The painter Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) lived his whole life in Delft, a city of canals in southeast Netherlands midway between The Hague and Rotterdam. He was baptized in the Dutch Reformed Church in 1632. When he married Catherina Boles in 1653, he converted to Catholicism. However, his main patrons – Pieter van Ruijven and his wife Maria de Knuijt – were members of the Remonstrant Church. No one is sure of Vermeer’s personal beliefs. Weber (2022) suggests that he might have been Catholic. Graham-Dixon (2025) argues that Vermeer was more likely drawn to the Remonstrants. One recurring subject in Vermeer’s paintings is a woman standing at a window. These solemn images convey great depths of feeling. The illustration shows a detail from Young Woman with a Water Pitcher (1662).  

 

The Dutch Republic and Religious Tolerance

The modern history of the Netherlands began in the 16^th Century (Blockmans 2022; van Deursen, 2022, Wielenga; 2015). By the mid 16^th Century, the Hapsburg Empire under Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, Archduke of Austria, and King (Charles I) of Spain, had managed by means of war and marriage to control much of Europe. Among its territories were the “lowlands” or Netherlands that had once been part of the Burgundian Empire. However, this would soon change as the Protestant Reformation swept across northern Europe. Although Lutherans and Baptists found converts in the Netherlands, the main denomination in the northern region was Calvinism, which founded the Dutch Reformed Church in 1571.

Charles abdicated in 1555 in favor of his son Phillip II of Spain. In 1567, Phillip, a fervent Catholic, sent an army under the Duke of Alva to suppress the heretics in the Netherlands. This triggered the Eighty Years’ War (also known as the Dutch War of Independence). The northern provinces of the Netherlands joined together to resist the Hapsburgs, signing the Union of Utrecht in 1579 and formally declaring the Dutch Republic under William of Orange In 1588. The war finally ended in 1848 with the Treaty of Münster, dividing the Netherlands into the mainly Protestant Dutch Republic in the north and the Catholic Spanish Netherlands in the south.

The following illustration shows maps of the Netherlands and of the Hapsburg Empire in the early 16^th Century.

Although Calvinism was the main Protestant denomination in the Dutch Republic, various groups rebelled against some of its severe teachings. One of the dogmas was the principle of double predestination: God not only elects some people for eternal salvation, but also abandons the rest to eternal damnation. Jacobus Arminius (1560-1609) argued against predestination. Hed also proposed that Christians should worship God by following their conscience rather than the teachings priests and pastors. After the death of Arminius, a group of his followers issued Five Articles of Remonstrance (1610) describing their issues with the Calvinist beliefs of the Dutch Reformed Church. These led to the Remonstrant Church. A subset of these believers also founded the Collegiant movement in 1619.  

The people of the Dutch Republic followed many different beliefs (Kooi, 2018). About a third remained Catholic; a sizable Jewish population had come as refugees from Spain and Portugal and from Germany, and there were many different Protestant communities. The principle of tolerance – allowing each person the freedom to belief as their own conscience proposed – was one the founding edicts of the Union of Utrecht.  

One way that the Dutch Republic tolerated different beliefs was the schuilkerk or clandestine church. Although the Reformed Church was the dominant church for the country and its leaders, minority groups could also have religious meeting places However, these were only allowed in buildings that were not ostensibly churches and did not show a public façade.  

Vermeer’s religious beliefs are not known. There was a small Jesuit center near the residence that he shared with his mother-in-law (Weber, 2022, p 14). And there was a Remonstrant schuilkerk behind the residence of his main patron Pieter van Ruijven (Graham-Dixon, 2025; Montias, 1989, pp 246-262).

Delft

Johannes Vermeer lived his entire life in the city of Delft. The following his painting View of Delft (1661) now in the Mauritshuis gallery in The Hague:

Marcel Proust was impressed by this painting and incorporated it into his novel The Captive, part of In Search of Lost Time. The following is the episode wherein the critic Bergotte goes to see Vermeer’s painting:

…an art critic having written somewhere that in Vermeer’s `View of Delft’ (lent by the Gallery at The Hague for an exhibition of Dutch painting), a picture which he adored and imagined that he knew by heart, a little patch of yellow wall (which he could not remember) was so well painted that it was, if one looked at it by itself, like some priceless specimen of Chinese art, of a beauty that was sufficient in itself, Bergotte ate a few potatoes, left the house, and went to the exhibition. At the first few steps he had to climb, he was overcome by an attack of dizziness. He walked past several pictures and was struck by the aridity and pointlessness of such an artificial kind of art, which was greatly inferior to the sunshine of a windswept Venetian palazzo, or of an ordinary house by the sea. At last he came to the Vermeer which he remembered as more striking, more different from anything else he knew, but in which, thanks to the critic’s article, he noticed for the first time some small figures in blue, that the sand was pink, and, finally, the precious substance of the tiny patch of yellow wall. His dizziness increased; he fixed his gaze, like a child upon a yellow butterfly that it wants to catch, on the precious little patch of wall. “That’s how I ought to have written,” he said. “My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of colour, made my language precious in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall.” Meanwhile he was not unconscious of the gravity of his condition. In a celestial pair of scales there appeared to him, weighing down one the pans, his own life, while the other contained the little patch of wall so beautifully painted in yellow. He felt that he had rashly sacrificed the former for the latter. “All the same,” he said to himself, “I shouldn’t like to be the headline news of this exhibition for the evening papers.”
He repeated to himself: “Little patch of yellow wall, with a sloping roof, little patch of yellow wall.” Meanwhile he sank down on to a circular settee; whereupon he suddenly ceased to think that his life was in jeopardy and, reverting to his natural optimism, told himself: “It’s nothing, merely a touch of indigestion from those potatoes, which were undercooked.” A fresh attack struck him down; he rolled from the settee to the floor, as visitors and attendants came hurrying to his assistance. He was dead. Dead for ever? Who can say? Certainly, experiments in spiritualism offer us no more proof than the dogmas of religion that the soul survives death. All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying a burden of obligations contracted in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be kind and thoughtful, even to be polite, nor for an atheist artist to consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his worm-eaten body, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much skill and refinement by an artist destined to be for ever unknown and barely identified under the name Vermeer. All these obligations, which have no sanction in our present life, seem to belong to a different world, a world based on kindness, scrupulousness, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one and which we leave in order to be born on this earth, before perhaps returning there to live once again beneath sway of those unknown laws which we obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, not knowing whose hand had traced them there—those laws to which every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only—if then!—to fools.  (Proust, 1927/1929, pp 249-251)

No one is sure which patch of yellow wall in the painting so fatally impressed the critic. Several regions have been proposed. My own preference is for the yellow wall just to the left of the left tower of the barbican. 

The following is a 1649 map of the city together with a 3D computer reconstruction and a diagram showing the lines of sight for Vermeer’s painting:

In the 17^th Century Delft was home to a thriving community of painters (Liedtdke, 2001) who came together in the Guild of Saint Luke. Among them were the still-life painter Balthasar van der Ast (1593-1657), Carel Fabritius (1622-1654) who died in the Donderslag (Thunderclap), a catastrophic gunpowder explosion that laid waste much of the northern area of the city, and Egbert van der Poel (1621-1664) who famously painted the aftermath of the explosion. Gerard Houckgest (1600-1661) and Emmanuel de Witte (1616-1692) painted church interiors. Pieter de Hooch (1629-1684), Cornelis de Man (1621-1706) and Jan Steen (1626-1679) painted genre scenes. 

Vermeer’s father Reijnier Janszoon managed the Flying Fox Inn in the center of the city and acted as a dealer for the painters from the nearby guild. He later owned the Mechelen Inn. Little is known about Johannes Vermeer’s life. He was baptized in the Nieuwe Kirk and buried in the Oude Kirk. In 1853 he converted to Catholicism so that he could marriy Catherina Bolnes and the couple moved to the residence of his wife’s mother Margaret Thins. Near this house was a clandestine Jesuit church. In a large second-story room in this spacious house on the Oude Langendijk Vermeer set up his painting studio. The following illustration from Graham Dixon (2025, p xxiii)

There has been much debate about the location of Vermeer’s painting The Little Street (1660). Graham Dixon (2025, pp 197-200) proposes that it represents on the left (where Vermeer placed his signature) the residence of his patrons Pieter van Ruijven and his wife Maria de Knuijt. Behind the residence, accessible through the black door was the clandestine Remonstrant Church, that is still standing today. The following illustration shows the painting on the left and a modern photograph of the church on the right.  

 

Vermeer’s Painting Techniques

Vermeer did not appear to use preparatory drawings. He was above all things a colorist. The edges of the objects in his paintings are shown by changes in color: there are no outlines. He appeared to be familiar with the new ideas about perspective (Wadum, 1995), and his paintings have a clear central vanishing point, as seen in the following diagrams. 

Several studies have proposed that Vermeer used a camera obscura or similar optical device to ensure the veracity of his paintings (Hockney, 2001; Steadman, 2001; Yeazell, 2026, pp 76-89). In a sense this would have meant that he created painted photographs. Various pieces of evidence have been adduced to support this theory. However, Liedtke (2009, p 7) pointed out that some of Vermeer’s canvases show a pinhole at the vanishing point. This suggests that he used strings to align his objects to the vanishing point. Furthermore, it is difficult to get the bright colors of a Vermeer painting in the dim light of a camera obscura. A reasonable idea is that Vermeer could have used a camera obscura as a check on the accuracy of his paintings, but that he still used conventional painting techniques.   

One argument against the camera obscura is the presence of perspective “errors” in the paintings. The reflection of the woman’s face in the window in Young Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window (1657) should not be visible to the artist or viewer. Since the opening of the jug in The Milkmaid (1658) is below the vanishing point, the viewer should see the milk within the jug as it is being poured (see Janson, 2026 reporting on an observation by Keith Cardnell).  

 

Woman Standing at a Window

Vermeer’s paintings have a depth and seriousness that belie any simple interpretation:

Unlike the Dutch genre painters of his time, with whom he has been routinely compared, he made pictures that are uniquely introverted and conspicuously lacking in any overt ambition to amuse or entertain. While his paintings radiate a deep sense of ethical conviction, they cannot be boiled down to a series of moral platitudes. The people we see in them are invariably thoughtful, though that is really an understatement: truer to say that they are rapt, caught up in a profoundly inward state of meditation, lost in thought. They are mostly women: shown reading or writing, playing music, pouring milk, making lace, or simply looking out at us. They are framed with such solemnity that we are left in no doubt about the importance, to them, of whatever it is that they are contemplating. (Graham-Dixon, 2025, pp 3-4).

A recurrent subject of Vermeer is that of a single woman standing at a window. There are six of these paintings. The following illustration shows these paintings printed approximately to scale:

The first of these paintings is Young Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window (1657). The viewer is not told what is in the letter. In the course of its history the upper portion of the painting had been painted over. In 2021 the Gemäldegallerie in Dresden restored the picture to its original form, revealing a painting-within-a-painting of a naked cupid. (The original image without the cupid is shown in the illustration of perspective earlier in this post.) The same painting is in the background of another of Vermeer’s paintings: A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal (1670). The cupid indicates that the paintings are concerned with romantic love. Graham Dixon (2025, pp 156-162) suggests that the 1657 painting is a love offering from Vermeer to his wife Catherine. The letter may be a profession of his love for her. The fruit on the table before the woman may represent the hope that their love bring forth fruit.

The bare wall in the painted-over version of the picture was taken to indicate the “modernity” of Vermeer. Only a modern painter would have considered a bare wall as worthy of representation (Yeazell, 2026, chapters 2 and 3). I must admit that I prefer the bare wall version. Like the bare wall in the later Woman with a Pearl Necklace (1664).

Graham-Dixon (2015, pp 239-243) pairs this painting with the later Woman in Blue Reading a Letter (1664) in the Rijksmuseum. The woman is the same, though in the later painting she is pregnant. Perhaps it is another love letter from Vermeer to his wife, who gave birth to Vermeer’s first son Johannes in 1663. The large map on the wall shows the provinces of Holland and West Friesland with the north to the right. This map was produced by Balthasar van Berckenrode in 1621 (Roeloffs & Weber, 2023, p 196). The large sea inlets south of Rotterdam are recognizable at the left. The same map is portrayed with greater clarity in Officer and Laughing Girl (1657). Since the window is not reproduced in this painting – it is only indicated by the light – perhaps the map serves to indicate the external world.    

Young Woman with a Water Pitcher (1662) now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York shows a woman about to pour water into a bowl. The woman wears a white headpiece which picks up the light coming in from the window. Graham-Dixon (2025) suggests that the painting is related to the story of Jesus and the woman of Samaria (John 4: 4-42), and promotes religious tolerance. Weber (2022, pp 132-133) proposes that the painting represents the immaculate conception of Mary. Bothe interpretations are speculative. The painting may just relate the inside (domestic) world to the outside (political) world as represented by the window and the map.     

The map in this painting is by Hendrik Hondius (1631) and shows all seventeen provinces of the Netherlands, both the Dutch Republic and the Spanish Netherlands. The illustration shows versions of the two maps we have considered:

In Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, Vermeer initially had the map extend to the left side of woman’s head, but then shifted it to the right. The original position is still visible as a slight shadow on the bare wall. The new position isolates the head of the young woman for the viewer’s attention.

In Woman with a Pearl Necklace (1664) Vermeer removes the map completely and leaves us with a completely bare wall which glows as brightly as her pearls: 

No one is sure what the painting represents. Ostensibly a young woman is enjoying how she looks in the small mirror mounted beside the window. Perhaps the woman is fixated on her looks and possessions, and fails to see the divine light pouring through the window (Weber, 2022, p 132). Perhaps, she is actually taking off her pearls, trading all her possessions for faith in Jesus: the one pearl of great price (Matthew 13: 45-46) (Graham-Dixon, 2025, pp 258-259).

 

A Pair of Icons

Vermeer’s main patrons were Pieter van Ruijven and his wife Maria de Knuijt (Montias, 1989, pp 246-262). After their deaths (in 1674 and 1681) their collection of Vermeer paintings passed on to their daughter Magdalena who was married to Jacob Dissius, the manager of the Golden ABC Printing Press. Magdalena died in 1682 and after Jacob’s death in 1695, twenty-one Vermeer paintings were sold at auction in Amsterdam in 1696. Among these paintings were The View of Delft, The Little Street and The Woman with a Pearl Necklace, which we have already considered.  

Woman with a Balance, now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, was the first painting to be auctioned. It was initially described as a “young lady weighing gold” but there is no gold in the balances. Most scholars give a date for the painting near 1663. However, Graham-Dixon (2025, p 184) suggests that it was painted in 1659 because it seems to be paired with The Milkmaid: the paintings are similar in size and share similar physical details such as the small nail in the wall near the window. Furthermore, the two paintings were paired by the auctioneer as lots 1 and 2. 

The following are Graham-Dixon’s comments (2025, p 185) on the Woman with a Balance:

The woman weighing is richer than the woman pouring milk, to judge by her jewellery and her blue jacket trimmed with fur, so she has to work harder to get to heaven. The Day of Judgement is on her mind: on the wall behind her is a doom painting thronged with figures of the damned and the saved, beneath Christ the Judge pronouncing his final sentence. But she has no worries on that score. There is a beatific smile on her face…. She has looked herself in the eye in the mirror on the wall. She has renounced her jewellery, taken it off and placed it on the table, together with some coins. All will go to charity. Having resisted temptation, her soul remains spotless. According to the description in the auction catalogue, the woman should be weighing gold, but in fact her scales are empty. That is not to say that she is weighing nothing, just that what she is weighing happens to be invisible. She has put her conscience in the scales, and found it so light as to be weightless. She has done no evil, bears no burden of sin.

The painting has more commonly been interpreted (e.g. Blankert, 1978, p 44) as depicting a rich woman who spends her time assessing her worldly goods, not realizing that these will have no value on the Day of Judgement. However, the serenity of the woman’s expression and her pure white head-dress are more in keeping with the ideas of Graham-Dixon. 

The painting was described at auction as being “in a box.” Graham-Dixon (2025, p 189) suggests that this probably means that the frame for the picture also included

shutters that could be opened or closed, like the wings of an altarpiece, or the folding doors of a portable devotional picture.

He also suggests that The Milkmaid was likely also displayed in a similar fashion in the van Ruijven household: like two religious icons that could be opened for viewing and contemplation.

The Milkmaid (1658), now in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, was the second painting to be auctioned in 1696. The title is a misnomer: the subject is a kitchen maid rather than a milkmaid, who tends to and milks the cows on a farm. The maid is pouring milk from a pitcher into a bowl. A large loaf of bread is in the basket and several pieces of another loaf are on the table.

Graham-Dixon (2025, p 186) suggests that maid is preparing food for the poor:

She stands for good works, for charity, for feeding others in both the literal and the spiritual sense. In the poor houses of the town a simple preparation of bread crumbled into milk was traditionally served to the indigent, whose teeth were too weak for more solid food. This is the dish she is preparing. While the milk she pours from the jug is real enough, it also calls to mind ‘the milk of the word’ which all crave ‘as newborn babes’ (Peter I:2). Likewise the bread on the table is knobbly, substantial, dusted with flour, but it also shimmers and sparkles as if blessed by divine light. It is a reminder of the bread on the table at the Last Supper and the loaves miraculously multiplied by the sea of Galilee, ‘the true bread from heaven’, which is belief and everlasting life (John 6). These are the gifts The Milkmaid brings: real food and drink for those who hunger and thirst, but spiritual food and drink too.

Another interpretation is that she is making bread pudding: combining bread, eggs and milk that will later be cooked to make the pudding (Schwartz, 2017, p 20, quoting Harry Rand).

On the floor to the right of the maid is a stoof or footwarmer. This is a wooden box with holes on its top, into which is placed an earthenware or metallic bowel containing burning charcoal or coal embers. Footwarmers were typically used when sitting: the feet were placed on the box, and the legs and feet covered with a blanket or skirt so that the heat rose to warm the body. (These are no longer used because of the danger of carbon monoxide poisoning.) Since the heat particularly affected the nether parts, the object was often used to symbolize lust. Liedtke (2009, p 13) therefore suggests the maid is thinking amorous or lascivious thoughts during her humdrum work. However, the seriousness to the painting acts to belie any satirical or sexual interpretation. Graham-Dixon (2025, p 186) suggests that the maid has put romantic love aside. One of the uses of the footwarmer was to stay warm during long sermons in a cold church. Another interpretation is that the maid has just returned from church and is putting its teachings into practice.

Graham-Dixon (2025, p 184-185) proposes that both Woman with a Balance and The Milkmaid served as paired devotional objects in the Remonstrant home of Pieter van Ruijven and his wife Maria de Knuijt. He relates them to the Bible’s Mary and Martha, the subject of one of Vermeer’s early paintings Christ in the House of Mary and Martha (1655) 

The woman weighing is reflecting, assessing, meditating. The woman pouring milk is preparing a meal, working for others, measuring their needs. One woman is thinking, the other is doing. One is contemplative, the other is active. We have met these women before, in different clothes, in a different setting and a different place. We have met them in the Bible and we have met them in another painting by Vermeer. Are they not Martha and Mary, the Active Life and the Spiritual Life, in another guise?

The Biblical story is as follows

Now it came to pass, as they went, that he entered into a certain village: and a certain woman named Martha received him into her house.

And she had a sister called Mary, which also sat at Jesus’ feet, and heard his word.

But Martha was cumbered about much serving, and came to him, and said, Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? bid her therefore that she help me.

And Jesus answered and said unto her, Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things:

But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her. (Luke 10:38-42)

Graham-Dixon is correct about the difference between the two paintings. One is concerned with the activities of the day, whereas the other attends to eternity. However, the women are not sisters: one is a mistress and the other is a maid. Nevertheless, his suggestion that the pictures were objects of contemplation during prayer meetings rings true:

Woman with a Balance would seem an apt image to contemplate during a period of prayer and reflection, perhaps therefore at the start a meeting. The Milkmaid, which is about going out into the world and performing good deeds, would seem suited to the end, when people were about to leave. (Graham-Dixon, 2025, p 189).

 

Woman at a Window

Artists have represented many different women at many different windows (Sliwka, 2022; Weber in Roeloffs & Weber, 2023, pp 162-167). Their pictures reveal the differences between internal and external worlds, between the domestic and the politic, the imagined and the real.

The upper part of the following illustration shows various examples: Caspar David Friedrich’s Women at a Window (1822) which portrays a longing for freedom; Wilhelm Hammeshoi’s Interior with a Woman Standing (1913) with its sense of sad solitude; and Isabel Codrinton’s The Kitchen (1927) with its underlying menace. At the bottom left is Edward Hopper’s Morning Sun (1952) showing a lonely woman about to face whatever the day may bring.

And on the bottom right is Tom Hunter’s photograph Woman Reading Possession Order (1997) which transforms Vermeer’s Young Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window to a modern setting.

In Hunter’s composition, the sumptuous interior of Vermeer’s painting has been replaced by a squatter’s residence in Hackney, east London and the love letter substituted with an eviction notice, a copy of which accompanies the photograph, asserting the harsh reality behind this carefully staged composition. Interpreted alongside the Vermeer, we may understand the baby on the table in Hunter’s photograph as the result of the actions of Cupid upon the woman at the window and as a fruitful manifestation of the abundant produce in the Dutch painting. In contrast to the Vermeer, the window here is closed, suggesting a more fixed outcome or certain finality to the situation. The light passing through the window, however, illuminating the woman’s resigned face and the child’s head, suggests there may be hope beyond these dire circumstances. (Sliwka, 2022, p 44).

 

 Envoi

Vermeer’s paintings of a woman standing at a window have a solemnity that warrants contemplation. We may not fully understand their meaning, but we are sure that they are immensely important. The following is Wislawa Szymborska’s 2009 poem from Szymborska (2015, p 413) about The Milkmaid:

As long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum
in painted silence and concentration
keeps pouring milk day after day
from the jug to the bowl
the World hasn’t earned
the world’s end.

References

Blankert, A. (1978). Vermeer of Delft: complete edition of the paintings Phaidon.

Blockmans, W. P. (2022). The formation of a political union, 1300-1588.In J. C. H. Blom, & E. Lamberts (Eds). History of the low countries. (pp 55-142).  Berghahn Books.

Deursen, A. T. van. (2022). The Dutch Republic, 1588-1780. In J. C. H. Blom & E. Lamberts (Eds.) History of the Low Countries. (pp. 143–220). Berghahn Books.

Graham-Dixon, A. (2025). Vermeer: a life lost and found. Allen Lane.

Hockney, D. (2001). Secret knowledge: rediscovering the lost techniques of the old masters. Viking Studio.

Janson, J. (2026) Vermeer and the art of linear perspective. Essential Vermeer

Kooi, C. (2018). Religious Tolerance. In Helmers, H. J., & Janssen, G. H. (Eds) The Cambridge Companion to the Dutch Golden Age (pp. 208–224). Cambridge University Press.

Liedtke, W. A. (2001). Vermeer and the Delft School. Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

Liedtke, W. A. (2009). The Milkmaid by Johannes Vermeer. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Montias, J. M. (1989). Vermeer and his milieu: a web of social history. Princeton University Press.

Proust, M. (1923, translated by Scott-Moncrieff, C. K., 1929). The captive. Modern Library.

Roelofs, P., &Weber, G. J. M. (Eds). (2023). Vermeer. Thames & Hudson.

Schwartz, G. (2017). Vermeer in detail. Ludion.

Sliwka, J. (2022). Reframed: the woman in the window. Dulwich Picture Gallery.

Steadman, P. (2001). Vermeer’s camera: uncovering the truth behind the masterpieces. Oxford University Press.

Szymborska, W. (translated by Cavanagh, C. & Barańczak, S., 2015). Map: collected and last poems. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Wadum, J. (1995). Vermeer in perspective. In A.K. Wheelock (Ed) Johannes Vermeer. (pp 66-79). National Gallery of Art

Weber, G. J. M. (2022). Johannes Vermeer: faith, light and reflection. Rijksmuseum.

Wielenga, F. (translated by Richards, L., 2015). A history of the Netherlands: from the sixteenth century to the present day. Bloomsbury Academic.

Yeazell, R. B. (2026). Vermeer’s afterlives. Princeton University Press.

Paul Celan (1920-1970) was a Romanian-Jewish poet whose mother-tongue was German. Both his parents died in Nazi labor camps. After the war, Celan settled in Paris but continued to write poetry in German. On July 24, 1967, he gave a recitation of his poems at the University of Freiburg. The next day he visited Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) at his cabin in Todtnauberg in the Black Forest. Many believe that Celan asked Heidegger to make some statement renouncing the Nazi movement that he had joined in 1933. However, although a 1966 interview about his ties to the Nazi party was published posthumously in Der Speigel, Heidegger never made any statement about the evils of Nazism and never mentioned the Holocaust. The 1963 photograph of Paul Celan is by Lütfi Özkök.

Der Dichter (Poet)

Paul Celan was born in Czernowitz, Bukovina, in northern Romania, in 1920, as Paul Antschel. His family were German-speaking Jews, and his mother was devoted to German literature. Although Celan spoke Hebrew and Romanian, he considered German his mother-tongue. In 1938, Celan went to Tours, France, to study medicine but returned to Romania when World War II broke out in 1939.

The Germans arrived in Czernowitz in 1941, and began rounding up the Jews for forced labor in 1942. Celan’s parents were deported to a labor camp in Transnistria (present day Moldova). His father soon died there of typhus. Later, his mother was shot for not being a productive worker. Celan felt immense guilt about his parents’ deaths since he had been unable to convince them to go into hiding. However, later in 1942 he was himself sent to a German labor camp in Romania. He was finally released when the Red Army arrived in February 1944. He began to publish poetry in Bucharest after the war using the name “Celan” which is an anagram of the Romanian spelling (Ancel) of his name “Antschel.” Among these early poems was Todesfuge (Deathfugue, 1947), a searing description of the Holocaust.

When the Romanian government became communist in 1948, Celan moved to Vienna. Finding the city empty and depressing, he moved on to Paris. There he continued to publish poems in German. In 1952, he married the graphic artist Gisèle Lestrange. He began teaching German literature and translation in the École normale supérieure in Paris in 1956. The following illustrations show Paul Celan in 1938 and in 1949.

Celan befriended the poet Yvan Goll (1891-1950) in the year before he died, and helped him to translate some of his French poems into German. In 1953, his wife, Claire Goll (1890-1977), wife accused Celan of plagiarizing her husband’s work; she reiterated these claims until she died. There was no foundation in fact for her allegations, and Celan was ultimately completely exonerated (Wiedemann, 2000; Olschner, 2001; Bonnefoy, 2010; Maurel-Indart, 2010; Arno, 2026, pp 187-217). Nevertheless, Celan became severely depressed by the resultant scandal.   

Despite the success of his poetry, Celan was still aware of persistent antisemitism in Germany, and he remained troubled by the accusations of Claire Goll. In the 1960s, Celan was hospitalized for depression several times, with each admission lasting for many months. During these stays he was treated with insulin shock therapy, now considered both barbaric and ineffective (Doroshow, 2007). Celan’s mental state deteriorated and he attempted suicide in early 1967. Following this attempt, his wife and child began to live apart from him out of fear for their safety.

 

Der Meridian

Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) famously remarked in 1949 in an essay that was later collected in Prisms (1955)

nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch, und das frißt auch die Erkenntnis an, die ausspricht, warum es unmöglich ward, heute Gedichte zu schreiben.
[To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today.]

Celan understood the problem of poetry, and indeed all art, in the age that followed the Holocaust (Zilcosky, 2005). One could not write about beauty in the face of such terrible suffering. Nor could one describe the suffering in poetry because that would only attenuate its horror. Nevertheless, Celan not only wrote poems but also used the language of the murderers. He attempted to change how the words were perceived: to salvage the language for his mother. The following are his comments on the German language on receiving the Bremen Prize in 1958:

Reachable, near and not lost, there remained in the midst of the losses this one thing: language. It, the language, not lost, yes, in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening. Passed through and could come to light again, ‘enriched’ by all this. (quoted by Arno, 2026, pp 185-186).

Although his early poems used the traditional formats and rhymes, after the war Celan began to write a different kind of German poetry: compressed, cryptic, polysemous. His task was facilitated by the way that Germanic languages allowed new words to be invented by combining old words (Benczes, 2005). This could be done simply for precision: an apple tree (Apfelbaum) is a special kind of tree. But more importantly it could be done by metaphor or metonymy: a brownshirt (Braunhemd) was a member of Hitler’s Sturmabteilung (stormtroopers). Celan’s use of these compounds can be seen in a brief poem from his 1967 collection Atemwende (Breathturn):

It is not clear what Celan means by Fadensonnen (Celan/Joris, 2014, pp liv and 469-470; Baldi, 2008; Felstiner, 1995, p 218). Perhaps the suns have been reduced to threads. Perhaps Celan is thinking of a Fadensonnenzeiger, an instrument that is used to measure the time when the sun is at noon so that longitude (the meridian) can be estimated. Perhaps he is referring to that time in late summer (Fadensommer) when gossamer threads drift through the air. Perhaps the suns of all our days are being threaded together by the Fates. Perhaps all these things?

The compound Lichtton is similarly polysemous. It might mean the analog recording of sound on a film by means of the intensity of the light. It might simply mean a sound as pure and transparent as light.

Felstiner comments on the poem:

Thin yet tough threads bind the dead to the living. Here, as in an etching of his wife’s, tenuous light hovers over the waste and void before Creation. Then a “tree-high” thought—and there is light. “Oh Orpheus sings! Oh high tree in the ear!” Rilke opens his Sonnets to Orpheus. For Celan, there is no return from the underworld, but “there are / still songs to sing beyond / humankind [jenseits der Menschen]”—not in some afterlife but a step beyond those he kept covenant with. (Felstiner, 1995, p 218)

The following illustration shows two of Gisèle Lestrange’s etchings from the books Atemkristall (Breath crystal,1965) on the left and Schwarzmaut (Black toll, 1967) on the right. They are as cryptic as the poems:

The following is Celan’s recitation of the poem:

In 1996 Harrison Birtwistle set several of Celan’s poems to music and combined them with musical interludes (friezes and fantasias) in a work entitled Pulse Shadows. The following is the setting for Fadensonnen with Claron McFadden, soprano, the Arditti Quartet and the Nash Ensemble

Celan believed that poetry was a way to communicate with others, to reach through the differences and to find a shared experience. He was deeply aware of the thoughts of Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) and Martin Buber (1878-1965) on the relations between the self and the “other” (Ceuppens, 2020). When he received the Büchner Prize in 1960, Celan gave an acceptance speech that came to be known as The Meridian (German text of speech; translations: Celan/Glenn, 1978; Celan/Felstiner, 2001, pp 401-414; commentary: Meyerhofer, 1981). The following are two excerpts (Glenn translation). First, about the nature of the poem:

The poem is alone. It is alone and underway. Whoever writes it must remain in its company. But doesn’t the poem, for precisely that reason, at this point participate in an encounter? in the mystery of an encounter? The poem wants to reach the Other, it needs this Other, it needs a vis à vis. It searches it out and addresses it. Each thing, each person is a form of the Other for the poem, as it makes for this Other. The poem attempts to pay careful attention to everything it encounters; it has a finer sense of detail, of outline, of structure, of color, and also of the “movements” and the “suggestions.” These are, I believe, not qualities gained by an eye competing (or cooperating) with mechanical devices which are continually being brought to a higher degree of perfection. No, it is a concentration which remains aware of all of our dates. “Attention”? Permit me at this point to quote a maxim of Malebranche which occurs in Walter Benjamin’s essay on Kafka: “Attention is the natural prayer of the soul.”

Second, about the opposing poles of self and other:

I find something, like language, abstract, yet earthly, terrestrial, something circular, which traverses both poles and returns to itself, thereby I am happy to report –even crossing the tropics and tropes. I find … a meridian.

 

Der Denker (Thinker)

Martin Heidegger was born in Messkirch, Baden-Württemburg in 1889. He studied philosophy at the University of Freiburg, finishing his habilitation thesis in 1916. He served briefly in the German army in a non-combatant role at the end of World War I. After the war, he taught at the University of Freiburg. In 1923 he was elected professor at the University of Marburg.

In 1927 he published his major work Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), in which he addresses the nature of being:

The central theme of Heidegger’s philosophy is the question concerning the meaning (Sinn) of being (Sein). The “fundamental ontology” he advances in Being and Time departs dramatically from traditional ontology in that it asks not what there is, nor why there is what there is, nor even why there is anything at all and not nothing. The last of those questions, most famously associated with Leibniz and Schelling, is what Heidegger calls “the fundamental question of metaphysics.” It is a deep and important question, but it is not the question of fundamental ontology, for what it asks about is the totality of entities, not the meaning of being. Heidegger’s question, then, is not, Why is there anything? but rather, What does it mean for something to be? – or simply (redundantly), What is it to be? (Carman, 2003, p 8)

One special type of being is that of the individual human – Dasein, existing in the world. As human beings we can conceive both the world and ourselves within it:

For the question of being, as Heidegger conceives it, is inseparable from questions concerning the understanding and the existence of those entities for which, or rather for whom, the question of being can be a question at all, namely, ourselves, human beings. The argument of Being and Time therefore begins by referring ontology back to what Heidegger calls an “existential analytic of Dasein,” that is, an account of the basic structures of human existence. (Carman, 2003, p 9).

One essential aspect of the Dasein is its relation to time: conscious human beings are mortal. However, our thoughts may outlive our lives, provided we live with “authenticity”: Eigentlichkeit, ownedness (Carman, 2003, pp 264-313). 

Heidegger realized that the nature of being is difficult if not impossible to understand through reason. He became fascinated by the idea that poetry determines the world through the words we use to describe it. (The word “poetry” derives from the Greek poiesis, making.) Heidegger interpreted the line of the poet Hölderlin (1770-1843):

Was bliebet aber, stiften die Dichter.
[But what is lasting the poets provide.]

The poet names the gods and names all things with respect to what they are. This naming does not merely come about when something already previously known is furnished with a name; rather, by speaking the essential word, the poet’s naming first nominates the beings as what they are. Thus they become known as beings. Poetry is the founding of being in the word. (Heidegger, 1941, p 59)

Soon after Adolf Hitler come to power in Germany (January 1933), Heidegger became Rector of the University Freiburg (April 1933). He joined the Nazi Party in May 1933, and remained a member until the end of the war. As Rector, Heidegger ensured the “alignment” (Gleichschaltung) of the university with the aims of the Nazi Party. He resigned from the rectorship in April 1934, but this was probably more related to his dislike of administration than to any qualms about Nazi policies.

After the war, he was considered a fellow traveler (Mitläufer), the lowest category of those requiring denazification. Though he was initially banned from teaching, he was allowed to return to lecturing in 1950. The following illustrations show photographs of Heidegger taken in 1922 and in the 1960s.

Heidegger did not feel regret for his involvement with the Nazi party. After the war he was more concerned with what he perceived as the injustices done to the defeated Germans, such as the Dresden fire-bombing, the communist takeover of East Germany, the German prisoners-of-war trapped in the Soviet Union, and the Nuremburg trials. Both of his sons had been captured on the Eastern front and were prisoners-of-war. This deep sense of German victimization led to an:

inability and/or unwillingness to accept responsibility for the horrors of the Shoah and this oppugning of the Other’s claim to having suffered as much or more than he (Bamberg, 2023, p 233).

This prevented him from ever acknowledging how Naziism had been so evil, particularly toward the Jewish people. In 1966 Heidegger granted an interview about his connections to the Nazi Party with the news magazine Der Speigel (Mirror), with the proviso that this not be published until after his death in 1976. In the interview, Heidegger noted his personal support for his Jewish students, and claimed that he had tried to attenuate the effects of Nazi policies. He did not denounce fascism. He did not mention the Holocaust.

 

 

Todtnauberg

In 1922, Heidegger’s wife Elfride used an inheritance to build a small wooden Hütte (cabin) in the Schwarzwald (Black Forest) close to the village of Todtnauberg, about 30 km south of Freiburg (Sharr, 2006). About 6 x 7 meters in size, the cabin is situated on the north side of a small valley. Close by is a spring, marked by a post surmounted by a small carving of a four-sided star. Heidegger enjoyed the solitude of the Todtnauberg and wrote much of Sein und Zeit at the cabin. The following illustration shows a plan of the cabin and photographs from 1966. The photographs show the wildflowers around the cabin, Heidegger bringing water from the spring, and Heidegger sitting at his desk in the study:

The following shows some modern photographs from the thinkingplace website:

Die Begegnung (Encounter)

By the time they first met in Freidburg in 1967, Celan and Heidegger were both well acquainted with each other’s work (Lyon, 2006; Kenaan, 2021; Bamberger, 2023):

Celan had read a wide range of Heidegger’s texts and was especially taken by the manner in which Heidegger’s philosophy of language searches for the essence of language beyond communication and its emphasis on the role of poetry in revealing that essence by freeing language from its everyday use. … Heidegger, too, not only read Celan extensively for more than a decade, but also valued the poet for his ability to recover, for thinking, more original forms of listening to the saying of words. For Heidegger, Celan’s poetry opens up a rare possibility of releasing the space of language “onto its own freedom,” by subverting the grip of instrumental reason activated by the founding templates of modern thought and fully realized in the age of technology. (Kenaan, 2021, p 353)

On July 24, 1967, Celan gave a reading of his poetry at the University of Freiburg. Heidegger was seated in the first row and invited Celan to visit him the next day at his cabin in Todtnauberg. Gerhard Neumann, a young assistant to Professor Gerhart Baumann, who had invited Celan to Freiburg, drove Celan and Heidegger to the cabin. Neumann’s only description of the meeting (many years later) was that during the drive and the time at the cabin the poet and the philosopher talked about National Socialism and that there were painful silences (Lyon 2006, p 164).  

The following is Celan’s report of the meeting to his wife:

The reading in Freiburg was an exceptional success: 1,200 people who listened to me with bated breath for an hour, then, having applauded me for a long time, they listened to me again for another fifteen minutes. Heidegger had come up to me—The day after my reading I was, with M. Neumann … in Heidegger’s hut (Hutte) in the Black Forest. Then there was, in the car, a grave dialogue, with clear words from me. M. Neumann, who was the witness of it, told me afterward that, for him, this conversation had something epoch-making about it. I hope that Heidegger will take up his pen and that he will write a few pages echoing that, and warning too, in the face of mounting Nazism. (August 2 letter, Celan, 2024, p 401)

Celan wrote the poem Todtnauberg on August 1 in Frankfurt (Celan/Joris, 2014, p 554). He arranged for the poem to be printed in a special limited edition, and when it was published in January 1968, he sent the first numbered copy to Heidegger (Lyon, 2006, p 187). The poem provides a cryptic description of Celan’s visit to Heidegger’s cabin:

“Todtnauberg” is really barely a poem; a single nominal phrase, choppy, distended and elliptical, unwilling to take shape, it is not the outline but the remainder—the residue—of an aborted narrative. It consists of brief notes or notations, seemingly jotted in haste with a hope for a future poem, comprehensible only to the one who wrote them. It is an extenuated poem, or, to put it better, a disappointed one. It is the poem of a disappoint-ment; as such, it is, and it says, the disappointment of poetry. (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1986/1999, pp 35-36)

The following is the poem with the Joris (2014) translation:

The poem contains three of Celan’s characteristic compounds: Sternwürfel, Waldwasen, and Knüppelpfade. We shall discuss these as we go through the poem.

The opening verse describes the wildflowers near the cabin and the spring with the carved star. Both flowers mentioned have been used in herbal remedies: the bright yellow Arnica for bruising and sprains, and eyebright (Euphrasia) for improving vision (Augentrost means eye-comfort). There is no convincing evidence for any therapeutic effect, but both flowers are strikingly beautiful:

 

The second verse describes Celan’s hesitant step into Heidegger’s cabin. Then the poet writes a brief statement into the visitors’ book. The inscription and the poem present the hope that, following the conversation in the car on the way to Todtnauberg, Heidegger would make some formal statement denouncing the evils of National Socialism and warning that it must never again come to power. The actual words written in the book were slightly different from those recorded in the poem:

Ins Hüttenbuch, mit dem Blick auf den Brunnenstern, mit einer Hoffnung auf ein kommendes Wort im Herzen. Am 25. Juli 1967 / Paul Celan (Joris, 1988)

The Brunnenstern is the carved star (Stern) at the top of the post with a spout coming from the spring (Brunnen): a stellated octahedron (stella octangula) compose of two intersecting tetrahedra. This shape can be contained in a cubic space (dotted lines). In the poem, Celan uses the term Würfel, dice. It is impossible not to see the Jewish star (Magen David, shield of David, composed of intersecting triangles) when the shape is viewed from one of the apices of the tetrahedra (left). The stellated octahedron is the Magen David in 3-dimensions:

Golb (1988) notes that the “book” in which Celan writes can be construed in several ways. It is of course the Heidegger’s visitor’ book in which many previous visitors, some with ties to National Socialism, had written. But it could also be the book referred to in Revelations 20:12, a Book of Judgement in which are written the names of the damned and the saved. It also refers to the text of Celan’s poem:

For this reason, “das Buch” of line 6 becomes “dies Buch” of line 9, and the crucial question linking one text to the other, “wessen Namen nahms auf / vor dem meinen?” not only has mystical significance and is about Heidegger, but is equally Celan’s questioning of himself and of the “names” inscribed in the text of an ideological tradition that remains, in a fundamental way, his own. Similarly, the “in dies Buch / geschriebene Zeile” refers, along with its other meanings, to the lines (or continuous “line”) of the poem itself, expressing the “Hoffnung,” in a textual present (“heute”) shared by poet and reader, that within the language of the text the magic realization of its absent meeting (standing, in any case, for all poetological desire) might occur: a personal conciliation of Celan and Heidegger (Golb, 1988, p 264)

The crux of the poem is Celan’s hope for Heidegger’s kommendes Wort in Herzen. He and Heidegger have painfully talked about National Socialism and the Holocaust. And Heidegger has said that something will be said. It is possible Heidegger just meant the interview with Der Spiegel that was to be published posthumously. But that was vacuous and that was not heute (today). Celan was obviously hoping for much more.

The next five verses describe the walk that Heidegger and Celan took in the forest near the cabin, a walk that was soon aborted because of the rain. Joris (1988) comments on how the word Waldwasen has multiple meanings and connotations:   

At first glance one could conceivably think that the poet has simply have chosen an erudite or “poetic” word instead of the more obvious and thus banal “Waldwiesen” – forest meadows. … A “Wase”, according to Grimm’s Dictionary of the German language, is, first of all, a piece of sod together with the plants that grow in it …  Celan is not talking of some grassy surface, a pleasant meadow, but has in mind something that goes deeper and incorporates the network of underground roots…. Grimm further glosses “Wasen” as … “the piece of land on which the knacker or “Wasenmeister” (the”Master of the Wasen”) guts and buries the dead livestock, also known in South Germany and on the Rhine as “Schindanger” – “the knacker’s yard” which one could nearly translate as the “killing fields”…. Then my eye fell on yet another “Wase”, a word current in North Germany, and used to describe a bundle of dead wood, the etymology of which Grimm leads back through French “faisceau” to Latin “fasces”, the curator’s bundle of rods, which became the symbol of, and gave the word for, “fascism”.

On the Waldwasen, Celan describes two Orchis flowers. Like the poet and the philosopher, they stand separate from each other. The Orchis has testicle-shaped roots, hence its name and the crude connotations.

These are the flowers mentioned by Gertrude in her speech describing the death of Ophelia in Hamlet (IV, 5: 193-5):

                                                   long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them.

It is possible that Celan mention of Krudes relates to these connotations of the flower. However , the word also means “raw” and might indicate that something else was said in the car. Perhaps something about the horrors of the Holocaust. 

Joris (1988) comments on the log trails mentioned in the penultimate verse:

They walk on “halb- / beschrittenen Knüppel-/Pfaden..” – “half- trod/log-trails”, literally on “paths made of wood” – the German Holzwege, which refers to a path in a forest, but also, in common parlance, to a dead-end, to a mistaken route, and is, of course, the title of a well-known book by Heidegger. Celan is too subtle to use Heidegger’s word, and his “log-paths” complexify the image further as Knüppel- the German word means both “logs” and “rods” – are also used as weapons to beat people, prisoners, etc.

In 1950 Heidegger had published a set of essays written over the preceding 15 years in a book called Holzwege. Heidegger explained the title

Holz lautet ein alter Name für Wald. Im Holz sind Wege, die meist verwachsen jäh im Unbegangenen aufhören. Sie heißen Holzwege. [“Wood” is an old name for forest. In the wood there are paths, mostly overgrown, that come to an abrupt stop where the wood is untrodden. They are called Holzwege.]

As one finishes reading, one feels that Celan has clearly and simply described what happened at Todtnauberg. However, one is also deeply aware that the poem alludes to much more. The following are comments by Oyarzún (2022):   

A diaphanous and at the same time unapproachable, impenetrable poem. Impenetrable, perhaps, because purely diaphanous. Everything is there in the light, in the forced light that prevails in these final poems; everything: including the formfitting reticence in which the poems are gathered. With everything clear, deutlich, how could one say that Celan’s poetry is hermetic? (p 2)

Why do I feel I cannot pronounce anything definitive about what happens in this poem? It is, perhaps, because I want to hold on to the impression— my earliest impression—that there is something unthinkable here, and this unthinkable would be the unthinkable (das Undenkbare) of an encounter without encounter, without dialogue, on a today that slips over itself (heute, Feuchtes), dislodges itself from itself, de-spairs [des-espera], drowning, falling on itself (viel: fiel). The unthinkable, das Undenkbare, imposes the terrible desolation of a forced and essential ingratitude (Undankbarkeit), a word’s immurement upon itself. (p 6)

As Oyarzún notes, the last word of the poem – viel (much) – used to modify Feuchte (wetness, humidity) is a homonym for fiel (fell, past tense of fallen).

The following is the musical setting for Todtnauberg from Harrison Birtwistle’s Pulse Shadows, with Claron McFadden, soprano, the Arditti Quartet and the Nash Ensemble.

The poem Todtnauberg was later published in Celan’s Lichtzwang (1970, light duress). Lyon (2006, pp 188-189) notes that the 1967 bibliophile edition of the poem contains a word not present in the later version: un-gesäumt meaning “without delay” just before kommendes Wort. When Celan sent Heidegger this gift, he was clearly exhorting him to make a statement about what they had discussed at Todtnauberg. Heidegger replied with a perfunctory letter of thanks for Celan’s gift. He never denounced National Socialism for its role in the Holocaust.    

The following are Lacoue-Labarthe’s comments on the encounter at Todtnauberg: (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1999, p 38)

To Heidegger the thinker—the German thinker—Celan the poet—the Jewish poet—came with a single yet precise entreaty: that the thinker who listened to poetry; the same thinker who had compromised himself, however briefly and even if in the least shameful way, with just what would result in Auschwitz; the thinker who, however abundant his discussion with National Socialism, had observed total silence on Auschwitz, as history will recall; that he say just a single word: a word about pain. From there, perhaps, all might still be possible. Not “life,” which is always possible, which remained possible, as we know, even in Auschwitz, but existence, poetry, speech. Language. That is, relation to others.
Could such a word be wrenched?
In the summer of 1967 Celan writes in the guestbook of the Hütte in Todtnauberg. He no longer knows who signed before him; signatures—proper names, as it happens—matter little. At issue was a word, just a word. He writes—what? A line, or a verse. He asks only for the word, and the word, of course, is not spoken. Nothing; silence; no one. The in-advent of the word (“the event without answer”).
I do not know what word Celan could have expected. What word he felt would have had enough force to wrench him from the threat of aphasia and idiom (in-advent of the word), into which this poem, mumbled against the silence, could only sink as if into a bog. What word could suddenly have constituted an event.
I do not know. Yet something tells me it is at once the humblest and most difficult word to say, the one that requires, precisely, “a going out of the self.” The word that the West, in its pathos of redemption, has never been able to say. The word it remains for us to learn to speak, lest we should sink ourselves.
The word pardon.
Celan has placed us before this word. A sign?

Der Abschied (Farewell)

Although he continued to write poetry, Celan remained severely depressed. He met briefly with Heidegger in June 1978, and again in March 1970. Nothing significant was said at either meeting. In late April 1970, Celan committed suicide by jumping into the Seine, probably from the Pont Mirabeau. His body was recovered about 10 km downstream on May 1. The German language has several words for suicide. One of these – Freitod – combines the idea of death and freedom. It is ambivalent about whether it is the freedom of will that chooses this way of death or of the freedom from suffering that the death provides.

In 2020, 50 years after Ccelan’s death, the German artist Anselm Kiefer (1945- put together an exhibition Pour Paul Celan of monumental paintings and sculptures at the Grand Palais in Paris (Dercon, 2021). The largest of the painting Als Arche verließ es die Straße (It left the road like an ark), made of emulsion, acrylic, oil, shellac, straw, metal, charcoal and chalk on canvas, was 840 by 1520 cm. Above a desolate wintry landscape a rudimentary raft floats into a dark sky on which are written in chalk the words from several of Celan’s early poems. The following is a photograph by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra.

The title derives from an early poem Das einzige Licht (the only light) first published in 1948. The full poem is written on the upper right of the painting. Two lines are

Dein Haus ritt die finstere Welle, dochbarg es ein Rosengeschlecht;
Als Arche verließ es die Straße, so wardst du gerettet ins Unheil
[Your house rode the dark wave, still it covered a roselineage;
As ark it left the road, so you were rescued in harm}

References

Adorno, T. W. (1955, translated by S. M. Weber 1967, reprinted 1983). Prisms. MIT Press.

Arno, A. (translated by Gauger, S. A., 2026). Paul Celan: a life. Belknap Press (Harvard University)

Baldi, M. (2008). Fadensonnen: Il pensiero poetico al di la di luce e suono. In M. Baldi & F. Desideri (Eds.). Paul Celan: la poesia come frontiera filosofica. (pp 37-45). Firenze University Press.

Bambach, C. (2023). The (im)possibility of homecoming: Heidegger, Celan, and the aporia of language. In Benjamin, A. E. (Ed.) Heidegger and Literary Studies. (pp. 214–252). Cambridge University Press

Benczes, R. (2005). Creative noun–noun compounds. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 3, 250–268.

Bonnefoy, Y. (translated by Felstiner, J., 2010). Why Paul Celan took alarm. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 125(1), 204–212.

Carman, T. (2003). Heidegger’s analytic: interpretation, discourse, and authenticity in Being and time. Cambridge University Press.

Celan, P. (translated by Glenn, J., 1978). The Meridian. Chicago Review, 29(3), 29–40.

Celan, P. (translated by Hamburger, M., 1989). Poems of Paul Celan. Persea Books.

Celan, P. (translated by Felstiner, J., 2001). Selected poems and prose of Paul Celan. W.W. Norton

Celan, P. (translated by Joris, P., 2014). Breathturn into timestead: the collected later poetry. Farrar, Straus, Giroux.

Celan, P. (translated by Joris, P., 2020). Memory rose into threshold speech: the collected earlier poetry. Farrar, Straus, Giroux.

Celan, P. (translated by Kavett, J., 2024). Letters to Gisèle (1951-1970): with a selection of letters from Gisèle Celan-Lestrange. New York Review Books.

Ceuppens, R. (2020). “Your country behind the mountain, behind the year”: Insistence of an inaccessible alterity in Paul Celan’s Poetics. Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies, 3(3).

Dercon, C. (2021). Anselm Kiefer: pour Paul Celan. Réunion des musées nationaux-Grand Palais.

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Ezra Pound (1885-1972) came to London in the summer of 1908. He cobbled together a living as a reviewer and editor for magazines such as The New Age and Poetry. He served as the midwife for modernism by arranging the publication of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Hilda Doolittle (H.D.). Sometimes charming, sometimes arrogant, Pound antagonized many of his colleagues in both England the America. His Homage to Sextus Propertius, a set of poems based on the work of the Latin poet, published in Poetry 1918, was panned. Pound left for Europe in the spring of 1921. His publication of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) served as his farewell to London. The illustration shows a photographic portrait by E. O. Hoppé taken in 1918 and published in 1920.

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

The book was published in a limited edition of 200 copies by the Ovid Press, founded by the Jewish poet and printer John Rodker in 1919. Though only active for about three years, the press published T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and James Joyce. The book was elegantly printed with each poem preceded by abstract drop caps designed by Edward Wadsworth. The following illustration shows the beginnings of the first two poems:

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley was reprinted in the 1923 edition of Personae and then again in 1958 together with Homage to Sextus Propertius in Diptych Rome-London. Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is divided in two, the first part containing 12 poems and the second 5, with an Envoi separating the two. The full text is available at Wikisource. This post, which will comment on some of the poems, is much indebted to the work of Espey (1955), Berryman (1983), and Ruthven (2020, pp 125-147). Pound was intelligent, fluent in several languages and widely read. He assumed his readers knew as much as he did, and failed to understand why they did not appreciate the significance of his work, which, though sometimes achingly beautiful, was often intractably obscure.

 

Ode pour l’élection de son sepulchre

The first poem in the book is Pound’s proposal for his own epitaph. Its title comes from a long poem by Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585), wherein he asks not to be memorialized by a marble tomb but to be buried in the nature that he loved. A short excerpt together with a translation by Curtis Page (1903) that uses rhyme but loses much of the sense:

Pound’s poetry was nothing like Ronsard’s (and even less like that of Page). He tried to write poetry that conveyed the truth of his time. He failed. He therefore requests an epitaph that recognizes his defeat. From the last stanza we learn that this poem is dated to the poet’s 30^th year. In a subsequent revision he changed this to the 31^st. This would then be 1916, the date when Pound published Lustra.

For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain “the sublime”
In the old sense. Wrong from the start –

No, hardly, but, seeing he had been born
In a half savage country, out of date;
Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn;
Capaneus; trout for factitious bait:

ἴδμεν γάρ τοι πάνθ᾽ ὅσ᾽ ἐνὶ Τροίῃ
Caught in the unstopped ear;
Giving the rocks small lee-way
The chopped seas held him, therefore, that year.

His true Penelope was Flaubert,
He fished by obstinate isles;
Observed the elegance of Circe’s hair
Rather than the mottoes on sun-dials.

Unaffected by “the march of events”,
He passed from men’s memory in l’an trentiesme
De son eage; the case presents
No adjunct to the Muses’ diadem.

The following is Pound’s recitation of the poem from a recording made at Harvard University in 1939:

The notion in the first stanza that Pound had tried “to resuscitate the dead art of poetry” alludes to Dante’s Ma qui la morta poesì resurga, (Purgatorio I, 7, 1321). In the last stanza, Pound quotes from the Testament (1461) of François Villon, a comic poem that serves, like Ronsard’s Ode, as the poet’s will. Pound felt victimized by society, in much the same way as the medieval poet. In 1923, Pound wrote a short opera based on Villon’s poem.

The second stanza refers to Capaneus, one of the “Seven Against Thebes.” A giant with immense strength, he claimed that even Zeus could not defeat him. Nevertheless, he was killed by a divine thunderbolt as he stormed the walls of Thebes. Pound shared his defiance.

The Greek quotation that begins the third stanza (transliterated as ídmen gár toi pánth᾽ ós᾽ ení Troíē refers to Homer’s rendition of the song of the sirens in the Odyssey XII: 189: “For we know all the suffering that was endured on the plains of Troy.” The next stanza refers to characters in the Odyssey: Penelope and Circe. Pound had begun to consider himself as a modern Odysseus. In 1917 published the first three parts of what were to become his life work: The Cantos. His idea was to create a sequence of modern poems that covered everything we understood about life, much like the Dante’s Divine Comedy. He later abandoned these “ur Cantos,” and began the project again with an episode from the Odyssey that had originally formed part of the original third canto. He then published A Draft of XVI Cantos in 1925.

This first poem of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is intriguing for its bilingual rhymes: Τροίῃ and leeway, Flaubert and hair, trentiesme and diadem.

Exactly who is speaking in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is not easy to determine (Bush, 1990; Wong, 2000). Pound created Mauberley as a persona separate from himself. In the first poem of the book this writer provides a eulogy for the poet E.P., who we can only assume was the youthful and idealistic Ezra Pound, who “died” unappreciated in 1916. In the first part of the book Mauberley then goes on to consider the state of literary London after that death. Lacking the emotional energy of the young E.P., Mauberley speaks in a detached manner. Occasionally the mask slips.

The second poem in the sequence tries to explain Pound’s failure as a result of the public’s taste rather than the artist’s lack of talent:

The age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;

Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries
Of the inward gaze;
Better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!

The “age demanded” chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the “sculpture” of rhyme.

The following is Pound’s recitation of this poem recorded in Washington in 1958:

By “the classics in paraphrase” Pound is referring to his versions of the poems of Propertius in Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919). Pound had attempted to convey the meaning of the poems rather than providing an exact translation. He had done the same with his translations from Chinese in Cathay (1915) but there were no pedantic Chinese scholars to criticize those poems.

In the third stanza, Pound distinguishes between statues made by means of plaster moulds from those sculpted from stone or alabaster. He likens prose to the cinema. For someone whose motto became Make it New (1934), he was decidedly antagonistic to new art forms. Ruthven (2020, p 130) quotes him as claiming “The Cinema is not art” in 1918.

 

There died a myriad

The most devastating event of Pound’s sojourn in London was World War I. Pound was acutely aware of the lives wasted by this terrible war. Pound’s friend Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who had sculpted a striking Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound in 1914, was killed in action in June 1915. Pound published a book on the sculptor’s works and thoughts in 1916: Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir. The following illustration shows a 1909 self-portrait of Gaudier-Brzeska and his sculpted portrait of Pound:

The fourth and fifth poems in the initial section of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley provide an elegy for the young men who died in World War I. These remarkably moving poems are the most memorable of the whole book. So much so that one can forget how well written they are.

IV

These fought, in any case,
and some believing, pro domo, in any case ..

Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later …

some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
Died some pro patria, non dulce non et decor …

walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;

usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.

Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
Fair cheeks, and fine bodies;

fortitude as never before

frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.

V.

There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization.

Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,

For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.

The following is Pound’s recitation of these poems, recorded in Washington in 1958:

The initial part of poem IV bases both its rhythm and its sense on the Lament for Adonis (around 100 BCE) by Bion of Smyrna (Espey, 1955, p 44). Near the end of the lament, the Loves pay tribute to the dead Adonis:

This flung upon him arrows,
that a bow, this a feather, that a quiver.
One hath done off Adonis’ shoe,
others fetch water in a golden basin,
another washes the thighs of him,
and again another stands behind and fans him with his wings.

Pound quotes from Horace Ode III: 2: 13: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (Sweet and fitting is it to die for fatherland). There was nothing sweet or fitting about death in the trenches of World War I. He also used the Latin phrase pro domo (for the home) as one of the reasons that the soldiers went to war. Latin made everything seem necessary.

Pound points to two main forces that led to the catastrophe of World War I: usury and lies. This is the first mention of “usury” in Pound’s poetry. He had become convinced by the economic writings of Clifford Hugh Douglas (1879-1952) that endeavors financed by interest-bearing loans cannot lead to anything new or good because banks will not risk take risks with their investments (see Kenner, 1971, pp 301-317). Far better for endeavors to be financed by the government by means of “social credit.” Pound later became fixated on the idea of usury as leading to the downfall of civilization, for example in his Canto XLV (1937)

Almost like an ancient prophet, Pound foresees the collapse of the British Empire using the powerful consonance of “bitch” and “botch.” However, the empire persisted between the wars, finally falling into pieces after World War II.

And what did these young men die for? Ruthven (2020, p 133) suggests that the last two lines of the fifth poem indicate

The bric-à-brac of an ancient and once vital tradition: but the civilization these men have died for is little more than a museum of shabby objets d’art.

The following is a different interpretation from Tearle (2019, p 65):

If ‘statues’ and ‘books’ are meant to be read as metonymic stand-ins for ‘art’ or ‘culture’ more generally, then our response to these lines is likely to be mixed. Does Pound think art is worth dying for, or not? Th e men who gave their lives in the First World War were not, aft er all, dying merely to defend the cheapened modern art which Pound’s poem laments, but all art of all ages. And ‘broken statues’ and ‘battered books’ hardly sound like modern art, but classical art that has been allowed to fall into ruin. In other words, Pound’s lines cast the soldiers as men defending something which the populace could not even be bothered to maintain, but which the artistic champion in him felt was worth dying for. Th e men who had sent Pound’s generation off to war had also been those who had allowed several thousand years of Western culture to fall into decline.

Envoi

After the memorial to those who died in the war, Pound presents several satirical portraits of people he had met during his time in London. Despite occasionally beautiful lines, they are for the most part not worth reading. But then, Pound inserts a poem entitled Envoi to mark the end of the first part of his book. An “envoi” (from envoyer, send) is a writer’s farewell message to the reader. It began in French medieval poetry and was famously used at the end of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (c 1385), The following is Chaucer’s Middle English and a modern translation. He hopes that God will allow him to write a comedy now that his tragedy is finished:

Pound bids his book farewell, believing it has nothing to say, but that it has born witness to the beautiful. The following is the text and a recitation by Pound from his 1939 recording at Harvard University:

Go, dumb-born book,
Tell her that sang me once that song of Lawes:
Hadst thou but song
As thou hast subjects known,
Then were there cause in thee that should condone
Even my faults that heavy upon me lie
And build her glories their longevity.

Tell her that sheds
Such treasure in the air,
Recking naught else but that her graces give
Life to the moment,
I would bid them live
As roses might, in magic amber laid,
Red overwrought with orange and all made
One substance and one colour
Braving time.

Tell her that goes
With song upon her lips
But sings not out the song, nor knows
The maker of it, some other mouth,
May be as fair as hers,
Might, in new ages, gain her worshippers,
When our two dusts with Waller’s shall be laid,
Siftings on siftings in oblivion,
Till change hath broken down
All things save Beauty alone.

Pound is describing his experience hearing the young soprano Raymonde Collignon singing Go Lovely Rose (Berryman, 1983, pp 141-143; Hesse, 1981). This is a musical setting by Henry Lawes (1596-1662) of a poem by Edmund Waller (1606-1687). The following is the poem

Go, lovely rose!
Tell her that wastes her time and me,
That now she knows,
When I resemble her to thee,
How sweet and fair she seems to be.

Tell her that’s young,
And shuns to have her graces spied,
That hadst thou sprung
In deserts, where no men abide,
Thou must have uncommended died.

Small is the worth
Of beauty from the light retired;
Bid her come forth,
Suffer herself to be desired,
And not blush so to be admired.

Then die! that she
The common fate of all things rare
May read in thee;
How small a part of time they share
That are so wondrous sweet and fair!

And this is a modern performance by Ellen Hargis accompanied by Paul O’Dette on lute

In the Envoi, the persona of Mauberley appears to conclude his comments on literary London by quoting a poem from the now-dead poet E.P.

This is one place where there is no doubt who is speaking. It is Pound himself, suddenly stepping from behind the wavering figure of Mauberley and all the veils of irony, to speak out personally, even confessionally, into a situation which he had seemed to contrive just so as not to speak in his own person at all. This wonderfully dramatic moment is signalized by the sudden appearance of a wholly unexpected metre and style, flowing, plangent, and cantabile, so wholly traditional in every respect that the voice of the poet seems to be the anonymous voice of the tradition of English song. (Davie, 1967, p 325)

Pound hopes that his book description of the singer’s grace might somehow excuse its writer’s faults and make the singing long remembered. Then he imagines he might fix the rose in amber so that it might never fade or die. And finally, he notes that though singer and poet will pass away, the beauty of the song will not.

 

Mauberley

Part II of the book is entitled Mauberley (1920). If the reader has had problems knowing what persona is present the poems of the Part I, he will almost certainly be completely lost in Part II. The poems in this section are perhaps best interpreted as the work of a poet who, after suffering critical rejection, has changed his style so that it no longer suffers from his youthful enthusiasms. However, this has caused the poems to become so cryptic as to almost unintelligible: outlines without color or shape. The following is the first poem:

Turned from the “eau-forte
Par Jaquemart”
To the strait head
Of Messalina:

“His true Penelope
Was Flaubert”,
And his tool
The engraver’s

Firmness,
Not the full smile,
His art, but an art
In profile;

Colourless
Pier Francesca,
Pisanello lacking the skill
To forge Achaia.

The following is a recitation by Pound from his 1939 recording at Harvard University:

Scholars agree that the fist two lines refer to the etching by Jules Jacquemart (1837–1880) that serves as a frontispiece to the book Émaux et Camées (Enamels and Cameos) by Théophile Gautier (1811-1872). Gautier wrote in a precise and unsentimental manner, The title of Gautier’s book indicates the author’s preference for the skill of a craftsman creating objets d’art to the excesses of the Romantics and their grand themes. The brief lines in the first poem in this Mauberley section are similar to those in Gautier’s poem L’Art (Espey, 1955, pp 45-46), the last four quatrains (with my loose translations) of which are:

However, no one is certain what Pound meant by the “strait head of Messalina.” Pound appears to have had in mind some portrait of Messalina (17-48 CE), the third wife of the emperor Claudius. Much younger than her husband she was rumored to have satisfied her desires by working clandestinely in a Roman brothel. Berryman (1977) suggested that Pound might have been referring to etchings of a bust of Messalina in the Louvre or of a head in Munich as presented in Bernoulli’s Römische Ikonographie (pp 188, 193). Moody (2007, p 383) proposed Aubrey Beardsley’s stark black-and-white 1895 etching of Messalina Returning Home (from the brothel) (Wilson, 2020). The various candidate etchings are shown below. Neither interpretation makes much sense, other than that the Messalina etchings are outlines without shading. Perhaps Pound is indicating that the poet Mauberley, chastised for his youthful excesses, has now drained his work of any form. This fits with the final stanza wherein he likens his new art to Piero della Francesca without the color, or Pisanello without the talent that let him make medallions as fine as those from ancient Greece (Achaia).  

The following is a 1447 medallion of Pisanello showing s portrait of Cecilia Gonzaga, the daughter of Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, Marquess of Mantua, on one side, and a representation of a virgin taming a unicorn on the obverse:

Luini in porcelain

The poems in Part II, cryptic and allusive, cannot be understood without access to scholarly annotations. The final poem recalls the description of Raymonde Collignon singing Go Lovely Rose in the Envoi that separates the two parts of the book. This final poem describes the singer rather than the song. Mauberley imagines the singer as a small porcelain medallion, perhaps like one of Gautier’s cameos, or one of Pisanello’s bronzes:

Luini in porcelain!
The grand piano
Utters a profane
Protest with her clear soprano.

The sleek head emerges
From the gold-yellow frock
As Anadyomene in the opening
Pages of Reinach.

Honey-red, closing the face-oval,
A basket-work of braids which seem as if they were
Spun in King Minos’ hall
From metal, or intractable amber;

The face-oval beneath the glaze,
Bright in its suave bounding-line, as,
Beneath half-watt rays,
The eyes turn topaz.

The poem likens the singer to a painting by Bernardino Luini (1480-1532) who worked with Leonardo da Vinci. Pound is likely referring to his painting Head of a Girl in the Wallace Collection (Berryman, 1977, p 299). This was part of a set of frescos in Villa La Pelucca near Milan (about1523) which were transferred to canvas in 1822.

Pound also compares the singer to Venus Anadyomene (rising from the sea), a name for Aphrodite (which may derive from aphros, sea foam”), the  goddess of love. In particular, to a sculpted head of Venus in the Leconfield Collection (Petworth House), illustrated as Plate 83 in the art encyclopedia entitled Apollo (1904) compiled by Solomon Reinach (Berryman, 1977, p 301).

His final image is that of a fresco fragment from Minoan Crete, commonly called La Parisienne, also described in Reinach.

The following illustration shows these three heads, all of which have survived long beyond the age of their creation. All have intricately braided hair, as we must presume did Raymonde Collignon:

As described in a letter to the editor of Padieuma, the half-watt lamp was a special type of light bulb that gave a “warmer” lighting than the usual incandescent bulb. It would have highlighted the singer’s “topaz” eyes. Topaz is frequently yellow, but occasionally blue or even red.

Once one has understood the allusions, the poem has a cryptic beauty. However, it still pales before the description of the singing as presented in Envoi.

 

Exile

In early 1921, shortly after the publication of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Pound left for Europe. The journal The New Age bid him an ambiguous farewell:

Mr. Ezra Pound has recently gone abroad, perhaps for one year, perhaps for two, perhaps for good. Following the old and, in my opinion, the bad example first set by a man of letters, Landor, Mr. Pound has shaken the dust of London from his feet with not too. emphatic a gesture of disgust, but, at least, without gratitude to this country. I can perfectly well understand, even if I find it difficult to approve. Mr. Pound has been an exhilarating influence for culture in England; he has left his mark upon more than one of the arts, upon literature, music, poetry and sculpture; and quite a number of men and movements owe their initiation to his self-sacrificing stimulus; among them being relatively popular successes as well as failures. With all this, however, Mr. Pound, like so many others who have striven for the advancement of intelligence and culture in England, has made more enemies than friends, and far more powerful enemies than friends. Much of the Press has been deliberately closed by cabal to him; his books have for some time been ignored or written down; and he himself has been compelled to live on much less than would support a navvy. His fate, as I have said, is not unusual: I could parallel it near home and with more than one instance. Taken by and large, England hates men of culture until they are dead.

After two years in Paris, during which time he edited T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), Pound moved to Rapallo in Italy where he stayed in self-imposed exile. While in Rapallo, he resumed work on The Cantos, a sprawling poetic work that by his death had extended to some 117 poems, the last of which remain uncompleted.

A man of towering intellect and enviable talent, he fashioned for himself an ego that considered only himself. He wrote only in accord with his own judgment, and lost the feedback of his fellows. Becoming fascinated by the economics of C. H. Douglas, he began to attribute all the ills of the world to the Jews.

During World War II, he made propaganda broadcasts for the Italian government, denouncing the Allied Governments and the Jews (Casillo, 1988). After the war he was indicted for treason, but judged mentally unfit to stand trial. He spent 12 years in St Elizabeth’s Psychiatric Hospital in Washington, D.C. There was never any definite diagnosis for what was wrong with him (Torrey, 1984). After being released in 1958, he returned to Italy, where he lived until his death in 1972.

Despite the keenness of his mind and the tremendous breadth of his reading, he could not see clearly, could not communicate his ideas so that they could be easily understood, and could not abide by any criticism. He became exiled in himself. This process began with Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.

 

References

Bernoulli, J. J. (1886). Römische Ikonographie. Teil 2, Die Bildnisse der Römischen Kaiser, I. Das Julisch-Claudische Kaiserhaus. Verlag von W Speman.

Berryman, J. B. (1977). The art of the image: allusions in Pound’s “Medallion.” Paideuma, 6(3), 295–308.

Berryman, J. B. (1983). Circe’s craft: Ezra Pounds’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. UMI Research Press.

Bush, R. (1990). “It draws one to consider time wasted”: Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. American Literary History, 2(1), 56–78.

Casillo, R. (1988). The genealogy of demons: anti-Semitism, fascism, and the myths of Ezra Pound. Northwestern University Press.

Davie, D. (1967). Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. In Ford, B (Ed) The Pelican Guide to English Literature; Volume 7 The Modern Age. (pp 315-329).

Espey, J. J. (1955). Ezra Pound’s Mauberley: a study in composition. Faber and Faber.

Hesse, E. (1981). Raymonde Collignon, or (apropos Paideuma, 7-1&2, pp. 345-6): the duck that got away. Paideuma, 10(3), 583–584

Kenner, H. (1971). The Pound era. University of California Press.

Kotin, J. (2023). Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era: FAQ. nonsite website.

Moody, A. D. (2007). Ezra Pound: poet: a portrait of the man and his work. Volume I The young genius. Oxford University Press.

Pound, E. (1920). Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. Ovid Press.

Pound, E. (1926). Personæ: the collected poems of Ezra Pound. James Laughlin.

Pound, E. (1958). Diptych Rome-London. Officina Bodoni (reprinted in 1994, New Directions).

Reinach, S. (1904). Apollo: histoire génerale des arts plastiques professée en 1902-1903 à l’École du Louvre. Librairie Hachette et Cie.  English translation

Ronsard, P. de (translated by Page, C. H., 1903). Songs & sonnets of Pierre de Ronsard, gentleman of Vendomois. Houghton Mifflin.

Ruthven, K. K. (2020). A Guide to Ezra Pound’s Personæ (1926). University of California Press.

Tearle, O. (2019). Battered books: Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. In The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem. (pp. 59–76). Bloomsbury Publishing.

Torrey, E. F. (1984). The roots of treason: Ezra Pound and the secret of St. Elizabeths. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Wong, K. A. (2000). Blurring of poet and persona in Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.” Paideuma, 29(3), 193–205.

Wilson, S. (2020). Aubrey Beardsley’s Messalina: going, or coming? Audrey Beardsley Society.

 

During the reign (14-37 CE) of the Roman Emperor Tibberius, Pontius Pilates served as Prefect of Judaea from 26 to 37 CE. During this time, the High Priest of the Temple was Joseph ben Caiaphas, who had succeeded his father-in-law Annas in 18 CE and served until 36 CE. Pontius Pilate was primarily responsible for the Judaea and Samaria, but the regions of Galilee and Perea were ruled as Roman vassal states by the tetrarch Herod Antipas who reigned from the death of his father Herod the Great in 4 BCE until 39 CE. Pontius Pilate presided over the trial of Jesus of Nazareth, most likely during the celebration of Passover in 33 CE. The illustration shows Jesus before Pilate, a panel of the Maestà (1311 CE) by Duccio di Buoninsegna.

History

Although the details of the trial of Jesus as reported in the Christian Gospels may or may not be true, two early historians have provided evidence that Jesus did indeed exist and that he was condemned by Pilate to die by crucifixion.

Flavius Josephus (37-100CE), a Roman Jewish historian, mentioned the crucifixion of Jesus in Book 18 of The Antiquities of the Jews (written in Greek and published in 94 CE). We do not have a copy of the original publication and the earliest known manuscripts date to about the 10^th Century CE, 900 years later. Most scholars agree that the section describing Jesus is authentic but that additions were made to it as the book was copied in the monasteries (Baras, 1987). Meier (1991, pp 59-62) proposes the following translation with the additions noted in italics.

At this time there appeared Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one should call him a man. For he was a doer of startling deeds, a teacher of people who receive the truth with pleasure. And he gained a following both among many Jews and among many of Greek origin. He was the Messiah. And when Pilate, because of an accusation made by the leading men among us, condemned him to the cross, those who had loved him previously did not cease to do so. For he appeared to them on the third day, living again, just as the divine prophets had spoken of these and countless other wondrous things about him. And up until this very day the tribe of Christians, named after him, has not died out.

Tacitus (56-120 CE), a Roman historian, mentions the crucifixion of Christ in Book 15 of The Annals (written in Latin and published about 115 CE), while discussing the Fire of Rome (64 CE) during the reign (54-68 CE) of Emperor Nero. No one knows the cause of the fire, but many suspected that it was caused by Nero, perhaps to make space for new buildings, perhaps to serve as backdrop for a theatrical performance. To remove suspicion from himself, Nero then accused the Christians in Rome of starting the fire.

But all human efforts, all the lavish gifts of the emperor, and the propitiations of the gods, did not banish the sinister belief that the conflagration was the result of an order. Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular.

At the time that Tacitus was writing the Roman officials in charge of provinces were no longer called “prefects” or “governors” but had been renamed “procurators,” in keeping with the change in their main responsibilities from military to fiscal.

 

Context

Despite the uncertainty about the reported details, the description of the trial in the gospels provides significant information about the beliefs of those that followed Jesus of Nazareth. This post will consider the narrative of the trial by focussing on the Gospel of John, written about 90 CE (Spong, 2013). The author was initially considered to be the disciple John, but most scholars now believe that the gospel was written by his followers. Although John was the last of the four canonical gospels to be written, the oldest known manuscript fragment of any gospel – the Ryland Papyrus 52 – is from a copy of John dated to the early 2^nd Century CE. The papyrus is written on both sides indicating that it came from a codex rather than a scroll. The words on the papyrus concern the trial of Jesus. The first side (recto) shows part of John 18:31-33

Then said Pilate unto them, Take ye him, and judge him according to your law. The Jews therefore said unto him, It is not lawful for us to put any man to death:
That the saying of Jesus might be fulfilled, which he spake, signifying what death he should die.
Then Pilate entered into the judgment hall again, and called Jesus, and said unto him, Art thou the King of the Jews?

And the opposite side (verso) shows part of John 18:37–38

Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.
Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews, and saith unto them, I find in him no fault at all.

The beginning of the word ΑΛΗΘΕΙΑ (αλήθεια, alítheia, “truth” as in John 18: 37) can be seen at the end of the third line of the verso of the papyrus fragment (right):

To illustrate the narrative of the trial, this post will use panels from The Passion of Christ, a series of 25 paintings by Duccio di Buoninsegna (1255–1319 on the reverse of the Maestà (1311, the enthroned Madonna with the child Jesus) in Siena Cathedral. The images were painted in egg tempera and gold leaf on wooden panels. The standard panel is 50 cm × 53.5 cm. Some panels are wider, and others have images that are twice the standard height. The narrative begins at the bottom left with the Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem and concludes at the top right with Christ’s Appearance on the Road to Emmaus. The lower half of The Passion portrays events that occur before those in the upper half, and the lower panel of each section occurs before the upper panel.

The following maps provide on the left an overview of the Roman Province of Judaea in the 1^st Century CE. Pilate spent most of his time in Caesarea on the coast. During the annual celebration of the Passover, when many Jews came to Jerusalem, Pilate travelled there with a small cohort of soldiers to ensure order and prevent any outbreak of rebellion. The Jews believed they should only be ruled by God and fiercely opposed the Roman occupation of Judaea. Some Jews – the Zealots – favored armed resistance. While in Jerusalem, Pilate stayed at the palace of the late Herod the Great. On the right of the illustration is a plan of the city of Jerusalem, showing the presumed locations of the various events during the Passion of Jesus. Two different sites have been proposed for the crucifixion (and entombment). Both maps have been modified slightly from the Conforming to Jesus website.

The Arrest

After the last supper, Jesus and his disciples retire to a garden on the slopes of Mount Olive. In Mark and Matthew the garden is named Gethsemane (“olive press”). While Jesus prays and his disciples sleep, a band of armed men led by Judas Iscariot, one of the disciples, come to arrest him.

Judas then, having received a band of men and officers from the chief priests and Pharisees, cometh thither with lanterns and torches and weapons. (John 18:3)

John does not mention the kiss whereby Judas identified Jesus, though this is described in the three synoptic gospels. Though the name “Iscariot” may indicate his birthplace in Qeriot, it may also derive from the Latin word sicarius, “assassin,” or from the Aramaic word sheqarya, “false” (Stanford, 2015, pp 23-27). In the latter cases, the name would have only been used after the death of Jesus. Spong (2013, pp 219-222) points out that the details about Judas, such as the thirty pieces of silver, and his suicide, derive from earlier traitor stories in the Hebrew scriptures. He suggests that Judas “is a mythological, literary creation, not a person of history.” However, some of the details in his history – Jesus identifying him as his betrayer at the last supper (John 13:26) and the kiss in Gethsemane (Matthew 26:48, Mark 14: 44) – seem too vivid not to be true.

There is some question as to exactly who comes to arrest Jesus. Clearly, the temple guards are involved, but John also reports (18:12) that a “captain” (χιλίαρχος, chiliarchos, tribune) and a small cohort of soldiers accompany the Temple guards. These terms were only used for Roman soldiers (see discussion in Winter, 1961, pp 44-50; and Cohn 1971, pp 71-93). One must presume that the high priests had discussed the arrest with Pilate and that he had agreed to send soldiers to ensure that nothing got out of hand. They had clearly decided to make the arrest at nighttime when Jesus was not accompanied by crowds.

Jesus asks the armed men whom they sought. When they state “Jesus of Nazarus” he replies “I am he”

Jesus therefore, knowing all things that should come upon him, went forth, and said unto them, Whom seek ye?
They answered him, Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus saith unto them, I am he. And Judas also, which betrayed him, stood with them.
As soon then as he had said unto them, I am he, they went backward, and fell to the ground. (John 18: 4-6)

John is playing on the divine name JHVH which derives from the verb “to be” and refers to God’s declaration in the burning bush “I am that I am” (Exodus 3:14). John wants to show that Jesus is proclaiming his divine status, and that the arresting party is momentarily taken aback. The question and answer are then repeated. John is trying too hard. I doubt this ever happened.

John then describes how Peter strikes off the ear of the high priest’s servant. Jesus admonishes Peter. Cool heads prevail. More extensive bloodshed does not occur.

 

Jesus before Caiaphas

Jesus is taken from Gethsemane to the home of Caiaphas the High Priest. John reports that he is initially taken to the house of Annas and then referred on to Caiaphas.

Peter follows the arresting party, and, while Jesus was being examined, Peter thrice denies any knowledge of him. The final chapter of John provides a parallel event wherein Peter thrice declares his love to the resurrected Jesus. Oh, that we all might have the opportunity to repudiate our betrayals.

John does not make much of the arraignment before Caiaphas. Several members of the Sanhedrin (the Jewish High Court) are present, but it is clearly not a formal meeting, since Passover had just begun (or was about to begin). The Sanhedrin has already considered the problem posed by Jesus. John 11 describes their deliberations after the raising of Lazarus from the dead:

Then gathered the chief priests and the Pharisees a council, and said, What do we? for this man doeth many miracles.
If we let him thus alone, all men will believe on him: and the Romans shall come and take away both our place and nation.
And one of them, named Caiaphas, being the high priest that same year, said unto them, Ye know nothing at all,
Nor consider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not. (John 11: 47-50)

The meeting at Caiaphas home after the arrest of Jesus simply confirms their earlier decision.

Now Caiaphas was he, which gave counsel to the Jews, that it was expedient that one man should die for the people. (John 18: 14).

John repeats this decision because he is smitten by its irony. According to the Christians, Jesus died that all people (not just the Jews) should be saved from the consequences of sin. Caiaphas is not aware of the full meaning of his words.

The other gospels are more explicit about the meeting with Caiaphas. Mark 14 describes how many false witnesses speak against Jesus, but that the priests are most concerned with Jesus’ blasphemous claim to be the Son of God. Such blasphemy is punishable by death according to Jewish law (Leviticus 24:16). Matthew reports how the high priest rends his garments on hearing Jesus’ blasphemy. The following illustration shows Duccio’s illustration of the arraignments before Annas and Caiaphas:

Duccio shows the arraignment before Annas (left), Caiaphas rending his garments (lower right), and the beating of the blindfolded Jesus (upper right). Duccio incorporates into these illustrations the disciple Peter (green-robed and haloed) as he makes his three denials of Jesus.

Although the High Priest and his supporters desire the death of Jesus, they may not have the legal authority to bring this about. It is generally thought that capital punishment (ius gladii, the law of the sword) in 1^st Century Judaea was the preserve of the Roman occupiers. This may not be true (Kacian, 2014). Nevertheless, the priests may not wish to be held responsible for the death of Jesus since he is popular with the people. Far better to let the Romans take care of their problem. The difficulty is that the Roman authorities will not consider blasphemy against the Jewish God as a capital crime. So the priests who bring Jesus to Pilate accuse him of claiming to be the King of the Jews. John’s gospel portrays them as being unclear about this accusation but definite in their desire for his death

Pilate then went out unto them, and said, What accusation bring ye against this man?
They answered and said unto him, If he were not a malefactor, we would not have delivered him up unto thee.
Then said Pilate unto them, Take ye him, and judge him according to your law. The Jews therefore said unto him, It is not lawful for us to put any man to death (John 18:29-31).

Duccio’s representation has a completely disordered perspective. There is no vanishing point. Jesus stands in front of the column he should be behind, and Pilate’s seat on the right tilts out of the picture as though he has no jurisdiction here.

 

Jesus before Pilate.

(i) the kingdom of heaven

Despite the confusing accusation coming from the priests, Pilate’s first question for Jesus is

Art thou the King of the Jews? (John 18: 33)

This is what he has distilled from the obfuscations of the priests. After clarifying the source of the question, Jesus answers

My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence. (John 18: 36)

This is the essence of Jesus’ teaching: the “Kingdom of God” (or the “Kingdom of Heaven” as it was called in Matthew). He mentioned it in the beatitudes: “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5: 3, 10). And he tried to explain it in multiple parables (e.g. Matthew 13). Nevertheless, the meaning of this kingdom remains unknown (France, 2005) Some have considered it apocalyptically as what will occur after the final judgement. Others have thought about it evangelistically as the state of the world when everyone has converted to Christianity. But these future-oriented interpretations are false:

The kingdom of God cometh not with observation:
Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you. (Luke 17 20-21)

The kingdom most likely represents the community of people who live harmoniously together according to the rule of loving one’s neighbor (e.g. Wenell, 2024). This is in effect the “church” in its spiritual rather than physical sense – the people not the building.

Jesus had previously distinguished between worldly and divine kingdoms when he had been asked whether it was lawful for a Jew to pay tribute to Caesar. He had answered

Shew me the tribute money. And they brought unto him a penny.
And he saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription?
They say unto him, Caesar’s. Then saith he unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s. (Matthew 22:19-21)

This distinction between the two kingdoms had tremendous implications (Dusenberry, 2021). Before Jesus, religious authority and political power were intertwined. Jewish kings were subject to priests and prophets. Roman emperors were considered divine. After Jesus it became possible for a religious authority to exist independently of national boundaries, and for people to have separate allegiances to god and to king. The fact that states could evolve independently of religion allowed such things as democracy and liberty to develop. That religion existed independently of the state allowed the church to persist through the rise and fall of empires. Dusenberry (2021, p 163) quotes from a letter by the 5^th Century Pope Gelasius to the Emperor Anastasius:

There are two ways, august emperor, in which the world (mundus hic) is chiefly ruled: the sacred authority of the priests (auctoritas sacra pontificum), and the royal power (regalis potestas).

At the end of his book. Dusenberry (2021, p 246) refers the French historian Fustel de Coulanges who describes the immense changes in society as the secular became separate from the sacred. The following is an extended quotation from Fustel de Coulanges’ book The Ancient City, initially published in 1864:

If, now, we recollect what has been said above on the omnipotence of the states among the ancients,  ̵̵̶ ̶ if we bear in mind how far the city, in the name of its sacred character and of religion, which was inherent in it, exercised an absolute empire,  ̶ we shall see that this new principle was the source whence individual liberty flowed.

The mind once freed, the greatest difficulty was overcome, and liberty was compatible with social order.

Sentiments and manners, as well as politics, were then changed. The idea which men had of the duties of the citizen were modified. The first duty no longer consisted in giving one’s time, one’s strength, one’s life to the state. Politics and war were no longer the whole of man; all the virtues were no longer comprised in patriotism, for the soul no longer had a country. Man felt that he had other obligations besides that of living and dying for the city. Christianity distinguished the private from the public virtues. By giving less honor to the latter, it elevated the former; it placed God, the family, the human individual above country, the neighbor above the city.

Law was also changed in its nature. Among all ancient nations law had been subject to, and had received all its rules from, religion. Among the Persians, the Hindus, the Jews, the Greeks, the Italians, and the Gauls, the law had been contained in the sacred books or in religious traditions, and thus every religion had made laws after its own image. Christianity is the first religion that did not claim to be the source of law. It occupied itself with the duties of men, not with their interests. Men saw it regulate neither the laws of property, nor the order of succession, nor obligations, nor legal proceedings. It placed itself outside the law, and outside all things purely terrestrial. Law was independent; it could draw its rules from nature, from the human conscience, from the powerful idea of the just that is in men’s minds. It could develop in complete liberty; could be reformed and improved without obstacle; could follow the progress of morals, and could conform itself to the interests and social needs of every generation.

 

(ii) witness to the truth

After Jesus’ comment on his kingdom, Pilate is not sure what Jesus means and asks again whether he is really a king. Jesus replies

Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice. (John 18: 37)

This again is a key part of Jesus teachings.

I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. (John 14:6)

There are perhaps two levels of truth (e.g. Sallis, 1995). One is related to the correspondence between one’s thoughts or statements and external reality. The second comes into play when we cannot know something, but decide to believe it is true. This is the truth of faith.

Pilate is again uncertain about what Jesus is claiming. But he is clearly not a threat to the Roman Empire:

Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews, and saith unto them, I find in him no fault at all. (John 18: 37)

It is difficult to know whether Pilate’s comment about truth is cynical, or whether he is just confused by Jesus’ claim. Nevertheless, it earned for him the epithet “jesting Pilate” in Francis Bacon’s 1625 essay Of Truth:

What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer. Certainly there be that delight in giddiness; and count it a bondage to fix a belief; affecting free-will in thinking, as well as in acting.

 

(iii) Pilate attempts to release Jesus.

Pilate decides that the easiest way out of his predicament would be to release Jesus through the customary prisoner amnesty at Passover: the privilegium paschale (Curran 2025). He asks those assembled before the palace if they would like either Jesus or the rebel Barabbas to be released. These were the priests and guards that bought Jesus to Pilate. They clamor for Barabbas.

Pilate attempts to assuage the crowd by scourging Jesus. Then he has a crown of thorns placed on his head and he presents Jesus to the crowd to be mocked.

Pilate therefore went forth again, and saith unto them, Behold, I bring him forth to you, that ye may know that I find no fault in him.
Then came Jesus forth, wearing the crown of thorns, and the purple robe. And Pilate saith unto them, Behold the man!
When the chief priests therefore and officers saw him, they cried out, saying, Crucify him, crucify him. Pilate saith unto them, Take ye him, and crucify him: for I find no fault in him.
The Jews answered him, We have a law, and by our law he ought to die, because he made himself the Son of God. (John 19: 5-7).

However, the Jews could not crucify Jesus. Their laws may have required the death penalty, but crucifixion was a Roman punishment.

The scourging and mocking of Jesus are portrayed by Duccio on the left of the following illustration. On the right are representations of Pilate washing his hands and of Jesus on his way to the crucifixion:

 

(iv) Who art thou?

Pilate is surprised by the tenacity of the priests and their followers. He asks Jesus “Whence at thou?” He already knows that Jesus is from Nazareth. As Schiavone (2017, p 154) points out

The question has an explicitly metaphysical resonance. It is the request of someone who, not without apprehension, senses he is in the presence of the unknown. If Pilate really asked it—and the relationship between the coherence of the account and the conceptual and historical likelihood of the described facts prompts us to consider it possible—the prefect’s investigation was no longer centered on ascertaining whether a crime had been committed, but on the nature and mission of the person before him.

Jesus does not answer, Pilate reminds him that he has the power to crucify him. Christ replies

Thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above (John 18: 11).

Jesus is claiming that his death is ordained. It is God’s will, not Pilate’s decision. This removes any idea of assigning blame or responsibility for the death of Jesus. Dusenbury (2021, p 148) quotes the remarks by Augustine of Hippo (354-450 CE) on the gospel of John;

The man they took by force – and then tortured and killed – was one “to whom nothing could have been done unless he himself willed it” (quem nihil valuisser nisi quod ipse voluisset)

This illustrates the paradox of an all-powerful and all-knowing god. If everything is ordained, no one can be responsible for their actions.

 

(v) No friend of Caesar

The final argument proposed by the priests is that the kingdom proposed by Jesus is a direct threat to Caesar.

If thou let this man go, thou art not Caesar’s friend: whosoever maketh himself a king speaketh against Caesar. (John 19: 12)

The claim to be King of the Jews is treason against the emperor. Fearful that the Jews will complain to the emperor that he did not properly persecute an insurrectionist, Pilate cedes to their wishes. Wroe (1999, p 273) imagines his state of mind:

Tiberius had perhaps already received unfavorable reports of him. Would he tolerate more? Did Pilate have any stock of goodwill left? If he had, was he really going to hazard it, and with it the lives of hundreds of Jews and Romans and others, on the fate of one peculiar preacher? One man’s life could never be worth that. If he let his soldiers loose on people, he would be called a butcher. He might lose Judaea. The crowd was al-ready on the edge of tumult, and he was getting nowhere in his efforts to persuade them. Besides, he was not there in Judaea to pursue celestial fantasies or to sift the philosophy of those he sentenced. He was there to preserve law and order in the name of Rome.

Pilate then seats himself on the “Gabbatha” (pavement stone, the place of judgment), and condemns Jesus to be crucified. Agamben (2015, p 45) proposes that Pilate does not provide a formal sentence, and what is written in John is far from clear. However, there must have been a sentence since the Roman soldiers immediately carry out the crucifixion.

Pilate insists that Jesus be identified on the cross in Hebrew, Greek and Latin as “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” The priests request that Pilate qualify this:

Then said the chief priests of the Jews to Pilate, Write not, The King of the Jews; but that he said, I am King of the Jews.
Pilate answered, What I have written I have written. (John 19: 21-22)

And so Christ was crucified. Together with two others, described as thieves, but probably insurrectionists, since thievery did not warrant crucifixion. In the presence of Mary his mother, Mary Magdalene, Mary of Cleopas and the disciple John:

(vi) innocence and blame

Although not mentioned in the gospel of John, Matthew describes how Pilate declares his innocence of the death of Jesus by washing his hands.

When Pilate saw that he could not prevail, but rather that a tumult was beginning, he took water and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, “I am innocent of the blood of this just person. See ye to it.” (Matthew 27: 24)

Most scholars consider this to be completely fictional. Although hand-washing was a means to declare innocence for the Jews (e.g. Deuteronomy 21:1–9), it was not a Roman custom. Nor was Pilate sensitive enough about Jewish ways to use it symbolically.

Matthew does not stop there. He then reports

Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children. (Matthew 27:25)

This is the clearest example of what is present in all the gospels: a shifting of the blame for the death of Jesus from the Romans to the Jews. Crucifixion was a Roman punishment. Even if we accept as true his misgivings, Pilate condemns Jesus to death. Assembled in the courtyard of the palace is a group of temple guards and priests. They are in no way representative of the Jewish people. And in no way could they have cried out in a single voice.

At the time that the gospels were written, Rome had just destroyed the Second Temple and driven the Jews from their homeland. The Christians of that time did not wish to antagonize Rome. For the most part, the Jewish people had not been attracted to Christianity, which was becoming more and more a religion of the Gentiles. The early Christians were probably upset that their fellow Jews ignored them, and even overtly persecuted them. When Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire, these words from the Gospels became the justification for a virulent antisemitism that culminated in the horrors of the Holocaust. The following are comments by Crossan (1995, p 152):

Those first Christians were relatively powerless Jews, and compared to them the Jewish authorities represented serious and threatening power. As long as Christians were the marginalized and disenfranchised ones, such passion fiction about Jewish responsibility and Roman innocence did nobody much harm. But, once the Roman Empire became Christian, that fiction turned lethal. In the light of later Christian anti-Judaism and eventually of genocidal anti-Semitism, it is no longer possible in retrospect to think of that passion fiction as relatively benign propaganda. However explicable its origins, defensible its invectives, and understandable its motives among Christians fighting for survival, its repetition has now become the longest lie, and, for our own integrity, we Christians must at last name it as such.

It was not really until the papal encyclical Nostre Aetate (1966, In Our Time) that the Christian Church guardedly admitted its role in the persecution of the Jews:

True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ; still, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today. Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures. All should see to it, then, that in catechetical work or in the preaching of the word of God they do not teach anything that does not conform to the truth of the Gospel and the spirit of Christ.

 

(vii) what really happened

The gospels were written long after the death of Jesus. They report details about Jesus’ arraignment before Pilate that no one other than Jesus or Pilate would have been privy to. They provide a fascinating story, but one that is more likely fictional than real. Pontius Pilate is portrayed as a thoughtful and merciful prefect, unable in the end to save a charismatic and popular preacher from the wrath of the high priests whom he had offended. In reality, Pilate probably paid little attention to the claims of Jesus. He may not even have shared a common language with Jesus. They may have spoken Greek, but probably neither was completely fluent. Pilate was mainly concerned with the maintenance of order, and if the crucifixion of a peasant preacher could prevent a riot, so be it.

Two needs were addressed by the story of the trial of Jesus. First, the fledgling Christian religion did not wish to antagonize the Romans. So the blame for the death of Jesus was shifted from Rome to the Jews. Second, the Christians wished to portray the death of Jesus as fulfilling the Jewish prophecies for a Messiah. Crossan (1995) has called this the “historicization of prophecy.” He shows how this occurs in the gospels’ description of the abuse suffered by Jesus during his times before Caiaphas and before Pilate (pp 118-132). The process became even more apparent in the description of the crucifixion:

Then the soldiers, when they had crucified Jesus, took his garments, and made four parts, to every soldier a part; and also his coat: now the coat was without seam, woven from the top throughout.
They said therefore among themselves, Let us not rend it, but cast lots for it, whose it shall be: that the scripture might be fulfilled, which saith, They parted my raiment among them, and for my vesture they did cast lots. These things therefore the soldiers did. (John 19: 23-24)

The prophecy is from Psalms 22:18

They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture.

Although Christianity considers this psalm as prophetic, Jewish scholarship describes it as simply a song of lament either for the state or the singer. Crossan (1995) describes many other instances in the gospels wherein statements in the Jewish scriptures are related to events in the Passion of Jesus, whether or not they were originally meant as prophecies.

Winter (1961, p 148) summarizes his review of the trial of Jesus:

the Gospel records, when critically examined, furnish clear evidence of the fact that Jesus was executed on a charge of sedition at the order of the Emperor’s representative. At the same time the contention is made that Jesus was devoid of revolutionary ambitions. The evidence, fragmentary though it is, affords no solid basis for the view that he was engaged in any political activities of a subversive character. That he was executed as a rebel, together with others who were executed on the same charge, by no means proves that he did work for the overthrow of the existing political system. So far as the procurator was concerned, he would have seen sufficient reason for ordering the crucifixion if he had come to the conclusion that Jesus’ itinerant preaching tended to excite the masses to expect the end of the existing order.

What really happened? All we know about the trial is summed up in Josephus as quoted at the beginning of this post:

And when Pilate, because of an accusation made by the leading men among us, condemned him to the cross, those who had loved him previously did not cease to do so.

 

Aftermath

Pilate was recalled to Rome at the end of 36 CE (Bond, 1998, pp 92-23). He may have come into disfavor because of his harsh treatment of the Jews, but by the time he arrived in Rome Tiberius was dead. Nothing is known about Pontius Pilate after his time in Judaea, though many have imagined his latter life (e.g. Wroe, 1999; Carter, 2003).

A set of writings called The Pilate Cycle (Elliot& James, pp 165-226) composed of letters from Pilate to Tiberias and to Claudius, and narratives of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus may have originated in the 1^st or 2^nd Centuries CE, but whatever versions have survived were re-written centuries later and are clearly fictional. The following excerpts are from the Paradosis Pilati (Tradition of Pilate), the earliest known surviving manuscript of which dates to the 12^th Century CE. It reports how Pilate was examined by Caesar on his return to Rome:

And when he had been brought to the city of the Romans and Caesar heard that Pilate was there, he sat down in the temple of the gods in the presence of the whole senate and the whole army and all the multitude of his forces. And he commanded Pilate to stand forward and said to him, ‘How could you dare to do such a thing, you most impious one, when you had seen such great signs concerning that man? By daring to do an evil deed you have destroyed the whole world.’ (p 209)

Pilate blames his actions on the Jews, and Caesar orders the destruction of their temple and the dispersement of their people. He also orders the execution of Pilate, who prays for forgiveness for himself and his wife Procla:

And when Pilate came to the place of execution, he prayed silently, ‘Lord, do not destroy me with the wicked Hebrews, for had it not been because of the nation of the lawless Jews, I would not have raised my hand against you, because they plotted a revolt against me. You know that I acted in ignorance. Therefore do not destroy me because of this sin, but pardon me, Lord, and your servant Procla, who stands with me in this hour of my death, whom you taught to prophesy that you must be nailed to the cross. Do not condemn her also because of my sin, but pardon us and number us among your righteous ones.’

And behold, when Pilate had finished his prayer, there sounded a voice from heaven, ‘All generations and families of the Gentiles shall call you blessed, because in your governorship everything was fulfilled which the prophets foretold about me. And you yourself shall appear as my witness at my second coming, when I shall judge the twelve tribes of Israel and those who have not confessed my name.’ And the prefect cut off Pilate’s head, and behold, an angel of the Lord received it. And when Procla his wife saw the angel coming and receiving his head, she was filled with joy, and immediately gave up the ghost and was buried with her husband. (pp 210-211)

The destruction of the temple ordered by Caesar did indeed occur. But this happened much later than Pilate’s return to Rome. The Jewish people revolted against Roman rule in the First Jewish-Roman War of 66-73 CE. The Romans retaliated ferociously and destroyed the Herodian temple in Jerusalem. Just as Jesus had prophesied:

And Jesus went out, and departed from the temple: and his disciples came to him for to shew him the buildings of the temple.
And Jesus said unto them, See ye not all these things? verily I say unto you, There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down. (Matthew 24: 1-2).

However, Matthew was written after the fall of the Temple. This is history converted to prophecy as opposed to prophecy historicized.

 

Retellings

Pilate continues to fascinate us. We imagine ourselves in his position. Would we have paid proper attention? Would we have recognized who Jesus was? Would we have been able to save him from his death? Or were we just there to set some divine plan in motion?

In The Master and Margarita (written in the 1930s) Mikhail Bulgakov tells how a Soviet novelist tries to write a novel about Pontius Pilate. He imagines a prefect with a severe migraine having to deal as best he can with an itinerant preacher who appears to understand him far better than he does himself. The following is a retelling of their conversation about truth:

“And what was it in any case that you said about the temple to the crowd in the bazaar?”
The responding voice seemed to stab at Pilate’s temple, was inexpressibly painful, and this voice was saying:
“I said, Hegemon, that the temple of the old faith would fall and a new temple of truth would be built. I said it that way so as to make it more understandable.”
“And why did you stir up the people in the bazaar, you vagrant, talking about the truth, of which you have no notion? What is truth?”
And here the procurator thought: ‘Oh, my gods! I’m asking him about something unnecessary at a trial . . . my reason no longer serves me . . .’ And again he pictured a cup of dark liquid. ‘Poison, bring me poison . .’
And again he heard the voice:
“The truth is, first of all, that your head aches, and aches so badly that you’re having faint-hearted thoughts of death. You’re not only unable to speak to me, but it is even hard for you to look at me. And l am now your unwilling torturer, which upsets me. You can’t even think about anything and only dream that your dog should come, apparently the one being you are attached to. But your suffering will soon be over, your headache will go away.”
(translated by Pevear& Volokhonsky, 2000)

Pilate’s headache is no more. Yet the trial and its effects have not gone away. The story told by the gospels led to the founding of a religion that is followed fervently or grudgingly by almost a third of the world’s people. However, the teachings of Jesus did not need to be validated by his death or resurrection. They were and are true in and of themselves. And he would not have blamed anyone for his death.

 

References

Agamben, G. (2013, translated by Kotsko, A., 2015). Pilate and Jesus. Stanford University Press.

Baras, Zvi (1987). The Testimonium Flavianum and the Martyrdom of James. In Feldman, L. H.; Hata, G. (Eds.). Josephus, Judaism and Christianity. (pp 338-348). Brill.

Bond, H. K. (1998). Pontius Pilate in history and interpretation. Cambridge University Press.

Bulgakov, M. (translated by Pevear, R., & Volokhonsky, L., 2000). The Master and Margarita. Penguin Books.

Carter, W. (2003). Pontius Pilate: portraits of a Roman governor. Liturgical Press

Cohn, H. H. (1971). The trial and death of Jesus. Harper & Row.

Crossan, J. D. (1995). Who killed Jesus? Exposing the roots of anti-semitism in the Gospel story of the death of Jesus. HarperSanFrancisco.

Curran, J. (2025). Pilate, Barabbas, and the privilegium paschale: law and leverage in Roman Judaea. Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 47(4), 501–525.

Dusenbury, D. L. (2021). The innocence of Pontius Pilate: how the Roman trial of Jesus shaped history. Hurst & Company.

Elliott, J. K., & James, M. R. (1993). The Apocryphal New Testament: a collection of apocryphal Christian literature in an English translation. Clarendon Press.

France, R. T. (2005). Kingdom of God. In Vanhoozer, K. J., Bartholomew, C. G., Treier, D. J., & Wright, N. T. Dictionary for theological interpretation of the Bible. (pp 420–422). Baker Academic.

Fustel de Coulanges, N, D, (1864, translated by Small, W., 1877, reprinted 1956). The Ancient city: a study on the religions, laws, and institutions of Greece and Rome. Doubleday.

Kacian, A. (2014). Potestas Gladii in Jesus’ Trial. Communications: Scientific Letters of the University of Žilina, 16(3), 20–24.

Meier, J. P. (1991). A marginal Jew: rethinking the historical Jesus. Doubleday.

Sallis, J. (1995). Double truth. State University of New York Press.

Schiavone, A. (2016, translated by J. Carden). Pontius Pilate: deciphering a memory. Liveright

Spong, J. S. (2013). The fourth gospel: tales of a Jewish mystic. HarperOne.

Stanford, P. (2015). Judas: the troubling history of the renegade apostle. Hodder & Stoughton.

Wenell, K. J. (2024). Locating the kingdom of God: performing sacred boundaries. T&T Clark

Winter, P. (1961, reprinted 2014). On the Trial of Jesus. De Gruyter.

Wroe, A. (1999). Pilate: the biography of an invented man. Jonathan Cape.

Robert Desnos (both ‘s’ pronounced, 1900-1945) was a Surrealist French poet. During World War II, after initially serving in the French army, Desnos became an active member of La Résistance. The illustration shows a photograph taken in 1943. On 22 February 1944, Desnos was arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Auschwitz. From there he was transferred to the Flōha labor campe, and finally, in April 1945, to Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia. Though Theresienstadt was liberated on 8 May, Desnos died there of typhus on 8 June. Contrée (“Against the Grain”), a book of 25 poems celebrating the land of France and its resistance to oppression, was published in 1944.

Rrose Sélavy

In 1921, the young poet Robert Desnos met André Breton (1896-1966) and became an enthusiastic participant in the automatic writing sessions of the Surrealist Movement. During this time, he also became smitten with Rrose Sélavy, the altera ego of Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). The name is a pun for Eros, c’est la vie (“love is life”), or arroser la vie (“give a toast to life”). In 1922, Desnos published under the title Rrose Sélavy multiple brief wordplays, puns and spoonerisms, supposedly dictated to him by Rrose while the poet slept (Conley, 2002, pp 15-44). Breton described them as “words making love” (les mots font l’amour) (Desnos, 1999, p 159).

The following are three of the wordplays: 

Rrose Sélavy voudrait bien savoir si l’amour, cette colle à couches, rend plus durs les molles couches [Rrose Sélavy would like to know if love is the fly-paper that hardens the soft foundation.]

La solution d’un sage est la pollution d’un page. [The solution of a sage is the pollution of a page. (page in the sense of both book-page and page-boy)]

Est-ce que la caresse des putains excuse la paresse des culs teints? [Does the whore’s caress excuse the laziness of dyed buttocks?]

The following illustration shows a photograph of Desnos by Man Ray (1925) and a painting by Georges Malkine (1928).

 

Desnos and Breton denounced each other in 1929. Desnos continued to write poetry though his days of automatic sleep-writing were over. During the 1930s many of his works were dedicated to the love of his life Youki (Lucie Badoud), who had been the muse and model for the Japanese artist Tsuguharu Fujita. Her nickname was the Japanese word for “snow.”

World War II

During the initial period of the war when very little happened – la drôle de guerre (phoney war) – Desnos enlisted in the army. When Germany invaded France in May 1940, he was captured, released, and then demobilised. He became a journalist at the newspaper Aujourd’hui, but continued to write poetry. Those poems that were more overtly anti-fascist were published clandestinely using pseudonyms. He participated in La Résistance by providing them with information secretly available to the newspaper, and arranging counterfeit papers for Jews and others sought by the occupying Germans. In February 1944, he was apparently betrayed by someone he had offended, and deported. The following illustration shows a photograph by Dora Maar taken in 1943, and an engraving portrait by Gaston Roux that was used for the volume État de veille (State of Alert) published by Robert Godet in 1943.

 

Contrée

Robert Godet published Contrée after Desnos was deported. The meaning of the title is complex. Both the French “contrée” and the English “country” derive from the Latin (terra) contrata which means “(the land) spread out before one.” In both languages the words came to mean the land around a town or city: rural rather than urban. In English, “country” was also used to denote the political entity that governs a defined region, a meaning that in French was taken by “pays.” The word “contrée” can also be the feminine past participle of the verb “contrer” meaning “act against” or “counter.” Adès (2017) translates this as “against the grain.” For Desnos “(la terre) contrée” suggests both the enduring land, and its rebellion against the current government.

The following illustration shows the etching of Dora Maar by Picasso that was included in the book, the title page, and then the first poem (La cascade). The etching shows a woman seated with her legs crossed on a chair made of books (Swan, 2017). The woman appears to be seen from both front and back; some have suggested that this double perspective might represent an embracing couple. Youki thought that the etching represented “a knight leaning on a stack of books” (Swan 2017, p 5). Picasso arranged for parts of the etching to be printed with each of the poems in the book. This may represent the desecration of the body of France by the Germans.

According to Conley (2003, p 124), Contrée contains one poem for every hour of the day and concludes with an epitaph. Although some of the poems are in free verse, most are formal in structure: nine poems are sonnets. Translations are difficult since one must find some compromise between form and meaning. Kulik (Desnos, 1984, 2004) uses free verse and finds exact meanings; Adès (2017) uses rhymes when Desnos does, albeit not always in the same order. The following sections present five of the poems from the book in the original French (Desnos, 1999; also Rimes website), and in the English translation of Timothy Adès (2017). Each poem is recited by Yvon Jean.  

 

La cascade

Quelle flèche a percé le ciel et le rocher?
Elle vibre. Elle étale, ainsi qu’un paon, sa queue
Ou, comme la comète à minuit vient nicher,
Le brouillard de sa tige et ses pennes sans noeuds.

Que surgisse le sang de la chair entr’ouverte,
Lèvres taisant déjà le murmure et le cri,
Un doigt posé suspend le temps et déconcerte
Le témoin dans les yeux duquel le fait s’inscrit.

Silence ? nous savons pourtant les mots de passe,
Sentinelles perdues loin des feux de bivouac
Nous sentirons monter dans les ténèbres basses
L’odeur du chèvrefeuille et celle du ressac.

Qu’enfin l’aube jaillisse à travers tes abîmes,
Distance, et rayon dessine sur les eaux,
Présage du retour de l’archer et des hymnes,
Un arc-en-ciel et son carquois plein de roseaux.

The following is a reading by Yvon Jean

 

The Waterfall

What arrow split the sky and pierced the rock?
Vibrant, it spreads its peacock tail and flaunts
Its blurry shaft and sleek unblemished flights,
The way the midnight comet finds its mark.

The flesh is opened. For the blood to rise,
While lips suppress the murmurs and the cries,
A finger bids time stop, pre-occupies
The witness who records it with his eyes.

Silence? And yet we know the passwords well.
We strayed from our camp-fires, we sentinels:
Drifting from shady corners we can smell
Salt surf aromas, honeysuckle smells.

Dawn bursts on far-off depths; a sunbeam limns
Upon the waves, at last, a sketch that leads
Back the returning archer and his hymns:
A rainbow, with its quiver full of reeds.

This poem, the first in the collection, seems on the surface to be like the love poems of the French Renaissance, wherein the lover sought to capture his beloved with the arrows of desire. However, the poem describes “the political pursuit of armed Resistance fighters hidden in the landscape of France” (Conley, 2003, p 131). Near a waterfall someone has been wounded, blood flows, passwords are given, and eventually the maquisards returns to their hideout and dawn arrives. The imagery for the waterfall is striking: the waterfall is likened to the tale of a peacock or a comet. Because of Desnos’ love of wordplay, one must wonder whether the word paon should recall païen meaning “pagan” – one who does not follow the established faith.

 

Le paysage

J’avais rêvé d’aimer. J’aime encor mais l’amour
Ce n’est plus ce bouquet de lilas et de roses
Chargeant de leurs parfums la forêt où repose
Une flamme à l’issue de sentiers sans détour.

J’avais rêvé d’aimer. J’aime encor mais l’amour
Ce n’est plus cet orage où l’éclair superpose
Ses bûchers aux châteaux, déroute, décompose,
Illumine en fuyant l’adieu au carrefour.

C’est le silex en feu sous mon pas dans la nuit,
Le mot qu’aucun lexique au monde n’a traduit
L’écume sur la mer, dans le ciel ce nuage.

À vieillir tout devient rigide et lumineux,
Des boulevards sans noms et des cordes sans noeuds.
Je me sens me roidir avec le paysage.

The following is a reading by Yvon Jean

 

The Countryside

I dreamed of loving. Still I love, but now
Love is no more that rose and lilac spray
Whose perfume filled the woods where each pathway
Led on directly to the blazing glow

I dreamed of loving. Still I love, but now
Love’s not that storm whose lightning kindled high
Towers, unhorsed, unhinged, and fleetingly
Would set the parting of the ways aglow.

Love is the flint my footstep sparks at night,
The word no lexicon can render right,
Foam of the sea, the cloud across the sky.

Old age makes all things fixed and luminous:
Knots are unravelled, streets anonymous;
Set in our ways, the countryside and I.

The countryside of Contrée stands in ironic contrast to that espoused by Vichy propaganda. Conley (200 3, p 1260 remarks

Under Pétain liberty, equality, and fraternity became outmoded concepts replaced with the moralizing, hierarchical values of work, family, and the notion of a mythical homeland led by the patriarchal Marshal.

Desnos remembers the springtime of his life when love blossomed, and the stormy time that followed when the war began. Now the country has hardened into resistance. Love still exists but it is now the flint that attempts to ignite rebellion.

 

La peste

Dans la rue un pas retentit. La cloche n’a qu’un seul
battant. Où va-t-il le promeneur qui se rapproche
lentement et s’arrête par instant? Le voici devant
la maison. J’entends son souffle derrière la porte.

Je vois le ciel à travers la vitre. Je vois le ciel où les
astres roulent sur l’arête des toits. C’est la grande
Ourse ou Bételgeuse, c’est Vénus au ventre blanc, c’est
Diane qui dégrafe sa tunique près d’une fontaine de lumière.

Jamais lunes ni soleils ne roulèrent si loin de la
terre, jamais l’air de nuit ne fut si opaque et si
lourd. Je pèse sur ma porte qui résiste…

Elle s’ouvre enfin, son battant claque contre le
mur. Et tandis que le pas s’éloigne je déchiffre
sur une affiche jaune les lettres noires du mot « Peste ».

The following is a reading by Yvon Jean:

The Plague

In the road a footstep echoes. The bell has only one
clapper. Where’s he going, the walker, coming
slowly nearer and briefly stopping? Now he’s outside
the house. I hear him breathing behind the door.

I see the sky through the glass. I see the sky where the
stars run on the rooftops. It’s the great
Bear or Betelgeuse, it’s Venus the white-bellied,
it’s Diana unfastening her tunic near a fountain of light.

Never did moons or suns run so far from the
earth, never was the night air so dense and so
heavy. I lean on my door which resists…

It opens at last, it swings and knocks against the
wall. And while the footstep moves away I decipher
on a yellow poster the word in black letters, “Plague”

The poem is written in free verse with the line-endings arbitrarily placed between article and noun, adverb and adjective. The world is out of joint. Never were the heavens so far from the earth. An unseen walker labels the house wherein we live in terror as infested by the plague. The label is ambiguous. Does it represent the oppression of the occupiers or the paralyzing fear of the oppressed? On another level the yellow poster recalls the yellow star that French Jews were required to wear.

 

La voix

Une voix, une voix qui vient de si loin
Qu’elle ne fait plus tinter les oreilles,
Une voix, comme un tambour, voilée
Parvient pourtant, distinctement, jusqu’à nous.
Bien qu’elle semble sortir d’un tombeau
Elle ne parle que d’été et de printemps,
Elle emplit le corps de joie,
Elle allume aux lèvres le sourire.

Je l’écoute. Ce n’est qu’une voix humaine
Qui traverse les fracas de la vie et des batailles,
L’écroulement du tonnerre et le murmure des bavardages.

Et vous ? Ne l’entendez-vous pas?
Elle dit « La peine sera de courte durée »
Elle dit « La belle saison est proche ».

Ne l’entendez-vous pas?

The following is a reading by Yvon Jean

 

The Voice

A voice, a voice coming from so far away
That it no longer rings in the ears,
A voice, like a drumbeat, muffled
Reaches us even so, distinctly.
Though it seems to issue from a tomb
It speaks only of summer and spring,
It fills the body with joy,
It kindles a smile on the lips.

I’m listening. It’s only a human voice
Coming across the din of life and of battles,
The crash of thunder and the babble of talk.

What about you? Don’t you hear it?
It says “The pain will be short-lived”
It says “The beautiful season is near”.

Don’t you hear it?

This poem is a poem of hope. In the noise of battle and the babble of talk, a voice promises that beauty will return. The voice is not loud, it is like the “still small voice” of God who promised Elijah that Israel would be delivered from its oppressors (1 Kings 19: 12).

 

L’épitaphe

J’ai vécu dans ces temps et depuis mille années
Je suis mort. Je vivais, non déchu mais traqué.
Toute noblesse humaine étant emprisonnée
J’étais libre parmi les esclaves masqués.

J’ai vécu dans ces temps et pourtant j’étais libre.
Je regardais le fleuve et la terre et le ciel
Tourner autour de moi, garder leur équilibre
Et les saisons fournir leurs oiseaux et leur miel.

Vous qui vivez qu’avez-vous fait de ces fortunes ?
Regrettez-vous les temps où je me débattais ?
Avez-vous cultivé pour des moissons communes ?
Avez-vous enrichi la ville où j’habitais ?

Vivants, ne craignez rien de moi, car je suis mort.
Rien ne survit de mon esprit ni de mon corps.

The following is a reading by Yvon Jean:

 

The Epitaph

I’ve lived today, and since antiquity
Been dead. I lived intact, but I was prey.
Man’s nobler side was jailed and put away;
Among the slaves in face-masks, I was free.

I’ve lived today, and nonetheless been free.
I watched the river and the earth and sky
Turn round me, and they kept their harmony;
Honey and birds, a seasonal supply.

How did you use these gifts, you there alive?
Did you misuse the days I spent in toil?
Did you make common cause and till the soil
To harvest? Did you make my city thrive?

Don’t fear me, you who live: I’m dead and gone:
Not soul nor body, nothing lingers on.

The sense of the poem stems from the ideas of mortality of the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341–270 BC), epitomized in the Latin epitaph used by many of his followers:

Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo (I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care).

Desnos agrees that today he lives, that before that was dead, and that after he dies nothing will remain. He cares not for before or after but concentrates on today. Despite the awfulness of the time into which he was born, he strives to remain free and to live in harmony with the world. He asks his readers if they using their talents for the common good or resigning themselves to servitude. The meaning of the poem is encapsulated in the line

J’ai vécu dans ces temps et pourtant j’étais libre

 

Imprisonment and Death

After his arrest and interrogation by the Gestapo in February, 1943, Desnos was sent to the transit camp in Compiègne. Youki visited him there and provided him with a care package. However, in April, Desnos and 1700 other prisoners were sent on to Auschwitz. From there, he was transferred to Buchenwald and then in May to the Flossenbūrg  concentration camp in Bavaria. Soon after his arrival Desnos was transferred to the Flōha sub-camp for where he worked for 11 months (Humphreys, 2002). During his stay there he wrote a few last poems usually at the request of his co-prisoners. On 14 April 1945, as the Allied Forces advanced into Germany, SS leader Heinrich Himmler ordered all concentration camps to be closed. After a forced march, Desnos arrived in Theresienstadt (Terezin) in Czechoslvakia on May 7. Germany surrendered on May 8, and all the guards left the camp at Theresienstadt. A period of chaos and starvation ensued. On June 4 a French-speaking Czech medical student Josef Stuna, assigned to help at the camp recognized Desnos. They talked about poetry, but Desnos was terribly sick with typhus, and died on June 8. The following photograph shows Desnos in a group of prisoners at Theresienstadt. He is in the center, leaning on the shoulder of a companion dressed in a black coat.

 

Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation

In 1962 a memorial to the 200,000 people who died in concentration camps after being deported from France during World War II was constructed behind the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris on the eastern tip of Île de la Cité. The memorial, designed by Georges-Henri Pingusson, has an entrance is marked by two concrete blocks. Inside is the tomb of an unknown deportee. Along both walls of a narrow chamber leading underground are 200,000 crystals meant to symbolize each of the deportees who died in the concentration camps. The actual numbers were less than 200,000.  Among those deported were 75,000 Jews; of these only about 2,500 survived. Of the 88,000 deported on political rather than racial grounds, about 53,000 survived (Wieviorka, 2016, p 417). On the walls inside the memorial are brief quotations from several French writers: Paul Élard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and Robert Desnos. The following illustration shows the memorial and the two quotations from Desnos:

The first quotation is from the ending of a poem published in 1944:

Car ces cœurs qui haïssaient la guerre battaient pour la liberté au rythme même des saisons et des marées, du jour et de la nuit.

For these hearts that hated war were beating for liberty to the very rhythm of the seasons, the tides, day and night.  (Adès translation).

The second quotation came from what was incorrectly assumed to be his last poem (Conley, 2003, pp 203-207; Desnos/Adès, 2017, p 93). This was quoted in Czech in a brief article in a Czech newspaper on 1 July 1945 that announced the death of the French poet at Theresienstadt. Translated back into French the poem read

J’ai rêvé tellement fort de toi,
J’ai tellement marché, tellement parlé,
Tellement aimé ton ombre,
Qu’il ne me reste plus rien de toi.

Il me reste d’être l’ombre entre les ombres,
L’ombre qui viendra et reviendra
Dans ta vie ensoleillée.

The poem was thought to be addressed to France. However, the lines actually came from a 1926 prose poem that Desnos wrote for his love at the time: the singer Yvonne George

J’ai tant rêvé de toi, tant marché, parlé, couché avec ton fantôme qu’il ne me reste plus peut-être, et pourtant, qu’à être fantôme parmi les fantômes et plus ombre cent fois que l’ombre qui se promène et se promènera allégrement sur le cadran solaire de ta vie. 

I’ve dreamed of you so much, walked, talked, slept with your phantom so much that all that’s left to me perhaps, is to be a phantom among phantoms and a hundred times more shadowy than that shadow walking in joy, now and in time to come, across the sun-dial of your life. (Adès translation).

 

Springtime

Desnos’ real ‘last poem,’ written on 6 April 1944 in the Flossenbūrg camp (Desnos/Dumas, 1999, p 1259; Desnos/Adès, 2017, pp 512-513) was:

Printemps

Tu, Rrose Sélavy, hors de ces bornes erres
Dans un printemps en proie aux sueurs de l’amour,
Aux parfums de la rose éclose aux murs des tours,
à la fermentation des eaux et de la terre.

Sanglant, la rose au flanc, le danseur, corps de pierre
Paraît sur le théâtre au milieu des labours.
Un peuple de muets d’aveugles et de sourds
applaudira sa danse et sa mort printanière.

C’est dit. Mais la parole inscrite dans la suie
S’efface au gré des vents sous les doigts de la pluie
Pourtant nous l’entendons et lui obéissons.

Au lavoir où l’eau coule un nuage simule
À la fois le savon, la tempête et recule
l’instant où le soleil fleurira les buissons.

The following is a reading by Yvon Jean

Springtime

Rrose Sélavy, beyond these bounds you stray.
Meanwhile the waters and the earth ferment;
The rose on fortress-walls pours out its scent;
Love has its sweats and springtime is their prey.
 
The rose has torn the stone-limbed dancer’s side.
While others plough and sow, he treads the boards.
The public, blind and deaf and dumb, applauds
This rite of spring, when he has danced and died.
 
The word that’s writ in soot is wiped away
At the wind’s whim by fingers of the rain.
Nevertheless we hear it and obey.
 
Down at the wash-place where these waters run,
A cloud portrays both soap and hurricane,
Retreating when the thickets bloom in sun.
(Adès translation).

The poem hearkens back to the days of his youth when Desnos was in love with words and with Rrose Sélavy, and looks forward to the days when spring would dispel the darkness that was Europe during the Nazi era. Desnos was forever the optimist. He used to read the palms of his co-prisoners and he would always find happiness in their futures (Desnos/Caws, 2007, p 1280). An apocryphal story is that he read the palms of a group of prisoners slated for the gas chambers and that his description of their future lives so confused the guards that the prisoners were not executed.

 

References:

Poems and translations

Desnos, R. (translated by Forché, C., & Kulik, W. T., 1991). The selected poems of Robert Desnos. Ecco Press.

Desnos, R. (translated by Kulik, W, 1994). Contré = Country: twenty-five poems. Windhover Press (University of Iowa).

Desnos, R. (edited by Dumas, M.-C., 1999). Œuvres. Gallimard.

Desnos, R. (translated by Kulik, W, 2004). The voice of Robert Desnos: selected poems. Sheep Meadow Press.

Desnos, R. (edited by Caws, M. A., 2007) Essential poems and writings of Robert Desnos. Black Widow Press

Desnos, R. (translated by Adès, T., 2017). Robert Desnos: Surrealist, Lover, Resistant: collected poems. Arc Publications.

 Others

Conley, K. (2003). Robert Desnos, surrealism, and the marvelous in everyday life. University of Nebraska Press.

Humphreys, K. (2002). Robert Desnos. In Leroux, J.-F. (Ed.) Modern French poets. (Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 258). Gale

Kulik, W. (1990). On Desnos. The American Poetry Review, 19(3), 29-31.

Swan, R. (2019). Contrée: Picasso’s visual fragmented tailpieces emphasise the poetry of Robert Desnos. Knowledge Commons.

Wieviorka, O. (translated by J. M. Todd, 2016). The French Resistance. Harvard University Press.

After a period of severe depression at the hospital at Saint-Rémy in the spring of 1890, Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) asked to be discharged. He left Saint-Rémy on May 16, 1890, and visited his brother Theo in Paris for a few days, before travelling to Auvers-sur-Oise, a small town about 30 km northwest of Paris, where Charles-François Daubigny had lived, and where several Impressionists, among them Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne, had painted. Auvers was also the home of Paul-Ferdinand Gachet, a kindly physician whom Theo had asked to accept his brother as a patient. Van Gogh arrived in Auvers on May 20, 1890. Over the next ten weeks he created 74 paintings. Among these, twelve used a “double-square” format: 100 by 50 cm. In these paintings, Van Gogh attempted to express his new vision of the world. Unfortunately, his depression persisted and on the evening of July 27, 1890, he shot himself with a revolver, dying from the injury two days later. The illustration shows his last self-portrait painted in Saint-Rémy in September, 1889.  

Doctor Gachet

Paul-Ferdinand Gachet (1828-1909) had trained at the Salpêtrière Hospital, but had retired to Auvers where he practised homeopathy. After his wife died in 1875, Gachet lived the life of a melancholy widower with his two children, Marguerite (born 1869) and Paul Jr. (born 1873). He collected paintings, and was himself an amateur artist. He possessed a small printing press.

Van Gogh met Doctor Gachet on the day of his arrival in Auvers. He found him a sad and sensitive man, but realized that he would probably not be able to help him with his depression. In a letter to Theo, he remarked

I think that we must in no way count on Dr Gachet. In the first place he’s iller than I am, it seemed to me, or let’s say just as much, there you have it. Now when one blind man leads another blind man, do they not both fall into the ditch?

Nevertheless, Von Gogh visited him frequently over the next several weeks and the two became friends. In a letter to his sister on June 5, he reported

I have found a true friend in Dr. Gachet, something like another brother, so much do we resemble each other physically and also mentally.

On June 3 he painted a portrait of the doctor (Saltzman, 1998). The doctor sits at a red garden table on which rests a foxglove plant. Foxglove, a source of digitalis, signifies the doctor’s medical profession. Also on the table are two yellow books: Germinie Lacerteux (1865) and Manette Salomon (1867) by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt. These novels, representative of the new movement of realism, tell depressing stories, and Van Gogh likely included them in the painting to reflect the doctor’s melancholy. The portrait is currently in a private collection. A copy of questionable authenticity is held by the Louvre.

And on June 19 Gachet gave Van Gogh a prepared copper plate so that he could sketch another portrait for an etching. The plate was later etched, and multiple copies were printed either by Doctor Gachet or his son. One of them must have added the incorrect date 15 Mai 90 in a shaky backward handwriting so that it would come out properly on the print. This is the only etching that Van Gogh ever made, though his extensive experience with a reed-pen drawings made him a master of this approach.      

In a letter to his sister Wilhelmina, Van Gogh describes what he wanted to convey in his painting: 

I should like to paint portraits which would appear after a century to people living then as apparitions. By which I mean that I do not endeavour to achieve this by a photographic resemblance, but by means of our impassioned expressions – that is to say, using our knowledge of and our modern taste for colour as a means of arriving at the expression and the intensification of the character. So the portrait of Dr. Gachet shows you a face the colour of an overheated brick, and scorched by the sun, with reddish hair and a white cap, surrounded by a rustic scenery with a background of blue hills; his clothes are ultramarine – this brings out the face and makes it paler, notwithstanding the fact that it is brick-coloured.

 

Daubigny

Charles-François Daubigny (1817-1878) was one of the first artists, together with Corot and Courbet, to practise painting en plein air. He wanted to capture the fleeting changes in light and color that happen in real life rather than in the studio. Daubigny settled in Auvers in 1860. While there he used a boat as a floating studio to paint the light effects on the Oise and Seine Rivers. His paintings are considered precursors to Impressionism. The following illustration shows two paintings: Springtime (1868) and Moonrise at Auvers or Return of the Flock (1878) 

Van Gogh held Daubigny in high regard (Bakker, 2015). He visited Daubigny’s widow in Auvers and painted the garden to the Daubigny villa on July 10, 1890:

The first painting with the cat in the foreground is now in the Kunstmuseum in Basel and the later copy, painted on July 23, is in the Hiroshima Museum of Art. In the background to the right is the Romanesque Church of Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption, just east of the villa. Van Gogh also made another smaller painting which focussed on the roses in the Daubigny garden. This painting was famously painted on a checkered napkin since Van Gogh had run out of canvas.  

Auvers-sur-Oise

The following map of Auvers-sur-Oise, simplified from Van der Veen (2023a) shows the Daubigny Villa, the Maison Ravoux where Van Gogh found lodging, and the locations where he painted several of his pictures.

The Double-Square Format

In mid June Van Gogh had begun to use canvases that were 100 by 50 cm for some of his paintings – a double-square format (Pickvance, 1986, p 258; Coquery 2023; Bailey, 2021a, pp 102-115). Two of the July paintings of Daubigny’s garden were in this format. Daubigny had painted his landscapes using wide canvasses, and it is possible that Van Gogh chose his new format with his predecessor in mind. Van Gogh had also been impressed the recent painting Inter Artes et Naturam (1890) of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898) which he had seen in Paris (Wattenmaker, 1981). This is 295 x 830 cm, almost a triple-square

Puvis de Chavannes’ painting shows figures unearthing architectural relics, creating ceramics, and picking blossoms in a park beside the River Seine. All under the watchful eyes of several artists who are sketching their endeavors. The painting celebrates both artistic creativity and the beauty of nature without which art could not occur. Puvis de Chavanne made the original for Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen, but he also made several smaller copies. The following is Van Gogh’s description in his letter to his sister Wilhelmina on June 5

On one side two women, dressed in simple long robes, are talking together, and one the other side men with the air of artists; in the middle of the picture a woman with her child on her arm is picking a flower off an apple tree in bloom. One figure is forget-me-not blue, another bright citron yellow, another of a delicate pink colour, another white, another violet. Underneath their feet a meadow dotted with little white and yellow flowers. A blue distance with a white town and a river. All humanity, all nature simplified, but as they might be if they are not like that.
This description does not tell you anything – but when one sees this picture, when one looks at it for a long time, one gets the feeling of being present at a rebirth, total but benevolent, of all things one should have believed in, should have wished for – a strange and happy meeting of very distant antiquities and crude modernity.

 

The following is Van Gogh’s description of his first double-square paintings in his letter to Theo on June 24, 1890:

Then I have a canvas one metre long by only 50 centimetres high, of fields of wheat, and one that makes a pendant of undergrowth, lilac trunks of poplars, and underneath them some flower-dotted grass, pink, yellow, white and various greens.

The following is the first of these paintings, Wheatfields near Auvers:

This is the mysterious Undergrowth with Two Figures:

Coquery (2023) comments on the latter

No horizon here, rather a closed space punctuated by the hypnotic rows of poplars with their uncertain vanishing lines; and in the foreground a trunk that is abnormally large compared to the others, designed to intensify the perspective. The geometry of the trunks, emphasized by strong black outlines, contrasts with the vigorous profusion of grasses and flowers, more thickly painted and hardly credible as undergrowth.
Strangely, Van Gogh does not mention the ghostly, frontally rendered couple, and the uncertainty of scale as they seem to float between the trunks and the waist-high grass that sprinkles their Sunday clothes. The pair – especially the man who wears a kind of top hat – resembles a bridal couple who have strayed too far from a church square. It represents the last instance of the loving-couple motif that pervades the artist’s oeuvre like a poignant regret.
In its haunting geometry this painting can be read as a reinterpretation of the orchard in Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’s great work, Inter artes et naturam.

Puvis de Chavannes might have represented the beauty of antiquity, but Van Gogh distilled into his painting the loneliness of modern life.

The following is Landscape at Twilight:

The painting is reminiscent of some of the twilight paintings of Daubigny, although Van Gogh’s colours are more intense and his brushwork far more energetic. The picture is evenly divided into bright sky and darker land. In the distance is the Château de Léry, built in 1635.

Van Gogh describes the painting in his letter of June 24

Finally a night effect – two completely dark pear trees against yellowing sky with wheatfields, and in the violet background the castle encased in the dark greenery.

A week after these first three double-square pictures, Van Gogh painted a portrait of Marguerite Gachet at the Piano using his new format, but orienting it vertically. In a letter to Theo on June 28, he described the painting

Yesterday and the day before I painted Mlle. Gachet’s portrait, which I hope you will see soon; the dress is pink, the wall in the background green with orange spots, the carpet red with green spots, the piano dark violet; it is 1 metre high by 50 cm wide.

The following illustration shows the portrait and an excerpt from the letter where Van Gogh suggests that the portrait and the Wheatfields near Auvers would complement each other. The illustration shows the two paintings aligned as proposed: 

J’ai remarqué que cette toile fait très bien avec une autre en largeur, de blés, ainsi l’une toile étant en hauteur et rose, l’autre d’un vert pâle et jaune vert complémentaire du rose; mais nous en sommes encore loin avant que les gens comprennent les curieux rapports qui existent entre un morceau de la nature et un autre, qui pourtant s’expliquent et se font valoir l’un l’autre.
[I have noticed that this canvas goes very well with another horizontal one of wheat, as one canvas is vertical and in pink tones, the other pale green and greenish yellow, the complementary of pink; but we are still far from the time when people will understand the curious relation between one fragment of nature and another, which all the same explain each other and enhance each other.]

 

Wheatfields under Turbulent Skies

Vincent Van Gogh visited Paris in early June and became aware of the stresses of his brother Theo. His newborn son had been sick, and Theo himself was uncertain whether to stay at his position with the art dealers Boussod and Valadon, or to strike out on his own. Vincent realized what a burden he had been for his brother. In a letter to Theo on July 10 he states

It’s no small thing when all together we feel the daily bread in danger, no small thing when for other causes than that we also feel our existence to be fragile.
Once back here I too still felt very saddened, and had continued to feel the storm that threatens you also weighing upon me. What can be done – you see I usually try to be quite good-humoured, but my life, too, is attacked at the very root, my step also is faltering.

He then states that he has just completed two

immense stretches of wheatfields under turbulent skies, and I made a point of trying to express sadness, extreme loneliness. You’ll see this soon, I hope – for I hope to bring them to you in Paris as soon as possible, since I’d almost believe that these canvases will tell you what I can’t say in words, what I consider healthy and fortifying about the countryside.

One of the paintings was Wheatfields under Thunderclouds, now in the Van Gogh Museum:

Coquery (2023, p 141) remarks that

This is the most austere of the double squares and the only one giving a predominant role to the sky, which is enlivened with heavy impasto and broad, lush brushstrokes. 

Despite the storm building up on the left, the painting conveys an abiding sense of peacefulness. The storm will come, but the fields will remain, the green will become golden and the harvest will begin.

The second painting is Wheatfield with Crows, also in the Van Gogh Museum.

The painting is stormy. The brushstrokes are ragged. The sharp contrasts between blue and yellow and between red and green heighten the emotional intensity of the painting.  

Although the horizon is clear there is no single vanishing point and no unifying perspective. The painting appears to show two triangular wheatfields. Wouter van der Veen (2023) took two photographs from the probable location of this painting. The first shows a path between two fields viewed from the side of the Chemin de Montier

The following shows the same scene photographed using a panoramic lens. Now the scene looks much more like the painting:

Van Gogh was using a panoramic perspective. This is much closer to what the human eye sees. Our field of vision is about 120˚ vertical by 200˚ degrees horizontal. This fits very well with Van Gogh’s double-square format. Most paintings deal with only the center of our field of vision where we see binocularly (about 120˚ square) and leave the periphery unrepresented.   

Bailey (2021a, p 24; 2021b) points to an 1843 painting by Daubigny that was likely taken from the same spot. Van Gogh may have known the painting and may have sought out the same location. However, there is a huge contrast between Daubigny’s peace and Van Gogh’s storm.  

Any interpretation of Wheatfield with Crows is forever tainted with the fact that the painting was long considered Van Gogh’s last painting before his suicide (Bailey 2021b). However, it is now known that the painting was finished almost three weeks before. It is not a harbinger of death. Rather, Erickson (1998, p 162) points out the Van Gogh considered wheatfields far more restorative than ominous. She quotes from a letter to Theo on July 2

It is just in learning to suffer without complaint, in learning to look on pain without repugnance, that you risk vertigo, and yet it is possible, yet you may even catch a glimpse of a vague likelihood that on the other side of life we shall see good reason for the existence of pain, which seen from here sometimes so fills the whole horizon that it takes on the proportions of a hopeless deluge. We know very little about this, about its proportions, and it is better to look at a wheat field, even in the form of a picture.

Van Gogh was clearly suffering and he was contemplating death, but he looked to the wheatfields for affirmation. Erickson remarks (p 164)

If the roads, as they run out of the painting or disappear among the resplendent wheat, in Crows over the Wheatfield, were intended to represent death, it is a death of triumph and ultimate release. Taking into consideration van Gogh’s view of death, the images of crows and wheat, and country roads begin to come together to show what van Gogh describes as the “healthful and restorative forces” of the French countryside. The vast, troubled skies of deep royal blue, which occupy almost half of the compositional space of the painting are symbolic of the infinite, the ultimate goal of the artist’s pilgrimage. [the quotation is from the July 10 letter]

 

Harvest

By mid-July the harvest was in full swing. Van Gogh painted a peaceful representation of a Field with Haystacks: 

 

Van Gogh had long delighted in the harvest. The following illustration shows his representation of Wheat Sheaves from July 1890, together with an earlier drawing and painting from 1885. The 1890 painting is almost ethereal in its lightness.

 

Even the rain did not dampen his peaceful feelings. The following painting of harvest fields in the rain was created on July 18. The crows are present, but they are part of the landscape:

 

Farms

Soon after his arrival in Auvers, Van Gogh had painted a group of thatched farmhouses just to the east of Auvers.  The following illustration shows a photograph from 1887 (Van der Veen, 2023a, p 54) and one of Van Gogh’s paintings from late May or early June:

In the final days of his life, probably on July 26, Van Gogh returned to these farms and created a wonderfully peaceful picture of the farms. The double-square format allowed him to represent the whole group of farm buildings nestled together:

 

Tree Roots

Van Gogh’s last picture, painted on the day that he shot himself, was probably Tree Roots (Maes, & van Tilborgh, 2012). Some parts of the background are just flat colors and lack the final brushstrokes that Vang Gogh typically used. Van Gogh finished all his other paintings except for the Farms near Auvers, in which a small area of the sky was not completed. The painting represents the roots of trees at the side of a road.

The following are comments by Pickvance (1986, pp 282-3):

Ambiguous, stylized, vitalistic, life-affirming, antinaturalistic yet palpably organic: a kind of prototype for an Art Nouveau frieze. No foreground, no element on which the viewer can get his spatial bearings, no sky to differentiate back-ground from foreground, no stabilizing horizontal. The roots and trunks are vertical; the ground plane is almost vertical. The motif could be part of the steep rise of the hillside, with the village below and the plain above, that characterizes the length of Auvers; van Gogh could have found it at almost any point. The image is passionately observed, yet objectively rendered.

Van der Veen (2020) found a postcard showing Rue Daubigny in the early years of the 20^th Century. That allowed him to pinpoint the location of Van Gogh’s tree roots:

Suicide

After painting Tree Roots and bringing it back to his room at the Maison Ravoux, Van Gogh went out in the early evening of July 27 “behind the chateau.” There he shot himself with a revolver (Bailey 2021a, pp 117-125). Though he aimed at the heart, the bullet entered the lung or upper abdomen. After the shot, he must have lost consciousness for a brief time. When he came to, he searched for the revolver “to finish the job” but was unable to find it. However, he was able to walk painfully back to his lodgings. Doctors Gachet and Mazery examined him but decided that there was nothing that they could do. Theo Van Gogh was notified and arrived in Auvers on July 28. Van Gogh died at 1:30 am on July 29.

Doctor Gachet made a sketch of Van Gogh on his deathbed. Of interest is that he did not sketch the details of Van Gogh’s wounded left ear. He later made an etching from the sketch. Both are rudimentary. Gachet signed his works “Paul Van Ryssel” (or PVR) using the name of his birthplace near Lille (“Ryssel” in Flemish).

The location of the suicide is usually assumed to be north of Château Léry. However, this would have required a very long walk back to Maison Ravoux for a mortally wounded man. Van der Veen (2023c) has argued that the Manoir des Colombières was also referred to as a château, and claimed that the site of Van Gogh’s suicide was close to where he had made his last picture: the red dot on the map presented earlier in this posting, only 200 m from his lodgings. A rusted revolver found around 1960 in fields near Auvers was probably the one used by Van Gogh. He had apparently taken it from its owner, Arthur Ravoux, the manager of the inn where Van Gogh lodged (Bakker et al., 2016, p 80).   

It is impossible to know what led to Van Gogh’s decision to kill himself (Bakker et al., 2016). He suffered from recurrent episodes of depression. He felt he was a tremendous burden to his brother. Though he was convinced of the significance of his art, no one other than his brother and a few friends seemed to think it had any worth. 

Aftermath

Van Gogh was buried in the cemetery at Auvers. His brother Theo died six months later, apparently of the late effects of syphilis, though grief may have played a role. Though he was initially buried in Utrecht, where he was hospitalized, His wife Joanna Bonger-Van Gogh arranged for his body to be transferred to Auvers in 1914, and the two graves rest side by side, covered with ivy that came from a cutting from the garden of Doctor Gachet:

After Theo’s death, Johanna Van Gogh-Bonger retired to Bussum, just east of Amsterdam, where she earned a living through translation and by taking in lodgers. She edited the correspondence between Theo and Vincent, and kept together all of Vincent’s paintings. She continually promoted her brother-in-law’s work to dealers and museums, and in the early years of the 20^th Century he finally began to receive the recognition he deserved (Luijten, 2023). The following illustration shows a 1905 portrait of Joanna by her second husband Johan Cohen Gosschalk, and a photograph of her in Amsterdam from 1909. On the wall is Van Gogh’s Landscape at Twilight.  

The Double-Square Paintings

The following table lists the double-square paintings. The number is from the de la Faille catalogue (1928) 

 

References

Bailey, M. (2021a). Van Gogh’s finale: Auvers and the artist’s rise to fame. Frances Lincoln.

Bailey, M. (2021b). Van Gogh’s mysterious Wheatfield with Crows—what does it really mean? The Art Newspaper. September 3, 2021.

Bakker, N. (2015). In Daubigny’s footsteps: Vincent Van Gogh. In Ambrosini, L., Fowle, F., Bakker, N., Boitelle, R., van Dijk, M., & Clarke, M. Inspiring Impressionism: Daubigny, Monet, Van Gogh. (pp 104-129). National Galleries of Scotland.

Bakker, N., Meedendorp, T., & van Tilborg, L. (2023). Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise: his final months. Thames & Hudson.

Bakker, N., Tilborgh, L. van, Prins, L., & Meedendorp, T. (2016). On the verge of insanity: Van Gogh and his illness. Yale University Press.

Coquery, E. (2023). On the threshold of a ‘New Painting’: the double square works. In Bakker et al. (2023) (pp 134-161).

de la Faille, J.-B. (1928).  L’Œuvre de Vincent van Gogh: catalogue raisonné, ouvrage accompagné de la reproduction de plus de 1.600 tableaux, dessins, aquarelles et gravures du Maître. (6 vols). Les Éditions G. van Oest.

Erickson, K. P. (1998). At eternity’s gate: the spiritual vision of Vincent Van Gogh. W.B. Eerdmans.

Luijten, H. (translated by L. Richards, 2023). Jo van Gigh-Bonger: the woman who made Vincent famous. Bloomsbury Visual Arts.

Maes, B., & van Tilborgh, L. (2012). Van Gogh’s Tree Roots up close. In van Tilborgh, L. (Ed.) Van Gogh: new findings. (pp 55-710) WBooks (Zwolle).

Pickvance, R. (1986). Van Gogh in Saint-Rémy and Auvers. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Saltzman, C. (1998). Portrait of Dr. Gachet: the story of a van Gogh masterpiece: modernism, money, politics, collectors, dealers, taste, greed, and loss. Viking.

Van Tilburgh, L. (2023). A short biography of unbearable suffering: Van Gogh’s chosen end. In In Bakker et al. (2023) (pp 162-177).

Van der Veen, W. (2020). Attacked at the very root: An investigation into Van Gogh’s last days. Arthénon

Van der Veen, W. (2023a). Exploring Auvers-sur-Oise: people and places. In Bakker et al. (2023) (pp 34-57).

Van der Veen, W. (2023b). The secret of Wheat Field with Crows. Arthénon

Van der Veen, W. (2023c). About the place where Van Gogh took his own life. Arthénon

Wattenmaker, R.-J. (1981). Vincent van Gogh and Puvis de Chavannes. Vie des arts, 26(104), 94–96.

Su Shi (蘇軾; simplified 苏轼; Sū Shì, literary name 東坡 dōngpō “east slope,” 1037-1101) was a poet, calligrapher, painter and statesman during the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127). After criticizing some of the new government policies in his poetry, he was indicted in 1079 for treason. After the Crow Terrace Poetry Trial (烏臺詩案), he was found guilty and condemned to death. The emperor commuted his sentence, and Su was exiled to Huangzhou in Hubei Province. There he converted an old army camp on the eastern slope of a mountain near the city into a farm. During his exile from 1080 to 1084, he adopted the name of his farm as his professional pseudonym, practised Buddhism and wrote poetry. 

Poetry and Politics

Su Shi was born in Meishan near Chengdu in the western regions of the Chinese Empire. He and his younger brother Su Zhe travelled to the imperial capital Kaifeng to take the civil service examinations in 1057. They both passed with distinction and came to the attention of the powerful statesman Ouyang Xiu (1007-1070), who promoted their careers. Su Shi spent time as an administrator in various regions of the empire. While in Hangzhou in the southern Yangtze delta, he was responsible for dredging the West Lake and constructing a promenade that is now known as the Su Causeway. Hangzhou would later become the capital of the Southern Song Dynasty (1127–1279), when the northern regions seceded to form the Jin Dynasty (1115–1234).

From 1069 to 1076, the chancellor (and poet) Wang Anshi (1021-1086) brought in a series of reforms called the New Policies (新法 xīnfǎ). These were intended to improve the life of small farmers who were being bought out by large landowners, to increase taxation so that the government could maintain a professional army for defence rather than forcibly drafting young men, and to stabilize the prices of goods like salt so that rich merchants could not monopolize the markets (Egan, 1994, pp 27-53). In a sense these government interventions were “proto-Keynesian” in nature (Zhao & Drechsler, 2018). 

Although the intentions were good, the reforms were largely unsuccessful. For example, in the “Green Shoots” policy the government gave low-cost loans to small farmers to buy seeds in the spring. However, the bureaucrats administering the policy were terribly slow. The farmers had to travel to government centers for their loans and stay there for prolonged negotiations when they should have been at home planting. Wang Anshi refused to acknowledge the problems, and earned the sobriquet “his stubbornship” (Pease, 2021).

The following illustration shows the Song Dynasty at the time of these reforms.

 

The Crow Terrace Poetry Trial

Su Shi criticized the new reforms in both poetry and prose. By 1079 Wang Anshi had largely retired from public life, but his supporters were incensed by the criticisms. They arranged for the Imperial Office of the Censorate, nicknamed the Crow Terrace because of the crows who nested nearby, to indict Su Shi for treason. Article 122 of the Sung Criminal Code prohibited any “expression of critical comments directed against the emperor” (Hartman, 1990, p 18). Or in more poetic terms

指斥乘輿 Denouncing the Imperial Chariot

The records of the trial are intriguing since much of the prosecution depended upon the interpretation of poetry that was by its very nature both allusive and metaphorical (Hartman, 1990; Wang, 2011). Su Shi provided a deposition in which he explained his own poetry. The following is the fourth of his Mountain Village poems:

杖 藜 裹 饭 去 匆 匆
过 眼 青 钱 转 手 空。
赢 得 儿 童 语 音 好
一 年 强 半 在 城 中

With walking sticks and wraps of cooked rice, they depart in a rush
Turn around, with borrowed money spent, their hands soon empty.
Children learn the language and ways of the big city
For half a year they stay inside the city walls.
(text and translation from LAC website)

And the following is Su Shi’s interpretation

My meaning here is that as soon as the common people receive the green-sprout money, they at once squander it in the cities. It also means that the country people twice yearly must pay summer and autumn taxes and several other levies, to which is now added the green-sprout and corvée assistance monies, with the result that the children from the families who work on the great estates are often in the cities, where they become disorderly and learn nothing but a city accent. (Hartman, 1990, p 23).

The trial dragged on for four months. At the end Su was found guilty and condemned to death. However, Emperor Shenzong was counseled by the dowager Empress Cao and by Wang Anshi to commute the sentence. Su Shi was deprived of his salary and exiled to Huangzhou (黄州, presently part of Huanggang), a small town in Hubei on the Yangtze River. (Hubei is the region north of the Dongting Lake, whereas Hunan is the area to its south.)

Su Shi arranged to obtain some land on the East Slope (Dongpo) of a hill near Huangzhou. There he became a farmer to provide food for his family. He changed from a formal statesman to a hard-working layman:   

To state the matter simply, in Huangzhou, Su Shi became Su Dongpo, “Su of East Slope.” This poetic personality, with its firm, philosophic, yet jovial poise of spirit, was created by Su Shi’s major writings in Huangzhou. Reaffirmed in the poetry of his later exile to Huizhou and Hainandao, the image of Su Shi finding joy even in the worst of adversity has become part of the Chinese cultural heritage. (Fuller, 2023, p 251),

Su Tungpo now was to become a farmer by necessity and a recluse by temperament and natural inclination. What society, culture, learning, reading of history, and external duties and responsibilities do to a man is to hide his real self. Strip him of all these trappings of time and convention, and you have the real man. A Su Tungpo back among the people is like a seal in water; somehow a seal dragging its fins and tail on land is only half a seal. Su is never more likeable than when he is an independent farmer trying to make his own living. The Chinese mind usually glamorises a poet wearing a “coolie hat”, putting his hands to the plough and standing against an idyllic hillside, provided he can also compose good verse and beat time to it by striking the buffalo’s horn, and provided further that he occasionally, or even frequently, gets drunk and climbs the city wall to prowl in the moonlight. (Lin, 1948, p 183)

 

East Slope

In 1081, Su wrote a set of eight poems about his life as a farmer. The following is the first of these with a translation by Jeffrey Yang (2008):

And the following is a translation by Lin and Young (2020)

 

The Cold Food Festival

The Hanshi Observance (寒食節) is a traditional festival celebrated in early April (Holzman, 1986). Legend has it that in the 7^th Century BCE a nobleman Jie Zhitui refused to come out of the forest to pay allegiance to his lord. The angry lord burned down the forest to force Jie out, but wound up burning him to death. In remorse, the lord instituted an annual period without fires as a memorial to Jie.

In 1082, Su Shi wrote two poems about the festival, describing how desolate he felt. He wrote these out in his distinctive semi-cursive (running) script in a sample of calligraphy that has been preserved, and is now in the National Palace Museum, Taipei. The following illustration shows the scroll that contains the calligraphy. The top section shows the full scroll (about 200 cm long). Below that is an enlargement of the title section that was added much later with calligraphy by Emperor Gaozong of Qing (1711-1799). This reads 雪堂餘韻: Reminiscences of the Academy (likely one of the halls in the Forbidden City where the emperors studied). Then there is an enlargement of the poems with two colophons. The first colophon in small script is by the Emperor Gaozong of Qing. The second colophon in characters larger than Su’s is by Su’s student Huang Tingjian (黃庭堅, 1045-1105). The lowest section shows an enlargement of Su’s poem. Particularly striking characters are in lines 2 (年, nián, year), 5 (中, zhōng, middle), 11 (葦, wěi, reed), and 13 (紙 zhǐ, paper, banknote) from the right. Each of these has an exaggerated descending line suggestive of rain or tears. This piece of calligraphy is generally acknowledged as one of the greatest examples of running script.

The following is the text of the first poem written from left to right

自我來黃州 已過三寒食
年年欲惜春 春去不容惜
今年又苦雨 兩月秋蕭瑟
臥聞海棠花 泥汙燕支雪
闇中偷負去 夜半真有力
何殊病少年 病起頭已白。

A free verse translation by Lin and Young (2020):

 

Red Cliff Rhapsodies

In the winter of 208-209 CE, the Battle of the Red Cliffs (赤壁) occurred on the Yangtze River to the west of Huangzhou. This naval battle, wherein the forces from the south of China led by Liu Bei and Zhou Yu defeated the numerically superior forces of Cao Cao, was one of the major events leading to the downfall of the Han Dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE) and the beginning of the period of the Three Kingdoms (220-280 CE). 

During his time in Huangzhou, Su Shi and his friends made several trips by boat to the site of the ancient battle. Modern scholarship places the location of the battle near Chibi, which was west of the location visited by Su Shi, now called the “literary” as opposed to the “historical” Red Cliffs. In 1082, Su described these trips in two prose poems (“odes” or “rhapsodies”). In the first , Su Shi and his friends drank wine, and remembered the song that Cao Cao composed on the eve of the battle:

The moon is bright, the stars are few,
and magpies come flying south,
three times round they circle the tree,
where is the branch on which to roost?
(translated by Stephen Owen, 1996, p 281)

The following illustration shows the Red Cliffs on the Yangtze River and a map of the battle in which Cao Cao was defeated. The red calligraphy on the cliffs is 赤壁(red cliffs) written from left to right.

One of Su’s companions played a melancholy tune on his flute and remembers

Once Cao Cao had smashed Jingzhou, he came down to Jiangling, going east with the current. The prows and sterns of his galleys stretched a thousand li, his flags and banners blotted the very sky; he poured wine and stood over the river, hefted his spear and composed a poem—he was indeed the boldest spirit that whole age! And yet where is he now? (translation of Tian, 2018, p 305)

This led him to a meditation on the transience of life:

We go riding a boat as small as a leaf and raise gourd flasks of wine to toast one another. We are but mayflies lodging between heaven and earth, single grains adrift, far out on the dark blue sea. We grieve that our lives last only a moment, and we covet the endlessness of the great river. We would throw an arm around those immortal beings in their flight and go off to roam with them; we would embrace the bright moonlight and have it done with forever. And since I knew that we could not suddenly have these things out of the blue, I gave the lingering echoes of that desire a place in my sad melody. (Tian, p 306)

Su replies to his companion

And do you, my friend, indeed understand the water and the moonlight? As Confucius said as he stood by the river, “It passes on just like this,” and yet it has never gone away. There is in all things a fullness and a waning to nothing, just as with that other thing, the moon; and yet it has never increased and never vanished altogether. If you think of it from the point of view of changing, then heaven and earth have never been able to stay as they are, even for the blink of an eye. But if you think of it from the point of view of not changing, then neither the self nor other things ever come to an end. So then what is there to covet? (Tian pp 306-307

The quotation from Confucius is from Analects IX 16 “The water flows on and on like this, never stopping day or night”

Su continues

且夫天地之間, 物各有主, 苟非吾之所有, 雖一毫而莫取. 惟江上之 清風, 與山間之明月, 耳得之而為聲, 目遇之而成色, 取之無禁, 用之不竭, 是造物者之無盡藏也, 而吾與子之所共適.

Between heaven and earth each thing has its own master. If something is not mine, then I cannot take it as mine, even if it is only a hair. There is only the cool breeze along with the bright moon among the mountains. The ears catch one of these, and it is sound; the eyes encounter the other, and it forms colors. Nothing prevents us from taking these as our own. We can do whatever we want with them, and they can never be used up. This is the inexhaustible treasure trove of the Fashioner-of-Things, and it serves the needs of both you and I alike. (Tian p 307)

This conclusion to the poem provides a moving reconciliation between transience and eternity. In the words of Zhang Longxi (2023, pp 221-222)

Through the dialogue of Master Su and the flute player and from the perspective that comprehends both mutability and constancy of all things, nature is invoked as a great healing power to cure human wounds and suffering, and relieve men from self-pity and depression.

Over two centuries later in 1301, the great Chinese calligrapher Zhao Mengfu wrote out Su Shi’s Two Odes on the Red Cliff and provided a portrait of Su Shi. This original scroll was later cut up to form album leaves each 27 by 11 cm. These are now in the National Palace Museum in Taipei. The following illustration shows at the top a digital recomposition of the original scroll of the first ode, and then an enlargement of the portrait and two album leaves near the end of the ode. The quotation beginning “Between heaven and earth… (且夫天 qiě fū tiān, and man heaven) begins in the right-most line of the enlarged album leaves three characters from the bottom.

Su’s poem shows his ability to write fluently and clearly about issues of importance. Yang (2015, p 3) discusses this in terms of “spontaneity.”

A primary Chinese term for this notion is ziran 自然 (literally ‘self-so-ness’). Ziran in the premodern context could function as an adjective: ‘being natural’; or adverb: ‘naturally’; but not as a noun in the modern sense of ‘nature’, that is, our material environment. The semantic gist of ‘spontaneity’ is also found in terms such as tianran 天然 (‘heavenly made so-ness’), tianjun 天鈞 (‘Heaven, the Potter’), tiancai 天才 (‘heavenly endowed talent’), shensi 神思 (‘divinely inspired thinking’), wuxin 無心 (‘mindless’), wuyi 無意 (‘without intention’), wuwei 無為 (‘without agitation’), and so forth. Conspicuously, these are all compound words that suggest that a certain object is originated from itself (zi), created by a transcendental agent (tian or shen) or, in any case, simply formed without human interference (wu).

Su’s poetry expresses the truth directly without any apparent effort on the part of the poet. The underlying pattern of the Dao makes itself manifest through the words (Bol, 1992). Fuller (2023, pp 2-4 and pp 78-118) considers the poetry in terms of 理 lǐ or “inherent pattern.” Through Su’s words one can see the underlying order of things. He quotes Su Shi’s own description of his work:

My writing is like a spring of ten thousand gallons; it does not choose its path as it goes out. On level land it flows smoothly and quickly, and a thousand miles a day is not difficult. When it comes to turns and breaks over mountains and stones, it follows the object to describe the form, and it cannot be known. That which can be known is that it always travels where it ought to travel, and it always stops where it ought to stop. It is like this, and as for all else, I too cannot know. (Fuller, 2023, pp 3-4)

 

A Visit to Mount Lu

Politics changed and Su Shi’s formal exile in Huangzhou came to an end in 1084. By 1086 he had returned to the capital in Kaifeng. In 1084 he visited Mount Lu (廬山, Lúshān), a mountainous area containing multiple towering peaks just south of the Yangtze and west of Lake Poyang. It is a land of mountains, mist and mysticism. The origin of the region’s name is usually related to the legendary Kuangsu who lived in a small hut (lú) in the mountains before becoming a Daoist immortal (Hargett, 2004, p 10). After the 4^th Century CE, Mount Lou became a prominent center for Buddhism, and numerous temples were built there (Grant, 1994). One of these temples in the northwest part of the mountain is the “West Forest Temple.” One of Su Shi’s most famous poems records his visit there: Inscription on the Wall of the West Forest Temple. The Buddhist sense of the poem is that one cannot understand the overarching truth of life when one is lost in its details The following is a word-by word translation 

This is a translation by Burton Watson (1994, p. 108):

From the side, a whole range; from the end, a single peak;
far, near, high, low, no two parts alike.
Why can’t I tell the true shape of Lu-shan?
Because I myself am in the mountain.

And a rhyming version by Xu Yuanchong (2005, p 397).

It’s a range viewed in face and peaks viewed from the side
Assuming different shapes viewed from far and wide
Of Mountain Lu we cannot make out the true face
For we are lost in the heart of the very place.

The following illustration shows on the left the poem as written out by a modern calligrapher Quan Xijun. On the right is a modern painting of Mount Lu in the autumn together with calligraphy of Su Shi’s poem:

Below is a version of the poem in chaos calligraphy (2016) by Wang Dongling (1946- ) together with two photographs of the area. The calligraphy gives a true sense of the land of mists and the mountains:

Mount Lu is the subject of many paintings. The following illustration shows on the left a painting made in 1467 by Shen Zhou (1427-1509) and on the right a modern painting by Qi Kun (1901-1944) created in 1943. These were exhibited at the National Palace Museum in Taipei in 2020.   

 

Bamboo, Rock and Tree

Su Shi was a talented painter as well as calligrapher. In 2018 a scroll containing his painting of Bamboo, Rock and Tree, long held in a private collection, was auctioned for almost 60 million dollars (Sturman, 2022). The following illustration shows the complete scroll (26 cm by 185 cm) at the top. In the middle are the first two colophons, the rightmost by Liu Liangzuo (11^th Century) and the next by the poet and calligrapher Mi Fu (1052–1107). And at the bottom is the painting with the more recent seals removed. The painting was likely created in the 1080s and the first two colophons added in the 1090s.

Liu Liangzuo describes how he was able to view the painting that was owned by Feng Qiyun. He then provides a poem (4^th line from right)

舊夢雲生石,浮榮木脱衣。
支離天壽永,磊落世緣微 

A rock born from clouds in an old dream;
A tree sheds its robes of empty glory.
Gnarled and knotted, heaven’s gift of years is timeless;
Rugged and upright, the fate of this world is fickle.
(translation Sturman, 2022)

Mi Fu provides a much more beautiful piece of calligraphy, though his words are less poetic. His colophon begins:

四十誰云是,三年不製衣。
贫知世路險,老覺道心微

Forty, who says it’s so?
Three years of no new clothing!
Poor, I know the worldly path is precarious;
Old, I awaken to the Dao-mind’s subtlety.
(translation Sturman, 2022)

 

Dongpo Pork

Legend has it that Su Shi created the original recipe for East Slope Pork (东坡肉, dōngpōròu): pork belly braised with ginger and scallions in soy sauce and rice wine. The recipe is contained in a poem that has been attributed to Su Shi:

 

Epilogue

Although Su Shi returned to political favor in 1086, this was not to last. He was banished again in 1090 to the south of China, ultimately to Hainan Island. He was pardoned in 1100, but died soon thereafter in 1101.

 

References

Bol, P. K. (1992). Su Shih’s Tao: unity with individuality. In This culture of ours: intellectual transitions in T’ang and Sung China. (pp 254-299). Stanford University Press

Egan, R. (1994). Word, image, and deed in the life of Su Shi. Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University.

Fuller, M. A. (2023). The road to East Slope: the development of Su Shi’s poetic voice. Stanford University Press.

Grant, B. (1994). Mount Lu revisited: Buddhism in the life and writings of Su Shih. University of Hawaii Press.

Hargett, J. (2004). Su Shi and Mount Lu. Journeys, 5(1), 4–22.

Hartman, C. (1990). Poetry and politics in 1079: The Crow Terrace Poetry Case of Su Shih. Chinese Literature, Essays, Articles, Reviews, 12, 15–44.

Holzman, D. (1986). The cold food festival in early medieval China. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 46(1), 51–79

Lin, J. I., & Young, D. (2020). Listening all night to the rain: selected poems of Su Dongpo (Su Shi). Pinyon Publishing

Lin, Y. (1948). The gay genius: the life and times of Su Tungpo. Heinemann.

Owen, S. (1996). An Anthology of Chinese literature: beginnings to 1911. W.W. Norton.

Pease, J. (2021). His stubbornship: Prime Minister Wang Anshi (1021–1086), reformer and poet. Brill.

Sturman, P. C. (2022). Inscriptional practices of the Song Literati: revisiting Su Shi’s Old Tree, Rock, and Bamboo. Archives of Asian Art, 72(1), 75–95.

Tian, X. (2019). The halberd at Red Cliff: Jian’an and the Three Kingdoms. Harvard University Asia Center.

Watson, B. (1994). Selected poems of Su Tung-pʻo. Copper Canyon Press.

Wang, Yugen. (2011). The limits of poetry as means of social criticism: the 1079 literary inquisition against Su Shi revisited. Journal of Song-Yuan Studies. Volume 41, 29–65.

Xu Yuanchong (2005). 300 gems of classical Chinese poetry. Peking University Press

Yang, J. (2008). East Slope. Ugly Duckling Press.

Yang, Z. (2015). Dialectics of spontaneity: the aesthetics and ethics of Su Shi (1037-1101) in poetry. Brill.

Zhang Longxi. (2023). From Ouyang Xiu to Su Shi: the splendor of Northern Song Literature. In A History of Chinese Literature. (pp. 206–228). Routledge.

Zhao, X., & Drechsler, W. (2018). Wang Anshi’s economic reforms: proto-Keynesian economic policy in Song Dynasty China. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 42(5), 1239–1254.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) was born in small community called Caravaggio just east of Milan. He first became recognized as a painter of genius in 1602 when he completed a set of three paintings on the life of Saint Matthew for the Contarelli Chapel in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. Caravaggio had a ferocious temper and in 1606 he killed a man in a brawl and was banished from Rome. After a period of exile in Malta, Sicily and Naples, he negotiated a pardon. However, in Naples in 1609 he was violently assaulted by his enemies. He died in Porte Ercole as he tried to return to Rome. The portrait by Ottavio Leoni derives from the time when Caravaggio was in Rome at the height of his powers, though it was likely completed later.

Matteo Contarelli

The story begins with Matthieu Cointerel (1519-1585) a French Cardinal who provided support for the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi, France’s national church in Rome:

Though construction had started in 1518, all building had been halted during the sack of Rome by mutinous German troops in 1527. The church exterior was not completed until 1589, two years after the death of its benefactor Cointreau. The austere Renaissance façade now contains statues (by Pierre de l’Estache, 18^th Century) of the important saints and kings that came from France: Charlemagne and Saint Louis (lower level), Saint Clothilde and Saint Jeanne de Valois (upper level). The interior decoration, much of which was completed in the 18^th Century, is far more extravagant than the exterior, tending to Rococo rather than Renaissance. The ceiling has a large fresco showing the apotheosis of Saint Louis by Charles-Joseph Natoire (18^th Century).  

 

Saint Matthew

As well as supporting the building, Matteo Contarelli (as he was known in Italy) also provided an endowment for one of the side chapels to be dedicated to his namesake Saint Matthew. Matthew is traditionally considered to be the author of the Gospel of Matthew although it is likely that this gospel was written by another person, perhaps a colleague or follower of the Saint (see discussion by Allison, 2004, pp 7-72).

The calling of Matthew (also known a Levi or Alpheus) to be a disciple is mentioned briefly in the three synoptic gospels, though only in the Gospel of Matthew (9: 9-13) is he named Matthew:

And as Jesus passed forth from thence, he saw a man, named Matthew, sitting at the receipt of custom: and he saith unto him, Follow me. And he arose, and followed him.

And it came to pass, as Jesus sat at meat in the house, behold, many publicans and sinners came and sat down with him and his disciples.

And when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto his disciples, Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners?

But when Jesus heard that, he said unto them, They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.

But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.

Although this is the only mention of the saint in the Bible, many legends grew up over the years about his exploits after the life of Jesus. These stories were compiled in Volume 5 of The Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine (1275). According to legend, Saint Matthew spread the gospel to the land of Ethiopia. While there he came upon two sorcerers who were using dragons to torment the people. By making the sign of the cross, Matthew tamed the dragons and defeated the sorcerers. He also raised from the dead the daughter (or son) of King Egippus. In return for this miracle, the king’s daughter Ephigenia became a nun. After Egippus died, his successor Hirtacus lusted after Ephigenia. Matthew refused to release her from her vows of chastity, and the infuriated king arranged for Matthew to be murdered.  

In 1868, Andrea Orcagna (1308-1368) constructed a pilaster for the Church of the Orsanmichele in Florence with scenes from the life of Saint Matthew: on the left are the calling to discipleship, and the taming of the dragons: on the right are the raising of the king’s daughter and the martyrdom of the saint; in the center is the writing of the gospel.  

In 1587, the executors of Contarelli’s will commissioned Giuseppi Cesari, Cavalier d’Arpino (1568-1640), to provide frescos for the walls and ceiling of the chapel. He painted the barrel vault of the chapel with a fresco showing Matthew raising the king’s daughter from her death bed. On the sides of the vault were two paintings showing anonymous prophets in the style of Michelangelo but without his genius:

Matthew and the Angel

Cesari completed the ceiling in 1593. Financial difficulties delayed his payment, and the Cavalier went on to other projects. In 1587, the executor had also commissioned a sculpture depicting the inspiration of Saint Matthew from Jacques Cobaert (1535–1615) for the altar. However, he experienced great difficulty finishing the sculpture (Hess, 1951). The figure of Matthew alone was finished in 1602, but the priests deemed it incomplete and refused to take it. After Cobaert’s death, Pompeo Ferrucci provided the angel to go with Matthew, and the strangely disjointed sculpture now resides in the Church of the Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini:

In 1599, the financing of the Contarelli Chapel was taken over by the Fabbrica (works office) of Saint Peter’s (Graham-Dixon, 2010, p 192). Cesari was offered a contract to complete the chapel, but by then he was too busy. The contract was therefore given to Caravaggio, a protégé of the Cardinal del Monte. He agreed to complete the side panels by 1600. But he would paint using oil on canvas rather than in situ frescos. Caravaggio did not make preparatory drawings, but painted directly onto the canvas using models posed under carefully controlled lighting. He painted rapidly using a severe chiaroscuro style that came to be known as “tenebrism.”

The Calling of Saint Matthew

The first painting Caravaggio completed was The Calling of Saint Matthew (1600):

Caravaggio has transposed the event to his own time and place. On the left two people enter a darkened office. One of them has a faint halo: this is Jesus. In front on him, standing between the viewer and the savior is Saint Peter in a dull yellow cloak. From what may be an open window bright light streams diagonally into the office illuminating the faces of a group of five people at a table. There is some ambiguity about who is who (Dubouclez, 2024): I shall follow the interpretation of Graham-Dixon (2010, pp 194-197). The central person with a distinguished beard and a luxurious red and yellow doublet is Matthew Levi, a prosperous tax collector. Counting the money on the table is a rueful taxpayer. Looking over his shoulder through spectacles is an elderly man who appears to be checking the calculations. At Matthew’s left shoulder is a young page with a feathered cap and a golden doublet. At the corner of the table with his back to the viewer, dressed elegantly in black and white and wearing a sword, is Matthew’s bodyguard (or bravo). There is a space at the table: the viewer can imagine himself or herself sitting there.

The group at the table is reminiscent of an earlier painting of Caravaggio: The Cardsharps (1597). Paying taxes always seems like being cheated. Both paintings display Caravaggio’s mastery of the feathers and fashions of the day.

The difference is the right hand of Jesus. Jesus points to Matthew and says simply, “Follow me.” In the shadows, he holds out his left hand as though beckoning the viewer to join him as well. After his Matthew paintings, Caravaggio seldom returned to the genre subjects of his youth. It was as if he also felt called to a more meaningful life.

If one look carefully at the feet in the shadows on the lower right, we can see that Jesus is turning to leave the office of the tax-collector (Puttfarken, 1998, p 170). He already knows that Matthew will come after him. Matthew appears uncertain about what to do. But if we look at his legs beneath the table, we note that he is already turning toward Jesus:

Matthew, in his wine-dark velvet hat, points to his own chest as if to say “Who, me?,” but underneath the table where they sit his legs have already answered the call long before the message has reached his brain. We can see Matthew’s legs because Caravaggio has omitted one leg of the table. In the real world, it would crash to the ground. In the world Caravaggio has created, we barely notice: we are too absorbed in the dilemma of an ordinary man whose mind lags behind his heart. (Rowland, 2024, pp 3-4)

The following illustration shows on the left the legs of Matthew (and the absent table leg), on the upper right the hands of Jesus and on the lower right the feet of Peter and Jesus:

Jesus’ right hand is copied from Michelangelo:

The shrouded gesture of Christ, the most noteworthy single motif in Caravaggio’s picture, is a studied quotation from Michelangelo’s most famous image, the Creation of Adam on the Sistine ceiling. Christ’s oddly limp right hand, seen as if stopped by the camera, mirrors that of Michelangelo’s inert Adam, who is about to be invested with life by God. Christ is the New Adam, and “as in Adam all men die, so in Christ all will be brought to life” (I Corinthians 15:22). Caravaggio was no Michelangelo, yet we may see here a kind of identification, perhaps the first that Michelangelo Merisi made with his great predecessor and namesake. (Hibberd, 1983, pp 97-99).

The following illustration shows Michelangelo’s 1511 painting with an expanded view of the hands of God and Adam, and Caravaggio’s hand of Jesus, the mirror image of the hand of Adam:

 

The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew

The contract for the painting was very specific:

a long wide space in the form of a temple, with an altar raised up on the top of three, four, or five steps: where St Matthew dressed in vestments to celebrate the mass is killed by the hands of soldiers and it might be more artistic to show the moment of being killed, where he is wounded and already fallen, or falling but not yet dead, while in the temple there are many men, women, young and old people, and children, mostly in different attitudes of prayer, and dressed according to their station and nobility, and benches, carpets, and other furnishings, most of them terrified by the event, others appalled, and still others filled with compassion (quoted in Graham-Dixon, 2010, p 194)

Caravaggio had no previous experience with painting more than three or four people together. He experienced great difficulty with the Martyrdom. Radiographic studies revealed pentimenti with a design completely different from the final painting. It is likely that Caravaggio had begun The Martyrdom before The Calling of Saint Matthew, given up and then returned to it after the latter was completed. 

In his original effort, Caravaggio took pains to depict the altar and the temple, and outlined three assassins. The focus of the picture was a helmeted assassin with his back to the viewer. Saint Matthew is shown falling under the blows of his executioners. Caravaggio realized that this design was not working. Saint Matthew’s death was not at the center; everything was far too crowded; the central assassin was faceless.

He decided to start over. He opened up the center of the painting to show the dying Saint Matthew who has fallen to the ground. Members of the congregation turn away from the horror of his murder. Some are without clothes – probably about to be baptized. The artist himself is portrayed in the background watching the martyrdom with a combination of terror and pity. An angel reaches out to the saint to give him a palm branch, symbol of salvation and eternal life. There is now only one assassin and he faces the viewer. He is almost naked. He exudes rage.

The following illustration shows the pentimenti of the earlier versions of the painting (Camiz, 1990; Olson, 2002; Vodret-Adamo, 2011, p 73). There were several aborted attempts to portray the architecture of the temple. Caravaggio soon realized that he was not interested in architecture: most of his later paintings use a background of either dark shadows or bare walls.

The figure on the right of the altar boy recoiling from the murder of the saint derives from Titian’s 1529 painting of The Assassination of Saint Peter of Verona, which Caravaggio has likely seen in the form of a 1560 etching by Martino Rota:

The imposing body of the assassin is reminiscent of Michelangelo’s Adam in The Creation of Adam (1511) in the Sistine Chapel (Clayton website).

The head of Caravaggio and the head of the assassin look down in parallel on the dying saint, one in the shadows with pity and one in the light with anger:

The Inspiration of Saint Matthew

In 1602, after Contarelli’s executors had refused Cobaert’s incomplete sculpture of Saint Matthew and the Angel, they asked Caravaggio to produce a painted version for the altar (Graham-Dixon, 2010, pp 234-237). Caravaggio’s first version of The Inspiration of Saint Matthew portrayed the saint as an old man who appears not to comprehend what is going on as a youthful angel guides his hand. The writing on the tablet shows the Hebrew version of the opening two verses of Matthew’s gospel (Lavin, 1974).

The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

Abraham begat …

Lavin (p 64) notes that this represents the transition between Old and New Testaments:

The lineage of salvation has been announced, the founding father has been named and his seed is being sown. The light of a new age has dawned.

The Hebrew gospel is an intriguing idea. Saint Matthew was certainly Jewish and, if he was the author of the gospel that bears his name, he would probably have written it in Hebrew. However, as far as we know, the original version was in Greek, perhaps compiled by a follower of Matthew rather than by Matthew himself.

The following shows a black-and-white photograph of the painting, which was destroyed by fire in Berlin in 1945, together with an enlargement of the saint’s writing and the Hebrew text (from Lavin, 1974).

Jesus chose his disciples from ordinary people and Caravaggio wanted to show Matthew as a “simple man stunned by the directness of his revelation” (Graham Dixon, 2010, p 236):

Perhaps the most touching aspect of the painting is the intimacy of the relationship between the stooped saint and the tender young angel, whose wings enfold the whole scene in a hushed embrace. The angel is God’s messenger but also the embodiment of Christian love – a love so generous that it encompasses even those as ragged and gnarled as the cross-legged, doltish St Matthew.  

The most striking aspect of Caravaggio’s Matthew is his humility. Thomas (1985) quotes from a description of Matthew by Lazius (1555): 

Even though he was most learned, yet he was not at all exalted, but in accord with the meaning of his name, truly strove to present himself as humble and lowly. He would always remark that, “to whatever degree you are great, so much more be you humble in all things.” And this to the wise man: “disgrace follows the proud, but exaltation follows the humble” . . . as a pauper himself he followed Christ the pauper.

The name Matthew in Hebrew means “gift of God” (Matityahu). The gospel was not created by him but given from God. 

However, the priests were dismayed by the portrayal of Matthew as a holy fool rather than an inspired saint, and refused the painting. One of Caravaggio’s patrons was happy to take the rejected canvas. He was also able to convince the priests as San Luigi dei Francesi to allow Caravaggio to create another version. In the second version, the saint was far more distinguished, albeit still barefoot:

Matthew the shockingly illiterate peasant has suddenly been turned into Matthew the dignified, grey-haired sage. This scholar-saint kneels at his desk, quill pen at the ready. He is draped in red robes and has been equipped with an expression of dignified attentiveness. Rather than guiding his uncertain hand, the angel now counts off the verses as he dictates them. The pages of the book are no longer visible, but since the angel has got to the index finger of his left hand — number two, in the gestural rhetoric of the time, since Italians counted the number one with their thumbs —it seems that he has once more got to the start of the second verse, and Abraham’s begetting of Christ’s lineage. (Graham-Dixon, 2010, p 237).

Lavin (1974) compares Caravaggio’s two versions:

In the first version the divine word was conveyed mechanically through a laborious and earthbound process of physical instruction to a humble proletarian whose chief virtue lay in his knowledge of his own ignorance. In the second version it is conveyed miraculously to a stunned intellectual through a heaven-sent process of strictly rational analysis and exposition. Again, the key to the irony lies in the divine mystery itself, which brings truth to him who is wise, be he ignorant or learned.

 

The background is almost completely dark. The figures spiral around each other: divine forces binding the saint to the angel. The saint’s robe is pulled down by gravity; the angel’s robe billows upward toward heaven.

The table at which Matthew is writing is askew, and the bench upon which he kneels threatens to tumble out of the picture frame. This feeling of imminent upset fits with the revolutionary message of the gospel.

Lavin (1974) points out how Caravaggio was indebted to Tintoretto’s The Virgin Appearing to Saint Jerome (1583) which Caravaggio has probably seen in a 1588 etching by Agostino Carracci. And Caravaggio’s painting in its turn inspired Guido Reni’s 1635 depiction of Saint Jerome. The illustration shows the earlier etching on the left and later painting on the right:

 

However, no one – before or after – could ever rival Caravaggio’s airborne angels. Young and sensuous. they float lightly in the clouds as erotic representatives of the divine. The following illustration compares the angels in the Inspiration and the in the Martyrdom.  

Farewell

Caravaggio’s paintings for the Contarelli Chapel made him famous. They also represented a turning point in his choice of subject matter. From then on, he concentrated on religious themes. It was almost as though, like Matthew, he had been called to greater things. To see the chapel and the paintings is a deeply moving experience. But hard to describe, just as the chapel is notoriously difficult to photograph. We say farewell with a photograph by Robert Wash.

And the ending to a poem about The Calling of Saint Matthew by Karen Fish (2021, p 29)

Only a few ways to describe what actually happened—Matthew
touches his chest, indicating a confusion
with this unlikely enlistment.
His companions slouch, dumbfounded amid
the flush and feathers and swords.
There is the humble disbelief
all who are chosen share—that moment
when the world seems just a pile of hammers,
hatchets, buckets of coins—one
thinks plainly how unlikely,
absolved from all that is ordinary.

References

Allison, D. C. (2004). Matthew: a shorter commentary. T & T Clark International.

Camiz, F. T. (1990). Death and Rebirth in Caravaggio’s “Martyrdom of St. Matthew.” Artibus et Historiae, 11(22), 89–105.

Dubouclez, O. (2024). Le jeu de l’indécision. « Littéralisme » et ambivalence dans La Vocation de saint Matthieu du Caravage. Dix-septième siècle, 302(1), 5–28.

Fish, K. (2021). No chronology. University of Chicago Press.

Graham-Dixon, A. (2010). Caravaggio: a life sacred and profane. Allen Lane.

Hess, J. (1951). The chronology of the Contarelli Chapel. Burlington Magazine, 93(579), 186–201.

Hibbard, H. (1983). Caravaggio. Harper & Row.

Lavin, I. (1974). Divine inspiration in Caravaggio’s two St. Matthews. Art Bulletin, 56(1), 59–81.

Puttfarken, T. (1998). Caravaggio’s “Story of St Matthew”: a challenge to the conventions of painting. Art History, 21(2), 163–181.

Rowland, I. D. (2024). The lies of the artists: essays on Italian art, 1450-1750. MIT Press.

Thomas, T. (1985). Expressive aspects of Caravaggio’s first Inspiration of Saint Matthew. Art Bulletin, 67(4), 636–652.

Vodret Adamo, R., Cardinali, M., De Ruggieri, M. B., & Leone, G. (2011). Caravaggio: la Cappella Contarelli: Roma, Palazzo Venezia, 10 marzo-15 ottobre. Munus.

de Voragine, J. (1275, translated by W. Caxton, 1483) The Golden Legend or Lives of the Saints.

Bai Juyi (白居易, pinyin Bǎi Jūyì, or Po Chü-i in Wade-Gilles transliteration, 772-846 CE) was a Chinese poet. In 815, after inappropriately advising the emperor, he was exiled from the capital Chang’an to JiuJiang on the Yangtze River. One night, at a farewell party on the river for a friend, he heard a musician playing the pipa. Entranced by her music, he found out that she had once been a sought-after courtesan in the capital. After her beauty had faded away, she had retired to the provinces, where she played her music and lamented her lost youth. Moved by her plight, Bai Juyi composed his Pipa Xing (琵琶行, “Ballad of the Pipa”). The illustration shows a drawing of the poet and the pipa player from a scroll by Guo Xu (1456–1532).

Life of the Poet

Bai Juyi was born in Northern China and came to the capital Chang’an to pass his examinations for the civil service in 800. There he became close friends with the novelist and poet Yuan Zhen (779-831) (Tan, 2025). He soon became a prolific and popular poet, with the courtesy name Lètiān (樂天, happiness of heaven: optimism) (Waley, 1949). Bai Juyi and his predecessors, Li Bai, Wang Wei and Du Fu, are considered the four great poets of the Tang Dynasty (Geng, 2021). He became renowned in Japan where he was known as Haku Rakuten from the Japanese transliteration of his courtesy name (白楽天). In 815, the prime minister Wu Yuanheng was brutally assassinated because he would not agree to the demands of some rebellious warlords. Bai Juyi wrote a memorial calling upon the emperor to seek out and punish the assassins. However, the politics were complicated. Bai Juyi was considered presumptuous – it was not for him, a tutor in the imperial household, to advise the emperor. He was exiled and demoted to a minor position (“master of the horse”, essentially an adjutant) in Jiujiang, then known as Jiangzhou (Waley, 1949, pp 101-104). While there, he heard the playing of a pipa near the river and wrote his famous poem The Ballad of the Pipa. Bai Juyi was allowed to return to Chang’an in 1819. He then served for periods of time as governor of Hangzhou and governor of Suzhou. Bai Juyi was a devoted Chan Buddhist and when he grew old, he retired to a Buddhist monastery near the Longmen caves famous for their colossal statues of Buddha (carved in 672 and 676). At the monastery he was able to compile a full collection of his poems before his death.

The following illustration shows in the upper left a statue of Bai Juyi at the Pipa Pavilion in Jiujiang, in the upper right a posthumous portrait of the poet by Chen Hongshou, a 17^th Century painter, and at the bottom a view of the Longmen caves.

Translating the Ballad of the Pipa

The poem is written in rhyming couplets with 88 lines each of 7 characters for a total 616 characters. It is preceded by a preface of 138 characters. The following is the poem in elegant regular-script calligraphy by Guo Dingjing (17^th Century CE), now in the Princeton University Art Museum:

The Chinese text of the poem is readily available, as is an early English translation by Witter Bynner in his book The Jade Mountain (1929). Several other English translations have been published: Fuller, 2018, pp 283-289; Giles, 1888, pp 157-160; Harris, 2009, pp 21-26; Watson, 1984, pp 249–252; Xu et al, 1987, pp 292-296: Xu, 1994, pp 18-121; Yip, 2004, pp 288-297. Other translations are available on the internet: Phil Multic and Gan Siowck Lee.

The poem is difficult to translate since its sound patterns are as important as its meaning (Peng, 2023; Yu & Chang, 2024). This post will provide some sense of the Chinese sound patterns of Bai Juyi’s poem with recitations by Pu Cunxin and accompanying pipa by Wu Yuxia, taken from a production by China Global Television Network. After Giles’ s initial prose version, most English translations have use blank verse and made some attempt to imitate the sounds of the original. The translation of Xu Yuanzhong (1987, 1994) uses rhyming hexameter couplets. The translations in red accompanying the character-by-character transcriptions in this post are mine; they are heavily indebted to the other available translations.

The Setting

Bai Juyi provides his poem with a preface that sets the time and the place. During his banishment to JiuJiang, while saying farewell to a visitor one evening on the banks of the Yangtze, he hears the music of a pipa. He finds out that the player had once been a famous musician and courtesan at the court in Chang’an. However, as she had grown old, her beauty had faded, and she had retired unhappily to the provinces. Bai Juyi is struck by the similarity of his fate to hers, and mourns their mutual fall from grace:

Moved by her story, he writes a long poem about the pipa player on the river far from Chang’an

Jiujiang, which had once been known as Jiangzhou, is a city on the Yangtze River. The region of the river near Jiujiang was sometimes known as the Xunyang River. The Yangtze River, the third longest river in the world, is about 1.5 km wide at Jiujiang. Lake Pongyi, which was once called Pengli Lake, the largest freshwater lake in China, drains into the Yangtze at the eastern edge of the city:

Bai Juyi is throwing a farewell party for his departing friend on a small pleasure boat on the river. As shown in the following illustration from Hangzhou in eastern China, these small rowboats still provide spaces for celebrations on the waters. In Jiujiang it is autumn: the maple leaves have turned scarlet, and the plumes of the silver grass have reached their peak. 

The following illustration shows a scroll with calligraphy of Pipa Xing by Wen Zhengming (1470-1559) at the National Palace Museum, Taipei. At the top is the painting at the beginning of the scroll. In the middle is an enlargement of the boat with the poet and his guest listening to the pipa player. At the bottom is the beginning of the calligraphy in semi-cursive (or running) script. The first line (on the left) has the title:

Beginning of the Ballad

The initial lines of the ballad describe the autumn leaves and the silver grass. The farewell party begins but there is no music:

The opening scene of the poem was portrayed in a silk-painting (34 x 41 cm) in an album by Qiu Ying (1494-1552) now at the Palace Museum in Beijing:

 

The Pipa

As the party laments the absence of music, the sound of a pipa is heard across the water from another boat. The partygoers are completely entranced. They call out and ask the musician to play for them. She agrees but holds the pipa up to hide her face.

The pipa is a Chinese plucked string instrument very similar to the European lute (Wong, 2011). Both instruments have their origin in the Middle East. The pipa came to China via the Silk Roads during the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE). The instrument typically has 4 strings though some old pipas have 5. Though early pitas have as few as 4 frets, modern pitas can have up to 30. Though occasionally round, the body of the pipa is usually pear-shaped. Traditionally the pipa was played for small intimate groups, but in modern times electronic amplification has allowed pipa virtuosos to play for larger audiences. The following illustration shows some ancient pitas and a photograph of Liu Dehai (1937-2020), one the greatest pipa players of recent times.

The following is a performance of “Xunyang Moonlit Night” (浔阳月夜, Xúnyáng yuè yè) by Liu Dehai.

The Music

The poem then provides a bravura description of the music of the pipa:

These are some of the most famous lines of poetry in China. They have been variously translated. The following version by Xu Yuan-Zhong (1984; 1987) uses the same rhyme scheme as the Chinese poem:

The thick strings loudly thrummed like the pattering rain
The fine strings softly tinkled in murmuring strain.
When mingling loud and soft notes were together played,
’Twas like large and small pearls dropping on plate of jade.

Witter Bynner (1929) uses blank verse in his translation:

The large strings hummed like rain,
The small strings whispered like a secret,
Hummed, whispered—and then were intermingled
Like a pouring of large and small pearls into a plate of jade.

And the following translation is by Isabel Wong (2011), a musician rather than a poet:

The lowest string hummed like pouring rain;
The higher strings whispered as lover’s pillow talk.
Humming and whispering intermingled
I,ikc the sound of big and small pearls gradually falling into a jade plate.

The architects of the Oriental Pearl Tower (1994) in Shanghai based their design on Bai Juyi’s image of pearls falling onto jade:

 

Following the music of the pearls, the pipa provides the quiet song of an oriole, and then like a freezing brook the music slows to a stop:

 

After a brief pause the pipa plays a wild crescendo that sounds like the charge of armored warriors, and then suddenly the player stops.

 

The Life of the Pipa Player

During the ensuing silence, the pipa player tells her story. She was once a highly acclaimed musician in Chang’an. Her beauty and her talent were the toast of the court.

This description of the life of a successful musician and courtesan in Chang’an has been translated in many ways. One version is especially vivid. In 1917, Ezra Pound (1885-1972) published Three Cantos in Poetry Magazine, and again in the American edition of his book Lustra. This was the beginning of a set of Cantos that ultimately numbered 109. These initial three cantos – often called the Ur-Cantos – were extensively revised when Pound published A Draft of XVI Cantos in 1925. Much of the original Canto II is no longer evident in the new sequence. The general theme of Ur-Canto II was the “poetics of loss” (Carr, 2018). Pound describes the ruins of the ducal palace in Mantua, and mourns the loss of most of the music of the troubadours. And then he provides a brief description of the setting of Bai Juyi’s poem and the words of pipa player:  

     Yin-yo laps in the reeds, my guest departs,
The maple leaves blot up their shadows,
The sky is full of autumn,
We drink our parting in saki.
Out of the night comes troubling lute music,
And we cry out, asking the singer’s name,
And get this answer:
                                   “Many a one
Brought me rich presents; my hair was full of jade,
And my slashed skirts, drenched in expensive dyes,
Were dipped in crimson, sprinkled with rare wines.
I was well taught my arts at Ga-ma-rio,
And then one year I faded out and married.”
The lute-bowl hid her face.
                              We heard her weeping.

It was not until much later that Pound’s allusion to Bai Juyi was recognized (e.g. in Weinberger, 2007, p 128; discussed on the Pound Cantos Project website)

Pound had no knowledge of the Chinese language. In his book Cathay (1915), he “translated” a set of 15 Chinese poems based on the notes of Ernest Fenollosa who had studied Chinese poetry with the Japanese professors Mori and Ariga. Despite his lack of training in Chinese, Pound intuitively grasped the essence of the poems (see discussion by Yip, 1969). The brief excerpt from Ur-Canto II is typical of his translations. The meaning is clear though the words are not the same as in the original.

In Pound’s poem, Yin-yo is the Japanese transliteration of Chinese characters for the Xunyang River (Romaji, Jinyō-kō), and Gamaryo is the Japanese version of 蟆陵, which literally translated is “Toad Hill” (Fuller, 2017, p 286). This is the region in Chang’an city near the burial site of the Confucian scholar Dong Zhongshu (179–104 BCE). In Bai Juyi’s poem, the pipa player says that this is where she grew up (and learned how to play the pipa).   

To return to the poem: The pipa player’s high life did not last forever. Her brother went off to the army, her mother died, her looks faded, and she was no longer as sought after as before. She married a tea-merchant and came to live in Jiangzhou. Her husband is usually away on business. Alone on her boat she plays the pipa and remembers happier days.

Listening to her story Bai Juyi feels an intense sympathy: he too has fallen from grace and now lives alone far away from the capital.  The musician plays a final intense song:

We do not know the music that Bai Juyi found so moving. The following is a piece entitled Night Thoughts composed and played by Wu Man (1963- ), who studied with Liu Dehai.

Wu Man’s composition derives from a famous poem by Li Bai, who spent much of his later life in exile from the capital. The following translation is by Xu Yuan-Zhong (1984, p 125).

靜夜思                    A Tranquil Night

床前明月光             Before my bed a pool of light
疑是地上霜             Is it hoarfrost upon the ground
舉頭望明月             Eyes raised I see the moon so bright
低頭思故鄉             Head bent in homesickness I’m drowned

The Life of the Poem

Bai Juyi’s poem was popular among calligraphers and artists. The following is a scroll by Wen Boren (1502-1575) now in the Cleveland Museum.

And the next illustration is a painting by Lu Zhi (1495-1576), from a calligraphy scroll now in the National Museum of Asian Art at the Smithsonian Institution. The boats near the lower shore are as lost as the poet and the pipa player:

And the following is an illustration by Hua Zhangyi from a retelling of Bai Juyi’s poem (Liu Yang, & Hua Zhangyi, 2024) for children: the poet dedicates his poem to the pipa player.

 

References

Bynner, W. & Kiang Kang-Hu, (1929). The jade mountain: a Chinese anthology, being three hundred poems of the T’ang dynasty, 618-906. Alfred A. Knopf.

Carr, H. (2018). The Ur-Cantos. In R. Parker (Ed.) Readings in the Cantos. (pp 9-32). Clemson University Press.

Fuller, M. (2018). An Introduction to Chinese Poetry: From the Canon of Poetry to the Lyrics of the Song Dynasty. Harvard University Asia Center.

Geng, L. (2021). The four great Tang poets. In A Comprehensive Study of Tang Poetry II (pp. 1–42). Routledge.

Giles, H. A. (1884, revised 1923). Gems of Chinese Literature. Bernard Quaritch

Harris, P. (2009). Three hundred Tang poems. Alfred A. Knopf (Everyman’s Library)

Liu Yang, & Hua Zhangyi, (2024). 琵琶行 (Pipa Song). CITIC Press.

Peng, Y. (2023). A comparative study on two English translations of Song of a Pipa Player from the perspective of translation aesthetics. Frontiers in Humanities and Social Sciences, 3(4), 36-40.

Pound, E. (1915). Cathay. Elkin Mathews.

Pound, E. (1917a). Three Cantos II. Poetry, 10 (4), 180-188

Pound, E. (1917b). Lustra of Ezra Pound: with earlier poems. Alfred A. Knopf.

Tan, M. A. (2025). Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen. In Z. Zhang & V. H. Mair (Eds.) Routledge Handbook of Traditional Chinese Literature (pp. 151–161). Routledge.

Waley, A. (1949, reprinted 2005). The Life and Times of Po Chu-i. Routledge.

Watson, B. (1984) The Columbia book of Chinese poetry: from early times to the thirteenth century. Columbia University Press.  

Weinberger, E. (Ed.). (2007). The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry. Carcanet.

Wong, I. (2011). The Music of China. In Capwell, C., Nettl, B., Bolman, P., Dueck, B., Rommen, T., Wong, I., & Turino, T. (Eds.). Excursions in World Music, 6th Edition. (pp 88-131). Taylor & Francis

Xu, Y., Loh, B., & Wu, J. (1987). 300 Tang poems: a new translation. The Commercial Press.

Xu Yuan Zhong (1994). Songs of the immortals: an anthology of classical Chinese poetry. Penguin Books in association with New World Press.

Yip, W. (1969). Ezra Pound’s Cathay. Princeton University Press.

Yip, W. (2004). Chinese Poetry: An Anthology of Major Modes and Genres. (2nd ed., Revised).  Duke University Press.

Yu, Y., & Chang, C. (2024). Text complexity and translation styles from the perspective of individuation: a case study of the English translations of Pipa Xing. Humanities & Social Sciences Communications, 11(1), Article 159.

 

The Silk Roads were overland routes connecting China to the Mediterranean Sea, which allowed the trading of silk, paper, gold, jewels, horses, and other goods. These began during the 2^nd Century BCE at the time of the Roman Empire in the West and the Han Dynasty in the East. The Silk Roads remained active until the 15^th Century CE, when they were largely replaced by maritime trading routes. At present they are mainly used for archeological research and tourism. The illustration shows a modern camel caravan in the desert near Dunhuang. As well as trade goods, the Silk Roads facilitated the movement of religious ideas. Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Manichaeism, Christianity, and Islam followed the Silk Roads into China. Mithraism, Manichaeism and Islam spread into Europe.   

Central Asia

A map of the present political boundaries in central Asia will allow us to get our bearings:

The following map shows the topography of the region and traces one of the many possible Silk Roads from Chang’an (Xi’an) in China to Tyre on the Mediterranean.

The following diagram, modified from Wood (2002), shows the changes in altitude (in meters above sea level) over the journey. It also notes the main mountains that are traversed, the deserts that are crossed and the main rivers on the way.  

The Silk Roads spanned some 8000 km and were active for about 1700 years. They are described in multiple recent books (Frankopan, 2016; Hansen, 2017; Millward, 2013, Torr, 2018, Whitfield, 2024; Wood 2002). A striking TV series from Japan can be downloaded from archive.org. The following two maps by Simeon Netchev show the Silk Roads at two different points in time: the first map when trade began between the Roman Empire and the Han Dynasty in the 1^st Century BCE, and the second map when the Silk Roads were at their height during the late 8^th Century CE with the Tang Dynasty in China and the Abbasid Caliphate in the West. The first map also shows the maritime routes connecting China, India and Europe, and the monsoon winds that facilitate them. These sea connections are sometimes considered the “Golden Road” (Dalrymple, 2025, pp 4-5).

The Mongol Empires (1206-1368) supported trade along the Silk Roads. However, in the 14^th Century CE the Mongol Empires fragmented, and the expansion of the Ottoman Empire (1299-1922) blocked overland connections between the Silk Roads and Europe. Trade between China and Europe continued using the maritime routes. Vasco da Gama made his first voyage from Portugal to India around the Cape of Good Hope in 1497. The overland Silk Roads soon became used only for local trade, and desert sands reclaimed many of the ancient trading posts (Beckwith, 2009, pp 232-262; Torr, 2018, pp 105-126).    

Many different empires established themselves for periods of time in central Asia (Beckwith, 2009). The following diagram, modified from Waugh (2009), shows some of the most important. Though having its capital in the east, the Mongol Empire (1206-1368 CE) extended all the way to Europe. 

 

The Library at Dunhuang

Since it will play a role in much of what will be said about the movement of religions along the Silk Roads, we shall briefly mention the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang (墩, dūn, tumulus/mound + 煌,huáng, shining/brilliant). Dunhuang, located on an oasis containing Crescent Lake and is surrounded by sand dunes, was an important stop on the Silk Road from the time of its beginning in the 2^nd Century BCE (Hansen, 2017, pp 288-335). Nearby is the Jade Gate – an opening in the Great Wall of China that allows entrance to the Hexi Corridor connecting the cities of Chang’an and Luoyang to the deserts of Xinjiang in Western China.

Buddhist monks first arrived in Dunhuang in the early centuries of the common era. In the 4^th Century CE, they began carving caves into of the sandstone cliffs 25 km southeast of the city. These Mogao Caves – “Caves of a Thousand Buddhas” – are a system of about 500 separate temples decorated with wall paintings and sculptures and connected by intricate stairs and platforms. By the 9^th Century, the monk Hong Bian had made the Three Realms Monastery near the caves into an important center of learning. When he died, his statue was placed in Cave 17. On the wall behind him were painted two banyan trees with a water bottle and a cloth bag hanging on the branches. Under one tree an acolyte holds a fan; under the other, a disciple holds the monk’s staff.

In 1002 CE the Karakhanids spread into the Taklamakan Desert and destroyed the Buddhist City of Khotan (Sinor, 1990). Though they had once followed both Buddhism and Christianity, the Karakhanids had converted to Islam in 934 CE and considered all other faiths as infidels. Fearful that Dunhuang might also be destroyed, the monks put all their treasured manuscripts and paintings in Cave 17 with the statue of Hong Bian, and sealed the cave off from the outside world (Rong, 1999). 

In 1900, while sweeping sand from the temple floor of Cave 17, a Daoist monk, a custodian for the caves, realized that the rear wall was false and discovered that the sealed-off chamber contained piles of ancient manuscripts. In sum there were about 50,000 manuscripts and other objects in the cave, which became known as the “Library Cave.” In 1907 the newly discovered treasure trove was examined by the explorer Aurel Stein, who purchased many of the manuscripts for the British Museum (Morgan & Walters, 2012). Paul Pelliot visited in 1908 and bought a set of manuscripts for the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

The following illustration shows on the left the entrance to the Mogao Caves. Most of the building is from the 20^th Century. On the upper right is the statue of Hong Bian in the Library Cave. On the lower right is an impression of what the cave must have looked like in 1900.

Most of the manuscripts found at Mogao concerned Buddhism and were written in Chinese. However, some of the manuscripts related to other religions such as Manichaeism, Christianity, Judaism and Daoism. Many ancient languages other than Chinese were also represented: Sanskrit, Tibetan, Sogdian, Hebrew, and Old Uyghur.

Judaism

One of the manuscripts from the Library Cave is a Hebrew prayer for forgiveness (selihah). At one time it was folded up, perhaps so that it could be carried easily in a small container as an amulet to ward off evil. The text does not directly quote scripture but is very biblical in its wording. The following illustration shows the complete manuscript on the upper left. The photograph has been lightened to facilitate reading. On the upper right is an enlargement of the first 4 lines together with a transcription (Koller, 2024). The English translation of these 4 lines is below together with a quotation form the book of Numbers showing a similar style.

The manuscript is dated to around 800 CE. This and a few other Hebrew manuscripts from other stations on the Silk Road suggest that Jewish merchants were involved in the trade between China and the West. There may therefore have been Jews in China during the Tang dynasty or even earlier. A group of Jews in Kaifeng in central China petitioned the emperor to build a synagogue in 1163 CE (Berg, 2024). Their ancestors may have originally travelled to China over the Silk Roads. Their descendants still live today in China.

 

Zoroastrians

The religion of Zoroastrianism was established toward the end of the second Millenium BCE, and became the state religion of the main Persian Empires: the Achaemenid (559-331 BCE), Parthian (559 BCE – 331 BCE) and Sasanian (224–651 CE). Zoroastrian priests were generally called magi.

(i) Biblical Magi

The Gospel of Matthew relates how three magi (translated as “wise men”) came from the East to visit the newborn Jesus in Bethlehem.

Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem,

Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him. (Matthew 2: 1-2)

These wise men may have been Zoroastrian priests from Persia. If so, they would have travelled along the Silk Roads. The illustration below shows a mosaic representation of the magi from the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuove in Ravenna (565 CE). The magi are shown in typical Persian clothing: flowing capes and Phrygian caps.

(ii) Mithraism

Mithraism was a Roman Mystery Cult focused on the God Mithras, one of the many Gods (yazata) worshipped in Zoroastrianism. The cult involved secret meetings in underground temples called Mithraea, archeological evidence for which has been found throughout the Roman Empire:

Mithraism was active from about 50 CE to about 300 CE. In the 4^th Century CE Christianity was mandated as the sole state religion in the Roman Empire (Edict of Thessalonica, 380 CE). Thereafter Mithraism essentially vanished.

The Mithraeum was set up for a communal feast for the initiates, who were almost always men and mainly soldiers. One essential part of the temple was a fresco or sculpture of Mithras slaying a bull – the “tauroctony.” No one really understands what this sacrifice means. It might have something to do with redemption and salvation, much like the crucifix in a Christian church.

The iconography was stable across its many different locations. In the center, the God Mithras slays the bull. Above are representations of the sun and the moon, and below the bull is attacked by a crab, a snake and a dog. The following illustration shows a tauroctony from the 2^nd Century CE unearthed from the Villa Borghese in Rome:   

The cult was originally believed to have been imported into the Roman Empire by soldiers who had fought in the Parthian wars, a series of conflicts occurring from 54 BCE to 217 CE, and who had thereby been exposed to the Gods of Zoroastrianism. However, there are relatively few Mithraea in the Eastern reaches of the Empire. And there is no evidence that the worship of Mithra in Persia involved any of the apparent rituals that occurred in the Roman Mithraea. Some have therefore suggested that the cult was a Roman invention (e.g. Stoll, 2022). Indeed, some of the earliest Mithraea are concentrated near the city of Rome (Chalupa, 2016), Nevertheless, the cult was devoted to one of the Zoroastrian gods, and most of the early descriptions of the cult acknowledged its Persian origins (Boyce et al, 1991, pp 468-490).

One possibility is that Roman Mithraism allowed its cult members to embrace an “otherness” and make themselves distinct from their fellows:

the imagery of Mithras dressed in the Persian garment and soft shoes with Phrygian cap on top of his curly hair alluded to the Greek topoi of Persians who were Rome’s ‘exotic other’ and ‘fiercest foe’. Such an iconography enabled the Roman Mithraists to depict their god as a foreign deity and to identify themselves as those Roman elites who had the knowledge of worshiping the foreign god. The Oriental imagery of Mithras created a boundary for Mithraic brotherhood and distinguished the cultic community from other forms of religiosity and religious groups in the wider cultural and religious boundaries of Rome. Whatever its origin, the Roman mystery cult of Mithras strongly relied on Roman attitudes and romantic visions of Persia and the Parthians in particular. (Mahzjoo, 2024).

 

(iii) Sogdians

At the time when trading was at its height, the main middlemen on the Silk Roads were Sogdian merchants (Pin Lyu, 2024). Sogdia was the name for the area of land between the Amu Darya (or Oxus) and the Sri Darya Rivers. Its capital was Samarkand. The following map shows the location of Sogdia in Central Asia. The black lines show several of the Silk Roads:

The Sogdians were descendants of the ancient Scythians. At the time of the Achaemenid Empire, when they were known as Saka, they paid tribute to the Persian Emperor in the form of camels and horses.

During the time of the Sasanian Empire, Sogdia was at the eastern limits of the empire and practiced Zoroastrianism (Grenet, 2015). When the empire was invaded by the Muslims, these frontier regions were able to maintain their religious practices for several centuries.

During the Abbasid Caliphate the Sogdians traded extensively with the Chinese and established large merchant colonies in cities of northern China.

The following illustration shows on the left two bas-relief representations of Saka bringing camels and horses to the Emperor at Persepolis (6^th-5^th Century BCE). On the right is a Tang dynasty porcelain statuette showing a group of Sogdian musicians on a camel. This was found in Xi’an and dates to 723 CE. 

Zoroastrian funerary practices mandated that the corpse should not be allowed to pollute either the air or the land. Neither cremation nor burial was possible. Zoroastrians typically laid the corpse out on a stone bed and allowed vultures to strip the flesh from the bones. In China, Zoroastrians compromised by constructing closed tombs within which the deceased was laid out on a funerary couch and allowed to decay above ground. If the deceased was a rich merchant, this funerary bed could be quite ornate. The following illustration shows on the left a carving from a 6^th Century Zoroastrian funerary couch in Northern China, now in the Miho Museum in Japan. The upper half of the carving shows a Zoroastrian priest caring for the sacred fire during the funeral service for the deceased. He is recognized by the face mask that prevents him from contaminating the fire with his mortal breath. The mourners are behind the priest. A camel is recognized to the right of the sacred fire, and several pack horses are seen below. The upper right of the illustration shows how the complete funerary couch was set up.

The lower right shows a small ceramic statuette of a Zoroastrian priest with a face mask. Although he is sometimes considered a camel driver, he is more likely a priest tending to the sacred fire. The face mask is just too typical. The statuette was found in northern China and dates to the 8^th Century CE.

 

Buddhism

Gautama Buddha lived in the northeastern region of India in the 6^th or 5^th Century BCE. After his death his followers taught the new dharma throughout the Indian subcontinent. The Mauryan Empire (320 BCE–185 BCE) expanded to incorporate Greco-Persian lands in what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan. Ashoka (304–232 BCE), the third Mauryan Emperor, promoted Buddhist thought throughout his domain. 

(i) Gandhara

Few representations of the Buddha occur form the first centuries of the new religion. Since the teaching proclaimed that the everyday world was transient and misleading, artistic representations may have been considered unworthy. This changed when the faithful encountered artists of the Greco-Persian world in a region of northwest India called Gandhara. Realistic sculptures of the Buddha and his disciples proliferated. The following illustrations shows sculpture of the Buddha made in the Gandhara from the 1^st, 2^nd and 5^th Centuries CE:

 

(ii) Colossal Buddhas

As their religion spread along the Silk Roads, Buddhist monks began to carve statues of the Buddha out of the sandstone cliffs along the route. Some of these assumed colossal sizes (Wong, 2019). The earliest large Buddhas, up to 15 m tall, were carved at the Yungang Grottoes near Datong in Northern China beginning in 465 CE. Colossal seated Buddhas, 33 and 23 m tall, were carved in the Mogao caves near Dunhuang in the 7^th and 8^th Centuries CE.

And around 600 CE, in Bamiyan, located in present-day Afghanistan, 130 km northwest of Kabul, two huge standing Buddhas were carved, one 38 m and the other 55 m tall. Since details such as the folds in the robe and the facial features could not be carved in the sandstone, these were added to the rough-hewn statues using stucco. The arms were constructed using stucco on wooden armatures. Over the years much of the stucco work eroded away leaving the large ungainly limestone forms.

The people in the area when the statues were carved were Hephthalites. These people followed several different religions (Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Manichaeism) and tolerated the work of the Buddhist monks.

In 2001 the Taliban enforced a Muslim edict forbidding artistic representations of human beings. The two Bamiyan Buddhas were destroyed.

The following illustration shows at the top a panorama of the Buddhas in the Bamiyan Valley before their destruction. The lower left of the illustration shows a close-up of the larger of the two Buddhas. The lower right compares before and after its destruction.

 

(iii) Avalokistesvara

Avalokistesvara was the bodhisattva of compassion. His name in Sanskrit means “he who looks down,” i.e. he who considers the concerns of the faithful. As Avalokitesvara travelled along the Silk Roads to China he slowly changed gender from male to female (Stein, 1986; Suebsantiwongse, 2025; Yu, 2001). In China she became known as Guānshìyīn, (觀世音, look/observe+people/world +sound/voice: “the one who perceives the cries of the world”) or Guanyin. As the deity moved to Japan, she became known as Kannon, and veered back toward masculinity.

Avalokistsevara characteristically holds a lotus flower and sometimes prayer bead. Sometimes he or she has multiple heads which make her vision and hearing more acute. Occasionally the deity has multiple arms the better to aid those in need. As Guanyin, she often carries a vase of pure water to relieve suffering.

The following illustration shows the transformation of Avalokistesvara. In order from left to right and then form up to down:

1. Stone, Avalokistesvara, Gandhara, 3^rd Century CE
2. Bronze, Avalokistesvara, Gandhara, 4^th Century CE
3. Stone, Avalokistesvara, Northern China, 6^th Century CE
4. Wood, Avalokistesvara with multiple heads, Northern China 11^th Century CE
5. Wood, Avalokistesvara “seated at royal ease,” China, 11^th Century CE
6. Bronze, Avalokistesvara, Nepal, 14^th Century CE
7. Gilded Wood, Kannon, Japan 11^th Century CE
8. Porcelain, Guanyin, China 17^th Century CE
9. Jade, Guanyin, China, 19^th Century CE
10. Titanium callosal statue (78 m) Nanshan Guanyin, Hainan Island, 21^st Century CE

 

(iv) The Diamond Sutra

As Buddhism travelled along the Silk Roads to China, the sacred texts began to be translated from Sanskrit to Chinese. One of the most important translators was Kumarajiva (344–413 CE) who was born in Kuqa on the northern edge of the Taklamakan desert. His father was a Buddhist monk from Kashmir. Around 400 CE Kumarajiva travelled to Chang’an where he wrote most of his translations of the Buddhist literature.

The original Diamond Sutra was likely composed shortly after the time of Gautama Buddha’s life in the 5^th Century BCE. However, it was not formally written down in Sanskrit until the 2^nd or 3^rd Century CE. The sutra narrates a dialogue between the Buddha and his elderly disciple Subhūti about the nature of reality and how to attain the wisdom that would release one from suffering. The world is transient and illusory; one must release oneself from any attachments; one must seek emptiness. The following is from Red Pine’s introduction to his translation of the sutra (2001):

following his Enlightenment, the Buddha had taught people to free themselves from suffering by realizing the impermanence and interdependence of everything upon which their suffering depended, including and especially themselves. The Buddha called this the realization of shunyata (emptiness), the view that because nothing exists independently of other things, it has no nature of its own, and every-thing is therefore empty, and this emptiness is the true nature of reality. Later, when the Buddha began teaching people to view emptiness itself as empty and to put the emptiness of emptiness to work in the liberation of all beings, few disciples grasped this new teaching, which he called the perfection of wisdom, the wisdom beyond wisdom.

One of the most important discoveries in the Mogao Caves near Dunhuang was a woodblock-printed copy of Kumarajiva’s translation of the Diamond Sutra. The pages were printed by Wang Jie in 868 CE, probably in Sichuan, and then pasted together to form a scroll about 5 m long. The colophon gives the date and notes that the sutra was being made freely available to all who wished to read. This is the oldest printed book of which we have a copy.  

The frontispiece of the scroll shows a woodblock drawing of the Buddha surrounded by bodhisattvas, and supernatural guardians. In the lower left is the disciple Subhūti. The following illustration shows this print together with details of the Buddha and his disciple redrawn by Zhao Ming An.

The following illustration shows the first page of text in the scroll along with a character-by-character translation of the title and the first few words of the sutra:

And the following illustration shows the last page of the scroll which includes the famous verse that the Buddha uses to describe the transience of the world. On the left, a character-by-character translation is followed by the English version of Red Pine, based on both the Sanskrit and the Chinese versions of the sutra (2001):

 

Christianity

During the first 4 centuries of Christianity, the nature of Jesus as both God and Man was extensively discussed. One position was that Jesus was of two distinct natures – dyophysite; another was that his two aspects were conjoined as one – miaphysite; and yet another was that his Jesus became fully divine – monophysite. Though these old distinctions are almost impossible to understand in modern times, in the 5^th Century CE they were matters of life and death. The Church of the East (also known as the Assyrian Church) distinguished itself as miaphysite, and became separate from the dyophysite Byzantine and Roman Churches in 451CE. These latter churches condemned as heretical the monophysite teachings of Nestorius, a theologian in the 5^th Century. The Church of the East is often known as the “Nestorian Church,” although its views on the nature of Jesus actually differed from those of Nestorius (Brock, 1996). Although the Church of the East remained separate from the Western Churches for many centuries, it has now established communal relations with the Roman Catholic Church.

 

(i) The Dunhuang Glora

Among the manuscripts found in the Mogao caves was a Chinese Christian Hymn loosely based on the Gloria in Excelsis Deo (Glory to God in the highest), also known as the Greater Doxology (words of praise), especially the version used in the Church of the East. The manuscript was probably written about 800 CE and provides clear evidence that missionaries of the Church of the East had travelled on the Silk Roads to China and were actively proselytizing there centuries before the Jesuits first arrived in the 15^th Century CE (Moule, 1930, Teng Li, 2024).

The hymn has 11 verses each containing 4 lines of length 7 syllables, in keeping with Chinese poetic practice. The following illustration shows the beginning of the hymn together with a character-by-character translation of the title and the first line.   

 

The following is a translation of the first three verses of the hymn (Moule, 1930, p 53; Henson, 2017, p 329)

If the highest heavens with deep reverence adore,
If the great earth earnestly ponders on general peace and harmony,
If man’s first true nature receives confidence and rest,
It is due to Alohê the merciful Father of the universe.

All the congregation of the good worship with complete sincerity;
All enlightened natures praise and sing;
All who have souls trust and look up to the utmost;
Receiving holy merciful light to save from the devil.

Hard to find, impossible to reach, upright, true, eternal,
Merciful Father, shining Son, holy Spirit, King,
Among all rulers you are Master Ruler,
Among all the world-honoured you are spiritual Monarch

“Alohê” is a Chinese transcription of the Syriac name for God.

 

(ii) The Jingjiao Stele

In 781 CE a monument dedicated to the Christian faith (景教,jingjiao, luminous religion) was erected in Chang’an (Keevak,2008; McGrath, 2021). The limestone stele is almost 3 m high. At the top is a cross and a nine-character title. The following illustration shows the stele in situ (before it was moved to a museum), an enlargement of the title, and a character-by-character translation.

The stele summarizes the beliefs of the Christian Church in an inscription of about 1900 characters. This mentions that the Christian church was first established in China in 635 CE through the efforts of the monk Alopen. At the bottom of the stele is a much shorter inscription in Syriac.

After the end of the Tang dynasty 907 CE, Christianity almost disappeared (Teng Li, 2024). The Jingjiao Stele was buried, either for protection by the monks or as an act of desecration by those who reviled the foreign religion. It was unearthed during the 17^th Century.

Nevertheless, the Church of the East continued to send missionaries along the Silk Roads and several centuries later, Christian Churches were built throughout the Mongol Empire. The Mongol Empire (1206–1368) and the Yuan Dynasty in China (1271–1368) were tolerant of the different religions. The foreign religions of Buddhism, Christianity, and Manichaeism contributed as much to society as the homegrown Daoism and Confucianism.

Manichaeism

Mani (216-274 CE) was a Persian prophet who conceived the world as divided between the light and the dark. He taught that the human soul was imprisoned by birth into the material world, and that the suffering that this entailed would only cease at death, which released the soul from the body. If one died free from sin, one’s soul would return to the realm of light. The dualistic religion that he founded – Manichaeism – flourished in the centuries after his death, spreading all the way to Spain in the west and China in the East.

(i) Spread to Europe

In Europe, Manichaeism declined after Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire. However, some isolated groups, such as the Bogomils in Bulgaria and the Cathars in Southeast France, continued to follow Mani’s teachings:

(ii) Spread to China

Manichaeism spread along the Silk Roads into China during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE). During the Uyghur Kahnate (744–840 CE) in what is now Northern China and Mongolia, Manichaeism was acknowledged as the state religion (Mackerras, 1990).

During the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368 CE), a large silk painting (158 by 60 centimetres) was made to illustrate the Manichaean cosmology. This showed the realm of light at the top. In the center was a representation of the judgment that occurs at death: the decision whether the soul is released into the realm of light or sent back to the hell on earth. The following illustration shows the painting with some explanatory analysis (Gulaczi, 2015, pp 247-258), and enlargements showing a portrait of Mani (from the left side of the New Aeon level) and details of the tangled judgement process: 

In Cao’an a small town on the west coast of China, a small temple built in 1339 CE was dedicated to Mani, the “Buddha of Light” (Lieu, 1998, pp 188-193).  Over the years the temple became used for Buddhist practices. The following illustration shows the bas-relief portrait of Mani over the altar and the inscribed stone in the grounds of the temple.

The inscription reads

Purity (清净, qīngjìng), Light (光明, guāngmíng),

Power (大力, dàlì), Wisdom (智慧, zhìhuì)

Supreme (無上, wúshàng), Ultimate Truth (至真, zhìzhēn)

Mani (摩尼, móní), the Buddha of Light (光佛 guāngfú)

The first four are the attributes of the Manichaean Heavenly Father. Mani considered himself as a prophet in the line of Zoroaster, Buddha and Christ. As such he could be conceived as one of the manifestations of the divine – the Buddha of Light.

 

Islam

After its founding in Arabia in 622 CE, Islam quickly spread to adjacent regions. By the time of the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258 CE), the community of the faithful (Ummah) extended all the way from Spain to the borders of China:

 

(i) Abbasid Caliphate

The Abbasid Caliphate with its capital in Baghdad oversaw a period of great prosperity and learning, that later became known as the Islamic Golden Age. At a time when Europe was going through the Dark Ages, Baghdad was a place where scholars studied and preserved the literature of the past and contributed to our knowledge such new ideas as algebra and trigonometry. Islamic physicians distinguished different diseases, and Islamic physicists mapped the heavens. Abassid architecture developed gorgeous arches and domes, stucco decoration with arabesque patterns, and walls covered with multicolored tiling.

The Abbasids made great use of the newly discovered paper (Schatzmiller, 2018). The technology of papermaking originated in China around the 1^st Century CE and was brought to the Middle East through the Silk Roads. The first paper mill in Baghdad was built in 795 CE. Paper made it easy to provide inexpensive books for scholars to study. Knowledge became no longer limited to the elites.    

The following illustration shows on the left a painting of a scholars in a library during the Abbasid Caliphate taken from a 13^th Century manuscript. This may represent the House of Wisdom, also known as the Grand Library of Baghdad, which was founded in the 8^th Century CE. On the right is a photograph of a honeycomb archway (muquarnas) from the Abbasid Palace in Baghdad built in the 12^th Century CE.

(ii) The Great Mosque in Xi’an

Islamic merchants came to China along the Silk Roads. By the 8^th Century the Muslim population of Chang’an (Xi’an) was sufficient to warrant the building of a mosque in the form of a temple. The Great Mosque of Xi’an (西安大清真寺,Xī’ān Dà Qīngzhēnsì) was first constructed in 742 CE, and rebuilt in its present form in 1384. Islam was referred to as 清真教 (Qīngzhēnjiào: pure and true religion), and a mosque is generally referred to as 清真寺 (Qīngzhēnsì: pure and true temple).

The following illustration shows a plan of the mosque together with photographs of the Phoenix Pavillion (鳳亭, fèng tíng), the “Examining the heart tower” (省心楼,shěng xīn lóu) which probably served as a minaret, and the ceiling of the Phoenix Pavilion:

 

Epilogue

For many centuries the Silk Roads were a conduit for goods to travel between East and West. The East produced silk, paper, tea, and porcelain. The West gave gold, silver, glass, cotton, and leather. The regions along the Silk Roads provided horses, camels, rugs, lapis lazuli and jade.

As well the Silk Roads allowed different religions to travel to distant countries. Buddhism came to China. Islam spread to both the East and the West. Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, and Christianity also journeyed with the caravans. Travellers on the Silk Roads were missionaries as well as merchants (Foltz, 2010). 

Some feeling for the people of the Silk Roads can be found in the poem The Golden Road to Samarkand by James Elroy Flecker (1814-1915), a British poet who briefly worked in the consular services in the Middle East before dying at a young age of tuberculosis. The conclusion to his play Hassan, published posthumously in 1922, is a conversation among the members of a caravan about to leave Baghdad for Samarkand: 

We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go
Always a little further: it may be
Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow
Across that angry or that glimmering sea.

White on a throne or guarded in a cave
There lives a prophet who can understand
Why men were born: but surely we are brave,
Who take the Golden Road to Samarkand

…

Sweet to ride forth at evening from the wells,
When shadows pass gigantic on the sand,
And softly through the silence beat the bells
Along the Golden Road to Samarkand.

We travel not for trafficking alone;
By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned:
For lust of knowing what should not be known,
We take the Golden Road to Samarkand.

The following is a reading of these verses by Roger Helmer

And the musical introduction to the Japanese TV series on The Silk Roads by Kitaro:

 

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