Et in arcadia ego: Guercino and Gauguin – 700th Post!

Paul Gauguin, Spirit of the Dead Watching, 1892

Paul Gauguin’s painting “Spirit of the Dead Watching” and Guercino’s painting “Et in Arcadia Ego” have much more in common than one might assume at first sight. Guercino’s painting is a strange mix of the pastoral idyll and the dark motif of memento mori. The dark and foreboding spirit of the Baroque is seeping its darkness into the Arcadian landscapes of Giorgione. Two shepherds are seen gazing at a skull placed on a cippus. A little mouse is seen next to a skull and under it we see the words which also give the painting its enigmatic title “Et in arcadia ego” which means “Even in paradise I am”. The skull is a harrowing, spooky sight and its presence in the calm greenery of nature disturbs the peacefulness. The face expressions of the shepherds reveal their feelings; their easy going attitude was tainted by the sight of the skull which brings thoughts of transience and decay which is inevitable for all that is alive; a flower withers and so will the man. Even visually the composition is divided between the shepherds on one side and the skull on the other and between them is a thin line which they don’t want to cross, as if coming nearer to the skull will somehow taint their carefree existence.

In Gauguin’s painting a lush female nude and warm, vibrant pinks and purples serve as a cheerful facade for the dreary existential motif that lies underneath. The girl’s youthful, sensual body is contrasted with Tupau, the spirit of the dead, which is lurking from the background dressed in a black cloak. The girl can feel its presence and she feels uneasy. The young girl in the painting is Tehura, Gauguin’s thirteen year old Tahitian wife, and according to his letters one evening he came home and found her “immobile, naked, lying face downward flat on the bed with the eyes inordinately large with fear (…) Might she not with my frightened face take me for one of the demons and specters, one of the Tupapaus, with which the legends of her race people sleepless nights?” Some art critics have interpreted her fear as the fear of Gauguin’s voracious, aggressive sexuality, but I will not go into that theory right now. Instead, I will focus on the spirit of the dead as a foreboding, eerie element in the vibrant, cheerful, hot, tropical world which is almost like a heaven on earth in some ways. The presence of Tupao is the infiltration of death and transience in this tropical paradise of vibrant colours, juicy fruit and eternal summer, it is as if his presence calmly says “Et in arcadia ego” and sooner or later, you will all die.

Also, as you can see from the title as well, this is my 700th post!

Giovanni Francesco Barbieri also known as Guercino, Et in Arcadia Ego, 1618-22

Francisco de Zurbarán – Saint Agatha

Francisco de Zurbarán, Saint Agatha, 1630-33

In the first half of the seventeenth century Francisco de Zurbarán, perhaps the spookiest painter of the Spanish Baroque, painted a series of portraits depicting female saints and virgin martyrs which is surprisingly vibrant in colour and mood, at least compared to his other paintings. Zurbarán painted around twenty such portraits and all of them present the image of youth and delicate beauty: the saints are painted as rosy-cheeked girls, elegant and serene, and most importantly – beautifully dressed in sumptuous fabric in all colours and shade, from mustard yellow and rich red to greens, blues and even some splendid Veronese pink. In his time Zurbarán got his fair share of criticism for portraying the virgin martyrs in such a lavish way, accentuating more their worldly beauty and rich attire rather than their humility and piousness. And indeed, they look more like dainty princesses than martyrs. Still, there is something that clearly marks them as saints and not princesses: their attributes; a visual symbol that helps us recognise which saints is presented in the painting. Our sweet little saint Agatha here is painted carrying her cut off breasts on a platter and that is how we know the painting shows Saint Agatha and not some other saint.

Agatha of Sicily (c. 231-251) was an early Christian saint born in Sicily and the story goes that, according to Jacobus de Voragine’s “Golden Legend”, the young Agatha took a virginity vow and, on many occasions, rejected the romantic offers of Roman prefect Quintianus. This all happened during the persecutions of Decius and eventually Quintianus reported Agatha to the authorities. He imagined that Agatha, when faced with torture and death, would give in to his demands, but instead she prayed to god for courage. Part of her torture included her breasts being cut off with pincers. She was suppose to be burnt at the stake but an earthquake prevented this and then she was sent to prison where St Peter the Apostle appeared to her and healed her wounds. She died in prison, remaining faithful to her ideals.

In Zurbarán’s portrait, not a trace of suffering, torment or pain can be seen on her delicate pale face, only perhaps a tinge of wistfulness. Her slender figure is arising from the darkness of the background like a beautiful sculpture and there is nothing in the painting that distracts us from the real motif: Saint Agatha. She’s gazing in the distance with her large dark eyes while her breasts, so pale and so beautifully sculpted, stand on the platter like two delicious cupcakes. Around her neck a pearl necklace, her dress falling beautifully. I like other female saints portraits as well but Agatha showing off her cut off breasts is perhaps the most interesting to me because it’s kinda provocative and naughty. Just imagine what an outrage these tits would cause if the theme of the painting wasn’t religious but worldly. Here are some other paintings from the same series:

Francisco de Zurbarán, Santa Dorotea, 1648

Francisco de Zurbarán, Saint Dorothy, 1640-50

Francisco de Zurbarán, Saint Ursula, 1635-40

Juan de Valdés Leal – In Ictu Oculi

“Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness.

Everything passes.

This is the one and only thing I have thought resembled a truth in society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell.

Everything passes.“

(Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human)

Juan de Valdés Leal (1622 – 1690), In Ictu Oculi, 1670-1672

In 1670-72 Spanish Baroque painter Juan de Valdés Leal was commissioned by the Brotherhood of Charity to paint two paintings, “In Ictu Oculi” and “Finis gloriae mundi”, for the Hospital de la Caridad in Seville. The sombre and dark paintings fit perfectly with the mood that characterised the sixteenth century in Spain. The “vanitas” genre of painting captures the mood of the times because it unites the themes of the religious spirit bordering with fanaticism, the fascination with death and the obsession with the transience of earthly life. A dark, dramatic and foreboding atmosphere is seeping out of this painting like spilt ink colouring the white paper in the sea of darkness. Arising from the dark background is the figure of a grim reaper who is holding a scythe and a coffin and with his right hand pointing at the letters written above a candlestick “In ictu oculi” meaning “in the blink of an eye”. How nice of the grim reaper to point out the title of the painting for us. His left foot is standing on the globe; how very dainty. Bellow the grim reaper stretches a cluttered landscape of earthly life, filled with material possession such as books, globe, jewellery, crowns; everything that the soul cannot take to the spiritual realm. The colours – hushed down, sombre, faded, apart from that shiny pink and red – serve to convey the mystical and dark mood. Motif of transience was all the rage in the Spanish Baroque poetry and here is a poem by Pedro Calderon de la Barca called “These flowers, whose pomp“:

THESE flowers, whose pomp was joyous to behold,
When the white dawn awoke them out of sleep,
At eve shall be a ruin fit to weep,
Lulled in the darkling night’s embraces cold.
This posy bright with listed hues of gold,
Snow-white and purple, rivalling heaven’s bow,
Will be a warning to our life below;
So doth one day its little life enfold.

To flower, the rose displayed her buds at morn,
And to grow old and wither, did she flower;
One is her cradle and her grave forlorn.
So men behold brief fortune’s earthly dower,
To die upon the day when they were born,
For the past ages are but as an hour.

The verse “the past ages are but as an hour” goes well with the motif of the painting “In Ictu Oculi”; a rose blooms and withers quickly, compared to the rose our human life is long, but compared to eternity it is not. We are surrounded by things that remind us of transience and yet we dread it the most. The other painting, “Finis Gloriae Mundi”, further emphasises not only the passing of everything on earth but also the pointlessness of success, reputation and everything humans spend (or waste?) their life chasing after. The main part of the painting are the two coffins positioned in different directions and they hold the rotting, decaying bodies of a bishop and a knight who both enjoyed fame and repute, though of a different nature, but are both now – dead. In the dark background, another skeleton and a pile of bones and skulls are also painted. Can things get any creepier here? There are times and day when nostalgic thoughts and trips down memory lanes rip my heart in two, but on other occasions thoughts of transience fill me with bewilderment and passion at once because if life passes quickly, if “life is a dream” as Calderon de la Barca wrote, then why waste a single second of it not enjoying it, not being ecstatic that you are alive – while you are alive. In a second you’ll be ashes, so rejoice while you can.

Juan de Valdés Leal, Finis gloriae mundi, 1672

Jan Steen – The Lovesick Maiden

Today we’ll take a look at a very interesting painting from the Dutch Golden Age; “The Lovesick Maiden” by Jan Steen.

Jan Steen, The Lovesick Maiden, c. 1660

In a typical Dutch interior of the period, a pale young woman is suffering from a terrible illness, the one for which no cure has ever been found – love! She is situated in the middle of the canvas as if she was an actress playing a role on the stage. Tragedy is the genre. On her right side is her maid servant, on her left is a doctor dressed in unusual clothes. His hat in particular is strange, and look at the way the servant is eyeing him. He is checking the girl’s pulse. The setting is the girl’s bedroom, there is a bed in the background, in the left corner there are bed heaters and the girl’s appearance reveals an intimate setting; she is wearing her white linen night cap, and she only carelessly threw on her ermine trimmed little coat to keep her warm I guess, her rounded white bosom are peeking above her garish red corset. She is too in distressed to care for frivolous matters such as clothes! Too ill to care, and still too healthy she appears to be sitting there like that instead of lying in bed. And that doctor too looks too much like a comedy actor. That’s because he is a quack doctor. Next to the girl’s feet a little dog is sleeping. In the context of a love scene, a dog usually represents fidelity. What exactly is she faithful to here; to her unrequited love, or to her love sickness?

I can really imagine her thinking these thoughts from Bob Dylan’s song “Love Sick” as she is sitting there with her head on her hand, her leg raised up, her rosy cheeks and her furrowed brow, half-lamenting and half-sulking:

“Did I hear someone tell a lie?
Did I hear someone’s distant cry?
I spoke like a child; you destroyed me with a smile
While I was sleeping

I’m sick of love but I’m in the thick of it
This kind of love I’m so sick of it….

I’m sick of love; I hear the clock tick
This kind of love; I’m love sick

Sometimes the silence can be like the thunder
Sometimes I feel like I’m being plowed under
Could you ever be true? I think of you
And I wonder

I’m sick of love; I wish I’d never met you
I’m sick of love; I’m trying to forget you

Just don’t know what to do
I’d give anything to be with you“

Decades before this was painted, in 1610, the French physician Jacques Ferrard published a study of this “disease of the fantasy”, named “Of Lovesickness or Erotic Melancholy: A Scientific Discourse that teaches how to know the essence, causes, signs, and remedies of this disease of the fantasy“. Here he names the symptoms of this illness that this Jan Steen’s pale girl which also have: “Lovesickness gives rise to a pale and wan complexion, joined by a slow fever that modern practitioners call amorous fever, to palpitations of the heart, swelling of the face, depraved appetite, a sense of grief, sighing, causeless tears, insatiable hunger, raging thirst, fainting, oppressions, suffocations, insomnia, headaches, melancholy, epilepsy, madness, uterine fury, satyriasis, and other pernicious symptoms that are, for the most part, without mitigation or cure other than through the established medical remedies for love and erotic melancholy… These symptoms of disease have caused many to believe that love is a kind of poison that is generated within the body itself…” (quote found here.)

Jan Steen, Physician’s Visit, 1660

In this painting, a sculpture of Cupid in the shadowy upper left corner, above the doors which lead into the outdoors stands as a symbol of love that is tormenting her. This is however just one painting in a row; Jan Steen made an entire series of paintings that portray love as an illness and a doctor as a quack. It was a comedy genre beloved in his time and especially in his home town of Leiden because the Leiden University produced many fine doctors in the country. Here is another example that he made, the same year in fact, called “The Physician’s Visit”. In this example, the painting of Venus and Adonis on the wall tell us that Steen’s girl is suffering from lovesickness. The physician is feeling her pulse because that was a way of knowing whether the patient suffers from the “erotic melancholy”. The illness could also be detected through the urine, and we can see that the maid is holding an urine bottle. Also, the little boy in the left corner is a Cupid dressed in contemporary costume, ready to shot his arrow.

Apart from doing mischief, Cupid was especially fond of idleness and even in the Ancient times Ovid wrote how avoiding idleness makes you immune to Cupid’s arrows. During the Renaissance it was thought that idleness in fact triggers erotic melancholy. “In “L’Antidote d’amour”, Jean Aubery delineates the “particular dispositions” that make one susceptible to passion and thus to love-sickness. Chief among these are idleness, youth, luxury, and springtime. When all of these factors are present, passion is inevitable. Why are artisans and laborers exempt from erotic melancholy, even during springtime and even if they are young? Because, the author concludes, they know neither luxury nor idleness.” (Virginia Krause; “Idle Pursuits: Literature and Oisiveté in the French Renaissance”)

If Steen’s lovesick maidens had been doing their embroidery regularly or had other occupations, they might have avoided the trap of pining and yearning. All in all, these painting are comedies of love and everyday life and the possible buyer most likely had a good sense of humor.

Gerard ter Borch – Love Letters and Glistening Satin Gowns

In this post we’ll take a look at some pretty women dressed in splendid white gowns by a Dutch Baroque painter Gerard ter Borch.

Gerard ter Borch, Woman Reading a Letter, 1660-62

Out of the darkness that lures in the background, a genre scene full of intrigues and turmoil arises. A table, two chairs and three figures hold a story. A pretty young lady is reading a letter, most likely a love letter. Her raised eyebrows and slightly parted pink lips reveal her thoughts and feelings; she’s surprised, confused, a bit saddened by the words of the letter. An older female figure dressed in a fur-lined dress is sitting at the table, above an unfinished letter, she’s resting her head on one hand, and holding a quill in the other. Her gaze tells us about the seriousness of the situation. Even the young long haired servant boy glances at her worryingly! Meanwhile, a little dog is sleeping on the other chair.

Let us take a moment to appreciate her gorgeous satin gown. It is painted so beautifully and so skilfully that it looks, to me, as if it was a ball gown woven from moonlight and dandelion seeds for a forest fairy and by some magical mistake it ended up in the wardrobe of a seventeenth century lady. By painting the dress so shining and white, Ter Borch not only emphasised the rich status of the lady wearing it, and showed the elegance and sophistication of the latest fashions, but he also used it as a dazzling contrast of light and darkness. The background and the other figures are painted in dark sombre tones, and the spotlight is on her, the lady reading a letter whose words and emotions will remain forever mysterious to us. In that splendid whiteness the woman looks like a fragrant white lily blooming in the darkness of her beautiful cage.

Gerard ter Borch, Lady at her Toilette, 1660

In “Lady at the Toilette”, we have a somewhat similar scene. Again a woman dressed in a gorgeous white satin gown with details in gold and blue takes the central position. Our eyes are on her, but where is she looking? Both her clothes and the interior signify her high status, and are surely more sophisticated than Vermeer’s are. The interior with a fireplace, Oriental carpet, a mirror, and candlesticks shows luxury. The mirror shows the woman’s profile, but it doesn’t quite make sense. A figure behind the woman is perhaps a maid helping her with her gown, or a seamstress taking a measure or putting finishing touches to the dress. There is a richly dressed servant boy again. A little dog is present as well, not sleeping this time, but stretching with curiosity on the chair.

Ter Borch always lets the long skirt touch the floor and stay there in movement, creating shadows and depths, and you can almost hear its rustle, imagine its softness and shine. With his emphasis on elegance and splendour, Ter Borch partly announced the art of the eighteenth century.

Gerard ter Borch, Woman Writing a Letter, 1655

And now a lady not reading a letter but writing one. Take a look at her pearl earring, and look how concentrated she looks, as if she doesn’t know we are gazing at her. And what is she writing, I am bursting with curiosity to find out!

These days, Jan Vermeer is perhaps the most well-known out of the genre-scene painters from the Dutch Golden Age of painting but Gerard ter Borch has painted his fair share of everyday people in everyday situations and he went even further than Vermeer and Jan Steen by adding the glamour and stylishness to everyday life; he transformed middle class ladies into belles of the ball. There is a simple reason why genre painting flourished in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century: there was a free art market and painters weren’t restricted by the demands of the church as they were in the neighbouring Flanders or Southern Netherlands, then controlled by Spain. The artists naturally shifted their focus from the pompous religious subjects full of pathos and flair, which dominated the Spanish and Flemish Baroque, to humble beauties of everyday life. Genre-scenes were a popular option, but still lives and landscapes were common too. This shift seems all to natural to me, for, if a king or a court lady deserves to have her portrait painted, if she is worthy of being captured on canvas for eternity, why wouldn’t a middle-class lady from Utrecht or Amsterdam be a worthy subject for a painting?

Gerrit ter Borch, Messenger, 1650

Painting “The Messanger” is very interesting because the mood of mystery that lingers throughout Ter Borch’s paintings reaches its peak here. A lady in a shining white satin is reading a letter brought by a messenger merely a moment ago. But she turned her back on us, so not only are the words of a love letter concealed from us, so is her face expression. Is she smiling sweetly and trying to prevent herself from giggling, or is she standing in that dark room with a furrowed brow, trying to prevent tears from obscuring her vision, in case the messenger had brought sad news and is waiting for a quick reply. We will never know.

In all these paintings, Ter Borch presents us with a gentler, more intimate, softer side of Baroque; a world of silence and stillness, eloquent glances and glistening fabrics, letters being written and letters being read, letters full of secrets; a world we can relate to and which intrigues us. Jan Vermeer’s genre scenes have a similar mood, and the emphasis is, in both artists, on intimacy and silent drama that takes place behind closed doors.

Gerard ter Borch, An Officer Making His Bow to a Courtesan, 1660s

I decided to add the painting you see above just because of the ethereally beautiful white fabric. It looks so light and airy as it touches the floor. Also, I recently wrote a short post about Victorian photography where girls are dressed in splendid gowns and reside in chambers of silences and dreams, and looking at Gerard ter Borch’s paintings now reminds me of those photographs.

Also, I already wrote about Jan Vermeer’s similar genre scenes here.

El Greco’s ‘View of Toledo’

When I first saw this painting, I could not believe it was painted at around 1595-1610. because it’s so sharp, impulsive, dark and expressionistic; it’s so unlike any other painting of the time. Though the style of this painting is a striking resemblance to 20th century Expressionism, historically it is an example of Mannerism.

Alongside Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ and some of Turner’s and Monet’s landscapes, this painting is one of the best known depictions of the sky in Western art. This is not a typical landscape, it’s rather expressionistic for it shows the painter’s view of Toledo, a town he lived in most of his life, and not a faithful depiction of the town. Enigmatic symbolism of the painting could be connected to the mystic spirit the town was surrounded with those days. Also, isolated landscapes are rare in Spanish Renaissance and even Baroque paintings, thus making El Greco the first Spanish landscaper.

I am just so intrigued by this painting; the sky looks so powerful, so raw and so threatening while the buildings of Toledo look static, gloomy and solitary. Grey buildings are in contrast with the vivid green nature that exceeds in brown shades, even black in the background. Trees and bushes look so crooked and strange as if they are whispering a curse. I am writing a story set in an isolated castle (in England actually not Toledo haha) and this painting is my main inspiration for describing the nature.