“tomorrow, tomorrow “ cries the crow / “cras, cras” krast de kraai

What a wonderful discipline art history is!  

It can turn one into a connoisseur of birds’ Latin cries while suggesting a link with a rousing 80s disco song.

It shows the way to fortitude amidst a sea of troubles.

It can send one on a hunt for a caged crow through deserted museum rooms.  

Let me explain.

Hope as a Crow Clinging to Pandora’s Box.

When despairing of current world affairs, what better consolation than a book about the iconological metamorphoses of Pandora’s box? (1)

That box out of which all evil escaped …. before Pandora could put on the lid again …. But what remained, clinging like a bird to the edge?  Hope! Hope for a better tomorrow faithfully stayed with a hapless humanity. And which bird sparks hope, speaking of tomorrow, because it cannot speak of today? (2)

The crow - with its croaky cry “ Cras! Cras!” – which in Latin means “Tomorrow! Tomorrow!”

In a later age, Grace Jones would also vigorously sing:   "Tomorrow! Tomorrow! I love you tomorrow. Tomorrow is only a day away!” 

Allegory of Hope (“SPES”) as Industry & Good Husbandry   

About hope the Old Masters, too,  were never wrong. How well they understood it’s always best to just stubbornly plough along when all else goes wrong. As in  Bruegel’s  picture “Spes” / “Hope” (3)

Shovel, Scythe, Beehive  --- the tools of the industrious worker are the symbols of hope. Hope standing calmly in “a sea of troubles” with around her “men suffering all manner of catastrophe, loss, and misery”.

IVCVNDISSIMA EST SPEI PERSVASIO, ET VITAE IMPRIMIS NECESSARIA, INTER TOT AERVMNAS PENQ INTOLERABILES

The assurance that hope gives us is most pleasant and most essential to an existence amid so many nearly insupportable woes. (3)

Hope , again, and now with all attributes.

Panofsky shows another picture as a metamorphosis of Pandora and Hope (4)  

Beehive, Scythe, Ship (with all sails set for SPES)  - this must mean hope! And yes, there is Pandora's faithful bird, too. The caged bird, assuring that hope is here to stay with us.

The legend under the picture reads  “ L’espérance, vitrail de 1519. Bruxelles, Musée du Cinquantenaire” (Hope, Stained Glass Window, Brussels  Cinquantenaire Museum)

Hey, that’s here in Brussels. 

So of course I rushed off to the Museum to find Hope! 

Apparently nobody else had - neither tourists (not particularly wanting to be in a Brussels these days), nor Belgians (who probably all went to the seaside). 

 

So I wandered alone through deserted museum rooms … finding Byzantine- Greek icons and swaying Northern Madonna’s lovingly cradling their child. Finding a sweeping Roman Victory (alas beheaded) and ponderous Roman heads (without bodies). Finding Syrian mosaics , lavish Flemish Brussels tapestries, and much more…  

I did not find my “Hope with the Caged Bird”. But what more could one hope for than finding calm and light washing through still rooms preserving humanity’s artefacts throughout the ages.

When I left the museum I heard a crow crying, I looked around but didn't see any hopping bird. Looking up , all I saw was an angel with fluttering wings, arms outstretched towards the sky.

Opening a  box of notes

1. Dora & Erwin Panofsky: « La boîte de Pandore »  "Pandora's Box"
2.    « Mais pourquoi [demande-t-on à l’Espérance] t’assies-tu sur un tonneau oisive ? » « Toute seule ie fus [répond-elle], qui demeuray restive sur le bord du tonneau alors que les malheurs voloient de tous costez avecques mille peurs. » « Mais qui est cet oiseau ? » « La corbeille  fidelle, ne pouvant entonner ‘il est’ , dit ‘il sera’  «  (Alciata, Emblemata – as cited in Panofsky’s Boîte de Pandore) 
3.    H. Arthur Klein,  Graphic Worlds of Pieter Bruegel The Elder  
4.     « La boîte de Pandore », p28

time to meditate and create

Is she sleeping, perchance dreaming ?  No,  I rather think she’s meditating, ponderously so.   

Because you see, her eyes are open, if only barely – just enough for a brooding stare.

Let me engage you in a small experiment in order to prove my point about her melancholy state of mind.   Just do it, I mean adopt her pose:  put your right arm on an arm-rest, bend your right hand’s wrist downwards as far as you can, let it then support your horizontally positioned head and keep your eyelids open for about half a centimetre.  Remain in that state for at least 10 minutes.

Congratulations:  your performance is now  part of a rich western tradition in representing  Melancholy!

 Granted, it’s not highly rated these  days, melancholy musing ...  all that waste, sad time...  (1) 

Only, who says it’s wasted time?  Melancholy musing is also about thoughtful meditation and contemplation which throughout the ages have been associated with intellectual creative activity that surpasses the immediately useful and mediocre. (2)  

And then, nothing like a meditative spell to replenish the reserves of creative energy.   

Boredom and  “ennui” call for compensation  ;  from meditative stupor to the ‘frenzy of artistic temperament’ .

Notes & Nods to old friends

       (0)  Mary D. Garrard : Artemisia Gentileschi around 1622: Artemisia  as the Allegory of Painting, The Magdalen as Melancholy, The Reappropriation of Gendered Melancholy

(1)   « Rien n’est si insupportable à l’homme que d’être dans un plein repos, sans passions, sans affaire, sans divertissement, sans application.  Il sent alors son néant, son abandon, son insuffisance, sa dépendance, son impuissance, son vide. Incontinent, il sortira du fond de son âme l’ennui, la noirceur, la tristesse, le chagrin, le dépit, le désespoir.  […][…] L’âme ne trouve rien en elle qui la contente. […] C’est ce qui la contraint de se répandre au-dehors. »  Pascal, Pensées

(2)  « la mélancolie […] confère à l’âme d’une part l’inertie et l’indifférence , d’autre part la faculté de l’intelligence et de la contemplation »  Panofsky & Saxl, Dürer's "Melencolia I"

(3) hors catégorie;  "La mélancolie trahit le monde pour l'amour du savoir. Mais en s'abîmant sans relâche dans sa méditation, elle recueille les objets morts dans sa contemplation pour les sauver. [...] La persévérance qui s'exprime dans l'intention de la tristesse est née de sa fidélité envers le monde des objets". Walter Benjamin, Origine du drame baroque allemand  



 
 

Reading in a Room with a View – an iconological approach (1)

 

Reading in a room with a view?  Rather, disturbed while reading in a room with a view!  (2)

One moment you’re ensconced in your book, enveloped in the soft light and the peaceful sounds pouring in from the open window... 

And the next moment  a winged creature in fluttering robe bursts in, looking intently at you and pointing at the ceiling (3).  Perhaps announcing something?

Suppose someone would not be acquainted with the Gospel-stories  and would be unfamiliar with Western art history, could he or she then still come under the spell of this panel? 

What prior knowledge does one need to be moved by that half open shutter, the tangible feel of atmosphere in the shaded corner behind it?   

Does one need to be an art historian or devout catholic to peer curiously into the landscape outside, lovingly noting the winding brook (or is it a road- peering even closer now), the trees, the farmhouse, the castle on the bluish-shimmering horizon.

One might be puzzled of course by the prominence of the blazing red canopy bed. And what’s this circle with a dove in it?  Strange place,  too, to hang a mirror ( but who cares about that when you’re in thrall of the mirror’s reflections).  And that lovely white flower in a vase, why is it standing there in front of the scene?  

 

Now, what about the two characters in this scene?  The winged creature looks benevolent enough, so those must be good tidings it (is this creature a he or a she or someone in between? ) is bringing (4). 

The woman,  on the other hand,  does look slightly bemused, but composed all the same :  full of grace indeed ... Speaking of gracefulness: do follow the sinuous golden edging (5) of her richly folded blue robe.  In any case, whatever  the nature of the tidings, she has her book to hold on to. Lovely book too, what would she be reading? 

 

To go by all  the 15^th/16thetc  Century Flemish panels with women-reading-in-a-room  (often even blissfully undisturbed  by winged or other creatures)  this must have been a culture placing a very high value on both books and learned women!   

This (wishful or true?) appraisal (6) may well be one of the prime reasons (7) of my deep fondness for these panels ...   

And I’m definitely not alone  in that affection – how many times,  when wandering about in a museum room, did I  not see some other visitor all of a sudden perk up with full attention, a smile spreading over her face, sighing and then happily exclaiming (for instance (8)): 

 "oh look! a Saint Barbara reading!"

  

Notes on Meaning in the Visual Arts

  (1) Ok, I am going to be ironical here  – but not really, or at least not completely, since meaning in the visual arts is always bound up with so much genuine affection. In any case, in Panofky's analytical framework, there are  three layers of ‘signifying’

a.       Natural subject matter, subdivided into factual and expressional: ie the purely descriptive, primary qualities of a painting

b.      Conventional subject matter:  eg that winged creature is the angel Gabriel announcing (The Annunciation)  to Mary her immaculate conception (cornerstone of Christian theology!) = object of iconography

c.       Intrinsic meaning or content:  revelatory of deeply rooted attitudes, of ‘zeitgeist’, of the essence of a culture – better known as “ something else” – the elusive synthetical intuition remaining after all details have been scrupulously analysed and explained  = object of iconology 

(2)    A specimen of one of the many  lovely 15^th&16^th(&etc)  century Flemish paintings depicting the Annunciation: the middle panel of a triptych by the  Master of the Legend of Saint Magdalen – an anonymous early 16^th C ‘minor master’ emulating  Rogier van der Weyden

(3)    “Il désigne le ciel d’un geste extatique dont de nombreuses générations se souviendront ».  In his  "Les Primitifs Flamands"  Erwin Panofsky enthusiastically follows the evolution of this angelic pointing gesture in miniatures  by (amongst others )  Pucelle   and Jacquemart de Hesdin, dated around 1325-1375

(4)    A pity there’s not a scroll twisting from his/her mouth,  giving away the words of the message. A very handy early tradition, these wordy scrolls, one that has alas been lost over time, to be revived however in the text-balloons of comic books

(5)    A vertiginous experience, once you start really concentrating on following that meandering golden edging - as fascinating as Duccio's best designs. 

(6)    Cynics could argue that these panels only promote the image of devout women whose reading range is limited to the bible.  However, one should not underestimate the favourable impact of  a pictorial tradition paying visible respect to women reading.  What a relief, indeed, these images,  for any thinking girl or woman.  Especially when contrasted with other presently thriving cultural traditions,  which either  show women as mere lust objects or deny them visibility altogether.  

(7)    Alongside the sensual atmospheric qualities of these paintings – the way light filters in these rooms ...

(8)    Scene witnessed in the Prado on Sept 19th^th 1996  -confirmed by the entry-ticket stuck in the catalogue at exactly the page with the Master of Flémalle’ s (or a follower’s)  “Saint Barbara reading”  ( so I discovered with pleasure when checking out this catalogue, just for this post)

9) Credits: post inspired by a comment on a blogpost by LH...
 

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