Myths, History, and Art

Twelve Essays on Art as Deception

Basil Markesinis

Austin Macauley Publishers

2020-01-31

About the Author

Sir Basil Markesinis has held tenured senior posts at the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, University of London, Leiden (in the Netherlands) and the Law School of the University of Texas at Austin where he is now Emeritus Professor of Comparative Methodology. He has also held for a number of years part-time Chairs at the Universities of Paris I (Sorbonne), Paris II (Assas), Munich (Germany), Ghent (Belgium), Siena, Genova and Rome (Italy), the Michigan Law School (at Ann-Arbour) for two years and the Cornell Law School for four years. He has authored or co-authored 53 books, over 150 legal articles, and close to 100 articles on geopolitical issues in journals and newspapers in three continents. His most-recent work is his three-volume illustrated treatise entitled Ancient Greek Poetry from Homer to Roman Times, Jan Sramek, Verlag (2017). His academic work has earned him Fellowships at the Academies of Athens, Belgium, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Rome (Lincei), as well the Athens Archaeological Society and the American Law Institute. For his work in promoting international relations and the study of various European cultures, especially through his creation of the Leiden Institute of Anglo-American Law (in 1987); The Oxford Institute of European and Comparative Law (in 1996) of which he was founder, fund raiser and first director; and the Texas Institute of Global Law (in 2000), he was awarded the insignia of the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Italy; the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of France; the insignia of the Grand Cross of Service with Star of the Republic of Germany, as well as the insignia of Commander of the Order of the Légion d’ honneur of France. In 1997 on the recommendation of the Lord Chancellor, he was appointed Hon. Queen’s Counsel; and in 2005, on the advice of the Prime Minister, he was knighted by H. M. Queen Elizabeth II for ‘exceptional services to international relations’.

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Basil Markesinis (2020)

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Acknowledgment

A special debt is gratefully acknowledged to His Serene Highness the Prince of Liechtenstein for ‘supporting this publication’ by communicating, through the kind services of Mag. Michael Schweller, Registrar, Ausstellungsorganisation, of the Principality, His generous permission to allow the reproduction of the unique ceiling of Herkulessaal des Gartenpalais Liechtenstein painted by the great 17th and early 18th century Italian Jesuit artist Andrea Pozzo.

Thanks are also due to the Archdiocese of Vienna for kind assistance by some of its most helpful staff – namely Dr Martin Sierek, Sekretär of the Jesuitenkirche Wien and Frau Angela Ringhofer – in helping me obtain a photograph of that beautiful ceiling of the Jesuit Church of Vienna. As always, a great religious Order was able to attract the services of a highly gifted artist, and through this publication, more people will enjoy it.

Very special thanks are also due to the legal and art staff (such as Marina Ivanova) of that jewel of the arts – the Tretyakov Gallery of Moscow – for helping the author acquire the right to use Tatiana Yablonskaya’s painting of bread – a masterpiece of Soviet Socialist art. Likewise, I gratefully acknowledge the help received from Dr Lisa Monnas, author of the magnificently illustrated Merchants, Princes and Painters, Silk Fabrics in Italian and Northern Paintings 1300 and 1550, Yale University Press (2008) for valuable advice concerning Titian’s fabrics and the minerals used to create his amazing colours.

Last but by no means least, my usual thanks goes to Mr Andreas Spirou, my long-standing friend and computer expert, who on so many occasions helped Bicester Print Ltd and me to typeset a difficult text and pictures.

Preface

Paintings, like texts, dealing with events or people – mythical, historical, or living in the present – often require interpretation for what may be – or appear to be – described or depicted on a canvas or a mural but may not coincide with what emerges from a more careful examination of the image or the text. This divergence may be due to the creator’s artful or unintended concealment of his true intentions or may be the result of a simple misunderstanding due to the reader or viewer of the work of art in question. All these possibilities arise because, contrary to the common belief, human see with their eyes but also their brains. Using famous paintings as illustrations of this thesis, this collection of essays deals with these kind of problems and explores the possibilities that art offers for deception or misinformation or the mobilisation of public opinion in the interests of the state or divers modern movements learning how to exploit social media to promote their causes and interests through an increasingly sophisticated use of images easily multiplied by modern technology.

Those who have had the (good or bad) fortune to have committed their thoughts to paper often find that as the decades go by they seem to return to topics they have discussed earlier though this does not prevent them from enriching their older ideas by considering those of others which have appeared since their own texts first saw the light of day. I have not avoided this rather common fate and willingly acknowledge that in what follows I have drawn frequently and, at times heavily, from at least five works of mine: Good and Evil in Art and Law Springer Wien/New York (2007); The Duality of Genius, Jan Sramek Verlag, Wien (2008); On the Endurance of Ancient Greek Thought Through the Ages, Jan Sramek Verlag, (2014); Ancient Greek Poetry from Homer to the Romans, 3 vols, Jan Sramek Verlag (2017) (some of the above also appearing with modifications in other languages namely, German, Greek, Italian and Chinese) and my most recent Euripides in Macedonia, Psychological Problems in Ancient Greek Tragedies published by Bicester Print Ltd in England on behalf of the Alumni Association of the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki in Greece (2017). Other works which proved useful in writing this book appear in the footnotes though the frequency and extent of the citations hardly do justice to my indebtedness to their learned authors. A bibliographical list at the end of this work, limited to books and articles actually cited in these pages, may in part make up for the above-mentioned omission since it alerts my readers to important works dealing with the topics touched upon which deserve to be consulted further by those who wish to delve further into these subjects and the ideas I express about them.

The debts are not limited to the written thoughts of others but also to those who kindly allowed me to use copyright-covered illustrations which tie in well with the themes of this book, and present its ideas in the form of superb coloured images and not just printed words. Thus, as in the past, so now do I express my profound thanks to Bridgeman Images and, in particular, Sian Phillips, as well as Madame Anne Catherine Biedermann of the RMN of France, who have kindly supplied me with high-resolution pictures for the reproduction of the following classic paintings. They are in the order they appear in this book:

Jacques Louis David, The Assassination of Marat, © RMN/ Gérard Blot/Christian Jean;

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa, Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome, Italy, © The Bridgeman Images;

Detail of the above Saint and Angel, © by David Finn, New York;

Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun. Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat. © The National Gallery, London;

Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, Portrait of Queen Marie-Antoinette with Rose, © Château de Versailles, France, Bridgeman Images;

Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, Portrait of Queen Marie-Antoinette with Her Children, © Château de Versailles, France, Bridgeman Images;

Sir Frederic Leighton, The Bath of Psyche, © Bridgeman Images;

The Church of the Jesuits in Vienna, the fresco of ceiling and illusionary dome by Andrea Pozzo, © Permission for reproduction granted by the copyright holder Alberto Fernandez, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/;

Herkulessaal, Gartenpalais, Liechtenstein mit den Deckenfresken von Andrea Pozzo, © Liechtenstein, The Princely Collections, Vaduz-Vienna;

Francesco Goya, The 3rd of May, Prado, Madrid, Spain/ Bridgeman Art Images;

A crude early 19th century forerunner by an unknown artist (engraving), copyright holders not identified;

Titian, Bacchus and Ariadne, © National Gallery London and Bridgeman Images;

Mademoiselle Louise O’Murphy, by François Boucher, © Alte Pinakothek, München/RMN of France;

Jean Veber, Odysseus and Nausicaä, in the public domain;

William McGregor Paxton, Nausicaä, © Private Collection/Photo Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images;

Titian, Diana and Actaeon, © Knole, Kent, UK/National Trust Photographic Library/ Bridgeman Images;

Camille Corot, Diana Surprised in Her Bath, © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA/Bridgeman Images;

Titian, The Death of Actaeon, © National Gallery London and Bridgeman Images;

Mikhail, Aleksandrovich, Vrubel, Seated Demon © Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia/Bridgeman Images;

Mikhail, Aleksandrovich Vrubel, The Flying Demon, © State Russian Museum, St Petersburg, Russia/Bridgeman Images;

The Six-Winged Seraph, by Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel; Wikimedia Commons, in the public domain;

Anna Akhmatova portrait by Olga Della-Vos Kardovskaya, 1914, courtesy of the Tretyakov Gallery and Bridgeman Images;

Anna Akhmatova portrait by Natan Altman, 1914, Courtesy of the State University of St Petersburg, /© DACS 2018/and Bridgeman Images;

Stalin and Voroshilov by Alexander Gerasimov, © Private Collection and Bridgeman Images;

Marshal Zhukov by Vassily Iakovlev, © Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia/Bridgeman Images;

Tatiana Yablonskaya, Bread (1949), thanks to the special and kind permission received from the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia;

Nikolai Kogout, We Defeated Our Enemy… (1920), © The Estate of Nikolai Kogout; Photo; © Tate, London. 2018;

Nikolai Troshin, from USSR in Construction Propaganda Magazine. © The Estate of Nikolai Troshin; Photo; © Tate, London. 2018;

Nina Vatolina’s The Struggle Against Fascism © The Estate of Nina Vatolina; Photo; © Tate, London. 2018;

Felling the Dead Wood of the State, an electoral poster for the Greek New Party (1946), painted by Fokion Dimitriades, © by Mrs Julietta Markesinis;

Clytemnestra from the Battlements of Argos, by Sir Frederick Leighton © Bridgeman Images;

Emperor Charles V of Germany, by Titian, © Alte Pinakothek/Bridgeman Images.

Introduction

Words and art can reflect or create sublime images but they can also deceive and manipulate human minds.

Rivers of ink have flowed through the ages to describe and explain Ancient Greek thought and art in all its forms, frequently to admire it, occasionally to adapt it, often to imitate it. The overall Greek edifice has thus remained intact for it handled eternal issues in thoughtful ways and in a language unsurpassed in its clarity and restraint. But edges also had to be smoothed, infanticide and matricide had to be explained if not outwardly condemned; other ideas such as revenge, which even in the unique mind of Aristotle was seen, within limits, as a form of justice, had to be compared with and accompanied by Christian forgiveness. In this smoothing process, Western Culture and, especially Western pictorial art, from approximately the Renaissance onwards, played a key role, thus repaying the Greek East for a legacy, which proved so inspiring to its own artistic corpus.

Paintings, like music and even words, can generate some of the most vivid and sublime images known to man, remaining ingrained forever in his mind, but art can also create disturbing images, especially of human suffering. Two examples will suffice, namely, Goya’s Cronus eating his children and Picasso’s Guernica. Exposure to such vivid images challenges the idea that man was made in the image of God (though some of the ancient Greek Gods could be champions of cruelty and perversion). Moreover, if prolonged exposure to such paintings occurs, they can even alter political beliefs if not human characters. In between, we can have images, which on their surface can be puzzling, even attractive but in reality, can also be seen as concealing more reprehensible motives leading to socially condemnable conduct. Propaganda, as we shall note below, when impregnated by political motives, can result in seriously undesirable social consequences. Pictorial propaganda, in favour of or against new patterns of social behaviour related to issues such as feminism, the environment and the expanding reach of political correctness, raises slightly different but also vitally important issues.

All of the above can and do occur for, as already stated, though it is the eye which first receives the light signals emitted by writing or painting, their final interpretation is processed by the eye and the brain working together. The famous thinker Sir Ernst Gombrich, OM, was among those who explored this complex theme in his work Art and Illusion.1 In my early years as a Fellow of the British Academy, I was invited to have tea to meet Gombrich. The breadth of his learning was, then as much as it is now, truly humbling; and only two other colleagues, whom I got to know in the course of my life – Professor Sir Bernard Williams and Professor Jacqueline de Romilly of the Académie française – ever had a comparable effect on me. Professors Martin Gilbert, E. R. Dodds and Maurice Bowra, would have been added to this list had it not been for the fact that, alas, I only got to know them through their works but not in person. The world of scholarship is distinctly poorer now that none of the above is still around to dare to innovate and inspire though other, eminent colleagues, such as Pat Easterling, Sir Simon Schama and Richard Jenkins have been most helpful in the help and inspiration they have provided to me through their work or their letters, always full of invaluable advice.

Art promoting religious, social, commercial or, even, artistic aims, though not necessarily as socially dangerous as the art, which promotes party political interests or dogmas, can be equally deceitful. On the whole, it should also be treated as repugnant if used to promote selfish interests, especially if its statements and depictions are untrue, not fairly balanced, or motivated by the desire to make personal gain. Yet, as we shall note towards the end of this book, artistic brilliance can still survive when political darkness is all around it. This statement, though written by me, excites me; for it fills me with optimism.

The structure of this book is meant to show that the motives behind deceitful art can be varied and some examples will be used to provide illustrations for this proposition. The emphasis will be on pictorial art, what messages it may conceal, whether they are acceptable or reprehensible and, one hopes, after issues such as these have been explored, it will be left to the readers to decide to what extent the pictures reproduced fall into one category or the other; or, though attractive to look at, may be value neutral. It goes without saying, however, that the pictures in the list chosen were grouped under headings solely to inject a modicum of order into the presentation of possible ideas about the phenomenon of deceit. This is because different motives may lie behind the intention to deceive through the medium of art as well as the quality and openness of the medium used to produce a particular effect on viewers. Generally speaking, however, viewers, more often than not will be unsuspecting that the artist may be attempting to influence their minds. What they see or read may thus be only part of what the creator really had in mind.

The above brings me to my last observation, which is connected with the title of this work. Normally, the title of a book must be ‘catchy’ and I hope the one chosen serves that purpose even though, it is itself partially deceptive. For though David’s Assassination of Marat was indisputably intended to deceive the French of his time, it did so in an artistically remarkable manner, and so, on the whole, the deception remained unnoticed by its original viewers. Other paintings discussed in this book, however, cannot easily be considered deceitful. At the other end of the spectrum, I explore some famous paintings which did not deceive but reflected societal concerns or predicted – typically indirectly – events or even societal upheavals about to happen.

So, for instance, Madame Vigée Le Brun, when painting her famous portrait of Marie-Antoinette with her children never intended to deceive her sovereign and friend, though those who commissioned the painting had hoped the painting, as they imagined it would look when commissioning it, would do just that and persuade the citizens of France, which in those days resembled a boiling cauldron about to explode, to love or at least like their Queen. In the event, their attempt failed to influence the thinking of ordinary citizens – impoverished, hungry and increasingly restless citizens, who felt dissatisfied at the way they were being governed.

Art can and has been used to give effect to all these dubious intentions or, at times, more subtly insinuate a particular idea – moral or not – or even communicate an entirely innocent image. Neither of these last two examples can fall under the heading of ‘deceit’ though they may help provide an additional twist to a painting which may have a meaning quite peculiar to itself but, which might be missed or cause confusion to the hurried or uninformed viewer.

The title of my book must, thus, be read with the above kind of clarifications in mind. It must also be remembered that though I have, throughout my life nourished a great interest in the classics, history and art I am neither a classicist nor an art historian but a jurist. Still, one hopes, the book might, here and there, contain the odd idea which may be of some interest to a professional classicist or art historian for it was really written for the individual we once referred to as the educated reader. This is why, though the bulk of the work relies on information derived from classical texts as well as facts and observations derived from the study of famous paintings produced over the centuries, it also contains wider thoughts and observations arising from a peripatetic life, working in different capacities with very learned people, gleaned from historical posters or even, novels bearing the signs of true historical research.2 In short, it has been built on information derived from a life-long devotion to the merits of inter-disciplinary research.

The purpose of such varied interpolations of personal thoughts or experiences is to goad the reader to reflect more widely on all the diverse material utilised to write this book so the closing chapter is an invitation to him to reflect on the themes common to most of these essays and in particular the warning not to fall into traps into which he might have fallen into in the past simply by a hurried glance at painting hanging on a museum’s walls.

If this wider ambition to make my readers reflect on the diverse material incorporated in this book is satisfied then, I may have somehow stumbled into achieving the greatest service an author can perform for his readers, namely to make them reflect on his ideas. Whether these ideas are right or wrong is a secondary matter.

Sir Basil Markesinis QC, FBA, completed in Oxford on the 30th of January 2018, the day of the Three Holy Hierarchs of the Orthodox Church

A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, Phaidon, 6th ed. 2002, reprinted in 2005.↩︎

I cite below Sarah Dunant’s work on Courtesans in Renaissance Venice but the masterpiece of this genre of writing is Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoires d’ Hadrian a feat of imaginary but also reliable writing. A gripping novel, entirely relevant to Essay No 12, is by Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time, Vintage (2016) will be discussed below.↩︎

1

Disguising Cruelty as a Political Message1

One of the most worrying characteristics of cruelty is the variety of forms it can take. All its shades produce undesirable results, though the effects can vary according to its type. In my view, the vilest forms are those related to political propaganda; throughout history, this has been confirmed by the propaganda produced by regimes which belong to the two ends of the political spectrum: communism or opportunistic socialism on the one hand and ideologies which can be bracketed under the generic term the extreme right. My opposition to such regimes is due partly to the fact that their ideas and deeds affect entire societies and partly because the socially adverse consequences of such ideologies tend to leave a long-lasting imprint. Art, which disguises human evil, is thus one of the most repulsive kinds, at any rate, once its viewers have managed to see what may lie behind artistic mastery. Jacques Louis David’s portrait of the assassinated Marat is one of the best illustrations of this.

i. Marat: The Real-Life Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Marat was an important figure of the French Revolution but not of the pivotal significance of Robespierre or Danton and this is because, essentially, he was a henchman. Henchmen of morally bankrupt and politically discredited regimes are abhorrent individuals. Arguably, they are often psychiatrically ill. Hitler’s Martin Bormann and Stalin’s Beria must surely fall into this category. Marat, who (according to Hippolyte Taine)2 once said that 270,000 heads had to roll before public tranquillity could be restored, placed himself in this category of paranoiac fanatics. His moral perversity was never explicable nor made pardonable, but to some of his contemporaries, it was hidden by the fact that he was exceptionally well-travelled and widely educated having studied at Saint Andrews and written works on politico-philosophical topics as well as medical topics as widely diverging as gonorrhoea and eye diseases. Constant travel to Bordeaux, Amsterdam and different parts of England among other places, earned him the admiration of such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. By the eve of the Revolution, exceptional productivity – including a book on Newtonian optics and then a book on criminology (influenced by the work of the Italian Beccaria) – combined with a finely tuned sense of self-promotion helped him create quite a reputation for himself. For a time, he even managed to be hired as a physician in the household of the Count of Artois – later King of France under the name of Charles X. By the eve of the Revolution, a carefully planned ‘switch’ resulted in his being elected an Honorary Member of the Patriotic Societies of Carlisle, Berwick-upon-Tweed and Newcastle, and having repeatedly given scientific papers to Académie des Sciences of the Institut de France. What we see up to this point is a real Dr Jekyll; what, from now on, we were about to get was his other half – Mr Hyde.

The call for the Three Estates to be convened in May 1789 – something that had not happened since 1614 – marked the beginning of his involvement in politics. A series of pamphlets, published in quick succession, touched upon topics that preoccupied the Constituent Assembly or attacked the moderate reformers who were advocating some kind of imitation of the English constitutional settlement in order to save the French Crown. The more he spoke on these issues, the more he felt the need to create a medium through which he would publicise his increasingly extreme thoughts. So, in 1789, he founded a paper; after changing names twice, he finally settled on the famous (or infamous) title L’Ami du peuple. The paper was composed almost entirely by him, printed hurriedly and clandestinely distributed. What made L’Ami du peuple so dangerous was its growing practice of denouncing citizens for their disloyalty to the Revolution and treating them as guilty until somehow they managed to prove their innocence. By 1792, he had managed to become a Member of the National Convention, which declared in September that France was a Republic.

The publication of L’Ami du peuple stopped; its role, including the (often unsubstantiated) denunciations, was continued by a new paper entitled Journal de la république française. It needs no imagination to figure out that such antics soon earned him eponymous and anonymous enemies and forced him frequently to go into hiding. But his battle against the Girondins – the more moderate section of the revolutionary group, as contrasted with the ‘Jacobins’, the one he felt closer to – continued. As the date fixed by fate for his death approached, he became uncontrollably fanatic.

By now, however, Marat was also suffering from a skin disease, which began to develop around the end of the 1780s when he often took to hiding in the Paris sewers in order to avoid the growing number of enemies. We have a fairly detailed description of his symptoms – intense burning of his skin, itchiness, headaches, insomnia, insatiable thirst and a dermatosis (at times purulent and blistered) that apparently began in the anogenital areas and then spread over all his body – but no scientific diagnosis. Some, like Carlyle, suggested syphilis; others, in view of the constant thirst, thought it was diabetic candidiasis. None of these suggestions, however, explain the nature and duration of all the symptoms, something which led one medical doctor to suggest that Marat’s ailment would probably be diagnosed today as dermatitis herpetiformis.3 Whatever it was, it forced him to spend many hours a day in a bathtub4full of cold, medicated water. It was here5on the fateful day of July 13 1793, that Charlotte Corday, an unknown sympathiser of the Girondin cause, turned herself from an educated woman – well-versed in the works of Plutarch, Corneille (to whom she was distantly related) and Rousseau (as her last letter to her father attests) – into a cold-blooded murderess.

At first, it looked as if Mlle Corday’s attempt to reach her victim was destined to fail because she was stopped at the entrance of the building by the concierge, but she returned to her lodging, wrote some letters and then came back at around 7:30 that evening. Taking advantage of some other visitors, she mumbled to Marat’s common-law wife, Simone Evrard, that she had with her a list of agitators in Normandy which Citizen Marat would wish to see. He overheard this from his room and ordered that she be let in. His greed for more deaths thus hastened his own. Once inside, she found him in his bathtub. Marat grabbed the list from her hands and eagerly promised that they would all be guillotined. Within seconds, he had been butchered by the visitor. Marat did nothing more, though he is reputed to have cried out to his partner for help. Within four days, Corday was herself was tried and led to the guillotine, though not before, on her insistence, she had had her own portrait drawn by Jean Jacques Hauer. In those days, life was as cheap as the administration of justice could be quick. The brilliant, mercurial and amoral Madame de Staël would capture the significance of Marat’s death in one phrase when she wrote that he would be the one whom “posterity will perhaps remember in order to attach to one man the crimes of one epoch”.6

This, however, was the man the Revolutionary Committee of the time was anxious to immortalise in a portrait and the artist chosen to do it was, indisputably, the most famous one in Paris at the time but also the greatest opportunist of an era which forced people to shift allegiances if they wished to remain alive. Jacques Louis David was his name; and his opportunism, apart from a brief spell in prison, allowed him to serve the directorate, Napoleon as consul, Napoleon as emperor and survive even the restoration of the monarchy in 1814 and then again in 1815, though this time he took the precaution of moving to Brussels where some ten years later he died a normal death.

ii. The Last Portrait: An Example of Art as Power

David’s portrait of Marat lying stabbed in his bath is a unique work of political spin and, at the same time, David’s, arguably, finest work of art. Some critics, like Anita Brookner, have seen it as a painting that (like others) reveals David’s psychic disturbances;7 others have insisted that it should be approached bearing in mind the turbulent socio-political context in which it was created.8These are all issues that need not be addressed here, not least because their discussions by many authors have yielded no conclusive answers.

The official commissioning of the portrait presented the artist with a dilemma, which he had already faced in his past though never to the extent that it was presented to him in this case. In this and other paintings, David struggled to find an answer to an old dilemma: should art report the real or inspire through the ideal? Putting it more simply, in terms of artistic freedom, can freedom of expression explain or even justify the deformation of truth. One of the questions to be addressed was, and it remains, is to what extent did David’s work distort the truth? Giving in to this latter temptation would render the artist deceitful as well as his work. Yet, an objective understanding of the climate of that particular period in French history obliges us to admit that at the moment of his death Marat was being treated, by the revolutionaries at least, almost as a saint. To be sure, Marat was eventually also seen as the real Mr Hyde that he was; but, as stated, there had also been a time when, to the eyes of many, he had also been seen as Dr Jekyll, talented, respectable – and to some at least even in our times – considered to be, at the very least, an intriguing personality.

David may have been carried away by one image and thus, neglected to notice the second. He, himself, displaying the vanity of artists (and politicians responding to ‘the call to the office’), immodestly described how he felt the call of the people asking him to immortalise Marat’s death. Vain as he was, he did respond, but to achieve the ‘miracle’ he was asked to perform, he first had to recast his subject from a decomposing body into an idealised form. This was not easy for at the time of Marat’s assassination Paris was experiencing a heat wave and thus arranging his decaying body in a presentable form posed many difficulties. David did quite a lot to change the scene of the crime. No one has given a better blow-by-blow account of this transformation than Simon Schama in one of his most fascinating books. Readers who enjoy his style as much as his wide learning will do well to read his account to which I am indebted.9 Here, more dryly but more appropriately for the purposes of the text of a series of lectures, is the list of alterations made by David in order to convey a political message and not simply to depict a gruesome scene.

Marat’s body was, as stated, in a state of serious decomposition. It thus had to be heavily whitened in the painting and his flesh depicted as if made of imperishable marble;

Corday struck him near his clavicle and severed his carotid artery, but his wound is depicted as a neat incision at about the height where the Roman soldier’s lance pierced Jesus’ body. The aim of this change was clearly to invite comparisons.

Rigour mortis meant that it was impossible to close Marat’s eyes completely by the time the first sketches were done – hence that hooded look;

The letter stained with blood and held in his hand contains not the list of names denounced to him by Corday but a completely made-up sentence ‘it is enough that I am truly miserable for me to have a right to your benevolence’. This shows Marat as the victim of his own generosity rather than the rabid traitor-hunter he actually was;

A second letter on his makeshift desk – also a symbol of his simple tombstone – is a ‘thank you’ letter from a widow of a Republican soldier who has been granted a pension by the ‘good’ Marat;

His tongue ligature had to be severed in order to prevent it from lolling out of his mouth;

The hanging arm, pen in hand, was meant to show Marat working for the people up until the very end; in fact, rigour mortis meant that they could not move it in the right position, so an arm from another body had to be temporarily attached to Marat’s body; and finally,

On the floor, the good pen is contrasted to the ‘bad’ knife; the handle of the knife, which was apparently made of black ebony, is now white ivory in order to make the contrast with red blood even more obvious.

The result is what contemporaries described as the ‘pietà of the Revolution’; and in Schama’s concludingwords:10 “Despite everything it stands for, despite its place in the history of great lies, it remains shockingly, lethally beautiful.”

A wider ranging discussion can be found in Toby Clark’s Art and Propaganda, The Everyman Art Library (1977) whilst Claudia Mesch’s Art and Politics: A Small History of Art for Social Change since 1945, I. B. Tauris (2013), deals with propaganda involving more trendy subjects such as peace movements, feminism, the environment, which excite many and may annoy few. Both views deserve a hearing, and they will get it in this book, albeit in truncated form.↩︎

The French Revolution, 3rd vol. (2004), p. 118.↩︎

Its exact nature has long been in doubt. J. E. Jellinek, ‘Jean-Paul Marat: The differential diagnosis of his skin disease’, American Journal of Dermatopathology (1979) I: 252-2. The author diagnosed it as dermatitis herpetiformis.↩︎

. Strangely, Napoleon also liked/had to spend many hours a day in the bath, something which, however, did not stop him for conducting business, dictating and signing letters, etc. The medical reason that encouraged this practice is not known, as it still remains unknown why the Emperor had great difficulty in urinating, a fact noticed by many of his soldiers while he was marching with them when he would break ranks and retire behind a tree to relieve himself.↩︎

The bathtub itself has had a long story. In the beginning, it was lost but it eventually found its way into the hands of a private family. When the last of its members died, it was passed on to a local priest who, a couple of years later, was surprised to find through journalistic endeavours that he was now the owner of Marat’s bath. Offers to sell it to the Musée Carnavalet failed because its trustees were unconvinced of its authenticity. A generous offer by Madame Tussaud’s was accepted, but the acceptance was lost in the mail and the matter was dropped. Eventually, it was bought by Musée Grénvin, where it can now be seen.↩︎

Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution Française (1818), vol. 2, p. 51.↩︎

In fact, she describes him as hypermanic, paranoiac and in a constant state of delirium. See her Jacques-Louis David, Chatto and Windus (1980) pp. 109 ff.↩︎

Among those who take this view is Dr Nikos Hadjinikolaou in his Art History and Class Struggle, trans. Louise Asmal (1978).↩︎

The Power of Art, (2007), pp. 219–23.↩︎

Op. cit., at p. 235.↩︎

2

Portraying an Inwardly Flawed Artist as a Pious Man

i. Bernini’s Character: The Shadows Behind the Light

The plausibility of either the sensuous or the religious interpretation of the masterpiece discussed in this second essay and depicted above, hinges to a large extent on Bernini’s character and personality, and on this the numerous books written about him up until about the late 1960s were either silent or very brief as were the biographies written about him during or just after his death. Thus, though we are told how little he ate and how devout he was – apparently he attended mass very frequently – his character or character moods are hardly discussed, let alone explored in depth to see how often they shifted and may have affected his work. As modern experts have commented1the two original biographies (especially that of Baldinucci) present him as a faultless man. Their emphasis is on the grandeur of the individual and not his flaws. The duality theme becomes, in this case, even more relevant given the systematic attempt to conceal anything that would detract from his religiosity as the cornerstone of his achievement. But is his character warts and flaws – really such a non-issue? The question breaks down naturally into two parts: his character proper and his religion.

From Bernini’s very first biographer, Filippo Baldinucci, we discern a trend to emphasise his religiosity and conceal the shadowy incidents of his life. Baldinucci tells us nothing, for instance, of the Costanza (Bonarelli) incident (discussed below) and only includes the bust made of her in an appendix listing Bernini’s works. Characteristically, perhaps, he also does not ever refer to her by her married name – Bonarelli – but uses her famous family name: Piccolomini. Later, in his account of Bernini’s life, with an understatement that would do credit to the most English of commentators, he tells us that the Cavaliere “had some youthful romantic entanglements without, however, creating any impediment to his studies of the arts or prejudicing in any way that which the world calls prudence”.2 He is clearly alluding to the Costanza incident with Bernini’s brother, for in the next sentence, he immediately goes on to state that Bernini’s “marriage…put an end to this way of living”.3 Incidentally, this also leaves us in no doubt that Baldinucci was aware of the incident and thus did not fail to mention it out of ignorance but, on the contrary, decided to conceal it out of design.

Bernini’s son (Domenico) produced the second; one might call it a contemporary biography since its writing began while Bernini was still alive and it is safe to assume he was aware, at the very least of how it was progressing, even though it was published posthumously in 1713. Though never fully translated into English, it is generally accepted to be more candid. Domenico, however, being a more experienced historian than Baldinucci, shows clearly how well he knew how to manipulate his father’s ‘blemishes’ and – almost – turn them into strong points in his favour. The wily reference to the incident (with the brother, the assistant and Costanza to be discussed below) is included in this account is rather vague and certainly incomplete terms, concealing the full horror of Bernini’s temper and actions. The main aim of the account may thus have been to show how the Pope forgave him – rightly – given what a great man the subject of the biography (father of the biographer) was. Other flaws in the character, such as the ones to be listed below, are, however, entirely omitted. Such concealment is, for the reasons to be listed below in the Epilogue, understandable. For the Church (and the Jesuits, who played an active part in the writing of the first biography) were as anxious as Bernini himself to use the book to answer his many critics.

The book is, thus, not only seen as an occasion to enhance his glory – if anything, modern archival evidence suggests this was a secondary aim – but as an opportunity to answer numerous pamphlets, leaflets and orally transmitted rumours circulating in Rome concerning the structural soundness of his work (especially the cupola of the Cathedral of Saint Peter), the sexual misbehaviour of his over-sexed brother, Luigi, and the growing popular discontent with the (mis?) use of State finances (which they saw as being adversely affected by the costs of the Bernini activities). To this growing climate of hostility, we must, of course, add that with the election of Clement X as Pope in 1670 (and, above all, of Innocent XI in 1677), Bernini increasingly found himself separated from the persons and the cultural policies of the popes. To put it differently, the early conception of the biography coincides with a period in Bernini’s life when the publicity machine of yesterday was no longer working as well as it had done in the past in his favour.

The first attempts to record his life were thus biased, not least since all their information came from the family, much of it probably from Bernini himself. But they were further distorted by the fact that the institutional forces encouraging the production of the biography (and, indirectly, the later one by his son Domenico) were aimed at consolidating his reputation as a virtuous and great man and not at acclaiming his excellence in his profession.4 This explains why biographies reserve their most resounding praise for the character and greatness of the man and make little effort to appraise his art or place it within the wider context of artistic developments of his times. Given this background, it is little wonder that the other or flawed Bernini would be scrupulously hidden from the eyes of posterity until the political forces behind it had, effectively, died.

The views expressed in the previous paragraphs, in essence, condemn Bernini’s first biographers for having concealed the shady side of this unique artist. Baldinucci, being a well-trained Jesuit has, in a little-noticed ‘statement by the author’ published at the end of his biography ‘cleverly’ admitted as much himself in anticipation of any attack on his impartiality. He thus wrote:5

"…it may happen that the writer at times discovers among the purest gold some particle that is not completely pure. But the writer must not, because of that, abstain from making the light of that which is most perfect shine forth for everyone’s eyes, since it must be plain that to have in oneself some mixture of clay is only to be human."

The first italicised sentence (some particle…) half explains why he has omitted to recount shady aspects of the life of the genius. For, in his florid language, he tells us himself, a few lines further down, that he, “made a pact with [his] pen that it must, as if it was an amorous bee, follow the trail of the mellifluous parts of the flowers, leaving the opposite course to some poisonous spider born in filth and nourished by garbage, who now or after I shall have published my account, wants to sink his teeth into the less appetising, from which I kept my respectful lips, and feed upon it”.

Whether such bias is acceptable to modern historiography is highly debatable. In my own view, and where one is writing (as Baldinucci was) a biography and not, for instance, producing a learned catalogue of Bernini’s opera, such an approach may represent an unacceptable form of one-sidedness. However, consistent with the thesis of this work, it may also deprive the reader of interesting insights into the artist’s thoughts and how hey fashioned his work. For the personality of the creator is reflected in his works and, reciprocally, his works can often give us interesting clues about his character. To put it differently, and we shall elaborate this point at that stage, important works of art represent an amalgam of the artist’s and the sitter’s character.

Baldinucci, in keeping with the official desire to present us with an unblemished Bernini, clearly gives the impression that he does not share this philosophy. Yet his second italicised sentence (“since it must be plain…”) can be seen as bringing him close to another theme central of this book: the duality of humans. Yet if one accepts that humans have a dual nature, a mixture of body and soul, human and animal, good and evil, one is more likely than not to come to the opinion that understanding them calls for knowing, understanding and depicting or describing both sides. My mind, as I write these lines, jumps to another, famous and contemporaneous artist – Anthony van Dyck – and his portraits of King Charles I always ever so slightly but prophetically one might add revelling a melancholic countenance in his facial expressions.

Whatever, one’s views about the forgiving attitude adopted by Bernini’s early biographers, the fact is that this tradition has continued in contemporary accounts of his life. For they are notable for their emphasis on his work (and the understandable praise for it) but also remain almost entirely silent on his character and personality, even though archival material began to surface from about the 1960s onwards, helping to reconstruct better not only the facts, but also the contribution made by each member of Bernini’s family to the construction of the myth of the ‘blameless’ life.

Though the omission of his character flaws (and how these give us insights into his life and work) is understandable in some modern works, it is less easy to comprehend in others. Thus, that Rudolf Wittkower’s learned monograph should be silent on personal traits is understandable because it is largely concerned with documenting his huge work. The silence in other works, however, such as his Art and Architecture in Italy 1600–1750, which devotes 54 pages to Bernini’s life and work, borders on the ‘odd’. For in this account, Wittkower is not just cataloguing the artist’s work but setting it in the context, mores and fashions of the time. The length of the essay may be a partial explanation but this cannot be invoked to explain the silence of larger (and most readable it must be admitted) biographies, such as that by Hibbard.6

Of course, each author is free to decide what he includes and what he excludes in his works. Yet, such persistent silence over the shadier aspects of the subject’s character legitimately justifies others to ask why this is so. Is it, for instance, because Bernini still enjoys the protection of the Catholic Church and the writers close to it? Is it because authors feel that the personal characteristics should not be allowed to ‘blacken’ the image of a great figure? Or is it because Freudian interpretations still raise suspicions as to the accuracy of their assessments and explanations?

This list of questions can be expanded further. Thus, is it because any assessment, difficult and debatable in normal circumstances is impossible here, given that the person analysed has been dead for over 300 years and (unlike Mozart) we have few clues about his behaviour and state of mind? Is it because Bernini’s (genuine) religious feelings automatically exclude the coexistence of any shadows in his character? Or is it, finally, because authors, especially art historians, believe that one’s character and personality do not find a way to be reflected in one’s work? I believe, for instance, that many German art historians have generally taken a hostile view towards the value of psychoanalytical biography in the world of art through this, of course, is a generalisation and must be treated with appropriate caution.

These reasons, individually or in combination, may justify the decision to pass over in silence the shadowy features of Bernini’s personality; and they account for the bland, short statements we get in most books to the effect that Bernini was frugal in his dietary habits – apparently, he lived almost solely on fruit and bread (but why is that important to record?) – or that he went to church every day and took communion two or three times a week.

Yet such attitudes, however, they are explained (but not justified), deny the reader all insights into an important aspect of his life. Likewise, they deny the viewer of his masterpieces the opportunity to revisit them armed with additional information that might plausibly add a new dimension to their analysis and overall impressions of their works. They also raise the possibility – revisited in the Epilogue of this book – of a conspiracy of silence, though this is more often than not likely to be based on circumstantial rather than conclusive evidence.

Be that as it may, we only rarely get physical descriptions of him and of his fiery character. One from Baldinucci’s early account is worth quoting.

“His eye was spirited and lively with a piercing gaze under heavy eyebrows. His behaviour was fierce, his speech made a most effective impression, when giving orders, he terrified by his gaze alone. He was much inclined to anger and quickly inflamed. To those who rebuked him for it, he would respond that the same fire that seared him more than others also impelled him to work more than others who were not subject to such passions.”7

Much later, his son Domenico would express similar thoughts when in one sentence he described his father as being “stern by nature, steady in his work, passionate in his wrath”.8 This is a compact phrase but, in its last four words, it greatly helps us understand those incidents of his life where he seems to have lost total control of himself.

Still, even if the fiery, short-tempered character is revealed, its consequences are not fleshed out. Simon Schama (and a few others, such as Lavin) take matters further when they describe how Bernini very nearly killed his own brother Luigi because he found him having an affair with his mistress, Costanza Bonarelli. A frantic chase followed after he caught his brother coming out of Costanza’s house, almost in flagrante delicto, during which he broke two of Luigi’s ribs. Later, at home, a second attempt was made against his brother’s life, forcing him to seek refuge in the nearby church of Santa Maria Maggiore9while his still-enraged brother was trying to kick the doors in. Still, the ‘genius’ was not appeased and hired a servant to go to Costanza’s house and ‘cut her face to ribbons with a razor’. How do human and divine justice react to such behaviour? As they always do: with partiality! Schama sums up matters up in his usual beautiful and lively style:

“The penalties for these crimes and transgressions were unequal to their cruelty. The servant was arrested, tried and sent to prison for assault. Costanza, the victim, was, as the art historian Sarah McPhee has discovered from the archives, sent to prison on charges of adultery and fornication. Luigi, the philanderer, was exiled to Bologna for his own safety. Distraught, their mother Angelica implored the Pope to intervene and somehow restrain Gian Lorenzo, who thought and acted, she said, as if he were Lord of the World. Bernini was indeed penalised – by a 3000 scudi fine, about the sum he would have received for one of his busts. But his patron and friend Urban VIII then waived the fine…”

Divine justice in a very worldly form!

Should we be surprised by this statement of facts and, more importantly, by the wider implications behind them? Not really. Divine texts promise justice in the other world, not this one. No wonder, since they know that those who do the Godly bidding in this world – including the God’s Vicar on Earth – can be just as partial, human and deficient as the rest of us often are.

The incident, however, reveals even more about the ‘genius’, his amorous adventures and his ability to portray lust on marble. The Cavaliere’s libidinous tendencies were clearly likely to land him in trouble again. The wily Pope saw this and arranged for him to marry Caterina Tezio, a beautiful and wealthy Roman. The cunning initiative must have worked since we have no further record of sexual indiscretions. But poor Caterina, by all accounts terrified of her husband, had to put up with the Cavaliere’s insatiable sexuality by bearing him 11 children. Interesting though this information is in order to help us avoid a hagiographic depiction of Bernini, it is not entirely irrelevant for the understanding of his masterpiece, the Teresa sculpture.

Hot-tempered, over-sexed, cruel and thoughtless of the suffering of others; what else was Bernini Mark II, who has been lurking in the shadows conveniently concealed by the admirers of Bernini Mark I, the public figure, who was always in the limelight? Professor Irving Lavin10had this assessment to offer about Bernini the professional:

“…What of…Bernini the man? Here, it appears, his laudatory biographers have been economical with the truth. He was notorious for his ruthless ambition and the lengths to which he would go to defeat his rivals. Passari recorded in print that he was like the dragon guarding the gardens of the Hesperides, who worked against anyone attempting to gain the golden apples of papal grace and spat poison and sharply pointed darts of hatred all over the path that led to possession of the highest favours…. Someone else, less well-placed, called him a malicious and wily man.”

It would hardly add much to the picture to say that, despite Baldinucci’s claims to the contrary, Bernini was equally mean in giving credit to his students and assistants who helped him on more than one occasion to complete parts of his commissions. Lavin, in his above-mentioned work,11 goes further by suggesting he was “A manic-depressive psychological profile, such as is frequently associated with creative genius in any field, and is normally excused as an artistic temperament. This was exacerbated by a degree of success early in life, which would have turned the head of even a well-balanced individual. Furthermore, Bernini was indulged by a strong protector, in Maffeo Barberini, who was prepared to overlook even heinous crimes for the sake of his artistic prowess. In short, his moral character had been warped by artistic and worldly success”.

This is interesting and, in fact, more than that: it is yet another text suggestive that the darker side of Bernini’s personality may well be of interest to professional psychiatrists. And yet, the deeper reasons for such flaws are not immediately obvious. For unlike Mozart, Bernini had no clashes or psychological problems with his lesser father. Unlike David (and Mozart), he suffered from no impediment, no deprived childhood, no physical deformity (such as Mozart’s deformed left ear or small size), nor any other unpleasant characteristic (like Mozart’s annoying giggle). Unlike most of the great 19th century artists, Bernini was neither physically ill nor illegitimate and had not come from a broken family background.

So the mystery of his manias and psychoses, if that is what they were, remains to be explained, but real they were, and they afflicted him severely during the first half of his life. Nor can one doubt them or belittle them on the grounds that he was deeply religious. Yet, can one take Lavin’s words literally? I have already alluded to the reasons that make such a diagnosis unreliable in the hands of a non-professional psychiatrist and, what is more, one forming an opinion on the basis of slender evidence. For the diagnostic requirements set out by modern psychiatry do not seem to be there in Bernini’s case. To be sure, the huge ego, the hyperactivity, the short temper and the minimal sleeping all seem to satisfy the signs normally used to diagnose cyclothymic disorder; we also have evidence of the above alternating with periods of deep depression.

And yet, some of these symptoms seem to stop after his marriage to Caterina Tezio. The second half of his life thus is – or seems to be – calmer, except for his obsessively maintained visits to Church and his often-silent praying in front of his Teresa monument. Are these signs of deep faith? Depression? Internal agonising? A disturbed conscience? Historical distortion of what really happened? Or all five? We will never know for certain; so we are forced to leave this question about his psychological condition unanswered. In a way, that only adds to the fascination of the man.

Yet, even if the signs of psychotic conditions are absent, his early violent traits are well documented, as is his ability to use the work of others to his benefit. Like all aspects of human behaviour this, too, can be ‘explained away’ and subsumed under his genius. Or it can provide a cause for reflection about the man’s character. Wittkower, commenting on how Bernini’s later work did not depend on him “handling the hammer and chisel himself” [my emphasis] but on the actual work being done by his pupils or other associates who, at the height of his atelier’s power, could have numbered up to 300 craftsmen. The degree to which their work was stylistically integrated into his is, to be sure, little short of wondrous; and Wittkower attributes it to “the degree of his [Bernini’s] preparatory work and the subsequent control exercised by his mastermind”.12 In short, this coordination was another sign of his genius and a rare one at that. For not only was he brilliantly creative, and maintained this creativity throughout his long life, he was also an able administrator, supervisor and controller of his atelier – even if, given his short fuse, he must have undoubtedly achieved all this in a forceful (if not brutal) manner.

On the other side of the scales, however, one must add something that may have weighed less in his time but should be of more concern to contemporary commentators. Quite simply, it is the compromise of intellectual integrity that occurs when one ignores the droit de l’auteur. For his associates, who never received any acknowledgement for their participation in the creation of his masterpieces, may have willingly or unwillingly accepted this loss in exchange for working in his atelier.

Still, depriving them of all share of the creative credit shows, yet again, a degree of rapacity and egocentricity that, though common in Renaissance and High-Renaissance Italy, must also be seen as a sign of dishonesty. It is no wonder that Bernini’s arch-rival Francesco Borromini felt ‘sour’ for having his substantial work on the Baldacchino – the canopied marble and (mainly) bronze cover over Saint Peter’s burial site in the eponymous Cathedral – left totally unacknowledged. Thus, Borromini, who was no apprentice but (almost) as great an artist as Bernini, had the same fate as Giuliano Finelli, whose delicate work on the Daphne statue was never acknowledged.13 In legal terms, that makes Bernini not just an offender but a recidivist; but a huge talent, it would seem, always helps conceal such character blemishes.

Borromini, however, was not the only one to have his work appropriated by the master. Jennifer Montagu 14takes over at this stage and gives a further illustration of the artist’s behaviour:

“The group of Apollo and Daphne was of course conceived by Bernini himself. In this image of metamorphosis, the roots stitch her toe to the ground: the rough bark encases the soft flesh of her thighs, and the leaves sprout from her fingers. But the equally miraculous metamorphosis of the block of marble into delicate roots and twigs, and into floating tresses, was largely the work of Giuliano.15 The extraordinary virtuosity of this young sculptor from Carrara was exploited here… [by] Bernini, perhaps, because he was jealous of Finelli’s obvious talents, or because he was wary of his prickly personality, held him back from the advancement he had promised … Like all great men, Bernini had his enemies, and they were not slow to point out that someone else had done the work for which he received credit… Finelli…tired of seeing his triumphs enrich another, left Bernini’s studio and set up on his own…”

Montagu goes on to conclude that:

“Bernini appears to have learned a lesson from it, for never again did a sculptor of comparable talents work for him in such an anonymous capacity.”

Yet this assertion seems debatable since: first, we know from Montagu’s own scholarship that Finelli’s work was also exploited in at least three other sculptures – Santa Bibiana (or Santa Viviana), the Angels on the Altar of S. Agostino and in the bust of Maria Duglioli Barberini16; secondly, we know that Bernini did this to Borromini (who, apparently, carved the major part of the Baldacchino, though, admittedly, he was not part of Bernini’s atelier); and, thirdly, in the light of the earlier statement by Rudolf Wittkower stating that very little of Bernini’s latter work depended on him “handling the hammer and chisel himself [my emphasis] but on the actual work being done by his pupils or other associates”.

We are thus back to the impression that for some inexplicable reason, Bernini’s biographers17are so dazzled by his undoubted talent that they seemed to downplay the (many) incidents of different kinds of improper if not immoral behaviour.

So let us return to our reluctance to see in his works anything other than spiritual sublimation and end with Bernini’s wondrous and difficult-to-interpret masterpiece: The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. Could a man such as the one we have just described, a man who tasted sex with full fervour and depicted passion over and over in his works, a man who had a self-confidence equalled only by the Italian artists of the Renaissance, who had strong ideas about his work and his self-importance, whose psychological tergiversations may have deprived him of the balance that common sense brings and, finally, a man who, in his own mother’s words, liked to behave as ‘Lord of the World’, refrain from giving the Teresa sculpture the interpretation he sought fit and, moreover, was compatible with his character, his temperament, his life?

Can even his religious feeling, undoubted though it was, overcome all the other character features that make the sensuous if not erotic reading of his work so plausible? For me, the answer is clearly in the negative. Bernini, like all the greats of the Italian scene of the 16th and 17th centuries, was too great, too talented and too full of himself to allow his ego to be subordinated completely by religious conviction or the accepted patterns of social behaviour. If his raw material thus gave him room to express his own creativity, he was bound to take the opportunity and not succumb to the exigencies of average hagiography.

The unknown Bernini, hidden to us by most of his biographers, thus dictated the hand of the ‘public artist’. If the popes, who gave him the free hand, got it wrong, they as much as he should be answerable before the Highest Court. For they were put in charge of morality and religion and fell below the standard expected of the head of the Catholic Church. But then, such laxity of behaviour characterised most of the Renaissance popes whose prominent place in history owes more to their talents as patrons of the art rather than to their deep sense of religiosity.

ii. The Rapture of Saint Teresa

We must now turn to Bernini’s masterpiece, indeed one Baroque’s greatest achievements which must be studied not just looked at and admired both for its simplicity and complexity. We are referring to the Cornaro Chapel in Santa Maria della Vittoria, with the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa at its centre. Nothing less than the term ‘theatrical’ can describe the ensemble, which called for all of Bernini’s talents to be combined. For creating it, he acted as designer, sculptor, painter, theatrical producer and stager of great events. The colour of the painting, the grandeur of architecture and the plasticity of sculpture are all to be found in this small chapel, itself part of a larger church. The Cornaro Chapel, the subject of numerous commentaries, thus represents the apex of Bernini’s effort, in the words of his first biographer Filippo Baldinucci, “to unite architecture, sculpture and painting in such a way that they together make a beautiful whole”.

At the centre of the setting, just behind the altar, is Teresa’s body in a semi-reclining position in full rapture with the angel to her right (or left, from our point of view) holding the arrow, which, according to her statement pierced her heart – her transverberation – as the Papal Bull that canonised her put it. But to return to the angel, (or, rather, the Seraph), he is divinely beautiful and seems to have floated down from the vault above. There, around a window, angels hover worshipping the Holy Spirit. Around the main sculptures, one finds the columns, designs and colours that give Baroque its own opulence. Bernini used a huge amount of different marbles of varying colours to produce the dazzling overall effect. Professor Patterson gives an exhaustive list; here, just a small selection will suffice.

Thus, the large panel behind the statue is alabaster. The pilasters are verde antico from Thessaly. The panels below the columns are Turkish onyx. The panels below the sculpture are Egyptian onyx. There is Greek white marble, black marble from the Pyrenees and red marble from France. The angel’s arrow is made of bronze. One must stop here, for listing where the artist had deployed the over 20 marbles, stucco, fresco bronze, gilt and amber glass would take more than one page.

Colour is combined with light, the latter always associated with divine revelations, always a particular concern of Bernini’s. Wittkower gives a flavour of the artist’s concerns and how he tried to address them. He writes:18

“To use rays of light as signs of spiritual enlightenment was, therefore, an old practice of painters, which acquired heightened importance in the age of Baroque. If a way could be found to replace paint by real light as achieved in his pictures, the impact on the beholder would be enormously intensified. Bernini first solved this problem in the Raimondi Chapel. Standing in the dim light of the chapel, the spectator looks into the bright light of the altar-recess where the miracle takes place, From then on Bernini always tried to use directed and often-concealed light to give potency to his depiction of vision and miracle, the Cornaro Chapel and the Cathedra Petri are cases in point. He later adapted the Raimondi to other creations. While this was a way of bringing home to the faithful an intensified experience of the supra-natural, it also strengthened the pictorial quality of these works”.

The viewer is drawn into this maze of design and colour, but he is not alone. On both sides of the altar are what nowadays one might describe as two ‘theatre’ boxes. Eight leading men of the Cornaro family (six of whom lived during the 16th century) are depicted in semi-relief, four on each side. What a gathering of notables: The Patriarch of Venice, Cardinal Federigo Cornaro (1579–1653); the father of the donor, Doge Giovanni Cornaro; and a further six Cornaro Cardinals (not carved by Bernini himself). Almost certainly, Bernini had nothing to do with seven of these busts, all of which seem idealised depictions and have blank eyeballs. However, Federico Cornaro, the builder of the chapel, is notable for his features – his strong cheekbones, prominent nose, bald head and goatee. Additionally, his is the only bust with incised pupils and irises, which led Baldinucci (Bernini’s first biographer) to claim that this was the only one that came from his hands. Modern experts19 have doubted this assertion on the basis of its craftsmanship, which, they claim, does not come up to the master’s usual high standards.

The assembled cardinals are looking in all directions; they are themselves also quite a sight. Indeed, what an illustration of nepotism, recorded for perpetuity! Perhaps the purpose was to show that the Venetian Cornaros had even out-performed the Florentine Medicis. And what a collection of expressions these observers have; but what do they suggest? Some scholars and most contemporary observers who visit the chapel assume that they are reacting to the miracle (or the erotic scene, if one takes that view) with devotion, amazement, incredulity, or all three. Simon Schama is among those who have argued in favour of this view,20 and it seems consistent with his overall interpretation of the scene depicted in the Chapel. Schama’s interpretation is also consistent with the more widely held view that Bernini’s work must be seen within the wider context of Baroque theatre. Yet since Blunt’s influential article appeared in 197821, this view has been doubted on a number of grounds.

Theatre boxes did not exist until the 1640s; ‘the architectural feature over the altar is much more like a tabernacle enclosing a sacred relic than a stage’; the depicted cardinals (even the few looking in the direction of Teresa) cannot, because of the angles of the walls, actually see what is happening at the altar. In view of the above, and the fact that the bulk of the depicted Cornaros lived a century earlier, Blunt concludes that it is best to see them assembled and “holding a ‘dispute’ – in the sense of a theological discussion – about the miracle of the life of the saint”.

Such interpretations are not just plausible given the authority of those who have advanced them; they are also compatible with the general view that this altar, as a whole and in its component parts, must be seen as a deeply religious work. Still, the statue of Teresa has not only been seen as a symbol of religious imagery; it has also been admired on purely aesthetic grounds and found to depict, in Schama’s words, “an unforgettably beautiful woman”. No wonder, then, that it has always defied a single explanation and courted controversy. Why such controversy?

To begin with Teresa’s thrown-back head indicates swooning ecstasy; her eyeballs are revealed below heavy eyelids, enhancing the same sensation; her lips are parted as if emitting her famous moan; her left foot is floating bare in the air, literally and appropriately, given the Order she has founded (the Discalced or barefooted Carmelites); her body barely shows under the drapery, though this is so disturbed as to suggest much bodily agitation underneath it. And as if all this were not suggestive enough, to her right stands an angel, barely clad and with a cherubic expression that some have called benevolent but I see as impish. He holds in his right hand the arrow, not a spear as Teresa had claimed in Her Life. To make the whole thing project the impression of Teresa’s levitation, Bernini had to hollow out the marble from below in a way that often caused serious risks of it cracking.

The inspiration for the posture came from Teresa’s own account of her rapture, which received wide circulation among Carmelite monasteries. The crucial part of her own description deserves to be fully quoted because it has nourished, not silenced, the controversy that surrounds the statue. Here is how she described the experience:22

“Beside me, on the left hand, appeared an angel in bodily form, such as I am not in the habit of seeing except very rarely. Though I often have visions of angels, I do not see them…But it was our Lord’s will that I should see this angel in the following way. He was not tall but short, and very beautiful; and his face was so aflame that he appeared to be of the highest rank of angels, who seem to be all on fire. They must be of the kind called cherubim, but they do not tell me their names. I know very well that there is a great difference between some angels and others and between these and others still, but I could not possibly explain it. In his hands, I saw a great golden spear, and at the iron tip there appeared to be a point of fire.”

At this point, I feel it desirable to separate the piece that follows (without interruption in her own text) because it is so ambiguous and can help explain some ‘odd’ features of the sculpture and the interpretations it has received.

“This he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he pulled it out, I felt that he took them with it, and left me utterly consumed by the great love of God. The pain was so severe that it made me utter several moans. The sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one cannot possibly wish it to cease, nor is one’s soul then content with anything but God. This is not physical, but a spiritual pain, though the body has some share in it – even a considerable share.”

Remove a few words here and there and, not knowing the background of this story and reading this text alone, one would treat the above as a purely erotic experience – indeed, why not even as a fairly good account of an orgasm experienced by a virgin? No wonder that a mere century after the sculpture was finished a French nobleman visiting Rome remarked, “Si c’est ici l’amour divin, je le connais.” Other notable observers have made analogous observations but it serves no purpose to give a long list.

Those who stress Bernini’s devout Christianity have reacted with horror at such suggestions. The whole experience depicted, they say, is divine and not corporeal. Translating Saint Teresa’s text into marble was an exercise of devotion. In his famous Spiritual Exercises, Saint Ignatius de Loyola urges us all to picture each religious event and conjure up the image of that holy person in order to converse with them. And as for technical objections, made to facilitate a more profane interpretation – note for instance that the arrow is not pointing at Teresa’s heart but lower down at her groin – the answer is that the angel is depicted holding it after he has pulled out of her heart.

The problem with this sensual or even erotic interpretation of the scene is not that it may be seen to be religiously offensive. The problem is that it translates Teresa’s text into sculpture; and both – the Saint and the sculptor – keen readers of Saint Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises had striven to achieve what he had trained people to do: to marshal all of their faculties to give the reader or the observer an extremely vivid personal experience of the event we wish to meditate on. In view of this, how can one attribute to Bernini an intention to be sensuous, even erotic? Two answers may provide a way out of this dilemma.

First, why does being Christian and deeply religious, preclude all other motives or ideas playing a part in the finished product? Complex products, deeply significant creations of the human mind, are rarely if ever the result of one motive, idea, or stimulus.

Second, the great art historian Ernst Gombrich taught us in his Art and Illusion that a work of art is fulfilled by “the beholder, [who] share[s] in the reading of the artist’s image”. He continues: “What we read [and what we see] depends on our capacity to recognise in [it] things or images we find stored in our minds.”23 Professor Petersson, who shares the classical (and reverential) view of Bernini’s Teresa, also seems to admit24 that other interpretations are possible. He thus states,

“The perfect perception of a work is the ideal, but it is never attained. In practice, we have almost ceased to accept the notion that perception can be total, perfect and entirely objective. The way a painting or poem is perceived depends very much on the viewer’s or reader’s knowledge, memory, expectations and personal predilections. The fact that nearly all works of art are symbolic makes it clear that the experience of each is to some degree fulfilled by us.” [My emphasis.]

One might thus conclude that different interpretations are possible. Yet my point goes further. For it is not that we, like any other viewers, are entitled to see the sculpture in any way we think makes sense; I feel that in this instance, the artist gave us enough deliberate clues to see his masterpiece in the way he saw it as well. And these clues, consistent with the thesis of this book, are found in his own life and character, those two elements of Bernini’s life that (as we been persistently noted) are omitted or downplayed in most biographies. Moreover, they are also found in the work itself. For it is not just that the angel is using a golden arrow (with its very clear symbolism given the association of arrows with hearts) instead of a spear; it is not that Bernini has put forth so much effort, as the Schama quotation below demonstrates, to tell us how we can (should?) interpret the writhing body under the nun’s habit. It is also the fact that he has sculpted Teresa looking so young and beautiful when we know that when the incident happened on the 27th of August 1559, Teresa was 45 – not young in those days – and by all (contemporary) accounts “plagued by heart trouble, fainting fits, tumours, broken bones, catalepsy and smaller distresses like ulcerated teeth and morning nausea”.25 This again departs from what he shows us; the sculpture is a departure from the reliable information we have about her which we have reasonable grounds to believe was also available to Bernini. There are simply too many clues in the scene that must have been planted deliberately – Bernini liked to give his creations layer upon layer of meaning “to be revealed progressively through the contemplation of the work of art”.26 His purpose must thus have been to make us consider additional if not alternative understandings of his interpretation of his theme.

Additional? Alternative? I have italicised the words for I think it is possible to go further than that and say that this (unorthodox? non-devout?) interpretation may be the only one available to us. For we must note that Gombrich, further down in his brilliant exposition, tells us that the awareness of the role played by the mind of the beholder “can [only] be found…where art becomes emancipated from its ritualistic context and appeals deliberately to man’s imagination”.27 For then and only then will the viewer’s mind process the optical data transmitted to it on the basis of the images and ideas already known to it.

Religion plays the role of restraining ritual and tells us how to interpret the visual data received in our mind. Indeed, it forbids us to entertain alternatives, summarily dismissing even attempts to explain why we see things differently. But if the mind is freed of this ritualistic context, it can then only interpret what it sees on the basis of what it knows; and though it knows and recognises sexual ecstasy, it has no means of recognising or authenticating the religious version. Gombrich, referring to his War work as a monitor of hardly audible radio transmissions tells us how “You had to know what might be said in order to hear what was said”.28 I think by the same token, indeed Gombrich suggests as much earlier in his text, you have to know what is depicted in order to see it. Thus, the biologically and psychologically natural reaction is to see this amazing scene in the way Simon Schama described it in his most recent book, Power of Art where he wrote:29

“What did rapture, after all, look like? Bernini knew perfectly well what it didn’t look like: all those altarpieces featuring heaven-beseeching, rolled-up eyes! What instead, if they were rolled down, the way he had seen ecstasy written on a woman’s face? What if he carved this woman, who herself, had dared to describe her experience so graphically, as if at the height of her sexual pleasure, utterly abandoned to a flood of sensation, straining towards her spiritual consummation, body and soul indivisible? Who could dare challenge him? He would take his own, ample carnal knowledge and turn it into a sacred shock. Bernini took the chance, mingled the real and the ideal. His Teresa, it hardly needs saying, is no middle-aged nun rising up the wall in her habit like an untethered balloon, nuns clinging to the hem. This woman is unforgettably beautiful, a match for the beaming seraph. They are, in their way, a couple. We see his exposed breast, infer hers. The smiling angel aims his arrow (rather than a spear) not at her breast, but significantly lower on the torso. From her half-opened mouth with its upper lip tightly drawn back, we know she has already been penetrated; that the angel has already pulled the burning shaft from her body and is poised to enter her once more. However, how could Bernini make visible the tide of ardent feeling washing through Teresa? Here he has the crucial conceptual insight of the entire drama. He turns her body inside out so that the habit – the protecting garment of her chastity, the symbol of her discipline – becomes a representation of what is taking place deep within her. It is in fact, the climatic shudder itself, a storm surge of sensation cresting and falling as if the marble had been molten. These billows pour themselves from the smiling angel directly into Teresa’s robe, where they join an ocean of undulating waves that fold into hollows and crevices. One such darkly unfurled opening makes itself into a suggestive form between the saint’s draped thighs.”

Much of what follows draws on the fascinating essays included in Maarten Delbeke’s, Evonne Levy’s and Steven Ostrow’s excellent Bernini’s Biographies: Critical Essays (2006), even though the footnote references have been omitted to avoid over-burdening the text. The Prolegomena written by the aforementioned three editors of this work are particularly relevant for the theme of this book.↩︎

Baldinucci, op. cit., at p. 68. This is precisely the sort of ‘kind abridgment’ that makes one wonder whether the recording of Bernini’s life exclusively undertaken by Jesuits may not have been deliberately putting into practice the ‘propaganda’ instincts pursued so successfully throughout this famous Order’s history.↩︎

Baldinucci, op. cit., at p. 68.↩︎

Thomaso Montaneri, At the Margins of the Historiography of Art etc. in Maarten Delbeke’s, Evonne Levy’s and Steven Ostrow’s excellent Bernini’s Biographies: Critical Essays (2006) pp. 73, 94 ff.↩︎

The Life of Bernini, (English translation by Catherine Enggass) (2006 ed.) at p. 110.↩︎

Hibbard, Howard, Bernini, New York: Penguin Books (1965) reprint, Penguin reprint (1990).↩︎

The Life of Berini, English translation by Catherine Enggass, (2006 ed.) at p. 72. I have italicised the words or sentences that strike me as significant.↩︎

Aspro di natura, fisso nelle operazioni, ardente nell’ira, cited by Rudolf Wittkower, Bernini: The Sculptor of the Roman Baroque (Phaidon, 2nd ed. 1996), p. 13.↩︎

There is an ironic twist here. For Costanza eventually returned to Rome and, from the 1640s onwards, lived in a house five minutes’ walk from the Trevi Fountain and Bernini’s own house. Whether they met or not after the dramatic incident described in the text we do not know; but her husband, Matteo Bonarelli, continued working in Bernini’s atelier. Costanza developed into a successful businesswoman and, from her will, discovered in more recent times, we know that she died a wealthy woman leaving, among other things, a valuable collection of paintings to her seven-year-old daughter. Both she and Bernini are buried in Santa Maria Maggiore, the church that linked their lives during a turbulent moment of their youth now providing a resting place for their bodies at the end. Costanza’s fascinating story, constructed on the basis of recently discovered archival material, is recounted by Sarah McPhee, Costanza Bonarelli: Biography versus Archive in Bernini’s Biographies: Critical Essays (ed. by Maarten Delbeke, Evonne Levy and Steven F. Ostrow, 2006).↩︎

Irving Lavin, “Afterthoughts on ‘Bernini’s Death’”, LV, The Art Bulletin, pp. 429–36.↩︎

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, New Aspects of his Life and Thoughts (1985), at pp. 275–6.↩︎

The Sculptor of the Roman Baroque (Phaidon, 2nd ed. 1996), p. 194.↩︎

Their rivalry has been documented by many works. See inter alia, Jake Morrissey, The Genius in the Design: Bernini, Borromini and the Rivalry that Transformed Rome (2005), esp. ch. 4, which depicts their relations while the both worked on the Balddachino of St Peter’s.↩︎

Alessandro Algardi (1985), p. 26, cited by Charles Avery and David Finn, Bernini: Genius of the Baroque (1966), at pp. 63 and 280.↩︎

Finelli mainly worked on Daphne’s fingers as they are elegantly transformed into twigs. Probably he also worked on the bark which is beginning to envelop Daphne’s legs.↩︎

Cited by Avery and Finn, op. cit., at p. 280.↩︎

Baldinucci, op. cit. at p. 88, merely mentions Finelli’s name along with those of other pupils but says not a word about the incidents mentioned in the text above. In the Epilogue, some reasons for Baldinucci’s ‘partial’ account of Bernini’s life are explored.↩︎

Rudolf Wittkower, Bernini: The Sculptor of the Roman Baroque (Phaidon, 2nd ed. 1996), p. 194.↩︎

Wittkower, Bernini, op. cit., at p. 266.↩︎

Simon Schama, Power of Art (2006), p. 117.↩︎

‘Gian Lorenzo Bernini: Illusionism and Mysticism’, Art History, I, No. 1, March 1978, pp. 67 ff, especially, pp. 74–76.↩︎

The relevant part of the text is reproduced by Robert Petersson, The Art of Ecstasy: Teresa, Bernini and Crashaw (1974), p. 40.↩︎

E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (6th ed. 2002, reprint 2005, Phaidon Press), at p. 155 ff. The emphases in the text are my own.↩︎

The Art of Ecstasy (1974), p. 46.↩︎

Petersson, The Art of Ecstasy (1974), p. 20.↩︎

Irving Lavin, Gian Lorenzo Bernini. New Aspects of his Life and Thought (1985), p. 141 (a book as learned and elegantly written as it is beautifully illustrated).↩︎

Op. cit., at p. 161. Emphasis added.↩︎

Op. cit., at p. 171.↩︎

Power of Art, BBC Books (2007), pp. 114–15.↩︎

3

Portraying the Queen of France as a Woman of the People

i. A Calm, Kind Woman with a Strong Sense of Mission

Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun, whose self-portrait wearing a straw hat is reproduced above, was born in Paris in 1755. The family was poor so to start with her care had to be entrusted to a local Convent. Later, however she returned home and since her artistic talent was already becoming obvious she received her first lessons from her father Louis Vigée, a minor artist. Unfortunately, he died when she was 12 so, after that, she continued perfecting on her own what she had already learnt from him, mainly by copying works by old masters, since in those days her sex precluded the possibility of doing a pupillage in one of the major ateliers of the time.1 Additionally, she also received some occasional assistance from two lesser painters living in Paris at that time. Notwithstanding these setbacks, the young Elisabeth was, by the age of 15, already able to earn modest fees from her early portraits until adversity struck again when her mother remarried and the entire family moved to a house on the Rue Saint Honoré, near the Royal Palace. Her newly acquired stepfather, however, despite the fact that he was well off, developed the habit of squandering her modest earnings. This exploitative attitude was, alas, to be continued by her own husband when, a few years later, she married M. Pierre Le Brun, an art dealer with a passion for gambling.

To the careful observer, all of the above give clear signs that Elisabeth was made of sterner stuff and would not give up on her early ambitions whatever obstacles life put in her way. Happily, her moral strength was also accompanied by robust physical health, which proved useful when, in later life, when the revolutionary crowds stormed Versailles and she had to flee Paris in the middle of the night accompanied by her young daughter Julie in fear of their lives since she was considered a long-standing friend of the unpopular Queen.

Her escape took her first to Lyon and from there, two days later into Italy where she was already known and thus nourishing the hope that she might earn her living by painting the portraits of local aristocrats. Her calculations and hopes proved entirely correct and marked the beginning of the acquisition of an enviable international reputation, which today is still evidenced by the fact that most major museums have one or more of her portraits.

Italy welcomed her with warmth and proved that its notables were eager to have their portraits painted by the young French woman who had managed to portray the Austrian born French Queen as an attractive woman. Italy thus became the first step in a long peregrination, which lasted 12 years.2 This took her to Austria, Poland, Russia – the last retaining her for six years and where she painted the portrait of the Polish King – and then finally England where Lord Byron became one of her last and most famous sitters during her stay in his country.

Profitable though these trips were, the reader must not forget how difficult it must have been for a young woman with a very young daughter travelling by coach over endless and often poorly maintained roads in often-atrocious weather conditions which must have often added to the dangers of travel. It was thanks to her physical fitness that she managed to endure such constant hardship, look after her young daughter all the time, and keep up her considerable artistic productivity

Happily, as stated, her health held up and, having become widely acknowledged across most of Europe and engaged to do portraits of the highest members of the local aristocracies, she eventually resettled in France in 1805 and lived there to the ripe old age of 87. No wonder it was she who chose the inscription written on her tomb in the Cimetière de Louveciennes near her old home: “Ici, enfin, je repose…” (Here, at last, I rest…). A determined and unstoppable devotee of her profession had finally reached the end of the road with her painting having changed slightly but not drastically since she had started some 75 years earlier. The main change was that her colours intensified owing much to the prevailing Rococo school, while her style slowly moved closer to the emerging Neoclassicism. By the end of her life, Elisabeth left some 660 portraits and nearly 200 landscapes. But let us return to the narrative of her life.

The early popularity of the young artist attracted the attention of important aristocrats whose portraits she began to paint. Membership of the Académie de Saint Luc followed in 1774 and two years later marriage to an artist called Pierre Lebrun took place. His relatives were well placed in society and thus helped enlarge her circle of acquaintances until she was finally introduced to the Queen, Marie Antoinette of Austria, who, in a letter to her mother, was already complaining that she had not found an artist to her liking.3 The encounter of 1779 changed all this and a mutually happy relationship began.

The painter’s Memoirs, written in a simple and readable style leave us in no doubt that from the first encounter the Queen’s facial features impressed her as did her blue eyes. In fact, she goes further stating that whenever they were together they were always merry and kind.4

It is obvious from the artist’s own memoirs that in the process, she became close to the Queen and, at times, they even sang duets5while the painting progressed. Elisabeth misses no opportunity in the few pages that concern these sessions with the Queen to describe her as being always quick to say “something pleasant to those who had the honour of being presented to her”.6

The Queen’s features are constantly described admiringly as are her manners towards all she encountered. At another point of the Memoirs, we are also told that one day the Queen arranged for her “six-year-old daughter to dine with a little peasant girl and attend to her wants”.7

Madame Le Brun’s comments suggest a genuinely close relationship between the Monarch and subject/portraitist. Yet, the few examples of detailed comments made about the Sovereign seem at variance with the image the Queen’s French subjects had of her; and French historians have, overall, passed down to us a similarly negative picture of her character which is presented overall as politically interfering, egocentric and patently indifferent to the growing miseries suffered by the French at the time caused by the worsening economics of the state – mainly because of the war in America, but also bad harvests which often led to hunger. So how can one begin to close the gap between these differing impressions?

Clearly, no question arises of the memoirs having been censored by Royal officials prior to publication for by the time they were written the Royal family had been executed and its courtiers dispersed if not killed themselves. Nor is it likely that in those early days that the courtiers had advised Madame Lebrun in advance to say and write good things about the Queen when recording their encounters. After all, at that time no one could have foreseen the royal executions which would occur in 1791.

Nor do I feel there is evidence to suggest that palace officials were manipulating the relationship for political reasons though it must be admitted that the decision to produce the famous and controversial portrait of the Queen with her children was in order to improve the Queen’s image with the public and we are sure of that since this particular portrait was arranged by the courtiers.

In the portrait finally produced, Madame Le Brun gave clear signs of her integrity as an artist by depicting the queen almost as uninterested in her three children as they are shown to be in her, looking in all directions but not in the direction of their mother. So, though the picture seems to have gone down well with the courtiers, it would be accurate to say that the family portrait had no real effect as a public relations exercise. Indeed, whether intentionally or unintentionally, the artist produced a picture of the Queen not smiling or projecting any warmth.

Indeed, looking at all of the Queen’s portraits over the years her face remains remarkably unchanged, with a look which if not cold is certainly unsmiling and the posture formal and stilted. In the case of the ‘family portrait’, this tendency for a serious pose must have been enhanced by the after-effects of the infamous “scandal of the diamond necklace”8 which left the Queen’s already dented reputation in tatters even though in this case most historians agree she was entirely innocent. So I return to the question early put namely, how can we bridge the gap between diverging contemporary impressions with that arising from the Le Brun Memoirs and a long line of royal portraits?

My guess is, and in the absence of concrete information I am forced to speculate, one cannot doubt Madame Lebrun’s sincerity as a true friend of the Queen as well as an artist who, if honourable, which we know that she was, would never have agreed to produce a false, even less so deliberately deceiving, image. My own inclination is thus to lean in favour of the view that Madam Le Brun, being essentially a woman of humble stock, brought up in an upright manner, struggling to become recognised as a young painter, must have been dazzled by being so frequently in the presence of her Monarch. Dazzled and, indeed, impressed to find that the Queen, when left alone in the presence of a young, charming, loyal artist, passionate about her profession, also became more relaxed and, arguably, was able to produce a smile – which is so uniformly absent from most if not all of her official portraits. All of this, however, would have been impossible when she was on public display, restrained by the dictates of the protocol as well as her own introverted temperament. Indeed, the pattern of official poses seems to have been from her earlier sittings in her official garments painted in 1788.

A further argument in support of my supposition that Madame Le Brun remained loyal to the Queen comes from the fact that, once the Revolution broke out, she was so widely seen to have been close to her Monarch that she was forced – as already stated above – to leave Paris in the middle of the night disguised along with her only daughter and go to Lyon and from there, the following day, end up in Italy. If Madame Le Brun’s friendship with the Queen had not been genuine and well known, she would not have been forced to resort to such extreme measures to save her life and that of her daughter.

The self-exile avoided these dangers but it came at a high price; constant travelling to different countries which, under the conditions of travel of the time must have been tiring, dangerous and worrying, not knowing what lay ahead, other than hope that the local aristocracy would wish to have their portraits painted by the woman who had once been the Queen’s portraitist and confidante.

On the last score, however, she should not have worried for her reputation as a painter had travelled well ahead of her so in Italy she was received with warmth and admiration for her work and commissions for portraits of aristocrats kept her there in reasonable comfort for three years i.e. from 1789 to 1792. Indeed, in Rome, her paintings met with great critical acclaim and she was elected to the Roman Accademia di San Luca. Austria followed for three further years, 179295, and then Russia for a period of six instead of the usual three years. A double portrait of the Empress Catherine’s granddaughters pleased the ageing Empress and she agreed to sit for a portrait of herself, though fate intervened and the Empress’ unexpected stroke put an end to the project. Still, honours continued to be showered upon Madame Le Brun and while in Russia, she was elected a member of the Academy of Fine Arts of Saint Petersburg.

The stay in Russia had coincided with the Revolutionary period in France running out of steam. Remaining in touch with her husband (even though they had separated) who, as stated, had remained in France, they agreed to begin an active campaign to have her name removed from the list of counter-revolutionary émigrés. Vigée Le Brun was thus finally able to return to France in 1804–5 just as Bonaparte was transforming himself from First Consul into Emperor Napoleon and beginning the second and progressively more autocratic phase of his incredible career. Her relationship with the new regime remained somewhat tense despite the fact that she no longer was seen as a royalist émigrée and was even asked to paint the portrait of the Emperor’s sister, Mme Murat.

The lukewarm reception in France, however, had not affected her popularity in the rest of Europe so she visited England at the beginning of the 19th century and was surprised9 by the hospitality of the people she met. Naturally, she was as always kept busy painting those who admired her work. Among her sitters – all members of the nobility – the most unusual, charming and eccentric must have surely been Lord Byron. But she admits, with her usual simplicity, that the travel bug had not left her so, a mere three years after arriving in London, she packed her bags and went to Switzerland where she enjoyed the mountain air and was also made an honorary member of the Société pour l’Avancement des Beaux-Arts of Geneva.

During the last phase of her life, she returned to France and bought a house she came to love in Louveciennes. Unfortunately, the village was not too far away from the Belgian border and after the battle of Waterloo, a period of great inconvenience (and danger followed) since the area was overrun by Prussian soldiers who spent much time looting nearby villages and terrorising the local inhabitants, including our heroine. Not surprisingly, she warmly welcomed the return of the exiled King, Louis XVIII, for whom the praise, understandable from her side since he treated her with great politeness and she remained a monarchist at heart, is not easily compatible with the image history has left of him. I mention this not because this essay has political pretensions but only to stress, once again, the gentleness and kindness of her character. To this, I would add that her political immaturity which characterised her throughout her life.

Be that as it may, by the mid-1830s she completed her Memoirs describing the last phase of her life which saw the death of her estranged husband – who, again, is treated with kindness – and her beloved daughter at the very young age of 30. As always, she retained her composure and finally passed away on the 30th of March 1842 when she was buried in the Cimetière de Louveciennes near her old home.

With her death, Europe and the art world lost one of the most original, restless, but also modest and kind members who had charmingly painted on canvas some of the top members of the aristocracy of the European Continent and left them all enchanted by her pleasant countenance.

ii. The Painting of 1787 of the Queen with Her Children

The portrait,10 as stated, was artistically appreciated by the members of the upper classes who saw it after its completion. For the general public, however, it was not what the courtiers, who dreamt up the idea of commissioning it, had hoped it would become. Indeed, the portrait was not immediately hung in the place reserved for it in the exhibition hall. Was the painting, therefore, a successful artistic deception?

I believe, as most historians do, that it was not. For the courtiers had not reckoned with the Queen’s serious if not cold demeanour when on public display. Nor had they taken any account of Madame Le Brun’s integrity as an artist who could not make up a loving scene between mother and children when there was none. Yet Madame Lebrun’s friendship towards the Queen never wavered. She just painted what she saw, indeed she always strived to paint her sitters in their best possible manner, and could not have painted a fake scene. Finally, whereas Madame Lebrun’s must have been aware of the growing signs of the approaching storm she could not have imagined that it would break out a barely two years after that famous or infamous canvas was painted.

The Queen’s popularity could also not be helped by her own remote demeanour, popularly attributed to her presumed insensitivity towards the plight of the ordinary Frenchmen, and, at the time, enhanced by her Austrian background, as well as the worsening economic situation which increased the chances of a popular uprising. All of which goes to explain why, if one looks at the face of the queen in the family gathering scene, she is as remote and expressionless as she is in almost all of her earlier solo portraits. This is obvious for instance if we compare her face in the family portrait as well as her earlier – 1783 – solo portrait known as Marie Antoinette with a rose.

The 1783 painting of the Queen also deserves closer comparison with another portrait by Madame Lebrun of more or less the same period, namely that of Madame Grand who in her second marriage became, for a while, the wife of the famous and controversial French statesman Talleyrand who, being at the time an active Bishop of the Catholic Church, was prohibited from having a religious marriage. Indeed, even his civil marriage had to be sanctioned by the Emperor himself.11 The angelic expression of Madame Grand, with her eyes cutely rather than reverently looking upwards, thus stands out in stark contrast to the sombre expression of the queen in most of her portraits, especially the important one with her children of 1787, in that case for the additional reason that it was painted at the time when she was also much concerned with the public scandal of the Royal necklace. All of this goes to show that the artist knew how to paint a beautiful woman and capture a warm expression in a pretty face so long as the sitting model was, herself, also able and willing to project such warmth in her character. It thus came to pass that a careful plot by courtiers to improve their Queen’s public image failed to produce the planned result. Such miscalculations, however, come at a price when the incident touches upon national politics.

The Queen holding a rose

Still, to recapitulate and conclude, potentially the most incriminating – if this is not a too harsh word to use – a feature of the family portrait was the fact already noted namely that not one of the young children is looking towards their mother. If the aim of the painting was thus to portray to the world a warm and loving mother, this clearly did not emerge from the canvas eventually produced.

There is, however, a postscript to the story of this famous painting, which is little known among the general readers and for this reason may be of interest to repeat it. When back in France, however, during the Napoleonic era, Madam Lebrun discovered that her painting was attracting much public interest. In fact, it was hanging on the walls of the Versailles Palace where it had been moved soon after it was completed since the Queen always cried when she passed it and saw her prematurely deceased son. So it was at Versailles that she went to see it, and it hung in a room to which the crowds no longer had access; but the custodian recognised her, greeted her warmly, and took her to see it only for her to discover that it was turned around facing the wall.12 This was because, on the orders of the Emperor, who dithered as to whether it should be removed altogether finally decided that the painted side of the canvas should face the palace walls. A famous scene was this concealed from the visiting public as a result of an Imperial order which suggests that behind the greatness of a uniquely gifted leader must have lurked some inexplicable complexes, obviously stirred into action by the popularity of the by now deceased former Queen.

The incredible bias and obstacles faced by women artists up until the 19th century is recounted by Simona Bartolena in his fascinating book Femmes Artistes: De la Renaissance au Xxi siècle, Gallimard (2003).↩︎

A very useful map of her travels is reproduced on p. 331 of Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Ėditions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux (2015) prepared for the exhibition of 2015–6 at the Grand Palais in Paris, henceforth, simply referred to as Le Brun, RMN edition of 2015. For full details, see bibliography.↩︎

Le Brun, RMN (2015) at p. 150.↩︎

Ibid at p. 25. In my view, none of these features is obvious in the finished products. Whether this was because protocol demanded that she look serious when on public display or whether shyness temporarily removed the endearing human features of her personality, one cannot say.↩︎

Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun, Memoirs of a Painter, first published in English by Doubleday in 1903 and then republished by Trotamundas Press (2009) at p. 27.↩︎

Op. cit., above, pp. 25 ff.↩︎

Ibid. at p. 29.↩︎

Cardinal de Rohan, in the worst but well-established tradition of the high-ranking clergy of past times, was a womaniser and a greedy and ambitious courtier. For a time, he served as French Ambassador to Vienna, and unflattering statements were made by him about Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria and mother of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, which had reached the latter making the relations between Queen and Cardinal very frigid. Desirous of regaining the French Queen’s favour, the Cardinal hatched an incredible plot with Madame de La Motte, a genuine descendant of a legitimate son of Henry II of Valois, but otherwise an accomplished fraudster living under the self-assumed title of Countess de la Motte. The plan she concocted with the Cardinal was that he would purchase from the Royal jewellers a highly elaborate necklace weighing 2.600 carats and costing 2,000,000 livres – or in 2015 values the equivalent of 14 million dollars – and present it to the Queen as a gift. (In fact, earlier, in 1776, the King had offered it to her as a gift but she had declined it). Madame de la Motte thus began a fabricated correspondence, allegedly between the Queen and the Cardinal, ending with a faked encounter in the shadows of the Garden of Versailles between a whore, impersonating the Queen, promising the Cardinal to forgive him for his earlier indiscretions in exchange for giving her the said necklace. He agreed to pay for it in instalments over two years, bought the necklace and handed it over to Madame de la Motte to pass it on to the Queen but Madame chose to abscond with the jewels. The sum due to the jewellers not being paid, so they complained to the Queen who knew nothing of the said affair. A few months later, the Cardinal was unceremoniously arrested while in the palace and tried by the Court of Paris but was acquitted. Madame de la Motte, however, was found guilty, whipped, branded as a thief on both arms, and imprisoned. She later escaped and was never heard of again. The entire affair, despite its incredible twists and turns, had never involved Marie-Antoinette personally. However, her reputation, never high with the French, took a great battering from this scandal and took the unpopularity of the Royal family to new depths just a few years before the outbreak of the Revolution broke out.↩︎

As she admits in the last chapter of her Memoirs, pp. 200 ff.↩︎

This and other portraits of the Queen are discussed in various parts of the magnificently illustrated book Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun published on the occasion of the exhibition in the Grand Palais in Paris of September 2014 to January 2016. For fuller reference to this work, see bibliography.↩︎

For more details, see Le Brun, RMN (2015) at p. 173.↩︎

Memoirs, at p. 210.↩︎

4

Accentuating Beauty to Hide Foul Character

i. The Leighton Beauty and Its Antecedents

Aphrodite was, of course, the goddess of love; and for most of us, love still conjures up images of deep and pure affection; a union of spirits with the blessing of human and divine law; loyalty, or maternal devotion without, of course, all these sublime feelings excluding the intensity of bodily rapture experienced in the act of procreation. Yet, in her original form Aphrodite – or Astarte in her earliest and darker Phoenician image – possessed few of these attributes.

Sappho, according to Plato the 10th muse, claimed to be in close contact with the goddess whose help and guidance she often sought. Her devotion to her, however, never blinded her to her true character, referring to her as “δολοπλόκος” 1 (weaver of wiles). The Cypriots, on whose island, she was meant to have been born, took a harsher view and described her as the “man killer” (ανδροφόνος). Others, across Greece, would remind us that she was the sister of the Furies (which is correct since both were born from the spilt blood, which flowed from Uranus’ barbarous castration). The goddess felt loyalty to no one: certainly not to her husband – Hephaestos – nor, even, to the father of her most famous child, Anchises, let alone the child himself – Aeneas. Uncaring she was but, worse still, she was proverbially vindictive. The entire plot of Hippolytus hangs on her vindictiveness because the young hero was a sworn virgin, and this desire to harm him even led her to use as the tool of her wrath Phaedra who was known to be the goddess’ most devout follower. Nor, finally, must we ever forget that the first recorded war between different worlds – the Trojan War – began because she bribed the judge to name her the most beautiful of the contenders. Nothing, in short, that this woman did could ever be done in a straight way; the devious, the self-serving, always presented greater appeal. One could go on offering details of her unattractive character but the purpose of this sketch is to talk of how it was constantly transformed by artists through the centuries who presented her as an irresistibly attractive woman, concealing her character’s flaws. In short, a better illustration of the idea of art as a medium of deception one cannot find.

The difficulty experienced by any author wishing to promote this thesis about the goddess is the wealth of artistic creations in sculpted or painted form one can invoke as illustrations. A few examples, because of lack of space, limited to names and very brief comments can serve as a mini-introduction before we focus on Sir Frederick Leighton’s masterpiece reproduced above.

Morally, deeply tainted the goddess may have been but as a creator of myths and literature, she topped the other gods of Olympus (with the possible exception of their king, Zeus). Pheidias was the first to catch her beauty in sculpture which nowadays we can only imagine from the Medici Venus in the Uffizi. Aphrodite Kallipygos has also come down to us as a Hellenistic copy which went through at least two major operations to correct broken parts of her body. But her fame and her name rested on her beautiful buttocks, and her strangely over-twisted neck depicts her keenness to admire them herself. Vanity can thus be added to her character flaws. Aphrodite of Milos, is also a Hellenistic relic – the work of Alexandros of Antioch, probably completed sometime around 130–100 BC. Though time has deprived her of one of her arm and the aesthetics of the period favoured well-nourished female bodies to an extent, which is not the case these days, she still adorns the Louvre where she has stood since the early part of the 19th century.

Nothing was ever straightforward with the goddess; so this statue surprises us once again with an intriguing peculiarity of her show-off disposition. For though the loincloth used to conceal her modesty fulfils its purpose if the statue is looked at from the front, it fails to achieve the same aim if we look at her from behind. Seen from this angle, the sculpture suddenly becomes mischievous allowing the cloth to slip, revealing her beautiful buttocks and thus suggesting a double personality, (as well as the Greek preoccupation with well sculptured behind).

Moving quickly through some masterpieces of pictorial art one should probably begin by noting Botticelli’s beauty (awkwardly it must be said) standing on a shell and drifting towards a luxuriant natural environment, the painting arguably displaying the obvious influence of the teachings of Saint Francis of Assisi, who had taught Westerners to admire God through nature and his creations.

This romantic image of Aphrodite and love will reappear early in the 18th century in Antoine Watteau’s masterpiece The Embarkation for Cythera2presented in 1717 to the Académie des Beaux-Arts upon his election as a member and now hanging in the Louvre. Lush vegetation and a richness of colour represent rococo art at its most exuberant and endearing mood, and rightly so, since the picture depicts the French aristocracy at the end of a pilgrimage to Cythera in the joyful and affluent days that France enjoyed after the death of Louis XIV and the end of his fund-draining wars. The topicality of the painting, however, in no way conceals its Greek origins. Thus, first, the location is associated with the ancient goddess, since Cythera – a Greek island at the southernmost tip of the Peloponnese – was one of the many places associated with her birth. Second, the presence of Aphrodite is everywhere manifested by the darting about of her son Έρως (lust), as always behaving in a lively and mischievous manner, even though she is herself depicted on the right of the picture as a beautiful but cold stone statue. The third way ancient Greek culture is secreted in the canvas is that its theme is based on the Greek understanding of love’s brief duration and final vanquishing by old age and death. The posture of the beautiful lady at the centre-right of the picture is one of many signs which suggest the sensation of visiting a beautiful place – or reflecting on a wonderful sensation – but for the last time, as her head is turned back as if to say farewell to all this beauty which she may never experience again.

This, however, was one of the images that Aphrodite could generate in the minds of the imaginative artist, and it did whenever the prevailing artistic mood – the Rococo in this instance – encouraged it. With this artistic movement, however, more often than not the carnal prevailed over the romantic or sentimental, and this had also been true during the period of the Italian Renaissance. So, a mere century after Botticelli the client/patron of the arts would be looking for something more carnal and erotic, and the depiction of the courtesan – the newer version of the ancient Athenian Hetaira – will direct the creative mind towards new images.

In Titian’s masterpiece known as the Venus of Urbino – though never and nowhere so officially baptised – we find, perhaps, the perfect example of this twist in the story with lust – not love – at its centre, an emphasis reinvigorated after the Rococo interlude, in the even more human, fleshy and mundane version of Manet’s Olympia. Once again, Aphrodite is not mentioned by name; yet the posing ‘whore’ is bold enough to invoke it through her name: Olympia! Yet the painting is about love, love in the form of sex, and sex brings the goddess back to the minds of most viewers and makes her as eternal as is, by necessity, the act of procreation.

Our last example comes from a unique painting which appears almost at the same time and it comes from a much-loved artist of the time, Alexandre Cabanel. The work caters for the clients of the romantic era but also let’s slip one sign of the dark past of the lady through the prominent display of the sea froth on which she is lying and which, of course, is nothing less than Uranus’ semen. Aphrodite thus remains the temptress or, perhaps one should say, an indecipherable character, allowing every artist to see in her what he wants to see and in this way remaining truly eternal.

With this brief introduction to the chameleon character for the goddess, let us return to Leighton’s masterpiece and note straight away that even in modern times her depiction caused some considerable commotion.

Leighton’s Aphrodite is inspired by the statute now housed in the Museo Capodimonte of Naples. His painting reproduced above – nowadays considered as his best painting of a nude – is entitled The Bath of Psyche. Notwithstanding its official name, however, it has been widely acknowledged to have been inspired by the Callipygian Venus; and this theory is supported by a number of details in the painting. For instance, the presence of doves, perched on the railing supporting the background curtain, are birds traditionally associated with the goddess of love. Indeed, because of this association, as well as the fact that the posture of the marble copy (of the lost original bronze version of the 3rd century BC) “heightened the sense of narcissistic self-absorption, the reaction of most Victorians at the time the painting was exhibited, was strongly negative”.3

The surviving marble copy probably began its life in Syracuse but was moved from there to Rome when it became the property of the Farnese family. When the Farnese property was inherited by the Bourbons, it was first moved to another Palace of theirs in Rome – the Farnesina – which is part of the Palazzo Corsini and then, finally, to Naples where Leighton must have seen it.

The statute was originally discovered with its head missing but in two restorations (in the 16th and 18th centuries) the head was re-sculptured before being replaced in (more or less) its proper place. I have not been able to determine the exact degree of ‘restoration’ but note that work was done not only to the head but also to one leg and the left arm. The word re-sculptured is also used in various documents but it is unclear as to what precisely it involved. On the whole, however, great satisfaction was widely felt after the works had been completed though this might suggest that the backward turn of the neck might have been slightly accentuated to allow the goddess to admire her beautiful buttocks – hence, the words I used above – more or less.

Leighton’s painting, whatever its name, is not an exact copy of the surviving marble version of antiquity but an adaptation. I use this word partly because it transferred the original idea from marble to a canvas; but, more importantly, Leighton also made significant and, I would suggest, successful changes to the original posture of the goddess. In his painting, her head is leaning towards her left side in a way which is less pronounced than that of the statue’s (which is leaning in the opposite direction) with the result that the viewing of her famous buttocks is now achieved with the help of a water reflection of them, because she is depicted standing in front of a pool of water. Perhaps for all these reasons Leighton also changed the name of the painting to The Bath of Psyche though, again, one must stress that he also left intact clues to the original inspiration of his painting.

The exaggerated twist of the neck of the statute was thus rectified while the deliberate protrusion of the left hip was also, compared to the surviving Roman statue, tuned down by Leighton, resulting in a more comfortable posture and an aesthetically more pleasing overall effect. The painting also reflects Leighton’s dislike of sensuous depictions of nudes, as he opts for his usual calm shades of off-white to give a kind of marble effect to the bodies, and for those commentators who waste time puzzling over his sexual life, the statue presents a touch of homoeroticism. The clue in the painting which, apparently, has prompted such over-imaginative minds to speculate about the artist’s sexual propensities is nothing more than the fact that Psyche appears to have been painted with small breasts. This is evidently a spurious argument made to cause a sensation but since it was never substantiated by any hard evidence, it can be totally ignored.

ii. Erotic Versus Attractive Feminine Beauty and the Element of Deception

The distinction suggested in this subtitle is not as clear as it may appear to be from the words used and this is because of three reasons. Firstly, because the two kinds of beauties I envisage and describe briefly below can merge the one into the other and cannot always be kept apart. Secondly, because the professional and social background of the sitters in both these cases is not always clearly demarcated. Finally, the extent of the differences in the characters of the sitters is not necessarily easily discernible.4 So let us attempt to put in these two categories some of the most beautiful portraits of women in history and then let the reader test the validity of the tentative points made above and below.

In the first category of clearly erotic or hedonistic portraits I would include (i) the Venere d’ Urbino by Titian; (ii) Danaë Receiving the Shower of Gold, by the same artist; (iii) François Boucher’s Mlle O’Murphy; (iv) Olympia by Ėdouard Manet and (v) The Birth of Venus by Alexander Cabanel.

In the second category I would mention: (i) Apollo and Daphne, by Bernini; (ii) Primavera by Sandro Botticelli (with the emphasis on the portrait of Flora which, to me possess the greatest dignity)); (iii) The Bath of Psyche by Sir Frederick Leighton; (iv) Princess Olga Orlova by Valentin Serov and (v) Anna Akhmatova, by Olga Della-Vos Kardovskaia (1914).

For lack of space, I will offer my comments on the above as bullet points.

First, my choices in the first category are all in the nude or semi-nude;

Second, apart from the first, they have all been linked to Aphrodite and appear as having shared to varying degrees in the shades and shadows found in the goddess’ character;

Third, they have all been immortalised by famous sculptors or painters.

Fourth, they all attracted lovers and invited erotic relationships;

Fifth, all were painted or sculptured with ordinary women, in some cases of loose morals, sitting for the artists who immortalised them.

Sixth, moving to my second group all, but Leighton’s painting, depict women fully dressed up; Bernini’s Daphne is half-clad.

Seventh, all depict attractive if not beautiful women with strong to very strong personalities;

Eighth, all of the women in the second category have attracted men for different reasons but not, always with patently erotic motives. Akhmatova may be a very unusual exception having married three times, having enjoyed intimate links with at least three men and indeed, on one occasion, lived in a ménage à trois with a long-lasting lover, his wife and daughter, facts which may strengthen the view that she was not a typical phlegmatic character but a mixture with the sanguine personality characteristics.

Ninth, the women in the second category, exuded style, grace, aloofness, the nobility of birth or character – or both – all of which were probably absent in most of the ones included in my first category.

Finally, tenth, how much of the above shows in the works which have immortalised them? Judging the characters of humans by looking at their portraits (or photos) is a risky business if undertaken by non-specialists and on the basis of inadequate samples. My own study of Akhmatova’s two famous portraits, by Olga Della-Vos Kardovskaia and Stephan Atman, along with prolonged reflection over her emotionally volatile lifestyle, meticulously documented in chapter seven of Elaine Feinstein’s biography entitled Anna of All Russias, persuaded me that she must have been one of those humans with mixed temperaments: brilliant, intriguing and difficult.

The above are some very tentative and very personal reactions towards some women and the works of arts that have depicted them for posterity. They are presented here in the form of a sui-generis postscript to this essay since reference is made to most of these women in this book. The reason why I have deliberately kept my observations in telegraphic form is because in my concluding chapter I invite my readers to reflect on the material I have given them and form their own views. I did this for I have increasingly come to believe and to advocate that a book is successful only if it manages to produce a fruitful dialogue between its author and his absentee readers. So I await praise if praise is due, but, above all, constructive criticism which is by far the most useful reaction an author can hope to receive from his readers.

E. Lobel and D. Page, Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta, Oxford (1955), Fr. Sappho apparently felt she had a direct relationship with Aphrodite and meant the word as a compliment. This should not be a surprise for, as Maurice Bowra explains in greater detail in his Greek Lyric Poetry (1961), pp. 196 ff., the Greeks believed they enjoyed an intimate relationship with their gods.↩︎

The preposition should probably have been “from” not “for” since most experts believe the scene marks a departure, not an arrival.↩︎

For an interesting discussion concerning the name of the painting and the reactions it provoked, see Lord Frederic Leighton (1830-1896), pp. 214-5, published by the Royal Academy of Arts and Harry N. Abrams Inc. Publishers (1996). For fuller details, see bibliography at the end of this work.↩︎

The impossibility of slotting humans into rigid pigeon holes applies to all the women I use as examples in order to formulate general propositions before beginning to think about the examples I have chosen. So let me take Anna Akhmatova – nom de plume – as an illustration of an exceptional human impossible to slot into any one personality type. For she was aristocratic and a commoner; she was a real rebel in her youth as well as being Russia’s greatest female poet of the 20th century. A family woman who also married three times and kept on experimenting with informal relationships with men, and finally, a woman who deeply suffered during the darker years of the Revolution and yet refused to leave her people and, against all odds, survived to die in his mid-70s covered in glory world-wide.↩︎

5

Deceiving the Eye by Exploiting the Rules of Perspective: An Artistic Miracle

In painting, there is nothing more openly deceiving than the kind of painting technically described as trompe l’oeil, the deceiving of the eye, which in English can also be spelt without a hyphen. This in no way can be considered as being morally condemnable since it is a form of perspectival illusionism which existed even in Antiquity but in Europe flourished during the Baroque period. On the contrary, it is a deception that attracts admiration. So, it included in this book for the sake of completeness since it undoubtedly is a form of deception.

As stated, as a type of painting, trompe l’œil goes back to ancient Greece. It was (and is) often employed in murals, invariably to make the existing space look bigger than it is but also to show-off the artist’s ability to reveal his full talent to manipulate the rules of perspective. Instances from Greek and Roman times are known; for example, remnants from Pompeii give us some idea of how developed ancient artists were in this form of painting. A typical trompe l’œil mural might depict a window, a door, or a hallway, which, however, does not exist in reality. In the late Renaissance and, especially in the Baroque era, artists became more ambitious.

A version of an oft-told ancient Greek story concerns a contest between two renowned masters of Antiquity. Zeuxis (born around 464 BC) produced a still life painting so convincing that birds flew down to peck at the painted grapes. A rival, Parrhasius, asked Zeuxis to judge one of his paintings that was behind a pair of tattered curtains in his study. Parrhasius asked Zeuxis to pull back the curtains, but when Zeuxis tried, he could not, as the curtains were included in Parrhasius’s painting – making Parrhasius the winner of this bizarre competition of egos.

The widespread fascination with perspective drawing in the Renaissance, prompted artists of the late Quattrocento such as Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506) and Melozzo da Forlì (1438–1494), to paint illusionist ceilings, generally in fresco, that employed perspective techniques such as foreshortening to create the impression of greater space for the viewer below. This type of trompe l’œil illusionism, as specifically applied to the ceiling paintings, is known in Italian as di sotto in sù, meaning ‘from below, upward’. The elements above the viewer are rendered as if viewed from a true vanishing point perspective.

The appeal of trompe d’ œil painting reached its peak, however in the Baroque and Rococo years with the Italian Andrea Pozzo, a Jesuit brother who had begun his religious career as a novice at the order of Discalced Carmelites at a Convent near Trento in 1661 before becoming a Jesuit.

Born in 1642, he died in 1709, Pozzo turned into a multitalented artist of the Baroque era working as a decorator, painter, architect and art theoretician. With the passage of time, he perfected the so-called quadratura painting, which has been succinctly defined in the Oxford Companion to Western Art as “an illusionistic painting of walls or ceilings usually in fresco in which architectural or sculptural details are painted to give the illusion of reality”.1The method consisted in exploiting the rule of perspective in which the focal lines begin at the corner and meet in the centre, which is the vanishing point, thus making the painting appear as being almost three dimensional. Indeed, Pozzo’s Tractus perspectivae pictorum et architectorum2 was one of the earliest books written on perspective which, in due course, was translated into German, English, Flemish and even Chinese.

His work, involving a fair amount of mathematical calculations, was successfully applied to design artwork to create the impression of a non-existing cupola on a flat roof, such as that of the Jesuit Church in Vienna reproduced below. Moreover, trompe l’oeil involved more than additions of cupolas. Complex apses, and entire (flat) ceilings, such as that of the St Ignatius Church in Rome, were created and there Pozzo’s quadratura technique produced a grand architectural realm above the real space of the church making the picture seem three-dimensional and the space of the church much larger than it really is.

Thus, when looking up at the cupola, viewers can see what look like pillars holding up a ceiling with windows painted between the said pillars. In the middle of this, against the ceiling as it were, God, Jesus and Saint Ignatius who, in a sense, is the leading figure, is depicted receiving a great beam of divine light from the Trinity which he then deflects to the four corners of the world.

Through this image, Pozzo is once again celebrating the missionary activities of the Order to which he belonged in accordance with its founder’s imaginative ideas and indefatigable zeal as a teacher. And, as if all this was not enough, Pozzo also installed a circle of red marble on the floor of the church to mark the focal point for the best viewing of his ceiling. To this day, many of those visiting the church are unable to tell that the ceiling is a painting and not an actual cupola.

Pozzo, though mainly concerned with ecclesiastic buildings, was invited by the Emperor Leopold I of Austria in 1704 to work also in Vienna, while in Lichtenstein he produced on the ceiling of the Garden Palace of Lichtenstein another of his masterpieces depicting the feats of Hercules in the so-called Hercules Hall (see below). As a result, Pozzo’s fame spread and his style became known and copied in churches throughout Europe.3

By Clare Ford-Wille. See: Quadratura in the Art and Architecture section of the Encyclopaedia.↩︎

The first English edition of 1707 is available under the title Perspective in Architecture and Painting, Dover Books on Architecture, and in it, its author explains and illustrates his theories and work. It contained at the very beginning an “Approbation” – these days we might describe it as a short but most favourable foreword – by the three greatest British architects of that time namely, Christopher Wren, John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor.↩︎

For more introductory information, see, among other learned works, International Dictionary of Architects and Architecture, St James Press, 1993.↩︎

6

Who Is Good and Who Is Bad?

The puzzles of interpreting a great painting hiding the changing views of its creator

i. The 3rd of May 1808

From the millions of pictures and paintings one sees in one’s life some stay in one’s mind forever. More often than not this happens when the depicted image is either sublime or horrific. If, in addition, the painting in question also presents aspects, which prompt the human mind into searching for a deeper understanding of the said work of art, then this becomes truly indelible. Goya’s 3rd of May belongs to the first category; Velazquez’ Las Meninas belongs to the second.

Goya’s 3rd of May also invites reflection on the question of how a work of art can also deceive the viewers through reinterpretation of its contents rather than through changes made to its contents. In the instant case, from the very outset, it poses the question of the artist’s intentions for he sought to deceive the authorities in Madrid in the hope that they would give him commissions for new works. For during the artist’s long, illustrious, but much suffering life painter originally saw in the depiction of this bloody event the chance of cosying up to the new order emerging in Spain after the Napoleonic invasion at the beginning of the 19th century. Since the ancient regime of the (Spanish) Bourbons had denied him new work, those now in power might show themselves more generously inclined. That this was undoubtedly and genuinely in his mind when he first envisaged the project is substantiated by the fact that Goya, like other liberally inclined European artists of all kinds, had been quick to express his admiration for Napoleon.

But Napoleon, when he ceased being Bonaparte – i.e. First Consul – in 1804 and became Emperor, he also seemed to have lost much of his original common sense, reforming zeal and even caution in planning his foreign policy. The French intervention in the affairs of the Iberian Peninsula was thus a political error, in magnitude second only to his subsequent and even more disastrous decision to invade Russia.

The years of strife that followed the Napoleonic invasion became unusually bloody and Spain as a whole suffered greatly. Indeed, Goya himself recorded in pen and ink sketches many of the committed atrocities. Helped by Wellington, and the errors committed by those Napoleon had sent to administer the newly conquered lands, the tide of war changed leading to a French defeat and withdrawal and the return to the notorious Bourbons who failed to learn from their past errors.

At this stage, Goya, ageing and with rapidly deteriorating mental health, made his second crucial mistake in thinking that the Bourbons, once back for good, would now support him as an artist. Four years after the bloody events in Madrid, he thus decided to flatter the returned rulers by offering to paint the events of the 3rd of May, though this time the painting would be to celebrate the return of the old regime and thus alleviate his increasing poverty and lack of recognition. The 3rd of May was thus now intended to celebrate and flatter the heroic Spaniards for resisting Napoleon now that Providence had, again, placed once again in the ‘safe’ hands of their old (but if truth is to be said very mediocre) rulers. At the time, the changing views of the artist were noticed by the few who knew his circumstance, his motives and his volte-face; but it was only with the passage of time that his change of political allegiance was seen as an (understandable yet morally condemnable) switch of behaviour.

The painting deals with a specific incident of an abortive riot, which took place in a neighbourhood of Madrid known as the Montaña del Principe Pio on or around the 3rd of May 1808. The reasons why I chose to discuss this famous oil canvas are many. First, because the events it depicts are historically true and in no way imagined. Second, because the depicted incident raises two further sub-questions: the importance of law and order versus the right to protest. To answer these facets of the wider question we must decide who is the good guy in this picture and who is the bad one and, further, at what time should we judge these issues: when they happened, i.e. in 1808, or when they were painted i.e. in 1813.

Are all of the above ideas, at least at their core, related to absolute notions such as good and evil? Or can these notions change with time so that what was once good can later be seen as evil and vice versa? In other words, how easy is it for different observers to understand differently an observed event which, in other words, takes the form of a crucial question: ‘to what extent does the observer’s brain changes the observed picture or the text studied given that he not only sees things through his eyes but also with his brain?’ Ernst Gombrich made much of this distinction in one of his best monographs entitled Art and Illusion.

Yet another reason why Goya’s painting is so fascinating is that it fully justifies a warning voiced by Professor Charles Segal about literary and artistic interpretation involving personal responses and choices. In his Interpreting Greek Tragedy. Myth, Poetry, Text,1 talking of one work being easily subject to many differing interpretations, he notes:

"That many meanings are possible for a given work does not mean that any meaning is possible. An interpretation still must have its grounding in a respectful accuracy about the details of the text." (My italics.)

A few lines further down2 Professor Segal amplifies this statement by adding:

“To recognise the plurality of possible readings is not to deny that some readings may be better than others: the ‘better’ readings may have more insight, take fuller account of the totality of the text and the author’s [or artist’s] oeuvre, range more widely over the implications, discriminate more keenly among the qualities of certain parts or certain characters, and so on.”

These questions about the multiplicity of possible interpretations of this particular painting of Goya can be subjected to a similar test. Our enquiry, however, does demonstrate the Goya painting revealing a continuing preoccupation with central themes which got the ancient Greeks thinking as, in this and other cases, also got various religions to puzzle over. Our enquiry thus shows how classical works, by virtue of the fact that their message is eternal, allow their creators to express it, on paper or on a canvass or in marble, in ways which can suit the demands of different times. This freedom is, naturally, given to the viewer to manipulate, as he sees fit, the material provided by the creator. So let us now turn to Goya.3

Goya’s picture is impressively conceived showing a firing squad of six (presumably) French soldiers executing some of the local rebels or, more precisely, some hungry, frustrated but innocent citizens. Some already lie on the ground, surrounded by much-spilt blood. The one remaining to be shot is on his knees, his hands are outstretched, his expression tense. He must be the next one to fall, and his apprehension is transmitted to the viewers of the painting by his agonised expression. All this is not only impressive but also fascinating, and fascinating it is in different ways.

Is thus the fascination due to the brutality of images of war which a realistic painting can bring to life?4 Does the fascination become obvious if Goya’s painting is compared with other paintings of executions if there are many such works of art? Or does the picture become fascinating if through it and its surrounding history we can discover the aims and frame of mind of the artist? The multiplicity of questions asked may confuse, even disturb those – who knows, maybe most of us – who seek one clear view about a work of art and see in ambiguous alternatives signs of incomplete thinking.

This is not the view the present author favours. On the contrary, he believes that what makes work truly classical is the fact that the more one examines it the more the said work keeps posing new questions leading to different interpretations and therefore, the more eternal it becomes in terms of time and space.

Goya’s painting depicts events which took place in 1808 but when it was painted and when it was completed is not clear. The only thing that is clear that it was completed after the events took place. Indeed, the first record of the canvas’s existence does not appear until 1834 (!) when the artist Theophile Gauthier mentions that he saw it collecting dust in the vaults of the Prado Museum. Did Goya’s views about what he painted change between these various possible dates?5 And was he ever aware of other depictions of executions before he began his own?

To the first question, the answer must be positive though it is unclear when the change in the artist’s mind took place and what prompted it other than his hope that it might change his circumstances as an artist who earned his living through painting. Goya, a liberal by nature, might have well reacted adversely to Napoleon’s growing autocratic behaviour, as other liberals did in other parts of Europe; recall, for instance, how Beethoven removed the dedication of his Fifth Piano Concerto to Napoleon. The Spaniards had another cause for complaint: the change of behaviour of the invading armies as the war began to go against their interests.

A different and more self-centred explanation might well be linked to Goya’s complaint that the reigning Bourbons had not, as he had hoped, favoured him with commissions before they were deposed by Napoleon’s armies so, initially at least, he was probably sympathetically inclined towards the Napoleonic invaders. By the time the painting was completed however, the Bourbons were back in their country, Napoleon had left Spain, having realised too late what a strategic mistake the wars of the Iberian Peninsula had been. It is more than possible that by this (later) stage Goya might have convinced himself that presenting the 3rd of May as a moment of resistance against Napoleon by the heroic locals would have flattered the returning King and earn him the much-needed commissions. The hope, however, never materialised for the Bourbons, as was said of their French line, had learnt nothing and forgotten nothing during the period of their exile. In short, they returned to Spain unchastened by the experience of their exile.

To our second question, the answer must be positive; for the Wars of the Iberian Peninsula were exceptionally bloody, divided not just the invading French from the invaded Spanish, but also the Spaniards themselves. Blood flowed in rivers, and some of it came from executions. We know that some at least were recorded from the outset in crude drawings and prints of varying quality and that Goya must have seen some, not least since the English took extra care to disseminate such depictions illustrating French barbarity. Indeed there was one such print, now in the Institut Municipal d’ Historia de Barcelona depicting the massacre of five monks at Murviedro, a small Moorish town some 16 miles northeast of Valencia rechristened in 1877 as Segundo. We shall return to this at the end of the analysis of the Goya painting for it may well have influenced the basic conception of his masterpiece.

All of the above observations show how details of the Goya canvass can help knowledgeable viewers see it in different ways. But the reinterpretation game can continue for this is no ordinary canvas but the product of an imaginative if troubled human mind.

The facts of this painting need not be altered, but its reinterpretation can be left to the viewer’s mind which can change by playing down some of its features of the picture. Thus, one of the basic questions raised by this picture is whether for the reasons already given, it is essentially a work intimately linked to the Christian religion, its values and its symbols or it is really dealing with the question if civil unrest or, if we wish to go to the much wider and universal issue, who is ‘bad’ and who is ‘good’ in this picture? This takes us to a level of considerable abstraction and may even give the impression of being an over-simplified question, yet as we move from specific to highly abstract analyses of this painting we may find ourselves reaching differing conclusions but also reflecting on philosophically wider matters.

Avoiding describing the 3rd Of May as a religious work is not going to be easy even if we wish to evade it for Goya gave us more Christian clues than those already mentioned. For instance, next to the prime victim (with the outstretched hands) we find a praying monk, no doubt yet another inclusion intended to suggest that the Church is always near its suffering flock. Then we must note how, if one prolongs the bayonets of the executioners in the direction of the victims, one will notice that they ‘pierce’ some of the rebels at about the height of their livers. That, too, reminds us of Christ and how his right flank was pierced by the spear of a Roman soldier at about the same height. Devout Christians, as the Spanish always were, would notice such details; members of other religions, however, would not.

A second interpretation of the incident of the 3rd of May 1808 is, however, possible, not least because Goya’s fascination with war and its consequences is known and well reflected in his individual prints from his series Disasters of War. So this painting can be seen as a realistic depiction of civil unrest in which, of course, the dour form Spanish Catholicism could not be entirely absent. Yet by placing the emphasis on the barbarity of human conflict we are not only echoing Goya’s aforementioned preoccupation with the consequences of human conflict; we are widening the appeal of the painting to include other religions and different nations. Such imaginary changes would not, of course, alter the fact that this remains a well-painted and vivid picture; but by seeing it in this manner we now suggest the picture could be made to speak also to the hearts or minds of those who believed in other deities such as Jove, Mohamed, Buddha etc.

Such a widening of the symbolism in the painting could only come through artistic reinterpretation which would downplay the Christian symbols which Goya scattered in his work of art. Thus, the person about to be killed with his arms outstretched could also remind us of the gesture of surrender and submission made to prevent the potential killer from carrying out his military task. Is this too far-fetched? Not necessarily; for let us recall our earlier quotation from Professor Segal who urged us to take into account every possible relevant factor (and that is why I italicised his ending words when at the beginning of this section I cited his work). For, if we accept the message of the painting not just as I described it so far we can liberate its appeal in terms of both time and geographical space.6 It can thus become a contemporary masterpiece on civil unrest which is daily occurring in the Middle and Far East, not to mention even the United States where we have recently experienced a number of killings of African Americans by policemen. Not to mention officially carried executions (albeit using different methods) in a country which recognises and, indeed, in some of its States makes frequent use of the death penalty.

So, forget or underplay the symbolic use of colour and imagery just pointed out of the direction of the light beams towards the heavens as well as all the other indications which would have led devout Catholics such as the Spaniards to the above-mentioned interpretation of the canvas as depicting an essentially Christian theme. Just treat them instead as details ’appropriate only to that country and the time when the picture was painted’ and try, instead, to give the picture a timeless meaning. Begin to search for the wider meaning of the picture; the one we mentioned at the beginning of this discussion. Who is bad and who is good? And is that judged by the law – νόμος or φύσις – (natural law). This was a much-discussed question by the Sophists, and it will become useful in the interpretation we are about to consider.

The above thinking can thus easily lead the observer to imagine the rebels as freedom fighters, Palestinians for instance, opposing the foreign occupation and struggling to acquire a state of their own. Or we could see those about to be executed as liberal rebels – Kurds for example – fighting an authoritarian state that wishes to deny them the basic human right to liberate their own lands. In such cases, both are defending basic human rights so natural law is on their side. Jump from Turkey or the wider Middle East to China a few decades ago and think of the firing squad as a menacing tank, which a brave young Chinaman is trying to stop with his outstretched arms in Tiananmen Square and forcing the oncoming metal monster to zigzag before it came to a complete halt. This is, I dare say, as iconic a picture of Goya’s 3rd of May and depicts human courage and idealism versus brutal force. You could even say that this is what faith can achieve; though this time you would no longer be referring to Christian faith, but human faith in exalted human causes.

In all these cases, we are back to the idea that rebels/the protesters/the unarmed black American who is shot at point-blank range by a contemporary American policeman who is sitting astride him are the ‘goodies’ or, at the very least, the innocent, while the executioners, or even the Chinese tank driver, represent the oppressors, the baddies, even though the law – νόμος – may be on the side of the latter. And they are baddies because there is a law – the natural law – that stands higher than the written law.

With minor adjustments to the details, we have thus given the picture a significance which goes far beyond what Goya ‘depicted but not beyond what, necessarily, could have crossed his mind’ given his known preoccupation with war and its consequences. We have thus given this work of art a new audience, a new and wider meaning, by ignoring costume, lighting and other signs, but one which still remains loyal to Goya’s main theme: that in human conflict humans kill or maim humans. We have thus achieved a measure of useful originality through reinterpretation. In other words, we have successfully married the original ’creator’s’ mind with the creative imagination of another generation in an environment which is now recognisable to a contemporary audience. Reinterpretation has given a masterpiece a new lease of life and has done so by manipulating the features of the painting not by drawing a second painting openly depicting its transformation into something different but in humanitarian terms equally valid. We have also noted how, with small adjustments, we can change the meaning of a painted canvas from depiction to propaganda.

Seagal is right. Great works of art are susceptible to differing interpretations though, as he stressed, this does not mean that all are acceptable. Nor, if we can go further than he did, say with certainty, which is the one that is the right one. His cited words ask us to consider all the relevant surrounding circumstances and reach a conclusion, which makes the most sense to the totality of the oeuvre of the artist.

In Goya’s case, this was street violence during a period, which started as an invasion and ended up essentially as a civil war. Is this not the picture we also get from Ancient Greek tragedy as explained in volume II of my trilogy Ancient Greek Poetry from Homer to Roman Times? Is this not the place the likes of Euripides wished to bring us in such great tragedies as Hecuba and Medea; in other words, to put us in the deciding place and let us decide if these characters were good or bad, the playwright having given us only the basic facts on which to form our judgment?

ii. An Earlier but Crude Forerunner

Many, including this author, have explored in some detail, how an original idea in art (or even literature) can be (a) copied, (b) varied or modified, (c) simply inspire a sequel, or even (d) lead to a complete transformation of the way it was originally externalised by its first inventor. 7

The crude and anonymous wood engraving depicted above, done two years before Goya had painted his 3rd of May, showed the execution of five patriotic priests after the fall of the old Moorish town of Murvierdo – rechristened in 1877 into Segunto – lying some 16 miles Northeast of Valencia. The engraving, was, eventually, turned into a print, was massively distributed among locals by the English forces eager to advertise the barbarity of the invading Napoleonic forces. At the time, Goya was nowhere near Valencia but is widely believed to have seen one of the disseminated leaflets of the print. In which of the categories mentioned above – (a) to (d) – does his painting belong?

It could, of course, come under ‘variation’ or ‘inspiration’ – i.e. (b) or (c) – but in reality, what matters is that the borrowed primitively executed idea in Goya’s hands became a masterpiece. The borrowing of the idea worked because, as we said, the original creator and the borrower’s mental predilection dovetailed completely as Goya’s, early sketches about the raging Peninsular War, had already stirred Goya to produce many images of the barbarity of war. The transformative effect of his genius occurred mainly through the brilliant use of colour and light introduced in the painting we are considering.

There is something romantic in a moonlit night, but a moonless night is dark. Dark, also, is the scene depicted; so darkness suited Goya in this instance. He wanted to depict an assassination; not an ordinary military execution. So his killing had to take place at night and not in broad daylight as is the case with the Murvierdo print.

However, Goya also needed some light, and he added it in a way that it could simultaneously provide symbolism in two ways. First, in his version, the light beams began at ground level and moved to the heavens. So for the man about to be executed and, one assumes, the others in the queue, salvation and benediction was imminent. By contrast, the executioners are grey, anonymous, not individualised on the canvas who will, therefore, never be remembered since no one will recognise them to start with.

Notable, also, is the fact that the Goya painting is not a massacre of priests but a killing of laymen with one priest present, who knows, there to confess the morituri though, possibly, in the end also getting killed himself. This can also be seen as a crucial difference; for it transforms the image from a Spanish and Christian to one that may be applied to all countries and all times. In that sense, it symbolises the inhumanity of humans and thus attempts to put this abstract and frightening idea on a simple, stretched canvas used for painting.

This notion that this scene could be happening anyway is also clear if the compare the earlier crude print with the later masterpiece. For in the first, the depiction at the back and above the horizon line of the fort of the city under siege is real. It is shown where it stood and fought to the end. But Goya’s background has puzzled the scholars who have tried to guess where exactly it took place since they know – or so claim – that the executions took place near the montaña del Príncipe Pío. Can they be more specific by trying to identifying the nearby building standing in the haze? So far as I know, no one has; for Goya’s was not interested in topography but in the overall effect his painting would have. He was right; but in this world which gave him so much pain, directly or indirectly, his recognition was bound to come posthumously. His religion is and remains among the many that recognise this awful truth and thus promises justice only in the … other world, not this one.

A postscript is needed to explain and apologise for the poor quality of the print. Apparently, it can be found in the Institut Municipal d’ Historia of Barcelona. I wrote to ask them for a better copy and permission to use it in my trilogy – if ever it appeared in print. I received no reply. In the end, however, I was blessed by the fortunate recovery of a six-page pamphlet written by Anthony Lacy Gully entitled The Unexpected Source of Goya’s painting ‘May 3, 1808’ and plagiarised much – not all – of the many facts he crammed in the space of a mere 6 pages. I publicly acknowledge my debt to him for his brilliant discovery and will gladly pay reasonable compensation for the unauthorised use of this old print.

There is a lesson here for my readers to note with care. For throughout my text they will find many examples of apparently minor details, which can, however, bring one’s text to life but which serious volumes of scholarship can be tempted to ignore. So the overall conclusion can only be one: Anything and everything that one chooses to examine in this life can lead one down unexpected paths where amusing stories and sometimes thought-provoking ideas may be lying in wait to be explored and used. This small book, as I keep stressing in several of its parts, has this as its main aim.

Cornell University Press (1986) at p. 370↩︎

Ibid. at p. 371. My italics for reasons which will become evident in my text below.↩︎

The different interpretative readings of this masterpiece are discussed in Professor Hugh Thomas’ Goya: May 3, 1808, London (1972).↩︎

The great Ernst Gombrich gave my sentence an interesting twist in the title of his Images of War in Romantic Art, Meditations on a Hobby Horse, and Other Essays on the Theory of Art, London (1963), pp. 125 ff. André Malraux opted for a similarly poetic approach to a painting depicting human barbarity by writing [on the 3rd of May] “we have … not simply the actuality of war but its poetry,” Saturn: An Essay on Goya, London (1957), at p. 107.↩︎

A superb summary of much presented in this section can be found in A. Gully’s The Unexpected Source of Goya’s Painting May 3, 1808, in Studies in Iconography, 9, (1983), pp. 99 ff.↩︎

‘So on’ are Segal’s apparently colourless words – but, in my view, they are perfectly suited to accommodate what I would call the ‘geography’ and ‘time factors’ and how they can affect/alter the understanding of a work of art (written or painted). His fame as an internationally admired artists was, as we saw, very restricted far from fulfilled throughout the period during which neglect not recognition was haunting him and, no doubt, accelerating his mental decline. In my view, whatever the immediate stimulus for this painting, Goya was in his heart of hearts thus not just painting a local scene but one which condemned unjustified violence wherever and whenever it occurred. If that was, indeed, in his mind, it is reasonable for us, as well, to try and understand his painting in this wider sense.↩︎

In volume 3 of his trilogy Ancient Greek Poetry from Homer to Roman Times, Jan Sramek Verlag, Vienna (2017).↩︎

7

Projecting a Brutal God as a Romantic Figure

i. The Uncertainties of a Great Work of Art

The significance of Titian’s masterpiece is basically twofold. First and foremost, it must be judged as a work of art and it is indisputably a masterpiece if not his masterpiece. Secondly, it gives a twist to numerous uncertainties and contradictions, not to mention brutalities which characterise the Dionysian cult of ancient Greece, the Middle East and other, associated, Eastern myths. In this sense, we see here, as in other works of Titian and later painters and playwrights, a softening of the edges of ancient Greek mythology. Personally, I tend to refer to this softening of edges of Greek myths as the West’s quid pro quo for the rich legacy, which the East had bequeathed to the emergence of the European culture.

Beauty does not need to be explained to appeal to humans; but if the emotional and psychological appeal of a work of art can be further enhanced by the provision of technical, at times superficially boring1details, then that appeal can be transformed into admiration, even awe. One example will help lay the foundations of this argument.

Viewers must first notice that in compositional terms, the canvas is divided into two simple triangles, the left-hand one which roughly begins at the feet of Ariadne and ends at the treetops on the top right corner of the canvas while the right-hand triangle covers the lower right-hand half of the more or less square canvas.

Once this balanced division of the usable space is noted the viewers must observe or, rather, be impressed by the amazing brightness of the dominating blue of the sky and Ariadne’s different tunic of a different, darker, blue.2 This colour came from a mineral which Venice, as a naval power, could easily import into Italy, indeed, they, effectively, had a monopoly on it. The mineral was lapis lazuli and was extremely expensive for it had to come to Europe having been first mined in Afghanistan. Once in Europe, it became a paint known as ‘ultramarine’ and often used in depictures of the Virgin Mary’s tunics. When liberally used – as it was in Bronzino’s portrait of Eleonora of Toledo3 – the cost of the painting could be very high. This is because in this instance, the mineral was needed in considerable quantities and, before pulverised and mixed with oil to form the paint, it had to be assembled from all over Italy for the sole use of one portrait.

This kind of analysis has been made of all the rich colours, which characterise Venetian painting and are found in most of the best-known works of Titian. This is no place to attempt to repeat here such details though they formed part of the extensive and highly technical work which the expert restorers of the National Gallery had to do to clean and repair canvases such as the present one which bore visible signs of ageing.4 Also worth mentioning is the fact that the same kind of work had to be done, especially in the case of Titian paintings, including the one which here concerns us, since they made use of a great variety of other very bright colours such as greens, yellows and reds.

If we take this last colour as an example, we note that its shades are not the same on the band that goes around Ariadne’s body and Dionysus cape. Such subtle colour variations would typically require a mixture of different pulverised minerals and then be combined with other colours – frequently white – before applied on the canvas. This was, again, a time consuming and expensive process; important parts of the painting were then often ‘glazed’ i.e. painted over several times to produce a smooth finish concealing the brush strokes as well as to enhance subtle colour variations which these days can be found pre-prepared in industrially produced colours. In Titian’s case, for instance, we know that he would glaze i.e. apply a transparent layer of paint over another thoroughly dried layer of opaque paint and repeat this process as often as 12 times. This process was neither easy nor could be done in a hurry; but when it worked, it could increase luminosity and create new shades of basic colours such as red.

Equally remarkable is Titian’s successful effort to include in the picture almost all the key figures of Dionysus’ entourage beginning with his teacher and long-time friend Selinus, who was a wise, learned, amusing and a notable figure in his own right in Greek mythology.5 Also notable – surprising one might say – is the use of cheetahs to draw Dionysus’s chariot as the myths tell us that it was tigers which drew the chariot and not cheetahs for they were less widely known in Italy at that time. The most likely explanation for this deviation from the text of the myth is not ignorance or sloppiness on the part of Titian but his wish to please his commissioning client, the Duke of Ferrera: The Duke kept at his home a small zoo which, however, had cheetahs but not tigers. Finally, the reader must notice on the top left-hand side of the painting a circle of eight bright stars which represent the crown, which once sat on Ariadne’s head. More about this in the next section.

Let us now move to the Dionysus story and the god’s relationship with the Cretan Princess Ariadne as part of the turbulent and peripatetic life of the god. Our story must, of course, begin with Dionysus, one of the strangest, long-lasting, important, complex and racially mix of gods belonging to the Greek Pantheon.

ii. Dionysus: One or Many Hiding Behind the Same Name?

Almost everything said or written about Dionysus has come down to us in varied forms and raises the question whether we are talking about one god or a succession of gods who assumed the same name. To be sure, almost no Greek myth or mythological figure has reached us in one simple version given that the time and place of their origin varied widely. This polymorphy continued through the way classic tragedians used the inherited mythological material and transformed it further in their tragedies. To take but one example: Oedipus Rex. Most of us know the plot found in the Sophocles play which is very different from Euripides’ version which survives only in fragments.

This diversity, however, is, or strikes me at least, as being excessive in the case of Dionysus with the result that agreeing on its essentials (and deciding what is the main message/moral of the theme, if it has one) can be difficult if not impossible when you are faced with so many uncertainties concerning the god himself. This is clearly no place to discuss all these issues but here is a list of headings where uncertainties and contradictions abound.

‘Where did Dionysus come from?’ In which geographical area he operated? How senior a good was he? ‘Who were his parents?’ ‘What was his sexual predilection?’ To what extent in later centuries could he and his cult be linked to Christianity or even seen as one of the Greek precursors of stories and events which were also adopted by the later Christian religion? I shall only look at three of these questions – those italicised above – and express the doubt as to whether the bulk of this conflicting detail may nowadays be of interest to non-specialist classicists. Indeed, I shall attempt to go further and suggest that even they may have more or less exhausted what they had to say about the god and his cult and it may be time that we should complete this evolutionary process by settling on a simpler image fashioned by modern pictorial artists and musical composers. This may strike some as dangerously innovative; but over 60 years ago the great E. R. Dodds, Regius Professor at the University of Oxford, had warned future scholars that anyone who wished to say something new about this god and the Euripidean play should look at it not only “as a piece of Greek but as a work of art and at the same time (like all works of art) a social document”.6 So let us begin by summarising existing knowledge on the topics I said I would focus on and which are all essentially sociological and psychological in nature.

Where Did Dionysus Come From?

Until a few decades ago the prevailing theory was that the cult of Dionysus came from Lydia and Phrygia, (in Asia Minor) into Greece via Thrace, then Macedonia, and then moved southwards. This move was typically placed in the 7th or, at the latest, 6th century BC (even though Dionysus already appears in Homer and Herodotus dating was not far removed from that of Homer).

More recent archaeological findings in Crete – for example, Chania – discovered stones with Linear B inscriptions which would place the arrival of the cult in Crete at a much earlier date – probably as far back as the 14th century BC, if not even earlier. Combined with references to bulls and bull athletics, as well as the use of honey and wine – all closely associated with Dionysus – the theory gained ground that the first point of entry was the South of Greece, namely Crete, with the cultural invasion – including the cultivation of the vine – coming from Phoenicia to Crete and then spreading northwards. This would tie in well with the flourishing commercial trade that Crete enjoyed with the Phoenician littoral and, to a lesser extent, Egypt.

Who Were His Parents?

This question does not, so far as I know, arise before the late 7th century and with a god known as the ‘first Dionysus’ or ‘Dionysus Zagreus’ who was linked to the Orphics and the mysteries at Eleusis. In these accounts, Dionysus is presented as the son of Zeus who, in the form of a snake, inseminated his niece Persephone – in Latin terminology Proserpina – the daughter of Demeter (Latin Ceres) who was Zeus’ sister. Zeus’ wife (and also sister), the goddess Hera, had the child killed through violent dismemberment carried out at her behest by the Titans. Athena, however, managed to save the child’s heart and from this, the child was placed on a mountainside, far from the reach of Hera. Contemporary myths also record that Zeus had designated this child to be his successor as the King of the gods in the event of his death, but not much more turns on this story.

Why is this different genealogy of interest or use to modern students reading classics? The only consequence I can think of is that this birth of the god, sometimes referred to as the first Dionysus, would deprive him of the parallel with Christ, used by Greek writers living in northern Egypt during the early centuries AD and preoccupied with the reconciliation of Hellenism and Christianity. For one of the oft-cited connecting points between the two religions was that in both the case of Dionysus and Christ their father was a god and their mother an ordinary mortal. Moreover, both Dionysus and Christ were born, died and were resurrected.

The God’s Sexuality

This is mostly discussed in The Bacchae of Euripides, written around 408 BC when the playwright had moved to Macedonia as the guest of the local King Archelaus. This play provides some of the most concrete information about the god and the most detailed available account of the bacchanalia.

In this tragedy, possibly the most difficult and certainly the darkest of Euripides’ plays, King Pentheus of Thebes is an arch opponent of the god. He is described as suffering from repressed homosexuality or, in my view, more accurately repressed sexuality since the indications are that he was bisexually inclined. Less is said explicitly in the tragedy about the god but my own overall impression is that he, too, was bisexually inclined. The issue of repressed sexuality – first raised in ancient literature in this play – became hugely important two and a half thousand years later as a psychological problem, which was much discussed by Freud and his school who argued that if not nipped in the bud it could develop into serious forms neurosis.

Adding a psychological dimension in the analysis of an ancient, difficult, but well-written text as The Bacchae can help give a modern flavour to ancient studies and thus help retain of your students considering classical studies as an option as college or university.

A Modern Simplification of the Myth: Does It Beautify or Deceive Us?

I mentioned earlier my view that these fine differences in the genealogy and character flaws of Dionysus are not likely to be of small interest and, in any event, no real use to modern readers. On the other hand, could a simplification be attempted in keeping with a general trend, which we find in European art – theatrical, artistic and musical – from about the Renaissance onwards? Its central theme is the softening of the often-primitive if not barbaric myths which Greece bequeathed to the West. As I have already suggested this could even be seen as the West’ answer to the East’s generosity to entrust it with its myths, tacitly allowing it to use them and develop out of them its own modern culture, essentially, an amalgam of Greek and Judaic thought, Roman law, Christian religion and Northern European customs. If the overall result of such a quid pro quo can be seen as involving a certain degree of beautification of some very old stories then, arguably, both sides are winners. For thanks to such adaptations, the East’s creative stories can survive into our times; thanks to Western genius knowing how to retain the core of an old imaginative idea but altered to fit it in a new and wider environment.

Such an effort, however, could also be a form of deception. For it could be seen as an attempt to transform the Dionysus myth to the point that while making sense of it in a new world the change would present an image of the god which would be too distant from the accepted 2,000-year-old model which through its complexity, made his story even more fascinating.7

As an author, I would like to put these alternatives to my readers as proposals deserving evaluation. They would do little more than suggest a handful of artistic works, which might justify the beginning of such a beautification process, which, in normalising the life of the god, would present its own interest. This would not lie in shocking but producing a calmer and recognisable image for the god, and this process of revision could be prompted by glancing, first at an outstanding work of pictorial art and then at reflecting on an equally unusual if not also beautiful opera whose composer was gifted with the talent of writing divine music for female voices. With the help of women, as seen by art, the god would become normal and attractive and loose his erratic behaviour and perverse habits.

Titian is my artist and his painting Bacchus and Ariadne is the work, which seems to me to beg for more than admiration for his artistic talent in composition and the use of colours. It is the broader symbolism of the work I now wish to stress; the one – I confess – most appeals to me for it civilises a deeply disturbing rebel.

In his painting, Titian offers this long-suffering, insecure, vindictive god a peaceful alternative. Peaceful and romantic; for it implies that his uncertainties about his sexual identity can finally be laid to rest. More importantly, this evolution in his lifestyle is not constructed out of thin air but makes use of elements found in the old Dionysian stories. Moreover, such transformations happen in real life; they do not belong entirely to the world of day-dreaming so the idea to discover it in art does not differ so much from the image of many a young man who sowed his wild oats early on and later settled down to peaceful reconciliation with himself and his environment. What brings about the change in our Dionysus is that he has now for the first time in his life he has fallen in love, showed it instantly to the woman of his choice by offering her the heavens and placing her crown up in the northern sky to shine forever. As this version of his myth tells us his marriage to Ariadne is blessed with many children, and, again, we have no reason to adopt in our new story the toils and complications that the ancients, following their usual habits, had to invent. In short, allow the modern artists to introduce through romance the genre of writing – romantic – which they more or less ignored until the end of the ancient Greek era.

And what about Dionysus cult? Well, if all the debates of the early centuries after the birth of Christ – especially in Alexandria, which remained a stronghold of Hellenism and where the real battles against the challenges posed to it by Christianity were fought – produced a viable compromise between Christianity and Hellenism, we can see Dionysus’ movement as a movement which is there to provide companionship and mutual assistance to the desperados of this world and thereby tie in well with the religion which also cared so much for the meek. For, in essence, both religions – ancient Greek and Christian – if seen as social movements, which they also were, showed their soft spot for the meek, the lonely, the abandoned and the poor. In keeping with the artistic trends of Western Europe, we can forget the orgies the past, the violent dismemberment and eating in the raw of young animals, and replace them by tangible efforts made by wider sections of society to be helpful to the needy and caring of our natural environment. If what has already happened from the days of antiquity is not already enough, it does, at the very least, represent a marked change with past attitudes and an attempt to espouse the advantages of calm and peace and human altruism.

In opera, Ariadne, too, finds her peace once the self-centred man – Theseus – the man she helped save his life and enhance his heroic status, is finally out of her life. Her falling in love with him can be seen as a sign of youthful immaturity; his abandoning her as evidence of male self-centeredness. Germinetta’s common sense advice proffered to Ariadne over 12 unstoppable minutes in a coloratura aria, which only the talent of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal could ever offer the leading female soprano, comes at the right time and strikes exactly the right note for my idea.

The abandoned Princess on the coast of Naxos is thus no longer depressingly waiting for Hermes to lead her to the underworld which offers the most unattractive form of perpetual calm. Es gibt ein Reich, she mournfully sings. Such a state does exist, though not where in her depression she had expected. Its beauty lies precisely in the fact that it is different from what she was imagining and waiting for. For fate has given her finally a better place among the living with many children of her own by her side. Our “Great and Powerful Princess”, as Germinetta, tongue in cheek, calls her at the beginning of her aria, finally lands safely in the real world because feminine common sense has finally made her understand that suffering is common to all and can only be battled through new thinking.

By being brought down to earth, she is no longer great and powerful, but she also no longer lonely. Now she has finally realised that “happiness”, as Byron put it so well, “was born a twin” for she has found the right man, and her true crown is not tottering on her head, but perpetually shining in the heavens. She may have been born socially privileged; but, Germinetta is right to tick her off and remind her that she is human – the same as the humblest of her species. And if she is clever, which mythology assures us that she is, she will also know that when life gives you a second chance, wisdom demands that you seize it.

As for Dionysus, he may have had a harsh beginning in his early days and later on in life much power, which always comes accompanied by its favourite companion: conflict. Now, with a beautiful Cretan by his side, a Cretan whose myth always treated her without ever mentioning her name as the most important of the Cretan Goddesses8 – he can find the calm, which he and his new wife have always craved for.

Taken together and all these ingredients may have inspired the Venetian artist and the Austrian composer to proclaim that the time had come to put an end to the blood-curdling stories of Antiquity and offer us pointers for a different story.

And why not? This is a myth is it not? So why not end it as story-telling should always end, namely with happiness for all. Under Titian’s amazing blue sky – for no other of the blue skies which he as painted matches this one in luminosity – there can be no room for sorrow.

My italicised words are here, in part, used inaccurately for what I wish here to refer to which is the existing literature provided by the National Gallery to describe the restoration of the canvas in the late 60s. To be sure, it is technical and for this reasons boring to non-specialists; but it describes a unique feat once pictures of how the painting was – brown and dirty because of its original coat of varnish. Though the cleaning and restoration was, as I call it a feat of modern technology and human expertise, at the time it gave rise to quite an uproar. History and the viewing public, however, owe them a debt of gratitude.↩︎

A similarly stunning blue, smoothly applied on the canvas, can only be found in the elaborate (velvet?) dress of the sitter in Titan’s Laura de Dianti of 1523 and the virgin’s tunic in his The Virgin, The Child, St John and a Donor (the last in matching yellow) of 1532. Only three other paintings – Holy Family and Shepherd of 1510; Man with a Quilted (silk?) Sleeve of 1510, and Mater Dolorosa of 1554, use substantial quantities of blues, though in the penultimate painting blue is mixed with green depicting silk, while in the last one, the Virgin’s heavy cape, is mixed with black.↩︎

She was the wife of Cosmo Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany during the middle decades of the 16th century. The portrait is housed in the Uffizi Gallery of Florence.↩︎

The Wikipedia entry for this picture contains references to valuable technical texts prepared to assist the experts of the National Gallery of London to restore the painting to its current luminous state having removed the old and darkening thick layer of varnish and explaining in detail the minerals used for the large number of colours found on this canvas. On this see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacchus_and_Ariadne↩︎

The best-known portrait of this loyal companion of Dionysus was painted almost a century later by Sir Peter Paul Rubens and depicts him both corpulent and drunk and thus barely able to stand up straight.↩︎

Euripides, The Bacchae, Preface to the first edition (1943) reproduced at page 5 of the second edition (1959). My italics.↩︎

Or, in some cases – and I am here thinking of the effect Nietzsche’s works had on the understanding of Dionysus – even darker.↩︎

The Cretan connection of Dionysus is explored in a most scholarly and readable manner by Carl Kerényi in Dionysus. Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, translated from the German by Ralph Manheim, Princeton (1976)↩︎

8

Depicting or Promoting Illicit Sex?

Boucher’s (1703–1770) painting of Mademoiselle Marie-Louise O’ Murphy in 1752 is undoubtedly a classic of its kind; the problem, however, is what is its kind? Is this, in short, an example of the erotica fashionable in its time as well as throughout 19th century France, or did Boucher go a step further and produce pornography, perhaps even recommending sodomy and pederasty?

The discussion on this second possibility has raged ever since the 14-year-old girl was painted by the master painter of the Rococo style and close friend and protégé of Madame de Pompadour, chief mistress of Louis XV of France. Some draw the distinction depending on the answer given to the following question: was the nude here painted as a body of a woman, or as an object? In my view, this is a play with words, and the result remains as unclear as the artist’s choice of posture as well as the light pink colouring of the nude body, especially in the areas surrounding the buttocks. In one word is what we are looking at, something more sinister or merely an illustration of the artist’s hedonism, for Boucher was certainly an uncontrolled hedonist.

I do not see hedonism – in the sense of a predisposition to seek pleasure – as a crime. Still, the posture of the young girl is a factor to be weighed and taken into account in the final characterisation of the painting as well as the artist’s motives. This will involve an exercise in guesswork though, to reach a conclusion, one must bear in mind two facts. First, the O’Murphy canvas was painted at least twice, the older one now exhibited in Munich’s Alte Pinakothek, while the newer one – by one year – is to be found in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum of Cologne. Obviously, people liked it, and so did the creator so he went to the trouble of doing a second copy.

Two copies (of an atypical posture for a nude) must suggest that the posture was what made it so unusual and thereby unusually attractive. That this must have been the case with Boucher is strongly suggested by the fact that he had already adopted the very same posture in a slightly earlier painting of 1745 known as the Odalisque Brune (to contrast it with the O’Murphy picture which later also became known as l’ Odalisque Blonde to distinguish her from the Odalisque Brune). Since in the space of approximately five years, four fairly similar paintings reproduced this posture we might as well christen it the Boucher posture.

While we wonder what must have been going through his mind, Boucher must have been having a whale of a time, so much so that in the 1745 version he was reputed to have used his wife as a model for his Odalisque Brune. Though the spirit of the times encouraged a licentious attitude to life, this time it seems he overstepped the limits since he was instantly attacked for this by Diderot whose weighty authority as a thinker and self-appointed censor of the arts, kept the unfriendly gossip against him alive for some time after. The principle canvas of this (earlier) Odalisque is now housed in the Louvre while the second copy is exhibited in the Museum of Fine Arts of Rheims. Our discussion about the posture chosen for the Odalisque Brune and O’Murphy canvasses must reconfirm the hedonism of the artist; but does it go further?

This guesswork about his character and his own sex habits cannot be brushed aside, especially if we look at yet another painting of his – completed a mere four years earlier (1741) – namely Leda and the Swan. Arguably, this may take his hedonism too far, especially if we compare the way he handled the subject which had attracted the attention of other great artists as well.

In this version, we are presented with a voluptuous Leda lying on her back with her legs splayed wide apart and hanging off the sides of her bed while the viewer’s glance inevitably is drawn by her most provocatively shaven genitalia about to be pecked at by the swan lying nearby. In a few words – the only I think which are appropriate – the artist’s hedonism, come what may, was simply uncontrollable. Indeed, this provocative positioning of the masquerading Zeus stands in stark contrast with the earlier version of this same mythological theme as imagined and painted by no lesser an artist than Rubens. This chronologically earlier rendering of the theme shows the bodies of Leda and the swan/god beautifully intertwined but without the French artist’s irrepressible eroticism. So, if judgment should be passed as to which of Boucher’s paintings possibly crosses the boundaries between the erotic and the pornographic, the (condemnatory?) verdict should – I venture to suggest – go to his 1641 painting of Leda.

Beyond this debate, however, lies another one hinted at in the title of this essay. It follows naturally from what I have just said so, simply put, it is this: could one see the O’Murphy picture, for all the reasons already given, as going beyond depicting a young nymphette in a provocative posture to promote indirectly the pleasures of sodomy and pederasty in a society which, at the time, must have been practised freely since it had no enforceable rules against sexual misbehaviour in private?

This question moves us from art to morality and an invitation to guess (at best) the artist’s motives from certain features of his work.

Even more guesswork is needed to add to this question; for next to it we find a third and theoretically more abstract one namely, whether art is judged by reference to artistic rules or the rules of morality or both?

If an unequivocal answer could be given to the question posed earlier, the praise (or condemnation) of Boucher’s most provocative nude painting should go to his Leda and the Swan. This, however, touches on the subject of bestiality, not sodomy or pederasty, which would be the case if we were to focus solely on the O’Murphy canvas.

The problem is that even this restrictive interpretation is not without its difficulties and these stem from the fact that, through the ages, the definition of sodomy has included anal sex, oral sex and bestiality, and the O’Murphy painting does not touch these last two forms. Perhaps, therefore, this question may be best considered by going back in time to when the issue of anal sex, in the context of homosexuality and heterosexuality, was debated. This older debate has not ended; though it has often been diminished in intensity in those legal systems where it has been in more recent times been decriminalised.

As far as ancient Greece was concerned, Greek myths, especially in their early phases, were harsh, brutal and utterly immoral; with the slow progress of medical and ethical teachings, recourse to some of these sexual practices – incest and bestiality for instance – became frowned upon and by the time of the Byzantine Empire both were even cruelly punished.

In classical times, however, anal sex was usual between men though, again in theory, the most learned of those who expressed views on this subject merely advocated and exercised restraint on how often it was practised. By contrast, other religions, such as Judaism,1 took a hostile attitude towards male sodomy as some countries still do. England, for instance, did so until fairly recently; Russia still does. This severe approach, but not the severe penalty imposed under Judaic and later Byzantine law, was widely adopted in Europe in the form of criminal statutes outlawing these practices from the 19th century onwards.

As the law continued to adopt an infinitely varied approach to these problems art followed a path of neutrality, progressively beautifying old stories while not avoiding altogether the opportunity desired by its patrons – to produce paintings, which titillated viewers. What happened in practice, however, was that in private such sexual encounters remained concealed by ignorance or discretion. Both of these attitudes changed in the case of homosexual sodomy – if it ever came into the open. Discussion about sexual matters, however, grew towards the end of the 19th century as the development of psychology and psychiatry encouraged their open discussion by linking them to mental ailments.

If from older attitudes, we now move to the other end of the spectrum, namely our times, we will notice that the Boucher painting need not be made the object of moral indignation but merely – and that only arguably – the subject of discussion as to its artistic excellence. I say this with some measure of assurance since sexual liberation has increased the incidents of most – not all – of the ancient sexual practices and, what is more, made them vastly more visibly accessible to the masses through modern mediums of communication such as sexual manuals, porn films, videos, the internet and other forms of communication represented by the social media.

What, however, has also changed is the fact that the feminist movement has nowadays demonstrated a more interventionist approach, including a growing concern against the exploitation of – typically – young men as well as women at the workplace or the sexual grooming of youngsters via the net, thus corrupting them morally or even leading them into prostitution. In these venal activities art, in the old sense, has been absent though one must also not forget that some great modern artists, who worked almost down to our very own times – I am thinking of Cezanne and Picasso as obvious examples – displayed what I would, for lack of an accurate term, describe as a heightened degree of personal sexuality if one is to judge both from their many paintings and sketches on this subject as well as what is known about their private lives.

To the above one must add another development, which has increased interest and even given the seal of approval to a variety of sexual activities, which, in days gone by, were severely stigmatised. Thus, medical literature concerning sex, combined with more effective measures against unwanted pregnancies, taught to youngsters at school, has contributed to a further flourishing of an early interest in sex.

Indeed, after the Second World War sex, homosexuality, and bisexuality, marriage between and adoption by gays and homosexuals, as well as sexual self-gratification, began to be discussed more openly and attract ordinary humans in the names of equality and education. Thus, by 1948, the year when the first edition of the two Kinsey Reports dealing with the Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male was published and, later in 1953, the Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female, the habit of subjecting patterns of sexual behaviour to statistical analyses and, generally speaking, progressively presenting the entire realm of sex clothed in scientific garb.

Kinsey and his school thus analysed data for the frequency with which women participate in various types of sexual activity and, reversely, how often men resorted to transvestitism, and also looked at how factors such as age, social-economic status and religious beliefs influenced the frequency sexual intercourse in older age. Comparisons were made of female and male sexual activities while sexual subjects, such as masturbation, which, since the dawn of man had been treated as taboos, became topics of wider discussion and, indirectly, even approval. No wonder then that such literature grew in size though, at times, so also did the criticism levied against this trend, which varied in content, from morality to serious questioning of the empirical methods used to assemble the information presented in these books.

The many points sketched above have amounted to a veritable revolution in the way sex is discussed in modern societies so, with all this in mind, let us return to how viewers might react to Boucher’s painting and unexpressed intentions. In brief, my view is that the painting would nowadays be artistically admired but in sexual terms be considered ‘tame’. As for the artist’s possible intention to corrupt public morals, it would not receive, I think, a second thought.

The first part of my conclusion inevitably makes use of the volume and variety of the widely circulating contemporaneous sexual material, which instantly robs Boucher’s painting of all novel and shocking features. The major problems of present-day societies revolve, as stated, round two different issues: how should one treat women and, indeed men, in their daily social intercourse without demeaning human dignity and, secondly, how can one eliminate sexual grooming via the internet.

These underlying issues are not, of course, new phenomena; however, how to handle them without turning trivial events into litigation is a difficult and, as yet, unresolved issue. This book, however, does not provide the right forum for such a discussion. It is enough to touch upon the modern concerns solely to express the conviction that no mileage can be gained by trying to magnify the provocative effect of Boucher’s and other artists’ sensual view of the world. For though it may suggest to some sodomy as well as a sexual relationship with a very young girl or boy is unacceptable, nothing is gained by even contemplating that other modern scourge: litigiousness.

My own view thus remains that this is a painting by an old artist known for his love of painting nude women, often set in idyllic landscapes and in some instances’ adopting strongly provocative postures. In this Boucher was no different from Titian (and other great artists of the past) who showed a similar admiration for the nude human body. This was particularly true of the Rococo era and a fair part of the artistic product of the 19th century. But in terms of numbers, as against the many more straightforward portraits of aristocrats and recently enriched, overweight, middle-class burghers of this era, paintings of nudes represented a minority of the total artistic output. The question mentioned in the title of this essay would thus simply not be posed during previous generations.

So I very much doubt that today’s visitors to Munich’s Alte Pinakothek will be shocked by seeing this painting given the abundance of infinitely more provocative material easily available to them though they will, most certainly, stand before it for longer than usual and admire it as a work of art. Whether this represents progress or regression in art and morality can remains debatable. I tend to subscribe to the view that excellence or mediocrity in art should be judged by artistic criteria and not morality. This is true in our times, but it was also true when the portrait was painted.

M. Boucher thus did not, in my view, wish to encourage or deceive anyone. Indeed, one of the first viewers of the work, as it was being painted, was the famous cosmopolite of the time M. Giacomo Casanova. Being a man well versed in letters and languages, his comment was limited to admiring the beautiful young Greek, for in a linguistically brilliant jeu de mots, the greatest ‘lover’ of history claimed that the Irish Miss Marie-Louise O’Murphy was, really, a beautiful – όμορφη (omorphi) – Greek and proceeded to introduce her to the king of France, Louis XV, who, after some financial haggling, and the request that she take a bath (!), proceeded to hire her services the following day.2

Casanova’s culture not only reflects his ability to use his knowledge to give an amusing twist to the picture; it also demonstrates art’s ability to enrich further our collection of fairy-tales. For in the event, the young Irish girl shown in the picture, through her charm and guile, ended her life as fairy-tales usually do: Miss O’Murphy married into the aristocracy, lived happily ever after, as did all who met her and enjoyed her favours. Her quite unique rise from rags to riches lasted for 77 years, and Boucher’s painting of her helped a great deal.

For instance, Deuteronomy 23:13.↩︎

The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt 1725-1798, being the rare unabridged London edition of 1894 translated by Arthur Machen to which has been added the chapters discovered by Arthur Symons, Oxford, Benediction Classics, chapter IX.↩︎

9

Unrequited Love: Literature’s First Recorded Instance

i. Unrequited Love: An Unexplored Theme in Ancient Greek Literature

A theme which received much attention in European literature, especially during the 19th century, was left almost untouched by ancient Greek literature. In chronological order, three notable incidents can only be mentioned namely: Odysseus encounter with Nausicaä; Phaedra’s passion for Hippolytus, and Polyphemus’ love for Galatea. Though this neglect is to be regretted, it is not surprising since romantic art did not figure prominently in Greek writings. Yet in all three of the example just given we find at least two out of the usual three found in this genre of love writing: love; drama and the missing sacrifice or death.

ii. Homer Properly Read

The encounter of Odysseus and Nausicaä in the Sixth book of the Odyssey is one of the most delicately described meetings between the seasoned hero of the Odyssey and a beautiful, intelligent, but very young maiden. The goddess Athena had half prepared it, and some subsequent authors have wondered why it did not flourish, but Homer kept a tight grip over the structure of his epic poem and would not suffer distractions from the evolution of his plot as it moved towards its dénoument. It marks, however, the crossing point from Odysseus’ adventures in the company of mythical creatures to his return to the world of humans. This transition would not have gone smoothly if his supplication to the maiden who unexpectedly saw him appear before her semi-nude had not worked. That it did so was because of the brilliant way our hero formulated his plea for leniency and help.

This first hurdle faced by the famous castaway was not an easy one to overcome. This was because in the ancient world supplication was a serious matter and had to follow a prearranged formula if it were to have a chance of success. Thus, it was not complete until the supplicant actually touched the supplicated1person’s knees or chin. Once this was done, the moral and religious pressure put on the latter to grant and observe the supplicant’s request was considerable. Supplication is twice involved in the Iliad – Themis to Zeus and Priam to Achilles – and twice in the Odyssey – by Odysseus to Nausicaä (in an informal form) and Odysseus towards Arête and Alcinous. Aeschylus and Euripides also wrote plays with the title of Suppliants.

In ancient Greek history, two cases of a breach of the rights of suppliants acquired a certain notoriety. The first concerned the coup of Cylon, an aristocrat and Olympic Games winner, intended to overturn the Athenian regime in the mid-6th century BC. The coup failed and the rebels sought refuge in Athena’s temple. They were subsequently offered the chance of a fair trial in exchange for giving themselves up. For reasons which need not be discussed here, Cylon escaped but his followers were stoned to death by the Athenians. Herodotus and Thucydides give different accounts of the details (Herod. v. 70-1; Thuc. 1. 126). The second event involved Pausanias, the Spartan General who won the final and decisive Battle of Platea against the Persians in 479 BC. His subsequent behaviour, never entirely clarified, suggested that he was attempting to negotiate various deals with Persia. He left his hometown but after a peripatetic life returned willingly in exchange for a fair trial. Hard evidence against him, however, was not available and rumours began to circulate that the Spartans had decided to assassinate him. He thus sought refuge in a temple, to which his compatriots responded by sealing him in and, essentially, starving him to death. The incident played a dominant role in the diplomatic propaganda of the Spartans and Athenians on the eve of the Peloponnesian War (Thuc. 1. 128.1; 130–35.1.). So, how supplication was practised and what occurred if the promises given to the supplicants were not observed were matters closely regulated both by tradition and religion.

To understand how suave and cunning Odysseus was we must remember that the first meeting with Nausicaä took place on the beach of Phaeacia. Though already beautified by Athena, we must not forget that as he appeared from behind the bushes (where he had spent his first night after his shipwreck beautifully described in Book 5 of the Odyssey) Odysseus was totally nude, barely covered only by branches. Not surprisingly, such a picture sent Nausicaä’s attendants scuttling in all directions; but the princess stood her ground (despite the implicit danger in such circumstances, that she could have been raped by this unknown, wild-looking stranger).2 Rape, however, was not on Odysseus’ mind but supplication. Yet, supplication, as we observed above, involved touching at least the knee of the supplicated person if not his or her chin.

Yet how could such a gesture take place, in view of what has just been said about his nakedness? Could words, alone, assist our hero to get a helpful welcome? It could be possible if they could lull the supplicated person into a state of calm reasoning and this could be achieved only if the words used were not deceiving and projected the supplicant’s intentions were meritorious and presented in a calm and well-reasoned manner. Odysseus was superb with words and he achieved this near impossible task. A few selected extracts from Professor Robert Fagles’ translation3 may help reveal how shrewdly his words were chosen to calm and not frighten the young girl:

"Here I am at your mercy, princess

Are you a goddess or a mortal?

If one of the gods, who rule the skies up there, you’re Artemis…4

The daughter of mighty Zeus … just look

At your build, your bearing, your lithe flowing grace …

But if you are one of the mortals, living here on earth,

Three times blest are your father, your queenly mother …

But he is the one more blest than all other men alive, that man,

Who sways you with gifts and leads you home, his bride

I look at you and a sense of wonder takes me."

Mr Jones, a contemporary Homerist, who is one of those who have spent time commenting on the shrewdness of this speech,5 is right in stressing that every word, every phrase, every sentence is first and foremost intended to reassure the maiden that the nude stranger who has appeared from nowhere will not harm her. But it is the words used and images generated by them which help achieve this ultimate aim which is to supplicate without going through the required – strict – formalities linked with supplication.

Linking Nausicaä to Artemis was thus not just a compliment for the reasons given in the italicised part of the extracts of the poem. It is of great symbolic value since she was the goddess of virginity. Praising the young girl’s family also suggested that the visitor valued close family ties. The reference to her (future?) husband is a masterly coup through which the stranger makes clear that he does not know if she is married or not but has no intention of interfering with such a possibility. This, again, implies his respect for marital status. The verbal coup de grace, however, in this onslaught of courtesy and style comes with Odysseus using the word wonder, not desire, let alone lust, to express the emotion Nausicaä provokes in him.

That this is, indeed, a brilliantly successful verbal (and, thus, unusual) supplication is proved by the fact that at the end of it Nausicaä instantly promises to help him in any way she can, which she and her family actually do.

Second, ingenious though this ‘introductory’ speech is, it is by no means the only example of Odyssean diplomacy. Another such diplomatically phrased speech – this time explaining to a mistress why he wants to leave her – is his refusal of Kalypso’s almost irresistible offer to keep him on her island.

This, too, is notable for avoiding perfectly natural words which, however, might have hurt the sensibilities of the abandoned and easily offended Kalypso, thus proving once again Odysseus’ ability not only to create relationships with different women in a civilised and friendly manner but also to terminate them in a diplomatic way.

Neither of these points deserves to be ignored when trying to understand Odysseus’ character. Above all, what must be noticed and appreciated is his modus operandi; for his words, how they were chosen, and how they were strung together, say much about how Homer fashioned his hero’s image through the speech he gave him. The latter’s strength thus does not lie in a remarkable physical height, as with Ajax, nor in startling good looks as with Achilles, but in his ability with words. At the same time, it is worth reminding the reader that Homer kept a tight grip over the structure of his plot, all the more amazing given how the Odyssey took its final shape in layers over a long period of time.

iii. Homer Misrepresented by Art

The success of Jean Veber,6 who painted the picture reproduced at the beginning of the Essay must be noted and admired for, unlike most other artists who handled this topic, he remained scrupulously close to the Homeric text. He thus recreated on canvas by paint and brush what Homer had expressed through words on parchment or, later, papyrus. By contrast, the painting of William McGregor Paxton (1867–1941), appearing just above, cannot, in my view, be regarded as a first, nor even, a second or third class painting. Given this assessment, the reader may wonder why then did I include this painting in this work? This author offers explanations below which can be summed up in one sentence: the newer interpretation of the scene

totally misdescribed a famous incident in Homeric mythology. In the absence of a title or subtitle, the newcomer to it will not be able to place it among the list of moving ancient myths. Thus:

First, its departure from the Homeric story is so blatant that one must wonder whether it might even be described as a painting that deceives. Might is here a keyword and I stress it since one can find no implication that the artist intentionally set out to deceive his viewers.

Second, what appears on this canvas bears no resemblance to Homer’s narrative in Book six. Most notably, Nausicaä’s girl servants all seem to be present and not to have scuttled away fearing for their lives or that they might be raped. This would have been the likely reaction of young girls finding, at that time, themselves on a deserted beach suddenly faced with the appearance of an unshaven, aggressive-looking, semi-nude muscular man.7

Third, in the Homeric poem, Odysseus appears gingerly from behind a bush under which he spent his first night on the island of the Peace whereas in this painting, he is painted behind a distant rock almost giving the impression that he is a peeping tom.

Finally, and most importantly, the Paxton painting totally omits the supplication theme and the main difficulty Odysseus had to face, namely his inability to follow the established procedure. The Odyssey, in fact, shows in its text how the polytropos – the man of many turns – adventurer found a way around the difficulty through the skilful use of well-chosen words. I say, nothing of the fact that at the centre of this American composition we have an incongruous group of dancing nudes. How can one explain the artist radical deviation from such a classical narrative?

One explanation is that though he may have heard of the incident in his lifetime he may never have actually read the Homeric text. 8A more redeeming explanation is that he had read it in a hurry and so failed to realise that every detail was included in the scene for a purpose. A variant of this explanation might be that he read his Homer but had forgotten the details given by the time he painted the picture. The last and most charitable explanation would be that he did not set out to paint this first crucial meeting between a polytropos hero and an intelligent and beautiful young girl, but just to treat the story as an indirect inspiration for offering his very personal take of the encounter, which brings us back to why is he making the prancing nudes the centre of his picture.

The only mildly plausible explanation is to begin the presentation of this highly romantic encounter – possibly the first recorded instance of unrequited love in antiquity – in upbeat erotic tones. If this possibility crossed his mind it would, in my view, represent a serious misunderstanding of Homer as a poet. For Homer is restrained, uninterested in describing in any detail passionate encounters or painting erotic scenes with words. Indeed, the reader of the Odyssey will be impressed how this episode of unrequited love is recorded with the uttermost of restraint and a total absence of any explanation as to why it was never further developed in the poem.

But to return to Homer’s understated descriptions of love. Thus, seven years of cohabitation with Kalypso leave us only with hints that the sexual encounters which she seeks so passionately, Odysseus merely puts up with; indeed, by the end of his stay on the island sex between the two has ceased altogether since the nymph no longer excited him.9

His first night in bed with Penelope after a 20-year separation is likewise related as a matter of fact and has even led a well-known (female) English Homerist to describe it as “disappointing” because of its total lack of passion.10

What (partially) redeems the preceding description can be found in Book 23 which contains the mutual recognition and reconciliation scene which reveals to us husband and wife both crying in each other’s arms and in which we find a uniquely beautiful simile which at the beginning applies to a man – Odysseus – but in its second part is extended to Penelope, a woman, the best explanation for this unusual syntactical composition being that Homer finally sees them as having become one person!11 But all this is charm, style and romance that is brief, understated and incompatible with allusions to sex, reinforced by a bunch of nude dancers, who might have moved an ageing Boucher but not the greatest poet of them all.

Supplication, widely unknown in modern Western cultures, is discussed in extenso by John Gould in Hiketeia, The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 93 (1973) pp. 74–103, a technical but worth-reading article.↩︎

Athena must again take the credit for this by easing Nausicaä’s fears (Bk. 66, pp.139-40).↩︎

Penguin Classics, lines 162 ff. My italics to emphasise the point I make in the text above.↩︎

The resemblance with Artemis is facilitated by stressing that Nausicaä was, like the athletic goddess, both tall and graceful, thus surpassing on both counts her attending girls (Bk. 6. 101–9).↩︎

Homer’s Odyssey (1988, repr. 1991) at p. 58. The book modestly conveys the impression that it is meant to assist students at finishing school exams and during early university years; yet it is admirably full of references on how Homer shapes characters with a few words (the theme of the present book), and always provides numerous references to his texts to support the points he is making (such as the few lines cited above). In my view, many a mature general reader and not only the youngsters he rightly sets out to inspire will benefit by reading Mr Jones’ assembled thoughts. The only drawback I see in his book is that it is set out in the form of notes to another colleague’s translation of the 24 books of the Odyssey.↩︎

For most of his life, Veber (1864–1928) chose to make his reputation as a caricaturist. For instance, his caricature of Bismarck, presented as a bloodstained butcher, caused quite a stir at that time, when the French had no reason to be nourishing good feelings for their great neighbours. Nowadays, however, Veber is beginning to be noticed as a talented artist.↩︎

At the time, this fear would have been wide spread and the source of danger would be from passing vessels that saw unprotected young maidens playing on the beach or, more typically, pirates.↩︎

The Odysseus/Nausicaä encounter is described by Homer in great detail in Rhapsody ζ, verses 110-254 (or in the Fagles translation of the Odyssey, Penguin Classics, Bk 6, verses 139–280).↩︎

Od. Bk. 5, 154–5 (original version).↩︎

Od. Bk. 23, 343 ff. Edith Hall, The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer’s Odyssey, I. B, Tauris, (2012), at p. 189. Thus, its modern non-Greek poets such as Borges and Neruda who have fanaticised about Odysseus’ loves; but that is another story.↩︎

The key lines are found in Fagles’ Odyssey, Bk 23, 259–63 and 269–273.↩︎

10

Art Softening Cruel Greek Myths: An Essay in Imagination

i. Preliminary Observations on Two Interrelated Canvases

The eternal influence of Greek ideas is not only due to the fact that they explore the perennial problems which humans encounter in their lives; nor have they been studied simply because they were written in a style which is both succinct and full of meaning which is rarely imposed by the poet but the readers must discover for themselves. The continuing influence ancient Greek ideas exercise is perennial largely because the Greeks were able to use words to paint pictures. This idea was, indeed, repeatedly articulated by Simonides of Ceos1 – and unavoidably was destined to stimulate the imagination of great painters. In the absence of vibrant literature, the images of these myths would have been lost. If an example is needed to support this observation the reader can cast his mind to the endless works on Aphrodite and ensured her immortality. Astarte, her Phoenician predecessor, never enjoyed similar support and thus, to most of our contemporaries, she remains almost totally unknown.

The myth which fascinated many artists, Titian including, was that of Diana (Artemis) and Actaeon. Like most Greek myths, at any rate in their original phase, it recounts a cruel story. Similarly, like most myths, it came down to us in different versions. Finally, if one extends the study of its facts somewhat – which I will attempt here very briefly for the sake of relative completeness of the discussion of the illustrations this story presents – we will find an amazing coincidence. For the story involves one of two first cousins – Actaeon and Pentheus. They are the sons of two sisters – Autonoe and Agave – daughters of the founder of Thebes King Cadmus.2 Both princes insulted (different) gods and both died cruel deaths. Greek gods, often being utterly unforgiving, it mattered not that the first intruder innocently into the goddess’ privacy while the second prince was intentionally persecuting his god.3 Both cousins thus died awful deaths, providing a common moral to their two stories: it is dangerous for humans to offend their gods. What follows requires a preliminary warning.

Our discussion here deals with the reproduction of the myths – written or oral; what does matter is that though their plots were externalised in words, in this essay we shall encounter them repeated but also modified through paintings. When judging paintings, however, it is essential that the critic judges not just in moral terms but also, if not mainly, on the basis of aesthetic criteria. Aesthetic criteria cannot only change as we move across time and geographical space; they can also differ from moral canons of judgment. At times, however, the changed views of a society can also dictate to art what course it should take. This happened throughout the ages though the evolution towards new positions was never quick. Two famous paintings, according to one view intended to be sold as a pair to King Phillip II of Spain, each of them ended up with a different fate. What changed their (alleged) pre-destined common path has never been clarified; here we shall attempt to solve this mystery by proposing one if not two plausible answers.

ii. The Principal Painting

Originally, in ancient Greek art – for instance in the depiction on vases – Artemis (Diana in Latin) did not quite get the exposure reserved for her brother, Apollo. Early depictions portrayed her as stiff and not particularly appealing or sociable. From about the 3rd century BC, however, her ruthless character and self-centred behaviour took centre stage in paintings, especially those showing the way she punished Actaeon. The original Greek myth had Diana killing Actaeon because he had boasted that he was a better hunter than she was. According to the later Ovidian version, Actaeon accidentally strayed in a dense forest and saw Diana in the nude. Diana became agitated not having easy access to her bow and arrows to kill the intruder so, instead, she splashed his eyes with water and blinded him so that he could never boast of having seen her naked, and then turned him into a stag, upon which he was mauled by his own hunting hounds. This was a cruel reaction by this goddess, but as the readers of the Hippolytus – an early Euripidean masterpiece – will recall, that in that play the goddess showed the same lack of human warmth even towards Hippolytus who was a shy and immature young man but utterly devoted to her.

In art, of the two versions of the story recounting Actaeon’s death, the Ovidian version gripped the artists’ imagination, possible because it revealed the goddess’s lack of self-control. 4This is because she did not hesitate to kill the young hunter simply because he accidentally entered the wood where she was enjoying a quiet moment with her maidens near its stream. Indeed, the way the goddess first blinded him and then transformed him into a deer to be devoured by his own hounds, fully reveals the cruel streak of the goddess who was also the goddess of virginity.

The original of the earlier paintings by Titian5is owned by the National Galleries of London and Scotland. For some reason, they are not (easily) made available to authors to reproduce. Here we were forced to reprint a version of the painting housed in Knol House in Kent though the degree of Titian’s own involvement in this version is not clear. 6

Other versions of this encounter of Diana and Actaeon have been painted by artists such as Rubens but in these later works, the atrocity of the incident was seriously played down. A Roman marble statue of ancient Greek bronze, now housed in the Louvre, is an exquisite piece known as the Artemis of Versailles, shows that Artemis need not always be depicted killing stags but also caressing them. By the end of the 18th century Thomas Gainsborough, in the one and only painting he did of a mythical story, depicted the Actaeon incident. Yet, again, there is no sign on the canvas of his hounds attacking his transformed body and all that is discernible – not more – on the left side of the painting is the minute figure of a man crawling on the ground, with barely visible antlers sporting from his forehead. Four words are deliberately italicised in my text, above, to show that the ferocity of the incident is played down so much so that art critics have wondered whether the painting is a finished sketch. If the above is plausible, the diminutive depiction of Actaeon may be seen as concealing an unexpressed decision by more modern artists to make Actaeon fade out of the picture and even its title.

A second explanation for the unfinished nature of the Gainsborough has been to link it to this artist’s style foreshadowing Impressionist techniques. In my respectful view, the second interpretation carries little conviction since, if any English painter can be regarded as a forerunner of the Impressionist movement, it must be Turner and not (the much earlier in time) Gainsborough.

This leaves us with the first argument as an explanation for the almost unnoticeable inclusion of Actaeon in the picture. To me, this explanation suggests, first an uncanny resemblance with the fate reserved to the Titian original second painting namely, an unfinished, unsold, or unwanted picture, finally left abandoned and unclaimed as if the artist was distancing himself from it and known as the Death of Actaeon. We shall return to the strange fate reserved to this canvas which some have always regarded as a ‘pair’ of the first one – Diana and Actaeon. Whatever may be the true explanation for depicting the unwanted intruder blurred and in minuscule size, the final result conforms with the pattern which began at the end of the 16th century namely, the famous encounter with the goddess still attracting the imagination of the artists but its depiction steadily being softened.

Certainly, by the middle of the 19th century, we see this tendency firmly confirmed in a painting by Camille Corot. This painting is entitled Diana Surprised in Her Bath which means that by now Actaeon’s name has also been banished from the name of the canvas.

Corot’s version is a Constable-like landscape, in vivid green colours, – unusual, given Corot’s partiality for shades of greys and silvers – and the only way that the Actaeon myth can even pass briefly through the viewer’s mind is – again – the diminutive figure of a hunter shown in the right-hand middle ground strolling peacefully through the woods totally unthreatened. And even this association will be a fleeting one, reserved for the cognoscenti of ancient Greek myths unless they are able to notice another minute figure, this time on the distant

left-hand side of the painting, where a faint sketch of a semi-transformed human with antlers may be noticed by those with excellent eyesight. In this painting, the cruel aspects of the myth are, quite literally, diminished given how Corot made Actaeon almost invisible.

Let us then return to the original of Diana and Actaeon which was sold and delivered to King Phillip of Spain in 1559. The large canvas of the original – 184.5 cm x 202.2 cm in size – was painted by Titian and represents the most influential illustration of Actaeon unfortunate appearance onto the scene. Its composition displays a dynamic arrangement of the eight figures (including a barely visible black slave close to the left side of the goddess) in sparkling light and intense colour. Yet Actaeon’s intrusion is visibly innocent for he looks lost and is not even looking in Diana’s direction. Most certainly, he is also not displaying any signs of aggression, as his own bow and arrows are lying at his feet clearly suggesting the young hunter sense of surprise. The only hint of imminent disaster, and that only for those who already know the Ovidian version of the myth is indicated in this picture by the skull of a stag placed on a nearby stone pedestal, as well as some animal pelts. Experts have argued that this is Titian’s hint of what will follow in the story; but that is a supposition likely to be shared only by those who know the contents of the proposed sequel, which, at that time, had not even begun. So, if we wish to pay so much attention to this minor feature of the canvas why cannot we argue that this is an old trophy of the goddess who after all, was the goddess of hunt?

The accepted view of linking the delivered painting with the undelivered – at best still at its imagined stage – draws its force from the letter Titian wrote to the King of Spain in 1559, where he mentioned he could offer to sell to the King a pair7 of canvases, even though the second, apparently believed by some experts to have been the Death of Actaeon, was not even begun until the middle of the 1860s. So, for someone not knowing the myth, the canvas actually delivered in 1589 could have easily been entitled, a chance encounter in the woods and seen this would have stirred nothing more than the admiration of its creator’s mastery of his art. Since most of the versions of the infamous encounter that follow Titian’s first painting, tend to suppress this unnecessary explosion of aggressiveness by the oversensitive goddess the existence of the first and delivered painting would have caused no controversy. Which attracted the attention of important art historians. Before we glance at them briefly and offer our views on them let, first, appreciate that even the first Titian painting of the Actaeon incident, taken on its own, can invite us to speculate on a number of issues.

Leaving cruelty aside – which is not explicitly shown in this first picture – the percipient viewer or the astute teacher should thus not fail to draw to the attention of viewers or students to the many other (sub) themes of the myth, especially picked out in the first Titian version. Thus, one could consider the themes of: (i) nakedness, chastity and virginity as judged in antiquity, the Renaissance and nowadays; (ii) the attraction of the countryside versus large conurbations. This figures in many important paintings of Titian, such as his Bacchus and Ariadne, and it had been an important theme during the Alexandrine period as the preferred site where the telling of stories should unfold; (iii) the importance of human privacy, especially in public places, and how should its violations should be punished, if at all, and by whom.

iii. The Painting Which Was Never Delivered to the King Revives the Actaeon Controversy

The rumoured, from the mid-1560s existence of a sequel to the Actaeon saga, thus stirred academic waters. Here I shall look at two issues. First, what prevented this picture from being united or reunited with the one delivered to the King of Spain in 1589? Second, why was the painting kept secret, never sold to anyone and found only in Titian’s atelier upon his death?

In the first question, I use the words united or re-united. The second term might be appropriate if we were to take the view that from the outset this second picture had been envisaged as a pair of Diana and Actaeon with its title the Death of Actaeon, in essence, competing the telling of the drama began in the first painting. I have already explained why I tend to subscribe to the view that the sold pair consisted of Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto, and even if there had been some misunderstanding in the correspondence between Titian (who wrote in Italian) and the King (who always wrote

in Spanish), the latter seemed entirely reconciled with the fact that he got the Callisto painting which was duly exhibited in his palace.

Once the gradual emergence of the second Actaeon painting began and – presumably through rumours – its existence began to be known, why was there no move from either side – King or artist – to complete the original deal – if, indeed, there had been such a deal – have the second painting delivered to Spain? Sheila Hale, in her superb biography of Titian, offers a number of possible explanations for the lack of any initiative to delivery of this second painting to Madrid.

First, the political climate in the 1570s was more depressed and sad due to geopolitical events, which had been calmer when the whole commissioning of paintings from the King of Spain was first discussed.8 Second, by the 1570s Phillip was, himself, deeply embroiled in a worsening war in the Netherlands while his State was steadily leaning towards bankruptcy because of the cost of the protracted war hostilities. Thirdly, the artist seemed to be slowly running out of steam as he was approaching his 80s. Indeed, the unfinished painting shown above has suggested that much of it may not have been coming from Titian’s own hand, as rumours at that time insisted was the case about other of Titian’s works. In the canvas that concerns us, for instance, Diana’s head is widely believed to have come from a disciple working in Titian’s studio. Actaeon’s blinding and transformation is also not depicted as resulting from the hurling of water in his eyes but being shot by her bow which, incidentally, in this picture is not strung! This is not compatible with Ovid’s account which otherwise served as the inspiration for this – or these – paintings. Diana is also fully dressed whereas in the immediate preceding canvas – Diana and Actaeon – she is totally nude as, indeed, she was described by Ovid. Finally, fourthly, her size in the second picture seems far too big if her body is compared to the size, which the rules of proportion would dictate when seen against the semi-transformed Actaeon slightly further back on her right-hand side. All in all, as Hale thus suggests, “the dark and violent subject matter of Titian’s paintings from the 1570s reflects a change in outlook so profound that it surely transcended the calamities of the times”.

So let us move to my second point: why was the painting not ‘finished’ or painted and delivered to someone else? Titian was an artist with a keen eye for beautiful women9 as much as making money out of his art! Such ‘inactivity’ on his part to miss getting paid for a work that was nearly ready for sale cannot thus be left unexplained if, indeed, it was – in his eyes – nearly ready to leave his studio.

Yet, it would seem, that no effort was even made to sell it. So could it be that Titian was beginning to have doubts as to how to complete the canvas, assuming he still wanted to see it as depicting the logical sequel of the subject matter of the first? If respected art historians such as Sheila Hale chose to treat the story as unresolved or hanging in the air, can an amateur step forward and try to fill the gap? If we accept – and not all would – that both in classics but also in art there is room for amateurs to make their contribution – slight no doubt in the eyes of the professionals but bona fide – then the answer must be ‘yes’, and in my respectful opinion the explanation lies in the fact that by the end of the 16th century, and certainly by the mid-17th century, a certain move was gaining pace favouring a softening of the characters and the narratives of stories inherited from the ancient worlds of both of Greece and Rome.

This shift in morality or official aesthetics can be found formulated mainly by the great literati of French theatre from the mid-17th century onwards though even earlier, sages such as Montaigne, had shifted thinking towards greater tolerance and modesty. Thoughts such as these affected the fairly radical surgery performed by the French classical thinkers and playwrights of the 17th and 18th century to the Greek plays they adapted for the French stage; it is also reflected in the sudden dislike taken of ancient heroines such as Hecuba and Medea, and it could have well-found expression in the dislike Baroque and newer artists took in the Actaeon story. Utilising this broader kind of reasoning may strike some as too far-fetched; yet it presents the additional advantage of explaining to us why Titian may have refused to sell it to anyone who would willing to pay him a reasonable fee. For it bears repeating, that Titian was very ‘greedy’ when it came to money and to keep a canvass in his atelier gathering dust could not have appeared to be a financially prudent move.

Reviewing all these diverse signs one is thus left wondering whether Titian had not – could not? – finally, decide how to explain the different impressions created by the first and second accounts of the myth. Doubt might have thus gripped his mind as to whether the second painting should be made public, impairing if not destroying the image of the more laid-back posture of the goddess found in the first of the so-called pair. After all, most of his clients, accustomed in purchasing his endless reclining nudes, would have loved the Diana and Actaeon scene but felt attracted by the depiction of a more energetic, muscular if not even masculine, image of a huntress, cruelly murdering an innocent passer-by.

My view, as a lover of the art and French theatre of the 17th and 18th centuries, is thus that the emergence of a trend to opt for a less brutal presentation of ancient Greek myths and stories was now appealing to societies, which were becoming less keen to hang in their living rooms pictures showing moments of unjustified brutality. Indeed, I would go further and suggest that in the centuries that followed the ‘West’ as a whole was repaying the ‘East’ for bequeathing its imaginative myths to it by artistically smoothing their ages to fit it in with a change in the aesthetic demands of a new era. It is against this background that perhaps one can best explain the stripping of Racine of the Hippolytus psychological problems of both the young man and Phaedra ad the transformation of the story more into a straightforward story of romantic rivalry and disappointment.

This trend slowly gained ground as Europe moved towards an exuberant and fun seeking Baroque, a more humane and more liberal enlightenment or, later still, towards a romantic 19th century, when the original barbarity of Greek myths was losing its original appeal in France as well as Germany10 Orestes’ matricide had to be condemned;11 Medea’s infanticide should follow the same path;12 while Hecuba’s perceived revenge mania had to wait for at least three centuries before what she did to Polymestor came to be seen as an act both courageous and understandable of a good Queen harshly treated by fate.13 The same move away from harsh and brutal images can be seen in the depiction of famous religious scenes such as for instance Saint John the Baptist holding, his decapitated head, under his arm (even though Titian himself painted this scene in his early youth.

Though Titian comes somewhat earlier in this ‘softening’ process, my suspicion is that being the genius he was he may well have sensed these changes occurring in the general European climate coming, encouraging playwrights as well as other artists to reconsider their hostile views towards some of the most famous tragic heroes of antiquity such as Hecuba, Medea and Orestes.

Is it thus so utterly inconceivable that in his old age Titian was beginning to sense this approach of this change in aesthetic mood? Feeling old, one may thus imagine him feeling that the easiest way to resolve his Actaeon dilemma would be to leave the second unfinished painting lying unclaimed in his atelier? To me, it almost reminds one of a father who is no longer keen to show off one of his children, and it is even interesting to note that a German published books printing a large number of Titian’s coloured paintings to do not even include the Death of Actaeon in their selection.14 Had he been younger, and still as energetic as he had been in his youth, he might have, alternatively, gone down the path that Rubens, Gainsborough and Corot took and just allowed Actaeon to fade out of his picture as originally sketched.

So we return to the view most keenly argued by Sir Claude Phillips that the pair of paintings sold to Phillip in 1589 did not include the two parts of the Actaeon drama (but the Callisto painting), and, if that is so, the need to reconcile the differing tone of the two versions and the non-delivery of the second painting becomes less pressing. If this explanation is accepted it could then be taken to mean that all Titian completed for Phillip II was the first and milder version of the Actaeon drama and that he was thus, in effect, one of the first who, after some unresolved dithering, decided to leave for posterity only his earlier, completed and ‘softer’ version of the cruel myth. If that were to be widely accepted, it would only…

Simonides of Ceos expressed the idea I find so attractive with the usual brevity of Ancient Greek poets: “The word is the image of things”. Related to this idea is another: “Painting is silent poetry. Poetry is painting that speaks.” Both cited by Sir Maurice Bowra, Greek Lyric Poetry: From Alcman to Simmonides, 2nd ed. (1961), at p. 363.↩︎

Cadmus was also the man who introduced the Phoenician alphabet – consisting of consonants only – to Greece, leaving it to the locals to add vowels and make their language one of the most agile and expressive ever invented.↩︎

I recast Pentheus’ story and behaviour in a sociological and psychological setting in my attempt to offer a differing interpretation of The Bacchae from the one usually encountered in most of the published monographs. Thus, see my Euripides in Macedonia – Psychological Problems in Ancient Greek Tragedies, published by Bicester Press Ltd on behalf of the Alumni Association of the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki (2017).↩︎

Metamorphoses, Bk. 3, trans. by David Raeburn, Penguin Books (2004), pp. 99–104. It will be remembered that in the original Greek version Acteon’s boast was an intentional statement whereas in the Ovidian version he innocently strayed into Diana’s private space triggering her excessively harsh reaction.↩︎

Books about Titian and his work are a legion but among the most interesting, thorough and well written I would include Sheila Hale’s Titian: His Life and the Golden Age of Venice, Harper Press (2012). The title of the earlier painting was Diana and Actaeon; that of chronologically later and possibly unfinished one was the Death of Actaeon.↩︎

It is also darker than the National Gallery version, possibly because it may have never been properly cleaned for a darker hue of old paintings was often cause by a thick layer of the original varnish.↩︎

In his beautifully illustrated book on Titian (2006) Sir Claude Phillips argues (at p. 253) that Titian, in his letter of 22nd September, 1559 promised the King the “dispatch of the companion pieces of Diana and Callisto and Diana and Actaeon…” both painted and completed by 1559. So if this is the correct pair of (offered) paintings, the Death of Actaeon was not even part of the pair and, indeed, was not even begun until 1565 (See op. cit., above, at p. 183). If this version of event is accurate, then the second episode of the Actaeon drama was thus never part of the promised pictures, and this might even explain why the so-called sequel is not even reproduced in all picture books dealing with Titian’s most famous works. See, for instance, Ian Kennedy’s Titian, (2006). In practice, the effort to reconcile the different styles of the two Actaeon paintings becomes meaningless.↩︎

Hale in Titian, op. cit. at p. 689 gives succinctly the catalogue of disasters that clouded Venetian skies and souls at that time. As we shall note later in the text, the mood in Spain was not much better.↩︎

Sarah Dunant’s In the Company of the Courtesan (2006) describes the important role courtesans, who figure so prominent in artists’ paintings, played in Venice’s glittering and darker settings. Though a novel, as its author rightly admits (p. 363) the Rome and Venice it describes are “deeply rooted in research”.↩︎

This is no place to overburden a brief text with detailed references but we can see this transformation progressively championed by the great intellectual writers of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, by such luminaries as Racine, Corneille and Voltaire in France or the Schlegel brothers in Germany. Indeed, this softening of approach is evident not only in their adaptations of Greek tragedies but also in the books and pamphlets which they wrote about the French Theatre.↩︎

Though Voltaire did this in the most awkward of ways, e.g. Clytemnestra is killed because she fell in the way of her son’s sword as she was trying to save her paramour Aegisthus from being killed. See his Orestes, trans. by William F. Fleming, Wilder Publications (2011), pp. 4 et seq. and scene VIII.↩︎

Electra’s Matricide was also condemned (indirectly) by Pierre Corneille in his darkest of plays – which he, however, regarded as his best Rodogune. Princesse des Parthes, Gallimard, Folio Théâtre, with an excellent introduction by Professor Jean Serroy (2004) and even more severely in his Writings on the Theatre, ed. by H. T. Barnwell, Basil Blackwell Oxford, (1965) pp. 48–9.↩︎

Before she and, indeed, Euripides, came back into favour largely as a result of the writings of Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Griechische Tragödien, 3, vols., Berlin (1904–6 ), an eminent 19th century German polymath who was always willing to assist young English students and dons seeking his help, and his English counterpart and friend, Gilbert Murray, for decades Regius Professor at Oxford and Chairman of the League of Nations, who single-handedly re-habilitated the reputation of Euripides in England, first through his monograph Euripides and his Age, London, Williams and Norgate (1913) (Forgotten Books photographic reproduction) and then through his sensitive translations of many of the playwright’s tragedies which were admired by British literati of the stature of Bernard Shaw. I have reviewed some of these issues for the benefit of Greek-speaking readers in my Greek book The Legacy of Ancient Greek Tragedy to European Culture, I. Sideris, Publishers. (2013), pp. 380 et seq., especially, pp. 392–409.↩︎

Of course, one can counter-argue that the omission was justified on grounds of space; yet even unfinished this picture has so often been discussed it still invites some discussion as to why it was altogether omitted from the books Ian Kennedy’s on Titian cited earlier one. Make, once again, Titian to stand out as a pioneer in aesthetic fashions.↩︎

11

A Poet’s and an Artist’s View on Loneliness

i. Life of an Unusual Artist1

Outside Russia, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel’s paintings are not as well known, as are those of that country’s superb 19th century’s portraitists such as Valentin Serov. But his painting of Lermontov’s Sitting Demon, 2the chief character of the mid-19th century poem – and a handful of other accompanying copies or variants on that poem – brought to wider attention within Russia the growing unease of its citizens about the choices that lay before them. Decisions, at a moment of national turmoil, are not easy; and this ‘confusion’ gained pace from the moment Czar Alexander II emancipated the serfs in 1861 and the long but inevitable road began towards the Revolution of 1917 which in most respects surpassed in its far-reaching consequences the earlier French Revolution of 1789. Thus, since the Sitting Demon was painted in 1890, to be followed in 1902 by the Down-Cast Demon, Vrubel’s Demons literally seized and never relinquished the entire country’s imagination as Russian writing, arts and politics in general, went into a frenzied search for the Nation’s ideals and where they should be discovered: In Western or Eastern culture? Germanic or Slav ethnicity? Western philosophy or the Russian Orthodox faith? Finally, was a liberal form of government realistically achievable in a large and ethnically diverse nation or was authoritarianism the only way to keep it together? No sooner did the country even begin to think about these alternatives they, as their demon, seemed to touch heaven, then crash to earth if not into hell. To put this idea in religious terms, the slightest contact with God led to denying Him, and with the denial came the anguish of unrealised faith.

The uncertainty and confusion sketched above really took a grip of Russia as the turn of the 20th century approached, foreshadowing the approaching political explosion. At the same time, the artist’s aforementioned masterpieces multiplied as – tragically – his own mental instability grew. His character began to change, and by 1902, a serious nervous breakdown, possibly accelerated by his own tertiary syphilis, took place. By 1905, he was nearly totally blind. Nature was literally destroying an innovative artist.3 His work slowly ground to a halt; he became permanently hospitalised in mental institutions, and one last great work in the Art Nouveau style – the Oyster of 1904 – echoed the dying inner voice; but even death was cruel to him, dragging out his misery until 1910.

This mixture of personal and national ambivalence described above was the central theme of Lermontov’s poem – the Demon, which inspired Vrubel’s widely discussed major work of his later life. These feelings are captured in the Demon’s facial expression and hunched physical posture. In Wikipedia, this author, like others, has often found a modern and quick reference work. Less frequently, but by no means rarely, he has also come across ideas condensed into meaningful passages. The following lines, from a very short entry on Vrubel, deserve special praise for they are very compact but also contain well-calibrated characterisation both of the painting and its creator. Thus, we read, “He [the Demon] appears at once passive, introverted, proud and solitary. His body shows contrasting masculinity and femininity with his long hair and indolent gaze.”

As mental decay, slowly at first and faster later, took hold of his mind and body Vrubel’s character became volatile and inscrutable. In one sense, the first ten years of the 20th century represented the peak of his creativity, but they also mark the beginning of the acceleration of the destruction of his nervous system. So, from this period, we have masterpieces inspired by Russian folklore stories such as the Snow Princess (1900), a veritable symphony of light blues and white, and his slightly earlier, disturbing, but also philosophically problematic painting: the Death of Pan (1899).4

In each of these two works, the source of inspiration was quite clearly defined; but that was not always the case with most of his other paintings. Critics and art historians have variously described his work as belonging to the Symbolist school, Art Nouveau, even Cubism; but Vrubel never adopted any of these terms, which this author as a layman finds neither clear but also confusing that in the relevant literature the one term often seems to slide into the other.

For some commentators, a clearer guide could be found in his early work when he spent some five years working as a restorer of icons at the 12th century Church of Saint Cyril in Kiev. To meet this challenge, he moved for a time to Venice to consult earlier examples of Byzantine art in Venice and Ravenna and, apparently, he made some copies for himself. Unfortunately, however, before returning to Russia, he destroyed them on the grounds that he was not interested in preserving his work but only in its creative process.

This loss is to be regretted for only from these early paintings could we have determined with certainty the form and extent this influence took. In its absence, however, the present author suspects that the words ‘influence’ and ‘inspiration’ are mentioned but they cannot be convincingly proven to be substantial. His Six-Winged is sometimes said to invoke Byzantine influences; but if they in my view present, they are faint,5 at any rate, if compared with some of the best-known examples of Byzantine works, which can still be seen in these two important Italian cities Vrubel visited in his youth. In any event, his Seraph painting is, in my view, more typical of his symbolist views than any other artistic movement.

His Descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles of 1885, reproduced in splendid colour at pages 30 and 31 Mikhaïl Guerman’s book (cited at the very beginning of this essay) as well as Maria Peitcheva’s book,6 supports my doubts that his overtly ‘Byzantine’ icons draw their style from Byzantine iconography rather than its later evolution in late Medieval Italy or Kiev. Indeed, at page 26 of his magisterial work Mikhaïl Guerman contains a cryptic – in my view – statement (in French) in which he states, “That while in Venice [Vrubel] became more preoccupied by the Renaissance than the Byzantine art.” I read this as supporting my above-mentioned view and, indeed, a scrutiny of the depicted Apostles does not reveal some of the most typical features of Byzantine iconography; for they are different individuals and do not look at all alike, or stand upright next to each other, as Byzantine tradition demanded. They are also (fairly) three dimensional, painted with shadows, none of the above being typical features of Byzantine painting. This is progress but, again, it is something, which is not found in classical Byzantine iconography. Finally, some of the Apostles are also, in part, painted in bright if not luminous colours as is – again – the case of The Six-Winged Seraph even though such colouring would not be recognised – subject to my caveat expressed above – in the Byzantine tradition where austerity and conservatism were the bywords of the slow evolution of Byzantine art which, for most of its classical phase, was not interested in producing religious paintings but icons.

So, whatever the original inspiration, Vrubel is asserting in his 1885 ‘appearance of the Holy Spirit’ his character and, more importantly, his conception of the path Russian painting should be taking as it moves closer to establishing its own identity. This, indeed, becomes even more obvious in his Six-Winged Seraph which appears some 20 years later, seems inspired by Isaiah 6: 1–8 and many art historians and critics placed in Vrubel’s symbolist phase.

However, one of the problems of trying to link Vrubel with a particular school or artistic tradition is that he himself would refuse to be so pigeonholed. Thus, critics have even identified in his later works traces of Persian influence, especially in the colouring. So, the best one can propose to the reader is to try to familiarise himself with this artist’s work by glancing at representative samples many of which have been collected in monochrome or coloured books of varying sizes.7

The Six-Winged Seraph,8 composed in 1904 while Vrubel was hospitalised in Moscow, deserves closer attention not only because of its importance to symbolists – to whose movement Vrubel belonged for a time, but also because of its use of an amazing combination of dark greens and blues, with touches of red scattered around the golden crown of the Seraph. How impressive this colouring is, becomes instantly obvious to the viewer from the reproduction shown above.

Yet, behind this beautiful if strange image lurks an important but dark Pushkin poem of 1826 entitled The Prophet. In it, we find a theme, which gripped Russians, writers and artists alike, throughout the 19th century. This movement treated artists of all kinds as mediators between the world one perceives through one’s senses and another world, which one understands only intuitively. So, according to this poem, man is struggling, lost in the desert where he can neither see nor hear nor speak the truth. So, when the Seraph approaches him, he removes his heart and replaces it with a burning piece of coal which suddenly ‘fires him up’ enables him to see and understand the world around him, and is now expected to spread God’s word.

Vrubel’s pictures, however, were not only colourful in the very literal sense of the word used above; the survival of many of his pencil drawings or aquarelle sketch reveals a considerable talent in sophisticated drafting. Since in the absence of colour, movement is the major if not the sole way of attracting the attention of the viewer, these ‘lesser’ works deserve careful attention to be paid on lines depicting movement

Among them, I would include and urge my readers to track down and judge for themselves Vrubel’s Rider galloping in pursuit of a deer, drawn in 1891. I insist on this sketch not only because it captures perfectly the gallop of the horse but also because it can provoke more than admiration for the artist’s ability to include much detail in a remarkably free-flowing sketch, but this little gem of a sketch can take viewers with easily excitable imaginations much further, something that always makes a work of art more interesting to study.

For instance, the present author tried to imagine the said sketch with the addition of a small child clinging to the rider’s chest. Such an addition, if well executed, could end up being the ideal pictorial expression of, for example, Geothe’s Earl König poem. Such a combination of drawing with words, enjoyed while simultaneously listening to Franz Schubert’s divine music, offers, especially to imaginative minds, a uniquely rich sensation of varied images reaching the brain through the eyes as well as the ears; a combination which truly brings to life Goethe’s galloping father, desperately trying to prevent Death snatching his boy from his arms.

In the case of the Sitting Demon, this inter-connectivity of various forms of image-generation arises because the painting so closely reflects the contents and feelings generated by Lermontov’s 9poem, composed largely while the poet was doing his military service at the Caucasus. In this poem, the poet thus managed to give a portrait of evil, which is not only romantic but also tragic for in struggling to become good it fails since evil cannot escape from itself and must remain condemned to its loneliness.

If the poem is, as I suggested, tragic in its main message, in abstract terms it is also revealing of something much closer to our earthly politics. I hinted already at what this is: the loneliness experienced by most of life’s true leaders – political, economic, military, good or bad – at the moment when they have to make highly significant decisions. So let us pause for a moment on the lonely moments of the leader’s life and explore how this comes across in this and related paintings of Vrubel.

The portrait reproduced at the beginning of this essay displays both the characteristics I just alluded to, namely the romantic and the confused. The male strength, expressed by the Demon’s arm muscles combined with the almost weeping feminine face provides much of the romantic impression generated by the picture. Taken out of the context of the poem, which gave birth to it, the portrait could easily be mistaken for that of a beautiful young Greek god, alone and confused, in a way that does not befit his status and foreshadows his fall. The Archangel of Light experienced such a fall, and though in Hell he is repulsive, as Εωσφόρος – Lucifer, his name in his prime – he was – indeed as Baudelaire10described him: “the most beautiful of angels”: "le plus beau des Anges". His original name, at least, exuded the blinding effect of bright light, and in its association of images far exceeded the appeal of names such as Raphael or Gabriel.

Loneliness can stem from many causes and one, in particular, may deserve a closer look since it may be relevant to understanding not only the position of Satan but also of those who find themselves in all kinds of positions of authority. For Satan is not just a ‘baddie,’ he is also a leader. He tells us this himself,11 not being ashamed that his kingdom is Hell. And – Hell – as, indeed, the enemy camp, Heaven – are, both environments which are hierarchically structured: what matters in them is thus loyalty and obedience rather than friendship or love. Since both these ‘settings’ – Heaven and Hell – can be seen as power-centres, involved in an ongoing power struggle, this overall description of what happens there rings true in many modern settings, such as modern corporate environments where the ‘life expectancy’ of those near the top can be very short. We see all this in numerous literary depictions of the Devil12and they reveal at least two common threads: first, his ambiguous character and second his tormenting feeling of loneliness before taking a decision or after taking the wrong one.

Yet we can also imagine the above feeling dominating the minds of the occupants of Downing Street or, come to that, the Hôtel Matignon, or the White House, since one suspects all of the above have felt this way, perhaps with the Head of State, Parliament, or Congress are also breathing down their necks while a large section of the media daily degrades their standing. But there is more that adds to the agony, and the source of this anxiety emanates from their so-called friends and not their opponents. Does this sound odd?

If one is to judge from history books, political autobiographies, or informed articles appearing in respected political journals, the occupants of all high posts are forced to earn constantly the loyalty and obedience of their subordinates by threatening them, cajoling them and, even, deceiving them. This endless game of deception is necessary to keep up the morale and confidence of their own friends and subordinates, even when they, as leaders, know that things are not going well and the circumstances do not warrant optimism. Maintaining this gap between reality and desirability is mentally and psychologically draining as anyone who has had to go through such motions can attest. Deception thus becomes endemic in political life, and, I repeat, this kind of deception is as necessary as it is truly difficult to effect successfully unless the leader is also a consummate liar! Perhaps, because loyalty and obedience are so rarely found in this world, their absence is so severely punished in the other.

This emphasis on almost unbearable loneliness and sense of confusion13is what this painting was taken to embody. Whether or not we, its modern viewers, agree with this impression, the fact is that to these two paintings Vrubel owes his wider fame precisely because they came to represent the confusion which the bulk of the Russians felt about the choices that lay before them as well as the consequences each would entail.

Trying to Do Good and Forced by Nature to Do Harm

Lermontov became known as the Byron of Russia not only because he was an excellent romantic poet but also because he shared the eccentric character and, to some extent, the wild life style of his English predecessor. Before dying young he served in the army in the Caucasus (as did in later years Vrubel) and left us with some splendid water colours of his own of this beautiful mountainous region which captures its own special light.

It is in the Caucasus in fact that the love story of the Demon takes place. As he is flying aimlessly around the world – see the photograph above where the head is not easy to discern immediately – he spots down on earth Princess Tamara. Readers of Milton’s Paradise Lost will recall that nothing gave Satan so much cause for grief as the sudden sight of Adam and Eve embracing each other in their bower in the Garden of Eden. The Demon’s burning desire was to kiss her but, as Andrey Sinyavsky, put it succinctly:

“Remember what happened to the Demon? He fell in love with Tamara that divine beauty incarnated in a ravishing woman, and decided to believe in God. But as soon as he kissed Tamara she died, killed by his touch. She was taken from him, and he was once more alone and in his anguished unbelief.”

His grief and loneliness are caught beautifully in the following lines of the poem.

"The melancholy Demon winged

His way above the sinful earth

And memories of happier days

About his exiled spirit thronged;

Of days when in the halls of light

He shone among the angels bright;14

When he had known both faith and love,

The happy firstling of creation!

When neither doubt nor dark damnation

Had whelmed him with the bitterness

Of fruitless exile year by year,

And when so much, so much…but this

Was more than memory could bear.

Outcast long since, he wandered lone,

Having no place to call his own,

Through the dull desert of the world

While age on age about him swirled,

Minute on minute – all the same.

Prince of this world – which he held cheap

He scattered tares among the wheat…

A joyless task without remission,

Void of excitement, opposition –

Evil itself to him seemed tame."

Sinyavsky, again, moves the story from poetry into a wonderful summing up of Russian society at the turn of the 20th century by telling us:

“For a century, this was also the story of Russian culture, which had been passed by the Demon… Russia went into a frenzied search for an ideal, and no sooner did she touch heaven, than she fell. The slightest contact with God led to denying Him, and with the denial came the anguish of unrealised faith.”

Vrubel’s three principal different paintings of the Demon – and many copied versions of them – turned a romantic dream into a poet’s nightmare. By doing so, he gained immortality for the poem given that, as stated, it captured the dilemmas facing an entire society at a moment of historic changes. So, in his paintings, he did not deceive but, in fact, foresaw the immediate future, a future of prolonged and deep uncertainty which is always found when one world is dying but the new one has not yet quite emerged.

What Lermontov and Vrubel did not foresee nor could have foreseen is how, after initial tergiversations, the new order which took over the life of the Russians was to use art as a way to get a hold over their minds; how art, in the early years of the Lenin’s rule, was essentially seen as a branch of education to reduce the high levels of illiteracy and begin inspiring the improvement of citizens’ minds, and how the dream turned into a nightmare as Stalin’s dominance grew.

This first assessment of the role of art in society was courageous and fitted in well with Lenin’s pragmatism, but after his death, the gradual consolidation of Stalin’s power was to change radically the use to which art in all its forms could be put. Socialist Realism beginning to take off by the end of the 1920s, and was officially launched in 1934 when the state effectively took over managing the minds, thoughts and ideas of artists. This was a development much worse than the time-honoured practice of censorship of thoughts and ideas already externalised. Now artists – and I am using the term in the widest possible sense to include writers, pictorial artists, architects and even composers – had to think, imagine, write, compose and paint in the way the state thought was best suited to the creation of the new way of life which communism had introduced into Russia.

The result was not universally approved: indeed, on moral and aesthetic grounds, it got more than its fair share of criticism. I italicise the word more not in order to justify its authoritarian streak but to accept the fact that a radically new system of governance needed its own culture and this had to be – at least in part – a new culture. Its consolidation, however, depended on constant propaganda, and the observance of its newly laid down principles officially announced in 1934 was what brought true hardship to the artists who could not conform to the rigid party dictates. Those who could not adapt were thus quite simply silenced. Propaganda, not art, became part of education, and art itself suffered. The West objected, then criticised, then damned the new system. But as Igor Golomstock rightly observed in his monumental work entitled Totalitarian Art:

“In a totalitarian system, art performs the function of transforming the raw material of dry ideology into the fuel of images and myths intended for general consumption. The precise nature of the raw material – whether it is the cult of the Führer or of the leader, dogmas of race or of a class, laws of nature or of history – is of no importance than whether one uses beet or wheat when distilling alcohol: the raw material lends a specific flavour to a final product which is, in essence, identical: the means of preparation (totalitarian aesthetics) and the technology of production (totalitarian organisation) turn out to be equally similar.”15

As we shall note towards the end of the next essay, this new philosophy significantly lowered the standards of Russian literature and art, though isolated exceptions did survive. Yet, despite strong condemnation, many of the ideas of this Soviet policy – above all, telling artists and consumers of art how to think – were gradually adopted in the post-World War II period even Western Societies with the gradual use of art to promote not just the interests of the state but those of particular sections of society who shared a common cause, common beliefs, complaints or dreams.

This newer tendency to enforce uniformity of thinking and expression may not be as authoritarian as was the Soviet version of the 30s and 40s and at least part of the 50s. People have not been banished, tortured or exterminated for failing to follow the newer fads. In practice, however, how one thinks and what one writes can be controlled in an as unbending a manner as the Western democratic background can tolerate when stretched to its limits, and the new reformers, though quick to demand tolerance towards their beliefs, were and remain slow in showing it towards the creeds of their opponents. For, like Milton’s Satan and Lermontov’s Demon, however, earnest and good they may be in their intentions to spread their ideas, they cannot, in the end, escape the fact that they are prisoners of their own extremism.16

ii. Postscript. Serov and Vrubel: A Sketch of Two Friends in Parallel

Serov and Vrubel were contemporaries and friends; they studied together, and both dreamt together of “steering new courses in art”. 17.Then, suddenly, the second of the two was stirred into action by the inexplicable urge that often takes control of the soul of a potential genius and impetuously pushed him to branch out on his own and leave his existing circle. Reading about him, one suspects that there was an element of restlessness deep inside him, which condemned him to constant shifts in search of the right way to express himself artistically. His unwillingness to include himself in any particular school of the painting may have been linked to this artistic – I would even venture the risk of being wildly wrong and use the words psychological volatility. Combined with his later but developing neuroses these two attributes may have led to a form of permanent isolation, the kind his Demon must have also felt and this may well be one of the reasons, which enabled him to convey so well this feeling in the facial expression of his greatest creation.

The germ of genius was in Vrubel: his work attests to this, but geniuses also seem to suffer from self-destructive urges. This weakness did not affect his colleague and friend Serov; nor did the latter suffer from the neuroses, which affected his friend and destroyed him so cruelly during the last years of his life. So Vrubel, while he could have remained ‘flighty’, moving from one artistic style to another though not, as already stated, managing to express on canvas his own ambivalence until he expressed it in his Sitting Demon, capturing at the same time his Nation’s agonies for the next 20 or 30 years. There were some sequels to the Demon but nothing as nation-shattering as that solitary painting. Of course, there were other good works at the turn of the century, and it is just possible that by studying them carefully one can divine the particular mood he was in when painting each of them. Compare, for instance, his portraits of the White Princess and the Death of Pan, the themes, the colours used, the light and darkness each of these great paintings project, all give clues as to his state of mind, and they were not the same when he was painting each of these paintings.

Serov, by contrast, did not flit like a butterfly from topic to topic and from one artistic fashion to another, though he kept a watchful eye on the rapid changes occurring in the Russian artistic scene of the first two decades of the 20th century and often borrowed new ideas. What truly puzzled him was something very different.

Agonised, not just puzzled. This occurred when he was painting his important portraits, the domain of painting to which he left his greatest legacy; for what concerned him was not “the outward appearance [of the face of the person he was about to paint] which is often unprepossessing, but…the characterisation it can be given on canvas”. “The search for traits worthy of portrayal is what inspired him and even carried him away.”18 So, unlike Vrubel, who was flitting from one artistic school to another in search of artistic innovation, Serov was keen to learn, willing to adopt new techniques and was in a constantly happy disposition. Above all, however, he was steady.

Steady versus restless would thus be the words I would choose to distinguish their characters for, in my respectful view, in the final analysis ‘character’ is what enabled the one to find fulfilment and deprived the other of the wider recognition which his undoubted talent cried out for.

Serov’s system, method, patience and a contented temperament made him steadier in his progression towards greatness. As stated, this did not mean that Serov was not willing to adopt ideas, theoretical and practical, in his chosen vocation; it just led him to adopt the techniques he thought would best fit the subject he was painting. Here then, is another observation which can be tested for its veracity for it does not seem to have been stressed adequately by those more learned than the present author when reviewing Serov’s work placing much – too much – emphasis on when a work was painted.

Looking at the bulk of his work, one notices his experimentations with artistic techniques. Bold brush strokes, use of colours and looseness in execution appear most frequently in his landscapes, including those which also feature animals meandering in the background. The subject matter here seems to be a more important matter than when the work was painted.

His Overgrown Pond in Domotkanovo, where he spent some time in 188819 – now exhibited in the Tretyakov – is an amazing symphony of greens depicting cold looking, stagnant waters surrounded by wild vegetation. No attempt here to ‘cover’ the brush strokes, as was once the fashion; indeed, the play of light on the water in the lower foreground of his canvas, suggests a boldness of strokes that would be very rare in classical painting. In other landscapes, however, such as his Bathing a Horse, painted in 1905 and now in the Russian Museum of St Petersburg, free strokes dominate the entire canvas and do so even more in an ‘ethereal’ or ‘impalpable’ way – I can think of no better words for the impression the painting makes on my mind – of about the same time entitled Horses on the Seashore where the freestyle approach goes, I feel, even beyond the limits of Russian Impressionism.

Serov, might allow a similar degree of artistic ‘informality’ in some portraits – such as those of his two children, Sasha and Yura, of 1899 – also in the St Petersburg Museum20– but never when it came to the portraits of his important clients from whom he earned his living and on whose success his growing reputation depended.

Among them is the beautiful Princess Olga Orlova (of 1911) whose enigmatic look, magnificent nonchalance, well-groomed pedigree dominates her beautiful face sheltered by an enormous hat. But as Sarabyanov once again21 observes, “the fixed pose characteristic even in its casualness” was “arrived at after long experimentation and repeated changes”.22 The same can be said of his wonderful portrait of a calmly confident Prince Yusopov on horseback painted in 1903 – the portrait that opened the doors to Russia’s most senior aristocrats.

While Serov was using in parallel his different painting techniques for different kinds of clients – for instance, he was very keen to paint actors and opera singers, his friend Vrubel was taking originality in painting to its limits in some of the canvases which we noted above, such as the White Princess or the Death of Pan, to which I would add the six-winged Seraph. The colouration in all three is wondrous.

Note also, for instance, the way he produced the shadows under his eyes in a famous self-portrait of the early nineteen hundreds by means of numerous, tiny, untidy, little pencil strokes which make no sense when looked at closely but work perfectly when admired from a distance.

But the innovative impulses of a genius can take the artist too far by going further than his society can really stomach. This may break rather than make the artist so possessed, and this excitement that sometimes accompanies innovative zeal can become dangerous if it coincides – as, alas, it did in Vrubel’s case – with his growing mental illness which from about 1905 onwards put him entirely hors de combat.

In the preceding paragraphs, I have argued that a brilliant man like Vrubel never quite achieved his full potential. This may be due largely to the increasing hold his mental illness took on his mind and body; yet, his character also played no small part a long-lasting impact on Russian painting, but if I am wrong in this speculation, the reader will have to discover himself what prevented Vrubel from fulfilling his undoubted potential. To say that nature treats humans who philosophically are born equal unequally is not an easily acceptable answer. Indeed, in my view, it is downright unfair.

The most readable book on Vrubel I have come across is Mikhaïl Guerman’s Mikhaïl Vroubel: L’Annonciateur des temps nouveaux, Ėditions Parkston, Bournemouth/Ėdition Aurora, Saint Pétersbourg (1996). A thought-provoking text runs throughout the book parallel to beautifully produced, mostly coloured pictures, though all this comes at a price. To minimise this drawback, I have thus also cited below smaller and less expensive books which will also give the interested reader many samples of his work which must be consulted as often as possible to demonstrate to the reader the originality, if not at times eccentricity, of his work.↩︎

Now in the Tretyakov Gallery of Moscow.↩︎

This destruction of his perception and thus his work must have come in stages as his many self-portraits suggest, on page 64, for instance, of Maria Peitcheva’s, Mikhail Vrubel: 170 Coloured Plates, (2016), we find a pencil self-portrait which reveals a very handsome if slightly sad-looking artist. The same year – 1905 – saw another self-portrait, essentially revealing the same handsome man but a close up of the way he has drawn the shadows under his eyes reveals an immense number of apparently untidy pencil strokes which, seen from a distance, however, do not appear disturbing. Earlier still, self-portraits – reproduced on page 54 of the aforementioned book – show him having blotted out his right eye while the left one reveals an agonised expression, a drawing of his which to me suggests some kind of serious mental disturbance.↩︎

One of the only two gods of the ancient world who ever died; the other was Asclepius. Plutarch, De defecto Oracolorum, The Obsolescence of Oracles, 5, 17 of Moralia, Loeb Library No. 306.↩︎

I would, however, qualify my statement for looking at the mainly small golden and red pallet strokes around the Seraphs head one’s mind can be led to the multi-coloured small stones which form a Byzantine mosaic.↩︎

Mikhail Vrubel: 170 Colour Plates (2016) at pp.11–13.↩︎

For a monochrome collection of drawings and paintings, see Maria Tsaneva’s Vrubel: 116 Paintings and Drawings, Printed in Poland by Amazon Fulfillment in (2015). Coloured versions can be found in Maria Peitcheva’s Mikhail Vrubel: 170 Colour Plates (Amazon Printing 2016).↩︎

In the Christian and Jewish religions, a Seraph is a heavenly being who, in the first religious tradition is placed in the highest rank of the angelic hierarchy while in the second they are placed in the fifth the term describes six-winged beings that are the caretakers of God’s throne, flying around it and constantly, singing “holy, holy, holy” which in Greek is known as the Trisagion. They are often held to come under the supervision of Gabriel so, to that extent, the chief Archangels – Gabriel and Raphael may stand above the Seraphs. In hierarchical terms, cherubs form the lowest rank of angels. These heavenly creatures appear frequently in works of theology, literature and art. This bird’s eye view of the hierarchical nature of the Christian structure is widely criticised in Milton’s Paradise Lost – partly because he associates it also with the Catholic Church and the Royal Court and partly to explain why Lucifer finally cannot stand it and rebels.↩︎

Mikhail Lermontov is widely considered the greatest Russian poet, next to Pushkin. He was also the father of modern Russian prose, a poet, a painter, a rebellious aristocrat, introspective, mercurial, arrogant, brave, charming, yet at times also deeply cruel. In his literary work, he was largely influenced by international literature but especially Byron, whom in many ways he held up as his model.

References to his principal works, such as his poem Death of the Poet, which openly blamed the Russian establishment for Pushkin’s death and catapulted him to celebrity status overnight, or analysis of his prose masterpiece A Hero of Our Time, or his romantic poem The Demon, are bound to be crass, even if undertaken by a true expert, let alone an ordinary lawyer who has simply read them. Yet one thing can be said with certainty and that is that without understanding his highly complex personality one cannot appreciate the huge impact his work had on all subsequent Russian literature. That is because, by being a “lost soul” himself, he represented in his work the same kind of confusion experienced by his fellow countrymen, confusion as they sleepwalked towards a huge social upheaval. Decades of inactivity on the part of the Russian establishment allowed the steam of social resentment to gather and finally explode in 1917.↩︎

Charles Baudelaire, « Les Litanies du Satan »: in Les Fleurs du Mal, Auguste Ponler-Malassis, Paris (1857).↩︎

“Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven,” Milton, Paradise Lost, I. 263. Compare this with Achilles’ statement to Odysseus when, during the latter’s homecoming voyage, they meet in Hell: “By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man – /some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive – /than rule down here over all the breathless dead” (The Odyssey, XI 555-8, Penguin Classic, English translation by Robert Fagles).↩︎

Milton’s Satan, Goethe’s Faust and Bulgakov’s Woland, from his Master and Margarita offer good illustrations.↩︎

Milton provides us with an excellent illustration of this just after the end of the famous “What though the field be lost?” speech. For, just a few lines further down – I, 125-6 – he concludes: “So spake th’Apostate Angel, though in pain, Vaunting aloud, but rackt with deep despare.” Likewise, before the famous Nymphates speech, he is described as being in “Horror and doubt” and full of “troubled thoughts:” IV. 19-20. For more, see A. J. A. Waldock “Satan and the Technique of Degradation” in Paradise Lost and Its Critics (1947).↩︎

Here, of course, we have an allusion to his old name: Lucifer.↩︎

In the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy and the People’s Republic of China (1990), p. xii.↩︎

Milton, again, phrases the core idea beautifully when he makes Satan lament “Which way I fly is Hell, myself am Hell”: IV, 75.↩︎

Dmitry Sarabyanov, Valentin Serov: The First Master of Russia Painting, (1996) at p. 8. Sarabyanov’s learned introduction to the above tome prompted the idea of a quick sketch in parallel in search of an explanation why the first of these two friends remained a ‘classic’ while the second did not quite fulfil his potential as a genius.↩︎

The words within inverted commas come from Dmitri Sarabyanov’s introduction to his book Valentin Serov: The First Master of Russian Painting (1996) p. 47 though the italics are mine. The reason I stress them so much is because they reveal the moment that his artistic creativity was at its height. But I also stress them because they are relevant for the reader to understand what fired Serov’s imagination but also because his ideas tie in well with the points I make in the conclusions – below – where I stress that the psychological relationship that is built between artist and sitter is crucial for the success of the portrait as well as the understanding of the final product.↩︎

Reproduced on p. 16 of the Sarabyanov book.↩︎

Reproduced as picture no 55 in the Sarabyanov book. Likewise see the portrait of his wife Olga Fiodorovna Trubnikova reproduced as No. 7 in the above-mentioned book. What interests me is not so much that this is an unfinished portrait but the bold brush strokes used by the artist in what could be described informal portraits.↩︎

Op. cit., at p. 52.↩︎

To appreciate the points made in the text above about the posture – “casual fixed pose”: the italicised words, which represent the artist’s instructions are almost a contradiction – one must see the full portrait and not just concentrate, as is usual, on photos reproducing only her beautiful face and impressive hat. Attention should thus be focused on her left leg, informally crossed over her right leg, or her long fingers, wrapped around her necklace, with one pointing at her long neck. See picture no. 78 of the said book.↩︎

12

State Defined Deception: A New Dogma for the Arts 1

i. Preliminary Thoughts on the Russian Approach

In literature, the challenge of making ‘good’ believable and even appealing is not easy given that, in general terms, it is easier to understand bad or weak or even identify with such people. Some great authors of the West managed to make their heroes both grand and (just about) believable by addressing their human qualities and rounding off the edges of their heroic attributes. Nineteenth-century Russian literature added the ‘human factor’ to the characters it created even though this sometimes meant stressing their ‘bad’ features. Emphasis on the evil human motives of a character, such as greed, ambition, lust, single-mindedness and even selfishness made them interesting. At the same time, they avoided the portrayal of pure goodness, which makes a self-consciously perfect character seem too austere and remote. Linking the characters’ beliefs and motives to those of their creators and their times also made them seem real and appealing. This approach strikes me as archetypally Russian and without exact equivalents in Western European art.

Historically, Russian literature allowed humanity and the environment to affect the goodness and badness of its characters in two different ways: by creating in the 19th century the superfluous man – flawed and human – and in the Soviet era, from the end of the 1920s, by inventing the positive hero, designed to be as near-perfect and iconic as the times required but who, from a literary point of view, was often wooden and formulaic. How good or bad these characters were will be the main theme of this essay, but first, the contrast between these two ‘models’ should be stressed by providing a few thoughts about the situation in the 19th century.

The term superfluous man was popularised in Turgenev’s Diary of a Superfluous Man but the character type goes back to the earlier part of the 19th century when the newly emergent Russian intelligentsia tried to acclimatise their native soil to foreign ideas. The ‘superfluous man’ reflects the difficulties and dilemmas of the prolonged attempt to ‘Europeanise Russia,’ an attempt that had been forcefully initiated by Peter the Great.

Russian writers were forced to seek new allies to act as ‘intermediaries’ in their attempt to speak on behalf of these new ideas. This task was further complicated by another challenge, namely that presented to society by the growing pressure to end serfdom. This double challenge led the intelligentsia to transform itself into the vanguard of the emerging national life, but adapting to it was not easy. As Professor Seeley expressed this dilemma:2

“The Russian intelligentsia (…) was in the unhappy position of experiencing both sets of stresses simultaneously since the impact of European culture became effective in Russia at the very time when the feudal order was beginning to break up.”

These sets of opposites generated a clash between foreign and home, old and new, cultures, and the writers, as well as the characters they created, reflect the multiple stresses of this need to acclimatise to the new generation. This led to creativity, originality, loneliness, unhappiness and, invariably, failure in the social and political arena of the real world. In the literary world, however, it accounted for the creation of some of the greatest characters of Russian and, indeed, world literature: good and bad, but also real, reflecting all these qualities and emotions. This approach did not produce one type but followed an evolutionary pattern, going through three phases.

First came the dandies or aesthetes.3 This phase is characterised by worship of the self. Wit, superficiality, charm, inhibition of emotions, latent femininity, detachment, but also, in a moment of crisis, ultimate submission to the convention. Are these good or bad features? Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin is the archetype of this character, a character in search of a role in society. His search was doomed to failure as the political and social climates were not yet right and he is left having destroyed his own happiness as well as the happiness of those around him. This, then, may not be a description of what is good or bad, but of what is real – or, more precisely – of failure in the real world.

The second form assumed by the superfluous man is arguably best found in Lermontov’s Pechorin4Here dandyism was replaced by a will to power; to control the wills and emotions of others, particularly women. It is combined with cruelty and a measure of fatalism. Pechorin, however, also has “a balanced and critical understanding of himself;” and, in keeping with the times (and the life of his creator), he “is a rebel, even though he may have no very clear idea of what he is rebelling against and has no idea at all of what he is rebelling for.”5 “Pechorin’s incapacity to love is matched by his craving to be loved,” and this makes him pursue power as a substitute for that which he cannot obtain. Professor Seeley concludes:6

“Pechorin represents the acme of the superfluous man of individualism, of vigour and bitterness and perhaps of emotional inhibition. In the 1840s the superfluous man moves through the cerebration of Rudin and the quietism of the defeated towards historical and moral insignificance.”

He is, of course, referring to Rudin, the protagonist of Turgenev’s On the Eve published in 1860 (and probably modelled largely on Turgenev himself and the famous 19th-century revolutionary figure Yevgeny Vassilyich Bakunin). In Rudin, however, we have a different model of the superfluous man, in keeping with Turgenev’s heroes who are no longer the products of a rich and idle society but the self-made, educated representatives of the emerging new order. The aesthetic and the volitional are now taken over by the cerebral, even intellectual. But, in keeping with the common feature of superfluity and failure, Rudin is equally doomed, though this time because of his inability to leave behind him his university idealism and adapt to the real world. Later, Bazarov, the central figure of Turgenev’s masterpiece Fathers and Sons, fails because he is too far ahead of his time; some have even described him as the first ‘positive hero,’ others as the first Bolshevik, who will, effectively, appear first somewhat faintly on the literary scene at the beginning of the 20th century and then more forcefully from the end of the 1920s on.

But to return to the superfluous man, what makes him and the literature devoted to him interesting, indeed moving, is his humanity. This confused humanity, despite its excesses, seems to me to represent the goodness of sorts. To begin with, the characters stem from the minds of authors who are, to say the least, themselves deeply troubled. Some are illegitimate (such as the critic and writer Aleksandr Ivanovich Herzen, not discussed here); others lost their parents and were brought up by distant relatives (Lermontov); yet another grew up unhappy in other people’s households (Pushkin), or suffered from a strong-willed, brutal and frustrated mother (Turgenev); some were sickly (if not seriously ill) (such as Dostoyevsky); most had clashes of some kind with the authorities (Dostoyevsky, again). They also travelled to Western Europe, and on the whole not only admired it but also liked it, but like all Russians, they felt homesick when outside the country they so often criticised.

These troubled authors produced troubled characters. As stated above, they were not (morally) bad, or at least not entirely bad, since they had redeeming features.; but they were mostly lost or, as Sir Isaiah Berlin put it rather charmingly in his Romanes Lectures delivered in Oxford in 1970,7 these ‘superfluous men’ became “the ancestor[s] of all the sympathetic, futile, ineffective talkers in Russian literature” – and one has to read Russian literature or meet Russian literati to appreciate how true this statement is.

The contrast of these qualities made them ambiguous, capable of different interpretations and, at times, tragic. They were thus not only real but also interesting, and they were both because they represented human beings battling to survive in a changing environment. Many of the agonies that haunted them are still haunting Russians and non-Russians as well. In their complexity, I think they help us understand better the shades of good and evil, and to the extent that they depict human life in its daily aspects, neither grand nor (in most cases) downright damnable, they not only show how politics and law underlie much of literature but also how in the depiction of the struggles of the ordinary man the world of literature can come not only closer to that of law but also make its characters believable by making them as mixed, ambiguous and confused as are the ones we find in law.

In the opposite model of Russian literature – the positive man – on whom this essay will focus, we find quite a different trend, one which aims to design the ideal (later in the sense of active) man but ends up with a creation which, in literary terms, has not been seen a success, at any rate in the eyes of most Western literary critics. Yet the importance of this movement, which begins in the mid-19th century with Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky’s hero Rakhmetov in the novel What is to be Done?, whose mixture of radical utilitarianism and heroic asceticism hugely appealed to both Populists and Marxists of the second half of the 19th century,8 reaches its turning point with Gorky’s Mother,9 the impact of which within Russia was substantial and long-lasting and gave his a special closeness even to such remote figures as Stalin.

ii. Another Form of Evil

Controlling or attempting to control other people’s thoughts is, one would have imagined, in the eyes of most humans, a serious evil. Artists of all kinds would be the first to stress their deep dislike of such an idea, and this is what led some of them during the Stalin and immediate post-Stalin era to accept the risk of smuggling their manuscripts abroad to be published. The Russian-educated French critic Hélène Peltier10 describes Andrei Donatovich Sinyavsky’s feelings after he started publishing his works abroad clandestinely:

“The possibility of writing without constraint taught him that freedom of conscience and of the word was not a luxury of an anarchist individualist, dangerous for the common good: (…) but a fundamental necessity of man and the condition of all individual social progress (…).”11

English prose writing dislikes the use of italics and exclamation marks; were it otherwise, I would have dared to place the entire citation in italics, especially the following words: “Freedom of conscience and of the word [is] not a luxury of an anarchist individualist … but a fundamental necessity of man.” It is this attempt to turn a virtue into something associated with anarchist individualism that urges me to condemn it outright.

Rather than stop at this point, however, it is necessary to go further and accept that controlling the mind of another person can be more oppressive than censuring the already published end-product of his thoughts. This, incidentally, must also entail disagreeing with those legal colleagues who, in their writings, may have implied that injuries to the mind may be less serious than those to the body as part and parcel of justifying the common law’s reluctance to treat mental injuries less generously than physical lacerations.

Human beings need to be encouraged to develop their own thinking and imaginative mental processes not only in order to fulfil their own potential but also in the interests of the society to which they belong. Controlling or restricting such thinking is likely to affect adversely the interests both of the individual and of society at large, and in the case of creative people, it must be soul-destroying to deny them the outlet, which their mental energy requires in order to express themselves as they see fit. Such control will only help reduce human beings to automata and remove one of those features, which most distinguish them from animals. Just as bad is the possibility of such control becoming the cause of diminished inventiveness and creativity in gifted people. A society which prevents its ‘specialists’ to shape their own ideas but allows uncultured bureaucrats to tell them how to write, what paint and what to compose is as good as dead. It is a tribute to intellectual Russian resilience that much originality survived, albeit mostly in hidden form.

Yet clearly, no one is objecting to advise, guidance and education from experts when the aim is to shape one’s ideas and not distort them in the direction untrained but doctrinaire bureaucrats wish to do in pursuit of their imposed political ideology. Our task is thus to determine the parameters beyond which intervention in human creativity, instead of being educational and useful, as open-minded instruction can be, becomes unproductive and even destructive if it stops free thinking. This is the point at which it may be necessary to start thinking of evil.

How far can one go in controlling human creativity? This may depend not only on the form of control or guidance taken but also on the extent of the interference as well as the sanctions prescribed for disobedience. ‘This is what I would do if I were in your position’ is very different from ‘you can only do this and nothing else, and if you do not obey me you will be severely punished’. The idea of proportionality may enter into such equations to determine the dividing line between permissible and impermissible.

For present purposes, just as important is to note the time in the thought process when the control is being exercised. Many reasons can be given to explain why the problem of defining what, in this context, is permissible and what becomes bad, or even evil, is not easily resolved. Here, we shall mention some of the difficulties under two headings.

Under the first heading, one must immediately clarify that externalised thought can be and is restrained in many legitimate ways, and that is where the law plays an important role. For even the greatest advocates of freedom of speech accept that there are occasions when limits should be placed on expression and speech. After all, no value, not even life itself, is inviolable under all circumstances. Killing in the course of a legitimate war or in self-defence may be tolerated (even if disliked by most). The difficulty is to determine when restrictions to free exercise of such rights can be allowed – a difficulty enormously enhanced by the fact that in law, the ways in which controlling expression and speech are achieved differ widely depending on which legal notion and in which legal system it is being invoked.

Thus, speech can be controlled in different ways and to differing extents depending upon whether the speech is treated as sedition, blasphemy, libel, or covered by the words hate speech or, race-related speech, or falls under the category of sex discrimination legislation. In all these instances, interference with speech may be legally allowed; the real question, however, lies in defining the limits of such interference in the rights of others.

Our problems do not stop there, for the fact remains that all the above-mentioned notions and legal concepts just happen to be understood differently by most legal systems. Politicians are known for stressing that they share common values with other leaders and other countries. Yet such formulations do not pay sufficient attention to the real differences that we encounter in different legal systems even when they are both referring to the legal notions such as for instance, defamation or free speech or privacy n their respective countries. This makes our task of comparing what precisely is allowed, tolerated, or punished more difficult to define with precision. So the fact that these days politicians and the media talk of common values, does not mean that these values are understood in the same well and equally well protected in all the countries of the Western world. The rich variations one finds in the legal systems of the world, even among those – for instance the USA and Canada – which exist in cultural and geographical proximity, clearly show how difficult it is to establish commonly accepted limits of permissible interference in key human values, including fully developed life, foetal life, thought, speech and human privacy. A discussion of all these variants would call for a different title than the one given to this sub-section. In the present instance, it would merely serve a limited purpose if only one of the torts or crimes mentioned above was chosen for closer treatment.

The second difficulty is that the control – certainly on the legal plane – is often exercised over one’s expressed speech, or to put it somewhat differently, the externalised thought, rather than over the internal process of thought-formations, i.e. before an idea has been shaped and well before it is externalised so as to reach the outside world. To put it differently, more often than not it is the externalised thought, which is controlled or punished by the legal system, less so the right to choose what one will think to paint, write, or compose before this decision has been externalised.

The lack of clear rules to control/prevent the latter kind of interference does not mean that it is any more acceptable; it merely suggests that, for various reasons (mostly practical), it is less regulated, and when it is regulated it is addressed by means of penalties which can lead the artistic creators who have violated them either become unemployable or even disappear without trace. But it is this type of interference that will be discussed here. For it is the stifling of the inner thinking process which in the bulk of cases halts human originality and leads to the sameness and intellectual sterility that I dislike most and which I regard as a form of evil.

Bulk of cases, however, was italicised to alert the reader to the fact that this mental interference with a writer’s or artist’s creativity can in some cases have the opposite result and force the oppressed to channel all his energy, all his imagination and all his mental strength into achieving exceptional feats. I thus keep stressing that even during the harshest days of Socialist Realism there were Russian writers or artists who continued to create while keeping their original works under wraps.

Of course, the two interferences – the one with the externalised thought and the other with the as yet unexpressed thought are inter-related. For, if what one writes or paints or composes is censured, banned, destroyed, or criminalised, the inner thinking process that created such works is also bound to be bruised and, even, over time, intimated into atrophy.12 Censorship, for instance, of the kind that societies have in one way or another known since their earliest existence, targets the already externalised expression though, indirectly, it also affects future thoughts and actions of creators, and it can do this in, broadly speaking, two ways.

Thus, it can either stifle all further productivity along the banned lines.13 What I just wrote was particularly true in Soviet Russia during the period of Stalinist repression though, at various times, we encountered the same phenomenon in other countries such as China, Chile, Cuba and South Africa to offer some examples. In such cases, however, lone spirits may choose not to publish their ideas at all, or give their creativity different outlets. There is a wider loss, however, in such cases; for if the creator is silenced, his ability to influence the lives of others in his community through his externalised thoughts will also disappear because of the after-effects that censorship and punishment create.

Alternatively, the repression of a creator’s inventiveness may force the creator to shift his talent to other – perhaps less satisfying or less well remunerated – fields of activity or prompt him to adopt a new ways of externalising his thoughts by means of allegories, irony, symbolism, coded writing, in this way hoping to deceive the censors. In the worst cases, however, he may be led to the conclusion that it is easier and safer for him to cancel or postpone indefinitely the publication of interesting ruminations or useful inventions and this will be tantamount to killing creativity altogether,14 besides depriving his communities of the benefit of his new ideas.

In an essay written in 1946, George Orwell expressed much of the above in the following manner:15

“The imaginative writer is unfree when he has to falsify his subjective feelings, which from his point of view are facts. He may distort and caricature reality in order to make his meaning clearer, but he cannot misrepresent the scenery of his own mind: he cannot say with any conviction that he likes what he dislikes, or believes what he disbelieves. If he is forced to do so, the only result is that his creative faculties dry up. (…) Even a single taboo can have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind because there is always the danger that any thought which is freely followed up may lead to the forbidden thought.”

One can only come to the conclusion that all of the above must be mentally exhausting for the ‘creator’ – artist or writer – quite apart from being offensive to, if not destructive of, his own sense of dignity and self-respect.

These are serious obstacles to any discussion of the evil that lies behind such abusive conduct, but they must be overcome. For, as stated, the repressive rules which stifle thought, censure, punish it, or try to channel it in a particular direction before it has been formed and externalised amount to an evil. Though censorship may also, indirectly, have this inhibiting effect, the systematic brainwashing as to what should be expressed, described and praised in the Soviet Union of the Stalinist period seems to me to be in a category of its own.

To make up for the scant and unsystematic material that deals with many of these issues we must look elsewhere for evidence that supports my worries. To the extent that it exists, it is found in the realm of constitutional law, politics, and the notion of the rule of law or, at a more specific level, statutes regulating educational matters. But for the pathology in this type of control, we have next to no legal rules in the way that we have for the cases where the already externalised thought is censured or punished. The relative paucity of legal rules on this topic does not, however, mean that no evil has been committed.

For the way thought can be dictated or pushed towards the direction willed by its controllers, we have to glean our information from psychiatry, history and, more precisely, the history of literature and art: how the human mind is conditioned and how the human mind can, eventually, be broken. From these sources, we shall also see the effects such controlling desires have on the creativity of individuals concerned, their mental piece, as well as on society as a whole.

The difficulties sketched in the preceding paragraphs have been laboured mainly because it is important to explain why, in this sub-section, we cannot follow the pattern of presentation of arguments adopted in the earlier ones and link, straight away, the general arguments expressed here with specific works or paintings of more classical or traditional times. To put it differently, this is an evil that can be understood only with some indirect help from law and, further down, with the help of some pictorial illustrations.

A new solution had to be devised to link the discussion of this evil with those discussed earlier on. And the besetting problem of this book, namely how to select a few examples sufficiently representative to justify wider propositions without turning this into an unmanageably large work, has to be addressed again.

From all these difficulties, I can only offer two ways out:

The first is to build my arguments around the Soviet literature that began to emerge from about 1927 onwards (when Stalin consolidated his power) and, in the concluding essay, discuss briefly how some of these traits of interfering with thought are appearing in our days in the context of interests concerning specified groups of individuals – for example, feminists, homosexuals, environmentalists and the like. This is not to condemn any of the above; only to make sure that in the pursuit of their respective worthy causes they do not entirely disregard the rights of those who do not share their views or aspirations.

The second way to look at these questions is to become specific and as good a way as any of doing this is by looking at George Orwell’s major works and seeing how literature has dealt with different aspects of the problem. Orwell was chosen because he began life being on the extreme left of the political spectrum and ended it very conscious of its hidden dangers. I also focus on Orwell because he is English and sometimes we pride ourselves on the belief that we have never flirted with such abominable techniques as flourished in the darkest days of Soviet Russia. Well, maybe this belief is not completely justified.

Interestingly, both of the approaches selected lead to the same result: control and perverse interference affect adversely intellectual creativity, make people unhappy, force them to abandon their profession, even make them social outcasts, and for all these reasons should be considered as a species of evil. In my opinion, both approaches confirm one theme among many found in the essays, which form this book’s sub-sections. This is that literature – and art more generally – reflects life and, in turn, this links us to politics, and the overall political ideology, which prevails in a particular society, and in these case the desire to influence thought is to deceive those who receive the products of this thought in the form of books, pictures or posters.

If these conclusions are correct, and the way of reaching them is not methodologically flawed, one must remain alert to the danger of such ‘thought control’ resurfacing in our lives even if in its ferocity it can, probably, never match that of the Soviet years, at any rate not in the so-called civilised world. We shall return to these themes briefly at the very end of this book in the chapter entitled, Concluding Thoughts.

iii. Soviet Literature from the Early 1930s Onwards

The relative freedom enjoyed by Russian writers and artists during the 19th century – relative, as censorship during that period could be harsh – was variously put to use as each author tried to position himself within the context of the social, economic and political changes that affected the country during that time. Indeed, as we have already noted, the authors’ understanding and portrayal of these issues came to perform an important social function by providing a forum for intellectual debate impossible in the political arena.

All this not only conferred upon Russian writers a social position and standing unequalled by writers in other European countries; it also helped attribute to them ‘prophetic’ qualities and, to an extent, enabled them to act as mediators between established and emerging thinking. This crucial point was stressed most clearly in an open letter, which Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinski addressed to Gogol as early as 15 July 1847. The critical section reads as follows16

“Only in literature, in spite of our Tartar censorship, there is still some life and forward movement. This is why the writer’s calling enjoys such respect among us. (…) The public (…) sees in Russian writers its only leaders, defenders and saviours from dark autocracy, orthodoxy and the national way of life (…).”

The Russian Revolution was to bring most of these habits and traditions to an end though this did not occur immediately under Lenin, but later during the Stalin years. Indeed, in the beginning, the role of the writer in helping to shape society was preserved until in 1932 Stalin, who fancied himself as being one of the literati, coined the chilly, mechanistic title of engineer of human souls leaving to others subsequently to define who would engineer the engineers. As Toby Clark rightly remarks in his readable Art and Propaganda in the Twentieth Century:17

“Lenin, more pragmatic and suspicious of avant-garde extremes, viewed the function of art as lying within the broader framework of education, for which tackling the illiteracy of 80 per cent of the population and the scarcity of basic technical skills were the real priorities.”

Official thinking, however, started to alter as changes began to appear on the industrial scene combined with the growing consolidation of power by Stalin. Professor Katerina Clark, in her essay, Little Heroes and Big Deeds: Literature Responds to the First Five-Year Plan, sets great store by the effect of the first forward leaps of industrialisation and collectivisation, especially during the years 1928–1931, on the shape literature took subsequently.

Society had to be remade though Stalin, thinking differently from Lenin, also felt that “the list of things to be changed [should] include not just the terrain, but also man himself. In keeping with the dominant industrial imagery, social institutions were seen as a sort of assembly line for retooling a human product and turning out the new Soviet man.”18

But thought, so intimately linked to one’s soul, was not shaped; it was tamed, indeed subdued, if not progressively totally repressed.19 This was not only because the regime began – in earnest from about the end of the mid-1920s – to impose its own philosophy. This timing was no coincidence for 1927 was the year that Stalin began to consolidate his power. His inclinations progressively were translated into state policy, and this involved the decision to prosecute those whose work he did not approve of.

More importantly, from about that time onwards, Stalin increasingly succeeded in making authors and poets write about people who possessed the features, which his new regime considered desirable. The era of the little man was about to be launched, eventually to be replaced from about the mid-1930s with an era anxious to create heroes or, rather, attribute to ordinary men and women the status of hero. The people of the Soviet Union, authors and the masses who had a great impact on the formers’ work, were clearly struggling to find a new identity suitable to the new times and, in the process – and apart from notable exceptions – plunging Soviet literature to its nadir.

The intention to create a progressive, middlebrow, or popular literature known as Socialist Realism was discussed at various informal meetings (some attended by Stalin himself) in the early 1930s. However bad the effects of this initiative may have been – and the theme of this and the previous sub-section was and remains that they were bad – the motives behind the idea were understandable. For, as Professor Clark has observed20

“The leadership of the time wanted to generate new literature to match the significance of the place they believed Marxism-Leninism occupied in the evolution of human thought. All previous systems had produced great literature, and it was time to show the world what Soviet communism could do.”

Its political roots were thus understandable as its realism was not something that sprang suddenly out of nowhere. Gorky’s21 novel Mother, a work with a social significance and revolutionary tendencies published in 1907–8 and constantly revised by him until the mid-1920s, would be regarded as a model for this school.

But though this movement was not without antecedents of its own, it found a fertile soil in which to take new root in the revolutionary zeal of the times; not entirely novel in its approach (few ideas or movements seem to be entirely without precursors in Russian history and culture), its ideological explanation and, even, justification, was now entering a new phase.

From the late 1920s onwards, the canons of invention and construction were thus no longer freely chosen (as, in the case of Gorky 25 or more years earlier); they were going to be imposed with growing ferocity. This meant a huge shift in the underlying concepts. For one was no longer talking in terms of what was good or bad in an aesthetic sense; one was henceforth only allowed to have one – official – understanding of what was good and what was evil. As Czeslaw Milosz observed in his introduction to the English translation of Sinyavsky’s On Socialist Realism22

“Unfortunately, Socrealism [this acoustically unattractive word is an abbreviation of Socialist Realism] is not merely a question of taste. It is a philosophy, too, and the cornerstone of official doctrine worked out in Stalin’s days. (…) The inferiority of poetry, novel, plays and pictures produced in accordance with this formula cannot be avoided, since reality, which is quite disagreeable, has to be passed over in silence in the name of an ideal, in the name of ought to be.”

The writers of the new era were thus asked – and eventually ordered – to be optimistic,23 exude happiness, write about socially relevant issues, find goodness in hard work and service to the nation and to refrain from themes offensive to the new order such as ideas coloured by the values of systems in competition with Communism (such as Christianity).24 The above may all sound as clearly defined commands but, in practice, they were not. Thus, when one writer felt he needed more guidance, he was simply told to write the truth. Since this hardly took matters much further, the Writers’ Union produced special leaflets for its members and even arranged for model authors to go on lecture tours to instruct the interested.25 The capsule formula offered by one (feared) official – A. A. Zhdanov26 – in 1934 was that Socialist Realism should pursue “a combination of the most matter-of-fact everyday reality with the most heroic prospects.” How one combines verisimilitude with the art of fabricating myths is, of course, another and arguably insoluble problem.

It would be too facile, however, to attribute this change of ideals, values and aims solely to the Communist Party’s growing grip over authors. Dobrenko has examined in great detail the interaction of author and reader in the emergence of the Socialist Realist texts and how the latter, in tune with the climate of the times, came to encourage the creation of such literature.27 Thus, it is not only the author, who is increasingly expected to write in a certain manner; the same goes for

“The literary critic who must learn to write for the masses, for the workers and the collective masses, learn to criticise from the point of view of the present, from the point of view of the problems that disturb the masses, write so as to arm the masses with the ability to relate critically to works of art, (…).”28

But there were new elements in this movement, and both are crucial to our theme since they represent restrictions on freedom.

The first was its foundation on the doctrine of mandatory ‘party-mindedness’ (partijnost), which drew heavily on an article published in 1905 by Lenin entitled “Party Organisation and Party Literature”.29 This doctrine, with variations, apparently remained alive during the period of mild thaw introduced by Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, who restated in 195730 in one of his periodic pronouncements on the role of literature that the “highest social destiny of art and literature is to mobilise the people in the struggle for new advances in the building of Communism”.

Professor Katerina Clark was thus entirely right to observe that:31

“In Soviet literature, in the early 30s, there occurred a major political-cum-institutional-cum-theoretical upheaval (…): a single, centralised writers’ organisation was formed (the Writers Union) to which all writers were obliged to belong; literature was required to be responsive to the Soviet political platform and policies, and a single doctrine or method for the making of literature (Socialist Realism) was mandated to writers.”

The second was that it gave a new and more sinister twist to the relationship between literary activity and official ideology. To quote Professor Clark again:32

“(…) During the old regime, there were writers who shared the official ideology, and the government itself played a monitoring role in 19th century literature. The chief difference between the tsarist and Soviet situations is the fact that the Soviet government has not only censored the writers – has told them what they must not write; it has also told them what they must write.”

This underscores the distinction made in this sub-section between controlling the externalised thought and influencing the unformed still internal thought.33 The principle was bad, the ways it was enforced were harsh; the contradictions in the guidelines given irreconcilable and thus, justly, the subject matter of subsequent sarcastic commentary.34 The above were the rules, which should be obeyed, and if it meant lying or deceiving, so be it. Stalin took this idea to extremes when a flood of drawings and paintings of him attending official functions, which disobeyed instructions given to the artists to conceal his many physical defects began to flood the market.35 Retribution was swift and harsh.

iv. The way pressure was applied

The preceding section recorded some of the unfortunate effects of the Soviet regime’s attempt to subjugate its artists to the new order either by controlling their minds, by telling them what to write or paint and by stopping them from externalising what they had already written or painted. How this pressure was applied to rebel Soviet minds has been vividly described by Solzhenitsyn, among others.36 Though much of the information given appears in the form of a novel or the story of a hypothetical individual, it is largely autobiographical. Zamiatin’s letter to Stalin asking for leave to go abroad, supposedly for reasons of health, also shows how deeply affected he was, as a writer and as an individual, by the constraints put on his creative freedom.

George Orwell’s work is, of course, in no way connected with Soviet Realism. In his Animal Farm, however, more so perhaps than in 1984, we find a literary account of the way psychology is used to produce a state of subservience. However, a note of caution is called for. Here, I shall focus only on Orwell, an author so rich in material and ideas that his work has already generated many books. However, our attention on Orwell must not leave unacknowledged his debt to Evgeny Zamiatin’s work, We. In many respects, this can be seen as a forerunner37to two important English works: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984. Both works show the same concern for man’s enslavement to a technological society,38 the latter also offering useful clues as to how the brainwashing is done and how horrible are its effects.

Orwell’s Animal Farm, in my view, the better of his two masterpieces,39 is too well known to need any summarising. But among the multiple messages contained in the book proper, one must not forget to include Orwell’s castigation40 of the self-imposed literary censorship exercised by the English establishment on any views “challenging the prevailing orthodoxy”. This appears in the unpublished preface to the book and, of course, mainly referred to the attempts made at the time to prevent the publication of Animal Farm lest it caused offence to Stalin and Soviet Russia, then still nominal allies of Great Britain. To me, however, the warning is still valid, just as the message applies to all governments and not just the British. There are two aspects of this warning, which, I believe, are relevant to the ideas found in this book.

The first is that this censorship is enforced by pressure groups, whose vested interests appear to be threatened by a writer’s thoughts or words. Now this may well mean, and for many centuries did mean, threatening the vested interests of the establishment; but nowadays, as I explain in the next subsection, it can also be seen as including the kind of censorship imposed on thought that diverges from the norms of the contemporary phenomenon of political correctness. For here, too, there seem to me to be many things one cannot do or say for fear one might offend one or another section of society.

The second and related point explains why this kind of voluntary (i.e. not necessarily legal) censorship works. In Orwell’s words, again taken from the unpublished preface,41 it is because of [the] intellectual cowardice which exists in this country [and every other country], which is the worst enemy of a writer.

Intellectual braveness, the opposite of intellectual cowardice, is, I am sorry to say, not a widely found attribute of the academic world, at any rate in the non-scientific areas of learning with which I have some familiarity. So, if I am right in saying that any kind of attempt to impose a certain way of looking at things is likely to intimidate most writers into conformity, then this manner of controlling a scholar’s thinking is bound to be bad or, indeed, an evil. Again, this point re-emerges in my last subsection where I explain my reasons why I regard the political correctness movement as being potentially dangerous to academic freedom.

The other major theme in Orwell’s Animal Farm that is relevant for my purposes is the way in which propaganda, the spreading of lies, misinformation, hypocrisy and word manipulation can be used to shape people’s minds and control their thought. Though all this is depicted in Animal Farm in an allegorical manner it still does not fail to reveal that the animals which submitted themselves to the new order are less happy, less free and amazingly (but also convincingly) susceptible to state propaganda. The account of Boxer’s death42 is one of the most moving scenes in literature, and “despite the animal disguise, we feel we are in a real world. This – these congeries of guzzling pigs, snapping dogs and heroic horses – is what humanity is like; very good, very bad, very pitiable, very honourable”.43 Orwell, who wrote the piece expressly to criticise the excesses of the Stalin 30s gives us some useful clues as to how authors who lived during the period here discussed must have felt; it must have been very depressing.

One last point should be made to underline the brutality with which artists of all kinds – and we are not talking just of writers but also artists and musicians – were confronted. Being sent off to the Gulag often meant death because of the harshness of the conditions that awaited the inmates. Equally inhuman, however, was the fact that they would, invariably, removed from their homes in the middle of the night. The agony of waiting for the police to break into one’s flat and remove the condemned citizens was so unnerving to all the inhabitants of their building that the habit grew that those anticipating their arrest would await at the entrance of their building or at the lift wells, accompanied by a small bag holding the few personal belongings they could take with them44 which were never enough to keep them warm and properly fed once they arrived at the camp. The poet Mandelstam was one of those who died in this way in his camp at Vladivostock.

v. The Uncompromising Writers

To be sure, some writers of the period who toed the party line45conformed to these new requirements but also attained reasonably high standards (like Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov in his novel Virgin Soil Upturned46). Specialists in Russian literature – certainly of Western origin – would, however, argue that this was no golden age for Russian literature even though the works themselves give us interesting information about the prevailing social and political conditions in post-revolutionary Russia.47

Not all artists, however, could conform to the new requirements; nor were they by temperament inclined to spend time trying to evade the censors. So a fair number of them went through voluntary patches of literary inactivity. In the case of Pasternak, these instances became known as his silent periods. This author in particular, whose rising career as a poet was admired by Stalin, ceased writing and turned his hand to translating Shakespeare and Goethe, among others. His translations immediately attracted high praise, and the constant refining of his Russian rendering in some cases succeeded in giving to some Shakespearean characters – Hamlet most notably – an almost iconic status in Russia.

Anna Akhmatova during the barren years – 1925 to 1940 – when her work was banned from publication had to live off meagre translation fees and, what must have been very demeaning, occasional help from her friends, not least because she remained all her life generously inclined towards members of her family, former husbands and even their mistresses. In such circumstances, one can only imagine the very considerable economic privations suffered by talented people like her and, just as importantly, the psychological frustration that this dependence on the charity of friends48must have had on her poetically sensitive and creative spirit.

Yet some never gave up even though this meant forcing poets such as Anna Akhmatova to compose her best-known poem – Requiem – essentially over a period of ten years – 1935 to 1945 – and doing so in instalments which were never written on paper but recounted in short extracts to various friends to memorise them. It was in this fragmented state that that the various instalments of the poem survived until it was finally finished and put together in 1961.49 This massive collaborative attempt to keep the various parts of the poem memorised rather than preserved on paper was necessary to ensure the authorities never got hold of it, destroyed it and also punished the poetess. What barbarity on the one side; what courage, imagination and mental agony on the other, and all this in order to preserve the poet’s sacred lines which formed the product of her talent.

In other instances, however, the inability to write in accordance with the new guidelines, coupled with the dispiriting effect of seeing one’s work rejected by the censor, led to an involuntary silence. In this group was Bulgakov, posthumously destined to acquire a considerable reputation through his masterpiece The Master and Margarita. Even his satirical novel Heart of a Dog, a lesser piece, completed in 1925, was not published within the Soviet Union until 1987, 49 years after the author’s death in 1938.

By the mid-1930s Bulgakov was, in fact, in such a state of depression and penury that he took the unusual step of writing to Stalin asking him for permission to emigrate in order to make his living as a writer. Surprisingly, the dictator, who had much admired an earlier work of Bulgakov’s, The White Guard50 (which subsequently became a play51) telephoned him personally and though he refused him permission to emigrate, he found him menial employment in the Moscow Art Theatre.

Another way around the command to write only what officialdom approved was by trying to express one’s discordant ideas in allegorical or phantasmagoric terms which, it was hoped, might conceal the real meaning from the prying eyes of the censors. Even this, however, was not always deemed safe so that, for instance, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, replete with allegory and hidden meanings, had – as already stated – to wait to see the light of day until after his death.52

Sinyavsky is yet another writer who had to comply with this ‘publish abroad pattern’ while his correspondence with his wife while serving his time in the Gulag, is also notable for the coded way in which they communicated with each other about his developing text.53 Moreover, he achieved the considerable feat of secreting in his (apparently) anodyne daily letters the text of a whole book (Strolls with Pushkin) in the form of coded fragments which only his wife, Maria Vasilievna Rozanova, could understand and was thus able to put together and have it eventually published as a book abroad.

This process of concealment, however, coupled with the constant agony of being discovered, took a heavy toll on the health of many an author. Besides, anonymous publishing abroad meant no fame, no readers/followers at home, no direct exchange of ideas with fellow thinkers in one’s own country, no royalties and, of course, punishment if they were discovered.54

The risks were high. Even where no prosecution was brought, internal ostracism was complete, as is shown by the fate reserved to those writers whose work, though published abroad, somehow became known back in Russia. Zamiatin55 offers one more example, though the vindictiveness of the authorities reached new heights after the end of the Second World War when all hopes for a thaw were frustrated and more relaxed conditions had to wait until the Khrushchev era and, more importantly, the era of glasnost and perestroika inaugurated by Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev in the 1980s.

The fate reserved to Pasternak, whose Doctor Zhivago was, as noted, also first published abroad in Italy in 1957, was one of the harshest. This novel was rewarded in 1958 the Nobel Prize for Literature but its author was forbidden to go to Stockholm and receive it officially or the financial part of it. At least, he never had to endure exile to Siberia, a fate reserved for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

But even for those who avoided the Gulag, staying behind in Russia, was not easy. Anna Akhmatova, one of Russia’s greatest poets of that period, saw her first husband – Nikolay Gumilyov – executed for no apparent reason in 1919 while her son spent time – on and off – in prisons for most of the 1920s and the 1930s, while her third husband ended up in the Gulag. As already noted, her own work was also put on hold and she was not allowed to be published until 1940 when, oddly in that year, a work of hers slipped through the net but, almost immediately, was withdrawn from circulation because it contained an earlier piece of hers that Stalin condemned since he felt it was aimed personally against him.56 It was not until the Thaw of the mid-1950s that some of her poems were allowed to be published.

Still, Anna Akhmatova never chose to emigrate and leave “her people [sic] behind” unlike Marina Tsvetaeva, the other great Russian poetess of the 20th century, who did. Akhmatova, in fact, caustically commented on this difference of attitudes by writing that “She [Tsvetaeva never felt] comfortably abroad, but she wasn’t happy in Russia either.” So Anna only left Russia twice in the mid-sixties, first to visit Sicily and collect the Etna-Taormina Prize and then Oxford to receive an honorary doctorate. But, international recognition came too late to be enjoyed, for a year later, she died from a heart attack.

While alive, however, Akhmatova remained mentally strong to the end. Though the beauty of her youth was gradually eroded, especially by progressively adding much weight from the late 1920s which some linked to medication received after contracting tuberculosis around 1915. Her beautiful voice, however, never left her and this was a crucial asset to a poet who enjoyed reciting her work, which she did in her early years and went on doing this in later life. Indeed, so did the sense of charismatic presence she generated whenever she entered a room.

Anyone, who has studied the marvellous painting of her by Olga Della-Vos-Kardovskaia in 1914 – reproduced below – will have noted how the artist captured her unforgettably beautiful [notwithstanding her aquiline nose] profile, noticed her stylish and self-contained posture, cutting an amazing figure of stillness and contemplation.57 And the same sense of astonishment at this woman’s ‘presence’ is generated by Natan Altman’s portrait, perhaps the best known of her portraits though, apparently, the sitter herself remained ambivalent about it.58

The preceding words suggest, to me at least, how well Kardovskaia succeeded in her task. If this is so, and I believe it is – because the sitter allowed her to detect part of her strong personality: the serious, the silently determined, the phlegmatic side which allowed her to survive and be creative (though unpublished) through so much hardship.

But there was another side to her personality, the woman who seemed to collect men and turned them into husbands or lovers. This side of her personality is – slightly – more obvious in the work painted by her second and famous painter Stephan Atman, a Russian Jew, a modernist and a cubist, who completed his own portrait in the same year that Olga’s picture was completed. He, however, was – arguably – encouraged to reveal in striking blues and yellows a very modern woman: modern in her dress, modern in her laid-back posture, depicted close to tantalising her viewers who, with the passage of time, would progressively also become her admirers, not least because she was a woman so gifted with a special sensitivity in using words.

Summaries such as the above may trigger the reader to start thinking about the characters of truly gifted and unusual humans, but they become truly meaningful if accompanied by a modicum of detail to show how a character can shine light in the literally and metaphorically dark environments these tormented talents had to live in. Her brief encounter in Leningrad with Isaiah Berlin in 1945, as recounted by Michael Ignatieff in his beautifully simple but clear language,59 may help me drive this point home for the reader who wishes to go deeper into this strange period of history.

It is a theme often to be encountered in Russian literature that chance meetings change the lives of people and that with Berlin was due entirely to fate. For a while in Russia on a mission set up at Churchill’s orders, he found himself in Leningrad wondering in a bookshop that specialised in rare or old editions of books. The name of Akhmatova came up and though he knew her as one of Russia’s greatest poets he had neither met her nor read any of her poems. When asked if he would like to meet her, he replied positively and thanks to the bookseller’s telephonic intervention, he found himself in her flat a few hours later.

The encounter between the Riga-born, Russian/Jewish in origin Oxonian don of great repute and the equally Russian poetess, recounted in the books mentioned above, offers amazing insights into the misery and deprivations prevailing in the post-war Leningrad. The characters of the two interlocutors of this, their first of two meetings within the space of two days; clues as to which Russian authors each liked or disliked and why, and even the emergence of an intellectual bond between them which some – without hard evidence – have made others wonder whether it went beyond the likely platonic levels which facts support. It is the characters of the two that fascinates me more but, because of lack of space, it will suffice to limit my own take of what experts have said about them to a few sentences not least because they could not have been more different from each other. One thing, however, can be stated with confidence: Berlin, by his mere presence in Leningrad, and quite apart from the gossip and serious ideas they exchanged, provided for her a much-needed link with persons of her unforgotten past who had emigrated as well as informing her of the latest trends in emerging post-war Europe.

He, almost the age of her son, brilliant, learned, with a great future ahead of him, but also riddled by complexes of insecurity, concerns about his looks, his chances of marriage and a good measure of hypochondria. He loved England but could not have been more different from the English who, in later life, would shower him with honours. His links with Russia had been many, and this was the topic that helped the two get started in their reminiscences and recounting of their interests. She, by contrast, enduring various fairly serious ailments from about 1915 onwards, retaining her beautiful eyes and voice, but visibly ageing also bore the signs of life’s hardships especially reserved for those whom the Soviet Regime did not like (yet admired).

At the moment of their meeting, she happened to be receiving some help from the state as a result of various radio and other talks delivered during the siege of Leningrad which had attracted much publicity and support from the beleaguered populace. Her strength of character, however, was untouched and her loyalty to her country undiminished as shown by the fact that except for one brief visit to Paris in her youth – which produced an amorous liaison with Amedeo Modigliani and a one line (hideous in my view) sketch of her which she retained fondly in her room – she had not travelled abroad and flatly refused all idea of emigrating as others did. Only before dying, did she manage two brief visits to Sicily and Oxford to collect some prizes – nothing else. Despite all of the above, she retained her imposing – almost imperious – posture, which always impressed those who met her.

I state, in passing for lack of space, the above features for I hope those who turn to the books I have recommended above for further details will retain in an effort to understand her character and how it enabled her to survive her endless family adversities and even refuse to consider the possibility of suicide. A temptation to which her friend and equally famous poetess Marina Tsvetaeva succumbed after the execution of her husband for treason.

This setting, however, is important not only because, incidentally, it reveals in the longer accounts given of it by others, the terrible conditions of life under the Stalin and War years but also how volatile life was under that dictator’s rule. For he was instantly informed of her meeting with Berlin and read a hideous, biased and nasty report submitted to him by the (in)famous Andrei Zhdanov60 – the intellectual enforcer of Socialist Realism. And, as a result, she was stripped of her small pension and returned to her state of abject poverty, the services rendered to the ordinary people during the siege of Leningrad trying to keep their morale up were thus instantly forgotten. Experts can decide if the decision to return to the oppressive status quo ante was a natural move now that her services were no longer needed or whether they stemmed from Stalin’s proverbial paranoia about plots and had thus so interpreted the visit of Berlin to Russia.

So, notwithstanding all the above the conclusion about the greatest poet of Russia in the 20th century is that few of her contemporaries suffered more than she did from Stalin’s knack to torment psychologically those of his victims he chose to torture mentally by blowing hot and cold in his attitude towards them rather than kill them outright. For decades she thus survived poverty, neglect, hunger and anything the regime could throw at her along of serious ailments such as tuberculosis, heart problems, an inflamed jaw which required operation, constant spells of dizziness, the result of near starvation, perpetual agony about the fate of her son, who spent much of his time in and out of Russian prisons. Yet she endured, so also proved that her intellectual sparkle remained alive even during the darkest moments of humanity – the theme of my final conclusion in this book.61 And her character and beauty shone through the following two famous portraits made of her when she was a rising young star, and such is the shine that even the long Soviet darkness of 70 plus years failed to extinguish it. So, even amidst such darkness, freezing temperatures, indescribable poverty and hunger, family upheavals, deaths and imprisonments and widespread disease, true talent never stopped to shine even when it was hidden by public censorship from the public eye. Elaine Feinstein’s remarkable biography of Anna Akhmatova proves the resilience of her talent against incredible onslaughts of fate.

Her character and beauty shine through the following two famous portraits made of her by Natan Atman (on the right) and Olga Dolla-Vos Kardovskaia (on the left). Later, in the Appendix, we shall show how unbelievable adversity in life eroded her beauty but left untouched her charm and unique personality, which even socialist realism was unable to destroy.

An all-embracing conclusion of this subsection could be expressed in a few words. At the height of the Stalin terror, 1936 onwards, there were three types of artists: those who disobeyed the rules and disappeared or were certifiably dead; those who switched to other occupations or went silent by going underground or got published abroad, and those who violated the (often vaguely) expressed rules of how to express their talents but, having creatively recanted for their sins, were miraculously rehabilitated.

Now two words above were italicised to illustrate that though recantation and forgiveness were highly valued notions by Christianity, in the agnostic Soviet Union of Stalin something more than I am sorry or forgive me was needed before rehabilitation might be considered. Might again is the keyword since forgetting past indiscretions would happen, if the regime needed to use and exploit the reputation of the former sinner. The life of Dmitri Shostakovich, one of Russia’s most notable composers of the 20th century, confirms the last of the above statements and offers us the chance to cast a brief glance at socialist realism as it affected musical composers.

In the beginning of his life, Shostakovich benefited from the patronage of Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky; but after the latter’s execution, his relationship with the authorities ran progressively into periodic but serious difficulties, alternating however in later life with phases of reduced tension and the award of public honours! Under attack from the political establishment Shostakovich’s music idiom thus varied: in the beginning, it was influenced by the work of Stravinsky and later by Mahler. From his 15 symphonies, the first two, as well as his first two operas, attracted strong negative reactions from the Communist establishment while his 5th and 7th symphonies opened the way for his eventual rehabilitation, as did the music he wrote for films, a musical genre which much appealed to Stalin.

Stravinsky and Prokofiev provided the first inspiration for his graduation piece of 1926 – his first symphony – and quickly earned him abroad the admiration of Bruno Walter, Leopold Stokowski and Arturo Toscanini, who conducted it in their respective countries. Within the USSR, however, the symphony provoked the first stirrings of political discontent since it was seen as being out of step with the political requirements of his time.

In 1929, his first opera, based on a story by Nikolai Gogol, brought local criticism to a pitch, the general shape of the discontent now taking the shape of the emerging socialist realism which demanded writings and music that reflected the revolutionary philosophy progressively specified by the government. That was music that ordinary Russians would appreciate and not, as it were, being part of an era when music was designed to appeal to the effete classes. This criticism became even more venomous with the staging of his second opera entitled Lady Macbeth of [the] Mtsensk [District] (and in its convoluted love/jealousy plot bears next to no resemblance to the classic Shakespeare play). The reaction, however, was more than venomous; it even became dangerous for the composer because of a fortuitous event.

This misfortune for the composer was that that the opening night performance in 1936 was attended by Stalin, Molotov, Mikoyan and Zhdanov. Two-thirds through the performance the officials, who have made obvious their dislike of the opera, vacated the government box to show their disapproval, a move instantly noticed by the entire audience. Worse was to come since the next day, the Pravda carried a damning editorial – not a run of the mill review – under the title Muddle instead of Music, many readers even believing that Stalin may have had a hand in the writing of its damning contents. The plot was condemned on grounds of immorality not found in the life of those who worked in state farms, while the style of its music, in the jargon of the time, was described as formalist, an expression used to suggest that it was musically coarse, primitive and vulgar, influenced by American tastes and incompatible with those of the average modern Russian.

The ferocity of the attack was also worrisome for the consequences it could and did have for the composer’s lifestyle and career prospects, its extreme tone coinciding chronologically with the beginning of Stalin’s political terror, which entered its new and most aggressive phase from 1936 onwards. Mentally, this shook Shostakovich so much that for a time he even contemplated suicide. Posts and commissions were thus lost, and his next symphony, suitably adapted to the new tastes, took well over a year before it could be performed and begin a process of acclimatisation to the aesthetic demands of the new era to be consolidated with his Fifth Symphony. However, the road towards rehabilitation reached a decisive point with his Seventh Symphony, which, coinciding as it did with the interminable siege of Leningrad by the Germans, sent out to the entire world one of the strongest anti-fascist signs ever to have originated from a musical composer. The composer’s total rehabilitation, however, had to wait for Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s period of political thaw.

Among the new leader’s politically calculated moves was the wish to improve relations with the world of music so it was his idea to appoint our composer as, ‘President of the Russian Federation Union of Composers’. Shostakovich artfully but unsuccessfully tried to dodge this honour on the grounds that he had never been interested in politics nor knowledgeable of Marxist Lenin philosophy. A superb literary account of the available facts on which these ‘negotiations’ took place can be found in Julian Barnes’ novel62 largely following the account found in Shostakovich’s own Memoires63 The most sticking point was the fact that this grand new post carried with it obligatory Membership of the Communist Party. Khrushchev, a cunning operator, had thus set a trap, which our composer could avoid only with – almost – insurmountable difficulty. The demand facing him was thus in order to get this post he would have to agree to join the Communist party, an act he had resolutely refused to do all his life on the basis of his non-participation in political matters. However, the pressure was powerful and though in the end, he had to give in – in the event his decision was variously interpreted as a show of commitment, the result of irresistible political pressure or, as Barnes put the composer’s own view, as a sign of cowardice, which was infinitely more difficult to adopt instead of courage.64 This internal struggle, is important because it shows that Shostakovich was never a committed Communist as, year later, the obituaries in Anglo-Saxon leading newspapers, such as The Times and the New York Times, had suggested. The compromise, however, brought to Shostakovich a measure of internal fame and peace while it also enabled his old adversaries such as Zhdanov to claim that with proper guidance even rebels like our composer could eventually be put on the right path of socialist realism.

vi. Pictorial Art Under the Influence of Soviet Realism65

Socialist Realism in art was the name given to Soviet painting from the 1930s and for, approximately, the next 50 years. As with writing, the style and content were laid down by the state with the intention to further the goals of socialism and communism. Like literature painting had to be typical i.e. depicting scenes of everyday life of the people, realistic in the representational sense of the term and partisan i.e. supportive of the aims of the party.

As in the case of the literature of the period paintings were also meant to elevate the common worker, whether factory or agricultural, by presenting his life, work and recreation, as both admirable and pleasurable, as befitted the entire order of things inspired by socialism/communism. The ultimate aim was to create what Lenin had called “an entirely new type of human being” whereas Stalin, with greater pomposity, referred to the new artists as engineers of souls. Thus, Soviet art of this time aimed to depict the worker not just as he was, carrying his tools and leading a very normal life, but also as it should be. In that (narrow) sense, the movement mirrors the course of American and Western art where the ordinary human being became the subject of the novel, the play, poetry and art, gradually replacing the portraits, which the likes of Le Brun, Whistler, Lazlò, or Serov had once produced with such success.

The last thought can be taken further than simply expressing this author’s preference for and admiration of their work; it can also be seen as a blanket condemnation of all the art of Soviet realism. Is this, however, a sustainable conclusion?

To be sure, few would disagree that – the bulk – of what came out of painters’ ateliers during these 50 plus years would not attract much admiration. Yet real talent, when it exists, always finds ways to survive. In the Soviet Union artists, like writers in 19th century Russia, learnt how to evade the censors or when they could not do this, or the trying was not worth the effort and risk, they often produced works just for themselves so that few others would even be aware of their existence. The Soviet artists thus acquired the habit, which some writers also adopted, of creating private bodies of work in their own time, which they kept secret and which only began to emerge in more recent times and even slowly began creating a market which has begun to appear in more recent times.

Technical competence of the highest order was, however, also found in many of the official painters of the Stalin regime such as those by Alexander Gerasimov. Among his many works – and by no means were they all portraits of Stalin – we can include one painted in 1938 which attracted much attention and praise. It is, in fact, a double portrait, which depicts Stalin and Voroshilov strolling past the Kremlin while in the distant background, inserted there to keep faith with the political propaganda of the time, we see some smoking factory chimneys. Indeed, when later the artist was awarded the Stalin Prize his high standing as the official painter of the Dictator’s court was confirmed. The said painting deserves to be reproduced below.

On the other hand, Vasily Iakovlev’s portrait of Marshall Zhukov on horseback, reproduced below, though well known and classically executed with much competence, remains a pompous depiction of an undoubtedly multifaceted hero and, in my view, an excellent example of the totalitarian art of “Deifying the Leader as his beautiful grey horse trampled over the banner of the crushed Third Reich”. 66

So, to conclude, while the methods of enforcing the will of the State were and remained totally reprehensible, pictorial art, like literature, did not die out completely though, in both painting and writing, it can be argued, that the subtle heights of the 19th century portraiture were never again achieved. To put it somewhat more bluntly, genius became even rarer than usual; but talent did not die out.67 A painting by Tatiana Yablonskaya, variously entitled in English Corn or Weat but in Russian referred to as bred, an edible

Substance which had a great symbolic value in Soviet Russia of the time – offers a good illustration of my point, above, so that one hastens to add that she was justly considered to be one of the best artists of the post-war years who also had the knack of using scenes from daily life successfully. Corn, reproduced above, offers a pleasing example.68

The painting depicts scores of contented women bagging corn and sweeping up grains left over on the floor of their working space. What gives away the admittedly attractively coloured depiction of the girls at work are the stage-managed impression – and, indeed, the girls, especially the one standing in the middle of the picture, almost look like dancers in a musical. The painting exuded happiness and optimism, and these requirements so earnestly demanded by the new regime earned the artist her first major recognition – The Stalin Prize.

The scene was, thus, officially judged to be fulfilling admirably the guidelines of Soviet Realism to depict the abundant produce found in collective farms, all functioning thanks to hard working and exuberant workers, their faces glowing with pride and joy. The reality, however, was completely different, as most contemporary Russians would have known. Collective farms, which represented the bulk of cultivatable land in Russia at that time, were unproductive since they were run inefficiently due to a total lack of personal interest by the workers in these state-owned enterprises.

The propaganda nature of the painting, however, won the day even though, on careful observation, the tricking of the censor is again noticeable. For a careful study of the canvas reveals that it gives total prominence to the women workers, having banished all males who are depicted because of the rule of perspective as diminutive and placed on the borders of the picture. To put it differently, would the painting have attracted equal praise if men had been placed in the foreground and the women appeared in the margins? I am tempted to express a doubt since the equality of men and women was an important theoretical banner of the new order even if it required reverse discrimination. The hypothetical question I raised, however, by reversing the emphasis from women to men, shows that equality as a notion remained difficult to handle in practice for the Russians – as much as the Americans during their own earlier Revolution where slavery was retained despite the egalitarian nature of the US Constitution. Nevertheless, however, attractive the painting may be, it demonstrates that the creation of paintings with formulaic structures, one-dimensional characters and unconvincing plots, did not solve all societal problems but just helped package them in a different form. As Sinyavsky put it:69

“Social realism starts from an ideal image which it [then] adapts the living reality.”

Notwithstanding some nit-picking, the fact remains that in this work the artist succeeds in conveying the enthusiasm of the workers whose hard labour in the fields kept the nation fed while also generating a feeling of well-being which characterises Tatiana’s many and varied paintings. The reputation of this Ukrainian-born artist kept growing and this particular painting was so popular that it also ended up as a Soviet postal stamp! Her long life gave the state the opportunity to keep showering her with honours up to the end of her life.

To conclude, respectable artists did survive in this arid climate and nowadays their numbers are slowly beginning to grow with their works also beginning to emerge in the market and acquire modest if not respectable prices. For the sake of relative completeness, one must thus mention a few more names of popular artists, notably those of Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Isaak Brodsky, Alexander Samokhvalov, Alexander Deineka and Yuri Pimenov and, later, Arkady Plastov and Vladimir Stozharov, while by the 1960s there was a shift to a more severe style by artists such as Victor Ivanov, Geli Korzhev, Viktor Popkov, Tahir Salahov, Piotr Ossowski, Pavel Nikonov and Nicolai Andronov.

vii. Graphic Art in Posters70

So far we have been focusing on art on canvasses (or, more rarely, on wood) hanging in museums, official buildings and the like. From a purely artistic point of view, most of the posters produced during this period were more primitive in style than the best of the great paintings hanging on museums walls. From a propaganda point of view; however, poster-art was by far the most effective way of transmitting the official – and if we wish to remain faithful to the central theme of this collection of essays, deceptive messages, namely approving all the points which officialdom wished to promote – e.g. hard work, joyfully carried out by ordinary people or nations – or attacking nations or institutions disliked by Russian officialdom – e.g. capitalism, (German) fascism or American fads.

My explanation rather than excuse for this choice of a restricted presentation of the work of ‘poster artists’ is partly the planned size of this work but mainly the existence of the superb book prepared by the late David King, probably the world’s greatest collector of photographs and posters of the Stalin years, and produced by the Tate Publishing Company under the title Red Star Over Russia.71

So, for the sake of a first impression, let us reproduce below some posters to demonstrate how many of them could be truly stimulating even though as a form of art they were far less sophisticated than proper oil paintings. Here, then, are four examples accompanied by a short and rough translation of the Russian words which appear on them, all printed in the pages that follow in smaller fonts to indicate their ‘supportive’ role. Three of them are ‘made in Russia’, products depicting what Socialist Realism progressively stood for and what it hated, while the fourth comes from a country which only narrowly missed falling directly under the gravitational pull – politically and artistically – of the Soviet Union. For the rest, the reader must, again, be referred to the already cited work of David King, which I regard as monumental not only because it provides through pictures such an informative account of life in the Soviet Union during some very difficult times but also because it offers some very important indications that many of these poster artists truly deserve the appellation of ‘artist’ and should not be seen as belonging to a lesser breed. The fact that even though all obeyed the rigidly laid down rules we discussed above thus did not prevent them from depicting different individuals at all sorts of moments in their social life in the Soviet Union during some very troubled years.

Before one moves briefly to my four examples of poster artists a few words about their predecessors – the graphic artists and designers of the late 19th century – for they may well help reveal them as artistic inspirers of the Revolutionary artists of the ‘20s and ’30s. To be sure, the earlier breed produced work, which was more detailed, smaller in size, multi-coloured and used mainly to illustrate book covers or covers of menus destined for great banquets. By contrast, their revolutionary successors designed large posters, with a clear political message and usually – both for effect but also reasons of economy – their colouring was limited to two maximum three colours. Artistically, however, they were related to the earlier engravings and not to oil paintings for no attention was paid in poster art to shading, contrasts between complementary colours, nor the rules of perspective. The resemblance between the work of the late Tsarist graphic artists and the later revolutionary bunch becomes particularly visible if one compares late 19th /early 20th-century Russian posters advertising commercial products and thus moving away from the more ’dainty’ subjects, which, originally, kept the book engravers in business. For a more meaningful discussion and comparison see For details see: The Twilight of the Tsars, Russian Art at the Turn of the Century, Hayward Gallery London 7 March – 19 May 1991, South Bank Centre,(1991), chapters 11–13.

Example One

This poster of 1920 by Nikolai Kogout represents a forerunner of what Soviet Realism would come to represent from the end of the twenties onwards when industrialisation began to move into forward gear. The caption claims: “We defeated the enemy with weapons; now with hard work we will get our Bread”. The first part of the motto is, of course, untrue; but then one comes to expect a certain amount of lying in political propaganda. The treaty of Brest Litovsk, however, which brought to an end the war between Germany and Russia, was most certainly not a military victory but a sui-generis diplomatic one, the fruit of Lenin’s courageous pragmatism. The second part of the motto was, on the other hand, correct, and patently true is the final exhortation, which stresses the words “Everyone to work”. Thus, the poster depicts a muscular man along with an equally muscular and determined-looking woman, giving it their all in the environment of heavy industry which was the model of industrial development adopted by the Soviet Union (and, after the War, China as well) within the framework of the so-called ‘five-years plans’. The three colours used to produce the poster – ochre, orange and black – in their own way underline the ascetic message, which is full of meaning and determination to succeed.

Example Two

Ten years later, and slightly more colourful, the propaganda magazine "USSR in the Construction Making" depicts the industrial dream of Soviet Realism. The poster is by Nikolai Troshin, the magazine’s artistic director who, at its peak, managed to make it available in five languages! The world of skyscrapers is prefigured in it but also note how the builders of the future are depicted as minuscule figures in black at the bottom of the colossal edifices they have built, which come close to the futuristic world envisaged by imaginative authors such as Zamiatin, Huxley, or the cinema director Fritz Lang. The days of the eponymous hero have given way to the anonymous worker who sweats for the common weal.

Example Three

This is a truly amazing poster by Nina Vatolina reproduced below comes from a crucial time of the war with Germany. To start with, her red dress – a colour often associated with Russian communism – contrasts sharply with the Nazi black. The symbolism of her hands must also be noted. So, her right hand is pointing upwards, to victory (or the heavens, it does not matter which), while the left one is clearly pointing downwards towards a mother lying killed with her orphaned baby crying on her chest, both presumably the victims of Nazi ferocity. Nina’s cry, according to the words on the poster, decries Fascism as “the most evil enemy” and rightly adds the words “of women” since they, too, were actively involved in the fighting against the Third Reich and, as women, also had to mourn endless numbers of husbands and sons killed by the German onslaught. The barbarity of the German invaders and their destructive mania, even when finally forced to retreat, has been recorded in history and, these day, can only be matched by Muslim fundamentalism destroying, for instance, the treasurers of Palmira or precious antiquities in Afghanistan. Finally, Nina also happens to be one of the few demonstrating women who is not only visibly tough but also obviously young and feminine. This is yet another sign that during the interminable battle of Stalingrad and the sieges of Leningrad and Moscow all Russians, irrespective of age, sex, ethnicity, or looks were became actively involved in what was ‘their finest hour’. To this heroic mobilisation, a heavy shadow falls on it namely, Stalin’s and Zhukov’s total unwillingness ever to hold back on the killing of huge numbers of their own people for the sake of final victory which they were determined to get for the good of Russia but, of course, also to the benefit of the rest of the struggling Europe.

For artistic parallels of advertising posters from the Tsarist era, minus the political message, which dominates the Revolutionary poster art, see the illustrations on pages 157, 164, 166 and 168 of the above-cited book The Twilight of the Tsars.

Example Four

From the earliest days, the pictorial style of Soviet revolutionary posters spread to all countries affected by the gravitation pull of Russia with the result that many posters which would eventually become identified with the philosophy of Socialist Realism originate in countries such as Hungary, Armenia, Georgia and Ukraine. Greece was not one of this group though, had it not been for the Yalta Agreement, dividing the world between East and West, it might have joined them. This, however, came close to happening, partly because of opposition to the Dictatorship established in Greece between 1936 and 1940 but mainly because the Communists and their sympathisers had almost monopolised the resistance against the Germans. The poster depicted here was painted by one of Greece’s greatest cartoonists, Fokion Dimitriades, whose work appeared in the leading liberal paper of the time The Vima. It was commissioned for my late father’s newly created party known as the New Party for the electoral campaign of 1946. The colouring, the muscular man, and the chopping down of dead branches of the tree of State, indicated by the words ‘bureaucracy’, ‘corruption’ and ‘party favouritism’, were its major slogans as it advocated a remaking of Greece out of the ashes of a devastating world war and a continuing civil war. The poster as a whole bears the strong influence of Russian posters of earlier times with the muscular figure that dominates the poster closely resembling a figure painted by the Hungarian artist Biró commissioned by the socialist party in alliance with the local communists. (A picture of this poster, depicting the Hungarian Parliament in red, is reproduced in the book of Peter Paret, Irwin Lewis and Paul Paret, entitled Persuasive Images, Princeton University Press (1992) at p. 110.) Contemporary commentators of the current chaos could, rightly I think, attribute the present chaotic situation in Greece as being linked to these three plagues from which Greece has suffered ever since its modern appearance as state early in the 19th century. Here, however, the point stressed is the similarity of the artistic style, which the Russian Revolution of 1917 exported to many countries as well as the longevity of this artistic movement.

viii. An Attempt to End with an Objective Postscript

The dark clouds that gathered over the Russian skies from 1917 onwards plunged some of its inhabitants into gloom while it left others hoping that the change would work for the better. What neither group foresaw was that the Russian (political and intellectual) winter would last another 74 years, with only a short-lived respite – the so-called ‘thaw’ – in the mid-fifties and early sixties under Khrushchev.

Just as surprising, however, was the explosion of creativity that marked the early days of that winter; but when its darkest days came, the days one finds described in such frightening terms in the books of Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavsky and Feinstein’s biography of Akhmatova – to mention but a few – we no longer feel surprised but a vivid sense that we are faced with a miracle that so many Russians managed to survive physically the above storm and a few of them even retained while it lasted their intellectual creativity.

One may like, dislike, fear, or even hate Russia, Soviet Russia or the current Russian Federation. Yet the ups and downs it experienced during its worst political storms – the Stalin purges, the German sieges of its major towns, the Andropov last outbursts of inhumanity – must be observed with a measure of understanding and even admiration for the continuing imagination of its artists. Asking for admiration may be too much for many, but true scholars and true artists must discipline themselves to understand and describe without personal bias what they see. For literary description, as much as artistic depiction, bereft of at least a valiant attempt at objectivity, are sure signs that the describer’s mind has ceased functioning along with his heart. So let us start with Lenin’s death and then switch to the artful rise of Stalin to sole power from the mid-twenties onwards.

Few would doubt that the ways of Socialist Realism were legally and morally abominable. Was the work produced – in writing or pictorially – also deceptive and, if so, by whom was the deception perpetrated and at the expense of whom? This is the core of this collection of essays, and the first part of this one, the longest of the 12.

Given the pressure exerted on writers and painters to conform to the rules of Soviet Realism, it would be difficult to condemn individual artists as guilty of any legal or moral impropriety if they obeyed them. If they exercised a different option, assuming they had one which they rarely did, it would condemn them to unemployment and abject poverty death by starvation, not to mention the fact, often stressed above, that to deprive a true artist the right to externalise his artistic voice could, and did, even lead to suicides. This is no place to discuss in detail such dramatic decisions other than to mention that they were not only taken by some of Russia’s and, later the Soviet Union’s, most famous poets, men and women of the world of theatre and letters, but to stress that increasingly – and oddly – they were taken by those who were sympathetic towards the new order but could not reconcile themselves with the extremities reached by the cultural censorship of the state.72

The few who could shift – downgrade one might even suggest – the ways they employed their intellectual talents, would do so, and we have already noted that Pasternak and Bulgakov did in different ways but at great personal cost. Others, as we also noted above, chanced an appeal to Stalin to allow them to emigrate. Interestingly enough, with the prompting of loyal communists in the system – such as Gorky for instance – clemency of sorts was occasionally exercised (as in the cases of Zamiatin and less so Bulgakov); but next to being very tough, Stalin was very unpredictable so, in content, the concessions were minimal. So, if the artists were not guilty of the deception they were asked to perpetrate, who was?

Legal liability for the state itself was, of course, inconceivable; but moral guilt for their policies and the suffering they caused to individuals was, and remains, as undeniable as the harm they caused to Russian literature and other forms of art in terms of art. But what is that compared to the tens of millions of Russians who suffered torture and death at the hands of Stalin for over 20 odd years often even ending in their unexplained disappearances?

History, of course, has damned Stalin to eternity. Indeed, it was a fitting irony that it was some of his closest colleagues who moved first to condemn his era and even executed some of his closest henchmen (such as Beria) before Stalin’s body had even had the chance to decompose, since it was preserved for ‘inspection’ by future generations of visitors in a Mausoleum initially shared with Lenin, but later, under Khrushchev, was finally evicted from it.

Still, very few human activities and ideas in life can be irredeemably condemned or are entirely condemnable, for though outright condemnation is easy in life, criticism in a balanced manner takes a measure of moral courage, which professional authors, at least, should aspire to. Thus, among the plethora of untrue or unrealistic stories and images that have survived from this awful period, one claiming that literary and artistic quality died out completely, was not right. Quality, in literature, in poetry and art was achieved by some artists who lived during these terrible decades, even if their works had to be published abroad, published posthumously, or transmitted to one another in coded ways until the time came when they could be published.73 And equally unforgettable is the fact that the ordinary Russian men and women fought with arms to the very end an invader who was in no way better, more human and more civilised than the worst samples Soviet Russia produced itself.

Pictorial artists, also saw their talents, such as they were, diminished so, indisputably, during this period the ranks of mediocre artists swelled to high numbers. There existed, however, also good artists and poets whose works touched different viewers in different ways. Tatiana Yablonskaya’s work, despite some untrue details, generated colourful depictions of daily life. Technically, at least they could be classed as being well beyond competent, even if what was missing from this period as a whole was the indescribable and unquantifiable term ‘the inspiration of the genius’.

Looked then from a wider, sociological, angle Soviet Realism, despite some very unattractive edges, did not succeed in repressing totally the freedom-loving soul of the Russian artist or poet. Moreover, even the work which conformed with the dictatorship’s wishes also offers useful insights into an oppressed society just as some of the earliest Flemish painters gave us through their (not infrequently frightening) paintings of life in the late Middle Ages glimpses of their poor, harsh, exploitative and primitively superstitious societies.

The result: the purity of inner hearts and souls can always be found by those who know what to look out for, but the outer world we inhabit will always show the signs of bad government for these cannot be hidden. Those who doubt this would do well to visit or revisit the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena and spend a morning – not less – studying Simone Martini’s superb mural which still reveals to us the effects of good and bad government.

In my opinion, all of the above illustrates the difference ‘the leader’ a particular society can make to its well-being. The contrast has already been hinted, but it bears repeating. Lenin’s bourgeois upbringing and inherent pragmatism associated art and culture with education. He favoured both of them and perceptively considered them as necessary for his country’s emergence from its economic destitution into which the even more ineffective socio-economic system of the 19th century had plunged it in. In the early years of the Revolution Lenin’s overall philosophy also favoured the virtues of different artistic styles – also hinted at in my opening comments of this essay – which only began to wane as Stalin’s contrasting authoritarian grip over his country began to emerge.

Would Lenin’s more restrained approach have lasted had he lived longer? Inspired guesswork might well deny the fact that the master of political reversals in politics – such as the treaty of Brest Litovsk which was the work of his impressive political realism74 – would not have changed attitudes even in matters of culture if the surrounding environment favoured such a turn given the emergence of totalitarianism in Germany, Italy and later the Republic of China. Works already cited such as Art and Power: Europe under the Dictators represent a marvellous comparative exercise, which illustrates the differences between these variations of totalitarianism but also the destructive power, which their common feature – the lack of respect for human freedom and dignity – entails.

In writing Essays 11, 12 and the Concluding Thoughts of this work my wife Eugenie, with a long-standing interest in and knowledge of Russian literature, gave me valuable advice as to what material I should read and saved me from a number of errors for all of which I remain truly grateful. Otherwise, I tried to compose as simple an introduction to the vast and complex evolution of Russian literature of the 19th and 20th centuries freed from distortions caused by historical rivalries or continuing political tensions between Eastern and Western Europe. As a result, I strived to assess the dark days of Socialist Realism by admitting that though it caused unparalleled human misery by adversely affecting the freedom of human thought it did not extinguish artistic originality in all forms of art. I hope the arguments and pictures I have assembled will help make my presentation as objective as possible.↩︎

“The Heyday of the ‘Superfluous Man’ in Russia,” Slavonic and East European Review, vol. XXXI, no. 76, Dec 1952, 93 ff.↩︎

See “The Heyday of the ‘Superfluous Man’ in Russia,” Slavonic and East European Review, vol. XXXI, no. 76, Dec 1952, 93, esp. 98 ff.↩︎

A Hero of Our Time, published in 1840, a year before the author’s untimely death in a duel.↩︎

Seeley, op. cit. pp. 105 ff.↩︎

Op. cit. p. 108.↩︎

Reproduced as an introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1975), p. 21.↩︎

From What Is to Be Done (published in 1863).↩︎

Written in 1907 but reworked six times until it settled in its final version in 1922–23.↩︎

Her full name became Hélène Peltier Zamoyska (through her marriage to a Polish national). She was the daughter of the French Naval Attachéin Moscow and a fellow student of Sinyavsky at Moscow University in the 1940s. It was she who smuggled out of Russia in 1956 the first work written under the name of his alter ego, Abram Tertz.↩︎

Quoted in Andrei Sinyavsky, For Freedom of Imagination: Essays by the Imprisoned Soviet Critic on Pasternak, Yevtushenko, Akhmatova, Robert Frost and Other subjects, translated and with an introduction by Laszlo Tikos and Murray Peppard (1971), p. XVII.↩︎

The fatwa pronounced by the Iranian Ayatollahs on Salman Rushdie for his Satanic verses over 15 years ago would appear to fall into this category.↩︎

However, one cannot deny that literary masterpieces were written when the human spirit was deprived of its freedom. Bulgakov’s work proves this, or rather proves two things. The first is that true originality can never be totally stifled by oppressive methods; the second, however, is also important for it shows us how oppression can force it underground or prevent it from blossoming in its own country.↩︎

This, I think, is seen in the bulk of so-called Holocaust literature, which often assumes the form of testimonials or dying declarations. From a historical and sociological point of view, such writing constitutes an important source of information. From a linguistic point of view, such literature “can meaningfully and sensibly be read as [constituting] quasi legal documents”. But from an aesthetic or literary point of view such works cannot, it seems to me, be subjected to ordinary literary criticism, and they do suggest an (inevitable) drying out of creativity. For more details (and references to further literature), see Sidra Kranz Moshinsky Literature of the Holocaust: The Testimony of the Witness in The Happy Couple: Law and Literature (eds. J. Neville Turner and Pamela Williams) (1994), pp. 157 et seq.↩︎

“The Prevention of Literature” reprinted in Essays (Penguin reprint, 2000), p. 334. The cited text is particularly appropriate in a book which largely deals with deceit. As will be noted towards the end of this section, the question is deceit by whom? The artist? The state that obliges him to demonstrate his thought in a particular way? Or both?↩︎

Translated by Sir Isaiah Berlin and cited in his 1970 Romanes Lecture at the University of Oxford (also available as an introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons published in 1975. The text can be found on p. 7).↩︎

The Everyman Art Library (1997) at p.↩︎

“‘Little Heroes and Big Deeds’: Literature responds to the First Five-Year Plan” in Sheila Fitzpatrick (ed.), Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931 (1978), pp. 180, 192 – a most valuable collection of essays on the sociological and political foundations of the literature of this period.↩︎

Indeed, knowledgeable authors attribute much of the ‘bullying’ to the infamous ‘proletarian’ literary association RAPP, which was particularly militant and active during the late 1920s. For more details, see Professor Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Cultural Revolution as Class War", Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931 (1978), pp. 8, 28 ff.↩︎

The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (3rd ed. 2000), p. 36.↩︎

Gorky was the nom de plume of Aleksey Peskov and, in Russian means ‘bitter’.↩︎

University of California Press (1982 edition), p. 134.↩︎

Artists, especially of a romantic disposition, are by nature pessimistic. Inclined towards pessimism are also entire nations – strange as it may seem one can bracket under this heading both Russians and Greeks. To turn the above into optimists runs so counter to their natural disposition it almost certainly means expecting them to acquire different characters.↩︎

Many of these requirements will be made obvious in the photographs of paintings or posters which I have chosen to reproduce in the pages that follow.↩︎

A pamphlet produced in 1927 entitled ‘What Kind of Book Does the Peasant Need?’ discussed briefly in Evgeny Dobrenko’s The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature (trans. by Jesse M. Savage, 1997), p. 136, provides more insights as to what is expected of an author. But as Dobrenko, op. cit. pp. 137 ff. points out this was not only the result of party imposition on authors but also influenced by conditioned readers who came to expect these virtues from a good book. Dobrenko, who is one of those who has stressed the reader’s involvement in the emergence of this kind of literature and values, thus argues “that the ideal Soviet reader is in no way a passive object for external influence, but rather a demanding creative subject” (Dobrenko, op. cit. p. 292). This symbiosis seems to have peaked in the 1930s when “glorifications of the reader became a feature of almost all writers’ speeches (…)” (op. cit. p. 301). To the above ideas, however, one should add one cautionary observation: the respective roles of author, literary critic and reader constantly mutated during the Soviet period, so one cannot take what happened in, say, the early 1920s or 1930s as being always appropriate or relevant from the mid-thirties or later as the communist leash became tighter.↩︎

A photograph of him exists depicting him in full flow gesticulating in the exaggerated manner that appealed to the European dictators of the time. Tikhon Khrennikov was, in 1948, handpicked by Stalin to do a similar controlling work of composers which he had been performing unofficially since the mid-1930s.↩︎

The mass reader of the late 1920s thus came very close to expecting from his literature the same ‘virtues’ which officialdom required. For a list of his expectations see, for instance, Evgeny Dobrenko, The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature (trans. by Jesse M. Savage, 1997), pp. 126 ff.↩︎

Dobrenko, op. cit., p. 92.↩︎

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Works, 3rd ed., vol. VIII, p. 387: “Literary works must become a component part of the work of the organised, planned, united, social democratic party.” (Translated from the Russian by Eugenie Markesinis).↩︎

For a Close Link Between Literature and Art and the Life of the People, Kommunist, no. 12 (1957), reproduced in Sinyavsky’s On Socialist Realism (University of California Press edition 1982), p. 164.↩︎

The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (3rd ed. 2000), p. 30.↩︎

Op. cit. previous note, p. 252.↩︎

It can, of course, be argued that the non-externalised thought can remain free to think /imagine what it pleases. The point, however, is that external repression, over a period of time, can make thoughts ‘dry up’ or force artists to turn their creative minds to, arguably, less original occupations such as translations of the works of others as a means of economic survival. Pasternak’s work offers an example though it can, again, be counter-argued that his translations were themselves works of art.↩︎

By Andrei Donatovich Sinyavsky in On Socialist Realism (1959). The book was published abroad under the assumed name of Abraham Tertz but the advantages of anonymity were lost when it was traced back to him and he was put on trial in 1965 – the first trial of an author based solely on the contents of his work. Selected documents from the trial can be found in Leopold Labedz and Max Hayward (eds.), On Trial: The Case of Sinyavsky (Tertz) and Daniel (Arzhak) (1967).↩︎

Toby Clarke, in his aforementioned work Art and Propaganda, etc. at p. 95, thus observes: “in reality Stalin was short, fat and bandy-legged with a pock-marked face, narrow forehead and a withered left arm.”↩︎

See The Gulag Archipelago. Most notable of his novels is The First Circle, though see also One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. For a general account, see also Evgenia Ginsburg’s fascinating account of the camps in Journey into the World Wind (1989).↩︎

The reverse influence – English on Russian – must, however, also be noted since Zamiatin, who had worked in Newcastle-upon-Tyne during the earlier years of the First World War as a naval architect supervising the building of some Russian ice breakers, was a fluent English speaker, a great admirer of H. G. Wells and subsequently wrote two essays about him in Russian, published in 1922 and 1924 respectively.↩︎

It is, of course, interesting to note that at almost at the same time, 1927 to be precise, Fritz Lang’s masterpiece film Metropolis appeared on the screen, depicting similar concerns.↩︎

The other, of course, being 1984.↩︎

The proposed preface to the book was not included in the original publication but was subsequently found among his papers and published for the first time in The Times Literary Supplement of 15 September 1972 along with an introduction by his biographer, Professor Bernard Crick. I have been using the Penguin reprint of 2000, the words in quotation coming from page 99.↩︎

Op. cit. p. 98.↩︎

Op. cit. pp. 79 ff.↩︎

C. S. Lewis, ‘George Orwell’ in Lesley Walmsley (ed.), Essay Collection: Literature, Philosophy and Short Stories (2000), pp. 155, 157.↩︎

For details see, Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time, Vintage (2016), pp. 15 ff. and 51 ff.↩︎

Though this does not mean that the party itself ever gave explicit instructions; most of them came from writers associations or influential party authors.↩︎

Published in 1932.↩︎

Professor Katerina Clark’s The Soviet Novel: History as Literature (3rd ed. 2000), p. xii, adopts a less judgmental approach, attempting instead “a dynamic account of the novel’s evolution, seen in the general context of Soviet culture.” Her background account does not, I feel, in any way conflict with my more critical evaluation.↩︎

The most amazing instance is of Mayakovsky’s and Pasternak’s decision to arrange a public reading of their poems with the proceeds – secretly – going to Akhmatova to meet vital needs. Feinstein, op. cit., p. 131.↩︎

The poem, including its short but very moving preface written in prose, can be found in English in Anna Akhmatova, Selected Poems, trans. by D. M. Thomas, Vintage Books (2009), pp. 87–97.↩︎

Completed in 1924 and published in 1966.↩︎

Under the new title The Days of the Turbins, which Stalin apparently saw many times.↩︎

In 1966–7, and thanks to the efforts of his wife, an incomplete version appeared in a Russian magazine, Moskva. The full version appeared abroad in 1967.↩︎

Markesinis, Eugenie, Andrei Sinyavsky: A Hero of his Time? Studies in Russian and Slavonic Culture (2013).↩︎

Sinyavsky and Pasternak were among those who fell into this category.↩︎

His anti-utopian fantasy We was first translated into English by Gregory Zilboorg and published in the USA in 1924. I have relied on the English edition first published by Jonathan Cape in 1970 by Bernard Guilbert Guerney and reprinted by Penguin with an introduction by Michael Glenny in 1972. The book describes life within a glass city where all human activity is surveyed and controlled by the authorities.↩︎

Strangely, however, during the Second World War, her reputation among ordinary people was during this period so high that she was allowed to give some well-attended lectures to the defenders of the besieged city assuring that their country and their language were destined to survive. Once the ear was over, however, Stalin reverted to his older game of playing cat and mouse with her.↩︎

Rosalind P. Blakesley, Russia and the Arts: The Age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky, National Portrait Gallery, London, (2016), plate 26.↩︎

Feinstein, op. cit., p. 9. Lists of most of the portraits done of her can be found in

https://artoftherussias.wordpress.com/2012/05/04/akhmatova-in-art/ . Some, however, such as the one-line sketches by Modigliani are, in my respectful view, valueless but priceless while those depicting – from the mid-forties onwards – an over-weight and aged poetess do not give the viewer a clue of her youthful beauty and calmly strong character.↩︎

Isaiah Berlin, A Life, mainly chapters 11 and 12, (1998). His narrative is partly repeated but also expanded by Elaine Feinstein’s Anna of All the Russias, chapter 13, (2007). To keep the text to manageable proportions, further references to these two works will be omitted.↩︎

Extracts of it are re-produced in Elaine Feinstein’s book, op. cit. at p. 222.↩︎

Her adventurous life is recounted in Elaine Feinstein’s, gripping biography Anna of All the Russias: A Life of Anna Akhmatova, Vintage Paperback 2007. Chapter 1 offers a most readable account of the Russian ruling classes sleepwalking into the abyss while the bulk of the people suffered from hunger and disease.↩︎

The Noise of Time, op. cit. pp. 148 ff.↩︎

Dictated to and edited by his younger pupil and friend, the musicologist Solomon Volkov. For details, see bibliography at the end of this work.↩︎

Op. cit., pp. 156–8↩︎

I owe much in what follows in the works cited above and below but also to Gleb Prokhorov’s Art Under Socialist Realism: Soviet Painting, 1930-1950, Craftsman House, Australia, (1995). Quite a few pictures depict reproduced family or social scenes; but it is difficult to deny that the artists’ heart is more in those depicting socially important leaders.↩︎

Indeed, Western military leaders, such as Eisenhower and Montgomery, were quick to express their admiration for Zhukov and reward him with the highest decorations of their respective countries.↩︎

This sentence may please some but leave others indifferent. Yet somehow get the reader to glance first at Serov’s painting of Prince Felix Yusupov (reproduced in Valentin Serov: The First Master of the Russian Painting, with an informative Introduction by Dmitry Sarabyanov, Parkstone/Aurora Publishers, Bournemouth and St Petersburg (1996), picture no. 28) and then Iakovlev portrait of Zhukov. Those who have studied both parallels can then decide who has truly succeeded in his assigned task. Both artists produced equestrian portraits; the first is a societal pose by one of Russia’s greatest families; the second is plain political propaganda on a canvas, albeit successful. To be sure, the horse in the second painting tramples on the fallen banners of the defeated Nazis, something which will enthuse the politically minded viewer; but it is art and artists that we are comparing here not messages. So, in the first painting the horse stands calmly as its long training of a thoroughbred has taught it to do; the second horse, on the other hand, has gone wild – and understandably some might say given the moment captured by the painting. Finally, both riders are self-confident but the first exudes his disciplined upbringing, as his right hand reposing on his hip beautiful demonstrates, drawing his self-assurance from the fact that he knows that he has always been at the top. The second, a self-made man who has risen to the top through his talent and ruthlessness, is literally portrayed as being over the top. In a sense, one understands his exhilaration. Iakovlev succeeded with his propaganda portrait because he could feel the toil required from the self-made men to succeed. Serov, on the other hand, knew his aristocracy, since he spent a lifetime painting them; so his success as an artist must have come as naturally to him as it did to the self-centred prince choosing his pose. Thus, in the space of about 50 years these two Russian paintings, and the artists who produced them, had changed as much as their sitters and the worlds’ they inhabited. The reader who grasps these details has already taken his first big step in understanding how art, like everything else, had changed in Russia.↩︎

Her account on how this masterpiece was painted can be found in Yablonskaya, T. N., How I worked on my painting ‘Grain’ // An Artist’s Experiences. Edition 3, Moscow, 1957, p. 58.↩︎

On Social Realism (1972), p. 200.↩︎

Graphic arts were highly developed during the twilight years of the Tsarist regime, which explains why their revolutionary successors were able to put so successfully the inherited techniques to the service of the new era. For interesting textual and photographic material of the Tsarist antecedents, see: The Twilight of the Tsars – Russian Art at the Turn of the Century, Hayward Gallery London, 7 March-19 May 1991, South Bank Centre (1991) pp. 134 ff.↩︎

A Visual History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Death of Stalin, Tate Publishing (2008).↩︎

I mention three for, to varying degrees, they were identified with liberal ideas, sympathetic to socialism and in some cases even staunch supporters of the new communist order. Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (1893-1930) was, in fact, posthumously described by Stalin as the “as the best and the most talented poet of our Soviet epoch.” and yet he committed suicide for the reasons mentioned in the text above. Marina Ivanova Tsvetaeva (1892-1941), spent some years in self-exile in Paris, Berlin and Prague but on her return to Moscow had to experience her husband’s persecution and, finally, execution in 1941 upon which she followed him by committing suicide herself. Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam (1891-1938), was a Polish Jew who pursued philosophical studies at the Sorbonne, Heidelberg and then Saint Petersburg) having, during his youth, worked, with Nikolai Gumilyov, the first husband of Anna Akhmatova. After vacillating between praising and criticising Stalin, and suffering short periods of exile, Mandelstam ended up in The Gulag at Vladivostok, asking his friends to send blankets and food. None arrived and he died of cold and hunger. He was posthumously rehabilitated during the period of the Khrushchev ‘thaw’ and totally exonerated during the Gorbachev years for all he had been falsely accused. The above may have been the attitude of a small number of very talented people; yet for present purposes, what is interesting is that, on the whole, they could be considered to have been close or very close to the new order. Yet they had the courage to object to the way its fanatical officials enforced the policies of socialist realism and paid for this purity of thought the supreme price.↩︎

Other masterpieces, like Bugakov’s Master and Margaritta, totally unconnected with the spirit of Soviet Realism, were written during the said period even though they did not see the light of day until well after their authors had died. So, if this shows something it is that though Stalinism caused untold misery to millions, including Bulgakov – it failed to snuff out completely his indisputable talent.↩︎

The extent of Lenin’s strength of character and pragmatism can only begin to be realised if one recalls that under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Russia gave up one quarter of its population and industry and nine tenths of its coal mines in exchange for ending its participation in World War I and, in particular, establishing peace with Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire. The loss, however, enabled the Russians to refocus on their country during their subsequent five year plans initiated by Stalin to develop a heavy industry but not suitable for peace production. However, the factories turned out endless tanks during the height of the German threat to Moscow, Stalingrad and Leningrad.↩︎

Concluding Thoughts

i. Character, Character and Only Character

Character makes endurance in adversity possible; character makes it possible to lose with grace and win with magnanimity; character, in sport, makes it as pleasurable competing as winning; character makes it infinitely preferable to forgive than to seek revenge; character makes friends tolerate each other’s flaws and thus makes true friendships last; character kills pomposity and allows modesty and gratitude to flourish, and, since this book is mainly devoted to art, if the character and temperament of the subject of a portrait comes through on a painted canvas, it instantly transforms the effort of the artist into a triumph.

This book has been mainly concerned with painting and its ability to describe people and events – real or imagined – in a way that will give pleasure but also educate and even inspire the viewer. To achieve such long-lasting ambitions the painters must do their work according to certain truths and, arguably, the most important is to capture the character – i.e. the inner as well as the outer characteristics of individual humans.

In the case of the painting of portraits, two characters, not one, have to be understood and their temperaments reflected on the canvas: that of the sitter and that of the artist. In what follows I shall treat character as a close alternative to temperament since both terms represent the combination of mental, physical and emotional traits of a person, which are often accompanied by a disinclination to submit to conventional rules or restraints. Temperament has been analysed from very ancient times and in our day more so by psychologists and philosophers who tend to see the term as an alternative to character, predisposition, nature and personality.

Painting a portrait is successful if, beyond pleasing the sitter and informing the world of what he really looks like, it also depicts the true or, at least, the main characteristics of the sitter. Moreover, when we refer to character[s] in art, we must always remember, as already stated, that in this depiction two characters are involved: the artist and the sitter. For the painting to be successful, their respective characters must click or dovetail in the sense that, at the very least, they understand, even if they do not like, each other.

In this co-operative relationship, honesty and perspicacity play an important part in producing the desired result. This means that the artist must be honest and paint what he sees or – better still – detect and reflect on the canvas the true character of the sitter. He must not distort, for better or for worse, the image he sees, let alone deliberately deceive his viewers. The sitter, in turn, must display his or her true character or, at least, help the portraitist discover it and thus do justice to the final product.1

I italicised the word help for some sitters have the personality gift of transmitting the best of their characters to third parties, including artists painting their portraits. For instance, the famous Russian poetess Akhmatova had this natural gift, and this may explain which she was one of the most oft-painted poets of her time. For "the appeal of Akhmatova as a model was not merely [due] to her unusual appearance [nor] her fame after the publication of her [poems], but also in how she met the gaze of the artist, and in how she helped him see in her something greater than a poetic rule maker or lady of fashion."2

In this process of mutual understanding, however, a complication may arise, and it can often be difficult to resolve. This difficulty, especially for the non-specialist, stems from the fact that humans can have different or mixed personality features; they may, in other words, have mixed temperaments, something known and accepted by those who specialise in the study of these psycho-medical features of human personalities, which means that nowadays it is widely accepted that many persons may partake of the characteristics of many types of personality, e.g. choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic and melancholic. So, what if sitters, consciously or unconsciously, let reveal to one artist painting their portrait one aspect of their character while, at the same time or later, reveal to another portraitist a different side of their personality? How are we then to deduce from such a complex state of affairs if the sitter’s true personality has been discovered and projected on the canvas by the portraitist?

The portraits of Akhmatova by Olga Della-Vos Kardovskaia and Stephan Altman, reproduced in the previous chapter, offer a perfect example of this dilemma. In different ways, both are marvellous paintings though, by reflecting the fact that in their technique they represent different artistic schools and this may make the detection of her character features even more difficult to guess. What makes this state of affairs even more intriguing is the fact that different viewers can see in the portraits of the same sitter a different temperament or personality being projected.

Olga’s painting thus depicts a pensive, serious, thoughtful, traditionally posing Akhmatova. On the other hand, Stephan’s rendering could be seen as portraying a woman who, through adopting a laid back posture may appear to be ‘inviting the viewer to come near her’, though the painting of her arms and the muscles around her neck can also suggest to other observers that she is showing a fair degree of tenseness. Now those inclined to pay most attention to Anna’s laid-back posture may even be inclined to see a woman in a ‘flirtatious’ mood and, in life, she was a flirt by nature.

With the help of extraneous evidence, these not immediately obvious to all features could be understandable for two reasons. First, because of the change in the circumstances of Anna’s lifestyle brought about in their wake – two official marriages, several extra-marital relationships and a long-lasting torment brought about by her son’s repeated imprisonments. Secondly, because the twenties and thirties were – Europe wide – years of great licentiousness if compared to the preceding years. This was as true of Berlin as it was of London, e.g. its famous Bloomsbury group – so why not see it as reflecting the climate of Russia of the time as well. 3

So are the viewers imagining things? Or are we now faced with a personality which has changed over the years and acquired the characteristics of persons with mixed temperaments? Though it is impossible to say with any degree of certainty, it is quite plausible to suggest that both of the above suggestions may contain an element of truth. Akhmatova, in brief, may have not been a straightforward phlegmatic person, as most who knew her have suggested, but one of a mixed type, perhaps, with a touch of the features found in sanguine characters. Those who try to avoid weighing all of the above factors before reaching a conclusion may thus be guilty of deception or self-deception but nothing more serious than that.

By contrast, an example of straightforward dishonesty was described, indeed given special prominence, by being included at the very beginning of the book and even on its cover. It remains a unique example of deceptive political propaganda perpetrated by a great but opportunist artist: Jacques Louis David. His times may have nourished his opportunism,4 even to the point of betraying friends whose portraits he had also painted.5 This, however, is, at best, an explanation not a justification for what he did, but, though art needs truth, like life, it is not dishonest to the point of denying artistic excellence even when this is accompanied by deceit. The painting of the dead Marat is almost as frightening as the assassinated rebel, but no art critic has ever denied that it was also an amazing piece of art.

Over the centuries, apart from natural scientists, the category of describers of what they saw also came to include a number of notable portraitists. The work they did not only produced some very attractive depictions of notable and/or attractive sitters; it also furnished invaluable sociological information about life in different countries, different eras and amidst differing social strata of society. To do all this well, honesty in depicting people’s true selves was, once again, essential. Van Dyck excelled in this in capturing the melancholic expression in the eyes of King Charles I, especially in the central figure of the famous triple portrait.

An example of honesty was described in Essay no. 3 in the story of Madame Vigée Le Brun’s portrait of the Queen of France with her children. In her completed work she produced quite simply what she saw, and her character, as it emerges at least from her Memoirs written towards the end of her life, makes it impossible to imagine her being party to any scheme aimed at deceiving the French of her time.

Vigée Le Brun’s honesty may thus have scuppered the Palace’s scheme to produce a deceptive image; but the person who, quite spontaneously, also made it impossible to deceive the public, was the very person whose image her courtiers had attempted to manipulate the Queen. For, every time she posed for an official portrait she became prim and proper, and all-too-conscious of her title of queen. In the case of her portrait with her children honesty, once again, helped produce a painting, which, though not noted for the warmth of feelings, over the years it became historic. It thus kept attracting viewers to the Palace of Versailles where it ended up who just wished to catch a glimpse of it even though by that time it was only of mere historical value having lost all the darkness of the intrigues which courtiers had planned in the shadows of the palace corridors.

There is an important lesson to be learnt from stories such as these. The writer’s, artist’s, photographer’s, sitter’s, own characters all play a key role on whether the final product will succeed in portraying a striking picture of the person who figures in the picture as engaging, attractive and real on a two-dimension surface. The third dimension an artist can add to this two-dimensional material of his is not just depth and perspective; it is a penetration into the sitter’s soul and revealing it to the viewers. Character is thus the word that figures throughout the process of turning a blank canvas into a marvellous painting, and this must be discovered and understood by the artist first and then projected in his final product so that it is judged by the world.

Two illustrations of historical personalities whose characters and moods obviously impressed their artists – in different ways – are shown in pictures reproduced below in this section of the book. The first is Clytemnestra, a heavily mythologised person of history, painted by Sir Frederick Leighton on the basis of the impression which has survived thanks to ancient texts which had evidently impressed the artist. The portrait reproduced below is an excellent example of what the artist who painted it must have thought the Mycenaean Queen looked like a choleric person if there ever was one.

Since Clytemnestra never posed before Leighton, his impression of her would and did depend upon whether he had done

his research about his subject thoroughly before the first brush stroke touched the canvas for the need to prepare is crucial to any truly great artist. We saw, for instance, towards the end of a previous essay concerning Vrubel, the views the great Valentin Serov held on this point. He there voiced the real anxiety [sic] that gripped him until he had discovered his [potential] sitters’ character before deciding if he would paint him or her and if so, how he would transfer his or her characteristics onto the canvas.

I share this keenness – or should I use the word obsession – that artists have in understanding the character of the person whom they are about to paint for they are not photographing a human being but painting the portrait of an individual man or woman, as his friends and family would recognise his or her features and character. I have spent quite a few lines making this point for I think this is precisely what we see in Leighton’s painting of the Queen of Argos and Mycenae. For he, too, did not just paint a woman, or even, a Queen but a powerful, vindictive, devious female as history has given her to us through numerous accounts of perceptive ancient authors and playwrights who could paint with words.

So, what we see is a buxom and not a dainty feminine, stern, not sweet-looking, choleric woman, impatient – and, in my view, her crossed hands display this impatience – for the first signals indicating that her husband, King Agamemnon was on his way back from Troy. Moreover, what makes her quite repulsive as a human is – and we know it – that her impatience is not due to the fact that she has missed her husband because of his prolonged absence but because she is impatient to murder him the moment he sets foot in their home?

Just as Christianity had its Salome; Ancient Egypt, its Cleopatra; Rome, its Livia Drusilla; Renaissance Italy, its Lucrecia Borgia; so did ancient Greece had her own specimen of a power-obsessed woman in Clytemnestra.6 In her Leighton portrait, evil is clearly in the air. The palace guards, looking for signs of Agamemnon’s approach to the palace, and the Chorus, in the early parts of the tragedy entitled Agamemnon, thus feel all this in their bones so subtle hints are dropped to warn the audience that the dénoument of the tragedy is going to be blood-curdling.

Anyone reading Aeschylus’, Sophocles’, Euripides’ descriptions of Clytemnestra will also recall what her own children thought of their mother and will, therefore, have no difficulty in accepting Leighton’s dour image of her. Indeed, a careful study of this painting as a whole will show that the only part of it which does not exude anger, revenge and turmoil, but order and calmness are … the pleats of the Queen’s dress! And this is only because Leighton enjoyed painting pleats, just as Alma Tadema made himself an expert in painting marble floors and thus included them in as many of his paintings as he possibly could. Artists have a way of inserting their own quirky interests in their paintings just as Whistler would secret at the bottom of his canvases, his wasp.

The conclusion is: painting the portrait of a person no longer alive, succeeds all the better if the artist has done his homework well, while catching the likeness of a living person on canvas requires the artist to gauge his sitter’s character well as they face each other and be true to what he imagines or sees, whatever the cost to either artist or the subject depicted on the canvas.

This last opinion can be easily stated but it is difficult to appreciate how important it is in practice. For artists, as much as politicians, generals and businessmen, must understand their interlocutors if they really wish to remain ahead of whatever game they are playing. The idea just expressed about artists is transferable value to other situations where such knowledge may be useful.

The ability to catch and reflect on canvas the disposition of the sitter was something Titian could achieve perfectly. The portrait below proves this since it is one history’s greatest portraits, in this instance depicting Emperor Charles V of Germany who was facing the portraitist when he was being painted.

The Emperor was such a complicated personality and the moment when his sitting for his portrait took place was so politically complex that it did need a master artist to depict on canvas its full significance. So what we see in the picture above is the live impression that the Emperor must have made on Titian who had worked for him for over 25 years. Can we guess what this was?

Now Titian was both an observant and perceptive artist so he must have known of the Emperor’s sober, rational, stubborn and pragmatic nature as well as his devout Catholicism which, for the observant viewer is also depicted in this unique work of art.7 All this background information gave him a good start in understanding the formidable rather than lovable man sitting opposite him. Additionally, however, he must have also sensed that the person posing for him was, in this instance, plagued by gout and was beginning to show signs of fatigue – clearly visible in the rings painted around his agonised eyes – from his constant wars with Protestants and Ottomans. 8

By the time the depicted portrait of the ageing Emperor was completed, Charles’ optimism, even though he had recently defeated the Protestants at the battle of Mühlberg,9 was more or less fading because of his growing realisation of his failing ability to bring the Protestants back into the fold of Catholicism. Indeed, despite ongoing talks, and despite some concessions made towards Protestantism, the Diet of Augsburg, which came a few years later, confirmed this status quo and left untouched the Roman Catholic ritual of the Church. Augsburg, in other words, was an interim agreement, and the experienced Emperor must have understood that yet another war would be needed to bring this huge religious clash to a compromise conclusion. In short, he must have also started thinking that the time was fast approaching for him to retire.

The renewed armed struggle did in fact occur in the 17th century when Catholics and Protestants – this time from most parts of Europe – clashed again in an even bloodier war, which became known as the Thirty Years War. And this did, in fact, end with an important compromise – on a variety of legal grounds – the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 which was even signed simultaneously in two cities, one Catholic and one Protestant, namely Münster and Osnabrück.

Charles’ abdication, however, had come much earlier, in 1555 to be more precise. After some time spent on distributing his lands between his son Phillip and his brother Ferdinand, the broken but once grand ruler, finally returned to Spain in 1556 and lived the last two years of his life in the Monastery of Yuste.10 No other option could have been open to a sincere and devout Catholic who had failed in his life’s main task. Is this too brutal a conclusion?

Were it mine, alone, this harsh assessment might have been questionable, but when more or less the same conclusion is voiced by one of the world’s most wily contemporary politicians, Henry Kissinger; his words must receive more attention. Writing in 201411, he maintained that “the efforts to fill [the] aspirations inherent in his [the Emperor’s] office [went] beyond the capabilities of a single individual. A haunting portrait by Titian from 1548 at Munich’s Alte Pinakothek reveals the torment of an eminence who cannot reach spiritual fulfilment or manipulate the … levers of hegemonic rule.” The italics are here needed to stress the words, which to me indicate that Dr Kissinger fully shares the view that Charles V left Germany a broken man.

Human moods can greatly influence the painting of portraits and offer the artist the choice to produce an honest or deceiving portrait. Moreover, moods, as much as the character of the sitter, can be influenced by his varying attributes such as age, fatigue, health concerns or actual illness, inherent optimism or pessimism, self-discipline or absence of it and the like. Titian’s masterpiece displays all these characteristics of the ageing monarch.

So, if we now move to a different personality, unbendingly devoted to his mission in life, all shaped by his deep and austere religious beliefs, we can come across our last illustration, a sitter totally uninterested in having himself beautified by his portraitist. Indeed, one can go further and suggest that such sitters are not only indifferent to how there are portrayed; more seriously, they may be unable to appreciate the public relations effects that inspired portraits had in times when the mass media communications were undeveloped.

Oliver Crowell was such a person. A strong character, austere and dour, hardened and not mellowed by his religious beliefs, could not have been an entertaining sitter for his portraitist, Sir Peter Lely. Upon their first encounter, the artist was thus instantly warned that he would not be paid if he did not paint the General as he was and, instead, attempted to soften his manner or beautify his far from attractive face. The instructions, brutally delivered to Lely, were thus simple: “Use, Sir, all [your] skill to paint a picture truly like [me] and not [to] flatter [me] at all”. For, if the portrait did not reveal “all the roughness, pimples, warts and everything [the artist saw in Cromwell the latter would not pay the painter] a farthing for it”. This instruction became the origin of the expression ‘warts and all’.

So, it is worth repeating that to understand a portrait fully one must also dwell deeply in the characters of the sitter, the artist, but also on the special psychological relationship that developed between them. If the importance of the above is correctly perceived, and this is by no means an easy task not often explored by art critics, it will add a further dimension to our understanding of painting in general and portraiture in particular.

In all three portraits discussed above, there is not the slightest attempt to deceive the viewer, which, incidentally, is not the case with Van Dyck’s superb portraits of King Charles I where the (eventually executed) King is artfully presented to have been taller than he really was.

ii. Is the Deception Obvious of Itself or Does It Need Supporting Facts?

So, in the light of the concluding statement, let us return to our theme of deception in pictorial art and decide if the artist’s intention to deceive is manifest just by looking at the canvas, albeit with enhanced care, or whether it requires the pleading of additional facts which will turn an innocent-looking image into an inexplicable or, even, a negative one.12 The process we have to explore here thus resembles the lawyer’s task when pleading an ‘innuendo’ in the law of defamation where the defamatory meaning is not obvious on the face of the statement complained of and only the pleading and proving of additional, extraneous, facts can make the statement actionable.

Thus, we noted, that Vigée Le Brun’s paintings of the Queen of France would not, by themselves, make anyone even suspect that there was some kind of dishonest or sinister motive concealed in the painting or its commissioning. It is only additional facts, which must be invoked and proved that can reveal the ultimate and deceitful aim of those who commissioned the portrait. In the event, if the painting failed to reveal the queen as a warm and caring mother and individual it was not deceitful but had revealed what the artist has witnessed. This is because when sitting for a formal portrait, as was the one ordered by her husband and his henchmen, the requirements of protocol gripped her mind and made her look serious if not uninterested while her children likewise showed no interest her, either. What was in her mind, and is suggested by the invariably upward slant of her face, was to project the majesty of her office. Studying the over 20 portraits painted of her by Madame Le Brun alone shows that this was a common feature of the pose she adopted when on ‘public display’. Quite simply, that is how she had been taught to look on public occasions such as these and she remained true to her style.

The same can be said of the Bernini statue of Saint Teresa. For centuries, it was treated as a model of the sculptor’s religious devotion. After all, it was the centrepiece of a private chapel belonging to an important Venetian family which included among its members: Cardinals, a Pope and a Doge. How else could such work in such setting could be interpreted?

It is only when, with the passage of time, the iron grip of the Church weakened and the critics (and some ordinary viewers) began reading with care the words used by Teresa to describe her communion with God, that they suddenly became aware how easy it could be to misinterpret her text and treat her religious rapture as one resembling an erotic ecstasy. With his usual flowing style, Simon Schama makes the transition point superbly easy when he writes13, “What did rapture, after all, look like? Bernini knew perfectly well what it didn’t look like: all those altarpieces featuring heaven-beseeching, rolled-up eyes! What instead, if they were rolled down, the way he had seen ecstasy written on a woman’s face?”

This last point reveals Schama’s talent as a perceptive analyst of works of art for such an art critic, known as a lucid writer, does know how, through carefully selected words, he can put into circulation a new interpretation. The three sentences, cited above, achieve just that, and reflecting on them reveals how a careful selection of words cannot only create new interpretations but also destroy explanations accepted for centuries. The term religious rapture was, from the outset, a dangerous one. For, since no one has ever seen or recorded one, no one could challenge Bernini for understanding it in the way people had always imagined an erotic ecstasy. The result is a triumph of art but one achieved through an invented deception assisted by the skilful use of words.

iii. The Motives Behind the Deception

As was noted in the preceding sections over the years the motives behind artistic deception have varied widely. They have included political propaganda; religious propaganda; erotic pre-disposition on the part of the artist, which, however, he wishes to keep concealed; or, finally, the desire to make a big financial gain by exploiting the uniqueness of a work of art to attract media publicity.

David’s portrait of Marat is one of the best examples of art being used for political propaganda; that is why it was used on the cover of this book. The story of this painting, however, also proves that at times various motives may be combined. In this case, there was also a secondary, though no less important, reason to produce an untruthful picture. This was David’s own reputation, which was built on an uncanny ability to make use of his opportunistic talent which, throughout his life, allowed l’ ami du peuple to change ideas or behaviour to fit in with changing fashions in times of a national crisis. We have, here, in other words, the true hallmark of the opportunist who instantly recognises in the suffering of a neighbour or in social uncertainty in a country the chance of a lifetime for personal enrichment and aggrandisement. This talent is also widely found among politicians but this does not make it any more enviable.

All this is perfectly evident from the kind of pictures David painted as the Monarchy of the Old Regime was replaced by the chaos of the Revolution; as an expected popular uprising mutated into the darkness of the terror; as its horrific extremism hastened its own collapse, only to be succeeded by a period of paralysing incertitude officially known under the title of the directorate. This, too, collapsed since the times were overflowing with problems calling for answers, not inaction and dithering crowds clearly in need of the appearance of a visionary leader.

France was lucky, and, as is often the case with democracies during periods of crises, the leader came to power by means of a coup d’état. Organised in part by his brother, our ambitious general had long realised that his fellow citizens were ready to give up some of their treasured liberté in exchange for achieving the even more earnestly desired égalité.14 So, on the eve of the 18/19 Brumaire 1799, 9th November, after an atypical brief moment of hesitation, our ambitious Corsican General seized power, became First Consul of France and embarked on the most ambitious challenge to level the unsteady vessel of the state; heal the wounds which the Revolution had caused with the Catholic Church; close huge gaps in the state finances; enact a new Civil Code and lay down the administrative foundations of the modern French State. Bonaparte was his name; and a knack for compromise and diplomacy, combined with an unprecedented talent for rapid military campaigns, made him the talk of Europe, not just France, and the idol of most European liberal intellectuals such as Bentham in England, Goethe and Beethoven in Germany and Goya in Spain.

In 1804, however, he decided to crown himself Emperor of the French, a turning point in his character and a slow beginning towards his final defeat some ten years later. David, naturally, adapted his own views to all these changes; and, sensing Napoleon’s megalomania, was also managed to be the one who was commissioned to paint the huge portrait of the Emperor’s official coronation. David opportunism, however, had its limits so, though he profited from an exceptional fluidity in French politics that lasted for nearly 25 years – counting from the beginning of the Revolution – in the end, he had to seek a different existence in Belgium where he died politically unscathed but, as an artist, not forgotten. This, however, did not mean that during this period of exile his popularity as an artist in other countries waned in the least.

Though periods of social uncertainty encourage the appearance of opportunists on the public scene, the exploitative attitude for the sake of personal aggrandisement goes back to antiquity. This, in turn, feeds the human predilection for deception as a way of getting one’s way without resorting to force. One of the best examples of this can be found in the worship of the Egyptian god Amun in Greece under the name Ammon and the protagonist of this story was a man so great as to make us wonder why he felt the need to have recourse to such deceptive propaganda.

Ammon had a temple at Thebes as well as a statue, the gift of Pindar, who even honoured the god with a hymn. Sparta, as well, had such a temple; and its inhabitants, as Pausanias records, consulted from an early time the oracle of Amun in Libya. At Megalopolis, the god was represented with the head of a ram15, and the Greeks of Cyrenaica dedicated at Delphi a chariot with a statue of Ammon.

In short, the reputation of the god – regarded as the Egyptian equivalent of Zeus – was such that Alexander the Great journeyed to the god’s temple after his victory at the battle of Issus. Sensitive as the great king was to public relations and propaganda, he ensured, during his stay in Egypt, that the oracle proclaimed him “the son of Amun”. Alexander thereafter considered himself divine, and coins were instantly struck showing the king’s head with the ram horns. Later in his life, he augmented and intensified these messages of cultural assimilation with conquered races through marriages and other public acts, all suitable recorded to present him as a world, and not just a Greek, leader and turning him into the first if not the only conqueror/civiliser. What was, originally, a deceptive message had the potential of becoming – and did become – the representation of reality. The instinct of this deceiver was spot on!

The same principles apply if we move from political to religious motives; for it was religious – for which read survival motives – that led the Catholic Church and its allies to conceal for centuries Bernini’s antisocial if not, at times, downright immoral behaviour in his private life. For this, the Renaissance Church was not unprepared since it had an acquired talent of ignoring if not concealing the human flaws of God’s vicar on Earth. The same went for many of the Renaissance Princes of the Church whose services to the arts, not the church, can never be adequately acknowledged by Western culture.

The same immorality, born of a super-human ego, affected Bernini’s relations with professional colleagues of equal standing, such as Borromini. What may, however, be morally worse, was the attitude manifested towards talented juniors whom he may have perceived as future competitors. For them, he would develop a strategy of getting them out of his way.

Nowadays, it is widely accepted that beneath Teresa’s sculpted habit lies an erotically seething body revealing the artist’s human desires. I believe that his wish was to deceive his viewers that his aim was to depict Teresa’s sanctity and not his own repressed lust. This is a belief not a suspicion, for how else could he have expressed as an artist his human lust in the midst of a chapel. As for his Jesuit friends and family, they all seemed to have played along with this idea since his public image was as valuable to them as it was to him.

If this wonderful statue is, therefore, really about lust hiding behind a religious habit, it is not the only work of the sculptor which offers evidence of his willingness to cheat; and if, as also stated, this meant cheating a junior associate, so as to get praised himself for the younger man’s work, so be it. Giuliano Finelli may have helped Bernini in one of his earlier works – Santa Bibiana or Viviana. The corpus delicti, however, that reveals the older man’s attempt to cheat the young man, can be found in none other than Bernini’s masterpiece of Apollo and Daphne; and we have already discussed how in that case he treated the most talented of his assistants who had turned Daphne’s beautiful fingers into brittle twigs and concealed her trained body by a growing tree bark.

It is no use continuing with illustrations such as the above for they all point in the direction of the title of this book and also support the concluding thoughts found in my Epilogue viz., genius invariably conceals flaws, physical and mental, just as shadows are always found where light exists. Yet, now because of lack of space, we must glance, however briefly, at the new ways in which propaganda – potentially as oppressive – may be entering our lives.16

iv. Signs that the Soviet Desire to Control Thought May Be Reappearing in Muted Forms in the West

This phenomenon, as hinted, is both old and new; and precisely because we have seen it take some very ugly forms in the past, we must remain sceptical towards it in the present. What is worrying about the new phenomena is that one sees in them some of its similarities with what we said, above, about Socialist Realism.

The aim of these new movements, championed by like-thinking men and women, is to force society to think favourably about them and their causes; and though there is no state behind them to assassinate anyone who does not espouse their cause and comply with the behaviour they expect from one, such movements are increasingly able to neutralise socially anyone who takes them head-on. So influence and power they have, though it does not derive primarily from the state.

But there are also other differences between the older and more modern mutations of Socialist Realism. First and foremost, it does not, as stated, emanate from the state but from modern, specialised, interest groups which, aided by the social media, can exercise their powers through slogans, writings, graffiti – anything in fact that can appear on surfaces such as pavements, roads, bridges, walls – accessible to the public. The artistry or the stylistic elegance of such drawn or written messages may be much inferior to what most cultured people might once have described as art; but the potential omnipresence of such ‘art’ can soon neutralise its artistic deficiencies and end up influencing human behaviour or, even, frightening people to do as asked.

This is an important new development since it is concerned with fabricated – i.e. potentially even deceptive – propaganda by a defined group of individuals who have an interest in publicising and promoting a cause. Claudia Mesch, in her already cited interesting monograph, brings under its heading such movements as Civil Rights Movements, Environmentalism, Gay Identity, Feminism and an important heading she has failed to elevate into an important all-embracing heading – political correctness. This is not the kind of book where these topics deserve to claim much space, so I will only mention briefly the last two for a number of reasons, which will make sense immediately to any reader but also link this material with what has already been mentioned in the sub-section on Controlling Minds and, thus, Controlling Thoughts and art that projects further human aims.

The preliminary point that all these headings, and feminism, in particular, have in common is this: they have rightly – and it must be stressed – raised public consciousness about the inferior status accorded to women – in the family, at school, at university, as well as in the workplace. To varying degrees, this has been true throughout our human history and almost in every state on our planet. An injustice, to be sure, which needed suitable rectification.

Personally, I am delighted that this movement has made great strides towards improving the position of women in society in all the areas alluded to above and this includes one of my academic areas of interest, namely classical studies, wherein the last 40 years or so, feminism has greatly contributed to making the subject more popular and enriched it by scholarly publications which show that its promoters not only have a cause to promote but also often – though not always – the knowledge to support their arrangements sensibly.

If we stopped at this point, there would be no complaint, not from me at any rate, levied against feminism. However, we cannot leave matters as they stand above simply because like all new movements the feminist movement has also had its share of extremists who have saddened those who believe in moderation, reason and courtesy in public debate. More importantly, however, extremist posturing has harmed the movement itself by: (a) adopting strident if not also opaque language; (b) resorting to writing obviously flimsy material and passing it off as scholarship; (c) introducing its principles, again in extreme forms affecting all aspects of academic life such as elections to senior academic posts.

This belief that emotion and feelings can even overturn the hitherto accepted dominance of intelligence and reason and openly even challenge truth can be taken by the acolytes of the new trends to extremes can provoke the reaction of even the centre-right sections of the more serious press.17 Instead of continuing with generalisations, however, let us offer just a few of some of the craziest beliefs seriously put forward for reflection by the rest of us.

Under: (a) I hope I will be allowed to give an extract from the writings of a colleague who has been much more involved in feminist studies and the phenomenon of political correctness. I thus agree with Professor Ian Ward, a much more sympathetic observer of the Critical Legal Studies movement, which spawned unattractive outgrowths when he writes:18

“The early socio-political CLS [critical legal studies] movement began with the very best of motives. Its primary ambition was to educate law students about the politics of law. It has ended, not by reaching any particular goal or indeed identifying one, but by going round in ever-decreasing circles, using up its dissipating energies in a multitude of various internecine disputes, and in the invention of increasingly pretentious and ultimately useless language which, rather than educating, serves only to mystify and then to alienate all but the most fervent of believers.”

Under: (b) I deliberately wish to use a truly flimsy example and, if it strikes some as being too extreme, let us not forget that extreme examples can, in teaching, help offer the best illustrations of how unsatisfactory a proposition or even a thesis can be.

It comes from the pen of Professor Susan McClary, a Harvard trained musicologist, currently – I believe – teaching at the University of California Los Angeles. In a piece published in 1994 in a gay lesbian journal, she tried to argue (so far as I know against all existing evidence) that Franz Schubert’s sexuality may have influenced his music.19 I am no musicologist and cannot determine the effect her strange musings have had on others, but the Wikipedia entry (not clear to me by whom it was written) certainly suggests that not “many critics (…) take her ideas seriously”.20 A few years earlier the same author had written the following text about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which, one could argue, became the banner of her cause:21

“The point of recapitulation in the first movement of the Ninth is one of the most horrifying [sic] moments in music, as the carefully prepared cadence is frustrated, damming up energy which finally explodes in the throttling murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release.”

Statements such as these, tightly packed with words that show deliberately expressed strong views, might conceivably not only give the impression – quite wrongly, of course, and I am sure not intended by the writer – that Beethoven himself harboured thoughts close to rape. But they also represent yet another example of the point made earlier on in this book, namely the trained or professional critic’s self-destructive ability to separate himself or herself entirely from the public he or she is meant to be educating. The danger is that such topics and such language have little room in serious universities training students to acquire profitable employment in the future. I, of course, may be wrong.

Yet, just as Professor McClary is entitled to express her views, my own right to disagree with them is paired with her right to formulate them. And, just in order to exclude the objection that as an English don I do not know or understand the American University scene within which McClary has flourished, let me remind my readers that I have taught in four major American Universities for over 34 years. So, to quote Martin Luther, “Here I stand and can’t do otherwise.”

Finally, as far as my point (c) is concerned let me start with two frivolous decisions taken by two American universities under the influence of these new trends and end this short digression with a more serious objection.

First, at the George Mason University, “staring [sic] at two homosexuals holding hands” is treated as a discrimination and harassment offence. Second, at the University of Minnesota School of Social Work, the university authorities have asked their students not to wear cologne in an attempt to create a fragrance-free zone.22 Presumably, the odour of sweat, from the intense, American kind of jogging, is welcome as a sign of a healthy life.

More serious are my worries over university behaviour concerning senior academic appointments where serious disagreements can arise over the choice of subjects to be taught and the composition of electoral committees entrusted with the selection and election of – one assumes and hopes – the academically most qualified candidates for the posts that have to be filled. These are highly important academic concerns upon which the continued excellence of many American institutions depend, but they can be – and will be – jeopardised if these institutions succumb to the pressures put upon them by the political correctness lobbies.

The person commissioning the painting, if he is to play a role at all, must likewise wish to see the truth prevail and not see in the commissioned painting the means of distorting the truth; or simply see the painting as a means for promoting his own aims.↩︎

Olga Rubinchik, Olga, « Я зд есь, на сером полотне…» – Ахма това и худ ожники, which in English could be rendered as ‘Here, am I on a grey canvas. Akhmatova and Artists’ first published in Toronto Slavic Quarterly, No. 11 (Winter, 2004) and loosely translated into English by the authors of the internet site https://artoftherussias.wordpress.com/…/akhmatova-in-art/↩︎

Love affairs played an important part in Akhmatova’s life and the possible social and sexual parallels with the Bloomsbury kind of groupings that sprung up in Europe at about this time may be worth investigating one day. For details, see Feinstein’s biography, ch. 7.↩︎

As Professor Warren Roberts put it so aptly in his Jacques-Louis David: Art, Politics and the French Revolution (1989) at p. 177: “he was the most serious artist of the time but also he had been the most changeable. He had been drawn to all government and all leaders…”↩︎

I am referring to the portrait of his friend and famous chemist of the time, Antoine Lavoisier, for which, in exchange for turning it into a double portrait and including his wife in it, he demanded and exorbitant price. The painting is now housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. A few years later, Lavoisier was arrested and tried during the Reign of Terror and David agreed to be one of the signatories of his execution.↩︎

Missing from my list is Judith who, for many a reader, should have been included as the one who decapitated Holofernes, the Assyrian King. Yet, she is so atypical and thus variously depicted in Renaissance and Baroque art that she is best omitted from my list and left to the inquisitive reader to analyse her as best he can, religiously, sexually and politically.↩︎

A number of experts have argued that the colours of the sitting portrait give away the Emperor’s preferences. The simple black garment was thus linked to his title as Duke of Burgundy, which, in those days, also had close contacts with Belgium, which the Emperor, having been born in Ghent, considered his true homeland. The red carpet not only forms a wonderful contrast with the black which dominates the top part of the painting but is also what one might describe Cardinal red thus underlying his devotion to Catholicism. Finally, the decoration around his neck, is the collier of one of the oldest and most respected Orders of European Chivalry, that of the Golden Fleece, in those days in the gift of the Kings of Austria, Spain and Belgium but nowadays awarded only by the King of Spain.↩︎

The Emperor’s failing health and growing melancholia are described in some detail by Sir Claude Phillips in his Titian, op. cit. p. 231. This portrait must be compared to the first ever drawn of him painted by Titian in 1533 entitled Charles V with Dog, the Emperor being at the height of his power and good health. He was so pleased with Titian’s work that he instantly gave him a high honour and made him his official portraitist.↩︎

This, too, gave birth to an equestrian, both heroic and optimistic, portrait by Titian.↩︎

For his retirement, Charles V chose the small, out of the way, Hieronymite Monastery of Yuste in the Province of Extremaduranorth Southwest of Castile though the main building had to be extended to accommodate his entourage of some 50 persons. There, he spent his days praying though he was also visited by his illegitimate son, Don Juan of Austria, as well as his son, King Philip II of Spain. Yuste is also the setting for both scenes of Act II of Verdi’s opera Don Carlos, which is focused on the son of Philip II who was implicated in a plot against his father, which led to his execution. Charles died and was buried in the monastery church; though later his remains were transferred to the Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo del Escorial where most of the dead Spanish Kings lie.↩︎

Henry Kissinger, World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History. Allen Lane (2014), ch. 1. The italics are mine in order to stress the words, which to me indicate that Dr Kissinger fully shares my view that Charles left Germany as a broken man.↩︎

The point made above about the short height of Charles I – 5 ft, 4 in. – is an example of what I wish to discuss in this subsection. For his deceptive depiction in the Van Dyck portraits is noticed and, perhaps discussed, only by those who realise how the concealment is accomplished by painting the king from a low angle upwards.↩︎

The Power of Art at p.↩︎

Expert wordsmiths as the French are soon realised that the third word, which formed part of the Revolution’s battle cry namely, fraternité, was vacuous so no one need worry about its atrophy too much.↩︎

Pausanias, viii.32 § 1.↩︎

I found Claudia Mesch’s Art and Politics: A Small History of Art from Social Change Since 1945, I. B. Tauris (2013) a well-written introduction to the modern trend of artists to engage with diverse modern, political, movements – though their art takes different forms than those which we associate with traditional art, typically aiming to please rather than champion novel causes. My major complaint with her original work is that the accompanying illustrations are inadequately helpful to those who, like the present author, cannot claim much familiarity with these modern forms of art.↩︎

Thus, see Melanie Phillips’ excellent article in The Times of 23 January 2018, p. 26.↩︎

Law and Literature: Possibilities and Perspectives (1995), at p. 22.↩︎

‘Constructions of Subjectivity in Schubert’s Music’ in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (1994).↩︎

http://wikipedia.org?wiki?Susan_McCary’s_constructions_of_subjectivity_in_Franz_Schubert’s_music (last accessed 27 April 2006).↩︎

‘Getting down off the Beanstalk,’ Minnesota Composers Forum Newsletter (January 1987), pp. 7 ff. (my italics).↩︎

For other examples see John Leo, ‘PC: Almost Dead. Still Funny,’ U.S. News and World Report (5 December 1994), p. 24.↩︎

Epilogue

Character Shadows, Flaws and Deviations

Many of the authors whose life and works inspired paintings, the artists who accomplished this move from idea to canvas or this transformation from manuscript to painting, as well as the characters depicted on the canvasses, themselves, were unusual figures, to say the least. Unusual here is used not necessarily as a synonym to talented for it goes without saying that all of them were gifted in different ways.

As one moves up the scale from talented to the almost inconceivable and unattainable heights of ‘genius’, human understanding of such a mental status becomes blurred and uncertain in biological, moral, psychological terms as well as its behavioural predictability.

That is the point where this unusual factor enters the equation and difficulties of different kinds begin to complicate our thinking about geniuses. For, as I once tried to demonstrate in a more detailed book,1 exceptional levels of creativity are often accompanied by physical and mental peculiarities – one might even speak of aberrations from normal behaviour as well as mental problems of a wide variety – which can manifest themselves on the entire scale of social abnormalities, such cheating or unattractive levels of opportunism and moving into mental problems from hypomania, turning into obsessive bouts of disloyalty, kleptomania, moral depravity and even reaching higher levels of mental disturbance such as severe symptoms of anxiety, bipolarity, depression, neuroses and, even, madness.

The previously discussed artist Vrubel fell into one or more of these categories which both helped his talent surface but, beyond a certain point, they also impeded it from producing new works. In short, at such heightened levels of psychic deviance, creativity can cease,2 as it sometimes also does if the person in question is nowadays treated effectively by means of chemical therapy operating on his brain. As the symptoms decrease the talent also slowly dies.

Glancing selectively at some of the painters discussed in this book, a few would clearly fall in the category of genius. Most interested in pictorial art I would undoubtedly include is Titian in this very select group, not least because of the impact he had on the work of later famous artists such as Rubens and Van Dyck.

Goya and Vrubel might be considered for inclusion in this exceptional category though I can imagine differing doubts expressed about each of them even though they were both exceptionally talented artists. I suspect doubts would also be expressed about Jacques-Louis David being placed in the category of genius even though he was the key painter who – almost single-handedly – switched French Rococo to Neo-Classism and also maintained throughout his life a steady stream of highly regarded works. Likewise, admirable is Sir Fredric Leighton though, again, I suspect many would take the view that he received his fair share of State honours for a life’s contribution to art in Britain and no further categorisation of his high standing is called for.3 Matters would, however, be different, in the case of Bernini. For not only he was a multi-talented artist; he was also undoubtedly the greatest sculptor of modern history and thus few would find it difficult to call him a genius notwithstanding a character seriously affected by quite a few of the shadows I alluded to above.

Moving to literature Lermontov strikes me as coming very close to the highest limits of exceptional talent, both as a poet – in the 19th century Russia probably second only to his idol Pushkin – but also as the creator of the model of modern Russian prose. In addition, and judging from the many of his watercolours, which I have seen, I would suspect few have immortalised his beloved Caucasus the way he did. All in all, therefore, a very intriguing character, convincingly described as Russia’s Byron.

Among poets, Homer, whose amazing imagination has inspired a couple of paintings discussed in this book, must clearly be ranked as one of the world’s most fascinating geniuses, along with Shakespeare and Goethe. However, his private life being totally unknown to us escapes the risk of having its flaws – which as a human he must have had – publicly analysed.

Others discussed in this book – like Boucher and Madame Le Brun – were clearly talented or, one might say, very talented for their times. In the case of Madame Le Brun, one would also have to offer praise for her overcoming through incessant work admirable perseverance and good character the obstacles faced by women painters of her time.

The last of the artists who call for a special mention in this concluding summary would Andrea Pozzo. His incredible talent in the trompe l’Oeil genre of painting enriched numerous religious and civil building in Italy and central Europe adorn and one might even add he was precisely the kind of exceptional talent which the quite unique religious Jesuit Order was quick to spot it and rapidly attracted him to its ranks during the centuries it offered its exceptional services to education.

I end this brief and knowingly incomplete survey of artists who have been mentioned in this work with the suggestion that my readers should always try to familiarise themselves with the character traits of all these great artistic creators. For understanding their characters – mental warts and all – will enhance not just their works but also help us appreciate better how they transformed stories first described by pen on some kind of writing material – parchment or papyrus for instance and, later, paper onto canvasses painted by brush. This changing of medium presented its own challenges and those interested in the more technical problems encountered in frescoes or canvass paintings may find this study of unusual interest.

Letting the Mind Wander Beyond What It Has Seen and Read Thus Far

This book has looked at great works of art depicting interesting and attractive men and women, important events, mythical or historical, which only imaginative humans could ever have invented, described, or depicted in a memorable manner. However, it is also about those who posed before painters or sculptors or were imagined by the latter who, stirred by their superhuman perception, transformed what was imagined into something real for others to see, to admire and often even like.

Since I had other aims apart from the above in writing this book, I would earnestly advise my readers, especially the younger ones among them, to go beyond the information provided by me in the text, pictures and notes, and try to begin weaving their own ideas around all this material. Allowing, indeed encouraging, their minds to wander beyond facts given my readers and viewers may well perfect their abilities to analyse works of art realising that this is a challenge that calls for more than an attentive look at a picture. For a wide-range reflection over such complex works of art may lead those attempting such a challenge to draw wider conclusions about the human characteristics of great creators.

Stirring the human imagination of the viewer or reader is like any other form of education: it requires stimuli, encouragement to escape from standard forms of thought, and the possibility of rewards at the end if they manage in the end to turn such reflections into some form of advancement of knowledge. For education should be about making people think, not filling their heads with information, especially if they do not know how to use it.

In whatever way they absorb the above-mentioned condensed advice, whatever angle these potential pupils adopt to study these works and the lives of their creators, they must treat this effort as a stepping stone towards their own betterment; and humans, as Sophocles stressed in a famous choral song in his Antigone, are wondrous for with encouragement they can always go on improving their characters, their thinking and their world. Art, in other words, cannot only please humans; it can go further by stimulating new thoughts, new ideas and action even by those who have not – yet – given signs of unusual creativity.

I honestly believe that most humans can if they look deep into themselves, always find restrictions – I am inclined to call them ghosts – which deny them the self-confidence they need to move forwards and upwards. For most humans, battling their ghosts can be the most difficult battle they will ever have to conduct during their lives. Those who persist with it, however, will invariably win in the end no matter if they are poor or rich, endowed with an average or not exceptional education, discouraged instead of being inspired by their immediate environments. So let us read, look around us, reflect and daydream and thus unleash what is creative inside us.

Studying the kind of works I have discussed in this book should also make my younger readers ponder on the many advantages that can flow from an education which never compromises on excellence; and, while accepting the excellence of the great men and women who occupied me in this book, accept no limits to their own ability to imagine and daydream on how to attain excellence. In short, I want to prick with a needle my readers to force themselves to be bold in their own thinking and not to allow anything other than their common sense and the rules of nature to act as brakes. I also want my readers, especially the younger ones, to realise that the great people whose work can inspire them were not great from day one but became great by working hard, working constantly and at critical junctures of their lives daring to innovate. Success thus attained can then make others think further. For truly great are those who turn out to be useful to others and not merely achieve fortunes or recognition just for themselves.

So I conclude, great are those who can prick the imaginations of others into action or reaction to something which has already taken place; who give themselves the self-confidence to imitate, adapt and advance further the work of others into new realms; to encourage them to take fate into their own hands and, as our greatest English epic poet wrote, to “pursue things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme”.4

Preferences

It is human, especially for young readers, to hasten to classify, artists, composers, writers and scientists in an order of excellence which ties in with their views but, by the nature of things, it is impossible to do. Referring to Da Vinci or Michelangelo as the greatest of artists is, in my view, as wrong as saying that Bach or Beethoven are the greatest composers. All one can do is to say that ‘in my view’ Titian or Velazquez are among my favourite artists just as Mozart and Beethoven are my preferred composers. Likewise, I could refer to Aristotle rather than Plato as the most captivating and realistic philosophical mind in history or, moving back to painting since art attracts me so much, suggest that Sir Anthony van Dyck or Valentin Serov are among the most attractive portraitists whose works I have long admired. The above is permissible and can even provoke interesting further discussions if I elaborated the reasons which led me to acquire these preferences.

To turn, however, my personal tastes in apparently objective and unimpeachable assertions would not only be wrong; it would objectively be unsustainable. The question which then follows the above is why did I not fill this book only with the works of those whom I, personally, regard as the best? The easy answer is the title I chose for these essays largely dictated my choice of works to illustrate the themes I had decided to emphasise.

However, there is a second reason why I had to make choices taking into account additional criteria and not just personal preferences. One only will be mentioned but it is important namely, I wanted my examples to represent a reasonable geographical distribution so as to underline that the phenomena I describe can be found everywhere in the word. Size and time-wise, this led me to devote a fair amount of my work to Russian and Soviet art. This is partly because, to many, it is little known; but mainly because I was determined to try and present a reasonably objective presentation of this major political and artistic policy which governed the lives of millions of people for many decades and which most scholars, especially in the West, felt compelled to stigmatise. This policy, dictated by the government, is known as Socialist.

To avoid misunderstandings, I hasten to add and will repeat again further down, that to a large extent I share the dislike of the inherently repulsive idea of the State dictating to artist and authors how to think and what to write or paint. But I also felt and feel that simple damnation was and is unacceptable if this policy is (a) not also understood as a sociological phenomenon and (b) sufficient allowances are not made in my narrative to mention a number of successful artists and works who survived this government scourge.

I repeat, to reduce somewhat the shock that my views may generate, such a globally negative approach to the basic tenets of Socialist Realism is entirely understandable both on political and moral grounds. Understandable though it may be, however, it is not convincing if it is not accompanied by at least the effort to provide corrective of sorts for true scholarship cannot be absolute in the expression of its views.

I did my best on that score and tried to suggest that even during the peak of 20th century Socialist literature, art and poster art – and by this I am referring to propaganda posters – works appeared which transmitted, in their own ways, a powerful and moving message which helped prepare the Soviet Union during its finest hour when Fascist authoritarianism was ante portas. The success of this ability to react to this horrific threat not only saved Russia; it also helped – enormously – the equally endangered West.

To conclude and explain, if the explanation is needed, the above are some of my reasons for attempting in these last two essays and the concluding thoughts for this book to find redeeming features for the historically very important Socialist Realism movement. It is difficult even to attempt such a task with a semblance of honesty since the desire of this political system to control and direct human thought is repulsive to most authors, including the present one. And it is even more difficult to carry it through successfully bearing in mind the huge numbers of innocent Russians who simply disappeared from the face of the earth during these years, especially during the great purges of the mid-nineteen thirties.

The fact thus remains that Socialist Realism was an important, long-lasting and essential attempt to create new literature and art for a completely new – literally revolutionary – socio-economic system of governing a major country. Such a need cannot be dismissed out of hand, even though the way it was attempted left much to be desired. Nor can it be denied, and empirical studies exist to prove this, that to many Soviet citizens this new literature proved aesthetically appealing. What remains totally unappealing is how this policy was enforced and what effect it had on the dissenters.

So, first, in considering its effects we must thus consider not only how it oppressed many, especially artists and ordinary workers the negative effects – but also how during some key moments of Russia’s modern history it managed to galvanise its citizens to resist an aggressor as unpleasant and as barbarous as the Soviet regime itself had often proved to be towards its own people – a major positive effect.

Second, the oppression of human thought did not, as is commonly asserted, extinguish all signs of quality in literature and art like the above summarily presented text and pictures attempted to show. I made this point above and I repeat it because I feel compelled to do so to weaken the condemnatory sentiments, which have monopolised the literature on this subject. Most of these products of the human mind during this period may not represent the very best that ever came out of Russia during its long history; but in their own way, and given the overall circumstances, some important works do survive telling an extraordinary story about an extraordinarily resilient people.

Third and ominously, we must not be too quick to gloat for the rise and fall of this tendency to control how people think. For this urge of the state and of organised minorities has not run its potentially destructive course under the new globally encountered and growing curse: political correctness. So, though some of the very worst attributes of the Soviet system have thankfully weakened if not died, the danger of some groups or organisations still wishing to control our thought is still alive so we must always strive to strike a workable balance between free thought and speech for both the groups who promote their agendas and those who dislike them.

The Duality of Genius, Shades, Blemishes and Vices in the Lives of Great Achievers, Jan Sramek Verlag, Vienna (2008). For the interested reader, chapters 1, 10, and the Epilogue may, for present purposes, offer the greatest interest.↩︎

The talented Russian artist Vrubel, whose work we glanced at earlier, offers the illustration we need. For he ceased working altogether four years prior to his death as a result of a total nervous breakdown, possibly exacerbated by tertiary syphilis.↩︎

A veritable icon of late Victorian England gifted with a handsome stature, considerable artistic talent, and honoured by the State with a Knighthood and then a Peerage though fate was not on his side for he died one day after the news was communicated to him making him the shortest serving peer in British history.↩︎

John Milton in Paradise Lost, I, 16 following a similar idea put forward earlier in 1532 by the great Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto in his poem Orlando Furioso, Canto 1.2. In my view, the best starting point to enjoy and understand this marvellous poem is Harvard Professor Gordon Teskey’s edited version, published by A Norton Critical Edition, New York-London (2005).↩︎

Appendix on Some Portraits of Anna Akhmatova Related to Ideas Expressed in the Text About Her Life, Looks and Temperament

The Museum of Anna Akhmatova recognises over 200 portraits painted by her contemporaries – portraits in the graphic arts, fine art, sculpture and even mosaic.

During her lifetime, her portraits were painted by such great artists as Amedeo Modigliani as well as Russian or Armenian artists or dilettantes. All are important, even if only as documentation. Sometimes they depict her likeness, and sometimes her state of mind. Sometimes they are a reflection of the internal world of the model, and sometimes they are a reflection of the relationship between the artist and the model. And there are times when we can’t even say there was a relationship at all between the painter and sitter. At such times, the image is less interesting as a portrait of the poet than as an illustration of the epoch.

If we trace the chronology of Akhmatova’s imagery, we can see not only how she changes with age and attitude, but also the changes in the interplay between artist and model. It is worth remembering the impact of her personality and taste on the manner of execution of her portraits. In her iconography, there is little of the artistic experimentation of the 1910s-1920s, although as the [common law] wife of the avant-garde art critic Nikolai Punin in the 1920s and 30s, she moved in avant-garde circles and they were hardly indifferent to her. (Indeed, it may safely be said that nearly every one of those bohemians was in love with Akhmatova.) All of them undoubtedly saw her as ‘classically austere’, and this partly determined the style of her depiction.

What is the secret behind Akhmatova’s portrayals? What prompted her contemporaries to explore her appearance for nearly six decades? There is no simple unique answer to these queries.

Eric Hollerbach wrote to Akhmatova in 1922, and apologised for some indiscretion he committed: ‘I think that it is my awkwardness before you is a completely unconscious reaction to that sharp, dark, almost continuous ache provoked in me by your existence.’1 Something had to be done about this ache, and Hollerbach dedicated poetry to his muse, and published the aforementioned anthology under ‘The Image of Anna Akhmatova’.

The introductory text reproduced above is taken from the original Russian text entitled Olga Rubinchik, « Я зд есь, на сером полотне…» – Ахма това и ху д ожники, which [in loose] English could be rendered as

“Here, am I on a grey canvas. Akhmatova and Artists” first published in Toronto Slavic Quarterly, No. 11 (Winter, 2004) and loosely translated into English by the authors of the internet site https://artoftherussias.wordpress.com/…/akhmatova-in-art/

Here, only extracts that relate to the title I have given to the Appendix are reproduced; and, where such borrowing has occurred, it is reflected through the use of fonts in bold italics. By contrast, my own scribblings are written in the first person and are printed in Roman fonts to remind the reader of my amateur status. For observers of paintings and drawings, who also happen to love passionately art in all its forms, are the consumers of the works of acknowledged artists so, I feel, there are entitled to their views, right or wrong, and even if irreverently expressed. My own love or art in all its forms is exceeded only by my interest in discovering the revealed (or hinted) characters of the sitters and the nature of their relationships with the artists. In this sense, it is the second and the last paragraphs of the introductory text that mainly attracted my attention.

An appendix was, I felt, appropriate to Akhmatova for three reasons. First, because so far as my elementary researchers suggested, next to Russian royalty, she was the most widely painted of Russian writers and poets; secondly, because her talent shone through the indescribable darkness which reigned throughout most of her life; finally, the same can be said of her apparently austere charm which endured even after illness, poverty, hunger and family troubles sapped her youthful looks of much of their beauty shown in the two famous portraits of 1914, reproduced in the main corpus of this work, above.

Looks, talent, character and luck for we must never exclude how this unpredictable element also plays a part in human lives – all formed a part of her existence. Can we be bold enough, however, to try to pinpoint the central factor of her irresistible charisma? It is an author’s duty to fly kites and invite his readers to agree with him or refute his arguments. In that spirit, I thus feel that the most crucial element that glued together all her virtues was her character – calm, strong but also sensitive.

Shyness characterised her early years but as her poems were published and attracted admiration the transformation of character into something quietly majestic began. As Kornei Chukovsky2 observed: "in her eyes and posture and her dealings with people appear the chief feature of her personality – majesty. Not arrogance, not pride, not haughtiness, but majesty, regal,…, unshakeable confidence and self-respect for her own high literary mission. Even in later years, anyone who knew her felt her ‘tranquil importance’ and treated her with special respect, although she remained simple and friendly with them all."

The summary which follows briefly annotates a collection of portraits of Akhmatova and, rightly I believe, begins with one of the earliest sketches made by Amedeo Modigliani in Paris in 1911 where they met and became lovers. Others were made, then and later, one assumes from memory, but this particular one is the only one, which survived among the belongings of Akhmatova and was treasured by her throughout her life.

In pictorial art, paintings of landscapes, pottery containing fruit, or vases full of flowers one can use colours and drawings freely, ranging from naturalistic images to something bolder, more modern, even totally abstract. In the opinion of this author, however, such an approach does not work with portraits of humans, living or historical, but instantly recognisable through accurate descriptions or their facial features or moral characters.

This caveat of mine is not disturbed even by altered or ‘deformed’ modern variations such as Francis Bacon’s numerous renderings of the Velázquez portrait of Pope Innocent X (in the Bacon versions the sitter as known as the ‘Screaming Pope’) for they, as well, also present recognisable versions of the famous Pope.

My requirement, however, is not fulfilled in the sketch of Modigliani’s which follows below (as well as those not reproduced because of lack of space). For it is well known that other sketches exist, possibly of a later period and done from memory, which can also be linked to her, not because of any physical resemblance but because her name is associated with them. So, too, in the first and earliest sketch, reproduced below, apart from a minute reference – visible only to eagle-eyed viewers – of the sitter’s aquiline nose, no other feature exists to link the sketch with the poetess. Yet the above doubts do not deprive these sketches of their high market value, the product, who can tell, of successful publicity that modern art can attract.

So time now to glance at a few more works of art depicting the once beautiful women during later, difficult, times which, I hope, will help complete the visual image of a remarkable woman.

Sketch No 1: A Reclining Akhmatova

(Drawn in 1911, this is the only one, possibly the first, of 16 sketches that Modigliani gave her and survived among her belongings. © by Amedeo Modigliani, 1911/Paris/Bridgeman Images)

Sketch No 2: Portrait Drawn by Yuri Annenkov

This portrait, painted in 1921, fully captures the tragedy she was living at that time when her first husband was executed under false charges and she was experiencing one of those periodic bouts of ill health, hunger and such abject poverty that, as she would tell her closest friends at that time, during that entire year she had only one dress to wear. The pain in her eyes captures the mental torment caused by the combination of personal disasters. © Yuri Annenkov/Institut d ’Etudes Slaves, Paris/Archives Charmet/Bridgeman Images

Sketch No 3: Portrait of Akhmatova by Martiros Saryan
(1946)

This portrait reveals the sadness of a different kind, that associated by old age creeping up and gradually destroying the physical beauty that once dazzled all who met her. Nonetheless, the date of the portrait reproduced above, is important since it coincides with the time she met Sir Isaiah Berlin and so charmed him that when he returned to his hotel after spending the entire previous evening talking with her he proclaimed, in the presence of the British Consul who was meant to be accompanying him, “I am in love; I am in love”. (Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin. A Life, (1998) at p. 161.) This is truly a sign of her magnetic personality that could generate such feelings of excitement to an intellectual almost half her age who, in later years in Oxford would agonise whether, because of his looks, he would ever get married.

Sketch No 4: By George Ginsburg Boscov,
Painted in 1964

Akhmatova’s ability to tempt artists to want to draw her continued as the years rolled by and the time of her death approached. Indeed, we have two drawings of her face the year she died – 1965 – one en face and the other in profile – by Georgy Ginsburg Voskov. His written impressions about her are, indeed, almost more important than his two sketches for they capture the impression she made on artists. Voskov thus observed in 1964, "[he] was infatuated at first glance… [for] irrespective of her age, she exuded the energy of a beautiful young woman. And evidently, she charmed people: black kimono, barefoot in sandals, a pedicure, beautiful hands, a ring with dark stone…"

This is quite a compliment for as her portraits of that time show – and her photograph at her doctoral ceremony in Oxford confirms – she had by that time gained much weight and the beauty of the youth had gone this version of the older face was exuding a mellower tone than the portrait done by Saryan, reproduced above. By now, however, it was the personality which through the power of the head and the different images projected once looked at from different angles determined the overall impression she made; and to the above one had to add the amazingly confident if not regal posture she had always promoted as part of her very conscious attempt to fashion the image from which she would always be remembered.

Is all this a form of the vanity of which she was often accused even while alive? Possibly, since many women, as pretty and as successful as she had been, would not hesitate to display signs of this sin. Yet I would add that, in part, this could also be seen as her sui-generis self-defensive mechanism of showing to the world that she could survive almost anything fate could throw against her.

Postscript

A brief sketch about the artists who produced these pictures and acknowledgements for allowing to reproduce them in this work.

Yuri Annenkov (1889–1974), the scion of a family which included Pushkin’s publisher and a 19th century revolutionary who ended up in Siberia, was professionally known for his book illustrations – including Gorky’s fairy tale book Samovar and Alexander Blok’s best-selling, multi-layered, poem The Twelve. He also worked for the theatre and cinema and for his work earned the admiration of the well-known modernist Yevgeny Zamyatin (mentioned in the main corpus of this work).

Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920), a Sephardic Jew by origin from Livorno, began his artistic career in Italy but really rediscovered himself upon moving to Paris in 1906. From then onwards his interest in sculpture took a serious turn and he developed his characteristic elongated faces in his portraits and in his invariably nude feminine bodies. In France, he led a hedonistic and bohemian existence, drinking and resorting to drugs to excess, in part to conceal his tubercular meningitis and the possibility of resulting social ostracisation because of the highly infectious nature of his disease. After his early death, the market value of his work increased phenomenally though, aesthetically, it was not of a kind that appealed to everyone and this remains true in our times as well.

Martiros Saryan (1880–1972) was an important Armenian artist influenced by the French Impressionists but also incorporating in his attractive, brightly coloured, Middle Eastern landscapes, sometimes even incorporating in them Persian motifs. Floral still lifes and portraits also figure in his oeuvre, as well as designs for costumes and scenery for the theatre. In addition to the above, he also found time to serve as the director of what is now The National Gallery of Armenia and also to serve as deputy in the USSR’s Supreme Soviet for which he was even honoured three times with the Order of Lenin. Repeated attempts to trace the copyright holders of the oil painting reproduced in this book have failed to produce any results and even the painting itself is rarely found in collections of Saryan’s numerous works. If the true copyright owner ever turns up I will, with my apologies, attempt to make suitable amends.

George Ginsburg Boskov. Repeated attempts made by the author and some of his friends as well as Bridgeman Images Ltd failed to discover a coherent account of the life and work of this artist whose name appears variously spelt. A web entry to a food conference in which he took part mentions that, “having earned a masters in military mechanical engineering in Leningrad in 1957”; he also “displayed an interest in Eastern philosophies” [and then] “found himself ejected from one empire (presumably the USSR) to another [the USA] in the late 1970s” where he may presumably still be alive pursuing various hobbies of his. Though the two sketches of Akhmatova appear in a few sites, no other reference to any other artistic work of his has been found nor any hints as to possible copyright holder[s] of the said sketches. Grateful thanks are due to two learned colleagues – Dr Jane Grayson (a learned scholar in Russian and Soviet studies) and Dr John Wieczorek (a learned Germanist) for wasting much time in this unsuccessful detective search.

I added the italics for judging from the effect the poetess had on most men it is permissible to presume that her over-powering charm proved too much for some men to handle. Hollerbach’s last sentence, above, reminds one of an earlier, similar effect which Madame de Récamier – the famous Salonière of the Napoleonic period – had on her portraitist, Jacques Louis David. For he was progressively discombobulated by both her good looks and her temperamental behaviour, and when he heard that she had also commissioned another painter – “the more worldly and affable Gérard” – to do her portrait, he suddenly stopped working on the one he was doing for her with the result that it was never completed. When he died, many years later, it was found in his atelier. Both portraits are now in Paris, the David in the Louvre and the Gérard in the Musée Carnavalet.↩︎

Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky (1882–1969) was one of the most popular writers of children’s poems in the Russian language. His catchy rhythms, inventive rhymes and absurd characters have been admired by generations of Russian children. For example, lines from one poem, Telefon (The Telephone) became universal catch phrases in the Russian media and everyday conversation. He adapted the Doctor Doolittle stories into a book-length Russian poem and also translated a substantial portion of the Mother Goose canon into Russian. Much of the above text derives with thanks from the Wikimedia entry.↩︎

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(2013) The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt 1725–1798 Oxford: Benediction Classics.

Raeburn, Michael (ed.) (7 March-19 May 1991) The Twilight of the Tsars, Russian Art at the Turn of the Century, Hayward Gallery, London: South Bank Centre, chapters 11, 12 and 13.

Thomas, Hugh (1972) Goya: May 3, 1808, London.

Tsaneva, Maria (2015) Vrubel, 116 Paintings and Drawings, Poland: Amazon Fulfillment.

Yablonskaya, T. N. (1957) How I worked on my painting ‘Grain’ // An Artist’s Experiences. Edition 3, Moscow, p. 58.

Yourcenar, Marguerite (1977) Mémoires de Hadrian, suivi de carnet de notes de Mémoires d’ Hadrian, Paris: Folio.

Vigée Lebrun, Elisabeth, Memoirs of a Painter. An extraordinary life before, during and after the French Revolution, first published by Doubleday in 1903 and republished in 2009 by Trotamundas Press Ltd.

Voltaire (2011) Orestes, translated by William F. Fleming, Wilder Publications.

Waldock, A. J. A. (1947) ‘Satan and the Technique of Degradation’ in Paradise Lost and Its Critics.

Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von (1904-6 ) Griechische Tragödien, 3 vols., Berlin.

Ward, Ian (1995) Law and Literature: Possibilities and Perspectives.

Wittkower, Rudolf (1996) Bernini, The Sculptor of the Roman Baroque, 2nd ed., Phaidon.

Zamiatin, Yevgeny Ivanovich, We, first translated into English by Gregory Zilboorg and published in the USA in 1924. I have relied on the English edition first published by Jonathan Cape in 1970 by Bernard Guilbert Guerney and reprinted with an introduction by Michael Glenny by Penguin in 1972.