal measure of the sacred universe. Copernicus, born two years after Dürer, was writing his Commentary through the same years, though its publication was delayed. We cannot say his observations were better than Ptolemy's — certainly not his mathematics. His science takes its strength from what would culminate in Leibnitz: the world-marriage of causal Reason and Faith. Copernicus' God prefers the simplicity and beauty of sun-centered circles: "How exceedingly fine is the godlike work of the best and greatest artist." Still, the unknown elipses required corrective epicycles: "thus thirty-four circles suffice to explain the entire structure of the universe and ballet of the planets." How much God would have preferred his circles to be seven. 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �8 C.G. Bell Symbolic History 15) Triple (right to left): [A] Dürer, 1519, Maximilian; [B] Clouet, c. 1520, Francis I; and [C] (Rubens, from a lost) Titian, c. 1525?, Charles V 15a) Hans Holbein the Younger, 1536, King Henry VIII, Thyssen Col., Lugano 15b & c) Singles: B of 15, Fancis I; A of 15, Maximilian Music: Luis Milan, Pavana III from El Maestro, 1535, Candide CI 31068 To what pavan of pomp, humanist light and reason seemed now to enter the lists of state: Maximilian, Francis I, Charles V. We should add Henry VIII of course, whose meeting with Francis at the 1520 Field of the Cloth of Gold Shakespeare would recount: ...when Those suns of glory, those two lights of men, Met in the vale of Andren ... Men might say Till this time pomp was single, but now married To one above itself ... all in gold ... ...every man that stood Showed like a mine ... Though as the play allows, the glittering. chivalries ministered "communication of a most poor issue" — statecraft reenacting the fiasco of Faust. Those cultured kings (against our television hacks): Maximilian with his six languages, art, music — friend and patron of the skilled and wise — for all their great aims, what a hash they made of Europe. (cut Milan) Under the knightly mask, the opportunism of Machiavelli: — Kaiser Maximilian, 1511: nothing would better become us than to receive the papal office ... we have decided to raise up to three hundred thousand ducats ... through the Fugger Bank in Rome ... our crown jewels as security ... 16) 16a) Dürer, 1520, Portrait of Jakob Fugger, Alte Pinakothek, Munich; + V detail Grünewald, after 1520, Satiric Trinity, drawing, Staatliche Museen, Berlin If Fugger... (here Dürer's portrait of Jacob, shrewd capitalist prototype) 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �9 C.G. Bell Symbolic History wishes to know how we will redeem those treasures ... the estates of the Empire ... hereditary principalities and lands ... a third of all our income from the papacy until it is paid. What Fugger money in fact secured was the election of Charles V; nor did this Jacob's 1523 demand for payment help the continuing indulgence scandal: It is...clear as day that your Imperial Majesty could not have acquired the Roman Crown without my help ... I humbly petition ... that the sum of money due me together with the interest should be discharged and paid to me without further delay ... With Capital, why not the counter-giant of socialism? Geismayr, leader of the Peasants' Rebellion in Tyrol, thought to dissolve clergy, privilege, cities, and business, in a classless purity of faith: All smelting houses and mines ... which belong to nobles or foreign merchants, such as the Fuggers ... shall be confiscated and given over to public ownership ... This is Geismayr's constitution when he dreams in his chimney corner and imagines himself a prince. 17) 17a) Hans Holbein, 1527, Sir Thomas More, Frick Gallery, New York City; + V detail Jean Clouet, c. 1535, Guillaume Budé, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City Music: Brumel, c. 1510(?), O Domine (Requiem & Elegy), SAWT 9471 A ex No wonder Thomas More, painted by realist Holbein, lets his Utopian narrator despair of counselling princes: If I should propose to any king wholesome decrees ... how deaf hearers, think you, should I have? Rather, he dreams like Geismayr of a communism both early Christian and modern: where possessions be private, where money beareth all the stroke, it is hard and almost impossible that there the weal public may justly be 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �10 C.G. Bell Symbolic History governed and prosperously flourish ... For who knoweth not that fraud, theft, brawling, strife, murder, treason ... die when money dieth? And though More wears velvet and fur with a great chain of gold, he clothes his sober citizens like Huguenots or Puritans, and sets them, after six hours of common work, to wholesome exercise, then to lectures and solemn music in their public halls. (fade Brumel) Everywhere the drive for heaven turns to the world. a18) 18) Dürer, 1521, The Four Apostles, Alte Pinak., Munich; + V detail Same, detail of John the Evangelist and Peter (video: detail of John only, from V18a) As Luther comments on Galatians (and Dürer shows it in his Apostles): When I have this righteousness ruling in my heart, I descend from heaven as the rain making fruitful the earth: that is to say, I come forth into another kingdom, and I do good works ... If I be a householder, I govern my house ... Yet Luther's zeal stiffens to self-righteousness: I teach those things only which are commanded me from above ... therefore my doctrine is true, sincere, certain and of God ... Therefore whatever doctrine teaches not as mine does, must needs be false, devilish, accursed. Calvin most clearly phrased how the new faith should raise the will by its very denial: that man ... in miserable necessity ... should aspire to the good of which he is destitute, and to the liberty of which he is deprived; and should be roused from indolence with even more earnestness, than if he were supposed to be possessed of the greatest strength. Were not the energies of Christendom sprung from the start of Incarnate paradox? 19) 19a) 9/1995 Moslem architect Sinan 1550-57, Mosque of Sultan Suleyman, interior, Istanbul (CGB '77); + V detail "Blue Mosque" of Sultan Ahmet I, 1609-16, Istanbul, Turkey (CGB '77) Giants in the Earth �11 C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Turkish "Whirling Dervish", ney and tambur phrase, with chant opening, Nonesuch H-72067 What are we calling giant? The Soliman Mosque erected in Constantinople from 1550 to '57 points the question. Are not those vast and airier rivals of Hagia Sophia more gigantic in impact than anything from Renaissance Europe, though St. Peter's was then building, and is larger? Yet surely there are clues here to the dynamic imbalance by which Istanbul would fall behind, with the rest of the Orient, and be Westernized. The city had been taken by the Ottomans in 1453. Turkish conquest would go on for a century, reaching almost to Vienna, while Europe pursued its Machiavellian broils. But at the Byzantine heart, the late 15th-century arcades of the Topkapi Palace look to Tuscany and Venice. What was mighty in the West was a ferment of ideals and hopes, Christian free humanism, transforming self and world. Though against sultanic display — (fade Turkish chant) 20) Giovanni Bellini, 1514-15, Orpheus, Circe, Pan and Luna, National Gallery, Wash. DC (CGB '60; video uses whole, from Va20, CGB '60); + V detail Music: Cara, c. 1500, from Occhi Miei, "O dolce passion," Nonesuch 71701 the quieter harmonies of Italian Renaissance seem hardly overweening. 1500 witnesses, in all the arts, a style of articulated repose, into which older painters (here Giovanni Bellini) move, or where the younger (as Raphael) begin. It affines Sannazaro's Arcadia to the chordal music of the Frottole and Lauds — this Cara. (end Occhi Miei) But that calm throbs with pastoral and neo-Platonic dream — stirring the perfection Quixote was bound to espouse next to chivalry, the Age of Gold. So Corteccia for the Medici: "O begl' anni dell' oro, O saecol divo, vedrovv' io mai?" 21) Giorgione (finished by Titian?), c. 1510, Fête Champêtre, Louvre, Paris; + V detail from V21a Music: 9/1995 Arcadelt, pub. 1537, Il bianco e dolce cigno, Deller, BGS-5051 Giants in the Earth �12 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Meanwhile, as in art from Bellini to Giorgione and Titian, the frottole repose advances, with the mingling of North and South, to the swelling dynamic of the madrigal. Arcadelt is transitional: "Il bianco e dolce cigno." 22) Raphael and school, 1519(?), Isaac, Rebecca & Abimelech, cropped, Loggia, Vatican;+ V detail To learn what is Promethean here, listen to the chords: these full triads of the heart sound music's utopian claim. 23) Correggio, c. 1525, Jupiter and Antiope, Louvre, Paris (video goes from a detail to the whole) Here, an erotic swan excess: "I would die a thousand times a day." (end Arcadelt) With the same pictures: this Correggio, 2nd 22) Again, Raphael, Isaac, Rebecca, and Abimelech, whole the romantic Raphael's most romantic scene, when Abimelech saw Isaac with Rebecca, 2nd 21) Giorgione, Fête Champêtre (slide show details the figure to the left; video repeats the whole, adding the upper body of the left figure) and the Giorgione — let us savor a sonnet by Molza (CGB): Now spring returns to clothe the native hill And in the valley spreads her finery, And odors such as breathe from Araby Her garland tresses on the wind distill; 3rd 22) Raphael, Isaac, Rebecca and Abimelech, detail At this dear season to my window sill Chloris comes with the sun... Vestiva i colli e le campagne intorno La primavera di novelli onori, E spirava soavi arabi odori Cinta d'erbe e di fiori il crine adorno; Quando Licori a l'apparir del giorno... 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �13 C.G. Bell Symbolic History 2nd 23) Correggio, Jupiter and Antiope, detail 2nd 23a) Titian, c. 1515, Sacred and Profane Love, Borghese Gallery, Rome Gathering purple flowers with her hand — "In guiderdon di tanti ardori" ... — "In recompense for so much love," she murmurs "These I have culled, and with them here adorn you." Typical, the rift between that love-sweetness and the fact of Molza's Roman court life (his Modena home and family deserted) down to his death by the new plague of syphilis, and a last dreaming elegy in pure humanist Latin. 24) Lor. Lotto, c. 1498, A Maiden's Dream, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; + V details below and above: Va24 and V24a As the Gothic landscape ripens in Lotto to Renaissance mood, Della Casa turns Petrarch's mystery to sensuous caress: O sonno, o della queta, umida, ombrosa Notte placido figlio. Not even in Sydney — "Come sleep! O sleep, the certain knot of peace!" — had English quite refined such sounds: "oblio dolce de mali/ Si gravi." Though Wyatt and Surrey, too, steep Petrarch in Renaissance shadow: Alas! so all things now do hold their peace! Heaven and earth disturbèd in no thing ... The nightès car the stars about doth bring. Calm is the sea; the waves work less and less ... 25) Double: Raphael [A] 1504, Madonna dell' Granduca, Pitti, Florence; and [B] 1507, Madonna of the Goldfinch, Uffizi, Florence; + video singles and a detail Music: 9/1995 Giacomo Fogliano, c. 1510, from Ave Maria, Vanguard BG-680 Giants in the Earth �14 C.G. Bell Symbolic History From 1504 to '7, Raphael was blending Umbrian, Flemish, and Leonardo in what would hold its own for centuries as the ideal Madonna — a form of womanly grace, of which later artists might say (as Galeazzo di Tarsia did of Italy) "Membrando la fatal vostra beltate" — "Remembering your fatal beauty." At the same time the homophonic lauda melodized, as in Fogliano, a timeless "Ave Maria". (fade Fogliano) 26) 26a) Raphael, 1514-15, Portrait of Castiglione, Louvre, Paris Florentine, 16th cent., Machiavelli, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence Humanism from the first had invoked eternal presences. A hundred years before this Raphael portrait of Castiglione, Platonic Courtier, Bruni had written of his chance to study with the Greek Chrysoloras: Thou mayst gaze on Homer, Plato and Demosthenes ... converse with them and receive their admirable doctrine. So Machiavelli, exiled to his farm, writes (1513) to Vettori, how, after a day of snaring thrushes, doing chores, reading by a spring, gabbling with rustics at the inn: When evening comes, I return home and go into my study. On the threshold I strip off my muddy, sweaty workday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, Va27) 27) V27a) 27b) Raphael, 1510-11, Parnassus, from right side, Segnatura, Vatican Same, left side; video: detail only (V27) Raphael, 1509-10, School of Athens, center and right side; Vatican, Rome Same, detail of central figures and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of ancient men of old, where I am welcomed kindly and taste the food which is mine alone, and for which I was born. I make bold to speak to them and ask the motives of their actions, and they, in their humanity, reply to me. And for the space of four hours I forget the world and my cares, the troubles of poverty, and the fear of death; I live again in their company ... From their conversation ... I have composed a small book on Principalities ... 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �15 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Raphael's Parnassus and his School of Athens are the art- actualizations of those immortals first seen by Dante in the Noble Castle of Limbo, their light conquering the hemisphere of darkness. And it was from later residence there that Rabelais' Gargantua (1534) must have conceived the Abbey and order of Theleme, its one clause and rule: "DO WHAT THOU WILT" -Since men that are free, well-born, well-bred ... have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth to virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice; and it is called honour. 28) V28a) Michelangelo, 1508-12, detail from the Flood, Sistine Ceiling, Vatican Same, another detail Music: Josquin des Prez, c. 1494(?), Hosannah, Ave Maris Stella Mass, DL 79435 Upon the already elevated repose of the early century, and especially of Raphael, Michelangelo's mighty forms broke, at the Sistine unveiling, with undeflected challenge. Similarly, the ease of Italian harmony was entrained in the canonic rush of Josquin. (fade Josquin) 29) Raphael, 1514, Fire in the Borgo, detail; Vatican, Rome V29a) Same, whole, from which video also takes its 29 detail The result in Raphael fills the later Stanzas of the Vatican with muscled nudes: an Aeneas carrying Anchises, with other anomalies of a Papal miracle when the old Vatican loggia burned. Music: Constanzo Festa, c. 1527(?), from Deus, venêrunt gentes, DL79428 It was Festa in music who absorbed Josquin into the 1500 Italian, creating the high Roman style, for which Palestrina has been disproportionately praised. 30) Raphael, 1518, The Vision of Ezekiel, Pitti Palace, Florence; + V detail (music) In his last great works, whether the huge Transfiguration or this small cloud-borne Ezekiel, the soft genius of Raphael ventures like Tansillo-Icarus in the sonnet: "Scorning earth, I beat wings to the sky" — "E spregio il mondo, e verso '1 ciel m'invio." 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �16 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Flaminio: Who would have thought it possible, after such centuries of darkness, that so many lights should have arisen in a single time? (fade Festa) Va31) 31) V31a) Piero di Cosimo, c. 1510(?), Perseus and Andromeda, whole; Uffizi, Florence Same, center of scene (CGB '59) Same, a wider variant (CGB '59) The consciousness of Renaissance seizes even on the outmoded matter of Chivalry, whether of Perseus or St. George, the Crusades, or the Peers of France, working it up in literature to the Romantic Epic. Pulci's Morgante was a giant (as Don Quixote would say, "though disproportionate, affable and well-bred"); the Roland of Boiardo and Ariosto is a man, yet his love-mad actions in the Orlando Furioso are Quixote's giant model in the Morena, when those naked sommersaults give Sancho more than he might report to Dulcinea. In England it is Spenser — Ariosto through a Protestant filter: The Red Cross Knight in the den of Errour: (She) wrapping up her wrethed sterne arownd, Lept fierce upon his shield, and her huge traine All suddenly about his body wound That hand or foot to stirre he strove in vaine: God helpe the man so wrapt in Errours endlesse chaine. 32) 32a) Tintoretto, 1558, St. George and the Dragon, National Gallery, London; first, V detail of the princess, below Same, detail of St. George and the Dragon Music: V. Galilei, c. 1580(?), Il vostro gran valore (Gerwig) VICS-1408 If Spenser had looked for a picture to illustrate his Faerie Queene, he could hardly have found a better than Tintoretto's St. George, where the romance wonder of Ariosto becomes a moral allegory: like the defence of Una (or truth) from the fiend. And pointing forth, lo yonder is (said she) 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �17 C.G. Bell Symbolic History The brasen towre in which my parents deare For dread of that huge feend emprison'd be, Whom I from far see on the walles appeare... With that they heard a roaring hideous sound... Three passion days the Red Cross Knight fights, wounds the brass-plated monster with his steel, but is thrown down, to rise recovered, first from the Well of Life and then from the Tree, on the third day transfixing the dragon through his hollow maw: So downe he fell, and like an heaped mountaine lay. From this billowing groundswell (as from Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, or the lute monodies of Galilei), (end Galilei) a33) 33) 33a) Mantegna, 1497, Parnassus; Louvre, Paris (CGB '80) Mantegna, 1504, Triumph of Virtue over Vice, Louvre Paris (CGB '80) Same, detail of Vices (CGB '80); with video details from 33a and 33 Music: V. Capirola, c. 1517, Ricercar Il (Ragossnig) Archiv 2533 173 to return to Ariosto, is to enter a thaumaturgy of Gothic poignance in High Renaissance: the lute ricercare of the early l5OO's (Capirola): Mantegna's last painting of Virtue and the Pool of Vice; Orlando's dream of Angelica upon the Dante-Petrarch flowered strand: (CGB) He took such present pleasure in his dream As lovers feel, possessing their desire — A moment only — then a tempest came And bore the flowers and leaves down heavy air ... His love was lost there, and the bordered stream, Whelmed in dark and cloud, and without reason; While he went up and down sounding her name Demanding of the echoing fields and forests: "Who has changed my sweetness into poison?" 34) Same, detail (left) of Mater Virtutum imprisoned in an olive tree (the warning cry); digital having first added two Vices: Va34 And then he heard his lady, and she too cried, 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �18 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Weeping, she called upon him for his aid. He hurried to the sound; it shifted place. He turned again, still seeking, back and forth, In bitter sorrow for his vanished solace; And then another voice came from the North: "Abandon hope of happiness on earth." At this appalling cry he wakes, he stirs, And finds himself, as in his dream, in tears. (CGB) (fade Capirola) How could such magic fail to seed wonders over Europe? 35) 35a) V35b) Master of the Vyssi Brod Cycle (Bohemian) c. 1350, Birds, from Christ in the Garden, National Gallery, Prague Master of the Middle Rhine, c. 1410, Paradise Garden, detail, right side, Städelsches Inst. Frankfurt Same, whole The natural life that had vollied from Gothic North to Ars Nova South and come back North enriched toward Renaissance — as with Chaucer, or the first bird Virelais of late 14th-century France Music: Jean Vaillant, c. 1390, Par maintes fois, Nightingale phrase SAWT 9466B that vigor ripening, as in Oswald von Wolkenstein, to the tenderness of Tyrolean heart — Music: Oswald v.Wolkenstein, c. 1410(?), from Der Mai, ARC 3033 (fade) dips south once more, a36) Vb36) 36) V36a) French Tapestry, c. 1510, Lady and the Unicorn Tapestry #6, Musée de Cluny Same, detail of falcon French Tapestries, c. 1510, Noble Pastorals, Preparing Wool; Louvre, Paris From another Noble Pastorals tapestry, a courtly pair, detail and so returns to France in the space and robes of 1500, the frottole chords and rythms, to take, in Jannequin's 1528 Song of the Birds, the gusto of Francis and Rabelais. Here is 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �19 C.G. Bell Symbolic History the Nightingale couplet, with an entrance of the refrain. While tapestry details hold the screen, from the Noble Pastorals and the Chase of the Unicorn. Music: a37) Vb37) 37) 38) V38a) Jannequin, 1528, from Chant des Oiseaux (Boulanger), Decca DL 9629 Franco-Flemish, early 16th cent., Tapestry III, Hunt of the Unicorn, detail: pair of partridges, Cloisters, Metropolitan, NYC Same, detail of waterfowl Same, Tapestry IV, det. Woodcock and Duck Same, Tapestry III, detail of Hunter sounding Horn French (Touraine), c.1505(?), Tapestry, The Garden of Love, from Chateau of Le Verger, Musee des Gobelins, Paris Grangousier's friends could not have warbled better over their cups. 39) 39a) English Tudor, 1523, Compton Wynyates, Warwickshire, England (CGB '63); + V detail Cornwall, 1485-1539, Cotehele House, kitchen In the new kingdoms feudal castles shed their walls, looking to the villas and gardened palaces of Italy. Compton Wynyates sets the mode in Henry VIII's England: the mullioned-windowed hall in a wooded land, with church, farm, village — the great house built in the brick and half-timbering of the rural cot. A description of evening in Nevill's "Castell of Pleasure," 1518, restores that nature and mood: The nyght drew nye the day was at a syde My herte was heuy I moche desyréd rest Whan without comfort alone I dyd abyde Seynge the shadowes fall from the hylles in the west Eche byrde under boughe drewe nye to theyr nest The chymneys from ferre began to smoke Eche housholder went about to lodge his gest The storke fering stormes toke the chymney for a cloke... Curfew was ronge; lyghtes were set up in haste ... Which were playne precedentes that day was clerely paste. Va40) 40) 9/1995 Chateau de Chenonceau, over the Cher French Renaissance, 1518-27, Azay-le-Rideau Chateau, Indre-et-Loire Giants in the Earth �20 C.G. Bell 40a) 40b) Symbolic History Niccolo dell' Abbate, c. 1558-60, Euridice and Aristaeus, detail, National Gallery, London Leeds Castle, 13th c. and 1512, Maidstone, view from the South East France was more formal, and from Leonardo down more open to Italy. But the Chateaux of the Loire were as close to forest and chase, fields and harvest, as the court poet Marot in his 1539 Eclogue to the King, where he tells of his youth in that still wooded land (Villon's old cry of vanity, "de ma jeunesse folle," here Renaissanceaffirmed): Sur le printemps de ma jeunesse folle, Je ressemblois l'arondelle qui volle Puis ça, puis 1à ... Such the European blend of nature and custom, that Spenser can describe his English boyhood by varying Marot (as Marot had learned from Florentine Poliziano: Nel vago tempo di sua verde etate ... Viveassi lieto in pace e in libertate.) Spenser: Whilome in youth, when flowrd my joyfull spring, a41) Vb41) 41) 41a) V41b) dell' Abbate, c. 1550-55, Galerie Henri II, Chimney wall with hunting scenes, Fontainebleau (CGB '59) French-Italian, c. 1513-40, Galerie Francois I, Rosso Fiorentino, Mythological scene, Fontainebleau (CGB '59) Same, another bay, with Education of Achilles (CGB '59) Jean Coulombe, 1485, Tres Riches Heures, November, Acorn Harvest, Mus. Conde, Chantilly Galerie Francois I, Fontainebleau, general view (CGB '59) Like Swallow swift I wandred here and there ... I went the wastefull woodes and forest wyde, Withoutèn dreade of Wolves to bene espyed. Even in the gilt and panelled galleries of Fontainebleau, the legends painted by Rosso Fiorentino, Primaticcio, dell' Abbate, have absorbed, as from stream and forest, the freshness Spenser translated from Marot: 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �21 C.G. Bell Symbolic History O quantefoys aux arbres grimpé j'ay ... How often have I scaled the craggie Oke, All to dislodge the Raven of her neste: How have I wearied with many a stroke The stately Walnut tree, the whils the rest Under the tree fell all for nuts at strife: For ylike to me was liberty and lyfe. (Though the last line is Spenser's alone.) 42) 42a) School of Fontainebleau (Niccolo dell' Abbate?), c. 1560, Wheat-Threshing, Mus. de Fontainebleau; first, V detail P. Brueghel the Elder, 1565, Wheat Harvest, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City And it is also at Fontainebleau that art-cultivation of nature is expressed in a harvest landscape as real as Du Bellay's "Song of the Wheat-Winnower to the Winds": A vous troppe legere ... J'offre ces violettes ... (as Lang closes it): Ah, winnow with sweet breath, Winnow the holt and heath Round this retreat; Where all the golden morn We fan the gold o' the corn, In the sun's heat. The New World did not simply offer itself; it was opened by the swelling Prothalamion of that love: Against the Brydale day, which is not long: Sweete Themmes runne softly, till I end my Song. 43) 9/1995 French MS, c. 1260(?), Saul smites the Ammonites, MS 638 f. 23v, Pierpont Morgan Library; + V detail Giants in the Earth �22 C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History French, 13th cent., La Quinte Estampie Real (Munrow),"Crusades" Argo ZRG 673 In crusading chivalry, the battle-joy of the North had refined itself into art. Isrealites and Ammonites take the arms of Franks and Moors. Bertran de Born had voiced that keenness in the poems Pound flung at an age weary of war: "it pleaseth me to the heart when I see strong castles besieged,/ And barriers broken and riven." As revived in a sestina: Hell grant soon we hear again the swords clash! And the shrill neighs of destriers in battle rejoicing, Spiked breast to spiked breast opposing ... Va44) 44) (fade Estampie) Altdorfer, 1529, Battle of Alexander, whole, Alte Pinakothek, Munich Same, vertical expanse right of center, from which video takes horizontal spread With what physical depths the tide of Renaissance endows that fabled stour: Altdorfer's Alexander, Jannequin's Battle of Marignan, both of 1529. Music: a45) 45) 45a) V45b) 46) Jannequin, 1529, from the Battle of Marignan (5th voice, Verdelot, 1549) Angel S37025 Same, detail of mounted lancer (CGB '59) Same, Chariot of Darius in flight (CGB '59) Same, Alexander in pursuit (video repeats, from 45 and 45a, closer details of Darius and Alexander, and again, Darius and Alexander) Same, upper right, camp and city, landscape and sky Titian, 1548, Equestrian Charles V, whole, Prado (video takes two details only) (end Jannequin) The battles of Bible and myth yield to Titian's Charles V, at the actual victory of Mühlberg; yet he holds the mythic stance, Othello's "Pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war," which Baroque and even Napoleonic heroes would cling to. It is almost the lusty make-believe of Pantagruel against the Dipsodes: "How Panurge" and three others "vanquished and discomfited six-hundred and three score horsemen very cunningly" — winding them in with ships' cables to a trap of gunpowder. For 2nd 45) Battle of Alexander, detail: sun over sea and land (variant of V45b) 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �23 C.G. Bell Symbolic History What buoys up the make-believe is the expanding giant reality of man and world. Magellan had just rounded that globe; Copernicus had set it revolving in planetary space. 2nd 46) Music: Titian, Charles V, mounted, detail (video: 46 whole and detail of head from V2nd 46a) Willaert, c. 1635(?), Ricercare (3-voice Schott #6), Musical Heritage Society 913 To an always mounting blazon of art and music (this Willaert ricercare), even those inadequate kings who stride the curved horizon play Shakespearean hero-roles: ...methinks it were an easy leap To pluck bright honour from the pale-faced moon. 47) Patinir, c. 1515(?), Landscape with Charon's boat, Prado, Madrid In Patinir, the rounded Magellanic margin first stretches a Bosch dream — Charon ferrying a soul toward a fiery shore. The boldest pre-Columbian prophecy, in Pulci's Morgante, 1482, is communicated by a fiend, Astarotte: Hung among the stars by god's mystery, The world has everywhere the form of a wheel, And as it draws all things to its center, You can sail beyond the gates of Hercules, And come at last to the other hemisphere, With castles and kingdoms unknown to us here. (CGB) 48) 48a) P. Brueghel, 1558(?), Fall of Icarus, Royal Gallery, Brussels (CGB '59) Same, detail to the right: Icarus (video returns to 48) So the Altdorfer we have seen, and, by 1558, Brueghel's Fall of Icarus, where the widening earth, the galleon-traffic of the sea, leaves the old myth only a few plumes, a drowning flash of legs, "White feathers...the Gulf claims." Though if Icarus is so discounted, the global flight goes on. 49) 9/1995 Double: World Maps, [A] Germanus, 1487, and [B] Desceliers, 1550, British Museum, London (video separates V49 A and B, then takes a detail of B) Giants in the Earth �24 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Thus two printed maps, Germanus from 1487, the Eurasian landmass, with Africa to the Cape of Good Hope filled in with the names Dias had just given, the hemisphere of water unknown; and from 1550, Desceliers, the Mercator projection, but for Australia and parts of Asia, almost as we would draw it today. (end Willaert) 50) Japanese, c. 733, Vajrapani, Todai-ji Temple, Nara, Japan And where for centuries Buddhist guardian dæmons had warned venturing aliens from sacred shrines — as this Vajrapani in the Todai-ji Temple of Nara, Japan — 51) Japanese-Western, c. 1600, Enamel screen, Music by a Harbor; + V detail suddenly mission schools were teaching Christianity and the Western arts. Did lute romances even there sound the new grandeur of man — Milan's "Durandarte"? Music: 52) 52a) Luis Milan, 1536, Durandarte, opening (Meili) Vict. M-495 (3) (fade) Russian, 1505-09, Cathedral of Archangel Michael, Kremlin, Moscow Brunelleschi, 1432, shell decoration on Lantern of Cathedral, Florence (CGB ‘48); video returns to the Cathedral of Archangel Michael At the heart of the unyielding fastness of Russia, the Kremlin, this 1509 Cathedral of Michael, on an otherwise Byzantine mass, displays the scallop shells of Italy (as from Brunelleschi's lantern on the dome of Florence); at the same time Russian chant took the passion for Roman harmony which would end with the Cossacks' swelling the Psalms of David for the audiences of America. 53) Russian, mid-16th cent., Church Militant Icon, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow Music: Russian traditional, from First Psalm of David, old Col. DBX 12 Though in the Church Militant ikon of the time of Ivan, the force already flowing from Venice just stirs the surface, or perhaps the depths, of what Henry Adams would still call that Eastern vis inertia. (fade Russian Chant) 54) 54a) 9/1995 Peter Brueghel, 1565, The Dark Day (Feb-March), Kunsthistoriches, Vienna; + V detail Same, another detail Giants in the Earth �25 C.G. Bell Symbolic History In Spanish-Inquisition Flanders, Brueghel had advanced from the early Icarus to the stupendous landscapes of the months, this "Gloomy Day", from which the ultimate storm-scapes of Rubens would take their cue. In English the mightiest poem from the same time is Sackville's "Induction": The wrathful winter, 'proaching on apace, With blustering blasts had all ybared the treen And old Saturnus, with his frosty face, With chilling cold had pierced the tender green; The mantles rent, wherein enwrapped been The gladsome groves that now lay overthrown, The tapets torn, and every bloom down blown. ...small fowls flocking, in their song did rue The winter's wrath, wherewith each thing defaced In woeful wise bewailed the summer past. . When lo, the night with misty mantles spread, Gan dark the day and dim the azure skies... It taught me well all earthly things be born To die the death, for nought long time may last; The summer's beauty yields to winter's blast. Va55) 55) 55a) Peter Brueghel, 1568, Peasant Dance, detail to left; Kunsthistoriches, Vienna Same, closer detail Same, whole On the cresting life-wave comic and tragic blend. If the dishe be pleasaunt, eyther fleshe or fishe, Ten handes at once swarme in the dishe. And if it be flesh, ten knives shalt thou see, Mangling the flesh and in the platter flee. To put there thy handes is perill without fayle, Without a gauntlet or els a glove of mayle. Ofte in such dishes in court is it seene, Some leave their fingers, eche knife is so kene. On a finger gnaweth some hasty glutton, Supposing it a piece of biefe or mutton. 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �26 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Whatever Barclay's Eclogues, about 1510, owe to the humanist pope Piccolomini, they stand on the huge slope of farce that leads from the Middle Ages through Rabelais and Brueghel to Cervantes and Shakespeare. 56) Peter Brueghel, 1568, Peasant Wedding Feast, Kunsthistoriches, Vienna; + V detail (cf. V56) With Rabelais that farce takes the prodigious flesh it can only have where the sons of God have gone in to the daughters of men: L'occasion & maniere comment Gargamelle enfanta fut telle. Et si ne le croyez, le fondement vous escappe... The occasion and manner how Gargamelle gave birth was this; and if you do not believe me, may your bum-gut fall out. Her bum-gut indeed did fall out ... from eating too many tripes ... Grangousier bade his wife eat sparingly, because she was near her time ... Notwithstanding, she did eat sixteen quarters, two bushels, three pecks and a pipkin full. What a filthy deal of loblolly was this, to swell and wamble in her guts ... While they were drinking, she began to be a little unwell in her lower parts... a57) 57) Rubens, c. 1618, Silenus drunk, detail of mother giving suck, Alte Pinak., Munich (CGB '59) Same, whole (video details Silenus) The midwives, groping her below, found some peloderies of a very bad savour, which they thought had been the child, but it was her fundement which had escaped from eating too many tripes. Whereupon an ugly old trot made her a medicine so binding that all her arse-pipes were so oppilated, stopped and obstructed you could scarcely have opened them with your teeth, which is a terrible thing to think on... Rubens crests the monstrous vindication of body — a Gargantuan tie especially in the riotous baroque (though we have trimmed it) of Motteux and Urquhart's Rabelais. After the thin Gothic nudes, Titian and Rubens. Falstaff also poses the question how bulk serves exuberance. Apt we call it humor. And Renaissance languages, most of 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �27 C.G. Bell Symbolic History all English, with "Latinate verbocination," ("To such exsufflicate and blown surmises,/ Matching thy inference"), laid on enormous weight, yet trained it on home truths. 58) 58a) 58b) 58c) Triple: [A] Giovanni da Bologna, 1569-81, Allegory of the Apennines, Villa Demidoff, Florence; [B] Momper, c. 1580(?), L'Eté (mountain as head), Collection R. Lebel, Paris; and [C] Roman, 1592, carved doormouth of Casa Zuccari (CGB '86) Roman, Door-mouth (58C shown singly) da Bologna, Allegory (58A shown singly) Momper, Mountain as head (58B shown singly) From garden giants (Giambologna's "Apennines" through Momper's manmountain called summer, to the door-mouth of the Casa Zuccari in Rome — we search the portentous overflow of symbol into body, the coincidence of humanist learning with huge codpieces; of Pantagruel's Tartarean guts — the time he was sick and swallowed seventeen workers in copper balls, who opening springtraps came out with lanterns and spades, and groping and falling through a horrid infectious gulph smelled their way to the fecal blockage, dug it up, cleaned it out with baskets, and so reentering their copper spheres were vomited forth — the link between that and the great-souled letter Pantagruel receives from his father, exhorting to unbounded knowledge and virtue, to study all history, languages, manners and chivalry, law, mathematics, science: For knowledge of the works of nature, let there be no sea, river, or fountain of which you do not know the fishes, all fowls of the air, trees and shrubs of the forest, plants of the earth, all metals hid in its depths ... let me see thee a bottomless pit of knowledge ... As in the thought of Paracelsus, no limits here, no abstract denial or separation of soul from earth and practice. a59) b59) 59) 59a) 9/1995 Venetian Byzantine, c. 1225(?), Creation Mosaic, Vestibule, San Marco, Venice (CGB '66) Same, another detail (CGB '66) Double: [A] detail of b59; and [B] Raphael 1508, Adam and Eve, Ceiling, Segnatura, Vatican, Rome Raphael, Adam & Eve (59B shown singly) Giants in the Earth �28 C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Byzantine Chant (Athos), Easter Eve, from a Lauds psalm, Archiv 2533 413 B The revelational order, like the starry spheres, has broken. In the mosaic domes of Byzantine Venice, where the creation of earth and Biblical life of man circles its Godcenter, the quest of delight reduces to an Eden episode and banishment of those angular breast-fallen, flesh-denying nudes — all poignance of wish and loss gathered in rings of eternal gold. Where is the cry Ausonius distilled from the long earth-love of Greece and Rome (fade Mount Athos chant) — to fill out Raphael's Papal ceiling — "collige, virgo, rosas," "Maiden, pluck the rose," Music: Costeley, pub 1570, from Mignonne, allons (at "las, las") Boulanger, Decca DL 9629 which Poliziano would revive with Quattrocento tenderness, "Cogliam' la bella rosa del' giardino," and the Rebirth send abroad from Florence: Ronsard's "Mignonne, allons voir si la rose"; Spenser's translation from Tasso: "Gather the rose of love, whilest yet is time"; down to Marvel's cormorant defiance: "And tear our pleasures with rough strife,/ Thorough the iron gates of life"? (fade Mignonne) 60) 60a) 60b) Primaticcio in Fontainebleau, c. 1560, Ulysses and Penelope, Wildenstein; + V detail Primaticcio, c. 1550(?), fresco from the bedroom of Mme. d'Etampes, at Fontainebleau Jean Goujon, 1548-49?, "Nymphe de la Seine," relief from a fountain, Louvre, Paris Against the ascetic leap beyond death, the cry of time and flesh takes new imperative, as in the gaze of Primaticcio's Ulysses; however late it is to tell Penelope: "Gather ye rose-buds while ye may." In that field of passionate impossibility, no poem has more beauty than the Ronsard sonnet Yeats would redo: When you are old and gray and full of sleep ... Though we have still to translate it: When you are old, at evening, carding wool, 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �29 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Bent to the glow of fire and candlelight, You will say, marveling at this verse I write, "Ronsard sang of me when I was beautiful." There will not be a servant of them all, However spent with labor and the night, But starting at my name will praise your fate — As one whom fame acclaims and ever shall. My bones will be under ground; my ghost above Rest in the twilight of the myrtle grove; You will be hunched at the fire, old and gray, Regretting my love and your proud disdain. The time that passes will not come again; Believe me: pluck the rose of life today. (CGB) 61) Jean Cousin, c. 1560(?), Eva Prima Pandora, Louvre, Paris; + V detail That imperative is hurled against the recorded fate: "You old and gray": Regrettant mon amour et vostre fier desdain. So Cousin's snake-wreathed, skull-propped Eve as first Pandora: Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, à la chandellè Assise auprès du feu, dévidant et filant, Direz chantant mes vers, en vous esmerveillant: Ronsard me célebroit du temps que j'estois bellè. Lors vous n'aurez servante oyant tellè nouvellè, Desja sous le labeur à demy sommeillant, Qui au bruit de mon nom ne s'aillè resveillant, Bénissant vostre nom de louange immortellè. Je seray sous la terre, et fantosme sans os, Par les ombres myrteux je prendray mon repos: Vous serez au fouyer unè vieille accroupi 62) 62a) Titian, 1540-60(?), Venus of Pardo, Louvre, Paris Same, detail; + V closer detail Regrettant mon amour et vostre fier desdain. Vivez, si m'en croyez, n'attendez à demain: Cueillez des aujourd'huy les rosès de la vie. 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �30 C.G. Bell Symbolic History No doubt the poem exceeds French art of the time, requires the tragic radiance of Correggio's Antiope, or this Titian Venus of Pardo — the crux of Age of Gold — as in Tasso's Aminta. "S'ei piace, ei lice," "If it pleases, it is allowed" — against a world which grows old and sad — "Il mondo invecchia, e invecchiando intrisce." What power of the Rebirth makes that desired Arcadia so real? "Amiam" — Let us love, for the sun dies and is born, But for us its brief light Fades, and sleep brings on eternal night:— (CGB) "e'l sonno eterna notte adduce." 63) Double: [A] French, c. 1320, Vierge de la Celle, detail, Louvre, Paris, and [B] Michelangelo, 1521-34, Medici Madonna, detail, San Lorenzo, Florence No doubt the magnified embodiment we are calling giant was implicit in the mangod reach of the Middle Ages. Already this Mary of painted limestone (left; French c. 1320) smiles the sensuous poignance of Gothic humanization, though the archaic smile of the Greek Korê is not more mysteriously suspended. To set, against its wistful ethereality, the mood and brooding weight of Michelangelo's 1530 Medicean Madonna, is to touch the very pulse of prophetic enfleshment. 64) English Gothic, 1320-25, Lady Chapel windows and vault, Cathedral, Wells (CGB '84) Music: English, early 14th cent., 3-voice Jacet granum, Nonesuch H 71292 As in dialectic theology, so in Medieval discant (here English early l4th century), or in the always more ingenious vaulting of cathedral stone (this Lady Chapel of Wells), we feel the stretching of that bow of spirit. In music, indeed, all later styles had to shape their being from the Gothic store. (fade Jacet Granum) 65) Spanish Renaissance Gothic, c. 1500, Condestable Chapel, Vault, Burgos; + V details Music: Alonso de Alva, c. 1500, Ut queant laxis, Angel S-36926 That architecture could have done likewise Spain makes startlingly clear. In the 1500 Condestable chapel of Burgos, as in this Spanish polyphony, articulate Renaissance 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �31 C.G. Bell Symbolic History has been achieved without the intervention of the classical. Alonso de Alva) 66) (fade Spanish, 1568, Gothic Dome of Burgos Cathedral, crossing, Spain; + V details Music: Josquin des Prez(?), c. 1520, from Inviolata ... Maria, Seraphim SIC-6104 While the Crossing of Burgos, 1568, within the same Gothic (and Moorish) idiom, has solemnized a wreathing as grand as the many-voiced summits of polyphony — from this 12-part Inviolata attributed to Josquin, (close Inviolata) through Gombert, Willaert, Morales, to the mightiest of all, Tallis' Spem in Alium whose 40voices fuse in a chordal enormity of passionate lowing, as of the brazen cow in which the tyrant of Syracuse burned his victims. Music: a67) 67) Tallis, c. 1570(?), from Spem in Alium (toward close), (78) HMVDA 1921-22 P. Brueghel, 1563, Tower of Babel, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna Double: [A] Anglo-French (Paris), c. 1425, Tower of Babel, Add. MS 18850, British Museum, London; and [B] Brueghel, Tower of Babel, a67; + V detail of [B] The concept of a 40-voice fabric is as far from the century before, as folk plays from Rabelais, or this illuminated Tower of Babel quaintly harried by the angels from the 1563 Brueghel, where the claim of the mighty ones in the earth is spatially enacted. a68) English late Perpendicular (Tudor), 1446-1515, King's College Chapel, exterior from the southwest (CGB); cropped from wide-angle Va68 b68) Same, interior, looking up: windows and vault (Sam Adams' slide) Vc68) Same, wide-angle interior, looking west (CGB '77) Vd68 and e68) Same, west window, and closer: video shows upper part (CGB '77) 68) Same, whole interior with organ loft, black and white (cf. V68, color) (end Spem in Alium) Though perhaps Tallis' greatest music is in the 5-voice Lamentations of Jeremiah (here in the epoch-making Deller recording). 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �32 C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Tallis, c. 1575(?), First Lamentation of Jeremiah, opening and close, (Deller) Bach Guild 551 These passionate implorations might span the Continent of that tragic century, from the 1500 Gothic spatiality of King's College Chapel, Cambridge, For 1st 69) Double: [A] Michelangelo, 1536-41, from Last Judgment, Upper part, and [B] Beaufort Chapel, Warwick, variant (video shows singles and detail of 69A) V69a) Fountains Abbey, view from the East, North Yorkshire 69b) Same, Presbytery, looking East to the thunderhead of Michelangelo's Judgment in Counter Reformation Rome (of which a crude variant clouds a wall of the also late Gothic Beaufort Chapel in Warwick). (skip to "Jerusalem") Tallis, like Byrd, was a Catholic, writing in an England where despoiled monasteries enforced Shakespeare's metaphor of age: "Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang." 1st 70) Michelangelo, 1550-56, Pieta, upper half, Duomo Museum, Florence; + V detail of Nicodemus How could the titan calmly revealed in the Renaissance island of 1500 knit incarnate thews but in Judgment tragedy and the war of values, which darkening to the Lear storm would found, confound, and fortify the airy earth-freedoms first dreamed? As Milton would say: "What purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary." (end Tallis Lamentation) Va2nd 69) Michelangelo, detail of Judgment, the damned beat down 2nd 69) Same, a Soul weighed down It is in Christian denial of his Promethean self and art that Michelangelo made the syntax of the sonnet a poetic battleground of hope and fear: Giunto è già '1 corso della vita mia Con tempestoso mar, per fragil barca, Al comun porto, ov' a render si varca Conto e ragion d'ogni opra trista e pia. 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �33 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Already now across tempestuous seas' Uncharted course my brittle bark has blown To the common port, where all come to own Account and cause of goods and trespasses. Wherefore the loving fancy's subtleties, That made of art an idol and a throne, Break in deception — snares, too late known Such bitter sweets as to damnation please. Amorous thoughts, long since proved vanities, What are you now, if double death incline, One sure, one doubted, both foretasted harms? a2nd 70) Michelangelo, 1555-64, Rondanini Pieta, Sforzesca, Milan Vb2nd 70) Same, profile detail (copy of CGB '80) 2nd 70) Again, Nicodemus head Not any mastery of paint or stone Can ease the heart that sees how love divine Spreads on the cross — to gather us — his arms. (CGB) Nè pinger nè scolpir fie più che quieti L'anima volta a quell' amor divino Ch'aperse a prender noi 'n croce le braccia. How far this last Michelangelo self, Nicodemus as lamenting world-father, has come from that youthful morning with Leonardo, Pico and the rest, in Medici Florence; how tragically pushed self's prophetic claim. a71) 71) Raphael, 1511-12, detail of Madonna of Foligno, Vatican Titian, c. 1510, Gypsy Madonna, Kunsthistorisches, Vienna (CGB '59); + V detail Music: Josquin des Prez, pub.1504, Coment peult (instr.) Archive 3223 What High Renaissance had reached for, in neo-Platonism, Josquin's Musica Reservata, in Raphael, or as here, in the first works of Titian, was the earthly eternity of divine beauty and good — what Sydney would give Sapphic measure in his remaking of Sannazaro's 1500 Arcadia: If the sencelesse spheares doo yet hold a musique, 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �34 C.G. Bell Symbolic History If the Swanne's sweet voice be not heard, but at death, If the mute timber when it hath the life lost, Yeldeth a lute's tune, Are then humane mindes priviledg'd so meanly, As that hatefull death can abridge them of powre, With the voyce of truth to recorde to all worldes, That we be her spoiles? a72) 72) (fade Josquin) Titian, 1565, Self Portrait, Prado, Madrid Titian, 1565, Self, in an Allegory of Prudence and the Ages of Man, National Gallery, London; first, V detail Music: Lassus, c.1560, Penitential psalms: Domine, ne in furore, ARC2533 290 (B) The embodiment of that Promethean claim would lead those devotees through fields of lowering actuality (as Don Quixote would exclaim: "I do not even know how chivalry can work in so depraved a time.") In the sonnet, the crisis would run from Michelangelo to Campanella, to Gongora in Spain; in England to Shakespeare, and thereafter to Donne. The raptures of idea and form — Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to come, Can yet the lease of my true love control, Suppos'd as forfeit to a confined doom buckle under the assault of fact: Tired with all these, for restful death I cry, As, to behold desert a beggar born ... ... maiden virtue rudely strumpeted ... ... captive good attending captain ill... Thus Titian, nearing 80, self-portrayed, in an allegory of Prudence and the Ages of Man — 73) V73a) Titian, c. 1570, Crowning with Thorns, Alte Pinak., Munich (CGB '59) Same, detail (CGB '59) Titian, climaxing a productive life which reached from the laude and frottole repose of 1500 to the star-crossed pathos of the last Passion pictures — a darkening so widely 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �35 C.G. Bell Symbolic History shared, we seize almost at random, from a generation of music, on Lassus' Penitential Psalms. 74) Veronese, 1578, Battle of Lepanto (of 1571) detail, Accademia, Venice The age-long threat of Moorish invasion broke in Lepanto, where Cervantes was maimed and then taken into slavery. But there was a symbolic Lepanto of new against old, and Cervantes was not the only giant of the spirit who fought there. In some such engagement Bruno went up in flames, Galileo went captive behind inquisition walls. (fade Lassus) 1st 75) El Greco, 1590-95, St. John, detail from Crucifixion, Prado, Madrid It is hard for products of Enlightenment to realize that the religious heightening is no less titanic than the worldly, no less fraught with earth-transforming danger. Bruno was a churchman; and who knows if the mystic frenzy of El Greco had been translated into thought and word, how heretical it might have been? Was not John of the Cross accused for those amorous meetings with Christ where the loved into Lover was changed? 1st 76) Tintoretto, 1583-87, Night landscape with St. Mary of Egypt, Scuolo San Rocco, Venice (or V1st 76, lighter) 76a) Same, detail of Mary V76b) Tintoretto, 1583-87, Night landscape with St. Mary Magdalen, Scuolo San Rocco, Venice In Tintoretto it is Mary of Egypt who shares a night as God-tinctured as when Juan de la Cruz ascended Mount Carmel: En una noche escura, con ansias en amores inflamada ... It is the night Tasso pooled with moonlight, silence and love: What dewdrops, what tears ... Quai lagrime eran quelle...? The woods and streams are quiet 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �36 C.G. Bell Symbolic History and without wave the sea... Sien muti i baci e muti i miei sospiri... Or in his Jerusalem, the Erminia brooding which Fairfax has gleamingly rendered: Invested in her starrie vaile, the night In her kinde armes embraced all this round, The silver moone from sea uprising bright Spred frostie pearle on the canded ground: And Cinthia like for beauties glorious light, The love-sicke Nymph threw glistering beames around, And counsellors of her old love, she made Those vallies dumbe, that silence, and that shade. E secretarii del suo amore antico Fea i muti campi e quel silenzio amico. Va2nd 75) El Greco, 1597-1600, The Annunciation, detail, Collection of Thyssen, Lugano 2nd 75) Greco, 1603-05, The Nativity, detail, Illescas, Hospital de la Caridad Since the mid-century chromatic experiments of Vicentino and Lassus, music had explored the mode of dramatic emotion and crepuscular melting. In Marenzio's setting of Petrarch's night sonnet, "Solo e pensoso i piu deserti campi," what vast glimmerings of the plasmic world have been explored since Petrarch. The upper voice runs a half-tone scale from G to high G and back to C, setting all the other voices nocturnally awash. Music: 2nd 76) 2nd 76a) 2nd 76b) 77) 77a) 9/1995 Marenzio, 1599, Solo e pensoso, chromatic opening, BGS 5051 Double: [Tintoretto, [A] St. Mary of Egypt, (76), and [B] St. Mary Magdalen (V76b) Tintoretto, detail of V76b, Mary Magdalen, background (or V2nd 76a) Tintoretto, detail of 76, St. Mary of Egypt, background (cut Marenzio) Pierre Dumonstein, c. 1580, Portrait of a man, Mus. Jacquemart André French School, late 16th cent., Portrait of Montaigne, Musée Condé, Chantilly; video then returns to detail of 77, Dumonstein Giants in the Earth �37 C.G. Bell 77b&c) 77d) 77e) 77f) 77g) Music: Symbolic History Double: Jacques Callot, etchings, [A] 1622, A Duel, and [B] 1617, Couple Promenading; both from Capricci di Varie Figure, British Museum, London (video takes them singly) Francois Clouet, 1560-70, Diane de Poitiers, detail, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. (CGB '75) Nicholas Beaugrais, c. 1560-80, Apocalypse Window, Royal Chapel, Vincennes Castle, Near Paris Callot, 1617-22, Capricci #62, Old Shepherd Piping, etching Dumonstein, detail of head (see 77) Claude le Jeune, before 1600, Revecy venir du printans (Boulanger) Decca DL 9629 Let this unknown Frenchman of the late century (with Claude le Jeune's measured Spring song) remind us of that modest giant, Montaigne. In his essay on Presumption, he asks, with regard to a self-portrait Renate of Sicily has sent Francis II: Why is it not as lawful for every man else to pourtray himself with his pen, as it were for him to do with a pensell? How can Montaigne in that portrayal neglect the scar he calls his "cicatrice" — in Hamlet's words — that "the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." At a time when the resolve of the Protestant Bourbon was beseiging and starving Catholic Paris, that flaw becomes the virtue of a civilized man: Le peuple se trompe ... Grandeur of soul consists not so much in mounting and pressing forward, as in knowing how to govern and circumscribe itself. There is no science so arduous as to know how to play the man, to live this life. For my part I love life, and cultivate it, such as it has pleased God to bestow it on us ... I accept with gratitude what nature has done for me ... the great omnipotent Giver ... all goodness himself, has made everything good... Transcendental humors affright me...Who would escape being men, do not transform themselves into angels but into beasts... 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �38 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Yet how Transcendental in the later sense is this perfection of being ourselves "without miracle, without extravagance ... gay and sociable ... nor let music be wanting ..." (end Claude le jeune) 78) Agostino Carracci(?), c. 1590, Portrait, Self(?), Alte Pinakothek Munich; first, V detail No less the product of a giant century than the radical powers being then suppressed in Italy. Pomponazzi, early in the century, had expressed the fate to follow: The philosopher is a very Prometheus. Seeking to penetrate the secrets of God, he is consumed with ceaseless cares, forgets to eat and sleep, is derided of all men, held for a fool and unbeliever; harried by inquisitors, he becomes the gaping stock of the common crowd... A prophecy fulfilled in Bruno: And so I spread wide pinions to the air, Nor fear the impasse of glass or crystal sphere, Piercing the heavens to the infinite. And as I leave this globe and mount the vast, Beating my way across the ethereal waste, I lose the care of every common sight. (CGB) 79) Limbourg Brothers, 1413-16, Night arrest of Christ in the Garden, Musée Conde, Chantilly; + V detail The last Promethean work of Renaissance was the grappling with the starry universe. The first representation of that fathomless night nature had been in the Tres Riches Heures at the start of the 15th century. By 1440 Cusanus was formulating it: and although our universe is not infinite, nevertheless, one cannot conceive of it as finite; it is not enclosed in boundaries, nor is the earth its center nor any sphere of the stars its circumference ... It has its center everywhere, its circumference nowhere, because God is its circumference and center, He who is everywhere and nowhere ... Plato, in fact, said the world is animate; and if one conceives God as its soul — without immersion — much of what we have said will be clear. 80) 80a) 9/1995 Elsheimer, 1609, Flight to Egypt by night, Alte Pinakothek, Munich; video also takes a detail from V80 (CGB '59) and a starry one from 80; so digital, as z a &b Moon Surface from Apollo 15 Command Module; digital has Io here Giants in the Earth �39 C.G. Bell 80b) 80c) Symbolic History 1930s print, Jupiter as seen from one of its moons; here luna surface Volcanoes on Io, moon of Jupiter, radio photographed by Voyager I, here Jupiter As Elsheimer (1609) stretches out that starry sky, Bruno's soaring expands the cosmos of Cusanus: For us consists the Universal sphere as a single all over-spreading, infinite, immovable continuum, in which numberless spheres or particular worlds exist. There is but one sky, one immeasurable worldspace, one matrix, one universal connective, one ether region through which the whole moves. In this become visible innumerable stars, constellations, world bodies and suns ... Of these our earth is one, yet not a single one is the center, for the universe is in all directions equally immeasurable ... The earth and all other constellations have their own soul, which again is but a part of the World Soul. By 1610 Galileo's Sidereal Messenger communicates the shattering news of telescopic sights. He had begun the true exploration of worlds in space. other stars in myriads ... never seen before ... the body of the moon ... thirty times larger ... like the face of the earth itself ... everywhere full of vast protruberances, deep chasms, and sinuosities ... four planets, neither known nor observed before my time, which have their orbits round a certain bright star ... (The moons of Jupiter.) Va80+1) G. Romano, 1530-32, Fall of the Giants (here video takes a detail from slide 1, see opening); digital veries the order of these 80+1) From the same frescoed room, another scene; + a closer V detail Of the enterprise of the century, as of the later West, two things had been clear from the start, that it was giant and that it was perilous. They knew of old, those myths of titans in the world. As once I applied the symbol of this picture: And all whom superstitions of the dark Had thundered down for daring — Icarus Sun-melted, Phaeton Jove-destroyed, Prometheus Of the fire and Lucifer of morning, Niobe made tears and Semele love-burning — 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �40 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Rose divinely, winging west with the dawn... We feel the fatal angels strike the tower, Or through the slant rifts of the rock-hurled hail, Glimpse dreads of distance where our running kind Shot with his lightnings fall, and the mountains drown. 9/1995 Giants in the Earth � 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 Giants in the Earth (16th Century), Symbolic History, Part 16 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 16 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_16_Giants_in_the_Earth_16th_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/c015e517b8b8e1fd3245aeaaf2b6c203.pdf 9101b0e032cb506240dcf879279e357f PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 17. Michelangelo: Storm Center CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 August 1995 Last Revised January ‘96 �1 Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 17. Michelangelo: Storm Center 1) 1a) Michelangelo, 1513-16, Moses, San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome Same, Michelangelo Moses, detail If history appears as an evolving field of force, its most charged sequence has been in the culture of the Christian West, and insofar as that power records itself in the arts, Michelangelo stands at its peak, an incarnation of dynamic will. Any of his works, here the Moses, of 1513 to '16, is not simply an art-object, but an energy-organizer at all levels of the creative stair. It is in some way a self-portrait, personal to its maker; as specific to its generation, it exemplifies also a period style, say Florentine Renaissance; third, it is an image of Western man, protagonist of our culture from its Medieval beginnings to today; last, an embodiment of world force, it actualizes something divine — the shaping thrust of nature, as Michelangelo put it, of God. Music: 2) 2a) Josquin des Pres, 1515-20, close of Absalon, Nonesuch H 71216 Sistine Chapel, 1475, with Michelangelo ceiling (1508-12), and Judgment (1536-41), Vatican, Rome Same, detail of Michelangelo ceiling (Josquin des Pres — compared by their contemporaries with Michelangelo — David's lament for Absalon.) (end Josquin) So history sounds the resonances of art as symbolic form: person, period style, culture, world soul. If we ask of the person, Michelangelo, it is the Sistine Chapel which gives most immediate answer. Under the vault of the Creation (1508 to '12) all tales of this daemonically driven man become August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �2 C.G. Bell Symbolic History credible: the titanic bent of his person, his pride in dealing with Pope Julius, himself a violent man; it no longer surprises us that he could shut himself up in the chapel and paint for years, hardly admitting his patron, the Vicar of Christ. 3) 3a) Michelangelo, 1508-12, Sistine Ceiling, The Prophet Jeremiah, whole, Vatican, Rome; + V detail Same, Jeremiah, detail of head These tensile forces build with Michelangelo's own words and the things reported of him to a single surge. To feel it we may focus on any of the represented Prophets, Jeremiah say, and at the same time rehearse one of Vasari's typical stories: Late in Michelangelo's life the consuls responsible for rebuilding St. Peter's wrote: "As regards the progress and designs and prospects of the new basilica, the deputies know nothing whatever, Michelangelo despising them worse than if they were outsiders." When he was brought before the Cardinals he revealed that three windows of travertine were to light the vault. "You never told us anything about that," said the cardinal. "I am not obliged to tell your lordships or anyone else what I intend to do," replied Michelangelo; "your business is to take charge of the expenses and to see that no one steals. The building is my affair." Va4) Sistine Ceiling, 1st bay, two Nude figures 4) Same, left figure [Note video variant, V4] Or we may consider the Dialogues of Francisco de Hollanda, where Michelangelo says of his mission (and he is the first to speak in these terms): A man cannot attain to excellence... if he be not singular or distant, or whatever you like to call him. As for those other meek and commonplace spirits, they may be found without the need of a candle in all the highways of the world... 5) Same figure, detail of head [Note video variant, V5] In the same dialogue he says of his art: Good art is nothing but a replica of the perfections of God and a reflection of His art; it is a harmony and a melody which only the intellect can understand, and that with great difficulty... August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �3 C.G. Bell 6) Symbolic History Sistine Ceiling, whole 1st Bay, Light from Dark If these were Michelangelo's sentiments, is it any wonder that this Messiah of Art, in the first scene of the Sistine Creation, the Separation of Light from Darkness, hit on a new and implicitly heretical conception? 7) French, mid-13th cent. MS, Cod 2554, f50v, God Creating, National Library, Vienna In contrast to a 13th-century God, who creates with the effortless calm of spirit, 2nd 6) Again, Sistine Ceiling, Light from Dark, detall of Jehovah; + V detail the Sistine Jehovah initiates the world in the brute involvement of body. In Goethe's words: "In the beginning was the deed." Curious that another Renaissance revolutionary, toward the end of the century, the Englishman Marlowe, should describe Hero's first experience of physical love by a simile of creation, conceived in the spirit of Michelangelo: ...She strove; This strife of hers, like that which made the world, Another world begot of unknown joys... For 2nd 7) French Illumination, c. 1250(?), God Creating, Genesis, title page, St. Louis Bible, Cathedral, Toledo How far from the 13th-century Genesis is the divine strife by which the Sistine vault proclaims dynamic primacy. Va8) Sistine Ceiling, whole (though the video crops to about five scenes) 8) Same, detail of three central scenes Its very space is folded in perspectival battle. Look how any of the alternating small scenes (as here at the center), with its border figures seated as on sculptural supports — how each shapes, above and below, its own recess, of which the mouldings define a fit meeting point. But the adjacent large scenes are spilled over from each side by those cornices, so that they exist in a sort of negative space. August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �4 C.G. Bell 9) Symbolic History Whole of Sistine Ceiling, seen from the entrance Against the Baroque formulation of an entire ceiling from one point of view, Michelangelo's summoning of space from the old spacelessness, buckles the vault in corrugations of generative strain. 10) 10a) Sistine Ceiling, Head of God Creating the Sun and Moon Same, the arm-spread figure of God The head of God making the sun and moon is one of the most concentratedly violent. Like the Moses, it fuses something of Pope Julius and of Michelangelo himself in a fury of the embodied divine. We may relate it to a letter the artist wrote his brother about the same time, displeased with some mishandling of family affairs: I wish to tell you that for the last twelve years I have wandered miserably through Italy; I have supported every shame, suffered every hardship, worn out my body with every toil, and risked my life itself a thousand times for the single purpose of advancing my family. Now that I have begun to raise it up a little, it is you, and you alone, who desire in a single hour to destroy and pull down all I have spent so many years and such labour building up. By the Body of Christ, but this shall not be! I am ready to wipe away ten thousand such men as you are whenever it is necessary. And now, be wise, and do not vex to wrath one who has other causes for anxiety. a11) 11) Sistine Ceiling, Nude figures from Separation of Land from Waters, 3rd bay Same, of these, the agitated nude to the right; video: detail only Michelangelo was renowned for that "terribilità." It permeates not only his art but his life. His first biographer, Condivi, writes of his daily habits: He has always been extremely temperate in living, using food more because it was necessary than for any pleasure he took in it; especially when he was engaged upon some great work; for then he usually confined himself to a piece of bread, which he ate in the middle of his labour... While he was in full vigour, he generally went to bed with his clothes on, even to the tall boots, which he has always worn, because of a chronic tendency to cramp… At certain seasons he has kept these boots on for such a length of time, that when he drew them off the skin came away together with the leather, like that of a sloughing snake... August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �5 C.G. Bell a12) 12) Symbolic History Sistine Ceiling, Deluge, detail, right Same, detail, left Turning away all the artists summoned from Florence to assist him in the technique of fresco, packing them off home, Michelangelo tackled the ceiling alone, with only a boy to help him mix paint. Vasari tells how he got so used to looking up that if he was given anything to read he would automatically raise it and hold it over his head. And Michelangelo says as much in a satiric poem (Symonds): My beard turns up to heaven; my nape falls in, Fixed on my spine: my breast-bone visibly Grows like a harp; a rich embroidery Bedews my face from brush-drops thick and thin... So foul I fare, and painting is my shame. For he never forgot that he was a sculptor driven to painting as to an art he despised. 13) 13a) Sistine Ceiling, Adam from the Creation Same, Adam, upper detail Such is the man of violence and sorrows who saw himself and was already seen by his contemporaries, as in some way justifying his archangelic name, a type of the creating divine. Vasari gives it the theistic expression of the time: "The great Ruler of Heaven... resolved... to send to earth a genius universal in each art... that the world should marvel at the singular eminence of his life and works and all his actions, seeming rather divine than earthly." Music: 14) Ganassi, pub. 1543, Ricercare for Viol, Seraphim SIC 6052 From the same fresco, the hands of God and Adam He was the symbolic life-giver, born in an age already aware of itself as a time of rebirth, aware too that the generative energy it felt centered somehow in the visual arts, in the representational conquest of bodies in space, artistic herald of the Western science of power — music too first reaching toward instrumental and fugal pomp (Ganassi). (close Ganassi) August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �6 C.G. Bell 15) 15a) Symbolic History Michelangelo, 1501-03, David, whole, from his left, Accademia, Florence (CGB '86) Same, David, whole, from his right (CGB '86) Music: Cabezon, c. 1540(?), Diferencias on El Cavallero AS-40 It was this Michelangelo who in his youth (forty years before Spanish Cabezon's variations on El Caballero) could take the great block of flawed marble hacked and spoiled by his predecessors and liberate the David (1501-3). Again it is Vasari who says: "This revival of a dead thing was a veritable miracle" (end Cabezon) a theme Pater would treat more pantheistically, in relating the Sistine Creation of Adam to the David August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �7 C.G. Bell 16) Symbolic History Michelangelo, 1530-33, Fourth Captive, for Julius' Tomb, "Young Giant Awakening," Accademia, Florence (CGB '86); + V detail (while the slide show substitutes a double, 16a: two views of the same captive; so digital and the unfinished Slaves: This creation of life — life coming always as relief or recovery, and always in strong contrast with the rough hewn mass in which it is kindled, is in various ways the motive of all his work... And as his persons have something of the unwrought stone about them, so... with him the very rocks seem to have life. Surely, in the organ Ricercare, from the first Cavazzoni, through Cabezon, to the Gabrielli, giant forms struggle for release. Cavazzoni: Music: Marco Antonio Cavazzoni, 1527, Ricercada, SVBX 5322: 1-2 Thus, long before Pater and the 19th century, Michelangelo's own metaphor of the creative artist informing stone suggests a more than Platonic mystery, 17) Same, Captive III (Bearded Giant), upper portion, Accademia, Florence by which both artist and stone become agents and collaborators, realizing the impulsion of a deeper will. This is the Michelangelo Emerson would make part of the universal striving of spirit to realized form: The passive master lent his hand To the vast soul that o'er him planned. a18) 18) (fade Cavazzoni) Same, Captive III, detail of head Same, Captive II (Atlas), Accademia, Florence (CGB '86) Andrea Gabrielli: Music: Andrea Gabrielli, c. 1550(?), Canzona, near close, Period TE 1133, Side 5 He builded better than he knew; The conscious stone to beauty grew. August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �8 C.G. Bell Symbolic History And we should not forget that this last line is suggested by the technique Michelangelo followed in his carving, and which he has touched on in various sonnets: Non ha l'ottimo artista alcun concetto Ch' un marmo solo in sè non circonscriva: Where is the shape of the best artist's dream? It is sleeping somewhere in the uncut stone; And the task of the hand that serves the brain Is to strike off the excess and free the form. (CGB) (end Gabrielli) The attempt to reveal, in the first of our modes, Michelangelo as person has veered to the fourth, Michelangelo as agent of world-spirit — 19) Michelangelo, c. 1524-26, Vestibule of Biblioteca Laurenziana, Florence what even in architecture buckled the articulations of Renaissance, turning this vestibule of the Laurentian Library — its curved and balustraded stairs spilling into a vertical space of thrustback columns, pilasters, blind windows, and broken pediments ("the limbs of architecture," Michelangelo wrote, "are derived from the limbs of man") — into as radical a point of departure, 20) Michelangelo, 1526-33, Double: Tombs of [A] right: Lorenzo and [B] left: Giuliano, Medici Chapel, S. Lorenzo, Florence as in sculpture the archetypal polarity of the Medici Tombs: Lorenzo, pensive thinker (right), with twilight Morning and Evening; against active Giuliano (left), with the extremes of Night and Day. In recorded music, the first fruit of such tensile ingathering is in Ortiz's Ricercada Quinta, published in Rome, 1553, as performed on Anthologie Sonore by Boomkamp and Bodky. August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �9 C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Ortiz, pub.1553, Ricercada Quinta, Anthologie Sonore 40 20a) Same, Tomb of Lorenzo, A of 20 20b) Same, Tomb of Giuliano, B of 20 For 2nd 19) Michelangelo, Double: [A] Lorenzo and [B] Giuliano dei Medici (video doubles full-length figures; slide show, half-length) 2nd 19a) Same, Double: details of heads (order reversed) a2nd 20) Same, Dawn, from Lorenzo Tomb (slide show, colored; video, B&W) For 2nd 20) Same, Double: Twilght and Dawn, from Lorenzo Tomb 21) Same, Night, from Giuliano Tomb 22) Same, Day from Giuliano Tomb 23) Same, detail, shoulder and head of Day (end Ortiz) Though even in this tortional Day, the conjuring of Michelangelo as world-spirit must assume historical modes for its operation: the tragic embodiment of Renaissance, within the God-projective daring of the Christian West. That the West has a character is as easy to feel as it is hard to formulate. 24) Triple: [A] Greek (Ægina), 480 B.C., Bronze warrior's head, Acropolis Museum, Athens; [B] Greek, c. 350 B.C., the so-called Mausolus from Halicarnasus, detail, British Museum, London; and [C] Roman 1st cent. A.D., Male Portrait, Palazzo Capitolino, Rome When we look at the human image as it records itself in art, it is clear that Greek sculpture in its early phases (left) was essentially free of introspective personality; and that when, in the Alexandrian period, introspection appears (center, c. 350 B.C. "Mausolus") it is as a weakness, a sensuous yearning and nostalgia — darkening, after the crisis of Republican Rome (right) to a weighty obligation, a stoical cause of gloom. 25) Double: [A] Attic, c. 600 B.C., Dipylon Head, National Museum, Athens; and [B] German, c. 1060, Bronze Crucifix, Head of Christ, Abbey Church, Essen-Werden In Western civilization on the other hand (right), some kind of subjective personality is present from the first, and manifests itself throughout as a phenomenon of power August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �10 C.G. Bell Symbolic History (Werden Christ, 11th century). Whereas an Archaic Greek Kouros (left), similar in stylized abstraction, is clean of any such inwardness. 26) French Gothic, c. 1210, Head of Samuel, from N. Portal, Chartres; + V detail This sense of the private soul as a creative energy, as something positive and divine, runs from the Romanesque origins to our own day. Every style-study must unite and differentiate. Within the West as a whole, we move from the sacerdotal Gothic (Chartres about 1210, Samuel — in music, Perotin); Music: 27) Perotin, c. 1200, from Beata Viscera, "O mira novitas," (Tinayre) Lumen 32011 (fade) Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1512, Self-Portrait, red chalk, Biblioteca Reale, Turin; + V detail through the humanistic Renaissance (1512, Leonardo, Self — in music, Festa); Music: 28) C. Festa, 1514, from Lament for Anne of Britanny (adapted for Maximillian, 1519, by Senfl) ARCHIV 3223 (close) Rembrandt, 1660, Self at Easel, Louvre, Paris; + V detail the darker introspection of the Great Baroque (c. 1660, Rembrandt, Self — in music, Schütz); Music: 29) H. Schütz, c. 1645, from the Symphonia, from the Seven Words ARCHIV 198408 (close) P.O. Runge, 1804-05, Crayon Self Portrait, Kunsthalle, Hamburg; + V detail the Romantic liberation of intuitive ego (1804, Runge, Self — in music, Beethoven); Music: 30) Beethoven, 1808, Pastoral Symphony, opening of 2nd Movement, (Walter) Odyssey Y33924 (fade) Van Gogh, 1888, Self, Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts; + V detail to the Modern immolation of that ego in an act of triumphant despair (about 1890, Van Gogh — with Debussy in music). August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �11 C.G. Bell Music: 31) Symbolic History Debussy, 1893, String Quartet, from the 2nd Movement, Nonesuch M1007 (fade) Attic, c. 480 B.C., The Blond Boy, Acropolis Museum, Athens Yet beside the Greek idealized art-man (Athens, about 480 BC), so far from celebrating the confessions of soul-in-flesh, these shadings grow indistinct — 32) 32a) Albrecht Dürer, c. 1500, Self in fur-collared robe, Alte Pinakothek, München; + V detail Dürer, c. 1510, Nude. Self as study for Christ at the Column, Schloss Museum, Weimar the Western man blends into one dynamic image: focus of the human paradox — from Abelard and Dante through Villon, Quixote, and Hamlet to Faust — of the tragic waste and glory of personality. This image (Dürer, Self) is in some suggestive way also a Christ-image and, painful as the recognition may be, an image of Lucifer as well. It has the stamp of the incarnate god upon it, of a god who has immersed himself in body and time, and not so much to his Platonic loss as to his dæmonic gain. For that seems to be the archetype to which it is related, and without which it could hardly have converted the pagan weakness, Augustine's "abyss of conscious personality," into such a well of selfaffirming power. 33) 33a) 33b) 33c) Michelangelo, c. 1513, The Dying Captive, Louvre, Paris (CGB '80) Same, from his right (CGB '80) Same, upper detail Same, detail of face Music: Juan Vasquez, pub. 1560, Lagrimas de mi consuelo, lst version, MMG-1103 For Michelangelo, he portrays such secret depths by every curve of shaped stone — here from the Julius tomb, one of the two captives actually finished, about 1513. So too the music of expressive passion, which Josquin called Musica reservata, spread from his Absalon, through the always more chromatic daring of Willaert and de Rore, to all parts of Europe — as, around midcentury, to the Spain of this Vasquez "Lagrimas." Here sound and image voice what Santayana has translated from Michelangelo — in four lines the romantic flaw and glory of the Incarnate West: August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �12 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Ravished by all that to the eyes is fair, Yet hungry for the joys that truly bless, My soul can find no stair To mount to heaven, save earth's loveliness. Gli occhi mie', vaghi delle cose belle, E l'alma insieme della suo salute Non anno altra virtute C'ascende al ciel che mirar tutte quelle... 34) (close Vasquez) Roman Christian, c. 325 ff., Rotunda of Santa Costanza, Rome (CGB '86 variant, so far not used) Music: Gregorian (Apostolic?), Mass XII, close of Gloria, (Solesmes) London 5633 In architecture, the round-arched Roman-Christian temple (here Santa Costanza, 325 and after), which retained — with Gregorian — a certain classical measure and harmonious ease, (end Gloria) 35) French Gothic, 1212-41, South Aisle of Rheims (CGB '59) Music: Perotin, c. 1210, from 3-voice Diffusa est gratia: "benedixit te Deus," (Cape) AS 65 b (78) gives way to the skyward reachings of Gothic (Aisle of Rheims) — the bare chords, driving triple rhythm, and, lilting through that sternness, the mystery of Perotin's organum. So Aristotle's ethic of the mean opens to an ethic of charity, which does not aim at the reasonable, but at the infinite extreme. 36) French Gothic, 1195-1218 ff., Choir buttressing of Bourges Cathedral (CGB '84); so video, from V36; while slide show uses a wider Sam Adams' view Already in the Medieval town and under the tutelage of self- and-world-denial, the Western giant is stirring. Yet how lean and stripped the timeless aspiration of Gothic buttressing, this Bourges — severe as the Dies Irae: Tuba mirum spargens sonum... The great horn thundering doom August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �13 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Through the shires of the tomb Gathers all before the throne. (CGB) 37) Same, Bourges, interior, windows (CGB '84) How spaceless the vision of liturgical lights in dark, inner silence in the functional shell — mystical as the Dies Irae: Fount of pity, be saviour to me... Salva me, fons pietatis. 38) (close Perotin) Michelangelo and others, 1550-64 ff., St. Peter's, from the Janicula, Rome (CGB '86) Music: Victoria, c. 1590(?), Salve Regina, close, (2 choirs, etc.) Tel. AWT 6 3537 In contrast, the apse of St. Peter's, which Michelangelo finished late in life, with the crossing and projected dome, encloses, in a nobly reasoned display of outward mass, 39) Same, St. Peter's interior, Nave to Choir, especially vault, Rome a tragic solemnity of space — let the mind strip off the incrustations of Bernini's Baroque. From Gothic to this, from Perotin to Papal polyphony (here Victoria), advances — as from Dante to Milton — Michelangelo's Donation to the sacred, the physics of volitional power. (close Victoria) So as Gothic ripens to Renaissance and Renaissance flexes to Baroque, 40) 40a) 40b) Double: [A] Græco-Roman (Pompeii) 1st cent. A.D., Idyllic Landscape, National Museum, Naples; and [B] Rubens, c. 1624, Het Onwaer (The Storm), Franz Konig, Haarlem Again, Pompeiian Landscape, A of 40 Again, Rubens' Storm, B of 40 August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �14 C.G. Bell Symbolic History that surf breaks always more wildly on the shore of the world. Even mathematics begins its progress from the Apollonian forms of Euclid to the Dionysiac frenzy of the infinite and infinitesimal, the calculus of motion. For all this, the landscape (though Michelangelo neglected it), gives a visual sign, densening through centuries of withdrawal and return from the Pompeiian soft dreamworld — Virgilian and Ausonian realm of the shades, "sola sub nocte per umbram... et... silva in magna" — to Ruben's vortex (which is equally that of the burned heretic Bruno) of god-irradiated matter in illimitable space. From the first heaving up of the spires in the 12th-century towns, to the blasting off of moon rockets today, a perilous chemistry unfolds in the crucible of the Western world. 41) N.E. France, early 10th cent., St Matthew, from MS 4, Walters Gallery, Baltimore It is kindled in Celtic and Germanic Christendom. In this Saint Matthew from the darkest century, the 10th, mystical force, denying the earth fabric it would increasingly transform, burns in the hieratic containment of creed. August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �15 C.G. Bell Symbolic History But with every tick of the style-clock, 42) Rhine-German, end of 13th cent., Prophet left of Main Portal, Strassburger Minster that power, entering the world, assumes more spatial and human validity. Consider the type of bearded and prophetic age: 1300, Strasbourg — a lean Gothic energy, bearing still the enigmatic stamp of timelessness; 43) Double: [A] Donatello, 1412-15, St. John the Evangelist, detail of head, Duomo Museo, Florence; and [B] Michelangelo, 1513-16, Moses, detail of head, St. Pietro in Vlncoli, Rome 1412 (left): Donatello's Evangelist: a calm filling-out of human command; 1515 (right): Michelangelo's Moses: giant assertion controlled by incredible will. In this pair, the maturation of Western spirit peaks in the harmonious assertion of Renaissance and Florence. a44) 44) Benci di Cione, etc., 1376-82, Loggia dei Signori (dei Lanzi), Florence Same, Loggia dei Lanzi, another view (CGB '86) Music: Gherardello, c.1340(?), from a Gloria (from 3rd Qui Tollis, without Amen) MHS 3634 Let this 14th-century Loggia, later named for Cosimo's Lancers, guide us, in that peerless city, to the Piazza of the Signoria, where Michelangelo's David would take its place. Exiled from the Tuscan center, Dante (whom Michelangelo would memorize) had brought Aquinas' Medieval synthesis to a Gothic peak, at the same time seeding it with the radical individuality of Renaissance — thereby initiating the bold transitions of Petrarch and Boccaccio, of Ars Nova music (here Gherardellus), as of this columned hall. 45) Double: [A] Michelangelo, 1489, sketch, after Giotto's Assumption of St. John, Louvre, Paris; and [B] Giotto, 1325-30, same detail from that August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �16 C.G. Bell 45a) Symbolic History Assumption, Santa Croce, Florence [video then separates the sketch and a larger section of the Giotto fresco] Giotto, Assumption of St. John, whole of B of 45 In Florence art had been spearheaded for two hundred years, through Vasari's three periods: the first, "a new beginning." Among Michelangelo's earliest sketches is a copy of the great-robed figures on the left in this Ascent of John the Evangelist, from Giotto's last phase, 1325 to '30, that Dante-time, when music also advanced from the Old art to the New. (end Gherardello) 46) 46a) Double: [A] Masaccio, 1425-26, The Tribute Money, detail, Brancacci Chapel, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence; and [B] Michelangelo, c. 1493. sketch from same, Graph. Samml., München Again, Masaccio, The Tribute Money, whole Music: Dufay, 1453-4, Lament for Constantinople, last third, (Munrow) Seraphim SIC 6092 In another sketch the 15-year-old Michelangelo studies this fresco by Masaccio, formative genius of Vasari's second period — his massive 1425 figures accompanied by the full humanity of Dufay's triadic chords. 47) 47a) Masaccio, 1426, Crucifixion, Museo di Capodimonte, Naples Simone Martini, 1340-50, Double: two Magdalens [A] from Deposition, Museum, Antwerp; and [B] from Entombment, Berlin-Dahlem Galerie, Berlin Yet Masaccio himself reveals why Vasari, tracing the techniques of representation, would call the 15th century transitional. His Crucifixion projects on the gold ground of Byzantine an exploratory Renaissance nude, a voluminous mourning Mary, and a leaner Fra Angelico John, with a Magdalen whose red-robed Gothic cry roots in the symbolic space of Simone Martini, Duccio, and beyond. (close Dufay) 48) Caravaggio, 1602-04, Deposition, Vatican, Rome Music: August 2, 1995 P.F. Cavalli, 1656, Messa Concertata, from Crucifixus, SAWT 641931 Michelangelo: Storm Center �17 C.G. Bell Symbolic History If the 1600 goal was the formulated rhetoric and muscled volition of embodied Baroque (Caravaggio and Cavalli), (close Cavalli) a49) 49) 49a) Michelangelo, 1504, Tondo, Holy Family, Ufizzi, Florence (CGB '59) Same, Holy Family, upper half only (CGB '59) Same, Holy Family, closer detail we recognize, as by touch, the importance of Michelangelo's 1504 fulfillment of Vasari's Third Style: "art has achieved everything possible in the imitation of nature." In this Florentine tondo, the Patriarchs who wait behind the time-wall of Redemption become nude athletic Greeks. Here the creative energies of the West, sacred or profane, determinedly shift their locus from the timeless into time. So Josquin des Pres' "Et Incarnatus est" — "and was made flesh." Music: 50) 50a) 50b) Josquin des Pres, 1515-20(?), Missa Pange Lingua, from the Credo: "Et Incarnatus est," Decca DL 9410 (close Josquin) Strasbourg, c. 1300, Prince of this World and Foolish Virgin, full length, W. Portal of Cathedral; + V half length Same, detail of Prince Same, double: faces of [A] Prince and [B] Foolish Virgin Music: English, 13th cent., from Estampie, (Binkley) SAWT 9432 No doubt the joy of earth is ubiquitous, but in medieval dance, as in the Strassburg portal, where the Tempter Prince offers the smiling foolish Virgins a wormeaten apple, joy floats, an irresponsible vanity, in the ascetic containment of creed. So Aucassin in the 13th-century romance, when the priest tells him to give up Nicolette and be saved, says it is only the old priests and the poor and crippled who grovel at the altars and in the old crypts, who go into Paradise. But into hell will I go, for into Hell go the fair clerks and knights killed in the tourneys and in the great wars... and the gentle ladies who have two or three lovers along with their noble lords. And there go the gold and silver, the furs and cloth of vair, and the harpers and rulers of this world. With these let me go, if only I have Nicolette, my sweet friend whom I love so well. (end Estampie) August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �18 C.G. Bell a51) 51) 51a) Symbolic History Botticelli, 1478, Spring, detail of three Graces, Ufizzi, Florence; video, upper detail only Same, Spring, whole Same, Spring, right detail Music: Isaac, c. 1485(?), Fortuna Desperata, 3 viols, opening, Allegro 14 If the early Renaissance, under classical example, witnesses a blossoming of such joy in life, it remains — as in the Ballades of Isaac — suspended in the old faith, where the loves of earth hardly claim validity. Botticelli's poignant realm of The Spring (1478) lures from that Gothic tapestry of line, as ideal, as frail, as Poliziano: Love to the kingdom of his mother came, Where light battalions of his brothers wing, There the smiling Graces hold their reign, And beauty weaves flower-garlands for her crown; There lusty Zephyrus, pursuing Flora, Wheels and sets green fronds and herbs aflower. (La Giostra, 67): 52) 52a) (CGB) (fade Isaac) Michelangelo, 1497, Bacchus, full length, Bargello, Florence (video works from variant V52); + V detail, half length Same, Bacchus, detail of Faun Music: Dalza, c. 1500, from Piva, lute duet, (Rooley and Tyler), L'Oiseau-Lyre SOL 325 even Michelangelo's Bacchus (1497), the paganly drunken work of his youth (like all the clear acumen of Machiavelli's politics or the voluptuous diversions of the Papal or other courts — Dalza's lute dances), exists under a cleavage of values, as the great heroes and lovers burn in Dante's Hell. This ambivalence has its purest expres- August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �19 C.G. Bell Symbolic History sion in the circle of Lorenzo de' Medici (died 1492), where Michelangelo was trained. One pole is asserted by Lorenzo's carnival poems: The beauty of youth is a brief flower That is always fading away; Love and be happy while you may, For tomorrow is not sure. (CGB) Chi vuol esser lieto sia: Di doman non c'è certezza. 53) 53a) (end Dalza) Botticelli, 1500-10, Pieta, Pinakothek, München (CGB '59); + V detail Same, Pieta, lower right detail (CGB '59) Music: Josquin des Pres, c. 1490(?), from the Stabat Mater: "Eia mater," AS 73 The counter-pole is announced by the reformer, Savonarola. It was his call to penitence (sharp as Josquin's Stabat Mater) that broke Botticelli, wrenching him from the orange groves of Venus to the anguish of the late Pietas and then, it appears, out of art altogether. For already in the Florence of Michelangelo's youth, the opposition that would dominate the following centuries — Renaissance and Reformation; Cavalier, Puritan — had come to its sharpest focus. Inflamed by the carnival processions and songs, Savonarola invented a sacred inversion of that frenzy, a religious carnival with bonfires of pagan art and vanities and the chanting of popular tunes transformed to pious hymns. It was a movement of heretical reform, anticipating the Calvinist reversal of Renaissance and, like the Calvinist, 54) Same, Pieta, lower left detail, feet (copy of CGB '59; see Pascal 28) inevitably democratic: it is in the rough measures of the common crowd that Savonarola's exhortations come to us: 0 anima cecata — che non trovi riposo, tu se' da Dio odiata — pel tuo viver vitioso: August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �20 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Blind soul of man — you have lost your peace, Under curse and ban — for your godless ways; From Christ your spouse — your soul has strayed, 55) 55a) H. Bosch, 1504, Hell fragment detail, Pinakothek, München (CGB '59) Schongauer, c. 1480-90, engraving, The Temptation of St. Anthony, Public Library, New York City Not asked his aid — let mercy go. Woe, woe, woe, God's fear you do not know. (CGB) There are parallel stirrings all over Europe, as in the hell-fury of the visions of Bosch. As for Michelangelo, he was twenty-three when Savonarola was burned; his first painting, Vasari says, had been a copy of Schongauer's Gothic Temptation of St. Anthony; and he was so possessed by the penitential voice, that it echoed through his later life, sounding again and again in his art and poetry. (end Stabat Mater) 56) 56a) Michelangelo, 1536-41, Charon, detail, Last Judgment, Sistine Chapel, Vatican; + V detail Same, Double: [A] Death and [B] Hell details It was the basic polarity, not only of the sixteenth century, but of the Christian West, each pole, as always, penetrating and empowering the other — Promethean energy and pride, and the self-abasing surrender to holy love and fear. Certainly it was the cross of Michelangelo; his personality and works are strung in that tension. Music: Morales, c. 1540(?), from Emendemus in melius: "Attende," (Turner) ARCHIV S-2533 321 So in his age and the dark beginning of the Counter Reformation, (when the implorations of Josquin had densened to Morales), Michelangelo returned to the Sistine Chapel to paint his Last Judgment, reviving with more personal violence the old powers of Death and Hell. The ambivalence under which this painting 57) 57a) 57b) Same, Judgment, whole Same, The Saved, rising, far left Same, upper spread of the whole Judgment; + V detail of nude figures August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �21 C.G. Bell Symbolic History was conceived is illustrated by the problem of the nude figures. Aretino, inventor of the newspaper and a writer of malign sway, sometimes called "the scourge of princes" and later "the poison flower of the Renaissance," had written Michelangelo an open letter of fawning praise (1537, telling him how to paint the picture, and asking for a sketch. Michelangelo never replied. After a series of such affronts, Aretino began a campaign against the painting (letter of November 1545) as lewd and heretical, belonging in a bagnio or stew rather than in the Papal Chapel. This from a man who boasted of living in a Venetian stew which his own sister managed, and whose bawdy dialogues satirize the stews of the Renaissance Church. For Aretino exhibited the worst Catholic cleavage of the time, an opportunistic hovering between pagan voluptuousness and hypocritic religiosity. It was as if he had formed himself in the Borgia image. 58) Same, detail of Christ and Mary; first, video return to upper spread While Michelangelo, like the Protestant he was accused of being, followed the more dangerous path, determinedly unifying the poles of Renaissance and Medieval, body and spirit. (end Morales) 59) 59a) Same, Judgment, details of britches, front and back Same, closer detail, front (video adds the lower section of 59) The result of Aretino's campaign was that Michelangelo's painting was saved from destruction only by being "purified". A painter thereafter called the "britches tailor" was hired to daub in robes here and there, concealing certain portions of the figures, one might say in the nick of time. But the conflict which led to this result was not initiated by Aretino. It had begun before in Michelangelo himself; it had its roots in his art and soul. He had been in his youth an admirer both of Lorenzo il Magnifico and of Savonarola. 60) Same, Hell, detail with Minos; + V detail of V60a When he first came to Rome he had written an attack on papal corruption under Julius II — as he would paint, in the Judgment, Pope Paul III's master of ceremonies as Minos, Hell-Guardian, wrapped in his own snake-tail. Here helms and swords are made of chalices: The blood of Christ is sold so much a quart: His cross and thorns are spears and shields; and short August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �22 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Will be the time before his patience cease... Who wears the robe is my Medusa still... The holy banner only leads to ill. (after Symonds) 61) 61a) Michelangelo, 1530 (copy), Leda and the Swan, National Gallery, London Daniele da Voltera, 1565, Bronze bust of Michelangelo, detail, Bargello, Florence Music: Willaert, pub. 1545, from Dulces Exuviae: Dido's Lament, Odyssey 32 16 0202 At that time Michelangelo was celebrating Pope Julius in the projected Tomb, as he was to celebrate the Medici in Florence. The very man moved to the religious passion of the late poems, painted the destroyed Leda and the Swan (1530), preserved in copies — one of the most erotic works of the age; though all his works (with Willaert's setting of Dido's love-death), hymn the Eros of touch (end Willaert): "No stair to heaven but earth's loveliness". So Michelangelo had known the moral cleavage, had subsumed it and laboured to unite the severed realms. When hypocrisy in the guise of virtue accused him of Lutheran obscenities, he was impelled forward, 62) Michelangelo, Judgment, Flayed skin, detail, Sistine Chapel, Vatican as if leaping the centuries, toward some Blakean reversal of values. On the skin which is held by the flayed Saint Bartholomew, Michelangelo has painted what is evidently a weirdly tormented portrait of himself. 63) 63a) 63b) Same, detail of St. Bartholomew holding flayed skin (with video variant, V63) Titian, 1545, Portrait of Aretino, detail, Pitti Palace, Florence Again 62, Flayed Skin At the same time the gross and somehow sinister figure of the saint, crouched on the hell side of Christ, vindictively raising the knife — like one who has stolen into these circles of religion and judgment, or, more terribly, belongs there — has been given the sensual and violent features, the gross lips and beard (recognizable from Titian's portrait), of Michelangelo's own metaphorical flayer, Aretino. As an early critic of the painting said: (M. Pitti, 1545) "There are a thousand heresies, signally St. Bartholomew's beardless skin." August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �23 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Thus the artist breaks with the embodied institutions of the faith on which, in his old age, he increasingly depends. a64) Donatello, double: [A] 1427-35, Jeremiah, detail, (CGB '86); and [B] 1455, Magdalen, detail (CGB 86); both: Duomo Museo, Florence (video uses two single slides) For 1st 64) Michelangelo, c. 1550-56, Pieta, Duomo Museo, Firenze; (CGB '86; or V64, old black & white) The sequence of pride and humility not only characterizes the historical movement of Renaissance and Counter-reformation. It had been the central experience of the Middle Ages: the lusty defiance of Aucassin, who would no doubt before his death come grovelling in rags to those very crypts he had despised. That was the life-cycle of the Archpoet, Abelard, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Donatello, Botticelli, perhaps even of Leonardo. But in Michelangelo it becomes increasingly evident that the old return to faith is in fact a new departure, springing from the titanic will. In him it is not so much a change of direction as a fulfillment of the individual and creative quest. He had always been dissatisfied with the realized. Now he presses beyond the embodiments of art (Florentine Pieta, 1550-56) — a65) Double: [A] G. Pisano, 1301, Mystical Christ, from Pulpit, Pistoia; and [B] Giotto, 1325-30, St. John's Ascension, detail, Santa Croce, Florence 1st 65) Michelangelo, c. 1550-56, Florentine Pieta, upper half: Nicodemus, Christ, and Mary (CGB '86) [the slide show having inserted b65, another view of the whole] embodiments advanced about 1300 by Giovanni Pisano and Giotto, when Dante, looking down from the sphere of stars, had seen the earth "such that he smiled at its vile semblance." e vidi questo globo Tal, ch'io sorrisi del suo vil sembiante... Chaucer had followed in the death of Troilus: And down from thennes faste he gan avyse This litel spot of erthe, that with the se Embraced is, and fully gan despise August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �24 C.G. Bell Symbolic History This wrecched world, and held al vanite To respect of the pleyn felicite That is in hevene above. Such is the Gothic ground of acceptance. But when Michelangelo makes it the theme of his last poems: "Teach me to hate this world so little worth," the pulse has changed. Some Renaissance imperative of conscious person and ennobled flesh has deepened the struggle. Like the fall to humility of Lear, so mighty, so passionately arched against its own surrender, Michelangelo's Christian yielding becomes the immolation of heightened pride. This is written in the late poems, as in the last self-portrait, Michelangelo as Nicodemus, brooding over the dead Christ. For 1st 66) Same, Nicodemus, detail of face, as Self-portrait (CGB '86) Io parto, a mano a mano Crescemi ognor più l'ombra, e'l sol vien manco, En son presso al cadere, infermo e stanco. I pass now, day to day, Each day augment to dark, and the sun grows cold; I hover on to the fall, infirm and old. (CGB) For 2nd 65) Florentine Pieta, looking up, from the statue's left side (CGB '84) In this tensile darkening so personally his own, Michelangelo was the profoundest resonator of Counter-Reformation experience — his the shade and burden of that tragic mid-century. For 2nd 64) Same, upper two thirds, black & white Music: Gombert, pub. 1539, from Confitemini Domino, (Tinayre) Lumen 32021 Did God born and crucified point into the world or out of it? Would our mortal flesh, by that Incarnate archetype for the West, be consumed or glorified? Was the Kingdom of God within us or beyond? If that was always the stretch of Christianity — how heightened after 1200 by Joachim's Coming of the Spirit in time; how magnified after 1500 by a groundswell of world and body, at once affirmed and denied. 3rd 65) Same, heads of Christ and Nicodemus, black & white August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �25 C.G. Bell Symbolic History In Michelangelo, against the sensuous mastery of represented passion, comes a violence of soul breaking with all representations of sense. In recorded music, nothing so affirms the tensile mastery as Tinayre's rendition of the Confitemini by Gombert, most exalted of post-Josquin polyphonists. 2nd 66) Same, Nicodemus as Michelangelo, black & white detail (video: V2nd 66) (end Gombert) But is Gombert's weaving too smooth for the old Michelangelo? a67) 67) 67a) 67b) Michelangelo, c. 1556, Palestrina Pieta, whole; video, see Va67 (CGB '48) Same, upper half (CGB '48) Michelangelo c. 1499, Pieta, St. Peter's, Vatican (or V67a), whole Michelangelo, 1526-33, Tomb of Lorenzo dei Medici, head of Evening, San Lorenzo, Florence (or V67b, horizontal) Music: Vincentino, 1567(?), from Heu mihi: "Miserere," Bach Guild HM 34 SD On the other side is the tonal defiance of the Chromaticists, of whom Vicentino by 1555 had composed motets and Lamentations entirely in the half-tone scale (not to mention his theoretical quarter tones). Here the expressive element itself becomes a gulf where the old Modes go down, while the major and minor keys "remain, despairing of the port." Who but Michelangelo could so have fused the antinomies? (end Vicentino) For him it was the time of the late unfinished Pietas: this, about 1556, formerly from Palestrina. As Vasari says: his judgment was so exacting that nothing satisfied him. He finished few statues in his manhood, the completed ones having been done in his youth. Of course Michelangelo's reasons for leaving works unfinished varied from case to case. But the larger significance remains — as with all vital drifts, emergent from the particular and accidental. 68) Michelangelo, 1545-50, Crucifixion drawing, British Museum, London August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �26 C.G. Bell 68a) 68b) Symbolic History Same, 1550-55, another Crucifixion drawing, with Mary and John, Louvre, Paris; while video takes an upper detail of 68 Again, Florentine Pieta, detail of Nicodemus, Christ, and Mary (B&W) The late drawings, perhaps, give the clearest sign of his break with the determinate. Here is no question of a recalcitrant material, forced abandonment, lack of funds. The artist might have rendered his vision with whatever finish it required. Yet even in so swift a medium, he preferred to hint by cloudy blurrings, at solemnities beyond expression. Through the account of a French traveler, Blaise de Vigenere, we can visualize the old sculptor in the penurious drabness of his room, standing sleepless nights before the marble, a cardboard hat with a candle in it for light, using no models, measurements, or pointings, but breaking into the stone 69) 69a) Michelangelo, c. 1556, Palestrina Pieta, whole (CGB '86) Michelangelo, 1550-56, Florentine Pieta, another view (CGB '84); while video repeats Palestrina Pieta, upper half (CGB '48) from slide 67 from the front and sides, as if to reach for the enshrouded form. De Vigenere wrote: I saw Michelangelo at work. He had passed his sixtieth year [he was actually seventy-five] and although he was not very strong, yet in a quarter of an hour he caused more splinters to fall from a very hard block of marble than three young masons in three or four times as long. No one can believe it who has not seen it with his own eyes. And he attacked the work with such energy and fire that I thought it would fly into pieces. With one blow he brought down fragments three or four fingers in breadth, and so exactly at the point, that if only a little more marble had fallen, he would have risked spoiling the whole. And spoil it he frequently did, at least to his own judgment, chipping too deep or striking a flaw; then the work would be abandoned, one of many pregnant becomings, stone ruins testifying to a search for the ungraspable, more poignantly expressive than all the completed works others were so facile in. a70) b70) Michelangelo, 1550-56, close detail of Florentine Pieta, with chipped arm; while video shows such a detail from b70 Same, upper half, with same cracked arm (CGB '86); while video varies 68b August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �27 C.G. Bell 70) Symbolic History Same, Florentine Pieta, whole, 1900 photograph Sometimes, more terribly, the sculptor would become the enraged Saturn devouring his children, as with the Florentine Pieta on which De Vigenere had probably seen him working, and which Michelangelo intended for his own tomb. It is Vasari who lets us reconstruct the scene of the violent old man, having come to hate this ripest but imperfectible work of his hand, raging over it in the dark room, breaking it with the mallet — the brooding face of Nicodemus sorrowing over the Christ, the artist's image of himself and his sorrow — yet stranger still, hinting at God the Father suffering over his world ("for it repenteth me that I have made them"), or as Lear would take it from Jehovah: "crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once that makes ingrateful man" — so the sculptor stands, the work in fragments before him, and as Vasari says, "would have smashed it to atoms, had not Antonio his servant asked for it." Thus it was turned over to a clever botcher, Tiberio Calcagni, who as a price for cementing it together tried to "finish" it, spoiled the figure of the Magdalen with polishing, and would have ruined it all except by good luck he caught the plague and died. a71) b71) 71) 71a) V71b) 71c) Again, Florentine Pieta, horizontal detail of a70, showing the damaged arm Same, Head of Nicodemus, side view Michelangelo, 1555-64, Rondanini Pieta, Sforzesca, Milan; while video uses V71, from a B&W photograph Same, upper half of the statue, seen from the side; while video details the upper half of V71, just above Same, side view, upper part, from whole side view (CGB '80; cf. NOW: The Rooted Future 128) Same, Rondanini Pieta, front view of the two heads Indeed, the universal process, of which we have made Michelangelo and his art paradigms, is not merely a building, but a destroying; the Promethean daring goes hand in hand with the Phætonian fall. And this returns us to the Western history of which Michelangelo was a part. For the concept of artist as protagonist of creative spirit is a product of the way of thought Michelangelo and his age initiated, of the Renaissance assertion of human power in an articulated world of time, space, and causality, and this assertion was to run its course through sundry debacles and somber spiritual returns, of which none is more deeply moving than the tragedy and transcendence of the late Michelangelo, in whom the youthful pride of the Renaissance David grows to the August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �28 C.G. Bell Symbolic History brooding but noble mask of Nicodemus, and then abandons outward form in the dimensionless grief of the Rondanini Pieta (1550-64), this unfinished marble sabotaged and remade six days before the artist's death. Against that twice-quoted line: "soul can only mount by the beauty of earth," comes the break of a final sonnet: Not any mastery of paint or stone Can ease the heart that sees how love divine Spreads on the cross to gather us his arms. (CGB) Nè pinger nè scolpir fia più che quieti L' anima volta a quell' amor divino Ch'aperse, a prender noi, 'n croce le braccia. In music the chromatic shorelessness of Vicentino would climax in Gesualdo's Responsories, 1611. Music: 72) Gesualdo, 1611, "Tristis est anima," opening, (Craft) Columbia ML 5234 El Greco, c. 1575-77, Pieta, Johnson Collection, Museum of Art, Philadelphia; + V detail (fade Gesualdo) For 2nd 71) Double: [A] Michelangelo, 1555-64, Rondanini Pieta, Milan; and [B] Cimabue, c. 1283, Crucifixion, Refectory, Santa Croce, Florence Here pride is so broken on the wheel of fate, that we are simultaneously thrown back to the Byzantine and Medieval spaceless image and forward to the post-Renaissance surrender For 2nd 72) Double: [A] Again 72, El Greco Pieta; and [B] Rembrandt or school, c. 1644, Christ at the Column, Walraf-Richartz Museum, Köln; slide show adds 2nd 72a, single of this B, Rembrandt's Christ at the Column and return — to this El Greco, or philosophically to Pascal — that whole current which, down to our own day, penetrates humanism and comes out on the other side. For the world's proudest civilization has perpetually humbled itself before the lean figure of selfsacrifice and earthly negation, the stripped Christ at the Column, for whom Rembrandt too would fall out with form and color. August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �29 C.G. Bell 73) Symbolic History Michelangelo and others, c. 1550-90, St. Peter's Dome, interior And yet it is strange, the work to which Michelangelo turned with most intensity at the close of his life was most assertive — the construction of the dome of St. Peter's. Despite the opposition of enemies (or perhaps on that account) he would not give it up. As he said: "many people believe, as I do myself, that I have been placed at this post by God. I will not leave it..." Did the impersonality of the dome, which needed for its realization only to be engineered, lead the artist beyond that frustrating involvement in the image of man? 74) Roman (Hadrian), 118-128 A.D., Pantheon, interior, Rome (CGB '86) He was obviously aware of the series of mystically directed domes, from the Pantheon, formed as Christianity opened its inner space in the soul of Rome, 75) Byzantine (Justinian), 502-62, Hagia Sophia, interior with dome, Constantinople (CGB '77) through Hagia Sophia in 6th-century Constantinople, 76) Brunelleschi, especially 1420-36, Santa Maria del Fiore, Dome and Chapels, Florence (CGB '84); slide show uses another view, showing the whole Dome to the proud Brunelleschi dome of the Florence of his youth. It is as if he sensed the symbolic values Yeats has expressed in his poem "Byzantium": 77) Michelangelo, etc., c. 1550-90, St. Peter's Dome, as by moonlight, Vatican A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains All that man is, All mere complexities, The fury and the mire of human veins. August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �30 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Was the demand of spirit which drew him to the dome, that ultimate vaunt and abstract music to the divine, a78) Vb78) c78) 78) Michelangelo, 1555-64, Rondanini Pieta, Sforza Castle, Milan (CGB '80) Same, from the side, upper half (CGB '80; detail of NOW: The Rooted Future 128) Same, another view of the two faces; while video details from Vc78, an underexposed slide of the two figures (CGB '80) Same, side view, detail of heads (CGB '80) also fulfilled in the last broken carving of his age? The Rondanini Pieta leaps past art, sending up an incredible flash in its surrender. Here is the denial that reverses itself in human value, as when Lear's pride is crushed: "Come, let's away to prison. We two alone will sing like birds in the cage." This pity and transcendence has gone beyond the Medieval breaking of pride and its somber return to faith, just as Shakespeare was to go beyond that and beyond Renaissance tragedy. Did Michelangelo also win through into a new realm of reconciling tenderness? It is hard to know. Certainly he did not live in quite the time or place to make of that emergence a utopian romance. Shakespeare was the first to come far enough out of the Renaissance vortex to sing the brave new world of human love, wisdom, and power beyond. But Michelangelo has hinted at something in these fragments shored against his ruin. For 1st 79) Michelangelo, 1501-04, David, from his left, Accademia, Florence (CGB '86) Conversely, in the youthful David, from the time of his own pride and the last free pride of his city, Florence, he inevitably suggested the tension and debacle to follow, which was already laboring in his soul. That is what makes the David more than a wellwrought image of civic power. The whole Michelangelo is there, in that tour de force of his youth, just as the whole man is in the last fragmented work of his age. 1st 80) Same, David, head, full face It is the strangely troubled face of the David that foreshadows the future, as the poignance of Botticelli invited Savonarola. If this is the Promethean giant, he bears with him the old Augustinian flaw and ground of reversal: "Even this testimony, that God humbles the proud." August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �31 C.G. Bell Symbolic History 2nd 79) Same, David, front, knees to head (CGB '86) Humbles, and yet, to add heresy to Augustine — by that humbling translates them into gods. "Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, the gods themselves throw incense." Yet why call it heresy? Had not Paul said: "Because the creature itself shall also be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God"? And was not this the fire through which the classical Prometheus walked, and emerged: Dante, Michelangelo, Beethoven, Blake — avatars of Messianic flesh. 2nd 80) Same, David, head and shoulders (CGB '86); to which slide show adds a closer detail of 1st 80, the David, full face; also digital Or, from the time of the David itself, Josquin's Hercules Mass: Music: August 2, 1995 Josquin des Pres, c. 1499(?), close of Kyrie, Hercules Mass, AS 73 Michelangelo: Storm Center � 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 Michelangelo : Storm Center, Symbolic History, Part 17 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 17 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_17_Michelangelo--Storm_Center 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/22845d346798a9a04da7da4364afc297.pdf d8f33d854daec04edd10e80d5d3f25f2 PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 18. Period Styles: A Review of the Incarnate West CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 June 1995 Last Revised January ‘96 �Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 18. Period Styles: A Review of the Incarnate West a1) Double: [A] Ugarit (Syria), c. 2000 B.C., Archaic idol, silver and gold, Aleppo Museum; and [B] Delphi, c. 475 B.C., Charioteer, Mus., Delphi; + video detail of the double (see Va1), and a closer detail of the head of A (from A of Va1) b1) Greek bronze, c. 475 B.C., Charioteer, almost profile, head and shoulders, Mus., Delphi Vc1) Greek, Attic (Phidias, etc.), 447-432 BC, detail of maidens, E. Parthenon frieze, British Museum, London 1) Attic, 430-20 B.C., Eleusinian Votive Relief, National Gallery, Athens (CGB '77 lacks contrast; video uses V1, detail only) Western culture is bred of yoked opposites: Græco-Rome and Yahwe-East. The Greek word for beautiful is καλοσ, which is also the word for good; and it becomes, for Socratic reason, identical with knowing — ugliness and evil reduced to deceptive masks of ignorance. So in the Republic: Then the just is like the wise and good, and the unjust like the evil and the ignorant... Then virtue is the health and beauty and well-being of the soul, and vice the disease and weakness and deformity of the same... or the Protagoras: since all virtues are knowledge, including justice and temperance and courage... Music: Mesomedes, c. 130 A.D. (or Byzantine?), Hymn to the Sun (close), Decca 20156 A (78) 6/1995 Period Styles 1 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Against the Attic celebration of that harmony (where the Goddess Demeter gives the king of Eleusis the sacred grain, while Kore crowns him) — 2) Roman 78-81 A.D., Vespasian invests Domitian, Cancelleria Reliefs, Vatican; video: detail only Double: [A] Parthenon, 447-38, Bearded Horseman, West frieze in situ; and Etrusco-Roman, 1st cent. B.C., Head of a man, Vatican 2a) the Roman will to apply Greek knowledge and beauty for the legal ordering of self and world, seems a leap, as from Homer to Virgil, from vibrance to discipline, as weighted as Mesomedes' Hymn to the Sun, or Vespasian's choice of Domitian for his heir. (close Hymn to the Sun) Yet what are these contraries but lobes of the twofold Classical command, for which Plutarch paralleled the lives of Greeks and Romans: it becomes a man's duty to pursue and make after the best and choicest of everything... virtue creating at once admiration of the things done and desire to imitate the doer... so we have thought fit to spend time and pains in writing the lives of famous persons — a3) Sumerian, c. 2600 B.C., Naked Orant, from Khafaje, Temple of Nintu, Baghdad Museum Vb3) Syrian from Megiddo (Palestine), c. 1350-1200 B.C., Statuette, probably a ruler of Megiddo, Oriental Institute, Chicago 3) Phoenecian, c. 1200 B.C., bronze Divinity (from Beirut?), Louvre, Paris; + video detail Music: Jewish Music, traditional, Kaddish for Passover, etc., Decca 20156 B (78) Are they not equally opposed to the earth-searing zeal which had been building up for two millenia in the Semitic crescent — beauty and good as far apart as yaphey and pov, as far as Egyptian bondage from the Beautiful in his cloak of many hues — all that pride thrown down and exalted by the Unnamable: The earth saw and trembled. The hills melted like wax at the presence of the Lord. [Psalm 97] Arise, shine, for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee. [Isaiah 60] Va4) Wider view of the frescoes of slide 4 4) Graeco-Syrian (Iran) lst cent. A.D., Sacrifice to the Palmyrene Gods, from Dura Eurotus fresco, Nat. Mus., Damascus 6/1995 Period Styles 2 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History V4a) Same, head of a priest (cf. Early Christianity, 13) Let that build through the ferment witnessed in art by the lst-century frescoes from Dura on the Euphrates, through the Teacher of Righteousness of the Dead Sea Scrolls, through Christ, John, and Paul to a symbolic flame in which this realm, Rome and all, fuse in revelation: Behold, I shew you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. (I Corinthians) (fade Kaddish) 5) Roman, c. 180, Bust of the young Commodus, Vatican Mus., Rome; + video detail So bring it to bear on the soul-hunger and itch of flesh which the Græco-Roman overreach and inward erosion had become: — Longinus of the third century, with a statue of Commodus: As some children always remain pigmies...our tender minds, fettered by a just servitude, are unable to expand... And Paul: Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools... Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts... 6) 6a) Early Christian, later 5th cent. (Africa or Spain), Mosaic to Optimus, Museo Paleocristiano, Tarragona, Spain Roman Christian (Milan), 5th cent., mosaic detail, an Ancestor of Christ, Capella Sant' Aquilino, San Lorenzo, Milan Seed that moody decay with the faith-paradox of Augustine's City of God: It is incredible that Christ should rise again in the flesh and carry it up to heaven with Him. It is incredible that the world should believe this; and it is incredible that this belief should have been effected by a small sort of poor, simple, unlearned men... The proofs, the persuasions, lay 6/1995 Period Styles 3 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History not in words, but in wonders... If all the world believed without miracles, that remains a miracle as great as the rest. (XVIII, vi) a7) 7) German, 6th cent., Horseman Ornament, Landesmuseum, Karlsruhe Lombard, later 6th cent., King Agilulf and warriors, gilded copper, Mus. Naz., Florence While the barbarian overthrow of the outward fulfills the Judgment-turn of spirit. Jerome: By their speed they outstripped rumor, and they took pity neither upon religion, nor rank, nor age, nor wailing childhood... but filled the whole earth with slaughter and panic. But already this 6th century Lombard King Agilulf was baptised, throned and sworded like Judgment God in the anomaly of warrior Christianity — as if the trumpet of radical texts, deflected in the Dark-Age gyre of force, summoned through doom toward earthrenewal. 8) Roman Christian, 3rd cent., statuette of the beardless Christ, Thermae, Rome; + video detail Music: Gregorian, Tenebrae factae sunt, opening, Solesmes, V-M 87 That would be the first task for the West, to convert the twilight farewell of late-classical Christianity — as in the Gregorian Tenebrae, or this 3rd century beardless Christ in the Roman Thermae — (fade Gregorian) 9) Double: [A] Northumbrian end of 7th cent., Ruthwell Cross, detail; and [B] French Romanesque-Gothic, c. 1120-50, Tympanum Christ, detail, Vezelay V9a) Ruthwell Cross, whole carving: Mary drying Christ's feet 9b) Again B of 9: Vezelay, Christ detail; first, video closer detail of the head through the upsurge rooted in the Dark Ages, this 700 Ruthwell Cross (left) with the runes carved on it: "syllicre trêow/ on lyft laeden leohte bewunden,/ beama beorhtost" — to the intensity of the 12th-century dawn: the Judgment Christ of Vezelay (right) with Perotin. 6/1995 Period Styles 4 �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Perotin, c. 1200, from Beata Viscera, Tinayre, Lumen 32011B Here memories of the sweet and sour of Hellenism, its refinement and question, do not arise, as with Tertullian and Julian the Apostate, either as an evil to be shunned or good to be pursued. That is all drowned. Surrender is as automatic as the stark reserve of primitive style, the mounting of stripped earth, self and desire, on affirming creed. So within the single-voice line of Perotin's Beata Viscera, we have come as far from Gregorian as from pole to pole. (fade Perotin) If the Period Styles of the West find their archetype in God's assumption of flesh and world, how fiercely that first coming stares through space and time. a10) Vb10) 10) 10b) V10c) 10d) Amiens, c. 1230, Quatrefoil (Lust?) from socles of Portal of the Virgin, Amiens English MS, early 14th cent., Creation of the Animals, detail, Illuminated French Bible of Holkam Hall, MS Ad. 47682 f. 2v., British Museum, London Franco-Spanish, late 13th cent., Blessed in Paradise, Main Door Tympanum, Cathedral, Leon; + V details (thus V10a) Same, lower detail Exeter Cathedral, c. 1360, Façade, detail (CGB '80) Gothic, 1391-95 and ff, Square and Drapers' Hall, Cracow Music: Pierre de la Croix, c. 1290(?), S'Amours-Au Renouveler, close Ducretet Thomson 320 C 107 The second task was to widen the faith grip, to diversify the life it contains. In that Gothic ambivalence of joy and denial, the springtime of earth smiles creedacceptance. So Ars Nova music reaches from this Pierre de la Croix, through de Vitry, to the century's end. By 1300, this Paradise Tympanum of Leon Cathedral teems with the life Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of Hito, would pour, about 1330, into his Book of Good Love — (end Pierre de la Croix) Music: 6/1995 Philippe de Vitry, c.1330, Garrit gallus, Norton Hist., Volume I Period Styles 5 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History such lusty matter as Snubnose the Tough, mountain cowgirl, who lugs the priest to her hut and feeds him for a bout: Comamos deste pan duro; Después faremos la lucha — narratives gemmed with festal poems (CGB): Día era muy santo de la pascua mayor — It was the holy day of Easter; The sun came golden from the grove And men and birds and flower-clusters Welcomed him, chanting to love — cantando al amor. Had not Jean de Meung's continuation of the Romance of the Rose called forth the orders and ranks which Chaucer, a hundred years later, would set on Pilgrimage? — (fade de Vitry) Music: Grimace, c. 1390, Alarme, alarme (Deller) Everyman 298 SD Knight, Squire, Yeoman, Prioress, Nun, Monk, Friar, Merchant, Clerk, Man of Law, Franklin, Shipman, Doctor, Wife of Bath, Parson, Plowman, Miller, Reeve, Summoner, Pardoner, Host, Alchemist, and more. (fade Grimace) 11) Giotto, 1297-1300, Miraculous Spring, detail of a boy drinking, St. Francis frescoes, Assisi [video draws detail from the whole, Va11] Next was to craft and shape those suspended vitalities, to give them the modes and proportions of the dimensional — a task which, as Vasari stresses, dominates Italian painting from early Giotto (this detail of a boy drinking at St. Francis' miraculous spring), 12) Giov. Bellini, c. 1500-05, The Barque of Love Allegory, Accademia, Venice; first, video detail Music: Dalza, pub. 1508, from Tastar de Corde, lute, L'Oiseau Lyre, SOL 325 to the Leonardo-tide of 1500 — this Giambellini Barque of Love. While music in its passage from Ars Nova toward the temporal modes of major and minor, fills the chords of Dalza's lute preludes. (end Dalza) 6/1995 Period Styles 6 �C.G. Bell a13) 13) Symbolic History H. Bosch, 1503-04, Garden of Delights, a central detail; Prado, Madrid Bosch, 1503-4, Love-bubble detail, Garden of Delights, Prado, Madrid; + V closer detail (video draws from V13, a wider detail) Music: Josquin des Pres 1500-10(?), from Allegez moy (6v) Seraphim SIC-6104 (1) Nor was the translation of symbol into the sensuous language of earth confined to Italy; it equally possessed the 1500 North. The globe of Bellini's watery Venus is curiously matched, the same years, by the bubble calm of Bosch's secret lovers. So, like Josquin's "Allegez moy" ("dessoubz la boudinette — under the belly button") (music), an English lyric weaves its moony Beulah: In arms he hent That lady gent, In voiding care and moan; That day they spent To their intent In wilderness alone. 14) 14a) (fade Allegez moy) S.German, c. 1515, Talheim Altar, angel detail, Landesmuseum, Stuttgart; + V detail Mathias Grünewald, Madonna in the Garden, upper detail, Church of Stuppach, Würtemberg In the happy convergence of sacred and secular, the Talheim Altar angel smiles ravishingly, the "In dulci jubilo" receives Sicher's organ setting, while Skelton applies the poetry of Mary to a fetching girl: Music: Fridolin Sicher, c.1500, In dulci Jubilo, Weinrich; Musicraft GM 127 A Star of the morrow gray, The blossom on the spray, The freshest flower of May... It were an heavenly health, It were an endless wealth, A life for God himself, 6/1995 Period Styles 7 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History To hear this nightingale Among the birdes small Warbling in the vale, "Dug, dug, jug, jug! Good year and good luck!" With "Chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck!" 15) (close Sicher) French, c. 1340-45, Three living and three dead, Prayerbook of Bonne de Luxembourg, Cloisters, Metropolitan Museum, N.Y.C.; + V details But that Incarnation heightens also the woes of flesh. Death, in the Dark Ages, had been the hope of devotion. As life aspires from that ground, 14th-century Pucelle — or a follower — illuminates the living and the dead: three proud horsemen, confronted by three corpses — as Chaucer, a few years later, would take it up, in the clean irony of the Pardoner's Tale: "Now sires," quoth he, "if that ye be so lief To find out Death, turn up this crooked way... See ye that oak? Right there ye shall him find..." 16) 16a) N.M. Deutsch 1517, Death & the Maiden, grisaille, Kunstmuseum, Basle; + V detail Bosch, c. 1504, The Last Judgment, upper part of central panel of tryptych, Gemäldegalerie, Vienna After 1500, the eruption in Holbein, Baldung Grien, this Deutsch, of life's claim and Dance of Death seizure, heightens toward the vortex of the tragic stage. The same Skelton who had warbled for Isabel, keens "Upon a Dead Man's Skull": Our days be dated To be check-mated With draughtes of death Stopping our breath: Our eyen sinking Our bodies stinking, Our gummes grinning, Our soules brinning... O goodly Child Of Mary mild, 6/1995 Period Styles 8 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Then be our shield! That we be not exiled To the dun dale Of bootless bale, Nor to the lake Of fiendes blake. Va17) 17) 17a) 17b) 17c) Memling, 1479, St. John in Patmos, with the Horsemen of the Apoclaypse, from right wing of Baptistry, Catherine Altar, Hospital, Bruges Varying detail of same, from which video shows head of John and three Horsemen Same, from The Vision of John: Fourth Horseman, Death, with Hell following after H. Bosch, 1510, Prodigal Son, Boymans Museum, Rotterdam H. Bosch, 1480-85, Crucifixion, Royal Museum, Brussels (CGB '74); video: upper section only The central wonder is the meeting of two modes of reality: Medieval and Renaissance. Nature, never better rendered (as in Memling's Vision of John), fulfills itself in Revelation: here the Horsemen of War, Famine and Death, with Hell following after. So an English poem of 1500 lifts a romance wandering to the anagogical: He bare him up, he bare him down, He bare him into an orchard brown. In that orchard there was an halle That was hanged with purpill and pall. And in that hall there was a bede, It was hanged with gold so rede. And in that bed there lithe a knight, His woundes bleding day and night. 18) Q. Metsys, c. 1500 (Replica), Salvator Mundi, Gallery, Aachen (CGB '74) By that bede side kneleth a may, And she wepeth both night and day. And by that bede side there stondeth a stone, Corpus Christi wreten there on. 6/1995 Period Styles 9 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History — That wounded Knight the Body of Christ. So, in this Metsys variant of a lost Jan van Eyck, we see the mirrored "omnivoyant" of God as man become the Western archetype. If our culture has a focus it must be there, in the threefold Coming, Passion, and expected Resurrection of a divine, self-enmeshed in flesh and world. For 1st 19) Indian, 12th-14th cent. A.D., Dancing Shiva, "Lord of the Dance," Museum, Portland, Oregon Or is it always impossible to fix the oneness of a culture — as of the namebearing families and species of nature, which we still may recognize, through all their variety, like the known face of a friend? Spengler and Toynbee thought to line up cultures as you would the repetitive life-cycles of a plant. For 1st 20) Chinese (Sui), 581-618, Standing Bodhisattva, Art Museum, Atami But plants reenact what evolution has staked out for them. Whereas history is at the exploratory tip of evolution itself, that tree which elaborates the new. Its recurrences waver through a growth-web of branchings. For 2nd 19) Hindu (Gupta), 5th cent.(?), Idealized Buddha, detail, British Museum, London; + V detail In this basalt Buddha, we have simultaneously to experience a neo-Platonic and early-Christian parallel, in soul's withdrawal from the vale of Maya, and a difference in the sensuous langour here, of soul's ecstasy; to observe a oneness with the whole family of Buddhist cultures spread over Asia and through a thousand years, and the signature, in this caressed volcanic rock, of the 5th-century Gupta school of North India. 2nd 20) Chinese (Tang), 672-5, Seated limestone Buddha, Feng-hsien-ssu Temple, Lung-men, Honan How richly other and same is this colossal limestone from a century or so later and 2500 miles away. With what triumph the mystic avatar is here seated on the ceremonious refinements of Tang and Confucian Honan. 21) 6/1995 Japan, Kamakura Period, 1328, Shinto deity as Buddhist priest, Fine Arts, Boston; with video details (cf. V21) Period Styles 10 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Again, after six centuries and more, in Kamakura Japan, with how immediate a life-grace this Shinto deity assumes (in painted wood and with crystal eyes) the guise of Buddhist priest. A whole civilization emanates from him: rock gardens and perfect houses, silks and flowered screens, the poetic courtliness that gives the loves of Genji the art of a calligraphic scroll. We remember in the West the gradual assimilation of the Dark Age fierce Christ to the suavities of every day, and we ask: Was the entire, related earth ripening toward the temporalities it now militantly demands? 1st 22) Mosan-French 11th cent.(?), Head of Christ, Museum of the Basilica of Notre Dame, Tongres For the West, if its essential motion is the reading over of the eternal kingdom into the actual, its incarnate one should exhibit two phases: as its modes are still mysterious and earthless (this 11th century crucified Christ from the region of the Meuse, in Belgium), 1st 23) Rembrandt 1661, detail of half-length Risen Christ,Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB from a2nd 23, from which video draws its detail) or as even its mysteries take flesh in the here and now. It is in the many-dimensioned continuum which leads from the Romanesque-Gothic beginnings through the deep personalization of Rembrandt's 1661 Risen Christ, that we must define a spectrum of period styles. 2nd 22) Mosan, 11th cent., Head of Christ, detail; + V closer details Music: Catalan 1162, 1 v., Conductus for Count Berenguer IV, MHS OR 433 (close of instr. & voice) Where each pole of that suspended one-many must be seeded with its opposite — Carolingian already called a Renaissance; that human penetration of the sacred, shaping (before 1100) the haunting pity of the Tongres Christ; or in music soon after, this planctus for the death of Berenguer. (close Conductus) a2nd 23) Rembrandt, 1661, Risen Christ, half figure, München (copy of CGB '59; see Pascal 56) 2nd 23) Again, Risen Christ, Head detail, with robe on the chest (CGB '59); from which video makes closer details 6/1995 Period Styles 11 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History While late Rembrandt magnifies light, space, drama, by their seeming sacrifice to the Christ mystery. So the Passions of the old Schütz, about 1664, strip the polychoral to a single voice, as of chant: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Music: Schütz, c. 1664, from St. Matthew Passion, "Mein Gott," ARC-3172 (fade) but charged with the tensile will of Baroque. Like yin-yang, the plot from Romanesque to this. 24) Mozarabic, 975 (Leon), Hell from a Beatus Apocalypse, Cathedral, Gerona; + V detail Music: Mozárabic, 10th(?) cent., close of Creed, from "unam sanctam," ARC-ST 2533 163 If the primary cleavage is of the timeless against time, ring first the changes of last and changeless things — Apocalypse; yet even Apocalypse would rear in time a spatial throne. At Dark Age ground, before 1000, the Hell of a Mozárabic Beatus Commentary presents in symbolic depiction (with this Silos Creed) the literal nothingness of the earth to be dissolved. (end Creed) 25) Bandol and Battaille, c. 1373-81, Destruction of Babylon, detail, Angers; video: details only, below and above Music: School of Machault, c. 1380, Degentis vita, opening, (Munrow) ARC-2565 052 Leap 400 years of Romanesque and Gothic to the Angers Apocalypse, and in music to the school of Machault. Here expression, always more earth-embodied, still serves the non-dimensional. How gradual at first, how hyperbolic at last, the empowering which by 1600 would break all stabilities of the geocentric but God-centered world. (fade Degentis Vita) 26) 6/1995 Dürer, 1496-98, Apocalypse, The First Four Trumpets Sound, Berlin, etc.; from this whole the video takes details only, ranging from God to trumpeters Period Styles 12 �C.G. Bell 26a) 26b) Symbolic History Same, First Four Trumpets, lower section, from which video takes two details Dürer, 1496-98, Apocalypse, The Whore of Babylon, detail, upper right Music: Obrecht, c. 1490(?), Hosannah, Missa Fortuna Desperata, Decca DL 79413 Dürer, 1496, time of the Masses of Josquin, or of this Obrecht, holds the symbolic line of Gothic. But when the first four trumpets sound, the sky shattering like glass, the cloudy firmament rolled up as a scroll, the things of nature blown like withered leaves, it is the created real which takes the cyclone of spiritual doom, the dimensional earth on which the fires fall — as the Christian struggle, then assuming passionate body, swept the new men and nations, economies, science, in the whirl of its religious wars. (end Obrecht) a27) 27) El Greco, 1610-14, The Vision of St. John, Opening of the Fifth Seal, Metropolitan Museum of Art, N.Y.; + two V details Same, close detail of figures to the right (copy from CGB '74, 1600 2nd 3); to which video adds a similar group detailed from a27 Music: Giov. Gabrielli, pub.1615, from Timor et tremor (close) Angel 36443 Though the climax delays another hundred years (the great style-divides suspiciously hugging the centuries); it flames in the last works of El Greco and of Giovanni Gabrielli — as if what Renaissance art and thought had dared — Bruno's infinite universe of besouled material worlds: this earth, sun and moon, planets and innumerable stars — were swept in the Muskostrom of now physical doom. (end Gabrielli) It is the dynamic divide between the explosive Mannerism of late-Renaissance 28) V28a) 28b) 6/1995 Rubens, c. 1620, Fall of the Damned, Aachen Gallery replica (CGB '74) of the Alte Pinakothek original, Munich Rubens, c. 1620, Small Last Judgment, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (here upper half, but videoed from the whole (CGB '59; see Baroque 2nd 73) Again, Fall of the Damned, lower section (video, panning on 28, goes from a close detail to a wider spread; slide show uses a CGB '74 detail: a wheel of bloated sinners Period Styles 13 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History and another country with more gravitational laws. Music: T. Merula, c. 1640, Capriccio cromatico, close, Mus. Guild 129 In Rubens, 1620, the Last Judgment itself is a pagaent of corporeal triumph and display. For more than a hundred years the pomp of Baroque churches, the might of fugal music, the causal order of the universe, would assert the timeless and spaceless by a phenomenal opera (how majestic its scenery, how reasoned its chords) staged exactly to the converse values. (end Merula) 29) Limbourg Brothers, c. 1416, Hell, Tres Riches Heures, p. 91, Chantilly; with video details Music: Dufay, c. 1420, Creed (close) Missa Sine Nomine, "et in spiritum" Lyrichord LLST 7234 Perhaps the half-way mark from Dark Age symbol to Rubens' blubber Hell (and curiously, like that Fall, a fountaining blast and fiery tongue of the damned; though in the clarity of Gothic wit, its counter-pole) is this Pol de Limbourg about 1416. While in Dufay's earliest Mass (Dufay, who would later bring Renaissance almost to the embodied force of Josquin) we hear the 1420 continuance of such angular thinness and mood-suspension — those double leading-tones and bare fifths of Ars Nova. Let both stand midway in that first phase of the twofold West — the enfleshment of eschatology. (end Dufay) 30) French Ivory carving, 13th cent., Castle of Love, Victoria and Albert Museum, London; with video details Against which, the arts of earthly joy had been springing from the judgment ground, preparing for the Western incarnation's second phase. Music: 13th c. motet on Adam de la Halle's tune "Robins m'aime" Seraphim SIC-6052 Though in this 13th-cenutry mirror case of the Castle of Love, as in the music of triple runs hung over bare-fifth loyalty — this motet based on Adam de la Halle's "Robin loves me, Robin has me" — in these, as in the a-causalities of dream-romance, delight is as brittle, as thin, as its spatial rendering. (end Adam de la Halle) 6/1995 Period Styles 14 �C.G. Bell 31) Symbolic History Pol de Limbourg, c. 1415, May, Tres Riches Heures, Musée Condé, Chantilly; with video details Music: Binchois, c. 1425-30, De plus en plus, close (Cape) Anthologie Sonore 39 In the museum- (and concert-hall-) without-walls, moments — the dawn birth of 1400 — are always ours; as the dream lovers, in May of the Tres Riches Heures (and to Binchois' "De plus en plus") issue from the castle through a little wood, into a hawthorneflowered space, which first gives them ground to think their pleasures real. Charles d'Orleans: Summer's harbingers have come — Les fouriers d'Esté sont venus Pour appareillier son logis, Et ont fait tendre ses tappis De fleurs et de verdure tissus. 32) (end Binchois) Titian, c. 1519, The Bacchanal of Andros, Prado, Madrid; video: details only (cf. V32a, b, c) Music: Willaert, c. 1535(?), Ricercare, 3-v. #7 Schott, (close), MHS 913 A hundred years, and even myth, Titian's Bachanal of Andros, stakes out a summer shore for the rapt enfleshment of the dance of wine and love. That dynamic of sense — as in the Ricercares of Willaert, is a battle call, which turns the 16th-century to a field of moral war. (end Willaert) 33) 33a) 33b) Rubens, c. 1632(?), Castle Park with Figures, detail, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien (CGB '59); with video details, as Va33 Rubens, 1631, Rubens' Garden, Alte Pinakothek, Munich Return to 33, Castle Park, right section (which video divides to above and below) Music: 6/1995 Wm. Lawes, c. 1635, from Pavan (l & 3), Consort no.8 in G, violin, theorbo, etc. Argo ZRG 555 Period Styles 15 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History By the Cartesian 17th, Rubens complements enfleshed Apocalypse with a liferapture, where chivalric dream and pagan myth lift this moated castle, the artist, his wife and guests, on a validating wave of present good. (music skip) Like Royalist England, William Lawes, Jonson's "Penshurst": Thou hast thy walks, for health as well as sport; Thy mount, to which the dryads do resort, Where Pan and Bacchus their high feasts have made Beneath the broad beech, and the chestnut shade... Herrick's "Come, my Corinna, come, let's goe a Maying": See how Aurora throwes her faire Fresh-quilted colours through the aire: Get up, sweet slug-a-bed, and see The dew bespangling herbe and tree... (fade Lawes) That may have been the prime of the European fruitful earth. 34) Gainsborough, 1748-50, Robert Andrews and his Wife, National Gallery, London; + V details Music Thos. Arne, c. 1740(?), "Oh, the transport of possessing”, from "Suleiman and Zaide," Technichord-2 No. l0 Since by the 18th century of Gainsborough, Fielding, this Arne "Transport of possessing" — though the Glorious Revolution, Locke and Common Law have laid a firmer base, both in philosophy and custom, for the freehold pride of cornucopian ground — the skeptic edge of Enlightenment already undercuts the Lord and Lady Booby of the sunlit heritage. (fade Arne) 35) Moritz von Schwind, 1858, Morgenstunde, Schack Gal., Munich (CGB '59); first, video details Music: Brahms, 1869, from Alto Rhapsody (major melting, voice and Chorus) RCA VLM 1146 With Moritz von Schwind's mid 19th century Waking — as in those tearful meltings into the major which Schubert taught Schumann, Liszt, this Brahms — the 6/1995 Period Styles 16 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History wedding of expected joy has been over-extended. So parents used to say, when children could not stop giggling: "Your tickling string is hanging out, and it's going to get stepped on." (fade Brahms) 36) 36a) 36b) Toulouse-Lautrec, 1900, Messaline, Bührle Foundation, Zürich; with video details Same, detail, the upper half of the figure (only in the slide show) Joan Miró, 1938, Self-portrait (as cosmo-chaos), J.T. Soby, New Canaan, CT (replacing the 36b of earlier videos: Toulouse-Lautrec, 1891, "A la Mie," Fine Arts Museum, Boston Music: Mahler, 1888, from lst Symph., 3rd Movement, VOX VBX 116, face 2 By the end of the century the overstretching breaks in Nietzschean scorn. Thus from Brahms to Mahler. Is Toulouse-Lautrec's "Messaline" named for the silk, or for Emperor Claudius' cruel profligate? Or is it exactly the silken opulence centuries had been in search of which stirs this consciously late-Roman surfeit of flesh and venom of soul? As in Pound's Blast: They howl. They complain... That the twitching of three abdominal nerves Is incapable of producing a lasting Nirvana. If the earth-titan for whom Mahler named the First Symphony is the alienation of that God who took on time and flesh, what Resurrection (his title for the Second) was at hand? (fade Mahler) 37) French, 942-84, Sainte Foy Reliquary, Conques, Auvergne; + V detail So far, we have felt out the dual incarnation of the whole. In that continuum we have now to trace and name the century-by-century changes of the style moon. First we lay it down, as if it were true — though birth was stirring even there — the stripped negation of the Dark Age ground. Dogmatic reduction (we say) has become with the Christianized tribes of the North the automatic home: this jewelled reliquary of Sainte Foy throned over the mortal shroud. 6/1995 Period Styles 17 �C.G. Bell 38) Symbolic History Nicholas of Verdun, 1181-83, Enamel Resurrection, Klosterneuburg, Austria; first, video details As shoots of Romanesque-Gothic spring from that ground, they work in creative tension with its otherworldy creed. Year by year the bare field of damnation and prayer gathers more of earth's compromising life. Nicholas of Verdun's 1180 Resurrection raises God into time. So scholasticism reshapes the faith it acclaims, planting reason in Tertullian's paradox: "Incarnation sure because impossible." Reason, like digestion, can dissolve its own frame. So with the speculation of the Greeks. But medieval question begins and ends in dogma. (Digital varies the following Laos slide-sequences.) 39) V39a) 39b) French Gothic, 1160-1205, Laon Cathedral from the S.E., Nave and West Towers (CGB '59); video, detail only Same, W. Front, street view: Rose and Portal (detail from CGB '74, Gothic II, 52) Same, West Front, South side of South Portal: Joseph, Mary with Christ, and Simeon (CGB '59); while video shows, from the same tympanum, Mary, Angels, and Dove (from slide 40a) It is the protection of the transrational fabric from the energy to be released there which makes possible the giant constructions of Gothic and Renaissance — a dialectical buttressing of which the Cathedral is an outward sign. Consider Laon, with Thomas Aquinas' triple vaultings over the insoluble One as Father, Word and Spirit, both changeless and active in the world: It would seem there cannot be any procession in God... For procession signifies outward movement. But in God there is nothing subject to motion...no diversity... On the contrary, Christ says, from God I proceeded... I answer... as outward procession to external matter... inward procession to the intelligible word... one with the source whence He proceeds... 40) 6/1995 Same, from Central Portal and bay, detail of Mary and Christ with Saints (CGB '59); while video shows lower detail from the South Tympanum, Period Styles 18 �C.G. Bell 40a) Symbolic History Annunciation, etc. (again from slide 40a), then picks up the statues of 39b, from the same portal, with a detail of Simeon, Mary, and Christ Same, Tympanum of the West Front, South Portal (CGB '59), already featured by the video, which here details the Mary and Child of the Central Portal (from 40), returning to the whole S.W. Tympanum, and so to a flash of the West Towers It would seem that procession cannot be called generation... On the contrary, it is said: This day have I begotten thee... I answer: …not generation from non-being to being... but the origin of a living being from a conjoined living principle... as a man proceeds from a man... (But procession does not end with the Word; there is another, of the Spirit, called the procession of Love. Lest we slide to a pantheism of infinite processions:) I answer: Divine processions can be derived only from actions which remain in the agent, one with his essence... relations to creatures are not real in Him... (Creation thus withering like a pricked baloon. What then of God's body?) A divine person signifies a relation as subsisting... Numerical terms denote in God... a transcendental multitude... (Sursum Corda! The Greek one-many has been seated in spirit!) In such fiats of daring the Organum of Perotin vaults over modal Gregorian, pillared on the transhuman perfection of bare chords. 41) V41a) V41b) 41c) Same, Laon, interior, Choir and Nave, looking SE (CGB '59) Same, section of the south side of the Nave (CGB '74) Same, looking due east, from Nave into Choir (CGB '74) Same, Choir only, with Rose and Lancets (CGB '74); of which the video shows only the Rose Window Music: 42) 6/1995 Perotin, c. 1200, from Organum Triplum, Alleluia, SAWT 9530a (end Alleluia) French Gothic, c. 1260, Crusaders receive Host, inside portal, Cathedral of Rheims; video, detail only Period Styles 19 �C.G. Bell 42a) Symbolic History Roman de Fauvel, 1316, Carnival sports, MS fr. 146, f. 34r, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris Everywhere temporality is trained on the mystical. The civic and national work in the hierarchies of chivalry and church, as these Rheims Crusaders receive the symbolic host of earthly vanity and divine reward. Even the pre-science of Bacon takes the cover of scholastic authority. Goliard poetry flowers in the monastic garden. "Sumer is icumen in," lively and cunning canon, has alternate words of pious Latin. How sprightly, to lute, pipe and viol, the Worcester "Alleluia psallat." a43) 43) East Anglian, early 14th cent., whole Beatus Page, Psalter of the St. Omer family, British Museum, London Same, upper right detail; from these and three other slides (Vb43, Vc43, V43a) the video pursues a sequence of four details only Music: English, c. 1300 (Worcester) Alleluya psallat (instr.) EMS201 Sacred manuscripts, the cathedrals themselves, break into marginalia of fighting, drinking and love; while the secularized drama, issuing from the church doors, fills the holy ground with juggling and profane farce. That these sports can be embraced on a Psalter's Beatus page, as the Tumbler in the French miracle devotes his dance to our Lady, allows them a freedom from responsibility which after the Renaissance they could never claim; while their doubtful charter (comments here on the Fall, and the Drunkenness of Noah) sharpens their joy, heightening everywhere the plangent clash of Gothic. (end Alleluya psallat) 44) 44a) French Gothic, c. 1300, St. Jacques, detail, Musée, Beauvais; first, video detail French, 13th cent., painted ivory, Angel, Louvre, Paris (CGB '80) Music: Fauvel MS, 1316 (but music earlier), Motet, Zelus familie, ARC 2723045 (2 b) Meanwhile, below all, remains the other center, suffusing primitive functionality with a haunting and unresolved enigma, neither happy nor sad, but beyond and above 6/1995 Period Styles 20 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History both, the mystery of the May morning, of bare chords, the archaic smile, Lancelot's night with Guenevere in the country from which no stranger returns. (fade Zelus familie) 45) Hans Holbein the Younger, 1533, The Ambassadors, National London; with video details, including one of the skull Music: Gallery, Susato 1551, Pavane La Bataille (Munrow) Angel S36851 Of course this liberated energy ultimately dissolves the frames in which it is born, or formulates others of conscious responsibility, replacing the supermundane and nontemporal with the pride of man and earth. Though the dark sonorities of Susato's Battle Pavan, like the distorted skull in the foreground of Holbein's Ambassadors, would summon Renaissance grandeur to the enobling brunt of tragedy. This humanist shift occurs in a four hundred year complex, of which we have now to define the stages. (fade Susato) 46) 46a) 46b) Double: [A] French, c. 1220, plaster copy of lost St. Peter head from Notre Dame, Paris; and [B] Andrea Bonaiuti da Firenze, c. 1365, "Boccaccio" head, Spanish Chapel, Florence; + V singles Double: [A] 13th cent., Chartres; and [B] 14th cent. Siena Pal. Pub. (video then returns to 46: St. Peter and "Boccaccio" head) G. Pisano, 1302-10, detail of Prophet, from upper zone of the Pulpit, Cathedral, Pisa Consider the divide between 13th-century Gothic (in music, Ars Antiqua) and the late-Gothic of the 14th century. In the cast (left) from the original Notre-Dame St. Peter, about 1220, the released force, the personality, is hierarchical, one with the transrational synthesis of faith. Even troubador song and chivalric romance seem born outside time: their logic is of selfless devotion, and it is to the crypt of silence that they return. Whereas, in the so-called Boccaccio head from the Spanish Chapel in Florence (mid-14th century), secular force and person stretch an already loosening ascetic creed. So town-dwarfing cathedrals yield to the civic claims of towered Italy and the trading North, Thomas Aquinas to the agitations of Wyclif; literature expands to Petrarch, Machault and Chaucer, music to the exploratory modulations of Ars Nova. Yet all this vigor retains from the Medieval some half-spaceless enigma of the earth-pilgrimage. 6/1995 Period Styles 21 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Between these style-faces towers their 1300 boundary, the Divine Comedy, both Gothic synthesis, and the liberating revolt of the new man. 47) V47a) Erwin v. Steinbach c. 1300, façade design, detail, Strasbourg Cathedral; video: lower part only English (Ely) early Decorated esp. 1322-42, Choir, Octagon, and Lantern, Crossing seen from the south, Cathedral, Ely (CGB '77); with video return to 47, upper part For Ars Antiqua we have heard Perotin with the Cathedral of Laon. Now with the Ars Nova "Amen" of the Tournai Gloria, let us range later Gothic, from Erwin von Steinbach's 1300 Strasbourg façade design, through Italy and France, and back to Ely crossing with its octagon. This art quickens with ingenuity; while the pure chord fabric of music widens for the progressive inventions of hocket. Music: Ars Nova, c. 1320, Tournai Mass, Gloria, Amen, SAWT 9517-A Ex 47b) 47c) 48) V48a) Va49) 49) Va50) Siena Cathedral, upper façade, completed 1380 (CGB '48) Same, Nave, interior, esp 1229-64 Orvieto Cathedral, 14th cent., upper façade, (CGB '84) Same, Choir, interior (CGB '84) Giotto, 1303-06, Scrovegni Chapel, interior, Padua Giotto, 1304-06, Adoration of the Magi, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua Andrea (Bonaiuti) da Firenze, 1343-77, fresco: Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas with Arts and Sciences, Spanish Chapel, Florence (CGB '59) 50) Again, Spanish Chapel frescos: Harrowing of Hell (CGB '59) V50a) Same, Church Militant and Triumphant, lower detail (copy of CGB '59, see 18th Century 65) 51) French, 14th cent., carving, Madonna, Senlis Cathedral (CGB '59) a52) English Decorated (Ely), 1322-42, exterior, Ely (CGB '77; cf. V47a, above) 52) Same, interior, Crossing with Octagon, Ely (CGB '77) V52a) Same, a more flood-lighted view of the Crossing (1994 video insert) Like that Gloria, the Gothic dome of Ely is twenty-five years past what we have called the 1300 divide. For 1st 53) 6/1995 Period Styles 22 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Florence, esp. 13th-15th cent., General view of the city ( detail from CGB '59, Milton 29); here video also previews Giotto's Campanile, Florence (CGB '48; see 2nd 53) But since, in the continuous rebirth within Gothic, the same question will be posed by 1400: how to distinguish the 14th century from the 15th, which for all its medieval heritage, we call Early Renaissance — let us stake out the farthest advance of Italian Ars Nova and School of Giotto toward the natural harmonies to follow. Art offers an array of softening grace, from Giotto's tower, finished fifty years after his death, 1st 54) Nino Pisano, c. 1365-68, Madonna del Latte (lighter version), Museum of San Matteo, Pisa through the observation of Andrea and Nino Pisano — this Madonna del Latte, tender as Dante's Stream-of-Grace metaphor: "No infant so quickly turns its face to the milk...as I to dip eyes in that water..." — 55) Altichiero, 1390-95, fresco: Saints present members of the Cavalli family to Madonna and Angels, central section, St. Anastasia, Verona; video draws from Va55, the whole fresco in fresco, the increasing immediacy ties this Altichiero to the 1390 miniatures of dei Grassi. For 2nd 54) Giovanni dei Grassi, c. 1385-95, The Visconti Hours, BR 90, Marriage of the Virgin, Bibl. Naz., Florence; video: lower section only While of recorded music, Landini's "Gram piant' agli occhi" most ripens toward the suavities of Dufay. Music: 2nd 53) 3rd 54) 2nd 55) 6/1995 Landini, c. 1370(?), Gram piant' agli occhi, ARC 3003 Giotto and after, 1337-87, Campanile, Florence (CGB '47, from the dome of the Cathedral) Madonna del Latte (darker version); video shows a detail of each slide, the light and the dark Again, Altichiero's Virgin and Saints; video shows only closer details Period Styles 23 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History V2nd 55a) Again, from The Visconti Hours: Marriage of the Virgin, closer detail a56) Again, Giovanni dei Grassi, c. 1385-95, The Visconti Hours; BR 48, Birth of the Virgin, det., Bibl. Naz., Florence 56) Double: [A] Giovanni dei Grassi, c. 1385-95, The Visconti Hours, Vol. I B.R. 48, Birth of the Virgin, det., Bibl. Naz., Florence; and [B] Jan van Eyck, c. 1422(?), Birth of John the Baptist, Mus. Civ., Turin 56a) B of 56; video: details only Dei Grassi died a year after Landini. In his Visconti Hours (left), the intimate International Style makes its furthest Italian and 14th-century advance. But here we have coupled it with a comparable birth from the Turin Miniatures (right), probably by Jan van Eyck and some thirty years later — over the threshold of Chaucer's pilgrims, when music too has ripened from the fifth-based poignance of Landini (fade Gram piant' aqli occhi), to Dufay's triadic counterpoint. Music: Dufay, c. 1433, from Alma Redemptoris Mater (Cape) AS 35 In each art, Early Renaissance defines itself: within the old context of sacred myth and authority, the harmonious and observational, by quiet infiltration, have possessed the body of an ostensibly Medieval universe. The revealed assumes the fabric of physicality; while the moods and details of earth find the consistency of their own ordering — though that order remains insular, not yet proclaimed of the whole. 57) 57a) 57b) Double: Brancacci Chapel frescoes, c. 1425: [A] Masolino, Sin of Adam and Eve, and [B] Masaccio, Expulsion of Adam and Eve; Chiesa del Carmine, Florence; + V detail of double (from V57) Masolino, Sin of Adam and Eve Masaccio, Expulsion of Adam and Eve, detail (fade Dufay's Alma) Yet in the Rebirth ferment of the Florence of that time, the revolution of human power grows more absolute, in theory and practice. As we face the frescoes on either side of the entrance to the Brancacci Chapel in the church of the Carmine, across the Arno — the linear thin continuance of Masolino's Sin of Adam and Eve (left), against the tragic might of the young Masaccio's Explusion (right) — the conscious divide of 1425 piles itself on the style-shift of 1400, quietly attested (in Masolino) by the soft space and personality of International Gothic. But where the actual and embodied has made (in 6/1995 Period Styles 24 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Masaccio) the breakthrough Alberti's Treatise on Painting ties to flesh: "as long as breath remained to it, whoever spurned the flesh would spurn life itself" — how can we call such an awakening "insular"? 58) V58a) 58b) Donatello, c. 1430, Portrait of Niccolo da Uzzano, Bargello, Florence Donatello (with Rosso, and Ciuffagni), 1415-22, Prophet with a Scroll, detail of head, Mus. dell' Opera del Duomo, Florence Donatello, c. 1455, Youthful St. John the Baptist, Bargello, Florence At its boldest — here Donatello's Bust of Uzzano, about 1430 — it must seem that the humanist transformation is complete. We have to remind ourselves that this force is cultivated in the shelter of an unchallenged faith-frame, its daring permitted by ambiguity of values. So in Valla's "Dialogue of Free Will", which Calvin and Leibnitz would praise, reason heretically denies freedom, but within a fable of Tarquin and the Oracle, and over a return to Patristic surrender: "How is the pot to question the Potter?" We remain in the immediacy of rebirth — the secular as unvalidated antithesis in Catholic creed. Only by what would seem a backward step, the zeal of Reformation against that double talk, would we enter the late Renaissance phase of struggle. Whereas the century of Donatello a59) 59) 59a) Gentile da Fabriano, 1422-23, Adoration of the Magi, altar, detail, Uffizi, Florence (CGB '59) Gentile da Fabriano, 1422-23, Adoration of the Magi with Predella (on video, Predella is cut), whole, Uffizi, Florence (CGB '59) Same, Procession detail, above, to which video adds a return to much of the central panel runs a sequence of naive delights — Music: N. Grenon, c. 1420(?), "Noe" close of "Nova vobis gaudia," SAWT 9505A earth and man not yet bound to self-responsibility for thought and act. In Gentile da Fabriano, in an isorythmic Noel by Grenon (both about 1420), we wake to child-renewal of the Garden. The Kings who kneel below have come through Tuscan hills above, like hunters, mounted, with leopards and falcons, with hound and horn. 6/1995 Period Styles 25 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History (end Grenon) a60) Vb60) Benozzo Gozzoli, 1459, Procession of the Magi, Medici Palace, Florence (slide shows vertical left section, with Cosimo and Piero de' Medici below; video shows only that detail, using Va60) Same, detail with John VII, Emperor of Byzantium That century heightens the realism without restating the aim. The walls of the Medici Chapel, under Gozzoli's legend of the same Epiphany, celebrate the "bel viver fiorentino." But that life is wider than Florence. Let us range Europe again, with Dufay's "Se la face ay pale" Kyrie (c. 1450) — from Ghiberti's doors to van der Weyden's Bruges, and back to the Tuscan complement. Music: Vc60) 60) V60a) a61) 61) Va62) 62) 62a) 63) 63a) Dufay, c. 1450, "Se la face ay pale," from Kyrie, AS-25 Same, Magi frescoes, right: from wide vertical section, video shows upper part, Procession winding into the hills Same, detail with Lorenzo de' Medici Same, detail of mounted youth with a leopard Again, Medici Chapel frescoes, from the Chancel, detail of an Angel Ghiberti, 1425-52, Shepherds from Abraham and Isaac, East Doors, Baptistry, Florence (CGB '48) Roger v. d. Weyden, 1455-60, Annunciation, from the Magi Altar, Alte Pinakothek, München (CGB '59) Same, detail of Mary (CGB '59) Roger v. d. Weyden, 1440, St. Luke Painting the Virgin, Fine Arts Mus., Boston [or CGB '59, whole and (unused) details of the Munich replica, see video file V62a, b, c, d] Baldovinetti, 1460-62, Nativity, SS. Annunziata, Florence Same, detail, left, landscape [or V63 (unused) alternates, CGB '86] Perhaps the most loveable picture of all for innocence and observation is Baldovinetti's fresco of the Birth by a ruin on a limestone ledge over the Val d'Arno, which by such mixed techniques as Leonardo would pursue, has almost faded off the wall. In this, as in everything, it speaks that Florence: Quant'è bella giovinezza Che si fugge tuttavia! 6/1995 Period Styles 26 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 64) Hugo van der Goes c. 1480(?), Death of the Virgin, Gröningemuseum, Bruges; with video details 64a) Same, a more balanced detail Music: Tinctoris, c. 1475(?), from Kyrie, Christe Eleison, Missa 3 vocum, Seraphim SIC-6104 In late 15th-century Flanders, two painters press (in opposite directions) toward the human consciousness of 1500. Van der Goes' Death of the Virgin, painted not long before his own death of melancholia, invokes the darkening tessitura of Ockeghem, or of this Tinctoris three-voice Kyrie. Even an anonymous English poem projects such imploration: Sodenly afraid, Halfe waking halfe sleping, And gretly dismayd, A woman sate weping, With favour in her face far passinge my reson And of her sore weping this was the encheson. Her sone in her lappe lay, sche seid, slein by treson, If weping might ripe be, hit semed then in seson... 65) 65a) (end Christe eleison) Memling, 1489, Martyrdom of St. Ursula, St. John Hospital, Bruges; video: details only — central, above, below Memling, 1489, Reliquary of St. Ursula, St. John Hospital, Bruges Music: Pierre de la Rue, c. 1500(?), Sanctus, Missa Ave sanctissima Maria (6v) Seraphim, SIC 6104 Against the passionate realism of van der Goes, Memling quietly enriches temporal celebration. So with the wreathing of sacred polyphony over the Europe of Josquin des Pres. As if, in this Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, the glow of figures, fabrics, reflecting armor, and background space, continually voiced the overlapping delight of Pierre de la Rue's six-part "Holy, Holy, Holy." (music) Yet all that earth-praise flowers in the reliquary shrine of church containment. Va66) 6/1995 Leonardo da Vinci, 1498, Cartoon of the Virgin and Child, with Anne, National Gallery, London Period Styles 27 �C.G. Bell 66) 66a) Symbolic History Leonardo da Vinci, 1508-10, Virgin and Child with St. Anne, Louvre, Paris; + V detail and closer detail Same, detail of Mary and Anne; from which video takes only the head of Anne, with a mountain background So the island harvest matures to High Renaissance, that 1500 point of balance where a now-conscious humanism serves the old absolute which still embraces it. In this Leonardo, Mary draws Christ back from the lamb of his Sacrifice; Anne, the lap of prophecy on which she rests, smiles acceptance — and before a landscape, which, as so often with Leonardo, exhibits the whole of earth-history: mountains reared by the erosion that wears them down. Where else does tragic knowledge clothe itself in such shadowed smiles? (cut Sanctus) For which the unrecorded Italian music would be Tromboncino's Lamentations. a67) 67) 67a) Botticelli, c. 1478, Head of Flora, Primavera, Uffizi, Florence Double: [A] Botticelli, c. 1478, Head of Flora, Primavera, Uffizi, Florence; and [B] Leonardo, 1510, Head of Anne, from Virgin and Child, Louvre, Paris (video adds a closer detail of Flora) Leonardo, 1510, Head of Anne, from Virgin and Child, Louvre, Paris; + V return to a detail of Mary and Anne Music: Isaac, c. 1485(?), from Fortuna Desperata, Vielle trio, Allegro 14 Botticelli was born only seven years before Leonardo, grew up in the same Florence; his Spring, with the equivocal thin smile of this Flora (left), Roman goddess of flowers and of prostitution, was painted about 1478, when Leonardo was already exploring what would ripen to the 1510 Anne (right). And yet a single composer, Isaac, at the Florentine court, exhibits both modes: in his ballades the poignant grace of Gothic: (close Fortuna Desperata) Music: Isaac, 1492, "Quis dabit capit meo aquam," Pt. I, bars 15-32, Decca DL 79413 in his great Laurentian elegy, the converse mystery of fullness. (fade) 6/1995 Period Styles 28 �C.G. Bell a68) b68) c68) 68) 68a) Symbolic History Carpaccio, Ursula's Dream, head of the sleeping saint (detail of 68); video adds entire left side of 68 Gerard David, c. 1506, Virgin of the Annunciation, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; first, a video detail Giovanni Bellini, c. 1490, from Madonna with Saints Katherine and Mary Magdalen, detail of the Magdalen, Accademia, Venice (CGB '59) Vittore Carpaccio, 1495, Ursula's Dream, whole, Accademia, Venice (CGB '59); + V detail of the Angel (from V68) Same, detail of the sleeping St. Ursula (CGB '59) Music: L. Compere, pub. 1519, from O bone Jesu, Seraphim SIC 6104 (side 5) The achievement of 1500 is the cultivation of Renaissance rich repose, over a creed of Judgment "and the life of the world to come." Such the Praise-of-Folly urbanity by which Erasmus outraged Luther. In music there is the Frottola and Lauda harmony of chord progression reared on the heritage of the church modes — a homophony also cultivated by the Flemings, as here by Compere. With painting that calm horizon extends from the North (Memling and David) to the Italy of Leonardo, Perugino, Luini, Giovanni Bellini, early Raphael, Giorgione. This Carpaccio Dream of Saint Ursula, enshrines its Venetian style-center. (end Compere) But the mutant of Gothic force Savonarola had sowed in Medici Florence, would rise through Ursula's sleep of dreams. Va69) Michelangelo, c. 1525-30, Tomb of Giuliano de' Medici, Medici Chapel, S. Lorenzo, Florence b69) Michelangelo, 1520-34, Tomb of Lorenzo de' Medici, Medici Chapel, S. Lorenzo, Florence 1st 69) Same, detail of Lorenzo's head V69a) Detail of a69, head of Guiliano de' Medici Music: Pere A. Vila, pub. 1557, Fantasia, viols, 2nd half, Candide CE31068 By 1530 that fruitful island of suspended values is yielding to an expansive struggle of new against old, the old enfleshed by the new, a tragic birth, where the 6/1995 Period Styles 29 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History physical and human modes of the modern are stretched in the whirl of Medieval contempt of earth and timeless faith. In the flexing of Michelangelo (this pensive Lorenzo from the Medici Tombs), in the always more conscious control of musical space (a swelling Tiento by the Catalan Vila), we enter the Tensile phase of late Renaissance. a style which, with its Dynamic sequel, strains under the name of Mannerism. (end Vila) Va70) Double: [A] Pontormo, c. 1527, Angel and Mary heads, details of Annunciation, S. Felicita, Capponi Chapel, Florence Vb70) Pontormo, c. 1527-28, Madonna and Child with Infant St. John, Uffizi, Florence 1st 70) Pontormo, c. 1525-30, St. Jerome, Niedersachssisches Landesmuseum, Hannover V70a) Same, detail of upper body and head 70b) Pontormo, 1525-28, Deposition, Church of S. Felicita, Florence; video: center spread only with a closer detail (cf V70c) Music: Cipriano de Rore, pub. 1550, from Madrigal: Ancor che c'ol Partire, (Deller) Bach Guild S-5051 Of Florentine early Mannerists, Pontormo most sensationally breaks with High Renaissance, twisting the nude penitence of Jerome smiting his breast with the stone, into a manic war with its framed space and barren landscape ground. In music, the degree inflection by which Josquin for expressive grief had wrenched the modes, advances (about 1540) through Willaert to the passionate chromaticism of Vicentino, or of this de Rore. (end de Rore) For 2nd 69) Titian, 1545-46, Pope Paul III and his nephews, detail, Capodimonte Mus., Naples For 2nd 70) Tintoretto, 1548, Miracle of St. Mark, Accademia, Venice Reformation disrupting the North, counter-Reformation tightening the South; under both, a confident and now aroused humanism struggling in science, politics, philosophy, for freedom and the power to build — in this turmoil, every stress communicating itself through the cultural ambience to each point of expression — 6/1995 Period Styles 30 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Europe rises to a might of creativity, as giant men are pressed up from the whirling mass, flesh of that hypostasis of spirit. 71) Titian, 1559, Rape of Europa, Isabella S. Gardner Museum, Boston; + V details Venice heads the 1560 shift from the Tensile bow of Michelangelo toward El Greco's Kinetic arrow. With Titian's great myths, with the Ricercare of Andrea, first of the Gabrielli, the tethered is unleashed. Music: 72) A .Gabrielli, c. 1560(?), from Ricercare del 12 tono, [old] Columbia 60366 Titian, 1559, Diana and Actaeon (Bridgewater), National Gallery, London; + V detail (end Gabrielli) Though the unleashing brings on the dark of tragic storm. To tie this passion to its archetype, 73) 73a) Early Christian, late 3rd cent., detail of an Orant between Shepherds, Major Cemetery, Rome (video: upper part only) Early Christian, mid-3rd cent., Orant from the Crypt [miscalled] of "La Velata," fresco in the Catacomb of Priscilla, Rome oppose, from its Christ beginnings, one of those mild Crucifixion allusions in Catacomb art, with the Gregorian Tenebrae, of which we have heard the opening — how quiet even the voice-leap of the dying cry, "My God, my God!", the drop through diabolic tritone to acceptance: "Et inclinato capite" — Music: 74) 74a) Gregorian, 5th cent. and after, Tenebrae, cont., Solesmes, VM-87 (fade) Titian, 1573-76, Last Pieta, whole, Academy, Venice Same, left detail; with V74a, variant, and V74b, detail of vault place that against the embodied agony, the last Pieta by Titian, from his nineties, with Ingegneri's mighty rhetoric of the Tenebrae: 6/1995 Period Styles 31 �C.G. Bell Music: 75) 75a) 75b) Symbolic History Ingegneri, c. 1575(?), Tenebrae, old Strasbourg Choir, Col. FRX 56 Same, Last Pieta, lower spread of the whole (CGB '59) Same, upper left section of 75 Same, central group from 75 [using the five basic slides, with two video variants, a sequence of twelve video images has been framed] (end Ingegneri) Those vast forces (over the 1600 divide of Bruno, El Greco, King Lear). a76) 76) Bernini, 1674, Monument to the Blessed Ludovica Albertoni, S. Francesco a Ripa, Rome Same, detail of upper body and head; with video details from a76 and 76, + V76a have only to set, as in Cartesian formulable array, to precipitate another style-century, the 17th, billowed up on the conscious assertions of Baroque. "To try to render figures expressive," said Bernini, "I... put myself in the same attitude that I want to give the figure..." In him, in Grandi's "O vos omnes", causal reason and vindicating will dramatize the incarnate passion. Music: 77) V77a) 77b) Alessandro Grandi, 1621, O Vos Omnes (instrumental opening), Nonesuch H-71329 G.G. Bernini, c. 1622, Self-portrait, Galleria Borghese, Rome Bernini, 1655, Self-portrait, Galleria Borghese, Rome Bernini, c. 1668, Gabriele Fonseca, Fonseca Chapel, S. Lorenzo in Lucina, Rome But no sooner has that world-shaping introspection appeared in Cartesian confidence than it casts the shadow of Pascalian doubt. Its cloud-capped towers and solipsistic self are vulnerable; the reason that exalted them may let them down. In the heroic axioms, as at the wings of a temporal stage, the future of rococo mockery and romantic pain wait their cue. As Eliot says in "Gerontion": History has many cunning passages... Gives too late What's not believed in, or if still believed, 6/1995 Period Styles 32 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In memory only, reconsidered passion. Va78) Gregorio de' Ferrari, 1684, Summer (center det.), ceiling fresco, Pal. Rosso, Genoa b78) Sebastiano Ricci, 1707-8, Medici Escutcheon, fresco, Pitti Palace, Florence 78) Double: [A] Magnasco, c. 1720, Punchinello and Son, Gatti-Casazza Collection, Venice; and [B] Gregorio de' Ferarri, 1684, Autumn, detail of Bacchus, Palazzo Grapallo, Genoa (revised video holds B after the double, V78B, while the first videos, instead of the double, used another Magnasco: 1710-20, Girl and Musician before a fire, Italico Brass Collection, Venice) 78a) Italian late Baroque (Juvarra, Turin), 1718, Great Stairway of the Palazzo Madama, Turin (CGB '84) Music: Alessandro Scarlatti, c. 1700-10(?), Affetuoso, close, 6th Concerto Grosso, in E major, ARCHIV 198 442 Again around the century mark (now of 1700) the ever-present change of history sharpens toward another quantum break. The massive Baroque vindication of divine order yields, in Ricci of Florence, to Rococo wit, sentiment, Enlightened play; art darkens in Magnasco, as in the satires of Swift; it lightens, in the frescoes of de Ferrari in Genoa, this Autumn, to the airy artifice of Tiepolo and the France of Louis Quinze. And already the Concerti Grossi of Alessandro Scarlatti, Domenico's father — this "Affetuoso" close of the last — enter the courtly salon where rational disillusion and heart's revolutionary hope would both be entertained. (close A. Scarlatti) 79) 79a) V79b) L. Carrogis, c. 1760, David Hume, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh; + V detail Piranesi, 1750, Self at the age of 30, engraving Piranesi, 1745 and 1761, Le Carcere XIV, 2nd state, detail, National Gallery, Washington D.C. What has so nonplussed the 1760 empiricist David Hume? Is it the ruffled repletion of some Johnsonian meal? Or is this the moment recorded in the Appendix of his Treatise on Human Nature when, having pursued through years and volumes a system based on simple, atomistic perception (though one might have guessed perceptions are ingatherings already tinged with self and world), he discovered (true to the logic he had played) that he stood in contradiction (what Kant would call antinomy), no way (having 6/1995 Period Styles 33 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History started with the disconnected) to account for any composition, self, or substance, even to the power to think or say "I am": If perceptions are distinct existences... no connections are... discoverable... all my hopes vanish when I come to explain .the principles that unite our successive perceptions in our thought or consciousness... For my part, I must plead the privilege of a sceptic, and confess that this difficulty is too hard for my understanding. a80) 80) V80a) 80b) 80c) Phil. Otto Runge, 1805-06, Rest on the Flight to Egypt, right side (which video narrows to a detail of an Angel in a Tree, Kunsthalle, Hamburg Same, whole; video: first a detail of Joseph, then the whole, then a narrowing to the central group Frank Kupka, 1911-12, Discs, Museum of Modern Art, Paris Franz Marc, 1913-14, Deer in the Forest, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlruhe Again, Rest on the Flight to Egypt, central group (CGB '86); video takes from this a detail only, of Mary and the Christ child Music Beethoven, 1826, close lst movement, Quartet No.14 in C-Sharp Minor, Op. 131, Col. M5L 277 So the transcendental imperative would become what the spirits demand of Faust, to reconstitute the lost world within: Baue sie wieder, In deinen Busen baue sie auf! Thus Runge renews Incarnation from imagination, nature and romantic heart; Beethoven sublimes sacred polyphony in the C Sharp Minor Quartet. It is the aspiration which (through all 19th-century thickening of the bourgeois and material — and even in Nietzschean complementarity with that) spirals from 1800 Beethoven to 1900 Schönberg, from Runge and Friedrich to the Cubistic, Orphic, and Blaue Reiter dissolution of spatial things — as Goethe's cry of spirits: "Build it in inwardness!" would take, in our century, the voice of Rilke: Is it not this you wished for, earth, to be reborn in us invisible? Erde, ist es nicht dies, was du willst: unsichtbar in uns erstehn? 6/1995 Period Styles 34 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Was it the Resurrection of the god who had entered time and flesh? Or could the Incarnate himself foretell the countdown of that Resurrection? As Yeats asks of Leda, "so mastered by the brute blood of the air": Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop? 6/1995 Period Styles (End Beethoven) 35 � Dublin Core 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 Period Styles : A Review of the Incarnate West, Symbolic History, Part 18 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 18 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_18_Period_Styles--A_Review_of_the_Incarnate_West Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online.